José Celestino Campusano: Het eigenzinnige Zuiden

Campusano once told me: “I aim to leave behind a concrete, palpable vestige. I guess this intention is not far from the one behind those paintings found in the caves of Altamira […] I find it necessary to leave behind a vestige of how things used to be, of how the light of the sun shone on a skin, of how the tone of voices were like, of how was the dramatic imprint in that social context.”

From Bosques (2005), the mid-length film he co-directed with Gianfranco Quattrini, to El perro Molina(2014), Campusano has remained faithful to this goal. Through cinema, he vindicated a territory stigmatised by the media and the written press. He filled with images a space that was uncertain because of its inapprehensible dimension, the so-called ‘Buenos Aires Conurbation’. He offered some sort of rationality to a region allegedly inhabited in some sectors by barbarians. And, behind the ferocious image of those men and women who barely survive day after day, he found an undeniable dignity.

An Anthropological Quest
Campusano’s first seven films helped to offer a fair representation of a way of life synthesised by bikers’ communities; a belated form of tribal association perhaps, in which values and principles unaligned to the logic of capitalism still existed and were passed on. This first period in Campusano’s filmmaking was marked by an anthropological search. The filmmaker knew deeply the universe he was representing; he stockpiled real stories and reordered them in film while intensifying the universal character of the peculiar culture to which he devoted his time.

To begin with, Campusano’s film staging was a classical one. All elements are coordinated in such a way that narrative flow is allowed to become the determining force. This does not mean that, in each of his films, Campusano disdains to consider the cinematic aspects. Although pure formal experimentation would become a late-bloomer interest for him, his curiosity for the recording instrument that the filmic camera is was present right from the start.

Poetics and Tradition
As a part of his poetics, Campusano usually uses the concept of the ‘collective composition’. For him, this means a way of showing specific cases known by the community, whereby the film’s protagonists influence the (re)creation of fiction: the slang used in dialogues, some ‘degraded’ Gaucho poetry that sometimes summarises the moral of the tale, the selection of costumes and furniture, the locations as reservoirs of collective experiences; all of these are signs of reality gathered together by the crew. This is why each shot is so realistic and vehement. The gathering of evidence of a whole era is attested to by the inventory of archaic firearms that pass through his characters’ hands, by the particular attention paid to sexual practices, or by the ethics of domestic pleasures – little related to the regulation of bourgeois eroticism – and the scars on the characters’ bodies, often shown in extreme close-up.

Also, to suggest that motorbikes replace horses in his films is not to overly force the issue. When bikers move forward in line as they travel on the roads on their huge motorcycles, they seem to be riding the asphalt. The tribal issue emerges once again and we see, shining, a social memory with echoes of the forefathers of these men and women – the poetic resurrection of the ghost of the Quilmes, an ancient ethnic group from northern Argentina which, at the end of the 17th century, was relocated to Buenos Aires. This is a good explanation of the immediate assimilation by Campusano’s films to the rules of the Western genre. The 17th century is still alive in the urban peripheries of Buenos Aires, and the conflict between civilisation and barbarism returns as an unsolved enigma – the infinite ghost of Argentinean history.

Mapping Injustice
The second period of Campusano’s filmmaking begins with El perro Molina, and is then affirmed with Placer y martirio (2015) – his mysterious incursion into the ways of desire among the upper classes in Buenos Aires, or rather among the nouveaux riches of neoliberalism – and begins to unfold completely in El sacrificio de Nehuén Puyelli(2016), Cícero impune (2017) and El azote (2017). This dropping of anthropological fiction for tales linked to cases of injustice or the political evolution of the filmmaker, coincides with the abandonment of his familiar territories. When Campusano leaves the Quilmes region – in the periphery of Buenos Aires – a significant turn, apparently not only related to Argentina, also occurs. It could be said that this statement is proven wrong by El arrullo de la araña (2015), because the shop portrayed there is within the periphery of Buenos Aires. But this unusually, and hyperbolically, dialogued tale takes place inside a hardware store and could happen anywhere in Argentina, or Latin America for that matter. And the main subject actually discussed is the conceptual enemy of that period – the microscopic perversions of a social and economic system.

The most recent Campusano is the one Rotterdam will get to know first. The location chosen for shooting this film is Brooklyn, a space far, far away from Ezpeleta, Berazategui or Quilmes. And even though in Brooklyn Experience the focus of interest is experimentation with filmic perception, the streets of Brooklyn and the few pedestrians walking on them convey a silent sense of decadence and abandonment which bridges the vast gap between these two worlds.

Text: Roger Koza