A first draft of our title

working on it, not done yet... but thoughts on style, like and dislikes appreciated...

Between baffling nonsense and sterile onespeak

Director’s notebook:

I’ve just spent a reflective vacation in the Patagonian Andes, and I’ve been mulling over how to present our protagonists and their actions, from the Andes farther North, to the rest of the world. Such a particular reality… the plan is to project this reality in the most particular way possible, that is, faithful to the particular people, time and place we have collaborated with/documented, while still creating a totally original artistic vision. The trick is to have this be understandable to people while still stretching their understanding to new heights.

The balance, then, that’s been weighing on my shoulders (wish they were more Atlas-like), is what I refer to in the title of this post. Artistic creativity works through communication, and communication needs a shared frame of reference, a mutual intelligibility. However, if it is immediately completely understandable, the message becomes sterile, and a collective “duh” comes from the public. Concretely, I’m worried and excited about our experimental character-actor improvisations (the same person talking to themselves, essentially in two different roles) and some of the more controversial political interventions.

I think ideally a viewer should immediately access one level of understanding, based on their own experience and knowledge. Let’s call this ground floor of our Spectacular Palace of Meaning. Once in, they should be given a spectacular view of the inner courtyard, with hundreds of doors, all differently shaped, entering into the various wings of the complex. However, from the central courtyard, and even from outside the building, it should be obvious from the upwards-pointing lines in the architecture that, although all doors pass through different sections, the entire structure is designed to channel you upwards towards the pinnacle of it all, a shiningly beckoning tower from which the whole world will be seen from a new, worldview-shaking perspective.

You don’t have to understand how you got there after your wanderings about the tower, you don’t need to understand the plan, you don’t even need to remember which door you came through, since they all lead to the same transcendent place.
So that’s one theory. Another was eloquently put by a close friend of mine, who said that if he can get 0.0001% of people to like his work, he will be supremely successful. So, either you find this population and cater to their needs/desires, or you do your own thing and trust that this population will find you and your work – it’s probably wise to go with a bit of both strategies. Though there’s always someone who will enter a senseless maze of a building (or movie) and say, “wow, I love it.” Same goes for big empty blocks without windows.

I think the world was made to be only partially intelligible, with mystery equally important as understanding. The tower of Babel was built with it’s top in the heavens by the people who survived the Great Flood, people who all spoke the same language. “God came down to see what they did and said: "They are one people and have one language, and nothing will be withholden from them which they purpose to do." So God said, "Come, let us go down and confound their speech." And so God scattered them upon the face of the Earth, and confused their languages, and they left off building the city, which was called Babel "because God there confounded the language of all the Earth."(Genesis 11:5-8).

Why would God do that? Was it because everyone understanding everything all the time is boring as hell?

brainstorming catchphrases

Thinking about a subtitle for the film, a little catchphrase under the title… and would love to hear what folks think about the various options. Vote on one!

possibilities, in order that they occurred to me:

1.

SPECTACULAR MOVEMENTS

---

a journey across Bolivia in a Theater-Truck

creative political intervention in action

the soul of social movements in flux

---

This is an adaptation of the catchphrase we’ve been working with, and it works to describe the gist of the film. Drawback is that it’s looooooong, and very literal.

2.

SPECTACULAR MOVEMENTS

--- we are living a process of change ---

Spoken several times by various characters throughout the film, it seems to sum up the constant shifts in identity on the micro level as well as in the social and political situation on a macro level…

3.

SPECTACULAR MOVEMENTS

--- everybody moves ---

Aims more at the vague, evocative, abstract

--- every body moves ---

variation A

--- everybodymoves ---

variation B

--- everything moves ---

variation C

4.

SPECTACULAR MOVEMENTS

--- when you move, you move the world ---

Aims for the epic… could sound a bit pretentious?

5.

SPECTACULAR MOVEMENTS

--- move it, and it will move you ---

6.

SPECTACULAR MOVEMENTS

--- change is never as spectacular as you hoped, and always deeper than you thought possible ---

---

change is never as spectacular as you hoped

movement is always deeper than you thought

---

variant A

--- change is never as spectacular as you hoped, and movement is always deeper than you thought ---

variant B

on top of the world

another idea, for website/poster/who knows... the idea would be to make more figures, and for them to be relatively the same color/lighting...

playing with images

starting to look towards the website design, and posters, and the general look-feel of the film, not only on the promotional side, but that too... here's some visual brainstorming, all comments - ideas and criticism very welcome!

they both seem too busy and "efectista", as they say down here, but might be a step in a fruitful direction - I like the multiplication, going from one (person) to two (shadow) to three-four (image of persona and shadow) to who knows how many... maybe just for one page of the website, or maybe just for here and now?!?

more ideas to come, as we go working on the new page and developing our visual style, and more already up on the Spanish language blog

música

As I put together our new demo, I've been thinking about the música for the film... am looking for something Andean but modern, some kind of fusion, perhaps with a circusy, jazzy or folky flair. Below's a link to one of the songs that Teatro Trono used in their play, something along the lines of what might work, an excellent 20 min andean-jazz fusion. I'm still trying to track down the band's name, I think they're from El Alto, and will update this post with their name as soon as I can find it. Enjoy!

the link to the song

From the Director’s notebook, 16 September 2010

So I have returned to Buenos Aires with my 70+ hours of footage, and at this point have seen most of it… and am just starting to put it all together with great joy and struggle.

I keep referring to this experience as finding myself in a labyrinth that we fought our way into, deep deep deep, where we reached the beast in the center. I’m not sure who won that battle, but now we need to find the way out, find Ariadne’s gold thread that will lead out of the maze of dead-ends, in order to emerge in the wider world with a story to tell, and a path that we can point to for others to follow to the center of this story. (To find the carcass of the beast we slayed? Or a reborn beast? Or does the beast take on a new shape for each adventurer, a minotaur for Theseus, a kharisiri fat-sucking white man for an Andean, a multi-headed pastiche of archetypal and pop monsters for a Westerner?)

In the next few entries here, I’m going to go into my personal musings and brainstormings as director, to give you an idea of the creative process undertaken in the construction of this film. The film itself explores the creative process of constructing the play and the performances that Teatro Trono takes to the stage and the streets of Bolivia, so it seems only fitting that we continue delving into these creative dynamics as we construct their construction.

Here below and elsewhere, “Actors” refers to the real people, the characters of the film, “Characters” refers to the characters in the play. Of course, the real people also put on their for-the-screen masks, play themselves, and it all gets richly confusing.

--

How to begin? So many ways to open a film…

Option 1

Start with the everyday scenes of the actors with their families, cooking and eating and discussing their latest play and the personal experience of “what happened” in the revolts of 2003? This sets up a conversation about identity, culture, memory. In a way, it starts at the beginning, both in terms of the beginning for the Actors, and through personal memories it point to the beginning for the city of El Alto as an adult city in rebellious maturity, and the beginning of the “new” Bolivia under the lead of Evo.

Peeling potatoes, the most Andean of foods, Maya asks her mother about who taught her to peel potatoes (it’s obvious by her relaxed lightning speed peeling that the mother has peeled millions of potatoes). Is this a question about her grandmother? Later Maya puts on a traditional cholita dress for her character, like her mother and one must assume her grandmother. At home with her real-life cholita mother, Maya is submissive and quiet, while onstage her cholita character is a rebel, with a rifle and a Zapatista mask, overthrowing the government. And with her theatrical “family”, she’s outgoing and assertive, a far more experienced actress than she is potato-peeler.

The generational difference (gap?) is obvious, as is the value placed on updated tradition by these young actors: contrasting with her mother, Maya wears a t-shirt emblazoned with Ayni Rock El Alto, “ayni” being the Andean reciprocity, the foundation of the community. This rebellious migrant city, El Alto, is a source of great pride for these politicized artistic youth, and their plays and interventions glorify and sympathize with the migrants whose pains and uprootings and upheavings and transformings gave birth to this city, to these actors, and to their art. Perhaps their art is a form of ayni, a way of reciprocating by reflecting-replicating-resurrecting-redirecting the struggles of their parents and neighbors.

And perhaps even more sticky and interesting: this “ayni” is contentious and controversial. This latest generation of creative progressive social actors has inherited the spirit of protest, and honors the memory of the last generation’s struggles… by paradoxically criticizing the establishment created by these same struggles. For example, they satirize their neighbors’ violent lootings during the uprisings of 2003 which were excused as “redistribution of wealth”, and the current acts of mass violence in the not-uncommon lynchings which are excused as “community justice”; and they even attack Evo Morales, the supreme international symbol of successful indigenous struggle, who has recently impeded justice for the military crimes of the past in order to stay on the good side of the military.