In this last week I've spent 14 hours viewing Mario Llinas extraordinary La Flor, a film about films and about how they elicit meaning. Yes, I understand that this is merely a single reading but its a treasure trove of this against time as the film took 10 years to complete and almost the same amount of time to view (sic). For me though there are numerous genres employed in the vast narrative, the fact that there are no resolution to the complex plots that are launched throughout the film's duration makes it obvious that traditional storytelling may not be its prime objective. The intrusion of the filmaker and his accomplices into the film adds another layer for rumination. Everyone cites Rivette's classic Out1 with its long duration and cast of thousands, including several group of actors but the truth is that Llinas also has literary antecedants, writers who love to playfully diverge a narrative into autoreflection or some narrative digression that may serve no plot purpose. And its among those writers-some Argentinian, Cortazar and Macedonio Fernandez, and the collaborative nature of the story telling (Borges and Bioy Casares). Then there are the 4 actresses who create a landscape of women in charge-way to much for me to write about but let me emphasize that this is a film to see and experience if you run across it. Anyway, the long and the short is that here is a good overview of this landmark of a film that few have actually noticed. An article at Mubi site that aired it over the last month:
In the Argentinian film La Flor (2018), a certain kind of sight and a certain kind of sound predominate—spread right across its roughly thirteen-and-a-half hours and six major parts.
First, the sight. There are various directors in cinema history known for their stubborn insistence on using a particular camera lens which becomes their veritable stylistic signature: for example, the 25-millimeter lens for deep focus effect in Jacques Rivette; or the split diopter in Brian De Palma. Mariano Llinás takes the exactly opposite position in La Flor: his lens-weapon of choice is a defiantly shallow one, plunging great expanses of any frame into blur (after a while, you’ll think you need an appointment at the optometrist). Sometimes there’s a relatively traditional bit of focus-pulling back and forth between two points in a scene (between several characters, for instance). Far more often, it’s a mise en scène based on characters slowly walking out of blur and into focus—that is, if they ever make it into focus. Oddly, one of the only “characters” to get a royal, deep-focus treatment is Margaret Thatcher (played by Susana Pampín)!
Second, the sound. La Flor is a vast stream of different languages, accents, dialects, vocal tonalities. Talking, singing, laughing… but a great amount of it is post-synchronized. And the sync is deliberately off, hit-and-miss, like in some B movies (and in Orson Welles’s films, even when he’s doing Shakespeare). The lips and the words are often not matching (not to mention the framing segments where Llinás himself “speaks” to us in images where his mouth is resolutely closed!). It all has the sonic ambience of a studio recording. This sound design is not an accidental, coming-and-going effect: it’s total, from one end of this river-film to the other.
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