Fernando Birri
“The role of cinema…consists of manufacturing films reflecting the objective conditions in which the struggling peoples are developing, i.e., films which bring about dis-alienation of the colonized peoples at the same time as they contribute sound and objective information for the peoples of the entire world, including the oppressed classes of the colonizing countries.” So declared The People’s Cinema Committee Number One at the Third World Filmmakers Meeting in Algiers in December, 1973. The committee consisted of such Third World filmmakers—among them, the “father” of cinema in Argentina, Fernando Birri., whose work is the subject of a recent retrospective at Brooklyn’s Spectacle Theater, entitled “Cosmic, Raving, Lumpen Cinema: The Films of Fernando Birri.”
Fernando Birri developed a pure cinematic system that communicated the experience and feelings of a people, following his interest in cities, indigenous life, and living conditions. His moral convictions would remain the same throughout his career and regardless of the type of picture—be it a survey film, documentary, narrative fiction, or even avant-garde experimental works.
The beginnings of this trace back to his first student film Selinunte (1950). It is a travelogue of ancient Greek ruins, but Birri does not only wish to photograph, but to reveal. How can the uninitiated eyes see how these ruins entangle themselves in a history, a people? Birri implements dollies and pans that carry the viewer into the action, creating a cinematographic effect beyond photographic documentation. Rather than simply encapsulating the physical, Birri casts a ballet dancer to dance through landscapes, covered in beautiful low-angle shots of ancient columns. The film does not merely reflect what the Acropolis looks like, but also the emotions it stirs within, remaining true to the mythos and history: the camera provides corrective lenses that allow the foreign viewer to witness what the initiated already know and allow the initiated to feel pride in what is theirs, and can now bestow upon the outsider.
This style and purpose proved formative, and is reflective of Birri’s entire canon. His camera never settles, never ceasing to explore and probe. In the documentary Immagini Populari Siciliane Sacre (1954), he reframes canvases and utilizes camera movement to bring Sicilian paintings to life, turning a still of wartime into a historical representation of combat. This technique provided Birri with a tool to empower the still image in more fully developed works, such as Castagnino Diaro Romano (1967), a short on Juan Carlos Castagnino, the painter and philosopher.
That Birri would turn his lens on Castagnino is no surprise; the men share artistic convictions: “Commitment and communication. The responsibility of committed men is the responsibility of the committed artist and not the other way around,” Castagnino states in his narration for the film. Form is in service and part of the message: “There must not be a separation between the work as a result and its search, but a consequence of the balance between order and chance, between the experimental and the mental,” says Castagnino. These words echo throughout Birri’s filmography, always searching for a mode to best represent the people and their psyche. His films are a journey of invention and growth, all in service of a message. From survey short to full-length narrative, to his epic experimental ORG (1979), made in exile, he experimented with the line between fiction and documentary at the service of a higher, emotional truth.
Tire dié
His breakthrough 1960 short, Tire dié is a majestic chameleon of a film; a prime example of the power of cinema to bridge a gap between viewer and subject, allowing them to empathize with a people otherwise unknown. Tire dié begins as a travel piece, a familiar product of the time, with aerial views over the oceans and cityscapes of Santa Fe, Argentina, while a narrator dishs out factoids about the place (32,800,000 glasses of beer are drunk each year). The oceans and building soon turn to slums and “the statistics become gloomy. There are many, too many,” the narrator says. This sets the tone before the film proper has even begun (Birri employs a similar technique at the beginning of Los Inundados [1962], where its narration and images of rainfall establish a hopeless cyclical nature prior to the titles). Birri interviews children and parents about the tire dire—the act of children yelling at passing trains for the passengers to toss them a dime.
Tire dié very much has a moral position, but does not preach or point, it simply illuminates; the images and interviews speak for themselves. An underemployed father admits the money gathered from the tire dire is essential to their family budget and a 28-year-old mother who “looks 40” has to contend with a culture that expects her to provide for her children, but also looks upon her critically if she works. The editing clearly sets up an impoverished society that very much depends on this form of begging as part of its income. Nobody claims that it is right or just, only that it is essential. It is hard to argue with these voices and these faces.
Tire dié is far into its 33-minute running time before it takes the viewer to the tire dire itself, and Birri shoots it as a neo-realist document, transporting the viewer into the lives and mindsets of its subjects: the impoverished and young of Santa Fe. The scene is played for all the tension it can muster—it is very similar in feel and tone to the money exchange on the train in Kurosawa’s High and Low. The cutting and images indicate that this is, in some sense, a re-enactment: there are POV shots of both the passengers and the children; extreme closeups of faces; images of the train flying down the rails; children running alongside. An intense cacophony of sound fills the soundtrack: a spectral mix of children calling, smoke wafting, and train chugging along the rails. The intensity is extreme: Birri does not allow the viewer an easy or passive viewing experience. This is an act of desperation. This is cinema of desperation. It ends with a close-up of a starving, teary-eyed girl who stares back at the audience watching her life from their cinema chairs. This is considerate, confrontational, and incredibly dramatic cinema. Birri wants no audience member to leave unscathed….or uninformed.
He evidently found the dramatic vehicle an effective method, choosing docudrama for his next picture, the feature Los Inundados, a critical work following an under-represented community from the slums, and shot with a loose plot in a mobile, documentary style. The film commences with the narration: “When the film ends, we’ll all go back to our flooded.”
Perhaps realizing the power that the footage shot for the train sequence in Tire dié afforded him, Birri uses the fictional framework to his full advantage. The film is awash in mood and texture, filled with wind, barreling rain, and sharply composed frames. Credit should also be given to cinematographer Adelqui Camuso, who also shot Birri’s Bueno Dias, Bueno Aires (1959), a short informational on the city, but shot on real, early morning streets, full of clutter and newspaper, and bums awakening on the benches. This is Birri’s world: the lived in world, not the antiseptic tourist view. Birri felt the mood of a city and Camuso could peer his camera into the darkness. The images are that much sharper, the framing that much tighter, the separation between character and audience that much smaller.
Birri discovered as he created, evolving new ways to communicate and make his cinema serve a purpose. Audiences gravitate towards narrative, so even in shorts consisting of primarily found footage such as La Pampa Gringas (1963), he structured a tale of colonialism (“Everything was ours. Everything we touched was ours.”) around the rise of a family, complete with playfully inventive cinematic editing: a car crashes, but the narrator quickly decides “We get to this place a few years later…let’s go back,” and Birri rewinds the footage and brings the viewer deeper into the narrative.
ORG
This incessant inventiveness (along with a decade-plus exile in Italy) would eventually lead him towards a more explicit form of experimentation. Perhaps due to lack of resources, or perhaps feeling that narrative structure had run its course in the high-tension global world of the 1970s, Birri’s monumental ORG, completed in 1979, continues his insistence of feeling over documentation. A kaleidoscopic LSD trip—part found-footage, part collage piece, part adaptation of Thomas Mann’s The Transposed Heads—the film drops the viewer headfirst into the moods, impressions, dangers, and confusion of this period in Latin America. Purportedly, ORG contains over 700 audio tracks and over 26,000 edits. While ORG was quickly shelved after its premiere, it has recently resurfaced. It will never be an “easy” viewing, but if one attempts to “feel” rather than “understand,” that viewer might bare witness to something far closer to the lived experience of 1970s Argentina than any narrative picture.
Ultimately, Fernando Birri committed his life to being a storyteller and communicator of culture in the most important sense. Like the griots before him, his work was to bring forth history and knowledge. A master of cinema, he was adept in nearly every format he touched, but always with the same purpose: shedding light on the impoverished peoples and reflecting on the objective conditions surrounding them, be they early morning Bueno Aires; the train tracks of the Tire dié; the flooded slums of Santa Fe; or even the entire mindset of a nightmarish decade spent in exile. His films communicated the responsibilities of the committed man. And in this way, he is a true artist, and one whose work deserves to be rediscovered.