The Gold Bug (Alejo Moguillansky, 2014).
To get to know El Pampero Cine, it would be best to start with their contradictions. Equally screen maximalists and minimalists, they have made some of the biggest small films of the past two decades: consider the ambitious, narrative-hopping epics for which they’re best known, such as La flor (2018, 13½ hours long) and Trenque Lauquen (2022, 4½ hours). The collective is impressive as much for the way they finance yearslong productions on shoestring budgets as for their expansive, Borgesian storytelling. Working largely with consumer-grade equipment and refusing most public financing, the spirit of El Pampero Cine is one of limitless creative possibility and roguish independence.
Founded in 2002, the group consists of Mariano Llinás, Laura Citarella, Alejo Moguillansky, and Agustín Mendilaharzu, all of whom direct their own projects and work on each other’s in various creative roles. The group came together after the production of Llinás’s first feature, Balnearios (2002), in order to distribute that film, but the collective really crystallized as such during the production of his second film, Historias extraordinarias (2008). A four-hour-long epic that includes lions, explosions, and a trip to Mozambique, Historias extraordinarias employed many of the methods which would come to define the group: small budgets; shooting on affordable, collectively-owned video cameras; and mainly casting friends and family who could adapt to a protracted schedule. It was also the first time Citarella produced, Moguillansky edited, and Mendilaharzu served as cinematographer on an El Pampero production, cementing many of the collaborative dynamics that persist to this day. Rather than a traditional release, the group partnered with the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires to screen the film once a week for a year so it could gain traction by word of mouth. This collaboration and El Pampero’s experimentation with alternative models of distribution would continue for the Argentine releases of their subsequent films.
From the beginning, the group has forged an economically and creatively sustainable production system that avoids most government or studio financing. Their smaller productions are mostly self-funded, and on larger-scale films such as La flor, they have only taken money from “funds that won’t require accountability” and “producers who aren’t owners of the film,”1 according to Citarella. Their way is closer to a patronage system, and it manages to keep them free from the political demands on content often seen in the state-sponsored funding systems that fuel many national film industries. In the wake of president Javier Milei’s recent decision to defund INCAA, the main state financing body of Argentine cinema, El Pampero’s longtime outspoken refusal to take money from the state has taken on an unfortunate poignancy. In the midst of rampant austerity measures and censorship, government financing and the political arm-twisting it entails has become at least as much of a risk as a reward, whether it be in Argentina, China, Germany, or beyond. Even if financing their films is more complicated than they have sometimes let on—in interviews they typically dodge the question, with Lllinás at times teasing that all their money comes from “the Dutch,” or else an off-shore oil rig—El Pampero’s projection of complete autonomy and ability to make epic films through essentially DIY methods has a seductive, rebellious sway to it.
Historias extraordinarias (Alejo Moguillansky, 2008).
These tensions partly animate Moguillansky’s The Gold Bug (2014), a film that is perhaps the most vivid encapsulation thus far of the El Pampero Cine spirit and style. Moguillansky was given a grant by the Hubert Bals fund with the dictate that he work with a Swedish co-director, Fia-stina Sandlund, whom he had never met, to make a film in Argentina about the 19th-century Dutch feminist icon Victoria Benedictsson. Working within these limitations to fashion an autocritique of the film’s own production, Moguillansky delivers an allegory on the absurd state of international film financing. The film follows Moguillansky’s crew—his El Pampero collaborators, cast to play themselves—as they hijack the production, itself a front for their true intention to look for buried treasure in the jungle. As the crew play pretend, insisting that they need to go to the town of Leandro N. Alem in order to investigate the story of the eponymous 19th-century Argentinean leftist, the film becomes a hodgepodge of dueling narrators and characters all vying for control of the film and the treasure. At various points, Alem, Benedictsson, and Sandlund speak to us in voice-over, the last of whom places irate phone calls to Moguillansky as she tries to take back control of the film. Then the female crew members conspire to steal the treasure for themselves.
The Gold Bug is a messy, ungovernable text that wields all of these clashing voices and ideologies to depict the contemporary politics of filmmaking. Yet for all of its big ideas—class, colonialism, feminism, the nature of cinema itself—the work is more than anything a group self-portrait rendered as one giant allegorical joke on the system. Setting up tracking shots using horse-drawn carts, standing around drinking maté and making music, kicking a soccer ball around between takes, their work is equally a space for play and a serious pursuit. It’s a utopian vision of what a film production can be: free from the demands of the marketplace; easily mixing the high-brow with the low- (Mouchette [1967] serves as the inspiration for a piece of visual slapstick, while Straub-Huillet is invoked to confuse the European producers and perpetuate the crew’s ongoing farce); full of camaraderie and collaboration; and letting the larger political sentiments it arouses dance uncomfortably across the background.
While stylistic and thematic resonances run across the films of El Pampero Cine thanks to the collaborative nature of their development and production, each project is still ultimately authored by a single member. In the same way that one might discuss auteurist touches within the Hollywood studio system while also situating those productions within the broader aesthetic and industrial tendencies of the studio, the work of each of these filmmakers can be considered individually while still keeping an eye toward the influence of the collective.
La flor (Mariano Llinás, 2018).
MARIANO LLINÁS: SCHEHERAZADEAN CINEMA
Scheherazade is our patron saint.
—Jacques Rivette
Our problem is how to return to fiction from a place that is neither reactionary nor anachronistic. How to make fiction after Godard.
—Mariano Llinás
With three narrative features to date—each managing to triple the previous one’s running time, and cumulatively exceeding twenty hours—Llinás has made a career out of playing Scheherazade, the narrator of One Thousand and One Nights and master of the narrative tease. Llinás deploys an almost encyclopedic array of narrative techniques to keep his films going: abundant cliff-hangers; sudden shifts into epistolary subplots that can be featurette-length in themselves; long flashbacks detailing character backstories; Rashomon-style subjective rehashes of the same event over and over; forays into essayistic asides on all sorts of incidental material.
Linás’s first film, Balnearios (2002), takes a single subject—beachfront resorts—and attempts to exhaust it from every angle, cycling through a series of devices and forms, from a faux-anthropological documentary on beachgoers with a tone reminiscent of Roland Barthes’s Mythologies to a quasi–ghost story told through still images. The point of the endeavor, in this and much of Llinás’s cinema, lies less in the power of the individual episodes than in the intellectual curiosity generated by the structural game-playing. It’s not only the drama of the characters and events that feels important in his films, but the drama of the structural mechanics behind the act of storytelling—how one surprising incident can follow another and what technique Llinás can pull out to keep his narrative engine running, for four hours or fourteen.
Historias extraordinarias (Mariano Llinás, 2018).
At the root of Llinás’s work is a keen interest in the fundamental complicity between audience and narrator that enables the suspension of disbelief. One function of Llinás’s favored structural devices is to render the artificiality of storytelling explicit, making it clear that both spectator and narrator are aware that the other is in on the game. “I’ll try to explain what this movie is about,” Llinás narrates from a roadside rest stop at the opening of La flor, his magnum opus and longest film to date. He explains the structural devices at play: there will be four stories with beginnings and no endings, then one complete story, and lastly one story with an ending but no beginning. The stories will be, he continues, a mummy film in the style of Val Lewton, a musical, a spy movie, an unclassifiable film, a remake of a French classic, and a story of women captives in the 19th century. All the stories will also star the same four actresses: Laura Paredes, Pilar Gamboa, Elisa Carricajo, and Valeria Correa, who are part of the theater troupe Piel de Lava. Though Llinás's description of these structural limitations has a distancing effect, much of the film to follow relies on our deep susceptibility to losing ourselves in the workings of the drama.
Llinás’s work, and La flor especially, has much in common with the work of Oulipo writers such as Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, who took on various literary constraints and turned them into explorations of what their medium could do. In La flor, Llinás’s structural gambit strips traditional storytelling of some of its most fundamental elements—dramatic resolution and consistent psychological characterization—while retaining all of the aesthetic tools and mechanics that serve to pull off the illusion of narrative coherence and plausibility. This is a film that is constantly beginning again, like Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, in which every other chapter appears to be the first of a different novel. What results is an interrogation of the fundamental terms of the medium that turns form itself into content, firmly foregrounding the telling over the tale.
Each episode builds off the preceding ones, complicating their formulas in an effort to offer something new, and by the time we’ve reached the nine-hour mark and fourth episode, the film starts to look backward, approaching the origins of cinema. After a lengthy interlude on a director obsessed with shooting trees, seemingly a wink to D. W. Griffith's famous dictum that “what the cinema needs is the wind in the trees,” the film slips into a silent black-and-white remake of Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country (1946), then becomes a cryptic pseudo-western recorded from the projections of a camera obscura. Llinás’s work is a touch Wellesian, and as much as he is a consummate entertainer offering immediate genre pleasures by the truckload, La flor builds to something like a grand statement on cinema toward its end. By nearly exhausting the medium’s abilities, the film also invigorates it, suggesting that cinema has simultaneously run its course and only just begun.
Ostende (Laura Citarella, 2011).
LAURA CITARELLA: SUSPICIOUS MINDS
It is as if fiction and procedurals were in charge of resolving the emptiness of the characters.
—Laura Citarella on Ostende
Almost all of El Pampero Cine’s films are apt to pull apart the very basics of storytelling, splitting off into another tale or swerving into a vastly different genre partway through. Where the work of Llinás is focused on the powers and possibilities of the narrator, Citarella is drawn to the role of the viewer and the way audiences construct narratives based on fragmentary, incomplete, and insufficient information. The two films she has directed solo, Ostende and Trenque Lauquen, form a diptych that Citarella has hinted may become a larger series. They both focus on a woman named Laura (played by Laura Paredes) who becomes stranded in remote parts of the Buenos Aires Province and stumbles onto large labyrinthian mysteries that may or may not simply be products of her own idle curiosity.
Ostende finds Laura at a seaside resort in the off-season after winning a vacation through a radio contest. As it is too cold to swim and too windy to sunbathe, she starts observing the other guests and slowly speculating on the potentially nefarious goings-on between an older man (Julio Citarella, the director’s father) and the two women with whom he can always be seen. As Laura stalks the trio through the woods of the resort and spies on them from the hotel balcony, Citarella oscillates between building suspense over what the old man might be up to and building a sense of mystery over what is motivating Laura’s deep suspicions. Taking cues from Vertigo (1958), the film plays with our sense of identification to illustrate and question the ways we as spectators and voyeurs can be easily overtaken by our own sense of morbid curiosity.
Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella, 2022).
Trenque Lauquen starts with the same parameters as Ostende—Paredes, ambiguously mysterious events, and a small provincial town—but it’s vastly more enigmatic than its predecessor. The story of a missing woman, Laura, and the two men who have gone looking for her, the first her husband, Rafael (playwright Rafael Spregelburd), and the other her lover, Ezequiel (Ezequiel Pierri, Citarella’s husband), Trenque Lauquen immediately evokes the modernist mystery of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960) as well as the noir intrigue of Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944). Told in two parts—the first an epistolary romance and the second a science-fiction mystery, each of which builds toward its own explanation of where Laura went—the film offers us many different potential solutions without ever fully confirming or denying any. It is the Schrödinger's cat of missing-woman tales, prompting epistemological questions over certainty, truth, and whether it’s ever possible to actually know someone, let alone a fictional character.
Where La flor pushes endlessly forward, always starting new tales without ever looking back, Trenque Lauquen is more circular in nature. Like the film’s characters, who are seen driving over and over again down the same roads while listening to the same songs on the radio, Trenque Lauquen moves through a series of repetitions, constantly folding back in on itself to retread the same narrative and geographic territory, yet each return voyage prompts fresh revelations and emotions. The first half of the filmdepicts Ezequiel’s recollections of his romance with Laura, which hinged on their mutual fascination with a set of letters from the 1960s belonging to a mysterious woman, Carmen Zuna (played by Citarella). The search for Zuna seems to form something of a parallel to Ezequiel and Rafael’s search for Laura, but just as this plot starts to hint at a conclusion the credits roll, an intermission intervenes, and the film proceeds to completely refocus and subvert the events of the first half. A sci-fi conspiracy thriller told through a voice recording Laura left for Ezequiel before her disappearance, the second part repeats many of the principal elements and beats of the first while completely shifting genres, mood, and perspective. Where La flor is often concerned with difference and an ever-multiplying array of narrative possibilities, Trenque Lauquen’s insistence on repetition turns the focus inward, toward the ways we receive narrative information as we search for meaning. The result is a melancholic portrait of postmodern alienation that melds the ordinary and extraordinary into one vast, unknowable mystery.
The Parrot and the Swan (Alejo Moguillansky, 2013).
ALEJO MOGUILLANSKY: DIALECTICS AND PLAY
Your music is not provocative. It is like a game for kids.
—Margarita Fernandez to Helmut Lachenmann in The Little Match Girl (Alejo Moguillansky, 2017)
La flor and Trenque Lauquen loom large in the reputation of El Pampero Cine due to their expansive lengths, narrative breadth, and festival prestige. The films of Alejo Moguillansky have a comparatively undersized sense of importance, though they are no less essential. If his works seem smaller that’s because they deal with the casual intimacy of everyday life. Working faster and with less planning than Llinás or Citarella, Moguillansky trades their grandiosity for an immediacy and self-referentiality that gives his features a unique sense of freewheeling adventurousness and aesthetic abandon. Wildly discursive and prone to hopping from documentary to melodrama to slapstick to political reflection at a moment’s notice, Moguillansky’s work also best embodies the playful teasing characteristic of El Pampero Cine’s films. Brazenly setting up and destroying his own structural parameters, self-consciously deploying narrative and music cues for comedic effect, stuffing his films with rampant film-historical references, Moguillansky produces the purest and most joyous display of El Pampero Cine’s penchant for reworking the audience’s expectations of what a film is, breaking apart the conventions of cinema in front of their eyes in order to understand its inner workings.
Often casting his artistic collaborators and family members to play themselves, Moguillansky works with the autobiographical impulse to examine the everyday economic conditions of contemporary artists in Buenos Aires. His projects typically originate as documentaries and slowly build into narratives in the course of production. In The Parrot and The Swan (2013) he began by documenting his own avant-garde theater collective, Grupo Krapp, before growing interested in the boom operator who keeps stepping into frame, El Loro (Rodrigo Sánchez Mariño), and beginning to craft into a story around his romantic life. Ultimately growing to incorporate elements of Swan Lake, the resulting film is a versatile mix of a romantic comedy, droll workplace satire, and pseudo-documentary on the working conditions of both dance troupes and documentary filmmakers.
This affection for documentary often gives Moguillansky’s work a clear political flavor and Marxist bent unique amongst the El Pampero Cine members. The immense amount of work artists have to do for little to no pay lies at the heart of many of his films, often serving as their primary source of comedy. Satirical tales of money’s corrupting influence abound, such as in The Gold Bug, or For The Money (2019), in which members of an avant-garde theater troupe become fugitives from the law after stealing the prize money from a theater festival. In The Middle Ages (2022), Moguillansky’s pandemic-era farce, his own daughter Cleo’s Méliès-influenced obsession with looking at the moon quickly spawns a get-rich-quick scheme that has her pawning off all of her parents’ things so she can afford a telescope.
The Middle Ages (Alejo Moguillansky, 2022).
A poet of artistic precarity, Moguillansky also best embodies the frugality of the group’s filmmaking process in his aesthetic approach. In contrast to Llinás’s inclination toward a subverted sense of classicism and Citarella’s Antonioni-esque cinema of alienation, Moguillansky’s filmmaking is one of willful eclecticism and experimentation. Apart from his first film, Castro (2009), which was shot using traditional working methods and retains a rigorously constructed sense of mise-en-scène and choreography, Moguillansky has used the flexible, drawn-out shooting schedules of El Pampero Cine to embark on projects with no plan in sight, letting the film find itself through its own making. This has facilitated a certain improvisatory quality in his films, which readily give way to all sorts of digressions. In The Parrot and The Swan and The Gold Bug, his two films explicitly about filmmaking, the vast number of formal gags on display add up to an open-ended exploration of the medium itself that helps fuel their narrative and thematic concerns.
Moguillansky is the resident editor of the group, and these aspects of his work speak to a dialectical sense of film form. Diverse narrative elements and references are often incorporated not for dramatic function, but for obscure poetic effects and unexpected humor. In The Little Match Girl, his most explicitly political film to date, this process results in a simple work, almost fable-like, that is nonetheless resolutely difficult to pin down. Starting as a documentary of avant-garde German composer Helmut Lachenmann staging a production of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl in Buenos Aires, the film begins to mutate when the musicians threaten to strike over their labor conditions. Growing to incorporate a national transit strike, a pianist with ties to the RAF, a VHS copy of Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), and the music of Ennio Morricone, the film willingly embraces the nonlinear and discordant connections between these various elements. The result is a poetic portrait of family life in Argentina with quiet ripples of leftist political history running underneath.
Clementina (Agustín Mendilaharzu, 2022).
AGUSTÍN MENDILAHARZU AND AN IN-HOUSE STYLE
In the world of cinema there is an aristocracy of directors that we are interested in attacking politically. It seems incorrect to me to say that a film is “from” someone.
—Agustín Mendilaharzu
Having directed only one feature film to date, Clementina (2022), Agustín Mendilaharzu might be the most elusive of the four members of El Pampero Cine, at least in the eyes of international audiences, yet his contribution to the group is no less significant for it. Primarily a theater director, playwright, and actor who got into cinematography by chance, his work as the resident cinematographer of the group has done much to give their diverse output a formal coherence. Apart from the creative and physical dexterity needed to pull off such ambitious films on modest budgets—on Historias extraordinarias he doubled as actor and cinematographer, at times pulling focus right before jumping in front of the camera—he also has given the group something of an in-house style.
Typically working with prosumer-grade Canon cameras for thrift and flexibility, the group’s films have a grainy immediacy and casualness that’s equally aesthetically and economically motivated. Locked-off photography is the norm, favoring simpler pans and tilts over zooms, handheld work, or dolly shots, which would be expensive and time-consuming. Long takes also feature heavily, an analog for the extended running times of the films themselves. When the camera does move, it typically does so slowly, drawing out the drama and poring over details of the environment. In Llinás’s and Citarella’s work, in which the proliferation of stories is fundamental, shallow focus is used to add tension and mystery by obscuring information, turning even simple scenes of a character walking down a road or around a resort into moments of suspenseful anticipation as they recede into or emerge from a blurred-out background. Moguillansky, on the other hand, often prefers deep-focus tableaux with dynamic blocking that can both add a level of artificiality to the scene and capture groups of artists at work in their environments.
In Clementina, co-directed by Constanza Feldman, Mendilaharzu crafts one of the most graceful and straightforward efforts of the El Pampero Cine filmography without forsaking any of the formal playfulness that defines their work. A pandemic production, the film follows a couple (real-life couple Mendilaharzu and Feldman) struggling with maintenance problems in their apartment and, ultimately, moving during lockdown. Told across five episodes with frequent references to Percival and the Black Death, Clementina also features many familiar El Pampero faces, such as Moguillansky and Laura Paredes playing Russian movers, and many of the autobiographical elements that help give El Pampero productions a familial feel. It also adds an extra level of playfulness and formal experimentation to those watching the film within the context of the group’s work as a whole. A small joke, such as the way Mendilaharzu always appears out of focus across the film, is given extra juice when one realizes that without him behind the camera there would simply be no one to pull focus.
Clementina (Agustín Mendilaharzu, 2022).
In interviews, El Pampero Cine often describe themselves as a rock group or a family, and one of the many pleasures that arise from watching El Pampero productions lies in seeing the same faces and names reappear time and again. From actors like Walter Jakob or Laura Paredes, to family members like Moguillansky’s daughter, Cleo, or wife, Luciana Acuña, to collaborators like composer Gabriel Chwojnik and boom operator Rodrigo Sánchez Mariño, to the actual collective members themselves, be it in a cameo or starring role, the roster of familiar faces gives their entire filmography a sense of continuity and self-referentiality. Yet perhaps the greatest unifying element is their sense of freedom and irreverence towards established cinematic norms; a shared desire to constantly question what a film can look like, how it can be made, and how audiences can experience it. In the start of their third decade and after the critical successes of La flor and Trenque Lauquen, their ambitions continue to grow. No matter how large their films become, one hopes they’ll still feel just as small.
- Claire Allouche, “Entretien avec El Pampero Cine: la vie des pirates,” Répliques (2018): 11. ↩