Color Fields & Chiaroscuro: Camilo Restrepo on "Los Conductos"

Camilo Restrepo discusses his feature debut, a striking portrait of his friend Pinky and his native Colombia.
Andréa Picard

Camilo Restrepo's Los Conductos is exclusively showing in many countries starting March 11, 2021 in MUBI's Debuts series.

Nervy and brazen, Camilo Restrepo’s much-anticipated feature debut is a portrait of a young Colombian man struggling with addiction and the physical and psychological after-effects of religious indoctrination and exploitation at the hands of a cult leader. Shot on grainy 16mm in vibrant primaries and unfolding a striking, graphic interplay of light and darkness fitting to the protagonist’s dramatic plight, Los Conductos is a feverish fictionalized account of Felipe “Pinky” Lozano’s life. A friend of Restrepo who appears in his short film Como crece la sombra cuando el sol declina (2013), Pinky plays himself in this revenge fantasy destined to expiate his demons but which also exhumes the cyclical violence of Colombia’s past through radical and energizing abstraction. With hypnotic and elliptical rhythms, the film takes place in a largely nocturnal and quasi-mythological Medellín (whose nighttime illuminated vista Pinky observes from a perch, in meditative moments of tranquility), where Pinky encounters enigmatic characters, which may exist as figments of history, his imagination, his own checkered past, or his drug-induced delirium.

A propulsive journey fueled by focal shifts of time and distance and vertiginous movement, Los Conductos explores the sliding spectrum between good and evil with chromatic geometric tension, heightening the strange matter that is reality and the perceptual shifts for someone in distress living in the margins. With palindromic portents, Restrepo creates both a physical and mental landscape that mines the disorienting decisions engendered by a life’s demands for daily survival. A fitting follow-up to the filmmaker’s impressive (and intensely expressive) short films, Los Conductos is an urgent cri de coeur of resistance against structures of oppression as well as hegemonic systems of representation. Its portals and subterranean passageways provide liminal spaces of thought, mysteries that are appropriately unsolved yet anticipatory in an ongoing state of uncertainty composed of fragments—like lights at the end of a tunnel, truth amid confusion, hope amid despair. Like the blood orange colored fabric of flames that engulfs Pinky’s surroundings, the film is replete with metonymic images that transcend reality’s paradoxical inscrutability, offering small-scale possibilities of triumph and self-creation in face of relentless hardship. The film thus traces Pinky’s transformation, a rebirth occasioned through collective creativity in which formalism and fabulation are conductors of defiance and regenerative ways of seeing.


NOTEBOOK: Los Conductos is crucially, for me, a film about light and darkness and the uncertain space in between. Or, put another way, about good and evil and their blurry, shifting boundaries. It’s also an expression of liberation, an exorcism, a simulated revenge for Pinky—a real person, whom you’ve known for several years and who appears in one of your short films. What was it about Pinky that led you to make this film?

CAMILO RESTREPO: I am glad we are starting our conversation with the idea of a luminous contrast that would be like the image of the moral spectrum between good and evil. Much of my thinking arises from lights, shapes, sounds and colors. Los Conductos is indeed a film as simple as that: A film whose formal elements resonate with the story of its protagonist, my friend Pinky. A young man who one day realized that he no longer knew where the boundaries between good and evil lie. The victim of a religious sect from whom he managed to escape, Pinky reflects on the evil he was driven to commit in the name of a supposed divine justice. Knowing that his faith was the instrument by which he was manipulated, he learnt to mistrust everything and everyone. How can anyone know what is true or false, good or bad, real or imagined? This is Pinky's constant questioning. I think, like you do, that the chiaroscuro reflects this confusion, and that the title Los Conductos—which suggests a tunnel at the end of which there may be light—marks the young man's path towards a form of redemption.

NOTEBOOK: What was it like to work with Pinky? Did he have ideas or concerns about how his life would be portrayed?

RESTREPO: Pinky and I have been friends for a very long time. Our communication has always been sincere and fluid. When we agreed to make Los Conductos, each of us committed to fulfilling a role. I had to create a conducive environment for him to develop his acting. In response, Pinky had to adjust himself to this environment, which was not easy for someone who was going through a period in his life of, let's say, "sans toit ni loi."

Before the shoot, Pinky was living in a state of utter destitution, abandoned to the consumption of crack cocaine on the streets of Medellín. Over the years of preparing the film, I had gradually lost communication with him, to the point where one day arose within the production the legitimate question of whether Los Conductos should be interpreted by someone else. For me this was inconceivable. What mattered to me more than anything else was to confront Pinky with the experience of taking up his own traumatic story and rewriting it in a different way. He was the one who had to make his own portrait, and thus imagine himself differently. Fortunately, one day Pinky called me after several months of silence, which triggered the immediate shooting of the film for fear of seeing him disappear once again.

I now find that Pinky drew his portrait with great sincerity, taking on the responsibility of assuming his own weaknesses, thoughts, and desires (to kill the guru of the sect, for instance). This taking charge of his own image has proven to be the source of a new strength for him. I'm surprised to see that there was a Pinky before and a Pinky after the shooting.

My role in all this, to put it simply, was to frame his portrait. This frame I built with a series of historical and literary characters who expressed my views on Pinky's situation, and by the same token, the situation of the country. This frame is the element that gives a touch of unreality to Pinky's story. In this way, I assumed, through the artifice of my own artistic ideas, my distance from his experiences.

NOTEBOOK: Can you elaborate further on the purpose of including allegories and historic figures in this fictional account of Pinky’s drastic life and the balancing of one person’s experience versus that of a country’s?

RESTREPO: To illustrate the question, let's imagine a historical ladder. Using this ladder, Pinky goes down from his present state to his memories of the religious sect. Once on this level, he goes back even further, to Colombia's past. The further back in time he goes, the more he distances himself from his own person, from his identity. Thus, he arrives at a point where it is possible for him to exchange his life with that of another character, Revenge, who we know in the film to be a legendary bandit in Colombia in the 1950s. By losing his own identity through this movement into the past, Pinky begins to personify an idea, that of the revenge of the oppressed.

Likewise, one gets the feeling that the country's boundaries begin to blur as the film goes deeper into the heart of Colombia. Let's imagine that we look through a microscope, and that the problems of Colombia, amplified by the film, resonate with social problems common to all countries. It is as if we were touching on the very substance of these problems.

To sum up, it seems to me that the micro does indeed recall the macro, so that a look at a single individual can offer a vision of the whole of humanity. Los Conductos—whose title becomes an allusion to this idea of moving from one scale to another—is a film of zooms, of changing focal lengths.

NOTEBOOK: The film is also very emphatically about representation itself and infers a number of dualities or duplications, such as Pinky’s real experience and its filmic portrayal (thus, the real and the copy), his physical proximity and his distance (manifested through fragments and close-ups), the embodiment of his drug trip cast as his double, the dual characters, the silk-screening of T-shirts, and the materiality of the medium itself, the film’s 16mm celluloid. Further, the film’s formalism foregrounds a radical repudiation of realism with its elliptical editing and foreshortened images and a very pronounced juxtaposition of sound and image: It’s a heady mix that is both invigorating and rich in implication. I wonder if this came about in the writing stage or through a more visual means of conception (such as observing locations and the quality of light, the hues of color, textures, et cetera)?

RESTREPO: First, I try to act on the materials then I try to see if the result makes sense. I can now talk about the film in an analytical way, but nothing was really calculated at the beginning.

I can see that in Los Conductos there is indeed a questioning of the status of the audio-visual in relation to reality, and that this questioning is not so much critical as it is formal. The way in which the tactile and visual elements are arranged in the film awakens a feeling of mistrust about the role they are commonly attributed to while representing reality. Take the treatment of colors, for example. It does not seem "natural," to talk in the terms used to sanction the expressionist tendencies of figurative painting. The lights, the sounds, the objects, Pinky’s acting, the scenes with the character of Revenge, all the elements that make up the film signal a desire to create an environment that is more expressive than realistic. Then, the repeated allusions to the figure of the double, the duplication, the reproduction, appear as warnings against identifying the film with reality. Because, as you point out, I am opposed to so-called "realistic" tendencies, which, by playing on a mimetic effect, comfort the viewer by offering stereotypes. 

I feel there is a great danger in making films that cover up our vision of the world instead of questioning it. For me, a director's job is not to put the viewer in front of the frame they are used to seeing, but to explode this frame. Explode it so that reality is not what we are used to believing it to be. I even understand that making films is acting against reality. I am part of the legacy of Latin American directors who believed it was relevant to question the reality of their country by dismantling the current image we have of that reality.

I think that from form to content, Los Conductos expresses a discomfort with reality. For the character of Pinky, reality does not exist. The only thing that matters is the point-of-view from which one composes the image one wants to convey of things, since this is what he learned in the sect: the lies used by the leader to manipulate his followers altered their perception of the world. In that sense, lies are like the drugs Pinky abuses to change the face of reality. Reflecting on this system set by the film, if reality is what is perceived, the notion of realism should be re-evaluated at every moment.

I am surprised to see that my questioning of the relationship between reality and perception is linked—within the film itself—to the tensions between good and evil brought about by Pinky. From this correlation emerges a general question that unites Pinky and me: is all this true or is someone trying to make me believe that it is true? I think that this question expresses a mutual desire to emancipate us from the paths laid out.

NOTEBOOK: Is this where the hope and mischievousness come in? While Pinky’s situation is harsh and despairing (and historically linked with class oppression) the film also depicts instances of joy and vigor in his search for freedom and his daily survival. The film never moralizes his actions and instead there are surprising moments of complicity and release (music being one such “conductor”), indeed humanizing a complex cycle of neglect, abuse and violence. I guess my question is more about the “paths laid out” that you mention above and the possibilities of transgression as a form of resistance.

RESTREPO: In the film there is indeed no moral judgment of Pinky's behavior and actions. It is not a moralizing film, showing the right path through the wrong acts of its protagonist. On the contrary, it is a film that underlines the important place of free will in a reflection on morality. This free will exists as a movement in the spectrum between good and evil that we spoke of at the beginning. I have tried to point out this movement and not its direction.

From this movement comes an incredible feeling of vitality. The sensation of seeing that a person’s life consists in choosing a path at every moment. It's as if one has to constantly question oneself. The paths traced (by religion, by society, by political regimes, by ideologies, by our own habits, by our vices...) prevent us from reinventing ourselves. These paths exist to create a stable ground under our feet. But, personally, I believe that a person is fulfilled when they use their creativity to build themselves, running the risk of getting lost.   

There is a joy in this idea of self-fulfillment. In Los Conductos, Pinky is unquestionably the source of this joy, because in a way the film gives him the opportunity to reinvent himself in front of a camera. I have the feeling that he has regained a dignity he thought he had lost forever. He, who bore all the wrong social labels (drug addict, criminal, homeless, lazy), suddenly realized that he was much more than a label; that he was a man who doubts, but that doubting is precisely being human.

This freedom that he discovered in front of the camera radiates throughout the film until it explodes in the final scene—totally improvised—where his face changes in a second from the greatest sadness to the most intense joy. Then, after going through these contradictory emotions, Pinky runs away to disappear in the distance.

Nobody at the time of shooting the scene knew what he was going to do, not imagining that he was going to step out of the frame and leave us standing there filming a film without him. But it was that he no longer needed the camera to finally be the Pinky he wanted to be. For me, that moment was one of the most intensely human moments of my life. Every time I see the scene again I think of the end of Chaplin's films, where sadness and joy mix in an indefinable way.

NOTEBOOK: You began as a painter and the film is composed of striking compositions, graphic shapes, fascinating frames and a flattening of the image in many cases—almost turning them into objects. Whereas Bresson (another painter-turned-filmmaker) was heavily influenced by the still lives of Chardin in his final work, L’argent (also a revenge story, where the slippage between good and evil is as definite as it remains a mystery), one senses here an affinity to a more modern, figurative genre of still life (with rounded edges and cast shadows), in which objects take up the entire shape of the frame. The color play is amplified; the hot primaries of red, yellow, and blue dominate and create a pattern of their own. Would you say you apply a painterly eye when making a film? I think specifically of a close-up of a hole from an extricated wire socket that is like an Yves Klein monochrome with molten crumbling textures of blue. Perhaps we are ultimately closer to Antonioni’s Red Desert than we are to Bresson…?

RESTREPO: It's funny that you think of Antonioni’s Red Desert. I wasn't thinking about it when I made Los Conductos, but I've been thinking about it for a few months now for my next film. It's not so much a reference as a film, but as an idea of color. How to live within color? I read this question in Antonioni's film. Which reminds me of his admiration for Mark Rothko's paintings. For his first film in color, Antonioni had given himself the task of changing reality. I remember a few lines from an interview where he said: "In Red Desert I had to change the very face of reality, the color of the water, the roads, the landscapes, I had to paint them literally."  How to live through or within color? For a painter, light cannot be dissociated from color, and the way the world appears before our eyes cannot be dissociated from light. It is therefore an essential, even essentialist question.

In the period when I was painting, I deeply admired the painters who made monochrome paintings. I thought that the ultimate achievement of painting was the field of color without forms. But I was aware that I could not repeat what had already been done by others. It took me years to understand that I could achieve this intensity of the "radiant light field" with the tools of cinema. It's not monochrome, but it's somehow the same idea. It appears enunciated in Los Conductos by Pinky's voice-over when he observes a foundry fire. Pinky says:

“Underneath it all lies a magma in which matter loses its shape to be regenerated.
A star whose components melt together, to produce new matter from the old.
A perpetual resurrection that makes us forget what came before.
The world would be simpler if it remained formless,
without color, without sound, without one thing signifying another,
or being a memory of another life.
Nothing more than white light.”

 The image that comes after these words is of course that of the sun. This light is the sum of all colors. A white, which the writer Robert Walser likened to a whisper, to a prayer.

NOTEBOOK: When one thinks of painting and cinema, seriality is often mentioned because of the literal succession of frames/images. In Los Conductos the eye is indeed drawn toward certain serial forms within the images, such as striated rays of light illuminating Pinky’s cardboard bed in the warehouse, the succession of lights in the tunnel when he rides the stolen motorcycle, the spinning slats during silk-screening, but I’ve also heard you speak eloquently about your interest in diptychs and the eloquent space in between images. In Medieval and Renaissance diptychs and triptychs, the narrative is told through a means of reduction and simplification, often elaborated with jumps in time. Can you discuss the audience’s role in contributing to that in between space in Los Conductos? Do you think this active role is necessary for a film’s political intent to be felt?

RESTREPO: An unimaginative spectator is not a spectator. We all know that images poorly represent the sensory richness of what surrounds us. They put a three-dimensional world into two dimensions, fragment it into small frames, take away its smells, et cetera. But images still have a richness, that of exciting the imagination of the people who look at them. The role of images is therefore not to replace the world but to suggest it, to give a reading of it, a possibility to feel and understand it differently than when we are in it. This is why the screening room is such an important place. It is like a hole in the web of what we call "reality." This hole is an eloquent absence, like the space between the two paintings that make up a diptych. Eloquent absence because it tells us that there is a link between one painting and the other, between the screen and the world. In the films I enjoy, this link is highlighted but not given.

On the contrary, in the films and moving images works that I hate, the link between the world and the image appears immediately. It appears as an ideology, as a truth, which skillfully comforts the viewer to make them believe that what they see on the screen is what they want to see. There is no eloquent absence in these films, for they leave no room for doubt in the viewer.

So, yes, it is a political act to allow the spectator to question him or herself, to question what they see in the film, to question the director and his/her intentions. We may lose a few spectators along the way, but after all, cinema should not always be conceived as a means of communication for the masses.

NOTEBOOK: Medellín is mostly portrayed as nocturnal in the film, with interjecting starkly sun-soaked images.. The chasms of time-space are ambiguous hinting at fantasized digressions and subterranean worlds and a move into the countryside. Nature is healing and provides nourishment. Did you always envision the location as both a real and quasi-mythological site?

RESTREPO: Does Medellín really exist?  Is there not more than one Medellín? And if so, what about the one in which was I born?  I remember a city that pulses with crazy intensity, where the sun rises and sets at least three times a day. A sun that makes everything effervescent: Things, people, spirits, moods, rage, joy. I remember that Medellín in which I no longer live. For me, this city belongs to a contemporary mythology and to a mythology to come, to put it paradoxically.

NOTEBOOK: The sound design (and music) is so layered, evocative and propulsive. I assume you shot much of the film silent and did sound in post? Can you talk about this process? (Bresson—again, sorry!— said: “cinema can go beyond painting. [… It] is tomorrow’s writing or painting, with two kinds of ink, one for the eye, one for the ear.”)

RESTREPO: I am proud to be able to say that I am getting closer to the people I admire. Bresson is a great master.

I made two musical films before filming Los Conductos. In these films, I was looking for a form of speech enunciation that was more authentic and emotional than dialogue. As the themes of these films had a certain gravity, I came to the idea that important things are expressed in a unique way, in a moment and a space of their own. Performing music in front of the camera seemed to me to be the option for these films.

After my musical Cilaos, I remained with the impression that sound is a channel capable of connecting distant worlds. This idea came to me after understanding that the Reunion Maloya that Christine Salem sang in Cilaos is a rhythm that establishes a link between the world of the ancestors and that of the living. So, for Los Conductos, the link between different realities reappeared with the intuition that the sound had to be entirely constructed elsewhere than where the images were going to be filmed. That's why the whole film was filmed silent, to be sounded in post-production. The sound of Los Conductos is therefore not a capture but a creation.

NOTEBOOK: As a Colombian living in France for the past two decades, how do you view contemporary Colombia from this unique distance?

RESTREPO: A few years ago, when I made my short film Impression of a War, I thought that distance allowed me to take a critical look at the country, distancing me from having to react "epidermically" to the harsh socio-political conditions that Colombians face every day. But today, I see that distance is beginning to make me lose more and more of my links with contemporary Colombia. This is probably why I wanted to include a historical part of Colombia in Los Conductos, talking about the television clowns of the 80s and the bandits of the 50s. Spatial retreat seems to draw me towards a retreat from the present. I imagine that my position will change in a few years. Borges wrote: "Being Colombian is an act of faith." I hope to keep the faith to still be a Colombian who will live, even from afar, the present of his country. Maybe it's just a matter of time to be in the present.

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