ANDEAN MUSIC, ANDEAN FILM… SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT

I finally get back down to La Serena and it’s just that- serene, and dirt cheap too, unlike certain other touristy locations. I even find something there I haven’t seen much of on this trip, Andean music, complete with dances, the kind of thing you might expect to find in Bolivia, but not here. I like it, the clogging and tapping, the singing and rapping. It reminds me I’m in South America. It reminds me I’m alive. To be sure the dances and costumes are derived from the Bolivian standard, regardless of to what degree any of them might still exist in Chile. Andean music itself is becoming increasingly interbred, and increasingly with jazz. I like it. A good example of this is the Chilean group Entrama I saw earlier in Valdivia. All Andean groups incorporate a great deal of Spanish folk music of course. This could help revive the genre. Andean music was one of the first types of ‘world music’ on the scene, long before ‘Afro-Beat’. Why has it faded? Is it too simplistic, too folksy? Have we simply outgrown it? Certainly the fact that many of its proponents are playing for tips on street corners and in subways doesn’t help, making it seem too common. Dressing up in American Indian costume like I saw in Barcelona and even in Buenos Aires doesn’t help much either. Those Otavalenos don’t miss a trick. The verdict is still out. Many of its problems are problems of ‘world music’ in general of course. But more of that later, I’ve got a film festival to attend in Vina del Mar.

I had a choice of which film festival to attend, the Mar del Plata ‘grade-A’ event or its much lesser known minor cousin, the Vina del Mar event. Vina (sorry no ‘enye’ on this keyboard) fit my schedule better and Chile satisfies my belly and my pocketbook better, so that’s where I showed up. If you’re hard-core of course you could do both in succession, but who’s so hard core when you could just sit home and watch cable instead? Still, there’s something nice about a good festival, mostly the opportunity to see a lot of good independent films and the festive atmosphere itself. For better or worse film festivals in recent years have increasingly become the farm system for Hollywood, a place for films to find distributors and audiences, the same films showing up all over the ‘circuit’, about as spontaneous as an alarm clock. On the plus side, Hollywood is making some of its best films ever with directors from all over the world, including del Toro, Cuaron, and Inarritu from Mexico.

Vina hasn’t reached that level yet, being more a venue for student films and the Spanish-language market for independent features and documentaries. The student films were fairly predictable dissertations on the status of the human condition, and the ease of changing all that if only society weren’t so corrupt. As Gertrude Stein once said, “students they are merciful, and recognized they chew something.” I wish I had said that, but I catch flack for my flights of fancy writing. Write vertically just once instead of the usual horizontal missionary position, and I’m sure to hear about it from hacks with axes. Sure as shit some redneck cop with bad teeth is gonna’ stop me and ask to see my poetic license. It never fails. Film is no different. It long ago surrendered to its to its most mundane role as a popular literary medium, its qualities of light color sound and celluloid reduced to subordinate roles. Such things are relegated to ‘experimental films’ and their festivals, increasingly hard to find. Money wins. YouTube and its surfing dogs don’t help much either, such is the tyranny of democracy, but they DO have stuff by Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage and all the other early innovators, if anybody still cares.

The documentaries at Vina were a disappointment, more talking heads (a technical term) than telling pictures, moral platitudes from southern latitudes, predictable at best. Boring film is failed film. The Mexican ones from the Churubusco studios were best, not surprisingly. This is a film tradition the qualitative equal of Hollywood, commercial cradle of Bunuel, and fountain of creativity. Their stuff always looks good. The fiction fared better than the documentaries. Though it’s hard to see them all when they’re playing simultaneously on different screens, the ones I saw were good, particularly an Argentine offering called ‘Soledad’, a play on terms, being the name of a new-born child and the theme of the film, solitude. The story manages to weave through social classes and their distinctions without falling into clichés, just confusion. Such is life, a comedy of airs and errors. The Chango Spasiuk-infused soundtrack was perfect.

The Vina festival had its moments but largely failed from an outsider’s point of view. First and foremost a festival should be festive. I suppose it was if you knew where the parties were, but such are superfluous considerations for an aficionado of film. The buzz was at the O’Higgins hotel where I got wi-fi, not at the theatres, waiting with baited breath to see the next cinematic jewel to melt in your mind. One problem was that venues were scattered around town; at least Vina is not so big, so doable. Try that in Bangkok. They did once and it was the worst film festival I’ve ever attended. The ‘festival’ consisted of a sign under which volunteers would steer you to the theater that had the film you wanted to see (in a city of ten million!) and before which trucked-in Hollywood celebrities would gather for publicity photos, a purely media event organized by government functionaries. The same event when organized by and for film-lovers is one of the best I’ve ever attended, scads of films in one central location, both ‘circuit’ films and regional delicacies, robustly attended by local Thais always looking for an excuse to party.

Vina started off with one strike against it, fallen ill to the Latin American disease, labor strikes. From what I gather this one is by municipal workers, looking for cures to the ‘crisis’. This is not surprising in the typical Latin American bureaucratic state, but Chile is the least of those. Old habits die hard. This shut one of the main venues down, the Municipal Theatre and its retinue of selections and competition entries, though somehow it managed to open for the evening’s high-profile gala events. Shit’s relative. The main problem was with the organization itself. Information was not clear about times locations and costs, so some perseverance was necessary. That’s doable and probably excusable. Not excusable was the unprofessional attitude of much of the volunteers themselves, presumably film students, entering theatres mid-screening en masse laughing and cutting up, even talking on cell phones. *^%$(&^%!!! Hardly anybody stayed for credits and sometimes they were cut out completely!? There is no substitute for professionalism. Still, Vina’s got potential. But me, I get on the bus again a day early and head for the hills. After three weeks in Chile it’s time to head back to Argentina. It’s time to head home, wherever that is.