It is logical, even desirable, that, due to the overabundance of images in circulation, some filmmakers dispense with filming, appropriate that existing and ubiquitous audiovisual magma and in a creative montage alter the origin of the images or establish new relationships between the planes without changing the initial motivations of the moment in which an event, a person, a phenomenon was recorded with a camera.
Archive films have always existed, today more than in other times, and they can lead to essays, documentaries or fiction.
Danube it is a strange case. He uses various newsreel materials, resorts to archives intended for tourism promotion, introduces two or three sequences from a Polish film (The attempt1959), uses other materials without a precise origin, also adds many photographs and declassified police documents.
Almost all of the materials are of a documentary nature, and cover a little over twenty years of Argentine history. The seen goes from 1947 to 1970.
The common thread is a city: Mar del Plata. And the attention is directed to the creation of the famous class A film festival that is celebrated in the epicenter of national popular tourism. It is not all.
It happens that the film by Agustina Pérez Rial is anomalous and paradoxical. It is not hybrid, in the sense that it transforms non-fiction into fiction without dismissing the problem of the delimitation between artifice and the attempt to correspond.
The documentary is never neutral, nor does it stop assuming a perspective, but it does recognize a limit: reality is respected, which does not mean that it is not interpreted. Indeed, Pérez Rial builds a singularity; the images replace the real; the sound is restored as a support for reality, but the voice of a Russian woman who arrived in 1947 invests the fictional set. The voice kindly parasitizes the documents without stripping them of their historical truth, but adds a plot in keeping with the times.
The story that is born in the voice and resignifies the whole takes up the ideological persecution that had its splendor in the de facto government of Onganía and in the city of Mar del Plata in 1968. The hunt for communists, also Peronists, was an obsession of the institution of order and the government of the day.
Regarding this specific data, Pérez Rial adds the case of a typical group of the time linked to a cultural association called Danubio. The Russian girl is a member of the group linked to the utopian thought of the 60s, who also works as a translator from Russian to Spanish and sometimes works at the film festival as an interpreter for the guests of the Eastern bloc.
This year, Poplars on Pliushia Street, by Tatiana Liovznova, was one of the competing films. The protagonist —imaginatively— translated the director, among other things, and her closeness to the Soviet delegation made her suspect. (Remarkable film that of Liovznova, who predicts the drama of The bridges of Madison By other means).
The paranoid delirium of police reports, with their lunatic categories and synoptic charts typical of obsessive paranoids, can seem derisory and ancient until the ear is well pointed towards the present.
The words may be less laborious today, but the fervor to detect persists, because this practice is a symptom of the prevailing general ideological disorder. Today no one would describe the potential infiltrators to conquer socialism as “communists, pro-communists and crypto-communists”, as one report says, although some no less creative phrases are heard from time to time. The difference is the context. Today’s is parodic, yesterday’s perverse.
Mysterious Danube. It could have been a curious exercise in memory, but in some passages it abandons its status as a mere symbolic archeology of the past to sporadically become an archeology of the present.
To see
Danube (Argentina / 2021).
Rating: Very good
Address: Agustina Pérez Rial. Screenplay: Paulina Bettendorff. Photography: Pupeto Mastropasqua. Editing: Natalia Labaké. Sound: Manuel Reservoir. Duration: 62 minutes. At the Municipal Film Club.