After having debuted at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, “Mudos testigos” arrives in national theaters this March 2 to pay tribute to Colombian silent cinema and demonstrate, if you will, that these stories made a century ago are in perfect dialogue with the current era.
The film premieres within the framework of the Cine sin Tiempo cycle, which brings together a selection of silent film masterpieces that influenced its creation process and which, at its opening, on February 22, will screen incomplete films with live music by the ensemble of Carlos Quebrada.
Jerónimo Atehortúa, author of films such as “The cinemas to come” and producer of “Pirotecnia” and “Como el cielo después de llover”, accepted the challenge of Luis Ospina and, following the inspiration of the directors of the French New Wave, which previously were critical, he decided to make his directorial debut with this wide-ranging feature film.
THE NEW CENTURY: What is this silent film with a broad historical context about?
JERÓNIMO ATEHORTUA: It is a posthumous film by Luis Ospina, a director from Cali who died in September 2019, and is the love story between Efraín and Alicia, who is engaged to a man named Uribe. “Mudos testigos” stars Mara Meba (Alicia), Roberto Estrada Vergara (Efraín) and Rafael Burgos (Uribe), film actors from the first half of the 20th century, who are back on screen thanks to experimental work and of “collage” that speaks a little about what Colombia was like at that time.
ENS: How was the film made, how was that process?
AND: It is made with a lot of effort, it is very classifiable because it can receive most of the labels that they put on films, for example it can be considered a documentary, fiction, genre, experimental film, but if you like to think of it as an archive film , “collage”, an experimental fiction, is also acceptable. In “Mudos testigos” there is a double movement, because it is the last film by Luis Ospina and it is my first film, but also because it is made with materials that were filmed more than 100 years ago and yet it is totally contemporary.
ENS: How difficult was it to make a film with materials from more than a century ago?
AND: The challenge of making “Mute witnesses” was great, it was not easy to make a fictional story with a credible narrative thread from the film archive. So they opted for the 20th century methodology, “the ‘cine-détournement’, typical of situationism, which consists of making use of images from other films, varying the context so that they acquire new meanings. This methodology not only responds to a job, but to a poetic-political practice that understands that archives and film memory are not mausoleum objects, but living objects to the extent that they are used over and over again to give them new and unusual senses. It must be taken into account that most of the films from the silent period in Colombia are incomplete and with the sequences that exist it is difficult to spin a story. For this reason, from a script work, between Luis Ospina, Juan Sebastián Mora and I, a cinematographic story was generated that merges the image with texts inspired by literary works, which support and connect the story.
ENS: Beyond being a love or fiction film, is there a background?
AND: It tells the impossible love story between Alicia and Efraín in the first half of the 20th century, in a very troubled context. However, what begins as a love story gradually turns into one of more political overtones, it also shows the way of thinking before, of seeing situations and how they faced them. “Mudos testigos” is made entirely with fragments of other films that correspond to the silent period of Colombian cinema, that is, the films that were made between 1922 and 1937, before synchronous sound appeared. We took those movies, we studied them very well, we watched them hundreds of thousands of times and we identified narrative lines.
ENS: What does this film represent for Colombia today?
AND: When one sees movies from the past, it is inevitable to know a little more than what they have told us. Those images alone tell us the history, the cities, the anxiety, the worries and a lot of very interesting things. You inevitably know the past and its plots. In this feature film, in addition to the actors, the films themselves are protagonists, because they recapitulate the anxieties of an art and a time, such as landscaping, melodrama, violence, and also concerns that are still valid in Colombian narrative. The first Colombian films and a large part of the audiovisual that has been produced in the history of the country is melodrama and we treat this genre with respect and affection, which we merge with experimentation to put together pieces of many films, as literature or cinema do. modern, to tell a love story to which the political theme is added.
ENS: How long did it take to make “Mute Witnesses”?
AND: He The film’s process took four years. Delimiting the universe took a couple of seconds. Then, getting those films in their proper versions, accessing those images, having the right conditions to be able to finish it, it was a bit difficult and very extensive, and it took about two and a half years. We had the help of Patrimonio Filmico and digitizing it was an interesting process, then it was necessary to get a collaboration from the Cinemateca de Bogotá. This film replicates a bit in principle what the style of silent films was like back then, there are images and it has texts that help to tell the story, those texts in turn are inspired by literature, by history. We see that before the film activity was quite romantic. These films, especially the fictional ones, tend to favor the world of feelings, many times they are guided by an idea, an emotion. Most of the films are about love, stories of men who meet women and have to go through different adversities to be able to get together, but anxieties, class, racial, and gender issues also filter through, and are portrayed with a certain candor. but if you see them from another angle, you realize many issues that today are vital to think about, to understand the conflicts and fundamental relationships. I think people might like those stories.
classic melodrama
“Aura or the violets” (1924), “Manizales city” (1925), “Like the dead” (1925), “Love, duty and crime” (1926), “María” (1926), , ” The tragic end of Gardel, his last farewell” (1935) and “The first essays of the national talking cinema” (1937) were some of the films that Luis Ospina selected to give that narrative framework that encompasses the transition from silent cinema to movies. sound and that goes from being a classic melodrama to a story with a much more modern cinematographic language, in which the protagonist begins to become aware of the structural violence that surrounds him.