2023 Doc history : Colombia Doc history : Colombia
In 1905, the French cameraman Félix Mesguish was commissioned by the President of the Republic Rafael Reyes Prieto to film some public ceremonies: this marked the official birth of cinema in Colombia. In 1912, the first cinemas opened and as of 1915, production began to develop thanks to two filmmakers of Italian origin, the brothers Vincenzo and Francesco Di Domenico, who imported foreign films but also founded the country’s first production company, the SICLA (Sociedad Industrial Cinematográfica Latinoamericana). Through the twenties, the quantity and quality of the films grew. Arturo Acevedo Vallarino recorded the country’s major historic events with newsreels from 1924 to 1948. The arrival of sound provoked a crisis in Colombian film; all through the thirties, the only production was documentary. Nonetheless, the major economic and political strides made in this decade (industrialisation, political and social reforms) allowed as of 1941 the revival of feature film production (three a year on average) often musical comedies inspired by Mexican production. This evolution was interrupted by the assassination of the liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán (1948), marking the outbreak of a ten-year civil war between liberals and conservatives resulting in more than 300,000 deaths and the collapse of film production. Only four feature films were shot between 1948 and 1960. The return of relative civil peace made production possible again (three films a year from 1961 to 1979). This renewal was also stimulated by the political engagement of numerous filmmakers who saw in cinema an instrument for spreading ideas of liberty and democracy.
Among them, José María Arzuaga, is the director of three major works. His two fiction films Raíces de piedra (1961, heavily censored) and Pasado el meridiano (1965), are inspired by post-war Italian cinema with a strong documentary flavour. His urban symphony Rapsodia en Bogotá (1963) is an experiment more inclined to poetry than to realism. In militant film, the work of Carlos Álvarez, Asalto (1968) and ¿Qué es la democracia? (1971), remains fundamental. His work, which became a model for small-scale, self-produced forms in Colombia, was influenced by the aesthetics of urgency characteristic of the noticieros that Cuban filmmaker Santiago Álvarez made at the ICAIC and the neo-realism of the Argentine Fernando Birri.
It is above all in the seventies that film becomes infused with a political radicalism that strongly influences its language, giving many films a particular style situating them somewhere between ethnographic research and militant cinema. We can cite Ciro Durán (Gamín, 1977, on street children) and Francisco Norden, who began his remarkable work as of 1964 (Se llamaría Colombia, 1970; Camilo, el cura guerrillero, 1974 as well as the fiction film Cóndores no entierran todos los días, 1984). Among the protagonists of Colombian documentary in the seventies, we find Marta Rodríguez and her husband Jorge Silva. Marta came to documentary via radical sociology (Camilo Torres) and visual anthropology (Jean Rouch) and Jorge, the couple’s cinematographer, through journalism, photography and the film-club movement. Their methodology required long periods of field work with the use of photography and recording, then the construction of a scenario followed by the shooting and editing, leaving the subjects of their film (always the most marginalised victims of social progress in the third world) the time to participate in the process at each stage (Chircales, 1966-1971; Nuestra voz de tierra memoria y futuro, 1974-1981). The result was to introduce documentary discourse into the subjectivity of the people being filmed without losing a socio-political perspective: an exemplary fusion of politics, poetry and visual anthropology.
The seventies saw the first interventions of the state in the sector. A 1971 law obliged film houses to accompany the projections of foreign films with a Colombian short subject, which stimulated a strong growth of documentary activity (the so-called sobreprecio short films). Then in 1978 the Focine was created (Compañía de Fomento Cinematográfico), a public entity responsible for controlling box office receipts (up to then falsified by the industry), encouraging the production and distribution of films and supporting and organising festivals and retrospectives. This resulted in a considerable increase in the production of subject based feature films (eight per year in the period from 1980-1988).
During this thriving period for documentary short films appeared a generation of more formally radical filmmakers. Luis Ernesto Arocha, architect and painter (Al mal tiempo buena cara, o la Ópera del Mondongo, 1974), was one of the greatest representatives of Colombian experimental cinema. He belonged to the Barranquilla Group in the fifties together with writers, philosophers and artists, who turned this coastal city into one of the most important intellectual centres on the Caribbean since 1940 (group at the origin of the mythical film La langosta azul, 1954). He directed a series of works characterised by their homo-erotic content, social criticism, irony, an attraction for the monstrous, technical and conceptual experimentation. Lisandro Duque Naranjo (Favor correrse atrás, 1974; Lluvia colombiana, 1976, co-directed with Herminio Barrera; the fiction film El escarabajo, 1982), breathed new life into film with his ferocious humour and the postmodern self-reflexivity of his films, shedding light on the fabrication of a film and ironically showing up the manipulation inherent in the medium.
In 1971, in Cali, a new generation of artists, photographers and musicians came together to revolutionise art in Colombia. The Grupo de Cali was a heterogeneous group of artists who met in the city’s film clubs, around the film review Ojo al cine and in the artistic community Ciudad Solar – a building where almost all the members of this collective lived and shared their lives. Among the protagonists of this group, which was above all a group of friends and only named Grupo de Cali later by journalists, must be mentioned the critic and writer Andrés Caicedo, publisher and photographer Hernando Guerrero, the filmmakers Carlos Mayolo and Luis Ospina (Oiga vea!, 1971 ; Cali: de película, 1973; Agarrando pueblo, 1977). The Grupo aimed at showing the raw reality of Colombia in the seventies, in opposition to the glossy fiction produced by Hollywood or visible in the telenovelas, but also far from the miserable and neocolonial image made by so called “engaged” cinema from Europe or America. For Mayolo and Ospina, film buffs fed by popular culture, a cinema that uses the class poverty of the poorest to validate its own political agenda and confirm its ideology is nothing but a “poverty-porn”, the ultimate spectacle.
At the end of the seventies was born another notable collective, Cine-Mujer, the first Colombian feminist collective and among the pioneers in Latin America. Founded by Eulalia Carrizosa, Clara Riascos, Dora Ramírez and Sara Bright, Cine-Mujer always attempted to show the daily life of the country’s invisible women. Women at home, women workers at home, mothers, the indigenous poor, the subservient are the actors of a highly varied body of films (portrait, essay, inquiry, pamphlet), small scale in its manufacture and free in its form.
The second half of the eighties was marked not only by aggravated political tension (with the strengthening of guerrilla movements, active since the sixties), but also by the emergence of drug cartels whose violence reached a paroxysm in 1989 when the liberal presidential candidate, Luis Carlos Galán, was assassinated because he had declared war on the drug barons. In this climate of terror, industrial activity collapsed, which also affected film. In 1989, the Focine ceased its activities, and in 1992 it was disbanded. Between 1989 and 1995, only two films a year were produced in extremely difficult conditions. The most remarkable film is Rodrigo D. - No futuro (1989) by Víctor Gaviria, a docu-fiction about a group of boys, victims of the cartel, obliged to sell drugs to find food and nourish their families (six of the nine boys who acted in the film, all chosen off the streets, were later killed). Things began to improve after 1996, when the government decided to encourage film production, increasing to four films a year. Filmmakers responded to this encouragement by making films that in some cases managed to make a name outside the country (the films by Sergio Cabrera). The renaissance of Colombian cinema only really took place after 2010. Today Colombia is one of the most active film production centres in Latin America.
Federico Rossin
In partnership with the Bogotá Film Archive, the Fundación Patrimonio Fílmico Colombiano, Proimagenes and the French embassy in Colombia.
Special thanks to Ricardo Cantor Bossa and Arnaud Miquel.