Shot on 9.5mm
2024
Black and white
HD (1645 x 1536) 1.31:1
6:06 min
Stereo sound
Original format 9.5mm
The game has had great relevance in the competitive sense of our capitalist society. This premise shapes the way we act and create meaning, not only in each individual but in the entire society worldwide.
This view confuses our perception of reality and the consequences of our actions; They connote their power structures and the desperation of certain actors to establish new rules of the game. War and genocide are appearances that we did not expect in this century, like the images of an extinct cinematographic format. Images of a menacing phantasm? or a resistance format that refuses to disappear?.
Deputting a film on a diffuse sound and the iconic silence, before the topical noise of the train on the defile of a film without image and in 9.5 mm, since the perforation is unique and central and finish on a fragment of Arundhati Roy,* Indian author, engaged, in three sentences given in three stages for a complete reading distinguishes this film from the Simple Footing of Sequences. The artist in time known as peace.
«The trouble is than once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out.
There´s no innocence. Either way, you’re responsible»
Antonio Arango takes on the role imparted by the artist, therefore to the director, seriously but he does not leave his need for an artist. Alarming on the war by borrowing plans of aircraft is not accompanied by a historical discourse neither figures or even rapprochements with our time despite the allusive comparison of a tank /attack /tank of the Great War with the current elements. The plasticity of the film remains significant and the flashes, the white lines twice on a black background oppose the abstraction to the game images, small cars held or remote controlled and projecting against a wall, aircraft and other toys like the monkey upside down or such an object directed in all directions or such upside down
However, if it is not a lesson on war and its devices, such an occupation of space, such a resumption of the reason for the accident parallel to those of the damaged film, perforations widening, shifting dust and the text causes reinforcement: the obsessive model of victory also goes through the game; The game is not free act, it also forms thought. And it is the child who likes to organize the battles of his lead soldiers
The conceptualize is already political act without departing from the act of artistic creation
Note :
The quoted paragraph begins as follows:
«In wartime, you can be suddenly fascinated by rituals in love with a purple souimanga -a kind of hummingbird-, you can also be interested in the secret life of red fish in jar or slow mental degeneration of your old aunt, and nobody can tell you that these things are devoid of art, beauty and truth. Like me to have the unlucky enough to find you confronted with a silent war.»
His only novel: The God of little things. Followed by three political tests: The End of Imagination, on nuclear tests carried out by India, The Greater Common Good, against the policy of the big dams; and The Reincarnation of Rumpelstiltskin on the privatization of essential infrastructures such as water and electricity.
Simone Dompeyre. Rencontres Internationales Traverse Vidéo
Screeenings:
2025
CosmiX, International Experimental Cinema Festival. Paris, France
Earth Space Gallery. Hoxton, London, UK
XXVIIIth Rencontres Internationales Traverse Vidéo. Toulouse, France
2024
Altered Images Film and Music Fest. London, United Kingdom
Inflamável – Festival de curtas em Super 8. Brazil