Altiplano

Altiplano (2009) is a American-Belgian drama film directed by Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth. The movie recounts the realities of different people around the world (Europe, Middle East, and South America), but that redemption from their tragic lives at the small Quechua village called Turubamba of the Andean plateau. With dialogues in five languages (French, English, Persian and Quechua), Altiplano shows us a world divided, but that connects through feelings and travels with images.

The film begins with a devastating event that gives us to understand that the plot was based on the suspense and mixed feelings that arise from equally bittersweet moments. Grace (Jasmin Tabatabai) is a photographer who travels to Iraq where her guide and friend is murdered in front of her eyes and she is forced to photograph the scene. Despite the advice of his family to publish the photograph so that the world knows the story, the trauma caused by that death eats away at his conscience and leaves him in a state of desolation. Her partner travels to Turubamba on a medical mission but she remains in Belgium, unable to continue with the art of capturing painful realities in photographs.

Parallel to the situation of Grace, the young indigenous Saturnina (Magaly Solier) introduces us to know the small town called Turubamba (the location is fictional for this movie, but the name belongs to a village in Ecuador) and their own tragedies. Saturnina plans to get married, but a mercury spill from the gold mines around the area has left most of Turubamba's people blind or close to death which compromises Saturina's plans. Her story and the struggles of the Turubamba village are presented as the main plot of the movie. In a somewhat surreal and lyrical way, Brosens and Woodworth show us a Latin America in which the indigenous traditions and beliefs are blended with Catholicism creating a unique culture. For example, Saturnina is the guard of the figure of the Virgin Mary and like her, all the people from the village attend to church and worship the saints. But simultaneously to the traditions acquired during the colonial period, they continue adoring the Sun, the Moon, Mother Nature, having rituals with corn, and speaking their own language, Quechua.

Saturnina's fiancee dies due to mercury poisoning. This event is a breakdown not only for Saturnina but for everyone concerned with Turubamba such as the mining companies and the doctors of the mission. The problem of the mining spills becomes sounder and people start protesting. Max (Oliver Gourmet), Grace's husband who was trying to investigate the causes of the poisoning with the rest of the medical crew dies accidentally during one of those protests. Overwhelmed with both casualties (her friend in Iraq and her partner in Turubamba), Grace travels to understand the situation in which Max died which was not recorded or reported anywhere. She finds Max's camera which contained a video of Saturnina's suicide. In the video, Saturnina leaves messages explaining her decision and the situation of her village. "Without images, there is no history" and "the mother Earth will never forgive our deed" are some of the shocking phrases that will remain in Grace's mind to help her find redemption.

Towards the end of the movie, the scenes are presented in black and white accompanied with sad music and shots of the faces of the indigenous killed by the contamination and their grieving families as a way to emphasize their feelings. The change in colour makes those moments more dramatic than the rest of the movie. The story does not go on relating the result of the protests for the mining or missions around, indeed, by the end of the movie those factors disappear completely leaving us only the images that reflect the feelings, the tragedy, and the fantasy of indigenous beliefs. Again like in other movies depicting Latin America, ecological problems and the struggles faced by minority groups seem to be the least important matter in the film. They are part of the movie just to propose plots that appeal to the audience for its realism.

Like in Gibson's "Apocalypto", Elliot's "The Debt", or even in the Zorro movies, the Latin American "real" drama is called to the screen with elements such as the language (Spanish or a native tongue), exploitation or the memories of it (resentments from colonization), and the combination of these with actual history of the region or of its people, especially of indigenous people.

Tetro

Francis Ford Coppola described his movie Tetro (2009) as symbol of reinvention for his now more personal narratives (autobiographical in some respects) and opposing to the Hollywood mold that “makes the same movie over and over again”. “I view this as the second movie of my second career” Coppola commented about Tetro and the first of his 2000s’ movies “Youth Without Youth”. Both movies very different to the ones that made him famous like The Godfather trilogy, but in which cinematographic images of colourful but confusing memories, dreams, and traumas typical of Freudian psychoanalysis persevere. Following this new wave in Coppola’s work (but maintaining some of the recurrent themes of previous productions: black-and-white films, family dramas, and Italia American influences), Tetro comes with a plot about a truth that is being repressed.

And what better way to give a new face to the plot than to take it to a place like Latin America. Presented at first in black and white, the movie starts with the arrival of Bennie Tetrocini (Alden Ehrenreich) to La Boca neighbourhood in Buenos Aires looking for his older brother Angelo (Vicente Gallo), an unsuccessful novelist who now is known under the name of Tetro. Bennie wants to understand why Tetro moved to Argentina and why he hides his past. To unveil Tetro’s mystery, Bennie reads and completes an unfinished novel written by Tetro and that seems to be based on his life. This codified text allows every character to remember fractions of Tetro’s traumatic experiences like the death of his mother, and the treason of his first love with his father the opera conductor Carlos Tetrocini (whose fame always overshadowed Tetro). This text triggers flashbacks, but it also influences the creation of dreams and stories for a play that are the only colourful parts of the movie.

Convinced that his bother’s dark personality is explained by the traumatic stories of the novel (and aware of the potential of the material) Bennie decides to publish the novel to help his bother overcome the past, and produces a play using his brother name, Tetro. However, the cure ends up being worse than the disease. Like in psychoanalysis itself, interpretations might be relative to those trying to materialize what is in the mind. Even though dreams and memories are fragments of a truth, they are still a fantasy representation that projects something else, and in this case, it is also the repression of Bennie’s own memories.

Tetro means many things. It is the apocope of the surname Tetrocini. Tetro is also the new name that Angelo Tetrocini has decided to use in Argentina to start a new life. "Angelo no longer exists, I am Tetro" the protagonist exclaims, referring to Tetro as a totally new person, with no past (although in reality he is hiding one that torments him). But Tetro is also an artistic name. It represents the ambivalence of the family drama that is recurrent in Coppola's films. This ambivalence is also part of the family trauma that makes us see several flashbacks and surreal mental representations (quite expressive and colorful moments) are characteristics of neo-noir cinema. But despite the color scenes, most of the video is true to the black and white of the classic noir.

In this movie, the way in which Argentina is portrayed contributes a lot to the family drama of the plot and to the style of the movie. The streets of La Boca neighbourhood are surrounded by a bohemian life environment: people going out all the time, enjoying street art and open sexuality, and meeting at nightclubs to present their new creations. Music, theater, literature and the importance of art as a whole in Tetro’s life help to build a plot charged with emotions and mystery. Those same elements maintain the noir genre though it is adapted to new audiences and times, as the New York Times called it: “Family Dynamics, Without Bullets”.

memory

Sigmund Freud's 1899 paper on "Screen Memories" is one of his first treatises on memory and repression, appearing a year before the landmark The Interpretation of Dreams. The centerpiece of this paper is a self-analysis (lightly veiled) in which Freud describes one of his own childhood memories. His memory has a dreamlike quality, but it is also decidedly cinematic. In this sense, we can consider the "screen" here as analogous to the silver screen on which the cinematic apparatus projects its idealized fictions of the past, substituting (as we will see) for a real, traumatic memory that the projected sequence invokes but forecloses. Here is Freud's screen memory:

I see a rectangular, rather steeply sloping piece of meadow-land, green and thickly grown; in the green there are a great number of yellow flowers -- evidently common dandelions. At the top end of the meadow there is a cottage, and in front of the cottage door [. . .] a peasant woman with a handkerchief on her head and a children's nurse. Three children are playing in the grass. One of them is myself (between the age of two and three); the two others are my boy cousin [. . .] and his sister [. . .]. We are picking the yellow flowers and each of us is holding a bunch of flowers we have already picked. The little girl has the best bunch; and as though by mutual agreement, we--the two boys--fall on her and snatch away her flowers. She runs up the meadow in tears and as a consolation the peasant-woman gives her a big piece of black bread. Hardly have we seen this than we throw the flowers away, hurry to the cottage, and ask to be given some bread too. [. . .] the peasant-woman cuts the loaf with a long knife. In my memory the bread tastes quite delicious--and at that point the scene breaks off.

Freud terms this a "scene," and it can immediately be imagined as a film sequence: the establishing shot of the meadow, a thick green spotted with vibrant yellow; the medium shot of the children playing; perhaps a close up of the young girl's bunch of flowers; the sudden attack by the two boys and then perhaps a pan as the girl runs up the meadow to the cottage; cut to the boys throwing away their flowers and following the girl; maybe another medium shot of the peasant woman cutting the bread; a close-up of the boy's face as he bites into the food; and then the final dissolve.

Viewed as a film scene, two aspects of this "clip" are striking. First, that there is no sound: this is a silent movie in which the action is played out visually, melodramatically. Indeed, unlike much of Freud's later analysis of dreamwork, the emphasis here is not on the linguistic, on signification or even symbolism. Rather, and this is the second striking aspect of the scene, Freud focuses on taste (the bread that "tastes quite delicious") and on color. This is a memory in primary Technicolor. It is a sequence realized in vivid hues--the green of the meadow, the yellow flowers, and then finally the black bread--and these colors are key to the memory's interpretation.

The memory, Freud concludes, is a false one, a fictional recollection. Its meaning, moreover, is to be found not in Freud's infantile past, but in events that took place some fifteen years later than the date to which the memory ostensibly refers. The protective screen (in the sense now of guard or overlay) is not interposed between the person remembering and the true trauma that inspires it, but projected back, to a remote past, apparently interrupting the infantile amnesia that characterizes our first few years. In short, the desires that the memory encodes are doubly displaced, temporally (from the near past to the distant past) as well as psychically (from one object to another). Here is part of Freud's reconstruction of the semantic web that has led to, or rather, been both occluded and invoked by, his duplicitous memory:

When I was seventeen and at my secondary school, I returned for the first time to my birthplace for the holidays, to stay with a family who had been our friends ever since that remote date. ... I was seventeen, and in the family where I was staying there was a daughter of fifteen, with whom I immediately fell in love. It was my first calf-love, and sufficiently intense, but I kept it completely secret. After a few days the girl went off to her school (from which she too was home for the holidays) and it was this separation after such a short acquaintance that brought my longings to a really high pitch. I passed many hours in solitary walks through the lovely woods that I had found once more and spent my time building castles in the air. These, strangely enough, were not concerned with the future but sought to improve the past. If only the smash had not occurred! If only I had stopped at home and grown up as the young men in the house, the brothers of my love! [. . .] A strange thing. For when I see her now from time to time--she happens to have married someone here--she is quite exceptionally indifferent to me. Yet I can remember quite well for what a long time afterwards I was affected by the yellow color of the dress she was wearing when we first met, whenever I saw the same color anywhere else.

So it is the color yellow that marks the continuity between Freud's adolescent infatuation and his later reconstructed memory of an infantile color scene. The yellow marks the libidinal intensity of Freud's "calf-love" and also provokes an attempt to recreate the past: its displacement onto a primordial screen memory marks Freud's "building castles in the air" whereby it is not a utopian future that is imagined, but an alternative past. Rewriting a possible history, Freud's imagination infuses his false memory with the intensity of an affective hue borrowed from a more recent trauma.

The screen memory, for Freud, is untrue: invented, fictional. But like all fictions, it indicates a larger truth, and that truth is revealed not through symbolism but in the resonance established in the saturated intensity of yellow upon green, then dispersed by the election instead to discard the seductive yellow and seek nourishment in the deep black of the peasant bread. Encoded in this scene is also, therefore, the rejection of the fantasy that it conjures up. The memory emplots its own counter-narrative or critique, whereby Freud (to anticipate concepts that he will only develop later) chooses the earthy black and white of the reality principle over the seductive pleasure principle of the screened vignette. And indeed, this screen memory also anticipates the direction of the theory of psychoanalysis itself, in which Freud gradually drops the concept of the cinematic screen memory, with both its immersion in a reconstructed affective past and its link to a real trauma, in favor of an increasingly linguistic paradigm keyed into universal archetypes. The concept of the "screen memory" appears only in the first edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, and is dropped in the second. And when the first volume of Freud's collected essays are published in 1906, the "Screen Memories" paper is omitted. It is as though Freud himself wanted to forget, to feign ignorance of, this early stage of his theorization.

But it seems worth resurrecting or recollecting this early Freud, both in itself for what it offers screen studies, broadly conceived, and as a revealing symptom of the repressions and blindspots of what psychoanalysis would later become. This is a Freud of affective resonances, immanence, and psychic materialism, rather than the Freud that Lacan would summon up for film studies, the Freud of distanciation, spectatorship, and the rigid demarcation between symbolic, imaginary, and real.