Raymundo (review)

The life, work, disappearance, persecution, and murder of Argentinean filmmaker Raymundo Gleyzer (1941-1976?) provides the film Raymundo with the structural bone that branches out to a multiplicity of plots.¹ In Ernesto Ardito and Virna Molina's Raymundo, fragments of Gleyzer's films of Argentina appear, unearthed footage of an epoch that would see him go underground and a wave of revolutionary Latin American film break out. Calls for a "Third Cinema," the Cine liberación collective, and the Cine de la Base group all came out of Latin American popular resistance movements (in Argentina in particular) and their need to define national identities. Raymundo Gleyzer's work is a legacy of revolutionary cinema for Mexico, Brazil, and Chile, as well as Argentina.²

Visual elements in the film include animation, newspaper clippings, maps, archival footage, segments of Gleyzer's censored films, footage revealing his field work techniques and his involvement with communities throughout Latin America, Gleyzer's diary and home movies, and a heavy use of titling. The sound design is essentially dialogical, narrated with voices of Gleyzer's surviving friends, colleagues, and family.

The filmmakers look at Gleyzer's life in relation to an intricate chain of historical incidents in Argentina during the 1960s and 1970s. Among their findings are long-buried records of an Argentinean state on its way to military dictatorship, censored footage from Gleyzer's films, newspaper clips, and documentation revealing divisions within the Peronist and Marxist parties. The film denounces the economic and political involvement of the United States with the Argentinean government and the institutionalization of an oppressive apparatus of disappearances, persecution, and torture.

Ardito and Molina's film is a monumental work of revisionist history. They see the potential of cinema as a revolutionary tool. In Ardito's words: "We think of film as a bullet that ignites consciousness....We must serve as the stone that breaks silence, or the bullet that starts the battle. Poetry is not a goal in itself. Among us poetry is a tool to transform the world." In Raymundo there isn't a clear-cut rivalry between the first (mainstream), and second (auteur, neo-realist) cinema. Getino and Solanas defined alternative third cinema as that which the system couldn't assimilate, or as the cinema that fought the system directly.³ Cine de la Base, the radical production group of which Gleyzer was a leading member, and other forms of liberation cinema were born in very different contexts, so it should be expected that younger generations of filmmakers need to assert their national identity with new discourses and new ideological tools to confront the challenges of neoliberalism.

Gleyzer's work evolves in a context in which third cinema is being defined in Latin America. An animated sequence in Raymundo shows the process of the building of an improvised movie theater in a particular community. Because regular theaters featured commercial interests and censorship was the order of the day, Gleyzer's idea was to bring the cinema to the people instead of bringing the people to the cinema. His mobile theaters were perhaps impractical, but successful in the sense that his message was delivered to many people. However, whenever Gleyzer confronts the mainstream distribution circuits, a great percentage of his works are censored and banned for years. We have to remember that the cinematic technological innovations brought over to Latin America were embedded with ideological as well as economic investments.

What good is a film that people will not be able to see? For instance, in México, la Revolución Congelada (Mexico, the Frozen Revolution) (1971), Gleyzer examines Mexico's social structure from all sides, denouncing the government's corruption and exposing the struggle, exploitation, and poverty of the peasants. The film is banned in Mexico, and Raymundo Gleyzer is declared persona non grata. As a Mexican filmmaker today, I'm looking at Gleyzer's work in and about Mexico for the first time, and I see, within a minute...