In the historic port city of Cartagena, Spain—border crossing between Global North and Global South, between the south of Europe and the north of Africa—we present a program of experimental cinema from the “other continent,” with weight placed less on North America (with which we nevertheless chronologically begin) than Latin America.

In Black Vision (1965)—rarely seen in this form, here presented in 16mm thanks to the Film-makers’ Cooperative in New York—Stan Brakhage re-edits and intervenes on his earlier engagement with Jean-Paul Sartre’s writing, made on a commission for a public television program on existentialism hosted in 1961 by Sartre translator Hazel Barnes. It is indeed “the only passage” in Sartre’s writings that ever “specifically concerned” Brakhage: the passage from Nausea wherein the protagonist sits in a park and imagines his suicide.” Brakhage presents Sartre against the grain of his supposed dualism, emphasizing continuities between the radical contingency of the ego and the hard matter of trees and a statue (in fact, the Robert Burns memorial in Denver’s City Park).

Light Licks: By the Waters of Babylon: I Want to Paint It Black (2011) by Saul Levine (who studied with Brakhage in Chicago) offers a vision of the distinguished filmmaker’s much-delayed first visit to Europe (delayed by his trepidations about going to the continent of the Holocaust). It specifically takes him to gothic Prague, where monoliths now manifest in the form of the grave of Rabbi Judah Lowe, “alleged maker of the golem,” and where the disembodied hand visible in Brakhage’s film now seemingly has attached to it marionettes: themselves de-objectified, de-solidified statues.

Mexican filmmaker Azucena Losana’s eco-developed Super 8 Ceibo/Erythrina crista-galli (2020) belongs to her series of Metarretratos, made during her years in Argentina filming the same plants used to develop them, and in this case consisting of negative and positive images of a ceibo tree by the side of the Pirámide de Mayo in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. Salomé Lopes Coelho’s important research on the series touches on the ironies of ceibo/erythrina crista-galli’s status as Argentina’s national flower, its significance in Guaraní dyeing practices, as well as its mythologization in the legend of the Guaraní woman Anahí’s resistance to the Spanish Conquest. According to Lopes Coelho, in Losana’s work, “The properties of the Ceibo matter are understood not as static, meaningless, and lacking the capacity to act, but rather as generative becomings, as things that act on/with other things.”

In Colombian filmmaker Sebastian Wiedemann’s Oculto (2023), with archival footage of human intrusion into the Amazon, the program’s previous, seemingly innocent manifestations of the human hand now reach their climax as that same limb violently wields a chainsaw against a large tree: an all-crimson frame anticipates this schism. The shame at being human that Wiedemann expresses in a title is either the macroscopic version of the radical contingency and superfluousness felt by Brakhage’s Sartre, or its very opposite: humans cannot be superfluous precisely because we are so destructive.

With Neon Cortex (2023), Oaxaca-based Mexican filmmaker Bruno Varela offers apparently “softer” images of seeds, of the silhouette of a hand against a leaf, of a shirt hanging in the form of a scarecrow. But they are surpassed by, or at least in lopsided dialogue with, the proliferations of monoliths that its speculative science-fiction narrative of colonization, trance, and madness bursts open: the momoxtle (small altar), the spikes of the pochote, the blazing torch, the oiled devil at carnival in Tilcajete, Oaxaca. The cosmos invoked by ritual depends on the very material of its constitution.

We also close ritualistically: punctuated by footage by Mexican filmmaker Annalisa D. Quagliata never intended by her as a complete film, but rather as work towards a music video for the “experimental Mexica” rock band Los Cogelones: El árbol de la noche victoriosa (2020), celebrating the 500th anniversary of Hernán Cortés’s 1520 defeat by the Mexicas, and the ahuehuete tree adopted as that defeat’s symbol. And yet the footage’s rhapsody assures its completeness.
-Byron Davies

Thanks to Addison Ellis for a continuing collaboration on Brakhage’s engagement with Sartre.

Thanks to Salvi Vivancos and 2020 Studio in Cartagena for their help in the planning.