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Abstract
El escarabajo de oro/The Gold Bug is a film made of detours. This commissioned film was conceived as an international North-South collaboration. The original intent nevertheless changed shape in the process, which produced a chain reaction of variations: this straying in turn shapes a narrative that proliferates endlessly through metonymical forms. The itinerary of making this film encapsulates the conflicts between the aspirations of an independently produced cinema and the imperatives of international subsidies, as well as those between the identity of national cinemas and transnational horizons.
The film’s opening credits announce that the movie draws inspiration from Poe’s short story of the same title, and also from Treasure Island, which it “adapts to the screen from the point of view of pirates.” This corsair’s perspective affords a strategy to slip into the interstices of collaborative modes and eschew the impositions of paternalism in the demands of funding bodies. The Gold Bug fully inhabits this multicultural contact zone that is contemporary cinema; still, despite its questioning of essentialist notions of national identity, it relies on cultural stereotypes which it deploys in a satirical vein, as it singles out the persistence of geopolitical differences and discusses the limits of the redistribution that transnational networks are thought to enable.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Acknowledgement
This article has been written in the context of the Research Project “Transnational relations in Spanish-American digital cinema: the cases of Spain, Mexico and Argentina” (CSO2014-52750-P) funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of the Spanish Government and co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).
Notes
1 For a transnational perspective on co-productions in Latin American cinema, see Falicov (Citation2007) and Villazana (Citation2008). Falicov examines, with a degree of ambivalence, the benefits and limitations of the successful Ibermedia programme. Villazana, for her part, poses the problem of the aesthetic value of co-productions since “these films suffer – in one way or another – from social de-contextualization” (Villazana Citation2008, 70).
2 Another programme of the CPH:DOX is called Adopt a film! and its basic idea is explained as follows: “Are you passionate about film and documentaries and do you have an interest in using your network to spread the art of documentary? You can still become a film ambassador for CPH:DOC by adopting a film!” (CPH:DOX Citation2015). For all its apparent generosity and altruism, could there be a more paternalistic attitude? As usually happens with political correctness, unfairness and discrimination cloak themselves in good manners. The procedure is similar to that adopted by some NGOs in developed countries, inviting citizens to become sponsors (anonymous and at a distance) of children in the Third World.
3 In El loro y el cisne (The Parrot and the Swan, Alejo Moguillansky, 2013) the people who make the film are also part of the film. So the sound engineer (of the documentary) continuously appears on screen and, quite naturally, ends up falling in love (in the fictional film) with one of the dancers. You could say that the documentary material itself generates the fiction. Here too, we are not dealing with an actor who plays the part of a sound engineer, but a sound engineer who is, apart from a sound engineer, also a character. Therefore, what we have is not a camera wandering off-screen, but the off-screen invading the film. El loro y el cisne is not a film-within-a-film, it is a film-outside-of-a-film. If Moguillansky breaks through the fourth wall, he does not do so to expose the artificiality that sustains fiction. He rather aims to show that in this artificiality there can be a beautiful love story.
4 On the “equivalence” of transnational links, see Kathleen Newman (Citation2010, 9). It was Mary Louise Pratt who formulated the notion of a “zone of contact”: “I use this term to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (Pratt Citation1991, 34).
5 That is what Chanan claims: “Cinema was transnational from the very start, and global in reach and operation by the 1930s” (2006, 41). See also Stephanie Dennison (Citation2013).
6 Peter Wollen refers to festival films as a new genre, “specially made according to their own rules and traditions in order to win prizes”. Immediately recognisable by juries, critics, and audiences, these festival films have “become integrated into the institution of cinema”. For Wollen, the festival film is inseparable from the idea of a new wave; and seeing as the concept of a new wave began to fuse with national cinema, “it no longer represented a revolution, but a tradition” (Wollen Citation2002, 9–10).
7 The producers (the German and the Frenchman) are referred to by the others as “those who cough up the dough” and sometimes they call them “the Swedes”. It is the same kind of simplification to which Europeans are prone when they confuse Argentines with Paraguayans, Chileans, or Uruguayans.
8 Moguillansky: “Fia is the owner of 51 percent of the film. I’m the owner of 49 percent of the film. Why? Because she’s European. This is not part of the story of the film! This is the truth” (Walsh Citation2015).
9 See, in the same parodic vein, the short De hacer películas para los cítricos europeos / About Making Films for European Citrics (2014) by Rubén Mendoza.
10 And Spregelburd concludes: “The theatre, which is poor in resources and infinite in imagination, chastises the film world for its overwhelming dependence on money and the institutions that offer it; this film owes to the local theatre some of its noblest lessons but at the same time films remind the theatre – really rubbing it in – of the most precious gift films have to offer: real, not metaphorical, adventure” (2014, 5).
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David Oubiña
David Oubiña has a PhD in Literature/Arts from the University of Buenos Aires. He is a researcher affiliated with the CONICET and a professor at the University of Buenos Aires, the University of Cinema (Argentina) and New York University. He was visiting professor at the University of Bergen and at the University of California, Berkeley, and visiting researcher at the University of London. Currently he is on the Editorial Boards of Las Ranas (artes, ensayo y traducción) and of Cahiers du cinéma: España. His research focuses on contemporary cinema, Argentine cinema and the relationship between film and literature. His latest books include Filmología: Ensayos con el cine (2000), El cine de Hugo Santiago (2002), Jean-Luc Godard: el pensamiento del cine (2003), Estudio crítico sobre La ciénaga, de Lucrecia Martel (2007), Una juguetería filosófica: Cine, cronofotografía y arte digital (2009), and El silencio y sus bordes. Modos de lo extremo en la literatura y el cine (2011).