CARLOS CASTILLO
PROGRAMME 1
Sala (S8) Palexco | Thursday June 5th | 5:00 pm | Free entry to all venues until full capacity. It will not be possible to enter the venues after the screening has started.
Super 8 Reality Interaction – Every sea has a silver lining
Carlos Castillo | 1988 | Venezuela | Performance in Super 8 | Variable duration
Inspired by the desire to tear down the Berlin Wall, this work begins with representation (painting) and then, playing between what is being projected and what is happening in the hall, it tears down the illusion to give way to the eternal reality of the sea.
Matiné 3:15
Carlos Castillo | 1976 | Venezuela | Super 8 | 18 min
Matiné 3:15 (1976) by Carlos Castillo is a work that parodies a movie show. The film is made up of advertisements, trailers, and a “movie” that is only a “beginning”, a mere introduction to the characters of a story that does not get told, since the true story being told is the beginning of its own screening at a public movie show. Hence, the work is actually its preamble, its “prologue”, and it is thus a “promise” in which a “mystery” is proposed that neither appears nor gets clarified; a “tale” for the future through which the conditions and conventions about the public presentation of a cinematographic work get shown, as well as the restrictions accompanying its screening. It is a film that narrates the possibilities of it “becoming an event” and, with that, it puts into practice a critical moment through which it not only alludes to consumer society and the loss of the movie industry, but also to the role assigned to the audience, to the phenomenological distinctions between advertising and film narrative. With humour, in this parody, the recurrence does not thematize the film work itself, but rather the conditions for the possibility of it “entering” into the show and from there the estrangement, passivity and subjection of society and culture. (Sandra Pinardi)
Made in Venezuela
Carlos Castillo | 1977 | Venezuela | Super 8 | 10 min
Made in Venezuela is a parody of institutional messages about the potential wealth of a country that has become rich through oil exploitation. The strategy here is to juxtapose the front and flip side, the propaganda and the nightmare. It is a common area that includes sensationalism and allegory: images of a rubbish dump, vultures, and a doll in the colours of the national flag, which a blindfolded woman dressed in white throws off a cliff. But the film’s power lies in the fact that, while it may appear easy to attribute meaning to the allegorical figures, the same cannot be said for the film’s message, beyond its expression of despair. That is why the short remains relevant today. (Pablo Gamba)
T.V.O.
Carlos Castillo | 1979 | Venezuela | Super 8 | 7 min
Television is one of the themes in T.V.O., which tells the story of a lonely woman’s interaction with the contraption. “The dog is no longer man’s best friend; now it’s television,” Castillo said in a conversation with the author of this article. The character is played by Mimí Lazo, one of the country’s most prominent actresses and a Venezuelan sex symbol. The film toys with this stereotype as regards the vicarious satisfaction given by romance and sex on screen. The other theme, linked to loneliness, is developmentalism: the main character lives in Parque Central, a middle-class housing complex whose residential buildings were finished in 1972 and became a symbol of well-being on the brink of the oil boom. (Pablo Gamba)
Manos arriba!!! Esto es un atraco (Hands up!!! This is a stick up)
Carlos Castillo | 1980 | Venezuela | Super 8 | 3 min
Photographs appear in Hands up!! This is a stick up. It is a short film narrated via voice-over with still images. There is an absurd investigation, an event constructed based on the improbable, while some clues cast doubt on the veracity of the information. Referring to a confusing photo, it says: “the room from just one angle”. The sound and photography connect with another cinema tradition, causing motion driven by the capacity of the narrative or atmosphere. We are reminded of La Jetée by Chris Marker, Now by Santiago Álvarez, and some forays by the early Wim Wenders. The motion appears, virtually, due to the musicality and to the action fostered by the audio. (Ángela Bonadies)
Uno para todos y todos para todos…?! (One for all and all for all…?!)
Carlos Castillo | 1980 | Venezuela | Super 8 | 12 min
Cinema entertainment creates a series of conditioning for the spectator (a dark theatre, credits, actors, film types). These elements prepare us for what we are going to see. In my film, I take a story and offer four endings (happy, dramatic, commercial). So if films have a beginning, a middle and an end, mine has a beginning, a middle and an end, an end, an end, an end… (Carlos Castillo)
Esta película está que quema! (It’s really hot, this movie!)
Carlos Castillo | 1980 | Venezuela | Super 8 | 3 min
It’s really hot, this movie! addresses the connection that the viewer makes with the work as of the first image. The camera gently pans over the body of a beautiful naked woman, and just before reaching below her navel, it stops. Immediately afterwards, the title of the film appears written in Spanish, English, and French: It’s really hot, this movie! and Un film plein de feux! A few seconds of suspense and the film begins to burn.
Sopa de pollo de mamá (Mum’s chicken soup)
Carlos Castillo | 1981 | Venezuela | Super 8 | 10 min
Mum’s Chicken Soup is based, according to its director, on a cooking recipe for six people: a small chicken, two onions, two garlic cloves, a carrot, three cups of milk, two potatoes, a tablespoon of cornflour, with salt and pepper to taste. Ms. Maite is preparing chicken soup in her kitchen, and next to her, on a television, a strange character (Francisco) is seen trying to force open windows and doors, determined to get into a house. In ten minutes, Castillo explains, two actions are narrated that ultimately prove to be complementary, and the outcome is disconcerting.
CARLOS CASTILLO
MADE IN VENEZUELA
In the never-ending task of decentralizing the standard, even a standard that in itself is a peripheral one like that of experimental cinema, giving Super 8 film made in Venezuela its proper standing is always an unfinished task. Within that galaxy that still remains hidden on this side of the Earth, Carlos Castillo (Caracas, 1942) is one of its brightest stars. An avant-garde personality, sculptor, designer, conceptual artist, performer and Super 8 filmmaker, Castillo’s work is brimming with humour, biting criticism, formal experimentation and boundless artistic inventiveness. His cinema (both his activity and his activism in this regard) was one of the driving forces behind the unique artistic effervescence that Venezuela experienced in the 1970s and 1980s. It was a cinema that, as is the case in Argentina, relied on Super 8 as a trustworthy format and the driving force behind its own aesthetics.
But let us first sketch the backdrop to this story. In the 1970s, the economic boom led to the term “Saudi Venezuela” being coined as an expression of the country’s oil wealth and its impact on people’s lifestyles. It was double-edged sword: on one side there was exacerbated consumerism, while on the other a cultural cosmopolitanism that brought with it an art seeking to rebel against ferocious capitalism through conceptualism and performance. Nor should we forget that Venezuela was one of the first democracies in Latin America, and at the time there was some degree of political stability in the country. In 1976, the International Super 8 Avant-Garde Film Festival founded by Julio Neri and Mercedes Márquez kicked off in Caracas. With it, Castillo began making films and later took over as the festival’s director. As Pablo Gamba explains in his article “Carlos Castillo and Venezuelan avant-garde cinema in Super 8”, at that festival there were works shown “by Stan Brakhage and the Argentine filmmaker Narcisa Hirsch, for example, and among those who visited the country there were Chris Marker and the American Lenny Lipton, author of The Super 8 Book”. The festival was part of an international federation that enabled films to circulate in both directions as part of a rich trans-national ecosystem. As one can see, it is a movement closely linked to the format, which was taken up as a means of expression by multidisciplinary artists. It is a choice that is not based solely on economic reasons. The researcher Isabel Arredondo in her contribution to the book Ismo Ismo Ismo (Ism Ism Ism) ventures that “The use of the Super 8 format, in which all Venezuelan experimental films were shot, may be a necessity, but it also represents a rebellion against consumerism. Super 8 films are of little commercial value because they cannot be duplicated or therefore sold or shown in cinemas. One of the responses to the commercialization of art is to use a format of no commercial value. Another is to use the body as an object of art,” referring to the importance of performance at the time (which was recorded on Super 8) and to the counter-cultural value of such cinema. Thus, an incredible scene of Super 8 filmmakers flourished, whose fame was consolidated with a visit to Cannes by Carlos Castillo, Julio Neri and Diego Rísquez in an exhibition of works by all three arranged in keeping with the selection made in the Directors’ Fortnight of Bolívar, a Tropical Symphony (1980), a feature film by Rísquez entirely shot in Super 8 starring artists, which put forward a hallucinatory vision of the conquest of America.
In this context, Castillo (who began drawing and later committed himself to sculpture in the 1960s) adopted cinema as his playing field, albeit not without artistic vision and ambition. His early works provide a commentary on mass media and culture, as well as playing with the expectations brought about by the language conventions of mainstream cinema and television, shaking up the role of the viewer within them. Hence, his first film, Matinee 3:15 (1976) is a response and parody of a movie show with its advertisements, its trailers and its (failed) film. A surrealist view is given by T.V.O. (1979), acting as an allegory of the power of television. Manos arriba!! Esto es un atraco (Hands up!! This is a stick up) (1980) subverts and laughs at the codes of film noir and true crime news. This early period of Castillo’s cinema gave rise to one of his most emblematic films, Made in Venezuela (1977), a critical view of the oil wealth and the misery on the other side of it. Using the language of institutional messages, Made in Venezuela shows a trio of tailcoat-wearing capitalists dancing on a landfill to express the painful contrasts in society at that time. In this regard, Castillo says in an interview by Ángela Bonadies for the magazine Tráfico Visual: “I think there are two permanent ingredients in my films and in my work: humour and drama. Starting off with a joke and ending up portraying the opposite. It’s the way I work and see things, from one extreme to another. Funny scenes that conceal dramatic situations deep down. One has to have one’s own vision to live with this reality and that fiction, and translate them.”
The second programme is structured around works from the 1980s that clearly show a quest related to the plastic arts, as well as an attempt to portray the city of Caracas itself. Such is the case of City vs. Art (1981), in which Castillo “paints” the city in front of the camera, and Failed attempt at flight (1982), one of the milestones in his film work, where Castillo throws a Super 8 camera off the West Tower of Parque Central, the tallest building in Caracas (still under construction at that time), thus achieving a very short abstract film, which Castillo has shown several times in the form of an installation, inviting viewers to hang from harnesses to emulate hanging in the air in free fall.
The two sessions will be preceded, on a single occasion, by two of his Super 8 Reality Interactions, a series of film performances conceived by Castillo in the 1980s, in an unusual display of expanded cinema made in Venezuela.
In 2024, a big exhibition was dedicated to him entitled “Carlos Castillo. C.C.T.V.: Almost Everything 1963–2011” in Caracas (a partnership between the Carmen Araujo Art Gallery and the TAC Hall), reflecting a long and rich history that has still not ended in the 21st century. It is therefore essential for this Venezuelan wealth, which has nothing to do with oil, to transcend its borders and take its rightful place in cinema and in the history of global avant-garde art.
Elena Duque