CARLOS CASTILLO
PROGRAMA 2
Sala (S8) Palexco | Saturday June 7th | 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 – Píntate de colores (Paint Yourself in Colours)
Carlos Castillo | 1985 | Venezuela | Performance in Super 8 | Variable duration
This kind of game of mirrors could be called the painted painter, bringing together painting and cinema through the material itself.
Ciudad vs. Arte (City vs. Art)
Carlos Castillo | 1981 | Venezuela | Super 8 | 10 min
And the painting develops until it bursts in and becomes the main action in City vs. Art. It is a manual action that is unprecedented, ephemeral, and transformed into performance. There is a role reversal: the director is both painter and actor; the picture painted of the landscape takes centre stage; the hand hesitates, then chooses paints that cover up the landscape, and “the work” appears. The director-painter becomes destroyer-censor by using a hammer to smash the glass containing the picture-protagonist, revealing a “natural landscape.” The gestures are not without irony. Layers and layers of meanings crafted “by hand” lead us to think of that first painting that came out of the frame and burst onto the canvas: Las Meninas by Velázquez. In both, the onlooker is called upon to create the riddle, as in The Mystery of Picasso directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot. (Ángela Bonadies)
Transformations
Carlos Castillo | 1981 | Venezuela | Super 8 | 7 min
Transformations is a work in which the director tackles the issue of gender freedom. In Castillo’s opinion, the moving images and the action taking place allow for a window to open for free thought and interpretation of what is being seen. “To be or not to be,
that is my film,” the director tells us.
Intento de vuelo fallido (Failed Attempt at Flight)
Carlos Castillo | 1982 | Venezuela | Super 8 | 21 sec.
The deconstruction of cinematographic visual codes is most acutely expressed in the work Failed attempt at flight by Carlos Castillo, a small “masterpiece” of the experimental texture of Super 8 cinema. It not only exceeds its medium and format, as well as the narrative associated with the “moving image”, but is also effectively “invisible”, “unpresentable”. Its creation seems like a game: throwing a Super 8 camera switched on and recording from what was at that time the tallest building in Caracas. The movie films the images of its own accelerating fall, a succession of chromatic shots that cannot be identified either in terms of what is “recorded” in each one (windows, columns, walls, sky and ground) or in its own formal layout as an image (colour, composition, shapes and figures). What is perceived and captured is the impotence of vision—of perception—to distinguish this extreme, exhausting mobility, this vertigo of “free fall.” In the absence of visibility, this image triggers one’s body, which gives in to the overwhelming uncertainty of the motion. The “moving image” at the extreme of its own kinesthesia becomes “invisible” and migrates with its possible visualization to other media: a roll-out that copies each of the frames that make up the moving sequence, thus demonstrating its own material conditions of production as a strategy to make itself visible. The cinematographic practice alludes, then, explicitly to its strategic dependence on other discourses, on other rationales, through which it happens as something visible. (Sandra Pinardi)
Se Alquila Ciudad (City for Rent)
Carlos Castillo | 1983 | Venezuela | Super 8 | 40 min
With a keen eye, Castillo delves into the potential and material threats surrounding him. […] In the case of City for Rent, we are suspended in the air, but now it is thanks to the deep silence of an empty, inhospitable, uninhabited city. For nearly three hours of film, the artist walks through the capital’s main avenues during the 1982 census. Deserted corners, voiceless streets and useless traffic lights open up to the bleak gaze of a lost citizen trying to find his way; apocalyptic metaphors for a desolation that today also breathes in the ailments of our urban spaces, environs tainted by institutional neglect, the prevailing violence and the day-to-day insecurity. (Lorena González Inneco)
50•90…era jugando (50•90…was play)
Carlos Castillo | 1990 | Venezuela | Super 8 | 16 min
50•90…era jugando tells the story of a newlywed couple who come to live in a house inherited by the protagonist. Castillo describes the plot as follows: “a newlywed couple settles into a house inherited from the wife’s grandmother. Everything involves discovering, enjoying themselves, and living happily and in harmony. However, the husband discovers that a locked room is the wife’s secret hideaway. In that room, she recalls her family past. He confronts her, reproaching her for not being part of that world or of her ancestors. Annoyed, he takes it out on photographs, damaging them and ridiculing the ancestors by using their costumes. The couple goes from living happily to knocking on the gates of hell.”
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