‘Leaves of K.’ or of impregnable fragility.
By ANTONIO ENRIQUE GONZÁLEZ ROJAS -November 28th, 2023
RIALTA
When the Argentine essayist Luis Gusmán analyzes, in his book Kafkas (Edhasa, 2014), Franz Kafka's use of the initial K in his diaries and novels as a sign of an identity besieged and obliterated by sociopolitical forces, he wonders whether "the abolition of the identity of the Jewish person is the prefiguration of the subsequent elimination of the Jewish body?"
Thus, he endorses the perspective of the French critic Marthe Robert when she writes in 'Franz Kafka's Loneliness' (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982) that in 'The Trial' and 'The Castle' there is an identity annulment: "In the end, he only lets the man subsist, reduced to a simple expression, the man truly without attributes in whom only the last core of what is human survives".
The identities and bodies of the Nicaraguan women that filmmaker Gloria Carrión Fonseca encapsulates in the collective protagonist of her film Hojas de K. (2022) have also been victims of ferocious attempts to suppress them, to dilute them into oblivion, to banish them definitively from the human condition, to decompose their humanities into unrecognizable fragments, without dignity or will.
Carrión Fonseca also seems to reverse the dire meaning of the Kafkaesque "K" and turns it into a symbolic challenge to the repressive pretensions of Daniel Ortega's regime. She provides women with a common identity whose collective plea can achieve a powerful resonance in the reality of their country and shatter the hegemony of their supposed absolute rulers.
K. is also an identity that protects, a fortified capsule that does not naively give away the names of the politically persecuted women still living in the Central American nation so that they will not be punished again, this time for offering their testimonies about the punishment. Thus, it results in a denial of the silence with which it has been intended to erase the history written by them during the popular uprisings that broke out in 2018 against the Ortega regime.
'Leaves of K.' falls within the realm of the "animated documentary" and, as part of the official selection of the IV INSTAR Festival, it will be available for Cuban audiences on the Festhome platform from Monday, December 4 to Sunday, December 10, always from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. On Tuesday 5, and also on the 10th of that month, it will be screened at the Argentinian host of the event, the General San Martin Cultural Center, in Buenos Aires, while on Wednesday 6, it will be screened at the Zumzeig Cinecooperativa in Barcelona, Spain. The Alameda Art Laboratory in Mexico City has also scheduled its screening for Friday, December 8, and Sunday, December 10.
The aesthetics and filmic style of the animated documentary have served as an ideal device for dealing with the threatened testimonies of the victims of contemporary totalitarianism, whose protagonists either cannot be revealed in order to protect them and their families, as is the case with the young Afghan refugee starring 'Flee' (Jonas Poher Rasmusen, 2021), or have fled so stripped of any documentation of their past that they require an almost complete recreation of their experiences. This is the case, for example, of Iranian visual artist Marjane Satrapi, author of the graphic novel 'Persepolis' and co-director (with Vincent Paronnaud) of the film adaptation of the same name (2007); as well as North Korean filmmaker's Shin Dong-hyun, 2021, survivor of the Kim dynasty's concentration camps and protagonist of 'Camp 14' (Marc Wiese, 2012), and Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Pahn, who in 'The Missing Picture' (2013) recreates with dioramas his childhood during Pol Pot's genocidal Khmer Rouge revolution.
Carrión Fonseca dialogues more directly with Satrapi's visual style and opts for a simple aesthetic, almost like a child's doodles, with a seemingly rushed execution that helps underscore the urgency of her message, the haste of her denouncements. The shots of 'Leaves of K.' suggest images sketched in the darkness of a dungeon, which would be smuggled the next day beyond the bars into the world. The words of the collective protagonist compose brief and precise testimonies in which all the force of a last speech, of a single opportunity, is concentrated.
Every word can be the last, and every revelation can be sealed by the end, so each has to carry universes. Every sentence must be resounding proof against repression and abuse. Absolute silence stalks the women who speak through K. Their bodies and identities merge into a sort of hydra. The multiple heads resist being severed.
K. is a multitude present, attentive, and resilient. It is a letter that accommodates all the phrases of the world, a letter that contains the sound of all the letters and embraces all the alphabets. It is a bleeding thorn that does not cease to bother its executioner gardener. It does not cease to manifest its existence, its presence. The tip does not become blunt; the stem hardens more and more each time.
The voice, pure and free, without a throat to be silenced, without a head to be cut off, without a body to strike, and without a precise location in space, is perhaps what terrifies authoritarian powers the most. They have no choice but to eliminate the air so the sound does not propagate and gain ubiquity or to erase the memory using non-existent technologies.
The invisible omnipresence of the testimonies summarized in K. -interpreted by someone who identifies herself with the pseudonym Kochittacihuatl- and recreated by illustrators M455U, The Introvert Bee, animators Milo Otz, Lops Llorel, and Capi Mart- other fictitious names that protect threatened lives or endangered families under Ortega's shadows- eludes the beatings, rapes, and intimidations suffered by these women imprisoned during the 2018 demonstrations.
The air and the symbols cannot be locked up. The force of tyrannies is physical, and the incorporeal leads its minions and thugs to a dead end. The well-known "force of ideas" is a very expensive image for the propaganda machine of totalitarian political systems, one that does not take long to come back over their own heads like a justice boomerang. While repressive force and horror increase, oppressive ideologies dry up... They serve as compost for new and opposing ideologies.
The more the bodies of dissidents are punished, the faster they become fertile territories for the germination of emancipatory thought. Their fragility is impregnable and unbeatable, like the brief sylph in 'The Idea' (Berthold Bartosch, 1932), another classic of cinema and film animation encrypted in the essences of contemporary heirs such as 'Leaves of K'.
You can read the original note here