Taxibol
By Mariana Martínez Bonilla – december 3rd, 2023
LOS EXPERIMENTOS – BLOG DE CINE
In its fourth edition, the INSTAR Film Festival, organized by the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism (hence the acronym that gives name to the international film event), founded and directed by Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera, explores the transnational character of recent Cuban cinema and the dialogue it establishes with other cinematographies produced in authoritarian contexts, privileging those works whose aesthetic and thematic proposals are presented as novel and risky.
With venues in Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Cuba, Miami, New York, Sao Paulo, and Paris, the IV INSTAR Festival will be held from December 4 to 10 in a hybrid format. Included in its official program is 'Taxibol' (2023), the most recent work by Italian filmmaker Tommaso Santambrogio, filmed in Cuba with the collaboration of Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz, whose international premiere took place a few months ago at the Nyon International Film Festival, Visions du Réel in Switzerland.
Santambrogio was awarded at the 80th Venice Film Festival with the Bisato d'Oro prize for best director for his debut feature, 'Oceans Are the Real Continents' (2023), an extended version of the short film of the same name released in 2019, filmed in San Antonio de los Baños, and starring an entirely Cuban cast. In it, advised by Lav Diaz himself, the Milan-born filmmaker portrayed, through beautiful black-and-white photography, the paradoxes of life in the region near Havana, whose inhabitants struggle between loneliness and migration against the backdrop of a rainy, decadent Cuba in crisis.
In 'Taxibol' Santambrogio opens a series of questions in a postcolonial tone about the relationship between memory, the forms of obliteration and persistence of the dictatorial past in the Philippines and Cuba, and cinema as a critical device capable of going beyond itself to fight injustice, revealing the power relations that hide behind the traumatic imprints and the ambiguities of colonial discourses in their modern and contemporary forms.
In the form of a triptych in which fiction and non-fiction are knotted together to become a critical interpellation, 'Taxibol' is divided into three parts. The first one, a bilingual dialogue that takes place in a closed universe (i.e., a car), witnesses the encounter between Lav Diaz and Gustavo Flecha, the cab driver in charge of transporting him during the Filipino's stay at the San Antonio de los Baños International Film and TV School, and with whom, as Diaz himself states, he shares a universe of emotions and affections that go beyond the barriers imposed by language; for example problems related to migration and interpersonal relationships, and cinema's capacity as a weapon of political protest.
In the second part, after Lav Diaz reveals the true intentions of his stay on the island to Gustavo, the tone of the film changes. A black screen, with some wear marks on its surface and what appears to be a sprocket, starts a silent fictional portrait of the life of Juan Mijares Cruz (played by Mario Limonta) on a farm on the island. This man, as Diaz tells the cab driver, is an elderly former general of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who subjugated the Filipino people for over twenty years, who lives incognito on the island, and whom the filmmaker seeks out to assassinate as part of a ritual of revenge and memorial restitution of justice for his people.
Finally, the closing sequence of the medium-length film in question brings us back to a non-fictional tone. This time, with the help of archival footage that shows both Marcos' rise to power and the protests against him, fiction and documentary meet to collapse with a commentary of critical pretensions (Cuban radio recordings off-key as the final credits roll) about the dictatorial parallels between Cuba and the Philippines.
On a formal level, once again, the use of black and white stands as a motif that produces estrangement in contrast to the colorful and festive imagery with which life in the island territory is usually associated. The only moment in which color invades the screen is in the final sequence, when Juan Mijares, seated in front of his television set, watches the images of the Philippine archive. Their irruption on the screen, beyond becoming a closing punctuation, allows us to think about the complex relationships between the historical narrative that allowed the consolidation of the dictatorship as a form of colonialism that emerges as a paradox of modernity and how the protest against this form of domination is articulated, on the one hand, and, on the other, the negotiation of the spaces of its persistence.
Thus, the ghosts of the past manifest themselves in everyday spaces of the house inhabited by the former general and his servants. The old man, whose reduced mobility serves as a pretext to make the woman in charge of the household chores undress him and tuck him in for the night, passes through a series of solitary rooms where time seems to be suspended. This perpetual, mummified present is embodied in a series of slow movements, repetitive actions, and static atmospheres: each scene presents slight variations, but in all of them, the man looks out the window or performs some solitary activity such as writing a letter or watching television, smoking a cigar, eating dinner, and going to bed. During the night, nightmares that we never see but hear (screams and moans of pain) haunt him and make him wake up agitated and abruptly.
The medium and general shots, beyond their contrasting chiaroscuros (once again, we may wonder about the metaphoric potential of the staging of 'Taxibol'), frame that asphyxiating dictatorial environment, maintained and petrified by that solitary and mute figure. They also show a series of objects belonging to a timeless past since their state of preservation is excellent, almost museum-like, and frame the constant (and also reiterative) presence of a pair of caged birds and numerous hunting trophies: preserved animal heads. Some critics have considered the presence of taxidermy in the film as a metaphor (rarefied, one should add) for the emptying and suspension of life during periods of extreme state violence. It should also be noted that the sequences that make up the fictional part of 'Taxibol' were filmed at the La Vigía Estate, the residence of the American writer Ernest Hemingway between 1939 and 1960, after which it became the Cuban Museum.
As part of these contrasts, extra-diegetic sounds anticipate the encounter with a series of outdoor spaces where banana harvesting and the raising of pigs and chickens take place. All this under the gaze of a foreman who reproduces the colonial latifundist logics, according to which the spaces and the representation powers of the past are negotiated, but also the logics of its manifestation in the form of disciplining and subjugating the bodies of the farm workers who communicate and obey through gestures and, in the best of cases, a grunt of disapproval, as in the case of the domestic worker and cook, after preparing a stew that turned out not to the liking of her employer.
Through the situation opened by the conversation between Lav Diaz and Gustavo Flecha in the first part of the film, it does not seem idle to wonder about the symbolic nature of these muted subjects and spaces as a critique on the reproduction of colonial logics, obliterated through the configuration of silences and opacities in the official narratives of post-revolutionary Cuba and the contemporary Philippines. This is not insignificant, as the film was produced just one year after the rise to power of Bonbong Marcos, the dictator's son, following a campaign that sought to erase the crimes and plunder his mother and father committed during the dictatorship, leaving the Philippines in a highly vulnerable and precarious state.
On the other hand, the discordance between the exterior and the interior of the farm also appears as a continuation of the formal duality of the film, which employs fictional strategies to elaborate a documentary narrative and some documentary observational forms (general and static shots) that end up forming the core of a fictional mise-en-scène. Thus, in the first segment of Santambrogio's piece, Diaz and Flecha are shown through an interplay of close-ups and counter-shots that relate to the rhythm of their conversation. These men inhabit the space of containment, empathy, and friendly familiarity offered by the automobile in which they have traveled from San Antonio de los Baños to Havana, as Diaz states in a fragment of the improvised dialogue that the director himself, in an interview with Antonio Enrique Gonzales for Rialta, referred to as a canovaccio. That is, a form of theatrical improvisation.
In short, the triptych that shapes 'Taxibol' displays the relevance of the dictatorial memory in an audacious way, where audiovisual resources are knotted with a critical reading, developed from the interstitial convulsion of the present, which appropriates the paradoxes and performative excesses of the dictatorial violence and its consequences. Firstly, through the insistence on the filmmaker's position on the social, cultural, and political commitment of cinema, made explicit through the voice of Lav Diaz, and secondly, through the search for a visual, sonorous, and narrative approach that questions how the "recent past" (a term Elizabeth Jelin refers to as a euphemism to confront the difficulty of naming the extremely violent and terrorist forms of state control taken by Latin American dictatorial regimes) has been written as a univocal entity, unidirectional and monumental, giving account of the paradoxical condition of the phenomena, the policies and the violence that keep it under a perpetually immobile validity, as if it were a mummy, like that ghostly figure that Diaz has the task of murdering bloodily, crushing its head and devouring its brain.
The critical roots of ‘Taxibol' beyond its affiliation to the work of the Filipino filmmaker, with which it has both thematic and formal affinities, and its hybrid execution, a motif that has already been seen as a form of narrative transgression in Latin American cinema in the last two or three years and which, if not interpreted with caution, could prove problematic, respond to the urgency to account for the colonial past and the obstinate and unpunished persistence of its violent grammars, not only in Latin America and Latin America and the Caribbean but throughout the global South. With this film, T. Santambrogio joins the group of the most interesting voices in contemporary cinema, determined to take a stand and reformulate the memories of repression as in the case of Paz Encina, Andrés Wood, and Pablo Larraín, among others, whose filmographies emerge within the framework of a broader set of theoretical and artistic searches that delve into the memories of dictatorship in Latin America since the 1980s.
You can read the original note here