sneersnipe film review

An interview with Esteban Sapir, director of La antena (The Aerial) at the Rotterdam International Film Festival 2007

Faced with a film that according to the press notes takes the mantle from Eisenstein, Vertov and Lang, and allegedly reinterprets the very language of conventional film, the prospect of meeting the director of such work proffers scepticism, revelation and alarm in abundance. When one actually confronts the director in question you might expect an inscrutable demagogue pedalling his latest grand unified theory of the visual arts. Luckily not so Esteban Sapir, director of La antena, the opening night film at the Rotterdam International Film Festival 2007.

Sapir is a convivial Argentinian guy in his thirties who chats verbosely about his latest project which rather perversely may actually be the real deal. La antena could be described as a modern silent film shot in black and white but that wouldn't really do it justice. It's a fairy tale set in an austere snow bound metropolis where everybody has lost the ability to speak. In this silence a ruthless television station owner exploits the only lady left who can speak by broadcasting her songs to an envious city. So when pressed about the rather grand statements roaming around about his film Sapir is refreshingly frank. “There's not one starting point. I had a lot of ideas that then became La antena.” But when pinned he falls back on “I wanted to tell a story only by seeing images. And that story I wanted to tell by images spoke about communication”. And rather beautifully and maybe even uniquely this is exactly what La antena does.

Nimbly name dropping Eisenstein, Vertov and Lang without really explaining their specific influences in a little more detail Sapir likens their use to a collage. Just like any other magpie maverick, reinvention is as much appropriation as it is innovation. “My intention was to experiment with film language. A lot of films only try to show what is written on a script. I didn't want to do that I wanted to tell all this by images not by telling only a script. I wanted to go back to the silent movies where you had a text but it was in the image.”

La antena is a work that does indeed challenge film language with the same radicalism at heart as did the works of Dziga Vertov by giving a feature film a totally different approach to communication. But for all this talk of influential directors and film language, La antena owes considerable dues to comic books as the most exciting element of La antena are the inter-titles. For just as in most comics the characters in the film communicate using text, often in bubbles. “The text lives with the film. It's part of the film. It's not just text. It's an object inside the film. It's intention is given by the size and the movement of the text in the film. It's like a comic but...”.

Beautifully, characters' dialogue is actually part of their world allowing words to be manipulated and even manhandled. So, for example, people can disguise their conversation by concealing their words with a coat. Naturally for a film this visual it was all thought out in advance, reminiscent of Marvel comics in the 1960s or the graphic design of 1960s magazine Oz. “The design of the film was entirely drawn on storyboards frame by frame. At first I drew them and afterwards an artist drew it with me frame by frame. For each frame I thought a movement for the subtitles. But afterwards I saw the first tests of the film I took away most of them and left the ones that you see in the film.”

Personally, watching La antena put me in mind of Sin City, creation of Frank Miller, the prolific comic book writer responsible for Sin City, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and 300 – a film about to burst upon our screens in the impending blockbuster season. Sapir acknowledges Miller as an influence and immediately mentions the budget of Sin City “Sixty million dollars! “. Despite budget differences it does indeed owe a debt to Frank Miller and many other comic artists because although not a comic book adaptation Sapir has made what may be the purest comic book film yet.

So when asked which comics in particular where influential to him Sapir happens to mention El Eternauta, or eternal traveller as it's known in English, by Héctor Germán Oesterheld. El Eternauta has been described as one of the major comics of the twentieth century. I certainly hadn't heard of it before this point but I'm not going to pretend to be anything more than a casual comic book fan. The premise is that aliens attack the earth, and specifically in the story Buenos Aires, by means of a deadly snow fall which kills all who it touches. A few survivors manage to avoid contact with the snow forming a short lived resistance before the protagonist is able to escape via time travel in an alien spacecraft. The Art Deco city in La antena, obviously linked to the expressionism of Fritz Lang and Friedrich Murnau, is snow bound too linking itself and Sapir to El Eternauta.

The Argentine New Wave was also associated with cities, but much more gritty realistic ones than the ones dreamt up by Oesterheld or Sapir in La antena. A feature on the FREPESCI website on South American cinema connects this group of filmmakers in the 1990s via their love of looking at transition through cities in different ways. Sapir was a prominent member of that movement with his début feature Fine Power (Picado fino) and other directors included Adrián Caetano, Bruno Stagnaro, Pablo Trapero, Diego Lerman and Martín Rejtman. Possibly the most well known of this bunch internationally might be Fabián Bielinsky, who's film Nine Queens was marked with the dubious accolade of a US remake after much success.

Conventional categorisation of this wave has proved tricky due to its disparate nature generally resorting to terms like 'cinema of orphans' or descriptions of a gritty street bound aesthetic that merged documentary and fiction styles. Suffice it is to say Fine Powder was an integral part of it. By way of a sad epilogue reinforcing the sense of the 'cinema of orphans', Oesterheld himself became one in the disappeared when he too went missing in the mid 1970s.

Vertov aside, Fritz Lang probably has the biggest contribution to the look of La antena in its depiction of a cold temporally indefinite city that recalls Metropolis amongst other expressionist films. Sapir deliberately set out to make a self-consciously artificial world that resembled Lang's work on the surface at least. “All the effects and the city are done like that for the people to know that they are done on cardboard...They don't have the lack of perspective. I wanted that to be shown and noticed by the audience.” The cardboard approach also extends to the acting in the film. “Histrionics, overreactions - performance was all because they didn't have words”.

Unfortunately the other Lang connection is less compelling, pushing post modernism a little too far in this context. One scene has a lady tied to a giant Swastika evoking the energisation of the robot maria. A companion scene later has a child tied to a large Star of David in opposition. It's a jokey nod to Lang and his influences with a contemporary sense of irony of the battles going on here, not least in the set design but by using such potent symbols from the 20th century Sapir instantly provokes a reaction that potentially outweighs the allegorical elements of La antena. “Everybody asks that question! I used them as two very different icons: anti-Semitism and oppression... The oppressed and the oppressors.” He then wryly comments “...and the Nazis were the ones who invented television and propaganda”.

The notes of course don't mention the most obvious contemporary Sapir has made for himself with La antena, Guy Maddin, whose work often mimics the old filmmaking practices with a knowingly camp wit. La antena although playful is considerably more serious. Sapir himself hadn't seen any of Maddin's work until after he'd finished shooting La antena “the director of photography gave me as a present for my birthday a film by Guy Maddin – The Saddest Music in the World – fantastic film I liked it”.

Lastly given the prominence of text in La antena, a major obstacle facing non-Spanish speaking audiences are the subtitles themselves. They are all in Spanish. Unlike a normal foreign language film overlaying subtitles on the film itself presents a problem as they will clash with the look of the inter-titles. At the screenings in Rotterdam subtitles were projected just below the screen adding to the common problem with visually commandeering films where you have to decide whether it's more important to enjoy the picture make the compromise and occasionally read the subtitles from time to time to follow the dialogue. A small dilemma for watching such an inventive film.