These are very strange times for cinema. While the advance of technology seems to keep its long-made promise, allowing many to make their own films—indeed, anyone can turn on a phone camera and film like there’s no tomorrow—, the film industry is continuously imposing new “professional” standards on filmmaking and distribution, seemingly safeguarding cinema itself, but actually blatantly gatekeeping it. If there’s anything wrong with filmmaking nowadays, I’m afraid 6K won’t fix it.
Even as a film worker, I’ve never been a technical guy, so over the years I’ve asked many stupid questions. As it happens, some of them turned out to be of the sensitive kind. Like, why should I pay more for a 4K copy if the projector of my theatre only screens 2K? Did Radu Jude actually have to make a DCP for premiering his iPhone-shot film at Berlinale? When did repertory film programming become so expensive? And does every film really have to be restored, as they say on the streets of Bologna? The ever growing “resolution”, “clarity” and “sharpness” are just passwords for the accelerationist ideology of the film industry, brilliantly put into words as early as 2007 by Hito Steyerl in her essay “In Defense of the Poor Image”.
Of course, a good part of the history of imagery could be understood as such: for centuries, seeing something better, in detail, implied getting closer to it. Much has changed in the last decades—fundamentally, our understanding of distance and image, among others—, but the concepts of clarity and detail still dominantly inform our appreciation of experiences and knowledge, including art. So an unclear film such as Chilean filmmakers Luciana Merino and Pascal Viveros’ Towards the Sun, Far from the Center, engages with contemporaneity in ways unsuspected at first glance. And when I say that it’s an unclear film, I mean this in the most obvious way: its image, consisting of slow pans of Santiago taken from a bird’s eye view (at a pace different from that of a drone—maybe from a crane?) is zoomed-in so much that it seems bidimensional; not abstract, but plastic, toyish, slightly unreal. What a telling paradox of cinema: you lose focus once you get too close.
But however Disneyfied the city of Santiago seems at first in these unfocused brightly lit shots, it is modified as the camera pans away from, I assume, “the center” (middle-class residential houses). We’re following a couple—two young women, played by Fernanda Vicens and Jimena Albarrán—who guide the camera to the outskirts of the town (this is the main and only “narrative” of the film), from a pocket park to a housing block reaching for the sky, watching cats on the hot tin roofs of smaller, poorer, livelier houses. They come and go, peekaboo, sometimes long enough to forget about them. Along the way, the city is becoming warm, humane, reassuring: at no point does it feel like they are escaping from something, even if the opening science fiction like intertitle could suggest as much:
“I dreamt with future cities
built only for us
where the sun was trying to find us.”
Are the women hiding from the sun? Is that why their image is unclear? You need light for image-making… Exposure: a term with a heavy connotation in both cinema and queerness. Hidden faces, blurred details and off-frame speculations are a huge part of the contemporary queer experience—just think of online dating. Being out, “overexposed”, making yourself public as a queer is a question of courage, of privilege, struggle and dysphoria. In this perspective, the Santiago of Merino and Viveros, with its undetailed landscapes and people, liberates the queer experience from evident taxonomies. To me, such a Santiago is equally utopian and dystopian, a city of blurred differences, neither completely visible or invisible, as real as it is unreal; but I’d be curious to cruise it once, “towards the sun, far from the center”, and see for myself if queerness is more about difference or similarity.
Since I myself have never been to the actual Santiago, I could’ve been the ideal spectator of everything this film is not: a postcard, a guided tour. The filmmakers refuse their film to become a photographic testament of any kind. Next to the women, the city itself is the third character of this love story—a reminder not only of the complicated history of modern queerness and urbanity, of all the others and boys and girls who’ve been perverted by big cities (a homophile myth), of all of them who love the misery and grace of the metropolis, of those who hate it as well, but also of the extremely pressing moral dilemma of the gentrifying imagery. Worthless on the visual market, an unclear image such as this one, resists commodification, and is not for sale. The queerness of the film, I believe, is one with the peekaboo love story: that of a poor image. In her essay, Steyerl puts it like this:
“The poor image is a rag or a rip; an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution. (...) The image is liberated from the vaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digital uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance. The poor image tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming. (…) The poor image is an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image. Its genealogy is dubious. (…) It often defies patrimony, national culture, or indeed copyright.”
If you read between the lines what’s written with invisible ink: “defies patrimony, national culture, or indeed copyright”; “liberated”, “abstraction”, “in its very becoming”, “illicit”, “dubious”. And if you look at those images long enough… they’re perfectly queer.
