CoMo No. 26: Panama (August, 2024)

[sally]

[Holdrüholoheuho]

if anyone wonders why this CoMo is delayed... it's because of the delirious (& failed) struggle for novelty!
witnessing a steady decline of interest in CoMo, CoMo representatives (in joint efforts with Panama's President José Raúl Mulino) have offered Nicolas Maduro political asylum in Panama — hoping to gain exclusive contents (& related increased attention) for this thread.
unfortunately, the offer was declined...

Panama offers asylum to Venezuela’s Maduro to allow for transition

Venezuela's Maduro rejects Panama's offer of safe passage

thus, instead of mind-blowing interviews with Nicolas Maduro from Panama, we can only bring the usual boring CoMo stuff in the upcoming days.
i know it sucks but stay tuned anyway!

[Lencho of the Apes]

The whole world is watching... Except for the people still in a neo-liberal trance state.

[rischka]

[Holdrüholoheuho]

a neo-liberal trance

(based on what i have just seen) i can testify that a significant tutor of the neo-liberal lessons MARGARET TEACHER is still haunting Panama


For Your Peace of Mind, Make Your Own Museum (Ana Endara Mislov, Pilar Moreno, 2021) #CoMoPanama

In her village in Panama, Senobia saw art in everything. Put a broken umbrella on a bottle and you have the head of a wild man. A stick plus a plastic cup becomes a bird. She turned her house into “The Museum of Antiquities of All Species.” There are old telephones and computers, and hanging everywhere are cards on which she wrote her thoughts. Her last wish: to keep everything in her museum as it is.



Pilar Moreno and Ana Endara tenderly portray her in a gentle, conceptual documentary, where Senobia’s spirit seems present in every shot. They film her amateur artworks as if they were exhibits in a museum. They give her fellow villagers the exact same dress as Senobia wore, interview them in her kitchen, and have them read from her diary. She was a vivacious wit, a free spirit who cared nothing for convention.



But the elderly women also break through the fourth wall and talk about their own lives. Senobia, her art, and her reflections turn out to be a wonderful vehicle to talk about loneliness, old age, femininity, and all that remains when a person no longer exists.

(from a Europocentric perspective) one of the most remarkable objects of “The Museum of Antiquities of All Species” is certainly a “Bed in the Style of Louis XV, Year 1582” — a rooster lurking around symbolizing the undying passion



“The Museum of Antiquities of All Species” also contains a parade of “Important Women of the XX Century” — notice that Senobia Cerrud placed herself in the very middle!


besides MARGARET TEACHER, the Old Continent (namely the Isles) is also represented by PRINCESA BIRDIANA

[rischka]

[Holdrüholoheuho]

Invasion (Abner Benaim, 2014) #CoMoPanama

INVASION is a documentary about the collective memory of a country. The invasion of Panama by the U.S. in 1989 serves as an excuse to explore how the people remember, transform, and often forget their past in order to redefine their identity and become who they are today.










Dignity Battalions → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dignity_Battalions

[Holdrüholoheuho]

God Is a Woman (Andres Peyrot, 2023) #CoMoPanama

The Kuna community is one of the largest remaining Indigenous tribes in Latin America.



→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Blas_Islands
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guna_people

Based in the Guna Yala islands off Panama’s Caribbean coast, they organized a revolution in the 1920s that helped establish their independence. In 1975, they attracted the attention of Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau, an Oscar-winning French filmmaker and anthropologist. He moved with his family to spend a year documenting the Kuna’s matrilocal society.




He promised to share the resulting film with the community, but that never happened.

In recent years, Kuna elders have been on a quest to have that promise fulfilled. One of the most motivated is Arysteides Turpana, who studied in France and doggedly pursues the film’s trail through the bureaucracy of government ministries.



In God is a Woman, Swiss-Panamanian filmmaker Andrés Peyrot follows Turpana’s quest and captures the way a younger Kuna generation is making their own media. One of those rising talents is Orgun Wagua, who collaborates with Peyrot as a cameraperson and associate producer.

Many Kuna members from the 1970s retain strong memories of Gaisseau, his wife Kyoko, and their young daughter Akiko. Their memories bring out discrepancies between how Gaisseau saw the Kuna versus how they saw themselves.




That doesn’t diminish their eagerness to see what he made.





God is a Woman is simultaneously a cautionary tale raising questions around how and why documentaries are made and for whom,




and a testament to the power of what it means to see yourself on the big screen.

[Holdrüholoheuho]

Golden Talons: The Dawn of Justice (P.P. Jambrina, 1927) #CoMoPanama

The film is a fierce critique of United States policy towards Latin America, focusing in particular on the United States' backing of Panamanian separatists that led to the partition of the former Isthmus Department from Colombia.

→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gran_Colombia
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_of_Colombia
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separatio ... m_Colombia

It is believed that all actors and staff involved in the film employed pseudonyms in order to avoid the fallout from what in 1926 was still a very polemical subject in Colombia. The film was censored by the Colombian (& U.S.) government(s) upon its release. It subsequently faded from the public view and was thought lost for decades.

It was found (in the mid-1980s) and restored by the Fundación Patrimonio Fílmico Colombiano, though only the film's beginning, end, as well as another three reels' worth of footage, has been found.

so, the film's plot opens in 1903, when the two powers (the Yankeeland & the Ex-United States of Colombia) struggle over Panama.

In 1903, the United States and Colombia signed the Hay–Herrán Treaty to finalize the construction of the Panama Canal but the process could not be completed because the Congress of Colombia rejected the measure (which the Colombian government had proposed) on August 12, 1903. The United States then moved to support the separatist movement in Panama to gain control over the remnants of the French attempt at building a canal.

(besides other things) the film celebrates the power of investigative journalism!
after the investigators of the main Yankee anti-establishment journal (called “The World”) managed to afford (in Colombia) the irrefutable proof (the first and foremost “Panama Papers”) of Teddy Roosevelt's involvement in the dirty Panama Canal business, Teddy's aspirations for second term are thwarted and (here we are already entering into the realm of alternate history) when the Canal opens in 1914, no imperialist power can hold an upper hand over its traffic because the international law and order is restored & prevails (happy end!)

→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_World
Panama Canal Libel Case → https://exhibitions.library.columbia.ed ... libel-case









international law and order weights more than all the dirty money of the plutocrats!

Garras de oro (Golden Claws), also known as Alborada de justicia (Dawn of Justice), has been referred to as the first anti-imperialist film.

an extensive (serious!) read about the film:
html → https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362425
pdf → https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362425/pdf

[Holdrüholoheuho]

Introduction to Probability Theory (Michael Stevenson, 2008) #CoMoPanama

Michael Stevenson‘s video work is based on an account given by the bodyguard of General Omar Torrijos. The General was the de facto leader of Panama from 1968-1981, and is perhaps most well known for signing the Torrijos-Carter treaty with the US in 1977 which (eventually) secured Panamanian sovereignty over the Panama Canal Zone in 1999. The script for the work, read out in Spanish, is based on the observations of Torrijos’ bodyguard (a mathematician known as Chu Chu), and discusses events surrounding the exiled Shah of Iran’s stay on the island of Contadora. The narrative is interspersed with various asides discussing theories of probability, hence the title Introduccion a la Teoria de la Probabilidad. Stevenson’s work hits on the notion of ‘calculation,’ and the cold and strategic approach to foreign policy which can be argued was (and still is) behind so much international intervention, particularly in the region of Panama. It also suggests something of the disjointed way these different regional histories are retold and re-examined, and the way the passage of time re-contextualises their importance on a contemporary stage.

→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Torrijos
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9 ... t%C3%ADnez
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contadora_Island

”Power tends to corrupt,
and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Lord Acton’s famous formulation,
the most misquoted in history,
depends on implied conditional
(if A then B).
Logic teaches that if this statement is valid
then its inverse will also be valid.

[Holdrüholoheuho]

a “grand finale” with a very nice film that has hardly anything to do with Panama... “Panama” serves here as a “cause” of the homesickness (& other illnesses of the “urban alienation spectrum”) of the main protagonist, an immigrant to “Yankeeland“ (from “Panama“).

O Panama (James Benning, Burt Barr, 1985) #CoMoPanama

O Panama, scripted by Burt Barr and filmed by James Benning, was made for TV. Immigrant (Willem Dafoe) comes to New York from an unidentified Latin American country and appears to fall ill in the middle of winter. He drifts through this illness, confined to his apartment where his imagination is free. The tedious reality of the sickness and the vivid hallucinatory visions of his delirium, are stitched together by the polarities of light and dark, hot and cold, sound and silence, day and night, presence and absence. There is no dialogue and little action as a `mental landscape…rife with heat and color’ emerges from the backdrop of a bleak urban winterscape.

Only once did the artistic trajectories of James Benning and Burt Barr intersect, but that they did with a Bang!, as O PANAMA is a gem that makes both their oeuvres shine a bit more brightly. In someways, this visit with a deliriously ill man is closer to Barr’s work at the time, like THE WOMAN NEXT DOOR (1984) or THE DOGS (1989), both urban alienation cacophonies done in a very rigorous, reduced style (Barr is now remembered mainly for his minimalist video works showing e. g. an ice cube melting …); then again: O PANAMA shares many a concern with Benning’s early adventures in experimental narrative like HONEYLANE ROAD (1973), 8 1/2x11 (1974) or 11x14 (1977), making this into something like a coda of a development discarded. From nowadays perspective, the probably most intriguing aspect of this exercise was the choice of actor to carry this one-manshow: a young Willem Dafoe in full Wooster Group furor just at the cusp of becoming a Hollywood star with STREETS OF FIRE (1984; Walter Hill), TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. (1985; William Friedkin) and PLATOON (1986; Oliver Stone). Which is to say that O PANAMA contains all of mid-1980s US moving image art – nothing less. (Olaf Möller)

[rischka]

wonderful stuff as always jiri

[Holdrüholoheuho]

oooh

but there is one more (true epilogue!) film still...
CoMo meets (accidentally) Year poll (Gradiva, Giorgio Albertazzi, 1970)