Jorge Sanjinés

Jorge Sanjinés (born July 31, 1936 in La Paz ) is a Bolivian film director . He was one of the most famous protagonists of Bolivian film and a militant political cinema in Latin America . In his later films, his partisanship for the indigenous population is expressed in a less agitational way. They are “no longer committed to a revolutionary political program”.

Life

Difficult beginnings

Sanjinés began journalistic work in 1954 in Arequipa , Peru , where he had followed his father, an economist, into exile. As a teenager he wrote short stories, poems and an unpublished novel. In the 1950s he studied philosophy and literature in La Paz and later film in Chile . His parents could not support him while he was studying in Chile. “When I was there, I went through starvation situations and the poor living conditions of the workers. I lived as a worker. I had friends among the workers who lived in terrible economic conditions. I couldn't understand how they could survive. I paid for my film education by working like her. I believe that contact with the phenomena of poverty , oppression and exploitation was important for my future life, especially with regard to what kind of films I would make after my training. "

After his return to Bolivia in the early 1960s - the country was then in a "great cultural isolation" - he founded a number of institutions together with screenwriter Oscar Soria , including a film club, the film magazine Estrenos Sanjinés wrote several articles on the theory of filmmaking, and the Escuela Fílmica Boliviana , the first film school in Bolivia. The film school was closed by the government that wanted to keep control of the film production.

After a few commercials, the two made their first independent film, the short film Revolución , which won the Joris Ivens Prize at the Leipzig Documentary Film Festival . Revolución showed images of misery and with it the conditions that had led to the rise of power by the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario in the revolution of 1952, but had not been overcome by it. Revolución is a silent film and follows Eisenstein's assembly aesthetic . It was in clear contrast to the official documentaries with voice-over sound that were made at the Instituto Cinematográfico Boliviano (ICB) , which was founded in 1953 immediately after the revolution . There was a demonstration in the presidential palace. President Víctor Paz Estenssoro said the film was good but "very dangerous". Further public demonstrations of Revolución were banned. This was followed by the medium-length film Aysa! [Landslide!] That Sanjinés shot in the mining region. The main character of the film is a miner who exploits a mine abandoned by the mining company on his own account and dies as a result of an industrial accident.

Soria, like most other Bolivian film people, had worked for the United States Information Agency and the US embassy in the 1950s . Without financial support from the USA it was practically impossible to make films at that time due to the difficult economic situation. The filmmakers used their often self-taught talents in these co-productions, which was sharply criticized by Sanjinés. “This situation was due to the filmmakers' lack of political awareness, a [r] clear attitude towards the interests of the people, although the goals of the North Americans were known. They became victims of their inadequate ideological training and their professional blindness. So they left their knowledge, their experience, their talent, everything that they had acquired with great difficulty in the many years of filmmaking, when they were still editing by hand, measuring the light with their eyes and, to the enemy of the country their families ate less so that they could buy film material. ”(Sanjinés)

The collective that was later called UKAMAU emerged from the collaboration between Soria and Sanjinés; The cameraman Antonio Eguino and the producer Ricardo Rada also belonged to his core .

Sanjinés, who always viewed political filmmaking as a learning process that required constant self-criticism on the part of the filmmaker, was quite critical of his first films. These films would have shown the poverty of certain strata of the population, reminded the bourgeoisie of the existence of these strata, but said nothing new to the poor themselves. “Only the demonstrations in mines and peripheral areas opened our eyes and showed us the right way. It was then that we discovered that this cinema was imperfect, inadequate, limited, that, in addition to technical defects, it also contained errors in conception and content. […] We had to learn: the people are much more interested in knowing how and why misery arises; who caused it; how and in what way it is to be combated. "

First successes

UKAMAU, the first feature film by the collective that gave it its name, was made with state money. General Barrientos , who had carried out the coup in 1964, had the Instituto Cinematográfico Boliviano closed immediately after his coup, but reopened in 1965 . Sanjinés became technical director. The premiere therefore took place in the presence of the top of the state, but they were not at all enthusiastic about the result and viewed it as "treason", understandable from their point of view, since Sanjinés had submitted a wrong script. The story of an Aymara Indian who took violent revenge for the rape by a Spanish-speaking middleman that led to his wife's death would hardly have been financed otherwise. Sanjinés was fired and the National Film Institute closed. UKAUMAU broke all of the small country's audience records. “Only later were the copies destroyed. But by then more than 300,000 Bolivians had seen UKAMAU. ”In the context of a country marked by a deep cultural and social divide, it was clear that this revenge was not just a reaction to an injustice suffered by a single person. Although UKAMAU could not yet be called a film weapon due to “its structural limitations and its concessions to an aestheticizing tendency”, it was already a call to “lead the people's struggle in a consciously violent form”, said Sanjinés.

The collective saw the success of UKAMAU as a responsibility. The next film, Yawar Mallku (The Blood of the Condor), should therefore address what they consider to be the central conflict. Since the ruling class of Bolivia was ultimately an instrument of US imperialism , they wanted to attack it head-on. To do this, they took up the sterilization of indigenous women (without their consent) by employees of the Peace Corps in the USA. They saw in it "[...] the opportunity to give a concrete shape to imperialism, which for our people had always been something intangible abstract." The US embassy did not succeed in the demonstration of Yawar Mallku, who was mainly in Quechua and to a lesser extent was filmed in Spanish. “As a direct consequence of the demonstration by Yawar Mallku, the fact that the North Americans stopped the mass distribution of contraceptives, recalled all employees of their organization in the three sterilization centers in the country. Nor did they dare to dismiss the charges brought against them even by conservative newspapers such as Presencia. ”In 1971 the Peace Corps was expelled from the country.

Despite these practical effects, the collective was not of the opinion that with UKAUMAU they had found an adequate cinematic expression for their political concerns. “[…] Although YAWAR MALLKU reached approx. 550,000 viewers, the film did not yet have communication skills that led to active participation. Its plot structure, which is typical of a feature film, gave the statement it contained a dangerous level of unbelievability. "

Looking for a "revolutionary cinema"

Overcoming the traditional fixation of the feature film on one or more individual heroes was now a crucial task for the collective. Viaja a la independencia por los caminos de la muerte [Journey to Independence on the Paths of Death] was created as a co-production with the German Catholic television production company 'provobis' and was never shown in cinemas due to the faulty development in a Berlin copier. Still, from Sanjiné's point of view, it was a crucial film for the group's development. “For the first time we set out to present the history of our people. […] Of course there are some main characters, but they are closely connected to the collective acting. It's a qualitative leap, a break with the earlier films. ”The film shows a conflict between two groups of campesinos during the reign of Víctor Paz Estenssoro .

The US embassy is said to have deliberately fueled this conflict in order to weaken the then very powerful trade union movement. “Under the pretext of restoring peace and quiet, the army could have been brought very close to the mine area and, with the help of the manipulated campesinos, could have taken it in a jab. But the miners saw through the game. They surrounded the advancing army and seized their commander. They organized a people's court that sentenced him to death. [...] He was executed by tying six sticks of dynamite to his belt and setting them on fire. "

In El Coraje del Pueblo [The Courage of the People] the concentration on the collectively acting masses was even more evident. "The level of political consciousness of the Bolivian miners is so high, for example, that the possibilities of conscious participation are unlimited." The subject of the film is a massacre that took place in 1967 near the Siglo XX mine . The miners played themselves here in a kind of active re-enactment. B. filmed the first massacre in EL CORAJE DEL PUEBLO without a break, from the moment the crowd flows down the hill to the moment the shots are fired. [...] They were images that the people created (or rather, those that they remembered); they were situations that were embodied on the spot by people who they lived through for the second time in the turbulence of the action, in the noise of the gunfire. ”So Sanjinés deliberately aimed at the audience's identification with a collective, which through an“ emotional Shock ”should be triggered. “This was in contradiction to the cinema conception, which aims to create a 'distance' between the audience and the film so as not to impair the process of reflection. On the contrary, we were of the opinion: the emotional - that is, something peculiar to human nature - is not only not an obstacle, but can be a means to sharpen awareness. "

"Communication with the people"

In the further development of the film language , the "[...] two stumbling blocks of paternalism and elitism had to be avoided. It was about deepening the perception and the representation of reality, because the clarity of the language could not arise from a mere simplification, but had to arise from a lucid synthesis of reality. "

The orientation towards the collective - in contrast to bourgeois cinema, which is perceived as individualistic - resulted just as much from the goal of provoking revolutionary solidarity as from the need to orientate oneself to the mentality of the majority of Bolivians in order to be able to communicate with them . “Anyone thinking of a cinema for the Bolivian people must assume that most of the inhabitants of this country do not view human relationships from the point of view of utility, like the ruling minority, but from the point of view of cultural and spiritual integration and interrelation. That is why, for this majority, cinema that is not determined by individualistic principles and attitudes is adequate. Because the attitude norms of this large majority are permeated by the principle of the group, the collective. "

Since the filmmakers themselves belonged to the non-indigenous minority, they repeatedly encountered difficulties in his attempt to make cinema for and with the indigenous majority. When filming Yawar Mallku in 1968 they came to a village of which they had only known one resident who had seen UKAMAU in La Paz. Although the film crew paid very high wages, none of the villagers initially wanted to appear in the film. The Quechua- speaking indigenous people met the collective with open suspicion, and the only liaison officer did not explain the situation. “We had thought that by mobilizing a single influential man, we would also get the rest of the people moving because we would have to be dependent on him. We had not understood that the Indians put the interests of the collective above the interests of the individual, that for all of them what was not good for each individual could not be good [...] “The situation could only be solved by the filmmakers demonstratively subjected to the decision-making mechanisms of the indigenous peoples; In a ceremony that lasted several hours, led by a yatiri , it was decided with the help of coca leaves that the intentions of the film people were not objectionable.

Yawar Mallku was internationally successful. In Bolivia itself, the film was positively received by the middle class “[...] but not by the farmers in Bolivia, who perceived it as an interference of the dominant culture in their reality. According to Jorge Sanjinés, it was still a film made about their problem from a different cultural perspective. The level of language and the dramatic structure of Yawar Mallku follow a vertical orientation. The kind of dialogue in the film had to be learned by everyone involved, because the approach was entirely western, classically European. "

Films in exile

When Hugo Banzer Suárez launched a coup against General Torres in 1971, Sanjinés was in Europe and had just finished post-production of El coraje del Pueblo . The new government banned the film from showing and Sanjinés remained in exile until 1979. In 1972 he wrote the screenplay for El enemigo principal . The film came out in 1973 and received numerous awards. Fuera de aquí , which Sanjinés wrote together with his wife Beatriz Palacios in Ecuador , is less well known internationally . It was a coproduction with the University of Los Andes (Merida, Venezuela), the University of Quito and with workers' organizations and farmers in Ecuador. " Fuera de Aquí reached a large audience and according to research by the University of Quito it was discussed by five million people over a period of five years."

“ Fuera de Aquí was also shot in Quechua and Spanish. The film is about a group of American missionaries who go to the Andean community of Kalakala. [..] While the missionaries help the Indians with medicine, they also do mineralogical studies of the area. ”Finally, accompanied by the Bolivian authorities, an American company appears that wants to buy the whole area. Some indigenous peoples consent, others refuse and are murdered. The surviving indigenous people are resettled in a desert, where some die of cold and hunger. When they protest against this and demand to be able to return, they are massacred by the Bolivian army.

After returning

In 1979, Sanjinés was able to return to Bolivia and publish his book Teoría y práctica de un cine junto al pueblo [theory and practice of a cinema close to the people] in Mexico . The political situation in Bolivia remained unstable and in July 1980 there was a particularly bloody coup. "This coup by General Luis Gracia Meza had an enormous impact on Bolivian cinema, the entire film production came to a standstill." The film critic Luis Espinal was kidnapped, tortured and murdered. Sanjinés went into exile again and returned to the country in 1982 after returning to civil rule. The documentary Las banderas de amanecer [The flags of daybreak] portrays the struggle of the Bolivian people from 1979 to 1982. Sanjinés received various awards from workers' organizations.

Commitment to Latin American cinema

Sanjinés has been a member of the Committee of Latin American Filmmakers ( Comité de Cineastas de América Latina ) since 1967 . In 1985 he helped found the Fundación del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano .

A new style of film - La nación clandestina

In November 1987, Sanjinés began shooting La nación clandestina . This film is shot in a style new to Sanjinés. Among the role models who influenced him as a director, Sanjinés names Francesco Rosi , Satyajit Ray and Theo Angelopoulos . Angelopoulos influenced Sanjinés' visual style the most. "In Angelopoulous' films the camera becomes a spectator of what is happening and moves between the actors, with the result that the audience becomes a participant in the act of filmmaking."

In La nacion clandestina , Sanjinés tried for the first time to implement his cinematic vision in such a way that he shot every scene in a single take. In this film, Sanjinés works with professional actors and with 'amateurs'. The takes are up to 5 minutes long, which required months of rehearsals with the video camera with the actors. The secret nation is the Aymara, about whom the Spanish-speaking residents of La Paz know little. The film's hero lives in the capital, an Aymara Indian who was ostracized by his community because he was viewed as a traitor after becoming part of the dominant Spanish culture, soldier and paramilitary. As the film progresses, the main character returns to her community.

La nación clandestina received a positive response from the critics. "It is a kind of mature synthesis that has been purified from the entire previous career."

Para recibir el canto de los pájaros - a self-reflective film

Also para recibir el canto de los pájaros (The Song of the Birds) is a film about the clash of two cultures and indeed on a doubled manner. It's a movie about making a movie. The theme of the film in the film is the destruction of culture and the cruelty of the Spaniards at the Conquista . The conflicts that arise between the film team and the indigenous peoples designated as extras are similar to those that Sanjinés experienced while filming Yawar Mallku . out.

Los hijos del último jardín

Sanjinés' last feature film so far is about a group of young people in La Paz. Sanjinés wanted to make a film that was aimed at younger people, as this part of the audience is "the part of society that is most affected by cultural conformity" . The young people offer the money they stole from breaking into the villa of a top politician to an Aymara community, although they or their relatives may need it urgently. The Aymara congregation refuses after long deliberation. The criticism reacted ambiguously

Movies

• Revolución, documentary, 1963
• Ukamau , feature film, 1966 - a German version was created for ZDF
• Yawar mallku - The Blood of the Condor, 1969
• El Coraje del pueblo, 1971
• El enemigo principal , 1973
• Llocsi Caimanta, Fuera de Aquí, 1977
• Las banderas del amanecer, 1984
• La nación clandestina, 1989 [1]
• Para recibir el canto de los pájaros - To hear the birds singing, 1995
• Los hijos del último jardín, 2004

Writings and interviews (chronological)

• Un cine militante in: Cine Cubano , No. 68, pp. 45-47, La Habanna 1971
• El coraje del pueblo - Apuntes y observaciones ; in: Cine Cubano, No. 71/72, pp. 46-51, La Habana 1971
• La experienca boliviana ; in: Cine Cubano, No. 76/77, pp. 1-15, La Habanna 1972
• La busquesda de un cine popular ; in: Cine Cubano, No. 89/90, pp. 60-64, La Habanna 1974
• The Courage of the People: An Interview with Jorge Sanjinés , Cinéaste, (Spring 1974), 27–39.
• (with Oscar Zambrano) Cinema for the people - the Bolivian experience in: Cinema and struggle in Latin America. On the theory and practice of political cinema , ed. by Peter B. Schumann, Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag 1976, pp. 144–167
• The folk protagonist of the story (after "Cine Cubano" n93: 126-32 1977). Film and Television 7 n8 (1979): 47-51
• Teoría y práctica de un cine junto al pueblo, México: Siglo Veintiuno Ed., 1979, engl. Theory and practice of a cinema with people, Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press; New York, NY, 1989
• Para ser verdaderamente bolivianos tenemos que estar integrados a la vida de las mayorias: una entrevista al cineasta boliviano Jorge Sanjinés, interview with Romualdo Santos in: Cine cubano. - La Habana. - No. 98.1980, pp. 56-61
• Place of memory. Film and Television 11 n9 n / a (1983): 57-60
• Revolutionary Cinema: The Bolivian experience in: Julianne Burton (ed.): Cinema and Social Change in Latin America. Conversations with Filmmakers , Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986, pp. 35-48
• Interview with José Sànchez-H in: Sànchez-H. 1999: 98-108
• Modernity and the indigenous world in: Wolpert 2001: 225–228
• “The cultural mirror is important.” Interview with Jorge Sanjinés about indigenous and Bolivian cinema; in: ila, No. 292, February 2006, pp. 10-11

Secondary literature

• Leon G. Campbell, Carlos E. Cortes: Film as a revolutionary weapon: a Jorges Sanjines retrospective . History Teacher 12n3 (1979): 383-402.
• Jose Sanchez H: Neo-realism in contemporary Bolivian cinema: a case study of Jorge Sanjines's Blood of the condor and Antonio Eguino's Chuquiago , dissertation, 1983.
• Peter B. Schumann, Rita Nierich: A prerequisite for understanding is interest in and respect for the other culture. Filmbulletin (Switzerland) 33 n4 (n178) (1991): 56-63 -
• Michele L Lipka: Filmmaking and the making of a revolution: Jorge Sanjines, the Ukamau group, and the New Latin American Cinema , University of California, Santa Barbara, 1999
• José Sànchez-H .: The Art and Politics of Bolivian Cinema, Scarecrow Press 1999, ISBN 0-8108-3625-4 (chapter on Sanjinés pp. 77-108)
• El cine de Jorge Sanjinés. Santa Cruz, Bol .: Fundación para la Educación y Desarrollo de las Artes y Media - FEDAM, 1999.
• Peter Strack: “Two things are not always better. Los hijos de ultimo jardin by Jorge Sanjinés "in: ila, No. 292, February 2006, p. 11
• Pedro Susz K .: 100 years of film in Bolivia . In: Rafael Sevilla u. a. (Ed.): Bolivia - the misunderstood country? Bad Honnef: Horlemann, 2001, pp. 197-220.
• Bernd Wolpert: From Revolutionary Cinema to Cinema of Cultural Encounters: The Work of Jorge Sanjinés . In: Rafael Sevilla u. a. (Ed.): Bolivia - the misunderstood country? Bad Honnef: Horlemann, 2001, pp. 221-228. With a text by Sanjinés
• DM Wood: Indigenismo and the Avant-garde: Jorge Sanjines' Early Films and the National Project , BULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH, 25, no. 1, (2006): 63-82
• Franziska Näther: Jorge Sanjinés and his work , www.quetzal-leipzig.de (January 2009, accessed June 21, 2015)

proof

1. ↑ Näther 2009
2. ^ Sànchez-H 1999: 77
3. ^ Sànchez-H 1999: 99
4. ^ Sànchez-H 1999: 77
5. ^ Sànchez-H 1999: 78-79
6. ↑ On Revolución and Ukamau in the context of efforts at that time to construct a national identity, cf. Wood 2006
7. ^ Sànchez-H 1999: 80-81
8. ^ Sànchez-H 1999: 81-82
9. ^ Sanjinés 1976: 144-145
10. ^ Sanjinés 1986: 48
11. ^ Sanjinés 1976: 147
12. ^ Sanjinés 1986: 48
13. ^ Sanjinés 1976: 147
14. ^ Sanjinés 1976: 148
15. ^ Sanjinés 1976: 149
16. ^ Sanjinés 1976: 150
17. ↑ cf. Retrieved May 15, 2009 from Ken Rustad's article at peacecorpsonline.org
18. ^ Sanjinés 1976: 151
19. ^ Sanjinés 1976: 167
20. ^ Sanjinés 1976: 153
21. ^ Sanjinés 1976: 154
22. ^ Sànchez-H 1999: 85
23. ^ Sanjinés 1976: 154
24. ^ Sanjinés 1976: 155
25. ^ Sanjinés 1986: 41
26. ^ Sanjinés 1976: 156
27. ^ Sanjinés 1976: 159-160
28. ↑ Only afterwards did the collective decide that it would have been better to put the script aside to make a film about this experience. (Sanjinés 1986: 47) To a certain extent, Sanjinés made up for this film by making a film with Para recibir el canto de los pájaros about filming a film with indigenous people.
29. ^ Sànchez-H 1999: 91
30. ^ Sànchez-H 1999: 86
31. ^ Sànchez-H 1999: 87
32. ^ Sànchez-H 1999: 87-88
33. ↑ cf. Sànchez-H 1999: 87-88
34. ↑ cf. Sànchez-H 1999: 89
35. ^ Sànchez-H 1999: 78
36. ^ Sànchez-H 1999: 101-102
37. ↑ Susz K 2001: 213
38. ↑ cf. Sànchez-H 1999: 97-97 and Sanjinés 1976: 156-160 Para recibir solved “an enormous polemic in relation to the ideological position of the director” Susz K 2001: 215 cf. on the attitude of the older Sanjinés: Sanjinés 2001
39. ^ Sanjinés' 2006: 10
40. ↑ cf. Strack 2006: 11
41. ↑ for further interviews cf. Cinema and Fight in Latin America. On the theory and practice of political cinema , ed. by Peter B. Schumann, Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag 1976, p. 238

Web links

• Sanjinés website
• Jorge Sanjinés in the Internet Movie Database (English)