Return to Macondo: Myths and Metaphors in Argentine Cinema

Post | One Red

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Daniel is back home and he gets a bullet.

Paulina returns to her hometown, she gets a child left behind after being raped.

The above plot comes from the two films " Outstanding Citizen " and "Paulina's Choice" in the "2022 Argentina Film Festival". Different from the "running and fleeing" theme of Argentine films in the 1990s, contemporary Argentine films are more about "returning and returning".

"Homecoming" does not seem to be an easy task anywhere in the world, whether it is the 10-year homecoming odyssey of Odysseus in " Homer ", Jesus in The ridicule at home is still the ideal disillusionment in Hardy 's novel "Homecoming". Although the Chinese believe in "returning home in good clothes", they also sigh "don't return home if you have the right way".

But in Latin America, "returning home" seems to mean something suicidal. PeruNobel Prize winner Vargas Llosa once returned to Peru from Europe to run for the presidency, but failed after three years of continuous death threats; Colombian Nobel Prize winner Garcia Marr Recalling his return to his hometown of Alcataca, the prototype of Macondo , Cox said: "I will never go back alone again, especially in . After it was published, all those old colonels looked like they were going to pull out their guns and start a special personal civil war with me." In fact, since the publication of books such as "Withered Branches and Lost Leaves" and " One Hundred Years of Solitude ", Macondo has become "the perfect metaphor for Latin America", and has also become synonymous with violence, death and loneliness, and a world full of misanthropy and loneliness. A lonely labyrinth that adores death.

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The protagonist of "Outstanding Citizen", Daniel, carries a double image of Márquez and Llosa . He won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his writing centered on his hometown and has lived a rich life in Europe as a rich writer. Life. However, the beautiful corpse of flamingo in the pool is exactly the portrayal of his situation: the creative inspiration is dead, just like a beautiful corpse. So he returned to his hometown of Salas, an Argentine town that was the source of his inspiration and the heart of literature.

Of course, this town did not appear as Macondo at the beginning, but a peaceful and peaceful pastoral scene. Daniel, who has not returned for 40 years, felt the comfort of a tired bird returning to the forest. Next, there are earthy ceremonies full of evil charm, such as the parade with the beauty queen on the fire truck, the sheep's head banquet, gaucho (Argentine Pampas grassland cowboy) costumes, and brothel hunting. It’s only been a day” nostalgia. But a few details make us feel the stagnation of time. One is the photos of Peron and Evita on the wall of the town government, showing that the time of the town stayed at least half a century ago.

Another impressive plot is the painting award in the small town, which turned out to be a "life-and-death" competition among religions, administration and gangs, and Daniel's insistence on fairness offended all these three forces. This award forms an interesting contrast with the Nobel Prize at the beginning of the film.

In just three days in the town, Daniel has become a rat crossing the street. He was banished by the administrative forces, surrounded by "literary gangs", resented by enthusiastic neighbors, shot by small guns, and finally turned into a dark wasteland. The prey slaughtered by the incumbent. Here, the film suddenly turned from comedy and farce to tragedy. The people of the town can't leave, but he can't go back; he can only write it, but he can't change it, let alone save it; he is not a redeemer, just a survivor.

Interestingly, the bullet at the end is the weapon that killed his (bearded) old me and the "sperm" that impregnated the new book.

It is no coincidence that the writer did not return to his hometown for 40 years, and 40 years ago, in the mid-1970s, it was the time when Peron died, Argentina was torn apart, and a military coup was about to take place. Although Daniel was portrayed as a prophet and a saint, the truth is that he left and it was the people of the town who took it all. Like Macondo, the town of Salas, Daniel's hometown, is metaphorically referred to as a "portrait of the country" by the film director, which is also a mockery of the arrogant Argentines, because although a total of 6 Latin Americans have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Argentina has not. .

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If Daniel's return is to break through the artistic dilemma, Paulina's return in "Paulina's Choice" is for the moral dilemma; the former's motif is "kill the saint", the latter is "the Holy Spirit conceived" , both of which stem from the quest for self-redemption. In this "2022 Argentine Film Festival", the protagonists in several films achieved self-redemption by "returning to Macondo". So, how was Macondo in the Land of the Dead endowed with the function of "redemption"?

In the book "Argentine Myths", author Alejandro Grimson uses "mythology, liar" to reflect on the inferiority of Argentines: imagination replaces reality, passion trumps reason. In this sense, "Paulina's Choice" carries a strong sense of realism to go to the earth and discover the truth. Fate depends on personal choices, and the structure of the film is determined by four choices made by the protagonist Paulina. At the beginning of

, ​​she chose to give up her great career as a doctoral lawyer and went to her hometown to teach the course "Democracy Formation and Rights Dissemination"; the second time, when she was raped in the village, she chose to return to the village to continue teaching; the third time, when She dropped the prosecution when she knew who her rapist was; the fourth time, when she found out she was pregnant, she decided to keep the child.

A long shot of close-ups staring long at Paulina's pretty but powderless face, her teaching face, her raped face, her face in rebellion against her father. And her clearly white face contrasts with the mixed-race faces in the classroom, where she teaches in Misiones, a northern province of Argentina, where Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay meet, so the The face of the rapist has traces of Indians , black mixed race. Coupled with the poverty and barbarism of the region, Argentina in the film is completely different from the self-identity presupposition of the Argentine "European enclave" and the white country.

There is a passage in the film, which is a self-report of a Murato (mixed-race) girl Weiwei: She was raped by her uncle at the age of 14 and gave birth to a son. Rape is the "metanarrative" of Latin America. The great nautical discovery and the colonization process are a kind of invasion rape, which means that modern Latin America is the product of "rape". The rape of Paulina, a white woman, is in a way a repeat of history and revenge of the natives. And Paulina chose to leave the mixed-race child of the rapist in her belly, which means that she chose to "accept reality", accept the present, and accept the history of the Americas. But Paulina is not a contemporary "Virgin", she is not a Redeemer, but a "Receiver". She is not even the air elf "Ariel"-style American youth called by the Uruguayan thinker Jose Enrique Rodo, who abandons the physical and material and lives a spiritual life of "love and beauty". She believed in bodies and actions over laws and morals, and she rebelled against "violence and power" with love.

The last scene of the film is Paulina walking firmly on the country road, her calm face facing the camera and walking towards the audience until it fills the screen and can almost smell it. She keeps walking towards the camera, towards the audience, towards reality. Not only did she return to Macondo, but she stayed in Macondo.

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But Macondo is not just a place in the world, as Márquez put it, but also "the past", a fragment of time - a bad hour. The time and space of another film "Hortensia" in this Argentine Film Festival returns to a vague nostalgic past, telling the heroine Hortensia in a slightly fantastic way in the predicament of losing her father, unemployment and lovelorn. A story of blond boys and beautiful shoes with hope. In this Argentine tale, the leaky old Siamese refrigerator and the rancid taxidermy are the father's relics, serving a similar "elephant in the room" function, and their removal at the end of the credits symbolizes a farewell to the heavy legacy of patriarchy .

Another movie "Mom? Mother! Mom (2020) tells a fairy-tale story from a child's perspective. The blurring of time and space, the simplicity of the plot, the idyllic retro images of and the faces of white girls that fill the screen make the film omit the expression of Argentine nationality. , and turned to a magnifying glass-style screen writing of daily life. Here, the disappearance and death of children are just accidents and legends, and the menarche of young girls and children's games have become important rituals in daily life.

is different from previous Argentine films that "begin with passion, end with sadness, and end with sadness in between" narratives of suffering, "Hortensia" and "Mom? Mother! The tone of films such as "Mom" is light, not only to remove history, to remove suffering, to remove national expression, but also to "add ice, sugar and milk", using high-saturated candy tones, fairy tale-like minimalist stories, telling the story. Personal, micro, inner emotional waves. However, to foreign audiences, this type of film is like entering a vacuum, with a slightly out of order plot, out of focus on the theme, and weightlessness in the narrative.

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Nothing is more representative of Argentinian love relationships than the tango : the catwalk, the deep sorrow, the passion. Tango is a war or struggle in which men and women voluntarily put their lives into it. But the traditional tango also reflects Argentina's machismo, the dance steps are completely dominated by men, and women just follow and cooperate step by step. But several emotional films in this Argentine Film Festival let us see the subversion of this relationship.

"Last Tango", "Hortensia" and "Whale Song" are all "one person's tango", which are women's embrace and awakening of loneliness in solo dance. "Last Tango" can be regarded as a model in the new century musical. The alternation of documentary and imagination, the combination of material and scene recurrence, plus the game and struggle between men and women, love and dance, make tango more than just emotion Art and stage art have also become screen art that is constantly being recreated. In the film

, ​​when the man finally leaves, the heroine Maria begins to dance with a man in black. The man in black completely integrates himself into the darkness of the background. Dancing alone is like dancing with darkness. She became a "dancer in the dark," dancing with darkness, with loneliness, with death.

At this point, the nature of tango has changed. In traditional tango, the male dancer decides when, where and how fast the dance poses. But in this passage, the man becomes a shadow that follows and goes along with the woman, and the woman becomes the leader. It can be said that the eternal passion for love is the spiritual "Macondo" of the Argentines. At the end of the film, when Maria walks alone through the streets of Buenos Aires , she is red-haired and weather-beaten, like a survivor of a battle of love, one who stepped out of "Macondo" and stood alone in Queen of the wilderness of her own life.

Of course, more and more people believe that Macondo is not just a "perfect metaphor for Latin America", Vargas Llosa believes that "the history of Macondo condenses the history of mankind", while the American scholar Bell-Vee Yada even considers it "a metaphor for the history of the rise and fall of all human civilizations". In this sense, to return to Macondo means to return to what Márquez called "the seed", or to what Plato called the "cave", rewrite genes, retell myths, and reinvent yourself.

Paulina returns to her hometown, she gets a raped child and a full experience of the land.

Daniel returns to his hometown with a bullet, a new book, and a miracle of rebirth.