A camera pans the inside of a theatre where no audience is present. A lyric singer (Peruvian Valeriano Lanchas), accompanied by a pianist, produces music that is either inaudible or distorted and incomplete. Coffins. Political slogans in the middle of a funeral. The flags and names of left-wing armed groups, one of them still active in Colombia today. Fragments of strange poems drift in and out. A return to the empty theatre.
EL LEÓN is a laboratory for experimentation, a construction zone for the assembly of memory.
What is this diverse footage doing together? What short circuit or sparks of meaning does it bring us? EL LEÓN is a laboratory for experimentation, a construction zone for the assembly of memory. The image, in the words of Harun Farocki, is a force field in which the visible pushes toward the invisible. A necessary double operation: critical assembly and disassembly.
Resting in the coffins we see, recorded by a cameraperson (EL LEÓN is also a piece of found footage), the bodies of Alberto Alava, Eduardo Umaña and Jesús Antonio Bejarano, university professors and progressive thinkers, murdered in the 1980s and 1990s. All three had ties to Colombia’s Universidad Nacional and represent the ethos of a university allied to the mission of seeking a more just country, and the defence of peace and human rights. An active thought that dreamed of creating a new country based on the transformative power of ideas.
A legion of spectres roams EL LEÓN: speaking perhaps of our dead and our struggles, which will not rest until justice prevails.
The poems, fragments of which can be heard in EL LEÓN, were written by León de Greiff. His poetry, forged in Colombia during the first half of the 20th century, distances itself from any realistic, costumbrist and denunciatory aspirations to create new worlds, and exists only in the language he invented. The Universidad Nacional’s main auditorium bears his name, in tribute to this great Colombian poet. It was founded in 1973, and reopened in 2023 after lengthy restoration. The place, intended for art, has been permeated time and again by pain and urgency.
The footage is displaced from its origins, not to be neutralized, but so that, united in another series, they produce a revolt in meaning and feeling.
EL LEÓN, by assembling these diverse, strange and estranged materials, also creates a new world, a sensitive and intellectual space from which to approach other ways of feeling and understanding history, not only through the rationality of discourses, with their explanations – always necessary – and certainties. It reworks archival footage and images produced by the war, which are not subordinated to any historical or judicial truth. These materials are displaced and reworked poetically and symbolically, taking a shortcut that leads, in any case, to a truth. A truth perhaps less disputed because it appeals to common ground: that of emotions and shared pain.
(…)
A legion of spectres roams EL LEÓN: speaking perhaps of our dead and our struggles, which will not rest until justice prevails. “Not a minute of silence, a lifetime of struggle!” we hear in the speeches. And we see the angry crowd upholding this collective demand. There are many roots to the evocative power of this artwork. The footage is displaced from its origins (documentary or news footage, radio archives of a poet’s voice), not to be neutralized, but so that, united in another series, they produce a revolt in meaning and feeling.
The critical and interpretative deconstruction in EL LEÓN is possible and even necessary. And yet, its strangeness remains. Borrowing the words of León de Greiff’s “Ínsula”, one of the poems that are part of the film’s sonic magma, it (EL LEÓN) is a: “Grave, elusive symbol. / Grave, elusive symbol, nocturnal / grim idea spinning in the chaos.”
Pedro Adrián Zuluaga
