Kiro Russo - Marxist cinema from Bolivia
In this episode of HOBO, Bolivian director Kiro Russo discusses with us his psychedelic Super 16mm “symphony of a city”.
La Paz is the least western capital of the Americas. Located at more than 3600 metres above sea level, the city spreads like a sea of bricks, stones and concrete in the canyons that precede the “altiplano”. El Gran Movimiento, which won the special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival - Horizons strand - in 2021, recreates a symphony of the city in the heights with a tale of nightmare and redemption of the working class.
In this episode of HOBO, Bolivian director Kiro Russo discusses with us his psychedelic Super 16mm “symphony of a city” which tries to explore the crushing demand for labour in Bolivia in new and surreal ways.
El Gran Movimiento is a visual symphony that immediately evokes, like ghosts, the images of the great urban symphonies of Vertov, Ruttmann or Vigo. But if those films told (each in its own way) one of the founding myths of XX century, the city as a symbol of a nascent modernity and technological rationality, Kiro Russo’s work immediately appears posthumous, decadent.
A film in which the noise of the trucks, the cacophonous chatter of the people at the market, suddenly become music. Gradually, as the film proceeds down its trajectory of bodily decay, the ruptures in the carefully drawn aesthetic become ever more frequent and unexpected, culminating in a furiously and rhythmically edited sequence that appears to mix footage from different sources, along with a flurry of faces and streets.
Indigenous people in Bolivia dance to 80s synth music against the melancholy gloom of the streets. The juxtaposition of a shaman in a green wilderness, followed by insalubrious discotheques playing loud synth offer a peculiar and sometimes unsettling mix of temporalities which Kiro Russo sees as a defining feature of contemporary Bolivia, where local regionalisms converge with a globalised world of technology.
The third episode of HOBO is out now.