Updating Ethnographic Film in the XXI Century. The contribution of Damiana Kryygi (Alejandro Fernández Mouján, 2015)

CAMPO, JAVIER

Aliso VIejo

Exposición; Damiana's Exhibition at SOKA; 2015

The history of documentary cinema includes numerous films that chronicle an ethnographic search. As directors took to filming the risky paths of various ethnographic journeys, the unexpected and the surprising began to happen when the little red light of the camera was on. North American Direct Cinema film-makers pioneered these type of recordings, due to a large extent to the technical advances available to them from the 1960s on. In order to undertake this type of project, it is essential to be able to leave the studio equipped with a lightweight camera with syncronic sound feed. Otherwise, with heavy equipment and a tripod, the follow-up of an artistic project will only be partial and partially ?fictionalized? in the process of filming a documentary.In Argentine documentary cinema, this type of work is rare. Directors were more interested in documenting a wide range of political circumstances, and not necessarily microprocesses of cultural definition. A precursor was Jorge Prelorán (Hermógenes Cayo/Imaginero, 1969 (nineteen sixty nine); Medardo Pantoja, 1969; and Héctor di Mauro, titiritero/Héctor di Mauro, Puppeteer, 1980, nineteen eighty).In recent years, as this type of work has become more common, film-makers have recorded cultural processes. Alejandro Fernández Mouján does this in Espejo para cuando me pruebe el smoking (Mirror for a Smoking Jacket), a film that emerged from a political rather than an artistic desire. The director was interested in talking about the events surrounding the financial crisis of 2001 but without actually talking about them. That is to say, he wanted to talk about politics through art. He associated himself with Longhini, an artist who, using objects found on the streets at the end of 2011,decided to make artworks that invited reflection about what Argentina is and what it has become. He is also a very experienced cameraman, considered one of the best documentary cameramen in Argentina.He worked on the most important social documentaries of recent Argentine history, such as Cazadores de utopías/Hunters of Utopia (David Blaustein, 1996) and Memoria del saqueo/Social Genocide (Fernando Solanas, 2004), among others. In his films, the image is always flawless if he is responsible for it. In addition to cameraman, he is also always the cinematographer, and even when he directs, he does so with a camera on his shoulder in case the creative processes lead to unexpected events.With Damiana Kryygi returns to northern Argentina, where he had already made the free ethnographic films Caminos del Chaco (Chaco?s roads, 1998, nineteen ninety eight) and Las Palmas, Chaco (2002, two thousand two).The film Damiana Kryygi goes back to 1896 (eighteen ninety six). In the dense Paraguayan jungle, a three-year-old girl of the Aché people survives the massacre of her family by white settlers. She is baptized Damiana by her captors. For Anthropologists from Argentina?s La Plata Natural History Museum, she becomes an object of scientific interest in their racial studies. One hundred years later, a young Argentine anthropologist identifies part of her remains, found in storage at the museum in La Plata. Her head is found a short time later at the Hospital Charité in Berlin.