By Jonathan rosenbaum
Translator: Chen Sihang
Proofreader: issac
Source: jonathanrosenbaum.net
In a North American context, Lau Lutz's films can be counted as pure outliers.
Rao Luz
This allowed him to adapt to the taxonomic investments of European state-run television stations in order to allow different kinds of works to coexist. Deviant directors from the United States or Canada who want to make marginalized films must wear coats of arms and coats of arms of certain schools or genres —art films, avant-garde films, punk films, feminist films, documentaries, or academic thesis films—so that they can get funding from investors in one terminal and then promote and distribute their films to another.
On the other hand, Lutz only needs to accept the institutional framework of state-run television – which, as he puts it, provides room to fill in the blanks – so that he automatically acquires an investor and a group of viewers, and he does not have to rely on other alliances or camps, but only needs to submit to the open framework of "culture" or "education".
Thus, Lutz's voluminous, varied, and very different works constitute a "heresy" that is a real insult to capitalism's definition of "experimental works" that govern our culture.
We classify those marginalized works in a slum-like manner. If Lutz's work is to be forcibly used to fill the void created by these classifications, then in most cases we will find that Lutz's work appears "too much" or "too little", precisely because it is impossible to archive it – even if his work itself can be said to be building a new European slum.
Dialogue with dogs (1977)
Despite the differences between Lutz's different works, both his films and videos seem to combine the characteristics of a "lab" and a "game room", which often redefine what we mean by "serious" and "non-serious".
Lutz, while rigorously constructing materials and playing like a child, reminds us of the exemplary films of Godard and Warhol through his vast number of works, as well as the combination of professionalism and craftsmanship.
For Godard, "anything can be put into a movie"; for Warhol, "anyone can be an actor"; and Lutz uses his parallel structure of parody seriousness to constantly subvert his chosen material from within.
In this case, any words and actions can be expressed without hindrance.
If we want to understand how he did it, we have to go back in time to where he came from. Born in Puerto Montt in 1941, Rao Luz studied theology and law (perhaps the two most restrictive professions).
Sponsored by a charity, he made his first serious attempt at artistic creation—a Rockefeller grant that allowed him to write more than a hundred plays between 1956 and 1962. After writing a number of film scripts that could not be submitted, he studied for a year at the Film Academy in the Province of Santa Fe, Argentina.
Eventually, he dropped out of school in 1967 for opposing the dogma that everyone in Latin America has a responsibility to make documentaries. In Buenos Aires, he began working on an ambitious feature film inspired by Daphne Dumurier's novels, but Lutz never finished it. (It's gone missing, like many of Luz's Chilean works, which were lost for a variety of reasons.) The only surviving version of the film is currently missing. ）
The Three Cruel Tigers (1986)
Lutz then wrote and directed Three Miserable Tigers (1986), an adaptation of a play by Alejandro Sivigin that won the locarno film festival's top prize in 1969. This was followed by a failed Chilean-American co-production, and a 16mm film adaptation of Kafka's novel, Penal Colony (1970).
Penal Colony (1970)
After this, he filmed his first television film, The Wordless Man (1971), a very free-form adaptation of the work of Max Birbom, shot for the Italian R.A.i. television station. He managed to complete the work within budget, which allowed him to shoot the next two feature films: the one-hour-long Exploitation (1973) and the four-hour-long Socialist Realists (1973).
During these two years, Lutz produced three short films for Chilean television, one adapted from the best-selling feature film ("White Dove," "It's a Love Story... Probably a million people read it, which is 10 percent of Chile's population") — the film was later cut and banned from export — and a one-hour documentary about the heroine of White Dove, with a short film remade. This was followed by a military coup in September 1973 and The exile of Luz: he moved to Paris in February 1974.
Since then, thanks to the national television councils of France, Germany, the Netherlands and Portugal, he has gradually become a writer-director, almost uninterrupted – his work has caused a series of reactions, especially in the 1980s.
His first famous European film, The Assumption of Stolen Oil Paintings (1979), built a reputation for comparing him to Borges. The film sets up an interesting metaphysical system that becomes the basis of his fantasies.
The Hypothesis of Stolen Oil Paintings (1979)
It also expresses a subtle, campane irony, a texture derived from an academic education, a fantasy English narrator (from Coleridge to Carroll to Stevenson to Chesterton) and an impenetrable labyrinth of narratives. This literary character of Lutz's work seems to have brought him into the realm of European art cinema.
But his work also provides a camp-like mockery of this so-called "art film," which satirizes the seriousness, coherence, and technicality of the film—which makes it difficult to define his film in terms of this genre. (Many critics considered these films somewhat similar to orson Wells's low-budget films, notably Mr. Akadin[1955] and Immortal Story[1968], because they all had unconventional camera angles, flashbacks, and other forms of "fabricated" narrative, and they were "irresponsible" to the producers.) ）
Mr. Akadin (1955)
All of Lutz's films are more or less "closet comedies", which tend to weaken any form of seriousness, as they may become some sort of solidified discourse, some predictable elements that include the mechanisms that generate illusions, ideologies, social commentary, and/or complacency in general. But apart from a few specific short films, no film is entirely in the form of comedy, so like "art films", we can't label the "comedy" genre on these works.
This indistinguishable form can be seen as one of the strategies of political exile so that his films can escape some kind of absolute fate. After all, being classified is the first step to labeling bad. From this point of view, Lutz's frivolous whimsy can be compared to Nabokov's satire, and they always control many of the meanings in their work.
Theoretically, everything can be seen as some kind of refutation or criticism, so that we can easily see a Lutz documentary (e.g., The Great Event and the Ordinary People[1978]) as a dismantling of the documentary as a form.
Great Events and Ordinary People (1978)
A fictional film about the Third World becomes a satire of stereotypes, for example, in Above the Whale (1982), the Netherlands speaks on behalf of Patagonia, in which six languages are spoken (one of which is even fictional!). ), used to present a sense of conflict in a cultural system.
Lutz also made a documentary for french television (French History Textbook[1979]), which gave a very straightforward overview of French history—even in films like these, there are Lutzian, almost crazy moments. He did not limit the historical, highly representative clichés, but pushed them to the extreme.
And in the elaborate children's adventure stories (e.g., Pirate City[1983]), we can see the poetry of violence, and driven by unbridled surrealist creativity, we witness this amazing explosion of poetry (like the formula that appears in Godard's Made in America [1966], these films are "Walt Disney Plus Blood", which can no longer be counted as "children's films").
Pirate City (1983)
They may be time bombs about to detonate, or traditional clocks that refuse to declare time, but either way, Lutz's films are an indescribable thing, and they exist to destroy the functional environmental elements that even the institutions that invest in them themselves.