….

Beginning a film with a diffuse sound and iconic silence, before the topical noise of the train on a roll of film without an image, in 9.5 mm (because the perforation is unique and central), and ending with a fragment of an interview with Arundhati Roy,* an Indian activist author, in three sentences presented in three parts for a complete reading, distinguishes this film from simple footage of game sequences. And leads us to the position of the artist in so-called peacetime.
“The problem is that once you become aware of its existence, you can no longer ignore it. Staying silent and saying nothing then becomes a political act, just like protesting. You are no longer innocent. Whatever your choice, you are responsible.”

Antonio Arango takes the role assigned to the artist, henceforth to the director, seriously, but he does not abandon his artistic necessity. Raising alarm about the war by borrowing aircraft shots is not accompanied by a historical discourse, nor by figures, nor even by comparisons with our time, despite the allusive comparison of a tank/attack/tank from the Great War with current elements. The plasticity of the film remains pervasive, and the flashes and the double white strokes on a black background contrast abstraction with images of play, small cars held or controlled remotely and projected against a wall, airplanes and other toys like the upside-down monkey, or an object pointed in all directions, or another upside down. Or this fragment from Pathé, with a comedian hitting himself on the head and falling…
However, if it’s not a lesson on war and its devices, such a use of space, such a repetition of the motif of the accident parallel to those of the damaged film, widening perforations, shifting dust, and the text provokes reflection: the obsessive model of victory also passes through play; play is not a gratuitous act, it also shapes thought. And it is the child who delights in organizing the battles of his toy soldiers.

Conceptualizing it is already a political act without departing from the act of artistic creation. Note:
The quoted paragraph begins as follows:
“In times of war, for example, you may suddenly find yourself fascinated by the mating rituals of a purple sunbird—a type of hummingbird. You may also be interested in the secret life of goldfish in bowls or the slow mental degeneration of your elderly aunt, and no one can tell you that these things are devoid of art, beauty, and truth. Or, on the contrary, in times of so-called peace, you may, like me, have the misfortune to find yourself confronted by a silent war.”

His only novel: The God of Small Things.
Three political essays followed: The End of Imagination, about India’s nuclear tests; The Greater Common Good, against the policy of large dams; and The Reincarnation of Rumpelstiltskin, about the privatization of essential infrastructure such as water and sanitation. Electricity.

Simone Dompeyre
Curator