March 8th, 2024 – 6 pm

Bruno Varela presents “Neón Cortex” (a transsubstantiated film) (2023) at the 21st Morelia International Film Festival (Mexico), to be held from October 20 to 29. The film is part of the Mexican short films selection, where it will compete with works by Dennis Noel López Sosa (Ajá), Armando Navarro (Arkhé), Luna Marán (Bucan Tu Rhachhidu’) and Natalia García Clark (Estatuas), among others.

Varela’s short film is a reformulation of itself, as it had already been created in 2019, and is characterized by the reuse of some images that we recently saw in “El prototipo” (2022), a film about which we wrote in “Los Experimentos” a few months ago and which also motivated an interview. Through an electronic correspondence, the creator himself stated that he would not exhibit both works together due to the evident significant contamination between them.

However, this does not mean that in this new montage or linkage, the images that give shape to another visual exercise should not be read according to the coordinates proposed by prototypal science fiction, developed in the feature film winner of the Silver Puma for Best Film in the Ahora México competition during the last edition of the FICUNAM festival. It is not about replicating the way in which we make sense of Varela’s adaptation of P. K. Dick’s work, but of recognizing the communicating vessels and the particularities of his very singular fictional scheme.

Since its first form, called Corteza neón (2019), the work manifests the artist’s concern for the exploration of the physical properties of the film medium. Expired emulsions and films damaged or subjected to processes of decay by the passage of time constitute a speculative fiction of material order, in which the gazes of the filmmaker and the viewer come together to form a potential film through the collapse of the emulsion in its development and scanning.

“Neón Cortex” (2023), the new version of that work, digs itself up to its embed structures and wills in a new form-time. Its essence remains unaltered: “vegetable narration, dream of seeds”, producer of trance. Hence, its potential quality unfolds in two senses. On the one hand, as a rearticulation of experience from the creation of conditions for the reconstruction of audiovisual practices outside the hegemonic margins of meaning (hence Miguel Errazu once related it to the concept of “potential history”, coined by the Israeli theorist Ariella A. Azoulay). On the other hand, as a random deviation of textual meaning towards the vibratory affect, produced by the state of trance or hypnosis that emerges from the synchronization between its soundtrack and the rhythm of its montage.

Its images show the vestiges of past time, an ancestral time that becomes anachronistic in each of the multiple manifestations of the will of the film as a living entity. In them inhabit natural, organic elements, we believe they are plants whose structures are disrupted by the lens of a camera whose movements blur and reconfigure them. The textures of nature become part of the grainy and imperfect materiality of the photosensitive surface. Here and there you can see a mark, a wound, some misalignment of the image at the time of its digitization that will take the form of a line on the material or, even, will manifest the wear and tear of the filmic. Over there, a fragment of sprocket that forces us to become aware that what we see is nothing more than an indexical sign, trace of a time and an object that are presented in their absence.

Over the images of seeds, some subtitles are inscribed. They narrate a futuristic story about a group sent as vanguard to an Oaxacan laboratory, a momoxtle located in the desert. As a contextual note, we add that a “momoxtle” is a pre-Hispanic altar, located at a crossroads, where worship was paid to the gods and the dead. What interests us here is the relationship between the photosensitive processes of cinema and the filmmaker’s ideas about the possibility of the machine-generated self-generation of an “artificial and programmed” world.

Allusions to electromagnetic fields are already an authorial hallmark, as is the constant resignification of images through their multiple linkages in various imaginary circuits that produce varied sensory effects. If we could propose a sequential scheme without making a découpage, we would obtain a first summation of elements: close-up shot of seed floating in a crystalline liquid + low-angle shot of plant with blue background + unformed image that moves incessantly + airplane turbine. Thus, as if it were an equation, Varela constantly reconfigures his significant chains. Later, the images are repeated, although their positions on the time line vary, allowing the accumulation of other images with similar framing and movement characteristics.

According to the story narrated by the textual additions, the subjects that arrived at the momoxtle became plants and these, in turn, became magnified images (images of flowers appear on the screen). The latter show their details without any embarrassment whatsoever. The camera lens replicates the point of view of an insect. In addition, the frenetic pace of the images (both in themselves and in the montage) amplifies the trance-like effect in Neon Cortex. It is as if we become participants in the mythification of the interval, the film tears us away from the spatio-temporal coordinates that give meaning to the world according to the Western worldview that rejects other knowledge forms, not based on modern science.

In Neon Cortex, Bruno Varela, as he has been doing in his most recent works, turns cinema, a modern machine par excellence, into a political device, capable of rearticulating the sense of the world from sensorial and hypnotic perspectives that do not respond to the scientization of knowledge and experience. In this trance (where space and time are rearticulated), the teachings of Maya Deren’s Anagram and its rituals of transfiguration of time resonate, in which myths merge with aesthetic and ethical explorations that are deindividuated.

The oversight on the part of the festival (intentional or not) in placing this and other experimental works, not necessarily non-fictional, in the stultified and almost rotten category of “documentary” is striking. It is foolish to ignore all thediscussions about the variations of the image that does not adhere to commercial practices, which since the mid-1950s were recognized in festivals and contests such as the SODRE Documentary Experimental Film Festival, held in Uruguay from 1954 to 1971, and the First Experimental Film Contest in Mexico, organized by the Union of Film Production Workers in 1965, to cite just two examples. And, not to mention the complete lack of interest in the exercise of an informed criterion that reviews the theoretical approaches in this regard. This, of course, does not contradict the commitment to the generation of spaces for the exhibition of this type of creative proposals that escape from a rigid categorization.

Text by Mariana Martinez Bonilla