The Endless Film

 The Buenos Dias Film Archive houses fragments of movies that were begun but never completed.  This footage exists in raw form, often showing the clapboard initiating the shot, or marred with ink or other markings.  Leandro Listorti, an Argentine film-maker, has cut some of this footage together to comprise a 57 minutes feature, The Endless Film (2018) -- the Spanish title uses the word "infinite" for "endless."  The film is experimental, of course, and has no narrative -- indeed, Listorti has adopted a Dadaist approach to this footage and seems to have cut it together in a haphazard and intentionally inexpressive montage.  The film shows people in a car talking to one another (B & W without sound), a man who looks like a criminal pursued by another shaggy-looking guy -- hairdos in the B & W footage date the images to the early and mid-seventies.  A girl talks on the phone, a bald guy in a decaying, ornate building with a cast-iron spiral stairs attempts to replicate the famous Da Vinci image of man as the measure of all things -- there's lots of showy chiaroscuro (apparently, this film had a reasonable budget); there are some animated monster; in a showy scene a pretty girl (she was talking on the phone in any earlier technicolor sequence) shoots through an aquarium and hits a bad guy -- she seems to be a spy of some sort.  There's a deserted beach with some pergolas and abandoned chairs; at the end of the movie and man and woman enter from the foreground and walk away from the camera -- the woman sits in chair a long way from the camera; the man inexplicably continues his trudge through the sand.  We see a little elegant-looking pornography, machine diagrams, and, for a pointless political frisson, a fragment of a B & W doc with sound extolling the importance of "authority" -- apparently, an artifact of the military junta that once controlled the country.  A couple of period pictures are cut into the montage.  There's an interesting shot of a river flowing down through brush and over some rocks with women doing laundry in the creek downstream.  (I immediately recognized this as a scene from Zama, although I don't know what gave me this idea -- and, reviewing the closing credits, I found that someone tried to make a version of Zama, known now through Lucrecia Martel's impressive but unsuccessful version, back in 1984.  There's some cheesier footage -- a clip from something that looks like a spaghetti Western shows a man sweating in front of a hearth while some desperados aim a shot gun at him.  The most interesting aspect of the film is the credit list of incomplete pictures cannibalized to make the movie -- among those films, I noticed an early picture by Lucrecia Martel, something called Eternauta  shot in 2009.  This picture seems to be the source of the color footage with the pretty girl and the gun.  (I think the final shot on the beach is also from this incomplete movie.)  The internet tells me that Eternauta is a science fiction comic book by Hector German Oesterheld and Francisco Solano Lopez published in 1957 or thereabouts and repeatedly the subject of efforts to adapt to the screen (projecto maldita ) -- apparently, the story will appear on Netflix soon.  I can't tell you any more about this peculiar projecto maldita because I don't read Spanish.

The movie is pointless.  Listorti is doggedly humorless and avant-garde -- in comparison to a film of this sort made with genius, Guy Madden's The Green Fog, this picture is dull, irritating, and a slog.  Listorti makes no effort to redeem the material, doesn't edit it together into any semblance of a narrative, and doesn't show any trace of humor in dealing with these fragments of damaged film maudit. And the footage compiled doesn't have much intrinsic interest -- the camera is usually too far from the subject matter to be expressive or the compositions are wrong or the lighting is either too bright or too dim.