Los Huercos is a short film directed by Christobal Leon and Joaquin Cocina. The picture seems to be a co-production between the streaming service MUBI and an art museum in Santiago, Chile. The little movie is a gem, very disconcerting and macabre. The film has several layers of meaning: on the surface, the picture is a whimsically gruesome stop-action animation involving a scary-looking doll-like necromancer and the corpses with which she traffics. However, the film also embodies a complex political allegory.
The movie is shot in sepia-tone, rather grimy-looking black and white. (It has a suitably strange soundtrack, a plaintive violin sounding over an array of sinister clicks and high-voltage hums.) A title claims that this is the world's first animated film, discovered in 2005 in the Santiago museum archives and, then, restored by Leon and Cocina. The film is said to date to 1900. (This is all fraudulent). The picture reminds me of a Quay Brothers production, although rather more clear and approachable; the picture also has affinities with Jan Svankmayer's surrealist films made in Czechoslavakia. The film-makers note that their inspiration is a Lithuanian entomologist, Ladislaw Starovich, who worked at a museum where he planned to make films showing living insects. The hot lights killed the insects and, so, supposedly Starovich animated the bugs by using tiny wires and shot them in motion using stop-action. (Whether this is true or just another hoax perpetrated by the directs in unclear to me.)
The film begins with an image of a cameo of pale woman with a rather ghostly appearance. We are informed that this is Constanza Nordenflicht, a necromancer who dug up the bones of two men named Jaime Guzman and Diego Portales. She is said to have resurrected these dead men and played with the cadavers. The movie shows a wall with rotting wallpaper that peels away into a heap of shavings at the foot of a wall that is pierced through the boards to reveal a tiny curtained stage. Constanza is behind the curtain -- she's a doll-like figure, manipulated like a marionette by strings attached to her limbs. Constanza makes some occult gestures and summons up a heap of dirt from which disconnected bones crawl -- they writhe like earthworms. The dirt is animate and moves around lifting objects up onto a dais. Constanza makes gestures that cause the bones to wiggle and dance. She cumulates the bones to try to make skeletons but the remains can't be properly reassembled. Then, she puts the two skulls and the rest of the bones in a wicker basket and walks through a landscape of spidery wilted trees to schematic church (a chair disassembles to form a steeple, cross, and a doorway to the chapel). In the chapel, Constanza crosses herself, lights a fire, and sets the bones on fire. This action puts meat on the bones: we see severed limbs, torsos that appear to have been dissected and split apart, and the decapitated heads of a man wearing glasses and a younger handsome fellow. Both of these heads are very distinctly dead, inert, seemingly partly decomposed, with lesions on them, and dull, vacant eyes. Constanza, then, uses her magic to try to reassemble the bodies -- mostly she gets this all wrong, creating monstrous assemblies of hacked-up meat. Finally, she gets the corpses in some semblance of human form and, then, conjures clothing for them. We watch the action now through an iris cut-out in the shape of a heart. Constanza caresses the young man with the lesion on his cheek. She seems to be joined to him in a service presided over by the other corpse with glasses. (He has a cross sprouting incongruously out of his occiput.) Constanza may be married to the young man's cadaver. She has a marriage license which is ripped in two. Then, she writes her name in reverse, causing the letters to vanish with the penstrokes. The young man, Diego Portales also "unwrites" his signature. The marriage licenses is burned and, after waving goodbye, Constanza simply vanishes in a poof of smoke. The two inanimate corpses remain. They become covered with something white, possibly dust as time passes. The film ends with a title about a "white marriage of a white groom to a white bride by a white priest who entrusted them to the white." This seems to be a surrealist poem printed on the screen in archaic font. On the face of things, the film seems to be about a woman who conjures up corpses, plays with them, and, even, marries one before vanishing -- the film could be interpreted as an essay on the nature of moving pictures which contrive the illusion of motion from individual still frames, all severed from one another. Films are like Frankenstein's monster, inanimate matter stuck together in a montage that makes the corpse seem to move.
But there's a political allegory at work here. Diego Portales was the architect of Chile's first constitution, an oligarch who limited the franchise to wealthy property-holding men in the late 1830's. He was assassinated and became a national martyr and a hero to the Right. Augusto Pinochet said that Portales patriotic spirit had fused Chile into a modern nation. Jaime Guzman was a Catholic constitutional lawyer, a close advisor to Pinochet, who was assassinated outside of the Catholic University in Santiago in 1991. This explains why Guzman sometimes grows a cross out of his head and why he seems to preside over the wedding between Constanza and Portales. (Portales' wife and children died and, although he didn't marry again, his mistress was Constanza Nordenflicht -- presumable the cameo in the movie is actually an image of her.) The woman seems to be an apparition signifying Chile, a country in which right-wing forces are continuously resurrected to oppress the people. (The movie was conceived in 2019 during the struggle to adopt a new Constitution in Chile, a political enterprise that resulted in much right-wing violence -- this is called the Estallido Social. These protests, originally initiated when the cost of subway fare increased in Santiago, become violent: churches were fire-bombed and there were massive demonstrations attacked by the police. These demonstrations were in support of Chile's new constitution.. Interestingly, Portales' bones, thought to be lost, were found during renovations of the Santiago Metropolitan Cathedral and forensically identified in 2005. (Ladislaw Starowicz was a real filmmaker and, apparently, a pioneer in surrealist stop-action movies; Terry Gilliam thinks his Mascot is one of the ten greatest animated films. I will have to learn more about him.)
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