El Gran Movimiento Review: An Exhilarating and Revelatory City Symphony

Writer-director Kiro Rosso’s sociological film suggests a mosaic resolving out of innumerable shards.

El Gran Movimiento
Photo: KimStim

Kiro Rosso’s El Gran Movimiento opens with a panoramic view of the brick buildings that crowd La Paz, Bolivia, into the monotone jumble of which a slow zoom seems ready to deposit us. This zoom is emblematic of a film that aims not merely to encompass the distant and the close at hand, the large and small scale, the social structure and individual person, artificial and natural, but to reconcile them in the process. For the next six minutes, Rosso puts off narrative development in favor of a cinematic core-sampling of Bolivia’s high-altitude capital. If the opening sequence sets us up for the experimental style of what’s to come, it also deserves to be viewed almost as a short film in its own right.

Following that slow zoom, Rosso’s film cuts to a slow pan to the right across a hedge of skyscrapers collapsed into a single plane, then cuts again to a slow pan in the opposite direction across more buildings, closer this time. All the while, the rumble and honk of traffic, the distant rattle of jackhammers, children screaming at play or in distress, anonymous motors, buzzers, and claxons, mingle on the soundtrack—not instead of music but as music, like a test of futurist composer Luigi Russolo’s manifesto The Art of Noises. When music does start to creep in, it’s an ambient drone broken by horns like car alarms.

Then a shot divided into planes of rock, brick, and sky, like a Max Ernst frottage, of the cable cars trundling high over the city. A shot of pylons sprouting Gordian tangles of wire that bristle with moss. Skyscraper windows distort, like funhouse mirrors, the cars and people they reflect. The slow zoom on a wall of posters torn away to reveal deeper layers, a chaos of signs weathered to abstraction, visually rhymes with the opening zoom and the flattened perspectives of the subsequent shots, prompting us to think of the city as a palimpsest.

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With its conspicuous montage, distortion of perspective by means of various lenses, and depiction of the city as a character in itself, El Gran Movimiento wears its influences—Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera and Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi—very much on its sleeve. That said, its concession to, at times, a narrower scope builds upon these influences. After all, there’s a story here, rudimentary as it is: A miner named Elder (Max Bautista Uchasara) has traveled to La Paz with two friends in order to join the titular movement protesting mass unemployment. It may be all the coal dust he’s inhaled over the years, or a more spiritual malaise, but Elder soon falls prey to a debilitating lung condition.

Subsequently, a local crone, Mama Pancha (Francisa Arce de Aro), takes in Elder, addressing him as her godson and finding work for him and his companions at one of the city’s markets, but his condition rapidly deteriorates until it’s impossible for him to carry crates and melons, his labored breathing given a visual dimension by overexposure and loss of focus. Mama Pancha places him in the care of Max (Julio César Ticona), a medicine man who, in dreams or self-induced hallucinations, takes the form of white dog to sniff out a cure.

Meanwhile, a rhythm of zooms out to the impersonal level and back in to the personal (visually as well as narratively) restores the city to an extension of landscape as opposed to a rupture from it, reframing La Paz as a bed of minerals. This approach lends El Gran Movimiento a sociological, pseudo-documentary aspect, culminating in a frenetic montage that’s worthy of Sergei Eisenstein: In pitch blackness, a huddle of bouncing lights approaches the camera—revealed to be miners clattering along a horizontal shaft in their helmets equipped with headlamps. Lumps of coal trundle along a conveyor belt and flywheels spin, the film cutting back and forth between them at an increasing tempo to match the beat of the music, as the coal crumbles into smaller and smaller fragments.

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Cut to worms of meat squirming from a sausage grinder. Produce laid out in the market. Paper money changing hands. Surging crowds raising dust under parasols like lily pads. The tempo of the editing increases again until the split-second images blur into simultaneity—a mosaic resolving out of innumerable shards, as exhilarating and revelatory as it is disturbing.

Score: 
 Cast: Max Bautista Uchasara, Julio César Ticona, Francisa Arce de Aro  Director: Kiro Russo  Screenwriter: Kiro Russo  Distributor: KimStim  Running Time: 85 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2021  Buy: Video

William Repass

William Repass’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, Fiction International, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. For links to his published writing, click here.

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