Session 2

El eco
Ana Poliak
Argentina, 1984, 3 min, colour, Spanish

La fe del volcán
Ana Poliak
Argentina, 2000, 85 min, colour, Spanish

“This door opened up for your past, this piano trembled with your song. This table, this mirror and these paintings hold the echoes of the echo of your voice”, wrote our Homer, Homero Manzi. El eco stylises something that nobody could think of as beautiful: the space beneath a new motorway, a place in the shadow that didn't exist before, a place where there probably used to be houses and a track. La fe del volcán makes two friends in another place they aren't usually to be found, and gives them the streets for something more than hunger, cold, looking for money, for something, whatever it is. Each film stars a young girl. The first is small and lives in a dreamlike world, but closer to a nightmare than a dream. She lives with a woman beneath a bridge, surrounded by hunger and danger. The second is older, a teenager, and is a little the ghost of the first: we don't know where she lives, or who with, she just appears. She works as an apprentice in a hairdresser's and spends her time in the city centre, an expanded centre that includes those squares outside the big railway stations that in those years, those of the 2001 crisis, turned into a purgatory on the point of falling into the abyss. She makes friends with a knife sharpener much older than her, and who we don't know much about either, but gradually, in the time they spend amiably riding around on the knife-sharpening bicycle, we find out a little more. He's lived longer and seen more; in fact, he's seen one of the causes of the state of things in general. He's seen the dictatorship, its politics, its economics, and everything returns to it all the time, like an echo. He knows for sure that not only do they walk among corpses, but the ground is full of them. Both of them feel an anguish that seems endless, and this is the anguish that comes from history, because that crisis, that upheaval in the street, comes from before, from the same place as the corpses.