Session 3

Caracol
Ana Poliak
Argentina, 1982, 2 min, B&W, silent

Parapalos
Ana Poliak
Argentina, 2004, 90 min, colour, Spanish

They go together, the first film and the last. Caracol is a silent short filmed in 16 mm with a Bolex, lasting less than two minutes in its little universe. The story is close to what comes after: a boy climbs a wall to look more closely at a snail moving slowly along the top, and finds an alien world. Between white sheets and linen drying in the sun, there are two young girls playing with a bag that floats above them as if by magic. Something like this happens to the protagonist of Parapalos, but in a harder way, because he isn't a child anymore and the world he discovers is that of working in the city. A young man from Germania (an old community of German migrants on the Argentine coast, where there are a lot of fields) comes to Buenos Aires to live and work. He moves in with a cousin, a girl who is also from the country, who rents a tiny apartment with one small bed. As often happened to workers in the past (though it has not disappeared completely), they live with a system of "hot-bedding": when she wakes up, he other comes home from work, making a space as if it were a Soviet romantic comedy, a film by Abram Room, making the most of time, space and happiness. His job is also something that almost doesn't exist either: he's a pin boy (parapalos in Spanish) at a bowling alley that's half real, half digital. Night after night he and some workmates sit, lie and crouch on the invisible side of the game, behind a wooden partition -a space even smaller than his home- picking up pins and returning balls. They're all men and older than him, and they've all lived a long life full of ideas, which they pass on to the lad. A film that takes place almost entirely in interiors, in precarious working and living conditions, which squeezes out of all this the joy of living between things.