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We should not forget that cinema in its early days was highly flammable. In 1897, two years after the first screening of Lumière, cinema was struck by catastrophe: a fire at the Bazar de la Charité. Cinema therefore had to distance itself from that fire. Nonetheless, fire attracts and keeping a distance is no easy task. Flogisto is, in a sense closely tied to the old chemists evoked by the title —especially Georg Stahl— an experimental film, an experiment. To see what happens if one does something. What happens when film is burned? What happens if, once burned, you transfer what’s left onto celluloid using a contact transfer technique? This film is the result of that experiment. A pact with the uncontrollable. Fire is thus captured once more, and we can observe the show and fearlessly lose ourselves in the almost silent sound of that which burned.
1.500 kilos brings us closer to another fire. We do not know whether the fire comes from that which we are shown or whether it is the very gaze of the filmmaker that, in contact with the material shown to us, burns what is shown. Based on material mostly found on social media and television, from pulling on various threads, the film follows the trail left by the contemporary ultra-right-wing trend, without forgetting its past. Bulls, processions, football, a por ellos, flags... The first chapter is entitled La vida empieza en lágrimas y caca. At times, it seems we are looking at a genuine shitstorm. However, we soon realise that this shit has been cleverly put together. One simply needs to see, among other things, how it weaves together the arrival by metro to the Estación del Arte, the televised news about a pretend bullfight in front of the Gernika and a dialogue between Picasso and the German ambassador Abetz in 1937. By manipulating highly varied materials, the filmmaker verges on chaos but is never engulfed by it. At times, it seems that his handling of the material tends to burn whatever he touches, to destroy it from within. But rage is not the only thing present here. Something more needs to be done. The filmmaker sculpts shit. He sends back at us all that which is said and done to confuse and raze intelligence in such a way as to make us think, so that we start to find clarity in that which overwhelms us. Little by little, other figures also emerge: a graffiti commentator, a man giving away placards, a poem accompanying a climate protest... The conviction to not give up, no matter what.
Pablo García Canga
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