Spanish premiere
Sumo, one of the top bands in Argentinian rock, as they prepare for and play a historic concert: presenting their final album at the legendary Obras arena, recorded a couple of months before the death of their frontman, Luca Prodan.
“A document”, according to the modest credit that opens the film. In actual fact, a film that structures the precise gesture by Rodrigo Espina when filming the legendary release concert for After Chabon by Sumo, at the Obras Stadium on 10 October 1987. It was Luca Prodán, the charismatic leader of the band, who asked his friend to record it because he didn’t think he would survive to the end of the year. And he was right. The images taken by Rodrigo —as well as the editing by José Luis García, who has arranged the material almost 40 years later— superbly convey the friend’s anguished request. Rodrigo’s camera sticks close to Luca’s skin and the wake he leaves behind, often at the cost of seeing or hearing him, of losing his feet. Jean-Pierre Beauviala said that video cameras with a built-in microphone were the perfect tool for “lazy ethnographers” who were unfazed by films “with no declared commitment, with no declared misframing”. The misframing in this film is not only found in its images but also in its sound. A musical documentary? Yes, only that the camera frames neither the music nor the concert, and what we discover is not so much what happens on the stage but rather in the surroundings thereof; in the dressing room, in the corridors outside the dressing room, in the neighbouring bars. A rejection of all prefabricated forms and a commitment to a pure and tough way of life to the end. As if the real show were in the preliminaries and not so much the concert itself, in the energy needed to get up on stage and not so much in what happens afterwards, in the daily life of someone who already knew themselves to be shadow, image.
Manuel Asín