Alberte Pagán, born in O Carballiño in 1965, is a Galician filmmaker and writer.
Film criticism Alberte Pagán is a recognized theorist and researcher.Villarmea 2016, p. 236. Writing in Galician, Spanish and English, he has published many articles, chapters and books on experimental cinema. His Introducción aos clásicos do cinema experimental was published in 1999 by the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea. He authored Imaxes do soño en liberdade. O cinema de Eugenio Granell, a monograph on the film work of surrealist painter Eugenio Granell. In 2014 he published Andy Warhol, a "complete and rigorous" monograph which vindicates the materiality of the artist's films. He has collected his in-depth interviews with Peter Kubelka, Malcolm Le Grice, Ken Jacobs, Taka Iimura, Phil Hoffman, and Bill Brand in Emotional Materials / Personal Processes. Six Interviews with Experimental Filmmakers.
Political filmmaking Alberte Pagán is a key figure among Galician filmmakers. His films have a strong political bent,Martínez 2015, p. 213. but are also concerned with "signifier-signified explorations" and "seriality, metanarration, hybridization of materials and subversion of codes", as in Pó de estrelas (2007) or in the films from his series "Surfaces" and "Film Studies". His cinema combines "formal research with political implications".Escudero, Antón (February 6, 2014). "Alberte Pagán, cineasta e escritor: 'Warhol foi un auténtico investigador e explorador da mecánica do cinematógrafo'", Sermos Galiza, p. 27.
The whole of his work can be read as a "manual of resistance", from agit-prop to the deconstruction of inherited codes.Xestoso, Manuel. "Alberte Pagán. Cine desde as marxes." Sermos Galiza, November 11, 2021. p. 11. "O conxunto das súas películas é case un manual de resistencias que abrangue desde o agit-prop máis urxente (Película urgente por Palestina) até o desvelamento do discurso sistémico a través da súa deconstrucción (Frank)." The political strand of Urgent Film for Palestine (2012) is rooted in the anticolonialism of films like Afrique 50 (René Vautier, 1950). Among his influences are Andy Warhol, Michael Snow and Chris Marker. His films "generate controversy" and "provoke analysis and reflection" "while still achieving attractive and genuine visual results".Donoso 2018, p. 221.
He has filmed in Nicaragua (Os waslala, 2005), Western Sahara (Asahra hurratun!, 2009), Zimbabwe (Tanyaradzwa, 2009) and Colombia (A realidade, 2012), but has also reflected on the political problems of Galicia as in Faustino 1936 (2010) and A quem se lhe conte... (2011), which deals with the environmental disaster produced on the Galician coast by the oil spill from the Prestige tanker.Villarmea, Iván. "Políticas de representación no novo cinema galego. Do modelo Zeitun á estética da resistencia". Nogueira 2021, pp. 100-101. The inverted chromatism and the "depressed landscapes" of A quem se lhe conte... remind us of the aesthetics of the paintings by Anselm Kiefer and Daniel Richter.Donoso 2019, p. 57. His political films are "a lucid anthology of the chronic evils of today's world".Gil, Avelina R. (March 13, 2014). "Como ser Alberte Pagán". Faro de Vigo, Faro Cultura, p. II.
Bs. As. His first film to receive recognition was the minimalist and conceptualCastro de Paz, José Luis; Cerdán de los Arcos, Josetxo, "Razonables huellas documentales (2000-2006). Un variado, fértil y alentador panorama". Rodríguez, Hilario J. (2006). Miradas para un nuevo milenio. Fragmentos para una historia futura del cine español, Festival de Cine de Alcalá de Henares. Bs. As. (2006), awarded at the Play-Doc Film Festival and winner of the Román Gubern Film-Essay Award. Bs. As., modelled after Chantal Akerman's News from Home, is "a forceful and, at times, enigmatic work", a collage of past and present, of Europe and America, of documentary and experimentalism, in which Pagán recovers the oral history of his family, broken apart by emigration. The film intertwines family progression with political history.Pérez Pereiro, Marta. "Filmar a tribo, filmar o íntimo no cinema galego contemporáneo". Ledo 2019, p. 200. Its final 14-minute-long tracking shot in Buenos Aires metro has been interpreted as a "descent into the hell [...] of identity".Domínguez, Daniel. "Bs. As. de Alberte Pagán: A memoria dunha fenda". Tempos Novos, August 2007. p. 77.
Bs. As. is the forerunner of the New Galician Cinema (NGC).Martínez 2015, p. 210.Nogueira, Xosé (2023). "De la trabajosa artesanía a la artística autoría: el proceloso caso del documentalismo gallego" [From laborious craftsmanship to artistic authorship: the turbulent case of Galician documentary filmmaking]. Torreiro and Alvarado 2023, p. 178. Bs. As. [...] opera todavía hoy como obra seminal y referencial para la acuñación de la marca NCG.Redondo Neira, Fernando; Pérez Pereiro, Marta, "Identidades buscadas e construídas: imaxes da emigración galega no cinema". Ledo 2018, p. 126. "Vense considerando [...] como un título, en certo xeito, inaugural, ou cando menos pioneiro ou inspirador, do que finalmente callou na marca coñecida como Novo Cinema Galego." Its dual composition, which would be retaken in other NGC films like Tanyaradzwa, Todos vós sodes capitáns (Oliver Laxe, 2010) and Costa da Morte (Lois Patiño, 2013), also helped shape Xurxo Chirro's Vikingland (2011).Redondo Neira, Fernando; González, Xurxo. "As marcas do procesual nos límites da experimentación do Novo Cinema Galego". Nogueira 2021, p. 83. The film turned Pagán into a reference, a "touchstone"Salgado, Daniel (October 29, 2010). "A imaxe exploradora". El País, Luces, p. 9. and a pioneerSande, José Manuel. "A década prodixiosa. O NCG en dez fitos." Nogueira (2021). p. 278. of the NGC. As Martínez writes, "without any doubt, Alberte Pagán embodies the figure of the patriarch of this group of creators."
A Pedra do Lobo A Pedra do Lobo (2010) was Pagán's first foray into fiction filmmaking. Filmed in Galicia, Panama and Malta, it is "a raw, visceral and rough film". It is a "spacial" remake of the "temporal" Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen, Bergman, 1968). The filmmaker constructed the film from eighteen hours of improvised filmed material. It is a montage film, in the sense that it was not filmed to illustrate a story, but was improvised, so that the autonomous scenes, when spliced together, trigger the narration.Salgado, Daniel (December 2, 2011). "Imaxes en colisión. O cineasta Alberte Pagán estréase na ficción coa 'áspera' A Pedra do Lobo." El País, Luces, p. 7. It was the first film by Pagán to receive financing (€10,735.33 net, €18,000 gross) from the Galician Agency of Cultural Industries.
Tanyaradzwa His three-hour-long, double screen Tanyaradwa, filmed in Zimbabwe, was defined as "anti-anthropological"Oliveira, V. (June 24, 2009). "O ollar 'antiantropolóxico'". Galicia Hoxe, Maré, p. 36. and "antiethnographic", so as to avoid any temptation of an orientalist reading.Oter, Jorge; Miquel Gual, Joan. "Miradas hacia el exterior: construcciones de una otredad alejada." Torreiro and Alvarado 2023, p. 392. It is divided in two parts: "Scenes of country life" and "Scenes of city life". Tanyaradzwa, influenced by Andy Warhol's cinema, opts for "disintermediation" and direct communication with the audience, outside of commercial modes of production and established distribution circuits.Smith 2012, pp. 113-114. Its double screen, which removes narrative causality, is also a materialist device that serves to defuse emotion, as in the sequence where, on one screen, the actor and co-author Tanyaradzwa recounts parental abuse, whereas on the other she laughs and talks inconsequentially while smoking weed. In the film, the protagonist is not the object of the camera, but rather a subject in possession of a discourse that challenges our ethnographic gaze.Rozados, Lara. "O suxeito atravesa a pantalla: Tanyaradzwa". A Nosa Terra, June 25-July 1, 2009. p. 36.
The filmmaker made a four-screen version for Play-Doc Film Festival (where it won the Best Galician Film award), "redoubling its commitment to experimentation in the field of random editing".
Other films Pó de estrelas, hailed as one of the best short films of the year by Cahiers du Cinéma España,Reviriego, Carlos; De Predro, Gonzalo (December 2007). "Cuando el cine pequeño se hace grande". Cahiers du Cinéma España, p. 47. is film of "montage as organizer of discourse and of cinema as a militant and critical tool, but never as a pamphlet".
His short Eclipse (2010) was one "of the most emblematic films of the NGC". In Eclipse Pagán does not use the video camera in a realist way, but rather plays with it "as something much richer in nuances, capable of playing with the textures and effects derived from the incidence of light on the analog mechanism of the camera".Donoso 2018, p. 230.
Puilha (2010-2020) is a double-screen film which combines and compares two recording of a ruined house seemingly empty. On the left we see the images recorded on January 17 at 3:33pm, on the right the images recorded exactly to the minute ten years later. The decay and apparent abandonment of its façade contrasts with the smoke coming out of the chimney, which reveals life inside the ruins.Donoso (2019), p. 58.
Uluru, winner of the Galiza Award in the Curtocircuito International Film Festival, connects with the cosmopolitan vocation of the New Galician Cinema, but can also be read as a vindication of the right to self-determination of both the Australian aboriginal peoples and those of Galicia.Villarmea, Iván. "Fóra de campo. Traumas históricos e persoais no cinema galego". Ledo 2019, p. 244.
His award-winning Elefante is the shortest film possible. It consists of a single frame which lasts 1/60th of a second (16.7 milliseconds). "Elephant proves the essential difference between photography and cinema, the radical difference between a frame and a photograph – cinema is not movement (a single frame cannot reproduce movement) but visual time. Elephant imposes its (minute) duration, which simultaneously shows and hides." The film is a denunciation of everyday fascism.
Film Studies Walsed (2014), an interpretation of Eugene Deslaw's Visión fantástica (1957), inaugurated the series "film studies", in which Pagán uses found footage to deconstruct the original films and subvert their meanings. But the found footage Pagán reuses in Walsed, as in Quim.com (2014) and Frank (2015), is already constructed from previous found footage, hence we can call these films "third generation" pieces.Tenreiro Uzal, Cibrán. "Entre illas. Reciclaxe e arquivo no cinema galego." Ledo 2020, pp. 64-65. Both Walsed and Frank are "a reflection on the vampiric power of images".Bernal, Fernando (junio 2016), "Walsed/Frank", Caimán Cuadernos de Cine.
Also a found footage film, but made outside the "film studies" series, is A mosca (2017), a brief film made by cutting up every single frame of an anonymous trailer and randomly reordering them. Part of the ongoing Proxecto Remolque (Project Trailer) conceived by Cris Lores, A mosca proves "the impossibility of replicating what has disintegrated".
Surfaces