El León

This work is based on an image found in the Colombian news archives. It shows how death invaded a place that was not meant for it: the El León de Greiff auditorium at the National University of Colombia.

Here is a short and literally fulgurant film: it strikes like a series of lightning flashes. Visual flashes (a scathing montage of scratchy, unwelcoming video archives), sound flashes (screeching, Larsen effects, a harsh wind blowing out of nowhere), documentary flashes (a man’s corpse lying absurdly on a ping-pong table and covered with a white blood-soaked sheet) – which enables Diana Bustamante’s film to bring a stark violence to the surface. A violence that speaks to a very precise context. Among the many victims assassinated by

Colombia’s military in the 1980s and 90s were many students and professors, to whom tribute was paid in the highly symbolic cultural venue, the León de Greiff auditorium. Opening on the silent image of a tenor in contrast with the reverse image of empty seats, the film sums up with remarkable acuity the agony of a civilisation under fascist rule. From this inaugural silence rises a muffled roar pierced by strident clamours and excerpts from a poem by the man who gave the place his name. It speaks of profound darkness, an abyssal wind and ghosts, echoing the formal flashes that drag us deep down into limbo. Yet, El León does not stop there: the magma of hell gradually dies away, first replaced by the sound of a piano and the tenor’s now audible voice, then by the resolute uproar of the crowd gathered for the funeral – “not a single minute of silence, a lifetime of resistance!”, it shouts with a roar that eventually drowns out the roar of the abysses.

Jérôme Momcilovic