Descomedidos y chascones

本片由卡洛斯·弗洛雷斯·德尔·皮诺导演XX主演，于未知智利上映！

Descomedidos y chascones (the title in English would be something like "Useless and Confused") is an experimental essay film about post-68 youth culture in general and the Chilean youth culture under the Popular Unity government in particular. Mentions of the film almost always begin by noting that it had its theatrical premiere in Chile on September 11th, 1973. Self-consciously indebted to Solanas & Getino's 1968 Hora de los hornos aka Hour of the Furnaces, the film adapts the Third Cinema aesthetics of the "imperfect" to the thematics of youth in a variety of ways. The film attempts to document the situation of the young people who have come of age at a post-revolutionary moment. As one description puts it, it offers "a non-doctrinaire" approach to the didactic film which was unusual for the period (up to a point). In addition to Solanas, the film draws on some of Helvio Soto's strategies in Voto más fusil (1970) (which I hope someone will be able to share?). It is not entirely successful as a work of art or as a work of experimentation. It makes extensive use of a technique that is put to much better effect in other films of the period but seems to have been wildly abused by Chaskel's students: long tracking shots of texts which invite us to read along. I would conjecture that this must have been an exercise that Chaskel required of all of his film students. Toward the end of the film, images of pavement being broken up echo images from the beginning of chicks (condors?) breaking out of their shells and babies bursting out of their mothers' wombs. While the film does not (for me) excite the same degree of curiosity and interest as most of the other UC films I've seen from the period, there is something terrible and heartbreaking about knowing that these images of vital but indeterminate rupture were being projected in the darkened theaters of Santiago on September 11th. The film in its entirety can be viewed on Vimeo. It features music by Los Jaivas and footage from a representative Chilean music festival and demonstration of the era.