Quote:
An elderly man with wings is blown off course during a tropical storm in this symbolic fantasy. The Old Man (Fernando Birri) lands near a Caribbean island where a poor family gives him shelter in a hen-coop. Father Gonzaga (Luis Alberto Ramirez) is the skeptical priest who rushes to damn the creature. Soon the Old Man becomes the subject of curiosity seekers as Elisinda (Daisy Granados) and Pelayo (Asdrubal Melendez) start charging admission. A traveling carnival of human oddities camps near the Old Man as people flock to see the show. The Old Man is reduced to being an unwanted pet, and after six years, he mends his wings and flies away.

Awards:
1988, Concurso Caracol de Cine, Radio y TV de la UNEAC
1988, Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano
1988, La Biennale di Venezia – Mostra Internacionale d’Arte Cinematografica

1.47GB | 1h 30m | 1280×720 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/B2FE119F02973E4/Un_senor_muy_viejo_con_unas_alas_enormes.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/D39EFE60EA872C1/Un_señor_muy_viejo_con_unas_alas_enormes.srt
or
https://fikper.com/JvaTdx03h4/Un_senor_muy_viejo_con_unas_alas_enormes.mkv
https://fikper.com/LmfGXFK2mj/Un_señor_muy_viejo_con_unas_alas_enormes.srt./a>

The post Fernando Birri – Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes AKA A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings (1988) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis
The book EL SIGLO DEL VIENTO, the third part of a trilogy about the history of Latin America, is not a traditional historical work. The Uruguayan writer and journalist Eduardo Galeano (1940) was even exiled for a long time to prevent his headstrong and critical style from becoming too famous. His style, which combines dry facts about the exploitation, the oppression and the violence in South America with individual anecdotes and literary creativity, is preserved in the documentary that Fernando Birri adapted from the book. In ‘chapters‘, each dealing with a certain period in the history of this century, an image is created of a continent that is constantly afflicted by setbacks and misery. A continent that threatens to go down, but where the people always rise again to fight against injustice and poverty. Archive footage of historical figures such as Salvador Allende, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro illustrates the key episodes in the history. The film also draws a link with North America: in short scenes, Birri refers to the icons of the 20th century, from Rita Hayworth and Elvis Presley to John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Eduardo Galeano appears as the narrator. His sonorous voice guides the spectator through the history. A recurring element in the film is a puppet play, made by cartoon filmmaker Walter Tournier, around the historical figure of Miguel Marm籀l, a man who dies several times, but time and again rises from his ashes. This Marm籀l is the personification of Latin America, which brims over with life force, despite everything.

2.22GB | 1h 25m | 741×556 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/F90BF28A87E2C72/El_siglo_del_viento_(Birri,_1999).mkv

Language:Spanish
Subtitles:None

The post Fernando Birri – El siglo del viento AKA Century of the Wind (1999) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Fernando Birri’s Tire dié (Throw Me a Dime, 1958) begins with an aerial shot of the provincial city of Santa Fe, Argentina. The association of voice-of-God narration with perspective-of-God images only reveals the full extent of its parodic intent as the narration progresses and conventional descriptive data (such as geographical location, founding dates, population) give way to less conventional statistics (the number of streetlamps and hairdressers, loaves of bread consumed monthly, cows slaughtered daily, and erasers purchased yearly for government offices). As the houses give way to shanties, the narrator declares, “Upon reaching the edge of the city proper (la ciudad organizada) statistics become uncertain…. This is where, between four and five in the afternoon…during 1956, 1957 and 1958, the following social survey film was shot.”

The railroad bridge surveyed by the aerial camera just prior to the credits is the site of the first postcredit sequence. From God’s vantage point, the camera has descended to the eye level of the children who congregate there every afternoon. In the first postcredit shot, a little boy in close-up stares directly at the camera, then turns and runs out of frame. Other children appear in close-up, looking and speaking in direct address. Their barely audible voices are overlaid with the studied dramatic diction of two unseen adult narrators, male and female, who repeat what the children are saying, adding identifying tags like “…one of the boys told us,” or “…said another.” This initial sequence ends as the camera follows one of the boys home and “introduces” his mother in direct visual and verbal address, followed by her voice-over (soon compounded by the overlay of the mediating narrators) and images of observation and illustration. This “chain” sequence, whereby one social actor (usually a child) provides a visual link with another (usually an adult) continues throughout the film.

The primary expectation deferred and eventually fulfilled by the film’s intricate structuration is the appearance of the long and anxiously awaited train to Buenos Aires. The interviews in which local residents discuss their economic plight are repeatedly intercut with shots back to the tracks and the growing number of children keeping their restless vigil there. The eventual climax of expectation (the subjects’ and the viewers’) has the bravest and fleetest of the children running alongside the passing train. As they balance precariously on the narrow, elevated bridge, their hands straining upward to catch any coin the passengers might toss in their direction, children’s voices on the sound track chant hoarsely, “Tire dié! Tire dié!” (Throw me a dime!”).

The first product of the first Latin American documentary film school (The Escuela Documental de Santa Fe, founded by Birri in 1956 upon his return from Rome’s Centro Sperimentale), Tire dié was a collaborative effort whose evolution and ethos suggest a more observational than expository motivation. After selecting this particular theme and locale from preliminary photo-reportages, Birri divided his fifty nine students into various groups, each of which was to concentrate on a particular personage from the community under study: “We went there every afternoon for two years, to get to know these people, to exchange ideas, to spend time with them; but we ended up sharing their lives. We never concealed the fact that we were making a film, but neither did we emphasize it. The film was clearly secondary to the human relationships that we established.

Despite severe financial and technical limitations, the group sought the synchronous self-presentation of social actors. Interventions by the authoritarian narrator cease after the initial precredit sequence. The filmmakers deleted their own presence from the interviews with riverbed residents, neither appearing on screen nor retaining their questions on the sound track. Generally, though not always, the film introduces social actors in direct visual and verbal address, followed by a montage of images of illustration and observation that are unified by the social actors’ voiceover commentary.

Given this apparent commitment to direct verbal address, the persistent intervention of the anonymous male and female mediator-narrators, speaking over the voice of the social actors, is unexpected and disconcerting. Investigation into the film’s mode of production reveals that this expedient derives not from prior design but from deficiencies in the original sound recording. Faced with the inadequate technical quality of the recordings made during the filming, Birri and his students had to compromise their original conception: “We approached two well-known actors…and asked them to re-record the original soundtrack, not dubbing the film but rather serving as intermediaries between the protagonists and the public. This re-recording is what appears in the ‘foreground’ of the soundtrack, but beneath it we retained the original track….Even though at first glance this voiced-over ‘professional’ sound track seems contradictory to our approach, it was an unavoidable necessity.” This overdubbing technique is quite common today in foreign-language documentaries when the filmmakers wish to retain the “flavor” of the actual social actor’s speech, but here it plays quite an opposite role, signaling the locus of contradiction and branding this early and influential attempt to democratize documentary discourse with the unwanted stamp of residual authoritarian anonymity.

An SD encode of the new restoration. Beautiful film.

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	32mn 28s
Size: 	2.10 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1508x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	1.398
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	9 025 Kbps
BPP: 	0.222
Audio
#1:  	1.0ch AAC LC @ 243 Kbps (Mono)

https://nitro.download/view/6AD8A67470667A8/tire_die.mkv

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English (Hardcoded)

The post Fernando Birri – Tire dié AKA Throw Me a Dime (1958) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

ORG and excess roads to wisdom
Fernando Birri
“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” said William Blake. This was the mantra we attempted to analyze in the non-film ORG. I want to try to make this lecture correspond formally to its subject, an experimental film. This may or may not work, but I want to attempt an experimental lecture as a way into the film.

I chose Memories of Fire by Eduardo Galeano because I think it gets to the heart of our experience. That is, the Americas as a vessel for delirium. This has as much to do with dreams as it has to do with the creative energy that some call poetry.

In fact, the whole of ORG has been conceived so that each viewer is required to complete it. It starts with this name, ORG, which can function as a prefix or a suffix. ORG generates organ, orgasm, orgy as well as Amorgos, for example. Search for the word that you want. In the course of the film, the word becomes intertwined with the Orgone theory of Wilhelm Reich. It is precisely to him that the film is dedicated along with two other names: Che and Méliès. … Putting these three names together is like mixing oil and vinegar, salt and sugar, Yin and Yang, traditional and conservative culture. In this schizophrenic and ecstatic mixture, contradictory elements remain separate and grow ever more opposed. This was an attempt made with the film to respond to the old concept of “harmony in discord” which is usually taken to imply that contradictions have been overcome.

The film first took shape in the crucial year of 1968: Che had died in 1967 in Bolivia, man was about to reach the moon and his ego had shifted. What was happening in the human psyche seemed to me to be like what happened when the Ptolemaic was replaced by the Copernican world system. At that time the human ego, or its sentiments, was loosing its centeredness. An ego-cosmocentric conception of the human was also being breached. The film suffers all the tensions and ruptures of these contradictions which are, in truth, only psuedocontradictions. {I don’t understand this sentence: “Una crítica es al lenguaje cinematográfico, hecha, de alguna manera, desde el interno del lenguaje cinematográfico, concebida por una bestia cinematográfica que es quien les habla.”} It advances a critique of the concepts of the left of that time from a man who, naturally, has also lived or tried to live in solidarity with the left.

(…)

In addition to the two crises I’ve already mentioned, the one about film language and the other about history, there was the third crisis: whether the film could ever be shown, a decision not to be weighed lightly any more than whether or not to commit suicide. But then it was decided that it would be shown in Venice. I constructed a large screen in front of the door of the cinema. This was never intended to be projected in a movie house but as part of something else, part of a happening, what today you would call an installation. So I install this giant screen before the entrance of the cinema and, with a large knife I’d picked up in India, at three o’clock sharp I climb a ladder and begin to cut away at the screen, tearing it open, so that the audience came through the screen. The audience was the backdrop for the film. Rather than situating the viewer in front of the screen as an active spectator, one who leaves no different than when he came to see it, I intended the viewer to enter the film …

The synopsis of the film, or non-film, I’ll read as it appeared in the press-kit: “Some years after the explosion of a mushroom cloud, a black man named Grrrr helps his white friend Zohommm to seduce his beloved Shuick in a love triangle. When Zohommm later becomes jealous, he consults an electronic Sybil about his woman and friend. She confirms his suspicions and, in despair, he cuts off his head. Grrrr, his black friend, finds him dead and also kills himself. When the woman Shuick discovers them, she tries to jump off a cliff, but is stopped by the electronic Sybil, who brings the two friends back to life. Shuick reunites with the two men, but their heads have been transposed, swapped (by mistake or not?) and a dispute arises between the two bodies to decide who will now get the woman. Is a man his head or his sex? This little question, the film leaves open.”

2.48GB | 2h 50m | 767×560 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/F0738844A901995/Org__Fernando_Birri_.mkv

Language:Italian, English
Subtitles:English, German

The post Fernando Birri – Org (1979) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

From Allmovie:
Government bureaucracy and ineptitude, as well as social foibles, get a drubbing in this socio-political satire by director Fernando Birri. Everything starts when the families in a poor, mud-hut neighborhood lose what little they own in a bad flood. In steps the militia to rescue them, and then the local government comes next as the politicos hope to gain points by relocating the group of unfortunates. Nothing goes right for the essentially honest, simple villagers who are now the dispossessed. One family seeks temporary shelter in a boxcar and ends up being attached to a train that then takes them on an interesting journey. Meanwhile, no one seems able to help them out and when the hubbub has died down, the families are not much different than when the flood first washed them out. Director Fernando Birri was particularly interested in Neorealism and would eventually move to Cuba.

569MB | 1:22:54 | 416×352 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/DEFB7D9C4F00845/Fernando_Birri_-_Los_Inundados_(1961).avi
https://nitroflare.com/view/76FDED8E511A7FB/Los_Inundados_aka_Flooded_Out_(1961).srt

Language:Spanish
Subtitles:English

The post Fernando Birri – Los Inundados aka Flooded Out (1961) first appeared on Cinema of the World.