By Brady Fullerton
PUBLISHED APRIL 2010 in Answer Print Vol 19 #1

Mas Se Perdio (We Lost More) (2008) by Stephen Connolly is a film which demands a careful meditation upon its mythopoeic themes and presentation. In viewing this film I was amazed by its subtle power despite its meticulous and restrained technique when compared with other films at the $100 Film Festival. Mas Se Perdio is undoubtedly a mythopoeic film which borrows techniques most significantly from structural film. Mas Se Perdio explores the notion of early utopia in Cuba through the themes of myth, time and space. The film’s discussion, if you will, of these themes results in a dialectic of myth and the past to the objective and the present. There is also a theme of nature and landscape as they relate to the notion of myth that the film both documents and creates.

Mas Se Perdio has a relative simplicity when compared to other experimental films for the limited visual elements introduced. These elements are always introduced separately and seemingly juxtaposed. The visual elements are as follows: a static view of a park with men working out casually; the abandoned National School of Ballet; the image of workers repairing a street; and the ocean with a pair of fishermen in inner tubes. Aside from the intertitles these are the only visual elements within the film. The structure of the film depends upon variations of these themes and their relationships.

The image of the men in the park is identified by an intertitle as the Cuban presidential square or street.  This static image recurs but it does not repeat; each time the film returns to this place there is a sense that time continues to pass smoothly from the last appearance of the image. The images are in color but of low saturation. The sound is not clearly diegetic; whistles, noises in the background of men exercising or involved in sport, a low rustling commotion of public sounds. Although the sound is suggested by the place very little of it appears to be created within the frame. This image sets a tone for the film which suggests a type of postcard filmmaking in which the artist captures something very subtle with little manipulation. This technique seems to echo P. Adams Sitney’s description of Stan Brakhage’s lyrical intention in his early Songs.  Also, of the image themes in Mas Se Perdio this scene is the most reminiscent of structural film for its fixed frame and limited activity. The effect upon the viewer is an immediate sense that the film demands contemplation. As this first scene continues uneventfully the viewer is forced to distill further details from the film and the static image soon gives way to meditation.

The images of the National School of Ballet are the most important in the film; not only do they belong with the other images as a study of utopia and place, but they suggest the direction of the film, contain its thesis and are commented upon by the rest of the images. The images of the ballet school’s ruins move smoothly over the surfaces, shapes, and forms of the school. Slow camera pans, occasional fixed frames and prior images of the park result in a meditation upon form and texture in the school’s architecture. Interestingly, the images outside the school are highly saturated colour, those inside are a textural monochrome. It is important to note that although the images of the ballet school do move from inside to outside occasionally during the middle of the film, the film’s progression, as regards the images of the ballet school, is from outside to inside—from colour to monochrome: a type of revealing. This serves to suggest an interpretation of the school and what it represents from present to past, abandoning the school to time, to history: little more than a relic. This is where the myth of the film begins. These images suggest both the myth of early utopia in Cuba as it is embodied by the architecture of the ballet school, but the ruins of the ballet school have a different meaning than the architecture of the school. That is to say that the form of the school suggests the myth of utopia while the texture of crumbling brick and encroaching vines suggests the destruction of that myth. Each of which is a subtle myth and together they represent a far greater myth, that of the faith in opposites; that is, the failure or success of a system determining in some sense its truth. The black and white interior images suggest a similar dialectic. The detailed, textural images of decaying brick, seen especially in the slow studied images of the showers, suggest an objective interpretation of the school as nothing more than the carcass of a building. Both the mythic and objective belong to a dialectic within the film which expresses the first part of the dilemma that the film explores. The sound throughout these images is both diegetic and non-diegetic. The diegetic sound is made up of birds and trees and the calm sounds of nature as it slowly overpowers architecture. The non-diegetic sound I could only identify, while watching the film, as a haunting guttural sound which oscillated in intensity. An interview with Connolly for a screening of the film in Rotterdam revealed that, "The music-like sounds in Más Se Perdió are extracts from a ballet - Sleeping Beauty - in keeping with the visual exploration of a ballet school building. This sound was sourced from LPs ‘played’ by hand, thus de-naturing their musical qualities and rendering it as ‘sound’."

The images of the workers repairing a street corner were filmed in colour with grainy filmstock that reminds the viewer of a Super8 home movie. One of the workers smiles at the camera with a nod of his decorated hat, and in this image the film has its most human interaction. This is further emphasized by the proximity of the workers to the camera, the boys on bikes passing closely and the mobile framing. Unlike the images of the park which maintain objectivity by immobile framing and a distance from the subjects, or the ballet school which features no human characters and is expressly focussed upon their absence, the street scene of the workers emphasizes the subjectivity of the camera. When the worker nods the viewer is first implicated in the film as a participant.
The image of the workers on the street repeats three times identically throughout the film, but each time different music is presented with the images. From what I can recall the music was a variety of pieces of classic jazz. This type of music is important to Cuban culture and its various presentations suggest both the importance of culture within the problem of the film as well as serving to reassert the subjectivity of these images by offering a new possible interpretation of each reiteration. There is a further variation to subjectivity in these images in that the intertitle introduces them as “12.35am, 16 February 2008” . This incongruous oppostion of past and present—between what is apparently, visually and audibly, the early 1960’s and the present day title—could suggest a further subjectivity of interpretation or, more likely, an echo of the sentiments acknowledged by the interior-exterior shots of the ballet school which create a dialectic between past and present as well as utopia (myth) and objectivity. Bruce Connor achieves a similar effect in A Movie by placing titles inappropriately in his collage in order to defamiliarize the viewer with certain expectations and prejudices.  The contrast also serves at times to elucidate notions of opposition or difference by juxtaposition.

Finally, towards the end of the film, Connolly disrupts our expectation when instead of returning to a previously introduced image, the image of the ocean appears. The entire screen is consumed by water and the slow rippling waves on the calm sea. After a long time focused upon the empty ocean the camera pans and introduces two fishermen in inner tubes floating calmly and silently. The camera remains attentive to them and then the film continues in the cycling of the earlier three visual elements. Not only does this break the cycle established by the earlier three image themes but it also offers the possibility of a typical ending to the film with a view of the ocean, perhaps the horizon and the sun setting; a naive vision of hope or the future. Instead Connolly disrupts both our expectations of the film and then our new expectations of this aberrant image. The fact that the ocean images appear only once within a film of repeating images suggests a juxtaposition to the whole and not simply to one or more images. The view of the ocean recalls structural films meditation upon a fixed frame, but it breaks with this notion by panning to the men in inner tubes afloat on what is an infinite ocean, having no horizon or land. This image suggests in reduced terms the relationship that the images in the film have to each other and to myth. The vast ocean with the two fishermen suggests a relationship of nature to man, mirrored by the ruins of the ballet school being overcome by nature, suggesting a malicious inevitability to nature which overpowers. This relationship too resembles that of myth and the objective.

Mas Se Perdio is a fascinating film for its comparison of myth, objectivity and subjectivity both as concepts within the film and perspectives which create the structure of the film. Films such as Stan Brakhage’s Anticaption of the Night and Dog Star Man represent subjective and mythical portrayals, respectively. Structural films such Andy Warhol’s Empire attempt a certain objectivity. Mas Se Perdio accomplishes a consideration of each of these elements under the subtle guise of an objective documentation. The prowess of Mas Se Perdio does not simply belong to the perspectives of the film, but more importantly to the content which meditates upon the myth of utopia and in so doing approaches a consideration of man’s relationship to place, to violent nature and malleable landscape.