last night i watched La Casa Lobo ("The Wolf House"), a 2018 film from Chile by Cristobal León, Joaquín Cociña + Alejandra Moffat -- i feel crazy writing just 3 names because i can only imagine there was a larger number of skilled people involved in realizing 75 minutes of nonstop experimental animation. according to wikipedia it took 5 years to make in a workshop. it feels like the kind of work that is only possible when it's supported deeply in a community -- i have a bit of a hole in my heart from watching all the artists i know here in the U.S. lose hope that support like that is possible here, so i'm grateful to the chilean institutions that funded this.
the framing of La Casa Lobo is the narrative voice of the German-speaking wolf, a patriarch describing his cult/colony of Germans in rural Chile, "misunderstood" by some unnamed group of outsiders but in his telling beloved by the "Chilean peasants" around them. this is based on the real history of Colonia Dignidad, a cult-operated farm compound surrounded by barbed wire with a watchtower and searchlights, where the sexually abusive German patriarch coordinated the torture and killing of leftists on demand for Pinochet. the protagonist is Maria, a young German girl whose life in "the community" is constant hard agricultural work, including caring for pigs. she lets two pigs escape and is threatened with solitary confinement, but manages to escape, she and the wolf tell us, but then the camera reels in circles around a claustrophobically enclosed space where stop-motion images coalesce and dissolve into each other nightmarishly, as though she is in fact in a cell, watching her dreams of freedom take shape on the walls and floors. in her dreams, though, she struggles with the authoritarian culture she's inherited. the two pigs accompany her, first as playmates, but she eventually starts to play at being a dominating parental figure and becomes their captor.
i was reminded in some ways of a favorite work of mine in a different medium, Yvan Alagbé's comic book École de la misère, which is on my mind right now because it's going to be Alagbé's second book to get a U.S. translation soon, I'm hyped. Misery of Love is also an empathetic and perceptive outsider's gaze into the white family and its victims, and a story about how love is limited by and structured by colonialism. the comparison is maybe a bit self-indulgent of me because they are so different -- not just medium and continent, but they're just very different texturally -- Misery of Love is a bittersweet (heavily bitter) account of the end of a marriage and what comes before and after it, controlled and reflective, a sequence of bursts of cold reality in greyscale -- while La Casa Lobo is a visceral and traumatic evocation of childhood in constant nauseating motion, the walls of the house sprouting wigs and saran-wrap, fake water, real fire, and detaching limbs as the wolf whispers in your ear. i loved both of them! check them out.