Jorge Sanjines
"The Ukamau Group & The cinema with the people"
Born in La Paz in 1936, he studied in the Santiago de Chile film school. A film school that was created by the young radical filmmakers inspired by that Joris Ivens first documentary films on Allende and Neruda´s political run. Santiago de Chile, when Sanjines arrived to study, by 1966 had already created not only a University Film Archive but also a Latin American Film Festival. The ideas of radical cinema were very strong, and Sanjines arrived willing to create a collective cosmogony, rather than a personal-individual one. Just like the Bolsheviks chose cinema as their principal weapon in the campaign to win the minds of the masses (Taylor - Bolsheviks, propaganda and cinema), Sanjines proposes to create a national cinema in which the participants and protagonists were the people. A radical cinema for the people.
Major Films:
- Yawar Malku (1966)
- The Courage of the People (1971)
Books:
- Theory and Practice of Cinema with the People:
In this book Sanjines elaborates on the early Soviet ideas of revolutionary filmmaking and cinema. Sanjines in the section Revolutionary Cinema, Anti-imperialist Cinema, mentions that the origins of revolutionary filmmaking are Vertov, Eisensten and Medvedkin. He writes, “The works by Dziga Vertov and his kinopravda that proposed to get rid of the make-up, actors and scenarios to capture the real life are very important. Plus, the first films by Sergei Eisentein had as protagonists the crowds. (...) And, the extraordinary work of the Soviet Medvedkin that created the ´Kino-Train,´ that fully equipped to film, process and edit the films that he was making while traveling his liberated nation, depicted workers to help them improve their working procedures.” Moreover, although the Bolivian director employs various themes and terms used in the early Soviet cinema (-i.e.- bourgeois cinema, prevalence of the group instead of the individual, etc); Sanjines advocates for a revolutionary cinema that has beauty as an intrinsic element of the ouvre.
Official Website
___________________________________________
Yawar Malku (1966)
Yawar Malku is radical film that denounces the sterilization of the Bolivian peasants by an ONG from the USA. The sense of radicalism is already exemplified in the subject matter, but what is more interesting is the radicalization of the film form. As the Bolshevik V. Kirshon mentioned, “Every day in all our cinemas in the town and in the country, in the commercial cinema and in the club, bourgeois morality, bourgeois prejudges, the bourgeois gospel faith in the “Lord God” are presented from the screen with all possible Priscillas and Barbaras to the Soviet audiences... The U.S.S.R. is the only country where revolutionary films can be made.” Sanjines in Yawar Malku portrayed Peace Corps volunteers as arrogant, ethnocentric, and narrow-minded imperialists out to destroy Indian culture. Sanjines stated that he was not interested in sterilization, per se. For him the issue served as a metaphor to dramatize how U.S. influence, through the Peace Corps as well as the Alliance for Progress, reached the most remote places in Latin America. Metaphorically, Sanjines held, North American hegemonic power had sterilized the mestizo culture, cutting it off from its Indian roots.
___________________________________________
The Courage of the People(1971)
Shoot on location, this film recreates the massacre of 1942 in which several miners were killed. Through the use of montage — as the Vertonian super eye and editor that are capable agents of making time and space converge —, Sanjines depicts other six massacres that occurred after 1942, to finish reconstructing that of 1967. The Bolivian director not only explores how to merge time and space, but also uses photographs that point out the instigators of those massacres, with face,name and title, just like Esfir Shub does in her found footage films.