Eileen Myles: I love the enactment/realization feel of your film, The Labyrinth, and I think all your work I’ve seen so far does this kind of dance of narration and replacement which is probably a combination of things you are actually obsessed with or haunted by (in terms of subject matter or story or incident) and then there’s the practical question of what’s available when you’re shooting a film (location, sources or actors) and what would best serve to tell the story you have in mind and how to juggle those real or substitutive visual elements though even the aural and the visual themselves seem to keep replacing each other more than supporting directly. There’s I think an undermining of each that creates a feeling of fullness in your film. I’m probably the wrong person to say this (ha) but it strikes me as poetic this way you have of making or going forward that you have…

And – adjunct to that (cause I don’t think I’ve even asked you a question yet) just thinking more literally about your process perhaps in a writerly way…

Can you tell me how you begin? In The Labyrinth – what was the first scrap? Your narrator presents himself like a simple man, a witness of sorts but finally he feels like a teacher. This morning I was wondering – is he an actor – is the speaker a voice you chose, is it many stories…

Laura Huertas Millán: I met Cristóbal Gómez Abel, the narrator, in 2011 while doing a research in the Colombian Amazon around drug trafficking and architecture. We’ve developed a dialogue around different uses of the coca plant, grounded in his experience as a former drug worker and his belonging to the Muina Murui community, where the plant is sacred and worshiped in an opposite way from the “narcos’” ideologies and uses.

In the Muina Murui community, memory is transmitted through oral tradition and elder persons are honored as memory and knowledge gatekeepers. Cristóbal, who is around seventy years old, is indeed an educator. He is a father, a grandfather, a great grandfather – in his community, abuelo (the grandfather) refers to literal kinship but also to a societal kinship. Abuelos and abuelas are the grandfathers and grandmothers of the community, the protectors, the mentors.

Cristóbal is also a witness, as you say. He lived the cocaine boom in the Amazon in the 1990s. He also inherited the trauma of the Amazonian rubber plantations genocide (the Casa Arana crimes) that happened in the previous generation.

The stories that Cristóbal tells in The Labyrinth are all firsthand experiences. The film was built around one sound recording I made in 2012, one year after our first meeting. That shooting was a strong moment, materializing hours of discussion in other contexts. It was the first line of the film to come, from which everything unfolded.

EM: When the story is told about the men killing the cow and cooking it over the fire it had a chilling effect like the cow is like a whore. Like they got some cow, some girl… the implicitly collective male violence was introduced here crudely but I felt it subtly. Can you tell me about your various ways of inserting the power of the feminine or female within this story that’s officially about men, or male power and its collapse in a variety of ways?

LHM: The cow is such a symbol… A cow in the Amazon territory is a complete anomaly. It points to the presence of cattle agroindustrial forces which we know are responsible for the violent destruction of the forest and its human and nonhuman inhabitants. In the Colombian context, cattle and drugs also evoke the cast of extreme rightwing landlords who have been ruling and destroying the country over the past decades. The presence of the cow sets the tone of who is present at the drug lords “party.”

The brutality of the killing of the cow for its consumption, how the slaughter of the animal becomes part of the Narco routine of gathering, celebrating, and corrupting the police and the army, is also a representation of what violence constitutes in those circles: a spectacle and an ethos. Everything and everyone in that system has to be executed, annihilated at some point: animals, women, indigenous people, workers, the forest, judges, activists, themselves.

Murdering and torturing women and sexual workers is an intrinsic part of the misogynistic Narco culture. Misogyny is indeed an intrinsic layer of this story.

EM: Nothing is told simply here. Even in relationship to the feminine, or female. It seems you pick it up, play with it – there was that moment of so many back shots, of ladies being led by the arm, repetitively. It echoed for me the way the story itself kept plunging through the jungle – it felt like both intention and loss a way of being in a story, being a story, as a woman and then not, being material, adjunct…

LHM: Yes, absent women and the forest haunt this film. When editing I felt that the images of roads, cars, planes, oil pipelines, fires, the evocation of the cow, concrete constructions, were figures pointing the destruction of the forest. A deadly extractivist colonialism that never stopped. And it produces so much waste. There is an image in the film where you see an empty sneaker trapped in mud, plastic, and excrements. An image of disappearance and ruin.

The house is part of that compulsive wasting. An entropic domestic space. Layering Cristal’s voice (the aspirant matriarch in Dynasty) evoking domestic abuse and her own sentimental alienation with the house’s shattered walls was a gesture in the direction that you are pointing. Making present the macho violence embedded in those walls, and yet enhancing with sarcasm the toxicity of her own sentimentalism.

There is another moment in the film when you actually see Cristal trapped in the huge Carrington villa, behind a window. She’s the only human from the found footage whose face is shown in the film. In that scene, she becomes a witness herself, but from the other side of the glass, from the point of view of the privileged, she is a perpetrator.

Today, Evaristo Porras’ ruin is also used by its neighbors for picnics or games, as the end of the Cristal voice’s sequence shows. That image is important. Ruins are seen here as the possibility to build new collectivities. And this was for me a conscious feminist aesthetic gesture, to avoid looking at the ruin with nostalgy toward a patriarchal violent world (what Romanticism and neo-Romanticism movements have replicated over and over) but rather with optimism, seeing them as possible spaces for new forms of togetherness.

The people walking from the back are also a glimpse and mockery to the Romantic male figure par excellence, à la Friedrich, a figure also very present in documentary and ethnographic cinema.

EM: And within those ruins there’s yet more art. I got very excited about the drawing of a seahorse I think on that white wall – maybe following the exterior of the ruined building, so it appears after the space has been discarded, wreckage – it was like a teenager’s fantastic drawings, or a notebook or just on the street – it represented delinquency rather than art – or freedom. I started thinking about tattoos being handmade legends that we carry on our body like stories and how your film is operating on that level – in that it is carrying a myth through many different levels so the handmade-ness of a story or a film was becoming the subject, also. Is feminism here or a female perspective a kind of delinquency?

LHM: Graffitis and tattoos are often associated in my films, it’s interesting that you saw that here. I’ve been building continuities between surfaces of architectures and women’s skins in other films (Black Sun or jeny303) and here it’s almost as if the house lends her body to the voice and vice-versa. It’s an hyphenated presence, both human and an ecosystem. And Cristóbal evokes both his and the house’s youth.

The house is a character on its own. It has scars: it was built upon drugs’ money and later destroyed by drug consumers who tore apart everything of value once it was abandoned. That is why the windows, doors, stairs, are literal holes. The graffiti is one of the marks of its current inhabitants (most of them homeless youngsters), who have also left finger scratches on the walls, human fluids and excrements of all kinds, like signs of revolt against any domesticity still present in the house.

The house also has broken dreams: the found footage represents the model of what she should have been and never was. Even in the moments of wealth, she never attained the size or luxury of the Carrington’s mansion.

Writing back “hand-madeness” I wrote “hand-madness.” Yes, hand-crafting was key while editing this film, the playfulness of assembling the materials. I realized while doing it that asking for the permission to use these images was to de-politize them. The act of appropriation makes sense, on its own. If those US TV series have colonized our imaginaries why would I go and ask them if they would allow my criticism? It’s not delinquency but détournement, it’s political.

EM: The story about someone owing someone else a million pesos, how the money kept moving in the telling so that the capital is just an illusion – they owe you money so then they shoot you or they give it to you and then they shoot you. It felt here like the subject was capitalism – debt is the real part of the story.

LHM: It is. Debt as the operating tool, the weapon of colonialism that never stopped.

It was important to keep those testimonies of how the drug trafficking was building upon the plantation methods present in Latin America since colonization. After the legal abolition of slavery, debt became another way to hold workers prisoners in agricultural exploitations, and that was the system that the rubber plantations used in the Amazon, causing the genocide of indigenous people (30,000 people only in Putumayo, Colombia). When the drug lords colonized Leticia and the triple frontier, they replicated that indebtment, killing people Cristóbal knew.

EM: And then there’s the emphatic-ness late in the film of conversational repeat, I don’t have a quote here, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about – it produces kind of a vernacular authority and then the prominent music soon after has more of that kind of undermining, nightmarishness to it like a broken carnival so that I guess capitalism haunts the jungle and jungle haunts the suburb. We keep flipping, both feeling destabilized but feeling by it the interrelationship of it all.

Oh yeah, and the surprising insertion of the death experience.

LHM: …which is brought naturally by Cristóbal himself when he recalls how it was to work for the drug lords – a threshold for a deep spiritual transformation.

The near-death experience is the most subjective experience one can have, as it can only be shared with others afterwards, through stories. The shift between the witness’ position in the film’s beginning to this ultimate individual subjectivity is a pivot in the piece.

EM: The narrator’s assertion that he ‘came back’ from death becomes larger than an individual but a kind of return, an architectural moment in human life. Shrinks always like to say that later in life one seeks ‘a return’. I think the film is guided by a human scale. I love how the end works – the blackness and the boots drying by the fire. It works because we have so little – fire and darkness. It almost asks if it is the beginning or the end because so much is taken away…

LHM: This sequence was shot in the forest, one day of walking away from the Muina Murui village, and shot by night. I’ve never witnessed a darker darkness than the moonless Amazonian forest – even if the near-death experience is told while we see a moon in the image, there is no chronological coherence between the shots at the end of the film, just a narrative illusion. The night, the darkness, yes, it is the beginning of the film, a closure that is a re-birth. Cristóbal is taking his clothes off to go to sleep near the fire. Maybe he will dream again all of this.

Credits

Written & directed by: Laura Huertas Millán
Cast: Cristóbal Gómez Abel
Image, sound, editing: Laura Huertas Millán
Sound edition: Laura Huertas Millán, Guillaume Couturier

Sound mix: Olivier Guillaume

Color Correction: Evy Roselet
Production: Laura Huertas Millán - Studio Arturo Lucia

With the support of:
Département de la Seine-Saint-Denis
Salon de Montrouge
maison des arts - centre d´art contemporain de Malakoff
Abattoirs (FRAC Occitanie, Tolouse), AFIAC (Fiac)