What Ayi Turzi had been doing informally is basically what algorithms do, but “well.” A compulsive diver of the video store shelves of national genre cinema, her people asked her for recommendations and she, as if she were a kind of human IMDb, told them: “If you liked this one, you might like this other one.” Thus, her specific knowledge of fantastic, independent, rare and very rare cinema catapulted her towards an oracular position: Ayi really knows Argentine genre cinema.
Bloated with data, inflated with technical sheets, references, trinkets and pop miscellanies, Turzi began to vomit lines, paragraphs and visceral definitions regarding her Holy Grails. A little because of the pandemic – and that handle that pushed to “do things” – and a little with the intention of repairing the lack of research tools on that “other cinema”, Ayi meddled in the titanic task of watching, reviewing and tell the story of 839 movies. And, between the absence of formalities and the suburban chaos in which the national genre is immersed, was born Unusual and Fantastic, the other Argentine cinema.
“What I wanted was to match films. I did a lot of work, going through film festival catalogues, online databases and a lot of things that are not on the Internet. The idea was that all the information was there, or as much as possible , in one place. I didn’t differentiate between INCAA and independent films. Every ‘genre’ component is included,” he tells the NO the author, who on the afternoon of this Tuesday, June 25, will present it at La Nave de los Sueños, along with Gabriel Patrono and other educated speakers.
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Unusual and Fantastic It is his first research book and his second published (the previous one, Septem Somnia, is a series of horror stories) and adds a medal to his eclectic resume. Previously, she filmed the fictions And… who killed the butler? and Chevisaursand right now it’s rolling Bizarrophilia, about the national bizarre cosmos, which he hopes to release sometime this year. As an example, the trailer for this documentary will be premiered at today’s event. “The fantastic comes out of reality and the everyday, from the theme to the way of doing it,” he emphasizes.
“People know The Sleepwalker, Moebius and a little more. It is just the tip of the iceberg of national genre cinema. What is missing is disclosure,” the author emphasizes. In that sense, she hunted down the lamp, the first aid kit and the boots and meddled in the most sinuous, swampy and dark corners of the national fantasy, facing extremely rare, hidden, difficult to find films. and even lost.
“There is a section of films that I know exist but there is no way to see them: Leviathan, Climate Adventists in the Blasphemous Dimension, Red Hook, The intruder.” A whole archeology of lost nac & pop movies. What happened? Well, everything: directors who changed jobs and denied their past, burned hard drives, deleted DVDs, fights that ended in buried projects, oblivion and so much more .
Now, why do these films “have a hard time” achieving another level of notoriety? “I think because no director, not even those within the industry, thinks about spreading them,” Turzi confesses. “They want to move on to the next thing. It is a very niche cinema that does not have many screens. They premiere at the Buenos Aires Rojo Sangre and you have nowhere to put them afterwards. That generates demotivation.”
Likewise, Turzi identifies a loss: that of the cinephile’s place. And, incidentally, he attacks the platforms and the new configurations of passive viewers: “If Netflix doesn’t tell you ‘This is for you’, you don’t watch it. The viewer doesn’t help and neither do the platforms. For example, Netflix never recommended me Stories of the Occult. I always watch Argentine cinema and horror movies. However, he never did the exercise of recommending that to me, which combines both things.”
Among the transcendental films of this universe, the author mentions Zombie Plague, the pop zombie trilogy by FARSA Producciones, a film that, he says, “is already canonized, they even mention it in the faculty.” He also rescues a film that meets the book’s punchline: Classic, by Marcelo Gil. “It has a very strange atmosphere. There are those that claim to be atmospheric and are rubbish. This is a film that, when you see it, you don’t know if you saw a movie or lived a nightmare. And it goes against that absurd prejudice that ‘the Argentine films are all about the dictatorship.'”
At the time, between 2007 and 2014, this “other cinema” had a shining moment: productions throughout the country, festivals that spread, spectators that accompanied. It was an independent, self-managed, lateral move, but it happened: the VideoFlims Galas, the deformed conclaves of Buenos Aires Rojo Sangre, the screenings of La Nave de los Sueños at the National Library, the premieres on FM La Tribu, the weekend parties of filming or the jokes that were done to collect coins to face filming days. That amalgamated names, embraced ideals, conspired in favor of a “spirit of the times.”
“I think that from Zombie Plague people began to want to make movies and from Terrified everything became professional. Although you had movies coming out in theaters, everything became a little more massive. More people showed up wanting to see them,” Turzi identifies. “At the time there were leaders like Pablo Marini or Pablo Parés, plus a lot of talent rowing alongside. But it didn’t get off the ground because we got older, because it wasn’t self-sustaining, because the BARS is held once a year. And viewers end up wanting to see Darin’s. And what happened with the next generation is that they opted for a much less collective movement.
However, the aura that Turzi captures in Unusual and Fantastic also raises something defining: what happened on that golden age of national genre cinema capitalized on a lot of actors, directors and technicians who ended up defining their craft forever. “It was more than 10 years in which the pot was stirred. Everyone collaborated with everyone. Today that fire went out because time passed. Matías Lojo says that, at the time, during Kirchnerism, he had a job with which he was able to save money to make 2 Crazy people in Mar del Plata, your movie. But Macri came, the pandemic and now Milei, a series of temporary issues that did not help.”
Regarding the historical perspective, the researcher nails the guampas in The Satario as the “first Argentine fantasy film.” Yeah, The Satario, that mysterious film considered -also!!!- as “the first pornographic film in history.” The review continues with the incunabulum Splendor (1922), The Beastman (1934), A Light in the Window (1942), the supernatural and Catholic comedies of the ’40s and all the lines of that history that made its way to the side of “the official history.” Turzi says: “When the New Argentine Cinema happened, it was also released Zombie Plague and was never considered part of the movement. In fact, the FARSA even presented it at BAFICI and they rejected it. Luckily, that perspective has now changed.”
Meanwhile, the book not only close-up about Buenos Aires but enlarges its magnifying glass to the entire national territory and enthrones a deliberately Creole search. “I imagine that it is a book for someone curious, although a little comfortable. It is for anyone who is interested in cinema in general,” confesses Turzi. “I would like it to help recover the spirit of getting together to make a film. Today they sell you a disastrous idea of success, that if you don’t win 20 dollars you are a loser. For us, success was premiering a film at BARS. And for me, it still is. Life is not just cryptocurrencies”, attacks the author, who does not stop throwing hyperlinks to horror, science fiction, thrillers with supernatural elements, comedy and the bizarre; objects of desire of the Fernando Martín Peña of national genre cinema.
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