This program brings together short films that share an interest in exploring cinema’s oneiric, disturbing, and irrational potential. Within The Blue Lobster, a lost treasure from Barranquilla, Colombia, about a foreign secret agent investigating radioactive lobsters, one can detect the roots of what would later become magic realism. Álvaro Cepeda Zamudio [and co-filmmaker Gabriel García Márquez] avoid the literary, the theatrical, and the picturesque. Luis Ernesto Arocha, also from Barranquilla, is represented with a work about the sculptures of Bernardo Salcedo. The frenetic editing and dense and fragmented soundtrack bewilder the viewer’s perception. Photographer Horacio Coppola created the short Freudian exercise Traum while a student at the Bauhaus. Raúl Ruiz’s first film, a surreal mix of suitcases and somnambulists, was lost for decades in a Chilean archive during Pinochet’s military rule. Mariana Botey’s The Magic of the Smoked Mirror, made in collaboration with the actor-director-artist Juan José Gurrola, represents an intersection between two generations of Mexico’s avant-garde.

—Luciano Piazzo and Jesse Lerner, cocurators, Ism, Ism, Ism

This program is part of the touring series Ism, Ism, Ism: Experimental Cinema in Latin America; the related catalog is available in the Museum Store.