Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Roger

It’s a simple story, a love story, although like all love stories it has its vexations, its movements sideways and back. 

Federico Lamas’ Roger (2004) begins with the words ‘That which drives us inspires and breaks our astonishment,’ scrawled in a spidery hand on a sheet of lined paper that looks like it’s been torn from a diary, or a notebook kept by a bedside to record a dream on waking. This paper (dotted with a constellation of hearts and asterisks, as though love were something that exists in an infinity of footnotes) inhabits the whole screen, and is seemingly fixed to it with beige masking tape, in what might be an allusion to the way in which a movie editor cuts and pastes together frames of a film. Following a set of credits, again written in a spidery handwriting on stained and doodle-sprigged notepaper, we see the words ‘She leaves (catch the baby),’ which then give way to footage of a man and a woman engaged in an argument. We cannot hear what they are arguing about (Lamas’ jangling score sees to that), but the words ‘look at me,’ written again on a swatch of tape that seems to hold the film together, suggest a history of misunderstanding, of muttered recriminations and averted eyes. We all know these moments, when love begins to sour, to transform itself from something that filled the universe into something that feels like a cosmic void, and we all know what happens next. 

The man (his red t-shirt blushing angrily) takes the woman by the shoulder, his passion edging ever closer to aggression; his gesture, for all that it is designed to draw her closer, propelling her from his orbit. The words ‘She leaves’ appear on a piece of masking tape, and she runs away, the camera tracking her movements from frame to frame, as though her bruised love is exerting a planet-sized gravitational pull on the narrative. Finally she stops to take out something from her handbag (a lipstick? a phone?) and we realise that despite the apparent distance she’s travelled from her lover, the whole of her trip has taken place against the same backdrop—a dirty wall on which appears a moon-like, circular form. We begin to think about cartoons, and the way in which they repeat, say, the same five seconds or so of desert backdrop in a scrolling scene to save money on animators’ fees. We begin to think about the concept of travelling without moving, and what this might tell us about love. 

Suddenly, the camera begins to speed to the right, back towards the woman’s lover. The words ‘She exxxcites me’ appear (their triple ‘x’ perhaps signalling erotic intent), and, having made some silent decision, he runs towards her, the repeated backdrop pulsing behind him. He runs so fast and so hopelessly, however, that exhaustion overtakes him, and he collapses to the ground. A black dog wanders into the shot, sniffs him, and sensing the scent of heartbreak on his skin, runs off in pursuit of the woman, hoping, Lamas hints, to reunite them like an emissary of Venus, or an avatar of second chances. (It is worth remarking, here, that black dogs are symbols of depression, and that we might also read this running canine as an embodiment of a sadness that has startled itself into action). The dog reaches the woman, and the ambiguous words ‘one of them says something’ flash up, and he runs back towards the man. This time, however, shafts of light illuminate the repeated backdrop, as though diving grace, or a supernatural expression of feminine forgiveness, is blessing the world and all it contains. The dog reaches the man, he rises, and the words ‘Tries it again. Let’s go’ appear, followed by the man’s exit stage right—the opposite direction from which the dog has come. The film ends, and we’re left not knowing whether the couple were ever reconciled, whether their canine go-between has worked it’s doggy, amorous magic. Something, however, tells me that it has. The man’s exit will take him in a new direction, away from the repeated backdrop, with its suggestions of circular arguments—surely this is the road to making up? However, the man’s exit is also an exit from the film, and thus an exit from the narrative conventions of movie romances, in which lovers fall apart, and are then brought back together again by some deus ex machina, or some divinely ordained movement of the planets. That Lamas leaves the couple’s possible reconciliation hanging in the balance is the real achievement of this work. The artist asks us ‘do you believe in movies?’ and it’s this belief (or its lack) that determines how this story ends in the afterlife of our imaginations. As the masking tape-spotted frames of Roger suggest, we—the viewers—are the true editors of any story. We may cut and paste, and rework the world to our will.