'Extraordinary Stories': Beyond Cinema

In the 2022 film "Trenque Lauquen" (directed by Laura Citarella) produced by El Pampero Cine, the female protagonist Laura leaves her fiancé, quits her job, and drops out of her nearly completed PhD program to walk into the Pampas grasslands alone. Her decision mirrors the real-life departure and rebellion of El Pampero Cine: a departure from the existing film industry and film aesthetics to create handcrafted films inspired by the collective spirit of punk bands and reevaluate the significance of cinema in the digital era where it is predicted to become obsolete.

El Pampero Cine was founded in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2002. The group consists of four members: Mariano Llinás, Alejo Moguillansky, Laura Citarella, and Agustín Mendilaharzu. It is not just an independent production company or an autonomous community, but also a group of people passionate about experimentation and innovation who sparked a revolution in film aesthetics. Among their works, the most representative is "Extraordinary Stories" (2008). In this film about African lions, mysterious boulders, transnational crimes, romantic legends, and military bases, the director Llinás takes us to an uncharted territory, a new continent, and a beyond made up of possibilities. Speaking in French, he said, "'Extraordinary Stories' defines El Pampero Cine and presents it to the world as a collective. In our view, this film was a great battle fought, our triumph[1]."

（C’est avec Historias extraordinarias qu’El Pampero se définit et se présente au monde comme groupe. Ce film a été pensé comme notre grande bataille, notre triomphe.）

Secret Realm of Humanity

"Extraordinary Stories" is a four-hour-long suspense film composed of three sets of anonymous characters, three unrelated narratives, and 19 chapters (as shown in the table below).

Table of the story structure of "Extraordinary Stories"

X, played by Llinás himself, witnesses a murder at the San Martin Mill at the beginning of the film and inexplicably ends up killing someone himself. He traps himself in a blue hotel and obsessively weaves crazy stories from the news in the papers and the people outside the window. Z arrives in a small town on the Pampas to take up the boring job of a bureaucrat. He is obsessed with his deceased ex-girlfriend, whose photos, bills, maps, and letters guide him on a fruitless treasure hunt and ultimately to the hiding place of an African lion. Yet strangely, the narrative shifts to Z's ambiguous relationships with two sisters. The story of the third character, H, only strings together a series of river sceneries and images of the ruins of canal monuments.

The only commonality these three parallel stories share is the element of space—this film is a compendium of stories about the Pampas region. The stories are told by different narrators with expressive and magnetic voices, and the three narratives are unrelated but similar in their storytelling. Fragments of events are forcibly pieced together into a porous jigsaw puzzle; the gaps are tenuously filled with imagination and fiction constantly; the plot moves from one mystery to another without any resolution; and the nomadic characters roam from one place to another, with their true nature shrouded in mystery.

X is a commoner; Z is a criminal; H is an opportunist. The three men are not heroes or decent people in the usual sense. Even by the end of the film, the audience still knows little about them. Transcending good and evil, and even binary oppositions, they resemble characters from Jorge Luis Borges' stories: heroes who are inwardly traitors, and villains who are crowned as saints. In other words, the film leads us to a "secret realm of humanity." As Erich Fromm put it in "The Art of Loving," "We would still remain an enigma to ourselves, as our fellow man would remain an enigma to us."

Due to the film's rhizomatic rather than linear narrative, the characters merely serve as bridges that link the inorganic story fragments. The independent voiceover is more like the real protagonist, an autonomous system that allows for limitless creative interpretation. Llinás is obsessed with novels by Borges, Roberto Bolaño, and Edgar Allan Poe, and the influence that they have on him is evident in his films. Borges' labyrinth of time, mystery stories, and cyclical universes, Bolaño's anonymous characters, delusional ramblings, and detachments from reality, and Poe's intertwining of horror and poetry are all embedded within his works. Although the story of "Extraordinary Stories" entails incredibly rich elements – architecture, monuments, letters, photos, maps, documentaries, books, newspapers, television, etc – the medium most closely related to the film is still the novel. It is described as "a kind of cross between the visual language of cinema and literature in the most classic tradition, and between performative theater and bodies empty of identity that do not become characters but develop in real and mundane spaces."

（ una especie de cruce entre el lenguaje visual del cine con lo literario en su tradición más clásica, y el teatro performativo en eso de los cuerpos vacíos de identidad que no llegan a ser personajes desenvolviéndose en espacios reales y mundanos）。

'Useless' Time

Citarella said that the group gives value to time that is considered "useless" in their narratives. In traditional cinema, there is a strong organic connection between the characters, plot, events, and themes (or values). It is reflected in the causality of the plot and the consistency of character actions, as advocated in the Hollywood screenwriting bible, Robert McKee's "Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting." However, "Extraordinary Stories" is the opposite. Its characters appear randomly; there is no causal relationship between events; the events are selected and arranged haphazardly, and they do not show any correlation.

For example, in Chapters 11 and 14 of the film, Z follows a clue to find an African lion in a warehouse and witnesses its death in secrecy. This scene seems to bring the plot to a climax and partially confirms Z's speculation about the existence of the treasure. But then, the story ends abruptly. Z now flirts with two sisters on a farm for a few days, but nothing happens, and Z leaves a few days later. Such choices make "Extraordinary Stories" appear like a gobbledygook that conveys El Pampero Cine's inorganic film philosophy: break all established rules, value "useless" time and events, care for non-essential people, and highlight how the world is centerless and how life is meaningless using narrative gaps.

Moreover, El Pampero Cine's films not only redefine cinema, but also humanity. Its films feature many pixelated close-ups of characters shot using low light, shallow focus, and desaturated colors, making them appear mysterious and captivating. In “Extraordinary Stories”, man is not a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman, but a rope over an abyss. Or, to put it another way, the abyss is not an inescapable hell but another secret realm of humanity. The Pampas grasslands symbolize another kind of life, like the labyrinth of time in Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths," where the past, present, and future coexist, and multiple timelines coexist.

In El Pampero Cine's films, the audience is no longer a passive spectator but a co-creator. During the "useless" time and in the narrative gaps, the "moments" in which the audience finds themselves intersect and resonate with the time movement of the characters, allowing them to create a world together.

Through meaningless, non-plot-driven, authorial detachment strategies, "Extraordinary Stories" sets aside modern discourses on historical causality and nation-states, rebooting its own culture in the wilderness, and in doing so, reaching an unknown beyond. If Christopher Columbus is said to have replicated the Old World instead of discovering the New World, then El Pampero Cine would be creating a new continent with its films—a secret realm of humanity that is neither elsewhere nor anyone else's.

[1] L’ODYSSÉE D’EL PAMPERO: De Historias extraordinarias à Trenque Lauquen，https://www.cahiersducinema.com/actualites/lodyssee-del-pampero/