Review: The Players vs Angeles Caidos (1969)

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27, December 2011Reviews, World Cinema

Cast: Luis Barrón, Leonor Galindo, Gioia Fiorentino
Director: Alberto Fischerman
Country: Argentina
Genre: Drama

Lost on the opposite shore of Argentine cinema history, on the far side of the military dictatorship of 1976, this film continues to turn fervently upon its axis, stirring tremors all around it and yet heroically alone, the sole exponent of a cinematic “new wave” that never was. Alberto Fischerman was part of the Group of Five, a quintet of film directors with a background in advertisement who determined, during the late sixties, to trace a new path for the national film industry, hoping to combine commercial success with a different and more independent method of distribution, along with an ostensibly fresh and unique point-of-view culled from the worldwide avant-garde and art-house developments that had gestated during the ongoing decade. David Oubiña charts their history in his book Silence and its Edges, which dedicates an entire chapter to The Players vs. Ángeles Caídos. According to Oubiña, the Group of Five essentially failed: they achieved no great commercial success and introduced no real aesthetic innovation, they were a sterile pseudo-movement that fizzled out after each member of the quintet released their debut. Only one film, the subject of this review, gained any notoriety and respect. It was the only truly iconoclastic feature, the only work to really meet the supposed promise of the Group of Five.

It was the only truly iconoclastic feature, the only work to really meet the supposed promise of the Group of Five.

I haven’t seen enough from this ephemeral movement to counter Oubiña’s historical interpretation. Tiro de Gracia by Ricardo Becher is the only other film I’ve watched from the Group, and outside of capturing a moment in time — the youthful, bohemian atmosphere of late sixties Buenos Aires — it’s dull and out-of-tune, never finding its proper rhythm, drifting across characters and situations through choppy editing that yearns to be jazzy. The Players vs. Ángeles Caídos, however, is truly great. It is deeply self-referential: at once filmed theater, a film about theater, and a film about film, chronicling the rivalry between a cast of actors, the Players, who shuffle tragicomically around a film set, while a shadier band of outcasts, the Ángeles Caídos or fallen angels, stare at them with envy and indignation from the shadowy crevices of the sound-stage. This confrontation escalates until it explodes in an all-out brawl near the end, which bares some resemblance to the frequent gang battles in A Clockwork Orange.

Yet this plot is barely felt during the film’s running time. Fischerman, here, is not interested in traditional storytelling, but is after more destructive and jarring objectives. Many self-referential films, even the great ones, naturalize and include the self-reference into the narrative, erasing the fissures. The “film within a film” is co-opted by the film that contains it. Fosse’s All That Jazz, Saura’s Tango, and Fellini’s 8½ are all, to different degrees, filmed diaries of how they were made, but they insert their mirror image into the logic of the overall story arc and thus mend any possible fractures. The “film within a film” no longer questions the validity of the film that contains it but merely becomes a fact of it.

Fischerman, here, is not interested in traditional storytelling, but is after more destructive and jarring objectives.

In many ways, the same happens in The Players vs. Ángeles Caídos, but Fischerman has his actors criticize the man behind the camera - that is, Fischerman himself - for allowing the above to happen, letting a coherent story polish and tame the disjointed improvisation unleashed by the performers. As Oubiña argues, there is a tension between the freedom sought by the actors and the control imposed by the director. When the film closes, the words “Invent your Games” flash gigantically on the screen, a Cortazaresque exhortation in favor of creativity and imagination. But this is a command. How can you order someone to be spontaneous and inventive? Moreover, this phrase appears after a lengthy monologue by one of the fallen angels, who chastises the director for not providing anything like the freedom he promised.

Like in Hugo Santiago’s Invasion, the characters are trapped inside their fiction. They can toss childishly about the screen, without reason or psychological motivation, interacting for interaction’s sake, but they cannot escape the confines of the film set. Life occurs inside the tiny boundaries of the dictatorial fiction, from which the Players cannot escape and into which the fallen angels cannot break in.

Not only is this film about its making, but it also questions its making and its right to exist. The actors often behave irrationally or playfully, in the hopes of breaking through the celluloid and escaping the linearity of the story by introducing tangents that lead nowhere. But even with so much liberty and looseness, the characters are trapped, since their dynamic movements can only happen inside their prescribed arena. Even the film itself is trapped. Despite its avant-garde flair, it is never completely free of convention. Every shot almost invariably leads to the next, and even when the rules are transgressed, directorial control is only further established. In one humorous musical scene, the post-synched singing is mismatched with the images, so that a man sounds like a woman and vice-versa. The joke is so well done that it cannot ever be confused for a mistake.

Neither the characters nor the film finds the freedom they wanted, but their efforts towards this ideal are captured by the camera. Although it cannot run away from its need to be coherent, the film contains within itself its own attempts at disobedience, so that, regardless of their ultimate success, these attempts are already successful in that they comprise the content of the film. If nothing else, The Players vs. Ángeles Caídos chronicles its own disobedience, of which the film is both storefront and critic, providing a whole discussion on the nature of rebellion.

80/100 ~ GREAT. If nothing else, The Players vs. Angeles Caidos chronicles its own disobedience, of which the film is both storefront and critic, providing a whole discussion on the nature of rebellion.

Guido Pellegrini
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Buenos Aires Film Critic. I might look like a cinephile, sound like a cinephile, and watch films like a cinephile, but I'm not sure that I am, in fact, a cinephile. I like to think of myself as some sort of itinerant (and probably lost) traveler who has chosen film as his preferred medium of imaginative flight, and who has in turn chosen imaginative flight as his preferred method of thinking.