Historia Pluriversal: Ernesto Baca’s Samoa (2005)

Resumen

Ernesto Baca’s feature-length experimental film Samoa (2005) was fundamental
in kindling a renewed interest in Super 8 in Argentina at the beginning of this century. Its
massive collection of shots are organized around a single but multivalent idea: the mirror as
site of the contraconquista. The film opens and closes with shots of conquistadores bearing a
light-reflecting mirror, a symbol of the “images at war,” that is, of the renaissance perspective
against which the film will frequently enlist the flatness of the Super 8 format. Samoa’s
non-linear structure itself takes up the figure of the mirror: a symmetrical, palindrome-like
curve. Its conception of space is derived from the gap between those sides of the curve,
thus making it the opposite of spatial conceptions dominant in “classical” cinema: a whole
region of structure and depthless shots versus thin structure and deep space. The film then
becomes a sustained interrogation of the notion of a center: the center as a fold between
two mirrored representations, which in turn becomes an occasion for interrogating the
relationship between metaphysical centers and geopolitical ones (metropoles). The film
thus points towards an eth