Haunted Cinema (Fantasma)

Melbourne International Film Festival - Fantasma - Australian Premiere

This medium-length feature from Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso - who'd so impressed me in Toronto last year with Los Muertos - comes to Melbourne straight from Cannes, where it played out of competition in the Director's Fortnight. Many here walked out of the screening mid-way, not impressed by Alonso's intense minimalism: one went on to write in an imdb comment that it was "possibly the worst film [he'd] ever seen", adding for good measure, "avoid, avoid, avoid."

In Fantasma actor Argentino Vargas, playing himself, arrives in the San Martin Theatre in Buenos Aires for a screening of his film Los Muertos (Alonso's previous film). The hovering camera follows Vargas as he paces the empty halls of the sprawling theatre complex, moving about the decrepit building's 10 floors, rarely encountering anyone. We also follow the isolated movement of four other people within the building: the cinema programmer, an employee, the caretaker and another actor, Misael Saavedra (star of Alonso's first film, La Libertad). There is no action to speak of, just seemingly aimless wanderings inside the cavernous edifice.

At one point Vargas finally finds the screening room and sits through Los Muertos, with the unimpressed caretaker and a cinema employee as the only other audience. This is an amazing scene which is loaded with strange lyricisim. We find ourselves sitting in a cinema, watching an actor sitting in another cinema, who is watching himself on the screen. At this moment we are forced to acknowledge and ponder the ideas discreetly emerging from this otherwise insubstantial film.

I found myself moved by this evocation of the loneliness inherent in all artistic contemplation, by the sadness in this portrait of a deserted arthouse cinema which has obviously seen better days. There is also much truth in the idea that a work of art is meaningless without an audience, but that an audience of one is all it takes justify its creation.

Ultimately for me, Fantasma is a film about the process of watching films, a comment on the state of arthouse cinema today, a love letter to the San Martin and a zen-like meditation on architecture and space.

I'll grant you that Fantasma is not the most accessible of films, but avoiding this deceptively simple movie is missing an opportunity to take in some of the most impressive sound design ever recorded on film. The entire film contains no more than a dozen words of dialogue, but as we follow the protagonists around the maze-like theatre complex, we discover a parallel world of sound. White noise, machinery, waterworks, elevator doors, airplanes passing overhead, footsteps echoing in dark corridors... these sounds are given extraordinary prominence by the contrasting absence of narrative, music or dialogue, combining to create an evocative soundscape of stunning clarity and power.

Fantasma plays both like a meta-sequel to Los Muertos and a tribute to Tsai Ming-Liang's Goodbye Dragon Inn (in which men wandered the corridors of an old cinema during its last ever show), but stands up on its own as a minimalist masterpiece of contemplative filmmaking.

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Haunted Cinema (Fantasma)