by Finn Jubak
Ciro Durán, the Colombian filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer best known for documentaries depicting the situation of the economically oppressed in Colombia, such as Gamín (1978), passed away in 2022 at the age of 84. Durán also directed politically-inflected fiction films, such as Aquileo Venganza (1968), a Western set during Colombia’s Thousand Days’ War of 1899-1902, and La Nave De Los Sueños (The Ship of Dreams) [1996]. Durán’s commitment extended to organizing with filmmaker’s unions in Venezuela and Colombia and with the Communist Party, for which he was imprisoned for a year in his youth.
La Paga (1962) is Durán’s hour-long first film, previously considered lost but now rediscovered and restored thanks to an original internegative held at the Cinemateca Nacional de Venezuela. The film depicts the life of a landless peasant in a remote village who grows increasingly frustrated at the greed of his landowning boss, who does not provide him with enough to cover his debts, with his young child growing increasingly ill as he waits for “la paga” (the wage) to come in. These pressures cause the peasant to lash out at his family and waste the money when it does finally arrive, getting drunk and then abused by police as he imagines violently overthrowing the town’s social order from his jail cell. The film is unrelenting in its sparseness and painstaking in its cynical depiction of violence and the economic cycles that underpin it. With both Soviet and neorealist influences, the film is also a key example of the nascent currents of Third Cinema and an inside look at the development of one of Colombia’s politically committed filmmakers.
I spoke with Vladimir Durán, the filmmaker’s son (and a filmmaker himself) who coordinated the restoration, on the occasion of the film’s screening at the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna.
La Paga was your father’s first film. How did he end up making it?
My father was born in a small village in Colombia, near the Venezuelan border. He was the son of the dentist of the village. So, it wasn’t a peasant family, but it was an agricultural region and it was near the Catatumbo jungle, so it was in a kind of frontier atmosphere, small villages surrounded by jungle. This was the late 1930s. I think he witnessed a lot of exploitation there, of the peasants by the landowners. And then at the age of nine, he was sent to boarding school in a bigger village, Ocaña. It was a really conservative village and that was a whole new world. And then when he was 16, he finished high school early and went to the National University of Colombia, in Bogotá. It was there that he discovered theater as well as film. And I think he found in film a place of emotional shelter from what he had experienced so far. So he wanted to study film. His father told him, no way, you have to study chemistry or something that’s useful. So he started studying chemistry, and then mathematics.
When his father died, quite young, he left the university and he wanted to go to France and study cinema. But he had no money. And so in 1959 he decided to stop in Venezuela for a few years to make money. Venezuela was in an economic boom because of the oil. It was called “Venezuela Saudi.” He discovered Caracas, a really interesting city, with a lot of intellectuals, including many Europeans. He started going to the tertulias [gatherings] that took place, mostly at the Sangre Azul bar. So he was attending those, and he also started studying with Román Chalbaud, a very well known theater director. He also got involved in politics and started organizing with the unions of the cinematographic industry.
When he was 23, he went to a Venezuelan town that is really close to the Colombian border, also really close to his hometown, and he made La Paga. The film represented the social situation in Colombia, drawing from his childhood observations. Growing up, I always knew that my father’s debut film was shot in Venezuela and that it was lost.
How was the production financed?
It was self-financed, but he worked in cooperation with the rest of the crew. As I mentioned, he was involved in the cinematographers’ union, SUTIC [Sindicato Único de Trabajadores de la Industria Cinemagratográfica]. [Note: He would end up co-founding ACCO (Asociación Colombiana de Cinematografistas) and was also president of Copelco (Cooperativa de Películas Colombianas).] It was collaborative with the director of photography [Raúl Delgado], and it was self-financed with his wife, Marina Gil. The film was finished, and then about a year after that, because of his participation in politics, he was imprisoned. He was told his sentence would be 30 years. He was a 24-year-old boy then. In the end, he stayed in prison for only a year before the Venezuelan government made an amnesty with the Communist Party. So he was freed and was offered the opportunity to shoot a commercial western in Colombia [Aquileo Venganza]. He left Venezuela to do that project, and after that he didn’t return. He split up with his wife, and he also had a daughter, my big sister, who was born in Venezuela.
Did it screen at all?
There was only one screening because at the time, it was the Betancourt government. The film was considered “against the constitutional order,” and subversive, and against morals. So it was really censored. There was interest from the Venice Film Festival to show it, but the Venice Film Festival needed the agreement of the government. So it didn’t show in Venice, and there was only one screening somewhere. And then a few months later he was in prison.
Can you provide a bit of political context for the country around this time, under Betancourt? I know about the Carupano and Puerto Cabello uprisings. Communists were in constant struggle against the government, right?
Yes. And the Cuban Revolution of 1959 had really inspired and influenced many all over Latin America. In Venezuela, they had two long dictatorships. The second one of them was Betancourt, who had been a dictator but then had a later term when he was elected to lead a new, supposedly democratic government. And so at the same time, there was hope brought by the Cuban Revolution for leftists who saw it was possible to make a revolution and take power by arms.
Let’s go back to your father. When he first arrived in Caracas and started getting into films, what was he watching?
He became obsessed with Soviet cinema, Eisenstein especially, but really all of the Soviet filmmakers. I think you can see European influences as well. Political cinema coming out of Europe. He was also passionate about Italian neorealism. You can see that present in the film as well. For example, at the end of the film, when [the peasant] is in jail, the only way that he rebels is in his imagination. I think what’s sad about La Paga is that he cannot rebel in any way but in his imagination. The film ends with a politician giving this totally surreal speech. And you see the peasant in the jail cell, with blood dripping from his head. But he escapes the prison in his imagination and he makes a revolution and takes revenge against the merchant class of the town who have been exploiting him, represented by the pharmacist and the tailor. And then personally, my father was very inspired by the political situation in Latin America, especially the Cuban Revolution.
It’s such a class analysis in a certain way. It’s these very tight views into, for example, what it’s like in the field between the boss and the workers. Even within the family, it is an economic lens focused on the reproductive labor of women. The peasant’s pregnant wife, it’s as if she’s a machine.
Yes, her body’s a machine, but a machine that isn’t working because she’s sick. And his son is sick too. It’s all economic structures.
That is very Eisensteinian.
Well, it is. These are archetypes of social forces. There is a scene in the pharmacy between the guy that supports the guerillas versus the pharmacist, who gives that speech saying they’re only bandits that want to rob, they’re evil, and so on. It is a very archetypized conversation. A friend who was in the screening remarked to me that it felt like a conversation you could hear in Buenos Aires today. The prepared speech: those guys are evil! And someone else saying, hey, come on, it is a complex situation.
I know you didn’t make the film, but I’m struck by the complete absence of music. It’s so brutally quiet. Nothing, no moment of release, no song even when the credits roll. What are your thoughts on that?
I never discussed these details with my father, so this is just my own impression. But what I really like is that the film respects the pace and the rhythm of someone that works the land, who has to wake up at 4:30am and goes to sleep at sunset. He spends the whole day working the land outside, and time drifts in a very different way. Sometimes the film compacts the time. And there are other moments when it is really slow. For example, you see him place the seeds one by one into the field. That’s when I do feel it was his childhood experience coming through. I think it was his childhood landscape, geographically and emotionally. As I mentioned, where he grew up was very violent. I think he was thinking about Colombia when he was showing these violent scenes. If you look at the history of 20th century Colombia, it is about land ownership. The inequality of land ownership has triggered a lot of violence. So I think he was already forming a specific angle on what he witnessed. And then afterwards in Aquileo Venganza, although it is a western made for a commercial production company, he managed to camouflage a political message about land ownership and how the peasants are dispossessed.
I wanted to ask about other films being made around this time. In your introduction here at Il Cinema Ritrovato, you mentioned both Fernando Birri’s Tire Dié (1960) and Glauber Rocha’s Barravento (1962) – this is of course the time that Cinema Novo and Third Cinema are being articulated across the continent via manifestos. In Toward a Third Cinema [a manifesto by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino published in Tricontinental in 1969], they talk a lot about the exhibition of films and what the role of the film is supposed to be, things like agitation of the masses. It’s not for a bourgeois spectator. I know this film only screened once, but do you have any sense of his idea of how it would have circulated? Was the idea that it could be part of those tertulias in Caracas? Would it be shown in the village where they were shooting?
That’s a very, very present discussion, even now. Who makes the film, and who represents the popular classes? Normally the people who make films are middle or upper class people who are educated. My father came from a rural family, but he had the opportunity of an education that peasants didn’t. He went to the national university. In Caracas, he was with the intellectuals. He had opportunities that even his sisters didn’t have because they stayed in their village, but he was the boy who got to leave and be educated. So the question is, for whom do we make films? If you think about “the masses,” then it could be a very commercial thing, measured by the number of viewers. But at the same time, if you only operate in an artistic or a political register, you’re talking between friends. And it’s also an attack sometimes: we make films for European viewers and for European festivals. It is naive to say that we make these films for the peasants. They don’t care about these films. But at the same time, peasant movements of the time triggered some class consciousness among the middle classes, including filmmakers. So that’s a broader question that’s still current today, perhaps even more so today.
So, after discussions with your father, you decide to go looking for the film. Where did you find it and do you know how it ended up there?
My father considered it lost. And, when he was about to die, my sister Esther Durán Gil and I started talking about the film and said, we could try to find it. We asked the Cinemateca Nacional de Venezuela. And we knew that they were facing challenges and still are, so we were not hopeful that they would find it. But they did find it. I applied to the Colombian Film Fund [Fondo para el Desarrollo Cinematográfico de Colombia] to support the restoration, and we got that funding. I talked to Fundación Patrimonio Fílmico Colombiano, which carried out the restoration in collaboration with the Cinemateca de Bogotá. We restored his two first films, La Paga and Aquileo Venganza. In terms of Aquileo Venganza, the last reel had been lost, and we found that in the Cinemateca Nacional de Venezuela too. So we restored both films.
Was it the original release print?
What we used for La Paga was the original internegative. I would think that [the Cinemateca] recovered it at some point. They used to recover a lot of footage. It was given to them, I don’t know exactly by who, maybe the producers themselves. But my father thought it was lost, and by the time this happened he was in Colombia anyway.
What condition was the material in?
It was in a difficult state. The Colombian Film Fund did all of the supervision and the digital restoration from the cleaning and scanning that was done in Bogotá. I coordinated the project from my home in Buenos Aires. Now that it’s complete, we will be returning the cleaned physical material as well as the digital copy we created, and then we will of course have a digital copy as well.
Is it almost like a kind of “repatriation” of the film, in terms of the digital copy being now available in Colombia, where your father is well known?
It’s not a repatriation because it’s a Venezuelan film, even though it was made by one of the most famous Colombian directors of the 20th century. It’s an asterisk, in a way, that the film was made in another country.
It’s interesting that that asterisk put it in this position. Since it’s not recognized as a Venezuelan film, the Cinemateca there was less likely to prioritize it for research or restoration.
Yeah. I’m really thankful we thought to ask them. They just did not know that they had it. At first, they were reluctant to look. But I insisted. And then they found it.
You and your sister Esther play a key role here. This film was sitting in the archive, and it’s quite likely no one would have been as persistent as you were in seeking it out, since it was your father’s film. You sent the 10 emails needed to apply that pressure.
Esther, who passed away last year [and to whom the restoration is dedicated], was Venezuelan, so the film represents her story more than mine. So there is a personal aspect there for both of us. But there are other reasons that drove us. There are the archetypes, and there is the union angle. But I also think in the social imaginary, it’s an iconic film for Latin America. It’s a very important film to have rediscovered for Latin American film history. Even though it is my father, I try to see it objectively. But it was just three years after the Cuban Revolution, and then look at what was happening in Argentinian and Brazilian film. And what he did after that was make very political films. He made a lot of documentaries, representing that class stratification in Latin America, especially in Colombia, and you can see those ideas building in this first film.
What’s next for exhibiting this film?
The film will open the Medellín [International Film Festival], and I plan to show it at other festivals as well. I’m still finishing the restoration of Aquileo Venganza, and we will then be able to show that. And then I’m going to continue with his other films that are more accessible, but not restored. I want to restore all of them.
Finn Jubak is an independent film archivist and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. He has covered contemporary found footage and experimental film practice for Filmmaker, NECSUS, PIN-UP, and Screen Slate.
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Wonderful interview. It really brings the family’s dedication to finding their father’s movie alive.