El ultimo malon

By Girish Shambu, Professor of Management at Canisius College in Buffalo; author of The New Cinephilia, a book about Internet film culture; and the editor of Film Quarterly’s online column, Quorum., February 18, 2022

Conscious diversity yields discussion

Alla Nazimova performs the dance of the seven veils in Charles Bryant’s Beardsley-inspired Salomé (1923)

FLEFF is designed as much around opportunities for discussion and discourse as it is around watching films.

I once spent an entire day at FLEFF in a series of seminar-style, round-table sessions called FLEFF Lab, which featured about 20 participants from a variety of backgrounds. The discussions revolved around the festival theme of “Disruptions” which was defined broadly and imaginatively.

The discussions roamed far beyond the term’s conventional, pro-capitalist use in the area of tech-enabled innovation.

FLEFF self-identifies as an “environmental” film festival, but its use of the word is expansive. Since the forces that are causing our ecological crisis are fundamentally capitalist, and since those forces ravage both the natural environment and all non-human and human life on the planet, the purview of the festival turns out to be all-encompassing.

The scope of work is correspondingly broad. FLEFF features not only films, but also concerts, installations, theatrical events, and new media works.

One of the highlights of my FLEFF experiences was a pair of silent films with live musical accompaniment.

First, a version of Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1923), starring the now mostly forgotten but famous in her time Russian-born star Alla Nazimova. Openly bisexual, Nazimova hired her (purported) lover Natacha Rambova as costume designer, art director, and production designer. The result is a striking blend of bold, graphic minimalism and Art Nouveau. Ryan Smillie calls it “America’s first art film.”

Second was one of only seven surviving Argentine silent films, El Ultimo Malon (1917). The film dramatizes the last Indigenous rebellion in Argentina.

The cast, composed almost entirely of non-professional actors, reputedly includes many who were part of the 1904 Macovi uprising. The director, Alcides Greca, even appears briefly as himself in the film, which is a work of fiction with intriguing elements of ethnographic documentary.

Girish Shambu

Both silent performances were preceded by special, one-time theatrical performances (Salome co-written by Saviana Stanescu and Patty Zimmermann, El ultimo malon cowritten by Jonathan Ablard and Zimmermann) that creatively contextualized what we were about to see.

Another high point of the festival that year was a screening of short works by the experimental filmmaker Kelly Gallagher titled “Feminist Animations.”

The films in the program were divided between the deeply personal and the viscerally political. Her aesthetic, which makes playful and powerful use of cut-out animation collage, is accessible and affecting.

Gallagher is a former union organizer, and her commitment to collectivist radical politics comes blazing through both in her films and beyond them: for example, she has made all her work available to watch for free at Vimeo.

FLEFF is unlike other film festivals I’ve attended because it consciously gathers an unusual diversity of people in a single space. FLEFF welcomes cinephiles, film/media makers, critics, scholars, curators, journalists, and students.

This piece was previously published in a longer version on Girish Shambu’s blog.

FLEFF: A DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENT