Caldo de cultivo from Lola Miralles on Vimeo.
The Spanish original. And an English translation (how lovely is that?). It's an amazing video and those of us who speak and read English are very appreciative!
Culture Medium from Phillipe on Vimeo. Subtitled in English.
This film is powerful and primal. It moves by scenes that appear as surreal representations of a poem that is postmodern, and emerges from the depths of the maternal terrain. The poem struggles with birth, the body, the subjectivity of the mother/the writer, what creativity is. We never see a child, thankfully. In the history of art, birth was always about the child, the divine child. The mother's experience was invisible. She was merely the receptacle for the new subject, she through which the citizen was born.
In Caldo de cultivo/Culture Medium, we begin with that richest of mantles, that umbilical sky of nutrients, the placenta, or, rather, a mass of weeds lapping in the waves that appears placental. It is a surprisingly realistic image. It is hard to look at, the mass of veins and arteries through which nutrients flowed from the mother to the child in utero and the waste that flowed back to be dispersed in her body. It is there, floating on the salt water, expelled; Caldo de cultivo/Culture Medium begins with the afterbirth.
In the thumbnail still for the video, we see Lola, the poet herself, the shadow of the poet, curtains of light and something round, like a moon, or a paper lantern. That image appears and disappears in the scenes where we see Lola's silhouette, right way up or upside down, against the curtains. Is the round shape in the curtains an accident? Or a representation of the pregnant belly? Lola is not pregnant in the film poem. Yet her poem dredges through maternal imagery.
Phillipe is an artist turned filmmaker. An artist who feels that painting had come to its end, that art galleries are museums of history. His films are a type of multi-media painting. He creates collages, assemblages with his camera and his film editing. Caldo de cultivo/Culture Medium explores the maternal terrain and the mute mother. But not directly. This makes his work truly brilliant.
She is silent behind a net. The beautiful Spanish poet gazes at us behind a white net. She does not speak in the film, though we read her poem. And what a poem it is! We read cryptic words written in the mother's voice. She who is silent speaks. It is a difficult speaking, the maternal terrain is resistant to the language of culture.
Phillipe's filmic images are strange, Surreal and superbly attuned to the core of the poet and her poem.And in the girdle. Rip the hard fabric and get to the flesh, tear the flesh, let one among so many that still have to be find the tortured way (but so lively), under the sheets to give the final blow of air needed for the harvest there where the tenderness of fluids found the seed progression sprouting with no miracles. There is a nauseating garden in the entrails of my bed.
The hand-held camera walk through the sand of the dunes with the immediacy of the depth-soundings, the clicking that is like a heartbeat of the soundtrack reminded me of travelling, into life perhaps. The footprints, others have gone before. Then the sea wind blowing the poet's hair in the room silhouetted against the curtains of light, and that moon shape that seems embedded in the scene by the filmmaker. The film is a visual poem by the filmmaker, by Phillipe. Back in the sand, we come to seagrass that, given the poem, the opening image that is like placental "entrails,"appears to my eye as pubic hair growing on the body of the mother become as large as the earth. We see the shadow of the filmmaker, and again, I feel he is foreshadowing his birth. Birth is metaphor for many things, isn't it.
Back to the mute and beautiful Spanish poet behind the gauze, or netting, she asks us 'not to look "in the corny reflection/ of the ethereal and fanciful divas." This I read as the woman portrayed by the artist as femme fatale, as reflection of a male gaze and desire, misses the point. The mother is the mute founder of culture, a culture that ignores her, and silences her - except if she can speak as a "fanciful diva." Her deep knowledge of life and death may not cross the tongue of words.
We are in a "reflux that weaves" in a windowless room of walls. There is anger in the writing (though not in the steady gaze of the beautiful poet): "The spleen that comes out when they try /to tear us apart from the child." The ropey veins, entrails, threat of being 'girdled' appear as the poet playfully rubs a nest of rope about her head: "And in the girdle. /Rip the hard fabric and get to the flesh, /tear the flesh." The section of the poem that I quote above appears in the subtitles while the poet plays with the tangled rope.
We are deeply in embodiment, in "the tenderness of fluids." Again, I find the use of the word, "fluids" brings me into deep memory of the maternal body and its mess of fluids, spittle, waters, colostrum, milk, and the baby's fluids. The poem says, "the seed" sprouts "no miracles." The shots of her eyes is brilliant at this moment when we reflect on what she has seen, her wisdom, the knowledge of the mother who gives birth.
The beach in the darkening light, and the base of the tree trunk calls to mind the tree of life, what upholds, and the camera, our sight, revolves under the shadows of the leaves of this tree. The lace of light through the silhouetted leaves again visually echoes the ropey textures of earlier images.
Probably the central lines of the poem are: "There is a nauseating garden /in the entrails of my bed." Lola Miralles speaks them directly to the camera and to the audience of the film. It is the only time she speaks in the whole film.
Then she is portrayed sideways, in a white sheet, behind small sticks and perhaps wire or rope. Is she giving birth? Is she lying in corpse pose? We do not know: "The waste of the helpless body /found mother soil." And, yes, "growing under the sun of the buttocks, /nurtured by all worldly secretions." The placental, birth canal image of bleached pubic hair like tiny stands of rope that appears next is pure Surreality. The hollow cave from which we all emerged is there, "blood, /bile, /sweat, /flux, /breath."
Then we re-enter the garden. Is it Eden? It shifts and moves in 'flux' like the opening placental weeds. "The young vine trunks are now thick /enough to have sons like shoots /where fruit is bursting green." The film is black and white, there is no colour. It is stark, and strange.
The final image is Frida Kahlo-like. Our Spanish beauty lies in an embroidered white nightgown on a bed of white sheets in corpse pose and the sheet is pulled back from her by unseen hands: "One more push and done, /the birth in the linen." Then she is upright with her eyes closed, and draped in strands of linen, or cloth. She is Madonna-like, and lifts a branch of leaves up over her head and out of the picture frame, "Not the first harvest of smooth golden grapes /cultivated in manure, though." A wind blows.
A film poem to take your breath away with its profundity and beauty.
Caldo de cultivo/Culture Medium: Actress and poem by Lola Miralles; scenery and production assistance by Kenneth Pilgrim; filmed in Alicante and Urbanova, Spain, and Beverley, England; directed, and filmed and edited by Philip David Edson.
