THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE
1er March 2008 Raul Reyes, number 2 of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the Colombian Marxist guerrilla, was killed in a bombardment in Salvadoran territory. After the attack, a number of computers containing Reyes’ correspondence with, in particular, Manuel Marulanda Velez, the leader and founder of the FARC, as well as with various emissaries and diplomats, will be seized. Reyes was often in charge of negotiations leading to the release of hostages held by the guerrillas. It is these documents that constitute the basis of the film by Juan José Lozano and Zoltan Horvath, drawing a portrait, over several years, of the man who was as much a warlord as a spokesperson for the armed struggle.
But red jungle is also a film using a particular process of animation. Juan José Lozano, its co-author, of Colombian origin, made his debut in the production of documentaries. His concern to restore and reflect on this moment in the contemporary history of Colombia has been enriched by the desire to deploy this story by subjecting the image to a particular treatment. A series of graphic alterations enriches and transforms the shot shots. The spectator thus passes from a sensation of recording to the artifice of imagery which now admits itself as such. We owe this work to the other co-author of the film, Zoltan Horvath, and to the Nadasdy studios in Geneva and Tchack in Lille.
Feeling of distancing
The film thus attaches to a character seized in what may seem like the daily existence of various camps, in the stifling dampness of the jungle, between organization and management of daily life, political and militant exhortation, military training, meeting with journalists from all over the world in clandestine press conferences. Reyes was the one who embodied and built the image of the FARC for foreign observers.
But the plastic bias adopted by the authors of the film introduces a curious feeling of distancing, as if the odyssey described by the film was above all a matter of mental projection, of a kind of construction established a posteriori. The South American guerrillas have created a particular, heroic, mythical imagery. Lozano and Horvath’s film is both aware of this and perhaps wishes to reveal its ideological nature through the very artifice of the process employed.
red jungle also contributes to a political reading of the history of the FARC. The film thus describes a slow process of decomposition. The euphoria of a glorious Guevarist imagery will gradually be replaced by the feeling of a loss of control of situations and initial objectives. It is based on the painting of a character who seems to be gradually blinded, to get lost in the heart of an illusion preventing him from taking the measure of real events. Reyes finds himself at the center of a process of collapse, of which he no longer seems to take the measure. Betrayals, desertions, loss of popular support (demonstrations against the FARC hostage-taking policy brought millions of Colombians to the streets), increasingly flagrant impossibility of influencing concrete situations characterize the slow evolution of a character who walks, ineluctably, through the jungle, towards his destiny.
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