GARRAS DE ORO OPERA-CINEMA FOR SOPRANO FOR THE COLOMBIAN SILENT FILM: GARRAS DE ORO
Juan Pablo CARREÑO, music NIETO, video and stage Maxime PASCAL, musical direction Augustin MULLER, informatic realization Le Balcon
Duration: 40 minutes
July 25 & 26, 2013, Festival Paris Quartier d’Été Église de Saint Eustache, Paris
A 1926 SOUTH AMERICAN FILM where Uncle Sam looks at the map of Colombia with lust before snatching Panama with its long golden claws. Cinema-concert for two voices, soloists, amplified ensemble and electronics, from the poem Acuarimántima by Porfirio Barba Jacob and the first recitative of the cantata Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan I, BWV 98 by Johann Sebastian Bach, intended to one of the most remarkable films in the history of Colombian cinema, a cinematographic UFO long prohibited: Garras de Oro (1926).
Mysteriously conceived by anonymous, scandalously – and briefly – projected, hurriedly removed by the censors all over Latin-America, then disappeared for more than forty years, this film has as a starting point the events that led to the independence of Panama against Colombia at the beginning of the XXth century.
Are we in front of a Colombian claim movie made after the independence of Panama? Or, is it a subtle artifact of American propaganda directed against Theodore Roosevelt? For this project, Juan Pablo Carreño has felt inevitable the artistic intervention of the Colombian filmmaker Luis Nieto within the original film, by reconstructing some scenes that fit in an original way at different moments of this anonymous cinematographic work. A cinema-concert performance by Le Balcon where instrumental music, narrative illustration, political manifesto and questioning about national identity intersect, complement and respond.
