Seen at the 2021 MOMA Film Festival online:
In watching this film, the first thrill was that of recognition: hearing my old Bronx Science friend,
Richard Shpuntoff speaking Argentine Spanish—an admittedly personal response to the film. Next we hear his daughters and wife teaching how to pronounce Spanish words like an Argentine--with a soft 'D.'
Then it becomes immediately clear that the film is playfully separating the subtitles from the voice over and then from the images as well. We have expectations about subtitles providing a reasonable translation of what someone is saying in a film. Richard explains that he works in Buenos Aires making subtitles for films; that he has done so for many thousands of films.
This is the point where he separates the two levels of meaning. But this is not some chaotic Dadaist shredding. As you watch your way through the movie, you get the feeling that subtitles at the beginning of the film matched voice over dialogue at the end of the film. The effect is to bring the end of the film back around to its beginning—like a well-wrought essay. Something they taught us in high school.
Along the way, the film has all sorts of juxtapositions—the movie is fundamentally about contrasts and parallels between the US and Argentina, New York and Buenos Aires, Jose Marti and FDR. Richard recalls the history of urban development in NYC by talking about the Cross Bronx and the Bruckner Expressways but the images show almost identical elevated highways in Buenos Aires. We all have heard that Robert Moses was a dictator, but then Richard is speaking about dictatorship in Argentina and its American support through Nelson Rockefeller.
The three levels—voice, image, text— are out of synch to make a point about relations from one end of the Americas to the other. Yet by the end of the film, you realize that there is a circularity to this lack of synchronization.
Most crucially, there is the adorable footage of Richard’s 80+ father walking around the Lower East Side/Chinatown describing the neighborhood when he was a boy during the Great Depression. At first it seems that Richard is drawing his father’s recollections about moving from Brooklyn to Manhattan into his own travels between NYC and Buenos Aires, but then three-quarters of the way through the film we get footage of his father at home in the kitchen discussing politics and suddenly you see where Richard gets his own politics and how much his journey replicates the ongoing contrast in NYC, between outer borough and the City.
The juxtapositions between sound-image-text become both a history of US politics in the Americas and a biography for father and son.
