La zona intertidal (Intertidal Zone)

LA ZONA INTERTIDAL was made at a time when terrorist acts from both state and paramilitary were the order of the day in El Salvador and shaped the global perception of the country. Instead of the agitprop montages that characterized the political cinema of Latin America in the 1960s and ‘70s, this film is dominated by a feeling of deceptive calm: a beach, lapping waves, a man reading in a hammock, two men in conversation... The violence that breaks into these scenes is hinted at more than it is depicted. Only a closing text panel dedicating the film to the murdered teachers of El Salvador establishes a clear political context. LA ZONA INTERTIDAL was shown at the Short Film Festival Oberhausen in 1982 and awarded one of the main prizes by the International Jury. The festival program listed a “Grupo los Vagos” as the author of the film, a four-member collective that had begun working together in 1969 as the theater collective Taller de Los Vagos and later switched to the medium of film: Guillermo Escalón, Marie-Noëlle Fontan, Lyn Sorto and Manuel Sorto. The group was close to the ERP (Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo / People’s Revolutionary Army) and also made films on its behalf under other names: Cero a la Izquierda and later Sistema Radio Venceremos. Guillermo Escalón recalls that although LA ZONA INTERTIDAL was very positively received at film festivals in Havana and Oberhausen, it was criticized by most of the ERP comrades as “esoteric” and described as a “marijuanada.” A 16mm copy of the film is kept in the archives of both the Short Film Festival Oberhausen and Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art. The two copies differ not only in their degrees of ageing, but also in their credits: while the Oberhausen copy includes the names of the collective members, this text panel is absent from the credits of the Arsenal copy. In Oberhausen, LA ZONA INTERTIDAL has two file cards whose entries suggest that the copy shown at the 1982 Short Film Festival came from the holdings of the Friends of the German Cinematheque (i.e. today’s Arsenal). After the film won an award at the festival, Oberhausen apparently also acquired an archive copy, which was available from August 1982. The first copy was returned permanently to the Friends of the German Cinematheque at the end of 1982, where it still is today. When and under what circumstances it originally came into that collection can no longer be reconstructed. Since September 2017, Luciano Piazza and Jesse Lerner have dedicated a series of programs at the Los Angeles Film Forum to Latin American experimental film under the title “Ism, Ism, Ism: Experimental Cinema in Latin America.” As part of their efforts, new, color-corrected copies of LA ZONA INTERTIDAL were produced. This enabled the acquisition of further 16 mm copies for the archives of the Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art and the Short Film Festival Oberhausen as part of “Archive außer sich.” The original 16 mm camera negative was provided by Guillermo Escalón.