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"It's been 15 years, they don't let us create," said Marés González, a remembered actress from the Chilean National Theater that Germán Bobe rescues from our cultural heritage and invites her to be part of his filmography in the video clip of "Olor Gas” and “Induce”

 

It was 1988. The triumph of the NO option in the plebiscite called by the dictator Augusto Pinochet supposes for Chilean society a hope for change that is not only restricted to the political, but also means opening other spaces for personal and collective freedom from cultural and artistic production.

 

In those years, there was a sector of youth in our country that actively participated in an incipient alternative scene to which artists who had come from exile would integrate, such as Germán Bobe, who had spent his childhood and adolescence in Libya, Italy. , Holland, United States and Argentina. It was in the latter country where he began his film studies, taking his first steps with two pieces of video art: "Angel reparador" and "i x santiago" (1988) by the hand of the creator Sergio De Loof with whom he wrote the script for his first film. Fiction short film "Latina". That initial stage with De Loof propels him from a place that, although quite underground in its beginnings, using low-budget production means to create a visual universe strongly influenced by kitsch, the imaginary of Hollywood and its musicals, this collective Called “Al Camp Troupe”, it will soon gain a relevant place among the practices and aesthetics that are beginning to circulate in broader spaces of the Chilean cultural scene. From this collaboration with the Argentine artist, a work methodology will emerge in which life and work merge around collectives where painters, designers, singers work in unison on a common idea in which Bobe is the main manager from his private sense of visuality.

 

It should be noted that at that time Chile was a space in permanent creative turmoil thanks to the democratic airs that were felt after 17 years of dictatorship. Almost parallel to his arrival in Chile, the play "La Negra Ester" had been released, based on the tenths of Roberto Parra, brother of the famous Violeta and directed by Andrés Pérez, well-remembered creator of the Circo Teatro. It is from the ranks of that company that some of Bobe's most faithful collaborators come from, such as Álvaro Henríquez, singer of the Los Tres group whose videos we will see in this cycle, or Javiera Parra, granddaughter of the aforementioned Chilean singer-songwriter.

 

It is in this context of social and political change that his personal pop perspective inherited from artists such as Andy Warhol, the cinema of Derek Jarman, which along with the deliberate use of kitsch and Latin American popular baroque as expressive tools, criticism to the binary definitions of bodies, the interaction between rock music, comics, painting, theater, as well as other multiple referents of mass culture and religious icons, all will become the distinctive features of this multidisciplinary artist who begins his career in those years.

 

The work of Germán Bobe is one of the most provocative insofar as it manages an unprecedented space in dispute with the heteronormative accounts of sexuality that, however, achieves a fairly wide scope through his work in the field of video clips that, for those years began its circulation at the regional level thanks to channels like MTV Latino.

 

Proof of this commitment to overcoming official accounts of sexuality is the film MOIZÉFALA LA DESDICHADA (1996) starring the underdog model of Palestinian origin and drag queen Moisés Ammache, who in an unprecedented act for national cinema of those years, performs a leading role in which, dubbed into Japanese and in black and white, he has to overcome a series of tests to win the love of his favorite singer: Darioleto Benítez, played by the vocalist of the rock band Los Tres Álvaro Henríquez.

 

As a reference for this film we can find the influence of the aesthetics of Fellini's cinema and Italian Neorealism, which is reflected in the choice of characters; common but expressive faces, large women with a thick voice, marquises, hetairas and other popular characters. After all, it is another way that Bobe approaches reality from fiction. In the same way, the musical numbers, as in the films of the 50s and 60s, constitute a main narrative axis from which the complex relationships of love, jealousy and betrayals between its protagonists can be understood.

 

This link that has been built since its inception between image and music will be a characteristic mark in the work of this artist. Her audiovisual works in general reflect this long experience in the field of video clips, incorporating elements such as the choreography of older women simulating vedettes with hats and feathers rescued from a mythical Santiago cabaret "Bim Bam Bum" and non-hegemonic bodies of women, all of this. as ways of criticizing the rigid formats of advertising beauty.

 

Her 1989 short film “Latina” tells the story of a country woman who dreams of being an artist, played by Javiera Parra, who comes to the city of Santiago in search of new opportunities. This theme, widely treated in costumbrista theater and Mexican drama, will be reinterpreted by Bobe in a parodic context in which the categories of social class and gender become diffuse, as happened in the early underground cinema of John Waters and Pedro Almodóvar.

 

Thus, the cycle "Baroque dissidences and political transition in Chile" aims to establish a journey through the work of this audiovisual creator between the years 1988 and 2022, focused on his first creative decade, a period that marks an initial stage of work that dialogues with the Chilean social and political context and, at the same time, allows us to know an early LGBT poetics whose best example is the figure of the transsexual dancer Candy Dubois. This artist builds herself beyond the impositions of biology, reaching a mythical record rarely seen in the history of sexual dissidence in Chile. Undisputed protagonist of the Santiago bohemia of the sixties with the Blue Ballet (a dance troupe made up of drag queens), through Bobe's gaze we see how she is updated more than thirty years later in the context of an alternative cultural scene that she proclaims as one of their biggest divas.

 

Thus, this quasi-documentary record of Bobe's creation with Dubois will give shape to LGBT poetics in Chilean cinema, which in the coming years will be deepened by other artists in different fields who drink to a certain extent from this baroque imaginary worked by this artist during those years of democratic transition.

 






Mauricio Álamo