Camilo Restrepo’s deceptive film traverses the history of images through a political and playful sensibility.
During and after wartime or political unrest, photographs, literature, films, and all art can be used as propaganda. To criticize and analyze these works are some of the methods in how we should react to art in its conception and meaning. Room of Shadows (original title: La chambre d’ombres), the latest film from the Colombian filmmaker, Camilo Restrepo, is a film essay that critiques and analyzes various forms of art through a chamber room setting approach, led by Élodie Vincent, whose theater-like monologues serve as an acerbic analysis of dismantling the image and its propaganda into astute interpretations. The film is having its North American premiere at the Montreal International Documentary Festival in the International Feature Competition.
With Restrepo’s signature style, aestheticism blooms through his textures in celluloid, production design, and sound. Shot on 16mm, the spectrum of colors such as red, blue, and yellow create a setting with vibrant detail and atmosphere. The convergence of materials such as film and painting harmonize in a totally singular output, reminiscent of the political red motif from Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise. It’s hard not to be mesmerized by Restrepo’s vision, where his formal qualities allow his themes of imagery and nonfiction to gradually deceive us, using his own cinema as a form of reflection.
Restrepo approaches the interplay of power between art and history through several historical accounts of images and its context. The structure is simple: Elodie, a woman who seems to be trapped in a room, enunciates monologues from various artists whose work dealt with the act of seeing. From Pliny the Elder’s story of an obsession of a person carved into the stone as one of the earliest existences of an image to the power and control of the voice and image by John Smith in his 1976 masterpiece, The Girl Chewing Gum, Restrepo’s extensive knowledge and sharp interpretation is on full display. With stories about Bertolt Brecht’s theories to non-fiction political filmmaker, Travis Wilkerson, these stories create a holistic understanding on how and why art is interpreted.
As stylish and unique Restrepo’s sensibilities are, his scope comes off as minimalist. Working only under the confines of a single room, hallway, and outside the building, Restrepo manages a flurry of immersive techniques that reels you in. Whether Restrepo’s double dolly technique transports Élodie into different spaces as a transition point or lighting patterns that gives the sensual feelings of Ernie Gehr’s Serene Velocity, it’s Restrepo’s understanding of art that fully gives Room of Shadows an immersive experience. With such political and intellectual themes present, Restrepo also allows his playfulness to be a part of the theme. With a brilliant ending, bringing the history of the image and his film full circle, a paradoxical element comes into play, reminding us that images are deceptive, and unequivocally, so is cinema.
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