Una película en color (Bruno Delgado Ramo, 2019) (Patreon)

First off, thanks to Jordan Cronk for alerting me to the existence of this experimental gem, a new work from a Spanish filmmaker of whom I was only dimly aware. Delgado Ramo works in Super-8, which is sort of hard to believe when you see his latest film's expansive nature and complex editing. Una película en color ("A film in color") clocks in at just over 30 minutes, and although it bears many hallmarks of structural film, it is much looser and more lyrical than the formalist works it superficially resembles. While some films establish parameters and then go through their predetermined permutations, Delgado Ramos has a somewhat different agenda. He organizes a kind of arena for game-play, where certain things can happen. And while they will not all happen, and you don't know exactly what will happen, nothing that turns up in the film feels out of place.

Una película is a silent film that mostly concerns color and text, although not exclusively. Having read a bit about the film, I discovered that it was shot over a period of time within Delgado Ramos' bedroom / office, a confined space that he chose to diaristically explore. But this is not entirely evident from simply viewing the film itself. What comes across instead is the organization of playful sets of oppositions. We continually see close-up pages of books, some of them pertaining to color, others not. But more notable is the fact that Delgado Ramo shifts between Spanish and French text. We are meant to recognize that "language" is appearing here not as communication per se, but as a problem, as difference.

The same goes for color, as the filmmaker introduces gels in front of the lens to shift the hues of the image, while also carefully cataloging bright colors and colored objects within the film. We get references to the film itself, both through pure light exposures that produce stark reds and blues, and shots of Delgado Ramo's package of Kodak stock. Then we also see a series of fruits, labelled with their grocery stickers and merchandise codes. Like the film, these "natural" colored objects are organized by numbers and series.

As another set of information, Una película gives us images of space and architecture, as well as reproductions from art history. On the one hand, there are recurring pictures of a skylight, with the camera working to structure the image along the lines described by the ceiling's window frame, producing blue and silver diagonals. We also see someone (the filmmaker?) thumbing through still photos of this same skylight. At other points, Delgado Ramo inserts details from paintings that include lenses, optical devices, windows, fruit, or other objects that rhyme with the material depicted elsewhere in the film.

As Delgado Ramo processes these various sets of imagery into a kind of fugue pattern, he also manipulates color and distance, so that things either appear with their natural, local color; artificially tinted; filling the frame; or matted on a solid-colored background. And at times, we see the furniture and environment of the room we're in, and the body of the filmmaker manipulating the objects we are looking at. So we are working with certain variables: two kinds of text, image on film vs. image-as-image on film, space on film vs. image-of-space on film, manipulation behind the camera vs. manipulation on camera, color as natural temperature vs. color as cinematic manipulation.

As I indicated above, Delgado Ramo in no way produces an exhaustive compendium of these moves or oppositions. If this film is "structural," it is more in the spirit of something like Roland Barthes' S/Z, wherein the writer establishes a set of reading systems as provisional heuristics, fully aware that they correspond to his interests and might well be replaced by other, equally valid organizational schemas. There is a great deal of Hollis Frampton and (especially) David Gatten peeking through Una película, but the film's overall feel is much more akin to the work of Robert Beavers, about the least structural filmmaker you could imagine. Like Beavers, Delgado Ramo is chiefly concerned with observation, the elegance and beauty of the things around him. Una película en color is kind of like a well-ordered but incomplete notebook, filled with diagrams and ley lines traced among the various beautiful things.