How often do you walk out of the cinema and say to yourself, what the fuck was I just watching? That’s my current state, having just seen the 22 minutes long Basta. People talk about shocking films, from Chien Angelou to Titane. I thought about Cronenberg, Park Chan Wook, but none of these hold a candle to Ulive’s assault on the senses. Filmed in Venezuela, it’s the most delirious, terrifying attack on big oil capitalism possible. Like the Military industrial’s own pornographic violence, there’s no coherence, no receivable discourse. When the bomb hits, you don’t get to think though the logic of its hitting, and this film, nearly fifty years after its making, has the same demonic power, albeit a power realised through art, the art of selecting the image, editing the image, adding sound, creating rhythm. In short, through the employment of the art of cinema. It’s completely and utterly hateful, revolting, obscene. And therein lies its secret. If ever a film chose to step out of the received ideas of what should be shown in a cinema, this is it. If you ever get the chance to watch it, do - but watch it somewhere where the sound is turned up, and you cannot look away or glance at your phone or go and get something from the fridge when it gets too much.
(It turns out that Ugo Ulive, like myself, directed in El Galpon and for La Comedia. Jorge Blanco also had one play produced by La Comedia before he left Uruguay. It makes one wonder what might have been. These days in this country, the cinema and the theatre have almost no intercambio. It’s one thing or the other.)
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