Could you tell us about the way you met Ricardo Rifo? How and when was the idea of making this film with him born?
We met by accident, in the middle of an isolated beach in Chile. A remote, rural zone I had never been to before. Ricardo was walking in the distance, he was gathering seaweed, and, little by little, I saw him getting closer. He was with a pack of dogs, many of them. I was with a friend. His long journey towards us felt rather troubling. It seemed to me that we wanted to talk to each other. Our meeting was very magnetic. He told me a lot of things and, ended up revealing one more: he had followed a dog instructor course in Santiago forty years before, with a woman with a German name and last name. I had a very vague idea of who Ingrid Olderöck was. I took his picture with an analogue camera and kept his number. We established a relationship over the phone. His voice, muffled and sometimes unintelligible, became familiar. I paid him several visits. There, I met his family and got to know the entirety of the coast area. I started producing Super8 footage of him, of the landscapes. These records, along with the phone calls, made up the base of the research material. This first step lasted four years, but his testimony did not go further than just anecdotes. I was writing speculative films in constant and never-ending elaboration. Until 2022, when he decided to go further within his narrative. That is when everything seemed to get together.
Could you tell us a little more about this impetus?
Ricardo entrusted us with sensible information, which he had kept secret for 40 years, and that was haunting him. There’s a reason for which, when we met on this beach, he told me, without knowing me, that he had worked for a torturer. This secret is like his own silence prolonged in time. But is it also the inability of others, ourselves, to prepare ourselves to listen. Lost voices abound. And these people, accomplices of the regime, tend to alleviate their responsibility and wash their hands from it. He communicated this quite tricky information, after four years of talking, in front of the camera and with explicit consent. I had to consult a lawyer to know how to handle this information and finally decided to share it with the justice system. A legal investigation was opened about the Ingrid Olderöck house, and from there, a new film started to take shape, called Exterra, currently in development, that I am co-directing with Celeste Rojas Mugica.
His account follows asynchronously the off footage and only reveals snippets of information, until the final inserts clarify the context. How and why did you build the narrative in that way? Does this “dead tongue” giving its title to the film refer to the inability to speak?
The film is about the difficulty faced by a man—and potentially of any human being—to express himself about himself and to put words on what he has seen and lived. The film proposes a journey through agrestic landscapes, some still wild, others already destroyed by forest extraction. It is an abstraction of these forty years of silence: Ricardo suffered a facial paralysis which took his voice from him. He remained with a dead tongue. This event coincides with the time when, in 1983, he decides to escape from his work with Olderöck. There was a long process of rehabilitation to be able to communicate again. He was isolated from the world and from speech for five years. Even today, he has a speech disorder, but a vital need pushed him to find his voice again. To me, it seems very symbolic and courageous, linked to his own capacity to articulate a language as a living exercise of memory.
His voice seems to come from phone recordings. Which choices guided this processing of sound? In which direction did you work the rest of the score, which is very elaborate?
Our relationship was shaped, at first, through the phone. His voice imprinted to my ears with this tessitura. There was distance made from interference, sometimes even unstable from the precarious telecommunication infrastructure in his isolated terroir, which, in a figurative sense, is also what is happening with his tongue. When, during editing, we tried it with his clear voice, without any meddling from the phone, proximity became embarrassing, his voice too present, too neat, as if the revealing of his identity did not make sense within the speech anymore: the character moves, expresses himself in the gray zones of memory. The film engages in this vague, contradictory, hard to moderate position. The processing of sound, in that sense, emphasizes the illegible, the fragile and the spectral.
The materiality of 16mm is essential to the film. Can you talk about this choice of format, and of black and white? What did the use of film allow you to do?
Ever since I started this field research, all of the images have been film. Like the phone, the photochemical texture of the image has moulded my relationship to the material and the character. There is an aesthetic decision-making process within the representation, which is already here through its physical medium. The organic vitality of celluloid gives way to volumes of information in the images, where alterations and grain arise. In a black and white format, these alterations foster the elusive nature of the speech and the own darkness of the character. In this regard, the film is allowed to experiment with the camera’s double exposition, the use of physical margins of the film rolls where many shapes and aberrations out of the image’s control appear.
Between long, fixed shots and rapid and chaotic sequences, the film follows a fragmented writing which sometimes seems to translate the idea of the unspeakable. How did you work on the editing?
The editing is built around a distance oscillating between the footage and the witness document. At times, these elements almost seem to meet, then grow apart and sometimes even run into each other in a constant back and forth. The formatting of the voice over and the footage is also part of a pact built with Ricardo, delimited by the existing distance between us, but also by the desire to meet, to discuss about the project. The processing of his voice during editing, because of the delicate information he is sharing forty years later, was made with a lot of care, grounding itself in the trust we had developed. From this voice, a cinematographic narrative emerges, and deploys: before the difficulty of talking about institutional violence and the horror in dictatorship by a major part of complicit citizens in our country, it is necessary to establish a dialogue, to question, to persevere. That is what this film is: a stubborn urge to follow and track, in the darkness of the forest, the inner voice of a person.
The setting of the film, which is also where the character lives, shows a landscape destroyed by single-crop farming. Why was it important for you to show this?
The area where the farmer lives is host to an abundant and fertile native vegetation, which was destroyed by massive single-crop farming plantations: pine and eucalyptus. All of this area of Chile is known as the “green desert”, because of the abusive use of land by forestry companies, making it entirely unusable. In these same areas, there are increasingly constant and uncontrollable forest fires, many of which are provoked by these very companies, in order to handle the issue of plagues and epidemics, or to access culture in virgin forest terrains. This creates extremely violent landscapes. At the same time, Ricardo has an inner wisdom about nature and lives on what the earth gives him. His job consists mostly of looking after several fields appointed for single-crop farming production. That is to say he protects a deregulated extractivist industry threatening his own conditions of subsistence. These landscapes represent an institutional violence and the culture of impunity in Chile: not only is there a disproportionate abuse conducted against the people and the land, but the same impoverished social base is utilized as the protective structure for a system of violence and impunity. The silence pacts, concerning the crimes committed during the dictatorship, act in the same manner—and Ricardo is proof of it. Extractivism is uprooting, even until the language.
Interview by Louise Martin Papasian
