2 Moments, 4 Versions (2025).
Directed by Jorge Luis Villacorta Santamato
To prestylize reality prior to tackling it amounts to dodging tne problem.The problem is to manipulate and shoot unstylized reality in such a way that the result has style. This is a proposition no less legitimate and no less difficult that any proposition in the orlder arts.
STYLE AND MEDIUM IN THE MOTION PICTURES [1934]
https://www.dst.org.nz/transformfilm/panofsky.pdf
https://monoskop.org/images/1/14/Panofsky_Erwin_1934_1966_Style_and_Medium_in_the_Motion_Pictures.pdf
However, if commercial art be defined as all art not primarily produced in order to gratify the creative urge of its maker buy primarily intended to meet the requirements of a patron or a buying public, it must be said that noncommercial art is the exception rather than the rule, and a fairly recent and not always felicitous exception at that. While it is true that commercial art is always in danger of ending up as a prostitute, it is equially true than noncommercial art is always in danger of ending up as an old maid. Noncommercial art has given us Seurat's "Grande Jatte" and Shakespeare's sonnets, but also much that is esoteric to the point of incommunicability.
Erwin Panofsky
STYLE AND MEDIUM IN THE MOTION PICTURES [1934]
The people who live in a particular society learn from that society according to the social conditions in which they were born. If someone was born in a place with notorious economic capital, what this person learned about the general economy was from the practice of the place where he was born. His ideas about the economy are the cultural capital that corresponds to that economic position. The kind of people this person meets is conditioned by that social position. Everything that identifies that person as a member of a social position (activities, clothes, gadgets, haircut styles, the relation between his weight and his height, mannerisms, pronunciation, vocabulary, etc.) becomes a symbol of such a position.
A symbolic producer is conditioned by its social origin. The symbolic producer's objective is to accumulate capital in a particular field of symbolic production. An "artist" intends to be recognized as an "artist" in the "art field" or field of art production. An artistic style will have specific levels of recognition in different positions within the art field. The artists occupying positions in the field of art production create symbols conditioned by their social origins. These symbols are not immediately recognized as "100% artworks" by the members of the field, even when they may effectively function as symbols of social origin. So, the field of art production is a place where the symbolic producers show their symbolic proposals, aspiring to have them recognized as "art" by other symbolic producers. Naturally, due to the different tastes, partially a product of social origins, it is not possible to obtain a total consensus. An unpopular style may be promoted with financial means as an "exclusive piece of art." It may become a symbol of exclusive consumption, even though it does not guarantee its total acceptance in the whole field of art production. It will be valuable in the social position that consumes symbolic productions as symbols of "exclusive consumption." It is possible that such consumers do not have the cultural capital to express why that artpiece has "artistic value" even though they may understand that it is a symbol of their social position.
Historically, at the international level, artistic styles have been used as symbols of socioeconomic systems. Let's mention "Socialist Realism", officially sanctioned by the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. The people in charge of psychological warfare in the United States, among other styles, promoted "Abstract Expressionism" because the American experts assumed that the style could not be politically weaponized by the experts working in the Soviet Union. At the same time, the style allowed positions with more economic capital to have an artistic taste different from those with less capital within the US. In fact, American artists practicing "Abstract Expressionism" within the US were repressed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as "Communist" suspects.
Within this historical context, it seems original that an artisanal movie like "2 Moments, 4 Versions" (2025), directed by Jorge Luis Villacorta Santamato, intends to combine the two styles: "Socialist Realism" and "Abstract Expressionism." At least, it is what the movie director-writer-producer-editor-protagonist thinks. The images show that their Socialist Realism portion depicts one character instead of a collective or a recognizable leader. So, the most minimalist section (when it comes to editing or camera movement) is more petit bourgeois than Socialist. From this last perspective, the lonely character may be a representation of petit bourgeois daily alienation. The most edited movie section is not abstract enough to be part of the Abstract Expressionism style. The source images are recognizable even when they are superimposed and their colors have been altered. The realistic touch is all over the formally expressive segment. Technically, it would be possible to create abstract images by pixelating the source footage. A collectivistic feeling may be achieved by having more characters behaving as a collective.
So, the style doesn't qualify as "Socialist Realism" or "Abstract Expressionism". It is a petit bourgeois "Realist Expressionism" or an "Expressionist Realism." I would discard "Expressionism" alone because paintings in such a style have more fluid qualities. Within the film production field, "German Expressionism" uses distorted sets and makeup, techniques absent here. The film is composed of both styles, "realism" and "expressionism", in a way that seems pedagogical: out of four parts, the first one is what a camera produces, the second one alters the color in different sections and lasts the same as the first part, the third one intends to create feeling with editing techniques and evident color distorsion and its duration is longer than the previous two parts considered individually, the fourth and last part, the shortest one (three minutes), is the most abstract one. The apparently random audiovisual flow suggests uneasiness through the music, images, and sounds. By watching the movie, it is possible to notice that the second, third, and fourth parts are byproducts of the preceding ones. The filmmaking is not hiding the procedure, which seems to be a pedagogical approach more than a commercial one that would try to nourish an illusion of uniqueness or strangeness for the final product.
If the symbolic production is related to social positions, to what social position is attached this symbolic product? It is petit bourgeois, yes. One that moves between individuality and even more individuality. The character's "ridiculous behavior" in the first and second segments may be appreciated by social agents who would enjoy degrading someone from the position they assume the protagonist occupies. They would be located at the symbolic "petit bourgeois left." The third and fourth segments would be enjoyed by social agents who pay attention to editing style, images, sounds, and music. These consumers have the advantage of being detached from the protagonist as a symbol of social position because the audiovisual flow becomes the protagonist. They are at the symbolic "petit bourgeois right." Here we have two different publics, a situation that may be considered a problem from a commercial perspective. Thus, the film doesn't have a commercial intention but a scholarly one: it describes a procedure before exploiting an aesthetic effect in a monetary sense. Who thinks that a movie is a tool that increases "rationality"? A nerd, someone on the spectrum, the social one. From a marketing viewpoint, both kinds of audience will be partially satisfied or partially dissatisfied.
What do we do? Who is going to explain to the "audiovisual artist" that he should remove his didactic intentions from his evidently explanatory project? Spectators with less scholarly capital are not interested in creating audiovisual products! They want effects! Corrosive, sarcastic ones or stylistic ones! Not even people with scholarly jobs truly pay attention to artistic methods because they prefer to analyze the final product. By interviewing the filmmaker, who happens to be me, I learned that he imagines he is applying the model described in the article "The structure of the French literary field during the German Occupation (1940–1944): a multiple correspondence analysis" by Gisèle Sapiro. Jorge Luis Villacorta Santamato provided a quote from such a scholarly article:
"Specific recognition by peers paves the way to long-term consecration, as opposed to present institutional consecration that is associated with temporal power."
So, this guy makes his movies to be considered "an audiovisual artist" or "filmmaker" by similar symbolic producers and ignores the general public. His sectarian tendencies appear clearly to him. Let's wait and see what happens.
Jorge Luis Villacorta Santamato
Art Historian, PhD
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2 Moments, 4 Versions (2025). Trailer (3 minutes).
Directed by Jorge Luis Villacorta Santamato
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2 Moments, 4 Versions (2025). Full movie (1:10:40).
Directed by Jorge Luis Villacorta Santamato
<iframe src="https://www.imdb.com/videoembed/vi3254896665" allowfullscreen width="240" height="180"></iframe>
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