Venezuela

Postales de Leningrado

Postales de Leningrado

A Scene from New Venezuelan Film

By Jeffrey Cedeño

The 2007 Venezuelan film “Postales de Leningrado”—postcards from Leningrad— mingles history and politics to pose a question about identity—the identity of the children of those men and women who opted to join the guerrilla struggle in Venezuela in the mid-20th century, just when the nation was trying to reestablish democracy after the Marcos Pérez Jiménez  dictatorship (1952-1958). Venezuelan film director Mariana Rondón’s full-length feature won the Grand Prize El Abrazo for best film in Festival de Biarritz last year.

Postales de Leningrado portrays the history of a young woman guerrilla who, as a subversive in the 1960s, has to give birth while she is still clandestine. However—and just by coincidence—her daughter is the first to be born on Mother’s Day in 1966; thus, the mother’s photo appears published in the newspaper. This maximum exposure contrasts with her furtive life, as parents and children while fleeing from the militia adopt an anonymous life, filled with threats and fear. The daughter is now the protagonist who narrates the tale and whose perspective testifies to events that have never really ended, but always only have been interrupted and changed. The girl’s narrative encompasses the story of ther cousin Teo, as the children wait for postcards from Leningrad as proof that their parents are down from the mountains. The children  take turns as protagonists in the story; in their fanciful world of games, desires, hiding places and pseudonyms, they recreate the clandestine adventures of their guerrilla parents and nurture a fantastic world of superheroes able to (con)fuse fiction and reality in a life that tries to defend itself on a daily basis  from fear and death.

Rondón brings us close to a past that is not consumed with legal or moralizing grudge matches. Rather, the director demonstrates a vital fragility that freely allows the yearned after and delayed revelation of a self that, in order to survive  in the midst of ideological and military confrontation, does not hesitate to disguise itself. At the beginning of the film, the girl’s first declaration is “The time of year I like the best is Carnival because when we disguise ourselves, it’s as if we were hiding,  because no one can catch us. My cousin Teo, who is older than me, doesn’t like to dress up in costumes; he says that the best way not to get caught is never to tell anyone your real name. I do tell people my real name; my favorite costume is the Invisible Man, but I like to get dressed up in different costumes. The truth is that Teo likes this costume too, but he says that what he really likes is getting the psotcards from Leningrad that his mom sends.” In the background, the viewers sees images of a Caracas Carnival in the 1960s. Postales de Leningrado portrays identity through fiction: to avoid the risks of being captured, the guerrillas and their children must mask themselves with one name after another; the children dream of the furtive heroics of a man-frog and the invisible man, longing to encounter their parents again in Leningrad—a place dreamed about by Teo, a filmlike space desired and materialized by Rondón. These fictions evoke—they make return—an absence: that of the always postponed family life, that of a childhood that wishes to explain itself in order to put together the pieces of vital history.

Postales de Leningrado indeed offers us the autobiographic and family history of Mariana Rondón; the film is a way to share and experience, from this vantage point, the narrative scenes established through a historic and fair communitarian sense prioritize—beyond fear and threats—the question of identity, a question about the forms of discourse that we construct not only when we give ourselves a name, but also seek out a place within the social space. In its aesthetic and multiple dialogues, the film clearly demnstrates possibility of affirming life: fear and risk; fantasy and heroism; violence and death, story and image. in the middle of anonymity,  the childish imaginary world and the pop aestheitc of the 1960s, the film through a language of borders and narrative flashbacks in an “artesanal form of communication,” as Walter Benjamin would put it, between fiction, documentary and reality, between the the comic and the devastated, between photography and pictorial intervention, but also between rationality and craziness, between commitment and betrayal, between life and death, city and mountain, , Rondón’s film tells us, altogether, that this heterogeneity—the heterogeneity of life itself—makes up the name, the identity, that it is not only a way of being, but a way of knowing fragmented in the past, present and also in the future, thus the interrupted, uneven and interwoven storytelling of the girl who at once narrates and testifies to history.

The search for and use of multiple expressions of media thus becomes a clear resource for knowledge and self-knowledge; the girl narrator intervenes and manipulates the film image and, in this way, operates on the very act of narration and its possibility of creating identities, all of which inscribes an exercise of individual and collective responsibility capable of reconstructing historical memory. The past constitutes a legacy with which the children must dialogue and confront, but this past is anchored in the present and concentrates, without a doubt, in a question of identity not so much to demand an answer or express a doubt, but to confirm what is said and done.  Postales de Leningrado is without a doubt a place where naming takes place, far beyond anonymity, uprooting, and disappearance; it safeguards the self in history....that other history.

Jeffrey Cedeño is Professor in the Department of Languages and Literatures in the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas. He has published several articles on literature and Latin American culture in specialized magazines in Latin America, the United States and Europe, including  "Venezuela in the Twenty-first Century: 'New Men, New Ideals, New Procedures?'".Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (March, 2006).