Muchedumbre, The Crowd

I was on a road trip when I stopped for a meal. Before me stretched a vast, arid canyon of rock and dust, and far in the distance, buried deep within that rugged landscape, rose what seemed to be a church. I asked the shopkeeper what it was, and he told me that down below lay Jordán, a ghost town devastated by the violence of the 1950s, reachable only on foot by way of a nineteenth-century stone path. His story brought to my mind Comala, the town in Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo: a place haunted by specters, inhabited by memories and traces of an ancestral, almost archetypal violence. That special connection, between a fascination with a ghost town first encountered in literature and my own search, as a filmmaker, for a way to confront the narrative  of violence, was what led me down that path from which there was no return.  

It’s the effect of trauma. I arrived at one of the many towns haunted by the constant presence of their past. People still feel a deep fear of talking about what happened, because even though the physical violence, the murders, and the massacres have stopped, there is now a psychological terror. The same people who perpetrated that violence are still there, owning the farms and the land. So, people end up feeling dazed every time the past is examined; you can even see it in their bodies, in their expressions, in their gestures. And at first, that frustrated me a lot; I thought that this impossibility would mean I’d never be able to finish it, but then I realised that what I was filming were the effects of terror, how it had penetrated  their bodies and shaped their human experiences. 

At first, people were always a bit wary; naturally, they wondered what this man was doing in these parts, who he worked for, what he wanted, and who he was looking for. But I have a relationship with places and people that develops over time; I always go back as many times as necessary, I enjoy the process and spending time with the people I film.

On one of those trips, after I kept insisting, a peasant  told me, “Stop asking questions. They’ve already made a movie here. Get out of here.” At first I thought that was the end of my own idea—there was nothing original left; someone else had discovered the tragedy of that town before I did. Then they showed me a photo of one of the actors, and I began searching for him. Months passed before I found Javier Gutierrez, the director, who, surprised, told me that no one knew he existed.  

The film got lost in the editing process and he never finished it, so when I told him what I was filming, he handed me all the raw footage so I could do something with it. Now, his unfinished film wasn’t exactly about the town—in fact, he didn’t even know what had happened there—but the similarities were obvious. His fiction recreated the violence of the 1950s and the bloody clash between bandits and landowners. Part of the footage had been shot in the town and the rest in a theater.

Amid the images of the village, there appears that desolate, cursed landscape, with houses in ruins and overgrown with weeds, inhabited by paramilitaries who watch day and night as mules pass by carrying the dead. On stage, torture and massacres take place between the two sides, and bodies and body parts are scattered across the stage.  

While my material was filled with situations dominated by silence and oblivion, that fiction explicitly reveals all that unspeakable violence, where bodies ceased to be merely victims of the bipartisan war and became a territory inscribed with terror. I understood that his film was a document and a memory of that geography and its ruin. And although the formal and aesthetic intentions were very different, the question that ran through us was the same. How to film violence, and in some way, we both felt that we had failed.

So I began to play with the materials, to explore them, to see their failures  as possibilities, and to arrange them in a way that allows them to relate organically through a narrative—which is my voice and my experience. That is why in Muchedumbre, the present and the past influence each other, merging into a single flow of images that come and go, that reappear. 

Actually, my Mini DV footage was recorded the first time I arrived in the village in 2009. I decided to include it because it’s part of a process of discovery; it’s my own archive and my memory of meeting the people there. I’m not interested in marking a past or a present through formats or their textures, so the fact that all the materials coexist and interact with one another at the same time relates more to a timeless sense of the narrative. 

In Muchedumbre there is a more circular perception of time; we always return to the same thing but in a different way, and in that sense, both my own images and the found ones were reinterpreted and manipulated to construct this idea. 

When I began to develop my character, who wanders along that tangled, endless path, I thought of images from the past as the footprints of my experience. In those footprints lie the stories I had heard, which took on new variations every time I returned to the village.  So from the editing stage onward, we sought to create that effect: the filmmaker walking a path and leaving footprints, and by retracing them, revisiting the stories, acknowledging the intentions of the past, and confronting his own wandering. The footprint reveals the process of making a film about what remains unfinished, because there are stories that cannot always be told, and accepting that failure is what ultimately allowed me to finish the film. 

It all starts with the question of how to film or represent the violence. 

And this has to do with what has happened systematically in my country; it is a deeply rooted violence that keeps repeating itself, and while the triggers may vary over time, there is a structural issue that we have been unable to change. 

Recognising this complexity—where our history is marked by a kind of loop—led me, in the final stage of the editing, to develop strategies that would capture this cyclical nature. 

The materials we worked with were all scraps, fragments, and unfinished ideas, so we had to account for that as well—for that fragility and that difficulty in telling the unspeakable. Rather than offering a conclusion, this is a film that opens up and raises questions about form.

So we built narrative elements that would contribute to this sense of the unfinished—such as traveling down a path riddled with traps where there seems to be no end, the world of that ghostly, ruined town trapped in an endless cycle of terror and trauma, where my character, the filmmaker-narrator, tries again and again to recount in different ways the violent events that destroyed that town, but without ever reaching a conclusive point. It is the path of wandering. Because if violence in Colombia insists on repeating itself, how can today’s filmmaker break free from that cycle and avoid becoming entangled in the documentation or reconstruction of a repetition? In that sense, Muchedumbre captures, in its various layers and folds, not only an isolated history of violence in Colombia, but also a reflection on its representation.