Cinema
The Blue Lobster
La langosta azul
Álvaro Cepeda Samudio · 1954
Synopsis
A foreign secret agent, known as the gringo, arrives in a fishing village on the Caribbean coast to check whether the lobsters caught there are radioactive. While he rests at the hotel, a cat steals his. He goes out to look for it, and the camera follows him through streets crushed by heat: a dog, a woman cooking, children and their kites, fishermen at work. A sorcerer passes by. The investigation comes apart as the village comes into view.
Context
Shot in 1954 at La Playa, near Barranquilla, in sixteen millimetre on reversal film, silent, by four members of the group that met in the city's cafés, among them a future Nobel Prize winner in literature. The story comes from a dream of one of them, who wrote the screenplay and also played a part in it. The painter Cecilia Porras made the costumes and acted, and the photographer hired for the production stills ended up in the leading role. It is an avowed homage to Buñuel. Long impossible to find, it was rediscovered, restored and shown in New York.
Who it is for
Twenty-nine minutes, silent and in black and white. One must accept that the investigation leads nowhere: the village is the subject.
Prizes and reception
The founding work of Colombian experimental cinema, and the only known surrealist film from the country. Since shown at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.