A Paper Tiger (2008)

a.k.a Un Tigre De Papel

Director: Luis Ospina

Screenplay: Luis Ospina

Luis Ospina is a director I have no knowledge, one of the many introduced to me through MUBI's streaming service and gives them their wings, because even if they are temporary their retrospectives of directors especially those difficult to see the work of are usually fascinating. Colombia for cinema is also a marginalised country in spite of its history of films, not easily accessible for whatever questionable reason; one of the few prominent works to get a lot more Western film publications on being Embrace of the Serpent (2015), and not a lot many else before. A Paper Tiger is a film from Ospina, a director in his homeland who is prolific without many sadly knowing of his existence outside that country, this particular film a peculiar creation regardless of its country of origins and an ambitious project for anyone to create.

It's a documentary about artist Pedro Manrique Figueroa, whose main work was paper collage but over the decades, during Colombia's tumultuous political eras and Figueroa's involvement in Communism, bore witness to the rise of Communist China, to conflict with his comrades over the purpose of art, to getting into trouble with the FBI by stamping American dollar bills with "Fake" to undermine their use.

Figueroa also doesn't exist. He's managed to get a textless credit on the Museum of Modern Arts' website, but Figueroa is a mere creation of Luis Ospina for a mockumentary. It's a testament to A Paper Tiger, however, that it's pulled off with genius. Even a slightly ridiculous tangent, that he had a cameo in Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust (1980) as a member of the cannibal tribe, is built on context which makes sense, that Figueroa was kicked out of a Mormon group for experimenting with psychedelics in the middle of the jungle, half mad and a mass of hair, all with the director going as far as hiring (amateur?) actors from the region of the jungle the film is said to be shot in to play translators, talking about the film was utterly lying about the tribal community and building on Figueroa getting the Amazon native cast to distrust the Italian production crew.

This is where the film succeeded for me - a) there's an underlying intelligent complexity, and b) Luis Ospina acquired the resources to actually pull it off, arguably more complex than some well known mockumentries as he has an international cast of talking heads to play fake figures. It does look like a nineties documentary, despite being made in the late 2000s, but I won't complain as it's a film made to look perfectly like an actual documentary. He also cast well in mind that Pedro Manrique Figueroa, as a guy who travelled around the world, has a list of interesting interviewees to talk about him, from an Indian colleague he studied with who recounts the paranoia he had in protecting a sack of potatoes, only for them to be for a recipe, a son of a Chinese colleague and friend who found subversions of Maoist work in paper collage hidden among his father's possessions after his death, or an English woman our elusive protagonist had a brief romance with who is outspoken and charming, only willing to speak of the more scintilating details of the romance to her dog only. Figueroa even though he is a missing enigma, a hollow form in the centre of this only seen vaguely in some materials, becomes a powerful spectre as a result of this structure.

Production wise, it looks the part. I admit I'm not a fan of talking head documentaries baring some cases as unless they are great tools of research, they are cinematically bland. Here however with a project that's openly fictional and using the style as an artistic format, it does the talking head interviews and archive footage choices so well I come to appreciate the art form of having to create even a fictional biopic, wishing only documentaries on art were as detailed and with multiple chapters as this fake one does. It helps as well as the art of Figueroa's paper collage is also accomplished perfectly, to the point it could be hung in galleries in its pop art sights that involve religion to communism, being a nun with Che Guevara tattooed to her bared chest to purgatory being having to read Chairman Mao's Little Red Book among the fiery coals.

Many questions, not all about Figueroa, are found and where A Paper Tiger gets interesting, as to what it is all supposed to mean. A Zelig figure, Zelig a 1983 Woody Allen film where he created a chameleonic character who was there in various historically significant moments blending in everywhere, Pedro Manrique Figueroa is there for a considerable part of Columbian culture and the world from the forties to the end of the eighties. He is eye view to Columbia's left and right wing changes, is the older man covered in hair when psychedelics alongside rock and nudity became popular in the country, and is part alongside the talking heads of the influences that took over, from both a Communist perspective to landscape changing events across the world like the Vietnam War. Communism has a sordid underbelly that makes the film's high view of it problematic and uncomfortable for me when the mockumentry takes on pro views - Pol Pot, Stalinist purges, Mao's purges - but where it deals with the fractures the film doesn't take punches either.

You get to Chinese communism and the original Communist fracture, to the point of the subversive distortions of Maoist imagery that the interviewee brought up, and by the late quarter A Paper Tiger's narrative arch becomes an existential crisis for Pedro Manrique Figueroa. The issue that plagued real life artist, that Communism eventually became that art should serve merely the state and "Social realism", eventually leads Figueroa to break away, leading to the absurd lost eighties of stumbling onto the Cannibal Holocaust set, or an actor playing an FBI agent with features blurred showing one of Figueroa's tampered dollar bills he was caught working on.

The film does, of course, leave the mystery of what happened to Pedro Manrique Figueroa in the open. Maybe he willingly encased himself in a museum and became a mummy, as one interviewee suggests, or is still alive? Whatever the idea, Luis Ospina intended our unseen protagonist to represent the virtues in his views, the political shitraker whose art became entirely individualistic to want to improve society around him by tearing it up. It's an idealised view, even here Figueroa with a sense that he'd be a nightmare at times (like the bag of potatoes anecdote) but ultimately a good heart. This is a film which from Luis Ospina clearly showed what he beleived in, the director passing in 2019, with passion following individual freedom against giant groups and governments. Unlike Zelig who was so ordinary he transformed, fitting to Woody Allen's stage persona of neurosis and feeling small, Luis Ospina's fictional mirror is always focused and creative, just thrown between events like a working Ping-Pong ball. His creator's mockumentary on him is inspired as a result.

Abstract Spectrum: Playful

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None