O No Coronado
- Craig Baldwin |
- 1992 |
- 40 minutes |
- COLOR |
- SOUND
Rental Format(s): 16mm film
This black-comic Conquistador chronicle aggressively reconstructs the 1540 Spanish invasion of those Pueblo Indian lands now known as the American Southwest through a multifarious, mixed-tense montage. Live-action vignettes are densely woven into wildly diverse "found" footage, video-to-film FX, and a time-warped musical mix, to create not only a sensual cinematographic fabric of allusion, gesture and landscape, but also a polysemic, post-colonial pastiche of critical perspectives on the Conquest outside of any one discourse. Animated graphics, collateral material and multiple voices interpenetrate the epic collage, conjugating a delirious, open-ended historiography that updates issues of imperialism, tourism, treaty rights and environmental protection from the 16th century to the present, and beyond.