La Casa Lobo feels essential to this project not just because it’s the reason I ended up in grad school, structuring this weird web to pass off as a thesis——but because it builds art around the manipulation and grafting of inconsistent and incompatible realities. It shows the ways in which this unsettling not only constructs a new reality, but also constructs the buy-in for that new reality.
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Many of the cultural objects I examine throughout this project employ transmedia storytelling. I’m fascinated by the construction and assemblage of evidence to worldbuild.
La Casa Lobo does not use transmedia storytelling (in fact, in some important ways I think it undermines and rejects it), but it’s a really effective example of the way the tools of transmedia storytelling are employed to impact belief and to shift reality(s). The disembodied, all seeing voice of the narrator is not dissimilar from the implied ubiquity and all-knowingness of “Q”. The film’s presentation as found footage is not dissimilar from the presentation of The Blair Witch Project. The intentional blurring together and apart of realities to construct another separate reality (one with a designated puppeteer) is consistent.
Transmedia storytelling typically intentionally obscures its “game master(s)”. This can be a function of a collective, decentralized authorship (as with the Slenderman lore), but it can also be a function of hiding the intentions of the narrator(s) (as with QAnon, or even The Blair Witch Project)——which could range from getting you to engage with a franchise, to getting you to invest yourself in a dangerous ideology.
León and Cociña play with this: as La Casa Lobo opens, you see live action footage of cheerful Germans bottling honey and working the land. You’re told by a syrupy narrator in Spanish that what you’re about to watch is a film, “rescued from the vaults of our colony” to “dispel the horrible rumors that have stained our reputation”. Then, in a text slide, León and Cociña are credited as having “restored” the film, before opening into the animated portion. This implicates them in the storytelling, even if not as director/animators, and nods to the real-or-fabricated push and pull of the film.
This play is restricted to the confines of the film, though. They do not undermine, exaggerate, or disguise their role in the construction of the narrative outside of it. (For contrast, The Blair Witch Project’s marketing team had the actor/filmmakers marked as “missing, presumed dead” on IMDB, absented them from panels, and built the film’s website to be a collection of evidence pointing to the film being “real”).
León and Cociña have been nothing but transparent about everything that went into constructing their film. La Casa Lobo was even filmed in gallery spaces, where the public could see the literal architecture and structure of the narrative, and of León and Cociña’s practices.
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What La Casa Lobo does, for me, is offer a proximity to the real. By acknowledging the ways in which realities are constructed/layered/mutable, and by grafting those realities together, using a medium that is hyperreal and dense with artifact emotion, León and Cociña get close to that thing that I’m not sure we can understand.
After my first couple viewings of La Casa Lobo in 2020, while I was writing my early blog post about the film, I did some research about Colonia Dignidad. I watched a documentary (I can’t remember the name of it——it wasn’t the newer Netflix one, which I’ve yet to watch——I think it was something I found on YouTube) that featured interviews with survivors. It was heartbreaking. On its own, I don’t know that the stories would have stayed with me though. The harms perpetrated within the cult’s walls make an unfortunate amount of sense when you consider its position within histories of colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy, misogyny, and fascism. But La Casa Lobo did something to my insides. It pulled on the affective strands that tether me to the realities I touch, and to the realities that I will never/could never touch. And while it does that, León and Cociña gesture toward the multiple other constructed realities that the film is built upon; whether that’s the reality of cardboard and masking tape, or the reality of Colonia Dignidad.
Only through the grafting do we get a glimpse of what might be the real.