VIOLENCE AND ENDURANCE: Foundational resource of masculine identity and faith, La Fortaleza de Andrés Torres
“What is endurance but the human substitute for faith?”
The discourse dictates that which religious vocation endurance is tested in adversity, in the journey. The fixing principle of experience is endurance, resistance, the art of enduring, of enduring whatever comes however it comes; LA FORTALEZA: debut film by Bumangués director Andrés Torres, an 84-minute documentary piece that reads the adventures an
Much of the film we follow Jorge who follows his Atlético Bucaramanga soul with fury and ardor and who very soon embarks on the adventure of Los Muleros: fans who travel along the roads hanging from trucks and mules to witness the matches of their team regardless of distance and conditions.
The concept of Los Muleros underlines not only a resource of group identity, a micro-story as a reserve of meaning for life, but also a very particular way of resistance and masculine identity, both built on belonging (as a collective with a clear socio-territorial matrix and the subsequent defense of that territoriality) and the reference responding to global symbolic ideas, in this case to the establishment and hegemony of masculinity at the hands of the molding institution that is Football.
The devotion of these memorable characters imbues the film with a sense of “one’s own” and a very clear object of alterity. That which is “proper” should not only be followed but fervently defended. The Muleros, fans or “barristas” act accordingly with this demand and build a solid way of administering this power that has been symbolically granted to them. Not only are devotion and sincerity required, which is tested by the intensity of their passion, but also violence and rudeness turn out to be foundational resources of identity, an identity of shock. “When this appropriation with the “something external” is impossible, then I experience it as violence” Byong Chul Han.
The overexposure of this adventure of traveling at the mercy of trucks, hunger, cold and the dangers of the roads also follows a complex path of identifications. The symbolism of these trips is not minor, it frames the perhaps adolescent and/or human need to enroll in a unit, in an image.
In one of the screenings of the documentary, the brother of one of the protagonists, responding to the personal question about the bars and Los Muleros, replied: “In life I have only had two mirrors, my brother in jail and my cousin dead, there are no more exits. , the street is no longer for me” thus provoking a sensation of youth as a liminality to overcome with time.
G.S. Hall, renowned American pedagogue and psychologist of the 19th century, compared the life cycles of the human being with the evolution of civilizations and in his speeches he made adolescence the equivalent of barbarism. The youth finds in this sporting ritual and gesture the perfect operation of affiliation, identification and that to seal this link it is necessary to set in motion a device of power that seeks purity in the collective and in the represented masculinity, a purity that corresponds to the “I” and a necessary otherness to discard, this otherness engenders a violence that mutates throughout the film between literal and symbolic, visible and invisible, frontal and viral, physical and psychic.
“…Masculinity is achieved after a fight (against oneself) that often involves physical or mental pain. As Nicole Loraux says referring to the beginnings of the Roman Republic, “virility is shown in an open body.” The warrior’s scars testify to wounds and spilled blood, and prove the value of man and citizen…” (Elisabeth Badinter, 1993)
The rejection of the film and the camera to the opacity of the football experience is definitive, the integration and adherence of the spectator to the “band” is imperative, the camera is one of them, we are one of them, there is no opportunity to distance nor for alterity, we cannot be others. It delves into every description and practical exercise of the muleteer as an event but actively dialoguing with an intimate form of spectacle; The director Andrés Torres says that the realistic, poignant and lively performance of the young people in front of the camera responded to a complete immersion of the filmmakers in the daily life of their lives but also to a large extent to the automatic performative attitude that they add to their person in the rite of the parties and the constant search for prestige and respect in the symbolic confrontations in defense of their fans. Each game and meeting is a new opportunity to renew loyalty and resistance, especially masculine, in BODY and SOUL.
The deployment of all the skills and abilities to arrive on time to encourage its Mother Ship: “El Leopardo” avoiding the control entities work as a counterpoint and bold commentary towards the same ones that it hasabandoned to this adolescence, lost (found?) in the passion of football. It is clear that the foundational resource of order in this small world is not the police authorities or the politicians who are openly represented as little more than opportunistic clowns who give the perfect opportunity to young people to assert their presence and power in the world, his little world. The communicative void of the controlling entities is filled in the film with scathing and witty visual and dramatic accusations, “The political void is filled by the spectacle of staging” wrote Byong Chul Han in Topology of Violence.
The life of a Mulero and a ferocious fanatic becomes an eternal Rite of Passage where it is worth “killing or dying” and that inevitably constitutes an active mechanism for the construction of individual and collective identity and that this identity is appreciated as a matter of performance that is staged on national highways.
The scenes are memorable (although they seem trivial) the muleteers tattoo symbols of their team on their skin over and over again, enduring the pain and the wait. A religious community wages wars, travels unimaginable distances, exercises violence and accepts violence for its convictions, consequently, it acts politically. It is not less important to understand the passion, the ardor and finally the mimesis that they seek with their desires and that lead to conflict, the drive for belonging and death that surrounds them, the violence due to lack of communication and a religious cry asking for something to believe in. and unconsciously exercising a political act.