Nadaísmo on film: Violence, originality and the archive in Paraíso (2006)

The experimental film Paraíso (Felipe Guerrero, Colombia, 2006) adapts and translates through time and media the work of the 1950s–1960s countercultural and vanguard literary movement of nadaísmo, specifically the verse of nadaísta poet Jaime Jaramillo Escobar. Merging contemporary images filmed in a now-obsolete super-8mm format with archive footage evoking Colombia’s past, Paraíso takes up nadaísmo’s critical poetics forged in the long wake of the Bogotazo of 1948, and places them in dialogue with the variously violent and utopian actions and discourses of twenty-first century Colombia. As well as suggesting temporal and topographical compression, the film’s juxtaposition of visual and audiovisual modes, gauges, formats and colour-schemes renders in film form Jaramillo’s call for poetic language to be ‘supple, slippery, undulating’. Visual and written poetics thus combine to undermine the fixity of thought that engenders violence at distinct historical junctures. At the same time, they hint, with profound ambiguity, at the possibility of imagining Colombia as the ‘paradise’ of the film’s title.