Author wanted: Analysis of critical texts about The Green Wall movie (Armando Robles Godoy, 1970)

Abstract

This paper aims to identify some lines of discussion and critical appraisal around Peruvian movie The Green Wall (Robles Godoy, 1970). The contents of two texts written by Desiderio Blanco and Isaac León Frías in 1970 —the first published in Oiga magazine and the second in Hablemos de Cine magazine— are contrasted with two texts written by Sebastián Pimentel for Godard! magazine in 2005 and 2010. The results of analysis are grouped around three dimensions: references about cinematographic staging —shots and camera movements, sound, character performances and film edition as temporal resource—, symbolic constructions —the meaning of Tingo Maria’s jungle in the film and the confrontation between bureaucracy and main character as individual human being— and authorial condition of Armando Robles Godoy as filmmaker. Analysis allows us to conclude that issues identified in critical evaluation’s texts of La muralla verde, as well as in Robles Godoy’s film work, respond to different conceptual conditionings, ideological substrates, cinema approach methods and diverse development’s stages of cinematographic art. Many films, as it happens with any form of artistic manifestation, can be resignified over the years and in the course of time. Thus, certain elements not valued in its time can berediscovered later.