by Maria Bustillos
Every life, Epifanio said that night to Lalo Cura, no matter how happy it is, ends in pain and suffering.
Here is a fact that recontextualizes the crimes for us. The weight of the crimes, not only the crimes against the murdered women but against the guys in the Santa Teresa prison, the guys who are stuck in the corrupt police force, and the crimes of the mass society, crimes of enforced poverty and ignorance, begin to assume new and different proportions in this week’s section. As word of the crimes begins to spread, the whole world’s complicity begins to make itself felt.
The “snuff film” section speaks very clearly to this alteration. There is a real film called Snuff that was filmed in Argentina in 1971, that depicted a “Mansonesque murder cult.” The film was originally called Slaughter. The directors of the real film are Michael and Roberta Findlay. According to Wikipedia:
Independent low-budget distributor and sometime producer Allan Shackleton later re-released another version of the film, unbeknownst to the original filmmakers. Having just read a newspaper article on the rumor of snuff films being importer from South America, he decided to cash on the urban legend and added a new ending to the film in which a woman is brutally murdered by a film crew, supposedly the crew of Slaughter[2]. Filmed in a verite style by Simon Nuchtern, the new ending purported to show an actual murder. This new footage was spliced onto the end of Slaughter with an abrupt cut suggesting that the footage was unplanned and the murder authentic. This new version of the film was released under the title Snuff, with the tagline The film that could only be made in South America… where life is CHEAP
By this means and others that I’ll be getting to in the next few days, Bolaño demonstrates the involvement of pretty much everyone in the kind of mindset that would find the torture and murder of a woman entertaining.
