Las fuerzas

In filming jockeys from the 2015 cohort at the La Plata school in Argentina during their training and up to their first professional race, Paola Buontempo has, in a way, given us the reverse shot of Los Animales, her short film screened at the 2012 Cinéma du Réel, where the frame is used to convey the presence of caged animals kept apart from human society. The jockeys, often from landowning families where riding is passed down from father to son, are filmed during their training sessions in a manner that leaves the viewer wondering each time about the purpose of the exercise. Weigh-ins, hippology lessons, galloping on horse simulators to acquire the right body positions, an interview with a blaringly loud sportscaster, a furtive gesture to touch a Virgin Mary statue stationed in the corridor of the hippodrome… The sometimes clinical precision of the shots suggests that the apprenticeship primarily involves adjusting two complementary bodies, that of the animal, which is kept at a distance by the theorising and mechanical reproduction of the same movements, and that of the sportsman – fine-tuned and reduced to fitting dimensions, modelled down to his facial expressions, and enrolled in a system of simulation as fascinating as it is absurd – but which could conceivably reveal, under its atypical trappings, the truth of any learning process. (Charlotte Garson)