PERIPHERAL PIRATES
Swashbuckling action, scoundrelly antics, and even tattered iconography are all mere ornaments of what the act of piracy actually entails. Rather, one deed embodies this infamous practice and encompasses its whole ethos: that of looking through the spyglass. It isn’t as flashy as high stakes fencing on the rigging. It isn’t as nuanced as the buccaneer’s code of conduct. And yet, without it, the pirate’s reason for being simply isn’t there. It’s by means of this seemingly innocuous motion, that of scanning the surrounding landscape, that the caricature of piracy becomes fully fledged and a character is built from action.
In Central America, just as in most other corners of the world labeled under the euphemism of “developing nation”, access to any filmmaking beyond shopping plaza multiplex cinema and lifeless algorithmic curation comes by blatant (and remorseless) infraction of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Cinematheques and arthouse cinemas are either non-existent, or deeply precarious and compromised to make ends meet. State support situates film among the lowest tiers of priority, butchering culture funds at every opportunity they get in the name of the austerity mantra. Central American cinephilia only gestates out of sheer force of will, taking the scattered insights of Mexican and South American publications, forums, and Letterboxd lists, and using them as a treasure map.
Usually, cinema establishes the POV of a “pirate scene”” strictly inside the wandering vessel. The quest, be it as a loot-thirsting endeavor or an exploratory inquiry into the unknown’s mystical allure, only starts once something tangible manifests within sight of the crow’s nest; an exotic object of desire, the evocation of value in its rarity. Piracy can be boiled down to this search for wishful possession of prized treasure, however, the place and conditions from where this desire comes fundamentally complicate the pirate’s perspective.
Canonical scenes paint the pirate ship as a violent force of anarchic extraction, bearer of an almost libertarian spirit of “free-for-all”. Its proceedings aren’t that far off of the officially-sanctioned uprooting of the Royal Navy, when one thinks about it. Their veneer is simply rougher around the edges, and more raggedy. The key point of separation boils down to the very nebulous concept of “authorization”: Piracy is when the official channels aren’t fully respected. No matter how asymmetric or exclusionary these channels are, if they aren’t used as intended by established hierarchies, one delves into the sordid realms of felony.
By that definition, entire regions of the world have been left to be characterized akin to the lawless ports of cutthroat corsairs. It doesn’t matter that the official means were never an option. Even if they were, they wouldn’t have applied in the same way to those “lesser lands”, full of unruly denizens guided by debased urges that affront all kinds of “good costumes”. Even if put under the same black banner, their way of looking through the spyglass is very different. The relationship to what refracts within the zoomed lens lacks the romanticized promise of high-adventure or discovery.
At first, the immediate impulse is a speedrun of the Official Canon. The Sight & Sound/Cahiers du Cinema standards that only occasionally appear on niche cineclubs. From there, depending on the corner of the internet one gravitates towards, taste becomes more eclectic. Nearly always guided by those external referents, hypnotic flares appear at a distance from the makeshift spyglass. Torrenting sites, Russian troves and Iranian Telegram groups conform to the vessel in which the Central American pirate tends to navigate. The lack of infrastructure to actually enforce copyright laws like our neo-colonial higher-ups demand, makes the endeavor a fertile one, providing an avenue for limitless leeching and extraction. Still, what is being reclaimed is simply what’s taken for granted in big metropolises and “first world” urban centers. The means might be transgressive, but the end calmly rests in the realm of status quo most of the time.
A looming melancholy drifts from the stranded islands, looking into the sea towards vessels reaching a point of no return, filled with riches they’ll never see again. What was once a given is now vanishing with each passing second, buried under mountainous blockades. To protect against whom? Against those who can’t be trusted to restrain themselves. The ones who haven’t fully embraced the “good costumes” despite all the external efforts to assimilate them. They simply aren’t qualified, so decisions about their best interest clearly need to come from somewhere where decency still reigns.
The punitive restrictions apply the same way as in these bastions of progress, with the caveat of vast differences in ease of official access. The nature of the restriction could be monetary, political, or geographic. Most likely all of them at the same time. This leaves the onlooker on a deeply uneven standing, where the nature of its compulsion is not to stand tall amidst their obscure and precious bounty, but to simply level the field and have the opportunity of being part of the same conversations. Thus, the foreign spyglass’ act of piracy is powered by vindication. It’s not a convenient alternative that expands one’s perspective; it’s an imperative in order to even have a perspective.
The latest festival darling. The revered Grand Master’s new Criterion restoration. Perhaps a sicko oddity heralded by Anglo-Saxon cult movie fiends. Rarely is the promise of piracy as vindication, as a subversive force, fully palpable. It feeds an individual, almost collectionist mindset of satiating one’s “cultural capital” and then moving on to the next fix. In the background, while one lusts for the shining goods of foreign lands, the improvised ship that has carried us so far is showing deep cracks in its hull. The kind that can’t simply be jury-rigged and taken for another spin as if nothing had happened.
As one strays further away from the enshrined treasures of legitimacy, the rough material reality of what lies on the margins comes to the forefront. A deglamorized notion of “uncut gems”, perishable objects whose current degraded status is usually the best version that will ever be available. The Pyrrhic exercise of the onlooking pirate becomes even more dire when this realization sinks in. The ideal of a free roaming voyage of communal abundancy inevitably reaches the rocky stretches of structural inequity. The lens of the spyglass focuses easier on what’s beyond than on what’s in immediate proximity.
To distinguish themselves from mere individualistic privateers, the freebooters of peripheral waters serve a double duty in cinephilia: reclaiming what’s been put beyond their reach, and safekeeping and distributing the last remnants of local goods, mostly stored away and half-rotten. This latter part of the endeavor resignifies the sovereign spirit of piracy, that of existing beyond law and order, and grounds it deeply in a collective consciousness around survival. A throwback to a Pirate Code perhaps, and even further down the line, in an alternate history where traders of the Mediterranean and Masters of Commerce weren’t just facades of imperial projects, but true emissaries of cultural exchange.
All-encompassing adriftness serves as a unifying state. Being all on our own, just like any roguish underbelly, demands watching each other’s backs. Sharing ephemeral Drive folders, spamming dodgy uploads with watermarks, openly rallying around the feebleness of every title we find as a manifestation of urgency. Simultaneously, the irony comes when everything must be done in the shadows. The benefits of a narrower spotlight are quickly demolished when that also means that losses aren’t quantified in the same way. As it should be, it’s something of international indignance when the lavish edifices of identifiable filmographies, with their own set of eclectic auteurs, perish away. Awful VHS transfers with single-digit Letterboxd logs taken down forever due to a random YouTube flag doesn’t tend to warrant the same kind of mournfulness, so everything moves via word of mouth, in a strenuous dichotomy between fostering accessibility and keeping the potential set of damaging eyes away.
When they manage to look inwards, the Latin American pirate inherently becomes an archivist, a programmer, and even a historiographer. A jack of all trades, whose amateurish juggling comes out of necessity, and whose individual effort shouldn’t have the direct impact on the history of the medium that it does. Their alternative channels are countercultural and an example of praxis, and at the same time, an unsustainable byproduct of scraping together pieces in No Man’s Land. A sense of duty is in place, to be able to rejoice in the treasures already here, and make sure they appear in someone’s spyglass when they eventually—hopefully—look this way.
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