Julián Hernández | Cobalto (Cobalt) / 2023

the commercial photographer

by Douglas Messerli

 

“For photography, cobalt blue is one of the most challenging colors to reproduce. According to researcher Robin D. Myers' paper on color accuracy, the color cobalt shows up more accurately when the image was shot in low light or when other colors are incorrectly reproduced, and this applies to both film and digital photography. To reproduce a cool cobalt with a simple blue subject, it is recommended to use fluorescent lighting combined with low and minimal red and infrared emissions to reduce the blue from being ultramarine.”

 

Gustavo Hernández de Anda and Julián Hernández (screenplay), Julián Hernández (director) Cobalto (Cobalt) / 2023 [21 minutes]

In the earliest frames of this short film, we see Damián (Joaquín Bondoni), returning, with help, to the photographic studio of Uriel (Luis Vegas), after Damián has been beaten and robbed by a violent john with whom the former model, now hustler has become entangled. Unable to even use his hands, Uriel must help the injured Damián urinate in his bathroom (also his darkroom), which obviously calls up his own past love of his model, particularly as he soon after gives his former boyfriend a sponge bath.

   Yet the studio, cast mostly in the cold cobalt blue light is also a source of memories for Damián, who has simultaneously been loved and abused through the capture and photographic representing of his own image in response to Uriel’s attentions. Sometimes we cannot quite determine whether Damián’s small yelps of pain are from the bodily damage his john has inflicted or from the memories of their photographic encounters wherein Uriel, bit by bit, as he made him over to be the model and lover he wishes him to become.

    At different moments they both turn toward and away from one another, afraid to recounter that very powerful sexual past and the same moment desiring it again. For one long moment in the bathroom encounter they lustfully hug one another, reiterating what they had but at the same moment metaphorically devouring up one another in their past inabilities to appreciate one another as full human beings.

 

    Slowly as we move back towards their past we perceive Uriel as the loving creator of the young, 18-year-old Damian, as he moves him again and again, sometimes not so gently, into a sexual position for his photographs which create an artistic world while not always recognizing the human one of the model himself.

     Almost continually, even now as an injured man asleep, Uriel snaps Damián’s image, as if “stealing the subject” away from his own being as fearful natives often suspected of foreign intruders as attempting to do as they entered their world in the early 20th century with their demands to record and, let’s face it, commercialize the moment of their discoveries.

     These body-stealing moments are alternated, of course, with kindness. “Do you need anything?” And once again, the snap of the photo, the wind of the camera, this time in the past, with a mention that Damían was born in Celaya, in the province Guanajuato, Mexico, making him a provincial, outside of the center of Mexican culture, Ciudad de México. “He says he was born again when at eighteen he arrive in Mexico City.”

   Almost from the beginning Uriel attempts to make him over, to “try smiling with his eyes,” something quite difficult for the surly Celayan.

     Now bathing his former Pygmalion, Uriel, the angel of light, takes the sponge to Damián’s nude body as if almost trying to wash away all the impositions of the past, despite, a few moments later, Uriel recounting that until he received the call for help, he was convinced that Damian had gone out of his life forever. And even now the sorrowful Damian is told by Uriel to try to sleep as if he were merely a misbehaving child.

     Back to their previous days, Uriel declares Damían to be a terrible model, for which the subject of Uriel’s voyeurism seems to feel necessary to apologize. But, of course, Damían is, in fact, a beautiful human being with whom Uriel falls in love, despite the distance he puts himself between all those whom he photographs.

   But Uriel’s lovely photographs of Damían are not his only works, and his model soon discovers openly pornographic pictures of Uriel engaged in sex with the owner of his apartment, Orlando, from which he has procured it, accordingly, for free.

    That scene is followed by a rather brutal photo-shoot, wherein Uriel asks his model to pose in a black face mask as he places him what appear to be several soft-porn S&M pictures, during which he tells his own story of also being an outsider, who met Orlando, who moved him into his studio, and who soon after went away for long periods of time, leaving the studio into his care.   

   Soon after, leaving the studio for Damían to care for, he returns to see his model has moved in, seeking shelter in his own space for which he too must now pay to maintain. A battle, imagistically dating back to the Pergamene Greek school sculpture from BC 370-300), the Gustave Courbet painting of 1875, the Thomas Eakins painting of 1899, and the later 1905 George Luks painting, Hernández involves these two me, together engaged, in the historical art of male nudity, in a scene that certainly evokes all of these and other such works as they explore their love and resentment of one another.    “But this is no fairytale,” Uriel insists, casting a much darker layer upon the film that we already know has very dark textures. Damían suddenly starts turning tricks “for fun,” leaving Uriel for days without seeing him.

     When he returns, Uriel again corrects his model (“Straighten your neck”) as he attempts to transform him into the creature he might be able to fully love.

     Once more we are rushed into the future, as Uriel attempts to care for the still-healing Damían, the hustler feeling angry that he cannot remember the beater’s face, and that even worse they took all the money he had made. And now commerce creeps back into the conversation, as Damían pretends to admit, “I do it for the money, OK?”

     Uriel’s answer is strange, “We both know that’s not true.”

     “And I do like it,” answers Damían.

     “I know.”

     Damían’s answer, however, puts the entire work into another perspective: “I can’t fuckin’ stand you Uriel.”

     That admission of their relationship, in fact, leads them into a mad sexual frenzy, a sex scene far more tough that the tender wrestlers, that we realize they are ready in their lust to nearly to consume oner another, to devour almost as vampires one another’s flesh.

      What we realize is that the anger, frustration, the hate is mutual because, in fact, Uriel has used

Damían for his commercial advantage, and even if the other is now working as a hustler, he is perhaps the purer of the two of them, since Damían truly embraces sex as a sensual pleasure. In only this last scene has the photographer finally put away his camera.

       Lover, voyeur, consumer, and the ready receptor of the orgiastic pleasure of sex are conjoined ultimately in the remarkable Mexican director Julián Hernández’s most recent short film, a work that explores territories where few others these days might take us.

 

Los Angeles, August 27, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Review (August 2024).