The Aerial (La Antena) (12a)

Esteban Sapir confesses to a nostalgia for the time when every Eisenstein, Lang, Vertov or Murnau frame and the minutiae within it had to communicate meaning in the absence of a spoken word.

Enter a winter-clad town ruled by an Arturo Ui type called Mr TV, who imposes his dictatorial control by making its inhabitants speechless.

They are only permitted furtive lip-reading, increasingly threatened by The Machine, which is secretly turning all words into TV foods.

The town, without a voice and at the mercy of Mr TV, descends into consumerist somnambulism designed to ensure docility.

Hypnotising pulp is dished out by regular TV broadcasts that are controlled by The Machine. It is kept going by the voice of a cabaret singer who has mysteriously retained her speech.

Mr TV kidnaps her to ensure total control and accelerate the destruction of words.

Not all is lost, however, as The Inventor, sacked by Mr TV, discovers that the blind son of the singer has also retained his voice and that, by broadcasting it live via an abandoned aerial high in the mountains, Mr TV can be brought down.

Like a latter-day Eddie Constantine in Goddard's Alphaville, The Inventor takes up the challenge among lurking shadows of swastikas and a posse of Mr TV's goons led by a rat.

He dons deliciously symbolic Soviet tank commander headgear with a star, the blind lad puts on a CCCP cosmonaut helmet and they are off to conquer fascism.

Somewhat confusingly, the blind boy's final liberating broadcast is a Freudian cry for "mummy," uttered from a neon-lit Star of David-shaped contraption. A metaphor of the tribe of Abraham being lost, it's destiny poisoned by zionism?

Reminiscent of a strip cartoon with claustrophobic settings, one-dimensional characters, on-screen text and thriller tempo, the film is peppered with touching, symbolic references to Chaplin, Man Ray and the surrealists. Pure art house stuff.

MICHAL BONCZA