At one end, a nearly perfunctory art documentary; on the other, a lively essay film on color; in between, a shambolic chronicle of a failed project and a personal falling out. These are the three component films of Mariano Llinás’ The Triptych of Mondongo, making its North American debut at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight. Since drawing international attention for his six-chapter, 14-hour epic La Flor in 2018, Llinás has directed several documentaries that have been nearly impossible to see in the United States. It’s apt, then, that this is the first of his projects to surface, given its similarity to La Flor. Though The Triptych of Mondongo’s three parts come in at a little under five hours, its similarities to La Flor go beyond simple structure. Where that previous film was made in collaboration with Piel de Lava, a collective of four actresses who star in the majority of the film, The Triptych of Mondongo began as a commission by ArtHaus Central to document the Mondongo Collective’s Baptisterio de Colores. And like Piel de Lava, the two artists currently comprising Mondongo, Juliana Laffitte and Manuel Mendanha, are old friends of Llinás’. (For his second feature, Extraordinary Stories, the artists created portraits of the three leads, including Llinás and cinematographer Agustín Mendilaharzu, for the poster.)
Part 1, The Tightrope Walker constitutes Llinás’ attempt to fulfill the commission, cutting between the construction of the Baptisterio, a cathedral full of multicolored plasticine inspired by Johannes Itten’s book on color theory, Kunst der Farbe, (which eventually lends its title to the third part of the triptych,) and an interview of Mondongo conducted by Gabriela Siracusano, an art historian specializing in materials. To the extent Llinás has a handle on what this first part is, it’s a focus on material, and we see a large crew coloring and shaping plasticine, painstakingly labelling the hundreds of blocks and eventually placing them in the cathedral. Focus, however, is what is lacking from this first film, in which Llinás often points the camera at his computer screen, scrolling through the film’s transcript (or is it a script?) in Word or playing Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo score, which is spattered across the film, courtesy of YouTube. As the film closes, the computer screen pulls focus entirely, with Microsoft Word becoming Llinás voice as he types out his frustration with the materiality of the artworld in which Mondongo works. “The rich have their channels / in the bedrooms of the poor,” Llinás quotes Leonard Cohen, rendering his diversion of blame from Mondongo onto the system more insulting than absolving.
Llinás’ computer screen, rendered comically filthy by digital cinematography, is somehow an even greater presence in Part 2, Portrait of Mondongo, which begins by stating the end of Llinás’ friendship with Laffitte and Mendanha. After further outlining their differing economic stances — Llinás has come to believe that during years of his venting about the role of money in art, the two were not commiserating but making fun of him behind his back — his attempt at portraiture begins. Here, his playful, intertextual approach begins to emerge. Continuing to punctuate with the music of Herrmann, as well as Glen Gould, Llinás considers portraiture through the work of Manet, through Mondongo’s own portrait of himself, and through the reactions various men have to being filmed in a public square. This approach grinds to a halt when he proposes to Mondongo that the film become a challenge: alongside his portrait of their art inspired by Itten’s book, he will complete his own film inspired by the same source material. When he ambushes the two artists with a script in which he explains this conceit to them, he’s waylaid when Mendilaharzu reminds him of a Letterboxd review of his previous documentary, Clorindo Testa, which accuses him of repeating himself. Indeed, this sort of conceit appears in La Flor as well, the self-reflexive fourth chapter of which casts Piel de Lava as brujas, witches, in conflict with a filmmaker making an extremely long film with them who finds himself more interested in filming trees. Though Llinás insists to Mendilaharzu that “we can’t make films for a guy saying stuff on Letterboxd,” he includes an extended sequence in which he turns the review into a poem. Indeed, he seems to indulge the reviewer somewhat substantially, with the shots of him typing at his computer replacing the voiceover that is apparently at both its most prominent and its most banal in Clorindo Testa.
The whole project reaches its climax with an extended shot of Llinás face during the same conversation. Here, what is at issue is not economics or self-reflexivity, but basic courtesy. When Llinás interrupts Laffitte to point out a dog chewing on a piece of wood, she snaps. It’s this disagreement, which brings Llinás to tears, which actually seems to poison the relationship. The fight filters into the final film of the triptych, in which Llinás takes on the role of a “Fritz Lang villain,” or Lang himself, making his attempt at drawing inspiration from the Itten book. Though largely occupied with color, giving up the Herrmann music for audio taken from a concert at ArtHaus inspired by color and featuring frequent input from his color correctionist, he also casts La Flor’s Pilar Gamboa as Laffitte to reenact the argument Laffitte herself had no interest in reenacting. When they reach the previous film’s climax, Gamboa immediately takes Laffitte’s side. Llinás still fails to see the point of view, making clear why the project became untenable. That an untenable project became three films is deeply characteristic for Llinás, and his collage approach allows what is salvageable to shine. It’s a relief that his bombastic presence, and eventually voiceover, return to Kunst der Farbe, and even as he bickers with Gamboa and Maria Villar, who helps him to read Itten’s German, there’s a warmth present that is absent for much of the triptych’s second part. Ultimately, the three films are an escalation, perhaps even an apex, of the self-reflexive methods of combative collaboration Llinás has been engaging in for years. Whether it’s this escalation, the shift from autofiction to documentary, or the specific combination of personalities at play that brings the combat out of the realm of playfulness is unclear. As is whether Llinás has taken any lessons from this, with each film including a Marvel-esque post-credits stinger, the third of which seems to puckishly hint at more of the same.
Published as part of Doc Fortnight 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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