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Gianfranco Rosi
France, Italy
2011 | Digital | 1:20:00
El Sicario Room 164, a former assassin describes his experiences working and killing for the Mexican narco-state in a bland motel room on the US side of the border—bland except for the extraordinary charge that comes of the sicario’s claim that he once tortured a man in this very same room. There are at least three frames that count in El Sicario Room 164: Gianfranco Rosi’s unblinking camera and the motel room, both of which suppress context, and the notebook with which the sicario diagrams and occasionally illustrates his firsthand knowledge of the cartel’s systematic brutality. The fact that he is hooded throughout, withholding his identity and what would otherwise be the El Sicario Room 164’s key expressive surface, only heightens the tension between his emphatic storyboarding and the film’s non-illustrative method.
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