It’s straightforward to understate what a wierd, startling beast of a documentary Javier Horcajada Fontecha’s “From My Chilly Lifeless Fingers is.” One can undersell it by passing it off as an amateurishly patched-together expose of the rampant gun tradition that has America in its tight grip. There are not any conspicuous efforts to amp up inventive strategies or flash glimpses of an authorial type.
The tone of the documentary drives its peculiar essence from the motley scraps cobbled collectively. The subjective slant of the filmmaker needs to be gleaned from the disparate patchwork behind the movie. It isn’t the abandonment of a transparent perspective the movie pushes forth, however by way of the panoply of scattered fragments, there emerges a pointy sense of politics that’s agency, forthright, and hedges no bets on what it’s railing towards and taking aside.
The rhythm of the movie is free-flowing, punctuated by bursts of digressions that emanate from a singular nodal level. Two gun sellers deliberate on a set of cardinal tenets pertaining to arms dealing with. They foist a clutch of arguments that hammer the simple necessity of arms and their incorporation into every day life. Their arguments have just one agenda: to make the usage of weapons entrenched within the on a regular basis unavoidable and important for the sake of not only one’s security however a complete gamut of causes tied to familial bonds.
Gun rights are primed as not just one’s proper and responsibility butt additionally linked to the reason for ladies’s protection from sexual or different aggressions. The reasoning launched by varied stakeholders throughout the board needs to be heard with a view to be really believed. The trick is in how the bizarreness will get translated into essentially the most mundane register of existence and normalized. Biblical authority is invoked, and so are heavyweight political campaigns waged on the promise of gun safety. There’s an particularly surprising part the place the bravado of wielding and gifting weapons to ladies is posited as a approach of wooing them and allaying their bitter moods, slipping into the grotesque sexualization of the weapon itself.
When collated collectively because it has been on this movie, the load of the escalating gun tradition could be really horrifying and surprising to witness and register. It’s a type of issues that beggar perception however which you recognize is enmeshed in actuality with the unbending willpower to socially sanction what’d be in any other case labeled as essentially the most excessive impulses of man.
The arguments of the sellers are a blunt reiteration of the beliefs which have change into inveterately embedded within the material of American society, all the way down to essentially the most common family. It’s by way of studying tips on how to deal with arms that household bonding will get to be affected. Siblings join and fathers prepare their children, thus the household unit turns into a stronger unit due to the brute power of weapons. Even alphabetical sketching books are full of the nitty-gritty of arms and their elements.
“From My Chilly Lifeless Fingers” makes essentially the most baroque heightened conduct the stuff of waking actuality. From the hiccups and accidents surrounding the very act of holding and aiming the gun to the bigger ecosystem that permits a hard-wiring of reckless, unfastened management of weapons and turning it into masculine pleasure and a rudimentary possession, the documentary is a stinging and terrifying examination.
From My Chilly Lifeless Fingers screened on the Fantasia Movie Pageant 2024.
From My Chilly Lifeless Fingers (2024) Film Hyperlink: IMDb
