The Mutant

Clemente Calvo


This is a complex film by the artist Clement Calvo, who presents a bizarre postapocalyptic narrative, in which work has become a form of slavery and freedom is a completely unknown asset.

This is one of the type of works in which the viewer is able to appreciate new details, possibilities and images with each new viewing. In this piece, the author presents us with a possible world, a future world in which workers have become total slaves in their work places, a world in which neither free time nor free thinking is conceived of. A worker, bored and fed up with his job, decides to do something which no one has ever dared to do before: to abandon his post and enter the muddy waters of freedom. This slave can hardly imagine how bizarre and wild freedom can be for someone who has never enjoyed any of it.

The piece, which begins with a certain order, following certain patterns of narrativity, slowly looses its structure as the main character frees himself up from the shackles of work. A predefined loss of structure which is linked to the opening up of the piece to polysemic meanings, in addition to being a metaphor for the possibilities that the sought after freedom offers, a freedom which separates our protagonist from the unidirectional destiny offered by his job. In this way the unexpected occurs at various levels as the viewer is confronted with a series of images which, despite seeming to have a random order, slowly leads us through the progress of our protagonist.

The relative filmic disorder that is generated grows as the main character moves further away from the chain of production that has kept him constrained. The city, a key element in this piece, is like a mirage of a civilization which has lost its course. This video, which, as has already been mentioned, offers multiple levels of reading, opens up a wide range of interpretations, the final version of which each individual viewer can conjecture themselves, being thereby able to deposit their own longings in the chain of production of meaning.

Technical datasheet

  • Title: The Mutant
  • Direction: Clemente Calvo
  • Production: Clemente Calvo y la New York Film Academy. 1994.
  • Duration: 00:09:44
  • Original format: 16 mm
  • Formats: Betacam Digital - DVD
  • TV systems: NTSC - PAL
  • License: Creative Commons