‘The Phantom’ Venice Review: A Witty Meditation on Memory and Artistic Legacy

The attempt to make a biographical film about a little-known artist gradually turns into a playful meditation on art, culture, and, above all, the passage of time. Straddling documentary, mockumentary, and fiction, this cinematic exercise ventures into the world of the Instituto Di Tella and the creative ferment of Buenos Aires in the 1960s. Under the pretense of producing an institutional documentary to accompany an exhibition of artist Rubén Santantonín’s work, filmmaker Ignacio Masllorens —assisted immeasurably by David Lamelas, another multidisciplinary artist from the same generation— uses the project to reflect on art, its myths, and the ways those myths become intertwined with the lives of the people who created it.

Working within a format that has become something of a signature for several El Pampero productions—Mariano Llinás, Laura Citarella, and Alejo Moguillansky have all employed it—The Phantom begins as a commissioned film. Or rather, as the reconstruction of what appears to be a commission to make a film. Two producers specializing in audiovisual content for galleries and exhibitions are hired to create a video about Santantonín. The young producers (Constanza Feldman and Victoria Baldomir) have never heard of him, and the woman commissioning the project (Carmen Iriondo) simply tells them to look him up online. Their search reveals that Santantonín was the co-creator, alongside Marta Minujín, of one of the defining artworks of the era: La Menesunda, the immersive installation that became a sensation at the Di Tella Institute but has long been credited solely to Minujín. Santantonín died shortly afterward, and remarkably little is known about either his life or the rest of his body of work.

The commission also comes with an unusual condition: David Lamelas must direct the film. A contemporary of both Santantonín and Minujín, Lamelas was also part of the creative team behind La Menesunda and went on to become a pioneering conceptual artist whose paintings, sculptures, installations, films, and happenings have been exhibited around the world. The producers aren’t convinced he’s the right choice. Their solution is to cast the nearly eighty-year-old artist as the film’s interviewer and public face while they quietly manage the production behind the scenes. But as Lamelas interviews curators, critics, scholars, and fellow artists, he begins revisiting not only Santantonín’s past but also that of the Di Tella and his own career. Before long, he wants to take creative control himself, transforming what began as a straightforward commission into something far more personal and ambitious. To do that, however, he’ll have to clash with the producers.

This mockumentary framework —even though many of the events and people are entirely real, that is the narrative device at work— is ultimately just a pretext, another familiar storytelling strategy from the El Pampero school. The Phantom uses it to pursue what truly interests it: recreating that extraordinary cultural moment, introducing viewers to a generation of artists of whom only a handful are still alive, revisiting the Buenos Aires of the period —where the Instituto Di Tella once stood there’s now a sporting goods store, while the neighboring Galería del Este has fallen into semi-abandonment— and, above all, allowing Lamelas to better understand a man like Santantonín, whom he never knew particularly well, while simultaneously exploring his own past.

On one level, the film examines Santantonín’s work within the artistic renewal of the period. Older than most of the emerging avant-garde artists, he died at just forty-five after burning almost all of his work, which consisted largely of the enigmatic objects he simply called cosas («things»), pieces whose forms deliberately resisted clear definition. His early death gave rise to a persistent myth: that he took his own life out of frustration after his greatest artistic achievement came to be credited almost exclusively to the far more flamboyant and internationally celebrated Minujín. Lamelas’s investigation, however, reveals a far more complex —and considerably different— reality.

But The Phantom ultimately reaches beyond the portrait of an overlooked, supposedly cursed artist. Although he enjoyed far greater recognition during his lifetime, Lamelas also uses the journey to reassess his own work and career, particularly through encounters with old friends and colleagues —including the recently deceased Luis Felipe «Yuyo» Noé, Leopoldo Maler, and Minujín herself— which prompt him to revisit a chapter of his life that, as he readily admits, had faded from his increasingly fragile memory. Gradually, the film assembles a tapestry of recollections that naturally invites reflection —and perhaps even nostalgia— for a remarkably free-spirited and inventive period in Argentine art, when the work of young avant-garde artists attracted extensive media attention and drew enormous crowds.

The director of Martin Blaszko III and Atlas orchestrates these disparate materials with both playfulness and precision, allowing The Phantom to shift effortlessly from absurdist comedy to a more conventional documentary before evolving into an unexpectedly moving meditation on memory and on the ways art both reflects —and fails to reflect— the lives from which it emerges. One especially revealing detail, which the film barely touches upon, is that Lamelas represented Argentina at the 1968 Venice Biennale with the controversial installation Office of Information about the Vietnam War at Three Levels: Visual Image, Text and Audio. His return to Venice and the Biennale nearly sixty years later gives the film yet another layer of meaning, bringing full circle its fascinating exploration of the intersections between art, life, and the passage of time.