Luminousness of Error

As a part of his multiple attempts to put the world — and the things in it — in order — by making all kinds of lists and inventories,  J.R. Plaza dedicated himself to the curious task of correcting the two volumes that he owned of The Film Encyclopedia by Ephraim Katz (the first, published in 1979; the second, in 1994).

Each night, after watching the evening movie on a local television station, he proceeded to verify that the film he had just seen was listed in the proper categories according to “director” and “actor.” If there was some omission in the encyclopedia, Plaza corrected it in pencil. Over time, he found more than a hundred errors, of which Bonillas chose twelve (only seven are shown here) to create this series, in which those same movies that Plaza meticulously recorded are used to light up the pages where the errors were located. In this way, film is reduced to its essence: light. What is more, as we don’t manage to distinguish the characters or much less the plots of these movies projected through the page, the experience is, rather, an atmospheric one: a bath of varied chromatic tonalities illuminates the spectator’s face. Because, in fact, becoming aware of how fallible we are can be an illuminating revelation.

Plaza did not alter the two volumes of his encyclopedia only for the purpose of completing or updating them, but also to correct them, thus defying the theoretically indisputable authority of an encyclopedia. In Bonillas’s hands, however, the volumes take on new and unexpected value. They are no longer mere encyclopedias, inexact as any; they have become books that conceal, almost like a riddle, the demonstration of the impossibility of perfection, of the inevitable presence of error.