Imaginero

We watched a film in class today about an imaginero, an image maker, in the high plateau of Argentina.  In it, there were some very clear scenes of shearing, spinning, and weaving.  Shearing took place using a simple knife, with the sheep on the ground with legs tied.  The people must have very steady hands and confidence, as they shear exactly how we're told not to, pulling the wool up and stretching out the skin in a way that would easily lead to cuts, making it hard to discern where skin ends and wool begins.  This may have just been due to the particular part of shearing that made it into the final edit - we only saw her shear the less desirable belly wool, which most of us skirt out.  Maybe she does it differently along the back and sides?  We see Aurelia, wife of the imaginero, walking with the small flock of sheep and spinning using a bottom whorl spindle with a very long shaft.  She spins like the Navajo, drafting out a length and getting some twist into it, then tugging the half-spun yarn to distribute the twist and even out the diameter.  She spins and walks, but, when the sheep settle into a grazing spot, she crouches and supports the spindle on the ground to spin.  I was excited to see that she does what I do when I use a supported spindle - she makes a temporary mini cop near the tip, winds on up there for a while, then (I presume) unwinds and rewinds it onto the large cop at the bottom of the spindle.  Thus the long shaft.  The wool appears to be of marginal quality, similar to churro of some type, but perhaps leaning more toward a medium wool than a coarse wool.  The yarn is thick, maybe a worsted weight single, and she spins from something approximating roving.  My favorite part was the weaving.  Hermogenes, the imaginero, weaves on a loom that is tensioned like a backstrap loom, but with a hand-built frame and treadle system, making the actual motion of weaving resemble a standard modern floor loom.  The wooden parts are rough and lashed together - which is interesting, considering that we see lots of his handwork, and it is all very finished and intricate.  I believe that this loom, without a set tension system (no beams, minimal frame) would be easy to collapse and store, to set up in a variety of locations, or even to load on a donkey and transport if needed. 

Anyway, I highly recommend this film, if you can get it.  It is by Argentine director Jorge Preloran and pretty much just available through interlibrary loan.  I have it on order to watch again, primarily because the copy we had in class was poor quality, a film of a film, and Hermogenes' narration is translated into English dubbed over the original.  The one available on loan is in Spanish, which I'll enjoy more, and I did catch that the translation was wanting some of the nuance and intonation provided by the imaginero.