Il faut recommencer de zéro.- J.-L. Godard (around 1966)
In order to be clear, let me tell you three seemingly unconnected stories.
In 1983, my phone rang. A young man I had never heard of named José Luis Guerín, who was then, it turned out, aged 23, and who lived in Barcelona, was to have some sort of preview of his first feature film in Madrid, and wanted me to present it. I told him I had to see it and like it enough. Which I did (both) some days later. Once I had agreed to present it, I asked him why he had thought about me. He replied that he had read and liked some of my reviews, especially one, about 9 years before, on Bresson's Lancelot du Lac. I was doubly intrigued, because very few people (and he was only 14 at the time) had liked that particular Bresson movie, and I had detected some Bressonian attitudes in his film, Los motivos de Berta. Thus began one of our usually spaced but very long conversations, which make him always late at some appointment (I feel guilty that he once kept Marcel Hanoun waiting for a very long time). It was already then quite unusual for such a young man to talk about Flaherty, Griffith and Dovzhenko as his contemporaries, just like Godard, Eustache or Garrel, not that even the latter trio were very popular or even widely known among Spanish cinéphiles or filmmakers in the early ‘80s.
Guerín was, no doubt about it, one of a kind. And he not only kept but steadily surpassed the promise of his first feature. He made, in Ireland, Innisfree (1990), in English and Gaelic, about the memories left around Cong, County Mayo, by the shooting of John Ford's The Quiet Man (1952); in 1996, he shot Tren de sombras (Le Spectre de Le Thuit), practically with no dialogue, in France, which was a fascinating inquest starting from a “found footage” home movie (actually shot by Guerín); in 2000, he filmed at long last his native city of Barcelona, in the copiously awarded (including the National Cinema Award) and very personal documentary En construcción, which made of him a relatively known figure. I seem to have been the first to watch each of his movies, although I must state (since people wonder when they see your name in the acknowledgements section of the end credits) that I merely encouraged him or supported his stand against producers or other people who wanted him to shorten his pictures, a step which would have impoverished them and damaged their precious rhythm. Since En construcción, he has continued lecturing and teaching, spurring youngsters to make unconventional movies, and has been busy preparing a new film.
In a medium-sized cinema like the Spanish one, which is not really an industry but rather a mixture of small business and individual craftsmanship (not always on good terms with each other), the only truly original, ambitious, and interesting films are made by a shrinking group of independent filmmakers, devoted enough to suffer long periods of forced unemployment, frustration, and even poverty. They still believe film could be an art, and try to do something about it. The reluctant “father figure” or model of most of the younger promising filmmakers is, of course, Víctor Erice, and they incur the risk of doing almost as few pictures as he. There are better and worse seasons in such a fragile cinema as ours, depending on how many of these filmmakers succeed in making something (even a short), but 2005 has yielded, for me, a very poor harvest, despite the official, corporate, or complacent opinions voiced by most critics and filmmakers and the depressing box-office success of some of the worst. And, fittingly, the best film of the year does not exist.
Of course, it does, since I’ve seen it eleven times, in three different versions so far. But it has no official or administrative existence: the Ministry of Culture does not know about it, has not “reviewed” or “registered” it, and therefore, it will not appear in the catalogue of Spanish Cinema: 2005. It has never been publicly shown. At my insistence, Guerín has screened it privately to only a handful of friends, and has so far refused to allow anybody from festivals to see it. All that on the dubious ground that it is not really a film, but merely a sort of photographic blueprint for a future feature, purportedly to be shot on 35mm film stock (instead of with a small, low-definition digital-video camera and partly at least with a digital still camera), in color (the “prototype” is in black and white, since Guerín completely de-saturated it), with dialogue, noises, and music (instead of being absolutely silent, which I feel is how it should stay), without intertitles (whereas it is a film to be read, and it is a vital part of its experience to see the words appearing on the screen, as in some of Godard’s later films), and with full normal movement (actually, it looks almost like a feature-length La Jetée, since most of the images are stills; there are only, occasionally, some slight, brief, rather tentative movements, a bit like in some Godard films starting with Sauve qui peut [La vie]).
But it is not at all true, as its author pretends, that this film is a blueprint, or a collection of random notes taken in order to prepare a film, or a preliminary sketch of a film to be made — which, I feel, would be wholly redundant, since Guerín has already made it, and very successfully, in a more innovative and cheaper way. Far from being a pre-production “scale model,” it is a minutely edited, carefully structured and rhythmed marriage of narrative and reflection, of recollections and speculation, full of mystery and with an acute sense of unceasing, perhaps endless search, which often makes one think of Hitchcock's Vertigo only to remind you, a moment later, of Jonas Mekas's Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania, or suggest a longer, more complex development of Eustache’s late short Les Photos d'Alix. I throw out all these references not in order to boost the film, but to help readers to grasp the very particular nature of a film they are unable to see, and perhaps will never have the chance of getting a glimpse of. And it is something so unique that I find it very difficult to describe.
By the way, it is provisionally titled Unas fotos… En la ciudad de Sylvia… y otras ciudades. Which could be translated as Some Photographs… In the City of Sylvia… and Other Cities. Or perhaps as Some Stills… In Sylvia’s City… and Other Cities, or maybe Some Snapshots… In Sylvia’s City… and Other Cities. In any case, the title is what I like least about it. It is self-derogatory (although partial, like everything in the world, the film is far from being merely “some photos”) and utterly misleading as a description. Its present title does not even suggest the narrative drive that makes the film move (in every sense of the word), even though its images are mostly still and its pacing quite deliberate. It should be called, for example (to change it as little as possible), In Search of Sylvia through Her City… and Other Cities. Even if Guerín wants to conceal how personal and subjective a film it is (I wonder how, and even why? He’s shy, of course, but…) and would rather pretend that Unas fotos has nothing to do with an intimate journal.
However, what is really meaningful is the personal starting point of what finally becomes a very peculiar kind of speculative fiction, which made me think of a daylight version of André Breton's Nadja, a book that, surprisingly, the filmmaker has not read. In 1980, in the city of Strasbourg, Guerín (or the unseen, nameless narrator who addresses us silently, in brief written phrases) met a girl named Sylvia, who spoke a little Spanish because she had studied nursery in Salamanca. He either never knew or forgot her family name. The only “mementoes” of their meeting are a box of matches from the café “Les Aviateurs,” where they met and talked, and a beer mat with some annotations on it: the address of a local old bookstore that, twenty years later, when Guerín tried to find her, wasn’t there anymore.
Considering her profession, Guerín takes a city map and locates the places where she could be: hospitals and clinics, the Faculty of Medicine and such. He roams around these places with watchful, hopeful anticipation. Looking at every girl on foot or bicycle, standing in wait for a date or a green light at a pedestrian passage, sitting in a café or a restaurant. Seemingly without realizing at first that, since twenty years have passed when the search starts, any young girl resembling Sylvia would more likely be her daughter. Looking at women, finally of all ages, without finding Sylvia, he becomes interested, intrigued or attracted by several others, many of them utterly different from Sylvia, and even follows some through the streets of the city, while recalling the love of Goethe for Charlotte (or Lotte), who was also from Strasbourg and who felt jealous when the character in “Werther,” who so closely resembled her, happened to have eyes of a different color from hers.
I will not disclose more about Unas fotos, because part of the excitement it produces comes from the surprising connections and associations that Guerín spins. It would lose its almost Hitchcockian suspense, its Bressonian drôle de chemin where “the wind blows where it wills,” the sense of strolling through different European cities — what the French call flâneries — which account for a large part of its most peculiar charm. It is enough to suggest that it is a truly European film in its spirit and its cultural references — Petrarca and Laura, Dante and Beatrice crossing paths in the past of cities visited once and again, and making the narrator wonder where exactly, and from what point of view, the poets first saw the women they would become obsessed with — typically a filmmaker’s concern.
Only on one point can I understand Guerín’s reluctance to show his new film: it is perhaps a new kind of movie, probably too far apart from the commonplace, and the times are not too open to experiences like this. As a matter of fact, I have difficulty in imagining a time when such a film as Unas fotos would be normally shown at your nearest theater, no matter where you live (even in Paris). It is perhaps too intimate an experience for people you don’t know to be sitting around you. And the total, hard silence I find so necessary to look at it properly, without the rhythms of any music interfering with those of the film, without sound or dialogue or music announcing, underlining, stressing, or “poeticizing” any part of it, probably would be as dangerous in an almost empty theater as in a crowded house. Most people react quite aggressively towards prolonged silence, they would think the sound was not properly working and start yelling and guffawing, only to realize, aghast and angry, that the film is really, wholly silent. Which would cause a self-defensive reaction against a film that commanded so much attention and concentration on its images as to give no rest, no truce, no clue, no hope of distraction from the screen. Maybe a new kind of cinema calls for a new way of communication with the audience, which could be not a crowd, but individuals or small groups of friends sitting before a TV set, in the intimacy of their own homes. Perhaps it would have to be distributed on DVD or bought online.
On the other hand, I find that Guerín’s new film should be seen everywhere, because it provides an exhilarating demonstration of freedom. It proves that, thanks to new, ultra-cheap technology, you can make a great, daring, personal film without money, on your own, with only (of course) a lot of talent, effort, and time, and I find that this could be extremely encouraging to aspiring filmmakers who almost despair at the difficulty of getting started, of convincing producers, and even — the film once made — of getting a fair release. Since the film really does exist, it should be seen. After all, what are films for whose goal is not merely making money? For seeing and for helping others to see.
Guerín has been collecting images for this project during almost four years, and building it up and reshaping and refining it incessantly. For that he needs no money, no funding, no producers. His main investment is his own time. Time to travel and walk, to read and think, to choose angles and frames, to look around and to edit his recollections, the traces of his search. Modern technology allows that for almost no money at all. But DV may be used — it is often — too recklessly; it is too easy. And for a true filmmaker, it should pose some questions. With digital video you can shoot as much as you want, and make very long uninterrupted takes, rather than carefully thought shots; the cameras are so small you may become easily a Peeping Tom or a voyeur, and so light you can hold them in your hand, forget about tripods and move it around all the time, with no apparent need to care about continuity or even about properly framing and composing. As a matter of fact, digital technology has no photograms, no frames, no 24-frames per second speed, no Maltese Cross, no persistence of vision, no projection, almost no shots to cut and link; that is, almost nothing of what has defined cinema for about a century. Even editing is a different issue: digital video encourages a new, quite passive conception of “montage.” I’m sure Guerín has read at least some of Serge Daney’s disquieting writings about freeze-frame, about stills, about the variable nature of images. I gather he’s given these issues some deep thought, and I believe he has, perhaps unconsciously, found a way of avoiding the temptations and facilities and dangers of digital video filmmaking.
His instinct has made him start at the very beginning. With the new, cheap, almost cost-free equipment, and taking as his model not D.W. Griffith or Louis Feuillade, or even Louis Lumière, but rather the very earliest of pioneers, Étienne Marey and Edweard Muybridge, he has found again the true essence of cinema, its forgotten, invisible, taken-for-granted secret: that there are in fact no real images of movement, but only stills, a succession of photographs whose succession creates the illusion of movement. Between each, there is always at least a diminutive, almost unperceivable ellipse, the black blank piece of film between each frame. Godard was hinting at this very problem, I think, when he began employing videotape and started stopping the movement of images, or slowing it down, then accelerating again, so as to render visible the original isolation and the willful, deliberate linking of the frames that allows the passage from one photogram to another, which also explains Bresson’s insistently calling what he did cinématographe instead of cinéma: after all, he was writing with the articulate movement of fixed, still images. That’s why I consider it some sort of “poetic justice” that Guerín, reinventing cinema with digital means, has returned to the very beginnings, without any sort of sound, not even music or noise, without color, and has employed only the minimal, bare elements, those available when cinema was not yet entertainment, not even a show, but almost a scientific tool intended to look at what you cannot see with the naked eye, and to register it and keep a record, to take notes, to make annotations. But Unas fotos is not merely a remake of the early steps of cinema before Lumière: I don’t recall a single silent film that used titles as some sort of inner monologue, as a kind of silent, written equivalent of voice-over commentary, as Guerín does. As the W. B. Yeats poem quoted at the beginning of Guerín's Innisfree announced, “I will rise now, and go….”
© FIPRESCI 2006
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