Mapa hacia las estrellas de David Cronenberg

Toda psicoterapia que muestre rasgos psicoanalíticos nos ofrece una temporalidad en la que el pasado intrusiona de manera intermitente el presente, redirigiéndolo hacia una narrativa mitológica que enuncia en clave trágica su eterna repetición. Esto es, el paciente debe enfrentarse a (ponerse en frente de) su pasado y resolver el misterio de su propio trauma invocándolo hacia el presente. Debe viajar en el tiempo para sustituir el yo de antes, que de alguna manera falló en vivir su presente, por el yo de ahora, supuestamente más sabio y capaz. El trauma no cesa de regresar al futuro, el mismo pavor reconfigurándose en nuevas situaciones. El proceso de la terapia es una historia de fantasmas: el fantasma y el trauma funcionan igual, mediante proyecciones: apariciones en la noche de la incomprensión de lo sucedido. El fantasma siempre reclama algo a los vivos, de ahí la narrativa común de necesitar la ayuda de un vivo -el yo presente- para resolver un asunto pendiente.

Aunque el terapeuta, Stafford, sea un gurú new age amante de mantras y fórmulas, y aunque la paciente, Havana,  sea una actriz narcisista y consentida enfrentándose a la mediana edad, nos encontramos ante un relato victoriano en el que remordimiento, rencor y dolor deben figurarse, hacerse figuras.Ya sea en fuerzas naturales que resuenan como símbolos, ya sea en los ecos constantes que asolan el castillo de la familia: la hija que debe simultáneamente escapar de y convertirse en la madre, la pareja de hermanos transformada en su reverso (el del matrimonio), y en el acorde más victoriano de todos: el repudiado, ya sea el hermano deforme encerrado en el sótano o la esposa loca recluida en el ático -el personaje (¿protagonista?) de la heroína Agatha es una tristísima y preciosa combinación de ellos.

Maps to the Stars es una película de horror y un drama familiar, además de una reflexión metacinemática sobre el mundo de Hollywood. También es una muy cómica (por extremadamente realista) sátira de una determinada clase social (productora de entretenimiento de consumo) y sus muchas enfermades, a las que todos quedamos expuestos a través de la cultura de masas. Quizás el momento que capta mejor nuestro zeitgeist (aunque se pueda decir esto casi de cada escena en la película) sea Havana practicando la posición de loto mientras aúlla de dolor.

La gran belleza

La grande belleza (Paolo Sorrentini) abre con una cita del desbordante Viaje al fin de la noche de Céline. Viajar es muy útil porque nos pone la imaginación a trabajar, el resto es engaño y dolor. Nuestro viaje es completamente imaginario, y en ello reside su potencia. Así comienza una película cuyo recurso formal más recurrente es el travelling, que aparece con una frecuencia y una intensidad fatigante, y que corresponde a, entre otras muchas cosas, a la temática del turismo vital, de vivir la vida como un turista. Jep Gambardella, esteta y juerguista, tiene sesenta y cinco años y no ha salido de Roma en treinta años (ni ganas), pero vive con la intensidad de un corto viaje y con la frívola tansitoriedad de un visitante -acariciando todas las superficies con sus sentidos a la caza de un recuerdo o souvenir lo suficientemente hermoso como para traérselo de vuelta a una patria y una vida cotidiana de la que carece. Gambardella pertenece al club de Bartleby de Vila Matas, a la estirpe de los escritores del silencio: tras escribir una novela fulminante en su juventud no volvió a escribir. Su búsqueda de la belleza lo condujo a un hedonismo lujoso y festivo del que ha hecho su método y su ética, un placer que inesperadamente se le agota. Los planos suponen preguntas sobre la sensualidad y sus posibles transmutaciones. ¿Qué ocurre en el reverso del lienzo mientras se está pintando? ¿Cómo se percibe al viandante resguardado cuando uno se encuentra calado hasta los huesos? Preguntas y planos vertebrados por un montaje preciosista que crea una coreografría barroca, abocada al exceso, como las vidas de los personajes. Lamentablemente, aunque tan sólo hacia el final, cierta espiritualidad algo tradicional aparece disfrazada de destino, mientras las elecciones musicales se vuelven redundantes y una interesantísima estética de la grotesquidad deviene en un ingenuo realismo mágico. Aún así, una potentísima defensa de la imaginación, del truco barroco y del ilusionismo perdura hasta el final, que por supuesto es tan sólo y nada menos que un comienzo.

La encarnación surrealista

En "La producción sistemática de simulacros irracionales" Eduardo Subirats (Proceso a la civilización: La crítica de la modernidad en la historia del cine) analiza Un chien andalou (1929) como la encarnación de los procesos subconscientes en la realidad material. Se desprende ya en el Primer manifiesto (1924) que esta transmutación alucinante (la materialización de la irracionalidad) es uno de los objetivos base del proyecto surrealista, y acto seguido se empieza a enaltecer la predisposición lógica del medio del cine para llevar a cabo esta operación, sobre todo desde su analogía con el sueño (Jean Goudal, "Surréalisme et cinéma,"1925.) Lo que resulta más iluminador es que, debido a las disquisiciones de Subirats sobre la afinidad de Dalí con la sensibilidad católica, nos damos cuenta cómo Un chien andalou revela las similitudes del proceso surrealista con el momento de la encarnación desde un punto de vista católico (imaginero e imaginario.) La fantasía surrealista corresponde a la cristiana en cuanto a que los designios inescrutables del subconsciente se materializan para que así se manifieste la expresión de la auténtica realidad, el subconsciente o el reino de los cielos, que subyace y antecede a la experiencia cotidiana/terrenal. Debemos hablar de una afinidad específicamente católica, ya que esta expresión debe desembocar siempre en imágenes, precedidas por la profecía o el sueño (que se entretejen en Freud, científico surrealista, como lo que podría llamarse una onirización del destino.) La imagen en ambos casos supone el medio para comunicarnos con lo oculto o lo divino mediante las reacciones instintivas del sobrecogimiento, la pena y el asco. La exhibición del acto de rajar el globo ocular es una crucifixión.

Meshes of the Afternoon

"One of the few films that I remember fondly [laughs] is Meshes of the Afternoon and I saw it when I was sixteen, so thirteen years ago, and I saw it in school, and it really affected me, strongly. As I remember the plot is pretty cyclical and I’m sure my memory of it will be even more convoluted [laughs]. Am... there is this woman walking down the street in LA, it’s in black and white, and it feels immediately drugged or dreamlike, and... there are these stark shadows. Maybe some flowers in a gate, she goes into a house, it’s maybe her friend’s house, it’s not her house, and takes a nap and then what follows is a dream, but not quite a dream of... there is this malevolent kind of male figure, creeping in the corners, and doubles her... and then certain objects that, I can’t remember what, if they had any significance or role but they are early distinct; there is like a knife, a key, a loaf of bread, kind of like violent domesticity, and... maybe more flowers and maybe they are still outside. At some point the male figure appears to be this figure in a cloak with a mirror face, it was terrifying, to me [laughs]. But then other times I think it’s a, I can’t remember if we can actually see his face or not, but I think I remember that it was actually her husband or her lover that played him, and then they made the film together. Am, there is a scene where she is sitting at the table with herself, and... I believe she awakens, and then she’s still in the dream or realizes the dream is not real. Am... there is a death. She is killed, I read it as a suicide, at the time, she is looking at herself and, I can’t remember how it ends at all. 

Pulp Fiction

"So... am... the movie that I am, that I’ve always really loved and that I kind of can’t get over how entertaining and sort of just like infinitely visually rich for me is Pulp Fiction. I saw Pulp Fiction with my dad on cable tv in Colombia when I was fourteen, which was about a year after it had come out. I think at the time I didn’t go... I was too young to see it in the theater, because it was so violent, but my dad and I watched it together and we just really really loved it. Am, the beginning,I remember, well I have the soundtrack and the soundtrack has like a lot of the dialog in it and the dialog is really like clever and funny, and the, I love the opening scene because the opening scene really misdirects you about what the movie is going to be about. At first, there is Pumpkin and Honey Bunny and they’re robbing a diner. So you think, when you don’t have any information about the movie, you think that the movie is going to be about two robbers, am, like two, like Bonny and Clyde kind of people, but then, it kind of is, is totally about like, all these other people, and all these other kind of shady people in the LA underworld. And then, I actually, like I really don’t remember, I don’t remember the fragments of the movie in order at all, I just remember parts that I really love, because every unit of the movie is really visually striking in its own way, and, so like the,the all the scenes between Mia Wallace and Vincent Vega are just like so kind of weird and romantic and incredible, and I think like, when I saw it I was fourteen, and I just like found Mia Wallace to be like my model of femininity. I thought she was like so... glamorous, and beautiful, and cool, and I love how she talks to Vincent Vega, and how she kind of like punks him out all the time, and, he thinks he’s like this kind of tough (hiff?) man but he ends up being totally intimidated by this mobster’s wife. Am, I love when they go into the diner and they do the twist, they dance to Chuck Berry’s “Jack Rabbit Slims”, or no, they da- they dance to Chuck Berry’s song at “Jack Rabbit Slims”. The lyrics to that song are incredible, “it was a teenage wedding and the old folks wished them well... you could tell that monsieur really loved the mademoiselle, am, something something rang the chapel bell...” Ah.... I forget the lyrics, but it’s a totally narrative song, which is really amazing because it’s like, the Chuck Berry song becomes a narrative within a narrative within a narrative, and it’s totally superimposed into these people that don’t have any kind of familial relationships, so it’s just like, it’s totally disorienting and bizarre but also really like nostalgic and kind of funny and ironized and I just like love, that whole part of the movie, where, then like Vincent Vega  takes Mia Wallace home and she tells him about how she was in a trailer for a... for a Charlie’s Angels style show, called, “Fox Five” or “Fox Fire”, and like she says that she told the joke and she resists telling him the joke and then she says: what did... what did mama tomato, or what did papa tomato tell baby tomato when he’s squashed and, and she says “ketchup,” and she is so sexy when she says that... So she looks at him so meaningfully and then she goes, am, into the apartment and has the drug overdose, but it’s like, it’s really incredibly like, I’ve, a drug overdose is like really, you know, an incredibly like, ugly, and scary thing, but the way like, the way that it gets stylized is like amazing, and the way it’s sexualized, it’s just like, it’s just like this moment of total ecstasy, and the, the Urge Overkill song is like: “Girl... pum pum pum pum-pum, you’ll be a woman... soon”, and it’s like, the camera angle, and her dancing, I think it’s like the most beautiful scene of a woman dancing that I’ve ever seen on film, and it’s like, I don’t know, for me it’s just like... it has nothing... it has very little to do with like cultural context or anything, it’s, it’s like the beauty of this, like, they create this totally rapturous ecstatic environment and like, just like her, she moves with so much grace, but also with this kind of sense of irony, and... So, that’s like my favorite scene from the movie ever, and just for that reason alone I’ll never be able to get that movie out of my head. Am, and, what else, I really... the scenes between John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson are really amazing, am, they’re really funny,  and like ah... this is more towards the beginning, this is definitely like before, Mia Wallace has the overdose, but,am, when they’re talking about what they call Big Macs in France, that’s really really great, and, um, yeah, the dialogues are like really... really hilarious. Am, but, there is like this certain point after Mia Wallace overdoses, where the latter half of the movie is just like all blood baths, and all of a sudden everything is, like this kind of intense stylized bloody violence, and I had never, what struck me was that, I think that like, in a certain way Tarantino was a kind of sentimental education in violence for me, I always was taught that visual violence was bad, and that I didn’t like it, and then all of a sudden I find myself like really really enjoying that kind of stylized visual violence, and learning to love like the choreography of violence,like when they accidentally shoot the guy in the face in the back of the car, and all of a sudden the back seat of the car is completely splattered with blood, it’s just like, it’s so satisfying and it’s so visceral. Am, yeah, I’m trying to, I’m trying to think what else, oh, and you know, there is just the whole matter that it’s a very circular movie and, I mean now, that kind of narrative is really common and so we don’t feel the originality of it that much, but, of course, a lot of it is stolen from Godard,and it’s very, it’s very much patterned after movies like Weekend, but the way he appropriates that makes it feel so fresh and makes it feel like, like a real tecni- like a real way of disrupting narrative conventions that felt like, really satisfying as the viewer that seemed to suggest that like but disrupting narrative conventions you’re [recording stops here.]

The Shining

“Ok. The most important thing when you are watching The Shining is to see the dust in the air. To be honest, like, ok. So, it’s a guy that has to take over this pretty much house is a place that no one can ever go to for like five months or so, in the dead of winter, in, Colorado or something. No one can ever, no one can go there, it’s completely isolated, you gotta think, it’s so big, no one is there, he’s only there to like, keep the thing going so they can run a ski resort in the winter -The dust that settles in that plays, because there is no maid or anything, they are not there to clean it, and you see al these isolated pieces of furniture in shots that are covered in dust and the light that comes through the window is so... mind blowing. Kubrick put up sheets, like sheets outside of the place that they were shooting at, and put like a thousand lightbulbs behind the sheets to get this dusty glare to come through, so when you see like the window shots, like, I mean, it’s all, but at the same time, it’s like an amazing actor performance, like it’s such an (?) movie, but at the same time you have this man, Jack Nicholson, the greatest American actor at that time [laughs in the background] or, whatever. The most like has the most energy on the screen if you’ve seen him, and he is, pretty much winging it, because they are not following the plot at all, I mean the lines that he says are not from the book or anything, they were rewriting the script. I don’t know. That’s why I think it’s a great movie. “

“Someth...”

“I don’t know what else to say. That’s... that’s... you wanna talk about specifics?”

“Am, I’m not supposed to intervene in this. But I’m doing it right now. Why does he kill them, or tried* to kill them?”

“To me, well, ok, anyway, I’m glad you asked that, because I feel that’s the point of the movie, what makes the movie great is that you don’t ever, you know, you are not supposed to ask that question. And that’s what makes the movie great, he just, I mean, it’s not about personal things, it’s about a particular kind of fucking horrifying feeling, that everyone feels and that comes across in this movie and it’s not a co- you never ask that question of why this man is gonna kill these... because it just has to happen because the hotel looks horrifying! Like it’s not a reason but, that’s not, like, no horror has personal feelings because all personal feelings can be explained and horror is just like something that is like [guttural loud noise resembling interferences in a radio -laughs in the background.] It’s just there. I don’t know.” 

Sometimes

This time I watched Mullholland Drive the line that pierced me the most is one that Adam, the filmmaker, says casually at his party: "Sometimes good things happen." He is about to announce his marriage with Camille or her pregnancy, we don't get to know it; but whatever is going on between them is not a good thing, because it is based on Camille's desire to hurt Diane.
The movie is a concatenation of catastrophes in crescendo that leads to a tragic impossibility of redemption: Camille's cruelty towards Diane leads the last one to get Camille killed, and Diane finally succumbs to her guilt by committing suicide. Bur right before the end of the movie, we see the landscape of LA with Betty and Rita superimposed as phantasms: this is a reminder of the moment in the movie when Rita was wearing a blond wig and they both looked similar, and walk together through LA at 2 AM to the the theater El Silencio. They are in slow motion, laughing and in love with each other. Even if their destiny (and ours) is bound to meaningless horror, to a second-hand (taped) experience of reality that leaves nothing to say, que da paso sólo al silencio, that moment will remain. And this is the most we can expect: Sometimes good things happen.

Watching ourselves watching

Today I watched Caché by Haneke for the second time. I was 21 the first time, so at first I thought that it wouldn't impress me as much this time, the second time, that its powers would be diminished by repetition. And of course I couldn't be more wrong. The impact that Caché produces grows up with you, the older you are the more multifarious and tentacled your guilt is, the fairer the punishment. The only difference is that the first time I was surprised by feeling guilty, and that now I'm so familiar with this mechanism that I am even daring to theorize about it. 

The most intriguing shots (which is to say a lot) in the film are the ones that start like the one above: a still camera, watching for several minutes. We think that we are in the position of a surveillance camera, or later on we think we are in the position of the stalker. Then all of a sudden the shot gets contaminated by blurry rewinding lines: we are not watching the street, this is the tape that the characters got of the stalker spying on them. The amazing thing is that we realize we are not only watching the characters, but at the same time, the characters are watching themselves being watched. This is a tromp l'oeil, an instability between dimensions in an incessant shift: from extradiegesis to diegesis, from reality to fiction, from disembodied eye to incarnated victim. From unaware consciousness to consciousness thinking itself. Isn't this the most masterly formalization of guilt, of this awful splitting that allows us to be judge and judged at the same time? This is also we quoting Majid to ourselves: "I just wanted you to be present".

Arrebatos

You can watch Arrebato with English subtitles now, thanks to this precious German edition by Bildstoerung, which comes with two documentaries (Iván Z and Arrebatos) and a short film by Zulueta, Leo es pardo. Inside the case you will find as well a beautiful booklet with essays and stills from the film.
This post intends to be about Arrebatos, the documentary about the making of Arrebato. To write about the film itself is a vertiginous task that must be undertaken with a predisposition to loss, momentary and irreversible, of oneself and other luxuries (this will happen imminently, here or somewhere else. Ailleurs is where Arrebato takes place). Some days one wants to humanize oneself and more importantly, stay humanized -these are not the days to write about Arrebato. Today I'm trying to keep myself warm, so I can push myself through the already said.
Marta Fernández Muro, who played the role of Marta (big teeth impossible to maintain all of it inside the mouth, her mouth is always open: excessive talking, excessive breathing, laughter always ready -a victim of celluloid, Eusebio Poncela called her). Marta says that Arrebato is a deeply religious film, that she looked for that word in the dictionary and the only word she remembers seeing is ecstasy, that Arrebato is ecstasy, more exactly the ecstasy of Santa Teresa as portrayed by Bernini.

The documentary starts with the announcement of a confession to be made by Eusebio Poncela: I had never talked about this, but today I'm going to tell you, so it stays recorded here. And the documentary finishes it with it. Zulueta was planning to end Arrebato  otherwise. Eusebio said, what if the camera shoots him? And Zulueta decided to use Eusebio's idea. "I should have never said that. That was not the way the film should have ended. He used my idea and someone got shot. And it wasn't me."

stagnant, contemplation

Serendipity Icicles, by Philip Maier

Still Cinema

"I always got in trouble for that; for using common people as models. They, the priests and my patrons, told me it was profane. Hah. Of course it was profane. That's the point."
-Christopher Peachment fictionalizing Caravaggio

"Pero un segundo gesto, el propiamente barroco, de alejamiento y especificación del objeto, crítica de lo figurado, lo desasimila de lo real: esa reducción a su propio mecanismo técnico, a la teatralidad de la simulación, es la verdad barroca de la anamórfosis."
-Severo Sarduy

I used to think that the beginning and essence of cinema was movement, image in movement. I thought this just until last night, when I watched Caravaggio (1986) by Derek Jarman. The most unsettling moments are when the film registers the athletic stillness of the models, enacting the silent drama of their tableau vivant. And then, Caravaggio's and the film's realisms fuse into each other in an illusionistic trick: the cinematic reenactment is so similar to the painting that we don't know whether what is being filmed is the painting or the flesh-and-blood actors. The film turns into a trompe l'oeil! This is the most perfect rendering of the baroque through cinema, to detach movement from the real in a theatrical gesture of simulation. Is stillness the anamorphosis of cinema?

metem[psycho]sis

I recently watched Psycho, yet again. Once more I forced myself to be a victim of the dirtiest trick that a narrator can play on an audience: to kill the main character in the middle of the story. In the past I assumed that this was just a sardonic experiment in narrative, but not this time. From the start the story is focailized through Marion Crane, and after her murder, the camera is freed from her perspective, it wanders around the room until it sets itself to inhabit Bates. Hitchcock is the great master of isomorphism: form always imitates content. Psycho is a film split in two characters to formally reflect Norman Bates -a host inhabited by two. And of course, he is the owner of a motel.

Sentimentalism is self-annihilation (not in a good way)

After watching “Small Town Gay Bar” it has never been more clear to me that the biggest failure through which a documentary can doom itself is deciding its message to the world before shooting it (not that documentaries need to be fashioned according to a message, but that’s a different story.) Even as commendable and necessary as its purpose is (the spread of recognition and respect for gay individuals and their hard attempts to build communities in the rural South,) “Small Town Gay Bar” is so determined to dignify the people it portrays that it ends up silencing them. The emphasis on how normal their lives are as hardworking citizens, god-believer Americans and monogamous lovers leaves out the very differences it is attempting to celebrate. If you live in an environment in which you are harassed every day of your life you are not normal nor you should be; the self-conviction of one’s normality only asserts the conditions in which exclusion and violence take place, it perpetuates an identification with the oppressor and simplifies the social significance of homosexuality in order to appropriate it.

Every interviewed is shown as saintly devoid of resentment, never harboring bad feelings or resentment for the forces that inflict them pain and fear. “If you don’t like me, I don’t care.” The christian remains a martyr, the logic of lynching is internalized by turning the other cheek. There is this moment when, at last, a drag-queen raises her middle finger addressed to the ones that tell her everyday that she is going to hell. It is a good-humored middle finger though, softened by laughter. In a way, it still is “I don’t care.” The documentary wouldn’t allow a middle finger otherwise; it would never show its characters being angry or hurt, not to mention ambivalent. That would open cracks in the early memorial that is being built for them and would ruin the funereal sentimentality culminated in the inspiring music that starts more than 20 minutes before the end and shows the interviewees silently posing, mourned for while still alive. A tragedy flattened by its foreshadowing, why does the drag-queen always has to get killed in narratives?

There were moments when the shots were cut in the middle of people’s sentences. That is perhaps what I found most deeply terrifying. Why were the cut? Maybe they said something considered inappropriate by the director, something that contradicted the overdignified stoic aura that the documentary had created for them even before shooting them. Hard attempts at dignification are suspicious. Everyone is always already worthy, just let the camera show in what unseen, unnoticed ways they are.

Documentary filmmakers: your task is to set the conditions for the appearance of a moment when you have to step back and let the camera do its work… that is when a documentary is born.