Jose Luis Guerin Films

It's taking me forever to write about the Harvard Film Archive's retrospective of films by Jose Luis Guerin - but I'm going to do it, no matter how long it takes. I suppose one of the advantages of writing about films like this, undistributed (mostly), usually only seen in festivals and special showings like this one, is that there is not the sense of timeliness you get with current releases. They'll show here and there, they'll turn up on video formats, and people will be talking about them, here and there, once in a while, for years. They are wonderful films: beautiful, clever, full of ideas and images that stay with you, and tend to get inside your head. You start thinking about other films through them - I do anyway. They create new contexts - for instance - seeing Tren de Sombras, with its reproduced (invented) films puts a twist on not just fake Nietzsche footage, but big budget Hollywood fare. They give me too many things to think about, and I might as well think about it in public.

This post, then, is just an introduction: capsule reviews of the films themselves. Subsequent posts will dive in a bit deeper. Hopefully sooner rather than later, though who knows.

Inisfree - shot in Ireland, on locations John Ford used for the Quiet Man, with extras from the Quiet Man, as well as discussions of the film, reenactments of scenes from the film, and so on. Guerin talked about the myth of the lost paradise, and its application to the Irish in America. But that myth comes up over and over in Guerin’s films, as we shall see. This is a handsome film, consistently interesting in what was on screen, but a bit fragmented and disorganized - it's a very young film, it seems.

Tren de Sombras - recreations of amateur footage from the 20s, at times presented as if real, at others shown explicitly as reproductions. Both are manipulated - the film is distressed, manipulated - slowed down, sped up, reversed, repeated, and so on, sometimes as if it were just the found footage, at other times, explicitly being manipulated for this film. This alternates with footage from the present - shots of the village and castle in Normandy where it was shot, some of them straight documentary, others more ambiguous. Guerin spends a lot of time in the house, shooting the rooms and props - shooting especially at night, the shadows on the wall, which make a visual rhyme to the distressed film: but that’s what a film is, after all - shadows on the wall.

En Construccion - this is the closest to a straight documentary of these films. Film about the destruction of a block of slums in Barcelona, and the erection of a new apartment building in its place. Gentrification, Catalan style! Shot over a year or so (though it took a couple more years of work - Guerin had the luxury of time because he had a student crew to work with - this was their education, three years making this film) - roughly following a group of characters. Juani and Ivan - a pair of lowlifes - he's lazy, does nothing - she's a prostitue, tough and charismatic (and very reminiscent of Vanda Duarte); some of the workers - the man in charge of the bricklaying and his son; another bricklayer and his two Morroccan assistants - one skinny and strong, the other a smart, talkative, communist; an old sailor turned tramp, and a couple of his friends; a couple kids - especially a girl, related to the foreman. Guerin films them as they build the place, start to finish basically, showing them working together, talking together, etc. - and then the place is done, and they are replaced by the finish carpenters putting in fixtures, and real estate agents giving tours, and prospective tenants complaining about the rest of the neighborhood. Though it ends better than that - with a family getting their kid to wave at the old people living across the street. And then we see Juani carrying Ivan down the street as the camera retreats and a crowd follows them - then she puts him down and he picks her up and we cut to credits...

(This film is very similar to Pedro Costa’s Vanda’s Room - story of a slum being razed, shot over a long period of time, etc. - and both of them centered on a dark haired husky voiced drug addicted woman - Juani and Vanda: who not only anchor the film, but were apparently instrumental in getting it made. Vanda’s room was the center of the production as well as the content of the Costa film - and Juani’s room was the center of Guerin’s production, their headquarters, and she was the liaison to the community. Both being made almost simultaneously, as well...)

In the City of Sylvia: 3 days in Strasbourg: a young man, day by day - first he walks around the city with a map, then settles into a café. The next day he comes back, and looks at the people at the café - we look at the people at the café - for a very long time. We watch them, we watch him watching (taking notes, sketching) - then, he sees one particular woman, and sets out to follow her when she leaves. Follows he through the city, at first without her noticing, then with the owman trying to evade him - he finally catches up to her on a tram, and tells her what he is doing. Is she Sylvia? He says he knew her, six years ago. She says no. He keeps trying - she says no. He apologizes and apologizes, and she gets off the tram, no longer angry at him. Later he goes to a bar, tries to talk to one woman, watches people dancing, while a bartender reenacts Manet. The next day, he’s back at the café, then follows another woman to a train station - where he sits all day, looking at people, as we do. And that is all.

Some Photos from the City of Sylvia: Black and white still photos related to the City of Sylvia film. Starts in Strasbourg, telling the same basic story of the fiction film: Guerin (or a narrator) looking for a woman he knew 22 years ago... Going to their old places, looking for her in the streets, riding a bicycle, etc. Starting there, it moves to the broader themes - the woman glimpsed - from Dante and Petrarch to Goethe to Alfred Hitchcock. (Doesn't mention Citizen Kane though that is the basic situation: a woman seen once, the man projecting a whole alternate life on her). Moves to Madrid, Florence, Avignon (where Petrach saw his Laura) - showing the streets again, women, etc. We see hints of the coming film: Manet’s Folies Bergere painting quoted in the fiction film; the graffiti - "Laure, Je T'aime" that occurs throughout the streets of Strasbourg comes from a wall in Florence - "Tiamo Laura" - etc. This is all very much in the vein of Chris Marker: still photos like La Jetee (and shots that are very similar to La Jetee - people on the streets, shots in museums, etc.) - the style of Marker’s essay documentaries, with written titles playing the same role as the voice overs in Marker's films. A travelogue, like Sans Soleil, which itself contains a meditation on Vertigo, among others - as are these two Guerin films. That, I fear, will have to be something I develop later.

And running through all these films is the theme of the lost paradise: the mythical place in Innisfree; the lost time and places in the lost films of Tren de Sombras; the destruction of the old neighborhood in En Construccion (which wasn’t much a paradise - though neither was Ireland, with its wars and unemployment, when you take it as it really was); and the lost women of the two Sylvia films. And that myth, the woman glimpsed who represents another life, suggests another dimension of these myths: the idea of the shadow self - the person you could have been, a life you could have lived. But I will have to come back to that, too.