Cinema from the Inside: Andrés Di Tella explores the art of filmmaking in 'A Film Is the Entire Cinema'

In A Film is All Cinema , filmmaker and journalist Andrés Di Tella compiles texts by contemporary filmmakers that were produced within the framework of the Film Program, which Di Tella has coordinated since its inception in 2013. Perhaps this is why the texts gravitate towards amphibious registers , as if the tone they adopt could not be fully inscribed within the orbit of the academic, nor in the field of journalism. At the same time, the texts are the record of special classes , but the interventions do not exhibit the crushing certainties of a lesson, but rather the openings of someone who thinks with doubts or groping.

The directors invited by Di Tella talk about their films, their production processes, their relationship with cinema, and also their personal lives , but nothing conforms to the conventions of the interview or biography genre. This oscillation must be traced, then, in the normal functioning of the Program, beyond the guests and the special classes. In the prologue, Di Tella describes the rules of the space, with nine-month cycles and a rapid pace of short filming.

Each group presents what they filmed that week to the class, but they are not allowed to give any explanations about what they produced: it's the footage that should speak . Once they've seen the work, the other groups comment on what they've seen, and only at the end are the filmmakers allowed to speak. Di Tella says that listening often resolves creative problems, and there's no longer any need to respond or explain, leaving those who filmed "empty."

The instructor (Di Tella himself) does not intervene in these instances, which reinforces the Program's premise and horizontalizes exchanges between students . It doesn't seem surprising that in this teaching context, the participation of guests can allow for as many formats and expository strategies as those read in "A Movie Is All Cinema , " recently published by La Crujía and Torcuato Di Tella University.

One of the most curious presentations is that of James Benning , responsible for a unique cinema that dialogues less with the films of his contemporaries than with experimental forms of literature or landscape .

Its presentation is biographical and political, but also, above all, geographical . Benning recounts the journeys that shaped his life, from his native Milwaukee to long journeys to inhospitable regions of the United States, his contacts with marginalized populations, and his belated attempts to find work as a math teacher.

Contrary to all expectations, in this journey, cinema turns out to be a minor anecdote, something that emerges in passing in a brief sentence, barely a footnote that punctuates the intensity of the biographical narrative. At the end of his class, Benning invites students to do the same: draw maps of places that are significant to them and trace the contours of their personal stories.

Unlike Benning, Joao Moreira Salles talks about cinema, but he does so through the lens of another director: Eduardo Coutinho. Salles isn't interested in laudatory portraits, but rather in analyzing the crises that led Coutinho to dramatically modify his projects. After the success of "Goat, Marked for Death ," which was interrupted by the Brazilian dictatorship in 1964 and only completed in 1984, Coutinho's work comes to a standstill: the Brazilian believes he'll never be able to make another film like it and doesn't know how to approach the next one.

After a long creative stasis, the documentary filmmaker finds (or creates) a new path through an unprecedented documentary format in which the interviewees speak directly to the camera and the testimonies are edited more or less in the order in which they were filmed . This model resulted in Santo Forte , which in 1996 relaunched Coutinho's career into a highly prolific period that culminated in his tragic death in 2014.

The interest in Coutinho doesn't seem accidental. Salles himself, aged sixty-three, has a short and scattered filmography, consisting of just four films in more than two decades .

His two most important films ( Santiago and No intenso agora ) were made eleven years apart . Coutinho thus acts as a strong saint for Salles, a minor divinity who guides the life of a devotee who finds in his mentor the key to his own career as a filmmaker.

Romanian Radu Jude also surprises with a show of faith , only the saint in question is Andy Warhol, the fallen angel of pop for whom cinema was merely one medium among others through which to prolong his work. Jude reconstructs Warhol's films with a remarkable mix of erudition and attention to detail : Warholian cinema (if it can be called that) interests him as a condensation of a specific idea of ​​art, that of the failed work that renounces any aspiration to respectability, and that finds in this gesture the path to something truly new.

An exponent of playful and insolent cinema, Jude looks to Warhol's filmography for a kind of program to reflect on the current place of a filmmaker. The path of the grotesque, the intemperate resource, and "badly made" art serves him, through Warholian imagery, to review his own career, from his early appearances on Romanian television to the success of Unfortunate Sex or Crazy Porn .

In addition to the aforementioned texts and those by Pedro Costa and Marta Andreu , the book includes three others by Argentine filmmakers: Lucrecia Martel, Mariano Llinás, and Albertina Carri. Readers who have followed her interviews and writings will recognize her emphasis on themes and positions. Carri narrates the process that led her to film Las hijas del fuego.

It was her approach to porn, she says, that led her to encounter, following the logic of the archive, a new world , but also a familiar one, which includes both the representation of the subjugation of women and a taste for the low and the minor that fatally separates it from the legitimate areas of art and its institutions.

In this journey, the director of Los rubios tells a story that accumulates happy contrasts , whether in the incredible ending of the almost lost The Woman in the Window (an old porn film, presumably French) or in the conflictive relationship with pioneering feminist authors who openly declared themselves against the genre.

Martel's text, which opens the book, deals with the monstrous in the everyday , the secret face of the beings and things around us. Cinema, says the director of La ciénaga and Zama , is especially suited to capturing and exposing these folds, to detecting the seams that reveal the strange , without fully exhibiting it.

One way to generate that experience, Martel reminds us, is precisely sound and its rarefaction, a dimension curiously forgotten by many films , and which in his films is almost ahead of the visual, a cinema that listens as much or more than it sees.

Llinás, on the other hand, doesn't talk about sound but rather about space and the relationship that someone who films should maintain with the world around them. We must seek, Llinás explains in his usual maximalist tone, a unique place that helps us think about (and in) cinema, even when doing anything other than filming.

The director of Spas and Extraordinary Stories ' arc of references spans the entire history of cinema , from The Women Workers Leaving the Factory by the Lumière brothers to the end of Spielberg's The Fabelmans , which recreates the now legendary encounter with John Ford. Ford, precisely, had a place. It was Monument Valley, the horizon against which most of his films are silhouetted, or at least the best ones, whether they were Westerns or not.

A film is all cinema , compiled by Andrés Di Tella (La Crujía and Torcuato Di Tella University).