Category: Catalan

Legendary filmmaker Barbara Hammer spent a month at Cape Cod in 1998 making film, recordings, and journal entries. A year before her death 20 years later, she gave the material to director Lynne Sachs, and she created with and for Barbara this beautiful short.

It is like a dream, described to herself through her diary, it becomes a poem. In this wee shack ensconced on the sandy scrub before the beach, Barbara watches the sun rise over the ocean. No electricity or running water, she is alone with her thoughts and the expanse of sky. There she meditates on the surrounding beauty, and contemplates light and colour through her camera.

Pieced together 20 years later, as Barbara’s life is running out, it gives a poignancy to her gasping, clasping joy of the ephemeral beauty of the ever-changing natural world. It is never scenery but a daily interaction with life. The sun to warm, the shock of her rainwater shower, the wind strumming the dune grass.

A really lovely short film.

Really interesting short documentary on A Toute Epreuve, a book of poetry that was created by surrealist painter and sculptor Joan Miro, conceiving of the book as a form of sculpture and each illustration as a work of art.

The book was created in collaboration with Paul Eluard, the French surrealist poet. He composed the poetry in 1930, inspired by Miro’s hometown of Barcelona. Miro then took a decade working on creating his book. With a cover of wooden board, the book is composed of folded paper, with illustrations made from India ink prints from woodcuts. The whole thing took years to make, sculpting each of the cherrywood blocks just so. Miro was meticulous in what he wanted on each page, how it should interact with the text, and how it should fold together as a three-dimensional object.

It was also fascinating to see the book’s conservation. Everything has been kept, the woodcuts, the tracing paper used to create them, the different versions of the pages, as Miro worked out what would go where. All is taken pristine care of, and preserved for the future.

Really interesting look into such a unique object.

Architectures In Silence is a short film combining shots of an abandoned dog track with historical silent footage of architects Le Corbusier and Antoni Bonet with their thoughts on architecture on black title cards.

I didn’t like it. I had a think about what I didn’t like. Was it the architecture of the building, the Canodrom of Meridiana? Was it the pure insufferable chat about art between the two famous guys? Was it the style it was filmed in? It’s hard to nail down. It just left one word ringing in my head and that word was:

Wank.

And it’s not like I can’t sit and watch narrativeless films, I have and for much longer, and I do enjoy them, their stillness and space for contemplation. And it’s not that I don’t enjoy stuff about architecture or art or folk wanging on about it, coz I also definitely do. And I’ve seen other stuff by this director I’ve liked, so it’s not like that’s the problem.

This film just doesn’t work for me. It’s just not for me. Despite it only being 10 minutes long, I found it wearing, and didn’t get much from it. I don’t know if there’s much more to it than that – I didn’t like it.

Los Tarantos is a flamenco version of Romeo and Juliet set in Franco’s Spain. It is great fun. Everybody is dancing all the time. The Romeo character goes to his mum and is like, Mum, I love Juana!, and the maw’s like, No, she is from a rival clan and I will dance the dance of my hatred for them! And Juana’s like, I love your son, let me show you the depth of my love through dance! And the mum’s like, I forgive you, let us dance the dance of reconciliation. It’s brill.

It stars Carmen Amaya, the greatest flamenco dancer of her time, as the mother of Rafael (Romeo). Rafael was played by Daniel Martin, who also went on to be a great flamenco dancer, so the dancing in it is top notch.

The Montagues and Capulets of the tale are the Los Zorongas and Los Tarantos, feuding gypsy clans encamped in the Somorrostro district of Barcelona. Long ago, old Zoronga and old Taranto were rivals in love for Angustias (Carmen Amaya), but she married Taranto and had, by the looks of it when you first see their house, a million children. Jealousy ate at Zoronga until he dobbed Taranto into the fascist police, ridding himself of a rival and getting rewarded with cash in the process. Now he is a rich man, owning his own stables, and keeping company with the Pacoas, who helped him hand over Taranto to be killed, and who are all round bad eggs. While Angustias is left to raise her and Taranto’s kids with very little, poor as they are, they are nonetheless rich with love, music and dance. But a hatred for Los Zorongas burns in her heart.

The film begins when Curro Pacoas, a shitestirrer and brute, incites a fight by taking Zoronga’s son Jero to harass Los Tarantos selling paper flowers and overturning a wagon with a mother holding a baby inside. Jero is wounded in the fight and asks his father to take revenge on all Los Tarantos. His father sees that Curro and Jero were the ones clearly at fault and tells them to just mind their own business.

Meanwhile Rafael is dragged to a party by his friend, Mojigondo, who has hooked them up with a couple of tourists. To get into their pants, Moji takes them dancing in the Somorrostro, a gypsy encampment which became a shanty town district of Barcelona. Rafael half-heartedly follows, but once there, is struck by the beauty of one of the dancers.

Juana (Juliet) is the daughter of old Zoronga, and is there celebrating the wedding of her cousin. This involves showering the naked bride in her bed with flowers. Her cousin then gifts one of the flowers to Juana, telling her she will meet the man of her dreams one day. Juana goes outside to dance with her clan. There she sees Rafael and instantly falls in love.

They try to marry, but don’t have the papers. Rafael tells his mother of his love and Juana comes to beg for his mother’s blessing of their union. Although initially appalled, she knows all too well what strife in love feels like, and relents, admitting Juana is a good girl, blameless for her father’s faults.

However old Zoronga is having none of it, and locks Juana away in his mansion. Two weans have to sneak her a homing pigeon so she can send a message of her love to Rafael. Kids in the future will simply not believe that this was the equivalent of texting while grounded.

When this doesn’t work to split them up, Zoronga puts it about that he has betrothed her to Curro. It is Zoronga’s hope that one or both of them will grow despondent and give up their quest to be together, but Curro uses it as ammo to fuel further violence. When he can’t get a rise out of Rafael, he kills his friend Moji. Curro fully intends to take Juana as his wife, and when she steadfastly declares her love for Rafael, he beats her and attempts to rape her.

As the film reaches its climax, will the mad dog Curro be contained? Will Zoronga put Juana’s safety above his own pride? Will true love win out?

Great wee film, with cracking dancing.

Ocean Feeling is a short experimental art film of overlaid images of biological life with an ambient drone score. Strangely hypnotic and beautiful.

The filmmaker moves from Barcelona to Buenos Aires and begins filming her new city. However, after 8 months of doing so, the city remains a stranger through her lens.

The film ends with the filmmaker expressing dissatisfaction with what she captured, and I think that’s palpable throughout. It’s like the camera is not big enough for what she wants to capture, like she is seeing the city through a keyhole. There’s something about the frame that is almost claustrophobic.

Of course, the filmmaker is projecting her own experience, feeling as though the city is a stranger when it is her who is a stranger in the city. She finds all the people she shoots distant, but it is her shooting from a distance that has created that space. She is frustrated that she cannot capture a sense of engagement with the city, yet she is entirely absent from all but the final shot. Some shots feel so detached, you almost feel like the camera was just set up on a stand and left. It makes you realise that a filmmaker can make just as much of an impact by their absence as by their presence.

A project the filmmaker clearly only thinks of as a partial success, it still has something to tell us about the filmmaking experience, and the sense of detachment of being new to a city.