NSN profile from 2007 (as part of The Best Films of the 21st Century, so far):
Dans la ville de Sylvia (Spain/France 2007) and Unas fotos en la ciudad del Sylvia (Spain 2007). Director: José Luis Guerín.
History is at the core of José Luis Guerín's cinema.
The Barcelona-based filmmaker brought his two latest movies to the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) last week -- Dans la ville de Sylvia, a French/Spanish co-production shot in 35mm and an accompanying video-journal, Unas fotos en la ciudad del Sylvia, which was made with a handheld camera in DigiBeta.
Throughout his career Guerín, a film professor at Barcelona's Universitat Pompeu Fabra, has used every means at his disposal to re-examine the past. Growing up in Franco's hermetically-sealed regime made him wary of accepted truths and their dubious relationship with a packaged reality. And that fascination with history extends to the cinema itself.
"It's a dialogue with the past," says Guerín through translator Omar Ruiz-Diaz. "It's in my mind always. When I talk to the students I see them as filmmakers already. It's very important that the students have a knowledge of the people who made films in the past. When students show me a film it's important to make connections with the past."
Guerín's interest in film began in Barcelona's cinemas where he attended screenings and started making films himself. "I was young and it was during Franco's regime so there wasn't any movie school. There was a film library and a pub where we discussed all the movies that we saw."
The Franco era of his youth was a cultural wasteland where American films were banned outright. Guerín learned about U.S. filmmakers long before he actually got a chance to see their work. He started shooting movies of his own in Super 8 and 16mm and developed a documentary approach which he continues to use to this day. The early '70s saw the emergence of an alternative culture in cinema parallel to the mainstream with Jonas Mekas and the New York underground particularly important for Guerín. "The new approach gave us the idea we could do things with small cameras and with this perspective I started to do my first feature film when I was 22 years old (which was released as Los Motivos de Berta: Fantasía de Pubertad in 1985)."
The black and white film shot in 35mm was fully scripted but was perhaps the last time Guerín worked with even the semblance of a conventional format. His next work, Innisfree (1990), visited the Irish town where John Ford shot The Quiet Man while other films mixed documentary and found footage in new and radical ways. Tren de sombras (1997) is a silent homage to the origins of cinema while 2001's En construcción documents the dismantling of Barrio Chino, a rough and tumble working-class neighbourhood where Barcelona's underworld once thrived.
Several of Guerín's students over the years have been invited to work on his projects. Each film is a new experience for the director who prefers that as little as possible be predetermined. "It's not preproduction, production and postproduction," stresses Guerín about his working methods. "It's an organic process for me to write and shoot and edit.
"A scriptwriter is an excuse to have this kind of approach. It's a very dynamic way to think about making movies. I don't want a closed script. I want to reinvent and be free to add ideas. For me cinema is the site of revelation. I need to be the first spectator for my films. I need to watch them with some level of surprise at all times."
Asked if he has ever run into problems using this open-ended approach the director laughs and says "only with the producer. My moral reference (for this approach) is Robert Flaherty. Flaherty didn't look for a typical producer. When he started a project people wouldn't understand what he wanted because he was changing things here and changing things there."
Guerín moves continually between the elements of control and chance, a contrast which he compares to the filmmaking methods of two earlier cinematic masters Alfred Hitchcock and Jean Renoir. "Hitchcock was best on a closed set and anything outside his control was a terrible accident. Jean Renoir was the opposite -- he loved the real, the accidental." Guerín values both approaches but on his latest project he let chance take over and followed wherever it led him.
At one level the Sylvia films are about unrequited love and missed opportunities. A nameless narrator searches for a woman he once met in Strasbourg 22 years earlier. He has little to go on but returns to the city of Sylvia "with the secret purpose of finding her." The woman in question does not even know the man exists. And as he searches through the streets for his idealized woman he says: "I don't keep a clearimage of her face and if I met her again I might not recognize her."
Omar Ruiz-Diaz, from Canada's Spanish-language El Popular Daily, translated Guerín's conversation with the North Shore News and accompanied the filmmaker while he shot footage around Hastings and Main last week. Guerín takes his Sony Betacam with him everywhere and in Unas fotos en la ciudad del Sylvia, which received its world premiere at the Pacific Cinémathèque on Oct. 2, he went out into the streets of Strasbourg in search of Sylvia. His camera picks up one image after another and follows unidentified women serepticiously studying them for answers.
In Dans la ville de Sylvia, an 84-minute colour feature, the camera is often static with long takes reading situations as people come in and out of the frame reminiscent of Chantal Akerman's minimalist cinema. This is narrative fiction within an ambient framework. In the 70-minute video journal, Unas fotos en la ciudad del Sylvia, the material has been desaturated and frozen as moments in time -- what was originally colour footage has been edited into single images with the narration fed to us as poetic intertitles: "I assist with uncertainty the revelation of identity,"; "In every corner the missing one is being remembered,"; "There aren't images of (Petrarch's) Laura nor certainty about her identity . . . only the testimony of a poet."
Asked if he ran into any difficulty shooting people on the street Guerín replies: "Yes, but it was a very exciting problem. For me the poetry of film is what I see and at the same time what I receive from the stage and the stage in this case is the street. You've got the script, you've got the street, you've got the stage, you've got the people but at the same time something will come up and you don't know exactly what it is. Incidental things are a very important element of the movie. Especially with the Sylvia project."
Like Guy Maddin, Jean-Luc Godard and a handful other exemplary filmmakers Guerín uses the testimony of the past in his search for new forms of cinema.
