false war (carlos álvarez, tr natasha wimmer)

Álvarez’s exile novel is a bricolage. There are scenes from Cuba itself, but also Miami, Mexico City and Berlin. The novel adopts the fractured narrative so beloved of postmodernism (or wherever it is we have got to), skipping not just from country to country but also across timelines. The unifying thread is a deadpan discomfort, shared by many of these characters, from the first person narrator to the female psychologist. There are various strands whose juxtaposition makes for an abrasive read: no sooner does the reader begin to connect with one sequence than they are thrown into another. It’s reminiscent of Enrigue’s Hypothermia  or Luiselli’s Faces in the Crowd, other writers who appear to embrace a mosaic narrative, as they seek to portray the complexity of the modern day frontlines between first world and third.  

la fundición del tiempo (d juan alvarez)

Alvarez’s film is one of those which you begin to enjoy far more the moment you step out of the cinema. This is not a back-handed compliment. There is a code (codigo) to watching cinema, and when a film wilfully disrespects that code, as a viewer we feel disorientated, unsure of ourselves. However, the act of breaking the code, of fucking with time, is something that a bold filmmaker is prepared to do in order to assault and reform perception. There were times, watching La Fundición del Tiempo, when I struggled with the lassitude, but within seconds of leaving the cinema, stepping out into the actuality of Bartolome Mitre, I was basking in it. A curious paradox, but an admirable one.

The film is split into two halves. One is set in Japan. It studies a tree doctor who saved some trees which had been half-carbonised by the nuclear bomb at Nagasaki. The doctor continues to grow trees from the fruit of those atomic trees. The second half occurs in Uruguay. It focuses on a man who tames wild horses. The process is documented in painstaking detail. We learn little about the man, but everything about the process, the way in which man brings nature to heel, with a mixture of cruelty and kindness. Alvarez’ camera lingers, frets, rides with the tamed horse, as it buckles and resists before it ultimately capitulates to man’s will. 

The two halves are married by an extended, Reygadas-esque sequence of mist and white light. Images appear and fade away; a metaphor for the process of watching a film where the viewer’s engagement seems to drift in and out of focus. In that sense this is a profoundly meditational experience. Rather than seduce us with narrative and flow, the film challenges the viewer to reflect. The translated title of the film might be: The Casting of Time. Alvarez compels the viewer to question their relationship to time, as a viewer and as a human being. 

avant (d juan alvarez)

Juan Alvarez’s Avant opens with a shot of the Sodre, a purpose-built concert hall that, like many big projects in this part of the world, opened years late, over-budget, looking like a white elephant. The narrative kicks in with the arrival of Julio Boca as the Sodre Ballet’s new artistic director. Boca is the superstar of Southern Cone ballet. Which means he’s more than just a ballet dancer. In Argentina and Uruguay he is revered. An Argentinean, he agreed to take on the artistic directorship of the Uruguayan company after having retired from dancing himself.

Avant traces the development of the Sodre Ballet as Boca’s management helps to transform both ballet and the building into a flourishing success. But this is just a single strand in what is an increasingly complex and sophisticated narrative, told with a detached eye and a finely-chiselled edit. The film touches on how hard it is to produce work of artistic ambition in the third world; but it also adheres to a democratic vision where the cleaner’s importance is respected just as much as that of the prima ballerina. This is a film conscious of its context, unafraid to allude to the socio-political conditions the ballet operates within.

However, no matter where it takes place, ballet is ballet. Avant is, above all, a film about what it’s like to create ballet. The show that reaches the stage, full of clean bodies in perfect sync, belies the labour that goes into the creation of the art. Alvarez’s film traces the thousand and one elements that go into the creation of a ballet, offering along the way some kind of insight into the stress that Boca and his company contend with as they struggle for perfection. Scenes such as a ballet dancer exiting the stage in tears, or Boca himself contending with the problems of communication from the sound booth, or the simple case of a man trying to pull an office chair up a flight of stairs, offer vivid insights into the difficulties of both creating ballet as well as creating ballet in the third world, without the film ever having to resort to any kind of formal explanation or exposition.

My personal relationship with the Sodre has lead to an understanding of an art which for many years I didn’t get. In Alvarez’s backstage vision we see how ballet dancers are as much like sportsmen as artists, pushing bodies to their limits, constantly challenging themselves. Where Alvarez could have gone for the X-Factor approach, his film instead conveys the dancers’ dramas with an  understated eye, showing how their efforts are part of a greater whole. Alvarez achieves this with an almost metronomic discipline as he builds his portrayal, frame by frame. It is a cliché which, perhaps, he might not object to, to say that the film is a ballet in its own right, prioritising image and music above the spoken word, capturing the essence both of the Sodre and of ballet itself.