00:07 Cinema is an art of the present where ideas are embodied.
00:12 The ideas on paper can be better or worse,
00:17 but they are paper, and only in contact with the actors,
00:21 with the film do they become incarnate.
00:23 And if ideas are not embodied, they are of little or no use.
00:49 'Cerrar los ojos / Close Your Eyes', it's about two characters.
00:54 One of them carries all the burden of memory on his back
01:00 and to the other, fate has granted him grace,
01:04 we can speak of grace,
01:06 of the fact that he no longer knows who he is or who he was.
01:09 And there's that dialectic.
01:12 But I was also interested in highlighting
01:17 something that is often not mentioned as much as memory,
01:22 which is consciousness.
01:24 The debate is not only whether Julio Arenas,
01:28 the character played by José Coronado,
01:30 will be able to recover his memory?
01:32 But, especially, wether he has a conscience,
01:36 an awareness of the other.
01:37 Because, although he does many tasks in the asylum,
01:44 we will never see him helping an old man or an old woman.
01:50 And that's premeditated on my part,
01:53 because that would reveal a degree of consciousness.
01:57 And what's in the final debate
02:00 is whether a glimmer of consciousness is possible in the character.
02:07 I think that's where the spectator has to give the answer,
02:11 has to elaborate the answer.
02:13 If the film gives an answer, it closes the mystery.
02:17 I differentiate between enigma and mystery.
02:20 The enigma is typical of any thriller.
02:25 It's about unravelling or getting to know
02:29 or solving the riddle.
02:32 And you say, “The butler was the murderer.”
02:35 Mystery is of a much higher category, and mystery, by nature,
02:44 has to be something open-ended,
02:47 otherwise it is not a mystery.
02:49 It stops being a mystery.
02:50 I have been a scriptwriter for all my films,
02:53 although, when a book is written about film scriptwriters,
02:59 I am never included.
03:02 I've done all the screenplays and some of them on my own.
03:05 'La morte rouge' I did it alone.
03:08 For me it has been an experience, to
03:09 a certain extent, not entirely new,
03:14 but rather of recovering the time where I had worked
03:19 with another scriptwriter,
03:21 because I made 'El sol del membrillo / Dream of light'
03:25 with Antonio López, without a single written line of script.
03:31 In the other realities of short or medium-length films,
03:38 I simply used two or three pages, nothing more.
03:41 I believe in that form of creation,
03:44 as it also depends on the nature of the story we want to tell.
03:49 The script has also established itself
03:51 as an absolute protocol in the audiovisual sector.
03:53 And nowadays, I believe that the script is used,
03:59 because of the sources of financing, as an unavoidable protocol.
04:04 And that makes everything much stiffer,
04:08 everything much more formatted.
04:09 I've never been to any screenwriting school in my life.
04:14 Never.
04:15 I distrust manuals as well.
04:20 But in this film, given the nature of the story,
04:24 and the need for actors,
04:27 I called Michel Gaztambide to develop the script,
04:31 because I practically already had the story written.
04:36 It was a great experience and I think it was necessary.
04:40 It was necessary.
04:42 First of all, it must be said that for me a film is a living organism.
04:47 It is a living organism throughout all the phases, all of them.
04:52 A film cannot be confined to the fact of the script
04:57 or to the fact of the shooting.
04:58 Each phase is a living organism.
05:01 It discovers and must contribute to the creation of the film.
05:08 Jean-Luc Godard said that when he was editing,
05:12 he went against the filming.
05:14 That's a rather terrorist way of saying it,
05:17 that he was against the filming.
05:18 But it’s true that I've always practiced this work of creation.
05:26 For me, editing is essential.
05:29 I've been involved in all the editing of my films,
05:31 from the first day to the last.
05:34 That aspect is decisive.
05:36 I know that there are other directors who don't do the editing
05:40 and pass it on to an editor.
05:45 But I think it's essential.
05:48 And also the sound.
05:50 I give as much importance to sound as to image.
05:53 In other words,
05:53 all the creative processes of a film must be just that, creative.
05:59 And they also serve to weigh up what you did on set.
06:07 We know that Flaherty is the first director
06:12 or documentary filmmaker in the history of cinema who first shot,
06:18 then looked at what he had shot on the moviola,
06:21 and depending on what he had shot,
06:24 he shot again.
06:25 In other words, it is a living, absolutely living factor of creation,
06:31 which unfortunately the practice
06:33 now inherited from the television system,
06:37 from the audiovisual system,
06:38 puts in parenthesis.
06:41 As a result, the film, the project,
06:45 ceases to be a living organism as I say,
06:48 and perhaps the shooting phase is privileged.
06:53 But I still belong to that school.
06:57 I mean, I was brought up in a different way.
07:01 Actors, actresses have a special nature.
07:10 Perhaps something of what 'Close Your Eyes' aims to do
07:14 is precisely that.
07:16 For an actor, someone who has been an actor,
07:19 the characters they have played throughout their life as an actor
07:21 still have much more power,
07:24 much more existential force, than their real, everyday life.
07:31 And in fact, we know that the private, everyday lives of actors
07:36 are sometimes very disjointed, subject to crises
07:41 and what remains of them, in the memory of the spectators,
07:46 is that whole series of characters
07:49 that they played throughout their lives.
07:53 One could say, perhaps exaggerating a little,
07:56 that this is what constitutes them.
07:59 That is in their very nature.
08:02 In other words, if Julio Arenas, seeing himself
08:06 acting like an actor on a screen,
08:09 is more likely to recognize himself
08:12 than if the motives of blood or friendship are invoked.
08:16 I place what I have been able to transmit
08:20 in the workshops that I have given,
08:23 not only here, but also abroad,
08:26 always outside the institutional framework.
08:30 That is to say, there are now many film schools
08:34 scattered all over the world
08:37 and these schools tend, logically,
08:43 because some of them are subsidized by the State,
08:49 or by a ministry,
08:51 to orient teaching very much towards creating picture.
09:00 These pictures are then going to be replaced in the industry
09:04 and progressively renewed with other pictures.
09:08 The type of transmission that I, at least modestly, have worked on
09:16 and for me it is very important, is to transmit
09:18 the little or as much I have been able to learn.
09:23 Using references.
09:26 For example, I was at Béla Tarr's school in Sarajevo,
09:31 teaching a film course,
09:34 and there the discipline was the complete opposite.
09:39 There wasn't even a program.
09:42 And because I'm quite organized, I would tell Béla Tarr,
09:46 “We should have an index of where the course is going,
09:53 what we should...”.
09:55 I was much more conventional than he was,
09:57 who practiced the most unorthodox teaching you can imagine.
10:01 Of course, outside the institution.
10:04 How long did that school last?,
10:06 the time it took to suspend the funding of the university
10:10 that commissioned it. And that's how it is.
10:13 It's very difficult to train... You can't train poets,
10:17 you can't train real filmmakers,
10:20 but you can put them in front of the object of their vocation.
10:26 Because I think there are a lot of people, men, women,
10:30 who want to be film directors, they'd love to be that,
10:35 but I don't know if they want to be filmmakers in the same way.
10:39 Being a filmmaker is a commitment.
10:42 Nobody forces you to be a filmmaker.
10:45 No one forced me and you have to accept what that means,
10:50 with all its consequences.
10:52 That's why I think I've been very lucky.
10:55 If I have any legacy, it's in my films,
10:59 and I try to separate my name, but I can't,
11:02 because it has become
11:03 a factor to feed the epic legend that one tells,
11:10 which is totally alien to me.
11:15 “I am not that person,” Rimbaud said.
11:18 Well, that's how it is.
11:21 It's in my films and people pass, filmmakers pass,
11:27 films I hope will last.
11:30 I don't know, because the digital medium, so far,
11:36 has not been proven to last longer than photochemical medium.
11:42 And this is very interesting.
11:44 Do you know what is the most durable
11:46 and longest lasting image medium in history?
11:51 Do you know?
11:52 Oil painting.
11:54 Oil painting is the image medium that has remained
11:59 the most over time.
12:01 If all museums were in digital or photochemical format,
12:07 the colors would already be...
12:09 but there they are. Oil paintings.
12:12 So we have to contemplate what is called progress,
12:17 technological progress, taking certain things into account.
12:22 We are not always moving towards a completely new horizon.
12:28 What counts, above all, is awareness,
12:31 training, rather than technologies,
12:35 because they are constantly being renewed
12:38 and today there is a fetishistic cult of technology,
12:46 which is also something that I try to instill
12:49 in the people who come to my workshops
12:52 to free them from that burden.
12:55 The burden of technology.
12:58 There's not much premeditation in things.
13:01 Things come up.
13:03 I try to make them come out in a natural way,
13:06 not in a prefabricated way.
13:08 I think, and I don't know if I have succeeded,
13:11 the self-referential in cinema must be treated very delicately,
13:16 because it can become a kind of rhetoric of oneself.
13:21 In other words, there are directors in the history of cinema,
13:28 magnificent directors
13:30 that in the last stage of their lives have imitated themselves.
13:37 That's the worst thing. It happens to writers as well.
13:40 Writers who, in their last books imitated the style of their youth
13:47 that gave them credit in front of the publisher or society.
13:51 But it's already a style, in a way, stiff, dissected.
13:55 I tried to get away from that but I don't know if I succeeded.
13:59 Although I think that many times I let myself be carried away
14:01 by something that is very important to me,
14:03 which is emotion and emotion is more difficult to graduate.
14:12 I, like so many other colleagues here,
14:16 went to Madrid at a certain point
14:20 because it was the only place where we could study film.
14:24 There were no schools here in the Basque Country,
14:27 today thankfully they exist.
14:30 Someone doesn't have to leave their homeland
14:32 to seek education abroad.
14:35 Although it's always good to move and travel, obviously.
14:39 I remember that when I arrived in Madrid,
14:43 when I went to study at university,
14:45 there were two important things for me,
14:47 that Madrid had 220 cinemas, with double bill cinemas,
14:53 and the Prado Museum.
14:55 A Prado Museum not hijacked by the invasion of tourism.
15:01 There were months in the winter
15:05 when I was watching 'Las meninas'
15:07 in a room that they had specifically for that painting,
15:11 alone with the painting,
15:13 an unusual thing that is impossible to obtain today.
15:16 But for me, movies
15:21 and the Prado Museum have been fundamental as a setting.
15:26 Because in addition, one learns about color.
15:31 I studied Art History in High School,
15:35 but all the reproductions of paintings were in black and white,
15:41 and I started working in film, an internship,
15:44 in black and white, of course.
15:47 The transition to color
15:48 obviously takes you much more directly back to painting.
15:54 I believe, frankly, that cinema,
15:57 in short, has more to do with painting than with literature.
16:04 But not in the order of plastic imitation.
16:07 I think there are films that have no interest,
16:11 that are dedicated to imitating paintings.
16:13 To imitate, which is to seek beauty on the surface of the image,
16:18 disdaining what must be fundamental,
16:22 which is the dramatic and narrative validity of the scene.
16:29 In this quest to imitate paintings,
16:33 sometimes the narrative coagulated and wrecked.
16:38 Nowadays, with the control of the digital image,
16:43 you can actually paint the film in post-production,
16:48 subject it to a process in which the surface
16:53 can always be as it is now, very beautiful,
16:58 but it is a beauty on the surface of the image.
17:02 And just as that was a vindication of the origins of cinema,
17:08 because cinema has always struggled at the beginning,
17:12 in the 20th century, to achieve a status as an artistic language.
17:17 And one of the great battles of cinema,
17:19 which was born as a barracks invention,
17:22 is to achieve legitimacy as an artistic language.
17:27 At that time, filmmakers often applied to the imitation
17:31 of the plastic art of painters
17:34 to point out that the cinema was capable of making
17:37 pictures with Rembrandt's chiaroscuro.
17:41 And in fact, in the movies, still in the black and white
17:46 of the origins, the operators said,
17:49 "we're going to do a Rembrandt now",
17:51 because they were going to work on chiaroscuro.
17:53 And of course, he was a master at that.
17:54 But that has followed an evolution,
17:57 because cinema is already in museums, it's in academies,
18:02 it has all the social recognition
18:05 and that battle has already been consummated.
18:15 I have always understood cinema as a means of knowledge,
18:20 that is why I never stop learning from it.
71SSIFF | Kafea - Pedágio
08:45
71SSIFF | Kafea - Beyond the Fog
13:02
71SSIFF | Kafea - Grace
21:08
71SSIFF | Kafea - El juicio
02:46
71SSIFF | Kafea - Les rayons gamma
22:18
71SSIFF | Kafea - The New Boy
18:51
71SSIFF | Kafea - Los delincuentes
24:55
71SSIFF | Kafea - Los impactados
16:26
71SSIFF | Kafea - We Are the Hollow Men
13:25
71SSIFF | Kafea - Bauryna salu
18:28
71SSIFF | Kafea - Contadores
15:35
71SSIFF | Kafea - Single Light
17:24
71SSIFF | Kafea - Alemania
19:30
71SSIFF | Kafea - Camping du lac
15:16
71SSIFF | Kafea - Short Story
26:58
71SSIFF | Kafea - Aunque es de noche
21:22