hispanic research journal, Vol. 15 No. 1, February 2014, 49–60 Praise for the Muses of José Luis Guerin Fernando Canet Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain This article offers an analysis of the unique and complex work of José Luis Guerin, one of Spain’s most prominent film directors, taking as a point of reference the cinematic correspondence that Guerin has recently exchanged with Jonas Mekas within the collective project titled Todas las cartas. Correspondencias fílmicas. The correspondence between both filmmakers from December 2009 to April 2011 is of special relevance as the five letters that Guerin sent to Mekas capture the innermost feeling underpinning his work. As a result, these cinematic letters constitute the perfect pretext, the ideal point of reference for an exploration of the main themes or motifs that have inspired Guerin’s cinematic work, from Innisfree (1990) to his most recent works released in 2011. keywords José Luis Guerin, cinematic correspondence, art film, contemporary cinema, Spanish cinema In 1996, in commemoration of the centenary of cinema, Jonas Mekas wrote what he titled the ‘Anti-100 Years of Cinema Manifesto’,1 in which he offered the following description of the independent avant-garde filmmakers for whom he felt admiration: ‘they took their Bolexes and their little 8 mm and Super 8 cameras and began filming the beauty of this world, and the complex adventures of the human spirit, and they’re having great fun doing it’ (2012: 19). These words of Mekas’s might equally serve to describe José Luis Guerin, one of the most prominent directors on the current Spanish art film scene.2 The main purpose of this article is to offer an analysis of Guerin’s unique and complex work, taking as a point of reference the cinematic correspondence that he has recently exchanged with Jonas Mekas. 1 2 Text presented at the American Center in Paris on 11 February 1996 and first published in Point d´ironie, 1 (Paris, 1 May 1997). His work has been awarded the FIPRESCI International Critics’ Prize, the Special Jury Prize at the San Sebastián Festival, Spain’s National Cinematography Prize, the Goya Award for Best Documentary Film, and the National Cinema Prize of the Government of Catalonia, as well as being nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. From 30 November 2012 to 7 January 2013 the Pompidou Centre presented a retrospective of his work, and he was invited to participate in the Venice Biennial (June–November 2007). © W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2014 DOI 10.1179/1468273713Z.00000000073 50 FERNANDO CANET Todas las cartas. Correspondencias fílmicas was a project curated by Jordi Balló (2011),3 which had its precedent in the correspondence exchanged between Spanish filmmaker Víctor Erice and Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami.4 The project was conceived with the intention of having directors with similar concerns engage in a dialogue through filmed letters. According to Balló (2011: 14), this relationship is consolidated in an exchange where one letter looks and listens to the preceding one, and thus the correspondence between the two filmmakers is successively constructed. Including the aforementioned pairing of Erice and Kiarostami, a total of six pairs of directors have taken part in this film correspondence. The correspondence between Guerin and Mekas from December 2009 to April 2011 is of special relevance to the purpose of this article because, as will be shown in the pages that follow, the five letters that Guerin wrote to Mekas capture the feeling underpinning his work. For this reason, these cinematic letters constitute the perfect pretext, the ideal point of reference for an exploration of the main themes or motifs underlying Guerin’s film work. I will therefore use this correspondence as a guide to develop a eulogy to the muses who have inspired the films of this filmmaker, from what is considered his first mature work — his second feature, Innisfree (1990) — to his most recent works released in 2011.5 In this way, the letters that Guerin sent Mekas take on a self-reflexive quality, much like that of his earlier film En la ciudad de Sylvia (Guerin, 2007), which for Rob Stone is a ‘palimpsest of Guerin’s previous films’ (2013: 170). This particular quality could be attributed to his entire filmography, as the idea of a film establishing a dialogue with those that preceded it is a common feature of Guerin’s work. Such intertextuality is a symptom of his cinephilia, which in his case is expressed not in written form but as a filmed essay. It is a practice originally developed by Jean-Luc Godard when in the late 1950s and early 1960s he put down his pen to take up a camera. Maria M. Delgado, referring to the whole correspondence series, describes this practice as ‘a way of “writing” to a contemporary about what they do and how they do it’ (2013: 12), or in Stone’s words, referring in his case to Guerin’s films, as ‘essay[s] on film on film instead of on paper’ (2013: 174). In the case of the filmed correspondence the essay is presented directly in the film by Guerin himself, without intermediaries, that is, without characters who would intercede between him and the spectator. Thus, it is Guerin, through his filmed dialogue with Mekas, who reflects in his own film on his own means of expression, giving special attention to the Muses, the inspirational goddesses according to Greek mythology whose mere presence is enough to spark the urge to pick up the camera and start filming. Returning to the quote by Mekas with which I began this paper, one of the defining features of Guerin’s films is his approach to the world around him. As Guerin says to Mekas in the fourth letter he sends to him, budget restrictions have led Guerin to specialize in public spaces, allowing him to become more familiar with 3 4 5 Co-production between the Centro de Cultura Contemporáneo de Barcelona (CCCB), the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco (CCUT) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Caja Madrid’s La Casa Encendida de la Obra Social, and Acción Cultural Española (AC/E). See the article by Jordi Balló and Ivan Pintor in this issue. José Luis Guerin began his career at the age of fifteen, shooting a significant number of films with Super-8 and 16-mm cameras before making what would be his first feature on 35-mm film, Los motivos de Berta (1983). It is one of his first works, Elogio de las musas (1977), that inspired the title of this paper. PRAISE FOR THE MUSES OF JOSÉ LUIS GUERIN 51 the world around him and the people who inhabit it, who as a result have become one of his main motifs as early on as Innisfree. In this sense, Guerin’s films fully adhere to the guidelines laid down for the documentary genre by John Grierson in his article ‘First Principles of Documentary’, published in Cinema Quarterly in 1932 (reprinted in Grierson, 1966). The first of these principles makes his stance quite clear: ‘We believe that the cinema’s capacity for getting around, for observing and selecting from life itself, can be exploited in a new and vital art form’ (1966: 147). And this is exactly what Guerin has been doing throughout his film career: going out to observe reality, looking attentively for what it might offer at any given moment. This way of understanding reality as a source of inspiration has been shared by a significant number of filmmakers, from the pioneer Lumière Brothers to the directors who continue to turn to it today, among whom could be included fellow Spanish filmmaker Víctor Erice, whose approach or way of understanding cinema is very similar to Guerin’s. Erice is a firm believer in the principle that in reality is everything; you only need to look, and that reality is revealed as if it were an open window on the world. Two years after the celebration of the centenary of filmmaking, Guerin would go back to the origins of cinema with his film Tren de sombras (1997), a work that constitutes a full declaration of the principles that define how he understands his chosen medium. The film begins with a recreation of old family scenes supposedly shot by an amateur filmmaker, Gérard Fleury, and concludes with Fleury’s inexplicable disappearance. With this narrative, Guerin proposes a journey through the history of a style of cinema for which he feels a special connection, a style which after one hundred years of life seems, like Fleury, to be doomed to disappear if nothing is done to stop it. If no action is taken, this old ramshackle house, the former home of Fleury and his family, will vanish into the fog. By returning to the origins of cinema, Guerin seeks to prevent this kind of filmmaking, which has written its history in capital letters, from being condemned to oblivion. The only way to ensure that this does not happen is by bringing it back. It is not insignificant that Tren de sombras ends with a scene in which reality is captured without interrupting its natural flow, giving centre stage to everyday life on a street corner in the small village of Le Thuit in the hills of French Normandy. It is a long take, an undeniable expression of a kind of contemporary filmmaking that turns its gaze back wistfully to its origins with the intention of recovering the forms that characterized its birth, and that also constitutes a contemporary reading of the realist theories of French critic André Bazin, who, along with Siegfried Kracauer, was the first theorist responsible for what Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener have recently dubbed ‘cinema as window’, a term that defines ‘the essence of cinema in terms of its ability to record and reproduce reality and its phenomena, including aspects which are invisible to the naked human eye’ (2010: 15).6 But it could also be an example of what ‘Deleuze called the eruption of a “little time in its pure state” (2005: xii) in time-images that render the audience subject to their durée’ (Stone, 2013: 176). 6 The dialectic that Elsaesser and Hagener bring up to date in the first chapter of their book Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses (2010), between ‘cinema as window’ and ‘cinema as frame’ was originally posited by Bazin (1967, i: 24), who differentiated between ‘those directors who put their faith in the image and those who put their faith in reality’. 52 FERNANDO CANET This long take has its reverse shot in Guerin’s next film, En construcción (2001), where a pair of eyes painted on a wall unblinkingly observe the reality before them: ‘things seen and heard during the construction of a new building in Chinatown, a popular district of Barcelona that was born and dies with the century’. It is the patient and attentive gaze of Guerin and his production team, who for three years documented the transformation of a neighbourhood now succumbing to the blows of a huge bulldozer that unceremoniously turns a piece of local history to rubble. As William Viestenz suggests, ‘En construcción cinematically immortalizes the final days not only of a derelict building but of the social dynamic that surrounds it’ (2009: 552). The bulldozer in turn may be interpreted as a metaphor for the heavy machinery of the film industry, which annihilates everything in its path, especially the kind of cinema which, as suggested above, seems to have vanished with the turn of the century. And the time that there is never enough of in a production made according to the procedures established in the film industry is exactly what certain filmmakers need in order to capture reality, at least if they seek to truly understand it, because, as Viestenz once again notes, it is only ‘after spending three years studying the contours and idiosyncrasies of his subject matter, [that] Guerin is able to furtively penetrate this reality with sharpness’ (2009: 544–45). Guerin himself defines this time as ‘the Flaherty work unit’.7 And it is precisely the problem of not having enough time during shooting that makes time the most precious asset for directors who, like Guerin, believe that: ‘[the] real luxury is not lighting, or cranes, but the power to think during the shoot. There is no time to think; Chaplin was probably the best because he had time to think while shooting’ (quoted in Monterde, 2007: 132). Another filmmaker who takes Guerin’s view is the aforementioned Erice, who in his film El sol del membrillo (1992) portrays the painter Antonio López spending hours and hours in front of a quince tree with the aim of capturing its true nature on the canvas. At the end of the film, the camera supplants the painter, forsaking its transparency to occupy the profilmic space. With this statement, Erice claims for the cinema the time that the painter has to portray the world around him. Guerin’s films are also filled with statements of this kind, such as the scene of Fleury waiting patiently on the shore of the lake in Le Thuit — as if he were, in the words of the director, a ‘fisherman with his pole’ — for the moment when there is just the right amount of light to capture the most beautiful semblance of reality. Fleury is clearly Guerin’s alter-ego. The following words of Tomás Pladevall, director of photography for Tren de sombras, seem to suggest as much: ‘during the shoot, on exciting and exhausting days we searched for the ephemeral, illusory fluttering, the product of chance or of a collusion between light and time [. . .]’ (2009: 33). Thus, only with patient waiting and an attentive gaze can the beauty of reality be captured. While in En construcción, eyes painted on a wall is the signifier used to symbolize this idea, it is again a fictional character, in this case a young artist identified in the credits as ‘the Dreamer’, who is the figure chosen in his next film, En la ciudad de Sylvia (2007), to represent this expression of attentive waiting. 7 It took Flaherty three years to shoot his first film, Nanook of the North (1922). Three years was also the time it took José Luis Guerin to complete En construcción. PRAISE FOR THE MUSES OF JOSÉ LUIS GUERIN 53 However, these figures are erased completely in his next few films, both in Guest (2010) and in Correspondencias fílmicas, in which it is Guerin himself who, inserted comfortably into the narrative, contemplates the world around him directly without intermediaries. In Correspondencias, the director replaces the protagonist in En la Ciudad de Sylvia, as he sits on the terrace of a café and observes the reality unfolding before his eyes, while he looks for things to film or writes in his notebook, whose pages lie waiting to lose their virginal whiteness. In this way, the protagonist/director examines his encounter with reality relentlessly looking for the details that will begin to form the seeds of a new story, whose outlines will appear on the pages of the notebook and begin to gestate. While in En la Ciudad de Sylvia the trigger is a female muse, Sylvia, in Correspondencias the spark that fires the imagination can be found anywhere around him, such as in the revolving door (as discussed below), where whimsical fate may offer him the reflection of a beautiful woman bursting with youthful vitality — a new image, taken from the present, which may prove to be the perfect antidote for the pain provoked by a particular nostalgic image from the past. But for reality to reveal its most beautiful face or to find, in the words of Godard, ‘the extraordinary in the ordinary’,8 the filmmaker needs to be extremely attentive to his surroundings. In the first letter that Guerin sends to Mekas, he recalls something the latter had said when the two met in New York (an encounter which was of course filmed and can be seen in Guest): ‘I react to life’ were Mekas’s words, which became so engraved in Guerin’s mind that they acquired the status of a cinematic formulation. Perhaps on hearing them he realized what he had been doing since his first films. For Nicole Brenez, the works of both directors ‘are characterized by the renewal of descriptive forms and the challenges of observation’ (2011: 280). Although this dynamic can already be seen in Innisfree, in which Guerin is seduced by the landscapes and the people who inhabit a small village in western Ireland called Cunga St Feichin, Co. Mayo, and is also evident in Tren de sombras, as noted above, it would not be until En construcción that reality would truly assume the role of protagonist. In this case, the fragment of reality portrayed is part of the filmmaker’s own hometown: the Raval neighbourhood in Barcelona. After En la Ciudad de Sylvia, reality returns with full force in Guest. In this case it is a reality further from home, the result of about two years of travelling around cities which Guerin had visited for one reason or another. The characters chosen to become the characters in his films in En construcción and Guest share one thing in common: rootlessness. In the fourth letter that Guerin sends to Mekas, while sitting on a terrace in a piazza in Venice, once again gazing at a notebook and a new reality that will provide the ideas to write in it, he confesses to Mekas that ‘[a]ll the people I’ve been filming recently share this sense of rootlessness [. . .] And I look at them, I watch them and I invent stories’. As Jay Kuehner notes, ‘[t]he visibility of people, particularly the immigrants in this prototypical European city, those beyond the self-interest of the romantic and of the audience, is called into question by Guerin’s inclusion of what he calls “the human morphology of the city”’ (2008: 15). 8 In 1966, on the occasion of a Louis Lumière retrospective, Jean-Luc Godard delivered a speech in praise of Henri Langlois, the founder of the Cinémathèque Française, observing that what interested Lumière was ‘the extraordinary in the ordinary’ (quoted in Brody, 2011). 54 FERNANDO CANET An image that appears repeatedly both in Guest and in Correspondencias is the unmistakable shadow or reflection of Guerin holding his handheld camera while he strolls like a flâneur, as Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin labelled them in their day, through the streets of these cities. In his first letter to Mekas, Paris is the protagonist. While we see the word flâneur written on a page of his notebook, he tells his correspondent how Guest is the product of a long journey around the world. Different realities filmed with no preconceived ideas by wandering aimlessly through the streets of the cities he visited, but always attentive to the possible revelation of a motif or a character for a new story. These are the words that Guerin writes to Mekas while his attentive gaze turns to the surface of the street, which turns into a screen onto which the shadow of a passer-by is projected. Thus, the different streets where the filmmaker wanders become the screen onto which the shadows of that reality, where the world off-camera is protagonist, are projected. The shadows of nature, mainly of trees, whether leafless or dressed in foliage, and the possible stories concealed by the passers-by he encounters on his journeys are two of the main motifs that capture his attention. However, the supposedly aimless path that he took through the streets of Paris do finally lead to a destination, which is none other than the Boulevard des Capucines, and specifically the Grand Café where the Lumière Brothers held their first public film screening on 28 December 1895. On his arrival here, Guerin aims his camera and shows the spectator the inscription that commemorates that historic moment. The itinerary he proposes thus proves significant, as once again the spectator’s gaze is directed, as it was in Tren de sombras, onto the origins of filmmaking, and therefore onto the mythical figure, as he explains to Mekas, of ‘the camera operators working for the Lumière Brothers who travelled like this, alone, with their cameras’. As Guerin points out, ‘the Lumières were very important to Mekas; he had even made a film about L´arrivée d´un train en gare de La Ciotat (The arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station)’ (quoted in Brenez, 2011: 281). And on his way to another station, the famous Gare de Lyon, Guerin tells Mekas that he thinks of him as one of those camera operators, perhaps the last one, while we see the shadow of his figure with the camera cast onto the street. Of course, Guerin (as he himself admits) also identifies with that ‘romantic image’ (Losilla & Monterde, 2010: 15) of the travelling filmmaker who with his camera films the world around him wherever the whims of fate dictate. This idea is developed with special attention in Guest. While all of his films (except En construcción) are the product of a journey, in Guest travel is the film’s main underlying motif. The hurried movements of travellers carrying their bags at the Gare de Lyon are the next target of Guerin’s camera. This scene remains his focus until his filmic gaze turns to the legendary restaurant Le Train Blue, founded in 1900. The first letter thus concludes with a rhythmic construction made up of random fragments of people going in and out through the revolving door of this restaurant, until an anonymous hand halts its mindless movement. The background noises of the station are replaced with outdoor sounds, where the wind is shaking the leaves of the trees, which in this case are the leaves of the revolving door. These images and sounds finally give meaning to the words that Guerin says to Mekas at the beginning of the letter: ‘Now I will attempt to capture some interesting reflections in the revolving door before me. It turns, like a series of small, random films. You know: the wind blows wherever it PRAISE FOR THE MUSES OF JOSÉ LUIS GUERIN 55 pleases’. This idea was already represented symbolically in En la ciudad de Sylvia, where, as David Sterritt very astutely describes it, ‘chance and happenstance share the spotlight in the end, when the pages of the meticulously framed sketchbook flap randomly in a breeze’ (2011: n.p.). And it is precisely this attitude that leads Guerin to engage with the third principle declared by Grierson: ‘we believe that the materials and the stories thus taken from the raw can be finer (more real in the philosophic sense) than the acted article. Spontaneous gesture has a special value on the screen’ (1966: 147). It is precisely this hope for an encounter with chance that drives Guerin to wander the streets, as he himself says, to take on ‘the attitude of the flâneur with a camera’ (2010: 15). Thus, for both Guerin and Mekas the camera is the tool employed to relate to life. Brenez describes each of them as ‘a man with a camera and nothing else’ (2011: 281). We might interpret these words as an allusion to the film Man with a Movie Camera shot by Dziga Vertov in 1929, a film which is, of course, a clear point of reference for both directors. Guerin concludes the fourth letter by introducing us to Malgorzata Zavinska, who he tells Mekas ‘has seen a lot of things’, while we view her in a close shot that allows us to glimpse Guerin to her right in the background, reflected in a mirror through a door. Like a modern-day Velázquez, the filmmaker offers us a portrait of his own menina. Her face is frozen and the spectator is shown a detail shot of her eye, an allusion to the ‘film eye’ (kino-glaz) theory defended by Vertov, and again the figure of the filmmaker off camera is shown in the frame, this time reflected in the pupil of his model. The reality that the two filmmakers record with their respective cameras turns into a kind of filmed diary of gradually accumulated entries which are subsequently taken up again in the editing room, the place reserved for a re-encounter with this material which, after some time has passed, engages the filmmaker’s attention once more. In Mekas’s second letter to Guerin, he invites him to visit his editing room and see his old Moviola, through which Mekas revisits part of his filmed history: a series of outtakes that Mekas wants to put together in what he says will be his last film, titled ‘Footages’. In this case, the journey back in time is thirty years, with old footage shot in New York and London, which Mekas recalls wistfully. Old friends of his appear and even he himself is a protagonist, in a collection of images from a bygone era. Another product of the past, but a much more recent past, is the footage that Guerin decides to edit in response to Mekas’s letter: images from a festival in Lisbon two years earlier. The result is a homage to Nika Bohinc, a Slovenian film critic whom Guerin met at this festival, who was murdered some time later. The images thus reproduce a body which no longer has life in the present but which, thanks to the magic of cinema, is recovered in each projection. With this exercise, Guerin offers a contemporary reading of the idea formulated by André Bazin that the cinema embalms time. This is what Guerin himself tells us: The cinema captures a fragment of time. From the moment you say Action! until you say Cut! you choose and embalm a fragment of time. This makes the cinema something very mysterious. And it was a feeling which in its early days was very present for the spectator: the amazement of seeing a presence that is absent, of those figures that move on a screen. (Weinrichter, 2009: 98) 56 FERNANDO CANET It is a feeling which, according to this logic, is very present in old family films, which is why he decided to recreate them in Tren de Sombras. It is this very material that Guerin recovers on the Moviola with the intention of resurrecting characters who, as the film progresses, the spectator begins to realize are the product of the director’s imagination. He does so after leaving the present of the French village behind and plunging into the night, the nocturnal realm of the imaginary in the terminology of Gilbert Durand, into the past of the ramshackle country house where the footage was taken. The ghosts of the past begin to rise and cast their shadows in the different rooms as if each one were a movie theatre. In this way, he plays with tricks of light to pursue, paraphrasing Lotte H. Eisner (1955), his ‘desire to break into the depths of the screen and of life by controlling the shadows’. It is ‘phantasmagoria loaded with meaning’, again in Eisner’s words, which gives up its central role to the old images whose protagonists live again thanks to the use of the Moviola. These images rush by in the editing room under the attentive gaze of Guerin, who plays them back again and again, searching them for what cannot be seen with the naked eye. It is in this way that he assumes the role of Thomas, the protagonist in Blow Up (Antonioni, 1966), who obsessively enlarges a photo in search of what it conceals, or the meticulous work of New Yorker Ken Jacobs, who in his film Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969, 1971) painstakingly analyses one of the frames that give motion to the ten-minute short film of the same name shot by G. W. ‘Billy’ Bitzer in 1905. Jacobs describes his work in the following terms: ‘Ghosts! Cine-recordings of the vivacious doings of persons long dead’.9 David Bordwell, meanwhile, points out that ‘so much is going on in the original’s tableau that the viewer may miss Tom’s theft of the pig. Jacobs’s scanning and enlargement imbue this instant with a spectral thrill’ (1997: 102–03). Similarly, Guerin’s very attentive gaze is responsible for discovering aspects that would otherwise pass by absolutely unnoticed. Guerin is thus an example of the kind of filmmaker who during both shooting and editing, in the words of Jacques Aumont, develops ‘the capacity of cinema to observe and choose from life itself: what needs to be seen is there, all that is needed is to distinguish it’ (2004: 80). And what he ultimately manages to distinguish in these home-made films is a supposed relationship between two characters, which he brings to light through the manipulation of the raw material in the editing room. Thus, as Marsha Kinder very rightly notes, ‘this thrilling sequence reveals how editing always functions as a search engine, for the unseen person whose hand controls the switch seems to be seeking the most meaningful and resonant combinations of images and sounds, those that will create a moving story out of these fragments’ (2003: 22). Tren de sombras is not the first film in which Guerin explores the present in search of traces of the past. This is a journey he previously took in Innisfree, when what he sought to recover was the world shown in the footage that John Ford took years ago in his ancestral home. In 1952, Ford decided to go to Ireland to explore his roots by filming The Quiet Man; Guerin would make the trip in 1988 to establish a dialogue between the present and the memory of the past. To do this, he visited the places that 9 Ken Jacobs made this comment in 1971 for the catalogue of the Filmmakers Cooperative (quoted by Sitney, 1979: 368). PRAISE FOR THE MUSES OF JOSÉ LUIS GUERIN 57 had served as locations for Ford’s film in order to observe how they had changed with the passage of time, and to create the right situations to draw out an updated version of the myth both for the generation who had lived it first-hand and for the generations that followed, who knew of it through the stories their elders had told them. All of this was with the intention of untangling the mystery behind the mythical town of Innisfree. Although in his next film, En construcción, the basic objective was to document the transformation of the Raval neighbourhood in the present, the exploration of the traces of its past is also central to the film. Different layers of memory begin giving shape to the neighbourhood’s past from the opening scenes of the film, which begins with black-and-white archive footage showing vignettes of life in the neighbourhood in the mid-twentieth century. The first shot offers the spectator a pan across the city of Barcelona, beginning with the sea and ending with the sight of three smoking towers. These three towers, a symbol of the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, have lost the function for which they were designed and, now dormant, form a part of the external structure of a hotel. On the other hand, as Viestenz notes, ‘the omnipresence of Sant Pau del Camp, the oldest church in Barcelona, in the background of the scenes is a constant reminder of the historical layers extant in the neighbourhood’ (2009: 542). Its resistance to the passage of time is a conversation piece for those who first demolish and then reconstruct the building that is the protagonist of this film. Its walls, dating from the twelfth century, are compared with the Egyptian pyramids unearthed after the television broadcast of Land of the Pharaohs, the film directed by Howard Hawks in 1955. In the case of En la ciudad de Sylvia, the hope of a re-encounter is what takes Guerin back to Strasbourg. The distant memory of a woman is the reason behind his decision to wander the streets and return to his old haunts in this French city. As has been noted previously, Guerin transfigures himself into a young artist, just as Goethe once did in his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). The name of Guerin’s beloved is Sylvia; Goethe’s was Lotte. As Mar Diestro-Dópido suggests, ‘the memory of an unreachable woman has haunted many male artists’ (2009: 13). Poe’s muse was Annabel Lee, Dante dreamed of Beatrice, and Petrarch had Laura. Indeed, the last of these is cited by Guerin in the film; paintings containing the words ‘Laure je t’aime’ adorn the walls of the streets where the young artist wanders in his obsessive pursuit of Sylvia. In short, all these artists share the same obsession with pursuing an encounter (or re-encounter) with the ideal woman; all of them, as Stone suggests (2013: 175), are slaves to this mission. Thus, in this film a past event is again the main reason for the journey that the filmmaker takes in the present. But the past event in En la ciudad de Sylvia is not as distant as the one that inspired one of his more recent works, La dama de Corinto, an audiovisual installation or cinematic sketch, as the director himself subtitles it, produced by the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente and exhibited from December 2010 to August 2011.10 In this case, the journey is to Mount Parnassus in Greece, which looms over the town of Delphi, a place that takes us back to the mythical origins of painting. The foundational story narrated by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History is the source of inspiration for this work. Pliny’s story tells of the 10 The film was also exhibited at the Pompidou Centre in Paris from 7 December 2012 to 7 January 2013. 58 FERNANDO CANET Lady of Corinth, the daughter of Butades of Sicyon, who, faced with the departure of her beloved for war, cannot bear the idea that he may never return, and so she uses the light of a candle to cast his shadow on a wall onto which she traces his profile. In this way, the obsession with embalming the transitory, something that will disappear with the passage of time, is also at the heart of Pliny’s story, in the figure of the beloved that the Lady wishes to immortalize through that light casting his shadow onto the wall. This is the origin of painting and, as Guerin acknowledges, of cinema, and, as noted above, is a recurring theme in his films. It is an obsession that began in his childhood, when on his bedroom wall he watched gigantic shadows, as he himself recalls, of ‘trees, of leaves, filtrations of light through the blinds’, that invited him from an early age to dream in images. Because Guerin first developed the creative gaze of the filmmaker in his infancy, it is with regard to the infancy of art that he hypothesises ‘that the prehistoric man of the caves of Altamira, before drawing the bison, had dreamed it or imagined it through a trick of the shadows created by the rough edges of the cave, where sunlight seeped in that cast shadows in which he made out a bison’ (Arroba, 2002: 32). The second letter that Guerin sends Mekas begins its journey with the diary in which a pencil indicates a visit to Walden Pond. The image of a local engaged in artisan fishing on this immense lake located in Concord, Massachusetts in the northeast of the United States, in addition to reminding him of Flaherty’s film Nanook of the North, takes him back to the mythic figure of Henry David Thoreau, and his philosophy of living in communion with nature, as well as images of Francesco Giullare di Dio and Franciscan images from Mekas’s films. This is why, as Guerin tells Mekas, ‘the muses must not be far from here’. Thus, while we hear some youths playing around in the snow, Guerin directs his gaze to the beautiful shapes drawn by the arms of the naked trees against a pale sky. An improvised canvas, a natural screen, which perfectly exemplifies the quote that closes his fourth letter to Mekas, as on a film screen can be read the words of Thoreau: ‘the world is but a canvas to our imagination’. In this article I have sought to demonstrate that reality, the world that Guerin sees around him, is one of the main muses that inspire his work. And it is by virtue of his status as a traveller that he can get the best creative leverage out of these sources of inspiration. In this way, as a roaming guest, as he defines himself, or as a relentless flâneur, he takes from reality the reward it reserves for the privileged few who know how to observe it and react to it. It is a reality to which Guerin turns not only to take the pulse of the present but also to recover the traces left by the past with the passage of time. Stone suggests that ‘Guerin is also concerned with the malleability of history and myth’ (2013: 170); he is a director interested in both present and past, two different temporal frames that coexist in his films to reveal both the realities of today and the realities of yesterday that have since been transformed into myth. As Stone points out, ‘memories are not static, but mobile and liable to mutation, with the result that any distinction between what is remembered, what is imagined and what is imagined as remembered is impossibly elusive’ (2013: 173), and it is Guerin’s collage of temporal frames that in part explains Stone’s description of his work as reflecting a ‘Cubist notion of cinema’.11 11 Readers interested in exploring this theory further may read the chapter on Guerin by Rob Stone in the recent book edited by Maria M. Delgado and Robin Fiddian on contemporary Spanish cinema (2013). PRAISE FOR THE MUSES OF JOSÉ LUIS GUERIN 59 Guerin explores all of these questions with a gaze educated and trained by cinema itself. In his fifth letter, while we watch some Japanese workers filmed from the opposite building through the windows of their offices, he comments to Mekas that these are ‘[o]ffice workers that would never have caught my interest, if it weren’t for the fondness transmitted by the filmmaker Ozu in his films’. Without doubt, Guerin is one of the greatest cinephiles of all Spanish filmmakers. Not only are his films packed with references to film history, but that history is, together with the world around him and the traces of the past he finds in it, one of his main sources of inspiration. Thus, because reality is filtered through his cinephiliac gaze, the details of that subject inevitably evoke previous cinematic works in his mind. Because for Guerin, as he himself has recognized on different occasions, ‘the house of the filmmaker is cinema itself’, that ‘maison du cinema’ of which the Lumières spoke back in the dawn of filmmaking, a place of meeting and conversation for Guerin’s three main muses: the arts in general and particularly cinema, life, and myth. Bibliography Arroba, Á. 2002. Conversaciones con José Luis Guerin. Letras de cine, 6: 68–73. Aumont, J. 2004. Teoría de los cineastas. Barcelona: Paidós Comunicación 155 Cine. Balló, J. 2011. Todas las cartas. Correspondencias fílmicas. Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona e Intermedio. Bazin, A. 1967. What is Cinema?, 2 vols. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bordwell, D. 1997. On the History of Film Style. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Brenez, N. 2011. Mimesis 2. Correspondence between Jonas Mekas and José Luis Guerin. In: J. Balló, ed. Todas las cartas. Correspondencias fílmicas. Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona e Intermedio, pp. 280–87. Brody, R. 2011. ‘Hugo’: Martin Scorsese’s Cybercinema. The New Yorker, 23 November. Deleuze, G. 2005. Cinema 2, trans. By H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta. King’s Lynn: Continuum Impacts. Delgado, M. M. 2013. Introduction. In: M. M. Delgado and R. Fiddian, eds. Spanish Cinema 1973–2010. Auteurism, Politics, Landscape and Memory. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 1–20. Diestro-Dópido, M. 2009. Rushes: Tale of the Unexpected. Sight and Sound, 19(4): 13. Eisner, L. H. 1955. La pantalla diabólica. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Losange. Elsaesser, T. & Hagener, M. 2010. Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses. New York and London: Routledge. Grierson, J. 1966. The First Principles of Documentary. In: F. Hardy, ed. Grierson on Documentary. London: Faber & Faber, pp. 145–56. Kinder, M. 2003. Uncanny Visions of History: Two Experimental Documentaries from Transnational Spain — Asaltar los cielos and Tren de sombras. Film Quarterly, 56(3): 12–24. Kuehner, J. 2008. José Luis Guerin’s Point of View. Cinema Scope, 33: 11–13. Losilla, C. & Monterde, J. E. 2010. José Luis Guerin. Cahiers du Cinema. España, 37 (September): 14–16. Mekas, J. 2012. Anti-100 Years of Cinema Manifesto. Caimán Cuadernos de Cine, 11 (December): 19. Monterde, E. 2007. José Luis Guerin. In: J. Cerdán and C. Torreiro, eds. Al otro lado de la ficción. Trece documentalistas españoles contemporáneos. Madrid: Cátedra, pp. 120–40. Pladevall, T. 2009. Sobre la fotografía de ‘Tren de sombras’. Barcelona: Versus. Entertainment. Sitney, P. A. 1979. Visionary Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sterritt, D. 2011. In the City of Sylvia. Cineaste, 36(4) [online] [accessed 17 December 2012]. Available at: <http:// www.cineaste.com/articles/emin-the-city-of-sylviaem-web-exclusive> Stone, R. 2013. En la ciudad de Sylvia/In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerin, 2007) and the durée of a dérive. In: M. M. Delgado and R. Fiddian, eds. Spanish Cinema 1973–2010. Auteurism, Politics, Landscape and Memory. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 169–82. 60 FERNANDO CANET Viestenz, W. 2009. Cinematic Ethics within the Picnoleptic Moment in José Luis Guerin’s En construcción. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 86(4): 537–53. Weinrichter, A. 2009. Metraje encontrado. La apropiación en el cine documental y experimental. Pamplona: Colección Punto de Vista. El tema central de este artículo es la particular y compleja obra cinematográfica de José Luis Guerin, uno de los principales representantes del cine de autor español. La correspondencia filmada que recientemente han mantenido Guerin y Jonas Mekas, entre diciembre de 2009 y abril de 2011, dentro del proyecto colectivo titulado Todas las cartas. Correspondencias fílmicas, adquiere especial relevancia para los propósitos de este artículo, ya que en las cinco cartas filmadas que Guerin le envía a Mekas se recoge a la perfección el sentir de la obra del primero. Por esta razón, estas cinco cartas filmadas son el punto de partida ideal para explorar los principales temas o motivos que inspiran el trabajo de Guerin, desde Innisfree (1990) hasta sus más recientes trabajos estrenados en 2011. palabras clave José Luis Guerin, correspondencia fílmica, cine de autor, cine contemporáneo español Notes on contributor Fernando Canet is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain, where he teaches on the Fine Arts degree and on a Masters in Artistic Production and Postproduction. He has been a visiting research fellow at Goldsmiths College University of London and at New York University. He has taken part in several national and international research projects, and he is the author of two books (2002: Narración cinematográfica and Narrativa Audiovisual: Estrategias y recursos), and various chapters and articles, mainly on contemporary cinema. Correspondence to: Dr Fernando Canet, Camino de Vera, s/n, 46022 Valencia, Spain. Email: fercacen@har.upv.es