Harvard’s Film Study Center recently announced a new award: the Robert Gardner Fellowship, named in honor of the FSC’s founder. The 2013-14 Gardner Fellows are Claire Denis and Spanish filmmaker Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro. Born in Galicia in 1975, Enciso studied filmmaking in Cuba before making his feature debut with Pic Nic in 2007. His second feature film, Arraianos, locates him in that vein of cinema, from Robert Gardner to the current work coming from Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, that seeks not so much to explain other cultures as to provide an immersive experience of them—be it the Benares of Gardner’s Forest of Bliss (1986) or the Nepalese cable car in Manakamana (2013) by Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez. — David Pendleton
Arraianos is a village in Galicia, the northwestern corner of Spain directly above Portugal. Enciso’s quietly evocative portrait of this place and its inhabitants echoes such recent cinematic descriptions of seemingly pre-modern ways of life as Frammentino’s Le Quattro volte (2010) or Sweetgrass (2009) by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash. But the episodes of the everyday—cutting wood and tending to livestock—are interspersed with excerpts from The Forest, a play from the 1960s by Galician dramatist Jenaro Marinhas del Valle, in which villagers recite snippets of existentialist dialogue. Mixing Flaherty with Straub and Huillet, this combination of documentary and ritual highlights the film’s roots in another strain of contemporary filmmaking often found in Spain and Portugal—the poetic intertwining of fact and fiction in the work of Pedro Costa, José Luis Guerín, and António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro. The film’s fiery climax leads to an epilogue bathed in autumnal light, which may be announcing nothing less than the end of Arraianos itself and, with it, a vestige of the archaic.
Audio transcription
For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.
John Quackenbush 0:00
April 14 2014, the Harvard Film Archive, and the Department of Visual Environmental Studies screened Arraianos. This is the recording of the introduction and the Q&A that followed, participating are HFA programmer David Pendleton and filmmaker Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro.
David Pendleton 0:20
Good evening, folks. I'm David Pendleton, the programmer here at the Harvard Film Archive. And it's my pleasure to welcome you all to a very special evening that marks a new chapter in the collaboration between the HFA and Harvard's Film Study Center. But before I explain that, let me just ask you, as always, to please turn off anything that you might have on your person that may make noise, or shed any light. And please refrain from illuminating such devices or consulting such devices while the house lights are down, for the pleasure and the concentration of those around you.
When I say that tonight marks a new chapter in collaboration with the Film Study Center, that's because we're very pleased to be the venue to host tonight's screening, which serves as the inauguration of a new award being given by the Film Study Center here at Harvard. The Film Study Center was founded by Robert Gardner in 1957, to support the making and the exhibition of cinema that seeks to interpret the world—the real world beyond this theater—in image and in sound. And so to support this mission, the Film Study Center is announcing a new award, the Robert Gardner Fellowship, named in honor of Mr. Gardner—the filmmaker of Dead Birds and Forest of Bliss, and many, many others—who's been so important to the study of film here at Harvard, to ethnographic and documentary filmmaking worldwide. And so two recipients have been announced by the Film Study Center this year: the French filmmaker Claire Denis, whose work I imagine is familiar to many of you. She's been here before at the HFA to present her work, which includes Chocolat, Beau Travail, White Material, and many other films. And tonight's filmmaker Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro. We had hoped that Ms. Denis would be able to join us in person to present her latest film, Bastards, which were showing on Friday. But in fact, she won't be here; we'll look to bring her another time when her schedule allows.
But we're very fortunate tonight to have Eloy Enciso who is one of the many exciting emerging filmmakers coming out of the Iberian Peninsula these days. The film that we're going to see tonight is his second feature film Arraianos which premiered in 2012, and has been making its way at film festivals around the world.
The film itself is named after a small village in Galicia near the border of Portugal—Galicia being the northwestern region of Spain sort of due north of Portugal and the region from whence Enciso hails by way of a detour to Cuba to study filmmaking. And I think it's quite apt in a way that we're showing Arraianos as the first screening to announce this award, because there is a way in which Arraianos is very much related to to Robert Gardner's work, in the sense that both are descendants of or variations on more classical ethnographic filmmaking. The variation being that rather than seeking to explain a culture to us or explain a place to us, Arraianos, like Gardner's work, actually seeks more to give us an immersive, sensuous experience of that place.
And I think Arraianos can also be placed in relation to another nonfiction film made here at Harvard more recently, that being Sweetgrass by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash, in that, like Sweetgrass, Arraianos is also a way of presenting a way of life that seems, if not exactly pre-modern, certainly an older way of life and something more tied to older cultures, to the peasent world, etc. And yet, Arraianos more than that as we'll see in the very first sequence which features two women reciting an excerpt from the 1960s play The Forest by the existentialist Galician playwright Jenaro Marinhas del Valle. And so one of the things that's so exciting about Arraianos is the way in which Enciso is working at the intersection of so many important traditions in both modernist art cinema but also in contemporary filmmaking. I mean, there are a number of films that have appeared recently mixing documentary and fiction and interested in older or vanishing ways of life. I’m thinking of Frammartino’s La Quatre Volte / The Four Times from Italy, and Mercedes Alvarez’ El cielo gira. And at the same time, when I say “modernist art cinema,” it's because the use of the non-professionals in the film owes a lot to the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet. But perhaps the most immediate context is that a number of Spanish and Portuguese filmmakers who’ve mixed fact and fiction and who are often fascinated with these older communities or older ways of life—besides Mercedes Alvarez, José Luis Guerrin with his Innisfree, and above all the films of António Reis and Margarita Cordero, Trás-Os-Montes and Ana. We could also mention Pedro Costa as well, in terms of the use of non-professional actors.
As I said, there's a lot going on in Arraianos. And syou get a hint in the opening dialogue in which the two women discuss the relationship between the general and the specific: “All trees are the same, no trees are different.” And I think that prepares us for a certain way to watch the film: are we watching something that's meant to be very specific to a particular place, very regional, or are we watching something that's more allegorical, and perhaps universal, or is there a way in which those two intersect? In any case, above all, I think what's remarkable about Arraianos is its exquisite beauty, and its exquisite use of quiet and stillness. And so to honor that, I'll stop talking now. But we do have Eloy here with us. We'll have a discussion after the film, but he's here, first of all, to greet all of you. So please welcome Eloy Enciso.
[APPLAUSE]
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro 7:04
Thank you, this is an honor for me to be here. It’s a big pleasure. Thank you very much. And I think we can maybe see after the film, we can talk. Thank you very much for coming. And see you after the film. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
John Quackenbush 7:29
And now the discussion with David Pendleton and Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro.
David Pendleton 7:35
And actually, before we start the conversation, there's something that I forgot to do, which was to mention the people who currently are running the Film Study Center and who've overseen these awards. And so I want to thank for their cooperation and mention Lucian Castaing-Taylor and the two people who are here with us tonight, Ernst Karel and Cozette Russell. So thanks to those of you who are carrying on at the Film Study Center!
[APPLAUSE]
So I'll ask just one or two questions to get the conversation started, then we'll open it up.
But maybe the simplest way to begin would be to ask you to talk about this village and how you came to make a film of... First of all, Arraianos, is that the name of an actual village? Is that the name of the village that we see?
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro 8:34
Actually, it’s the area. Because they're in the border between the north of Spain, Galicia and Portugal. They didn't call it a border; they call it line—A Raia—which means “line” in Galician. And so the people living there, they’re called Arraianos.
David Pendleton 8:59
Okay, so another way to translate the title would be people who live on the line or near the line, is that right?
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro 9:05
Yeah. We were thinking about the English translation of it, but it was Border People which doesn't sound really nice. So we decided to keep it Arraianos and I like the sound of the word. It really sounds like something old in a way. And also, because when you see arraiano you don’t know if this person actually is from one side of the other side of the border, which also has something to do with the film.
David Pendleton 9:42
Right, right. And so then to what extent is what we see a portrait of a place that you found and to what extent is it your vision of a particular place, if you see the distinction that I'm getting at?
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro 10:03
The relation with the play?
David Pendleton 10:05
No, the place.
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro
Ah, the place, the place.
David Pendleton
Because I'm thinking for instance, we never see people using cell phones. There's no televisions, etc. And so I'm curious to hear more from you about to what extent like you just went and filmed what you saw, and to what extent you were very carefully selecting...
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro 10:27
That was a conscious decision to not show a lot of things that really can [put you] in a historical time. And so we were more or less taking care of not showing things like cell phones, or things [that] tell you this is [the] 1980s or whatever...
David Pendleton 11:03
Right. So then, in a way, if the title then could also lead one to see the film in a more allegorical sense, perhaps, rather than as a portrait of a particular place?
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro 11:20
Yeah, that was also the idea because my interest actually is not about the place itself, but about what the place represents not only for me, as Galician, but anyone who [can] relate to a rural community. And that's why I like cinema so much, because from a very small or concrete reality, the whole world, in a way, it's sounds [like] that.
David Pendleton 12:07
And so that in some ways, the place that we see is representative of Galicia for you, as a whole, is that fair to say?
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro 12:18
Actually, I'm not from this part of Galicia, I'm from Northern Galicia. But I arrived to this place by chance, because I heard about this story, which actually is not in the film, stories about some villages down there that really didn't belong to Spain,or neither Portugal for a very long time. So kind of a little community [?state?] that live for a long time with their own rules, the anarchic way of living, because they were far away from power centers, Spain and Portugal. And this, in a way, made me recall my idea of Galicia when I was a child, because I was born there, but I grew up in a different place in Spain, but all my vacations and coming back to the village, I grew up in a small city, but… And actually, my memories of Galicia as a child was really... like it was [going] back in time in a way. And also, it was this idea of a place which is far away from everywhere and has their own rules, very anarchic. As a child, I didn't really get it, how everything—even the language—works. So for me, it also relates to a place with their own rules, and a place where there [were] things that I didn't understand. And in a way there was an atmosphere of mystery for me, because also—this is very important in Galician culture—the beliefs of things that are not really… well they’re different from the way we relate to the surroundings like in the cities. I mean, the forest, for instance, it's very important. It's very important, the relationship with the landscape,with the weather. It really makes the attitude or the character of the people there. It changed a lot, for instance. And in the film, in a way, we wanted to portray how the mood of the people changed because of the weather also. I see maybe here it happens a little bit also, no?
David Pendleton
Yes, yes.
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro
I think very happy people these days.
David Pendleton 15:31
[LAUGHS] Yes, exactly. He brought the sunshine when he arrived on Saturday.
No, but that's interesting, because there is a way in which the film seems to be having to have this cycle. At first, when I was watching the film, you think that it's got this cycle of the seasons, but then there's this fire that seems to interrupt that, and which has been seen by some sort of an apocalyptic climax in the middle of the film, but watching it more recently, I see all these signs of rebirth in the last sections of the film after that fire. And I guess I'm just wondering, if you could talk a little bit about the structure of the film as a whole, and whether you see it as sort of a narrative that's working through, or whether it's more like the description of kind of a cycle?
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro 16:25
Yeah, actually, I wanted the fire to be part of the film, because it's also very important in Galicia, because there are a lot of fires there. And so at the beginning, I didn't really know where the fire will be in the film, but in the editing, it became really clear that after the fire will be a change, and also the sequence where this guy reveals as a leader, whatever…
David Pendleton
Right, Baqueano.
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro
Baqueano. In the script, that was supposed to be at the beginning of the film. But then the editor Manolo was really clever to say that in a way we needed to... As spectators of the film, have the need of this kind of prophet, whatever, who really says “We can get out of this place.”
David Pendleton
I see. So we would have a sense at the beginning then of people being lost or being stuck before the savior comes to announce himself. Is that what you mean?
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro 17:47
Yeah, but in a way, when we started to make the sequences, they started to be really like an explosion in terms of the narrative in the film, and the fire [had] this allegoric meaning of the apocalypses. And, actually, that was, in a way, my way of seeing the rural community, as not apocalyptic, but at least like the end, in a way. And then making the film, which was quite a long process, and being with them and staying with them, I realized that actually, their way of seeing things [is] quite different and then I realized that the [idea] that you're going to be the end of anything is very pessimistic in a way... it's very...
David Pendleton
Sort of narcissistic?
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro
Narcissistic. Yeah, that's what I was looking for: narcissistic. And it’s been like this, but in a way I realized that it's very narcissistic... Why should he do the end of anything? I mean, it's very narcissistic for so many generations again and again, and you precisely you, you are the chosen one to be the end of whatever… The film really doesn't go back in terms of the atmosphere but in a way goes on also. And that's what I learned making the film that it’s not the end because it's almost almost like a cliche when we were mentioning before, films about the rural communities not only in Spain, but in Europe, and most of the time, they are these kind of melancholic…
David Pendleton
Elegies… to a way of life that’s dying.
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro
...elegies about the end of this way of life. And actually, of course, the film is made in a way that is open to interpretations, but my own is like... How we do the editing of the film is not about the end, but something has changed, but the life will keep going. And, naturally, because when we were talking about editing the last scene, we thought about this film of John Ford called My Darling Clementine which has this very beautiful scene at the end, that you maybe remember that it looks like they are all getting together for the inauguration of the church, but actually the end is a party.
David Pendleton
Right, they dance.
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro
They dance. And so we thought about this scene that maybe we can make in our way our version of this last scene because at the end of the film, you hear that something is going on in the village. And you hear sounds of music and in a way, they are all alone, but in a way, they're preparing [for] a community meeting. So yeah, this idea of this community will keep going maybe in a different way. I guess in a different way, but keep going.
So about the apocalyptic part, that was my one concern I had—and also Manolo—without doing the editing, that the interpretation of the sequence would be very apocalyptic. So that's why we decided in a way to contrast this with the photographs, with the pictures, which was supposed to be in the film, also, I just decided during the shooting... It was something very intuitive that I decided: let's shoot the family albums of the people there. But I didn't know if I was going to use it, or how I was going to use it. And then I [left] it to Manolo and say, “Okay, you got this here, if you want to use it.” And then because we [had] a very, very clear feeling that time is going to speed up at this moment of the film. We are going out of the place, of course, because it's also the first signs of progress of the technology, like the windmills and the cars. And then we said maybe we use another level of meaning at this point that recalls all the generations before and some gestures that are in the pictures about... In a way, the pictures talk about family love. And that was another way of maybe [counterbalancing] this feeling of “this is the end.”
David Pendleton 23:29
Right. Right. That's interesting.
Are there questions in the audience at this point? I have more questions and I can go on. But yeah, we'll take a question from Peter down here in the front and the question from over here. If you’ll wait until a microphone comes to you. We'll go over here first, and then we'll go over there.
Audience 1 23:48
Hi, thanks for the beautiful film, really very beautiful and elegaic. One of the instances in the film that seems to come up has to do with the singing, like in the tavern or in the fields. And I was wondering whether the songs were something that was specific to the group of people that you were working with, whether it was partially scripted, whether they were prompted, whether it was just sort of what happened. How did that element evolve in you working with…?
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro 24:41
It was much more by chance than it was supposed to be [like] a film director, classical film director who already knows everything before shooting. So basically in the tavern, we had these complicated scenes with complicated dialogues which came also from the play, but I didn't know how to get into the tavern so I realized that maybe was a good way to just get into the tavern—again, John Ford—by singing, like what John Ford did. So John Forn goes into the tavern or saloon and there’s singing and then start the scene. So I told them maybe “Can you sing a song?” and the actors of the film I [cast] them because shooting is a very boring process for the people who [are] not like the director, the DOP and the rest, the research is very boring. So I cast the people through two theater amateur groups but there were only women doing that in that place; there were no men. So I needed some men and then I went to a chorus, people who get together to sing popular songs. And I just asked them “Please sing songs that you usually sing.” And then in the editing we decided to [take] out all the dialogues between the guy Baqueano, this guy who gets into the tavern and starts to talk to them because it was too many words in the film. And then the songs which were supposed only to be the excuse to get into the tavern became much more important for the film. And a little bit by chance, one of the songs is a very popular song in Galicia and another one is very popular in Portugal. The first one is [UNKNOWN] Rains—which is what happens in Galicia, actually, most of the time—and the other one is a song by a very, very famous [?contessatarean?] singer in Portugal.
David Pendleton
Like a protest singer.
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro
Protest singer, yeah. About a revolt. The song is about a revolt that happened in Portugal.
David Pendleton 27:55
The revolt led by women in the song...
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro
Yeah.
Audience 2 28:04
Hi, Eloy. Deborah. A very beautiful film very beautifully shot. I don't even have the technical language to ask you how some things happen, but the timing was so good. The pacing of looking at a scene until you actually noticed a figure or until the light changed and yet it didn't take forever so I was very impressed with it.
I was very affected by the singing as well—by the men and by the women—and now that I understand a little bit how you set it up, it still felt like what is there to talk about? These people work together all day long. They speak—you know, “Pull, Alberto!”— they speak when they need to speak around work, but the singing is so communal; everyone seems to know the same song. They probably learned them very young or picked them up. But the comment I wanted to make was that I just noticed so much that there are no niños, you know, there are no children or jóvenes, no young people. It sort of made it feel like a bubble in time in a way. It was very unreal, like these people had lived here forever, these same people, and other versions of them would live also forever. It had a magical feeling in a way and also the animals... Whenever I see animals on film, I always think what good actors they are! They're so natural. And so that was a riveting scene to see this calf being born and all the cows encouraging the mother cow and it sort of replaced the need you have for children. So that you didn't feel like, “Oh, it's a place that’s dying because there are no children” because that need is filled by the animals in a way. And also the love that people—in their eyes—for the animals, was not like pets, but you know, maybe for food, but there was such affection in the faces of the actors for their animals. Very, very powerful film. Thank you very much.
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro
You’re welcome.
David Pendleton 30:36
Are there young people there that you chose not to film?
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro 30:41
Very few young people, and almost no children, because they all move not necessarily very far away, but to the small towns where they have schools, and they have more like a modern, contemporary life. And, it's not something that I really decided on purpose, but it was, in a way, natural. Because I wanted to portray the generation of our grandparents, so I concentrated on that, because when we talk about the rural, and you see films about the rural, and why the rural, what's changing there, I always hear in the conversations that we always refer to the technological and population changes, but not about the change of what I think is most important. It’s been the biggest change, which is in the way, how we look to what we have around, and especially what is our relationship with the things that we actually don't know. And this is why I think that our generation of grandparents are really special in this way. Because I think it’s the—I don't know how you say in English—the things you use for doors and windows...
David Pendleton 32:29
Like the threshold or…? You can also say it in Spanish, because somebody here…
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro 32:32
The bisagra… I think it's the hinge. It's like a hinge generation. That's what I call it in these papers you wrote, going to use later, and because I think the [UNKNOWN] they have was a way of seeing the world where the things that you don't know are still possible. Because you can’t prove it or you don't know, you’re not saying it doesn’t exist. I'm thinking about all the relation with all the sacred stories, the popular stories about the forests, about the... all the things you cannot prove, but you still believe. There is a saying—a very typical saying in Galicia—that people say “I don't believe in witches, but they [exist].” This kind of, you know, “I don't believe but still they are.” And I think we've changed. We really have changed, because we have become a very scientific, materialistic society, and I think we are becoming poorer, because we know more, but we are denying… We are more confident because we know more about things. We cannot prove they don't exist, so we live as if they don’t exist. So that was very important for me to make in this film to concentrate on this. And because identity which has to do with memory, I think is real not only by reality, but the mythical construction of the reality. It’s a mixture of all things. I mean, who I am is what I've been doing, but also how I construct this story about myself and of course, also when we talk about a society or a part of an identity. So in a way, I think that the old grandparents’ generation was how they built the only identity, it was richer. So I didn't film children, because there were not many, and also because I wanted to concentrate on [INAUDIBLE].
David Pendleton 35:42
Yeah, there's a question in the back
Audience 3 35:48
Congratulations for the movie. It had multiple dimensions for me, and one of them was actually the struggle to achieve a balance between the solid hierarchical structure of a city and the strong community that a village can create. I was wondering if we are actually sharing that dimension.
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro
I didn’t hear…
David Pendleton 36:21
I think he's asking about attention in the film, maybe between a question of hierarchy that you might find in something larger, like a city, a larger social unit versus a more sort of horizontal
communal...
Audience 3
I’m wondering if that was one dimension, just a struggle to reach a balance between the two.
David Pendleton 36:40
And I think it probably has some to do with the arrival of this figure Baqueano perhaps? He's also sort of a savior. I mean, I think he's asking about tension in the film between hierarchy and a more communal, kind of like, level sort of existence.
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro 37:01
Yeah, Baqueano made us a lot of work because what was the necessity the need of a character like this in our community. But it was something that we had from the play, and in a way even though in the film, we didn’t get so much deeper into this, there’s always these kind of figures in every social structure, right? So as you say, it's kind of allegorical, many things in the film. And we decided to keep it just as… he almost has no character, he's a guy that you don’t know anything about. He doesn't belong to the community, he appears like…
David Pendleton 37:58
Right, out of nowhere, in the forest…
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro 38:04
And in a way, you'd never know if he really knew the way out, or we wanted to play [with] this kind of ambiguity with this guy. Is it this guy who told them to burn the forest, or is just that they misunderstood the message? Or is it just that, I don't know, they really hewing to this speech that they realize that they have to do it by themselves. So yeah, so we decided that the idea was to do it pretty ambiguous. So in a way it's your choice to answer this because the play was like this, that's why we also decided to use this play. There was also a long process to get– When I decided to make a film in Galicia, I knew that it was very important for me to portray language in the way of not what is said, but the plastic and musical aspects of the language, which I think is the most important. [It’s] what makes any language unique. So I didn't want to write the [script] myself. So we needed this kind of, say, materia prima...
David Pendleton
Right, some sort of like starting material or… original material.
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro
Yeah, original material to work from this musicality in the Galician language. So we ended up with this play which as you say, was an existentialist play, which in a way is very abstract and I like that because it gave us a lot of freedom in a way and is not putting the answers on the screen. So it's only sending questions or possible interpretations to the audience.
David Pendleton 40:35
And this does the play also have this political dimension? Because I don't know how different Galician Spanish is from Castilian Spanish. But I know that the play was written during the Franco period—he's a Galician playwright—when I'm assuming those kinds of regional differences were more or less suppressed, or meant to be kind of ignored, I think. And also, then you have this figure Baqueano who may or may not be a leader. He may be a religious figure or a political figure. I guess I'm curious to hear more about the play and and how well known this person is in contemporary Spain and that sort of thing.
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro
He's not very well known at all. And he wrote in the 60s, more or less in the 50s, 60s. It's not very clear, because he never published until the 70s. B he said that it was an allegorical play about the dictatorship in Spain. But the few notes he left about the play, he said every theater director could do it as he or she wanted, so if you wanted to do a representation of the play... But for him, he was thinking about an empty theater with not even a sign of the forest. Why? Because he wanted every spectator to see much of the forest [for] himself; it can be the dictatorship or whatever. I also like that, because otherwise, we'd think about it like an old play. So that's what I like from this way of approaching the audience or a conflict. Yeah, that relates to the first question about not putting details of historical time.
David Pendleton 42:41
Right, right.
And at what point did you– It sounds like then you’re almost thinking of the film as, in some ways, like an adaptation of this play. But yet, in the final film, we have very little of the play and then lots of observational sequences of the guy breaking up the ice that's in his cistern, or the calf birthing sequence... And so I’m fascinated by these two very different elements as a very sort of formal kind of—the sort of Straub-Huillet-reciting-the-text things—and then the observational sequences, and I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about... or is it purely intuitive, or just the way in which you see those two different kinds of sequences, how they relate to each other?
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro 43:28
This film had to shoot in periods. One of them was in 2009. And that was supposed to be the only one. And I followed the script, the play. And we filmed for five weeks. And then we came back, we edited the film, and we wanted it to be the film. And actually, we managed to have a film. But I was not really happy with it because the intention of the filmmaker was before the life of the film itself. I don’t know if I’m explaining it, but when you see the intentions of the filmmaker instead of the film itself.
David Pendleton 44:20
It’s sort of like in the foreground in a way, your intentions…
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro 44:22
Yeah, my intentions were very referential, like, as you say, Straub and blah, blah, blah. And also, there was something I wanted to do. I wanted from the beginning to make a film in the border between fiction and documentary. But usually these films are done in a way that they are mixing techniques or ways of working from fiction and documentary, but in a way that you cannot make a difference when you're watching the film. I mean, you say La Quatro Volte or … I mean, the tone and the aesthetics of the film…
David Pendleton
It all gets very unified.
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro
Yeah, it’s unified and it's very– And I really wanted to– But I forgot when doing the first shooting that I wanted to do– It’s like putting two ways of approaching this place together even though they are not supposed to be because filmmakers usually don't do that. And I tried in the first shoot, but the documentary material—even though I don't like to talk about fiction and documentary—was short and poor. So that's why I decided to come back to really show this kind of… And I was reading the Vertov diaries…
David Pendleton
Dziga Vertov?
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro
Dziga Vertov. And I read something he said. Dziga Vertov said if you shoot a real apple and a fake one in a way that you cannot [tell] a difference, you're supposed to be a good filmmaker, but you are not a good filmmaker, you should shoot the real one in a way that no fake apple pass as a real one. So I said yeah, that was [what] I wanted to do, in a way, to put these kinds of different approaches, materials, ways of seeing this place and these people... actually showing that they are very different ways of approaching, that they are the same thing. I mean, by showing these documentary moments, I think the fiction or the theatrical moments became more close to what we usually say as documentary.
It's complicated, because also the use of non-professional actors has a relation with this, because I wanted to use non-professional actors, not because it's cool, or whatever, but because I think they don't have a complete control of themselves as human beings, especially when they have a camera in front of them. And I like to put them in non-naturalistic situations, because then when you do that, there’s subtle, subtle details that are really showing who they are. And I don't know if I'm making this explanation…. I think the sequences with these two ladies in the forest, in a way, we have the feeling that we know we are portraying unique people because of all this complicated and anti-natural way of approaching them through these very dense and unnatural texts and their positions. I am forcing them to do it because there is in every fiction technique, or in every fiction approach to reality, there is a documentary layer. Godard said that, right? That every fiction was a–
David Pendleton
That every film is sort of a documentary of its own making.
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro 49:01
Of its own making. Yeah, yeah. So in a way, it’s related to that. This idea, this whole idea of combining different approaches.
David Pendleton 49:11
So did you rehearse with them? Or did you just show them– Well, obviously, they’ve memorized the text. So they've done a certain amount of preparation work before they showed up.
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro 49:21
We rehearsed for almost one year. Because there was more text and also even with these texts, it was kind of complicated. And because we people who live in the cities, we think that people in their rural communities, they do nothing, they are always... and they are very busy all the time. So we have to rehearse like once or twice a week, for nine months, one year. And then I started shooting. Because I wanted them not to be concerned or worried about the text when we were shooting. So it was important that they really had the text inside them in a way, only be concentrating on the tone and the rhythm, the tempo, the silences.
David Pendleton 50:24
Other questions in the audience?
Steffen has a question.
Steffen Pierce 50:31
I just wanted to say that I think you achieve some of what Pasolini achieved with his non-actors. You know, you kind of use sacred texts as well. I’m thinking of The Gospel According to St. Matthew. And I love the—what you're talking about—the timeless sense of these actors using the text and it really doesn't belong to any particular time now, or any time of the past I can think of, so I really think it's a success.
David Pendleton 51:03
Yeah, we were talking a little bit about Pas– Well the scene where Baqueano announces himself is a very sort of Pasolinian sequence, right? Because it's very frontal, he addresses the camera, and he has the shawl over his head, right? And a staff. Yeah. That's a moment that’s very Pasolinian.
Are there other questions? I'll ask one last question, and we’ll go back to the audience one last time. I just wanted to know if you– There's a sense of matriarchy that comes out in the film, and I'm wondering if this is something that was deliberate on your part or if this is something that you saw in the place. We start with the two women talking and for most of the film, it's mostly the women talking. We see the men singing and we see the men doing things but… like the women tell the woman to strip [UNKNOWN] etc, etc. It seems to fade a little bit towards the second half of the film, but it starts out with this very strong sense of these very powerful women.
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro 52:02
Yeah, Galicia is matriarcado. What’s the word in English?
David Pendleton 52:08
Oh, it’s a matriarchy or a matriarchal society.
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro 52:12
But in a way, it’s this thing about when you work with the real, you think that many things are always by chance, but at the end they make sense in a way and as I say, I cast the people in the local theatre groups and there were no men. Actually in the play, the two main roles—which are these two ladies—are men. But for me it was very clear from when I saw these two ladies that they were going to play these two roles. And yeah, people ask me sometimes why they are always in different places. No men and ladies. But in a way it is still like this. It’s not that they don't get together, but you go up to bars there and you hardly see women there. And yeah, I think it's matriarchal.
David Pendleton 53:33
Any last questions or thoughts in the audience? If not, I'll end by saying thanks to all of you. And thank you Eloy and thanks to the Film Study Center.
Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro 53:47
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
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