Date:
Location:
Speaker: Andrés Di Tella, Filmmaker and Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor, Harvard University
Moderated by: Ignacio Azcueta, PhD Candidate in Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University
The diary has that rare virtue of never quite being a “work” but, rather, always, a work in process. One writes it every day, without any correction, without knowing fully why, with no other objective than to capture something of the flow of life, the feeling of the moment. In the same way, my project Diaries (Argentina, 2022, performance, color, 90 min)) is a project in the making, still unfinished. It embraces on equal footing the notes taken each day in the notebook, images recorded without any pretension on the cell phone, personal archive, material found on the internet. Todo bicho que camina va a parar al asador, as the gaucho saying goes: every walking beast ends up on the grill! Incidents from daily life, childhood memories, portraits of friends, chronicles of trips, readings and songs. I began by making a series of shorts without knowing exactly what I would do with them, simply out of a desire to make brief, instant films that would take me out of the habitual rhythm of filmmaking: with luck, each feature takes two or three years of work; in one case, it took me seven years! These diaries, on the other hand, were made sometimes in a single day, or in a week or two. I was also interested in the dramaturgy of the short format: how to unfold a story, say, in one minute. This provides for a further challenge: How to present the diaries in public? How to convey the idea that this is not a feature film in episodes but, instead, something else? I have chosen nine pieces as a provisional sampler of the project (which for the moment counts twenty pieces). Trying out a combination of different durations: from one minute to twenty-five minutes. I have given them a roughly chronological order, with some license, allowing for the suggestion that this is just one part of the whole, that there are pieces missing in this jigsaw. And I decided to combine the shorts with live readings from my notebooks, so that these intrusions might break the spell of the feature film, of cinema. The different presentations of the project at the Buenos Aires and San Sebastián film festivals allowed me to try out diverse permutations between images and texts, so that no one saw quite the same “film.” I realized that this mutating form of presentation was appropriate for what is, in the end, a mutating project. This screening at the Harvard Film Archive will be, in this literal sense, unrepeatable. ” This screening is part of the Harvard Film Archive program Archives and Memories.
Andrés Di Tella (b. 1958) is a filmmaker, writer and curator, based in Buenos Aires. His films include Montoneros, una historia, La televisión y yo, Fotografías, El país del Diablo, Hachazos, ¡Volveremos a las montañas!, 327 cuadernos and Ficción privada. His work spans video art, installations and performance pieces, as well as TV documentaries. He has published two books: Hachazos and Cuadernos. He was the founding director of the BAFICI (Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival) and artistic director of the Princeton Documentary Festival at Princeton University, where he was also visiting professor. He currently directs the Film Program at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. Retrospectives of his work have been held at Filmoteca Española Madrid, Festival dei Popoli Florence, E Tudo Verdade Sao Paulo and Festival de Lima, among other places. He was distinguished with the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Premio Konex de Platino for best documentary filmmaker of the decade 2011-2020.
Ignacio Azcueta is a PhD candidate in Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He specializes in contemporary Latin American literature and film. His dissertation "Nostalgic Detectives: Narratives of research in contemporary Latin American Literature and Film (1996-2020)" explores the use of archival materials in contemporary Latin American literature and film, in order to understand their ethical and political interventions on history and memory.
Presented in collaboration with Harvard Film Archive