O À pala de Walsh é, pelo terceiro ano consecutivo, parceiro do Frames Portuguese Film Festival, festival de cinema português na Suécia que se inicia já no próximo dia 22 de Fevereiro. Relativamente aos filmes que serão exibidos, tive o gosto de escrever a folha de sala para o José e Pilar (2010), de Miguel Gonçalves Mendes.
Todas as folhas de sala podem ser lidas aqui. Mais informações ali ao lado.
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"Saramago’s relationship with Portugal was never peaceful, due to the numerous and infamous gestures of contempt taken in the 90s by the right-wing Government headed at that time by Cavaco Silva, the current President of the Republic, and which led to the author’s exile in Lanzarote. Saramago has always been known for his reserved and truculent personal style and his departure to the Spanish island – insularity which goes hand in hand with his personality – definitely took the spotlight away from his homeland’s public eye, which helped to create a certain myth around his persona. That is why Mendes’s documentary, an intimate testimony of Saramago’s life with his wife Pilar, is a true exercise of “unveiling” his last years (almost until his death in June 2010).
In a diaristic but serene tone (contrary to Saramago’s hectic agenda), José e Pilar (José and Pilar, 2010), a “road doc” organized in three acts, is an ambitious work, since it addresses a wide range of topics: the passage of time and the sense of urgency that old age brings, love and life as a couple, God and death, even the island of Lanzarote itself. Somehow, it turns out to be not just a documentary about Saramago, but by Saramago himself (as if he was, for a moment, the director of the film), in the sense that he takes advantage of the film to make personal notes of his daily life (to “document” it, precisely), as a kind of logbook. Exchanging views with Žižek, for whom “Fiction is more real than the reality of playing social roles”, since in the face of “the dialectic of «wearing the mask»”, “the only way to depict people beneath their protective mask of playing is, paradoxically, to make them directly play a role, i.e. to move into fiction”[1], we would say that, more than representing “reality”, what all documentary film should aspire to is the representation of the human element; and if the human – the “human being” itself, the behavior of “being human” – indeed implies, as we know, the use of masks in our daily lives, then what is actually real (but that is all, it does not mean necessarily more interesting) is that documental and composite final result made of transparency and opacity (the one from the “mask”), and not fiction. What is real, in fact, is the act of Saramago signing autographs when he no longer has the patience to do it (and not the impudent writer that by “removing the mask”, would tell fans to go away) or the act of Pilar asking a member of the audience to leave the room (and not to insult him or strike him as the first “inadmissible impulse”[2] would lead to).
Shot at a time when Saramago was already a figure of planetary dimension, it is also very interesting to note the way in which the film captures the zeitgeist of the 21st century writer (and the whole powerful “machine” behind him) as a media figure whose prominence as someone who interprets the world he lives in and being heard and respected for that (as were Sartre, Camus, among many) loses relevance whilst his media presence as a “pop star” soars. Saramago, for better or for worse, is perhaps one of the last models of the public intellectual armed with his own critical thoughts concerning society, even though he does not escape from his own “merchandisitation”: as Saramago himself laments, even when he has nothing further to say, he still has to give dozens of conferences and speeches, smile for the audience, sign books, emit soundbites.
If every film, as Jacques Rivette once pointed out, is a documentary of its own shooting, then Mendes’s documentary is one of a double meaning, since it focuses on two “shootings”, that is to say two creative processes, the cinematic and the literary one. Indeed, Mendes follows Saramago completing the writing of The Elephant’s Journey, the last book published in his lifetime, and also catches, in one of those happy miracles that sometimes happen during a shooting, the writer on the plane germinating the very initial idea for Cain, his definitive and essayistic novel inspired by and about biblical texts. In this respect, it is curious to note that as we hear so many times Saramago, a confirmed atheist, denying the existence of God (there are many and brilliant aphorisms from him in this matter), Mendes frames these passages with almost mystical shots of the cosmos and of a deserted and virginal Lanzarote (as if dating from the “beginning of the world”, with a great mist slowly crossing the hills), a movement between the Universal and the Particular evoking the mystery of life and of creation. It seems, as Žižek stressed about Andrei Tarkovsky’s work, like the film breathes in some sort of materialist theology, in the sense that the access to “the spiritual dimension [the mystery of creation] [can] only [be successful] via intense direct physical contact with the damp heaviness of earth (or stagnant water) [the earth of Lanzarote we see in the film]”[3]. But there is also the mystery of love, since if, as Saramago puts it, “The history of mankind is the history of our misunderstandings with god, for he doesn’t understand us, and we don’t understand him”, then the story of Saramago and Pilar is instead, as those same shots of the cosmos imply, about their complete understanding, about their almost predestined encounter somewhere written in the stars filmed by Mendes, because it is by looking up to them, as once Bogart said to Joan Leslie in Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra, that we “can almost feel the motion of the earth” (and we all know that he is not referring only, or not at all, to earth, but to love and the motion it causes in us). We may now, therefore, better understand Saramago’s dedication (“To Pilar, who had not yet been born and took so long in coming”) and his “cosmic” certainty that he and Pilar will “meet elsewhere”.
There is a defining close-up shot of the whole film: it’s that one in which we see the hands of Saramago and Pilar holding and caressing each other. The shot is long and accompanied by a musical and urgent crescendo whose peak coincides with the separation of their hands, since they are now needed for applauding a speech. The hands of Saramago and Pilar want to touch each other, indefinitely, but there is no time: they must move on to the next step, the next conference, the next plane. In this imperative of continuity, this close-up rhymes with the last shot at the airport, a “flying” shot, as if the film – and the life of Saramago, both biological and artistic – would never finish, flight to flight. And since Saramago’s biological life is so intertwined with his work, we would say without hesitation that he will always remain steady and vigorous like the quince tree of Victor Erice".
[1] Slavo Žižek, The Fight of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski between Theory and Post-Theory, British Film Institute, London, 2001, at p. 75.
In a diaristic but serene tone (contrary to Saramago’s hectic agenda), José e Pilar (José and Pilar, 2010), a “road doc” organized in three acts, is an ambitious work, since it addresses a wide range of topics: the passage of time and the sense of urgency that old age brings, love and life as a couple, God and death, even the island of Lanzarote itself. Somehow, it turns out to be not just a documentary about Saramago, but by Saramago himself (as if he was, for a moment, the director of the film), in the sense that he takes advantage of the film to make personal notes of his daily life (to “document” it, precisely), as a kind of logbook. Exchanging views with Žižek, for whom “Fiction is more real than the reality of playing social roles”, since in the face of “the dialectic of «wearing the mask»”, “the only way to depict people beneath their protective mask of playing is, paradoxically, to make them directly play a role, i.e. to move into fiction”[1], we would say that, more than representing “reality”, what all documentary film should aspire to is the representation of the human element; and if the human – the “human being” itself, the behavior of “being human” – indeed implies, as we know, the use of masks in our daily lives, then what is actually real (but that is all, it does not mean necessarily more interesting) is that documental and composite final result made of transparency and opacity (the one from the “mask”), and not fiction. What is real, in fact, is the act of Saramago signing autographs when he no longer has the patience to do it (and not the impudent writer that by “removing the mask”, would tell fans to go away) or the act of Pilar asking a member of the audience to leave the room (and not to insult him or strike him as the first “inadmissible impulse”[2] would lead to).
Shot at a time when Saramago was already a figure of planetary dimension, it is also very interesting to note the way in which the film captures the zeitgeist of the 21st century writer (and the whole powerful “machine” behind him) as a media figure whose prominence as someone who interprets the world he lives in and being heard and respected for that (as were Sartre, Camus, among many) loses relevance whilst his media presence as a “pop star” soars. Saramago, for better or for worse, is perhaps one of the last models of the public intellectual armed with his own critical thoughts concerning society, even though he does not escape from his own “merchandisitation”: as Saramago himself laments, even when he has nothing further to say, he still has to give dozens of conferences and speeches, smile for the audience, sign books, emit soundbites.
If every film, as Jacques Rivette once pointed out, is a documentary of its own shooting, then Mendes’s documentary is one of a double meaning, since it focuses on two “shootings”, that is to say two creative processes, the cinematic and the literary one. Indeed, Mendes follows Saramago completing the writing of The Elephant’s Journey, the last book published in his lifetime, and also catches, in one of those happy miracles that sometimes happen during a shooting, the writer on the plane germinating the very initial idea for Cain, his definitive and essayistic novel inspired by and about biblical texts. In this respect, it is curious to note that as we hear so many times Saramago, a confirmed atheist, denying the existence of God (there are many and brilliant aphorisms from him in this matter), Mendes frames these passages with almost mystical shots of the cosmos and of a deserted and virginal Lanzarote (as if dating from the “beginning of the world”, with a great mist slowly crossing the hills), a movement between the Universal and the Particular evoking the mystery of life and of creation. It seems, as Žižek stressed about Andrei Tarkovsky’s work, like the film breathes in some sort of materialist theology, in the sense that the access to “the spiritual dimension [the mystery of creation] [can] only [be successful] via intense direct physical contact with the damp heaviness of earth (or stagnant water) [the earth of Lanzarote we see in the film]”[3]. But there is also the mystery of love, since if, as Saramago puts it, “The history of mankind is the history of our misunderstandings with god, for he doesn’t understand us, and we don’t understand him”, then the story of Saramago and Pilar is instead, as those same shots of the cosmos imply, about their complete understanding, about their almost predestined encounter somewhere written in the stars filmed by Mendes, because it is by looking up to them, as once Bogart said to Joan Leslie in Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra, that we “can almost feel the motion of the earth” (and we all know that he is not referring only, or not at all, to earth, but to love and the motion it causes in us). We may now, therefore, better understand Saramago’s dedication (“To Pilar, who had not yet been born and took so long in coming”) and his “cosmic” certainty that he and Pilar will “meet elsewhere”.
There is a defining close-up shot of the whole film: it’s that one in which we see the hands of Saramago and Pilar holding and caressing each other. The shot is long and accompanied by a musical and urgent crescendo whose peak coincides with the separation of their hands, since they are now needed for applauding a speech. The hands of Saramago and Pilar want to touch each other, indefinitely, but there is no time: they must move on to the next step, the next conference, the next plane. In this imperative of continuity, this close-up rhymes with the last shot at the airport, a “flying” shot, as if the film – and the life of Saramago, both biological and artistic – would never finish, flight to flight. And since Saramago’s biological life is so intertwined with his work, we would say without hesitation that he will always remain steady and vigorous like the quince tree of Victor Erice".
[1] Slavo Žižek, The Fight of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski between Theory and Post-Theory, British Film Institute, London, 2001, at p. 75.
[2] Slavo Žižek, op. cit., at p. 74.
[3] Slavo Žižek, op. cit., at p. 102.
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