CARTAS COMO PELÍCULAS (LETTERS AS FILMS)
Cartas como películas (Letters as films)
Author: Garbiñe Ortega
Publication Date: February 2021
Publisher: La Fábrica and Punto de Vista Festival
248 pages • Hardcover ISBN 978-84-17769-76-5 • E-book 978-8417769765
This book of correspondence between filmmakers brings together more than fifty letters written between artists including Barbara Hammer, Carolee Schneemann, Jim Jarmusch, Terrence Malick, Robert Frank and Bill Brand. Postcards, manuscripts and typewritten letters together with recent emails reveal unknown and surprising relationships, a whole creative universe that takes place outside the cinematographic plane. The material gathered by Garbiñe Ortega, director of the Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival, includes stills, portraits, drawings and story boards that bring the creative process closer to a personal and intimate sphere.
La Fábrica, together with Punto de Vista, International Documentary Film Festival, publishes the book Cartas como peliculas , which gathers correspondence between more than fifty contemporary filmmakers, active creators or those who have been active until very recently.
Chick Strand, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Barbara Hammer, Jean-Luc Godard, Margaret Tait, Fernando Trueba or Jem Cohen are part of this compendium that, although it is a choral work with very different voices, has common themes such as the audience, the success or unrealized movies.
As the coordinator of the work and director of Punto de Vista Garbiñe Ortega points out: “it is a passionate investigation, in which I challenge myself to find relevant letters between filmmakers to draw unthinkable connections and relationships with the aim of drawing new genealogies and families cinematographic “
It is a book that allows different readings, where relationships between letters and images, temporal jumps, non-explicit thematic sub-chapters, small sequenced tributes, such as the one dedicated to Harun Farocki, or to a generation of American avant-garde cinema are proposed (Barbara Hammer, Chick Strand , Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann) -, and imaginary epistles written for this project by present-day filmmakers (such as Mariano Llinás, Ana Vaz, Deborah Stratman) and addressed to filmmakers in the history of cinema, living or dead, that they have not met.
Max Golberg points out, in the foreword to the book: “this selection is based on a broader interpretation of the” correspondence “, collapsing the chronology so that each of the letters can develop in a common exchange: let’s call it cinema.”
Letters like movies have very varied voices, but also very varied types of relationships: from intergenerational letters, to letters between collaborators, friends and even lovers.
Along with typewritten letters, postcards, reproductions of handwritten letters and emails, the book has drawings, story boards or photograms, among other documents, which allow us to delve into the cinematographic and personal universe of all these creators.
Ultimately, as Golberg affirms, the fundamental theme of this book is “the understanding and admiration that occurs between filmmakers.”