Título original: One day since yesterday: Peter Bogdanovich & the lost american film · Bill Teck · USA · 2014 · Guion: Bill Teck · Documental.
How unfair life is. Sometimes it puts you on top, others send you down. And when you're too low, you really are, without contemplation. This could be the summary of the story of life, not only the protagonist of this story, but of so many film directors. an industry, this one from the movies (It would also apply to any other form of expression.) who is merciless towards those who, for one reason or another, they lose the rhythm of what we call current events. How many names have been left in the gutter, victims of their insatiable appetite? And since we get, what is that today? Some of the answers to these questions are found, if not firmly raised, yes at least suggested in the background of this work.
One day since yesterday…, actor's first feature film, producer and director Bill Teck, It is a piece produced in the year 2014 that we can now enjoy thanks to the video on demand platform Filmin, and that brings us closer to the figure of the American director Peter Bogdanovich. After a first stage as a film critic, the author of works as well known as The last picture show, What's wrong with me doctor? o What a ruin of a function!, enjoyed, at the beginning of his career as a filmmaker, of the approval of a Hollywood that surrendered at the feet of its talent and that, at the beginning of the years 70, saw in him the dazzling promise of a new stardom. Especially since the premiere of The last picture show, Bogdanovich's career would experience unstoppable rise and recognition. But all this shine would fade after the filming of the film. They all laughed, a portrait of New York at the time wrapped in a romantic comedy of entanglements and the summit of a style that drew on the roots of the great North American and European directors. After its conclusion, the news of the murder of its lead actress Dorothy Stratten at the hands of her ex-husband, with whom Bogdanovich had begun a romantic relationship, would mark the rest of his professional and private life. Nothing would be like before. As guests on this journey we will find, among others, to Bogdanovich himself, to directors Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson, and actors Jeff Bridges, Ben Gazzara o Cybill Shepherd.
This interesting unfolds (y, above all, very distracted) Bill Teck's work on as many planes as one is able to explore. The first of these plans has to do, we mentioned it at the beginning, with a reflection on the conflicts of fame in an industry that forgives neither sins nor, much less, to the sinners. Or better, the idea of the confrontation between art and notoriety. The personal problems arising from Stratten's unexpected death, would push Bogdanovich to make a series of strategic mistakes that would end his podium as the industry's darling.. Never again would the director enjoy so much public attention and recognition. In fact, we could say (and hence his recent documentary works) that Bogdanovich, despite continuing to work on several works of fiction to this day, has returned, in the eyes of the specialized press, to that first work as a critic or scholar of the seventh art, more than to be recognized as a director. But, In fact, Bogdanovich would suffer the pressure of the scrutinizing gaze of representatives of the film business almost from the first moment. In such a competitive industry, ascended at breakneck speed to the Olympus of the Gods and cared for with care by all, Bogdanovich would wake up, or at least that's how he felt, the misgivings of his professional colleagues. In Tarantino's account of those early years of his career, Bogdanovich came to enjoy a fame that placed him even above the stars who came to work in his films. (perhaps one of the funniest scenes in the film, in which the author of Reservoir Dogs He shows himself to be the great narrator of anecdotes that he has always been.). At the first stumble, the hyenas, always hungry for morbid, would fall on him. But, What is left when the camera lights go off and the ink of the press leaves you aside??
Well, what remains is the man, no more no less. It will be at this point when Teck's work offers its best weapons. A work that delves beyond the tabloid speeches to rescue from their ashes the tender and deeply emotional and moving portrait of a man from whom life had been taken from him., in an incomprehensible way, what I wanted most and, for a short period of time, composed the center of his world. Like so many other times, One day since yesterday… (title that refers to a text that Dorothy Stratten dedicated to Bogdanovich) It is the story of a life marked by fate, but also for love and passion. love and passion, not just for Stratta, but for all women, actors and characters who helped him in his career. A reflection on friendship (like the one she has with the actor and director John Cassavetes, captured in one of the most touching moments of the film), about beings lost in circumstantial relationships, but they leave a deep mark, of betrayals or misunderstood gestures (There is her relationship with the actor Ben Gazzara), but especially about the unconditional love towards an art, the cinema, that in Bogdanovich, like many others of his generation, It was more than just a way to unleash their creativity., It was a way of seeing and understanding the world., to breathe the same life.
Psychological portrait, but also physical, that of a man already in his old age, but in whose eyes there is still the spark of passion for his work and everything that surrounds him. and here, even if it is a little later in time, We could relate Teck's film to the recent release of the film by critic and director Mark Cousins, The look of Orson Wells. Cousins focuses his work on a photograph of Wells lying on a bed to end up closing the shot over his eyes. That's where you find the shine, the very origin of Wells' passion and his way of approaching his work. It is also the look of a huge defeat. Passion and defeat are also found in Bogdanovich's gaze.. Behind the eye bags, under drooping eyelids, slow gesture and speech, that mischievous half-smile appears from time to time that, despite the blows, It lets out the vitality that it still keeps inside. That is the best tribute that can be paid to Bogdanovich.
But, above all, we talk about cinema, in a way of conceiving it as a spectacle and, at the same time, as art that, today more than ever, it is worth claiming, among other things because perhaps it has been ruined forever in the morass of an industry dominated by large multinationals that, in most cases, They offer a product lacking in something as elevated and today as little appreciated as emotion.. It is not uncommon to find a false debate in the media that seeks to establish a confrontation between auteur cinema understood in the European way and the current Hollywood industry.. And here I think many commentators are deliberately distorting the terms of the discussion to confuse. It is not about despising an industry for the sake of despising it.. The thing is, from two to three decades to this point, that industry (with few exceptions, hence the presence of both Tarantino, as chronicler of that past and director, like Wes Anderson) seems to have dedicated itself more to the balance of results of the box office world than to seek works that show true talent. Bogdanovich appears here to claim, directly or indirectly, the heritage of the great classical masters. Ford, Walsh, Capra, but also Renoir. Bogdanovich is today one of the great classics of cinema, is the link, the bridge between those already old generations and what would come in the following decades. what has happened? Hoy, when everyone wonders why cinema is losing viewers, Perhaps what should be questioned is not what these supposed new consumption habits that have come to replace it consist of., as if the viewer were just a machine to be directed based on algorithms and empty market strategies. What has been lost?, would be the right question. It's art, we could say. That is the struggle of the protagonist of this story.
Bil Teck has built, con One day since yesterday, a work that, from the particular, recovers that almost mythological vision of the artist and his work. That's what he does here, create a myth in the manner of old film legends. Teck puts the artist and his life on the podium that he understands belongs to him and that he has lost to place his art back at the center. There may be those who find all this somewhat disproportionate.. The artist is a human being like everyone else and elevating him to a higher category can make us make some major mistakes.. But perhaps it would be advisable to recover some of that old admiration that was felt for the maker, the master who operates behind the shadows of the work. It's true, It is not advisable to idealize them either., but in the relationship between the one who offers a good work of art to the world and the other who receives it, I don't find there's anything wrong with interjecting a little gratitude., that which arose from that old conception of cinema as a well-crafted spectacle. We are not talking about obeisance, Well, we all know that the artist can be, also, a monster. It's something of that old way of marveling at what was out of the ordinary, but what, however, He meant it another way., happier in this case, more lively. All this is, believe, referred to in this film. We admire the artist who has created a work and in that admiration we connect with what has been done., the work itself, that which transported us for a few hours to that other space or place (aesthetic, intellectual, emotional) that caused us those sensations that we will then carry with us for the rest of our lives.. There is nothing wrong with enjoying such innocent complicity.. And there may be those who think that all this is nothing more than gratuitous digressions, but that's how it is, precisely, How does this interesting work begin?, with this phrase that the actor James Stewart (another classic) left Bogdanovich himself: “when you make movies, “What you do is give people little pieces of time that they will never forget.”. Stewart's Word. GERARDO LEON
