On the screen, rescued from memory, We see the images, Rounds en 16mm, From different daily scenes starring marriage formed by Léon and Vivian Barret, A upper class Swiss couple in the years following World War. Léon and Vivian travel all over the world and record the places they visit and the activities in which they occupy their time. While this happens, A printed text on screen tells us the meaning of these same images. Extracted from what Vivian's intimate diary looks like, These texts share their existential doubts with the viewer, His life with Léon, Your hopes, His love forbidden by another man. Thus, The intimacy of a life that moves between the tragic memory of the war conflict opens before our eyes in a society that begins to be reborn, The sense of love, death, the value of memory or how it is built and, consequently, How we build, at once, Our identity.
The problem is that none of this really happened and, however, It could have happened. Con My mexican bretzel, Nuria Giménez Loreng offers us, in his first work, A first -order formal exercise that invites us to question how we manufacture the reality that surrounds us and, above all, The stories we put in order and make sense of the world. A written text is enough, Some images and our own imagination and baggage of cultural experiences and experiences to build an entire universe. And isn't this how our memory works? A set made of retales that make sense when we join the pieces in our head. We talked to Nuria Gómez about these ideas and their experience when articulating this particular story. My mexican bretzel It opens on Friday 11/12 In commercial rooms.
First, I would like you to put us in perspective and tell us the background of this particular project. What is the context in which this story arises?
When my Swiss grandfather died in the year 2010, I accompanied my mother to Switzerland to help take care of her things, And in the basement of his house we find fifty coils, The majority of 16mm and some of 8mm. For me it was like finding a treasure. I did not know what state the coils were or what was inside. I asked my mother and took all the material to Barcelona, Where I live. There I started digitizing and seeing the material that had. It seemed wonderful. I knew I wanted to do something or, rather, I knew very well what I didn't want to do, But I didn't know what I wanted to do, I found that as I was advancing with the project. Basically, At first I vision of the images many times and, So, I started seeing things that I had not seen in the first views (why, at first, You see the most obvious). Then, You see more details at a visual level. But, in the end, You are already seeing things that are not so visible, gestures, grimaces, things of nonverbal language. And it seemed fascinating because every viewing I saw something I had not seen before. Then, How did I not know what I wanted to do, I started playing with the images, And as I linked to them I was making a selection of what attracted me the most, Seeing what worked for me and what was not. On the other hand, in parallel, independently to images, I started writing all the ideas that came to mind on any subject. These two processes lasted three years and, in the end, From the fourth year, I started looking for ways to fit text and image. After, I started building Vivian's character from the images, combining it with what I had put in the text, that were things I wanted to give exit.
So, The text, The story of Vivian's story is from your invention, It is not a real newspaper.
No, no. Actually, Vivian Barret does not exist. They are fictitious characters built by me. The only thing that exists is the dexamyl that was an antidepressant of the years 50 [And that has some importance in the plot], Schaffhause's bombardment, really, The accident of the Lemans career [a multiple clash in which the pilot Pierre Levegh died and 83 spectators and what, According to the movie, The two protagonists lived], They are small real things that give credibility to history. But I did not intend to be plausible, not at all. In fact, Everything seemed super-disappeared and, precisely for that, For most people they have been very credible. Everyone tells me to believe it until the end, When everything begins to disassemble.
I wanted you to talk about sound work and music, two elements almost non -existent in the tape, But they have a very calculated presence.
Sound treatment is something we have worked a lot with Jonathan Darch, What is the sound designer, who has done a spectacular job. It has been many months of work to decide where that sound began, Where it ended, Why we chose it and what we were looking for. One of the decisions that was very clear is that I did not want to use ambient sound. I wanted the sound to express emotions, that it was a kind of voice of Vivian or underline Léon's obsessions. In the movie there are only four songs. I am very cautious when using music because it seems to me that it is a resource that is so powerful that it almost erases everything. To any image you put a soundtrack, of sadness or melancholy or whatever, It will square. I don't like using it like this. Oh well, There is Charles Mingus's wonderful song with New York images, I love it. Then there is the song Requiem for a fox De Sandro Perri, With the meeting of Vivian and Léon. The musical selection is from Cristobal Fernández, Co-Mountor of the Movie.
The film reflects on filming images and its relationship with memory. Somehow, It happens that, over time, what we film ends up replacing the own memory of the facts lived.
Yeah, The film talks a lot about how we interact with the world through the camera. That is very reflected both in Vivian, With the writing of his diary, as in Léon filming. Actually, What they do, And what we all do really, is to select the part of the reality that interests us to tell us. We build our own memory and thus also build our identity. But perhaps "we rebuild". There are a number of facts, But what you have may have anything to do with what happened, But it's what tell yourself. Filming is, literally, that, because you frame a part of reality and what does not interest you leave it out, Hence there may also be self -deception. But it is the story you want to make yourself of what you are seeing, When in reality there is also something that you are ignoring.
What seems interesting to the project is that experience of rescuing, Through your images, other people's life to, at the same time, build another life from them. What did that experience mean for you?
Bueno, More than rescuing what I do is interpret the images to build a reality following them. An interpretation that is very free. If I tell you that my mother, What is their daughter, He commented after watching the movie that had made a more true portrait of his parents than if he had told their real lives ... for me that is very significant. In that sense, There is a real part there. And then, On the subject of telling a life is something that has always fascinated me a lot. When I read short stories where they told you in forty pages a whole life or an entire personality, I wondered how it was possible to do that. In that sense, I thought a lot about the question of fragmentation. If we ask anyone who tells you your life in seventy -four minutes, What things have marked, What people have influenced, That forces you to select and think what has made you who you are now. That is what I consider when building the characters. But the fact of handling material outside me, It gave me a lot of respect. I have tried to do it since the greatest possible respect. They are my grandparents, but, even if it wasn't like that and had found that material in a market, I would have treated it exactly with the same respect and honesty, Because it seems to me that it is very delicate to treat other people's material. Nor has that prevented me from doing so. It was too tempting to work those images, They seemed very beautiful.
The film encourages us to reflect on the relationship between truth and lie. As the promotional motto says, A lie can hide a truth. What exactly was your concern about this issue? Y, above all, What do you expect the viewer to maintain with respect to all this?
At first, I was very clear that I didn't want to use my grandparents' private life. I know it may seem contradictory to use your images, But not their private lives. But, in the end, of the 97 years that my grandfather lived I am showing 74 very built minutes with a text and music, And that's what I show. In that sense, I didn't want to make a biography. That, on the one hand. On the other because to me, as a process, I was much more attractive, fascinating and funny invent those lives. And thirdly because if I had wanted to stick to the facts, I would have had to ask my mother that, At that time, It was a girl and I should have been trustworthy, which is the most deceptive thing in the world. So, I think that I would have lied much more if I had tried to make a documentary about the real life of two people who are not and can not give me their version, What if I lie openly. In any case, I would be lying. It is very difficult to tell another person's life without the other person saying anything.
In that sense it is curious that, For example, When someone's biography is going to be written, so many versions of the same life are found, depending on who interprets it and, in the end, Who is that person is something we don't know if we solve.
Of course, That is why I prefer autobiographies to biographies because, at least, It is your own lie that tells you. In the end, We all select what interests us and we tell, And for something we select that. No matter what the reason, The point is that it is your own construction. But that another person builds it for you ... there will be a real part, But there will be another lie. And I also did so because I think that in every fiction there is some documentary and in every documentary there is some fiction. In the end, Everything is mixed. I do not like that the truth corresponds to the documentary and fiction with the lie. For me a proof of this is what my mother told me, that he was transmitting more truth with a fiction than if he had made a documentary about his real lives.
Continuing with all this, To what extent do you think the look of the one who looks can transform your movie? It seems to me that this is a case in which there is a round trip dialogue enters the screen and the spectator.
Fully. I loved what I am receiving from the people who are watching the movie. It is something beautiful, Enriching and what is a gift. I have left several spaces in the movie, There are several holes, And each one fills them as they want. Many people make interpretations or ways of filling those holes that seem absolutely wonderful to me. I like that a lot. For me the spectator is an active person, curious, intelligent. It's true, You have to make an effort when reading, or I also understand that there may be to whom silence can be uncomfortable, We are not accustomed. But, As a spectator, I like to leave me a margin of freedom to finish the movie.
The movie almost retroplates us to silent cinema. You have not put inter-ties because the texts appear as subtitles at the bottom of the screen. There has always been a discussion about itself, With sound cinema, There was something of the force of the image that was lost. In that sense, Your movie recovers a bit that way of telling and that way of forcing the viewer to see images.
Exact. I had quite clear from the beginning that I didn't want a voiceover. I have a version with that voice, because I didn't want to rule it out without having tried it, But I confirmed that no. It is largely to leave the viewer that freedom to decide with what voice Vivian speaks, from what place it speaks to us. And then because, So, It seems to me that moving images charge an impressive force. They have much more power. Like the sounds of sound, that have the strength they have thanks to the silence that surrounds them. If all the time had put ambient sound, would have weakened a lot. Yeah, I think that, in this way, has something magical, poetic. About the voiceover also had a lot to do with the daily format. The newspaper is designed to be read, not said aloud, Where there is a kind of covenant of silence with what is told the notebook. They are like confidences and breaking that silence seemed a little sacrilegious. Besides, It also has to do with the issue of being a woman in the years 50, In those who had no voice. It is very significant how each one is expressed. He expresses himself with the camera, which is something much more phallic, out, external, shared with others, with pride. And she expresses himself in silence, inward, With discretion, without anyone knowing, Writing in your notebook. That seemed very significant to me. Who has the command, who drives, who films, who looks is the man.
There is a kind of dialogue between these two forms of expression, A tension, almost like a war between words and what is showing the image.
Yeah, And then there is the issue that her shape does not disturb the least, But his shape, Yeah. It is that shot, The fact of being pointing continuously. But that conclusion comes later, Because the film is made very visceral and intuitively. I have not intellectualized or premeditated. It is a thing that has a lot to do with how I felt using the foreign material, his. I was representing in Vivian the discomfort he could feel while I manipulated the images. Filming the other has that appropriate the other, of some violence. In that sense I was exercising that appropriation and that kind of violence using my grandfather's gaze, Building a story from there. I think it also had to do with that.
