Letters to My Dead Parents: the title is somewhat misleading, since the film has little to do with the genre of the “filmed letter”, and given that you are not addressing your parents directly. Even though, at the very beginning of the film, you seem to suggest that the starting point was the frustration of no longer being able to see them or speak to them. Is this the film’s actual point of departure? What need does it answer?
The film seeks to connect with the parents not out of sadness for their absence but out of a desire to revisit the life they have lost. For this, literature and film are very appropriate media. I am fascinated by the possibility of play that film allows. The play of playing with one’s dead parents through images and words. In this play, the film is a letter, a visual letter, which moves away from the “filmed letter” form, as this presupposes a familiar text that is staged and calls forth images. In my film, there are rather diverse texts that are organized alongside the images that want to be on screen, creating a state of contact. The duration of the film is the duration of a session of contact with my parents, which is shared with the audience. The film is the need, or rather the desire, to revisit the past, and to have conversations I would have liked to have, creating a living state of connection.
There is also the desire to conclude an imaginary and confusing montage that is pressing to be resolved and take over the screen. Perhaps this is the true starting point, where the images of the parents struggle to be placed within a system of relationships.
But since I’m the organizer, along with the editor, I was very interested in having my parents wonder about the detainees and the disappeared, about the more than a thousand bodies seized by the military whose whereabouts no one yet knows. How can that be? How can a society continue to accept the magnitude of this fact?
This film continues the home movie tendency that runs through your body of work—films that turn the home into a remarkable studio and cinematic operator: through the images and objects found there, through the windows that open onto the outside world. This time, your house also becomes a sort of vessel from which to travel through space and time. Could you comment on the importance of the house and its cinematic power?
It’s true, the house has become a constitutive element of my films, and it’s because the windows overlooking the courtyard and the interior corridor are the places where they are conceived. In a way, the brain of the films functions there, while the camera is running. That’s where the film conceives itself, and in that conceiving, it travels through the house itself, through time and space. What’s unique is that the viewer can think along with the film and its director, at the same time.
Cartas also belongs to another thread in your work—that of films that look back to the past: to Chile’s violent past, and your own, as a filmmaker who remained in Chile during the dictatorship to make films. With this film, you go further back than ever before, and delve into a past that is more intimate than ever. In short, to the Chile before Pinochet, during your father’s lifetime. Why now?
If not now, when? Well, time is running out. So, while I’m alive, I’ll still have time to travel through memory, and it unfolds without temporal or spatial limits.
I was 21 years old when the brutal military coup occurred. That’s an incredibly defining experience that brings the worst of humanity to the forefront, just as it is today with Netanyahu. The worst of humanity installed in power. My father died just before those events, and those facts will be etched in my consciousness forever. That was the main thing to revisit with my parents.
And yet, at the heart of the film, once again, are the early years of the Pinochet dictatorship—also the years of your cinematic training and your first films, notably No Olvidar, your debut film, which focused on the massacre of the peasants of Lonquén. This intertwining of your personal life with the traumatic history of the country is the core the film repeatedly returns to—and not just the film, but your work as a whole. Why? What are you seeking to lay bare, to understand, to work through?
Talking about political and social events is essential to me as a citizen and filmmaker, but I can’t do it by shouting from a balcony. The film doesn’t accept it; it’s not its way. I’m surprised how my film No Olvidar (Not to forget) was able to enter Cartas a mis padres Muertos, and it was through an imaginary encounter with Raúl Ruiz in Paris. Imaginary but desired. Ruiz, exiled in Paris, unleashed in his cinematic creation, and I, who had taken the negatives from Chile to be able to edit the film in Europe. No Olvidar and the dead of Lonquén and the disappeared, can enter the film through a game. As Ruiz himself says, you have to enter the events with a certain ceremony. Otherwise, they bounce off.
One is struck by the litany of names of the victims, the evocation of the dead and the disappeared, which at times gives the film the feel of a memorial, a monument to the dead of those years. Against the absence of bodies, the presence and repetition of names?
To name is to bring into existence, to give life, to rescue from death. I also do this in other films, with the names of the Andes mountains. There’s mountain Provincia. We must name it. If we don’t name it, we open the door to neurosis, to a profound disconnect with reality. You put it very well: against the absence of bodies, the presence and repetition of their names.
This gravity, this presence of death, of the dead—which, I feel, reaches a new intensity here—is counterbalanced by an extraordinary lightness and elation, a contagious joy in capturing the present moment. The film constantly navigates between these two tones. This joy, this vitality of the present, you find it above all in the garden, where you seem to take immense pleasure in filming—camera in hand—the acrobatics of the cats, the flight of bees and hummingbirds around the flowers, and so on. A whole life, a beauty without story, outside of History. How do you go about filming these moments? Is it a daily or regular practice?
The beauty that unfolds in my backyard is a constant attraction. I always have a camera ready, and my phone too. There are clouds, birds, and the movement of leaves that can’t be missed. I can’t live in peace without capturing those moments. And in the editing, they fulfil the dramatic function of the “meanwhile.” While the brutality of the deaths was occurring, a cat walks on the roof of the house, a hummingbird sucks sugar from a flower. There’s also the fact that the person making the film is a filmmaker who likes cinema, who knows that the main thing he’s doing, before telling anything in particular, is making a film, and that entails a crafty and playful manipulation of materials, images, sounds, and meanings. Furthermore, he’s a filmmaker who’s no longer so young as to take things too seriously, who’s Chilean, alive, and has a sense of humour. All these things are what make films. A pulse between gravity and lightness.
But above all, it is the editing that shapes the writing of your film. You construct the narrative with an even more varied set of materials than usual: the garden, the house, your children today, your personal archives (another house, still the children), the magnificent family archives inherited from your father, and many other sources. Could you speak about the gathering of all this material, and the challenges of assembling it in the edit?
At some point, I discovered my own archival footage and that of my parents as precious material to put on screen. Because they’re materials that haven’t been filmed for a movie, they have a genuine beauty, the innocence of their own beauty, and the beauty of their innocence. These materials expand the associative possibilities of the images, creating new meanings, expanding the worlds being told. And with this verification in the editing room, almost any material can be included. Even more so when it comes to letters. Letter writing offers the writer great freedom. They have the power to talk about everything and for each thing to have a meaning, which ultimately is that of being part of a letter. This is also true when the film is freed from the obligation to tell, to narrate, with an acceptable logic. Escaping narrative logic is fundamental. Thus, films cease to be an advancing line and transform into spheres or galaxies in which the author and the viewer can lose themselves. When an editor enters into such a job, he stops perceiving it as a job and editing becomes for him a situation with the power of enchantment.
The editing room is the room of freedom. I’m increasingly trying to live up to that essential fact. I think the interest that always exists in making a new film is to experience that freedom more fully than in the previous film.
Thanks to the editing—particularly the editing of your voice, which at times seems to be commenting on the images in real time—you create a narrative of sovereign freedom, one that seems to follow the very thread of your thoughts, their whims, their digressions, the rhythm of your emotions. Is that what you are seeking in cinema? How do you write this voice, which seems almost unwritten? In what relationship to the images, to the editing?
Yes, there’s special attention paid to the voice, its tone, and the way it’s recorded, so that you can feel exactly what you’re saying about the viewer being able to follow the thread of a thought and an emotion. A voice as far removed as possible from a “narrator’s voice,” from a voice endorsed by the director. It’s a voice that’s often recorded without a written text, in the editing room, to be immediately tested with the image, and that recording is the final one; it’s not remade later in a post-production format.
Interview by Cyril Neyrat
