When did you first discover Viel Temperley’s work ?
We both studied literature at the University of Buenos Aires during the 1980’s. Although Viel Temperley was not part of the curriculum, his name circulated among us almost clandestinely. You had to read Viel. Reading his poems produces something quite singular: you don’t come away from it unchanged. It deeply and mysteriously affects one’s sensibility. It’s probably the deepest way poetry can wound us. Those among us that have been impacted by this experience are forever bound to Viel and repeat certain lines as an act of brotherhood: “I have just taken communion and I am in ecstasy” or “I am going toward what I have known least, I am going toward my body”.
What about the readers who appear in the film? How did the idea of making a film drawn from such a singular book come about?
After living with this book for many years, we felt the need to make a film about it. The idea was to combine poems and readings, with a group of people who could bear witness to what we ourselves had felt. Rather than an explanation of the book, we wanted them to tell us about the visceral, uncanny and unsettling effect its reading had on them. We called them “the touched ones”. In this film, they become “the pilgrims”.
Viel’s book is filled with images yet the film had to add others to these.
Hospital Británico, Viel’s book, is indeed permeated with very powerful imagery. They sometimes move us without our fully understanding what they mean. The pinhole optique photographs created by Lara Seijas enabled us to move away from the naturalism and harshness of digital imagery in order to approach the symbolic but also sensual dimension of Viel’s poetry.
We chose certain motifs such as sand and horses and built sequences of photographs around them with a specific intention: to favor a more vulnérable mode of perception, one that is less attentive to the transparency of things.
One of the most striking aspects, to me, is the transitions between the reading of the poems and the readers’ own reflections on them.
There is only one interview with Héctor Viel Temperley, lead by Sergio Bizzio. Speaking about Hospital Británico, Viel said:
“It’s the book of a trepanned man. The person who wrote this poem no longer exists. At the time (I didn’t yet know that I was going to undergo radiation treatment), I left with my skull open: I was going to write. I had found the solution in the fragments, I rearranged them, I wrote something that talks about my mother’s death…and the rest is of a man that had left reality because he had an egg in his brain. Hospital Británico, allowed me to believe that I had left the words and I don’t know why”.
We found in this idea of fragments one of the keys to the film’s structure. There would be a journey, and throughout that journey, fragments of the poem would emerge, interwoven with the testimonies, connected above all through an emotional continuity.
To connect all these different elements together, we filmed witnesses while they were in motion and dissociated their words from their bodies. And, of course, there was a great deal of editing work with Mario Bocchicchio to ensure that the transitions between the different pieces felt both natural and unexpected.
Interviewed by Manuel Asín
