Como me da la gana II

Thirty years ago in Chile, at the height of dictatorship, Ignacio Agüero made a short film, entitled As I Please, in which he took the liberty to interrupt his colleagues at work to ask them about what that work meant to them. Flaunting that joyful insolence of his, Agüero resumes today the thread of such Socratic work: through the current phase of national and international splendor of Chilean cinema, he is determined to pose once more the question of the essence of cinema to his young fellow film-makers. This sequl, however, does more than merely carry out an inves- tigation. Other, private images from childhood, in addition to testimony brought from a school teacher in charge of directing film workshops, are added to the answers gleaned on the shooting site. The archives of the present thus mingle with yesterday’s. It is also a matter of meeting the challenge of answering by himself the question posed all through the film while providing an answer not through sentences – which his comrades often find themselves trapped in – but through images instead. Better still, through subtle, indirect, and nonetheless manifest montage of all these images pointing, all together, to an upstream source: child- hood’s unspoken secret. (JPR)