Private, social histories intersect in Cineastas
Argentinian filmmaker’s play makes North American premiere at Luminato
NOAH RICHLER It is doubtful that there is a city — beyond, perhaps, the Manhattan of Woody Allen or the Tel Aviv of Ori Sivan (the creator of the television series, In Treatment) — that is more delighted by the habits of psychoanalysis than Buenos Aires.
And so it was not surprising that when, finally, I did manage to find Argentinian writer, filmmaker and theatre director Mariano Pensotti, he was on a Buenos Aires sidewalk waiting for his psychoanalyst’s appointment to begin. Neither was it surprising that he would be quite so busy.
Not that you would know it. Pensotti speaks congenially and enthusiastically, as if he is communicating his ideas for the first time. And that he certainly is not. Cineastas, the play that is likely be to considered his breakout success, is one of 13 works that Pensotti has produced in the last 16 years. It enjoyed its North American premiere at Luminato on Saturday night and has already toured festivals in Amsterdam, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Santiago (Chile) and Vienna.
The sleek play had its origins in a series of discussions Pensotti had with four film directors shooting in and around Buenos Aires, and is proof of his conviction that the way forward is “to put into my work as many things as possible from my own life, and that means not just my real experiences but also my fictional ones.” This idea, says Pensotti, “is at the core of Cineastas. I am very much focused in my work by how much we are all built by the fictions we have been consuming since the beginning of our lives.”
Cineastas relates the parallel and contrasting stories of the four directors but also the characters brought to life in their films, intercut as a movie might be made. The creative journeys of the four directors become ones of revelatory self-discovery, and are ingeniously displayed upon collaborator Mariana Tirrante split- screen set simultaneously displaying scenes from the filmmakers’ works and private lives.
The audience is witness both to his characters’ fictions, and the real lives they influence. In Pensotti’s world view, the borderline between these two realms is “totally a blur.”
“The filmmakers,” says Pensotti, “are taking incidents from their own lives and trying to control their world through fiction. They are in an almost Godlike situation where they can invent anything they want in their stories but, on the other hand, their private lives are being transformed by the fictions that they are creating. There is always this exchange. Sometimes fiction has more power than their private lives, rather than the other way around.” Argentina is, for Pensotti, a well not just of commercial fictions — of books, theatre, film and so on — but of “family myths” and national ones, too. It is this intersection of personal and public stories that Pensotti calls “an obsession.” Cineastas, the director says, “is an attempt to try and understand how much our private histories are related to our social history; to try and tell the history of Buenos Aires not through the history of its inhabitants but through the stories that the city’s inhabitants feel.” How could it be different? (Buenos Aires, you’ll recall, is also the city that was home to the greatest of Argentinian storytellers, Jorge Luis Borges). If the city is one that is best explained by fictions — by storytellers and filmmakers and all the brilliant, constantly morphing fusion of fiction and truths that are told in its psychoanalysts’ offices — it is because the city itself, the place of these stories’ beginnings, is a fiction. “Most of Buenos Aires,” says Pensotti, “was built, at the beginning of the 20th century but in the image of European cities that, afterwards, were destroyed by the war. It is a city where a lot of the streets may resemble European streets, but are really Latin American, a city that was built as a representation of another place that in fact no longer exists.” Cineastas is at the MacMillan Theatre, 80 Queen’s Park, Sunday and Monday, 7:30 p.m. Noah Richler is Luminato’s curator of Literature and Ideas.