El Tango Del Viudo 2020 ING Web Berlinale
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(1967) · Dirección: Raúl Ruiz (2019) · Co Dirección: Valeria Sarmiento (2020) · Estreno Mundial "The story revolves around a man whose wife has committed suicide and appears to him as a ghost. The ghost follows him everywhere, under the bed, under tables… After seeing the ghost so frequently, the man begins to resemble her, in a spiral in which we discover that he was never really married and that what is really going on is his personality doubling and a schizophrenic game". Raúl Ruiz. Luis Alarcón, Actor AND ITS DISTORTING MIRROR During 2016 and 2017, while researching and to the editing room; which today boasts the post-producing The Wandering Soap Opera, a artistic direction of Valeria Sarmiento, lm directed by Raúl Ruiz in 1990 and lmmaker, lm editor, and widow of Ruiz; and completed under the direction of lmmaker whose development has surpassed several stages. Valeria Sarmiento, we learned about the existence of footage from other unnished In 2018, a group of people born with profound projects by Ruiz. Among them was a set of deafness, who are also experts in reading facial, 35mm rolls of The Tango of the Widower (El lip, and body language, deciphered the dialogues Tango Del Viudo), his rst feature lm, lmed in of the actors on screen. With a certain degree of 1967, held in storage at an old cinema in success in this complex work, the literary script Santiago de Chile. was rewritten with playwright and screenwriter Omar Saavedra Santis, which allowed us to In a news article from that era, Ruiz had distance ourselves from the lm in order to nd commented on the obstacles that made it the right tone. Ruiz referred to The Tango of the impossible for him to nance the lm’s audio Widower as an experimental lm that showed post-production: "The future will be responsible dierent humorous situations of Chilean reality, for giving this movie sound, which today is immersed in a horror-fantasy lm, where a being stored silent." widowed teacher is haunted by the "collective" THE TANGO OF THE WIDOWER THE TANGO ghost of his wife. In plain sight, what could dene the lm is the rescue of Raúl Ruiz's rst feature, lmed at the Once in the editing room, Valeria and her team young age of 27. However, if our observation gave denitive form to the dialogues, and digs a little deeper, we realize that there are realized that the characters inhabit their city in instances that transcend this basic analysis, in an era that seems more like a timeless village, order to understand its essential foundation as a expressed in the dead times of work whose creative process was frozen for underdevelopment. This generates a narrative more than fty years (1967-2019), quite a long atmosphere in which certain ever-present time for the original footage to go from the set elements in Ruiz’s lms appear by surprise, and which in this lm (his rst feature) are already Musician Jorge Arriagada, an eternal being incubated, such as: the permeability collaborator of Valeria and Raúl, upon seeing between the life of the living and that of the one of the rst cuts of The Tango of the dead, where ghosts are presented in esh and Widower, was so enchanted that he delivered bone, inhabiting reality in a trivial and everyday mock-ups of dierent musical sonorities, from way. There are also characters that are one and symphonic to minimalist, ultimately nding the many at the same time, in a game of constant element that would dene the sound identity of personality splitting. There are also some codes the image: a sonata composed for a chamber born from the magical thinking of the Mapuche orchestra of handsaws played with a metal bow people and of the Island of Chiloé in the south and theremin. of Chile, a usual source of inspiration in Ruiz’s cinematic universe. Finally, we would like to point out the enormous national and international interest that has arisen The found footage is completely chaotic in from the completion and premiere of The composition, full of short repeated fragments Wandering Soap Opera, a lm that was shot by from previous scenes, like sharp pieces that have Ruiz in 1990, but like The Tango of the no connection to one another, an inaccessible Widower, was not nished. Only twenty-seven and evanescent nightmare, populated with years later, in 2017, it was released worldwide at inverted images, both in terms of frames and the the 70th Locarno International Film Festival in reversion of cadences. In addition to this, there the International Competition, continuing its are other fragments of scenes, with new shots journey through the most important lm that show a dierent point of view of the same festivals in Europe, Asia, the United States, and scenes repeated previously. Latin America, always accompanied by Valeria Sarmiento and the production company Valeria Sarmiento wanted to connect the POETASTROS. concept of this lmic enigma with the distorting mirrors that her husband liked so much. She lucidly remembers a handwritten text in one of Ruiz's notebooks, where he generically describes his intention to give a lm a spiral structure but intervened by a "narrative mirror", so that the lm somehow makes the viewer revisit previously watched scenes, but in a dierent sensory experience, delivering new symbols which are redundant in form but not in content.This text has been key to deciphering this mysterious footage, and has articulated the structure of The Tango of the Widower in two parts: the rst is the original, and the second is its double, seeking to produce a new narrative territory that provides ideas for a new language and new interpretations. Filmmaker Valeria Sarmiento When I met Raúl, he had just nished "Three Sad Tigers", his rst feature lm. He told me about an earlier lm that he had not been able to nish due to lack of means. Indeed, I never saw his "The Tango of the Widower" until after his death, once the lost copies were found in the attic of Cine Normandie, a movie theater in Santiago. Only seven rolls were found, the rst of the set was missing, and they had only the image, not the sound. What to do? How to rescue that material? My rst impression of those images was one of seeing only ghosts; a large part of those actors had died. I told myself: we had to prioritize that very feeling from then on. The irremediable lack of sound suggested to me that it would not be a matter of making all of this material a realistic lm. The music should be contemporary and thus make evident, by contrast, the mismatch with the era of its lming. We immediately started trying to discover what the actors said in their dialogues, a labor that we were able to carry out with the collaboration of lip-reading specialists, deaf women. A draft was immediately put together, followed by a story and a rst cut. The issue for me was to nd out, what would Raul have done? I remembered then that he always wanted to make a lm that, on the one hand, would present the images in the normal direction, and on the other, they could be seen in the opposite. He never got around to it while he was alive, except for a small exercise done at National Film Institute for an experimental program. It is time, I told myself, to undertake the distorting mirror that Raul wanted to realize, through a story told chronologically, with the outline of a second story that would leave the impression of being the rst one, but now seen through a distorting mirror. Such is the adventure of this lm. I ultimately feel I have respected Raúl's assignment and hope that by rescuing other lms that he left unnished around the world, we can present a week of lms: "Raúl Ruiz post mortem". I must thank the POETASTROS production team, all of the technicians, and many other collaborators who accompanied me on this adventure. (1967) (2020) DIRECTION CO-DIRECTION Raúl Ruiz Valeria Sarmiento SCREENPLAY CO-WRITERS Raúl Ruiz Valeria Sarmiento, Omar Saavedra Santis DIRECTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY PRODUCTION DIRECTION Diego Bonacina Chamila Rodríguez EDITING AND SOUND DESIGN Galut Alarcón LOCATIONS ORIGINAL MUSIC Santiago de Chile Jorge Arriagada Santa Lucía Hill EXECUTIVE PRODUCTION National Library Chamila Rodríguez General Cemetery Galut Alarcón Galleries and Streets of Santiago Downtown Huelén Street Apartment LIP, SIGN LANGUAGE AND BODY LANGUAGE READING Carolina Mujica, Carmen Gloria Uribe and Carmen Figueroa Elgueta ORIGINAL CAST CHARACTERS VOICE ACTORS Rubén Sotoconil Widower Sergio Hernández Claudia Paz Ghost Chamila Rodríguez Luis Alarcón Silva Néstor Cantillana Shenda Román Lola Gabriela Arancibia Luis Vilches Nephew Gabriel Urzúa Delna Guzmán Ana Marcela Golzio Alonso Venegas Devil Arturo Rosell Claudia Paz, Actress Delna Guzmán, Actress Fotografía: Álvaro de la Fuente Luis Vilchez, Actor Shenda Román, Actress Raúl Ruiz is Chile’s most internationally recognized lmmaker, and is considered one of the greatest experimental directors and lm theorists of all time. From 1973 on, he lived in France, where he made most of his more than 120 lms. He was born in 1941 in Puerto Montt, Chile, and died in Paris on August 19th, 2011. In 1969, he won the rst of many international awards, the Golden Leopard at Locarno International Film Festival, for Three Sad Tigers. In 1986, he received the award for Best Director Filmmaker at the Paris International Film Festival. In 1997, he was awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival for Genealogies of a Crime.