02/08/2018
The publication completes the programme Correspondencias: películas como cartas (Correspondence: films as letters), in which films from different points in history converse with each other.
With this book, Punto de Vista aims to reveal connections and affinities which until now official film history has failed to recount, as told by some of the most important directors of all time in their letters. These missives reveal secret friendships (Louis Lumière and George Méliès), unknown collaborations (Orson Welles and Robert J. Flaherty) and projects which would never have been documented without them (Maya Deren’s idea of making a film about the circus, Pasolini inviting Jacques Tati to take part in Porcile).
The curator Francisco Algarín and the artistic director of Punto de Vista, Garbiñe Ortega, who together masterminded the book, insist that ‘cinema must be accepted as an ever-incomplete thought, like a story from which several pages have been torn. It is these gaps that the reader must fill out.’ And that is the book’s undertaking: to gather those pages, those letters, so that together they might construct a story of film full of surprises and emotions, an intimate account of cinema, as told by those involved: Marguerite Duras, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Robert J. Flaherty, etc.
Some of these letters also expose the end of partnerships (Marguerite Duras showing Alain Resnais a script which, after he rejected it, she herself would end up filming), document important points in history (war in the case of F. W. Murnau or Robert J. Flaherty, the political situation in Indonesia, Italia or France in that of Joris Ivens, Pasolini or Truffaut) or betray cries for help in moments of creative confusion (Paul Sharits writing to Stan Brakhage, Stan Brakhage to Hollis Frampton, Gregory Markopoulos to Stan Brakhage). In short, a collection of surprising, comic, tragic, nocturnal and, maybe, drunken tales offering highly personal perspectives on the seventh art.
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