Este curso he empezado un Máster de crítica cinematográfica organizado por la Escuela ECAM en colaboración con la revista Caimán Cuadernos de Cine. Os dejo el duodécimo ejercicio del Taller de Escritura, Odisea de rechazo, en el que entrevisto a Dan Sallitt por motivo de su película The unspeakable act.
Os la adjunto en dos partes. En primer lugar, la traducción presentada, y en segundo, el original en inglés. Espero que os guste:
– Español:
Dan Sallitt: Odisea de rechazo
Dan Sallitt (Wilkes-Barre, Pensylvania, 27 de Julio de 1955) es un crítico y cineasta estadounidense. Es reconocido por su trabajo como realizador indie en producciones con micro-presupuestos, con una filmografía breve pero aplaudida compuesta por títulos como Honeymoon, Fourteen o la película sobre la que versa la entrevista, The unspeakable act (2012). Esta conversación tuvo lugar de manera telemática a través de una reunión de zoom, a las 19:00 del 13 de mayo hora neoyorquina, 01:00 del 14 de mayo hora madrileña. Se grabó el audio, transcribió, tradujo al castellano y editó hasta obtener el texto que se reproduce a continuación.
¿Cuál fue tu punto de acceso a esta controvertida historia de The unspeakable act? ¿Hay alguna conexión con tus experiencias personales?
La idea del incesto siempre me ha interesado, el porqué es algo prohibido. Los jóvenes idealistas, cómo yo también solía ser, pensamos que cuanto más cercanas se encuentren las personas y más conocen del otro, mejor. Así que porque no amar a alguien que lo conoce todo sobre ti. Me gustan los temas al borde de la incomodidad, y me gustan cuando tienen que ver con sexo. De modo que era un buen tema para mí, me ayudó a crear un buen personaje en mi cabeza. Que Jackie sea un personaje tan combativo es lo que la hace tan apasionante para mí. Es una persona sin límites o intelectuales o emocionales. No cede ante nadie.
Tu película es, de alguna manera, una historia de amor, pero los dos hermanos rara vez aparecen juntos en el mismo plano. ¿Cuál fue el proceso para elegir desarrollar la relación siempre desde el lado de Jackie?
Para mí no es tanto una historia de amor como una historia sobre esta fascinante persona, que vive en esta casa que es casi una maqueta de la mente humana. Dentro de esta casa mantiene su propia y poderosa visión del mundo, y tiene en ella todo lo que quiere. Toda esta imagen de Jackie, la casa y su mente se fusionó a través del tema de estudio de la película. Me gusta mucho el personaje de su hermano, pero la película habla en realidad del proceso que atraviesa ella. Él no experimenta demasiados cambios, ama a su hermana pero está lejos de tener el mismo dilema que Jackie.
El tiempo fluye sin esfuerzo en tus películas. ¿Cómo ideas y llevas a cabo tu singular tratamiento de las elipsis?
Pido perdón por sonar como un adicto cinematográfico, pero el ejemplo de Maurice Pialat está muy presente en mi cabeza. Pialat era muy atrevido juntando fragmentos de película y transformándolos en una narración, a pesar de que no señalizara al espectador estas continuidades en el tiempo. Intenté acercarme a la concepción del tiempo de Pialat en otras películas. No sé si lo conseguí, pero creo que aquí, por primera vez, ese espíritu de Pialat, en cuyas películas los saltos temporales eran muy materiales, como bloques de piedra unificados, se adueña de la película en considerable extensión. Siempre debes calcular lo que dejas fuera de tus películas, asegurarte de que tus elipsis no lo arruinan todo.
¿Cómo ha afectado a tu aproximación a la realización cinematográfica tu experiencia como crítico?
La realización cinematográfica tiene dos fases: la primera, que consiste en buscar ideas y entusiasmo, generar las cosas sobre las que quieres que trate tu película y decidir de qué manera quieres hacerla, no tiene nada que ver con la crítica. Esta fase es como una inmersión en el subconsciente: es vergonzosa, con todas estas extrañas partes de ti mismo que no quieres que emerjan pero lo hacen igualmente, cosas que debes dejar fluir para censurar después. Pero una vez tienes esas ideas, la segunda fase del proceso, consistente en darles forma, analizarlas, estructurarlas…se parece mucho al trabajo de un crítico. Aplicas las mismas reglas, pero a esas ideas propias que una parte de ti mismo ha germinado.
¿Hay alguna ventaja específica que aporte a tus sensibilidades las dimensiones de micro-producción de tu cine?
Esta pregunta es interesante en este momento porque, por primera vez, un conocido está haciendo un esfuerzo de recaudación de fondos para hacer realidad un guion soñado que guardó desde hace mucho tiempo, que definitivamente es demasiado grande para poderse rodar sin presupuesto. Espero que nadie me pida grabar el sonido con una calidad diferente, y tampoco me interesaría un estilo de iluminación radicalmente distinto, no quiero algo que sugiera demasiada ficción o artificio. Sólo me siento restringido por el tema de estudio. No movería la cámara por todas partes si tuviera la oportunidad de hacerlo. Espero no tener problemas con esto si algún día tengo la oportunidad de hacer una película más grande.
– Inglés:
Dan Sallitt: Odyssey of rejection
What was your first point of contact with this controversial story? Was there any link to reality in your personal experience?
No, I have no sisters. Which is good, because it would have been hard to make the movie if I did. I think somehow the idea of incest has always been a little interesting to me, why it’s forbidden. Young idealists, as I used to be, used to think the closer people are and the more they know about each other the better, so then why not someone who knows all about you. I like subjects that are at the edge of being uncomfortable, and I like when it’s about sex. So it was a good subject for me, it created a really good character in my mind. The fact that Jackie is such a forceful character is what makes it so exciting for me. She is very unrestrained, intellectually and emotionally. She obeys no one.
Your film is, in a way, a love story, but the two brothers rarely appear together in the same shot. What was the process of choosing to develop this relationship always by her side?
To me it’s not so much a love story as much as it is a story about this rather fascinating person, who is in this house, which is almost a model of the human mind. And within this house she has her own very strong view of everything, and she happens to have everything she wants in that house. This hole image of her and the house and her mind blended together by the subject matter. I think of it mainly as a movie about her. I very much like the character of her brother, but is really mostly about her process. He doesn’t go through any changes, he loves her sister but he has nothing of the same dilemma that she has. It’s almost like the movie is like a diary she’s keeping.
The voice-over of Jackie marks a very personal and introspective tempo. Was this narrative approach into the story there from the start?
I think it was. There’s nothing schematic about that voice over in my mind. I didn’t have any rules for it, about when was it supposed to be there, about what time was it supposed to be coming from, whether was someone who has experienced it already or someone who is in the present…I simply did it for effect. When I liked the effect I putted the voice there, and I knew somehow that the collision between what she was thinking and what we would see on screen was going to be important sometimes. If you listen to it, it comes from different places, different times…It’s always there to create the maximum interesting effect, the most interesting perspective on Jackie and the situation.
Why did you decide to support your movie with words in such a strong way? Is this talkative feeling a way to make it feel literary?
Definitely not literary. In fact, I think the dialogue wouldn’t work if it had that literary quality, it had to feel different than that. I was very influenced in my early cinephile life by Éric Rohmer, who is still the biggest influence on my filmmaking. I really feel about dialogue the way Rohmer feels about it. In interviews he said that if people talked a lot in their movies it wasn’t because they had much to say, but because people talk a lot in real life. I feel that way. People tend to talk, and they talk a lot. When we make movies, we tend to strip away conversation because we have an image of how the movies should do, we have rhythms in mind, silence, music…but if you are following people, you’re gonna run into a lot of talking. Rohmer gave me the courage to do this. For him was just a sort of realism. A carrying signal that will create some dramatic effects along the way.
Time flows so effortlessly in your movies. How did you approach to your own treatment of the ellipsis?
If I could be forgiven for sounding too much of a film geek, but the example of Maurice Pialat was very much in my mind. Pialat is very daring about throwing pieces of a movie together and turning them into a narrative, even though he doesn’t signal for you these continuities in time. Probably the best example is À nous amours from 1983, or at least the one that putted this idea in my head. I was reaching to Pialat’s idea of time, of presence in other movies. I don’t know if I really succeeded, but here for the first time that kind of spirit of Pialat, where jumps of time were very material, like blocks of stone put together, takes the film over to some extent. You have to always calculate what you left out, make sure that your ellipsis don’t ruin anything.
How has your film reviewing experience influenced your approach to filmmaking?
I never had to deal with the commercial aspect of filmmaking, were this hostility becomes specially strong and where the critic and the filmmaker can see themselves as opposites sides. Filmmaking has two faces: the first face, which is about coming out with ideas and excitement, and generating the things you want to make the film about, and the way you want to do the film, has nothing to do with criticism. That face is like a dive into your unconscious: is embarrassing, all these strange parts of you that you don’t want to come out come out, you have to let these things flow and then censor them after…It’s an unconscious process almost, the whole idea of finding material that has artistic excitement, and that gives you enough excitement to go through the process, because you need to motivate yourself. But once you got some ideas, there’s another part of the process, which is shaping them, analyzing them, structuring them…and that’s very much like being a film critic. You’re being a critics with your own dumb ideas and say all right, that doesn’t make any sense and What if this and what if that. You apply the same rules, but to your own ideas that another part of you created.
Is there any specific advantage that micro-budget filmmaking and dimension gives to your cinematographic sensibilities?
I do think about it when coming out with a subject matter, but is just a yes or a no. If the idea is too big, is a no. I never plan the movies to be small. This question is actually interesting now, because for the first time, someone is making an effort to get money for me to do this dream script that I’ve had for a long time, which is definitely too big for a no budget film. I was walking at home from work today and thinking to myself about this. I hope nobody would want to me to record a different kind of sound, because I don’t want to change my raw, very direct sound, I don’t want to put a lot of music in. In terms of image, I don’t want a radically different lightning style, I don’t want something that suggests a lot of fiction or artifice. So I wonder if these things will be exactly the same if you throw money in there. I don’t feel specially restricted by anything except subject matter. I would not be moving the camera all over the place if I had the opportunity. I could be doing some of these things now if I wanted to. I hope I don’t run into a lot of trouble if I ever get the opportunity to make a bigger film, I hope I don’t run into other people’s expectations.
How did you met Tallie Medel? What’s the most special feature that makes her such a strong asset to your last two movies?
When I was casting The unspeakable act, I was making a big shift down in terms of the age of my characters. I was asking for recommendations, and Joe Swanberg, who had never worked with Tallie but had met her and had the idea of working with her, gave me her name, along with three or four other names. And all of them were cast, I like his taste very much. After he mentioned her, I found some movies online, because she had a director in college who made several films with her. That guy is now famous, because he is one of the Daniels (Daniel Scheinert), who just putted out Everything, everywhere, all at once, where Tallie has a role in. Tallie is now in a lot of screens. I saw one of these college films that they made in Boston and on one of the first scenes it instantly made me feel that she was the right person. And I went through a long casting process, but I knew unless something really amazing happens, I was casting that one. I don’t think she was expecting at that moment to be cast, she was pleasantly surprised to get a lead role instead of a supporting role. I don’t know anybody like her, she has become very important to me. I wrote Fourteen for her. I feel as I don’t have any barriers that I have to get through with her. Her intuition is so much upfront that I don’t have to get past to any layers of craft or practice…I don’t have to try to get the person to stop doing anything. She is whole and there right away.
Néstor Juez
