Present Past Present
A festival’s greatest joys are often its discoveries, and a retrospective of the work of Argentine Andrés Di Tella proved revelatory for me. Di Tella’s films open up multiple dialectics—group/individual, society/citizen, history/actuality—all of them cross-addressing each other within a live, evolving present.Montoneros, a Story (1995), for example, shows members of a guerrilla group during Argentina’s dictatorship interpreting their own stories—those left out of the newsreels—and describing how they trained themselves to commit violence against a violent state by seeing their victims as less than human, a process that led them to dehumanize their peers. Di Tella himself narrates The Television and I(2002), in which his search to discover all the Argentinean TV he missed while living abroad as a child becomes a consideration of his family’s own business of building televisions and other home appliances. More often than not he finds gaps in his family history, which become metaphors for gaps in communication between his father and his grandfather, himself and his father, as well as himself and his son. Di Tella, like Coutinho, often creates conflict by putting himself in opposition with forces beyond his control. The struggle continues in his new film, Blows of the Axe (2011). The leading subject, Claudio Caldini, was an experimental filmmaker who left for India during the dictatorship and lived itinerantly after returning to Argentina until settling into a villa as its caretaker and lone resident. Each day he leaves the house with his 8-mm films in a mallet, as a voice-over tells of how “a man carries his work, his entire life, in a bag, on a train from Moreno to General Rodriguez.” He takes out the films to present them to Di Tella—both projecting and reenacting them—while insisting that the other filmmaker is recording his work but not defining him. “With film we want to show in images what images can’t show,” he tells Di Tella in the dark after a screening, adding, “and we try to say with words what words can’t say.” No matter how close the observer gets, Caldini refuses to be another’s character. As in other IAT films, one’s political situation influences one’s personality. While Caldini may seem cryptic, reticent, resistant, and at times even irritating, he is also free; for many who have lived under oppression, simply following your own will is an act of defiance.
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