In the usual way, with the hat in the head and the cap in the hand, we have been welcomed by the filmmaker José Luis Guerín (Barcelona, 1960), near the house, in the quiet, small and extraordinary square of Sant Pere that seems difficult to find in the Catalan triduum. The director, who has been compared to Victor Erice, author of The Motives of Berta, Innisfree, Train of Shadows, In Construction, In the City of Sylvia and Guest, spoke calmly, taking time for each answer, as in his films.

As you said, the ethnographic interest in space is the starting point for your films. In construction itself is the fresco of a neighborhood, the fresco of the metamorphosis of what it was and what it will no longer be.

It is true that my films are often born from the study of a space, from poetic perspectives rather than ethnographic ones. I like to start imagining and dreaming of a film from what a place gives me, always understanding cinema as a way to travel, as a way to relate to another space. In Under Construction, space becomes a social metaphor for change. This historical perspective was given as the film was made, because it often seems to us that historical cinema is only Roman cinema, but also in this film the city seeks its future, discovering its past, and we passed from one century to the next while rooting. We realized that the neighborhood we were portraying was a metaphor of the 20th century, a neighborhood born and dead in that century.

The landscape also determines the characters that live in it in your films.

The space is the frame. I like to commit to the space I’m filming, that the faces I’m filming are integrated in that space, that I leave my city and settle in another place. I find it hard to understand cinema in the form of office work, I like the fact that filming is something extraordinary, choosing the team and living in that space, forcing ourselves to see and interpret things. The traveler’s gaze sees more, more attentively, because he can escape the alienation of everyday life, which we often end up not seeing when we cross the same street.

To what extent is the documentary En construcción and to what extent is fiction? To what extent do you transcend genres in this desire to reflect reality?

It is a documentary because there is not a single word written by me, it is built from the dialogue created by the characters themselves, but this debate has me a little tired because of the restrictions and meanings that have been given to the concept of documentary. Each historical period has a different perception of the documentary. The documentary is probably the area that is moving the most today because it is still the most virgin area, less defined by the rules of the genre and offers the most varied ways of telling stories.

I don't think the documentary is objective. Originally it was a kind of news film that was considered objective, but already in the 1920s Jean Vigo claimed the need for a subjective documentary, emphasizing the filmmaker’s point of view. And I would say that in the documentary the subject is almost always the point of view: the discourse of a framing, the editing... Surely the viewer is aware and analyzes these writing issues with a more critical look than he would have with fiction. In Under Construction, the choice was limited by the very development of the events; the film began to be very open and as it progressed the possibilities diminished, the film itself went on to build and rethink itself.

And in that story that reality gives you, where is the control? How to control the sound to be transparent, the plan of the demolition of the house (which can not be repeated) to come out well...?

It would probably sound very bad in the first days of filming, but as the project progressed we realized that the conversations were very important, that they had to be heard well and that the main characters had to carry some micron on them. All this was possible thanks to the partnership, the trust obtained with them. Places, characters... The key is to pay attention to the possibilities that reality gives you, to know how to observe and to be able to adapt to the unforeseen, this is the consequence of control. Observation is the basis; from what you observe, you study, plan, choose and build.

And how would you define that observation, that look?

I don’t define it with words, but with movies. Each filmmaker chooses certain images for his film, each has its own criteria, which gives films with their own personality. Time is the key, spending a lot of time in a space to be aware of everything. The problem with many documentaries is that they are prisoners of the subject, and it is very important to have a free look when making a documentary, without prejudice, to be willing to discover new things that in principle seem trivial, but that can be significant if you look at them with attention. The documentaries that I am interested in are not spectacular, but those that show me something new when reading the diary. I think this is the way of modern cinema. I find obsolete the cinema that seeks the support of the script, with complex stories, because we are surrounded by the best elements for cinema.

So juxtaposed, the conversations in Under Construction are great, about loneliness, religion, architecture, the hardness of life, poetry, capitalism... and they are real. Does reality transcend fiction?

In my opinion, yes. Reality is generous if you know how to deal with it, if you know how to wait. Reality has more nuances than fiction, it is more complex. In fiction we must create credibility and for this we avoid the complexities and wrinkles of reality, full of riches and contradictions. The conversations in construction are very good and are possible because they are real. In a fictional movie, they might not be convincing.

The camera takes us as Voyeur, chasing the characters. How did you achieve this level of naturalness, intimacy and complicity with the characters... or rather with the people?

The word character seems appropriate to me because from the moment you choose the words, the frames... you are creating the character, when you film the person it is no longer that person, it is the reading that you do.

When it comes to naturalness, the key is to be there, you have to get the right environment, and you have to know how to wait, you have to get confidence. When I thought about making the film with the students, I thought, what can the students give me that the professionals wouldn’t give me? The time... the time. The first film has given me a real sense of what has been done in teamwork. Filmmakers always say that filmmaking is a teamwork, but we often don’t believe that; the cinema that interests me is also one look, not the look of a set. Normally I have tended to protect them from the group so that their looks do not contaminate mine, and it was different from En construcción, there was a great exchange, and it went well.

On the other hand, in the documentary the filmmaker cannot be understood apart from his qualities as a human being; the relationship you develop with people is part of the writing of the film. At the same time, it’s very pessimistic when the filmmaker wants to violate reality, manipulate what’s in front of him, when he’s filming to extract something like a predator; when your time is more valuable than that of the people in front of you.

You've depicted hard-living characters with their pros and cons. Is it difficult to make a social cinema that does not fall into stereotypes?

This cinema, which uses rhetorical clichés, is very irritating, and the so-called social cinema loses all its effectiveness and becomes a tinge of propaganda. It is not a free gaze, but a subordinate one, a curiosity, an impetuous one that must be constantly rethought. I ended up exhausted because many who only knew me for En construcción presented me as a paradigm of social cinema. So tired that I thought to make the next film with nice and bourgeois people to show that social cinema is much more complex; if you shoot fucked people it’s social cinema and if you shoot rich people it’s not. There is a social responsibility to look at. I am nervous about the lack of criticality with documentaries when dealing with social or historical issues, the so-called Non-Governmental Institutional Cinema. It seems that you can’t criticize this cinema because it has a good purpose, which causes a lot of damage to the cinema because it creates very lazy models, like the worst TV reports.

What is your relationship with the audience?

I think the viewer is me, not something distant and abstract. I watch a lot of movies and I know when I feel attacked as a spectator because the movie has treated me like I’m a fool. The audience needs their own space to decide things, to build the film with me. The television, however, never respects the spectator’s field; the voice off always gives him qualifying adjectives, all done, and it is very important not to attack the spectator’s field, which is the author of the film, together with the filmmaker. I don’t like emphatic cinema, the need to emphasize things without suggesting it.

Here is the fundamental equation of the film: the relationship that I develop with the characters as a filmmaker, and through which I connect these characters with the audience. This triangular look completes the film.

A
modest style prevails in your works, without artifices (natural sound, for example, compared to the soundtrack), based on everyday life... and also with a strong sense of poetry and reflection. How do you get the mood of your movies?

When you make a film, you take some things and leave others aside. By reducing some elements (music, effects, camera movements...), you reinforce the remaining elements, add extra value to an ellipse, a pause, a sound... In another movie perhaps the same ellipse, pause or sound will go unnoticed because you are busy following complex arguments, quick actions... The heartbeat you want to give to a gesture, to an image, is the echo. You have to think that everything you put in a movie is essential: if you film a girl, a tree, a street, you have to film as if you were filming a girl, a tree, a street for the first time. I like that when a film transmits to me that every image and sound is essential, beloved, that could not be offered in any other way; that there are no interchangeable and transitional images. After all, cinema is a renunciation. You made a movie because you gave up the other four before, and you had to give up the other four for each plane that appears.

In contrast to this style, how do you see the current audiovisual culture, saturated with constant rapid movements, images and sound?

It is an example of consumer cinema, but surely ambitious cinema is not like this and offers the viewer a different time with each image than in other times. In opposition to consumer cinema, there is a very simple and calm cinema, but this style of cinema has become clandestine, silenced by the mainstream media.

The concept of time is very important in your filmography. In Construcción there are numerous references: the destruction of a neighborhood, a way of life that will be lost forever; the eternal and ephemeral constructions of the past; the Roman remains. Is cinema the best way to capture time?

Yes, because it is the only one able to reproduce time together with music, to capture the passage of the days and nights of En construcción, of the seasons, the flow of that day to day.

You also pay attention to beauty in your works, the enjoyment of the senses. Also considering your love of art, what role does aesthetics play in your work?

He's the bearer of ideas. The form, in cinema, is not decorative, but a means of transmitting ideas. If you roll a sentence losing focus, then retrieving it and reframing it, it has a different value than the same sentence that is rooted with a fixed plane. One can be an unexpected phrase, caught in the air, and the other a plane organized to listen to that phrase: you force the reader to interpret very different things, depending on the form used. Form is essential, it is the medium we have. Let’s go back to the first, the key is the gaze: you don’t have to look for great themes, the great themes are in those that the gaze knows how to see.

The author's cinema is yours. What connotations come to mind?

It has a very heavy and serious side, curia, and some authors seem to me extremely narcissistic and exhibitionist, because the author’s cinema has that terrible side, that of the filmmaker who poses. And this leads us to miss the time of John Ford and the others, who did not have to give interviews with each film reflecting on metaphysics. The filmmaker is a bait for promotion, but I think that often the directors, talking so much, are an obstacle between the viewer and the film. After all, the goal is to put the viewer in touch with the film to make it their own. As a matter of fact, the contemporary cinema that I believe in has an author behind it, an author with a special and unique look.