MANIFESTO

Text originally published in the magazine Las naves, number 1, 2013. 

They ask me from the magazine to express myself about what I do, that there will be manifestos from other directors as well. The manifesto presupposes a series of certainties that I usually escape from. However, once I think about it in this sense, more beliefs appear than I initially suspected. I promise to write and, as usually happens in these cases, the days go by without writing a single word. I think that the subject is too broad, it exceeds me, I also think that maybe I don't feel like putting in print what I think could become a working method. A few hours before the delivery date I try some ideas about it, several of them a bit confusing. This is what was finally left: I want to make films to dialogue with the films that I like and with those that I don't like and because it is also the way in which I can organize the world according to my ideas, my criteria of justice, beauty and of pace. I also film to put all that organization at risk and because each film is the opportunity to try new things and at the same time correct what I didn't like about the previous one. On the other hand, I increasingly like movies to function as a walk without a precise destination or a very clear purpose, or as a visit to a certain world or state of mind and one does not know very well when or why is going to end. This of course implies filming from enjoyment and also with a sense of dysfunctionality, demanding perhaps for that viewer who only seeks in the cinema to be guided by the dramatic springs of a well-defined story.

The cinema, with its functional and ingenious professionalism, is losing the impulsive edge, the capricious side that art needs, the one that can bring us unpredictable, poetic or wild works. Beyond this, I try to establish a moral for making films, borrowed a bit from the filmmakers I like and which becomes a kind of capricious system of formal beliefs in which the search for what is real prevails over the search for any kind of effect.  Some characteristics emerge from this principle, such as the economy of expressive and technical resources, a certain visibility of the narrative mechanisms and a sufficient degree of awareness to distinguish cinema from life itself. In this sense, I am interested in the fact that the link between the narrator and the spectator and between the narrator and the characters is free of any artifice that modifies the relationship that the film proposes from the outset with all of them. I believe that through these attributes in which experimentation is not exempt at all, I give rise to that will for the real that I mentioned above and that vehemently opposes sensationalism and other manipulations of the kind that proliferate in an exaggerated way in the cinema today. In this regard, there is an error that is usually made: confusing the real with the liveliness of a shot. Today critics and especially festivals give too much priority to "the live" and many times that liveliness is the result of an operation typical of montage, representation or dramaturgy itself, or even worse, it is at the service of a device much greater than it is only legitimized by that tiny gesture of liveliness. This is nothing more than a folkloric use of the spontaneous and has little to do with the purity it seeks to demonstrate. For the real thing to flourish, a forceful morality is enough to annul the use of any cheap trick and in this, the genre, the style or the format do not matter. From the magazine they also suggest that I make reference to independence. But that is not the differentiation that affects me the most. I think there is a light cinema and a dark one, there is a capture cinema and a construction cinema, there is a cinema that is considered useful and another that is considered useless, there is a cinema that dialogues with the present and another that does not, there is a cinema poetic and another mathematical, there is a cinema that is aware of representation and another that ignores it and prefers to "imitate" life, there is a moral cinema and there is a cinema of effect, any of these dichotomies today can propose a more eloquent discussion about the state of cinema than being independent or not, which at this point doesn't say much anymore. On the other hand, I think that nobody who wants to make a film is completely independent. It depends on an aesthetic, on an actor, on foundation, on a film institute, as well as on a friend who lends his car to film. Independence is a myth originating from the vanity of certain filmmakers who often want to appear as lonely cowboys fighting against the coming civilization. Victimization in any order of life deserves indifference and in some cases, rejection. Independence read as a flag or ethical safeguard, at this point does not solve any of the problems of cinema, which, as we have seen, are usually concrete and very difficult.

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