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ANACHRONIES
Those who are truly contemporary,
who truly belong to their time, are those who
neither perfectly coincide with it
nor adjust themselves to its demands. They are
thus in this sense irrelevant;
but precisely because of this condition, precisely
through this disconnection and this anachronism,
they are more capable than others
of perceiving and grasping their own time.
Giorgio Agamben
The contemporaneity of a film is usually perceived in two different ways:
sometimes, according to the way the work responds to the concerns
of theme and discourse of the present; in others, from its degree of
suitability to the stylistic veins in vogue at the current moment. In view
of the task of selecting recent international films to dialogue with the
national program of the Semana Film Festival, the Anachronies section
takes its distance and chooses the path of aesthetic lag: if the films
screening here are contemporary works, it is precisely because of their
incongruity with the pretensions of the present; if they live up to their
time, it is because they do not conform to any of its tendencies. Faced
with the unbridled inflation of "contemporary cinema" - at the same
time immeasurable and relentlessly mapped out - our interest is on
the interstices of what is produced today: those films that do not allow
themselves to be framed so easily; which do not respond to thematic or
stylistic demands; which provide free relations with the past and open
gaps for an uncertain future; films that are anachronistic because they
struggle against the spirit of the present.
Considering a film by Eduardo "Teddy" Williams, for instance, the
strangeness is paradoxical: while experiencing the enchantment of
discovering the first cinema - places, people seeming to be filmed for
the first time, as in a Lumière vista - we have the clear impression of
being in front of the inscrutable gaze of a traveler who comes from
the future (or from Mars). From the "earth-to-earth" of Tan atentos to
the stratosphere of J'ai oublié !, the short work of Williams draws an
ascending course, punctuated by wonderful accidents. Without ever
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ANACHRONIES