From October 27th to 30th, 2023, Argentine director Pablo Mazzolo was present in Rio de Janeiro for the DOBRA International Festival of Experimental Cinema and the Latin American Meeting of Experimental Cinema organized by the festival. He presented a retrospective session with eight of his films, projected in S8mm, 16mm, 35mm and digital, and shared tables at the Encontro session with Àngela López Ruiz (Uruguay), Mónica Delgado (Peru), Sebastian Wiedemann (Colombia) and the curators of the festival, Lucas Murari and Cristiana Miranda.
Mazzolo has stood out over the last decade as one of the main names in Argentine experimental cinema, receiving great international attention. His films demonstrate a strong sense of renewal between one project and another, seeking specific codes and languages for each. Despite the strong presence of editing tracing a kind of route of intensities through images and sounds, Mazzolo reaffirms his aspiration for camera cinema, even when he makes extensive use of the effects achieved by the optical printer. Between light studies, dreamlike and apocalyptic states of nature, historical surveys through landscapes, observations of the individual’s animal and insignificant condition in relation to nature, optical illusionism through movement, filmic pulsations and convulsions and improvisational practices, the director holds a work of around eleven films that vary greatly from each other. In parallel, he maintains his practice as an editor, having worked on films by filmmakers such as Jonathan Perel, Alexandra Cuesta, Eloisa Solaas, and Julián D’Angiolillo.
At DOBRA, his films Oaaxaca Tohoku (2011), El Quilpo Sueña Cataratas (2012), Conjeturas (2013), Fotooxidación (2013), Fish Point (2015), NN (2017), Ceniza Verde (2019) and The Newest Olds (2022) were shown.
His speeches throughout the festival sometimes returned to the intriguing idea of filming the impossible, a topic that can be talked about endlessly and that can be directed towards different cinematographic forms and styles. Still, amid the rush of everyday life, the interview with Pablo almost didn’t happen. It was observing the director outside the Cinemateca do MAM, talking to two spectators about his films, that it became certain that it was necessary to space out the busy routine to complete the interview. In this conversation outside the museum after the session, his hands were as important as his speech. He gestured a lot, mainly to give shape to certain movements present in the films. It was through the hands that the barrier between the Spanish language of the Argentinian and the Portuguese of the two Brazilians was crossed, enriching speech with rhythms and intensities resulting from a language shared by vision and musical notion. It became evident, then, that recording these manual movements in a written interview would be as intriguing a capture challenge as filming the impossible.
The interview was carried out on September 30th, the last day of the festival, in one of the internal rooms of the Cinemateca do MAM. In Argentina, the electoral period was taking place, a time when the threat Javier Milei had not yet won the 2023 election and the country was flirting dangerously with choices similar to those of Brazil in 2018 with Jair Bolsonaro.
Gabriel Linhares Falcão
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Gabriel Linhares Falcão: You commented yesterday, after the screening of your films and today at the panel Encontro Latino-American de Cinema Experimental, about the idea of “filming the impossible”. Does this idea run through all of your work?
Pablo Mazzolo: Well, accessing Real is impossible. Trying to capture something from the Real with a camera too. I film images that for some difficult-to-understand reason I want to appear in my film. There, in front of the image, a dialogue is established. A quest to capture something impossible in that image. That’s what I worked on more consciously in my last films.
In Ceniza Verde (2019) there was something impossible to film. The collective suicide of the Henia Kamiare civilization, of which almost no traces remain. I filmed the space, and sacred places, as if it were a large cemetery. I filmed the absence.
There is something intuitive at the beginning, where you follow a path without knowing where the film will take you. You move blindly through the film. Then, looking back, what the film is looking for begins to “reveal” itself. Starting to find meaning in what I’m doing. This guides the future. It is also a way for each film to find its own code and language. A strategy to escape a style.
GLF: In Oaxaca Tohoku, would the earthquake and tsunami be the impossible?
PM: The filming of Oaxaca Tohoku (2011) was very peculiar. I was participating in a screenwriting lab organized by Sundance in the city of Oaxaca. When the meeting ended, the 2011 earthquake in Japan occurred. People began to panic due to the risk of affecting Mexico City or another nearby region. We should also avoid the coast, as there was a risk of a tsunami. This encouraged me to change the direction of my trip towards the coast of Oaxaca.
I found a place to settle at a certain height so that if the sea rose, I would have a place to protect myself from the tsunami. A naive idea, of course. I filmed and went up, filmed and went up… In the end, the tsunami didn’t happen.
I think the film captures some of the panic that Mexico feels about earthquakes. For me it was quite exotic and rare to see people so distressed by earthquakes. I think it would be strange for you Brazilians too. What counts is the panic. The fear of impotence in the face of natural forces.
GLF: I find it comical in this film that at the end there are people on the beach playing ball, there are people swimming naked, a couple loving each other… You create a strong counterpoint with that tsunami that doesn’t arrive, we also ask ourselves what we would do in those last moments.
PM: At first there was no one on the beach. At 10 o’clock they began to return. The first were the fishermen, who needed to work and knew nothing would happen. There is certainly a counterpoint between the tsunami and the final image of the couple and people having fun. I am interested in a certain animal and insignificant condition of man in relation to nature, to everything. Something similar happens in Conjecturas (2013) and NN (2017). In turn, this condition is all we have.
GLF: Could you comment on the study between natural and artificial light in Fotooxidación (2013), between sunlight and tungsten?
PM: I was doing a series of works with tungsten light, based on the idea that tungsten was a way to “proletarianize” light. It is, in a sense, a perversion of light forced into production. This in the film Fábrica de Pizzas (2010). Delving deeper into the “action of light”, “photooxidation” emerged.
I tried to work with light from all possible aspects, sunlight, tungsten, but the impossible was found in the need to film in the absence of light. Not “black”, but the impossibility of conceiving the very idea of light. The blind boy was fundamental to this. There is no concept of light or dark there.
It is an associative film and it has a classic structure. But instead of having dramatic action, it is supported by a structure of intensities.
GLF: I feel this idea of structure in many of your works, for example in The Newest Olds (2022). But it’s interesting that you say that your process is very intuitive, as if the assembly appeared in the moment. Is this idea of structure previous or something that appears?
PM: It appears in the montage! It’s like improvised and experimental music. You start playing, go here, there and arrive at the structure. It is not previous. There are many filmmakers who work with scores, not me.
GLF: I notice a lot of the crescendo movement in your films, like in The Newest Olds, Fotooxidación…
PM: There is the idea that the image accumulates and accumulates until it explodes. This same explosion gives way to the next… It’s quite classic too. [laughter]
GLF: I also notice that the sound in your films flows like music. When you edit the sounds, do you start with a similar idea?
PM: In some cases, I didn’t know; in others, I started thinking with a song in mind, I already had its previous function, but still thinking about how it would sound.
Whenever I’ve made films with music, I’ve had access to the songs before filming. The times I asked a musician to compose, I told him: “I don’t have money to pay you, but if you want to do it…” [laughs]. Then I have to be strict, if it doesn’t work out I have to say “no”, whoever it is, because the important thing is the film, in the end. So I prefer to know the music beforehand. So as not to disturb my friends.
It’s like a game, you have to play as a whole: play aesthetically, in a path where there is nothing, you have to take risks, be aggressive. I like a certain violence in the image, it’s a space for that, and reality is full of very violent images. In Argentina, the aesthetic that is winning the elections is that of a person holding a chainsaw or threatening to set fire to the Central Bank. These are powerful images. What images are we going to generate for the audiovisual fabric that surrounds us? When they tell me: “These are images that hurt my vision”, I say: “If it hurts you once, it’s not bad”. The reality is very intense.
I stopped using music a long time ago. I’m trying to make films with fewer elements. I work with sound recordings and files.
GLF: Do you usually put together the images or sounds first? They are very integrated into your films, some sounds anticipate images…
PM: In general, the images. Sometimes there are sounds that I know in advance could be in the film. For example, the Oaxaca song Tohoku, which is by Nurse With Wound. It was something that was going through my head when I filmed it, the sounds were already there. An oscillating sound wave, just like the ocean, which is like a big wave.
GLF: You mentioned in the session about your interest in underground and noise bands from Argentina and that you recorded them a lot.
PM: From 2005 to 2010, I religiously filmed the entire Buenos Aires experimental music scene. Experimental music in Argentina at the time was driven by a lot of improvisation, but there were two rules: no laptops or sheet music.
There were also circuits where musicians from all over the country played. The Argentine Libertarian Federation was a very federal space. Someday this documentary will be released.
GLF: And this contact inspired you a lot, right?
PM: A lot. Music is very important to me. There is a unique freedom in music and a certain basic, elemental, human thing.
Anla Courtis said that when she improvises with someone else, she intervenes in a way that she likes what it sounds like. This idea is something I maintain. You should be able to film anywhere. Be ready to make a movie in any space and place.
GLF: When rewatching your films at DOBRA, I thought a lot about the figure of the guitarist, as if the camera were a guitar, the optical copier was his pedalboard, and yet, even with so many effects, we still capture a lot of the act of filming, something like playing the strings, for example.
PM: The work is almost always optical. There isn’t much difference between the camera on the optical printer and the one I use on the street. I always start with a first camera job.
Sound is certainly physical, they are waves that we feel with our bodies. I like cinema to affect us. I respect the viewer a lot. I want him to enjoy it. And not a second of image is wasted in the film.
GLF: Continuing with the ideas of waves, in the debate that took place just now you mentioned that a session that had a big impact on you was one of Wavelength (1967), by Michael Snow. I would like you to comment more about your cinephile background and your inspirations.
PM: When I was a student there was no access to what is called experimental cinema. The closest was the avant-garde of the 1920s. Dreyer, Bresson, Godard, Cocteau, Cassavetes, Buñuel had a big impact on me. Jean Vigo was very influential for me, both him and his politics. When I saw his À propos de Nice (1930) I was very impressed. Dziga Vertov and his wife, Elizaveta Svilova. Vertov’s diaries are a masterpiece for me. The cine-eye has always had an air of freedom.
I consider the image of the knife cutting through the eye in Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) a philosophy of how to watch cinema. Conceptually, it influenced me a lot for Fotooxidación‘s child.
Dreyer is also a director I’m in love with. I would love to make pure cinema, with few shots and little editing. Almost a camera cinema. As an editor, I am increasingly looking for camera cinema.
I read about experimental cinema. Mekas’s diaries among other texts. But it was impossible to watch the films. One day I went to the Museo de Arte Moderno, where Claudio Caldini programmed Michael Snow’s Wavelength in 16mm. Film that belongs to the Narcisa Hirsch Film Library. From that film onwards, I dedicated myself to looking for radically different ways of approaching the image.
GLF: At the table you also mentioned a generation of Argentine filmmakers like Claudio Caldini, the Honiks…
PM: Narcisa Hirsch, Marie Louise Alemann, Horacio Vallereggio…
GLF: Do you think your work continues any tradition in Argentine experimental cinema?
PM: I think so. Everyone does very different things, but some were my direct teachers. The idea of “camera cinema” was transmitted to me by Claudio Caldini. I think what Cláudio does is very different from what I do. But philosophically and conceptually I adopted the idea that cinema is made in the camera. It seemed like a great idea to be able to rewind, overprint, and edit in camera. Think about the film in an abstract way. Fábrica de Pizzas and Conjecturas were shot entirely on camera. I filmed and covered it, thinking I would have to rewind it and calculating the pieces of black screen to superimpose later. I think there is a lot of crossover between filmmakers from different generations. Also a lot of solidarity among the community, although not particularly collective creation.
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