"What are "kurtas"?" "Kurtas..." "The Indian shirts." "But no buttons, like a tunic." "BLOWS OF THE AXE" "A man carries all his work, his entire life, inside a leather bag, on a train from Moreno to General Rodriguez." "Claudio Caldini, caretaker of a villa in the suburbs." "Secret filmmaker." "He was the first filmmaker I saw in action." "It was many years ago." "I was still at school." "I was invited to a shoot." "I shoveled soil, while Caldini shot." "Marta Minujin buried herself alive." "This was at a time when in Argentina anonymous bodies were being buried every day." "I didn't see him again." "Years later," "I heard he had left for India and that he had gone mad." "Claudio..." "When was it you came back from India?" "How long have you been here?" "Yes." "When I came back from India," "I had burned my bridges." "I didn't have a home or a job..." "And..." "I began to move about the city." "I lived in 36 different places within... 10 to 11 years." "That was till I landed here, in 2004." "I've been settled here since then." "But before, I'd move every six months, or three months..." "What did it mean to get here?" "A relief." "I really spent... a few years... just resting." "I was psychologically exhausted after having moved around so much, without a steady job..." "They were very difficult years." "Are you a difficult guy?" "Yes!" "Somebody told me." "Yes, everybody says so." "I have yet to experience it." "But we still have time." "No." "Right now there are no complications." "But if you spend... ten years in a city, without a home, with no job, no money, yes, you do become a little insufferable." "I dreamt I was looking after a house." "It wasn't my home." "Well, it was in the sense that I was living there." "But it was someone else's home that I was taking care of." "And this band of thugs came to force me out." "They were taking over my place." "Is that a recurring nightmare?" "I often have dreams like that." "Like I don't have a house." "Or I come home, to my childhood home, and it's no longer my home." "But I keep looking for home as if I were still living there." "Caldini makes films on his own, without any money, without help from anybody." "Or used to make films." "For many years he made almost no films at all." "For a brief period" "I set u with a small crew at the Villa of General Rodriguez." "I understand." "I feel the same reluctance myself." "It's like acting in a fiction." "Yes, it is fiction." "I can't see myself in something I don't believe in." "I would do it." "We could do it tomorrow." "But you've seen the weather." "It'll start raining any moment." "We'll get wet..." "We don't have... any shelter..." "I don't know." "I try to imagine your way of thinking and ifs like you don't know what you're doing." "The other film was the same." "It's too fast..." "It's almost... electrical..." "It's intangible." "There's nothing." "There's no substance." "I can't explain it." "And did you bring one of your works for us to see?" "Yes I did." "Here." "You tell me when you're ready." "We'll begin with Madeleine's short." "Shes starting today." "We all speak our minds here, you know." "That's the idea behind the workshop." "Remove it again." "There's a guide at the top." " You see?" " Yes." "You won't be able to place it in the wrong position." "My advice is always to switch the projector off when you work on it" " to prevent any..." " Sure." "What I'm going to do is to put up three parallel projectors and screen simultaneously on three screens." "I load them with loops." "Or the same film strip goes through the first projector, then through the second and the third." "And I mix the sound from the three." "We'll turn it on now." "Look at the gears!" " This is the change of speed." " You can feel the air flowing!" "I'm supposed to know how to use a projector, but ifs been a long time since I last used one..." "We're going to turn the lights off..." "Are you up for the scene in the train?" " The train?" " Taking the train..." "Taking the train?" "But we've done that!" "To shoot the bag on the train..." "I'll do whatever you say but I think that later on..." "Well, I don't know." "It's your film." "But to me ifs like fiction." "It's like fiction." "That bag..." "I rarely travel with it." "I keep it only because... it's the right size to travel in the cabin..." "For short trips but... it's not the bag where I keep my films, so..." "No, but you carry them there." "As a matter of fact, you brought them here in that bag." " They were in that bag, but..." " I'm taking inspiration from reality..." "I brought them here that one time, when we came with you in the oar..." "But only that one time." "You never use it?" "Yes, but not to carry the films." "When I go to Buenos Aires with my films" "I never take more than one or two with me." "I used to..." "The films don't move around any more." "I've only just now got the projectors so I can start showing them again." "Because we need some movement." "What I mean is..." "going to the station, waiting for the train, getting on the train... all that will put us in a bad mood." "And in the evening we'll be worn out and we won't want... to watch any more films or talk, I don't know..." "Maybe you're right." "These are the originals of his films, all in 8mm, an obsolete format that doesn't allow for copies." "This bag is like the manuscript of his autobiography." "This is a complete improvisation." "I've never screened a film here." "We don't have a screen." "Home movies!" "Homeless movies!" "This is just the preparation." "It's not the action itself." "Ready." "We can let the audience in." "Hey, nobody came!" "That's it." "Thanks, Andrés." "Now..." "Few people have seen his films." "They can only be seen when he is thereto screen them." "Each screening is different." "This smells like fireworks on New Year's Eve." "Ready!" "And when did you make this one?" "1970." "I was 18 years old." "No, actually I was 17." " So you were still at school?" " Yes, still at school." "I haven't seen this in ages!" "And those bugs?" "Look!" " Where are they?" " They're insects." "They were on the film apparently and they got stuck on the plate." "They look like insects." "And they are!" "Caldini's images make me believe cinema can be something else." "Correspondence." "You've seen that." "Festivals, seminars, flyers..." "No pictures here." "Look at this." "A contract for my Indian music group." "Experimental..." "This was... a screening of "El devenir de las piedras"" "which no one attended." "It was December 29, 1988." "No one." "Just us and two other people." "Jorge Abel Martin. "Super 8." "Which way for the small format?"" ""...tedious specimens of the so-called experimental cinema, such as the unforgettable 'Gamelan' by Claudio Caldini, who during 18 minutes -or was it many more?" " showed us the results of tying his camera to a pole and revolving it over his head to the point of weariness. .."" "The war-veterans of experimental cinema." "When he talks about those times, he always talks about "us"." "Horacio Vallereggio." "Silvestre Byron." "Marie-Louise Alemann." "Narcisa Hirsch." "Omar Chaban." "Caldini." "In the official history of Argentine cinema, they just don?" "exist." "Ifs as if they had never made a single film." "RECONSTRUCTION 1" "I asked if he could explain how he made some of his films." "It's finished." "The film ran out." "We're making a film for kids." "That's my feeling." "This is my fathers camera." "16mm." "This was the first camera I saw." "I learned to load it, as a kid." "I don't know if I have any special memories." "Maybe his need to explain everything that he did." "So if he made a home movie he'd teach us how to load the camera, how to use the light meter," "how the projector worked..." "I don't know." "At some point the dialogue between us stopped." "Dialogue!" "There was never any dialogue!" "He just stopped talking." "Then my mother became ill and when she died, my father fell into a depression and stopped talking." " What are these?" " These are my dads welding goggles." "Of course he didn't really get what I was doing with film." "You were just telling me... about these stories you made up when you were a kid." "What kind of stories were they?" "What were they about?" "One makes up a kind of... myth out of childhood." "But I think I just forgot." "I just forgot it or maybe what came after erased it and I can't remember much about my childhood." "Out of the blue I may remember something but..." "Isn't that what we're pursuing all the time?" "Yes, ifs what we're pursuing in film too." "Those moments when you remember everything clearly." "And then for weeks you cant remember anything at all." "You're in a kind of fog... it's the same as dreaming." "You wake up from a dream feeling you've been through the most amazing and unique experience, much more intense than than being awake." "And when you wake up ifs gone." "The next day you can't remember a thing." "It's agonizing, isn't it?" "It just slips away..." "What is it...?" "When you film, what is it you're trying to do?" "Can you say... that you have... something on your mind or is there something else...?" "No, when I film I try to have as little as possible on my mind." "I don't always accomplish that." "But when I film best is when I don't think at all." "RECONSTRUCTION 2" "Today I figured out what's happening to me" "Yes" "Why my name is not myself" "Why I don't have a home" "Why I am alone and not myself" "Because today I was born" "Today I was born" "Today" "The sun burned me" "And the wind of life" "Woke me up" "Sometimes I have the feeling that the real Caldini is not there." "As if he were absent from his own story." "Or better still, as if he were hiding behind the story he's telling." "I'm afraid if... while I'm handling the files and the film strips, 16mm, 35mm, what I'm saying is lost." "No single idea is followed through to the end." "The conversation is not properly organized." "Let's not leave it as it is." "No, no..." "You may like it but I don't." "Caldini is right." "I wonder how he would tell someone else's life." "As a matter of fact, he did try it." "He said, "A failed experiment"." "Maybe Caldini can be found there." "Tomas Sinovcic was a filmmaker friend of mine when we were in our twenties, around 1972." "And in 1976 he was killed by the military." "And from around 1980" "I wanted to make a film about him." "He disappeared without a trace." "His films were destroyed too." "And I wanted to make a film with the documents that proved his existence." "These are my notes from a telephone conversation with Tomas's father." "Which one is he?" "This is Tomas's head and this is his arm." "But you have to see the original photograph." "The original itself was dark enough." "And this is me." "But you can't see a thing!" "I don't have... any ability for story-telling." "It's an unfinished project." "Probably endless." "I would never feel satisfied with a finished film about Tomas." "We just don't really know..." "A friend once said, "And if he were alive?"" ""First Argentine Film Series"." "Look at this." ""The Argentine Film Series continues..."" ""And if he were alive..." Is that possible?" "No." "I don't think so." "No." "THE EYE IS AT RISK IN CLARITY" "THE EAR IS AT RISK IN WANTING TO HEAR MORE" "THE HEART IS AT RISK WHEN GIVING ITSELF COMPLETELY" ""A New Day"." "Raw footage." "I'd ask myself what would Tomas do if he were alive." "What would he film?" "Would he go out into the streets to film demonstrations?" "I don't know." "When you made this film, or when you tried to make "A New Day"... was it like... coming to terms with an unfinished discussion?" "There's something like that." "The film that maybe cost Tomas his life..." "He came to my place one day," "I was about to leave Buenos Aires." "He came one day with a super-8 film and asked me to help him with the sound." "I didn't refuse." "Today I would have refused." "Why?" "I never accepted the idea of seizing power through violent means." "At that moment..." "I think Tomas realized I didn't want to do it." "But somehow I had to... stand by my friend, be faithful to that friendship." "But I didn't feel right after doing it." "Of course it's not that..." "I don't feel responsible..." "I don't know." "I was afraid of the armed struggle and everything that was going on in Argentina." "I didn't want to get involved..." "At the same time, we were under certain pressure." ""If you don't take a stand... you're a coward or a traitor..."" "Did that kind of disapproval lead you to give up making films?" "At a given moment, I completely gave up making films, yes." "So that kind of criticism did affect you." "Of course it did." "I'm always in a tough spot when I have to... to talk about that." "RECONSTRUCTION 4" "How many years ago did you film this in India?" "Eighteen." "I shot it in India in 1991." "And how does it feel to be doing this remake?" "It's completely different." "The landscape..." "The light, everything..." "The feeling..." "But... could you talk about the origin of what happened to you in India?" "I don't know." "I think it started here, when I decided to escape from... from Argentina because what was happening" "under the dictatorship became unbearable." "You can't separate... one thing from the other." "I felt like a foreigner in my own neighborhood," "in my own town, in my own country." "It's like feeling that everyone is a stranger." "That's a terrible problem." "And it wasn't solved by going to a different country or a different city." "Yes." "And, paradoxically," "I agreed to make this film with you in order to tell this story, believing that you might be able to tell it better than me" "I don't really think about it all that much." "And it's not easy to... to say exactly what happened." "To me..." "I don't know why but what happened to you in India is part of what you're looking for in film too." "It's another form of that utopia, that search for..." "I don't know..." "Yes." "With film we want to show in images what images can't show." "And with words we try to say what words can't say." "When you were shooting... those sunsets... what was going through your head?" "That was the high point... of the crisis." "I was having hallucinations." "Yes." "I thought the sun was falling onto the earth." "But not like in that film." "It was much worse." "It's not that I just imagined it." "I felt it." "And I believed it." "It was a kind of nightmare." "I remember being taken around during an entire week in New Delhi." "I was delirious, having hallucinations, without eating or sleeping at all..." "And I was being kicked out of India because my visa had expired and nobody could take care of me in the state I was in..." "I put up some resistance." "I didn't want to get on the plane." "I was terrified and I had... no desire to travel in such a state." "I simply had no idea what was going on." "I was hallucinating all the time." "And then I woke up in a place I couldn't recognize, surrounded by people I didn't know." "It was obviously some kind of hospital..." "But I'm still half asleep, on some medication, so I don't quite understand what place this is, or who I am, or where I am..." "And that feeling goes on for several days until I finally realize I'm in a hospital." "But I'm still not sure who I am." "To make matters worse, in my passport, my name Eduardo was not very clearly written out." "And the doctors started calling me Edmondo." "So I became all the more confused." "I couldn't tell what they were talking about." "They called me by another name!" "On his return from India," "Caldini spent six months confined to the garden of his father's house." "He shot these images." "These days we've made somewhat ridiculous or pathetic attempts at recreating or reenacting..." "I never felt we were recreating or reenacting anything." "I think you're just trying to portray me." "Or to portray the man who made those films..." "And ifs no longer me." "I'm no longer myself." "From Chuang Tzu..." ""Wood lights up when rubbed against another wood." "Metal, when joined with fire, becomes fluid." "Fire which is inside water, can burn a fat acacia tree." "The quiet of the night cannot quell these fires."" "He hasn't shown his films in public for almost twenty years." "At General Rodriguez, with a borrowed camera and three lime rolls of unexposed film," "Caldini made a new film." "In six minutes of film he encapsulated six years." "I wrote this down:" ""To live just like one films." "To film just like one lives..." "I think that my next film will be different." "This is whats left of my last six years." "All the clothes that I used during this time and that were... quite worn out." "The mattress." "Blankets." "Some books that had been... completely ruined by the damp." "There was no way to rescue them." "What else?" "A printer, an answering-machine." "A telephone." "You didn't burn anything from the archive, did you?" "No, no." "The archive goes with me."