José Luis Guerin
On returning from class, a teacher is questioned by his wife, who distrusts his pedagogic project: an “Academy of the Muses” inspired by classical references, which is supposed to contribute to regenerating the world through poetry. The controversial project triggers a series of situations dominated by words and desire.
In Saint-Louis Cathedral, at La Rochelle, in a chapel filled with merchant marine ex-votos, there’s a painting that witnesses the tragedy of The Saphir in 1741. This schooner was becalmed for days and days in inter-tropical waters, with 271 slaves and 30 crew members on board. This painting is like a secret door in a Cathedral that opens on to the great History…
A series of video letters between José Luis Guerín and Jonas Mekas.
Filmmaker José Luis Guerin documents his experience during a year of traveling as a guest of film festivals to present his previous film. What emerges is a wonderfully humane and sincere portrayal of the people that he meets when he goes off the beaten track in some of the world's major cities.
Utilizing the impressionistic techniques of IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA (if SYLVIA was a riff on the “city film,” the more miniaturized MEMORIES might be termed a “street-corner film”), Guerín uses a disturbing incident in his Barcelona neighborhood to thread together a rich tapestry on music, culture, community, the fragility of life, and the tenacity of life.
The short film is like a journal page of film making. On making a film (in 1966) in Barcelona. On assembling together surviving fragments of the film, but not as a vestige of something for ever lost, but rather an occasion for making a new film of all sorts of fragments: images in Barcelona (in 2008/9) that echo images of the older film; images of making films (Hanoun's own, Boris Lehman's; other friends'); images of a storm in Biarritz; fragments of conversations...
This remarkable companion piece to In the City of Sylvia offers a compendium of images recorded by Guerín in Strasbourg while searching for the traces of a (fictional?) brief encounter some years earlier with a young woman named Sylvia.
A man returns to a city to try to track down a lovely woman he met six years earlier.
An author spends a year and a half filming what happens as a new apartment building is built in a neighborhood of Barcelona.
A silent homage to the origins of cinema, recreating the apparent disappearance of a French photographer in the 1920s. Experimental.
In the Mediterranean port of Barcelona two young unemployed girls living in a renovation area drift around the city desperately looking for a job.
The life of a young girl who plays with little animals and insects is suddenly changed with the arrival of a film crew and a strange man.
