What I do not express dies/ I don't want nothing to
die in me/ (…) a manic fever shakes me at the
thought of being late/ of wasting an instant...
Raúl Perrone, XXI century's Buenos Aires filmmaker,
takes Pier Paolo Pasolini as a pretext, in the literal
sense of the word; as a pre-existing text to take over,
also as an icon, to make it collide with other angels,
other stars, dark or radiant, of his cinema sky. Now
that the celluloid has just been extinguished, that any
ontology of the cinematic image has been in an
uncomfortable suspense, how to stand before the
death of cinema? Become a Neoclassical?
Neoprimitive? Neomodern? This does not seem to be
a dilemma for the Perrone’s cinema. The feverish
restlessness, his "manic fever at the thought of being
late", as does tell an adult character who speaks to
ragazzi gathered in a Ituzaingo's church steps,
pushes him to summon all spirits. Diverging times,
languages and dialects, Melies, Pasolini, Dreyer,
Leonardo Favio, Chinese shadows, Zeppelin, Handel
and techno-cumbia. The rubbing spike on the vinyl
record, the voices in reverse, the faces blurred in the
wake of the movement, as in a painting by Francis
Bacon; the chaotic friction of all resources is fair if it
can be integrated into a look.
In the night sky we see
the flickering light of the stars in outer space. But
truthfully we see something else: from each star's
light has gone thousands of years from the remote
source to finally reach our retinas. Each star is at a
different distance. We then see, not the past, but the
many past, all together now. The starry sky is like the
cinema, an optical effect. Only there for a sight. That's
how happens with cinema times at Perrone's cinema.
That's why Pasolini, his dancing silhouette, his
bleeding and sacred voice, can coexist with Dreyer
figures and characters of contemporary teenagers,
crossed by piercings and recognizably South
Americans faces. Pasolini is a star that shines
together with others, all simultaneously, in the
perronean sky. Ragazzi is a possible translation of
P3ND3JO5, within the translatability that Perrone can
afford to himself. P3ND3JO5 has been a new
beginning in his films, as if an adult could be born
again: Ragazzi is an expansion and intensification of
certain proceedings initiated at P3ND3JO5, the
furious disturbance of all registers, loops, mash-ups
sound and visual analogies, multiple
superimpositions, reverse projections, shadows,
ghosts (that old word that defines so well the essence
of cinema), the juxtaposition of the diverse cadences
from the film tracking defective damaging to idle,
pollution of the poetic voice in a missed connection,
as if the film DNA enters in a phase of turbulence
completed by the work of an enraged god.
We are those gods, eternal and rounded / others
leave us but it does not matter, you know?/ (…)
Thousands of bodies are illuminated of gold /
sometimes of nacre, of greenish and bluish plants
/ the faces that remained fixed as ancient tattooes
/ as yellowish daguerreotypes / with a beautiful
humid perfume / the gate got opened to the fate of
the echoes of the ancients.
Ragazzi is presented as a symphony in two
movements, appealing again to the musical lexicon,
as it did with the "cumbiópera" P3ND3JO5. Each
movement has a distinct character: the first centered
in the ragazzi who shared last night with Pasolini, is a
dingy hue, tinged by the shadows of crime and a dark
plot, as if this piece was filmed trough poet's dark
glasses. The second movement takes place in a
space of gleaming sun, on the edge of a brook under
a bridge, attended by a group of young poor
wagoners in their vital enjoyment and pleasure. Also
hovers around the tragedy: youngsters in risk,
adolescence as the threshold of a possible death are
constant in this stage of perronean fantasy. But the
passage from the funeral poetry to erotic blast of
those young bodies caressed by the sun and air
freedom summer afternoon overlap even to the tragic
fate. The camera seems to reach ecstasy when
captures the angular contours of the boys silhouetted
against a sky that seems to worship them, their eyes
in trance, the irresponsible vitality of horses and dogs,
the sudden emergence of female beauty. With a bright
and glorious end, with kids defying the law of gravity,
the laws of thermodynamics and the inevitability of
death, emerging, reborn of water. Perrone's camera
sacralize these glowing, innocent faces.
Oscar Cuervo
Y por fin llega el gran momento: mañana domingo 19/10 se estrena mundialmente Ragazzi, la nueva película de Raúl Perrone, en el Festival de Cine de Roma. Y Raúl me honró con el pedido de que unas palabras mías acompañen a sus imágenes en el pressbook de la película que se distribuirá en el festival. La versión en castellano de este texto fue publicada originalmente acá.
RAGAZZI - PERRONE - TRAILER from Trivial Media on Vimeo.
Sobre Ragazzi: el 5 de octubre pasado entrevistamos a Perrone en La otra.-radio (ver y escuchar acá). Y algo más sobre Fávula, la película anterior del Perro, también inédita entre nosotros, formará parte de de la Competencia Oficial de Largometraje del V Festival Pachamama - Cinema de Fronteira, que tiene lugar del 9 al 15 de noviembre en la ciudad de Rio Branco, Brasil, Estado de Acre.