Alejandro Gonz\u00e1lez I\u00f1\u00e1rritu, the Mexican director, has been widely celebrated for his innovative approach to storytelling. His 2000 debut, Amores Perros, was labeled a \u201chypertext film\u201d for how its three main threads spiraled out of a central car crash, but were otherwise disconnected. In an interview where he discussed his new Lacma show, Sue\u00f1o Perro \u2013 which sees I\u00f1\u00e1rritu return to hundreds of hours of footage that never made it into his debut movie \u2013 he shared that his father was the one who inspired his unique approach to film.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy father was naturally a great storyteller,\u201d I\u00f1\u00e1rritu told me via video from Los Angeles. \u201cHe always started with what was almost the end of the story, so he threw you a hook, but then he went back to the middle. He was a great storyteller, always finding ways to get new hooks here and there, to get you to listen to a long story.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the film installation Sue\u00f1o Perro, which saw I\u00f1\u00e1rritu review 1 m ft of archived celluloid taken while making Amores Perros, he pushes his explorations of narrative even further, giving audiences what he alternatively refers to as \u201clight sculptures\u201d and a \u201cdream\u201d that emerged from bits and pieces of the raw materials of his lauded debut. The creation of Sue\u00f1o Perro was a major process that took years of dedicated labor.<\/p>\n
\u201cI said to myself: \u2018Well, maybe I can rescue things that never did make it, and maybe they mean something,\u2019\u201d I\u00f1\u00e1rritu said. \u201cThat was a seven-year process, to discover if there was something or not. The film [Amores Perros] is 2 hours and 34 minutes, and that\u2019s around 18,000 feet of film. So 1m ft is a crazy amount of film. I wanted to shoot everything, I was probably running the camera all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n
A still from Sue\u00f1o Perro: a film installation by Alejandro G I\u00f1\u00e1rritu. Photograph: Image by Karol Pruzinsky<\/p>\n
I\u00f1\u00e1rritu, whose later films Birdman and The Revenant brought him two best director Oscars, was inspired to return to Amores Perros in part because of the film\u2019s 20th anniversary, which saw Criterion release a remastered version. Watching the remaster, he saw that his movie had retained its punch after after all those years. \u201cThe bite of these dogs was still really, really bad,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was fascinating to see that the film was still holding up so well.\u201d<\/p>\n
He also credits the propitious discovery that the archived recordings had been sitting for years in the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). \u201cI was really blown away by that,\u201d I\u00f1\u00e1rritu said, \u201cbecause you never do that. The miracle was that the producers \u2013 M\u00f3nica Lozano, Tita Lombardo and Martha Sosa \u2013 decided to send everything that was left out of the editing room to the UNAM.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those seven years sifting through the footage recorded for Amores Perros and turning it into an installation piece gave I\u00f1\u00e1rritu a different kind of creative freedom, one that was quite separate from his work with film. Whereas even innovative movies are subject to the demands dictated by the need to tell a compelling story, with an installation piece he could break the pieces out from narrative and turn them into pure chunks of image and sound.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s when you are liberated from the narratives that we are so addicted to \u2013 plot twists and all that \u2013 when you liberate the images from that, the images have to say something,\u201d he said. \u201cNot by serving any narrative, but by just being what I found. The way you remember a film is never complete, you always remember flickers, images, moments. That\u2019s the way our memory works. So, this is kind of a representation of how our memory works when we remember a film \u2013 it\u2019s fragments of light and memory that are not related, but in a way they mean something, they hopefully make you feel something.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sue\u00f1o Perro is all about about letting go of cinematic plot and looking for a different kind of truth that can be captured on film. I\u00f1\u00e1rritu explained that he was indebted to the authors of the Latin American Boom \u2013 spearheaded by Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Julio Cort\u00e1zar \u2013 who dared to tell stories in entirely new ways, constructing narratives that questioned the nature of our truths. Inspired by these writers, as well as Akiro Kurasawa\u2019s movie Rash\u00f4mon \u2013 in which different characters each tell their own version of a central murder \u2013 I\u00f1\u00e1rritu found his own understanding of how film can create its own version of our reality.<\/p>\n
A still from Sue\u00f1o Perro: a film installation by Alejandro G I\u00f1\u00e1rritu. Photograph: Image by Karol Pruzinsky<\/p>\n
\u201cRash\u00f4mon really made a huge impact on me, to know that there\u2019s one single event observed in three different ways, and to tell completely different stories. One of the things that we have lost is that we have confused truth with reality. Reality does not give a damn about our truth or about our beliefs. Truth feels very personal, but truth is not reality. Reality is much more complex, so those films, from Rash\u00f4mon to Amores Perros, are to observe one single thing and understand that reality does not actually exist, so we have just one slice of that event. And the world we are living is getting is very complicated because we are assuming that reality is what we believe, but that is not true.\u201d<\/p>\n
In searching for ways that moving images can put us in touch with the reality that goes beyond our personal truths, I\u00f1\u00e1rritu went to back to the cinematic basics that had been a mainstay of the medium for over 100 years, before the transition to digital. He purposely made Sue\u00f1o Perro very much a tactile experience that involves real film and real projectors. Audiences enter into a tight space filled with smoke and light, as well as the characteristic sounds of Mexico City. He thinks that for those who have never lived in an age when it was normal to see film projected onto a screen at 24 frames per second, seeing movie projectors will be a revelation.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think one of the very powerful things in my point of view from this experiment is that you arrive to a place that is dark, and you confront these huge projectors that are dinosaurs, that are the magic lanterns, projecting shafts of light. The physicality of it is a statement against AI. Suddenly, the people feel alive in that room. The installation is very sensorial, and that\u2019s what I was interested in, that young guys will understand how that flicker and that flame and that sound is super sensorial and sensual \u2013 that is part of cinema. It isn\u2019t just just the tablet or the cell phone that you watch by yourself at night in your room \u2013 that is very castrating for our being.\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u00f1\u00e1rritu hopes that this experience of Sue\u00f1o Perro will be a wake up call at a time when movies are increasingly seen at home on tiny screens, and when AI is increasingly integrated into the process of film-making. Being a director who really loves the old school materiality of film, I\u00f1\u00e1rritu expressed alarm at what AI may do to the movie industry.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow, with AI, we are arriving at a limit, where I think our senses will be so lacking in information that it will affect our ability to really learn from what we see and hear in a holistic, wholesome way. I think the crisis of AI will be the fact that we will start doubting everything we see on the screen. It will be so terrifying that it will force us to go back to basics, to just believe what we\u2019ve really experienced with our bodies, that it really was a real thing \u2026 maybe I\u2019m trying to be positive here, but it\u2019s so terrifying that I would like to find something that possibly can bring us to something good about it \u2026 this is an anti-AI exhibition.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I\u00f1\u00e1rritu worked on Sue\u00f1o Perro throughout the creative process for his upcoming film Digger, headlined by Tom Cruise. He found that spending time sifting through all the excess footage of Amores Perros was a relaxing and helpful counterpoint to the pressures of making a major Hollywood movie.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s so much pressure to finding the story, and that\u2019s what I think was liberating about doing the installations, it was almost like a game,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was very liberating to not have that financial pressure, and to be doing this in parallel. It was a great way to escape a little bit from [Digger]. I was just going back and time traveling time to 25 years ago and having a little bit of fun.\u201d<\/p>\n
As for Digger, I\u00f1\u00e1rritu couldn\u2019t help but be a little star struck by working with Cruise. He expects the movie to be intense, but in a very different way that Amores Perros was. \u201cIt\u2019s Tom Cruise!\u201d he exclaimed. \u201cIt\u2019s another kind of intensity, it\u2019s very fun. It was an exhilarating experience, a really great experience.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alejandro Gonz\u00e1lez I\u00f1\u00e1rritu, the Mexican director, has been widely celebrated for his innovative approach to storytelling. His 2000…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":511853,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-511852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=511852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511852\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/511853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=511852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=511852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=511852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}