By Juan Medina
With four feature films—Süden (2008), Papirosen (2011), Kékszakállú (2016), and Introduzione all’oscuro (2018)—Argentine filmmaker Gastón Solnicki has created a very solid filmography pushing the boundaries of non-fiction cinema. In his 2016 debut fiction film Kékszakállú, he takes inspiration in Béla Bartók’s sole opera, transposing Bluebeard’s Castle to Buenos Aires and Punta del Este to present a tale of generational inertia and emancipation. We spoke to Gastón on the occasion of the digital premiere of Készakállú’s as part of The Cinema Tropical Collection.
The titles of your movies reveal, at the very least, a special interest in music. Do you have any training as a musician? And a cliché but mandatory question: Do you approach the creation of a film as you would approach a musical composition?
I took piano lessons as a teenager. I started too late to be a pianist and I never had the patience to sit at the piano anyhow, but I did spend years editing. At the time, I also worked as a DJ, it was my first profession, and I practiced it with great pleasure during the 90s. The night was more than just a refuge to recover from school blows. Some of that experience in direct contact with dynamic range and volume, in the context of the last music of the 20th century, was a very important key to everything that came after. Making films is so related to music. It is perhaps the most linear relationship within cinema. It has to do with what Kagel said, that sound is first a gesture. I approach my films, as I can, with a mixture of voracity and desire for precision.
The film seems to be composed from shreds of story. Fragments of more or less disconnected scenes with which a rather vague narration is assembled. It is a methodology similar to the one you use in Papirosen and in Introduzione all’oscuro, pieces closer to the film-essay, if this category is of any use. Do you see clear continuities between these three pieces?
Absolutely. I think my four films are closely related. They correspond to different emotions and contexts, but they are all part of the same tissue. The narrative engine of my films is a mystery and their logic is emotional.
A factory of foam pieces, another one of sausages. They caught my attention, they’re not exactly the factory in Antonioni. Where did this come from?
They were points in common that the actresses had, and that we were very interested in. The styrofoam was more of a premonition. I had written some ideas about the styrofoam ice cream packaging and then I discovered that Laila's family had the only styrofoam company in Argentina, so we immersed ourselves there and one day while filming at the university, during a take we heard one of the actresses, Denise, speak about a sausage factory. At first, we didn’t understand what she had said, but when we cut I asked her if she had said anything about a sausage factory. In fact, her father owned a sausage factory.
When you are not illustrating preconceived ideas, there is a lot of freedom to find materials. All the things that interest me the most have to do with that.
Those who have Papirosen fresh in their memories will be struck by the appearance of your nephews in Kékszakállú. The family seems to continue being one of the core themes around which your cinema revolves.
Kékszakállú is the formal attempt to detach myself from the family. Papirosen is somehow the first stage of that movement. It is the same material, treated differently, with a different distance. It is part of a natural metamorphosis. My friend and colleague, writer Sebastián Martinez Daniell, one of the “surgeons” who helped me work on all of these materials, says that my creative process is gaseous. "What we do is try to understand what we are doing,” as another dear friend and close colleague, artist Alan Segal, told me during the Uruguayan part of the shooting for this movie, quoting Cage.
Cinema has known how to look with empathy and compassion at children and adolescents who face situations that exceed the capacities of their age. How do you look at these characters that seem to have difficulty facing the challenges of their already-reached adulthood?
I look at them from the same height, except when they’re on the trampoline.
The protagonist of the film is discovering how the world works outside the bubble of privilege that until now she has enjoyed. Would you describe Kékszakállú as a generational and class portrait: the portrait of a young generation who know they benefit from privileges and who bear a certain guilt because of them?
Yes, but it is not just a question of guilt. On the one hand, there are the teenagers and the whole question of class. The struggle of not being able to use the tools they have to their advantage. There are those who own the factories, there’s the world of work, and there’s also the world of craft. It’s my most Marxist film.
For me it has to do with a moment in the world: with the horror-atmosphere in which Bartók wrote the opera [Kékszakállú] at the beginning of the 20th century and with certain correspondences to our current world, which are in fact, not revealed so hastily.
