By Marina Mendes Gandour
In conversation with Cinema Tropical two weeks ago, celebrated Argentine filmmaker Matías Piñeiro notably announced that he will be moving away from the source of inspiration that has defined the tone and thematics of the majority of films so far in his career (Shakespeare), and towards the narrow but fertile world of works on and by the ancient Greek poetess Sappho. “I’m moving from Shakespeare to Sappho,” said the award-winning director after spending the last decade developing “The Shakespeareads” focusing on the often-overlooked female characters of Shakespeare’s comedies.
Piñeiro participated in an installment of TropiChat 20, Cinema Tropical’s ongoing series of conversations with key Latin American directors and film professionals taking place as part of the organization’s 20th anniversary celebrations, moderated by the organization’s Executive Director Carlos A. Gutiérrez. Over the course of their dialogue, the Argentine filmmaker director confessed to Gutiérrez that he’s done exploring the characters that held his attention for so long. The declaration heralds a marked shift in the filmmaker’s focus that’s bound to have far-reaching implications for the nature and tone of his works to come.
At the same time as he’s planning to embark on this new trajectory, Piñeiro will simultaneously be shooting his next feature film Ariel, confirmed to be the the final piece in his Shakespearean series. The film will be preceded by the upcoming short collaborative piece Sycorax co-directed by Spanish filmmaker Lois Patiño, that will have its world premiere at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight in a few weeks. Shot in the Portuguese Azores islands in the mid-Atlantic as a research project for the development of Ariel, Sycorax is named after an unseen character in The Tempest.
The two films will effectively wrap up his cinematic collection self-titled “The Shakespeareads,” which resulted in his films Rosalinda, Viola, The Princess of France, Hermia & Helena, and Isabella, which will be released this summer in U.S, theaters after its 2020 world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival.
Isabella (2020
Piñeiro mentioned he is ready to turn his sights to an altogether different figure that looms above literature, one rooted even further back in history: as he explained, he's launching into a close reading of the writings of Sappho, the Archaic Greek poet from the island of Lesbos, known for her lyrical poetry as much as for her depictions of love between women. “There’s this sense of fragmentation, of disappearance, and of memory, and how we reach Sappho, that is challenging me and making me have questions that I haven’t solved, and that I hope to ‘dynamize' with movies,” the filmmaker conveyed. . He will be working on two projects based on the poet, one connected to a text by the Italian writer Cesare Pavese in which he constructs a fictional dialogue between Sappho and the Greek goddess Britomartis, and the other to Sappho’s poems themselves.
Beyond his announcement on this major shift in the fundamental inspiration for his films, Piñeiro also shared his thoughts on his artistic process over the past decade, talked about the places through which he has lived and transited and that have enabled his career to move forward, and the ways in which he holds community around his filmmaking practice, principles that serve as a powerful example and reference when it comes to sustainable independent filmmaking.
The turn to Sappho comes as one more literary inspiration in Piñeiro’s body of work, as before Shakespeare, his first two feature films The Stolen Man and They All Lie were also based on works of writing, in this case Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s travel writing. The connection between his films and literature, Piñeiro added, comes from a place of trying not to be alone and not to “think cinema within a bubble.” Literature gives him initial elements that attract him and give him “a desire to know more.” The works of writing that inspire him bring up questions that make him want to explore these writings through the process of making cinema.
Another consistent thread woven through his works and that is a significant aspect of his filmmaking is the fact that, for Piñeiro, his crew and collaborators are often the same, and in fact carried over between projects. This, he said, is something that comes from the influence that theater has had on his perspectives and process. Throughout the conversation, he described the relationship between the cast, crew, and director as that of a collaboration: when a frame in his film works and is good, it’s because everyone was working in tension, magnetized together, not repelling each other.
The Princess of France (2014)
Rather than being an auteur, working individually, Piñeiro stated that he hopes to work in community. In his words, he explained: “In each time [making a film] I had less and less time, but [the crew] knew each other more and more and more, so the code is built, the way we know that we work together is built, the muscles have been trained, so now the idea is how to not become robotic, and how to keep on challenging ourselves and keep on expanding. The relationship is of trust, it’s the idea of building a bond, a pact.”
This desire for movement and dialectical tension isn’t only between him and his crew, however—Piñeiro also expressed that he doesn’t want his films to be rigid when it comes to the audience. They should own the movie rather than wait for the filmmaker to explain the meanings and reasons behind it, creating another set of relationships between the viewer and the film, where each person will receive the work in different ways. Therefore, at the same time that he does see the importance in framing, creating, and engaging with the boundaries of the image, the filmmaker emphasized his desire to leave space for the audience’s reception, as well.
However, it's important to note that this theater influence isn’t only his. In another insightful statement, Piñeiro reminded those watching that Argentine independent cinema from the last ten years has learned a lot from theater, and he himself has only followed that trajectory. He is, therefore, working not only in tandem with his collaborators but also within the broader Argentine filmmaking community around him.
To that end, both Gutiérrez and Piñeiro referenced the ways in which another prolific Argentine filmmaker, Martín Rejtman, has been influential in both Piñeiro’s vision of the process of making films, and also in the history of Cinema Tropical. Piñeiro names Rejtman’s film Silvia Prieto as one of the reasons that he was able to open his eyes to the idea that there’s not only one way of making a movie, which was important for him to start looking for his own process. “I remember going to the cinema with my mother to see Silvia Prieto,” Piñeiro reflected, and although at first he was unaware of how big of an impact the film had on him at first, he felt like it had left an impression on him. “I remember watching it and feeling like they put my body in another position, I was feeling things differently and I was attracted to that, although not knowing exactly what it was,” he continued.
Hermia & Helena (2016)
Although part of the pool of alternative independent filmmakers in Latin America, Piñeiro still does see some similarities between his style and the style of older film studios. He noted that although nowadays there is a tendency to try and go through the filmmaking process quickly, he prefers to sit with a project for much longer, to “remain in a state of shooting” where he writes and shoots and then goes back to writing and then shooting again, which he sees as something that is closer to the “industrial era” of film production and direction. In this way, Piñeiro explained to the audience the ways in which he has slowly built his own way of thinking about the filmmaking process.
When speaking about the trajectory of his own film career, Piñeiro mentioned a handful of different places that have marked him and helped him move forward. The Universidad del Cine was where Piñeiro studied filmmaking and where he “cultivated his cinephilia,” but Piñeiro remarked that the institution has remained present in his life far beyond the years he was a student. It is a place that he still relies on to be able to go back to when in need, and it has helped him fund projects as well as employed him as a professor, which has created another way for him to interact with cinema and the new generations of filmmakers.
After the Universidad del Cine, Piñeiro has found himself living in different places that have also influenced the films he would come to make. “My movies are attached to my biography,” he said, and therefore Piñeiro has found himself making a film about New York, as he was living there, and then the Azores islands in Portugal. His goal is to engage with the geographies of the places that have had a large impact in his life. Moving from place to place also allows him to expand and keep moving and engaging with new ideas and environments. Each new place pushes the film forward and allows the film to exist.
Piñeiro uses Viola to exemplify the way he threads his hometown of Buenos Aires through his films. Instead of going for clichés of the city, he leans on smaller references, focusing on certain neighborhoods that he circulated through and also using his friends’ houses as familiar places to embed his stories. This way, not only does he map the city in the ways that it feels personal to him, but it becomes a way of using his own communities’ resources and friends’ generosity, again referring to the overarching spirit of collaboration that governs his filmmaking style.
As Gutiérrez and Piñeiro discussed these ideas around the filmmaking process and how the director has found his style and followed his own path, while also leaning on his community in a “bond of trust and friendship,” many important suggestions and references arose that may inform the ways in which we look at and think about the future of filmmaking, especially as we observe the world and its possible new patterns post-pandemic. Piñeiro’s shift towards a new cinematic object of study will be particularly interesting to follow.
Watch the full conversation:
