November 27 - December 1

“I’m interested in the world of prisoners.” – Lisandro Alonso

“The slow-moving minimalism of new Argentine cinema finds its poet and master in Lisandro Alonso.” – Deborah Young, Variety

Lisandro Alonso established his themes and method with La Libertad (2001), a slip of a film shot in nine days for very little money, which chronicles a single day in the life of Misael Saavedra, a young woodcutter Alonso met on his father’s farm. (The incongruous, semi-ominous thrash of techno percussion accompanying the credits would become an Alonso trademark, as would the subsequent avoidance of non-diegetic music.) So matter-of-fact and uninflected is Libertad’s recording of Misael’s daily routines, faithfully recreated from weeks of Alonso’s close observation of his actual life and edited so that several sequences seem to adhere as real time, that the film has been hailed as the apotheosis of Bazinian realism. Spare in dialogue – the first, a simple salutation, comes as a shock almost half an hour into the seventy-three-minute film – and attuned to the rhythms of daily existence (chopping, eating, shitting, sleeping, buying and selling), the film elicited inevitable claims of the boundary between fiction and documentary being blurred, collapsed, or straddled. But Alonso’s reliance on Bressonian synecdoche, both within the image (truncated framing) and within the narrative, and his exacting management of sound and image, suggest a reality heightened enough to leave all notions of a modern-day Flaherty behind.

If Lucrecia Martel is the Chekhov of the so-called New Argentine Cinema, there’s a touch of Tolstoy in Alonso’s portrait of this country peasant. Simple, authentic, uncorrupted, Misael is, unlike Alonso’s subsequent protagonists, gregarious in his solitude, which seems less innate than imposed by circumstance. By comparison, Argentino Vargas, the fifty-four-year-old principal of Alonso’s next film, Los Muertos (2004), appears pathologically opaque, his reticence and detachment a result of guilt, grief, or homicidal instincts, it is never clear. Vargas’s concealed emotions and motivation allow Alonso to explain nothing while manipulating narrative expectation and assumption as willfully as any genre director.

Like Misael in Libertad, Vargas is a non-actor whose character carries his real-life name, but whose being is subsumed more intensely and intensively