Lettre d'un cinéaste ou le retour d'un amateur de bibliothèques

Through a narrator with a frivolous and seemingly deliberately fallacious status (that of a "library enthusiast"), Lettre d'un cinéaste ou le retour d'un amateur de bibliothèques (Letter from a Filmmaker or the Return of a Library Enthusiast) presents itself as a potential series of commonplaces typical of an exile's return to his native land, which we might at first believe to have been pastiched or self-parodied by Raúl Ruiz. : here, the evocation of the very real context of his departure under Pinochet, followed by the return to his childhood home and reunions with past acquaintances years later. But beneath this programmatic aspect, there simultaneously unfolds a quest for a memory, a missing color, a book, then a forgotten poem that gradually plunge us into the labyrinthine and multifaceted structure of Time as reality, intimate dream, and collective unconscious. The principle of return finds its expression in the poetic act, that of Ruiz's film, but also in the lost and then found poem that the narrator searches for or pretends to search for; a "pink book" which turns out to be a collection by the Chilean-Spanish professor and writer Juan Uribe Echevarría, which we have found and attempted to translate its very last line, as it seems to reflect, in depth, the dual nature of memory which is both object and subject, a consubstantial destination to the quest that animates or torments it:

"Finally, I saw a mollusk out of its shell, and through the reflections of the sun that resembled a twilight; this shining muscle moved with determination, but lost its luster due to the density of the wind, and as it did not find a crucible, it disappeared with the day." *

Simon Galiero
Filmmaker, author and editor
of the documentary journal Communs.site

* Cantos a lo divino y a lo humano en Aculeo, pages 142-143, verse from the repertoire of José Manuel Martínez, singer of Pintué