José Luis Guerín

IMDb User wrote:
This correspondence, or exchange of letters and video diaries between acclaimed filmmakers Jonas Mekas and José Luis Guerin is extremely potent, there’s sorcery at play in the mixture of the two. Together they’re light and dark. Mekas knows life’s joys, and is always a participant in what he films, Guerín is a detached observer, cold, present only as a black mote, reflected in the eye of one of his subjects. Guerín shoots in black and white and strives for formalism, Mekas loves hazard, loves his chaotic hand-held colour camera. Jonas Mekas felt that his images were inferior to those of Guerín, but a picture of his son Sebastian devouring a pickle, followed by Jonas on the deli sausage and wine, and then a cheeky close up of Goethe’s Faust; which of them Faust and which Mephistopheles? That one shot set me thinking about the nature of art and the privilege of artists, and could be interpreted in any one of several fruitful ways.Read More »

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Poetic approach to the origins and mythical configuration of Lanzarote.Read More »

An unnamed young man arrives in the foreign city of Strasbourg for reasons unstated. He waits at a hotel, visits a café, sketches passersby… Eventually his motives are revealed, but it is not a traditional narrative that Guerín is after so much as the urban experience of watching, waiting, absorbing. Out of these materials Guerín builds a spellbinding film that reminds us of cinema’s powerful ability to evoke the tugs of memory, desire and the transitory. An extraordinary city film, Sylvia almost entirely eschews dialogue to instead give a symphonic voice to the city itself through a rich and fully immersive soundtrack of urban sounds, explosions of music and strangeRead More »

Filmmaker Jose Luis Guerin documents his experience during a year of traveling as a guest of film festivals to present his previous film. What emerges is a wonderfully humane and sincere portrayal of the people that he meets when he goes off the beaten track in some of the world’s major cities. (IMDB Plot Summary)Read More »