Cineastas by Mariano Pensotti (review)

For the past fifteen years Argentine director Mariano Pensotti has created extraordinary performances that use innovative and unexpected locations and set pieces, including a rotating round stage (The Past Is a Grotesque Animal), the spaces on a street (The Tide), different apartments inside a building (Interiors), and a train station (Sometimes I Think, I Can See You), among others. His most recent piece, Cineastas [Filmmakers], returned to his beginnings and his first love: the movies. In this production Pensotti built a stage that moved the audience among film, theatre, and lived experience as it simultaneously explored the lives of four filmmakers in Buenos Aires. Throughout the show the spectators experienced the circumstances that affect the films being created.

The plot is very simple: four filmmakers struggle to complete four different movies over the course of a year. The perfectly rendered set design by Mariana Tirantte allowed us to follow both sets of stories (that of the filmmakers and the plots of the movies) by dividing the stage into two levels—an elaborate split-screen of sorts. The lower level featured an interior setting, where each filmmaker lives. The upper level—white, minimalist, and versatile—constantly changed to convey the different stories and styles in which each artist creates his or her masterpiece. The stories delve into the universal issues that plague each individual filmmaker, such as death, solitude, love, or fear, allowing for a fictional portrait of Buenos Aires through these personal experiences.

One character, a director of commercial films, learns that he has an incurable disease and decides to change the comedy he is working on to include events in his personal life and explore the new sense of loss he is experiencing. Another, a director of experimental films, is separating from her husband while making a documentary about the separation of the Soviet Union through its film musicals. An up-and-coming indie director, who is also the daughter of a disappeared militant, is asked to make a film about one of the disappeared from the Argentinian Dirty War, who suddenly returns, alive, in 2013 and creates unbalance in the bourgeois life of his children. And a very poor filmmaker, who works at McDonalds, steals money to make a film that ridicules the multinational world and its prevalent imaginary.

Horacio Acosta, Juliana Muras, Valeria Lois, and Marcelo Subiotto in Cineastas. (Photo: Carlos Furman.)

The relationship between film and life, through theatre, pushes the audience to question how much of our reality is built through fiction. This becomes more evident as we are led to constantly question whether making the movie transforms the filmmaker’s life, or vice versa. After all, as is clearly stated in the play, we are what fiction has made of us. Each story and film intertwines as they seamlessly cut in and out of each narrative through the lives and fictions of the characters. It is an unwieldy text, with five actors that transition among several characters in eight stories. However, the piece is driven by its constant questioning of fiction and reality, an idea that is foundational for Pensotti’s generation—one that did not live under the repressive military dictatorship and has struggled with the fictions that have been built around the history of the nation. As Pensotti describes it, “we are a broken generation, incomplete” (as compared to their more political parents). The piece investigates the ephemeral, what remains of a lived life, and how it relates to the telling and understanding of the stories around us. Is a piece of art a time capsule that confines our lives for posterity? Or is it really our lives that are the vehicles through which art is immortalized, as we repeat things we have seen in artworks a hundred times before? Do our fictions reflect the world, or is the world a distorted projection of our fictions?

Javier Lorenzo, Horacio Acosta, Marcelo Subiotto, and Juliana Muras in Cineastas...