In "En construccion" film on the transformation of a neighborhood People from Barcelona. Jose Luis Guerin reports on urban changes implemented in our major cities and their consequences ...
The "Barrio Chino" and mythical central district of Barcelona with its working population. A place that collected immigration, whether or Andalusian Maghreb, attracted by the rich and industrious Barcelona, where sailors on a spree rubbed shoulders with prostitutes in the many bars that lined the narrow streets ... The "Barrio Chino" who served the setting for Peter Andre Mandiargues in his novel "the margin" or to Eduardo Mendoza "The Mystery of the Enchanted Crypt" whose main character is a pure child of the "Chino" ... A neighborhood was born and died with the century, like Jose Luis Guerin wrote the highlight of his film ...
Following major rehabilitation, construction, related to the 1992 Olympics, the face of changing the center of Barcelona. The "Barrio Chino" victim too of these changes gradually withering, is reduced to a trickle, is emptied of its substance ... Guerin committed in "En construccion" to show the predicted death of the neighborhood through the prism of a site. "En construccion "For eighteen months following the works of construction of a building in the heart of the" Chino ".
To account for a quarter of his life, his past, his soul, his ghost, nothing better than letting people speak for themselves ... What is Jose Luis Guerin, disappearing behind their words. There is a willingness among Guerin attempt to account for things from the inside. No adding comments, explanations are added to these words. The director adopts
so the choice to let us live events and changes through a few recurring characters, an old man, a little girl, a prostitute and her boyfriend ... Guerin weaves time of his film on the time of construction, which becomes the scanning of all things and in which the sequences come with aggregate figures ...
For them as for other residents, this site acts as a trigger, acts as a catalyst becomes the place to be.
the example of the discovery of a Roman burial, his excavations, which becomes the attraction of the moment. Each inhabitant will comment.
These bones form a bridge to ancient times and issue a bitter, some of these people will not die in the place where they spent their lives, expropriated or relocated elsewhere ... They also are building ties with emptiness, loss and impermanence of all thing, José Luis Guerin queue elsewhere metaphor with excerpts from a film "Land of the Pharaohs" by Howard Hawks, it seems, on the subject of pyramid building ... dream of immortality, end a world ... The reflection of an inhabitant "was seen on the bodies and we do not know ...." This recurrence of past time but also next time the movie runs.
As this church, which gradually disappear as the field work is progressing as buried in the strata of the past ... Guerin plays in this film that partition of passing time, rising static shots in stills: the seasons , clocks marking time, of progress, but more finely with the plans on the walls and the materials they contain. Shots of great plasticity but come searching and update the layers of memory, layers of wallpaper, traces of frames ... These materials are like a palimpsest of memory qu'exhume Jose Luis Guerin delicately, layer after layer ... plans on different materials, bricks, cement, plaster, dirt, pallets, are just beautiful.
Jose Luis Guerin not only local residents. We also passed on the side of the yard workers. A world apart with its own life, its own rules, isolated from the rest. This passage from the side of the site enables us to live Guerin concerns of these workers, their newspapers, their love of work, procurement of know-how. The site remains a place where generations are working side by coast, where workers organized a fraternity, where there is an amazing Moroccan laborer Marxist ... Architects, developers, real instigators of the project are also absent from this film, Guerin puts his camera on the side of the little people.
The compositions of plans chosen by Guerin reinforce this impression of separation: surcadrages, vision obstructed, disrupted by either a balcony, a scaffold, a louver. Two worlds coexist alongside one another, without communication at first ... Everyone is thus observed. The building s'allégorise as a besieged fortress, printing strengthened at the end of the film by security fears of potential buyers ... who is in prison, which is locked? These frameworks
they begin, they portend for future relations between newcomers often from the Barcelona bourgeoisie and the old neighborhood?
gradually by the proximity, links are forged between workers and residents, sketches of dialogue, the walls descend, relationships are created between a worker and a young girl from a girl whose site serves 'playground with the neighborhood gang of kids and a foreman, a young North African who ends up getting hired, but these links are ephemeral, workers are just a rough time ... These meetings fictional sketch real potential ...
It never ceases to irrigate his film of these possibilities of fiction, stories to come or probable and this encounter between the worker and the young girl, between the girl and the foreman, but also with the prostitute, her boyfriend Juan and Ivan living in its fangs, recurring characters that we follow in their daily Ivan ... he will seek work, commit it to the Legion, will they stay in the district after their precarious housing squatters or killed ? Fiction as that old man who wanders, currency on a past invented from scratch, which takes all its misery by charging the magnifying objects ridiculous and without values found here and there at random from his travels ...
ago at Guerin , like Pedro Costa, a love, a look that makes each of his characters worthy ...
Jose Luis Guerin played with our imagination, it opens spaces with primers proposal narrative, but goes further and Guerin plays the possibility of staging, open a gap, building bridges. Imperceptibly, something starts to change, a game is established, staged and the film slides on the side of fiction, but with sweetness and lightness, and this in several sequences, and then goes back to the documentary the same way, without breaking.
The magic and leave us "stuck" to these bits of stories, those unfinished pieces that constitute the memory of a world, a neighborhood, a life ...
Dvd Release March 20, 2010
"In Construccion"
Dir: Jose Luis Guerin
Duration 125mn
Format 4 / 3-color-Pal-Multizone
OV subtitled in French
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