Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Mexican director, has been widely celebrated for his innovative approach to storytelling. His 2000 debut, Amores Perros, was labeled a “hypertext film” for how its three main threads spiraled out of a central car crash, but were otherwise disconnected. In an interview where he discussed his new Lacma show, Sueño Perro – which sees Iñárritu return to hundreds of hours of footage that never made it into his debut movie – he shared that his father was the one who inspired his unique approach to film.
“My father was naturally a great storyteller,” Iñárritu told me via video from Los Angeles. “He always started with what was almost the end of the story, so he threw you a hook, but then he went back to the middle. He was a great storyteller, always finding ways to get new hooks here and there, to get you to listen to a long story.”
In the film installation Sueño Perro, which saw Iñárritu review 1 m ft of archived celluloid taken while making Amores Perros, he pushes his explorations of narrative even further, giving audiences what he alternatively refers to as “light sculptures” and a “dream” that emerged from bits and pieces of the raw materials of his lauded debut. The creation of Sueño Perro was a major process that took years of dedicated labor.
“I said to myself: ‘Well, maybe I can rescue things that never did make it, and maybe they mean something,’” Iñárritu said. “That was a seven-year process, to discover if there was something or not. The film [Amores Perros] is 2 hours and 34 minutes, and that’s around 18,000 feet of film. So 1m ft is a crazy amount of film. I wanted to shoot everything, I was probably running the camera all the time.”
Iñárritu, whose later films Birdman and The Revenant brought him two best director Oscars, was inspired to return to Amores Perros in part because of the film’s 20th anniversary, which saw Criterion release a remastered version. Watching the remaster, he saw that his movie had retained its punch after after all those years. “The bite of these dogs was still really, really bad,” he said. “It was fascinating to see that the film was still holding up so well.”
He also credits the propitious discovery that the archived recordings had been sitting for years in the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). “I was really blown away by that,” Iñárritu said, “because you never do that. The miracle was that the producers – Mónica Lozano, Tita Lombardo and Martha Sosa – decided to send everything that was left out of the editing room to the UNAM.”
Those seven years sifting through the footage recorded for Amores Perros and turning it into an installation piece gave Iñárritu a different kind of creative freedom, one that was quite separate from his work with film. Whereas even innovative movies are subject to the demands dictated by the need to tell a compelling story, with an installation piece he could break the pieces out from narrative and turn them into pure chunks of image and sound.
“It’s when you are liberated from the narratives that we are so addicted to – plot twists and all that – when you liberate the images from that, the images have to say something,” he said. “Not by serving any narrative, but by just being what I found. The way you remember a film is never complete, you always remember flickers, images, moments. That’s the way our memory works. So, this is kind of a representation of how our memory works when we remember a film – it’s fragments of light and memory that are not related, but in a way they mean something, they hopefully make you feel something.”
Sueño Perro is all about about letting go of cinematic plot and looking for a different kind of truth that can be captured on film. Iñárritu explained that he was indebted to the authors of the Latin American Boom – spearheaded by Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Julio Cortázar – who dared to tell stories in entirely new ways, constructing narratives that questioned the nature of our truths. Inspired by these writers, as well as Akiro Kurasawa’s movie Rashômon – in which different characters each tell their own version of a central murder – Iñárritu found his own understanding of how film can create its own version of our reality.
“Rashômon really made a huge impact on me, to know that there’s one single event observed in three different ways, and to tell completely different stories. One of the things that we have lost is that we have confused truth with reality. Reality does not give a damn about our truth or about our beliefs. Truth feels very personal, but truth is not reality. Reality is much more complex, so those films, from Rashômon to Amores Perros, are to observe one single thing and understand that reality does not actually exist, so we have just one slice of that event. And the world we are living is getting is very complicated because we are assuming that reality is what we believe, but that is not true.”
In searching for ways that moving images can put us in touch with the reality that goes beyond our personal truths, Iñárritu went to back to the cinematic basics that had been a mainstay of the medium for over 100 years, before the transition to digital. He purposely made Sueño Perro very much a tactile experience that involves real film and real projectors. Audiences enter into a tight space filled with smoke and light, as well as the characteristic sounds of Mexico City. He thinks that for those who have never lived in an age when it was normal to see film projected onto a screen at 24 frames per second, seeing movie projectors will be a revelation.
“I think one of the very powerful things in my point of view from this experiment is that you arrive to a place that is dark, and you confront these huge projectors that are dinosaurs, that are the magic lanterns, projecting shafts of light. The physicality of it is a statement against AI. Suddenly, the people feel alive in that room. The installation is very sensorial, and that’s what I was interested in, that young guys will understand how that flicker and that flame and that sound is super sensorial and sensual – that is part of cinema. It isn’t just just the tablet or the cell phone that you watch by yourself at night in your room – that is very castrating for our being.”
Iñárritu hopes that this experience of Sueño Perro will be a wake up call at a time when movies are increasingly seen at home on tiny screens, and when AI is increasingly integrated into the process of film-making. Being a director who really loves the old school materiality of film, Iñárritu expressed alarm at what AI may do to the movie industry.
“Now, with AI, we are arriving at a limit, where I think our senses will be so lacking in information that it will affect our ability to really learn from what we see and hear in a holistic, wholesome way. I think the crisis of AI will be the fact that we will start doubting everything we see on the screen. It will be so terrifying that it will force us to go back to basics, to just believe what we’ve really experienced with our bodies, that it really was a real thing … maybe I’m trying to be positive here, but it’s so terrifying that I would like to find something that possibly can bring us to something good about it … this is an anti-AI exhibition.”
Iñárritu worked on Sueño Perro throughout the creative process for his upcoming film Digger, headlined by Tom Cruise. He found that spending time sifting through all the excess footage of Amores Perros was a relaxing and helpful counterpoint to the pressures of making a major Hollywood movie.
“There’s so much pressure to finding the story, and that’s what I think was liberating about doing the installations, it was almost like a game,” he said. “It was very liberating to not have that financial pressure, and to be doing this in parallel. It was a great way to escape a little bit from [Digger]. I was just going back and time traveling time to 25 years ago and having a little bit of fun.”
As for Digger, Iñárritu couldn’t help but be a little star struck by working with Cruise. He expects the movie to be intense, but in a very different way that Amores Perros was. “It’s Tom Cruise!” he exclaimed. “It’s another kind of intensity, it’s very fun. It was an exhilarating experience, a really great experience.”
#Alejandro #González #Iñárritu #Amores #Perros #art #show #antiAI #exhibition #Alejandro #González #Iñárritu
