Du verbe aimer marks the start of the self-reflective documentary in Peru. In this essay, Mary Jiménez summons up her past and her present. While the soundtrack tells of her efforts to win her mother’s love, the images bring us face to face with her grief. Using films with different emulsions and tones, she visits the streets of Lima, her old school, the mining areas and the psychiatric hospital where she was admitted. With little rituals, interviews and recreations, Jiménez offers up a fragmented chronicle of love and death.
Narcisa Hirsch, a pioneer of Argentine experimental cinema, made a series of intimate films for her girlfriends and family that until very recently had not been shown outside a domestic setting. Andrea 1973 is a birthday present: memories, songs, photographs, genealogies, film archives from the recent and distant past, games and costumes, a garden over the years and, of course, the voice of the filmmaker, who at one point tells her daughter: “I wanted to be alone with you through this, through what we are seeing.”
Du verbe aimer, Mary Jiménez, 1984, 16mm, 77min, Original version with Spanish subtitles; Andrea 1973, Narcisa Hirsch, 1973, 16mm, 9 min.
DCP screening.
Copies provided by Centre de l’Audiovisuel à Bruxelles and Filmoteca Narcisa Hirsch, respectively.
Acknowledgements: Tomás Rautenstrauch.
