A Film Returns: Alberto Laiseca at the Biblioteca Nacional

A film I made in 2004 on Alberto Laiseca will be shown as part of a cycle at the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires.

There is something particular about a work returning to the city where it was made, and to an institution that has long held a central place in Argentina’s intellectual life. Time rearranges the meaning of things. What once was immediate becomes, unexpectedly, part of a larger continuity.

At the time, Laiseca wrote me a letter after seeing the film. His response, characteristically his own, resists summary. It reads less like a commentary than like an extension of his thought—unfiltered, expansive, and unwilling to resolve itself.

What follows is an excerpt:

“This film is existential. That is to say existentialist on one hand and essentialist (sic) on the other. The Vietnam section, which may seem like a joke, is on the contrary one of the most important. I volunteered for that war. Not being accepted was a dark moment in my life, because I needed to go there to follow an accelerated ontological course. Perhaps it was what saved me from death or mutilation. I will never know. In any case my life was a long Vietnam. For some of the people who accompanied me as well. Someone died in combat — despite the innocent qualifier of ‘non-combatant female personnel assimilated to the Base.’ Don’t come to me with nonsense. And now I carry the wounds of the war of old age. I look at myself in the film and cannot believe I am so old; it must be something temporary, my head tells me. Because just yesterday at five in the afternoon I was twenty-three. Sometimes I can look at myself as if it were someone else. Observing myself, the first thing I said was: ‘Christ, they really gave it to this guy hard.’ I don’t know how to close these lines. The best thing is not to close them.”

Alberto Laiseca — July 2004

The screening will take place within the program El monstruo en pantalla grande, organized in the context of the exhibition Laiseca, el iniciado.