#pere portabella

[weirdlookindog]

Christopher Lee and Soledad Miranda in Cuadecuc, vampir (1971)

[pierppasolini]

Cuadecuc, vampir (1971) // dir. Pere Portabella

[litafficionado]

The Supper/El Sopar(1974) dir. Pere Portabella

[davidhudson]

Happy 97th, Pere Portabella.

[marcogiovenale]

cuadecuc, vampir / pere portabella. 1971

>>> https://youtu.be/kwD1G2Vo198?si=sEyuHawzEKcLllXd

[frnndlcs]

Die Stille vor Bach, Pere Portabella, 2007

[aschenblumen]

Película disponible para ver online en 1080p, con subtítulos en español incrustados.

[alwaysalreadyangry]

Seeing a lot of Goncharov content but only real 70s movie heads will know that Spanish director Pere Portabella was meant to be making a behind-the-scenes documentary of the film which turned into a whole other thing. It's called GOMORRA CALLS.

Scorsese is in it and so are his parents, for some reason. At first you're just like oh this is cute, they're bringing food to the set, taking an interest in what's going on. But it becomes this quite... Creepy reality-bending thing? His mother keeps cryptically referring to weird telephone calls they've been getting at home, and his dad keeps moving things on the set, you can only see what he's doing if you spend a lot of time watching him at the edge of the frame while someone else is talking. And sometimes they'll get to the set in the morning and find things left in the wrong place, there's a weird smear on a camera lenses, one of the actors has lost half the pages from the copy of the script they've been learning from.

I think the idea was meant to be that they're being hounded by the realfe mafia for making the movie. But it almost seems like they're being haunted by the ghosts of mafia members at times. Like, Scorsese's hotel room will be freezing cold, and he's being sent anonymous messages at the front desk in a way that just doesn't make sense. He says, "I'm not sure if someone is trying to stop this movie... Or if they just want to be part of it. If they want to look at a prop in the wrong place and just say, hey, that was me."

At the time of its limited run in the US, Scorsese said he didn't really know what Portabella was making, fueling theories that the film was true documentary and not fictionalised. But it's listed as fiction on Portabella's Wikipedia page now, and the prevaing theory is that it must be made up. It's not been included on any of the Goncharov DVD or Blu-Ray packages but it was supposed to be a Criterion Channel exclusive last year... It never showed up, and there are rumours it's to do with audio licensing issues. But there's a VHS rip floating around out there if you know where to look.

[rozieramati]

Nocturno 29 (Pere Portabella, 1968)

[cinearchitecture]

Cuadecuc Vampir (Pere Portabella, 1970)

[shiningwizard]

The Silence Before Bach (Pere Portabella, 2007)

Big bang Bach. Before: nothing. After: all. Makes a convincing argument, although i think the music is doing most of the work here. But the filming, the choice, style and flow of the vignettes, serves it dutifully. From this guy's fingers, outward to ears, patronage, preservation, fingers able to replicate, history and divinity. Keys, fingerboards, tone holes impacted in some order, at some strength, at some duration, whether mechanically, physically or providentially, and look how life and the world can be. It's all very affecting, the more i think about it.

[aaroncutler]

Sessão Mutual Films: Os vampiros de Luis Ospina e Pere Portabella [Mutual Films Session: The Vampires of Luis Ospina and Pere Portabella]

November 4th: The link above leads to Portuguese-language information about the 26th edition of the Mutual Films Session, co-curated and organized by me and Mariana Shellard, whose screenings will take place between November 6th and 30th at the São Paulo-based unit of the Instituto Moreira Salles.

The event places into dialogue four films by two important contemporary all-genre artists (documentary, fiction, and experimental) whose works often deal with vampirism as a sociopolitical metaphor. The Colombian film and video-maker Luis Ospina (1949-2019) will be represented with the short mockumentary Agarrando pueblo (aka The Vampires of Poverty) (co-directed by fellow Cali native Carlos Mayolo) and the feature-length horror film Pure Blood, both of which discuss the vampiristic divisions along race and class lines in Colombia in the decades following the country's prolonged civil war known as “La Violencia”. The Catalan filmmaker and producer Pere Portabella will be represented with the feature-length experimental film Vampir-Cuadecuc and the shorter video piece Mudanza, both of which reflect in allegorical fashion on the legacy of Spain’s four-decade-long military dictatorship run by the general Francisco Franco. Each one of the two programs will include films by both directors, with the melancholier and more mysterious Program 1 containing a pairing of Mudanza with Pure Blood, and the more overtly playful Program 2 offering Agarrando pueblo (whose title can be roughly translated as “taking advantage of people”) together with Vampir-Cuadecuc. (In Catalan, the word “cuadecuc” means “worm’s tail”, and it also refers to the end of a reel of film stock.)

The November 7th screening of Program 2 will be followed by a public talkback with two Brazilian scholars who have previously worked with these directors’ cinemas. The university professor and film critic Lúcia Ramos Monteiro was responsible in 2017 for the curatorship of a large retrospective of Ospina’s film and video work that was held in Rio de Janeiro in 2017 and in the presence of the director. The journalist and editor Claudio Leal has met Portabella on several occasions and formally interviewed him for a profile piece published in 2021 in the Folha de S. Paulo (the Brazilian newspaper with perhaps the finest arts coverage). During the preparations process up to now, each specialist on one filmmaker has expressed pleasure with getting to know better the work of the other.

Ospina and Portabella superficially seem to be quite different artists, with the Colombian prone to black humor and myriad pop culture references, and the Spaniard moving between oblique and didactic stylistic modes with frequent gestures towards the world of high art. We have therefore been surprised to find that admirers of one also frequently admire the work of the other. This is possibly due in part to how the artworks made by both filmmakers draw upon ideas of subversion that challenge conventional approaches to storytelling in ways that engage the viewer’s critical thinking. The vampire is thus crucial in the works both of Ospina and of Portabella, both as a figure and as a metaphor – an entity that violates boundaries and comfort zones as a way of giving itself life. This entity (the vampire, the vampiric ruler, the vampiric artwork, the artist) is inevitably all at once dangerous, attractive, and aware of its own power.

The filmmakers detail the ideas behind their works in two supplementary texts that have been translated into Portuguese for our website. One is a monologue by Portabella about the making of Vampir-Cuadecuc, which was originally delivered in Castilian in 2017 and included as a video interview on the Second Run DVD edition of the film. The other is a career-spanning interview with Ospina that was conducted by the Polish-American film critic and programmer Ela Bittencourt during a retrospective that the filmmaker received in 2018 at the festival DocLisboa and subsequently published in English in the magazine Film Comment. Both men speak lucidly and generously about their work in these pieces, as they were known for doing throughout their careers. However, when it comes to truly understanding the potency of their films, something emerges that is also the case with vampirism: No rational explanations suffice.

[drzito]

Esta semana, especial documentales.

El sopar (Pere Portabella, 2014)

[365filmsbyauroranocte]

Pont de Varsòvia (Pere Portabella, 1990)

[davidhudson]

Happy 96th, Pere Portabella.

[dare-g]

Cuadecuc, Vampir (1971)