VERDICT: The sumptuously photographed documentary depicts the realities of a location film shoot while ruminating on filmmaking with the help of Robert Bresson.
In 2019, documentary filmmaker Samuel Moreno Alvarez followed his compatriot Juan Sebastian Mesa into the Southwestern Antioquia region of Colombia in order to capture the experience of Mesa shooting his fiction film The Rust. An artistic riff on a behind-the-scenes documentary, Alvarez’s resulting medium-length piece, Filming, adorns its patiently observational tone with a selection of quotes extracted from Robert Bresson’s book Notes on the Cinematograph – enriching the act of watching to create a meditation not only on filmmaking but self-expression and internal reflection. Screening as part of the Burning Lights Competition at Visions du Réel, the verdant environment only serves to amplify Filming’s quietly entrancing milieu.
Many of the sequences in Alvarez’s film are unremarkable in and of themselves. His camera watches the discussions preceding a newly arranged scene, watches crew members lugging equipment through the forest, and watches the prop department preparing the carcass of dead chicken with bright synthetic gore. The audience sees actors practicing their lines and others debating the need to have their hair cut – all against the sumptuous backdrop of the northern Colombian landscape. The fragments of Bresson meanwhile appear intermittently on screen as text, the meaning of each layering onto the previous and projecting a gradually accumulating context onto the proceedings regarding the relationships between filmmakers and actors and the motivations and considerations the whole crew is wrestling with.
At one time, a local man stumbles, inebriated, onto the set. His appearance is just one of several moments in which the realities of the world encroach into the supposedly hermetic realm of the production. Filming is a self-reflexive work that feels cognisant of the fact that such instants of unexpected action are impactful both to itself and The Rust. The correlation between the two films (one being made before the camera, one being made behind it) is permeated by the implications of Bresson’s words about direction and performance. While it may be difficult to discern if certain sequences are somewhat less verité than conscious enactment, that arguably makes Alvarez’s film all the more potent in its explorations of the filmmaking process.
Director, cinematography, sound: Samuel Moreno Alvarez
Producers: Alex Arbelaez, Samuel Moreno Alvarez
Editing: Daniel Cortes, Samuel Moreno Alvarez
Production companies: Monocyclocin, Tropico Atomico Films (Colombia)
Venue: Visions du Réel (Burning Lights Competition)
In Spanish
42 minutes
