24/02/2024 - BERLINALE 2024: Argentinian writer-director Matías Piñeiro shows that a cinema of fragments is indeed possible

Matías Piñeiro’s work has been questioning the limits of film adaptations for more than 15 years, always with increasing sophistication. In 2020, he premiered Isabella [+see also:
trailer
film profile], the latest instalment in a series of films exploring the female roles in Shakespeare’s comedies, where he focused on “Measure for Measure”. The film won a Special Mention in the Encounters sidebar in Berlin, a nod of approval towards the expansive oneiric worlds conjured by the New York-based Argentinian director that would have delighted even the Bard himself. But even for audiences unfamiliar with Piñeiro’s idiosyncratic style and approach to doubling, text-to-image reverberations, and metatextual layers, You Burn Me [+see also:
interview: Matías Piñeiro
film profile] — his latest film premiering in the Encounters section of this year’s Berlinale — can be a suitable entry point. 

In the opening shot and title card of the film, two Ancient Greek words become three in English with the turn of a page. Sappho’s Fragment 38 in the Aeolic original and Anne Carson’s English translation exist on separate pages of a book that is, effectively, Piñeiro’s film unfolding. The in-between of those pages, like the cuts between sequences, hold a whole world together. You Burn Me is based on two literary sources and their interconnectedness: one is Sappho’s poetry (or rather the fragments of it that remain) and the other is Cesare Pavese’s 1947 text “Dialoghi con Leucò,” more specifically the chapter “Sea Foam,” where Sappho herself converses with a nymph named Britomartis. Pavese’s text is a dialogue about death, love, and desire, and the point of convergence between the two female figures is a similar death: a fall off a cliff and into the sea.

Like all of Piñeiro’s films, this 64-minute work finds new ways to be discursive not only when it comes to words, but with images and sound too. What makes the dialogues come to life is the multiplicity of ways they are made present: the same Bolex camera records (in the hands of cinematographer Tomas Paula Marques and the director) silent snippets of life, streets, skies, waves, books, hands, and occasionally, the faces of Piñeiro mainstays Gabi Saidón (as Sappho) and María Villar (as Britomartis). Shots appear and reappear, tuning in and out of a voiceover reading of Pavese’s text that follows a loose, dreamy logic, inviting the viewer to listen with their eyes. A synaesthetic experience frames a film that both relies on text and negates it in favour of image and sound, the music composed by Saidón herself. 

You Burn Me embraces the fragmentary form and imagines a cinema with footnotes; it asks whether a film can not only operate on multiple levels of meaning and representation, but whether it’s possible for these levels to interact and give birth to new shapes and forms themselves. While all this sounds highly conceptual, engaging with Piñeiro’s work is as easy as breathing: its beauty and rigour are never at odds with one another. Like Sappho’s fragments which testify to the absence surrounding their few words, You Burn Me can conjure up a whole universe that is of course, fictional, but also truthful to a certain extent, by inhabiting the lack instead of trying to fill it up. Desire is like a cracked bowl: it spills and spills.

You Burn Me is produced by the Buenos Aires-based Trapecio Cine and the Spanish Películas mirando el techo, in co-production with San Sebastián’s Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola.