They reflect the work and creative routine of the writers

PHOTO TÉLAM // DOCUMENTARY. They are available on various platforms.

BUENOS AIRES, 6 (Télam), (By Ana Clara Pérez Cotten). – From the anecdotes that marked the beginnings to the secrets that built the plot of the work, with advice for those who are just beginning to write but also with the first-person reconstruction of what they believe was central to their career, the documentaries and miniseries that tell the life and trajectory of writers invite from the platforms and the web to know the behind-the-scenes of literature through a diverse selection that these days allows one to approach the back room of authors such as Juan Carlos Onetti, Alejandra Pizarnik, Diana Bellessi or Joan Didion.
Netflix and HBO, but also Vimeo, Youtube and Canal Encuentro offer audiovisual productions that seduce the viewer with the possibility of investigating the always complex figure of writers, supported by testimonies but also by interpretations that allow approaching the work from dissimilar and creative perspectives .
The death of the American writer and journalist Joan Didion in the last week of December brought together many of her readers who were moved by her death and also those who, after the news, were curious to meet her, to see “Joan Didion: The center yields”, the 2017 documentary directed by Griffin Dunne, available on Netflix.
The production portrays in all its complexity “the poet of the great Californian emptiness”, as defined by the writer Martin Amis. In the first person, the writer – who managed with sensitivity and insight to tell something as intimate and at the same time universal as the pain of grief – reflects on her literary career and her hectic personal life in the intimate documentary that her nephew filmed. The author reviews, one by one, books such as “Troubled River”, “Democracy”, “As the Game Comes”, “The Year of Magical Thought” and “Blue Nights”. But he also gives an account of how he practiced journalism in sections of interviews with Annie Leibovitz, Patti Smith, Michelle Williams and Liam Neeson.
Also on Netflix you can see “Gabo, the magic of the real”, a 2015 documentary that investigates the origin of the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez and recounts his poor childhood in a small town in the north of his country. The film, directed by British Justin Webster and with testimonies from two of his readers-friends Fidel Castro and Bill Clinton, shows how the author of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” won the Nobel Prize for Literature and became a writer. internationally renowned. “Is this the most important moment of your life?” Asks a journalist after winning the Nobel. Gabo responds: “No. The most important moment of my life was when I was born.” Minutes later, the author of Aracataca responds without hesitation: “Winning the Nobel Prize was being able to finally dedicate myself to writing without anyone screwing me up.” At the end, when asked what to do to avoid death, he enunciates an infallible formula: “Write a lot”.
Within days of Netflix putting “Let’s Suppose New York is a City” online, the miniseries was already a viewing phenomenon and had cultivated viewers multiplying phrases and anecdotes. Fran Lebowitz and Martin Scorsese share the frame for the intelligent and acidic writer and comedian to unleash her eloquence. And although Lebowitz runs through his biography, he shares the limelight with the director of “Taxi driver” and “The Irishman” and with New York.
With 7 episodes of 30 minutes, she intersperses archive material with the present in which the author of books such as “Brief manual of urbanity” and “Metropolitan life” talks with her co-owner or visits the places she detests most in New York because she longs for the Big Apple of the 70s.
The audiovisual format, due to its narrative and its ability to articulate testimonies and archive material, also allows us to give an account of how an editorial phenomenon was born and developed. “A phenomenon called Elena Ferrante”, by the Italian director Giacomo Durzi, investigates through testimonies of authors such as Roberto Saviano or Jonathan Franzen in a certain paradox: one of the most popular writers of our time decided to remain anonymous. The documentary begins with a fragment in off of an interview with Hillary Clinton in which she confesses that she has been absolutely dazed by Ferrante’s “Neapolitan Tetralogy”, which she describes as “hypnotic” and says that she could not stop reading it. The documentary orbits around the expression “Ferrante fever” to capture the essence of a literary phenomenon whose popularity spreads with the magic and mystery that a pseudonym hides.
“Arthur Miller. Writer”, available on HBO, premiered in 2018 and traces the life of one of the great American writers and playwrights with his daughter, the filmmaker Rebecca Miller. With an intimate journey of record that is fed by interviews, private photos, letters and newspaper clippings, she shows the Miller father, the committed writer and the public figure who oscillated between the controversies and the love affair with Marilyn Monroe. This framework reveals his roots as an artist and how the main events of the 20th century shaped his life on a personal and political level.
Latin American literature also finds in the audiovisual format a way of accounting for its richness and complexity. “Never read Onetti” by Pablo Dotta, a co-production between Spain and Uruguay, can be seen on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMNzrpr4js8-
The violinist María Dorothea Muhr, who was her partner, and the writer Eduardo Galeano tell anecdotes while the singer-songwriter Fernanda Cabrera -responsible for music along with Jorge Drexler- analyzes in front of the camera how the figure of Onetti marked Uruguayan creators.
In the film some pen manuscripts of the author of “El astillero” are also discovered. There is the last note – a kind of farewell – that he wrote on March 27, 1993, a year before he died: “Perhaps my feeling of sorrow arises from the fact that when I wrote the last words of my books I always experienced a feeling of goodbye. Let them fix it, I will never read them, nor will I correct press proofs. “
Documentalist Andrés Di Tella is the author of “327 notebooks”, a film based on reading the diaries of the writer Ricardo Piglia, who died in 2017. The viewer of the documentary -which can be seen at https://vimeo.com/ondemand / 327cuadernos and which premiered in 2015, simultaneously on Public TV and the cinema – access the privacy of someone who is processing their life.
The film owes its name to the 327 diaries of the author, which he began to write during his adolescence and which were published in three books as “The diaries of Emilio Renzi”. “You could say that it is more a fable than a documentary and that Ricardo is the symbol of someone who is seeing what meaning he can give to his past. Those notebooks are a reincarnation of that past. We all reprocess the past and try to put together a story with the loose pieces because we need life to have meaning through those memories, “explained Di Tella.
Piglia, who from the beginning of the film announces that “there is nothing more ridiculous than the pretense of portraying one’s own life”, opens the doors of his life to Di Tella and shares with him his most intimate memories, since his father – who was imprisoned in 1955 for defending Perón- decided to escape with his family from Adrogué to Mar del Plata, until he was declared a neurological disease that continues to afflict him and prevents him from writing.
“Secrets of the garden”, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV3-kFNEV20 was made in 2012 by Cristian Costantini, Diego Panich and Claudia Prado.
The poet Diana Bellessi shares with the viewer a journey through some of the most important settings of her life: the patio of her Buenos Aires house and the streets of Palermo; the corners and loved ones of his hometown, Zavalla, and the house on an island in the Delta, the area where he took refuge during the dictatorship and where he goes to escape the city and write. His great passions: writing and plants.
In 2013, Virna Molina and Ernesto Ardito filmed “Alejandra”, available at https://vimeo.com/ondemand/alejandra, a documentary where life and work, tradition and innovation cross to tell the tragic life of Pizarnik. Difficult adolescence, love, loneliness are reflected in the documentary. The essayist Ivonne Bordelois says that her figure is close to that of Franz Kafka and intimate details that give dimension to the figure of the poet: she could not do simple things like pay bills or solve a paperwork because they felt that they could ruin her life.
Since its launch, Encuentro has dedicated part of its programming to account for national and regional literary creation. “Bodoc, memories of a magician, available at http://encuentro.gob.ar/programas/serie/9968#top-video, brings together reflections of the writer and poet from Santa Fe, who died in 2018. In 2000 and after Forty years he published his first novel “Los Días del Venado”, which would be part of the trilogy “La Saga de los confines” for which he received awards and distinctions
Bodoc was recognized as the Argentine revelation in the genre of fantasy literature: he combined the epic with the history of American cultures from a particular and passionate vision. “Death is present in my literature because it is present in life, there is no one without the other. There is only one way to make ourselves eternal: to love. You have to feel part of the whole and understand death as a transformation. I am leaving, but I return in the words, I return in the literature “, promises the writer, eternal, from the screen.