Ragazzi a Roma

What I do not express dies/ I don't want nothing to

die in me/ (…) a manic fever shakes me at the

thought of being late/ of wasting an instant...

Raúl Perrone, XXI century's Buenos Aires filmmaker,

takes Pier Paolo Pasolini as a pretext, in the literal

sense of the word; as a pre-existing text to take over,

also as an icon, to make it collide with other angels,

other stars, dark or radiant, of his cinema sky. Now

that the celluloid has just been extinguished, that any

ontology of the cinematic image has been in an

uncomfortable suspense, how to stand before the

death of cinema? Become a Neoclassical?

Neoprimitive? Neomodern? This does not seem to be

a dilemma for the Perrone’s cinema. The feverish

restlessness, his "manic fever at the thought of being

late", as does tell an adult character who speaks to

ragazzi gathered in a Ituzaingo's church steps,

pushes him to summon all spirits. Diverging times,

languages and dialects, Melies, Pasolini, Dreyer,

Leonardo Favio, Chinese shadows, Zeppelin, Handel

and techno-cumbia. The rubbing spike on the vinyl

record, the voices in reverse, the faces blurred in the

wake of the movement, as in a painting by Francis

Bacon; the chaotic friction of all resources is fair if it

can be integrated into a look. 

In the night sky we see

the flickering light of the stars in outer space. But

truthfully we see something else: from each star's

light has gone thousands of years from the remote

source to finally reach our retinas. Each star is at a

different distance. We then see, not the past, but the

many past, all together now. The starry sky is like the

cinema, an optical effect. Only there for a sight. That's

how happens with cinema times at Perrone's cinema.

That's why Pasolini, his dancing silhouette, his

bleeding and sacred voice, can coexist with Dreyer

figures and characters of contemporary teenagers,

crossed by piercings and recognizably South

Americans faces. Pasolini is a star that shines

together with others, all simultaneously, in the

perronean sky. Ragazzi is a possible translation of

P3ND3JO5, within the translatability that Perrone can

afford to himself. P3ND3JO5 has been a new

beginning in his films, as if an adult could be born

again: Ragazzi is an expansion and intensification of

certain proceedings initiated at P3ND3JO5, the

furious disturbance of all registers, loops, mash-ups

sound and visual analogies, multiple

superimpositions, reverse projections, shadows,

ghosts (that old word that defines so well the essence

of cinema), the juxtaposition of the diverse cadences

from the film tracking defective damaging to idle,

pollution of the poetic voice in a missed connection,

as if the film DNA enters in a phase of turbulence

completed by the work of an enraged god.

We are those gods, eternal and rounded / others

leave us but it does not matter, you know?/ (…)

Thousands of bodies are illuminated of gold /

sometimes of nacre, of greenish and bluish plants

/ the faces that remained fixed as ancient tattooes

/ as yellowish daguerreotypes / with a beautiful

humid perfume / the gate got opened to the fate of

the echoes of the ancients.

Ragazzi is presented as a symphony in two

movements, appealing again to the musical lexicon,

as it did with the "cumbiópera" P3ND3JO5. Each

movement has a distinct character: the first centered

in the ragazzi who shared last night with Pasolini, is a

dingy hue, tinged by the shadows of crime and a dark

plot, as if this piece was filmed trough poet's dark

glasses. The second movement takes place in a

space of gleaming sun, on the edge of a brook under

a bridge, attended by a group of young poor

wagoners in their vital enjoyment and pleasure. Also

hovers around the tragedy: youngsters in risk,

adolescence as the threshold of a possible death are

constant in this stage of perronean fantasy. But the

passage from the funeral poetry to erotic blast of

those young bodies caressed by the sun and air

freedom summer afternoon overlap even to the tragic

fate. The camera seems to reach ecstasy when

captures the angular contours of the boys silhouetted

against a sky that seems to worship them, their eyes

in trance, the irresponsible vitality of horses and dogs,

the sudden emergence of female beauty. With a bright

and glorious end, with kids defying the law of gravity,

the laws of thermodynamics and the inevitability of

death, emerging, reborn of water. Perrone's camera

sacralize these glowing, innocent faces.

Oscar Cuervo

Y por fin llega el gran momento: mañana domingo 19/10 se estrena mundialmente Ragazzi, la nueva película de Raúl Perrone, en el Festival de Cine de Roma. Y Raúl me honró con el pedido de que unas palabras mías acompañen a sus imágenes en el pressbook de la película que se distribuirá en el festival. La versión en castellano de este texto fue publicada originalmente acá.

RAGAZZI - PERRONE - TRAILER from Trivial Media on Vimeo.

Sobre Ragazzi: el 5 de octubre pasado entrevistamos a Perrone en La otra.-radio (ver y escuchar acá).  Y algo más sobre Fávula, la película anterior del Perro, también inédita entre nosotros, formará parte de de la Competencia Oficial de Largometraje del V Festival Pachamama - Cinema de Fronteira, que tiene lugar del 9 al 15 de noviembre en la ciudad de Rio Branco, Brasil, Estado de Acre.