Andrés Di Tella and the Documentary of the "I"

IN THE SCOPE OF RICH AND ALWA 125 YS renewed Argentinean documentary filmmaking, the work of Andrés Di Tella stands out for reflecting about the documentary genre while at the same time making us see reality according to his gaze.

Di Tella began as a video artist and also worked for television studios before dedicating himself to making feature films with very diverse cultural and social themes. However, all of his productions have in common their desire to explore the encounter between the fictional and the documentary.

The narrative structure of his first feature film, Montoneros, a Story, is based on a trip that takes advantage of spatial displacement to instate a long dialogue with Ana Testa, who remembers her militancy and the posterior repression of which she was a victim. In this transfer in the direction of the past, Di Tella aims to escape the traditional political documentary thought of as a testimony or a document in order to show the viewer the vital experience of militants, charged with ideas but also emotions, humor and much fragility.

Already in this first film, the filmmaker introduces several of the elements that he works with throughout his filmography. On one side is the option of showing intellectual and technical operations that allow him to develop the films he makes; on the other is working subjective enunciation within the documentary.

In this sense, The Television and I implies a landmark in his filmography. It is there that he opens the toolbox he works with for the audience's gaze, that is, the audiovisual material he uses and the contradictory way in which this material is built and ordered.

Di Tella presents himself in the first person to express the tensions between his conscious purposes and the way in which they reframe themselves during the creative process. For this, he puts at our disposal the difficulties and passions that awaken in the path of knowledge.

Like The Television and I is a film in which Di Tella explores his relationship with the industrial project of his paternal family, Fotografias centers on memory as a maternal legacy. In the first, the emphasis is on showing how the public and the private are articulated in the scope of a family in Argentina is a synonym of industrial development and aesthetic vanguard. In the second film, the filmmaker moves in Hindu culture to encounter a spirituality that comes out as very distant, though it brings him closer to his mother.

The diptych does not put into play this autobiographical raw material to move the viewer, but to absolutely break the tradition of the classic and expository documentary, looking within, interconnecting the facts that want to know with complex and chaotic networks in which personal, social, historical and cultural reasons intervene.

His last creation, Blows of the Ax assumes the richness of the documentary is rooted in the possibility that the viewer sees the process of knowledge in which the filmmaker moves in order to appropriate a determined reality. This time Di Tella is obliged to plunge into the abyss, as the object of observation is the artist Claudio Caldini and his work. Thus, in these images the certainties and uncertainties of two creative universes that always experiment on the limit of artistic conceptions intertwine.

In summary, Andrés Di Tella produced a body of work that is full of surprises, including a systematic theoretical reflection on the genre. Innovation and self-consciousness are the words that best characterize his works.

Clara Kriger

	The Devil's Country ANDRÉS DI TELLA (ARGENTINA/ ARGENTINA, 2008)
	Photographs ANDRÉS DI TELLA (ARGENTINA/ ARGENTINA, 2007)
	Blows of the Ax ANDRÉS DI TELLA (ARGENTINA/ ARGENTINA, 2011)
	The Television and I ANDRÉS DI TELLA (ARGENTINA/ ARGENTINA, 2002)
	Macedonio Fernández ANDRÉS DI TELLA (ARGENTINA/ ARGENTINA, 1995)
	Montoneros, a Story ANDRÉS DI TELLA (ARGENTINA/ ARGENTINA, 1995)
	Prohibited ANDRÉS DI TELLA (ARGENTINA/ ARGENTINA, 1997)
	Reenactment of the Model’s Crime ANDRÉS DI TELLA, FABIÁN HOFMAN (ARGENTINA/ ARGENTINA, 1990)