On the founding of cinematic movements with Argentine poet, painter, filmmaker, theorist, teacher, and utopian Fernando Birri.

By B. Ruby Rich

Long ago and far away, cinema changed forever. How long ago? The end of World War II. How far away? Rome. The movement that merits hyperbolic claims was Italian neorealism, the cinematic response to a world indelibly altered and which itself altered the future of the movies. Italian neorealism, with its emphasis on real-life locations and nonprofessional actors and new forms of narrative, led to the French new wave and the New Latin American Cinema movements.

Everyone seems to know all about the French new wave, the cinematic revolution that started in the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma magazine and spread to the screen via Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless and François Truffaut's The 400 Blows. Comparably little is remembered of the New Latin American Cinema, a group of films that brought to their own countries a parallel sense of identity, excavating powerful myths, showing the reality of people's lives, and throwing off antiquated formulas in favor of radical new styles and anticolonial messages. A few films may survive in the memory or at least the history books: Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas's The Hour of the Furnaces, from Argentina, Tomás Guttiérez Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment, from Cuba, Glauber Rocha's Antonio das Mortes, from Brazil. What those films have in common is a devotion to a particularly Latin American cinematic aesthetic, variously termed "an aesthetic of hunger" and "an imperfect cinema," a technically stripped-down but imaginatively embossed filmmaking hurled like a celluloid broadside into the social reality of underdevelopment.

There's a great untold story of how the aesthetics and politics of Rossellini and company jumped the Atlantic from Italy to Latin America in 1956, beating the nouvelle vague to the punch. There's only one man who can tell it - and he happens to be here in San Francisco at the moment: Fernando Birri, the charismatic septuagenarian who's traveled the globe like a Johnny Appleseed of cinematic inspiration.

Hold the saga, however, and imagine instead the man himself. The first thing you'd notice is the beard, a touch that has probably meant different things at different times - rebel, artist - but today makes him look a bit like Ian McKellen in The Lord of the Rings, a bit like a biblical patriarch, and hopefully not, for his sake, like an airline passenger about to get snagged by the profilers. Next up are the interminably twinkling eyes, reflecting the unblinking generosity with which Birri views the world. As often as not, his trademark hat is in evidence. Actually, it's now a duplicate hat - ever since he threw the last one in the air "like a bullfighter," as Birri described it to me mid-reenactment, at a Swedish film festival where the audience, acting more like the Pacific Bell Park crowd on a home-run day, swallowed it as a souvenir. The abashed festival director presented him with a new Borsalino in apology.

Birri is in the Bay Area this year thanks to a fellowship at Stanford University, where he's teaching courses on Latin American cinema and his own work. Chatting with him one afternoon in the Presidio office of the San Francisco Film Society, I notice how language rolls off his tongue in a nearly untranslatable literary Spanish that floats through the air. Poet, painter, filmmaker, theorist, teacher, utopian. Former puppeteer, agitator, polemicist, exile. Recently encountering danger of sainthood. If the San Francisco International Film Festival is really running the risk of absconding with its own reputation, it chose wisely for its Persistence of Vision awardee this year: Fernando Birri is a filmmaker so principled, so important, and so underrecognized that no festival honoring him could possibly find its virtue impugned. It was Birri who crossed and recrossed the Atlantic as a young man and created, in Santa Fe, Argentina, a new Argentine cinema.

Talking with Birri, I rediscover the aura I've already experienced on several occasions around the world in his presence. Birri brings to even the most prosaic interaction the same attentiveness, openness, and invention that he brings to his films. He also brings the same optimism. Even with Argentina in political and economic meltdown ("the most punished country in Latin America," he bemoans), he's sanguine. The new filmmaking renaissance under way in Argentina and the new young filmmakers who have emerged there - Lucrecia Martel with La cienága, for example, or Pablo Trapero with Mundo grúa - are reviving the originality for which he once fought, bathing images with the same deep love of people and place. Never jealous or bitter, he salutes it. "This is the future," he says, beaming. It's more proof for his theory that out of the darkest hours, and only then, come shining opportunities for cinematic genius.

Reflecting on the evolution of the New Latin American Cinema movement sends Birri into the voluminous pages of a book on his oeuvre. He's looking for an essay he once wrote (he's as known for his writings as for his teaching and films) that added an extra "nuevo" to the movement's title. Now, Birri says, any such essay would have to be retitled again. It's the "nuevo, nuevo, nuevo, nuevo" movement by now. It just keeps being reinvented. At the Guadalajara Film Festival last month, I heard a rumor that a new Cuban film, Nada, had been selected for the Cannes Directors' Fortnight. It's a first feature by Juan Carlos Cremata Malberti, who, as it happens, was in the first class of Cuban students taught by Birri in the '80s. So, he was Birri's student? I imagine a paragraph here about the master and his disciples. Nope. Birri, it seems, does not believe in students or teachers. "No maestros, only collaborators." More hierarchies bite the dust.

Birri himself has continued filmmaking - thanks here to the German producers who've made that possible - but, with a nod to his age perhaps, he's been focusing on history. One recent film, The Century of the Wind, is based on the great Uruguayan cultural critic Eduardo Galeano's trilogy of novels exposing the colonial and neocolonial history of Latin America. Last year's Che: Death of Utopia? (note the deliberate question mark) returned to a subject he'd already mined once before in Mi hijo el Che, a long interview with the martyred revolutionary's father that tries to restore the man to the myth; this time around Birri examines the opposite end of that spectrum, with interviews bent on discovering just what Che means to people today.

Like Che, Birri is an Argentine. His own story begins at the beginning, with his birth on March 13, 1925, in the town of Santa Fe in central Argentina. His grandfather was an Italian anarchist who emigrated there; his father was a professor with a left-leaning library, and his mother, who died when he was 10, was an artist and a hatmaker (the beloved sombrero explained). He still speaks of his grandparents, too. "My five grandparents," as he says, referring to the Guaraní woman his mother's railroad worker father took up with while traveling. They had a family life filled with artistic ferment. His aunt Otilia taught him piano; his uncle Ramón taught him painting. As a university student, he began to work in theater, acting and directing, and also continued his lifelong passion for writing poetry. During that time he was part of a traveling puppet theater loosely based on the example of Federico García Lorca's own troupe, La Barraca.

Like many of his generation, who came of age as WWII was coming to an end, Birri was filled with a passion for communicating and saw the movies as the obvious medium. In 1945 he founded the Cine Club de Santa Fe. The contagious fervor of Italian neorealism was sweeping the world. For a young filmmaker at that time, one who rejected the glossy moneymaking machine called Hollywood, in the belly of the beast that was anticommunist '50s America, there was only one place to go: Rome's legendary Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. In 1950, then, Birri performed a return migration back to Italy, the Birri family's native land, and enrolled at the cradle of modern cinema itself, where he studied with the likes of Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini. His roommate, as destiny would have it, was a young would-be screenwriter by the name of Gabriel García Márquez.

Birri worked as a screenwriter, actor, and assistant director to De Sica, Zavattini, and other Italian directors. Afterward, instead of returning directly to Argentina, he began his lifelong pattern of roaming the globe. He stopped in Mexico en route back to Argentina and worked with the famous filmmaker of Mexico's golden age, Emilio "El Indio" Fernandez. Back home, Argentina's military government was seeking a transition to constitutional rule; for a short time post-Perón, first with Gen. Pedro Eugenio Aramburu and then with President Arturo Frondizi in charge, Argentine political and economic life seemed promising. So Birri returned home, hung his shingle (and his hat) in Santa Fe, and began translating neorealism into an Argentine vernacular.

Who can explain what turns ideas into actions in particular places at particular times? From 1956 to 1963, Birri directed the Instituto de Cinematografía de la Universidad del Litoral, the now-legendary filmmaking workshop dedicated to movies anchored in the actual conditions of the people of Santa Fe. The institute produced filmic essays on housing conditions and work conditions, on people's actual lives and struggles. Its first completed film, Tire dié, was immediately revolutionary. Documenting the harsh lives of the children who ran along train trestles begging money from railroad passengers, it showed something that is now nearly routine but was then unknown: with a 16mm camera (the digital camcorder of its day), it captured the faces of poor people, the struggles they endured to survive, the spirit that animated them nonetheless and could, somehow, animate a different and fair society. This little half-hour documentary, as known to Latin American filmmakers as it is unknown to much of the rest of the world, is now recognized as the foundational work of what came to be called the New Latin American Cinema movement. It was the spark that ignited a continent and led to a decade of revolutionary cinema.

The world was different then, Birri recalls. "There was another vibration then. We all knew of each other. There was a sort of subterranean solidarity that was very strong. At times of change, we especially need friends and family, and back then in the '40s and '50s, we had them in the world of film: the new wave, the new films of India, the oppositional films in the U.S., filmmakers throughout Latin America. Now, instead, there's a mental blindness that impedes vision and prevents our seeing the future." This lack of vision is troubling to Birri, a devout visionary who believes that we must be able to see the future if we are to lead lives of action and fulfillment. "Life is impossible without a future," he laments and shakes his head.

The end of the '50s was certainly a time for foreseeing the future. In 1959, when Fidel Castro's revolution brought a new government to Cuba, its nascent filmmakers - like Alea, another Centro classmate, and Santiago Alvarez - hailed Tire dié as a model that Cuba and all of Latin America should follow for its aesthetic freshness, its radical political vision, and its loving devotion to its people. It has reappeared on lists ever since, most memorably on a cinematic list: as a clip in the Argentine documentary landmark The Hour of the Furnaces, made 10 years later by Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas.

"Mine is a tentative cinema," Birri says. "I have never shown a completed film, and I hope never to do so." Instead of perfecting documentary, Birri shifted genres. His next film, Los inundados, was a comedy set in the same sorts of slums that produced the trestle runners, this time with a script and an upbeat sense of humor but still with nonactors in the real-life settings favored by neorealism. When the New Latin American Cinema movement was up for reevaluation in the '80s, it took pride of place away from Tire dié, better encapsulating the spirit of upbeat humanism that seized the continent at a moment when the military dictatorships were coming to an end (and before the spasms of the free market set in). Los inundados (literally, "The flooded ones") follows the survival strategies of a group of working-class folks left homeless by the combined effects of a flood and the political corruption of the local government. Sounds about right for a San Francisco audience circa 2002.

The Birri story is a study in chiaroscuro, with revolution and repression alternately coloring the canvas of his life light and dark. By late 1963, Birri and his colleagues were attracting too much attention from the increasingly repressive Argentine government. His school days were over. In a sort of forced march, he and his filmmaking cohorts stealthily crossed the border into Brazil, where they were welcomed and financed to continue their work - for a minute. In April 1964, Brazil too fell to the generals. And Birri's life of exile began in earnest.

He journeyed to Mexico to meet with his old pal García Márquez, still a screenwriter but already at work on a novel that would become One Hundred Years of Solitude. Birri doubted his group could find support in Mexico and continued on to Cuba, where he found the Instituto Cubano del Arte y la Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) ideologically welcoming but strapped for resources.

When I asked why he returned to Italy, Birri retorted, by rewriting the question: "They returned me." It was Latin America, the imperious generals and the impoverished friends, who obliged him to return. He would live in Italy, more or less, ever after. Apart from extended stays in Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela, apart from residencies like this year's at Stanford and trips to oversee the new Birri Foundation in Argentina, he lives in Italy still - in the Rome he discovered, along with cinema, in 1950.

When Birri returned to Italy in 1964, he imagined he could work there. "But it was no longer the Italy of the '50s, nor the Italy of neorealism any longer," Birri says. "Something else was happening." He charts for me the momentous events of the late '60s that he experienced there, and his choices are a measure of the man: "the death of Che Guevara, May '68 in France, a man landing on the moon, sexual liberation." It was in that ferment that Birri worked for 11 years on Org, an avant-garde opus that was worlds away (and not just the Atlantic) from the films he'd made in Santa Fe. "I thought that a new world was possible, and so perhaps a new cinema was possible too." He worked completely on the margins in Rome, well outside of a film industry that was increasingly commercial. He says that there was "never a plan or strategy" for Org, that he just responded to "currents, to dreams and nightmares." An experimental film that carries proof of its late-'60s invention in its psychedelic splendor, Org would have looked right at home in the early years of Canyon Cinema's distribution catalog. The Birri artistic biography is a story of endless adaptation and reinvention, the life of a man whose mind is as restless as his legs. He once declared when asked for his nationality, "My feet are my country."

Before long Birri was ready for a change again. Luckily, García Márquez was ready too. In 1986, García Márquez summoned him to Cuba to return to his roots and direct a new film school in San Antonio de los Baños modeled on his Santa Fe institute. I clearly remember sitting there in Cuba, under the hot sun, while Birri expounded poetically on the geometrics of the school's new symbolic logo (a circle, a square, a triangle) and dedicated its curriculum-to-be to the mission of creating a new generation of third world filmmakers, proclaiming that "the raw material of our art is light, we are workers of light." With the support of García Márquez, he even made a new film and starred in it. A Very Old Man with Very Large Wings (1988) brought the fancy and fervor of his earlier work to a poetic spectacle of magic, realism, and faith.
In 1988, Birri brought the film to the Sundance Film Festival and participated in a historic panel that I chaired with many of the Latin American cinema greats. With simultaneous translation, it became a three-hour panel everyone sat through, owing to the presence in the audience of Robert Redford himself, with his "lady" at the time, Sonia Braga, serving as his personal translator.

Whenever people speak of Birri, they seem to talk like him as well. The poet Rafael Alberti describes him as having "the beard of a Tibetan monk." García Márquez calls him "the grand papá of Latin American cinema." One interview is titled "Don Quixote." Fernando Birri is a utopian, even now. With the world in shreds, I wonder how he can preserve his positivism. He grieves for his country: "It used to be compared to Paris, and now few people even have work because of the terrible economy. Before, there was a vast petty bourgeoisie. Now there is almost no middle class left between the very rich and very poor." Never a pessimist, he finds his old energy again in a moment. "Not to be negative," Birri continues. And out comes a flood of observations centered on the notion that adversity is the cradle of transformation. Hard times? "It's leading to new social movements, without codification, new movements completely outside the old political categories. It's a moment of tremendous crisis and effervescence, completely new. Something is going to happen."

No, he doesn't know when or what, but he's certain. "History is not static," Birri emphasizes. "And it happens like this. If history seems to end, it's only to begin again." His grand theme is utopia. "However, utopia does not happen in moments of happiness, but the opposite, in history's most tragic moments." Overlooking the unmitigated disaster that Columbus's famous voyage unleashed on the Americas, Birri cites the era of 1492, focusing instead, with persistent optimism, on the symbolism of finding a whole continent where old thinking had suspected none. "Look at the discovery of the new world, when things were collapsing in Europe. It's in the moment of collapse that utopias emerge. You can't just focus on the point of your nose. You must look past it to the future."

Birri clearly does: while his Birri Foundation was going strong prior to Argentina's political and economic crisis, he acknowledges with a shrug that few people are able to work there now. But there's a final irony that brings a smile nonetheless. The foundation is housed in an abandoned train depot that was donated for its use. It's the exact depot from which the train in Tire dié used to leave. Fifty-odd years later, the train no longer runs. And its depot is now inhabited by the grown-up bearded rebel who once passionately believed that by metaphorically throwing itself on the tracks, cinema could change not just itself but society too. The best part is that this remarkable prophet, one part beatnik and one part hippie, a man with all the dreams of the present and all the memories of a near-century, believes it still.

Los inundados screens with Tire dié, Sun/28/2002, 3 p.m., at the Kabuki 8, as part of its tribute to Fernando Birri, who will be interviewed onstage by UC Santa Cruz professor Julianne Burton-Carvajal.

This article was first published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, on June 27, 2002.