Tú me abrasas

Ein Sprung von einem Felsen in die Ägäis – der Legende nach stürzte sich die griechische Dichterin Sappho aus unerfüllter Liebe in den Tod. Auch die Nymphe Britomartis sprang angeblich von einem Küstenfelsen: auf der Flucht vor König Minos, der sie über ganz Kreta gehetzt hatte. Beide Frauen ließ der Turiner Schriftsteller Cesare Pavese in seinen „Gesprächen mit Leuko“ miteinander diskutieren – über Tod, Liebe und Verlangen. Piñeiros essayistischer Poesiefilm bringt nun alle drei Figuren zusammen, beim buchstäblichen Blättern durch die Fragmente der sapphischen Lyrik und beim verspielten Reenactment mythologischer Zuschreibungen. (Gian-Philip Andreas)

In Matías Piñeiro’s first two films, his chosen literary inspiration was Domingo Faustino Sarmiento; in his later ones it was William Shakespeare. With TÚ ME ABRASAS it is Cesare Pavese, and through him the Greek poet Sappho of Lesbos, as well as Alfonsina Storni and Natalia Ginzburg. The various quotations and verses from their works constitute the film’s discursive material, with phrases read by actresses rehearsing a yet-to-be-filmed passage from Pavese’s Dialoghi con Leucò, while salient lines are highlighted on the page. Two ideas exist at the heart of the film: locating the grammar of desire, and the best way to film poetic thought—or to translate verse into a film shot. Piñeiro slots into a recognisable tradition here, that of Straub-Huillet, but also employs his own voice to conduct a playful enquiry into how to film a poem, an isolated statement, a paragraph. All the filmmaker needs are landscapes and performers to stage a happy meeting between cinema and literature, recognising both the differences between the mediums as well as their areas of intersection, as when he breaks down a poem into syllables and synchronises them cuts between individual shots. (Roger Koza).

Matías Piñeiro: EL HOMBRE ROBADO (2007), TODOS MIENTEN (2009), ROSALINDA (2010), VIOLA (2012), LA PRINCESA DE FRANCIA (2014), HERMIA & HELENA (2016), ISABELLA (2020), SYCORAX (2021, K, KO-REGIE)