PHOTOGRAPHY

ALMERIA.EXTERIOR.DIA
Photographs from the shooting of El Mejor de los tiempos, de Felipe Vega
Photographs by Elías Palmero
Sala de exposiciones del Instituto de Estudios Almerienses
Montaje: Sprint Design (Almería)
Mayo 2007
See more. Ver: sites: ALMERIA SHORT FILM FESTIVAL




Books make up part of life, and cinema is born out of it.. That a plot should come from a novel, from a newspaper, from a true or made up event changes nothing. The fact of reading it is enough. A fact, when it is evoked, is a reading.
M. Antonioni


The spanish director Felipe Vega speaking with the actor Jack taylor

In the Sierra de Gador, Felipe filmed one of the first sequences from "El Mejor de los tiempos", the sea of plastic in the backround, and between two shots, he poits out to Linares (the cameraman) a small cloud, alone and motionless; and Linares, like someone who already unserstands, points the camera toward. That one rang a bell for me.
There in my days as a student, I had the chance to see for first time, in those "art-cinema"s, an Antonioni film: Proffesione Reporter, and I discovered that there existed another way of makig films, nearing abstraction, beyond the "window" of the Renaissance and Aristotelian rhetoric. In a library I foud a litle book with the screenplays for The nigth, The eclipse and The red desert. I still hadnt to see those films, but I relished those stories, simply the descriptions of the shots, full of sugestion, without nay apparent syntax, void of subordinate clauses, without too may adjetives...

I dont know if a screemplay is literature, and I will live up to the experts to decide. It is also said that theater is meant to be seen, and its true; but it is no less true to say that to read Valle-Inclán (whose author has said impossible to stage) is an emotional experience. any staging of "Luces de bohemia" is a chalenge: for the stage dirction of a café, for example, indicates that "the sahadows and the music float of a cloud smoke, and on the livid trembling the voltaic arches. The multipliying mirrors are full a melodramatic interest. Somany suggestions for the directors, stage designers, ligths directors... to read theater or films screemplays is to freely anticipate and walk unknoun paths out of which we are given directions, a provocation and aesthetic experience in and of itself.
felipe let me read the first screemplay for El Mejor de los tiempos; I had that privilege, as well as that of attending the film shot. there were more screemplays after that voluminous one I read, but in the end what surprised me about the final film was that I found myself once again with a great deal of shots that brougth back the memory of Antonioni, many silences, some of long duration, like the repeated moon, the Fallen Angel or that motionless cloud in the sky....

At the porposal on the International festival of Short Films, I had selected a few photographs from that film shoot in an attempt, not be a making of, but rather to get a better look at those times and those days. Photograpfs that appear to be contaminated by that silence, photos that time which influences perception so very much, has granted new meaning. Moments of work, of rest, places and times that are memory, past and still present of a land owerflowing with beauty thougth with so many conquests sitll yet to be had...
Elías Palmero
Photographer





The spanish actress and director Icíar Bollaín