de Patricio Guzmán
“PUEBLO EN VILO”
52 minutes (1995)
SYNOPSIS :
Some kilometers outside the central zone of Mexico (in the mountains of the west), there's a small place without a railroad, without original architecture, without handiworks, without industry, without indigenous, without tourists. It's an ordinary town, with no special qualities. A Mexican writer, however, Luis González, who was born and died in the town, wrote a surprising book telling of the small occurrences in the village. The book was translated into several languages and became a classic text of "microhistory". The thesis is that everything that happens in a small town is a reflection, an echo, of what happens in the whole country... The film reconstructs the disperse memory of this community with the presence of Luis González and the other elders of this group of human size and without any particular hero.
REDUCED FACT SHEET:
Script, direction: Patricio Guzmán.
Photography and camera: Eric Pittard.
Assisted by: Andrea Guzmán.
Editing: Cathérine Mabilat.
Direct sound: André Rigaut.
Music: Béatrice Thiriet.
Artistic consultant: Renate Sachse
Executive producer: Yves Jeanneau.
Production company: Les Films d'Ici for France-2
Filmed on: Super 16 MM in color.
Final format: DVD and Beta Pal.
SELECTION OF CRITICS:
“The town band, the card players, the cemetery, the grocery store, the bell tower. With these diverse images, Patricio Guzmán begins his film which is at the same time about San José de Gracia and about ‘Pueblo en Vilo’, the book by Luis González that inaugurated ‘microhistory’ in Mexico, which is to say the history of small towns or regions without history. For a notable book, a notable film. “Master of the dominion of the documentary as a form, Guzmán interweaves the interview accounts with the presentation of the town in its diverse images, with fragments of film archives, with family photos, with images of faces or human figures that need no text to support them. “This complexity of film design, this concern for punctuating or emphasizing certain contrasts (for example, between the discotheque and the rural stores), remove the film from the futile folkloristic vision, merely descriptive, or easily historicist of so many other documentaries, which turns this film into a live testimony full of meaning...”
Jorge Ruffinelli. Università di Stanford, USA
