In Tres Haikus Modernos, a 12 minute short by Cristián Tàpies Goldenberg, we see a series of poetic meditations on time, memory, and the construction of a sense of place and history. The film’s three sections are “haikus” in the sense that they use aphorisms, historical clips, interview footage, and original images and sounds as compressed poetic elements, facets of a collage that provoke moments of epiphany.
The titles of the three sections are all stated in pairs, suggesting polarities rather than single ideas. The first part is called Home is Memory and Memory is Home. By the time we arrive at the third part, this has become a question: Is My Home my Memory? That the titles are in English, in a Spanish language film, already suggests the idea that “home” may be something which is imposed from elsewhere, a potent suggestion in Chile, where the 1971 coup that killed president Allende and brought Pinochet to power had direct support from the United States, a history that is referenced in the film’s first section.
The opening sequence shows two full moons crossing paths: one rising and one setting. Later, we see Pinochet’s 1974 May Day speech, announcing he will break the power of trade unions, followed by a clip from the famous “Soy un luchador social” (“I am a social fighter”) speech by Salvador Allende, in December of 1971, when it was clear that his death and the death of his transformative government were imminent. We hear the ecstatic cheers of the crowd, the thrill of his message of defiance. One power rises, another is brought down. And one’s sense of “home” is shaped, crucially, by the ability to document and remember. An intertitle quotes from a Latin author of 90 BC (“Constat igitur artificiosa memoria ex locis et imaginibus”) to the effect that an effective method of remembering things is possible through a mental association of images with places, an idea that can apply to filmmaking as well.
The second section includes an interview with an older man, looking at his collection of photographs from his childhood and youth, and explaining how the photographs fail to capture the reality of a moment. A snapshot from his time in the army shows him cautiously smiling, but he remembers the moment as filled with fear and with grief for a close friend who had just been killed. The third section includes a sequence of shots from Paris, moments which attempt to capture an interlude in a foreign city, but with an emphasis on capturing people with cameras, people who in turn are trying to create an elusive sense of home and history through images.
It is a crucial question for any artist working with images: how to deal with their power, deceptive, descriptive and evocative. And for those who spend their lives many different places, how do we construct our internal “home?” Tres Haikus Modernos isn’t concerned with answering this question. As in haiku, Tàpies assembles fragmentary observations into compressed jewels of meaning, glittering with insight. The film leaves you not with answers, but with a dazzling sense that momentary light has been cast on the contested realms of history, both personal and national.
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