José-Luis Guerín, En construcción (2001)

In his 2001 film En construcción Catalan filmmaker José Luis Guerin (currently much-acclaimed for En la ciudad de Sylvia about which I have also posted) employs building works both as metaphor and as framing device. The suspension of normal activity provided by the works provides a coherence and a focal point to anchor the images which otherwise would appear arbitrarily focussed and contrived. Playing with our preconceived perceptions about the boundaries of the documentary and fictional forms, Guerin seems of one mind with Godard who declares them to be the same. An apparently deranged vagabond declaims in the opening sequence against the proposed improvements. He urges “squares as one finds in London,” not old-fashioned narrow streets with apartment buildings. If there is one predominant voice in the film it is his, however, and during the course of the film we frequently see him wander in and out of shot offering opinions on all manner of questions. In one scene he proudly displays his stock of “capricios”, trinkets salvaged from his forages in the street; this eloquent scene reminds us of course that in his former incarnation - on board a cruise ship - he would have amassed exotic trinkets in the manner of Pere Jules in Vigo’s L’Atalante.

Clearly Guerin wants to give a certain integrity to his ‘cast’. His bricklayers are alternately a lonely insomniac and a voluble Moroccan sage who spouts Marxist dogma while lining up the bricks and mortar for the master builder. His head builder is, likewise, a gentle family man who playfully teases the truth from his daughter about her Sunday afternoon mischief on the building site, while the son is an unobjectionable suitor of the ‘girl next door’ - they court each other across the divide between his scaffolding and her balcony. This is film which coaxes the extraordinary out of the most apparently mundane situations and settings. The camera placement and framing deliver a mesmerising array of images estranged from (but still belonging to) their objects. Like Mallarmé Guerin's camera is determined to describe not the object itself but the effect it produces. The film paces itself partly in line with the real time of the construction of a wall, and partly in the slowed-down time of the dope-smoking lovers. Those exceptions to the film’s slow unravelling are the estate agents and prospective buyers who come to view the apartments. While they imagine their expensive furniture into place the builders - whom we recognize from earlier scenes - go about their own business. The film is partly about these two times, and about extracting another time from the repetitive and normalising advances of late capitalism.

The archaeologists slow down the progress while excavating an ancient burial site and the builders declare themselves delighted since they will still be paid; the dope-smoking lovers are oblivious to their surroundings and continue to be so as in the final scene - one long take - they piggy-back each other up the street to their new home; the Moroccan builder takes an ironic distance from the world but through his generous nature gains a niche of time to himself; the foreman and the property developer chat over lunch on the site and exchange views on the construction techniques used in ancient Egypt. The film recalls to me a remarkable passage printed in parentheses in Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse. William Bankes recalls with nostalgia how he once observed Mrs Ramsay stirring amidst the unfinished walls of a hotel under construction. There is much that stirs as well as much that is gently stirring in Guerin’s own Work in Progress.