Cinema Galeries : En Construcción

Cinema Galeries : En Construcción

14/03 @ 18h45

PORTRAITS

Work in Progress (En Construcción) is a portrait of
people and of a neighbourhood. The film’s characters are builders working on a new building in the Raval, and the residents of this symbolic historical neighbourhood of Barcelona. Throughout the film, Guerin focuses on their faces and gestures, on how they speak and on how they occupy spaces. The composition of the shots is fundamental to his portrayal of the characters. The streets and spaces of the Raval, a popular working classneighbourhood in the city centre undergoing gentrification, are the other characters of the film.

CONVERSATION AND THE POWER OF WORDS

Through words, people with very different life stories and origins truly get to know each other: they listen to each other and they talk to each other. During the building work they learn to understand each other, to work together, to pass on their skills and to forge friendship. This sequence takes place when both the construction work and the film are coming to an end, and the viewer feels that a community has been created which connects the workers, local residents and also the film crew. Words are also often the means
by which characters often become memorable for us, allowing us as viewers to learn to know and love them.

WORK

This is a film about work. It is about the builders working on the building, but also the filmmaker, Guerin and his student film crew, working to create a film over the two years during which they filmed the construction of the building. In this image, the builders are involved in the manual work of building a window. In the same way, the filmmaker uses the camera to create another window, the frame, to compose each shot in a meaningful way. Thus the construction of the building, brick by brick, progresses in parallel to the film, shot by shot. When the building is completed, so is the film.

THE WINDOW AND THE FRAME WITHIN A FRAME

The windows connect the outdoors and the indoors, the homes and the neighbourhood. Through the windows, the new building is incorporated into and visually connected with the neighbourhood, so that the interiors (the private spaces of homes) are linked with the exterior (the city). While Guerin uses his shots to create frames or visual windows showing the
architecture, the shots are also transparent windows for seeing and documenting the life and reality of the neighbourhood. It is a visual idea of pictorial tradition that is characteristic of many of the film’s shots: the frame within a frame. In this photogram it is expressed by means of the connection between the foreground, showing the builders inside the building, and another frame in the middle distance: the window showing the façade of the church of Sant Pau del Camp.

PRESENT AND PAST

Different layers of time and history are brought together in a single image: the new construction of the building still in progress, the church which is still standing after eleven centuries, and even further away, other buildings from the 20th century. This gives a glimpse of a neighborhood, in
which many different eras, cultures and origins coexist. And one of the main themes of the film is highlighted: the passing of time, the contrast between the stable and the transitory, the tension between construction and destruction, and memory and loss.

Cinema Galeries
CinEd - European Cinema Education
for the Youth - En construcción - José Luis Guerín - SPAIN, 2001 - PEDAGOGICAL PACKAGE

For Dreamers, Coffee shots, Orezza, eau de Saint-Georges !