Tú me abrasas

Tú me abrasas
You Burn Me

An adaptation of “Sea Foam”, a chapter of Cesare Pavese’s Dialoghi con Leucò (1947) in which the Greek poet Sappho and the nymph Britomart talk of desire and death, while also imagining its potential footnotes and detours.

EN

Tú me abrasas marks a turning point in the work of Matías Piñeiro and in how he approaches the adaptation of literary texts. After a series of fiction films inspired by female characters in the work of Shakespeare, the Argentinian filmmaker takes on a visual poem, or perhaps an essay, following a two-layered reading which draws on Cesare Pavese’s own approach to Sappho in Dialogues with Leucò.

The result is a film that is at once dense and light-footed, somber and playful, sweeping viewers into a dance of translation and memory that manages to create a sense of contemporaneity and to salvage a work of art surrounded by death. […] In adapting Pavese, Piñeiro also adapts history’s footnotes and gaps, various layers of reading feeding into each other in a continuous creation of new forms.”

Antoine Thirion1

“The very first ritual was the way that the film was made, in the fact of getting together around this camera, around the Bolex. The technology really limits, and the limitations helped me nurture the mise-en-scène. I was printing every shot, making little papers and was putting them together in a very long scroll, organizing them in relation to the text. It’s a conceptual text, allegorical… It’s about the dialectics of dialogue. And so, the text needed a different technology, a different mise-en-scène than the other films.”

Matías Piñeiro2

FR

« Tú me abrasas opère un écart dans l’œuvre de Matías Piñeiro et dans sa réflexion sur l’adaptation de textes littéraires. Après une série de fictions inspirées par les personnages féminins de Shakespeare, c’est à un essai ou à un poème visuel que le cinéaste argentin s’attelle ici à partir d’une double lecture, celle de Sappho via l’un des Dialogues avec Leucò de Cesare Pavese.

Piñeiro tire un film dense et léger, grave et ludique, qui fait entrer le spectateur dans un jeu de traduction et de mémorisation à même d’instaurer une contemporanéité et de sauver une œuvre cernée par la disparition. […] Piñeiro adapte non seulement le texte de Pavese, mais aussi les notes de bas de page et les lacunes de l’histoire, différents niveaux de lecture communiquant les uns avec les autres en produisant continuellement de nouvelles formes. »

Antoine Thirion1

FILM PAGE
UPDATED ON 19.09.2024