Contra la museificación del mundo: La orilla que se abisma (2008) y La casa (2012) de Gustavo Fontán

Argentine director Gustavo Fontán has been able to make subtle, intelligent bridges between film and poetry. This essay explores the ways this dialogue has been achieved in two of his recent films: La orilla que se abisma (2008) and La casa (2012). The first one focuses on Juan L. Ortiz’s poems. Fontán seems to know how to ‘translate’ Ortiz’s poetic world into images based on the notion that poetry is vision, a febrile state of our sensitivity during which we can see things that are impossible to see while we pass through other states of mind. The second film shows a house that tells its own story in a very poetic way. The house itself seems to register – from its own point of view – how it is being dismantled and destroyed. Fontán has created an atmosphere close to the oneiric state, an atmosphere where past images copulate with the present, where what it is gone still lives within the current ruins.