SPACE, NOT TIME: The Films of Lisandro Alonso

ABOUT THE SERIES:

The American Cinematheque is proud to welcome one of the most visionary artists of contemporary cinema, Argentinian filmmaker Lisandro Alonso, for a complete retrospective at the Egyptian, Aero and Los Feliz 3 Theatres. Featuring his six films, the series marks the first in-person retrospective of Alonso’s work in Los Angeles and includes the L.A. Premiere of his critically acclaimed new film, EUREKA.

A wholly original and uncompromising artist, Lisandro Alonso has pursued a stark yet alluring vision of the world throughout his ever-evolving career. Making his debut at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, Alonso burst onto the international arthouse scene with his first film, LA LIBERTAD, a meditative portrait of a woodcutter’s day of labor amongst the desolate Pampas. His sophomore feature, LOS MUERTOS is similarly oriented towards themes of solitude in a harsh natural world—this time set in a sweltering jungle—but demonstrates his need to continually reinvent himself as an artist, trading the documentary aesthetic of his debut for a more elusive, dreamlike approach. In his next two films, his characters (often played by nonprofessional actors) continue to work, wander, and yearn alone in increasingly abstract ways, whether in the self-reflexive meta-work FANTASMA or in the more loosely constructed narrative in LIVERPOOL.

The 2014 JAUJA represented a bold new direction, as Alonso creates a visionary Western that is both wonderfully classic in its sentiments and thoroughly modern in its construction. The film follows a Danish captain wandering the remote regions of Patagonia during the late 1800s in search of his daughter as he attempts to reestablish his family unit, another haunting theme that echoes through Alonso’s cinema.

JAUJA was perhaps Alonso’s most acclaimed film by that stage of his career, winning the FIPRESCI Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and also featured the first collaboration with Viggo Mortensen, who delivers a stunning performance as the desperate father. Mortensen and Alonso collaborate once more in the director’s highly anticipated new film, EUREKA, which comes after a near 10-year gap in filmmaking. Acting as a sort of collision of the previous styles and themes that Alonso has worked with throughout his career, EUREKA is undeniably his most ambitious project yet. Traversing time, space, and genre, the film presents an elliptical meditation on the experiences of indigenous communities across the Americas, from the fabled Old West to contemporary South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation to the jungles of 1970s Brazil. The American Cinematheque is proud to present the L.A. premiere of the film as the centerpiece of our celebration of Alonso’s ever-expanding cinema.