Valeria Sarmiento (b. October 29, 1948) is working on what is probably one of the most fascinating artistic projects of contemporary cinema – namely, on finishing the oeuvre of her partner, Raúl Ruiz, the legendary and prolific Chilean experimental filmmaker who died in 2011. The newest film from this series was presented at Berlinale, as the opening film of the prestigious Forum section: The Tango of the Widower Its Distorting Mirror (El tango del viudo y su espejo deformante) – shot in 1967 and thus the first fiction film by Ruiz, which has now also become his last film, simultaneously.

But to call Valeria Sarmiento a mere custodian of Raúl Ruiz’s films would be a fatal mistake. Also an important director, editor and screenwriter in her own right, Sarmiento was born in Valparaíso, where she attended the local film school. There she met Ruiz in 1968, upon which the two formed a romantic and creative partnership that lasted until his death, the two having fled together to France in 1973 after Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’etat. Sarmiento directed over 20 films during her career, which began in documentary cinema and then migrated to fiction, her best-known films including titles such as Notre mariage (1984, the Grand Prix for new directors, San Sebastián), Amelia Lópes O’Neill (1991, Official Competition, Berlinale) and Elle (1995, in competition, San Sebastián). Starting with 2012, the year in which Lines of Wellington (nominated for the Golden Lion in Venice), a historical film prepared by Raul Ruiz and finalized by her, was launched, Sarmiento began to work on completing the unfinished works of her late partner, the second film in this series being The Wandering Soap Opera / La telenovela errante (filmed in 1990), which was presented in the Locarno film festival competition in 2017.

The Tango of The Widower and Its Distorting Mirror is perhaps the most intimate film of the three completed by Sarmiento, as she faithfully reconstructs the rolls of Ruiz’s debut in the first part of the film and then approaches her images to build a superb tribute to her partner. A tribute that lies beneath the empire of wanting to extend time through the means of cinema, a way to bring back to life what has been lost – all the more so as the original story revolves around a widower, his widow position giving the film a deeply moving note. At the Berlinale, I spoke with Mrs. Sarmiento about how she worked on the restoration of The Tango of the Widower and about her very own artistic process in The Distorting Mirror.

I’d like to start out by asking you about the beginning of the process – how did you discover the film reels of The Tango of the Widower, what state were they in when you discovered them, and how did the restoration work go?

When we finished our work on The Wandering Soap Opera (2017), we encountered the six rolls of film which had The Tango of the Widower on them. They had been numbered from two to seven and the number one reel was missing, which we never managed to find. These reels had been stored in the depository of the Normandie cinema in Santiago de Chile. This version was a 35 millimeter blow-up of The Tango, which had initially been shot on 16-millimeter footage.

The material was discovered without any sound, so the dialogue and the soundtrack of the film had to be redone from scratch. I understand that this process involved professional lip readers, which seems fascinating to me. Could you tell me a bit more about this part?

When we found the material, it was mute. Our first task was to find people who were capable of reading lips. We found three specialists that could help us trace the first approximate list of dialogues. This way, we could discern without a doubt what was said by the characters that were visible on the screen, but, it was impossible to tell what the characters that were speaking off-screen in given scenes were saying. So, from this point onward, we decided to create our own script. And after we were finished with it, we started to look for voice actors that could do the dialogue dubbing. Since the majority of actors in the film had died or were very old, they could not do the dubbing, since their voices had changed a lot in the meantime.

How was your collaboration with the members of the team of the original production that are still alive, and what was their involvement in this process of restoration and recreation?

Many of them had died in the meantime. The actors that were still alive were all around ninety years old, so they could not remember the script anymore. However, they did remember that they had a lot of fun on set and that for many of them it had been their first-ever experience with a film shooting.

At what point in the production did the idea, the wish of adding your own authorial voice to the film, in the form of The Distorting Mirror, and why?

When we discovered that these six rolls of film would permit us to create a fiction film that was just half an hour-long, I remembered what Raúl has always wished to do, and which he had written about in his diary in the following words: to create a film that permits a double lecture. (He had also worked on some exercises at the National Audiovisual Institute which were pursuing that direction.) I realized then that I had to do a fiction which regarded itself in a Distorting mirror, which would recount a different story.

Do you believe that the implicit reference to Lewis Caroll goes beyond the formal aspects of the film – and here I am referring to the reverse structure and the various distortions of image and sound present in the film?

This picture had to be brought to the present, so I decided to eliminate the foley and to work only with the sounds that were strictly necessary to the fiction. For example, in the film, you can’t hear a single step, not a single rustle of a dress – which are all elements that are used to give the sense of reality to a work of fiction. I wanted the characters to be like phantasms, like ghosts, which was the first impression that I had of them when I saw the copies of the film.

I think it’s important to investigate all around the possibilities of the image.

 

Much has been written about the capacity of cinema to capture time, from Andre Bazin’s time crystals to Gilles Deleuze’s time-image. What are your own thoughts about this topic?

This film is strange in this sense. Shot in 1967, completed in 2019 and 2020.

This work was the same as the one of an archaeologist working to unearth, reconstruct and present a vision of a past and of a Chile that no longer exists. But, above everything, it’s a homage to Raúl Ruiz, who left us in 2011.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.