‘I sing to books and women’: María Elorza sings to books and women

2023-04-18 15:52:15

“The books we choose draw our true genealogy”, is heard in the first feature film by María Elorza (Vitoria, 1988), which hits theaters on April 21 (it will do so in Bilbao on the 25th). We are what we have read, so diving into someone’s library is a good way to get to know them. In ‘A los libros y las mujeres canto’, the director wanders through the books of four mature, educated and left-wing women, including her own mother, Tonina Deias, former professor of Literature at the Vitoria Faculty of Letters. The result is a walk down memory lane and a vindication of the healing and formative value of reading. For something at the end of the brief footage of just over an hour (76 minutes) a minute of silence is observed by all the burnt-out libraries, from Alexandria to Sarajevo.

Trailer for ‘I sing to books and women’.

Premiered in the New Directors section of the San Sebastián Festival, where it won the Youth Award and a special mention of the Basque Film Award, ‘I sing to books and women’ is a playful artifact brimming with humour, which combines the testimonies of its four protagonists with fragments of film classics, images shot by the director as if they were (false) archival material, animations, delicious music and cultured quotes. Thus, Borges, Rilke and Epicurus shake hands with Chaplin in ‘City Lights’, Marlon Brando in ‘Last Tango in Paris, Buñuel in ‘Un perro andaluz’ and, of course, ‘Fahrenheit 451’, the allegation against illiterate totalitarianism signed by Truffaut based on the novel by Ray Bradbury. “I see cinema as a tool to preserve what I like in life,” justifies María Elorza, who, like Jonás Trueba, puts into her films what makes her happy.

Bach and Bizet’s ‘Carmen’ play and we meet Loreto Casado, translator, editor and professor of Literature, whose father named it after the patron saint of aviators because they did not let him name it Plane. Quite a character, traveler, sparkling and eccentric, trying on her “Marlene Dietrich trench coat, Sade skirt or Beckett coat”. There is also Waltraud Kirste, who in the mid-60s met a Basque exile in Paris with whom he would end up living in Donosti and becoming a Goethe specialist. And Dr. Viki Claramunt, another wounded letter who in her Marxist-Leninist past turned the back seat of her car into a mobile library and printed pamphlets with a cyclostil in the kitchens of working-class families. Today he abhors that Amazon is ending commerce in the cities.

María Elorza’s mother, Tonina Deias, and her sister Anne Elorza in Herculaneum.

‘I sing to books and women’ responds from its title to the first verses of Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’: «I sing the weapons and that man who came to Italy as a fugitive from the shores of Troy». María Elorza, who has lived in San Sebastián with her family since she was eight years old, began writing the script when her mother dropped some shelves on top of her. Result: a dislocated finger and a copy of ‘The Divine Comedy’, by Dante, split in half. After her, “following the joke”, she contacted the friends of her mistress, also “threatened” by the books. “It’s about talking about literature and claiming the books, but also about connecting the viewer with these characters and paying homage to them,” explains the director. “I am very fond of them and they have had a certain weight in my formation.”

María Elorza portrays women “who continue to practice literature” at a time when people hardly have books at home anymore. «Your bookstore accurately portrays you if we take into account which books stay and which you throw away. What do we keep to read in the future, how do we arrange the books, which ones do you put on display… I, for example, always leave gaps for those that remain to come», discovers María Elorza. Her film recalls the Nazi ‘Bibliocaust’ and she travels to Herculaneum, in the Italian Campania, where the only library from Antiquity that has survived to this day is preserved. She also recounts that Cuban women cigar makers liked being read to them ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ so much while they worked that this is how the mythical cigar ended up being baptized.

Spoken in Italian, Spanish and Japanese, ‘I sing to books and women’ pays homage to a politically committed generation, for whom books were as essential as food. “They tell us a lot about who we are,” says the filmmaker. «I feel envy and admiration for a generation that was very thirsty to read having grown up in a dictatorship». Great themes that the film addresses with a smile. «I wanted to talk about literature but not for a few, without being pedantic. The spirit of the protagonists is playful, they enjoy literature and that had to be conveyed, the joy of living and the joy of reading.