2024-05-05 03:15:46
VINCI – HAND TO HAND 7 points
(Argentina, 2024)
Direction and script: Franca González.
Duration: 79 minutes.
Premieres exclusively at Cine Arte Cacodelphia (Diagonal R. Saenz Peña), on Sundays at 7 p.m.
The Argentine documentary filmmaker Franca González He has been building a solid work that is in no way tied to a single thematic, social or formal interest. However, several of his films embrace the possibility of approaching art and its makers, without swearing fidelity to the same narrative logic or to a format set in advance. Following then the maxim that it is the material itself (and the subjects, that is, the people in front of the camera) that largely define the final result, Vinci – Melee doesn’t look too much like Totem (2014), focused on an Alaskan red cedar cutter, oa Liniers, the simple outline of things (2010), which followed the famous cartoonist from Buenos Aires to Montreal. However, together they seem to make up a sort of trilogy about artists within his filmography, made up of seven feature films to date.
Premiered just a couple of weeks ago at the Baficithe first part of the title clearly indicates its center of gravitation: Leonardo Dante Vinci, or simply Leo Vinci, the renowned sculptor born in Barracas in 1931 who knew how to integrate, in more explosive creative times for the plastic arts, the Southern Group, celebrated in the ’60s by André Malraux himself. González’s camera finds him, at his 90 years, as active as ever, bending a sheet metal with a device invented by himself, or carving the hardest and at the same time noble material with which a sculptor can work: marble. In an immense workshop-studio that has not changed much over the last six decades, Vinci puts the finishing touches on a couple of new works and rearranges others from the pastimmobile inhabitants of the not-so-small personal museum located in the workshop (a handful of his sculptures can be admired in the Museum of Modern Art, the Malba and the Casa Rosada; others, according to his own words, were sold and today it is impossible to recover them) .
The protagonist laughs at his own name and surname and states that when he was born his father set the bar too high for him. Despite this, the Argentine Vinci demonstrated his talent for drawing from very early on, as he recalls in one of the many conversations he has with colleagues, friends and his partner, the also sculptor Marina Dogliotti. González completely avoids the talking head resource – the traditional on-camera interview – and opts instead for accompany the honoree in their daily activities, particularly during the creative processwhich in his case offers the traits of a laborious profession: the fight against the material, hard and resistant, is an essential part of the job. During the intimate celebration of his 91st birthday, after blowing out the candles and thanking those present, Vinci reserved a short reflection on his art.
The search for a “too well kept” photo taken by Sara Facio and the need to throw away old papers, disused frames and other objects allows the director to open a chapter dedicated to the past, to those times in which Argentine sculpture was very popular in the Latin American and international circuit. But Leo Vinci, beyond being careful with his work, remembering perfectly each sculpture made, They don’t seem too interested in times gone by.. On the contrary, when the film accompanies him to the coast to spend, once again, a day camping under the pines, the brief scene is imposed as a break in the creative battle against the elements – stone, metal, clay – and its eternal clash with the hammer, the knife and, above all things, the hands.