Film director, screenwriter, producer, public servant, teacher, a benchmark of the Argentine film industry, Manuel Antín, who died this Thursday at the age of 98, was all of this and will be remembered for all of this. But he wanted to be something else: “I was never a convinced filmmaker. I was always chased away by the writer I wasn’t,” he acknowledged two decades ago, when he had already retired from directing. His career was marked, as is his legacy, by that gap between what he wanted and what could have been, between the letter and the image.
“I have the pride, by pure chance, of having participated in three important periods of cinema in our country,” Antín himself summarized. “I started in the sixties, and that is the generation to which I belong; then, in the mid-eighties, I participated as part of the generation of democracy, and at that time I somehow managed Argentine cinema from a political point of view; and in the nineties, the film school emerged, which I joined by founding the Universidad del Cine,” he recounted in a conversation with fellow filmmaker Daniel Burman, captured in the book Film dialogues (2016).
Manuel Antín was born in 1926, in the town of Las Palmas in Chaco, and was educated at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. His first expressions were literary. He wrote and published poems, such as The morning tower (1945) and Mermaid and spiral (1950); theatre, as The sand anchor (1947) and Not too late (1957); also novels, such as All the venerable ones (1958) and High the moon (1991). But, as he himself once said, he felt that he did not have enough talent to devote himself to literature. And he turned to cinema.
First as a screenwriter and soon as a director, he was part of the generation of artists who renewed Argentine cinematography in the 1960s. He did so without abandoning his love of literature. “There is no cinema without literature,” he explained. “The defenders of a non-literary cinema do not want to see all the literature that lies behind cinema. We are written people. It may seem exaggerated, but I believe that everything is literature.”
Between 1960 and 1982 he made a dozen films based on books. Punishment for the traitor (1966) brought to the screen a text by Agusto Roa Bastos; Don Segundo Shadow (1969), the work of Ricardo Guiraldes; in Far away and long ago (1978), by William Hudson; in The invitation (1982), by Beatriz Guido. In 1962 she also directed a version of her own novel, All the venerable ones —it was screened at the Cannes Film Festival, although it was never commercially released in Argentina.
But his best-known adaptations were those of Julio Cortázar, with whom he cultivated a long epistolary friendship. His film The odd number (1962) was based on the story “Letters from Mom” and Circe (1964), in the homonymous story. In Privacy of the parks (1965), Antín, co-author of the script, wove the stories “The Idol of the Cyclades” and “Continuity of the Parks” into a plot. “Julio was the writer I couldn’t be and whom I plagiarized in the only way I could: making films, which is a highly accepted way of plagiarizing writers,” said the director in an interview with the newspaper The Nationin 2004. Antín used to remember that he was in charge of taking the originals to the editor Francisco Porrúa Hopscotchwhich Cortázar had sent him from Paris. Fortunately, he was more careful than his friend: some time before, Antín had sent him the original, the only copy of one of his unpublished novels, which Cortázar had lost in a hotel.
With the restoration of democracy in Argentina, Antín was called in 1983 by the Government of Raúl Alfonsín to head the National Institute of Cinematography. From there, he promoted the modernization of the local industry and, among the first measures, achieved the dissolution of the Cinematographic Qualification Body, the body that had carried out the censorship of the military dictatorship (1976-1983). After six years in public office, he stood out as a promoter of film schools and careers. In 1991 he founded the Universidad del Cine, where new generations of filmmakers were trained, such as Lisandro Alonso, Mariano Llinás, Damián Szifron, Benjamín Naishtat or Pablo Trapero. And where, also, different views and ways of making films took place. “We never got into each other’s style and we have helped make films of a cinema in which we believe and also of which we do not believe,” said Antín in an interview with the newspaper Page/12“In general, people think about teaching the cinema that interests them in order to train similar directors, but for me it is the opposite.”
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