Ángel Faretta
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Ángel Faretta | |
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 Ángel Faretta | |
| Born | 21 April 1953 Buenos Aires, Argentina |
| Occupation | Novelist, playwright, short story writer, poet, film critic |
| Nationality | Argentinian, Italian |
| Period | 1980–2009 |
| Genre | Fiction, essay |
Ángel Faretta (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1953) is an Argentine writer, film and art scholar, poet, poetry translator, and narrator. Since 1977 he has published essays and analytical and critical articles on art, literature, and cinema in different media. For many followers of his theory, he is “the most consummate theoretician of cinema in Argentina, and its most insightful, original and influential thinker, always faithful to his ideas and beyond any passing fad.1” Film critic and screenwriter Fernando Regueira wrote:
"Faretta is the only thinker with his own theory of cinema -and a general aesthetics- in our country and, perhaps, in the whole Spanish-speaking world."' Regueira Fernando [1]
Biography and Work[]
He was born in Buenos Aires on April 21, “the anniversary of the foundation of Rome” as mentioned in all his books, 1953. He descends from a very traditional family from the south of Italy. His father Donato (1900-1988) emigrated to Argentina in 1926, where he engaged in rural work in the region of the family property in Saladillo and then in industry and construction. His mother, Lisa Pingitore (1914-1988), born in Argentina, also descended from a very traditional family from the south of Italy of noble ancestry, especially through the maternal line of the Di Renzo family. Faretta did his primary and secondary studies with the Piarist Fathers at the Calasanz School in Caballito. He then studied philosophy, theology, aesthetics, history of art and religions, as well as traditional symbolism with Gillo Dorfles and Guido Aristarco in Italy, and with Adolfo Carpio, Conrado Eggers Lan, Antonio Pagés Larraya, and Héctor Ciocchini in Argentina, among others. In Faretta's words,
“In those years, secondary school, at least the one I attended, provided a comprehensive education. Latin, theology, philosophy, literature and, most importantly, the interaction with teachers.."[2]
In his education, he acknowledges a number of private and anonymous mentors, such as Horacio Álvarez Boero, a scholar of classic American cinema. About him, Faretta recalls: “We were talking to Samuel Fuller who, deeply impressed but Alvarez Boero’s display of knowledge, looked at him and said, ‘Horacio, you sound as though you actually lived in Hollywood for a long time’.”
Another source of learning was the nightly experience of what probably were the last years of a real bohemian scene in Buenos Aires. In that nightlife bohemians and the European aristocracy converged with the initiation masters of traditional knowledge in different places, such as “old bookstores and their backrooms, bars, nightclubs, and whisky bars like the one Tania used to run across from the Cervantes Theatre”. As I have said for so many years: ‘those who did not live in Argentina, in the Buenos Aires of those years, will never know the sweetness of life’”.
He stated: “A philosophy of history, for example, cannot be developed without thoroughly studying and analyzing the spiritual creations of men, their way of thinking and also of poetizing, or rather both in concert. For centuries it has been impossible to approach something called history as if it were a fossil awaiting us in a state of suspended animation so that through an act of bookish magic, we could bring it back to life once again. But if we try to find out how history envisioned its living space, how that fear was experienced and represented, how it continued to reconfigure the task of its predecessors and how a figure, type or emblem reconfigured it in various poetic, pictorial, novelistic, and filmic works, I believe that rather than recovering a fossil, we can reconnect with the living past in us, which is thus made present. Naturally, it was obvious to me that we had to start with the aesthetic manifestation closest to our experiences, namely cinema. And from there, a philosophy of history and art was derived, rather than go in search of something locked up in museums and covered with the cobwebs of the pseudo-conservative, since those who wish to preserve something do not hide it or mummify it. Of course, it was a matter of understanding not only how cinema existed as such, but also what and who necessarily opposed it. Its polemos. After defining that, it was necessary to go from the present to the past in a flashback. Thus, we dealt with melodrama in ‘La pasión manda’(Passion Rules), and then with the poetics of Argentine tango, with the symbolism of the vessel, and with the mythologem of the double, which are the subsequent books already finished or about to be finished”.
Faretta has been teaching privately for four decades, developing his theory in seminars, conferences and in a number of private courses. He has declined university engagements in his country.
Courses and Seminars[]
Along with his work as a film critic, he has taught his own theory in courses, conferences, and seminars on “Romanticism and the Romantic Mentality”, “Cinema and Evil”, “Introduction to Fantastic Literature”, “An Aeshetics of Evil”, “On Traditional Symbolism”, “On Myth and its Relationship with Art” and “The Symbolism of the Vessel”.
In 1989, Faretta founded the school of cinema Aquilea, after the name given to the mythical city of Buenos Aires by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares in the film Invasión (Invasion) by Hugo Santiago.
The concept of cinema (an audiovisual introduction)[]
At the beginning of 2015, the Arbós-Szmukler chair of the Image and Sound Design degree program at the School of Design and Urbanism of the University of Buenos Aires, in collaboration with Ángel Faretta, produced a series of audiovisuals presenting the fundamental theoretical contributions of his work “The Concept of Cinema”.
N°1 - Cinema is fantasy by definition: Cinema as “active” art in contemporary life. The concept of cinema as a theory of art in modernity focused on cinema from all possible points of view (political, historical, religious and formal). A theory that is neither formalistic nor sociological/content oriented. Definition of metaphysics. All cinema is fantasy.
N°2 - Griffith and the three heuristic elements: Off-camera. The principle of symmetry. Vertical axis. The tragic and the cinema.
N°3 - The cinema of film studios: The backgrounds of cinema as an organic construction. Italian Renaissance, European and American Baroque, and German Romanticism. Cinema as continuity of baroque politics by other means. Hollywood films and the reconfiguration of traditional data. Cinema is "dixie" in opposition to the world of the liberal-capitalist mentality. Cinema as an alien. The material (and symbolic) mode of production of Hollywood cinema. The separation from late romanticism.
N°4 - Heroes and Artisans: The classic Hollywood director was an author inasmuch as he was an artisan. The artisan as someone who creates on the basis of a function and a trade rather than the liberal individual genius. The Indo-European trifunctionality (Dumézil). The hero as the bearer of the mythical element. The search. The original wound.
N°5 - The enemy sees us first: The climax. The high and the low. Cinema as will and representation. Harvard vs. Hollywood. The enemy always understands us first. Cinema opposes the bourgeois liberal-positivistic mentality based on three factors: the tragic, the hero, the bilocation of the woman created in the nineteenth century by the liberal mentality (mother-holy-wife/whore).
N°6 - Self-awareness: Self-awareness: knowing that one knows and knowing what one knows. Every incorporation is a critical one, otherwise it is overindulgence. Cinema as a secret society. Cinema as a symbolic customs house. Cinephilia as the infantile malady of the concept of cinema. Cinema has come to an end.
Reading-as-being[]
In 2016, along with Diego Ávalos and Melina Cherro, he produced the podcast “Reading-as-being”, on various topics of art and culture.
Agatha Christie (part 1 and part 2)
Tango and bolero (part 1 and part 2)
Cat People by Jacques Tourneur
I walked with a zombie by Jacques Tourneur
Literature[]
In 1993 he published Datos tradicionales (Traditional Data), a book of poetry. He then combined his teaching activity with writing. During this period, he devoted himself to the reorganization of his writings, and as a result of this task he has published two books of fiction. His work of fiction is almost entirely in the realm of the fantasy genre:
"I am passionate about the genre, and it is almost an Argentine one. I intended to follow in the footsteps of Borges, Bioy Casares, and Marco Denevi. I set out to tell the history of Argentina through a series of novels and stories in this genre, because this is a fantasy country. I am not talking about magic realism, but about fantasy literature".
El saber del cuatro (The Knowledge of the Four) (2005), his first published narrative work, consists of four stories that can be read like the four parts of a novel. Each of the chapter-stories is a variation on the same theme: the presence of the devil in the contemporary world through different guises. Its title refers to the basic operation of Kabbalah. It is also a quaternary journey through four moments of the Argentine history - with two of them in the immediate future- and all of them are related to a moment and an author of Argentine fantasy literature.
Tempestad y asalto (Storm and Stress) (2009) is already a novel in the full sense of the word. It aims to be an account of the origin of Argentina and at the same time an initiation novel. It is also a critical reading of German Romanticism starting from the title taken from "Sturm und Drang". Clearly divided into three parts, its axis is the expulsion and suppression of the Society of Jesus in this part of America, and especially of Argentina, in 1767. The novel, however, begins in the early 1800's and the events narrated in its second part occur long before the expulsion of the Jesuits. Thus the novel is proposed both as a fantastic and mythical story about the possible origins of Argentina, as a self-aware journey through the unfolding of the fantasy narrative and German Romanticism and the various narrative milestones of the nineteenth century. This book, as well as El saber del cuatro (The Knowledge of the Four) , is part of a saga written over the years, made up of stories, nouvelles and novels about Argentine history as seen, or rather refracted, by the fantasy mode.
Viajeros que huyen (Fleeing Travelers - 2016) is what Faretta has defined as a "conversation novel". The story of a group of friends pierces the history of Argentina from 1963 to 1973. Through chapters that can be read as individual stories, he exercises a distant realism, where the mythical and hermetic of his two previous narrative books are reconfigured in a low mimetic key, while avoiding the black pit of costumbrism (the novel of manners)
Poetry[]
Many of his poems remain unpublished, since the first editions of his poetic work were not reprinted. In recent years he has published much of his poetic work, as well as various translations of poets (Horatio, Sextus Propertius, Catullus, Ariosto, Leopardi, Baudelaire, et al) on the blog "Another Church is Impossible" directed by the poet Jorge Aulicino.
Theory[]
His theory of art was defined as "a theory of modernity or the modern world through film". This is expressed in his books "El concepto del cine" (The Concept of Cinema), in the notes of "Espíritu de simetría" (Spirit of Symmetry) in: "La pasión manda. De la condición y representación melodramáticas” (Passion rules. On the melodramatic condition and representation) and in “La cosa en cine. Motivos y figuras" (The thing in cinema. Motives and figures").
Faretta establishes a line of continuity between the relationship that was established in the Renaissance between Patrons and artists, with the one that existed during the golden age of Hollywood cinema between the "studio system" (Warner, Universal, Paramount, Metro, 20th Century Fox, etc) and the directors: an analogy that contradicts the idea of "uneducated despots with money" and "sensitive artists".
Based on the predominant Austro-Hungarian Empire background of many of those cinema pioneers, Faretta finds in that genesis the most conclusive rationale for much of his theory: "cinema, as a specific expression of the contemporary gaze and knowledge, developed the most advanced aesthetic expressions and techniques without relying on the liberal and the atheist conception of the world".
In Marcelo Zapata’s words, Faretta holds that:
"The Hollywood of Austro-Hungarian immigrants was a true religious "alien" in the body of a political power that, thanks to the glitter of fame, money and glamour, boasts about those who, deep down, contradict it. Of course, in this conception, cinema (in its most traditional sense) has been losing its most authentic artists without replacing them".
Philosophy of Art[]
For forty years now, Faretta has developed a philosophy of art through cinema, as well as melodrama, fantasy and poetry, thus completing a general aesthetic theory and philosophy.
One of the central theses addressed by Faretta in his aesthetic philosophy consists of what he calls "traditional culture in diaspora since the dusk of the Middle Ages". Intentionally mistaken for "popular culture", to give it a minor, derogatory or childish character, for this author it is just the reverse. It is the resource through which the traditional, symbolic and mythopoetic forms are preserved through operational reconfigurations and metamorphoses of the traditional data, a term that he attaches to metaphysics. He also defines it as "the operative -and non-speculative- use of these traditional data".
To this end, he has created a hermeneutical path starting from the most topical of these reconfigurations, which he has called "the concept of cinema", and then moving on to the previous configurations: melodrama, fantasy, as well as police fiction (which Faretta has called "crime fiction"), as well as the symbolic forms of poetry and representation from German Romanticism to French symbolism. With regard to the latter, he makes an extensive critical and hermeneutical study of the symbolic tradition of French lyric poetry and the lyrics of the Argentine tango.
His ideas have been substantially influenced by the Italian philosopher Giambatista Vico. Faretta has put his work and concepts back into circulation in the intellectual world of his own country as well as in the rest of the Spanish-speaking world. Just like with the work of the Romanian historian of religions Mircea Eliade; both influences are fully stated and acknowledged by Faretta in his theoretical-essayistic work.
Thus, in the first volume of his aesthetic theory, "The concept of cinema", he claims "... cinema is not a photographic extension of the theater or of the theatrical; nor is it a permanent source of photography in motion that splits the space-time continuum to detach itself from whatever ghost of eternal theater; nor is it a code of visual charades for the disabled; nor is it a puzzle, a cryptogram or a photographic mime".
It is an ideative -or fantastic- construction that selects and synthesizes prodromes or assumptions from which the previous arts and disciplines departed -or are believed to have departed-. It is both a poiesis (i.e., the power to do) and a techne, though both are brought together again at the end of the aesthetic times.
These concepts are controversially addressed in the book "Passion rules, melodramatic condition and representation". This psychic-aesthetic drift is seen as the possible way to continue with the feeling as well as the experience of the tragic during a process of total mobilization. He focuses on the formal origin of melodrama in the Renaissance, and then moves on to the 19th century thriller, both in its crime and fantasy aspects, reaches its representation and extreme formalization in The Concept of Cinema, which centers on the work of Douglas Sirk, and also ventures into opera and the so-called Italian "light music", as well as Argentine tango and the Central American bolero.
In this case, Faretta also develops a whole critical work on the dispossession or disfigurement of the sacred, even by certain forms of ritual simplification on the part of the Catholic Church (to which the author himself belongs), and he objects to both the sentimental and ritual reduction of its theological representations and formulations. The author argues that these "Saint Sulpice" curtailments led to a theological shift in thinking and representation towards poetic and dramatic forms that gave rise to the fantasy genre - narrative, poetic, theatrical and pictorial -, which was later condensed in The Concept of Cinema. In this book he highlights the following determining factors of the melodramatic condition: its "soul-spiritual genealogy", namely, "a craving for mystery and its return as the obscure", "the banalization of evil" (in a totally controversial sense against the reiterated assertion by Hannah Arendt, about "the banality of evil") and "the earthing of Hell" (partly based on the theological-aesthetic research of Hans Sedlmayr, albeit not sharing all his conclusions).
Then in "Nota conjunta sobre Hugo del Carril y el melodrama" (A comment on Hugo del Carril and melodrama) - a long essay included in both "Cinco films argentinos" (Five Argentine films) and "La cosa en cine. Motives and figures" (The Thing in Cinema. Motives and Figures) - he undertakes a detailed hermeneutical interpretation of the film "Más allá del olvido" (Beyond Oblivion, 1956), which Faretta considers the masterpiece of Argentine cinema. In this work, the symbolic interpretation of its staging and structure encompasses its historical-political meaning, as well as its soul-spiritual drifts.
He has previously stated that hermeneutics, or what is said to be so, cannot merely make introductory prologues about the difficulties of all kinds that a complete hermeneutical reading presents when it addresses all or as many of the possible meanings. For this author, hermeneutics, which is the same as symbolic or structural formal interpretation, cannot be undertaken by separating the formal from its meaning without the risk of sinking itself. That is why it is about "meaning, both as the direction and goal of the work and its significance".
The other part: A theory on poetry and fantasy art[]
At the 2nd International Congress of Fantasy Literature held at the Mariano Moreno National Library on May 9, 2015, Ángel Faretta gave two conferences that shed light on his unpublished theory on poetry and fantasy art..
1 – The Birth of Fantasy, “The Sandman” by E.T.A Hoffmann (1818)
Narrative works'[]
In his narrative work published so far, Faretta focuses on fantasy stories, an expressive form which he also explores as a theorist and historian. Both in the stories of "The Knowledge of Four" and in the novel "Storm and Stress", he sets out on a journey through the fantastic epos of the origins as well as the subsequent historical developments in Argentina, a country he defines as "fantastic par excellence".
Faretta has categorically defined fantasy as the opposite of both magic realism and science fiction.
In "The Knowledge of the Four", there is a self-aware allusion to the previous steps taken by classic authors of Argentine fantasy. In turn, "Storm and Stress" presents two historical axes: the expulsion of the Jesuits and, according to this author, the simultaneous occurrence of these events and the birth of Argentina as a nation, and the period in which German Romanticism was born and developed.
He defines his recently published second novel, Fleeing Travelers, as a “conversation novel”. It tells the story of a group of friends that pierces the history of Argentina from 1963 to 1973 through chapters that can be read as individual stories, he exercises a distant realism, where the mythical and hermetic of his two previous narrative books are reconfigured in a low mimetic key, while avoiding the black pit of costumbrism as he has asserted. (*)
As for the common element of these two novels, he said: “That element is Argentina as a mythical birth in Storm and Stress and its decline in the real-historical in Fleeing Travelers”.
Books[]
· Datos tradicionales (Traditional Data), poems, 1993,
· El concepto del cine (The Concept of Cinema, 2005), a summary of his theory on cinema.
· El saber del cuatro (The Knowledge of the Four, 2005) short stories.
· Espíritu de simetría (Spirit of Symmetry, 2008), a compilation of essays published in Fierro magazine in the 1980s and 1990s.
· Tempestad y asalto (Storm and Stress, 2009), a novel.
· La pasión manda. De la condición y representación melodramáticas (Passion Rules. On the Melodramatic Condition and Representation, 2010), an essay.
· Cinco films argentinos (Five Argentine Films) June, 4th, 2016) Wayback Machine. (2012, a book of essays in collaboration with Fernando Regueira, Sebastián Nuñez, Alberto Tricarico y Guillermo Jacubowicz about the classic films Rosaura a las diez, Más allá del olvido, Mujeres que trabajan, Historia de una noche y Safo, historia de una pasión).
· La cosa en cine. Motivos y figuras (The thing in cinema. Motives and figures),essays, 2013)
· Viajeros que huyen (Fleeing travellers) (novel, 2016)
· Poems and translations on the blog “otra iglesia es imposible”
· Essays and studies on sites such as www.angelfaretta.com.ar; “Aquilea liberada” y en “Tapados, raros, fallidos y olvidados”
References[]
- ^ Fernando Regueira, ANGEL FARETTA. CRÍTICA COMO CONTEMPLACIÓN, ES DECIR, TEORÍA. http://www.uncriticodedomingo.blogspot.com/
- ^ http://videotecaaquilea.blogspot.com/2007/06/entrevista-angel-faretta.html Reportage a ANGEL FARETTA
External links[]
· Official website of the author.
· On the book Spirit of Symmetry
· Notes on the theory of cinema by Angel Faretta. Archived in the Wayback Machine on July 10,
· Reading-as-being podcast.
· On the book"The concept of cinema ", by Rafael Cippolini.
· Example of a film review: "How to board the Titanic", by Ángel Faretta Archived in the Wayback Machine.
· on July 10, 2011 in A Review of Storm and Stress, by Marcelo Zapata
· A review of “Storm and Stress", by Alberto Laiseca
· A review of "Passion Rules…", by Jorge Aulicino
· Editorial Djaen
· Marcelo Zapata’s interview on "Fleeing Travellers", in Ámbito Financiero
· Daniel Gigena’s interview on "Fleeing Travellers", in La Nación
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- People from Buenos Aires
- Argentine science fiction writers
- Argentine male writers
- 1953 births
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