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Proper Eyes (Por sus propios ojos)

What we cannot talk about we just pass over in silence. This, as widely known, is the last proposition – out seven - in Ludwig Wittgwnstein’s Tractatus logicopilosophicus. The central thesis and subsidiary proposition make “pictures” of the world in a philosophical-linguistic structure as the fact.

The connection with the faux documentary PROPER EYES/Por sus propios ojos is rather loose – as loose, perhaps, as the relations built in and out of the world as we know it, the opposition between inside and outside, inner and outer edge. But this scribe’s own association between the Wittgenstein proposition and Liliana Paolinelli’s opera prima is far from loose – it stems from John Edgar Wildeman’s short story of the same title, first published in Harper’s magazine and then compiled in the volume God’s Gym. Wildman’s What We Cannot Talk About We Must Pass Over in Silence starts with the anonymous fifty-seven-year-old narrator saying that he has a friend whose son is doing time in an Arizona prison. About once a year, this friend visits his son. Just once a year, because of the distance – father lives on East Coast, son’s incarcerated on the West Coast. And on top of that, all the preparations – tangible and intangible - before the flight, before seeing his son once again. And finally the hardest part of visiting – leaving, in the painful knowledge that his son is left behind, trapped in prison.

The women in PROPER EYES/Por sus propios ojos are not unlike the father in Wildeman’s short story. It must be a universal feeling, if one rushes to conclusions. But these women go through this ordeal not once a year. They do it on weekly basis, on Sundays, visiting day. Fathers, brothers, husbands, lovers, boyfriends – these are men behind bars whose sole connection with the outside world are these woman who, impervious to the weekly humiliations they must go through before prison guards throw the doors open for them to visit the inmates, wait patiently, weep in silence, cry out their pain in a hushed fashion.

Paolinelli’s approach to the subject of incarceration, to what it’s like to be inside and what in feels for a next of kin to be outside is quite original and miles apart from the stereotyped view of hundreds of fiction and non-fiction works on the same subject. Paolinelli’s gaze, at the start, is like “looking in from the outside” – the protagonist is Alicia (Ana Carabajal), a film student whose graduation thesis will be a documentary on the women who visit their incarcerated sons, husbands, the lot. Alicia’s story, and her struggle trying to find women willing to talk to her and appear on the record describing their lives and their feelings about what it’s like to have a son in prison, was quite familiar to the director. As a film student, she herself had to fence off prejudice and break all kind of social and individual barriers to get into the souls of people whose lives she chose to document on film.

PROPER EYES/Por sus propios ojos, then, follows Alicia and her friend-fellow student Virginia all the way from the initial phase of the graduation thesis up to the very end, when the research comes to an end and the researcher finds, with lacerating pain, that there is no true distinction between “inside and outside”, that we’re all trapped in cages of our own.

The human bonds in PROPER EYES/Por sus propios ojos are quite similar to those of free society at large – mutual convenience, solidarity, friendship, love. Mothers, wives, girlfriends, sisters, all stand together as one against the intruder – Alicia and her camera; Alicia, a 25 year-old who has made to the final of her film studies which she must cap with a graduation thesis. Obsessed with the idea of approaching and at the same time distancing herself from the theme and subjects of her planned documentary, Alicia and her friend relentlessly pursue their goal – getting one of those “Sunday women” to talk to the camera. One thing is clear to them right from the very start – they are to portray the outside and will stay away from the inside, unlike most documentaries or works of fiction in the same theme.

Resorting to the “cinema-within cinema” technique, Paolinelli pictures Alicia’s journey as, forced by unfavourable circumstances, she (Alicia) must cope with the fact that no “Sunday woman” is willing to speak. Their feelings, they all seem to say, they will keep to themselves, the only private thing left to them after losing all trace of human dignity. No talking. They must pass it all over in silence.

Following a hunch, Alicia and Virginia decide to come forward to a middle-aged woman they have spotted in the crowd of silent women. Elsa’s been looking at them all the time, wondering what these young girls could be up to, aliens in a world of aliens they have chosen as the subject of the scrutinizing gaze of their weapon. The camera’s implacable eye surveys it all and keeps it for posterity.

Alicia pursuits a goal. So does Elsa. Alicia is relentless in her pursuit. So is Elsa. They meet. Elsa agrees to talk, though not there, in the privacy of her home, she says. Alicia and Virginia, camera in her hand, knocks on Elsa’s door, only to find the woman, under to some petty excuse, decides to keep her thoughts, her words, to herself. No camera, she says. A voice recording she agrees to, but this is not what Alicia’s been after this time. Images, visuals, that’s what she needs for her graduation thesis. From the outside looking in, as the scope of her work will be confined to this sole aspect, even if there’s more than one side to the matter.

Repetition and tenacity will get her where she intends to, Alicia tells herself. There’s something Elsa, the mother with an incarcerated son, badly needs and wants: someone who can help her keep her son alive while serving time. It’s give and take. Alicia agrees to play the game – she will visit Elsa’s son, Luis, the following Sunday. A reversal of roles follows: Alicia, along with hordes of other silent women, rises early in the morning, wraps a few edibles and other staples in a bag, and in she marches to the prison’s gates. At this point, acknowledging the fact that she’s crossed the barrier she was not supposed to – she finds herself from the inside looking out. An asset, this strategy, director Paolinelli has one for.

Alicia gets close, dangerously close to the subject of her study – a tangential subject, she thinks, for her only purpose, thus far, is to do Elsa a favor in return of another. This, she realizes, is the only way to get Elsa to talk to the camera. By giving her something in return of her testimony. For a story – any story- to move forward, the narrator must basically state who does what to whom, and the consequences thereof. In this sense, Paolinelli’s study of personal transformation is a clever one – it’s not only a single one, but all the main characters who undergo profound changes as they go along the hostile corridors, onto a prison block and finally into the inmate’s cell. “We’re finally trapped” her eyes say. But director Paolinelli is short on verbal statements. There are no words here. Alicia keeps in silent. And silently she goes out of prison’s doors, rather uncertain of who’s in and who’s out, where the inside and the outside blur into one. Ana Carabajal’s casting at the innocent, permeable graduate student is a true find. If PROPER EYES/Por sus propios ojos is a faux documentary, Carabajal makes it seem as though she were there for real, not acting, just letting the camera roll while her own life goes on. Luisa Nuñez, who plays Elsa, the inmate’s mother, is as close as cinéma vérité will probably get into making fiction pass itself off as the real thing. True, Por sus proios ojos is a work of fiction. It is also the real thing.

PRODUCTION NOTES. PROPER EYES/Por sus propios ojos, Argentina 2008. Written and directed by Liliana Paolinelli. Principal photography by Martin Mahabed. Music by Vincent Artud. Starring Ana Carabajal, Luisa Núñez, Maximiliano Gallo and Mara Santucho, among others. Mandragora Producciones. Runing time: 81 minutes NC13. Distributed by FiGa Films in the USA and Canada. www.propereyesthemovie.com