Alexander Hartman He does not say that he cried, but he does not need to clarify it either. When she sat in the front row of the Gaumont Cinema, On the night of Thursday, April 20, the director loosened the tensions he had accumulated during the year and a half that it took him to make the documentary about Joseph Louis Heads. It was a long process, in which he interviewed journalists, judges, lawyers and politicians such as Eduardo Duhaldeand during which he repeated something that became a kind of habit: regularly seeing a photo of the photographer on his cell phone, an image that even illustrated one of his WhatsApp groups.
Alexander Hartman: Crime touches you, and a lot, it moves you, but it’s good to make the effort to know who this guy was, to know him. There is something that Edi (Zunino, former director of NEWS) also says in the film: “Well, he wasn’t a saint. He was a common guy.” Sometimes you expect to find heroes or villains, because it is difficult to identify with someone who, in the end, is like one. But it’s good to do the exercise of putting yourself in that place and trying to understand that it really could have been me, you, anyone. That’s why having that photo and looking at it, so that the question comes: Who was Jose Luis Cabezas? The risk, if not, is that things are “cheguevariized”, it becomes only a poster. And I, at least, wanted to go a step further from the personal. For me it was very important that it not be an object but that it be a subject.
Hartmann, who has just directed “Carmel”, premiered “The Photographer and the Postman”, a film produced by Netflix that arrives on the platform on May 19 and that has already had three screenings in the Bafici. The film, which is produced by Vanesa Ragone (who worked on “The Secret in Their Eyes”, an Oscar winner), reconstructs the crime of the photographer of this magazine, on January 25, 1997. The documentary includes the participation of Gabriel Michi, season partner and friend, Edi Zunino, then in the Politics section, Gustavo González, editor of Politics, Ricardo Ragendorfer, journalist who participated in the investigation of the famous cover of “Maldita Police” (whose cover illustrated a photo of José Luis), Alejandro Vecchi (lawyer of the photographer’s family) and former Buenos Aires governor Eduardo Duhalde, among others.
News: He says that for the documentary he looked for the person Cabezas. Did you find it?
Hartmann: I think so, that among all those who knew him and spoke for the film, yes, I understood him. And there is something very valuable… not that I am comparing myself, but today you are doing the Netflix one and tomorrow you are doing your independent one (the director also premiered “El Nacional” at Bafici, a documentary about the school) and the day after tomorrow I’m doing the camera as I did a thousand times. That common thing that we all have and that I think is good to have, to work. José Luis was that, a laborer and, at the same time, an obsessive. Evidently, he had aspirations to be better and to be understood by more people. For me it is good to revalue that in a world of so many clichés. In fact, with José Luis there was that attempt and it’s good that his friends bring him down all the time. There is an idea that if he died, he died for something, because he had an ideal or because he was a militant. And no. He was not a militant, his ideal was to be a better photographer and that seems very human and very beautiful to me. They killed him for doing his job. Obviously José Luis revealed things, but he was doing his job. He didn’t have that heroic intent that we’d love to find because we’d like to find an explanation for why he was killed. But, for me, the crime for nothing, for doing his job well, is even worse. In addition, something happens that from listening to and talking about him so much at one point you don’t even know if at some point you’re not going to dream about him, about José Luis. I am already entering the most fanciful terrain, but at some point you are entering someone who is dead with all the burden that that has. There is something strong there.
News: Does that energy end when the documentary ends, when it is presented or is it still there?
Hartmann: No. It was very strong for me to see it. In fact, I always had a hard time watching this movie while I was editing it. It cost me a lot because it has a lot of information and for many reasons. Just the other day I was able, at the premiere at Bafici, for the first time, to see her stripped. I took off a backpack a little and that there were many people who had known him, there was Gaby (Michi), but I got carried away. I think a film was captured that tries to revalue memory, to rebuild who José Luis was and, at the same time, to tell something that interests me a lot, which is that context of the country, that context of a corrupt government and a economic policy that we already know how it ended. And, at the same time, try to have some cinematic value. We were very careful with the recreations, which were few and are like a more poetic element, the objects, the revealed ones. We also wanted to revalue that, that old work in the laboratory, the idea of what is revealed in every sense, literally the paper and the photo are revealed, but also that with the photographer’s gaze something of reality can also be revealed. So the other day I got carried away and got really excited. Not gloating myself, not because it’s mine, but because I saw the whole story and said, “Motherfucker, why did all that happen?”.
