He likes to be punctual, he knows the annoyance of waiting or missing what was agreed. His commitment exceeds the clock, it is with time. He believes that history, with capital letters, is the product of being at the right time. Alfredo Arias appears at the exact second this interview was agreed upon. A chronological review of this director, actor, regisseur: he is a child born in a home hostile to his interests, who allowed himself to be cradled by the neighborhood cinema, an adolescent who went through the military high school imposed by his family, a young man who gave birth himself at the Di Tella, he had to go into exile in Paris in 1968 and took on another language that did not change his Argentine accent at all. He is a man of “abstract age” who proclaims himself in the future, who comes and goes to continue creating.
News: What things did you have to wait for?
Alfredo Arias: For example, to be able to make movies. Because my first idea was to go towards cinematographic language. The neighborhood cinema was fundamental in my training, I had the hope of being able to make and reflect there, on that screen. For different reasons, I was trapped inside the theater.
News: How long did it take to get to the cinema?
Aries: Cinema is linked to the roots, because it is a dazzling community art for which an entire community is needed. And for me it was very complicated in the uprooting to find my theme and talk about things that were deeply mine, although I tried once. And the second, I had to rely on more cultural material, more learned. Finally now with “Fanny walks”, I get to make a film in my city and with my roots.
News: If the cinema is linked to the origin, it was almost the need to return to the warmth of home, and his had been hostile to him.
Aries: Yes, but perhaps that hostility served to make me fall more deeply in love with other things. Because, for example, when I have to do five years of military high school, I escape by imagining movies, and that remained as a benefit of that aggression that I had to suffer, because in the end the imaginary was always a refuge. I remember the ceremony of going to the movies on Wednesdays, with my grandmother and my cousin.
News: What role did your mother play?
Aries: Many women of that time went to the wedding and then wondered what I am doing here and that misfortune caused the frustrations to be reflected in the children. And in any case I suffered a lot from those rebounds. I think my mother should have had a space to express her frustrations and I offered her that space, since I was a different child, because what I wanted did not fall within the canons of a painful petty bourgeoisie.
News: And he declared himself a “Peronist child” in a radical home!
Aries: Yes, I never give up my identity, I was never afraid to be different. It was not at any time an anguish, as the loss of roots was, that was more complicated.
News: Almost that the exile to France was subsequent to this symbolic exile of childhood.
Aries: I think so. Once, the psychoanalyst told me: “You had to put the ocean between you and your family in order to continue existing”. One of my obsessions was not to move away from the route that I had made for myself, and to try to see how I could resolve situations so that they did not lead me to a position of mediocrity. I was carried away by the Di Tella tsunami and all that shaped me. I have always managed to be able to continue, but that requires a lot of discipline and a lot of lucidity.
News: When an artist finds his way of expressing himself, does he become bourgeois or does he continue to have an effervescent spirit?
Aries: What happens is that those dazzling moments also have a firework effect, they function as a celebration of oneself in the face of creativity. What remains once that fire has passed is all there is to learn. That opens the great enigma of how to go through that labyrinth and what it is that you have to learn to continue surviving on that path.
News: What was the hardest thing to learn for you?
Aries: French culture. I was lucky to arrive and have an immediate impact and that opened a path that continues to this day. But language is a mountain, getting to unravel it, how to express yourself and how to understand the construction of a culture through its language… Because the problem is that the mother tongue allows you to move forward with confidence, but when you are in a foreign culture, is in front of an enigma.
News: And what he did?
Arias: You could say that two cultures coexist in me. There is the culture of the roots, which is spontaneous, affective, intuitive, of pure emotion; and there is the French, which is all learned, an intellectual work. Here I can lead intuitively, while there I have to learn.
News: At 78 years old, he still has that overwhelming spirit, it comes and goes.
Aries: Yes, it is the advantage of not living within the schemes that society offers us, one is not aware of age and the roles that society offers us: the child, the adolescent, the adult, the old and the one who die (laughs). I have not felt compelled to adopt any of the formats. I live in an abstract age. It is rather the exterior that reminds me of my age.
News: He says: “The crack is a pacifier that they gave us to entertain us and waste our time, you can’t go forward or backward, it’s a kind of standby.” Where are you when you are neither on one side nor the other?
Aries: I am in the future. It seems to me that globally, and without going into the problems of Argentina, the political system is over, we are in the throes of an old political world. See what happens to Putin: he wants to become a tsar, he wants to be someone backwards, not forwards. The question is where he wants us to look at the policy that is being offered to us.
News: He went from being that self-proclaimed Peronist child to an adult who says that “Peronism is a historical fact that it would be good to overcome and find other ways of thinking about ourselves.”
Aries: Do you know why I can say that? Because I will never go into the anecdote. I want to be in the basics. I think that eventually what we serve as artists is to give a goal, a meaning, so I say get all this out of the way and let’s talk about fundamental things. It seems that what this story is telling us is let’s stay where we are, there is no way forward. And the world has already changed.
News: He was part of the experimentation of the 60s, how did he relate to substances?
Aries: I was very very young, I did not reach that stage. We were drugged with life, but we also owe that to a family like Di Tella, who changed their neighborhood, created several galleries, bookstores, people came to see the works of these characters. Knows? The question is whether or not to be at the right time, I mean, for example, when we talk about the Peronism of Eva Perón and Perón, they were at the precise historical moment. Di Tella, too, corresponded to a moment in which that could exist and did exist fully.
News: This historical moment is the possibility of what?
Aries: The problem is that a plot is needed that cannot be set in motion only by formally organized wills. If the Ministry of Culture wants to make a Di Tella, it is not going to happen because first there has to be the genius of people who capture the moment and then a generation that has been prepared from childhood until a certain moment to exploit, to grow and to combine the political, social, economic fact with art. I can kick with “I want genius” but no, that is not manufactured, it is manufactured by history.
News: How do you keep interpreting and creatively materializing something?
Aries: The formula is the daily and daily exercise of thought. I know my plot to the end of my days and I know everything I would like to do. So the result of being able to stay alive is because one more or less has envisioned a possibility of existence. It is not related to achievements but it is like an internal conversation that will be silenced the day one does not exist anymore, but not as long as he can continue thinking. It is worth taking the risk to think. And no one tells us that this commitment to ourselves is going to be easy and happy., as this psychoanalyst always said: “Who told you that you are going to be happy”. Besides me fight seems much more attractive than happiness. It is as if he were a person trained for that fight, because making art is installing something in reality that reality does not want.
