It was 1995 in Bogotá. I was going to the cinema at Avenida Chile, then called the Granahorrar Shopping Centre. Eurocine was showing one of its first editions, and I, a self-taught cinephile, believed in the superiority of art-house cinema. It was thus, by a twist of fate and out of that conviction, that I went to see the film: “Smoking/No Smoking” by French film director Alain Resneis.
I didn’t know much about French cinema, which I hated at the time, and even less about Resnais, who, being French, had escaped my attention due to the aforementioned prejudice. But upon seeing the film, time stopped. I entered a state without time or space. While that was what I loved about cinema, its ability to stop real time and transport me to other worlds, other times, this particular film became like a Möbius film and completely transformed me.
Although the film isn’t exactly cinema, but rather theater, and its actors are just two people, playing nine characters, and the English cliffs are the interior of a studio, the experience transformed me and transported me back to my old age.
Explaining this transgression of space and time isn’t easy, but I’ll try. I was Alain Resneis at the time. The director, who would have been 75 at the time, made me relive his life and look back. How so? I don’t know how to describe these kinds of episodes, but I know it wouldn’t be the last time it would happen to me. The film was a play. Or rather, two plays. They happened at the same time. The screen wasn’t flat; it was a stage; better yet, the shores of England. The two-dimensionality of cinema constantly escaped, drawing me back to the chair I was sitting in, and the constant people leaving or simply sympathizing and murmuring turned this place into a theater. The play, the plays, lasted 300 minutes, but at that precise moment, I became an old man. I had transformed and had already lived.
That year was also the first time I started over. It wouldn’t be the only time; it was more of a lifestyle; a position.
He was a pilot who stopped flying. A dreamer who stopped dreaming and started building. He was Icarus in free fall. His melting wings plummeted at escape velocity. He was a boy transforming into a young man, into a man. He was a reality and no longer an imagined project. The sky faded, and the force of gravity reclaimed its certainty. I was falling, for the first time. But not for the last.
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If you want to know how the transformation ended, go to the next link.
