10 · 13 · 07

Alfonso Cuarón debate about truth and reality in films

Clara Sánchez

At Pinacoteca de San Agustín many young filmmakers and some actors came together to listen to Alfonso Cuaron’s lecture. The Mexican filmmaker was received by Daniela Michael, director of the Festival Internacional de Cine de Morelia, and a lively round of applauds welcomed them.

Alfonso Cuaron was standing at the podium, he was surrounded by beautiful oil paintings by anonymous painters who portrayed Saint Augustine’s life. Cuaron started off by saying that they should forget about the name “Master Lecture” because he isn’t interested in categories but just in the cinema.

Cuarón then mentioned the beginnings of cinema, reminding everyone that it started as documentary. He highlighted that he was interested about the truth and reality so he mentioned the Lumiere brothers who recorded daily life issues like Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory and Arrival of a Train at a Station. These films were really popular because the spectator himself became part of the show.

The Mexican filmmaker emphasized that with Meliés cinema achieved another perspective because he created fiction and turned film into a magic show. Brighton School was dedicated to documentary “portraying conscience, not truth, the higher classes were portrayed and then later on he was interested on the forgotten social classes,” said Cuarón.

Reality or Truth

With montage sequence Einsentein tried to recreate truth, but Cuarón mentioned: “montage is far away from the truth, because to recreate it you need a point of view and truth itself depends on the person who is searching for it. Reality is different in every place. As filmmakers we must search for truth because reality can be found anywhere.”

So thus began the questions and answers session

What is your definition of truth and reality?

A.C. “Reality is everything that surrounds us. It is deciphering all these codes to form a reality. Truth is a common point, it makes us normal, it has to do with a collective consciousness, and you don’t necessarily need a spiritual or religious point of view, you can simply see it as evolution of the species or an information code called DNA, or if you are Marxist you can call it a historical code.

Reality doesn’t care about interpretation. According to our own reality, to who we are, we are going to judge and interpret truth, here is where the problem arises because narratives sometimes become ideologies: narratives created from realities and not truths.

Truths are dealt with the narratives by mystics, not ideologists. Art links us to this truth that is common to all of us. I believe that crazy people, artists and mystics connect us with that truth. Science deals with realities and it is very important. What I mean is that we can not grasp truth from our reality, because we do not live in truth, we live in reality. Science is a way to interpret truth from a common set of norms, and pure science reaches the same conclusions that mystics reach while searching for the truth.”

While creating how can we achieve truth from reality?

A.C. “Reality is the starting point for every single thing. Truth is behind every word, every image, every norm and principle. To achieve it you must start from your own interpretation: truth transcends ego and sometimes people get truth spite of their own ego, what I mean is that to achieve truth we must overcome our own ego.”

So it has to do with an emotional aspect instead of reality? Cinema is not about saying what can be said but it is about saying what can not be expressed...

A.C. “Emotions are real. Feelings are real. The difference between sensibility and emotional is not connecting to a “reality” point of view but to act