This article appeared in the October 4, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

You Burn Me (Matías Piñeiro, 2024)

“We play with the surface of things,” the Italian poet and novelist Cesare Pavese writes in Dialogues with Leucò (1947), one of the last works he published before his death by suicide in 1950. “We mutate.” Pavese gives these lines to the mythical sea nymph Britomart, who, in the imaginative world of the author’s short dialogue, encounters the ancient Greek poet Sappho after she’s hurled herself off a rocky cliff into the crashing waves below. “Everything dies in the sea and then comes to life again,” Britomart tells Sappho. “Now you know.”

Matías Piñeiro’s You Burn Me is a film that revels in the surfaces of things, in the way things come to life again. An ingenious and open-ended translation of Pavese’s dialogues, Sappho’s poems (which mostly survive today as fragments of phrases), and various other footnotes from the lives of both writers, You Burn Me looks to these source texts not as material to adapt faithfully or “visualize,” but instead as their own potent cinematic form. The film is particularly enamored of books—pages are constantly being folded and flipped by fingers in the film, dried-up leaves and flowers imprint themselves over words and tattoo the paper, and pastel-colored highlighters scribble annotations and doodle bawdy comics in the margins.

Piñeiro has long been interested in how traces of the past inflect our everyday lives—as signs of the ancient or modern world embedded in the contemporary one—in a career now spanning eight features and several shorts, many of which weave a classical dramatic text into the lives of a group of contemporary characters. In You Burn Me, an unnamed narrator who’s fascinated with Pavese and Sappho decides to make a film, casting herself as a lovelorn biology student roaming through an art museum. She enlists longtime Piñeiro regulars Gabi Saidόn and María Villar to embody the eternally dialoguing Sappho and Britomart. This “casting” process is merely referred to through voiceover rather than actually depicted as part of the on-screen narrative, so the fictional film-within-a-film becomes inseparable from the one we’re watching. We see Gabi and María each change the other’s contact info on their phones to read “Sappho” and “Britomart,” and then engage in a reimagined version of Pavese’s dialogue over text messages and voice memo. Later, the biology student heads back to her apartment, only to find that the locks have been changed by a jealous lover. She rambles around the city and then sits in a public park beside a fountain adorned with classical busts, where she answers a phone call from the partner who locked her out. Here, Sappho’s fragmented poems become the film script—deployed as the yearning and incomplete responses to a pained phone conversation with an ex held in public.

The idea of ekphrasis (in the sense of a work of art that describes another one) is at least as old and solidly Hellenic as Sappho’s poems, written circa 600 B.C. But what’s most fascinating is how Piñeiro goes about his translation, carving out his own richly personal associations from the living remnants of an always unfinished past. And while You Burn Me is, in some ways, of a thematic piece with the rest of Piñeiro’s work, it’s also a major leap into new territory. It’s a resolutely intimate and handmade film that burrows even deeper into its filmmaker’s obsessions: the lure of marginalia; the act of reading, translating, drawing, and making music; and the drive to imprint oneself on things for the sake of it.

Shot on 16mm with a Bolex camera—a device associated with a particular strain of diaristic filmmaking (Piñeiro is credited as one of film’s cinematographers)—the projected film images are pockmarked, scratched, and stubbled with texture. At times, the frames even appear to vibrate, as splashes of red-tinted dye encroach on the left side of the image, sliding in and out like waves. There are a few moments in which the narrative of the film itself breaks down spectacularly into specific, discrete images that correspond directly and concretely, but also imaginatively, to scraps of poetry: Piñeiro translates the Sappho fragment “For me, not the honey, not the bee” into two-or-three-second-long clips that each refer to an individual word in the poem. “Me” transforms into a close-up of the scorned biology student pushing her key into the changed lock; “honey” becomes sea foam washing into the shore; and so on. These poetic sequences, played and then replayed, train the viewer to interpret this newly assembled associative vocabulary. Eventually, these filmed mutations viscerally evoke the feeling of empty space on the page—of wet heaps of decomposing scrolls, with shards of jagged language jutting out.

Jem Cohen is another filmmaker closely attuned to the surfaces of everyday life, interested in smuggling narrative into an experimental filmmaking tradition. But where the individual components of Piñeiro’s films hang together in a delicately calibrated equilibrium—he once compared their structures to Calder mobiles—Cohen’s films instead work by a slow accretion, where new images, sounds, characters, and formal conceits are progressively tacked on in a way that might throw things temporarily off-balance.

Cohen’s new feature, Little, Big, and Far, takes its big ideas (about art, institutions, commerce, urban life) and structuring principles (essayistic, epistolary, peripatetic) from his previous efforts like Museum Hours (2012) and Counting (2015). But his latest also feels like a new point of departure, with its densely packed discursive detail and free-flowing sections blending archival photographs, street photography, camera-exposure tricks, and roving music from the drummer Jim White.

The film follows Karl (Franz Schwartz), an aging Austrian astrophysicist who loves free jazz (“The Coltranes brought cosmology into music,” he tells us via voiceover while spinning their 1968 album Cosmic Music on vinyl in his Vienna apartment). Despite his far-out scientific specializations and listening habits, Karl leads an otherwise simple and quiet life, shuffling through the city streets to his job at a university and then back to his apartment to soak alone in his tub. His life is buoyed, emotionally and intellectually, by the emails and letters he receives from his wife, a cosmologist living in Texas (played by experimental filmmaker Leslie Thornton), and another acquaintance who may be either a biologist or just a highly engaged layperson interested in bringing scientific concepts to the general public (played by multidisciplinary artist Jessica Sarah Rinland). These two characters provide some of the true pleasures of the film—suggesting a secret world in which avant-garde filmmakers are also underground astronomers, and in which cinema is its own vessel for exploration of time and space. (“I always wanted to be a cosmonaut,” Cohen said in a 2015 interview.)

As the film wears on, though, we start to sense that Karl is an isolated, perhaps even fatalistic person. He hasn’t made the trip to Texas to see his wife in years, and though he also has a grandson living somewhere in the United States, he seems mostly preoccupied with the idea that the boy will grow up in a world infinitely dimmer than the one he knew as a child, and ever distant from nature and the sky. When Karl travels to Greece for a conference, he decides to stay on for a few extra days, trekking to a remote island in search of a dark place to view the stars. It’s ambiguous whether this journey is a sort of astronomer’s last rites or a renewed attempt at hope.

At times, it feels like Cohen’s film might be slipping away from its open-ended and generative premise, particularly when Karl’s monologues take on the air of preachiness; we get the distinct sense that the writer-director is pressing his own opinions onto his characters. At other times, the film’s voiceover bombards us with information that even the most patient and dedicated viewer might find overbearing. If Museum Hours employed an Akerman-esque ambiguity between narration and image—where the museum-guard protagonist tells us stories about his youthful stint as a rock-band tour manager while the camera moves fluidly from shots of birds on rooftops and street corners to close-ups of birds on paintings—Little, Big, and Far sometimes links images and voiceover in a more one-to-one, and therefore flattening, way, as if simply explicating things.

One of the film’s most beautiful scenes, though, does the exact opposite. Thornton’s cosmologist tells Karl through a letter (read aloud on the soundtrack) about her search for a spot along the path of totality of a solar eclipse. When her quest is thwarted due to traffic and thousands of people overcrowding a football stadium, she pulls over in the massive parking lot of a mall instead, where a spillover group of eclipse-chasers, whom she calls “pilgrims,” slowly gather beneath JCPenney and Sephora signs to swap goofy eclipse glasses and crane and contort their heads toward the skies. The scene has a rhythmic power, sustained by the musicality of Thornton’s funky drawl, as the camera lingers long after the eclipse has ended and the crowds have thinned out, night falling slowly on a corporate parking lot that had, however briefly, transformed into a site of public communion.