RIP Mauricio Walerstein
El Universal
By: Simon Bulgaris
July 4, 2016
Filmmaker Mauricio Walerstein has died
The filmmaker was born in Mexico, but his career was developed in Venezuela, died Sunday
Although Mexican by blood in his veins run (born in Mexico City, on March 29, 1945), he was a Venezuelan Mauricio Walerstein passionate through film, especially that made in this country explored the most intimate aspect of the human impulses screened by political commitment and sexual desire.
Thus, any historicist purpose regarding national cinematography is taken to include in many cases your name, as well as being unyielding when dealing with the issues that obsessed him, Walerstein also starred in a phenomenon that divided in two the future Venezuelan cinema: the so-called "boom" of the seventies and eighties, the time when local production returned viewers the clearest picture of the national situation.
Mauricio Walerstein died Sunday in Mexico due to cancer, whose inexorable advance lived and suffered alongside his wife, Venezuelan actress Marisela Berti. He was 71 years, but beyond that precise data, it is impossible not to recall the courage to assuming his office, his steady hand to tell stories, his interest in Venezuelan literature and, especially, delivering absolute who managed the actors who worked under his guidance.
The excitement that produced the possibility, looking out by the director of photography Abigail Rojas, adapted for the big screen the novel by Miguel Otero Silva, When I mourn not cry, brought to these lands knowing that the story of the three Victorinos those who had to live the overthrow of Romulo Gallegos and the establishment of the dictatorship of Marcos Perez Jimenez, could not overcome the Mexican censorship then.
And all immigrants in Venezuela he was received in 1971 with open arms. And here he realized his dream: When I mourn not cry became a landmark of national cinema to rank among the top ten films seen in 1973. In addition to linking this success to the fact that the film is based on a novel well known for Venezuelan readers, the cultural phenomenon that represented the work of Walerstein was well explained by the critic Alfonso Molina in his article "national film 1973-1993: very personal memory of the Venezuelan film" (1997): "(...) the film Walerstein he established a relationship of identity between the viewer and what was happening on the screen. One way of talking, acting and, ultimately, a way of being Venezuelan. First national eyes saw a story, a dramatic process and characters that belonged to them. "
If something leaves a legacy Mauricio Walerstein is its artistic coherence. He never sold to power. He never made movies to please. He never betrayed his vision. And he never cared that the critics encumbrara or crushed. When the latter happened, his reaction was nothing but indifference that made him look from the outside as a creator beyond good and evil.
Basten their words to understand what his philosophy as a filmmaker: "I'm not interested me the big issues. Gandhi never perform or Miranda. I am a man of my time and the Western world that is alive and that I care. Nor do I deal with the propagandistic film and never would. I do not think that revolutions have nothing to do with cinema, nor the revolutionaries with the filmmakers. I am an anarchist and I think that's the ideal position of the creator. I prefer the films of John Ford to any of Eisenstein, although it sounds pedantic ".
Titles like Chronicle of a Subversive Latin American (1975), the company Forgives a Moment of Madness (1978), Eva, Julia, Perla (1978), The maximum happiness (1983), male and female (1985), Woman to Woman ( 1986), the passionate Mobile (1994) and Games under the moon (2000) report a filmmaker who, despite public acceptance that took his films, had its ups and downs, its good and not so good movies. Of course, he never disowned perceived worse.
In any case, his creative exploration always aimed at the same goal: to unravel the instincts of his characters, starting with the guerrillas indoctrinated from Cuba in the nascent years of the rise of democracy in Venezuela; through the love triangle interpreted in male and female, Orlando Urdaneta, Elba Escobar and Irene Arcila, and arriving at the drama of many Venezuelan workers exploited to the sale, as he that desperate man who played Simon Diaz in the company occurs forgives a moment of madness, Walerstein made adaptation of the eponymous play by Rodolfo Santana.
It seems commonplace, and perhaps be said that beyond its physical presence and as in the case of all the artists who have achieved some resonance within a culture, from now on will be your movies that speak for Mauricio Walerstein. Personally, there are a lot of sequences recorded in memory; indelible: that of Pedro Laya as Victorino Perdomo wandering the streets of Caracas; the conversation in a restaurant starring Rafael Briceño and Miguel Angel Landa, as two subversives who planned the kidnapping of an official from the US Embassy; the Virginia Urdaneta, Marcelo Romo and Luis Colmenares mending a quilt; the worker the Orlando Nunez (Simon Diaz) beside himself; Alicia's (Irene Arcila) eroticized by a drumbeat ... anyway.
WALERSTEIN, Mauricio
Born: 3/29/1945, Mexico City, Federal District, Mexico
Died: 7/3/2016, Mexico
Mauricio Walerstein’s western – producer:
Eye for an Eye - 1971