Earlier in the semester, we had the opportunity to apply for several volunteer jobs/internships in Buenos Aires. I had been enjoying my New Argentine Cinema class and I saw that one of the internship offerings was writing for a Cinema/Culture magazine with my cinema professor, Hernán Sassi. This seemed like an interesting opportunity and a very good way to improve my Spanish. I had the interview with Hernán, which wasn’t really an interview as the discussion was in the future tense (“So when you write the reviews, you will be meeting with me weekly,” etc.). About two hours later, I got the job.
First thing I learned is that these were not nice, two dedos gordos (thumb, literally fat fingers) up reviews, these were literary, academic, and way beyond my Spanish writing capacity. The movie I was to review was Viola by Matías Piñeiro, an hour-long film that follows the lives of women in a production of Twelfth Night musings about life and love. The director mixes the scenes of Shakespeare in and out of the theater, combines Viola Shakespearian with Viola Actual, and loops and repeats scenes and dialogue throughout the film. I am a big Shakespeare fan, so I was looking forward to getting to study another of his plays.
How I felt after my first draft of Viola. (Photo: Katherine Larson.)
The first draft of my review did not go so well. Hernán used phrases like, “These ideas do not interest me” and “Perhaps when you rewrite this you can make a new file.” I have had meetings with editors and professors that have not gone well, but this was a new low—all in Spanish, I was having difficulty understanding everything he said but I knew he was not pleased. At the end of the meeting, I was told to keep the sentence in which I said who the director of the film was, and one other sentence that we were going to turn into a brand new review. The diamond hiding in the rough of my review was my quoting (note: not anything I had actually created, just something I took from the dialogue) the following line from Viola as she seduces Olivia: “I can say little more than I have studied, and that question's out of my part.”
This sentence led us to the idea of the value of the copy and how an exact copy of a text can be something new and relevant in a new context. Hernán recommended I read “Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote” by Borges to add another literary connection to my review. In the story, Pierre Menard sets out to make an exact copy of Cervantes’ text, and the narrator of the story (Borges?) asserts that it is something new and a new feat of literature. (You can read the full text of the story in English here).
With serious help from Hernán, three weeks and countless drafts later, I had something that was close to a movie review. To produce this 500-word piece of writing, I watched two films, read Twelfth Night, and struggled through Borges in English and Spanish. I definitely cannot write that well in Spanish, so I really have to thank Hernán for all his help making it sound like an educated review. Even after all of this work, we still don’t know if the magazine will accept the review. In our last email, Hernán wrote, “es una revista cool, y tu reseña es cool” (“It’s a cool magazine, and your review is cool”), so we will see what happens. I am cautiously optimistic.
