Primal Events: The Early Films of Gonzalo Suárez

Abstract

his article seeks to address the specificity of filmic form in the work of Gonzalo Suarez, a filmmaker very much associated with literature and the written word. It argues for the use of the word translation rather than adaptation in the movement from page to screen. It seeks to identify certain motifs and images in Suarez’s early work and suggests that it is distinguished by mutation and transference that, in turn, determine questions of filmic structure and subjectivity. In this discussion of form, the article focuses upon the idea of the “void” as a primal space of creation and does so with refer-ence to Suarez’s 1997 short piece on Chillida. This is done in order to draw out a coherent relation between the first films and the later work.