You Burn Me (Matías Piñeiro, 2024).
That we can be here…and still find things to call beautiful and to love or to be unable to stop loving is indefensible. But we are here, and we do.
—Anahid Nersessian, Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse
Oceanic waters are “drenched in sperm and tears” as “Sea Foam”—one of 27 pensive, playful texts in Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leuco (1947)—begins. How boring, remarks Sappho to a nearby nymph. Both Britomartis and Sappho threw themselves into these salty, sticky waves out of desperation—to escape lecherous men, to obliterate a broken heart—and the poet, for her part, is disappointed. She longed after a sea that would swallow, that would annul. She longed for death. Swimming through the fluids of desire and despair forever was not at all what she had in mind. Cheer up, urges Britomartis. Becoming “a curl of frothing wave” is a fine fate. Sappho is not so sure, frowning about a “deep tidal unrest” while the buoyant nymph smiles.1
Were they commentators today, an online video of their exchange might take as its title “Britomartis DESTROYS Sappho!” Somber Sappho might be grateful for destruction, but the ambiguity of the scene would be spoiled. Against a contemporary trend of hostile discourse, Argentine filmmaker Matías Piñeiro draws from the sparkling fount of Pavese’s open dialogue in You Burn Me (Tú me abrasas, 2024), keeping the old ebb and flow of indeterminate difference in motion across 64 quicksilver minutes.
Casting aside the Shakespearean comedies that inspired his previous works, Piñeiro channels “Sea Foam” and two of its sister texts: Sappho’s own poetry and an essay on Pavese. Actors from other Piñeiro projects—Gabriela Saidon and María Villar—resurface in those intertextual estuaries, their lilting performances breathing life into Sappho and Britomartis’s back-and-forth. Yet Piñeiro is now interested in reading as much as reenactment; with a Bolex camera, he lingers over pages as well as bodies, rendering the material experience of reading palpable on 16mm stock.
When we talk, Piñeiro speaks with some excitement about what he calls “the mnemotechnic game,” which is interleaved throughout the film. Both the title and another line, adapted from fragment 146 of Sappho (neither for me honey nor the honey bee), are broken down into the unit of the word, and each word is accorded an image. That image is less a direct translation than an oblique or paradoxical relation: “honey,” for example, illustrated not as golden nectar but as saline sea. At first, the image is twinned with the word, spoken in Spanish voice-over and also (for those of us watching with subtitles) written at the bottom of the screen. Words later disappear. With the mute but familiar image, we might recall the meaning from before—seeing foam, thinking mellifluous—or we might imagine a new one, a new poem from Piñeiro’s repeated sequences.
In the first example of this mnemotechnic game, Piñeiro translates the first word of the film’s title—tú in Spanish and you in English—as an image that trembles. While the shuddering image depicts a building, that structure is made unsound. In this part of the poem, you shifts interminably, impossible to pin down. Translation between Spanish and English raises a problem in the second word of the film’s title—me in Spanish but burn in English. Can the image of a determined finger on an apartment buzzer, pressing it again and again to no answer, stand for both first-person pronoun and ardent verb? Can the final image of a running tap, liquid flowing down a drain, read as abrasas and me as well? To Spanish eyes and ears, me becomes a frustrated position—unrequited, perhaps—and abrasas is, mysteriously, not a flame but a waste of water. Reading in English, burn becomes the persistent calling and me is the superfluous stream. When we cross-pollinate word with image and between languages, the results can be aberrant, quixotic, unexpected.
In an article for Film Comment in March, Phil Coldiron quipped that “artist’s moving image” might better be called “writer’s moving image,” lamenting that text and speech often appended to the image captioned, clarified, and closed down interpretation. For him, a filmmaker like Mary Helena Clark twists words into images differently: as amalgamations that neither fix nor fit, but instead multiply meaning. For those bold enough to permit it, superimposing images with words produces paradox—or what Anne Carson, in Eros the Bittersweet (1984), calls “stereoscopic vision.”
Archaic Greek writers like Sappho had, Carson asserts, “an ability to hold in equipoise two perspectives at once.”2 Playing with lyric, fragment, and dialogue to suspend creative ambivalence throughout You Burn Me, Piñeiro participates in this tradition. Chasmic darknesses underlie the work: a young intellectual’s suicide, the sexual harassment of nymphs that saturates myth, the ruinous heartache of a lyric poet. Yet these are all honeyed, loosened, made “sweetbitter” through the surprise pleasures and stereoscopic visions of Piñeiro’s film.
You Burn Me (Matías Piñeiro, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: Anne Carson takes If Not, Winter for the title of her 2002 Sappho translation. You picked fragment 38 with You Burn Me.
MATÍAS PIÑIERO: I wanted to offer different entrances to Sappho: not just the Pavese dialogue—I could have called the film Sea Foam—but another book to be read, a game of remembering, various translations of single lines. I wanted somehow for Sappho to insert herself between the lines of “Sea Foam,” making the text open and bloom. I wanted, as well, to focus on lines that aren’t about broken hearts sometimes. When we see the amphora in the museum, Sappho is depicted as sad. Generally, I wanted more joy.
NOTEBOOK: Cesare Pavese and Sappho are new points of inspiration for you. How did you come to them?
PIÑIERO: I teach at Elías Querejeta in Donostía and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Traveling between the two creates waves of encounter; in those waves, I read Pavese and Sappho. From there, the process became a little…polyamorous. I worked with different people in Donostía, Buenos Aires, and New York. I went to Turin for the Pavese link.
NOTEBOOK: All of these locations, but the film inhabits a mythical space, in that it is often with paper, sea, or sky, and it is quite tricky to fix the film to any one place. Except when we have identifiable images like Caffè Torino or Hotel Roma.
PIÑIERO: Hotel Roma in Turin, just to confuse things.
NOTEBOOK: Did you travel to Greece, to Lesbos, for the Sappho link?
PIÑIERO: Not Lesbos. It’s all fake. [Laughs.] Athens and Syros, yes.
When it comes to Sappho, there is no truth. I’m exaggerating a bit, but Sappho was writing centuries ago, so it’s hard to hold onto something. I felt the film needed a constant or cracked movement to reflect that. So you are on the beach in Greece. Then you catch a wave in Argentina. And the technology of the Bolex made me work in a fragmented way, as did the low budget, not being able to shoot all at once. I learned how to use the camera and often made mistakes. I scattered the process across two years. In some sense, then, there was no faking fragmentation.
At one point, I was working with 16mm outtakes from a film of mine, The Stolen Man (2007), which features María Villar, the same actress who plays Britomartis here, as well as imagery of an apple. [Author’s note: in Sappho’s fragment 105, an apple “reddens on a high branch.”] I thought that I could scratch the 16mm, or paint it, or bleach it…but all of that was too decadent. Beautiful, certainly—the stuff of a Blu-ray extra, but not right. Sappho did not damage her own poetry; it decayed with time. So the question was how to create the experience of fragmentation without faking it and without becoming too cerebral.…That was the balancing act.
NOTEBOOK: Can we talk about the role of music in that balancing act?
PIÑEIRO: Someone told me silence is important to Sappho—she was a musician—so there was a question of what to do about that. I wanted music that would appear and disappear, that would be porous. I remember I went to a play about Sappho that made songs out of her poetry, but it made everything banal: you can’t reproduce the exact sound of a lyre, or you need someone who is very knowledgeable in that field. I considered putting the poems to music but it seemed simplistic, too reductive. María and Gabriela are musicians as well as actors, so I called on them for music. With the guitar, there is some resonance with the lyre, then the keyboard’s electronic sounds added another, different voice.
You Burn Me (Matías Piñeiro, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: Early on, there is an annotation in one book about Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. I thought, “Is this going to turn into something like their Pavese adaptation, From the Clouds to the Resistance [1979], or even Antigone [1992]...?”
PIÑEIRO: No. Imagine! That Spanish annotation is a note to myself, and it says that “Sea Foam” was not adapted by Huillet and Straub. I felt that allowed me to step in.
NOTEBOOK: “Sea Foam” has a playful quality to it.
PIÑEIRO: And the film has a number of suicides.
NOTEBOOK: And Sappho is often read as a lyric poet of unrequited love, which, of course, can be exquisitely painful. What you take from Pavese, perhaps, and share with someone like Carson is a sense of humor; the film gets to somewhere brighter than just “a number of suicides.”
PIÑEIRO: Yes, because of dialogue. In the process of conversation, two people disagree and agree.…Britomartis changes the meaning or the value of what Sappho is saying, and Sappho does the same thing, and the two are listening to each other—neither fighting, nor tolerating, even from opposite perspectives, but discussing between point A and point B without annihilating the other, without it becoming a boxing match. What starts as a binary develops with new layers and other positions.
I tried through this to make the topics of suicide and desire breathable. For me, filmmaking is about sharing the things I like and putting a bit of light into them. Although the film is about suicide, which might be the end of things, I wanted to keep it open with the hope for change. I wanted something still to be alive.
NOTEBOOK: There is something like a happy ending, when the gaze is returned between two women where it has been directed otherwise toward the ether or the skies.…But that notion of opposites at play, not necessarily confrontationally, arises in lovely lines about “doubled desire” and “two thoughts at once.”
PIÑEIRO: “I don’t know what to do, two are my thoughts” is one possible translation of that Sappho line. Who knows which is the correct one?
NOTEBOOK: All of them are correct in a way, no? Carson points to the problem of pronouns in archaic lyric poetry and observes that Sappho’s text actually says “us,” not “me,” in fragment 38: you burn us, a choral voice says. Carson, characteristically cryptic, reasons that “the fragile heat of fragment 38 seems…to evaporate entirely without a bit of intervention.” I want to talk about intervention in relation to “tú me abrasas,” and the fact that the English translation “you burn me” disarranges the words and therefore the images.
PIÑEIRO: God, tell me about it. [Laughs.] For fragment 146, the English translation is also not correct: “for me, not the honey, not the bee” instead of “for me, neither the honey, nor the bee.” It was easier to repeat the same image for “not” in the mnemotechnic game.
People might know and like Sappho, but perhaps more from the vox populi than from reading the poems. I collected images for the spectator to learn the poetry of Sappho by heart, and I wanted people to read. It is a film to read. I make a point of this: it is a shot of the book, not digital text over the image (which would have been much easier and cheaper). I wanted intimacy, company.…
You Burn Me (Matías Piñeiro, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: And the book allows for highlighting and annotating. I’m thinking now about other surfaces in the film: smartphones, and also a postcard with what is perhaps the loveliest dick doodle I have ever seen.
PIÑEIRO: I included the dick drawing on the poster at first, but later removed it. I didn’t want to centralize the phallus. But it is important in the film because it introduces a masculine presence, one that is a bit flaccid, and flows into the scorpion imagery associated with the story of Pasiphaë and Minos. [Author’s note: Queen Pasiphaë of Crete, according to the Bibliotheca, cursed her husband, King Minos, with serpents and scorpions for ejaculate, with the intention that he not inseminate but instead kill his concubines.]
NOTEBOOK: Why make the main character a biology student? Why introduce bacteria along with myth, poetry, and everything else?
PIÑEIRO: I was reading the work of a biologist, Lynn Margulis. For her, bacteria signifies both life and death. Bacteria can be germs, of course, but it isn’t all negative. Bacteria can be vital for life to come. All of that complemented the idea that things can change depending on perspective.
NOTEBOOK: Toward the end of the film, the Natalia Ginzburg text on Pavese is introduced. There is one line that seems to imply he died by suicide because he had no curiosity left; he felt that he knew everything. That moment emphasizes the vital pleasures of not knowing.
PIÑEIRO: I put the Ginzburg essay in the film not only because it is very beautiful, but because the friendship she had with Pavese moves the film away from any idolatry of him or romanticization of his death. She has a take on him that is both hard and soft, thorny and not.
NOTEBOOK: Any hero worship is also diffused because this is not just a film about Pavese, in the same way that this is not just a film about Sappho.
PIÑEIRO: I didn’t want to add to monolithic myths of artist-geniuses who killed themselves.
NOTEBOOK: You create a new poem at the end of the film, a new set of images without words, which is a real invitation for participation from the spectator, I think.
PIÑEIRO: At one point, I wanted to have three mnemotechnic games. I wanted another one about an apple, but it would have been too much. The first time, with three words: easy. The second time, with eight: still possible. More than that though… Not that long ago, new Sappho poems appeared. I wanted that end to indicate that more poems might appear. I’m curious to see what the readings of the film are—the paths, the flows.