Film books The most personal Olympus by Juan Antonio Vigar
Was Manuel Alcantara who created the metaphor of the vertical pond to refer to the movie screen: a well-defined space in which to dive and dissolve into other worlds. Is now Juan Antonio Vigardirector of Malaga Festival and the Cervantes Theater as head of the public company Málaga Procultura, who endorses the motto for the title of his book The vertical ponda book of 24 stories (as many as frames circulate per second in the wonderful invention of cinema) in which he reviews the life, filmography and anecdotes of a good handful of classic cinema myths, from Rudolph Valentino to James Dean passing through Billy Wilder, Orson Welles, Cary Grant, Maureen O’Hara, Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn, Esther Williams and Johnny Weissmüller. Vigar presented her book at the recent edition of the Melilla Film Week (responsible for the edition together with the UNED center in the autonomous city) and will do the same this Tuesday the 11th at 7:00 p.m. at the headquarters of the Andalusian Center of Letters in Málaga (C/ Álamos, 24) in conversation with Miguel Ángel Oeste.
The publication of the book comes after a long period of rest and maturation: “I thought I had written it five years ago, but someone recently reminded me that I actually finished it ten years ago. It’s been a long time, but I’ve been able to review the stories thoroughly and finish giving them the style that seemed most appropriate to me, very visual, always based on images,” explains the author. In each story, Vigar starts with an anecdote about each character portrayed, such as the one that has to do with the last one. toupee Humphrey Bogartto, from there, “offer an approach to life and filmography of each artist, without a pedagogical or academic intention: my true desire in writing this book has been none other than to entertain the reader.” The director of the Malaga Festival points out, in addition to this desire, an intention: “That of recovering for news to cinema figures classic which, I fear, remain in a shadow zone for current generations. And I’m not just referring, mind you, to the youngest.”
“Classic cinema is capable of inspiring us to create new things without losing sight of what others did before us”
In this sense, Juan Antonio Vigar denies any concession to nostalgia, but he does admit that writing about classic cinema means doing so, inevitably, about the memory personal: “I grew up next to the cinema that was in carranqueright where today the Malaga Philharmonic Orchestra. So from a very young age I attended the double sessions with my father in which I thoroughly immersed myself in the whole world. There I definitively dove into the vertical pool that Manuel Alcántara referred to. And there my training process took shape as cinephile, but, even more so, my determination to be part of the world of cinema. In each of these stories there is, of course, the gaze of that child who discovered these myths for the first time in that cinema.”
In the biography of Juan Antonio Vigar, The vertical pond entails an added episode to a tireless dissemination of classic cinema through the tools of the Malaga Festival: “When I became the director of the festival, we decided to reinforce the programming of classics in the Filmoteca in the Albéniz Cinema and we had a very good response from a large audience in which the presence of young viewers stood out. Subsequently, we decided to give this programming own event range using loop The Golden Age, in which this popular response has increased. I firmly believe that classic cinema has a utility value, not because of nostalgia, but because it is capable of inspire us to create new things without losing sight of what others did before us.” In the end, how boring and gray life would be without these traveling companions. There will be no better pool for this summer.
