Paola Lagos Labbé is an expert in self-representational documentary cinema and essay cinema and has 20 years’ experience as a teacher in Chile and Spain. Through an in-depth analysis, the author has created a monographic study of the filmmaker, photographer and painter David Perlov, born in Brazil. Perlov emigrated to Paris at the age of twenty-two, and six years later, he moved to Israel with his family.
“What struck me about his cinema is how he shied away from a narcissistic view and a confessional rhetoric”, explains Lagos. Over 50 years, David Perlov portrayed a series of videos, photographs and pictorial works that escaped from mainstream cinema to focus on an alternative, domestic format. “He gave up everything apart from keeping diaries; deeply depressed, he kept recording images on the four walls of his house,” the author adds.
In David Perlov. La imagen bisagra como pensamiento cinematográfico intersticial, Paola Lagos provides a series of common elements that connect all the artist's worlds. Thus, visual motifs such as windows, doors, mirrors or the television in his own home serve as entrances to the reality he wants to tell. Perlov's work, as Lagos explains, is not purely autobiographical, as it also depicts aspects of politics, history and warfare of the time that troubled the filmmaker.
“David Perlov had a critical view of the war in Palestine; he said that in the face of reality, all that could be done was to raise the white flag of peace,” Lagos explains. The Jewish author was opposed to the Israeli actions in Lebanon that were taking place at the time, and wondered how it was possible to narrate this massacre on film. At the same time, he criticized the banality of television.
Lagos therefore offers a reflection with the intention of serving as an object of study for any other filmmaker who might deal with themes similar to those discussed by Perlov. The magazine of the Argentine Association of Audiovisual and Film Studies Imagofagia praised Lagos’ work. “Those who read the study will find it a valuable source of material for the understanding of Perlov's work,” wrote the author Fernando Pérez Villalón.
At the presentation, which took place at the Filmoteca de Catalunya, there was a special discussion on ‘My stills’, the last diary that Perlov released in 2003. In it, the filmmaker unveils his own process of discovery of video technology and shows the images taken during the last years of his life in Tel Aviv.
Paola Lagos Labbé has joined the Faculty of Communication Sciences at UIC Barcelona for the 2024-2025 academic year, teaching audiovisual language, documentary film and audiovisual culture to students of Journalism and Audiovisual Communication.
