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MIRA PERLOV AND ALBERTO DINES DEBATE “DIARY”, THE EPIC ABOUT DAY-TO-DAY LIFE FILMED DURING TEM YEARS BY DAVID PERLOV

The “Diary” by David Perlov, an epic filmed during ten years, about people’s day-to-day life, divided in six parts of one hour each, is part of the program of the 30th São Paulo IFF, followed by a debate on the 23rd, 20h, at the Mostra lounge (Shopping Frei Caneca, 6th floor). Taking part in the debate, there will be the producer of his films Mira Perlov, the cinema professor Ismail Xavier and the journalist, friend and admirer of the filmmaker’s work Alberto Dines.
David Perlov was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1930, was raised in São Paulo and died in Tel Aviv in 2003. Thanks to the work of conservation and restoration by his wife and producer Mira Perlov and his daughter and editor Yael Perlov, these wonderful films, of a deep humanism, can now go round the world.


LESSONS IN HUMANITY

There are fundamental lessons in the cinema of David Perlov. His Diary, filmed informally over the course of ten years, unhurriedly recomposes life as it goes on and suggests a simple exercise of patience in deciphering the best in our humanity. When we observe the day-to-day movement of private lives, his own existence and surrounding family, with him or through his eyes, we will perceive the importance of small actions and gestures that slowly make for the admirable mosaic of human greatness.


To follow with him in the passage of time and of the political waves that are contagious to us - participants in disquiet, mistakes, errors, and euphoria, history in the process of rebuilding, all bear the touch of a benevolent master. At the very start of his diaries, he tells us he tired one day of conventional cinema and has become interested in that which he left us as a heritage, namely, a precious archive of images equivalent to retrieving memory, full of instances from the collective unconscious.


David Perlov´s Diary begins with gentle rhetoric: "May, 1973, I am buying a camera. I am beginning to film myself, for myself. Professional cinema no longer interests me. I film day after day in search of something else.


Above all I seek anonymity. I need time to learn how to do this." And this moving speech is to end in 1983, with premonition in his visits to the city where he was born (Rio de Janeiro) and to the city where he grew up (São Paulo).


David Perlov wrote a great book over the course of ten years - a book that would be incomplete without the images from his magnificent diary. His films in the form of a diary would also be incomplete without the texts of profound humanity and issues regarding our temporality. David Perlov´s images and commentaries are the pretext for a greater cause that cinema has rarely attained throughout its history of so much emotion: the texts, the thoughts of Perlov form a literature beside itself, so very intense and sincere, completed with unassuming images of this that is the greatest of human adventures: astonishment at life itself, at real life.


Returning to São Paulo, passing through Luz Station, David Perlov inquires of his patient spectator, almost at the end of his sixth and last part of the Diary: "Was it not here, seeing these images (from the framework of a train window), that my love for cinema began?" Perhaps yes, and again, perhaps no, inspired by the thoughts of Glauber Rocha, Perlov states: "This camera in my head is a mask!". At the end of this extraordinary cinematographic reading, the film closes with a great lesson from Master David Perlov. He has just made us see that nothing we actually live is in vain.


Translation into English: Clare Elizabeth Charity and Laura Rebessi