Reverón

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OF MARGOT BENACERRAF'S CENTENNIAL!

In November 1951, Venezuelan Margot Benacerraf interrupted her film studies in Paris to create her first work, Reverón, a poetic study of the legendary and eccentric Venezuelan artist. The 30-minute short gained international acclaim when it premiered at the 1953 Berlin Film Festival.

In the summer of 1951, after completing my first year at the IDHEC, I was called back to Caracas because my father was gravely ill. Fortunately, he recovered, but while I was there I happened to meet the cultural attaché from the French Embassy, and it was through this connection that I came to make my first film, Reverón  — a film made without benefit of technical preparation, without having even touched a camera, without having so much as made a two-minute student film, though of course by that time I had seen many films and had a feeling for what I wanted to say and do with my own.

Gaston Diehl, the attaché, told me that he was a great friend of Alain Resnais, whom he was trying to convince to come to Venezuela to do a film about a local painter, Armando Reverón, in whom I was also very interested. Resnais, who had just made Van Gogh, his first film about painting, was then starting Guernica, as it turned out, so he had to decline. Diehl asked me about Reverón, and I told him that, like everyone else with my interest in art, I had once visited him at his house.

In those days, Reverón did not enjoy the stature he does today, when several rooms in the national art museum are dedicated to his work, when his paintings travel abroad as part of international exhibitions. Though he has always been a great painter, at that time his greatness was recognized in a much more informal way. People would trek out to Macuto to visit him on Sunday afternoons as a kind of diversion. They would buy one of his paintings for a song and laugh at his eccentricities. They called him El Loco de Macuto. This was in 1951! No one imagined the trajectory that lay behind his art.

So Diehl proposed that I take on the project, since I was interested in film. I said I would be honored, but I made it clear that only in November, when I would be returning to the IDHEC, would I begin my technical studies. He still wanted to entrust the project to me. I proposed to make a preliminary trip to see Reverón, after which we would collaborate on the screenplay. That’s why Diehl’s name appears in the credits, as an acknowledgement that he inspired the project, though as it turned out he did not have a hand in writing the screenplay.

Macuto, a seaside resort which today is easily accessible by freeway from Caracas, back then was at least three hours by car on terrible roads. But this project implied another kind of distance as well — a distance from social propriety and compliance with parental expectations. Society in those days was much more conservative, of course. My parents were already upset with me because sending a girl to study outside the country simply wasn’t done — and studying film was beyond human comprehension! So nothing was easy for me, not even writing, because I was always regarded as transgressing “normal” limits. Women of my generation finished sixth grade and got married. To get a high school degree was not normal, and to seek a university diploma even worse. So, when I told them I was traveling to Macuto by myself to see a crazy painter and write something about him … well, I think I caused my parents a lot of anguish. As Spaniards transplanted to a very provincial society, my parents were doubly closed-minded.

It was very difficult to prepare the script because none of Reverón’s works had been catalogued. To compile a list of them, I literally had to go door to door asking people what they had and requested permission to photograph the paintings with my little still camera. How often I found what are now regarded as great masterworks stashed out in someone’s garage, being gnawed by rats… 

To this day, my film stands as the only serious study of this artist’s work filmed during his lifetime. I shot my film in late 1951. In 1952, Reverón was committed to a psychiatric hospital where he was subjected to electroshock therapy. He died in 1954.  -- Margot Benacerraf