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Nancy Morejón: Paisajes célebres
Juanamaría Cordones-Cook. Nancy Morejón: Paisajes célebres. Film.
Peñalver, 52: the sea, the house1
I must begin this presentation of Juanamaría Cordones-Cook's Nancy Morejón: Paisajes célebres by making a simple but important point: I will no approach it from the perspective of a film specialist, but rather as a literary scholars. I do so because of my marked professional deformations: I am above all a literary and cultural critic, and from that perspective I tend to approach all cultural production. But, underlying this caveat is a very important idea: films can also be a method used by literary scholars. What I propose to do is look at Juanamaría's documentary as an imaginative and innovative way to approach literary studies.
In Nancy Morejón: Paisajes célebres Juanamaría is able to do what a good literary critic should always do: she offers us a coherent reading of the work of an artist, in this case, of Nancy's poetry. How she does this? First, she presents the poetry directly. The documentary can be seen as a brief anthology of Nancy's work. After seeing the film, a hypothetical viewer who came to see it without previous knowledge of Nancy's poetry will have a very good idea of her work. In the film Nancy reads for us poems like "Mujer negra," "Amo a mi amo," and "Richard trajo su flauta," among others works that have come to represent her entire production. A critic who composes an anthology, that is to say, the critic who selects for her or his readers the important and representative texts of an author or a group of authors, performs an important critical task by determining what the reader will know of the author or authors. So, in this primary sense, Juanamaría's documentary is a work of literary criticism; it is a critical work of fundamental importance since it shapes our image of Nancy by selecting the poems that we identify as her most important pieces.
However, we usually think of literary criticism as a direct interpretation or reading of a work of art. Juanamaría's documentary also performs that function, even though it does it in an indirect and very imaginative manner. Let us see how she does it.
As a good scholar, she...