En el taller is the third feature film by Ana Salas. The film has been screened as part of the 5th Panorama of Colombian cinema in Paris. It is a documentary about the creative process of the painter Carlos Salas, although it must also be considered as a documentary of an encounter between a filmmaker and a painter, as well as a more intimate encounter between a daughter and his father.
In her precedent films, Ana Salas has been explorating the possibilities of film language to document different moments of her life. It is in a certain way an exploration of how to make an intimate diary with images, but in which it is not a matter of telling the things that happen in life, but rather of capturing the images that arise from life. There is a certain opacity in the images that allows them to exist publicly and still preserve an intimate sphere of significance. It is precisely the opacity of the images that makes Ana Salas’s films not really a narrative about her life, but something else, an exploration of the nature of the image. This reflection on the image is what allows the film to be seen as an encounter between a filmmaker and a painter.
Carlos Salas’s pictorial work is indeed the main subject of the documentary. We can discover technical, logistical and intellectual aspects of his work, but we can also perceive some details that tend to go unnoticed, such as the value of time in the emergence of the pictorial image. Perhaps the aspect that has been best revealed in this documentary is the materiality of the pictorial work, and in this sense, it is necessary to emphasize the participation of Carolina Ortiz in the sound direction of the film. We can hear a variety of sounds that include a hand passing over the canvas, or the thunderous twists of a metal support holding a picture, the sharp sound of liquids when mixed, the steps of someone wandering. And even the sound of silence when someone is observing a painting.
I was particularly interested in a reflection by Carlos Salas at the end of the film about the influence of the film process on his painting. At the end of the projection, I asked Ana Salas and Juan Soto if they perceived and how the influence of pictorial work in the cinematographic process. It is a question that is definitely more complex for Ana, because she has grown up under the influence of her father’s pictorial work, and is undoubtedly part of what has led her to make films. In Juan’s case, the influence of painting has been perceived during the editing work, which he has described as a sensation of working with the same method.
Personally, I am interested in researching and writing more about this subject, so I already have a reason to watch the film again, and a topic of conversation to sit down and talk with its creators.