All language subtitles for Villa.Captive.2011.BLURAY.720p.BluRay.x264.AAC-[YTS.MX]

THREE FABLES ABOUT VILLA OCAMPO

Stories spring up of their own will.

They reach our imagination,
or our memory, which is the same thing.

The starting point is always ambiguous.

Both vague and precise.

Unique and repeated.

For example: A man entering a house.

A man spellbound by the house
he has just stepped in.

A man spellbound by the house
he has just stepped in.

We are reminded of Bioy Casares
"The Invention of Morel".

A fugitive is shown an island
lost on the map.

A forsaken island which can be
either his salvation or his doom.

Less defiant than resigned,
the fugitive decides to reach it.

We know what follows: He will discover
the same cyclical visitors,

an immortality machine and a woman
of ritualistic beauty, named Faustine.

Before all that, however,
he will have discovered a house.

A house which, oddly enough,
he calls a museum.

As an exercise of the mind,
let us imagine a similar fugitive,

here, in the slopes of San Isidro.

A fugitive who,
like the one described by Bioy,

is the victim of a shipwreck
who manages to reach firm land

and find his way to an impressive
building, over a hundred years old.

While Bioy's fugitive
called the house a "museum",

our imaginary fugitive
is uncertain

whether he is in a museum
or in a house.

THE FUGITIVE

The place is uninhabited;

but the fugitive feels it could
have been abandoned very recently.

Or rather: The place expects someone
who has no intention of coming back.

There is an odd mixture
of periods and styles:

wicker chairs
next to a sumptuous mahogany table;

great 19th century portraits
next to very modern lamps.

The fugitive may not know the names,
or the history behind those objects,

but something in such diversity
draws his attention.

A piano and many photographs.

Whether he identifies them
or not, the faces are famous:

Rubinstein, Nehru, Chaplin,

Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene,

André Malraux, Paul Valéry.

There are dedications
and signatures on the photos.

In fact: The signatures are everywhere.

If the fugitive were an addict
to the myths surrounding culture,

he could read names
in every corner:

Troubetzkoy on a sculpture,
Léger and Picasso on rugs,

Louis XVI on a fireplace,
Man Ray on a photograph.

Certainly, it would be
almost impossible to recognize

names such as Dagnan-Bouveret
or Helleu on some of the paintings.

Those portraitists, so much coveted
by the River Plate women a century ago,

today deserve just a bare mention
in some biography of Proust.

But it's the girl in the portraits
that attracts the fugitive's interest:

it's always the same girl.

A hundred years ago
this girl was young, an adolescent

born, perhaps, at the same time
the house was born.

The fugitive does not fail
to notice her face,

at once melancholic and determined...

...Vaguely, the fugitive will succeed
in defining what worries him.

He seems to perceive a contradiction
in the landscape of the house.

On the one hand the attitude
of the one that exposes his taste,

the collection of files
on the person he admires,

but at the same time these
people seem to have been present.

These are traces of
famous people that perhaps

one of the girls in the
portraits occasionally knew.

Or maybe it's the scattered and
multiple version of a narcissistic family.

People who had lived here
and who marked their passage.

Perhaps the house was a museum.

But for some reason
the fugitive assumes that

whoever lived there would also
have put the same photos

and trophies to live and admire
themselves next to them.

Admiring themselves.

Eden Hotel Berlin
Mars 81... 30.

Dear daughters.

Last night we've been
to watch a movie of Conrad Veidt.

Pretty successful.

I got out excited
as always when I see Conrad.

Tonight we've gone to the theater
and we've seen him in the flesh.

It's identical.

It's so much more reliable
in the movie than at the theatre.

We went back to the hostel for dinner.

And Drieu was telling bullshit
about my enthusiasm.

And me telling back
some bullshit as well.

And when at the best

Conrad Veidt appears in person

and sits at a table
with two German-looking men.

Too bad he sat behind me,

for I could not see him
unless I turned around completely.

I would have wanted to talk
to him, because I feel I know him.

But there were too many people
and Drieu bothered me

I feel frustrated
for not having met Conrad.

I shall try to find a way.

He has amazing eyes
and a somewhat sinister mouth...

His voice is quite charming and he's
a very good actor. He intrigues me.

This afternoon we went out with
Walter Gropius, another modern architect;

we saw more houses,
more working-class districts, etc.

Gropius in person is far more
interesting and nice than Mendelsohn.

But I think Mendelsohn's houses
are more valuable,

even though the name has less value.

The fugitive continues to move
smoothly through the museum,

or rather, the house.

He will neither find
an immortality machine,

Nor a Morel or a Faustine.

The girl in the portraits, though,
has definitely fascinated him.

He is thinking about her
as he goes through a vestibule,

a hallway, a large dining room;

he is also thinking about her
as he goes up the staircase,

which is framed
by an improperly-hung rug.

The rug seems to be valuable,
probably designed by a famous artist,

that's why it has been hung:

to spare it from its natural destiny
of foot marks and cigarette embers.

The fugitive
is still thinking of the girl

as he finds an impressive library
at the top of the stairs.

There is also a desk,
and some letters lying on it.

The signature he sees in one of them

bears the name which may hold the clue:

Victoria Ocampo.

THE FETISHIST

At this point, it may be better
to abandon the fugitive,

overcome by the impenetrable library.

Or rather, to transform him,
to turn him into somebody else.

Again, the image of the beginning:

a man entering a house.

But now he is hunting a treasure
he believes or imagines is hidden inside.

Let's remember the hero
of Henry James's The Aspern Papers.

The plot: A literature
lover, a fetishist,

moves to Venice to have access
to a famous writer's correspondence.

Those papers are inside a house,

and that house is guarded
by a hundred-year-old woman.

The fetishist will pay any price

to obtain those papers,

including humiliating himself
or seducing the old lady.

What is the story about?

Perhaps it is just a study
about a strange obsession,

the passion
for letters and manuscripts.

What do we look for?, he wonders.

Maybe the original's
fragile and unequivocal evidence:

time's erosion on the material,

the hint of a pulse in the calligraphy,

the words meant for a single recipient.

It is not just the original's value,
but also the presumption of intimacy.

Can letters reveal so much of a person?

James's fetishist believed they do.

He believed it too passionately perhaps,

and so he never gets to read them:

the old lady's niece burns them,
one by one, in the stove.

"Why should I keep them?",
the woman asks herself,

humiliated by the fetishist's
refusal of her love.

The Aspern Papers,
nobody's papers.

Instead, our fetishist,
formerly the fugitive,

could spend long hours in this house.

Let us imagine that this man,
suffering from temporary amnesia,

had woken up in this house
without knowing how he arrived,

and, at first,
ignoring even where he was.

This fetishist
would have discovered before long

that this was
Victoria Ocampo's house.

He does know
that the hanging carpet is Picasso's,

that the music scores have been
written by Stravinsky or Ansermet,

that the huge 19th Century portraits
were painted by Pridiliano Pueyrredón,

that the sculpture is by
the Russian prince Paul Troubezkoy,

that the lamps
were designed at the Bauhaus

and the portrait of the lady of
the house by the sea is by Pedro Figari.

The fetishist possesses - almost
infinitely - the proper names.

Oddly, this stranger
is the ideal inhabitant of this house,

an outsider and owner at the same time.

He can, therefore, find the letters
Victoria wrote,

and the letters Victoria received.

He can be moved by
Borges' calligraphy:

microscopic at first, bigger
and erratic as blindness advances.

He can discover inscriptions
from surrealists and dadaists,

such as André Breton,
Paul Éluard and Tristan Tzara,

and others by Jacques Lacan:
young and unknown in the first ones,

famous in the last,
stentorian always.

He can spot the volume
where Camus kept inscribing

the dates of his successive
encounters with Victoria,

a list that closes
with a question mark,

thus underlining the uncertainty
of a future meeting that never was.

To the eyes of the fetishist
the minute sign swells like a river

and conjures up the image
of the insurmountable Acheron.

Shortly before, Camus had described
the house in his travelling diaries:

"This is a big and pleasant house
in the style of "Gone with the Wind".

Great old luxury - I feel like lying
down and sleeping till the end of time".

The portraits show Bioy Casares,
Borges or Roger Caillois,

but they also bear the signatures
of Gisèle Freund or Man Ray.

Names and more names,

it is almost incredible
that they all fit in just one house,

in just one life.

Each one of them evokes a destiny
both in life and after life.

The fetishist knows
that the whims of fame and prestige

have favoured some of them in life
and quickly abandoned them after death.

Conversely, to this moment,
and as he holds these papers

and volumes in his hands, others
continue to be remembered:

Eduardo Mallea, André Malraux,

José Bianco, Indira Gandhi,

Graham Greene, Gabriela Mistral,

Rabindranath Tagore, Walter Gropius,

María Rosa Oliver, Le Corbusier,

Aldous Huxley, Henri Michaux,

Virginia Woolf, Benito Mussolini,

T.S.Eliot, Coco Chanel,

Silvina Ocampo, Hermann Von Keyserling,

Pierre Drieu La Rochelle,
María Rosa Oliver,

Alfonso Reyes, Charles Chaplin,

Tamara Karsávina, Xul Solar,
Ernest Ansermet...

The fetishist finds not only
the correspondence, but also the library.

A library
can be that of a person,

but this one is almost the library
of a whole era and its vicissitudes,

its fleeting trends,
its secret treasures.

The fetishist can read the whole library
without opening the volumes.

He can survey the spines of books
and guess the multiple layers they hold.

The 19th Century books that survived
fires and the passage of time,

including her father's
engineering books.

"Life of Dominguito", which Sarmiento
himself dedicated to Victoria's aunt.

Hilario Ascasubi's "Complete Works",
published in Paris in 1872.

Original editions of books by European
travellers to the River Plate.

In sum: the whole "liberal" library
inherited from parents and grandparents,

with books dating
from the 16th to the 19th century.

Then: Victoria's own books.

Children's books in French,
annotated by Victoria and Silvina.

Her first and last
fellow traveller: Dante,

the inspiration for her first book.

Oscar Wilde, the banned writer,

whose books are hidden
by Ramona Aguirre, her mother,

books which also guard among their pages
her future husband's love letters.

Fashion, the prestige
of Nobel Prize winners,

but also her own friends
such as José Bianco,

editor of Sur magazine
for more than twenty years,

or her own discoveries,
such as Borges, and the translations.

Silvina's books,
the most akin and the most secret.

Books with long-meditated
inscriptions

or inscriptions as spontaneous
as the confession of a crime,

as when Pablo Neruda, with one stroke,
puts an end to fifty years of enmity.

Music books, design books,
books by structuralists, mathematicians;

biographies and autobiographies,
letters.

An itinerary from Ascasubi in France
to Caillois as Borges' publisher -

episodes of the same parable.

As he shuffles names, titles
and dates in his memory,

the fetishist thinks he is a voice
imitator, an unlikely impostor.

Sometimes he remembers,
with an almost painful precision,

moments belonging
to other lives.

The setting for one of those
moments is this house,

one evening towards the end
of 1931 or at the beginning of 1932,

when destiny brought two passions
together: books and friendship.

A boy of eighteen,
an enthusiastic and premature writer,

chats in a corner
with a 32-year-old poet and essayist,

already presumed to be a genius.

They had just been introduced
at a social gathering

in honor
of a foreign intellectual

whose name not even our fetishist
seems to have remembered.

Suddenly, the hostess's commanding
voice reprimands them:

"Stop being shitty
and talk to our guest".

The abrupt confusion
caused by the incident

ends up bringing
those two shy men together.

On their return trip to Buenos Aires,

Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis
Borges sealed their association,

in literature and in life.

THE DETECTIVE

The fetishist is still immersed
in the untiring papers:

A Narcissus in strangers' mirrors.

It is time to give him up too.

Or, instead of leaving him behind,

to transform him once more.

To turn him into someone who dislikes
papers and the prestige held by a name.

Someone who has discovered,
in the overcrowded solitude of the house,

a name and a face,

that is to say, a destiny.

It is then, the third story,
the third memory.

A man enters a house.

He is a detective entering
the house of a very beautiful woman,

who has just been murdered
on her own doorway.

In "Laura", the novel by Vera Caspary
which Otto Preminger laboriously

turned into a memorable film,

the detective gradually falls in love
with the woman's portrait and memory.

In love with the portraits exuding
the mystery of her wordly existence,

perhaps because
the threads of fascination

allured him even more
than those of crime.

Such subtle necrophilia
will end very soon:

in the midst of the detective's
dream, Laura comes back:

first, as a ghost
and soon after, as a suspect.

She is the suspect of a death
that had been her own

and now is just
that of an anonymous woman.

But no one will return this time,
the house will continue to wait.

Neither will there be anonymity:

the name Victoria Ocampo
is inscribed in every corner.

However, the detective
will have portraits to contemplate,

and a myriad of stories and testimonies

about the exceptional
destiny of this Victoria.

The detective could uncover
many odd things about that destiny.

First, that both the house he visits
and Victoria were born at the same time,

more than a century ago, in 1890.

Also, that she was the eldest of six
sisters and that Silvina, the youngest,

born thirteen years after her,
was going to be a unique writer,

someone to whom fame was elusive
in life and prodigal today.

He could find out that the engineer
Manuel Ocampo and his wife Ramona Aguirre

had met at the funeral of
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in 1888.

That is why she would say
that, in that house,

Argentine history was discussed
as another family affair.

He would know that Mr. Ocampo had built
the house for the lazy summer days,

when the family arrived from Buenos
Aires in horse-drawn carriages,

after a journey of several hours
along the road leading to the river.

Also, that the house would witness
something no one had planned,

because it can never be planned,
it just happens:

the birth of a bond
with literature,

established by both the eldest
and the youngest of the sisters.

Our detective will eventually discover
that such unforeseen, unexpected drive,

will be a central force
in the lives of the Ocampo sisters,

an impulse which emerges
as part of a certain education,

but which develops and asserts itself
to become the center of one's life.

It then reflects back on such origin
and education so as to redefine them,

to redesign them.

What the fetishist
had observed in the library,

now the detective tries to find in life.

These girls, educated
by French and English governesses,

had to make a real effort
to write in Spanish;

their family had not foreseen
a literary career, or any artistic

career for them,

they were just destined to become wives.

We were six girls, not like those
in children's stories, but pretty ones.

Our education was home-made.

Around that time, no one thought
of giving women a different education.

My father (with a certain gift
for understanding things) was more aware

of my good qualities
than of my defects

(my laziness to do things
that demanded an effort).

He said once, in my presence:

"If she had been a boy she would
have studied, followed a career."

I thought: "Thanks God
I'm not a boy. What a bargain!".

Mademoiselle Bonnemason,
the French governess,

would arrive in Villa Ocampo
with the one o'clock train.

She never missed it,

although, when the rain was heavy,
we hoped she would.

She was never sick either,
even if her pupils

used to wish her a mild
but prolonged illness.

We would wait for her at the gate.
I would then run,

climb up the side of the break
and shout to the driver,

who wanted to hault the horses:
"Keep going! Keep going!".

The detective will then
find out that Victoria,

following the family mandate,
will marry someone

only to fall suddenly in love
with that someone's cousin

during her own honeymoon
in Paris.

She will have an affair with
Julián Martínez, her husband's cousin;

it will last until she is forty

and he, who is much older,

understands it is time
to disappear from that woman's life.

But the Paris honeymoon in 1913
is a double revelation for Victoria:

her love for Julián Martínez
and her love for Stravinsky's music,

the modernity which was always

to accompany her and for which
she would fight many a battle.

Somehow, the romantic scandal
and the radicalism of the music

seemed to be the two sides of a coin,

and Victoria will parade both
provocations throughout Buenos Aires.

Guided by the great
conductor Ernest Ansermet

and the Castro brothers,
she will succeed in introducing

contemporary music in the Colón
against a ferocious resistance.

En 1936, at the Buenos Aires
premiere of Perséphone,

with Stravinsky - the composer -
conducting, and she herself reciting,

she was to combine several obsessions:

the old childhood dream
of being an actress,

the stubbornness to change the Colón's
taste and make it match her own,

her eagerness to meet those she admired,

in this case a Russian
of genius in perpetual exile.

When he thought I was about to be
angry, Stravinsky used to tell me:

"You have a temper. I like that."

And he would laugh in my face.

(In fact, what happens is
I have "outbursts".)

I could have replied:
"And what about you?"

But I gave him rights
that he did not grant me.

There are genius's rights
just as there are author's rights.

He was in a position to
demand them, I wasn't.

When he disliked something or someone,
you could not change his mood.

He became indomitable,

and his buckings
could throw the best horseman off.

So I would put up gently
with the free expression of his opinions

on whatever his whim
chose to take him regarding musicians,

even those musicians I admired.

I would not have tolerated an iota
of such criticism by someone else,

someone of a lesser stature.
A creative talent, I used to think,

sometimes defends his creation
by denying somebody else's.

Although he does not quite
understand it, the detective thinks

that Victoria believes romantic
and other provocations mingle together,

as if they were all the same thing.

Precisely, to be able to live in Mar
del Plata with her lover Julián Martínez,

Victoria commissions a cubic house
from a storehouse builder,

as if it were necessary to spark
a double outrage in her neighbours.

Soon after that, she will also raise
the stakes in Buenos Aires,

by commissioning a rationalist house
from Alejandro Bustillo.

Her neighbours also accuse her
of ruining the district.

It started with an itch,

a desire to get rid of the clutter
I had gathered around me.

I had a hunger for white walls
without mouldings, without ornaments,

either outside or inside.

I had not been in Europe for some years
and it was only in some magazines

that I could have a glimpse of
something matching what I liked.

I got together with a man of good
disposition, a storehouse builder;

we drew the plans
for a stripped house: a few cubes.

The house was meant to stand
on a small piece of land

I had bought in Mar del Plata,
in front of the sea.

It was built there,
with all her windows

letting in an unbelievable
stretch of the Atlantic Ocean.

There was no hint
of a skyscraper project in the resort.

It was 1927.

To his amazement, the detective
will discover that at the age of forty

this woman resolves to take
yet another detour on her course:

she founds a magazine,

probably because the craving born
of childhood reading is still alive:

to read more, to achieve her own writing,
to lead others to share the same passion,

to meet in the flesh the authors
of the pages that changed her life.

One day, around October 1929,

we were taking a walk in Palermo.

The air had the heaviness of a storm;

the smell of the earth and the roses
was as thick as fog;

and we walked through that sweetness
without really noticing it.

You strongly criticized
my passivity,

and I would criticize,
with no less violence,

your presumption that I was fit
for certain chores.

And then, for the first time,
the name of this magazine -

which had no name - was uttered.

When I arrived in Paris, I realized
the magazine project had preceded me.

I noticed the fantastic
and absurd turn which the scheme,

not yet articulated in my mouth,
had taken in other people's lips.

I knew then
that such a vulgar caricature

would not yield
to my explanations or rectifications,

but only before the magazine itself.

Do you remember my arrival in New York?

Do you remember your frustration
when, attracted by skyscrapers and jazz,

I seemed to have forgotten the magazine?

One night, as we were having dinner
at Child's, you admonished me.

Your long speech ended like this:

"If your interest in the magazine
is so superficial

that anything can take you away
from it, then give up your project".

You saw my eyes
fill up with tears

(tears that fell
on the food on my plate).

I was both annoyed and moved.

Annoyed with my own emotionality
and moved by your friendly harshness.

That same night, however,
once your bitterness subsided,

you admitted you understood
quite well my greediness for New York

and my neglect of everything else.

Who better than you
to understand it!

As I embarked in Brooklyn we were
both sure the magazine would exist.

I ignore, as I write,
whether you know its name already.

It was chosen by phone,
across the Ocean.

A whole Atlantic seems
to have been needed for this baptism...

We had several names in our heads
but we could not reach an agreement.

It was then that I called
Ortega in Spain.

Those people are used
to baptizing us...

and so, Ortega did not hesitate

and immediately found his favourite
among the names on the list:

"SUR" he shouted to me from Madrid.

That's the name I brought back
from my phone hunt,

and which we stuck with an arrow
on the magazine cover.

The detective will learn about
Victoria's other love affairs.

For example,
the tragic Frenchman

who defined the Pampa
as horizontal vertigo

and who used to feel that he was
inhabited by Hitler's soul.

A Frenchman who before attempting
suicide for the first time

would write to Victoria
about how beautiful his death was,

on a gorgeous afternoon,
with his window wide open on Paris.

He did not succeed then and Victoria
will receive his lines many years later.

But by that time Pierre Drieu
La Rochelle will have achieved his end,

shortly after the first attempt.

Paris, 20th January, 1930.

Dear Ange:

- You cannot imagine with how much pleasure.
- or joy- I receive your letters.

This is a life
of Franciscan poverty

as far as "courtesies
of the heart" is concerned,

as the Beast
of the Apocalypse would say.

Drieu? He was here today
and the day before yesterday.

As I told you: he is more and more
in love with shipwrecks, defeat,

disasters, cataclysms,
decay, ruin.

He does not want to see anyone.

When you order me to sing.

It seems that my heart
must be bursting with pride.

And I look into your face
and tears come to my eyes.

There was the love affair with another
Frenchman, much younger than her,

who was stranded
in this same house during the war,

the one who discovers Borges
and shows him to the world,

who edit, in San lsidro, the issues
of a magazine financed by Victoria,

which the allies will drop
on the turbulent European soil.

Probably Roger Caillois is better
remembered today for those things

than for his prose assembled
in so many of those library volumes

which the detective will never touch.

The detective will find out
much more about Victoria:

that she dined with Mussolini,
and was sent to jail by Perón,

that she fought for the equality
of women's rights,

and made a proposition to Eisenstein
to film a documentary on the Pampa,

that she attended
the Nüremberg trials,

that she anticipated the dimension
reached by Lacan and Borges,

and overestimated
that of Tagore and Von Keyserling,

that she received decorations
from France and England,

that she despised
the 1978 Football Cup,

and that she died impoverished
and very lonely in 1979,

in the same
overcrowded solitude of this house.

All that
will be known to the detective,

formerly the fetishist,
formerly the fugitive.

He cannot, however, stop thinking
that those dates and names

do not solve the mystery of the
beautiful girl in the youthful pictures.

Now he envies the portraitists
whose names do not mean anything to him:

because they saw her,
because she posed for them,

because they created these images
which are different from her

but have become the real her
for the detective, and now for us too.

A girl who crossed an ocean
to have her portrait painted,

who went to France in search
of her own image.

She found more than that
a hundred years ago.

In a matter of hours she met both
Julián Martínez and Stravinsky's music,

love and modernity.

But for us,
that girl is unrecoverable.

"When the end draws near, there
no longer remain any remembered images;

only words remain".

The phrase sounds familiar
to the detective,

who, through professional bias,

has always been suspicious of words.

I have reached the edge of eternity
where nothing ever dissipates.

Neither hope, nor happiness,

nor the memory of faces
glimpsed through tears.

O soak my glassiness
in this ocean.

Immerse yourself into
the bosom of your complaints.

And let me finally feel,

this lost caress throughout
the whole of winter.