Editor’s note: On Saturday, Walter Salles will be bestowed a Luminary Award at the Academy Museum Gala Tribute, along with Penélope Cruz, Bruce Springsteen and Bowen Yang. Multiple Oscar winner Alejandro González Iñárritu wanted to say a few things about his friend Salles, the storied director of Central Station and most recently I’m Still Here.
Walter Salles couldn’t understand how a raw piece of wood could become a giraffe or an elephant. Especially since the hands sculpting that wood belonged to the Polish artist Frans Krajcberg — a man who had arrived to Brazil without ever having had any contact with those animals. Surprised by the question, Krajcberg replied: “Well, I take the wood, and everything that is not the elephant, I remove.”
Walter learned this lesson well in 1995 when he made his first documentary about the correspondence between the sculptor Krajcberg and a woman serving a 20-year prison sentence, Maria do Socorro Nobre. When Walter sculpts a cinematic piece, everything that is not human, he removes. What remains is the talkative biped animal we are — always naked and exposed.
His gaze is compassionate but honest. There is no place for irony or cynicism. Nor does he indulge in excess emotion or manipulation. I first met Walter more than 25 years ago after the release of Central Station that beautiful film born out of his first documentary about the correspondence between the inner worlds of Brazilian characters. Humanity seeped and shone through non-actors interacting with actors, always under the wise and soulful gaze of Fernanda Montenegro.
In his film I’m Still Here, three decades later and still faithful to Krajcberg’s teaching, Walter stripped away everything unnecessary so that we could see, with clarity, and through the eyes of Fernanda Torres, what is truly essential in a painful human experience.
Paradoxically, at a time when corporate cinema seems intent on stripping away everything human — leaving only pixels, algorithms, and the basest ideas that trigger and manipulate our most obvious, cruel, and primitive emotions—Walter removed all frontal and reductive politics which, in a binary world, just blind and agitate even more the people who already agree with us, in order to offer and explore a purely human cinematic sculpture about silence. And silence is political in singular way.
The control of the narrative and the language is the signature of every dictatorship. Censorship forces silence. Things need to be felt and understood through the gaze and not the verb. It is through silences, through the stretching of time, through the waiting for a body that does not return, that the spectators entered the film and completed it.
For Walter, the reconstruction of a family memory, at the core of the film, mirrored the rebuilding of Brazil’s collective memory. I’m Still Here architecture flows between the individual to the collective, the artistic and the politic, the local and the universal. Cinema and identity intertwined.
Over all these years, with a good bottle of red wine on the table and plenty of laughter, we have shared countless conversations about our mutual passion for the cinematic language and the construction of films. Walter always describes a film in architectural terms. A film is less a place one sees than a place one inhabits.
In my view, there are engineer directors and architect directors. The former makes vertical films—solid, functional, built with heavy strokes. The latter are more horizontal, transparent, drawn with lighter lines. For the engineer, the important thing is structure, what is visible from the outside, and the efficient, pragmatic and rational function of the materials. For the sculptor or architect director, everything revolves around what is not seen, but rather felt. It is about the relationship between exterior and interior space, privileging sensation over function — the emotion of light and space over the object itself.
To me, what defines the architecture of Walter’s cinema is nobleness. Nobleness in one’s gaze cannot be studied or imitated; It must come from within, from the filmmaker’s way of being and thinking.
In dictatorships, such as the one now unfolding at digital speed in many countries around the world, thousands or millions lose their lives or disappear. Often only the important people are remembered. Over the past five years, I listened to Walter speak of Eunice and her family with the empathy and tenderness of a son. She was an unknown figure to the world, yet essential in Walter’s life. In Brazil, as in every country scarred by dictatorship, everyone carries a Eunice in their heart. That’s why Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, has just been sentenced to over 27 years of prison after attempting military force to overturn an election. In the United States, a dictatorship is still an abstract thought. A black cloud looming. In Brazil, they know by experience. Hatred, spread through rhetoric, populism and the internet,- acts like a virus, ravaging any healthy social organism bringing, death, destruction and pain. Just as Italian Neorealism and Brazilian Cinema Novo once did, through his cinema, Walter’s inner space opens its doors horizontally, without agendas or hierarchies, so that all human emotion can converse within this personal yet collective space.
I deeply celebrate that our admired and beloved friend Walter Salles is now deservedly receiving the Academy Museum Luminary Award for his beautiful sculptural and cinematic work.
