Manuel Puig: pioneer, tyrant and saint of the # quedateencasa cinephile

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Of all the silly ephemeris that come true in 2020, some have something special. This year marks four decades since the Argentine writer bought his first betamax video player. "Do you realize? We have old age assured!" Puig wrote to his friend Ítalo Manzi. The next 10 years, the last of his life, were devoted to the collection, international traffic and consumption of beta tapes. Puig had money and prestige, he was still young and lived in Leblon, one of the most beautiful neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro, but his life slipped into a confinement that will be very inspiring for all those who in these days of confinement are obsessed with having something new to see on your screens.

Manuel Puig's video mania is documented in the book Varados en Río , by Javier Montes (Anagrama, 2016), which refers to Manuel's videos , the text in which Ítalo Manzi recounted his friendship with Puig and his shared obsession with video . And it is also easy to find an ademic text, Three modes of expectation: female characters and cinema in Painted mouths. Giselle Carolina Rodas' newsletter, which includes a lot of information on the subject.

A little information. Manuel Puig went to the cinema for the first time in General Villegas, his town, in 1935. The cinema was called Teatro Español, the film was Frankenstein's girlfriend with Boris Karloff and his companion was his mother, Maria Elena Delledonne, Male , who, 50 years later, he accompanied Puig in his exile in Leblón. Together, mother and son shared a diet of six movies a week: four Americans, two Argentines, and some loose examples of European cinema .

The impact of that cinephilia was enormous: cinema was the hard core of Puig's work and life. His novels are full of scenes taken from movies of the interwar period which, in the writer's opinion, was the golden age of cinema. And in his life, any friendship was conditioned by shared movies , as can be seen in Manzi's text. Many of Puig's energies were devoted to being able to watch almost forgotten movies or, in his absence, to collecting fetishes to console him for the lost and longed- for beauty . For some years he lived in New York, where the rerun card was luxurious, but when he moved to Brazil, Puig was orphaned by classic cinema.

And then the Betamax arrived. In his book, Javier Montes tells that the first player came from the United States, that he had to be picked up at the airport as if he were a head of state on an official visit, and that his apartment (barely furnished and full of plants) became the " cinito from calle Aperana " . From there, Puig devoted himself to his Betamax: according to Montes, he organized a network of providers who recorded television movies in New York, Los Angeles, Rome, Mexico City and Paris. The copies arrived from Italy were the best. In his travels, Puig acted as a cunning drug dealer. He gave Betamax gadgets to his movie buffs and in return enslaved them . In fact, Puig referred to them as "video slaves" and "slaves" in his letters. When he traveled to participate in a literary gathering, he demanded that he be introduced to the best video collectors of the city he was going to.

And as a trafficker / addict, he expanded his infrastructure: he bought VHS and PAL reproductive devices , and he created a transport network that connected the distant Rio with the rest of the world: tourists who visited the carnival, friends who returned to America from Europe to spend the holidays, packages sent by mail ... His tastes became almost twisted . Puig, according to Ítalo Manzi, did not like virgin tapes. I wanted the material to come re-recorded, who knows why. Furthermore, his interest was increasingly selective. Sometimes, he claimed a specific scene from a movie to his sources. The rest did not interest him.

Puig's video library had 2,500 movies at his death, according to Giselle Carolina Rodes. This is how he explains it in his article: "The variety of titles reveals a broad criterion when looking at cinema. On a first survey, tapes of various origins have been identified: (11) a) German (silent and voiced); b) Italian; c) Spanish; d) Films from other European countries; e) Asian films; f) North American (silent and voiced); g) Mexican; h) Argentinean; i) Brazilian; j) Opera, ballet and concerts; and k) Video clips and "varieties." In keeping with the library, a larger space is reserved for Hollywood productions of the 1920s and 1950s. The material dialogues with collector preferences that crystallize in the stockpile of select directors' output. ( John Huston, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Joseph von Sternberg, Max Ophüls, Ernst Lubitsch, etc. ) and much of the filmography of stars , such as Rita Hayworth, Marlene Dietrich, Lana Turner, Greta Garbo and Gloria Swanson. "

These days it is not easy to find movies like that on video on demand platforms. Who had that collection and an old Betamax of the time.

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• Stay at home
• movie theater
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• culture

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