November 26: 2019 (XXXIX: 14) Alfonso Cuarón: ROMA (2018, 135m) The version of this Goldenrod Handout sent out in our Monday mailing, and the one online, has hot links.

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DIRECTOR Alfonso Cuarón WRITING Alfonso Cuarón PRODUCERS Nicolás Celis, Alfonso Cuarón, and Gabriela Rodriguez CINEMATOGRAPHY Alfonso Cuarón EDITING Alfonso Cuarón and Adam Gough In 2019, the film won Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film of the Year, Best Achievement in Directing and Best Achievement in Cinematography (Alfonso Cuarón), and it was nominated for Best Motion Picture of the Year, Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role (Yalitza Aparicio), Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Marina de Tavira), Best Original Screenplay (Alfonso Cuarón), Best Achievement in Production Design, Best Achievement in Sound Editing, and Best Achievement in Sound Mixing. CAST Yalitza Aparicio...Cleodegaria "Cleo" Gutiérrez, one of the family's maids Marina de Tavira...Sofía, the mother of the family Fernando Grediaga...Antonio, Sofía's absent husband Jorge Antonio Guerrero...Fermín, Cleo's lover Marco Graf...Pepe Daniela Demesa...Sofi Diego Cortina Autrey...Toño Carlos Peralta...Paco Nancy García...Adela, Cleo's friend, and one of the family's maids Verónica García...Teresa, Sofía's mother José Manuel Guerrero Mendoza...Ramón, Adela's lover Latin Lover...Professor Zovek Allen Borrelli...the American Military Trainer ALFONSO CUARÓN (b. November 28, 1961 in Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico) studied philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and

filmmaking at CUEC (Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos), a school within the same university. Speaking on the autobiographical nature of his latest, Oscar-winning film Roma (2018), Cuarón says: “[Jorge Luis] Borges talks about how memory is an opaque, shattered mirror, but I see it more as a crack in the wall. The crack is whatever pain happened in the past. We tend to put several coats of paint over it, trying to cover that crack. But it’s still there.” As a film director (17 credits), Cuarón has managed to carve out a career as both a critically acclaimed auteur, often writing (17 credits), editing (10 credits), producing (11 credits), and doing cinematography (11 credits) for films he directs and as a skilled helmsman for ambitious, commercially successful adaptations. As an auteur, he has directed, written, and edited films such as Y Tu Mamá También* (2001), for which he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Writing, Children of Men (2006), for which he was nominated for Oscars for Best Writing and Best Achievement in Film Editing, Gravity* (2013), for which he won Oscars for Best Achievement in Directing (he was the Latin-American

Cuarón—ROMA—2 filmmaker to win for directing) and Best Achievement in Film Editing and for which he was nominated for Best Motion Picture of the Year, and Roma* **(2018), a semi-autobiographical film he had begun working on in 2006 and for which he, again, won an Oscar for Best Achievement in Directing and for Best Achievement in Cinematography and was, once again, nominated for Best Motion Picture of the Year. He has also helmed several large-scale projects adapting literary works, most notably the 2004 adaptation of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, a film he was perhaps trusted with given his calling card adaptations of A Little Princess (1995) and Great Expectations (1998) combined with his recent success with Y Tu Mamá También, lending what was considered a safe, family franchise with a substantial edge. These are some of the other films and TV series he has directed: Who's He Anyway*** (Short) (1983) and Hora Marcada (TV Series) (1989-1990). As a producer, he notably produced Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). These are some other films he produced: Camino largo a Tijuana (1988), Sólo con Tu Pareja (1991), Cronicas (2004), The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004), The Possibility of Hope (Video documentary short) (2007), The Shock Doctrine (Documentary short) (2007), Rudo y Cursi (2008), and Desierto (2015). He did cinematography for films such as: Recuerdo de Xochimilco (Short) (1981), Hora Marcada (TV Series) (1988-1990), and El motel de la muerte (TV Movie) (1990). He also wrote for films and television series, such as: Believe (TV Series) (2014). Finally, he also edited films such as: Vengeance Is Mine** (Short) (1983). *Producer **Cinematographer ***Editor YALITZA APARICIO (b. December 11, 1993 in Tlaxiaco, Oaxaca, Mexico), in her first acting part, Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018), she was nominated for an Oscar for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role. Aparicio is the first Indigenous American woman and the second Mexican woman to receive a Best Actress Oscar nomination, following Salma Hayek for her role in 2002's Frida. Her parents are of indigenous origin; her father is Mixtec and her mother is Trique. She is not, however, fluent in the Mixtec language and had to learn it for her role in Roma. Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2019, and, in October of the same year, she was named UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Indigenous Peoples. MARINA DE TAVIRA (b. 1974 in Mexico City, Mexico) began acting in film and television (33 credits) in the late 1990s. She was nominated for an Oscar for her supporting role in Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018). These are some of

her other roles: Tentaciones (TV Series) (1998), Viajando sobre los durmientes (Short) (1999), Hijas de su madre: Las Buenrostro (2005), Un mundo maravilloso (2006), Efectos secundarios (2006), The Zone (2007), Love, Pain and Vice Versa (2008), Casi divas (2008), Nora's Will (2008), Sexo y otros secretos (TV Series) (2007-8), Los simuladores (TV Series) (2009), Desafío (2010), Capadocia (TV Series) (2010), Viento en contra (2011), Richness of Internal Space (2012), Ingobernable (TV Series) (2017), Ana y Bruno (2017), How to Break Up with Your Douchebag (2017), Cómplices (2018), Roma (2018), Niebla de Culpa (2018), This Is Not Berlin (2019), and Reminiscence (filming) (2020). FERNANDO GREDIAGA made his film debut as Sr. Antonio in Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018). JORGE ANTONIO GUERRERO (b. 1993 (age 26 years), Mexico) began his acting career the same year he appeared in Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018), also acting in two television series: Luis Miguel: The Series and Narcos: Mexico. He has since appeared in several television series in 2019: Crime Diaries: The Candidate, Sitiados: México, and Hernán. He will be appearing in Bonded, which is in post-production.

Anthony Lane: “Alphonso Cuarón bears witness to peril with ‘Roma’” (New Yorker) The last film made by Alfonso Cuarón, five years ago, was “Gravity,” in which Sandra Bullock floated through space, evading debris caused by a Russian missile strike and hitching a ride on a Chinese reëntry capsule. By contrast, Cuarón’s new film, “Roma,” is in black-and-white, and the star, Yalitza Aparicio, has never acted before. Most of the story is set in Roma, a pleasant suburb of Mexico City, in 1970 and 1971, and the special effects are largely confined to dog mess. The earlier movie cost a hundred million dollars; the new one, reportedly, a tenth of that sum. Let us hope that such dizzying career moves become culturally commonplace, and that Metallica will soon reform as a piano quartet, with a series of lunchtime concerts at the Frick.

Cuarón—ROMA—3 Aparicio plays a maid named Cleo. She hails from Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, but we never glimpse her home, for she has taken root in another household, in the capital, and gives no sign of wishing to leave. Alongside her is her fellow-servant, Adela (Nancy García), with whom she shares a room; after the daily toil, they exercise together before bed, laughing as they try to touch their toes. Although they speak Spanish to their employers, the two women tend to converse in a Mixtec language, and the movie is a babel, ceaselessly attuned to both human and animal tongues: canine barks, the croon of a bedtime lullaby, the moans of mothers in labor in a maternity wing. A knife-grinder passes down the street, announcing his services with the toot of a bird whistle. The family for whom Cleo works—and who, we soon realize, would barely function without her—is headed by Antonio (Fernando Grediaga), a doctor. His first appearance is a daunting one. A Ford Galaxy, shining and growling, inches into the garage beside the house, with a shadowy figure at the wheel. Waiting in anticipation are his wife, Sofia (Marina de Tavira), two of their four young children, and Cleo. We expect a proud paterfamilias to step forth, instead of which a bearded fusspot emerges: distracted, half attentive, already preparing to leave on a business trip. At once we know in our gut that this man will not stay the course, and that the drama will be played out, and upheld, by the other characters. As Sofia, a little the worse (and the more confiding) for drink, says to Cleo later on, “No matter what they tell you—women, we are always alone.” The movie is founded on Cuarón’s own childhood, and, as he goes in search of that time, any stray Proustians in the audience will be struck by two aspects of his quest. First, the more microscopic the memory the more readily we believe it. Second, the enfolding presences are female. Consider the closeup of a boiled egg that Cleo taps and cracks for the youngest child, Pepe (Marco Graf), spooning the warm, gelatinous contents into a china cup. (Proust’s narrator likewise recalls the flat plates, adorned with pictures, on which his aunt liked her “creamed eggs” to be served.) On the rooftop, Cleo does the family’s washing and hangs it up to dry; sunlight gleams through the white lace and cotton in a beatific haze. Pepe is idling there one day, and the two of them, the maid and the boy, lie down with eyes closed, pretending to be lifeless. “I like being dead,” Cleo remarks, and fans of Cuarón’s “Y Tu Mamá También” (2001) will remember the heroine who cradles a

small girl in shallow waters, saying, “Let’s see you float like a corpse.” In neither case is there anything bleak or creepy in the words. Both women are simply slipping into the kids’ imaginative games. Cuarón is in fruitful territory here. After “A Little Princess” (1995) and the best of the Hogwarts films, “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” (2004), he made “Children of Men” (2006), which shudders with horror at the prospect of a childless world. No surprise, then, that “Roma” should reverberate not only with innocence but with the awful intuition of its collapse.

There’s a wonderful sequence in which Pepe’s older brothers, Paco (Carlos Peralta) and Toño (Diego Cortina Autrey), scrap in the hallway. Nothing new in that, until one of them hurls something hard and heavy at the other, who ducks. It smashes the glass panel behind him, and both boys stop, rendered blank and mute by the nearness of genuine

harm. And we know, as they also know but cannot yet digest, the cause of battle: their father has gone, and he will not be coming back. They are now the men of the house, and already they are trashing it in their distress. The most significant child in “Roma” is the one that Cleo carries inside her. On a day off, she has an assignation with a friend named Fermín (Jorge Antonio Guerrero), and gets pregnant. She tells him so at the cinema, with a comedy playing in the background; he goes to the bathroom and never returns. (Another vanishing man.) She also tells Sofia, asking meekly, “Are you going to fire me?” The answer is no, and so it is, months later, with the baby almost due, that Cleo and Teresa (Verónica García), Sofia’s elderly mother, visit a furniture store to buy a crib. Suddenly, there is a commotion outside. The women turn to the window and find themselves gazing at a full-blown riot, with student protesters being harried down the street by riot squads. One youth is pursued into the store and killed, whereupon Fermín, of all people, appears with a revolver in his hand, and a wild stare. Just as we’re wondering what else this benighted day will inflict on poor Cleo, her water breaks. Not everyone will be seduced by “Roma,” and those who resist it will point to this crucial scene. Is it not too pat, fusing the personal crisis with a public upheaval and wringing meaning out of mere coincidence? Indeed, is the entire movie not stacked with fancy visual rhymes: the airplane high in the sky, for instance, that is mirrored in a flood of soapy water at the start and repeated in the final shot, or the two boys dressed as astronauts—the rich one,

Cuarón—ROMA—4 in his silvery costume, tramping through the woods, and the poor one, with a plastic bucket for a helmet, parading through a slum? And, if the echo implies that all children, whatever their social origins, are as one in their dreaming, is that not proof of the film’s political complacency? Though the mayhem outside the furniture store refers to a real event (the Corpus Christi Massacre of June, 1971, in which scores of demonstrators died), Cuarón makes no attempt to explain it, and nothing is more telling than the sight of Cleo glassed off from the scenes of revolt, as if they were beyond her comprehension. How can she, an indigenous member of the rural working class, find succor and satisfaction—even love—in fulfilling the needs of the upper bourgeoisie? Why must she kiss their kids good night? All those charges are valid. Nothing will be fomented by the film. The bridling wrath of the underclass that we find in Italian neorealism—“I curse the day I was born,” is the hero’s cry in “Bicycle Thieves” (1948)—is wholly absent, and there’s not a whisper of the anarchistic mischief practiced by Buñuel in “Diary of a Chambermaid” (1964), in which the aging patriarch kneels down to unfasten the boots of a bored underling. Yet here’s the thing: “Roma” is persuasive in its beauty. It wins you over. The face of Aparicio, in the leading role, is not placidly resigned but serene in its stoicism, and if she is less a participant than a bystander during the major convulsions of the era, well, few of us can claim to be much more. Cuarón himself is the director of photography on the movie, which glories in its tranquil surveys of domestic space, with the camera panning round the living room, and in the tracking shots that usher us through the action—left to right, right to left, to and fro, along furrowed fields and crowded avenues, as if the filmmaker were trying to keep pace with his thoughts while they carry him into the past. Some of them trespass on the surreal, as when, on New Year’s Eve, we come across revellers, in evening dress, helping to extinguish a forest fire. All roads lead to “Roma.” And so to the climax. The fatherless family is on a beach vacation, and two of the kids get into trouble, sucked in and swamped by the breakers. Cleo, who can’t swim, goes in to save them, and the camera follows—not plunging in with her, in a salty rush of panic, but staying to one side, at a distance, to observe her efforts. That might sound clinical, yet something miraculous happens: the scene becomes more emotionally draining, not less, because of the bright sunshine that gilds the crests of the menacing waves, and because of the Cleo-like calmness with which Cuarón bears witness to peril. After the final credits, the words “Shantih shantih shantih” appear, as they do at the end of “The Waste Land,” yet the film—smooth, unchoppy, self-contained—could hardly be further from Eliot’s poem. Do not look to “Roma” for the bristle of

agony or dread. It is the clarity of Cuarón’s eye, and the sea-like sway of his remembrance, that compel you to trust the tale he tells.

Simon Hattenstone: “Alfonso Cuarón on Roma: ‘We cast for almost a year …I couldn’t find the right person” (The Guardian) Congratulations, Alfonso, Roma is our No 1 film of the year. How does that make you feel? Oh, fantastic! That’s so great! From the Guardian – that’s huge! That makes me feel so happy. How would you describe Roma? It’s a year in the life of a family and a country … For me, this film has always been difficult to describe. It was a process of following the character of Cleo [the maid to a middle-class family, based on his own] and through her exploring wounds that were personal – family wounds. Then I realised these were wounds that I shared with many people in Mexico. And then I came to the conclusion that they are wounds shared by humanity. Roma is a love letter to your family’s maid, Libo. What does she think of it? She has seen it two or three times. She likes it a lot. She cries a lot. The beautiful thing is that when she cries it’s not because of what is happening to her, it’s because she’s concerned about the children. She’s not focusing on her own pain. Your mother and father are significant figures in Roma. Have they seen it? No. My dad passed three years ago and my mum passed early this year. I showed her a cut of the film. It was clear that her end was coming, so I organised a screening of the work in process for her, Libo and my three siblings. When your parents are gone, you start to see things differently. You can start romanticising it, or you go to the other way. For me, it’s more the latter. The way you capture the wonder of childhood reminds me of directors such as Víctor Erice and

Cuarón—ROMA—5 Steven Spielberg. Were you influenced by them? They are in my DNA. Film-makers who have this childlike sense of wonder. Spielberg has been a big influence on my generation. I love him. Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive is a masterpiece – one of those great films about childhood. Guillermo del Toro is also passionate about this film. A scene in Roma where the father parks his car in the garage and the children watch with awe reminds me of the UFO landing in Close Encounters. Was that deliberate? Hahahhaha! That is so funny. I never thought of that, but I can see it. Actually, that scene is inspired by the arrival on the moon of the spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Is it true you despaired of finding the right Cleo? Yes, we cast for almost a year, and I couldn’t the right person. Sometimes, I’d meet women who looked like Libo, but they wouldn’t feel like her. Or sometimes I’d meet people who felt like Libo, but they didn’t look like her. I was so lucky when I met Yalitza Aparicio. It was such an immediate impression. With Yalitza, there was this amazing sense of familiarity; this mix of intelligence and warmth. Then I was anxious because Yalitza said she was not interested, so there were another couple of weeks of sweating until she said yes. How important was it that Cleo was not played by a professional actor? I didn’t mind if she was professional or not professional. I just wanted them to look alike and be alike. But there was something studied – jaded, even – about the professional actors I interviewed for Cleo. Yalitza didn’t have any of that. None of the actors were shown the script. Did you feel bad about not telling Yalitza in advance about the scene in which she gives birth to a stillborn baby? Yes. She was sobbing and sobbing. I could not bear it any more. I rushed and embraced her and was, like: “Cut, cut, cut. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” And she was just crying and saying: “I thought you were going to bring a live baby.” I asked her later if she thought we went too far, and she said: “I understood why you did it, but it was very shocking.” Yalitza was sharing with us a real reaction to the circumstance. She was extraordinary. Were you influenced by Ken Loach in withholding the script? Look, you talk about Spielberg, Loach, Erice. All those guys are in my DNA. This is the first film I tried to do

without any sense of influence, and the first film [in which] I consciously tried not to pay homage or do anything derivative. So much so that if I found myself doing a shot that reminded me of another film, I would change it. The production designer, Eugenio Caballero, more than once,

asked: “Why are you changing the shot? That was beautiful,” and I’d say: “Yes, it’s beautiful because it’s not mine.” Then, when I took the new shot, he’d say: “But this is boring,” and I’d say: “Yes, it’s boring, but it’s mine.” In the end, it’s impossible to escape who you are. And who I am is a person who as a film-maker is infused with the DNA of other film-makers. Probably,

I’m too much of a cinephile to be an auteur. One of the boys in Roma thinks he has lived before. Is that you? No, that’s my younger brother. He used to say, all the time: “When I was old …” I’m the boy who receives the slap from the mother [for eavesdropping]. Does it upset you that Netflix has allowed it such a limited release in cinemas, or are there big advantages of going with them? I definitely wish it was in way more theatres. By the same token, I have more theatres playing Roma with Netflix than I would have got. Everybody else was going through the filter of black-and-white, Mexican and Spanish, and Netflix didn’t see it like that. I’m happy that it has sold out virtually every theatre showing it. It proves that the cinema experience and streaming are not incompatible. But I do believe the best place to watch a film, particularly a film like Roma, is the cinema. In Italy and Poland, we are playing in about 60 theatres. I’m just sad that in the UK, it’s not playing in that many. Has Roma made you think differently about your childhood? Not only my childhood; it has made me reassess many things, including my own complicity in certain situations – such as hierarchical society and the relationship between class and race that is prevalent not only in my country, but throughout the world. What scenes do you find most personally painful in Roma? There are many scenes. But what gave me the biggest pains were the scenes about the bubble of this middle-class family. This movie is set in 1971, and the social problems have actually got worse since then. That is really painful. Yesterday, we received good news about domestic workers, who have been campaigning for social security and to be legally protected. The judges declared it was

Cuarón—ROMA—6 discriminatory not to grant them those rights. What is so scary, though, is the amount of racist commentary about this on Twitter. And when Yalitza was on the cover of Vogue, you have no idea of the amount of racist comments about it. So, 1971 or 2018? The problems are even more acute today.

Christopher Orr: “Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma is a Masterpiece of Cinematic Technique” (Atlantic Monthly) Alfonso Cuarón is among the most unusual of world-class directors. He is not closely associated with any particular genre, and while there are cinematic elements that recur in his films—the long panning shots come to mind—he does not have what most filmgoers would consider a signature style. He has made, among others, the raunchy, idiosyncratic coming-of-age story Y Tu Mamá También; the best of the Harry Potter films, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban; the extraordinary dystopian fable Children of Men; and the fascinating exercise in spatial—literally spatial—geometry, Gravity. Cuarón’s trademark, to a remarkable degree, is simply excellence in whatever project he chooses to undertake. Roma, his newest work and his most personal—an ode to his upbringing in Mexico City in the early 1970s—is a marvel: frame by frame, scene by scene. It is quite possibly both the best film of Cuarón’s career to date and the best film of the year. The genius of Roma is that it is simultaneously narrow in focus and vast in scope. It opens with a shot that looks down from above on paving stones that, after a moment, are covered with water. A reference to the first shot of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg? I tend to believe so. But in this case, the water pours not from the sky but from a bucket. This is not a public street but a private courtyard, one being mopped by Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), the maid and nanny of a well-off Mexico City family. The contrast between employers and employee is quickly made explicit in terms both cultural (while most of the film unfolds in subtitled Spanish, Cleo, who is of indigenous descent,

frequently reverts to a rural Mixtec dialect) and racial: Cleo is dark-skinned, while the family she serves could hardly be whiter if they had emigrated from Sweden. Said family consists of a mother (Marina de Tavira), a father (Fernando Grediaga), four young children, a dog, a cook (Nancy García), and a grandmother (Verónica García). But it is through Cleo’s eyes that the film is principally told, and she is that most perfect of cinematic interlocutors: central, intimate to everything that transpires within the household, even more than the parents themselves. Yet she is still, on a fundamental level, an outsider, with all the perspective that entails. Early in the film, Cleo becomes pregnant. Her impregnator is an awful man, and he is initially presented to viewers in the most explicit sense possible: full frontal nudity, for a prolonged bout of kung fu moves utilizing a shower rod. It does not seem accidental that he is—in moral terms, plot function, and physical substantiation alike—a “dick.” Complicating matters further, the family’s father, another awful man, abandons the household for a mistress, requiring the mother to offer ever more extravagant lies to her children about his never-ending “business trip.” Cleo is caught in a perpetual twilight zone of semi-awareness, overhearing snatches of the family’s dissolution, but never being brought into its full confidence. I’ll forgo describing the rest of the plot in any detail, in part because it is unnecessary: In Cuarón’s hands, a scene that features young brothers playing shootout with toy pistols on a roof and then segues into an inspection of laundry drying on the line is a greater pleasure than many of the year’s most clever cinematic subplots. Roma captures, as well as any film I have seen, the spirit of “magical realism,” without ever hinting at the supernatural. Its magic is pure, stunning cinematic technique. Roma is amusing without being a comedy. (Certainly, no other quality film has ever leaned as hard as this one into the idea of dog shit as a principal narrative metaphor.) And, until its final act, it is moving without indulging in melodrama. I should caution prospective moviegoers that, in its final third, Roma has not one but two scenes that threaten to shatter your heart to a degree that few films will ever dare. I did not see these moments coming. But by its conclusion, Cuarón’s film proves itself both wonderful and fearsome. See it. You will never forget it. Anne Thompson: “Curón Tellss Lubezki How He Filmed ‘Roma’—Even One Quiet Shot Needed 45 Camera Positions” (IndieWire) Alfonso Cuarón’s impressive black-and-white memoir of 1971 Mexico City, “Roma,” recognized as one of the year’s best by multiple critics groups, finally arrived

Cuarón—ROMA—7 on Netflix December 14. Last Sunday on a packed soundstage at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood, the writer-director-cinematographer was grilled by his old film school buddy Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, who collaborated on six films with Cuarón, including “Y Tu Mama Tambien,” “Children of Men” and “Gravity,” the movie that won them both Oscars. Three-time Oscar-winner Lubezki started to prep the film but when the “Roma” shooting schedule ballooned to over 108 shooting days, he was no longer able to commit to the schedule and Cuarón, who trained as a cinematographer, took on the task himself. Lubezki asked his long-time collaborator to explain the many rules he broke while making a film that could earn him his first cinematography nomination, among other things. Here’s an edited version of the highlights. Emmanuel Lubezki: Alfonsito, I have a lot of questions. After we finished “Gravity,” Alfonso whispered that he had an idea for another movie. Then he goes away and sends a script and we started to work on it. He is a little like a reptile. When he changes his skin, every time he finishes a movie, his next will be completely different from the previous one. This movie was very different and I was excited to work on it. He disappeared again, went to Cannes, and then said “I don’t want to do the movie.” Then he called me: “Would you come to Mexico?” And it’s what became “Roma.” What happened? Alfonso Cuarón: I was prepping, sending photos, location scouting in South Africa and the desert. Then this thing “Roma” happened. It originated after “Children of Men,” we talked about that in that period. I was afraid of doing it — and then I had to do it now, because of age. It’s this thing: “OK, I’m growing old. I want to understand who I am in terms of who I was.” It was also the connection of the economic success of “Gravity.” We always have the same complaint when shooting a movie: “It’s not equipment — it’s time, I want to do a film the way I’d love to do it.” The time you prepped this film informed me so much. I wanted to do the Academy format; you convinced me to go 65 and wide. That started to inform the whole thing. We started talking about lighting. EL: Why black and white? AC: I didn’t want a film that looks vintage, that looks old. I wanted to do a modern film that looks into the past. And you kept questioning me about black and white: “Maybe color is better, otherwise you’re going to look back.” That was your argument about the 65, because it

brought a different unapologetic quality to the film. It’s not a vintage black and white. It’s a contemporary black and white. Black and white was part of the DNA of the film. When the idea manifested, it was about the character Cleo [Yalitza Aparicio], the tune was memory, and it was black and white. From there you can change things. EL: You tend not to follow the rules. With this one you are working with non-actors, using complex blocking. You are dealing with dancers who haven’t danced. Was this style developed during the writing, or found in situ? AC: It was decided on the page, the script was densely described, including sounds. It has to do with stuff we’ve been doing together since “Y Tu Mama Tambien,” which changed my approach on foreground vs. background, character vs. social environment, and on “Children of Men,” we elaborated on that. On this one, I decided, “OK, I am going to trust that I already built that muscle and I’m not going to worry about it. I’m just going to make it happen.” When I would first describe to the crew the shot, they would think I was joking! EL: Something that was unlike “Children” and “Y Tu Mama” was the tempo. The camera is moving at a different tempo than the actors. It’s almost a complex jazz

number. Are you describing it to the crew and they are doing it? What is the procedure? AC: First is to find the space, when I start lensing, to go through the whole thing. Timing was the most difficult thing. People ask always about the beach scene. What was more complicated was simple things like doing a

round movement, a 380 inside the house. When Cleo is turning off the lights we have 45 different camera positions, the camera can’t be in one place and panning. It was a floor with lines everywhere. Even before bringing in the actors it was about sorting out the timings. But the actors had to have the flexibility to improvise. Something I learned from you was communicating with the dolly or the operator. EL: You’re telling them to slow down as you are watching, I see. It does produce a feeling — hard to describe — the camera becomes almost like a consciousness revisiting the story. The camera knows something the actors do not. It’s very powerful. The other thing you do different from all the other movies we did together is the blocking of the scene is perpendicular to the lens. When you track, the actors are moving parallel to the lens. Usually, if I was there: “Alfonso that is very flat, we should compose in the c axis not the x axis.” Why did you do it?

Cuarón—ROMA—8 AC: It needed to be objective. We would not have dollies in and out, and embrace the flatness, but compensate for that flatness with background. EL: This is a very objective film. In “Gravity” we explored the idea of elasticity, we’d be objective and then got into her helmet and it becomes subjective. This movie is really objective 100 percent, like “Y Tu Mama.” AC: It’s a ghost of the present visiting the past, objectively without getting involved, just observing, not trying to make a judgment or a commentary, that everything there would be just the commentary itself. EL: It becomes even more complex, because it’s mysterious and very emotional, I don’t know why. It feels like the camera and the cinematography are not there to illustrate; they are the film itself. Another contradiction from the book of filmmaking: you rehearse these complicated movements but some of the actors don’t know what’s coming. They didn’t read the script? They know the mechanics, but don’t know where the emotional turns are coming? AC: They know some of the mechanics but not all of them. It was all the time changing; I was throwing them curveballs. The problem was editing, all the takes were so different. I’d choose something that was so great in context and the next moment find something that did not work. It was a domino effect. You had to go back to the first take and everything changed, the sense of timing and even information. Part of the challenge was a lot of the camera was static and characters moved around. It was more challenging when the camera was moving. EL: Moving in different rhythm. AC: It was also luck. For the beach scene, we had to build a jetty, and put a techno-crane to keep the same height. And the day before we shot, tropical storms weakened the jetty. Every time we tried to shoot the scene the cameras would derail. I wanted to have six takes before the sweet spot of the light. We couldn’t get anything, it was derailing 45 seconds after saying action; we would get the beginning. Luck. When the sweet spot came the camera didn’t derail and we have the only good complete shot. I didn’t want to keep on going. I was afraid of safety and also because the light was not worth it. Do a lot of prep so you can be bit luckier! EL: You were setting up the camera, talking to the actors. When did you have time to do the lighting?

AC: That was fundamental. We’re going to be in the dining room. I knew roughly the shot. From the night before we start doing pre-lights, having extra crew working

extra hours to start doing a pre-rig, then I would finish. It was a process. Embracing being a cinematographer forced me to be on the set all day long. When we work together, we work, I go away. Somehow I had to be there, that was triggering more details of the memory of the moment, it was very useful. I was there lighting, and composing. For me, it was: “What would Chivo do?” EL: Inside the movie theater with interactive light,

you shoot naturalistically with a lot of depth. That combination is not simple. It requires that you have a deep stop and that means you need a lot of light. In this particular scene you can see what’s being projected, see the lighting on [the characters], there’s a fill light, so you can see who they are. Then there’s a big change of light. This scene, even for a very old tested cinematographer, is a nightmare. How did you do it? AC: I don’t want movie lights. I want the scene to be lighting everything in sync with the projection. Projecting 35 mil is not enough light, 65 we can’t afford, we don’t have a big F stop. Shoot 35 open as much as possible, with the F stop you lose the depth the field. So you need power. The solution of how do it was informed by “Gravity” LEDs. We changed the screen for LED lights that would be projecting, and then replaced later in post-production for 35 mm projection. To reach our characters, on top of the screen there was a smaller LED with lesser intensity that was in sync. And also I rounded a bit on the sides. The challenge was the change of light when the lights come up. EL: Amazing. What about the music, or lack of it? We did it in “Y Tu Mama Tambien” but not to this extent. AC: In “Y Tu Mama” we chased the source, bringing it more to the foreground. Here the source depends on the distance and sometimes you barely hear it. The music was the sound of the places. That was part of the design from the get-go. It’s described in the screenplay and one of those things that you follow through. EL: You are never satisfied–“we fucked this up, this is a mistake, we should not have filmed this.” This to me seems like your most successful film. Sorry, if I’m talking like a critic. But it’s a combination of everything that you’ve learned, what you’ve been doing for so many years. Are you satisfied with the movie?

Cuarón—ROMA—9 AC: I am very pleased because it’s what I set out to do. I had the luxury that I had the time to do it. In other films there are more conventional narratives. Here I decided what I set out to do. I don’t know if it’s successful. I set out to bring it out unfiltered. And I am satisfied, yes. That I would watch it again, no! EL: Congratulations, I adore the movie. I think it’s one of my favorite movies.

Samuel Axon: “After Roma swept the Oscars, Steven Spielberg seeks to block streaming films” (asrs technica) A spokesperson for Amblin, the production company run by director Steven Spielberg, has told IndieWire that Spielberg plans to support an effort to change the rules of the Oscars to bar some films primarily distributed via streaming platforms like Netflix from nomination for Academy Awards. "Steven feels strongly about the difference between the streaming and theatrical situation," the spokesperson told the publication. "He'll be happy if the others will join [his campaign] when that comes up [at the Academy Board of Governors meeting]." The conversation in Hollywood about the legitimacy of films made for streaming has been fierce since critical darling Roma—a Netflix-backed film from Y Tu Mamá También, Children of Men, and Gravity director Alfonso Cuarón—took home Best Director, Best Foreign Language Film, and Best Cinematography in an unprecedented sweep for a streaming film. However, Roma lost Best Picture to controversial film Green Book, which Spielberg backed. Some industry figures have proposed a requirement that films run in theaters for at least four weeks before they can be considered for Oscars. Others have said they believe the amount of money Netflix spent lobbying for Roma (estimates range from $25 to 50 million—much more than is common, IndieWire reports) was unfair. But there is not yet any consensus on which specific changes to the rules will be proposed or potentially ratified.

When asked in an earlier interview with ITV News whether streaming is a threat to cinema, Spielberg provided this answer: It is a challenge to cinema, the same way television in the 1950s pulled people away from movie theaters and everybody stayed at home cause it was more fun to stay at home and watch, you know, a comedy on television in the 1950s than it was to go out to see a movie. So Hollywood's used to that. We are accustomed to being highly competitive with television. The difference today is that a lot of studios would rather just make a branded, tentpole—you know, guaranteed box office hits from their inventory of branded, you know, successful movies than take chances on smaller films. And those smaller films the studios used to make routinely are now going to Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix. And that's where—and by the way, the television is greater today than it has ever been in the history of television. There's better writing, better directing, better performances, better stories are being told. Television is really thriving with quality and art, but it poses a clear and present danger to filmgoers. Further in the conversation, he explained his reasoning for why films released primarily on Netflix or the like should not be candidates for the Oscars: Fewer and fewer filmmakers are going to struggle to raise money or to go over to compete in Sundance and possibly get one of the specialty labels to release their films theatrically, publicly. And more of them are going to let the SVOD businesses finance their films, maybe with the promise of a slight, one-week theatrical window to qualify them for awards as a movie. But in fact, once you commit to a television format, you're a TV movie. You certainly—if it's a good show—deserve an Emmy. But not an Oscar... I don't believe that films that are just given token qualifications in a couple of theaters for less than a week should qualify for the Academy Award nomination. Historically, TV movies have not attracted the kind of filmmaking talent and production values that films on Netflix or Amazon do now, and this has created a point of contention in the industry when it comes to classification. Later, Spielberg reiterated the point while accepting an award from the Cinema Audio Society: I hope all of us really continue to believe that the greatest contributions we can make as filmmakers is to give audiences the motion picture theatrical experience. I'm a firm believer that movie theaters need to be around forever... The sound is better in homes more than it ever has been in history, but there's nothing like going to a big dark theatre with people you've never met before and having the experience wash over you. That's something we all truly believe in.

Cuarón—ROMA—10 Currently, films do not need to run exclusively in theaters to qualify for Oscars, but they must play for one week in New York and Los Angeles and receive reviews in print newspapers—qualifications Roma met. (In fact, Roma played for as long as three weeks in some theaters, and it ran in theaters outside of New York and LA as well.) The Academy holds a post-Oscars meeting every year. Spielberg reportedly will seek to promote the changes at that meeting. The Academy gave a comment acknowledging that it would discuss the issue of streaming: "Awards rules discussions are ongoing with the branches. And the Board will likely consider the topic at the April meeting."

Slavoj Žižek: “Roma is being celebrated for all the wrong reasons, writes Slavoj Žižek” (The Spectator) My first viewing of Roma left me with a bitter taste: yes, the majority of critics are right in celebrating it as an instant classic, but I couldn’t get rid of the idea that this predominant perception is sustained by a terrifying, almost obscene, misreading, and that the movie is celebrated for all the wrong reasons. Roma is read as a tribute to Cleo, a maid from the Colonia Roma neighbourhood of Mexico City working in the middle-class household of Sofia, her husband Antonio, their four young children, Sofia’s mother Teresa, and another maid, Adela. It take place in 1970, the time of large student protests and social unrest. As already in Y Tu Mama Tambien, Cuaron maintains distance between the two levels, the family troubles (Antonio leaving his family for a younger mistress, Cleo getting pregnant by a boyfriend who immediately abandons her), and this focus on intimate family topic makes the oppressive presence of social struggles all the more palpable as the diffuse but omnipresent background. As Fred Jameson would have put it, History as Real cannot be depicted directly but only as the elusive background that leaves its mark on depicted events. So does Roma really just celebrate Cleo’s simple goodness and selfless dedication to the family? Can she really be reduced to the ultimate love object of a spoiled upper-middle class family, accepted (almost) as part of the family to be better exploited, physically and emotionally?

The film’s texture is full of subtle signs which indicate that the image of Cleo’s goodness is itself a trap, the object of implicit critique which denounces her dedication as the result of her ideological blindness. I don’t have in mind here just the obvious dissonances in how the family members treat Cleo: immediately after professing their love for her and talking with her ‘like equals’, they abruptly ask her to do some house job or to serve them something. What struck me was, for example, the display of Sofia’s indifferent brutality in her drunken attempt to park the family Ford Galaxie in the narrow garage area: how she repeatedly scratches the wall with chunks of plaster falling down. Although this brutality can be justified by her subjective despair (being abandoned by her husband), the lesson is that, due to her dominant position, she can afford to act like that (the servants will repair the wall), while Cleo, who finds herself in a much more dire situation, simply cannot afford such ‘authentic’ outbursts – even when her whole world is falling apart, the work has to go on… Cleo’s true predicament first emerges in all its brutality in the hospital, after she delivers a stillborn baby girl; multiple attempts to resuscitate the infant fail, and the doctors give the body to Cleo for a few moments before taking it away. Many critics who saw in this scene the most traumatic moment of the film, missed its ambiguity: as we learn later in the film (but can suspect now already), what truly traumatizes her is that she doesn’t want a child, so a dead body in her hands is good news. At the film’s end, Sofia takes her family to the beach to help Cleo deal with her heartache (in reality, they want to use her there as a servant, although she just went through a painful stillbirth). Two of the children almost drown in the currents but Cleo wades in to rescue them even though she herself can’t swim. The event leads to Sofia and the children declaring their devotion to Cleo for such selflessness and Cleo breaking down, admitting she never wanted the baby in the first place. Back home, as she returns to the drudgery and prepares another wash, Cleo says to Adela she has much to tell her, as a plane flies overhead. After Cleo saves the two boys, they all (Sofia, Cleo and the boys) tightly embrace on the beach – a moment of false solidarity if there ever was one, a moment which simply confirms that Cleo is caught into the trap that enslaves her… Am I dreaming here? Is my reading not too crazy? I think Cuaron provides a subtle hint in this direction at the level of the form. The entire scene of Cleo saving the children is shot in one long take, with the camera moving transversally, always focused on Cleo. When one watches this scene, one cannot avoid the feeling of a strange dissonance between form and content: while the content is a pathetic gesture from Cleo who, soon after the traumatic stillbirth, risks her life for the children, the

Cuarón—ROMA—11 form totally ignores this dramatic context. There is no exchange of shots between Cleo entering the water and the children, no dramatic tension between the danger the children are in and her effort to save them, no point-of-view shot depicting what she sees. This strange inertia of the camera, its refusal to get involved in the drama, renders in a palpable way Cleo’s disentanglement from the pathetic role of a faithful servant ready to sacrifice herself. There is a further hint of emancipation to come in the very final moments of the film when Cleo says to Adela: ‘I have much to tell you.’ Maybe, this means that Cleo is finally getting ready to step out of the trap of her ‘goodness’, becoming aware that her selfless dedication to her family is the very form of her servitude. In other words, Cleo’s total withdrawal from political concerns, her dedication to selfless service, is the very form of her ideological identity, it is how she ‘lives’ ideology. Maybe explaining her predicament to Adela is the beginning of Cleo’s ‘class consciousness’, the first step that will lead her to join the protesters on the street. A new figure of Cleo will arise in this way, a much more cold and ruthless – a figure of Cleo delivered from ideological chains. But maybe it will not. It is very difficult to get rid of the chains in which we not only feel good but feel that we are doing something good. As T.S. Eliot put it in his Murder in the Cathedral, the greatest sin is to do the right thing for the wrong reason.

Brian Tallerica: “Roma” (rogerebert.com) Alfonso Cuaron’s “Roma” opens with a close-up shot of a stone-paved driveway. We see soapy water cascade over the rock, as someone off-camera is cleaning it. In the reflection of the water, we can see the sky, although even that reflection undulates and changes as the water moves. A plane then moves across the field of view within the reflection. It sounds so simple but there is so much in this sequence of images that is reflected in the film to follow: a natural flow of life—water, stone, air—while also presenting us with the concept of the micro within the macro, like a plane against the sky. So much of “Roma”

repeats that concept of the personal story against a backdrop of a larger one—the face in the crowd, the human story in the context of a societal one. Cuaron has made his most personal film to date, and the blend of the humane and the artistic within nearly every scene is breathtaking. It’s a masterful achievement in filmmaking as an empathy machine, a way for us to spend time in a place, in an era, and with characters we never would otherwise. The woman cleaning that driveway is Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), a servant for a wealthy family in Mexico City in the ‘70s. Cleo is no mere maid, often feeling like she is a part of the family she serves more than an employee—although she is often reminded of the latter fact as well. She may go on trips with them and truly love the children, but she also gets admonished for leaving her light on too late at night as it wastes electricity. Cleo is a quiet young woman, eager to do a good job, and able to stay out of the way when controversy arrives within the family, especially with the distant, often-absent patriarch. Everything changes for Cleo after an affair with a cousin of her friend’s boyfriend results in a pregnancy. Cleo’s employers offer to help their favorite servant with the pregnancy, taking her to the doctor and supporting her with whatever she needs, but the child’s father disappears, and Cleo looks worried about what her future holds. “Roma” spends roughly a year in the life of Cleo as she plans for motherhood, tries to support a family that is coming apart, and simply moves through a loud, changing world. Cuaron, who shot the film in gorgeous black-and-white himself (and clearly learned a thing or two from regular collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki), adopts a fascinating visual style for “Roma” in that he rarely uses close-ups, keeping us at a distance from Cleo and his other characters, and allowing the details of the world around them to come to life. Without over-using the trick, which would have resulted in a cluttered film, Cuaron often places Cleo in a tableau that could be called chaotic, whether it’s a market teeming with people behind her or even just the home in which she spends so much of her time, full of noisy children, relatives, and servants. Cleo’s existence is a crowded one, and it almost feels like it gets more so as the film goes along, mirroring her increasing concern at the impending birth of her child. With some of the most striking imagery of the year, "Roma" often blends the surreal and the relatable into one memorable image. Throughout “Roma,” Cuaron uses his mastery of visual language to convey mood and character in ways his mostly-silent protagonist cannot. There is no score, and yet “Roma” feels aurally alive, largely because of the veracity of Cuaron’s attention to detail. There’s a tendency for filmmakers who attempt to make something that could be called “poetic” to get loose with detail. The idea is that

Cuarón—ROMA—12 poetic cinema can’t be realistic cinema. What’s so stunning about “Roma” is how much Cuaron finds the poetry in the detail (this is also true of Barry Jenkins' "If Beale Street Could Talk," one of the other great movies of 2018). The film is remarkably episodic—so much so that its lack of driving narrative may disappoint people when they watch it on Netflix—but it’s designed to immerse you, to transport you, and those who go with it will find themselves rewarded. Cuaron’s film climaxes in a couple of emotional scenes that will shake to the core those who care about these characters. Cuaron has said that this film is a tribute to the women in his life and “the elements that forged me.” With that obviously personal angle driving the production, “Roma” often plays out like a memory, but not in a gauzy, dreamlike way we so often see from bad filmmaking. Every choice has been carefully considered—that wide-angle approach allows for so much background detail—and yet “Roma” is never sterile or overly precious with its choices. It’s that balance of truth and art that is so breathtaking, making Cuaron’s personal story a piece of

work that ultimately registers as personal to us, too. And you walk out transformed, feeling like you just experienced something more than merely watching a film. That kind of movie is incredibly rare—we’re lucky if get one a year. “Roma” is that special. I don’t often get as personal as some critics do in reviews, but how strongly I feel about this film seems to warrant one more closing thought. By virtue of being blessed to work here, I’m often asked what I think Roger Ebert would have thought about some of the films that have been released since he passed. It’s emotionally overwhelming to consider what he might have written about “Moonlight” or “Selma” and so I try not to go down that mental rabbit hole, but I felt that absence perhaps most greatly while watching “Roma.” When it ended, I thought more than ever about how he would have written about it. I think that’s because it so completely embodies what he considered the role of great cinema as an empathy machine. We should be thankful there are films like “Roma” keeping that machine humming.

JUST ONE MORE IN THE FALL 2019 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS (SERIES 39)

Dec 3 Baz Luhrmann Moulin Rouge 2001

BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS SPRING 2020, SERIES 40

Jan 28 Chaplin City Lights 1931 Feb 4 Lloyd Bacon 42nd Street 1933

Feb 11 Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp 1943 Feb 18 Billy Wilder Sunset Boulevard 1950

Feb 25 Henri-Georges Clouzot Wages of Fear 1953 Mar 3 Lucino Visconti, The Leopard 1963 Mar 10 Maskaki Kobayashi Kwaidan 1965

Mar 24 John Schlesinger Midnight Cowboy 1969 Mar 31 Alan Pakula Klute 1971

Apr 7 Robert Altman McCabe and Mrs Miller 1971 Apr 14 Martin Scorsese King of Comedy 1983

Apr 21 Wim Wenders Land of Plenty 2004 Apr 28 Wes Anderson Isle of Dogs 2018

May 5 Pedro Almodóvar Pain and Glory 2019

CONTACTS: email Diane Christian: engdc@buffalo.edu…email Bruce Jackson bjackson@buffalo.edu... for the series schedule, annotations, links and updates: http: //buffalofilmseminars.com...

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The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the State University of New York at Buffalo and the Dipson Amherst

Theatre, with support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News.