SESSION 121, ILLEGAL _CINEMA

Screening of Take One (Wakefield Poole, EEUU, 1977), proposed by Daniel Alegrete, followed by a discussion.

Take One is described as a “docufantasy” set in San Francisco in the late 1970s. Poole invites several gay men to describe their fantasies in front of the camera and to subsequently embody them in scenes constructed within the process of filming itself.

The film is situated between documentary, fiction and experiment, making cinema into a device for translation between desire, story and image. What is imagined, what is stated, and what is filmed never coincide completely, and the film’s strength arises from that discrepancy.

The director’s apartment serves as a domestic set where fantasies are materialised, while the city of San Francisco and its cinemas articulate the collective dimension of pornography as a shared experience. The continuum between the intimate and the public, which traverses the entire film, is displayed between these two spaces.

In the final analysis, Take One is a metacinematographic reflection on how cinema not only represents desire, but also produces and organises it, returning it transformed into images.

Daniel Alegrete (Madrid, 1993) is a filmmaker who was trained at FilmFactory (Sarajevo), MasterLAV and the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola. Since 2021 he has lived in Bilbao, where he developed the Fuera de campo programming project and founded the production company Lapislázuli Films. His work explores queer issues and horror and has been shown at festivals and shows like PROYECTOR or DOC Buenos Aires.