El Father Plays Himself

“When the image we’re con­struct­ing is strong, sub­merge your­self in it”, says film­mak­er Jorge Thie­len Armand to his father Jorge Thie­len Hed­derich ear­ly in Mo Scarpelli’s El Father Plays Him­self. ​“For­get about every­thing”, Armand adds, explain­ing how he hopes to direct his father in the fea­ture film they will be cre­at­ing togeth­er, which Scarpel­li (Armand’s part­ner) has tasked her­self with documenting.

There are too many cam­eras in the room and the atmos­phere is fraught. Armand’s sug­ges­tion is not well received, and moments lat­er his father is charg­ing around, scream­ing that he is not ​“a whore” and, despite hav­ing agreed to star in a fic­tion film made from a script incor­po­rat­ing ele­ments of his life, will not be told what to do. ​“It’s like I’m sign­ing a con­tract with the dev­il”, Roque says.

Despite the overblown, child­like nature of the rant this line is a part of, it lands upon some­thing lucid that this mak­ing-of doc­u­men­tary looks to express. It is hard to make a film eth­i­cal­ly. Many things are self-evi­dent­ly exploita­tive, but some lines are not clear until you cross them.

Beyond the fact that mak­ing any film about a fam­i­ly mem­ber is dif­fi­cult, there is one oth­er key fac­tor that blurs the lines of con­sent present in this pro­duc­tion, which result­ed in Armand’s sec­ond fea­ture, La For­t­aleza. Hed­derich is a seri­ous alco­holic, and man­ag­ing his rum intake becomes a logis­ti­cal chal­lenge for the film crew, as well as some­thing that com­pli­cates autho­r­i­al ques­tions sur­round­ing his abil­i­ty to ade­quate­ly assess the fair­ness of his rep­re­sen­ta­tion and be an effec­tive par­tic­i­pant in its construction.

Theilen’s cho­sen process involves reveal­ing the rel­e­vant por­tion of the script to his father on the morn­ing of each day’s shoot­ing, so that he can act out each scene as if in the moment. As Hedderich’s scenes get dark­er and he becomes drunk­er, ques­tions arise around whether, when see­ing the worst of him­self in a final cut, he will be com­fort­able with what has been made.

At 15, Armand left his father in Venezuela to live with his moth­er in Cana­da, and the nar­ra­tive of La For­t­aleza involves both the father’s alco­holism and the rec­on­cil­i­a­tion of his rela­tion­ship with his son, two things that are iron­i­cal­ly being test­ed by the tense con­di­tions of the pro­duc­tion itself.

This is rich meta­tex­tu­al ter­ri­to­ry and Scarpel­li effec­tive­ly mines it, sit­ting qui­et­ly as a fly-on-the-wall and unob­tru­sive­ly cap­tur­ing what could be con­sid­ered the real gold of the pro­duc­tion, the com­plex inter­per­son­al inter­ac­tions between crew and cast mem­bers mak­ing a film about a life whose real lives also hap­pen to be inex­tri­ca­bly interlinked.

“He’s real­ly like this”, Armand observes while film­ing one scene. In being a drunk, abra­sive mess, Hed­derich could be seen to be embody­ing the prin­ci­ples of method act­ing and being a com­mit­ted par­tic­i­pant in the recre­ation of his own myth, but doing so does not appear to be doing any­one any good.

In El Father Plays Him­self, a film which involves stag­ing a recre­ation of a process of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion is mir­rored by a film-with­in-a-film that shows the real­i­ty of the con­flict that lies behind the nar­ra­tive being recon­struct­ed. Whether or not they may mean to, both father and son end up sub­merged in the images they are strug­gling to create.