El Father Plays Himself

This rich meta-documentary follows a father and son on a deeply personal filmmaking journey into the Amazon jungle.

“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.

Published 4 Aug 2021

Tags: El Father Plays Himself Mo Scarpelli