Filmmaker: Leonardo Cariglino

Instructions on How to Cry by Julio Cortázar

Poet: | Nationality: | Filmmaker:

This is from the first chapter of Cronopios and Famas, translated by Paul Backburn, “The Instruction Manual” — “an absurd assortment of tasks and items dissected in an instruction-manual format,” according to the publisher’s description on Amazon.

Sari Rachman is the actress, and also supplied the voiceover reading of the poem. Leonardo Cariglino did everything else. You can read the text at Maud Newton’s blog. Someone else posted a video interpretation of the poem on YouTube, and had I not discovered this one, I might have posted it. But I’m afraid Cariglino’s film blows it out of the water.

Incidentally, Cariglino is in the midst of a fundraising campaign on Kickstarter to make a film inspired in part by a Baudelaire poem. Check it out.