Review of Santiago (2007) by Lucas M — 25 Feb 2011

There's no such thing as reality. All that we see and experience end up being part of a frame. Something like "everything has three sides": your, mine and the (supposed) true one. Where stands the reality of the 'you' that has nothing to do with the 'me'?

While watching Santiago, I could truly understand what Susan Sontag meant when she compared the camera to a gun. In her novel "On Photograph", she says that : "To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.".

We all know that documentaries are only a part of a whole, a fraction of something called reality. What we don't tend to think about is that real characters are also a creation, a fiction when converted into a subject.

Santiago was the enigmatic butler of the filmmaker's family. Speaking more than five languages, a lover of classical music and boxing, the Argentinian wrote all along his life 30,000 pages about the history of the world's aristocracy. These are facts, however, what Salles was really looking for when decided to make the documentary - what he only discovered thirteen years later - was not the real Santiago, but Santiago from his childhood memories. Like an implacable murder, Salles "violates" Santiago and turns him into an object to finds out, at the end, that the relationship employer and employee had never been broken, as this relationship is also an allegory of what happens throughout any film between the documentarist and his/her subject. Or between reality and fiction.

* the black and white film was the perfect choice. a tropical light wouldn't match with Santiago's personality and sense of respect (for tradition).