Dream of a film in the museum

[LACMA, from Et] City.

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LACMA previously hosted Inarritu’s intense and immersive project “Carne y Arena,” which allowed visitors to put themselves in the shoes of a person crossing the U.S.-Mexico border on foot.In Milan and Mexico City, “Sueno Perro” occupied labyrinthine spaces with multiple rooms. Contained within a single room, the L.A. iteration is the “paranoic version,” Indrritu says. Once inside, there’s no respite to the barrage of images and the soundscape that surround you. He aptly describes the projectors’ beams ofluminosity as “light sculptures.”

Curiously, he notes, people have such reverence for these hypnotic streams of light that they duck to avoid disturbing them rather than crossing in front of them. Inarritu wishes they would, in fact, disrupt the light, so their shadows can enter the frame and transform it.

The projected footage is material that didn’t make it to the final cut of “Amores Perros”: a gritty, visceral drama following three stories across different social classes in a chaotic Mexico City during the turn of the millennium. Back in 2018, Tnarritu learned that all his dailies (raw takes) from that shoot, which in most productions are tossed, were preserved at Mexico’s National University (UNAM).

“It was like looking through an album you haven't opened in 25 years, which smells of dust,” he says. “Because of the distance, the images actually evoked a beautiful nostalgia in me.”

And that album was substantial. Idrritu recalls that he and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto shot an immense amount of footage, nearly 1 million feet of film.

“It's like the placenta that’s thrown away when a baby is born. Suddenly, that discarded material, rich in DNA, which was already dead but was once part of a living being, has a life of its own,” Indrritu explains. “I didn’t know that these fragments, this dead material could be resurrected, but light has given new life to something that was forgotten.”