Erasure Poem: I Would Like to Know

During the last winter months, I dedicated the majority of my time to the creation of my bachelor thesis, which concerned the enigmatic oeuvre of the Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso. Due to a remarkably minimalist and contemplative style, as well as the foregrounding of ‘time’ and ‘duration’ rather than ‘action’ and ‘motion’, his films are most often labeled as ‘slow cinema’. Almost all of his feature films portray the solitary quests of taciturn men through rough and desolate landscapes, and contain very little dialogue and contextual information. Just like the travels of Alonso’s protagonists, writing and completing my thesis proved to be an arduous and challenging, yet also stimulating and rewarding journey. As a final farewell to this intellectual labour, I have created a sort of belated foreword to my thesis in the form of an erasure poem. Based on the director’s note accompanying the DVD of Alonso’s great film Liverpool (2008), in this poem I’ve incorporated reflections on my general fascination for film directors, my thesis process, my interest in Alonso’s characters, and my curiosity for the cinematic medium.