Edgardo Cozarinsky fue crítico de cine en los años sesenta. En 1974 se instaló en París, huyendo de la inestabilidad política que asoló Argentina, luego de realizar en su país natal su primer largometraje underground titulado, enigmáticamente, ..... (puntos suspensivos). En París se convirtió en escritor de ensayos con Vudú urbano, que abrieron una faceta sobre el cine que nunca tuvo retorno, como el también notable trabajo Borges en/y/sobre cine.
Su filmografía en Francia incluye mediometrajes y largos experimentales, que mezclan documental y ficción, testimonio y especulación: La guerre d'un seul homme (1981), Guerreros y cautivas (1989), Boulevares del crepúsculo (1992), Citizen Langlois (1994), El violín de Rothschild (1996), Fantasmas de Tánger (1997) y Dans le rouge du couchant (2003). Hacedor de documentales con forma de ficción o ficciones vestidas de documental, hubo varios intentos con el cine, y más recientemente llegó el tiempo de las ficciones literarias —los cuentos de La novia de Odessa y su primera novela, El rufián moldavo—, para volver a incursionar recientemente con Ronda nocturna, de inminente estreno.
Junto a largometraje de ficción Ronda nocturna publicó dos libros, Museo del chisme, el guión y diario de rodaje de su film, a los que suma su primer trabajo como director de teatro, con Squash.
Edgardo Cozarinsky (1939-) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is a writer and filmmaker, who is best known for writing Vudú urbano.
His family name goes back to his great grandparents, Jewish immigrants from Kiev and Odessa at the end of the 19th century, his first name tells of his mother's infatuation with Edgar Allan Poe.
After an adolescence mostly spent in neighborhood cinemas that showed double bills of old Hollywood films and reading an inordinate amount of fiction in Spanish, English and French (favorite authors - Stevenson, Conrad, some Henry James), he studied literature at Buenos Aires university, wrote for local and Spanish film magazines. He was barely twenty years old when he became acquainted with Borges, Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, all writers of prestige whom he saw frequently during his years in Buenos Aires. In 1973 he won a literary prize with an essay on gossip as narrative device in James and Proust. In 1974, he published Borges y el cine, a book enlarged in every reprint (Spain, 1978 and 2002, and translations).
After a first nine-month stay in Europe and a visit to New York between September 1966 and June 1967, he returned to Buenos Aires with the desire and the decision to leave behind his life as a literary idler. After dabbling in journalism, in the culture section of the weekly magazine Primera Plana and Panorama, he made a first film, an underground feature shot on weekends throughout a year, knowing that it could not pass the local censorship of the period. It was nevertheless screened at festivals throughout Europe and the United States. Its title was already a challenge Puntos suspensivos (Dot Dot Dot).
In 1974, in the turmoil of political agitation and imminent repression, he left Buenos Aires for Paris. There he embarked into filmmaking with works that falls roughly into two categories -fiction films and "essays", mixing documentary material with a personal, even private reflection on the issues raised by the material. The most distinguished of these is La Guerre d'un seul homme (One Man's War, 1981), a confrontation between Ernst Jünger wartime diaries and the French newsreels of the occupation period. At a time when the arts' departments of several European television networks were willing to support such ventures, Cozarinsky was able to develop this approach in a series of very original works.
During the rest of the 1970s and the 1980s, his literary career was mostly dormant. But his only published work of the period became an instant cult book - Vudú urbano (Urban voodoo, 1985), a mixture of fiction and essay not unlike his film work, with prologues by Susan Sontag and the Cuyban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante.
In the same year, after the end of the military regime in Argentina, he visited briefly to Buenos Aires. Three years later, he made a film in Argentina, in the far South, a "Southern" - Guerreros y cautivas (Warriors and Captive Women). From that date on he started visiting his native country more and more often, occasionally shooting there material for his European "essays". His most adventurous later films were Rothschild's Violin and Ghosts of Tangier, both made between 1995 and 1996.
It was in hospital that he wrote the first two stories in his prize-winning book La novia de Odessa (The Bride from Odessa). From that date on, his film work became sparse and he started publishing "all the books I had not put on paper", fiction mostly but also essays and chronicles. He became immediately established as a writer to reckon with in the Spanish language, and was translated into English, French, German and several others languages.
From that date, also, he started spending most of the time in Buenos Aires with regular but short stays in Paris. He wrote and directed a play (Squash), the mini-opera Raptos (Raptures), both in 2005, and he appeared on the alternative stage together with his GP, Dr Alejo Florin, in one of Vivi Tellas' "documentary theater" ventures -Cozarinsky y su médico. In 2008, he started to work on the libretto for a chamber opera with the musician Pablo Mainetti - Ultramarina, based on motives from his own novel El rufián moldavo (The Moldavian Pimp) inveterate nomad, Cozarinsky has shot at least part of his films not only in Buenos Aires and Paris but also in Budapest, Rotterdam, Tallinn, Tangiers, Vienna, Granada, Saint-Petersburg, Seville and Patagonia. He rarely spends more than three months in any fixed place and considers Buenos Aires his pleasure basis and Paris his cultural department store.
“Nuestro objetivo final es nada menos que lograr la integración del cine latinoamericano.
Así de simple, y así de desmesurado”.
