Tabernero: A Documentary Crossing the multiple exiles of Peter Paul Weinschenk.

I don’t remember if I heard the name of Pablo Tabernero[1] for the first time on Borges's film review of “Prisioneros de la ” (“Prisoners of the land”, 1939), or in conversation with other filmmakers in a Buenos Aires. In fact, it was most probably the latter. To the best of my recollection, Borges didn’t name Tabernero, he simply concluded that his work as director of photography was admirable[2].

I live in Charlottesville, and Buenos Aires is becoming a fading memory Then, why? Why Tabernero, Borges and “Prisoners of the Land”. There are probably are no easy answers, although a few coincidences do come to mind.

Seven years have passed since I first met Henry Weinschenk. He’s also an expat from Buenos Aires living in Charlottesville. One day Henry introduced me to the “Tuesday’s Lunch Club”, the unofficial Argentine delegation in-exile. There I met some very interesting fellows, some no longer around like Henry Dahl and physicist Raul Baragiola. I try to make it every Tuesday for lunch when I can. I enjoy the company of those with whom I share the past, a code of sorts, a comparable sense of humor, and the mutual understanding on a myriad of issues. There is diversity in the same.

It was in one of these gatherings at the “Tuesday’s Lunch Club” in Charlottesville, that Henry Weinschenk brought up his father's name, a well-known cinematographer in the gilded age of Argentine cinema. However, for some strange reason, I didn’t make the connection, or I didn’t want to make the connection, or perhaps I was distracted making other connections to realize that Tabernero and Weinschenk are the literal translation of each other. However, I eventually did, and that's when the real feast began. Tabernero, the cinematographer behind “Don’t Ever Open That Door” and “If I Die Before I Wake” two of the most relevant Post War - Film Noire films in Argentina, was also the father of my good friend.

I soon found myself absorbed in the minuscule details of Tabernero's extraordinary life. A life crossed by the Weimar Republic and the Bauhaus, by the Nuremberg Laws, Nazi Germany and exile, by the documentary experience with the Durruti Column at the height of the Spanish Civil War; a life of multiple escapes, define by Argentina in times of Eva Peron, by his children, by more than forty films, and by his legacy on to a generation of cinematographers like Ricardo Aronovich who went from disciples of Tabernero to directors of photography with Raúl Ruiz, Louis Malle, Ettore Scola, Costa-Gavras, Hugo Santiago, Ruy Guerra and Alan Resnais, to name a few of those who might have benefited from Aronovich, and Aronovich’s learning experience next to Tabernero who knew the secrets of Weimar experience.

“Never Open That Door” was featured last November during the 39th edition of Festival Des 3 Continents, and "Prisioneros de la ", one of Tabernero's masterworks will screen at the upcoming “Il Cinema Ritrovato”, Bologna's film festival dedicated to restored versions of the best works on film from around the world.

In the meantime, I will continue patching the episodes in the life Henry’s father, the man the Borges didn’t name and perhaps honor the legend with a documentary the way he would have wanted.

[1] . Peter Paul Weinschenk, Berlin, August 8, 1910

[2] Sur, Revista. A?o IX. Buenos Aires, Imprenta López, 29 September 1939, pp.91