There Are Not Thirty-six Ways of Showing a Man Getting on a Horse (2020)

A film critic attributed to the American director Raoul Walsh the concept: "There are not thirty-six ways of showing a man getting on a horse". It was quoted and misquoted over time, as a principle of movie-making. As Edgardo Cozarinsky writes, the classic filmmaker knows that there are more than thirty-six ways, but he'll make us believe that the one we are seeing is the only truly possible. The film is divided into chapters: in the first, excerpts from over 70's films by Walsh, people mount (and dismount) horses, and then enter (or exit) a room. In chapter 2, the director leads us through a research process to determine the source of the alleged concept; he asks colleagues and movie buffs, questions the veracity of the attribution, and fumbles with the meaning of the sentence in different cultures, namely the American and the Francophone. Chapter 3 will result in an experimental adventure movie. How much experimentalism is there in classic cinema and how much classicism exists in the so-called experimental cinema? This film exposes the friction between transparency and opacity, classicism and avant-garde. It is about the simplicity of making a movie, and about its rules, its possibilities and its resistance.