A short excerpt from the booklet essay by David Jenkins.


Lisandro Alonso was born in Buenos Aires where he later studied at the city's Universidad del Cine. Identifying his cinematic influences is a daunting task, not just because his films are so distinctive, but also because, in interviews, he rarely compares his work to that of other directors'. Looking specifically within Argentina, fans of the beguiling mystery movies of Lucrecia Martel – The Holy Girl (2004), The Headless Woman (2008) – would probably find Alonso's work to be similarly challenging, especially as both filmmakers work with material that derives much of its emotional resonance from events that occur outside the location and timeline of the on-screen narrative.

The naturalistic, working class milieu and rejection of melodrama in Alonso's films also ally them also with the bittersweet and tightly focused character studies of countryman Pablo Trapero. The pair even have a history of creative collaboration, with Alonso working as sound engineer assistant on Trapero's debut, Crane World (1999) and its fiction follow-up, El Bonaerense (2002), while Trapero produced Alonso's La Libertad. Unlike Martel and Trapero, Alonso has never had one of his films distributed in the UK (this DVD is the first of his projects to get a commercial release in this country) and while it's a often the kneejerk reaction of the critic to invent 'waves' or national movements in order to explain away pockets of territorially cosy artistic accomplishment, there's a overriding clarity and subtle intellect to Alonso's work that – beyond superficial similarities – places it within a broader cinematic tradition. In reviews and festival write-ups that mention Alonso's films, regular name checks include Bruno Dumont, Robert Bresson, Bela Tarr, Robert Flaherty, Frederick Wiseman, Chantal Ackerman, Pedro Costa, Jia Zhang-ke and Tsai Ming-liang.

Liverpool received its world premiere in the Directors' Fortnight strand of the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. Alonso initially co-wrote the film with Salvador Roselli, a fellow alumnus of the Universidad del Cine. But, as things got closer to the shoot, Alonso decided (amicably) to ditch much of Roselli's contribution in order to follow his own creative instincts . As with his previous films, the casting was achieved through meeting people while scouting for locations, and Vincent Gallo look-a-like Juan Fernández was working as a snow shovel operator in Tierra del Fuego prior to being selected for the lead role of Farrel.

Aside from adding to the documentary sheen, the casting of 'non-actors' is a fundamental aspect of Alonso's cinema. While characters are seldom (if ever) required to act in the traditional sense, the fact that these people come to the screen with no baggage and little preconceived notion about how they should project themselves lends his films an authentic yet eerie quality. As with the 'actor-models' in the films of Robert Bresson, Alonso is clearly attuned to the idea that physical suppression of emotion – acting as an internal rather than external form of communication – will not be lost on the camera's gaze. It's true that Fernández is saddled with a few more technically demanding acting moments than either Misael Saavedra in La Libertad or Argentino Vargas in Los Muertos, especially in the latter stages of the film, but the emotional increments we're dealing with are minuscule to say the least.

The spare aesthetic of the Liverpool holds the key to unlocking our relationship with Farrel. Only on rare occasions does Alonso (with the aid of DoP Lucio Bonelli) allow his camera a tilt or a pan, and the feeling his fixed frames evoke is one of mechanised surveillance, like we're monitoring Farrel's snowbound journey via a bank of closed-circuit television screens. The soundtrack often picks up and amplifies the buzzing of lamps or the whirring of machinery. Human voices are very low in the mix. Ostensibly, it's a style that feels like a continuation of the discreet impulses of his previous work, but with an added layer which keeps the film's hero at even more of a haunting remove.

David Jenkins’ complete essay, from which this excerpt is taken, appears in the booklet which accompanies the DVD release.