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Recent Spanish Cinema at the |
The
following notes arise from viewings at Sevilla’s XII
Festival de Cine Europeo (information in English here)
in November 2015. I was a member of the Official Section jury (which considered
several of the films discussed below), but was also following up certain
recommended titles, especially in the ‘Resistencias’
section of the Festival that concentrates on current, independent and
adventurous Spanish production. My thanks up front to
Festival Director José Luis Cienfuegos and Programmer Alejandro Díaz Castaño for making this
adventure possible.
Spanish
cinema – as the current push for Catalonian independence constantly reminds a
newcomer to the place, like me – is full of differentiations and divisions.
There never was any simple, unified ‘mirror to the nation’ here – not even the
mirage of it. There is Spanish cinema, Catalán cinema, Basque cinema … and then co-productions of various levels and kinds
(Spain/Mexico, Spain/France, Spain/Uruguay, etc) … and then the type of
renegade micro-productions (some emanating from film courses and schools) that,
a couple of years ago, kicked off a ‘new Spanish cinema’ revival after the
first, crippling years of the country’s economic crisis, characterised by films
as different as the gag-skit-based Gente en sitios (People in
Places, Juan Cavestany, 2013) and intimist dramas like Jonás Trueba’s Los Ilusos (2013) or Fernando Franco’s La Herida (2013).
Plus,
as in any well-cultivated cinema/cinephilia landscape, there are (depending from where you are standing and looking) the
beloved or despised ‘official masters’ (Pedro Almodóvar,
Alejandro Amenábar, Carlos Saura),
the once-cult figures in uneasy détente with the mainstream (Álex de la Iglesia, or Bigas Luna until his death in 2013), those who move between
once-political filmmaking and the ever-present Euro-pudding temptation of
lacquered, starry productions (Isabel Coixet), and
those genuine culture-heroes who maintain their public image and high-esteem
level even when chances for them actually making new work seem terribly fallow
(Víctor Erice, Montxo Armendáriz).
Regular
reflections on the state of Spanish cinema – for instance, by Carlos Losilla in the pages of the magazine Caiman or the newspaper La Vanguardia – tend to diagnose developments in this
national arena along two axes. On the first axis, there is experimental
narrative work – often existing (partly because modest budgets tend in this
direction) on that now famous ‘line between fiction and documentary’ (that was
the title of a seminar in Melbourne way back in 1987, almost three decades ago,
but the growth area designated by this vital marker still shows no sign of
shrinkage). Of the films canvassed below, O futebol strays into this field, and even The Academy of Muses (the frame of which
is fully fictive) draws on its energy. Furthest out in this direction at Sevilla was Luis Aller’s Transeúntes, a
genuinely strange montage experiment hyper–rapidly cutting together two decades
of gathered footage into the largest and most sprawling network–narrative (and
city symphony) ever devised.
Then,
on the other axis, there are the endless attempts to either satisfy or playfully
subvert (while reaping benefit from) the laws of movie genre – seen, in Spain
as in every country struggling in the world-dominant shadow of Hollywood, as
the near-magical entrée to success in the commercial market, as the widespread
hopes pinned on Carlos Vermut and his curious Magical Girl (2014) show. In Sevilla’s 2015 crop, Norberto Ramos Del Val’s Amor tóxico and especially Pablo Hernando’s Berserker worked and tinkered with genre elements. The latter, made with few material
resources but plenty of energy and commitment, spins a well–acted mystery tale
that sets off from the bizarre premise of a troubled woman murdering her
boyfriend and fixing his head to a car’s steering wheel. Although its narrative
tricks–within–tricks finally overwhelm the project, it holds our interest.
Let’s
go right to the top rung of this modest and informal survey. José Luis Guerin’s La Academia de las musas (The
Academy of Muses) is among the most exciting and stimulating films, from
anywhere, of the past few years. Armed with extremely modest resources – a
digital camera, small crew, an ensemble of non-professional actors – Guerin and
his collaborators began with the documentation of a university seminar (led by Rafaelle Pinto) in which this gregarious Professor tries to
convince his (mainly female–enrolled) class that the ancient concept of
Woman–as–Muse remains a viable and important concept for our modern, fallen
world – and for the renewed (or persistent) possibility of creating poetry
within it.
From
there, the assembled team collectively weaves a highly intriguing fiction
concerning the various relationships (on various levels) between the teacher,
several of his students (played by Mireia Iniesta and Emanuela Forgetta, among others), and his no-bullshit wife (Rosa Delor Muns). There are
discussions, excursions, confrontations … and finally, even a few surprise
revelations.
A
plot summary does not even begin to capture the dynamic texture and movement of
this great film. As if to answer all those dour critiques that pegged Guerin as a idealising-fetishist-voyeur guy-type after In Sylvia’s City (2007) and its various
offshoots in video, photography and installation, Guerin upends his own seeming
auteur-system by staging the relentless comedy of women challenging the hero
about his views – often in stunningly vibrant, intellectual exchanges. (Pinto,
it should be added, gives as good as he gets.) But, more than that, The Academy of Muses is a genuinely dialogical film, in its entire structure
and form. I have rarely felt such a vivid sensation of a movie as an agora for
contesting views, and clashing viewpoints. A very verbal work
– and a work about speech itself, as gesture, act and posture, power and
seduction – it nonetheless manages to achieve wonderful, new effects of mise en scène (using frames crammed with
faces, reflections in glass, superb close-ups) with the digital image.
Pozoamargo is a Mexican-Spanish
co-production. Its director, Enrique Rivero, was born
in Spain but is based in Mexico; I was impressed by his Parque via (2008), a small gem that moved from the Jeanne Dielman-like record of a quiet
man’s servitude in a wealthy home to a sudden, turnaround, blunt-force-trauma
conclusion (as ‘slow cinema’ is sometimes wont to do). Pozoamargo also – for good and
for ill – has a critic immediately reaching for comparative equations: it’s Lisandro Alonso (Jauja and pre-Jauja) + Abbas Kiarostami (zig-zag roads in distant fields) + Carlos Reygadas/Amat Escalante (a pig
munches on our hero’s face as he lies under the rubble of a collapsed building)
+ Béla Tarr = …
It’s
also a tale of guilt and flight. Jesús (Jesús Gallego) has – as a
gruesomely close-up insert of his penis over the toilet bowl reveals – raging
Venereal Disease. He abruptly leaves his partner, his home, his village, with a
plan to disappear into anonymity. Next stop: Pozoamargo in Castile, sheltering a close-knit, farming community of churchgoers who all,
equally, seemed wracked by either guilt or sexual frustration. When history
inevitably begins repeating itself for Jesús, he
decides to end it all, about one hour into the full 99 minutes. That is when
the movie does its reality-warping switch, from colour into black-and-white,
and possibly also into a more mystical realm of shadow-selves and second
chances (just watch out, in this space, for the flesh-eating animals out for
karmic revenge).
It’s
easy to make it sound derivative and second-hand. But – especially in its first
hour, before the Turin Horse-like
solemnity sets in – Pozoamargo is quite captivating, on no small account due to the taciturn, granite-like
presence of Gallego in the lead role (on screen for virtually
every second). Rivero has yet to entirely find his
own voice as a director, but he is someone to keep a close watch on.
Documentary
modes of a relatively familiar sort – tending to the contemplative in one case,
and reflective diary/chronicle in the other – structured Mauro Herce’s Dead Slow
Ahead and Eloy Domínguez Serén’s Ingen ko pâ isen (No Cow on the Ice). I was especially
won over by the latter: beginning as a familiar lament about migration and
alienation (the director moved to Sweden and later began a romantic
relationship with a partner who doesn’t always seem happy with the camera’s
constant testimony), the film actually begins to cheer up considerably once the
filmmaker, left to his own devices, starts really learning his new native
language and trying to fit in. Despite all that cold water, ice and snow, it’s
a surprisingly sunny lesson about the drive to culturally displace oneself, and
how to cope with the consequences of that drive.
O futebol (the official English title is On Football) – made in Brazil,
birth-country of the now Spain-based director, Sergio Oksman–
is a film that divides audiences.
O futebol is in the now vast pool of ‘personal
documentaries’ from the past three decades about directors trying to come to
terms of endearment, or reckoning, with their parents – whether living, dead,
or (as here) in transition from one state to the other. Sometimes this loose
genre can come across as a big, egotistical whinge on the part of the director
– demanding recognition, understanding and love from a parental figure who, for
one complex social/personal/historical reason or another, is simply unable to
grant that reciprocation. Especially as the documentary camera, a few feet away
in the room or park or cemetery, rolls relentlessly. (I recalled, for example,
the recently deceased Haskell Wexler and his fierce challenge to his son Mark
embarking on such a ‘sentimental journey’ of account–settling in Tell Them Who You Are [2004].)
But, at a certain point, O futebol turns a corner, and we see proceedings another way. We
become alert to the element of fantasy-projection (and even persecution) in the
filmmaker, through the way he portrays himself and his project – desperately
wanting to recreate the past and give form to a memory which, perhaps, he never
even truly lived. Like in Margot Nash’s superb Australian film The Silences (2015), a certain agony
intrinsic to such pained revisiting of a largely mute past invades the
arrangement of the images and sounds, the gestures and tableaux: here given
immortal expression in the father’s left-behind crossword puzzles (hundreds of
books full of them), which the camera gazes at, ever closer, in search of a
deep clue to the past’s mysteries that cannot be there – and never will be
there, no matter how furiously this ambivalently grieving son inspects them.
|
from Issue 6: Distances |
© Adrian Martin, February 2016. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors. |