Albert Serra made the San Sebastian Film Festival vibrate. If his fictions always shake up and shake up the old-fashioned industrial cinema, his first documentary made Zinemaldia shiver. It is clear that Serra is facing a challenge, and the creation of a non-fiction work on bullfighting was part of it. He has been working for five years on what has finally become Lonely afternoonsthe most anticipated film of the Official Section.
Serra takes patterns from his narrative films and applies them to a film that places the gaze at the level of the arenas where we witness the violence applied to the animal, which we listen to until it breathes. But he also sneaks into the backstage of the gang and shows an outdated masculinity there. He achieves this without forcing. By dint of rolling and searching.
There is something that seems different this time, however, and that is that Serra has been much more cautious in his answers than on other occasions. He has let the film speak, he has thrown it in the face of the spectators, letting them draw their own conclusions. He has few certainties, but one of them is that he will always make the films he wants and not what he is asked to make.
When did you decide to make a film about bullfighting?
It’s a world that’s not completely foreign to me, but I’m not a regular fan either. He had been to one or two bullfights in recent years. The ones that José Tomas gave in Barcelona. When I was little, I also went once… but it was forgotten. It came from Pompeu Fabra’s master’s degree in documentary, who told me that I should make a documentary with them, and I always replied that I didn’t have a subject that interested me to document. And after insisting so much one day, I said: “fuck it”. I thought it was a subject that posed a difficulty, because if we say bulls now, it seems like something a bit old-fashioned that, a priori, wouldn’t seem very associated with my modern ways. I told them and at first they said, now, bulls? They thought about it for a few days. I know they thought maybe he wasn’t playing now, but why wasn’t he playing? That was the beginning.
There’s a funny thing, one day I was with one of the producers, Luis Ferrón, at one of the events in Madrid. We were talking about it and Frederick Wiseman (one of the most prestigious documentarians in the world) was there. We told him about the project and he loved it. When I left, he said to the producer: if he doesn’t do it, I will. And that spurred me on even more, I said, let’s do it. It’s an accumulation of circumstances, but I was always aware of the difficulty I had. I knew it would be a bit controversial because of the subject itself.
The question is obvious, and perhaps even asked by one of the producers, is it bullfighting?
I am for… well, I am not against it. I would obviously prefer that it exists rather than not exist. Without a doubt. But this type of attitude is of no use to you when you are making a film, and even less so when you are making a documentary film. What is beautiful is precisely to put yourself in this state of innocence, in this position of research. You are going to document a subject that exists, but you can try to make the camera look for things that are unnoticed, things that surprise you, things that you could not find otherwise. And above all, things that human eyes have never seen or had access to. That is what it is for. Otherwise, it would be very boring. Otherwise, you already have the television broadcasts.
What surprised you?
I was surprised by the dialogues in the film, which we discovered during the shooting. There is a poetry behind all this, it comes from the universe of your life. Phrases like “That’s life”, “The fronts of the soul” or the whole subject related to the truth, which is another word that comes up often and is very interesting, because it is something totally lost in the contemporary world, where everything is reduced to communication or the effect created. And they say things like “The whole truth” or “With what truth you killed”… A kind of poetry that I didn’t even know existed. All this comes from the wireless and we saw it with the very advanced assembly process.
What television always does is trivialize. Here we mean the complete opposite, amplify, use everything and make it part of reality.
Albert Serra
— Director
Also on an aesthetic level, you will be surprised. Because we have seen photographs of bullfights, but we have not seen sustained shots, long shots. Shots like those in which we follow the face of the bullfighter, with that type of vibration, being in an extreme situation, but maintaining the shot a little longer… are things that surprised me and that, I think, had an indisputable artistic value. interest.
So far the bulls have been seen on television, did this TV show show a softened version of bullfighting?
What television always does is trivialize. Here we mean the complete opposite: amplify, use everything and make it part of reality. This is a documentary. If the film did not have these moments of… I won’t say cruelty, but of transcendence over life and death, it would not be the same. It would not have the same substance. It is part of the theme. That is what it is and that is also what makes it unique. What distinguishes it from any other show. For me, it was obvious that he had to be there. Nor will it change anyone’s opinion, but I like the idea that he is there plastically. It is a bit a question of the honesty of the film itself. It is an important subject. I wanted to honor the honesty and commitment of the bullfighter, but also a parallel and equally honest portrait with all the other elements. That is why the audience is avoided, folklore is avoided. Not everything can be reduced to a debate, and I think it cannot be seen that way.
We always talk about the morality of images, whether a travels It’s a moral question or it’s a foreground. It’s true that since it’s a documentary it’s much more complicated to choose that, but to what extent was the morality of the images taken into account later, during editing.
Obviously, after so many hours of recording, you have to choose. My editing process was no different from that of the fiction films I have made. Among all the images, I choose the ones I like, for whatever reason, in a completely arbitrary way, and with them and another editor, we construct the film. This arbitrariness in this first choice means that the film escapes any form of ideological reduction. From there, yes, of course, you have to evaluate and calculate many things. There are more or less cruel images. More or less long… There are people who will think that it should be a little more balanced, and I say why. I want to do what I want. Being balanced is not a criterion for me. For me, balance is that it has a formal internal logic, or that it has it at the level of atmospheres, but not that it has more content of one type than another. Also, being a documentary, there is a certain fatality. I have the images that I have.
But to answer your question, beyond chance or arbitrariness, my taste comes into play. And I don’t ask myself why I like or don’t like an image. There are more distressing images, or with more blood, that we haven’t included, maybe because they weren’t so pretty… I don’t know. They are all choices and there is always a part of morality in them. Always. It is the portrait of bullfighting that has been made by a person who is not part of it. They have given us the access and freedom to offer a totally free and, I believe, aesthetic vision with artistic potential.
He talked about honesty. Does that honesty put the film in a position where bullfighting fans or anti-bullfighting people might not appreciate it? Have you thought about how it might be received?
Of course we think about it because there were a lot of people, because we even did a screening for the bullfighter’s entourage, but I don’t change anything by thinking about this reception. I know it was a very controversial and thorny subject. In a way, you give the image of something, reflecting the image of a practice. So what image will remain? But what do you want me to tell you, is that if I thought that, if I listened to some, I would have to put images, and if I listened to others, I would have to put others.
If I had to give 100% attention to the bullfighter, it would probably be an infomercial of his best bullfight of the year. Can’t. Somehow I can’t be aware of it. I know the debate is there. The film I made in the end is the one I love and in which everything makes sense and everything has a reason for being. It’s a very subtle subject where everyone has their opinion. You would never finish if you listened to people. You can’t do things to please people. And even less something like this. So you also need a certain honesty.
