Albert Serra’s cinema gives the viewer the impression of looking through a peephole at something forbidden. But what you find on the other side of the door is not what cinema usually shows, but what it actually avoids. In I released, The Catalan filmmaker held the audience’s head so that they could attend a cruise at the time of Louis XVI when sex was dirty and unpleasant. In The death of Louis XIV We were witnessing the decomposition of a monarch (and the monarchy) who could barely move and who saw his time slip away while his body wasted away.
Today, the filmmaker once again forces us to look through a peephole to discover the world of bullfighting as it has never been shown before. He did it in Lonely afternoonsthe film that turned the San Sebastian Festival upside down and left him convalescing for a few days. Serra spent five years making a documentary about bullfighting and submitted it to the Zinemaldia competition, where it was by far the most anticipated film in the competition.
At the morning screening, there was an almost childish excitement at the idea of discovering what one of the most important auteurs of Spanish cinema had created, especially in the festival circuit. It was the only film that everyone came to see virgin. No images had been seen and, beyond the selection committee, no one knew what was inside those images. Lonely afternoons. The festival has rediscovered the mystery and excitement that should always reign in a show. Just for that, Lonely afternoons It is, by far, the event of the contest. To this, they add that its premiere takes place the year in which the National Bullfighting Award was abolished and with a demonstration demanded for the presence of the film at the festival.
What Albert Serra has achieved is to place his camera so close to the bullfighting world that it is impossible to escape it. And when you put a magnifying glass on something, the truth appears. For decades, the dominance of mainstream television production has generated a watered-down and white imaginary. A construct in general plan. In which we do not see how the bull bleeds out, how it is dragged towards death when it is no longer worth anything or how it arrives absolutely weakened at its supposed equal confrontation with bullfighting.
The camera focused on the folklore, the fun, the people, and especially the bullfighter. Albert Serra adopts a certain distance as a filmmaker—he doesn’t position his camera to tell the viewer what to think—but by constantly searching for every detail of what happens in the square, he ends up creating a merciless account of the violence that occurs there. square. The cinematic language destroys the television language and reveals reality. As if it were a bullfight, the film follows the great bullfighting star Andrés Roca Rey in his confrontation with five bulls, but also in his travels to and from the bullfight.
Yes, it shows the bullfighter’s fear of death, but the bull’s suffering has never been seen like this. We hear his breathing. We hear their sniffles, because here is the great discovery of Lonely afternoons. We hear everything. We are forced to see what we do not want to see, but Serra also makes us listen to what we have always been deprived of. In this way, he ends up breaking another bullfighting cliché, the supposed great respect of the bullfighter for the bull. Here, Roca Rey and his gang insult the bulls (“go with your fucking mother”) and constantly praise their human genitals (“I smell your eggs”).
It’s just balls, balls and shouts praising his masculinity (“He’s a superman”). There are several important details in the decisions about the bullfights made by Albert Serra. First, the film begins with the only image of a bull outside the ring; and the second is that no bullfight grants the bullfighter the privilege of being the last image, but rather it is the bull dragged with ropes without any gentleness, with cruelty.
Serra removes the bullfighting rites, perhaps unintentionally, to show them only with the distance of a documentary. The constant presence of religion, the overloaded and false epic of the empty phrases they say, and even the way they put on the costume of lights. One of the most powerful images (and there are many) of this documentary is the one that shows the bullfighter placing his package, with a rosary and pink stockings. An outfit that gives off a homoeroticism that contrasts with the toxic and sweaty masculinity of the square. Right after, the bullfighter needs someone to put him in his costume. He does it by lifting it by hand. The same one who will face death five minutes earlier is not capable of dressing himself.
If the ring parts are violent and wild, those that show the intimacy of the bullfighters do almost more damage. Serra places a camera in his van. There, we see the impassive face of Roca Rey, the great mystery of the film, but we hear above all what this ball team says that increases the ego of its boss. These are empty phrases that they believe to be profound. “The mediocre envy you,” we hear him say when he is not satisfied with his work.
There is in Lonely afternoons Something really surprising when we talk about a documentary is that there is a work of staging. The images are thought out and chosen. Serra manages to play with the off-screen, with beautiful shots, with a certain poetics of death, and also uses close-up punches on the bull’s mouth or on the bloody mouth of the bullfighter. Thanks also to a sound and musical work that sublimates the whole thing.
Perhaps the most important thing of all is the very existence of Serra’s cinema, an undomesticated cinema, outside of all norms and which makes us think, which makes us doubt even our shadow. Serra throws his images at us and it is we who collect and decode them without help or handles. Something unusual in today’s cinema.
Lonely afternoons It includes debates about the morality of images, about the representation of death (this film would have been unthinkable as fiction) and about the way in which a subject like bullfighting is approached. What the filmmaker has shown happens publicly in a square even if we don’t want to look at it. Perhaps placing a camera inside is the best way to be truly aware of everything that is there. We should not be afraid to look through Serra’s uncomfortable peephole, and vice versa. What is on the other side is perhaps, even unwittingly, one of the most powerful anti-bullfighting portraits possible.
