- Sep 11
- 8 min read
This was the UK premiere, hosted by the ICA as part of their Off-Circuit strand, exhibiting films and filmmakers the Institute feel deserve greater UK distribution. It was preceded by a fantastic introduction from Albert Serra, and followed by an excellent Q&A with same, which was mostly &A, as he turned three brief prompts into 45 minutes of extemporaneous, excited talk, indicative of an endless curiosity, and a fascination with and passion for the values and capabilities of film images, and how to use cameras to access and reveal what’s unseeable-to-the-naked-eye in personalities, behaviours and cultures.
For at least his last two features - Afternoons of Solitude and Pacifiction, currently the only Serras I’ve seen - his and cinematographer/co-editor Artur Tort’s approach is shoot extraordinary amounts of footage with multi-camera setups (500-550 hours for Pacifiction and 700 hours for Afternoons of Solitude, so Serra says), none of which he watches during shooting, but which later is sync’d, catalogued and winnowed down to feature length.
It’s worth noting early that the footage is also beautifully composed and colour-graded, compelling you to watch for purely textural, graphic pleasure. You register this immediately in both films - in Pacifiction’s gliding wide of a cargo ship at dusk and Afternoons of Solitude’s stern, beautiful opening scene of a bull in some undefined, tenebrous space, all lifted blacks, gentle highlights, and the slightest green, a colour in short supply elsewhere in the film.Tort shoots on 4K or 6K digital cameras in Super-16 mode, using only part of the sensor to record a lower-than-full-res image. This is blown up to 4K for projection, producing a soft, somewhat film-like look, while the motion and wide depth of field has a digital feel. In concert with tasteful production design, costume, and control of saturation and contrast, the product has an intoxicating effect.
The pictures are lush, at once graphic, flat and painterly, hyper-focused on close-up details, but always relating to a bigger world outside the frame. The many long-lens compositions flatten space, while movement in foreground and background, and careful, realist sound design, creates an ongoing sense of what’s outside the frame.In Pacifiction, you and the lead character increasingly feel as though the real story is happening elsewhere, somewhere inaccessible, and the closest you might get, if you’re lucky (or not) is feeling its pulse in the air around someone’s gaze or words. In Pynchon’s world, “you may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures”, but for Benoît Magimel’s De Roller and the Tahitian locals, you might prefer to have not done even that. Ignorance of your own ignorance was bliss - knowledge of your irrelevance is agony.
Afternoons of Solitude’s textures are different. Where Pacifiction’s tropical setting displayed a broad spectrum of watercolour-like tones - light and colour blooming outside the lines and washing over characters - Afternoons of Solitude feels grainier and more dense, all heavy embroidery, sand and blood. It doesn’t feel coincidental that where the apocalyptic last shot of Pacifiction resembles the French tricolour flag, large sections of Afternoons of Solitude, set in red-walled bullrings with deep yellow sand underfoot, resemble nothing more than the Bandera de España. Among all the other things on Serra’s mind, or perhaps its more accurate to say drawn from it by what he’s chosen to look at (to quote him after a screening of AoS, “I don’t know what I think”), these films seem to be peculiar kinds of state-of-the-nation addresses. It’s a fair assumption to make, as while Serra is absolutely an aestheticist, he also has real socio-political drive.
Your sense of the larger world in Afternoons of Solitude is similarly implied. The film takes place almost entirely in just three places: the bullring, where the film’s hyper-self-conscious star, Andrés Roca Rey, performs his fights (or art, or torture and murder, depending on your perspective); the van driving between them, the camera fixed always in the same spot (with one exception, a brief shot through the window of a gloomy evening passing by), with Rey framed front and centre and his entourage surrounding him, ever-ready with compliments; and the hotel rooms where he’s dressed and prepared by an assistant/manager whose enigmatic face and patient manner creates a similar quiet mystery to Mike Landscape’s always observing colleague/predator in Pacifiction - what’s behind these men’s eyes? Is it menace? Is it care? Do they know the secret to everything?
The choice of shooting in and limiting the film to these areas does a few things beyond just offering access to intimate details, otherwise practically inaccessible. It’s a choice that creates repetition, and encourages you to see the small differences in routine behaviours. You wonder if the repetition and occasional boredom reflects how Rey’s life might feel. Another arena, another bull, another hotel room, another costume, another injury, another van ride. Taken from small, confined space to small, confined space, surround by walls, applause, sycophants. His dark eyes, sometimes ecstatically present and alive, sometimes seem as dull and empty as those of the wilting bulls.
Maybe the solitude is his as much as the animals’. The film gives a powerful sense that Rey is profoundly alone. His experience is not that of his obsequious entourage. He’s managed and guided and kept blinkered in ways not dissimilar to the bulls or horses. His life seems absurd, pitiful. He’s not arrogant, but he performs arrogance. At one point he wonders aloud why he’s been ‘saved’ from injury, and the small pursing of his lips suggests he knows the reason he won’t say - he’s meant for this? He’s protected from on high? That wouldn’t be surprising, his reverence for the accoutrements of his abiding religious belief is almost funny - endless signs of the cross and kisses for both the crucifix around his neck and the two images of weeping Mother Mary at his hotel bedside before leaving for a fight. But then we’re back again in the van, and watching how unconvinced Rey seems by his teammates’ endless praise - it’s all ‘the biggest balls’ and ‘one of the greats’. You wonder if he, like the bulls he kills, has been born and bred for only this, his colleagues acting as blinkers to the rest of life, he knows it.
And what is the ‘this’ he’s always focused on? A display of great spiritual beauty, a dance of light, colour and power - flirting with, provoking, and swerving around the charging spirit of death - or is it a pure, unalloyed bloodlust, indulged for cheap entertainment, an increasingly desperate and insecure cry from a shrinking, outmoded (or outvoted) part of the culture?
There are moments when a beauty in the bullfighting absolutely appears. Rey’s poses, his rictus, noh-like scowls, and his curving motions with and around the bulls, seen in almost abstract close-up, are variously striking, athletic, camp, iconic and ridiculous. The widest shots, which here tends to mean those which frame Rey and the bull head to toe (or tail), are the most convincing argument for bullfighting’s beauty. The shapes of the torero and the toro in motion, transforming and reforming, stiff then gliding, have a remarkable tension-release relationship. You find your heart and breath calibrating to it more than watching it. (Whether the bull needs to have been skewered by the rejoneador (‘lancer’) on horseback, his legs and feet protected by thick metal armour and whose blindfolded horse receives a potentially lethal skewering of its own by the self-protective bull - or impaled with banderillas (ornamental barbed sticks) by men who quickly escape the arena after dispensing them, in order to achieve this strange beauty, is up for debate. The film makes little judgement, except to imply by the fact of its existence that these things should be seen).
And there is a lot worth seeing, both the charming and the repulsive.
The members of Rey’s cuadrilla are a fascinating bunch, characterised by the kind of Pasolinian faces Serra is right to observe are dying out - carved, thin-skinned, anachronistically masculine. These men are outrageous, plainspoken, irrational, two-faced and cruel, insanely (or suspiciously) generous in their compliments to Rey in one moment, and the next (when he’s out of earshot) chattering anxiously between themselves, expressing all the worry, concern and terror they barely concealed in the arena when their friend and icon (and meal ticket) was all-but-gored, in one of three brief moments where the bulls get the upper hand. The first of these, when Rey is tripped and trampled, is both frightening and fist-pumpingly exciting, as after the first extended bullfight, a genuinely horrible thing to watch, I was happy to see a bull dispense what felt like justice, and see this preening wanker dealt a few blows.After another occasion of being briefly overwhelmed by his opponent, Rey climbs back into the van, bruised and battered and wearing the baggy blue scrubs he often wears post-fight (the exact opposite of his fitted, ostentatious performance gear). Among the usual adulation and the dismissal of the now-deceased bulls, one member of the cuadrilla quietly holds back tears, presumably shaken at almost losing his friend. Later, we see this same man gritting his teeth in what looks like an involuntary gesture of blood-lust as he watches a thoroughly defeated bull cornered and stabbed to death by his colleagues.
On that point, I found myself giving enormous credit to the bulls, who never seem to give up. Unlike some of the men, who take breaks from the fight, hiding behind or jumping over walls, and who are working in a team - to paraphrase R.P. Murphy, “they like a rigged game” - the bulls define perseverance. They fight on, falling only when their body can’t any more sustain them. The pace of Serra and Tort’s editing serves to emphasise this, and though we don’t see most of the bullfights in full, extended takes provide ample opportunity to feel the weight of time in the arena, and to witness our thoughts and feelings develop as the shots do.
Regardless of Serra’s story about the film converting or corrupting a vegan audience member in New York, Afternoon of Solitude is surely more likely to upset or convert a pro- than an anti-bullfighter. It’s a deeply horrible thing to see up close, though I found myself more able to bear it the more I saw of it.
That all being said, it’s also true that the film isn’t really ‘about’ bullfighting. Assume it’s true when Serra says, as he did in his introduction, that he doesn’t really care about bullfighting as such. It’s a vector to something he does care about - which is what? Man and death? Flesh? Violence? Performance? Certainly the latter, as among the more exciting things he shared was his belief that where film can and should break new ground and develop is in the direction of actors. This is something he’s been working hard on, and which is a particularly refreshing idea in a world focused more on cameras and screens than what they capture and display.
Serra bookended the film with two theories he’s been mulling, the first being about cinema as corrupter (the other was about good documentary necessarily betraying its subject - “otherwise what are you doing, advertising?”), and he came upon this idea after hearing the mixed response from the Roca Rey team to AoS). Maybe my shift from repulsion at the sight of a bullfight, to feeling some appreciation of its beauty, puts paid to that idea. Or maybe it’s simply a matter of attrition, and like the bulls being bled and worn down by the toreros, I was worn down by the red-rag of the images onscreen, forever tempting me and each time desensitising that much more.
To be clear, I say all this with huge appreciation for Serra and his work. He seems to me a generous and serious artist, open-minded and thoughtful, and I’ll happily follow the next wave of his muleta whenever that time comes.
