fabian

Afternoons of Solitude

there is a moment in shakespeare's play when lady macbeth, plotting murder, calls on spirits to "unsex" her. to make her remorseless, resolute, empty of the pity that makes women weak . she gets her wish, and it destroys her. but what of those who are born already unsexed in this way? what of those for whom remorse is not a condition to be overcome but a faculty they never possessed? albert serra's portrait of bullfighter roca rey raises this question without answering it. which is, i think, the point. roca doesn't read as evil. evil is too moral a word, too relational. he is something else: fundamentally elsewhere. his personality is superfluous to his being. he is what he does. Tthere is no self visible outside the doing, which means there is no self available for reflection, and no conscience to torment. what am i to make of such a person? we do not learn where roca was born, whether he is married, what he thinks of the animals he kills. these omissions are not gaps in the docu. serra's bet is that roca's essence is precisely what remains when all such information is stripped away. and what remains is a man who can only feel himself exist when death is near. this is the nietzschean abyss made flesh. roca rey shows us what we might become if we emptied ourselves of everything except our function. he is the logical endpoint of specialization, of the modern demand that we be what we do and nothing more. his teammates wax philosophical about "the front lines of the soul", but the soul they describe is a battlefield with no civilians, no home front, no life beyond the war. it is repetitive, austere, deliberately withholding. but it is also transfixing, because what it withholds is precisely what we think we need to make sense of what we see. we want roca to explain himself. we want him to show remorse, or anger, or doubt. anything that would place him in a moral universe we recognize. he gives us nothing. his eyes are open, but their sense is shut. and in that shutting, we see ourselves reflected. desperate for meaning in a world that has reduced a man to his function, and a bull to its death.

nathansnook

Afternoons of Solitude

“𝘋𝘰𝘯’𝘵 𝘵𝘰𝘶𝘤𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘧𝘶𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘳’𝘴 𝘣𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘥. 𝘐𝘵’𝘭𝘭 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘶𝘴.” Andrés Roca Rey goes through with it, over and over again, and you start to wonder, to what degree? Til death? Overwork. Overkill. At what point does the work become your life and is that work worth living for? The closest you’ll ever get to a bullfight without ever having to attend one as the camera focuses where our minds lead us to: the proximity between bull and bullfighter. It becomes a nauseating dance between life and death. Horns. Silk, satin, and velvet. Blood. To add to the experience, it would’ve been wise for director Serra to consider sound design to heighten experience as spectator as I think cheers define the music involved in the dance of life and death. This is an essayistic attempt in looking at the disruptions of monotony in slow cinema. We circle and circle to a dizzying degree, expecting an end. A death. But whose? It’s voyeuristic at best, and you can’t help but be mesmerized not by the blood and sweat, but the costumes. It’s pure theater, and has been for hundreds of years. I guess there’s still a reason people still go to the theater. Not to break away from monotony, but to understand that it exists and it breaks. Much like a person. Much like an animal. We never know the last of our days. Life has an end we can’t predict. But in flashes, quick flashes, can we register breakages as attempts to a life of desires, and one without is unlivable.