Albert Serra: "99% of cinema is stupid, 100% in the case of Spanish cinema."

BarcelonaTo mark the centenary of Antoni Tàpies last year, the Museu Tàpies commissioned director Albert Serra to create a piece that would generate new narratives and reflections on the painter's work. The result is Faith without works is dead52 minutes of magnetic and deconstructed images, eight segments ranging from the study of a body or a scene framed in a sensual, almost violent way, to total visual abstraction, sometimes projecting a work by Tàpies and giving great prominence to the sound mosaic of loops The film features synthesizers by Marc Verdaguer, Serra's regular musician. It was screened this Thursday at the Museu Tàpies as part of the Loop Festival, a closing of the circle that culminated in a subsequent discussion between the filmmaker and journalist Joan Burdeus.

In a torrential speech that left little room for Bordeus to speak, Serra defended the impossibility of the commission. He challenged the audience to name "a single good film" about a visual artist. "There isn't one. All there are are subterfuges to avoid the impossible. If a painter like Tàpies had wanted to make a film, he would have, and if I wanted to make paintings, I would be a painter." Serra's solution involves "the irony" of printing "absurd subtitles that don't actually subtitle" throughout the film. All of them are taken from phrases that appear in Tàpies' paintings. “We scanned all the letters in more than a thousand paintings and graphic works,” Serra explains. “It’s a type of investment not everyone makes, and one that unconsciously ends up imposing a certain logic.”

Energetic and vehement, the filmmaker has defended his way of making films. “One of my strengths is that I film everything,” he affirms. Afternoons of solitude I have 700 hours of footage. When you have everything, you can choose. But if you're so stupid that you only film the ideas in your head, your cinema will be stupid, and not even chance can help you. That's how 99% of cinema is, 100% in the case of Spanish cinema." Serra also spoke about his next film, the first he has shot with an American cast that includes, among others, Riley Keough: "You'll be blown away, because my cinema is already a total farce. But what if the world is a total farce?" Or is this a dream and what I'm describing is reality?" In the footage he has already edited, the filmmaker says he has detected "an absolutely new atmosphere that doesn't match anything anyone has ever done."

As usual, Serra has also defended his right to emancipate himself from public opinion. "We're all messed up by political correctness, which is a disgrace. Before, people admired the artist who took risks and said what couldn't be said. This aura of the individualistic artist could be applied to Tàpies, who wasn't speculative. It was his world." And he concluded his argument by emphasizing that, in reality, "there's a certain delicacy in not taking the viewer into consideration at all." filmmaker-painter. But Serra has been moderate: "He has his universe and it's interesting. Look, I don't like films, but I understand that there's a serious, honest search. That said, the more academic, the more boring, like that one with the tractor [A true storyI once told a woman at a dinner party that the editing of that film was awful, and it turns out she was the editor." It was Mary Sweeney, who was married to David Lynch at the time.