Albert Serra conceives bullfighting as an intimate experience

The interest in men who hover around death runs through much of Albert Serra's filmography. Afternoons of solitude, his first feature-length documentary, clearly shows the desire to capture, through a ceremonial and spectacular practice, this link with the death of a man willing to kill or, to a much lesser extent, to die in the attempt. Although it is part of a long artistic and intellectual tradition of attraction to bullfighting, the Banyolí filmmaker wanted to make a bullfighting film like no other had been seen. An achievement that involves a series of decisions regarding formal refinement and discursive enrichment. Afternoons of solitude There is no voice-over or interviews, so the proposal departs from the usual report, eliminating intermediaries between the film and the audience.

We are faced with a work with an immersive vocation from its device. The team of Afternoons of solitude has spent months recording the daily lives of the protagonists, the bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey and his team, who wore wireless microphones capable of recording their most private conversations while a fixed camera in the car that took them up and down filmed their reactions just before and after the bullfights. An operation more typical of the hyper-surveillance society that updates to digital times the ontological conception of André Bazin, who saw cinema as an art whose technology allows us to reveal a reality that we cannot capture with the naked eye (or ear).

An introspective matador

The choice of the Peruvian Roca Rey as the protagonist underlines the idea of the matador as an introspective figure who conceives his work with the solemnity of a transfiguring ritual and distances the image of the bullfighter from the flashy folklorism with which he is often associated. In contrast, the comments of the gang reflect the cult of a leader who sublimates his masculinity through a deadly rite, in an adoration that is also expressed in a vocabulary and register that is both colorful and specific. Contrary to appearances, Afternoons of solitude It also highlights how the private liturgy of the bullfighter before the bullfight has many traditionally feminine characteristics: dressing in tight clothes that show off the figure, the use of pink stockings and precious accessories, the presence of a valet to adjust the corset of objects and the bow.

In the process of distancing himself from some of the discourses in which the stories about bullfighting have been embedded, Serra also empties the bullfight of its spectacular aspect. There are no general plans in Afternoons of solitude, so the audience is left out of the visual field (not the sound field) and bullfighting ends up being conceived as an intimate relationship between men and animals. With cameras that are often positioned at the height of the beast's point of view, at times the framing loses the objective of offering a contextual and legible perspective of the action in the ring and tends towards a certain aesthetic abstraction.

The film does not fall into extreme stylization because the sound device, with the protagonists' conversations in the foreground, keeps it anchored in reality. Also because, through this device, the cruelty towards the animal becomes unbearably evident: the images of the overwhelmed eyes, the tongue hanging out, the panting of the beast as it snorts and agonizes while it is finished off and mutilated, seem to give factual reasons to those who oppose this spectacle of torture. It is not that the film attempts to balance the two opposing positions on bullfighting, but rather to assume the cruel nature of an event that is considered to be ominous. The montage, especially in the second half, adopts the repetitive structure of traffic rituals that seek to achieve some kind of transcendence. The ending, however, also avoids narratives of triumph. The victory lies in the film itself, the demonstration of art as a discursively complex and aesthetically heartbreaking approach to a terrible practice.

Albert Serra: "If there was a vote on bullfighting, I would vote in favour"