Albert Serra: "In a year, 80% of movies will be made by AI, and they will be made better."

Barcelona"The evolution of contemporary art goes one way and that of my mind goes another, and I believe that the interest of this proposal lies in that collision," he said on Thursday. Albert Serra before presenting at the Filmoteca Faith without works is dead, a piece commissioned by the Museu Tàpies to commemorate the painter's centenary celebrated last year. tribute perhaps it would be excessive: for 53 minutes divided into eight parts with titles like Friend, Oracle either First fall, Serra films scenes without narrative or hardly any action, sometimes over the projection of a work by Tàpies and always accompanied by a sound envelope of layers of synthesizer and feedback by his regular musician, Marc Verdaguer. Occasionally, subtitles appear that have no relation to what is shown on the screen: it could be an evocative "Who dreams of whom?", a disconcerting "Amor Visca" or a cryptic "honey, oriole, sparrow, warbler". Among the actors who appear in the film – it cannot be said that they act – is Lluís Serrat, Serra's faithful squire since the times ofHonor of chivalry. The images have a magnetic and violent aftertaste, especially when the camera moves abruptly as if someone had hit it.

"We wanted to generate new questions and reflections about Tàpies and we thought about Albert Serra, but we were clear that it wasn't about making a documentary," explained Imma Prieto, director of the Museu Tàpies, to a packed Chomón hall. "At first, there were a lot of doubts," Serra admitted. "They asked me what I would do and I said, 'Whatever I want!' And they said, 'Well, if it has to do with Tàpies, so much the better.'" The filmmaker places the problem in the very relationship between visual art and moving images, a question he already explored in 2016 in the piece Three resistors, commissioned by the Luma Foundation in Arles. "How do you make a film about Tàpies if his work, so material, internal, and spiritual, is the opposite of cinema, almost antithetical?" Serra asked, who after some thought came to the conclusion that "it could only be done from ambiguity and in the form of mockery, or perhaps irony, because irony, the end of which can be a certain sincere emotion."

Regarding his relationship with Tàpies's work, Serra recalled seeing exhibitions during the artist's lifetime. "He did one every year at his son's gallery, and there were always two very good paintings and the rest... average," he said. "Every year it was the same. And on the poster outside they always had one of the easiest and most superficial paintings in the exhibition, but with very graphic elements and words. Sometimes it was moving, sometimes illegible, and sometimes it was illegible to me." The director's interest in Tàpies's words led him to "scan absolutely all the paintings" to reproduce the phrases, which are the subtitles that appear intermittently in the film. faith without works is dead. "They are his words written literally, even the lack of an accent, because that's how we recover that graphic aspect of his," Serra said. "Tàpies was a great poster artist, one of the five best in the history of art. But for me, the phrases are just motifs."

In an exercise of sincerity that is typical of him, Serra admitted, however, that all the works he does for the art world—he has also done work for Macba, Documenta in Kassel, and the Venice Biennale—have a purpose that goes beyond the commissions from centers and festivals, and is about discoveries "in smaller doses and in a more sophisticated and profound way" in his fiction films, "in which the weight of human interpretation is much more important."

Serra, conductor

During question time, former Filmoteca director Esteve Riambau took the floor to question Serra about the piece's music, "the strangest thing in Tàpies's universe." The filmmaker acknowledged that the format of the piece, without any dialogue, allowed him to vent and give prominence to Verdaguer's music, which in the context of a fiction film would have had a "more timid and nuanced" presence. He compared himself to an orchestra conductor, "for whom there is no music, only sound, and who creates sound with the instruments until the music appears." "The editing is the same, but most directors have a script, something to say, or a great obsession; they are very presumptuous," he asserted. "I see everything on the same level: the plot, the actor, what they say, the image, the sound... And through that, I try to create a kind of hypnotic sensation that makes you believe in the impact."

The director became more and more excited as he outlined his argument. "People are stupid," he said of most directors. "They have an idea and they dedicate themselves to putting it into images to tell it. But if you have a hard drive with 500 hours of images and 500 hours of sound of heterogeneous material, what you have to do is interpret it with your intuition and understand the reverberations." And he added: "I don't have any ideas or anything to say, only images and sounds. Telling an idea you've had leads nowhere, only to making schematic things that have already been seen 50,000 times, and it leaves no room for innocence. And I am innocent. AI."

In this sense, Serra vindicated "imagination" and "maximum innocence," and warned about the lack of originality in today's cinema. "In a year, 80% of films will be made by AI, and better. If the films are already a copy, an AI will always copy better because it has more data." Paradoxically, the director admitted that seeing Faith without works is dead At the Film Library he was surprised to find himself thinking about Vampire/Cuadecuco Pere Portabella, especially in regards to the textures and the "use of incorrect angles" to film the actions of the actors, who in this film are actually the ones inCount Dracula, by Jess Franco, starring Christopher Lee, of which Portabella filmed a kind of making of experimental in 1971. "Vampire It influenced me a lot, especially because those actors are shit; all that was rubbish, but you film it from the wrong angle and it's great," he said. "You film a bad actor with a camera normally and he's dead, but you film him from the side, without him knowing it, and that's another dimension, it's life."