Atavistic cruelty and strange beauty

Why a doc­u­men­tary about bull­fight­ing? Al­bert Serra ex­plains that Jordi Balló, head of the Mas­ter’s de­gree in doc­u­men­tary-mak­ing at Pom­peu Fabra Uni­ver­sity, sug­gested the pos­si­bil­ity of him shoot­ing a film. Serra said he had no de­sire to make a doc­u­men­tary but that if he ever did it would be about bull­fight­ing. Al­though the an­swer was not en­cour­ag­ing, the idea grad­u­ally took shape. Serra re­mained faith­ful to two of his main prin­ci­ples: at­tack­ing po­lit­i­cal cor­rect­ness but also putting aes­thet­ics first, to­wards an ethics that in­volves demon­strat­ing that there are no blacks and whites but only shades of grey.

What is Tardes de soledad? First of all, it is a vi­sual ex­pe­ri­ence of great beauty and great tough­ness. It is a film that shows the fight be­tween man and beast with­out con­ces­sions. The film be­gins with the image of a bull snort­ing in the mid­dle of a meadow, and from there we are trans­ported to the bull­ring. We never see the au­di­ence, only the man who has to kill the beast, his team mem­bers and the an­i­mals them­selves. The vi­sual ex­pe­ri­ence makes us no­tice things never pre­vi­ously seen. The three cam­eras that filmed in bull­rings around Spain give us a priv­i­leged place in the duel. The prox­im­ity dis­con­certs us, scares us or se­duces us. The bull­fighter is stained with blood and we see the bull dying while the man stands proud of the work he has done. But we also see the bull­fighter at­tacked by the bull. We feel the an­guish, the pain, the fear and the adren­a­line, but also the suf­fer­ing of the tor­tured an­i­mal. Very care­ful sound work by Jordi Ribas al­lows us to hear the bull­fighter’s gasps. Serra does not just stay with what hap­pens in the arena, but ex­plores the tran­si­tion to­wards the con­fronta­tion. We see the bull­fighter putting on his ’traje de luces’ (suit of lights). The bull­fighter’s stock­ings and ex­u­ber­ant cloth­ing strike a cord of sex­ual am­bi­gu­ity to con­trast with the mas­cu­line viril­ity ex­hib­ited in the arena. A mov­ing cam­era shows us the bull­fighter in pain after he is run down by the bull. His team mates praise his brav­ery while one of them cries. Serra once again puts myth at the heart of his work. The films im­agery re­minds us of Goya, Manet, Zu­loaga, Pi­casso, Sorolla... An en­tire vi­sual and lit­er­ary cul­ture emerges in Tardes de soledad, but we also feel some­thing that re­flects its eclipse. Serra is doc­u­ment­ing some­thing com­ing to an end. He cap­tures a closed world strug­gling to main­tain its anachro­nis­tic in­tegrity in the face of mod­ern times.

This is a de­lib­er­ately am­bigu­ous and com­plex film. Those who love bull­fight­ing will find a work that re­veals the bar­bar­ity of what they love head-on, and those who are anti-bull­fight­ing will be faced with im­ages that re­mind them that such is­sues as these are al­ways more com­plex than we think. Above all, Tardes de soledad doc­u­ments an atavis­tic vi­o­lence that is some­how re­lated to a cer­tain Span­ish un­con­scious­ness.

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