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Albert Serra, or Cinematic Time Regained
Over the past almost twenty years, Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra (b. 1975) has occupied a singular place in contemporary world cinema through a series of remarkable films that boldly engage canonical texts and traditions long considered “unadaptable.” Serra’s first widely seen features, Honor of the Knights (2006) and Birdsong (2008), together announced the exciting ambition of his filmmaking. Striking versions of Don Quixote and the Holy Bible, respectively, the two films gave vivid new form to hallowed texts while also revealing the singularity of Serra’s radical approach to image, narrative and performance. Featuring non-actors drawn largely from his hometown, both films showcased Serra’s minimalist directorial style of using three cameras to capture the widest range of footage while giving only scant instructions to his cast and even, at times, completely distancing himself from the set itself. Through a painstaking and laborious editing process Serra then drew from that extensive footage to craft mesmerizing works that expand the revelatory time between actions and those crucial moments when the actors go further into and even beyond their given roles. By giving full dimension to gesture and dialogue unfolding, often subtly, in real time, these two films can now be seen as important entries in the so-called “slow cinema” movement that emerged in the early 2000s.
Honor of the Knights and Birdsong also revealed the important dialogue between Serra’s cinema and intertwined traditions of avant-garde filmmaking defined by Andy Warhol on the one hand and Rainer Werner Fassbinder on the other; pioneering artists whose films similarly oscillated between austere minimalism and stylized theatricality. A baroque Fassbinder turn was, in fact, explored by Serra’s three subsequent features—Story of My Death, The Death of Louis XIV and Liberté—a loose trilogy of period films set in the declining demi-worlds of the 16th and 17th century where powdered, bewigged aristocrats and kings embody states of torpor, feverish desire and decay, the later most powerfully figured in the eponymous Louis XIV whose slow bedridden death is poignantly staged as a penumbral chamber drama.
Serra’s next features pushed his filmmaking into important new directions, first with Pacifiction, a captivating and hyper-stylized paranoid thriller set in a lush, color-saturated Polynesian paradise and then with his most recent, revelatory film, Afternoons of Solitude, a documentary portrait of the celebrated Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey set largely in the ring. Bringing Serra full circle with his early Cervantes adaptation, Afternoons of Solitude finds him once again discovering an innovative approach to a monumental Spanish tradition. More importantly, however, the film offers an important reminder of the documentary essence of Serra’s filmmaking which embraces cinema’s quintessence as a photographic and documentary medium able to capture the subtlest of performances—gestures, phrases, emotions—far better than the ever-distracted human eye. Indeed, in many ways, it seems as if all of Serra’s films up to now, and the intimacy with performers earned by his ever-patient camera, were training for the intense corrida staged by his startling up-close cameras and microphones which render the ancient ritualistic sport of bullfighting a startling emblem of the purest kind of documentary realism. A film quite literally about life and death, Afternoons of Solitude is stripped of the explanatory guardrails that have become standard in documentary today, giving way to a direct confrontation of the viewer with the very gaze of the bull itself and the admixture of fear, courage and perhaps madness that is the art and vocation of the toreador. – Haden Guest
The Harvard Film Archive is pleased to welcome back Albert Serra—who visited in 2009—now as a Robert Gardner Fellow at the Film Study Center.