Reading the interviews diagonally Albert Serra, the Catalan director could pass for an irredeemable and unbearable fool. And it is true that the self-proclaimed “Mother Teresa of Calcutta of Spanish cinema” collects headlines that favor wild media clickbait to shape one of the most controversial and hated characters for her radical vision of the film industry, audiovisual creation and its apparent lack of originality, or products like ‘Star Wars’ or the series, which it considers harmful to the viewer.
But, starting only from the images of his filmography, and leaving aside his juicy hot take that any cultural journalist would burn to publish, Serra is one of the most relevant filmmakers of the 21st century at a national and international level.. A regular at the Cannes festival, the director of ‘Pacifiction’ collects awards and recognitions everywhere in any territory that is not Spanish, where his irrevocable punishment is to be hated by locals and strangers who are more than willing to condemn his words without look at your images.
And it is that Serra has not earned his recognition by chance or by the consolidated establishment of European auteur cinema: It is his films and his radical approach to images that speak for a committed filmmaker. with the search for what is behind the eye of the (digital) camera, his desire for fiction and non-fiction to be indistinguishable, his narrative (when intuited) emerged in the editing room, his treatment of contemporary solitudes and the (questionable) hypocrisies of all societies, their curiosity to show the obscurities and recesses of the story(s), or their acting policy governed by abandonment to avoid dramatic construction.
Although the signer will never speak (without irony) of “separating the work from the author” for such a simple understanding that all art is conditioned by its context, the public figure of Albert Serra, a cantankerous, self-important dandy, shouldn’t overshadow his rigorous cinematographic process nor his integrity as a creator. It is these reasons that turn his work into an overwhelming slab whose effects on the viewer (it does not matter if it is enjoyment or burden, attraction or repulsion) only lead to crushing astonishment.
Filming as an irreducible commitment to images
serra is a meticulous picture director (It is not understood that ‘Pacificction’ is not even eligible for the Goya for Best Cinematography for the work of Artur Tort), where there is a very clear and more than studied sense of staging. The equipment in his films is built not so much during filming as in the editing room, a clear reflection of his obsessive and obsessive search for something more behind the camera.
The cameras work haphazardly (three digital cameras recording at the same time), allowing you to get images galore in search of a kind of essence that, a priori, exists, but is hardly perceptible. This is how he explained it in an interview about ‘Liberté’, his penultimate film, for Espinof: “The cameras scrutinize something that is there, something that I have no idea about, nor can the actors themselves control.”
Ever since ‘Honor de Cavalleria’, in which an unexpected sense of wonder was glimpsed in an unrepeatable visuality, the director seems obsessed with rediscover those innocent images. His process is, then, an inverse operation that, from the performative scrutiny and the particular context of his sequences (hypermediatized, with an almost absent direction of interpretation and with aggressive clashes in search of the genuine), allows him to rediscover these images, like a patient hunter who sets all his traps (the shooting) until the indomitable prey (the images) falls into them.
One of the most eloquent explorations of Serra’s work speaks of this change of direction in search of pregnant images: “It is not a question of revealing the filmed beings as they are, but of placing them in a singular scenic context. —an immersive filming without script guidelines, without indications of direction and with three cameras filming at the same time that leave the actors without a reference point— so that unknown aspects of them recorded by the device unconsciously surface”.
Towards a politics of abandonment in the shadows of history(s)
The strangeness of the observed and observant glances in Serra’s films, which have their maximum expression in ‘Liberté’, they are born during filming not only because of the director’s multi-camera strategy. The filmmaker chooses to minimize communication with his actors, so that the performance is continuous on set and the actors never get out of character, but also so that the actors cannot anticipate and avoid the primal and instinctive consequences caused by the (reduced) filmmaker orders.
this quirky approach to acting politics from abandonment it provides the filmmaker with a kind of authenticity between prefabricated (by tireless insistence given the thousands of images that the camera captures) and genuine (because, after breaking all the barriers of acting after exhaustion, it leaves only essence). A formula that, accompanied by overwhelming planning (how can we forget Benoît Magimel’s trospid dance in ‘Pacifiction’, unfairly forgotten in interpretive categories), leaves hypnotic and pregnant images.
As it happens when searching for your images, Serra peers into the darkest and most macabre recesses of History, in search of the other side of progress and a hypocritical and disbelieving idealism.This is the case of his approach to the Enlightenment in ‘The death of Louis XIV’ and, especially, ‘Liberté’, as a denunciation of the hypocrisy of the French bourgeoisie.
But the director’s fixation with the shadows of the story(s) does not only look for perversities, since there are also liminal spaces in the realm of great storiesnot necessarily historical, and a certain obsession with the mythical, which are what Serra rescues: the strange halftimes of his particular vision of Don Quixote in ‘Honor de Cavalleria’, the strange journey to nowhere of the Three Wise Men in ‘Els cants dels ocells’, or the opposition of Casanova and Dracula in ‘Història de la meva mort’.
Serra’s films, always located in liminal territories (of the story, of the format, of the construction of characters), have a first germ in the capture of his images, but equally or more important is the work in the cinema. mounting.What’s more: the narrative construction of his works, if it can be glimpsed, is never previously described, since they are born between the obsessive diving of the director and his editors in the vast raw. We said before that Albert Serra is a hunter: because in editing he becomes the one who tames the beasts, a tamer of feral images which he prepares to be seen in an alleged purity that amazes, but leaves unknowns.
‘Pacifiction’: the post-colonialist hell with which Albert Serra culminates his obsessions
With the start of ‘Pacifiction’, it seems that Albert Serra betrayed himself and gave way to a narrative that, despite its congruently slow pace, as occurs in a slow paradise like French Polynesia, could pass for conventional.
But the director’s spirit is incorruptible, and what resembles an accessible story soon frays to all possible abandon, leaving room for lonely bodies and lost looks that leave the evening light and enter the neon lights of the night.
The irrepressible descent makes the tape fully congruent in the opus of the filmmaker and, at the same time, renewing to a certain extent: although it travels towards the confusing, the sensation of story always remains in the background; Unlike his previous works, he does not search among the shadows of Enlightenment ideas or great stories, but among those of the most recent history; Despite insisting on soliloquies and abandonment in front of the camera, many of his scenes are related to editing…
Being, at least in appearance, the most conventional of his films, ‘Pacifiction’ is the definitive confirmation (if it was necessary) of the director’s consolidation, which does not exempt his eager character and confused and incomprehensible will. But Serra’s cinema is one of efforts and intricacies, not so much for bringing rewards to those who enter the game and decipher its apparent enigmas, but for stimulating the speed of thought and overinterpretation. Is that good, or not necessarily? And, above all, does this question matter in a panorama in which images barely exude meaning no matter how much we squeeze them?