Pastwowa Wysza Szkoa Filmowa, Telewizyjna i Teatralna

im. Leona Schillera w odzi

WYDZIA REYSERII FILMOWEJ i TELEWIZYJNEJ
Gabriel Herrera Torres
Numer albumu: 7637

Realism in contemporary filmmaking

Praca Magisterska

Master thesis, written under

the supervision of professors:
Dr. Jakob Mikurda
Dr. Andrzej Bednarek

Lodz, 2015

Index.

Introduction.........................................................................................4
Reality...................................................................................................8
Interlude
Subject and object's playful collaborations...................................................22

Film's pursuit of reality.....................................................................25

Language and state. Direction and territory
Immersive and Semiotic cinema.................................................................33

Bibliography, filmography and web................................................40

Introduction

As my thoughts on the selected topic developed, which started as a study of the collaboration
between the sacred and the absurd, it was not easy to find out what this essay was meant to achieve. For
months, with no self-consciousness what so ever, I tried to make a properly structured theory that would
collect notes and comments I've been gathering along the years and turn them into a properly standing,
self-sufficient, working tool, some kind of coherent landscape of the way I've came to perceive the world
through filmmaking and how does it connect and reflect upon everything else. I felt exited, infatuated
even, with the megalomanic idea of a personal worldview, filled with the concepts, confusion and
feelings that have grown in me for the last several years. It didn't took long (or maybe it did) to figure out
that the notes, quotes and ideas where not necessarily consequent with each other and phrases that seemed
to be deeply provocative or mysterious had little to say when you'd try to unfold them or integrate them to
a coherent point of view, one that you could actually stand for.
In the spirit of what came to be, though, the final topic of the essay, I take the liberty to transcribe a few
choices from those examples and paste them, unrelated to anything else, as opening line for the present
work:
If a frog had wings, he wouldn't bump his ass so much 1 / The entirety of a
room remains intact regardless of turning-on or turning-off the switch of the
light2 / A grand protocol, a wonderful protocol! I will write the most beautiful
protocol that anyone has ever seen / The sudden understanding that anything
I'd make the rest of my life was condemned to be made by myself drew the
borderline between two things. I still don't know exactly which things those
are / ...And there she goes again, on and on with the same, stubborn topic. I
am so afraid of women like that, So deeply satisfied with anything / That
man does not like music at all / Oh! Such a happiness it is! To be right here,
balancing my feet! The old man seems to think, They move back and forward
1 Dialog from Fat City (1972, john Huston)
2 Aphorism by Mexican writer Jernimo Game Ruiz

this feet. They move wonderfully this feet! / A narration must not be lineal
but cubical / Talent is a small, meaningless detail / The repetition of joy /
A series of war generals in a meeting room report the current losses to the
emperor. They cry with bitter existential awareness every time they mention a
sunken boat: The A46, master! The A 46! / He could not see the conceptual
frontier that divided a room from a hall, a street from a highway, a plate from
a cooking pot / Cosmetic intelligence / I guess they're not so different things,
in the end, the harassment of nature and its total indifference said the snail.
The frog looked at him without paying any attention: the snail was so shiny,
beautiful and soft. Like a lover's tong / There's a some kind of beauty in
stupidity which maybe, just maybe, we should all be striving for / So that not
everything would happen to a single person, God created many persons; So
that the same thing would not happen to every person, God created many
things; As a result of such superb organization, different things happen to
different Persons all the time.
Out of my first failure, then, I tried to reduce the work to the study of specific cases or films that
would represent one or other position, but I soon realized I didn't have enough to say about any of them.
Finally, the on-going topics of simultaneity/free association and realism jumped into the table as clearer
and closer concepts, holding, I hope, a slightly analogue relationship to that of the sacred and the absurd,
where one seems to be the most unlikely and most fertile collaborator of the other and vice-versa.
Reality doesn't exist anymore or, maybe, out of an almost officially accepted convention it is not
anymore Just One. It is not ubiquitous, nor perfect, nor logical, nor continuous, nor finished. We know
nothing about reality except, perhaps, that it is multiple and subjective, but not anymore polarized
between observer and observed: they seem, more often than not, to be smashed in some sort of
polymorphic suit that no one is wearing.
To this extent, the sole idea of realisms or neorealisms in cinema is today unthinkable and the
nearest it might be rests in films of the likes of Apichatpong Weerazeetakul or Carlos Reygadas or metafantasies like the Act of Killing, all of them trying to respond to this polymorphic, self-referential but un-

judgmental shapeless reality and making an effort to link it together through associations,
parallelisms, and by materializing the subjective into the objective and back. They often turn, therefore,
mythological in more than one sense. Mythologies that, though initially might be rooted in the cultural
grounding of each film, often get to overcome that relative identity films using similar devices from
radically different cultural backgrounds, like anthropological documentaries that come out as mystical
cowboy road-movies or documentaries about sensory-horror on a fishing boat, for example (sweetgrass
and Leviathan from Lucien-Castaing Taylor, US).
All of this slowly builds up into some kind of dadaist sacrality, onomatopoeic, that through
something as a subsidiary consciousness, an informed naivety 3, tries to create a mythologic body for
perception, to restore an assembly of imaginary beings.
I belong to a generation and social class saturated of self-criticism and extenuate analysis,
lusting for self-love even when self-love is by all means a senseless idea, a desire without rational
fundings or historical justification, when by all proofs we are not only sick: we are the sickness itself.
This lust has walked its way through film culture along a decade or little longer and is today expressed in
the ways that reality and people are being further and further portrayed (who would have said
that the director that 30 years ago was teaching us to identify what we had in common with an
alienated, misanthrope sociopathTravis from Taxi Driverwould be today making a humanistic film
about Wall-Street (The wolf of wall-street)?
In the end, I believe, the present work is just an attempt to convey and structure a way in which
film, along the years, could (and partially already has) slowly become a tool to develop a view on the
world and myself, a thinking and feeling tool, that aims to nothing else but to help me deal, understand
and create my own place and my own ideas through the times and with the people and places that I have
and to which I will relate. I hardly believe there are closed or mature enough concepts in it but I hope it
will at least reflect a first, honest, effort of structure and sense and a portrait of my own struggle with
reality, what ever this one might be.
3.- A kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism, a moderate fanaticism, oscillating between
sincerity and irony, deconstruction and construction, apathy and affect, attempting to attain some sort
of transcendent position, as if such a thing were within our grasp.
The metamodern generation understands that we can be both ironic and sincere in the same moment;
that one does not necessarily diminish the other. Quoted from Luke Turner's article: Metamodernism: A brief
introduction.

If you believe in the Rabbit, youll believe in anything. If you dont

believe in the Rabbit, it means that you wouldnt believe anything.
Atsushi Wada: The Great Rabbit.

Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.

Chris Marker

Reality.

We have no choice but to write about what we know.

But because is hard to say that we are really aware of what we know, being honest about it is
rarely true enough, deep enough, embracing enough. The shape of honesty is often deceitful by being
subjected to one's preconceptions, to one's sense of duty, blind faith in facts or, simply, to one's current
mood. An honest statement is rarely a true statement and is a concept as highly overrated and
misunderstood as Truth itself. Maybe we should never reduce ourselves to our degree of honesty but to
the creative potential of our own confusion. Fair enough, though, Honesty and Truth are both almost
necessary there where they are, ruling their moral kingdom as they do, and we should not put out their
basements by pure sadistic pleasure or by the misguided vanity of being right.
Anyone should know, by now, that there is little to no value in being right.
Then again, we have no choice but to write about what we know and the first thing I can think
about is fear. Is in fear where a list of babbling arguments burst effortlessly into my mouth as with an old
song we can hardly still understand. I'm also wasted in them, uninterested, and I rarely feel they have
come to be other than vain. But I know them well enough, Vanity has at least a soft, suggestive shape to
play with, and even if we risk to stay just on the surface of things (as is always the nature of Vanity and
Fear) isn't there a temptation back there, at the end, to say that things are ultimately nothing else than their
very surface? Nothing else than beautiful, voluptuous shapes without anything to hide, without anything
further than their own, pompous, stubborn lines?

I can track my memories of fear way back into my life. It is not and it has never been difficult to
scare me. I tend to jump at the slightest loud sound or provocation, every lighting in a stormy night is a
matter of life and death and, while young, the evenings without parents at home seemed to be doomed
with horrendous possibilities, from being mugged and killed by masked intruders to ambiguous
speculations on the nature of my parents existencewhat if they were not really my parents to begin
with?. In the last few years of my life, though, fear has stopped coming from the idea of a sudden
disaster that would tear the stable reality apart, to the on-going, overwhelming feeling that reality was not
stable at all to begin with, and had never existed as this sort of controlled commodity I had taken for
granted early on.
As I grew, every new change, every new character, event or stage, would insert itself into some
kind of predisposed system, and I used to enjoy the way in which each one of them would respectfully
alternate or introduce into my current life as a clearly grounded bubble with its own internal dynamic, its
own heroes, events, laws and stories, leaving completely untouched the rest of it and staging itself either
as an easily absorbed new detail in a clear and logic space or as a disconnected dream in which my daily
life would remain safely structured, awaiting for my return.
Leaving my hometown to visit grandparents in the big city was one of those rare opportunities: I
would lay on the back of the car while my father or mother drove, measuring my own size with the size of
the seat below me (in which I could still fit my body fully extended), and eventually fall asleep while the
road and the country, abstract and shapeless both of them, disconnected from any kind of logical
geography, kept passing-by committed to their intensity rather than to their direction. I would often wake
up in my aunt's room deep at night, several hours latter, where her mysterious african puppet hanged from
the wall above three old single beds. I was that way greeted into this other space, familiar in its own way,
that would safely extend for several days before I'd return home following the same blinded routine that
had taken me there in the first place. The whole experience comes to memory similar to the one of getting
in and out of a film theater where, after some time deeply submerged in this sort of dream-like state,
you'd come back to your actual life, carried with a new gaze that seemed granted to you from outside in
an alien, inconsequential time, giving you a qualitative advantage: the sensation of having crossed your
own life's boundaries and returned, unharmed and internally charged without any real energy source at

sight. In opposition to such disconnected relation to space and place, many years later I would read
Werner Herzog's anecdote in which he walked from Germany to France to save Lotte Eisner in her dying
bed. There are things you should never do in any other way, he says. If, for example, you'd intend to
marry a loved woman from a village far away, you should without any excuse get there by your own
exhausted steps. There is a sense of dignity, a magical one, in drawing with your own body the
extension and shape of the world's length; and there is a certain statement, if maybe adjacent to Herzog's
idea, on the way in which we build reality by physically taking part in it, where no desire, intention, or
subjective construction, should ever go very far without taking the physical world along with it: there is a
symmetry in the walked space and the metaphysical intention of asking a young provincial lady's hand in
marriage, one that we should not underestimate (the same symmetry that kept Lotte Eisner alive ten
years longer, back then4) .
This principle, that nurtures a good part of the german director 's work, is easy to relate to Tsai
Ming-Liang's recent films where we follow the almost motionless walk of a monk-like creature across the
streets of Taiwan and Europe (Walker and Journey to the west) and generally to the rest of his work,
deeply engaged in the relation between the body and the space. The Taiwanese filmmaker (already
minimalist from the beginning of his career) has grown further and further limited in the narrative
elements of his films, which more and more radically seem to be constructed just by placing a person or a
group of persons in a specific place, as if both things would always mirror and grow invisibly into each
other, identify with each other, and state each other's presence and length (I don't want to sleep alone,
stray dogs or no no sleep, along the previously cited) 5.
It brings to mind as well, in a different way, Robert Walser's compulsive walks a beautifully
small writer devoted much more to his daily walks than to his writing even if those trips where never
intended to connect two places or ideas or to enhance a certain meaningful action, and could be
underlined in an opposite, anarchic way: nothing was less desired by the swiss writer than to leave a trace
4.- Werner Herzog's book OF WALKING IN ICE, describes in detail the experience of his travel on foot to save Lotte Eisner
(Vom Gehen im Eis, C. Hanser Verlag Munich 1978), while in the long interview held with him by Paul Cronin, Herzog
extends on his ideological standpoints towards traveling on foot, his views on the perversion of tourism as an expression of
travel, while remembering his relationship to Lotte Eisner (A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED: CONVERSATIONS WITH
PAUL CRONIN, Faber & Faber, London, 2012).
5.- In the essay representation of space/place in Tsai Ming Liang's The hole, Amir Ganjavie studies the way space is
portrayed in that another Tsai Ming Liang movie, if maybe not necessarily from the perspective we are using here, but
nonetheless stating the prevalescent concern of the Taiwanese filmmaker to the emotional and existential meaning of space.

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or to make a statement of himself, and his daily walks were by definition aimless and purely inspired by
aesthetic self-gratification 6.

Lotte Eisner and Werner Herzog.

Stages of Robert Walser's face: For long time I've felt fascinated by Robert
Walser's unique face. It seems to be a testament, on its own, of a man who's
internal world and sensibility were completely and mercilessly expanded,
exposed and mixed into the exterior world without any kind of separation. It
reminds me a phrase from Jose Luis Borges I once read: after 30 years of age,
each man can and should be held responsible for the shape of his own face.

Regardless the case, there is still a clear connection between the eerie sensibilities of Herzog and
Walser and their two contrasting but deeply defining relationships to walking and to a world grounded
and fed on that principle. In the same way as with Tsai Ming Liang studies of being and place, walking is
an act of metaphysical significance that seems to measure one's self or correlate one's subjective being
6.- THE WALK is a short novel by Robert Walser describing a daily walk along his town and the extreme sensorial
insanity that arouses in the otherwise passive walker. The walk extends simultaneously outside and inside in absurd
connections and impressions, immersed in the contemplation of nature and creating beings almost magical, literally built out
of the impressions of people and nonsensical social conventions that are recollected in the way.

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to one's objective trajectory in space. But while we'll keep deepening this topic further on, let's take back
the story of my own relationship to fear and find out if both ends (Herzog's integral idea of reality and my
own disjointed experience of it) will get to meet.
Its not easy to share the feeling of aggression when for one reason or another someone from the
first world, back in my hometown, would either come along in the car with us or appear on his own in the
second world of grandparents and city. The whole event was for me exciting and supernatural, some kind
of metaphysical violation that most of the times was brief, harmless, and not really menacing at all, but
that was carried with a deep, ungraspable danger: the proof that everything had been there all along,
simultaneously, and would eventually collide, connect, grow overwhelmingly free, and the carefully built
realities I was relying-on would show themselves insufficient to deal, organize and interpret the existence
of everything outside of them. Since then, in the measure I've grown, moved over and over from a house
to another, from a city to another and from a country in one side of the globe to another in the opposite
corner, my experience of reality has grown into a pretty agoraphobic one, where way too much
information, places, meanings and connections seem to multiply and reproduce, as with an echoes that
would not be even repeating the word thrown into the void in the first place.
I had a remarkably happy childhood. Even if both of my parents where born back in the big city
(the shapeless excess of the 22-million-people Mexican Capital), I was born and raised in a really small
one far into the country. My parents moved there, along with a group of friends, as many other young
people at the time, with the idea of escaping the lifestyle of the grand Metropoli and making a life project
on their own terms, not subjected to the social and ideological demands of a consuming and moneyoriented society, and trying to advocate for principles they had somehow built or embraced. In many
ways, though they might not feel completely comfortable with such description as it might reduce an
existential choice into a political one, a choice of intensity into a choice of meaning they where making
a statement, just as so many more people of their generation famously did, and they still had the context,
the historical and the personal projects strong and alined enough to believe that such a statement was
possible, a possibility that, for better or worse, seems to be far from clear for my generation.
Much more radically than in some other places, maybe, in Mexico the difference between growing
in the city and growing in the country was an extremely meaningful one, almost unbreachable in every
sense; I've often felt there is not even a comparative reference frame for both realities, each one with their

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own rules, traditions, sensitivities, information and perceptions of culture and time.
While this has to do, on one hand, with the usual issues: time in smaller cities seems to run slower
since the distance between things is different, the environment is less aggressive and is more likely to
create strong communities for reasons of closeness and routine, etc., in the case of Mexico its also related
to other kind of problems, like the dramatic contrast of accessibility to information (or any other thing),
the levels of basic education in comparison to the city, or the even stronger and clearer division of racial
and social backgrounds: the more you deepen into the Mexican countryside, the less strong appears to be
the racial mixture or, to put it other way, the stronger it seems the racial contrast (the white seems
whiter, the brown seems browner, not only in terms of skin color but in terms of cosmogony and world
view, in terms of mental and emotional structures), in such a way that, in order to make a picture of the
moulding that my childhood gave me, I need to add the other ever-lasting leit motivs of my home country,
similar to those of any post-colonial one: Mexico is conformed by a strong clash and division of
economical and social (and unavoidably racial) classes, the well established and grotesque miss division
of wealth, or the marginal survival of ancient, pre-european cosmogonies that breath deformed deep
inside its population, edited, masked and mounted on the pathologically assumed (misinterpreted or
interpreted by force) european paradigms.
The concept of paradigm as a socially or culturally accepted structure, deeply embedded in the
collective understanding and imagination, that orders and rules reality to make it domestic, commongrounded and collectively meaningful, gives a strong tool to portray the main impression I have today of
my own country: a place where all possible paradigms have violently and drastically collapsed on each
other, mounted and coincidental by force, one over the other, transformed and transpiring as collaged,
malformed animals, from where some kind of old mythological creatures, noises and smells, come out
from time to time, eventually benign, eventually perverse and self destructive, eventually just colorful,
affirmative, playful, absurd and ironic. The on-going occidental/cartesian culture, today informed of it's
own carnivorous historical input, so deeply carried along by the contradictions and insufficiencies of
guilt, makes continuos efforts (often with sincerity), to acknowledge, absorb or save a series of cultures
they are drastically unequipped to understand. At their best they make nothing more than to romanticize
or paralyze a shapeless but often beautiful, ecstatic monster, fearlessly alive, from which they are an
integral part already, and no rationalization of any sort will exclude them from that.
Mexico is an overwhelmingly beautiful and overwhelmingly contradictory place however you

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might take it, where group imagination plays a central part in a flashing and bombastic theater play and
the rules of what is and is not accepted as real are constantly being moved, disguised, invented and
erased. Radically different mythological creatures are being convened through identical prayers,
different emotional subtexts drawn with the same gestures or shaped by the same places, objects and
protocols. There is no way of agreeing on the meaning of each element, but there is at least something
like a constancy of the elements themselves.
The conflictive relation between paradigms makes me think of a situation we commented at home
few days ago which might serve as a colorful insight:
We have two cats in our crowded apartment in the center of Lodz. The two pedantic and
indifferent animals respectively white and gray, big and small, old and young glide, explore and rule
the rooms of the house with their own independent pace and curiosity, rarely paying attention to us other
than by some con-descendent accident or a misguided reaction. Observing their nuances, the strange
missions they set for themselves and their discoveries, has turned into a source of entertainment for the
rest of the population in the apartment.
But as abstracted as they may be of our own world, eventually they'll approach to get someone's
caress, a plate of food or some insinuation to play, and then you can hopefully identify the places,
moments and objects where both of our understandings briefly and very adjacently recognize and meet.
This connections are of very different kinds: they sometimes appear from an accident where we are both
involved, or by an object that might be a common obstacle: a plant, a glass or a piece of paper (this cats
have made a special habit of laying on white paper, source for our daily confrontations when they are
caught resting on a new drawing from Paulina or a recently printed school work), or by the universal
meaning of food and feces we have both sides agreed on the meaning of food, to say the least. With
regard to feces I am not completely sure we have a common understanding yet..
But I often have the feeling that the points of connection, more clearly there where we are both in
our respective sides getting some kind of gratification (stroking their furry hair, for example, from which
we both seem to get a satisfaction), have actually little in common when it comes to being identified as
the same action achieved with the same tools for the same purposes on both sides of the cord (I'm
often not even sure they recognize my hand as being irreversibly attached to my body). The

common

event is certainly significative for both of us in the measure that we both get something out of it, but for
no one is unfamiliar the strange feeling that what for me is, for example, an elbow for them might as

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easily be a curtain or not even a noun, but an emotion, an intention, a list or a letter, and just for some
sharp and lucky coincidence what I recognize as an elbow and they might think of as color green
creates a certain otherwise impossible analogy, one that, by its repetition, will create its own figure, a
figure that is neither from good old Mariusz and Porzandek's world (those are the names of our two
cats), neither from our own.
The creators of the webpage Spurious Correlations, have taken the implications of this kind of
analogies all the way down the road by finding unexpected and absurd connections, completely unrelated,
in official data, and making an absurd but precise and obsessive attempt to destroy any paradigm we
might have left.

Spurious correlations7

7 Spurious Correlations Web page: http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

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A much more closer and dramatical, though less radical, example, that implies this insight to shine
a light on human behavior and affective bonds, is found in the film Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven8,
where Rainer Werner Fassbinder portraits a middle-aged woman, Emma Ksters (played by the great
Brigitte Mira), suddenly widowed when she finds out that her husband, in a lapse of insanity, has killed
himself and murdered a colleague of work in the way.
After the deeply traumatic and incomprehensible news that she is hardly prepared to relate to
anything, understand or articulate, Emma is needed not only for a sense of deeper meaning, human
compassion and warmth, an attentive ear and a desperate assertion of the memory of her late husband (all
of them denied to her in any honest loving way by the people and society around), but for a vehicle to
8.- Mother Ksters Goes to Heaven (Mutter Ksters' Fahrt zum Himmel): R.W. Fassbinder, West Germany, 1975.

16

articulate her own passion.

While the film keeps going, we realize that at least the last of this needs will be satisfied through a
confusing surrogate:
While neither of her children, the newspaper reporters or the factory where her husband worked
answer to her in the slightest human or merciful way, a group of communist rebels sees a martyr for their
cause and seduces her into thinking that her husband was actually a true revolutionary with a hidden
and honorable agenda, result of a (conscious or subconscious) rebellion against the oppression of the
system that... (etc.)
The poor Emma, seduced by the redeeming arguments of the communist team (and a subsequent
anarchist group in the last part of the movie) which had no real understanding for her either, slowly
involves with the movement, which by turning her into a passionate militant empowers her to commit
truthfully and legitimately to her feeling of loss, even when she does not understand or care at all for the
system of belief she has coincidentally came to represent.
What for me is the most interesting, human and moving question placed by Fassbinder's film, is in
the realm of the Who is using at who? argument: I hesitate to think that our heroine must be pitied or
victimized, in the end, by understanding her as abused and manipulated (though one of the two alternative
endings that Fassbinder filmed suggests that that is the probable way to go) because, while the communist
group was able to manipulate and funnel the pathos of the woman's sorrow, turning it into a flag of their
own and actually unrelated fight a theme similarly treated by several other films Emma found in
them (and partly thanks to nothing else but her naivety or partial denial of the cause she represents) the
necessary vehicle for her own pathos, her own patheticintense experience searching for some parallel intensity
of reality and of herself in reality:
The woman finds a vehicle for this intensity, completely
unrelated to the communists or anarchists quest, that
needs to be somehow articulated, signified, placed in a
vessel and (rightfully so), she takes the only vessel that
presents that could contain and canalize her.
Emma Kusters (Briggitte Mira)
gives a powerful speech.

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If I am maybe pushing the limits of the analogy in order to make a point, there is a similarity in
the relationship between the cats and the people in my apartment and the encounter between the needs of
the communist group and Emma's passionate quest. The similarity is not only of the order of who is using
at who, but of two parallel conventions solving each other's objectives by creating an unexpected figure,
thanks to simultaneity or coincidence. Both sides being radically different in meaning and intention
(almost alien-like) while identical in shape: a little bit in the same absurd coincidental style of the
spurious correlations included in the previous page.
This idea could maybe grow in Jung's concept of synchronicity:
Synchronicity: meaningful coincidence.The classical Chinese text did not ask what causes
what, but rather what likes to occur with what (speaking in regard to the I-Ching, the Chinese book of
changes). Through this concept, Jung sketched a way in which we might penetrate deeper into the interrelation of psyche and matter ()9

is it possible to think of an understanding of the world not

through causality but through coincidence, not through chronology but through simultaneity?
I feel tempted to relate this idea to Herzog's foot-travel ideology afore mentioned but, contrary to
Jung, if we are somehow tracing our place in the relationship of psyche and matter, Herzog himself is
not precisely equating either his own or his hero's subjective world against the exterior world as if they
where two parallel dimensions, as much as I know he is not so keen to the very idea of subjectivity,
concept that he seems to consider insufficient to contain or define a person. In the same way, Herzog is
openly suspicious and elusive of self-analysis as every evidence indicates that for him subjective and
objective are insufficient categories to describe our experience of life, and the only possible outcome of
self-analysis is a neurotic, disjointed one, an empty dissolution of a non-existing problem, coming from a
somehow fake illusion of complexity.
After all, in his films the hero's subjective self exists in a flat, unidimensional universe of
absolute stubbornness or extreme alienation, divided between his two classical archetypes (respectively):
Megalomaniacs trying to achieve a major, all-embracing (and useless) act, an act that would by itself
justify the existence of all things (Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre, the wood-sculptor Steiner, to name a few), or
isolated, handicapped characters, foreign to every possible social convention, unable to process reality
9.- Taken from from Jung and Richard Wilhelm introduction to the I-Ching.
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through the common social and historical filters and therefore engaged in the creation of their own
personal interpretation, one that, more often than not, reaches to radically different conclusions and
creates parallel logic structures to the universally accepted ones, structures that prove to be intimately
more coherent and human than those of the accepted human world (Kaspar Hauser, The Land of Silence
and Darkness, Grizzly man, etc.).
Both kind of characters are defined by being foreign to social conventions while deeply inner to
world's authenticity, and there's no better example of it than the semi-autistic Kaspar Hauser when he
states:
Let those apples lie, they are tired and they want to sleep.
Kaspar, an apple can't be tiredreplies his tutor, Herr Daumerapples don't have lives of
their own, they follow our will! I'm going to roll one down the path: it will stop there where I want it to.
Herr Daumer throws the apple, which rolls out of the path and hides in the grass.
The apple didn't stop, it hid in the grass! says Kaspar.
Herr Daumer tries again to demonstrate his point with the help of a Logician that walks along
with them:
May I have your help in demonstrating it, mr. Hurman? Now Kaspar, look: mr. Hurman is
going to put out his foot and when I'll roll the apple it will stop there where we want it to . Daumer
throws the apple, mr. Hurman puts out his foot.
The apple bounces in the floor and jumps above the foot of mr. Hurman.
Smart apple! It jumped over his foot and ran away! says Kaspar Smart apple! Kaspar
says. 10
What I believe that Herzog relates to the World's physicality is not so much human subjectivity
but human will and, with will, the everlasting battle of a character, lost always in advance, to state his
own dimensions and the dimensions of his dreams against the ones of reality (but not from a
psychological point view, but a pathetic one, which is the main framework to make plausible the themes
and situations of his movies). This somehow amplifies the definition of a person's relationship to reality
from being simply divided between subjective or objective: A statement of dignity, a meaningful act with
its own territory, remains as the primary judge of what should be considered as real, as it contains both
things framed together: the world and the subject. Herzog's characters are not tormented by the
10 Scene from The Enigma of The enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974, Werner Herzog) .

19

contradictions and complexities of their subconscious, but by the very pathos of their existence, by the
very fundamental contradiction that pulsates in the bottom of life. Therefore, for example, while
murdering by jealousy and falling into madness, Woyzek is not defined by a compulsive Dostoyevskian
internal struggle, filled by inner monologues that attack, analyze and decompose each other, but by a
primal existential impulse: his characters do not doubt as they know that they themselves and the world
are one and the same thing, and everything will, ultimately, be swallowed by the landscape in which
human will is a pretty concrete, space-occupying thing (Though it certainly might be closer to a waterfall
than to a tree).
Woyzeck's total pathos11:

11 Scene from Herzog's film Woyszeck (1979)

20

For some reason or another I've felt stimulated by this kind of ideas since I got involved into
filmmaking. Its certainly related to my own confusion, to the fever of growing up, finding and assuming a
place, being forced, neurotically pushed, to define the other as opposed and exterior to myself. I
therefore started to feel intolerable the unavoidable contradiction that complies the existence of others, of
any other, while simultaneously growing in claustrophobia with the idea of my own self.

By

extension, when I started to doubt about my own statements, all reality started to fade, to contradict, to
remove, as reality is in this construction identical to Will and a will-less character is equal to an unstable,
law-less, reality, one that we can't trust in.
It was at some point of this period that, while hearing one of the many arguments that Noam
Chomsky holds along the web (for whom I feel great respect), the whole discussion began to fall into an
irrational sequence of adjectives and qualifications and I suddenly had the most uncanny feeling of
loosing ground: stepping into that weird place in which the good, ideal consciousness of X (let's say
Chomsky) breaks down and turns into something else. And the same stability and coherence that for me
he represented is turned into some sort of perversion simply because of that hesitation in which such
stability is forced to defend, and therefore stops being real: because reality is or should be stable,
trust-worthy, coherent, unitary.
A suggestive dialog from a Godard's film seemed then to offer a temporary, paradoxical solution:
...this morning is like a dream, and we should all think that the other is the one who's dreaming.. 12.
And this road leads us back to the poetic potential of analogies and free association, where an
image or a sound can reveal a hidden characteristic interior to a completely different image or sound just
by putting them together or overlapping them (we might push and say that one is the dream of the other
and vice-versa), which is a deeply cinematic principle (The Spurious Correlations could be easily
mirrored with a good sequence of parallel or intellectual montage). Under our view, it also seems to
touch, question or organize, the limits and conventions of what is real and how it relates to ourselves,
how we are entangled and our subjective input is as susceptible of being redefined, re-placed in the
order and function of things as much as everything else, as long as its experienced as a constitutive part of
reality, not an exception of it.

12.- 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle): Jean Luc Godard, 1967
21

As a final, playful note, I like to imagine that by selecting and connecting isolated actions,
gestures and exercises of our daily life, we might discover some sort of forgotten prayer, key to solving
our relation to that invisible something. I like to imagine that film might somehow work as an attempt into
achieving or searching such connections.

The extreme foreigner Kaspar Hauser

(Bruno Schleinstein) waits to be found in the street.

22

Interlude.Subject and object's playful collaborations

1.-

No matter for how long she'd look at it, the photograph that Gloria held would not manage to

convey the 50 meter waterfall that it portrayed, the long lost cascade, deep into the mist with the colorful
mountains by the bottom (Oh, such mountains that there where!), where she had made the picture in oh,
such a beautiful day! and that she vividly remembered.
But no matter the effort, Gloria could not reach anything of it through the image she was now
holding at home, as much as she would try. Then, in desperation, she tried to improve it by covering with
things, details or glares, trying to touch something of the place that her picture had so shamelessly
destroyed.
Just half way through she realized that she was actually creating a new place of glowing,
iridescent pink, and she kept retouching it, moulding it and exaggerating it without ever getting closer to
the moisty waterfall.
Soon the place stopped being recognizable at all, but she kept going just by the blissful, newly
discovered power to distort it, to create it again from the beginning. And something else started to arise
without being noticed. Some blue-purplish monstrosity, half way green, of magnificent fluorescence and
ink misplacements, of shiny voluptuousness of glue that barely remembered they had ever been mountain
at all.
By the end Gloria didn't know anymore what was she doing in the first place. She didn't even
know that she had taken such a picture somewhere else and something in some point between the place
and the fact of taking away its image had ripped it of from its condition. She didn't know anymore
anything about it, and she had as well the impression that that was not important at all.
Overflowing of pride and pleasure, she just added a simple motto as for example Happiness is
not to do what you love but to love what you do or some similar phrase in big capital white letters with
faded colors and thick contours, covering a third part of the landscape with its eminent and convincing
message that didn't mean anything at all.

2.-

Since her two daughters left the parental home, my aunt owns her free time as she had never

before. This situation has led her into painting. She gathers with a group of friends, each time more often,

23

to paint the most strange looking flowers I've ever had the chance to see. The women, fascinated with all
kinds of materials, colors and models, and with no frame of reference whatsoever, have slowly
contributed to create a new, unexpected and unrecognized visual genre that they bring back to hang at
home where, under the silent resignation of their husbands and the periodic insistence of time,
accumulates.
Pointy and texturized flowers. Monstrous flowers jumping out the frame carried of gesso and jams
and confetti. If you visit my aunt's house, you are immediately assaulted in the lounge by an
onomatopoeic marguerite, or a fat and robust sunflower as the helix of a giant fly. Softly, secretly, my
aunt keeps building a symmetrical paradise of mutant and psychedelic flora along that wide and
affectionate house, that says that everything everywhere is safe: that even those tridimensional pictures on
the walls seem swallowed by the calm and secure living-room or the impeccable constellation of the
kitchen.
But I don't believe, personally, that something might be safe of this psychotic flora that grows into
the walls of the house in its fantastic symmetry, and I am waiting for the day in which Edmund-the
husband will be devoured, hypnotized or duplicated by a demented marguerite or by that chrysanthemum
over there that looks the way must look a crocodile's heel.

24

Film's pursuit of reality.

In some way, the provocation pushed forward in cinema by Italian Neorealism back in the forties
and fifties, asking what was supposed to be portrayed as real or as an honest representation of reality, has
never felt such a strong urge to surface again as today. But if the popular Italian movement denounced to
fiction the existence of reality and a new set of rules to approach it where the not glamorous life would
jump into scene with roaring dignity, making besides of its statement on humanitarian and social
concerns, a point on the the duty to recognize or accept its roughness into the clean illusion of cinema
today the implications of approaching reality in film are so different in meaning and objectives that the
analogy can be hardly placed at all between both cases, and we could not even recognize the question as
being the same.
Departing from the fact that reality is not something that needs to be or is even susceptible of
being denounced not because denunciation could ever stop being pertinent and necessary, or things
worthy of denunciation could have disappeared (though today any accusation has to be placed within a
much more careful framework in a world that can't anymore deal with the idea of sides, that can not relate
with monolithic concepts of good and evil), but because reality can't be held as something hidden or
avoidable and is instead experienced as something overly exposed, supersaturated, multiple and invasive,
that self-reproduces and accumulates in all directions and that is already assumed as a correlate of
consciousness in one way or another, not even an abstract or allegorical one as it might be supposed:
popular culture, participant of all the paradoxes of modernity, is perfectly informed and aware of the
fragility of whatever that is real.
Following this lead, the trend of contemporary cinema that came to deal with this question is one
that tries to adapt to this polymorphic construction and tries to grow with it, making as much efforts as it
can to convey not only reality's complexity but its lack of intentionality and judgement while searching
for a structure to which we may finally relate, since our reality is built in such a way, that is imperative
going way too far if we are ever going to reach it 13.
A Cinema concerned with reality might actually be one trying to reframe and connect the
mythological beings of his own culture into a common territory with the territory of his historical past and
13 .- Quoted from Rudiger Safranski's introduction to P. Sloterdijk Spheres.

25

present: in Apichatpong Weerazeetakuhl's movies, for example, there's no division at all between daily
life, dreams, memories or ghosts as they are all accepted in the same dinner table 14:

A son turned into a jungle spirit (left) and a deceased wife sitting at the
table in a calm night (above) in Uncle Bonmee, who can recall his
past lives.

Under this guidance, documentary and fictional scenes have had to

find a connecting key, where both of them find each other's
equivalence's (there's no such thing as a concrete reality other than
the one we're trying to create: Fantasy is discriminated because reality is up to such extent overloaded that
a truly aware cinema today is rarely one that speaks about non-existing worlds, but one that performs its
fantasy through the connections that manages to establish, through the articulation that is able to perform
over the world, as long as reality does not exist already as such).
We could say, for example, that a film like Post-Tenebras Lux15, by Carlos Reygadas, is much
more concerned with reality than any of the films made by the brothers Dardenne, which not necessarily
for the strict naturalism that defines them have any preoccupation with the recovery of reality, but with
14 .- Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010, Apichatpong Weerazeetakuhl)
15 .- Post Tenebras Lux (2012, Carlos Reygadas)

26

conveying conceptual and moral questions on human condition.

Post Tenebras-lux, film from the Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas, flawed as it is, is none the
less one of the most realistic films I've encountered in recent film production.
On one hand is concerned with an ontological definition of film, which has to be updated as well,
to be consistent with the contemporary reality of images:
The movie made its best to take seriously the principle that what is left for Film in the era of the
overpopulation of images, is to use unrepeatable youtube clips from life and find their points of
coincidence: The movie is composed by a series of unconnected un-conceptualized and visceral scenes
that fight as much as they can to make sense of their message not through the story that is told, but
through the intensity and poetic and pathetic relation between the sequences. The result, if not always
successful, carries with it several moments of deep beauty and insight, and seems to propose a possible,
legitimate answer of film language to the excess of audiovisual images.
On the other hand (though in this awareness strongly plays my own relation to the subject), Post
Tenebras-lux directly tries to confront the contradictory Mexican reality in its content and its form, the
same one we pointed out at the beginning of this essay and, I dear to say, with a very similar perception of
the country to my own. Reygadas, trying to make a film as foreign to Reason as he possibly could,
created a movie that plays like a mythological mash-up of subjectivities, forming and deforming reality in
the same way in which the actual clash of social, racial and cultural entities do it in the actual place.
Entirely subjective and committed to reality at the same time, but resilient to a specific subject
as every scene could be deformed by any character and no specific character prevails between them all
(even a character that appears in one single scene seems to bring with him his personal input), reality is
quite literally built by the multiplicity of its subjects and simultaneously by none of them at all.

27

Frames of Post Tenebras Lux that clearly show the idea of a collective
realism. The female character depicted in the last of the frames (above),
has this only apparition in the whole film. The image, nonetheless, is
completely subjugated to her personal experience. In the same way, the
football players in the previous page appear and disappear without any
clear narrative, spatial or cultural connection whatsoever, in selected
points of the structure.

*
Our generation grew up with the tradition of de-construction and irony, we grew up on a diet of
daily Simpsons shows, globalization and multiplicity, raised by the postmodernist principles against meta
narratives and unitary truths, against an all-embracive Subject and its ever-lasting internal monologues.
But If today we may see a necessary return of The Subject that had been paralyzed in agoraphobia
by the openness of the world, that old Subject from the modernist era that was the first victim of the
postmodernist thinking, has to comeback condemned to the same schizophrenic multiplicity of the world
that receives him (a similar feeling to the one that a film like Post-Tenebras Lux might leave).
For Errol Morris, a filmmaker committed to facts, the division between the subject and the world
is loud and clear and a fairly unnecessary concern: Reality is re-enacted inside of our skulls routinely.
That's how we know about the world. We walk around in the world. The world isn't walking around in
us!, he mentions, fairly offended, in some masterclass around the web. In my case, I prefer to think that
reality is a two-directions word (to say the least, as, from what we've said so far, reality today is more
some kind of rhizome): the world is walking inside of us as much as we are walking inside of it, but the
practical conundrum of such affirmation makes it invalid anyway, as much as there is no evident way in
28

which we can reach to common conclusions by understanding things from this perspective.
But its valid to say that Errol Morris himself has a sensibility for idiosyncratic, oddball characters,
meaning people that strongly convey or carry with them a personal way of feeling, moving and thinking
(as we can clearly see in any of his films), which means that, at least intuitively, he feels respect for the
way in which each person relates and reacts to whatever that considers to be real, which projects him into
the world as much as the world projects itself into him in the same, continuous pace. They deform each
other with pristine and stubborn intensity, but that does not mean that we can not fairly acknowledge
something as having really happened. It doesn't imply to question the ethical significance of facts.
Therefore, the idea would not be to trivialize the notion of reality to favor the subjective but to,
somehow, integrate subjectivity into a collective common ground. We can not and should not trivialize
the facts in virtue of the subject that observes them since even at the end of the road we will have to relate
with and through the facts in a convention of reality.
So lets choose to agree that something exists or, further on, that everything exists, and not only the
subject that perceives it.
In the article Notes on the state of the Subject 16, Simone Stirner goes further in explaining the
relationship between modernism, postmodernism and some new intellectual trend that should overcome
them both. The first paragraphs of this page are pretty directly cited from her own description of the
Subject, while she, and the metamodernist movement, point at the way in which the comeback of the
Subject is possible because it is now capable to create a certain sphere of action for himself, protecting
him, if well temporarily, from the excessive exposition to the world by taking himself and his own needs,
desires and affections simultaneously ironical and sincere, unstable and stable:
The subject reappears and it comes with other dismissed categories
such as trust, belief, coherence and even love. I would suggest that it
reappears in a confined space that Peter Sloterdijk in his Spherology
describes as a Bubble an artificially created space, where in a human,
intersubjective experience, the outside forces exposed by postmodern thinkers
can be temporarily shut out.

16 Article Notes on the state of the subject by Simone Stirner.

29

What mostly draws my attention in their discourse is this specific ambiguity that allows the person
to exist again in the world, without loosing the insight of its complexity, a view that I can increasingly
recognize in the films produced in our generation that try constantly to convey a stronger, nonjudgmental version of their protagonists. We can see examples of this all over the contemporary film
production: films that ten or twenty years ago would have been undeniably conceived to accuse or portray
a certain dark institution or an antihero rightfully dismissing the plain heroic protagonist from of
before that, even while having struggled all the way, in the end takes the most morally questionable
decision out of cowardice or greed), today swirl around and in the same or similar topics they focus their
energies in some sort of vindication of the protagonists, not at all by justifying what they where many
years ago condemning, but by enhancing a certain love towards their subjects, a certain not acquiescent
compassion that skips over moral and justice towards identification. But not an identification where we
ourselves confront and get to know our darker-self (which was the theme of the immediately previous
cinema), but one where we accept having it and try to, simultaneously, find a transcendental position
where we can still enjoy ourselves.
We can clearly see this in mainstream films like The Wolf of Wall street17, a film that if i'd be made
twenty years ago would be an act of denunciation for a corrupted, materialistic and self-destructive
system, and that today, while implying and keeping exposed the same system, subraya a certain humanity
to it that is morally or ethically insignificant, but existentially meaningful.
The character portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie (while being no genius at all) is a
wizard of rhetorical speech. This skill, properly funneled, allows him to encourage and motivate a slowly
growing group of enthusiastic and greedy people, eventually creating a small empire of money and
excess.
In its highest peaks, his empire is some kind of ecstatic and nihilistic fantasy, a Dionisiac festivity
of tons of people partying and being grotesquely rich and stoned, but simultaneously working and
creating something together, whatever it might be. To this respect, the party scenes in the office are the
most carefully built and unique pieces of the film, reaching up to Fellinesque fantasies, that seem to
enhance the shared feeling of intensity and ecstasy as the one thing that keeps their whole reality pasted
together.
While along the road DiCaprio's character steals and is stolen from, tricks and is tricked, betrays
17 The Wolf of Wall Street: Martin Scorsese, 2013.

30

and is betrayed, none of this events seem, in the end, to have a deeper meaning (though his wife steals his
fortune, his friend keeps his company and he goes right-on to end in jail), as he still from prison, in the
end, seems to guard no hard feelings at all, while remembering with excruciating placer and honest love
the moments shared together. Somehow, the questionable things that he and others did to each other are
not what defines their bonds, but the ecstatic intensity of the shared experiences, and loyalty is, in this
sense, not relative to whatever greedy or cynical actions any of them ever committed to each other, but
the fact of having experienced honestly (the kind of honesty you can not really choose as part of a moral
commandment) a common act of creativity and intensity.

Office hours in The Wolf of Wall-Street

The story of the cinematic hero in the last 30 years of history (at least in the less acquiescent
cinema) is pretty clearly following this scheme, and a new approach to the human, to the need of covering
ourselves by a warm, affective glow (one without a denial of the world or that could actually be used as
an excuse to play our part in it) refers quite well the demand of this adaptation, where some kind of
informed naivety is necessary in order to make a space again in reality for ourselves.
A scene on the defense of an idol from the film Hahaha 18 directed by Hong Sang Soo, expresses
with eloquence this idea:
A sexy tourist guide (our hero's love interest) standing next to a pedantic statue, is telling about the
18 HaHaHa: Hong Sang-Soo. South Korea, 2010.

31

feats of some historical hero to a group of tourists. The listeners ask her if the information she is giving
about him is true: The story one of them saysis filled with fabrications, and we tend to fantasize
about our idols...
The young and smoking-hot tourist guide-lady answers deeply hurt and with fervent passion for
the historical hero to which her narration alludes:
You are saying that he doesn't exist, right? But if you'd be to ever meet him, he'd be so brilliant that
you'd be barely able to see him!...
Then she takes a second, as she is soaked in tears...
When we say that heroes don't exist... there is a self hatred in what we say... is it not?...
Finally, her wounded passion defeats her and she asks the crowd for a second, moving away
form her audience.
A perplexed group of tourists keep looking at the absurd statue in an awkward silence.

The tourist guide (left) being seduced by a stubborn hero (right) in Hahaha.

32

Language and duration / Direction and territory.

Semiotic and immersive cinema.
Cinema tends to be a figure of length and duration and, as such, a statement of something's
presence. Avant-garde filmmakers like the american James Benning have completely devoted their
work to this idea, trying to examine the self of cinematic image in relationship to whatever its observing
(registering). The films of James Benning seem to be there just to state the existence of things, the
length of framed phenomena: the period of time in which the persona fades out from a man standing
in front of a lens, the length and fading of a specific gesture against the length of a vanishing summer
afternoon, or the reflections of exterior events in a series of quiet lakes selected along the United States
and framed symmetrically to the sky19 (a far away train, a repetitive fish, a group of people's voices. It
reminds a little bit of the famous David Hockney painting a bigger splash: the image of a pool right
after someone who? has jumped into the water. The only thing we can see is the frizzed splash of
water: some kind of negative of a presence and the unique prove that someone has ever been there).
This extreme position (further empowered by the arrival of video) is, to different degrees, implicit
in a wide range of contemporary filmmakers ever since people like Tsai Ming-Liang popularized the idea
of slow cinema by the end of the eighties and the beginning of the nineties. The films of James Benning
seem to be a radical exposition of a fascination that any filmmaker has experienced: the immersive
pleasure of allowing the-world-itself to fill a frame with its own rigorous arbitrariness.
But as long as the idea of what is real keeps getting amplified and disruptive, the growing
ambiguity on the true nature of things, of what is deserved to be portrayed as existing and what not and,
by contradiction, our tacit agreement on the existence of everything, sets the ground for questions that
should keep open and progressive our idea of film. At the same time, the written word culturally looses
ground in people's mental construction and grows further and further smaller against the overpowering
Visual State, and cinema has to learn to answer and participate on this new fluctuating reality of images.
I've found myself struggling to admit, for example, the insane multiplicity of an i-phone:
A table lamp is an object with a concrete function and objective that defines it. And at some point in the
not so distant past, a lamp that, for example, would be attached simultaneously in its design to an ashtray,
would be making a drastic metaphysical leap. We have all been fascinated over and over by an object
19 13 lakes: James Benning, USA, 2004.

33

with multiple functions (as if it where somehow breaking some physical or semantical law 20) but an iphone seems to be not even an object anymore in the strict sense of the word! An object without a space
of its own! That could not even give a hint of it's meaning and possibilities based in its plain shape. An
object that would offend Gaston Bachelard in the same way in which he was offended by the very
existence of apartments: spaces, according to him, without any poetic or existential resonance, without
any place for the person to hide, build or nest, to correlate a part of himself 21.
And we shall then leave ourselves to the dazing hands of panic! Because who knows what are we
really filming when we aim a camera towards an i-phone, that seems to insist that he does not really exist
while growing insistingly in every possible invisible direction!
So the crisis of the presence of things has to push film forward to question and embrace all
definitions, and this leap has to be done as consciously as possible, because everything exists
simultaneously and there seems to be no way to regulate it, but we still have to relate constructively with
it.

An I-phone

One of the frames in the film 13 lakes by James Benning.

20 Who didn't love the great Inspector Gadget!!!!

21 La Potica del espacio (Space Poetics); book by philosopher Gaston Bachelard.

34

Is from all this thoughts that I got puzzled by the idea of measuring an inhuman time, or the
lost time of someone that is not more than the representation of something or someone else: What is the
meaning of a time passing over someone or something without a real or complete ontological value?
How is time spent by someone who doesn't exist or is properly as such? What kind of Time is this that
is not only not useful or functional but that is also not inhabited by anyone in the strict sense of the word?
What kind of Time is this that can not even be used to Feel the presence of things?
This are questions that Tarkovski's Solaris22 was starting to make in the character of Hari: a
physical projection of the protagonist's subconscious without a proper self but thrown into reality and to
the anxiety of existing all the same. Without being able to tolerate it, Hari commits suicide and is reborn
over and over, representing the single most tragical element of the film. Progressively, one of the last
works of the recently deceased Harun Farocki is an installation that studies this lost time for puppets
(Paralell IIV)23. The idea of an abandoned, unconnected, un-used time for puppets turns provocative as
long as, initially, a puppet without a task should not be able to exist at all. Farocki concentrates in
observing and commenting all the possible meaningless and paradoxical actions of characters from a
video game like Assassin's Creed, Grand Theft Auto or Minecraft and expanding on its implications.
Following the spirit of this questions, I took the liberty of creating my own existential monster in
an animated installation where a gigantic goat is built by thousands of minuscule characters.
The project consists on the simple contemplation and development of this sort of existential
fetich: Along it's single, continuous duration, we will observe this absurd construction trying to keep
itself standing amongst the other (true goats), while slow and clumsily disarming into the ground,
dropping people over and over which will try endlessly to climb back and fill uncovered spaces,
members and extremities for a fake mammal.

22 Solaris (1972, Andrei Tarkovski)

23 Paralell IIV (Harun Farocki, Germany, 2014). Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p68Cxndnjrs

35

The Banning Goat:

Video-Installation

The proper representation of the beast, nonetheless, implies to inhabit a place, coordinate a
collective impression of breath; to develop or create necessities, weaknesses, games, pleasures,
someone/something else's emotions; to exist in a specific fragment of the world in a specific way with
an specific intention, as simple as this one may be. The Installation is, somehow, and attempt to create a
territory and a length, an intensity for an absurd and virtual collective monster.
(This Idea brings me back towards my own agoraphobic self: while I keep growing it seems to me
that my choices or the changes in my life are each time less occupying a real space, an ontological
change from one state to another with a decision in between, and they are more and more fluctuations of
things without territory in which a concrete decision seems to have little or no influence to what actually
happens my decisions seem to be insignificant, superficial, unnecessary.
I don't know if, by the end, further away from everything else, I'll be able to see this territories
clearly, with their frontiers and figures, with their presences, between which I jumped without noticing
that what I was doing was, actually, nothing less that a conscious decision of a different kind).

36

*
Maybe as a reaction to the same crisis on the presence of things, or overwhelmed by the same
fragility of the subject left by the postmodernist traditions, the fashion-in-turn of independent, avantgarde filmmakers seems to be, often, trying to find things back not in their selves, but in their reflections,
connections, and duplicates.
In film all borders have been crossed over and over along every possible frontier: The ontological
questions of documentary and fiction (if there ever actually were) have been since several years ago
assimilated or integrated by independent filmmakers like Nicolas Pereda or Lisandro Alonso or Jia
Zhangke or... today both of things (documentary and fiction) copy each other and exist in each other to
the same extent, with absolute freedom and without any contradiction. The codes and themes of simulacra
and repetition are explored with everlasting curiosity by authors like Hong Sang-Soo in Korea or Matias
Pieiro in Argentina, or in the absurd dystopian films of Yorgos Lanthimos, to name a few. Needless to
mention the long ago surpassed limits of graphical exposure or visual saturation as much as most of the
classical, today infantile, taboos of violence and sex, family and manichaean heroes.
This currents, heirs of the afore mentioned historical traditions and traumas, and of the
predominant position of language in the study of society, seem to understand that we are condemned to
our knowledge of the world, and there's no way of saving anything sacred when things are as exposed as
they are and their connections so roughly sketched.
Maybe we should, in opposition, hide the things while letting their connections jump outside, and
there's a certain feeling in contemporary filmmaking that makes us believe that if truth is elusive to such
extent, when images have stopped being themselves, when there's only left the dialogue between things
replicas, between their representations, projections and duplicates, things won't be anymore what matters,
but the movement between them. So we are not supposed to search in things themselves, but in their
repetitions, patterns and investments. And we must then believe that is in that flow where the true state
really is; that when-the-time-comes, the only genuine thing has always been the movement (in such a way
that we might still save everything else. In such a way that the image of things, and things themselves,
will find their presence back, not in themselves, but in the way in which they lean the ones towards the
others. In the way in which they flirt, splice and relate; in their figure, soft and hard, that simultaneously
is and is not theirs).

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*
The meeting of the two aforementioned film themes (the subordination of things to their
connections, representations and duplications and the creation of audiovisual territories that might still
convey the presence of things) while apparently contradictory, seem to be two of the main problems that
cinema has or will have to deal with and that respectively could relate to language and intensity in the
cinematic universe.
The ultimate idea is that film has the uncanny possibility of being simultaneously a state and a
language, an intensity and a direction, as the shot of a hand in a movie from Robert Bresson, where the
hand is simultaneously the idea of the hand and the presence of the hand.
It brings to mind a scene in Kagemusha24 in which the forged king has to learn to behave like a
real king: A king has to move in such a way: each movement has an intention, a direction, a past and a
future. Each movement of a King's hand is a server for the next of his movements. This is what
distinguishes the King from the Thief, and it would seem to be there, in my opinion, a certain glimpse, an
acknowledgement of one of the beautiful functions of cinema: gliding between reaching out towards the
presence of things, while fighting to save their connectivity.

Bresson's frames of hands.25

Apart of anything else, I'd like to understand cinematic creation as an act of freedom and, because
of that, of generation of meaning (because freedom is meaning, freedom is figure).
That is what I personally feel that freedom must be like: absolute congruency. That to which one
would like the most to approach: to the point where you emotions concur with your actions (so that you'll
never be a slave of the ones or of the others), to the place in which what you produce closes back its circle
in yourself having drawn a certain constellation far away.

24 Kagemusha: by Akira Kurosawa, 1980.

25 Extracted from the short film-essay Hands of Bresson, by Kogonada.

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*
So, reality has to be conceived again. And it can't be defined by its commitment to facts, or to
the psychological, political, objective or subjective: reality, at least in the cinematic sense, is committed to
Intensity and Territory and by extension to Truth. Not truth as a convention or an affirmative lie. Truth
as the affection of something's presence, of something's complete intensity: poetic truth, the kind that you
can identify in certain cinematic images that work as coincidental, unexpected Alephs and that could
not, and should not, be susceptible to be explained or interpreted with words. Concentrations of space,
time and meaning: ...like the drunk men liking the ice in bells from the deep, the group of people pushing
the train in day of the bread, the woman hearing a recording of herself while almost simultaneously
laughing and crying in Belovy...
Images that, as deeply as possible, as mysteriously as possible, signify.

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Freddie Quell and The Master, Lancaster Dodd, meet

after a short dramatic separation and hug and collapse
in an exhibition of fraternal and infantile joy, throwing
each other to the ground and hugging, stripping each
other's pants, laughing, dancing, fighting and screaming
all at the same time. (The Master, directed by Paul
Thomas Anderson. USA, 2012).

We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by
descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically,
not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual
formula, while a metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing
features as the world it represents. An image as opposed to a symbol is indefinite in
meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and
finite. We can analyze the formula that constitutes a symbol, while a metaphor is a beingwithin-itself, it's a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it.
Andrei Tarkovsky26

26 Sculpting in time (1989, Andrei Tarkovski)

40

41

Bibliography

- Werner Herzog's OF WALKING IN ICE: Vom Gehen im Eis, C. Hanser Verlag Munich 1978.
- A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED: CONVERSATIONS WITH PAUL CRONIN, Faber & Faber,
London, 2012).
- Essay: REPRESENTATION OF SPACE/TIME IN TSAI MING LIANG's THE HOLE, by Amir
Ganjavie. Published in the Academic Journal Cross-Cultural Communication;2012, Vol. 8 Issue 3, p37.
- EL PASEO (The walk), by Robert Walser. Editorial Siruela, 2014
- Richard Wilhelm and Jung's introduction to the I-Ching, the chinese book of changes: I CHING: EL
LIBRO DE LAS MUTACIONES (33 ED.). RICHARD WILHELM; VERS. DE D. J. VOGELMANN; PROL. DE
C. G. JUNG, EDHASA, 2010.
-LA POTICA DEL ESPACIO (Space poetics): Gastn Bachelard, Ed from FONCA, 1997.
-ESCULPIR EN EL TIEMPO (SCULPTING IN TIME): Andrei Tarkovski, Ed. RIALP, 2008.

Filmography

-WALKER, directed by Tsai Ming-liang. China, 2012

-MOTHER KUSTERS GOES TO HEAVEN (Mutter Ksters' Fahrt zum Himmel), directed
by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. West Germany, 1975.
-THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER, directed by Werner Herzog. West Germany 1978.
-WOYZECK, directed by Werner Herzog. West Germany, 1979.
-UNCLE

BONMEE

WHO

CAN

RECALL

HIS

PAST

LIVES:

Weerazeetakuhl, 2010. Thailand.

- POST TENEBRAS LUX: Carlos Reygadas, 2010
- THE WOLF OF WALL STREET, directed by Martin Scorsese, USA, 2010.
- HAHAHA, directed by Hong Sang-Soo. South Korea, 2010.
- 13 LAKES, directed by James Benning. United States, 2004.
- SOLARIS, directed by Andrei Tarkovski. Soviet Union, 1972.

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Apichatpong

Web sources

-METAMODERNISM: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION: Luke turner's article from the web

magazine Notes on Metamodernism:
http://www.metamodernism.com/2015/01/12/metamodernism-a-brief-introduction/
-SPOURIOUS CORRELATIONS: http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
-NOTES ON THE STATE OF THE SUBJECT: Article by Simone Stirner published in the
web magazine Notes on metamodernism:
http://www.metamodernism.com/2011/11/02/notes-on-the-state-of-the-subject/
- PARALEL IIV: Harun Farocki, Germany, 2014.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p68Cxndnjrs /
Presentation:
https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2014/berlin_documentary_forum_3/programm_
29/harun_farocki_parallel.php

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