NYFF '24: "Afternoons of Solitude" is a Barbaric Beauty

by Cláudio Alves

When I was very young, I remember being besotted by bullfighting. Around where I grew up, the so-called art of the "tourada" was fundamental to the local culture, a noble practice to be celebrated. My parents were a tad horrified by my interest, and I was an ignorant child. For some reason, I had never realized what was happening in the arena, too blinded by the matador's glamorous figure, the dance-like spectacle, and the thunderous applause. But seeing it live and then watching TV recordings, I realized something. What I thought were theatrical tricks and mud were actual violence and blood splatter. Back then, I dreamed of being a vet, so the thought of all that animal pain made me feel nothing but revulsion for what I once found beautiful.

I was reminded of this while watching Albert Serra's Afternoons of Solitude, a documentary on Peruvian-born "torero" Andrés Roca Rey which earned the Catalan director the biggest prize at this year's San Sebastián Film Festival. For once, I saw some of the beauty again, along with the brutality and the horror. I felt tears in my eyes and nausea erupt from within. Quite the cinematic experience…

It begins with red-on-black credits, a pregnant silence. Then comes the bull, black pelt painted amethyst in the faint moonlight. The beast's breath is the only sound the audience can hear. For a film that will contemplate the art of killing such animals, Afternoons of Solitude is particularly keen on perceiving its oxen majesty. Staring into its eyes, the camera almost seems to search for a feeling, an emotional dimension, a tragedy. And from one bold feat of image-making to a bold cut. The film goes from the bull's stare to the bullfighter's eyes, brow sweaty as he leaves the arena and goes to undress his "traje de luces." Underneath, the shirtsleeves and bone-white breeches are blood-stained. 

Before we even knew it, another of those bulls has been slain. But what about that cut from an animal visage to a human one? Is Serra equating the two entities, giving the same value to both lives? Mayhap, he is on the lookout for an empathetic bond with the beast that will accentuate the horror of the carnage. But there are other, less comfortable possibilities. After all, to define the bull and its killer as equals is a fool's errand. One animal knows the rite and reason for their fate. The other remains ignorant, stuck in a theater of death it never consented to. It's stuck in the position those bipedal knights have decreed. 

Yet another reading arises. To a certain degree, Serra's curious but detached gaze finds Andrés Roca Rey as impenetrable as the animals he so ceremoniously massacres. As an audience, we may project meaning and try to deduce expression, but there's a limit to what one can observe. Before the camera's inquiry, he's just like the bulls, an aesthetic phenomenon synthesized into the gorgeous moving image we call cinema. And what to make of its beauty? You can call Afternoons of Solitude an amoral film, but does that make it bad cinema? Must one agree with what a piece of art stands for to appreciate it? Must something be moral to be beautiful?

As one who ascribes himself to a formalist view of cinema, the conundrums of a formal masterpiece whose politics confound, mayhap disgust, has been a matter of much introspection for years. Serra's cinema brings it all to the forefront of the mind, eager for a confrontation. It certainly feels like a reckoning. When Afternoons of Solitude arrives at its first moment in the arena, such feelings only intensify. The camera is so close, the colors so exulted, that even young, foolish Cláudio wouldn't have been able to confuse the bloodshed for wet earth. Through Serra's audiovisual treatment, the carnage is a deep ruby, practically blazing.

In Pacifiction, cinematographer Artur Tort made Polynesian landscapes look irradiated. In Afternoons of Solitude, he makes every surface appear as if it's bleeding. Even the shadows have the pulpy dimension of fresh minced meat, glistening with its juices. These qualities are made more salient by framing and cutting choices Tort and Serra devised, working as co-editors this time around. They get so near the subjects as to dispel the simple spectacle of the dance. From a minimal distance, Roca Rey's expressions lose their nobility, becoming something altogether other – not quite feral, but certainly grotesque.

Both bull and bullfighter are organisms squashed between panes of glass under the filmmakers' microscope. As a director, Serra is curious rather than hectoring, a student of tradition willing to show its ugliness yet unwilling to denounce its wrongdoing. As an audience member, you'll have to decide if that's right or wrong, if you can accept cinema in these terms, or if you'll reject it outright. It's a Rorschach test in shades of red rather than the black ink blot. But even then, I'm not sure Afternoons of Solitude is a celebration to be debated. After all, it's unsparing in the detail of torn flesh, as eager to contemplate the embroidered costume of the bullfighter as to ponder the suffering of its victim. Incongruities abound.

Serra is further fascinated by the performance aspect, formalizing the killing into a collection of codified gestures. It's theater. No, with the emphasis on exaggerated gender, preening masculinity with arched backs and bulges forward, it's actually closer to a drag act. Under the spotlights, the blood glistens gold, and the manly form appears gilded. The long takes Serra privileges are obscene spectacles that demand you consider their contrasts, even their absurdities. Along with the pained animal body comes the matador's sculpted behind and artistically arranged bulge, ready to consume as much of the screen as the bull facing certain death.

"Life is worth nothing" and assertions of Roca Rey's masculine prowess resound on the soundtrack, all while the camera looks intently at the carcass being roped and dragged, humiliated one last time for the public's pleasure. What notions of masculinity are these that require wanton violence, such naked cruelty? By not looking away, Serra undercuts the folly. "You make a difference" says another member of the entourage, but what does the matador really do that makes a difference? What's the primordial appeal of bloodshed in these traditional contexts? Why is manliness validated by destructive acts? In Afternoons of Solitude, masculinity is a death cult.

Still, it should be clarified that Serra doesn't seem interested in making a discursive film, prescriptive or moralistic. His disinterest extends to the system he's depicting, and the individuals, too. There's nothing about the Peruvian bullfighter's personality or his inner self. He is the image in the arena and nothing else. For Serra's camera, he isn't allowed to be anything else. There are no interviews, no narration, no commentary imposed on the images. That's what matters – the images, their construction, and the reactions they produce. One can go as far as saying that Afternoons of Solitude is essentially about image-making rather than bullfighting. 

Consider the photoshoot interlude, tightly filmed with a telescopic lens. It feels like Serra is documenting wildlife rather than a glamour machine doing the dirty work of making marvel out of mayhem. In the arena, he also isolates the players, not just with proximity. The camera always points down, so it can only consider the bullfighter against the dirt. We never see the audience whose attention he glows under. And through this, though Primarily set in open spaces, Afternoons of Solitude becomes a claustrophobic watch. Similarly, while there's applause, Serra doesn't work according to its clamor. The frames are stark if splendorous, and the sound accompanying them is often mournful.

The contrast between the score and the arena's fanfare intensifies when the latter starts to erupt through the solemn soundscape. And in that dynamic, there's a reflection of how the entire movie machine works. The applause comes, the bull dies. Yet, the film ponders the torrents of red more than the human euphoria, white eyes unseeing as the animal gasps its last breath. By being so willfully repetitive, cyclical in structure, the film further draws attention to how these signages and cinematic elements are put together to suggest meaning. Serra, Tort, composers Ferran Font and Marc Verdaguer, along with a masterful sound team have conceived a work of pure cinema in all its iniquitous glory.

They have also produced what could be called a zoological snuff film elevated to the highest echelons of formal sophistication, a dispassionate craft that's maybe not so dispassionate after all. At the end of the rhetoric and interrogations, we return to a central question many won't be able to get past. Is Afternoons of Solitude an apologia for animal abuse? I'm not sure. It's a test for the audience, alright, but what exists in formal terms indicates an implicit study of antithetical ideas, even opposing views. Blood and sand and sparkle are all there, but so is torture, ever-present death and an agony that no roaring applause can conceal.

Afternoons of Solitude is playing in the Spotlight section of the NYFF. Distribution rights have been acquired by Films Boutique.