Gore's Glory

on Albert Serra's 𝘈𝘧𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘰𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘚𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘶𝘥𝘦

(from Afternoons of Solitude)

I DRAGGED a handful of loved ones to the Greene Naftali gallery in Chelsea to pay our respects to Harun Farocki’s installation Deep Play in the winter of 2008. On those white walls, the great German artist-filmmaker-theorist had mounted twelve different screens/projections, each confined to a fixed vantage point; in aggregate, they totaled twelve different POVs on the 2006 World Cup soccer final between France and Italy. So for example, one camera (Farocki’s own) remained rigidly pointed at the stadium from maybe a mile away, and it captured antlike spectators trickling in and out as the sky changed colors over the game’s one hundred and thirty-five minutes. Closer POVs were trained on individual players, on coaches, on crowds, or on broadcast TV systems.

Deep Play was an art exhibit about soccer but also a piece of widescreen interactive journalism, a kind of bowdlerized X-ray of then-modern spectatorship. And while this particular World Cup final had already gained international notoriety for French captain Zinedine Zidane’s headbutting of Italian captain Marco Materazzi, Farocki’s disentangling of the all-seeing apparatus that enabled its broadcast meant relegating the match’s most famous moment to just one of innumerable data points to be mixed and matched on the all-seeing timeline. It doesn’t take a Marshall McLuhan to recognize that our means of both making and sharing visual media, whether documentative or utterly bogus, have multiplied exponentially since 2006; today, the idea of a major television event broken down into its constituent camera angles feels quaintly pre-digital.

Memories of Deep Play resurfaced while watching Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude (Tardes de soledad), a documentary portrait of Peruvian-born torero (bullfighter) Andrés Roca Rey. Serra deprives the viewer of anything one might expect going into a “sports documentary”: there are no interviews, there’s no voiceover narration, no expository montage, no detailing of Rey’s childhood or introduction to bullfighting nor any real acknowledgement of his social life outside the world of bullfighting. So, stripped of these accoutrements, what’s left? Deep Play came to mind because Afternoons feels like a kind of inverse. Serra’s camera is obsessively trained on Rey. You hear the cheer of the crowds but never see their faces. The bulls in the arena have already been stabbed multiple times; Rey’s task is to finish them off while they are at their most fatigued (and thus, their most dangerous). There is no godlike hand at the control console, no relief found in cutting to something or somebody else. Somebody is smiling, but not the torero.

Taken in full, it’s a bit like ESPN directed by Andy Warhol, an exercise in minimalism against the current of ever-expanding digital maximalism. Whatever we learn about Rey, we learn from watching him at work which, necessarily, includes getting dolled up in traditional garb and no small amount of the hurry-up-and-wait bullshit immanent to sports (as well as filmmaking). After each match, Rey and his entourage load into a vehicle, but we never get an establishing shot from the outside. So it’s unclear whether it’s a bus, an SUV, a van or a limo. Serra repeats the same interior shot each time, with Rey focused on—or past—the camera, looking like Bill Murray in Wes Anderson’s The Life Acquatic with Steve Zissou. In the ring he looks like Warren Beatty sometimes, unafraid to make a fool of himself. Sometimes he looks like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. His handlers and sidekicks gas him up after the matches: You showed a huge pair of balls. Warrior, you are great! The people want you. It’s for your style. Slow motion. Life is nothing, you got balls! The extremity of such statements shows how high Serra might want to take us in his quest for eternal greatness. It’s hard not to wonder if Rey’s very real bravery is being put to the test purely for its own sake, unlike that of someone fighting in defense (allegedly or otherwise) of their homeland.

Like the dances between Rey and his doomed combatants, there’s a lot more to be said about Serra’s film as a portrait of male vanity, and of these elite group dynamics, especially versus the phantom crowd dynamics we hear, but never see, in the arena. An early-middle section exposes the way Rey’s posse talk about him—and the bulls—differently when he’s not around, his seat conspicuously empty as the anchor of the frame as we’ve come to expect it. Taken as a portrait of sychophancy, Serra’s film is rivaled only by Wolf Koenig and Roman Krotoir’s classic 1962 verité featurette Lonely Boy, about proto-Beatles-level superstar Paul Anka. I have no idea if Serra has seen it, but outside his new film, Lonely Boy helped me unlock the boys-club rituals of Marty Scorsese¹.

In her superb Running Away From Myself: A Dream Portrait of America Drawn From the Films of the Forties, the massively underrated critic and antiwar activist Barbara Deming mapped depictions of what is now called PTSD, in epochal Golden Era studio releases during and after the second Great War. To quote Deming:

Men die in these films, for this is war, but they fall on a battlefield bright with visions of the life they “almost happily” die to secure; each with his family photograph, his letter from sweetheart, wife or Mom, with news of the home town he is proud of, tucked in his pocket; or the page he has torn from a magazine—”Your Ideal Home”. “We shall utterly defeat the enemy,” the government film A Prelude to War quotes General Marshall. And at his words, a bright bright globe eclipses a dark.

Later,

…The emergency operation will never end. The camera cannot take its fill of that face, where teeth bite lips, eyes suddenly roll in a swoon (for this, name at random almost any film.) Here is no controlled rendering of the facts of war. The camera voluptuously involves us in the destructive moment, moves in too close and dwells overlong, inviting us to suffer in the ecstasy of dissolution, the thrill of giving it all up.

This compulsion, betraying itself in film after film, belies the bright tableaux arranged, the bright words carefully mouthed, and hints at some very different sense of the actuality of things, repressed but secretly insistent. And a long look confirms just this. The figure of the clear-browed soldier with the dream in his eyes turns insubstantial, and another figure claims attention, member of no happy clan, a figure of bitter aspect, withdrawn upon himself, who cries, “Don’t you ever wonder if it’s worth all this—I mean what you’re fighting for?”—who cries, “I stick my neck out for nobody… I’m not fighting for anything anymore, except myself!… All hail the happy days when faith was something all in one place!”

That last line comes from Rick (Humphrey Bogart) in Casablanca. Just as his yearning for “all in one place” doesn’t make him a fascist, Afternoons of Solitude is not reactionary or jingoistic. Rather, it addresses cultural heritage in form; it acknowledges the passage of time by dint of its existence.

A Spanish colleague who saw the film last weekend told me the commonsense feeling on the mainstream left is that the world has moved on, and the matches should be abolished in Spain the same way they are in Argentina, Cuba, Denmark, Canada and most other countries (as well as Mexico City, Catalonia and Barcelona). In Spain it’s a posh, controversial sport whose populist origins have been ceded to aristocracy. The fights are time-honored rituals, nonnegotiable crucibles of masculinity, bloody and breathtaking old-world grand guignol theater. Another anecdote: before Grasshopper Films picked Afternoons up for distribution, multiple friends told me it was the best film they had seen in 2024, with the caveat it was unlikely to play in the United States due to its unflinching brutality. Jokes about seeing it at Lincoln Center are usually accompanied with jokes about PETA protesters dumping blood on you as you leave the cinema.

I’ve read as little as possible about this movie, but the best negative review was from the beyond-redoubtable Brazilian critic Filipe Furtado, on Letterboxd:

Sadism in pretty pictures. Serra is obsessed with death and ways it can be aestheticized; he is also at heart a provocateur who probably stays too much time jet legging the international film circuit, so he frankly lacks the moral seriousness to reckon with something like this beyond thinking of the ways film apparatus can relate and mythologize the performance of bullfighting. One of the reasons I thought Pacifiction² was his best movie so far is that it erased the distance between Magimel’s agent of empire and Serra himself, Afternoons of Solitude might’ve been worthwhile if it did the same, but its distance mostly allows him and his audience off the hook, it's a vile movie about evil as spectacle for us but its updated take on bullfighting’s grotesquerie remains pure symptom.

Serra has cultivated a following within international cinema for his revisionist takes on holy cows such as Don Quixote, the Three Kings and Louis XIV. In 2014 I spent a long afternoon in the Lower East Side talking with him about Story of My Death, his (arguable) breakout which depicts an unholy meeting of Casanova and Dracula as the end of the Enlightenment and the beginning of Romanticism, to put a too-fine point on it. (We hung out at Cakeshop³.) As I understood it, Serra’s patented technique involved multiple cameras rolling in digital, so that scenes were blocked and documented in a way allowing traditional dramaturgies to get spiked, made slow, hyperrealistic and perhaps even boring. Young and stupid, I told myself Serra and I had hit it off, surely better than he had with other critics and interviewers. I remember being especially pleased with myself when he affirmed my description of his project as being “against fetishizing the past.”⁴ With his farts and shit jokes as signposts in the history of the life of the mind, Serra was all about taking history off the pedestal. And while Afternoons of Solitude doesn’t skimp on grime, mud, guts or blood, you have the feeling of watching “history” in media res, it’s all just too close to call beyond the disaster economics of who lived and who died. The film’s gnarliest moments require you to ask, “What just happened?” Once you start watching it’s impossible to stop, and once seen it’s hard to forget.

Whatever else needs to be said about the racist, revanchist, xenophobic tide sweeping Europe and the United States, it’s a reaction to the last several decades’ worth of globalization. Wages go down, the cost of living goes up, the cost of (some) goods is cheaper, national identity becomes fragmented by relentless exposure to the rest of the world (or at least, pointillized fragments of its representations via the internet), and beacons of cultural homogeneity such as a bullfight inevitably harken back to a simpler time. Serra loves jokes and joke-formats, thus, an action movie about banality. Lincoln Center programmer Dan Sullivan was the one who initially hipped me to Serra, and I kept recalling something he had said about the (relatively few) action sequences in Michael Mann’s Blackhat and Ferrari: “When they happen, it feels like the end of the fucking world.”

Like a witness’ phone, leaked police bodycam or security camera video, Serra’s film makes it hard to look away. Animal-like, it evinces no performative opinion about its subjects. At its most firing-on-all-cylinders moments it provides two and a half layers of spectatorship: there’s watching the bull, watching Rey, and watching Rey watch the bull. Our avatar Rey looks incapable of enjoying anything. Repressed. Pent-up. Insecure. Turgid. Afraid to say the wrong thing. Catholic.

I’ve spent a lot of time wondering if Serra’s foregoing of context/exposition is an absconding of responsibility, the kind of gimmickry that has reasonably dogged his mostly rapturous critical evaluation over the last decade. The older I get, the more haunted I am by Jimi Hendrix’s comments in a 1967 interview when asked about his guitar technique:

Gimmicks? Here we go again. I'm tired of people sayin' we rely on gimmicks. What is this? The world is nothin' but a big gimmick isn't it? Wars, napalm bombs and all that. People being burned-up on TV...

It’s a cliché for critics to say a specific fleeting image or moment conjures a whole world, but that’s almost what happened for me watching Rey kiss, and touch, a portrait of the Madonna and child three times before entering the ring, in one of Serra’s many paparazzi-esque static single shots. (“All hail those happy days when faith was something all in one place!”) Would seeing Rey using a smartphone shatter the sweeping mythos drilled in on by Serra? Or would it not make a bit of difference? Your mileage will vary.

I’ve referenced a lot of films trying to reckon with Afternoons of Solitude; Serra is, for all his high-art adjacency, also a creature of cinema. He knows how to make death look good. And instead of arguing the sadism of the bullfights gives Spain some kind of inconveniently truthful engine like, say, the violence defended by Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, he shows it as it is: an organic spectacle of national character, rooted in manufacturing consent and greasing the gears of industry. There are other examples, and we don’t always get a chance to look this close.

Learn about where to see Afternoons of Solitude here. Special thanks to Nico Pedrero-Setzer, Irene Rihuete Varea, Phil Coldiron and Rachel Yara.

Current Mood: Stunned 😵‍💫
Current Music: Matmos - Kendo for Yukio Mishima

1. This observation courtesy Glenn Kenny, who spoke at an event I organized with Vivien Goodman, Joseph di Mattia and Tom Sutpen at the late 92YTribeca, after a screening of Lonely Boy with Peter Watkins’ Privilege (which quotes it extensively in its depiction of celebrity-as-waking-nightmare). The good old days…

2. I’ve not seen Pacifiction (sorry!) but found great satisfaction in its embrace by Brad Pitt and David Fincher.

3. Serra was 38 at the time and when we stopped at the Iconic Magazine Shop on Bowery, he sifted through some glossy fashion rags before complaining: “This is a dictatorship of the young!”

4. For the same publication, Lucrecia Martel would kick off another indelible conversation by asking me: “What is history if not one big invention?”