Perhaps Albert Serra is right, and future cinema audiences will pay money just to suffer. “More money than now, because only when you suffer do you feel something,” he tells us in a memorable interview we conducted on a rainy morning at the last festival.
However, the 49-year-old Catalan already offers us a small glimpse of this cinema of the future in his own work. The 165 minutes of PACIFICTION—his most elaborate film to date, structured in long, often emphatically theatrical sequences—also divided the Cannes audience in 2022 into two camps. Some gave up halfway through, but those who stayed were rewarded for their investment of time at the end: a raw, unrestrained sensuality literally bursts from the images when the waves in the sea off Tahiti roll across the screen.
On the surface, it is about the tactics of a French high commissioner in the current late phase of colonialism. Subliminally, however, it is about forces that only cinema can both reveal and tame. His latest film, TARDES DE SOLEDAD – AFTERNOONS OF SOLITUDE, which won him the main prize at the San Sebastian Film Festival and celebrated its German premiere at the FILM FESTIVAL COLOGNE 2024, directly addresses the pain of spectacle. In his first documentary film, he devotes himself to bullfighting, the ritualized violence par excellence, with agonizing sobriety. He sees no romanticized melancholy in the loneliness of the torero. “It is a prerequisite for his work.”
The same applies to Serra's idea of the creative individual. Perhaps he would have liked to have lived in the 1960s, when the Nouvelle Vague was also a topic of discussion outside the film world, but those days are gone. “It would be nice to rely on an artistic group, but I don't see one anywhere.” For the film artist Serra, who completed 100 days of filming in 100 days at documenta 13 in 2012, avant-garde is a lone struggle: “All that matters now is the artistic form. It's intimate, you have to do it for yourself and you can't rely on anyone else.”
