Afternoons of Solitude (Albert Serra, 2024).
Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon (1932), his book of reportage on bullfighting, was received skeptically by some critics upon its publication. When reviewing it in The New York Times, R. L. Duffs contended that the work’s long-winded spiritualism was at odds with the writer’s habitually lapidary prose. Catalan director Albert Serra is also a self-described admirer of the sport; it repels some even while it mesmerizes others with its peculiar mixture of artful pageantry and shocking gore. His new nonfiction film Afternoons of Solitude (2024) eschews the Hemingway-esque temptation to dress up in philosophical garb a spectacle that, at its core, stems as much from crude, irrational impulses as it does from the desire to touch the sublime through a proximity to violence.
In Afternoons, whose title professes its affinity for Hemingway’s rendering of tauromaquia, Serra follows the Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, observing him mostly in the ring in Bilbao, Madrid, Seville, and other cities over a period of three years. The solitude in question is both Rey’s and the bull’s, but taken even further, it encapsulates Serra’s own uncompromising obsession with the infinite plasticity and manifold complexity of the image, which often sets him apart from his contemporaries. Here, Serra avails himself of the latest digital technology, discovering and structuring the film in the editing process. The film’s sensual cinematography—by Artur Tort, who also shot Serra’s previous films Roi Soleil (2018), Liberté (2019), and Pacifiction (2022)—at times comes so close to the man and beast that viewers hear their heavy breathing, and can see sweat trickling down Rey’s face, the fierce grimaces transfiguring his visage, and the air bubbles of the blood speckles shimmering on the wounded animal’s coat. In such instances, the two figures’ isolation is so stark and seemingly absolute that one might indeed be persuaded to believe that bullfighting is an epic battle between two noble opponents, locked in an infernal contest of wills, the bull storming furiously, the man’s hips brushing the animal’s massive torso. But Serra also uses this uncanny closeness—in contrast to the wider shots more customary when bullfights are filmed for television—to peek behind the performer’s bellicose mask. The sound mix captures, for instance, the voices of his assistants to ardently egging him on, offering tactical advice, underlining the reality that the game isn’t equal—it’s a team effort against one. Serra plants a camera in the front seat of the bullfighter’s limousine, where his team comes across as aggrandizing sycophants—“What balls you have!” “Superman!” “What a great man you are!”—in bursts of adrenaline fueled by shock, which nevertheless add a satiric touch, dispelling the frightful aura in the ring.
Bullfighting has recently been banned in parts of Spain, due to the suffering inflicted on the animals. Not surprisingly, then, Serra’s film sparked controversy; animal-rights groups protested ahead of its release. Both sides, pro and against, will find here fodder for their arguments. Perhaps Serra’s film can be best understood as a plastic homily to an ancient art form that’s outlived its time. Whether it survives, and I doubt it will, is out of the filmmaker’s hands. He doesn’t hide its brutality, but seems doubtful about expunging all collective experience of ritualized violence. The contrast between the mediated forms of extreme violence that permeate social media and the embodied spectacle of violence, staged as an encounter with the Real, is beyond the scope of the film, but certainly informs Serra’s thinking.
Serra’s insistence that the image comes first, and that cinema is, above all other considerations, a plastic form, chafes against most contemporary sensibilities—certainly with the notion of political correctness, or of shielding the audience from shock. Though it is Serra’s first work of nonfiction, Afternoons of Solitude doesn’t aim to reveal the hidden truths of bullfighting; instead, Serra immerses viewers in the spectacle as well as in its contradictions, as if to say that some cultural phenomena are so rooted in the psyche, and cut so deep, that they cannot be easily dismantled by reason.
I met with Serra at the 72nd San Sebastian Film Festival, where Afternoons had its world premiere and won the Golden Shell. In our conversation, Serra referenced the painters Salvador Dali and Francis Bacon as two artistic guiding lights. With his quirky mustache and playful antics, Dali may seem today like an uncle with a proclivity for pranks, but the visceral brutality of Bacon’s giant chunks of human flesh—torn, sullied, yet exuding an uncanny eroticism—indeed matches the spirit of Serra’s new film. In it, blood has viscosity and volume. Death is a sacrificial spectacle for Bacon and Serra, and both, with keen sensitivity to their chosen mediums, convey a profound sense of time. In Serra’s film, death is about stalling, duration; waiting for it is horrid. The Spanish poet Federico García Lorca may have captured this feeling best in his four-part poem, Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, which also laments “the bull alone with lifted heart / at five o’clock … When the icy sweat began to flow […] and death laid eggs in the wound.”
Afternoons of Solitude (Albert Serra, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: There was quite a bit of talk in the press conference about how different it was for you to make a documentary, with the process being more chaotic, for instance, having to shoot with three independent cameras. Yet it seems that in your entire career, you’ve always instilled a bit of controlled chaos on your sets, seeking situations that feel raw and unscripted.
ALBERT SERRA: Everybody said in the beginning that I was applying a documentary method to fiction, which is quite rare, because with fiction people assume that you project your preconceived ideas, imprinting them on the film. This was never my case. I was born with digital technology—I started making films with a digital camera around 2000—so for me it was always about finding something interesting [by looking] through the camera. I guess it was a pretty modest point of view that I didn’t appreciate myself. Otherwise, I find having an idea already in your mind and then merely depicting it on film banal. Asking actors to express something you already have in mind is not rich enough, but if you just start shooting, observing what’s in front of the camera, and then have the energy to transform it into a fiction or a fantasy, with mise-en-scène and casting, then you arrive at something that’s not banal.
Casting is important, because there are some people who expand the limits of their personality to create work that’s more ambiguous. In this sense, Afternoons of Solitude, though it’s a documentary, is similar to what I did before. I never speak with my actors prior to shooting—and in this film, I almost never spoke with the bullfighter, Andrés Roca Rey. It feels normal for me to assume the risk of this kind of method because I’ve been doing it for a long time.
NOTEBOOK: Considering that you’re always looking in your actors for something raw and unfiltered, I guess you found the ideal actor in the bull—as crazy at that sounds?
SERRA: Yes. For instance, you can’t know before the shoot when the bull will become interesting—the bull is at first, I don’t know, like an object, it is part of the show, but when it suddenly looks into the camera it becomes like a mirror. And it’s not something you can predict ahead of time, abstractly. You need to see it and recognize the value in the complexity of the real image, otherwise [the film] will be very schematic, revolving around one idea instead of many ideas.
NOTEBOOK: I’m intrigued by the way in which you court a degree of banality in your films. In Afternoons, for instance, there’s the team’s small talk in the car, which is much more prosaic than the rest of the film, even though it frames bullfighting as a business and adds some humor. How did you decide to put the camera in the car to film the team as they are driving to and from fights?
SERRA: We made sure the camera was always there, because I thought that it would be interesting not to have a camera operator. Nowadays, you put a microphone without a lavalier on your subjects and then they just forget it. In the scene, Rey actually complains about the light that keeps shining in his face the whole time. His team knows that the light is there because of the film, of course, but then they forget the reason almost immediately, and talk about it as if there were no camera, just the light. That’s the magic of cinema.
We live in an almost permanent representation. We are so much more conscious that our private life is also a public life. But from the beginning, it was my dream for my private and my public life to be the same; I don’t see any difference. I always dreamed of this kind of total transparency, and now we’re living inside it. Thanks to social media, everybody is used to showing [their lives] all the time. I can’t even take credit for my subjects’ forgetting it.
Afternoons of Solitude (Albert Serra, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: You said that you realized these conversations in the car were important only once you were in the editing process?
SERRA: Of course you create the film’s actual structure in the editing. You give it depth and identity. You create a fantasy. To an extent, you also do it while filming, by being passionate about your work, and by shooting and shooting, not getting desperate, or discrediting what you shot as nothing, trusting that your casting is good. There is a certain fatality about it—the shoot has a destiny—but you don’t know how it will turn out, not even during the bullfight.
NOTEBOOK: But you do know that the bull will die.
SERRA: Well, you don’t! Not always. There have been a lot of bullfighters, and very famous ones, who have been killed by the bull. In the film, Andrés comes very close to being seriously wounded.
NOTEBOOK: I wonder what it was like to film him. You said that you don’t speak much with your actors anyway, so the documentary method isn’t that foreign to you. His being a performer, though—one who’s very conscious about playing a role, and someone who puts on a show in the arena—does seem to blur the line between cinema’s real and performative aspects.
SERRA: But this blurring is part of his personality. With actors, I can perhaps manipulate the scene, because there’s an agreement that it’s a fiction film, and the actors are getting paid. Here it’s a documentary, so the team accepts the deal, but it’s a different process, people are more interested in being themselves. That’s why I chose a subject that’s already very dramatic, because I cannot control what the person does or how he behaves. You just have to be patient.
There is, of course, a history here. In Rey’s case, you might be wondering why he’s doing this. In the past, a lot of bullfighters were poor, but he already comes from a wealthy family, so he doesn’t need the money. Nowadays, many living bullfighters have already reached a high status [in society], and many bullfighting schools are very expensive. But what’s interesting is the conquering of fear, a sense of commitment, and of duty, a sense of serving a tradition that’s part of your past. I don’t know Rey’s main reason, but at any rate in my film it’s not that simple. The film is almost an abstraction, separate from Rey’s reasoning or his choice.
NOTEBOOK: In this sense, you go against the impulse common amongst documentary filmmakers to contextualize a subject’s actions or to “humanize” him, as we say. Your films often revolve around spectacles—of power, of desire. Does he interest you more as the center of a spectacle?
SERRA: Yes, and of the power of will, determination.
NOTEBOOK: Because of his death drive, as Freud might say?
SERRA: I don’t know, perhaps. At first, I wanted to also film another bullfighter and make the film revolve around this parallelism between the two stories, but in the end, I realized that Rey was right [for the film], because of a certain mystery, it’s never just because he’s photogenic.
NOTEBOOK: Watching him has a certain aesthetic pleasure about it, but he’s also like a high priest of bullfighting. His behavior is sometimes nearly ascetic.
SERRA: Ascetic, yet combined with the aesthetics of bullfighting that are very baroque, very gorgeous from the purely plastic point of view.
NOTEBOOK: Such as the sparkly brocade of the bullfighter’s costumes?
SERRA: Everything. That is the paradox. He’s very ascetic, almost like a monk, but on the other hand, bullfighting as a representation has a power for the audience. For instance, Rey is wearing clothes that are extremely uncomfortable for doing any kind of physical activity—it makes no logical sense, but it’s part of the [performance]. At the same time, I think that there’s a mystery there, it’s in his personality, it’s visually impressive, quite dangerous, and ritualistic.
You can see bullfighting in the United States and it’s very dangerous, but not as dangerous as here, and not as ritualistic—there’s no killing. But that’s the beauty of the [Spanish] bullfight from the anthropological point of view. I thought that perhaps in some countries the audiences would not understand the violence in the film, but international festivals take my point of view as an anthropological one—something that is outside the debate that we’re currently having in Spain, which is a moral debate, around the idea that this tradition comes from the past and that our society needs to modernize. But from the anthropological point of view, it is interesting.
NOTEBOOK: But it seems that what interests you most is actually choreography. The way you film the bullfighting through close-ups, for instance, it’s as if it were a dance.
SERRA: Of course, the image is about the face and the figure, but it’s also about movement, space, and time. There’s choreography and sensuality of movement. In fact, in the psychological elements as well, because the bullfighter is isolated from the group, but at the same time they are all part of a team.
NOTEBOOK: You used a very striking phrase in the press conference to describe your main intention in portraying both the violence and, paradoxically, the terrible beauty of watching a bullfight: the plasticity of blood.
SERRA: Of blood and flesh.
NOTEBOOK: We take the presence of this kind of plasticity for granted in contemporary art, or in the visual arts, in general. In the press conference, you mentioned Goya, for instance. Certainly I see an acceptance of it in contemporary photography and art, especially when it comes to depicting the abject.
SERRA: If you have real blood and real flesh, it means that there is some abjection. In this sense, I come from the art world. Not in the sense that my background was in art, but that I was always interested in avant-garde artists, from the surrealists to Francis Bacon.
NOTEBOOK: It’s interesting you mention Bacon. His paintings are not even so much about the flesh but the moment of abjection when human flesh becomes meat. It’s very violent.
SERRA: For me, that’s part of the game. As you say, what we accept in painting or photography is very different from what we accept in moving images. There’s a morality in the moving image, when we make sure that we take time, for instance, not just to take a picture of the fight, but also to take in the meaning when you see that life is abandoning the bull. And in all the other movements. I don’t know, but for me, it’s not a problem [to film this way].
Afternoons of Solitude (Albert Serra, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: You expose your audience to the aesthetic experience of death—the sensual glimmer of blood, for instance, its seduction. This seems to build on your depiction of the abject in Liberté. You take the risk of claiming the supremacy of the plastic image—or perhaps, you seek it?
SERRA: In the end, perhaps some viewers will be offended by the film, but without the [violent] scenes, it would have been superficial, concentrating on the positive things, or on trying not to annoy anyone. At the same time, there’s never any provocation in my films. There are some things that I like, but I’m not filming to be arty, or provocative. It’s about form.
Blood is part of Afternoons, but I keep it there only to the extent that it’s part of the work, making it realistic, and interesting. In the rushes, I had much more violent material, for instance, images of vomiting blood, but I didn’t use them because it would have looked like [I’m just portraying] how tragic a life is or simply being provocative. I prefer to assume a more formalist point of view. Of course, this also creates a paradox—that’s the whole point—because flesh and blood are a very rough, concrete material, but in cinema, I don’t know why, but we’re somehow not used to seeing them. They expand, become unreal, an element of fantasy. This paradox is what I like in cinema and it was very important for me [to establish it] in the editing.
NOTEBOOK: Would you consider presenting your film at some point as an installation?
SERRA: Yes, it could be. Though I’ve been told in the art world not to touch this subject matter, even if it’s part of the past, unless you make a very anthropological or critical work.
It’s true that, if you see Afternoons as an outsider—someone who’s not Spanish—it is, in a way, anthropological for you, because it doesn’t concern you as a lived experience. You see it more as a show inside the cinema, purely cinematographic. And that’s fine too. You can approach it from the visual angle. If it wasn’t there, I would have never made the film.
Of course, for me, as a Spaniard, there are a lot of sharper elements that touch me, because I see and feel them in the streets. The power of the will or the experience of fear are universal themes—we all experience fear and ask ourselves how to control it—but the subject of the fanatic elements of bullfighting is very Spanish. It’s the feeling that life is nothing, and yes, perhaps it also touches the fanatic in me. I like living in France a lot, and the French cinema is very important to me, but I’m Spanish! I cannot avoid it. I am also a fanatic. It was Dali who said, “I had to come myself to France to put on the table a big piece of horrible, bloody flesh. Meat.” I’m not that pretentious [laughs], but it fits my character. I feel close to this idea—a bit to a suicidal tendency. You know, the Spanish dictator Franco sent troops to fight with Hitler’s soldiers in the Second World War, and Hitler said the Germans were shocked and very happy to fight alongside them, because the Spanish did not protect themselves. They would leap from the trenches.
NOTEBOOK: So it's an image of rushing toward death that enthralls you?
SERRA: It’s the irrational. We are part of this irrational feeling expressed in the bullfight.
NOTEBOOK: I guess that’s the fascination with Surrealism, which is having a comeback.
SERRA: It’s a fascination with the atavistic. For this reason there are a lot of shots in the film where you don’t see the audience or the arena, not even the team. You only see the bull, the fighter, and the sand and the sun. It looks like the fighter and the bull could be in the desert somewhere. Now or 2000 years ago. That is the loneliness I portray. They live in a bubble. And maybe so do we. Perhaps we’re the lucky ones, not having to fight.