24/09/2024 - The Catalonian filmmaker breaks down his way of understanding cinema and the creative process underpinning his new film, a bullfighting documentary portraying a matador and his entourage

(© Dario Caruso/Cineuropa)

Catalonian filmmaker Albert Serra talks to us about his way of understanding cinema and the creative process underpinning his new film, Afternoons of Solitude [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Albert Serra
film profile], a bullfighting documentary portraying a matador and his entourage. The film has been presented in the Official Section of the San Sebastián Film Festival.

Cineuropa: Afternoons of Solitude is a sort of exploration of the microcosm of bullfighting. Why were you interested in this particular world?
Albert Serra: Because I didn’t have any other topic quite as unique as this one close at hand. For Chinese or Russian people, it’s very easy to make documentaries because reality is stranger than fiction, as they say. But in civilised European countries, there are very few things left that still elude the bourgeois world of communication that we live in.

The feature follows the life of matador Andrés Roca Rey and his entourage over the course of one day of fighting. What piqued your interest in this, or what did you intend to narrate through this story?
Nothing – I didn’t intend anything, otherwise the documentary would not have been in the least bit interesting. Everything was there just waiting to be discovered, and the search was conducted with the camera, not with words or preconceived ideas. I ended up recounting what I found, or at least the most intense and sophisticated things that I came across – the least boring stuff, really.

You portray your protagonist like a kind of classical hero who wants to live on eternally through his feats during his lifetime. Were you always intending to make such a portrait?
Yes, because the desire to transcend the banality of everyday life always seems like an admirable goal in any circumstances. And if one does so with feats that spill the least blood possible, as in this case, then so much the better.

Why did you call the film Afternoons of Solitude?
Because I thought the matador and his entourage were lonely. I changed my mind on this several times during the edit. But in the end, I realised that they were indeed lonely (also metaphorically, in relation to the modern world), and I kept the title.

It revolves around bullfights (as well as what comes before and after them), and there are many close-ups of everything that happens during such events. Why did they interest you on the narrative or cinematographic level?
I’m interested in the most invisible things, the things that nobody has seen or heard, the things that can only be captured by the camera lens or a cordless microphone that you end up forgetting about after a few hours… Simply because it’s more original or even because, at some points, it’s something people have never seen before.

This is not your typical documentary, in the classical sense. Was this singular narrative also something you didn’t think about beforehand, and which gradually emerged during the process of creating the film?
It all emerged as the process went on, much like the fact that the unwitting narrators were the members of the entourage, with their comments or dialogue. Before shooting, logically, I didn’t know that they would be so interesting and that they could provide some structure for the action. They also surprised me. I use what fascinates me, basically.

I see a certain continuity or similarity in the aesthetic and the style of your films, in terms of the use of colour, sound, time, tone and so on (above all, it brings to mind Pacifiction [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Albert Serra
film profile]). Is the story there to serve the aesthetic, or is it also a way of digging deeper?
The story is useless – I don’t even know what you’re referring to. I work with images like poets work with words. There’s a sort of immanence and reversibility in them, but at the same time, there’s an inevitability as well. They only mean what they mean in that specific context of the film.

The feature ends up being something akin to a journey or a hypnotic immersion in the world of bullfighting. Were you seeking such a form of immersion?
Yes, I am drawn in by anything hypnotic; I have no interest in reflection or didacticism. And if it has a psychedelic edge, so much the better.

(Translated from Spanish)