58 In between

Few aesthetic practices bring us as close to the experience of travelling as drifting through film stories during the hundred years of the cinema (à la Godard). Leaving one film to enter another, we are thus submerged in that fast flow of time and space constructed for our eyes: even though this drift inevitably nowadays includes rejecting the luminous transparency characteristic of the celluloid film and depends on a rather dull reproduction that is the result of the proliferation of the digital video disc.

Yet, whether it is at the cinema, on the television or computer, what do we see on the screen? What we see is that there is an agitated world before us in the image. Both in the past and in the present.

André Bazin said (and Víctor Erice recently reminded us of it at Arteleku) that there are filmmakers that believe in image, and filmmakers that believe in reality and are confident about it. In any case, the filmmaker’s goal would involve catching the life inherent to that agitated world (even if it is a life that will always end up escaping, inexorably, like sand through your fingers). Starting from there, we can consider the very time of the account (whether fiction or a documentary) as time open to that life, that agitated world, leaving us in the hands of fate. If we agree with Erice that the contemporary film experience is twilight in nature, in line with a time of a civilising twilight, we only have two alternatives: either intone a heart-felt and nostalgic requiem for film making, or learn to appreciate the beauty of the world again, even in the framework of a dominantly audiovisual spectacular setting, where we have lost the distance needed for the production. And even so, from that loss of distance, learn to be able to appreciate the beauty, while truly trusting (a la Rossellini) reality.

And we are, clearly, still too young for the requiem.

GABRIEL VILLOTA TOYOS