The Monstrous Screen

This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the idea of the monstrous.

This final session is centred on High Roads (Giuliana Racco, 2022), a film which displaces the gaze, shifting it from the major accounts of genocide in Palestine towards daily forms of resistance. By way of four Palestinian women who play sport, breathe, and practice other bodily disciplines in a context marked by Israeli military occupation, the film shows how care, persistence and community-building can become political practices. High Roads, therefore, connects with the idea of the “magic yes” via the decision to keep on producing well-being, movement and ties in conditions that conspire against it. It also puts forward a form of decentralisation: resistance appears not in institutions or official discourses, but in bodies, affects and shared gestures.

The session unfolds through films that practise ways of deviating from the institutional axis and activate other modes of looking, playing, resisting and organising collectively. Through masks, altered rules, corporeal fictions and daily practices of care, the pieces work with situations where an acceptance of the improbable or the strange is a kind of “magic yes”: a gesture which allows something to be displaced and transformed within a context of hegemony.

The museum thus no longer appears as a fixed place from which to order culture, becoming instead a space traversed by other rules, temporalities and ways of inhabiting the commons. The films assembled in the session displace the gaze towards what normally remains outside: peripheral territories, hybrid practices and clumsy gestures which, however, are full of intent or forms of organisation distanced from dominant codes. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, the rough, the precarious and the strange appear here as legitimate forms of making and showing culture.

The idea is less about affirming a new centrality than opening a question about what happens when central authority is destabilised and other sensibilities, bodies and imaginaries enter the stage. Films that, rather than offering closed responses and looking for consensus, experiment with different ways of inhabiting the museum and producing common space. 

This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.

The third session gazes at film as a place from which to dismantle the idea of one sole history and one sole time. From a decolonial and queer perspective, it explores films which break the straight line of past-present-future, which mix memories, slow progress and leave space for rhythms which customarily make no room for official accounts.  Here the images open cracks through which bodies, voices and affects appear, disrupting archive and questioning who narrates, and from where and for whom. The proposal is at once simple and ambitious: use film to imagine other modes of remembering, belonging and projecting futures we have not yet been able to live. 

This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.

Session number two looks to approach film as a place from which cultural work is made visible and processes of production engage in dialogue with artistic creation. From this premise, the session focuses on exploring how audiovisual content is produced, assembled and distributed, from the hands that handle the images to the bodies that participate in its circulation. The aim is to reflect on the invisible effort, precarity and forms of collaboration that uphold cultural life, that transform the filmic experience into an act that recognises and cares for common work.   

Building on the idea of “the monster of work”, EquipoMotor opens up a dialogue on how the museum might become “a little more Frankenstein” by addressing the material conditions that reproduce, among other things, situations such as those reflected in Get into The Zone, the piece selected by the intergenerational group. The session seeks to continue inhabiting friction, to raise uncomfortable questions and to refine the language with which to imagine futures in which workplace malaise is not silenced but organised.

Get into The Zone is a video essay by Juan David Galindo that explores states of intensive concentration associated with work and leisure in digital environments. The title draws on an expression used in programming to describe a state of productive hyperfocus, linking this condition to contemporary diagnoses and forms of distress such as ADHD, burnout syndrome, anxiety, depression and hyperstimulation.

Galindo’s proposed trajectory combines narrative and conceptual elements. It connects the use of stimulants — from amphetamine-derived pharmaceuticals to coffee, tea, yerba mate and taurine-based drinks — with the economic and cultural history of these substances. It also relates these practices to screen-based work dynamics, video games, electronic music and forms of leisure shaped by continuous stimulation. The author’s personal experience functions here as a guiding thread, situating these processes within a broader social and historical framework.

This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.

This first session explores freakiness as methodology, a way to approach film and museum from experimentation, anomaly and deviation from established canons. Film is understood as a space of essay, where images, sounds and narratives move out of place to open other forms of critical reading, question norms and place the established under strain. This is the framework in which the group agrees to begin from dissent and formulate an initial question: Which monsters already inhabit the institution? 

Buenos días España shows how the Brotherhood of Ancient Legionary Knights of Barcelona repeatedly carry out their rituals and military codes of conduct every Sunday, demonstrating how these practices keep far-right ideologies alive. The piece triggers a kind of gaze and tension that interests this group and steers the conversation towards how the abject can inhabit apparent normality.

In The Party, actor Hrundi V. Bakshi (Peter Sellers) is mistakenly invited to a glamorous dinner party in Hollywood. His curiosity and two left feet lead to one funny mishap after the other. During the soiree he consoles Michèle, a young actress who has been fired by her producer, and the chaos gathers momentum when Bakshi accidentally opens a retractable floor, making the guests fall into a swimming pool. A small hippie-style elephant gatecrashes the party, brought by a group of young people, and Bakshi asks the guests to wash the elephant as it is a sacred animal in his country. The house fills with soap suds, culminating in a wackily chaotic party.  

When Stanley Kubrick was once asked who Peter Sellers was, he replied: “There is no such person as Peter Sellers”. The Party is one of the most widely recognised comedies in the history of film, its director Blake Edwards and the English actor making an entertaining critique of a fading conservative society. The cultural revolutions of the 1960s fit into the container of a choppy swimming pool: people from high society, an elephant, a Russian ballet, waiters, beatnik youth… similar to Sellers’s own identity: an empty vessel that can be refilled. In the film, Edwards tapped into the ingenious actor’s innate improvisation and the swimming pool as a container for revolutionary intent.

A couple of families spend the summer in a country cottage. The relationship between them exposes a crisis. The alcoholism of Mecha (Graciela Borges) and Gregorio (Martín Adjemián) becomes clear, leading to a drift in the education of their children and impacting relationships of respect and affect. Weariness expresses the lackadaisical environment.   

In La ciénaga Lucrecia Martel approaches the decadence of a middle-class Argentinian family. The pool of dirty, stagnant water reflects the economic and social collapse of a whole country, yet reflects more than economic crisis as it becomes a murky well feeding off the pain of those living in the house. An erstwhile space of joy, the swimming pool becomes a reflection of adult depression, resulting in apathy. And the children, especially the girls, seem to be the only people awake in this drift. Barring a flicker of unawareness, the young people immerse themselves in rainwater or the water from the river, in water that flows, but are cautious of getting too close to the swimming pool.

A couple with three adult children live in a modern country cottage. A large swimming pool takes centre stage in a sizeable garden. The property is skirted by a large fence that blocks a view of the outside. Here, the father has educated his children without outside contact, maintaining their belief in a false world: aeroplanes fall in the garden like toys and they must act like dogs to defend themselves from the ferocious cats that surround the house. The promise of going out into the world when they lose their dogtooth is proof of their maturity. 

Lanthimos builds a world that is surreal, comical and terrible. The swimming pool is the house’s central element, a limited, controlled space assimilated like the sea, yet under the father’s supervision. A space of imagination, but with sinister intentions: the children are indoctrinated under the water as they believe in a better world. Far from reality. The swimming pool’s limits are the limits of their freedom, a false state of well-being expressed in the weightless bodies in the water. The liquid element is an analgesic magma with the power to educate offspring under the latent fear of a shark bite.

The young, bright Bella (Yanina Kasheva), after unforeseen heartbreak at her graduation party, meets Apostol (Kosta Tsonev), a reserved architect, and Boyan (Kliment Denchev), a comedy actor who is cynical about his country. The three characters climb up to a diving board in a municipal swimming pool, where they begin a strange relationship of friendship, love and despair which reflects a generational clash.  

Binka Zhelyazkova, the great enfant terrible of Eastern European cinema, critic of the communist system and widely acclaimed film-maker beyond Bulgarian borders, made in The Swimming Pool a masterly metaphor for a country in decline. The public pool symbolises a closed, immovable enclosure where society is festering. From the height of a diving board she sees, in a panoptic view, the different generations living underneath a limited space. On one side, older people attempt to preserve the old revolutionary spirit with constant collective swimming exercises while, on the other, young people don’t hide the desire for freedom that remains unrealised. The result is an ideological clash in how to act and move in the enclosure, unearthing vast hypocrisy in the lost ideals of socialism, reflected in the total apathy of youth. The Swimming Pool for Zhelyazkova is a reflection of the disillusionment and existential void of a whole country and system.

The characters played by Alain Delon (Jean-Paul) and Romy Schneider (Marianne) experience their love in apparent splendour. A sun-drenched house, a blissful swimming pool, beautiful bodies, sexuality in abundance. The visit of Harry (Maurice Ronet), a successful musician, friend of Jean-Paul and ex-lover of Marianne, accompanied by his young and beautiful daughter Penélope (Jane Birkin), rocks their relationship, bringing to light the jealousy and insecurities of each one in a dark game of possession and male rivalry. 

If there was a definition of the glistening blue pool in this sexual thriller, it would be the paradise of Adam and Eve, represented by the shots of happiness of Romy Schneider and Alain Delon in this swimming pool on France’s Côte d’Azur. The appearance of these two beautiful creatures kissing semi-naked by the water is one of film’s resonant images. The paradise cannot be fractured, not even by death. As in the crossing of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where humanity’s first lovers bathed naked in the water, innocent to their imminent end, the reflection of the crystalline water of The Swimming Pool shows this game, and the deep traumas which, under this mantle, are hidden in the amorous relationships and limits that only love is capable of breaking to solve.  

In this session both endings to the film are screened: the original version, open and symbolic, and the Spanish version, marked by censorship during Francoism, and its sequence for a Spanish premiere — a stereotypical and reductive vision reflecting the sociological condition of the country.