Playback: The Sublime Image

— With a presentation and talk by Manel Muntaner 

The film series closes with a dystopian vision of the 1980s, a piece which is regarded as a cult work in Spanish video and hitherto one of the most forgotten. In Especial 84, Manel Muntaner intermingles key passages from George Orwell’s 1984 with contemporary images of surveillance, domination, violence, resistance and subjugation. The video recalls the dark side of the 1980s, a time of neo-conservative shifting in international politics and the AIDS pandemic, by way of a carefully chosen selection of fictional extracts and real news, apocalyptically narrated with a voiceover that seems to turn Orwell’s warning into an urgent prophecy.

The sixth session is a return to video’s narrative dimension at its most cinematic, while also incorporating, with maturity, the traits of the medium — collage, the rupture of a film grammar and the nature of recording lived experience — through the screening of two cult medium-length films. In Pornada (a wordplay with “porn” and “working day”) the inhabitants of an unusual Castilian town labour to get a telephone service as they dig their own grave in a local cemetery for entertainment; Hispanic Surrealism, a reflection on Spain’s rural exodus and humour along the lines of José Luis Cuerda are concentrated in this unique video by Javier Codesal, a milestone in the medium. The work of Manuel Abad, meanwhile, is a tragic and melancholy meditation on suicide in Galicia using the aesthetics of collage that is characteristic of video.

Video-Nou (1977–1979) was a Barcelona collective that used video as a medium for criticism, participation and social intervention during the Transition to democracy in Spain, their work committed to horizontal communication and the collective production of videos with communities. The practice of the collective — made up of Carles Ameller, Genís Cano, Albert Estival, Xefo Guasch, Marga Latorre, Pau Maragall, Lluïsa Ortínez, Lluïsa Roca and Joan Úbeda — made video a popular tool with which to recognise, through collective voices, dissipated authorships and natural performers, the nascent society at the time. This session presents a compilation of the collective’s best works, from neighbourhood life and street assemblies to developmentalism in Barcelona, its environmental consequences and the new political landscape. A fresco of 1970s Spain.

— With a presentation and talk by Julián Álvarez 

How does video’s new gaze recognise space in its different dimensions? Batlàntic puts forward a tangible representation of financial abstraction in contemplating on the glass architecture of a multinational bank a superimposed formula to calculate value. Fàbriques is a fascinating example of urban architecture, a drift through the factories of the Barcelona area of Poblenou before it underwent radical gentrification. As if in an exercise by Georges Perece, describing the same square over and over, Línia 39 puts forward a videographic panorama to exhaust the gaze in one place: twenty-four hours in the plaza de Rovira i Trias in Barcelona. Moreover, in Indian Circle Eugènia Balcells approaches a similar exercise to early Chantal Akerman in turning the camera into a mechanical eye of domestic intimacy, in stills of life that occur between unalterable movements of the camera.

The third session gathers youth music subcultures from the mid-1980s, a vibrant time for music video language, exploring how music, partying and night-life encapsulate a profound desire for total change, reflected in the formal experiments of the works here. The Basque radical rock of La Polla Records (Juan José Narbona with Txus), Hertzainak (Josu Zabala with Mata a tu viejo) and Kortatu (Tipula Beltza with Sarri, Sarri) with latent terrorist conflict (Ramón de Vargas with Canciones vascas), mixed with the telluric, histrionic Galician punk of Os Resentidos and Antón Reixa in Abdul, a music video with scenography by artists Menchu Lamas and Antón Patiño, and Alicia en Galicia Caníbal, a music video of Galician identity seen through the lens of counterculture via the track “Galicia cannibal”. The session concludes with Andalusian folklore in the witty, night-time style of Círculo Vicioso in Temperamento cañí.

A programme threaded together by the mise en scène, the masquerade, the costume, pastiche and aesthetic saturation. Regina Álvarez, in a pioneering and little-known exercise in the female gaze, studies, via the pose, the construction of femininity in canonical cinema. Antonio Cano and Pedro Garhel, for their part, film a performance for camera developed at ARCO 1985, whereby Garhel and Rosa Galindo dance around post-minimalist sculptures with loud colours. José Ramón Da Cruz develops a psychodrama laden with aestheticism between a dancer and a person with reduced mobility. Finally, El Hortelano, an iconic painter from Madrid’s Movida movement, makes in Koloroa an impossible news bulletin, which, in topsy-turvy Spanish, he presents with Ouka Leele and artists from the time like Ceesepe, Nazario and Jaume Sisa. A method that would inspire Almodóvar in Kika (1993).

— With a presentation by Manuel Palacio, curator of The Sublime Image. Video Art in Spain (1970–1987) and a lecturer in Audiovisual Communication and Advertising at the University Carlos III (Madrid), alongside Carlota Álvarez Basso, head of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Audiovisual Works from 1992 to 1999, and Chema González, head of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Film and New Media Department.  

A programme on the origins of video linked to happenings, performance and Action Art; in other words, connected to life itself. Primera Muerte (First Death) is the first video art piece made in Spain, a work which disappeared for decades before being finally recovered by curators Imma Prieto and Blanca de la Torre in 2010. After the Barcelona College of Architects asked a group of avant-garde artists made up of Sílvia Gubern, Jordi Galí, Àngel Jové and Antoni Llena to give a lecture, the group decided to record everyday scenes of them living together and subsequently showed them during the lecture on a TV monitor while Àngel Jové read extracts of William S. Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch and the audience was recorded and confronted with their own images while The Beatles’ song “Let It Be” played. Meanwhile, in Subsensorial Actions 1 by Muntadas, the artist, with his eyes covered, experiments with meanings alluding to somatic actions recalling Vito Acconci and Lygia Clark, as well as the existential absurdism of Buster Keaton.

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.