Afterlife

In the final chapter of Seleção Nacional, we present a group of works from Portugal and Spain richly intertwined with the peninsula’s “tellus”.

The films included in these telluric experiences and stories, selected in dialogue with Luis Parés, director of Cineteca Madrid (Madrid’s cinematheque), probe connections between diverse filmmaking practices and the immanent forces of these lands and landscapes: at times in a living dialogue with the people and beings that inhabit them, at others bringing into play (through cinematic interpretation) the agency of their elements, making room for their “vital materialities”, to invoke Jane Bennett’s term.

We do so by bringing two distinct historical moments into focus: the period around the fall of the dictatorships in both countries; and, with greater emphasis in the programme, the years following the financial crisis that hit southern European societies particularly hard in 2008. In this way, the programme examines the intentions of a cinema that emerges in the course of social processes confronting systemic crises, expressing profound desires for political, cultural and, more broadly, ontological reorganisation. It is precisely where this desire for transformation manifests itself that this cinema — through its formally diverse stories and experiences — seeks to find itself. We therefore speculate on how the difficulty of imagining a tomorrow — a becoming, too — underpins the genesis of these cinematic intentions and their searches for spaces where culture (and life) recentres itself on primordial values.

We try to ask how cinema absorbs this movement, which lays claim to certain centres and turns its back on others, to express a desire for change and transformation. Underlying it, one can discern a vision of a “slowly cancelled future”, as described by Franco “Bifo” Berardi and, following him, Mark Fisher: a generational predicament that prompted cultural “displacements” towards values, materialities and epistemologies opposed to those that sustained social failure in different contexts. Several films clearly confront the very notion of “collapse” — with ways of exposing it, countering it, but also, at times, embracing it. We are therefore not looking at a linear movement in cinema. Answers to the questions cinema may ask or the things it may seek — and through which it may define itself — may simply lie in how it comes to express itself through the elemental environment of nature, through gestures that almost gather up its organisms, and through immersion in the dynamics (including social ones) established there. It is in nature’s pulse and in the ways human experience merges with it, and
confronts it, that these films settle, often with a sense of vulnerability (intellectual, emotional or even technical). This group of works is not intended to raise any question of identity, or discourses around “Iberianisms” per se; rather, it aims to delineate a portion of landscape and nature — their magnetism above all — in which these filmmaking practices — which, it should be stressed, have parallels in other countries — will develop and take root. Can the overlap between the two countries’ cinematic practices reveal connections and movements with shared characteristics? Possibly (or certainly), in some cases. And what might they mean? Perhaps the films and the way they enter into dialogue with one another can suggest answers we have not directly sought.

Until January, we revisit key works from the past that express this pulsating desire to reconnect with roots and with ways of understanding cinema through collective interplay and ancestral rites. These films reclaim forgotten ideas and places of culture; a forgetting that has translated, over decades, into forms of political injustice. There is therefore also a search in these works that is nonetheless reparative. In this context, we highlight the enduring influence of Reis and Cordeiro (marking 50 years since their masterwork, Trás-os-Montes), through films that absorb traces of a filmmaking practice explored by the Portuguese duo, whose distinctive vision is internationally recognised.

We will turn our attention to geological time and, in particular, to the pull that the volcanoes of the Portuguese and Spanish archipelagos have exerted on filmmakers. Through these works, we can ask what today’s artists and filmmakers seek in ideas of eruption and erosion: to understand and test collapse, redemption, erasure, reinvention? All these suggestions will be valid if we consider the many films that have plunged into these phenomenologies in recent times (and the three films that illustrate the theme within the programme); within the theme of “volcanoes”, we also want to make room for an enquiry into the relationship between the eruptive force of the earth and that of film, as materials that implode and reveal themselves to fix realities in place.

We highlight Bread as a material and its presence in various works from today and the past, primarily to invoke an idea of time, waiting, mutation and material symbiosis. An idea of production, too.

We wanted to highlight contemporary collective experiments in film laboratories that explore a different relationship with the earth. In this area, we are interested in understanding the
contours and meanings of this inclination in cinema (arising from the motivations described above), including the links between the materiality of film stock, production mechanisms, film development processes and natural elements.

Telúricas is thus permeated by constant and evident “returns”. The programme ends as it might begin, foregrounding this concept and what it may carry with it: a return to ways of being, existing and being present; a return to physical and immaterial places lost along the way, which most of the films seek to reclaim. This would seem to be the main thread running through this “telluric cinema”, whose historical and, above all, contemporary predominance in both countries justified this dialogue without a nation or defined borders.