An Empty Ritual

Albert Serra’s Tardes de soledad [Afternoons of Solitude] (2024)

A dark bull stares straight into the camera. It is night, and his black coat blends into the surrounding darkness. Only his white horns, snout, and a faint glint in his eyes catch the cool moonlight. Panting and puffing, the bull seems to have originated from the night, like a hellish creature lying in wait for us. After the long, piercing gaze, the bull begins to move, walking among the trees. The camera follows him from a distance. The bull stops again, and the montage cuts to a close-up. He pierces the camera with his gaze, his dark eyes almost merging with the black night. Then the silent tension is broken by a piece of ominous music that slowly swells. The montage cuts to a man sitting in a van, dressed in a costume richly decorated with glittering embroidery. He too looks straight into the camera, as an indirect counter-shot to the bull. His face is sweaty, tense, and serious, as if he has just gone through an intense event. It soon becomes clear that he is a bullfighter.

This opening scene from Albert Serra’s Tardes de soledad [Afternoons of Solitude] looks like a prologue but turns out to be more than just a simple prelude: the Spanish filmmaker sets in motion the first gears of the viewing machine that will draw the spectator in. A figure emerges from the darkness that will become the centrepiece of a dance of movements and glances, with Peruvian matador Andrés Roca Rey in the lead role. In terms of structure, Afternoons is simple: the film documents around ten of Rey’s bullfights in Spanish cities such as Bilbao, Madrid, and Seville, each following a similar principle. The film navigates between only three spaces – the arena, the van, and the hotel – and plays out the three phases of a bullfight: the preparation, the fight, and the aftermath. Although the film doesn’t always strictly adhere to this timeline, these three phases remain the rhythmic anchors of its structure. Serra approaches bullfighting as a fact, detached from any folkloric or cultural context, and forces the repetition of this act of violence into a rudimentary form. In the bus, a single camera hangs from the seat in front of the torero. Long takes capture Rey in tense concentration and full of adrenaline before the fight or in the decompression after, chatting with the men who assist him inside and outside the arena. With the audience out of shot, the long scenes of the bullfights emphasize the choreographed duel between Rey and the animals. The narrative tension in these scenes is simple and, in a sense, empty: it comes as no surprise that the animals always end up in a pool of their own blood. Despite Serra documenting these gruesome tableaux, the design of the scenes is impressively stylized, with an extremely precise soundtrack in which the isolated voices of the men and the panting of the bulls, as well as the applause and reactions of the audience, are arranged as if in a composition. The scenes in the hotel room also show the run-up and aftermath, but here Rey is seen isolated from the hustle and bustle in a sacred devotion, in which even getting dressed takes on an almost ritualistic character.

By stylizing this phenomenon of bullfighting in a certain simplicity, Serra creates an ingenious viewing box whose sole purpose is to show us what it wants us to see. In interviews, Serra himself states that he wanted to replace the bullfighting audience with cinema viewers. The doubling of this spectacle throws the cinema viewer into a game in which their own viewing becomes the most important stake. How should I watch this? Should I even watch this? Why do I keep watching? 

In fact, everything has already been seen after the first bullfight: Rey is caught by the bull but ultimately comes out on top. The bull, which is systematically worn down, ends up as a carcass after a cowardly knife stab to its skull. As a document of absurd folklore, the subsequent duels add no real value. Of course, this repetition is not merely cinematic: Rey fights up to sixty corridas a year. But we have seen the story of the bullfight after the first, and we have experienced the attraction. It is in the repetition that Afternoons opens up other spaces. Thus, despite the horror and bloodshed, a strange boredom arises that remains ambiguous. Is it the boredom of an overly drawn-out film? Or is it that of a bored spectator who, through repetition, sees their thirst for spectacle satiated too quickly? Is the spectator thus forced to reflect on their latent but intrinsic sadism and voyeurism? Does the filmmaker want to burden the spectator with a sense of guilt about his complicity?

Serra is no amateur. He masters the codes and rules that govern mise-en-scène better than anyone, knowing which obstacles to avoid, how to navigate around questions, and how to keep them just “dangerous” enough to maintain the film’s appeal. The film is deliberately too long, as a conscious aesthetic choice on which the film relies. Each fight is filmed or paced differently, as the rules of audio-visual composition require. He does not explicitly criticize bullfighting and gratuitous violence; in the film, they are detached from cultural-nationalist or political alliances. Serra understands that such criticism, which could just as easily be expressed separately from the film, would neutralize the mechanisms of his viewing box. To a non-Spanish viewer, the phenomenon appears to be an empty ritual anyway, whose symbolism and accompanying actions never land, not even in its folklore. Tauromania presents itself in Afternoons as a spectacle of protocol and codes for initiates. Separate from tradition, it reveals the grotesque logic of false courage and staged horror, in which, ironically, the blame is shifted onto the bull if things go wrong. Ultimately it is the figure of Rey himself, who transforms into a strange, almost peacock-like apparition in the heat of battle, who attracts the most fascination.

But the repetition in Afternoons emphasizes the emptiness and futility of the ritual not as such. Serra is more interested in the mechanics of his viewing box and what happens when a ritual such as bullfighting enters it. It is clear that the film allegorizes our desire and viewing activity as spectators. The viewing box that is cinema is presented to us in a stripped-down form: as permitted voyeurs, balancing between identification and sadism, hoping for a “good” outcome, we watch what we are given to simply watch. The horror of the violence becomes an intimate and almost sensual spectacle of colour fields and plasticity, in which yellow-pink and red cloths, red walls, light yellow sand, glistening dark red blood, white banderillos, and the green, red-black, and white-yellow dressed, almost dancing matadors merge into a plastic feast of colours and bodies. Are we being given what we long to see? Why, then, are we bored?

Cinema is, of course, also a ritual: At a specific place and time, in the darkness of the cinema at the appointed hour, away from everyday reality, a group of spectators comes together, a temporary community formed around the object of the “film”, in collective concentration, sharing the same experience, where rhythm and the “stars” on the screen also provide a mythical cadence. In his self-referential metaphor, Serra explores a ritual in which violence, death, and power are turned into spectacle in a controlled, choreographed way. Cinema can do exactly the same thing: make death and violence aesthetic and “beautiful” and allow the audience to enjoy it from a distance. Just like in the arena, the gaze of the cinema viewer revolves around a single focus: the point of concentration of every gaze and movement, the place where the meaning of the action unfolds. Here, very specifically, the bull. Just like the men in the arena, our gazes are also completely focused on that one point, and it is the ritual of watching itself that generates meaning. When the animal finally dies, everything seems to dissolve. The meaningful centre disappears and proves to be as valuable as it is fleeting.

Serra is primarily interested in cinema as a cultural question: Who makes it and who watches it? How is it viewed? Afternoons therefore primarily presents an image of cinema, a mechanism that Serra masters exceptionally well but which also makes it very transparent. Without nostalgia or a sense of pastiche, he occupies a space that unfolds before the viewer like a transparent minefield: the components are still there, but we should perhaps not expect any real fireworks.

The outcome of this self-referential question therefore remains ambiguous; the metaphor doesn’t seem to fit completely. As viewers, we naturally recognize this lack of closure. As an essential part of the viewing box, it is up to us to connect the dots. In the context of this artistic ritual with its own customs and expectations, the viewer must also take their place in the swamp of images and sounds in order to ultimately distil something meaningful from it. But is that new? Does that ambiguity ultimately point to an artistic tension that cannot be bridged and is therefore interesting? The empty courage displayed by the matador in the orchestrated slaughter never gains any real appeal. If this loss of appeal becomes the starting point for another game of watching, horror, and boredom, the question remains as to what the ritual of cinema can add to it.