This text appeared within the June 27, 2025 version of The Movie Remark Letter, our free weekly publication that includes unique movie criticism and writing. Join the Letter right here.

Afternoons of Solitude (Albert Serra, 2024)

“The solar is the very best bullfighter,” wrote Ernest Hemingway, “and with out the solar the very best bullfighter is just not there. He is sort of a man and not using a shadow.” In Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude (2024), one corrida notably takes place within the rain. Andrés Roca Rey, the Peruvian matador on the heart of this fascinating and disturbing documentary, will get loads of different alternatives to shine and glitter in his traje de luces, or “swimsuit of lights,” a dressing up whose flamboyant delicacy seems like an alibi for the brutal violence its wearer inflicts within the bullring. But even when the solar is out, he stays a person who’s in some sense not there. His vacant, nearly harmless magnificence is worthy of a hustler in a Warhol movie, a floor free from any deep inside roil of want or worry. He’s as opaque and dumbly corporeal because the hefty beasts he torments, barely verbal, all puckered lips and arched postures. An entourage of hype males surrounds him, affirming his greatness and the massive dimension of his testicles so incessantly that each issues appear urgently and perpetually in query. “I used to be a bit unhappy that he was not pleased with the ultimate outcome,” Serra advised Paris Match of Roca Rey’s response to the film. However this shouldn’t be shocking. Voiding all psychological interiority, Serra movies Roca Rey as an animal amongst animals, a rhyme he makes clear by opening with a graphic match reduce between two faces, positioned frontally on the heart of the body: a bovine visage, cloaked in darkness, and that of the toreador, sweaty and inscrutable.

After all, a reduce like this could equally mark out an opposition, and Afternoons of Solitude is a movie that depicts an atavistic battle between man and animal wherein dying is the stake. It does so in an observational method, unflinchingly presenting the stomach-churning savagery of tauromachy whereas refraining nearly fully from providing commentary on the controversial exercise. Serra has lengthy professed the assumption, inherited from the historic avant-gardes, that the digicam is ready to reveal realms of visibility inaccessible to the attention alone. As such, Afternoons of Solitude makes no try to copy the expertise of attending a reside corrida. As an alternative, it delivers an inconceivable proximity to the motion, magnifying and fragmenting it in ways in which oscillate between the transfixing and the insupportable. When writing about Pierre Braunberger and Myriam Borsoutsky’s Bullfight (1951), André Bazin had trigger to notice that the “framing of man and animal is rarely tighter than a medium shot and even an American [medium-long] shot.” In contrast, Serra and his director of pictures Artur Tort exploit the affordances of digital cinematography to restrict the sight view radically, isolating moments and gestures to create tightly held pictures of nice plastic sophistication.

In its fixation on Roca Rey, Afternoons of Solitude echoes Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane: A twenty first Century Portrait (2006), which educated 17 cameras on the legendary footballer all through a single match. But Serra extracts and abstracts from the continuum of actuality much more dramatically than did Gordon and Parreno, breaking with their emphasis on actual time. His movie is marked by a number of acts of fastidious exclusion, reminding considered one of how totally the alternatives of what to indicate and learn how to present it comprise essential authorial gestures throughout the observational mode, a form of filmmaking so usually misunderstood as merely duplicating actuality. The movie’s excessive closeness to the interspecies encounter transforms what was a mass gathering into an intimate confrontation with a hellacious spectacle. There’s usually nowhere else to look than on the bleeding wounds of a bull that has been agonizingly antagonized. Serra decisively bars the gang from the body, attenuating bullfighting’s connection to collectivity (and thus to a nationalistic significance) and depriving the spectator of a diegetic surrogate who would possibly function a degree of relay for the gaze. We will neither sneer at nor establish with the corrida fanatics, for Serra has deserted any try and seize the expertise of the reside occasion and as a substitute constructed a relation to the world that may be discovered solely in cinema, full with a musical rating.

Along with his surrounding gang, Roca Rey is rarely fully alone, even when he usually appears to exist at a take away from everybody round him, save for the bull. The titular solitude would possibly thus even be understood in relation to the dying animals, whose remaining moments determine as tragic caesuras throughout the movie’s circulate, and even to the viewer, who should face these scenes of balletic atrocity for themselves, with restricted steerage. Whereas the soundtrack lends some emotional coloration, any conclusions that one could draw in regards to the apply of bullfighting happen within the absence of exposition. The construction and guidelines of the corrida are by no means defined. What makes a great or unhealthy efficiency? Why does Roca Rey proudly maintain up a bull’s severed ear on the finish of a battle? This movie is not going to let you know. Some audiences will come to the movie already possessing this information, however many is not going to; both means, the transmission of such understanding, so integral to the passing down of custom, is a course of wherein Serra declines to take part. Fairly than a story trajectory culminating in heroic glory or humiliating failure, repetition predominates. By limiting his movie to 3 recurring settings—the bullring, the lodge, and the van that transports the Roca Rey posse between them—Serra conjures a sense of infernal confinement throughout the looping temporality of formality.

Does the truth that Afternoons of Solitude doesn’t explicitly condemn bullfighting—which is banned in Serra’s native Catalonia and championed by excessive right-wing events resembling Vox as emblematic of the Spanish nation—imply that it affirms the merciless apply? It isn’t an overtly important movie, and it undeniably aestheticizes violence. However illustration is just not essentially endorsement, and the bulls’ struggling is just not intensified by being photographed. It exists, and Serra reveals it to us. There’s magnificence on this, sure, however nothing that dulls a critical reckoning with horror; quite the opposite. On this regard, Afternoons of Solitude is best in comparison with the work of Francis Bacon or Miriam Cahn than to Hollywood’s repulsively gratuitous indulgence within the disposability of our bodies, human and animal. It will be fallacious to counsel that the movie empathizes with the animal in ache, however Serra’s decisions are such that this empathy can come up within the spectator, together with outrage on the barbarism that calls itself civilization. Some will certainly resolve that they don’t want to topic themselves to those excruciating pictures. Those that do are promised the difficult, visceral expertise of one of many 12 months’s greatest movies.

Erika Balsom is a reader in movie research at King’s Faculty London and the co-editor of Feminist Worldmaking and the Transferring Picture (MIT Press, 2022).