During the Barcelona heatwave, nighttime temperatures usually offer a certain respite, especially if accompanied by some kind of breeze, thus allowing one to enjoy the city outdoors. They imprint a more leisurely and pleasant rhythm, for leisure activities in a context that seems transformed. Cinephile passion is one of the most gratifying, few of us doubt it. Hence the many offers that, between July and August, are offered under the popular and always successful formula of "open-air" cinema.
Whether in a neighborhood square or on the walls of Montjuic Castle, but also in museums such as Cosmocaixa, within the framework of a suggestive cycle dedicated to science fiction following its exhibition Robots. Humans and Machines or the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) which from a very different perspective -we would say, practically antithetical and therefore complementary- approaches the reality of the unknown abysmally, following the inspiration of its current exhibition, titled The Black Light. Secret Traditions in Art Since the 1950s.
ILLUMINATED CINEMA
In the current edition of the cinema cycle popularized by the object that enables enjoyment, the longed-for "Gandules" (the type of summer chair that ensures high comfort, a bodily nonchalance that allows maximum concentration on the screening) three films are programmed each week from August 7 to 23, under the title "Illuminated Cinema: Magic, Lysergia and Occultism". A triad of phenomena, or activities that border on the paranormal, usually contrasted with the light of reason, and which visually provide experiences of high emotional intensity.
Most of the films in the cycle present an objectifiable interest -the first, for example, is a milestone in cinematography- although there are also some for open-minded cinephiles, palates immune to fright, and lovers of rarities in general. Without palliative, in any case, we dare to recommend the opening one, on August 7 -The Phantom Carriage (Körkarlen) by Victor Sjöström, released in 1921- which, moreover, will allow the viewer to familiarize themselves with the entire program.
Being prior to the sound synchronization of cinema -undertaken for the first time six years later, in The Jazz Singer- Victor Sjöström's film used to be accompanied by live music, which remains on this occasion as a particularly noteworthy element. The performance will be by the group Obsidian Kingdom, which, in the words of the organizers, is an "internationally recognized Barcelona band within the metal, drone, industrial, and avant-garde music scene. Its immersive, experimental, and powerful sound perfectly complements the magical and phantasmagorical spirit of a great classic like The Phantom Carriage." A true "cine-concert" session, which will allow discovering a reference film, based on a Swedish legend, according to which the last sinner of the year is punished with the task of driving the carriage that collects the deceased during the following year. A tremendous plot for the post-romantic mentality, cinematographically realized in an even more unusual way -due to its novelty, at least with that degree of sophistication- such as the double exposure technique.
"The cycle is an opportunity to discover little-accessible films and enter the hard core of the heterodox through creators who, in effect, move away from the most traveled currents"DOUBLE EXPOSURE
As a product of magic, the juxtaposition of frames simultaneously shows the presence of bodies, then translucent. A technique that must have aroused astonishment, in that it allows the living and the dead to coexist in the reality of that fiction. A phenomenon that we will rediscover with no less sinister overtones ten years later, in Carl Theodor Dreyer's wonderfully unsettling Vampyr (1931); specifically, in the episode of the protagonist's splitting/dreaming who faints and believes himself dead, even attending (the vision of) his own funeral.
We will never tire of pointing out how fundamental to the history of cinema is the genre we know today as Horror. A genre rooted in the anxieties of the late romantic mentality, which discovered in the technique of moving images the possibility of visualizing the invisible, and which perpetuates well into the 20th century. Cinema gives reality to the shadow, to the reverse of light, which opens up an infinity of narrative possibilities, which can address those atavistic fears, barely verbally expressible by human beings.
FEATURED FILMS
Other films in the cycle deal with that dialectic of vision based on plots that are sometimes deliberately disconnected. For example, reflecting altered states of consciousness, in Iván Zulueta's uncomfortable Arrebato (1979), in which the possibility of one or more parallel realities opens up. Realities susceptible to being discovered by an occult science, and which can be as terrifying as those captured in Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon (1957). The mysterious phenomenon of spiritual enlightenment is also illustrated in Robert Hardy's The Wicker Man (1973), or the influence of magic on erotic instincts in Anna Biller's The Love Witch (2016).
The last film scheduled -and most recently released- is clearly parodic, affected by a seventies look that enables a double reading: "a venomous and exquisite film that vindicates the figure of the witch from a feminist perspective and projects burning issues around the toxicity of the myth of romantic love," explain the organizers. The circle closes with this mocking re-reading of an issue that, in fact, Dreyer very seriously raised in Dies irae (1943) through the use of aesthetics linked to the period that had fostered the belief in amorous sublimation, which dramatically points out the gap between longing and the consequences of its impossible realization, so remembered by psychoanalysis.
THE OTHER SIDE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
The mechanisms that lead to embracing the little, or nothing reasonable, are multiple and evolve epochally, just like the need to embrace beliefs that appear to reconcile emotions and reason. Hélas, studies -very rational themselves- demonstrate what Nietzsche intuited in a context close to that of the creation of The Phantom Carriage: rarely do behaviors -or, even discourses, Hobbes had predicted- rely on rational arguments, individuals being moved by a will that tends to escape them. More than pertinent, thus, the cinephile excursion through the other side of consciousness, which unconsciously pushes to act or suffer. If not to stay in the parallel world of fiction, then to enjoy or abominate from a prudent -and comfortable- distance-the possibilities inherent in the journey.
The journey proposed by the CCCB does not intend to be exhaustive, nor does it comfortably focus on the big names, as is otherwise usual. Gandules'18 therefore represents a new opportunity to discover less accessible films and enter the hard core of the heterodox from creators who, in effect, move away from the most traveled currents.
Featured image: Still from The Phantom Carriage