My Films, Featured in a Book on Spanish Alternative Cinema
Jan 22, 2025
I'm honored to share that my films have been featured in Steven Marsh's book, Spanish Cinema Against Itself: Cosmopolitanism, Experimentation, Militancy. This publication, edited by Cátedra Editions, delves into Spanish alternative cinema and includes an analysis of my work from pages 279 to 282. You can find more details and purchase the book here:
In his analysis, Marsh discusses my project Video-Derives, which comprises two abstract short films, Sol and Vigilancia aérea. These pieces were filmed during the 15-M movement in Puerta del Sol, capturing the sensory experiences of the protest through experimental sound and lighting. Marsh notes that, rather than serving as journalistic reportage or propaganda, these films function as political interventions through their abstraction, becoming integral parts of the collective initiative.
Having my work mentioned in this book is a gratifying milestone. It’s encouraging to see these projects, which were created during a significant moment in time, being recognized in a broader context. I look forward to continuing to make films that resonate with audiences in different ways.
The book can be purchased here.
Below, you can read the analysis of my films, from pages 279 to 282.
The project Video-Derives by Flavio G. García, which is part of the exhibition and DVD "¿Spanish Revolution?", consists of two short abstract pieces filmed in Puerta del Sol and its surroundings during the encampment. García, an activist and active participant in the 15-M movement since the beginning of the protest, does not produce reportage.
This is not a journalistic initiative, as the purpose of his films is not to gather visual evidence to counter the distortions of mainstream media, nor to expose police brutality (there were committees, groups, and individuals doing precisely that). Nor is it propaganda, despite García's political affinities. However, García's abstract work is political in the performative sense I have previously defined. That is, through its very abstraction, by exceeding formal boundaries, it becomes, in and of itself, a political intervention.
In the two shorts, Sol (just over five minutes long) and Vigilancia aérea (a little over twelve minutes long), García experiments with the sonic texture and lighting patterns generated by the whirlwind of the protest.
These suggestive cinematic performances—which, rather than representing, substituting, or defending the collective initiative of 15-M, are part of it—encompass the entire range of sensory registers. They include the threat of the police surveillance helicopter, with its insect-like flight, rhythmic buzzing, and throbbing rotors (a motif present in various 15-M films, including those by Sylvain George), the confusion of noises, the confrontations with the police, the celebrations, and the claustrophobia of the close-up, which predominates in Sol. As other commentators have observed, there is an excess of sound and images in García's work; the screen collapses into pixelation that seems to suggest that such excess hinders vision and interpretation. That suggestion implies that the excess is unsettling.
However, the immediate effect is one of a fragmentary representation that draws attention to its own technology. Sol consists of a series of shots of people making recordings in the square with their mobile phones. As the crowd stirs around the boundaries of frames within other frames, the recourse to the sensory and the affective is produced by the awareness of the materiality of the mobile phone camera itself (see figs. 9.2 a-b).
What we see here is the fragmentation of the space inherent to any photograph, but with the additional fractal framing characteristic of the digital, in the sense that there is no material negative on which to print the image, but only the repeated image of the image on the screen. In a sense, these second-hand images come to define their own production (shot on a mobile phone, the short film's emphasis is placed on proliferation—the singular-plurality—of mobile phone cameras, as each one produces its own film from the same, though different, images). It is worth noting that, amid the plurality of devices that make up the mise en abyme, metonymy or synecdoche returns once again in the pixelation. More than photographic blurring, pixelation is the fragmentation of a totality or a component of a larger entity. In this case, synecdoche overlays the temporal and the spatial. In García's shot sequence, the images—the staging—are marked by spacing, by the division of space within the screen's frame and between frames. The spacing between the images defines their creation. The combination of pixelation on the surface of the frame and the mise en abyme generated by the camera filming other mobile phones filming shapes the spacing and spatialization characteristic of digital imagery, while also revealing a series of tensions between part and whole, interior and exterior, surface and depth.
The staging of these shots—the organization of the materials within the frame, their editing—characterized by an iteration of the mise en abyme, is, in turn, a mise à l’écart due to the ghostly effect of pixelation. This effect occurs within the frame, within the shot, in a spatialization adjacent to the central point of the mobile phone's own image, which opposes the forward movement of the narrative. This vertiginous visual spacing, driven by its excess, provokes a new division of space beyond the crowded framing of the occupied square. Puerta del Sol is the place where the city takes root. It is the kilometer zero, the epicenter of Madrid.
In addition to the spatial division, the film proposes a temporal postponement. Within the shot, there is a clear rupture, a mismatch of the present not only in relation to the future and the past but with itself, an enactment of what Derrida has called "the division of the instant." According to Derrida, real-time or simultaneity does not exist. We occupy the space between the not-yet and the no-longer, and in every event that is recorded live, there is always some imperceptible delay, "an extremely reduced différance," which here becomes visually evident in the recording device capturing the pro-filmic event. It could be said that the combination of the technology that allows the production of an image without material support—what Derrida calls "photographic performativity"—, the filmic texts themselves, and the location serve to dismantle (just as the image's pixelation does) the distinction between the pro-filmic, the filmic, and the post-filmic, such that filming ultimately becomes a form of archive.
