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