Made in the immediate aftermath of Franco’s death, the film both reckons with the recent past and confronts an uncertain present—one in which the democratic structures of contemporary Spain were still in the process of taking shape. Over two and a half hours, the film unfolds as a counterpoint between extended gatherings of leaders from major leftist parties and a series of polymorphic variations. Actor Francesc Lucchetti wanders through the empty rooms of the former residence of the Generalísimo, traverses the ruins of abandoned towns in the north of the country, or projects a Francoist propaganda movie on an editing table. A Basque revolutionary song animates the landscape; fragments of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights overlay fictional scenes of torture; an interview with a party leader is interrupted by the director’s reminder: “Don’t forget that we are making a movie.”
The form itself expresses a yearning for democracy. General Report is a parliamentary film: its composition encompasses a plurality of tendencies. Communists, socialists, Christian democrats, and even a monarchist are given space to speak. Catalan, Galician, and Basque are all heard. Reenactments coexist with interviews, appropriation with observation, and Brechtian gestures with raw immediacy. If the project’s monumentality and militant impulse recall Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s La hora de los hornos: Notas y testimonios sobre el neocolonialismo, la violencia y la liberación (The Hour of the Furnaces, 1968), it never strays far from the provocations of Raúl Ruiz’s Diálogos de exiliados (Dialogues of the Exiles, 1975). The interminable conversations among politicians—not to mention the striking absence of women—some of them abruptly interrupted by the editing—become a symptomatic expression of a confused and fragmented left. There is no doubt that Portabella is a committed socialist; yet, as an avant-garde artist, he is also a ferocious critic of everything that moves.
General Report II (2015) engages with a profoundly different social landscape. It unfolds as a fresco of the multiple, overlapping crises affecting Spain and Europe: the economic pressures of neoliberalism, the specter of climate catastrophe, and the demands for direct democracy in the wake of the 15-M movement. In and around the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, extended conversations among intellectuals and politicians attempt to take the measure of the present, while images of street protest intermittently disrupt the film.
As in the first General Report, the approach oscillates between directness and critical detachment. Portabella is clearly interested in what Antonio Negri, Paul B. Preciado, or even a group of Catalan oceanographers has to say, yet he does not hesitate to interrupt a conversation with a shot of a gunshot from Luis Buñuel’s L’Âge d’Or (1930). Two professors sit in a café discussing current affairs, while the camera lingers on the waiter’s gestures. A crane shot glides across a large table as captions list the names of museum board members, but the chairs remain empty. A recurring movement: the camera slowly advances toward a projectable surface—a window, a painting, a wall, a screen—onto which images from the outside world suddenly irrupt. Why not simply cut to the next sequence? Because, for Portabella, the impulse to plunge into reality is inseparable from the need to reflect on the medium itself. In the end, a sequence of automated machines producing plastic culminates in a wall of transparent boxes. Images of street protests appear, projected onto the surface. But the plastic remains visible.
Portabella’s oeuvre reveals a tireless artist, one who persistently constructs and deconstructs an inventive dialogue with the documentary form. By piercing the flesh of his ghostly fictions with sudden documentary irruptions or shredding his informative reports with the sensual scrutiny of an avant-garde sensibility, Portabella is always drawn to the pulse of reality, while leaving the fabric of his works wide open to the assaults of experimentation. There is no doubt: as an artist, Pere Portabella is a century-old vampire.
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