Courtesy of Andergraun Films
There is a certain spectacle to which the bullfight—or the corrida de toros, the sport’s less colloquial Spanish name—lends itself, which is at once literary, artistic, operatic, cinematic. Irish-born artist Francis Bacon produced one of his most well-known works in 1970, Study for Bullfight No. 1, one that parallels the corrida’s own three stages. Against a backdrop of golden ochre, both toreador and toro are a whirl of movement, man and beast entangled in a dance of death. Though Bacon’s focus would largely remain with such thematic motifs as religious figures and mythological furies, he remained fixated on bullfighting throughout his career. A lesser-known triptych captures the more visceral side of the sport; 1987’s Triptych strips the spectacle bare, depicting instead fragments of a broken body, blushed with blue and purple bruises, blood seeping from half-bandaged wounds. Bacon’s final, unfinished painting was also an impression of a bull, half-formed, something of a metaphor of death itself; the artist, then, staring down his impending doom.
This image of the ghostly figure of a bull, shrouded in darkness, nostrils flaring, sides heaving with effort, is echoed in the first shot of Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude. In a previous interview, Serra said Bacon was one inspiration for the subject matter of the film, his first documentary. The two artists are bound together by an iconoclasm that belies an obsession with history and a fascination with folklore. With Serra’s period pieces, the mode that has characterized much of his career, there is an additional effort to expose the intimate realities of such large-scale mythos. When Serra was commissioned to produce a two-minute trailer for the 2022 Viennale, he used the image of a bull as visual shorthand not only for sex and death but also proximity, a reference to cinema’s capacity for capturing violence. Utilizing the same footage with which he would eventually open Afternoons of Solitude, Serra’s trailer is titled Vienna Waltz, a reference to Vienna’s notable export, the Viennese waltz, a dance that involves both leader and follower in a tight, closed frame, making circles around a larger floor. The corrida, too, is of course a kind of circular dance.
The debut of Afternoons of Solitude at San Sebastian Film Festival—based in the northern Basque city, itself close to such historically significant bullfighting centers as Pamplona and Bilbao—was only slightly marred by protests from the Spanish political party PACMA, which aimed to have the film removed from the festival slate. The campaign was unsuccessful, and Afternoons of Solitude went on to win the Golden Shell for Best Film. In Serra’s own homeland of Catalonia, bullfighting is legally contested. The Catalan Parliament banned the sport in 2010, but the vote was overturned in 2016 on the grounds that it was unconstitutional. Still, no bullfighting has taken place in the state since 2020, and such political context is reflected in Serra’s careful observation and deft hand. Despite such legal challenges, Spanish filmmakers from Carlos Saura to Pedro Almodóvar to Pablo Berger have found the art of bullfighting to be a worthy subject for their lenses, for there is narrative embedded in the very structure of the sport.
The fight itself follows a traditional three-act structure: the introductory tercio de varas, when the bull first enters the arena, followed by the tercio de banderillas, when the bull is further weakened by steel-pointed dowels. However, Serra refuses to adopt such a conventional throughline. Instead, he focuses on small details that characterize the toreador’s rituals of preparation for the fight, such as the way he delicately handles his rosary between dexterous fingers before kissing the Virgin Mary three times (we see such religious reverence throughout the film). Afternoons of Solitude progresses, then, as a series of conversations and corridas. Our toreador shuffles back and forth between the hotel rooms where he will prepare for his fight, the limousine that takes him and his cuadrilla, or posse, to and from the arena, and the arena itself. Of the corrida’s three acts, the film most often bears witness to the final one, the tercio de muerte—when either the bull or the toreador is killed. The creation of such narrative impetus is self-evident, but Serra manages to do something else entirely with the material. His structure is not anything so simple as life and death, though the general arc of a tragedy is expected.
In film history, much of the corrida’s visual language was rendered first in black and white. The silent film Blood and Sand (1922), starring Rudolph Valentino, marks one of the first and most influential depictions of a bullfight on-screen. It’s a tradition that Pablo Berger pays homage to with his film Blancanieves (2012), and one that characterizes Carlos Saura’s feature film debut Los golfos, or The Delinquents (1960). Such high-contrast black-and-white cinematography heightens the drama of the event. After all, although the color red has become the most symbolic shade of the corrida, bulls are color-blind, their eyes and attention driven instead by movement. Pedro Almodóvar’s Talk to Her (1986) is decidedly saturated, however, a classically Almodóvarian color palette of reds, oranges, and pinks. Scale and spectacle are conveyed through shots of the bull twisting in slow motion, accompanied by a tense violin and frequent cuts to a cheering crowd, anxious in their seats.
These conventions, too, are rejected by Serra, despite having worked with such maximalist aesthetics in 2022’s Pacifiction, his most recent major work prior to Afternoons of Solitude. Languorous is often used to describe Pacifiction, and it’s true that the film—at nearly three hours—is something of a meander through Tahiti. Filming without much loyalty to the shooting script, Serra had over five hours of footage to comb through. The cultivated sense of artificiality created by the film’s lighting serves as contrast a documentary-style approach to the edit, where the film was ultimately found. Conversations are improvised; scenes outstay their welcome and progress without a clear plot driving the narrative. Within the mode of fiction, this approach lulls the audience into a kind of complacency, an intentional boredom that complements the film’s own pervasive sense of paranoia. With Afternoons of Solitude, such deliberation functions as observational; there is an intensity inherent in the corrida itself.
Serra’s selection of the Peruvian-born Andrés Rocas Rey as the subject seems to make sense as a casting decision. With each corrida we witness, his passes—the grand swaths of red cape, the muleta, which draws the fierce attention of the bull—grow increasingly elegant and increasingly dangerous. Even as he is knocked to the ground by the bull, even after he bears the brunt of the bull’s horn to his shoulder, Rocas Rey is quick to return to the warpath, blood seeping onto the sequined embellishment of his chaquetilla. He plays to his crowd. His boyish face, all soft edges, contorts into exaggerated emotion, somewhere between fear and rage. He puffs air into his cheeks as if this very act will bring him even closer to the bull’s blustering nostrils. The bravery he exhibits, a willingness to bring himself as close to the bull as possible, is the mark of a skilled toreador. This quality also influences the aesthetics of the sport. As toreadors prepare for each pass, they stand with their legs apart, pushing their hips forward and sending their weight to their heels. The movement of the muleta draws the bull along the curve of the bullfighter’s body; the longer he is a toreador, Roca Rey becomes seemingly emboldened to bring the bull closer and closer to the forward pitch of his body.
Likewise, Serra brings the camera close to the action. We rarely see the fight from the perspective of the audience; the proximity is too intimate. In Ernest Hemingway’s nonfiction work on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, he notes that the ideal seat is one that is “not too near the ring so that he will see the entire spectacle rather than, if he is too close, have it constantly broken up into bull and horse, man and bull, bull and man”—though it would seem that Serra’s own approach is to be as unflinchingly close to the action as the toreador himself. The composition of the frame remains tightly focused on this central relationship, so fracturing our understanding of the spectacle that we cannot truly appreciate the breadth of the arena, the wide expanses of sand, the surrounding crowd. Instead, it is as if we are positioned behind the barrera, a wall within the arena itself from where the cuadrilla—and the toreador himself—can emerge and disappear, drawing the fierce attention of the bull and then diving for safety. There is an element of complicity; we are also symphorophiles, ecstatic witnesses to the violence despite our better judgment.
Though Serra goes out of his way to negate any formal dynamic of hero and villain, protagonist and antagonist, heel and face, the roles emerge regardless. The bull, after having been speared by the picador on horseback and pierced by the banderillas along his broad shoulders, having been increasingly weakened and bled, is driven to exhaustion and collapses into the sand, defeated. A member of the cuadrilla slices off the bull’s ears as trophies of the fight, proffered to the crowd, and the bull’s limp body is dragged by his hooves from the arena. Roca Rey then clambers into a limousine on his way back to the Ritz-Carlton and ponders the sheer luck of his own survival as his cuadrilla echo each other’s adulation of their hero toreador. The sign of a “bad bull” is one who is unpredictable; such unpredictability is why we watch.
Carly Mattox is a film writer, cultural programmer, video essayist, and occasional amateur ballroom dancer based in New York. Her writing has appeared in Sight and Sound, Little White Lies, and the Brooklyn Rail, among other publications.