Critical Map, ironic and desperate self-portrait
Criticism The future
The painter
Pierre Soulages
maintained that the color black is actually simply a refutation of itself. It is all that he denies. "It is at the same time a color and a non-color. When light is reflected in black, it transforms and transmutes it, and opens a mental field of its own", he writes in one of his reflections of an air as mystical as each of his glowing and opaque paintings. The centenary Soulages is French and he is white.
Arthur Jafa
, on the other hand, maintains that black, rather than a simple color (or no color), is power, it is beauty and it is alienation. Jafa is American, he's a video artist, and he's black.
Rubén H. Bermúdez,
instead, he prefers to pose the question as a simple question, like the question he has faced since as a child when he looked at himself in the amazement of his classmates:
"And you, why are you black?"
.
Bermúdez is from Móstoles, from
Atleti
, he is in his quarantine and has recently presumed paternity.
And, obviously, it is black.
Rubén H. Bermúdez has just presented
the film
'We all like bananas'
at
Documenta Madrid
.
The one-hour-long tape opens with a silent and old footage:
'Danse espagnole de la Feria Sevillanos
' (the misprint is in the title). It is a short by
Louis Lumière
registered at the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition. In it, a black man dances a Sevillian woman. It collides and there, in effect, in the '
shock
'the perplexity and grace are recorded, the enlightenment that haunts Soulages and the beautiful force of which Jafa speaks. What follows is a portrait that is both a self-portrait. "Seven black people star in the attempt to make a film. A choral portrait, intimate and warm," says and writes the director himself and, in effect, that is. They are a group of people who in today's Spain look at each other, look at us and, how could it be otherwise, we look at each other.
The self-portrait is theirs and, there the finding, belongs to all of us.
We have arrived.
The director says that everything started much earlier. The project was probably started unknowingly the first time you looked around and there weren't people like him there. Or rather, there were, but the gaze never lingered on them.
"For television, blacks are always the others," he
says laconically. Later he ended up dedicating himself to photography and over time, in 2018, he ended up publishing the book that he could not help but be entitled '
And you, why are you black?'
, without a doubt, a point and apart in the visibility of the Afro-descendant community in Spain. And so on until with the help of Matadero Madrid and the inspiration from Jafa's film
'Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death', he
ended up in the project that has now just been presented.
The director Rubén H. Bermúdez.
Ebebe Miranda, Oumoukala Sow, Ken Province, Chumo Mata, Agnes Essonti, and Nadia and Hannah
walk through the film, they look at each other and look at us
.
The camera is limited to recording the infected daily life of his day to day and does so with a transparency very close to the celebration and the miracle.
"This is not another story of resistance and racism. The idea is to rescue a collective voice among like-minded people who laugh," says the director with all the non-drama of which he is capable.
And indeed, the film moves around the screen convinced of all its enormous power to claim precisely another way of looking.
And it is there, unintentionally, what the philosopher El Chavo del 8 would say, where the film becomes strong and in its festive and happy revolutionary way.
Bermúdez quotes Jafa and by his side the directors Luis López Carrasco, for '
The future'
, and Elías León Siminiani, for '
Mapa
'. The two of them and the filmmaker
Claudia Claremi.
From there he tries to draw the map of his influences, his references, his debts and also his fears. "I wanted", he says, "a collective authorship in which all the voices were mixed into one, that all the characters were one." The characters watch TV, walk around, cook, paint themselves in front of the mirror and even talk to themselves because those who live alone soliloquy. There is also a scene of fighting and racism on the Madrid commuter train between a black man and several guards. "I imagine", he points out, "that it is inevitable."
Although the film is neither conjunctural nor in the worst sense of the word political, few films seem more obviously political in the best and most current of senses. While the protagonists watch the series '
La que se avecina'
or while they are drawn in perfect drawings of a single stroke or while they walk the streets of the city or while they are recorded with the camera, what is right to see in a certain new possibility to see. And that is where
the color black reaches the clarity of its own mental field, of its beauty, of its power.
The result is a choral triptych composed of doubts, questions, fragments and intimacies.
"Too many times all our stories are summarized in conflict, racism and racism. There is racism, of course, but there is more," he concludes.
'
We all like bananas'
is a self-portrait and is simply a mirror of an entire country that does not want to be oblivious to anything;
of a Spain that aspires to something more than simply
the strangeness turned into news and anger from a simple hug.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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