Abortion is finally freed from the stigma of silence in recent cinema

• Venice 'The Event' turns abortion into a harsh, feverish and extremely rigorous emotional and political testimony

• Review A journey to the bottom of the night

• Interview Annie Ernaux: "Writing is turning a weapon against yourself and against the world"

Silence, like the occult, has good press.

At least in the movies.

In one of his aphorisms, always cryptic and always enlightened, Robert Bresson, the master of pure cinema that Marguerite Duras would say, defined the exercise of filming as the anguish of not letting anything escape that is only glimpsed, "of what perhaps it is not yet seen and that it will not be possible to see it until later".

Cinema as one more form of thought would be, in the ascetic ideology of the filmmaker, a work towards unveiling, but also a job of concealment.

And of silence.

In fact, the great discovery of sound cinema is none other than the expressive value of, precisely, silence.

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Cinema.

Audrey Diwan: "Banning abortion is condemning women to the slaughter of illegal abortion"

• Drafting: LUIS MARTÍNEZMadrid

Audrey Diwan: "Banning abortion is condemning women to the slaughter of illegal abortion"

Cinema.

A Silent Tragedy About Eliza Hittman's Teen Abortion

• Drafting: LUIS MARTÍNEZBerlin

A Silent Tragedy About Eliza Hittman's Teen Abortion

In the last edition of the Venice Festival, the director

surprised with a recusal of the '

' lyric in the frontal exhibition of the sinister: an abortion.

Few times before had the cinema dared so much.

From any point of view.

The 'gore' horror genre is based on the theatricalization of human weakness to the point of fright that, in its most extreme sense, is confused with mockery.

What you see in

film that would end up winning the Golden Lion, is just the opposite.

Suddenly, everything hidden is stripped of more or less imposed literature or aestheticism to show itself to the viewer in his most fragile daily life.

And even brutality.

What is wanted to be shown and is shown is not so much the horror of an act, but also, like the horror of the stigma and guilt that has always served to hide that same act, to keep it in the unseen, in the unnameable, in the silence.

Anamaria Vartolomei and Sandrine Bonnaire in 'The Event'.CARAMEL

It is still relevant, even contradictory, that the ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States that last Friday repealed the right to abortion in force since 1973 coincides with a moment in cinema and its history dedicated to breaking one of the last barriers of silence and shame.

When the voluntary interruption of pregnancy acquires, perhaps for the first time, the power of representation, justice struggles to annul it.

is the latest and most vibrant example.

Along with it we could cite '

', by Eliza Hittman and which in 2020 won the Grand Jury Prize in Berlin;

'

, by Phyllis Nagy, also presented this year at the Berlinale;

'

', by Yngvild Sve Flikke, praised as the best comedy in European cinema in 2021, or, hurrying, '

', by Rachel Goldenberg, premiered on the HBO platform.

In Spanish cinema there are no notable, close and clear examples of this same matter, but almost.

Far behind,

by Cecilia Bartolomé in a pioneering way;

in the 90s, '

', by Benito Zambrano... and little else.

'

',

It doesn't talk about abortion, but it dares to approach motherhood from a point of view so far removed from clichés that, in some way, it replicates the scheme of all this new cinema in the paragraph above.

"In reality, what is being resolved is how the woman's body is spoken about and represented, which is almost always seen from the outside and through the gaze of a man. It is always someone else who defines it, idealizes it or condemns it. Being a mother in the common ideology responds to some clichés that have little to do with what a mother experiences", says the director while recalling that the first time she saw an abortion represented in the cinema was in the movie

, where all that was associated with the woman who practiced it were the traits of "the lost woman";

of, again, guilt and shame.

"Women rarely, and now is when you start to see them, talk about themselves. What matters is the diversity of points of view," adds the director while placing motherhood or abortion on the same plane , the menstruation that is never seen and never talked about.

A moment from 'Ninjababy'.

'

stands on the first-person account of the writer

Set in 1963, it depicts a desolate panorama of back rooms and secrets, furtive glances and obvious humiliations.

"Talking about the past," reasoned the director, "is the way of doing it in the present. Everything that is seen on the screen responds to a pattern of thought that is still in force. There is a veil of silence about abortion and in it we are educa. I myself had an abortion and when I traveled to Venice to present the film I asked myself if I could talk about it. That's when I realized the mistake. The silence of Anne [the protagonist played by

] is still mine and the of so many."

A trip similar to that of this declaration, which is also the declaration of principles of the film, is that of

Hittman portrays the journey that, after the sentence drafted by Judge Samuel Alito, will probably become an obligatory journey of initiation for a good part of American youth.

The camera focuses on the gaze of a 17-year-old girl who has an abortion in silence, in the dark and in complete solitude.

Or almost.

The protagonist (Sidney Flanigan) and her friend (Talia Ryder) flee their native Pennsylvania to New York.

Everything will happen in just two days.

The director turns this minimal plot into an authentic and superb trip to the bottom of the night, in a naturalistic, melancholic and stark drama about harassed adolescence.

But also, and this is what is important, the film is offered as a celebration (hard and merciless, but a celebration after all) of freedom,

Haley Lu Richardson and Barbie Ferreira in 'Unpregnant'.

"What is strange and relevant",

"is that the taboo is so heavy that, despite seeing in the film how the protagonists impose themselves on everything, what remains for the viewer is an immense sensation of pain. you take home the pain of the characters. Nothing more. I imagine that the next step would be that, without giving up that loss, the other prevails, the constancy of the victory of the decision made, of the life recovered. Nobody aborts for pleasure" .

The director speaks from the authority of having also braged in her cinema with more than one taboo.

spoke of lesbianism amid patriarchal rigor with the same clarity rehearsed by Diwan or Hittman.

Let's say that the last step, that of liberation from mourning, that of the story not necessarily always linked to tragedy and shame, is the one that '

' and

The first two are handled with the tools of comedy not so much to deactivate the drama as to confront it with all its contradictions.

freedom weighs more than pain.

And in the third, the true story of the activists who in the 1960s helped secure but illegal abortions is told, from the certainty that any other alternative is and has always been worse.

"Everything that has to do with women is associated with shame. We talk about induced abortions, but the same pattern of thinking works for unprovoked ones. Both are hidden, just as the act of violence is always denied. motherhood", comments this time

that since her film

reverses every commonplace about almost everything.

"Motherhood is not one. Motherhood depends on many things and is always associated with social class," she adds as a coda to drop abortion as well.

'Four months, three weeks and two days'

, by Cristian Mungiu, or '

, by Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy, like before them '

, by Mike Leigh, or '

by Nancy Savoca and Cher all talk and talk about abortion.

But always from the denunciation, the revelation or the astonishment.

And from the shame, the silence and the hidden.

"We are starting. There is a long way to go. Perhaps what has happened now in the Supreme Court is nothing more than proof that the change is real. If there is a reaction, it is that progress is being made," he concludes optimistically despite everything, and despite Bresson, Ruiz of Azua.

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