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SUR columnist Juan Francisco Ferré on the enduring allure of cinema

Juan Francisco Ferré

Malaga

Friday, 7 February 2025, 16:01

Forget about work and politics, family and debts, and go to the movies - there's so much to see, perhaps more than in so-called reality. Cinemas survive by miracle, and the very existence of cinema is, in a way, both a miracle and a wonder. Walk in without fear and leave behind the world that overwhelms and disgusts you. Choose your film wisely - not just anything will do. Pick an experience that is rewarding and memorable, then don't complain. There is still so much to see. That is cinema's great lesson. Life is lived, but it is also watched, or observed. The screen is a rear window through which we uncover the most precious secrets - both of others and of ourselves. Cinema is both experience and spectacle, teaching us to view life from a new angle, a different perspective.

Cinema shows us that everything in life is fleeting and transitory, like fashion. Films always carry a contemporary connection; in one way or another, they speak to us, the inhabitants of the present, about the things that intrigue or captivate us. Don't wait to watch them on streaming platforms - it might be too late if you think about it. See them in dark theatres, where light reveals its true power. Remember, cinema is the only art form that maintains a magical connection with both the light and darkness of the world - something the brilliant David Lynch understood well, the darkroom where the hidden depths of the human unconscious are projected in an endless session. Life is brutal, and cinema can be too. In this sense, one must not miss the great film of the moment.

In The Brutalist, the brute is a tycoon, the pure embodiment of American capitalism, and the modern artist is a Hungarian Jew who fled the horrors of Nazism. The brutalist architect risks his life and fortune to complete an ambitious project funded by the magnate - one that, in reality, holds a hidden meaning tied to the architect's own life. His suffering, and that of his wife, in the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dachau-places where the darkroom was transformed into the inferno of the gas chamber-also form part of the film's narrative.

European exiles - writers, scientists, artists, musicians, intellectuals - made America great and Europe small. Our deep-seated barbarism and self-destructive drift, despite the exuberant brilliance of European culture, deprived us of being a true geopolitical power. The abduction of Europe is beyond remedy now, unfortunately, and only worsening. Face the truth.

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