WFF 2025: Afternoons of Solitude

Unexpected admiration for a Wisconsin Film Festival documentary about bullfighting. Plus: An overdue update.

Good morning, MTWZ subscribers and Wisconsin Supreme Court Justic-Elect Susan Crawford only.

I am in the middle of the busiest four-week span in quite some time, hence the delay in posting here.

The good news is that, as of mid-March, I have a full-time job at a university. I will share more details about it in due time. For now, I’ll just say that I find the work very fulfilling. I am also pleasantly surprised at the dedication I have been able to summon, day in and day out, without much sleep or time for relaxation.¹ I was worried, after so many years in grad school, that my expectations for work-life balance were permanently out of whack—that I had gotten soft. While that last part perhaps remains true, in an evolutionary sense, I am content to report that I feel more energized and motivated with this new career opportunity than I have in awhile. Once I feel a real sense of security and ownership about this new position, I will discuss it more here. Fortunately, that shouldn’t be too far in the future.

The bad news is that I have had no time for writing. I should have more room to dedicate to MTWZ next week, after returning from an academic conference I am spending way too much out-of-pocket to attend. I intend to post at least one newsletter covering what I saw at the Wisconsin Film Festival (April 3-10), which begins tomorrow night! I will most likely post my WFF coverage after the fest concludes. This month, I should also be able to squeeze in a new edition of “The Latest,” on top of sharing older pieces of film writing, similar to the Something Wild analysis I posted last month—anything to keep this newsletter active as I close out the academic year.

For today, I want to share a short piece on the Wisconsin Film Festival documentary Afternoons of Solitude (2024), directed by Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra. I was surprised how much I appreciated it, considering its depraved subject matter (read on below). Somehow, there are still tickets available for both showings (also listed and linked to below)!

As always, your decision to subscribe, at the free tier alone, motivates me to continue writing here. I am grateful to have just a couple minutes of your day.

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Afternoons of Solitude (dir. Albert Serra, 2024)

Screening April 5, 8:30 pm, Chazen Museum of Art, and April 10, 4:45 pm, Flix Brewhouse Madison (Buy tickets via Eventive here)

It says a lot that I am recommending this film at all, given how reprehensible I find the sport of bullfighting and how loath I am to watch animals being killed. This is a documentary, filmed over three years across Spain, that depicts the slow deaths of a half-dozen bulls and the culture of worship around the men who kill them. But thanks to the choices of its director and the maddening allure of its lead human subject, Afternoons of Solitude justifies its existence and then some.

Viewed historically, Afternoons of Solitude continues, and in its own way combines, at least three time-honored approaches to documentary. On the one hand it functions as an ethnographic document, in this case of a specific, peculiar, and violent cultural ritual. While devoid of voiceover, it is kin to Jean Rouch’s The Mad Masters (1955) in its unflinching and uncomfortably contextualized view of public animal slaughter. The first bullfight lasts over twenty minutes, depicting the rehearsed flow between the picadores, banderilleros, and matador as they respectively lance, pierce, and stab the spine of the poor animal. That last blow tends to not be instantly fatal; the coup de grâce involves plunging a knife into the bull’s brain. With surprising alacrity, a horse-drawn chariot then drags the bull’s corpse out of the ring. We see all of this.

The film’s commitment to duration—approaching tedium at times—allows the subjects to reveal themselves, in Direct Cinema fashion. After the first bull is carried off, one of the banderilleros exclaims to the matador, “Life is nothing! You got balls!” This fixation on cojones recurs throughout the film—just because it is exclusively voiced by the observed subjects does not make its inclusion necessarily subtle.

As conceived by Albert Serra, known for narrative features Pacifiction (2022) and The Death of Louis XIV (2016), the film’s aesthetic also owes much to art cinema more broadly. In this way, Afternoons of Solitude can also be appreciated as an art filmmaker’s foray into nonfiction. Usually, the seminal works of this sort arrive at the beginning of a filmmaker’s career: Both Georges Franju and Alain Resnais respectively made Le Sang des bêtes (1949) and Night and Fog (1956)—both relevant touchstones here!—before their most celebrated fictional efforts. Other filmmakers like Herzog, Wenders, and Akerman toggled between fiction and nonfiction across their careers. I am intrigued by Serra’s devotion to documentary in this light, as the length of time he spent filming and editing this (reportedly from 700 hours of footage) suggests this is no passing fancy.²

At the end of the day, however, the documentary mode at Afternoons of Solitude’s core is the artist/celebrity portrait. Just as Clouzot made art of his own in filming Picasso before a canvas, Serra recognizes the cinematic potential of a uniquely talented narcissist. And unfortunately for those of us invested in animal welfare, the central matador, Andrés Roca Rey, is a babe—and Serra knows this. Between bullfighting, the camera studies Rey’s face in the backseat of a limousine, or his body in interchangeable hotel rooms, where a manlet on his team is tasked with squeezing him into his sequined traje de luces. Clouzot never viewed Picasso in this way, thank goodness.

Most of the time we see Rey in the ring, through a roaming telephoto lens. His contorted face, angled gait, and sharp eyes are all astonishing to behold, like a perched great horned owl or courting male peacock. That does not mean I derived no satisfaction from the multiple on-screen instances where Rey is gored or trampled by a bull otherwise destined for death. The coarse disdain his fellow matadors show for these aggressive toros (“That bull was criminal!”) contrasts with Rey’s frequent reflections on and questioning of his own fate: “I was lucky,” “He got me, and I was unhurt,” “Why wasn’t I hurt?”

Bullfighting is ultimately a team effort, and a cowardly one in my view, so the film’s title is not meant to be taken literally or nobly. But Rey’s sincere and quiet questioning (heard only by Serra’s microphones) do nothing to bolster his standing in this arena of nihilistic machismo, and so resembles a form of solitude indeed.

1. On the positive side, “no time to relax” also equates with “no time for doomscrolling,” I have found!

2. Nor do I mean to imply that this is Serra’s first documentary—The Lord Has Worked Wonders in Me (2011) is one such earlier feature.