In Presence of Mind (El celo, 1999), an adaptation by Antonio Aloy of Henry James’s famous novella The Turn of the Screw, Agustí Villaronga plays the role of Fosc, a character more felt than seen; a transient presence, like a ghost or someone outside the actual story being told. In The Uninvited Guest (El habitante incierto, 2005) by Guillem Morales, Villaronga plays the mysterious character who introduces himself into a man’s house and becomes part of this; another presence more felt than seen, a kind of parasite who starts to feed on the emotions of the house’s owner.
These two brief performances as actor – or rather non-actor – might serve to summarize Villaronga’s work and what this represents in the context of contemporary Spanish and Catalan cinema: an evasive cinema, unclassifiable, with just such a transient presence. With only seven feature films in twenty-five years, from Tras el cristal (1986) to Pa negre (2010), Villaronga is an actor who appears and disappears, like those two phantasmal characters he plays, in the margin of his own work behind the camera; performing as an actor, but without allowing himself to be filmed.
Bursting onto the scene with a first film (Tras el cristal) that generated great expectations – as well as controversy – had its positive aspects, but also sowed the seeds of doubt. Much was expected from the director, born in Majorca in 1953: so much, in fact, that the commercial failure of his second feature film, El niño de la luna (1989) – made for a much higher budget and with the clear ambition of uniting authorship with commercial success – gave short shrift to,
or at least diminished, the salutary role Villaronga could have played in Spanish cinema at the end of the 1980s.
El niño de la luna is an exploration/elaboration of the mythical, almost atavistic worlds Villaronga had already developed in two of his three shorts, Anta mujer (1976) and Al-Mayurka (1980). The third of these, Laberint (1980), is an essentially evocative, sensory experiment; the choreographic adaptation of a painting by Antoni
Tapies that is transformed into a canvas in motion. El niño de la luna clearly, albeit perhaps not effectively, shows the register Villaronga aimed to strike in contemporary cinema. His vocation was to unite cinéma d’auteur with genre cinema, and it is to this mission – riskier than it seems at first sight, and one at which many producers have failed – that he has devoted himself ever since, with results that have been at times as disconcerting as they have been fascinating.
Tras el cristal contains all the essentials of Villaronga’s cinematography. The elements that characterize his style and themes permeate every pore of this film. The story of the relationship between a homosexual former Nazi torturer and one of his young victims, inspired in equal parts by the sadistic personality of Gilles de Rais, Joan of Arc’s Field Marshal during the Hundred Years’ War, and by Nazi barbarism generally, gives Villaronga an opportunity to express the main tenets of his cinematographic world with unusual maturity (considering his inexperience and the many problems that occurred during the making of the film): the desecration of the innocence of youth; a certain poetics of cruelty; an apparent moral ambiguity; the blending of good and evil without a clear demarcation of where one begins and the other ends, and the idea that evil is cyclical – that it feeds on itself and always resurfaces.
Tras el cristal is a vampire story centered on the idea of a man –the former Nazi imprisoned in his iron lung – who is unable to live life by himself, after having enjoyed its dark side: torture, rape, injecting gasoline straight into people’s hearts... In El niño de la luna, this dark side was mitigated by the more evocative and mythical imagery, but the film’s poor reception provoked a change of course in the career of the director, who was firmly set on venturing in the two opposite directions of classicism and radicalism. Without being either one or the other, Tras el cristal presents an extreme experience by means of an unhurried, almost orthodox mise en scène.
Villaronga remained true to his calling up to the completion of El mar (2000), his new exploration of the roots of evil, and again a discourse on an almost atavistic kind of violence (the murder and suicide at the beginning, perpetrated by children on children, takes place in a deep cesspool inside a cave that has nothing Platonic about it whatsoever). But unlike his latest film, Black Bread, both El pasajero clandestino (1995) and 99.9 (1997) are undertakings Villaronga was unable to raise to the desired level. The first is an adaptation of the novella of the same title by Georges Simenon, which takes place in one of the Belgian author’s favourite geographical locations, Tahiti; a place where people go to look for peace before dying. The result steers a middle course between an almost literal transcription of the original and a few personal touches by the director –, the way of telling the tragic love story between a young telegrapher and a prostitute included – in a forced manner. The second is a lurid thriller with elements of occultism and ancestral rites, though far removed from the almost anthropological vocation with which, in his first shorts, Villaronga filmed some of the folkloric rituals of his native Majorca.
These two examples of genre films have cancelled out the credit Villaronga garnered as a director committed to ideas deviating from the dominant orthodoxy in Spanish cinema at the time, as well as to a mise en scène in accordance with these ideas. Like the characters from Presence of Mind and The Uninvited Guest, the more personal Villaronga appears and disappears. In 99.9, we see nothing of this director committed to a different and personal form of cinematography. In Aro Tolbukhin – In the Mind of a Killer (Aro Tolbukhin – En la mente del asesino) (2002), the complete opposite is the case. In this film (co-directed with Lydia Zimmermann and Isaac P. Racine), several styles collide: documentary; fake documentary; fiction; reportage; entertainment – as do formats: Super-8; 16 mm; 35 mm; video; colour; black-andwhite – to tell the supposed story of a Hungarian merchant seaman executed in Guatemala for having burned seven people alive in an infirmary. Another example of the evil that always resurfaces in Villaronga’s cinema.
Fiction and (fake) documentary go hand-in-hand in a conceptual experiment in which Villaronga’s hallmark is clearly visible in the section shot in black-and-white, which reconstructs – or simply imagines – the relationship between Tolbukhin and his sister during childhood and adolescence.
The uniqueness of Aro Tolbukhin – En la mente del asesino consists of its combination of formats and its renewal of the possibilities of non-fiction. On the other hand, the interest of El Mar and Pa negre resides in the acceptance on the part of Villaronga of certain elements specific to post-war Spanish cinema situated in a rural setting (almost a genre in itself), then converting these and placing them against a simple backdrop – such as Nazism in Tras el cristal
– in order to cross the fragile boundary between good and evil.
Both films feature similar concepts. The tuberculosis sanatorium, which in fact is a kind of prison for those who are different – and not just because it concerns those vanquished during the conflict – confirms the morbid impulse that informs each of the director’s stories and categorically shows how it is possible to make cinema d’auteur in the context of a politics of industrial cinema.