El cielo gira

Miguel Marías

Such, no doubt, was one of the uses of the cinematograph at its beginnings, as had happened years before with photography. Not that this was its original or main function, nor the goal behind its gradual and confluent multiple invention during a certain period of time, an invention itself sketched or foreseen by many scientific tools and entertainment artefacts (sometimes magician’s tricks, from the camera obscura and the decomposition of a horse’s leg movements, to Chinese shadows and the magic lantern); in fact, the centennial festivities held already a decade ago – we should recall that the supposedly dying cinema has aged a further ten per cent – did not celebrate its invention, much less the art form it could not dream of becoming in 1895, but its first showing to an audience: namely, its revelation as a spectacle open to commercial exploitation for a profit, the business which immediately became the undreamed-of possibility of offering the sight (in a different way) of what we had already seen; or, a little later, what most people only knew through books or oral description, in dreams or by the sheer power of imagination, too far away, once travel took too long and cost too much.

But that possible mission of cinema – anybody who wishes to assign it to himself will find an eager audience, for the very same reason that everybody seems eager to look in wonderment at any old family album of photographs, whether a friend’s (even for the bearer it is a series of unknown people, most of them dead before his or her own birth), or a wholly anonymous person’s, if we happen to find it in an antique shop or browsing at a flea market – that mission was soon to be forgotten, substituted by purposes (more fanciful and much farther from the shadow of death) other than recollection. Since most of us manage to live thanks to the unconscious but permanent effort to forget death – making sure we never think about it, or only (much against our will) when it strikes close – it comes as no surprise that most cinema has always neglected, indeed positively avoided, any such potential intimation of mortality.

Since the advent of sound, the cinema’s ability to fully record the traces of things still present but soon to drown into the past, thus making them last longer, has steadily increased – traces of things which probably will die not long after, thus becoming prey to that second and final death which is oblivion, especially with the physical extinction of those who keep such things alive in their memories for a while. From the 1930s onwards, the voices of the dead could echo in a dark theatre, and the recorded sound of their footsteps could reaffirm their walking images, forever in movement as long as the piece of film is screened, well after the death of everyone who was once photographed in action.

But, surprisingly, talking pictures seemed even less often than the silents to have a penchant for that labour of preservation. In countries which would rather forget than remember (like Spain), there have been very few instances of an approach that would allow the preservation of images of things already in the process of being destroyed, eroded or buried. Thus it comes as an unexpected and welcome surprise that a young woman filmmaker, for her first feature, has chosen to look at the past and return to her birthplace. She is already aware that she is a survivor: despite her youth and lack of experience she is the last person born in Aldealseñor, a very small and now almost depopulated town at the outskirts of the diminutive capital of the province of Soria – quite close to it but off the main highway, so nobody takes the trouble of visiting it. In fact, even the people born there cannot stay for long, if they want to study or get a job.

There are still some neighbours left, all aged, but good talkers, with precise and savoury vocabulary, laconic wit, and an unexpected and spontaneous talent for storytelling. And these few old-timers were approached by Álvarez in order to try to learn, while someone still remembered it, the already vague past history of the village, what happened there when some things still happened, the feelings aroused by the echoes of the world that get to them through radio and television, and how they react to this news with wise scepticism and childish innocence.

During the long shooting of El cielo gira – following the flow and cadence of the seasons – there were, as might be feared, new casualties and further destruction, senseless attempts at giving life to a place – or rather, making profit from it – where there is very little left, and that little so lonely and so abandoned to its own fate by everybody else (take a look at the electoral campaign, the cursory incursion of both main political parties). And this forlorn no man’s land, these mostly empty houses, these people patiently waiting their own end, have been captured by Álvarez’s camera, so that people who have never come near Aldealseñor can see it and remember them when they are no longer there. She has looked at them and filmed them as if she wanted to prove that, although now living elsewhere, she’s still from their village, one of them, and that she will remember. With the naked beauty, dry and unornamented, of her people and countryside. With apparent coldness, without sentimentalism or demagoguery, without ever raising her voice. The film sounds like a whisper and flows like a brook of clear, cold water, eternally in motion. And it shows quite simply the coming future, the aeolic-energy windmills that break the simple lines of the naked skyline and will soon cover the small, strong, isolated tree on the hilltop, the pre-fabricated luxury hotel rooms which are built right into the old stone of a strange, Arabic-looking, medieval palace. No complaints, at most the implicit irony of people who powerlessly contemplate how fake gadgets displace authentic things, things which will, however, be kept forever on a film called El cielo gira that relates many other things: the individual stories – usually untold – of several of its inhabitants, dead or alive, present or departed, during the Spanish Civil War or the protracted postwar which followed it, or the painter whom Álvarez invited to touch and infer – with the remainder of his eyesight, and the helpful answers of villagers to his questions – the place of her birth, the lonely tree which she saw as a little girl each day, upon waking, when she looked out of the window. The tree still stands there, each day more alone, yet resisting the wind.