August. The dark is fashionable?

Last Friday, Rodrigo Prieto, my director of photography, said with his characteristic simplicity: “We’re filming an historic scene”. I looked at him in surprise, because Rodrigo is one of the most talented and least ostentatious technicians I have ever met. His remark had to do with the last group of sequences shot in total darkness.
How can you shoot without light, without any light at all, inside a space like a closed box, without a single crack? Rodrigo studied the problem until he found the solution.

In his words: “We know that the human eye is capable of seeing a limited range of the electromagnetic spectrum, but that it’s possible to register ultraviolet and infrared light photographically, even though we don’t see it. I started investigating and discovered that there are infrared lights which illuminate spaces so that security cameras can “see” what is happening in a place where apparently there is no light. I supposed that it would be possible to adapt a high definition camera in order to be able to work with infrared light just as security cameras do.
At Panavision, in Paris, they had already carried out trials with their digital camera “Genesis”, replacing a filter that prevented infrared light from passing through with one that was transparent. Normally, digital cameras need to prevent the invisible spectrum from affecting their sensor, for the signal would have information that doesn’t correspond to the human eye, but if the filter that prevents this is removed, then it’s possible to film the wavelengths corresponding to infrared light...

The challenge of filming inside an enormous black box has been a fascinating experience for me. My work consists of lighting and I had to do the opposite, I had to work in a total abstraction, I had to imagine “non-light” and how to represent a totally black space in which the actors had to act without seeing, in front of a camera and a lens that did see them.

It was an almost spiritual revelation, discovering that infrared light is a minute example of all that exists in the Universe, and around us, that we are incapable of seeing. We think that reality is only what we see, but in fact there are countless vibrations, waves and radiations that we neither see nor feel and which are as real as our own skin…”

There is one sequence in “Broken Embraces” in which the characters of Lluis Homar, Blanca Portillo and Tamar Novas go for dinner at a restaurant whose specialty is the dark, that is, the clients eat and drink in total darkness. The waiters who serve the food are blind.
That kind of establishment exists. The first one to open was in Munich, and the idea was that relatives of blind people could accompany them during the meal in the same darkness in which they eat and live. The experiment had a lot of coverage in the media and Berlin opened another restaurant for blind people that was soon visited by clients anxious for new experiences. The one I know, and which I used to document myself, “Dans le noir”, is in Paris and the clientele consists mainly of curious or inquiring people looking for a special evening.

Asier Etxeandía, Lluis Homar, Blanca Portillo and Tamar Novas in single file, entering the dining room of the restaurant without a view. © Paola Ardizzoni and Emilio Pereda.

I thought that the phenomenon and how it spread was interesting and, given that there is a blind character in my film, I wrote a sequence which is set in one of those places, respecting the logistics of the real restaurants. I took as my reference the one in Paris, the only one I know personally.
I didn’t eat there but I was inside the dining room. I have never experienced a similar dark. It is total, vaporous, dense blackness. It isn’t a vacuum, it’s something else. That kind of dark is much blacker than you can imagine.

At one point in the sequence, Tamar Novas explains the origin of these restaurants to Blanca Portillo (his mother in the film) and he ends by saying that they’ve become very fashionable. The mother, disconcerted and on the verge of an anxiety attack, asks him and wonders herself: “The dark is fashionable? I can’t understand that.”

MAN IN THE DARK

That’s the title of Paul Auster’s latest novel, but it fits perfectly with the script of my film. In fact, the origin of “Broken Embraces” (I think I’ve already mentioned this) lies in the long hours I spent in the dark in my bedroom suffering from migraines.
For months I only had at my disposal pain, darkness and imagination. If I wanted to defend myself against the first, I had to use the other two arms. I needed to center my mind on some other place, far from my bedroom. As I couldn’t talk or read or watch television, I was the one who would talk to me, within myself. I had to be the one to tell me stories.
I discovered that this was possible, that I could link one action with another. That was how Lluis Homar’s character came into being, a writer who had lost his sight in an accident and who, moved by despair and boredom, starts to make up stories. After all, that’s what he did before he lost his sight. And the fact of fabulating again saves his life.

Men in semidarkness. Rubén Ochandiano visiting, with evil intentions, the middle-aged blind writer. © Paola Ardizzoni and Emilio Pereda.

The power of the imagination isn’t lost in the dark. The dark opens infinite abysses around your body which you have to learn to avoid, but it also opens infinite horizons in which to expand.
The important thing is to recover the desire to participate in your life, with the elements at your disposal, and to reinforce them (this goes for any illness). And that is what my character does.

That is how the first version of the script of “Broken Embraces” began. And that, more or less, is how the novel by my dear Paul Auster begins. (When I started writing the words you are now reading, I had only read the first chapter, in the literary section of the newspaper El País. Now I have read the entire novel and I recommend it enthusiastically.)
In any case, and fortunately, the beginning of my script gradually disappeared in successive versions. Now there is no longer a man lying in the dark of night and day, imagining stories in order literally to kill time. It would have been difficult to explain that I hadn’t been inspired by the first chapter of Auster’s novel, something that would have been impossible anyway because my script and his novel were being written at the same time, but curiously at that time I had coincided with Paul Auster on various occasions and he could have mentioned something to me about the theme of his novel.

We had both received the Prince of Asturias award. I was in the final stages of my promotional tour of “Volver” and I was thinking of taking up again the script of “La piel que habito”, my hypothetical next film. For some time I had been feeling stranded on the rocky adaptation of that story and I thought it would do me good to rewrite it with someone. Auster seemed like the right writer to me, but his shyness made me shy too, and I didn’t want to propose something that would be embarrassing to him.

Over the course of our three-day stay in Oviedo, we shared lots of situations, as well as food and drink. At one of those suppers, when we were already pretty lively, I consulted him about the possibility of writing a script together. He told me that there was no problem with his work schedule. I was thinking of doing it three or four months later and I didn’t mind going to New York.

Paul Auster and I celebrating the Prince of Asturias awards. Oviedo 2006. © Pedro Almodóvar.

As soon as the promotion ended in January 2007, I decided to tackle the problem of my headaches, which had increased in 2006. From that moment on, while I underwent various treatments with a group of neurologists, the pain increased… Anyway, the fact is that during the first six months of 2007 I was trapped by the headaches and the treatments. I couldn’t go to New York or write with Paul Auster. Nevertheless each of us wrote a story about narrators in the dark. A typically Auster situation.

GIVE ME THE DARKEST NIGHT (February 2003)

In Paris, on February 23, I received the César award for Best Foreign Film for “Talk to Her”, and the next day I traveled by train to London for the ceremony of the BAFTA awards, where I had a double nomination (Best Original Script and Best Non-English Language Film).

On the train journey, half dozing and dulled by the lack of rest, I thought about my acceptance speech, in case I received either of the awards, but I couldn’t think of anything.
Normally I prefer to improvise but, when the acceptance is in English, I prefer to have something minimally prepared. I don’t always manage it, it’s very hard to me to visualize myself accepting an award when I’m only nominated. I never think they’re going to give it to me and I feel like an idiot preparing an acceptance speech for something that doesn’t belong to me.

On the train, I was glancing through the newspaper, it was in the days prior to the invasion of Iraq. The American forces were already installed in the area, waiting impatiently for the order to attack. The media were speculating on the how and when of the invasion, they mentioned the climate and the moon as determining factors.

With regard to the climate, Captain Daneker said they were “trained to work in the most extreme conditions” and if the Iraqis could bear the heat, so could they. With regard to the moonlight, according to what the same captain said, the American troops were in conditions to begin the attack without a single ray of moonlight. According to analysts at the time (I’d like to know what they think now), with the technological means they had, the taking of Baghdad would be a stroll for the American troops.

“Give me a closed night, give me the darkest night and I assure you we’ll send Sadam and his men to the place they belong: hell”, said Captain Daneker, according to an article in El País on February 23.
That demand, which sounded so Shakespearean, as well as hair-raising, gave me the idea for an acceptance speech should I get any award. And I did, I got both the awards for which I was nominated. It was when I received the first one that I gabbled through my anti-war speech.

“Cinema and war are two very different things, I would say that they are absolutely opposing realities. The body and soul of films is light, even darkness is made on a basis of light…”
After saying this, I quoted Captain Daneker’s “Give me the darkest night, etc.” and I related it to a song by the Mexican genius José Alfredo Jiménez, called precisely “Luz de luna” (“Moonlight”) (…since you went away, I haven’t had any moonlight). And I added that in our culture the absence of moonlight represents pain, loneliness and abandonment by the loved one. And I continued: “We have to halt this Army of Shadows, because the dark will only bring us pain, absence, desolation, hunger and death. And there is nothing more unnatural than death”.
It was a moment of disconcerting glory, I was probably melodramatic and clumsy, I was so passionately opposed to the war and so excited at receiving the BAFTA that I don’t think people understood me very well. But I did manage to create some unease among those attending the ceremony. It can’t have been easy for the English to understand the relationship between the war in Iraq and the great Mexican composer José Alfredo Jiménez.

SPANISH DARKNESS

I’ve just read it in the newspaper El Mundo, August 28th. Aznar states categorically (all his statements are always categorical) that he doesn’t regret the photo in the Azores with Bush and Blair.

“I don’t regret it because it was the most important historical moment that Spain has had in two hundred years.”

Aznar’s capacity for self-deception and historic simplification is beyond belief, when referring to the last two centuries of Spain’s history, two particularly convulsed centuries in which the monarchy was overthrown twice, two republics were founded, there were two dictatorships (in the XX century), multiple coups and a war of independence against the French invasion…

Aznar also forgets that after all that historic convulsion Spain has achieved political stability in the last thirty years, thanks to the arrival of Democracy. And that, in this period, the citizens have demonstrated on the streets and in opinion polls their absolute rejection of that unjust, illegal war (90% of the population expressly stated their rejection) of which he seems so proud. At the time of the Azores photo, he didn’t have any scruples about representing a people whose opinion he was disregarding. In the same way he is disregarding it now.
It is retroactively frightening to think that the fate of our country was in the hands of someone with such a perspective of himself and of the history of Spain.

In the same interview, Aznar affirms: “I am sure that sooner or later PSOE (Socialist Party) will pay for their attitude to the attacks of March 11th 2004, and they will have to pay dearly for that tremendous disloyalty.” In his parallel world I suppose “disloyalty” is equivalent to “rejection of complicity in lying”.

Like August Brill, the protagonist of “Man in the Dark”, by Paul Auster (an elderly man who is immobilized in bed due to an accident and, to fight against the nights of sleeplessness and loneliness, reinvents the history of the United States which he submerges in a civil war, with the sole intention of killing time before time kills him), Aznar has invented a parallel universe in which he lives, deliberates and predicts catastrophes, a universe and a language in which there is no equivalent for common sense, uncertainty or doubt.
Sunk in his infinite moral darkness, Aznar fabulates about the history of Spain, especially about the time in which he believes he was the absolute protagonist. Fabulating is something to which everyone is entitled, if it weren’t that he involved all of us in his fabulations. The rest of us live within the confines of reality and are horrified that someone should write our history, the one we live day by day, distorting it, twisting it, changing it, reinventing it according to his whims and interests.

History cannot be reinvented. History is.
Pedro Almodóvar