Watching ourselves watching

Today I watched Caché by Haneke for the second time. I was 21 the first time, so at first I thought that it wouldn't impress me as much this time, the second time, that its powers would be diminished by repetition. And of course I couldn't be more wrong. The impact that Caché produces grows up with you, the older you are the more multifarious and tentacled your guilt is, the fairer the punishment. The only difference is that the first time I was surprised by feeling guilty, and that now I'm so familiar with this mechanism that I am even daring to theorize about it. 

The most intriguing shots (which is to say a lot) in the film are the ones that start like the one above: a still camera, watching for several minutes. We think that we are in the position of a surveillance camera, or later on we think we are in the position of the stalker. Then all of a sudden the shot gets contaminated by blurry rewinding lines: we are not watching the street, this is the tape that the characters got of the stalker spying on them. The amazing thing is that we realize we are not only watching the characters, but at the same time, the characters are watching themselves being watched. This is a tromp l'oeil, an instability between dimensions in an incessant shift: from extradiegesis to diegesis, from reality to fiction, from disembodied eye to incarnated victim. From unaware consciousness to consciousness thinking itself. Isn't this the most masterly formalization of guilt, of this awful splitting that allows us to be judge and judged at the same time? This is also we quoting Majid to ourselves: "I just wanted you to be present".

Arrebatos

You can watch Arrebato with English subtitles now, thanks to this precious German edition by Bildstoerung, which comes with two documentaries (Iván Z and Arrebatos) and a short film by Zulueta, Leo es pardo. Inside the case you will find as well a beautiful booklet with essays and stills from the film.
This post intends to be about Arrebatos, the documentary about the making of Arrebato. To write about the film itself is a vertiginous task that must be undertaken with a predisposition to loss, momentary and irreversible, of oneself and other luxuries (this will happen imminently, here or somewhere else. Ailleurs is where Arrebato takes place). Some days one wants to humanize oneself and more importantly, stay humanized -these are not the days to write about Arrebato. Today I'm trying to keep myself warm, so I can push myself through the already said.
Marta Fernández Muro, who played the role of Marta (big teeth impossible to maintain all of it inside the mouth, her mouth is always open: excessive talking, excessive breathing, laughter always ready -a victim of celluloid, Eusebio Poncela called her). Marta says that Arrebato is a deeply religious film, that she looked for that word in the dictionary and the only word she remembers seeing is ecstasy, that Arrebato is ecstasy, more exactly the ecstasy of Santa Teresa as portrayed by Bernini.

The documentary starts with the announcement of a confession to be made by Eusebio Poncela: I had never talked about this, but today I'm going to tell you, so it stays recorded here. And the documentary finishes it with it. Zulueta was planning to end Arrebato  otherwise. Eusebio said, what if the camera shoots him? And Zulueta decided to use Eusebio's idea. "I should have never said that. That was not the way the film should have ended. He used my idea and someone got shot. And it wasn't me."