The Limits of Control

This film is considered one of the director’s less successful works. But in my view it is his best: rich material for analysis in entirely different discourses and full of many dimensions, which, as you watch, give the impression that you understand what is happening, yet leave you completely lost as to where and on what level this understanding lies and what it consists of. To analyse this film in detail from a psychoanalytic or any other point of view would take a lot of text and pictures; I will leave that for possible future posts about it. Still, I will pull one moment out of the film’s field of events and leave it here. In the first third of the film, the character on whom attention is focused, who is also the protagonist, comes to a museum several times and, looking at the paintings, stops in front of one of them and gazes at it thoughtfully. The meeting between the protagonist and the subject of the painting happens at once. He recognises what is depicted and sets off into the world, where he encounters the same subject, but in a different form and on a different stage, as an event of everyday life. Here the story unfolds from the art object.
Next, the director shows the protagonist looking down from a high balcony at the cityscape of a most beautiful city, Barcelona. And this landscape moves onto canvas and appears as an image in a painting. In the next shot the hero stands before this landscape, but now in the museum. Here events unfold in the opposite direction, from the world into the museum. Two diametrically opposed scenes show the dynamics of how the protagonist’s story unfolds: at first he follows the world, then the world follows him. And yes, one could say this is the same old story of the hero being not some nobody, not a “trembling creature”, but one who “has the right”. This theme fits the plot if we consider it in the Hegelian discourse of master and slave. The myth of Theseus can be traced too, and what serves as Ariadne’s thread in this film? Imagination. Imagination not as fantasising and flight from reality into unknown distances, but as a creative impulse born at the meeting point of the hero and the world. So what influences the hero? The world, or does he influence it? Apparently, it is this dialectic that shapes the events on the hero’s path to his goal. Or to his limit?