Sometimes Sadness, Sometimes Rebellion

From Viennale

At the Reina Sofía in Madrid, Eva looks at images of people who are also looking. They are Val del Omar’s photographs of the Pedagogic Missions, which brought cinema to the furthermost corners of Spain during the Second Republic. The people in the images are watching a film for the first time, and their gestures are full of fascination. At the museum, she meets Dante, who is, like her, from Córdoba, Argentina, and is in Madrid to carry out research on a 1904 text, Juan Bialet Massé’s Report on the Condition of the Working Classes. As they walk through a city whose light is so different from that of their home, they wonder whether the things so central to the twentieth century (labour rights, cinema) can survive today. The new light, new city and their new curiosities cast new shadows on the nightmare that is the Argentinian present: the frustration, the fear, the confusion, the sadness, everything that comes before rebellion. What is to be done? A VECES ME ENTRA TRISTEZA, OTRAS VECES REBELIÓN pursues this question to the point of shifting its own form, constantly jumping outside of itself to where the others are, as the sorrows it touches on are not of the one, but of the many. (Lucía Salas)