'Abyssal' or the escape of the concrete
By ANTONIO ENRIQUE GONZÁLEZ ROJAS -November 22nd, 2023
RIALTA
Abyssal (Alejandro Alonso2021) is a chronicle of the eternal end, the melancholic beauty of decomposition, and the impressive precipitation of wounded leviathans into the mouth of Hell, piece by piece.
As in his previous film Terranova (2020) –co-directed with the Spaniard Alejandro Pérez– with the city in full spectral transmutation, Alonso cartografía aquí la erosión, el desmoronamiento, la fuga de lo concreto, la disolución de lo sólido. Abyssal –que como parte del IV Festival de Cine INSTAR estará disponible para los públicos cubanos en la plataforma online Festhome del 4 al 10 de diciembre, siempre entre 10:00 de la mañana y 12:00 de la noche– capta un universo en transición hacia misteriosos estados de la existencia, incomprensibles para el raciocinio humano.
The film may be, as its title suggests, a peek into the deepest realms of life, where the roots of the Tree of the World barely reach. Viewers in Buenos Aires are invited to go there -also due to INSTAR's transnational initiative- on Tuesday, December 5, at the Centro Cultural General San Martín, as well as other moviegoers on Thursday 7, at the Zumzeig Cinecooperativa in Barcelona; on Friday 8, at La Maison de l'Amérique Latine, in Paris, and on Sunday 10, at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City.
El laureado Alonso here maps the erosion, the crumbling, the escape from the concrete, the dissolution of the solid. ‘Abyssal’ –which, as part of the IV INSTAR Film Festival, will be available to Cuban audiences on the online platform Festhome from 4 to 10 December, always between 10:00 and 00:00– captures a universe in a transition towards mysterious states of existence, incomprehensible to human reasoning. El hombre de la cámara (1929): toda una apología del bello y sincrónico poder de la industria como eje del progreso de la Humanidad.
In Abisal, Vertov's machines fall silent and lose meaning in their definitive immobility. The pistons no longer run with an unstoppable rhythm toward the future. The gears no longer sing their triumphal hymn and no longer spin like frenzied planets. Rust shrouds them, cushions them, and soothes the cold that the night brings while, at the same time, it swallows them up and deforms their angles. It melts their individualities, shiny and sharp shapes, into a brown, undefined, dusty homogeneity. Little by little, the boats are transformed into dunes. Dust to dust. Water to water.
This last port, as it may seem, does not have the solemn tranquility that could be found in an elephant's graveyard, where monsters rest in peace of titanic bones and ivories. The last sleep of marine giants endures a final torture; this is a circle of Hell where they are condemned to perennial dismemberment because of unknown sins. The stranded moles helplessly accept such an ordeal of mutilation and disfigurement, perhaps praying inwardly to be left to drown in peace, surrendered to a corrosive dullness and a benevolent self-forgetfulness.
They also suffer from the intrusion of men, who swarm among them, charged with breaking their ribs and spines, tearing apart the glorious work of other men: these old monuments to the triumph of will over Nature and God himself. With the dazed mechanics of perpetuum mobile, they fulfill a de-civilizing, anti-Machinist task, like termites that anchor their existence and subsistence in the conscientious dismantling of the sturdiest structures conceived by engineers. perpetuum mobile, cumplen una tarea descivilizatoria, antimaquinista, como termitas que anclan su existencia y subsistencia en el descoyuntamiento concienzudo de las más fuertes armazones pensadas por los ingenieros.
The anthropomorphic figures end up merging, becoming indistinguishable in the ruinous landscapes where they perform their annihilation tasks. From aggressive and strange entities, they become complements, symbiotic residents of these sleepy wrecks overlooking the waters of the last day.
These men of Abisal, trapped in the cemetery next to the endless bones they must dislocate, suffer the tautological fate of Sisyphus. The doomsayers are both condemned and ignorant of it. In several of Abyssal's best shots, Alonso -always the cinematographer of his films- fuses his laborious silhouettes with the decomposing masses, tying them to the same fate. They are crepuscular visions where the imperious backlight annuls all perception of individuality; they are spaces invaded by dense vapors that devour shapes; they empty them of volume and blur any identity.
The main character (Raudel González Cordero) seems, at times, to acquire a slight awareness of inhabiting a timeless, strange place, marginalized from the dialectic flow of existence. A constant impulse leads him to pry into the labyrinthine bowels of the dead ships, to rummage through their secrets, the remnants of life that may remain in the corners and are suddenly revealed, generating chaos in the silence. He seeks reasons for his redundant labors: the destruction of the immobile, the useless, the dead.
He is drawn to tales of the supernatural, besieged by the sense that there is something beyond the pre-established normality and the final judgments about good and evil, about what "is" and "isn't" without nuance. Possibly, he perceives what lies beyond because he already inhabits it, because he is a ghost still unaware of this new state. Or because perhaps he has always been a ghost. Doubt and unease never leave him and make him dissonant among his companions, who are more at ease with their surroundings.
Abyssal proposes the immersion in a sphere of estrangement and atrophy, inhabited by monstrosities and specters, illuminated by a sun at the end of the world, whose moon is replaced by the cyclopean orbit of a lighthouse: a sort of infernal Cerberus that seems to maintain a careful panoptic surveillance over the whole place. Alejandro Alonso unfolds a diffuse and abysmally beautiful story about the last remnants of life, awaiting the definitive apocalypse that will plunge everything into nothingness, where, at last, it will be possible to dream.
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