Albert Serra Awarded 2024-25 Gardner Film Study Center Fellowship

Albert Serra Awarded 2024-25 Gardner Film Study Center Fellowship

The Film Study Center is pleased to announce that filmmaker Albert Serra has been awarded the Gardner FSC fellowship. In collaboration with the Harvard Film Archive, a retrospective of his films will screen from Friday, March 7 through Saturday, April 12 with the filmmaker in person March 28, 29 and 31. Full schedule and tickets at the Harvard Film Archive.

ALBERT SERRA, OR CINEMATIC TIME REGAINED

Over the past almost twenty years, Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra (b. 1975) has occupied a singular place in contemporary world cinema through a series of remarkable films that boldly engage canonical texts and traditions long considered “unadaptable.” Serra’s first widely seen features, Honor of the Knights (2006) and Birdsong (2008), together announced the exciting ambition of his filmmaking. Striking versions of Don Quixote and the Holy Bible, respectively, the two films gave vivid new form to hallowed texts while also revealing the singularity of Serra’s radical approach to image, narrative and performance. Featuring non-actors drawn largely from his hometown, both films showcased Serra’s minimalist directorial style of using three cameras to capture the widest range of footage while giving only scant instructions to his cast and even, at times, completely distancing himself from the set itself. Through a painstaking and laborious editing process Serra then drew from that extensive footage to craft mesmerizing works that expand the revelatory time between actions and those crucial moments when the actors go further into and even beyond their given roles. By giving full dimension to gesture and dialogue unfolding, often subtly, in real time, these two films can now be seen as important entries in the so-called “slow cinema” movement that emerged in the early 2000s.

Honor of the Knights and Birdsong also revealed the important dialogue between Serra’s cinema and intertwined traditions of avant-garde filmmaking defined by Andy Warhol on the one hand and Rainer Werner Fassbinder on the other; pioneering artists whose films similarly oscillated between austere minimalism and stylized theatricality. A baroque Fassbinder turn was, in fact, explored by Serra’s three subsequent features—Story of My Death, The Death of Louis XIV and Liberté—a loose trilogy of period films set in the declining demi-worlds of the 16th and 17th century where powdered, bewigged aristocrats and kings embody states of torpor, feverish desire and decay, the later most powerfully figured in the eponymous Louis XIV whose slow bedridden death is poignantly staged as a penumbral chamber drama.

Serra’s next features pushed his filmmaking into important new directions, first with Pacifiction, a captivating and hyper-stylized paranoid thriller set in a lush, color-saturated Polynesian paradise and then with his most recent, revelatory film, Afternoons of Solitude, a documentary portrait of the celebrated Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey set largely in the ring. Bringing Serra full circle with his early Cervantes adaptation, Afternoons of Solitude finds him once again discovering an innovative approach to a monumental Spanish tradition. More importantly, however, the film offers an important reminder of the documentary essence of Serra’s filmmaking which embraces cinema’s quintessence as a photographic and documentary medium able to capture the subtlest of performances—gestures, phrases, emotions—far better than the ever-distracted human eye. Indeed, in many ways, it seems as if all of Serra’s films up to now, and the intimacy with performers earned by his ever-patient camera, were training for the intense corrida staged by his startling up-close cameras and microphones which render the ancient ritualistic sport of bullfighting a startling emblem of the purest kind of documentary realism. A film quite literally about life and death, Afternoons of Solitude is stripped of the explanatory guardrails that have become standard in documentary today, giving way to a direct confrontation of the viewer with the very gaze of the bull itself and the admixture of fear, courage and perhaps madness that is the art and vocation of the toreador. – Haden Guest

The Gardner Film Study Center Fellowship

The Gardner Film Study Center Fellowship, established in 2014 in the name of pioneering filmmaker and FSC founder Robert Gardner, is awarded annually to outstanding filmmakers from around the world. The fellowship comes with a $10,000 stipend to be directed to a filmmaker’s work and an invitation to join the community of FSC fellows and CMP students at Harvard for a short visit including a series of screenings and discussions.

Robert Gardner served as the FSC’s Director from 1957 to 1997 and was a faculty member in the Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard University (now Art, Film, and Visual Studies). An internationally renowned filmmaker and author whose works have entered the permanent canon of non-fiction filmmaking, his major films include Dead Birds (1964), a lyric account of the Dugum Dani, a Stone Age society at one time living an isolated existence in the Highlands of the former Netherlands New Guinea (Gardner was the leader of the Peabody Museum-sponsored expedition to study the Dani in 1961-62); Rivers of Sand (1974), a social commentary on the Hamar people of southwestern Ethiopia; and Forest of Bliss (1985), a cinematic essay on the ancient city of Varanasi, India, which explores the ceremonies, rituals, and industries associated with death and regeneration.