an uphill battle

(Photos courtesy of Impacto Producciones, Saragossa, Spain)

Recently I stopped by Impacto Producciones to talk shop with Javier Millán, a producer, and Robert Torrado, a digital effects artist. They were excited about Amores Ciegos, a short they made late last year with director Marise Samitier.

Amores Ciegos, which is about two couples and their interpersonal struggles, was an unusually hands-on project for Javier because Samitier wasn’t in Spain: “I was her eyes and made decisions because she was in L.A.” This meant he got to chose crew, locations, and some actors. Roberto, on the other hand, had less to do than normal, because there was very little that needed to be digitally altered, one of his domains of expertise. “Are you happy when you have problems to correct?” I asked. “No,” he said, “but I’m happy when I find them in big-budget productions, because they aren’t supposed to be there.”

Short films like Amores Ciegos, Javier explained, are like the CV of a director who is attempting to get financing for a feature-length film. This is especially difficult in Spain, because American films occupy so much theater space. “Normally, of 5 or 6 movies coming out, half are American,” he estimated, and not every one of the others is even Spanish – there are also movies from other parts of Europe and South America to contend with.

Because of lower budgets, Spanish movies tend to be about more intimate, personal topics, which can turn people off, and it can be hard to find an audience for this kind of film. “People prefer American movies,” Javier explained. “They don’t like Spanish films. They prefer to disconnect…The Spanish films that do succeed are similar to American films.”

choose your gravestone wisely

Occasionally, in order to break routine, I pick a spot on the map I’ve never been and make it a point to go there. A few weeks ago, it was the cemetery of Zaragoza.

It wasn’t by chance that I chose a cemetery -- I’m a kind of cemetery tourist, which means I visit them for no other purpose than Comparative Cemetery Studies. I especially like the largest ones, and the Cementerio de Zaragoza turned out to be one of those cemeteries that’s so big that it has its own streets, as though it were a town of the afterlife or something.

I’ll admit, it’s hard to really get much out cemeteries. After spending a fair amount of time in them, though, I’m more attuned to some of the more subtle effects. I’ve begun to see each plot as its own dramatic presentation. It could be plain or fancy, but it’s a point of focus for attention, and if I pause and ponder, I get a particular kind of feeling, like the weight of biography is upon me. This is a little easier to do if the marker is simpler, and isn’t dated by arcane iconography or any hints about the personal idiosyncrasies of the deceased.

When they are, it can be hard not to be pulled from the abstract and poetic back into the banal and silly. In a major Boston cemetery, there’s a sepulcher for a man who designed the machine that made sowing shoes uppers onto soles much quicker; over the entrance there is a depiction of it in low-relief that makes it look like a high-powered microscope as drawn by Jack Kirby. It’s hard to look at it and think about the man as anything more than an industrialist.

Then there’s dated imagery. In the oldest graveyards in Boston, just the way the markers look can remind you how remote the long-dead of history are. One common theme from Boston’s earlier cemeteries is a stylized skull that brings to mind the Mexican Day of the Dead more than New England, and then there are also often weeping willows and other outdated, now-meaningless signs. They all put the person in a time and place, and make it harder to relate to them.

The conclusion I draw here is that graves just don’t age well. Why would they? They are supposed to be an everlasting representation of you, but what, really, is going to do that adequately? That’s why I want to be cremated. That way, there won’t be any chance that a passerby might stop at my eternal resting place a hundred years from now and mutter to themselves, “Gosh, isn’t that tacky.”

Anyway, judge for yourself.

here's my attempt to describe a very specific feeling

Here in Spain, last week was Semana Santa, the Holy Week before Easter. I had heard that Granada was beautiful, and had heard that there were processions there, but this was about all I had bothered to learn before going.

As it turned out, they were something less and more than a parade. For several nights in a row, religious groups called cofradías were marching through town, often simultaneously, and with a lot of the same basic ingredients – brass bands, women in black dresses, and men in nazareno robes wearing the same pointed hood that the Ku Klux Klan appropriated. Probably most importantly, though, there were the pasos, which are elaborate regal floats depicting Jesus or Mary.

The pasos were carried, slowly, by groups of costaleros, who were hidden beneath the paso and moved it forward in stages, setting it down after a few minutes moving it forward. After a stop, they would all stand at the same time, and the paso would pop up and shudder forward, as if on its own. The musicians looked forward rather intently, playing songs that were mournful and foreboding, with the drums at their most threatening.

The first night I was in Granada, as the processions crawled through the city, I jumped into a bar that looked out onto a tight alley where a procession was about to pass. The pasos came by, barely fitting in the street, and as they passed the bar, I could only see a section of the paso framed by the bar doorway, making it seem even just a bit larger than it already was. I stepped into the street, and the women in their black dresses were stopped there, and the crowd watched. The atmosphere was charged with the moment.

As the women stood there, their long, thick candles burned and children tried to catch what was dripping off. Most of the women did not notice. They were looking off into the middle distance, and I saw that this was not a fiesta but a rite.