Excerpt from A Toast to St Martirià
BY ALBERT SIERRA (TRANS. BY MATTHEW TREE)
I started it, I finished it.
—Celso Costa (1928–2009), an entrepreneur from Banyoles
I don’t know if it’s appropriate for me to make this speech. I wondered about it when I was asked, and in the end I had to search for some reasons that would make it look appropriate. Two good reasons occurred to me. Right now I’m making a speech for the Banyoles festa, and there you have two words: ‘festa’ and ‘Banyoles.’* Well, I will make a speech that will talk about these two things, because both of these elements—‘Banyoles,’ ‘festa’—have been very, very important in my life. I’d say that they’ve been the two most decisive elements in it, and they continue to be so, despite everything, right up to now.
I don’t think that there is anybody in the contemporary film world—at least at the level at which I find myself in it (that is to say, the level of those people who have been favoured with a certain amount of international recognition as far as the critics are concerned)—for whom playfulness has played such an important role: always, in all my films, right from the start. For me, and I think also for those around me, this has been absolutely fundamental. If things were not done in order to have fun, if there was no trace of festa or fraternity in them, they would have been meaningless. To live a humdrum life, a life, let’s say, in which there is no subversive element, presumptuous though that word may sound, is to live a life that may become dull and bereft of interest. This essential concept is linked to and has its origin in a whole group of people from Banyoles who influenced me and who I’d like to talk a little about. I decided to be a film director precisely in order to perpetuate the concepts of festa and playfulness. In no way did I want these ideals to be limited to the normal festa days celebrated by every village, such as the St Martirià here in Banyoles, or even to birthdays, which are the equivalent of village festes on an individual level. Those concepts had to be extended and expanded so that, in fact, they formed part of life, three hundred and sixty-five days a year—which is why, without certain very important collaborations and influences, this agenda could never have been brought to fruition: cinema is an art which is logically based on collective work. When you become aware that life only makes sense if it happens like that, in a natural way, then this ideal almost turns into a political programme, into a programme for life, and if, on top of this, this ideal can be combined with art, and you can go one step further and make it into a way of life or of earning your living, then so much the better.
The concept of ‘Banyoles’ was very important right from the beginning. Obviously, because I’m from Banyoles, right? Here’s a question which I’ve often asked myself and which is difficult to answer, and you’ve probably asked yourselves the same thing: would things have been different, would it have been possible to have been what I’ve been, or to have done what I’ve done, if I’d come from another place? To what extent has this specific situation, in this specific town,
with these specific people, conditioned my life? To what extent have all these factors influenced the fate of a given person? Or, on the contrary, would our individual strength have been enough to have ensured that we developed in a similar fashion, under other influences, in another place? The question of how much leeway, how much power, circumstances have over us, and what percentage of power we have over ourselves, is one of the great dilemmas in life, and, indeed, is always debated in terms of a dialectic between genetics and culture. At which point I’d like to add that I’m always in favour of the importance of culture, which is a choice and therefore a sign of civilisation; and besides, the genetic element is limited to a very specific aspect of personality, which is character, without which, it’s true, one can’t do anything ambitious, because only character allows us to overcome the fear of failure when we want to set off on previously untrodden paths; and even within the different elements that make up character, one specific part of character is resolution. I have never forgotten an extraordinary quote from the cardinal of Retz, in which he makes the subtlest distinction between courage and resolution, using a masterful formula: “Monsieur le comte avait toute la hardiesse de cœur que l’on appelle communément vaillance, au plus haut point qu’un homme la puisse avoir, et il n’avait pas même dans le degré le plus commun, la hardiesse de l’esprit, qui est ce que l’on nomme résolution. La première est ordinaire et même vulgaire; la seconde est même plus rare que l’on ne se le peut imaginer: elle est toutefois encore plus nécessaire que l’autre pour les grandes actions.”* Do not think of this as a paradox; resolution is needed to keep a festa going; neither is it a paradox, as I showed in my film Liberté, to wish to impose licentiousness by force, using necessary violence.
The concept of ‘Banyoles’ is, of course, linked to another very important theme. Many of you, certainly those of you who are with me here, have also had to build your professional careers, or have had to live—either for personal reasons, or for any other—in big cities. And here we come across another focus of tension which is both interesting and funny: what are the advantages, what are the drawbacks, of a small town—about the size of Banyoles for instance, which I consider to be pretty much ideal—compared with those of the big city? The magma and the indefiniteness of the big city: above all after the Industrial Revolution, in the eighteenth century, or when the great urban conurbations began to appear a little later on, this is a theme, a dilemma, a debate, and food for plenty of thought which has both interested and affected many philosophers, many artists, many creators when they wanted to know if they had to move to and earn their living in the big city. And they asked themselves how that would affect their thinking, how it would affect their lives, and, if their thinking was a little more ambitious, how this would affect community life in general when they moved there. There are many theories, but common sense clearly leads us to believe that maybe—as regards the most essential thing in a person’s life, their formative years—a small town can be much more beneficial. The heart of the big city is chaotic and its psychological base is the intensification of nervous living, a rapid, uninterrupted succession of external and internal impressions which are difficult for a person, for an individual, to absorb. This can lead to confusion, it can even lead to tedium, simply because of one’s inability, well described by Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel, to assimilate all those sharp, fleeting and intermittent impressions. This tedium happens a lot more frequently than most people think; and despite the fact that it may appear to be another paradox, this tedium is a lot more common in the minds of the inhabitants of big cities than in those of small villages. In theory, big cities have seen the invention of every conceivable form of distraction, precisely in order to mitigate this effect, this tedium; and yet tedium, in an unsettling way, increases. It’s a bit like what happens to drug addicts: they give themselves an ever-larger dose of a given drug and it has less and less effect. The same thing happens in the city, with the result that this famous tedium, or spleen, as they used to call it in the nineteenth century, was born there; the fact is that, so far as creativity is concerned, many people believe that these are not ideal conditions. To organise all this tedium, to organise all this big city confusion, something called reason was obviously invented, through the use of which attempts have been made to transform this tedious confusion into something bearable.
In the big city, most relationships are thus transformed into more or less intellectual ones, that is to say, based mainly on personal interests. People are transformed, they become undifferentiated and are valued only because of what they contribute. This is not the case in villages, precisely because, since this accumulation of nervous living does not exist there, there is no need to deal with it: you don’t have to protect yourself from anything, and personal relationships can be of an emotional kind. I believe this is the great difference: the contrast between those intellectual relationships based on one’s interests, with emotional ones which are probably based on more irrational, more essential, more instinctive, more sovereign impulses, and which mark the way people relate to each other in villages. And these emotional relationships are not imposed, nor should they be mythologised. A village is not a family, it is not a fraternity which is, let’s say, absolute, it’s not a given . . . nor does it necessarily have to exist. A village is more or less a community in which people choose to live, but, as I say, with certain emotions, with relationships that are manageable and, to some extent, more profound than those to be found in the cities. I believe that this creates a certain resilience, because it inevitably puts people’s individuality first: their instincts, their personalities; everything which is excluded in the city is accepted by people and generates a vital—and I believe an impulsive—way of living, which is much more intense and, in the long term, if this happens in one’s formative years, it generates an even greater resilience.
I’ve met a lot of people in my life, and the fact is I’ve hardly ever met anybody—or I could even say I’ve met absolutely nobody—who was born in a big city and who impressed me; the remarkable people who have crossed my path come from areas which aren’t the big city; and it is due to this experience of mine and to my intuition, that I am convinced that all the really strong, resilient people never come from an urban environment or from a big city, where it is much harder to develop a certain firmness of purpose, a certain strength, for the reasons I have just explained.
A city imposes a kind of preciseness, without which it wouldn’t function. The same example has been given many times; if the clocks were to remain unsynchronised for just one hour, the resulting chaos would last for days . . . In a village that doesn’t happen, you are not under that influence, under the imperative of a life of schematic precision, if I can put it like that. The value of life is to be found precisely—so I think and so everyone who influenced me and who I knew in Banyoles taught me—in singularity, in peculiarity, which are completely alien to any form of plan, and which avoid any kind of uniformity.
As I’ve said, many philosophers have dealt with this theme, and I read them, not only for the intrinsic debate involved, but also for their usefulness in my own life. In order to take personal decisions about yourself, you can ask for advice, you can think for yourself, or you can go to history’s greatest thinkers: even if they’re dead we have access to them through their books. Among them there is Nietzsche, for instance; or John Ruskin, the master of Proust, who I’ve read a great deal of: I read La Recherche three times, and although it provides a magnificent portrait of what the city is, or the city at the beginning of the last century, it also provides a magnificent portrait of a life apart, of a solitary life; Georg Simmel, who also influenced me very much and who in some of his books also deals with this theme and all the resultant sociological consequences. (I won’t go into a slightly more contemporary theme, how the Internet and mobile phones have transformed these theoretical advantages of small towns or villages, have reduced them to almost zero, and we’ve all ended up living in an uncontrollable, impossible-to-assimilate mental city . . . but that’s another subject, and unfortunately now is not the time to talk about it, although I have not been able to resist touching upon it because of the sadness it causes me.)
This, as was inevitable, naturally led all those philosophers to hate big cities and everything they give rise to. This punctilious life, this ordered life, has a god—the god of the monetary economy, which is what regulates the whole thing, and which takes precedence over emotional relationships. And there’s also another side of the coin: this god tends to intellectualise existence, and therefore loathes instinctive impulses.
These three elements—the monetary economy, the city in itself as a space full of stimuli, and intellectualism—are used in order to transform and to try and diminish the life force. But of course, these three elements face a clear contradiction when they come up against the disturbance represented by local festes: that playfulness which I mentioned at the beginning. This playfulness is pure expenditure, as George Bataille would’ve put it, which does not generate any profit; it is the accursed share which is close to being sacred and is not managed by any form of control; on the contrary, it is based on instinct, on a natural fraternity, on impulse, on a desire to satisfy oneself and have a good time which, as you know, is the joy so typical of festes and is the reason why they are celebrated; and which is also why, in order to prevent them from becoming totally uncontrollable, villages limit them to certain designated days and don’t let them go on all year long.
That’s what I wanted to disrupt, by which I mean that I wanted to extend it and even to encapsulate it, and now I will explain how. The start of the whole thing is closely linked to the problem to which I’ve already referred: I lived in Banyoles, but I moved to Barcelona to study at the university, bypassing, as Donald Trump would put it, the city of Girona, which at that time also had some universities, I think, I don’t remember very well—but at no time did it occur to me or to anyone else I knew, that is to say, more or less respectable people, that one had to study in Girona, instead of which we made a direct bypass, as I had seen people do ever since I was a teenager, when the University of Girona didn’t exist as such, and neither was Girona as important or
fashionable a city as it is today, although for me it continues to be the same boring, conservative, provincial thing that it always was and always will be, I’m sorry to say. At that time, all the people in Banyoles, mentally, physically, and without hesitation, bypassed Girona and went straight to Barcelona, and all the influences that were here in Banyoles came straight from Barcelona and made us a lot more mentally cosmopolitan when compared to those other people who lived, pitifully satisfied, like fattened piglets, in a larger town—Girona—that provided them with all the provincial necessities they required. So this is another concept I’d like to stress: this kind of mental cosmopolitanism—when you don’t have anything else—which allows you to adopt all the advantages of a big city without having to take on board any of its defects . . . because it is mental and also prevents you from deceiving yourself about the good things in the little place where you live. And that is quite the opposite of the provincialism I have alluded to. And it is possible because when you live here, in Banyoles, as a teenager, people arrive at the weekend bringing all the news from the big city . . . That is to say, news about the world in general. At that time, with that form of mental cosmopolitanism, with the influence of all those people who were older than I was, but still young, influenced by the Barcelona in which they lived and which they abandoned fanatically every weekend (neither did they deceive themselves about the good things in the big city despite having ended up there); inspired by all these people, when I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old, I thought that no way would I hang around, and that I’d go straight to Barcelona.
There was this dilemma. This huge dilemma about what would be the use of going to Barcelona and how I could protect myself from this intensification of nervous living which the big city gives rise to. But I did this in a very natural way. I studied Hispanic philology for four years, and then did two years of theory of literature and comparative literature and in between a course in the history of art, which took two more years. All in all, I spent eight years at university. And here is an extraordinary anecdote which illustrates both literally and metaphorically how I protected myself: I don’t think there is anybody in the world who has spent eight years in a university without making a single friend or even acquaintance there, albeit in the most superficial way—absolutely nobody, during those eight years. I can safely say that I lived my life there without any kind of human contact with any person whatsoever with the exception of the occasional professor, and even then in such a shallow way that I wouldn’t qualify it as contact—of any kind. That’s how it was—it was that radical, I’m telling you. Obviously, I wasn’t interested. This is something which might seem contradictory, because anyone would say that, in a big city, curiosity would come to the fore—such are the people, the human material (or of acting material as Heiner Müller liked to call it, because a big city is a theatre, a permanent spectacle) on offer, such is fun on offer, that it would seem you simply have to be interested in it all.
At the time that didn’t strike me as being at all convenient. In fact, I lived a rather curious life. I never went in person to university. Never means that I maybe turned up for ten or fifteen percent of the teaching hours, at most, and maybe not even as much as that; and I never made friends with anyone, never had any acquaintances. As you might imagine, and given what my life has since been, I don’t appear to be a shy or unsocial person, quite the contrary: in fact, part of my success is due to my social skills, because once the films are finished, when pure creative energy is no longer needed, a knack or a little propensity for PR comes in very handy. And the slight pleasure which this sociability gives can be perfectly natural, doesn’t have to be banal in any way. It can even, absurdly enough, be extremely important at times. Warren Buffett has often told the story of how his life changed when he lost his fear of speaking in public (thanks to the courses of Dale Carnegie, which he attended; I read his books . . . when, in fact, I didn’t need to, even though you always get something out of them). Warren Buffett even claims that much of his success began that very day. So in this sphere I also have a certain responsibility—a shared one in this case; I believe that we (when I say we I mean myself, Montse Triola, and all the people who formed Andergraun Films), precisely because we shared this past based on instinctive human relationships, not on intellectual ones, were able to express ourselves in the world of PR, which is usually understood to be a world full of falseness and self-interest, almost comparable to merchandising, to selling products; well, all of us have been able to express ourselves in a far more natural manner, surprisingly so in comparison with that of everyone else in that world, and this has been one of the keys to our success. But as I said, this has been the result of a natural evolution: I had the germ of sociability inside me, and I am, as I say, quite a social person. Nonetheless, at university I didn’t want—and that is exactly the right word—I didn’t want to meet anybody at all.
There is also another miraculous thing that happened during my time at university. For many people it would seem that the result of a life is the fruit of a whole series of orderly, linked elements, but the truth is quite the opposite; and I like to think that in the film world this is even more exaggerated, and that I have learnt to adapt myself to it extremely well. A very funny anecdote from the years I spent at university, aside from not having met a single soul, is as follows: to finish all my courses I only needed one more subject, a difficult subject called Spanish syntax II or Spanish syntax III, I can’t remember which; it was a very difficult and very technical subject, and I had no intention of studying it and nor did I wish to, although I always thought that if I could do so properly it would be a sign of intelligence, because language creates and expresses logical thinking; but, in the end, I was in my own world at the time, following my routine of never visiting the university building nor listening to anything that went on there . . . The day of the exam arrived and at the last moment I simply couldn’t face going in (I hadn’t spent even a single day in class); I hated the whole business, something which is incomprehensible because I considered that I had a gift for this subject, and, finally, I decided not to do this exam, which would have made things extremely complicated for me because it was the last subject, and I would’ve had to go back to university six months or a year later (at that time, if I’m not mistaken, they were already thinking about making it possible to re-sit exams in September). That would have been an absurd complication, but it was such a huge bore to have to study that subject that I decided not to.
In spite of this, at the last moment, on the very day of the exam, without having studied, due to an esoteric impulse or because of some kind of providential human intuition (intuition being a quality which is rendered impotent by big city life where it is faced with the rigid, schematic precision of events, but which in small towns or in the country is a useful guide, because there life is governed by impulses), due to a sudden physical tension, a final intuitive blow, I got out of bed and, after much doubt, went over to the university, arriving fifteen or twenty minutes late for the exam. There, outside the open door, I saw a large crowd of people and a kind of commotion going on inside the classroom, sheer chaos, people coming out into the cloister, on the ground floor of the Central University of Barcelona, into Plaça de la Universitat, back into the old building, and I thought, “I’ve made a mistake, it can’t be this classroom.” I went to another classroom, looked around for a while, then checked the announcement board, and asked people. Time was getting on, time that turned out to be providential for me . . . In the end I understood that it looked as if the classroom really was where I’d thought it was, so I went over and asked what was going on, and a student told me: “The professor hasn’t turned up.” Then I saw a person come out with a list of names, and again I heard people say, “The professor hasn’t turned up and they’ve made a list of people’s names, they’ve made a note of people’s names,” and I saw that the person with the list was at the threshold of the door, about to emerge—I was outside—and I stared at his piece of paper with the names on it, like an alcoholic in front of a bottle, and, alarmed, I said to him: “Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey . . . Me, me, me!” I barred his way and took the list from him: “Did you write my name down?” He said to me: “You . . . Where were you? But you’re here outside . . . Who are you, what are you doing out here?” And I answered: “No, man, no, I was inside, I only came outside for a moment, there was a long queue inside of people waiting for their names to be put down and I got distracted, and what was it you wanted . . . ?” And when he heard these last few mysterious words, he replied: “Ah, OK . . . OK, OK . . .” And he put me down on the list. All the students passed the exam because the professor hadn’t turned up; because people were on that list, well, they let them pass the exam. And so I got my degree in Hispanic philology, something which would probably never have happened without that last, apparently useless effort to get out of bed and get over to the university; and my life would have changed, and I don’t know if I would be standing before you now as an illustrious and exemplary citizen.
* Banyoles (population c. 20,200), in the province of Girona in north-east Catalonia, is officially a city (Catalan ciutat). At once rural and an industrial hub, in English it would be called a town; most of the people who live there, however, call it a village (Catalan poble). The Catalan word festa (plural festes) refers exclusively to partying, whether that be in private houses or in a whole municipality; in the latter case they are called festes majors, and are always preceded by a speech, usually given by someone from the town or village in question. The festa major of St Martirià, at which Albert Serra delivered the opening speech in 2022, is held in Banyoles in mid-October, and consists of various concerts, a procession of drum-beating people (some of them dressed as dwarfs and giants), displays of human tower-building, a correfoc (demons and dragons wielding large fireworks as they cavort through the town), and the dancing of sardanes—the Catalan national dance—in which four different sardana orchestras compete with each other in the main square. Among other things.—Translator
* “The count had all the boldness of heart, which we commonly call courage, to the highest extent that any man can, and he did not have, even in the most commonplace degree, the boldness of mind which we name resolution. The first is ordinary, even vulgar; the second is even more rare than we may imagine: it is, however, even more necessary than the other for great deeds.”—Jean François Paul de Gondi, Mémoires du cardinal de Retz (1717).