The faces of war

Within a media-driven world in which meanings acquire the characteristics of their opposites, as we see with war or illness, there is an epistemic revolution underway, which claims for subjects themselves the prerogative of an ontological resignification, so that the production of meaning in our lives may free itself from the prevailing socioeconomic model. Culture, today, lives off labels, inscribed in a market-based legitimation that seeks to drag subjectivity off to a dark corner where nobody recognises it. But it is there — where else? — that subjectivity devises its strategies of reinvention. With the turn of the millennium, it became clear that all apparent ways out from the commercial mapping of art were, after all, perfectly controlled: indie, seemingly so seductive in its irreverence, was no more than the trendiest tentacle of the mainstream. Criticism, once misunderstood for its alleged elitist propensities, was called upon to surrender itself to the fetishism of the art trade, not infrequently adulating what it had previously execrated. For anyone stepping out of line, the horizon of unemployment loomed like a deathly spectre. And the arts, in general, like glass, plastics and paper, were sorted into their respective containers. From afar, however, like a train that we cannot yet see but whose audible gallop announces its impending impact, we could identify gestures of a resistant love, propositional kernels of a change from the inside out, that is, aligned with an artistic feeling, non-negotiable in the parameters of a market only willing to rent prefabricated parcels of its territory.

Just as bodies escaped the conveniences of the stock-takers — claiming a creative freedom without which they would remain instruments of a logic both productive and reproductive, essential to the growth of inequality in the world — so too art objects, constrained by the rules of the market, fled from a kind of readability that dispensed with the inalienable abilities of the subject. If the deep roots of a decision lie with the person deciding, then an understanding of that decision must be derived from a compatible degree of sensory or interpretative depth. To put it simply, it was the mystery of human existence that saw itself defended from pornographic devastation by those who, despite being in vulnerable conditions on the edge of artistic survival, were committed to values greater than price. Laura Carreira, a young Portuguese filmmaker who emigrated to Scotland in order to bring about the dream ironically announced by her surname (‘career’), soon understood that the atomisation of society and the precariousness of the structures that support artistic work — as well as of the logics that guide them and the available means — were not limited to our own poor country. Yet the will to express herself artistically prevailed over these difficulties and, at her own expense and after much sacrifice, she managed to create Red Hill, the short film with which she showed where she was headed, or at least the foundations of the building she proposed to construct: a social, empathetic cinema, which puts itself in the shoes of those it observes and portrays, tendentiously, anti-heroes bent on a disproportionate dependence on work, on whom falls the unfair stigma of their own responsibility for their self-failure.

From this perspective, and although this argument may be subject to perverse interpretations, perhaps the budgetary limitations of both Red Hill and its forerunner The Shift brought together the ‘here’ and ‘over there’ of cinema, almost bestowing on the camera the role of a mirror. Not that these two small filmic objects are documentary in nature; they both follow rigorously constructed fictional screenplays, but it becomes difficult to watch them without the feeling of having a life flash before our eyes. Laura Carreira’s art is also, therefore, in her ability to sidestep labels and propose a vision of cinema that uses the scant resources at her disposal in service of a notion of social justice, grounded in all ways in a profound idea of the truth. Because if the point of departure for these films is observational, if their primary root is the emotions and sentiments generated by the asymmetries and dislocations of life, then the point of arrival also reflects this register, even if fiction has been invited to the dance in the meantime, as a vehicle for potential richness. Put another way, there will always be more people living the films of Laura Carreira than seeing them. Both Red Hill and The Shift reveal an idiosyncratic director — even if we can detect influences from Ken Loach and the Dardenne brothers — with a firm hand, who combines human sensitivity and cold blood, rawness and lyricism, aggression and subtlety.

And, despite their open endings, both works provide clear evidence of a community ideology consolidating itself in the filmmaker’s mind. The films are united by the questions they ask, first of each other — the anguished embargo in the voice of Jim, the night-shift security guard in Red Hill, seems to ask Anna, the agency worker in The Shift: “Is this how you want your life to end?” —, and, also, of each viewer and society as a whole, becoming pillars of a cinematic, activist career path that deserves to be encouraged and generates the highest of expectations.