Nuevo / Otro Cine Español - Un Lugar En El Cine

Ghosts in the Machine

There’s a particular quiet that hangs over places where something enormous has already ended. Alberto Morais seems drawn to that quiet like a magnet. In Nuevo / Otro Cine Español - Un Lugar En El Cine, he doesn’t simply talk about the history of European cinema.

He brings some of its surviving figures back to the places where that history still lingers in the air. The result feels less like a conventional documentary than a séance. Morais is trying to sketch a lineage of what he calls "cinematic resistance," tracing a path from post-war Italian Neorealism to the stubborn auteurs still working in its shadow.

As an argument, it can be a little loose. As a collection of faces carrying history around in their bodies, it’s quietly remarkable.


Take Theo Angelopoulos. Morais follows the Greek master from Athens to Ostia, to the same stretch of beach where Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered. Angelopoulos was never a man of small emotional gestures, and his presence here is heavy in every sense.

He moves like someone carrying far too much memory, staring out at the sea as if it might finally explain itself. The wind swallows the usual ambient sound, leaving him in a pocket of isolation. It could have tipped into grandiose mourning pretty easily, but Morais knows when to stop pushing.