Philosophy in the Woods

I feel like prey.

Perhaps soon you won’t anymore.

If there is a dialectical movement to be found in Albert Serra’s decidedly non-dialectical films, it is in the relationship they figure between movement and stasis. Firm in the belief, or delusion, that “chivalry is civilization,” Quixote in (2006) wanders in search of opportunities for action, which are always elsewhere; his gaze has no recourse but to land in heaven. In (2008), the Magi dawdle toward an encounter with the origin of an eternal life, or, if you prefer a term closer to Christendom’s sources, a new of life, abstract, indefinite, and unchanging. ’s (2012) Casanova, in the boundless range of his appetite for the world, in his joyous, idiot desire to know it intimately through consumption and excretion, is finally drawn towards a force of nature at its most unnatural, an unholy terror which leaves him flat on his back. In (2016), Jean-Pierre Léaud’s Sun King expires as the court stands in idle witness, a comic foil to the mechanics of statecraft, which cannot wait; while, in this story’s comic transposition to the modern gallery, the contemporary courtiers, the public, return a literal sense of movement: they are, it seems, only fleetingly interested in the sight of death. And the dispersal throughout the gallery of the five screens of (2015) doubles the abstract movement of capital as it flows