Truth is a “bird of prey”: interpreting the postcolonial dialectic in Agustí Villaronga’s El ventre del mar (2021) with Frantz Fanon

ABSTRACT

In this article, I argue that Agustí Villaronga’s 2021 film El ventre del mar (The Belly of the Sea) explores a post-Fanonian version of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic as a historical struggle between colonizer and colonized, and between the elite and the dispossessed in a limit situation. Villaronga’s cinematic vision of this historical struggle is neither progressive-linear nor simply non-linear, but iterative, as it casts light on uncanny analogies between necropolitical strategies (Mbembe 2019) marking different periods and political regimes: from the absolutist and colonial nineteenth-century France to the democratic European Union of the twenty-first century. To this end, Villaronga interweaves three hermeneutic layers into his filmic fable: the memory of a nineteenth-century historical event as mediated through pictorial and literary representations, a critique of the present marked by refugee crises and postcolonialism and an exploration of the human condition in its agonistic-tragic dimension. In Villaronga’s cinematic vision, the agon between master and slave ends neither in reciprocal recognition (as theorized by Hegel) nor in the emergence of the “new humanity” overcoming the Manichaean, “compartmentalized world” of colonialism (Fanon [1961] 2005. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Books), but in an open dialectic of resistance and radical uncertainty.

KEYWORDS:

• Truth
• postcolonialism
• Agustí Villaronga
• Frantz Fanon
• Spanish cinema

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge the feedback of the two anonymous reviewers as well as the editors for their meticulous and exacting work on this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 When Villaronga portrays political leaders, as in his television miniseries Carta a Eva (2012), it is not to reconstruct their key role in a standard historical context. Carta a Eva fictionalizes a minor episode from Eva Perón’s life: her visit to Spain in 1947. Villaronga employs a perspective of displacement, as he constructs the story as an interaction between three women: Perón, Carmen Polo (Franco’s wife) and Juana Doña, a communist sentenced to death.

2 Villaronga’s oeuvre contributes to a substantive body of Spanish films that deal with the Civil War (Araüna and Quílez 2017; Espinós 2019; Imbert 2019).

3 El ventre del mar won the Golden Biznaga for the best Spanish feature film at the twenty-fourth Málaga Film Festival. Villaronga also won the award for the best director of the contest. In addition, Roger Casamayor won the best leading actor for playing the character of Doctor Jean-Baptiste Savigny. For the critical reception of El ventre del mar, see, for instance: Martínez 2021; Hristova 2021; Tordera 2022.

4 Villaronga cited in Prieto (2021). Villaronga’s cinematic work has been often interpreted in an ethical or metaphysical key, whereas I will emphasize its political and spiritual significance. Scholars such as Pedraza (2007) and Espinós (2019) go as far as to argue that Villaronga is uninterested in politics. For Pedraza, Villaronga’s films are not about politics or a historically specific war, but about evil and its perpetuation (Pedraza 2007, 18; Prieto 2011). Villaronga seems to condone this line of interpretation. For instance, he argues about Pa negre (2010) that what mattered most to him was to avoid impregnating the film with political ideology (Villaronga 2011, quoted in El Mundo 2011). However, Pedraza’s dichotomy is unpersuasive. Villaronga’s filmic representations are not unconcerned with or ambivalent about moral-political issues: unveiling forms of immorality and violence (political/social/sexual), as well as their transversality, is at the core of his films. Consider Pa Negre, Villaronga’s most acclaimed movie: the Republican idealist (Andreu’s father) ends up as an executioner, thus uncannily resembling his fascist enemies, which are portrayed as morally and politically evil. Evil in Villaronga's cinema has a political dimension, even if it is not reducible to politics.

5 For Villaronga’s brief turn to the theater, see Gomila (2023). Like Badiou, Villaronga was interested in the political-emancipatory function of the theatre, and in its function as parrhesia (as theorized by Foucault) or, speaking truth to power. As he puts it, with reference to the adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s Clytemnestra in House of Names: A Novel, “la base de esta función es que cuestiona los poderes absolutos y analiza todos los condicionamientos de la libertad desde las estructuras de poder” (Villaronga, quoted in López 2020). This interpretation of Clytemnestra applies to Thomas in El ventre del mar as well.

6 Villaronga’s concern with iterative resonances between different historical contexts occurs in other movies as well. See, for instance, the treatment of disease and the references to AIDS in El mar (Capilla 2019). I take “iteration” from Derrida (1988) to refer to phenomena that involve at once repetition and difference (Ungureanu 2008; 2019a; 2019b).

7 It is noteworthy that Villaronga’s interest in the Indignados movement and the struggle of the dispossessed for “Democracia Real Ya” El ventre del mar is interpretable as symbolically conveying a cinematic form of populist confrontation with the powers that be (Ungureanu and Pintor 2021). This theme of people’s struggle is also evident in Villaronga’s theater (López 2020).

8 A trial ensued, yet those responsible for this tragedy were largely exonerated. Savigny eventually co-wrote a book about the ordeal and even posed for Géricault.

9 Paradoxically, Baricco’s and Villaronga’s poetic mode is, in certain ways, more “realistic”, as it recovers the colonial background of the tragedy, as will be discussed later.

10 The formal emancipation of Blacks from all French territories occurred in 1848. For a detailed and convincing criticism of Barnes’s apolitical and trivializing interpretation, see Alhadeff (2008).

11 For Villaronga on Von Trier as a source of inspiration, see Villaronga (2021).

12 Villaronga simplifies the narrative to essentialize the story. For example, while Baricco's narrative features various members of the "elite" taking center stage at different points, Villaronga condenses these roles into Doctor Savigny, who collectively embodies the authority figures.

13 Villaronga’s film moves away from his earlier neorealism toward an aesthetics that engages, in Géricault’s footsteps, with the “infinite” (Burke [1957] 1998, 101), namely the experience of incommensurable horror and beauty (a theme that will be discussed later in greater detail).

14 Zizola was on board of Argos in August and September 2015, documenting the rescue of over 3,000 migrants. The ship's name is an allusion to the nineteenth-century tragedy represented by Géricault.

15 Villaronga makes explicit the political significance through the use of filmic collage, including not only the use of footage from Zizola’s In the Same Boat, but also of images of the Nazi concentration camps and the sculptures of the activist-artist Taylor (Murray 2021). It is noteworthy that Taylor is the creator of the installation of the Museo Atlántico: the first underwater museum in Europe and the Atlantic Ocean, located off the coast of Lanzarote, roughly halfway between the southern edge of mainland Spain and Senegal, where the shipwreck took place.

16 For the use of religious imagery in Villaronga’s previous movies, see Pedraza (2007); Capilla (2019); Espinós (2019, 481).

17 In an alternative interpretation, Villaronga’s portrayal could be deemed too conservative: although Thomas's successfully rebels against the master, he ultimately opts to yield to the legal system. As Fanon emphasizes, "the colonial subject wastes no time lamenting and never seeks for justice in the colonial context" (Fanon [1961] 2005, 43). However, Villaronga's perspective on history is, in my view, thoroughly dialectical, not rooted in a belief in the Marxist revolution.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Camil Ungureanu

Camil Ungureanu is the Serra Húnter Associate Professor of Political Theory and coordinator of the MA in Political Philosophy in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. He is interested in critical theory, contemporary political thought, art and political imagination. He is also a founding member of the Barcelona Network for Critical Thought and Social Research. Email: [email protected].