Descubro el rayo, tus ojos tiemblan is an invitation to immerse oneself in a trance: a series of intermittent portraits whose power looks into the physical effects of light on the people portrayed and the spectators. We spoke with its creator, Guillermo Braga from Asturias, who is bringing us this film performance to be seen for the first time at (S8).
First of all, I’d like to ask you about the portraits the performance focuses on. You talk about “psychological portraits”, silent films, and Warhol’s Screen Tests, among other references. Can you elaborate on that for us? What was it like working with the actors?
In the images, for me, there are iconographic and personal echoes of cinema, and a technical, almost photographic arrangement that takes its inspiration from the famous Screen Tests (1964–1966). Essentially, the initial idea stemmed from the desire to film the expressiveness of a work of art that is sustained solely by a face, and to distill that to the utmost.
With the participants, I set up a conversation process revolving around the artistic procedure so they could have an active role where they could contribute. The aim was to create an intimate space in which the person placed themself in front of the camera in a dark room. I had arranged a set of lights in a zenith position, which I controlled remotely. I suggested they start by looking at the camera and gradually try to look into the light. As they go deeper into it, their eyes’ control over focus and notion of the positions of the camera, lights, and space disappear. A recording emerges of involuntary gestures, uncontaminated by acting, and related to a trance that is achieved based solely on the source of light. Light has an effect both physically and psychologically, revealing each person from the group in their own individual nature.
The cinematic exercise crosses its own threshold when the viewer, through the screen, witnesses the same effect.
How does all of this relate to the cinematic device, intermittency, and the possible effects on the viewer?
The image shows a blinding light that suddenly disappears, and this happens constantly. Via this mechanism, we gain access to a fragmented series of faces and gazes, as a record of what those people felt with those flashes, which furthermore is something internal and inaccessible. The flashing light activates black gaps behind the fading image, and when the projector beam is turned off, as viewers it returns us to ourselves for an instant.
There are few elements that appear: the light, the fading, and the face. That is where the format plays a leading role, since the film medium generates a layer of absolute materiality that manifests itself as a physical sensation of light in the film.
After the flash, sometimes an after-image is revealed that gets imprinted on the retina a few moments after disappearing completely. The intermittent light makes the animation of the cinema evident, in a chaotic, unsynchronised way; it is as if the camera were emancipating itself from the shutter. What the viewer thinks or feels no longer depends on my intention, but on how the aesthetic experience fits.
This work was initially presented as an installation. Can you tell us about its adaptation to film performance?
In the installation, the space allowed me to play with a path, an immersive layout, and a larger scale of screens in the hall that play with intermittency in an expanded way. Here, the viewer chooses their own itinerary and time. In that version, the artwork was digitised. Now, it is being presented for the first time as a positive print of the original colour format.
I think there’s something very powerful about attending the full screening, which involves facing a proposal that is both openly repetitive and yet uncapturable. The soundtrack, by Guillermo Rojo, acts as the driving force behind this fragmentation, and the projected image takes on special meaning in its original format together with the projection machines, which expand the classic screen, all to serve the overwhelming experience. The live projection and the cinema hall increase the energy and collective power of marvelling at the light, immersing oneself in the trance, and being closer to the actors’ experience during the recording.
