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Afternoons of Solitude and the Radical Isolation in the Face of Death (of the Bull)

In reconstructing the experience of the spectacle from the standpoint of perceived risk, the film sustains the illusion of human peril while letting the ritual’s profound asymmetry emerge without overt emphasis: a lingering epic opposed to an inevitable animal death.

By Mauro Lukasievicz

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There are spectacles that rest on a powerful idea even when that idea cannot withstand comparison with reality. Bullfighting is one of them: a ritual presented as an almost natural duel between two equivalent forces, man and bull, both supposedly exposed to imminent death. Yet a careful look is enough to reveal that this symmetry is, to a large extent, a construction. Risk does exist, but it is not distributed evenly; death is not a shared possibility but an almost exclusive certainty. From this point of departure—from a fiction collectively accepted—cinema finds a privileged terrain from which to interrogate not only what we see, but how and why we see it. This is the terrain in which Albert Serra’s documentary work is situated. He approaches the bullfight not as tradition nor as an explicit moral debate, but as a carefully organized system of perceptions. The film constructs a constant sense of extreme danger around the bullfighter, as if each pass could be the last. And yet this perception collides with a stubborn fact: over the past twenty-five years, only two professional bullfighters have died as a direct consequence of a corrida. The death of the bullfighter, so present in the bullfighting imagination, has become a modern myth, sustained more by the rhetoric of valor than by statistical reality. And still, cinema—Serra’s cinema—manages to reinstate that illusion with astonishing effectiveness.

The key lies in how risk is represented. Isolated from context, without figures or explanations, the bullfighter’s body always appears vulnerable, exposed, fragile before the charge. The camera reinforces this impression through ritual repetition, the duration of the shots, and spatial enclosure. Each corrida is experienced as if it were unique, definitive, even though we know the protagonist will dress again the following day.

What matters most is that, in bullfighting, there is a body for which death is not a hypothesis but a programmed outcome. The bull does not enter the arena with any real possibility of survival. More than that, the confrontation is far from “natural.” Numerous investigations, complaints, and testimonies have pointed to practices designed to diminish the animal’s strength before the fight: sedation, progressive weakening, blows, prolonged stress, and prior physical exhaustion that radically condition its behavior. Without turning this into a medical inventory, it is enough to understand that the bull arrives in the arena in a state far removed from its original power. The mythical equality between man and beast is thus revealed as a carefully produced fiction. The film does not explain or enumerate these procedures, but it renders them perceptible in another way. The bull’s body appears fatigued, bleeding, increasingly slow; its “natural” force dissolves before the camera. Opposite it, the bullfighter performs a choreography of precision and beauty that Serra films with an almost sculptural rigor. In this coexistence of grace and exhaustion, the true asymmetry of the ritual is revealed. The man seems to challenge death; the animal passes through it. The solitude that emerges is not shared: while the bullfighter can leave, recover, and repeat, the bull is left alone before an irrevocable end.

What is most unsettling is that, even in the face of this evidence, the film succeeds in sustaining the illusion of permanent human risk. This is its greatest formal intelligence. By removing context and suppressing any external explanation, the film reconstructs the subjective experience of the spectacle as it is lived: an absolute present in which every gesture seems definitive. The spectator feels that the bullfighter is at the limit, in the same way one feels that a race-car driver could die on the next curve. Cinema does not lie; it selects, frames, intensifies. And in that process it produces an emotional truth that does not necessarily coincide with material truth. The film’s affirmative force does not lie in a defense of the spectacle, but in its radical trust in cinema as a tool of revelation. By refusing discursive intervention, Serra forces the viewer to sustain a contradiction: to believe in the bullfighter’s risk while witnessing, again and again, the death of the animal. Ritual repetition reinforces this tension. Each corrida confirms that the bullfighter survives and that the bull does not. Over time, the epic is emptied out, and what remains is a structure that needs to produce the illusion of confrontation in order to conceal its fundamental imbalance.

In this sense, the film does not dismantle the myth from the outside; it lets it function until its cracks become visible. Bullfighting thus appears as a carefully staged fiction, a theater of risk in which human death is exceptional and animal death constitutive. Cinema turns this fiction into a sensory experience and, in doing so, confronts us with our own way of looking. We believe we are witnessing an ancestral duel when in fact we are contemplating a modern apparatus of control, attrition, and the representation of danger. The solitude that ultimately asserts itself is not only that of the bull that dies or the bullfighter who performs, but also that of the spectator, compelled to recognize that what seemed natural is, in truth, a construction sustained by the gaze and by the desire to believe in it.

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