This article appeared in the August 16, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Liberté (Albert Serra, 2019)

Over the past two decades, the Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra has repeatedly shrouded his subjects in both a literal and symbolic darkness. There is, for example, the darkness that engulfs the Three Wise Men during long passages of his 2008 Buñuelian Biblical drama Birdsong, underlining the illuminating role of the Star of Bethlehem. In the allegory-like Story of My Death (2013), night is the shared realm of both Dracula, as he acts out his primal urges, and Casanova, drunk on Enlightenment ideals; most recently, Serra’s 2022 tropical thriller Pacifiction is suffused with shadowy conspiracies about nighttime nuclear tests of the French Navy in Tahiti. In a newly translated collection of oration and writing, A Toast to St Martirià (Divided Publishing), Serra expands on his fascination with the “concept of the night” and its ability to generate obfuscation and intrigue, writing that people “become transformed at night, and the ambivalence of their comments, the ambivalence of their personalities, increases.” That idea also finds striking articulation in a new large-scale installation based on his 2019 play-turned-film Liberté, at the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, which opened on June 8 and is on view until September 29. 

On entering the exhibition, visitors are immediately plunged into darkness, forced to inch forward slowly over uneven ground composed of dirt and debris. Turning a corner reveals a relatively literal recreation of the setting of Liberté, a plotless yet provocative film that depicts 18th-century French libertines, expelled from their home country, cruising and engaging in various sex acts in the German woods, from dusk until dawn. The artificial forest of the installation is complete with bushes, brambles, and—it being 1774—three rococo sedan chairs, their ragged compartments dimly illuminated.

Four large screens on the walls of the cavernous exhibition space show different but complementary 33-minute edits of Liberté, condensing the original film’s slow-moving 132-minute duration, but still including its notable sensual sallies—the whipping, the rimming, the milk baths, and the golden showers. Clever cutting across the screens meant I had to keep my head on a swivel to follow the aristocrats’ erotic encounters. In a side room visible only through a porthole-like window, Serra also projects early erotic films from the museum’s archives on three screens, including the 1925 French porno Sister Vaseline, which depicts an alfresco threesome where a monk takes a gardener from behind while the gardener is on top of a nun. Combined with the unstable footing and a spatial soundscape full of rustling and moaning, this peephole view conjures a sense of distancing and disorientation rather than the immersive experience that other multimedia installations can sometimes promise.

While a palpable languor dominates the film, as the characters (and the audience) observe each action with a focused solemnity, the more frantic viewing experience across the exhibition’s four screens emphasizes the simultaneity of the characters’ nocturnal cavorting. It also heightens its visual gags—when Lluís Serrat’s character Armin, one of the more timid members of the bunch, did double takes through a dainty golden spyglass aimed directly at the camera, I felt like I was blocking his view of the action on the screen mounted on the opposite wall. Serra also cuts almost all the film’s dialogue, and with it, the many cerebral sequences in which characters describe rather than act out their fantasies, such as having a threesome with a calf. The absence of these monologues recenters the physicality and force of the couplings that we see; without even basic elements of context and characterization, the sex acts more closely resemble performance art, fitting for the gallery setting.

The artificial night of Serra’s installation relents at the end of its 33-minute loop, and a quick interlude of brightness reveals that the forest floor is covered in trash and junk: I spotted empty beer and spray-paint cans, cinderblocks, parts of an AC unit, liquor bottles, condom wrappers, a barbeque grill, a TV remote control, and discarded hubcaps. The harshly and too-briefly lit array of present-day debris pulls us suddenly out of the project’s nocturnal reverie, and offers, amid the recreation of the forest and the period sedan chairs, shades of Dada and Anselm Kiefer. As the lights fall again, this dingy dumping ground transforms back into a naughty playground for powder-wigged aristocrats worthy of a Watteau canvas.

This juxtaposition crystallizes the heart of Serra’s conceptual night and its ability to render characters, attitudes, and actions ambivalent. The contradictions acted out in Liberté include giving up control in the pursuit of freedom and inviting pain in the pursuit of pleasure. In 2016’s The Death of Louis XIV, the titular all-powerful monarch (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud) is powerless against a mishandled and fatal case of gangrene in his leg; his suffering is at once humanized through Leaud’s unsparingly realist performance and made alien and inaccessible by the stuffy decadence and ignorance the king has surrounded himself with. An existential opacity emerges in Pacifiction as well: the military maneuvers of a Western democracy are obscure even to one of its own high-ranking officials, not to mention its citizens.

In the eponymous centerpiece essay of A Toast to St Martirià—a reproduction of Serra’s long opening speech at a 2022 holy-day festival in his hometown of Banyoles—he attributes his decision to become a filmmaker, his practice of casting nonactor hometown friends, and his preference for filming late into the night to an intention to capture and extend the mischievous and unpredictable spirit of his town’s festivals and tertúlies (late-night meetups typical to Catalonia). His desire to access the same “unknown logic” that governed those formative environments, where “everything was thinkable, everything was possible,” is thus traceable in the way he makes his films as well as the subjects he treats. As he said in an interview for Film Comment in 2020, Liberté “presents sexual desire as a democratic force. In the sensual and sexual intercourses that take place in the film’s cruising area, social roles vanish in the hands of pleasure: the dominator can easily turn into submission, the master becomes the servant and vice versa.” Sexual liberation, for Serra, affords a breaking, or at least a weathering, of more rigid social codes as well.

Thoughout A Toast to St Martirià, Serra repeatedly links his films and his initial obsession with the night to his predilection for “playfulness” (he references it 20 times in the book), but his last three films have been suffused with a sense of resignation and, thematically, a focus on the corruptive power of absolute freedom. This is equally true of the exhibition in Amsterdam, which falls squarely under what Serra calls in the book the “nocturnal psychological umbrella” looming over his work. The freedom suggested by its massive square footage and the variety of projections on which to focus is confounded by the actual experience of fumbling through the dark installation and frenziedly following its many mirrored screens. When my eyes finally adjusted, I could roam the space for better-removed views of the work; that this basic motion eerily echoed the cruising of the characters in Liberté allowed me to revel in the exhibit’s own thrilling ambivalence.

Jamie Aylward writes about art and cinema for 3:AM Magazine, Curatorial Affairs, Dispatches, Film Comment, and other publications. He lives in Paris, France.