Editor’s Picks: Albert Serra Captures the Brutality of Bullfighting

Frieze Editor’s Picks is a fortnightly column in which a frieze editor shares their recommendations for what to watch, read and listen to.

Albert Serra, Afternoons of Solitude (2024)

Serra’s sparse, meditative documentary about the young Peruvian-born torero Andrés Roca Rey is an enrapturing two hours of erotics and violence, though its brutality makes it challenging to watch. Most of the film captures Rey in his skilful dance with bellicose bulls – the cinema tense with anticipation of his possible goring – always yielding victory for the deft fighter and his unseen arena audience. Cinematographer Artur Tort Pujol shoots intimately, close-up to Rey and his contorted expressions, and scenes in the limo rides following the exhibitions depict the ascendant youth as he processes mixed feelings of pride, fear and painful exhaustion.

Wang Bing, ‘Youth’ trilogy (2023–24)

Wang Bing’s series – Spring premiered last year, Hard Times and Homecoming earlier in 2024 – is a nearly ten-hour-long documentary about textile workers in Zhili, a town in the Zhejiang province of China. An heir to Frederick Wiseman’s inconspicuous observational – as well as Warhol’s machinic – style, Wang shoots a panoply of characters – many identified by name, mostly in their late teens and early 20s – who have been hired to work in factories manufacturing cheap clothing. It’s a remarkable, if inconsistent, feat, and necessarily undramatic, a decision that serves to not romanticize Wang’s subjects. I only wish it were shown all at once, so that audiences could experience the realism with which it is so clearly challenging and innovating.

Moníca de la Torre, Pause the Document (2025)

De la Torre’s latest book – her follow-up to 2020’s excellent Repetition Nineteen – memorializes the years during which it was written, insofar as it demonstrates how socio-political ruptures so quickly remind us of the fragile ground upon which systems of logic and meaning rest. The second poem in the collection, ‘Parable’, identifies the shared etymological origins of both ‘palabra’ – the Spanish word for ‘word’ – and ‘parabola’; a comparison which draws attention to the arched, as opposed to linear, shape of a word’s meaning. It’s a great book about impermanence, trees, the pathways of stars, cabin fever, pre-linguistic infants and healing, which attends to how a ‘poem’s aboutness became its burden’.

Moníca de la Torre’s Pause the Document is published by Nightboat Books in early 2025. 

^{Main image: Albert Serra, Afternoons of Solitude, 2024, production still. Courtesy: the artist and Andergraun Films}