The Year of the Discovery (Luis López Carrasco, 2020) (Patreon)

One of the most undeniably impressive films of 2020, The Year of the Discovery is also one of the most frustrating. A fiction / documentary hybrid, or perhaps more properly, a creation of a supporting document for an event whose traces have all but evaporated, The Year of the Discovery examines Spain in 1992 by focusing on the trade union uprisings in Cartagena that ultimately led to be burning of the state parliament building. 

In a little over three hours, Carrasco delivers a wide array of interviews, mostly set inside a local watering hole that once served the city's now-defunct industrial base. Shooting in Hi-8 video, and having his subjects select somewhat dated outfits, Carrasco generates a state of temporal undecidability. Are these interviews from 1992, or shortly thereafter? Or are the contemporary recollections of the events of 1992? Part of the structural premise of Discovery is that the past and the present are smeared to form an indecipherable, suspended time, wherein the economic and political decisions made by the EU and the IMF (which led to the destruction of Cartagena's economy) have left the city stranded in a neo-liberal limbo.

While it seems churlish to complain that The Year of the Discovery is too long, my main problem with the film is its bagginess and frequent lack of precision. One of the most valuable and consistently compelling aspects of Carrasco's film is its extended interviews with workers who were part of the '92 uprising, along with more contemporary trade unionists who are able to contextualize the loss of class consciousness in Spain with concrete analysis: exploitation of foreign labor, the gig economy, introduction of the open shop, etc.

However, the long midsection of the film consists of conversations among younger people that seem designed to showcase their lack of understanding of the issues, or at least their resignation. So we hear someone arguing for the return of compulsory military service, and another person claiming that bosses have it tougher than employees, and so forth. These conversations are so formulaic that it's difficult to believe that their speakers even believe what they're saying, although maybe they do. In any case, Carrasco could have selected a different method for displaying the failure of historical memory. As it stands, these extended interludes only dilute the power of the inquiry into 1992.

Likewise, Carrasco's use of the split-screen format is an odd choice. The Year of the Discovery, clocking in at 200 minutes, is only a few minutes shy of the total running time of Andy Warhol's The Chelsea Girls, an obvious influence. But why? I suppose both Warhol and Carrasco are interested in improv, and portraiture, and the manipulation of cinematic time. But for the most part, The Year of the Discovery uses the technique only to show two related angles of the same conversation. This allows us to observe listeners as well as speakers, something cinema tends not to do. But most of Carrasco's film is so visually negligible -- talking heads, really -- that his activation of a well-known avant-garde trope mostly feels like an unkept promise.