The Riaño reservoir was already the subject of your previous film. Why this particular interest in this area?
I stumbled upon the horror story that is the construction of reservoirs in Spain by chance, and upon the Riaño reservoir by necessity, because it is an inescapable, paradigmatic case that helps to understand many things—for example, the extent to which the Socialist Party was, economically speaking, the dictatorship’s finest creation. I made my previous film at home and almost three years later I screened it in the new Riaño (the old one was demolished and its remains are now sixty metres under water). Usually, you go to a place and make a film, but I made a film so that I could go to a place, as a safe-conduct, as an offering. And, once there, what happened to me was that I fell under a spell, I don’t know how else to explain it. The mountains have cast a spell on me, along with the forests, the rivers and certain people. I want to be there and be part of it, and contribute to the defence of the little world that remains, threatened by all manner of extractive practices. And I want to keep filming. Perhaps I have found my Monument Valley, even though the truly monumental valley lies beneath the water.
Your previous film was based on found footage. Here, it consists exclusively of your own shots. Why did you make that choice?
To be able to look at the landscape, to protect myself from it. It is said that neither the sun nor death can be stared at directly, and such is the case in the mountains: the vast grave that is the reservoir has now been joined by the thousands of hectares scorched last summer. These are landscapes that cause pain. But if you place a camera between yourself and the landscape, other problems immediately arise: what to frame, at what distance, with which lens… And then you have to set up the tripod, clean the lens, focus… you have to move, use your hands. These problems, minor by comparison, allow you to face the bigger pain; keeping yourself busy trying to show something keeps the anguish at bay, and then you can, at last, look.
Can you tell us more about the voice-over text? How did you compose it? What materials did you use?
The lack of resources forced me to abandon the idea of recording direct sound and to write that voice-over instead, pieced together from more or less original phrases and quotes from people who live or have lived in the mountains. Almost all men of a certain age write (on blogs, on social media, in the digital press, in their local magazine, in self-published books), about the world they still have and about the world that the reservoir took from them. It may well be that these memory efforts have saved them from going mad amidst so much destruction. And sometimes they say truly memorable things, and I am moved by their loyalty to the time and space that remained under water and by their determination to enter, they too, into the ‘universe of meaning’. They lost, without a doubt, but, by writing, they ensure that the winners do not win entirely.
How did you approach the editing of the visuals in relation to this?
During filming, I worked on space; during editing, on time. I walked a great deal and read a great deal (the amateur writers of the mountains), and what I saw whilst walking became intertwined with the words I was reading, with two phrases by Kafka that I’d read twenty years ago, with the songs from my mental jukebox, and with this and that. Everything coexisting on equal terms, like strands of thought. During the editing process, I tried to organise and rhythm those strands, and at first it was the images that inspired passages of voice-over, but soon the voice-over began to demand the repetition of some images or the inclusion of others that I had previously discarded, so I went back to find them. Without the voice-over, I don’t think I would have paid such close and careful attention to the shots I filmed myself.
The lively music in the opening, the amplification of certain sounds, the asynchronous sound… Can you tell us about your choices regarding the sound design?
The film is quite musical, isn’t it? Not just because of the music and the snippets of songs, but also because of the voice-over, which has a sort of troubadour-like quality to it, with all those repetitions. Moreover, apart from a certain blackbird and a certain calf, the sounds are ‘local’: I spent several days doing field recordings in the region. If you don’t bow to the conventions of naturalism, the possibilities are endless. Thanks to sound, you can show two different moments in a single image at the same time, for example. With sound, you can go back to the past of a burnt-out mountain, that is, to the fire, and see the fire.
Interviewed by Claire Lasolle
