GENERAL REPORT II
THE NEW ABDUCTION OF EUROPE
Synopsis
Portabella is putting forward the second part of one of his historic works, the “General report on certain matters of interest for a public screening”, which peeked out in 1976 at the start of the political transition process after Franco’s death. This second “Report” is made in the context of a severe systemic crisis in the cultural, economic-financial, political and energy fields. Above all, it nevertheless bears witness to the way civil society is coming out of this crisis with a new prominence, consisting quite simply in ordinary people’s recovering politics.
Excerpt of a text by Chema Gonzalez (Museo Reina Sofía)
Informe General II. El nuevo rapto de Europa (General Report II. The new abduction of Europe), Pere Portabella’s latest film, looks at the political, economic, social and ecological facets of the crisis from the standpoint of networks and culture. Informe General II represents a dialogue with a new restored version of its forerunner, Informe general sobre algunas cuestiones de interés para una proyección pública (General report on certain matters of interest for a public screening).
In 1976, the Spanish director filmed a vast fresco in motion covering the last dying embers of Franco’s regime and the process for founding a democratic State. Portabella assembles the work in a structure in which the spectator is always aware of the filming device and the type of narration produced by this. This new version has been restored to come out together with the first showing of Informe General II, thus closing a diptych on the last forty years’ history.
Informe General II reacts to another historical time, also hectic, unhinged and pressing, in which the map of politicians and institutions born in 1976 has been pushed aside for a diagram of multiple open and changing nodes. How is this new civil society reorganised to recover the instituting and changing function of politics. How do institutions respond to this challenge? How do films connect and interact with these new processes?
Informe General II defends the role of culture as a context for questioning the present and the role of the museum also as a public institution in its status as a setting for dissension and critical imagination from which we can consider what our inherited and immediate "narrations" are, and what type of subject can appropriate these and launch them into the future. Science, citizens groups, grassroots social movements and networks complement the cultural institution, tracing out an uncertain outlook that Portabella’s film displays and questions at the same time.