English Texts

Zizek says, owes as much to the world of the arts as
to the world of religion, since among capitalist general
merchandise it is the work of art which still keeps
‘its’ secret. For example, if we start from the definition
of ‘Mac Guffin’ given by Hitchcock – the void of the
‘Mac Guffin’, the nothingness of the ‘Mac Guffin’,
remember – we see that in its origin it describes the
routine procedure of a robbery, the theft of the plans
of the enemy fortress, and in the end, to continue
with Hitchcock, ‘stealing documents… stealing papers…
stealing a secret’. The idea Mignoni gives us is not
bad, to regard the main subject of Marx’s Capital as
a ‘Mac Guffin’.
Nuestro culpable, the film by Mignoni to which
our scene belongs, is a small masterpiece of Spanish
cinema. Produced in 1937 with the support of the
CNT, when Madrid was reeling under the bombardment
from the fascist aviation, its atmosphere and topics,
as we have said, seem suitable for a world at peace
where the revolution has triumphed. The difficulties
of the shoot – for example, Fernando Díaz de Mendoza,
one of the actors, was killed in the ‘tunnel of death’
while trying to cross into the national zone – made
the critics wonder about the timing of a humorous
film whilst ‘comrades were falling at the front’.
Mignoni even clashed with the trade union given
the incompetence of the staff they sent to work
‘on that film business’. It is odd for this writer that it
was the Marxist critics who were the harshest in their
assessment of the film. Its plot is that of a screwball
musical comedy that is ironic about the relations
between justice and bourgeois society, and they found
it too light. In the tangle, of course, a story of the
underdog versus the powerful is woven, but that is not
where the ideological charge of the film lies. ‘Apart
from the commonplaces,’ says José María Caparros,
‘a careful viewing of Nuestro culpable leads us to
a series of connotations where the ideology we are
concerned with is evident throughout the story,
despite the apparently light tone of the narrative.
For example, details as significant, albeit minimal, as
a silver-framed photograph of a pig, to the anarchist
gesture of the contemptuous, mocking raspberry of the
hero in prison or the “Happy Xmas” on the card that
comes out of the wallet in the place of banknotes in
the scene of the scam. But more important still are the
sequences where the three prisoners ask for equality
with El Randa, saying “we’re the bosses”, and the one
in the cabaret where praise is offered to the thief.’
Those ingenious details have also been attacked in the
name of a certain ideological orthodoxy, accusing
the film of confusing ‘the destruction of order with
libertarian order’ (sic.) Thus Emeterio Díez: ‘However,
although the heroes emerge victorious, the message
is that the bourgeois order can only be mocked
with the picaresque or a stroke of luck, hence the
importance given to a horseshoe. With that “magical
object” the film defends something as unrevolutionary
as the claim that happiness depends on chance and
not the action of man. Likewise the fetishism of the
dollar and luxury are not very orthodox.’ We can
end this critical review with the comment written by
J.B. Heinink in Flor en la sombra: ‘from now on, all
those who have suffered damage will be forced to
tell lies – I say the opposite so you understand me –,
which fosters the development of the film as comedy
and allows the introduction of songs with lyrics dotted
with sharp irony, where the director gives free rein to
his visual experiments on the basis of impressions
which, if they are not perfectly carried off in terms of
technical resolution, it is because they have no aesthetic
pretensions but keep to a preconceived purpose of
film syntax.’
The intention of this essay is to offer the story of
the work we are going to do. These lines are written
while we are working on the idea of the empty city,
and we come and go from Badia to confirm who
knows what hypothesis, who knows what promises.
Some time ago now – it was from a text by Luis Castro
Nogueira, Contra el tiempo, espacio, published in
the magazine Archipiélago in 1992 – I worked on the
idea described critically by the geographer E.W. Soja,
‘to give Capital a geographical character’. The
project, which sprang from the theoretical ideas of
Harvey and Jameson, offered Soja a formidable array
of conceptual tools, once a certain Marxist rigorism
that seemed paralysing had been overcome, and
opened up an equally huge array of linguistic strategies.
Now that I have rediscovered this possibility, which
has fallen like ‘manna’ from heaven almost, of returning
to this project for criticising capitalist space, a space
which subrogates time by acceleration, I took up some
ideas from that time again, for example, a simple idea
like highlighting the twofold condition of the word
‘tiempo’ in Spanish – it means both time and weather
– and observing its consequences. I remember that
Bill Murray, the main character of the film Groundhog
Day (Spanish title Atrapado en el tiempo) directed in
1992 by Harold Ramis, was a meteorologist, a weather
man who was trapped in a time sequence of one
day, and although the pair ‘time-weather’ does not
coincide with our ‘tiempo-tiempo’, it is one of the films
which has most distressed and amused me. In TIEMPO-
TIEMPO those doublings of language – I suppose the
great love for one another professed by surrealists and
Marxists must come from that same reading – which
formulated theoretically seemed too phenomenal,
too idealistic to me, have not prevented me now from
connecting a camera to the web with the same purpose:
to observe the skies of Badia, its atmospheric changes,
and compare them with their chronological values.
TIEMPO-TIEMPO is a space for thinking, a space which
when it comes to installing it is overwhelmed by the
phenomenon of Alfred Picó and the thousands of fanatics
who look at their computer screen instead of the sky
hoping to see if it is raining or the sun is shining. In
TIEMPO-TIEMPO I wanted to formulate a hypothesis on
the general conditioning factors of our habitat and how
they unfailingly mark the Duration of Labour and it turns
out that I am joining an alienated internet users club.
Another play on words, the construction UR-VANITAS,
a slogan to display on banners and notices on the
permanent building site of our cities, heightened in
the case of Badia since it is a city with no possibility
of expansion, perimetrically closed to land speculation.
I should clarify the distinction between the ‘Urbanality’
of Francesc Muñoz, who was also invited to collaborate
on these pages, an accurate definition of the
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