CONTRA LA INERCIA AGAINST INERTIA - granada cultura

(17) Ramón Gómez de la Serna. Ismos.
Madrid: SEACEX, 2002. p. 221.
(18) Paul Wells. Understanding animation.
London; New York: Routledge, 1998. p. 69.
(19) Op. cit., p. 128.
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its figures, for, what is there in them? Hardly ever
anything truly human, and often only masks as in
Solana. Pomet’s exact but very free brushstrokes
give the faces little more than distorted lines, dark
rag-dolls like those on the walls of Goya’s Quinta
del Sordo. However, on the other hand, we should
observe the faces that appear, Dalí-like, where least
expected: the column of smoke rising from the locomotive
in Treblinka (2007), a monstrous human face
for the inhuman machinery of the Nazi holocaust; or
in the enormous ball of fire of an explosion in Sam
(2009), the true face of power behind the innumerable
conflicts throughout the world. The cartoon-like
heads – here perfectly defined – that Pomet has
grafted onto the figures filling the military scene in
Academia (2011) [p. 76] are reminiscent of the comedian
Miguel Gila’s act when he telephones the enemy
to ask for holes for the guns (one of the heights
of Spanish absurd humour, not without roots in the
works of Miguel Mihura or García Berlanga, nor
therapeutic effects for a country where the memory
of the Civil War remains under the surface). The
fertile convergence of humour with Spanish culture
was indeed one of the arguments that Ramón Gómez
de la Serna used in the chapter of Ismos (1932)
dedicated to Humourism: “The Spaniard tries to
correct all that is solemn by taking it with humour;
and if a photograph were taken of the expression on
the faces of the smartest when peeping at great parades,
we would see a predominantly comic look.” 17
The statement might almost have been intended for
pieces such as the already mentioned Academia, but
also for La pajarita rosa (2010) [p. 77], where there
may be an echo of Fellini’s fascist-clowns, or Avantgarde
(2010), a bizarre military parade of Gigantes
and Cabezudos. The shocking presence of Ernie and
Bert in Pesadilla (2006) [p. 101] becomes grotesque
if we realize that the original photo used is of Franco’s
conspiratorial meeting with a group of officers
in Grand Canary just before the coup d’étât in 1936.
In his analysis of animated cartoons, Paul Wells stated
that “by authorizing the collapse of the illusion of
physical space, the metamorphosis destabilizes the
image, combining horror and humour, dream and reality,
certainty and speculation” 18 , and also that “this
spectacle was inherently amusing because it illustrated
the literal collapse of social order as it rested
on the physical medium. The notion of ‘surprise’ has
always been intrinsic to these models of comedy
because the level of involvement in the moment when
transgression of the ‘real world’ takes place requires
the audience to perceive reality in a different way.” 19
Where it acts with most force, Pomet’s humour does
not refer to the sphere of the purely absurd, but acts