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43 Regarding the
figure of the “building site spectator,” Colomer (in recent correspondence) suggests a key reference: José Luis Guerin’s film En construcción (2000), which depicts the transformation of the Raval neighbourhood in Barcelona in the 1990s. Certain moments
in the film document the habit (widespread among unoccupied, and especially retired, people, but also among children) of watching ongoing construction work, highlighting its nature
as public event. A significant passage in Guerin’s film dissects the moment when the demolition of an old block uncovers Roman archeological remains under
the surface. Swiftly the people from the neighbourhood gather together at the excavation site, where chisels and brushes have replaced hammers and bulldozers. There’s a speed and phase change. The public crowds around the pit and, almost in assembly-style, speculate and comment on the human remains found among the ruins.
44 J. M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, South Australia: University of Adelaide, 2014. Online edition, accessed February 2017: https://ebooks. adelaide.edu.au/k/keynes/john_ maynard/k44g/complete.html.
45 “Show that you are showing! Among all the varied attitudes / Which you show when showing how men play their parts / The attitude of showing must never be forgotten. / All attitudes must be based on the attitude of showing.” B. Brecht, Poems, 1913- 1956. Ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim. London: Methuen, 1976.
46 Bertolt Brecht, “Messingkauf Dialogues,”
in Brecht on Performance: Messingkauf and Modelbooks, London: Bloomsbury, 2015, pp. 18-19.
simply recorded opportunistically. Suspending or avoiding those conventions, however, does not automatically enable a work to qualify as “docu-fiction.” Besides, it’s a well-known fact that many retired people (at least here in Southern Europe) are fond of watching ongoing construction work, a pastime they much prefer to watching films like Symphony of A Big City. They watch buildings and parking lots being built, and they seldom stay till the end. They leave at a certain time: their gaze is an unfinished construction.43 If they ever by any chance happen to see the completion of the building work, they never applaud, but they simply leave, half satisfied, half disappointed. As viewers, they would probably much rather witness the famous scene described by John Maynard Keynes: “If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment.”44 Shooting a film and asking actors to do stuff, but not to act, is delicate work, especially if it results in actors also playing make-believe, pretending like they are doing certain things. “Das Zeigen muss gezeigt werden,” demands Bertolt Brecht in a poem: Showing must be shown.45 Somewhere else, through some generic character called “the Philosopher,” Brecht speculated on the possibility of hiring actors to perform entirely prosaic actions requiring no artistic behavior: stuff such as falling or just moving about. This would be called “thaeter,” a term that, as opposed to theater, designated the “purposeless imitations” that he sought: a kind of mimesis aimed not at conveying theatrical meaning but at the observation of actions and incidents. The Philosopher is consumed by an insatiable curiosity about people, “the way they socialize, strike up friendships and enmities, sell onions, plan military campaigns, get married, make tweed suits, circulate forged banknotes, dig potatoes, observe the movement of the planets”.46 The goal is to observe how society functions, to observe the world much like someone watching a building under construction. To set up an alternative system of “imitations” for that purpose does not entail in any way an aspiration for those imitations to be taken as realities. Quite the contrary: the goal, as William Gruber succinctly puts it, is “imitation but not dissimulation.” For Brecht, imitation “describes a multi- leveled series of repetitions and reproductions [... ] during
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