Helena Santín González | Ver (See) / 2016

raise high the roof beam, carpenter

by Douglas Messerli

 

Helena Santín González (screenwriter and director) Ver (See) / 2016 [14 minutes]

 

In Spanish director Helena Santín González’s 2016 short See, actor Biel Oliver plays a young man working at a repetitive and, as he later describes it, rather uninteresting job of a carpenter, the firm he works for evidently remaking furniture and other fine crafted goods. If nothing else, he is bored and tired of his job, including his nightly meet-ups with a woman who may be his girlfriend or just his best woman friend.

      For soon after they part for this particular evening, he takes the subway home, on the way picking up a slightly older man, played by Ricard Rivero, who is a photographer. Although the photographer gets off at a stop before his, the carpenter doubles back and meets up with the man, returning with him to his studio / apartment, where the photographer tours him through is newest work, with which Rivero is not sure he’s fully satisfied.  

      Oliver’s character, however, is highly intrigued by the photography he witnesses, and even fascinated by the camera itself. When he rises early in the morning with the photographer still sleeping, he dresses and takes the camera with him. We don’t necessarily see him taking photos, but he does look through the lens, and through the process refocuses on the thousands of everyday objects that he previously has not even noticed. What we perceive is that for the first time, he “sees” the world around him.

      At his job, the sterile work space suddenly becomes a world of objects and textures. At the end of the day, he takes the camera back to the photographer, waiting for his arrival at the gate to his apartment building, obviously explaining to him, out of our hearing, just what he has discovered through their chance meeting.

      Unfortunately, this film which has very little dialogue is itself filmed in dark, washed-out colors, which makes sense for the carpenter’s pre-sex encounter, but contradicts what we are supposed to “see” and discover in the latter half. The director Santín González clearly hasn’t yet found her way to open her lens to the full light and color of the world she is filming. Accordingly, much like Oliver’s character in the first scenes of this 14-minute film, we are forced to see the world through a glass darkly.

 

Los Angeles, September 18, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).