Research Statement

El año del descubrimiento’s virtuosic and creative use of montage is unlike anything I have ever seen. Its split-screen structure dominates nearly the entire work. At more than three hours long, this experimental documentary was shot in just nine days but took nine months to edit, underscoring the centrality of montage to its construction. It is complex, fragmented, and contradictory. It is also utterly and relentlessly hypnotic, even haunting. And yet, if this magical montage was crafted through digital editing, I sought to explore how it casts its spell by using those very same tools to dismantle it.

Most of the narration unfolds in a neighbourhood bar of La Unión, a former mining town near Cartagena (Murcia, Spain) that ceased its industrial activity in 1991. With its analogue video texture, shot with a Hi8 camera, and the temporally ambiguous appearance of the people and the bar, the documentary poses an enigma from the very beginning. It tricks the audience, who might wonder if they are watching archival footage of testimonies recovered from some VHS tapes that had been gathering dust in the basement of one of its protagonists for thirty years. But, as López Carrasco himself explained, his aim was to “shoot the documentary that nobody had shot and bring to light all those images from the past” (De Luna, 2022).

The split-screen works as contrast in the beginning, setting the spatial and temporal framework of the film. On the left side, titles describe the “carnival of events” of 1992 in Spain, such as the Barcelona Olympics, the Universal Exposition in Seville, and the designation of Madrid as European Capital of Culture. These events were “explicitly intended to celebrate the coming of age of a modern and democratic European nation-state” (Graham and Sánchez, 406) after the Transition to democracy in the late 1970s. On the right side of the screen, the other paragraph establishes the oppositional tone of the film, a more sombre political and social dimension eclipsed by the festive atmosphere: the industrial crisis plaguing the country, coupled with the growing citizen unrest and labour struggle, which, in Cartagena, culminated in a massive uprising and the burning of the Regional Assembly.

Yet, the juxtapositions created by the split-screen – and sometimes by the audio – do not always function as a contrast. Testimonies unfold on one side or the other of the screen. Sometimes they appear next to a black background or supporting, informative titles. At other times, they are displayed alongside archival images of workers’ protests. For the most part, on one side or the other, the viewer can glimpse footage of the lively bar where the film takes place. At times, characters converse with each other across the two halves of the screen.

This experimental documentary proves to be a vexing and challenging object of study, and the “Videographic Dissection” exercise developed by Ariel Avissar (2024) was a great opportunity to return to this familiar material with new methodological tools. My method for this video essay was deceptively simple: working in the editing timeline, I divided the film into blocks of interviews and archival segments. I colour-coded each section in the timeline to track how the split-screen was used across its 210 minutes. For example, I assigned one colour to clips of people speaking on the right with footage of the bar next to them, another when both sides displayed people talking on the same table. Did López Carrasco and his team follow systematic principles in their use of the split-screen? Or were these decisions more intuitive, even arbitrary? Mapping the film in this way became an act of dissection, an attempt to slow down and analyse a structure that is otherwise overwhelming in its flow.

My videographic deconstruction revealed some curious details, notably, the positioning of women. Many appear on the left side of the screen, almost as if visually opposed to the male union leaders and workers who more often occupy the screen and are placed on its right. But Josefina Pérez García always appears on the right side when speaking. A founder of the Movimiento Democrático de Mujeres (Democratic Women’s Movement), she recalls in her interview the precarious living conditions of working-class neighbourhoods under Francoist dictatorship, as well as the industrial resurgence of the 1970s that collapsed after Spain joined the European Economic Community, burdened by the obsolescence inherited from Franco’s regime. She is the only woman in the documentary who has actively participated in politics, and the only person who goes beyond the language of class struggle to raise ecological and gender concerns. This inspired a play on words in my video essay: “Josefina is always right,” because she literally occupies the right side of the screen, but she is also right in her powerful analysis linking labour struggle with broader issues.

Equally revealing were the moments when the split-screen vanishes, reserved for the narration of dreams. In one of them, scriptwriter Raúl Liarte, who comes from a family of shipyard workers, describes recurring visions of his childhood schoolyard, now shrouded in fog and haunted by aged and dead figures he recognises. The film grants these intimate moments the full screen. Dreams appear at the beginning or the end of the three sections of the documentary, serving as a subtle structuring device.

My attempt to trace exact rules for left or right positioning yielded no definitive results, but revealed that sometimes the power of a film lies in resisting systematisation. Rather than following a rigid code, the split-screen works, among other things, as a mechanism to immerse the viewer within the bar where the testimonies and conversations take place. At the same time, it grants viewers freedom: it does not dictate a single focal point but invites spectators to choose where to look, making the act of watching a participatory experience. Its juxtapositions create spatial awareness and simultaneity, while the Hi8 texture destabilises the boundaries between documentary and fiction, past and present, reality and dreams, private and public, memory and history. Therefore, these juxtapositions, drawing on Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image (2005), function as constellations in which all these apparently fixed dichotomies converge, thereby exposing, in this case, the contradictions of modernisation and industrial decline. What I initially approached as a code to be cracked became instead an invitation to embodied spectatorship, to experience history and memory as proximate, noisy, and multiple.

The final image of the Regional Assembly in flames crystallises this logic. For many witnesses, including López Carrasco, the event is remembered as if it were a dream. My videographic exercise led me to ask: could this image, too, be read as a dream? Is it the silenced nightmare beneath Spain’s international “coming of age”? Indeed, few recall that the protest happened, yet its symbolic force is undeniable. By closing with this photograph, the film unsettles collective memory and history, exposing the gap between official celebratory narratives of 1992 and the lived memories of crisis, unemployment, and revolt.

At first, I worried that my attempt to trace patterns had not uncovered anything spectacular, but this very realisation shaped the form of my response, leading me to create a video with a playful and humorous tone. I chose to accompany it with the track Sube que te llevo by MPM, a classic of Spain’s bakalao or makina scene, which is used in the film’s credits as another contrast¹ and lends the video a frenetic and chaotic rhythm. Humour and chaos, after all, can also be powerful for criticism, opening space for reflection. Ultimately, this method can reveal how films construct and destabilise meaning in ways not always perceptible in real time. It is thus a valuable tool not only for teaching students to attend to form as well as content, but also for film scholars and graduate researchers, as in my case, to build confidence in their insights into their objects of study. The process reaffirmed for me the importance of creative experimentation in research. Working “playfully” in the timeline allowed me to see familiar material anew. The insights were not only intellectual but affective: I felt more strongly the simultaneity of overlapping discourses and dichotomies, along with the spaces and memories. By approaching El año del descubrimiento with this sense of playfulness, I was able to highlight how its split-screen form resists easy interpretation, inviting the viewer to dwell in juxtaposition and fragmentation. The exercise reminded me that video essays, like the films themselves, need not always provide definitive answers in a strict, rigid form. They can also thrive in ambiguity, contradiction, and experimentation.

AI Declaration

The authors have no known or substantial use of generative AI to declare.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.