2013.10.16

FILM_REVIEWS_"Others Voices" by Iván Ruiz

At midnight on Wednesday 4 April, just before the rain began, the sidewalks of Torrijos Street, which houses the Verdi cinema in Barcelona, ​​were witness to the widespread joy shown by those who had just left the premiere of “Unes Altres Veus/Other Voices”, the documentary by our colleague Iván Ruíz Acero. A sense of joy that was not in a hurry to be hidden, content to be shared, each of us in our own way. Because the materialization of the idea and work present in the happy collaboration between Teidees and TEAdir, an audio-visual producer and an association of parents of children with autism, embodied in the characters of Iván, Marta and Silvia, among many others, have succeeded in captivating us.

I would say that it is necessary to watch the film and that it is necessary to tell others about it. It would be nice, and the film is certainly worth, if it was screened in cinemas around the world, neighbourhood cinemas, movie theatres, festivals, homes where friends get together to watch movies and eat popcorn, at seminars for scientists, artists and politicians, on buses travelling to Galicia, Morocco or Brussels and airplanes crossing the Atlantic and the Baltic… so that this joy can spread…

“Unes Altres Veus” is a different documentary in all senses. If documentary film has often been seen as the genre that portrays reality, “Unes Altres Veus” shows that, in fact, perhaps the only objectifiable thing that can be said about it, about reality, is that it is unique for each one of us, and that it is woven with humans’ most intimate matter: their words and their voices. This movie offers us a leisurely ride with no apparent route or destination, down the back roads of a labyrinth, which, gradually, will lead us to a meeting with its protagonist, Albert, a boy diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. The viewer, gently, will penetrate the radically different reality of autism, to end up amusingly and irremediably lost in whatever autistic sensibilities lay within us. As though it were a Möbius strip, the story of the experience of having this “small problem” -as Albert refers to it when talking about his diagnosis– seems to, without us knowing when or how, change from being what happens to him, to resonate deeply in our most intimate constitution as subjects.

I would say that this documentary is a testimonial for the 21st century, just as the memories of Dr. Schreber were in the past. Both have in common the enormous generosity with which their protagonists have decided to give testimony of how language affects them. Albert’s account brings us closer to the way in which the world of an autistic individual is constructed, his relationships with others, his thoughts, his fears and his dreams. But, at one point, the story crosses a certain threshold: it is no longer the story of what happens to some humans and becomes the absolutely singular testimony of this subject, and that is the point where the boundary, which at the beginning seemed to be unsurmountable between his world and ours, is breeched. In this sense, the film gives testimony of just how useful is any diagnostic label, showing how these labels have a fictitious nature, since they are created as a defence against the unknown.

The testimony of Albert is accompanied by the stories of parents with children with autism and the words of a few Lacanian psychoanalysts scattered around the world. They speak in their own words, transmitting – each in their own way – what it is about autism that has captivated them, what they have learned, what autistics have taught them as parents, educators or psychoanalysts. This is why their words are spoken from a chaise lounge: they are sitting, curled up, with legs crossed or open, with hands that are still or animated, in shots taken from very different perspectives, outdoors or in fictitious spaces created for the occasion, and each one of them takes up the invitation to speak as they see fit. That is why it is also the testimony of all who speak, and that’s why all the other children, Quique, Miguel, Victor, Hector, Lucía, Alex and the others come to meet Albert on his walks.

We could say that this documentary explains how Lacanian psychoanalysis approaches autism, because the ingredients that make it up are mixed as if it were “one practice among several individuals”: each one is something different, but in the scene, that is not the fundamental thing. Nobody is an expert on anything, no one is teaching or educating, each one speaks from their own place, drawing the path of the labyrinth- we enter the of the profound enigma of autism and we leave with the words, silences, music, looks and sighs that make us as parlêtres.

Addressing issues such as guilt, it shows how, for Lacanian psychoanalysis, the ultimate cause does not lie in any gene or accident or misconstruction of desire, but that the cause is lost. “The unfathomable decision of being” is erected in order to enable us to glimpse that the deepest respect for this decision is the way to share life with these beings of a great exceptionality. By loving the absolute difference, by letting ourselves be captivated by it, letting us be taught by it, Lacanian psychoanalysis has, and still does, make changes that may seem impossible to attain. The treatment proposed by psychoanalysis is that which is based on the Other, since the subject finding what can be used to invent an appropriate way of naming the world is dependent on the Other. This documentary was difficult, as Albert says, but not impossible. The paths of desire have resulting in a film that is “acustuflant”!

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