Look with Thine Ears: Sonic Encounters and Eviction in Eduard Cortés’s Cerca de tu casa (2016)

Abstract

Cerca de tu casa (At Your Doorstep) is a 2016 musical film about eviction in crisis-era Spain. Directed by Eduard Cortes and starring the singer Silvia Perez Cruz, the film breaks with realist portrayals of the crisis and victim-oriented narratives that alienate the individual from the collective and encourage passive spectatorship. Cerca uses sonic encounters in order to create a counter-narrative for the crisis featuring an affective, participatory audience experience through listening. In a close reading of four interdependent musical moments, I draw from scholarship in sound studies to demonstrate how diverse auditory strategies operate in the diegetic and non-diegetic space of the film in order to locate individual experiences of loss as part of a collective trauma. In particular, I analyze the role of film music, dance, popular protest, and song and public performance to suggest the need for engaged, responsive listening that invites and supports dialogical aural encounters, often with unexpected or unseen interlocutors. Ultimately, the film is about forging a new relational practice in post-crisis democracy. In its portrayal of the search to locate a network of experiences and alliances with others, the film posits what we might conceive of as a musical mobilization, one that is participatory, collective in nature and driven by listening.