Visualizing trauma – Marc Recha’s Dies D’agost

Abstract

Abstract Catalan director Marc Recha’s Days of August (Dies d’agost, Recha, 2006) is true to his usual aesthetic and themes. Minimal plots walk a problematic line between narrative and documentary; fiction and reality; past and present. In the rechian universe, cinema’s classical concepts and expectations are challenged and obliterated in an unresolvable chaos of sophisticated styles, media and references. Plots change, but what holds is the succession of dissociated and tenuous scenarios in haunted spaces where messages fail to be transmitted yet human enquiries persist. In Agost, the rechian style turns into a precise idiom to embody what has been forgotten and to communicate what has been left unsaid. Specific challenges stem from Recha’s desire to film our inability to grasp our past. Briefly, tentatively, spectators might understand that unless we tend to our wounds, no one will understand our personal and collective traumas.