The current technophile and technophobic panorama draws different positions around the culture/nature binomial, ranging from the sole admission of one of its terms to the definitive dissolution of the binomial through the identification of its parts. Very broadly speaking, this is the conceptual framework from which I start for the development of the non-fiction script I am developing with the A Coruña-based production company Zeitun Films. A non-binary fable in an anti-apocalyptic romantic key under the provisional name “Memoria de Anxos_Mise Abyme” in which, in a non-linear way, we witness the game of apparently antagonistic relationships that José Luis, the main character of the film, maintains with himself and with the context through which he passes. Immersed in a supposed state of disagreement and melancholy, J.L will decide to put the bodies and people -even loved ones- who insist on defending the survival of the natural human state by persuading him -explicitly or covertly- to shun any possible technological interventionism.

As a touchstone, José Luis embarks on a journey under the consideration that the binomial that others try to admit from a single perspective, for him, is indissoluble.  From then on, José Luis will ride on the back of a fluorescent horse guided by the seductive voice of a famous singer of light music who, on several occasions, will whisper to him: “when you go, I come from there”. On a silver balloon, he will travel through valleys, hills, cities and rubble. At times, he will sleep in an underground carriage, accompanied by “mud entities” who will help him -without apparent purpose- to walk among the ruins of the current academy of a famous Athenian philosopher, and shortly afterwards, he will find himself at the wheel of an imposing racing car, transporting ten jugs of oil, several chickens and a new chronology counter. Moments and circumstances in which the spaces of José Luis’s memory – as of those who attend to this situation – will gradually become covered with a substratum that will end up constituting an amalgam of locations, names, dialogues, situations, which will be terribly familiar to us and which, gradually, will allow us to understand that the point from which the story begins, like the equator and the end of the story, are a docket of situations and contexts previously produced. José Luis, aware of this, will decide to travel in the opposite direction to the timeline established in his script. In other words, his journey will be a return journey. A transit from the denouement of the story to the beginning of it. Like someone who retraces his steps, he will be directly confronted with his ” abysm setting “. He will be conscious of traversing along “his handwritten self” or, if one prefers, along “his old self”. An “I” which will undoubtedly retain the traces of an earlier writing. It would seem as if J.L wanted to expressly erase that which “is known to have already been said” in order to make room for what “now exists” or vice versa, what now exists will seem to be what was previously said. A space-time palimpsest tangled with myths and anti-myths. An accumulation and jumble of substances and of course, like any being who decides to retrace his steps, between qualities of two aspects, José Luis, will end up stumbling over himself. Now a cowboy⌁ who is shot four times, now a silent hermit⌁ who is in search of true love. The love of an exotic, nomadic and erratic life that creeps through Rotermani, the same factory complex that decades ago, long before he passed through, Stalker had already passed through. “The area” is now the “Wolf’s Lair”, Hitler’s barracks-refuge, where it is said that the roads are littered with “ashes and diamonds”. There, among ruins, vegetation and scum, José Luis believes he has found his love, a love that in a few hours collapses as when one feels one’s certainties begin to turn into doubts. Doubts that seem to find some relief when walking through the place where the protagonist, at minute 1:09:29, decides to read a poem:

“Often, you are like a bright torch, with burning rags around you, as you burn, I don’t know if the flames will bring freedom or death, or if all that is yours will disappear.”

Like someone looking for a star at dawn, José Luis submerges his body in the waters of Lake Masuria in search of the knife which, they say, lies under the water. On his return to the surface, slumped on the edge of a cliff, with the lost gaze of a rebel who sees and feels himself without a cause, José Luis realizes that both the cliff and the sea he now sees are not as he thought he remembered them. They seem to be composed of a new time. A time in the form of a voice, a voice that will confess to him not knowing when or where it was that a couple of watchmakers decided to build a clock/counter that would allow them to count all the fictional time produced by humanity.  In turn, the voice will confess to J.L that the construction of that artifact involved two main reasons. One, to know what it feels like to love a loved one, and the other, to be astounded by the fact that, for every minute we consume in our reality, the film industry produces three minutes. 1-3… since then, until now, something is changing. 1-3… the love of those watchmakers has been disrupted by time. In front of them, the same sea and the same cliff on which José Luis, dejected, still gazes among the many backdrops in the “dream factory” in Potsdam near Berlin. There, kneeling on the floor of the Babelsberg film studios, surrounded by a set that recreates a cliff and a cliff.  There, where a few meters away from him, Thea Von Harbou and Fritz Lang wrote Metropolis, José Luis will remain prostrate in front of this great set and will say to himself: “In Metropolis it was the year 2026, in Memoria de Anxos namely… the Garden of Forking Paths is imaginary.” Next to him, his fluorescent horse and his sports car. Animal-machine-person, they perfectly illustrate the binomial tableau that is the passage through this world; between the apparently false and the apparently real, there is a Metropolis; between the one and the other; the continuous advance of the myth of Proteus. The spaces of José Luis’s memory will gradually become covered with names, places and situations which, by arranging themselves in order to accommodate one another, by establishing more and more numerous relationships, there will not be a single isolated moment between them. Each one will receive its raison d’être from the others, while at the same time imposing its own raison d’être. After all, the memories through which José Luis passes are memories that unfold and pile up, like someone walking through the rubble of a ruin that is as authentic as it is truthfully unreal; as unreal as it is possible. 

José Luis and us, us and José Luis between, by and through the ambiguity inherent to the pair constituted between that which we vehemently affirm as reality, as opposed to that which we affirm with the same impetus to be constituted as fiction, or what is the same, trapped between the impotence produced by being aware that, to define anything, fact or person, here in this world, we only use two categories. As the backdrop folds, José Luis will ask himself: what is my existence made up of?

There, between the lines of the real and the fictitious, he will soon realize that he is at the epicenter of the drama, that is to say, in the area of disturbance where the culture/nature pair converge. Overwhelmed, amidst mechano tube tubes, spotlights and decorative motifs, he will be aware of being at the exact point where the passages and facts of what we understand as nature intersect with those of what we believe to be culture. It will be there, surrounded by the imagery of the film studios devised under a Weimar Republic. Yes, there, where the National Socialist regime under the direction of the propaganda minister Paul Joseph Goebbels carried out its cultural plans, there, where a few years later, the Soviet military regime would end up developing its cultural programme as well. There in Babelsberg; now Filmpark. A vast film park full of facilities with endless attractions and multiple screenings, dynamic 3D cinemas and didactic museums. There and nowhere else José Luis notices that she has not been allowed to conceptualize anything about herself⌁ but rather that everything she has experienced so far has been defined and constituted by the need for others to label. A labeling based on simple categories that obviates the diversity that comes with being and being someone – or something – in this world. Paradoxically, it will be the binarism under which the film industry operates that will end up empowering José Luis and allow him to distance himself definitively from it. But not before listening to all those involved in the development and production of his story, insinuating that he was making a serious mistake. 

Finally, on the fringes of any dramatic curve, far from the neuroses of any being looking for immediate answers, thousands of kilometers away from experts in narrative and film management. Outside the range of the specialist who determines whether what happened is a drama or a Psycho Thriller, a romantic comedy or an Alcantara series. José Luis, will manage to completely unknot his story to become an entity immersed in the production of a non-binary and ego-free cinematographic artifact. Now, once achieved, it remains to be seen if the one who observes him, i.e. you, decides to do what José Luis did, to become a compact piece outside the bipolar world and join it under another name; let’s say the one that truly corresponds to you; cyborg, not hero.