Segunda vez

“My Happening, I now repeat, was nothing other than ’an act of social sadism made explicit.”, writes the Argentinian intellectual Oscar Masotta in 1967. Spanish artist Dora García, employing different means of expression from re-staging and cinema to an enriching website with great texts accompanying the film, asks what the happenings of the mythical Lacanian of pre-dictatorship Argentinia can mean today. Even more she comes close to the ideal of fictional figure Pierre Menard from José Luis Borges’ story about a man who immersed himself in re-writing Don Quixote to the point of a deliberate anachronism. Due to an aesthetic of disorderly interruption and the constant pointing-out of the partly discomforting presence of the camera we never feel safe. The perversity of observing, the power structures of who is looking at whom become painfully palpable. Masotta’s reflections on psychosis and those of his contemporary Julio Cortázar on general moods associated with the Perón dictatorship are literally happening a second time. Finally García also shows that cinema always takes place in the presence. There is no doubt that the incidents of Segunda vez are reflecting today’s social sadism. (Viennale)