Written & Directed Xavier Guàrdia
Cinematography Guillem Camós Romero
Photographs (Colour) Marc Javierre Kohan
Editing Gabriel Ghiggeri / Xavier Guàrdia
Postproduction & Colour Armand Rovira
Sound Mastering Pablo Teijón
Sound Uqbar Estudis
Graphic Design Corinne García
Production Seny&Rauxa Docfilms
Nausica / Sibil·la / Dolores Rosa Serra Torrens
Interviewer Xavier Guàrdia
Fictional documentary where three women compare the current tourist with the all times traveller, establishing a dialogue between today’s society and the world of other times. Old photographs from the 20th century and current ones from the 21st become visual testimony to the transformation of Barcelona.
The three interviews are performed by a single actress, Rosa Serra Torrens, who plays a young anthropology student who transmits common sense and optimism, a middle-aged humanist who proposes a new direction, and an elderly revolutionary who offers a mordant critical vision of this current world that has lost its values and it has been adrift for decades.
Creative collaboration with the photographer Marc Javierre Kohan who contributes colour photographs taken from his photographic book Tourist Walk
Collaboration with AFB Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona (Photographic Archive of Barcelona) that provides black and white archive photographs dated between 1905 and 1959.
Photos from the shooting with Rosa Serra Torrens playing all three roles in the film. Nausica, a young university student, Sibil.la, a middle-aged humanist, and Dolores, an elderly revolutionary.
The film is mayeutic: it shows and persuades us to speak, just as Socrates did, it makes us philosophise, a philosophy in a direct and open way: it suggests ideas with the film’s own philosophers, Xavier and his guests, represented by the same actress: the anthropologist, the humanist Sibilla, and Dolores, the old woman who speaks of generational drift.
The film works with antithetical and dialectical structures. The antithesis of the multicoloured, massive and fast international versus the local-intrahistorical of Barcelona. The Mediterranean idea versus the invasive (“barbaric”) idea now represented with the tourist invasion resulting from globalization and the conversion of tourism into macro and intensive exploitation. Tourism from a position of avidity, tourism without an aim to get to know the city but to hunt it down and take it photographed as an object of consumption. There is no exchange, the tourist is not ambassador, he does not speak to the local man but, being an extension of his camera, comes in a swift act of predation and acquisition. The crowds of tourists led by the tour guide are the Chaplinian version of Modern Times applied to the current tourism industry. And going to the title of Xavier Guàrdia’s film, another antithesis could be highlighted, with its two titles: Other Times versus Modern Times.
And there is an antithesis with a sequence or structure in movement of a dialectical type, by which the past of the concept “trip to Ithaca” (“never rush the trip”) is faced or confronted. The trip as an enriching value confronted with the current mass trip of tourists shooting at everything that is put within eyeshot. The non-real-enjoyment, not of experience but of Proustian postponement for virtual enjoyment, postponed, of recollection-reproduction in the future, and, finally, the synthesis of these states with the tessitura proposed and prescribed by the anthropologist Nausica: “For travel to be enriching you have to be humble and keep your eyes wide open”; (…) “if you want to know foreign countries, you must travel like a poor man”.
The generational antithesis returns (of worldview and attitude) exposed by the actress who plays the old woman Dolores, who in her Andalusian emigrant accent confronts her life as a young woman and that of her parents in laudatory but extreme terms (“they worked from dawn to dusk”) with the life of today’s youth, equally exposed in extreme terms.
The author’s intention is therefore not to make a thesis, but rather that the viewer makes with the extreme thesis of Dolores and the equally exposed extreme antithesis of youth, a balanced and corrective synthesis between a more natural post-war life with values, productive and responsible, and the life of today’s youth, totally focused on leisure, without values, quite unproductive and irresponsible.
It is a film that in the first seconds could seem like a TV documentary, of the latest generation, but as it progresses, the viewer realises that it is not such, but a movie, and rather mayeutised by the director, the filmmaker Xavier Guàrdia himself. Definitely a short film with visual, verbal and musical poetry, with a well-priced narrative structure to balance it with the content. The ideas are reinforced with sound, colour, and the behaviourist display of masses of tourist extras. Yet this is accentuated and strengthened by the performance of the director and the actress who plays the role of an anthropologist, a humanist and an old woman representative of the worldview of their generations, who wander in the peripatetic way, speaking through the agora, with a philosopher’s tempo, a tempo far from the speed of the objective reality that they expose and analyse.
In addition, on a symbolic level, both the film’s presenter and the humanist Sibilla appear dressed in white and both barefoot: white is the colour of non-colour, a tone that symbolically means neutrality, purity and distance from what appears on the multicoloured stage. Walking barefoot symbolises being on earth, touching reality, feeling the city, being connected to it like its own trees.
One of the merits of the film is to show us the change in tourism in a Mediterranean city like Barcelona, from nostalgia for the past to criticism of the present, leading us with mayeutic methods to a third dialectical step where the viewer places in our time how the tourist experience should be. From nostalgia it is proposed to return to a city whose life was ordered by the criteria of silence, beauty and intimacy. Barcelona has always been touristy. But touristy of travelling individuals, be it a backpacker or an elitist flâneur
The short film Other Times by film director Xavier Guàrdia, a test bed for the feature film Barcelona Tourist Walk, stands as a biting and sometimes ironic vision of the problem of acultural tourism in the midst of the globalization of the 21st century.
Divided into three parts, it gives us a polyhedral vision of this new phenomenon, contrasting it with the concept of the traveller of the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th century, hence the concept of the title. And it is that, in other times, the traveller gave himself to others out of a thirst for knowledge and today it is an excuse for selfies, in an act of alienating narcissism.
Structured on the basis of fictionalized interviews, with notable performances by Rosa Serra Torrens, Guàrdia (also a screenwriter) inquires about the virtues of travel to end with the cultural decadence that globalization imposes. In the film we visualise it, on the skin of Barcelona, in the impressive colour photographs of Marc Javierre-Kohan.
In the first part, with some beautiful images of the monument to Columbus and having the waves of the sea as sound background, Nausica is interviewed, alter ego of the teenager who saves Ulysses from shipwreck. As if we were talking about a shipwreck, Nausica reminds us: “For centuries, travel was a spiritual quest. (…) The lure of the unknown has given way to an obsession of leaving nothing to chance”. “For travel to be enriching you have to be humble and keep your eyes wide open.” These philosophical reflections taken from the book Bertrand Russell Speaks his mind contrast with the images of a tourist Barcelona, full of cheap souvenirs and the burden of living in a gentrified city. The chapter closes with some nostalgic black and white photographs from when travelling was an adventure and not a summer “obligation”.
Between the whites of the protagonists’ costumes and the impeccable marble of the German Pavilion by Mies van de Rohe, a new character, Sibil.la, is interviewed. We are already in the second part. In a beautiful Majorcan accent (let’s remember the Cant de la Sibil.la in the Cathedral of Majorca), this pythoness warns us about how “we live in a time of technological euphoria and material abundance”. And it reminds us that a new Humanism is needed to prevent postmodernity from drowning out any individual and creative thought.
These lucid reflections, fragments taken from the book El Mediterráneo y los bárbaros del norte by Lluís Racionero, propose a new spirituality through urban
planning, creating an alchemical dialogue between the alienated societies of the north and the warm city of the Mediterranean.
Under the sculpture La Dona i l’Ocell by Joan Miró, we reach the third part where Dolores is interviewed, a revolutionary mystic, writes the subtitle. She points out the lack of values of the new generations in contrast with hers of the Spanish Civil War. A culture of effort and sacrifice is vanishing, she says, a society that believes it has seen it all when it has never been anywhere at all.
“You die young and they bury you old. Peace has broken out.” Perhaps this is the most shocking phrase of the film. It is at this point where the images become more distressing, due to the overcrowding and vulgarity of drunken tourism. It is a bitter comment on the lack of spirituality that leads to a runaway consumer society, barbarised to the point of banality.
The traditional Scottish theme Auld Lang Syne or the original Barcelona Tourist Walk composed by Daniel Andrew Griggs, both mark a soundtrack about what we have lost and how little we have gained. We thus have a beautiful combination of form and content. The old days, which will never return, are shown in melancholic black and white images of men and women of the past. In contrast, some full-colour photographs of sheep masses. Guillem Camós, director of photography, captures this reality between high and low angles in which the architecture disappears to give way to a set design where the tourist is the king in a performance of a decadent society.
The hyper-consumerist society has turned culture into a simulacrum of itself and society has made a spectacle. Ours is the decision about whether we want to be travellers or tourists of life. This, for me, is the final reflection of the film, since it tells us about a way of doing and living. Existence understood as a journey of knowledge and introspection or kidnapped by neoliberal globalising consumerism. Ours is the choice.