Informe general II: El nuevo rapto de Europa and the contradictions of a non-binary aesthetic

Abstract

The review on Pere Portabella’s Informe general II: el nuevo rapto de Europa (2015), a film that considers the shift inaugurated by the 15-M movement toward a new politics, examines the documentary’s visual language to ask whether it achieves what we understand its objective to be: to generate an aesthetics that does not distinguish the sphere of “social movements” from the “institutional” sphere, the time of the street from the time of the institution. The review traces the visual mechanisms that advance such an aesthetic to propose that Portabella, at times, reinstates the binary he sought to undo.