The screen of fantasy: ethics of witnessing death in Afternoons of Solitude

This essay examines Albert Serra's Afternoons of Solitude (2024) through a critical framework informed by André Bazin's realist ethics, Serge Daney's reflections on cinematic risk, and Vivian Sobchack's phenomenology of the ethical gaze. Grounded in Bazin's conception of the screen as a sacred threshold and Daney's critique of its sacrificial function, the analysis explores how Serra's formal austerity-characterized by long takes, distant framings, and durational stillness-at once evokes Bazinian ideals of temporal integrity and undercuts the ethical vulnerability they imply. The camera's unflinching gaze, rather than signaling moral courage, registers as aesthetic detachment. Drawing on Michel Leiris's evolving disillusionment with bullfighting as a form of ‘violent spectacle,’ and engaging the metaphysical provocations of Georges Bataille and Giorgio Agamben, I argue that Serra's cinema enacts a refusal of rupture. By rendering death as a motif rather than a singular event, his film transforms the spectacle of killing into an aesthetic loop, insulating both filmmaker and viewer from consequence. In contrast to the animal's unmediated encounter with the ‘open’ and the ritual's demand for corporeal risk, cinema here becomes a fraught intermediary-capable of bearing witness only when it reckons with its own limits as medium and moral frame.