“Cycles of Life: El cielo gira and Spanish Autobiographical Documentary”

A wide shot of a landscape with a hill and a solitary tree at the top. We hear the filmmaker’s voice: “This is the place that you see from the house where I was born, and therefore, the first thing I saw in the world.” This key moment, close to the beginning of El cielo gira (The Sky Turns), seems to suggest a standard autobiographical film about the life of the filmmaker. Instead, we find a portrait of a small Castilian village on the verge of disappearing, composed of long, contemplative shots of the austere landscape and the old villagers who inhabit it. It may come as a surprise, then, to realise that we are confronted with a landmark in Spanish autobiographical filmmaking; a sensitive portrait of a village filtered through the gaze of Mercedes Alvarez, never visible onscreen though present through her calm voice over commentary. This subtle approach to personal filmmaking somehow speaks of the uneasiness of some Spanish documentary filmmakers about turning their cameras on their own lives. The case of the film Retrato [Portrait, 2004], with Carlos Ruiz refusing to consider the portrait of his parents autobiographical, seems to underline that idea: “In fact, autobiography is just a contextual level in which one can discuss many things – time, memory, past and present, being man and woman – and mainly the dichotomy of the son’s point of view – myself, in this case – because it is the point of view of the child and the grown-up.” i