Programme 1

What consequences might a decision taken in The Hague in 1872 have for a village in Aragon in 1937? What can be glimpsed nowadays, in the streets and squares of Barcelona, of the clashes that took place in these same locations in May 1937? “If we are still alive, perhaps it is because a butterfly beat its wings and that effect reverberates through the walls of time”, we are told by one of the narrators of this film. The film itself shows us that cinema, thanks to editing, can move beyond the confines of time and space and allow us to see and hear just that: the echoes of a butterfly’s wings through the walls of time.

Framed by the ancient story of Antigone, Organizar la indisciplina comes and goes, jumping smartly between London, Switzerland, Barcelona and Oliete. It also comes and goes between the time of arguments by Marx, Engels and Bakunin and the time of the Civil War in Spain and clashes between Communists and Anarchists. It is all filmed in the present. A present in which some buildings have disappeared, and others still stand, a present made of tourists, soap bubbles, old men and women who remember, bullet marks in the stone, monuments, plaques and cemeteries. A present around which words echo that evoke former times. A present in which the film allows us to glimpse the echo of the steps that ran through these streets long ago.

“Even if an action was not going to be successful, its account should be”, we are also told by one of the voices off-screen. This film bears witness to an action that was not successful, an action that trusted in the search and mistrusted power, the short summer of anarchy, but it also teaches us about time, about times and places coexisting, about the past existing in our present and perhaps our present existing in our future, and also in a future that will not be ours.

Pablo García Canga