Pride In Richard Sennett's El Poasado

The durational is not exactly the marker of El pasado es un animal grotesco. Its two hours duration does not deserve, certainly, to be identified in a special manner. But the fact that the play represents the story of four young men over ten years, through alternating scenes on a carousel that continues to turn, and the principal fact that those stories are narrated in the voice-overs that are being performed at a time and in an uninterrupted manner, by each of the four actors in the piece, have created the full effect of a condensed universe, so continuous and overflowing. Moreover, there are practically no breaks in the work of these extraordinary four actors, representing both the protagonists and secondary characters as the storytellers
Having said that, should we relate this accomplishment with the sense of pride with which, in Richard Sennett’s approach, the craftsman exhibits the slowness of time invested in their work and eludes various technical barriers, and with these acquires the reward of having the ability and commitment that leads to a good result? Because it would not be entirely wrong to say, at least concerning Historias extraordinarias, that in principle the film seems to possess all of the broad definition of craftsmanship that, according to Sennett, challenges the institutions of the flexible capitalism and its transaction mode in the short term: the commitment of doing something good for the simple fact of doing it good, the emphasis on the objectification of the work, and especially, that time and obsession to which the new capitalism is so afraid of, to which Paul Valéry, when he said that "modern man no longer work at what cannot be abbreviated", diagnoses this early at the beginning of the century as something in the process of disappearance. And the fact is that not only clear that the movie contains work, a lot of work and the work of so many, as a form of cooperation, but that its realization calls to the foreground –at a time when the mastery of the craft of writing worth a little– the relationship between the technique and its result, be it classic, modernist, autonomous, or whatever you want to call
Or does the focus of Historias extraordinarias is not –more than the challenge of its duration (not that it is that long), but also the demonstration that you can still tell good stories– on how well, on such an extraordinarily well, it might be told? For its part, the virtuosity of technical precision with which the actors of El pasado es un animal grotesco embody almost without any breaks in their various roles in the play, and in turn, the effectiveness and the perfect adjustment of the way the story shift from one to the other, as well as the solid writing in each of the texts –which is one of the reasons for the aesthetic enjoyment of this spectator– are the effects of a well-made production. However, at the same time it is obvious that none of that illustrated pragmatism, postulated as alternative ethics for the design of collective strategies in the era of the new capitalism, may account for some projects whose works, enormous in scale, posited questions concerning “the well-made” production, the strategy of the obsession and the craftsmanship of time, within the larger framework of the inquiry of the artistic