Quiet, the first feature film by Miguel Faus, is a very thoughtful miniature with a polite, but harmful, criticism of a certain very modern and very bloodsucking Catalan bourgeoisie. Deliberately avoiding fuss, Faus relies on the story of an August at the beach house to show the daily ordeal of the maid (Paula Grimaldo), without a contract or vacation, who ruminates over small revenges until she is punished.
QuietIn addition, it has been raised without a penny of public money. Authentic independent cinema. “Quiet can boast of having been done radically outside the system,” says Faus. “Those who usually have the power to decide what cinema is made and what is not made… they rejected her. And we look for financing in another territory, the internet. But I prefer to highlight the success of the entrepreneurial initiative than to brag about not having received public money, because I am totally in favor of film subsidies as a concept. Faus resorted to an unprecedented method of financing a film in Europe. A crossover between cinema and the web3. NFTs are digital pieces – “robust, unalterable, yours” – that thanks to blockchain technology can only have one recognized owner. And Faus made the 2020 short film on which it is based Quiet to sell each frame as a unique digital piece. In this way he raised 750,000 euros in cryptocurrency. The finale came at the Sundance festival. Filmmaker Steven Soderbergh and the Decentralized Pictures platform awarded him the Andrews/Bernard Award, which supports $100,000 in funding projects they consider notable. That was in 2022. It must have been an experience to your liking because Faus has returned to NFTs to celebrate the premiere of the film and at very modest prices. Telefónica’s NFT marketplace offers the possibility of purchasing access to 16 videos from the making-of of the movie. A film, by the way, that is not foreign to this world either. The owner of the house (Ariadna Gil) runs a digital art gallery and, in another plot derivative, there is a vigilante robbery with cryptocurrencies. “The idea of digital ownership is valuable. The alternative is an internet governed by monopolistic corporations that are worth fighting against.”
The filmography of Faus, before Quietare two short films shot at the London Film School between 2018 and 2020. They are The Death of Don Quixote and the graduation work, Quiet, obvious germ of his first feature film. When he started making movies he stopped writing about movies. She did it in JotDown and cinema looks. His texts are interviews, film analysis, reflections on cinematographic art where he parcels out and breaks down the sequences. “I never wanted to be critical. I took it as a formative stage. He learned by vampirizing the tools of the creators with whom he spoke. They were selfish interviews, he did them like that because he wanted to learn.” In the talk with Olivier Assayas about Personal shopper, Faus’s detailed comments on the narrative strategies provoke everything from grateful responses – “it’s a good question, I had never thought of this like that, “Yes, what an illusion that someone would notice” – to severe disagreements – “No, I don’t see this.” So”-. He explains to Pawel Pawlikowski how many planes there are in cold war (251) –”Did you count them? It’s crazy.” And he does something similar with Jaime Rosales and petra: “it has 88 scenes and 118 shots.”
The end of The Death…, a representation of death that superimposes the death of the actor, supposes, explains Faus, the moral death of the director who puts his art above the life of the actor. “He must realize the price he has made him pay for this ending.” Quiet, both the short and the feature film, begin with the same scene: the maid cleaning a window whose glass occupies the entire screen. It seemed to me that with this screen wash Faus was cleaning the cinema of everything that was left over. There was no such intention, replies Faus, who, however, respects what each viewer constructs while watching a film. In the feature film, the maid Quiet It saves him a gang rape that seems imminent. It is an example of the elegance of the film. “It is easy to represent cruelty and reach the public. The protagonist is already a victim so that I can add, for sensationalism, more victimization.”
In a 2014 article, Faus wrote that when a filmmaker only thinks about resolving a scene or shot according to the standards of standard cinema… “disaster is assured.” And he continued: “supposed artists become mere stenographers and supposed works of art become simple photocopies.” Listening to it now… smile. “He was very young and optimistic. Most of us don’t invent anything very new. There are new things to do and there are heroes in the trenches of the avant-garde there, opening paths for all of us, but I cannot honestly, and being honest with myself and with you, take credit for that. Those who create new forms have a lot of merit, but this does not detract from what other filmmakers do: we tell stories a little differently, sometimes new ones, updating social stories, but at a formal level we return to what already exists. I am aware of what tradition frames me. And if you can’t escape it, embrace it. What happens is that I try to make it my own and make my cinema new because it is very mine. Only I can have made this film because it is the personal rehash of Miguel Faus. In the end, it turns out that everything is quote and metatext.” What happens is that Faus’s cinematic wisdom allows him to keep appointments that do not perish. “In Quiet there are plans stolen from Rome by Cuarón, by Buñuel, winks to Parasites…”. And a very Fausian poetics, uniquely his.
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