La gran desilusión
2013 · 10m · España
Directed by Pedro González Kühn
Genres: drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A cinema projectionist describes his work and reflects on the closure of neighbourhood cinemas and what losing them would mean for his life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a dirge dressed as cinema studies—the premise wants to be provocative (dying theatres! nostalgia!) but settles for elegy. Give me a film that actually *argues* something subversive about projection and loss, not just sighs wistfully at it.
González Kühn positions the projectionist's meditation within a lineage of essay films that treat labour and obsolescence as formal subjects—the restraint here, the refusal to dramatize grief, sits in real conversation with Vigo and the structuralists who followed.
The decision to let the projectionist's voice carry the film without cutting away to nostalgic images of the theatre itself is what makes this work—it trusts the listener's imagination to conjure what's being lost, and that economy of restraint transforms a small 10-minute piece into something that lands.