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THE GREAT BEAR MINUS TWO The enigmas of madness declares themselves one more time as a never ending source of inspiration. Whoever approach to this ambiguities and try to enunciate them, is been thrown to a slippery surface. From this mess gets away gracefully, in his first feature film, David Reznak (co-founder of the independent cinema La Enana Marrón), after a year devoted to register the day by day of the Leganés’ Psychiatric Hospital (Madrid). The outcome, this Great Bear Minus Two, narrated from the non-fiction, builds itself in interactive mode (according to Bill Nichols) to give priority to words. The director involves, takes part and gives the word to his protagonist who talk to the camera between them, or simply are quiet, in order to offer a choral mosaic of feelings and experiences. The verb flows, it becomes disjointed, mad, illogical, even invents itself to reveal, suddenly, brilliantly clear. “Madness has a primitive power of revelation: revelation that what is dreamy is to be real, that illusion has no limits” asserts an introductive text to the film. And the difficulty of the speech becomes sign and symptom of the difference, as well as relates the patient to “the other” and the space outside him. The proposal, in the incorporation of the documentary maker himself (with no authority and always behind the camera), brings to the memory the good choices of “Monos como Becky” (J.Jordá y N. Villazán, 1999). Can even reminds, because of its intense and penetrating capacity of observation, of the huge San Clemente (1980) and Urgencias (1987) de R. Depardon. Beyond the relationship, the film proves its reflexive vocation as combines, at times, with a symbolic intention. Like this alternates more denotative sequences: the waves of a lumpy sea, the fascinating flow of people in the subway at rush hour or the sky being cross-cut by a plane, that plays with abstraction and suggest, maybe, a relativization of these subtle borders that seems to separate the institutionalized madness (hospital) from the daily one. Outside allegories (free from interpretation) Reznak film adhesion to reality shows the impossible univocity of his images, and this way the tape offers itself open and wide.
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