Out (2012)

Thanks to academic ice-breakers such a Foucault, Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, the interest in 1970s anti-psychiatric theory and practice has experienced a renaissance, which in 'Out' is manifested in a formally rigorous 'case study', focusing on a sanatorium in Conxo, Spain. A synthesis of documents - newspaper cuttings, slides, Super 8 footage and new interviews - retell the story of madness as a prism for society's 'irrational' repressions in a basic form: text, image, speech. An employee compares the time before and after the reforms of the 1970s, and a former patient verbalises the same experiences as seen from within, in readings of his underground journal 'Black Meat'. Newspaper cuttings at the same time talk about a 'disaster' at Conxo, while footage from a festival held on the premises bears witness to a radical (and romanticizing?) attempt to break down the structural differences between 'normal' and 'deviant' - nota bene at a time when Franco still dictated both. But the directing duo Pablo Cayuela and Xan Gómez Viñas at the same time allow their own work to creak in the joints, with an expressive xylophone / percussion score seemingly warning against the ever-present mistake: that the privileged historical distance enables us to once and for all appraise the actions and decisions of the past.