In the Empty Balcony

Seven-year-old Gabriela carefully takes apart a watch—not in front of a balcony, but at a window where she makes use of the light from the courtyard. The music of Bach can be faintly heard. Peace reigns. Several close-ups align us with her as she sees—and shares with us—a man hiding in a recess of the building across the way. Everything is sparse, yet we hear her frightened breathing. From the rooftop, they search for him: two of them are Civil Guards. Gabriela pretends not to see him, believing that this way he won't be found, until a piercing scream breaks the silence and gives him away: the fugitive surrenders. The girl runs inside the house: “Mama! Listen! The war has come!” Thus begins what María Luisa Elío, in her book Tiempo de llorar [Time of Tears], called “the loss of paradise.”

In the Empty Balcony was filmed in 1961 and 1962 over the course of forty Sundays—days when no one had to work to make a living. With no professional actors, no one was paid. They were all friends, most of whom had arrived in Mexico as children, the sons and daughters of refugees from the defeat in the Spanish Civil War. Now adults, they reflect on exile and debate how to build a future while carrying that traumatic past.

The film gives intimate, precise, and precious images to Elío’s experience—the fragmented and incomprehensible memory of her childhood: the fear of bombings, the death of her father, the flight first to France and later to Mexico, and then a leap twenty years forward to the suffering of a young woman who cannot find her place and returns to the house with the absent balcony, seeking to understand how time both passes and remains frozen. These emotions are conveyed through a masterful balance of sound and silence, very limited camera movement, close-ups, inconsistencies between what is said and what is shown, and a lingering pace that draws us in completely.

In the Empty Balcony is the manifesto-film of the same group that published seven issues of the magazine Nuevo Cine [New Cinema] between April 1961 and August 1962, which discussed cinema from an avant-garde perspective. This experimental film is limited in technical resources but rich in emotion—those contained within the girl and those heightened in the woman. It evokes the experience of shock, common to a greater or lesser degree to that generation in exile, but it also reveals their creative spirit and cinematic sensitivity.

JT