![]() ![]() As we approach the closing scenes, an owl, the all-seeing bird of the night in the pic’s only concession to the invented, flaps towards the camera. Later we are treated to full-screen images of microbes under microscopes in sewage water, but these don’t seem quite to fit so well into the film’s patterning, feeling like a step too far in pursuit of the hidden. Through these scenes we are in the territory not of science fiction, but of horror, a Lynchian nightmare. There are rats, cockroaches and a wild cat. We focus in on sleepy human faces, traveling on the underground train.Īn animal is located in an area where there shouldn’t be one its eyes shine out at us, lit by infrared. Sometimes there are human figures, subterranean astronaut workers slowly advancing like shadowy characters in the sci-fi movies that Moreno seems continually to be referencing. Alayo?n, carried out in adverse conditions, and sometimes intercut with surveillance camera footage, brings a full range of techniques - tracking shots along train tracks, close-ups of dripping walls of pitted brick, vertical shots straining to see the sky. At times, the aim seems not to be to reveal what is hidden in the darkness, but rather the textures of darkness itself. But these locations are then daringly and sometimes disturbingly transformed into dreamlike images and sounds that are not so much filmic as immersive, experiential. ![]() The first, literal journey is to the ground beneath Madrid, to its train tunnels, its sewers, its eerie chambers, its underground rivers and man-made caverns, to the technology whose effects we feel up here in the unhidden city: There is much focus on the underground architecture. Hidden City is the opposite, finding unexpected activity where we would generally not expect to find it. At the most basic level, it was a documentary about absence where there should be presence. Moreno’s last film, The Building, was a political metaphor that recorded the dismantling of the Edificio Espana, a symbol of Francoism.
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