The running of the bulls and the voice of Villarejo

The broadcast of the San Fermín running of the bulls on TVE is a prodigy, a Spanish television genre that deserves an Emmy nomination.

About twenty shots in just over two minutes (three and a bit, if things go on for a long time) full of skill, talent and narrative pulse, with the added success of the silence of the commentators, which underlines the nuances of the environment, with microphones that capture to the dust kicked up by the herd.

What a sense of drama, what artistry in staging.

It is so well done, that even the self-righteous hypocrisy with which the

wish at the beginning (and celebrate at the end) that the race is fast and clean is forgiven.

Few times the word and the image are so dissociated.

No one confesses that they miss those slow and dirty running of the bulls, when the bulls were in better shape than the lads and the foreigners returned to Australia by ambulance.

The confinement is considered as a sporting event.

The runners—those fibrous hunks, well asleep and cut by the same nutritionist—stretch and warm up like athletes in an Olympic event, and even the shepherds, when the reporters plug in their artichoke, express themselves like soccer coaches before a Madrid- Barca.

Never has such a visceral and violent rite been wrapped in so much asepsis.

An unedited confinement by the art of TVE would resemble a recording of Villarejo, which is the only place where old Spain still finds itself, with the crudeness of a

joke .

If Hemingway today were looking for the romantic cliché and the exotic effluvia of knives and bullfighters, he would not find them in the curve of Estafeta, but in the slow and dirty voice of that commissioner that not even the sound technicians of the San Fermín running of the bulls could clean or beautify.

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