Achero Manas’ 2003 film "Noviembre" is a philosophical rebellion against the essence of art.
The film, which reveals the contradictions of aesthetics, ideology and social structures through the main character Alfredo, opposes the sterile and isolated structure of the bourgeois understanding of art. Therefore, Alfredo and his friends defend an art practice that sprouts, breathes and often rebels directly among the people. When Alfredo’s inner movement is considered in the context of ‘Stendhal Syndrome’, it reveals that art is not merely an aesthetic pleasure, but a force that paralyzes consciousness, erodes the boundaries of emotions and directly attacks the existence of the individual. By revealing the philosophical, psychological and sociological layers of "Noviembre," we will deeply analyze Alfredo’s tragic journey, the ironic mockery art directs at bourgeois shackles and art’s endless conflict with authority.
“Theater is drowning in walls, I want to take it to the streets!”
The film opens with Alfredo's conservatory scene. He is a young man trapped in the traditional understanding of theater, lost in the shadow of set rules and formulas. The psychological conflict here can be read through Freud's concepts of Id, Ego and Superego. The conservatory is the symbol of the superego. It represents the rules set by society, aesthetic boundaries and the mission assigned to art.
Alfredo, on the other hand, is a pure "Id." He is instinctive, unplanned, improvisational and full of rebellion. He does not want to be controlled, he wants to perform art as he feels. His teacher is the "Ego." He wants to balance Alfredo, include him in the system and tell him that art must fit into certain patterns.
However, Alfredo does not accept the pressure of the superego. He leaves the conservatory because he does not want to perform art as determined by the authorities. The philosophical basis here is based on Jean-Paul Sartre's existential philosophy. Alfredo rejects the role assigned to him by society and decides to recreate his own existence. But as Sartre said, “Freedom is a heavy burden for man.” Alfredo does not yet know the price of this freedom as he steps into it.
“There is no stage, no curtain, no decor, only the street.”
Alfredo has an understanding of art that pushes the boundaries of traditional theater. He is a revolutionary who aims to move theater from being a commodity that appeals to bourgeois taste in the dim light of large halls to sidewalks, squares, and subway stations. He believes in the fact that theater should be freed from the sterilized spaces it is confined to and performed directly in front of the public.
In this context, Alfredo’s art parallels Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater: He takes the audience out of a passive position and builds a structure in which they are included in the narrative. However, unlike Brecht, Alfredo’s theater is completely uncontrolled. Alfredo’s narrative is not only molded with a spoilsport aesthetic, but also with a chaotic naturalness. Ironically, Alfredo’s understanding of art makes the bourgeoisie’s position against art even more apparent. While the bourgeoisie wants to shape art and turn it into an isolated spectacle, Alfredo destroys this and defends the spontaneity and freedom of art.
Wanting to save art from the grip of an academic authority, Alfredo rejects his conservatory education and takes art to the streets. However, this action reveals that the idealized freedom of art is also an illusion. Because the system allows art to exist only in designated areas and within certain limits. This leads Alfredo to rebel not only against the theater system but also against the determining codes of all existing social structures.
After leaving the conservatory, Alfredo and his team start street theater. In this scene, art is no longer a mere performance, but an embodied action. While the bourgeois abstracts art, Alfredo absorbs art into his body. Art is no longer a show, but physical existence itself. The audience is no longer passive. There are no spectators sitting in their chairs waiting for the lights to go out, as in theater. People suddenly find themselves in the middle of a performance, surprised, startled and sometimes scared.
Psychologically, this scene is a counterpoint to Stanley Milgram's experiment in obedience to authority. People are used to the art format determined by authority. However, Alfredo's theater shakes their comfort zone. Performances on the street disrupt people's instinctive perception of normality and force them to make a choice: Either they will accept art or they will oppose it.
Alfredo’s eyes light up in this scene. He hasn’t yet seen the system’s reaction fully. He believes that art can be liberated, that street theater can really exist. However, this is an illusion. Because art is seen as a threat as long as it is not controlled, and the system does not allow it.
During a street performance, the police come and try to stop Alfredo and his friends. Here, the battle between art and authority becomes visible.
Art is anarchic. Authority, on the other hand, wants to confine art within the system. The police are the representatives of the order. Taking art outside of designated areas is coded as dangerous. Alfredo is like Nietzsche’s Superman. For him, art is not the entertainment of the average person, but a means of awakening. However, bourgeois art wants to see art only as something that provides pleasure.
When viewed from a psychological perspective, this scene shows the conflict between the "impulsiveness" and "control" of art. In Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, art is sometimes a reflection of repressed desires. Alfredo’s theater is an explosion of repressed emotions, fears, anger and joy. However, society is disturbed by these impulsive explosions and wants to limit them.
Stendhal syndrome is a phenomenon that occurs when an individual experiences physical and spiritual reactions when art is intensely felt. Dizziness, heart palpitations, confusion and a deep sense of loss can occur. The heart loses its rhythm in the face of a work of art. The floodwaters inside a person destroy all the barriers in front of it, and the individual finds themselves in a truth beyond time and space. In a world where art has become a commercial commodity and lost its soul, Alfredo wants to bring back this spirituality. However, his understanding of art is not hung on a museum wall or in a sterile area supported by state subsidies. It is a reality that echoes in the stones of the streets, the silence of the parks and the noise of the crowds. His theater is a participatory revolution in which the audience ceases to be a mere spectator and becomes a subject itself, melting into art instead of consuming it.
At some point, Alfredo begins to experience art not only as an action but as a physical collapse. In this scene, Alfredo's eyes darken in the middle of a performance, his knees shake, and his breath is cut off. Art is no longer a pleasure, but something that physically collapses him. This is where Stendhal Syndrome comes into play. The intensity of art shakes Alfredo's consciousness. He becomes an individual who is not watching a work of art, but rather art itself. Can art lead a person to an existential collapse? The answer for Alfredo is yes. For him, art is not just a form of expression, but a form of existence. And the true nature of art is not something that gives pleasure, as the system would have us believe, but a destructive energy. Alfredo also begins to lose control. Here, the film makes an ironic reference to the romanticized bourgeois understanding of art. Because for the bourgeoisie, art is an elegant escape. However, for Alfredo, art is a battlefield.
Alfredo's Stendhal syndrome is an ironic rebellion directed at the bourgeois understanding of art, which is used to glorify art and turn it into an object of worship, beyond a mere individual sensitivity. The museumification of art means that works that once had a revolutionary spirit become mere nostalgic indicators. However, art should resonate in the moment it lives, its spirit should not harden over time and turn into a display object. For this very reason, Alfredo's theater is a cry against the bourgeoisie's temples of art. For him, art should grow not within walls, but within people. This is why he leaves the theater stage and goes out into the streets; because with the disappearance of the distance between the stage and the audience, art will return to its roots.
The bourgeoisie's understanding of art is shaped within a system where aesthetics is sterilized, content is transformed into an object of consumption and the viewer is reduced to a passive recipient. In this system, art becomes a showcase object, a status indicator, or a material for academic discussion. However, Alfredo and the street theater he represents are a resistance born against this very understanding. He treats art not only as a form of expression but as a matter of existence. His theater is not a show, but a rebellion. However, for this very reason, he is doomed to be swallowed by the system.
Alfredo carries a hope that art can still remain free and wild in a world that has become commercialized and lost its soul. However, his tragedy is that this hope ultimately confronts the fact that it is a utopia. Because the free existence of art on the streets is either internalized and neutralized by the system or marginalized and destroyed at some point. Alfredo’s idealism inevitably crashes into the rigid walls of the system and shatters. His tragedy becomes not only an individual loss but also a representation of art’s inevitable fate in the capitalist system.
Where does art begin and end?
On a theater stage, in the graffiti on a street wall, or simply in the soul of the eyes that see it?
Alfredo’s art seeks to awaken the spectator and offer him a new window into reality. He is more of a prophet than an actor, more of a victim than a revolutionary. Unfortunately, however, his tragedy intersects with the fact that the effort to free art will always end in defeat within the system.
The bourgeois understanding of art, under the pretext of protecting art, encloses it in a glass bowl, sterilizes it, sanctifies it and ultimately renders it ineffective. Although Alfredo's theater aims to break this bubble, it will eventually either be assimilated into the system or marginalized and forgotten. In this sense, "Noviembre" is a narrative that reveals the contradiction between the freedom of art and its inevitable limitations.
While Alfredo is a figure shaken by the magic of art in the Stendhal Syndrome, the mocking gaze he directs at the bourgeoisie’s understanding of art turns him into a tragic hero. He is not only an artist but also one of the last representatives of art in a world where it has lost its soul. And for this reason, his story is an elegy that resonates not just with an individual, but with the entire history of art.
Art is a truth that sometimes pierces through human existence like a bullet hitting the heart, sometimes like a trembling line whispered by a poet into the night. It is not just an aesthetic game, sometimes a revolution, sometimes a prayer and sometimes just a scream. Achero Manas’ "Noviembre" is exactly the embodiment of such a scream; a naive and wild rebellion covered in the dust of the streets, shouting at the top of its lungs, laughing mockingly at the bourgeoisie’s sanitized temples of art. And the most tragic figure in that rebellion: Alfredo.
Alfredo's story is the story of an effort dedicated to proving that art is not just an object to be exhibited, but a living and breathing entity. His theater is not an aesthetic show trapped between stages and walls, but a ritual that echoes in the streets that suddenly draws people in and becomes reality itself. However, this ritual, born as an ideal, will turn into a tragedy. Alfredo's understanding of art, like every great utopia that gets stuck between the gears of the system, will either be assimilated and domesticated or will disappear in the darkness of history.
And it is at this point that Alfredo falls into art; he becomes intoxicated with its vibrations, gets lost in art and perhaps wants to stay there forever. However, the real tragedy of an artist is not hidden in art itself, but in how art is understood by people.
This is the disease of a person whose knees tremble in front of a painting, who freezes with the words that get stuck in his throat while reading a poem, who solves all the meanings of existence on a theater stage and then loses them again. The fact that art has the power to affect people physiologically, turns it from being just an aesthetic experience to a mystical and metaphysical phenomenon.
Alfredo is caught in this syndrome not in a museum hall, not between the heavy red curtains of a theater building, but directly in the middle of life itself. He does not only feel art; he burns in art. Art takes over his being like the blood circulating in his veins. At this point, Alfredo's existence turns into a metaphysical power that carries art in his body, beyond an artist or a theater actor.
However, Alfredo’s tragedy begins here. As the individual enchanted by art confronts the fact that this enchantment cannot last forever, it also turns into a curse. Believing that art is the absolute truth inevitably turns it into a matter of life and death. While Alfredo tries to preserve the purity of art, he will lose himself in it and when he finally realizes where this path leads, he will reach a point of no return.
The bourgeois understanding of art kills the soul while sanctifying aesthetics. Galleries, theaters and concert halls have become sterile areas where art is imprisoned behind walls, isolated from society and can only be consumed by the elite. However, art should exist where blood flows, where people walk, breathe and rebel. This is exactly why Alfredo takes his theater to the streets; because he believes that for art to truly live, it must be in the midst of life, in the midst of chaos.
For bourgeois aesthetics, art is a spectacle. It can be bought, discussed and subject to academic analysis, but it can never be truly lived. However, Alfredo argues that art is not a spectacle, but an experience. His theater is a kind of ritual in which the audience ceases to be a mere observer and the boundaries between the stage and reality disappear. For this reason, the bourgeois world does not and cannot understand Alfredo. His theater will neither win awards nor receive praise from critics. He will either be forgotten or destroyed because he refuses to take part in the system.
Art is a threat to the system as long as it is free. And like every threat, it will either be softened and rendered harmless or eliminated altogether. In trying to free art, Alfredo inevitably becomes its victim. He represents an ideal that questions whether art can live within the system. But this question always yields a bitter answer: No, art cannot be part of the system as long as it is free.
In the end, Alfredo’s theater will either become a commodity or be forgotten. His voice echoing in the streets will eventually disappear, like the silence left after a storm. The bourgeois art world will not make room for Alfredo’s theater, because his theater is a madness that questions the order and challenges the status quo. And madness can never find a safe space.
This is the common fate of art and revolution: Either it melts into the system and becomes unrecognizable, or it fades away as a myth. Alfredo’s story is not just an individual tragedy, but a reflection of a universal dilemma that every artist who tries to position art within the system faces.
Alfredo’s voice is a resounding cry for all revolutionary artists who are on the verge of disappearing, an ironic slap to the bourgeoisie’s understanding of art. And no matter how powerful this slap is, it will hang in the air at some point. Because the world is always too orderly, too rigid, too cruel for artists like Alfredo.
“Art must be free because man himself must be free. Art is a weapon that contains the future,” Alfredo says.
