Manel Muntaner selected specific fragments of George Orwell’s 1984 for the thematic structure of Especial 84. Orwell’s novel is hereby illustrated by a multitude of images taken out of the history of cinema, the artistic field and raw reality.

A voice-over leads us on the journey proposed by Orwell based on ideas of control, power, revolution, annihilation and the exercise of power. Writing (and culture) becomes one of the spaces in which to attempt to express the difficulty of the times imagined by Orwell. Emotions and sex are presented as a way of overcoming the kind of social control predicted by Orwell in his novel and which we can already discern today in our everyday realities.

Muntaner uses countless referents in order to lead us closer to Orwell’s text. Classic images from the history of cinema are combined with Ramon Caus’ paper sculptures, as well as with graphic material from Amnesty International’s campaigns. As we hear Muntaner himself reading Orwell’s commentary on torture, on screen we see images of the stories in the newspapers of the year 1984. Fiction and reality are indeed not so distant as we would like to think. Torture prevails and victims are always the same.

In Especial 84 the relationship between images and text are quite literal. This is a video piece characterised by a very fast rhythm and a very distinct tension, which can also be discerned in other works by Muntaner, such as Medio Tiempo or Full Blanc.