Segundo Intento begins with the generation of life: a cell’s mitosis, accompanied by sounds of machinery at work. The succession of images (some of them very recent) in this piece compose a clear declaration against the death penalty.
Segundo Intento collects together the author’s media related memories of deaths caused by state power. Various types of executions are presented (a man hung in the recent past, a man guillotined in the not-too-distant past, a shooting execution, an electric chair, and common graves). Around these events Bajo Ibáñez inserts images of outer space, science, boxing, and a cemetery - all are images that demonstrate the careful surveillance which the eye of the media big brother subjects us all to. At the cemetery, a wish of “there’s still time left” leads to the end of the video: an extreme-close-up shot of the face of a newborn captured in home video. The infant wakes up, turns and looks into the camera: as long as there’s life, there’s hope.
Bajo Ibáñez has assembled Segundo Intento with a certain inner fragmentation, each microclip featuring very specific sounds that bring the different images together. The editing thus exhibits the dynamism of a brief advertising piece. The value of each of the executions is determined by the media images that enclose it between fades-to-black, providing the viewer with a constant flux of information. It is as if the spectator was channel surfing in order to avoid the feeling of guilt.
In Segundo Intento Bajo Ibáñez continues his research into the reality of mass media images, which in his previous work, Largo invierno, he covered in silence. This is his second attempt at dealing in video with specific themes that concern him, such as the mass media’s mediatisation of truth. In this second attempt, his critique is more precise: he sets two elemental concepts against each other, life and death, and, at the same time, he subtly contrasts mass media images with more intimate domestic images, close and vital images that save the medium of video with a new promise.
