The recent release of the book “Escenas de cine: guión y análisis”, coordinated by Pedro Sangro Colón and Miguel Ángel Huerta Floriano, includes the collaboration of doctor Xavier Pérez with a text about the close relationship that has been maintained between two essential dramaturgic elements such as suspense and anagnorisis. It is a thorough essay about the devices that anagnorisis play in various scenes in the history of cinema and, in that sense, the focus is in agreement with the main premise of the book: to address a detailed study of the means that underpin the well-functioning of scenes, isolating the subtle design that achieves to swing the tensions over the very fibre of a dramatic moment.

So the book “Escenas de cine: guión y análisis” is devoted to the will to make a tracing of the relief of a subjacent “micro-dramaturgy”, diving into the narrative rigours that assure the efficacy of suspense, spacial structuring, the touch of genius, the visual corollary or the incipient climax of the sequences. In particular, Xavier Pérez analysis enquires into the tension that suspense manages to touch and gauge, thanks to the historical alliance with other elements such as anagnorisis and surprise. That sort of coalescence is, in fact, the matter the author tries to settle. Sometimes suspense becomes the muscle of a temporal dilation, other times its function will be that of a trigger to the past, or either on the contrary, a push towards a future expectation. And neither are there missing moments in which, simply put, we shrink at the impact of an unexpected find and, in such cases, suspense does nothing but embroider the wrapping of the surprise… Be it as it may, suspense branches as a sort of vegetal metaphor. It works like sowing alchemy —its fruit can fall upon us as the revelatory apple of Eureka or, in the worst of cases, be resolved with the treacherous aftertaste of rotten fruit. The proposed itinerary by Xavier Pérez, from Luces de la ciudad to Tú y yo or Monster Ball o Seven, produces sufficient diversity as to reach an idea of the extent to which the masquerade of suspense turns out irreducible to a closed formula. It is precisely that incapacity to fully recognize a single pattern which provides the apparatus of suspense with its major and most sharp power —i.e., to suspend our attention in desire.