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An/Other Spanish Cinema: Film in Catalunya,
1906–2006 will run January 27 through February
14 at the Walter Reade Theater
Catalunya’s cultural dynamism
and artistic legacy is in large part associated
with its cosmopolitan image. The artistic heritage
of Picasso, Miró, and Dalí, Gaudi’s
modernist architecture, and Barcelona’s design
tradition are only the most prominent reference
points. Yet Catalan cinema hasn’t achieved
strong recognition, whether it be on its home turf,
within the rest of Spain, or internationally. It
is confounded by its own characteristics: it’s
atomized, dispersed, and, for the most part, lacking
coherent movements and waves through which its filmmakers
might establish some kind of a dialogue, not to
mention a consolidated industrial model. It also
suffers from an identity crisis typified by the
fact that while the Catalan language is the clearest
manifestation of the region’s cultural difference,
its cinema is, paradoxically, mostly in Spanish.
The reasons for this are as much political—rooted
in the repression of General Franco’s dictatorship—as
they are cultural. And yet, having embraced numerous
influxes of migrants and therefore regarding bilingual
reality as a given, Catalan society is an open one.
At the beginning of film history two aesthetic schools
developed in Catalunya: one, led by Fructuós
Gelabert, was broadly realistic; the other, originating
in the work of Segundo de Chomón, was notably
fantastic. Chomón, who was born in Aragón
and began working in Barcelona’s film industry
in 1902, is considered one of early cinema’s
great masters of optical effects. He was also the
most international Spanish filmmaker of this period,
working with the Pathé brothers in Paris
and with Itala Film in Turin, and contributing to
Abel Gance’s 1927 Napoléon.
Chomón got his start by hand-coloring Pathé’s
negatives, and quickly established himself as a
genius of film illusionism, in particular due to
his mastery of stop-motion animation. In his The
Electric Hotel (El hotel eléctrico,
08), a couple moves into a hotel in which all the
services and appliances move to the rhythm of a
fuse box with a mind of its own. More than just
a Spanish Méliès, Chomón was
an artist who grasped how film could make the evolutionary
leap from fairground attraction to narrative medium.
After the Civil War (1936–39), the Franco
regime eliminated all traces of Catalan identity
in the film world. Nevertheless, beginning in 1947,
a series of Catalunya-based movies were produced,
with the aim of drawing audiences away from Hollywood
imports. The most noteworthy of these was Llorenç
Llobet Grácia’s Life in Shadows
(Vida en sombras, 48). Despite its lack of
overt social critique, the film’s unabashed
and passionately cinephilic spirit was enough to
get it banned. The boldness of having characters
listening to Catalan on the radio, not to mention
the film’s political ambiguity (which could
be interpreted as opposition to the regime) counted
for more at the time than its interesting formal
and narrative discoveries, such as the mirror game
that it plays out with Hitchcock’s Rebecca.
Around the mid-Sixties, when the military regime
decided to embrace more liberal policies in order
to improve its international image, a group of young
filmmakers launched the Barcelona School. Its emergence
was in reaction to the New Spanish Cinema and its
perceived realist limitations. The Barcelona School
was shaped by ideas arriving from the rest of Europe—the
French Nouvelle Vague and newly emergent modernist
forms in advertising, design, fashion, and photography.
The guiding force of the movement’s avant-garde
spirit and formalist acumen was a trio of filmmakers:
Joaquim Jordà, Jacinto Esteva, and Carlos
Durán. The film that really inaugurated the
movement was Vicente Aranda’s Fata Morgana
(65), which broke from conventional narrative with
a collage of literary references—from Borges
to Alice in Wonderland to Hamlet.
It was soon followed by Dante Isn’t Simply
Harsh (Dante no es únicamente severo,
67), the movement’s manifesto, which was co-directed
by Jordà and Esteva. Dante deliberately lays
bare its own mechanics, deploys characters devoid
of psychology, and uses digression and fragmentation
as narrative models (including a quote from Pierrot
le fou). After a prologue in which we see the
crew preparing to shoot the film, we enter a space
in which dream and reality become one: certain surrealist
stock images (Buñuel and Dalí’s
slashed eye, for instance) are invoked, and the
preeminence of form over content is realized. On
the other hand, Durán’s Every Time
That… (Cada vez que…,
67) contradicts the school’s own proclamations.
Despite avoiding realistic principles, Durán’s
films, in general, are accurate portrayals of certain
social customs, such as Barcelona’s “party
salons,” frequented by bourgeois youth infatuated
with pop art, advertising, and the music video in
its embryonic form. The Barcelona School proved
to be ephemeral, coming to an end due to lack of
interest, as well as its own lack of structure and
means, infighting, and hostility from certain quarters
of popular criticism, who accused the directors
of inadequate political commitment and ideology.
In 1975, Franco’s death
and the subsequent arrival of democracy opened the
doors for the recovery of Catalan’s cultural
legacy, its cinema included. In 1981, in an effort
to strengthen its industrial base, an annual Catalan
Cinema Conference (the Conversas del Cine de Catalunya)
was launched, resulting in the creation of an institutional
model aimed at reflecting Catalan heritage and identity
through language, history, and literature. But the
resulting films had no impact beyond the region,
and so eventually the model failed. While certain
initiatives have survived—the dubbing of Spanish
or foreign films into Catalan, for instance—none
of them are directly related to production. Thus,
the ongoing debate about the Catalan language in
film has been subsumed by the alleged need to dub
Hollywood releases into Catalan.
In this context, several filmmakers
have chosen to work outside the institutional model.
Of these, Pere Portabella is probably the most experimental.
From his first forays into the vampire genre, Cuadecuc:
Vàmpir (70) and Umbracle (72),
to his essay on the confusion of artistic languages,
Pont de Varsòvia (89), Portabella
has always expressed a strong resistance to orthodox
forms. This is most pronounced in his collage films,
which, with their dreamlike resonances and political
symbols, possess a double perspective. As the critic
Domenech Font has pointed out, they are linguistically
self-conscious and prompt the spectator’s
participation in a “story without plot”
only sustained by the gaze. Agustí Villaronga
is another resistance-based filmmaker. His In
a Glass Cage (Tras el cristal, 85)
is both a morbid fable about the corruption of innocence
and an allegory about Nazi atrocities, as well as
an exemplary exercise in transgression. He repeated
this approach in The Sea (El mar, 00) and
The Child of the Moon (El niño de la
luna, 89), and took it into the nonfiction
realm with Aro Tolbukhin in the Mind of a Killer
(Aro Tolbukhin: En la mente del asesino,
02).
Any overview of Catalan cinema
would be incomplete without mention of Ventura Pons.
A prolific observer of the manners and milieux of
Barcelona life, he is the most internationally recognized
of the region’s filmmakers. From films dealing
with post-Franco social upheavals (like his 1978
documentary Ocaña, an Intermittent
Portrait, which explores class tensions, celebrations
of homosexuality, and newly regained freedoms) to
social comedies about the existential conflicts
and relationships of the bourgeoisie (Amic/Amat,
99) and the working class (Anita Takes a Chance,
01), Pons has always been a chronicler of the Catalan
capital’s social universe. In some respects
it is an imaginary universe with a theatrical and
literary accent, frequently inspired by the writings
of Quim Monzó, one of the most important
authors in modern Catalan literature, and two outstanding
contemporary Catalan playwrights, Josep María
Benet i Jornet and Sergi Belbel. What It’s
All About (94), for example, is structured
in chapters based on various Monzó short
stories.
It is important to note that
the most interesting work made in the last few years
has been within the experimental parameters of nonfiction
film. This approach is exemplified by the documentaries
of José Luis Guerín and Barcelona
School alumnus Joaquim Jordà, who was creatively
reborn with the magnificent Monkeys Like Becky
(Monos como Becky, 99). Here Jordà
provides a lucid discourse on the thin line between
sanity and insanity, creating a veritable hall of
mirrors based in representation and fictionalization:
he films the patients of a mental hospital rehearsing
a play about the assassination of Egas Monis, the
inventor of the lobotomy, and, having recently suffered
a cerebral hemorrhage, he includes himself as one
of the film’s subjects, exposing the physical
and mental damage incurred. Having shaken the very
foundations of the psychiatric system, Jordà
moved on to the judiciary in About Children
(De nens, 03). Through a methodical study
of a pedophilia trial in Barcelona, Jordà
reveals the weaknesses of the judicial process and
its submission to the power of the media. At the
same time, he offers a sharp portrait of popular
resistance to government-imposed urban renewal.
This stance aligns his film with Guerín’s
masterful En construcción (01),
which records the demolition of a building and the
construction of a new one over the course of two
years in Barcelona’s red-light district (Barrio
Chino), an area now known as Raval. Guerín
creates an ode to the identities buried by urban
reconstruction, observing the passage of time in
an essay film about the transformation of the present
and a nostalgia for the past—including the
past of film history, reflected in several genuinely
Hawksian characters and a direct quote from Land
of the Pharaohs. In previous films, Guerín
had toured the ghostliest corners of cinematic archaeology
with Shadow Train (Tren de sombras, 97)
and paid tribute to his masters: John Ford was honored
in the documentary Innisfree (90), about
the repercussions of shooting The Quiet Man
in the eponymous town; the legacies of Bresson,
Dreyer, and Victor Erice were evident in Berta’s
Motives (Los motivos de Berta, 85).
The work of these two nonfiction masters has found
a recipe for creative continuity within the Master’s
Program in documentary at the Universitat Pompeu
Fabra in Barcelona. Both Jordà and Guerín
are program instructors, and have developed their
recent films within its framework, while at the
same time finding promising successors among their
students. The most outstanding example to date is
Mercedes Álvarez, whose The Sky Turns
(El cielo gira, 04) is a crepuscular study
of the imminent extinction of her native town, Aldeaseñor.
Her film, a nostalgic evocation of remembrance,
portrays memory and the passage of time by fusing
documentary elements and fictive strategies. It
is a combination that embodies the greatest virtues
of contemporary Catalan cinema.
Manuel Yáñez
Murillo is a Barcelona-based film critic on the
editorial staff of Letras de Cine as well as a contributor
to other Spanish movie magazines.
© 2006 by Manuel Yáñez Murillo
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