Spanish Cinema

Rob Stone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317874997
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

From the surrealist films of Luis Buñuel to the colourful melodramas of Pedro Almodóvar, Spain has produced a wealth of exciting and distinctive film-makers who have consistently provided a condoning or dissenting eye on Spanish history and culture.

For modern cinema-goers, it has often been the sexually-charged and colourful nature of many contemporary Spanish films, which has made them popular world-wide and led directors and stars such as Almodóvar, Banderas and Penélope Cruz to be welcomed by Hollywood.

Using original interview material with Spanish Cinema luminaries such as Carlos Saura, Julio Medem, Imanol Uribe and Elías Querejeta, Rob Stone charts a history of Spanish Cinema throughout the turbulent Francoist years and beyond. The book aims to provide a broad introduction to Spanish Cinema, the nine chapters divided into four types:

• 
  
  

• chapters on Spanish Cinema during the Dictatorship and following the transition to democracy survey current debate and opinion while tracing the development of themes and film movements throughout those periods.
• chapters on early Spanish cinema and Basque cinema present vital and fascinating aspects of Spanish cinema that have previously been ignored
• chapters on childhood in Spanish cinema, and sex and the new star system offer new pathways into the study of Spanish cinema
• chapters on Carlos Saura, Elías Querejeta and Julio Medem offer specific case studies of film-makers who are emblematic of different periods in Spanish cinema and, indeed, Spanish history

As with other titles in the Inside Film series, the book is comprehensively illustrated with representative stills and has a thorough bibliography, index and list of resources.

Chapter One
By way of Elías Querejeta

An overview of Spanish cinema

If there is a common thread through Spanish cinema, and so too this book, its name is Elías Querejeta. Born October 1934 in Hernani, in the Basque province of Guipuzcoa, Querejeta is the producer and sometime screenwriter whose name links the emergence of film as a political medium in the Basque Country with the cinema of resistance under Franco. His is the first credit on the most important films of Carlos Saura, Víctor Erice, Jaime Chávarri, Mañuel Gutiérrez Aragón, Ricardo Franco, Montxo Armendáriz and many others. He was a player in the New Spanish Cinema of the 1960s, a mover behind key films of the transition and a shaker of the increasingly independent nature of contemporary Spanish cinema. Thus, in a warm office on a freezing December evening, Querejeta listened with mock irritation to the outline of this book and surmised that the intent of its author was to work out what the hell I’m doing in this world’.¹ His first response was to call the Civil Guard, who were ‘to come immediately and chain up this nuisance’. But then he put down the phone – ‘You don’t mind me making jokes do you?’ – and, wine glass in hand, cigarettes at the ready, began to tell his story.

’I have an idyllic vision of the Basque Country,’ he says, ‘because my childhood was very happy, always. Except for school, which was terrible. It was the only horror that I’ve ever lived in my life.’ An infant during the Spanish Civil War, Querejeta grew up in one of the Basque provinces that had been declared traitors to the crusade of General Franco by the decree of November 1937. The Spain he lived in was subject to the fascist dictatorship that had been established following the defeat of Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War (1936-9). This regime was sanctioned by the Catholic Church and Querejeta’s education was typical of the repressive pedagogy that marked a number of Spain’s greatest artists, writers and film-makers both before and after the Civil War. ‘Maybe I exaggerate a little,’ he reflects, ‘but in the middle of that Hernani that I knew, with my friends and the wild games we played, going to school split me right down the middle/Did it destroy him? ‘No. Because I resisted. I wouldn’t let them destroy me. But it’s the worst: a useless, repressive education.’ To combat this lack, Querejeta set about his own education at home, where his father, a nationalist, Carlist and Catholic, kept a splendid library and allowed his children to enter and read when they were very young. ‘I was just a kid,’ he recalls, ‘not too aware of the repression, but very aware of the political happenings. I could talk to my father about anything. We kids had permission to talk about anything, to read anything.’

Even so, free speech was to some extent curtailed because the various regional languages of Spain had been outlawed by a dictatorship determined to centralise all government and homogenise all culture. The Basque language of Euskera was declared illegal and Querejeta’s formal education was therefore in Castilian Spanish, though Euskera still marks his memories of family life. ‘We never spoke Euskera at home, but my mother sang marvellously in Euskera. There was also a problem because the name of our house was in Euskera – Villa Gurutze – meaning cross or crossroads. And one day the Civil Guard came to tell us to take down the name of the house. My father was president of the Guipuzcoan Council (diputación) and didn’t let it happen. It was the only home to keep its name in Euskera’.²

Circles within circles: Querejeta’s childhood home is a place full of games and books and songs in a beautiful, forbidden language, surrounded by a country in the grip of a fascist dictatorship where culture, education and even language were controlled. This home is a refuge and a memory that not even the worst years of oppression and deprivation brought on by the Francoist regime can spoil. It is a tangible ideal perhaps, one that energised Querejeta’s future as a producer and screenwriter. Inevitably as he grew up the experience of this timeless place was replaced by a sense of lost innocence and an awareness of rural hardship and injustice under the dictatorship, two themes that dominate in most of the films with which he is associated, including La caza (The Hunt, 1965), El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive, 1973), La prima Angélica (Cousin Angelica, 1973), Cría cuervos (Raise Ravens, 1975), Pascual Duarte (1975), A un dios desconocido (To an Unknown God, 1977), Dulces horas (Tender Hours, 1982), El sur (The South, 1983), Tasio (1984), 27 horas (27 Hours, 1986), Historias del Kronen (Stories from the Kronen, 1995), Familia (Family, 1996), Barrio (1998) and La espalda del mundo (The Back of the World, 2000).

An enthusiastic home-scholar, Querejeta devoured novels and books on chemistry, but found the Spain beyond his front door a disappointment, the militarist regime having conspired with the Catholic Church to forestall any evolution in the country’s industry and educational system that had been pending since the end of the nineteenth century. Back then, the filmshow had arrived in Spain offering portals to progress in other countries and glimpses of better lives; but such incentives to social disquiet had been quickly suppressed by Church-backed censorship, while fledgling film companies suffered their share of the harsh indifference that successive governments showed to most manufacturing industries. Pre-Civil War, Spanish cinema had trundled along in fits and starts and sometimes stopped altogether. There had been occasional sparks from the surrealist provocation of Luis Buñuel and the spirited artistry of such directors as Benito Pero jo and Florián Rey, whose all-singing, all-dancing wife Imperio Argentina was more than a star: she was a phenomenon. But the Civil War put paid to dissidence and the cinema was now little more than a medium for propaganda, whether it was the imported kind from Germany and Italy or the home-grown variety of folkloric musicals and military epics that celebrated a God-fearing nation of loyal servants to the intertwined precepts of Catholicism and fascism. For six-year old Querejeta, however, his first experience of the cinema came from an older, more wonderful time:

We were in the garden playing at jumping off the swing. We’d put lines on the ground to show who’d jumped the furthest. My father travelled a lot and one day he came home carrying something on his shoulder. He called us and we followed him up to the fourth floor, to our games room. And he put a sheet on the wall and connected something and there was Chaplin.

The gift was a Pathé baby projector that fascinated the young Querejeta and would, in time, distract or perhaps just divert his talent from a promising career with explosives. ‘I loved chemistry/he recalls, we did lots of experiments and explosions. My father had books on chemistry and one of them had lots of formulas for explosives. So we experimented and put explosives on the tram rails. One day we increased the amounts, the tram came, there was the most amazing explosion and the tram glowed blue. The driver ran after us screaming, “It was the Querejetas TV Querejeta claims it was his last experiment, while a growing passion for the cinema led him to an enduring friendship with Antxon Eceiza, with whom he started writing scripts and, aged just seventeen, co-founded the cine-club of San Sebastian. At a time when all cultural and most social gatherings in the Basque Country were regulated and often policed, the cine-clubs were film societies that allowed for the union of similar-minded folk with a common interest in film. As Querejeta describes: ‘We had lots of difficulties because the Francoist censor was atrocious. But the cine-clubs had ways of getting films that didn’t go through the censor, very carefully mind, and we organised meetings that were more political than filmic. It was an excuse/

Cine-clubs had served a similar function since before the Civil War, when Luis Buñuel had collaborated on the running of the Cine-club español in Madrid’s Residencia de Estudiantes that provided a forum for many notable artists and writers of his generation (including Federico Garcia Lorca, Rafael Alberti and Salvador Dali) to savour and debate the advances and aesthetics of the developing art form. Films chosen by Buñuel and shipped to Madrid from Paris had inspired many of the Spanish avant-garde into appropriating the cinematic aesthetic for their poetry, painting and plays. Surrealism, for example, so naked and proud in Buñuel and Dali’s Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929) prompted writers and artists to experiment with philosophy and form in a way that would take them away from inscribed Spanish values towards more instinctive ideas of identity that were provocative and unavoidably profane. Similarly, the reclaimed tradition of the film society created a breeding ground for political dissidence in the Basque Country at a time when unions and most universities were banned, though the organisers, who aspired to a partisan selection of films (Soviet or Weimar films, for example), were not always commensurate with the political leanings of their members. ‘Three years later we thought it was too right wing,’ says Querejeta of the San Sebastian film society, ‘so we formed another – el cine-club Cantábrico – which we hoped was more left wing.’ Querejeta was smitten with the films of Carl Theodor Dreyer, whose Ordet (The Word, 1954), a story of a member of the Danish resistance who is murdered by the Nazis that becomes a meditation on life and faith, possesses many of the qualities that are evident in the films produced and written by Querejeta: a thematic contrast of serenity with brutality, and an aesthetic fusion of austerity and precision. ‘Dreyer,’ says Querejeta, ‘showed us how to contemplate reality.’

This enthusiasm for the cinema caused Querejeta to vacillate about the question of a career. Universities in the traitorous provinces of Spain had been closed down and there was little option for those young Basques who wished to remain in the Basque Country to study anything but practical sciences. Querejeta was close to leaving Spain altogether to study in Paris or London, but for family reasons he stayed in San Sebastian and went to university where he resumed his passion for chemistry. He also played for Real Sociedad, the local football team, and earned himself the abiding nickname mono-gol (mono-goal) for his single, fabulous, politically portentous placing of the ball in the back of Real Madrid’s net. ‘It’s true,’ he chuckles, ‘the whole stadium filled with white handkerchiefs.’ Nevertheless, his enthusiasm for football never turned to passion, while his university studies also came to nought. ‘I took my exams, but the professor said “Querejeta, you’re copying!” I stood up and said, “No, that’s not true.” He answered back, “You’re lying.” I said, “The only one who’s lying here is you.” And I was expelled/Subsequently he left the Basque Country for Madrid, following Antxon Eceiza who had enrolled in Madrid’s Official Film School (Escuela Oficial de Cine, EOC) in 1957. Querejeta was twenty-four and considered himself too old to study film, but he shared Eceiza’s notes and they resumed their collaboration on scripts.

The mid-1950s was an exciting time for film-makers. Led by the example and rhetoric of Juan Antonio Bardem, they had challenged the dominion of the state over independent film-makers and the censor’s final word on their alternative views on Spain. Bardem had been one of the first to enrol in the film school that was established in 1947 as part of the Francoist regime’s response to economic and political pressure from abroad to soften its fascism and invest in its own culture and industry. Working with Berlanga and UNINCI, Bardem had spearheaded an attempt to inject a conscience and relevance into Spanish cinema by imitating the aesthetic of the Italian neo-realist movement in films that dealt with ordinary people and pressing, social themes. Esa pareja feliz (That Happy Couple, 1951) and Bienvenido Mister Marshall (Welcome Mister Marshall, 1952) were comedies that poked fun at the pretentions of a society that was, in truth, threadbare and repressive, while celebrating the values of solidarity and class consciousness which had been largely eradicated by the regime. In 1955 Bardem had actually said so in the Salamanca Congress that was organised by the film society of the University of Salamanca. A member of the illegal and clandestine Communist Party, he had followed up a speech in which he attacked the condition of Spanish cinema with a screening of his Muerte de un ciclista (Death of a Cyclist, 1955), an example of cinema with a social conscience and a pointedly politicised aesthetic.

’UNINCI was a progressive production company,’ avers Querejeta, ‘with a lot of connections with the Communist Party, and when I arrived in Madrid it was my first contact.’ So was it films or politics first?

Films first. I’ve never made political cinema. Quite another thing is that there have been political considerations about the films that I’ve produced. It’s a label that I don’t like and it’s certainly not my intention. To reduce films, novels or books to this is very inconvenient. It’s limiting.

Nevertheless, Querejeta’s reputation as a political film-maker was immediate and has endured, largely thanks to his long history of battles with Franco’s board of film censors that began with the very first short films he wrote and directed in collaboration with Eceiza and Laponia Films, a production company whose major shareholders were all friends and members of the Real Sociedad football team. A través de San Sebastian (By Way of San Sebastian, 1960) was a philosophical montage that Cahiers du cinema compared to Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), but ‘because it was so strange [the censor] left it alone,’ remembers Querejeta. Not so A través del fútbol (By Way of Football, 1961), an 11-minute feature that suffered the excision of a whole four minutes.

A través del fútbol was an impressionist account of Spanish history through the metaphor of football. It included one shot of a goalkeeper lying in the mud like a downed soldier that was accompanied by the voiceover: In the year 1936 the typical national competitions were suspended for a period of three years.’ This obscure reference to the Spanish Civil War was also accompanied by music from a popular song of the Republican and Communist armies: ‘If you want to write to me/you know where you can reach me / On the front line of Gandesa / in the first line of fire’.³

’The censor understood it,’ recalls Querejeta with begrudging admiration, ‘and destroyed it.’ These were the years following the scandal of Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana (1961) and it was the first and most important lesson for Querejeta, that to evade the censor he would have to develop techniques of deceit and subterfuge which would be reflected in the complex, metaphorical nature of many of the films he produced with such collaborative directors as Carlos Saura and Víctor Erice. ‘I had a certain ability,’ he explains,

I always used usted [the for...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List Of Photographs
• Chapter One By way of Elías Querejeta An overview of Spanish cinema
• Chapter Two Leaving the church Early Spanish cinema
• Chapter Three Under Franco Spanish cinema during the dictatorship
• Chapter Four Another reality Carlos Saura
• Chapter Five Spirits and Secrets Four films about childhood
• Chapter Six Over Franco Spanish cinema in transition
• Chapter Seven An independent style Basque cinema and Imanol Uribe
• Chapter Eight Projections of desire Julio Medem
• Chapter Nine Seeing stars Banderas, Abril, Bardem, Cruz
• Further Reading
• Bibliography
• Index