Basque Cinema

A Cultural and Political History

Rob Stone, Maria Pilar Rodriguez

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857729682
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire sociale

Cinema has always been a vital medium for articulating the Basque region's unique identity and politics. The first definitive study of Basque cinema, this book provides a systematic analysis of the key Basque films, directors and cinematic institutions. Its narrative moves from the romanticised Basque Country travelogues of Pathe to the coded oppositional aesthetics of Franco-era films; from the post-Franco 'new wave' supported by regional government funding to the boom in auteurist cinema during the 1980s and 1990s. It also charts the contemporary impact of the film institute Basque Filmoteca and television channel Euskal Telebista in producing and disseminating Basque-language films. Based on archival research, close readings of films and in-depth interviews with influential figures in the Basque film scene, this book is essential reading for world film scholars and cultural historians.

1
Basque Cinema: Citizenship and Sentiment

No single viewpoint is valid on Basque cinema. There are too many different angles on what being Basque means, too many alternative takes on its history, too many jump cuts into its narrative of nationhood and too many competing versions of Basque identity playing in local, regional, national and transnational contexts. In sum, the plethora of features, documentaries, animated films, experimental shorts, festivals, activities and online ephemera makes the case for the study of a national cinema that is intact and at the same time fragmenting. Even the academic usefulness of objectively grouping together films and filmmakers must compete against definitions of Basque identity that might be plotted on a sliding scale of exclusionist and inclusionist criteria, nationalist strategies, individual and collective affiliations, funding models and cultural initiatives. For this reason, as many writers have acknowledged, one cannot avoid encountering and grappling with contradiction and paradox in the study of Basque cinema.¹ Previous studies point to a national cinema defined in terms of aesthetic, linguistic or thematic differences and even otherness, periods when films signified a cultural metaphor for a lack of identity, and a Basque language prioritized at certain times and subject to relegation at others. All these aspects feature in a cultural and political history that vaporizes above the molten differences of numerous definitions of Basqueness. To an extent, Basque identity has evolved in a cinematic tug-of-war between these differences and between difference and its disavowal. Contradictions thus abound not only in politicized aesthetics and industrial strategies but in themes, genres, the demands of various audiences, and the ambitions of distinct generations or waves of filmmakers. But if no single viewpoint is valid on Basque cinema, then they all are; for this Whitmanesque enquiry into whether it contradicts itself is easily answered. Very well, then it contradicts itself. Basque cinema is large, it contains multitudes.

This book on Basque cinema offers a disparate display of historical, thematic, aesthetic and political analyses grouped as much by mutual repulsion as by attraction but always relevant to the hypostasis or underlying reality of Basqueness. Basque cinema is and always has been a vital medium for the examination and perpetuation of Basque identity from numerous perspectives emanating from a specific geographical point and resulting in diverse trajectories. It is as buffeted by civil war and social change as it is by new media technologies and linguistic, cultural, propagandist and industrial imperatives. In response it has proven itself a durable vehicle for the historical, political, social and artistic interests of the Basque people and has duly imagined past, present and future variations on local, national and international concerns that all contribute to this frustrating, yet at the same time liberating ambiguity about the Basque Country. We can see an argument for recognition of this regional, even national cinema, in terms of industry, politics and aesthetics; but at the same time we are uncertain of its citizenship and must investigate its relationship to national Spanish cinema, while also wondering how that cinema might do without Basque filmmakers. However, it would be wrong to expect Basque filmmakers to be engaged in any uniformly auteurist or collective endeavour to create a unique cinematic monument to Basque identity, particularly when this is so entangled in theories of homeland and exile, subject to the migrant condition and generational shifts in ambition and the economic centre of gravity. Thus, while we aim to root our enquiry in Basque specificities, readers should accept that such things are subject to a fragmentary and evolving condition.

This book is also the result of a collaboration that saw value in pitting a view from the outside looking in against one from the inside looking out. Its co-authors duly argued, exchanged ideas and theories, swapped impressions of films and countless drafts of chapters. What has hopefully emerged is a cultural and political history of Basque cinema that resists any bias, which punctures assumptions, and admits on occasion that conclusions are elusive. Yet this is also a Bergsonian analysis in the sense that it does not aim to pin artificially categorized stages of Basque cinema to a board on which, for example, precise measurements of nationalism can be noted. Instead, though mostly chronological in its structure, the accumulating analysis seeks to observe Basque cinema in all its becoming. We begin with an explanation of the main theoretical tools that we have chosen for this task, being principally the transposition of Georg Sorenson’s notions of communities of citizens and sentiment and their relevance to cinemas within and beyond the nation state. From this we move to the origins of Basque cinema in Chapter Two before Chapter Three picks up the thread of the history of the Donostia Zinemaldia or San Sebastian International Film Festival, and finds that pulling it brings many of the political, social, artistic and industrial concerns of this book into focus. Chapter Four contends with various attempts at representing history and heritage in Basque cinema and considers the aims and legacy of the first Basque wave, while Chapter Five examines representations of terrorism. Chapter Six engages with the second wave of Basque cinema, which reached international audiences primed for auteurist endeavour in the 1990s, and Chapter Seven examines the history of short films and finds a recent swell of experimentation leading to a third Basque wave. Following this, Chapter Eight looks beyond any territorial definition to examine the Basque diaspora and its filmic investigation of identity, exile and reconciliation, while the ninth chapter goes looking for contemporary Basque cinema and, undeterred by derelict cinemas and punitive policies, finds it online, elsewhere and otherwise engaged. Finally, the conclusion returns to the views from inside out and outside in to argue that the future of Basque cinema should be considered in terms of an open and mixed Basque cinema, which takes in plural subject matters and formats and which is, at the same time, a kaleidoscope of reflections that reveal the thinking and feeling of contemporary Basques. This book therefore situates Basque cinema firmly within notions of Basque art, cultural practice and visual studies and alongside political and cultural strategies and developments, while considering its relevance to other small nations as a model industry, albeit a highly unstable one in which Basque citizenship and sentiment are continually transforming. We therefore once more echo Whitman as a warning. Basque cinema can be as bad as the worst and as good as the best. To those in search of a definition we say it exists as it is, and that’s enough.

A Place in the World

At first sight, Basque cinema seems to represent a very small place in the world. Its climate is mostly damp and overcast, punctuated by blasts of brilliant sunshine and solid rainbows. The landscape, like the weather, changes so abruptly that the idea of the Basque Country being several nations in one seems proven after any long drive, which can resemble time travel, although on closer inspection, its history, politics and art are revealed as both interwoven and constantly unravelling. For example, there are now several categorizable if not categorical generations of Basque filmmakers, whose differences add fuel to the argument that there are various versions of Basque cinema. A summary of this fractured and contested history begins with the pioneers and mavericks (1895–c.1930) that punctuate the early cinema of most nations, although no more than can be accommodated in a tiny retrospective made of fragments more than films. These were mostly made by employees of the Pathe Frères and Frères Lumière for their showreels and are a counterpoint to indigenous filmmaking in the Basque Country that includes the newsreels of Reportajes Mezquiriz, de última hora (Latest Mezquiriz Reports) and the ethnographic features sponsored by the Eusko Ikaskuntza (Society of Basque Studies) between 1923 and 1928, alongside the beginnings of commercial cinema and a few legendary but partially or wholly lost experimental works. Thereafter, attempts at documenting the rapid growth of Basque cities and the contrary survival of rural customs were piecemeal and the effort was devolved to competing propagandists in the periods of the Second Republic (1931–36), the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and the dictatorship of General Franco (1939–75) that would prohibit the Basque language of Euskara and curtail almost all film production in the Basque Country.

Deprived of industry and even language, it would take until the dissident context of the 1960s for Basque artists and members of film societies to engage in film theory and practical experimentation with film grammar as an oppositional politicised discourse. Their efforts at ethnographic features, abstract animation and avant-garde documentary shorts constituted a unique aesthetic response to oppression that was often rendered in canted angles, jump cuts, ellipses and staccato editing that boasted equivalency with the peculiarities of the otherwise forbidden Euskara. The collectively realised Ama Lur (Motherland, Néstor Basterretexea & Fernando Larruquert, 1968) was the first full-length feature made in the Basque Country since the Civil War and a major influence on its re-imagined community. Alongside the emergence of the world-renowned San Sebastian Film Festival, which began in 1953, the Basque Country gradually assumed a degree of autonomy in the latter years of the dictatorship before it was boosted by the transition to democracy and the autonomy that was officially granted in 1979. Thereafter, successive Spanish and Basque governments would push and pull funding and distribution quotas, apportioning degrees of responsibility to regional and national television networks. The election to Spanish government of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, hereafter PSOE) in 1982 brought filmmaker Pilar Miró into the role of Directora General de Cinematografía (General Director of Film) and subsequent measures aimed at increasing the production of quality features and their international distribution informed what became known as the Ley Miró (Miró Law, actually Royal Decree 3304/1983). This advocated that ‘good films had to appeal to different audiences within the nation and become nation-building narratives that would paper over the cracks and debunk the myths of Francoism.’² Yet this ‘nation’ was so evidently a centralised notion that regional cinemas within Spain, such as the Basque and Catalan, were largely subsumed within ‘the demands of plurality’ or ignored.³ Nevertheless, the response of the Comunidad Autónoma de Euskadi (Autonomous Community of the Basque Country, hereafter CAE), which had been formed from three Basque provinces in December 1979 and which had received responsibility for Basque culture in Royal Decree 3069 of September 1980, was a radical sentiment that prompted unprecedented investment in film production. Protectionist and supportive measures that saw film as a vehicle for Basque nation-building culminated in the first wave of modern Basque cinema with its forthright, polemical films about recent and mythic Basque history led by El proceso de Burgos (The Burgos Trial, Imanol Uribe, 1979), which ‘would come to mark the launch of modern Basque cinema.’⁴ These measures were closely linked to the establishment of Euskal Telebista (Basque Television, hereafter EiTB) in December 1982 and they culminated in the Proyecto de Ley de la Cinematografía (Cinema Law) of February 1983 in which a definition of Basque cinema was made law: Basque cinema was simply that which was eligible for funding of up to 25 per cent of its budget by the Basque government provided that 75 per cent of the cast and crew resided in the CAE, where the film could be shot in Castilian on the condition that a single copy was made available dubbed into Euskara.

As with the effects of the Miró Law on national Spanish production, ‘national’ Basque cinema increased in quantitative, if not always qualitative terms. Many filmmakers left the Basque Country for Madrid or the Basque diaspora beyond Spain, while others sought to build up a Basque-language industry from within via initiatives such as the Ikuska series of documentary shorts (1979–84) engineered by Antxon Eceiza. However, changes in policy in the late 1980s led to the scrapping of non-repayable subsidies and a move towards more commercial projects that would be managed by a limited company called Euskal Media, which promised a return on the investment of public money but whose attempts at a commercially viable Basque cinema attracted accusations of thematic irrelevance, favouritism and ineptitude in the matter of enabling a national cinema that was supposed to help build the new Basque nation. Nevertheless, market changes and production conditions in the early 1990s were such that a second wave of Basque cinema associated with auteurist practice emerged, only to profess temporary disassociation from Basque locations, themes and generic traditions. Thereafter, the digital revolution and the internet prompted so many transformations in the way that films are made, seen and thought about that the argument for an introspective and centripetal Basque cinema was blindsided. With film now software for downloading, sharing and streaming as well as capturing the everyday with unprecedented intimacy, digital technologies have allowed for the relatively unregulated dissemination of ideas beyond any legislative, industrial or ideological control. Consequently, the way that Basque filmmakers see themselves and the world (and increasingly how the world sees the Basque Country) has been transformed by novel forms of collaboration and communication via new means of production and distribution. By the new millennium, a new economic model of filmmaking had been enabled that could afford to be experimental, ephemeral and centrifugal. The government-sponsored Kimuak short film production scheme currently crests a third wave of Basque cinema that embodies Nicolas Bourriaud’s altermodernism because of its effort to ‘translate the cultural values of cultural groups and to connect them to the world network’ while foregrounding ‘the fight for autonomy, but also the possibility of producing singularities in a more and more standardized world.’⁵ Those making all kinds of films in the Basque Country now have their sights set on so many industrial, commercial, artistic and even political targets in the global exchange of cinematic images that our portrait of Basque cinema extends beyond its frame. Consequently, this book offers multiple perspectives on the various periods and aspects of Basque cinema while remaining faithful to the paradoxical, ambivalent, and heterogeneous nature of the films themselves, thereby avoiding any possibility of reducing the subject to fixed or biased critical interpretations. However, in order to achieve this some new framework of understanding is required; one that emphasizes the creative, even emancipatory potential of sentiment in relation to Basque cinema without ignoring the complex matter of its citizenship.

The Basque Community of Citizens

The modern state evolved in response to the decline of empire and its functioning was based upon the distribution of citizenship that had previously only belonged to an elite. This was calculated by the exchange of obligations and rights of its citizens, whose public order, payment of taxes and other contributions to the status of the state, such as military service, were rewarded with rights to education, basic welfare and a sense of inclusion that trumped exclusion. As time turned into history, citizenry became a people with political, legal, social and economic obligations and rights and a shared idea of itself as a subject with a separate historical, cultural and even linguistic identity that resembles Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined community’.⁶ This idea accommodated plurality in social structures and cultural expression but also safeguarded traditions as a way of preserving and promoting a collective identity that was coherent and desired. As obligations grew, rights were extended until the cultural sense of belonging turned into a difference worth defending and became its own reward. Thereafter, as Georg Sorenson describes, national identity was enhanced by seven factors that determined the contest of inclusion over exclusion, each of which are in flux but integral to the formation of the modern Basque Country.⁷ The first is a common language, where the contest is dominated by an occasionally tense face-off between Euskara and Castilian. The second is a single set of laws for all, which is contested when radicals seek to modify citizenship or the Basque government disagrees with the Spanish one in Madrid. The new middle class that Sorenson sees as essential for the formation of a modern nation is enabled by education and culture, which overlap matters of language. War too is a factor that intensifies collaboration and the sense of difference, with terrorism, which has special meaning for the Basque Country, being a version of this. The sixth factor is a move from religious to secular authority, which is complicated by the history and tradition of religion being inextricable from any previous factors. And the final one is referendum, which is the means by which the imagined community influences the progress of the nation by the establishment of majority decisions affecting the previous six factors and much else besides.

Sorenson explains that when all these factors are present, the community of citizens is one of strong, defining links between citizens and the state based upon an exchange of political, legal and social-economic rights and obligations. Consequently, the cinema of these citizens will be one of close links between government and the film industry, established and maintained by policies, quotas, incentives, funding and protectionism, and therefore somewhat akin to the Basque cinema that sustained and promoted the idea of nation-building following the creation of the CAE. Yet this definition does not cover the extent and complexity of this particular community for, whereas three Basque provinces form the constitutionally recognized CAE, four more exist beyond it. The CAE is comprised of only Gipuzkoa and its capital San Sebastian, Alava with its main city Vitoria, and Biscay with Bilbao. Separate from the CAE, though in the territory of Spain and complying with Spanish jurisdiction whilst enjoying a degree of independence that includes the collection of taxes, is the Chartered Community of Navarre, which was excl...

Table of contents

• About the Author
• Book Review
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Basque Cinema: Citizenship and Sentiment
• 2 Melodramatic Beginnings: Early Basque Cinema
• 3 Taking The Initiative: The San Sebastian Film Festival and the Transition
• 4 Past Tense, Present Tensions: History, Heritage and the First Basque Wave
• 5 Broken Windows: Representations of Terrorism
• 6 Elastic Basqueness: The Second Basque Wave
• 7 Boxed In and Breaking Out: Short Films and The Third Basque Wave
• 8 Longing and Belonging: Transnational and Diasporic Cinema
• 9 Funding Films, Finding Audiences: Contemporary Basque Cinema
• 10 Inside Out and Outside In: Two Concluding Views of Basque Cinema
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Series Page