The news about cinema that the veteran Editorial Chair It has been launching in 2022 in its Sign and Image collection. Fresh out are the memories from Juan Antonio Bardem (1922-2002), and it still goes onwhose new edition, prologued and clean of dust, straw, typos and inaccuracies with respect to the original of 2002, has been carried out by the historian and critic Carlos F. Heir. Some memories that come to open the events and tributes dedicated to the director of Main Street, Death of a cyclist, Revenge, Sonatas, Nothing ever happens y the bridge in it centenary year of his birth, which for now points to more discreet ways than those that celebrated Berlanga and Fernán Gómez in 2021, figures that do seem to arouse a consensus that in the case of Bardem has always been more controversial for his open political affiliation and perhaps also for the irregularity of his career.
Be that as it may, these substantial memoirs make spine from cultural and political history of Spain in the 20th century (they close right on the border of the new century, just a few months before his death) and put in the first person an essential trajectory to know and understand the keys to the best Spanish cinema of the Franco regime and his particular transition to the democratic era, for whose cause and that of the profession Bardem was always strongly committed since his affiliation with the Communist Party of Spain.
also recent, Female desire in Spanish cinema (1939-1975)collective volume coordinated by Nuria Bou and Xavier Pérezpay attention to the little studied phenomenon of stardom, the Feminine archetypes and the actresses of the Spanish cinema of the Franco regimeand makes an exciting journey through the relationship between censorship, morality and representation through figures such as the body-home, the woman of the country, the mystical body, the body-spectacle, the virgin, the modern woman or the monster-woman and the analytical review of the trajectories and roles of the most outstanding “stars of desire” of the period such as Aurora Bautista, Analia Gadé, Emma Penella, Lola Flores, Sara Montiel, Carmen Sevilla, Concha Velasco, Geraldine Chaplin or Teresa Gimpera from the hand of leading researchers such as Gonzalo de Lucas, Carlos Losilla, Sergi Sánchez, Violeta Kovacsics or our dear colleague Juan Jose Vargaswho is in charge of unraveling Marisol/Pepa Flores from the opportune concept of “disappearance”.
Very important is also the volume that the Hispanic Letters collection dedicates to the Collected literary work (1922-1935) from Luis Bunuel, of whom, even at this point, little-known or little-investigated facets continue to be rescued. Edited by Jordi Xifrathe book includes his poems surrealist, its short stories or very brief, his texts for the theater and, very especially, his essays and critical texts on cinemadedicated, among others, to Buster Keaton, Carl Dreyer, Abel Gance, Victor Fleming or actors such as Adolphe Menjou.
Outside of Spanish cinema, the recovery of Itineraries, The education of a film dreamerfrom Noël Burchoriginally published in 1985, once again gives fair value to one of the pioneers in the study of modes of representation of the primitive cinema (The skylight of infinity) o la japanese cinematography (to the distant observer). itineraries brings together numerous articles written between 1970 and 1985 where, from the strictest formalism to the search for the meaning of the film through analysis, a cinematographic thought in full effervescence and a whole theoretical treatise on the power of images unfolds.
To finish, three new installments are added to the large collection of monographs ‘filmmakers’which is already at number 129: Friedrich Wilhelm Murnausurprisingly still unpublished in the series, by Manuel Lamarca Rosales, the Japanese Hirokazu Koreedaby Miguel Muñoz Garnika, and the Italian Paolo Sorrentinoby Elios Mendieta, already have respective and thorough studies of their filmography and stylistic keys.
Annaud chooses Seville to present ‘Notre Dame is burning’
A lover of spectacle, nature and great technical challenges, the veteran French director Jean Jacques Annaud (In Search of Fire, The Bear, The Name of the Rose, The Lover, Seven Years in Tibet, Enemy at the Gates) has seen in the fire of the Notre Dame Cathedral of Paris the particular French 11-S, also an epic film with the focus on the firemen who doused the flames and averted total disaster portrayed as the true heroes of a few days of unfortunate memories for all of us who saw practically live on television how a good part of one of the most beautiful symbols of European and Western culture was destroyed.
Just three years after that April 15, 2019, it hits the billboards Arde Notre-Damey Sevilla It has been the city chosen by its distributor (Vertice 360) and the director himself for its Spanish presentation. Will be this afternoon at 7:00 p.m.. in Cinesur Nervion MK2where the director will converse with the public together with Jose Luis Cienfuegosdirector of the European Film Festival.
This presentation, which will be broadcast on streaming for other cinemas of the MK2 group, it is part of the Viridian Projectinitiative of a group of national exhibitors in support of European production with a committed and social background.
The premiere of the week: ‘Arthur Rambo’
Let no one be confused with the mythical warrior character played by Sylvester Stallone, the Arthur Rambo of the new Laurent Cantet (The class, The writing workshop) is the pseudonym of a successful young writer whose past as the author of incendiary tweets and provocative brings to the table the debates on personal responsibility, the border between the private and the public, fiction and reality or the cancel culture.
