VALENCIA. Today, October 6, is Spanish Cinema Day, a celebration that the Ministry of Culture pulled out of its hat in 2021 to highlight our cinematography and try to ensure that, at least one day a year, institutions and groups program films. Spanish, now or before. The ICAA and the Spanish Film Library offer some essential titles, with versions of the best possible quality for screening, to entities that want to join the party, be they other film libraries, city councils, cultural houses, citizen associations or neighborhood film clubs. The truth is that, even though proclaiming the day of this or that is a very artificial thing, it works. And so, between today and the next few days many screens are going to be filled with good Spanish cinema, as you can see by visiting the website of the Spanish Cinema Day. And, whatever the hard-working haters who so bother and despise our cinema think, there in their blindness, that is very good.
But I have not come to tell you the program for Spanish Cinema Day but to tell you, on account of the anniversary, that, truly, truly, truly, the history of our cinema is full of extraordinary gems, magnificent films, original and beautiful works that are worth taking more than just a look and not just on a specific day. I take advantage of the presence of Haunting in this year’s programming to rescue some titles, beyond the big names of Berlanga, Bardem, Saura, Buñuel o Almodovar, among others, whom there is no need to vindicate because they are at the top of cinematographic art. So here goes my own selection from Spanish Cinema Day.
Haunting, I was saying. Directed by Carlos Serrano de Osma in 1948, it is a film Lola Flores y Manolo Caracol. But not the Lola Flores and Manolo Caracol film that they may have in their heads. This is a beautiful rarity that mixes flamenco, surrealism, cubism and an aesthetic vehemence that is impossible to forget. It is a sensory experience that leaves your eyes wide and your soul altered.
The dancer and the worker (Luis Marquina1936) is a romantic, sophisticated and urban comedy, set in a cookie factory. art Deco, which makes a staunch defense of the value of work and workers, in addition to calling for understanding and harmony between classes and opposites: pay attention to the year of production, 1936. And, in addition to that, and in its dialogues we hear words like feminism or proletariat, it is a delicious musical comedy in the Hollywood style, although made with the money that coffee had to cost for a day of filming any US production. Surprising, extravagant and charming, it is magnificently made, with mounting solutions and very creative and modern staging.
In 1948, the same year of Hauntingone of the most unusual films of our cinematography was made, Life in shadows. The only and fascinating feature film of Llorenç Llobet
grace It is a dazzling love song to cinema in the form of a melodrama, which had several problems with censorship and was forgotten for a long time. Today it is considered, with all fairness, one of the best films in Spanish cinema.
Cinema is also the theme of The sixth Sensenot Shymalan’s, but Nemesio Sobrebrela from 1929. It is a silent film, made when sound was about to prevail, eccentric and shocking, which includes several avant-garde sequences, in the style of surrealist, dadaist or constructivist cinema that, in those years, they made in Paris, in Berlin or in Moscow Ferdinand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Richter, Man Ray or Dziga Vertov. And since we’re on the cutting edge, give it a try verbena essence (1930), from Ernesto Jimenez Caballero, a documentary poem from Madrid in 12 images, as one of its labels says. 11 beautiful minutes of urban symphony, with appearances by Maruja Mallo o Gomez de la Serna in which, even leaving us with a smile, the melancholy of contemplating the Spain that could have been and, alas, was not, prevails.
And what do I tell you about The seven hunchbacks’s tower? A ghost story, fantasy genre cinema, filmed by Edgar Neville in 1944, which, following the novel by Emilio Carrere, tells of the existence of an underground city, beneath the real Madrid, inhabited by criminals. Or of night functionwhere the director Josefina Molina sit down to talk Lola Herrera y Manuel Dicenta, long separated, about their stormy relationship, love, sex, marriage, desire, pain and much more. Awesome. And very modern, they won’t deny it to me, even though the film is from 1981.
Y One, two, three, to the English hideout (1969), an unusual musical, and I once again use the adjective very modern, of Ivan Zuluetawhich ten years later left us all speechless and trapped forever with Rapture (1979). Y The strange journeythat cursed film of Spanish cinema, directed by Fernando Fernan Gomez which, as it is, could contribute a large part of his filmography as a director to this list that I bring to you. AND Behind the glassthe amazing debut of Agustí Villaronga in 1986, one of the most unexpected films of Spanish cinema. AND Songs for after a warwhat today we call a creation documentary, but which is already Basilio Martin Patino made in 1971, perhaps without knowing how innovative it was, prohibited by the regime, and could only be released after the death of the dictator, in 1976. And Val del Omar and his audiovisual experiments. And the cinema of the Barcelona School.
And so many others. And our cinema is full of rarities, snipers, rare birds, unique films and hidden films, converted into works of cult. It is typical of a poor industry in a country with a history, that of the 20th century, that is more than complicated, between dictatorships, wars, transitions, urbanization and industrialization processes, massive emigrations from the countryside to the city and from here to abroad, and modernization in fits and starts to try to catch up with some neighboring countries. In fact, many films in our cinematography reflect that dispute between tradition and modernity that characterizes the history of Spain in the 20th century.
If you only watch Cine de barrio, the TVE program, you tend to think that the history of our cinema consists of Alfredo Landa y José Luis López Vázquez chasing Swedish women through Torremolinos, Concha Velasco y Toni Leblanc surviving in full development between the six hundred and the VPO and Paco Martínez Soria staging the excellences of the traditional and patriarchal comodiosmanda family. And it’s unfair. It is as if, in the future, only the successful family comedies of Santiago Segura, which is the 21st century version of these titles from the past. Those inhabitants of a century from now would come to the conclusion that Spanish cinema only consisted of stories of ugly men, basically teenagers of forty or fifty years old, lost in daily tasks such as putting on a washing machine or taking care of their children if their saint was not there. is at home, and beautiful, smart and neurotic married ladies, who knows why, with those idiots, all involved in absurd entanglements caused by misunderstandings and script errors.
Of course that accommodating cinema, the one that Cine de barrio programs, is part, with its often very high degree of sexism, machoism, homophobia and dandruff, of our history. And great actors and actresses worked on it. And they are of high sociological value, although not so much artistic. And hey, sometimes you laugh on a lazy, undemanding afternoon. But it is a shame that this type of production hides everything good, different and creative that makes up our history. All the stories that go beyond the norm or that, within it, stretch it, shape it and break it to go further. Look for them, don’t miss them, enjoy them. And be amazed and admire that, even in times where freedom was a scarce commodity, there were those who found a way to express their way of telling the world and life through cinema.
2023-10-06 10:10:09
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