VALENCIA. The most monumental work done so far on Luis García Berlanga: more than 600 pages of analysis and documentation on his life and work, new perspectives and a review of everything said so far. That’s Spanish fury. Life, work, opinions and miracles of Luis García Berlanga (1921-2010), filmmaker, a project in two volumes edited by the Filmoteca of the Institut València de Cultura y Filmoteca Española and coordinated by the professors Jose Luis Castro de Paz Y Santos Zunzunegui. Never before has something like this been done with a Spanish film director: not in length, not in depth, not in critical analysis. Without a doubt, one of the highlights of this Berlanga Year for what the collaboration between the two film libraries implies and because its documentary nature makes it a starting point for future research on the filmmaker. “Berlanga already has a good cultural recognition in Spain, but there were many gaps on it that this project tries to shed light on,” summarizes Castro de Paz.
This has been the main intention of Castro de Paz and Zunzunegui, who sit down a few minutes before the presentation at La Filmoteca with Cultureplaza to answer some questions. Furia Española has been a four-year project in which not only has everything that Berlanga wanted to be told and analyzed been selected, but an unpublished documentary collection has also been collected so far. Among him, a handful of writings by the director himself on cinema, published in different media; or a critical tour of each of his films premiered in film magazines. For this, it has been crucial to have his own archive that he kept in his home and that is “immeasurable”, in the words of Castro de Paz: “When it is deposited in an institution, it will have to be cataloged and studied little by little.” The professor calculates almost thirty scripts or synopses of projects that were not finally recorded.
An interview interview is also attached, which summarizes more than 70 interventions in the media; or a very extensive biography, reviewed by the writer Antonio Gomez Rufo. In addition, the volume has more than thirty contributions from Berlanga’s film scholars, who analyze his contribution to Spanish cinema from new points, dismantle others, and construct stories that have never been addressed. “In the analysis it is impossible to avoid any overlap, because the filmography is what it is, but within this, our years of study have allowed us to approach different points of view to make it as innovative and interesting as possible”, says Santos Zunzunegui .
Although Zunzunegui doesn’t like the concept deconstruct (“There is nothing to deconstruct, but to adjust a point of view. Each generation has to settle the accounts with the cinema of the past. The film is always the same, but the ways of approaching it change”), the work does . Some examples.
“Berlanga’s cinema is the fruit of a tradition that was established earlier, in the post-war period, and that was not broken later. Furthermore, his influences go far beyond René Clair and neorealism, as has been said with interest “, says Castro de Paz:” We have always known that Berlanga made a cinema whose reception was more complex than people imagined. The keys are the importance he gives to the shot, and the fact of generating situations of many people talking and shouting at the same time -which makes his films difficult to understand and receive beyond Spanish-speaking countries- “. Several articles point out the reception that the Valencian director had in countries such as Germany, France, the United Kingdom or Latin American countries. “This reception was very uneven. In Germany, for example, his films were not very popular, but then he was a judge at the Berlin Film Festival. The international recognition of the critics did have it ”, points out the same professor.
More pillars to tear down. As Berlanga himself came to express his rejection of the politics of auteur cinema, the idea has remained that his way of making cinema depends almost exclusively on the script and that its staging is simple. “Critics are lazy by nature and, sometimes, we take the filmmaker’s own words as if they were divine words. We have readjusted those ideas that the critics enchanted in a deep work of analysis, ”says Santos Zunzunegui. “The maturation of Berlanga’s cinema is on a different path from the rest of the cinema that was born in the 60s, and that’s where that critical knot comes from, which over the years has been unraveling. For some time, any minimally serious work has not doubted Berlanga’s authorial character ”, adds his colleague.
Does Berlanga serve to understand the present or did his cinema only have the pretense of serving as a surgical eye of Francoism? “If a person wants to be what happened in Spain during the dictatorship, it is better and more entertaining to go to Berlanga’s filmography than to the FOESSA reports. But even so, there are some issues that do remain in political life. Berlanga’s speech should not be applied today, but it does explain where we come from ”. For example, “Placid it can be taken as an almost geological analysis, by strata, of the society of that time ”.
About the tributes
Next week the Berlanga warehouse opens at the Cervantes Institute, coinciding with the anniversary of his death. What do some of the most authoritative voices expect from your memory? “I imagine it will be a script. I fabulous on some occasion that it could be a script that told something that they would not let him do. I am sure that, in any case, it will be something significant ”.
As the book, out of more than 700, does not have instructions for use (although they recommend consulting it rather than reading it at once), it is worth asking them what is the way to pay tribute to Berlanga in this very significant year: “Every action has to be aimed at people see his cinema more, to be able to be the restorations on the big screen ”.
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