Film Alert 101: Sixty Years of International Art Cinema 1960-2020 - Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - 6 (31) Other Western Europe

Other Western Europe

Spain Luis Buñuel (65) b.00, Luis Garcia Berlanga (81) b.21, Juan Antonio Bardem b.22, Carlos Saura (78) b.32, Victor Erice b.40, Greece Michael Cacoyannis (76) b.22, Netherlands Fons Rademakers (79) b.20, Bracketed number indicates an International Film Guide Director of the Year

6 (31) The New Spanish Cinema

Government interest in a strong national film industry in Franco’s Spain did not become apparent until the early 60s when the first attempt was made by Spain to enter the European Common Market. It was recognised that a concerted effort was needed to demonstrate, at least culturally, that Spain was no longer the retrograde, fascist backwater of Europe.

Spain's transition from Francoism to democracy spanned three decades from the end of the war in 1945 to the death of the dictator in 1975. Spanish cinema played an important role in this process. The two leading Spanish filmmakers Juan Bardem (1922-2002, above) and Luis Berlanga (1921-2010, below)) collaborated on a neo-realist influenced comedy, Esa Pareja Feliz/That Happy Couple (1951), and a popular satire of the so-called national cinemas, Bienvenido/Welcome Mr Marshall (1952), in which an image of national unity is imposed at home at the cost of cultural and regional difference in order to be successfully promoted abroad as a distinctive 'national' commodity so qualifying Spain for a share of Marshall aid from the US.

At a conference at Salamanca in May 1955 Spanish filmmakers of both the left and right looked to Italian neorealism as the model. Bardem's first film as writer-director, Muerte de un ciclista/Death of a Cyclist (1955), the first Spanish film to win a prize at an international film festival, portrayed Spanish society as corrupt and complacent. Bardem employs a dialectic between neo-realism and classic Hollywood melodrama rupturing the audience-binding “star close-ups” of the latter with “neo-realist sequences filmed in deep-focus long shots.” Marsha Kinder concludes that “this dialectical opposition between the two foreign aesthetics helped to forge the subtle, indirect language of the New Spanish Cinema.” ( essay, Kinder in ‘World Cinema’ Nowell-Smith ed. 597)

Bardem was arrested and jailed during the filming of Calle Mayor / Main Street (1956), regarded as his best film, in which he bitterly explores life under Franco. His production company was responsible for the production of Viridiana (1961) marking Bunuel's return to Spain, the Franco government's intention being for him 'to return to the fold' to make a film of his own choosing (“they didn't even ask to see the script in advance”). It was hardly surprising for it to be condemned by the Church and banned by the censors for blasphemy causing a major upheaval and loss of jobs in the film industry. After Calle Major Bardem’s work went into creative decline as he tried unsuccessfully to make a Spanish film that would also speak to an international audience but in so doing he was the first to highlight the abysmal state of the Spanish film industry.

Betsy Blair, Jose Suarez, Calle Mayor

Luis Berlanga who began his career with Bardem and “shared his colleague’s attempts to challenge the Franco myth yet with an opposite mode of discourse” ( Higginbotham 43). While Bardem challenged his audiences with somber carefully constructed plots in orderly narratives, Berlanga disarmed with rapid paced chaotic farces and comic ridicule of Spanish political situations and social types. While his career spanned three decades beginning with Welcome Mr Marshal which broke with the conventions of Spanish cinema prior to 1950, he nevertheless struggled to make films through the sixties, his scripts repeatedly rejected by the authorities. He managed however to complete two of his best, El Verdugo/The Executioner (1963), a black comedy about a reluctant public executioner “full of insights into the corrupt Francoist mentality” which achieved critical and international film festival success. In Tamano Natural/Life Size (1973, Michel Piccoli plays a chic dentist with an attraction for a life-like doll, fantasy in a permissive society taking on symbolic importance beyond the doll owner’s conceptions. “It carries to their logical conclusions [ Berlanga’s] most characteristic preoccupations - freedom versus power and the castrating woman” (ibid 55).

Nino Manfredi (r) El Verdugo

If Bardem did not further successfully develop the already referred to model of the dialectic between two foreign aesthetics (Italian neo-realism and classical Hollywood melodrama), as outlined by Marsha Kinder, he did provide, with Saura, the framework for “the subtle, indirect language of the new Spanish Cinema” (Kinder Nowell-Smith ed. 597). The opportunity was provided by changed political circumstances in the early 60s when the government, through the responsible minister García Escudero and a new general director of cinema, decided to officially promote this new art cinema abroad while still imposing censorship at home. Kinder notes that it was a Basque-born producer Eías Querejeta who pushed hardest against repressive censorship while creating a collaborative team of talented creative technicians. The best known of the ten works produced by Querejeta in the 60s directed by New Spanish Cinema directors, were those directed by auteur Carlos Saura. “They pioneered ‘la estetica franquista’, the ironic film style which came to characterise Spanish film during the Franco period.” (Higginbotham 29). Saura expanded the language of violence (an acknowledged influence on Peckinpah) along with politics, sex, and sacrilege. “Bardem’s voice of protest was, with its undeniable intellectual ring, too advanced for the general Spanish public.” Luis Berlanga came closer to creating a national cinema than Bardem. It was Bardem, however, who first defined the state of the Spanish cinema. His films are a continuation of that effort and are “the first serious attempt to awaken the national consciousness” (ibid 42).

The period 1963, under the administration of Escudero, saw the development of the ‘New Spanish Cinema’. “Well-intentioned as a whole, it was not disinterested,” being part of a political operation designed and directed from within the government, “to keep the outer and more showy aspects of the Spanish economic and social climate in tune with Europe.” The objective was to encourage certain new films of quality which would not raise any serious problems at home, a new code of censorship imposed while giving the impression abroad, especially at international film festivals, of a ‘new wave’. “It was, in short, simply an operation of political prestige” (Molina-Foix 18). The end result satisfied no one, least of all the ideological left, the voices for the new cinema which lacked audience acceptance, students and other critics of the state of censorship. Escudero’s position was dissolved for economic reasons and, although unstated, for his failure to control restless voices like an intense lobby group called the Sitgistas (Higginbotham 65). The tightly controlled experiment with art cinemas in urban areas for the screening of foreign language films was abandoned, apparently for lack of audience response.

Carlos Saura (1932-2023, above) was recognised as “the most direct heir to Bunuel’s film style and cultural perceptions” (ibid 77). He drew on Bunuel’s legacy of the “surreal documentary,” (Las Hurdes, L’Age d’Or), to convey reality indirectly so as to discredit the distortions of the Franco myth”, through metaphorical film language and syntax designed to confuse the censors (ibid). It did not confuse elements on the the Right, however, with militants firebombing a cinema showing one of Saura’s most affecting films in this mode, La Prima Angelica (1973), for its implied political critique of the Franco era. Saura was also criticised on the Left as a right wing collaborator because he was allowed to continue working. His career covered the whole period of the birth and development of the New Spanish Cinema with its urgent commitment “to reveal Spain to itself.”

In his first film Saura takes neo-realist ideas further than any other young Spanish film-maker in Los Golfos /The Hooligans (1959). A group of young men in a lower class area of Madrid with little prospect of employment, rob a factory to pay for the training of one of them as a matador with prospects of earning sufficient to share between them. As David Thomson notes at this early stage Saura is “far more affected by De Sica than Bunuel” - he had not then actually seen a Bunuel film.

Saura achieved the first of his international festival successes with his third feature, La Caza/ The Hunt (1965) in which the camera presides over the self-destruction of three middle class businessmen seemingly representative of the class that won the Spanish Civil War, their peasant guide, a ‘loser’ who hunts out of necessity. The focus on the characters in a closed situation and the violence of the hunt become motifs in an oblique allegory as the initially dispassionate relationship between the trio becomes unsettling then violent comedy in a tale of erotic obsession. Dedicated to Bunuel it is the first of a triptych in which Saura turned his attention from the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War in The Hunt, to another conflict in Spanish society - relations between men and women. Geraldine Chaplin plays a Vertigo-like double role, the object of a doctor’s attention in his search for an ‘ideal wife’. Peppermint frappé was also the beginning of their extended on and off screen partnership.

El jardin de las delicias / The Garden of Delights (1970) is the first of a series of political allegories which consolidated Saura’s reputation at home and abroad. “They are a skilful blend of metaphor which Saura had learned to master in La Caza. In them, reference to the family signifies both domestic and national life” (Higginbotham 84). In La prima Angélica /Cousin Angélica (1973) the protagonist makes a painful journey from Barcelona to honour his mother’s wishes that she be buried in her home town, near Madrid. On the journey Louis remembers as he is now and as he was as a boy; the two levels are merged, Bunuel-like, as to be indistinguishable. The extension of forty years of defeat and conflict into the present, and inevitably into the future, created considerable controversy as well as box office success. Saura, in response, stressed the psychoanalytic rather than the political context of Angelica - that he was only “echoing Adler, Jung and Marcuse” though “many Spaniards recognised the central character's search for identity as their own” (ibid 91).

Anna Torrent, Geraldine Chaplin, Cria Cuervos

Greater “mesmerising introspection” on Saura’s part is evident with Chaplin playing opposite Ana Torrent in a strangely subdued but lyrically perceptive examination of a child’s world in Cria cuevros/ Raise Ravens (1975) set in the last days of Fascism. “ Intriguingly, the film suggests that the spirit of the dusty surrealism of Bunuel lives on in his native Spain” ( Phil Hardy ‘Time Out’ ). Like Victor Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive, Saura’s Cria cuervos with La prima Angéica identifiy as “Saura’s most original and spontaneous works, reflects reality through the eyes of a child memorably played in both films by Ana Torrent. Higginbotham further identifies Saura’s choice of the bitter Spanish proverb “raise ravens and they’ll pluck out your eyes,” as typical of a repressive, fearful, and conformist myth as that of the Franco regime.” She further sees this as “another attempt by Saura to demystify the terminology, for its protagonist, Ana, resists every attempt to initiate her into its rituals” (92).

The success of Saura’s films internationally, was apparently not matched in Spain where they were regarded as art films for an ‘educated minority’ (Higginbotham 96) and also inevitably diverted attention outside Spain from other landmark films such as Miguel Picazo’s La tia Tula /Aunt Tula (1964) based on a novel by Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno considered ahead of its time for its treatment of the theme of social hypocrisy in the definition of woman’s role (marriage or the convent), “an hypocrisy not only implicating the male power structure based upon the church but the entire provincial culture which represents more than half of Spain” (96-9). While now considered a classic of New Spanish Cinema, with 4 minutes then cut by the censor, no indication is given in available accounts of the film’s general reception in Spain at the time.

The early 70s were the years of ‘soft dictatorship’ (‘dictablanda’) leading up to Franco’s death in 1975 in which government censorship within Spain was finally relaxed. This coincided with major international successes for the New Spanish Cinema. On the other hand in 1975 the film industry was hopelessly in debt while the best of the New Cinema and the experiments of the so-called Barcelona School and its avant-gardism fringe, were barely visible in their own country where very little of world art cinema could be seen on Spanish screens.

This politically and socially unsettled franquista period yielded Saura’s Cria cuevros and what has become one of the most acclaimed films in the history of Spanish cinema, El espiritu de la colmena / Spirit of the Beehive (1973). Victor Erice (above) in his first feature, turned to the those of the horror film for new myths. Erice “does not see El Espiritu as a narrative film, but rather a work which has a fundamentally lyrical, musical structure and whose images lie deep in the very heart of a mythical experience” ( Molina-Foix 34).

Fernando (Fernando Fernan Gomez) and Teresa (Teresa Gimpera) seemingly in a state of self exile, he now a bee-keeper given to reflecting on the lives of bees, she an unrequited correspondent writing to a lover or lost child, “studies in haunted solitude,” living with their two daughters, 6 year old Ana (Ana Torrent) and 9 year old Isabel (Isabel Telleria). David Thomson conjures up the image of ‘the quite empty house where everything is like a magic breath on the embers of memory or metaphor.” Suggestive of Franco’s Spain in microcosm, the remote Castilian village is connected to civilisation by the travelling cinema where the girls see James Whale’s film of Frankenstein (1931, above and below), and by the train, its regularly imminent arrival at the station on the windswept plateau announced by its melancholy whistle and, as the sisters are aware, by vibrations in the rail tracks .

When Ana, frightened and moved by the duality of the gentle monster on the screen, asks her sister why he killed the little girl and why he too was killed, Isabel knowingly reassures her that it’s a movie trick, the monster is not dead and Ana can call him. “Corrupted Isabel” tells “profoundly serious Ana” that the spirit lives in an isolated, abandoned barn temporarily offering refuge to a wounded fugitive maquis. Isobel, wilfully through disturbing games, seals her vulnerable younger sister’s traumatisation. Erice’s decision for the whole cast to use their original ‘given’ names during the filming assumes full significance in the film’s final scene “as Ana comes out of her coma.”

This is a film about spirits - spirits who walk, words and dream-images made flesh. But this spirit blows where it will, whipping like a shape-shifter; it is, variously, the spirit of the father’s beehive; the spirit of Frankenstein which has emerged from the movie screen to enter a girl’s mind; the spirit of war passes through this humble town, leaving its traces. The spirit is also the angel of death, and the temptation to evil as well as the temptation to exist. - Adrian Martin (Mysteries of Cinema 189)

"vibrations in the rail tracks"

Vicente Molina-Foix concludes that its “huge success in Spain (and abroad) lies mainly in the fact that [Spirit of the Beehive] was the first movie in thirty years to offer a truthful view of the oppressive atmosphere of post-war Spain as seen from the loser’s point of view. And yet Erice achieved this through ellipsis and stylisation” (34).

Erice’s film is a singular achievement of the ‘franquista’ period in which the mystery of character is gradually revealed in a cinema of poetry “something like a free stream of image and sound events, akin to a certain kind of avant-garde cinema,” in which “narrative is given entry to this poetry only as a compromise or a constraint (Martin ‘Mysteries’ 170).” In contrast in the year of Franco’s death in 1975 two films - Ricardo Franco’s Pascual Duarte and José Luis Borau’s Furtivos/Poachers marked a culmination of four decades of Spanish cinema with the themes of exploitation, ignorance and violence analogous to the then antiquated marginal position of Spain in the modern world. Both equate the mother figure with Franco’s Spain, a motherland now corrupt and cruel unwinding the theme of matricide belying traditional Spanish machismo (Higginbotham 115).

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Marsha Kinder,”Spain After Franco” Oxford History of World Cinema Nowell-Smith ed. pp. 596-603

Virginia Higginbotham Spanish Film Under Franco 1988

Adrian Martin “Ball of Fire : The Mysteries” essay in Mysteries of Cinema 2020 ed.

Vicente Molina-Foix New Cinema in Spain BFI monograph 1977

Verina Glassner review of ‘Spirit of the Beehive’ Monthly Film Bulletin November 1974

David Thomson review of Spirit of the Beehive in Have You Seen… 2008

Adrian Danks “Victor Erice” Great Directors Senses of Cinema March 2003

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Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more