Spain: out of the past

There has been continuous discussion in Spain since February 12th of the significance of the policy statement made by Arias Navarro, President of the government after the assassination of Carrero Blanco in December 1973. The core of Navarro’s speech was the apertura or ‘opening’, already an overworked phrase in Spain but one which promises, eventually, political parties, and before that greater freedom for the arts and mass media. This has already affected the Spanish film industry in two ways: a decrease in censorship, and the banning of the making of ‘double versions’ of films – a practice which arose because producers could earn more for the sale of their films abroad the more female nudity the movies contained; and since such films could not be shown to Spanish audiences, two versions were made.

Foreign films, like Visconti’s Vaghe Stelle dell’Orsa and Wajda’s The Birch Wood, have been passed uncut, but with their distribution restricted to the Salas Esspeciales, the art houses set up in 1967, which may not contain more than five hundred seats. Films destined for exhibition in the Salas Especiales, most of which are in Madrid and Barcelona, have always been subject to a lesser degree of censorship because they are seen by smaller audiences. (The same practice occurs in publishing; expensive editions have fewer cuts than cheap editions.) Boorman’s Deliverance was also passed uncut, and ran for three weeks in a Sala Especial in Madrid before being seized by the police. The ensuing excisions included the whole of the sexual assault scene. Russell’s The Music Lovers suffered only minimal cuts, which made the scene on the train more erotic than Russell intended.

Of course the reduction in censorship will mean little if it is simply a question of more nudity. What is needed is the freedom to treat important subjects without restraint. There are directors waiting in the wings: Angelino Fons, for instance, who since his first film La Busca (1966), an impressive version of Baroja’s novel, has directed almost solely bread-and-butter films, waiting until it is possible for him to deal freely with subjects like the Civil War and the Burgos Trial. If he did not make commercial films he might have to abandon his chosen profession.

Earlier, directors of promise during the Second Republic like Sáenz de Heredia, who made Patricio miró a una estrella (1934) and two films with Buñuel for Filmófono, in the 1940s made Triumphalist films (like Raza, plot by Francisco Franco) similar to those produced in Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. Of course films about the Civil War have been legion, but it is only in the last year that two have appeared with any pretensions to honesty and artistic merit. These are Víctor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive, a notable indictment of what Franco’s rebellion unleashed psychologically on Spain, and Carlos Saura’s La Prima Angélica, which observes the effect of the war on day-to-day domestic life.

The Spirit of the Beehive, the first Spanish picture to win the Concha de Oro at San Sebastian, is also the first film to reflect the sadness and frustration attendant on Franco’s victory in 1939, an event which partakes of the character of Cardinal Newman’s ‘aboriginal calamity’. The postwar mood is conveyed not in concrete details or facts but through the sadness of the landscape, the whisper of the dialogue, the shadows in which people move, the pervasive silence. All this suggests the devastating impact of the war. The Spirit of the Beehive is also the first film to deal with the men who fought without knowing why, whose choice of sides was determined by the events in the area where they happened to be on July 18th, 1936; who spent three years killing without reason and who then returned to their wives and children, but returned with something destroyed; men who harbour only a huge emptiness. Such a man is the father in Erice’s film, played by Fernando Fernán Gómez. During the Second Republic he was an aspiring intellectual (there is a photograph of him with Ortega y Gasset and Unamuno). Now he devotes himself to apiculture and to a journal, meditations on bees. Like his present life, the journal is an evasion, a result of the shock which produced passive complicity in the realisation of Franco’s regime. This is comment enough on the rift in Spanish culture occasioned by the Civil War.

The father’s evasions, his failure, are made evident in the scene in which he takes his daughters, Ana and Isabel, to a wood to look for toadstools. After explaining that there are good and bad toadstools, as the mother has told Ana that there are good and bad spirits – a Manicheism irreprehensible if one accepts that the war was won by the ‘bad’ side and lost by the ‘good’ side – he reveals that the best toadstools are in a nearby cloud-flecked mountain. He says he hasn’t been there; estamos tan flojos, ‘we’re so feeble,’ but he says that one day he will take them there. But of course he never will.

The family live in a large house, barely furnished, suggesting the soldiers’ practice of burning books and furniture, in a village on the bleak Castilian plateau, a village now flanked, like every other, by the Falange symbol of yoke and arrows. Not the least of the film’s merits is that it gets Castile right in its drabness. For the year is 1940 and the isolation of the village mirrors both the isolation inside the family and the isolation of Spain, evinced when Fernando listens to foreign news on his crystal set at night and one is made aware of the Second World War in progress beyond the Pyrenees, the war from which the Pyrenees seal off Spain, the war adumbrated in the magazine called Mundo, a soldier on its cover, which Fernando receives by post.

Teresa (Teresa Gimpera), Fernando’s wife, writes letters to a child adopted in the war who is now in a Red Cross camp in France and whom she forlornly hopes to see again. This is her pretext for leaving the house, the ‘beehive’, the introverted, self-contained existence of the family. It is from this world that her daughter Ana tries to escape through her belief in spirits. Teresa bicycles through the desolate landscape to a tiny railway station with a broken platform clock where she posts the letter in a train that slowly bears away slumped, staring men. The war alone is not responsible for the couple’s predicament, but the war has produced it by encouraging certain tendencies; for is there not a photograph inscribed by the young Teresa to Fernando, ‘To my dear misanthrope’? The film shows how the behaviour of the parents affects the children. The film is about the parents, who have suffered the war. It is not a film about children.

Ana and Isabel, aged six and seven, attend a screening of James Whale’s Frankenstein in the village hall. The younger girl accepts the existence of spirits and is encouraged in this, maliciously by Isabel and nonchalantly by her mother (‘A spirit is a spirit. With good little girls they’re good, but with bad little girls they’re bad’). And when Ana’s spirit comes, summoned by her, it is in the form of a maquis on the run who jumps off a train and plunges across a field at dawn. For Ana, as for her mother, the train is a symbol of hope, of freedom from the ‘beehive’, the sound of its whistle at night a magic casement. Erice has suggested that Mary Shelley created Frankenstein because she lacked a father; Ana’s belief in spirits arises for the same reasons. And the fact that this belief is engendered by seeing a film reflects the Spanish addiction to the cinema in the 1940s, when films provided the unique escape from the reality of hunger and the black market and forced labour camps.

The subtlety of the film lies in its use of the telling power of an image and the sparse dialogue, combined with a score which incorporates traditional Castilian children’s songs. The subtlety of the silence is evident for instance in the brief scene where Teresa lifts the lid of a piano and plays a few out-of-tune notes; or in the sequence that begins at night with the shooting of the maquis. Then the Guardia Civil sergeant is shaving and one notices his hands, the hands responsible for the death of Ana’s spirit. Fernando arrives at the barracks and is taken to see the body of the maquis, which is laid out in the village hall where Frankenstein was shown. Next, the family is having breakfast and the silence hangs until Fernando produces his watch, which Ana gave to the maquis, and makes it chime. Or at the end when Teresa, shocked out of her complacency by her daughter’s experience and having burnt her last letter to the adopted child in the Red Cross camp, finds her husband asleep over his desk. She removes his glasses and places his jacket over his shoulders, revealing that she has advanced from turning away and feigning sleep at the sound of his step on the stairs.

The structure of The Spirit of the Beehive is lyrical and, as Erice has remarked, there is no tradition of lyrical film-making in Spain, where only the American model is known. Frequently during shooting the actors and crew did not understand what was being asked of them, and there was much scepticism among the crew. In evading the baleful American influence, believing that in the 1950s the Americans nearly killed the art of cinema, Erice goes back to D. W. Griffith in his unflurried pace and sparing use of dialogue. Pre-eminently visual, scrupulously composed and superbly photographed by Luis Cuadrado, Spirit of the Beehive often has the impact of a silent film; its rhythm is a reflection of the family’s life. Such subtle understatement met with widespread incomprehension inside Spain, where audiences and distributors look for films which reinforce and give comfort to their social and intellectual standing, avoiding what will worry or upset. This may explain the booing at San Sebastian when the prize was announced.

Erice is now thirty-three. Between leaving the film school and making The Spirit of the Beehive, his first full-length film, he was critic and scriptwriter, assistant to Miguel Picazo for La Tia Tula (1964), and maker of publicity films and commercials. He has said that he would like to make a film about the traumatised girl, Ana, thirty years on from the action of The Spirit of the Beehive.

La Prima Angélica, Carlos Saura’s ninth film, which gained him the Jury Prize at Cannes this year, expands the peripheral attention given to the Civil War in El Jardin de las Delicias (1970). The film begins with the refectory of a boys’ college crawling with bodies extricating themselves in slow-motion from the wreckage caused by a chance Republican bomb. Later there is a fine evocation of July 18th, 1936. With the sound of machine-guns from the street, a cowering member of the Falange is wary of opening the door (‘We’re expecting a disaster’). He reasserts himself when the electricity returns and the radio reveals that the troops in possession of the town are Nationalist. Luis, the boy whose stay with his grandmother, aunt and uncle and cousin is prolonged because of the outbreak of war, suffers abuse of his Republican father in Madrid from these relatives, until one terrible moment when he imagines his father being shot. Finally Luis, with his cousin Angélica and a bicycle, attempts to cross the Nationalist lines to reach Madrid. Soldiers bring them back and Angelica’s father thrashes Luis with his belt. In the background, behind the boy’s cries, Imperio Argentina sings Rocio.

The film is an attempt to explain the significance of the Civil War to a generation, specifically the generation too young to have fought in it. Saura has claimed that his film is the first to be made about the Civil War from the point of view of the side which lost. Luis, the central character, lost the war as a child because it traumatised him, and the film demonstrates that thirty years later the wounds remain. The crippling effects of the traditional combination of church and family are seen here against the background of the national trauma of civil war. The film is notably critical of the church: its characters include a thuggish priest, a vindictive nun with stigmata and a priest expatiating on the dimensions of Eternity to a group of cowering boys, a scene which recalls a well-known passage in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. For Stephen Dedalus, Ireland was ‘the old sow that eats her farrow’; and so, for Saura, is Spain. Stephen Dedalus escapes but Luis does not, cannot.

There is a horrifying inevitability about the scene in which he is unable to comfort middle-aged Angélica (Lina Canalejas) when she comes to him in desperation because of her husband’s neglect. He is unable to oppose her husband Anselmo, the seeming reincarnation of Angélica’s Falange father. In fact Anselmo and the father are played by the same actor, but their appearance in real life must have been different, as a photograph of Angelica’s father reveals. Saura’s use of the same actors either as themselves when young or taking different roles thirty years earlier emphasises – like the furniture shrouded in plastic sheets in the room where Luis stayed as a boy and where he stays again at his now elderly aunt’s insistence – that despite the prosperity nothing has changed. Franco’s victory merely destroyed the hopes aroused by the Second Republic.

In opposition to the conformity and sterility and bullying implicit in an acceptance of Franco’s regime, implicit in the character of Anselmo, Saura places haunting moments: Angélica’s daughter trying on a floppy hat in the driving mirror while a pop tune (‘Change it all’) erupts from the car radio; Angélica, her daughter and Luis hurling a Frisbee at each other in an assertion of spontaneity reminiscent of the early films of Godard, while Anselmo stretches out in his car for a siesta (‘I’ve got a date with a woman,’ he has said to Luis, who doesn’t understand) after boasting to Luis of his financial acumen; middle-aged Angélica reciting a poem by Machado; Angélica and Luis when children inscribing their names on a stone monument while a train passes out of sight.

What is curious about La Prima Angélica is the complete absence of dramatic tension. The film is an assembly of montages, exquisitely photographed by Luis Cuadrado, which cohere in the mind later, rather than in the moment of seeing the film. Like El Jardin de las Delicias, La Prima Angélica is sustained by the considerable talents of José Luis López Vázquez in the central role. If Saura depends on him again he risks making the same kind of film again, for there are similarities between La Prima Angélica, in which a man remembers and reconstructs moments from his childhood, and El Jardin de las Delicias, where a man is forced to relive moments from his childhood.

Saura always risks being praised for what he says rather than for how he says it. He admits that all his films are polemical, which means that criticism of them can always be dismissed as being right wing, as of course it usually is; but this situation tends to immunise him from self-criticism as well. Fortunately, La Prima Angélica is heartening in that its realism suggests that Saura has moved away from the aridity of La Madriguera (1969) and the artificiality of Ana y los Lobos (1972). The sometimes hermetic symbolism was of course a way of circumventing the censor, but it threatened to smother Saura’s talent. His films between Peppermint Frappé and La Prima Angélica were as much the product of the exigencies of Franco’s regime as those of a director of the 1940s and 1950s, like Juan de Orduña. Both were forced to escape from reality, Saura into allegorical cerebralism and Orduña into making a succession of historical dramas glorifying Spain’s Imperial past, a past seen exclusively in terms of what Franco and his supporters claimed to have been fighting for. Neither was permitted unfettered exercise of his talent.

The slackening of censorship should alleviate this, and help Saura towards the creation of an integrated work of art worthy of comparison with The Spirit of the Beehive. For one doubts the Spanish critics who have argued that La Prima Angélica is on a par with the highest level of modern European cinema. Certainly an international comparison with the work of Antonioni, Wajda, Fellini, Godard, Bertolucci and Bellocchio, and a national comparison with, for instance, most of Berlanga’s films, is not to La Prima Angélica’s advantage.

Both La Prima Angélica and The Spirit of the Beehive were produced by Elias Querejeta, who remains the only consistent producer of quality films in Spain and who employs the best crew in the country, notably the photographer Luis Cuadrado, the camera operator Teo Escamilla and the sound recordist Luis Martinez. Outside Spain, indeed sometimes inside as well, there exists ‘the Querejeta myth’, exemplified by his award at Venice in 1969. The citation read: ‘For the courage and perseverance of his action in favour of an independent production, against all the traditional and conformist tendencies.’ One might jib at the word ‘independent’. For, as Antonio Castro has pointed out (in his El Cine Español en el Banquillo, Valencia, 1974, a collection of interviews with twenty-nine Spanish directors), Querejeta has ‘made more than twenty films without having to make an investment of his own.’

Querejeta’s films have been financed by the government which, under the norms instigated in 1964 by García Escudero, then Director General of Cinema, backed the costs, in the form of credit before shooting, and an advance on a percentage of the box-office takings (the size of the percentage depending on the points awarded when the film was seen before its release) of films judged to be of ‘special interest’, films which might represent Spain with dignity at foreign festivals. This protection was intended as propaganda for the foreign image of Franco’s regime and to direct attention away from the general mediocrity of Spanish cinema. Also, because such films would be seen by a comparatively small number of people inside Spain, they were subject to less censorship than the normal commercial offering. Querejeta’s films have satisfied the needs artificially created by García Escudero’s policy; without government protection he might only have been able to make one film.

Apart from The Spirit of the Beehive and La Prima Angélica, two films stand out from recent Spanish production, not least by virtue of the fact that their characters are credible people, not symbols or puppets. Habla, Mudita!, written and directed by Manolo Gutiérrez, won a prize at Berlin last year and was this year’s Spanish contender for an Oscar. A first film, Habla, Mudita! reveals the same confidence in a personal vision as The Spirit of the Beehive. A middle-aged publisher from Madrid (José Luis López Vázquez), on holiday in the Pyrenees, meets a dumb shepherd girl, and becomes obsessed with the idea of getting her to talk. The film evokes an extraordinary poetic atmosphere, a fairytale world where the publisher loses interest in his position in the civilised surroundings of the capital.

El Amor de Capitán Brando, directed by Jaime de Armiñán, was the Spanish entry at Berlin this year. A boy of thirteen escapes from the constricting pressures of life in a small Castilian town through his imagination of films where he plays Captain Brando, a man capable of fearless and unquenchable love. He embarks on a relationship with his teacher (Ana Belén), who is drawn into the world of Captain Brando, as is Fernando (Fernando Fernán Gómez), recently returned from exile, a man obsessed by the Civil War and unable to comprehend the reality of contemporary Spain. The film is meticulous in its observation of provincial frustrations, of people fighting to become themselves in the face of the hostile incomprehension of a small town.

The fact that El Amor de Capitán Brando includes a scene in which Ana Belén undresses, a sit-in (by the schoolchildren) and a ridiculous mayor suggests, like La Prima Angélica, that the apertura is working. Although the film was made before the apertura, and its script was repeatedly censored, it was finally passed with the censor only insisting on a few changes in the mayor’s dialogue. Armiñán himself admits that the film as it stands would not have been possible a year ago.

Meanwhile Spanish production remains mostly mediocre: horror films, science fiction, comedies about the sexual repressions of the Spanish male. Or films like El Último Viaje and Aborto Criminal, the one about teenage drugs and sex, the other about abortion. Both pretend to objectivity; both are meretricious and end in heavily reinforcing the status quo. El Último Viaje is about a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl bedded by a drug pusher in Barcelona, tripping at an orgy in Cadaques and undergoing an abortion in Amsterdam. On her return she dies from an overdose of LSD. It has been her last trip. The Spain of Philip II has claimed her.

The most popular indigenous productions in terms of box-office receipts remain the comedies, four or five each year, featuring Alfredo Landa. Un Curita Cañon (literally ‘A Fabulous Little Priest’) is typical. Landa plays a priest who encounters problems in his new parish. Some he solves, with the help of the leader of a female group appearing at the local discothèque, but eventually the town’s hostility becomes too strong and he decides to resign. His bishop takes him to the balcony of his palace; below in the square is a cheering horde of parishioners. The film ends on this Triumphalist note. It could be Franco at Burgos on October 1st, 1936.

Another indication of current attitudes is Cinco Almohadas para una noche (‘Five Pillows for a Night’). The plot concerns a girl about to get married, who sees a photograph of her mother in the house of her future father-in-law. Could he be the father she has never known? To find out, she brings together the five men closest to her mother, a famous singer during the Second Republic. It transpires that her mother slept with all five men (one of them a member of something very like the C.N.T., the Anarchist Trade Union) in a single night in 1936, shortly before the outbreak of war. By contrast her daughter, in the present, is terrified of losing her fiancé. The respect due to consecrated moral values is reserved for the present, with the censor condoning promiscuity if it is confined to an epoch when anything and everything was possible, if one is to believe the historians of the regime.

There are further recent instances of the ploys of the censor. Mogambo was revived this year. The dubbing continues to insist that Ava Gardner is Clark Gable’s sister and not his mistress. Peckinpah’s The Getaway had titles appended to the final shot, telling the audience that shortly after the action of the film the couple were caught by the police in Mexico and received hefty jail sentences. The Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races, made in 1940, circulates in a version dubbed with gags about Fidel Castro and Brigitte Bar dot.

It has been said with justice that the history of the Spanish cinema is as much the history of the films never allowed to be made as of those that were. Berlanga, for instance, has a cupboard stacked with rejected scripts. In the 1940s, there were cases of films enjoying short runs before they were withdrawn and all prints destroyed (Rojo y Negro, 1941). Or of a film being banned the day before its gala premiere and all copies being destroyed (El Crucero Baleares, 1941). The country then was glutted with German and Italian films. The film criticism of the period has to be read to be believed for its Triumphalist hyperbole and anti-Communism with a tincture of anti-Semitism. As the war was won by the side which had promised a New Order, the neo-realist trends in the Spanish cinema were quashed, trends visible in Santugini’s Una Mujer en Peligro (1935) and Puche’s Barrios Bajos (1937). It was not until Surcos (1951) by Nieves Conde and Esa Pareja Feliz (1951) by Bardem and Berlanga that any reply was made to the cloying religiosity of Sáenz de Heredia’s La Mies Es Mucha (1948) and the kitsch flamenco strain in Orduña’s La Lola se va a los puertos (1947).

The fact remains that Pío Cabanillas, the present Minister of Information and Tourism, has got to make the apertura work. He has to get it accepted by the right wing, by those responsible for the throwing of red paint and the scuffles in the projection box and the smashed windows and the bomb in connection with La Prima Angélica. Trouble arose because of the scene where Angélica’s father, wounded on the Aragon front, has (following the medical practice then normal) his arm aloft in plaster, in the position of the Fascist salute. The Secretary of the Falange received forty thousand letters demanding the banning of the film, which was seen by six ministers before being authorised without cuts. Obviously it is being pushed as a test case. If the apertura thrives it is to be hoped that Berlanga will film again in Spain. And Buñuel too, who has had trouble with the Spanish censor since 1933, when the government of Lerroux banned Land Without Bread. Although all Buñuel’s films since he left Spain have been about Spain, he has not yet dealt with the Civil War.

After thirty-five years of cultural politics, distributor, exhibitor and audience share the same mentality, described by a Spanish director recently as that of a child of fourteen. What may be the least sophisticated audiences of any Western European capital watch what must be the worst prints in Western Europe. What is needed are films which help the Spanish to face up to reality. Thirty-five years of cultural deprivations and depredations have produced an indifference which is hailed officially, on occasions like the assassination of Carrero Blanco, as serenity. What is needed, for example, are honest films about the Civil War by directors who experienced the war as adults. Sáenz de Heredia, for instance, has a project for a film about his cousin, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange.

The Spanish cinema can do nothing more worthwhile than help the Spanish people to face the past honestly, to conquer their fear of shibboleths, to slough off what Luis Carandell has aptly termed la baja calidad humana, literally ‘the low quality of human life,’ endemic since 1939, evident in thousands of books which represent a trampling on the truth appalling in its implications and which it will take decades to eradicate. In this sense the most hopeful sign in the last year was the shattered appearance of middle-aged and elderly people leaving the cinema in Madrid showing The Spirit of the Beehive. They had been forced to remember something they had been schooled to forget, something they had pretended had never existed.