BIBICI STORY

Influenced by the many currents that coexisted freely, without dogma or sectarianism – including the American underground, the most radical achievements of the Nouvelle Vague (Godard and Rivette), artists’ cinema derived from Fluxus and Pop Art, British structural film, and French Lettrist cinema – Spanish filmmakers managed to complete a series of movies in just a few years and with minimal resources. Distributed only through clandestine channels, these films aimed to sweep away auteur film models in fashion during the late Francoist period with a typically modernist slate-cleaning gesture. The Neo-vanguardia was a diverse and heterodox movement by definition, condemned to very limited audiences at university film clubs and private screenings in apartments. The elitist films from the Escuela de Barcelona took themselves too seriously, whereas those from the Neo-vanguardia that we are screening at the Festival embraced the pleasure of destruction and nihilist laughter, the ruthless joke and deconstruction. The EOC formalism was surpassed as a late-bourgeois legacy: consequently, intellectuals flirting with post-1968 revolutionary left-wing figures, who posed no substantial threat to the regime, were a constant target, as they were taunted for their empty rhetoric language and their thinking, lacking a basis in praxis. After a good post-ideological laugh, younger filmmakers dream of an image that finally returns to its original purity, the luminous white of cinema screen. If anything, cinema could be restarted by filming the wavy screen of a home TV, i.e., an image that is no longer a faithful reproduction of reality, but rather its reverse, fluctuating between abstraction and representation – an ironic message to announce upcoming postmodernism.

New Forms and Research in the Final Years of the Spanish Dictatorship

a programme curated by Federico Rossin

In recent years, a whole landscape of experimental films and directors from the last decade of Franco’s dictatorship has resurfaced from the vaults of Spanish film archives. We had read something about them in rare catalogues and books² convinced that their work was lost forever, swallowed first by clandestinity under the dictatorship and then by an archival ideology that tends to preserve only well-known ‘masterpieces.’ On the 90th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War, we present an overview to go beyond the already canonised Escuela de Barcelona, that is, to discover a filmmaking scene that challenged propaganda by renewing film language through feminism, structuralism, situationism as well as references to contemporary post-minimal art, the theatre of Brecht and Artaud, and serial and dodecaphonic music. By screening rare and amazing films, we aim to depict the lives of very young artists devoted to experimentation who took real risks in the face of fascism eschewing superficial militantism and the adoption of content devoid of genuine innovation in terms of language and form. This was a generation on the margins of history and film history, a lost generation that is still little studied or considered, a generation whose voice is now more necessary than ever.

2. See at least the pioneering yet still essential book edited by Eugeni Bonet and Manuel Palacio, Práctica fílmica y vanguardia artística en España 1925-1981, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, 1983.