MONEGROS

To combat the propaganda disseminated by NO-DO state-controlled cinema newsreels and documentaries, the Spanish experimental filmmakers opted for a radical critique based on film ontology and documentary realism rather than adopting a militant, frontal approach that would essentially mirror the regime’s strategy. In their view, the transparency of images was nothing else than an imposture, and objectivity a myth that belied underlying manipulation. They even attacked direct cinema – hardly practised in the Spanish film industry of the 1960s – for not being the right form to ‘give voice’ to the Spanish people, who were subjugated and silenced by censorship and the police state. Acknowledging their descent from the meta-documentary cruelty found in Luis Bunuel’s Land Without Bread (1932) and José Val del Omar’s Elementary Triptych of Spain (1953-1961), experimental documentary filmmakers from late Francoism undermined the conventional model of ‘cinema of the real’ precisely because they reject its immediacy. In their films, the world shown by cinema is merely a representation, at best a reflection, and not a hallowed recording of the visible. They expose the mechanisms, logic, and construction materials at work in said representation. As a consequence, they developed a form of documentary cinema that is conceptual and theoretical, self-reflexive and deconstructionist. The modernist arsenal (meta-cinema, the cinema machine, the film en train de se faire) no longer nods to the intellectual audience, pleased with the Brechtian game on offer: these films were subtle ploys that finally allowed directors to fight on equal terms against the lies of Francoism and the false paradise of consumption promised by the society of the spectacle.

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.