MARGARITA Y EL LOBO

This programme has a threefold goal: to showcase two fundamental works of the young Spanish cinema of the late 1960s that were never released in Italy; to discuss the ambiguities and pitfalls of the educational system at the state film school under the Franco dictatorship; and to recount a sensational case of censorship that exposed the regime’s violence and intolerance of emancipation and feminism. Founded in 1947, the Escuela Oficial de Cinematografía (EOC) was like an oasis where students could watch,4 learn, and make films that would never have been shown in Spanish movie theatres at the time. However, in the final years of the dictatorship, when the regime was disguising itself as tolerant and an advocate of avant-garde arts in front of the international community, the EOC students were subjected to oppression that ended by compromising their careers. Antoñito vuelve a casa and Margarita y el lobo, both graduation films, were brutally censored, killing the careers of the budding directors from the onset. With a merry ferocity and black humour, both works targeted the patriarchal, repressive ideology of family, marriage, State and Church. These attacks were not delivered based merely on ambiguity, symbolism, or allegory as had been the case for previous generations, who adopted either a realism textured with symbolism (one name for all: Carlos Saura) or an elegant, abstract formalism (one name for all: Pere Portabella) – these were tolerated if not ignored by the regime censorship on the grounds of being scarcely offensive. Adopting a novel approach to storytelling, a hybrid, mongrel form, a heterogenous and elusive style, Revuelta and Bartolomé launched a radical, ruthless critique of the figures of the father and the male, the priest and the fascist – those who had reigned over Spain undisturbed since April 1st, 1939, the day the Civil War ended and Franco secured victory.

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.