Esto no es un juego: The serious mayhem of Álex de la Iglesia

A devilish communication in El día de la bestia

   The Leeds International Film Festival 2014 has two Spanish cinema retrospectives. The first to get underway was the Berlanga and Bardem one, but this past weekend the Álex de la Iglesia retrospective began with El día de la bestia (my favourite of his films) screening to coincide with the Fanomenon Day of the Dead 8.
   Apart from El día de la bestia (1995), the retrospective is skewed towards de la Iglesia's more recent films. It's a shame that La comunidad / Common Wealth (2000) wasn't included, not least because it features Carmen Maura on top form, but the four films together capture various facets of the director's career. I have something of a mixed relationship with his films - I enjoy the dark humour, excessive mayhem, and cinematic brio, but find many of the representations of women problematic. Balada triste de trompeta is a case in point and the film manages to be both hypnotic and deeply unsettling at the same time. I think it's his most interesting film so far - if you've got the stomach for it (it's probably also his most violent film, which is saying something), it's well worth catching. I'm reviewing all four films for Take One (with an additional review of El día de la bestia for Eye for Film) and will add the links below as and when the reviews appear online.

• El día de la bestia / The Day of the Beast (1995)
• Crimen Ferpecto / Ferpect Crime (2004)
• Balada triste de trompeta / The Last Circus (2010)
• Las brujas de Zugarramurdi / Witching and Bitching (2013)

Preview: Spanish cinema at the 28th Leeds International Film Festival

El verdugo / The Executioner (Luis García Berlanga, 1964)

   The 28th Leeds International Film Festival begins this week, running between 5th - 20th November, and an unusually high number of Spanish films are screening there.
   As I mentioned in my previous post, Sobre la marxa / The Creator of the Jungle (Jordi Morató, 2014) will be showing, but there are also two Spanish retrospectives: one combining the early films of Luis García Berlanga and Juan Antonio Bardem with a few of their cinematic descendants (with films by Víctor Erice, Carlos Saura, and Pedro Almodóvar), and the other featuring the mayhem of Álex de la Iglesia (playing as part of the Fanomenon strand). Full details of screening times for all of the Spanish films can be found here.
   I'll be reviewing the Spanish films - and others - for Eye for Film and Take One. My intention is to put up a post here for each of the two retrospectives with a brief overview and collate the links to the relevant reviews. Sobre la marxa will get its own post because it fits with my current documentary focus, and the screening of Cría cuervos / Raise Ravens means that the Carlos Saura Challenge will restart (as I'll be reviewing the film as well, that extended post may not appear until the week after the festival).

My current obsession:

"Balada Triste de Trompeta" Title Sequence from David Guaita on Vimeo.


    Balada triste de trompeta is one of the films that I'm hoping to write a longer piece about. At the moment, however, I have become slightly distracted by the opening credits, which manage to condense around forty years of Spanish history into just over two minutes. They are designed by David Guaita (incidentally, I think that all of the reviews I've read mention the opening credits in glowing terms, but none of them actually mention the name of the designer), and you can read an interview with him (in English) about the process of making the sequence on his blog.
    I think that he’s right that the sequence probably has more impact for a Spanish person, but even as a non-Spanish person who does not recognise every individual included (I’ve actually worked backwards by making a list of key figures in the regime and then googling them to find out what they looked like, and I also looked at the list of people thanked by Álex de la Iglesia in the end credits to put a few more names to (the non-political) faces), the combination of the music with the rhythm of the cuts and the intercutting with icons of horror cinema gives a sense of deep foreboding.
    When I’ve got a bit more time, I’ll write a detailed piece about it because I think that these two-and-a-bit minutes are a mini-masterpiece of filmmaking.

Not-So-Random-Viewing: Álex de la Iglesia Edition

Clockwise from top left: Balada triste de trompeta / The Last Circus (Álex de la Iglesia, 2010), 800 balas / 800 Bullets (Álex de la Iglesia, 2002), The Oxford Murders (Álex de la Iglesia, 2008), El día de la bestia / Day of the Beast (Álex de la Iglesia, 1995).

   Balada triste de trompeta featured in one of my first posts on this blog as one of the films from last year that I most wanted to catch up with in 2011. I'm going to write a standalone post about the film in (hopefully) January -I need to watch it again before attempting to write anything of any decent length and I won't have the time until after Christmas. [I know I quite often say that and things still haven't materialised, but Nadie hablará de nosotras cuando hayamos muerto and a joint post about Los lunes al sol and Biutiful are still percolating in my brain, honest].
   However, on first impressions it strikes me as a culmination of de la Iglesia's work to date and it will be interesting to see where he has gone with his next film, La chispa de la vida (due for release in Spain in January); Balada triste de trompeta almost feels like an end point in terms of certain themes that recur across the director's work. It is unmistakably 'an Álex de la Iglesia film' in terms of the vividness and inventiveness of the imagery and an extremity of violence that takes on an almost cartoon-like quality; this is filmmaking that is by turns both exhilarating and highly disturbing. The circus is the perfect setting for the lunacy, violence, dark humour, and cruelty that run through de la Iglesia's films; given the miscreants, misfits, and malcontents who populate his films, it is almost a surprise that he hasn't set a story in this world before (although several of his films take place within an entertainment setting -a television comedy double-act in Muertos de risa and a Western sideshow spectacle in 800 balas).
   It was the sense that Balada represents a culmination of his work that made me watch the only two of his films that I hadn't seen previously: 800 balas and The Oxford Murders. 800 balas is in many ways a paean to cinema, filmmaking, and the type of films 'they don't make anymore'. The film takes place on old film sets in Almeria (the location for many Westerns filmed in the 1950s/60s, including Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy) where a former stuntman (Sancho Gracia) reenacts his glory days with a gang of reprobates as they stage a 'Western sideshow' for the dwindling number of visiting tourists. It is a warm tribute to a world that no longer exists. I had two surprises watching The Oxford Murders -1) that it was nowhere near as bad as the UK reviews had led me to believe, and 2) how little of de la Iglesia's normal visual style it contained; it was as if the tepid English sunlight had diluted his usual visual dazzling.
   Then I decided to rewatch El día de la bestia because it is my favourite of his films (and one of my favourite films, full stop) - and as it takes place on Christmas Eve it seemed appropriately festive (insofar as a film about a priest (Alex Angulo), a TV psychic / paranormal expert (Armando de Razza), and a death-metal fan (Santiago Segura) attempting to stop the birth of the Antichrist can be 'festive'). I've never understood why it isn't available in the UK (likewise his Carmen Maura-starring La comunidad (2000)) given that several of his other films are, and it currently also seems to be OOP in Spain. If you get the chance to see it, do so -it is very funny and a deeply affectionate take on the horror film.

Álex de la Iglesia’s Goya speech, 13th February 2011:

Someone has probably already translated this somewhere, and Alt Film Guide has a condensed version here, but this is my translation based on the transcript that El País put online almost immediately after the speech was given (they also have video). Please let me know if there are any errors (there were a couple of phrases I was unsure of).