Luis García Berlanga (1921 - 2010) and Juan Antonio Bardem (1922 - 2002)

Luis García Berlanga front left and Juan Antonio Bardem centre, on the set of Esa pareja feliz. Picture taken from the Berlanga Film Museum website

"[Spanish cinema] is politically ineffectual, socially false, intellectually poverty-stricken, aesthetically-void and industrially stunted" - Juan Antonio Bardem, 1955

"Berlanga is not a Communist, he is something much worse: he is a bad Spaniard" - Francisco Franco, allegedly (quoted in Marsh 2006: 122)  

   The 28th Leeds International Film Festival is currently offering a joint retrospective of the two directors - who trained at film school together - concentrating on the early stages of their careers (effectively their key films made during the dictatorship) but also including a few films made by later generations of directors who can be said to have cinematic links to Berlanga and Bardem - Víctor Erice's El espíritu de la colmena (1973), Carlos Saura's Cría cuervos (1976), and Pedro Almodóvar's Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? (1984).

   Although he co-scripted Bienvenido Mr Marshall!, arguably Bardem is somewhat shortchanged by the selection of films - the absence of Calle Mayor / Main Street (Juan Antonio Bardem, 1956) seems a glaring omission. Perhaps Berlanga's films from the period have better withstood the passing of time, their sharpness not dulled one iota (I say this having seen very few of Bardem's films). But Bardem's public criticisms of the cinema made in Spain - and his political commitment (which saw him jailed during the dictatorship - he was a member of the Communist party) - are addressed and / or echoed in the form and content of films made by Erice and Saura. The surprise is perhaps how much Berlanga and Bardem got past the censors - although their films were censored, they still seem pretty blunt in their criticisms of the regime and the Establishment - although maybe the metaphorical style of Erice and Saura (with which I'm more familiar) was a case of filmmakers learning from the postwar generation and cloaking their critique in a layer of opacity (although they still had their fair share of battles with State censorship). 

   Another connection across the years is Fernando Fernán Gómez, represented here as an actor in Berlanga and Bardem's joint directorial debut Esa pareja feliz (made in 1951 but not released until 1953) and El espíritu de la colmena, but he also worked with Saura (Ana y los lobos / Ana and the Wolves (1973), Mama cumplé 100 años / Mama Turns 100 (1979), and Los zancos / The Stiltwalkers (1984)) and Almodóvar (Todo sobre mi madre / All About My Mother (1999)). He is little known beyond the Erice film in the UK, but he was a colossus of Spanish cinema (he died in 2007) with a long and varied career both in front of and behind the camera (he had 212 credits as an actor and 30 as a director (the majority of which were also written by him)) - should I ever finish the Carlos Saura Challenge (hahaha...), I wouldn't mind investigating the films he directed.

   Although his films satirise social issues and regularly skewer the Establishment (both during and after the dictatorship), Berlanga had a more complicated political background than Bardem - Berlanga's father was a Republican who was jailed after the Civil War, at which juncture the future director joined the División Azul (a volunteer regiment sent by Franco to fight alongside the Germans on the Russian Front during World War Two), but he would later officially become 'an enemy of the regime' after the gathering known as the Salamanca Conversations in 1955 (the occasion of Bardem's infamous statement at the top of this post).

   Almodóvar's films more obviously connect with those of Berlanga (although Bardem repeatedly returned to Almodóvar's favoured genre of melodrama) - while Berlanga's work often depicts a realistic social milieu, the humour taps in to Spanish traditions of costumbrismo (effectively a series of stereotypes relating to the rural and working classes, not to be taken as realistic, which took on an ironic edge from the 1950s) and esperpento (in which a distorted version of reality is utilised in order to critique it), which can also be discerned in some of the films by the man from La Mancha (and also those of the other Spanish director who has a retrospective at Leeds - Álex de la Iglesia (who I will write about next week)).

   Both Berlanga and Bardem had long careers - the former directed his last feature in 1999, the latter in 1998 - so there are plenty more of their films to explore if the retrospective piques your interest.

I will add links to the respective reviews of the films listed below as and when they go online.

• Esa pareja feliz / That Happy Couple (Luis García Berlanga & Juan Antonio Bardem, 1953)
• Bienvenido Mr Marshall! / Welcome Mr Marshall! (Luis García Berlanga, 1953)
• Muerte de un ciclista / Death of a Cyclist (Juan Antonio Bardem, 1955)
• Plácido (Luis García Berlanga, 1961)
• El verdugo / The Executioner (Luis García Berlanga, 1963)
• El espíritu de la colmena / The Spirit of the Beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973)
• Cría cuervos / Raise Ravens (Carlos Saura, 1976)
• Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? / What Have I Done to Deserve This? (Pedro Almodóvar, 1984)

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).

Random Viewing: Classic Edition

   This blog concentrates on cinema from the 1990s onwards, but I've recently been watching a series of older films and thought that I may as well include them in the Random Viewing thread.

   First up is La escopeta nacional / The National Shotgun (Luis García Berlanga, 1978). Berlanga is a key figure in Spanish cinema (and a strong influence over a range of filmmakers of different generations) but seemingly little-known outside of Spain (in terms of the UK, his films have not been released here). I had previously seen one of his earliest films, ¡Bienvenido, Mister Marshall! / Welcome, Mister Marshall! (1952), which I enjoyed very much, and I have copies of two of his other classics (Plácido (1961) and El verdugo / The Executioner (1963) (not watched yet)) but it's quite difficult to get hold of his other films. I have discovered that some of them are available to stream (without subtitles) at Filmotech, so I'm going to work my way through them. La escopeta nacional is the first part in a comedic trilogy (followed by Patrimonio nacional / National Heritage (1980) and Nacional III / National III (1982)). This first part is set during the dying days of the Franco regime and is a send-up of the bourgeoisie at play; a hunt (a recurring motif in Spanish cinema, in part because it was one of Franco's past-times) on the estate of a somewhat unhinged aristocratic family is the backdrop for familial backstabbing, political power plays and various other grotesqueries, seen through the eyes of a Catalan businessman (José Sazatornil) who just wants to make the connections to enable him to develop a new kind of door-entry intercom. One of Berlanga's cinematic traits is the use of large ensembles (with the attendant overlapping dialogue) and there is a brilliant range of faces onscreen here, including José Luis López Vázquez, Luis Escobar, Amparo Soler Leal, Luis Ciges, and a very young-looking Chus Lampreave (a recurrent figure in Almodóvar's films). I imagine that many references went over my head as I'm not overly familiar with Spanish society of this period, but the broader references and skewering of the hypocrisies of authority hit their target. Expect the next two parts of the trilogy to make an appearance on here in the future.

   Berlanga's first feature (Esa pareja feliz / This Happy Couple (1951)) was co-directed with Juan Antonio Bardem -and it was one of Bardem's key films that I watched next. Muerte de un ciclista / Death of a Cyclist (1955) opens with the titular death as a couple hit a cyclist while driving in the countryside. Fatally, they decide not to offer assistance (the cyclist is still alive when they stop) and flee the scene as they (María José -played by Lucia Bosé- and Juan -Alberto Closas) are having an affair and do not want to expose their relationship. The event impacts on them in the same way -it reveals their true natures- but with different results: Juan, a university professor, is tortured by guilt and finding the political idealism of his youth reawakened decides that the 'right thing' would be turn themselves in; but the shallowness of María José is revealed as it becomes apparent that she will protect her social status (she is married to an important man) at all costs and shows very little concern about the life that she ended (she was driving). Throw in a blackmailer (played with a wonderful Peter Lorre-esque sliminess by Carlos Casaravilla), who may know less than than he insinuates to María José but is close enough to her husband to cause problems, and the tension amps up to Hitchcockian proportions. The film is an effective suspense drama (will the police catch them? will their affair be exposed? how will they deal with the blackmail?) but Bardem also manages to make social commentary by highlighting the gap between rich and poor without turning the film into a political treatise. Muerte de un ciclista has received the Criterion treatment in the US but predictably is unavailable in the UK -although there does seem to be a region 2 Spanish disc. I watched it on Filmotech and it is well-worth seeking out. It is beautifully-shot and certain scenes are strikingly (and memorably) composed. I also liked the ambiguity of the final image. 

From the opening sequence of Muerte de un ciclista