El cine de la Transición

Political and social transition from dictatorship to democracy (1965–1985) reflected in Berlin Arsenal’s film collection.

Of the 28 Spanish films in the Arsenal's film collection, 23 were made between 1965 and 1985. Years ago, I looked at these two decades, characterized by the political and societal transition from the late Franco era to democracy, and examined the question of how the commercialization of Spanish art in the 1960s and regime change triggered by the dictator's death in 1975, was reflected in the country's quotation art. Within the Living Archive context, my questions will focus on the cinema of these years, which is known as “Cine de Transición.”

In other curatorial contexts, the trash qualities of Spanish mainstream films and B movies of the 1960s and 70s have been highlighted: For example, in Berlin's Zeughauskino's season "The Celluloid Curtain – Europe’s Cold War" or in the "Blancanieves y los Siete Lobos" series on Spanish horror and exploitation cinema organized by the "Friends of weird films". By comparison, the focus of the Arsenal collection lay and lies on the political and "alternative" cinema of the Iberian Peninsula. Catalan underground cinema is represented by its main works (but unfortunately in most cases the quality  of the copy is very bad). In recent years, the "Cine Clandestino" made by Llorenç Soler, Helena Lumbreras, Mariano Lisa, Pere Portobella and others has been presented by Pragda in New York for example, and in 2010 it was shown in Berlin ("Clandestí. Invisible Catalan Cinema" at Babylon in Mitte and the "Gefährliches Kino" colloquium at the Deutsche Kinemathek).

My project centers on the post-Franco works of Antoni Padros, Basilio Martin Patino, Jaime Chávarri, Albert Boadella, Francesc Bellmunt, Jaime Camino, Ventura Pons, Iñaki Nuñez, Álvaro del Amo, Francesc Ribera and José Luis Guerín. These films found their way to the Berlin Film Festival’s International Forum of New Cinema and into the archive of the "Friends of the German Film Archive" from 1976 to 1985.

They give a sense of the social transformation that took place against a backdrop of newly-gained freedom of opinion and the abolition of censorship in 1977 on the one hand, and on the other of how the enormous need to examine 40 years of suffering found its way onto the screen. There are films, such as the essay GUERNICA ARDE and the documentaries LA VIEJA MEMORIA and EL CAUDILLO, which turn to the long overdue public examination of the events since the foundation of the republic in 1931 and settle scores with the lies and propaganda maintained by the regime for decades. There are films – fictional or documentary – in which the executions of opposition figures in the last years of the dictatorship are treated, such as LA TORNA and TOQUE DE QUEDA. Others make clear how a crusade ("Cruzada") was conducted in this reactionary, Catholic and Falangist country against homosexuality and transvestism. They also show that the long desired for point has finally come to follow up on the libertism of the 30s and the heritage of Federico Garcia Lorca. (OCANA, RETRAT INTERMITENT and A UN DIOS DESCONOCIDO)

But there is also a trend with the end of state repression that harbors a distrust of the political and shies away from contemporary history. Antoni Padros, the director of the 1976 anarchistic anti-Hollywood epic SHIRLEY TEMPLE STORY, is quoted as saying "that the most subversive thing one can do in cinema these days is make a completely romantic film." (Interview in: "El viejo topo", Madrid, January 1978) DOS by Álvaro del Amo and LOS MOTIVOS DE BERTA by José Luis Guerín belong to this trend.

In 2006, the historian Josefina Martínez published an article called "Tal Como Éramos. El cine de la Transición Política Española" in the magazine Historia Social (Nr. 54). Thus, she was not only quoting the Spanish distribution title of Sidney Pollack’s THE WAY WE WERE (1973) but also displaying her desire, as part of her reflection on film history, to find out more about herself and the rapid social transformations of the time. Analogously (and to mark a boundary), the title of my curatorial excursion into this era of Spanish cinema, in all its variety and multilingualism, could be "El cine de la Transición – tal como fue (re-)presentado en Berlín".

The objective of the project is a commentated film series that looks at the films of the underground and others made in the last decade of the Franco era and available in the archive, such as the Spanish (!) version of Helma Sanders-Brahms film essay THE INDUSTRIAL RESERVE ARMY. The idea is that the series will tour Germany’s communal cinemas as a film package in 2013.