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ABSTRACT
This essay explores the resonances between two moments in Spanish alternative film-culture history: the 1930s and the 1970s. We analyze how an anachronistic network of referents and practices regarding the democratization of film production and the political potential of nonprofessional film technologies was articulated across epochs. We locate these practices in an expanded genealogy of political nontheatrical film culture, from which the Spanish context has been largely excluded. To conceptualize these transhistorical echoes, we draw on some contributions elaborated by Jacques Rancière around the idea of anachronism and the missed encounters between radical theory and practice. As our case study, we examine how the project of an alternative film culture envisioned in the 1930s by radical film critic Juan Piqueras irrupted into two radical film formations that emerged in Spain in the 1970s: a new generation of radical critics known as the “Nuevo Frente Crítico” and a series of manifestations of militant cinema taking place in Catalonia.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the panel “Spain 1930/1970: Political Documentary and Film Education on the Brink of Social Rupture” (at Visible Evidence XXII, August 2015) and in the seminar “Anachronism and the Experimental Filmic Imagination” conducted by Sara Nadal-Melsió at New York University (Spring 2015). The authors are grateful for the very helpful feedback triggered by both presentations. Special thanks to Jordana Mendelson, Masha Salazkina, Lur Olaizola, Vicente Rubio-Pueyo, and Patrick Brian Smith.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Enrique Fibla-Gutiérrez is a PhD candidate in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. He is currently working on a dissertation on noncommercial cinema during the Spanish Second Republic (1931–1939), focusing on the relationship between film culture and the emergence of new social, political, and cultural formations. He has published in the Catalan Journal of Communication and Cultural Studies, among other journals. He is currently coediting a special issue of Film History titled “Towards a Global History of Amateur Film Practices and Institutions” and has an advanced contract for a coedited volume titled A Global History of Amateur Film Cultures for University of Indiana Press, as well as a forthcoming article in Screen. Email: [email protected]
Pablo La Parra-Pérez is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. He is currently working on a dissertation examining the articulations between militant film culture and political dissidence in Spain in the 1960s and 1970s. His academic work has been published in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies and Sociologias, and in volumes such as 1968 and Global Cinema (edited by Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi, Wayne State UP, forthcoming 2018) and Antoni Abad: megaphone.net/2004-2014 (edited by Roc Parés, MACBA-Turner, 2014). In 2016, he curated the artistic research project Europa, futuro anterior for Tabakalera-International Centre for Contemporary Culture. Email: [email protected]
Notes
1. “The proletariat must not consider amateur cinema as anything but a weapon with which to fight the social and cultural battle that is being waged. For this very reason, the proletariat must do everything necessary to seize it and train itself in its use.” All translations are ours, except where otherwise stated.
2. “Alternative filmworkers must instill (and promote) the importance of the cinematic sniper who, equipped with his S8mm camera, films what happens around him.”
3. For a detailed account of this generation of interwar film critics, see Gubern, Proyector de Luna. Although in this article we focus on Piqueras, to sketch an expanded leftist film front we should also mention, among others, film critic Mateo Santos (see Martínez Muñoz) and filmmakers Armand Guerra (see Carratalá) and Luis Buñuel (see Gubern and Hammond). Nonetheless, unlike Piqueras, they did not envision the type of organizational structures that the Valencian critic attempted to put in place (except for Santos, who created the journal Popular Film in 1926 and the Asociación Cinematográfica Española, ACE, in 1932).
4. Giménez Caballero founded the bourgeois-oriented Cineclub Español in 1928, where Piqueras and Luis Buñuel worked as programmers. After Giménez Caballero embraced fascism, the latter distanced themselves from him, creating their own Cineclub Proa Filmófono in 1931 (also with a highbrow scope). As we will see, Piqueras later attempted to emulate the organizational structure of these bourgeois clubs but with a proletarian audience in mind.
5. For more detailed information about Piqueras’s trajectory, see Llopis, Ramos Arenas and Touboul.
6. For example, in the foundational works of Malte Hagener on the emergence of film culture and the avant-garde, the Spanish context is completely ignored. Moreover, the only mentions of Juan Piqueras wrongly identify him as “Piqueraz” (“Moving forward” 147) and as a fascist! (“Mushrooms” 160).
7. Although there is no space to explain this history in detail, the outbreak of the Civil War triggered an array of revolutionary film practices including the collectivization of film industries in Barcelona and Madrid, the production of feature and propaganda films and the distribution of Soviet films addressed to workers and soldiers on the frontlines. Of course, Piqueras’s work with Nuestro Cinema, alongside that of critics like Mateo Santos with Popular Film, greatly influenced these occurrences. See Cabeza, Fibla-Gutiérrez, and Salazkina and Noguer.
8. Salazkina has expanded on this network of references elsewhere (see her “Moscow-Rome-Havana”).
9. The term is Lucien Febvre’s (qted. in Rancière, “The Concept” 21). Rancière has elaborated on this problem in The Names of History.
10. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the radicalization and expansion of the anti-Franco opposition in universities, factories, popular neighborhoods, and even in the form of armed struggle. After an ultimately cosmetic “liberalizing” hiatus in the 1960s, the regime, under the control of the most reactionary wing of the Francoist bloc, responded with several states of exception and the massive imprisonment of dissidents. While many oppositional filmmakers had famously reached a tacit, and paradoxical, agreement with the film administration of José María García Escudero between 1962 and 1969 (the so-called posibilismo), his successors mirrored the repressive turn of the regime with rigid censorship practices, to which the counter-forces of film culture reacted with various tactics, as we will see in the course of this article.
11. Beyond the fundamental elaboration of the concept of “afterlife” in Ross’s May ’68, see the most recent developments in Communal 6–7.
12. Marta Hernández (1973–1976) included Carlos Pérez Merinero, David Pérez Merinero, Javier Maqua, Francisco Llinás, Julio Pérez Perucha, and Alberto Fernández Torres. F. Creixells (1974–1976) was made up of Ramón Herreros, Gustavo Hernández, Félix Fanés, Ramón Sala, and Julio Pérez Perucha. See Aranzubia Cob and Nieto Ferrando 64–65 and García-Merás 33–36. Marta Hernández’s members were mostly close to militant groups to the left of the Spanish Communist Party such as Movimiento Comunista and Bandera Roja (Prieto Souto 132–77). The gender bias of these all-male collectives is problematic and remains to be researched – particularly in the case of Marta Hernández, whose female moniker overexcited the imagination of the highly patriarchal milieu of the Spanish Left (García-Merás 40n75).
13. Harnecker was indeed the translator of the Spanish editions of Althusser’s For Marx (La revolución teórica de Marx) and Reading Capital (Para leer El capital), published in 1968 and 1969, respectively. For an exhaustive account of the reception of early Althusser in Spain, particularly in the period 1959–1979, see Vicente Hernando. See also Vidal Estévez 203.
14. Neither the 1953 Grupo Piqueras nor Juan Antonio Bardem, its most prominent member, developed a specific interest in the kind of noncommercial film practices that defined Piqueras’s project (Cerón, El cine 62). As for the title of Nuestro Cine, Román Gubern defines it as a reference addressed to well-informed militants (Viaje de ida 179). Although Nuestro Cine paid some attention to “independent” films shot in 16mm in later issues, noncommercial film culture was undoubtedly marginal in relation to the journal’s main attention to the commercial screen. It is worth noting that the later “Grupo Juan Piqueras” had explicit links with Marta Hernández: one of its members coauthored a book with the collective (Revuelta and Hernández).
15. The Pérez Merineros’s problematic insistence on the Spanishness of this materialist tradition echoes disputes over the formation of a “national culture” that could also be traced back to the 1930s and the debates that motivated the foundation of Nuestro Cinema. For an exhaustive account of this complex problem, see García Carrión.
16. “It is not a matter of mechanically and ahistorically subscribing to Nuestro Cinema’s proposals – which must be subjected to analytical surgery after this first stage of ‘field work’ in which we are currently immersed – but of reprising a crippled discourse and approach an era of still unresolved contradictions.”
17. The book was published in 1976 and included texts published since 1974 as well as previously unpublished essays.
18. “Knowledge is action. Science is not about extracting the truth as pure data, knowing is not copying the real but acting on it, transforming it.”
19. For a general overview of the assimilation of Althusserian theory in film studies, see Philips.
20. Later on, E. P. Thompson argued in similar terms that Althusserian theorists were “the products of a particular ‘conjuncture’ which has broken the circuits between intellectuality and practical experience … reproducing continually the elitist division between theory and practice” (3).
21. In Spain, criticism against the distance between Althusserian “theoretical practice” and actual forms of political resistance was available as early as 1971 (see Piera et al.).
22. The new policy of the Comintern was expressed in a now famous speech, “Unity of the Working Class against Fascism”, by Georgi Dimitrov – general secretary of the Communist International at the time (Dimitrov 86–119).
23. This conception has been maintained with varying nuances by a number of scholars. See Aranzubia Cob 143–45, Méndez Leite 152 and Porter i Moix 244.
24. “Contemporary film clubs are not the sons of experiences such as the ones proposed by NUESTRO CINEMA. On the contrary, the conventional film club today is a weird entity through which the dominant ideology spreads, glorious and unstoppable.”
25. “ … proposal, elaborated more than forty years ago is still there. Undoubtedly waiting for better times.”
26. “Although until now we have seen more or less known films, for the future we will have films unreleased in our country, which will consolidate – we are convinced of this – our enthusiastic and honest work towards a minority cinema since we can’t talk about a mass cinema when such films are scarce to us.”
27. Julián Antonio Ramírez recalls attending a screening of Battleship Potemkin organized by the FUE (Federación Universitaria Escolar) film club in 1934, which was stopped halfway through to give notice that the Guardia Civil (military police) was waiting outside of the venue, prepared to arrest attendants for their “revolutionary fervor” (in Aranzubia Cob 146).
28. Indeed, when Nuestro Cinema recounted the state of film clubs in Spain in 1935, it acknowledged the difficulty for entities such as the Sindicato Banco y Bolsa, Cineclub Frente Universitario, Socorro Obrero Internacional and Studio Nuestro Cinema – the film club of Piqueras’s journal – to continue their operations in the climate of repression that followed the 1934 miner’s revolution attempt in Asturias (González Vázquez 11).
29. For example Léon Moussinac’s Les amis de Spartacus in France (Vignaux), the Workers Film and Photo League in the UK (Hogenkamp 28–93) and USA (Alexander 3–65), and the activities of Willi Münzenberg and the distribution company Prometheus in Germany (Welch 7). Indeed, Piqueras’s explicit mention of the “relative success” of French revolutionary cinema was surely a reference to Moussinac (“Hacia una federación” 215).
30. Ramos Arenas has analyzed in greater detail the paradoxes of Nuestro Cinema’s rejection of popular commercial cinema and its defense of a proletarian cinema that wasn’t within the reach of those same workers (226).
31. “ … without the permanent yeast of new things, we can’t channel or sustain a mass cinema movement.”
32. See Fibla-Gutiérrez 106–108.
33. “The most pertinent and open platforms for political discussion and analysis.”
34. These film-club sessions were organized by Josep Maria Dalmau, a worker-priest close to radical Christian unions such as the Juventud Obrera Cristiana (JOC) and the Hermandad Obrera de Acción Católica (HOAC). Dalmau and Pineda’s testimonies are gathered in Murcia’s Setenta y dos horas.
35. Gubern recalls an occasion when his lecture after a screening of 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet, 1957) was openly contested by the workers of the Seat automobile plant in Barcelona for considering it too moderate and bourgeois, an episode that speaks volumes about the intensity of the political discussions that took place within film-club meetings.
36. Joan Martí, cofounder of Informe 35, estimates an average attendance of 650 spectators per week (Torrell, “El Volti, Informe 35 y la vocalía de cine-clubs” 47–48). Some of Informe 35’s sessions, such as the screening of The War Game (Peter Watkins, 1965) introduced by Marxist professor Manuel Sacristán, gathered together more than one thousand spectators in 1973 (Torrell, “El Volti, Informe 35 y la vocalía de cine-clubs” 48; Balló, Espelt, and Lorente-Costa 95). As Joan Anton González describes in detail, Informe 35’s profits financed the propaganda apparatus of Worker Commissions in Barcelona (Torrell, “La cabeza invisible” 62).
37. The strategy to occupy positions in legal platforms so as to turn them against the regime, known as entrismo in the jargon of the clandestine Spanish CP, became common in some sectors of the anti-Franco opposition at the time.
38. “ … the life and essential struggles of the proletariat in the world, that shows its ideas and initiatives, its labors and problems.”
39. There has been little detailed work published on the subject, save for the monograph by Tomás i Freixa, Beorlegui i Tous, and Romaguera i Ramió and one by Torrella, which offer useful information for further research on the topic, but lack critical distance and engagement with scholarship on similar developments across the world, to the point of becoming hagiographic and locally oriented accounts of the movement.
40. For instance, amateur cinema was institutionally supported by the “Catalan Cinema Committee” in its national and international amateur film contests, and the amateurs recognized this support in their account of the Fourth International Amateur Film Contest in the journal Cinema Amateur (“IV concurs internacional” 15).
41. Indeed, a few months after the publication of the proposal in Nuestro Cinema, its director in Spain Antonio del Amo Algara organized a screening of Catalan amateur cinema in Madrid, inviting prominent members of the CEC to present their films (De la Rubia 7; Romaguera, “La Revista” 320).
42. See Michelson 52.
43. Particularly in journals addressed to non-professional filmmakers such as Imagen y Sonido (1963–1975) or Cinema 2002 (1975–1980), among others.
44. See Marsolais 160–70.
45. “Seize your camera and aim it at the heart of your problems. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (the real one) will not forgive you.”
46. “‘Culture workers’ who, aware of what should be their socially engaged practice, abandon the [film] apparatus so as to be coherent with the integrity of their principles.”
47. On this turn in Portabella’s trajectory see Company Ramón and Gómez Tarín (53–54, 71). It should be noted that both Portabella and Gubern were members of important families of the Catalan bourgeoisie – the political commitment of disaffected sons of wealthy families being a fundamental feature for understanding anti-Francoist struggles from the 1950s onwards. Younger filmmakers and activists involved in later militant film formations (such as La Central del Curt, discussed below) would represent more diverse class backgrounds.
48. “ … with tendency to turn the ideological struggle into a (technocratic) struggle in the stratosphere.” See also Aranzubia Cob and Nieto Ferrando (67). According to Prieto Souto (133), the Pérez Merineros did not participate in the edition of El aparato cinematográfico español.
49. One of the CdC’s founders, Albert López i Miró, had been directly involved in Informe 35. The other two, Josep Miquel Martí i Rom and Joan Martí i Valls, came from the film clubs Ingenieros and Mirador respectively (See Martí i Rom 8–9).
50. Specifically, it was defined in a footnote as “una curiosa muestra de las intenciones redentoristas de una pequeña burguesía que lleva su ‘radicalismo’ a la marginación autocomplaciente, al ostracismo y a la más recalcitrante inoperancia política” (“a curious example of the good intentions of a petty bourgeoisie that brings its ‘radicalism’ to a self-satisfied marginalization, ostracism, and the most recalcitrant political uselessness”) (Cine español 71n37). Note that this observation was included in the same text where the Pérez Merineros reprimanded their former comrades of Marta Hernández for not paying due attention to specific grassroots film practices!
51. We do not have space to develop this side of the argument here, but the tradition of amateur cinema epitomized by the CEC had an accommodating continuity under Francoism, and, although it was criticized for its elitist and ultraconservative policies, was still active in the 1960s and 1970s.
52. This critique was common at the time, and was subscribed to by none other than Marta Hernández, who identified the promotion of a Spanish “independent” or “underground” cinema as a mere promotion of the professional filmmakers of the future (El aparato 209).
53. “In the first place, the apparatuses are easy to use. Whether for production or projection, anyone can use them. But the most worthwhile thing is the savings represented by raw film stock, its developing, and projection. A regular projection room is often beyond the economic reach of an organization that wishes to use it. Between the film rental, the room and the costs of advertising, the budget for the meeting is almost always used up. An amateur film apparatus can be installed anywhere – any room or meeting hall will do.”For a full translation of Piqueras’s article see “Our Amateur Cinema”.
54. “CdC offers this service to extend the distribution of this kind of cinema anywhere in the Spanish state. Mobile-cinema sessions include not only film screenings, but also debates and discussions with filmmakers … The CdC thus offers to film-clubs, cultural centers, ateneos, social centers, etc. the possibility to organize alternative cinema encounters that … not only contribute to the knowledge of other filmic realities, but also promote and stimulate everywhere the possibility of producing similar practices.” There is evidence of a series of screenings organized by the CdC in rural areas in León (Antolín).
55. Films such as Entre la esperanza y el fraude (CCA, 1976) or Can Serra: La objección de conciencia en España (CCA, 1976) were among the most popular titles distributed by the CdC (Rom).
56. “We always gave more importance to practical work rather than to theoretical reflection on our own activities. Maybe because we have seen other groups – in Spain and abroad – that “made brilliant theoretical reflections but were paralyzed when it became necessary to do something concrete … We have developed a few theoretical ideas, but they have always followed on from practice.”
57. For the Spanish case, see DOCMA’s screening series “40 años no son nada” or Lidia Mateo Leivas’s work on the “emergence” of clandestine cinema. For an exploration of similar issues from an international point of view, see Debuysere and La Parra-Pérez.