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Abstract
This article argues that Carlos Saura's 1964 film biography of the 1830s Andalusian bandit El Tempranillo, Llanto por un bandido, provides an insight into the impact of the War of Independence (1808–1814) and its aftermath on bandits in terms of physical and mental trauma, their involvement in politics and their interaction with civil society. Saura and his co-screenwriter used the French authors Théophile Gautier and Prosper Mérimée in their research on the period, thus incorporating views of Spain emanating from the culture of the Napoleonic aggressor. This, combined with the fact that the incorporation of outlaws into militia resistance was a common feature of the Napoleonic wars, produces a very complex backdrop for the film. If we add to this considerations relevant to censorship of the arts in Spain in the early 1960s, a flawed film which has not been seen as important in Saura's oeuvre becomes a very interesting witness to a century and a half of Spanish history.
Notes
1 Augusto M. Torres & Vicente Molina-Foix, ‘From Black Spain to Silver Bears, Part One’, in Carlos Saura: Interviews, ed. Linda M. Willem (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2003), 3–16 (p. 7). All interviews cited are reproduced as translated in Willem's edition.
2 See Francisco de Goya, Desastres de la Guerra (Calcografía Nacional, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid), <http://www.realacademiabellasartessanfernando.com/es/goya/goya-en-la-calcografia-nacional/desastres-de-la-guerra> (accessed 8 May 2017), plate 34 Por una navaja, plate 35 No se puede saber por qué for the executions and possibly also plate 64 Carretadas al cementerio for the cart in which the prisoners arrive. See also Juan Carlos Rentero, ‘Interview with Carlos Saura’, in Carlos Saura: Interviews, ed. Willem, 22–31 (p. 24).
3 Torres & Molina-Foix, ‘Black Spain to Silver Bears’, 7. There is probably a slip of the pen in the translation of this 1968 interview with Saura by Augusto Torres and Vicente Molina-Foix. The text mentions Buñuel as the hangman (verdugo, presumably) and Bardem et al. as the executioners, but this should probably have been translated as prisoners or executed, since there is only one executioner in the scene. This is Buñuel, and he can be seen checking the turning handles (the garrottes) on each mechanism as Buero Vallejo reads out the sentences. See Marvin D’Lugo, The Films of Carlos Saura: The Practice of Seeing (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1991), 48.
4 Saura's recollection in the early 1980s that the censorship of this scene related to the execution by garrotte of the communist Julián Grimau in April 1963 (though partly misplaced since Grimau was, in fact, executed by firing squad) is one reason why commentators have read Llanto por un bandido as a gnomic commentary on the Franco regime. See Gail Bartholomew, ‘The Development of Carlos Saura’, Journal of the University Film and Video Association, 3 (1983), 15–33 (p. 24) and D’Lugo, The Films of Carlos Saura, 47.
5 See Prosper Mérimée, Lettres d’Espagne, préface de Gérard Chaliand (Bruxelles: Éditions Complexe, 1989); Prosper Mérimée, Viajes a España, trad., prólogo, notas & cronología de Gabino Ramos González (Madrid: Aguilar, 1988). The historian, diarist, liberal politician and bullfighting aficionado Natalio Rivas Santiago published a biography of El Tempranillo: José María, ‘El Tempranillo’: historia documental de un bandido célebre (Madrid: Mediterráneo, 1945). Saura and Camus may also have read Natalio Rivas’ La Escuela de Tauromaquia de Sevilla y otras curiosidades (Madrid: Gráficas Uguina, 1939) and his Toreros del romanticismo: anecdotario taurino (Madrid: Aguilar, 1947), both with prefaces by the great early twentieth-century matador, Juan Belmonte. See D’Lugo, The Films of Carlos Saura, 46.
6 Bartholomew, ‘The Development of Carlos Saura’, 22.
7 Charles Davillier, Voyage en Espagne (Paris: Hachette, 1874). These travel accounts were published in instalments in Le Tour du Monde between 1862 and 1873.
8 D’Lugo, The Films of Carlos Saura, 46.
9 Benjamin Disraeli, Home Letters Written by the Late Earl of Beaconsfield in 1830 and 1831, ed. Ralph Disraeli (London: John Murray, 1885), 13. Disraeli explains the Spanish bandit to his correspondents by referring to a fictional character from Alain-René Lesage's early eighteenth-century picaresque novel set in Spain, Gil Blas and real Italian bandits—evidence of the primacy of France and Italy on the British Grand Tour, with Iberia very much a second rank destination at the time.
10 The Alhambra (1851), in Washington Irving, Bracebridge Hall; Tales of a Traveller; The Alhambra, ed. Andrew B. Myers (New York: Library of America, 1991), 719–1050 (p. 730).
11 ‘[…] as a result of looking at my companion, I managed to assign him the description of José Maria, which I had seen stuck to the gates of many Andalusian towns. Yes, it's certainly him … Blond hair, blue eyes, large mouth, good teeth, small hands; a fine shirt, a velvet waistcoat with silver buttons, white leather gaiters, a bay horse … No doubt about it!’ (Prosper Mérimée, Carmen et autres nouvelles, tome 2, ed. Jean Mistler [Paris: Livres de Poche, 1983], 175–247 [p. 186]; my translation).
12 Alexandre Dumas, Impressions de voyage: de Paris à Cadix 1847–48 (Paris: François Bourin, 1989).
13 The Esercito della Santa Fede (Holy Faith Army) was a popular militia constituted in 1799 by Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo to liberate Naples from Revolutionary French forces and re-instate Ferdinand IV and the primacy of the Catholic Church.
14 Claude Schopp, ‘Le Testament perdu’, in Alexandre Dumas, Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine, ed. & annoté par Claude Schopp (Paris: Phébus, 1995), 13–71 (p. 29).
15 Schopp, ‘Le Testament perdu’, 70; my translation.
16 ‘It is, we know from time immemorial, a custom for the Pope to give asylum to the brigands who lay waste the Neapolitan States; these brigands are certainly not an ephemeral blight but an ulcer inherent to the soil; in Abruzzo, in Basilicata, in Calabria, you are born a brigand from father to son, brigandry is a state; you are a brigand in the same way you are a baker; except, during four months of the year you leave your parental home in order to become a gentleman of the highways; in winter brigands stay peacefully at home, with nobody ever having had the idea of going to trouble them there. Spring come again, they spread out, and each one goes back to his usual post’ (Dumas, Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine, ed. Schopp, 901; my translation). This novel is arguably the completion of a trilogy on the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic years, which he began with Les Compagnons de Jéhu in 1857, followed by Les Blancs et les Bleus a decade later.
17 Dumas, Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine, ed. Schopp, 944–47.
18 Dumas, Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine, ed. Schopp, 247, 1096.
19 Dumas, Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine, ed. Schopp, 947.
20 María Victoria Rodríguez Navarro, ‘Hugo y Mérimée: entre la España imaginada y la España vivida’, in La cultura del otro: español en Francia; francés en España/La Culture de l’autre: espagnol en France; français en Espagne, coord. Manuel Bruña Cuevas, María de Gracia Caballos Bejano, Inmaculada Illanes Ortega, Carmen Ramírez Gómez & Anna Raventós Barangé (Sevilla: Univ. de Sevilla, 2006), 667–77 (p. 668), <http://www.culturadelotro.us.es/actasehfi/pdf/3rodriguezn.pdf> (accessed 7 March 2016).
21 A General Officer, The Military Exploits of Don Juan Martin Diez, ‘The Empecinado’ (London: Carpenter and Son, 1823), 90, 101. The same officer provides a translation of the letter Díez presented to Fernando VII on 13 February 1815, challenging the king's autocratic behaviour and demanding the restitution of the Cadiz Constitution. He was lucky merely to be condemned to exile in Valladolid.
22 Jean René Aymes cites Marta Giné, Francia mira la Guerra de la Independencia: la guerra en la literatura francesa del siglo XIX: Hugo, Balzac, Stendhal (Lleida: Milenio, 2008); La Guerre d’Indépendance espagnole dans la littérature française du XIXe siècle: l‘épisode napoléonien chez Balzac, Stendhal, Hugo (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008) (‘Pérez Galdós y la guerra de la independencia: las inevitables ignorancias del autor’, in Galdós y la gran novela del siglo XIX. IX Congreso Internacional Galdosiano, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 15–19 de junio de 2009, ed. Yolanda Arencibia & Rosa María Quintana [Gran Canaria: Ediciones del Cabildo de Gran Canaria, 2011], <http://actascongreso.casamuseoperezgaldos.com/index.php/cig/article/view/2076/2534> [accessed 26 April 2017].
23 See David Falkayn, A Guide to the Life, Times and Works of Victor Hugo (Honolulu: Univ. Press of the Pacific, 2001), for a sense of the contemporary reception of Hernani: ‘Those fine exaggerations with their heroic Castilian colouring, that superb Spanish emphasis, that language so lofty and imperious […] threw us into a sort of ecstasy’ (116).
24 Théophile Gautier, Voyage en Espagne (Paris: Charpentier et Cie, 1875), 108.
25 ‘The people one meets wearing modern dress, stovepipe hats, fully-buttoned frock coats, produce involuntarily a disagreeable effect on you and seem to be more ridiculous than they actually are; because they cannot really walk about, for the greater glory of local colour, wearing the Moorish albornoz of the time of Boabdil or the iron suit of armour of the time of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic. It is a point of honour with them, as with all the bourgeois of the cities of Spain, to show that they are not the slightest bit in the world picturesque and to prove their degree of civilization through trousers with footstraps. This is the idea which concerns them: they are afraid of being taken for barbarians, for backward people, and when one praises the savage beauty of their countryside, they excuse themselves humbly for not yet having railroads and lacking steam-powered factories’ (Gautier, Voyage en Espagne, 205–06; my translation).
26 Gautier, Voyage en Espagne, 108.
27 ‘The family we were travelling with was that of a rather well-educated engineer who spoke good French; they were accompanied by a large, raggle-taggle scoundrel of a man, once a brigand in José María's gang and now a mines watchman. This character followed the diligence on horseback, his knife in his waistband, his carbine on the pommel of his saddle. The engineer seemed to have a very good opinion of him; he made much of his honesty, regarding which his former occupation did not cause him the least worry; it is true that in speaking of José Maria, he told me on several occasions that he was a good and honest man. This view, which would seem to us somewhat paradoxical when applied to a highway robber, is common in Andalusia amongst the most honourable people. Spain has remained Arab in this regard, and bandits are taken easily there for heroes, an approximation which is less bizarre than it may at first appear, above all in the Meridional lands, where the imagination is so impressionable; disdain for death, audacity, detachment, alert and intrepid determination, skill and strength, all these qualities, which act so powerfully on spirits as yet little civilized, are they not those which form great personalities, and are the people so wrong to admire them in these energetic natures, even if their employment of them is to be condemned?’ (Gautier, Voyage en Espagne, 292–93; my translation).
28 See Gonzalo Sobejano, ‘Bandoleros, aventureros, guerrilleros’, Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingüe, 29:2–3 (2008–2009), 59–66 (p. 60) for a discussion of the origin of the word guerrillero in Spain in 1808.
29 Benito Pérez Galdós, Juan Martín, El Empecinado (México D. F.: Porrúa, 1975), 22.
30 Peter A. Bly, ‘On Heroes: Galdós and the Ideal of Military Leadership’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 10:3 (1986), 339–351 (p. 339).
31 Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, Sangre y arena (Madrid: Alianza, 1998), 168. The Marqués’ Andalusian accent, in contrast to the standard Castilian spoken by his much-travelled niece, Doña Sol, may be indicative of what Claver Estebán designates the ‘aplebeyamiento’ of some elements of the Spanish nobility since the eighteenth century, in a search to appropriate a more castizo identity, of the sort mentioned by Gautier. See José María Claver Estebán, ‘Sangre y arena (1916)’, in his Luces y rejas: estereotipos andaluces en el cine costumbrista español (Sevilla: Fundación Pública Andaluza, 2012), 260–70 (p. 263).
32 Galdós, Juan Martín, El Empecinado, 21.
33 Blasco Ibáñez, Sangre y arena, 203.
34 Blasco Ibáñez, Sangre y arena, 209–10.
35 Claver Estebán, ‘Sangre y arena (1916)’, 269.
36 Daniel Sánchez Salas argues that this may be an editorial decision taken exclusively by Max André. See Daniel Sánchez Salas, ‘La novela en el cine mudo: Blasco Ibáñez y su adaptación de Sangre y arena (1916)’, in Reescrituras fílmicas: nuevos territorios de la adaptación, ed. José Antonio Pérez Bowie (Salamanca: Univ. de Salamanca, 2010), 159–76 (p. 169).
37 Claver Estebán, ‘Sangre y arena (1916)’, 269.
38 Bartholomew, ‘The Development of Carlos Saura’, 22.
39 D’Lugo, The Films of Carlos Saura, 46, citing José Luis Egea & Santiago San Miguel, ‘Entrevista con Carlos Saura’, Nuestro Cine, 15 (1962), 33–35.
40 Torres & Molina-Foix, ‘From Black Spain to Silver Bears’, 7.
41 The visual reference is to Duelo a garrotazos (1820–1823), Museo del Prado, Madrid, <https://www.museodelprado.es/coleccion/obra-de-arte/duelo-a-garrotazos/2f2f2e12-ed09-45dd-805d-f38162c5beaf> (accessed 26 April 2017).
42 Bartholomew, ‘The Development of Carlos Saura’, 23; Antonio Castro, ‘Interview with Carlos Saura’, in Carlos Saura: Interviews, ed. Willem, 115–43 (p. 118).
43 D’Lugo, The Films of Carlos Saura, 46.
44 Manuel Barrón y Carillo, La cueva del gato, Museo de Bellas Artes, Sevilla, <http://www.museosdeandalucia.es/cultura/museos/MBASE/index.jsp?redirect=S2_3_1_1.jsp&idpieza=57&pagina=4> (accessed 26 April 2017).
45 Bartholomew, ‘The Development of Carlos Saura’, 24.
46 Torres & Molina-Foix, ‘From Black Spain to Silver Bears’, 7.
47 Torres & Molina-Foix, ‘From Black Spain to Silver Bears’, 8; Bartholomew, ‘The Development of Carlos Saura’, 23.
48 The skirmish was supposed to have been a full-scale battle, but Saura's shoe-string resources could not finance such a large-scale undertaking (see Torres & Molina-Foix, ‘From Black Spain to Silver Bears’, 8).
49 Torres & Molina-Foix, ‘From Black Spain to Silver Bears’, 7.
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.