Letters to Belvedere: participatory cinephilia in late Francoism

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the role of participatory cinephilia in the resistance to censorship near the end of the Franco regime in Spain (1968–1974). It takes as its case study the letters pages, or Consultorio, of “Mr Belvedere” in the commercial Barcelona-based film magazine Nuevo Fotogramas. Reconstructing as much as possible the identities and concerns of those who wrote to the magazine, the paper concentrates above all on the distinctive style and mode of address of “Mr Belvedere” and the relationship and community that he built up with suffering cinéfilos and cinéfagos deprived of films, in whole or in part, by the censor. The paper concludes that the Consultorio not only had a key function in the continued transmission of film knowledge under the dictatorship, but that Mr Belvedere’s playful and ironic style was consistent with the overall disposition of Nuevo Fotogramas, whose deliberate frivolity was in itself a challenge to the regime’s values and norms.

KEYWORDS:

• Film magazines
• Spanish cinema
• Spanish Transition
• participatory film culture
• cinephilia

Esto no es un espacio de crítica, sino de tertulia, ¿OK?

— Mr Belvedere (1972)

In Spain in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were at least two modes of struggle against the film censorship imposed by a waning dictatorship. The first was direct, earnest and widely recognized after the fact for its heroic protagonists. The second was oblique and ironic and is still much less widely acknowledged. The heroic figures of the first mode were filmmakers who defied the censor to produce films that fell foul of the regime and generated notorious controversies. The second had its base in Barcelona in the shape of the weekly film magazine Nuevo Fotogramas, which was openly frivolous in outlook but worked tirelessly to promote the freedoms that could be glimpsed beyond Spain’s borders and regularly found itself on the wrong side of the authorities, its playful disposition not just cover for political action but a kind of political action in its own right.

This article is concerned with the second mode, whose political effectivity before and during the transition to democracy is increasingly recognized by historians of Spanish cinema (see Triana-Toribio 2015; Pujol Ozonas 2011). We are specifically concerned with the ways in which this mode enabled, in the last years of Francoism, the participation of readers and budding cinephiles in a film culture that resisted the regime through lightness and archness rather than through earnest and direct confrontation. To reconstitute this cohort of participatory readers, we propose to examine one of the most enduring phenomena of Spanish film culture: Mr Belvedere, a fictional avatar who from 1950 inhabited the pages of Fotogramas and then Nuevo Fotogramas. The pseudonymous Belvedere was, and is, in charge of the correspondence pages of the magazine, and acted, while censorship was in force, as a sort of agony aunt for cinephiles deprived of the films, or parts of films, that were enjoyed freely and uncut abroad. These pages took various forms over the years, but the distinctiveness was in Belvedere’s replies in his Consultorio. Belvedere engaged in direct dialogue with correspondents who were often pseudonymous themselves, sometimes giving advice, occasionally admonishing, often gently satirizing the concerns they raised, the desires they gave voice to, in a game in which style and tone were as important as the putative content of the exchanges.

By concentrating on a selection of Belvedere’s writings in the Consultorio from 1968 to 1974, we seek to reconstruct the outlook and disposition of this community of Spanish cinephiles just before the transition to democracy. Who wrote to the magazine and why? What role did correspondence play in the evolution of Nuevo Fotogramas and its content? What forms of cinephilia found expression in the Consultorio, and what role did it play in a film culture that was subject to broad censorship and obfuscatory dubbing? Between the thriving film cultures of the 1930s and the end of censorship in 1979, film knowledge survived in Spain under inhospitable conditions. Do the thousands of pages written by Mr Belvedere represent one key and ingenious strategy in that survival? In answering these questions, we will draw on theories of participatory media and on the methods established in periodical studies for the analysis of magazines and journals.

Film journals and participatory culture

The scholarly literature on film journals and magazines mirrors the wider literature on periodicals in privileging prestigious titles, influential editors and renowned contributors, with the most attention paid, almost inevitably, to Cahiers du cinéma (see, for example, Hillier 1985; Bickerton 2009; Kehr 2011). In this vein, there are, in the Spanish context, valuable studies of important journals such as Nuestro Cinema (1932–1935) (Pérez Merinero and Pérez Merinero 1975; Ramos Arenas 2016), Primer Plano (1940–1963) (González 2004; Nieto Ferrando 2009), Cine Experimental (1944–1946) (López Izquierdo and Aranzubia 2007), Objetivo (1953–1955) (Nieto Ferrando 2009), Nuestro Cine (1961–1971) (Tubau 1983; Nieto Ferrando 2009), Film Ideal (1956–1970) (Tubau 1983; Nieto Ferrando 2009) and Contracampo (1979–1987) (Talens and Zunzunegui 2007). When the subject is popular magazines, they have typically been treated as sources for understanding the marketing and advertising strategies of the studios that also owned them, or as primary material for star studies in Hollywood and Europe (Slide 2010; Jeffers McDonald and Lanckman 2019) as well as Spain (Moix 1993; Perriam 2003).

A smaller number of studies have explored the relation between film magazines and their readers. Marsha Orgeron, for example, argues that Hollywood magazines, far from simply feeding stories to passive consumers, involved a strong “interactive culture” (2009, 3). Citing letters pages, advice columns and contests and quizzes that tested readers’ knowledge, Orgeron claims that fan magazines established a “framework of empowerment, providing a very tangible, attainable mode of participation for the otherwise potentially disconnected fan” (9). Although final authority on cinematic matters rested with the magazines, they also encouraged the authority and expertise of readers. In the British context, Mark Glancy shows how Picturegoer magazine worked hard during the Second World War to give the impression that “readers and writers of the magazine were a single community, with shared interests” and that readers could influence filmmaking through the regular surveys and polls conducted by the magazine (2011, 457). Readers, in their turn, used the letters pages to showcase their discernment and taste, demonstrating that they were “informed and astute viewers”, who had learnt through the magazine what was legitimate cinema and what was not (2011, 471). Matthew Hannah, meanwhile, considers how The Little Review borrowed strategies of reader engagement from film magazines such as Photoplay, modelling the “Reader Critic” of its letters pages on “access narratives” promoted by the film magazine (2015, 222). And in his study of early French and German film magazines, Michael Cowan argues that the participatory dimension of these periodicals was instrumental in cultivating a passion for and knowledge of cinema, a popular cinephilia. This educational function of magazines – in contests, puzzles, letters, even collaborative screenplay writing – “formed the basis for the acquisition of a cinephilic sense of self, one inseparable from the sense of belonging to a shared cinephilic community” (Cowan 2017, 33), anticipating the participatory cultures of Web 2.0 (2017, 2).

Although none of these critics are dismissive of the apparent agency granted to readers by the magazines, they are varyingly sceptical about the meaningfulness of this active participation. For Orgeron, Glancy and Hannah, the magazines give readers the feeling that they are directly interacting, or gaining “access”, but the connection is implicitly tenuous, or even manipulative. The magazines solicit controlled participation in order to keep their readers on the hook and purchasing the product. In the cases analyzed by Cowan, more important is the education of a group of readers, their constitution as a community of cinephiles, so the question of the readers’ active intervention in the magazine is less at stake, even if Cowan invokes recent theories of participatory culture to understand what is happening in magazines of the 1920s. In its most well-known formulations, the theory of participatory culture sees practices of fandom and the internet as a space “in which more people have access to the means of knowledge and cultural production and have a voice in governance and collective action” (Jenkins, Ito, and boyd 2016, 182). As Henry Jenkins, Mizuko Ito and danah boyd recognize though, even with the platforms of a networked world, the reality is often far from this ideal. A better explanatory framework for understanding reader contributions to periodicals might be found in Walter Benjamin’s comments on letters to the editor:

With the growth and extension of the press … an increasing number of readers … turned into writers. It began with the space set aside for “letters to the editor” in the daily press, and has now reached a point where there is hardly a European … who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other an account of a work experience, a complaint, a report, or something of the kind. Thus the distinction between author and public is about to lose its axiomatic character. … At any moment the reader is ready to become a writer. (2002, 114)

Readers who contributed to film magazines or participated in their many interactive practices, may not have had a direct say in film industries or “governance and collective action” in the words of Jenkins, Ito and boyd, but their presence in the pages marked the just as significant erosion of the distinction between author and reader. This was also the case with the letters pages in Nuevo Fotogramas, in which the contributions of readers are continuous with the magazine’s discourse on film, and Belvedere’s responses in the Consultorio are a way to manage that continuity and encourage a readership that drives the wider aims of the magazine.

Nuevo Fotogramas

Fotogramas was founded as a fortnightly magazine in 1946 by Antonio Nadal-Rodó and María Fernanda Gañán and converted to a weekly in 1950. Elisenda Nadal, the daughter of Nadal-Rodó and Gañán, joined as subdirectora in 1962 and took charge as director and chief editor in 1968, changing the magazine’s name at the same time, with the first new issue coming out on 29 March 1968 (see Ponga 2010, 38). It retained the name Nuevo Fotogramas until 1980, when it briefly closed and then reverted to Fotogramas on its return.¹ It was “a magazine, not a film journal; a mainstream, commercial product published by a family business which owned other magazines and was financed through sales and advertising” (Triana-Toribio 2015, 457). Nevertheless, contributors included high-profile writers Terenci Moix, Maruja Torres and Enrique Vila-Matas, as well as exiles from the defunct heavyweight film journal Nuestro Cine such as José Luis Guarner, Ricardo Muñoz Suay and Vicente Molina Foix.

Nuevo Fotogramas (NF henceforth) occupied an almost unique place in Spanish film culture in the early 1970s, as “a very peculiar hybrid of frivolous consumption, engaged cinephilia and the occasional gesture of political commitment” (Triana-Toribio 2015, 457). It was both beneficiary and product of the apertura, the dictatorship’s moment of cultural softening and gradual opening of Spain to foreign investment and commerce. The apertura saw changes to Spain’s press legislation in Ley 14/1966, de 18 de marzo, de Prensa e Imprenta, commonly known as the ley Fraga. Ley 14/1966 allowed glimpses of dissidence in the late 1960s, if not openly expressed opposition to the regime. It ambiguously enshrined freedom of expression, in theory allowed anyone to establish a magazine, loosened restrictions on editorial appointments and abolished prepublication censorship, while still allowing for the sequestration of issues should they offend the regime (see Badenes Salazar 2018, 95–99; Pecourt 2008, 102–106). These apparent new freedoms for generalist magazines, combined with the disappearance by the early 1970s of key Spanish film journals that had catered for a cinephile readership, such as Nuestro Cine and Film Ideal, meant that NF more or less had the field to itself between 1968 and 1978.² It “occupied the vacuum left by the disappearance of Nuestro Cine” (Hernández 1976, 184), while at the same time, as Triana-Toribio puts it, “never relinquishing its commercial, mainstream, and mostly middlebrow concerns” (2015, 457).

The “commercial” and “mainstream” side of NF represented continuity with Fotogramas: features on stars and stardom, on Hollywood and European cinema and pictures from the red carpet, as well as segments on Spanish cinema with a similar emphasis. At the same time the magazine in its new incarnation gently tested the limits of the ley Fraga by gradually introducing small doses of politics, and as the 1970s progressed, larger and larger doses of female nudity, the latter taken to be the primary index of newfound freedoms. To take as examples, we could consider one issue from early in this period and one from late on. Number 1023 (24 May 1968) has reclining on its cover Jane Fonda, one shoulder bare, in white jeans, while inside there is gossip about her marriage with Roger Vadim, and his previous partners (Bardot, Deneuve, etc.). The issue leads with a “Where are they now?” feature on Spanish child stars and has film, television and music reviews. It contains interviews with María José Goyanes and Claire Bloom, and also with Miguel Picazo, a Spanish director notoriously frustrated in his career by censorship after his debut La tía Tula (1964). Next to a short piece about motorcycles in cinema, illustrated by Ann-Margret astride a Moto Guzzi, there is a feature on Dark of the Sun (Jack Cardiff, 1968), a war film controversial for its graphic violence, torture scenes and male rape. In between, there is news and gossip from Barcelona, and from the film world, mainly about actors, including a short piece about Claudia Cardinale filming in Almería.

A mixed diet of sensation and titillation then, with hints of rebellion in the motorbikes, in a violent film likely to attract the interest of censors and in Picazo’s provocative complaint that in Spain “no existe una industria cinematográfica”. The centrepiece of the issue, though, is a seven-page spread from the Cannes Festival, comprising a “Diario frívolo del festival” (Fiestas 1968) and a news story on “La Batalla de Cannes”, which details the suspension of the festival in the face of protests spilling over from the events of May ’68. The story reports on the violent interruption of the screening of Carlos Saura’s Peppermint Frappé and the resignation of Louis Malle, Roman Polanski and Monica Vitti from the international jury, while also announcing Vitti’s engagement to Michelangelo Antonioni, with most of the photos in the section featuring her. Here, then, were apparently condensed all the interests of NF: stardom and festivals, politics and women’s bodies and, perhaps most importantly, excitement about a fertile film culture thriving outside Spain, but to which an elite set of cosmopolitan Barcelona hedonists had unrestricted access.

In issue 1438 (7 May 1976), eight years later, and a year after the death of Franco but before the arrival of formal democracy and the end of censorship, there is a continuation of these themes and a more direct challenge to the regime’s values. Along with the news, gossip and reviews, the issue contains a feature on Hollywood star Jennifer O’Neill, an account of political cinema in Argentina, two pages on eroticism in 1950s cinema (part of a series) and a story on Pilar Miró, one of Spain’s few women directors, next to a pictorial of Isabel Luque, draped revealingly in diaphanous white sheets and shirts. Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda make an appearance, just as they did in NF 1023. The article is in effect a chronicle of “Vadim’s women”, consisting of extracts from his autobiography Memories of the Devil, and illustrated by Fonda nude on a beach, arms and legs artfully positioned to ensure decency. It is purely chance that the two representative issues that we have chosen include Vadim and Fonda, and yet there is something appropriate about this symmetry: the French director known for his erotic cinema, the American starlet known for her political views. Vadim’s career was already in decline, and “Hanoi” Jane’s political capital was fading, but the two of them still embodied liberties tantalizingly out of reach for NF readers.

In the same prime position occupied by the Cannes report in number 1023, NF 1438 published the results of a survey of Spanish views on censorship in the cinema. The survey is illustrated with tables and bar charts, demonstrating conclusively that the majority of Spaniards want an end to censorship and do not believe that removing it will result in a decline in morality. The main point is illustrated by the story’s first image: the upward curve of a line graph following the curve of a woman’s buttocks. The accompanying text states: “La curva estadística se confunde por ahora con un símbolo manipulado, pero cierto de la libertad: el trasero” (“Los españoles y el cine” 1976, 7) The buttocks and graph also appear on the cover of the issue with the headline, “Los españoles no quieren la censura”. As Teresa M. Vilarós has noted, in late Francoism, sexual and political liberties were seen as one and the same thing: “El objeto de deseo de la España medio y tardofranquista se ha identificado repetidamente con una puesta en efecto de las llamadas libertades democráticas, aunándose éstas a una práctica de liberación sexual” (1998, 82). At NF, this conjuncture was not experienced without contradiction. Political liberty came at the cost of exploitative images of female bodies, and yet the magazine was edited by a woman and had influential female writers. Equally, “by focusing on the feminine world of consumption”, it was associated with a female readership, and its reputation for being chismosa has determined how it “has fared at the hands of film historians who privilege the masculine worlds of production in their tales of how the battle against Francoism was won” (Triana-Toribio 2015, 471–472). The feature on Pilar Miró in NF 1438 openly acknowledges the feminist movement, even if Miró says she does not want to be pigeonholed as a female director. Juxtaposed with the article about Miró is a woman in tight cutoff jeans, gazing at a wall of graffiti in an advert for sanitary pads.

Mr Belvedere

In the two illustrative issues of NF, the basic typology remains the same: Hollywood and Spanish stars, Spanish directors, film politics outside Spain, censorship, sex and eroticism in the cinema, the female body on display. But a typology alone does not capture the mood, style or sensibility of the magazine, nor does it tell us what its readers made of this cinematic miscellany and how it served their needs and aspirations. These two things – a disposition and a readership – came together in the pages overseen by Mr Belvedere. In Spain, both the Consultorio and its steward are household names, enjoying a legendary status in the country’s film culture. Mr Belvedere invariably features in encyclopaedia entries for Fotogramas and Nuevo Fotogramas, entries which get longer the more recent they are, testimony to the belated recognition of the magazine. In the entry on Fotogramas in Diccionario del cine iberoamericano, José Enrique Monterde lists some important contributors, and then writes that “[u]na firma significativa debuta en el no. 97 (22.09.1950): Mr Belvedere”. Monterde goes on to claim that the Consultorio “se convierte no sólo en una de las secciones más populares de la revista, sino en un auténtico lugar de desahogo de muchos lectores en los años oscuros de la dictadura” (2009, 22).³ And when documentary makers recently set out to chronicle the magazine’s history, they took as their point of entry its letters pages. Their title – Querido Fotogramas – alluded both to a love for the magazine and to the word with which a letter is typically begun (Oksman 2018). For many readers, Mr Belvedere and his advice page remain the most memorable aspect of the magazine, and he too played his part in its cult reputation for run-ins with the law: in 1972 he was fined three thousand pesetas for reporting on the mother-son incest in Louis Malle’s Le souffle au coeur (1971), narrowly escaping the three-month jail sentence, ten-thousand-peseta fine and nine-year ban from journalism that had been demanded by the prosecution for the crime of “escándalo público” (Mr Belvedere 1972).⁴

It is at once entirely fitting and completely unthinkable that Mr Belvedere should be accused of “escándalo público”. The Mr Belvedere of Fotogramas and Nuevo Fotogramas acquired his name and character from Sitting Pretty (Walter Lang, 1948), a film released in Spain as Niñera moderna. In Lang’s film, Mr Belvedere (Clifton Webb) is an urbane and multitalented eccentric of uncertain provenance, who responds to an advert placed by Tacey King (Maureen O’Hara) to look after her three hard-to-handle boys. Although disdainful of children, the supremely self-confident Mr Belvedere proves a highly proficient babysitter, as well as being handy in multiple other ways and eventually indispensable to the King family. Asked his profession, he states merely, “I am a genius”. He also turns out to be a writer, who composes a “screaming satire on suburban manners and morals”, based on the Kings’ bland American suburb of Hummingbird Hill. The film itself contained nothing to trouble the censors of Franco’s Spain in 1949. And yet at the same time, it is easy to see the appeal for the Fotogramas editors in this non-normative figure, ex-centric to a conservative social milieu, contemptuous of it and untroubled by its rules and rulings. Like Belvedere, Webb never married, and he was widely known to be gay, while the character of Belvedere is clearly coded queer for those in the know.

Both Fotogramas and Nuevo Fotogramas carefully guarded the real identities of the mysterious agony aunt of the Consultorio, an unsigned column which existed prior to the debut of Mr Belvedere, whose invention was partly a response to readers trying to guess the writer’s identity. It is now known that the first Mr Belvedere was the scriptwriter Luis Gosse de Blain and that Jordi Vendrell assumed the position, or shared it with Gosse de Blain, from 1955.⁵ Jaume Figueras held the reins from 1964 until 2016, with some interruptions in the 1980s when he was replaced by Àlex Gorina and Pablo López, who themselves had been consulvidentes, a neologism condensing consultante and vidente adopted by Belvedere in the late 1960s to describe those who wrote to him. Figueras had also written to the Consultorio in its early days, signing his letters “un belvederista”, and was head of publicity for the distribution company C. B. Films between 1964 and 1967. The Consultorio also benefited from access to a text and image archive dating back to Antonio Nadal-Rodó’s tenure as chief of publicity for MGM in Spain. If Mr Belvedere seemed to know everything worth knowing about cinema, it was thanks in part to the rich repository that Fotogramas and then Nuevo Fotogramas had become, both in its contributors and in its “sala de documentación”.⁶

A consultorio sentimental is an advice column, typically found in women’s magazines, curated by an older woman, or the avatar of one, who answers questions from readers on personal problems. In Spain, by far the most well-known was the Consultorio de Elena Francis, a radio programme that broadcast from Barcelona between 1947 and 1984, with a team including priests dispensing socially conservative guidance on behalf of the pseudonymous Elena Francis. It is certain that Barcelona-based Belvedere alluded to Elena Francis and was even intended as an antidote to her. The Consultorio of Fotogramas evolved over time and developed and grew especially during the first half decade of NF. At first just a single page, the letters section had by 1968 expanded to two pages, growing by 1973–1974 to four pages long, before shrinking down again to two and a half. By the time NF closed down, the name Consultorio had been dropped, replaced by “El Gabinete de Mr Belvedere”, although it later reverted to the original name and continues as the Consultorio in its current incarnation.

From the outset, the Consultorio published entire letters from readers as well as responses from Belvedere to letters that were not published, while only occasionally did he respond to a letter that was also published. When the letter was not published, Belvedere nevertheless made clear its contents in his reply, and each reply identified the pseudonym of the letter writer. To the Consultorio were added in 1972 “Belvegramas” – very short replies to simple questions – and to the section overall, a “Museo del Recorte” that hosted humorous snippets sent in by readers. Other novelties came and went over the years, but two points are critical. First, the period 1968–1974 was a moment of expansion, both of the size of the section and of Mr Belvedere’s popularity, making it the epoch of the Consultorio’s greatest prominence and prestige. Second, amidst all the changes, there was one constant, one core element to the magazine’s letters pages, that is, Belvedere’s replies, his counsel to readers and the characteristic voice in which he made them. This distinctive mix of condescension, irony and good manners can be heard in his response in June 1974 to a correspondent from A Coruña writing under the pseudonym “The Music Man”, who evidently expressed some misgivings about Bergman’s Cries and Whispers:

En primer lugar, me parece estupendo que en su oficina organizasen una especie de “mesa redonda” sobre “Gritos y susurros” en lugar de sobre la marcha del Campeonato de Liga. Lástima que su especial psicología le impida ver películas “impresionables” y no se decidiera a verla. ¡Oiga, que no es una película de vampiros! (1974b, 9)

But the droll and superior voice served more purposes than gentle mockery of timid cinephiles. The stakes were often higher, as demonstrated by this response in November 1968 to “Peter Pan” from Madrid:

De vez en cuando una carta como la suya le hace a uno reconsiderar toda su labor y le hace sentir un pequeño escalofrío. Por ejemplo, al leer que algunas de sus preguntas han quedado sin respuesta … o cuando dice si en el fondo el “cónsul” no será un pastatiempo [sic] “chic” para “niños-bien”. Menos mal que, finalmente, demuestra su adhesión – como diría un comentarista político español – y reconoce que se lo pasa bien con las páginas 2 y 3, por cursi y remilgón que sea su contenido. Oiga, su carta también es de las de “Museo”. Cuando muera, mi última voluntad será que el “Museo” se abra a los consulvidentes. ¡Y entonces habrá cada sorpresa y cada susto! … (1968b, 3)

Belvedere’s answer is on the one hand a tongue-in-cheek mea culpa for failing to respond to Peter Pan’s previous postings and on the other a put-down of his pretensions to good taste. At the same time, the response appropriates franquista language when it congratulates Peter Pan on eventually demonstrating his “adherence” to the Consultorio, as if it were a regime in its own right and implies in a coded way that Peter Pan’s letter was homophobic (by emphasising the words “chic” and “niños-bien”), even if the pseudonym has a queer resonance of its own. Belvedere’s response also obscurely hints at a censorship internal to the Consultorio itself, whose “Museum” will only open its doors to its consulvidentes upon his death, revealing plenty of surprises. Given that the Consultorio, within its letters and responses, was a window on what audiences knew and did not know about cinema under Franco, it is tempting to interpret these words as referring to what awaits consulvidentes in an undefined future when cinema is restored to them, uncut, uncensored, whole.

Consulvidentes

From the mid-1960s, and during the NF era, the Consultorio was organized under four headings, each one defining a general type of consulvidente: los curiosos, los fans, los inquietos and los belicosos. These categories give a good sense of the different modalities of cinephilia represented in NF. Los curiosos were those seeking information, wanting to know who directed a particular film, who acted in another, who won a prize or when (and if) a particular film was likely to be screened in Spain. For these correspondents, Belvedere’s answers sometimes consisted solely of lists of names of films and filmmakers. In another context, responses to los curiosos might be a mere bulletin board of movie trivia, but under a regime where knowledge of all kinds was strictly controlled, this category was inherently political, a mode of sharing more widely histories of cinema that were otherwise occulted.⁷ Los fans were the enthusiasts, those who shared with Belvedere their passions, seeking his endorsement for their tastes. Sometimes he complimented them, other times he questioned their choices, but rarely did he pour cold water on the enthusiasm itself, which he almost always encouraged, guiding consulvidentes to new films or helping them refine their likes and dislikes. The greatest compliment from Belvedere is the one he gives to “F. Caro”, whose “sinceridad … es de la primerísima división” (1973a, 12). Los inquietos is a more elusive category. Above all, it means “restless”, or even, within the setting of the Consultorio, “dissatisfied”. A consulvidente who was inquieto might want to share a discovery with Belvedere or report back from a trip abroad on the more progressive cinematic cultures of Paris or London, or even express a wish to become a filmmaker themselves. Although in all the categories the desires and aspirations of the consulvidentes were at stake, this was perhaps most evident with los inquietos. Finally, los belicosos was a label reserved for polemicists, for those who wanted to stir up controversy or start a fight with Belvedere, who by definition always had the last word.

As well as being designated curious, fanatic, bellicose or restless by the Consultorio, a large proportion of correspondents, as many as half in any issue, often more, chose to write under a pseudonym, as Mr Belvedere did. The first ever correspondent Mr Belvedere replied to was “Una rubia caprichosa” (1950, 2). Many other correspondents gave only initials, or a first name that might or might not be a pseudonym. A pseudonym provided some protection from a state apparatus that was ever alert for dissent, but adopting one was also part of the game of cinephilia that Belvedere was orchestrating. Replying to “La bestia erótica” in NF 1157, Belvedere warns, “De seguir con seudónimos como este nos vamos directamente al desenfreno, el libertinaje y la vorágine” (1970b, 4). With a pseudonym, a consulvidente could declare his or her cinematic allegiances and identifications, or demonstrate a privileged knowledge of film by alluding, for example, to an obscure (in Spain) film. Between 1968 and 1974, many of the pseudonymous writers were also regulars in the Consultorio, including, among others, “Karta” from Bilbao, “Peter Pan” from Madrid, “Cornelius von Cornelius” from Barcelona, “Diabolik” from Oviedo, “Anónimo español” from Alicante-Bilbao, “El hijo de la sosias de Gene Tierney” from Madrid and “Un gorila que no es Morgan disfrazado” from Barcelona, an allusion to Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (Karel Reisz, 1966).

The fact that so many of the consulvidentes wrote under pseudonyms makes it more difficult to say exactly who they were. The majority identified the city or town they lived in, with the largest numbers from Madrid, Barcelona and other parts of Catalonia. Other major cities were also well represented, especially Bilbao, Sevilla, Valencia, A Coruña, Gijón and Palma de Mallorca. There was also a very occasional letter from abroad – a fortunate consulvidente in London, Paris or Switzerland, either temporarily, or for good. In terms of gender, both women and men are represented in the names and pseudonyms used, with considerably more men than women between 1968 and 1974, even if the advertising in the magazine indicates a large female readership. As for age, there are few direct markers, but Mr Belvedere on occasion remarks approvingly on young cinephilia, for example, in this response to “Cornelius von Cornelius”:

Vaya, otro consulvidente precoz. De seguir la escalada de edades hacia abajo, vamos a tener que crear una sección nueva: “los párvulos”. De cualquier manera, a sus 13 abriles 13, no está mal su historial cinéfilo, habida cuenta de las dificultades con que tiene que tropezar un inquietorro de su edad para ver un cine un poco decente. (1970d, 2)

Some correspondents also refer to their military service, which means they are males of around eighteen, leaving home sometimes for the first time. One of these, “Miguel”, a fan of musicals, Belvedere cheerfully congratulates in 1970 for the “buen ambiente cinéfilo” that he has found in the army (1970j, 2).

Why did budding cinephiles like Miguel write to the Consultorio? According to Thomas Elsaesser, cinephilia is “more than a passion for going to the movies and only a little less than an attitude towards life” (2005, 27). It is also a love that is shared. By “sharing one’s likes, and dislikes and convictions with others”, says Elsaesser, cinephilia conjures up a community (31). But it is a community shadowed by a sense of loss, since cinephilia has “always been a gesture towards cinema framed by nostalgia and other retroactive temporalities, pleasures tinged with regret even as they register as pleasures” (27). In the London of the late 1960s that Elsaesser describes, this might mean, for example, a regret that the Hollywood films of the 1960s fall below the exquisite standards of the 1940s. In the democratic and relatively uncensored film culture of London, those desires and regrets could be pursued more or less freely. In Spain in the late 1960s and early 1970s, cinephilic desires arose in a very different context. Paradoxically, they might be considered ideal conditions for cinephilia, if, as Elsaesser claims, it is driven by a sentimental undercurrent of lack or loss. As Santos Zunzunegui notes, critics in Spain had to go to great lengths to keep up to date with releases and theoretical developments in film criticism, while making do with “un cine que se exhibía en nuestras pantallas bien diferente del que se veía en los países democráticos” (2016, 17).

To be a consulvidente was also to take part in this community, and many of Mr Belvedere’s correspondents embraced the term he had invented for them. In NF 1303, he writes as follows to one who signs under the name “El último tango en Belvedere Hills”:

Su sugerencia de crear una especie de “hogar del consulvidente” en cada ciudad importante para que el cinéfilo de viaje supiera donde encontrar almas gemelas no es del todo descabellada, pero yo siempre creo que el ritmo de funcionamiento de esta sección está en directa relación con el grado de aislamiento de cada uno de los que escriben. (1973c, 11)

Mr Belvedere hopes that the Consultorio functions as a home for the cinephile, a safe port to which readers can retreat, and he sympathizes with the isolation of some cinephiles. Isolation and the obstacles facing cinephiles under Francoism are common topics in the Consultorio. This is a group of cinephiles suffering for their love, who share their love of what they see and their intense frustration about what they cannot see. Consulvidentes are at the mercy of censors and dubbers, who place hurdle after hurdle in the way of the loved object. In NF 1108, responding to “Romero 2000” and to “Stefano”, empathetic Belvedere refers to “Madame Censura” as “nuestra todavía más voraz tijera” (1970l, 1970m, 3), and in NF 1137, he conjugates for “Dradog” this frustration: “Yo estoy harto, tú estás harto, él está harto. De cortes, de cambios, de prohibiciones, y de muchas cosas más” (1970e, 3).

It is in this sense that the Consultorio is a consulting room, with an almost therapeutic function for suffering cinephiles who must make do with much less than what they desire. Mr Belvedere often commiserates with those who must put up with films shown in less-than-ideal conditions and commends their efforts:

Mire, no me venga con quejas de los cortes que tenía “Grupo salvaje” en un local de centro parroquial. Eso pasa por no limitarse dicho local a la reposición de “Molokai”. (1970f, 2)

Mantener su afición al cine disponiendo de una sola sala en su pueblo (y otra al aire libre en verano) es casi un milagro. (1974c, 88)

Una nueva lamentación ante la desaparición de una de sus Salas Especiales. (1974d, 8)

Complaints about conditions in which films were seen are of course very much of a piece with cinephilia, and not just because they signal the lengths one will go to for love. As Malte Hagener and Marije de Valck note, “attention to the unique circumstances of the screening as well as the wish to retain the fleeting experience” was “one of the hallmarks of the first generation of cinephiles” (2008, 21). Salas especiales (or salas de arte y ensayo), referred to in the last response above, were exclusive theatres licensed to screen arthouse cinema in cities with over fifty thousand inhabitants from 1967, and the loss of one would have been painfully felt. They are a regular subject in the Consultorio, and Jaume Figueras had been closely involved in their establishment.

Cinéfilos or cinéfagos?

That many of the consulvidentes were self-consciously cinephilic can be seen in the pseudonyms they adopted, such as “Mamá cinéfila” from NF 1145 and “El cinéfilo de la navaja” from NF 1303. But other correspondents thought of their film consumption in more elastic terms and deliberately embraced the more flexible label cinéfago, such as “Cinéfaga 71” in NF 1173 and “El cinéfago que se adentró en el frío” in NF 1340 “Cinéfago” suggests a more varied diet of cinema that goes beyond scarce art and auteur films, a voracious appetite for all things cinematic, regardless of provenance. Indeed, on many occasions, correspondents disclose an interest in popular and art cinema in the same letter, with Belvedere’s approval.⁸ For example, to “Elena Marín”, who worries whether her tastes are too broad in NF 1137, he gives his blessing to enjoy the full spectrum of cinema from Gracita Morales to Alain Resnais (1970g, 2). It is also clear that some consulvidentes were cinéfagos by necessity. To be a Spanish cinephile was to be omnivorous because one could not be fastidious when the conditions of releases and what was on offer were so poor.

The more broad-minded cinéfago outlook extended to the magazine as a whole, which was not exclusively devoted to cinema, but also had sections on theatre, television and music and even book reviews. NF was far from being a purist film magazine, and the consulvidentes rarely objected to this fact. If one of them did make a call for purity, Mr Belvedere set them straight in no uncertain terms, as in this response to “El Conde Drácula” in NF 1145: “Le encuentro particularmente agresivo en sus cartas y especialmente en su tesis de ‘Mantenga limpio FOTOGRAMAS’ con la intención de barrer de todo lo que no sea estrictamente cine” (1970c, 2). And whereas in some cinephilic cultures of the 1960s, consuming film on television was “considered sacrilege” (Elsaesser 2005, 29), in the cinéfago context of NF under late Francoism, the polemics are not about whether the small screen is a suitable medium for cinema, but whether TVE, the national channel, is brave enough in its programming and sympathetic in its scheduling of cinema (see, for example, debates about television in issues 1303 and 1341).

For cinéfagos consuming whatever they could get, Mr Belvedere’s consulting room was also a means to commune with the more privileged: those with access to films that were screened unhindered and uncut abroad. These could be writers in the magazine, but also consulvidentes who travelled outside Spain and wanted to compare opinions with Mr Belvedere, since he also travelled, and neither censorship nor linguistic or cultural barriers limited his experience of cinema. Therefore, he can knowledgeably disagree in NF 1173 with “Ed-Rab” from Paris, who has praised Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers (1971), unseen in Spain:

Esa pseudobiografía de Tchaikowski, convertida en pura y neurótica relación de dos seres patológicos, alcanza el más sublime de los ridículos en escenas que … sonrojarían al propio Orduña. Por descontado que aquí no se verá, para comprobar si los lectores estaban a favor de usted o a favor mío, que todo podría ser. (1971, 2)

By keeping a dialogue going with the outside, the Consultorio refreshed those curious minds stuck inside. Questions from the curious are often about whether or when the releases they so desired would be available, and providing this information was a recurrent feature of the Consultorio. If a film was released in Spain with cuts or with dubbing that deliberately changed dialogue, Mr Belvedere set the record straight. Even if the readers could not see current releases uncut, the Consultorio evoked what was missing. Mr Belvedere confirmed whether the original versions were worth waiting for and sometimes even itemized precisely what had been cut. For example, in response to M. P. García from Girona, Belvedere describes the scenes removed from The Graduate (Bill Nichols, 1967) and wryly notes: “Hay que reconocer que los cortes están hechos con una maestría absoluta. No puede negarse que en esto somos los amos” (1969, 2).

Mr Belvedere never tired of reminding consulvidentes that films existed elsewhere intact and were seen in their original form by others. Consulvidentes’ experiences from abroad widened the frame of reference of the magazine for the readers as much as the articles did. See for instance, this response in NF 1145 to “Robinsona” who has just returned from Paris:

Otra que se da un garbeo europeo para ver cine. No me sorprende su envidia ante el funcionamiento de la Cinemateca francesa, festival permanente de todo el cine del mundo, ni su sensación de encontrar a su vuelta esas carteleras agonizantes de las que usted habla, en las que yo, personalmente apenas salvo ese René Clair que tanto elogia. (1970k, 2)

The contrasting of outside with inside was a constant refrain of these exchanges. In France you find a “festival permanente de todo el cine del mundo”; back home, “esas carteleras agonizantes” (2). To Alejandro Apellániz, who is in Berlin, Belvedere simply says, stop taunting us with your “alardes de cinéfilo agermanizado” in NF 1155 (1970a, 3).

Mr Belvedere also regularly invokes the famous screenings in Andorra, Perpignan and Biarritz of banned films which many attended on cross-border day trips, as in this reply to “Peix freixit” in NF 1281:

Organizar excursiones con entrada asegurada para la exhibición de “El último tango en París” y prometiendo trámites de pase fronterizo para quien no tiene pasaporte es, sin duda, el “dernier cri” de los “peregrinos del erotismo”. Registro la hoja de propaganda que me adjunta, pero no la divulgo para evitar consecuencias. (1973b, 4)

This information tells of curious and dissatisfied consulvidentes but also of a wealthier population and of cinephiles mobile enough, and educated enough, to consume cinema abroad. The Consultorio also indicates uneven progress. Availability was not simply premised on wealth and education, but on proximity to the border or being in the right city. So, for example, those in Valladolid and San Sebastián benefited from greater access to films because of those cities’ film festivals. In NF 1158, this response to “Massielito”, in San Sebastián, notes an abundance that was rare in the 1970s:

No se privan ustedes de nada: festival Godard, festival de cine en 16mm, y excursiones a Biarritz. Y, por si fuera poco, captando desde su casa el segundo canal de la televisión francesa, donde entre otras cosas ha visto usted el “Siroco de invierno” de Miklos Jancso. (1970i, 2)

Unsurprisingly, “Massielito” was classified as an inquieto.

Nuevo Fotogramas was doing its best to ensure that transnational connectivity existed for Spanish audiences, even if modernization and contact with the outside varied between regions. As Maruja Torres, an NF contributor who travelled freely, explains, bringing news from abroad became a trademark of the magazine: “Y nos moríamos por el extranjero, aquello tan mal visto desde siempre por la carcundia nacional. A los de FOTOGRAMAS nos chiflaba el extranjero. Nos nutríamos del mundo civilizado exterior” (2013, 78; emphasis in original). Before she reported from abroad for NF, Torres claims that she nurtured such desires and became a cinephile reading the Consultorio and writing to it under the pseudonym “Sofía” (2010, 4). Torres was not the only reader-contributor who became a regular contributor. Àlex Gorina and Pablo López, who took over as Belvedere during Figueras’s hiatus, had both been consulvidentes, the former as “Un gorila que no es Morgan disfrazado”, referred to in NF 1108 as “el ‘enchufado’ número 1 de este ‘cónsul’” (1970h, 2).

Cinephilia, as Elsaesser tells us, is retrospective and nostalgic, oriented towards a lost object that will never be recovered (2005). It is “always already tinged with nostalgia, possible loss, and retroactive temporalities” (Hagener and de Valck 2008, 21). The object of love is out of reach even when it is right in front of you, since “each image is already irretrievably lost upon its appearance” (Hagener and de Valck 2008, 21). However, this account does not quite work when the love is for a cinema that one is not allowed to see, even fleetingly. The nostalgic modality of cinephilia was certainly evident at times in the Consultorio, but it rubbed against the grain of NF, which was dedicated to colour, fun and frivolity. Instead, the prevailing tense of the Consultorio was futural, focused determinedly on a time after censorship. Belvedere and his consulvidentes are regularly concerned with the immediate future, in the expectation of a different world to come. In 1974, in issue 1340, for example, he counsels “Alba-70”, “Paciencia por La prima Angélica. Todo llegará”, suggesting that Saura’s embattled film will soon be seen. He expands: “Respecto a su sorpresa sobre mi ‘optimismo’ ante las aperturas de la censura creo justo decirle que fue una ráfaga basada en algunos datos positivos que luego se han ido difuminando” (1974a, 8). In the same issue he gives reassurances to “Vive … si te dejan”, disheartened by the closure of a local cinema: “No tema, pronto resurgirá, sino esa otra ante la atractiva lista de cosas que se anuncian para la temporada” (1974d, 8).

The future held out by the Consultorio contained more than just unobstructed access to cinema: it staked a claim on justice. Six years earlier, in less optimistic times, the consulvidente curioso “Jesús Gimeno” wonders whether Calumnia, just approved for release in a cinema of arte y ensayo was in fact William Wyler’s The Children’s Hour (1961). Belvedere says yes and goes on to reflect urbanely on the representation of lesbianism in cinema. In the case of the print released in Spain though, he explains that the dubbing has completely obscured the lesbian narrative, converting “a problem of lesbianism” into “un simple ‘robo de novio’ de una de las protagonistas a la otra”. Seven years late, and “mutilated”, to use a favourite word of the Consultorio, The Children’s Hour prompts Belvedere to muse more expansively: “El día en que se publique ‘el libro negro del doblaje español’ (¿quién se atreve?), este caso deba figurar en la primera página” (1968a, 3). In this way he anticipates not just a time after the end of censorship, but of an historical reckoning with that censorship.

Conclusions

The role of the consulvidentes, with their questions, their grumbling and demanding, which Mr Belvedere was keen to address and embolden in his answers, cannot be underestimated as factors in this fight for freedom. Clearly, Mr Belvedere performed the educational function that Cowan finds in the participatory aspects of film magazines, but reader participation in NF went well beyond the “interactive culture” (Orgeron 2009, 3) and “access narratives” (Hannah 2015, 222) at work in most commercial magazines, coming instead closer to the “access to the means of knowledge and cultural production” found in aspects of online participatory media (Jenkins, Ito, and boyd 2016, 182). From the outset, the Consultorio had been a site for readers to articulate their desire to be writers. In each of the first few issues in which he signed “Belvedere”, the custodian had to explain regretfully that Fotogramas could not publish the screenplays that correspondents were evidently sending in. Right through the 1950s and into the early 1960s, a subsection of the Consultorio entitled “Solicitudes de Correspondencia” was regularly longer than the Consultorio itself and filled with readers from all across Spain but also Portugal, Angola and Latin America, seeking each other out to write about their passion for cinema. And it was, after all, the readers who invented Mr Belvedere. For there was a Consultorio before Belvedere. As he explained in issue 97, when he made his first appearance, he was obliged to take on a name, otherwise the readers would continue to address him as “Señor Pepe del Consultorio”, or “Señor Policarpo del idem”, or more ridiculous things (1950).

And yet, there were two abiding paradoxes of the Consultorio. The first: to appear in the Consultorio was not to be heard directly by fellow readers but rather to be ventriloquized by Belvedere, who paraphrased the contents of the letters. Only one’s pseudonym was reproduced, not one’s words. Less important, it seems, than the letter of the demand was the recognition embodied in Belvedere’s response to the letter. The second paradox is an extension of the first: Belvedere’s paternalistic tone shared more than a little in common with the discourse that it so evidently resisted. As we have noted, the Francoist authoritarian state and the Catholic Church’s control over morality in cinema, which imposed dubbing and cuts, had the effect of infantilizing spectators, forcing them to see films in suboptimal conditions. Consulvidentes clearly resented this treatment and went to Mr Belvedere with their complaints. And yet the tone and content of so many of Mr Belvedere’s responses might be seen to reinforce this infantilization. Asked about the defining features of Clifton Webb’s Mr Belvedere in Sitting Pretty, Jaume Figueras said that above all Belvedere had a “muy buena mano para reeducar críos rebeldes”. This implies a strongly condescending approach to consulvidentes, but there is another reading of Belvedere’s arch manner. It can be seen as a kind of pastiche of authoritarian discourse, of the paternalism at work in the more famous Consultorio of “Elena Francis”. By adopting the tone and vocabulary of the state and Church, Mr Belvedere mocks the censors. By mirroring the infantilization and control of audiences, the Consultorio produced a kind of inverted paternalism, and the knowing consulvidentes joined in.

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Cristina Pujol and Belén Vidal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Buse

Peter Buse is Professor of Visual Culture and Dean of the School of the Arts at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of numerous articles and books on film and photography, including The Camera Does the Rest: How Polaroid Changed Photography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). Email: [email protected].

Nuria Triana-Toribio

Nuria Triana-Toribio is Professor of Spanish Studies at the University of Kent. She has published numerous articles and books on Spanish cinema, including Spanish National Cinema (London: Routledge, 2003), The Cinema of Alex de la Iglesia (Manchester: MUP, 2007) (with Peter Buse and Andy Willis) and Spanish Film Cultures (London: BFI/Palgrave, 2016). Email: [email protected].

Notes

1 Fotogramas was Nuevo Fotogramas between 29 March 1968 and 7 May 1980, when it ceased publication. It reappeared on 11 February 1981 (Ponga 2010, 41). For capsule histories, see Riambau (1998, 373) and Monterde (2009, 22–24).

2 Dirigido Por (1972–) overlapped with Nuevo Fotogramas during part of this period, but it was more traditionally, even narrowly, auteurist in outlook.

3 See also Riambau (1998, 373) and Nieto Ferrando and Monterde (2009, 409–412).

4 For a summary of the magazine’s and especially Elisenda Nadal’s run-ins with the authorities, see Lluch-Prats (2019, 159–164).

5 In an interview with us on 13 November 2019, Figueras stated that he inherited Mr Belvedere directly from Gosse de Blain in 1964. Monterde, however, says that Figueras replaced Vendrell in 1962 (2009, 22).

6 See Maruja Torres’s memory of Moix immersing himself in this archive in preparing his retrospectives on Hollywood stars and sometimes appropriating items for his “personal archive” (2010, 4).

7 From the mid- to late 1970s the function played by los curiosos was maintained by a section of the letters pages entitled “En busca del dato perdido” and then simply “El dato perdido”.

8 On Belvedere’s openness to popular cinema, especially comedy and horror, see Lázaro-Reboll (2017).