a Cinema of

Contradiction
Spanish Film in the 1960s

Sally Faulkner
A Cinema of Contradiction
For Nicholas McDowell
A Cinema of Contradiction
Spanish Film in the 1960s

Sally Faulkner

Edinburgh University Press

 © Sally Faulkner, 2006

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

22 George Square, Edinburgh

Typeset in 11/13pt Ehrhardt MT

by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7486 2160 1 (hardback)

The right of Sally Faulkner

to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
 Contents

Acknowledgements vi
List of Illustrations and Figures viii
Textual Note ix

Introduction: Contexts 1

Part I: Spanish Popular Cinema

1. Franco’s Great Family: La gran familia (The Great Family,

Palacios 1962) 27
2. Civilising the City in La ciudad no es para mí (The City’s Not
For Me, Lazaga 1965) 49

Part II: The Nuevo Cine Español (New Spanish Cinema)

3. Reality and Pretence in Los farsantes (Frauds, Camus 1963) 73

4. Repression and Excess in La tía Tula (Aunt Tula,
Picazo 1964) 101
5. Identity and Nationality in Nueve cartas a Berta
(Nine Letters to Berta, Patino 1965) 125
6. Ageing and Coming of Age in La caza
(The Hunt, Saura 1965) 145

Conclusion: Overlaps 175

Filmography 179
Bibliography 182
Index 194
 Acknowledgements

This book could not have been written without grants from the British
Academy and the School of Modern Languages, University of Exeter,
which enabled me to carry out research in Spain, and sabbatical leave,
jointly funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the
University of Exeter, which gave me time to complete the project. A grant
from the University of Exeter’s Keith Whinnom Memorial Fund enabled
me to attend the 41st International Festival of Cinema, Gijón, Spain.
Much of this work was presented as seminar and conference papers at
the School of Modern Languages and Centre for Research in Film Studies
Research Seminar, University of Exeter; the 50th Anniversary Programme
Research Seminars, Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin-
American Studies, University of Bristol; the Annual Conference of the
Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland, University of
Cambridge; the ‘Hispanic Cinemas: The Local and the Global’ Conference,
University of London, and the Hispanic Research Seminar, University of
Leeds. I would like to thank the organisers and those who attended for their
views. Earlier versions of Chapters 4, 5 and 6 appeared in Modern Language
Review (‘A Cinema of Contradiction: La tía Tula [Picazo 1964] and the
Nuevo Cine Español’, 99, 3 [2004]); Bulletin of Spanish Studies (‘Identity and
Nationality in Basilio Martín Patino’s Nueve cartas a Berta [1965]’, 83, 3
[2006]); and Modern Language Notes (‘Ageing and Coming of Age in Carlos
Saura’s La caza [The Hunt 1965]’, 120, 2 [2005]).
This book is in part a record of discussion and debate with many col-
leagues and friends over a number of years. Peter Evans, Susan Hayward,
Chris Perriam, Tim Rees, Alison Sinclair and Paul Julian Smith read
parts of the manuscript at different stages, and I would like to thank
them for their comments. John Hopewell, Duncan Petrie, Núria Triana-
Toribio, Kathleen Vernon and Gareth Walters also provided encourage-
ment at different moments as the project developed. Elizabeth Matthews
and Andrew Ginger offered advice on questions of art, as did Anthony
Faulkner on music, Derek Gagen and Mike Thompson on theatre and Tom
Caldin on translations. Helena López and Rob Stone kindly sent me copies
of their work. Marga Lobo, Trinidad del Río (Screenings), Javier Herrera
  vii

(Library) and their colleagues of the Filmoteca Española, Madrid have

always provided me with great support and encouragement. Thanks also to
Maruja Rincón Tapias for her generosity and advice. I am grateful to the
directors Mario Camus, Julio Diamante, Antxón Eceiza, Basilio Martín
Patino and the poet Guillermo Carnero for answering my questions about
their work.
Thanks, as always, to my parents, Anthony and Helen Faulkner, who
took me to Spain in 1975, and brother, David Faulkner, with whom I began
to learn Spanish. Without doubt my greatest debt is to Nicholas McDowell;
I dedicate the book to him.
 List of Illustrations and Figures

1.1 Adapted excerpt of musical score from La gran familia. Pedro Masó
P.C.
1.2 Excerpt of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ of Georg Friedrich Handel’s
Messiah.
1.3 Adapted excerpt of musical score from La gran familia. Pedro Masó
P.C.
1.4 Amparo Soler Leal and Alberto Closas in La gran familia. Photograph
courtesy of Pedro Masó P.C.
1.5 José Isbert and Amparo Soler Leal in La gran familia. Photograph
courtesy of Pedro Masó P.C.
2.1 Paco Martínez Soria and Gracita Morales in La ciudad no es para mí.
Photograph courtesy of Video Mercury Films.
2.2 Doris Coll, María Luisa Ponte, Paco Martínez Soria and Margot
Cottens in La ciudad no es para mí. Photograph courtesy of Video
Mercury Films.
3.1 Margarita Lozano in Los farsantes. Photograph courtesy of Video
Mercury Films.
3.2 José Montez in Los farsantes. Photograph courtesy of Video Mercury
Films.
4.1 Aurora Bautista in La tía Tula. Photograph courtesy of Video Mercury
Films.
4.2 Aurora Bautista and Carlos Estrada in La tía Tula. Photograph courtesy
of Video Mercury Films.
5.1 Nueve cartas a Berta. Photograph courtesy of La linterna mágica, P.C.
5.2 Nueve cartas a Berta. Photograph courtesy of La linterna mágica, P.C.
6.1 La caza. Photograph courtesy of Elías Querejeta, P.C.
6.2 Alfredo Mayo in La caza. Photograph courtesy of Elías Querejeta, P.C.

Every reasonable effort has been made to trace those holding rights to the
images reproduced and to acquire the relevant permissions.
 Textual Note

I have used the original Spanish titles of films in the text, but have given
English translations in brackets on first mention and in the index. I have
given the International English Title according to the International Movie
Database, http://www.imdb.com; for those films that do not have one,
I have consulted D’Lugo (1997) and Triana-Toribio (2003), or offered my
own translations.
I have translated quotations into English, unless they are very short, in
which case English only is given. These translations are my own, unless
otherwise indicated.
For information on the filmographies of directors, actors and technical
teams I have consulted the International Movie Database.
I have used two abbreviations in the text: NCE, to refer to the ‘Nuevo
Cine Español’ (New Spanish Cinema); and VCE, ‘Viejo Cine Español’
(Old, or Popular, Spanish Cinema).
 Introduction: Contexts

A key decade in world cinema, the 1960s was also a crucial era of change in
Spain. This book analyses six films that reflect and interpret some of the
political, social, economic and cultural transformations of this period. The
coexistence of traditional and modern values following rapid industrialisa-
tion and urbanisation, and the timid acceptance of limited change by
Franco’s authoritarian regime, are symptoms of the uneven modernity that
scholars argue characterises Spain of the modern era.1 Contradiction – the
unavoidable effect of that unevenness – is the conceptual terrain explored
by the six filmmakers discussed here, whose work ranges across experiences
of family and gender roles, rural and urban life, provincial and cosmopol-
itan mentalities, religious belief and ceremony, and youth and ageing.
The 1960s is also an important decade in the history of Spanish cinema
because, as in other Western film industries, this was a period of transition.
While television ownership eroded cinema audiences towards the end
of the decade onwards, commercial domestic films could still attract
massive attendance in the 1960s, with audiences occasionally exceeding
four million. Promoters and producers of art film appealed to a more select
demographic, in particular the growing number of university students and
graduates, in anticipation of this future competition from television.2 In
response to these twin phenomena of a still robust commercial industry
and a developing art alternative, I devote Part I of this study to the Viejo
Cine Español (VCE) (the old, commercial, or popular, Spanish cinema),
which was so called to highlight its differences from the Nuevo Cine
Español (NCE) (the new, art, or auteurist, Spanish cinema), which is the
subject of Part II.3
The examples of the VCE I analyse in Part I represent the two key ten-
dencies of the commercial industry in the period. Pedro Lazaga’s La ciudad
no es para mí (The City’s Not For Me 1965) (Chapter 2) was a blockbuster,
attracting almost 4,300,000 spectators, and, according to a recent calcula-
tion,4 taking the equivalent of 440,348 euros at the box office, which made it
one of the most widely seen and commercially successful films of the decade.
Conversely, Fernando Palacios’s La gran familia (The Great Family 1962)
(Chapter 1) had the lowest figures for audience attendance of all the films
2    

studied in this book, with just over 20,000 spectators.5 It made a profit
(25,000 euros), however, not through success at the box office, but rather
through the government subsidies it was awarded when it was given the
classification ‘National Interest’. In Part II, I analyse four different examples
of Spain’s contemporary art cinema, the NCE. Mario Camus’s Los farsantes
(Frauds 1963) (Chapter 3) is typical of the movement as a whole in its failure
to attract audiences (it had 62,000 spectators and made just 5,000 euros),
though it is interesting to note that this was three times the attendance figure
for La gran familia. Miguel Picazo’s La tía Tula (Aunt Tula 1964) and Basilio
Martín Patino’s Nueve cartas a Berta (Nine Letters to Berta 1965) (Chapters
4 and 5) are exceptional cases of success,6 with 408,000 and 417,000 specta-
tors and 67,000 and 60,000 euros profit respectively, while Carlos Saura’s La
caza (The Hunt 1965) (Chapter 6) attracted only 341,000 viewers and took
just 56,000 euros. Thus, while certain NCE films had the wide appeal that
some of the movement’s supporters anticipated, it became clear that its
natural audiences were the university-educated demographic to which the
directors themselves belonged.7 Notwithstanding the exceptional cases of
success, the NCE was financially viable thanks only to government subsi-
dies. In 1964 the propagandist classification ‘National Interest’, won by
VCE films like La gran familia, was replaced by ‘Special Interest’. This
award was for films deemed to be of artistic merit, which meant the NCE.
Thus even this brief analysis of production contexts reveals an overlap
between the subsidised popular cinema and the NCE in their shared depen-
dence on state protection.
Close readings of the six films suggest further similarities. In Part I,
I analyse the ways La gran familia and La ciudad construct conservative
representations that appealed to the government awards committee
(Chapter 1), or to mass audiences (Chapter 2), but also suggest that they
sustain counter-readings owing to the contributions of certain members of
their technical crews and cast. Often working at great speed with scripts
and personnel imposed by the producer, commissioned directors of the
popular cinema exercised limited creative control. The plural nature of
authorship in the popular cinema, therefore, allowed other contributors to
express revealing inconsistencies in the films’ otherwise conservative mes-
sages. Conversely, political opposition was the intent of the auteurist dir-
ectors of the NCE. In Chapters 3–6, I accept the notion of the director as
source of artistic control in these films, but none the less argue for a revised
auteurist approach that reveals the roles played by collaboration, and occa-
sional conflict, with other creative personnel. In this regard, each film dis-
cussed is very different, and they range from Camus’s experience with
pre-selected creative and technical personnel in Los farsantes, to Saura’s
  3

work with the sympathetic teams of his like-minded producer in La caza.

This revised approach liberates us from both an excessive reverence of the
auteur, and the expectation that films directly project the vision of their
directors. A Cinema of Contradiction does not go so far as to invert all
expectations: while the two examples analysed in Part I reveal the poten-
tial for dissent in the commercial cinema, I do not suggest in Part II that
art films, despite their intended opposition, were in fact conservative.
I show, however, that the expression of dissent in the NCE was far from
straightforward, for these directors, in collaboration with more or less
sympathetic creative and technical teams, attacked a government on which
they were paradoxically dependent for their work to exist. This contradic-
tion, which lies at the heart of ‘possibilism’,8 often made their oppositional
work both clever and awkward.
By refusing to isolate art and popular forms, A Cinema of Contradiction,
therefore, has three aims. In common with recent revisionist histories of
Spanish cinema, I show the complexity and possible contestatory value
of the widely dismissed commercial cinema under Franco, which often
revealed the very contradictions the films intended to conceal. I suggest
also that the production contexts of art cinema of the 1960s invite us to
reassess these films as products of contradictory contexts, which are no less
rich, and may be all the more rich, for their compromising genesis. Finally,
this book demonstrates that cross-fertilisation took place between the VCE
and the NCE on financial, technical and artistic levels and argues that we
should see them as complementary rather than opposing areas of cinematic
activity in Spain.9

Spain of the apertura

Already present in the previous decade, the contradictions inherent in
trying to reconcile tradition and modernity characterised 1960s Spain. In
the political sphere, these contradictions were triggered by the Franco
regime’s efforts to harmonise the two mutually undermining objectives of
retaining the repressive dictatorship and at the same time opening Spain
up to gradual liberalisation, a process termed the apertura. In the social
arena, Spaniards experienced the conflicting ideologies of Francoist trad-
itionalism, with its reactionary exaltation of Catholic, patriarchal and
Nationalist values, and global capitalism, with its cults of the acquisition
of wealth, material possessions and the free circulation of goods beyond
national borders.
In the early dictatorship years Franco successfully unified disparate
elements of his ruling party in the FET y de las JONS, or Movimiento
4    

Nacional, to govern a country split by the Civil War.10 By the 1960s,

fissures in his government were again apparent. These tensions were now
triggered less by the co-existence of disparate ideologies such as Falangism
and Carlism than by differing responses to the socio-economic changes
consequent on the abandonment of autarky and the process of industrial-
isation that was formalised and given impetus by the Opus Dei tech-
nocrats’ Stabilisation Plan of 1959.11 The apertura, a period that dates from
Manuel Fraga Iribarne’s appointment as Minister of Tourism and
Communications in 1962 to his dismissal as a result of the cabinet reshuffle
of 1969, can be seen as an attempt to counter the so-called desfase, which
Paul Preston has identified as a characteristic of modern Spanish history.
Such a ‘lack of synchronisation . . . between the social reality and the polit-
ical power structure ruling over it (Preston 1996: 10) potentially describes
the situation of 1960s Spain, a developing consumer society ruled by an
anachronistic dictatorship. The apertura was an attempt to realign ‘social
reality’ and the ‘political power structure’. It resulted in a contradictory
compromise between traditionalist and liberalist tendencies within
Francoism, an equivocal exercise in limited social reform by an authori-
tarian regime, which ultimately ended in failure with the return of hard-
liners at the end of the decade.
Franco apologists stress that aperturista measures, such as the establish-
ment of a Tribunal of Public Order (1963), which meant that political sub-
version was dealt with by civil as well as military courts, and Fraga’s press
law (1966), which gave limited freedom to the press, were a liberal response
to calls for change. Thus an uninterrupted line of progress is drawn
between the economic ‘miracle’, the apertura and political change the fol-
lowing decade in the 1970s. ‘By this sleight of hand,’ Helen Graham argues,
‘political democracy and cultural plurality become the legacy of a benevo-
lent dictator’ (1995b: 244). However, the continued exercise of repression
to quell political dissent, such as the execution of Joaquín Delgado,
Francisco Granados and Julián Grimau in 1963 (despite international
protest over the latter, which Fraga energetically supported [Gubern 1981:
224]) and the abolition of the official student union (Sindicato de
Estudiantes Universitarios [SEU]) in 1965, the return of political prose-
cution to military courts in 1968 and the suspension of civil liberties during
the State of Exception of 1969, reveals a regime governed by expediency,
willing to adopt liberal and repressive measures alike to safeguard one key
aim: its own survival.
If the changes in the political arena were ultimately cosmetic, it is
difficult to overemphasise the long-term consequences of the economic
boom and social transformation of Spain in the period. Even if uneven in
  5

distribution, industrialisation caused average incomes to soar, in one his-

torian’s calculations, from US$290 per capita in 1955, to $497 in 1965 and
$2,486 in 1975 (Schubert 1990: 258). But the shift towards a more liberal
economy was both rapid and patchy, triggering the contradictions that
characterise uneven development. No cultural text is a neutral illustration
of its historical context, and the six films analysed here both camouflage
and magnify the tensions and inconsistencies of this contradictory age.
These tensions are clustered around four areas of change: the shift from
rural to urban life; gender; religion; and generational conflict.
If political and social transformation is a consequence of urbanisation,
then immigration from the country to the city is the most fundamental
change of twentieth-century Spain. Franco certainly recognised this when
he tried to halt the march of progress by exalting country life during the
1940s. The policy of autarky interrupted the processes of industrialisation
and urbanisation begun in Spain in the nineteenth century, but the failure
of autarkic policy led to a return to this urban development. By the 1960s
the conflicts between the previous glorification of rural life and current
encouragement of migration to urban centres became acute. In 1940, 44.6
per cent of the Spanish population were employed in agriculture, a figure
that rose to 50.3 per cent by 1945 as Spain re-ruralised under autarky
(Grugel and Rees 1997: 125 n.18). Figures dropped from 1950, to 42 per
cent by 1960, and 20 per cent by 1976, as in the period 1955–75, six million
Spaniards – a fifth of the population – moved province: two million to
Madrid, 1,800,000 to Barcelona, 1,500,000 to work abroad, and most of the
rest to other provincial urban centres (Riquer i Permanyer 1995: 262–3).
Spanish cinema recorded and interpreted these far-reaching changes: the
village life left behind is an implicit and explicit source of nostalgia in La
gran familia and La ciudad, while Los farsantes and La caza condemn rural
depopulation and deprivation. The lure of the comparative freedoms of
the contemporary Spanish capital are explored in Nueve cartas a Berta and
implied in La tía Tula, as the films expose and condemn the sham moder-
nity of provincial Salamanca and Guadalajara.
While women’s working rights were formally recognised by the ‘Law of
Political, Professional, and Labour Rights of Women’ (1961), and their par-
ticipation in the workforce actively encouraged by the inclusion of women’s
work in the 1963 Development Plan, conservative Catholicism remained
the primary source of guidance in personal conduct. Gender roles, particu-
larly in the domestic sphere, were therefore a focus of interest and concern
in commercial and art cinemas. For instance, both Palacios’s La gran familia
and Picazo’s La tía Tula address the clash of tradition and modernity.
Both films run through a series of family events – a first communion,
6    

a holiday, childhood illness – but while Palacios’s film seeks to naturalise

pronatalism in a modern capitalist context, Picazo’s scrutinises the exces-
sive consequences of a literal interpretation of outdated Catholic gender
ideology.
Conflict and change were also the hallmarks of religious life in 1960s
Spain. While divisions in the Church became apparent in the period
1953–62, from 1962 to 1971 these widened into splits between arch-
conservative groups like Opus Dei and those who, inspired by reforms
introduced by the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II),12 sought a break
with the regime (Cooper 1976: 48). But the history of the Church in this
period is more than one of a change of allegiance; it is one of gradual aban-
donment. Stanley Payne reports that, following the 1950s boom, in the
mid-1960s, resignations of priests soared, while the registration of clergy
decreased ten-fold (1984: 199): ‘Although it was not clear to many at the
time, the urban, industrial and consumer-orientated society of the 1950s
was inaugurating a new phase of secularization’ (1984: 187). On the one
hand, popular film of the period reflects this process. La gran familia, for
instance, may begin with a first communion photograph, but the film
depicts this event as an opportunity for light-hearted consumerist fun, like
buying the children new outfits, rather than sober religious reflection.
Similarly, the village priest of La ciudad is a target of affectionate
ridicule rather than a source of serious authority. If the VCE laughs off
the anachronistic presence of religion in a modern context, the NCE
earnestly addresses this contradiction. In its anti-clerical assault on
hypocrisy and empty ceremony, Los farsantes portrays religion in 1960s
Spain as if Vatican II were not taking place; La tía Tula likewise ignores
the contemporary modernisation of the Catholic Church to explore the
impact on personal behaviour of conservative doctrine. Conversely, the
protagonist of Nueve cartas a Berta reflects on Pope John XXIII’s reforms,
though he ultimately embraces the conservatism represented by the reac-
tionary views of the two priests of his childhood.
Similarly, generational conflict is played in the different keys of conserv-
ative comedy and earnest realism in Spanish cinema of the 1960s. A problem
that is as old as mankind, generational conflict became a particular focus in
early twentieth-century pschoanalysis. 1960s Spanish cinema examines the
classic Oedipal scenario of antagonism between middle-aged fathers and
adolescent sons (for instance, in Nueve cartas a Berta), but the experiences
of older relatives, like grandparents, and younger children become a new
concern in the period. As Marsha Kinder has shown, Oedipality enabled
filmmakers to explore political issues through personal narratives of family
relations (1993: 13), but the focus on the very old and the very young in the
  7

1960s encoded a new critique of the longevity of the regime on the one hand,
and the inability of the young to succeed it on the other. In a climate of cen-
sorship, the Spanish families depicted became hugely over-determined: not
only did the young represent the future, but their ages specifically raised the
question of what would happen to Spain post-Franco; and the old were often
aligned with the increasingly frail dictator, whose mortality became ever
clearer as the decade wore on.13 The films studied in this book are peopled
by rebellious and docile children (La gran familia and La tía Tula) confused
adolescents (La ciudad, Nueve cartas a Berta, La caza) and both comically
absurd (La gran familia, La ciudad) and dangerously self-obsessed (La caza)
old men, who project the contradictions of an age preoccupied by youth, but
still ruled by an out-of-touch old man.

The Viejo Cine Español

If Spanish intellectuals are traditionally dismissive of their national
cinema, this is especially so in the case of popular film. The commercial
cinema of the dictatorship is a particular target, as, like all popular culture
of the period, it is assumed to be ideologically homogeneous and complicit
with the regime.14 The veteran cultural commentator Eduardo Haro
Tecglen is a typical case. A ‘child of the Republic’,15 he is well known in
Spain as a former member of the anti-Franco intellectual elite, and his
present activity writing a daily column and reviews for El País, Spain’s
leading daily, assigns him continued authority as a cultural gatekeeper. In
a recent column entitled ‘Viejo Cine Español’ he recalls that, under Franco,
‘Los que mirábamos la cartelera para ir al cine decíamos: ‘ “No, a ésa no,
que es española”, sin indagar más’ (Those of us who looked at the billboard
to see what was on at the cinema would say: ‘No, not that one, it’s Spanish’,
without investigating further). The aims of those films were:

nada que preocupe, no plantear temas, que no cunda el pesimismo; retorcer la comi-
cidad hasta deformar el físico del actor; cambiar la sonrisa por la carcajada de cuerpo,
no de cabeza; gastar lo menos posible, que es una de las maneras más conocidas de
destruir cualquier producto. (Que conste: hablo en todo caso de generalidad.)
(nothing troubling, not to propose themes or spread pessimism; to twist comicalness
to the point of deforming an actor’s physique; to exchange smiles for guffaws that
shook the body, but didn’t challenge the mind; to spend as little money as possible,
which is a recipe for destroying any product. [Please note: I’m talking about the
majority, in any case.]) (Haro Tecglen 2004)

Despite his parenthetical disclaimer, Haro Tecglen dismisses popular

cinema for its saccharine optimism, facile humour and low production
8    

values. His lament that it fails to be ‘troubling . . . propose themes or

spread pessimism’ is a useful summary of the Marxist orthodoxy of
Spanish film criticism, whose most famous proponent was Juan Antonio
Bardem (uncle of the acting star, Javier). A member of the illegal Spanish
Communist Party during the dictatorship, Bardem was the author and
co-author of the first acclaimed dissident films in the 1950s, Esa pareja
feliz (That Happy Couple 1951), ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! (Welcome
Mr. Marshall! 1952) and Calle Mayor (High Street 1956). Two statements
by this director would influence practitioners and supporters of Spanish
art cinema for a generation. Quoted and republished countless times,
Bardem declared at the Conversations of Salamanca film conference
organised by Patino in 1955 that Spanish popular cinema was ‘1. politi-
cally futile; 2. socially false; 3. intellectually worthless; 4. aesthetically
valueless; 5. industrially paralytic’ (Hopewell 1986: 57). In another widely
disseminated work, ‘¿Para qué sirve un film?’ (What’s a film for?), first
published in Cinema universitario in 1956, he declared that Spanish film
should instead ‘mostrar en términos de luz, de imágenes y de sonidos la
realidad de nuestro contorno, aquí y hoy. Ser testimonio del momento
humano. Pues, a mi parecer, el cine será ante todo testimonio o no será
nada’ (show through light, images and sounds the reality of our environ-
ment here and now. Be a witness to its human moment. Because it seems
to me that cinema will be above all a witness or it won’t be anything)
(Fontenla 1966a: 192). The work of a small but vocal group of directors,
and the criticism of the majority of critics and historians of Spanish
cinema, have acted like an echo chamber for Bardem’s rallying cries, in
particular the creators and supporters of the NCE, the subject of Part II
of this book.
The casualty of the Bardemian orthodoxy was popular film, an area of
cinematic activity that merits our attention on at least two counts. First,
the decision of Haro Tecglen and his companions to avoid Spanish films
was not one shared by millions of their compatriots. The 1960s was the last
decade when the domestic national cinema could still consistently attract
massive audiences (although the domestic blockbuster has made a recent
reappearance in Spain [Lázaro Reboll and Willis 2004a: 14–15]). Casimiro
Torreiro reports that audience figures for Spanish cinema in the domestic
market in the 1960s (which now in the new millenium hovers around
10 per cent), seem the stuff of fairy tales: 22 per cent in 1966, more than
27 per cent a year later and almost 30 per cent in 1968 (Torreiro 2000: 156).
Yet despite the inclusion of these figures Torreiro devotes his attention to
the NCE and its Catalan successor, the Barcelona School. In another
chapter published in a survey of the same year, the critic does include
  9

a section on commercial cinema, but this constitutes only a fraction of the

study (1995b: 331–5).
In 1984, Santiago Pozo Arenas argued that, with a 30 per cent market
share in 1968, ‘El verdadero cine español, el que merece este nombre, el
que consiguió mejorar su situación en el mercado fue: . . . La ciudad no es
para mí [etc.]’ (The real Spanish cinema, the one that deserves this name,
the one that managed to improve its market situation was . . . La ciudad no
es para mí [etc.]) (1984: 199–200), and collections of articles on specific
films, rather than historical surveys, have included work on both art and
popular cinemas, like Augusto Torres’s El cine español en 119 películas and
Julio Pérez Perucha’s edited volume Antología crítica del cine español (both
published in 1997). However, over the past decade, critics have defended
a second reason for focusing on popular film. Scholars influenced by cul-
tural studies, like Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi, have argued against a
Frankfurt School-influenced view of popular culture as a tool of control
to manipulate a passive public (1995a: 3) and used Antonio Gramsci’s
concept of ‘counter-hegemonic cultural tactics’ (1995a: 4) to invite us
to adjust our focus to the reception of culture, and away from the inten-
tion of its author or the government that financed it. This approach invests
audiences with agency, raises the possibility of resistant, or ‘counter-
hegemonic’, readings, and provides scholars with an intellectual frame-
work in which to take popular culture seriously. Drawing on both these
insights and work on other European popular cinemas (e.g. Dyer and
Vincendeau 1992), there followed a book-length critique of the tendency
to privilege art, or ‘quality’, cinema, over popular genres in definitions
of Spanish ‘national’ cinema, Núria Triana-Toribio’s Spanish National
Cinema (2003), then an edited collection that focused exclusively on
popular film, Spanish Popular Cinema (Lázaro Reboll and Willis 2004b).16
Part I of A Cinema of Contradiction seeks to add to this work by arguing
that fault-lines occasionally disrupt the smooth surfaces of the VCE in the
1960s. These fault-lines, which relate to the roles of stars, the use of editing
and the construction of space and mise en scène, can undermine the edifice
of conservatism otherwise constructed by the films, giving rise to resistant
or counter-hegemonic readings.
One consequence of the corrective focus on popular film in recent pub-
lications is the tendency to divorce this work from art manifestations.
However, by adopting the same approach in Parts I and II – an analysis of
production contexts combined with close textual readings – this book also
aims to show overlaps between the two cinemas. Triana-Toribio has sug-
gested that there is a similarity between Nueve cartas a Berta and the VCE
film Marisol, rumbo a Río (Marisol Bound for Río, Palacios 1963) in terms
10    

of the question of Spanishness (2003: 92–5). While I analyse a number of

conceptual areas, A Cinema of Contradiction aims to respond to her obser-
vation that:

Analysis of Spanish film of the 1960s has for too long given undue attention to the
Nuevo Cine Español at the expense of the Viejo Cine Español. . . . It is much more
profitable an exercise to compare and contrast the different versions of Spanishness
projected by these competing cinemas. And while there are obviously stark
differences, it is striking how many of their concerns in fact coincide. (2003: 92)

Besides overlaps in terms of concept, which arise from the fact that both
cinemas responded to the same contradictions of the time, A Cinema of
Contradiction also shows that there were practical links between the VCE
and the NCE through the presence and participation of the same person-
nel in each. It is obvious that, in a relatively small industry such as Spain’s,
art directors would be forced to use some of the same cast, technical crews,
sets, laboratories and even producers as their commercial counterparts,
but this is the first study to scrutinise the extent and meaning of these
overlaps.
The greatest difference between the VCE and NCE is in the area of direc-
tion. In the commercial industry, directors often had no formal training,
learning their craft as apprentices on set. Fernando Palacios, for instance,
worked as an assistant on nineteen films before his directorial début, as did
Lazaga, who gained experience as both an assistant director and a
scriptwriter (for instance, he wrote the script of Carlos Serrano de Osma’s
Unamuno adaptation Abel Sánchez [1946]). Conversely, NCE directors
studied both theory and practice at the state’s Official Film School (which
opened in 1947 and closed in 1976), and their first experience of a feature
film was often as its director17 – apparently producers would frequently
employ trusted assistant directors to work with them in order to mitigate any
problems arising from their inexperience (Méndez-Leite 1969: 100). Classes
were given by members of the industry, so the NCE directors’ instruction
by VCE personnel is a potential area of overlap (indeed the Director of the
School over the period of the NCE directors’ training was José Luis Saénz
de Heredia, author of the propagandist pictures Raza [Race 1941] and
Franco, ese hombre [Franco, That Man 1964]). Directors’ memories of the
efficacy of the classes and their levels of attendance differ considerably, but
all the accounts I have consulted mention that the School was a forum for
sharing ideas, swapping banned books and watching films that were other-
wise unavailable (Núñez 1964: 7; Monleón and Egea 1965: 10; Torres 1992:
25; García de Dueñas 2003: 82–4; 98–100). The privileged club feel of the
School, which was particularly dominated by the banned Communist Party
  11

(Torres 1992: 24; Alberich 2002: 27), was self-perpetuating, for its gradu-
ates would subsequently gain teaching posts – as did all the directors studied
in this book apart from Camus. In the late 1950s, one former student was
particularly influential: Carlos Saura. Slightly older than the other NCE
directors, the author of the much-admired Los golfos (Hooligans 1959)
became the unofficial leader of the NCE ‘movement’ (Oms 1981: 32), a role
acknowledged in his cameo appearance at the Madrid café in Nueve cartas a
Berta, when he is hailed as ‘maestro’.18
Commissioned directors do not choose their genres, and in the 1960s,
Pedro Masó, the producer of La gran familia, La ciudad and many of the
key VCE films of the decade, put his money in comedy. The Film School
auteurs may have enjoyed generic freedom, but their work also adhered to
a set of conventions. As I argue in Chapter 3, the NCE’s sacred cow was a
loose, and consequently much debated, notion of realism.19 This is because
the movement was the fruit of the three major sources of cultural influence
on Spanish intelligentsia in the 1950s. First, the NCE drew on a patchy
knowledge of Marxism (Torres 1992: 35), the sources of which included
the outlawed Communist Party delegates Ricardo Muñoz Suay and Jorge
Semprún’s ‘Operation Realism’ in Spanish universities (Labanyi 1995a:
295), the limited availability of banned texts and the sketchy theoretical
coverage offered by journals like Nuestro Cine (Monterde 2003: 109–10).
Second, Italian Neorealism, which had penetrated Spain via the two film
weeks organised by the Italian Institute of Culture in 1951 and 1953, con-
tinued to cast what Carlos Heredero calls its ‘long shadow’ (1993: 287) over
1960s Spanish film, though directors had access to only a limited number
of films (Torreiro 2000: 157). Third, the NCE repeated in film what the
1950s Spanish Social Novel had explored in literature, notably Marxist
political concerns, working-class subject matter and a social-realist style.
The film Llegar a más (Getting on in the World 1963), made by the Social
Novel writer Jesús Fernández Santos (who himself studied at the Film
School), and Camus’s adaptations of two other writers, Daniel Sueiro and
Ignacio Aldecoa, are specific examples of the general traffic of influence
between the 1950s novel and 1960s film. If the NCE ‘movement’ existed
owing to the directors’ coincidence at the Film School (Fontenla 1986: 181;
Sánchez Noriega 2003: 257), its only collective characteristic is this ten-
dency towards realism, though, as the examples in this study attest, this
was the loosest of alliances. While Camus’s Los farsantes emulated the tech-
niques and aims of Italian Neorealism, other NCE films combined realism
with a catholic range of influences, which came from watching films in
national theatres, the Film School and at foreign film festivals: Picazo’s La
tía Tula drew on melodrama and the gothic; Patino’s Nueve cartas a Berta,
12    

the formal experimentation of the French New Wave; and Saura’s La caza,
buddy and war film genres as well as documentary.
Despite their different training, some NCE directors would none the
less work with the same producers and in similar production conditions as
the VCE. This was because of state protection. Just as commercial pro-
ducers made films with the intention of winning the ‘National Interest’
subsidy, like La gran familia, so they also backed the work of NCE directors
in order to win the ‘Special Interest’ subsidy. For this reason the quintes-
sential VCE producer Ignacio Iquino backed Camus’s first two features,
Los farsantes and Young Sánchez. In my discussion of this first film in
Chapter 3, I assess the extent to which the director’s control was eroded by
this production context, and argue that Los farsantes also reveals fruitful
collaboration between Camus and Iquino’s creative and technical teams.
Other NCE directors offer more extreme examples: José Luis Borau’s
directorial début, for instance, was a commissioned spaghetti western,
Brandy (1963).
Even for those working with the new, sympathetic producers like Elías
Querejeta, NCE directors still needed to work with actors and technical
crews of the VCE. The migration of actors between popular and art
cinemas is a source of major overlap between the two. In his work on film
comedy, Steven Marsh has argued that the presence of the same actors in
different Spanish genres undoes the critically constructed boundaries
between them, and cites the example of José Luis López Vázquez, who
plays the same repressed middle-aged character in both comedy films, like
Luis García Berlanga’s Plácido (1961), and realist work, like Saura’s
Peppermint frappé (1967) (2002: 38). I suggest that the migration of actors
not only questions genre boundaries, but also upsets the sacred division
between Spain’s popular and art cinemas. Like López Vázquez, José
Isbert, for instance, plays a similarly disruptive role in Berlanga’s dissident
masterpieces ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! (1952) and El verdugo (The
Executioner 1963), and Palacios’s consensual comedy La gran familia.
Likewise, Aurora Bautista and Alfredo Mayo’s bombastic roles in the epic
cinema of the 1940s are evoked with critical effect in the NCE’s La tía Tula
and La caza. This process of exchange goes both ways: the star image of
troubled youth acquired by Emilio Gutiérrez Caba in his roles in Nueve
cartas a Berta and La caza is replayed with comic effect alongside Alfredo
Landa in Lazaga’s Los guardiamarinas (The Midshipmen 1967).
Similarly, members of technical crews migrate between the VCE and the
NCE, troubling the boundaries between them and acting as agents of
cross-fertilisation. To take the key areas of editing and cinematography,
the examples of the six films in this book suggest that the VCE and NCE
  13

were entwined.20 The editor Pedro del Rey, for instance, worked on both
La gran familia and La tía Tula; Alfonso Santacana worked on both La
ciudad and El verdugo; and the cinematographer Juan Julio Baena, who
created the gothic look of La tía Tula, gathered experience in both art
cinema (notably Los golfos) and popular film. In an interview with Baena
published in 1989, Francesc Llinàs notes with surprise that you are
‘el primer operador moderno, por decirlo de una forma, que se incorpora
a un cierto cine industrial, al tiempo que eres casi el director de fotografía
del NCE’ (the first modern cameraman, if I can put it that way, who is part
of a certain kind of industrial cinema, while at the same time you are almost
the director of photography of the NCE), to which Baena responds, ‘la
experiencia con Lazaga fue magnífica’ (the experience with Lazaga was
magnificent) (1989b: 218–19). If the blurring of boundaries is upsetting for
the critic, we should note that the various experiences are enriching for the
professional.
One crucial consequence of the migration of technical crew between the
two cinemas is that knowledge of technological advances was shared
between them. As Baena notes, new developments such as light-weight
cameras, lights and sensitive film stock made the technical innovations of
the NCE possible (Llinàs 1989b: 215). While formal experimentation with
this new technology was more sustained in the NCE (for instance, in Nueve
cartas a Berta or La caza), it was not absent from the VCE. As I show in
Chapter 2, in the prologue of Lazaga’s La ciudad, the editor Santacana and
cinematographer Juan Mariné (who never actually worked in the NCE)
draw on new techniques to offer a portrait of Madrid that would not be out
of place in an NCE film, and is on a par with the depictions of Paris or
London of the contemporary New Cinemas outside Spain.

The Nuevo Cine Español

For all this blurring, the difference between the VCE and the NCE is
nowhere more apparent than in the amount of critical attention that has
been addressed to each. While the VCE was ignored, dismissed or simply
mentioned as statistical background data until recently in critical accounts,
conversely, scholars have lavished their attention on the NCE. The history
of the NCE is a history of extremes. Because it is entwined with both the
history of Francoism and the history of Spanish cinema, it attracts either
fierce attack or extravagant support. On the one hand, it has been identified
with the dictatorship, thus denouncing the NCE means denouncing the
regime that protected and promoted it. On the other, it has been linked to
democracy, and so supporting the NCE means stressing an oppositional
14    

film tradition in Spain under Franco (to match the one that has been cham-
pioned at home and abroad post-Franco). By restoring the movement to
the context of the 1960s, A Cinema of Contradiction aims to avoid these
extremes, for one of the key contradictions of the NCE is that it is both
these things: it was supported by Francoism, yet the films also looked
forward to the regime’s end.
From the outset the NCE divided critics between supporters and
detractors. In the early 1960s, specialist journals were a soap box on which
supporters stood and defended both the films and the state’s policies that
protected them. Conversely, the Francoist press was downright hostile,
and later in the decade, journals became critical too.21 Once the compro-
mises of protectionism became clear, and directors either failed to make a
second feature or made second films that did not fulfil the promise of their
first (for instance, Picazo’s Oscuros sueños de agosto [Obscure August Dreams
1967] or Patino’s De amor y otras soledades [On Love and Other Solitudes
1969], compared to their La tía Tula and Nueve cartas a Berta), the NCE’s
supporters found common cause with its detractors. The movement was
condemned by specialist journals, the directors themselves, their succes-
sors at the Film School at the Sitges film festival of 1967 and by the
Barcelona School.22
Hostility towards the NCE continued in different accounts for differing
reasons in the following decades. Film commentators who cut their critical
teeth on the film journals of the 1960s would continue to condemn the con-
tradictions of protectionism in book-length accounts published in later
decades. For instance, Vicente Molina-Foix, writing it should be noted
before 1977 and hence before the abolition of censorship in Spain, decries
José María García Escudero’s policies for giving ‘fictitious liberty’, sum-
marising his legislation as ‘hopelessly inadequate’ (1977: 17); similarly,
Román Gubern calls the movement one of equivocal ‘oposición contro-
lada’ (controlled opposition) (1981: 211). In accounts published in 1973,
Augusto Torres would condemn the NCE as a ‘caricature’ (1973: 20) of
contemporary European New Cinemas, and blame government protection
for the unpaid debt of 230 million pesetas to producers by 1970 (1973: 43),
and the Barcelona School director Joaquín Jordá, who worked in collab-
oration with NCE directors in the early years, would state, ‘el cine español
es nada’ (Spanish cinema is nothing) (Torres 1973: 56). Similarly, in their
unambiguously subtitled volume on Spanish cinema, ‘algunos materiales
por derribo’ (materials to destroy it), Carlos and David Pérez Merinero
demolished the policy of protectionism. They fiercely attacked those like
Querejeta who had benefited from it, whom they accuse of being a mere
instrument of the regime (1973: 19 n. 15 bis), and Bardem, who is for them
  15

‘la institucionalización del cine “crítico”’ (the institutionalisation of ‘crit-

ical’ cinema) (1973: 21), and defended directors ignored by it, like Edgar
Neville, Marco Ferreri and Fernando Fernán Gómez (1973: 21), sum-
marising the movement as nothing more than propaganda to represent the
regime’s apertura abroad (1973: 25).
These views are echoed in accounts written from the 1980s on, but the
distance afforded by time tempers the virulence of earlier critiques. John
Hopewell, for instance, criticises the financial flaws of García Escudero’s
protectionist measures (1986: 65) and the failure of the films to appeal to
contemporary audiences (1986: 71), and notes that the preferential treat-
ment given to the young graduates of the Film School stifled alternative
creative currents, like the work of Fernán Gómez (1986: 251 n. 39), but
salutes the quality of some of the films made (1986: 66–76), in particular
the work of Saura (1986: 71–6). Casimiro Torreiro’s chapter (1995b) in the
standard reference work to the national cinema in Spanish23 likewise strikes
a balance between criticising the movement as a propaganda stunt to
improve Spain’s image at foreign film festivals (1995b: 306), which ignored
older oppositional directors (1995b: 326–31) and failed to connect with
Spanish audiences (1995b: 335), and admitting that García Escudero’s
measures enabled the production of films of ‘quality and interest’ and pro-
vided a platform from which some of Spain’s best directors entered the
industry (1995b: 340).
From the 1980s, an alternative tendency emerged that celebrated these
films as the politically dissident work of a group of auteurs. At a time when
Spain’s first Socialist government after the return of democracy was intro-
ducing a series of protectionist measures that were similar to the 1960s
model (the Miró decrees of 1983),24 a narrative of Spanish film history was
told in critical accounts that connected past and present: following Berlanga
and Bardem’s first dissident films of the 1950s, and the demands of the
latter at the Conversations of Salamanca in 1955, the Director-General of
Cinema García Escudero introduced protectionist measures that facilitated
the production of further oppositional films, which in turn looked forward
to the work carried out by filmmakers under democracy (Rodero 1981;
Caparrós Lera 1983; García Fernández 1985). This account continues to
persuade critics (Higginbotham 1988; Schwartz 1986, 1991; D’Lugo 1997;
Kinder 1997b), some of whom have taken it in important new directions to
include analyses of national cinemas (Kinder 1993; Stone 2002), and close
readings of both canonical and lesser-known films (Heredero and Monterde
2003: 385–454).25 As we have seen, this narrative privileges the NCE at the
expense of popular cinema. By focusing on both the links with the VCE and
the contradictory contexts from which these films arise, A Cinema of
16    

Contradiction aims to show that the NCE was a more complex and interest-
ing phenomenon than hitherto supposed. Like its commercial counterpart,
it responded to the tensions of the apertura, but was also itself the contra-
dictory result of that same apertura. First, it was a film movement spon-
sored by a dictatorship that its directors ideologically opposed. Second, as
Teresa Vilarós has pointed out with respect to the leftist intelligentsia of
1960s Spain in general, it benefited from the tentative political liberalisa-
tion that was a corollary of, or at least an adjunct to, economic capitalism,
another system that its directors ideologically opposed (1998: 75).
These contradictions characterised the legislation that enabled the films
to be made, as well as the films themselves. Fraga appointed García
Escudero as Director-General of Cinema in 1962, a post he held until the
closure of the department in 1967. With a degree in political science and
doctorate in law, this journalist, writer (his books cover studies of journal-
ism, politics, law, religion and culture, as well as cinema) and former
deputy colonel of Franco’s air force (Riambau and Torreiro 1999: 49–50)
was a Falangist and devout Catholic, but owing to his desire for reform, ‘In
the context of the time, both [he and] Fraga . . . passed for liberals’
(Vernon 2002: 261). García Escudero’s background in film is revealing of
the new direction that the regime wanted Spanish cinema to take. He had
held the Director-Generalship from 1951, but was sacked the following
year for awarding the ‘National Interest’ prize to José Antonio Nieves
Condes’s Surcos (Furrows 1951) in preference to Juan de Orduña’s turgid
CIFESA26 biopic of Christopher Columbus, Alba de América (Dawn in
America 1951). Surcos tells us a great deal about the minister who cham-
pioned it: though progressive in its adoption of the techniques and some
of the concerns of Italian Neorealism (an influence denied by the director
[Vernon 2002: 256]), it none the less reinforced reactionary Francoist
morals in its vilification of the city, and as such is a contradictory hybrid
that Kinder describes as ‘Falangist Neorealism’ (1993: 40). Surcos thus
projected the limits of García Escudero’s own position: he called for a pro-
gressive, intellectual cinema, but one contained within the confines of the
dictatorship. This aperturista belief in progress within limits is confirmed
in García Escudero’s interventions in the Salamanca conference of 1955,
and his 1962 publication Cine español – a book Fraga read before offering
him the Director-Generalship (Hopewell 1986: 65).
The progress with limits that is expounded in theory in Cine español was
put into practice in García Escudero’s 1960s legislation. In line with the
principle stated in his book that Spanish cinema would improve if its prac-
titioners were better educated (García Escudero 1962: Chapter 4), the
Director-General’s first change in 1962 was to reorganise the state Film
  17

School, the Instituto de Investigaciones y Experiencias Cinematográficas

(School of Cinematographic Experience and Research) and rename it the
Escuela Oficial de Cine (Official Film School). In response to the demands
of the Conversations of Salamanca, in 1963 censorship rules were pub-
lished which, up to this point, had been unknown, and in 1964 García
Escudero replaced the propagandist classification ‘National Interest’,
which had proved so controversial in the Surcos case, with ‘Special Interest’,
meaning ‘quality’ or ‘art’ cinema.27 This was part of a fourth change, the
establishment of a new system of government subsidies dependent on the
classification of a film according to censors’ analysis of the script (all
Spanish films automatically received 15 per cent of box office takings, but a
‘Special Interest’ film could be awarded up to 50 per cent of its projected
production costs).28 Finally, art cinemas, ‘Salas de Arte y Ensayo’, were
established for subtitled foreign cinema and ‘Special Interest’ films, which
led the Director-General to be dubbed the ‘director de cine-clubs’ (director
of film clubs) (García Escudero 1967: 111). Official statistics suggest that
these measures led to the emergence of 46 new directors, whose work
amounted to eighty-six films (Rodero 1981: 68), though Torreiro estimates
there were only thirty NCE films (2000: 157).
The major contradiction of this legislation was that dissent from the
state was supported by that same state. Thus while the previous generation
of oppositional cineastes were the bêtes noires of Francoism – consider the
scandal unleashed by Buñuel’s Viridiana in Cannes in 1961 – the NCE
directors were championed by the regime. Though Berlanga was part of
the former group, his description of this contradiction is both crude and
to the point:

tuvimos la buena-mala suerte de que el Director General de Cine . . . fuese un enam-

orado de todos nosotros. . . . Toda la legislación que hizo este hombre, que venía del
franquismo, hizo que acabásemos desembarcando en un cine nacido del Ministerio,
que es lo que ha jodido todo. (we had the good-bad luck that the Director-General of
Cinema . . . thought we were all wonderful. . . . All his legislation, which was
Francoist, meant that we ended up making films born of the Ministry, which is what’s
screwed everything up.) (quoted in Angulo 2003b: 45)

García Escudero’s legislation was typically aperturista: new freedoms

were presented as liberalisation, but were in fact a means of control. It was
an adoption by the state of the policy of keeping your friends close and your
enemies closer. New work by the Film School graduates was simultane-
ously encouraged and restricted. Production was aided through investment
in the School and generous subsidies, and international distribution was
encouraged by the preference shown for selecting NCE films for foreign
18    

film festivals. However, production was simultaneously hampered through

censorship, and national distribution and exhibition restricted by a screen
quota system that favoured dubbed Hollywood films.
The place of the NCE within national and international contexts
was therefore a particular source of anxiety, as I argue in Chapter 5. The
NCE was condemned by the Francoist press for being ‘extranjerizante’
(foreignified), compared to the ‘authentic Spanishness’ of the VCE con-
sensual comedies (Triana-Toribio 2003: 78), but no film exists in a national
vacuum, impermeable to transnational influences. So while the NCE drew
on foreign art movements like Italian Neorealism and the French New
Wave, the VCE too was influenced by American and Italian comedy
(Barbachano 1966; Palá 1966; Marsh 2002: 16; Marsh 2003: 134), and in
fact both cinemas were fertilised by all-pervasive Hollywood film. What
made the NCE different from the VCE in terms of nationality was that
while the VCE was a domestic cinema, the state sponsors of the NCE
wanted the films to enter ‘en los mercados nacionales y sobre todo los mer-
cados internacionales’ (national markets, and above all foreign markets)
(Fraga, quoted in Riambau and Torreiro 1999: 52).
A snapshot of foreign reception of the NCE at film festivals indicates
foreign critics’ differing responses to the movement. In Britain, Sight and
Sound gave a thoughtful overview of ‘The Young Turks of Spain’, singled
out the work of Saura, Antxón Eceiza and Francisco Regueiro for particu-
lar praise (Clouzot 1966: 69), and saluted Nueve cartas a Berta as the fore-
runner of ‘a rebirth of the cinema in Spain’ (Wilson 1966: 173). The US
trade journal Variety also hailed the ‘considerable screen expertise’ in evi-
dence in La caza, though its view of La tía Tula was mixed, and it consid-
ered Nueve cartas a Berta naïve. France’s Cahiers du cinéma, meanwhile,
praised La tía Tula as one of the best works of the NCE, criticised La caza
as over-schematic and described Nueve cartas a Berta as ‘interesting’.29
NCE directors and sympathetic critics in Spain played up the negative
views, however, and vented their frustration at being misunderstood.
They bemoaned the failure of foreign audiences to take into consideration
the difficult circumstances of filmmaking in Spain (e.g. the reception
of Plácido at Cannes [Erice 1962: 23]), their occasional incomprehen-
sion of the films (e.g. the condemnation of El verdugo as fascist [Fontenla
1966b: 7], or misunderstanding of Los golfos [Saura 2003: 457–8]), and
their back-handed praise – ‘la sobrevaloración paternalista adoptada ante
cualquier creación de un país subdesarrollado’ (paternalistic over-praising
of any creation from an underdeveloped country) (Monleón 1966: 8).
As the decade wore on, there was a realisation that foreign audiences
saw through the NCE as propagandist window-dressing (e.g. Llinàs and
  19

Marías 1969: 66–7; Torres and Molina-Foix 2003: 16), and directors
despaired to see that the political was placed above the cinematographic in
consideration of their films. For instance, when La caza was awarded the
Silver Bear at Berlin in 1966 it was reportedly ‘por la valentía e indignación
con que presenta una situación característica de su patria y de su tiempo’
(for the bravery and indignation with which it presents a situation charac-
teristic of its country and time), reasons that Saura rejected as ‘se desvían
de lo que es genuinamente cinematográfico, para chocar y caer en el par-
tidismo político’ (a diversion away from the genuinely cinematographic in
order to shock, and succumb to political partisanship) (Gómez Mesa 1966:
395). This, then, was one more cruel contradiction of the NCE, which I
discuss in detail in Chapter 5. Determined to remain in their home country
rather than work in exile (Clouzot 1966: 103), NCE directors were criti-
cised for being too foreign in Spain, yet too Spanish abroad.
The corrective critical gesture that disputes foreign consideration of
Spanish cinema as different (to paraphrase Fraga) is understandable. And
there are many points of comparison between the NCE and contemporary
New Cinemas, especially in the area of production. Like the Oberhausen
Manifesto (1962) that gave rise to the Young German Cinema of the
1960s, the NCE had a manifesto of sorts in the conclusions of the
Conversations of Salamanca (1955) (Kinder 1997b: 597), which similarly
enshrined a Romantic notion of individual authorship and implied the
need for state protection (Kaes 1997: 614). If the German directors were
often self-taught (Kaes 1997: 616), Spain, like France, Italy and a number
of Eastern European countries (Torreiro 2000: 158), had an official Film
School that became a forum to forge bonds. Closely aligned with the Film
School, Spain had specialist journals too, where students would address
through the word what they would later explore through the image. Left-
leaning Nuevo Cine, which replaced Objetivo (closed down in 1955 owing
to the controversy of the Conversations of Salamanca) and Cinema uni-
versitario (which lasted till March 1963), was broadly aligned with Positif
and Cinema nuovo, while the admiration of Hollywood genre film in Film
Ideal made it comparable, if only very loosely, with Cahiers du cinéma
(Monterde 2003: 105). Both Nuestro Cine and Film Ideal displayed their
kinship with their European counterparts by frequently including trans-
lations of their articles into Spanish. Government protection through
subsidy is a further key similarity between the NCE and contemporary
New Cinemas, which all shared a production context that Casimiro
Torreiro summarises as ‘El estado asistencial’ (The Welfare State)
(1995a).30 Resourceful independent producers, like Querejeta in Spain, or
Anatole Dauman and Pierre Braunberger in France, or Franco Cristaldi
20    

in Italy (Nowell-Smith 1997a: 570), worked the system of protection to

their own advantage and thus backed many of the key films of the period.
But in all cases, state money came with strings attached: just as the NCE
was to offer a liberal image of aperturista Spain abroad, so the French New
Wave, for instance, was to showcase to the world an energetic and youth-
ful France that had recovered from the Second World War (Benayoun
1968: 157). Finally, all these New Cinemas were dependent on new tech-
nology in order to shake up the conventions of representation that char-
acterised their indigenous popular cinemas (this Oedipal scenario of
generational conflict is particularly clear in the French case, where the
New Wave directors dismissed the work that preceded them as ‘le cinéma
de papa’ [Daddy’s cinema]).31
Given these similarities, Heredero argues against the thesis of Spanish
exceptionality to suggest that the NCE be considered not as ‘una flor de
invernadero crecida en el aislamiento de la dictadura franquista, sino un
reflejo nacional (todo lo encanijado que se quiera) de una esfervescencia
europea’ (a hothouse flower grown in the isolation of the Francoist dicta-
torship, but a national refection [call it as weak as you want] of European
effervescence) (1993: 376). Forty years on, it seems churlish to caution
against the argument that the NCE was the equivalent of European New
Cinemas on the grounds that this repeats the aperturista propaganda that
Spain was as liberal as its democratic neighbours. However, the tendency
to stress the NCE’s similarities with Europe leads to a distorted view of
the movement that overlooks its particular contexts, like its connections
with its domestic popular cinema. Comparisons play an important role in
the history of national cinemas, but they must always be grounded in a
thorough investigation of each particular case. By arguing that the NCE
is inseparable from, though not reducible to, its particular contexts,
A Cinema of Contradiction aims to offer such an analysis of Spain.

Notes
1. For example, Sieburth (1994: 41–4, 231–44); other scholars refer to ‘uneven
development’ (Graham and Sánchez 1995: 407).
2. Student numbers almost doubled from 69,377 in 1962–3 to 134,945 in 1968–9
in Spain (Riambau and Torreiro 1999: 31). The failure of the NCE to reach a
wide audience has been the source of much acrimony: some blame the govern-
ment for restricting distribution and exhibition, others its directors for their
aestheticism. We may move beyond the critical impasse of apportioning blame
if we accept that the movement, like the 1950s Social Novel that preceded it,
appealed to a select demographic.
  21

3. Joan Francesc de Lasa is credited with naming the movement, giving this title
to the Molins del Rei Film Festival of 1963 which he directed, though the
phrase is used by the editors of Film Ideal in 1960 (‘Nuevo Cine Español’
1960). Other epithets include ‘la nueva ola española’ (Spanish New Wave),
‘el joven cine español’ (Young Spanish Cinema), ‘el Cabo de Buena
Esperanza’ (Cape of Good Hope) (the latter phrase coined by José Luis Saénz
de Heredia [García de Dueñas 2003: 79]) and in the foreign press ‘The Young
Turks of Spain’ (Clouzot 1966). With the less complementary ‘cine mese-
tario’, the directors of the Barcelona School condemned the NCE’s excessive
focus on Castile (whose central plain, evoked in the work of the Generation
of 1898, is the ‘meseta’), and the two phrases ‘cine de funcionarios’ (Cinema
of Bureaucrats) (Llinás and Marías 1969: 66) and ‘los chicos de García
Escudero’ (García Escudero’s Boys) (Triana-Toribio 2003: 66) highlighted
the movement’s dependency on the government. The literary critic José
María Castellet also used the term ‘nueva ola’ in 1963 to refer to the Spanish
novel of the previous twenty years (Schwartz 1976: 7). Marta Hernández and
Manolo Revuelta coined the term ‘Viejo Cine Español’ in 1976 (Triana-
Toribio 2003: 75).
4. These and the following statistics on audience attendance and takings are
those published on Spain’s Ministry of Culture official web-page, http://www.
mcu.es/cine/index.jsp, on the link to ‘Bases de datos de películas’, as at
15 February 2005 and refer to Spain only. It should be noted, however, that
official box office control did not begin in Spain until 1 January 1965.
5. Reliable or not, in the interview included on the DVD version of the film
released as part of the El País ‘Un País de Cine’ collection in April 2003, Pedro
Masó claims that La gran familia played to packed houses in the afternoon
showings, but, as it attracted fewer audiences in the evening, it spent only two
weeks at a top cinema, but then lasted forty-seven weeks at a secondary one.
6. A third exception was Del rosa . . . al amarillo (From Pink to Yellow, Summers
1963).
7. Cine Asesor, a volume that records trade and press information, noted of
Saura’s La caza, for instance, that it would attract a select audience interested
in ‘el cine de los nuevos valores españoles’ (films about new Spanish values).
Ángel Fernández Santos’s survey (1967) of audiences at the Molins del Rei
Festival, 1967, further confirms the NCE’s appeal to a narrow demographic,
as does José Luis García Escudero’s decision to establish separate art cinemas
for foreign and NCE films the same year.
8. The playwrights Antonio Buero Vallejo and Alfonso Sastre began a dispute
over ‘posibilismo’ and ‘imposibilismo’ in 1960, which defined responses to
censorship in the coming decades. On the side of ‘possibilism’, Buero argued
that the artist was beholden to work with censorship in order to reach an audi-
ence, while Sastre condemned this as an unacceptable compromise, main-
taining that the artist should behave as if restrictions did not exist, even if this
meant his or her work never reached the public.
22    

9. In this last aim, I have been guided by Núria Triana-Toribio’s identification

of overlaps between these two areas in her study of Spanish national cinema
(2003: 71); Stephanie Sieburth’s questioning of the divisions between ‘high’
and ‘low’ in her work on Spanish literature (2002: 14); and Colin Crisp’s revi-
sionist history of the French New Wave (1993), which reveals its intercon-
nections with the classic French cinema it apparently opposed. I would like to
thank Susan Hayward for drawing my attention to Crisp’s study.
10. The Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional
Sindicalista, created in April 1937, was also known as the Movimiento Nacional
(National Movement).
11. Brought in to solve an escalating currency crisis, this encouraged deregulation,
introduced deflationary measures and opened Spain up to foreign investment.
12. Vatican II (1962–5) is credited with liberalising the Catholic Church in the
modern era. Its reforms included replacing the obligatory Latin mass with
vernacular liturgies, increasing power to the laity and approving ecumeni-
cism. It also condemned dictatorship, but Franco denied this was a reference
to Spain (Preston 1993: 725).
13. Quoting Payne (1987: 494), Paul Preston entitles the chapter covering the
period 1960–3 in his biography of the dictator ‘Intimations of Mortality’
(1993: 685–713). In 1960, rumours that Franco had suffered a heart attack had
to be officially denied (Preston 1993: 685); during 1961, Parkinson’s disease
was diagnosed (Payne 1987: 495); and a serious hunting accident on Christmas
Eve 1961, which seriously injured his left hand, caused particular concern
(Preston 1993: 697–8). Tatjana Pavlović, whose work covers an area similar to
my discussion of the ageing body in Chapter 6, argues that ‘Franco’s slow and
interminable dying and agony . . . deeply marked the [1960s]’ (2003: 70).
14. See Labanyi (1999) on the reception of Spanish popular culture in Spain,
where she notes that José Ortega y Gasset’s Modernist disdain for ‘low’
culture is especially influential (1999: 100).
15. ‘Eduardo Haro Tecglen: El niño republicano’, http://www.eduardoharo
tecglen.net/blog/. Consulted 31 May 2005.
16. These revisionist accounts also drew on the work of other Hispanic scholars
like Paul Julian Smith (1994; 1998), Peter Evans (2000) and Steven Marsh
(2002). For an overview of the role of cultural studies approaches in British
Hispanism, see Chris Perriam’s edited issue of Paragraph, 1999.
17. There were exceptions to this, like Antxón Eceiza’s experience on VCE sets
where he was employed to teach Francisco Rabal French (Angulo 2003a:
272–3).
18. Some critics name Los golfos as the first film of the NCE (Molina-Foix 1977:
19; Kinder 1993: 99), which may be justified because of its thematic concerns
and aesthetic influences, but I define the movement as the films funded by
García Escudero’s legislation, for without this protection they would not have
existed. See Zunzunegui (2002b: 103–5) for further discussion of the problem
of defining the limits of the NCE.
  23

19. Realism was the pet subject of Nuestro Cine through its entire run (1961–71),
the yardstick by which it judged VCE, NCE and foreign cinemas alike. For
articles devoted to defining the term and its import, see García Hortelano
(1961); Ezcurra et al. (1961); San Miguel (1962a; 1962b); Gubern (1963).
20. A further area of overlap is dubbing: American, VCE and NCE films in the
period were acoustically linked through the voices of the same dubbing actors.
21. On early support of the movement, see issue 15, Nuestro Cine and issue 61,
Film Ideal. In this period, support is also found in books written by Nuestro
Cine journalists like Fontenla (1966a) and Gubern et al. (1965). Republican
critic Manuel Villegas López also wrote on the movement (1967; 1991), as did
García Escudero, the minister responsible for its existence (1967). (García
Escudero would continue to defend his role in the NCE and the Barcelona
School in numerous subsequent publications: 1970; 1978; 1995). On hostile
accounts, see Martínez Tomás (1967); Triana-Toribio (2003: 78); Julián
(2002: 83). See Redondo (1964) for an example of criticism of the movement
in a specialist journal.
22. For criticism by the journals, see Molina-Foix (2003); Llinás and Marías
(1969); by directors, see Patino, quoted in Molina-Foix (1977: 19); by their
successors, see Zunzunegui (2002b: 104–5).
23. Torreiro also contributes the chapter on this period to Monterde and
Riambau (1995) and Gubern (2000).
24. Full discussion of the reasons for this similarity falls outside the scope of
this book. José Enrique Monterde has called post-Franco film of 1973–92
‘Un cine bajo la paradoja’ (A Cinema of Paradox) (1993), because, just when
the country broke free from Francoist protection, world, and particularly
European, cinema became dependent on such protection (1993: 17), hence
Spain had to return to this policy in order to compete. However, Monterde’s
argument that Spanish cinema was dependent on the state while world
cinema was autonomous (1993: 16–17) is not the case in the 1960s, when other
New Cinemas were as reliant on government subsidy as the NCE (Torreiro
1995a).
25. Added to this, there has been a recent tendency to lionise the NCE in Spain.
On the one hand, events like retrospectives (such as the one launched at
the Gijón International Film Festival, November 2003) and re-releases
(such as Suevia Films’ new collection of Patino’s filmography) are to be cele-
brated as they mean the work of the NCE may reach a wider audience. On the
other, the hagiographic documentary De Salamanca a ninguna parte (From
Salamanca to Nowhere, Peña 2002), and sycophantic volumes on directors like
Picazo (Iznaola Gómez 2004b), are monuments to Spain’s current cult of
nostalgia, which has celebrated in particular oppositional figures from the
dictatorship.
26. First a film distributor, CIFESA (Compañía Industrial del Film Español
S.A.) was a production company associated with Francoist values under the
dictatorship.
24    

27. Pierre Bourdieu’s insights (1999) are pertinent to interpreting García

Escudero’s attempt to define ‘art’ cinema, as Triana-Toribio has noted in her
reading of his ‘Judgements of Taste’ (2003: 65–9). According to Hopewell, the
‘Special Interest’ award dates from 1963 (1986: 64).
28. All critics give this figure (except Kathleen Vernon [2002: 261] who quotes up
to 70 per cent) but it is common knowledge that production costs were inflated
so that the 50 per cent subsidy would entirely finance the film.
29. For Variety reviews, see ‘Review of La Caza’ 1983; ‘Review of La tía Tula’
1983; ‘Review of Nueve cartas a Berta’ 1983; for Cahiers du cinéma, ‘San
Sebastián’ 1964; ‘Festival de San Sebastián’ 1967.
30. Spanish legislation in the 1960s was based on the protectionist model of
avance sur recettes and special subsidies for films awarded the ‘Special Quality’
prize instigated by André Malraux in Gaullist France (Torreiro 1995a: 51–5).
31. A further area of comparison is that between 1960s Spain and Eastern
Europe, where filmmakers benefited from similarly equivocal new freedoms,
and also developed a metaphorical film language to overcome censorship.
 PART I

SPANISH POPULAR CINEMA

 CHAPTER 1

Franco’s Great Family: La gran

familia (The Great Family,
Palacios 1962)

One of the last films to be awarded the ‘National Interest’ prize before José
María García Escudero replaced the category in 1964, Fernando Palacios’s
consensual comedy La gran familia seemed to contain everything that the
promoters of the Nuevo Cine Español considered wrong with the Viejo Cine
Español. The film is an example of the commercial Spanish industry
despised by the young generation of art directors and their sympathisers.1
It was commissioned by Pedro Masó, a scriptwriter and sometime director
(he worked on sixty-nine scripts over his long career, including those of La
gran familia and La ciudad no es para mí [Chapter 2]), who became one of
the most financially successful producers of the 1950s–1970s, working
for both Asturias Films and his own company. Its director, Palacios, made
only ten films before his premature death in 1965, including the sequel to
La gran familia, La familia y uno más (The Family Plus One 1965) (Masó
made the third part of the trilogy, La familia, bien, gracias [The Family’s
Fine, Thanks 1979]) and two Marisol films, after gaining solid training as
an assistant director for his uncle, Florián Rey, and Ladislao Vajda, direc-
tor of the runaway success of 1954, Marcelino, pan y vino (Marcelino, Bread
and Wine) (Heredero 1993: 247). La gran familia was a popular film in
terms of its production contexts, but not in terms of audience atten-
dance: according to the figures discussed in my Introduction, it attracted
a smaller audience than any of the apparently ‘minority’ NCE films I
discuss in Part II.
Masó aimed to make his money from subsidy, not the box office, in this
film; in this endeavour, La gran familia, the first film backed by his own
company (Hernández Ruiz 1997: 516), was a resounding success. Its cele-
bration of the conservative ideology that underpinned Francoism, attrac-
tively packaged as light, or ‘white’, family comedy,2 and supported by
popular stars, pushed all the right buttons on the classification board,
which awarded it the coveted subsidy. Indeed, even though the dictator’s
name is never mentioned in the film, its apparently perfect alignment of
28    

state policy with domestic life suggests it might be renamed Franco’s Great
Family:3 the father is head of the household, the mother, the angel of the
hearth, and the purpose of their marriage, procreation. In this sense,
watching La gran familia is like watching a 104-minute version of Franco
awarding a prize to the parents of a large family, a favourite subject of the
NO-DO newsreels at the time. Art would have appeared to match life for
audiences viewing NO-DO reports of such awards in theatres prior to the
screening of the film,4 then observing a year in the life of a family that had
received such an award in the film itself.5
Like the NO-DOs, La gran familia might therefore be considered a tool
of propaganda to support government policy. If today Western govern-
ments accept immigration (in theory at least) as a means to maintain work-
forces in response to declining birth rates, in Spain under Franco, a policy
of pronatalism was adopted to re-stock a country whose population was
depleted by the Civil War, and whose birth rates had been falling anyway
(Grugel and Rees 1997: 135). Even though contraception, sterilisation and
abortion were banned from 1941 (Brooksbank Jones 1997: 84), pronatalist
policy under Franco failed. As Anny Brooksbank Jones points out (1997:
94 n. 3), despite the prohibition of its use,

contraception was practised throughout the Franco years, as reflected in the decline
in family size between 1930 (when 38% of married women had more than four chil-
dren) and 1970 (when this figure had fallen to 17%) . . .. In 1963, 82% of doctors
reportedly believed their patients were using some form of birth control and in only
34% of cases was this thought to be the withdrawal method.

Economic hardship explains why many parents chose to have fewer chil-
dren in the post-war period, and, for those missing out on the economic
boom, poverty was also the reason for smaller families in the developmen-
tal years. In addition, from the 1960s onwards, middle-class couples post-
poned and reduced child-bearing owing to increasing female attendance of
universities and participation in working life.
Issues surrounding gender, therefore, throw into relief the tensions trig-
gered by social change. As Brooksbank Jones notes, ‘Throughout the
1960s, women remained at the epicentre of tensions between the compet-
ing demands of their official domestic role and the regime’s growing need
for an enlarged workforce’ (1997: 77). This uneasy alliance of tradition and
modernity is revealed by the government’s contradictory actions in the
early 1960s: while on the one hand its Ministry of Labour legally recog-
nised certain women’s rights in the workplace in the 1961 ‘Law of Political,
Professional, and Labour Rights of Women’, on the other, its Ministry of
Information and Tourism awarded the pronatalist La gran familia the
 ’   29

‘National Interest’ prize, which led to the top level of subsidy of 50 per cent
and benefits in promotion and distribution (Gubern 1981: 133).
To read La gran familia as straightforward propaganda, therefore, over-
looks its more complex response to the contradictory context from which
it arose: the failed promotion of pronatalism and simultaneous timid
encouragement of female participation in the work force. Since the film
focuses on a middle-class family, it does not address the economic reason
for the decline in child-bearing – continued poverty meant fewer children –
nor does it focus on the economic need for the women of working-class
families to work. Rather, it responds to, and condemns, the new situation in
the 1960s whereby middle-class couples postponed and restricted parent-
hood owing to changes in women’s roles. La gran familia celebrates the twin
cults of motherhood and domesticity that underpinned the nineteenth-
century gender ideology of the ‘ángel del hogar’ (angel of the hearth).
(Francoism’s return to these anachronistic Victorian-style values was given
legal expression in the re-adoption of the 1889 Civil Code in 1938.)6 Unlike
the authors of the historical epics of the 1940s and 1950s, Masó, the film’s
producer and scriptwriter, Rafael Salvia and Antonio Vich, its other
scriptwriters, and Palacios, its director, do not choose period costume
drama to advocate anachronistic values, but set the film in the present of
1962 Madrid, and even reinforce its contemporaneity by references to
current events, like the marriage of the future monarch Prince Juan Carlos
to Princess Sofía, which had taken place on 14 May 1962. Rather than
avoid the confrontation of tradition and modernity through a period
setting, then, La gran familia seeks instead to conceal the contradiction
between its contemporary setting and anachronistic values by naturalising
their reconciliation.
This chapter will therefore analyse first how the film conceals contra-
dictions to construct a conservative vision of the family that was convinc-
ing enough to win over the ‘National Interest’ awards board. Genre, plot,
musical score and performance style are harnessed to naturalise Franco’s
1960s Great Family and show that the current economic boom happily
coexists with traditional family structures. However, there are fault-lines
running through the film that, even if they do not entirely undermine it,
at least weaken this construction of conservatism. While mindful of the
undesirability of approaches to popular film that skew textual evidence in
their enthusiasm to read against the grain, in the second part of this
chapter, I will none the less contend that La gran familia sustains a reading
that reveals its tentative critique of Francoism in the 1960s. Peter Evans
has already demonstrated that there is a ‘discernible pattern of dissidence’
in an analysis of Masó’s Familia trilogy that emphasises its questioning of
30    

masculinity and parent–child relations (2000: 85). Focusing on the first of

the three films, I develop these insights by paying particular attention to
the role played by the veteran comic actor José Isbert and the discourse of
claustrophobia that is emphasised in the film by cinematography and
editing.

‘¿Estás contento por algo?’ (Are you happy for any

particular reason?)
‘Yo siempre estoy contento por mucho’ (I always have lots to be happy
about) the father of La gran familia replies to the mother’s enquiry if he
is happy about anything in particular, in one of the last scenes of the film.
Even though at this point there is a particular reason – it’s pay-day and,
furthermore, the day for collecting the tax allowance the father is owed
for his family of fifteen children – the general reason echoes like a refrain
throughout Palacios’s film: happiness is synonymous with the family,
and the bigger the family the better. If we read La gran familia as an
act of persuasion, its purpose is above all to naturalise this subjective
opinion as objective fact. If happiness means having a large family, then
unhappiness is caused by a lack of children – not economic hardship or
political repression – and unhappiness within a large family is simply not
‘natural’.
An arsenal of film resources is deployed to naturalise this message,
which relates in particular to the input of Masó, Salvia and Vich on the
script, Palacios as director (aided by Salvia as assistant director) and Adolfo
Waitzman, who composed the film’s original score. First, La gran familia
proceeds according to the generic conventions of familiar settings and
stock characters of the comedia sainetesca.7 Its characters are not only
recognisable, but are introduced in the opening sequence as types rather
than individuals. The credits feature no proper names, but present the
adults by family role – father, mother, grandpa, godfather – and the fifteen
children by nicknames related to their activities – ‘el petardista’ (firework
fan), ‘la enamorada’ (the girl who’s in love) – or physical characteristics –
‘la mellada’ (the gap-toothed girl), ‘los gemelos’ (the twins). The setting of
the film also conforms to expectations. Most of the action occurs in an
interior studio re-creation of a lower-middle-class family flat, and the
Madrid location is conveyed through references to emblematic sites in the
script and in exterior shots. For instance, when the father describes his
dream of the future, he sees the Gran Vía scattered with placards adver-
tising his son as architect and himself as master builder, or again, when he
admonishes another son for playing football in the flat, he asks, ‘¿Tú te has
 ’   31

creído que esto es el estadio del Bernabéu?’ (Did you think this was the
Bernabéu stadium?).8 The only exterior shots of recognisable city land-
marks are associated with male adult family members; in keeping with her
role as an angel of the hearth, the only public spaces in which the mother
is seen are the covered market, where she buys food for the family, and the
department store, where she chooses a first communion dress and sailor’s
outfit. The father is associated with contemporary, modernising Spain
when he visits a building site on the Paseo de la Castellana,9 and the
grandpa is connected to traditional Spain when he goes Christmas shop-
ping in the Plaza Mayor, which is emblematic of Madrid’s Habsburg
architecture. Characterisation according to family role and the setting in
Madrid follow conventional expectations and thus serve to naturalise the
status quo staged by the film: if the characters and the setting are ‘normal’,
so is the happy life of a large family presented.
This status quo is shored up further by its disruption and restoration.
The loss of Chencho, the family’s youngest male child, on a Christmas
shopping-trip with some of his siblings and grandpa in the Plaza Mayor,
and his subsequent kidnapping by a childless couple, briefly expose the
family as vulnerable in the urban environment. (As Evans [2000: 86] points
out, this event also indicates the criminal desperation to which an other-
wise pleasant couple are driven by their childlessness in a society that
assigns all value to having children.) However, this vulnerability galvanises
the family, leading its members to declare their enthusiasm for both its size
and unity, and of course Chencho’s return bolsters it further. After
handing him over, the childless couple makes a desperate plea to the father
for the boy to remain with them as they have no children, whereas the
Alonsos have so many. This proposal allows the father to dismiss any
notion that a child might benefit from being in a smaller family, and thus
champion Franco’s policy of pronatalism:

Ya sé que son muchos hermanos, pero precisamente por eso han de estar juntos
todos. . . . No se trata de que [Chencho] esté mejor o peor atendido, sino que esté
donde debe estar: en su casa. (I know that there are lots of brothers and sisters, but
that’s precisely why they all have to be together. . . . It’s not a question of whether
[Chencho] would be looked after better or worse, but rather that he is where he
should be: in his home.)

In this sequence we are further led to believe that the joy experienced by
the family on the return of the child is so great that it makes them oblivi-
ous to the presence of his kidnappers standing next to them outside the
television studio: one might reasonably have expected the family to rebuke
them for their criminal act.
32    

The loss and return of Chencho also allow the film’s authors to indicate,
in passing, the efficiency of state bureaucracy. Through four soundbridges,
four different sets of state officials are shown to combine their efforts in
what constitutes no less than a paean to bureaucratic efficiency. Extra-
diegetic music connects the first sequence of the initial phone call report-
ing the child’s loss to the police switchboard, to the second image of the
police commissioner receiving the report, and to the third image of the
police on duty in patrol cars, and finally to the fourth image of the state
radio presenters broadcasting the news of Chencho’s loss to the nation.
Moreover, and more importantly, the disruption and restoration of the
status quo through the loss and return of the child allow scriptwriters and
directors to signal the compatibility of family life and the modern city.
Chencho gets lost owing to the threat posed to the family by the anony-
mous modern city, but he is found thanks to television, a synecdoche of
that same modernity: the family appeal for Chencho’s return in a televi-
sion advert, and when the boy recognises his parents on screen, it pricks
the consciences of his kidnappers. This happy coexistence of family and
modernity is confirmed by the final sequence of the film. It is Christmas
Eve, and the reunited fifteen children gather round the new television,
which has been sent to them as a gift from the guilt-ridden kidnappers.
They tune in to hear the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ of Handel’s Messiah, which
is here restored to its ‘proper’ religious place after such irreverent treat-
ment by Buñuel in the beggars’ orgy sequence of Viridiana the previous
year. Next, the mother announces the imminent arrival of child number
sixteen, who will be called Jesús. On the soundtrack, we then hear the choir
rejoice: ‘And he shall reign forever and ever, King of Kings and Lord of
Lords, forever and ever, Hallelujah’. Through the music played on the tele-
vision (which may not have been grasped by all audiences as the words are
in English, but would certainly have been clear to the composer
Waitzman), the film makes an association that not only suggests that this
Spanish mother is ideal, but that she is in fact a modern-day Mary who will
give birth to a Messiah. Franco’s Great Family, therefore, becomes none
other than the Holy Family itself.
If the status quo is presented as ‘normal’ through predictable character-
isation and setting, and shored up by its disruption and restoration,
the scriptwriters and director further naturalise Franco’s Great Family
by structuring the plot of the film so that it follows the rhythms of one
calendar year. This includes both the physical cycle of the seasons of spring,
summer, autumn and winter, and the cultural cycles of the religious
calendar – holy communion and Christmas – and the academic and working
year – which alternate between periods of work, school examinations and
 ’   33

holiday. The parallel between physical and cultural cycles renders both
‘natural’, and because the plot of the film is aligned with these cycles, so the
message of the film is also presented as ‘natural’: the desirability of the more
or less yearly birth of a child to a married couple. This process culminates
with the mother’s announcement of her fifteenth pregnancy. Though this
event is based on the cultural choice of the couple not to practise abstinence
or use contraception,10 it is presented as natural, as is her husband’s
delighted reaction. Womanhood is, therefore, the vehicle that reconciles
both the natural and the cultural. The fertile female body, which functions
according to natural menstrual cycles, is used to naturalise the cultural
choice to have a large family.
The composer Waitzman is another key contributor to the film’s con-
struction of conservatism. With the exception of Handel’s work in the final
sequence, the soundtrack of the film consists of Argentine-born Waitzman’s
original composition. It functions first to complement the narrative, and
second, like the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’, to reflect and reinforce the film’s pro-
motion of the family. With respect to the first function, the use of the extra-
diegetic music ranges from the inclusion of orchestral strings to signal
romance (as when the parents are alone together), the inserts of percussion
to highlight comedy (as when the crowd of children visit the godfather’s
patisserie and – to his consternation – relieve him of most of his freshly
baked cakes), or the addition of music to emphasise the narrative (as when
circus music complements the children and grandpa’s circus game). With
respect to the second function of reinforcing the promotion of the family,
leitmotif is used effectively to underscore filial and fraternal bonds. This is
vital in a film that attempts to convince its audience over just 104 minutes
of running time that the fifteen children, who are physically dissimilar as
they are played by actors who are not blood relations (with the exception of
the identical twins), are in fact siblings.11
The film opens with a still frame of the family at what we later realise is
a first communion ceremony, followed by a still frame in medium shot of the
father and mother. These images are accompanied by the sound of a full
choir and orchestra performing Waitzman’s composition (Figure 1.1),
which looks forward to the full rendition of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ of the
final sequence. ‘La gran familia’ (The Great Family) sing the sopranos and
altos, then the phrase is repeated in the same melody by the baritones and
basses, which indicates the complementary roles played by men and women
in the construction of such a ‘Great Family’. Waitzman’s opening and
Handel’s ending of the film are not only comparable because of the full choir
and orchestra; their melodic profiles of rising and falling intervals, particu-
larly the perfect fourth, are also similar (compare Figures 1.1 and 1.2).
34    

Figure 1.1. Adapted excerpt of musical score from La gran familia, Pedro Masó P.C.

Figure 1.2. Excerpt of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ of Georg Friedrich Handel’s Messiah.

Figure 1.3. Adapted excerpt of musical score from La gran familia, Pedro Masó P.C.

Following this Handel-inspired musical introduction to the great family,

there follows a descending scale on strings that links the image of the
family in the public space of the church to the introduction of the family
in the private space of the home. A new musical phrase (Figure 1.3) played
on bassoon accompanies the medium shot of the grandpa, and this phrase
will become the Alonso family leitmotif used throughout this film and its
sequel, for which Waitzman was also composer.12
As the credits roll, we meet each member of the family in medium shot
as they sleep (save the parents in the marital bed, whose sleeping arrange-
ments are decorously referred to by the image of their slippers and of their
youngest child, the baby, in the cradle by their bed). The leitmotif is
repeated on the soundtrack, with variations of pitch and tempo and on
different instruments, so that the audience cannot fail to make the connec-
tion between the musical phrase and the blood bond that links these
members.
This musical portrayal of the blood bond also confirms and celebrates
the role of the father, as at the end of the first sequence we hear him whistle
the leitmotif as he leaves the flat for work.13 His role as progenitor is there-
fore announced and underscored by the fact that he is the only character
who links non-diegetic music (Waitzman’s score) to diegetic sound (his
whistle). (His paternity is similarly confirmed through music when he
 ’   35

sings the Christmas carol ‘Marimorena’, and his children gradually join in
[Hernández Ruiz 1997: 517].) After extensive treatment in the opening
sequence, the Alonso family musical leitmotif recurs throughout the
narrative to remind the audience of blood relations, like a kind of acoustic
representation of the family genes. In other words, the relationship
between family members is not only the subject of the narrative of this film
of family happiness. Waitzman’s score suggests that blood bonds are so
important that their representation extends beyond both narrative and
imagetrack to the film’s soundtrack.
The persuasiveness of the conservative message of La gran familia,
which we may measure by its award of the institutional prize, if not by an
upturn in the declining birth rate, is also due in large part to its excellent
cast, an aspect that was stressed in contemporary reviews of the film.14
While the director and co-director coax plausible performances from its
team of child actors,15 the picture is carried by the expensive stars,
Alberto Closas and Amparo Soler Leal, who play the father and mother,
complemented by José Isbert and José Luis López Vázquez, playing
grandpa and godfather, as their comic sidekicks.16 Closas plays a key role
in La gran familia, just as the father is central to the family in the narra-
tive of the film, and the patriarch is the mainstay of Francoist ideology. It
is important that he is seen both at home and at work, as this underscores
the parallel between his domestic and public roles: just as the father
must provide authority as head of the household and money as bread-
winner, so men must lead and work for Spain’s current economic boom
(were this a 1940s film, the empire might have been evoked in this
context). Indications of a cross-over between these two roles further
underscore the indivisibility of the two. For instance, we see the father
work on his building plans at home; then we see him accidentally use a
baby’s dummy instead of an eraser at work, a comic incident that causes
his colleague to recall the time when he delivered a plan wrapped up in
nappies! The choice of the father’s employment as a master builder also
emphasises the indivisibility of the father’s dual domestic and public
roles, for he is both building the new modernising Spain and populating
it. While the foreman at one of the building sites where he delivers his
plans disapprovingly remarks that he has ‘demasiados trabajos, demasia-
dos hijos’ (too many jobs and too many children), the exchange between
another two builders represents more faithfully the optimism of the film:
‘¡Si a este hombre le dejan, hace él sólo la Torre de Madrid!’ (If they let
him, this man would build the Torre de Madrid himself),17 comments
one. ‘¡Y además la llena de chicos!’ (And he would fill it up with children
too!) quips the other.
36    

The persuasiveness of this naturalisation of the male role as builder and

populator of modern Spain hinges on Closas’s convincing performance as
the eternal optimist. He cheerfully performs both roles, and is unper-
turbed by the series of setbacks suffered by the family, like the lack of
money to pay for the first communion, his ‘oveja negra’ (black sheep) son’s
failure in his exams and the loss of Chencho. If in the on-screen perform-
ance the mask of optimism does not slip – even when Closas delivers the
most implausibly cheerful lines – the actor’s off-screen persona surely
punctures this utopian rhetoric. Evans points out that Closas’s notorious
womanising undermines his clean-cut portrayal of the father: ‘he was an
inveterate Don Juan, the Spanish cinema’s equivalent of the endlessly
divorcing Hollywood prototype, married seven times, his first marriage at
twenty-one in 1942 lasting only three months, his second producing five
children’ (2000: 84). However, as Evans also shows, this off-screen star-
image is possibly harnessed by the film for its on-screen promotion of con-
servatism, for ‘paternity and marital fidelity are all the more convincing if
embraced by a sexually desirable male with a history of sexual experience’
(2000: 85).
Just as the role of the father is complemented by that of the mother in
the narrative of the film, part of Closas’s success derives from his con-
vincing interaction with his co-star, Soler Leal, who plays the mother, and
who was the only one of the four principal actors of the film to receive an
award for her performance (Figure 1.4).18 Drawing on centuries of repre-
sentations of saintly motherhood, and especially Catholic Marian iconog-
raphy and the domestic ‘angel of the hearth’ of nineteenth-century and
Francoist female conduct manuals, Soler Leal embodies the perfect wife
and mother fondly imagined in these texts. At only twenty-nine, the film
also somewhat implausibly imagines the youthful beauty of this mother of
fifteen – the actress playing the eldest child (María José Alonso) is in fact
only seven years Soler Leal’s junior. Like her husband, the mother is exces-
sively optimistic in much of the picture. For instance, ‘ya me las arreglaré’
(I’ll find a way) is her confident, fatalistic response to their inability to pay
for the first communion, which is ultimately resolved not by her, but by the
godfather’s charity.
None the less, her performance becomes more nuanced and interesting
following the loss of Chencho. On the one hand, the actress’s ability to
handle tragedy heightens her portrayal of the all-suffering mother, as when
she clutches her husband Carlos in anguish on hearing of the child’s loss,
or when she delivers a heartfelt description of her son to the authorities in
a static medium shot that underscores and glorifies her maternal despair
(we have never seen her take much notice of Chencho up to this point, but
 ’   37

Figure 1.4. Amparo Soler Leal and Alberto Closas in La gran familia. Pedro Masó P.C.

somehow she is intimately acquainted with the idiosyncrasies of his lin-

guistic and motor development). However, the tragic situation also provides
her with a single scene in which she may display anger, and Soler Leal seems
to relish her hearty outburst rather too much to be fitting for a domestic
angel. ‘Tú, que estás fuera de este mundo’ (You’re in a world of your own),
she snaps at the grandpa, who was responsible for looking after the chil-
dren, ‘La culpa la tengo yo por dejarles ir solos contigo. Ellos no tienen
conocimiento, y tú no sabes tenerlo’ (It’s my fault for letting them go with
you on their own. They don’t have the understanding, and you don’t know
the meaning of the word). This sequence of rebellion is short-lived: the
father reprimands her, and her temper is soon controlled and remains so for
the rest of the picture. It is none the less tempting to read it as a premoni-
tion of the actress’s future roles. Her portrayals of terrifying and aggressive
women in dissident cinema of the 1970s deconstruct the angelic mother-
hood of this picture (see, for instance, Mi hija Hildegart [My Daughter
Hildegart, Fernán Gómez 1977] and Crimen de Cuenca [The Crime of
Cuenca, Miró 1979]). This shift in her career has been attributed to Soler
Leal’s marriage to the producer Alfredo Matas (head of Jet Films) in 1969
(Aguilar and Genover 1996: 615), but her refusal to repeat the role of
mother in the second and third films of the Masó Familia trilogy indicates
an earlier desire for a change of direction.
38    

Closas’s off-screen persona and earlier portrayal of the tortured hero in

Bardem’s dissident masterpiece Muerte de un ciclista (Death of a Cyclist
1955), and Soler Leal’s future rejection of the role of beatific mother
perceived in her angry outburst, are cracks in the mask of marital and
parental bliss otherwise presented in the film. If those cracks are ultimately
papered over by the processes of naturalisation, structure of plot, sound-
track and performance style, other aspects of the film are more resistant to
concealment.

‘¡Superman no se rinde nunca!’ (Superman will never give

up!): José Isbert and Francisco Franco
If Closas and Soler Leal carry the family elements of this family comedy,
Isbert and López Vázquez, two of Spain’s greatest comic stars, provide the
comedy. López Vázquez plays to comic type, drawing on his trade marks
of exaggerated gesticulation and verbal excess to embody the grumpy but
lovable godfather and provide the film with its moments of textbook situ-
ation farce, as when he is ambushed by the children in the patisserie, courts
the school teacher in pitiable French, is attacked by a parachuting crab
from the children’s rocket and almost ends up in a television nativity play –
false beard and a live lamb hung around his shoulders and all. If these
interludes serve as moments of light comic relief in the film, Evans also
argues, in his consideration of the Familia trilogy as a whole, that the char-
acterisation of López Vázquez’s godfather plays the more important role
of bolstering the family institution by representing an undesirable alter-
native to it. First, his ‘benign, ridiculous’ masculinity (2000: 83) throws
Closas’s portrayal of the masculine ideal into relief, and second, his choice
of an alternative life-style (he marries, but has no children) is sent up as
ridiculous, thus reinforcing the family life championed by the film and
‘innoculating’ it against alternatives that threaten its existence (2000: 84).
In keeping with the overall act of naturalisation performed by La gran
familia, childlessness is not only figured as unnatural, but, in the case of
the childless couple who resort to kidnap, it is criminal, and in the case of
the godfather, absurd.
Isbert’s grandpa apparently offers similar comic relief. The humour of
his role appears to derive from simple comic reversal. He is the oldest family
member, yet while age defines the parents and older children as adults,
excessive age reverses the developmental scale and renders the grandpa a
child (as it did in his hilarious portrayal of the mischievous big kid in the
dark comedy scripted by Rafael Azcona and directed by Marco Ferreri, El
cochecito [The Little Car 1960]). While the grandpa’s pension suggests his
 ’   39

former membership of a salaried, adult world, the amount he gets is

insufficient to contribute to the ‘grown-up’ expenses of the household, and
he spends it instead on cinema tickets, sweets and comics – which are also
the favourite leisure items of the young children. The only other purchase
he makes is of a comically emaciated turkey for the family Christmas
dinner, which allows him simultaneously to exalt and deflate the stoic for-
bearance that characterised Spain’s impoverished post-war years, through
which he would have lived: the bird is ‘flaco, pero honrado’ (skinny, but
honourable) he pompously declares.
Notwithstanding occasional interactions with the adult characters about
not having much money, the injustice of retirement and whether he can
cadge a cigarette, the script renders most of Isbert’s verbal interventions
indistinguishable from those of the younger children. In particular, the
remarks he makes during the children’s games, which include battles (in
which he plays superman), space trips, rocket launches and circuses, are
indistinguishable from the children’s chatter. This makes him an enthusi-
astic child participant in, rather than an adult supervisor of, the games. His
nutritional habits reinforce his characterisation as a naughty little child:
when the family watch a film and the voice of the mother is heard warning
that eating too many sweets leads to worms, she is talking to the grandpa,
not one of the little kids. Indeed, when the younger ones fall ill after eating
too many cakes at the first communion, the adults and older children
remain well, but the grandpa falls sick too.
‘Eres más crío que los críos’ the mother reprimands him on arriving
home during a particularly raucous battle-game, which idiomatically trans-
lates as ‘you’re just a big kid’, but literally means ‘you’re more of a kid than
the kids’. Indeed, the film draws parallels not just between the grandpa and
the kids, but the grandpa and the youngest male child Chencho, the rather
dim toddler with whom he shares a bedroom. Both eat biscuits at the break-
fast table owing to their lack of teeth, and the speech of both is similarly
difficult to decipher. The grandpa is occasionally almost unintelligible
thanks to Isbert’s famous rasping croak – at this stage in his career this was
actually caused by the onset of laryngitis, an illness that forced him to give
up acting in 1964, two years before his death (Aguilar and Genover 1996:
291). Chencho too is difficult to understand as he hasn’t learnt to speak
properly yet. This is no surprise, as the grandpa is the one responsible for
teaching him: ‘ga – lle – ta’ (bis – cuit) he wheezes to him in a language
lesson at the breakfast table, which, unsurprisingly, the boy is unable to
repeat. ‘Ni tú me entiendes a mí, ni yo a ti’ (You can’t understand me and
I can’t understand you), the grandpa concludes at another meal scene with
the boy, reinforcing the similar linguistic unintelligibility of the two.
40    

Evans highlights both the visual and acoustic aspects of Isbert’s physi-
cality in reading his performance as critical of the current political regime:

His diminutive, gnome-like stature and rasping voice [are] the signs of Francoism’s
delivery of mutant forms of humanity . . . . Like López Vázquez he represents a
complex alternative form of masculinity, tolerated because of its comic reversal of
hegemonic forms, but also slightly troubling because its hyperbolic deviant expres-
sion registers the repressions and pressures to which all Spanish men had been
subjected. (2000: 83)

Isbert’s contribution to the film may be more troubling than Evans pro-
poses because, unlike López Vázquez’s godfather, his performance of a
‘comic reversal of hegemonic forms’ is imperfect. Like the godfather, he
has married, but unlike the godfather, he has evidently been a parent and
chosen family life. Therefore he is simultaneously both the quintessential
patriarch, because he is the original progenitor, and a comic reversal of the
patriarch, as his performance is occasionally indistinguishable from that of
the younger children. This confusing conflation gives rise to great comic
moments, as when the grandpa simultaneously champions the father – the
inheritor of his role – yet challenges him. For example, he tells the chil-
dren off for starting to eat before the father joins the head of the dinner
table, yet, like one of the naughty little children who cannot wait, he
himself nibbles his biscuits before the father’s arrival. But the amalgam of
both the normal and the comic in Isbert’s role in La gran familia is more
profound as it troubles that very ‘normality’ by blurring boundaries. If
deviancy from the norm is, in Evans’s words, ‘slightly troubling’, imper-
fect deviancy, whereby aspects of the deviant are combined with the norm,
is more troubling, for it poses a challenge to normality by questioning its
very existence.
Consider, for instance, the war game between grandpa-superman and
the children. Isbert is hilariously decked out in the children’s space helmet
and toy gun, but a military medal can also be clearly seen, swinging on a
chain around his neck (Figure 1.5; in this still the medal is concealed).We
may assume that the medal was awarded to him when he was a young man
fighting for the Nationalists, for while there is no explicit mention of the
grandpa’s military past in the film, it is likely that a man of his age would
have fought in the Civil War.19 This scene, in which Isbert is play-acting as
an American cartoon action-figure, recalls the celebrated dream sequence
of Berlanga’s ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! (1952). In Berlanga’s film,
Isbert plays a village mayor who dreams of being an American sheriff. In
the depiction of this dream, we see Isbert appear in a spoof Hollywood
western dressed in a cowboy outfit, complete with over-sized shiny
 ’   41

Figure 1.5. José Isbert and Amparo Soler Leal in La gran familia. Pedro Masó P.C.

sheriff’s badge, of which the glinting medal dangling around Isbert’s neck
in La gran familia is a visual reminder. In ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall!, the
authority of Isbert’s mayor is sent up through this comic appearance in a
re-created American film in the dream. In La gran familia, Isbert’s char-
acter’s frame of reference is similarly derived from American popular
culture: Superman comics and space adventure films replace the western.
But whereas the ‘real-life’ role as mayor is critiqued by the private dreams
of cowboys and Indians in ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall!, this is reversed in
the game sequence of La gran familia. Here, the fantasy world of the
grandpa’s war game is punctured by the reference to his ‘real-life’ military
experience. The presence of the medal, therefore, gives the lie to the child-
ish game by incongruously introducing the adult world of war, yet also
simultaneously reduces the war – which brought the current government
to power – to the level of a childish game. Rather than a comic reversal
then, Isbert is an incongruous adult presence in the children’s world, just
as elsewhere in the film he is an incongruous childish presence in the adult
world.
Isbert’s role as grandpa evokes another incongruous figure in Spain at
the time: Francisco Franco. The medal may remind audiences of the
Caudillo, who was often seen by the public decorated in military para-
phernalia, but a further parallel between the two lies in the fact that Isbert
42    

played the grandpa in La gran familia just when Franco was relishing the
same role. With seven children born to his daughter Carmen between 1951
and 1964, the dictator was enjoying presiding over his own Great Family,20
and Franco as benevolent grandpa was considered a suitable way to present
him to the nation as he aged.21 In 1962 Franco was seventy and Isbert
seventy-six, and both were slightly rotund, diminutive old men. Palacios’s
Great Family is therefore Franco’s Great Family because, through his on-
screen surrogate Isbert, the dictator is present in the film as the grandpa.
This parallel renders the script rich in double meanings. For instance, the
grandpa’s hilarious declaration in the middle of the battle-game that
‘¡Superman no se rinde nunca!’ (Superman will never give up!) becomes a
biting satire of both the dictator’s inflated sense of masculinity and his
refusal to relinquish power. The previously mentioned reference to Juan
Carlos and Sofía’s wedding is a further nod to this increasing preoccupa-
tion about Spain’s future post-Franco, which was to become one of the
major political issues of the 1960s, until the dictator finally named the
prince as his successor in 1969.
Thus, rather than a comic reversal of normality, Isbert’s portrayal of a
‘tonto lelo’ (silly twit) – as Chencho calls him in one of his few coherent
phrases in the whole film – is a troubling deconstruction of normality
itself, not least through reference to the figure of Franco, the nation’s role
model. Despite its location in this quintessential example of consensual
cinema, Isbert’s role in La gran familia might therefore be understood as a
dress rehearsal for his celebrated role as a retired state executioner in
another dissident Berlanga masterpiece, scripted by Azcona, of the fol-
lowing year, El verdugo. Steven Marsh notes in his reading of this film that
‘Isbert plays a type Spaniard, he is always referred to as “normal”, and
undoes Spanishness in the playing of it’ (2004: 127). Likewise, what is dis-
ruptive about Isbert’s presence in La gran familia is not so much his
‘hyperbolic deviancy’, but his problematic normality. To paraphrase
Marsh, in La gran familia, Isbert undoes the normal family by playing its
grandpa.

‘Estamos a punto de llegar a Saturno’ (We’re about to reach

Saturn): Travel and Entrapment
If Isbert’s role constitutes a connection between consensual and dissident
cinemas in the period, further evidence of cross-fertilisation between the
two is provided by the film’s editor, Pedro del Rey. Scanning the list of his
work in the 1960s gives the lie to any attempt to separate ‘Old’ and ‘New’
cinemas in the period, for La gran familia was cut by an editor who had
 ’   43

worked with all the respected art directors of the day, including Buñuel (on
Viridiana), Ferreri (on El cochecito) and Saura (on Los golfos), and would
work on two of the NCE films studied in depth in this book, La tía Tula
and Nueve cartas a Berta. While it would be naïve automatically to expect
a critical edge from this editor just because he had worked in the opposi-
tional cinema, his treatment of space in Palacios’s film does create a sense
of claustrophobia and entrapment that, like Isbert’s performance, under-
cuts its otherwise relentless utopianism. This sense of claustrophobia and
entrapment created through editing also provides the impetus for an alter-
native reading of aspects of the script, plot and mise en scène that refer to
movement and travel.
With eighteen inhabitants (fifteen children, parents and grandpa), the
Alonso family flat is overcrowded. At the start of the film, however, cine-
matography counters the sensation of claustrophobia. We meet the family
as they sleep, and even though there are in some cases four or five children
to a room, each child is assigned their own space by the camera through
their introduction in medium shot. (The exception is the twins, who share
a medium shot as they share a bed.) However, after the credit sequence, the
family flat is represented above all through long shots and relatively long
takes.22 Often the camera is static, with movement provided by the various
family members scurrying in and out of the frame, or backwards and for-
wards through depth of field, either playing games or attending to domes-
tic chores. On the one hand, the movement of the actors within these
scenes allows the cinematographer Juan Mariné to convey the cheerful
hustle and bustle of family life, but on the other, his static camera creates
an impression of claustrophobia that is emphasised by Del Rey’s length of
take. Núria Triana-Toribio calls the sequences featuring numerous family
members in this film ‘choral scenes’, which, she argues, are fundamental
to the film’s promotion of ‘desarrollismo and National-Catholic strategies.
The film’s portrayal hinges on choral scenes with middle-class characters
which emphasise that the production of (many) children, and the con-
sumption of goods are the desirable goals for the Spanish Catholic family’
(2003: 79). When the length of take transforms such choral communality
into claustrophobia, it follows that the conservative message of the film
regarding capitalist and family values is therefore weakened.
If the desirability of Franco’s Great Family is questioned by figuring
proximity as claustrophobia, then this is complemented by the represen-
tation of Franco’s Spain not in terms of the dynamism of change that
underpinned desarrollismo, but in terms of stasis and entrapment. While the
plot of the film includes one real journey to the Catalan coastal resort of
Tarragona, it also evokes a number of fantasy journeys through the children
44    

and grandpa’s games. Stimulated by space adventure films they have seen at
the cinema, in one scene they re-create extra-terrestrial travel in a spaceship
in the hall of the flat. But while in the films that they see at the cinema new
planets are discovered and explored, their spaceship is – symbolically –
grounded in the Madrid flat. ‘Estamos a punto de llegar a Saturno’ (We’re
about to reach Saturn) the grandpa informs the mother when she interrupts
the game, a declaration that conveys both the fascination for travel and the
impossibility of its realisation, and therefore encapsulates the film’s por-
trayal of frustrated escape. Just as the mother interrupts the gang’s space
travel when they are about to land on Saturn, so their attempt to send a
rocket to the moon is also frustrated by another family member. The rocket,
along with its parachuting crab-astronaut, lands on top of the godfather
during his courtship of the school teacher. It is therefore always the family
that blocks escape. In fact, the only place outside Spain reached in the entire
film is heaven, when the petardista sends a rocket up to God in the last image
to thank him for the return of Chencho. In other words, the film proposes
that in Franco’s Spain, the only contact needed in the outside world is
heaven – an ironic contrast with the military, business and political ties the
regime sought with the West at the time.
In the context of this discourse of claustrophobia and entrapment, we
might re-examine the script and mise en scène. The father’s previously men-
tioned reference to the flat as the Bernabéu stadium might be reconsidered
in this light as an ironic comment on its cramped nature. Likewise, when
he complains at work about the city traffic, his remarks encode a con-
demnation of the city as a whole as cramped. ‘¿Usted ha visto cómo está la
circulación?’ (Have you seen what the traffic is like?) he grumbles good-
humouredly to the site manager, ‘En Madrid ya no se cabe. Tendríamos
que hacerlo de nuevo, pero mucho más ancho. Y además hay que exten-
derse. Ciudades satélites. Alcalá, Guadalajara, Aranda . . .’ (People don’t
fit in Madrid anymore. We ought to build it again, but much more spaced
out. And what’s more, we need to spread out. Commuter towns. Alcalá,
Guadalajara, Aranda . . .).
The following exchange between the mother and father also refers to the
claustrophobic flat and the desire to move further afield. When the mother
tells the father that the baby will soon be walking, he responds, ‘¿Hacia
dónde?’ (Where to?). Although Closas delivers the line in a joking tone, it
seems rather incongruous, given the parents’ usual banter about the great
futures that await all their children.23 The idea that walking, movement or
travel is pointless in Franco’s Spain because there is nowhere to go is rein-
forced by the mother’s retort: ‘De momento como todos, pasillo arriba,
pasillo abajo’ (‘For the moment like all of them/us, up the corridor and
 ’   45

down the corridor). Though this line is cheerfully delivered by Soler Leal,
it confirms the suggestion of entrapment. Furthermore, ‘todos’ could refer
to ‘all the children’, or ‘all of us’, the latter suggesting that the whole of
Franco’s Great Family is trapped in the claustrophobic corridor of a flat,
with nowhere to go. The prominent placing of paintings of images of
transport in the family home might also be re-read in this context: the
images of the sailing ship in the hall and of the railway station in the dining
room suggest travel and escape that throw into relief the claustrophobia of
the living space.

While textual analysis shows how film form naturalises Francoist ideology
in La gran familia, it also reveals possibly unexpected overlaps between
consensual and dissident cinema in this period. Just as there are similari-
ties between Isbert’s contribution to La gran familia and El verdugo, the
references to claustrophobia and frustrated journeys in this commercial
comedy also look forward to dissident Spanish cinema’s treatment of the
same subject. Tula is unable to escape from the ideological imprisonment
of her suffocating life in La tía Tula, just as Lorenzo is symbolically
trapped in Salamanca at the end of Nueve cartas a Berta, or Enrique is cap-
tured by both Spain’s divided past and Saura’s freeze-frame at the end of
La caza. In Víctor Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive
1973), the little girls, Ana and Isabel, might be psychologically disturbed
rather than improbably cheerful like the children of La gran familia, but
none the less, they are all fascinated by symbols of transport. In Palacios’s
film these may be comic props, like an astronaut’s helmet, and in Erice’s,
lyrical images, like the train tracks disappearing on the horizon, but both
pessimistically point to journeys that these children may never make.

Notes
1. For instance, in Nuestro Cine, José Luis Egea (1963) condemned the film as
‘cine engañoso y cine mal hecho, cine-mentira. Cine-deshonestidad. Cine
inmoral’ (deceptive and poorly made cinema, a cinema of lies. Dishonest
cinema. Immoral cinema).
2. Álvaro del Amo contrasts consensual ‘white comedies’ with dissident ‘black
comedies’ (1975: 22); Núria Triana-Toribio suggests that in the mid-1960s
romantic comedies were replaced by family comedies (2003: 76–7).
3. The adjective ‘Gran[de]’ means both ‘big’ and ‘great’. Peter Evans (2000) and
Triana-Toribio (2003) translate the title as ‘Big’; I have chosen ‘Great’ to fore-
ground the film’s pretensions of grandeur, as well as the size of the family
depicted. The subtitles of the DVD version of the film, recently released by
Suevia Films, also use this translation.
46    

4. For instance, no. 1003B of 1962 (included on the video selection of reels that
accompanies Rafael Tranche and Vicente Sánchez Biosca’s NO-DO: el tiempo
y la memoria) might well have played before a screening of Palacios’s film,
which was released on 21 December 1962. These newsreels were obligatorily
screened prior to films from 1943 to 1975.
5. When a journalist visits the family flat towards the end of the film, he and the
parents recognise each other from his previous report of their large family
prize.
6. Consequently, comparisons of late nineteenth-century and Francoist culture
are revealing. See Stephanie Sieburth’s comparison of novels of the 1850s–
1870s and 1960s (1994) and my work on film adaptations of late nineteenth-
century novels in the 1970s (2004: Chapter 4).
7. The sainete is a subgenre of Spanish popular comedy, which began in the
theatre and was successfully adapted to film. It uses techniques of costum-
brismo – the detailed, picturesque evocation of local setting and character. In
both play and film versions, sainete characters include such types as vejetes
(comic old men), paletos (country bumpkins), clumsy, well-meaning nuns and
dim-witted maids, who populate a recognisable and often working-class
Madrid. The genre’s conventional plots present the status quo (or evoke it in
the recent past), disrupt the status quo, then restore it to bring about satisfy-
ing closure, sacrificing narrative verisimilitude in order to follow this formula.
Humour in these films is situation- and character-based.
8. Completed in 1947, this is the home ground of Real Madrid, the football team
supported by Franco.
9. The ‘barrio de Corea’ is mentioned, a colloquial name given to the area to the
north of La Castellana. I would like to thank Maruja Rincón Tapias for pro-
viding me with this information.
10. It is contentious to state that not using contraception, which was illegal, was
a cultural choice, but statistics on the decline of family size and medical
reports reveal that it was widely used (see the previous quotation of
Brooksbank Jones 1997: 94 n. 30).
11. Apart from the twins, the only actors who are actually related are José Isbert
and his daughter María, who plays the second family maid. This bit-part
makes a wicked counter-reading of the film possible. The grandpa looks phys-
ically like neither Alberto Closas, the handsome father, nor Amparo Soler
Leal, the beautiful mother (it is not clear whose biological father he is sup-
posed to be), nor any of the grandchildren. However, as Isbert and his daugh-
ter have a family resemblance, her casting raises the thought in the audience’s
minds that the old man’s only blood relative may be a daughter conceived
outside marriage.
12. In order to reinforce the connection between the films, the Alonso family leit-
motif is played at the opening of La familia y uno más, then at further key nar-
rative moments such as when Antonio passes his architecture exams or when
the family blow out the candles of the surprise birthday cake. Rather than the
 ’   47

diegetic use of Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus’, the leitmotif provides the extra-
diegetic sound for the second film’s affirmative ending. Carlos holds his first
grandchild and proclaims ‘ya hay uno más en la gran familia’ (now there’s one
more in the great family), as the leitmotif confirms the continuation of the
bloodline on the musictrack.
13. In Walter Lang’s Cheaper by the Dozen (1950), which Evans shows is the
source of Masó’s trilogy (2000: 80), the father’s whistle also plays an impor-
tant role, as he uses it to summon his children to gather together. Both films
promote large families and traditional parental roles (interestingly, at the end
of Lang’s picture, the mother takes on the father’s business role) and condemn
modern practices such as birth control. Both also share scenes such as the
illness of the children, the re-creation of government practices – both of dic-
tatorship and democracy – in family meetings, the trip to the seaside and the
attraction of an elder daughter to a young beau on holiday, which is conveyed
by his musical performance against the backdrop of the sea.
14. See the extracts from El Alcázar and Marca in Cine-Asesor (1962).
15. In the interview on the El País DVD, Masó recalls assistant director Salvia’s
skill at directing the younger children, which included tricks such as showing
the boy who plays Chencho a hypodermic syringe to make him cry. He also
reminisces that the atmosphere on set was like that of a ‘big family’, rather
than a group of actors.
16. Closas, one of the most highly paid actors of Spanish cinema in the period,
received half a million pesetas from the budget of 6,250,000 pesetas, which
was also one of the highest in Spanish cinema at the time (Hernández Ruiz
1997: 517).
17. Standing at 142 metres of height over thirty-four floors in the city’s central
Plaza de España, this was the tallest building in Madrid until the completion
of the Torre Picasso in 1989. Designed by the architects Julián and Joaquín
Otamendi, and completed in 1957, it is emblematic of fascist architecture
under Franco.
18. According to Carlos Aguilar and Jaume Genover, who list main prizes only,
she won the Círculo de Escritores Cinematográficos prize in 1962 and the
Placa San Juan prize in 1963 (1996: 615).
19. As well as American popular culture, the grandpa’s other frame of reference
is war. For instance, when he sees the sailor’s outfit to be worn by the petardista
for his first communion, he comments that all he needs now is a battleship.
His participation on the Nationalist side in the Civil War is also indicated by
his comment that the bottle of vodka contained in the Christmas hamper that
the family is sent in error must have been sent by a ‘rougé’.
20. The first boy was named Francisco Franco (the order of surnames for the
child was reversed by special decree), indicating the old dictator’s ultimately
unrealised dreams of founding a dynasty (Preston 1993: 596, 636).
21. See, for instance, NO-DO reels 567B (1953), 974A (1961) and in particular
1004A (1963) (all included on the video that accompanies Tranche and
48    

Sánchez Biosca 2002). The latter begins with the public presentation of the
dictator reading his end of year speech as the imagetrack cuts between images
of Franco and crowds of adoring supporters all over Spain. In the text of the
speech (much of which was written by aperturistas Manuel Fraga Iribarne and
Laureano López Rodó [Preston 1993: 706]), he refers to Spain as ‘nuestra
familia’ (our family). The reel then switches to the private portrayal of the
dictator with his wife and grandchildren, which complements this emphasis
on the happy family. The reel is dated 7 January 1963, so was very likely to
have been played in theatres before Palacios’s film, which ran over the 1962–3
Christmas period.
22. The spaceship game is portrayed with a take of 34 seconds (14 minutes into
the film) and the war-game take lasts 40 seconds (1 hour 13 minutes into the
film).
23. Key public roles within the Spanish state, like a politician and a diplomat, are
positions earmarked for the boys. While the older girls are characterised as
future angels of the hearth, it is gratifying that the younger girls may look
forward to being a translator (‘la traductora’) and an opera singer (‘la
soprano’).
 CHAPTER 2

Civilising the City in La ciudad no es

para mí (The City’s Not For Me,
Lazaga 1965)

In La ciudad no es para mí, Pedro Masó’s goal shifts from government

subsidy (the aim of La gran familia) to the box office, where the producer
had equal success. La ciudad became the most profitable film of the 1960s,
and one that is still considered a blockbuster. This success was thanks in
part to the commissioned director, Pedro Lazaga. One of the most prolific
(and least studied) directors of Spanish film history, with ninety-five fea-
tures to his name over his career as a whole (1948–78), Lazaga brought the
considerable experience and expertise in commercial comedy gained over
the 1950s and 1960s in films such as Los tramposos (The Con Men 1959)
to Masó’s commission. But the runaway success of the film is mainly
attributable to the casting of the adored theatre actor of the decade, Paco
Martínez Soria, who starred in and directed the play on which the film
was based.
Modern Madrid, which is evoked in La gran familia in order to show its
compatibility with the traditional family, apparently takes centre stage in La
ciudad. The city dominates the opening credits, triggers the plot, under-
scores characterisation and gives the title to the film. Unlike La gran familia,
which locates the status quo in the contemporary period, in La ciudad it
must be retrospectively evoked through older relatives, who embody the
nostalgic pull. If a rural past is implicit in Palacios’s film – through the ref-
erence to the mother’s knowledge of how to grow vegetables, for instance1 –
it is apparently the explicit focus of Lazaga’s picture, which repeats the
familiar formula of the country versus the city. La ciudad responds to the
rural exodus that characterised the shift from the post-war, autarkic years
to the 1960s, developmental years. In the earlier period, Spaniards were per-
suaded to remain in, or return to, the country to work to feed a nation aiming
at economic self-sufficiency. In 1947, Franco announced freedom of move-
ment for Spaniards within the country (Richardson 2002: 11–12), and if
migration to the city was then tacitly encouraged to foster the industrial
boom, urban immigration was actually included as state policy by the first
50    

Development Plan of 1964–7 (Schubert 1990: 210). A straightforward

change economically, urban immigration was more compex to justify ideo-
logically, owing to the energy invested in the vilification of the city and cel-
ebration of the country in post-war ruralist propaganda. The Falangist
director José Antonio Nieves Condes’s Surcos (1951), for example, champi-
ons just such a return to the country at the end of a narrative that charts a
family’s moral decline in Madrid.2 Conversely, Lazaga’s aperturista film
tries to reconcile the contradiction between the ideological rhetoric of
country values and the economic need for liberalisation, and concomitant
urbanisation.
In the first section of this chapter, I will analyse the ways La ciudad
civilises the city through its nostalgic appeal to the country. Martínez Soria
is the principal conduit of conservatism in the film, and his mission to
clean up the family’s moral life in the city is supported by a plot that insists
upon the right, or proper, place. A general anxiety about people being in
the wrong place in the period – the city, rather than the country – is thus
projected onto particular examples of people and things being in the wrong
place in the film. As in La gran familia, aspects of the musical score com-
plement this enterprise (for instance, the sound of traditional castanets
accompanies shots of the portrait of Antonia), but I will pay particular
attention here to the way mise en scène, in particular the use of paintings
and costume, is deployed to underscore the film’s act of persuasion.
As in La gran familia, the contributions of certain members of the
technical crew none the less create ripples in this smooth surface of con-
formity. Cinematography, editing and music in the credit sequence, for
instance, take advantage of current technical innovations in cinema to give
the initial impression of a film that celebrates, rather than condemns, the
vibrant, modern city. If this short portrayal of a Swinging Sixties Madrid
is insufficient to sabotage the ruralism otherwise promoted, its location at
the opening of the film none the less announces a possible alternative
reading from the very beginning. Furthermore, in terms of plot, La ciudad
repeats a tired comedy formula (which popular film inherited from the
popular theatre) of the trials and tribulations of a likeable paleto (country
bumpkin) in a hostile city. In the second half of this chapter, I propose first
that the audience’s attention, which is scarcely required to follow this pre-
dictable plot, is drawn to the comic exaggeration of its execution. Second,
I argue that the ostensible aim of the film to civilise the city is projected
onto an attempt to civilise women through the characterisation of the
female protagonist. Reconsidered in this light, the conservative message of
the film emerges as awkwardly over-determined, and the role played by
Luchy becomes surprisingly disruptive.
     L A C I U DA D N O E S PA R A M Í 51

‘La ciudad pa’ quien le guste, que como el pueblo ni hablar’

(The city’s for those who like it, but there’s nothing like
the village)
Paco Martínez Soria’s role as the conduit of conservatism in La ciudad
confers on this comic character a paradoxically serious narrative function
that was entirely absent from Isbert’s contribution to La gran familia. While
in Palacios’s film the grandpa occupies a richly comic, but ideologically
unsettling, liminal space between masculine normality and childish absurd-
ity, Martínez Soria’s character embodies the quintessential patriarchy that
is central to the conservative message of Lazaga’s picture. Tío (Uncle)
Agustín, as he is affectionately called in his Aragonese home village
Calacierva, is the axis about which the film turns. He is the narrative agent
who evokes and restores the status quo, which, thanks to our adoption of
his point of view, we are led to believe has been disrupted by city life. Tío
Agustín’s memories of his wife, son and daughter-in-law in the village
conjure up an image of traditional family life in a rural environment. He
tries to restore this status quo by fortifying the family, even though the film
stops short of advocating their return to the village. Thus the narrative
begins when Tío Agustín packs his suitcase, tucks a hand-painted portrait
of his deceased wife Antonia under one arm, hangs a basket of squawking
chickens over the other and pays his son and family a visit in Madrid. It
develops as he discovers to his horror that they have fallen prey to the evils
of urban existence. His son, Gusti, is a workaholic, and his daughter-in-law,
Luchy, is teetering on the verge of adultery (the censorship norms of 1963
banned its actual portrayal on screen). The narrative is resolved through Tío
Agustín’s interventions, by which he restores a status quo that has never
actually existed. Gusti newly sensitive to his wife’s needs and Luchy forced
to be an angel of the hearth, the film ends with Tío Agustín’s triumphant
return to Calacierva, where a street-sign is unveiled bearing his name and
the villagers (all of whom seem to live off his charity) cheer when they hear
he will not be returning to the city. He states the title of the film for the first
time on explaining his decision not to return to Madrid to his family: ‘La
ciudad no es pa’ mí’ (City life ain’t for me). There follows a second epilogue,
not found in the original play, which is superfluous in terms of narrative, and
extremely heavy-handed in execution. It is a second celebration in which the
villagers sing and dance a copla (popular song or ballad) for their avuncular
patron, the lyrics of which attempt to dissipate all conflict, ‘Bien has hecho
en regresar, Baturrico, la ciudad pa’ quien le guste, que como el pueblo ni
hablar’ (You’ve done the right thing by coming back, Aragonese country-
man, the city’s for those who like it, but there’s nothing like the village).
52    

This portrayal of ‘un pedazo de pan – un patriarca’ (a real sweetie – a

patriarch), as the voice-over of the film’s prologue calls him, is dependent
on a strong script and Martínez Soria’s performance. Vicente Coello and
the producer Masó wrote the former, adapting the enormously successful
sainete play by Fernando Ángel Lozano.3 Their script is largely faithful to
the original, but adds sequences that take advantage of filmic resources like
mise en scène. Thus the prologue in Madrid is added to reinforce the
significance of this setting, as is the subplot on the portrait of Antonia, and
the entire sequence at the Hotel Richmond, which underscores character-
isation and plot through paintings. However, the dialogue retains the
flavour of the original, and much of it is transposed verbatim from play to
script. Thus, in both play and film, fast-talking Tío Agustín retains his
patter, which is delivered through a thick Aragonese accent. It is laden with
verbal tics, like the addition of the diminutive form ‘-ico’ to the noun, con-
fusion of direct and indirect objects and verbal puns. For instance, as the
polite second-person verbal conjugation is identical to the third-person
singular in Spanish, Tío Agustín misunderstands the traffic warden’s ref-
erences to the traffic lights changing colour as statements referring to his
own humour [‘ponerse verde’ means both ‘to turn green’ and ‘to be inex-
perienced or jealous’] (in the play, see Lozano 1965: 25). Similarly, when
the maid asks him to find a tin of shellfish in the supermarket, he puns on
the polysemy of ‘navaja’ (both ‘razor shell’ and ‘knife’) to suggest she looks
for them in Albacete (the town famous for producing cutlery in Spain) (not
present in the play). Moreover, Tío Agustín’s language is replete with reli-
gious and rustic expressions. ‘¡Qué peregrinación!’ (literally, ‘What a pil-
grimage!’) he mutters to convey how long his journey has been, for
example, or ‘¿van en carro?’ (are you going by horse and cart?) he asks his
granddaughter and friend, misunderstanding their jargonistic use of
‘carro’ for ‘automóvil’ (car), or again, ‘Ha volado’ (He’s flown away) he says
to Luchy to indicate that Ricardo has left (the reference to ‘carro’ can be
found in the play [Lozano 1965: 41]). Tío Agustín’s speech is also a repos-
itory of basic vocabulary, like ‘moquero’ for ‘pañuelo’ (equivalent to
‘hankie’ for ‘handkerchief ’, though ‘moquero’ is etymologically linked to
‘moco’ – ‘snot’) or ‘corona’ (crown) for ‘cofia’ (coif) (the second example
occurs in the play [Lozano 1965: 24]).
Although these linguistic idiosyncrasies read as painfully contrived on
the page, on the screen Martínez Soria makes them just about plausible
by his era-defining portrayal of a bumbling but well-meaning paleto. La
ciudad won Martínez Soria the Placa San Juan Bosco prize in 1966 (Aguilar
and Genover 1996: 375) and inaugurated what Nathan Richardson calls
the ‘subgenre’ of paleto cinema in Spanish film, which included El turismo
     L A C I U DA D N O E S PA R A M Í 53

es un gran invento (Tourism is a Great Invention, Lazaga 1967), and El abuelo

tiene un plan (Grandpa Has a Plan, Lazaga 1973), and lasted till the mid-
1970s (Richardson 2000: 61). Martínez Soria’s all-talking, all-gesticulating
performance was honed to perfection through his portrayal of the same
character in the play, which, as Lozano stated in the prologue of its publi-
cation (1965: 5), was conceived uniquely as a vehicle for this star, and
which Martínez Soria directed himself. His Tío Agustín character passes
off downright rudeness and busy-body meddling as benevolent paternal
concern, though a contemporary audience would find his implicit recom-
mendation of domestic violence particularly hard to stomach (he makes
a gesture to indicate throttling Luchy and raises his hand as if to strike
the maid).
If we approach La ciudad as aperturista propaganda, its purpose is to rec-
oncile the key contradiction of 1960s Spain: tradition (here figured as the
country) and modernity (here represented by the city). It cannot champion
a reversal of the rural exodus like Surcos, as by the 1960s such a reactionary
move would jeopardise the Francoist economic boom. Thus despite its
seemingly relentless presentation of city life as inferior, the logical con-
clusion to this state of affairs – the return of Tío Agustín’s family to
Calacierva – is never even suggested. Although the moralising narrator of
the film’s prologue falls silent when the narrative begins, his preceding
condemnation of Madrid through a series of impersonal statistics, and
glorification of Calacierva through tender observations about its inhabit-
ants, ring in our ears throughout the film. Subplots and apparently inci-
dental background details set up oppositions that are intended further to
persuade us of the desirability of country life. For instance, when Tío
Agustín arrives in the capital, a crook attempts to sell him an envelope of
blank papers that he pretends are 1,000-peseta notes. Tío Agustín refuses,
of course, and encourages him to deposit them in a bank.4 This first occur-
rence in the city therefore presents it as a place of crime, as opposed to the
village, which, like its representative Tío Agustín, is a cradle of integrity.
(Tío Agustín’s cheating at cards to fleece the taxcollector in the village is a
different matter, of course, as he does so in the name of the villagers; even
the priest turns a blind eye.) The incident with the con man also contrasts
the city’s fraudulence with the country’s authenticity, for the crook pre-
tends to be a crippled simpleton, whereas Belén of Calacierva is genuinely
disabled.
To compensate for the impossibility of returning the family to the coun-
tryside, its proper place, the film develops a number of subplots that
return people, and things, to their proper places. The implication is that if
everything else is in the proper place, then life in the city, the wrong place,
54    

is tolerable. La ciudad proposes that Gusti, Tío Agustín’s son, is in the

wrong place, as he spends time at work as a surgeon in the hospital, not at
home. Furthermore, the film suggests that Gusti’s money is in the wrong
place because it remains symbolically inside his wallet, rather than being
used by Tío Agustín for the charitable benefit of the village. Gusti’s exces-
sive absence from the home is remedied by a lecture on family responsi-
bilites from his father, and, sure enough, at the end of the film he takes an
afternoon off work to take his wife to the cinema (that such an absence may
cause the cancellation of operations is a consequence of his actions that the
film does not concern itself to explore). Likewise, Gusti accedes to Tío
Agustín’s plea for cash donations, opening his wallet and allowing his father
to take thousands of pesetas to spend on gifts for the Calacierva villagers.
More dangerous for the family honour, the mother is in the wrong place
as she leaves the home. We learn, through the maid, that she is forever out
and about, either playing cards, seeing friends (a Roberto is mentioned) or
doing charitable work. In the film, we see her leave the home twice, once
to go to her husband’s hospital, where she accidentally-on-purpose bumps
into Ricardo, and again to go to the hotel bar on a date with this would-be
lover. These outings lead her to the verge of adultery – she is almost, there-
fore, in the wrong bed. Again, Tío Agustín’s intervention averts the crisis:
he sends would-be lover Ricardo packing and tells a few home truths to his
wayward daughter-in-law, which compel her to become an angel of the
hearth. By the end of the film, Luchy seems to acknowledge that leaving
the home got her into trouble in the first place, and she is even reluctant to
leave the flat to go out to the cinema with her husband (‘¿Por qué no nos
quedamos en casa?’ [Why don’t we stay at home?]).
Finally, two comic subplots reinforce this thesis of the proper place.
First, we learn that the maid has been in the wrong place, or bed, by getting
pregnant before marriage. Tío Agustín puts her in the right place by insist-
ing her boyfriend marries her, under threat of fifteen years in Ocaña,
Madrid’s famous jail. Finally, a subplot on the proper place runs through
the film concerning which picture should hang in the sitting room of the
Madrid flat: an original Picasso that displays the family’s wealth and
modernity, or the old-fashioned portrait of Tío Agustín’s wife, the dead
matriarch, Antonia.

Dressing Up and Dressing Down

The attention paid to mise en scène in La ciudad is indicated by the fact that
the technical crew included an art department of three (Luciano Arroyo,
Tomás Fernández, Jesús Mateos) to support the set decorator Antonio
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Simont (who was also responsible for décor in La gran familia). The place
occupied by Antonia’s portrait reflects the development of the plot of
the film, which is reinforced by the narrative use of other portraits and
paintings: the original Picasso owned by the family that hangs in their
sitting room (it is the Still Life with Guitar [1922]); the photographic por-
trait of Luchy, also placed in the sitting room; and finally the picture of the
old man with two prostitutes and the portrait of a maja, both found in the
hotel bar.5
Antonia’s portrait (see Figure 2.1) vies for central position on the wall
of the Madrid flat with Picasso’s Still Life with Guitar, a confrontation that
underpins the struggle between tradition and modernity in the film. The
opposition between the two pictures is dramatic, in both pictorial and sym-
bolic terms, and cannot be missed by the audience, especially as it is rein-
forced by the script. The portrait of the matriarch evokes the essence of
traditional values: executed according to realist convention, the plump and
comely Antonia, decorously dressed in a high-necked loose blouse, and
with her long black hair tied up in a traditional bun, smiles out from within
the rustic wooden frame. Tío Agustín exclusively controls the meaning of
the portrait. When we first see it, he informs us that Antonia ‘era una santa’
(was a saint). Further, he interacts with it as if it were a flesh-and-blood

Figure 2.1. Paco Martínez Soria and Gracita Morales in La ciudad no es para mí.
Video Mercury Films.
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woman, explaining ‘es mi mujer’ (this is my wife) when a fellow passenger

helps him carry it/her off the train (one wonders if there would have been
any difference between his engagement with this piece of paper, wood and
glass and with his wife when alive). He is even the medium that allows us
to hear Antonia’s voice from beyond the grave when he recalls Gusti’s
departure for Madrid and imitates her fretting over what he would eat
there. The controlling presence of the portrait of the dead matriarch
repeats the role of a similar picture in Nieves Condes’s Balarrasa (1950).
La ciudad borrows the earlier film’s use of arrangement within the frame
to underscore the portrait’s meaning. In Balarrasa, the portrait of the
mother dominates the background at key narrative moments such as
Javier’s return to the family home after he has taken the decision to become
a priest (Gómez 2002: 581). Likewise, in La ciudad, the image of Antonia
casts her silent approval over scenes such as the reunion of father and son:
the two embrace in the foreground, while the wife and mother in the por-
trait smiles down on them in the background.
In contrast, Picasso’s painting stands for the modernity that aperturista
Spain craved in the 1960s. By using a still life of an uncontroversial subject
matter, the film ignores the awkward facts that Picasso was a Spanish artist
who lived in exile in France (he moved there permanently from 1901) and
that his work condemned Spanish fascism. The international admiration
garnered by this co-founder of Cubism encodes the kind of success the
aperturistas fondly imagined for the NCE, but in Lazaga’s film, which was
not intended for foreign audiences, this example of high art simply
becomes a straw man to be knocked down. It symbolises first, the acquisi-
tion of wealth for its own sake, and second, the distortion of family values.
Gusti and Tío Agustín’s conversation about the painting and the portrait
summarises the opposition. Tío Agustín describes it as ‘Uno muy raro que
no se sabía lo que era’ (A weird one where you couldn’t see what it was of).
Rather than defend the artistic merits of Cubism, Gusti simply responds,
‘Pero padre, que vale un millón’ (But Dad, it’s worth a million pesetas).
This enables Tío Agustín to counter with a line that celebrates morals over
money, ‘Y esto, ¿no vale más para ti? Es tu madre’ (And isn’t this worth
more to you? It’s your mother). Tío Agustín’s dismissal of the aesthetic
merit of the Picasso painting is echoed by the film’s second mouthpiece of
traditional rustic values, the maid Filo, who refuses to keep it in her room
as it makes her feel sick (‘me da mareos’ [it makes me feel dizzy]). Although
Luchy is never aligned with the picture through juxtaposition within the
frame, she is nevertheless Picasso’s champion in the film, because she is the
one who insists the still life hangs in the sitting room rather than Antonia’s
portrait. This desire for the housewife to decide on the decoration of her
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own home seems reasonable, but it is given a symbolic dimension because

of Luchy’s near-adultery. When she speaks to Ricardo on the telephone
during the tea party, the Picasso still life is visible in the background of the
shot, and on the day of her adulterous date with him, the sequence begins
with a medium shot of the painting. Thus her distortion of family values
by contemplating adultery is pictorially represented by her association
with the ‘distortion’ of still life forms in the Cubist masterpiece.6
The condemnation of the challenge to patriarchy is also represented
pictorially in the scene at the hotel bar. Ricardo has arranged to meet
Luchy at Hotel Richmond in order to begin their adulterous affair. Mise en
scène underscores the moral distortion implicit in this plan, as the would-
be lover is juxtaposed in the bar with the picture of the old man with two
prostitutes. Just as the picture describes the perverse sexual relationship
between a decrepit old man with walking sticks and a scantily clad, buxom
young prostitute (Goya explores a similar opposition in La Boda
[The Wedding 1791–2], though the treatment of the figures here recalls his
Aún aprendo [Still I Learn 1824–8] and Las Caprichos [The Caprices 1799]),
so we are led to understand that Ricardo and Luchy’s adulterous union
would be similarly perverse. Furthermore, when Luchy arrives at the bar,
her position before the maja painting condemns her would-be adultery as
both artificial imitation and as prostitution. Through the pictorial align-
ment, Luchy and the maja are condemned as impersonators, which picks
up the idea of the fraudulence of the city alluded to elsewhere in the film.
In the eighteenth century, the fashion for upper-class Madrid women to
wear the clothes of lower-class majas for playful erotic effect was immor-
talised in Goya’s portraits La Duquesa de Alba (The Duchess of Alba 1797),
La Reina María Luisa con mantilla (Queen María Luisa Wearing a Mantilla
1799) and La Marquesa de Santa Cruz (The Marquess of Santa Cruz
1797–9), of which the painting in Lazaga’s film is clearly an imitation. In
fact, rather than a member of the upper class imitating the fashion of the
lower class, Luchy is a new member of the middle class. The daughter of
a poor rural family in Calacierva and a former village dressmaker, she is
anxious to consolidate her newly acquired status by displaying the kind of
cultural ‘distinction’ analysed by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.7
In a Spanish cultural context, she would therefore be described as a cursi.8
Eager to imitate all things foreign to compensate for the pace of her social
ascendance, she has changed her name from the Castilian ‘Luciana’ to the
foreignified, Italianate ‘Luchy’, drinks tea and spirits instead of coffee and
wine,9 and prefers Picasso to the traditional family portrait. During the
tea-party sequence, one of the marquesses, who, as a member of the aris-
tocracy, is a custodian of ‘genuine’ taste, immediately sees through the
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pretensions of Ricardo’s love-letter, which Luchy takes seriously. She dis-

misses its opening address, ‘adorada Luchy’ (My adored Luchy) as ‘¡Qué
cursilada!’ (How cheesy!)
The connection between Luchy the middle-class cursi and the maja
depicted in the painting is therefore that both are fraudulent imitators.
The painting serves a further purpose, however, in condemning Luchy’s
adulterous temptation. The maja painting is a sexed-up version of Goya’s
more subtle representations of erotic female spectacle on display. The
painter exaggerates the bust and bottom, and places the woman on a
balcony – the quintessential site of display. She coquettishly lifts her skirt
to reveal a shapely calf and dainty foot imprisoned in a pointed shoe.
Through her juxtaposition with the portrait it is suggested that Luchy is
decked out in a 1960s version of the maja’s temptress outfit. Her tight-
fitting glittery cocktail dress and fur coat10 replace the maja’s lace petti-
coats and mantilla, her hat stands in for the elaborate bow displayed on the
head of her eighteenth-century predecessor, and she carries an evening bag
instead of a fan. The similarity of both the attire and the pose of Luchy
and the maja is underscored by the positioning of the actress before the
picture for a full 8 seconds of the 17-second take that records Luchy’s
arrival at the hotel bar. Furthermore, just as the maja’s gaze beckons an
implied male admirer to the right out of the picture frame, so Luchy looks
for Ricardo to the right out of the cinematic frame. In both cases, the exces-
sive, and artificial, erotic display is condemned as prostitution, as both
women peer out of picture and cinema frames for male lovers or cus-
tomers.
The work in costume design (Humberto Cornejo and Matías Montero
Nanette) and makeup (Paloma Fernández and María Elena García) in the
Hotel Richmond sequence is typical of the whole film, which underscores
its characterisation of Luchy as would-be adulteress through her clothes
and cosmetics. What Luchy wears is as interesting as what she says and
how she says it, for although Doris Coll camps up her portrayal, dragging
on her cigarettes like a textbook femme fatale, Coello and Masó’s script
stifles her performance through lines that are little more than banal
clichés.11 Our first sight of her is on the balcony of the flat (a nice touch
that looks forward to the balcony on which the maja is displayed), where
she wears a modern outfit of leggings, vest and sweat band as she completes
her keep-fit exercise routine. Next we see her in an elegant white dress
and matching pendant earings, fully made up with thick eyeliner and
false eyelashes, as she receives her marquess friends for afternoon tea (see
Figure 2.2). During this sequence her father-in-law reveals her humble
origins as a village dressmaker, which indicates to us that she would be
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especially sensitive to the fact that what she wears conveys her newly
acquired class status. Her outfit for the adulterous encounter with Ricardo
at the hotel bar summarises her elegance, wealth and confidence in her own
sexuality, but, as we have seen, this display is parodied by its juxtaposition
with the maja.
Tío Agustín, of course, rescues her from the edge of adultery, and insists
she becomes the angelic wife and mother of patriarchy. Logically, her com-
pliance with his orders is represented sartorially. The action shifts from the
hotel bar back to the flat, where we see smug Tío Agustín contentedly
sprawling spread-legged on the sitting room armchair. Luchy has changed
her outfit, but on a symbolic level, Tío Agustín has punished her by strip-
ping off her fur coat, fancy hat and sexy cocktail dress, and reclothing her
in a dowdy, hand-knitted cardigan, with the tiny triangle of flesh that might
have been visible at its V-neck decorously shrouded by an ugly neckerchief
and old-fashioned brooch. Knitwear encodes the village in La ciudad,
through the saccharine characterisation of the disabled girl Belén, who
always appears wearing a knitted scarf, and who gives Tío Agustín a knitted
cardigan that he wears in the last scene of the film. Literally and
figuratively dressed down by Tío Agustín, Luchy’s new look makes her
instantly appear older and plumper, robbing her of the sexual confidence
she exudes elsewhere in the film. In other words, the visual manifestation
of her transformation into the angel of the hearth has made her a version
of Antonia. The film therefore condemns sartorial luxury as sexual lust,
punning on the shared root of ‘lujo’ (luxury) and ‘lujuria’ (lust) in Spanish.
It is not incidental that Tío Agustín remarks ‘¡Qué lujo!’ (How luxurious!)
when he first sees the Madrid flat, at a point when Luchy is wearing the
elegant outfit to receive the marquesses. In the last scene in the Madrid flat,
the old meddler has saved the family from the dangers of luxury and lust
by reclothing Luchy in ugly, asexual, village clothes.
This change is further underscored by the photographic portrait of
Luchy, which becomes the mirror-image of the painted portrait of Antonia
it faces on the opposite side of the sitting room in the Madrid flat. Earlier
in the film we have seen Ricardo caress the framed photograph as he fondly
imagines his future seduction, but in the penultimate sequence, when
Gusti returns home from work early and Luchy greets him in the dowdy
cardigan, the portrait is restored to its traditional role. When Gusti opens
the door of the flat, the shot is arranged so that we see him enter in the
background, while Luchy’s portrait dominates the foreground. Like
Antonia, Luchy is back in her proper place in the home, contained and
controlled by a portrait, and symbolically tied to her husband through the
connection of foreground and background in the cinematic frame.
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Swinging Sixties Madrid

Just as the counter-reading of La gran familia proposed in the previous
chapter emerged from the conflicting contributions of members of the
technical crew such as composer and editor, I also suggest an alternative
reading of La ciudad through an examination of the different interventions
of members of its crew. Script, Martínez Soria’s performance and mise en
scène all emphasise the film’s condemnation of adultery, which is aligned
with urban life, and promotion of the family, which is aligned with rural
life. However, the prologue of the film, which was added to Lozano’s orig-
inal play, proposes an alternative vision of a dynamic city full of possibil-
ity, as opposed to a static village immune to change. This is achieved
through the input of Juan Mariné (cinematography) and Alfonso
Santacana (editing), and the inclusion of an instrumental by ‘Los Shakers’
on the soundtrack.
The film opens with Mariné’s long shot of the recognisable Madrid
cityscape, which is recorded through a slow pan and long take from the
large park on the city’s western edge, the Casa de Campo. While the
cityscape is visible on the skyline, the trees and vegetation of the park dom-
inate the foreground. The slow pan and long take are therefore associated
with rural space through the position of the camera in the park. The title
of the film (presented by an intertitle) declares antipathy to city life, but
this conflicts with the interesting architectural collage of Madrid’s monu-
ments and buildings glimpsed in the long shot. The rock music played on
the soundtrack underpins this view of a dynamic modern city. ‘Los
Shakers’ were bang up to date in 1965: a Uruguayan band formed in 1963,
they sang in English and specialised in music that imitated ‘The Beatles’.
The rapid tempo struck by the electric guitar and drums contrasts with the
slow pan from left to right, emphasised by a long take of 36 seconds. We
associate the fast-paced rock music with the cityscape seen in the back-
ground, and the slow pan and long take with the rural park in the fore-
ground. This first sequence of the film seems to respond to the attraction
of the cityscape, as it ends with a zoom into the city, which takes our atten-
tion and interest with it. There follows a cut, then a matching zoom out
from a lampost to reveal the Plaza de España. This opening arouses our
interest in the city, and satisfies it by the movement from rural to urban
space by means of the matching zooms.
Like the ‘Los Shakers’ soundtrack, the use of the zoom is very contem-
porary, as this was one of the technical innovations that date from the end
of the 1950s in Spain (Sánchez Biosca 1989: 89). The cinematographer
Mariné takes advantage of further technical developments in the whirlwind
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filmic tour of the capital that follows, which records both its monuments
and most emblematic buildings (such as the Plaza de la Cibeles and the
Metrópolis building) and the activities of its inhabitants (we see pedestri-
ans crossing the busy streets, passengers riding on buses or in cars and
filmgoers entering a cinema). The rock music of the soundtrack and rapid
editing are also crucial to this breathless presentation of an exciting city.
Santacana only allows shots to rest on monuments or buildings long enough
for us to recognise them. The strong beat of the ‘Los Shakers’ track gener-
ates excitement and also makes Madrid appear a Spanish version of con-
temporary Swinging London. When night falls, this city portrait becomes
more formally experimental. From minute 1, 55 the music increases in
tempo and Santacana steps up the frequency of the montage.
Taking advantage of the creative possibilities allowed by new technol-
ogy that critics have thus far explored only in the art house NCE films in
this period, La ciudad therefore registers their impact on the commercial
cinema too. The introduction in 1960s Spain of new light weight equip-
ment like the German Arriflex camera (Llinàs 1989b: 214–15) allows
Mariné to locate his camera in interesting places, like the front of a car,
which affords us its perspective speeding through the city both above and
below ground. Furthermore, new extra-sensitive film stock reduced the
need for artificial lighting, expanding the possibilities of filming at night
(Torán 1989: 103–4), both here and in more formally experimental films
like Nueve cartas a Berta. Finally, in this nocturnal Madrid scene, the
imagetrack is speeded up to fast forward, a shift that promotes exhilaration
rather than disorientation, because there is no change of subject, and we
revisit places at speed that we have already seen at normal pace. Taken
together, this presentation of the whole city exudes the youth and energy
associated with the contemporary club scene, a feeling that is confirmed
when Sara, friends and Tío Agustín visit a nightclub later in the film and
we see ‘Los Shakers’ perform live the tune we have heard in the prologue.
The vibrancy and velocity of this 1960s city are then crushed by the
voice-over that begins at minute 2, 18. The disembodied male voice tries
retrospectively to align formal experimentation with a condemnation of
the city. He reads a list of damning statistics about Madrid, which echoes
the changes of perspective offered by the editing, and condemns the fast
pace of life in the capital, which recalls the fast-forward images and rock
music. This pompously authoritative voice-over is a version of the narra-
tive commentary that accompanied the NO-DO newsreels, and this
obvious association with the mouthpiece of the state may have led some
members of the audience to treat it sceptically. Furthermore, Spanish
audiences were used to hearing disclaimer voice-overs added by censors at
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the start of films, informing them, for instance, that what they were about
to see was fictional and in no way representative of Spain (for instance,
Calle Mayor [Bardem 1956]), or downplaying any possibly subversive
content in the film that followed (for example, No desearás al vecino del
quinto [Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Fifth Floor Neighbour, Fernández 1970]).
In addition, Núria Triana-Toribio speculates that ‘These prologues may
be there only because they are fashionable or familiar to the audience’, but
that none the less, ‘they can also be read as an implicit acknowedgement of
the presence of censorship’ (2003: 101). It is clear, then, that audiences’
responses to these prologue voice-overs were knowing, which raises the
possibility that some may have been sceptical of them, others may have
ignored them and still others may have bloody-mindedly adopted the
opposite view, simply because they were being told not to.
A resistant reading of the voice-over’s intervention in La ciudad is there-
fore plausible. Its insistence that the city is ‘unnaturally’ large is straight-
forward to deconstruct as it relies on a simple listing technique to create
the impression of overwhelming size. Statistics referring to inhabitants,
marriages, births, deaths and crime are reeled off, and nouns describing
excess are repeated: ‘montañas de . . .’, ‘toneladas de . . .’, ‘kilómetros
de . . .’ (mountains of . . ., tonnes of . . ., kilometres of . . .). The narra-
tor’s sigh of relief is audible when, at minute 4, 36, we move to the village,
and he reflects, ‘Ay, menos mal que todavía existen sitios más tranquilos’
(Ah, just as well that quieter places still exist). As if to reward the coun-
tryside-obsessed narrator, two long takes offer the pictorial recreation of
stereotypical bucolic images. First, the camera zooms out from the image
of two donkeys tied to a post in front of a whitewashed wall, and second,
it zooms in to an abandoned, horse-drawn cart leaning against another
whitewashed wall. In parallel, the narrator offers a nauseatingly paternal
and contrived description of the village and its inhabitants, which replays,
in a conservative and authoritative key, the famous voice-over prologue to
¡Bienvenido Mister Marsall! (Berlanga 1952), read by Fernando Rey and
scripted by Bardem and Berlanga. However, in its eagerness to portray the
ideal village, the film contradicts itself. For while pictorial mise en scène and
the narrator idealise tranquility, we also see a group of screaming young
children running down the street, and further commotion sets in at the
news of the birth of a baby boy. The idea is presumably to show that the
village can reconcile opposites and be both a repository of timeless tradi-
tion and motor of new life. However, cinematography and editing during
the village sequence recoil from the technical innovations of the city pro-
logue, and rather recall the slow pan and long take of the initial shot from
the Casa de Campo. So, despite the narrator’s celebration of the village, the
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energetic children and the news of the birth, the creeping pace of camera
movement and editing support a counter-reading of this rural eulogy as
static and stultifying, in contrast with the dynamic urban environment we
have previously seen.

Conservative Comedy Against Itself

If the prologue is read against the grain as a celebration of the city, it casts
a different light over the ensuing narrative. In Álvaro del Amo’s tongue-
in-cheek analysis of the predictability of Spanish film comedy, he notes
that the paleto plot, inherited by the cinema from pre-war theatrical tradi-
tions of the sainete and the zarzuela, turns around ‘las desventuras de
pueblerinos (que recibirán la denominación de “paletos”) en su contacto
azaroso con la ciudad’ (the mishaps of country people [who will be called
‘country bumpkins’] in their hazardous contact with the city) (1975: 18),
and that the paleto will inevitably be characterised by ‘la boina, la maleta de
madera y una caja atada con cordel en donde se guardan sólidas, contun-
dentes muestras de la bollería local y jugosos embutidos’ (his beret, wooden
suitcase and box tied with string, in which examples of heavy and filling
local breads and pastries and succulent sausages are kept). Based as it is on
a sainete play, La ciudad follows this plot and characterisation to the letter,12
attracting audience sympathy for Tío Agustín as he comically grapples
with manifestations of urban modernity like traffic lights, telephones and
supermarkets. Sure enough, Tío Agustín does not fail to underscore the
opposition of country and city through food and drink. Whereas the
Madrid family eat tinned food and cold dinners (according to the maid),
have tea and fancy cakes (as we see at the teaparty) and drink spirits from
a collection of glass decanters, Tío Agustín brings live chickens to make a
tasty soup, along with the inevitable chorizo, cheese and bread, and drinks
village wine from the porrón that he wields with Martínez Soria’s trade-
mark flourish.
Whereas conventional setting and characters in La gran familia served
to naturalise its conservative message, the predictable plot and characteri-
sation of La ciudad point to self-parody. There is a difference, after all,
between conventionality and predictability, and Lazaga’s film takes pre-
dictability to such an extreme that its conservative message collapses under
the weight of exaggeration. For instance, Martínez Soria’s role in the film
tries, and fails, to reconcile two opposites. He is simultaneously charged
with the serious role of instigator of propriety, and the comic role of paleto.
As well as the excessive verbosity and gesticulation typical of a sainete char-
acter, Diego Galán suggests that his performance style also draws on the
64    

world of circus clowns (1983). The intention is for the humour of his per-
formance to give a friendly face to his reactionary conservatism, but
instead it discourages us from taking that conservatism seriously. Tío
Agustín ends up joining the ranks of the other symbols of authority paro-
died in the film, like the mayor, the traffic warden, the taxcollector and even
the dictator himself – as Richardson points out, the porter of the Madrid
flat is set up, through his military-style outfit, as a Franco-surrogate whose
pretensions are mocked (2000: 68).
Take, for instance, the uproarious sequence of the marquesses’ visit for
afternoon tea. Tío Agustín is the defender of family honour here, as he has
sussed out Luchy’s situation by overhearing her read the letter from
Ricardo and eavesdropping on a telephone call. But this serious function
is undercut by the comic excess of his participation in the tea party. He
begins by stamping his feet to announce his presence, then continues by
sitting next to the marquesses on the sofa and lecherously drooling over
them with the embarrassing excess that would become typical of the Sexy
Spanish Comedy of the 1970s (Figure 2.2). The sequence ends with a
moment of textbook slapstick farce in which he drops a spoonful of sugar
down one marquess’s top, scatters the remaining contents of the sugar
bowl over himself and then accidentally sits on top of the other marquess

Figure 2.2. Doris Coll, María Luisa Ponte, Paco Martínez Soria and Margot Cottens in
La ciudad no es para mí. Video Mercury Films.
     L A C I U DA D N O E S PA R A M Í 65

(the scene is lifted straight from the play [Lozano 1965: 33–4]). This
conflict between his earnest narrative role of saving Luchy from the adul-
terous affair her friends encourage her to begin, and its comic execution
during the tea party, is exacerbated by the excessive theatricality of
Martínez Soria’s performance. He is above all a theatre actor (Aguilar and
Genover 1996: 375; Gracia Pascual 2002: 44), a fact alluded to in the script
of La ciudad when a marquess describes him as a ‘tipo de sainete’ (a typical
sainete character). The mismatch between stage and film performance
styles has interesting effects in other Spanish films. For instance, Aurora
Bautista’s stage background meant her roles in CIFESA’s historical epics
were characterised by melodramatic excess, which had the effect of con-
ferring her heroines with a vigour that undercut the otherwise patriarchal
content of the films. Similarly, Martínez Soria’s comic theatricality in La
ciudad translates into exaggerated excess on screen. He debunks the tradi-
tions he is meant to embody, causing conservative comedy to implode.
Consider, further, the role played by Tío Agustín’s beret. It emerges that
both the supposedly frivolous daughter-in-law and apparently wholesome
Tío Agustín are equally attentive to their headgear. On the one hand, the
beret declares Tío Agustín’s rural background, as when the traffic warden
looks him up and down and comments ‘Estos turistas de pollos’ (‘These
country bumpkin tourists’, literally, ‘These tourists with chickens’), or
when the maid assumes he is a peasant selling local produce when he first
arrives at the flat. But, on the other, it becomes overdetermined as a symbol
of patriarchal honour, either as a sort of cloth, which cleans up the family
honour, or a kind of weapon, which repels the family’s would-be attackers.
In the village sequences, Tío Agustín does not touch his headgear, which
conveys the security of his values in this space, but when he arrives at the
entrance of the Madrid family flat, he whips the beret off his head and uses
it to polish the brass plaque bearing his son’s name. This action looks
forward to the unveiling of the street sign bearing his name in Calacierva
at the end of the film, and also neatly conveys Tío Agustín’s role as sym-
bolic cleanser of the family honour. Again, when he finds the portrait of
Antonia in the junk cupboard (see Figure 2.1), the beret is removed and
used to polish the glass so the ideal wife and mother can be seen more
clearly in order to project the patriarchal values for which she stands. More
amusingly, the beret-qua-sword is brandished to repel the enemies of the
family honour. Like a warrior of yesteryear, resheathing his trusty weapon
after slaying a foe, Tío Agustín removes his beret and slaps it on his hand
a few times after he gets rid of the the marquesses who are encouraging
Luchy to have an affair, or dispatches the would-be adulterer Ricardo in
the hotel bar. This repeated and excessive use of the hat transforms it into
66    

a comic patriarchal prop, which has the ultimate effect of weakening the
traditions it is meant to uphold.
If the comic characterisation of Tío Agustín undercuts the conser-
vatism in whose name he acts, those very actions also seem to do more
harm than good. For instance, he meddles in his son’s marriage in the name
of patriarchal honour, but in so doing questions the authority of the
husband, for Gusti remains blissfully ignorant of his near-cuckolding and
is thus infantilised. On the very day of his wife’s adulterous date, for
instance, he whistles a tune that evokes the romantic bliss that the specta-
tor knows is in jeapardy, Beethoven’s Für Elise.13 In the film’s subplot, Tío
Agustín enforces a marriage between the maid and the Don Juan egg-seller
who seduced her, but her new husband is lazy, jealous and dominated by a
tyrranical mother, so action in the name of the institution of marriage
timidly questions that institution. It would appear that Tío Agustín’s only
success is in rescuing Luchy from adultery, a fact that invites us to recon-
sider what this film is really about.
The opposition between country and city is spurious. It is a smokescreen
that covers the real opposition of La ciudad: that between the faithful wife
and the adulteress. This is not a film about civilising the city, but one about
civilising women. On closer examination, country and city, which the
voice-over narrator tries so hard to oppose in the prologue, are not so
different after all. For instance, before focusing on an establishing long
shot of Calacierva (which matches the Madrid cityscape of the opening
of the film) Mariné holds the camera on the electricity wires that connect
the village to the outside world (this detail is also noted by Richardson
2000: 66). The fact that the village is not immune to modern techno-
logical advance is also shown by the arrival of Belén’s knitting machine.
Furthermore, the prologue of the film, which is meant to oppose country
and city, reveals that multiple employment is present in both: in the city,
the narrator addresses a character with five jobs; in the country, Venancio
has at least four – bellringer, sacristan, town-crier and general odd-jobs
man – which means he doesn’t even have time to visit his newborn son as
he has to ring the church bells, then read the official letter announcing the
arrival of the taxcollector. Moreover, the country does not have exclusive
ownership of community and family values. Tío Agustín comes to the city
to ‘save’ the family, but prior to his arrival we witness pleasant exchanges
between Sara and her parents, one in the flat with her mother, and one on
the telephone with her father. The crook may attempt to fleece Tío Agustín
when he walks out of the railway station in Madrid, but otherwise he
encounters a host of benevolent strangers: a kindly gentleman, who helps
him unload his luggage from the train, an obliging traffic warden, who
     L A C I U DA D N O E S PA R A M Í 67

helps him cross the road and gives him directions, and a responsible tour
operator, who makes up for his mistake of bundling him on the wrong
coach by giving him a lift to the flat. The film also points out that Madrid
is a city of rural immigrants. Gusti and Luchy may wish to ignore their
past thanks to their economic and social ascendance in the capital (on three
occasions Gusti claims not to remember his old village friends when Tío
Agustín tells him about them), but the less successful maid Filo is fond of
evoking her pueblo. Finally, even Tío Agustín’s embodiment of a paleto is
incoherent. He may get confused by the traffic lights on his arrival in
Madrid, but he otherwise shows a ready facility for modern technology,
such as the switchboard, which he deftly manipulates in order to uncover
Luchy and Ricardo’s arrangements for their date.
In his account of La ciudad as an example of paleto cinema, Richardson
likewise rejects the country versus the city conceit. ‘Tío Agustín’s
triumph’, he argues, ‘is not so much the triumph of the premodern paleto
but rather the victory of the modern capitalist’ (2000: 64). Richardson
challenges the assumption that La ciudad perpetuated the ruralist propa-
ganda of the regime and argues that its conservatism is instead located in
the film’s implicit promotion of consumer values. The scene in which the
Calacierva cacique (local patriarch) Tío Agustín extracts Gusti’s city
money in order to do rural charity is crucial, as it dissolves the difference
between country and city by showing that both form part of the consumer
culture enthusiastically embraced in 1960s Spain. As Richardson notes,
‘while the campesinos [peasants] proclaim disinterested love for their
former neighbour, they shower him with requests and feel betrayed when
the desired goods fail to appear’ (2000: 69). Furthermore, Richardson
argues that the village itself is commodified as an object of consumption
by the end of the film, which offers a coherent interpretation of why Coello
and Masó add an otherwise superfluous second epilogue to the script. The
ending reifies the countryside, according to Richardson, as an object of
consumption for both rural tourists, like the family visiting for the day for
the street-naming, and for fans of paleto cinema, who pay their ticket
entrance to enjoy the clichéd representation of the countryside on screen.
While sharing Richardson’s revisionist approach, I would add that
the interpretation of Tío Agustín’s role as a champion of consumerism,
or aperturista hero, is undercut by the exaggeration of Martínez Soria’s
comic performance. Furthermore, Richardson’s suggestion that the film
‘interpellated Spanish citizens as modernisation-friendly consumers
who could appreciate the market value of the rural’, leaves no room for
the kind of resistant reading of popular culture proposed here. Finally,
Richardson does not take into account the centrality of the representations
68    

of womanhood in the film, such as the portrait of Antonia and the charac-
terisation of Luchy. This centrality leads me to the different conclusion
that La ciudad is above all concerned with the control of female sexuality.
As a formulaic conservative comedy the film, naturally, repeats the tired
opposition of woman as an angel of the hearth (Antonia) against woman as
adulteress (Luchy prior to Tío Agustín’s arrival), and attempts to reconcile
these representatives of tradition and modernity by conflating the two
(Luchy following Tío Agustín’s departure). If this reading makes Mariné
and Santacana’s potentially subversive celebration of the city and condem-
nation of the country at the beginning of the film less important, it also
renders the ending of the film more open to resistant reinterpretation. In
the epilogue, Tío Agustín returns to Calacierva accompanied by his young
family, and the welcome home party laid on by the villagers is acted out with
absurd exaggeration. After the unveiling of the ‘Agustín Valverde’ street-
sign, the returned prodigal son makes a saccharine speech to the adoring
crowd, interrupted by heartfelt exclamations of ‘¡Viva Tío Agustín!’ (Long
live Uncle Agustín!). Perhaps Lazaga wanted to dampen this excessive
enthusiasm, as rainfall mercifully interrupts the celebration. But the aspect
of the sequence that is of particular interest, given the attention paid to
costume throughout the film, is the portrayal of Luchy. Although the script
has her play the domestic angel and beg Tío Agustín to stay and live with
the family in Madrid, we notice that she has exchanged the dowdy cardi-
gan, which symbolised her domesticity in the previous sequence, for a
matching checked coat and hat, pearl accessories, sling-back high-heel
shoes, full make-up and stylish hair-do, which symbolised her adultery. The
film might end with medium- and close-up shots of the tearful ‘pedazo de
pan’ patriarch weeping with happiness at the success of his conservative
enterprise, but Luchy’s reappearance in her sartorial finery adds a surpris-
ing disruptive note. Fashion and clothing may be conventionally regarded
as frivolous, or even considered symbols of women’s collusion with their
own oppression by early feminists. But in La ciudad, costume may also be
read against the grain as a celebration of the female agency that the rest of
this film tries to curtail.

The fact that La ciudad is based on a popular sainete play explains both its
success and its failure. Adapting an already profitable play is an obvious
choice for a producer out to make money, and re-casting its popular lead
further ensures its success. But even if scriptwriters aim for maximum
fidelity, the act of transferring the plot from stage to screen leads,
inevitably, to changes. In La ciudad, a prologue that sets the picture in
Madrid is added, but this enables cinematographer and editor to evoke an
     L A C I U DA D N O E S PA R A M Í 69

exciting, dynamic city, complemented on the soundtrack by the music of a

trendy young rock band, which challenges the conservative ruralism of the
plot. Furthermore, the attention paid to costume in the film means that
the would-be adulteress, who is symbolically contained and punished in
the home in the penultimate scene, may incongruously reappear in the epi-
logue, exuding sexual confidence through her clothes and makeup. Finally,
the re-casting of the original theatre actor in the film paradoxically works
against the conservatism he embodied in the play, for on screen, Martínez
Soria’s comic theatrical performance is so excessive that it parodies
the very traditions of country life and patriarchy that his character tries to
promote.

Notes
1. In the sequel, La familia y uno más, rural nostalgia is confirmed by the reve-
lation that the mother always wanted the family to move to a house in the
country.
2. On ruralism in Spanish cinema, see Richardson (2002) and Faulkner (2006).
3. First staged in Palencia on 13 June 1962, then in Barcelona on 8 August 1962,
and in Madrid on 6 Febuary 1963 (Lozano 1965: 6), the play was performed
thousands of times throughout Spain (Cine-Asesor 1966). For a definition of
the sainete, see Chapter 1, n. 7.
4. This excruciating episode repeats the trick performed by Tony Leblanc in Los
tramposos (1959), also directed by Lazaga, in which the gullible victim is
fooled.
5. Majas were working-class Madrid women, who were also often prostitutes.
Goya painted a number of portraits of these women in the eighteenth century,
and majas remained a popular picturesque theme in the nineteenth. In the
film, both the maja painting and the picture of the old man are poor quality
imitations of Goya’s treatment of these popular themes.
6. In Juan Antonio Bardem’s Muerte de un ciclista (1955), adultery is also associ-
ated with modern art through the blackmail sequence between Rafa and
María José at the art gallery.
7. Bourdieu’s analysis of class and taste is based on a survey of French social
mores carried out in a period contemporary with this film, 1963 (1999: 503).
8. Noël Valis, in her book-length study of cursilería, notes that ‘This word is
hard to define since all the English synonyms typically given in dictionaries
to explain it – “in bad taste, vulgar,” “showy, flashy,” or “pseudo-refined,
affected” – merely point to its symptoms, not its underlying condition, cause,
or context’ (2002: 3). These, she argues, are Spain’s uneven modernity, where
the old and the new coexist in uneasy proximity. Although she does not
mention 1960s Spain, the rapid transformations of this decade are typical of
this uneven modernity.
70    

9. In Saura’s 1967 Peppermint frappé, he aligns the Spanish bourgeoisie with the
consumption of the fancy tipple from which the film takes its name, a con-
coction that combines the visual inauthenticity of its impossibly green colour
(this was Saura’s second colour film), with the linguistic inauthenticity of its
conflation of the English noun ‘peppermint’ and the French adjective frappé
(iced).
10. When Cabiria of Fellini’s The Nights of Cabiria (1957) exchanges prostitu-
tion for respectability she abandons her fur stole.
11. This is because in the play from which the script is drawn, Luchy is treated
as an object of mockery. The stage directions specify that she dresses ele-
gantly, but also insist that she is forty-two years old and and wears glasses
(Lozano 1965: 22). Through Tío Agustín, the play misogynistically dismisses
Luchy’s near-adultery as an embarrassing attempt by an older woman to
regain her youth (Lozano 1965: 69). The repetition of this attack on female
ageing in the film seems rather absurd, for Coll is relatively young and attrac-
tive.
12. I use the term sainete in the sense of deploying a number of characteristics of
the theatre genre. In his study of the sainete in Spanish cinema, Juan Antonio
Río Carratalá uses the term more strictly, which means that, for him, while
films starring Paco Martínez Soria may contain many aspects of the sainete,
they are not film sainetes as the ‘omnipresence’ of this actor obliterates a pic-
turesque treatment of setting and customs (costumbrismo) and a choral tone
(1997: 148–9).
13. This weakening of the patriarch is original to the film, for in Lozano’s play
Gusti himself writes the love letters to Luchy in order to test her fidelity
(1965: 72–3).
 PART II

THE NUEVO CINE ESPAÑOL

(NEW SPANISH CINEMA)
 CHAPTER 3

Reality and Pretence in Los farsantes

(Frauds, Camus 1963)

Director or Producer? Models of Authorship in the Viejo

Cine Español and the Nuevo Cine Español
In the first two chapters of this book I offered close readings of represen-
tative films, paying attention to production as well as socio-historical con-
texts, to argue that the commercial cinema should not be condemned as
uniformly conservative. The same approach is adopted in the rest of this
book, necessarily modified to account for the comparative wealth of crit-
ical material on the NCE. If the films examined in Part I reveal that the
VCE contained elements of dissent that have previously been overlooked,
so the example of Los farsantes shows that the NCE was closer to the com-
mercial industry than has been suggested hitherto. In this opening section
I will chronicle the confrontation between the two distinct models of film
authorship of the producer-led commercial cinema and the director-led art
cinema in the genesis of Los farsantes.
According to the director-led, auteurist model of cinema authorship, the
NCE may be considered a cinema that explores contradiction as its direc-
tors critiqued the tensions within aperturista Spain in their films.
Following this model, I argue that Mario Camus’s attempt to define, and
condemn, reality and pretence in Los farsantes exposes these contra-
dictions. The film follows a group of travelling actors and sets up an oppo-
sition between the apparently artificial sphere of popular spectacle,
represented by theatrical performances and religious ceremony, and
the actual struggle for survival of the actors and their provincial audi-
ences, for whom the 1960s seem indistinguishable from the post-war ‘años
de hambre’ (years of hunger). Camus’s film, therefore, looks back to the
telling contrasts highlighted by Berlanga and Bardem in the 1950s between
the supposedly glamorous worlds of film, theatre and advertising and the
grim realities of working-class urban and rural life in Esa pareja feliz (1951)
and ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! (1952).1
According, again, to the director-led model of authorship, this early film
of the NCE also seems to exemplify the movement’s promotion of realism
74    

through both theme and form. Although the four examples discussed in
this book reveal considerable diversity within the NCE over the question
of form, critics have taken its adaptation of Italian Neorealism to the
Spanish context to be its aesthetic blueprint (see Introduction). In the early
1960s it seemed doubtful that Camus would be the Film School student to
direct a picture that pioneered the formal characteristics of the movement.
Saura, for instance, has spoken of his conviction that Camus would be a
writer (Sánchez Noriega 1998: 29), and the director himself has admitted
on a number of occasions that he planned to be a scriptwriter (Cobos and
Sebastián de Erice 1963: 746; Monleón and Egea 1965: 11; Sánchez
Noriega 2003: 252). None the less, his collaborative work in the late 1950s
and early 1960s with a number of the students who would become the key
figures of the NCE explains why his first film pointed a way for the rest of
the movement. Camus co-wrote the scripts for Saura’s first two features,
the pivotal 1959 Los golfos (with Saura and Daniel Sueiro) and Llanto por
un bandido (Lament for a Bandit 1963) (with Saura), as well as the scripts
for three films that were never made, La boda (The Wedding) (based on
Unamuno’s Abel Sánchez, with Saura), El regreso (The Return) (with Saura
and Sueiro) and Jimena (with Joaquín Jordá, Francisco Regueiro and
Miguel Picazo). He was also involved in the production of Basilio Martín
Patino’s two shorts, El noveno (The Tithe 1959)2 and Torerillos, 61 (Amateur
Bullfighters, 61 1961) (Sánchez Noriega 1998: 32). Particularly noteworthy
here is the collaboration with contemporary writers such as Sueiro, the
author of the original short story on which Los farsantes is based, and co-
scriptwriter for the film: as Kathleen Vernon has pointed out, Camus was
the bridge between developments in the novel in the 1950s and cinema in
the 1960s: ‘building upon his initial collaborations with Ignacio Aldecoa
and Daniel Sueiro, [he] codified a vein of Spanish critical realism that per-
sists today’ (2002: 262).
A reading of Los farsantes as auteur cinema therefore reveals the aesthetic
influence of Italian Neorealism and Spanish literature on the NCE.
However, the film owes its practical existence to the VCE in the form of the
unlikely figure of Ignacio Iquino. Director of some eighty-seven popular
films over half a century of filmmaking from 1934 to 1984 (including six
works in just one year, 1943), and producer of thirty-six pictures from 1949,
when he set up his IFI production company,3 Iquino’s support for the art
house cinema of a young Film School graduate is explained by the gov-
ernment’s intervention in film production in the 1960s. The subsidy
system meant that the state itself acted as a production company, leading, as
Casimiro Torreiro has pointed out, to two opposing production phenomena
(2000: 155). First, thanks to reduced financial risks, new producers began
     L O S FA R S A N T E S 75

in the business, and some of them shared the NCE directors’ intellectual
commitment to critique Franco’s Spain.4 Second, established producers of
popular cinema backed the work of the young NCE directors for financial
reward. Even if the resulting films are very different, Iquino therefore
backed Los farsantes for the same reason that Masó did La gran familia: pre-
production subsidies that would cover the costs of the film (Masó success-
fully gained ‘National Interest’ classification for Palacios’s film; Iquino only
a 2A for Camus’s). Eduardo Rodríguez Merchán describes this confronta-
tion between NCE directors and VCE producers as a paradox that ‘se repe-
tirá en diversas ocasiones: son los productores veteranos, los artífices del
“cine de muñequitas pintadas”, tan denostado por los nuevos autores, los que
permitirán a éstos desarrollar sus ideas y fabricar un cine que hable de la
realidad cotidiana desde una veta profundamente realista’ (will be repeated
on various occasions: it is the veteran producers, the makers of the ‘cinema
of painted dolls’ that the new authors insulted so often, who will enable these
same authors to develop their ideas and construct a cinema that talks about
everyday reality from a profoundly realist vein) (2003: 399, quoting Miguel
Picazo).
Camus experienced this paradox with Iquino, a producer whose behav-
iour in business Óscar de Julián describes as ‘go-getting and sharp’ (2002:
57). Learning that the government was offering special subsidies for films
made by former students of the state Film School, Iquino phoned the
graduates of 1962 and offered to produce a film of their choice (Monleón
and Egea 1965: 10; in an earlier interview the director recalled that at first
Iquino only asked for scripts [Cobos and Sebastián de Erice 1963: 745]).
Camus accepted the invitation to direct a film, presumably encouraged by
the freedom he had experienced in choosing a script, which Iquino had
told him needed only slight modification (Monleón and Egea 1965: 10),
and locations (Cobos and Sebastián de Erice 1963: 746). He chose an adap-
tation of a short story by Sueiro, which he co-wrote with the author, and
shot the film in Castile, where he himself, along with Patino and Luis Ciges
(who would play Justo in the film) had participated in a student travelling
theatre group in Holy Week, 1957.5
Notwithstanding this freedom, Camus’s experience with Iquino, who
produced his first two films, was to be a steep learning curve for the fresh-
faced graduate and stages the clash between director-led and producer-led
models of film authorship. Although later in his career Camus would work
on commercial film commissions (such as his Raphael and Sara Montiel
star-vehicle films of the late 1960s), his film background in his late twenties
was that provided by the Film School. As discussed in the Introduction, the
School trained directors to be auteurs. Its students considered themselves
76    

intellectuals, prized their independence and learning, and dismissed their

national popular cinema as anathema. Iquino altered Camus and Sueiro’s
script, dictated the length of the shoot (approximately two months) and the
entire cast and technical crew, basically offering Camus the personnel who
had just finished work on the now forgotten José María, el tempranillo (Forn
1963). This included the cinematograper Salvador Torres Garriga (who
only worked on these two films for Iquino), editor Ramón Quadreny (who
worked on ten of the producer’s films from 1950, but who went on to col-
laborate in the Barcelona School after Los farsantes), composer Enrique
Escobar (who worked for Iquino on every film from 1961) and set decorator
Andrés Vallvé (who worked on eleven from 1955 to 1971). Noteworthy
among the cast are Film School-trained Ciges (who later become an
important actor of the Barcelona School) and the excellent Margarita
Lozano (who had played Ramona in Buñuel’s Viridiana [1961]).
Despite their employment by what José Luis Sánchez Noriega terms
the ‘Iquino factory’ (1998: 58), it is therefore possible that Camus found
likeminded collaborators among this group, especially given some of their
previous and future roles. Emmanuel Larraz has also pointed out that the
low-budget techniques of Neorealism fitted perfectly with the notoriously
stingy Iquino’s desire to keep production costs to a minimum (2003: 5).
Overall, we have conflicting accounts of Camus’s experience, though inter-
viewers have tended to ask him about working with Iquino, not specific
members of the crew. In 1965 he recounts, a little defensively, that he made
both Los farsantes and Young Sánchez ‘con una libertad absoluta . . . Iquino
estaba realmente de acuerdo conmigo y, además, conmigo se portó muy
bien’ (with absolute freedom . . . Iquino really was in agreement with me
and, what’s more, he behaved very well towards me) (Monleón and Egea
1965: 14). However, in more recent interviews he has compared his own
experience to that of his fellow students with progressive producers in a
rather self-pitying tone: ‘yo siempre pensé que cualquiera de los otros tra-
bajaban con amigos’ (I always thought that any one of the others was
working with friends) (Sánchez Noriega 2003: 253). He recalls, for
example, that prior to the Young Sánchez shoot Iquino warned him that if
he used more than 8500 metres of film, he would have to pay for it himself
(Julián 2002: 57)! The director’s statements are therefore to be treated
sceptically. For instance, while on the one hand he has stated that his cast
was pre-selected (Julián 2002: 57), he has also claimed that he chose
Lozano, the female lead, himself (Sánchez Noriega 2003: 252). Further-
more, while he recalls that, after Iquino asked to see the material shot after
a few days, he gave him complete freedom (Frugone 1984: 53–4; Sánchez
Noriega 2003: 254), Sánchez Noriega reports that the producer later
     L O S FA R S A N T E S 77

forced Camus to include a flamenco sequence to take advantage of the actor

José Montez, who plays Currito, and insisted that 40 minutes of the final
material was cut (1998: 61).
What is certain is that the production context of Los farsantes was one
of paradox: the first feature of a director promoted by the state as a would-
be art house auteur, made by the creative and technical teams of a producer
notorious for churning out material of questionable quality – ‘el esta-
janovista del cine’ [film’s Stajanov], as Sánchez Noriega describes him
(2003: 253). After the completion of the film, Los farsantes fell victim to
the contradictions of the state’s policy towards cinema in the period.
According to the director, the censors cut it by almost 15 minutes
(Monleón and Egea 1965: 14), removing, first, the scenes that dealt with
homosexuality and second, the soundtrack of the Holy Week procession
drums from the final section of the film. Next, the producer – who had
covered his costs through the subsidy – neglected its distribution (see
Monleón and Egea 1965: 14) and Los farsantes was scarcely exhibited.6 The
film was never screened in Madrid, and shown only in re-release theatres
in other cities, although it was apparently successful abroad (Sánchez
Noriega 1998: 68). We consequently have little record of reception – even
reviewers were unable to see the film.7
The plot of Los farsantes follows Don Pancho’s group of nine travelling
players, who perform two plays and a variety act as they travel through four
different Castilian villages in the weeks preceding Holy Week, and ends
with the actors’ near-starvation in the days before Easter Sunday, which
they spend lying low in a flat in Valladolid because theatre is prohibited in
this period.8 In the last sequence of the film, the city’s bells herald the res-
urrection and the actors continue on their way. The basic conceit, which
draws on Alberto Lattuada and Federico Fellini’s Variety Lights (1950)
(Torreiro 1995b: 313; Sánchez Noriega 2003: 252), is to contrast the nature
of human existence illustrated on-stage, with that experienced by the per-
formers off-stage.9 From this opposition of reality and pretence, there
develops a study of the dangers of distraction. We see spectators submit to
the supposedly easy emotions stirred by sentimental theatre and popular
religious spectacle, but we are encouraged to condemn this diversion of
their attention away from the more urgent concerns of their own poverty
and lack of freedom. Likewise, the actors are engrossed by petty jealousy
and deceit, and thus fail to attend to what we are encouraged to understand
as the more pressing issues of bettering their own humble circumstances
and ending their dependency on Pancho. Integral to this story is Camus’s
allegorical condemnation of Spain’s continued dependency on a dictator-
ship that, in 1963, entered its twenty-fourth year. The film suggests that,
78    

like the characters of Los farsantes, Spaniards under Franco are also dis-
tracted by everyday concerns, diverted by popular culture and consoled by
popular religious ceremony, and consequently fail to address the reality of
their repression and dependency.
If we consider it an auteurist, or director-led, film on the basis of the fact
that Camus chose the script and locations, Los farsantes is therefore an
attempt to lift the scales from his audience’s eyes, and to this end champi-
ons both the aims and methods of Italian Neorealism. Its contradictory
production context reveals, however, that the auteurist NCE was practi-
cally dependent on the popular VCE that it intellectually condemned, a
fact that is often hidden in accounts of the movement. Los farsantes is par-
ticularly interesting in this regard because it addresses this production
context within the film narrative itself. We might first consider the link
between production context and creative expression as Camus’s attempt to
bite the hand that feeds him: Los farsantes aims to condemn the distorting
and distracting effects of popular theatre and spectacle, which encodes a
critique of the popular cinema for which Iquino was well known. How-
ever, and possibly despite Camus’s intentions, Los farsantes itself uses its
intended object of critique, popular culture’s appeal to emotional identi-
fication, to highlight the characters’ plight. Its attack of Franco’s Spain is
executed partly through a Neorealist denunciation of reality, and partly
through the audience’s emotional identification with Tina. This is thanks
to the strength of Lozano’s performance, the pre-selected star imposed on
Camus in a manner typical of producer-led cinema. Thus, perhaps despite
itself, this early example of the NCE in fact benefits from the backing of
the VCE in artistic as well as practical terms.

Condemning Popular Spectacle

The critical consensus that the aesthetic and political concerns of the NCE
derive largely from Italian Neorealism has led to work on the nature and
extent of its influence on particular films (e.g. Arocena 2003), and how it
interacts with other developments in world cinema of the 1960s. This latter
focus leads Carlos Heredero to consider the NCE in a European context,
and conclude that the movement is situated ‘En la estela de la modernidad:
entre el Neorrealismo y la Nouvelle Vague’ (In the wake of modernity:
between Neorealism and the Nouvelle Vague) (Heredero 2003). An alter-
native approach has recently been defended by Santos Zunzunegui, who
sets the NCE within the national context of indigenous cultural tenden-
cies (2002a; 2002b). He argues that, notwithstanding exceptions like Julio
Diamante’s Los que no fuimos a la guerra (Those of Us Who Didn’t Go to
     L O S FA R S A N T E S 79

War 1961) (which the director renamed Cuando estalló la paz [When Peace
Broke Out] when the censors objected to the original title), the NCE priv-
ileged Neorealism at the expense of Spanish comic traditions, in particu-
lar the esperpento. Zunzunegui shows that, despite the wicked satiric
success of this idiom of grotesque, dark comedy in the films scripted by
Rafael Azcona like El pisito (The Little Flat, Ferreri 1958), El cochecito
(Ferreri 1960) and Plácido (Berlanga 1961), the NCE rejected this fertile
creative vein to conform to a narrow, Marxist understanding of the
purpose of art. The movement adopted the ‘ “realismo” . . . en su formu-
lación de corte luckasiano’ (‘realism’ . . . in its Lukácsian formulation)
(2002a: 482)10 championed by Juan Antonio Bardem (whose presence
Zunzunegui describes, punning on the title of an Antxón Eceiza film, as a
‘cadáver cinematográfico . . . “de cuerpo presente” ’ [cinematic corpse . . .
‘present in body’] [2002a: 477 n. 18]), to the exclusion of alternative dissi-
dent tendencies. For the critics of Nuestro Cine, the problem with the esper-
pento was that it was seen as ‘de “fácil digestión” para una burguesía que
no se daba, decían, por aludida ante “lo insólito del monstruo o del esper-
pento” ’ (‘easily digestible’ for a bourgeoisie that, they would say, didn’t get
the hint when confronted with ‘the unusual spectacle of the monstruous
or the esperpento’) (Zunzunegui 2002b: 106, quoting José Luis Egea). ‘De
esta manera,’ Zunzunegui concludes,

se decretaba desde los púlpitos de la denominada crítica progresista [Nuestro Cine]

la marginación de una serie de raíces culturales que van desde el Arcipreste de
Hita hasta Valle-Inclán pasando por la picaresca o Goya, bajo el argumento de su
difusa mordiente política. (Thus, from the pulpits of the so-called progressive criti-
cism [Nuestro Cine], it was decreed that a series of cultural influences, from the
Archpriest of Hita up to Valle-Inclán via the picaresque or Goya, should be sidelined,
according to the argument that their political critique was vague.) (Zunzunegui
2002b: 106)

Los farsantes, a film not mentioned by Zunzunegui, seems typical of the

NCE’s embrace of realism. Eduardo Rodríguez Merchán confirms that
Camus

había decidido decantarse por un postneorrealismo moral que se desmarcaba de la

tradición deformante y paródica, cuyo paradigma se situaba en las recientes obras
maestras del dúo Azcona-Berlanga, para sumergirse en un criticismo más realista,
más objetivo o – si se prefiere – más ‘verdadero’. (had decided to opt for a moral
postneorealism that distanced itself from the deforming and parodic tradition, whose
paradigm could be found in the recent work of the Azcona-Berlanga duo, in order to
immerse himself in a more realist, objective or – if you prefer – ‘true’ criticism.)
(Rodríguez Merchán 2003: 398, quoting Santiago San Miguel; original emphasis)
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Camus’s aim in Los farsantes initially appears clear: to toe the Nuestro Cine
party line and depict Spanish ‘reality’ – to be understood in the Marxist
sense of a portrait of the class struggle – while condemning the distorted
versions of the ‘reality’ offered by popular spectacle.
However, it is significant that Camus chooses to focus on a group whose
poverty evokes the misery of the post-war years. In an interview published
in Film Ideal following the film’s release, the director notes that travelling
players had become increasingly rare in 1960s Spain, only surviving in
some parts of Castile and Extremadura (Cobos and Sebastián de Erice
1963: 746). On the one hand, the choice of this group allows Camus to con-
trast the poverty of the actors with the relative affluence of the bourgeoisie
and thus condemn the uneven modernisation of 1960s Spain. But on the
other, it raises the question of how far this fast-disappearing group could
be representative of ‘reality’ in the 1960s. Pancho’s vagabond theatre
company could scarcely be further away from the revitalisation of the
Spanish stage that was actually taking place in the 1960s (Zatlin 2002: 229).
Camus acknowledges this lack of realism later in the interview:

Los farsantes quizá no sea muy realista, el término realista está muy fastidiado ya . . .
la historia es una historia de ficción mía . . . no tiene ningún fundamento realista en
el sentido que tú lo dices . . . tiene un realismo en otro sentido. Es un realismo mío
personal. (Los farsantes is perhaps not very realist, the term realist is very vexed
now . . . the story is my own work of fiction . . . it doesn’t have any realist basis in the
sense that you mean . . . it’s realist in another sense. It’s my personal realism.) (Cobos
and Sebastián de Erice 1963: 746)

Unfortunately, the interview is poorly edited and the question (‘in the
sense that you mean’) that gave rise to this response is omitted, but we
might conjecture that it queried the director’s commitment to Nuestro
Cine’s Marxist definition of realism.
Finally, however, in an interview cited by Juan Carlos Frugone in 1984,
which is unfortunately undated, Camus declared that Italian Neorealism
was an influence on his first two features. He mentions Cesare Zavattini –
the scriptwriter of key works like Bicycle Thief (De Sica 1948) and frequent
visitor to Spain – who became a major source of influence for Spanish
writers and directors from the 1950s onwards (Heredero 1993: 289–90):

Yo pertenezco a una generación que creía en una revolución. Sigo creyendo en eso.
Zavattini decía: ‘Lo que uno intenta es conmover al hombre con todo lo que sucede
a su alrededor en el mundo. Y en particular lo que sucede hoy o en un inmediato ayer.’
Esto dio resultado en Los farsantes y en Young Sánchez . . . (I belong to a generation
that believed in a revolution. I still believe in that. Zavattini would say: ‘What one
tries to do is to get people to be moved by everything happening around them in the
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world. And in particular by what is happening today or in the immediate past.’ This
bore fruit in Los farsantes and Young Sánchez . . .) (Frugone 1984: 53)

It is perhaps more sensible to leave aside interviews, with their hidden

agendas of questions of political allegiance, and compare Los farsantes with
its two immediate sources of influence. First, unlike Lattuada and Fellini’s
Variety Lights, Camus avoids revelling in the glamour of the showbiz
world, thereby insisting that his audience focus on the film’s politics and
condemn theatrical spectacle as a source of distraction. Second, the
changes Camus makes to the narrative perspective of Sueiro’s original
short story also seem to indicate his desire to make a film that encourages
intellectual detachment, rather than emotional involvement. The perspec-
tive of Sueiro’s first-person narrator Rogelio is removed as Camus appears
to offer a choral film in which the actors form a collective protagonist, and
no single character becomes the object of our identification. This attempt
to check identification is consistent with Brechtian aesthetics as it is
intended to channel our attention away from individual concerns towards
the political message portrayed instead. Camus’s choice to focus on a social
group that is scarcely representative of 1960s Spain as a whole reveals that
his aim was not to offer the Lukácsian realism demanded by Nuestro Cine.
By focusing on the world of travelling players, his aim was, rather, to
oppose reality and pretence.
The object of Camus’s attack in Los farsantes is the perniciously dis-
tracting and distorting effects of ‘farsa’ (farce), which divert attention away
from ‘reality’. While denunciation may be less ambitious than the creative
appropriation of Spanish farcical traditions Zunzunegui so admires in
directors like Berlanga, Camus does not, therefore, ignore these traditions.
Further, the ‘farsa’ of Camus’s title does not narrowly refer to ‘farce’ as in
light-hearted carnivalesque buffoonery, which is only touched on in the
striptease performance. Camus puns on the polysemy of ‘farsa’ in Spanish,
meaning both poor quality theatre and pretence or deceit. This play on
words is original to the short story on which the film is based (see, for
instance, Sueiro’s reference to ‘la farsa se detiene’ [the farce stops] [1988:
79]) although Camus brings it to the fore by replacing both Sueiro’s orig-
inal title, ‘La carpa’ (The Big Top), and the title of the first version of the
script, ‘Fin de fiesta’ (End of the Festivities), with Los farsantes.11
Los farsantes, therefore, condemns the distorting and distracting effects
of pretence and privileges the drive for an authentic representation of
reality that was the mainstay of Italian Neorealism. It consequently
opposes popular performances with a portrayal of reality using Neorealist
practices such as on-location shooting (although there are some studio sets
82    

too), documentary sequences (the images and sounds of the Holy Week
processions were shot and recorded in Valladolid as a documentary prior
to the rest of the film)12 and an emphasis on mise en scène. On the latter
point, Camus affirmed that a concern for mise en scène characterised his
early work (the two shorts, El borracho [The Drunkard] and La suerte
[Luck], and two features Los farsantes and Young Sánchez) (Monleón and
Egea 1965: 10–11). In Los farsantes the long shots that sweep across the
barren Castilian landscape constitute a visual refrain in the film. These
exterior shots contrast with the artificial worlds evoked in the company’s
performances, and explain the poverty of the actors and villagers who
inhabit such lands. The use of these techniques, which Florencio Martínez
Aguinagalde describes as an ‘aesthetic of defeat’ (1989: 148), allows Camus
to denounce a reality that characters and audiences ignore owing to their
distraction by pretence.
The anti-clerical opening sequence of Los farsantes establishes this
thesis of the opposition of reality and pretence. Each actor is introduced in
medium shot as they wait in a theatre for the village priest to arrive and
perform the last rites for their recently deceased companion, Manolo. The
run-down setting of the village theatre contrasts with the elaborate cos-
tumes and backdrops left on stage. The intended clash is highlighted in the
script, where the theatre is described as having a ‘pared descarnada, con el
cemento caído y los ladrillos al aire’ (dilapidated wall, with the cement
render falling off and the bricks showing), yet ‘Aún está armado en la
tarima un decorado que representa la fachada de un lujoso palacio y los
árboles de un jardín’ (Scenery representing the façade of a luxurious palace
and the trees of a garden is still set up on stage) (Camus and Sueiro 1963:
3, 4). After taking in these differences, we witness Pancho rebuke the group
of actors for their indifference regarding their companion’s death. He
instructs them to feign mourning for Manolo’s passing for the benefit of
the villagers: ‘Demostrad que lo sentís’ (Show that you’re sorry). Thus just
as the theatrical props are artificial, so too is their grief.
When the priest and altar boys arrive to perform the rituals of mourn-
ing, the actors therefore respectfully gather round the body and bow their
heads. However, Camus rather playfully has Justo cast aside one of the cos-
tumes as he takes up his position in the group of mourners – thus exchang-
ing one type of performance for another. Telling also is the
cinematographic arrangement of the shot of the last rites. It is a long take
from the perspective of a camera placed on the stage, which suggests an
equivalence between theatrical and religious performance and highlights
the pretence implicit in both. The next sequences make this clear. In the
script Camus and Sueiro specify that at the interment, Pancho, ‘con un
     L O S FA R S A N T E S 83

ademán digno de un gran actor, tira un puñado de tierra contra la caja’

(with a gesture worthy of a great actor, throws a handful of earth against
the coffin) (1963: 14). Next, Pancho entreats the village mayor to sympa-
thise with his company’s mourning of their deceased companion – and
thereby write off the debts they have incurred – while back in the theatre
we observe that the actors’ true preoccupations go no further than putting
food on their plates and a roof over their heads. It is important to under-
line here that this introduction to the film is not a condemnation of the
callous self-interest of the actors. Camus attends to the details of their mis-
erable existence, emphasising their shabby dress and dilapidated sur-
roundings through mise en scène, and their attitude of dejection through
performance style, and thus provides ample explanation for their attitude.
Los farsantes rather censures the pointlessness of religious observance in
a situation where the mourners have more urgent material concerns.
Reality and pretence are likewise opposed in Camus’s treatment of the
two plays we see the theatre group perform. First, a version of Genoveva
de Brabante13 is staged in two villages. In the first village, Tina and Rogelio
act out Genoveva and Segisfredo’s betrothal, in the second, they perform
the couple’s reunion after Segisfredo had been tricked about his wife’s dis-
honour and death. Although parts of the performances may have been cut
on Iquino’s instructions, what remains of the treatment of the play and its
juxtaposition with events off-stage reveal that Camus’s apparent purpose
was to satirise the artificiality of melodramatic, historical theatre, whose
cinematic equivalent was the bombastic, historical cinema produced by
companies like IFI España, or CIFESA. While the performances them-
selves showcase fancy period costume and elaborate rhetoric, these illu-
sions of grandeur are deflated through the editing of the two extracts. The
first sequence follows the group’s escape from the first village, when they
sit on the back of the van in the open air, and we see the first of many argu-
ments between Rogelio and Avilés over Tina. The introduction of the play
by means of a fade highlights the jarring contrast between the preceding
sequence of physical hardship and petty jealousy off-stage, and the ornate
costumes and high-register language of Tina and Rogelio on-stage as
Segisfredo addresses his betrothed using the standard bucolic imagery of
love poetry:

Mi Genoveva querida,
jardín de olorosas flores,
ídolo de mis amores,
vida de mi propia vida;
y a la hora apetecida,
llego a hacerte dichosa,
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desde hoy serás mi esposa.

(My beloved Genoveva,
garden of fragrant flowers,
idol of my love,
life of my own life;
and at the longed-for moment,
I come to make you happy,
from today you will be my wife.)

The attentive viewer might, however, note that Genoveva’s misgivings

about her marriage on-stage reflect Tina’s difficulties in the love triangle
off-stage:

desterrar no puedo,
de dentro del alma mía,
extraña melancolía,
y presentimientos tales,
cual si nuestros esponsales,
nuncios fueran de agonía.
(I cannot banish,
from my heart,
a strange melancholy,
and a sense of foreboding,
as though our betrothal,
were a harbinger of great suffering.)

The sequence ends with a fade to a close-up of Pancho and Pura’s hands
counting peseta pieces, the camera then zooming back to reveal the whole
group gathered round the takings. This juxtaposition of the two shots again
highlights the gulf between the noble sentiments expressed on stage and
their irrelevance in the context of desperate poverty. In what may have been
a fruitful collaboration with editor Ramón Quadreny here, Camus, there-
fore, contrasts the Neorealist depiction of hardship with the fake portrait of
humanity offered by the play, which reinforces the thesis of Los farsantes:
that performance is a source of falsification and distraction, and characters
and audiences alike should focus on the everyday trials of life depicted.
In the second performance of a different section of the play, Camus refers
explicitly to audience reception. As in the first performance, Quadreny’s
editing again contrasts two situations. When Segisfredo re-encounters his
long-lost wife, their reunion is announced by his declaration:

Te creo Genoveva desdichada.

Ven a mis brazos
y deja que ellos sean
un trono para tu honor.
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(I believe you unhappy Genoveva.

Come into my arms
and let them be
a throne for your honour.)

These words evoke the tearful responses of two female members of the
audience, which are illustrated with cross-cuts. The technique of parallel
montage is rather obvious and the acting of the members of the audience
is poor, but its self-referentiality is noteworthy. The sequence appears to
instruct us how to react to the film we are watching. It seems to suggest
that an emotional response is undesirable and, because two women are
depicted, ‘feminised’. In contrast, it apparently promotes detachment: we
should respond in a non-emotional, intellectual or ‘masculinised’ way to
Camus’s denunciation of poverty and hypocrisy.
In the second play, the title of which is given on the group’s promotional
posters and the side of their van as Vanidad y Miseria (Vanity and Poverty),
Camus once again contrasts on- and off-stage worlds. Up to this point in
the film, Camus shows that for the company of actors, religious observance
is a matter of indifference. Pancho insists on keeping up appearances, such
as publicly mourning Manolo’s passing, and concealing the extramarital
relationships of Tina and Rogelio and Milagritos and Lucio (in the origi-
nal version of the film these would have included Currito and Vicente’s gay
partnership too). But this only serves to highlight the meaninglessness of
clerically sanctioned behaviour for the group. Indeed, the first time we see
Pancho scold the older couple for their lack of discretion about their sexual
relationship, Camus places a picture of the Virgin behind him, in the first
of many instances of ironic contrast in the film. Given this context of
patent atheism, the players’ performance of the Passion play, in which
Camus even has the randy Lucio in the role of the Messiah, is an obvious
critique of pretence. The treatment of this play is an instance of Camus’s
encoded critique of Spanish popular cinema, as it slyly overturns the
premise of the pro-Franco film made by Iquino himself, El Judas (The
Judas 1952), in which the actor who takes on the role of Jesus in the Holy
Week play is morally improved by the character he embodies.
The village priest is another target of this anti-clerical assault. First,
Camus changes Sueiro’s original so that in the film the priest insists on
checking the play prior to its performance, whereas in the short story it is
a teacher (Sánchez Noriega 1998: 67). But the priest is not just a source of
censorship in the film. As the actors get changed in the sacristy, Camus also
has him uncharitably instruct his sacristan to lock away the silver, for fear
it will be stolen. There follows a sequence that again indicates Camus’s gift
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for setting up ironic contrasts between sound- and imagetracks. As the

actors rehearse their lines and read out loud the pious sentiments of the
play, the priest’s sacristan puts the valuables under lock and key, much to
Rogelio’s annoyance. After the sequence in the sacristy, it is difficult to
interpret the performance of the play in the church atrium as anything but
empty theatricality. The mise en scène of the church’s façade, on which the
Falangist symbol is prominently displayed, also points to the anachronism
of the sentiments expressed, for in an earlier sequence the priest has admit-
ted that the building is in need of repair, just as its flock of faithful is ever
dwindling.
Camus’s condemnation of the distracting nature of popular theatre and
religious ceremony also extends to the official rhetoric of aperturista Spain,
which is referenced in the film with a Radio Nacional de España report on
foreign relations between the United States and Europe. After the per-
formance of Vanidad y Miseria, Tina and Rogelio accept an invitation – or
rather, given their hunger, force an invitation – to have lunch with
Rogelio’s old army friend and his family, while their companions play cards
and drink in the local bar. Frugone has interpreted the couple’s behaviour
in the bourgeois home as further proof of the actors’ fraudulence, for they
imitate their bourgeois hosts as soon as they are left in the house alone by
having sex, like man and wife, in the marital bed (1984: 55). The still repro-
duced as Figure 3.1 shows how mise en scène is constructed to convey the
similarities and differences between the actors and their bourgeois hosts (in
the version of the film currently available in the Madrid Film Archives this
image has been cut, presumably because it precedes the sex-scene). Tina
is juxtaposed with an image of the Virgin on the left side of the screen,
while the framed image of Rogelio in the mirror matches the framed pho-
tograph of Antonio in military uniform on the right. This not only reveals
that the penniless actors are willing to perform bourgeois roles. More inci-
sively, it also suggests that those religious and military bourgeois roles are
themselves nothing more than performances, since they can be acted out
with such ease by others.
However, the real object of critique in this sequence is not Tina and
Rogelio’s understandable desire to enjoy the home comforts of their wealth-
ier friends, but rather the opposition highlighted by Camus between the
actors’ activities and the radio report by means of diegetic sound. The
sequence opens in the bar, where the actors play cards and tease Avilés about
his jealousy of Rogelio, and the news begins on the radio. There follows a
soundbridge to Tina and Rogelio as they cavort in Antonio’s house and
the report on the European Union and the latest German–American
alliance continues. An ironic contrast is therefore drawn between the wordy
     L O S FA R S A N T E S 87

Figure 3.1. Margarita Lozano in Los farsantes.

Video Mercury Films.

description of international relations we hear and the picaresque tale

of Avilés’s jealousy, Tina and Rogelio’s lust and the ensuing violence as
the sequence ends in a drunken brawl between the two rivals we see. Los
farsantes shows that the aperturista government’s concern with Spain’s role
in the international arena is misconceived. Franco’s Spain in the 1960s
attempted to act as a modern European power on the international stage (in
the early 1960s it tried, but failed, to join the EEC), but Camus’s revelation
of the squalid reality of Spanish life exposes this as empty rhetoric that dis-
tracts attention away from the poverty and dependency of its citizens.
This condemnation of pretence culminates with Camus’s treatment of
the variety act performed by the actors for the group of upper-bourgeois
day-trippers we see arrive in the village during the religious play. These
bourgeois characters are not included in Sueiro’s short story, so we may
take this original sequence as one of particular interest to Camus. Their
inclusion enables the director to critique the two key social groups from
which Franco drew his support. Some of the group are members of Spain’s
landed gentry, as they own a mansion in the countryside, and the others
belong to the new entrepreneurial bourgeois class that benefited from
Spain’s economic liberalisation, as they drive luxury cars suggesting their
arrival from the city. The inclusion of these bourgeois pleasure-seekers
88    

also enables Camus to expose the huge disparities of wealth consequent of

1960s Spain’s uneven modernisation. Camus’s film makes clear that the
economic polarisation of the classes was as much a target of critique in the
1960s as the dictatorship itself. The three long shots and takes of the arrival
of the bourgeois in the village offer a striking image of these disparities of
wealth: the well-heeled, car-owning friends sit alongside the pious old
women clothed in black to watch the play. Pancho’s penniless actors also
look incongruous in the luxurious surroundings of the bourgeois holiday
home, where they arrive to perform the variety act. Camus’s inexperience
perhaps shows in the exaggerated portrayal of the bourgeois characters’
staggering snobbery, although it recalls similar attacks found in the con-
temporary Spanish novel.14 ‘Yo no me explico cómo puede vivir esa gente’
(I don’t understand how these people can live) scoffs one of them after the
actors arrive, ‘para mí son como marcianos’ (to me they’re like Martians)
agrees another, ‘auténtico gente de otro planeta’ (really people from
another planet) adds a third.
The treatment of performance during the variety act sequence is more
successful, however, because Camus returns to the thesis of reality and
pretence he has developed to this point. Of the various acts the groups
performs, which include Pancho’s rendition of Calderón’s La vida es sueño
(Life’s a Dream), the bourgeois are only interested in the striptease.
American jazz is played on the flashy new record player, and the English
lyrics of the female vocalist, especially the repetition of the word
‘Manhattan’, evoke a modern, Western and urban world to which Franco’s
aperturista Spain aspired. But Camus’s treatment of the striptease exposes
the artificiality of the bourgeois characters’ aspirations of modernity and
sophistication. The sequence is excruciating to watch: it is an erotic spec-
tacle reflected in the concave mirror of Valle-Inclán’s Luces de Bohemia
(Bohemian Lights 1920).15 Tina’s version of sophisticated erotica is a
grotesque deformation, thanks to Lozano’s brilliant performance as the
poor, ageing, exhausted and famished actress. She cannot keep time with the
American music – suggesting Spain’s uneasy transatlantic alliances – and
discards her clothes with all the artfulness of a child. When the record is put
on fast-forward she even hops and trips as she steps out of her skirt, and ends
up half-falling, half-slumping in the corner in a state of undress and distress.
Like the play-within-a-play of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, this performance
reaches a wider truth: the fake artificiality of Tina’s puppet-like act exposes
the actual artificiality of the bourgeois characters.16 The modern ambitions
of aperturista Spain are therefore exposed in Los farsantes as a sham.
A comparison of the esperpento treatment of Tina’s performance with
other directors’ use of this idiom of exaggeration is revealing of Camus’s
     L O S FA R S A N T E S 89

approach in Los farsantes. In the dark comedies of Berlanga or Ferreri,

grotesque exaggeration evokes laughter, not shame: consider, for instance,
the comic effects of Nino Manfredi as reluctant executioner in El verdugo
(1963). In contrast, Tina’s pitiable performance evokes compassion not
amusement; a point underlined by Avilés’s interruption at the end of the
sequence when he denounces the audience’s voyeurism, yelling ‘¡Fuera! ¡Si
quieren ver a una mujer desnuda, echen mano a una de éstas!’ (Get out! If
you want to see a naked woman, try one of these!), gesturing towards the
bourgeois women. The effect of this outcry within the film is further to
condemn the bourgeoisie. But, through Avilés, Camus also challenges us,
for at this point we too are voyeurs, having shared the bourgeois charac-
ters’ point of view as they watch the performance. Thus Avilés’s denunci-
ation also entreats us to sympathise with Tina as a suffering subject, not
laugh at her as a pathetic erotic object.17 This sequence shows that, even in
the context of Neorealism, the insights of the esperpento were not ignored,
as Zunzunegui affirms, but rather inverted. If, ‘In its declared intention
to show the comedy in tragic situations, the esperpento required the elimi-
nation of empathy and identification’, as John Lyon observed in his work
on Valle-Inclán (1983: 105), in Los farsantes, Camus shows the tragic in
comic situations, which conversely requires an emphasis on empathy and
identification.

Identification and Critique

This is an important turning point in Los farsantes, as from here on Tina
ceases to be one of a group of characters, and emerges as a tragic individual
with whom we are encouraged to identify. From the striptease sequence
onwards, the film begins to adopt her perspective in both narrative and cine-
matographic terms. As the plot unfolds, her feelings are emphasised, from
her embarrassment during the performance, to her dejection following
Rogelio’s betrayal, who we have seen steal the money she suffers so acutely
to earn. During the final Holy Week section of the film, it is Tina who ini-
tiates a sexual encounter with Avilés,18 and she then emerges as the only
character willing to rebel against the actors’ dependency. This shared nar-
rative perspective is reinforced by the subjective cinematography with
which mainstream narrative cinema fosters audience identification. For
instance, on the morning following the striptease, after a 180º pan reveals
that the actors have spent the night sleeping in the open, Tina is framed
in medium shot for a long take of 1 minute, during which the camera regis-
ters her wordless despair as, off-screen, the others discuss Rogelio’s betrayal.
Similarly, the impact of Rogelio’s return is also felt through a point-of-view
90    

shot from Tina’s perspective as she sees him in the corner of the café in
Valladolid. It may be argued that this focus on Tina’s personal distress dis-
tracts our attention from the denunciation of the collective experience of
poverty. However, Camus has been so careful to present the reasons for the
actors’ behaviour in a wider context earlier in the film, that Los farsantes con-
demns a general situation through Tina’s particular despair.
The importance of this identification with Tina in the film, therefore,
seems to contradict Camus’s apparent condemnation of emotional engage-
ment explored in his treatment of the tearful audiences of Genoveva de
Brabante. We may account for this discrepancy as the result of producer-
pressure, whereby Camus was forced to expand Tina’s role to take advan-
tage of Lozano, the most famous actor in the cast – confirmed by the fact
that her name appears first in the credits – though it would be an exagger-
ation to label her a bankable star.19 However, we have no record of Camus’s
discomfort with the cast. On the contrary, he declared in a contemporary
interview that if there were a remake, he would use the same actors (Cobos
and Sebastián de Erice 1963: 746), and, as we have seen, even claimed to
have cast Lozano himself. It seems likely that Camus’s development of her
character, and encouragement of his audiences to identify with her, were
intentional. The shift in emphasis away from a film with a collective pro-
tagonist to one with individual characterisation corresponds to Camus’s
description of his work with the actors: ‘A medida que ellos iban interpre-
tando yo iba creando los papeles como les iban mucho más a ellos. Así, el
papel iba de acuerdo con las posibilidades de cada uno’ (As they acted,
I adjusted the roles so they would fit them better. That way the role
matched the abilities of each one) (Cobos and Sebastián de Erice 1963:
746). Thus Camus fitted the film round Lozano’s abilities and conse-
quently expanded her role. Camus’s next film confirms this shift away from
a collective to an individual protagonist. Just as Tina becomes a focus for
Los farsantes’s denunciation of the continued poverty experienced in Spain
despite economic liberalisation, in Young Sánchez, Camus’s censure of the
lack of prospects of working-class urban youth likewise hinges on our
identification with the protagonist, Julián Mateos’s ambitious young boxer.
Tina’s characterisation in Los farsantes, therefore, reveals that, perhaps
despite himself, this NCE director was willing to adopt some of the stra-
tegies of popular culture that he also seemed simultaneously to condemn.
So, while he appears to critique the tearful spectators of Genoveva de
Brabante as emotionally indulgent, he evokes the very same sentiments of
pity and empathy in his own audience through his treatment of Tina. The
difference, Camus might contend, is that the former is triggered by the
pointless distraction of sentimental melodrama and the latter by the urgent
     L O S FA R S A N T E S 91

denunciation of the class struggle. However, taken as a whole, Los farsantes

demonstrates the possible contestatory effects of both popular culture – in
its appeal to emotional engagement – and art house cinema – with its
entreaty to address intellectually the situations presented. This not only
confirms that popular culture under Franco, so often dismissed and
derided, could play a potentially subversive role. It also shows that auteurs
of art cinema, who in theory dismissed Spanish popular culture, in prac-
tice adopted its strategies of identification.
Rather than the sanitised Marxist version of Italian Neorealism cher-
ished by contributors to Nuestro Cine, Los farsantes therefore exhibits the
contradiction that scholars have noted lies at the movement’s heart. For
instance, Bicycle Thief (De Sica 1948), one of the few films owned by the
Film School and one that Camus saw so many times he claimed he knew it
by heart (Sánchez Noriega 1998: 2), censures the distracting effects of
Hollywood melodrama on the one hand – Antonio’s bicycle is stolen as he
admires a poster of Rita Hayworth – yet on the other the film itself explores
the theme of family relations and uses the techniques of identification that
were central to the American genre. Giuseppe de Santis’s Bitter Rice (1948)
also seeks to oppose the distractions of Hollywood film with the reality of
female labour in the rice fields, though, just like his protagonist Silvana,
the director betrays a fascination for American popular culture, thus
undermining his political position. Los farsantes also censures popular
spectacle, but through Tina, Camus harnesses its appeal to emotional
engagement for his own critical ends. The treatment of the female audi-
ence of Genoveva de Brabante is therefore ambiguous: the emotions stirred
by popular theatre may be diverting, but may also be channelled to
denounce injustice.

Ceremony and Suffering

Popular religious ceremony is also presented in Los farsantes as a source of
distraction, but its treatment is less equivocal than Camus’s response to
popular theatre. Two of Camus’s characters declare their enthusiasm for
the Church and its ceremonies, which points to its role as a source of solace
in hard times. However, Camus and Sueiro’s script ensures that both state-
ments are undercut and cannot be taken seriously. Currito, who is the only
believer of the group of actors, admonishes Rogelio for challenging the
suspicious sacristan in the previously discussed sequence in the sac-
risty. But we cannot take seriously Currito’s declaration ‘tengo devoción y
respeto’ (I am devoted and respectful). Coming as it does after the group’s
uncharitable treatment by the priest, it seems ridiculous rather than pious.
92    

Likewise, on their arrival in the flat in Valladolid, the maid eagerly

describes the city’s Holy Week celebrations to the group. Again, we cannot
take her seriously when she states ‘Dicen que la Semana Santa de Sevilla
es muy buena, pero como ésta, ni hablar’ (They say Holy Week in Seville
is very good, but it’s not a patch on this one), as she reveals that her pride
is based on hearsay, not knowledge.
Camus’s critique of the Catholic Church – the institution that gave moral
legitimacy to the Franco regime – is, therefore, an anti-clerical thread
woven throughout the film. Los farsantes begins by underlining the pretence
enacted at Manolo’s funeral, proceeds to satirise the message of the Passion
play, and ends with a daring treatment of Holy Week, the most important
event in the Christian calendar. Like the actors who are so engrossed in
everyday concerns they fail to address the reality of their own situation,
Camus shows that the faithful are also so distracted by public ceremony that
they fail to address the actual suffering in their midst.20 The point is encap-
sulated by the first sequence following the group’s arrival in Valladolid.
During a meal in a guesthouse, the distrustful owner tells Pancho that the
group must leave. Given their obvious indigence, this seems reasonable, but
Camus slyly makes his point through the presence of a poster on the wall
behind the owner advertising ‘Semana Santa, Abril 1963’ (Holy Week,
April 1963), on which Christ’s Crucifixion alongside the two thieves may
be clearly seen. Earlier in the film, as the group arrives in the village where
they put on the second peformance of Genoveva de Brabante, Camus
prefigures this association of the actors with Christ and the thieves through
a long shot of their van passing behind three crosses that evoke the
Crucifixion, and that consequently associate them with both the transgres-
sors and the Messiah himself in his suffering. The poster reminds us that
Christ, who preaches compassion to the poor, was himself ‘numbered with
the transgressors’ when he was crucified beside common thieves (Mark 15:
28), and it is therefore an ironic comment on the owner’s rejection of
Pancho’s appeal for charity. The proprietress may not charge the actors for
their meal, but her refusal of lodging means she only partly fulfils the bib-
lical injunction on the treatment of strangers (Matthew 25: 34–46).
Camus’s critical treatment of the Valladolid Holy Week processions is
an expansion of this idea of ironic contrast. Fundamentally, the pity and
piety that is publicly displayed in the Easter processions are juxtaposed
with the actual and acute suffering of the group of actors that is hidden
from sight in two rooms of a private flat.21 The contrast drawn between
the representation of suffering in the processions and the actual suffering
of the actors is original to Sueiro’s short story. ‘Esos días dramáticos,
nebulosos, agónicos’ (These dark days of drama and death), his narrator
     L O S FA R S A N T E S 93

writes of Holy Week, ‘para nadie lo son tanto como para nosotros, los de la
carpa’ (are particularly so for us, the theatre people) (Sueiro 1988: 80).
Both the reader of the story and the viewer of the film are therefore invited
to consider contrasts between the biblical story and the plot of Los
farsantes. For instance, the fasting of the faithful in imitation of Christ’s
suffering in the wilderness is shown to parallel the actual starvation of the
actors. Likewise, the pain experienced by the faithful in imitation of
Christ’s Passion on the cross by beating drums in the processions (which
Sueiro mentions [1988: 117]) matches the actors’ actual pain through lack
of food. Our identification with the actors in their actual suffering rein-
forces the contrast with the imitation of suffering of the faithful.
This contrast is developed through editing, cinematography and sound-
track. The Holy Week section of Los farsantes is particularly interesting in
terms of film form as, like the siesta sequence of La caza discussed in
Chapter 6, it is not wholly driven by narrative; for while the actors’
suffering is part of the story, the linear progression of the plot is not
Camus’s primary concern. Parts of this 22-minute sequence (the film is 82
minutes in total) transcend narrative to represent hunger, madness and the
slow passing of time as the actors wait until the ban on theatre is lifted and
they can work and eat again. Since the actors’ suffering is physical, it is
logical that Camus should focus on the body. An important association is
made at the start of the sequence between the images of the suffering body
of Christ on the Holy Week floats in medium and long shots, and the
response of Currito as he looks on in medium shot. As Currito is a believer,
we assume at first that Camus’s parallel montage indicates his piety.
However, Currito is also the character who goes on to suffer most from lack
of food, so his association with Christ established through editing does not
indicate religious belief, but the shared physical suffering of the body. Even
if Camus was forced to include it against his will, the flamenco sequence
(Figure 3.2) underscores this shared suffering. In a performance that is a
far cry from the picturesque Andalusian spectacle of the españoladas (folk-
loric musical films), the close-ups of Currito’s straining body and
anguished face during the flamenco dance in the flat recall the agonised
body and face of the images of Christ we have seen on the floats. On Easter
Sunday, as the bells of the resurrection ring out, Vicente and Lucio carry
Currito’s almost lifeless body from the flat to the van, which also recalls the
removal of Jesus from the cross. Camus also uses close-up to represent the
suffering of other characters, such as the slow tracking shot in extreme
close-up of Justo and Avilés’s bodies, which emphasises their hands and
feet, the two body parts by which Christ was nailed to the cross. This rep-
resentation of starvation through the detailed attention to the experience
94    

Figure 3.2 José Montez in Los farsantes. Video Mercury Films.

of the body has been called Camus’s portrayal of ‘the cinematographic

physicality of the senses’ (Rodríguez Merchán 2003: 400), and is achieved
by extending Neorealism to a level of physical detail that approaches
cinéma-vérité, a technique taken to an extreme by Saura in La caza. What
is impressive here is that Camus pulled this off with the technical teams of
Iquino’s production machine, whereas Saura was working with arguably
Spain’s top art cinematographer of all time, Luis Cuadrado.
Camus’s original intention may have been to represent the passing of
time in Los farsantes by a similar emphasis on physical detail: the sound of
the processional drums in the street outside would have magnified the slow
passing of minutes and seconds for the actors trapped inside the flat.22
However, the censors picked up on the association made between the drums
and the actors’ hunger and descent into madness by means of the sound-
bridge, and forced Camus to add a new soundtrack to the last two reels of
the film. In the currently available version of Los farsantes, the important
diegetic sound of the Holy Week drums has been replaced by bland melody
of the background music that is played during the credits and to suture
sequences together. To deduce how this sequence might originally have
sounded we at least have a version of it in Sueiro’s original short story,
which reveals the role the drums play in underlining the actors’ gradual
starvation, ‘Los tambores habían retumbado en los cristales de las tres
     L O S FA R S A N T E S 95

ventanas, con los mismos sonidos lentos, estremecidos, siniestros que deben
acompañar a los condenados que van a morir en la horca’ (The drums had
made the panes of the three windows vibrate with the same slow, shaking,
sinister beat that must accompany condemned men to the gallows) (Sueiro
1988: 105), and in emphasising the passing of time as the actors wait:

Aquel tiempo sin horas y sin fechas, sin días ni noches, sin nada que hacer ni que
pensar, nos tenía como idos de este mundo. El miércoles por la noche nos metimos
en la pensión de la calle Teresa Gil y ya no volvimos a salir. Desde nuestra habitación
oíamos continuamente, durante todo el día y buena parte de la noche, el paso lento,
arrastrado, obsesionante de las procesiones, siempre acompañadas por el retumbar de
los tambores, y, de vez en cuando, la estridencia de las cornetas. (That time without
hours or dates, without days or nights, with nothing to do or think about, made us
feel absent from this world. On Wednesday night we went into the guesthouse on
Teresa Gil street and we didn’t come out again. All day and for much of the night,
we could continually hear from our room the slow, dragging, obsessive passing of the
processions, which were always accompanied by the booming of the drums, and,
occasionally, the shrill cry of the bugles.) (Sueiro 1988: 109–10)

In the final Holy Week section of the film, Camus, therefore, pays par-
ticular attention to the painful experience of the starving body and the slow
passing of time to establish a provocatively anti-clerical parallel between
the representation of the suffering of Christ in the biblical story, and the
actual suffering of a group of poverty-stricken actors in provincial Spain.
Los farsantes, therefore, condemns religious ceremony as distraction: the
Valladolid faithful display penance in the public processions, but ignore
the suffering of the actors in their midst.

Allegories of Dependency
Camus’s denunciation of the distorting and distracting effects of pretence,
in its various forms of popular theatre, Catholic ceremony, official rhetoric
and erotic spectacle, may also be extended to an allegorical reading of the
film as a whole. Audiences are called on to address what the director con-
siders to be the worthy object of our attention, his version of Spanish
reality, rather than be diverted by pretence. In this context the film may be
read as autobiographical, as the relationship between the actors and
Pancho allegorises Camus’s own dependency on Iquino. However, the
choice of the name Pancho for the manager of the theatrical group is not
accidental, as it is a familiar form of Francisco, the dictator’s Christian
name.23 Pancho’s relationship with the group of actors is, therefore, much
more than the encoded whingeing of an auteur director about his com-
mercial producer. It in fact refers to Franco’s relationship with Spain.
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The critique is hardly subtle. Pancho directs a company of desperate,

dejected actors, whose poverty and hunger rob them of ambition.24 Their
submission to him infantilises them and robs them of all dignity: they
accept his regulation of their private lives in the name of keeping up
appearances and put up with the miserable living conditions he provides
without complaint. It is noteworthy that Camus does not simply condemn
Pancho’s actors, or Franco’s subjects, for their dependency, but rather
explains the reasons for that dependency by showing how their attention
is diverted. The actors’ immediate concerns engross them. One obvious
instance of this is the sequence in which they fail to notice that Rogelio is
robbing them because they are absorbed by Tina’s striptease. In the film as
a whole, the jealousy, rivalry and betrayal between the actors is shown to
distract them from their desperate situation, which Camus highlights to
the audience by emphasising their poverty.
Only during the long days of hunger during Holy Week do we witness
any form of dissent from the actors. Their conversation in the flat, which
ostensibly describes their own situation, might be readily understood as
referring to the country as a whole. ‘¿Qué podemos hacer?’ (What can we
do?) asks a despondent Currito, to Vicente’s empty retort ‘¿Qué vamos a
hacer?’ (What are we going to do?). Lucio’s ‘Hay que resignarse’ (We’ll just
have to resign ourselves to it) characterises the group’s defeatist attitude,
and only Tina emerges as a character who tries to be the agent of her own
destiny. As she lies in bed, the camera frames her face in extreme close-up
as she reflects that ‘Nadie dirá nada, aunque el hambre les vuelva locos.
Esperarán tumbados, nadie será capaz de dar un sólo paso ni por comer.
Y cuando [Pancho] llame, todos tan contentos. El único que se libró de esta
vida fue Lorenzo, y por eso tuvo que morirse’ (Nobody will say anything,
even though hunger may drive them mad. They will wait, lying down,
nobody will be able to walk one step, not even for something to eat. And
when [Pancho] calls, they’ll all be perfectly happy. The only one who
escaped this life was Lorenzo, and to do it he had to die). The next day she
announces ‘¡Vosotros aguantáis esto!’ (You might be able to put up with
this!), which could refer to the group’s present predicament or the wider
political situation, and her defiant ‘Yo desde luego, ¡no!’ (I certainly can’t!)
announces her attempt to feed herself through prostitution. When she
strides out of the flat to a café to find a client, we follow her, accomplices
in her rebellion. Her disappointment is therefore ours when her bid for
autonomy is thwarted by the reappearance of Rogelio and she has to return
to the flat only to be beaten by Avilés for her supposed infidelity.
Had Tina’s rebellion succeeded, Los farsantes might have been a
different film, ending with an optimistic allegory of rebellion against the
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dictatorship, rather than a pessimistic portrayal of its continuation. Instead,

the final sequence is among the most despairing of Spanish cinema under
Franco. Pancho returns, and the starving actors follow him, staggering and
blinking, into the sunlit street of Easter Sunday as the bells of resurrection
ring out. Tina, the potential rebel, does not even have the energy to protest
when she sees Rogelio has rejoined the group. Justo then voices the most
pessimistic line of the whole film. We have witnessed his gradual realisation
that Pancho is a fraud, but rather than act on this knowledge, he simply
accepts it. ‘Mentira’ (That’s a lie) he says in response to the manager’s
extravagant promises, muttering to himself as he climbs on the back of
Pancho’s van, ‘Por lo menos no vamos a engañarnos’ (At least let’s not fool
ourselves). The church bells that mark the resurrection in this sequence
may therefore be understood as one more instance of ironic contrast in the
film. Rather than rebirth, they signify the symbolic death of the actors,
entombed by their condition of dependency.25 The end of the film, there-
fore, closes the circle: Los farsantes begins with the sound of the bells that
mark the actual death of one of the actors, and ends with the sound of the
bells that mark the symbolic death of the rest.

I began this chapter by considering Los farsantes as a site of confrontation

between the differing models of authorship of the VCE and the NCE.
Close analysis of production contexts reveals that while the NCE was
financially dependent on state subsidies, many of these films were also
practically dependent on the VCE as they were made by producers of
popular cinema. Los farsantes shows that the relationship between the
NCE and the VCE was artistic as well as practical. On the one hand,
Camus, the Film School-trained, would-be auteur, responds creatively to
this dependency by encoding a critique of popular cinema through his
treatment of popular theatre in the film. On the other hand, the auteur col-
laborates fruitfully with Iquino’s crew and cast. Having condemned the
distracting artificiality of theatrical spectacle, Los farsantes then takes
advantage of the range of Lozano’s performance style for its own political
critique. Likewise, the technical crew drawn from the VCE produce for
Camus a film that exemplifies the Neorealist techniques championed by
the NCE.

Notes
1. Bardem’s portrayal of the world of theatre, Cómicos (Actors 1954), is a psy-
chological study that is closer to Camus’s Young Sánchez (1963) than Los
farsantes, despite its subject matter.
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2. Strictly, ‘el noveno’ refers to the payment of a ninth of tenants’ goods to the
landlord, not the tenth implied by ‘tithe’.
3. According to Carlos Heredero, Iquino created his previous production
company, Emisora Films, in 1934, but after legal wrangles with his brother-
in-law, established IFI (1993: 86). Iquino’s filmography reveals his objec-
tives were entirely commercial: it ranges from the pious El Judas (1952),
which secured the ‘National Interest’ award for its service to Catholicism, to
¿Podrías con cinco chicas a la vez? (Could You Do it with Five Girls at the Same
Time? 1979), which cashed in on the market for pornography during the
destape.
4. The attraction of this new area to young entrepreneurs is referenced in the
conversation between the group of friends on the beach in Jaime Camino’s
Los felices sesenta (The Happy Sixties 1962). For details of companies produc-
ing NCE films, see Torreiro (2000: 155–6).
5. Both script and locations, therefore, drew on Camus’s own experience
(Sánchez Noriega 1998: 61). The student theatre group performed Lucas
Fernández’s Auto de Pasión in a number of villages near Segovia (Sánchez
Noriega mentions Sepúlveda, Turégano and Pedraza [1998: 22–3]). Camus
sets parts of Los farsantes in those same villages, and also includes the perfor-
mance of an auto sacramental (eucharistic play).
6. Camus claims the cost of the film was declared to be four and a half million
pesetas (of which he was paid 120,000), and that it received a subsidy of two
million following its classification as 2A (Sánchez Noriega 2003: 253–4). As it
was common practice to exaggerate production costs, we can assume that the
subsidy probably paid for the film. In a 1974 interview, Camus noted: ‘A veces
parece que el exhibidor no tiene interés ninguno en que la película vaya
bien . . . aunque parezca aberración resulta que hay películas españolas que
dan dinero aún sin estrenarse’ (Sometimes it seems that the exhibitor has no
interest in the film doing well . . . though it may seem an aberration, there are
Spanish films that are profitable before they are released) (Castro 1974:
111–12), a point also made by Peter Besas in 1997. He notes that the Spanish
film ‘industry’ (a term that Besas suggests might better be replaced with ‘arti-
sanry’) continues to produce films whose ‘financial return is often not made
at the box office but in the financing stage’ (1997: 243, 255).
7. For instance, Juan Cobos and González Sebastián de Erice reported that
Iquino refused to let them see the original version as the censors had
requested changes, and because the cut version was not ready, they ended up
seeing neither (1963: 745).
8. Camus thanks the mayors of Sepúlveda and Pedraza in the credits. Juan
Carlos Frugone states that the film was actually shot from 19 May to 20 July
1963 (1984: 151); in a contemporary interview Camus claimed the shoot
began on 15 May (Cobos and Sebastián de Erice 1963: 745).
9. Another influence may have been the documentary-style section of The
Greatest Show on Earth (De Mille 1952), which focuses on the work that lies
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behind the erection of the big top that is ignored by audiences enthralled by
the spectacles performed within it.
10. The communist literary critic Gyorgy Lukács held that the novel (Balzac’s
being exemplary) should be a realist illustration of the class struggle.
11. ‘La carpa’ was first published in a collection of the same title in 1958 (Schwartz
1976: 132). The title of the script that won third prize in the Sindicato del
Espectáculo competition in 1957 was ‘Fin de fiesta’ (Sánchez Noriega 1998:
23) (Patino’s ‘Amanecida’ [Dawn] won first prize). The script deposited in the
Biblioteca Nacional in 1963 is entitled ‘Los farsantes’. The translation of the
title as Frauds, which I have adopted following Chema de la Peña’s documen-
tary De Salamanca a ninguna parte (2002), loses the reference to farce as
theatre, but conveys the idea of pretence, both on the part of the actors and the
hypocritical society that they encounter.
12. The intention was seamlessly to suture these sequences into the narrative,
although the difference in their tone and grain is visible. At the time Camus
claimed he shot this material (Monleón and Egea 1965: 746), but has more
recently stated it is the work of a fellow Film School student, Miguel Chan
(Sánchez Noriega 2003: 254).
13. A legend illustrating the rewards of virtue, Genoveva de Brabante has been the
subject of numerous European novels, plays and films. Versions of this exem-
plary tale of female behaviour were common in 1940s Spain (Vázquez
Montalbán 2003: 37), and there were a number of theatrical treatments on the
post-war stage. Camus himself cannot recall which versions of Genoveva de
Brabante and Vanidad y miseria he used in Los farsantes, but in correspondence
with the author has revealed that the Genoveva text was lent to him by a group
of travelling players who were still performing in 1962.
14. For instance, Juan Goytisolo’s attack of the Catalan bourgeoisie in La resaca
(1959) and Juan Marsé’s critique of students from the same class in Últimas
tardes con Teresa (1966).
15. Camus was the scriptwriter for Miguel Angel Díez’s film adaptation of this
play (1985).
16. Thanks to Nicholas McDowell for pointing out this reference to me.
17. Triana-Toribio has demonstrated that in Camus’s Los santos inocentes (The
Holy Innocents 1984), the character Régula stops both Quirce and the audi-
ence from laughing at the pathetic simpleton Azarías (2003: 130). This cur-
tailing of the comic is similar to the situation that occurs here between the
triangle of Avilés, the bourgeois audience and Tina.
18. This replacement of Rogelio by Avilés in Tina’s affections is ironically
prefigured by Pancho’s instruction to Avilés to ‘aprender los papeles de
Rogelio’ (learn Rogelio’s parts).
19. Prior to Los farsantes, she appeared in seventeen other films from 1953,
though mainly in secondary roles.
20. A literary precedent for this can be found in Chapter 8 of Goytisolo’s Fiestas
(1957). My thanks to Caragh Wells for pointing out this overlap to me.
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21. The flat appears to belong to a rich, unnamed man, who keeps the former
actress there as his mistress. Frugone suggests it is a brothel – ‘gran ironía del
film: pasar la Semana Santa en una especie de prostíbulo’ (the great irony of
the film: spending Holy Week in a kind of brothel) (1984: 56) – but there is
not enough evidence to support this reading.
22. The Holy Week drums of Calanda are used by Buñuel to indicate the delu-
sion of his protagonist in Nazarín (1958); similarly, they convey Julián’s
mental instability in Saura’s Peppermint frappé (1967).
23. In Sueiro’s original short story the association is made clearer by the inclu-
sion of the detail that Pancho, like Franco, is Galician (1988: 87).
24. Larraz reads this film as a ‘homage’ to the ‘dignity’ of the actors, because he
interprets the inclusion of the plays as a celebration of the ‘magic’ of theatre
(2003: 8, 13), a view that leads him to a positive reading of the end of the film
where the group continue in the hope of inspiring audiences with their art
(2003: 14). But this interpretation overlooks both the ambiguous treatment of
popular spectacle and the role of Pancho.
25. Sánchez Noriega suggests the bells represent sadness and disappointment at
both the beginning and end of the film (1998: 63); I suggest a more extreme
association with death.
 CHAPTER 4

Repression and Excess in La tía

Tula (Aunt Tula, Picazo 1964)

Miguel Picazo’s La tía Tula is an example of the NCE films that Mario
Camus described as made ‘with friends’ (Sánchez Noriega 2003: 253).
It was jointly produced by Surco Films, a company set up by the novel-
ist Nino Quevedo especially for the film (Iznaola Gómez 2004a: 32), and
Eco Films, which was run by José López Moreno, Juan Miguel Lamet
and Ramiro Bermúdez de Castro, who had previously backed Manuel
Summers’s Del rosa . . . al amarillo (1963) and La niña del luto (The Girl in
Mourning 1964). Picazo’s technical crew included the cinematographer
and editor who were most closely associated with the movement, Juan Julio
Baena and Pedro del Rey, and he secured his desired star for the picture,
Aurora Bautista. Critical material on the film further confirms its status as
an auteurist production. A combination of La tía Tula’s triumph at the
1964 San Sebastián film festival (where it won best Spanish-language film
and best director),1 its success at the domestic box office (see Introduction)
and its coincidence with the centenary celebration of the birth of the
author of the original novella, Miguel de Unamuno, ensured extensive cov-
erage of this promising new director at the time of the film’s release.
Numerous interviews offered Picazo a platform to reiterate his authorial
intentions (‘Miguel Picazo’ 1964; Martialay and Buceta 1964; Núñez 1964;
Castro 1974). The unfulfilled potential that characterises the director’s
career from 1964 has also meant that more recent interviews still focus on
La tía Tula, his first and finest film (Gavilán Sánchez and Lamarca Rosales
2002; Hernández 2003; Iznaola Gómez 2004a).2
Given the ample supporting material provided by interviews with the
director, and the dominance of auteurism in Spanish film scholarship in
any case, critics have adopted an auteurist approach to La tía Tula. This
has led to the problem of how to deal with Picazo’s complaints about the
censorship of the film. Even though Picazo was entirely aware that the
NCE directors’ work was not immune from censorship from his own pre-
vious experience with scripts, he complained bitterly of the official treat-
ment of La tía Tula. His attack on censorship in the press caused him to
fall out of favour with the regime (Hernández 2003: 328), and in every
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interview he gave, he took the opportunity to condemn the cuts suffered

by his film.3 If, according to the auteurist approach, the director is the
source of creative intention in the film, how does the critic respond to his
lament that censorship meant 40–50 per cent of its impact was lost
(‘Miguel Picazo’ 1964: 45)? In these circumstances, readings of the films
may become elegies for the parts cut by the censors. John Hopewell’s inter-
pretation of La tía Tula, for instance, is a regretful analysis of the losses
suffered by a film ‘of such composed understatement every scene counted’
(1986: 66), while Jorge Castillejo has used the emotive language of ‘muti-
lation’ to describe its censorship (1998: 138).
This chapter avoids the criticism of lament by adopting a revised
auteurist approach that is sensitive to production contexts. First, for all
Picazo’s auteurist posturing, he, like all the NCE directors, was a product
of the government’s intervention in film in the 1960s. Trained at the Film
School, it was only García Escudero’s appointment as Director-General in
1962 that enabled Picazo to make his first film – a debt the director
acknowledged at the time (Núñez 1964). La tía Tula was awarded subsidies
when it was classified as 1A, which were increased to 50 per cent when that
classification was revised to ‘Special Interest’ in the light of the film’s
success at San Sebastián. This ironic production context of a would-be
independent auteur financed by the Francoist state suggests a new way of
thinking about the treatment of contradiction in the film, for the explor-
ation of rebellion and restraint in the narrative of La tía Tula matches the
director’s analogous experience in the film’s creation.
This chapter also offers a revised auteurist approach by paying attention
to the contributions of members of the technical crew and cast. Again,
Picazo’s statements must not blind us to the fact that, even in this quint-
essential example of the auteurist NCE, film is a collaborative art. Indeed,
even the backing of two NCE production companies did not necessarily
guarantee Picazo’s total freedom: the Eco producers disliked the film and
wanted to make the final cut, and only thanks to Quevedo’s intervention
did Picazo remain in control (Castro 1974: 332; Gubern 1997: 562; Gavilán
Sánchez and Lamarca Rosales 2002: 98). Cinematography and editing,
which were crucial to the impression of claustrophobia created in the film,
are the work of Baena, the ‘pioneer of modern cinematography’ in Spain
(Sánchez Biosca 1989: 90), and the seasoned NCE editor Del Rey. Both
were veterans of the dissident Spanish cinema of the preceding five years,
including Saura’s Los golfos (1959) and Ferreri’s El cochecito (1960), but
both also had experience of the popular Spanish cinema (as we have seen
with respect to Del Rey in Chapter 1). Picazo’s casting of CIFESA’s
heroine, Aurora Bautista, has led critics to conclude that in La tía Tula, the
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auteur aimed to oppose the VCE, but I will suggest here that the relation-
ship between NCE and VCE in the film might be more fruitfully recon-
sidered as one of overlap.
While we must attribute the exploration of the Virgin/Mother
dichotomy to Unamuno, the author of the novella, Picazo’s updating of the
film means that his La tía Tula responds to the way the Francoist regime,
especially in its neo-Catholic phase, enshrined the divorce between moth-
erhood and sexuality, or sanitised motherhood, through the figure of the
Virgin Mary. However, it is important to note the ways in which the gender
ideology of the regime evolved. While Helen Graham has observed that in
the 1940s the ‘many incarnations of the Virgin provided the perfect role
model’ for women (1995a: 184), economic development in the late 1950s
and 1960s saw the incorporation of middle-class women into the labour
force (working-class women had always been part of it) with concomitant
revisions to the regime’s legislation on gender – the reform to the Civil
Code of 1958, the ‘Law of Political, Professional and Labour Rights of
Women’ of 1961 and the inclusion of women’s work in the 1963
Development Plan (Amorós 1986: 42). Rosario Coca Hernando has chron-
icled the impact of this transformation in the 1960s in her study of the
regime’s Sección Femenina (Women’s Section) magazine Teresa, the
mouthpiece of official discourses of femininity. Parallel to the tentative
legal reforms in favour of women’s rights, she demonstrates that there
appeared ‘the image of the “modern” or “new” woman’ (1998: 5). As was
typical of the apertura, this figure was another contradictory reconciliation
of old and new values, a woman who was, in the words of the Sección
Femenina, ‘antigua y siempre nueva’ (old-fashioned and always up to date),
or, as Coca Hernando summarises, representative of ‘an ambivalent femi-
ninity which combined both the traditional and the modern’ (1998: 7, 13).
Given this context of tentative change in women’s roles, through the
characterisation of Tula, Picazo denounces both the contradiction of the
cult of sanitised motherhood and the anachronism of a continued adherence
to such outmoded gender norms in provincial Spain in the 1960s. Tula’s
aunthood, or attempt to be a Virgin Mary, or sexless mother, is a reductio ad
absurdum of the demand that women be ‘pure’ yet mothers.4 Picazo shows
that Tula’s behaviour results in both repression (through her denial of her
body) and excess (through Ramiro’s enslavement to his body, which leads to
an attempted and an actual rape). Saura recently summarised the first film
of his ex-student and fellow member of the NCE with a concision that
perhaps time has afforded: ‘hay sobre todo la explosión del sexo y de la
pasión amorosa que surge de la represión’ (there is above all the explosion
of sex and romantic passion that arises from repression) (2004: 205).
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La tía Tula is a thesis on the interdependence of restraint and rebellion,

which describes both the subject of the film and Picazo’s experience in
making it. It scrutinises the contradictions of Francoist ideology with
respect to gender and sexuality, and recursively examines its own contra-
dictory genesis as part of a government-sponsored movement, especially
Picazo’s equivocal experience of artistic freedom yet ideological restraint.
In this chapter I therefore combine a focus on these equivocal historical
and industrial contexts with close readings of film form. Repression and
excess are explored in particular through the use of setting, off-screen
space and the negotiation of the body. After considering the mise en scène
of Tula’s flat as a haunted house, I will examine three key areas of contra-
diction in the film: the portrayal of femininity; masculinity; and childhood.
I will also account for the impressive mobilisation of filmic resources
throughout, paying attention to script (plot and characterisation), casting
(characterisation), mise en scène (particularly claustrophobic settings), cine-
matography (especially lighting and the use of off-screen space), editing
(in particular the long take, as one of the remarkable features of this film is
that the average take is an unusually lengthy 2 minutes) and, finally, sound
(notably the significance of the switch between diegetic and non-diegetic
sources).
Some of the frustration that Picazo pours into La tía Tula, which is pal-
pable in every image, is explained by his experience up to 1964. The
decade began well. His graduation short, Habitación de alquiler (Rented
Room 1960) secured him first, a teaching post at the Film School that
began the same year,5 and second, an offer from Ferreri to produce his first
film (Hernández 2003: 323). Jimena, with a script by himself, Camus,
Joaquín Jordá and Francisco Regueiro, was to be a corrective version of
the Cid myth to challenge the Samuel Bronston-produced film directed
by Anthony Mann. The censors sent the script to the Real Academia de
la Historia, who rejected it, while supporting the American version
(Picazo has bitterly pointed out that this was because the revered Ramón
Ménendez Pidal’s son was the handsomely paid historical advisor to the
Mann picture [Castro 1974: 331; Hernández 2003: 324; Iznaola Gómez
2004a: 31]). After the initial rush of success, then, there followed three
years of disappointment for the aspiring filmmaker, in which the Viridiana
scandal erupted, UNINCI (one of the projected producers of Jimena)
folded and Ferreri’s residence permit was refused renewal, which meant
the return of Picazo’s mentor to Italy. Prior to his departure, Ferreri had
suggested Picazo read Unamuno’s novella and adapt it for film, but it was
García Escudero’s legislation that finally got the project into production.
A comparison with Unamuno’s original reveals the personal nature of
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Picazo’s treatment. In collaboration with fellow scriptwriters Luis

Sánchez Enciso, José Miguel Hernán and Manuel López Yubero, he
prunes the plot, eliminating Ramiro’s first marriage to Rosa6 and second
marriage to Juanita. This allows him to focus on Tula’s relationship with
her brother-in-law, Ramiro, and niece and nephew, Tulita and Ramirín,
and telescope the questions of repression and excess. Tula’s understand-
ing of ‘aunthood’ means that while she enthusiastically embraces the role
of mother to the children, she rejects all physical contact with Ramiro. It
is also significant that the scriptwriters empower Tula by having Ramiro
and the children move into her house (in the novella Tula moves in with
them [Unamuno 1996: 111]). After Tula rejects his marriage proposal,
Ramiro becomes increasingly frustrated and attempts to rape her (this does
not occur in the novella), but Tula succeeds in fighting him off. On another
occasion, aroused by Tula’s apparent advances, he does violate her cousin
Juanita. The girl falls pregnant, Ramiro marries her and takes the children
with him, leaving Tula alone.
Picazo and scriptwriters make the temporal and geographical settings of
Unamuno’s abstract original concrete. Picazo stated in numerous inter-
views on the film’s release and subsequently that Tula reminded him of
two women he actually knew (‘Miguel Picazo’ 1964: 44; Núñez 1964;
Castro 1974: 332; Iznaola 2002: 32).7 Thus the film is a tale of a woman in
provincial Spain, shot in Guadalajara and Brihuega, set in a period con-
temporary to its production. Picazo further explains his intentions in the
same interview in Ínsula:

Unamuno crea un ser de excepción, desorbitado. En la película se ha intentado lo con-

trario; es decir, acercar el personaje al público actual, para que lo reconozca y se sienta
próximo a él, tome conciencia del problema en su dimensión real y, al mismo tiempo,
le haga pensar en las consecuencias que se derivan del comportamiento de Tula y de
Ramiro. (Unamuno creates an exceptional, exorbitant being. In the film the aim has
been to do the opposite; that’s to say, to make the character accessible to today’s audi-
ence so that they recognise and feel close to it, become aware of the problem as it
really is and, at the same time, are made to think about the consequences of Tula and
Ramiro’s behaviour.) (Núñez 1964)

Unamuno’s original abstract study thus becomes a film of specific denun-

ciation (‘the problem as it really is’). Our response to Tula is complex for
we are at once encouraged to identify with her (‘recognise and feel close’),
yet condemn the consequences of her behaviour; although she is a victim
of her environment, in turn, she makes others her victims too. Though in
this interview Picazo dare not denounce that environment by name, it is
clearly the gender ideology of Franco’s Spain. The comment made by the
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interviewer about the ending of the film reveals the effectiveness of this
critique of contemporary society, and the use of the word ‘algo’ (some-
thing) again indicates that the target cannot be named: ‘Dan ganas de
arremeter contra algo, para que tales cosas no ocurran’ (It makes you
wanted to attack something, so that such things don’t happen) (Núñez 1964,
emphasis added).
As an adaptation, La tía Tula foregrounds its place in Spanish literary
history, but it is equally embedded in Spanish cinema history. Much has
been written on the relationship of the NCE with foreign movements,
especially Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave. In a recent inter-
view Picazo rather mechanically mentions the influence of Neorealism
(Hernández 2003: 326), but elsewhere he highlights the importance of his
teachers at the Film School in his training, rather than foreign films or
movements, stating in 1964, ‘En el aspecto cinematográfico, la Escuela lo
ha sido todo para mí. Yo no puedo hablar más que bien. Todo lo que sé de
cine lo aprendí en la Escuela’ (As far as cinematic matters are concerned,
the School has been everything for me. I can only speak well of it.
Everything I know about cinema I learned in the School) (Núñez 1964).
His teachers included the filmmakers Berlanga, José Gutiérrez Maesso,
Carlos Serrano de Osma and Saura, and in an interview with Javier
Hernández, Picazo mentions in particular the classes of Camón Aznar
(History of Art) and Enrique Alarcón (set decoration – Alarcón was
responsible for the interiors of Calle Mayor) (2003: 320). In another
interview, he stresses the influence of Serrano de Osma on his work
(Gavilán Sánchez and Lamarca Rosales 2002: 94–5), who had directed six
features between 1946 and 1951 and one in 1960, and whose filmography
includes the Unamuno adaptation, Abel Sánchez (1946). It would be naïve
to state that Picazo’s frame of filmic reference in La tía Tula is, therefore,
‘Spanish’, as any notion of a pure national cinema is a fallacy that overlooks
the transnational hybridity of film. However, it is the case that Picazo is less
concerned with his place among European New Cinemas than other NCE
directors (he never mentions trips to foreign film festivals, for instance). La
tía Tula is clearly indebted to dissident Spanish cinema of the 1950s and
early 1960s (when asked in 1964 which three Spanish films had most
influenced him he named ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! [Berlanga 1952],
Calle Mayor [Bardem 1956] and Viridiana [Buñuel 1961] [‘Miguel Picazo’
1964: 48]), which in turn drew on multiple international influences.
Picazo’s domestic drama bears the trace of the film noir deployed by
Serrano de Osma in his Unamuno adaptation (Labanyi 1995b), the
Hollywood melodrama used by Bardem in Calle Mayor and the gothic
employed by Buñuel in Viridiana. The influence of Italian Neorealism is
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evident too, through both its aim to address and denounce Tula’s class –
the landowning upper bourgeoisie of provincial Spain from which Franco
drew his support – and techniques like the use of direct sound.8
For all the oft-repeated rejection, the NCE did not operate in isolation
from the VCE. Picazo states that he cast Aurora Bautista not because of her
film work, but because he had seen her in a play (Hernández 2003: 325).
Given the NCE’s views of the VCE, Picazo’s dismissal of Bautista’s earlier
roles is to be expected, but it is impossible that he did not know them well.
Bautista’s 1940s–1950s CIFESA pictures, like Locura de amor (Love’s
Madness 1948) and Agustina de Aragón (1950) (both directed by Juan de
Orduña), were the blockbusters of the era. Jo Labanyi has noted that the
famous image of Bautista firing a canon in the 1950 film ‘passed into the
popular imaginary through its reproduction in children’s storybooks and
on postage stamps, calendars and brand labels’ (2000: 176). Furthermore,
a fellow student has revealed that Orduña’s films were studied at the Film
School. Antonio Drove recalls that Berlanga, who also taught Picazo,
would show Locura de amor, Bautista’s smash hit, over and again in class,
saying ‘Este Orduña, hay que ver, se lo cree tanto que te contagia su
emoción’ (This Orduña, it’s incredible, he believes it all so much that his
emotion infects you) (Alberich 2002: 26). The casting of Bautista is there-
fore a highly visible connection with the VCE, and I will argue that there
are further overlaps through the less visible contributions of La tía Tula’s
technical crew.

Tula’s Haunted House

Since La tía Tula attributes Tula’s behaviour to the stifling traditionalism
of the provinces, the construction of setting and mise en scène in Picazo’s
portrait of 1960s Guadalajara is especially significant. Picazo moved to this
Castilian city as a child in 1940, and associates it with the hardships of the
post-war years: ‘era el ejemplo más claro de una sociedad triste y reprim-
ida y que me supuso un nuevo planteamiento vital’ (it was the clearest
example of a sad and repressed society and made me approach life in a new
way) (Castro 1974: 328). While La tía Tula may show that the hunger of
these years has passed, the traditionalist mentality of the era, particularly
in the realm of gender, remains. The shots of the city are not particularised,
so the portrait of provincial Spain is general (unlike Bardem’s Calle Mayor,
which locates the action in Cuenca through establishing shots). The exter-
ior shots evoke gloomy tedium (filming took place in Guadalajara in a grey
autumn from 16 September to 3 November 1963 [Hernández 2003: 325]),
which is occasionally punctuated by church bells or the hum of a moped.
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Through lighting, Baena was careful to ensure a continuum between

these exteriors and the studio interior shots of Tula’s flat (Torán 1989: 113).
This domestic space magnifies the oppressive atmosphere Picazo associates
with the provinces. No mopeds offer a hint of modernity here, and it seems
doubtful that the television set Tula mentions buying after receiving her
tenants’ rent in an early sequence could ever find a place in it – over the
course of the film the set does not appear. Tula’s flat is a kind of time
capsule, redolent with tradition and death. The furniture belongs to her
dead uncle Primitivo (as explained in the script [Hernán et al. 1964: 33]),
who had been a priest, and there are two significant portraits that function
as projections of her value systems. The first is of the conservative Pope
Pius XII, who was already dead when the film was shot, replaced in office
in 1958 by the more conciliatory John XXIII, who set up Vatican II, which
recommended a series of reforms that shook the conservative Francoist
establishment.9 The second is of Tula’s dead female cousin Gabrielita,
who, according to the script, died from consumption at seventeen (Hernán
et al. 1964: 43). This portrait is particularly admired by the little girl Tulita,
who recounts the family story for our benefit: ‘le avisó el Niño Jesús a la
prima Gabrielita cuando se iba a morir’ (Baby Jesus warned cousin
Gabrielita when she was going to die), and who will later use the picture as
a model in her dressing-up game.
Luis Argüello’s set decoration (he also worked on Buñuel’s Tristana
[1970]) goes beyond melodrama’s usual emphasis on mise en scène to create
a house haunted by the ghosts of the past: a dead pope, a dead priest uncle
and a prematurely deceased cousin. This gothic dimension is accentuated
through cinematography and editing. Luis Enrique Torán notes of Baena’s
work in the film that ‘los negros, fundamentales en esta obra, lucen en toda
su profundidad’ (the blacks, which are fundamental to this work, shine out
in all their depth) and that the ‘acusada profundidad de campo se adecúa
perfectamente al juego escénico y a la inteligente planificación de Picazo’
(rich depth of field is entirely suited to the way Picazo plays the scenes off
against each other and his intelligent shot arrangements) (1989: 113). It is
important to note that contrastive lighting and depth of field, techniques
that Buñuel also used in his recreation of Jaime’s gothic house in Viridiana,
are not new technical innovations. They are in fact typical of film noir of
1940s Spanish cinema, such as the work of Picazo’s teacher Serrano de
Osma, which were shot according to the Guerner School.10 Despite its
NCE cinematographer, La tía Tula is therefore indebted to earlier prac-
tices in Spanish film photography, rather than the technical developments
in vogue in contemporary European New Cinemas. The effects of con-
trastive lighting and depth of field are also dependent on long takes, a style
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of editing that further embeds the film in indigenous cinematic traditions.

Pedro del Rey had previously used this technique with subversive effect in
both the dissident cinema (in Viridiana, for instance, the long take under-
scores Jaime’s gothic house) and popular film (in Chapter 1 I discuss his
occasionally disruptive contribution to La gran familia, in which he uses
the long take to imply claustrophobia).
In an interview of 1964 Picazo makes clear the dual function of Tula’s
haunted house. In terms of the narrative of the film it explains Tula’s treat-
ment of Ramiro, and in terms of the historical context it condemns the
situation in Spain in general:

la casa de Tula es una casa-trampa, es una casa horrorosa, es una casa monstruo, es
una casa atroz, y . . . esta mujer le hostiga [a Ramiro] y le trata como un enemigo . . .
No es una cosa de ciencia-ficción, es una cosa que se está dando en las relaciones
humanas dentro de España. (Tula’s house is a house-trap, it’s a horrendous house, a
monster-house, it is a terrible house and this woman harasses [Ramiro] and treats him
like an enemy . . . This isn’t science fiction, this is something that is happening within
human relationships in Spain.) (Martialay and Buceta 1964: 486)

By linking her behaviour to the house and mentioning science fiction films,
Picazo’s comments conjure up the image of Tula as a spider weaving a
deadly web to trap her victims. Tula’s house is a web of deadening trad-
itions. Only in the hidden shadows may life be found, as the children dis-
cover when they rummage around in the trunk in the back room11 and find
sexy women’s clothes and Ramiro’s love letters to Rosa. Tula’s victims will
include Tulita, who falls ill under her care, and Ramiro, who as well as
illness, is driven to criminality – though her first victim is herself.

Femininity
Picazo indicates repression and excess in La tía Tula through the treatment
of the body, oscillating between the extremes of Tula, who denies her body,
and Ramiro, who becomes ruled by his. The credit sequence, which follows
Rosa’s funeral wake, foregrounds Tula’s transcendence of her body. She
sits on her own in a room and background activity can be glimpsed through
a crack in the door. The viewer recognises that this is not a freeze-frame,
and is led to believe that Tula is motionless for over 2 minutes, thus exer-
cising incredible restraint over her own body (Picazo has subsequently
revealed that this effect was achieved by suturing five frames together again
and again [Castillejo 1998: 136]). Thus ideas of restraint and repression are
linked to both the treatment of the body and to editing, as we assume this
is a long take with no cuts. The soundtrack is also crucial in this sequence
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as it expresses the emotion of grief at the loss of a sister that cannot be

found in Bautista’s impassive face or motionless body.12 It is important also
that this sound is non-diegetic, which looks forward to a central theme in
the film: that emotion and desire are located off-screen, be that off-screen
space, like the trunk in the back room of Tula’s flat, or an off-screen source
of music.
In this credit sequence Tula transcends her body in terms of expressing
emotion, but is in another sense trapped in her body by the static camera
and trick long take, two cinematic techniques that become associated with
imprisonment throughout the film. The treatment of Tula’s body through
close-up in later sequences is similar. She is defined, or trapped, by her
body in the new domestic role she adopts after taking Ramiro and the chil-
dren into her house. To indicate this, the first three sequences in her flat
begin with close-ups of Tula’s hands attending to domestic labour: first we
see her hands clearing the dinner table, then ironing, then sewing. The way
these close-ups replace establishing shots also contributes to the sense of
claustrophobia in these scenes. Tula is also shown to transcend her body in
a sexual sense. When Ramiro kisses her hands, for instance, we then see her
wash them in disgust. There is a visual echo between the close-ups of her
hands completing household chores, which tie her body to domesticity, and
the close-up of Tula washing those hands, and denying her body in a phys-
ical sense.
As Picazo correctly predicted, though refused fully to explain, Bautista
is the perfect actress for this role. Her star image is one of pure histrionic
excess, and the repression of her performance style in La tía Tula enriches
her portrayal of the repressed aunt in a particularly effective way. The lusty
heroines Bautista embodied in Locura de amor and Agustina de Aragón, cry
out as if imprisoned in Tula’s every word and gesture, and serve as a con-
stant reminder that excess is the flip-side of repression. This is not to say
that Bautista’s performance in La tía Tula is unconvincing, but rather that
the choice of this actress is a particularly felicitous case of casting against
type. The relationship between the VCE and the NCE highlighted in La
tía Tula through the presence of Bautista is therefore not one of opposi-
tion, as Gubern argues (he calls her Tula role the ‘counter-figure’ of her
previous work [1997: 562]), or as Castillejo proposes (he sees this role as
‘totally opposed’ to her earlier work [1998: 7]), but creative reappropria-
tion. Even if unplanned, another biographical detail further adds to
Bautista’s embodiment of the contradictory aunt. In autumn 1963,
Bautista was herself a newly-wed. She married in Mexico on 3 September
(Castillejo 1998: 131), and, as she subsequently recounts, ‘Ese personaje es
el mejor que he hecho en mi vida, aunque lo hice con tensión bastante fuerte,
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porque tenía que interpretar a una solterona cuando en realidad estaba en

luna de miel’ (This is the best character I’ve played in my life, though I did
it feeling pretty tense because I had to portray an old maid when I was really
on my honeymoon) (quoted in Castillejo 1998: 46; emphasis added).
Bautista’s performance as a repressed aunt oozes with the excess that the
actress keeps in check. Only at the end of the film, when Ramiro announces
his future marriage to Juanita just when Tula has finally resolved to accept
him as a husband, does she unleash her anger and Bautista her dramatic
delivery. Likewise, this tense narrative is occasionally punctured by
moments of release that confirm the inseparability of repression and excess
implicit elsewhere in the film. For instance, two sequences of female hys-
teria, one anguished and the other joyful, contrast with Tula’s self-denial.
First, when Ramiro and Ramirín visit Rosa’s grave, we see a dishevelled
woman run into the churchyard and hear her cry hysterically and enig-
matically ‘¿por qué lo ha hecho?’ (why did he/she/you do it?), before she is
ushered out of our sight and earshot by well-wishers. Second, Tula attends
a hen party along with her female friends from the ‘Acción Católica’,13 in
which the women get tipsy on punch, and giggle and dance like schoolgirls
(Picazo recounts that he took particular care in casting the right actresses
for this sequence, and that it was a genuine booze-up, recorded warts and
all through long takes and direct sound [Martialay and Buceta 1964: 487]).
Their intoxication is not only a moment of release that highlights the
repression of the rest of the film, Picazo also uses it to condemn the women
as foolish schoolgirls, whose lack of knowledge of sex is highlighted in their
songs and jokes about the wedding night, stating, ‘creo que lo más corro-
sivo de esa escena pudiesen ser esas mujeres, esas vírgines de 27 y 30 años,
hablando del amor como si fueran niñas de 11 o de 12, portándose frente
al amor de una manera totalmente infantil, sin ser adultas’ (I think the most
corrosive aspect of this scene may have been these women, these virgins of
27 and 30 years old, speaking about love as if they were 11- or 12-year-old
girls, behaving in a completely childish way about love, not being adults)
(Martialay and Buceta 1964: 487).
If these two moments of release, one negative and one positive, throw into
relief the repression that governs the rest of La tía Tula, elsewhere release
is located off-screen. With this in mind, we may approach one of the scenes
cut by the censors, where Tula is shot in black lacy underwear, adjusting the
suspender on her provocatively arched right leg (Figure 4.1).14 For the
viewer of the film as it stands, such a vision of Tula’s voluptuous enjoyment
of her body is never seen but may be imagined, especially as the style of
underwear is in keeping with the type of clothing Tula hides away in the
trunk in the back room. Though not Picazo’s intention, the censoring of the
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Figure 4.1. Aurora Bautista in La tía Tula.

Video Mercury Films.

image reinforces the idea of an out-of-sight, off-screen space, bursting, like

the trunk of sexy clothes in the back room, with repressed desire. This
reading may seem to invest audiences with an over-active, schoolboy imagi-
nation, but such over-determination was a consequence of censorship. For
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instance, it was a widely held belief among Spanish audiences that Rita
Hayworth’s dance sequence in Gilda (Vidor 1946), where she removes her
gloves, was a full striptease that was cut by the censors (Vázquez Montalbán
2003: 100). As a female cinema-goer recalls, ‘As censorship was so ter-
rible . . . imagination went beyond reality . . . do you remember when Gilda
takes her glove off? Everyone assumed that the censors had cut that scene
because she went on stripping’ (Gómez-Sierra 2004: 94). In other words,
repression through censorship led to an excess of imagination.
A sequence that takes place towards the end of the film when the family
is on holiday in a country village (Brihuega) further demonstrates this
thesis of out-of-sight, off-screen space as the site and source of sexual
desire. The episode of the holiday replays the same tensions as the rest of
the film, but indicates that they may be resolved. The family has left Tula’s
web-like haunted house, and formal differences in the portrayal of the
village in comparison to the city invite us to expect a resolution. For
instance, unlike the static camera of the credit sequence, the holiday
episode begins with a dynamic rotation of the camera of almost 360°,
which records the village main square, then the arrival of the family from
Guadalajara on the bus. Furthermore, on their arrival in the country
house, we see Tula and Ramiro share food for the first time in the film;
significantly this food is fruit, in order to evoke Eve and the apple of temp-
tation. In the night-time sequence at the country house we see Tula awake,
consider her reflection in the bedroom mirror, then go to the kitchen to
drink a glass of water, where she encounters Ramiro. This sequence both
recalls and contrasts with the portrayal of their relations in the haunted
house in the city. The long takes are similar, indicating entrapment and
claustrophobia, as is the use of the mirror, which by this point in the film
we have come to understand as a symbol of entrapment within the frame.
The music, which we at first assume is non-diegetic, points to desire and
emotion, as it has throughout the film. The difference in this sequence is
our discovery that the music is diegetic as Tula later tells Ramiro that it
has woken her up. Literally and figuratively awoken then, Tula seeks her
object of desire, Ramiro. Just as the music shifts from a non-diegetic to
diegetic source, so Ramiro emerges from off-screen into on-screen space,
gliding into our field of vision when Tula has her back turned in the
kitchen. The sexual tension of this sequence is more palpable here than
elsewhere in the film. Tula drinks a glass of water, and whereas earlier in
the film her maternal relationship with Ramiro is articulated through her
feeding and watering him, here drinking and eating are associated with
sexual desire, as Picazo implied with the sharing of fruit at the start of the
sequence.
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While these shifts from off-screen to on-screen space on the imagetrack,

and from extra-diegetic to diegetic music on the soundtrack, hint at the
resolution of repressed sexual desire, the film ends with repression. In the
final sequence Ramiro leaves on a train, and is thus lost to Tula forever in
off-screen space, while she remains at the station trapped in the frame,
along with the abandoned, stationary rail carriage seen in the background
that Juan Miguel Company has argued symbolises her fate (2003: 410).
This ending differs from the one scripted and shot of a further sequence
at the graveyard. Picazo changed his mind about it (‘Miguel Picazo’ 1964:
48), and ends the film at the station, thereby echoing the ending of Calle
Mayor, in which Isabel also remains in a provincial station, refusing to
board the train and leave her life of frustration,15 and looking forward to
the ending of La caza, whose protagonist is likewise figuratively trapped
through a freeze-frame shot.

Masculinity
The treatment of masculinity in La tía Tula allows Picazo to explore
another set of gender-related contradictions. Studies of masculinity in
Western Europe and the US cite the post-Second World War period as a
time of ‘crisis’ over male roles, because a military definition of masculinity
had to be reconciled with the peacetime situation, and women were seen to
have ‘taken over’ male jobs. Labanyi has noted that in Franco’s Spain, ‘the
enforced return of women to the hearth after the war made such anxieties
unnecessary’, but that none the less a ‘demilitarization’ of male roles had to
be performed (1995b: 21 n. 11, 12). She has also argued that this transition
of roles was played out in late 1940s films (specifically 1945–51), which
often contrasted strong heroines with weak heroes, a tendency exemplified
by Agustina de Aragón, in which Bautista starred. Owing to political unrest
and the screening of Neorealist films at the first Italian Week of Cinema in
1951, Labanyi argues that this year ‘marked the end of this focus on the
family and the feminine, as the development of an oppositional cinema led
to a new stress on the political with plot lines consequently focused on the
male’ (2000: 164–5). In the NCE of the 1960s, plots still tended to focus on
the male, for instance Nueve cartas a Berta and La caza, but it is worth
pointing out that this was now to expose and explore male ineffectuality and
angst.16 La tía Tula bridges the two tendencies of the female-focused 1940s
popular cinema and male-focused art cinema of the following decades and
reveals the connections between them. On the one hand, like the films
analysed by Labanyi, it contrasts a strong female with an ineffectual male
protagonist, and on the other, like contemporary NCE films, it depicts
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a crisis in masculinity. If the way La tía Tula shows that these are just two
sides of the same coin is obvious, the connections this reveals between
popular cinema of the 1940s and auteurist cinema of the 1960s are not.
In La tía Tula Ramiro is set up as a counter-point to Tula. Her author-
ity in the domestic realm is opposed to his weakness. This opposition is
portrayed through characterisation and plot, which derive from Unamuno,
but is underscored by filmic means such as casting and the depiction of the
body. While Tula is played by Bautista, one of the most famous national
stars, Ramiro is played by the comparatively little-known Argentine actor
Carlos Estrada. Thanks to the use of direct sound, Estrada was not dubbed
post-synchronisation, and his ‘difference’ is therefore signalled by the
trace of his accent that can be heard on the soundtrack. These actors also
represent opposite performance styles, Bautista’s, one of overstatement,
Estrada’s, one of understatement, and these are played off against each
other to highlight the male character’s weakness. Male disempowerment is
also underpinned by the film’s negotiation of the male body, which sym-
bolically infantilises the male character.
At the start of the film there seems to be an equivalence between Ramiro
and Tula: both are figuratively trapped within the frame, and for both, desire
is relegated to off-screen space. For example, a daytime sequence and a
night-time sequence allow us to appreciate Ramiro’s sense of entrapment in
Tula’s flat through locating the source of sound in off-screen space. In the
first scene, we hear children playing and singing in the street outside, an off-
screen space, and then share a point-of-view shot with Ramiro as he gazes
longingly at their childhood fun. In the script, the lyrics of their childhood
song are spelled out. Although a different piece is sung in the final version
of the film, the original one describing the entrapment of nuns in a convent
is worth citing as its words project Ramiro’s experience of Tula’s house of
celibacy: ‘Ha dado la una. / Cierran los conventos. / Y las pobres monjas /
se quedan adentro’ (It’s one o’clock. / The convents are closing. / And the
poor nuns / stay inside) (Hernán et al. 1964: 33). Similarly, in the night
sequence we share Ramiro’s perspective as he hears drunken revellers return
home, a sound that also emanates from an off-screen space, and we again
appreciate his longing to join them.
Elsewhere in the film, the experience of entrapment that Tula and Ramiro
share is indicated through arrangement within the frame. In a number of
interior sequences, Picazo contrasts two focal points within the frame in a
long take. For instance, after Tula serves Ramiro lunch, rather than eat
with him, she sits behind him and attends to her sewing (Figure 4.2). Ramiro
provides one focal point in the frame in the foreground to the right, Tula
another in the background to the left. This bipolarity within the frame is
116    

Figure 4.2. Aurora Bautista and Carlos Estrada in La tía Tula.

Video Mercury Films.

also noticeable in the bedroom sequence during Ramiro’s illness, when

Ramiro’s presence in the foreground is again contrasted with Tula, as she
busies herself changing the bed in the background. A third interior shot,
when the family arrive in the village house on holiday, is arranged to con-
trast Tula sitting in the foreground with Ramiro at a distance behind her
in the background, as the family eat fruit. Gubern notes that this bipolar
arrangement is also used in the celebrated sequence of Tula’s confession
(1997: 563). It is furthermore a visual echo of the arrangement within the
frame of the husband and wife in a domestic setting of La gran familia, a
film with the same editor as La tía Tula, Del Rey. In the earlier film such
an arrangement conveyed harmony; here it represents conflict (Figures 1.4
and 4.2).
The conflict between Tula and Ramiro is also indicated by the differing
treatment of the female and male body. As mentioned above, from the start
of the film Ramiro is infantilised by Tula: trapped in her web, we watch
this male adult descend the developmental scale into childhood. Tula
attends to his body as a mother would a baby. For instance, Tula feeds
Ramiro’s body, and one of the first things we see him do is burp like a baby
after a meal (the significance of the burp was intended as it was specified
in the script [Hernán et al. 1964: 33]). She also dresses his body, and in one
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carefully composed sequence she checks what Ramirín is wearing before

he leaves the house, then what Ramiro is wearing before he goes out –
Picazo ensuring that both man and boy stand in exactly the same place and
in exactly the same way so we notice the parallel. Finally, Tula nurses
Ramiro’s body when he is ill with tonsillitis. This process of infantilisation
is reinforced by language, when Tula addresses Ramiro as a child using
babyish terms like ‘rey’ (pet) and playful scolding like ‘¿qué Ramiro es ése?’
(Is Ramiro being a silly-billy?). The lunch sequence (Figure 4.2) is telling
in this regard. When Tula serves Ramiro lunch she insists he wear a
comically over-sized napkin over his suit, which she has him tuck into his
collar so that the viewer cannot miss that it is meant to recall a baby’s bib.
Notwithstanding this infantilising attire, Ramiro is at his most assertive in
this sequence, questioning Tula about why she is avoiding marriage with
Emilio. The argument that ensues between the two significantly results in
a challenge to Ramiro’s manhood. ‘Pero soy un hombre’ (But I’m a man),
he pleads, still wearing the bib, then adds the telling ‘¿o qué sino?’ (or if
not, what am I?)
Tula’s attempts to de-sex Ramiro’s body by infantilising him are
doomed. Picazo’s most startling illustration of the thesis that excess is the
flip-side of repression is his portrayal of the transformation of meek
Ramiro into a potent sexual force who attempts to rape Tula and does rape
Juanita. But even Ramiro the rapist remains infantilised as he is still
defined exclusively in terms of his body. The need of an infant to be fed,
clothed and nursed transfers to that of a man for sex. It is important that
on two occasions Ramiro’s body is displayed in La tía Tula, as this further
indicates that he is defined by it. In an early sequence he strolls down the
corridor of the flat in a vest, and Tula draws our attention to his body by
asking him to cover it up. In a later sequence, when the family are in the
country, Ramiro bathes with the children and we see him in swimming
trunks. This contrasts with Tula, who is fully dressed in black as she looks
on from the river bank, and even her eyes are covered by sunglasses (see
cover illustration). As a male character who is defined by his body,
Estrada’s Ramiro assumes the role that feminist film critics have argued
that women are typically assigned on screen. In La tía Tula, we have a dom-
inant female lead and a secondary male character whose role is that which
Laura Mulvey famously claimed mainstream narrative cinema gives to
women on screen: ‘to connote to-be-looked-at-ness’ (1999: 837).
The most troubling aspect of La tía Tula for an audience today is its
failure to condemn rape as criminality. An awkward silence surrounds this
question in contemporary accounts of the film. Some reviewers even refuse
to refer to rape by name, opting instead for euphemisms like ‘vampirism’
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(Gortari 1964: 692), or ‘seduce and make her his own’ (Cine-Asesor 1964).
La tía Tula explains that Ramiro’s actions are motivated by his treatment
by Tula, but fails to condemn them and even seems to suggest they are
justified.17 While we are at least aware of the background of frustration that
triggers Ramiro’s attempted attack on Tula, his treatment of Juanita is
appalling. Little more than a girl herself, she is raped and impregnated by
her deceased cousin’s husband, then forced to marry him, but her anguish
is almost entirely ignored. Antonio Núñez does raise an objection to
Ramiro’s behaviour in an interview published in Ínsula (1964), but his
remark reveals a great deal about views of gender in 1960s Spain: why does
Ramiro insist on pursuing Tula, he asks Picazo in interview, when he could
simply use prostitutes as an ‘escape valve’ (Núñez 1964)? This comment
not only reveals that the reviewer of this prestigious Spanish journal con-
siders brothels necessary (they were legal in Spain until 1956 and their
prohibition was never enforced [Hooper 1995: 166]), a view that reflects
the double moral standards of the censors of the film, who cut the images
of Tula in her underwear, yet left those of the prostitutes Ramiro eyes on
the outskirts of the city.18 More troubling is Núñez’s failure to condemn
rape itself.

Childhood
If Tula’s mothering of Ramiro simultaneously infantilises and criminalises
him, what effect does it have on the infants themselves? While La tía Tula
suggests that adults may behave like children, conversely, Picazo’s child
characters are prematurely robbed of their innocence and shoulder the
burdens of a contradictory adult world. This is highlighted in the pre-
credit sequence of the film. As the church bells toll for Rosa’s funeral,
Picazo records in a tracking shot and long take the approach of a little boy
to Ramiro’s house, where the wake is taking place. The small child carries
an enormous funereal wreath, which both weighs him down, and obscures
his face and most of his body from the viewer. Similarly, the children who
form part of the narrative of La tía Tula are weighed down by the adult
world and their individuality is erased by it. Consider, for instance, Juanita,
Tula’s barely pubescent cousin. It is she who is the target of the excess trig-
gered by Tula’s repression as she is raped by Ramiro in place of her aunt.
Following this act of abuse, she ceases to be an individual, but becomes
trapped in enforced motherhood and marriage. In the final scene of the
film it is Tula’s anguish we share when she sees off the new family from
Guadalajara station because the camera remains on the platform with her.
Wife, step-mother and mother-to-be Juanita is hidden away from us in the
     LA TÍA TULA 119

railway carriage, her face obscured by dark glasses and her body by a volu-
minous maternity dress.
Even though the repetition of Christian names is common in Spanish
families, in the context of La tía Tula as a whole, the diminutive names
Ramirín and Tulita indicate the future erasure of the children’s individu-
ality as they are destined to become versions of their father and aunt. La
tía Tula indicates that Tula’s mothering is suffocating: under her care both
Ramiro and Tulita fall ill; Ramirín remains healthy as he does his best to
ignore his aunt. Thus she promotes illness rather than growth: her nur-
turing is symbolic smothering.19 This depiction of child-rearing alle-
gorises Picazo’s own contradictory creative experience.20 While on the one
hand the state, like a nurturing mother, promoted artistic growth through
subsidy, on the other it stifled that growth through censorship. In this sense
we may see the children as Picazo’s on-screen surrogates. Their experi-
ences therefore become doubly representative, of both childhood under
Franco and the director’s stunted creativity.
Ramirín is of less interest to Picazo than Tulita. The saucy pictures of
women in underwear that Tula finds in his school books, and the love
letters from his father to his mother that the boy discovers in the back-
room trunk, are examples of the standard inquisitiveness of a growing
child. What is interesting is that Tula’s exaggerated response magnifies
their significance. We do not see her confront Ramirín about the pictures
directly, but from this point on in the film she ceases to show him affection,
lavishing her smothering attention on Tulita instead. Similarly, she
snatches the love letters from Ramirín’s hands rather than explain their
privacy to the boy – we note, of course, that in the next sequence she
eagerly reads them herself. There is no evidence in the film that Tula’s
repressive actions trigger excessive behaviour in Ramirín, and no doubt his
frequent absence from her haunted house to play with schoolfriends helps
to immunise him against her. However, the sexual material he brings into
the house and unearths in the back room redouble Tula’s efforts at repres-
sion. Hapless Ramiro chooses to propose marriage to Tula on the very day
she finds Ramirín’s pictures and the letters. The horror with which she
rejects his offer is the same horror with which she confronts the pictures
and letters, indeed the pictures are lying on the table before them when
Ramiro puts the question to her.
If Ramirín is just a screen onto which Tula projects her fear of his
father, the treatment of Tulita is of interest in itself. The disturbing
sequence of her self-imposed muteness illustrates Tula’s (s)mothering
of her niece. We learn through Ramirín that his sister has promised to
be silent for two hours a day for a month, ostensibly as punishment for
120    

shattering the glass of the framed portrait of Gabrielita, but also as train-
ing for her future role as an ideal silent woman. In the sequence when the
two hours of one day come to an end, we can hardly read her cry ‘¡Ya
puedo hablar!’ (I can speak now!) as anything but ironic. As Luis Sánchez
Enciso, one of the scriptwriters, explained in interview: ‘A Tula se le
debería prohibir que educara a la niña’ (Tula should be banned from
bringing up the girl) (Núñez 1964). It is straightforward to read this scene
as an allegory of Picazo’s position as a NCE director. If Francoist cen-
sorship gagged Spain’s artists, its promotion of art cinema through
García Escudero’s legislation in the 1960s gave directors only an illusory
freedom to speak.
The children’s dressing-up game illustrates their internalisation of the
repressions of the adult world. At the start of the sequence, Tulita is at
home from school sick and plays at dressing up on her own. She has rum-
maged in the forgotten trunk in the back room and found a selection of
adult female clothes, which could have belonged to her dead mother, or
possibly to her aunt prior to her decision to wear black in mourning for her
sister. Decked out with exaggerated symbols of femininity (hat, shawl,
ostrich feathers and high heels), Tulita sings a religious song in practice for
her first communion to the portrait of the dead cousin Gabrielita that she
has taken off the wall and holds up in front of her.21 Next, Ramirín arrives
home and leaves his school books on the kitchen table, in the pages of which
Tula discovers his naughty photos of women in underwear. Meanwhile,
two colchoneros toil on the terrace of the flat, beating the stuffing of
Ramiro’s mattress. Finally, Ramirín joins in the dressing-up game. He finds
his dead uncle Primitivo’s priest’s hat and his father’s love letters to his
mother in the trunk; placing the hat on his head, he sets about reading the
letters. Rather convoluted on the page, this sequence is dense and layered
on the screen also, involving cross-cuts between three different spaces (the
back room, the kitchen and the terrace). It is a sequence about the identity
formation of children in a repressive society. The image of Ramirín in
priestly attire reading the love letters is a straightforward reference to the
reconciliation of sex and religion that the boy will confront as he grows.
With respect to Tulita, her adult female clothes, together with Ramirín’s
underwear pictures and her father’s love letters, point to her future social
role as a wife and mother, and mean that her holy communion looks forward
to her marriage not to Christ, but to a man. It is particularly important that
all these references to femininity exaggerate female sexuality. Recalling the
censored images of Tula’s saucy underwear, Tulita dresses in the clothes of
a hooker, Ramirín’s photos also point to prostitution, while Ramiro’s letters
speak of the pleasures of the flesh. This indicates that a distorted version
     LA TÍA TULA 121

of femininity and gender difference arises from a repressive context, like

Franco’s Spain.22
Picazo’s sequence is also an ironic commentary on the plot of La tía
Tula. Tulita sings of the Virgin and conception without sin as the workers
beat the mattress, but this does not just register a disjuncture between the
worldly and the other-worldly. We know from an earlier sequence that
Ramiro cannot sleep on that mattress owing to his sexual frustration, and
Tula, refusing to recognise this cause, decides that the solution is to have
it beaten to plump it up again.
The detail of the mattress-beating may do more than comment on the
plot. Given that it obviously reminds us of a bed, it may be instructive to
consider the sequence as a dream scenario, even though in terms of narra-
tive it is not signalled as such. If it is the representation of a dream, we may
read it as a nightmarish projection of Tula’s fears. Tulita embodies a series
of irreconcilable contradictions that govern Tula’s character. The child is
the fruit of the carnal union of Ramiro and Rosa, yet she sings of concep-
tion without sin, and thus projects Tula’s inability to reconcile sexuality
and maternity. The activity of beating the mattress would underpin this
denial of the flesh as it recalls the practice of self-flagellation. According to
this interpretation, the clothing, portrait and religious song might all be
seen as symbols of the social expectations that also rule Tula’s life. The
sequence depicts the way the individual must fall into line, a process that
is startlingly interrupted by the fact that Tulita falls over. This sequence
of a child, ludicrously dressed in adult’s clothes that cause her to trip up,
holding a portrait of a dead female relative that obscures her vision and also
causes her to stumble, and singing a religious song that absorbs her con-
centration and also contributes to her fall, is one of the most evocative rep-
resentations in Spanish cinema of the coercion of the individual in a
repressive society. As such it may also therefore be interpreted as an alle-
gory of the compromised artist, labouring, like Picazo, under overbearing
ideologies.

La tía Tula is a film of contradiction. Its director was funded by the state
through the subsidy system, but was also frustrated by the state through
censorship, a contradictory creative position allegorised in the film. Its
protagonist is the living contradiction of Francoism’s gender ideology, for
whom ‘aunthood’, or the equivocal combination of motherhood and vir-
ginity, is an entirely logical interpretation of society’s expectations. Tula
does not rebel against social expectations as we might expect in dissident
cinema, the most famous instance of which is the ending of Buñuel’s
Viridiana (1961). Played by an actress continually keeping in check her own
122    

excessive performance style, Bautista’s Tula embodies repression without

outlet. But in this film about repression, excess seeps out of every frame.
Outside the home, monotonous provincial life is punctured by the out-
bursts of hysterical and drunken women. Inside the terrifying family
home, which is a microcosm of that society, Tula’s repression triggers
excess: harmless Ramiro is transformed into a rapist, and innocent Tulita
becomes a future Tula, a forerunner of the disturbed children who people
Spanish art cinema of the 1970s.

Notes
1. Outside Spain it won best foreign film at Prades (1964) and the critics’ prize
in New York (1965) (Gubern 1997: 563).
2. In the nostalgic, hagiographic volume published by the Jaén local government
(Picazo’s birthplace) on the twenty-year anniversary of La tía Tula’s release
(Iznaola Gómez 2004b), Diego Galán laments that Picazo is a ‘wasted auteur’
(2004: 113) and Fernando Lara asks why the director made so little of merit
after this film (2004: 173).
3. In 1998, he declared 4 minutes and 47 seconds were removed, and described
these censored sequences with great poignancy (Castillejo 1998: 138–40;
Román Gubern [1981: 212] confirms this figure); in 2004, he stated 6 minutes
of the film were cut and lost forever as the negatives were destroyed (Iznaola
Gómez 2004a: 34–5).
4. In her blind adherence to ideology, there is scope for an Althusserian reading
of Tula as an ‘interpellated’ subject. See Kinder (1993: 19–20), on applying
this theory to oppositional Spanish cinema.
5. See Gavilán Sánchez and Lamarca Rosales (2002: 94). Picazo became a per-
manent teacher in 1964, resigning, along with Berlanga, in protest against the
measures of the new Director-General Alfredo Sánchez Bella in 1969
(Hernández 2003: 320).
6. An earlier version of Unamuno’s novella also began with the widowing of
Ramiro (Longhurst 1996: 15).
7. Unamuno also declared that he knew of a real case (Longhurst 1996: 13), and
in an earlier version of the novella (discussed by Alex Longhurst [1996:
13–18], drawing on Geoffrey Ribbans’s work), likewise highlighted environ-
mental factors to explain Tula’s attitudes. However, Unamuno aimed to break
with nineteenth-century realism, in which time and place are concrete, in
favour of abstract settings and a focus on philosophical questions (Longhurst
1996: 52–8), coining the neologism ‘nivola’ to describe his idiosyncratic
approach. Hence in the final version of the text Unamuno eliminates envir-
onment to show that ‘la actitud anti-masculina de Gertrudis [Tula] le salga de
lo hondo del ser y no de ciertos factores condicionantes históricos o ambien-
tales’ (Gertrudis’s anti-masculine attitude springs from the depths of her
     LA TÍA TULA 123

being, and not from certain conditioning historical or environmental factors’

[Longhurst 1996: 16]). Picazo’s film is in a sense, therefore, an adaptation of
the earlier version.
8. Picazo claims that direct sound was used in all but the river sequence and final
scene at the station (Julían 2002: 63); Baena states that it was only used in
interior sequences (Llinás 1989b: 222).
9. Through this portrait, Picazo is therefore careful to deflect his attack away
from contemporary Catholicism. One of the scriptwriters, Hernán, recalls
that another contributor, López Yubero, was very devout, and objected to any
direct attack against the Church (Castillejo 1998: 131).
10. Enrique Guerner, born Heinrich Gaertner, brought German expressionism
to Spanish cinema, and trained the generation of cinematographers that pre-
ceded the one who studied at the state Film School, which included Baena.
11. Carmen Martín Gaite’s 1978 novel about childhood under Franco also figures
the back room as a space of freedom and takes its name from it: El cuarto de
atrás.
12. Asunción Gómez (2002: 588) points out that Calle Mayor’s soundtrack
expresses Isabel’s emotions. Such a displacement of female emotions from
diegetic voice to non-diegetic soundtrack is typical of Hollywood melodrama.
13. A Catholic lay organisation ‘dedicated to influencing society in accordance
with church teachings’ (Grugel and Rees 1997: 130), Acción Católica was
most active in the 1960s, but entered into a period of crisis owing to Vatican II
(Bellosillo 1986: 11). The film portrays a number of its meetings, but its only
social activity that is mentioned is, unsurprisingly, film censorship.
14. This image may no longer be found in the film, but is now part of the iconog-
raphy of La tía Tula, as it is reproduced on the cover of Heredero and
Monterde (2003), and in Castillejo (1998: 48).
15. These films both start and end with funerals. Each features an actual coffin in
the first sequences (Rosa’s in La tía Tula and the joke one in Calle Mayor) and
each a figurative entombment of their female protagonists in their conclusions.
16. A current of films in the early 1970s returned to the opposition of ‘heroines
without heroes’, as I have argued in my reading of Emma Penella’s roles in
Fortunata y Jacinta (Fons 1970) and La Regenta (Gonzalo Suárez 1974)
(Faulkner 2004: Chapter 4).
17. Susan Martin-Márquez notes that the film of another NCE director,
Summers’s Adiós, cigüeña, adiós (Goodbye, Stork, Goodbye 1971), passes rape
off ‘as intimacy’ (1999: 150).
18. This recalls the decision to leave the images of the scantily clad American
dancers in the mayor’s dream in Berlanga’s ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall!, but
cut the erotic dream of the school mistress. Female sexuality, it seems, was
acceptable among prostitutes and foreign women, but not respectable Spanish
women.
19. This constitutes the background to both the symbolic revenge visited upon
mother figures in Spanish films of the 1970s, like Pascual Duarte (Franco
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1975) and Furtivos (Poachers, Borau 1975), and to the psychologically dis-
turbed children that populate other films of that period, like El espíritu de la
colmena (Erice 1973) and Cría cuervos (Raise Ravens, Saura 1975).
20. See Marvin D’Lugo’s exploration of ‘allegories of authorship’ in his mono-
graph on Saura (1991: 9).
21. As in La ciudad no es para mí and Balarrasa (discussed in Chapter 2), the por-
trait of a dead female relative haunts future generations by providing author-
ity regarding moral behaviour that cannot be questioned.
22. This sequence influences Saura’s treatment of the same subject in Cría cuervos
(1975), where the three sisters also dress up and act out adult scenarios, and
Irene cuts out photos of female pop stars and models, which recall Ramirín’s
underwear pictures, and pastes them in a scrapbook.
 CHAPTER 5

Identity and Nationality in Nueve

cartas a Berta (Nine Letters to Berta,
Patino 1965)

Basilio Martín Patino’s Nueve cartas a Berta of 1965 is widely acknowl-

edged as one of the key works of the NCE. If Camus’s Los farsantes was
made by a producer and technical team of the VCE, and Picazo’s La tía
Tula was largely impervious to the formal experimentation of con-
temporary New Cinemas, Nueve cartas a Berta was, in Casimiro Torreiro’s
words, ‘la película más emblemática del NCE, suerte de manifiesto-
compendio de las virtudes y las debilidades del movimiento’ (the most
emblematic film of the NCE, a sort of manifesto-compendium of the
strengths and weaknesses of the movement) (Torreiro 1995b: 318). These
‘strengths’ were perceived to be first, the film’s engagement with an area
of Spanish life that was resonant with the experience of certain critics and
audiences, and second, its display of cinematic modernity through formal
experimentation; they were rewarded with success at the domestic box
office (see Introduction), prizes in Spain (including Silver Shell for best
first film at San Sebastián, 1966) and the accolade of representing the
nation at international film festivals over 1967–8.1 Progressive, left-wing
journals like Nuestro Cine and Cuadernos para el diálogo championed Nueve
cartas a Berta at first, as they did the movement as a whole, until its failure
became apparent at the end of the decade. Miguel Bilbatúa, for instance,
called it a ‘valid’ and ‘necessary’ testimony of its time (though he pointed
out that it referred to a certain section of Spanish society only, the univer-
sity population) (1966: 6), and an important film in terms of form (Bilbatúa
and Rodríguez Sanz 1966: 10). Bolstered by its commercial success, Carlos
Rodríguez Sanz was less reserved: ‘Nueve cartas a Berta, independiente-
mente de su valor intrínseco, es, por su repercusión popular y su profundo
valor testimonial, por la actitud responsable ante la sociedad española que
de ella se deduce la película clave de los últimos años’ (Nueve cartas a Berta,
quite apart from its intrinsic value, is, owing to its resonance with audi-
ences, its profound testimonial value and the responsible attitude towards
Spanish society that can be inferred from it, the key film of recent years)
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(quoted in Martín Patino 1968, inside cover). The ‘weaknesses’ of the film
indicated in Torreiro’s summary would be condemned in Nuestro Cine
towards the end of the decade (for instance, Llinàs and Marías 1969),2 but
even at the time of its first showing and release, both Film Ideal, the journal
traditionally hostile to the NCE, and the conservative Francoist press, crit-
icised its flaws. These were seen as its ‘chaotic’ (Martínez León 1966), or
even ‘pompous’ (‘Review of Nueve cartas a Berta’ 1967) use of film form,
which seemed designed deliberately to put off audiences (Martínez León
1966: 343), its defeatist ending (Martialay and Marinero 1966: 377) and its
over-illustration of certain theses – with a knowing dig at Patino’s organi-
sation of the Salamanca film conference of 1955, José María Palá and
Marcelino Villegas compare the director to ‘un conferenciante expresán-
dose por medio de dibujos o proyecciones’ (a conference speaker express-
ing himself through drawings and screenings of clips) (1967: 69).
If Nueve cartas a Berta had both supporters and detractors in its day, in
subsequent criticism it became a victim of its supporters too. Film histori-
ans have stressed the naivety of those who placed their faith in García
Escudero, and the elitism of those who championed art cinema. The direc-
tors themselves experienced the exasperation of having their work rewarded
with prizes and promoted abroad on the one hand, yet obstructed through
censorship, distribution and exhibition in Spain on the other, and histori-
ans have lined up to condemn the cynicism of Francoism’s aperturista film
policy. The films served, in Kathleen Vernon’s words, as an ‘arm of foreign
policy’ for the government, because they were aimed at foreign audiences at
international film festivals to give an impression of Spain’s liberalisation to
the outside world (2002: 260; see also Molina-Foix 1977: 18; Kinder 1993:
93; Triana-Toribio 2003: 83). Directors were dubiously implicated in this
game of ‘international window-dressing’ (Torreiro 1995b: 306) because the
aesthetic experimentation of their films apparently made them appeal to
foreign audiences and ignore domestic ones. (The comparative commercial
successes in Spain of both Nueve cartas a Berta and La tía Tula are cited as
exceptions that prove the rule [Caparrós Lera 1983: 48; Triana-Toribio
2003: 82].)
While the contradictions of the regime’s policy of promoting, yet
obstructing the NCE are a focus of this book, I also maintain that the
films are not just documents that illustrate contexts, but artistic responses
to those contexts. Nueve cartas a Berta, a film that Patino has recently
described as shot through with ‘limitations and scars’ (Torreiro 2003:
312), explores the contradictions of the NCE through the question of
nationality. Patino takes the development of identity of a young male
protagonist – a standard topic of contemporary New Cinemas – and uses
     N U E V E C A R TA S A B E R TA 127

this conceit as a means to interrogate Spanishness. There is a clever match

between the conflict over nationality experienced by the protagonist in the
film’s plot, and the awkward alignment of a traditional Spanish provincial
setting with contemporary European film aesthetics in the film’s form.
These tensions furthermore encode the anxiety over ‘the national’ experi-
enced by NCE directors both inside and outside Spain. While impetus
behind the NCE was nationalistic – Franco’s Spain funded an art cinema
to rival those of its democratic neighbours – the Francoist state never
intended the NCE to be a Spanish national cinema in the sense of a
commercially profitable cinema aimed at a domestic market. Whether the
films were successful in the home market or not, Spanish directors like
Patino experienced the contradiction of being funded by a Spanish gov-
ernment to make films not for Spanish audiences, but foreign ones at film
festivals.
Like Picazo, Patino graduated from Film School in 1960, and filled in
the years until he made his first film writing commissioned scripts and
working in documentaries and advertising. In the interviews that followed
the showcasing of his graduation short film Tarde de domingo (Sunday
Afternoon 1960) at San Sebastián he stresses two things that help us under-
stand his approach in Nueve cartas a Berta. First, he highlights his refusal
to accept any of the numerous commissions offered to him by VCE pro-
ducers in those years (in 1966 he states there were six offers),3 declaring
stubbornly in 1969: ‘haré cine en la medida exacta en que me encuentre a
gusto con ello o me sea indispensable para vivir’ (I will make films when
I feel entirely comfortable with everything, or when it’s absolutely essen-
tial for me to live) (Maqua and Villegas 1969: 334). The second experience
he stresses – and one that explains why he didn’t have to take on those com-
missions for economic survival – is his work in the advertising world (he
worked predominantly for the ‘Valeriano Pérez’ agency [Pérez Millán
2002: 36]), which he claims gave him the practical experience he needed
after Film School, and the chance to complete more unusual work than
what was offered by the commissions he rejected (Martialay and Marinero
1966: 375).4 Working on adverts, he claims, also fed his particular interest
in montage (Martialay and Marinero 1966: 375; Bilbatúa and Rodríguez
Sanz 1966: 9).5
It was thus with both this tenacious sense of independence and practi-
cal experience that Patino approached Nueve cartas a Berta. The first-time
director was soon faced with the bemusement, if not downright opposi-
tion, of some of his technical crew and cast on the shoot. For instance, he
was told that what would become the celebrated travelling shot in the
casino, in which the actors stare directly at the camera, would have to be
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discarded (Bilbatúa and Rodríguez Sanz 1966: 18; Julián 2002: 65). While
one of his assistant directors, José Luis García Sánchez, was sympathetic,
the other, Ricardo Muñoz Suay, threatened to leave (Julián 2002: 66). Some
accounts of the production process reveal a director who was wilfully con-
trary: ‘siempre que oía a alguien del laboratorio decir: “qué parte más
mona”, veía una necesidad de hacer algo que no fuese “mona”. Al músico
le obligué a poner unas músicas sincopadas con tamborilazos que están
martilleando al espectador’ (whenever I heard someone in the laboratory
say ‘what a pretty part’, I felt the need to do something that wasn’t ‘pretty’.
I made the composer include a syncopated score with loud drumbeats that
pound on the spectator) (Martialay and Marinero 1966: 381). In a recent
interview Patino has recalled that owing to this relationship with his tech-
nical crew, the film was made ‘en un ambiente . . . de cierta incomprensión’
(in an atmosphere . . . of some incomprehension) (Julián 2002: 65), an
atmosphere that feeds into the portrayal of the incomprehension of his
protagonist in the film itself.
In subsequent criticism, such conflicts between a director and his crew
tend to be displayed as the badge of honour of the strident auteur, and pos-
sibly for this reason, their description appears rather exaggerated. Apart
from Muñoz Suay, who Patino declares belonged to the world of old
cinema (Julián 2002: 66), the young director enjoyed the collaboration of
Luis Enrique Torán, one of the prominent new Film School-trained cin-
ematographers of the NCE, and Pedro del Rey, the editor responsible for
the thoughtful montage of the films discussed in Chapters 1 and 4. Patino
may have acquired an unusual level of expertise in the practical aspects of
filmmaking through his advertising work, but we must avoid the auteurist
trap when we approach his work. Nueve cartas a Berta is clearly also depen-
dent on the experience brought by other members of the crew, in particu-
lar Torán and Del Rey, and their knowledge of the technical innovations in
film stock and camera equipment that underpinned the formal experi-
mentation of all the New Cinemas of the period. Thus the following
description of Nueve cartas a Berta in interview should be taken as a
gesture of Patino’s self-presentation as an auteur:

son intuiciones mías en torno a un trozo de vida, a un muchacho, a unos problemas,

a una serie de contradicciones, es un mundo en el que yo me he metido a indagar, en
el que me he metido a ver qué había detrás de eso, a comprender una realidad que
para mí era difícil. (these are my intuitions about an area of life, a boy, some prob-
lems, a series of contradictions, it is a world into which I have dug deep, in which I
have become involved to see what lay behind it, to understand a reality that was
difficult for me.) (Martialay and Marinero 1966: 377)
     N U E V E C A R TA S A B E R TA 129

In the revised auteurist approach to Nueve cartas a Berta I defend here,

Patino remains the central source of meaning in the film, in keeping with
the emphatic use of the first person in this description, but the contribu-
tions of other members of the crew will also be taken into account.
As in previous chapters, I will also argue that the constraints placed on
the auteur by the contradictory production context of the NCE enrich the
exploration of contradiction in the film. By the end of the decade, Patino
would bitterly dismiss the NCE as ‘jueguecitos de burguesitos que tienen
mala leche’ (little games played by little bourgeois directors in a huff)
(Maqua and Villegas 1969: 348), but he was none the less aware of his par-
ticipation in the game when making Nueva cartas a Berta: ‘Lo mejor para
nosotros de esta nueva situación es que se ha constitucionalizado un poco
la posibilidad de excepción, de las llamadas rarezas, siempre que se den
ciertas condiciones, que se entre un poco en el juego’ (The best thing about
this new situation for us is that it has institutionalised, up to a point, the
possibility of making something out of the ordinary, so-called strange films,
as long as certain conditions are met, and one goes along with the game up
to a point) (Bilbatúa and Rodríguez Sanz 1966: 9). García Escudero’s
legislation meant Patino could choose the script for his first film (he had
written Nueve cartas a Berta as an earlier commission that fell through
[Bilbatúa and Rodríguez Sanz 1966: 9]) and he recounts that he was even
able to select his own producers (Bilbatúa and Rodríguez Sanz 1966: 10),
because ‘Special Interest’ films like his brought guaranteed financial return
through subsidy. However the legislation also meant that the film was cen-
sored at both the script and post-production stages,6 and that the govern-
ment held up its release for one and a half years before approving its
distribution (‘¿Crisis en el cine español?’ 1967: 14). It is clear that even
during the apertura, in Franco’s Spain films could not be ‘institutionalised’
that were ‘out of the ordinary’ and ‘strange’ – the attempt to do so is a
cinema of contradiction.

‘Problematising Spanishness’: From Dialogue to

Monologue
The contradiction explicitly addressed in Nueve cartas a Berta concerns
the problem of Spanishness. If we turn to the historical context of the film,
‘the national’ emerges as an urgent concern. In the 1940s, the ideology of
Franco’s Movimiento Nacional was predicated on a Manichaean opposi-
tion of ‘Spain’ and ‘anti-Spain’, whereby the latter became a catch-all term
for political and religious dissent. Intellectuals and artists like Patino were
intensely preoccupied by the hijacking of ‘the national’ by Francoism. It is
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important to note, however, that in the 1960s this was no longer the com-
paratively straightforward case of a dissident artist opposing a repressive
regime. In the autarkic period, nationalism was a fundamental tenet of
Francoist ideology, which drew on nineteenth-century discourses of
nationality and a distorted version of the Generation of 1898 (Labanyi
1989: 35–6, 55–6). But as the regime progressively distanced itself from
fascism and overt manifestations of nationalism, the status of ‘the national’
by the 1960s was less clear. An example of its removal from official dis-
course was the replacement of the ‘National Interest’, by the ‘Special
Interest’ award in 1964. But ‘the national’ did not disappear from public
discourse altogether. Nueve cartas a Berta shows that the contradictions of
the apertura are telescoped in this question. This was the era of Fraga’s
infamous tourist slogan ‘España es diferente’ (Spain is different), yet also
a time when Spain, through the adoption of free market economic prac-
tices, sought parity with the democracies of the West. This tension
between fetishising Spanish ‘difference’ on the one hand, yet embracing
Western practices on the other, was thrown into relief for many Spaniards
by the experiences of tourism inside Spain, and the experiences of emi-
grant workers, and young students and intellectuals who were able to travel
outside Spain.7
Nueve cartas a Berta explores the latter experience through its protago-
nist, Lorenzo Carvajal. Plot is wholly subordinate to characterisation in the
film. Thus ‘Spanishness is problematised’, in José Enrique Monterde’s
words (1997: 612), through the conflicts concerning identity in the psyche
of this adolescent character, played by the type-cast, angst-ridden youth of
the NCE films, Emilio Gutiérrez Caba, who also stars in La caza (Chapter
6).8 We might first consider Nueve cartas a Berta a filmic Bildungsroman,
but one in which the young male hero shifts not from conformity to rebel-
lion, but the reverse. The film’s focus is on the bourgeoisie, thus experience
of the outside world, which throws Lorenzo’s sense of nationality into
question, is not gained by working in tourism, or as an emigrant worker,
but rather on a study trip abroad. Lorenzo goes to England and stays with
exiled Republican academic José Carballeira,9 with whose daughter, the
eponymous Berta, he becomes romantically involved. The film begins with
Lorenzo’s return to Salamanca, his family and his law studies at Salamanca
University. Berta is contrasted in particular with his Spanish girlfriend
(who is never given a Christian name, and referred to as ‘la novia’ [girl-
friend] throughout), though it is rather ironic that in this film about nation-
ality, the role of the quintessentially Spanish girlfriend was actually played
by a débuting Cuban actress, Elsa Baeza. Nueve cartas a Berta might also
be termed a filmic epistolary novel, as it is organised around the nine letters
     N U E V E C A R TA S A B E R TA 131

to Berta of the title, each introduced with an intertitle. Berta becomes a

code word for outside Spain, and thus for nonconformity, and the film is
punctuated by other reminders like the visit to Salamanca of a professor
living and working in exile in Harvard, Lorenzo’s visit to his French friend
Jacques in Madrid and his discovery that Carballeira’s old flat in the capital
now houses the office of an English-speaking business.
The development of the plot runs parallel to the ways the letters change,
so both chart Lorenzo’s character arc from tentative dissent to consent. At
first the letters chronicle the conflict in Lorenzo’s mind between Spain and
England, and his rejection of his homeland. ‘Es como si todo esto de aquí
no tuviera ya sentido’ (It’s as if everything here doesn’t make any sense
anymore), he writes to Berta in the first of the nine letters we hear read out
loud on the voice-over, and in the third, he asks:

¿Qué sentido tiene el acostumbrarse a vivir así, rutinariamente, sin alicientes, como
en el rincón de un planeta parado, conforme a unas normas tan ajenas y viejas que no
nos ayudan a vivir mejor, manteniendo y respetando unos intereses en los que no par-
ticipo, ni me atañen absolutamente? (What’s the point of getting used to living like
this, in a routine way, with no incentives, as if we were in the corner of a stationary
planet, under rules that are so unconnected from us and old that they don’t help us
to live better, upholding and respecting certain interests that I don’t share, that have
nothing to do with me?)

These thinly veiled critiques of life in Franco’s Spain continue throughout

the first two letters, but in the third, the focus shifts and Lorenzo attempts
to reconcile Spain and England in his mind. In this third letter he specu-
lates about Berta visiting Salamanca, and in the fifth muses about a life
together for them in Spain. From this fifth letter Lorenzo begins to
re-engage with his Salamanca life, and subsequently the epistles either
become shorter or only a few lines of them are shared with us on the voice-
over. This process culminates with the end of the letters at the film’s
dénouement, in which Lorenzo’s marriage to his Spanish girlfriend is inti-
mated and he conforms to life in Spain.
The nature of the communication within the letters changes, as does
their content. At first there is a dialogue of sorts between the couple.
Berta’s letters are never read out loud to us, either by Berta or by Lorenzo,
but he makes references to them. In his first letter, for example, he allows
us to surmise what her letters contain. He assures her ‘también yo estoy
deseando volver a abrazarte’ (I want to embrace you again too) and also
asks ‘¿Es cierto eso tan bonito que dices de que me echas de menos?’ (Is
this wonderful thing you say about missing me really true?). Furthermore,
in the first section of the film, which covers approximately letters one to
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five, the most common grammatical form used is the second person.
Subsequently, the letters become introspective monologues. The ques-
tions previously addressed to the specific grammatical second person Berta
become rhetorical questions, and reflections conveyed in the first person
predominate. Berta’s words are no longer relayed to us through Lorenzo,
and his allusions to her become increasingly infrequent. The end of the
letters signals Lorenzo’s final resigned acceptance of his Salamanca life.
If we consider these parallel developments in the content and the form
of the letters together, an existential thesis is clear: Patino posits that
acceptance of life in Spain implies the renunciation of the self. Nueve cartas
a Berta displays the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre, a philosopher whose
work was a key source of inspiration for Spanish dissident intelligentsia
from the 1950s, in spite of, or indeed because of, the placing of his work on
the Index of forbidden books in 1948 – which did not stop his work circu-
lating clandestinely.10 In the first section of the film, Lorenzo’s sense of self
is established through dialogue in the letters, and his readiness to question
his surroundings and his own role within them is redolent of Sartrean
‘being-for-itself ’. The process of renunciation of the self begins with
Lorenzo’s introspection, which is expressed by the transformation of the
letters from dialogue into monologue. As the letters become increasingly
introspective, Lorenzo gradually retreats from any active engagement with
his surroundings in favour of passive acceptance. His seduction by ‘bad
faith’ is exemplified by the empty rhetorical question he poses as he gazes
listlessly at the beatific congregation of his uncle’s church in the ninth
letter: ‘Y ¿por qué tengo yo que arreglar el mundo?’ (And why must I be
the one to put the world to rights?). The process of renunciation culmi-
nates with the silencing of the letters, which signals to the viewer that there
is no longer any thought or communication on Lorenzo’s part at all. We
might interpret this as an annihilation of the self in existential terms:
Lorenzo succumbs to a longing for the consoling stability, yet ontological
stagnation, of ‘being-in-itself ’.11 At the end of the film, Gutiérrez Caba’s
Lorenzo may still be visually present, but, aurally, he is eradicated by the
silencing of his voice reading the letters that give the film its title.
As both contemporary commentators and subsequent critics have
pointed out, Nueve cartas a Berta is indebted less to the Social Novel of the
1950s, than to Luis Martín-Santos’s Tiempo de silencio (Time of Silence)
(1961), which broke with its conventions. For example, the opposition poet
and publisher Carlos Barral, in whose Biblioteca Formentor series Tiempo
de silencio first appeared, stated in a note he wrote to Patino that his film
was ‘la mejor cinta española que he visto nunca. El Tiempo de silencio de este
cine’ (the best Spanish film I’ve ever seen. The Time of Silence of this
     N U E V E C A R TA S A B E R TA 133

cinema) (quoted in Bellido López et al. 1996: 115; Pérez Millán 2002: 92,
n. 4). While different in plot, Patino’s shift away from Neorealism towards
greater formal experimentation and exploration of existentialism in the
Spanish context in Nueve cartas a Berta share ground with Martín-
Santos’s novel. This debt is acknowledged in the eighth intertitle of the
film, which is called ‘Tiempo de silencio’ (Time of Silence) (Monterde
1997: 612). Patino’s choice of the name of his protagonist may also be
inspired by Martín-Santos’s references in the last lines of Tiempo de silen-
cio to St Laurence the martyr (Martín-Santos 1995: 287). Indeed at the
end of film and novel alike, the protagonists must suffer in silence the
renunciation of ambition and individuality, or metaphorical castration, to
use another of Martín-Santos’s images (1995: 283). The novel’s Pedro
finds himself dumbstruck and unable to complain as he journeys to the
provinces to take up the humble post of doctor (1995: 279–87), and in the
film, Lorenzo’s voice-over is also silenced, and he embraces his girlfriend
and the conformist life she represents.
Notwithstanding these connections with such an illustrious work of
oppositional Spanish letters, the plot and structure of Nueve cartas a Berta
sketched out thus far might also appear a predictable portrayal of the exis-
tential preoccupations of youth typical of contemporary New Wave
cinemas. It seems strange that Patino, whose life’s work Torreiro sums up
as ‘Contra los tópicos’ (Against clichés) (2003), should choose such a
theme. The topic was in fact selected by José Gutiérrez Maesso, who
originally commissioned the script, and Patino’s treatment of the protag-
onist seems only perfunctorily to fulfil the expectations of those who
funded NCE films with the foreign festival circuit in mind. Furthermore,
Gutiérrez Caba’s performance betrays a listlessness that goes beyond a
convincing portrayal of introverted youth. Gutiérrez Caba has recently
recalled Patino’s discouraging direction of the actors – whenever they
asked him how a scene had turned out he would apparently always reply
‘badly’ (Julián 2002: 65) – and in contemporary interviews the director
stated that the protagonist’s role didn’t interest him at all: Lorenzo was just
a pretext to explore his environment (Bilbatúa and Rodríguez Sanz 1966:
10; Martialay and Marinero 1966: 378).
Thus despite the excessive presence of Lorenzo on the film’s sound- and
imagetracks, he is in fact a strange absence at its centre. Patino uses a theme
in vogue at the time simply as a vehicle to explore the contemporary envi-
ronment, in particular the contradictions concerning ‘the national’. The
script even seems knowingly to gesture towards predictability of charac-
terisation when Lorenzo’s mother accuses her son of ‘haciéndote el exis-
tencialista’ (playing the existentialist). Lorenzo’s simultaneous feelings of
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attraction and repulsion for Spain, and his fascination with, then rejection
of, his experiences outside Spain, are not just the standard emotional
vicissitudes of a stereotypical ‘angry young man’, but convey the conflicts
inherent in the tentative opening-up of Spain in the apertura, which
contradicted the regime’s previous rhetoric of isolationism. Further,
Lorenzo’s equivocal experience of nationality encodes the experience of
this NCE director. On the one hand Nueve cartas a Berta was condemned
in Spain for being too ‘foreign’. In a review of the film in the conservative
press, for instance, it is considered a work that appeals to ‘propagandas
venidas de allende las fronteras’ (propaganda emanating from beyond our
borders) (‘Review of Nueve cartas a Berta’ 1967). On the other, the film was
criticised by foreign audiences at film festivals for being too ‘Spanish’.
‘What is good for Spain,’ complained a review for Variety, for example, ‘is
not necessarily fit for foreign consumption; this must be the least univer-
sal product of what is coming to be called the “new Spanish cinema.” [The
picture] demands a much greater knowledge of things Spanish than
foreign audiences are likely to have’ (‘Review of Nueve cartas a Berta’
1983). Over the question of ‘the national’, therefore, Patino, like his pro-
tagonist, was entangled in a frustrating paradox.

Formal Disruption: Conflict and Resolution

Conflicts over ‘the national’ also inform Patino’s choices of film form. The
literary analysis of the development of the letters I offer above does not do
justice to Nueve cartas a Berta as cinema. The shift from dialogue to mono-
logue in the letters that announces Lorenzo’s embrace of conformity is also
conveyed by means of the relationship between the soundtrack and the
imagetrack, through which Patino constructs his damning portrayal of
contemporary Salamanca. The soundtrack consists of Lorenzo reading his
letters to Berta in voice-over, accompanied by Carmelo Bernaola’s musical
score, and the imagetrack foregrounds Salamanca, Lorenzo’s home life
and his relationship with his Spanish girlfriend.
Patino uses sound in Nueve cartas a Berta to underscore the conflict
experienced by Lorenzo on his return from England to Spain and thereby
construct a general critique of his Spanish environment. Extra-diegetic
music is intentionally intrusive. Bernaola had warned Patino that the com-
bination of the spinet and drum clashed, but the director declared that he
was after precisely that effect of cacophony (Martialay and Marinero 1966:
381). The dubbing of the film is also discordant. Its poor quality was
pointed out in reviews (Martínez León 1966: 343), but there is a particu-
lar problem with Lorenzo’s voice. While Patino used Gutiérrez Caba’s own
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voice for the letters read in voice-over, he did not use it for Lorenzo’s dia-
logue within the diegesis of the film,12 a decision that the actor has recently
recalled with some resentment, because an actor who did not dub him- or
herself entirely was not eligible for awards: ‘Basilio consideró que mi voz
no correspondía a mi imagen, y me dobló de una manera terrible, gratuita’
(Basilio considered that my voice didn’t go with my image, and he dubbed
me in a terrible, gratuitous way) (Julián 2002: 81). The voice-over is there-
fore not only intrusive in itself, it also creates a conflict owing to the
different voices used to dub the protagonist.
Further conflict is created by the opposition of this soundtrack with the
imagetrack. An early example of this opposition comes when Lorenzo and
his girlfriend take a midday stroll around Salamanca’s monuments. The
companionship between Lorenzo and his girlfriend displayed on screen
contrasts with the voice-over letter to Berta. After enthusiastically describ-
ing the city’s sights that we see him visit with his girlfriend, he complains:
‘Pero no me sirve de nada venir a verlo yo solo, tan completamente solo,
Berta, mi Berta, estando tú tan lejos’ (But it’s totally pointless coming to see
it all alone, so utterly alone, Berta, my Berta, because you’re so far away).
Juan Antonio Pérez Millán considers that the use of voice-over as a coun-
terpoint to the imagetrack is occasionally excessive (2002: 84), but the
degree of excess always fits with the degree of Lorenzo’s rebellion. Thus in
another early sequence, the remarkable disjuncture between what we see
and what we hear conveys the extent of Lorenzo’s discontent. As we observe
Lorenzo embrace his Spanish girlfriend, on the voice-over he declares to
Berta: ‘Es . . . como si sólo existieras tú’ (It’s . . . as if only you existed).
Lorenzo’s dissatisfaction with, and reluctant participation in, Spanish
life is in fact doubly conveyed in this sequence, first, through this clash
between image- and soundtracks, and second, through the use of freeze-
frames and disruptive editing of that imagetrack. Patino claimed in inter-
view that the intention behind this formal experimentation was to distance
the spectator from Lorenzo’s story, disrupting conventional narrative con-
tinuity so that ‘le duele más, le escuece más’ (it hurts them more, stings
them more) (Martialay and Marinero 1966: 381). This may be interpreted
as wilfully perverse (as it was by Martínez León [1966: 343]), but in the
context of the film, it is a coherent component of Patino’s strategy to
render Lorenzo’s awkward reintegration into Spanish life, and thereby
question the national environment in general. In the early sequence
between Lorenzo and his girlfriend, Patino betrays the influence of both
Soviet montage, which had previously inspired directors like Bardem,13
and the playful jump-cuts of Jean Luc Godard’s Breathless (1959) and
François Truffaut’s The Four Hundred Hits (1959), by juxtaposing five
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shots of the couple from different angles and distances. Far from the formal
chaos of which he was accused, this sequence is engineered with absolute
precision. There is an exact match between the disruption of continuity of
space through the editing of Lorenzo and his girlfriend’s embrace, and the
disruption of continuity of time through the voice-over that recalls
Lorenzo’s relationship with Berta. Both of these instances of disruption
convey with concision the lack of harmony between Lorenzo and his
Spanish girlfriend.
Patino’s formal disruptions are intended to convey a profound malaise
in contemporary Spain, not just the wavering affection of a law student for
his girlfriend. Numerous sequences not directly connected to Lorenzo
question this wider environment. The direct stare of the actors in the long
tracking shot at the casino that apparently so offended Patino’s technical
crew effectively disrupts conventional film naturalism to render a familiar
community space strange: the actors’ impassive gazes make them look like
corpses. Similarly, the famous 360° panning shot of the commemorative
ceremony of the alféreces provisionales taken under cover in the centre of
Salamanca’s main square runs in direct opposition to the reporting of such
events through static long shots on the NO-DO.14 Patino’s slow pan picks
out the expressions of disillusionment on the faces of these men, which are
hidden from sight in official coverage. Again, on two occasions in the film,
Patino interpolates photographic collages of commercial adverts to throw
into relief the portrayal of the ancient monuments of Salamanca, and
convey the awkward co-existence of tradition and the contemporary
embrace of consumer capitalism in 1960s Spain.
Prior knowledge of non-Spanish cinemas may reveal the influences that
informed these images,15 but it is not necessary to appreciate the disrup-
tion conveyed in these sequences. Patino’s aim is not to show off his fluency
in the language of contemporary foreign cinemas, but to find a way to
render the familiar environment of Salamanca unfamiliar. In La tía Tula,
Picazo achieves this by portraying provincial life through a haunted house.
In Nueve cartas a Berta, Patino takes one of Spain’s most famous provin-
cial cities, but problematises the viewer’s recognition of its well-known
streets, river and monuments through formal disruption at every level. On
the soundtrack, this is achieved through an intrusive, irritating musical
score and conflicts in dubbing between Lorenzo’s voice in dialogue and
voice-over, and on the imagetrack, through freeze-frames, slow motion
and rapid montage, as well as the particular instances of long takes and
360° tracking shots discussed. Álvaro del Amo noted in his prefatory
essay to the 1968 published script of the film that Nueve cartas a Berta,
‘Cinematográficamente, niega la sólida coherencia de la vida provinciana,
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privándola de sentido’ (In cinematic terms, negates the solid coherence of

provincial life, robbing it of significance) (Amo 1968: 26). I would suggest
that the critique extends beyond provincial life to national life, as Lorenzo’s
failure to reintegrate in Spain following his trip indicates an equivocal
experience of nationality.
It is therefore coherent in terms of form that Patino conveys Lorenzo’s
ultimate resignation and acceptance of conformity through the alignment
of image- and soundtracks in the final sequences. This begins with the har-
monisation of diegetic and non-diegetic sound. Lorenzo’s gradual accept-
ance of paternal authority is conveyed in a late sequence in which he
returns to Salamanca and walks home with his father. His father’s words
of advice, which constitute diegetic sound, are echoed with only slight
modification on the non-diegetic voice-over of Lorenzo reading a letter to
Berta:

Padre: Tú dedícate bien a tu carrera, que es lo práctico, lo que tiene que hacer cada
uno es trabajar honradamente.
Lorenzo: Mi padre me ha venido aconsejando que me dedique bien a mi carrera, que
es lo práctico, que lo que tiene que hacer cada quisqui es trabajar honradamente.
(Father: You just devote yourself to your degree, that’s the practical thing to do, what
we all have to do is work honourably.
Lorenzo: My father has been advising me just to devote myself to my degree, that’s
the practical thing to do, what everyone has to do is work honourably.)

This alignment between diegetic and non-diegetic sound is repeated when

Lorenzo echoes his mother’s comment about the family’s new television in
a letter: ‘¡Fíjate qué lujo para nosotros!’ (Just think what a luxury this is for
us!) she exclaims, and he writes ‘No sabes el acontecimiento y el lujo que
esto representa para ellos’ (You don’t know what a big event and luxury this
is for them). The alignment between diegetic and non-diegetic sound also
looks forward to the synthesis between image- and soundtracks, which
communicates Lorenzo’s acceptance of life in Spain.16 In the final
sequence of the film, the voice-over is silenced, and Lorenzo’s conformity
is conveyed by his absolute occupation of diegetic space, that is to say, his
occupation of diegetic space in terms of both image and sound.

Perverse Metaphors
Patino also explores contradiction in Nueve cartas a Berta by enriching the
imagetrack through metaphors, and these often reverse conventional asso-
ciations. The film is a city portrait of Salamanca, and in the context of the
1950s and 1960s, when Patino himself knew the city as a young student,
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Salamanca was a double-sided, or contradictory, national metaphor. This

is indicated by Patino’s own recollection of his feelings about the city when
he made the film: ‘poco a poco nos fuimos convenciendo de que había otras
posibilidades en aquella Salamanca congelada, insufrible, que había otras
perspectivas, otras visiones. . . . Era una ciudad terrible, pero al mismo
tiempo con un gran encanto’ (we became gradually convinced that there
were other possibilities in that static, insufferable Salamanca, that there
were other views, other visions. . . . It was a terrible city, but at the
same time it had a great charm) (Julián 2002: 17, 64). On the one hand, the
ancient city symbolises Spain’s venerable past through its monuments and
architecture, and is thus associated with conservatism, and the contempo-
rary political expression of that conservatism, Francoism. On the other,
Salamanca is a cipher of tentative dissent: its university was a forum to
express political discontent in the early 1950s (Grugel and Rees 1997: 144);
and it hosted the Conversations of Salamanca of 1955, which Patino organ-
ised as director of the university film club. The characterisation of
Lorenzo’s two university professors encodes these differing attitudes. The
older academic in charge of the lecture by the visiting professor seems
closed to new ideas (he is uninterested in his colleague’s recommendation
of a new book on La Celestina by Carballeira), whereas the younger one is
apparently more in tune with the students, offering Lorenzo support when
he is taken ill at the university.
In Nueve cartas a Berta Patino does not reclaim Salamanca as a space of
dissent, but rather echoes these contradictions. The city’s architecture is
portrayed in the film’s mise en scène as ‘a great charm’ when Lorenzo strolls
through the streets and contemplates the monuments that had witnessed
the great events of the Spanish Golden Age, yet simultaneously the city
seems ‘terrible’ as the bright sunlight reflected off the monuments blinds
the viewer, a bleached effect created by Torán’s filming on sensitive film
stock – a technique that Luis Cuadrado was also to use in La caza. The
medieval-style drawings that form the background to each intertitle
(these are actually Alfredo Alcaín’s contemporary illustrations [Pérez
Millán 2002: 83]) have a similarly equivocal effect, intrusively reminding
us throughout the film of the presence of the city’s venerable yet anti-
quated past.
At the end of the film, Lorenzo and his girlfriend embrace on the bank
of the River Tormes and the camera then pans to the Salamanca cityscape.
Although the couple are located in a bucolic locus amoenus outside the city,
the pan to the cityscape indicates that, through his decision to conform,
Lorenzo will now be imprisoned in the city.17 Following the pan there is a
fade to a medium shot of a stone statue of an angel, over which the end
     N U E V E C A R TA S A B E R TA 139

credits role. There are at least two literary intertexts present here. Just as
in Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio’s El Jarama (1956) the river continues to flow
at the end of novel as it did at the beginning, despite the intervening nar-
rative events (1967: 7, 364–5), so Lorenzo’s conformity in Nueve cartas a
Berta is conveyed figuratively as his going with the flow of the river and
accepting life in the Castilian city. This living death is also indicated
through the metaphor of petrification, as the credits of the film roll to the
final image of the stone statue.18 Lorenzo’s fate thus again recalls that of
Martín-Santos’s Pedro in Tiempo de silencio, whose name is etymologically
linked to stone matter by its Greek root ‘petra’ (Labanyi 1989: 54).
I have argued that Nueve cartas a Berta is formally coherent throughout,
in the way that the relationship between the image- and soundtracks
changes in line with the evolution of Lorenzo’s character arc. Although the
city of Salamanca is an equivocal metaphor, my argument that we may read
the river and the statue of the last scene as symbols of conformity and
petrification retrospectively suggests transparency in the film at the level of
metaphor. Closer examination of symbol in Nueve cartas a Berta, however,
reveals that the use of other key tropes is often perverse, although always
aligned with Lorenzo’s shift from rebellion to conformity. With respect to
the treatment of movement and light, two abstract categories of obvious
relevance to the visual and kinetic medium of film, Patino reverses con-
ventions. Standard associations are apparent in the treatment of other char-
acters. For instance, freeze-frames, or lack of movement, convey stasis and
stagnation when they portray Lorenzo’s mother, father or grandmother
(Pérez Millán 2002: 88). However, when they depict Lorenzo, these shots
suggest the energy and dynamism of his thoughts, as in the sequences
where he resists the entrapment of Salamanca and his girlfriend by think-
ing about Berta. Consequently, the use of an apparently liberating mobile
camera to shoot Lorenzo’s return home through Salamanca’s streets with
his father at the end of the film is perverse.19 Here, the dynamic cine-
matography in fact conveys Lorenzo’s entrapment, stasis and stagnation.
This is a contradictory reversal of the standard association of movement,
but is entirely logical given the use of the metaphor of movement in
Lorenzo’s characterisation in the film as a whole; a static camera indicates
mental dynamism, a dynamic camera, mental stasis.
Similarly, light, especially sunlight, is not a source of enlightenment or
illumination but one of obfuscation in Nueve cartas a Berta.20 We may
compare the three tours of Salamanca’s monuments that feature in the
film, two by day and one by night, to explore this point. In the first,
Lorenzo wanders around the city alone, and in the second takes a stroll
with his girlfriend (Figure 5.1). In both, Torán’s use of overexposed stock
140    

Figure 5.1. Nueve cartas a Berta. La linterna mágica, P.C.

renders the bright sunlight blinding, suggesting the characters’ listlessness

and frustration. In the third, Lorenzo and his fellow students’ nocturnal
tour of the monuments with the Harvard professor brings knowledge.
Lorenzo discovers, for instance, further information about Carballeira.
Patino had persuaded the city authorities to floodlight emblematic monu-
ments like the university, the Old Cathedral, the Casa de las Conchas
(House of Shells) and the main square (Julián 2003: 67) (Figure 5.2), and
Torán’s sensitive film stock captured the architectural detail of the build-
ings, despite the dark (Torán 1989: 114). Had the monuments formed a
gloomy background that loomed behind the characters, the impact of the
sequence would have been diminished. The intellectual light cast by
the Harvard professor, and the capturing of the illuminated details of the
monuments on the imagetrack, are crucial to the implication of the film:
that while sunlight blinds the eyes and dulls the senses, darkness connotes
enlightenment.
It is useful to consider the Spanish fascist anthem, ‘Cara al sol’ (Face
to the Sun) in this context, which Patino was later to use at the start of
his Canciones para después de una guerra (Songs for after a War).21 Patino’s
treatment of light in Nueve cartas a Berta draws on the association of
sun and fascism, made clear by the title of the anthem, which is also its
first line. When Lorenzo tells Berta twice in his first letter that ‘valoré
     N U E V E C A R TA S A B E R TA 141

Figure 5.2. Nueve cartas a Berta. La linterna mágica, P.C.

demasiado ese sol’ (I overrated this sun), we may infer that this is a
significant questioning of the dictatorship, not just a throw-away comment
on the weather. In the context of fascist ideology that idealised the healthy
male body, it is perhaps to be expected that Patino also reverses standard
connotations of health and illness. In Nueve cartas a Berta, Lorenzo’s
illness indicates his rebellion, while his restoration to health at the end of
the film signifies his resignation and conformity. It is noteworthy that one
of Lorenzo’s excruciatingly reactionary uncles is a chemist, but his phar-
macy has no cure for Lorenzo’s ailment, nor for his mother’s nerves.
Instead, Lorenzo is ‘cured’ by a stay in the countryside during Holy Week
with his other uncle, the ultra-conservative village priest who is immune
from the changes introduced by Vatican II.
Finally, Patino reverses the trope of the seasons in Nueve cartas a Berta.
Through the conversation between Lorenzo and his girlfriend in the final
sequence our attention is drawn to the fact that it is spring: ‘Ya oscurece
más tarde’ (It gets dark later now) comments Lorenzo’s girlfriend, to
which he replies, ‘es que está llegando la primavera’ (that’s because spring
is on its way).22 Here, rather than the standard associations of new life and
new hope, spring connotes fall and inertia. The sequence thus also subverts
another line of the fascist anthem: ‘volverá a reír la primavera’ (spring will
smile again).23
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In Nueve cartas a Berta, Patino adopts one of the standard themes of the
contemporary European New Cinemas, discontented youth, and uses it as
a vehicle to explore conflicts over ‘the national’ that are particular to Spain.
Lorenzo’s existential crisis, during which he values then questions Spain
by turns, allows Patino to explore the wider question of Spain’s contradic-
tory attempts to liberalise relations with the outside world during the aper-
tura. Film form is harnessed in Nueve cartas a Berta to represent this fitful
evolution of Lorenzo’s character arc. Thus the relationship between
sound- and imagetracks, the portrayal of the city and the treatment of
metaphor evolve in accordance with Lorenzo’s psychological state.
Through both alliance and conflict with his technical teams, Nueve cartas
a Berta displays Patino’s remarkable command of film form, which is
deployed to create a particularly dense, occasionally perverse, sometimes
irritating, but always entirely coherent filmic world in which Lorenzo’s
experience of rebellion and conformity, symbolic of the national question,
unfolds.

Notes
1. For details of prizes and festivals in which Nueve cartas a Berta represented
Spain, see Bellido López et al. (1996: 228).
2. See José Enrique Monterde’s survey (2003) of the rise and fall of the NCE in
Nuestro Cine during the 1960s.
3. See ‘Interview with Patino’ (1961: 14); Martialay and Marinero (1966: 376);
Bilbatúa and Rodríguez Sanz (1966: 9); Maqua and Villegas (1969: 334).
4. The experience may also have given him the chance to become familiar with
new equipment, like the macrokilar camera, which was first introduced in
Spain for making adverts (Bilbatúa et al. 1966: 9).
5. An extract from Patino’s entrance examination for a teaching post at the Film
School entitled ‘Hacia un nuevo concepto de montaje’ (Towards a New
Concept of Montage) was published in Film Ideal (Martín Patino 1964).
6. Three intertitles were removed from the script, ‘La guerra’ (The War), ‘La
posguerra’ (After the War) and ‘Los aires de la paz’ (The Appearance of
Peace), certain scenes and phrases were cut from the finished film, and the
censors insisted that intertitles were added at the start of the picture to explain
that Berta was not Lorenzo’s Spanish girlfriend. The commemorative cere-
mony of the association of alféreces provisionales was a particularly controver-
sial scene, and was only passed when Patino produced a letter of support from
a representative of the association (Monterde 1997: 613). (The alféreces pro-
visionales were ex-soldiers who fought for Franco, and made up the officers in
his army. Most returned to civilian life after the war, and the ‘hermandad’
[association] was formed in 1958.)
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7. Barry Jordan (1995: 248), notes that Joaquín Ruiz Giménez, Minister of
Education from 1951 to 1957, increased the number of travel grants awarded
to university students. The NCE directors experienced both work and travel
abroad. Prior to beginning at Film School, Patino had travelled to England
and Italy (Julián 2002: 16), and Julio Diamante spent his summers working on
building sites in Paris in order to watch screenings at the Cinémathèque
Française (Colorado 2003: 264). After joining the Film School, directors
would travel together to European film festivals. See the account of such trips
in Julián (2002: 50) and Bellido López et al. (1996: 28).
8. Although Gutiérrez Caba shot Nueve cartas a Berta before La caza, Patino’s
film was released after Saura’s.
9. On the question of exile in the film, see López (2005: 86–8, 91–2).
10. See Jordan (1990), in particular the sub-section ‘Sartre and Engagement’
(1990: 85–101), which charts the impact of Sartre’s work following the 1950
translation into Spanish of Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (1948).
11. On ‘being-for-itself ’ and ‘being-in-itself ’, see Sartre (1981). On ‘bad faith’,
see in particular his Part I, Chapter 2.
12. My thanks to José Luis Ortiz, who suggested to me that Lorenzo’s dialogue
was dubbed by Simón Ramírez.
13. However, the film also encodes a critique of Soviet cinema through the parody
of Jacques, who is aligned with Buñuel’s most committed film Tierra sin pan
(Land without Bread) (1932) through his juxtaposition with a poster. Jacques
jokes that his Russian girlfriend looks like a peasant character from a social
realist film.
14. Thanks to the weight and size of the new Arriflex cameras, Patino’s camera-
man (the director doesn’t recall if it was Torán or Fernando Arribas) shot the
sequence without the knowledge of the crowd. Apparently, Patino and other
members of the crew created diversions to distract attention away from the
camera as it filmed (Pérez Millán 2002: 89–90). Román Gubern traces this
shot back to the Champs Élysées crowd scene in Breathless (Castro de Paz
2003: 422).
15. Critics have highlighted further influences, including Pier Paolo Pasolini,
Bernardo Bertolucci, Marco Bellocchio (Monterde 1997: 612), Theo
Angelopoulos (Castro de Paz 2003: 422) and Michelangelo Antonioni (Torreiro
2003: 316).
16. Helena López observes that Lorenzo’s acceptance of conformity coincides
with ‘the acclimatisation of the régime to the international economy’ (2005:
87). The coincidence of conformity and consumerism is confirmed when
Lorenzo arrives home to discover his family has purchased the television set.
17. In El buen amor (Good Love 1963), Francisco Regueiro similarly imprisons his
young couple in the venerable architecture of another ancient Castilian city,
Toledo (Galán 2003: 385).
18. In Tarde de domingo, the entrapment of the female protagonist is similarly
indicated by her juxtaposition with a lifeless doll.
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19. See Francia (2002: 116) for an account of the difficulties with this shot, which
reveals Patino’s insistence on its importance. The sequence was filmed from
a car boot, a photograph of which features on the cover of Bellido López et al.
(1996).
20. In Saura’s La caza, sunlight is also figured as a source of oppression, a point
emphasised by the use of high-contrast film stock (Stone 2002: 65). In the
final freeze-frame of Saura’s film, however, in which Enrique is caught as he
flees from the theatre of violence, stasis does seem to convey entrapment.
21. Made in 1971, this film was not released until 1977, owing to problems with
censorship. Quotations of the anthem are taken from the soundtrack of this
film.
22. The film was shot as spring advanced, from 12 April to 22 May 1965 (Francia
2002: 118).
23. A failure to read these metaphors ‘perversely’ may explain why some progres-
sive contemporary critics condemned the ending of the film for celebrating
resignation and failure (Pérez Millán 2002: 90), or for being too ambiguous and
for not taking sides (Patino, quoted in Julián 2002: 77).
 CHAPTER 6

Ageing and Coming of Age in La

caza (The Hunt, Saura 1965)

Such has been the critical acclaim enjoyed by La caza over the forty years
since its release that its origins in the NCE are sometimes overlooked. The
film is both typical and atypical of the movement. Carlos Saura was slightly
older than its other directors, many of whom he taught at the Film School
where he had a post from 1957 to 1964, and he had already completed three
shorts, a medium-length documentary (Cuenca 1958) and two feature-
length films, when García Escudero’s new protectionist measures enabled
him to make La caza. While his second film, Llanto por un bandido (1963),
had flopped, his first, Los golfos (1959), which represented Spain at Cannes
in 1960, had established him as the leading Spanish auteur to follow
Bardem and Berlanga (San Miguel 1962a: 7). A combination of this previ-
ous experience, his partnership with such a tenacious producer as Elías
Querejeta, plus good old-fashioned talent, meant that, unlike many of its
other directors, Saura was immune to the collapse of the NCE, and has
continued to make auteurist cinema uninterrupted to this day.
In terms of production, distribution and exhibition, La caza was
typical of the NCE. It was simultaneously supported through the ‘Special
Interest’ subsidy, yet stifled through censorship (although the censors’
changes have now become one of the legendary examples of how their
interventions sometimes opened up, rather than closed down, a film’s
meaning).1 It had a mixed reception from contemporary specialist journals
(as expected, Nuestro cine championed the film, which it featured twice on
its front page [Monterde 2003: 113 n. 28], but Film Ideal questioned it
[Sánchez Vidal 1988: 44]),2 and while limited exhibition and distribution
were blamed for the relatively small impact of the film on Spanish audi-
ences at the time of its release (Monleón 1967: 61), La caza caused a stir at
foreign film festivals, such as Berlin (where it was awarded the Silver Bear),
New York, London and Acapulco, although it had been rejected by Cannes
(Gómez 2003: 364; Sánchez Vidal 1988: 44).
Auteur studies of Saura’s work are concerned with the development of
the director’s creative vision, but this chapter argues that much can be
gained from restoring La caza to the context of 1960s Spain. Like the other
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NCE films examined in this book, Saura’s picture exposes and condemns
the contradictions of the decade. In particular, I will read La caza
against the two connected questions raised in my chapter title: the ageing
of both the dictator and the dictatorship by 1965, the year that followed the
anniversary celebrations of ‘25 años de paz’ (25 Years of Peace); and the
coming of age of a new generation of Spaniards born after the Civil War
that brought that dictatorship to power. Saura’s film denounces the
contradiction of a government headed by an increasingly frail Franco and
supported by a generation now on the far side of middle age, which was
dependent for its duration on an ill-informed and immature youth. La
caza, therefore, revisits through tragedy the question of ageing explored
in La gran familia through comedy (Chapter 1). These apparently oppos-
ing NCE and VCE films not only address the same question, but do so
through the performances of popular cinema stars – José Isbert in the
earlier film, and Alfredo Mayo, Ismael Merlo and José María Prada in the
later one.
The production context of Saura’s earlier Llanto por un bandido is
typical of the contradictions between creative aspiration and actual prac-
tice that characterise the other NCE films studied in this book. Stung by
the disastrous experience and outcome of making a low-budget epic (‘a
hand-held arriflex and five metres of tracks’ [quoted in Hopewell 1986:
71]), Saura approached La caza with absolute single-mindedness. It was
the ‘producto de un momento de violencia, de rabia personal’ (product of
a moment of violence, of personal fury) (Gómez 2003: 362) he states in his
most recent interview, a comment that reveals his anger at both the specific
experience of making Llanto por un bandido, and general experience of
living under Francoism. Saura’s intentions will therefore be central to the
interpretation of La caza offered here, but even in the work of this fiercely
defensive auteur, the contributions of actors and technical teams will also
be considered. For instance, although La caza may be the result of Saura’s
determination and Querejeta’s shrewd dealing with the authorities, it
owes a considerable debt to Luis Cuadrado, arguably Spain’s top art cine-
matographer of all time. Cuadrado was as tenacious as Saura – having
finished at the Film School within three years, he stayed for seven, appar-
ently to ensure he had mastered every aspect of his art (Torán 1989: 115).
His collaboration with the director, with whom he also worked on Stress
es tres, tres (Stress is Three, Three 1968), was by all accounts cooperative.
For instance, it was Saura, himself an expert in photography, who sug-
gested they use the macrokilar lens that made the extreme close-ups of
the film possible (Bilbatúa et al. 1966: 9), and both director and cine-
matographer had to join forces to win what Cuadrado called ‘la guerra con
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el laboratorio’ (the war with the laboratories) (Bilbatúa et al. 1966: 10). As
was the case with cinematographer Juan Julio Baena and Los golfos (Llinàs
1989b: 216–17), the laboratory technicians were at first reluctant to
work with the extreme contrasts of light and dark on the film stock, but
finally agreed (though with Los golfos, this came only after the suggestion
that Baena be sacked! [Llinàs 1989b: 216]). Saura’s personal vision in La
caza has been immortalised in a frequently cited comment by fellow
Spanish auteur Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, who declared that it ‘dio la
vuelta al cine que se hacía en España. En cuanto a tener un lenguaje aseado,
para mí hay un cine español de antes de La caza y otro después’ (turned
Spanish cinema upside-down. In terms of a well-worked language, there
is a cinema before La caza and a different one after it) (Torres 1992: 28).3
That ‘well-worked language’ was the fruit of Saura’s collaboration with
Cuadrado.
If Gutiérrez Aragón considered Saura’s third feature a watershed in the
history of Spanish cinema, its merit has not always been undisputed. In an
early indication of his contribution to the film, Mayo, one of the main
acting leads, recognised its potential before the shoot,4 but a dozen pro-
ducers rejected the project until it was taken on by Querejeta, the Basque
producer who exploited the state subsidy system with brilliant effect, and
with whom Saura was to work in creative tandem in twelve further features
over the following sixteen years.5 La caza has enjoyed more consistent
acclaim in later years, and has been praised by both practitioners of, and
commentators on, Spanish cinema, especially those concerned with its
auteurist traditions.
Over four decades, scholarly understanding of the importance of La
caza, and of the nature of its ‘well-worked language’, has evolved. Critical
responses are parables for their own times, as they shift in focus from
emphasising the film’s political import in accounts written during, and
immediately following, the dictatorship, to wider concerns in recent years.
Thus Manuel Villegas López, who published the first Spanish book on the
NCE in 1967, would stress the indirect political critique encrypted in La
caza, in a style of expression that is itself indirect and encrypted – the
result, no doubt, of the time of writing. He describes the film variously as
a ‘máscara. Todo está detrás’ (mask. Everything is behind it), a ‘fórmula
[que] es preciso desarrollar para llegar a su verdadero y concreto
significado’ (formula [that] needs to be worked out to get to the true and
secret meaning) (1967: 83), a ‘kábala’ (cabala), a ‘jeróglífico, cada uno de
[sus elementos] significa una cosa y todos juntos, otra’ (hieroglyphic, each
of its components means one thing, but together they mean another) (1967:
85) and finally, ‘Lo que se verá, si se puede, está más allá de lo que se ve: es
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el secreto del film’ (What one will see, if one can, is beyond what one sees:
it is the secret of the film) (1967: 86). This emphasis on the film’s ‘secret’
critique remained central to analyses well into the 1980s. Even though the
regime was over and the dictator dead, the fight against Francoism on the
ideological front continued on the pages of film criticism. These accounts
of La caza tended to focus on its evasion of censorship. In particular, the
rabbit hunt was understood as a metaphor for the Spanish Civil War; con-
sequently the self-destruction of the rabbit hunters/war victors at the end
of the film looked forward to the inevitable collapse of the dictatorship
established by that conflict (see Hopewell 1986: 71–6; Higginbotham 1988:
79; Kinder 1993: 160; Torreiro 1995b: 320; Monegal 1998: 203–8).
In 1988, Agustín Sánchez Vidal suggested that political readings of the
film were tied to the time of its reception:

Si en su día la construcción arquetípica de los personajes y el sentido parabólico de

la película imponían por encima de cualquier otra consideración una lectura política,
la perspectiva actual libera a La caza de esas servidumbres coyunturales. (If in its day
archetypal characterisation and the parable meaning of the film imposed a political
reading at the expense of all other considerations, today’s perspective liberates La
caza from that time of slavery.) (1988: 48)

Further lines of enquiry have included the film’s exploration of private

property (Pérez Rubio 1997: 609); the pictorial antecedents of Saura’s
hunting imagery (Wood 1999); its analysis of illness (Wood 2000) and use
of film form (Heredero 2003; Zunzunegui 2003).
This chapter is also a product of its own time, as it draws on this previ-
ous scholarship, reacts to a recent emphasis in Spanish film criticism on
questions of gender and masculinity, and applies new theoretical insights,
such as Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of the ‘movement-image’ (1997) and the
‘time-image’ (1994) in cinema (first published in 1983 and 1985), and
Judith Butler’s work (1993) on the materiality of the body.6 First, it argues
that the two rabbit hunt sequences, rather than conspicuous metaphors,
are a force of violent interruption in the narrative that prevents the
viewer’s facile involvement with a straightforward – if shocking – plot, and
predictable – if critical – characterisation. This main narrative, not the
hunt sequences, encodes critique, and its analysis will reveal the wider
nature of Saura’s satire of 1960s Spain. This is most profound in the treat-
ment of ageing, a question that has received only passing critical attention
thus far (D’Lugo 1997: 44).7 Finally, this chapter offers a new reading of
film form in La caza that draws on Deleuze and Butler, and lays particu-
lar stress on the significance of the landscape and body shots of the siesta
sequence halfway through the film.
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Violent Interruptions: The Rabbit Hunt

La caza is the portrayal of a day out hunting. At first we assume that this
is an occasion for three old friends to be reunited and to introduce a young
relative to the supposed pleasures of the chase. This fictional narrative is
interrupted by two sequences of hunting, which, given their accuracy of
detail and objective narration, belong to the documentary genre.8 The first
hunt takes place in the morning, and is carried out by the four armed men
using a dog as a retriever; and the second, in the afternoon, involves the
introduction of ferrets in the warrens to flush the rabbits out. On a first
viewing of La caza, these images cause the greatest emotional impact.
Despite the fact that they make up only 6 of the 83 minutes of running
time, the profound impression they make on the viewer surely explains
why the rabbit hunt has become so central to the interpretation of the film.
Despite the unsettling directness of these images of the unstaged rabbit
slaughter, which at times become almost unwatchable, in critical accounts,
the hunt has none the less been inscribed in the poetic register of ‘indirec-
tion’ (Monegal 1998: 203) and understood as a metaphor for the violence
and killing of the Civil War. For instance, Antonio Monegal interprets the
hunt sequences as an example of

the rhetorical devices that, in spite of being incorporated into the narrative and par-
ticipating in its development, generate a discourse that is not ruled by narrative
economy . . .. We may identify those devices as figural operations, equivalent to
metaphor and metonymy, which, when combined, make up the allegorical texture of
the film. (1998: 204)

While I also consider the hunt sequences to operate outside ‘narrative

economy’, the point I contend here is the extent to which they are ‘figural’
or ‘allegorical’. Rob Stone has recently argued that the images of cruelty
to animals in films like La caza, Furtivos (Borau 1975) and Pascual Duarte
(Franco 1975) appeal to us on such a visceral level that we should be
shocked by the reality of the slaughter, and not dilute this response by con-
sidering it intellectually. He argues that we must

observe the indisputable reality of these incidents rather than the narrative-bound
symbolism of the slaughter. . . . Audiences should therefore not dismiss the slaugh-
ter onscreen as a device or an artistic conceit when they are faced with real pain and
real killing. (2004: 76, 80)

The images of the rabbit slaughter in La caza are so direct that they must
be seen for what they are, rather than as indirect metaphors. We should
therefore acknowledge that their role is to deal us ‘a smack up the side of
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the head’ (Stone 2004: 81): they violently interrupt the narrative and shake
us out of our viewing complacency.
Saura’s own statements about his intentions in making the film also cast
doubt on the hunt-as-metaphor interpretation. In a 1969 interview, he
stated that originally the idea behind La caza had indeed been to make a film
about the Civil War. The setting was to be a hunting ground and old Civil
War battlefield he discovered during the shoot of Llanto por un bandido
(1963), and the hunting party was to be split between two camps, two men
in one, three in the other, clearly to evoke the two opposing sides in the
conflict (Torres and Molina-Foix 2003: 8). Although the setting was
retained, the split-party idea was scrapped:

we took out the allusions to the Spanish Civil War . . .. The basic idea had evolved
quite a bit. Of course, there was a Spanish Civil War, but we wanted a broader
meaning. . . . We deliberately took out the allusions because that seemed to [sic] easy
to us. (Torres and Molina-Foix 2003: 10)

The hunt/war metaphor is ‘too easy’. The documentary hunt sequences

interrupt: their function is to jolt us out of our involvement with the nar-
rative and force us to maintain a critical distance from the film, a Brechtian
process common to much of the NCE (see Chapters 3 and 5). For, without
these interruptions, and other key moments of self-consciousness and
de-naturalisation that I discuss in the final section of this chapter, La caza
is a conventional narrative, with coherent characterisation and a linear plot,
which progresses, with increasing inevitability, to its tragic dénouement.

‘25 años de paz’ (25 Years of Peace), 25 years older

Saura’s ‘broader meaning’ emerges from the narrative of La caza, rather
than the hunt sequences. The film is a critical study of ageing. The devel-
opment of this theme encodes Saura’s critique of Franco’s Spain, as it
probes current tensions surrounding the age of the dictator and the first
generation of Franco loyalists, and the regime’s failure to garner the
support of middle-class youth, upon which it depended for its survival.
The official celebration of the dictatorship’s longevity, the ‘25 años de paz’,
was a massive attempt to disavow both the decline of those who were
ageing and the discontent of those coming of age. These two preoccupa-
tions are visible beneath the surface of the film commissioned for the cel-
ebrations, José Luis Sáenz de Heredia’s Franco, ese hombre (1964). In the
final section of this chapter, I will analyse film form in La caza to explore
ageing in the wider context of the representation of the body.
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We know that the idea for this film came to Saura during the shoot of
Llanto por un bandido in 1963, and that La caza itself was shot in 1965: the
project was therefore in preparation throughout 1964. The year in which
the ‘the basic idea evolved’ was the year of the ‘25 años de paz’, and while
La caza is no mechanical representation of events in this period, current
causes of anxiety informed its own critical concerns. ‘25 años de paz’ was
a propaganda slogan coined by Fraga, the recently appointed Minister for
Information (who was also responsible for the infamous ‘España es difer-
ente’ [Spain is Different] tourist catchphrase). Fraga masterminded the
nationwide celebrations: there were exhibitions, prizes and extensive press
coverage, as well as Franco, ese hombre, Sáenz de Heredia’s biopic (Preston
1993: 714–15). ‘The anniversary revels’, Paul Preston recounts in his biog-
raphy of the Caudillo, ‘confirmed Franco’s belief in his own immense pop-
ularity’ (1993: 714). They may also be seen as an attempt to disguise the
disquiet felt in official circles over the continued viability of a leader who
seized power in a very different, and long past, era.9 The economic and
social changes of the apertura might be rhetorically spun as part of a
planned development of Francoism (Preston 1993: 706), but the material
manifestation of its anachronism was the physical presence of the dictator.
Franco’s ageing could not be hidden: he turned seventy in 1962, and his
visible decline, accelerated by the onset of Parkinson’s disease (an illness
never officially acknowledged [Preston 1993: 729]), became increasingly
obvious.
The second cause of concern, the other side of the coin of old age, was
youth, or coming of age. The regime was always aware that its survival
depended on attracting the loyalty of new generations, as the establish-
ment of the Falangist youth organisations in the 1940s made clear. While
the failure to win the support of working-class youth, represented in the
characters of Saura’s Los golfos (1959), or Jesús Fernández Santos’s Llegar
a más (1963), might be expected, and thus comparatively tolerable, the
opposition of the middle-class children of the victors of the Civil War was
not. These young people made up the student population, and disturb-
ances and demonstrations at Spain’s universities from the 1950s onwards
were a thorn in the side of the regime.10 Dissident cinema recorded this
discontent: Bardem’s Muerte de un ciclista (1955), for instance, included
a brief, but important, sequence showing student riots (most of it was
censored), and Patino’s Nueve cartas a Berta (1965) (Chapter 5) offered
a detailed exposé of an angst-ridden student.
The context of the ‘25 años de paz’ also explains the role of the Civil War
in La caza. Throughout the dictatorship, this conflict was perpetually
present in the public sphere, through the media coverage of commemorative
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events such as the annual military parades of 18 July and 1 April, and the
opening of the ‘Valle de los caídos’ (Valley of the Fallen) in 1959.11 While
there was an apparent shift away from the language of triumphalism by the
1960s, as younger ministers became involved in writing Franco’s speeches,12
this was just rhetorical spin. Constant affirmations of ‘peace’ in Fraga’s ‘25
años de paz’ celebrations were, of course, a constant reminder of the war.
This obsession with the war of 1936–9 also underlined the differences
between young and old in the 1960s. This is a textbook case of generational
conflict exacerbated by war and its aftermath, whereby the clash between
young and old is intensified as it is one between a group that has fought in a
war and a group that has not.
Ageing and coming of age, key sources of anxiety to Francoism in the
1960s, are probed in La caza through a critique of masculinity. Saura over-
turns in this film the kind of homosociality described and prescribed by
the consensual Francoist cinema of the 1940s. It has been noted that
casting Mayo intertextually evokes the actor’s former embodiment of
the ‘galán’ (idol) of Francoism in films such as Raza (Sáenz de Heredia
1941), ¡Harka! (Arévalo 1941) and ¡A mí la legión! (Raise the Legion!,
Orduña 1942) (D’Lugo 1991: 57; Sánchez Vidal 1988: 48 n. 24). Santos
Zunzunegui has pointed out (2003: 417) the similar function of Ismael
Merlo, who plays José, and José María Prada, who takes the role of Luis,
the third member of the trio. The point here is not to repeat the truism
that male characterisation in consensual Francoist cinema heroicises,13
and dissident cinema de-heroicises, but rather to stress that casting these
particular actors in La caza foregrounds their ages and their ageing.
Marvin D’Lugo states that the choice of Mayo, who plays Paco, is ‘a shat-
tering statement of the passage of time and the transformation of a bygone
mythic hero into a venal and narcissistic old man’ (1991: 57), and the same
might be said of Merlo and Prada. In 1965, the year Franco was seventy-
three, these actors were in fact only fifty-four, forty-seven and forty
respectively. But just as Cuadrado’s monochrome photography avoided
the middling tones of grey in favour of the startling extremes of black and
white (Sánchez Vidal 1988: 48), so the narrative avoids the middle ground:
these middle-aged men are portrayed as old. Furthermore, although the
actor Emilio Gutiérrez Caba, who plays Paco’s brother-in-law Enrique,
was twenty-three in 1965, in a parallel gesture of exaggerating extremes,
he is infantilised in the film.
Narrative and cinematography were crucial to emphasising age, but so
was performance style. If we are willing to accept that actors in the VCE
could subversively undercut the conservatism otherwise presented by a
film (see, for instance, my reading of José Isbert’s role in La gran familia,
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Chapter 1), then we may allow for the possibility of actors contributing in
a similar way to the NCE. Aurora Bautista (discussed in Chapter 4) or
Mayo, who had previously starred in the popular Spanish cinema of the
1940s, cannot simply be dismissed as passive participants in art films,
whose material presence is manipulated by the director to evoke their
earlier films. While it would be possible for the performance of an actor to
introduce an element of conservatism in an otherwise subversive film, in
fact Bautista of La tía Tula and the cast of La caza share the directors’
oppositional vision. The participation of Mayo in the early stages of the
La caza project, for instance, indicates his involvement with, or at least
knowledge of, the creative development of the work. Saura is to be cred-
ited for shrewd casting in La caza (as César Santos Fontenla pointed out
in Nuestro Cine [1966c: 17]), but a balance must be struck when appor-
tioning creative responsibility for performances. In an interview of 1974,
Saura stated with respect to directing actors that ‘durante las primeras
semanas estudio a los actores, qué es lo que me pueden aportar, etc., y les
dejo una cierta libertad para ver hacia donde derivan’ (in the first weeks
I study the actors, consider what use they can be to me, etc., and I give them
a certain amount of freedom to see in which directions they drift) (Castro
1974: 395). None the less, when interviewed in 1988, the proud auteur
would play down any actor’s contribution: ‘the actors . . . do only what the
director allows. The director must openly answer for their ideas, the actors
not’ (Zeul 2003: 113). The overall vision of the critique of ageing in the
film is Saura’s, and no doubt he instructed the cast not to act their age, but
old age. Still, the strutting arrogance of Mayo’s Paco, the stooping bitter-
ness of Merlo’s José, the sulking moods of Prada’s Luis, combined with the
actors’ own awareness of their previous roles, also play an important part
in La caza’s narrative of ageing.
The ageing, anxiety about ageing and defiance of ageing exhibited by
these three old friends are evident throughout the narrative. In the opening
sequence, Saura is perhaps over-keen to establish character and context –
a result, no doubt, of shooting in sequence. The relationship between the
men is immediately explained: they are old army pals, reunited for a day’s
hunting. ‘Después de tanto tiempo’ (After such a long time), José com-
ments as he puts his arm round Paco in a repeated gesture of forced com-
radeship, ‘otra vez juntos’ (we’re together again). He then reminisces about
a fourth old friend who, we later learn, has committed suicide: ‘si llega a
venir Arturo, los cuatro de siempre. Pobre Arturo’ (if Arturo were here, it
would be the four of old times. Poor Arturo). The intention behind this
exchange is to evoke, from the outset, the men’s former youthful and
chummy selves to contrast them with their present situation. We soon
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appreciate that their friendship is now a sham, as all three are motivated by
self-interest. José has organised the outing as a pretext to ask Paco for a
loan, Luis has come along to keep in with his current boss, though he is
keen to find a new one, and Paco just wants to take some exercise. Nor are
family ties disinterested: Paco has invited along his brother-in-law Enrique
because, through him, he has gained access to his father-in-law’s jeep.
Saura brings the theme of ageing to the fore through Paco and José, the
two older men played by the two older actors. They initially represent
two different approaches to ageing, but prove to be mirror-images of one
another. José is the obsessive. He claims he is ill, complains of stomach
pains and periodically takes pills. The illness is unspecified, but José’s
characterisation as an ageing ex-soldier is underscored when he admits to
Paco: ‘tengo dolores desde que me dieron el tiro’ (it’s hurt ever since I was
shot). During a break before lunch, Enrique takes a photograph of José as
he crouches over a pool to wash. He rips it up then glowers jealously at
Paco’s comparatively statuesque physique, while reproaching himself for
being old and letting himself go. ‘Parecí [en la foto] a un viejo de estos que
toman el sol en una esquina’ ([In that photo] I looked like one of those old
men you see sitting in the sun on a corner), he scolds himself in voice-over,
‘tengo que llevar cuidado. Es natural. Después de tanto tiempo sin hacer
ejercicio. En cambio, él sigue igual. No le importa nada’ (I must be careful.
It’s not surprising. It’s been such a long time since I’ve done any exercise.
However, he’s just the same. Nothing bothers him). Paco is the narcissist.
He takes pride in his well-preserved body, and his character anticipates
that of Julián in Saura’s next feature, Peppermint frappé (1967), in his inter-
est in exercise and cosmetics: while Enrique applies lip salve, Paco is the
only character to use suntan cream. In voice-over we learn of his fascist
intolerance of the physical imperfections of the weak and the lame.
However, just as his confidence driving the jeep at the beginning of the film
is undercut by José’s revelation of his former, lowly position as a truck-
driver, so his anxiety about ageing is revealed at the end of the film. In the
sequence that immediately precedes his murder by José, we see him
examine his wrinkles in the drinks-box mirror, then pull at his temples to
smooth out the crow’s feet. Like José, then, he rejects the reality of his
ageing and acts out the equivalent of tearing up the unflattering photo-
graph by altering his appearance before the mirror.
Cinematic form is used so that the whole film may be likened to an
unflattering photograph of ageing men. Critics have previously noted the
way camera-work, lighting and overexposure of the film stock depict the
oppressive environment of the old Civil War battlefields (Figure 6.1), but
those cinematic resources are also harnessed in order cruelly to expose the
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Figure 6.1. La caza. Elías Querejeta, P.C.

ageing and suffering of the body. Cuadrado trains his camera on those
bodies in starkly lit medium shots, dehumanising long shots and cruelly
detailed close-ups, which pick out their scars and wrinkles. Cuadrado
didn’t usually use the sun as a source of light when shooting outdoors, but
in La caza all the lighting was natural owing to the key role played by the
sun in the plot (Llinàs 1989: 245). (The sun is also crucial in the portrayal
of hard agricultural work in Saura’s earlier documentary, shot by Baena
and Antonio Álvarez, Cuenca [1958].) In La caza the men’s ageing bodies
sweat and burn under the scorching Castilian summer sun (Figure 6.2) and
Saura reminds us in interview that no artificial resources were needed to
evoke this heat: the sweat and panting were genuine and experienced by the
whole crew during the arduous four-week August shoot.14 As in Nueve
cartas a Berta (Chapter 5), figuring the Spanish sun as an enemy was also
an indirect attack on Spanish fascism, as audiences would link it to the title
and first line of the anthem ‘Cara al sol’ (Face to the Sun) (Oms 1981: 30).
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Figure 6.2 Alfredo Mayo in La caza. Elías Querejeta, P.C.

The equivalence between José and Paco is conveyed through their por-
trayal using the same cinematic resources. Saura also exploits the potential
offered by frames and mirrors to reinforce this similarity. The enclosure of
the two characters within a single frame becomes a visual leitmotif in La
caza, which echoes the credit sequence in which the camera slowly zooms
towards two caged ferrets. In the café at the start of the film, for instance,
the four men sit together at the bar, but, in medium shot, and through a
long take, the camera tracks from side to side to ensure that only two char-
acters occupy the frame at any one time. Again, when Paco drives from the
café to the hunting ground, he and José, who sit in the front seats, are
linked by mise en scène. In a long shot, we see the two men through the car
windscreen as it approaches, and the windscreen partition simultaneously
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divides and unites them. They are trapped by the frame of the windscreen
within the frame of the cinema screen in a visual refrain of the two ferrets
of the credit sequence, which share a cage that also contains a divide. There
follows an exchange between José and Juan’s mother that reinforces the
similarity between the hunters and ferrets, introduces the tension that
governs the film and looks forward to its violent end: ‘[los hurones] se
pasan el día gruñendo y removiéndose sin parar . . .. Están como locos,
y alguno se va a escapar’ ([the ferrets] spend the day growling and endlessly
moving around . . .. They’re sort of mad, and one of them is going to
escape).15 Ferrets are ‘notoriously vicious and ferocious creatures’,
Gwynne Edwards notes, ‘and the pair in the cage are kept in separate com-
partments to prevent them tearing each other apart’ (1995: 73), but his
reading only draws a parallel between the combative animals and the two
sides of the Civil War conflict. Through cinematography, editing and mise
en scène, the caged ferrets image resonates throughout the film’s portrait of
Paco and José, conveying the similarities and rivalries between these two
ageing male characters.
Mirrors are also used to link them. For instance, as the group prepares
for the hunt, we see José open the drinks-box to check its contents in the
left side of the frame. Paco is positioned in the right of the frame facing his
friend, and between them is the large mirror set in the lid of the drinks-
box. The image of José in the mirror matches the image of Paco located
behind it and implies that the two characters are mirror-images of one
another. This mirror-image conceit is used again to indicate equivalence
when the two men argue after Paco refuses José’s request for a loan. Both
characters stare at the camera straight on in close-up, as if the camera itself
were a mirror, and the images of the two men’s faces are cross-cut ten
times. Diegetically, we understand that the characters are staring at one
another, thus the sequence implies that each character contemplates not
his mirror-image, but the face of the other.
Rather than mirror-images, the other two older male characters in the
film – Luis, part of the original military foursome, and Juan, the exploited,
impoverished gamekeeper who looks after José’s land played by Fernando
Sánchez Pollack – are projections of José and Paco’s fears of ageing. Luis’s
weakness and clumsiness are caused by alcoholism, but when he falls off a
donkey in a rare moment of horse-play early in the film, José does not tease
him about his inadequate manhood, which one might expect in a context
where the ability to dominate animals would be considered a marker of
masculinity.16 He reproaches him instead for his ageing: ‘eres más joven
que yo y estás completamente acabado’ (you’re younger than I am and
you’re completely finished). Likewise, Juan functions as a manifestation of
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this fear of ageing. The script specifies that ‘tendrá cincuenta años, pero
parece más viejo. Los rasgos de su cara son secos y recios. Tiene la piel
surcada de arrugas, reticulada y renegrida del sol y de la intemperie’ (he is
about fifty years old, but looks older. His facial features are pronounced
and shrivelled. His skin is furrowed by wrinkles, crunched up and black-
ened by the sun and the elements) (Saura and Fons 1965: 36), a descrip-
tion that Sánchez Pollack’s physique. Juan also projects Paco’s fear of
physical disability: ‘no soporto los tullidos’ (I can’t stand cripples), he com-
plains, ‘me dan escalofríos. Prefiero morirme antes de quedarme cojo o
manco. Además, dan mala suerte’ (they give me the creeps. I’d rather die
than be lame or lose an arm. Also, they bring bad luck). Finally, the absent
Arturo casts a shadow over Paco and José’s lives, as his suicide signals their
own fear of death.
Through this exploration of ageing and anxiety over ageing, Saura
exposes what official discourse attempted to disguise in the ‘25 años de paz’
celebrations: the decline of a dictator and a dictatorship that had outlived
its time. Franco, ese hombre may be seen as an attempt to disguise this
anachronism. The title promises an insight into the life of Franco the
‘man’, but the demonstrative adjective ‘ese’ indicates its respectful dis-
tance: he is ‘ese’ (that), not ‘este’ (this), man. Only the start and end of the
96-minute film show the Franco of 1964; the biography is mainly a pre-
dictable, triumphalist romp through Spanish history of the twentieth
century. It is telling that Franco’s youth is emphasised, his early promo-
tions stressed by the voice-over narrator with reminders such as ‘una vez
más se repite la constante de ser el más joven en este empleo’ (once again
the ever-present theme of his being the youngest in this job is repeated).
This is an attempt to link him to the youthful soldiers of the military
parade at the beginning of the film, who are described as ‘hombres
jóvenes – los hijos y nietos de los que, bajo el mando de este mismo
Caudillo, conquistaron el porvenir de España’ (young men – the sons and
grandsons of those who, under the command of this same Caudillo, con-
quered the future of Spain). The film culminates with an interview with
the revered figure himself, whose pre-prepared monologue features famil-
iar references to the Civil War as a ‘Cruzada’ (Crusade), and Spain’s high
mission as ‘la reserva espiritual de Europa’ (the spiritual reserve of
Europe), and addresses the young once again with a plea that they should
recognise that ‘el progreso de la patria se alcanza con las aportaciones de
las sucesivas generaciones’ (the progress of the country is achieved
through the contributions of subsequent generations). No matter how def-
erential the interviewer, or sympathetic the lighting, camera angle and dis-
tance, the dictator now appears an out-of-touch old man.
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Saura’s film includes a fascinating reference to a similar attempt to dis-

guise old age through manipulating representation. Enrique’s snapshot of
the hunting party with the spoils of the morning’s rabbit hunt has become
representative of the whole film; the still is reproduced as an illustration in
published commentaries (D’Lugo 1991: 62; Sánchez Vidal 1988: 40) and
it is one of the three chosen for Saura’s official website, over which the
director presumably has authorial control.17 This photograph is a refer-
ence to masculinist hunting and military iconography. It recalls portraits
of Franco himself, and may even directly refer to the images of the dict-
ator posing with fish and game caught in the pursuit of his favourite
hobbies in the credits and at minute 90 of Franco, ese hombre. Its general
purpose, as Guy Wood has pointed out, is to caricature the kind of hunting
images that abounded in the period:

este fotograma . . . es una genial parodia de las ‘proezas’ constatadas por la icono-
grafía cinegética ‘oficial’ y encierra un fin propicatorio [sic] mucho más sutil. Tenía
que haber calado muy hondo en la psique de los espectadores a mediados de los
sesenta, público que habría visto y estaría harto de ver poses casi idénticas e igual-
mente vanas del Jefe del Estado y sus sicofantes después de sus cacerias [sic] en los
NO-DO o en la prensa, imágenes con que la maquinaria propagandística franquista
intentaba la captura ideológica masiva del pueblo. (this still . . . is a brilliant parody
of the ‘exploits’ paraded in ‘official’ hunting iconography and has a far more subtle
propitiatory purpose. It must have had a very deep impact on the psyche of spectators
in the mid-1960s, an audience that who would have seen and been fed up of seeing
almost identical and equally vain poses of the Head of State and his sycophants after
their hunting expeditions in the NO-DO and the press, images with which
the Francoist propaganda machine tried ideologically to imprison the people on
a massive scale.) (1999: 363–4)

The parody is carried out in La caza by exposing the artifice of the shot.
The four men strike pompous poses – particularly Paco, who puffs out his
chest and straightens his back to gain a few inches in height.18 But their
exhaustion and hotness, made visible through the sweat beaded on their
brows and soaking through their shirts, debunk the triumphalist visual
rhetoric to suggest that this photograph is just a cover for the crisis of mas-
culinity and ageing beneath.
La caza exaggerates age in order to critique ageing. On the one hand, the
middle-aged actors portray old age, and on the other, twenty-three-year-old
Gutiérrez Caba’s Enrique acts like a child. Middle age, old age and fear of
old age mark a new departure for Saura in his third feature, but these are
preoccupations to which he returns, for instance in Antonio’s anxieties
about age in Carmen (1983), and the experience of old age in Goya en
Burdeos (Goya in Bordeaux 1999). Adolescence, or coming of age, was an
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interest explored in Saura’s first film, Los golfos (1959), although this is
carried out in a manner more in keeping with the ‘angry young man’ theme
of contemporary New Wave cinemas (Delgado 1999: 41–2). Saura’s infan-
tilisation of Enrique, the young man of La caza, in fact looks forward to his
exploration of adults behaving as children later in his work. In Stress es tres,
tres (1968), for instance, he explores, in his words, the world of ‘tres adultos
que se portan como adolescentes’ (three adults who behave like teenagers)
(quoted in Sánchez Vidal 1988: 60); La madriguera (The Warren 1969) also
investigates the consequences of childhood games played out in an adult
context; and both Stress es tres, tres and Peppermint frappé investigate ‘el
problema . . . del sexo inmaduro en el mundo de pretendida adultez profe-
sional’ (the problem . . . of an immature attitude to sex in a world of sup-
posed professional maturity) (Sánchez Vidal 1988: 60).
Enrique works with Paco and his father, and he is characterised as a child
of the winners. We learn over the course of the film that his father owns
land, a factory and the jeep, and that he has lent Enrique his German gun,
which implies that he participated, along with Luis, in the Blue Division.
The portrayal of Enrique’s relations with the older group of men in La
caza is typical of generational conflict: the other men had fought in the war
and Enrique had not. But this is not just a case of what is rather fondly
evoked as ‘Loca juventud’ (Crazy Youth) in the title of one of the pop songs
(by Huerta Navarro) played on the men’s flashy new radio. This conflict is
pushed to extremes by emphasising the old age of the middle-aged men,
and infantilising Enrique, the youth.
At the start of the film Enrique commands no interest – in terms of cine-
matography he never occupies the frame alone, attracts no close-ups or
point-of-view shots, and his face is actually obscured in our first view of
him by the vizor of his cap. At first he uses the polite second-person ‘usted’
form to address the older men, and throughout the film is referred to by
Luis as ‘muchacho’ (boy) and by Paco with the diminutive ‘Quique’. There
is a visual and acoustic parallel between Paco periodically slapping Enrique
on the back and calling him ‘Quique’, and José patting his dog and cooing
its name, ‘Cuca’. D’Lugo has emphasised the growing importance of
Enrique’s role as the viewer’s figure of identification, or ‘on-screen
observer’, later in the film (1991: 60–6). The first point-of-view shot is
Paco’s, the second is José’s, as he observes a couple arrive in the café,
then most belong to Enrique. But these point-of-view shots indicate the
inquisitiveness of a child, rather than a masterful control of the gaze.
For instance, when Enrique first picks up the gun and we share his point-
of-view as he scans the landscape through the sight, we hear him make the
sound ‘¡pío, pío!’ (bang, bang!) as if he were playing a childhood game.
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Saura and Angelino Fons’s script specifies that Enrique has a ‘rostro . . .
algo aniñado’ (slightly childish face) (1965: 4) and make his clothes a point
of interest too: he is to wear a jacket that is too small (1965: 4), like a child
who has outgrown his clothes. In the film as it stands, the tight jacket has
been replaced by a pair of extra-short shorts that similarly infantilise him.
Saura emphasises this point when the camera tilts down after the scene at
the village bakery to take in two small boys wearing identical short trousers.
Here we see a man dressed as a child, just as, in terms of characterisation,
we have a child in an adult’s body. Saura is wrong, or forgetful, when he
says in an interview of 1996 of his La prima Angélica (Cousin Angélica 1973)
that ‘it is the first time in cinema that an adult adopts, let’s say, the form of
a child and acts like a child’ (Castro 2003: 129). The adult Enrique dressed
as a child in La caza is an example of what we may term generational trans-
vestism, of which there are other instances in the NCE. For instance, in
Picazo’s La tía Tula (1964) (Chapter 4), the adult Ramiro wears a bib, simi-
larly indicating his emasculation and infantilisation.
Through its focus on the extremes of age, La caza circles around a void,
which becomes an absence that is always present: manhood in its prime.
Significantly, this was Saura’s time of life: he shot the film in 1965 when
he was thirty-three. This is a state for which the older men are nostalgic
and which the younger man cannot reach. This absence points to the void
at the heart of Franco’s patriarchy. If the ageing and fear of ageing of the
three war comrades signal the decrepitude of a regime in its twenty-sixth
year and a dictator in his seventy-third, the infantilising treatment of youth
indicates a new generation ill-equipped to bring about change and assume
adult responsibility.

‘Idle Periods’: Time, Space, Body

La caza is therefore metaphorical cinema as it criticises the regime indi-
rectly through its narrative. But an analysis of the narrative alone, like the
excessive focus on the rabbit hunt sequences, still leads to only a partial
interpretation of the film. The reading of La caza carried out thus far has
shown that Saura uses a conventional film narrative of coherent character-
isation and linear plot to expose and critique anxieties about ageing that
characterised 1960s Spain. This is violently interrupted by the hunt
sequences, which establish an important critical distance between the
viewer and the narrative. But the progress of the plot is also arrested
through ‘idle periods’, a term used by Deleuze to describe pauses in a film
that are not justified in narrative terms.19 Like the rabbit hunt sequences,
these also interrupt the fictional narrative, but unlike those hunt sequences,
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which reach the viewer through the gut because they launch an assault on
our emotions, these idle periods reach the viewer through the mind because
they question our knowledge of time, space and the body. There are a
number of de-naturalising moments in La caza, which function as minor
interruptions to the conventional narrative: the two instances where char-
acters speak directly to the camera; the montage sequence when the guns
are loaded, which is edited so that the men appear to point the guns at each
other; the midday snapshot of the four men with their hunting trophies and
the freeze-frame shot of Enrique at the end of the picture. I will focus here
on the unsettling pause that takes place half-way through the narrative –
actually 54 minutes into the 83-minute film – the siesta sequence.
This sequence may at first seem justified diegetically, as it is culturally:
the two older men take a nap after lunch on a hot day. We might consider
it in relation to the film’s characterisation. Paco and José’s siesta is an indi-
cator of class and age – the downtrodden Juan must work, we presume, not
sleep, and the younger Enrique and Luis don’t bother with a snooze. It is
a nice detail of context that in the early 1960s Franco himself began to
depend on a daily nap (Preston 1993: 700). The siesta sequence of La caza
therefore debunks, succinctly and effectively, the rhetoric of virile mas-
culinity that reaches its climax in Saura’s portrayal of the snapshot of the
hunters/warriors with their spoils. In a Western cultural context in which
the reclining, sleeping or dead human form is overwhelmingly figured as
female, as Elisabeth Bronfen has demonstrated in Over Her Dead Body
(1993), the focus on these dozing old men, like grotesque ‘sleeping beau-
ties’, is particularly startling. Saura draws our attention to preceding trad-
itions of the gendering of the passive human form by juxtaposing his slow
pan over the two men’s bodies from left to right in the siesta sequence with
a point-of-view shot of Enrique’s fetishising gaze drifting, this time from
right to left, across the similarly reclining body of a blonde model in one
his girlie magazines.20 Thus Saura parodies his ex-soldier hunters not only
by depicting them in a period of inactivity – which is remarkable in itself
in a film about ex-soldiers on a rabbit hunt – but also by portraying them
using the fetishising conventions of pornography. The passive, sleeping
bodies of Paco and José reveal their weakness and ageing, and the stillness
of their forms looks forward to their ultimate inertia, at the end of the film,
in death.
During the siesta sequence we are afforded an insight into Paco’s and
José’s dreams through voice-over, which also confirms the characterisation
of the two men constructed thus far in the film. Paco’s reverie contains a
dream within a dream. His son recounts his nightmare of being killed by
dogs,21 to which his father responds with a condescending lament about
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the younger generations, and then a comparison between his son’s

upbringing and his own: ‘les enseñan cuatro cosas. No hacen nada en todo
el día y sueñan con perros. Si se hubiera criado como yo . . .’ (They hardly
teach them anything. They do nothing all day and then they dream about
dogs. If he’d been brought up like me . . .). José’s dream, meanwhile,
reveals his anxiety over his emotional and physical failings. His separation
from his wife is evoked through an argument with her, and his failing body
is alluded to through her accusation: ‘te has envenenado: tienes la piel vieja
y seca’ (you’ve poisoned yourself: your skin is old and dry).
However, the siesta sequence in La caza is unsettling in ways that tran-
scend its role within the narrative. Its experimental filmic depiction
wrenches it from the register of the everyday – the nap after lunch to aid
digestion and avoid the sun – and from its place in the story – the neces-
sary period of rest during a hot day out hunting. No special effects or
change of location here (the budget of two million pesetas22 would have
permitted neither): using exactly the same actors and location, experi-
mentation occurs by reversing the relation between plot development and
its filmic portrayal. In other words, while in the narrative sections film
form advances plot and underpins characterisation, in the siesta sequence
narrative is suspended and form is all. It is one example of a number of for-
mally disruptive moments highlighted by Carlos Heredero in his study of
the aesthetics of the NCE, ‘cuya inclusión se desentiende de los nexos
espaciales y causales hasta escapar de toda referencialidad o vinculación
representacional, hasta convertirse en meros iconos de cerrada función
expresiva’ (the inclusion of which bring about a detachment from spatial
and causal bounds to the point of escaping all modes of reference or rep-
resentational connections and of becoming pure icons with a restricted
expressive function) (2003: 152).23 The experimental formal presentation
of the siesta sequence is not, therefore, used only to create an oneiric
atmosphere, as Sánchez Vidal suggests (1988: 48), because the dreams are
linked to narrative and characterisation, and they only form part of the
second shot. The formal representation of this ‘idle period’ is rather to
transcend narrative and challenge the viewer’s perception of time, space
and the body.
Manuel Villegas López argued that in sequences such as this:

El tiempo es una imagen y la imagen no tiene tiempo. Se ha pasado del propósito

de narrar al propósito de expresar, y es la expresión y no la narración lo que da su
profunda y definitiva unidad al film. (Time is an image and the image has no time.
There has been a move away from the desire to narrate to the desire to express, and
it is expression not narration that gives the film a profound and definitive unity.)
(1967: 66)
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This observation anticipates Deleuze’s work on the ‘time-image’, as

Heredero has pointed out (2003: 141). Deleuze’s account of the shift from
the ‘movement-image’ to the ‘time-image’ offers a way of thinking through
the implications of the switch between narrative and experimental sec-
tions of La caza. Sánchez Vidal’s observation that the film is ‘un relato
lineal y de corte realista, “a la americana”’ (a linear, realist story told ‘in an
American way’) (1988: 46) – which echoes M. Marinero’s observation that
it drew on the American thriller (1967: 145) – may be developed if we con-
sider the narrative sections of La caza as cinema of the ‘movement-image’,
which corresponds in Deleuze’s work to ‘classical’ film, or pre-Second
World War American cinema, particularly the Hollywood genre film. In
the ‘movement-image’ sections of La caza time and space are subordinate
to action: the plot unfolds through linear succession in the present tense,
and space becomes the specific place of the hunting ground and old Civil
War battlefield owned by José. Consequently, the characters are bound by
the action of the plot, and we appreciate their ageing through the plot, even
if it is exaggerated and reinforced by its filmic portrayal.
Deleuze contends that a crisis in the ‘movement-image’ occurred in
post-Second World War cinema because the nature of experience in this
period so radically altered that a brand-new mode of cinematic expression
was necessary to represent it (1997: 210–11). This is the ‘time-image’, by
which Deleuze means post-war ‘modern’ film, such as Neorealism and the
French New Wave (Spanish cinema is not mentioned), in which time and
space are no longer subordinate to action. Time, in this type of cinema,
may thus transcend the tyranny of the present and space may become
indeterminate and strange. Characters are no longer bound by action, so
ageing, in the siesta sequence of La caza, is conveyed uniquely through
film form. This sequence of La caza might be considered a ‘time-image’,
though it is important to stress that this sequence lies embedded in a
film of ‘movement-images’. Saura’s La caza shows that both classic, nar-
rative ‘movement-image’ cinema, and modern, experimental ‘time-image’
cinema are capable of portraying and critiquing a modern world.24
If we examine the two sequences at the opening and end of the film that
concern the relationship between character and space, the difference
between the ‘movement-image’ and ‘time-image’, and Saura’s use of both,
are clear. In the first, we see Paco driving the jeep along a highway through
the Castilian plain. The narrative begins when he drives into the fore-
ground of the camera’s range; therefore, this specific jeep is singled out for
us as the subject of the film from the anonymous vehicles that pass along
the road. The jeep continues to approach the camera, there is a hidden cut,
then, in medium shot, we see Paco park and get out of the car. A tracking
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shot, still at medium distance, follows him as he walks away from the car to
look at the view, while he polishes the lenses of his sunglasses. We then share
the first point-of-view shot of the film with him as he surveys the skyline.
In medium shot we see his eyes move from left to right, then Saura cuts to
an eye-line match point-of-view shot that scans the landscape in the same
direction.25 This is a good example of how, in the ‘movement-image’, space
is transformed into a specific place in relation to plot. Through the point-
of-view shot, this indeterminate space, crossed by an unspecified highway,
becomes the specific place where the day’s hunting will occur. Moreover,
Paco’s visual ownership of that place through subjective cinematography
introduces the conflict with José that will drive the plot forward, for José is
the legal owner of that same place.
The final shot of the film focuses on the same landscape. Enrique has run
away from the theatre of violence up the valley side. But no controlling
point-of-view shot is offered here. Rather, he is trapped in the frame sur-
rounded by the landscape, as his panting continues on the soundtrack for a
lengthy 10 seconds. Critics have previously interpreted this image allegori-
cally: either in a negative sense, whereby Enrique stands for the young gen-
eration trapped by the hatred and violence of the older one (Kinder 1993:
165; Wood 1999: 369); or a positive one, according to which Enrique repre-
sents a generation that has succeeded in running away from these murder-
ous rivalries of the former (Millar 1975: 236).26 But if we consider it as a
‘time-image’, its meaning is more profound. The shot indicates man trapped
by time: both the vertiginous rush from past to future (the panting on the
soundtrack) and the terrifying stasis of the present (the freeze-frame).
The siesta sequence lasts 2 minutes and consists of two extreme long
takes, one of 44 seconds and one of 73. In the first, Cuadrado’s camera
slowly sweeps from left to right and moves down, in extreme long shot,
across the arid landscape of the Castilian valley from a point high up the
valley side. This space is not linked to the narrative as in the ‘movement-
image’ because this shot is not, as D’Lugo claims (1991: 65), the point-
of-view of one of the characters. There is a cut to an extreme close-up of
the radio, which is the starting point of another pan, again from left to
right, along the sleeping forms of Paco and José in continued extreme
close-up.27 There is a jarring contrast between these two shots in terms of
proximity to subject – extreme long shot cuts to extreme close-up – yet
similarity in terms of camera movement and length of take. At the end of
the pan over the men’s bodies, the camera rests on José’s right eye, which
cuts horizontally across the screen, because he is lying down and the
camera is upright. His eye opens and through a point-of-view shot we
share his view of Enrique in the distance; there follows the point-of-view
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shot where Enrique spies on the double-page spread of the magazine

model. These two point-of-view shots mark the end of the siesta sequence
and a return to the narrative. On the soundtrack, during the first shot, the
faint sound of the music the group were listening to on the radio is grad-
ually drowned out by the monotonous clicking of the cicadas. This forms
a soundbridge to the second shot. The cicadas are audible in the back-
ground as we hear the voices of Paco and his son in the first dream. These
voices fade out to the clicking sound, then we finally hear the voices of José
and his estranged wife in the second dream.
Unlike Deleuze’s cinema of the ‘movement-image’, there is no action
motivated by the narrative here, nor is there movement in terms of plot.
Although the camera moves physically, it is not for the sake of narrative. In
the ‘movement-image’, movement usually occurs, in any case, through
montage (Deleuze 1997: 29). The ‘time-image’ opens up time through
tracking shots and depth-of-field (Deleuze draws examples from Alain
Resnais and Luchino Visconti for the former, and Orson Welles for the
latter [1994: 39]), and for both of these shots the long take is necessary.28
Deleuze (whose writing on cinema can be at once evasive and engaging,
frustrating and fascinating) is characteristically vague on the exact nature
of the treatment of time in the ‘time-image’; however, its fragmentation,
or stratification, is key. His use of the term ‘crystal-image’ is more helpful,
as it indicates this textured temporal quality: ‘What the crystal reveals or
makes visible is the hidden ground of time, that is, the differentiation into
two flows, that of presents which pass and that of pasts which are pre-
served’ (Deleuze 1994: 98). Jacques Aumont, who quotes this passage,
summarises this as ‘temporal collage’ (1997: 183).
The notions of the ‘crystal-image’, in Deleuze’s terminology, or ‘tem-
poral collage’, in Aumont’s, throw light on Saura’s treatment of time in the
two long takes of the siesta sequence. We are no longer in the present tense
of the narrative sections of the film. The extremely long takes emphasise
the passage of time, making it both expand into synchronous ‘presents
which pass’, and contract into diachronic ‘pasts which are preserved’. In
the first shot, the slowness of movement on the imagetrack, and the
monotonous rhythm of the cicadas on the soundtrack, expand time to
the point that it stands still. Long takes, intense heat and the drone of the
insects are similarly used in Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
(a film not mentioned by Deleuze). In both Saura’s and Weir’s films, the
landscape takes on a hypnotic, static quality, which points to the timeless-
ness of the physical environment, whose monumentality, compared to
man’s ephemerality, seems overwhelming. On the other hand, that same
shot contracts time, and the landscape becomes, in Santos Zunzunegui’s
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words, a ‘lugar de sedimentación del pasado’ (place where the past is sed-
imented) (2003: 416). With the heightened sensitivity to the image that the
long take brings about, this shot becomes a ‘temporal collage’. We see not
only the human time of the twentieth century, when the valley witnessed
the Civil War, and left its trace in the form of bunkers (as Zunzunegui
points out [2003: 416]) but also geological time, when the rock developed
into its present formation, and a river, now no more than a stagnant pool,
carved out the valley itself.
The second shot, which is both similar, through camera movement,
length of take and the sound of the cicadas, yet different, through the dis-
tance between the viewer and the object viewed, also performs this con-
traction of time. In the ‘movement-image’, the body is most often
represented in action, and its movement is paralleled by the progressive
succession of shots in montage. This is reversed here. The body is static
and the camera slowly moves in a long take. Just as the landscape reveals
the strata of time in the first shot, so the body acts as an index of time in
the second. Though referring to the cinema of Antonioni, the following
passage from The Time-Image evokes with accuracy this sequence: ‘The
body is no longer exactly what moves; subject of movement or the instru-
ment of action [as it is in the ‘movement-image’], it becomes rather the
developer [révélateur] of time, it shows time through its tiredness and
waiting’ (Deleuze 1994: xi). The two bodies presented to us by Saura in
this second shot thus ‘reveal’ or ‘develop’ time through their agedness:
each wrinkle encodes passing human time, like each fold of the rocks in the
landscape indicates geological time. The scar on Mayo’s upper left arm
recalls the bunkers we see on the hillside. We presume it is a war wound,
like the one José complains of, so the scar, like the bunkers, is the trace that
remains in space of a human event in time.
In this second shot, the human body fills the frame through excessive
close-up just as the landscape fills it through excessive distance in the first,
and the slow, tracking movement is the same in each. Here, Saura is experi-
menting with the equalising role of the screen as frame. Deleuze, writing
at this point on the ‘movement-image’, observes that

the screen, as the frame of frames, gives a common standard of measurement to

things which do not have one – long shots of countryside and close-ups of the face,
an astronomical system and a single drop of water – parts which do not have the same
denominator of distance, relief or light. (Deleuze 1997: 14–15)

But these effects of ‘Gulliverisation’ and ‘Lilliputisation’, to quote Philippe

Dubois (Aumont 1997: 103), are more than just a curiosity of the cinematic
medium. For, if emphasised, their impact on the viewer may be profoundly
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unsettling. Saura exaggerates scale in the siesta sequence shots and shows
that, in Deleuze’s words, ‘the cinema can, with impunity, bring us close to
things or take us away from them and revolve around them, it suppresses
both the anchoring of the subject and the horizon of the world’ (1997: 57).
Following Deleuze, we may conclude that the siesta sequence is unset-
tling because it disrupts time and space, and thus questions the viewer’s
extra-cinematic knowledge and expectation of each acquired through
his or her own perception of ‘the horizon of the world’. Time no longer
unfolds in a linear manner in the present tense, but is fractured and evokes
present and past simultaneously. Space is no longer a specific place
explained by the plot, and our relationship to it is no longer stabilised
through the point-of-view shots of a protagonist. Finally, our location
within space is also disrupted by the radical shifts of extreme distance to
extreme proximity. All these elements ‘suppress’, in Deleuze’s words, ‘the
anchoring’ of the viewing subject.
That Saura chooses to portray the human body in extreme close-up is of
course especially significant. The over-proximity of this shot renders the
body unsettling: simultaneously familiar, yet strange, in the manner of the
Freudian Unheimlich. This shot denies the humanist urge, satisfied by nar-
rative cinema, to link the human form on screen to character and make it a
vehicle for narrative. In the siesta sequence, the portrayal of Paco and José
by Mayo and Merlo is incidental. Neither actor nor character counts, only
the materiality of their bodies – robbed of their individuality through over-
proximity – matters. Butler’s insights into the materiality of the body in
Bodies that Matter (1993) are therefore instructive here, although our
concern is with age rather than sex. Butler draws a distinction between the
material ‘facts’ about a body that are ‘primary and irrefutable’ – for ‘bodies
live and die; eat and sleep; feel pain, pleasure; endure illness and violence’ –
and the affirmation of those ‘facts’ within discourse: ‘their irrefutability in
no way implies what it might mean to affirm them and through what dis-
cursive means’ (1993: xi). Thus, Butler proceeds to show that ‘sexual
difference [is materialised] in the service of the heterosexual imperative’.
In other words, the sexed body is made to ‘matter’ or made ‘intelligible’
through its location within the hegemonical discourse of heterosexuality.
Discourse, therefore, has ‘the power . . . to enact what it names’ (1993:
187). If we consider La caza within Butler’s framework, the body in ques-
tion is not so much one that signifies sexual difference, as one that signifies
ageing. The ideological matrix that gives those bodies meaning, or makes
them ‘matter’, is Francoism. Its discourses of triumphalism and patriarchy
are crucial to characterisation in the narrative sections of the film. Paco’s
beliefs, for instance, lead to his sense of self-worth, and those beliefs hinge
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on a fascist exaltation of the healthy, male body. Even though, as I discuss

above, the narrative itself offers a critique of those discourses, especially
through the similarities revealed between Paco and José, the siesta sequence
takes the critique further. It wrests those bodies from the discursive con-
structs that give them meaning, from the constructs that both signify them
and give them significance. For example, within the narrative, war wounds
are a marker of virile heroism and military glory, but in the new ‘arrange-
ments’ thrown up by the ‘time-image’ they are just scars. In the non-
narrative siesta sequence these bodies are laid bare, as it were, before us:
scarred, weak, suffering and ageing.
The radical equivalence between body and landscape implied through
these two shots also deserves comment.29 In 1958, Saura described his
intention to create such a parallel. The passage reveals the consistency
between Saura’s vision and its realisation seven years on:

Intentaría un cine brutal, primitivo en sus personajes, un cine para rodar en la

Serranía de Cuenca, en Castilla, en los Monegros, en los pueblos de Guadalajara,
Teruel . . . allí donde el hombre y la tierra se identifican formando un todo.
Seguramente sería un cine no conformista – aquí estaría lo aragonés – directo, sen-
cillo de forma y muy real. Real en la valoración de las pequeñas superficies: la piel, el
tejido, la tierra, las gotas de sudor . . . (I would try to make a brutal cinema, with
primitive characterisation, a cinema to be shot in the mountains of Cuenca, in Castile,
in Los Monegros, in the villages of Guadalajara, Teruel . . . those places where
man and land are inter-connected and form a whole. No doubt it would be a non-
conformist cinema – that would be what was Aragonese about it – direct, simple in
form and very real. Real in the way small surfaces would be valued: skin, textiles,
earth, beads of sweat . . .) (Sánchez Vidal 1988: 24)

The list with which this quotation ends reminds us of the levelling effect
achieved through the two shots. In formal terms – and, as I have argued,
in the siesta sequence, form is all – body and land are equal. This levelling
effect has quite startling implications: the landscape is personified, and
the human body is, simultaneously, reified. While the former may be an
anthropomorphic gesture familiar to us from poetry,30 the latter has a
terrifying effect of objectification. The human form becomes no more
than inert matter, and Job’s ‘All flesh shall perish together, and man shall
turn again unto dust’ (34: 15), is enacted through the living body before
our eyes.31

This chapter is divided into three sections, which correspond to the three
distinct elements of La caza. This division is intended to highlight the
important differences and changes in the film between the narrative and
non-narrative sections, but it may also suggest that La caza is fragmentary.
170    

On the one hand, the tripartite structure of this chapter may be challenged
by affirming that coherence is maintained in the film through the strong
linear narrative (we know the men are on a day out hunting rabbits when
we see the hunt sequences) and continuity of space and actors (we know
Paco and José have a siesta after lunch at the camp). On the other, we may
defend this structure by proposing that the disjointed nature of the film is
precisely the point. The violent interruptions of the narrative caused by
the hunt sequences reinforce the viewer’s distance from that narrative, and
encourage his or her scrutiny of its critique of 1960s Spain. Through this
narrative, La caza launches an assault on fading Francoism by probing the
questions of ageing and coming of age, and to ignore this context is to
betray the period in which the film was made. However, Saura’s feature
also moves beyond politics to question the viewer and his or her experience
of self and world in a particularly profound way. In the siesta sequence, the
‘unanchoring’ (to use Deleuze’s term) of the viewing subject through
experimentation with time, space and the representation of the body,
brings about a violent interruption to the narrative as the hunt sequences
do, though in a very different way. Here the violence is not experienced at
the level of emotion – we physically wince as we hear the rabbits squeal and
see them die in the documentary footage of a real hunt – but at the level of
perception – the excessive distance and proximity of the landscape and
body in the siesta sequence, and the disturbing parallel implied between
the two, disrupt our knowledge of time and space. The film therefore scru-
tinises our emotional experience of violence, our conceptual experience of
ageing and our perceptual experience of our environment through the
body and the co-ordinates of time and space. The latter, in particular, is
dependent on Saura and Cuadrado’s use of film form in La caza, the
importance of which is implied by Gutiérrez Aragón’s reference to its
‘well-worked language’.

Notes
1. The sexually suggestive original title La caza de conejos (The Rabbit Hunt) was
shortened, and the words ‘guerra civil’ (Civil War) were replaced by ‘guerra’,
changes that rendered the film’s meaning more open.
2. M. Marinero’s review in Film Ideal is entirely laudatory, however, citing the
director’s ‘maturity’ and the ‘exceptional’ nature of the film (1967: 145).
3. I take this translation from Hopewell (1986: 72).
4. In recent interviews, Saura has been keen to emphasise Mayo’s contribution
to these early stages of the project, which cannot be acknowledged in the film’s
credits (Julián 2002: 68; Gómez 2003: 363).
       LA CAZA 171

5. In the interview included on the DVD version of the film, released as part of
the El País ‘Un País de Cine’ collection in March 2003, Saura mentions that
ten or eleven producers rejected it. Querejeta mastered the system of the
double-script: one was presented to the censors and the original one was shot
anyway. He got away with it as the films made with Saura enjoyed such pres-
tige abroad: ‘no sooner would a serious problem come up than we would
mobilise our contacts in France and Germany so that they would protest . . ..
That often helped to free a film blocked by a censor. Nothing scared the
Francoist regime more that what was said of it outside Spain’ (Saura, quoted
in Hopewell 1986: 134–5, 256–7 n. 5).
6. My thanks to Chris Perriam, who suggested I look at Deleuze and Peter Weir,
and to Julián Gutiérrez-Albilla, who pointed out the relevance of Butler’s
study to my work. On gender and masculinity in Spanish cinema, see, for
example, Perriam (2003).
7. There are other studies of ageing in the NCE, like Manuel Summer’s docu-
mentary of bygone heroes, Juguetes rotos (Broken Toys 1966).
8. Guy Wood notes, with reference to Miguel Delibes’s El libro de caza menor,
that the level of detail in the hunt sequences reveals Saura’s knowledge of
hunting (1999: 371 n. 10).
9. Fraga writes in his memoirs of Franco’s evident ageing when he saw him
deliver the speech that marked the end of the ‘25 años de paz’ celebrations
(Preston 1993: 715).
10. La caza was made in the year that the student union (SEU) was abolished
(Grugel and Rees 1997: 92–3).
11. This grotesque fascist mausoleum, constructed by Republican prisoners of
war and resting place of both José Antonio Primo de Rivera (the founder of
the Spanish fascist party) and now Franco, looms over the city of Madrid from
the mountains in the north-west. The future of this monument is under dis-
cussion in Spain today.
12. See Preston’s example of Fraga and Laureano López Rodó’s interventions on
Franco’s end of year broadcast on 30 December 1962 (1993: 706).
13. In any case, recent readings of these films reveal that their gender dynam-
ics are more complex than hitherto supposed. On Raza, see Triana-
Toribio (2000) and Martin-Márquez (1999: 89–96); on ¡Harka!, Evans (1995:
218–19).
14. Interview, La caza, ‘Un País de Cine’ DVD.
15. At script stage, the image of the caged ferrets was to be the final sequence of
the film (Saura and Fons 1965: 152).
16. Saura’s Los golfos dramatised this. As María Delgado notes, ‘[Juan’s] domin-
ation of the bull offers an expression of disciplined masculinity’ (1999, 43).
17. See http://www.clubcultura.com/clubcine/clubcineastas/saura/peli-caza.
htm. Consulted 24 March 2004.
18. The script specifies that Paco should walk with a straightened back, ‘para dis-
imular el vientre’ (to hide his stomach) (1965: 2).
172    

19. Deleuze notes regarding such a pause in Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thief
(1948): ‘there is no longer a vector or line of the universe that extends and
links up events . . . the rain can always interrupt or deflect the search fortu-
itously . . .. The Italian rain becomes the sign of idle periods and of possible
interruption’ (Deleuze 1997: 212). In La caza, Spanish midday sun plays a
similar role to Italian rain.
20. Zunzunegui has pointed out that Saura’s treatment of femininity in La caza
looks forward to his exploration of eroticism in his immediately subsequent
filmography (2003: 415).
21. Like Rita, who dreams of a big, black bull entering her bedroom to figure
Jaime’s quasi-rape of the nun in Viridiana (Buñuel 1961), so in La caza a
child’s dream encodes adult actions, for Paco will be killed, not by dogs, but
by José.
22. Saura, interview, La caza, ‘Un País de Cine’ DVD.
23. Heredero also interprets the skinning of the rabbit and the burning of the
mannequin as disruptive (2003: 152), but their comparative brevity and clear
function within the narrative (Juan and Carmen are preparing the paella; Luis
and Enrique are building a fire) make them less significant than the siesta
sequence.
24. The application of the concepts of the ‘movement-image’ and ‘time-image’
to this film would seem to expose the rudimentary nature of Deleuze’s divi-
sion. As Donato Totaro points out, the ‘polarity of action-image/American
and time-image/European is not that clear cut’ (1999: 7). Directors who
belong to the period of the ‘movement-image’, like Max Ophüls and Orson
Welles, are celebrated as great cineastes of the ‘time-image’ (Totaro 1999: 7).
Moreover, key notions, such as the opposition of indeterminate space versus
specific place and the ‘idle period’, are actually discussed in both realms.
Indeterminate ‘any-space-whatevers’, for instance, are included as a dimen-
sion of the ‘movement-image’ (Deleuze 1997: Chapter 7), as are ‘idle periods’.
Cinema of the ‘movement-image’, Deleuze notes, values ‘episodes outside the
action, or in idle periods between actions’ (1997: 205).
25. This point-of-view shot initially encourages us to identify with Paco: he is the
active agent of the narrative because he drives the jeep, and the active con-
troller of the gaze, through subjective cinematography, and his association
with the gaze is reinforced by the detail of him polishing his sunglasses.
However, the film recounts the diminution of his narrative agency and of his
control of the gaze. We are encouraged to identify with Antonio at the start
of Carmen (1983) in exactly the same way, through a point-of-view shot and
an eye-line match as he surveys the dancers in the pre-credit sequence.
Antonio, like Paco, loses narrative agency and control of the gaze and his
ageing is likewise exposed.
26. ‘Only the young man is spared the onus of the past’, writes Peter Besas (1985:
120), a point D’Lugo refutes when he argues that in the last shot, Enrique has
lost his ‘innocence’ and must acknowledge ‘the history he had previously
       LA CAZA 173

refused to identify as his own’ (1991: 66). In the script, Enrique ends up sym-
bolically trapped – he catches his foot in one of the animal traps as he runs
away – and injured – when he finally gets the trap off he is left limping, which
signals his future exploitation like the lame Juan (Saura and Fons 1965: 149).
27. These extremes of distance and proximity were made possible by using a
macrokilar lens. Normally associated with advertising in the period, this lens,
in Cuadrado’s words, ‘permitía enfocar desde diez centímetros hasta infinito,
pasando por todas las distancias intermedias’ (made it possible to focus from
ten centimetres to infinity, with all the distances in between) (Bilbatúa et al.
1966: 9).
28. Totaro notes that the ‘time-image is not necessarily a cinema governed by
long takes – though it can be – but a broader, philosophical separation from
movement-image. However, much of what Deleuze says about depth-
of-field . . . relates explicitly to the long take’ (1999: 8).
29. Zunzunegui points out the difference between these shots in terms of distance
(the title of his study is ‘Mirada distante, mirada lejana’ [Distant Gaze,
Faraway Gaze]), and similarity in terms of movement (2003: 417). Length of
take and the soundbridge also imply a parallel. He does not explore, however,
the effects of these similarities.
30. Consider, for instance, the equivalence implied between female body and
land in Pablo Neruda’s love poetry (e.g. poem 1 of Veinte poemas de amor
y una canción desesperada [1996: 9]), or the experience of landscape through
the poet’s body in Antonio Machado’s Campos de Castilla (e.g. ‘A orillas de
Duero’, lines 2–11 [1999: 151]).
31. This equivalence between landscape and body may have contributed to
Guillermo Carnero’s ‘Castilla’ (1979: 80–1), published in 1967, the year after
the film’s release – though in correspondence with the author the poet doubts
there was any influence. ‘No sé hasta dónde se extiende mi cuerpo . . .
Tampoco sé hasta dónde se extiende la tierra’ (I don’t know where my body
extends . . . Neither do I know to where the land extends) (lines 1 and 6) evoke
the experimentation with scale and length of take in the two shots of the siesta
sequence, which also render land and body endless. The shift of focus from
extension to entrapment between walls in the second part of the poem also
brings to mind the freeze-frame ending of La caza. Just as the poet recalls
Castile’s military past (21–6), Enrique, overwhelmed by a more recent
conflict, flees up the valley side to be entrapped by the four walls of the frame.
For Carnero, this entrapment indicates future nightmares by the repeated line
‘Me han despertado’ (I have been awoken) (21 and 24), or living death by the
description of ‘estos muros lisos como una tumba’ (31) (these walls as smooth
as a tomb) (translations from Walters 2002: 81–2).
 Conclusion: Overlaps

A Cinema of Contradiction seeks to interpret, not survey, Spanish film of

the 1960s. Thus while the two examples selected in Part I show that
popular cinema of this period may sustain contestatory readings, we must
be equally attentive to the construction of conservative discourses in
such films. Likewise, the examples of the NCE I analyse in Part II cannot
chronicle the evolution of an entire movement, though my selection of
four films is intended to show both its diversity, and its shared responses
to contradiction.
The key difference between the VCE and the NCE highlighted in this
book is that of single and plural authorship. In popular cinema, the voices
of producers, directors, actors, scriptwriters, cinematographers, editors,
composers and costume designers may clash in creative cacophony, and
these clashes sometimes prove propitious in exposing the very ideological
contradictions that the conservative contents of the films intended to
conceal. Thus in La gran familia, producer, director and assistant director
may focus on the film’s jolly parents and cute kids in order to celebrate
large families, but José Isbert seems to follow the same acting directions as
the children, becoming a comic but troubling man-child who questions the
patriarchal order he is meant to represent. Likewise, editing and cine-
matography in the urban prologue of La ciudad no es para mí casts doubt
on its otherwise reactionary ruralism, and Luchy’s appearance in its epi-
logue also contradicts the condemnation of female sexuality recommended
elsewhere in the film.
In the NCE too there are both intended and unintended outcomes. On
the one hand, these singly-authored films successfully condemn the con-
tradictions of aperturista Spain, as was the intention of their auteurist
directors. In my examples, directors focus in particular on disparities of
wealth (Los farsantes), excessive sexual behaviour as a consequence of
repression (La tía Tula), the attraction and repulsion of national identity
(Nueve cartas a Berta) and the ineffectuality of both the old and young (La
caza). But on the other, the NCE itself laboured under contradictions, and
the films are shot through with the tensions of this ironic situation.
Considering these films as contradictory in terms of both their subject
176    

matter and their production contexts leads to a new reading of the NCE as
a cinema of critique that operates on a number of levels. Los farsantes
appears to condemn the popular entertainment on which the film was
paradoxically dependent through its VCE producer Ignacio Iquino, but the
film also harnesses popular entertainment’s appeal to emotional audience
identification to effect its political critique. Similarly, the stifling repression
of La tía Tula may encode the limited creative freedom about which Picazo
bitterly complained, but this atmosphere also effectively conveys the stasis
of 1960s provincial life. Again, Patino’s awkward relations with his cast
and crew in Nueve cartas a Berta enrich the film’s portrayal of Lorenzo’s
experience of miscomprehension in contemporary Salamanca. Saura’s La
caza has acquired such a mythical status as a work of dissent that it is
difficult to peel back the layers of adoration and return it to its context.
Although it suffered censorship too, its talented director and plucky pro-
ducer ensured that this would be one of the few films to break free from
the NCE and become part of the much admired pantheon of Spanish
auteurist work.
If the conclusion that the NCE came of age with La caza is anticipated
by the admiring attention already lavished on Saura the auteur, the rela-
tions between the VCE and the NCE revealed by this book are not. A con-
sideration of production contexts shows that NCE films like Los farsantes
were made only thanks to the practical backing of the VCE. Furthermore,
the juxtaposition of Parts I and II of this book reveals other overlaps
between these two cinemas. For example, the stunning originality of
Saura’s film has rightly captured critics’ attention, but La caza could not
exist without the VCE. The exploration of male bonding in a military
context in Saura’s film gains its meaning through its dialogue with the
popular cinema, not only through recasting its actors, but also by rerun-
ning its plots. In a fascinating interview with Saura in 1988, Mechthild
Zeul suggested to the director that La caza was similar to the VCE film of
military male comradeship, which similarly features a trio of chums, Botón
de ancla (Brass Button Torrado, 1948) (a remake of which was released in
1961 [Botón de ancla Lluch]). This observation is rejected outright by
Saura, whose laughter at the idea is recorded in the interview transcription
(Zeul 2003: 108), and who states of the comparison that ‘Such things give
me great anxiety’ (Zeul 2003: 109). When Zeul persists, the director’s
denial of the influence of popular film borders on excess: ‘my films are the
total opposite of those of the 1940s’; ‘We didn’t consider the films of [Saénz
de Heredia or Rafael Gil, etc.] at all’ (Zeul 2003: 111, 113; emphasis
added). I suggest that Saura’s laughter and denials try to mask the inter-
dependency between the NCE and the VCE that Zeul uncovers.
  177

The migration of actors between the VCE and the NCE gave a face to
this interdependency. Recasting might be dismissed as a matter of crass
commercialism – NCE directors cast VCE actors in a bid for audiences –
or practical expediency – NCE directors cast VCE actors as there were few
to choose from. Critics have tended to argue that NCE directors cast actors
like Bautista and Mayo in films such as La tía Tula and La caza to play
roles that were the opposite of their previous parts in popular film. But star
studies have taught us that it is no longer sufficient to consider all actors
passive objects manipulated by an auteur, and that some may be creative
agents in their own right. In La tía Tula and La caza, these actors’ simul-
taneous evocation and repression of their previous roles are especially
effective. This is not to discount Picazo and Saura’s thoughtful selection
and direction of their cast, but to suggest a more balanced view of recast-
ing as an example of the fruitful cross-fertilisation between popular and art
cinemas.
The two parts of this study also reveal the shared conceptual terrain of
the NCE and the VCE. To be mentioned in the same line as Fernando
Palacios would be risible to Saura, but none the less the juxtaposition of La
gran familia and La caza in this book reveals a shared critique of the ageing
dictator, which is carried out through the casting of popular male stars of
a similar age. Likewise, both La ciudad and Nueve cartas a Berta record the
allure of the Spanish capital, even though this goes against the critique of
Madrid in the first film, and forms part of the condemnation of the
provinces in the second. Similarly, the view of the family presented in both
La gran familia and La tía Tula exploits long takes and a static camera to
indicate the suffocation of domestic life.
This example of editing and cinematography points to a final area of
overlap: technical teams. The specific example of Pedro del Rey’s editing
in both La gran familia and La tía Tula indicates a domestic industry where
crews and casts were shared between popular films and art alternatives. It
is hoped that this analysis will lead to further work on cross-over figures,
like Juan Julio Baena, the celebrated cinematographer of the auteurist Los
golfos and La tía Tula, who also worked on the popular cinema of Pedro
Lazaga, Luis Lucia and León Klimovsky. The comparisons of the VCE
and the NCE offered in this book subject the divisions between popular
and art cinemas erected by critics, directors and politicians to scrutiny.
What emerges is a picture of Spanish film of the 1960s that is much less
tidy, but one that is all the more interesting for its messiness.
 Filmography

La gran familia (The Great Family, 1962)

Director: Fernando Palacios
Producer: Pedro Masó
Production Company: Pedro Masó P.C.
Scriptwriters: Pedro Masó; Rafael J. Salvia;
Antonio Vich
Director of Photography: Juan Mariné
Music: Adolfo Waitzman
Décor: Antonio Simont
Editor: Pedro del Rey
Principal Actors: María José Alfonso (La enamorada);
Alberto Closas (Carlos, the father);
José Isbert (the grandpa); José Luis
López Vázquez (Juan, the godfather);
Pedro Mari Sánchez (El petardista);
Amparo Soler Leal (Mercedes, the
mother)
Running Time: 104 minutes
Release Date: 21 December 1962 (Madrid)

Los farsantes (Frauds, 1963)

Director: Mario Camus
Producer: Ignacio F. Iquino
Production Company: I.F.I. España S.A.
Scriptwriters: Mario Camus; Daniel Sueiro
Director of Photography: Salvador Torres Garriga
Music: Enrique Escobar
Décor: Andres Vallvé
Editor: Ramón Quadreny
Principal Actors: Luis Ciges (Justo); Amapola García
(Milagros); Fernando León (Rogelio);
Angel Lombarte (Avilés); Margarita
Lozano (Tina); José Montez (Currito);
180    

Consuelo de Nieva (Pura); José María

Oviés (Don Pancho); Luis Torner
(Vicente); Víctor Valverde (Lucio)
Running Time: 82 minutes
Release Date: Autumn 1963 (Barcelona)
La tía Tula (Aunt Tula, 1964)
Director: Miguel Picazo
Producers: Ramiro Bermúdez de Castro; Juan
Miguel Lamet; José López Moreno;
Nino Quevedo
Production Companies: Eco Films; Surco Films
Scriptwriters: José Miguel Hernán; Manuel López
Yubero; Miguel Picazo; Luis Sánchez
Enciso
Director of Photography: Juan Julio Baena
Music: Antonio Pérez Olea
Décor: Luis Argüello
Editor: Pedro del Rey
Principal Actors: Aurora Bautista (Tula); Mari Loli Cobo
(Tulita); Carlos Estrada (Ramiro);
Carlos Sánchez Jiménez (Ramirín)
Running Time: 109 minutes
Release Date: 2 September 1964 (Madrid)
La ciudad no es para mí (The City’s Not For Me, 1965)
Director: Pedro Lazaga
Producer: Pedro Masó
Production Company: Pedro Masó P.C.
Scriptwriters: Vicente Coello; Pedro Masó
Director of Photography: Juan Mariné
Music: Antón García Abril; ‘Los Shakers’
(songs)
Décor: Antonio Simont
Editor: Alfonso Santacana
Principal Actors: Doris Coll (Luchy/Luciana); Eduardo
Fajardo (Agustín ‘Gusti’); Alfredo
Landa (Jerónimo); Paco Martínez Soria
(Tío Agustín); Gracita Morales
(Filomena)
Running Time: 96 minutes
Release Date: 14 March 1966 (Madrid)
  181

Nueve cartas a Berta (Nine Letters to Berta 1965)

Director: Basilio Martín Patino
Producer: Ramiro Bermúdez de Castro
Production Companies: Eco Films; Transcontinental Films
Española
Scriptwriter: Basilio Martín Patino
Director of Photography: Luis Enrique Torán
Music: Carmelo A. Bernaola
Décor: Pablo Gago
Editor: Pedro del Rey
Principal Actors: Elsa Baeza (la novia); Emilio Gutiérrez
Caba (Lorenzo); Mari Carrillo
(mother); Antonio Casas (father);
Yelena Samarina (Trini); Iván Tubau
(Jacques)
Running Time: 95 minutes
Release Dates: 27 February 1967 (Madrid); 21 April
1967 (Barcelona)

La caza (The Hunt, 1965)

Director: Carlos Saura
Producer: Elías Querejeta
Production Company: Elías Querejeta P.C.
Scriptwriters: Angelino Fons; Carlos Saura
Director of Photography: Luis Cuadrado
Music: Luis de Pablo
Décor: Carlos Ochoa
Editor: Pablo del Amo
Principal Actors: Emilio Gutiérrez Caba (Enrique);
Alfredo Mayo (Paco); Ismael Merlo
(José); José María Prada (Luis);
Fernando Sánchez Pollack (Juan)
Running Time: 83 minutes
Release Date: 28 November 1966 (Madrid)
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Rodero, J. A. (1981), Aquel ‘Nuevo Cine Español’ de los 60: espíritu, estética, obra y
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 Index

25 años de paz (25 Years of Peace), 146, 150–2, Bermúdez de Castro, Ramiro, 101
158 Bernaola, Carmelo, 134
¡A mi la legión! (Raise the Legion!), 152 Bicycle Thief, 80, 91
Abel Sánchez, 10, 106 ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! (Welcome Mr
abuelo tiene un plan, El (Grandpa Has a Plan), 53 Marshall!), 8, 12, 40–1, 62, 73, 106
Acción Católica, 111 Bilbatúa, Miguel, 125
advertising, 127 Bitter Rice, 91
Agustina de Aragón, 107, 110, 114 blockbuster, 1, 8, 49, 107
Alarcón, Enrique, 106 boda, La (The Wedding), 74
Alba de América (Dawn in America), 16 Bohemian Lights see Luces de Bohemia
Alcaín, Alfredo, 138 Borau, José Luis, 12
Aldecoa, Ignacio, 11, 74 borracho, El (The Drunkard), 82
Alonso, María José, 36 Botón de ancla (Brass Button), 176
Álvarez, Antonio, 155 Bourdieu, Pierre, 57
Amateur Bullfighters, 61 see Torerillos, 61 bourgeoisie see middle class
Amo, Álvaro del, 63, 136 Brandy, 12
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 167 Brass Button see Botón de ancla
apertura, 3–7, 16, 17, 20, 86–7, 88, 103, 126, Breathless, 135
129, 130, 134, 142, 151, 175 Brecht, Bertolt, 81, 150
Argüello, Luis, 108 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 162
Arriflex camera, 61 Bronston, Samuel, 104
Arroyo, Luciano, 54 Brooksbank Jones, Anny, 28
art / auteurist cinema, 2–3, 9, 11, 15, 17, 73–8, Buñuel, Luis, 17, 32, 43, 76, 108, 121
91, 97, 101–3, 120, 126, 128–9, 145, Butler, Judith, 148, 168
146–7, 153, 175, 176; see also Nuevo Cine
Español (NCE) Cahiers du cinéma, 18, 19
audience viewing figures, 1–2, 8, 9, 27 Calle Mayor (High Street), 8, 62, 106, 107, 114
Aumont, Jacques, 166 Camus, Mario, 2, 11, 73–100, 101, 104, 125
Aunt Tula see La tía Tula Cannes film festival, 17, 18, 145
Azcona, Rafael, 38, 42, 79 Cara al sol (Face to the Sun), 140–1, 155
Aznar, Camón, 106 Carmen, 159
Castile, 75, 77, 80, 82, 107, 139, 155, 164, 165,
Baena, Juan Julio, 13, 101, 102, 108, 147, 155, 169
177 Castillejo, Jorge, 102, 110
Baeza, Elsa, 130 Catholicism / Catholic Church, 6, 91–5
Balarrasa, 56 clergy, 6, 85–6, 141
Barcelona School, 8, 14, 76 gender roles, 5, 36, 43, 103, 121
Bardem, Juan Antonio, 8, 14–15, 38, 62, 73, 79, Holy Week, 85, 92–5, 96, 97, 141; see also
106, 107, 135, 145, 151 popular culture, Vatican II
Barral, Carlos, 132 caza, La (The Hunt), 2, 5, 12, 13, 18, 19, 45, 93,
Bautista, Aurora, 12, 65, 101, 102, 107, 110–11, 94, 114, 130, 138, 145–73, 176, 177
112, 114, 115, 116, 121–2, 153, 177 censorship, 17, 18, 51, 61–2, 77, 85, 94, 101–2,
Beethoven, Ludwig Van, 66 111–13, 119, 120, 121, 126, 129, 132, 145,
Berlanga, Luis García, 12, 15, 17, 40, 42, 62, 73, 176
89, 106, 107, 145 CIFESA (Compañía Industrial del Film
Berlin film festival, 19, 145 Español S.A.), 16, 65, 83, 102, 107
  195

Ciges, Luis, 75, 76 espíritu de la colmena, El (The Spirit of the

Cinema nuovo, 19 Beehive), 45
Cinema universitario, 19 Estrada, Carlos, 115, 116, 117
Cinema-vérité, 94 Evans, Peter, 29, 31, 36, 38, 40
City’s Not For Me, The see La ciudad no es para Executioner, The see El verdugo
mí existentialism, 132, 133, 142
ciudad no es para mí, La (The City’s Not For
Me), 1, 2, 5, 6, 9, 11, 13, 27, 49–70, 175, familia, bien, gracias, La (The Family’s Fine,
177 Thanks), 27
Civil War, 4, 28, 40–1, 146, 148, 149, 150, familia y uno más, La (The Family Plus One),
151–2, 154, 157, 158, 164, 167 27
Closas, Alberto, 35–6, 37, 38, 44 Family Plus One, The see La familia y uno más
Coca Hernando, Rosario, 103 Family’s Fine, Thanks, The see La familia, bien,
cochecito, El (The Little Car), 38, 43, 79, 102 gracias
Coello, Vicente, 52, 58, 68 farsantes, Los (Frauds), 2, 5, 6, 11, 12, 73–100,
Coll, Doris, 58, 64 125, 175, 176
comedy see sainete; see also esperpento Fellini, Federico, 77, 81
Communist Party, 8, 10, 11 Fernán Gómez, Fernando, 15
Company, Juan Miguel, 114 Fernández, Paloma, 58
Con Men, The see Los tramposos Fernández, Tomás, 54
contraception, 28, 33 Fernández Santos, Jesús, 11
Conversations of Salamanca, 8, 15, 16, 17, 19, Ferreri, Marco, 15, 38, 43, 89, 102, 104
126, 138 Film Ideal, 19, 80, 126, 145
Cornejo, Humberto, 58 Film School (1947–62, Instituto de
Cottens, Margot, 64 Investigaciones y Experiencias
Cousin Angélica see La prima Angélica Cinematográficas [School of
Crime of Cuenca, The see Crimen de Cuenca Cinematographic Experience and
Crimen de Cuenca (The Crime of Cuenca), 37 Research]; 1962–76, Escuela Oficial de
Cuadernos para el diálogo, 125 Cine [Official Film School]), 10–11, 14,
Cuadrado, Luis, 94, 138, 146–7, 152, 155, 165, 15, 16–17, 19, 74, 75–6, 91, 97, 102, 104,
170 106, 107, 127, 128, 145, 146
Cuenca, 145, 155 Fons, Angelino, 161
cursi / cursilería, 57–8 Fontenla, César Santos, 153
Four Hundred Hits, The, 135
Dawn in America see Alba de América Fraga Iribarne, Manuel, 4, 16, 19, 130, 151, 152
De amor y otras soledades (On Love and Other Franco, Carmen, 42
Solitudes), 14 Franco, Francisco, 7, 28, 41–2, 49, 64, 95–7,
de Orduña, Juan see Orduña, Juan de 146, 150, 151, 152, 158, 159, 162, 177
Death of a Cyclist see Muerte de un ciclista Franco, ese hombre (Franco, That Man), 10, 150,
del Rey, Pedro see Rey, Pedro del 151, 158, 159
Del rosa … al amarillo (From Pink to Yellow), Franco, That Man see Franco, ese hombre
101 Frauds see Los farsantes
Deleuze, Gilles, 148, 161, 164–8, 170 French New Wave, 12, 18, 20, 78, 106, 164
Diamante, Julio, 78 From Pink to Yellow see Del rosa … al amarillo
D’Lugo, Marvin, 152, 160, 165 Frugone, Juan Carlos, 80, 86
Drove, Antonio, 107 Furrows see Surcos
Drunkard, The see El borracho Furtivos (Poachers), 149
dubbing, 134–5
Dubois, Philippe, 167 Galán, Diego, 63
García, María Elena, 58
Eceiza, Antxón, 18 García Berlanga, Luis see Berlanga, Luis García
Eco Films, 101, 102 García Escudero, José María, 14, 15, 16, 17, 27,
Edwards, Gwynne, 157 102, 104, 120, 126, 129, 145
Erice, Víctor, 45 García Sánchez, José Luis, 128
Esa pareja feliz (That Happy Couple), 8, 73 Generation of 1898, 130
Escobar, Enrique, 76 generational conflict, 6, 152, 160
Escuela Oficial de Cine (Official Film School) Genoveva de Brabante, 83–5, 90, 91, 92
see Film School Getting On in the World see Llegar a más
esperpento, 79, 88–9 Gil, Rafael, 176
196    

Gilda, 113 Kinder, Marsha, 6, 16

Girl in Mourning, The see niña del luto, La Klimovsky, León, 177
Godard, Jean-Luc, 135
golfos, Los (Hooligans), 11, 13, 18, 43, 74, 102, Labanyi, Jo, 9, 107, 114
145, 147, 151, 160, 177 Lament for a Bandit see Llanto por un bandido
Goya, Francisco de, 57 Lamet, Juan Miguel, 101
Goya en Burdeos (Goya in Bourdeaux), 159 Landa, Alfredo, 12
Goya in Bourdeaux see Goya en Burdeos Larraz, Emmanuel, 76
Graham, Helen, 4, 9, 103 Lattuada, Alberto, 77, 81
Gramsci, Antonio, 9 Lazaga, Pedro, 1, 10, 13, 49–70, 177
gran familia, La (The Great Family), 1, 2, 5, 6, Little Car, The see El cochecito
11, 12, 13, 27–48, 49, 50, 51, 55, 63, 75, Little Flat, The see El pisito
109, 116, 146, 175, 177 Llanto por un bandido (Lament for a Bandit), 74,
Grandpa Has a Plan see El abuelo tiene un plan 145, 146, 151
Great Family, The see La gran familia Llegar a más (Getting On in the World), 11, 151
Guadalajara, 107, 118 Llinàs, Francesc, 13
guardiamarinas, Los (The Midshipmen), 12 Locura de amor (Love’s Madness), 107, 110
Gubern, Román, 14, 110, 116 López Moreno, José, 101
Guerner School, 108 López Vázquez, José Luis, 12, 35, 38, 40
Gutiérrez Aragón, Manuel, 147, 170 López Yubero, Manuel, 105
Gutiérrez Caba, Emilio, 12, 130, 132, 133, Los que no fuimos a la guerra (Those of Us Who
134–5, 152, 159 Didn’t Go to War), 78–9
Gutiérrez Maesso, José, 106, 133 Love’s Madness see Locura de amor
Lozano, Fernando Ángel, 52, 53, 60
Habitación de alquiler (Rented Room), 104 Lozano, Margarita, 76, 78, 87, 88, 90, 97
Hallelujah Chorus, 32, 34 Luces de Bohemia (Bohemian Lights), 88
Handel, Friedrich, 32, 33, 34 Lucia, Luis, 177
¡Harka!, 152 Luck see La suerte
Haro Tecglen, Eduardo, 7, 8 Lukács, Gyorgy, 79, 81
Heredero, Carlos, 11, 20, 78, 163, 164 Lyon, John, 89
Hernán, José Miguel, 105
Hernández, Javier, 106 macrokilar lens, 146
High Street (Calle Mayor), 8 Madrid, 5, 30–1, 35, 44, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 56,
Hooligans see Los golfos 57, 60–3, 66, 67, 68–9, 131, 177
Hopewell, John, 15, 102 madriguera, La (The Warren), 160
Hunt, The see La caza maja, 55, 57, 58, 59
Manfredi, Nino, 89
IFI España S.A., 74, 83 Mann, Anthony, 104
immigration, 5, 49–50, 67 Marcelino, Bread and Wine see Marcelino, pan y
Instituto de Investigaciones y Experiencias vino
Cinematográficas (School of Marcelino, pan y vino (Marcelino, Bread and
Cinematographic Experience and Wine), 27
Research) see Film School Mariné, Juan, 13, 43, 60–1, 66, 68
Ínsula, 105, 118 Marinero, M., 164
Iquino, Ignacio, 12, 74–7, 78, 83, 85, 95, 97, Marisol, 27
176 Marisol, Bound for Río see Marisol, rumbo a Río
Isbert, José, 12, 30, 35, 38–42, 43, 45, 51, 146, Marisol, rumbo a Río (Marisol, Bound for Río), 9
152, 175 Marsh, Steven, 12, 42
Italian Neorealism, 11, 16, 18, 74, 76, 78, 79, 80, Martín Patino, Basilio see Patino, Basilio Martín
81–2, 84, 89, 91, 94, 97, 105–6, 107, 114, Martín-Santos, Luis, 132–3, 139
133, 164; see also realism Martínez Aguinagalde, Florencio, 82
Martínez Soria, Paco, 49, 50, 51–3, 55, 60, 63–8,
Jarama, El, 139 69
Jimena, 74, 104 Marxism, 8, 11, 79–80
Jordá, Joaquín, 14, 74, 104 Masó, Pedro, 11, 27, 29, 30, 37, 49, 52, 58, 67,
José María, el tempranillo, 76 75
Judas, El (The Judas), 85 Matas, Alfredo, 37
Judas, The see El Judas Mateos, Jesús, 54
Julián, Óscar de, 75 Mateos, Julián, 90
  197

Mayo, Alfredo, 12, 146, 147, 152, 153, 156, 167, Patino, Basilio Martín, 2, 8, 74, 75, 125–44, 151,
168, 177 176
Merlo, Ismael, 146, 152, 153, 168 Payne, Stanley, 6
Mi hija Hildegart (My Daughter Hildegart), 37 Peppermint frappé, 12, 154, 160
middle class / bourgeoisie, 57–9, 67, 79, 80, 86, Pérez Merinero, Carlos and David, 14
87–9, 103, 107, 130, 150, 151 Pérez Millán, Juan Antonio, 135
Midshipmen, The see Los guardiamarinas Pérez Perucha, Julio, 9
Molina-Foix, Vicente, 14 Picasso, Pablo, 54, 55, 56–7
Monegal, Antonio, 149 Picazo, Miguel, 2, 74, 101–24, 125, 127, 136,
Monterde, José Enrique, 130 161, 176, 177
Montero Nanette, Matías, 58 Picnic at Hanging Rock, 166
Montez, José, 77, 94 pisito, El (The Little Flat), 79
Morales, Gracita, 55 Plácido, 12, 18, 79
movement-image, 148, 164–5, 166, 167 Poachers see Furtivos
Movimiento Nacional (National Movement), Ponte, María Luisa, 64
3–4, 129 popular cinema (Viejo Cine Español [VCE]),
Muerte de un ciclista (Death of a Cyclist), 38, 1–2, 3, 6, 7–13, 15–16, 18, 25–70, 73–8,
151 97, 102–3, 107, 109, 110, 114–15, 125,
Mulvey, Laura, 117 127, 146, 152–3, 175–7; see also popular
Muñoz Suay, Ricardo, 11, 128 culture
My Daughter Hildegart see Mi hija Hildegart popular culture, 7, 9, 41, 67, 73, 90–1, 176
popular theatre, 73, 77, 81–5, 90–1
National Interest, 2, 12, 16, 17, 27, 29, 35, 75, religious ceremony, 73, 77, 91–5
130 variety act, 87–9
NCE see Nuevo Cine Español see also popular cinema
Neville, Edgar, 15 Positif, 19
New Spanish Cinema see Nuevo Cine Español possibilism, 3
New Wave see French New Wave Pozo Arenas, Santiago, 9
Nieves Conde, José Antonio, 16, 50, 56 Prada, José María, 146, 152, 153
Nine Letters to Berta see Nueve cartas a Berta Preston, Paul, 4, 151
niña del luto, La (The Girl in Mourning), 101 prima Angélica, La (Cousin Angélica), 161
No desearás al vecino del quinto (Thou Shalt Not pronatalism, 6, 28, 31
Covet Thy Fifth Floor Neighbour), 62
NO-DO (Noticiarios y Documentales Quadreny, Ramón, 76, 84
Cinematográficos), 28, 61, 136, 159 Querejeta, Elías, 12, 14, 19, 145, 146, 147
noveno, El (The Tithe), 74 Quevedo, Nino, 101, 102
Nuestro Cine, 11, 19, 79, 80, 91, 125, 126, 145,
153 Race see Raza
Nueve cartas a Berta (Nine Letters to Berta), 2, Raza (Race), 10, 152
5, 6, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 18, 43, 45, 61, 114, Realism, 6, 11, 12, 73–4, 79–81
125–44, 151, 155, 175, 176, 177 Operation Realism, 11
Nuevo Cine Español (NCE), 2–3, 6, 8, 10–20, see also Italian Neorealism; Marxism
27, 42–3, 56, 61, 71–173, 175–7; see also regreso, El (The Return), 74
art / auteurist cinema Regueiro, Francisco, 18, 74, 104
Núñez, Antonio, 118 Rented Room see Habitación de alquiler
Return, The see El regreso
Objetivo, 19 Rey, Fernando, 62
Obscure August Dreams see Oscuros sueños de Rey, Florián, 27
agosto Rey, Pedro del, 13, 42–3, 101, 102, 109, 116,
Old Spanish Cinema see popular cinema 128, 177
On Love and Other Solitudes see De amor y otras Richardson, Nathan, 52, 64, 66, 67–8
soledades Rodríguez Merchán, Eduardo, 75, 79
Orduña, Juan de, 16, 107 Rodríguez Sanz, Carlos, 125
Oscuros sueños de agosto (Obscure August Dreams),
14 Saénz de Heredia, José Luis, 10, 150, 151, 176
sainete / comedia sainetesca, 30, 52, 63–5, 68
Palá, José María, 126 Salamanca, 45, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 136,
Palacios, Fernando, 1, 10, 27–48, 49, 177 137–40, 141, 176
Pascual Duarte, 149 Salas de Arte y Ensayo (art cinemas), 17
198    

Salvia, Rafael, 29, 30 Torán, Luis Enrique, 108, 128, 138, 139–40
San Sebastián film festival, 101, 102, 125, 127 Torerillos, 61 (Amateur Bullfighters, 61), 74
Sánchez Enciso, Luis, 105, 120 Torreiro, Casimiro, 8, 15, 17, 19, 74, 125, 133
Sánchez Ferlosio, Rafael, 139 Torres, Augusto, 9, 14
Sánchez Noriega, José Luis, 76, 77 Torres Garriga, Salvador, 76
Sánchez Pollack, Fernando, 157, 158 Tourism is a Great Invention see El turismo es un
Sánchez Vidal, Agustín, 148, 163, 164 gran invento
Santacana, Alfonso, 13, 60–1, 68 tramposos, Los (The Con Men), 49
Santis, Giuseppe de, 91 Triana-Toribio, Núria, 9, 43, 62
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 132 Tristana, 108
Saura, Carlos, 2, 11, 15, 18, 43, 74, 94, 102, 103, Truffaut, François, 135
106, 145–73, 176, 177 turismo es un gran invento, El (Tourism Is a Great
Sección Femenina (Women’s Section), 103 Invention), 52–3
Semprún, Jorge, 11
Serrano de Osma, Carlos, 10, 106, 108 Unamuno, Miguel de, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106,
Sexy Spanish Comedy, 64 115
Shakers, Los, 60–1 UNINCI (Unión Industrial Cinematográfica),
Sight and Sound, 18 104
Simont, Antonio, 54–5
Sitges film festival, 14 Vajda, Ladislao, 27
Social Novel, 11 Valladolid, 77, 82, 92
Soler Leal, Amparo, 35, 36–7, 38, 41, 45 Valle-Inclán, Ramón María del, 88, 89
Special Interest, 2, 12, 17, 74–5, 102, 129, 130, Vallvé, Andrés, 76
145, 147 Vanidad y miseria (Vanity and Poverty), 85, 86
Spirit of the Beehive, The see El espíritu de la Vanity and Poverty see Vanidad y miseria
colmena Variety, 18, 134
Still Life with Guitar, 55 Variety Lights, 77, 81
Stone, Rob, 149 Vatican II, 6, 108, 141; see also Catholicism
Stress es tres, tres (Stress is Three, Three), 146, VCE see popular cinema
160 verdugo, El (The Executioner), 12, 13, 18, 42,
Stress is Three, Three see Stress es tres, tres 45
Subsidies see National Interest; see also Special Vernon, Kathleen, 74, 126
Interest Vich, Antonio, 29, 30
Sueiro, Daniel, 11, 74, 75, 76, 81, 82, 85, 87, 91, Viejo Cine Español see popular cinema
92–3, 94–5 Vilarós, Teresa, 16
suerte, La (Luck), 82 Villegas, Marcelino, 126
Summers, Manuel, 101 Villegas López, Manuel, 147–8, 163
Sunday Afternoon see Tarde de domingo Viridiana, 17, 32, 43, 76, 104, 106–7, 108, 109,
Surco Films, 101 121
Surcos (Furrows), 16, 17, 50, 53
Waitzman, Adolfo, 30, 32, 33–5
Tarde de domingo (Sunday Afternoon), 127 Warren, The see La madriguera
Teresa, 103 Wedding, The see La boda
That Happy Couple see Esa pareja feliz Weir, Peter, 166
Those of Us Who Didn’t Go to War see Los que no Welcome Mr. Marshall! see ¡Bienvenido Mister
fuimos a la guerra Marshall!
Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Fifth Floor Neighbour Wood, Guy, 159
see No desearás al vecino del quinto
tía Tula, La (Aunt Tula), 2, 5, 6, 11, 12, 13, 14, Young Sánchez, 12, 76, 80–1, 82, 90
18, 43, 45, 101–24, 125, 126, 136, 153,
161, 175, 176, 177 zarzuela, 63
Tiempo de silencio (Time of Silence), 132–3, 139 Zavattini, Cesare, 80
time-image, 148, 164, 165, 166–8 Zeul, Mechthild, 176
Time of Silence see Tiempo de silencio Zunzunegui, Santos, 78, 79, 81, 89, 152, 166–7