Memoria del descrédito (The memory of discredit)
A programme jointly organised by LABoral, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía that shows the recent change of structures, narratives and ways of filmmaking in Spain
Pere Portabella. El sopar,1974. Film.Courtesy of Films
Memoria del descrédito is a film programme that expands the activities of FICXLAB beyond the scope of the Festival, covering the recent change of structures, narratives and ways of filmmaking in Spain. The programme is organised by LABoral jointly with Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, with the collaboration of Fundación Municipal de Cultura, Educación y Universidad Popular de Gijón and the Festival Internacional de Cine de Gijón. It includes contemporary films combined, in double sessions, with historic films reviewing and negotiating their debates and proposals. Eventually what it shows is the revolution brought about by the so-called “other cinema”, with its precarious images, the use of events in fiction or its inquisitional attitude towards reality.
This film series explain how this “other cinema” makes up its own genealogy, developing a discountinuous and partial history of the audiovisual. To this end, contemporary films stablish a dialogue and are opposed to historic films reviewing and negotiating their debates and proposals. This game of couples that works like a cinema club with two venues -LABoral and Centro de Cultura Antiguo Instituto-, in two consecutive days blows up contemporary culture.
In Memoria del descrédito films by Paulino Viota, Cecilia Bartolomé, Jacinto Estave, Llorenc Soler and Pere Portabella are recovered for the present, illustrating a series of paradoxes that the political transition was not able to solve. On the other hand, the three present-day authors, Luis López Carrasco, Eloy Domínguez and Ramiro Ledo seem to be part of another tradition, until recently obscure or, rather, concealed, that has been brought to light by the long crisis we have endured since 2011 and they look for models to make films from the outside and marginalised. Not being able to take part of the old paradigms of production and dissemination.
PROGRAMME
October 4 and 5, 2014
Paulino Viota: prologue
Although this programme is distinguished by the confrontation of authors, Memoria del descrédito starts confronting two moments. Two key points in our recent history. In one hand the obscure militancy, the underground, and on the other hand the concealed militancy found it difficult to adapt to the new democratic audiovisual policy, where the difference was pushed first to the borders and, eventually, to marginality.
The author will be present in both sessions.
- Contactos. Mayo de 1970, 1970
Duration: 70’
Venue: LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial
Date: Saturday, October 4, 2014
Hour: 19 pm
The title of the film, Contactos. Mayo de 1970 is a polysemic structure that refers to the photographic process, the figure of the father, the classified ads section of newspapers and a musical composition by
Karlheinz Stockhausen. This film falls within the framework of the so-called “disident cinema” produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Contactos. Mayo de 1970 shows the failure of the main characters in trying to reconcile political activism and daily life, in context of a very hard social and economic reality. This film is considered a milestone, as it criticises a certain kind of militancy, while at the same time it stablishes a deep formal renewal based on its particular interpretation of the spaces and positions of the characters as part of a unique narrative in the Spanish film scene.
- Cuerpo a cuerpo, 1982
Duration: 82'
Venue: Centro de Cultura Antiguo Instituto
Date: Sunday, October 5, 2014
Hour: 19 pm
Carlos has died and Mercedes, his wife is left alone. His friend Faustino attends the funeral and he walks accidentally into his cousin Pilar. She introduces us to Ana, who will meet Iñaki again at the end of the film. It might look like one of these movies whose narrative design is based on a series of crossed stories. But this is not so, this is the clash, the collision between very different generations, each with its own experiences. In the context of a wide range of fears, helplessness and existential drifts fighting between two spaces diluted in time: Santander in summer. Madrid in winter.
As Viota admits in an interview with El viejo topo, “In Cuerpo a cuerpo I decided to experiment: working like they do sometimes in theater, based on improvisations with the actors, but in this case without a script, so that the improvisation creates the characters, the script, everything”.
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October 24 and 26, 2014
Luis López Carrasco + Cecilia Bartolomé: el pasado del futuro
With the presence of the filmmaker Cecilia Bartolomé Después de...
- El futuro, 2013, Luis López Carrasco
Duration: 67'
Venue: LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial
Date: Friday October 24, 2014
Hour: 19 pm
As José, AKA Kikí d’Akí, former singer of Las Chinas and fundamental figure of the Movida madrileña, “the future is not a stain on the wall”. This statement is perfectly in line with the naïve climate of her last LP in 1984. At that point the die of the political transition had been cast. The Spanish Socialist Party had just taken office. The desired future, the uninterrumpted modernity that the country had not had the chance to enjoy, seemed to be within fingertip reach.
El futuro, by Luis López Carrasco starts with a black image with the sound of a newly elected President González. Lots of euphoria. The fact is that the film could as well have started with a black image with the sound of the shots of the Civil Guards of Lieutenant-Colonel Tejero in the House of Parliament. After this concession to history, the film plays a game of camouflaging its tale. Of showing itself while at the same time concealing itself, just like trying to contradict the official tale of the happy 1980s: a tale about a progress that time has shown to be more of a legend than a chronichle, as it eventually ended like a mascarade, a carnival party, which is precisely the reality side of the trompe l’oeil around which the film revolves.
- Después de…,1981, Cecilia Bartolomé
Duration: 199'
Venue: Centro de Cultura Antiguo Instituto
Date: Sunday, October 26, 2014
Hour: 17 pm
What is fiction in the reality and what is reality in any fiction? In connection with El futuro, the film by Cecilia Bartolomé, Después de... might well be the diary of a dream that constantly threatens to break, or rather, a melting pot of dreams and expectations that will never be able to understand each other. Filmed almost clandestinely during 1979 and 1980, this documentary acts as a map where every space is a face, a word, an idea. However, a map that, in addition to registering the present of the Transition, was able to light no only the immediate future, but also several contradictions that today, still, our civil society has not been able to solve.
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November 7 and 9, 2014
Eloy Dominguez + Jacinto Esteva + Lloren Soler: exilios
With the presence of the filmmaker Eloy Domínguez
- Norte, Adiante, 2014. Eloy Domínguez Serén
Duration: 60'
- El largo viaje hacia la ira, 1969. Llorenç Soler.
Duration: 26'
Venue: LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial
Date: Saturday, November 7, 2014
Hour: 19 pm
The end of the Civil War meant for many Spaniards the beginning of a journey. A trip towards the strange, the unknown, where those who had lost the war became foreigners both abroad and in their homeland. In the faces of the men and women forced to exile, as we can see in El largo viaje hacia la ira, wrinkles are more than ever marks of time, grooves through which runs a feeling of nostalgia.
Cinema, after all, is the device that best shapes nostalgy, a feeling that takes place when one dreams of being where one is not. In Norte, Adiante Eloy Domínguez uses the camera to register this feeling of being always outside. A diary in between the hallucination produced by a familiar but strange landscape and the absence of language of someone that, due to the language barrier, cannot speak.
- Notes sur l'emigration,1960, Jacinto Esteva y Paolo Brunatto.
Duration: 18'
- Lejos de los árboles, 1973-2010, Jacinto Esteva
Duration: 63'
Venue: Centro de Cultura Antiguo Instituto
Date: Sunday, October 9, 2014
Hour: 19 pm
Even if they are significant, the barriers between emigration and inmigration are sometimes vague. One can emigrate from his/her country without even leaving it physically. And, similarly, one can be an inmigrant and feel really close to his/her homeland in spite of being far from it. Not all distances have a physical aspect. Some people, like Jacinto Esteva, are always outsiders.
What has happened so that, once again, it is necessary to write some Notes sur l'emigration? The première in Switzerland of this film triggered such a debate that General Franco’s government ordered to seize it, and this assignment was carried out by a paramilitary team during the presentation of a book by Juan Goytisolo in Milan. Since then it has been missing for 50 years until it has been recently found.
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December 13 and 14
Ramiro Ledo + Pere Portabella: el compromiso
- VidaExtra, 2013, Ramiro Ledo
Duration: 93'
Venue: LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial
Date: Saturday, December 13, 2014
Hour: 18.30 pm
The general strike of September, 2010, is mixed in Barcelona with La estética de la resistencia, by Peter Weiss. The discussions of that night will later be put into question by the characters of VidaExtra: Five anonymous friends which are neither teenagers nor communist militants anymore but, nevertheless, try to cope with the current situation, like the characters of the novel by Weiss did at the time.
- El Sopar, 1974, Pere Portabella
Duration: 50'
Venue: Centro de Cultura Antiguo Instituto
Date: Sunday 14, December 2014
Hour: 19 pm
Sitting at a table having lunch and chatting, the political prisoners gathered by Portabella in his film reflect upon the living conditions in prison, the resistance movement, the riots and hunger strikes inside prison, as well as life once they are free again and their return to militancy.
How can their experience become a lesson? Can one theorise in first person singular? Which is the balance between the particular and the collective?
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