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Onward,
Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva
Weekend
Edition
November 18 / 19, 2006
Father of the New Spanish Cinema
The
Songs of Basilio Martin Patino
By LARRY PORTIS
Most people who love good films know
about Pedro Almodovar and the fact that the contemporary Spanish
cinema is among the most creative and exciting of recent years
(in my mind, only the contemporary Iranian cinema can rival it).
But how many are familiar with the work of Basilio Martin Patino,
which ushered the new Spanish cinema into existence? The Mediterranean
Film Festival held in Montpellier, France (October 26-November
5) this year featured the films made by Patino over the past
40 years.
Patino, born in Salamanca in
1930, philosophy student and founder of a film magazine in the
early 1950s, is of the "in between generation", that
between the bloody war and revolution caused by a military coup
d'état against a democratically elected government, and
that of the post-Franco period. Perhaps more that anyone, he
contributed to the development of a critical vision in Spain
years before the actual demise of the dictator.
It is a paradox that the Spanish
Revolution and Civil War of the 1930s is arguably the most important
major political event of the twentieth century and certainly
the least known and understood. There are many who do not know,
or want to remember, that the governments of the United States,
Britain and France allowed a democratically elected republican
government in Spain to fall victim to a military rebellion supported
by the fascist forces of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. In
Spain, during the forty years of dictatorship following the defeat
of the republicans and revolutionaries, Francisco Franco and
his gang did everything possible to wipe out any memory of the
historic struggles and revolutionary innovations made there.
Patino's task was first to
examine living conditions in Franco's Spain. He did this in documentary
films (El Noveno, 1961 and Torerillos 61, 1962)
about folk customs. In them, he showed how institutions like
the Catholic Church and bullfighting had to be understood in
relation to poverty and the survival of feudal traditions.
In 1965, he made his first
full-length film, Nine Letters to Bertha, a story revolving
around letters sent by a student in Spain to a girl living in
England. The fact that the girl is the daughter of a republican
exile, and that the content of the letters describes the boredom,
reactionary attitudes, ignorance, pretensions of professors and
a generalized apathy among the population, instantly made this
film the standard bearer for an aesthetic movement with clear
political implications. Suddenly, Franco's Spain was publicly
shown, in Spain, as backward and stifling.
It is hard to evaluate events
such as the response to Nine Letters to Bertha. But it
is clear that both the regime and the public had taken notice.
When, in 1971, Patino made his third long film, Songs for
the Post-War (Canciones pra después de una Guerra),
the reaction was significant and surprising (his second film,
Del amor y otras soledades 1969, met with no real
success). A documentary about popular songs in their social context
during the period 1939-1953, the first 15 years of the dictatorship,
Songs for the Post-War begins with footage of joyous people
making the fascist salute at a public demonstration. Patino then
juxtaposes images of republican crowds and fascist crowds, showing
republicans singing "No Pasaran," and then reactionaries
chipping away a plaque celebrating the Anarchist leader Durruti,
the defender of Madrid.
Patino, understandably, engaged
in no overt reflection about how this period contrasted with
that of war and revolution. What he did was to feature songs
recounting contemporary concerns and events, such as the one
celebrating the sacrifices of the "Azul Division",
the Spanish soldiers who volunteered to fight in Germany along
side the Nazis. While the soundtrack features a singer lyrically
extolling the virtues of these soldiers, Patino showed old clips
of the fascist ceremonies sending them off, and then of their
return, defeated and mutilated.
Many popular songs of the time
lamented the destruction caused the "reds" and other
subversives. Other songs simply encouraged listeners to dream,
to fill the emptiness in the midst of solitude.
Tellingly, one song declaimed:
"you can do anything you want, even kill me, as long as
you love me." The end of the film leaves us with the distinct
impression that what Franco's regime most assiduously promoted
was a cult of death. "Race, Sacrifice, Family, and Patriotism"
these were the watchwords that Franco drummed into the
minds of Spanish people. Whether the glorification of blood and
death at the ritual bullfighting, the sacrifices of the civilian
population during the civil war, or the soldiers sent to fight
for fascism, death is the supreme compensation. Both Franco and
the Church made sure that the Spanish didn't forget what was
expected of them.
But there were other compensations,
and Patino revealed that a new "opening" of the deadly
Spanish regime came about in the early 1950s, when ties were
reinforced between the Spain and the United States. Military
and strategic cooperation led to new cultural influences. Coca
Cola and Walt Disney accompanied the installation of US military
bases in Spain. Popular entertainers from America were brought
in, such as Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra, Danny Kaye and Gary Cooper,
some of whom who had distinguished themselves as "friendly
witnesses" during the witch-hunts of the period.
All of this was set to music.
The joy was there, but it was forced. The regime wanted people
to forget, but in celebrating itself, it could not help recalling
how it had seized control. Over one million people died in the
civil war. Everyone had experienced death in some way. In the
context of the "post war", even nostalgia was almost
necessarily divisive and subversive. Juxtaposing the cult of
death, on the one hand, and the idiocy and frivolity of US popular
culture in the 1950s, on the other, must have left the viewers
of this film feeling queasy.
In fact, the censors did not
allow the film to be released. Although there was no political
criticism or advocacy in it, the documentary was deemed unacceptable
for public viewing. Still, it was very popular with the censors,
who brought their families to see it in the safety of government
buildings. The word got out, and, as Patino later learned, even
members of Franco's family arranged private showings.
A master of film editing, the
rather strange success of Songs for the Post War encouraged
Patino to do two things: first to make other documentaries, and
second to go underground to make them.
In 1971, he made the first
documentary about Franco's rise to power, Caudillo, a
film beginning with images of ruins, both material and human.
With footage taken from film archives outside of Spain (especially
from Portugal and England), Patino shows a Franco who was far
from being the grand caudillo.
A little man, physically short
of stature, Franco portrayed himself as a man "sent by God"
to lead "a crusade to protect Christian civilization"
from barbarian hordes. To do so, as he said, he was "ready
to kill half of the population in order to save Spain".
How does a man become so bloodthirsty?
Patino opines that Franco was a rather typical product of his
generation and professional caste, which was that of a military
officer humiliated by the crushing defeat of Spain in the Spanish-American
War. The obsession with redeeming the glory of Spain long-antedated
the advent of the Spanish Republic. Having chosen service in
Spanish Morocco, Franco exulted in the authority given to a colonial,
occupying force.
Free from censorship, if not
free from the possibility of discovery, prison and worse, Patino
explored aspects of Franco's ascension that still need more complete
elucidation. One example is how Franco managed to free himself
from other prominent generals, his competitors in the internal
struggle for power. Somehow, his rivals met with unfortunate,
and fatal, accidents. Another example is the fact that Franco,
although obsessed with the notion of "race", made massive
and effective use of Moroccan troops (against the wishes of Moroccan
notables) to slaughter his fellow Spaniards. His famous "Condor
Legion" included 30,000 such "Mauros".
Most remarkable in Patino's
documentary is his constant contrasting of ordinary life on both
sides of the conflict. The images that fascinate him are those
of common people whose major preoccupation is staying alive.
By an adroit use of stock shots and frozen images that the camera
sometimes zooms in on, Patino eliminates the abstraction and
distance that old film footage often produces. At times, we are
literally forced to look into the faces of people caught in a
struggle that defied imagination, so unexpected was the hate,
destruction and death that it inflicted.
The force of Patino's films
is that he never denounces. Rather than indict, he shows. People
on both sides of the conflict in Spain suffered, but on one side
the ideals motivating people were those of equality and social
justice. On the other side, that of Franco, the Phalangists,
the monarchists and the Church hierarchy, the ideals articulated
were clearly those of hate, contempt and cruelty.
In 1973, Patino made another
remarkable underground documentary, Dearest Executioners,
about the three state officials responsible for the strangling
of prisoners sentenced to death (with the infamous garrot,
the Spanish answer to the guillotine). By paying the three
men for their interviews (and their silence), Patino was able
to penetrate the mentality and the practices of the dictatorship,
three years before the death of Franco.
Everything seemed to change
after Franco's death and the end of the fascist regime. But the
question of recovering the memory of the interrupted Spanish
revolution remained. The repression of Franco has been replaced
by the cultural amnesia characteristic of contemporary consumer
society. This is why Patino has continued to explore the reality
and memory of Spain's heroic and tragic history. In films like
Madrid (1987), The Cry of the South: Old Houses
(El grito de sur: casas viejas, 1996) and (Octavia
(2002), the relevance of progressive movements and individual
commitments of the past are shown to be elements of present reality
that are necessary in the creation a better, future world.
Larry Portis is a professor of American Studies
at Montpellier University in France.
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