Spain

REAWAKENING AND TRANSITION: 1960–1975

During the final decade and a half of the old regime (1960–1975), Spanish cinema witnessed the beginnings of the cultural transition beyond the dictatorship. The most emblematic event of that changing order was the scandal surrounding Buñuel's Viridiana . The famed sur-realist filmmaker returned from exile in 1961 to make a film that appeared to be a reverential tale about a young postulant's dedication to Christian charity. Presented at the Cannes Film Festival of 1961 as the official Spanish entry, the film won a Palme d'or, only to be denounced by the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano as blasphemous. The film was banned in Spain, and the production company, Bardem's Unión Industrial Cinematografica SA (UNINCI), was dissolved. A decade later Buñuel returned to Spain to shoot another film while Franco was still alive. Tristana (1970), often considered Buñuel's masterpiece, was based on a minor novel by the nineteenth-century novelist Benito Pérez Galdós. His final "Spanish" film, also his last film, was Cet Obscur objet du désir ( That Obscure Object of Desire , 1977). Though only four films of his total output of more than thirty were actually shot in his native Spain, Buñuel remains for many the quintessential Spanish filmmaker.

In the early 1960s a group of progressive technocrats assumed positions of power in key government ministries. Principal among these was Manuel Fraga Iribarne, who took charge of the reorganized Ministry of Information and Tourism, which controlled media censorship. The liberal Fraga orchestrated the return of García Escudero to the film office, encouraging him to publish a set of criteria that would guide the censorship of film scripts and subsequent final copies of films ready for distribution. This bureaucratization of censorship enabled filmmakers and their producers for the first time to challenge censorship cuts and negotiate revisions. Censorship reform was part of an administrative initiative to invent a new image of Spain for international markets, especially tourism. Part of that plan called for a "New Spanish Cinema," much heralded through official promotions at international film festivals. The newness of Spanish cinema was based on a younger generation of directors, including Carlos Saura, Basilio Martín Patino (b. 1930), Miguel Picazo (b. 1927), Mario Camus (b. 1935), and Manuel Summers (b. 1935), most of whom would, in time, forge their own careers as mainstream filmmakers. By 1966 the strategies had yielded impressive results, boosting the annual production of Spanish films to an all-time high of 174. Some film historians later dismissed New Spanish Cinema as merely the Franco regime's window dressing to cover its repressive nature. But New Spanish Cinema did much to challenge the status quo by expanding the limits of permissible representation in Spanish films.

Most notable of such works was Saura's La caza ( The Hunt , 1965), which examined the impact of the civil war on contemporary consciousness. Saura's success with broaching the negative image of the war while circumventing censorship owed, in part, to the dealings of his astute producer, Elías Querejeta (b. 1930). Querejeta engaged the censors, convincing them to allow certain images and dialogue to remain in the shooting script, and used the film's dialogue to highlight the ways self-censorship had deformed the characters' outlook. Another feature of the Saura-Querejeta collaboration was the unusual effort made to market the film at international festivals, drawing attention discreetly to the social realities of contemporary life in Spain. The Hunt won the Golden Bear award at the 1966 Berlin Film Festival. Throughout the final years of Franco's dictatorship, Querejeta's modest production company was responsible for the early careers of a number of other filmmakers, including Víctor Erice (b. 1940), Jaime Chávarri (b. 1943), and Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón (b. 1942).

Another historically significant movement of the period was the Barcelona School, young Catalan filmmakers who challenged the "look" of Spanish cinema. Though largely an effort at aesthetic renovation, the visual style seen in Vicente Aranda's (b. 1926) Brillante porvenir ( Brilliant Future , 1965) and Fata morgana ( Left-Handed Fate , 1965), Dante no es únicamente severo (Dante Is Not Only Rigorous, Joaquín Jordá, 1967), Cada vez que … ( Each Time That … , Carles Durán, 1968), and Ditirambo (Gonzalo Suárez, 1969) expressed a striking alternative to the often drab views and linear narratives of Castilianized Spanish cinema. These young directors often took inspiration from contemporary art and advertising. Of the filmmakers of the Barcelona School, only Jaime Camino (b. 1936) and Aranda achieved prominent careers in more conventional mainstream Spanish filmmaking.

One of the dominant themes of oppositional cinema during the final years of the old regime, repressed and deformed memories of the past, was powerfully portrayed in The Hunt . The theme continued in other Saura films ( El jardín de las delicias [ The Garden of Delights , 1970], La prima Angélica [ Cousin Angelica , 1974] and Cría cuervos [ Raise Ravens , 1976]), and in Patino's documentary Canciones para después de una guerra (Songs for After a War, 1971). The most critically acclaimed of these efforts was Erice's El espíritu de la colmena ( The Spirit of the Beehive , 1973), which in a seemingly apolitical way recounts the experiences of a girl of seven or eight in the Castilian provinces in the early post-civil war period. Through an elliptical style and an intricate visual narrative structure, the film stands as a unique expression of the creative power of filmmakers to subvert the spirit of censorship to present critical visions of life under the dictatorship. The film won a special prize at Cannes.