Film and debate series
Curated by Carles Guerra
Joaquim Jordà's most recent documentary films have become references for a public no longer satisfied with the merely cinematographic. Since 1979, when Jordà shot Numax presenta (Numax Presents), his films have been linked to more extensive, overarching debates. Numax presenta (1980) witnesses the closing down of a Barcelona factory just when Spanish politicians were signing the Moncloa Pact. Later, El encargo del cazador (The Hunter's Assignment) (1990) put together the leading voices of the generation of the Spanish democratic transition. Mones com la Becky (Apes like Becky) (1999) questioned the limits of psychiatry. Later on, De nens (About Children) (2003) intertwined the urban regeneration of Barcelona's Raval neighborhood with a case of pedophilia. Lastly, Vint anys no és res (Twenty Years is Nothing) (2004) reunited the same characters of Numax presenta to show what had been done about those desires expressed twenty five years before. The life stories that each person tells create an atypical frieze of our recent history. In this way, Jordà's cinematography has been associated with the urgency to deal with contemporary problems that frequently receive intense media attention. In this case, the movie is just one more link in the chain of public opinion, and an instrument with which to enter into debate.
Jordà's participation in the Barcelona School, which saw the production of Dante no es únicamente severo (Dante is not Only Severe) (1967), as well as his following phase of militant orthodoxy while in service to the PCI, (Comunist Italian Party) and his return to Spain at 1973, when he took up film again, which he had momentarily abandoned, offer three radically different contexts and, at the same time, three very differentiated models of production in his personal career. However, we must not simply reduce Jordà's profile down to film, for he is also a screenwriter, literary translator, and professor.
From there Jordà became a point of reference for young directors who found in him a way to make films outside of the dominant production models. Jordà's rather hazardous trajectory shows that his films reflect disparate and, at times, antithetic models of production. Among his movies we find documentaries, works of fiction, and militant films, as well as different formats and a variety of budgets. However, this diversity confers on his works a realistic finish that does not necessitate him recurring to any naturalism to make them as such. On the contrary, his films sustain themselves through their capacity to reflect and accommodate the human conditions and materials he works with.
Jordà could be defined as an intellectual who has turned film into a common space in which the cineforum itself is integrated. Each of his productions has generated specific publics, each attracted by the promise of participating in a debate. Just as it has happened before, he is only interested in producing the situation. "I worry more about the mise en place of the scene and the plane, and less about how to capture it on film. I organize the situation, and after that step aside. I could even go out for a coffee, and return when it is all done." This is what we could, without a doubt, classify as "situational cinema."
Carles Guerra
