The Brigades of Light. The artistic and poltical avant-garde in Spanish Cinema (1967 – 1981)

Cinema programme directed by Julio Pérez Perucha

Let us remember with ruthless clarity how, in October 1967 in Sitges, Catalonia, an assembly of (practising or potential) film-makers laid bare the imposed political, expressive and democratic shortcomings of the cinema of the time - even when it was most committed to the struggle for democracy; how, in 1968, the Anti-Franco struggles intensified among us: and how 1969 began with a state of emergency. As if that were not enough, in the field of cinema, censorship worsened and the obstacles from the corporate unions (vertical unions = anti-democratic, remember) grew apace. As a result, many film-makers/auteurs threw in the towel having decided that the room for manoeuvre within the system was going from minimal to non-existent. So they would simply turn their backs on the laws of Franco's government. From then on, their films would be alegal, when they were not completely illegal; semi-clandestine when they were not completely clandestine, meaning that they – both films and film-makers – could at any time become victims of police harassment.

This protean, exciting movement was started in 1967, based around two axes. Firstly, the refutation of the formal, signifying and rhetorical mechanisms right across the whole range of formulae in the predominant, and conventionally industrial or commercial, cinema. The argument is that the struggle against Franco's (or the capitalist) system began in cultural (that is to say ideological) spheres by attacking the mechanisms of communication and consumption: and from that perspective the choice of elements of reference was not decisive. The second axis was that which ensured that all anti-Franco political activity should be steeped in reality, thereby recuperating and restoring – for the viewer - the growing popular struggles taking place, making the arguments more immediately readable, leaving "formalist" experimentation for a less urgently needful time. An old debate, then. Obviously, on more than one occasion, the two axes became one.