Crisis Documentation Militant Cinema from the 1970s in the Iberian Peninsula
Cinema programme
This programme includes four films associated with the different types of militancy during the 1970s. The critique of the institutions and the forms of collective production marked a cinema where producers and recipients were often the same. In a context of anti-Franco struggle followed by the democratic Transition, cinema imagined a language on the fringes of the dream machine. In these films factories and prisons are real, while a critique of the media cries in the face of an incipient neo-liberalism’s promises. This film cycle coincides with the exhibition by Eulàlia Grau, I Have Never Painted Golden Angels, at MACBA until 26 May.
Programme
Friday 22 March 7.30 pm
Más allá de las rejas, Llorenç Soler, 1980, 20'
Clandestine film about the riots organised by COPEL (Colectivo de Presos en Lucha) at the Modelo prison, Barcelona, in the summer of 1978. The film features several ex-political prisoners denouncing the way they had been treated by prison warders, a collective formed under Franco that used strong repressive methods against the interns. For reasons of security, the film was screened without credit titles.
El cuarto poder, Helana Lumbreras, 1970-72, 45'
This film analyses the power of the means of communication run by the State and calls for the production of clandestine publications. The documentary, structured in three parts, ridicules the ‘official press’. Vertiginously edited, it mixes press cuttings, photographs and newspaper headlines, while showing images of the Vietnam War together with anti-American accusations, denunciations against imperialism, and proposals for a self-regulated ‘new’ press.
São Pedro da Cova, Rui Simões. 1976, 45'
The film is shown in Portuguese without subtitles.
In 1795, a man working for the priest of São Pedro da Cova discovered a coal seam while digging at Quinta dos Valinhos. For the people of that small village life changed quite dramatically as a result. The coalmines brought about a series of conditions that are still perceptible nowadays. The mines closed in 1970. Many lives were destroyed and the health of thousands of miners suffered irreversible damage. The mines left behind ruins, famine, unemployment, poverty and illiteracy. This series of three 15-minute documentaries was funded by the Portuguese Ministry of Education following the Carnation Revolution, as part of an adult education programme that went beyond mere literacy classes.
Friday 5 April 7.30 pm
Con uñas y dientes, Paulino Viota. 1978, 98'
Marcos, a strike leader, is chased and beaten by the factory director’s hired thugs. He and his wife seek help from a Party comrade: he must go into hiding until the situation is resolved; he stays with Aurora, a teacher friend. An intense relationship develops between Marcos and Aurora while they are together. Feeling threatened, the factory director ignores the crime to protect his financial wrongdoings. The workers get involved in never-ending discussions that get nowhere. Their employers use their capacity for manoeuvring to re-establish a temporary truce.
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