cinema

Marginal Catalan Cinema
Interview with Antoni Padrós by Beniamino Biondi

"He moved to the anarchist, underground, marginal, nihilist, I think the concept of marginal is the most acceptable, "said one of the entries in this interview most challenging of Catalan cinema. Catalan, not Spanish.

Antoni Padrós

You were born in Catalonia. What do you think of the film school in Barcelona?

The school of Barcelona was something very different from what I was trying to do at that time. I've always considered independent ideas and "isms", I was a kind of suicide bombers or sniper, far from a School of Barcelona, which I always recognized the merits of innovation, but I never fully accepted.
I was born and lived all my life, 30 km from Barcelona, Terrassa, textile and industrial city of Catalonia, in an era where everything was gray and dark, with a ruling class, the industrial bourgeoisie, mostly controlled by the dictatorial regime of Franco. In the morning I worked in a bank and in the evening to escape the environmental pressure, I painted, wrote and then I started to film stories about the sexual and political repression in this country. The weekend I met with some friends, and seriously and fully convinced of what I was doing, I began to film stories and basting. The stories over the years have been recognized by some. If you believe in what you're doing, sooner or later be appreciated as something authentic. This is my case, and is the most important thing.

How does it fit your film experience in relation to the experience of the School of Barcelona?

My involvement in the art world was through painting, becoming part of one of the most prestigious art galleries in Barcelona, Sala Gaspar. But ideological differences have meant that broke definitively with the commercialism of art galleries and I am so close to my real passion, which had always been the film, trying a new experience of life as the study of cinema. The French May was in full swing and the painting gave me no great hope to communicate my experiences, frustrations, loneliness and fear he lived in Spain. All this I could only do so through the images. And so it all started.
I studied film at Aixelà, a private institute in Barcelona, where I saw for the first time almost all movies of the School of Barcelona. My teachers were Pere Portabella, Miquel Doors Moix, Roman Gubernia, among others, all left-wing intellectuals, some members of the School of Barcelona. I learned the art of cinema and the philosophy of being independent. For me, being independent means being myself, look inside and test my ideas. And this in the belief that when you start a creative work you have to believe strongly in what you're doing. It 's like being kidnapped and subjected to the pleasure of enduring emotion, to live only to transgress and transform reality. To make the poetry of everyday life and, ultimately, transform it while remaining objective.
My experience with the School of Barcelona was the only spectator. Of course I appreciate the innovation of films like "Lejos de los árboles" Jacinto Esteva, Joaquin Jordá with "Día de los Muertos," the first José Maria Nunes of "Mañana" or Pere Portabella's "No amb els compteu dit" . Later, the excess of elitism ended up bored.

In many critical essays, your name appears alongside those of Font Espina and Antonio Maenza in current cinema marginal. Accept this critical position?

After being moved to the anarchist, underground, marginal, nihilist, I think the concept of marginal is the most acceptable, although in those years the only thing I wanted was to make a film. I do not know in depth the work of José María Font Espina but in my opinion, has nothing to do with cinema marginal. As for Antonio Maenza I can not say anything because I have not had a chance to see even one meter of his films. He died at 31 years and until now remains an unknown for me, as his works that are a mystery. Lack of awareness of its work for me has always meant a certain restlessness. This critical position I do not know what to tell you, sure that the person who will be supported in some way his reasons, but just do not know in reference to a source Espina ...

Ice cream

But the repression is cyclic

It's really been a marginal Catalan cinema or it was isolated and individual experience? In this case, your path as you have done?

If it exists, and then there was a marginal Catalan cinema, the distinguishing feature is its constant state of repression by the Spanish state in its language and its institutions. This current produced a film very different from the rest of the country and has certainly influenced me. My position could be described as politically incorrect, because I have never taken any dogma, creating a visceral form of great anger against injustice. I wanted to be just a free spirit who did not depend on anything or anyone and so I act in complete freedom. I do not care to be ignored by dogmatic great popes of the moment.
I define myself as a self-marginalization, I never expected anything from anybody. I am the son of the working class and a family that has lost the war. My work in the private banking sector has allowed me to use up all my salary (which was very small) in the passion, perhaps useless, to make films. Useless because it did not require more than a personal satisfaction and to prove myself to be able to materialize the imagination in 24 frames and transform reality without realizing that turning it made a deep criticism of myself. At that time I was a bit 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a schizophrenic who works in a bank in the morning and evening tells stories untold.

Watching your movies, it seems to me that the central element of your speech is the demystification of film cultural myths of the '60s and '70s. It seems to me that you, much earlier than others, has understood how the cult of liberty for freedom if only the prologue to the replacement of an old power with a new power, too ritualistic and even more dangerous.

We are no longer in the 70s, but some of my movies still have some validity, because repression is cyclical and policies always produce power. Furthermore, the future remains uncertain for many young people and this ritual is repeated: the old is always replaced by another power, but freedom still has a very high price. In the last step of my film "Lock Out" at the British Film Institute in London last November, during the conference after the screening, one viewer gave me a very important compliment to my way of being and thinking and which I consider a way of life. The phlegmatic English said: "Congratulations, because we are dealing with a free spirit." These words made me realize that, ultimately, make this particular type of cinema was not a useless passion.

Lock Out

Transgression of the representation

In my opinion, your path is a road block that uses the contemporary times of alienation and sexual repression to conduct an ideological discourse on existential crisis of a generation. Share this thought?

It could be that the road block of my address on the repression and sexual politics of the '70s was not only a speech at a particular time. Rather, it is something more general on the existential crisis of a generation much larger in time and physical space of an era. In the background the "pillars of the Country" are the same: the army, the family and religion.

In contrast to the directors of the School of Barcelona, who have worked to excess, it seems to me that your film work by subtraction and poetic synthesis. Your films hidden source of contraction of the language very close to the psychoanalytic process of identification. I have a feeling that your movies come to an implosion conscious to the point that I'd call it a utopian cinema implosion. What do you think?

Perhaps the difference in my films with the School of Barcelona is the immediacy of language, the withdrawal and replacement of transcendentalism hermeticism with irony and irreverent debunking of the alleged sacredness. The contradiction of language resides in a more direct approach and perhaps culturally maximalist. Utopia is possible when it breaks the reality.

In all these movies seems that you intend to play the "trauma unit", to borrow Roland Barthes. Do you share this idea?

It is very likely. The breaking of the narrative representation can reproduce the trauma unit, to implode the plot and get the breach of representation, which leads to the deconstruction of the narrative. Nothing is as it seems, everything changes and while the story is still there with its trauma unit. In any case the idea is similar construction-deconstruction.

Your technique of filming and editing it seems to me that responding to the ideological and emotional reasons than technical reasons. What do you think?

The instability requires ideological and imaginative solutions. For me it is a real witness of this ideological impossibility, a "poor cinema" where at one point a character from one of my film says: "We are the poetry momentarily alienated by the ruling class, but always about to explode." Technique is important when you can use it, but what is important to me is what is said or at least suggested.

¿Que hay para cenar querida?

In the virtual world the individual is dead

What have been and what are your relations with members of the School of Barcelona? And also, there is still a current marginal Spanish cinema?

My relationship with the members of the School of Barcelona, has always been friendly, especially with Pere Portabella, José Maria Nunes and Lorenzo Soler. Currently exists in Catalonia and throughout Spain is only one producer, named Lluis Miñarro, which brings a kind of cinema that could be called independent, but with the vision of a producer. For example, all the films that I did not officially exist. I have been a suicide bomber or a sniper, who initially did not expect anything from anyone. So my film was a suicide continuous wrong anywhere and could not enter into any circuit projection. There was only a group of university students who loved my film. Were exposed to the dangers of repression and its consequences for distributing this type of alternative cinema in the Circles of Cinema, and the University was the Central Short Films.
At present there are crazy and experimental filmmakers, who never enter into any commercial circuit. Andrés Duque is a great experimenter and another good documentary is Albert Pons. I hope soon to take over or peacefully coexist with the old marginal.

Your work seems very close to underground, avant-garde of the old Brazilian Eastern countries, but little to European cinema itself and Spain. What do you think?

The little Brazilian film I saw at that time were the only films of Glauber Rocha, Ruy Guerra, the rest, almost anything. Curiously, and thanks to the screening of "Lock Out" (1973) in New York there was anyone who compared this movie with "Sátántangó" (1999) Hungarian Bela Tarr. Also in reference to Brazilian cinema I can tell you that I recently discovered a movie that I was deeply impressed: "Limit" (1931) Mario Peixoto. It is a work of art.

Today there are still cultural conditions for a film deliberately marginal, or the end of ideology has corrupted the utopia of cinema?

I think so. There are conditions for a marginal cinema, but perhaps something has been lost very important as the reaction core of the individual in his projection of utopia. Now, in the virtual world. Everything seems to be limited and the risk is not the place. Everything is appearance, and nothing is real. The individual is dead.

What foreign experience do you have affected and still affect you today?

Pasolini's film of his early works, "Accattone" and "Mamma Roma" ... and this suburban Italian cinema with a poetic edge. In general, I have always been interested in Italian cinema in particular that of its golden age, Rossellini, Visconti ... Marco Bellocchio and psychoanalysis, with its eternal society. I also recently enjoyed the movie from the novel by Elio Vittorini's Conversations in Sicily "by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. From a young age, I identified with the poetry of Cesare Pavese and the images that I passed on the poems of "Death will come and will have your eyes."

What sense does your current cinema have and what are the objectives?

I do not know. The book follows his journey and in a sense it is as if I belonged. Over the years has acquired a life of its own. The thing that makes me happy is knowing that the younger generation accepted this legacy to do with it without shame. In the end, the efforts of all these years have not been in vain. Now, driven by the enthusiasm of some young filmmakers, I'm preparing the shooting of a medium length film about a man so exact that has bored even the Angel of Death. It's a Christmas story very cruel and disillusioned.