Pere Portabella
Pere Portabella
Pere Portabella is a veteran Catalan filmmaker whose narrative features—rich in interludes, plot diversions, atmosphere, and unexpected synchronies between sight and sound—limn the avant-garde and expand the expressive potential of cinema. Portabella, who began his cinematic career as a producer of fiction films implicitly critical of General Francisco Franco, had his passport revoked when Luis Buñuel's Viridiana 1961, which he helped to make, "embarrassed" Spain at the Cannes Film Festival in 1962. When democracy returned to Spain, Portabella served as a senator in the Catalan government. Throughout his various careers, Portabella continued to make cinema, investigating meaning in the moving image and expanding the notion of genre—particularly for horror films, fantasy films, and thrillers.
'Pere Portabella' curated by Mark Nash with accompanying film notes, unless otherwise indicated.
LECTURE: Pere Portabella
A special lecture on the films of Pere Portabella by Mark Nash, curator, writer and Head of Department for Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, London. Nash recently published Screen Theory Culture (2008, Palgrave) and also presented a retrospective of Portabella at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2007. He was co-curator of documenta 11: Documentary and the Reality Effect in 2002.
Sat 30 Aug 3.00pm / Cinema A
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Los Golfos (The Delinquents) 1960 ‘Inspired by Luis Buñuel’s films, Saura’s acclaimed first film—the “most difficult film in my career”—is an uncompromising portrait of a teenage gang (played by street children) and the first Spanish film shot entirely on location. When one of the boys expresses a desire to become a bullfighter, the others pull a big heist to finance their pal’s dream. Delayed by the censors during pro- duction, the film revealed the contradictions in Franco’s “defascistization,” and the censorship and repression that continued under his regime.’ MoMA Fri 22 Aug 6.00pm / Cinema A |
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El Cochecito (The Little Coach) 1960 ‘All Don Anselmo wants is a motorized wheelchair, so he can go buzzing around town with his invalid pal Don Lucas and join in the races for the handicapped. The problem is that there's nothing wrong with his legs, and his prosperous but parsimonious son, the lawyer, refuses to indulge him... El Cochecito, too, has its satiric edge – almost everybody, even likable Anselmo, is utterly self-centered. The drastic steps the old fellow takes to stop walking and start riding constitute a quirkily rueful look at the loneliness and longings of age.’ Walter Goodman Wed 27 Aug 4.00pm / Cinema A |
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Miró 37/Aidez L'Espagne 1969 Miró 37 juxtaposes documentary footage of the Spanish Civil War with an exhibition of Miró's work at the College of Architects in Barcelona that aimed to counter his appropriation by the Francoist establishment. Fri 29 Aug 6.00pm (Miró shorts program) / Cinema A |
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Vampir-Cuadecuc 1970 Vampir Cuadecuc is a delirious reflection on the codes and conventions of the horror film through the language of structural materialist cinema. Shot on the set of Jesús Franco's Count Dracula 1970, with a compelling soundtrack by Carles Santos, the film alternates between being a horror film—with intertextual references back to Carl Dreyer's Vampyr 1932—and documenting Franco's filming. This film evinces a distinct authorial style, evidenced through Portabella's use of high-contrast photography and his blending of documentary and fiction. Fri 22 Aug 7.30pmand Sun 31 Aug 1.00pm (with Play Back) / Cinema A |
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Umbracle 1970 In Umbracle, an aleatory horror film that paints a critical image of Francoist Spain, Portabella continues his exploration of the language of experimental cinema and develops his aesthetic of combining documentary with reenactment. He worked with Christopher Lee to produce an "ideal and predetermined cliché[d]" image of an actor: "Lee offered to perform my ideas with pleasure. I even managed to get him to do the hardest thing an actor can do: nothing." Sun 24 Aug 3.00pm / Cinema A |
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Play Back 1970 Playback documents a Carles Santos recording in which the chorus of the Liceu of Barcelona converts a musical text into a verbal and physical performance. Fri 22 Aug 7.30pmand Sun 31 Aug 1.00pm (with Vampir-Cuadecuc) / Cinema A |
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Acció Santos 1973 Acció Santos contrasts music performance with intellectual reflection. In the first section, Carles Santos performs Bach at the piano. Then, he listens to the recording while the film falls silent. Sun 31 Aug 3.00pm (with The Bridge of Warsaw) / Cinema A |
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Miró Tapís 1974 16MM, COLOUR, MONO, 22 MINUTES, SPAIN, SPANISH (ENGLISH SUBTITLES) / DIRECTOR: PERE PORTABELLA / ASSTISTANT DIRECTOR: ANNIE SETTIMÓ / CINEMATOGRAPHER: MANUEL ESTEBAN / EDITOR: TBC / PRODUCTION CO: PERE PORTABELLA / PRINT SOURCE/RIGHTS: FILMS 59 |
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Miró La Forja 1973 Miró Tapís and Miró La Forja are direct-sound documentations of the production of Miró works, including the vast tapestry that hung in the vestibule of one of the Twin Towers. Fri 29 Aug 6.00pm (Miró shorts program) / Cinema A |
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El Sopar 1974 In 1974, on the night the militant anarchist Salvador Puig Antich was executed, five former political prisoners—Angel Abad, Jordi Cunill, Lola Ferreira, Narcís Julian, and Antonio Marín—gather in a farmhouse to prepare a meal and make a film discussing the problems and issues arising from long prison terms. Portabella uses simple cinematic conventions to explore his subject: "You can't understand liberation if you don't begin with yourself." Sun 24 Aug 1.00pm / Cinema A |
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Informe generale sobre algunas cuestiones de interés para una proyección pública (General Report on Some Interesting Facts for a Public Showing) 1976 Clandestinely shot documentary footage of demonstrations in major cities is interwoven with interviews and discussions between Spanish politicians, union activists, and representatives (many of whom would become key figures in post-1978-constitution Spain). This film documents the creative process by which a constitution and a country come into being—through a society asking itself: How could Spain rid itself of its Francoist institutions and become a democratic, socialist country that respects the identities of its component nationalities? Sun 17 Aug 1.00pm / Cinema A |
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Pont de Varsòvia (The Bridge of Warsaw) 1989 The idea for The Bridge of Warsaw, a less conceptual film than Accío Santos, started from a line in a newspaper: "The body of a scuba diver was found in a burnt forest." Portabella elaborates narrative fragments from this kernel in a procedure that recalls that of the French nouveau roman. Made as the Cold War was ending, the film critiques the Spanish intelligentsia's indifference to political and historical change. Sun 31 Aug 3.00pm / Cinema A |
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Tren de sombras: Le Spectre De Le Thuit (Train of Shadows: The Spector of Le Thuit) 1997 ‘On November 8, 1930, amateur filmmaker Gérard Fleury stood on the shores of Normandy's Lake Thuit, watching the sun rise in preparation for an upcoming shoot that would never take place; he died later that day under mysterious circumstances. Out of this information, Guerín constructs a haunting meditation on the photographic and cinematic image, on loss and decay, on the passing of time, the recounting of history and the blurring of fact and fiction. He uses both re-enactments and decayed images to render ambiguous past and present, historical record and speculation, and to make poetry out of loss.’ Harvard Film Archive Wed 20 Aug 4.00pm / Cinema A |
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Die Stille vor Bach (The Silence before Bach) 2007 Portabella's latest film, about how Johann Sebastian Bach transformed the world through music, explores the dramaturgical relation between music and image. Works by Bach, as well as two of Felix Mendelssohn's sonatas, are performed on original and modern instruments (including a harmonica) in a series of narrative fragments set in environments associated with the music—from long-distance trucks to the Thomasschule Leipzig. An example of cinema redefining the experience of music for a contemporary audience, it recalls Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach 1968 in its structural use of music. Fri 29 Aug 7.30pm / Cinema A |
