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Luis
García Berlanga by Steven Marsh Steven Marsh teaches media ethics and cultural theory at New York University in Madrid. He is a researcher on the international collaborative project “An Oral History of Cinema Going in 1940s and 1950s Spain” and has written extensively on comedy in post-war Spanish film. He is joint editor of the forthcoming volume Gender and Spanish Cinema (Berg, 2004). |
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| Luis García Berlanga spearheaded the dramatic transformation that
Spanish cinema underwent in the 1950s and early 1960s. In spite of the harsh
censorship that hallmarked Francisco Franco's military and Catholic-inspired
regime, Berlanga succeeded in directing a series of films that undermined
the mores of the Dictatorship and established him as the most important
Spanish film director of his generation. From his first film in 1951 to
his final movie París-Timbuctú (1999), which heralded
his retirement, Berlanga has proved a consistent thorn in the side of authority,
both during the Dictatorship and throughout the democratic period that followed
the death of Franco in 1975. While his particular version of 'the popular'
is undeniably subversive, such subversion has proved politically problematic.
Claimed, at times, by both the Left and the Right, he has never easily fitted
in to either generic or ideological categories. Born into a wealthy, land-owning family in Spain's eastern province of Valencia, Berlanga enjoyed a comfortable and untroubled upbringing until the onset of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936. While the Francoist uprising sought to bring down the democratically-elected Second Republic, Berlanga's father was one of the Valencia regional representatives in the national parliament. In the aftermath of the war Berlanga senior was arrested and sentenced to death. Eventually the sentence was commuted but he remained in prison until 1952, only to die six months after his release. Meanwhile, shortly before the end of the war the 18-year-old Berlanga junior was mobilised by the Republican forces and conscripted into a medical unit. Following the Francoist victory, in what constitutes one of the many paradoxes of Berlanga's life, he seemingly changed sides and volunteered to serve in the Blue Division—the unit of Spanish soldiers who travelled to the Soviet Union to fight for Germany in World War II as part of an agreement between Hitler and Franco—in a desperate effort to gain favour with the regime and save his father's life. Although he never directly saw action, the future filmmaker would draw upon these experiences in later life and the dark comedy that pervades his cinema is marked by these ironies. Berlanga is not only the funniest but also the bleakest of Spanish directors. Once back in Spain, Berlanga moved to Madrid and commenced his studies in literature at the city's Complutense University. It was during this period that he developed an interest in cinema. In 1947, when the Madrid film school—the portentously named Institute of Cinematic Investigation and Experience (IIEC)—opened, Berlanga promptly dropped his literary studies and switched. Created by Franco's cultural commissars after the Civil War, the school was modelled on Rome's Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia founded by Benito Mussolini (which spawned, amongst other lauded directors, Roberto Rossellini and Michelangelo Antonioni). Together with his classmates from the first promotion of graduates from the IIEC—among whom was his friend and close collaborator, lifelong Communist Party member, Juan Antonio Bardem—Berlanga was instrumental in the creation, firstly, of Altamira and then Uninci, the production company behind some of the most significant Spanish movies of the post-war period and which, in time, would produce Luis Buñuel's Viridiana (1961). Keen to distance themselves from what they perceived as the backward, dogmatic, censored and often religious-based cinema required of them by the regime, Berlanga, Bardem and company were enthusiastic about the work of their counterparts in Italy. The screening of a series of movies during the 1951 Italian film week in Madrid came as a revelation to them.
In 1955 Berlanga and Bardem were present and decisive at a celebrated conference, known as the Conversaciones de Salamanca, organised by critic and director Basilio Martín Patino as an attempt to refocus the direction Spanish cinema was taking and to co-ordinate a dialogue between liberal elements within the state machinery (most notably the erstwhile head of cinema and theatre in the Ministry of Tourism and Information, José María García Escudero, who would hold the position on two different occasions in 1951 and 1962) and the moderately left opposition. It was Bardem's searing intervention in the course of the Conversaciones that has defined (and in my view misdefined) the entire generation. Bardem declared that Spanish cinema was, “politically ineffectual, socially false, intellectually poverty-stricken, aesthetically void and industrially stunted.” In spite of Bardem's speech at the Salamanca conference, it is simply not the case that Spanish cinema prior to his work and that of Berlanga was exclusively a vehicle for the Dictatorship and its allies in the Catholic Church, even though such a view was common currency among critics until recently. Over the last decade new scholarship has demonstrated that relatively few Spanish movies of the immediate post-war period conformed to Bardem's caricature. Of the more than 500 films made in Spain between 1939 and 1951—the so-called period of autarky or cultural and economic self-sufficiency—less than 20 conform to this particular caricature. The vast majority of the nation's film production consisted of musicals, melodramas and popular comedies. Even the populist, albeit brutally repressive, Franco (himself a fan of cinema) acknowledged the need to make concessions. In the aftermath of the war, the Nationalist victors were conscious of the necessity of incorporating the bulk of the losing masses into their project. To this end, the horrors of the post-war period were coupled with cultural initiatives designed to elicit popular consent. After graduation from the IIEC Berlanga and Bardem were chosen by their colleagues in Altamira to jointly direct Esa pareja feliz (That Happy Couple) in 1951, a bittersweet comedy concerning the economic difficulties of a newly-wedded couple living in Madrid who are chosen by lottery to represent a soap company for a day, with all the presents and free meals that come with it. Starring Fernando Fernán Gomez (a stalwart of Spanish cinema from 1940s to the present day) and Elvira Quintillá, this is very much a debut film that owes as much to sainete and Ealing comedy as it does to neorealism. The influence of the Communist Bardem is particularly clear towards the end of the film as the couple come to consciousness as to the nature of wealth and power. From then onwards, in Berlanga's solo career as a film director, his work is marked by a much more pessimistic sense of humour, in which such moral conclusions are noticeably absent. Indeed Berlanga consistently violates the conventions of comedy by refusing to countenance the concept of a happy ending.
Following ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! Berlanga directed the tame and inconsequential Novio a la vista (Boyfriend in Sight) in 1953, before experiencing the first of several lengthy periods of inactivity that plagued his career. Eventually in 1956 he made Calabuch and then Los jueves, milagro (Miracles on Thursdays, 1957). This latter film is claimed by Berlanga to have been savaged by censorship. (3) Concerning the fabrication of miracles for commercial purposes, such is the ferocity of its parody of the Catholic Church that one wonders what it was like prior to being censored. This is even more the case when one considers that the production company behind the film was connected to the Church and Berlanga was obliged to co-write it with a priest!
Berlanga's use of the sequence shot is central to a much remarked upon feature of his cinema: its choral quality. Berlanga's cinematic composition (and his comedy) emerges out of the representation of the crisis of an individual (who is usually male) in the conflictual context of the multitudinous group. Furthermore, his faithfulness to the same group of repertory actors (a generation trained in theatre and very often in music hall) that, with few exceptions, has remained with him for the last 40 years, gives a particularly 'spontaneous' feel to his cinema. This team, together with Berlanga's idiosyncratic camera work, has enabled the director to portray the 'popular' while retaining his own very personal style. In this way, just as he has violated critical categories of popular film, he has also complicated established approaches to auteur cinema. Nominated for the Best Foreign Language film award at that year's Oscars, Plácido—a Christmas movie—has a direct relationship with the work of Frank Capra and in particular It's a Wonderful Life (1946), albeit with none of Capra's sentimentality. Meanwhile, if Plácido unmasked the dominant discourses surrounding the traditional family and Christian charity, El verdugo, arguably his finest film, struck at the very heart of the repressive Francoist state. El verdugo tells the story of a man who, on marrying the daughter of the state executioner, is condemned to inherit his father-in-law's job. This is a story that interrogates and unveils the anatomy of Spanish society at an historical turning point. The film, for example, unpicks the reality of the country's 1960s tourist boom that would, on the one hand, help consolidate the revived fortunes of the Spanish economy, while on the other, would bring with it the unwanted 'foreign' values of liberalism and sexual freedom.
It is with these two films that Berlanga breached the borders of Spain and his international status was established. His own distinctive and discordant voice emerges from out of a mosaic of cinematic debts from both home and abroad. Among these influences are not only Capra, but also figures such as Jean Renoir, René Clair and, above all, his close friend and ally in anarchy, Federico Fellini. Although he continued to make movies until his retirement in 1999, El verdugo marks the last of the great Berlanga films. For political reasons, partly arising out of the Venice controversy, he found it difficult to work in Spain and in 1967 Berlanga, again working with a script written by Azcona, directed a flawed Argentine production, La boutique. He would return to Spain in 1969 to make ¡Vivan los novios! (Long Live the Bride and Groom!), a confused parody of the then-fashionable, albeit infantile, tendency prevailing throughout popular European cinema towards frivolity and titillation.
The death of Franco in 1975 once more opened doors for Berlanga to work freely. It has been suggested that, like other subversive filmmakers, Berlanga is at his finest when working in difficult circumstances. Certainly he was never fully able to regain the critical force of Plácido, El verdugo or even ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! again. One of the consequences of the ending of censorship was that it enabled Berlanga to fully explore and exploit what had only been possible to hint at in his earlier films: that of bodily function and disfunction. His Fellini-like obsession with the human body has often been confused (to a large degree thanks to Berlanga himself) with eroticism. The body in Berlanga's work is, nonetheless, either symbolic of age and decay or it is celebratory of human consumption; in spite of the director's own analysis, it rarely concerns sexuality. Perhaps more pertinently, in light of such critical films as El verdugo, is the suggestion of a lack of political force in the later Berlanga. The fact remains though that Berlanga is not a political animal in an identificatory sense of possessing a specific ideological affiliation. In spite of that, his political problems persisted beyond the Dictatorship. For a brief period at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s he was President of the Spanish Filmoteca (the National Film Archive) but fell foul of his new 'democratic' political masters. His final films tend to be farces that, in common with the earlier films, are open-ended and in which powerful figures come off badly. It is in the nature of his cinema that subversion is carnivalesque and largely unintended. Additionally, the subtlety of Berlanga's politics has often been underestimated. The following example perhaps serves to illustrate the complexity of this filmmaker's political engagement.
This anecdote reflects the intricately problematic relationship Berlanga has maintained with the great and the good of the Spanish state throughout his career in both dictatorial and democratic periods. Like all great comics Berlanga's glancing irreverence has proved unruly and genuinely subversive where more explicit and ideologically motivated cinema often fails. Berlanga's final films emphasise his fondness for the irrepressible humour of parody, often rooted in the traditional festivities that originate in his native Valencia. As many critics have pointed out, Berlanga's commitment to 'the popular' makes him a kind of utopian but he is one who has never lost his acerbic eye for the ridiculous aspects of power. © Steven Marsh, February 2003 Endnotes:
Filmography Esa
pareja feliz (That
Happy Couple)
(1951)
Patrimonio
nacional (National Patrimony) (1980) 
Select Bibliography Carlos
Cañique and Maite Grau, ¡Bienvenido Mr. Berlanga!,
Barcelona, Destino, 1993
Web Resources Compiled by Albert Fung European
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