The New Spanish Cinema

After 100 years of pulp, politics and melodrama, Spanish moviemakers have fashioned a cinema where

by Phillip Williams | Published September 29, 2002

The initial flowering of cinema in Spain at the beginning of the 20th century occurred in much the same way as in the rest of Europe. Spanish moviemakers grappled with the challenge of learning to harness cinema's artistic and commercial potential as an international art, while at the same time using the medium as a reflection of their own national culture. For a good deal of its history, Spanish film, like the country itself, was caught between a conservative take on the world and a more liberated, internationalist view of culture and identity.

It's said that the first movie shot in Spain was Eduardo Jimeno's People Coming out of the Noontime Mass at the Cathedral of the Virgin of Pilar in Zaragoza (1897), which was followed by a series of shorts done in the same spirit by the Lumiere brothers' cameraman, Alexandre Promio. The first actual fiction film made in Spain—written, directed, produced and performed by Spanish film pioneer Fructuoso Gelabert—was Café Brawl (1897). Barcelona was the center of Spanish moviemaking up until 1915; in addition to Gelabert, Segundo de Chomón was busy during those early days making a series of special effects pictures that led up to his spectacular fantasy film, The Electric Hotel (1905). Though Barcelona remained a center of production for the next 20 years, Madrid began to siphon off a large chunk of that activity, beginning when Benito Perojo and his brother, José, set up shop in the city.

Carlos Saura’s Tango (1998); Alejandro Amenábar’s Open Your Eyes (1997).

Content in these early movies reflected local Spanish cultural tastes faithfully. Documentaries about bullfighting were popular, as were adaptations of 19th century romantic plays, a trend touched off by Ricardo de Baños' 1908 version of Don Juan Tenorio.

In the 1920s, Spanish literature became a rich source of material for local moviemakers, with artists like Jacinto Benavente, José Buchs and Florián Rey all turning out successful big-screen adaptations. A hit adaptation of Carlos Arniches' popular That's My Man, directed by Carlos Fernández Cuenca in 1927, set the tone for many movies that followed. Arniches' theater was a prime source of material for many of the pictures produced just prior to the Civil War. His ability to bring to life the world of working-class Madrid, and his mastery of their vernacular, were a key part of his work's appeal.

The Spanish film industry was producing about 60 pictures a year at this point, but the advent of talking films soon cut into this rapid pace. It was during this time that Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali's surrealist short The Andalusian Dog (1928) was screened in Paris, launching Buñuel's notorious film career. For many people outside of Spain (particularly cinephiles) Buñuel, like Pedro Almodóvar today, came to represent Spanish cinema at its most irreverent, eclectic best.

Francisco Elías' The Mystery of the Puerta de Sol (1929) was the first sound picture produced in Spain. But while American and other European moviemakers made significant leaps in sound technology, Spanish films continued to be conceived as silent works, with synchronized sound added after the fact. It was Hollywood that gave Spanish audiences their first good sound films, determined to keep their grip on international markets. Spanish casts and crews were assembled in Hollywood to remake English-language films, using the same sets but with Spanish script translations. The technical quality of these pictures surpassed anything coming out of Spain, even though the content wasn't always specifically Spanish in origin. Given the poor infrastructure for moviemaking in Spain at the time, a significant number of film professionals migrated to Hollywood and Paris. By 1931, the production of Spanish-language films produced outside of Spain actually dominated the Spanish market itself.

In 1931, Spanish and Latin American film professionals got together in an effort to create a united front and lobby for government protection of their industry. No tangible results were produced. Then, in 1932, the first sound studio in Spain, Orphea Studios, was set up in Barcelona. The following year, Cinematographia Española Americana (CEA), a Madrid-based sound studio, went into action, along with Estudios Cinema Español S.A. (ECESA) in Aranjuez, just outside the capital. These new Spanish 'majors' were able to turn out some quality films, but nothing on the scale that Hollywood could generate. Still, with the addition of 14 smaller studios over the next two years, it was possible to declare a boom in Spanish cinema by 1935—aided by a high level of support from Spanish audiences.

While a lot of the material produced at this time was more or less escapist fare, companies like Compania Industrial Film Español S.A. (CIFESA) and Filmófono went beyond this trend to create pictures that were both commercially successful and artistically distinct. CIFESA's early hits included Rey's Mama's Suitor (1934) and Benito Perojo's On the Road to Cairo (1935). Significantly, Buñuel was hired to manage and participate in all aspects of Filmófono's activities (including directing projects himself under other directors' names). But Spain was still a conservative country, and most pictures reflected the traditional values of investors.

Popular hits of the day revealed that audiences continued to like material that captured the urban milieu. Still, a bit of social criticism did show up in Spanish cinema of the day, with films like Madrid se Divorcia (1934) and Who Loves Me? (1936). Fernando Roldán's Fermin Galán (1931) was clearly created to justify the existence of the Second Republic, which would soon come to an end with the arrival of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.

Víctor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973); and Fernando Trueba’s Belle Époque (1992) are all well-known entries in the canon of Spanish cinema.

The period just prior to the war was indeed a golden age of Spanish cinema, and for some, a golden age of Spanish culture in general. Spanish cinema had a strong domestic following, which it managed to achieve despite strong pressures from Hollywood and the total absence of subsidies from the government. The early to mid-1930s were also a time in which homegrown film stars such as Miguel Ligero, Manuel Luna, Rosita Díaz Gimeno and Antoñita Colomé captured the national imagination. Years later, Spanish director Fernando Trueba would put his own nostalgic spin on this beautiful time with his Oscar-winning Belle Époque (1992).

The great gains made by the industry by the mid 1930s were effectively halted (and in some cases reversed) by the commencement and eventual outcome of the Civil War, which saw a victory for General Franco's nationalist forces, who were allied with Nazi Germany. During the conflict, many productions were halted and moviemakers on both sides of the conflict found themselves cut off from large chunks of their audience—as well as their collaborators, many of whom died in the conflict or went into exile. While some of the pictures that managed to reach completion by 1936 (such as Rey's Morena Clara) did find commercial success on both sides of the divide, right up until the end of the War, there was little room for a liberated, creative cinema in Franco's Spain.

With Franco's government came increased censorship, government subsidies, classifications and ideological pressures aimed at steering content in a direction that would please the state's highly reactionary agenda. It wasn't long before moviemakers were effectively policing themselves. Ironically, the government's edict requiring Spanish as the only language allowed on national screens had the unforeseen consequence of placing foreign films on an equal footing with Spanish product since all films, regardless of their origin, had to be spoken in Spanish. Soon, better-made foreign films were gaining a solid base in the Spanish market.

Although cinema after the Civil War carried forward many of the themes and trends previously familiar to audiences, more films showed up which exalted the values and pretensions of the new order. Juan de Orduña's Follow the Legion (1942) and Antonio Román's Martyrs of the Philippines (1945) both glorified the honor of fighting and dying for the cause. The most significant picture of this ilk was Raza (1942), scripted by Franco himself under a pseudonym. It managed to succeed by couching the values of the nationalists inside a highly melodramatic plot featuring chaste love between two romantic leads. The picture underscored Franco's fetish for heroic death, and his vision of the traditional Spanish family as the ideal mechanism for producing 'good' Spaniards.

The regime's idealization of a supposedly glorious past spawned a string of opulent costume dramas such as Manuel Augusto García Viñola's Inês de Castro (1944), José López Rubio's Eugenia de Montijo (1944) and two major pictures of the period, de Orduña's Love Crazy (1948) and Agustina of Aragón (1950), both products of CIFESA. A steady crop of religious-themed films was also churned out around the same time, with titles like The Saintly Queen (1947) and Loyola, the Soldier Saint (1948). The hunger for a mix of melodrama and eroticism was satisfied by a number of costume dramas, done in the spirit of the escapist novela rosa, or pink novels. Movies like José Luis Sáenz de Heredia's The Scandal (1943) and Rafael Gil's The Prodigal Daughter (1946) were popular examples. Up until its fall in the mid-1950s, CIFESA (often compared to MGM because of its penchant for lavish costume dramas) became the quasi-official studio of Franco's government, rolling out film after film that reflected the regime's tastes and thematic obsessions.

In the 1950s, there were rumblings for modernization and liberalization in Spain, as many people compared the country unfavorably to a more modern and dynamic Europe. The government responded with a few cosmetic changes, allowing the publication of dissident film journals that advocated a cinema that was more connected to the everyday realities of Spanish life. Ironically, the formulation of a community of moviemakers with a desire for real change was formed at the National Film School, a government institution. Luis García Berlanga and Juan Antonio Bardem were principal figures in this group, inspired in part by the Italian school of Neorealism. The Bardem-Berlanga collaboration That Happy Pair (1953) was an early example of where this influence was showing up. The films of Marco Ferreri and Rafael Azcona—El Pisito (1959) and El Cochecito (1960)—were good examples of the cinema of dissidence, as was Carlos Saura's The Delinquents (1962). Saura would go on to have one of the most prestigious careers in Spanish cinema, a career that continues today with pictures like Tango (1998).

Many innovative moviemakers like Saura got their start just as the state was trying to put a liberal face on country. Government-sponsored support for new talent, offered under the guise of a program called New Spanish Cinema helped usher in some highly original films, including critical and commercial successes like Miguel Picazo's Aunt Tula (1964) and Mario Camus' With the East Wind (1967).

Over the next 10 years, along with all the pulp fare that had always been a staple of the country's cinema, moviemakers like Saura and Víctor Erice developed a talent for allegory that helped them get around continued government censorship. True liberalization of culture didn't come until Franco's death in 1975 and the subsequent transition to democracy, ushering in mavericks like Pedro Almodóvar (the poster child of 'liberated' Spain), J.J. Bigas Luna (Jamón, Jamón), Vicente Aranda (Mad Love) and Fernando Trueba (Calle 54). With them came a generation of new Spanish stars including Victoria Abril, Carmen Maura, Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz.

If the democratic era can be faulted for anything, it would be the government's tendency to subsidize serious films over populist cinema, leading to the production of 20 bad films for every good one. Throughout the 1990s, Spanish moviemakers lost market share at home to foreign (mostly Hollywood) competitors. But this is changing. A second front of gifted moviemakers, personified by such directors as Alejandro Amenábar, Julio Medem and Álex de la Iglesia, seems even less interested in pursuing respectable obscurity than their predecessors. Instead, they have chosen to embrace many of the strengths of commercial narrative moviemaking, while maintaining a refreshing degree of individuality and personal authorship.

For Pedro Almodóvar, the level of personal authorship enjoyed by Spanish moviemakers would not be possible within the mainstream. "By definition, mainstream cinema avoids anything that is personal, anything that might remind us of our human nature. What is it that makes Spanish cinema 'Spanish'? First of all, it is the absolute freedom to write, produce or direct anything you want. Secondly, we have no film industry—or what we have is very small. That means we have to make less compromises for money than big-budget films. The director's criteria are the only ones that matter. There aren't hundreds of agents with their respective stars telling you what you can and can't do. There is no producer demanding that you cut the running time by 20 minutes, or the producer just doing it himself without even telling you. There aren't 10 people from the production company going over your script with a magnifying glass and cutting out anything original, because it doesn't remind them of any other film or because it's just too dark. We don't have the shadow of the MPAA hanging over our heads like a phantom menace. When we write a script we don't have to worry about how many times the word 'fuck' appears. This doesn't mean that all Spanish films are art, but it does show that films like The Spirit of the Beehive would be completely impossible with the prevailing mainstream climate."

Amenábar's Open Your Eyes (1997) and Imanol Uribe's Running Out of Time are two films that show a basic alignment with modern commercial sensibilities. Though shot in English, Amenábar's The Others, starring Nicole Kidman, was made with Spanish money and went on to be honored with eight Goya Awards. Though thoroughly contemporary, the film reveals a taste for a secular mysticism, which has its spiritual antecedents in the history of Spanish cinema. The work of Julio Medem, one of the most thrilling new Spanish directors at work today, carries with it this spirit of existential inquiry, wrapped in the form of an often playful, searching narrative.

It's not unusual to find characters in any picture, be it the latest Hollywood movie or a 'serious' foreign film, in search of change or some missing part of their lives. What is unique about the best Spanish cinema, whether it's Medem's Sex and Lucia or Almodóvar's Talk To Her, is its ability to keep audiences engaged and entertained even as it explores life's biggest questions. MM

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