The lost cinema of Galician Cruz Risco, pioneer who recorded emigration to Paris or the Carnation Revolution

It wasn’t easy. A camera, four women and a Galicia reborn after four decades of repression and dictatorship. The objective was to film a fissure that separated the hard work of Galician migrants in Paris from the triumphalist image they transmitted when they returned to their hometown in summer. Some compatriots made fun of these bold actions, it caused them “expectation and hilarity”. But the work continued. The film was titled Why do we walk?was signed by Grupo 4 and in 1978 and 1979 he found a way to reach the public through the distributor Rula. It was even screened by the Seminci of Valladolid. The film, an example of direct cinema according to those who saw it, was lost. The historian Xaime Varela has reconstructed its history and that of its main promoter, Cruz Risco, pioneer, perhaps the first Galician filmmaker.

His father was Vicente Risco, writer, member of Cruz Martínez-Risco, the third of three brothers, born in 1943 in Ourense, studied at the Official School of Journalism in Madrid – with the help of Fraga Iribarne, a friend of the family – and worked in The voice of Asturias or on national radio. In ’68 he went to London, where he survived by working in a restaurant while writing reports on regattas. “I confirmed all this thanks to the postcards left at the Risco Foundation,” explains Xaime Varela to elDiario.es, who describes the process of searching for information on Martínez-Risco as “romantic”. His trace has faded into the footnotes of the history of cinema in Galicia.

After the English experience and a brief stay in Cannes, he moved to Paris. There he shared a house with Begoña Zanguitu, whom he had met during journalism classes. He earned money through small tasks, walking the pets of the Parisian lower bourgeoisie, for example. And he enrolled in the film department of the film school of the University of Vincennes, the famous Paris-VIII founded as an experimental center after the student and worker revolts of May 1968. It is likely that it coincided with Carlos Asorey, another Galician filmmaker. . forgotten and cursed people who took care of migrant communities and whose adventures Xaime Varela also saved. Regardless, Martínez-Risco studied sound engineering and quickly embarked on the adventures of direct cinema.

In the carnation revolution

He has just started his first year in Vincennes, it is 1974, and he has already started a documentary on the peasant revolts against the expansion of the Larzac military base in Occitanie – a decade of struggles which is ending with the coming to power of Mitterrand in coalition. . with the communists and abandoned the project. A year later, he worked at The fantastic museuman interview with the legendary Henri Langlois, director of the Cinémathèque française, filmed by Jean Lavasse. “It is possible that Cruz Risco appears in a frame of this film,” says Varela, in contact with friends of Lavasse himself. It would be one of the rare traces like the Martínez-Risco of the seventies, an almost ghostly presence in the precarious history of Galician cinema.

The fact is that also in 1975 he visited Portugal. The ongoing revolutionary process (PREC) was not yet complete – it would do so with the moderationist coup of November 25 of the same year – and documentarians and activists around the world – Thomas Harlan, Robert Kramer – were filming the last revolution of the left. in Western Europe. A letter from Martínez-Risco to her brother Antón, older than her and a remarkable novelist in the Galician language, informs her that with three other people, he is filming the fall of Marcelo Caetano and the Salzarista regime and the rest of the month of ‘april. 25. The film disappeared but its existence was confirmed in Varela by Begoña Zanguitu, who lived with Cruz for almost two decades. The historian also suspects that another member of the team could be Serge July, then a seasoned Maoist who had just succeeded Sartre as editor of the newspaper. Release. Then, the return to the native country.

Images of a return to the native country

During the summer of 1977, Cruz Risco, Begoña Zanguitu, Elizabeth Aguirre and Pilar Del Caz, from group 4, traveled to popular festivals throughout Galicia to photograph returning emigrants. “His idea was to record the contrast between the way he experienced emigration in France and his exhibitionism when he returned to his cities in August,” explains Varela. The movie, Why do we walk?lasts half an hour and since 1978 it has been shown in several villages where they had filmed. In Arxeriz, from A Peroxa (Ouense), for example, on a sheet hung on the door of a stable. As soon as it entered the distributor Rula, the work reached the short film festivals of Bilbo and Huesca or in Seminci itself. Xaime Varela has not seen it but knows it in detail. “Begoña and Cruz presented it as their final year project. The movie does not exist [o al menos resulta ilocalizable] but it has a 17-page report that has all the details,” he says. A film that exists even if its images no longer exist.

In the 1980s, Martínez-Risco moved to Spain. He collaborated with Iñaki Núñez Rozados in Curfewa one-hour feature film presented at the Berlin Film Festival and dedicated to the last people sentenced to death under Franco. Political and cultural normalization has triumphed and the direct and militant cinema in which it was forged has died out. The filmmaker settled in Altea (Alacant), at the time a magnet for post-hippies and moderns. From this stage date Villa Los Angelesa ten-minute short film submitted to the Filmoteca Española, perhaps her only work as a director accessible to the public. More or less since Varela was unable to get the institution to allow him to view it because it is a unique copy. In Galicia he tried to film with Emilio Pérez Calviño and with Daniel Domínguez he wrote a screenplay, River of Shadows. He helped Chano Piñeiro in Hope (1986) and in Ourense he opened a pub with friends. “But the last few years have not been good for her,” maintains the historian. Her family was expecting her for dinner on Christmas Eve 1992, but she did not arrive. She was found dead in her apartment in Ourense.

Xaime Varela recently spoke about her research at the Permanent Seminar on Gender Communication led by filmmaker and academic Margarita Ledo at the University of Santiago. In a few months he will do it at the Vicente Risco Foundation and then he will write it. Until now, Cruz Martínez-Risco was hardly mentioned in Documents on the history of cinema in Galicia 1970-1990 (1992) by Manuel González and Group 4 in the detailed thesis of Xan Gómez Viñas Do amateur ao militant: political and aesthetic implications of cinema in non-professional format in Galiza in the 1970s (2015). “She was modern in her actions and dressing in a city like Ourense. I imagine this caused their invisibility. She was a pioneer, perhaps the first Galician director,” she concludes.