They wanted to tell stories, their own, real ones, those that the Franco regime did not allow them to teach. For almost 30 years, the main names of our cinema have learned at the Cinema School such as Carlos Saura, Luis García Berlanga, Pilar Miró, among others. There they carried out practices known as 100 meter freestyle, about three minutes for them to roll freely.
However, these practices did not see the light of day due to Franco’s censorship since they were described as “irreverent”, “rude”, “dirty”… Today, the exhibition ‘The 100 meter freestyle: life and miracles of the Cinema School (1947-1976) seeks to recognize filmmakers and recover some gems of our cinema.
The La Filmoteca Española exhibition hall welcomes from October 4 to April 27 this exhibition which pays homage to space where great Spanish filmmakers of the second half of the 20th century were trained. The curator of the exhibition 100 meter freestyleAsier Aranzubia, told laSexta Noticias that the teachers of this school “were also many former students, like Carlos Saura or Luis García Berlanga.”
There, they were given a hundred meters of film in which They gave free rein to their most absolute freedom. From short films that had nothing covered to fictitious ads that were impossible to air at the time. Others, like a work by José Luis García Sánchez, in which he sought to provoke the appearance of a journalist with a “pornographic” microphone.
“It’s one of those films that marks the final phase of school And who is pushing to close the school. I believe that José Luis García Sánchez was expelled from the school, according to what Fernando Méndez-Leite told me”, he explains, about the end of a school where great filmmakers like Luis García Berlanga, Juan Antonio Bardem, Carlos Saura, Antonio Mercero scholars, Víctor Erice, Pilar Miró or Josefina Molina, among others.
These were years of extreme freedom in the midst of the dictatorship, until they tried to exhibit their works. Aranzubia says the school principal then told the students that if they wanted to “show the producers,” they would have to go through censorship. “He told him: ‘I have just seen them and I prefer that they go through the censorship, for fear of getting into trouble'”, adds the commissioner and remembers that they went through the censorship and the censors said it was “subversive, irreverent, dirty, sexual and crude” in images and language.
