Faia Díaz, whose voice approaches Galician folklore from a beautiful and radical point of view, sings behind glass. “Saint Christ of Fisterra / saint with the golden beard / help me pass / through the dark night of Spain,” the song says. It’s raining. It often rains in this place, the island of San Simón, in the Vigo estuary, which served as a concentration camp for fascism between 1936 and 1943. The constellation of echoes that the sequence triggers is infinite: the anti-fascist rewriting of popular tradition, committed poets, the geography of an undervalued memory, this old and weakened internationalist solidarity, the present which flows into the past and vice versa. On these and other questions he addresses The drunkards’ Marseillaisea kind of road movie documentary following in the footsteps of Cantacronache, a group of left-wing Italian musicians and writers who, in the summer of 1961, toured Spain to record the anonymous collection of anti-Franco songs. This is the first feature film by Pablo Gil Rituerto and its premiere will take place this Monday, October 21 at the Seminci in Valladolid.
This road of course stopped in Galicia. The members of the expedition had contact with the writer Celso Emilio Ferreiro, who was preparing to publish his emblematic Long stone night. He would do so the following year and confirm his status as a resistant poet and one of the most widely read in Galician literature. His voice, he who was a fine connoisseur of folklore, is one of the many that Cantacronache collected on magnetic tape during this trip. José Agustín Goytisolo, that of Words for Juliaor Jesús López Pacheco, author of the forgotten classic of social realism Power plantAlso. And, alongside the opposition intellectuals, multiple anonymous popular voices who sing, explain and criticize the state of things under Franco’s heel. This sound material, an unpublished archive kept in Turin, constitutes the heart of a delicate and fascinating film in which history and its scars cross time and emerge in contemporary Spain. Period music is reborn among today’s musicians, and Maria Arnal i Marcel Bagès, Faia Díaz, O Leo, Coro Minero de Turón, Nacho Vegas, Amorante or La Ronda de Motilleja appear on the screen.
A unique archive in Turin
“Ten years ago, in 15°C weather, I was investigating how we got to this place. I always like to go back and know where we come from”, explains to elDiario.es Gil Rituerto, until now editor for filmmakers such as Mercedes Álvarez, Marc Recha or José Luis Guerín, “and because of a series of coincidences, I begin to wonder how to make a “I filmed from a sound archive, given that the images from the time were rare and already widely seen”. Almost at the same time, chance intervened and, in a second-hand bookstore, he found a once legendary volume: the Uruguayan version of Canti of the New Spanish Resistance 1939-1961originally published in 1962 by Einaudi. This is how Pablo Gil came into contact with the adventures of Cantacronache, folklorists and activist authors based in Turin. “In the book [resultado del viaje por España y que el régimen calificó de ”Marsellesa de los borrachos“, de ahí el título de la película] They mentioned that they had returned to Italy with 9,000 feet of recorded tape and dozens of photos,” says the director of the documentary. He started to investigate. And he came across an emblematic photo, that of Margot Galante, one of the Cantacronaches, guitar in hand. “It captivated me,” he recalls.
The next step took him to the University of Seville, where the historian Alberto Carrillo-Linares taught. In his office he heard for the first time a copy of the unpublished recordings from 1961. Carrillo-Linares, who offers his testimony on screen, had published several academic articles on the Cantacronache in Spain and had obtained a copy. On this day he was definitely born, The drunkards’ Marseillaise. “Thanks to Facebook, I found the three living members of the group: Margot Galante, Lionello Gennero and Emilio Jona. Jona was in charge of an ethnographic music center and he kept the cassettes there,” he says. The vicissitudes of access multiplied at every moment, but ultimately Gil Rituerto succeeded. The construction of the film then begins. In the middle of the process, new treasures emerged, such as the series of images taken by Lionello Gennero and which constitute a fundamental part of the footage. In the meantime, Galante and Gennero have died. Jonah lives. But The drunkards’ Marseillaise It is not only an academic documentary on a forgotten episode of history, which would not be minor, it is also a passage between two worlds.
The political dimension of folklore
Gil Rituerto’s camera reconstructs the trip that the Italians made during the summer of 1961. They then entered Catalonia from France and in Barcelona they met the poet José Agustín Goytisolo. It is now his widow, Asunción Carandell – who died in 2022 – who speaks: “The only ones who did anything were the communists. There were few socialists then.” It’s as if he was responding to the voice-over that guides the documentary, that of Emilio Jona, who reads fragments of the diary written in his time by Cantacronache: “[Estos jóvenes] “They are happy and confident, but it seems they don’t really know what to do to get rid of Franco.” A few shots later, the images focus on the protests against the conviction of the trial defendants. This dialectic between past history and present punctuates The drunkards’ Marseillaise. The exhumation of civil war graves, a military parade in Madrid that the montage associates with a version of The four generals – “Madrid, how you resist” –, the electoral victory of the neofascist Giorgia Meloni in Italy or the criminal policy of the borders of the European Union, in this case in Irún, dialogue with the traces of the Cantacronache expedition.
In addition to the book Canti of the New Spanish Resistance 1939-1961once translated into many languages, the Cantacronache recorded an LP, also released by Einaudi, with versions of some of the collected songs. The album has become a classic of activist songs, particularly in Latin America. Legends of Chilean song like Víctor Jara or Quilapayún have recreated some of these pieces. “We know that the source is the Cantacronache because they even reproduce the transcription errors,” explains Pablo Gil, who in the film uses contemporary artists to embody this material. “I was interested in musicians who work on folklore but who take its political dimension into account. It doesn’t always happen like this. We also spoke with some folklorists who were not comfortable with this relationship and who were left out,” he explains.
It is precisely O Leo, a Galician punk singer-songwriter who oscillates between Billy Bragg and Voces Ceibes (legendary anti-Franco singing collective), who, in a sequence recorded in Santiago de Compostela, explains the role of Celso Emilio Ferreiro in all this. adventure. And member of La Ronda de Motilleja, a group from Albacete, which focuses on one of the keys of the material collected by Cantacronache: the intelligent and “naughty” way in which anonymous voices hid antifascist content in popular melodies. “Summer is gone / winter has arrived / very soon / the government will fall / what a turururú / it’s your fault”, they sing between guitars, cavaquinhos and piccolos Aunt Vinagres’ donkeyjust before a very exciting If you want to write to me. “We were looking for an encounter with the unknown. When we interacted with the musicians, they themselves suggested places for us,” he says. And so Amorante sings and plays the trembling trumpet in the hamlet of Txillarre, where the conversations that led to the end of ETA took place.
Tension between story and narrative
The fact is that the Cantacronache route through Spain – in addition to Catalonia and Galicia, passed through Guadalajara, Asturias, Burgos or Euskadi – ended in the courts. Among the Italians. Canti of the new Spanish resistance was kidnapped and its distribution was interrupted. Manuel Fraga Iribarne, then Minister of Information and Tourism, edited The drunkards’ Marseillaisesubtitle Defamation against Franco and Spainan anthology of chronicles from the official Spanish press in which they discredited the work with lies and rhetorical violence. But what stung in Italy was an anti-religious couplet: “The Holy Christ of Purity / they say that his hair grows / what grows is his dick / from giving the clergy an ass.” » Cantacronache also won the case and the songs of the new Spanish resistance spread throughout the world.
The drunkards’ Marseillaisethe film ultimately tells a story and, however, it is not, assures its director, a historiography. “The Cantacronaches said that their approach was objective, that the voice of the Spanish people was there. But it is obvious that there is of course a political operation. This tension between history and narrative exists. “We prefer to move away from the myth, to maintain a certain darkness.” Who sings, who modifies a popular lyric, who chooses which traditional melody, why tyrants are afraid of music, what does it say about the way the world is organized. This was also the political operation of a courageous group of musicians and poets from Turin, saving the nothings and their way of singing against a dictatorship, and Gil Rituerto’s documentary also talks about it.
