In recent years, a word has crept into our language. It is a “story.” Ten years ago, a story was news, but today it has a different meaning. Now it is about the way things are told, and this story is vitally important in an era full of—and here is another new term in our discourse—culture wars. Politicians talk about this story and have even created proverbs. “Facts kill history,” we hear every day on television shows. In reality, history has always existed, but it has never been given this much political importance.
Remember C3PO telling the story of what they had experienced while making noise with everyone around them? Well, basically the android star wars history was winning. It wouldn’t matter if what he said was a lie, or if it was fabricated or exaggerated, because his way of saying it was what made everyone eat out of his hand. This detour serves to talk about the talent of Enric Marco, the Spaniard who was for years the visible leader of the victims of the Holocaust in our country. He made speeches, he was present in the media… and he even managed to convince the Zapatero government for the first time to pay attention to the Spanish survivors and even to attend the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in Mauthausen.
The only problem, quite important, is that Enric Marco was never in a concentration camp. He invented a story and sold it so well that he got everyone to look where they preferred not to. A life built on a lie, or as the promotional poster of the film says, on an invented truth, deserved to be told in the form of a film. And there the metalinguistic game, what is a film if not another lie based on many stories that we want to believe?
This game is the one they created Frame Basque filmmakers Jon Garaño and Aitor Arregi, members of the Moriartys (stage name completed by Jose Mari Goenaga, here in the script with them and Jorge Gil Munarriz). Before talking about Historical Memory The infinite trench, and even in Handicap. They are now reflecting on the story, on whether a lie obscures the hidden truth and on the mask and fiction of the film they presented in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival before its premiere on November 8 in Spain.
The film has been fantastically received, and the praise increases when it is directed at the man who has taken Marco’s place. Eduard Fernández transmutes, disappears under the makeup and becomes someone else. He suffocates, loses his thread, lies, deceives and seduces us for almost two hours. It is impossible to take your eyes off his performance. The directors were always clear that he had to be Marco, but they did many tests to find the balance in the layers of makeup they were going to apply to him.
“One thing is the real Marco, the one in the photos, and another thing is the credibility that ours would have if we copied the real Marco. Even in interpreting him, if we make him more histrionic or less histrionic. It was a constant conversation with Eduard and the makeup team,” they say from the Venice Festival. The idea was “that it should not be an impersonator, but that it should have an essence.” “What happens is that this guy is so good…” they conclude about the performance of Eduard Fernández, who is already the favorite for all the awards this year.
“A very nice thing that happened to us is that just yesterday people very close to Marcos saw the film, people from the association, people who had a relationship with him, and without imitating him, without doing an imitation, they wrote to us to tell us that they seemed to see Marco. Eduard managed to create his own Marco, but very recognizable, and I think that is one of the best things we can say to him,” they add.
Cheated by Marco
They have been working on this project since 2006, but during this process they have repeatedly been confronted with the deceptions, or invented truths, of the Truth Framework. It began as a documentary of the three Moriarty summits with Jorge Gil Miñárriz. They met with Enric Marco several times. “A dozen times,” they say, to see how far the process was progressing. “One day, everything was already known, he told us he wanted to go to Germany to get papers proving that he had been incarcerated in prison. Not in a concentration camp. We thought we should record it, but when we asked him, he told us he preferred to go alone because it was something very personal. We understood that and we didn’t go,” recall Garaño and Arregi.
This was Marco’s first trap. “When he came back, he told us that he had something to tell us, that he had been recorded for another documentary with which he had signed a contract. He had not told us anything until then and for us it was a real shock. We did not know very well how to react. The fact is that the other documentary was made, it is very good and it is partly in our film. We left it there”, they continue. In 2010, and when you see the film you will understand the meta-cinematic game that the story plays, Enric Marco appeared with a sausage in his hand to apologize and ask them to make another documentary because he had not liked the first one.
The directors think about it and make a decision: “We say, ‘fuck it, this man is already old, he was already 89 before he was 90, so we said, let’s film him.’ We called you for an interview in Donosti. We bring it with us for three days. We have 15 hours of material recorded with Enric Marco. Question, answer, question, answer, an interrogation. Super cool material, but we don’t really know what to do with it because the documentary is already made. One day it occurred to us that what Marco does is take things from reality, he fictionalizes them and generates his own discourse to sell them and that we could do a bit of the same thing, mix a bit of fiction and reality in a documentary, but with parts of fiction. We asked him some questions and he told us that he thought it was a good idea, but that he should also tell us that he was meeting Javier Cercas.
This is Enric Marco’s second affair. When they found out, they told him that it would be interesting to introduce Cercas in their film, and he told them that he would talk to the writer about it. The answer, according to Marco, is yes, which is why one of the scriptwriters approaches Barcelona. As you can imagine, Cercas had no idea that this meeting was going to take place and it didn’t seem like a good idea. Second failed attempt.
The third time is the charm, and they were already clear that the only way to tackle the project was through fiction, but to introduce these reflections on truth, the fable and even the artifact of cinema as a means of storytelling. “These are topics that have always interested us, the artifact, the truth of lies, where this also places us as filmmakers…”, analyze the filmmakers who know that the question of narrative has become so important that it can be applied to many of the most recent world themes, because “when you make a historical film, you talk more about the moment in which you make that film than about the historical moment you capture.”
