They defined it as “a nest of reds”, a gathering of subversives against the regime armed with cameras. The Official School of Cinematography became a haven of freedom under the Franco regime. A home for creators who took advantage of the freedom these four walls offered them to learn a trade, yes, but also to circumvent censorship and create radical and anti-Franco works. They did it through the practices of a school that saw the birth of filmmakers such as Iván Zulueta, Carlos Saura, Víctor Erice, Pilar Miró, Jaime Chávarri and Cecilia Bartolomé.
All these works constitute one of the most important collections of the Spanish Cinematheque, and it is for this reason that the Ministry of Culture has initiated the steps to convert said collection into an Asset of Cultural Interest (BIC). This is the first time that a film library has acquired this category. Urtasun announced this, precisely, during the presentation of the exhibition The 100 meter freestyle: Life and miracles of the Cinema School (1947-1976)which offers the headquarters of the institution a journey through this place and through the practices that are now more protected.
Urtasun remembers the countless names that passed through the school, which he defined as “a refuge in the middle of the stifling climate imposed by the Franco dictatorship” and “the origin of a vast cinematographic production, but also of ‘a balanced look at cinema’. of his time, what was done outside our borders and in conditions of freedom. »
It is for this reason that he was proud to take the steps to declare the said collection as BIC. “This is the figure that guarantees the most comprehensive protection among those provided by our heritage law and for the first time it will be applied to a film collection. We are collecting all the necessary information to prepare the file which will soon be published in the BOE. Our goal is that by the middle of next year the archives of the Cinema School will officially be an asset of cultural interest in Spain,” he announced.
Asked about the parliamentary procedures of the law on cinema, which provides in its text that the Spanish Cinematheque also becomes BIC, the minister announced that he had been in contact this week with the parliamentary groups. The first step is to see if the amendments are presented in full – Vox did this last time – but while they “look at some of the issues that we know are affecting the sector, such as whether or not there are of a window for cinemas, or the possibility of including tax incentives. “I am convinced that among all the parliamentary groups, we will develop the best law for this country. “We are working intensively with them,” he declared without giving a date.
I had a lot of freedom and received a lot of slaps. Freedom has a price, but at least I did what I wanted to do. Then I had problems, but my memory from school is excellent
Cécilia Barthélemy
— Director
Asier Aranzubia, curator of this exhibition visible at the Filmoteca headquarters until April 27, explained how this school, open from 1947 to 1976, experienced its greatest expressions of freedom in the practices of its students. These practices were known as 100 free meters, because 100 meters was the amount of film they had to shoot, about three minutes, and at that time they had the freedom that censorship prevented them from doing.
“As they were intended for internal consumption and in principle not intended for public screening, this meant that students could say and show things unthinkable in Spanish cinema of the time and in a context where censorship prevailed and also this national-Catholic doctrine prevailed which conditioned everything in the social and cultural life of the Franco regime and from which they were somewhat exempt, because the school was an island of freedom in terms of ideology”, explained the commissioner.
In these exercises, there are “speeches against the regime, sometimes veiled and other times openly critical”, but taboos like “that of nudity” have also been broken. The collection of these materials totals approximately 1,750 titles produced at the school, including short films, medium-length films and commercials, but in addition, the Filmoteca Española, and therefore the exhibition, has “an inventory very rich in documentation ranging from exams, student cards, written exercises, storyboards…”.
These examinations are those of Iván Zulueta or Pilar Miró, for example. The first obtained a 9 and the second an 8 in Cinema History when asked about the New Wave, as can be seen in the exhibition. But although they were a haven of freedom, they quickly realized that they were facing what they called “a nest of reds”. “One of the reasons the school closed in ’71 was because it had gotten out of control, because the practices were so irreverent and so subversive that the administration realized that this training and spending a lot of money public money to train filmmakers makes no sense. Especially when what they are doing is cinema openly contrary to the regime,” recalled Aranzubia.
In the exhibition you can see the censorship sheets of various works by the School’s students, and one of them takes the cake. Cécilia Bartolomé and her Marguerite and the Wolf It was called “pornographic”, “blasphemous”, “obscene” and even one censor wrote a pithy sentence: “From a court of duty”. Bartolomé finished his studies, but was never able to put together a filmography because of censorship and the after-effects of the Franco regime, which deprived us of an irreverent and unique director.
She herself remembered all this during the exhibition, since she had attended the opening with another former student, the director Jaime Chávarri, who years later would film Disenchantment. Arm in arm, they walked through the corridors and while Chávarri questioned this so-called freedom, because outside the dictatorship he continued to exert pressure, Bartolomé explained that there he did what he wanted: “At the less, I had a lot of freedom and I received a lot of slaps. Freedom has a price, but at least I did what I wanted to do. Then I had some problems, but my memory of school is excellent.
Chávarri believes that he did more domesticated things and that Bartolomé was “revolutionary”, but the truth is that it was one of his practices that provoked censorship within the school itself. A reconstruction of the murder of Sharon Tate, where a transvestite boy appeared who sang songs by Chicho Sánchez Ferlosio and who angered the management. “We organized a general sit-down strike and left the school voluntarily. They wouldn’t let us meet, we had enough and 90% of the management students left. But Juan Antonio Bardem, who, in one of these contradictions, came from the Communist Party and president of the Vertical Cinema Union, gave us the map, because without this map we would not have been able to make films “, recalled Chávarri, who decided to enter the film school as “a new world” that changed his life. And also to all those who, decades later, will be able to discover their works, who will now benefit of the protection they deserve.
