Paula Ortiz’s film about the most terrible event of the Second Republic deserves a distinction. Recreates the true story of a mother who wants to make her daughter a free woman, but who possesses her the way so many men possess women.
As I sit down to write this column on The Red Virginthe recently released Paula Ortiz film, I smiled inwardly. I imagined a young colleague tackling this same task, and I thought that he could not avoid the temptation of situating this work in the literary and audiovisual genre of true crime. He would probably do it in the title itself, thinking that he would better “sell” his “article” to his editor and readers, in a way that was unequivocally current, modern and cool.
In short, I would tell this young imaginary colleague that the English formula true crime The translation is easy in the language in which he writes: it means nothing other than a real crime, a crime which really took place and which is not the fruit of the mind of a novelist or of ‘a screenwriter. And I would add that it is not a newly invented genre. Already in 1854, the Englishman Thomas de Quincey wrote his “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts”, inspired by the crimes that made John Williams darkly famous. And in 1996, the American Truman Capote recreated in “In Cold Blood” the bloody adventures of Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, without brains.
Humanity was not born in the year 2000, dear colleague. Nor the public’s fascination with these crimes which reveal the darkest side of the individual and society. I have cited De Quincey and Capote only among the thousands of writers, journalists, filmmakers, and documentarians who have chronicled real murders throughout the 19th, 20th, and into the 21st centuries.
We also did it in the language of Cervantes, where before the absurd importation of the formula true crimewe call the genre of events, black chronicle or red chronicle when recounting true crimes. Last Monday, Jaime Molero remembered it here with his portrait of the great Margarita Landi, the pioneer of the Spanish event genre. “Crime stories have always aroused people’s interest,” writes Molero, who fortunately does not cultivate Adamism. And he recalled the enormous popular success that the weekly The case had in Franco’s Spain. “Recounting crimes and events has never gone out of fashion,” he wisely said.
The assassination of child prodigy Hildegart Rodríguez by his mother, Aurora Rodríguez, in the early morning of June 9, 1933, in the family apartment on Galileo Street in Madrid, shocked public opinion in Republican Spain. He had it all: a cold-blooded parricide, a young, promising and popular victim, a haughty and detestable executioner, the backdrop for the most progressive causes of the time. This tragedy caused rivers of ink to flow in the newspapers and angered thousands of people during passionate debates.
I saw the film The Red Virgin last Sunday and I really liked it. Paula Ortiz tells the story well, the period setting is good and Najwa Nimri embellishes the character of Aurora, the woman who conceived Hildegart with a priest – a man who could not claim paternity – and raised her like a model woman. perfect – free, highly educated and multilingual – and he killed her when, at the age of 18, she began to show signs of intellectual and romantic independence. He killed her because she belonged to him. Aurora, as it is said in the film, wanted to possess Hildegart the way so many men possess women.
I have heard the story of Hildegart since I was a child. It turns out that José Valenzuela Moreno, a brother of my father, was the fiery prosecutor in the trial held in the spring of 1934, in which a popular jury sentenced Aurora to 26 years in prison. My uncle wrote a book about the case that was in my father’s library: “A Forensic Report. The assassination of Hildegart seen by the prosecutor in charge of the case” (Madrid, Editorial Mar i Cel, 1934). It was a great success: the oral chronicles had shed light on the numerous political and social troubles that Spain was experiencing at that time.
At the end of her novel “Frankenstein’s Mother”, in the acknowledgments section, Almudena Grandes recalled that, during a Madrid Book Fair, a stranger approached the stand where she was signing. The stranger told her that he worked at the Pablo Iglesias Foundation and wanted to give her a gift. It was a facsimile version of the book by tax Jose Valenzuela Moreno. I knew she was researching Hildegart affair and I couldn’t find this book. My father’s copy has disappeared and I can’t find it either,
This is not the first time that Spanish cinema has tackled this fascinating case. Fernando Fernán Gómez presented in 1977 My daughter Hildegarta film directed by him, with a screenplay by him and Rafael Azcona based on the book ‘Aurora de sangre’ by the libertarian journalist Eduardo de Guzmán, republished by La Linterna Sorda in 2014. I must say that Paula Ortiz’s version did not not impress me in the same way, in no way inferior to that of Fernán Gómez. That’s quite a compliment for me.
He Hildegart affair It was an event with immense political charge, which made it and still makes it so controversial. The right blamed the parricide on the socialist, anarchist and feminist ideas of Aurora and Hildegart. On the left, socialists and anarchists contested the victim – he was one of us – while condemning Aurora.
Freedom was and still is the theme of this tragedy. Aurora Rodríguez, interned in the Ciempozuelos psychiatric hospital until her death in 1955, wanted the women to be freed. Hildegart loved him too, but including his emancipation from an authoritarian and egocentric mother. Aurora, the female Pygmalion who dreamed of creating a free woman, had become a monster. So much so that he ended up killing his child when he felt it was getting out of control.
