If you stop someone on the street and ask them about the three most important filmmakers in the history of Spanish cinema, the first two will undoubtedly come up: Luis Buñuel and Pedro Almodóvar. To conclude the shortlist, there would be more dispersion. Many would surely bet on Luis García Berlanga, others on Carlos Saura, some would even mention the names of filmmakers who were unable to fully develop their careers due to their premature death, such as Iván Zulueta; or whose career is limited to a few films, such as Víctor Erice. Unfortunately, few people remember Pere Portabella, a producer and filmmaker without whom Spanish cinema (and the recent history of the country) would not be the same.
In short, Portabella was the first producer to opt for Saura, with whom he made The Gulfsand was one of the people who raised Viridianathe only Palme d’Or in Spanish cinema. A work that so angered the Vatican and the Franco regime that Silvia Pinal and the Mexican producers had to flee with the copy so that they would not all be burned and one of the masterpieces in the history of cinema would not be reduced to ashes.
For these two milestones alone, his career should be recognized, but there is much more. He was the second Spanish filmmaker to have a retrospective at the MoMA in New York and his works broke all established norms. He brought the avant-garde to Spanish cinema in films such as Night 29, Umbrella either Vampire Diaries. A cinema without rules, free and against the grain. Reductionist, Father Portabella could be the Spanish Godard. And like the Frenchman, one cannot remove his political commitment from his work as a filmmaker: he was one of those responsible for the return of Tarradellas to Catalonia after the dictatorship, senator in the Constituent Legislature and deputy in the Catalan Parliament.
Portabella – who belongs to a family that received a millionaire inheritance from Danone – produced the riskiest cinema of the Franco regime, made the freest cinema of the Transition and created two of the most important films of political cinema in Spain: The soup, on political prisoners of the Franco regime; and General report on issues of interest for public screening, where he gathered around a table important figures of the newly formed democracy to talk about the most important issues of the moment. Enough merits for his name to be studied in schools, and yet he has neither the National Cinema Award nor the Honorary Goya.
To make her figure known, to claim her and to project her, she was presented at the Venice Festival Constellation Lació Portabellaa documentary directed by Claudio Zulian and produced by Lluís Miñarro. A work where all the facets of the artist are covered and where experts in cinema and art value his work and specify: “He is the canon of Spanish cinema. One of the three most important figures with Buñuel and Almodóvar. This documentary arrives the same year that his book was published Defy the rules (Gutenberg Galaxy), a volume that brings together dozens of texts written by the author over 60 years and was presented this summer.
The reasons, cinematic, political commitment and coherence, are clear in the film, whose shooting took six years for a clear reason. “Well, until now, Pere had always refused to make a documentary about his figure, so that’s when I convinced him. It took six years of production, a few of which managed to convince him,” says Claudio Zulian with a laugh alongside Lluís Miñarro, one of the producers who opted for a radical cinema like that of Portabella.
It is his thought that has transcended, his coherence and his way of freedom, of focusing on the cinematographic fact. His ethical-political position
Lluis Minarro
— Producer
They both remember this phrase from the film and believe that the figure of the director is perhaps “a little confidential”. “It is not for a large audience, but I think that all the people in the world of cinema know him and appreciate him precisely because he opens the panorama, he opens the cinematographic material, he opens the possibilities of cinema and he dares where others, for whatever reason, do not.” They dare It is straight out of the box. And of course, all of us, as filmmakers, deeply appreciate someone who teaches us the possibilities of the material with which we work every day, “says Zulian.
Miñarro points out that Portabella also did not encourage “being connected to the industry because he went alone, he is self-taught and he did his work regardless of what people might say.” “I’ll even tell you that he has enough, let’s say, personality to allow himself that. He is a person who has lacked nothing, so he has been able to work with complete freedom, he has left his legacy and here it is. And those who want to see it and those who do not want to see it will also see it,” Miñarro points out.
He is undoubtedly part of this legacy, but when asked who could belong to this lineage that embraced the spirit of Portabella, they specify that “he never had disciples and he would not want to have any either.” Then some names come back, like José Luis Guerin, whom he produced, or Albert Serra, whom he helped in several exhibitions.
“His position is so unorthodox, so free and so creative, that it has had an impact on the filmographies of several people. In mine, for example,” Zulian adds. For Miñarro, more than influencing a filmmaker, he believes that “it is his thinking that has transcended, his coherence and his way of freeing himself, of concentrating on the cinematographic fact without having to listen to certain things that can come from other areas such as television, film institutes. In short, “an ethical-political position.”
Portabella’s cinema, and returning again to Godard, united aesthetics with politics and understood that even a travels It is a moral question. “There was a kind of cultural ecosystem where formal audacity and the experimental were identified with an anti-Franco resistance.” In the documentary, we hear him say that he did not make political cinema strictly speaking, since he was never a member of a party, but also that he feeds on political commitment, and therefore does not have to justify it, but also that he has never separated his political activity from the films he makes. There is politics in his fragmentation of the image, in the way he plays with it; just as we find in the most eminently militant films a fundamental figure for understanding cinema and recent history.
