The Films of Elias Querejeta

A Producer of Landscapes

Tom Whittaker

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781783164837
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Chapter 1

Geographies of Anxiety

Elías Querejeta’s earliest foray into film-making, A través de San Sebastián (1960), captured a Spain on the cusp of modernization. Just one year before its release, the Spanish economy had been opened up to foreign investment, ushering in a period of accelerated economic growth, otherwise known as Spain’s economic miracle. Significantly, this development was dependent upon rapid urbanization and coastal tourism, and these geographical transformations not only transformed the fabric of everyday life, but revealed acutely just how far Spanish society had been lagging behind the rest of western Europe. Economic liberalization suddenly threw into relief the static and conservative social mores of Franco’s Spain, creating a narrative of modernization fraught with social anxiety and unease. Nevertheless, it was precisely this narrative that shaped the thematic and formal concerns of Querejeta’s earliest collaborations, and provided the impetus for the nuevo cine español (NCE), in which Elías Querejeta Producciones Cinematográficas would occupy a pivotal role.

This chapter traces the development of Querejeta’s early career, from his short films A través de San Sebastián (1960) and A través del fútbol (1962), to his involvement in the NCE in the films El próximo otoño (Antxón Eceiza, 1963), De cuerpo presente (Antxón Eceiza, 1965) and La caza (1965). In embracing location shooting and new technologies, Querejeta’s collaborative team brought to bear a particular method of film-making, which would visually privilege the landscape. As we will see, the films mobilize the Spanish landscape as a dynamic space of modernity. It is a location where the limitations of superficial modernization are brought into relief, and where the social anxieties generated by the alienating effects of migration, tourism, consumerism and, most crucially, sexuality are worked through. Finally, through Henri Lefebvre’s writing on social space, I will show finally how the production of space in Querejeta’s collaborations enacts a clear and trenchant critique of the miracle years. As we will see, Lefebvre’s writing exposes the ways in which political resistance operates primarily through space – a dynamic which would inform the vast majority of his productions to come.

Towards a new production of space and place

In the 1950s, Querejeta’s close friendship with fellow student Antxón Eceiza led to a mutual passion for European art cinema. The Conversaciones de Salamanca in 1955 had proved that they were not alone in their interest. The conference provided an opportunity for dialogue between government officials and film professionals, and revealed a collective frustration among intellectual film-makers towards a stagnant industry that largely churned out escapist, ideologically compliant genre-based films. This dissatisfaction was encapsulated by Juan Antonio Bardem, who famously declared at the conference that Spanish popular cinema was ‘1. politically futile; 2. socially false; 3. intellectually worthless; 4. aesthetically valueless; 5. industrially paralytic’ (Hopewell 1986, p. 57). Although Querejeta and Eceiza were not present at Salamanca, the repercussions of the conference were pivotal to their early film education. Despite the fact that the conference did not bring to bear immediate changes in production, its legacy lived on in the proliferation of regional cine-clubs and intellectual film journals, and Querejeta and Eceiza played a hand in the development of this.¹ The pair organized cine-clubs in San Sebastián and later in Cantabria, providing local audiences with the rare opportunity to view the work of European film-makers such as Robert Bresson and Carl Theodor Dreyer (Angulo et al., 1996, p. 69). Having obtained his law degree in 1956, Eceiza moved to Madrid one year later where he enrolled at the IIEC (the Instituto de Investigaciones y Experiencias Cinematográficas). Querejeta dropped out of his degree programme in law and chemistry, and followed his friend to the capital in 1959 where he would find work at Unión Industrial Cinematográfica (UNINCI)–aproduction company which Querejeta later referred to as ‘una auténtica cueva de marxistas más o menos revisionistas’ (García, 1988, n.p.).² The company was responsible for a number of subversive comedies in the 1950s such as Bienvenido Mr Marshall (Berlanga, 1953), and was known most notoriously for its scandalous involvement with Viridiana (Luis Buñuel, 1961), whose anti-clerical content finally forced the company into liquidation. Although Querejeta fulfilled a number of junior roles there, he was given the opportunity to co-write, along with Eceiza and the director Juan Antonio Bardem, the script of Los inocentes (‘The Innocents’) (Juan Antonio Bardem 1963), an Argentine–Spanish co-production which articulated a critique of the bourgeoisie. Although brief, his training at UNINCI was crucial to his own role as a producer: their commitment to political resistance and approach to collaborative film-making would be central to the conception of his own production company. At the same time, Querejeta made invaluable contacts with Eceiza’s fellow graduates, who would soon make up the collaborative team for their first production together.³

During these early years in Madrid, Querejeta and Eceiza found themselves at the centre of an emerging culture of cinephilia. While at film school, the latter collaborated with Film ideal and from 1959 Nuestro cine, journals which sought to elevate the social and artistic status of Spanish cinema. Nuestro cine, in particular, was addressed to a liberal, cine-literate readership and, in providing critical debates around the status of film as art, fostered an intellectual climate of film criticism. In this period, the scope of the journal lay chiefly in two areas: the emerging European art cinema of the time and the promotion of a socially conscious national cinema. Thus, alongside articles on heavyweight auteurs such as Resnais, Visconti and Losey, there could be found interviews with young, emerging Spanish film professionals who had recently graduated from the IIEC, as well as information on local cine-clubs.

During this time, the journal also devoted some of its attention to Spanish documentaries, providing both reports of documentary film festivals and short reviews of the documentaries themselves. In an article entitled ‘Panorama del cine documental español’ [An overview of Spanish documentary cinema], Jesús García de Dueñas wrote that the Spanish documentary was failing to realize its potential. Rather than providing a source of reality or individual expression, the medium predominantly served to promote towns and villages as touristic destinations or show regional festivals and customs to the rest of the country, mainly because local councils and regional building societies were the chief sources of funding (1961, p. 11).

It was within this context that Querejeta made his first film, A través de San Sebastián (1960), which was directed both by Eceiza and the producer himself. Funded by UNINCI and Real Sociedad, the football team for which Querejeta had played as striker between the years 1953 and 1959, A través de San Sebastián is a documentary composed of short, impressionistic vignettes of everyday life in the Basque city, from people sunbathing on the beach to men eating pintxos in a local bar. Although just over ten minutes long, it provided an effective blueprint for Querejeta’s future production method, bringing together for the first time several of the members of ‘la factoría Querejeta’, the producer’s tight-knit team of regular collaborators: Luis Cuadrado, a student at the IIEC, was brought in as cameraman; Pablo G. del Amo, who had previously been working in Portugal, as editor; and Luis de Pablo, who had no previous experience in film, as the composer of the score. Eceiza recalls the team’s entirely collaborative approach to the film, whereby composition of each and every shot would be discussed in meticulous detail (Angulo et al., 1996: 71). In using a tourist resort as its subject matter, the film at first glance appears to adhere to the promotional touristic documentaries that had hitherto dominated the industry. A closer analysis of its style, however, reveals that the film in fact works to subvert this kind of film-making. Indeed, the censors maligned the film for its ‘estupidez cinematográfica’ [cinematographic stupidity], and scoffed at its ‘planos y escenas inconexas, referencias anacrónicas y pretensiones vanguardistas’ [disconnected shots and scenes, anachronistic references and avant-garde pretensions] (Hernández Les, 1986, p. 160).

The film opens with a series of images of old-fashioned sepia postcards of San Sebastián, with the final image briefly animated in stop motion. In shifting from the still to the moving image, the city is at once presented as a dynamic space, subject to flux and transformation. That we first capture a glimpse of the city through the mediation of a postcard is significant. As mass-produced objects, postcards actively participate in the geographical imagination of a place; through their repetition of a familiar set of images, they inscribe spaces with popularly held meanings. Significantly, in the film that follows, the experimental visual language works to break with the picture-postcard clichés of the resort, reshaping its topography in a highly poetic way.

The tension between the still image of the past and the moving image of the present is mirrored by the film’s formal juxtaposition of tradition with modernity. This is most strikingly conveyed through del Amo’s use of disjunctive and associative editing strategies, which strongly recalls the techniques of montage editing. In the second scene, for instance, an image of a modern car, with fumes billowing out of its exhaust pipe, is succeeded by that of the stern of a wooden steam boat, with vapour rising up from its blow holes. The graphic matching of the two shots, which are paired through the similarity of both their composition and subject matter, serves to contrast the two images by association. A similar effect is created a few moments later: a long shot tracks the buildings of the city’s old town; this is followed by a similar tracking shot of modern apartment blocks. This contrast is similarly developed via a further disjuncture between image and sound. The opening credits, for instance, consist of old photos of men in bowler hats that are accompanied by the sound of a car’s engine being accelerated. Elsewhere, images of old, traditional buildings are defamiliarized by the accompaniment of the eerie, distinctly modern, electronic sound of a theremin. The most innovative element of the film’s score, however, is its use of musique concrète: in a later scene the image of a water hose jetting its spray onto the street is overlaid with actual ‘found’ sounds recorded in a bathroom.⁴

Elsewhere, stasis and movement are contrasted with each other in a series of freeze-frame images of people sunbathing on the beach, which is followed immediately by a hand-held camera shot which abruptly zooms in on the same sunbathers. In another scene, the moving camera weaves its way through the city streets, filming the faces of passers-by. This is then succeeded by three carefully composed tableaux vivants of people sitting on a street bench, in various elaborate poses. The observational, almost ethnographic depiction of people moving within their own geographical milieux, would appear to invest the film with a cinema vérité feel. However, in its creative and playful treatment of actuality, the collaborative team seek to shape or interpret reality, rather than merely to depict it. As Eceiza recalls: ‘Nosotros teníamos una idea sobre el realismo, que no se basaba en la banalidad del realismo puro y duro’ (Angulo, 2003, p. 276).⁵ In its emphasis on the everyday, the film deploys a modern and experimental form as a means of playfully interacting and engaging with the city, presenting an image of the city as a ‘lived’ and mobile space. As its title A través de San Sebastian forcefully suggests, the film traverses the city: it moves through space, at once disengaging it from its clichéd and static picture-postcard images, while imbuing it with dynamism and movement. In mobilizing the city from different and shifting viewpoints, and contrasting these with the fixed city view of the postcard, the film brings to bear a new production of space. Crucially, this is a space that is created from the bottom up, through the diverse experiences of everyday life within the city.

Even more daring was A través del fútbol, Querejeta’s and Eceiza’s second collaboration together, which was financed by the Opus Dei production company PROCUSA. The film attempts to recount the nation’s recent history via the development of Spanish football. A series of illustrated stills of a football match are accompanied by an ironic voiceover that narrates the key events of the twentieth century. For instance, a football championship serves to represent King Alfonso XIII’s accession to the throne; the footballer Ricardo Zamora’s record-breaking transfer to Real Madrid in 1931 is seen as the rise of the Republic; the outbreak of the Civil War is narrated via the image of a goalkeeper diving for a ball. The film, which originally stood at eleven minutes, was cut to a mere seven minutes owing to stringent censorship that omitted all references to the Civil War (Hernández Les, 1986, p. 161). Although Elías Querejeta has since dismissed both A través de San Sebastián and A través del fútbol as naïve (Hernández Les, 1986, p. 56), these early films bring to light several of the concerns that would be central to his method of productions to come. If the first shows how the collaborative adoption of a modern film language gave rise to a new production of space, the second anticipates the cryptic, allegorical mode of storytelling that would characterize many of his productions during the Franco years. Furthermore, in making a subversive film for a company whose national Catholic beliefs ran counter to his own, A través del fútbol would prefigure a funding strategy which would define his managerial style during the years to come. Biting the proverbial hand that fed him, Querejeta would exploit government subsidies in order to establish his own production company and become one of the pioneers of the NCE. Before examining these years, it will first be necessary to situate his work within the sociohistorical context of Spain’s so-called miracle years, to which this chapter will now turn.

The economic miracle and the nuevo cine español

If Querejeta’s film-making looked beyond the borders of Spain, then so did the Spanish socio-economic landscape, which was poised to undergo a radical transformation. 1959, the year before A través de San Sebastián was made, was a key date in the shaping of modern Spain. Francoist technocrats sought to completely overhaul the structure of the Spanish economy: slow, inward-looking and predominantly agrarian, they intended to bring it into line with its modern European neighbours. In July of that year, the Stabilization Plan (Plan de Estabilización y Liberalización) was drawn up by Commerce Minister Alberto Ullastres. Pivotal to his plan was apertura, the opening up of Spain’s economy to foreign investment. Price controls and trade restrictions were subsequently deregulated (Harrison and Corkhill, 2004, pp. 9, 77) and, in a bid to lure international investors, the peseta was lowered to a rate 29 per cent below its previous value (Pack, 2006, p. 26). With the restructuring of the economy in place, the stage was set for a spectacular pattern of growth. While Spain in 1959 was still classified as a developing nation by the UN, by 1973 it had become the world’s ninth industrial power (Hooper, 1995, p. 18). During this period, which would come to be known as ‘los años de desarrollo’ (the years of development), Spain’s industrial growth period was almost unparalleled in the western world: only Japan would boast a higher rate (Harrison and Corkhill, 2004, p. 76).

As is well known, this process of modernization led to a massive exodus from the country to the cities, where the majority of the new jobs in industrial and service sectors had been created. Shubert shows that between the years 1951 and 1970, 3.8 million Spaniards moved from the country to the city (1990, p. 21), while Riquer i Permanyer demonstrates that Madrid alone had grown by two million (1995, p. 263). By the mid-1960s, people employed in the secondary sector for the first time in Spanish history outnumbered the country’s agrarian population (Harrison and Corkhill, 1995, p. 71). Rapid demographic movement inevitably resulted in the overcrowding and pollution of cities, with many migrants settling in chabolas (shanty towns), and later in high-rise apartments (Carr, 1980, p. 190). According to Shubert, this urban expansion took place in a political context in which no plans or controls were applied and in which greed and corruption were left unchecked (1990, p. 220). As developers were allowed to build at high densities, Spanish city centres, which already had among the highest population densities in the world, became even more crowded (Shubert, 1990, p. 220).

While the burgeoning cities saw the arrival of millions of migrants, the Mediterranean coast also swelled with unskilled workers, taking advantage of its thriving tourist industry. According to Pack, The Stabilization Plan provided an immense benefit to the tourist industry: the cheap peseta and the removal of red tape led to the opening of a floodgate of foreign tourists and property developers respectively (2006, pp. 82–3). The appointment of Manuel Fraga as minister of information and tourism in 1962 was also key to its success. Fraga’s ministry was keen to promote tourism as the driving agent of Spain’s economic and social transformation, and it was thus advocated as a ‘conceived national cause’ (2006, pp. 103,137). But again, the fallout of socio-economic change would have its geography. While the Spanish were brought into closer contact with their European neighbours, their own environment was blighted by overdeveloped resorts. As Pack notes, inflated property values led property developers to build rapidly, densely and often shoddily, in order to maximize their investments (2006, p. 101).

For Fraga, tourism was not only pivotal to Spain’s modernization but also its perceived standing within Europe. Fraga was eager to shake off Spain’s image abroad as the quaint and exotic backwater of Europe. The infamous ‘España es diferente’ (Spain is different) advertising slogan, which had served to exploit Spain’s sociocultural insularity from Europe, was subsequently dropped in favour of a more diverse approach where regional particularisms received broader representation (Pack, 2006, p. 149). Fraga also identified cinema as a means by which a new image of Spain could be projected (Triana-Toribio, 2003, p. 72). As a result, he brought in José María García Escudero as director general de cinematografía in 1962, who was given the task of creating a ‘quality’ national cinema which would serve to showcase Spain as a modern country at international festivals.

García Escudero set forth his far-reaching changes for the Spanish film industry in his book Cine español, published in the same year. He considered the ‘tres pecados capitales’ [three main sins] of his national cinema to be its refusal to deal with social issues, its abse...