We discuss four Pere Portabella Shorts on MUBI: Don’t Count Your Fingers (1968); Play Back (1970); Acció Santos (1973); Premios Nacionales (1969) focussing on their play with form, the conceptual cleverness, the surrealist aspects; the sensuousness of the imagery; the potency of their critiques.
Portabella seems to be in touch with all the leading painters, poets and musicians of the day; and their collaborations evoke a spirit of community and resistance that seems particularly powerful considering they were made under a fascist dictatorship.
I made a gif from part of a satirical ad in Don’t Count Your Fingers which you can see below:
An excellent article by Rosalind Galt contextualising Pere Portabella’s work and indeed that of the ‘Barcelona School’ , both in national and international aesthetic and political currents, may be accessed here.
We continue our exploration of Pere Portabella films, this one his third feature, Umbracle, an experimental off-shoot of Cuadecuc Vampir. Umbracle means shade created by twigs or pieces of wood, and we discuss the significance of the title in relation to what the film shows: is it focussing on what’s being hidden or revealed by the light? The film has a mystery that raises questions, a sensuality; there’s a seduction, both somatic and intellectual, to what the images are like, what they show, evoke, elicit. The film trots out three different film critics — Roman Gúbern, Miguel Bilbatúa and Joan Enric Lahosa — to discuss the impossibility of representing, and to advocate for an underground, more political, more experimental cinema (see clip below); juxtaposing this with excerpts of Frente infinito (Pedro Lazaga, 1959), a film about a priest in wartime, an ideal of Francoist cinema, the cross hand-in-hand with the rifle (see image below). A film of fragments, about modernity, on politics, a critique, yet one conscious of the seductiveness of sounds and images. We discuss all this and more in this all too brief podcast.
I am including the long excerpt where critics discuss censorship in Spanish cinema:
..as opposed to the ideal Francoist cinema of praying and shooting, condensed in this image:
The ‘Peter Cushing looking for his fee’ clip Richard refers to may be seen here:
An excellent article by Rosalind Galt contextualising Pere Portabella’s work and indeed that of the ‘Barcelona School’ , both in national and international aesthetic and political currents, may be accessed here.
An experimental retelling of the Dracula story, now so familiar that the film can forego dialogue until the end of the film, where Christopher Lee, who plays Dracula reads us the end of the novel. The film was shot during the making of Jesús Franco’s Dracula/ Conde Drácula (for Hammer) and is at once the telling of the story, with very beautiful, haunting and effective imagery, and also a deconstruction of the cinematic practices that go into the cinematic telling.
The film looks gorgeous. It’s shot in black and white, and there seems to have been some play in the developing of the stock as some of the shots have a partial inversion so that it has the look of the black and white negative (see below).
The film is about Dracula but it is also about deconstructing the practices of visual story-telling, so we get beautiful lit and haunting imagery, with fascinating shot compositions that seem to focus on light (see below):
But that also show the tools that go into filmmaking (cameras, special effects, the backs of sets, lights, make-up).
This culminates at the end with a series of flowing zooms where we see Christopher Lee take off his Dracula make-up:
…but was indicated from the very beginning:
Steve Marsh points out in his excellent piece on Portabella, The Legacies of Pere Portabella: Between Heritage and Inheritance (Hispanic Review , AUTUMN 2010, Vol. 78, No. 4, pp. 551-567): ”cua de cue is Catalan for “worm’s tail” — a resonant description of a projection of excess –but it is also a term for the unexposed footage at the end of a roll of film (coletazo in Castilian). Clearly that in its own right suggests a supplement, an addition, and one that reflects the very materiality of film’ (p.555).
The soundtrack is very beautiful and playful as well, sometimes just haunting ambient sound, sometimes excerpts from what seem to be jazz standards and opera; later on towards the end, the effect of a broken record starting and stopping again, and the only dialogue that of Christopher Lee at the very end of the film explaining how the death of Dracula is narrated in only 15 lines in the novel.
A film about light and darkness, about sights and sounds; a film about Dracula; a film about cinema also; and a Pere Portabella film that leaves one with the desire to see many more Pere Portabella films. It’s currently playing on MUBI.
PS.
An excellent article by Rosalind Galt contextualising Pere Portabella’s work and indeed that of the ‘Barcelona School’ , both in national and international aesthetic and political currents, may be accessed here.
A fascinating film which should be of particular interest to those of you into ‘Art’ or ‘Experimental Cinema’. The podcast discusses the importance of Pere Portabella as a seminal figure in 20th Century Spanish Cinema: he produced Saura, Ferrari, Buñuel and many others; and he also directed a whole series of films, of which we plan to work our way through. Nocturne 29 was his first feature. I have written on Warsaw Bridgehere. Richard and I have have also discussed Portabella’s Cuadecuc Vampyr (1970) here.
The podcast touches on Portabella’s bringing together some of the great artists of the 20th century to work on various levels of the film (music, script, art, cinema); whether it being the Marxist work of a bourgeois is inherently a problem, the significance of particular scenes (the poker games, the ending with the flags), the casting of Lucía Bosé and Mario Cabré, its form and its possible meanings. It’s a fascinating film and an extraordinary first work by a key director more people should be familiar with. It is currently on MUBI.
I´ve read much about Pere Portabella but had never seen any of his films until now. I´ve simply never had the opportunity and I´m grateful to MUBI for providing one. Ostensibly, for a long time he didn´t allow any of them to be released on VHS, DVD or blu-ray. As you can see from the kind comment below there are now box sets with English sub-titles so rather than a rare chance to see his films as I initially thought, this might better be seen as a great introduction to his work. .
Warsaw Bridge is a gorgeous meditation on the nature of art and the role of the artist; a measure taken of the differing relations between the chattering classes, working people, and the connection of each to art, interpretation, whether reality can be known objectively or whether it is always mediated through signs and paradigms of knowledge.
The film has a loose narrative involving a university biology teacher, a prize-winning author and a publisher but often takes flights of fancy, usually motivated by music: an orchestral score played through a neighbourhood in Barcelona, with pianos in the rooftops, and with the orchestra conductor leading on from a television monitor. We get naked women posed as classical tableaus, who sing and as they do so, their image becomes signs, which then get reduced to outlines and finally to computer code. This is a gorgeous, seductive, intelligent film about science and the body, memory and history, a history of art, and the value of aesthetics as mediated through various arts. I loved it.
Note: the images accompanying this text are image/notes for future reflections on the film.
