Brief history of Spanish social cinema

In almost all the interviews that Juan Diego Botto is giving to the media to promote his first film as a director, in the marginsthe actor argues over and over again that his debut film is the result “of the investigation of reality”. in the margins is a cinematic exploration of the effects that an eviction announcement can have.

Botto’s film, even though it is fiction, is woven with elements taken from reality. But it is not the distribution but film criticism that puts it within the subgenre of cine social. This reaction may be understandable: in these adverse times a good number of spectators would not pay to have a bad time (also) at the cinema.

However, the premiere of this film is the perfect excuse to ask ourselves about the mark that this type of story has left on Spanish cinematography. We start from the fact that the concept of the social is not only applicable to the documentary genre but also, of course, to the fictional story.

From timid beginnings to ideological commitment

From the outset, Spanish cinema does not seem to be a space concerned with the social during its first years of life. While the Lumière brothers made the workers of their factory in the city of Lyon the protagonists, in Exit of factory workers (1895), the Spaniard Eduardo Jimeno, two years later, projected Exit of the twelve o’clock mass from the Pilar Church in Zaragoza. A capricious but inevitably symbolic comparison.

During the first decades of the 20th century, our cinema ignored the so-called social problems, moving between traditionalism and international trends, betting on serials, zarzuelas or rural dramas. However, at the gates of the First World War, a group of Catalan filmmakers understood that the camera could be used for much more: their interests focused on what happened in the Tragic Week in Barcelona (The events of BarcelonaJosep Gaspar, 1909) or in the hardships experienced by the Spanish army in the Rif (morocco warRicard de Baños, 1909).

Modern Spain would still have to wait

The arrival of the Second Republic was definitive for the development of our film industry. Also that life now revolved around cities –after the rural exodus–, turning them into iconic spaces. Precisely the tension between the countryside and the city would lead to the shooting of one of the most controversial films in denunciation-cinema: Las Hurdes/Land without bread (Luis Bunuel, 1933). This documentary medium-length film, articulated on the basis of a raw and painful story, would be the prelude to a terrible Civil War.

Buñuel, aware of the power of images, sometimes twisted reality to achieve a stark filmic text, revealing a forgotten area of ​​Spain. The reaction of the public powers was immediate: the film was banned by the Government of the Republic.

Far from believing that the civil war was an inane stage in terms of film production, the two sides, as well as their different ideological divisions, produced works committed to their ideals. Although it is true that we could be talking about simple propaganda at the time, the tension of this period translated into productions rich in nuances: fictions such as Madrid front (Edgar Neville, 1939), or urgent news/documentaries like Spain 1936 (Jean-Paul Dreyfus Le Chanois, 1937), with direct narratives and Manichaean views.

From propaganda and censorship to the exploration of freedom

The Franco dictatorship found in the cinema a perfect ally to support the ideals of a regime that, in its early years, defined itself as national-Catholic. At that time, the plots of the films were articulated around historical themes, with deep Spanish roots, with pious incursions into religious and papier-mâché cinema.

However, Spanish cinema, just as the Franco regime did, gradually adapted to the socioeconomic realities of the time. Some filmmakers (dissidents, resigned, disillusioned, rare birds within the system), facing censorship, dared to raise social concerns in their works.

Exemplary is the case of Grooves (José Antonio Nieves Conde, 1951), a jewel of our cinema that bitterly shows the problem of rural emigration to a big city like Madrid. Groovesshot by a convinced Falangist, of a neorealist nature, presents a helpless and neglected working class, prey to a system that for the inhabitants “of this corrala” has nothing to offer them.

As was to be expected, Nieves Conde suffered in the first person interference from the censorship, which came to describe the work as “a film with very harsh connotations”. From the same director The tenant, a family social drama with the housing problem as the central plot. Precisely, the hardships of the lower-middle class will be the constant concern of the directors of the 50s: that happy couple (Juan Antonio Bardem and Luis Garcia Berlanga, 1951) and the little apartment (Marco Ferreri, 1959), for example.

The effects of Salamanca

This realist current –neorealist, we would say– added to a new batch of directors, to a certain openness in some social and cultural sectors, coincided in time with the so-called Conversations of Salamanca (1955).

These days of debate and reflection, organized by director Basilio Martín Patino, brought together directors, screenwriters and critics in this city for several days who critically analyzed the health of Spanish cinema. The final reflection of the conference stated as follows: “Spanish cinema lives in isolation; isolated not only from the world, but from our own reality. (…) The problem with Spanish cinema is that (…) it is not that witness that our time demands of all human creation”.

As a result of this new spirit, films such as death of a cyclist (Juan Antonio Bardem, 1955), the gulfs (Carlos Saura, 1960), the stroller (Marco Ferreri, 1960), The executioner (Luis Garcia Berlanga, 1963), Aunt Tulla (Miguel Picazo, 1964) the Nine letters to Berta (B. Martín Patino, 1966), who innovated not only formally but also in the development of the story.

Democracy and social cinema

The end of the dictatorship, the disappearance of censorship and a film industry concerned about not losing audiences to television, cornered –once again– social cinema. This seemed aimed at the intellectual elites of the left or, on the contrary, forced the forms of the so-called quinqui cinema.

Names like Paulino Viota, a director with a short career but a great ideological commitment, were concerned about the rights of workers and their labor exploitation (tooth and nail, 1978). On the opposite side, although also in militancy, the work of Eloy de la Iglesia stands out, heterodox, serial and provocative.

Precisely the recovery of civil rights and the exploration of freedom will be the themes most demanded by our cinema during the 1980s. Pedro Almodóvar’s early works are a large collection of identities whose actions and bodies are the true critical discourse. At that time, he still did not feel the need to do activism, although his stories are already exemplary in terms of the defense of personal freedom and dissidence.

The 90’s is the time of a cinematographic regeneration, with the appearance of new directors and the treatment of hitherto invisible themes. Immigration, for example, is made flesh in films like Alou’s letters (Montxo Armendáriz, 1990) y Mr (Imanol Uribe, 1996). These tapes, and some more, denounce the xenophobia that still exists in part of Spanish society. There is also concern about young people left adrift or working in precarious conditions (History’s part The crownMontxo Armendariz, 1995; jump into the voidDaniel Calparsoro, 1995; BarrioFernando Leon de Aranoa, 1998).

The truth is that, in recent years, Spanish cinema seems to have become aware, in a more forceful way, but also at times opportunistically, of the social problems that afflict the country.

The woman in the movies

However, there is a reality that breaks into the industry of the new century: the incorporation of women into the world of cinema. This supposes a new way of looking, of understanding the world and the story, and thus we find, from the feminine point of view, reconsiderations of daily dramas (Hi, are you alone?Icíar Bollaín, 1995; when you come back to my side, Grace Querejeta, 1999); or films with a clear vocation to position themselves in feminist activism, each one in its own way (Let’s go, Barbara.Cecilia Bartholomew, 1978; the girlsPilar Palomero, 2020).

As we can deduce from this journey, in short, Spanish social cinema is indivisible from the advances and setbacks that social causes have had within the country’s history.

Nicolás Grijalba de la Calle, Communication Department Director, FCA. Professor of Film History and Visual Culture and Aesthetics, Nebrija University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original.