A SPANISH NEOREALISM?

Spain offers an illuminating case study of the powerful influence of Italian Neorealism. At first glance, no country could have seemed more inhospitable to the Neorealist impulse. Once Francisco Franco’s forces won the civil war in 1939, he established a Fascist dictatorship. After World War II, Spain gradually reentered the world community, but it remained an authoritarian country until the mid-1970s.

The film industry was controlled by a government ministry that censored scripts before filming, required dubbing of all films into the “official” Castilian dialect, and created a state monopoly on newsreels and documentaries. The regime demanded pious, chauvinistic films. The result was a procession of civil war dramas (cine cruzada), historical epics, religious films, and literary adaptations (including a Don Quixote de la Mancha, 1947, that compared the idealistic hero to Franco). At a less prestigious level, the industry turned out popular musicals, comedies, and bullfight films. The domestic industry also furnished locales for coproductions and runaway projects.

In the early 1950s, however, countercurrents became visible. CIFESA, the biggest production company of the 1940s, overinvested in high-budget productions and collapsed. As a reaction to the superproduction approach, several low-budget films, most notably Furrows (1951), began to treat social problems, and some used location filming and nonprofessional actors in the Neorealist manner. At the film school IIEC (founded in 1947), students were able to see foreign films that were banned from public exhibition. In 1951, during an Italian film week, IIEC students viewed The Bicycle Thief, Miracle in Milan, Open City, Paisan, and Story of a Love Affair. Soon afterward, several lEC graduates founded a journal, Objetivo, that discussed Neorealist ideas.

The immediate effect of Neorealism is most evident in the work of the two best-known Spanish directors to emerge in the 1950s, Luis Garcia Berlanga and Juan Antonio Bardem. “B & B,” as they came to be known, had been in the first graduating class of JIEC, and in the early 1950s they collaborated on several projects. Welcome, Mr. Marshall (1951), scripted by Bardem and directed by Berlanga, is a comic fable reminiscent of De Sica’s Miracle in Milan. A small town transforms itself into a picturesque stereotype in order to benefit from the Marshall Plan (16.29).

Enormously popular in Spain, Welcome, Mr. Marshall satirized America’s expanding power, took jabs at Hollywood movies and Spanish folk genres, and made a quiet appeal for popular unity. It set the tone for later Berlanga films such as Calabuch (1956), which mocked the arms race, and it promulgated what came to be called la estetica franquista (“the Franco aesthetic”), a sardonic or an ironic treatment of apparently safe subjects.

Welcome, Mr. Marshall was selected as Spain’s official entry to the Cannes festival, and, despite controversy about its “anti-American” outlook, it won a special mention. The film launched Bardem’s career as a director. Soon, his stature was reaffirmed internationally with Death ofa Cyclist (1955), which won the best-film prize at Cannes, and Calle Mayor (Main Street, 1956), which won the Critics’ Prize at Venice.

Berlanga blended Neorealist impulses toward regional realism with a penchant for sardonic comedy. Bardem, by contrast, favored a more somber scrutiny of psychological states that owed a good deal to 1950s Italian developments. Calle Mayor, a fierce indictment of small-town narrowness and masculine egotism, recalls I Vitelloni, but without Fellini’s indulgent humor (16.30). Similarly, Death ofa Cyclist derives to some extent from Story ofa Love Affair; it even stars Lucia Bose, the heroine of Antonioni’s film. Bardem’s plot shows how an affair between a rich man’s wife and a university professor is shattered when their car kills a passing bicyclist. In trying to conceal their crime, the couple break up. The film ends with the woman, perhaps deliberately, running

16.29 The schoolteacher holds classes on how to dress and act like the cliched Spaniard in Welcome, Mr. Marshall.

16.30 Young wastrels in a small town (Calle Mayor).

Over her lover on the site of the accident. Bardem’s editing creates narrational commentary on the affair, and the deep-focus landscape shots isolate his protagonists in compositions that recall Antonioni’s (16.31).

As the work of Berlanga, Bardem, and others gained international attention, an alternative Spanish film culture began to surface fitfully. The growth of cine-clubs in various universities led to a conference at Salamanca in 1955. This event assembled filmmakers, critics, and scholars to discuss the future of the nation’s cinema. Bardem denounced Spanish film as “politically, useless; socially, false; intellectually, inferior; aesthetically, nonexistent; and industrially, sick.”14 After Bardem’s denunciation, he was arrested while filming Calle Mayor and was released only after international protests.

16.31 Antonioniesque alienation and anomie in Death of a Cyclist.

The Salamanca talks did not sway the industry but did encourage filmmakers to test the limits of government policy. Such resistance was helped by the production company UNINCI, founded in 1951 and responsible for Welcome, Mr. Marshall. In 1957, Bardem joined UNINCI’s board of directors and soon persuaded Luis Bunuel to return to Spain to make a film. The government welcomed Bunuel’s return, and his script was accepted with only one change (which Bunuel claimed was an improvement). Viridiana (1961) won the highest award at the Cannes festival, but when Church officials declared it blasphemous, the government banned this most famous Spanish postwar film. UNINCI dissolved. The rebellion of young filmmakers and critics had gone too far, and the experiment in Spanish Neorealism was over.