The bibliography on Spanish cinema has had a particularly sweet moment lately. In just a few months, our bookstores’ novelty showcases have welcomed volumes that have been offered, until recently, a little less than fanciful. Among them are appropriately edited and contextualized scripts or projects of films that have never been shot by some of our top filmmakers. In less than a year, the fan managed to keep it in their hands. Gallop and cut the wind (Free for Children, 2022), Long live Russia! (Nuggets, 2022) and Return to Calle Mayor (Pepitas, 2022), projects realized by none other than indisputable figures after all Eloy de la Iglesia, Luis García Berlanga and Juan Antonio Bardem, respectively. Centennials of the birth of the main characters of our cinema, such as Berlanga himself (1921-2010), Fernando Fernan Gomez (1921-2007) or Jose Luis Lopez Vazquez (1922-2009) filled the shelves of our bookstores with glee, and not so long ago, the oddball Santiago Aguilar and Felipe Cabrerizo finished giving birth to the monstrously funny and documented volume called La Codorniz, after many years of pregnancy. . From magazine to screen (and vice versa) (Cátedra, 2019), this is perhaps the pinnacle of work on homeland cinematography for a presenter. Aguilar himself, among many other works, gave us one of my books of the year, Zoom a Lazaga (The Abbey Library / Vial Books, 2022), a few months ago, a pioneering, thorough and immensely entertaining review of life and filmography. Pedro Lazaga, one of the ten or twelve writers, is really important to our cinema history no matter who he is and in many ways.
While it goes without saying that they are all highly recommended, they’ll excuse me for the introduction as I won’t mention any of the aforementioned books or authors now. The preceding paragraph at least serves, albeit incompletely and sporadically, to justify the excellent health that the publishing scene currently enjoys with regard to the seventh (or was it the first?) art made in our beloved Spain.
But I’m here to talk about another book; full of passion, wisdom, enthusiasm and admiration, an impressive worksheet of nearly nine hundred pages that I feel special and dedicated to another of our greatest and most controversial filmmakers, José Luis Garci. sympathy and an eternal debt.
With this monumental A empty life. The cinema of José Luis Garci (Hatari! Books, 2022), Andrés Moret Urdampilleta has begun to fill an inexplicable gap in the editorial panorama of publications on Spanish cinema. Inexplicable, because even if you more or less like Garci’s cinema (and I guess I will anyway, a lot, a lot, a lot, and more), there are more than objective reasons to justify the emergence of one or more volumes like this. there is. many years ago..
In fact, it is not entirely true that this is the first book devoted to the study of Garci’s cinema. It is true that over the last decade, books devoted to examining or partially analyzing the filmography of the Madrid filmmaker have gradually appeared. Among them, we can talk about emotion. José Luis Garci’s cinema (Notorious, 2012) by Agapito Maestre—more a book on philosophy than cinema—or E-Motion pictures: Las películas de JL Garci (Notorious, 2018), an extensive collection of reviews and commentary on each of his films. We can also talk about more or less successful works that focus on one or more of his works, such as Canción de luna. Garci, melodrama and mystery, Agustín Faro (Notorious, 2017) or co-authors Adictos a El Crack (Notorious, 2014 and 2019) and Volver a Begin. 40 years of starting over (Row and live, 2022). But so far, forty-five years after directing his feature film, we have been able to enjoy a broad and sensible critical study of his entire filmography, including short films, telefilms and screenplays he has directed. others.
It is divided into two distinctly different parts – Topic pending (1977) to Topic approved (1987) and Lullaby (1994) to Holmes & Watson. Madrid Days (2012), to add to that that miraculous extra ball, El crack Cero (2019), serves as both the unifier and the climax of both phases – his filmography consists of nineteen feature films. in addition to a handful of short films, TV movies and screenplays. It would be absurd not to notice level drops or direct errors in a fifty-year orbit, but I think Garci has at least seven or eight works that oscillate between the colossal and the extraordinary.
Through the pages of Andrés Moret’s book, we find ourselves an absolute creator, on the one hand controlling every detail of the films he shoots (usually not only the director, but also the co-writer and producer), but also when necessary, his decisions are not only first-class, but above all from absolutely reliable professionals. He also knows how to delegate to a formed team.
He’s fond of classic Hollywood cinema, there are those who accuse him of being slow, as if that’s a bad thing (the sin is not slowness, it’s a lack of rhythm, and his films generally keep a rhythm and the harmony is admirable). Others describe his cinema as stale, outdated or cohesive. They are adjectives that are not worth discussing. In any case, in the mid-21st century, I can’t think of anything more up-and-coming than shooting an enormous kaleidoscope of two hours and a bit long, with almost no plots—or an infinite number of plots. Carousel, c.1950 (2004), an unexpected Asturian western called Luz de domingo (2007), or a self-referential miracle like the aforementioned El crack Cero.
While swallowing the pages of this inexhaustible volume that Hatari has arranged with exquisite pleasure! The books witness the events of each of Garcia’s shoots, compare the critical reception of each of his works, draw on insights and comments from both the filmmaker and dozens of collaborators on not only cinematographic but also many aspects. vital, necessary for understanding his universe, and above all, we gladly share the assertion of this man who did (and continues to do) much to spread his passion for cinema among my generation, those born circa 1975 to 1985. that we learned to love movies through their television shows.
But in recent years, if there’s one aspect of José Luis Garci that needs to be highlighted, it’s not as a filmmaker, or even a popularizer, but more as a writer. The books that our man has published have long surpassed the films he has directed for some time. Four years earlier, he had estimated the number of volumes published on the same pages at twenty. Today I count book up, book down, thirty in my library.
The last two full of colorful pictures, published by Reino de Cordelia with the Madrid label between the spring and autumn of 2022, are called Telegramas cinephiles and Sports Lines. Two books with very different contents but with a similar origin: print media.
The first brings together “telegrams” that Garci published on ABC Cultural from 2021-2022. There are fifty quick, direct texts without full pauses where Garci talks about his usual subjects (I don’t know, Somerset Maugham to Howard Hawks, Penagos to Fritz Lang, noir to martini). Themes and names that always make up that joseluisgarcian galaxy in which some of us feel so comfortable, whether we share the objects of devotion or not. Somehow, for most of us, reading to him is like coming home, because Garci doesn’t repeat himself by interpreting Ramón Gaya, but instead “insists”.
The second again takes the eighty-odd daily recordings originally broadcast on ABC, but this time focuses on football and goes back a little further in time, specifically the period between 1992 and the 2004 European Championship, from 1996 to 1992. The Olympics and the 1998 and 2002 World Cups Dawn scripts written all in one go serve as an excuse for the games played the day before for Garci to unleash the discursive flood, as always happens in our man’s case. and writing about a thousand and one topics, not just sports. Even those of us, among whom I count, who care less about professional sports, shudder with these pages because, as with all great writers – and so is Garci – the issue is what matters least, what interests us, what interests us. What he’s passionate about isn’t his style (assuming such a thing exists), but his gaze, his distance, the warmth and content of his paragraphs. Garci wrote in 1992, “I also don’t know how to define exactly what exactly I’ve always wanted Poli to win against Whitaker or Arancha against Capriati. José Luis González instead of Aouita. I consider myself a citizen of the world. “I see it as a spectacle, but God, I have friends and sympathies in the world. And of course, when my friends lose fairly, I applaud my opponents, but I try not to let that applause become a punishment for them.” It is worth picking up any of his writings for such candid paragraphs. For now, I plan to continue reading at least the next thirty books.