Film director, producer, screenwriter, author of books about Nicholas Ray and Francisco Rovira-Beleta, restless film club in his youth and even an occasional actor, Carlos Benpar (Barcelona, ??1947) is, above all, a cinema enthusiast. But his is not the typical intellectualized, analytical cinephilia with the desire to teach – even though his erudition is impressive and his memory prodigious – but rather a cinephilia that I would dare to describe as experiential, nourished from the lost paradise of childhood. and unequivocally rooted in it. The cinema acts in Benpar as an influence and guide for life, not only as a refuge from which to enhance his dreams: as he himself indicates, the cinema functions in his case “as a sample for life, as a guide to move in it with determination. but without ostentation.”
In the same way, Tótem sin taboo, the book that is the subject of these lines, is not a standard volume of memoirs either, with its more or less nuanced or disguised egocentrism. Rather, it is a formidable, torrential and brave intimate confession, a wealth of memories and reflections that, despite its digressions and time jumps, ends up offering a complete portrait of its author and (re)constructing something very similar to an autobiography. , with the precious peculiarity that it exudes a rare and stark sincerity.
To begin with, the filmmaker acknowledges that the death of his mother, which occurred in 1993, was the driving force that triggered the writing of this book. Orphaned by his father before he was two years old, young Carlos wove with his mother a dense network of complicities that was permanent over time and which, as can be read in the text, still continues to influence his daily life. The filmmaker even admits that, lately, “making movies has lost interest for me because my mother can’t watch them anymore.” She, along with her beloved Aunt Teodora, were the people who sacrificed themselves for him and encouraged him at all times. Hand in hand with him, as a child, I went to the Clot cinemas, the popular neighborhood where he was born, cinemas like the Condal, the Martinense, the Meridiana, the Ducal… all of which have disappeared today. As if extinct are those memorable sessions of double program and continuous session that influenced the sentimental education of several generations and in which little Carlos began to be enthusiastic about adventure and Wild West films, learning to love the art of Walsh, Hawks , or Ray before knowing who those gentlemen were and what exactly they did.
Then, in his adolescence, came the definitive revelation, manifested as never before on that February 26, 1964, when he first saw The Trial, by Orson Welles, an overwhelming adaptation of Kafka that would mark his decision to dedicate himself to cinema. The trace of that title can be traced in Soplo de esplendor (1968-73), his peculiar debut feature, filmed between long parentheses and in a sort of clandestinity with respect to official cinema. In fact, most of his subsequent filmography materialized against all odds, plagued by economic hardship and the usual lack of institutional aid. The author writes about all this with an elegant acrimony, more ironic than spiteful.
We find greater confusion in the evocation of his relationships with women, often mediated – perhaps too much – by cinema itself, presided over by a certain intermittency or by the difficulty of consolidating. More coherence is offered by his film pilgrimages, which for Benpar, a traveler rather than a tourist, acquire a double meaning: a tribute to his own myths and a posthumous tribute to that mother in whose company he learned to love them. Thus, the author gives an account of his wanderings through that Monument Valley sacralized by John Ford, through that Bodega Bay that sheltered The Birds, through the Vienna of The Third Man, through that Prague that gave birth to Kafka, through the modest Galesville that he saw Nicholas Ray was born or by numerous enclaves in Italy that allow the memory of so many classics of that country’s cinema. Tours full of chance and anecdotes, in the course of which the author expresses mixed feelings, oscillating between excitement at the dreamed moment and longing for the past, for better and more exciting times.
There is also, of course, no shortage of allusions to his hard and firm defense of the right of directors to respect the integrity of their works, a fight that would crystallize in the splendid documentaries Filmmakers against magnates and Filmmakers in action (2005), awarded with two Goya and other distinctions, a diptych that marks the moment of greatest recognition in Benpar’s professional career, almost always doomed to relative marginality. As Miquel de Palol points out in the prologue, the author knows how to relativize the notions of success and failure. He suggests, implicitly, that true triumph lies in the enjoyment of the life journey, in its degree of emotion and intensity.
