Plays, movies, songs, books, paintings… relationships with the father have inspired countless artists. La Vanguardia, coinciding with Father’s Day, collects a sample of some of the recent cultural manifestations that have addressed this topic. In general, the mythologization of the father figure typical of other times is abandoned and he is exposed with his doubts, flaws and edifying moments.
Leonor Mayor Ortega
Cinema draws on the paternal-filial universe on countless occasions, among which the tender and intense Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022) stands out, which portrays the vacation in Turkey that the protagonist spent with her father (separated from her mother) when she was 11 years old. , some unforgettable days between laughter, confidences, baths in the pool and the beach, ice cream and games of pool… but also with some dark areas. Unforgettable interpretation of the father (Paul Mescal) and the girl (Frankie Corio)
Much less idyllic are the days off that Santiago Segura spends with his children in his latest comedy, Summer Vacation (2023), where the director and actor becomes a children’s entertainer at a hotel with a mission more impossible than Tom Cruise’s: entertain twenty children, including his own, who have been brought into the establishment as foreigners. In the film, the children seem more adults than the father and that is the same thing that happens to Georgie, 12 years old, the young protagonist of Scrapper (Charlotte Regan, 2023), an orphan who one day finds a surprise: A young man in his twenties with bleached Eminem hair appears who claims to be his father and moves into the family home. If Georgie finds a father, Michael loses his in the emotional Close to You (Uberto Pasolini, 2021), which tells the true story of a single father who only has a few months left to live and dedicates them to finding a new one for him. family to their four-year-old son.
And in the no less emotional The quiet girl (Colm Bairéad, 2022), little nine-year-old Cáit discovers that a father’s love exists, even if it is not hers. Sometimes, paternal love ends in tragedy as in The Wait (Francisco Javier Gutiérrez, 2023) where Eladio is a man who loves his son but loses him because of greed.
Justo Barranco
If motherhood, the powerful Madonnas, have presided over Western art for centuries, fatherhood, on the other hand, has been a much less central theme. Or, at the very least, loving. Certainly, there has been no shortage of paternities since ancient times, from the severe Romanesque pantocrators to Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam by God. There has also been no shortage of biblical parables with children to forgive. There is the exciting The Return of the Prodigal Son, by Rembrandt, one of whose masterpieces is precisely Titus, the Artist’s Son (1657), created the year in which he went bankrupt and his son and his wife had to take him like an employer. In the world of modern art, since the mid-19th century, paternities have gained momentum along with social changes and a good example is Van Gogh’s First Steps (For Millet) (1890), with a crouching peasant father waiting with his children. open arms to his little girl, who, held by her mother, takes her first steps. The more serious Alexander J. Cassatt and His Son (1884), painted by Mary Cassatt, portrays them in black in an armchair in which they read the newspaper stuck together, almost fused together, as if they were only one. And at the same time the Swede Carl Larsson in Brita and I portrays himself as bourgeois, in an explosion of color, with his very happy daughter on his shoulders. A response to the very unhappy relationship he had with his father, who cursed her birth.
And precisely the artistic exploration of trauma is very present in contemporary art, from creators like Niki de Saint Phalle against her rapist father to Louise Bourgeois and her patricidal fantasies since as a teenager she learned that her governess was her father’s mistress: her first breadcrumb sculpture represented his father and he dismembered it and ate it. Annihilating her mother was the driving force behind her art. Of course, art addresses new fatherhood, as in J. Ross Baughman’s iconic photograph Gay Fathers Kissing (1983), with one father carrying his son on his back. And between the trauma and the vindication, the photographs of Zun Lee and his project Father figure: born in Germany to a Korean mother, only when he grew up would he discover that her father had been an African-American soldier. In her images, she dismantles myths about absent black fatherhood, with powerful images of fathers with children in the Bronx or Harlem.
Francesc Bombí-Vilaseca / Lara Gómez Ruiz
Being a father is an experience through which literature has tiptoed. The little that has been said has been, as a general rule, to show a heroic parent who refuses to show the more human side of him. Little by little, this trend has evolved and, over the last two years, the number of works that make an effort to narrate fatherhood has grown significantly. The most recent are the essay The Father of Fire that journalist Sergio C. Fanjul has just published, in which he tells how being a father changed his life forever; and Little Speaker, by Andrés Neuman, in which the Argentine writer does not hide the emotions he felt at the verbal initiation of his son.
Alejandro Zambra also began to write about it after the birth of his son Silvestre and the result was Children’s Literature (Anagrama); and Erri De Luca did the same in A natural size (Seix Barral), in which he reflects on the extreme bonds that unite parents and children, from the story of Marc Chagall to the extreme sacrifice of Abraham.
The son’s admiration for his father permeates the pages of The Farewells (Books of the Asteroid), the latest novel by Jacobo Bergareche. “For little kids, his dad is everything. But there is a moment when the tables turn and it is the father who wants his son to look at him favorably,” he confesses to this newspaper. In the same publishing house we find Any Son, by Eduardo Halfon, who captures his dual status as father and writer.
A shocking story, but equally paternal, is the one offered by Daniel Vázquez Sallés in The Prince and Death (Folch
In Catalan, perhaps the book that deals with fatherhood most thoroughly does so as an object, since there are twenty authors who talk about the father figure in T’estimo com la sal (Vienna), a proposal at the initiative of Carme Junyent inspired by the idea that, for daughters, writing about their father can be the most difficult, along with a provocative idea: “Daughters don’t kill fathers.” Writers such as Lolita Bosch, Gemma Sardà, Marta Orriols, Llucia Ramis or Marta Marín-Dòmine – who dedicated her first novel to her father, Fugir era el més bell que teníem (Club Editor, 2019) – discuss the topic between fiction, nonfiction and the essay.
Sergi Pàmies distills his life in books, often seasoned with both reality and fiction, and there is also his experience as a son – although his mother, Teresa Pàmies, tends to go out more often, his father, Gregorio López Raimundo, also marks his literature – and as a father, as happens in his latest book, A les dues seran les tres (Quaderns Crema).
Without it being the actual theme of his latest novel, Marc Pastor recognizes that Riu de safirs (Edicions 62) would not be the same without his own paternity, and it is one of the elements that guides behind the scenes the plot of this halfway work of the western, science fiction or the noir genre, always within the framework of his Corvoverso.
These are just some of the many examples that little by little are breaking into bookstores, among which we must not forget the comic White Shark (Sapristi/Finestres), by Genie Espinosa, which talks about fatherhood from the point of view of young man who travels to a small island to collect the belongings of a recently deceased father whom he barely knew.
Sergio Lozano
The relationships between parents and their descendants have given rise to a good bouquet of songs, some as well-known as Isn’t she lovely that Stevie Wonder dedicated in 1976 to his daughter Aisha Morris, Fathers and sons by Cat Stevens or My father’s eyes , with which Eric Clapton compared the looks of his son and his father in 1998. Themes full of pride and hope such as Beautiful boy (Darling boy) by John Lennon, or Alba by Antonio Flores, without forgetting the emotional charge of Palabras para Julia, the poem by José Agustín Goytisolo set to music by Paco Ibáñez.
More recently, Camila Cabello composed First man as a tribute to her father for the support he gave her to become a singer. Not so bucolic is the story that St. Vincent tells in Daddy’s Home, the title track of the album published in 2021, where the American singer-songwriter tells the moment when her father was released from prison and met his daughter who had become a star. musical. Closer in space and time is Little Whirlwind, which the Madrid rapper Rayden dedicates to his son, for whom he has decided to step away from his musical career to be a father while exploring his side as a writer.
Now You has the same recipient, which Viva Sweden’s bassist, Jess Fabric, composed shortly before becoming a father, following in the footsteps of artists like Alejandro Sanz, who has dedicated songs like Tan solo se me idea, Capitán tapón and Mi to his descendants. favorite person in addition to remembering his own father in That One Who Gave Me Life, a heartfelt tribute like the one that Miguel Poveda paid to the man who gave him life, covering the melancholic song composed by Joan Manuel Serrat in 1973.
Magi Fields
In El pare, Josep Maria Pou played an older man at Romea who begins to lose his memory and whose family has to manage this new situation. Directed by Josep Maria Mestres, Florian Zeller’s text reflects on old age, when people stop being who they were. Another heartbreaking text, which could also be heard last year at the Teatre Lliure, is Tots eren fills meus, by Arthur Miller, directed by David Selvas, and with Jordi Bosch in the role of a businessman whose malpractice causes accidents among aviators. of World War II.
