A paragraph from a chronicle sent in 1916 from the Balkans for ‘La Vanguardia’ brings to light the first international Catalan and Spanish war cameraman, and cameraman of the first Bulgarian fiction film
The newspaper library of this newspaper is an endless coil.
Twenty lines buried in the March 10, 1916 edition trigger the celluloid of a story never before projected on our screens.
In the midst of World War I, only one newspaper from a neutral country – La Vanguardia – obtained permission from the Bulgarian and German army to witness their onslaught and invasion of Serbia.
One day, reporting from that distant and exotic front, our special envoy –Enrique Domínguez Rodiño– unexpectedly came across a young cameraman who was filming the advance of the Axis troops and he approached to talk to him…
Surprise! He was “a nice Catalan, from Barcelona, ??named Cayetano Pié,” writes the reporter, “an excellent cinematograph operator who, due to his honesty and talent, despite being a foreigner and young man, is director of the Modern Theater in Sofia, the best and most distinguished from the cinemas of the beautiful Bulgarian capital, owned by the most powerful film company in the East. He has been granted an extraordinary permit to visit the entire war zone with his device.
The reporter added that the cameraman had just arrived from the Serbian city of Niš, recently conquered by the Central Powers. He only talks about him in one paragraph.
I found these lines in the death throes of the Yugoslav wars, revisiting the landscapes that La Vanguardia reporters covered on the Eastern Front of the Great War. I saved them to one day pull this enigmatic coil and now, when pulled, a fascinating story between the belle époque and trench wire appears.
With no trace of Gaietà Pié in his own country – neither the Catalan nor the Spanish Film Archives have any news of the character – I ask for help from two Balkan friends who know Bulgaria and Bulgarian well: Marc Casals, Catalan translator and writer, and Ariel Ilieff, manager Argentine cultural who lives in Sofia.
Ariel locates two books –especially Enigmas and Times of ‘The Bulgarian is a Heartthrob’, by Petar Kardjilov– that investigate the beginnings of Bulgarian cinema, and Marc translates the few parts that talk about Gaietà Pié de Flores.
The story of this Catalan cameraman thus emerges as a film in itself, a succession of frames in black and white with a pianist –imagined– playing polkas under the screen and a plot –completely real– that could be filmed in three takes.
First take. Click. In the summer or early fall of 1914, with Europe falling into the abyss, a small group of technicians and actors knocked on the door of a house in Sofia. The first scenes of The Bulgarian Is a Heartthrob were to be filmed inside it. The maid, seeing them, was frightened and did not let them enter.
The shooting of the first fiction film in the history of Bulgaria had the air of a silent comic celluloid: the police wanted to arrest them for walking down the street with their faces painted, people insulted them and, while filming the scenes, the boys threw stones at Gaietà Pié, perhaps the first Catalan and Spanish cameraman for a fiction film outside our country.
The plot of the film was a scandal… A gentleman seduces a stranger through the streets of Sofia. They go shopping and she asks him to pay for everything with the excuse that he left his purse at her house. With the seducer carrying the packages, they come across the husband and the lady –disguising– proposes to the husband to take a taxi and free the porter from her burden. The couple takes the taxi after giving the bewildered hunk a coin for his services.
Gaietà Pié was not only the cameraman, he also advised the director –Vasil Guéndov– in the dressing room, and his technical mastery was key. He processed the tape in the attic of the Modern Theatre, blocking the light from the windows with rugs, drinking his water from a neighboring brewery, and working until dawn.
We know little about him. That he was young, very open and enthusiastic about his job. That he came to Sofia from Budapest. There is no photo of him: we only know, from Gendov, that when he smiled he showed “white teeth like a daisy.”
Despite the scandal, or thanks to it, The Bulgarian is a Heartthrob was a success and was screened for fourteen days at the Teatro Moderno.
The film was also screened in Vienna, Zagreb, Paris, London and, apparently, in Hollywood, where actors like Mary Pickford and Charles Chaplin saw it through a shady Bulgarian cameraman named Denchev who ended up in Al Capone’s gang and liquidated. for him when trying to steal a few wads of dollars.
The Bulgarian is a Heartthrob did not survive the 20th century: in World War II, the tape ended up destroyed by the Allied bombing of Sofia.
Second take. Click. A year after the film was shot, Bulgaria entered the First World War and the Modern theater sent Gaietà Pié to the front. He went from filming the Balkans from sensuality – the film of the seductive Bulgarian, The interesting flight in Sofia of the Rumpler airplane or The Rose Festival in Sofia – to capturing the faces of the defeated Serbian soldiers.
He filmed bridges destroyed, prisoners and weapons captured in Niš – it was when he met the reporter from La Vanguardia – and scenes from the front in Kumanovo (in 1913, in the First Balkan War, he had already filmed the fall of Edirne). With speed and technical skill: his war footage was immediately screened in Sofia.
Thus we discover the first international Catalan and Spanish war cameraman. The first international, because Ricard de Baños or Ignacio Coyne, who six years earlier had filmed war scenes in Melilla, documented Spanish soldiers in a Spanish colonial war.
Third and last take. Click. The projector bulb fatally heats the celluloid, the moving image freezes and burns. We are left with a blank screen.
Everything disappears. We have not been able to find any more traces of the cameraman from 1916. Did he return to Barcelona? Did he die too young?
His known life is a very short film. A flash of gunpowder and sensuality. We don’t even have The End. But, as in a Christmas story, before going blank the screen has given us enough frames to project –for the first time– the name of Gaietà Pié among the cinematographic pioneers of the country where she was born.
