What is the oldest film you have restored?
An Andalusian Dog (1929), by Buñuel.
Did it need restoration?
In 1960 they did a replacement and changed the speed and the original Wagner soundtrack chosen by Buñuel.
Did you prevent Buñuel from being corrected?
And other times it is the passing of time, that is, of power, that forces me to restore…
tell us.
Raza was conceived by Francisco Franco as a film of fascist exaltation with himself as the protagonist…
Undefeated warlord.
But we were able to restore its original assembly thanks to the fall of the Berlin wall.
Wasn’t it shot right after the Civil War?
In 1941, yes. Franco thought of it to please Hitler when the Nazis ruled the world; but then the Nazis begin to lose and the Caudillo dismisses the pro-Nazi brother-in-law Serrano Suñer from Foreign Affairs and orders “technical adjustments” in the production of Raza…
He was a dictator, but not a fool.
He ordered the original negative to be destroyed: it is destroyed, and Raza is retouched to become Spirit of a Race, released in 1950…
When the Americans were in charge.
The arm-raised salutes were eliminated, and the good ones, formerly fascists, were now patriots, and the bad ones, formerly democrats, were now communists. And derogatory references to the US were removed.
The cold war had just begun.
But the German archives had kept a copy of the original Raza in the UFA archives which was left in the hands of communist Germany. When the wall fell, those responsible for the reunified Germany returned it to us on time. Now we have both.
Have you restored any other unknown jewel?
Shadow Life, by Llorenç Llobet Gràcia, a filmmaker from Sabadell who went bankrupt shooting what is now considered one of the best five films in Spanish cinema.
I confess I didn’t know about her.
It was a fiasco in audience, but it is a jewel interpreted by Fernando Fernán Gómez and María Dolores Pradera. We restored it in 1983 for the Valladolid Festival, where it was a hit.
What does it tell us?
A film director who wants to shoot during the Civil War, but his wife dies and he believes that it is his fault for having been more aware of the film than hers.
Is the cinema to blame?
And the cinema redeems him: a reflection of cinema on cinema that anticipates the nouvelle vague.
Have you had a scare restoring?
Carne de fieras is a film that was about to be edited: shooting began in July 1936 in the Retiro park in Madrid.
Did Franco finish off the movie this time?
Filming was suspended, evidently. But the CNT forced the producer to continue filming to pay the workers…
The CNT controlled the show.
A collector bought it at the Rastro and it ended up in my hands and it was easy to assemble because there was only one take for each shot. But the best were not the actors, but what was also filmed accidentally…
Is the background better than the scenes?
Armed people are seen, and the director at some point goes out having coffee with the militiamen in Atocha between July and August of 1936.
That was a great movie.
They only repeated a shot because they dropped the camera. It tells the story of a boxer who loses a fight and, upon returning home, finds his wife with another and picks up a child from the street and a scene evoked by Cela appears in San Camilo…
Also 36?
It was a French woman, Marlène Grey, who dances naked in a cage of lions and the children followed the announcement of the show with a naked silhouette throughout Madrid…
It would not have passed the censorship of the forties.
Those of the Spanish Film Library found sacks of those cuts in the eighties when they changed ministries and gave them to me: I spent two years reviewing them and identifying films.
Count, count!
In Sor Citroën, with Alfredo Landa and Gracita Morales, the nuns are in the refectory eating and, instead of the Gospel, they are read from the Traffic Code…
What blessed innocence!
Well, you see: they cut it. And I remember another great cut in Even if the hormone wears silk, by Manolo Summers: at a baptism, the altar boy uses a plunger to unclog the baptismal font…
Another equally blessed.
With all the restored material we made a feature film, Cut 21 Chinese meters, which was one of the censorship notes.
“One of xinets”, they used to say in my town.
The censors were paid to censor the producers. And they charged those of Carmen Sevilla for cutting a cuplé as naive as it is still deliciously spicy.
