What is the oldest film you have restored?
An Andalusian Dog (1929), by Buñuel.
Did it need restoration?
In 1960 they gave it a makeover and changed the speed and the original Wagner soundtrack chosen by Buñuel.
Did you prevent them from correcting Buñuel?
And other times it is the passage of time, that is to say of power, that forces me to restore…
explain to 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 it to 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 it up to please Hitler when the Nazis dominated the world, but then the Nazis start to lose and the Caudillo dismisses the pro-Nazi brother-in-law Serrano Suñer as Foreign Minister and orders “technical adjustments” to the assembly of Raza…
He was a dictator, but not a fool.
He ordered the original negative to be destroyed and it is retouched to become Espíritu de una raza, released in 1950…
When the Americans were in charge.
The arm-raised salutes were eliminated, and the good guys, formerly fascists, were now patriots, and the bad guys, 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 remained in the hands of communist Germany. When the wall came down, those responsible for reunified Germany returned it to us promptly. Now we have both.
Have you restored any other unknown gems?
Vida en sombras, by Llorenç Llobet Gràcia, a filmmaker from Sabadell who ruined himself shooting what is now considered one of the five best films in Spanish cinema.
I confess I knew nothing about it.
It was an audience fiasco, but it is a gem played 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 thinks it is his fault for having been more dependent on the film than on her.
Is the cinema to blame?
And the cinema redeems him: a reflection of cinema on cinema that anticipates the nouvelle vague.
Has he gone to a restaurant?
Carne de fieras is a film still to be assembled: shooting began in July 1936 in Madrid’s Retiro park.
Did Franco end the film?
Filming was suspended, obviously. But the CNT forced the producer to continue filming to pay the workers…
The CNT controlled the show.
A collector bought it on the Trail and it ended up in my hands and it was easy to assemble because there was only one socket for each plane. But the best thing was not the actors, but what was also shot unintentionally…
Better the background than the scenes?
Armed people are seen there and the director at some point goes out drinking coffee with the militiamen in Atocha between July and August 1936.
That was a great movie.
They only repeated one shot because their camera fell. It tells the story of a boxer who loses a fight and, when he returns home, finds his wife with another and a scene evoked by Cela in San Camilo appears …
Also from 36?
It was a French woman, Marlène Grey, who dances naked in a cage of lions and the children were behind the advertisement of the show with a naked silhouette all over Madrid…
It would not have passed the censorship of the forties.
Those at the Spanish Film Library found sacks of these cuts in the 1980s with the change of ministry and gave them to me: I spent two years going through them and identifying films.
Explain, explain!
In Sor Citroën, with Alfredo Landa and Gracita Morales, the nuns are in the refectory eating and, instead of the Gospel, they read bits of the Traffic Code…
What blessed innocence!
They cut it. Another great cut in Manolo Summers’s Aunque la hormona se vista de seda: at a baptism, the school uses an unclog for the baptismal font…
Another blessing!
With all the restored material we made a feature film, Corten 21 meters de chinos, which was one of the points of the censorship.
“One of horsemen”, they called her in my town.
Censors paid to censor producers. And they paid those of Carmen Sevilla to cut a couplet as naive as it is deliciously spicy.
