• Juan Marsé dies, inventor of Barcelona
  • Marsé and politics Communism, loneliness and confusion

Marsé rather than write about cinema, wrote with and for the cinema. Or, better (and not to take off Baroja's sneakers ), he wrote on film. His relationship with cinema was so profoundly literal, rather than just literary, that on more than one occasion he made it clear that he was working with images rather than working with ideas. "For me, cinema is as much or more important than literature," he is heard saying in the documentary by Augusto M. Torres. Juan Marsé talks about Juan Marsé . And there, in that self-reflective exercise not without cinephile vanity, it says it all. He talks about himself, his work, his childhood in the double program rooms, of his discovery of the capacity of the cinema to transcend a reality of hunger and post-war, of everything that hurts each one of the adaptations of his novels ... light. That is the cinema. "In cinema, as in so many things in life, what really makes sense is to prolong the figure beyond the defeat that time and death inflict on us: reality," he insists. For Marsé, cinema is reality, but well.

Al Marsé, who played in a weekly newspaper section chaining the movie stars who populated his childhood and what came later will also be remembered as a polemicist against everything. And in that his passion for the screen is also shown. Every true cinema fan is also against cinema . In an already famous interview, he accused Spanish cinema of lack of talent. He did it in front of a Minister of Culture convinced that piracy embezzled everything. And in a thousand other conversations, equally furious, he revolted against each of the adapters of his novels. His most cruel insults were always taken by the most persistent of his followers: Vicente Aranda ("The only salvageable thing is Ornella Muti's ass," he says of The Bilingual Lover ). But not even Fernando Trueba, who originally worked on a script by Víctor Erice praised by the writer, was free of his invective. "I never talk about the movies right after the premiere so as not to harm the box office," he clarified, though, because of respecting ... maybe his copyright .

But beyond the noise and media folklore, the cinema. Or the Rovira, Roxi, Delicias, Iberia or Intimo cinemas that make up the ideas, the pasta and even the room of dreams and Marsé's own literature. He says that the time the word "Barcelona" appeared in Rouben Mamoulian's The Mark of the Fox , the world stopped. It was Tyrone Power who heard his sure enemy say that before he was a villain he was a fencing master in ... Barcelona. The same city of filth and ruins could also be the stage where to end forever the sure defeat that comes, again, from the hand of time and death: reality. In the long interview with Agusto M. Torres, he describes how much of the Montgomery Clift of A Place in the Sun is in the Pijo, apart from Last Afternoons with Teresa and everything that Julivert's death owes to the peculiar suicide of Alain Delon in The Silence of a Man by Jean-Pierre Melville. And it is also clear from what part of the dream arises the need to play aventis , to build and invent feats starring the kids, where "fragments of movies, comics, freely mix with real events in the world of adults, like violent in those years, although more underground, "according to Marsé himself.

For Marsé, cinema stopped in the 30s, 40s and early 50s. It was there that Marsé stayed to live with the sole intention of defeating death itself. Actually, it was not so much her obsession with cinema as the myth of cinema. The nuance matters. Liberty Valance cared , knowing that between legend and reality, better, literature (which is cinema), and it mattered to Marsé.

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