• Berlanguian Anniversary, the exhibition that makes Berlanga National Heritage

Before being Bardem and Berlanga, glories of Spanish cinema, Bardem and Berlanga already demonstrated from their first film what they would be capable of being, which was nothing more than, effectively,

Juan Antonio Bardem and Luis García Berlanga.

Always identical to themselves and, according to their friends, always at odds with each other.

The film

Walk through an ancient war

- their debut as directors - would be the most faithful demonstration that in the beginning there is always the reflection of the end.

One of the few, perhaps the only one, to notice it with certainty was the critic

JF Aranda

that in a chronicle dated 1961 and published in the magazine Arte cinematográfico, he gave an account of what that debut of the two was: a 20-minute short film telling the story of a war mutilated man who walks his own ruin through the forbidden ruins of the University City of Madrid.

In the background, as a stage, wound and argument, the Civil War.

Aranda would be the last witness of an event that immediately after that projection, was lost forever.

It was about the practices dated in 1948 (one year after the founding of the Film School) signed by Bardem and Berlanga, as well as by their classmates Navarro and Soria.

Due to shortages, only 50 meters of film per head were distributed.

The four decided to get together to complete a film of only 200 meters.

But not everything disappeared.

It was saved, and here the key, the footage discarded in the final montage and that, like the mold of a ceramic piece,

leaves traces and memory in its imperfect hole.

The image belongs to the director Elías León Siminiani.

The Spanish Film Archive today projects precisely four different productions with those wrecks of that shipwreck.

There are 67 exact and unpublished plans: 41 of them appear among the ruins that are both the memory of an epic and disastrous past and the testimony of a future fractured forever.

The rest, 26, are filmed in the already rebuilt sports stadium.

Image of 'Walk through an ancient war'. WORLD

What will be seen now are four short films that do not seek archeology work, or not only, but rather a new life.

Those in charge of assembling the puzzles -the directors

Carolina Astudillo, Fernando Franco, Nuria Giménez Lorang and the aforementioned Elías León Siminiani-

endow the old and unpublished material with new meaning by crossing the inspiration of those responsible for

Welcome, Mister Marshall

with their own ideology .

The past mixes with the present in an exercise in transparency that aspires to everything, including the future.

The Chilean

Astudillo

, previously the author of films such as The Great Flight, awarded at the Malaga Festival, makes the bloody history of Spain coincide with that of her country.

"It looks like an Olympic stadium can be a trench in a Civil War or a concentration camp in a military coup," he says and points out a detail: "The stadium in Santiago de Chile was built in 1938, when the war in Spain, and made in the image and likeness of the one devised by Hitler in Berlin».

From the hand of Walter Benjamin's text

The Angel of History

, time appears cyclical and Bardem and Berlanga suddenly discover themselves prophets.

Image of 'Walk through an ancient war'. WORLD

Agustín Lamas

is the real name of the protagonist of Walk through an ancient war.

He was not a war maimed but a rugby player like Bardem and he lost his leg due to a poorly treated fracture.

The plans of powerful geometries such as those devised by the Mexican Indio Fernández demonstrate the hand of Berlanga.

The location of the camera, according to Navarro's memory, was decided by Bardem instead.

Berlanga and Bardem commanded and disputed command.

Nuria Giménez,

director of

My Mexican Bretzel,

takes as a reference the double life of the war hero who is really just an unlucky athlete to imagine a story of impostors.

"I'm interested in exploring that contradictory sensation so typical of Berlanga of laughter in tragedy", he points out to define at the same time what moves him most about the Valencian director and his own cinema, always trapped between truth and lies, between storytelling and sleep.

Fernando Franco

, Special Jury Prize in San Sebastian for

The Wound,

ups the ante and confronts the brutal war of then "with the neoliberal peace of now."

Bardem's precise and

Eisensteinian

shots collide with the vertical frames of mobile phones.

The ruined University City of the forties overlaps with its reflection on Google maps of the two thousand.

And so, the rereading of it underlines one violence with the other.

Image of 'Walk through an ancient war'. WORLD

Towards the end,

León Siminiani,

director of

Mapa

and of series such as

800 metros

, is meticulous and after precisely explaining in his short film the hidden and now revealed history of Paseo por una Guerra Antigua, he dwells on the controversy over whether the film was or not sound.

Aranda remembers in his chronicles even a voiceover.

Bardem, on the other hand, commented that there was no money for so much.

"It is," says Siminiani, "the conflict between

memory and history,

between what was and what is now, again."

Bardem and Berlanga.

Forever.

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