A documentary about Eugenio Martín The hidden, dirty and perfect memory of Spanish cinema
The filmmaker of all genres or, because of the
unsought homonyms
, the transgender director.
This could be one of the nicknames of
Eugenio Martín
, or Herbert Martin, or Martin Herbert, or Gene Martin.
With all these names, pseudonyms, nicknames and more or less forced translations,
one of the most stubborn, brilliant and hidden directors of that other Spanish cinema,
as wild and non-conformist as it is passionate, signed his films that shaped the living matter of double- and double-shooting cinemas. of the entire imaginary of a country on the run from its own reality.
Martín's cinema
smells of pine ozone, of neighborhood cinema, of cinema at the limit of imagination
.
On Friday he died at the age of 97, the man responsible for at least three masterpieces that do not usually appear in catalogs despite being, as Spade would say, the very stuff dreams are made of.
Panic on the Trans-Siberian
(1972),
The Price of a Man
(1966) and, hastening,
A Candle for the Devil
(1973) give shape to a filmography that always adapted "to the demands of history", as he liked to say. at him from his hot-tempered tip.
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Quentin Tarantino: "Since I saw that movie at the age of nine, I have not been the same"
Writing: QUENTIN TARANTINO
Quentin Tarantino: "Since I saw that movie at the age of nine, I have not been the same"
Science-fiction, terror,
thriller
,
spaghetti-western
, musical, Spanish-style comedy or pirate adventures.
Nothing was alien to the last and greatest representative of cinema as a shared experience, as a journey to the bottom of
a common hallucination
.
His best-known work was the adaptation of a story about aliens that was also about zombies without giving up dressing in the finery of period cinema.
Panic on the Trans-Siberian
was a commission that responded to the requirement to
reuse an expensive model train
used in a previous film (
The Pancho Villa Challenge
).
From this modest and surreal requirement, and hand in hand with a British-American production, Martín
managed to make the mythical Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing exhibit themselves in all their morbid splendor
in the first adaptation of the story that later became
would emerge
The Enigma of Another World
, by Howard Hawks.
The story was told of a shapeless alien who occupied other people's bodies until emptying the eye sockets that absorbed the images of the brains.
And all this inside a train that crossed the snows of eastern Europe while an imminent revolution against the tsars was announced
.
The grace of this prodigy lies both in his frontal display of cinema as a builder of worlds and in his ability to reconcile the viewer with his most real and obvious fears.
The film manages, like any good exercise in fantasy, to rise as a perfect metaphor for a time of panic while ordering itself before the gaze as
a beautiful and cloudy representation of cinema itself
, which, as we know, is there to empty us inside. .
Martín demonstrated once again in what is his most celebrated work his ability to adapt and, above all, to reinvent
the rules always imposed by the genre from the most elemental passion
.
The idea was always to offer the viewer a spectacle of dreams and mystery in all its pure and brutal rawness.
The price of a man
is there as a witness to a way of understanding the trade without alibis.
The film that
Quentin Tarantino
defended as one of the best
spaghetti
in history at the level of
any of the emblematic productions of Sergio Leone
and which, furthermore, catapulted its protagonist Tomas Miliam is a complete vademecum of visceral, torrid and violent cinema to the brink of its most intimate despair.
As it is.
And the same goes for
Una vela para el diablo
, the crudest and most hidden tale of 'witches' that a condemned Spanish cinema has been capable of.
Reviewing his filmography seems like an exercise similar to leafing through a film manual that is also a manual on the history of Spain.
Eugenio Martín directed Julio Iglesias
in
La vida sigue igual
(1969), Lola Flores in
A Great Lady
(1970), the recently disappeared Gina Lollobrigida in
El hombre de Río Malo
(1971) and Marisol in
La chica del Molino Rojo
( 1973).
He was a witness, and above all a victim, of all the censorship, of all the forgetfulness, of
each and every one of the miseries of a country afflicted with bad memory
.
Eugenio Martín was born in Ceuta in 1925 and moved to Granada shortly after.
There he would grow up secretly reading Lorca and León Felipe
and poisoning himself with movies.
His first contact with what would later be his job was at the film club that he himself founded.
And so until the censorship of a Jesuit (who ordered him to review every text he published and every film he showed) made him give up.
"
Granada was a jail then
", he declared in an interview.
When he decided to go into exile, the possibility of studying at the Madrid Film Institute would come to him and that's where he went with what was his first short film (
Romantic Journey to Granada
) shot, edited and packaged.
Over time he would film his debut,
Bachelor Party
(1960), and with it would come his first disappointment.
We will not say failure.
That led him to accept being an assistant director to continue in the world of cinema
, which in turn would make him meet directors like Michael Anderson or Nicholas Ray.
Los corsarios del caribe
(1961) would be his baptism in genre cinema, in cinema for adventure, in cinema for cinema's sake.
And there he stayed to live.
The filmmaker of all genres.
Rest in peace
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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