When the great art critic Robert Hughes depicted the cultural landscape of Australia at the beginning of his career as a writer, back in the sixties, he insisted on the difficulties of his compatriots to find Picassos or Kandinskys in the newspaper archives of his country. Almost everything was known indirectly, through catalogs, slides and postcards. What was there—the paintings hanging in the museum halls—was too provincial and diminished, lacking the risk of the avant-garde. But over time Hughes had to accept this state of affairs, as Wim Wenders would say, and understand that, in effect, perhaps Australian art was no more than a footnote to the history of universal art, something that, even without possessing the necessary attributes to amplify the most important aesthetic discourses, inscribed in its center,could at least expand its peripheries.

I think of this very thing while trying to situate “quinqui film” within the context of Spanish cinema, already in itself quite diminished when compared to French, German, Russian or even British film. The cinematographer wanted it to appear to coincide with our biggest crisis as an empire, as a society and as a culture, and it seems that we would never have recovered from that unfortunate coincidence. Thus, our film history has always been of a local nature, with some exception fostered by artistic exile (Luis Buñuel's case, to whom, by the way, we could give credit for a quinqui film masterpiece if instead of having done Los olvidados (The Young and the Damned) (1950) in Mexico, a similar story could have been filmed in Spain, around the generation of the disinherited who had left World War II and which Roberto Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Andrzej Wajda and René Clément, among others, gave an account of) or the experimental heterodoxy (with the outstanding case of José Val del Omar, a visionary without continuation within the framework of Spanish cinema if we exclude Víctor Erice).