The coming of age of Catalan cinema?

In terms of international visibility, Catalan cinema has often been obscured by the towering figures of its famous painters, architects or musicians. As was the case with literature, during the Franco years cinema suffered from the double restriction of extreme censorship and linguistic proscription. In this way it thus could never achieve international recognition as its distinct voice was thoughtlessly subsumed into a wider ‘official’ national identity. However, 2007 may well have marked the end of such anonymity.

In that year the Lincoln Center in New York ran a series entitled ‘Film in Catalunya. 1906–2006’. The programme included twenty-five feature films plus two special sessions: ‘The Beginnings of Filmmaking in Catalunya’ and ‘Films of the Spanish Civil War’, with documentary works on that conflict by Mateo Santos, Félix Marquet and Adrián Porchet. As such, the series covered the entire span of Catalan cinema in the last century; and although its emphasis was placed in the production of recent decades, it managed to strike a wonderful balance between landmark films, such as Francisco Rovira Beleta's Los Tarantos (1962), the splendid recreation of the Romeo and Juliet story amid the squalor of the gypsy community of the Barceloneta (later demolished to make way for the Olympic village) or Llorenç Llobet Gràcia's Vida en sombras (Life in Shadows, 1948), the extraordinary tale of a man obsessed with cinema, which anticipates many film-within-a-film experiments to come. Also relevant was Juli Salvador's Apartado de Correos, 1001 (Post Box 1001, 1950), one of the first important thrillers to transpose film noir onto Catalan and Spanish screens.

The series also paid due tribute to the Barcelona School – a heterogeneous group of film-makers and artists who emerged during the 1960s and early 1970s with a characteristically cosmopolitan flair that set them apart from the ‘official’ idiom of the contemporary ‘New Spanish Cinema’. Their films were experimental in both script and structure and were largely influenced by Pop Art, fashion imagery and New Wave cinemas.