See english below
VELLOS CONTEDORES DE SOÑOS
A meu pai, que viviu os seus anos últimos sobre o lugar no que se alzou o derradeiro cine de Pontedeume, e que xa non vai poder ler estas liñas.
Hai tempo abondo que Jean-Luc Godard, co seu habitual gusto pola provocación e polo paradoxo, veu dicir que no futuro (no noso hoxe, sen ir máis lonxe) seguiría habendo películas, mais que o cine como fora coñecido durante boa parte da súa historia xa tería morto. Referíase o director franco-suízo ao feito de que, indubidabelmente, o home ha seguir precisando de contar, e contarse, historias en formatos audiovisuais de todo tipo, pero que o grande espectáculo de masas do século XX, coas súas institucións e as súas liturxias –a consulta afanosa das carteleiras dos xornais, o mercar unha entrada, a comuñón devecente dos murmurios que preceden o escurecemento das salas, e estas mesmas como grandes catedrais laicas do século–, estaba en vías de desaparición. E hai que convir, aínda que doia, en que no lle faltaba razón.
Resulta polo menos curioso que unha forma de espectáculo tan fondamente arraigada coa sociedade de masas e co proceso de urbanización galopante vivido no último século e medio (até o punto de resultar sinxelamente impensábel na sociedade rural anterior) comezase a rematar, lémbrao Gian Piero Brunetta nun libro simplemente imprescindíbel para entender a socioloxía do espectador cinematográfico, cando comezaron a desaparecer os vagalumes, esa obsesión de Pier Paolo Pasolini: “Nos primeiros anos sesenta, a causa da contaminación do ar, e sobre todo no campo, pola contaminación da auga, comezaron a desaparecer os vagalumes. O fenómeno foi fulminante e fulgurante. Despois dalgúns anos, os vagalumes xa non estaban”.[1] Recorda Brunetta que foi tamén daquela cando comezaron a desaparecer as salas tradicionais e con elas algo que tamén fulguraba na escuridade das cidades e vilas, e mesmo dalgunha aldea remota: os carteis luminosos deses rimbombantes receptáculos dos soños, de nomes ás veces tan eufónicos e invencibelmente exóticos (Splendid, Excelsior, Broadway, Roxy, Savoy, Lumière, Lux, París…) que até un ditador de curta estatura e luces aínda máis escasas impuxo, no caso español, que se castelanizasen con outros non menos castizos, e algún incluso extraordinario: Cid Campeador, Español, Colón…. Ou dito rapidamente: empezaban a morrer, co desenvolvemento acelerado da industrialización e do confort na sociedade, as salas de cine, e con iso comezaba una mutación case que antropolóxica nos costumes de millóns de seres humanos, do socializado ao individual, do compartido case ritualmente cunha multitude anónima ao vivido na máis estrita intimidade.
O cine comezou pobre, adoitamos esquecernos moito disto. Pobre de solemnidade, ademais: antros nos que pululaba o mal ambiente, espectáculos perigosos (non existía, cara a finais do XIX, a película de seguridade, co cal o celuloide se quentaba e frecuentemente ardía, provocando incendios e mortes), fume, ruído e sucidade. Espectáculo de orixe popular, iso que tanto gustaban de reclamar os surrealistas; espectáculo para clases subalternas (non foi acaso a bonne, a criada da casa, quen levou por vez primeira ao cine o neno Georges Sadoul, o primeiro grande historiador do medio, e non os seus pais, grandes burgueses que só gozaban do espectáculo teatral e da música clásica a soar en directo?) caracterizado, ademais, pola inestabilidade. Os locais fixos non existían, senón que a proxección de películas (non menos inestábeis no seu primitivismo tecnolóxico) eran labor de quincalleiros e doutros seres ambulantes. Sesións transhumantes que, nalgúns raros casos, adquirían un carácter extraordinario e recoñecido, como os británicos Animated Picture Show ou o Bioscop Show, ou o francés Théâtre Vignard. Só cando as películas comezaron a ser un pouco máis longas, a artellar unha linguaxe menos ruda, ou máis complexa, se se quere; a contar historias máis emocionantes e exaltadoras, foi cando comezaron, primeiro en Europa e soamente despois en EE.UU., as salas estábeis, xeralmente en locais de music-hall ou de variedades que ofrecían, como complemento, tamén películas. E un pouco máis tarde, cara a mediados dos ´10, xa como locais estritamente cinematográficos, o preludio da idade de ouro da exhibición (entre finais desa mesma década, cando a cadea Balaban de Chicago introduciu o insólito adianto da refrixeración nun gran local público; e, no caso español, até que a televisión, entre os ´60 e os ´70, comezou a limar lenta pero persistentemente a platea cinematográfica), cos seus inmensos locais de miles de localidades, como o Radio City Music Hall de Nova York, talvez a meirande colmea humana xamais proxectada e realizada para saborear vicarialmente tantas e tantas vidas de celuloide.
Naceron así as primeiras salas importantes e para un público que, a só dez ou quince anos do aventureiro e máis ben tremente comezo do portento, empezaba tamén el xa a ser outro: máis podente, máis sofisticado, tamén máis esixente. Houbo que contratar daquela aqueles lambidos porteiros e acomodadores con uniforme, xarreteiras e gorra de prato para que “domesticasen” a golpe de lanterna o público de sempre e, por que non, tamén os acabados de chegar, como houbo que facer máis amplo o acompañamento sonoro das oscilantes imaxes, do piano ou do violín solitarios ao órgano case litúrxico, o trío de cordas e até a orquestra, como a sinfónica que acompañou, por exemplo, a afectada estrea de O nacemento dunha nación, alá nas alturas de 1915. Grandes películas para públicos amplos, grandes actores en películas caras; pero tamén xéneros populares para públicos coñecedores (como a nosa zarzuela cinematográfica dos anos vinte… en películas mudas, tal era o coñecemento que tiña o público das súas letras e acordes!). E unha rede, cada vez máis extensa, de salas en todo tipo de localidades, da máis grande á máis pequena, e en todas as modalidades que os que nacemos nos ´50 aínda chegamos a coñecer. Salas do centro das cidades, con todo o boato e o esplendor das luces das súas marquesiñas, a moqueta suave que silenciaba os pasos, o pano de veludo ás veces exhibindo con fachenda o anagrama da empresa propietaria; pero tamén cines de barrio ou de reestrea, cines de madeiras gastas e forte olor a zotal nos aseos, pero iso si, con sesións dobres ou mesmo triplas; cines de verán e ao ar aire libre, salas parroquiais nas que as películas viñan (in)convenientemente mutiladas polos censores eclesiásticos; cine, cine, cine, sempre a mesma liturxia, sempre as expectativas de universos diferentes, de realidades distantes, de situacións nas que nunca iamos ser protagonistas. Seres incríbeis, mulleres glamourosas das que nos namorabamos apresuradamente e sempre con carácter provisional; homes de valor puro, ou de covarde vileza; ondulantes sombras proxectadas contra unha gran pantalla que era, déixenme ser un pouco relambido, o perfecto espello dos nosos soños. “Houbo anos”, escribiu algunha vez o grande Italo Calvino, “nos cales o cine foi para min o mundo”… toda unha declaración de principios, si; pero tamén, e sobre todo, unha completa educación sentimental.
No cine, como nas catedrais do Medievo, cabía case todo: a concupiscencia do bico furtivo ao primeiro amor, adolescente ou non, que tanto indignou os eclesiásticos de toda índole, até o punto de propor, en innumerábeis opúsculos incendiarios, nada menos que… a proxección coa luz acesa! A cita ás cegas ou a reunión clandestina en tempos de represión política. Ou sinxelamente o quentarse nos duros invernos de posguerra (recoñeceuno mesmo Pío Baroja, ocasional crítico nos ´40: as salas de cine tiñan calefacción, o que non tiña a maior parte dos fogares españois, e aínda que só fose por iso xa pagaba a pena pagar a entrada). E tamén, como non, a aprendizaxe para a sedución, o contemplar a afouteza do galán no momento de levar o cigarro á boca, ou de bicar (tan castamente para os nosos estándares actuais!) os beizos da anhelante heroína; a réplica aguda, mordaz ou desarmante da femme fatale de tantas e tantas películas negras. E tamén, claro está, a transgresión. Porque aínda que a historia acabase mal, iso tan frecuente no cine clásico americano, sempre se espreitaba, entre os pregues serpeantes das tramas, todo un fabuloso arsenal de contravencións, de prácticas socialmente penalizadas que os disidentes de todo signo sabían interpretar segundo os seus códigos. De que outro xeito, se non, os homosexuais puideron asomarse ás pantallas, esas mesmas nas que as mulleres afogadas por un patriarcado abafante aprenderon a vivir outras vidas (im)posíbeis…
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Diciamos que as salas de cine comezaron a desaparecer en España, e tamén en Galiza, dende os anos do Tardofranquismo e talvez deberiamos matizar que cando comezaron verdadeiramente a pechar a moreas foi arredor do célebre (e de infausta memoria) mundial de fútbol de España ´82, coa oferta masiva de aparatos de vídeo para gravar os partidos e coa proliferación de pequenos negocios de alugamento e venda de cintas. Foi daquela cando se acabaron os vellos locais periféricos, considerando como tales dende as aldeas aos barrios dos arrabaldes das grandes cidades. Entón, a vella alianza entre o capital inmobiliario e o cinematográfico, que tanto se necesitaron até entón para construír as inmensas salas de pronto periclitadas, rompeu tal como se forxara para dar paso a outro fenómeno, a proliferación das salas de malls, os centros comerciais que tanto, e tan mal, lles temos copiado aos americanos, que furou a estrutura tradicional do negocio, até converter os vellos cines impoñentes en multisalas moitas veces mirradas. Quedaron entón os locais ao arbitrio dos seus propietarios e da satisfacción de novas necesidades, convertidos axiña en todo tipo “doutras cousas”: igrexas evanxelistas, como en case toda América Latina, propiciando toda una avesa reflexión sobre a converxencia entre as formas do espectáculo audiovisual e a cerimonia relixiosa para o consumo de masas; tendas, aparcadoiros de coches (como lembraba esa entrañábel homenaxe ás salas que é Splendid de Ettore Scola); bancos poboados de presenzas estrañas, como se suxire en Los fantasmas del Roxy, esa fermosa canción de Serrat con letra dun cinéfilo de pro como Juan Marsé; ou ás veces, moitas veces, simplemente en locais baleiros sen destino preciso, como mostraba a mellor película de Wim Wenders, No curso do tempo, ou a desesperanzada epopea case muda que é A derradeira sesión de Peter Bogdanovich; locais que aínda amosan, nas súas descompostas entrañas, toda a inútil maquinaria coa que unha vez se lles encheron os ollos de ilusións a varias xeracións de incautos; gloriosos incautos, iso si, e a moita honra.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Nesas ocas estruturas mortas, nas fachadas derrubadas ou reconvertidas noutras e nos interiores empachados de soños rotos e esquecidos internáronse Manuel e Olaia Sendón, coas ferramentas de cadanseu oficio, que tan decote, nas súas mans, se converte en arte. A cámara fotográfica nun caso, a cinematográfica noutro: os milleiros de disparos que Manuel ten feito ao longo e ancho da xeografía galega para deixar testemuño indelébel e, permítanme dicilo, civicamente importante, e dos que o espectador ten agora a ocasión de apreciar só unha pequena, ben que significativa parte. E esa entrañábel homenaxe a un mundo morto que é o espléndido documental poético Os fabulosos irmáns da luz de Olaia dan conta, cada un no seu rexistro propio, dun mundo clausurado. Tanto ten de onde son, de onde foron esas fachadas trasnoitadas, eses espectrais espazos poboados soamente polo po, a humidade e os térmites: de Cartelle a Vigo, da Coruña á Costa da Morte; dese Sardiñeiro de tantos veráns compartidos por pai e a filla á bisbarra eumesa das miñas mellores lembranzas, por citar ao chou só algúns puntos, o certo é que o que ambos documentan é nada menos que a clausura dun cerimonial antropolóxico que foi, case ao longo e ancho de todo un século, a forma por definición do entretemento popular e a maquinaria de construción de imaxinarios máis potente que teña coñecido a modernidade. Pouco queda xa de todo iso neses espazos mortos, pero seguro que haberá moitos espectadores que aínda han soltar unha bágoa cando lembren o que alí viron, o que alí sentiron, o que alí soñaron. E non vai ser só nostalxia. Ha ser tamén o recoñecemento do tempo ido, de épocas talvez de menos benestar, pero tamén de cando eramos máis novos, máis ilusos e a vida se nos amosaba, brillante e prometedora, sobre o terso lenzo branco dunha sala de cine.
Casimiro Torreiro, 2009
OLD DREAM CONTAINERS
To my father, who lived his last years where the last cinema of Pontedeume had been, and who will not read these lines.
Long time ago Jean-Luc Godard, with his habitual inclination to provoking and paradox, said that in the future (our present time in fact) there would be movies, but the cinema as it used to be known, had died. The French-Swiss director was referring to the fact that, undoubtedly, man would still need to tell and to be told stories in an audiovisual format, but the great mass spectacle of the 20th century, with its institutions and its liturgy –the unflagging reading of the entertainments in the newspaper, buying the ticket, the yearning communion of the whisperings just before the cinema went dark, and the cinemas themselves as the great cathedrals of the century-, that cinema was an endangered species. And it must be said, however hard it is for us, that he was right.
It is at least curious that a spectacle so deeply rooted in the mass society and with the galloping process of urbanization in the last 150 years (to the extent that it is almost impossible to imagine it in the previous rural society), began to fade, as Gian Piero Brunetta remembers in a book indispensable to understand the sociology of the cinema spectator, when fireflies began to disappear. These animals were an obsession for Pier Paolo Pasolini: ‘In the first 60s, due to the air pollution and, especially in the countryside, to water contamination, fireflies began to disappear. That phenomenon was sudden and devastating. After some years fireflies were not there anymore’.1 Brunetta remembers also that it was then when the old traditional cinemas started to disappear, and with them disappeared as well something which shone in the darkness of cities and towns and even in some remote villages: the neon lights of those pompous receptacles of dreams, with names so euphonic and invincibly exotic (Splendid, Excelsior, Broadway, Roxy, Savoy, Lumière, Lux, París…) that even a short and dim-witted Spanish dictator ordered those names to be changed for more Spanish and ’castizos’ ones or even for extraordinary ones such as Cid Campeador, Español, Colón…Or in a few words: the cinemas were beginning to die with the fast development of industrialization and society comfort and at the same time there was an almost anthropological mutation in the habits of millions of human beings, from socialized to individual, from something ritually shared with an anonymous crowd to something lived in the strictest privacy.
The beginnings of cinema were poor, we tend to forget this, truly poor, and: seedy places teeming with bad people, dangerous spectacles (until the end of the 19th century the security film did not exist and the warming of celluloid provoked fires and deaths), smoke, noise and filth. A spectacle of humble origin, something very appreciated by surrealists; a spectacle for the lower classes (it was the bonne, the house maid, the one who took little Georges Sadoul for the first time to the movies, the first great historian of cinema, and not his parents, bourgeois people who only enjoyed theatre and live classical music?); it was a spectacle characterized by instability. There were no purpose built cinema halls and the showing of films (also unstable in their primitive technology) was a job for tinkers and peddlers and other itinerant people. Transhumant sessions which, on rare occasions, acquired an extraordinary character, for instance the British Animated Picture Show or the Bioscop Show, or the French Théâtre Vignard. It was only when movies became longer, when they began to articulate a more refined, or more complex, language; they started to tell more exciting stories, it was then when, first in Europe and later in the US, stable cinemas appeared; these used to be music halls or variety shows which offered films, as a complement. And little later, around the middle of the 10s, already established as strictly cinemas, a prelude to the golden age of film exhibiting (between the late 10s, when Chicago chain Balaban introduced the unprecedented innovation of refrigeration in large public premises; and, in Spain, until TV, between the 60s and 70s, started to wear down slowly but persistently the cinema stalls), with its huge premises with thousands of seats like the Radio City Music Hall of New York, perhaps the largest human beehive ever designed and built to taste vicariously so many celluloid lives.
So the first important cinemas were born, and for an audience who, only ten or fifteen years after the adventurous and rather trembling beginning of the invention, was also becoming something different: wealthier, more sophisticated, and more demanding too. It was then when those elegant porters and ushers in uniform, epaulette and cap had to be hired in order to “tame” with their torches the old public and the newcomers; and the sound accompanying the oscillating images had to be bigger, from the piano or the violin to the almost liturgical organ, the string trio and even an orchestra, like the symphonic which accompanied, for example, the premiere of The Birth of a Nation, back in 1915. Great movies for a great public, great actors in expensive movies; but also a popular genre for an expert audience (like our cinematographic zarzuela of the 20s…in silent movies since almost everybody knew by heart their lyrics and music!). And a wider network of cinemas everywhere, from the largest to the smallest, and in all the kinds which people born in the 50s knew. Cinemas in the centre of the cities, with all the ostentation and splendour of the lights shining in their marquees, the soft carpet which muffled the steps, the velvet curtain sometimes proudly showing the anagram of the company; but also suburban cinemas, cinemas with worn wood planks and a strong smell of disinfectant in the toilets, but with double or even triple sessions; summer cinemas in the open air, parish halls where the films appeared (in)conveniently mutilated by the ecclesiastic censors; cinema, cinema, cinema, always the same liturgy, always the expectation of a different universe, of distant realities, of situations in which we would never be the stars. Incredible beings, glamorous women who we fell in love with; the bravest or the most coward rogues; wavy shadows shown on a large screen which was, I know I’m being a bit old-fashioned, the perfect mirror of our dreams. ‘There were years’, the great Italo Calvino wrote, ‘when cinema was the world for me’…a declaration of principles, yes; but also a complete sentimental education.
In the movies, like in the Middle Ages cathedrals, almost everything was possible: the concupiscence of the furtive kiss to our first love, adolescent or not, which made the church people furious to the extent of suggesting in many inflammatory documents that movies should be shown with the lights on! The blind date or the clandestine meeting in times of political repression. Or just getting warm in the cold postwar winters (even Pío Baroja, an occasional critic in the 40s, admitted it: cinemas had heating, something that most Spanish houses lacked, and just for that it would be worthwhile paying for the ticket). And, of course, the learning of seduction, watching the self assurance of the hero when taking his cigarette to his mouth or the way he kissed (too chaste for our present standards!) the lips of the longing heroine; the sharp and caustic answer of the femme fatale of so many black movies. And transgression. Because although the story did not have a happy ending, something very usual in the classic American cinema, one could always make out, among the zigzagging plots, a whole fabulous amount of contraventions, of a practice socially penalized which dissidents of all kinds knew how to interpret according to their codes. How else could homosexuals appear on the screen, the same ones where women suffocated by an oppressive patriarchy learned to live other (im)possible lives.
We said that cinemas started to disappear in Spain and in Galicia in the closing years of Franco regime, and maybe we should point out that the moment when most of them really shut down was around the Football World Championship of 1982, with the massive offer of low price VHS recorders and the spread of small sale and rental video shops. It was then when the old peripheral cinemas disappeared, and those included villages and the outskirts of big cities. Then, the old alliance between the real state and the cinematographic capital which had needed each other up to then in order to build the enormous cinemas suddenly decaying, was broken to give way to another phenomenon, the spread of cinemas in the shopping centers, something we have copied from the Americans and which undermined the traditional structure of the business, turning impressive cinemas into multiplex very often too small. And the old cinemas were then left to the discretion of their owners to cater to new needs, they became all kinds of things: evangelic churches, in most parts of Latin-America, favoring this way a malicious reflection on the convergence between the audiovisual spectacle and the religious ceremony for mass consumer; they also became shops, parking lots (as it is remembered in that affectionate tribute to the cinemas which is Splendid by Ettore Scola); banks filled with strange presences, as it is suggested in Los fantasmas del Roxy, that beautiful song by Serrat with lyrics written by a real film fan Juan Marsé; or some times, many even, they became empty places with no fixed purpose, as the best film by Wim Wenders , Kings of the Road, showed us, or the despaired epic, almost a silent movie, which is The Last Picture Show by Peter Bogdanovich; places which still have, in their dilapidated entrails, all the useless machines that once filled with illusions the eyes of several generations of naïve people, gloriously naive, and proud of it.
In those empty dead structures, in the ruinous façades and inside those broken forgotten dreams Manuel and Olaia Sendón have gone, each one with the tools of their trade, which so often, in their hands, becomes art. The photographic camera in one, and the cinema camera in the other: the thousands of photographs which Manuel has taken all around Galiza in order to bear indelible witness and, let me say it, important in a civic way, and of which now the spectator has the opportunity to see just a small, although significant, part. And that affectionate tribute to a dead world which is Os fabulosos irmáns da luz by Olaia, recount, each one in his/her own way, an already disappeared world. It is not important where those outdated façades or those spectral dusty, damp spaces come from, from Cartelle to Vigo, from Coruña to the Costa da morte; from Sardiñeiro, with all those summers shared by father and daughter, to the Eume region where my best memories are, just to mention some places at random, the truth is that what they both are documenting is no less than the closure of an anthropological ceremony which has been, for a whole century, popular entertainment itself, and the machinery which built the strongest imagery that modern society has known. There is little left in those empty spaces, but many spectators will shed a tear when they remember what they once saw there, what they once felt there, what they once dreamed there. And it will be not only nostalgia. It will also be the realization of a time gone, maybe not very good times, but times when we were younger, more innocent, and life appeared bright and promising, on the smooth white screen of a cinema.
1 Pier Paolo Pasolini, in Corriere della Sera, Feb. 1st 1975, quoted by Gian Piero Brunetta: Buio in sala. Cent’anni di passioni dello spettatore cinematográfico, Marsilio, Venecia,1989, pp. XII-XIII
Casimiro Torreiro, 2009
[1] Pier Paolo Pasolini, en Corriere della Sera, 1 de febreiro de 1975, citado por Gian Piero Brunetta: Buio in sala. Cent´anni di passioni dello spettatore cinematografico, Marsilio, Venecia, 1989, pp. XII-XIII.
manuel sendón 