Cinema, or any other art form for that matter, does not easily lend itself to become tools of oppression. Despite the existence of films filled with hate propaganda, the free spirit inherent in these art forms invariably produces works that would break free of the tight control and produce subversive art.
Spanish filmmaker Luis E.Pares’s documentary The First Look (La Primera Mirada), being screened in the International Documentaries category at the 16th International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala, tells one such story.
When Spanish dictator Francisco Franco opened a film school in 1947, he must have hoped to produce films which would project his feared regime in a positive light. But, things didn’t pan out quite that way.
The documentary, which is a continuous sequence of works produced by students of the Institute of Investigations and Cinematographic Experiences from the late 1940s to the 1960s, shows how the students with a subversive mindset produced works of art which were deeply critical of life under Franco’s regime.
Many of these films used inventive ways to show the state of the country in indirect ways. In an otherwise normal family drama, the visuals show scenes of poverty and the crumbling infrastructure in a Spanish city. In another short film about a home maid’s Sunday afternoon, the only spare time that she gets in a week, she contemplates about her meaningless existence in a country where the working class find it hard to survive.
Quite a few of the filmmakers drew their inspiration from the emerging Italian neorealist films of that period, while some used Franz Kafka’s stories to criticise the regime in an allegorical fashion.
Among the students were those who became legends of Spanish cinema in later years including Luis Garcia Berlanga, Antonio Mercero and Carlos Saura. Saura was honoured at the International Film Festival of Kerala with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013.
The regime’s later attempts to crackdown on the film students with bans and other methods remind one of the travails of the students of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). But then, from there too, students like Payal Kapadia have gone on to do works of art that do not conform to the tastes of those in control.
