[Archives from 10/97-3/11]On the other side of the rural exodus captured in Llorenç Soler”s Long Journey to the Rage is Helena Lumbreras and Marià Lisa’s multi-faceted polemic, Field for Men, an exposition on the inequitable systems of landownership and tenancy farming under Franco that perpetuate a cycle of exploitation, unproductivity, and indenture. Wryly prefaced as the fairytale… read more »
Although allusions to François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless suggest José María Nunes’s affection for French New Wave, Sexperiencias finds greater kinship with Nagisa Oshima’s fractured, interconnected themes of sexual and social revolution. In a way, young hitchhiker, María (María Quadreny) is also a stand-in for accidental revolutionary, Motoki in The Man… read more »
In its tongue-in-cheek illustration of misguided revolutionaries, Antoni Padrós’s Lock-Out suggests a rough hewn and metaphoric – if more impenetrable and decidedly uneven – precursor to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation, interweaving episodes of straightforward narrative, dream-like interludes, and political manifesto into an abstract portrait of resistance and marginalization. For former finance worker Walter… read more »
Part of the Morality and Society program in the Clandestí: Forbidden Catalan Cinema Under Franco series, Enric Ripoli i Freixes and Josep Maria Ramon’s Happy Parallel emulates the familiar format of official Noticias Documentales newsreels – the only shot footages of “real life” permitted by Franco under a 1942 ban on non state-sponsored documentary filmmaking… read more »
Similar to Llorenç Soler’s previous film, 52 Sundays, Long Journey to the Rage is also a sobering portrait of poverty and marginalization. And like the bullfighting students of his earlier film, the people in Long Journey to the Rage are also anonymous immigrants who have abandoned a hardscrabble existence in the rural provinces in an… read more »
On the surface, a film about bullfighting would seem an unlikely source of resistance. But Llorenç Soler’s 52 Sundays is far from a flamboyant celebration of Franco-friendly displays of skill and aggression. Filmed from the perspective of aspiring toreros, often poor, undereducated teenagers from the country who get together on Sundays in makeshift schools on… read more »