Santander, Feb 9 (EFE).- The Filmoteca de Cantabria has brought to light the first films by Mario Camus, four short films from his student years at the Official Film School, which he shot in desolate landscapes on the outskirts of Madrid and which anticipate some keys to his work, like that figure of the loser so present in his stories.
Mario Camus (Santander 1935-2021) shared them with his classmates and teachers as an end-of-year project sixty years ago at school and they had not been shown again until last night in a special session, with live piano music, in the Filmoteca de Cantabria, which has been named after the filmmaker of “Los santos inocentes” since his death, in 2021.
The four short films have been restored and digitized with the collaboration of the Spanish Film Library, a process that lasted throughout the year 2022 and which for the Cantabrian film library also means opening a new field of work, after taking its first steps recovering amateur films.
«Mario Camus’s materials from the Official Film School were there, they belong to him and they were preserved but not restored. They proposed this collaboration to us and of course we wanted to enter, not only because of the name but because of the performances that we had already been doing, ”the director of the Filmoteca de Cantabria, Antonio Navarro, explained in an interview with EFE.
The first of the four films does not even have a title, it stayed in “Second year practice” and the next two, “The Wait” and “The Visit”, already have certain characteristics of Mario Camus’s cinema of the first years.
In these stories starring “very street human types”, there is “that taste for social realism closely associated with Basilio Martín Patino, Bardem, Borau and other authors of that new Spanish cinema that was already beginning to make very close films. to European modernity”, he points out.
Navarro, who has been part of the Cantabrian team that has worked on the restoration of the films together with Mohamed Al-nass and Andrés Gutiérrez, what has surprised him above all is the staging, “very solid, very well thought out and very well done.”
In the fourth work, “El borracho”, the only one that has sound and “a beautiful jazz soundtrack”, there are “those sordid landscapes, these outskirts of the cities and it already draws the figure of the loser very clearly, very present in his cinema”.
It was the undergraduate work of Mario Camus, to whom Carlos Saura, one of his teachers at school, had already “taken his eye” and commissioned him to write the script for his film “Los golfos”.
“El borracho” is a story set in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Madrid where new buildings under construction coexist with old houses and dirt streets. In the credits Pedro Olea appears as assistant director.
«The first ones are simpler but they are also the means, they would not have as much time to shoot. Here there is already a very large production, it already involves hours of filming, of thinking, of seeing the light. A shoot is worth a lot, especially because of the time and here you can see that there is dedicated time, “says Navarro.
As in the old silent film projections, the pianist Paco Vril has provided the music live for the other three films. “It is a soundtrack as a hypothesis that I think is very interesting and also gives Mario Camus’s film that external vision,” says the director of the Cantabrian Film Library.
A key figure in Spanish cinema, Camus, he recalls, was a very prolific director who throughout his career alternated his most personal work with “more nutritious” films in which he directed stars such as Raphael or Sara Montiel.
The Cantabria Film Library is reviewing all its titles so that “his memory is always present” and has opted to rescue its beginnings, not only because they are the first steps of the director of “Los Santos Inocentes”, “Después del sueño” and many others films, but because they themselves have a cinematographic interest.
He has opted to rescue them and above all to bring them to light. “If not, it does not make sense. Keep it of course, but you have to show it, “adds Navarro.
Lola Camus
