San Sebastián (EFE).- Probably no one knows that the first woman to compete for the Golden Shell was the Soviet Yuliya Solntseva. And not so many that the San Sebastián Festival was sometimes much more expeditious during the Franco regime than the General Board of Film Censorship itself.
Film Festival, hidden stories
The recovery of the Festival archive and its opening to the world through the website artxiboa.sansebastianfestival.com has opened up infinite possibilities for study. It will allow us to know and interpret what the San Sebastian event has been beyond the media focus, to investigate in depth seven decades of a history that transcends the cinematographic.
The conclusion of the first phase of the project “Zinemaldia 70. All possible stories”, promoted by the Festival and Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (EQZE), brought more than 4,000 documents to that free page last December.
To encourage archive research and generate unpublished academic texts, the José Ángel Herrero-Velarde scholarships were announced last month. However, since 2018 EQZE postgraduate students have carried out research, as well as conservation and cataloging work.
The relationship with Franco’s censorship
Pablo La Parra, coordinator of the School’s Research Department and also co-responsible for the Thought and Debate area of the contest, assured EFE that “the role of film censorship in the Festival had never been studied in depth.” They did so by following traces both in the archive and in external sources.
“What our investigation has made clear is that, in addition to ordinary censorship, the Festival developed paralegal censorship instruments, in many cases improvised and without clear criteria, which even contravened the censorship codes that were approved in the mid-1960s” , Explain.
The EQZE study focused on three “paradigm cases”. Perhaps the best known is that of the ban in 1971 of “Songs for after a war”, by Basilio Martín Patino, whose concatenation of episodes they have reconstructed.
“The film had already gone through an ordeal due to ordinary censorship. It had been accepted after introducing a whole series of Kafkaesque cuts to represent Spain in the Official Selection. But it was the director of the Festival, Miguel de Echarri, who decided that it could not be exhibited because it was offensive in political terms, ”he points out.
Echarri used his right hand for this, Félix Martialay. This soldier, film critic and director of the magazine “Film Ideal” published under a pseudonym in “El Alcázar” “a series of denigrating articles against the film.” This made it possible to “activate” a “very dark” part of the censorship code: the calling of “an extraordinary meeting to reverse an ordinary decision.”
The thing went further. The Festival also decided not to program “Liberxina 90”, by Carlos Durán, the film that was going to replace the one by Marín Patino, and in the Official Selection finally ended “Los gallos de madrugada”, by Sáenz de Heredia, a director related to the regime, with which “everything was controlled”.
The most radical informal censorship
“The informal censorship was sometimes more radical. The chain of censorship that goes from Patino to Durán has to do with that fear of the Festival for not generating any situation that could cause the slightest political shock in that showcase of the regime that was so valuable that the event was”, La Parra highlights.
“The topic that the Festival was a space for freedom is much more complex. The Zinemaldia played a role of limited liberalization ”, he adds.
women filmmakers
They also considered “broadening the vision” on female participation in the Zinemaldia.
“The female actress was overexposed in a very narrow and reified visual repertoire. We wanted to rescue images and experiences to show that from an early date there were women filmmakers, there were producers, screenwriters and workers who made the Festival possible”, she remarks.
The project “Another way of counting: presences, absences and representations of women at the San Sebastian Festival (1953-1978)” was then launched.
The starting point had been a question: “Who was the first woman to compete in San Sebastián? No one of us on that work team could respond,” La Parra highlights.
Her name is Yuliya Solntseva. A Soviet woman who, in the midst of the dictatorship, in 1965, presented “El Desna encantado” in the Official Section. In 1961 she had won the award for best direction in Cannes with “The epic of the years of fire”, which made her the only woman to have achieved that award for 56 years, until 2017 when Sofía Coppola obtained it for ” The seduction”.
The curious thing is that “a large number” of photographs of Solntseva’s visit to Zinemaldia are preserved.
“It’s not that we’ve had to salvage a shred of evidence, which might be the case. There is abundant documentation, but that documentation was not considered relevant to write the dominant history of the Festival”, he comments.
New narratives on established accounts
La Parra highlights that the archive project has avoided from the beginning “repeating clichés and commonplaces” and “shedding light on areas that have perhaps become more blurred” or “that raise questions that reposition the importance of the Festival in history in terms cinematographic, political and social”.
He says that the creation of the contest in 1953 by a group of San Sebastian merchants to give the city greater projection is a fact, “but not the whole story”.
“Since the first year the Festival had the support of the Franco regime, desperate to open up to the international community. And in a very short time he was recognized with the highest international category. This is so because the geopolitical pacts, which the Franco regime established particularly with the United States, were intermingled ”, he points out.
And if Kirk Douglas and other stars soon visited him “it was because there were interests in the commercial exploitation of Spanish screens by the great American ‘majors'”, he points out.
“The history of the Festival is highly paradoxical. That could be one of the big takeaways from our research,” she says.