Alfredo Valenzuela I Seville, May 27 (EFE) in 1927 and which is now reissued accompanied by a ‘storyboard’ or script sketch by cartoonist Jesús Zurita.
Icíar Boillaín confesses that he met Concha Méndez for the first time in the documentary “Las Sinsombrero”, when he discovered “this pioneering and exceptional woman crossing the Puerta del Sol defiantly, transgressively and fun without a hat, arm in arm with Maruja Mallo and Federico García Lorca”, for which he describes as “essential” the rescue of his work and also of his facet as a screenwriter.
According to Bollaín, Concha Méndez realized the expressive potential of cinema at such an early date, guessed that it is a “sum of all the arts” and concluded that the script should be a literary work independent from the others and, in effect, the his “is an original text, written for the screen, unlike the adaptations of literary or theatrical works that were the usual practice in those years.”
“There are barely twelve pages, but in them you can perceive the enthusiasm, vitality and profound freedom of a woman who lived defying all the social ties of a time in which girls, simply, were nothing”, concludes Bollaín’s prologue .
The shadows of Madrid’s night
The script for “Historia de un taxi” was published in Madrid in 1927 by the Ducazcal H. González Printing Press, after being published that same year in the magazines ‘La Correspondencia Militar’ and ‘Popular Film’, and also in 1927 by the filmmaker and producer Carlos Emilio Nazarí began filming it with a cast of young actors and actresses, although no copy of that film has been preserved, which may not have been released.
The script tells how, while the city of Madrid sleeps in the shadows, a group of parked taxis come to life and start chatting to catch up and, when it is the turn of the most senior, he recounts the affair that arose between Fernando and Carmen, who, through different doors, coincide in taking the same taxi.
This coincidence will be transformed into an avant-garde dream with Freudian overtones, which goes from the classic entanglement where the gallant will not remember the lady to culminate in cross-dressing.
The Granada label Cuadernos del Vigía, directed by Miguel Ángel Arcas, has now made a curious and very careful edition of “Historia de un taxi”, sewn with thread and with double accordion covers, as if joining two different volumes into one, that of the script and its ‘storyboard’ or sketch that develops the story as a comic.
Méndez’s interest in cinema
The edition includes a critical study by Roberta Previtera who recalls that Concha Méndez’s interest in cinema dates back to her childhood, when she was taken to the Retiro Park to attend the first open-air screenings, and her youthful courtship with Luis Buñuel during which he got to know the cinema of Chaplin and Keaton, which influenced his scripts.
Beyond her work as a screenwriter, recalls Previtera, Concha Méndez’s interest in cinema extended to a series of reflections that the author published in magazines and newspapers of the time in Spain and later in Argentina, as well as in Cuba. In 1942, he wrote a play that was characterized by its cinematographic influences, “La caña y el tabaco”.
The influence of cinema was also shown in some of Concha Méndez’s poems, such as the one titled “Bailaora”, which opens with a cinematographic image: “The oil lamp clings shadows to the whitewashed wall”.
Miguel Ángel Arcas has assured EFE that he has decided to rescue this work “because of its undoubted literary and artistic quality, and for its undeniable historical value” and to “claim the most unknown Concha Méndez, with the idea of placing her in the place that deserves in the field of Spanish cinematography”. EFE