Like the war cry of the forgotten province, this year’s Punto de Vista Heterodocsias section is also followed by an exclamation mark. As is usual in this space, it is about crying out. Crying out the name of somebody to reclaim it and bring it to light. There has been a lot of talk about Maenza recently, but to date, a retrospective that puts him on a par with Berzosa, Valcárcel Medina and other names cried out in this Heterodocsias section of Spanish filmmakers in previous editions has never been organised within an International Film Festival.
In the 1960s, I lived in a small apartment with hardly enough space for a wash basin-shower, a sofa-bed and a desk, on the first floor just above Bocaccio, the in-place for the gauche divine, of which Maenza did not take long to confess his deception to Alejo Lorén: “Barcelona is all hot air and pub gossip”.
By Pere Portabella
1) Omissions create legends and despite what people might believe, legends create knowledge. The history of Spanish cinema contains many gaps, so many that our cinema has often been considered to be a set of discontinuous lines, or a series of paths which lead nowhere, in a kind of never ending maze, and worse still, with no tale to tell. The gaps included that of a film industry that was always arguing against, which means that it was against everything, even cinema itself. A film industry, that were it to go beyond talk itself, would shake up the system in order to become something revolutionary in its own right (which involves a lot of hot air in itself). This gap in our cinema was covered by Antonio Maenza. The problem is that his character was, in turn, also full of gaps.
Luis E. Parés