ANTONIO MAENZA. The rhetorical violence of his ideas to the angry cry of the militant activist

Lois PatiñoIn 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

I often went to this establishment on returning from a clandestine meeting or from a shoot to end the night with my friends until the disc jockey got fed up of playing LP’s. In my case, leaving early was risky. From my pillow, I could hear the music much better without voices or noises, whilst the melodies and songs followed one after the other in an unalterable continuity, which I had got so used to that any change in the order or replacement of the songs startled me and falling asleep again was not so easy.

One morning in that spring of 1969, Antonio Maenza introduced himself to me wearing a jacket, tie, acetate glasses and well groomed, to tell me that the reason for his presence was because he believed that I was the only producer able to produce a film that was impossible to shoot. In short, it turned out to be what we called and still call a Brechtian alienation or a Dada artefact. To start off, I told him that I hadn’t found a producer for any of my films either so I understood his problem. He started to speak rapidly and fluently.

He identified himself as a filmmaker from Teruel but with a profile that was the most striking and attractive to me: a loyal exponent of the French May 1968 (Nantes/Paris), learned, with a vehement attack on the methods and on the moral and codes of conduct of representation, derived from a hegemonic practice of power, against which there was no other attitude than that of non-negotiable radicalism. Therefore, in my opinion, what he proposed was a film that was not important as a finished cultural product; what mattered was filming as a place for subversion, and breakdown to promote conduct against social, sexual behaviour, etc., fed by the spectacular force workers and the trade unions taking to the streets and squares of France, competing with students, which set off all the alarms, to which General De Gaulle, following a lightning trip to Algeria to ensure the control of the army, responded with a “curfew” in the whole country. 

I am not exaggerating when I say that Antonio Maenza gave his life by living it to the limit like so many men and women did, at that time of the premonitory global radicalism like today, but fortunately with greater weight of citizens as a key political subject than during the period from 11th September 2010 to 20th December 2015.

At that first meeting, I was convinced that Maenza did not intend to make a “film”, which would take him to a dead end or in the wrong direction. We agreed to start immediately using the team that had filmed Vampire, and we threw ourselves into it, assuming all of the risks and consequences: this is how Hortensia came about.

Maenza lived in a state of precariousness and at the same time with an overflowing anxiety of leading proposals and projects that often generate a strong rejection and incomprehension even in his own close circle. The power of his unquestionable images that go against the flow produce discomfort even today. They tell of a period in which the revolution must inevitably go through the bodies and changes in behaviour in which the utopia of “paradise now” tried to become reality. And we are still there.

My introductory text to the screening of Vampire at the MoMA in New York in 1972, which I was unable to attend having been denied a passport by the Spanish government, said: “Here, then, is a film made not despite, but as a result of the historic tensions of the context in which it has been made, or in other words, under the dictatorship”. This nuance can also be applied to Hortensia.

Marcelo Expósito says: “We would be wrong to understand his films as an irregular corpus produced in spite of the precariousness of his production conditions and the miseries and tension of everyday and cultural life during Franco’s regime. It is a practice carried out as a result of these conditions. He adds “Many things separated Maenza and Portabella but they shared an understanding of the cinematographic political and poetic relationship. They both operate from the specificity of cinematographic language but with the aim of producing film artefacts that would never be understood if observed exclusively from the inside of a cinematographic field”.

Maenza was a unique filmmaker but at the same time he was also deeply rooted in the period in which he lived. He lived passionately and relentlessly from the rhetoric violence of his ideas to the angry cry of the militant activist.  

The last time I saw him was on his return from the military service and his family reunion. Like the first time, in my apartment. This period left deep marks in his face although he never lost his haughty and challenging attitude.

It was a different, warm meeting. He was not the same Maenza. The reaction of the military and family environment to his audacity and daringness, which I liked so much of Antonio’s personality, had been lost. We laughed at each other’s expense and bade farewell with a lingering and calm hug, similar to those cinematographic shots that enable you to “be there” and be apart from the events but without going too far in order to see and watch more than the explicit and closer to what is thought but not said.

When Antonio decided to fall or throw himself from a third floor window to the street, I was not surprised. I was deeply saddened yet at the same time I felt an unstoppable urge to continue not in spite of, but rather as a vital response.

I have a great deal of affection, regard and respect for Antonio and for so many Maenzas who gave everything in those years in which we lived “Just the way we were”.

Promoted by
Gobierno de Navarra
Organized by
NICDO
With the aid of
Con la financiación del Gobierno de España. Instituto de la Cinematografía y las Artes Audiovisuales Acción Cultural Española Plan de Recuperación, Transformación y Resiliencia Financiado por la Unión Europea. NexGenerationEU
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