Pere Portabella Retrospective

For five decades, the Catalan filmmaker Pere Portabella (born 1929) has ranked among the most important protagonists of Spanish cinema. After first producing films by Carlos Saura (Los Golfos, 1959) and Luis Buñuel (Viridiana, 1961), at the end of the 1960s he began making his own films that originated in a both artistically and politically radical context. Artistic avant-garde movements and resistance against the Franco dictatorship are the poles between which he operates. His work focuses on expanding the possibilities of film as a medium: The deconstruction and subversion of aesthetic and narrative conventions, the relation between image and that which is shown, and the critique of representation. He often starts off with existing genres (advertising films, horror movies), the structures of which are then thoroughly examined and newly interpreted. This also includes the complex relationships between image and sound. He makes use of documentary and fictional forms in an equal way, often crossing or blurring genre borders. His atmospherically dense movies take images apart and assembling them anew, constantly evading the audience's expectations. Portabella's first films predominantly dealt with cinematic forms and the related questions of political representation. He then examined politics in a concrete fashion in the clandestinely produced EL SOPAR (1974), a film observing a discussion between a group of former political prisoners about their experiences in jail, on the evening before the execution of the Catalan anarchist Salvador Puig Antich. INFORME GENERAL from 1976 is a filmic stocktaking of the political situation during the phase of radical change in Spain.