Joan Brossa
Initially a documentary about the making of Jess Franco’s “Count Dracula” (a 1970 vampire movie starring Christopher Lee), "Cuadecuc, Vampir" presents "an intervention": an atmospheric, silent, black and white film-essay, serving as an alternative version of the original movie, showing grainy footage of the performers–both in and out of their characters–wandering through the Gothic sets and the natural locations; a ghostly narration between fiction and reality.
This film turns on two basic axes: the inquiry into ways of cinematographic representation and a critical image of official Spain at the time of the Franco dictatorship. “Montage of attractions” and Brechtianism in strong doses. Umbracle is made up of fragments (some are archive footage) that resound rather than progress by unusual links, with dejá vu scenes that promise us more but remain tensely unfinished. Jonathan Rosembaun said: “few directors since Resnais have played so ruthlessly with the unconscious narrative expectations to bug us”. Learning from the feeling of strangeness caused by Rossellini as he threw well known actors into savage scenery in southern Europe. Portabella makes Christopher Lee wander around a dream-like Barcelona. Without a doubt Portabella’s most structurally complex and most profoundly political film, that is ferociously poetic. — pereportabella.com
At underground film of the 1st Popular Festival of Catalan Poetry filmed in the Proce Theater in Barcelona on May 25, 1970, in solidarity with political prisoners. The participating poets were: Agustí Bartra, Joan Oliver (Pere IV), Salvador Espriu, Joan Brossa, Francesc Vallverdú and Gabriel Ferrater.
Portabella’s first feature, co-scripted by poet Joan Brossa, became one of the most influential works of the Barcelona avant-garde, although like all his early films, it circulated only in an underground fashion. Eschewing dialogue, the director constructs a non-narrative story in fragments that reveal the daily lives of an adulterous couple interspersed with a cryptic stream of unrelated imagery. The title of this homage to directors including Eisenstein, Antonioni, Bergman, and Buñuel refers to the 29 “black years” of the Franco dictatorship. — chicago.cervantes.es
Pere Portabella’s first work as a director, starts with the following phrase: “defeated…but not conquered”. This may or should be taken as an allusion to the technical K.O. taken by Portabella from Franco’s regime during the sixties as regards his work as a producer. Through the extremely raging playthings of the words of Catalan poet Joan Brossa, Portabella attempts to dismantle the forms of advertising discourse of that time.
