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FESTIVAL INTERNACIONAL DE CINE DE GIJÓN 01 AGOSTO 2012 // 1 ORGANIZA PATROCINA COLABORA

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Page 1: el50 number1

FESTIVAL INTERNACIONAL DE CINE DE GIJÓN

01 AGOSTO 2012 // nº 1

ORGANIZA PATROCINA COLABORA

Page 2: el50 number1

3 50FICXixón201 AUGUST 2012 // No 1

¿CÓMO SERÁ LA 50 EDICIÓN?

makers in the 80’s and 90’s, encouraged by the unexpected example set by Luc Besson, mainstream cinema wizard and auteur at the same time. There were also lessons to be learnt on graphic cinema from the films that opened Pandora’s box in the 60’s and 70’s, without losing their sense of humour and a clear – or rather, dark – political and social consciousness. Ro-bak, Kounen, Ozon, Gans, Delplanque, Noé and others darkly understood that the now classic modern American splatter offe-red a powerful creative arsenal, capable of turning the slightly bourgeois French movie industry, cradled by international and authorial fame, upside down.

That is how, albeit preceded by some previous examples of illustrated horror, the Bloody Revolution came to be. This is what we now refer to as the “new French cruelty cinema”: a brutal and subtle combination of themes, icons and archety-pes of the classic American splatter – psychokillers, zombies, rural horror, teenagers, creative deaths, satanism – and of the Euro-pean bloody horror of the 60’s and 70’s – particularly the Ita-lian giallo –, all filtered through the Bastille of French tradition itself, that of sadism, fantastique, black humour, and the phi-losophy of evil and the grotesque. The first stroke inevitably came from Luc Besson, acting as the producer of High Tension (Haute tension, 2003) by Alexandre Aja. Then the actual bloo-dbath started: The Pharmacist (Le pharmacien de garde. Jean Ve-ber, 2003), the Belgian The Ordeal (Calvaire. Fabrice du Welz, 2004), Sheitan (Kim Chapiron, 2006), À l´intérieur (Alexandre Bustillo, Julien Maury, 2007), Frontière(s) (Xavier Gens, 2007), Martyrs (Pascal Laugier, 2008), The horde (La horde. Yannick Dahan, Benjamin Rocher, 2009),… Then came others, of-ten bending and breaking the genre boundaries and raising today’s French horror movies to peaks of quality, excellence and distinction worthy of envy... but also to extreme heights of

visual violence, graphic portrayal of pain and cruelty that are sometimes hard to bear. And all of these films characterised by an unmistakably French sort of ideological, political, moral, social and even philosophical depth.

Nowadays the “new French cruelty cinema” is not so new, and neither are the Spanish “Filmax style” horror movies the French so admire and whose example they followed in their own way. It seems to be running out of steam, and some un-fortunate attempts to export its creators to the heart of a Ho-llywood, which has little or nothing to do with the originals of Romero, Hooper, Carpenter, Craven and other idols of the French movie makers, indicate that their peculiar way of crea-ting bloody horror is non-transferable. The “new French cruel-ty cinema” is based upon templates imported from Hollywood, but the final product is clearly intrinsically French. Just like the polar compared with American noir films.

All we can do now is wait … well, not only wait but analyze, revisit, and even dissect what is now clearly a unique historical moment, not only in the history of horror films or French cine-ma, but in cinema itself. Looking through eyes without a face, like martyrs confronted with new boundaries of sensibility, at what this new cruelty cinema, rooted in old traditions just as extreme, dares to set in front of us with the explicit power of an expressionistic brushstroke of red blood and meat, splashing the apparently white canvas of our everyday life, which is itself more and more cruel with each passing day.

One of the most interesting and

controversial trends in cinema in the last few years

Frontiere(s) (2007).

MartyrsFrance, 2008. 99 m. Color.

Directed by Pascal Laugier. With Morjana Alaoui, Mylène Jampanoï, Catherine Bégin.

Fil

ms i

n t

he s

ea

son

À l´intérieur (2007).

By :

JESÚS PALACIOS

CICLOS CICLOS

There is a point at which any revolution reaches its peak, its full height… In the

new French cruelty cinema that honour might go to Martyrs, a sophisticated, wild,

stylish, icy, sensual, brutal and tragic modern horror movie which is rooted in the

classics of the genre, but later cleverly intertwines these in a twisted plot that

in the end takes both the main character and the viewer to a territory of purely

cerebral horror, almost meta-physical, based on its extreme carnal physicality. The

sickening plot subtly quotes from several movies, from Eyes without a Face, and

Rosemary´s Baby (Polanski, 1968) to Craven and the early Cronenberg. Martyrs

nonetheless proves to be emphatically French in its capacity to combine scenes

of extreme pain and suffering with postmodern irony and philosophical comment.

Martyrs uses suspense as a trick to trap us in a final discourse closer to Sade

than to sadism, colored with esoterism and dark philosophy. The ghosts of Sade,

Nietzsche, Bataille, Artaud and Foucault dance like Chinese shadows against a

traditional background of bloody horror movies, almost like classic B movies. This

film is a jewel that shines alone, yet which at the same time shows the main

virtues and features of the so called “new French cruelty cinema” in their purest

form. More French and crueler than ever.

ON The New FreNCh CINeMA OF CruelTy

The 50th edition of the Gijon International Film Festival, in the Mutant Genres section, turns its attention to the “new French cinema of cruelty”, one of the most interesting and controversial trends in cinema in the last few years. This trend has shaken fantasy and horror movies and taken them to their riskiest and most innovative extremes.

or most of its history, French cinema – which isboth much more and much less than what most people imagine when they hear the words “French cinema” – has stood back from horror movies. Surrealism, sci-fi, thri-ller, fantastique…these genres are fine, but horror in the strictest sense of the term, and

even more so if it’s bloody, explicit and violent, is not. At least not often. The few scattered examples are hidden in the underbelly of mainstream cinema, even when they have a subtle and refined spirit, as in the films of Jean Rollin. Either that or they have been pulled apart by critics, capable of destroying anyone, as occurred with Franju’s seminal work of genius, Eyes without a face (1960).

The homeland of the Marquis de Sade, of the perverse deca-dence of Villiers, Mirbeau or Huysmans, of Dumas, Feval, Sué and their over-the-top newspaper serials, of bloodthirsty Fân-tomas or Chéri-Bibi, of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, Breton’s black humor and, above all, the outrageous Théâtre du Grand Guignol, the true precedent of gore, has ironically never (or hardly ever) pointed its movie cameras to the horror of tor-tured blood and flesh. This reserve has occasionally being interrupted by influential, isolated figures, usually linked to ‘cinema d’auteur’ – Ferreri, Girod, Zulawski, etc. – rather than to popular and genre movies. In this new millennium things have changed. An abyssal attraction for gore and American ho-rror already lurked in the insurgent wave of new French film

Inside (À l´intérieur)

France, 2007. 82 m. Color.

Directed by Alexandre Bustillo, Julien Maury. With Béatrice Dalle, Alysson Paradis, Natalie Roussel.

Frontière(s)France, 2007. 108 m. Color.

Directed by Xavier Gens. With Karina Testa, Aurélien Wiik, Patrick Ligardes.

Frontière(s) was released the same year as À l´intérieur, and it also reflects the

violent street revolts in the neighbourhoods and outskirts of Paris. Frontière(s),

adapts the classic rural survival genre of the American splatter – (Deliverance.

John Boorman, 1972), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Tobe hooper, 1974, etc.

– to deepest (or not quite so deep) France. The plot has an explicit political twist

that at some points delivers a politically correct tone… but at others does the

exact opposite and brutally delights in the aesthetics of nazi´xploitation, and

takes it to its bloodiest extremes, almost to the point of parody. Xavier Gens’

film clearly lays bare the political and social subtext that modern 70’s American

horror, in the hands of such liberals as romero, Craven, Carpenter or hooper,

only hinted at. The onlooker is forced to admit not only the cathartic potential

of the genre but also its critical function. In spite of this, the overly obvious

aspiration to become a social parable may go against the end result, as is the

case in the interesting but failed survival science fiction fable which Gens shot

later, The Divide (2011).

Clear proof that the true origin – or at least a good deal of it – of the “new French

cruelty cinema” is to be found in the Théâtre du Grand Guignol can be found in

this film, a bloody thriller which takes place indoors. This is a splatter for camera,

two women and some bloodied corpses, as brutal as it is effective and shocking,

and its minimalism makes the most of every corner of a single, claustrophobic

and distressing set. Just as in High Tension and some other examples of the

new French cruelty cinema, the main action is carried out by female characters.

These characters are barely accommodating, if at all, and they play with the genre

clichés – from psychokiller to survival – in order to give them an unexpected twist.

It is worth mentioning the role that motherhood plays in the new French horror

movies – see also Baby Blood (Alain robak, 1990), House of Voices (Saint Ange.

Pascal laugier, 2004), Vinyan (Fabrice du welz, 2008), The Horde, and also Livide

(Alexandre Bustillo, Julien Maury, 2011) – as well as the clear central role of

women. And Béatrice Dalle is much scarier than Freddy Krueger.

High tension (Haute tension)

France, 2003. 91 m. Color.

Directed by Alexandre Aja. With Cécile De France, Maïwenn, Philippe Nahon.

It was the first in the strictest sense of the word. A distressing and shoc-

king combination of slasher and thriller, with a hint of giallo, a touch

of sensual eroticism and a final turn to hell worthy of the novels by

Boileau and Narcejac (grandparents of the genre). The film was first

released in genre festivals and after that in movie theatres thanks

to the strength of europacorp, the company created by luc Bes-

son. Its release surprised the genre fans and caught more than one

critic and viewer by surprise. It showed that a new way to make

horror movies had been born, and that it was brutal and clearly and

distinctively French. Aja later shot a couple of effective American

remakes of some of the genre classics: The Hills Have Eyes, 2006

and Piranha, 2010, as well as the not so accomplished Mirrors,

2008, a remake of the Korean Geoul sokeuro (Sung-ho kim,)

2003. Originality being one of the strong points of High

Tension, one can’t help but wonder why the industry

seems to have confined its director to remakes.

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5 50FICXixón401 AUGUST 2012 // No 1

Bosnian people from the “cultural underground”. Some of the members of this movement - Nele Karajlic among them - created the “Surreal Top Ten”, a TV sketch show which be-came a sort of Balkan version of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Its authors used absurdity and black humor in their politically subversive and visionary television sketches, which predicted the fall of Yugoslavia.

Today’s circus-like performances of the No Smoking Orchestra, with hidden political messages, echo the spirit of the New Primitives. “Wake up from your boring dream! ”, calls Nele Karajlic in “Unza, unza time”, denouncing the public ignorance in Western countries during the bombard-ment of Yugoslavia by the NATO forces, back in 1999, when “people destroyed the difference between crime and punishment”.

When the war in former Yugoslavia broke out in 1991, the highly popular musicians from the multi-ethnic Zabranjeno pusenje separated, and the band stopped performing for a while. Their current line-up was established in Belgrade, where singer Nele Karajlic took refuge from war-torn Sarajevo. He joined Kusturica and started writing music for his films, after the Serbian director split from his composer Goran Bregovic. Stribor Kusturica, Emir’s son, soon joined the band as a per-cussionist. Kusturica’s films and the music of the No Smoking Orchestra merged into a single, unique

universe – the band’s music is an essential ingredient of his films, while cinema is an inspiration for the on-stage performances. They sometimes invite their friends - as well as their idols - to join them : Javier Bardem accompanied the band on percussion during their 2005 Cannes Film Festival gig and Diego Marado-na climbed onto the stage in 2008 during a party which followed the launch of documentary “Kusturica by Maradona”.

The key to the success of the No Smoking Orchestra is that they didn’t just copy other musical trends which have come and gone, but instead they have managed to find the conjuction between rock and traditional melodies rooted in the heritage of their homeland. The sources of their inspiration are icons of rock, but also musicians from local Balkan taverns - kafanas - where they gather to play popular folk songs to the public sin-ging along in an ecstatic atmosphere, with their arms high up in the air. Kusturica’s band blends classic rock riffs with brass music, which is played during weddings and funerals all over Balkans, authentic Serbian folk melodies with a punk attitude, and Gypsy guitars and Hungarian violins with classical music. The stage performances of the No Smoking Orchestra are very similar to contemporary jazz imrovisations, mixing jazz music with the sound of rock and ethno ; that’s probably why they are being invited to play at jazz festivals all over Europe.

“This could well be the music of the future – a new flavor”, said Joe Strummer, leader of The Clash, when the famous UK band performed with No Smoking Orchestra in Venice in 1999.

Behind a robust, bear-like appearance hides one of the most prolific contemporary

european filmmakers. But besides making films, he is also a guitar player, an actor,

an architect and a writer. his complex artistic vision reflects the region which he

comes from, the Balkans, sat on the crossroads between eastern and western

european cultural and political influences.

Emir Kusturica’s films placed former Yugoslavia and its cinematic tradition on the map, but they also did more than just that. They broke geographical, cultu-ral, political and aesthetic boundaries, and in doing so created a unique mythology.

Kusturica is a film director who can turn a movie illusion into reality: after the

filming of Life Is A Miracle, he transformed the film set into a village, and set up

his own home there. he may have lost his country, yugoslavia, and his home city

of Sarajevo, but he nevertheless built himself a new home - not far from his native

Bosnia, set in the dream-like scenery of the Serbian mountains. Five years ago, he

established a film and music festival named Kustendorf, which celebrates cinema

d’auteur and local culture and gastronomy. There, you can meet his friends Jim

Jarmush and Johnny Depp, sitting at restaurant Visconti, contemplating the snowy

mountains. Kustendorf became a symbol of Kusturica’s artistic vision - anti-global

and anti-hollywood - with streets named after his idols: Diego Maradona, Che

Guevara, Bergman, Bruce-lee... Joyful funerals of hollywood video tapes are organized during the festival. Kusturica’s art

is in perfect harmony with his life, in which his family plays a central role: his wife Maja, the producer of his films, his son

Stribor, who plays alongside his father in the No Smoking Orchestra and makes music for his films, and his daughter Dunja,

who is in charge of selecting the students’ films to be shown at Kustendorf. They are the core of a joyful tribe, made up of

family and friends, which surrounds the famous director for most of his time. In everything that he does, Kusturica remains

true to himself and his artistic integrity, defying conformism and political correctness. his political views, as well as his stand

against corporative capitalism and the hegemony of the uS in the world, are rooted in his strong sense of justice and in the

recent history of his country.

A free voice in a world full of constraints. A life devoted to an artistic utopia.

PeRFil

Melodías populares serbias con actitud punk, una guitarra gitana y un violín

húngaro con música clásica

By :

VíCTOR GUILLOTJournalist and director of the Centro de Interpretación del Cine en Asturias (CICA)

Emir Kusturica has stated in some interviews that his work truly mirrors the evolution of the Balkan peoples, a path which shifts between euphoria and pain. It is no exaggeration to affirm that his movies are a treatise on happiness, born from a Dionysian activism that whose result is both sentimental and

a free voice

By : A. O.

INMINENTEACTOS DEL CINCUENTENARIO INMINENTE

eMIr KuSTurICA, A MASTer OF hAPPINeSS

Teatro Jovellanos de GijónMartes 7 de agosto • 20:30 h CONCIERTO

Patio Centro de Cultura Antiguo InstitutoMartes 7 de agosto • 13:30 h* ENCUENTRO CON PÚBLICO

KuSTurICA’S FlyING CIrCuS

when he received his second Palm d’Or at the Cannes film fes-tival. No Smoking Orchestra have the on-stage energy of a punk band, mostly thanks to the personality and style of their charis-matic singer, Nele Karajlic.

Punk music was one of the earliest influences on the group of neighborhood friends who used to gather together and practice music in the cellar of Nele Karajlic’s appartment in Sarajevo in the ‘70s. At the time the group was called “Zabranjeno pusenje”, which literally means “No smoking”, in Serbo-Croatian. They soon became one of the most famous Yugoslavian rock bands. Kusturica would occasionally play the bass guitar with them.

The band was closely associated with an urban subcultural mo-vement called The New Primitivism, which originated in Sara-jevo in the early-to-mid 1980s. Its main representatives were well-known for using a humorous discourse when writing their lyrics, mainly drawing inspiration from the spirit of ordinary

la música del grupo es un elemento clave de las películas de Kusturica, y el cine sirve como fuente

de inspiración para sus actuaciones en directo

La música de emir Kusturica y su No smoKiNg orchestra soNará este veraNo

eN gijóN. eL ciNeasta serbio dará uN coNcierto coN su grupo eN eL teatro

joveLLaNos eL próximo 7 de agosto, deNtro de Los actos deL ciNcueNteNario

deL Ficx, además de maNteNer uN eNcueNtro coN eL púbLico. eN estas págiNas,

recorremos sus acordes y Fotogramas.

By :

ANA OTASEVICCorresponsal en París del periódico serbio Politika

Traducción :

DIEGO GARCíA CRUzEl rock se combina con la música tradicional de los Balcanes en los temas de la No Smoking Orchestra. La energía de sus canciones ha conquistado el mundo y ahora el grupo de Emir Kusturica aterriza en Gijón.

Underground (1995). Life Is A Miracle (2004).

*Horario sujeto a cambios por motivos ajenos a la organización. Consulta nuestra página web.

emir Kusturica’s response to the war and destruction of his country - yugoslavia - are his films, with their humanism

and their onirical celebration of life. They blend imaginative baroque images worthy of Fellini with

the anthropological pessimism of Dostoevsky. his irony comes from his Slavic

roots, but his vision of cinema is truly european. It contains ingredients

absorbed from the places which have had the greatest influence on his

work: the multicultural spirit of Sarajevo, the city where he was born,

Prague, where he studied at the famous Czech film school, like Milos

Forman before him, and France, where his international career started.

he won the Palme d’Or at the 1985 Cannes film festival for When father

was away on business and for Underground ten years later.

“I ‘m big in Buenos Aires”, Emir Kusturica told me in Paris last April, when I met him on the set of Au bonheur des ogres, a film directed by Nicolas Bary in which he plays one of the roles to-gether with Bérénice Bejo, the new star of French cinema.

But the famous Serbian director wasn’t talking about his films but rather about his band, the No Smoking Orchestra, in which he plays the guitar. A short glance at their touring plan for this year is enough to realise that creating another film is not Kusturica’s priority at the moment. Argentina, Uruguay, Chi-le, Switzerland, Ukraine, Spain, France, Canada… he is tou-ring the globe with his band.Kusturica is not the only director who has a band. Woody Allen plays the clarinet in a small jazz orchestra, Almodovar was once in a glam punk band, and Jim Jarmusch is a musician too. But no other film director can fill concert halls from Kiev to Montevideo with such an ecstatic

audience. It wasn’t a coincidence that Kusturica quoted The Sex Pistols frontman, Sid Vicious,

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7 50FICXixón601 AUGUST 2012 // No 1

magical, yet simultaneously grotesque and out of proportion, without falling into complacency or evading political commitment. All of these have made him one of the most singular chroniclers of Serbia and, by extension, of the former Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia.

One of Kusturica’s basic aims has been to contrast the Dionysian and joyful atmosphere of his work with the Apollonian feeling of Hollywood storytelling. “In the first half of the 20th Century, Hollywood was the world capital for idealism, and I am an idealist. Welles, Lubitsch or Capra, di-rectors I admire, passed away one after the other, and ever since American movies have been the centre of liberal capitalist conservatism”. When Father Was Away On Business (Otac na sluzbenom putu, 1985), Underground (1995), Time Of The Gypsies (Dom za Vesanje, 1989), Black cat, white cat (Crna maska, beli macor, 1998), Life Is A Miracle (Zivot je cudo, 2004) and Promise Me This (Zavet, 2007), are all movies in which Kusturica proposes a therapeutic look at cinema through life and death stories. Stories where tenderness and control meet, and which feature adorable rogues, cocaine addict mob leaders and characters as hyperactive as the gypsy beats they listen to. In the movies of this Bosnian self-proclaimed-Serbian director, a funeral can co-exist with a marriage, and everything is done in order to allow collective sorrow to flow and be discharged between shouts and laughter.

Kusturica’s movies are inspired by Federico Fellini and his Amarcord (1973). The Italian master’s style dazzled the young director while studying at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. In his me-moirs Smrt je neprovjerena glasina (Death is an unverified Rumour) of 2010, Kusturica confesses that Amarcord was to his movies “what the Big Bang was to the Universe. Its images and ideas became the sour-ce all my film rivers flow from. Anything that has happened in my life as a movie maker can be measured with regard to that movie”. It is true that Fellini’s style was fit for explaining life in Yugoslavia, but it’s also true that Yugoslavian literature already had such writers as Ivo Andric, who had told the story of the Balkans in his novels The Bridge On The Drina (1945) or Bosnian Chronicle, also known as Chronicles Of Travnik (1945), clear antecedents of an understanding of storyte-lling as an ensemble in which chronicles, magic and legend fuse to explain the development of a heterogeneous people, subject to the Turkish Empire first and to the Austro-Hungarian Empire later.

On the other hand, Kusturica’s work cannot be understood without considering the tradition created by other directors, such as Goran Markovic (Tito and me/Tita i ja, 1992, and Burles-que Tragedy/Urnebesna Tragedija, 1995), Slobodan Sijan (Who’s that singing over there, 1980) or Dusan Kovácevic (Balkan Spy/Balkanski spijun, 1981, and Profesionalac, 2003). It is Kováce-vic himself, playwright, screenwriter and director, who created the political and cultural interest (and became alma mater) of a group of creators labelled the New Yugoslavian Cinema, born in the wake of Tito’s death. The group dared to openly critici-ze the regime through a type of comedy related to the Italian and Spanish traditions: from Ferreri and Risi to Berlanga and Azcona. Even today we can see similarities between Kusturica and Álex de la Iglesia’s grotesque tendencies, as the latter also conceives cinema in group and political terms.

But why has Kusturica’s cinema transcended the Balkans whi-le the other directors have not managed to cross that border? The answer may lie in Kusturica’s sense of exaggeration. He has developed it in each of his movies, raising his films to the epic sphere, while the others have been satisfied with simply trying to create a comedy with dramatic depth and political background.

It is no exaggeration to say that his

movies are a treatise on happiness

For the Serbian, the most unbridled comedy in the most tragic context produces an epic story. The will to take characters to the extreme led the Serbian director to shoot Maradona By Kus-turica, 2008, a documentary that follows the steps of the Argen-tinian star, alternating between interviews and archive footage and allowing us to discover the most dramatic profile of one who is, probably, the best football player in history. This is not only a matter of devotion to a sport; the most interesting element of this work is the admiration for someone who is known for the Dionysus-like, epic and tragic dimension of his actions. “Mara-dona is someone so charismatic that he became the image of poor people in Latin America. He is not someone to forget his roots. His football resembled dancing, while his life resembled a tragedy”. Kusturica is now preparing a biopic about Pancho Villa. “If we look at our bandits and rebels, no one has been so big. I feel a great historical admiration for him”.

LONG-LENGTH FEATURES DIRECTED By EMIR KUSTURICA

Kusturica confesses that Amarcord was

to his movies “what the Big Bang was to the universe”

Kusturica, Emir.

¿Dónde estoy en esta historia? Memorias.

ediciones Península. Madrid, 2012.

1993 Arizona Dream

Silver Bear in Berlin Film Festival

1988 Time of the Gypsies

(Dom za vesanje) Best Director Award in Cannes Film Festival

1985 Father’s on a business trip

(Otac na sluzbenom putu) Gold Palm in Cannes Film Festival

FIPRESCI Award

1981 Do you remember Dolly Bell?

(Sjecas li se Dolly Bell)Silver Lion in Venice Festival

2008 Maradona by Kusturica

2007 Promise Me This

(Zavet)

2004 Life Is A Miracle

(Zivot je cudo) Cesar Award to the best movie in the European Union

2001 Super 8 Stories

1998 Black Cat, White Cat

(Crna macka, beli macor) Silver Lion in Venice Film Festival

1995 Underground

Gold Palm in Cannes Film Festival

ACTOS DEL CINCUENTENARIO INMINENTE

to children or a safe haven for marginal audiences and crea-tors. Through festivals, animation has earned the respect and appreciation of critics and audiences. With rigour and care, they have revealed the works of such pioneers as Starewicz, Alexeieff, Tyrlová, Trnka or McLaren, modern classics such as Svankmajer, Laloux or Bakshi, or the creators of the Golden Age of American cartoon, to name a few. They have also intro-duced audiences to Japanese animation, both in its most ins-titutionalised and its more alternative versions, with infogra-phics and 3-D technology or with stop-motion (before Pixar or Aardman made them so well-known). Festivals have, in short, made us understand that a parallel history of cinema can be found in animation, one worth knowing and celebrating.

But what is important is not the role animation has played in the history of audiovisual media, but rather, the role it plays today and will still play in the future. Specialized festivals or events with sections devoted to the topic show that anima-tion is a field of infinite creativity. During the last few years, “Anima’t”, the section of Sitges-Festival Internacional de Cine Fantástico de Catalunya, where I have the honour of working as a programmer, has shown the audience works by such con-temporary masters as Mamoru Oshii, Satoshi Kon and Mamo-ru Hosoda, who in spite of their fame and success in Japan, have not had easy access to the West. We have also regularly shown works by Phill Mulloy or Bill Plympton, to give just two examples of indomitable talent, and we have uncovered film geniuses whose work expands our horizons about the moving image, for example, Juan Pablo Zaramella and Philippe Gram-maticopoulos. Other Festivals have done the same with other creators, proving that animation is an unstoppable engine for narrative and visual innovation in today’s cinema and will con-tinue to be one in the future.

¿CÓMO SERÁ LA 50 EDICIÓN? LA FIRMA

Animation is the natural ally of those of us who seek movies capable of surprising us and calling into question our ideas about what can be represented in moving images.

The traditional dominant visual discourses are challenged by the capacity of different animation techniques to materialize and articulate signifiers and meanings, which would be ex-traordinarily difficult to portray in any other way. In the world of audiovisual expression, which has historically been domi-nated (with some exceptions) by the power of storytelling, of events that can be reduced to causes and consequences and translatable to words, animation has always been at the avant-garde, proving convincingly that movies are also, and above all, a matter of visual dialogue. This capacity to call into question some of our deep-rooted ideas about what communication by means of images should be, would be enough to grant animation a privileged place among the artistic means of expression of the 20th and 21st cen-turies. But that is not its only value. Animation is also a fantas-tic tool for avant-garde visual expression, for the development of a truly pop culture, for the creation of cult phenomena and for pure and wonderful entertainment.

These four forces (avant-garde plastic expression, pop culture, cult and entertainment) have been the strengths that have tra-ditionally spurred animation. And such have been observed in the festivals that have revealed animation’s hybrid and chan-ging shapes, festivals such as Annecy, Hiroshima, Cinanima in Espinho (Portugal) or Zagreb’s Animafest. Festivals that for de-cades have kept up with the never-ending list of British anima-tion schools and styles, the ever-lively animation coming from Western Europe and the unstoppable production of Eastern Europe. In the last decades, mains-tream festivals have included ani-mation sections in their offi-cial program, proving that it is no longer a minor genre, a product de-voted exclusively

this year, aFter severaL years iN the pipeLiNe, the gijóN iNterNatioNaL FiLm

FestivaL iNcLudes For the First time aN oFFiciaL sectioN oN aNimatioN, aNimaFicx.

here we showcase the most iNNovative, dariNg aNd creative projects iN aN area

which is ever more ceNtraL to our uNderstaNdiNg oF yesterday’s, tomorrow’s

aNd today’s ciNema.

Animation is an unstoppable engine for

narrative and visual innovation in today’s

cinema

By :

JORDI SÁNCHEz NAVARROResearcher on Audiovisual Media and programmer in Anima’t (Sitges-Festival Internacional de Cine Fantástico de Catalunya) between 2004 and 2012

Les ventres (Philippe Grammaticopoulos, 2009).

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9 50FICXixón801 AUGUST 2012 // No 1

HISTORIA DEL FESTIVAL

We must look back to the sixties in order to relive the beginnings of the Festival, which this year celebrates its 50-year anniversary. At the time, Spain was enjoying a period of economic prosperity caused by the end of autarchy and by the arrival of foreign aid, which combined to create a more relaxed social atmosphere in which new international movies began to reach Spanish audien-ces. A series of international festivals were set up in the fifties: the Festival Internacional de Cine de San Sebastián (1953), the Se-mana de Cine Religioso y de Valores Humanos de Valladolid (1956) or the Festival de Cine de Bilbao (1959). Cinema soon progressed from being a simple experiment to a summer attraction, and entrepreneurs were aware of the economic possibilities of this means of expression, and of its attraction to audiences and its potential to promote geographical regions. For this reason di-fferent cities in Asturias set up events, though not all survive to this day. One of the most productive and long- lasting proposals was based on the personal project of an artist.

Isaac del Rivero, born in Colunga, was a talented creator of graphic storytelling who published his first work at the age of seventeen in the newspaper La Nueva España. He was also a great fan of the movies since childhood, and looked back fon-dly on the shows he had attended at the Campos Elíseos thea-tres in Gijón. He often bought magazines devoted to movies,

Full of vitality at the age of 80, Isaac del Rivero (Colunga, 1931), founder of the Festival, welcomes us into his office to explain the beginnings of this pioneering event. “Setting up a film festival in those conditions and with no money was terrible”, says the man who crea-ted the first ever festival for boys and girls in Spain. In spite of the difficulties, Del Rivero managed to create a film celebration that has stood the test of time and which this year celebrates its 50th edition.

“In the sixties I had an advertising agency. We dealt with many advertising projects, but worked in a different manner to other agencies. I only used graphics”, he says. When thinking about what could be done that would be “cool and eye-catching”, Del Rivero realised that there existed no film festivals devoted to young audiences. Children “are the first who should have a movie festival for them, so that they can get to know and learn about cinema”, he affirms. So it wasn’t long before he developed a way to bring film to the young people of Asturias. The rigidity of Franco’s dictatorship prevented him from organizing the event “as an individual”, so he asked the magazine Cine en 7 Días for help. “I wrote to them and told them that among my various projects, the main one was creating the Festival Inter-nacional de Cine para la Infancia (International Film Festival for Children). Their answer was: great, go ahead” says the man who led the event for 19 editions, until 1981. “That was the starting point”, he recalls.

Fifteen countries took part in the first edition. “I started big”, says the founder half a century later. Censorship made it diffi-cult to bring foreign movies to Spain, as the first director of the Certamen Internacional de Cine para Niños explains: “if censors said something was no-go, you were left stranded. In any case,

The Gijón International Film Festival was born in 1963 as a Children’s Film-TV event and has evol-ved into one of the best-known and longest-run-ning festivals in the country. Since its origins as a childhood and youth event the Festival has always paid special attention to younger audiences.

en apenas dos décadas el certamen

llegó a contar con la participación de 40

países, y en cada edición la presencia

extranjera fue superior a la docena de

películas, con nacionalidades que nos

pueden llamar tanto la atención en

aquella época como Pakistán (1965),

Taiwán (1977) o Ceilán (1979). Muy

valorada en las primeras ediciones fue

la cinematografía de los países del este,

seguida por la de los países anglosajones,

como reino unido y estados unidos. De

este último, destacan las películas de

Disney, en concreto, El libro de la selva o

Los aristogatos.

Prácticamente todos los filmes españoles

dedicados a la infancia fueron presenta-

dos en Gijón, debido precisamente a la

condición de “escaparate nacional” que el

Gobierno otorgó al Certamen: Alas y Ga-

rras, de Félix rodríguez de la Fuente, Las

aventuras de Mortadelo y Filemón, de los

estudios Vara en sendas ocasiones, o El

Mago de los Sueños, de Francisco Macián,

creador de la famosa Familia Telerín.

By : A. C.

such as Cine en 7 Días and Pantallas y Escenarios. One of the sections of the former was devoted to setting up cinema clubs and relaxing the red tape this involved. The Cine Club C-7 de Gijón was born, created with the aim of “increasing its members’ cultural and artistic interest, in particular to film and organizing and providing access to such activities as the library, disco, newspaper archive, cinema club, sports, theatre, singing and music playing, photography, painting and shooting amateur movies” .

We have very little data on the original budget of the Festival, but we do know that the actual cost of the first edition was 763.843,95 pesetas. The theatre at the Universidad Laboral in Gijón was the venue selected for most of the Festival’s events, and it was do-minated by the official competitive section. The theatre hosted 1500 people: 950 seats in the aisle and the rest in boxes and the amphitheatre. Transport was to be included in the price of the ticket, to be sold in booths set up in Plaza del Parchís, which at the time was known as Plaza del Generalísimo. One of the main features of the Festival, from its very beginning, was the wide range of films aimed at 14-15 year-olds. The Festival was des-

cribed as an event with a broad scope, not only screening live action and animation movies but also including educational and recreational elements. Awards

were to be given by an international jury and by another formed of minors. The names of the awards were Pelayo de Oro and

Platero de Plata respectively.

During the week-long Festival, activities ran with the aim of promoting children’s cinema, such as the so-ca-lled “International Chats” which brought together ex-perts on the matter. The creative spirit of young people was fostered by means of a series of contests and exhi-bits for children, dealing with literature, photography, music and connections to well-known children’s film companies such as Walt Disney.

On Sunday 21st July 1963, Gijón town council held the official reception for personalities attending the first edition of the Certamen Internacional de Cine-TV Infantil. At half past four in the afternoon of that same day the first selected films were shown at the Universidad Laboral. The tickets cost 15 and 20 pesetas. These were the titles: The Magic World Of Topo Gigio (Italy); Little Red Riding Hood And Her Three Friends (Mexico); The Boy Who Loved Horses (United Kingdom) and the short movie Michelino IB (Italy).

Gijón’s unique Festival was born in a city which, though small, is home to lively and dedicated people enthusiastic about culture and modernity. In spite of the well-known difficulties which have beset the region, it has maintained the strength to keep these events alive thanks to popular support, especially among the young. Gijón successfully combines the fun and didactic elements of film, and carefully selects movies which are difficult to see at other festivals.

they accepted the first movies I sent”. No-netheless, he started fearing for those films

which, even though suitable for children, portrayed reality with all its light and

shadows. “I said: listen, say I go to Paris and I like a movie, what do I

do? Because I have to say whether I want it or not”. So a censor star-ted travelling with him. “In the end I managed to avoid the films

being censored or having anyone accompanying me”, he says, as he

relates how he managed to show films from Eastern European countries and the

USSR, which “were those who made the best mo-vies for children”.

Isaac del Rivero, whose love of cinema began with films he saw in his youth such as The third man (Reed, 1949), com-

bined screenings of movies for children with more adult films such as Zazie dans le métro (Malle, 1960) or Birth of a Nation (Griffith, 1915). During the week of the Festival, which took place between June and July or in September, depending on the edition, Gijón hosted key figures in the world of children. Among them was the poet Gloria Fuertes. “All of them were thrilled with the Festival because they saw the tremendous effort that was behind it”, Del Rivero explains. Those years involved hard work but the founder did what he could with the same energy he still possesses today. “I live things as I did at the time, I have to live what I do to the fullest, otherwise it doesn’t work for me”.

By :

ALMUDENA CORRALESGeography and History teacher and author of the research “El Festival Internacional de Cine de Gijón (1963-1981)”.

The Magic World Of Topo Gigio (1961).

By :

MERCEDES ÁLVAREz

El libro de la selva (1967).

Archivo personal Isaac del Rivero.

Page 6: el50 number1

staFF

Directores del periódico: Nacho Carballo Jorge Iván Argiz

Redactora jefa: Mercedes Álvarez

Editor de contenidos: Jesús Palacios

La firma: Ignacio del Valle

Página de cómic y caricatura: Albert Monteys

Han colaborado en este número:

Manolo D. Abad, Mercedes

Álvarez, Óscar Brox, José Havel,

Claudia Lorenzo, Ana Otasevic,

Jesús Palacios.

Fotografía: Marta Gómez Lucas

Pensar Audiovisual

Diseño y maquetación: SIGNUM (www.signum.es)

Traducciones: Diego García Cruz

Impresión: PROMECAL

Departamento comercial: 985 18 29 48 [email protected]

FEsTIvAL INTERNACIONAL DE CINE DE GIJóN

C/ Cabrales, 82. 33201, Gijón (España)

Tlf. (+34) 985 18 29 40Fax. (+34) 985 18 29 44

E-mail: [email protected]

síguenos en: Facebook (Gijon International Film

Festival. Official Site) Twitter (@Gijonfilmfest) Flickr (gijonfilmfestival)

www.gijonfilmfestival.com