“Dangerous” and “pornographic.” Those were two of the adjectives that the Francoism put to the work of Agustín Gómez Arcos. It was 1966 when the author presents the Lope de Vega de Theater Award for the second time. The first time he won it, but censorship said that award could not fall on him, so the prize was deserted. In his second attempt, not to be evidenced again and although he had won it again for the jury, the dictatorship agreed to give him the second prize, which was associated with an amount of money.
It was with that money with which Gómez Arcos bought the trip to France. A trip to your creative and personal freedom. The writer, born in a town in Almería, lived in repression with the homosexual community of Madrid, but went to Paris. There he wrote, in French, some of the best novels of Spanish literature of the last century as The carnivorous lamb either Maria Republic. However, its name is still a stranger to the vast majority of Spaniards. While in France it is an institution, its books are studied in schools and have even adapted in operas, here is nothing more than a shadow.
Thanks to the effort of the Cabaret Voltaire publishing house, his novels have been translating – thanks to the work of Elvira Adoration – and arriving at the bookstores, finding an audience that fell to sharp novels, of an exquisite prose and that radiographed the repressive society of Franco and the postwar period. Boca to mouth has been creating a community of fans who strive to make the writer known. Among them is the filmmaker Laura Hojman, who has tried to do justice with Gómez Arcos in A free mandocumentary that reaches the rooms and that tells the story of the writer, while giving voice to those who knew him and those who were subsequently fascinated by his works.
The anecdote of the theater remembers her at the film Alberto Conejero, playwright and one of the great claims of her theatrical work. As Conejero recalls, in an ironic turn of destiny, it was Franco who paid the trip of Gómez Arcos to France. If not, we could never enjoy his words. Of course, before leaving he had a last act of rebellion. He wrote a letter to the then Minister Manuel Fraga, sang the forties and told him to leave Spain.
One of the things that most imposes on A free man It is finally listening to the voice of Agustín Gómez Arcos. For his readers it has been nothing more than a black and white photo on the deck of his books. Now, thanks to the file material collected by Hojman we see him in motion and we hear him. What he says has its essence, his nerve. Your activism without concessions. “I want to get rid of Spain.” That is one of the first things to be heard in an interview in French and in his host country.
That phrase is, for the filmmaker, one of the keys to her documentary. A relationship that she defines as “of love and hate” that believes that it is also intuited in the relationship that is told in The carnivorous lamb Between son and mother, “a hatred disguised as great love.” “He has a deep pain and an anger. I like to claim that right to anger. What you love hurt. Notice that he offered him the French nationality many times, something that would have opened many doors, and always rejects it,” says Hojman.
It was about claiming everything Gómez Arcos represents. Those silenced and expelled voices. And how those absences have configured the identity of our country
Laura Hojman
– Filmmaker
Gómez Arcos never wanted to “get rid of his Spanish nationality.” “He does not resign that something that belongs to him is stolen. He says, ‘Spain is something else, Spain is me. You can take me physically, but you are not going to take away that identity, the things that have built me. No, that is not so, that Spain belongs to us and we are not going to give them that idea, ”he adds.
His idea of making the documentary “goes beyond doing justice with Agustín”, and has more to do with making it “with all that dissent that was expelled from our memory and our construction as a country, of our identity.” “It was about claiming everything that already represents all that he wrote in his books. It is an issue that interests me a lot. Those voices that have been silenced and that have been expelled. And how those absences, those silences have configured and have configured the identity of our country,” he analyzes.
One of the people who has helped claim the writer has been Pedro Almodóvar. His books appear for years in the bookstores of his characters, and he has always praised his work in the interviews he grants. Not just that. Both lived together on a shared floor a short period of time. That is why it is not strange that the filmmaker is the first to appear in A free man. He does not doubt and qualifies Gómez Arcos as “a milestone of Spanish literature.” One that he even thought about adapting. I try with The carnivorous lamb, But as he remembers in the film he considered it “impossible, too strong to take her to cinema.”
For Almodóvar there is not much difference between him and other authors such as García Lorca, killed and in a pit. “It could be one of those people buried in a grave, in this case that pit is called Paris. But Franco achieved the same as with the other artists. Demoner existence,” he says with forcefulness. That existence that is now recovered in his voice, but also in Marisa Paredes, which he knew and even interpreted his works before he was exiled, or contemporary authors such as Paco Bezerra, who tells how to grace how when he discovered the title of his plays, including Mrs. Mrs. Mrs. Smith’s interview for his ghosts He thought “Who is the fag who has put this title?”
In that phrase, almost chascarrillo, from Bezerra there is a key to Agustín Gómez Arcos. One that connects with one of the cultural wars of the moment and that wonders if you can separate the work and the author. Gómez Arcos’ work is marked by his homosexuality lived under the repressive threat in Spain; marked by the wounds of war, by Franco and by exile.
Hojman agrees that “creation is not independent, it leaves a person who has some experiences, vital experiences and a position, a way of being in the world.” “Creation is the expression of who you are and what you have lived and what you have felt. For me it is inseparable. In my documentaries there are no issues of people’s personal life. I do not touch it because they really do not interest me or are the story that I want to tell, but I think that to explain the work of an artist we must explain certain things that he has lived,” he says.
She clarifies that for her there was always the idea of getting, through Gómez Arcos, to talk about “the memory of our country.” That is why it is important that the writer’s work “was born of pain, rage and the need to give a story to all those stories that Franco seeks to annihilate, not only expeling them physically from our country, but putting them a slab of silence.”
That the work of Agustín Gómez Arcos continues to scoo The carnivorous lamb“Hojman believes that confirms that” his work is fully current. ” One of the things he wanted to deal with in the documentary is how during the transition and during that democratic process, the country is not rebuilt on memory, but goes ahead with oblivion. Many of the things that happen to us today come from there. In the end, the wounds that are covered with a patch end up suppurating, ”ditch.
For that, Gómez Arcos literature serves, to burst everything. To get the shame of a country without memory that has not even been able to value a fundamental author who, little by little he begins to highlight, but that “remains a great unknown.”
#documentary #justice #Agustín #Gómez #Arcos #milestone #Spanish #literature #censored #Francoism
