Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón (Torrelavega, 1942) has been, is and will always be a film director. Not in vain is one of the great directors of the transition. ‘Black litter’, ‘Talk, Mudita’, ‘Demons in the garden’, ‘half of the sky’ … his extraordinary filmography, endorsed by a good number of prestige awards, certifies it as one of the greats of Spanish cinema. But for a while to this part, since in 2008 he announced that he left cinema, Gutiérrez Aragón has revealed himself as a great writer. Among essays, novels and autobiographical stories, he has already published a dozen books. The last of them, ‘Life and Wonders’, is the one who summoned it on Tuesday to the ABC Culture Classroomon another rainy day in the capital.
And as in the book the Cantabrian tells his life, the talk that moderated Carlos Aganzodirector of the Vocento Foundation, began for his childhood, in postwar Spain and raised in a right -wing family. “People took a long time to tell things about the war, the defeated side and also of the other,” Gutiérrez Aragón recalled. «One of the first stories I heard in the family was my uncle Pepe’s. He was a phalangist and when the war broke out in jail, in Santander, in a prison ship. There they shot those who were imprisoned. One day, in one of the reprisals for the attacks of Franco’s aviation, it touched my uncle. His name was José Sancho. When they touched him they said his name and another one lifted, who was a priest and was called the same. And my uncle was saved. In my family that was not counted until twenty years later. You have to see how people want to remember and want to forget. You have to see that dark part of human memory that tries to erase the memory ».
His love of stories also comes from his childhood, when a disease tied him to the loneliness of a forced convalescence in bed and his only classmates were the books. Thus discovered the pleasure of telling stories. «I learned to tell stories and realized the enormous pleasure that it was to tell and that they told you: the pleasure of telling and listening to you. I discovered that people like to hear terrible things. I made my brothers suffer. I saw the faces of fright they put with what I told them. A sick child in bed imagines many things: he learns to resist. Although according to my mother I was not sick so long, because I have not only told this in the book, I have also done it in movies. He told me that I have taken a long way to that time I spent in bed, ”the filmmaker and writer recalled fun.
Film school
Gutiérrez Aragón told the attendees to the talk he had with Aganzo in the Circle of Fine Arts that came to the cinema by chance. He was attracted to writing, I can’t enroll in journalism and fell into the film school to watch movies. «Being a director seemed to me a very rare thing, and it still seems like it. I have not yet repossed the first impression that is to enter a filming and see that it does not exist, but is manufactured. When you enter a filming you do not see the actors, what you see are cables, tubes, lights, electricians and unpleasant people. Now not so much, but when I started everyone I was always angry. At that time he learned from teachers such as Berlanga, Saura or Borau. «The film school was a very special thing, because in the middle of Franco it was a site of cultural resistance, where no one got into. Censorship did not get there. We lived in a bubble, because the dictatorship was existed and there not. Then you went out of school and reached the harsh reality ». To the struggles with censorship to approve the scripts and to get used to not watching foreign films: “Buñuel’s, for example, could not be seen because they were censored.”
There was also time to talk about writing, of course. Of cinephile writing and literary writing. «There can be no good movie without a good script. From a good script you can make a bad movie, but you can’t make a good movie with a bad script, ”said Gutiérrez Aragón. He started as a screenwriter and has spent his life writing. «Although people like Haro Teclen or threshold encouraged me to write, I didn’t seem adequate to be a writer at times. Until I finished being purely a director did not want to be purely a writer, ”he said. «But it is also true that I wrote the film scripts, and a director spends more time on the computer screen that rolling, because it is rolls very fast. Many versions are made of a script, ”he added. The cinema and literature, for the filmmaker, are very similar: “It consists in telling a story that interests, that excites.” He, he said, although he has dedicated himself to cinema, books, television, to theater and so many other things, he has always done the same: “In the background I have always told the same story, which is mine.” We will have to believe.
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