There are people whose biographies are uninteresting, as are their autopsies. On the contrary, there are other biographies that awaken taste and affinity from the first screams, as soon as the world opens, when they begin to suck the black colostrum of ruin. The biography of José Luis Manzano belongs to this select class.
He came from Vallecas and worked as a hustler downtown, at the Victoria billiards, a place of vice and forbidden love where he met Eloy de la Iglesia, the filmmaker who would make him the protagonist of his films. This story and others like it are told by Eduardo Fuembuena in his book Far from herethe most complete work to date about José Luis Manzano and his relationship with Eloy de la Iglesia.
Between its pages we find a world where even shit has its own rules. Because for people on the other side of the stream, like Manzano was, death is a fucking way of being. And Eloy de la Iglesia captured the same thing in his street films where he not only portrayed an era, but the characters who inhabited it.
In these days of mud and political misery, another book dedicated to Eloy de la Iglesia arrives in stores. It is published by the Dos Bigotes publishing house and is coordinated by Carlos Barea. It is a choral book and, among the notable voices, those of Vicente Monroy and good Eduardo Bravo appear. It is curious to see how a filmmaker reviled in his time by the people of the guild himself turns out to be more alive today than any of the film directors of that time. Time has been able to give Eloy de la Iglesia an advantage. Definitely.
Vicente Monroy takes a tour of his lesser-known filmography, the one dedicated to horror; a genre that Eloy would use to address certain topics that, otherwise, would not have been possible. In this way, the underpants aesthetic of the so-called quinqui cinema will give way to the visual elegance of a Victorian mansion on the shores of the Cantabrian Sea in the adaptation of Another twist, the ghost novel written by Henry James.
For the part that belongs to Eduardo Bravo, it should be noted that, in a few pages, there is a review of Eloy de la Iglesia’s cinema and his relationship with political, ecclesiastical and social structures; all of this punctuated by that very personal sense of humor that Bravo uses when it comes to writing. The tension between morality and desire keeps the rope on which Eloy’s characters tread firm, and which turns out to be made of the same fiber used by Tormes’ Lazarillo or Don Pablos’ Buscón or Marsé’s El Pijoaparte, characters whose autopsy would have turned out to be as interesting as José Luis Manzano’s was.
His body appeared at Eloy de la Iglesia’s home. He was covered in wounds made with a sharp utensil. According to the forensic report, the cause of death “was violent in nature, with the beginnings of heroin and other toxic substances having been found in his blood, urine and vital organs.” In the end.
#neighborhood #blood
