Faia Díaz, whose voice approaches Galician folklore from a beautiful and radical perspective, sings behind glass. “Holy Christ of Fisterra / saint of the golden beard / help me to pass / into the black night of Spain,” says the song. It’s raining. It rains often in this place, the island of San Simón, in the Vigo estuary, which served fascism as a concentration camp between 1936 and 1943. The constellation of echoes that the sequence unleashes is endless: the anti-fascist rewriting of popular tradition , committed poets, the geography of an undervalued memory, that old and weakened internationalist solidarity, the present that pounces on the past and vice versa. On these and other issues it deals The Marseillaise of drunksa sort of road movie documentary in the footsteps of Cantacronache, a group of leftist Italian musicians and writers who, in the summer of 1961, toured Spain to record the anonymous anti-Franco songbook. It is the first feature film by Pablo Gil Rituerto and it premieres this Monday, October 21, at the Seminci in Valladolid.
That route stopped in Galicia, of course. The expedition members had contact with the writer Celso Emilio Ferreiro, who was about to publish his emblematic Long night of stone. He would do so the following year and confirm his status as a resistant poet and one of the most read in Galician literature. His voice, he who was an expert connoisseur of folklore, is one of the many that Cantacronache collected on magnetic tape on that trip. José Agustín Goytisolo, the one from Words for Juliaor Jesús López Pacheco, author of the forgotten social realist classic Power plantalso. And, along with the opposition intellectuals, multiple nameless popular voices that sing and explain and criticize the state of things under Franco’s boot. This sound material, a hitherto unpublished archive stored in Turin, constitutes the heart of a delicate and exciting film in which history and its scars cross time and emerge in contemporary Spain. The music of then is revived in the musicians of now, and Maria Arnal i Marcel Bagès, Faia Díaz, O Leo, the Coro Minero de Turón, Nacho Vegas, Amorante or La Ronda de Motilleja appear on the screen.
An unpublished archive in Turin
“10 years ago, in the heat of 15M, I was investigating how we had gotten to that place. I always like to go back and know where we come from,” Gil Rituerto, until now an editor for filmmakers such as Mercedes Álvarez, Marc Recha or José Luis Guerín, tells elDiario.es, “and due to a series of coincidences I begin to wonder how to make a “I filmed from a sound archive, given that the images of the time were scarce and already widely seen.” Almost at the same time, chance intervened and, in a used bookstore, he found a once legendary volume: the Uruguayan version of Canti della New Spanish Resistance 1939–1961originally published in 1962 by Einaudi. This is how Pablo Gil came into contact with the adventures of Cantacronache, folklorists and militant authors based in Turin. “In the book [resultado del viaje por España y que el régimen calificó de ”Marsellesa de los borrachos“, de ahí el título de la película] They mentioned that they had returned to Italy with 9,000 feet of recorded tape and dozens of photos,” says the director of the documentary. He began to investigate. And he stumbled upon an iconic photo, that of Margot Galante, one of the Cantacronache, guitar in hand. “It captivated me,” he recalls.
The next step took him to the University of Seville, where the historian Alberto Carrillo-Linares teaches. In his office he heard for the first time a copy of the unpublished recordings from ’61. Carrillo-Linares, who offers his testimony on screen, had published several academic articles on the Cantacronache in Spain and had obtained a copy of the material. That day he was definitely born, The Marseillaise of drunks. “Through Facebook, I found the three living members of the group: Margot Galante, Lionello Gennero and Emilio Jona. Jona was responsible for an ethnographic music center and he kept the tapes there,” he says. The vicissitudes of access multiplied by the moment, but finally Gil Rituerto achieved it. The construction of the film then began. In the middle of the process, new treasures emerged, such as the series of images taken by Lionello Gennero and which constitute a fundamental part of the footage. Galante and Gennero have, meanwhile, died. Jona lives. But The Marseillaise of drunks It is not just an academic documentary about a forgotten episode in history, which would not be minor, it is also a passage between two worlds.
The political dimension of folklore
Gil Rituerto’s camera reconstructs the journey that the Italians took in the summer of 1961. They then entered Catalonia from France and in Barcelona they met the poet José Agustín Goytisolo. Now it is his widow, Asunción Carandell – who died in 2022 – who speaks: “The only ones who did something were the communists. There were few socialists then.” It is as if he responded to the voice-over that guides the documentary, that of Emilio Jona, who is reading fragments of the diary written in his day by the Cantacronache: “[Estos jóvenes] “They are happy and confident, but it seems that they don’t really know what to do to get rid of Franco.” Just a few shots later, the images focus on the protests against the sentence of those accused of the process. This dialectic between past history and the present punctuates The Marseillaise of drunks. The exhumation of graves from the Civil War, a military parade in Madrid that the montage combines with a version of The Four Generals –“Madrid, how well you resist”–, the electoral victory of the neo-fascist Giorgia Meloni in Italy or the criminal border policy of the European Union, in this case in Irún, dialogue with the trail of the Cantacronache expedition.
In addition to the book Canti della New Spanish Resistance 1939–1961once translated into numerous languages, the Cantacronache recorded an LP, also published by Einaudi, with versions of some of the songs collected. The album became a classic of militant songs, especially in Latin America. Legends of Chilean song such as Víctor Jara or Quilapayún recreated some of those pieces. “We know that the source is the Cantacronache because they even reproduce the transcription errors,” says Pablo Gil, who in the film uses contemporary artists to embody that material. “I was interested in musicians who work on folklore but take into account its political dimension. It doesn’t always happen like this. We also spoke with some folklorists who were uncomfortable with this relationship and were left out,” he explains.
It is precisely O Leo, a Galician punk singer-songwriter who oscillates between Billy Bragg and Voces Ceibes (legendary anti-Franco song collective), who, in a sequence recorded in Santiago de Compostela, explains the role of Celso Emilio Ferreiro in this whole adventure. And a member of La Ronda de Motilleja, a group from Albacete, who focuses on one of the keys to the material collected by Cantacronache: the intelligent and “naughty” way in which anonymous voices hid anti-fascist content in popular melodies. “Summer is gone / winter has arrived / very soon / the government will fall / what a turururú / it’s your fault,” they sing between guitars, cavaquinhos and piccolos Aunt Vinagres’s donkeyjust before a very exciting If you want to write to me. “We were looking for an encounter with the unknown. When we interacted with the musicians, they themselves proposed places to us, for example,” he says. And this is how Amorante sings and plays a trembling trumpet in the Txillarre hamlet, where the conversations that led to the end of ETA took place.
Tension between history and story
The fact is that the Cantacronache route through Spain – in addition to Catalonia and Galicia, they passed through Guadalajara, Asturias, Burgos or Euskadi – ended in the courts. In the Italians. Canti of the New Spanish Resistenza was kidnapped and its distribution stopped. Manuel Fraga Iribarne, then Minister of Information and Tourism, edited The Marseillaise of drunkssubtitled The libel against Franco and Spainan anthology of columns from the official Spanish press in which they discredited the work with lies and rhetorical violence. But what had stung in Italy was an anti-religious couplet: “The Holy Christ of Cleans / they say his hair grows / what grows is his cock / from giving the clergy an ass.” Cantacronache won the trial, by the way, and the songs of the new Spanish resistance spread throughout the world.
The Marseillaise of drunksthe film, ultimately tells a story and, however, it is not, its director assures, historiography. “The Cantacronache said that theirs was an objective approach, that the voice of the Spanish people was there. But it is evident that there is a political operation, of course. That tension between history and story exists. “We prefer to leave the myth, to maintain a certain darkness.” Who sings, who modifies a popular lyric, who chooses which traditional melody, why tyrants fear music, what does it say about the ways in which the world is organized. That political operation of a brave group of musicians and poets from Turin was also about this, rescuing the nobodies and their way of singing against a dictatorship, and Gil Rituerto’s documentary is also about it.
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