In the summer of 1961, a group made up of seven young Italian musicians entered Franco’s Spain with a mission: to collect and record revolutionary songs against the regime and take them across the border without anyone catching them. The idea was to be able to bear witness to the fight of popular culture against the dictatorship. The melodies that the workers sang, the people of the towns, the popular classes that carried out an active combat that went from the streets to the songs.
It was 6,000 kilometers on the road after which the group, called Cantacronache, arrived in Italy loaded with material that went beyond 9,000 feet (2.7 km) of recorded magnetic tape. There were photographs, testimonies and poems from those anonymous revolutionaries. Also from informants and active members of the resistance against Franco. A year after the trip, Cantacronache decided to publish the material in a book titled Canti dellanuova resistenza spanish.
But Franco’s censorship was not going to allow that book to spread like wildfire, and Manuel Fraga, later a senior official of the PP and then Minister of Propaganda of the Franco regime, mobilized the fascist press throughout Europe to discredit the publication through an anonymous pamphlet. titled The Marseillaise of drunks. He did it. The book was seized and three members of the group were charged with obscenity and defamation of a foreign Head of State.
It is no coincidence that this is the title that filmmaker Pablo Gil Rituerto left for the documentary he presented at Seminci. The Marseillaise of drunks It recovers this incredible story, but it also becomes a new trip, the one that the film team takes and that replicates the one that Cantacronache took then. He does it with the help of one of the original members, the only one left alive, Emilio Jona, 92 years old.
Those songs, popular and political folklore, sound again 63 years later and they do so thanks to María Arnal or Nacho Vegas among others. They amplify the echo of those themes and give them new validity. In their voice, and in the present moment, they become new anthems against the extreme right and against the censorship that is exercised again decades later. An oral memory that is also historical and that in The Marseillaise of drunks It is highlighted in a journey through Spanish geography, a country where many wounds from Franco’s regime remain open.
Pablo Gil Rituerto came to this story almost a decade ago and practically by chance. “I was researching this period in the history of Spain, a bit in the heat of the social and political climate of ten years ago in Spain. I had the idea of working on a sound archive in a project that was frustrated, but I did stick with the idea of looking for it, because the film archive about that time is already known, but the sound archive is not. I bought a book and in the prologue it indicated, in a short introduction: ‘After 3,000 kilometers of travel through Spain. We returned to Turin with 9,000 feet of recorded recording tape.’ There I got on the trail of those songs, of that collection of poems that in the end had an archive base behind it,” says the director from the Valladolid festival.
Kids of 20 or 25 years old sing those songs now at demonstrations. They are still alive and there seems to be a flame. Let’s hope they can continue to evoke things
Pablo Gil Rituerto
— Filmmaker
When he found those recordings he realized that he had mythologized them. In his head they sounded “with heavenly voices,” and then he realized that “the archive was terribly austere and they were not professional singers, but in many cases anonymous people they met along the way, and in others, intellectuals and writers.” For this reason, they wanted to “reupdate the archive and in doing so make sense both at the time it was made and at the time it is listened to again.” To do this, they looked for “bodies that embodied those songs and made them their own, but that also took into account the political dimension of folklore.”
The historical context, when they began the project, is not the same as it is today, and in fact Gil Rituerto recognizes that “the social and political landscape in which we began to think about the film was totally different.” “We thought we would deal with an uplifted country, with a multiplicity of struggles that could rhyme with those songs. Then came a pandemic, came a whole social anemia and a lack of movements in the streets. I had sold that we would film the struggles of the present, but suddenly those struggles were not there or were not so evident, so we had to rethink where this meaning of the songs was,” he explains.
That is why they gave more voice to the groups that work for historical memory, because they have always been there, doing “background work for many years and that has not changed, while there are other struggles where there have been more ups and downs.” But now, upon releasing it, he realizes that those songs also serve as anthems of the present. He realized this when recently, at the Toulouse festival, he saw how many of those who attended, a population exiled during the war and the dictatorship, recognized the songs as “those they heard in their childhood.” But the new generations told him that “they are the ones that they, the kids of 20 or 25 years old, sing now in the demonstrations.” “There I realized that those songs were still alive, that there seems to be a flame, and let’s hope that they can continue to evoke things,” he says with hope.
One of the protagonists of the documentary ends up being Manuel Fraga, who, as the director of The Marseillaise of drunksis a figure that “occupies the centrality of the last half-century of the history of Spain.” “Without his intervention I believe that this songbook would not have had the impact it finally had. “He mounts a campaign against him, as he had done on other occasions, such as with the death of Julián Grimau, or with the famous Munich conspiracy.”
“In all these cases, the Information Service publishes a facsimile like the one that appears in the film, which is nothing more than an argument that they made available to the Spanish people to say that there was a conspiracy against them. But paradoxically, by doing that, he turned Cantacronache into a kind of martyr and the songbook into an object of desire. Fraga thought he was very smart, but without everything he put together, perhaps these songs would not have had such an impact,” he continues to remember and underlines the importance of the royalty-free edition that Giulio Einaudi published and that allowed those songs to travel around the world and They were also the breeding ground for the political songs of people like Víctor Jara, Quilapayún and Rolando Alarcón.
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