film lessons
‘The impossible years’, by Enrique Fibla Gutiérrez, recovers the memory of Juan Piqueras, creator of the magazine ‘Our cinema’
The story of the film critic Juan Piqueras, creator of the magazine ‘Our Cinema’, who was shot in the first days of the military uprising of July 18, 1936, is not very well known. Now the book ‘The Impossible Years’, by Enrique Fibla Gutiérrez, recovers her memory.
Juan Piqueras Gutiérrez (Requena, Valencia, 1904 – Venta de Baños?, Palencia, 1936), critic, writer, poet and film historian, was a very important figure in Spanish culture during the years of the Republic. A friend of Luis Buñuel, with whom he directed the film club of ‘La Gaceta Literaria’, he was René Clair’s assistant in ‘A nous la liberté’, he created in 1932 the magazine ‘Nuestra cinema’, which would achieve notable international prestige, described by the French scholar and historian George Sadoul as “the most important publication on cinema in capitalist countries”, in which the great filmmakers of the time, such as Sergei Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Bela Balázs, Joris Ivens or Rene Clair, wrote. Piqueras also published in numerous newspapers and magazines of the time, and even came to prologue a popular edition of ‘Life is a Dream’, by Calderón de la Barca.
In 1930 he married in Paris the Aragonese Catalina Ketty González, with whom he had a son, who always helped him with translations and corrections of texts, was a representative of the Spanish production company Filmófono (in which Luis Buñuel worked) in Paris, He was a member of the Communist Party of Spain in the years of the Second Republic and in his last years he lived between Paris and Madrid.
In mid-July 1936, Juan Piqueras leaves his home in Paris loaded with a suitcase full of books to visit a friend in Oviedo. Ketty and his son stayed in Paris. They would never see each other again. Sick with a stomach ulcer, he had to change trains in Venta de Baños, a place where the railway lines of the North of Spain crossed, but his illness did not give him respite, so he had to stay in the town of Palencia where he was visited by a doctor who recommended complete bed rest. Staying at the Fonda de la Estación, there he was surprised by the military uprising of July 18, 1936. A few days later he would be taken out of bed in his pajamas and shot by the rebels without any kind of trial. His body remains missing, although it is intuited where he was buried.
His death was kept hidden for months, despite the efforts of his wife to find out about him, who traveled to the Francoist area in search of him (later he would have multiple problems returning to France, and until 1940, and thanks to a Francoist general, did not obtain the visa). His death was revealed by the French newspaper ‘L’Humanité’, in a obituary together with the also murdered Federico García Lorca in February 1937. In the 1980s, the Valencia Film Library, at the request of Ricardo Muñoz Suay, baptized one of his rooms with his name, but after a reform, it was replaced without any explanation, by that of Luis García Berlanga.
In the book ‘The impossible years’, Enrique Fibla (historian, critic and cultural animator, coordinator of debates at the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona) reviews in detail the life and work of Piqueras, framing it within the avant-garde movements of the 30s of the last century, as well as parallels with the fight for freedom in other places throughout the 20th century.
The painter Josep Renau painted a large portrait of Juan Piqueras, which can currently be seen inside the Requena Town Hall, where a street bears his name. It would not hurt that at the Gala de los Goyas, this Saturday in Valencia, his name would be claimed. Piqueras is still one of the many disappeared buried in a ditch. His life and his writings are today essential to know where we come from, and one of the bloodiest claims of our historical memory.