I got so excited about the two Joan Blondell films screening at Elliot Lavine's "Hollywood Before the Code: Nasty-Ass Films For a Nasty-Ass World!" (March 2-8, 2012), that I neglected to note that Lavine's opening night doublebill includes not only Three on a Match, starring Blondell and Ann Dvorak, but, another 1932 Dvorak vehicle: Howard Hawks' Scarface (featuring Paul Muni), which will be shown in a B&W 35mm Studio Archive Print.
Of Scarface, Lavine writes: "This blistering pre-code gangster saga towers over the rest—an unnerving portrait of a brutally evil and immoral man (patterned very loosely after Al Capone) obsessed with the power that crime and other perversions have carved out for him. Blissfully violent and sexually profane, Scarface sears itself onto your unsuspecting brain like few other films can."
Of Ann Dvorak, film historian Matthew Kennedy has already bemoaned her status as "shamefully neglected." Opening night at "Hollywood Before the Code: Nasty-Ass Films For a Nasty-Ass World!" redresses that neglect. Here's a couple of lovely publicity shots of Dvorak from Scarface. You would think from her experience in Three on a Match that Dvorak would have learned that cigarette smoking can be hazardous to your health; but, I guess during pre-Code the Surgeon General was merely a gleam in his father's eye?
As Juliet Clark wrote in her introductory program note for the Pacific Film Archive (PFA) retrospective "Joan Blondell: The Fizz on the Soda" (which ran June 13-29, 2008): "With a lush figure, bright, platter-sized eyes that missed nothing, and a mouth equally ready to dish a wisecrack, pull a sneer, or plant a kiss, actress Joan Blondell (1906–1979) was a staple of Hollywood's studio heyday. The fact that she rarely got first billing testifies more to the wealth of star power in her era than to any shortage of talent or hard work on her part: she made close to a hundred films over half a century, and brought freshness and spirit to every role."
Blondell is featured as a pre-Code staple in two "nasty-ass" films from Warner Brothers programmed into Elliot Lavine's "Hollywood Before the Code: Nasty-Ass Films For a Nasty-Ass World!", upcoming at the Roxie Theater (March 2-8, 2012); both films in B&W HQ Digital.
Lavine synopsizes the first, Three on a Match (1932), screening on opening night, Friday, March 2: "Three young women, friends since childhood, reunite after years of separation. But the random hand of fate has determined that at least one of them will descend into the depths of drugs, depravity and death before the breathless pace of this tragically exciting sixty-three minute pre-code melodrama has exhausted itself." That "random hand of fate"—later avoided by Sydney Greenstreet in Three Strangers (1946)—is the WWI superstition that if three people lit their cigarettes off the same match, the third was doomed to die.
Juliet Clark synopsizes in her PFA capsule: "Compressing thirteen years into sixty-three minutes of screaming headlines and sordid melodrama, Three on a Match draws a triangle of types—bad girl, good girl, rich girl—only to tweak the social-determinist schematic with bitter irony. A chance meeting in a beauty parlor reunites a trio of childhood classmates: Blondell the reform-school graduate, pegged in girlhood as 'just not serious enough'; Bette Davis, the serious one; and Ann Dvorak, the snobbish striver who, ambitions fulfilled, finds adult life 'tiresome and pointless.' As the scenario rapidly descends into an underworld of drugs and crime, it becomes clear that there are worse things to be than a bad girl. The film showcases Blondell's knack for combining charming vulgarity with basic decency, and Dvorak's alarming talent for depravity; only Davis's character is underdeveloped (although her full physical development is on frequent display). Watch for an early appearance by Humphrey Bogart."
In his biography Joan Blondell: A Life Between Takes (University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 2007), film historian Matthew Kennedy adds: "In early 1932 [Joan Blondell] made the trenchant Three on a Match, all about the divergent fortunes of school friends who meet ten years later. Vivian (Ann Dvorak) has married a wealthy lawyer. Ruth (Bette Davis) is a secretary, and Mary (Blondell) has taken to the stage after a stint in reform school. With its attention on violence, drugs, and kidnapping, Three on a Match was judged by the New York Times to be 'tedious and distasteful,' but it has become a minor pre-Code classic. It is a wonder of economic film making, as a fully realized story covering thirteen years is contained in sixty-three minutes. The plot hinges on Dvorak's character, who squanders loveless, conventional respectability and winds up ensnared in the underworld. The idiom-filled dialogue had forward momentum and gutter-inspired realism. With its uncompromising conclusion, Three on a Match became a primal scream against the injustices visited upon women." (Supra, p. 48)
When I spoke to Matthew Kennedy during the PFA "Fizz on the Soda" retrospective, he said of Three on a Match: "If you want gritty pre-Code, they don't come any grittier than Three on a Match. It's part of volume two of TCM's Forbidden Hollywood series and it involves three women who were friends in grade school and then it catches up with them several years later and the different paths their lives have taken. One in particular—played by the shamefully neglected Ann Dvorak—burns a hole through the screen. The three women are Dvorak, Blondell and Bette Davis and, interestingly, of the three the one who makes the least impression is Bette Davis. Her role is quite underwritten. What's also interesting about Three on a Match is that it's only 63 minutes long and it covers something like 15 years. It is the most tight, economical, without-feeling-rushed movie you will ever see. It's a text book lesson in filmmaking efficiency and storytelling; it's absolutely amazing that way."
According to a positive review of the film in the November 17, 1932 issue of The Spokane Spokesman, Three on a Match depicted the passage of time through "a brand new approach and treatment... The parade of time is cleverly portrayed through news headlines down the years, popular song sheets, reproduced on screen, and excerpts from the news weeklies from 1919 and 1932." Within these montages, Three on a Match made clever use of its titular superstition by including a graphic of a "Believe it or Not" newspaper clip explaining Swedish match tycoon Ivar Kreuger's attempt to get people to use more matches by exploiting the WWI superstition.
The second Blondell film in the "Nasty-Ass" lineup, screening on Tuesday, March 6, is Blondie Johnson (1933). Lavine writes: "Against a graphically depicted Depression-era backdrop, the story of a wise-cracking gal who rises to the top in the male-dominated crime rackets is played out with enough gusto and sexually charged ammo to load a dozen tommy guns. A rapid-fire exercise in economy and excitement, this is first-class pre-code entertainment of the highest order!"
In my conversation with film historian Matthew Kennedy referenced earlier, I asked him to profile a Blondell film not included in the PFA series that he would want audiences to catch and his prompt suggestion was Blondie Johnson. "It's one of the few times," Kennedy told me, "where Warner Brothers said to Blondell, 'You are in no uncertain terms the name above the title and you're not co-starring with a man, not supporting somebody, it's a movie about you.' She's in every scene. It's a fantastic, low-budget gangster movie where Blondell plays the gangster. She's not the gangster's moll; she's the gangster."
Kennedy wrote about the film in his Blondell biography: "Joan finally had her chance at a solo turn with Blondie Johnson. This was her movie outright; she worked every day of its four week schedule. Conceived as a female Little Caesar, Blondie undergoes an extreme transformation at the hands of an indifferent society. As a Depression victim, she appears before a magistrate begging for assistance so that she may care for her sick mother. She gets no sympathy, then goes home to find her mother dead. She hardens quickly. 'This city's going to pay me a living, a good living, and it's going to get back from me just as little as I have to give,' she says with bitter certainty.
"
Blondie Johnson gently twisted movie storytelling and sexual stereotypes. This time Joan was not a gangster's female sidekick, she was the gangster. She became that way by the malfunctions of government, not because of a predisposition to be bad as was often the case in roles played by Cagney and Robinson. There is humor and authenticity in Blondie Johnson, and Joan enjoyed a personal success. She showed a new command on screen, occupying the space with full, confident strides and persuasively shifting from charity case to tough Mafiosa to vulnerable woman in love. It was a tidy hit at the box-office, grossing $325,000, more than twice its negative costs." (Supra, pp. 50-51)
With miscegenation their common theme, The Cheat (1931) has been coupled with Frank Capra's The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933) at Elliot Lavine's "Hollywood Before the Code: Nasty-Ass Films For a Nasty-Ass World!", reeling at the Roxie Theater on Sunday, March 4 in a B&W 35mm Studio Archive Print. "An exotically adventurous film from a most unexpected director!" Lavine exclaims, "A beautiful American missionary is, through fate, thrown into a romantic interlude with a charismatic Chinese warlord. Breaking many Hollywood taboos—mainly the issue of miscegenation and, in this case sprinkled liberally with simmering displays of passion—Bitter Tea is a primal slice of pre-code erotica, a film that will amaze you from start to finish!"
In his autobiography The Name Above the Title (1971, The Macmillan Company), Frank Capra admitted it was because he had to get an Oscar® that he decided to film The Bitter Tea of General Yen. Secretly, he had thought his previous film American Madness (1932) would score him the statuette and—when he expressed his disappointment to Harry Cohn—Cohn told him, "Forget it. You ain't got a Chinaman's chance. They only vote for that arty junk." "Okay," Capra decided, "If the Academy voted only for arty films (not true), I would make the artiest film they ever saw—about miscegenation! That ought to stir up some arty votes." (Supra, p. 140)
For Capra it was easy to consider Barbara Stanwyck for the role of the young American missionary Megan Davis, who he envisioned as "externally frigid but internally burning with her 'call.' " It was General Yen who proved a casting problem. "I knew what I did not want," Capra wrote, "a well-known star made up as an Oriental. I looked for a tall, overpowering, real Chinese. But there were no tall Chinese in casting directories, or even in laundries; most Chinese-Americans were short Cantonese. After many interviews we settled on a not-too-well-known Swedish actor, Nils Asther. He was tall, blue-eyed, handsome; spoke with a slightly pedantic 'book' accent; his impressive face promised the serenity and mystery of a centuries-old culture.
"But how could we make a Swede look Oriental? His blue eyes would photograph steel-gray in black-and-white film. That was an unusual plus. But what about the slant of his eyes? The prevailing method of 'changing' Caucasian eyes into Oriental ones was to stretch and tape the outer ends of the eyes towards the ears, fooling practically nobody. Besides which the actors looked more hideous than Oriental. There must be a better, more natural way. There was.
"Closely studying Chinese features, I noticed two major differences between Oriental and Caucasian eyes: One, the upper Oriental eyelid is smooth and almost round, lacking the crease, or fold, of the Caucasian eyelid; and, two, Oriental eyelashes are much shorter than Western eyelashes. We followed up the two clues: The make-up man covered Nils Asther's upper eyelids with smooth, round, false 'skins,' and clipped his eyelashes to one-third their natural length. Without adding any other make-up we made photographic tests of Asther's face. On the screen he looked strange—unfathomable. The stiff, upper eyelids kept his eyes in a permanent half-closed position. Of a certain he was not a Caucasian—and his face looked natural, uncontorted! Bedecked in Mandarin costumes, and a fez-like, black, tall skullcap for added height, Asther could pass for an awe-inspiring warlord. I added one final touch: an eccentric walk—long slow strides with both his long arms moving back and forth together—in parallel—with each stride. By keeping the camera low to accentuate height, Nils Asther became General Yen—ruthless, cultured, mysterious, and devastatingly attractive."
But not without incident. "In clipping Nils Asther's eyelashes, we forgot that long eyelashes protected Caucasian eyes against harsh light. The first day we exposed him to the glare of studio sun arcs he came down with the worst case of eyeburn (klieg eyes) studio doctors had ever seen. He was ordered to remain locked up in a dark dressing room between shots, and to wear dark, red glasses during rehearsals. Only during actual photography did we expose his unprotected eyes to the sun or studio lamps. Despite those precautions, Asther suffered constant acute pain throughout the whole picture. Fearing for his eyesight, doctors attended him night and day, administering poultices, eyedrops, and pain killers. Yet the gallant Swede gave a performance that one has to call an elegant tour de force." (Supra, pp. 141-142)
"The result of these labors, not surprisingly," wrote David Sterritt for his Turner Classic Movie essay, "is a Hollywood stereotype." Less dismissive and, perhaps, my favorite write-up on The Bitter Tea of General Yen is Kevin Lee's for Senses of Cinema: "Back then, audiences could not accept a film that showed a Chinese man and a white woman achieving unprecedented levels of intimacy. Today, audiences may regard the white characters' stereotypical denunciations of Chinese culture, or the interracial love story with the Chinese romantic lead played by a Swedish actor in yellowface makeup, with either camp irreverence or a queasy sense of shame for Hollywood's racist legacy. It is a film orphaned between historical and cultural norms." Veined with poignant subjectivity, Lee qualified: "I think the film's failure to find a home within a prevailing social convention was what made me fall in love with it. ... This is what I find to be of such value in The Bitter Tea of General Yen; that it risks offence for the sake of constructing a dialogue, one fraught with so many perils in the realms of politics, religion, cultures and sex, that it would not be worth it if it weren't necessary. Despite the social prejudices that informed its production, it dared to carve out a space where two people might live not as Chinese and American, heathen and Christian, man and woman, but just 'you and me'—while reckoning soberly with the impossibility of achieving such a space. Whatever faults it may have, its daring puts contemporary films of similar subject matter to shame."
Though The Bitter Tea of General Yen once again failed to secure Capra his desired Oscar®—"Damn those Academy voters! Couldn't they recognize a work of art when they saw one?"—it did bear the honor of being the first film to open the Radio City Music Hall in January 1933, even though scandalized audiences convinced the Hall to shorten the film's scheduled two-week run to eight days. The theme of miscegenation had been "made palatable and attractive as a natural outcome of passions molded by tumultuous times" (Wikipedia) and that proved unacceptable to the prejudices of the time, which contributed to the film's dubious distinction of being one of only two Capra films to lose money at the box office. As Barbara Stanwyck phrased it, "The women's clubs came out very strongly against it, because the white woman was in love with the yellow man and kissed his hand. So what! I was so shocked [by the reaction]. It never occurred to me, and I don't think it occurred to Mr. Capra when we were doing it" (quoted in Joseph McBride, The Catastrophe of Success, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1992, p. 281).
"My father warned me about men and booze, but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine."—Tallulah Bankhead.
My upcoming visit to San Francisco promises to reward me with cinematic treasures. First in line is Elliot Lavine's "Hollywood Before the Code: Nasty-Ass Films For a Nasty-Ass World!", reeling at the Roxie Theater from Friday, March 2 through Thursday, March 8. As detailed in the Roxie film notes: "It's been nearly fifteen years since the last great Hollywood Pre-Code Festival at the Roxie Theater but ... the Roxie is proud to announce its exciting return to blatantly profane pre-code motion picture entertainment.... Hollywood films produced before early 1934 were often marked by an unwholesome indifference to delicate sensibilities. Filled with erotically charged images, dangerous, graphic violence, and bizarrely aberrant behavior, these are films that over seventy-five years later continue to batter us with an arsenal of artistic bravura!"
As a huge Tallulah Bankhead fan, I am delighted to have the chance to watch my foghorn-voiced diva in this Pre-Code vehicle The Cheat (1931), directed by Broadway mogul George Abbott and co-starring Harvey Stephens and Irving Pichel in a B&W 35mm Studio Archive Print. Having seen the 1915 Cecil B. DeMille version with Sessue Hayakawa and Fannie Ward, I'm intrigued to see where Bankhead and Abbott will take this provocative tale of white slavery and miscegenation.
In her eponymous autobiography (1952:191), Tallulah Bankhead candidly admitted that all three of her 1931 ventures with Paramount Astoria—Tarnished Lady, My Sin and The Cheat—were banal. Despite their talent, these films "fizzled". "Why?" she mused, "For the same reason that though the eggs, the cracker crumbs and the salt used for the soufflé may be topnotch the resultant dish may be rancid." Paramount was teetering on bankruptcy and their "corporate jitters were reflected in their products," she surmised. "Patched, scissored, and victimized by all sorts of hocus-pocus", these "operas" (as she termed them) ended up messes.
The December 12, 1931 review in The New York Times granted reprieve from Bankhead's own disappointment, however, praising the film as "a most satisfactory production", no masterpiece but captivating, and noted that it was gratifying to observe the "handsome and talented" Bankhead—"who has been somewhat unfortunate with her previous screen vehicles"—at last appearing in one that "really merits attention."
At DVD Verdict, Daryl Loomis offers that "this remake of the even more bizarre 1915 Cecil B. Demille original has shocking moments even today. Tallulah Bankhead was a phenomenal actress and her lead performance, guilty and innocent at once, is dripping with sexuality. ...[T]hose interested in early 20th Century America's fixation on Oriental culture will [find] a lot to sink their teeth into."
Glenn Erickson adds at DVD Talk: "The script equates 'Asian' with 'perverse'. Pichel has spent a good deal of time in the Orient, and his mansion is decked out in Japanese style. For a party, he dresses Bankhead in an elegant Chinese outfit, like a trophy. The script gives him some barbaric Eastern ideas about sex—like a secret cabinet with dolls fashioned after his female conquests. When Bankhead refuses to play ball at the last minute, he brands her with a hot iron, to claim her as his possession! Like a demented version of The Letter, further complications involve a shooting and a rather hilariously exaggerated trial, where, of course, the 'truth burned into the flesh' must be publicly revealed. With Bankhead overdoing most of her scenes, it gets pretty sticky. The Production Code specifically rules out branding as acceptable subject manner; almost certainly with this film in mind."
At The Sheila Variations, Sheila O'Malley asserts that "Blue Velvet has nothing on the perversity shown in 1933′s The Cheat." To illustrate same, she cites the film's opening sequence where a tuxedoed Hardy Livingstone ("played with stiff creepiness by Irving Pichel") makes a welcoming speech to the wealthy party-goers attending a fundraiser. "His first line of the speech is something like, 'I suppose anything I say right now will seem rather banal…' And there is a snicker around the table, and one guy calls out, 'Careful, there are ladies present!' and someone else says, 'Nice word!' What I am trying to say is that the movie opens with a joke about anal sex—in the midst of a chi-chi fundraiser. Laughter runs around the room, and Livingstone, the creep, continues, 'As I said, it might be banal…' Another burst of knowing laughter. It takes a dirty mind to hear the word 'banal' and immediately think of assholes—but that is what the movie does. Everyone in the scene is in on the joke. It's not a 'code'. It's out in the open."
O'Malley provides a thorough narrative scene-by-scene synopsis of The Cheat, describing Bankhead's character as "a woman who knows how to handle men. She's got the banter down, she has an air of plausible deniability, and yet she also projects a smoldering kind of wild sexuality." Of Bankhead herself, O'Malley writes: "There's something about Tallulah that could never seem young. I am sure she was a child at some point, but she probably had a middle-aged soul from the beginning."
Originally entitled Buhl (2010), Jaffe Zinn's debut feature experienced identity issues when its French distributor Rezo Films expressed apprehensions that Buhl would be—as Zinn explained to Melissa Davlin of the Magic Valley Times-News—"something that would be hard to pronounce or hard to remember on an international scale." So his film was re-titled Magic Valley (2010)—"interesting," Zinn explained in an early interview for Mademoiselle Robot, "because it is misleading." Facebook / Twitter.
Whether Zinn's earlier award-winning short Bliss (2003) was named after another torporous small town in southern Idaho or was a wry spit in the eye of that ol' blissmongerer Joseph Campbell, I'm not quite sure; but, it suggests that Buhl followed suit not only as nomenclature but as a film as specific to place as to state of mind. What can you say about growing up in Idaho when fagbashing is a spectator sport? And when suicide by exacto knife becomes a party option after graduation? By local focus, Zinn captures a universal implication that violence and/or death can result from adolescent frustration and boredom.
Magic Valley—whose tagline is "One day. Several lives. One secret."—debuted in the Viewpoints sidebar at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival, which profiled a category of filmmakers with distinctive perspectives from their own regions (Magic Valley was chosen for "its unique Western sentiment"). Tribeca programmer Genna Terranova synopsized: "TJ Waggs [Kyle Gallner], a high school student living in the small town of Buhl, Idaho, carries the burden of a terrible secret on his shoulders. And he's not the only one having an off-day: A local fish farmer [Brad William Henke] confronts a selfish neighbor that has carelessly poisoned his crop, the shifty county sheriff [Scott Glenn] neglects his duties and uses his patrol car for his own personal gain, and a mom [Alison Elliot] is too busy fussing over the family dog to notice her missing daughter. To make matters worse, two preschoolers playing in the fields have chosen an unusual playmate—one who is the common thread linking all these characters together.
"Writer-director Jaffe Zinn's atmospheric vision is a ruminative look at a bored and numbed town on the verge of a wake-up call. His keen voice also speaks profoundly to the disconnection of community and the decline of morale in a struggling recession-worn American society. Paced and shot with restrained elegance, highlighting a standout performance by rising talent Kyle Gallner, Zinn's Magic Valley strives to capture who and where we are before the next defining moment happens."
Zinn confirmed in his director's statement for the film's press kit that he "wanted to make a movie examining the daily lives of people unknowingly in the midst of a tragedy, and what it means to be unaware of what is just around the corner."
Reviews from Tribeca were solid. At Variety, Ronnie Scheib praised Zinn and cinematographer Sean Kirby (Zoo, The Tillman Story) for infusing "each widescreen vignette with a palpable sense of portent, as if each bore the oddly intense coloration of memory." (A sampling of Kirby's intense lensing can be seen at the film reel offered at his site.) At The Atlantic, Benjamin Mercer found Magic Valley to be a "pleasant surprise" and qualified: "The basic structure of the Buhl, Idaho–set film might seem familiar to anyone who's seen more than a handful of American independents over the last decade or so: discrete storylines, their relationships to one another revealed gradually, converge around a single tragedy. But the tale is exceedingly well told, with a slow build that doesn't feel strained, and evocative photography by Sean Kirby. And the cast, anchored by Kyle Gallner and Scott Glenn, doesn't sound a false note."
At Film Stage, despite some reservations, Nick Newman concluded that Magic Valley "stands out among much of its indie brethren in its ability to avoid the cliches of a story like this, while not being afraid to take its time to ... actually establish some mood. It's a clever little movie." By year's end Newman included Magic Valley as one of the Top 10 Directorial Debuts of 2011, reiterating: "What a shame that this never found distribution. Jaffe Zinn's first outing as a director is a delicate, moody anti-mystery that takes conventions of the 'murdered teen' story and spins them on their head. Thanks to quiet language and contemplative direction, this ranks as one of the best independent films I saw in 2011." At Culture Blues, Jeff Hart appreciated the "understated performances from actors whose characters actually resemble human beings, slowly building a sense of place and community, eventually delivering a tragedy made all the more painful by the fact that we knew it was coming." At The New York Post, V.A. Musetto dubbed Magic Valley the "sleeper hit" of the festival and described it as "an American film with European sensibilities." Finally, at Backslash Reviews, Alan Zilberman praised that—for a slice-of-life drama—"Zinn does not shy away from the darker dimensions of his character's lives. No apologies are made for them, and Zinn instead tries to do them justice with an unflinching eye. Repeated images become a evocative metaphor for their desperation, and as the characters converge on a single event, Zinn hints a shared disposition led to tragedy."
IndieWIRE interviewed Zinn at Tribeca, where he told them that ideas usually come to him in the form of very specific images. "With Magic Valley, there were two images that sparked the idea: a pond full of dead golden trout and the image of two young boys finding a body in a field." Although he didn't want to go into much detail with regard to those images, he knew "that they were connected thematically by the idea of suffocation." On the Internet, perhaps the most widely-circulated video interview at Tribeca was with Zinn and actor Matthew Gray Gubler, who played Mok, "a metalhead fishmonger", due no doubt to Gubler's immense fanbase.
From Tribeca, Magic Valley had its international premiere at the Rome Film Festival, where Jordan Mintzer from The Hollywood Reporter was less impressed, conceding that Magic Valley was "exquisitely shot" and "aesthetically impressive" but "dramatically underwhelming." His main complaint lay with Gallner's "opaque" performance, though he favored Henke as "especially convincing as an earnest farmhand whose bad day is about to get much worse."
Magic Valley then had its Nordic premiere at the Stockholm Film Festival, where the programmers noted: "Perhaps Zinn is able to shoulder Gus Van Sant's cape as the foremost chronicler of Idaho life?" At Stockholm, Zinn granted a personable video interview. By way of Poland, Magic Valley found its way to the Dubai International Film Festival where Shariq Madani wrote at We Are the Movies: "Magic Valley is about the distractions and pass-times people indulge in when faced with an everyday mundane life. It also shows how each generation has its own innocent and naive fascination with violence. This film is a very confident and promising debut by the director."
Magic Valley's international festival pedigree confirms it as a wise choice for SVFF's opening night selection and it promises to bring a spectacular dimension necessary to any fledgling festival. Zinn is expected to attend, along with actor Scott Glenn, himself a 32-year Blaine County, Idaho resident. Glenn spoke to Tony Evans at the Idaho Mountain Express about his involvement with the film, and likewise conducted a video interview.
The multi-talented Zinn is likewise an illustrator and painter (certain illustrative techniques are apparent in his short films), as well as one half of the indie pop duo Folded Light (along with Bethany Toews).
Truth is, I still haven't quite figured out where I "fit" into Idaho's film scene. Although I've been intrigued by its regional aesthetics and focus on local production values since first attending the 2007 Idaho International (now in indefinite hiatus), I'm not quite at peace with how so much of the work I've seen to date is content to stay confined within state borders supported by local audiences. Then there's the obvious fact that I haven't truly "settled" into my retirement home in Boise, Idaho, aware that I have indeed left my cinephilic heart in San Francisco, where I regularly return for my press screenings, cinematheque revivals and interview ops; where I remain a member of the San Francisco Film Critics Circle; and where I feel I am a welcome member of a thriving film community. I keep hoping for the same here in Idaho; but—other than a friend or two I've made in the past half year—Idaho remains primarily a place I come to write up my festival experiences from elsewhere.
Thus, it's with sincere regret that I'll be out of the state when Idaho launches its inaugural Sun Valley Film Festival (SVFF) come March 15-18, 2012. The press release is, perhaps, necessarily inflated, boasting that SVFF's four-day festival "will screen films at the Sun Valley Opera House and the Magic Lantern Cinemas in Ketchum, and will bring filmmakers and film connoisseurs together to experience the best of the entertainment industry." SVFF promises a wide-range of film experiences, from shorts films, television and web series to documentaries and feature dramas and comedies, including family-friendly childrens programming, plus a morning discussion series aptly entitled "Coffee Talk" where filmmakers and industry experts are expected to engage their audience in a range of entertainment industry-related topics.
To date, however, a full program line-up has yet to be announced and ramp-up events are still in the seminal processes of fundraising and soliciting corporate sponsorship. They've done well. So far, CBS Affiliate KMVT (out of Twin Falls), Indieflix, Wild Gift, SVPN, Zion's Bank, and Concierge Q Travel Magazine have leant media and corporate muscle, while Tito's Handmade Vodka is the festival's official beverage, Sun Valley Resort the official hotel, and Alaska Airlines their official carrier. Additional funding has been provided by the Idaho Board of Tourism and the Frances E. Streit Foundation.
Local film production remains a presiding theme throughout the few features and documentaries announced to date, most of which have strong roots to filmmaking within the state and within local budgets and incentives. To that effect, SVFF is presenting a "One In A Million" Award to honor filmmakers who have made a standout film for under a million dollars, and a Vision Award, which recognizes producers and their filmmaking journeys. Naturally, there will also be an Audience Award.
All that being said, the question remains why films should be shot on location in Idaho rather than elsewhere? As if to definitively answer that question, SVFF has invited their wandering own back to the festival. For example, former Buhl resident Jaffe Zinn opens the festival with Magic Valley (2011), produced by former Idahoan Heather Rae (Frozen River, 2008), while actor / screenwriter Jay Pickett—a graduate of Caldwell's Vallivue High School and Boise State—returns from Woodland Hills, California with Soda Springs (2012), whose tagline speaks to the overall state of Idaho filmmaking and / or its film culture: "Coming home is easy. It's staying that's the hard part."
Magic Valley co-producer and Boise native Laura Mehlhaff explained to Boise Weekly's Jeremiah Robert Wierenga that with much of the secondary cast and crew pulled from the Idaho filmmaking community (southern Idahoans Becky Hagerott and Frank Holesinsky had small speaking parts as extras), she hoped Magic Valley could serve as a test-case for economic programs designed to bring more films to Idaho. "Idaho has such a great range to offer," she said, "not only in terms of talented actors and crew, but also diverse landscapes and a great cost of living. Yeah, we didn't have a tax incentive to support us, but because we could get access to things much more cheaply than we could in other states and because the people here are such a community and were so supportive, in the end it did make sense for us for us to be in Idaho financially as well as creatively."
Actor Scott Glenn, a 32-year Blaine County resident, told Tony Evans at the Idaho Mountain Express that Magic Valley had a positive economic impact on Gooding County, employing four actors, a production crew of eight from out of state and a "bunch of helpers" from Boise. "Even when a small film comes to a community, there's a big economic and emotional impact," he said. "Its good for a community. For better or worse, this culture is excited about movies. Everyone wants to help out."
Agustí Villaronga's Black Bread (Pa Negre, 2010) had its North American premiere at the Palm Springs International Film Festival in its 2011 edition and returned one year later for a one-off screening to celebrate the film's resounding success over the course of the year, including winning nine Goya Awards and being the first Catalan-language film to represent Spain as its official submission to the foreign language category of the Academy Awards®. Sadly, it did not make the final short list but there can be no question that the film has had incredible international reach, compelling the hearts of audiences worldwide.
Born in Palma de Mallorca in 1953, Villaronga obtained his degree in Art History at the University of Barcelona. He began combining work as a professor of visual image, film critic and artistic direction in the theatre. In addition, he has worked as an actor in various film and theatre productions. After directing various short films, his first full length film In A Glass Cage (Tras el cristal) opened in 1987. With Moon Child (El niño de la luna, 1989) he won a Goya award for best original screenplay. In 2000, one of his most personal works, The Sea (El mar), obtained the Manfred Salzberg Award at the Berlin Film Festival. Villaronga's filmography has generally been distinguished by its distance from commercial circuits. In 2002, together with Isaac P. Racine and Lydia Zimmermann, he made the film Aro Tolbujhin. En la mente del asesino, an audiovisual experiment mixing styles, genres and film formats. My thanks to Núria Costa Salvà of Working At Weekend for arranging time for me to sit down with director Villaronga and his producer Isona Passola.
In full disclosure, this is a paraphrased transcript. With my simple command of Spanish and his of English, my conversation with Villaronga was a mixture of both languages with some third inbetween language of instinct and good will thrown in for good measure. I trust I have remained true, however, to the tenor of our discussion. [This conversation is not for the spoiler-wary!]
* * *
Michael Guillén: Agustí, you're a filmmaker who isn't as well-known as he should be. Your first films achieved a certain notoriety and controversy, but it wasn't until Black Bread that you broke through to an international audience. This is the film that has caught people's attention.
Agustí Villaronga: That's true, yes.
Guillén: Can you speak to why that is? Because it shares similar themes with your previous films, though perhaps a bit more matured. Still, why do you think audiences are responding to your vision at this time?
Villaronga: This is a question Isona and I have asked ourselves many times. Why is this my first film to have such success? Just as you've realized, there are many of the same elements in Black Bread as there are in my other films—children in violent situations, ambiguous morality, homosexuality—but, perhaps, less intensely pronounced in Black Bread. This film doesn't grab the audience by the back of the neck like my previous films. Its approach is a bit more relaxed. Also, perhaps, the characters in Black Bread are more ... normal? In my other films, The Sea for example, the characters are mentally unbalanced and sick with tuberculosis; but, in Black Bread there's an old grandmother, the boy Andreu (Francesc Colomer) and his friends, and the father Farriol (Roger Casamajor) who loves his son. Maybe the father is also a murderer; but, he loves his son. He's an ordinary person whose personality has been changed by extraordinary circumstances in his life. By contrast, the two boys in The Sea are already crazy from the beginning of their story and that, possibly, makes it more difficult for the audience to identify with them.
Guillén: Speaking of The Sea, Roger Casamajor—who plays Andreu's father Farriol in Black Bread—is the same actor who played Ramallo in The Sea?
Villaronga: Yes.
Guillén: Which is interesting because his performances moreorless articulate the difference between these two films. He was almost uncomfortable to watch in The Sea because his performance as Ramallo was so intense; but, in Black Bread the intensity of his performance is contained and reflects that the tone of Black Bread is—I don't want to say calmer—but characterized by restraint. Is this a consequence of your maturation as a filmmaker or the effect of the original material on which the film is based, namely Emili Teixidor's novel of the same name?
Villaronga: It has partly to do, yes, with the fact that I'm older. That's important. Time changes a person, especially the way one is deceived by life. You fall in love and are betrayed by love. You try to create but have no success. These deceptions change you. You were someone specific once and then you are who you have become and you don't want to do things the same way. There's no denying that the success of Black Bread has made me very happy, but that's not why I make films. Success is no longer the most important thing in my life as it was, perhaps, when I was younger.
Guillén: You say that success is not the reason you make films, but won't the success of Black Bread influence the way you make films in the future? Hasn't it opened doors for you?
Villaronga: Yes, it has, and I want my films to open doors. I've always wanted to be accepted by my audiences. Although it was something I'd always imagined, it didn't happen; but now I'm happy—not just because of the success—but because different kinds of people are now connecting to the ideas and the feelings that I'm expressing in my films. That's the most important thing for a filmmaker.
Isona Passola: But Agustí, even though you may not have had success in terms of large audiences, I've accompanied you to many festivals in many countries and wherever we go you have fans who love your work. You have many interesting people who wait for your films. But you're a strange bird, you are.
Perhaps the success of Black Bread has to do with the fact that the novel on which it's based was a bestseller in Catalonia, in Spain? You can recognize Agustí's vision in every frame of the film, but Teixidor's novel was already quite accepted by all the major literati of Spain who are able to imagine the book in the film. The novel is full of elements that Agustí loves.
Guillén: And you saw that when you read the book, right? You were the one who brought the novel to Agustí?
Passola: Yes! I saw that the book had all the elements that Agustí loves, but not only the book. Emili Teixidor is a good writer. He has many tales and stories and novels that have subjects that interest Agustí and that are similar to his own subjects. A good author like Teixidor tends to work around the same ideas—the Civil War, the conflicts with children, the ambiguous morality of the adults, mysterious little villages where everything is hidden—and when I read Teixidor's novel, I instantly thought, "This would be wonderful for Agustí!" But I never dreamt his film would be so successful. When the film was released on DVD in Spain, it sold more than 150,000 copies in just two months, more than the release of Harry Potter. We've seen the same success in Japan and China. Why it should be so popular in those territories, I don't know.
Guillén: But that's what I'm trying to get at: to figure out why that is, why this film has had such immense popular appeal. I imagine myself as a typical American who is stupid about so many things that have happened or are happening in the world. [Both Villaronga and Passola laugh.] I sometimes feel that—if it weren't for film—I wouldn't know anything. This is one of the reasons I love film: it forces me to look at narratives with which filmmakers from their own countries address with concern and passion. By example, Spain's Civil War and Franco's post-war regime: you were a child while Franco was still in power?
Villaronga: Yes.
Guillén: What was that like for you? I presume it has influenced why, perhaps, you are looking at these historical atrocities through the eyes of children?
Villaronga: Ah. Of course, I have been very influenced by experiencing firsthand Franco's regime because the post-war in Spain continued long past the '40s, which is the time depicted in The Sea and Black Bread. The effects of the post-war continued into the '50s, the '60s, and even into the '70s, especially in one respect: religious repression.
Passola: The false moralism; the pseudo-moralism.
Villaronga: For me, that constant feeling of picado, of sin, terrified me as a child and into my young adulthood. I was fortunate in being able to travel outside of Spain as a young man, by which I could compare what was happening within Spain. But I have to ask you now the first question you asked us: what do you think is the reason this film is so popular with audiences? Why have audiences accepted Black Bread?
Guillén: I think it has to do with the narrative viewpoint of the children, much like Victor Erice's Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena, 1973) and Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno, 2006). I suspect audiences are more able and willing to look at these historical atrocities if they are framed through the eyes of children, or—as Bay Area journalist Johnny Ray Huston has suggested—through the resistance of children. Is it because audiences identify with the children in the sense that they do not know the historical context so they come at it through the perspective of the children who, themselves, do not understand the historical moment they are experiencing? In other words, is it that audiences perceive these historical atrocities with the same innocence as the children in these narratives and feel—with the children—that their own innocence is being desecrated? As the children are learning, we in the audience are learning at the same time. So I presume it is that element of identification that has had so much to do with the success of Black Bread and, previously, Pan's Labyrinth. I don't offhand know how Spirit of the Beehive was received by audiences upon its release, though I know it was critically praised.
Further, films I have seen about Spanish fascism in the cities are quite different from films about Spanish fascism set in the countryside, which again offsets a certain urban sophistication against the (perhaps romanticized?) innocence of rural folk. Your films, both The Sea and Black Bread, are set in the countryside. So I would have to ask you why you have chosen that pastoral setting to reflect this historical moment?
Villaronga: More because the literary sources for my films have talked about the countryside, both Teixidor's writing for Black Bread and Blai Bonet's novel for The Sea. I, myself, am not from the country. I was born and raised on the island of Mallorca within the city, the capitol. I didn't know so much about the country.
Passola: Perhaps this is also one of the keys to the film's success? People love the life of the countryside which Teixidor has described so realistically in his novel, and which Agustí has portrayed faithfully in his film. Agustí chose all the locations for his film so that they would match Teixidor's locations.
Villaronga: It's interesting that you say that, Isona, because people frequently mention how realistic Black Bread is, especially older audience members who were living in the countryside of Catalonia during the 1940s. They say, "Oh, it's just as I remember." But it's not true, eh? It's a convention. The locations of the film seem realistic, the village seems rural and mysterious, but it's actually a very sophisticated reconstruction. Even the dialogue spoken by the characters seems naturalistic, but again it's not true: the language is full of poetic exchanges. The costumes appear simple but they are elaborately designed. The resolution of all of this is that the film arrives as something real, as if it is happening at that moment in time.
Passola: I think what people are seeing as "realistic" is the truth of the story.
Villaronga: But that truth is internal; it's not really in the external details.
Passola: Your question intrigues us because it is the question that every day we ask ourselves. Our success feels strange.
Guillén: Let's shift to something of a delicate question—and I don't mean to be offensive at all, so please bear with me—but, last year at this time I was talking to Icíar Bollaín and she mentioned to me that within the film community in Spain there was something of a political tug-of-war going on between her film Even the Rain (2010) and Álex de la Iglesia's The Last Circus (2010). Do you feel in any way that—because their two films were so at odds—that Black Bread slipped through to victory, notably at the Goyas?
Villaronga: Ah! This is another question altogether about the prizes of the Academy. This is different than the question of how audiences have accepted the film. There was this fight going on at the Goya Awards because one of the filmmakers was the President of the Academy and the other was the Vice-President and they both had films in competition, and it is possible that our film Black Bread, which was considered less important, gained a certain focus within that controversy.
Passola: But let me say one thing: Agustí is beloved. He's a director who is loved a lot by the academic professionals of Spain. I know this for a fact. I think that the Academy decided, at last, to give him the recognition he had long deserved. For me, this is clear because the voting was very clear. Also, it's true that the Catalan voting was important in this case because in Catalonia everybody loved Black Bread and 50% of the Academy members are Catalan. Everyone knew that Agustí needed to be recognized and accepted definitively. It was important. And when Black Bread won at the Goyas, the joy of the people at the ceremony was palpable. This was not just a passing fad of popularity.
Guillén: It's interesting to hear you describe this because, here in the United States and among American film journalists, Black Bread's win was perceived as something of a dark horse victory, whereas you frame it as something long overdue in Spain. Admittedly, that's probably because your work has not had much distribution in the United States. Black Bread is the only film of your's that I've seen in a moviehouse, I watched The Sea online at MUBI, and have In A Glass Cage waiting for me by way of Netflix rental when I return home; but, because I have a great love for genre films, I familiarized myself with the body of your work through a series of erudite online career overviews, notably Chris Gallant's article for Kinoeye, Donald Totaro and Roberto Curti's pieces for Offscreen, and Quim Casa's essay for last year's retrospective at Rotterdam (with an attendant video interview conducted during their festival). If I may, I'd like to pursue some of the themes culled out of your body of work by those respective writers.
First of all, Donald Totaro has described your work as "paracinematic", a term coined by genre theorist Jeffrey Sconce, which Totaro describes as being "part of what Carol Clover and Linda Williams have called 'body genres'; genres which place as their prime aim the titillation of the body, those being horror (violence, blood, gore), porn (sexual arousal) and melodrama (weeping)." Your talent—from the little I've been able to see of your work so far—is how you combine these genres with the tropes of arthouse cinema. It strikes me that you're quite conscious about how you employ horror, let's say, to elicit poetry. Am I correct?
Villaronga: Yes, that's true.
Passola: I very much like this theory that Agustí combines art house with genre and that this creates poetry. I know Agustí is a poet. He doesn't know it, but I know it.
Guillén: We both know it. [Villaronga duck his head in embarrassment.]
Passola: I was interested in your comment about how Americans have reacted to Agustí's work. I think American audiences have been receptive and open-minded to his films and I especially feel that now that we've shown Black Bread around several cities in the United States. People usually say that European audiences are sophisticated and close-minded and that Americans are the opposite and I always thought that was just a theory; but, now—through our festival experience of Black Bread in the U.S.—I think this theory is true. Here in the United States audiences love stories about children; in Europe, no.
Guillén:Is that so?
Passola: American audiences are so open to being personally affected by Black Bread, which has created a new perception for me about American people.
Guillén: I think American audiences love genre films, which account for their popularity, perhaps moreso than arthouse cinema. Which is why I frequently ask filmmakers how conscious they are about using the tropes of genre to traffic their films to a broader audience. Because even though it's arthouse cinema that seems to traffic best among film festivals, I suspect it's genre films that the majority of audiences really want.
Passola: Are you sure? You think people want genre?
Guillén: It's just my opinion, but I suspect audiences want entertainment, and—generally speaking—are more entertained by genre than arthouse cinema.
Passola: But Black Bread is not a genre film.
Guillén: Oh, but I disagree. Black Bread has definite genre elements, even as it traffics as foreign arthouse cinema. It has melodramatic elements, which make it sad.
Villaronga: Melodramatic, yes.
Guillén: And it utilizes the horrific.
Villaronga: Yes, the fantastic.
Guillén: These are all genre conventions, but—as I said earlier—Agustí employs them in the service of arthouse cinema, again what Jeffrey Sconce calls paracinema and which Donald Totaro synopsizes as "a cross-generic cinema which eliminates the distinction between high art and trash / exploitation / low art by focusing on visceral emotionalism, on affect." What elevates Black Bread and Agustí's previous films above mere genre, however—what can be understood as their arthouse effect—is their moral ambiguity, which complicates the limitations of genre. What fascinates me in both The Sea and Black Bread, for example, is their exploration of the nature of evil. I would argue that evil is actually natural to the human animal, whereas good is something that has to be learned and practiced.
Villaronga: But this is your theory, no?
Guillén: Yes, but I'm not alone in thinking this. I've come to this attitude from studying with psychologists and theologians; but, what I'm trying to get at with regard to your films particularly, is the contagious nature of evil and how—when the children in your films witness evil, especially in The Sea—they become susceptible to evil, their innocence falls under evil's influence, or what is already evil within them by nature is triggered by experience. Evil becomes like an infection and spreads. For me that was the strength and the horror of the opening sequence in The Sea where the children witness murder and then commit murder and suicide themselves. The evil of adults enters through the eyes of children and taints their innocence and, at the same time, triggers the ethical response to resist evil.
Villaronga: That's true that evil is contagious but it's my philosophy that children are innocent at the beginning. It's the times they live in and the things that happen to them that change them. In four or five of my films this same theme happens: there is the child, there is the war, the war changes sensibilities, and some of the people are changed for the worse and become bad people. The violence is like a seed.
Passola: We had an amazing interview with psychiatrist Luis Rojas Marcos about this very subject, included in a video of people who have encouraged Black Bread's nomination to the Oscars®.
Villaronga: Rojas Marcos has written a book Las Semillas de la Violencia (The Seeds of Violence), in which he has explained what I am expressing quite poorly here.
Passola: But concerning Black Bread, Rojas Marcos has spoken about the post-traumatic stress that stays inside of people after horrific experiences like the Spanish Civil War and its post-war regime. When a situation is a collective trauma in the first or even the second generation, it remains long after in succeeding generations. He speaks very well about this theory as it applies to Black Bread and links it, of course, to the tragedy of the 9/11 World Trade Center. He was called in to help victims of that tragedy.
Villaronga: For me it is a pity that we are talking about such interesting topics when I have such a simple command of English. These topics are already very difficult to discuss.
Guillén: Please, speak to me in Spanish. I will understand you, even if I don't have a full command of spoken Spanish.
Villaronga: I've already mentioned that I was raised with a specific representation of religion, but—in my opinion—human spirituality is more important than religion, especially when we are talking about how evil makes people psychologically—i.e., spiritually—sick. Therefore, I adore those people who clean the world of this sickness. Normally, most of the people who watch my movies think that I am perverse; but, it's not the truth. In the last seven to eight years, I have become very involved with Buddhist teachings. They have changed me, which of course means they have changed the nature of my work. Many of these things remain unclear for me and I'm not sure how they play into my work; but, basically, I want to think the best of people and the world.
Passola: It's true! Agustí is very generous, moreso than I am. When I'm critical of someone, he'll say, "Don't say that." He always forgives everyone for everything. His spirituality is a very important element of his films.
Guillén: This I understand from Agustí's critique of the Catholic religiosity evident in his films. I was going to ask you if you were still Catholic, but now you tell me you are leaning the way of Buddhism, which believe me I fully support. But what I understand from reading about the cultural reaction to the repressive Catholicism of the post-war Franco regime is that—when Franco finally fell from power and Spanish artists and intellectuals felt they could express themselves again—one of the first waves of that expression was a collective need to "let it all hang out" and to explore the pseudo-morality you referenced earlier used by the Catholic hierarchy to enforce the unnatural and the artificial, and to do so by underscoring the perverse hypocrisies of the Catholic hierarchy and its support of fascism, something Guillermo del Toro emphasized when I spoke to him about Pan's Labyrinth.
This leads me to ask about one of your more controversial thematic concerns: the use of homoeroticism in your films. In The Sea it struck me that the homoeroticism was being placed alongside all that was fascist and evil; but, in Black Bread, the homosexual character was clearly the victim in this narrative and the violence committed against him was the seed of evil. Which obliges me to ask—despite what we've already determined are similar elements—how closely does your film follow the novel?
Villaronga: [Chuckles.] It's very far from the book. Of course, Teixidor's vision is easier; it's a simpler narrative line to follow.
Passola: It's more black and white.
Villaronga: When Isona came to me with the book, I admitted to her that I didn't understand it very well, or why she wanted me to think about it for a film because it was so normal, so simple, so clear. I was also reluctant because there had already been many movies made about the Spanish Civil War. But then I read Teixidor's other works and was particularly impressed with The Portrait Of A Bird Killer and when I considered combining the two books, I became more enthused. For example, the character of Farriol the father in my movie is complicated. Half of him is a good man, as in the novel, and the other half—taken from Portrait Of A Bird Killer—is absolutely bad. By combining both, we created one complex character. By doing so, we were able to better describe how war visited misery upon these people. The melodrama becomes not just a melodrama but opens up into new possibilities of forgiveness.
Passola: Agustí always finds something good in the bad and something bad in the good. This is his ability. It was not in the book and it was not in my idea of what could be done with the book. Agustí's participation with this project was his capacity to make the morality of these individuals ambiguous.
Villaronga: Another example would be the girl Núria (Marina Comas). In the book she is girlish and constantly crying. But in The Portrait Of A Bird Killer, there is an 11-year-old boy who has lost his hand. Again, I combined the two characters and the composite was stronger.
Guillén: I respect what you're saying, but for me it was not so much about forgiving good people for what is bad within them. I don't want to forgive Farriol for what he's done; I want to understand him for what he's done, even if he's done so in a bad way. Your film thins the membrane between good and evil and shows how this membrane is within everyone, adult and child alike.
Villaronga: I like to dissect my main characters, open them up, to reveal all that is inside them. I'm not afraid of what I'll find.
Guillén: But even as you dissect your characters to reveal them, you are respectful of this mysterious process by which they can be both good and bad. This might be confusing to some of your audience members who, perhaps, would want the story to be more black-and-white like the novel; but, for me this is your poetic impulse. A poet asks you to go with an image to see what it makes you feel. The audience isn't supposed to always know everything, even as they feel many different things. This, for me, has always been the power of an image: that it can contain contradictions without resolution. For example, the sequence where you have the beautiful boy bathing by the water, moving his arms as if he were a bird flapping its wings is sublime and mysterious. Is he half bird? Who is he? Why does he appear just then in the story? Ultimately, it didn't matter to me because he was simply a beautiful image within a complicated narrative. It would be unfair to ask you: what does this specifically mean?
Passola: Further, the point of view is Andreu's point of view. He never discovers the whole truth. The film's point of view is that of the children and the boy doesn't fully understand everything that is happening. He discovers aspects of the truth. For me this is wonderful and Agustí and I often discussed whether or not audiences would understand these beautiful images; but, finally, he decided to just go ahead and film it the way he saw it.
Guillén: Another very mysterious sequence was when Andreu went into the cave and had a vision of what had actually happened in the past. Just a moment ago I said it wasn't fair to ask you what something specifically means; but, here I go contradicting myself because I want to confirm my impressions of this castration sequence. You set it up so vaguely with the ghost of the delicate boy Pitorliua buttoning up his shirt who is then approached by, I assume, the brother of Señora Manubens? She has forced her brother to marry a woman in another country at the same time that she has sought to discredit his inheritance so she can have everything for herself. She had paid Dionís and Farriol to scare off Pitorliua, but they took it too far and castrated him. Señora Manubens subsequently hired Farriol to kill Dionís, which is the opening sequence of the film. Am I following this correctly?
Villaronga: Perfect! [Laughs.]
Passola: [Laughs.] You are probably the only one who understands this!
Villaronga: You are very clever because there is only one clue in the film that explains this and it's when Andreu's mother Florència (Nora Navas) finally reveals to him that Pitorliua was castrated, which she does very quickly. But the important part is not that the audience understands fully the particulars of what has happened; the important part is that the boy realizes his father has lied to him.
Passola: But the ending of the film is tough because—despite the fact that the mother Florència loves Andreu—he chooses to cut himself loose from her because he feels betrayed by his father, even though she is a good mother.
Guillén: I was more affected by his cutting off ties with his cousin Núria, specifically when she came running after him and said, "You promised me" and he responded, "If I can leave my mother, I can leave you." That's what was important for me, that in order for him to become himself—a young man in his own right—he had to cut himself off from the feminine influences. The mystery of this narrative is that his father committed a crime that, in effect, allows Andreu to become independent, albeit by default. I understood this because I had to do the same in my own life. At the age of 15, I had to cut myself off from my family, cut myself off from my mother, so that I could go into the world to become myself.
Villaronga: Why?
Guillén: Well, it's complicated but, basically, it was because my individuality was being stifled by the traditions of my family. They were already meddling in my business and trying to manipulate who I would become.
Villaronga: Ah yes, they were trying to control you?
Guillén: Yes. I was a creative person with a will of my own and I couldn't stand their interference so the only thing I knew to do was to leave home at 15 to live on my own terms. I knew early on that I thought and felt differently than the rest of my family. This is also, perhaps, why I was struck in your film by how anyone who spoke the truth was characterized as crazy. I loved the sequence in the cemetery when Andreu encounters Pauletta (Laia Marull), the mother of his friend Culet, the boy who died, and she speaks the truth. Everyone wants to say she's crazy because the truth itself is crazy.
Passola: Laia Marull is a very important actress in our country.
Guillén: So to wrap up here, your films have exhibited this continuous thematic thread of concerns that have expressed your creative vision, culminating popularly with Black Bread. Do you feel you are done with these themes or will you continue to explore them in future films?
Villaronga: I don't know.
Passola: Agustí is accepting offers to make other films. For example, he just shot a television series Una carta para Evita (A Letter For Evita, 2011) about Evita Perón.
Guillén: You've just made a film about Evita Perón?!
Villaronga: I just finished shooting, yes. It's both about Evita Perón and Carmen Polo, the women of Franco. It's a fantastic story.
Guillén: Well, I certainly look forward to seeing that in the future, along with the rest of your work that I've not seen. Thank you so much for taking the time today to speak with me. Your work is beautiful.
Villaronga: I am very happy with all of your opinions.
I got so excited about the two Joan Blondell films screening at Elliot Lavine's "Hollywood Before the Code: Nasty-Ass Films For a Nasty-Ass World!" (March 2-8, 2012), that I neglected to note that Lavine's opening night doublebill includes not only Three on a Match, starring Blondell and Ann Dvorak, but, another 1932 Dvorak vehicle: Howard Hawks' Scarface (featuring Paul Muni), which will be shown in a B&W 35mm Studio Archive Print.
