Raquel Piñeiro (Vigo, 1982) is one of those journalists with an eye trained to interpret the hidden meaning of apparently harmless elements of popular culture. His latest book, A country on the screen (GeoPlaneta), reads like an atlas of Spanish cinema but also like a history treatise that allows us to understand how the country has changed in front of the cameras of the directors and under the pens of the screenwriters, all on a rigorous, almost obsessive tour of the real and imaginary places of Spanish celluloid. In fact, he meets us at Plaza de los Cubos because it seems like a “telluric” place and he explains to us: “This square appears in Kidnappingbecause Zulueta lived here. Even in several of Almodóvar. In the 1990s it was a meeting point for Spanish neo-Nazis. It is incredible that in such a central place such things can happen with complete impunity and before the eyes of the whole world, without anyone doing anything. Unfortunately it’s very cinematic. And very Spanish.”
Ask. In his book he says that españolada is a very difficult genre to define but very easy to identify, so I’ll ask him to define it for me…
Answer. It’s a comedy, in which there is a bit of sex, not much, there must also be songs. She can’t take herself seriously and we viewers look at her with contempt but we will always see her. It works from “landism” to current sagas such as Father, there is only one.
Q. Which Spanish version do you think best reflects a fundamental change in Spanish society?
R. Come to Germany, Pepe It is a film about 1960s emigration to Europe. There’s a moment when Alfredo Landa’s character arrives at a boarding house in Monaco and meets a Civil War refugee played by Antonio Ferrandis, the future Chanquete. In the midst of Franco’s regime, the war exile is spoken of as a man who doesn’t return home because he doesn’t want to, at no point is it demonstrated that he didn’t return because he was shot or put in prison. Then Landa rushes back to his native Aragon when he sees a singing and dancing bus pass by. He can’t stand nostalgia and in the end there is nothing like Spain.
Q. Do you recommend it to all those young people today who are convinced that migrants are Spain’s problem?
R. Landa tries to go to work abroad on a tourist visa. It’s a film that doesn’t have a moralizing intent in that sense at all, but I recommend watching it for this very reason: because it teaches you a lot about how things were then and how they still work today. I heard a lot from the previous generation: “When we went to other countries we went to work and came in with everything that was legal.” Dirty lie. If this scam appeared in a film accepted by the Regime… imagine what things would be like!
Q. You explain that emptied Spain has existed in Spanish cinema almost since the 19th century. Which “emptying” struck you the most?
R. All the films shot in Torremolinos, Benidorm, Marbella, La Manga del Mar Menor in general during development include a montage with shots showing a humble fishing village, a man carrying a cart with a donkey and suddenly the voice in worn out of the presenter who starts talking about tourism and the evolving work of cranes. “Before, only kings spent the summer, now everyone can do it.” It’s fascinating how cameras captured that transformation in real time. Meanwhile, there were documentaries like Unusual Spainby Javier Aguirre, where you can see popular pilgrimages in which young people in their 20s and 30s still participated.
Q. Reviewing a lot of filmography, he talks about “national flamenquism”. Do you think this identification of Spanish with Andalusian is returning?
R. It never disappeared partly because economically it worked like a shot since the time of Merimée, passed through the Spain is different to Rosalía and is partly due to its differential character. The South has this mythical Al-Andalus thing that is unique. This condition of hybrid territory makes it very particular. And in fact it is for this reason, for example, game of Thrones Filming finished in Spain. They came to film here because in the original books there was a description of one of the kingdoms which was clearly Al-Andalus.
Q. Yet Orson Welles, he says, was fascinated by the Basques. And Franco too. Why were there so many alleged anti-fascists tolerant of the regime?
R. It has to do with the fact that they were rich and famous and it is much easier to live in a dictatorship, however bloody or repressive it may be, when you have the economic capabilities and, above all, the contacts. Orson Welles was penniless in the United States, but here he was the mambo king. It was a gifted life and they were treated well. The regime was not interested in him speaking badly of Spain again, nor in Sinatra doing so, which he did.
Q. And do you think Sinatra really hated Spain because he was anti-fascist?
R. No, I think it was an attack of betrayal because his wife was cheating on him with Mario Cabré. That doesn’t mean he had left-wing sympathies, but the real anger came because he got drunk at the Pez Espada hotel in Torremolinos and had an argument with the police. That kind of bull that the stars were counting on failed at that time.
Q. Which censorship is worse? What the Republic did The Hurdes by Buñuel or what the PP government did to the series April 14. The Republic?
R. You’re probably missing out on a lot more by not seeing it The Hurdes not because I haven’t seen the series April 14 La Repubblicawhich the Rajoy government censored for a certain period, because the artistic virtues of the former are much greater. We shouldn’t ask ourselves which censorship is worse, but rather how it is possible that this type of censorship still exists in the 21st century. Both are terrifying, but the one that is most incomprehensible today is the one that affects us most closely.
Q. Where do you think the film is based on? The peninsula of empty houses?
R. I have been following David Uclés since he lived with his ex-husband in the French Alps. Even then there was talk of writing a novel about the civil war in the key of magical realism. I thought, “Poor thing.” Well, poor thing, me. It must be shot in Aragon, because they are landscapes that can be used to represent Castile, Valencia and even the North. And then there is the Ebro front. They are landscapes that when you see them you think: civil war.
