A Look at the Complicated History of Galician Cinema

The international success of Galician film O que Arde, Oliver Laxe’s brilliant Cannes festival award winning new film, gives a good excuse to look back at the history of the Spanish region’s cinema, and the unfortunately limited output it has unfortunately been able to produce. It is always a bit controversial pigeon holing film movements, be it by style, country, or genre, but this issue is even further complicated when it comes to talking about Galician National Cinema. A humble region of Spain with its own language and culture, Galicia, an autonomous community in Spain to the North of Portugal is a distinctive part of the country whose identity is completely contrary to the stereotypical idea of Spain most people have. The weather is cloudy and rainy, the beaches cold, the countryside forestry and lush green, the traditional music features celtic instruments like the bagpipe, and the native language of the region is Galician, a sort of musical mixture of Spanish and Portugese.

Galicia’s main historic industries are fishing and agriculture, and being such a difficult place to live in the past because of the harsh weather, hilly landscape, and rough sea, and the fact that it is so isolated from the rest of Spain, it was a poor region that was greatly affected by emigration as Galicians looked to make a better life elsewhere. For this reason, many countries came to call the Spanish people as a whole Gallegos, thinking that the Gallegos that arrived were representative of the entire country.

In general there was little work and opportunity, and an unsurprising lack of funding for the arts, especially an artform as expensive as cinema. This was further complicated by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The history of Spanish Cinema as a whole was deeply affected by the Civil War, which ended in 1939, and the consequential dictatorship of the fascist Francisco Franco who would rule until 1979. Franco’s government not only limited the freedom Spanish directors had, with Spain’s most famous director, Luis Buñuel, living almost his entire career in exile, but it was also devastating for Galicia and other regions of Spain like Catalonia and the Basque Country which also speak their own language and have their own customs both of which were violently suppressed in favor of the one ‘true’ national identity and language. It is not that Galician cinema was limited during the dictatorship, but it was completely nonexistent.

For all of this, being one of the more rural, less developed parts of Spain, in a country whose national cinema and arts in general were greatly impacted by a restrictive dictatorship, and being a part of Spain that is not really ‘Spanish,’ due to its minority language and different culture, Galician cinema does not have the output many other national cinema’s have, and is particularly difficult to define. One can see Galician cinema in various ways, as cinema filmed in Galicia even if it is made by Spanish directors and shot in Spanish, as films only shot by Galicians in Galician, or as films shot by Galicians even if they are shot in other parts of the world and in other languages. Because Galician film can be defined in such a variety of ways and the more restrictive you are, the less films you have to talk about in an already limited selections, here I am going to analyze films that come from all three branches of thought to take a good well rounded look at Galicia in cinema and Galicians making cinema.

One of the first examples of a film made in Galicia is La Casa de la Troya, a film directed by the Madrid born novelist Alejandro Pérez Lugín who would go on to write, produce, and direct the film. Lugín’s film and the novel it is based on is an autobiographical story about a young man from Madrid who is sent off to study as far away from home as possible in the ‘uncivilized’ north west corner of Galicia. As he arrives he is completely disenchanted with the city, but, predictably, is slowly won over by his new home as each colorful Galician he meets tells him all he needs to do is meet a beautiful Galician ‘moza,’ and he will never want to go back to the big city life again. Guess what happens?

The film isn’t the most original, but Lugín’s love for Galicia rings through every frame of the film. Though the film is far from a masterpiece, (the takes are unfortunately extremely short, and the title cards take up as much of the runtime as the actual on screen action) but the shots of the old town of Santiago and surrounding countryside of Galicia give the film a sort of time in a bottle feeling. Living in Santiago, it was especially worthwhile for me to see the streets I know and walk through on a daily basis inhabited by actors from the 1920s. It was like seeing a piece of history, and, even though Lugín lacked the technical skills of the great silent directors, the pure existence of his film gives viewers a look into the university life in Santiago from 100 years ago.

As an outsider making a film about a Spaniard’s experience falling in love with Galicia, some Galician purests may see it as nothing more than a stereotypical view of their country, one that only captures the foreigner’s perception of Galician life without really understanding the people. Two other surviving films from the 1930s and 1940s, O Carro e o Home by Antonio Román and Galicia by Carlos Velo give us a much different look into Galician life. For one, they are both directed by Galicians: For another, they are documentary shorts that focus on rural life in the countryside. They are also heavily influenced by the Russian cinema of directors like Sergei Eisenstien and have a clear Marxist political aesthetic to them that romanticizes the agricultural working community.

Galicia was thought lost for decades when it was finally found in a Soviet archive and they were able to restore 8 minutes of the original film as well as surviving segments of other scenes represented in another Soviet film that used images from Velo’s work. Velo himself was forced to flee to Mexico where he would continue working as a director during the dictatorship. What survives of the film is an idealistic representation of rural workers in the Galicia countryside. The images show a strong proletariat representation of farmers who work together in a simple yet highly meaningful existence. There are some close ups of the farmers, but the film is most striking in its depiction of camaraderie. The men and women wear the same clothes and work together in carefully composed shots which depict a strong homogenous community where the collective works for the good of all.

One of the most striking sequences of both Galicia and O Carro e o Home is a scene of the farmers threshing with a flail (haciendo la tralla con un mayal). A flail is a small stick tied loosely to a larger stick. The large stick is raised and thrust downward into the hay to break it down. The scenes are shot in a powerful upward looking angle as the workers in unison perform this hypnotising dance-like chore that perhaps more than anything else really shows the powerful beauty of rural workers.

O Carro e o Home depicts a cart’s ‘life’ and role in the everyday lives of the farmers. How a tree is cut down to make it, how it is built, the subsequent work it is used for and how it finally wears down after having served a useful purpose to the community. Throughout the cart’s life we again see how the farmers not only thresh, but also cut down trees, plow, cultivate, etc. as a team. And while these film’s primary focus may be to show the rural working class, the close ups of individuals smoking, drinking, chatting, a woman with a basket on her head suddenly bursting into laughter, and a child smiling next to his parents or neighbors, give a real humanity to the people depicted. They not only work hard, but are also depicted to lead fulfilling lives thanks to their work, their family, and fellow workers.

During the dictatorship Galician cinema would all but disappear, with the majority of great Spanish artists, especially those that worked in another language, would have to flee or be subject to death or imprisonment, or they would have to find a way to work within the limits of strong governmental censorship. The next wave of Galician cinema would therefore come after Franco’s death, with director Chano Piñeiro being the most well known figure of the period. His most successful films would again deal with themes relating to rural Galician life, but he would expand on this and also touch on emigracion, one of the most important aspects of Galician history especially since 1885 up to the Civil War. Being from one of the poorest regions of Spain, many Galicians looked to a better life in America, with Galicians making up 14% of the Argentinian population, and so many were concentrated in Buenos Aires that it actually became considered the 2nd biggest ‘Galician’ city after Vigo.

Piñeiro’s short film Mamasunción is a tragic tale of an elderly mother who lives in a tiny isolated village in the mountains spending her days going to the post office to see if she has received a letter from her son who emigrated decades ago. The setting of the film is quite incredible, capturing the remote villages of Baíste y Rubillón, its paths and buildings made of black rock, the roofs of hay, the place has a cold and rough feeling about it that gives real perspective to the humble life the people led there and and an understanding of the temptation leave to look for a better life.

Time is the great theme of the film as Mamasunción waits with an apparent calmness in front of the clock for the hour of the mail delivery to come. Yet this calmness is betrayed for a quiet interior restlessness by her sad deep eyes. We do not know how long she has repeated this routine, but her face is so scarred by deep wrinkles, the many years of her life etched physically into every inch of the surface of her face, that it seems as if she has been waiting for an eternity. She finally receives her long desired letter, surprisingly taken aback after so many years of disappointment. Unable to read it, the town drunk reads it to her. In his letter, her son explains his desire to return to see her, but not until he has accumulated all the riches he sought after. Yet there is a brutally heart wrenching post script written by the Mexian government announcing her son’s sudden death and the delivery of his inheritance to her. This inheritance comes several days later as a government official drives his car into the village and reads the official documents about her son’s will. The sight of a car almost has a miraculous feeling to it in the village that seems completely removed from time. The villagers wait expectantly as the will is read, a briefcase of money left open for all the world to see, and Mamasunción sits there silently as if every word was torturing her soul. The film shows the price of emigration, how it tore families apart and how the dream that emigrating portended sometimes resulted in nothing more than a black nightmare for those that left and their families they left behind.

Piñeiro’s first full feature film, and one of the first in Galician history was Sempre Xonxa, released in 1989. The film tells the story of a love triangle between 3 children that again grow up in rural Galicia. The protagonists are Xonxa, the girl desired by two young villagers, Birutas and Pancho. Piñeiro again touches on emigration as Birutas emigrates as a teenager and is forced to leave his crush who will ultimately end up marrying and having children with Pancho. Birutas returns years later in a fancy car in a scene that resembles the ending of Mamasunción. However, this time he comes back alive and rich, a seeming success, yet finds that time has continued in his absence and that the life he wished for himself has now disappeared forever and no money in the world can buy him what he has lost.

The cinematography is fantastic, again capturing a village that seems removed from time and place, another example of the stereotypical mystical aura that certain parts of rural and coastal Galicia truly give off. Unlike Mamasunción, the village has a fairy tale feeling to it. It may be a slight, simple, isolated rural village where the inhabitants have to work hard through rough seasons to live a very meagre life, but they are depicted as happy and some of the colorful characters of the village are even Felliniesque in their joyfulness and absurdity. The character who is forever lost is Birutas. He was always a cruel child, but the impossibility to satisfy his desires incurably poisons him inside.

This leads to the most memorable scene in the film where Birutas rapes Xorxa after she rejects him. They are in a mill and he forces himself on her as she resists. Instead of directly showing the action Piñeiro edits a montage of the working wheels and turning gadgets within the mill, giving the scene an cold and robotic aesthetic that adds to the brutality and lovelessness of the action occurring offscreen.

Xorxa herself is a brilliant female protagonist. Even as a girl she has no issue with directly rejecting Birutas and saying what she thinks. As an adult she remains a strong woman who works as hard as her husband and who resists Birutas and refuses to let his actions ruin her life.

Sempre Xorxa is in many ways the essential Galician film of its time. It has the essence of a classic romance while portraying the magical beauty of the Galician countryside and represents rural life and it’s inhabitants, customs, and celebrations, while also portraying the impact emigration had on Galician society.

After the 80s and early 90s there was another hiatus in Galician cinema that wouldn’t really kick start again until the 2000s in what has now been named New Galician Cinema. New Galician Cinema is composed of films made by young Galician filmmakers who made independent and nonmainstream art films, shorts, and documentaries as demonstrated by films by serval directors among which are Lois Patiño, Eloy Enciso, Xurxo Chirro, and, most famously, Oliver Laxe. The films vary greatly in genre, style, language, and setting, but their directors share the same home and native language, and are helping put Galician cinema on the map. Some of their films are neither filmed in Galcian nor set in Galicia due to the lack of funding, but after their first successes, many have found it possible to return home and make films that relate directly to Galician ideas, issues, and identity.

Xurxo Chirro’s Vickingland is one of the most famous works of the New Galician Cinema Wave. His documentary edits together amateur footage taken by an unprofessional sailor named Luís Lomba who bought a handheld camera and started filming his everyday life on a boat that went through the frozen waters of Northern Europe. The footage may seem no more special than anyone else’s personal videos suddenly becomes extraordinary when edited into context. Chirro edited the film into chapters that focus on various aspects of Lomba’s life on the boat, featuring some amazing shots of the ice they sail through, and the simple opening and closing of the ship’s enormous doors to let passengers on and off. It gives us a real inside view into the everyday life of someone who works on these boats. But the most fascinating scenes are between Luís and his fellow Galician sailors, who, similarly to the rural villagers in Piñeiro’s films are forced from their homes for economic purposes, but this time they are sailers instead of emigrants.

One of the most memorable scenes is their Christmas dinner where they do their best to keep their Galician tradition by eating Bacallao and drinking wine. Their discussion ranges from hair loss, to the camera itself, with the men each stealing random glances at the camera as it records them, but most importantly they speak about what their families will be doing at home without them. It is a modern depiction of how the lives of sailors have changed. Instead of working on fisherman’s boats they now work on commercial ships that deliver passengers from one place to another in a completely different part of Europe. Times may have changed, but Galcia’s lack of opportunity still drives people away to make a living far from their homes and families.

Lois Patiño also worked in documentaries, but first he shot a short film called Montaña en Sombra. It is an experimental work that shows black and white long distance shots of skiers in the mountains in Switzerland. In these shots the skiers all lose all sense of identity and look more like ants moving thoughtlessly through a white abyss than humans. It is a beautiful film that makes you think of isolation as the skiers move silently through unreal, magnificent landscapes without any human contact. Based on the success of this short and other works he was able to return to Galicia and make a documentary about A Costa da Morte (The Death Coast), a scarcely populated part of the Galician coast where people live from fishing on the rough sea.

Of all the directors of New Galician Cinema, and Galician cinema in general, Oliver Laxe is probably the most recognized. Three of his films have been released in Cannes, and all three of them won prizes. The first two, Todos Vós Sodes Capitáns, and Mimosas, take place in Morocco and are filmed respectively in Arabic, French, and Spanish, and Arabic. Todos Vós Sodes Capitáns is a remarkable breakout feature which really displayed the future Laxe had ahead of him. The film, shot in black and white, begins with a lizard crawling up a wall. We hear the shouts of children and think they are talking about the lizard until we see their faces looking upwards and their fingers pointing towards the sky at an airplane. It sets up the entire film which will focus on perspective and who has the camera and what they are looking at and why they are looking at it instead of something else.

The film may step on its own toes by Laxe starring as himself as a director who works with Morrocan kids to make a film about their life. His project in the film is an ultimate failure because as a foreigner he is incapable of seeing the world through their eyes. It isn’t until he passes the project off to a Moroccan friend, the brilliant Shakib Ben Omar, that they are able to make a film that speaks to Morocco’s truth. However, these final sequences are shot in long picturesque takes that ultimately are Laxe’s own style, and not that of his Moroccan protagonists. In the end, we are still seeing Morocco through the perspective of a European director and not through the native youth. In any case, it is a subtly experimental film with great performances, and a beautiful visual aesthetic that would come to identify Laxe’s films.

His second film, Mimosas, is one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen. It is set in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco and tells a story which travels through time from the present to the past. It again stars Omar as a mystical taxi driver who is recruited to pick up someone in the mountains. As he drives across the plains the film changes time periods and when he arrives to the company he is to guide he is not a taxi driver, but a shepherd who must help two men transport the dead body of a Sheikh to his final resting place.

The film is very slow, but the imagery is so sublime that the runtime become irrelevant. The ending is left completely open in a way that seems unnecessarily ambiguous, something Laxe would do again in his next film, but his trust in the audience and his commanding visual sense make the film a fascinating viewing experience that blends a romanticized legendary segment with an unflashy, almost too realistic present.

With O que Arde Laxe finally came home to Galicia to make what is possibly the most watched Galician film in history. It was nominated for various Goyas (the equivalent to the Oscars in Spain) and made a star out of its 84 year old actress. The film tells the story of a pyromaniac who is released from prison and returns to his mother’s house. The film, like so many discussed before, is set in the interior of the region in the rural countryside. And here, Laxe focuses on a theme that has been especially prevalent especially in the past few years, which is the forest fires in Galicia that have devastated communities the past few summers.

Like Mimosas, O que Arde has epically astonishing cinematography and begins with tall Eucalyptus trees swaying in the wind in the darkness of night. Suddenly, inexplicably, a tree crashes to the ground, followed by another, and another. The unknown destruction is filmed so simply and so powerfully and finally Laxe cuts to a truck which is cutting the trees down by their trunks until it reaches an oak, too imposing to be demolished by the truck. Laxe here is commenting on the Eucalyptus which is an invading tree species that is the cause for many of the forest fires. People continue to grow them because they can make quick money by selling their lumber to paper factories, but when they are lit on fire, they burn quickly and spread fire uncontrollably. The message, this time environmental as well as economical, shows Galicia sells itself to its own detriment.

The film is filled with amazing imagery including a scene where a cow gets stuck in a huge mud puddle and our protagonist, Amador, has to jump in and try to remove it. It seems so real and so dangerous, that it almost feels like documentary footage. Then there is the climactic forest fire scene which blazes red orange and yellow and the screen seems to give heat off itself. Miraculously, the camera captures firefighters right next to the fiery hell trying to put out the raging flames, or not, as some seemingly put more gas on the flames to spread it more. Again, as these men only make money when they are working, the faster the fire goes out, the faster their pay checks stop coming.

While the imagery is captivating, another key aspect to the film are the performances from it’s two leads, Amador Arias and Benedicta Sánchez. Laxe did an extensive search to find two unprofessional actors to bring his characters to life and struck gold with his finds. Their quiet demeanor, wonderfully sculpted faces, and natural way of delivering their minimal dialogue give a modern depiction of Galicians that is otherwise unseen in cinema. As her son unexpectedly returns home after years in prison his mother simply looks at him, embraces him, and asks ‘Tes fame?’ (Are you hungry). One feels again as if one is seeing a real Galician mother and son, more closed than the Spaniards of the south, who show their love not by dramatics, but with food.

The success of Laxe’s film will hopefully lead to more Galician films getting made. In the end the history of Galician cinema can be seen as a history of Galicia itself, a lack of funding from the government to work, directors forced to flee and emigrate before during and after the civil war, filmmakers forced to make a career for themselves elsewhere before finally being able to come home to make films. Hopefully after O que Arde, producers will finally be convinced that it is worthwhile to invest in these films and the artists that make them. Spanish cinema, and Spanish society in general, is all the more rich for the diversity of voices that exist in this diverse country. Even though Galicia has a language and culture that differs from the general idea of what it ‘Spanish’ (a controversial idea in itself), it has every right to depict it to domestic and international audiences, and bring to life all the stories its filmmakers were unable to bring forth in the past.