The program revealed a filmmaker whose documentary practice is a rare combination of political commitment and formal restlessness.  

Although Portabella screened films at the Cannes Film Festival on several occasions and is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in Spanish cinema of the last sixty years—despite his clandestine activity and constant battles with censorship—he remains a largely overlooked filmmaker. Until 2006, when Pere Portabella received his first North American retrospective at the Gene Siskel Film Center, his films were barely known in the United States and had never been released on DVD or VHS. More recently, many of his films have become available on streaming platforms, yet his contribution to the documentary form has still not been fully examined.

At first glance, his oeuvre might suggest a kind of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde figure. On the one hand, he is the modernist auteur of non-linear narratives such as Nocturno 29 (1968) and Pont de Varsòvia (Warsaw Bridge, 1989). On the other hand, he’s the man who dared to capture an underground gathering of former political prisoners in El Sopar (1974). This seemingly riven personality—between uncompromising artistry and the commitments of a leftist intellectual—coexists with further contradictions. 

Born in 1927, the year associated in Spain with the avant-garde circle known as the Generation of ’27—which included primarily poets such as Federico García Lorca and Rafael Alberti, but also encompassed figures like painters Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, and Maruja Mallo, as well as the filmmaker Luis Buñuel—Portabella came from the Catalan industrial upper bourgeoisie. His economic stability enabled him to move into film production, beginning with Carlos Saura’s Los golfos (The Delinquents, 1959) and Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana (1961), before turning to directing his own films. But he was always a traitor to his class, even going so far as to suspend his filmmaking career to serve as a socialist senator and member of parliament between 1977 and 1984. 

These contradictions between his artistry and his politics are the driving force of his style. What Erika Balsom describes in his work as “the apparent split between a politics of the signifier and a politics of the signified” can also be understood as an intricate oscillation between a ludic engagement with form and a sustained desire to intervene in Spain’s political processes. Even in his most obscure, nearly abstract fictional experiments, a documentary murmur persists, surfacing as a latent testimonial impulse. And when he turns to documentary, an avant-garde sensibility permeates every gesture, even in works that—beginning with their titles—might appear devoted to a purely informational purpose. 

In Nocturno 29, his first feature, self-absorbed bourgeois figures wander through Catalonian landscapes and sumptuous houses, captured in harsh black-and-white cinematography. Delirious sequences collide, evoking an afterlife of Surrealism. Then, abruptly, as someone watches television, a recording of a military parade bursts onto the screen, followed by images of barking dogs in a kennel. These documentary irruptions shatter the film’s dreamlike drift. While they can be read as allegories of Franco’s regime, their force lies elsewhere as well: by disrupting the entrenched fiction of bourgeois life, Portabella attacks the self-enclosed logic of European auteur cinema.  

A deconstructive impulse is also at work in Vampir-Cuadecuc (1970), which at first positions itself as an analytic making-of documentary of Jesús Franco’s Count Dracula (1970), starring Christopher Lee. Soon, though, Portabella’s film mutates into an eerie vampire fiction, then into a making-of of the making-of, before slipping back into fiction again, and so on. Portabella vampirizes Franco’s shoot while allowing Lee’s presence to drain the lifeblood from his essayistic project. The critique of industrial film production and a vampire tale set against the backdrop of dictatorship ultimately devour one another, culminating in a cinematic bloodbath between documentary and fiction.

Umbracle (1972) begins in a similar register. A man (Lee, once more) wanders through a museum in Barcelona, buys a cigar, and witnesses an abduction on the street. Suddenly, this fictional drift is interrupted by a direct testimony from film historian Román Gubern, who discusses the censorship code governing Spanish cinema. Commenting on Rule 12, which “forbids the images or scenes of cruelty to people or animals, or of terror”, he exposes its hypocrisy: “the police in this country use terrorist methods on the streets, brutality against citizens, workers, students.” 

The references to Francoist repression are direct. In Nocturno 29, commentary on the political situation is as subtle as Luis Cuadrado’s use of high-contrast cinematography, in which blinding whites overtake the frame, as if the White Terror—the violence against dissidents carried out by the Nationalist faction—were suffocating the film itself. In Umbracle, by contrast, the film folds back on itself through its embrace of documentary, reflexively interrogating the role of underground filmmakers. Speaking in Catalan—a language forbidden at the time—film critic Joan Enric Lahosa observes that “legal unviability offers the filmmaker the possibility of researching ways that will be more meaningful with his media.” For Portabella, the turn to documentary does not entail an abandonment of formal sophistication; rather, it becomes a means of interrogating his own methods and of opening the work onto new cinematic possibilities. 

An even earlier work already signals his impulse to move beyond his bourgeois milieu. In Poetes Catalans (1970), we witness an underground gathering of poets in a noisy auditorium, organized in solidarity with political prisoners. The event is described by one speaker as “an act of presence of Catalan culture,” and one of its rallying cries is “poetry among the people.” A powerful cinematic energy emerges from the interplay between the recitation of poems and the audience’s effusive responses—voracious applause, cries for freedom and amnesty—captured with the immediacy of direct cinema. The atmosphere is so vivid, so politically charged, that a new form of joy seems to surface in the faces of the elderly poets. The enclosed space of the theater becomes a clandestine echo chamber for the demands of an entire population.

Portabella’s avant-garde approach to documentary practice also becomes evident in his dialogues with other arts. That includes four short films dedicated to painter Joan Miró made in the early 1970s (screened together at BAFICI under the title Suite Miró), and his co-writing work alongside poet Joan Brossa. But his most enduring collaborator is the experimental musician Carles Santos, responsible for nearly all of his scores and the subject of four short films presented at BAFICI as Suite Santos. These remarkable works operate on the threshold between cinema, music, and performance art. In Acció Santos (1973), the musician plays a Chopin piece at the piano, then listens to a recording of his own performance, before putting on headphones and leaving the spectator in silence for the same duration. In La Tempesta (2006), fragments of naked bodies are struck by jets of water while an opera by Rossini plays on the soundtrack. 

In Die Stille vor Bach (The Silence Before Bach, 2007), on which Santos also collaborated on the script, the boundary between documentary and fiction becomes largely irrelevant, as the film embraces a musical structure of theme and variations. We move freely from a tourist guide in Leipzig disguised as Johann Sebastian Bach to a period reconstruction of the composer’s family life, and then to a range of more or less fictional figures embodying Bach’s music—always recorded with direct sound—in disparate contexts: the actor portraying Bach at the organ of St. Thomas Church, where he is buried; a group of young cellists in the subway; a children’s choir; a pair of truck drivers, one playing a harmonica, the other a bassoon. Even an automated pianola plays itself. Despite this heterogeneity, the film never feels fragmented. It flows in tune with Bach’s music, weaving multiple narrative lines into an intricate yet harmonious polyphonic and counterpoint composition. 

The musical impulse at the heart of Portabella’s cinema resonates throughout his entire oeuvre. The prologue of the first General Report (1976) transports us to an abbey in the mountains. A somber tune by Santos, evoking his late-sixties horror scenes, sets the mood for a drifting camera that comes to rest at the tomb of Francisco Franco. At this point, Portabella could finally aspire to make a film for a public screening, as the full title makes explicit.