A book composed of the diaries of Juan Antonio Bardem shows the economic hardships he suffered as his fame faded
Behind the smiling image and the granite willpower of director and screenwriter Juan Antonio Bardem (Madrid, 1922-2002), was an insecure man, beset by endless financial problems. Not in vain, after his first moment of glory he had to feed his wife and four children. The man who shot ‘Calle Mayor’ and ‘Death of a Cyclist’ faced censorship, making a food film, and dealing with the whims of waning stars. We’re talking, yes, about Sara Montiel. Despite being a communist with firm convictions, “the last to turn off the lights in the PCE,” as the new president of the Film Academy, Fernando Méndez-Leite, ironically described him, Bardem was faced with a life of crooked lines. He drew masterpieces and films of gross commercialism. Coinciding with the centenary of his birth, ‘Juan Antonio Bardem. In manuscript, workbooks and other writings’ (Ocho y medio), a work with notes, criticism and unpublished words by the filmmaker.
A daring, revolutionary man, a good friend and a pleasant conversationalist, Bardem was a man misunderstood by the film industry. Méndez-Leite describes him as a “pioneer of an ambitious and testimonial film in the time of holy queens and gypsy whores”.
His daughter María, screenwriter Diego Sabanés and documentary filmmaker and researcher Jorge Castillejo purged the diaries and documentation kept in the archives of the National Film Library. Sixty boxes of documents were housed in the institution, because Juan Antonio Bardem was an incorrigible graphic artist. She wrote everything down in her diaries, written in English in the vain hope her children wouldn’t read them. His daughter María, a ‘script’ by profession, something like a film continuity supervisor, has had to swallow a lot of frogs reading some excerpts from her father’s copious writings. She was tempted to take on the role of censor, she was reluctant to show the vulnerabilities of her father, a director who succeeds in the cinema early on and who at the age of thirty was a member of the Cannes jury. However, that prestige has disappeared. I didn’t quite understand how the co-writer of ‘Welcome, Mister Marshall’, as one of the architects of ‘Viridiana’, the man who persuaded Buñuel to go filming in Spain, must now go out of his way to make films de greater glory of Rocío Durcal or Marisol.
Bardem had already been warned to be careful around Sara Montiel. In the shooting diary of ‘Varietés’ (1971) he gives ample evidence of knowing how to handle the actress and singer with his left hand. «For Sara, a ‘playback’ is a kind of mysterious and sacred rite, a religious ceremony in which she becomes an ordained priestess. She is full of fear for her physique, her wrinkles, for everything… and she clings desperately to those old ways of acting from her forgotten successes. Anyway, I think I teach him with a lot of humor and a smile. I like musicals,” he writes.
It has been a long time since he uttered that terrible statement in Salamanca in 1955 that portrayed Spanish cinema in bitter terms. A cinema “politically ineffective; social, false; intellectual, negligible; aesthetic, null, and industrial, rickety». While those words have been surpassed by time, some concerns remain, such as the need for new laws to protect the industry. “We need a different position of the state for the cinema. That the state sees in him no enemy, that it does not limit it, that it does not suffocate it».
Juan Antonio Bardem has hardly experienced any ideological evolution. He said the same politically in the 1950s as he did in the 1980s. Despite his apparent rigidity, some of his reflections are sound. That is how Diego Sabanés thinks, who assures that his words about how collective ideas are saved have not lost their relevance, nor has his condemnation of shortcomings in distribution.
Few know that ‘The House of Bernarda Alba premiered in Spain in January 1964, 28 years after García Lorca’s death. And who directed it? Well, Bardem, who in life made only two theater productions. A few years earlier, he had been interested in bringing the piece to the big screen, but the project, like many others, never came to fruition. In the 1980s he directed a miniseries about the life of Lorca, one of his last international successes.
María Bardem is the one who has suffered the most in this task of separating the wheat from the chaff in her father’s documents. He wanted to preserve his memory, at the cost of some omissions. “I’ve had to read things I should never have read,” he says.
Source: La Verdad
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
