Azkuna Zentroa - Begoña Soto

BEGOÑA SOTO

CINEMA AND AUDIOVISUALS

Sevilla, 1964. Professor at the University Rey Juan Carlos, where she was the director of the master’s’ and PhDs on Spanish Film Studies. She initiated the Film Library of Andalusia, managing it for six years. She restores and researches film material from the silent film period, collaborating in projects with the various film libraries, the Filmoteca Española, the Filmoteca of Catalunya and the Portuguese Cinemateca. She is coordinating the Spanish Womens’ Film History Project.

Among her recent articles: “El poder de lo desconocido. O cómo enfrentarse a la contribución de las mujeres en los primeros años del cine español” (The power of the unknown. Or how to face the contribution of women in the first years of Spanish film), in Presencies i representacions de la dona en els primers anys del cinema 1895-1920 (2019); “Field Trip to Insanity: Bodies and Minds in the Doctor Maestre Film Collection (Spain, 1915)” with L. Alonso and D. Sánchez, in Corporeality in Early Cinema Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form (2018); “Women and the shift from Theatre to Cinema in Spain: The Case of Helena Cortesina (1903-1984)” with E. Cordero, in Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film (2018). She is the editor, together with E. Cordero of the volume Women in Iberian Cinema: A Feminist Approach to Portuguese and Spanish Filmic Culture (Intellect books, June 2020).

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THE CINEMAS, THE CINEMATOGRAPHIC RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN SPAIN AND ITALY 1906/1918

The Società Italiana Cines (Italian Società Cinemas) was created in 1906 in Rome, and from that year on it had an office in Barcelona. That system with its own office with a manager brought in from Italy was not the case of any other Italian brand in Spain. Cinemas distributed more than one thousand titles from Barcelona between 1910 and 1917. Halfway through 1913 the brand Film de Arte Español was created to produce movies in Spain.

In this project I deal with the biographies of the Cines technicians who were moved to Spain: Mateldi, Turchi, Doria, Munzi, Miraglia o Genina. Some of them ended up developing their careers in Spanish film. Ensuring the contact of experiences of film professionals between Spain and Italy. The most characteristic two cases: that of Raimundo Minguella, a Catalan who worked between Barcelona and Turín representing Italian companies in Spain and the inverse, Spanish companies in Italy, to later create his own Italian-Spanish production company Excelsa Films. The case of Augusto Turqui was the opposite, the secretary of the board of administration of the Cines in Rome and later the responsible of their offices in Barcelona until 1917.

PROCESS AND EXPERIENCE

To write anything but the word pandemic in this synopsis would be ridiculous.

As a matter of fact, I believe that everything written about this project, or the biography, seems ridiculous. It wouldn’t be very convincing to say something like “nothing has happened here”. And that is not only wrong, but it would be unfair and irresponsible. Anything that could happen did happen. The project, the biography, the process, or experience shouldn’t be the same, they shouldn’t be told any way else that isn’t summed up by one word: pandemic, and the estimations accompany it. From the before and after, the before doesn’t exist and the after should be different.

It’s impossible to tell the tale of this process or experience without taking into account the discipline of having remained in Italy two months after I should have already been back in Spain. It’s impossible for any tale to withstand a process or experience given the fact that most of those days and nights of those two months were watching, without being able to do anything about it, Rome from the windows.

To write about the process and experience of the pandemic: I don’t know how to do it, and I do know that I don’t want to.

Even knowing that to write about anything else is ridiculous, I could tell of a few things. I researched in the National Film Library of Rome. I touched the original cellulose nitrate of the title Carmen (Doria, Turqui, 1913). Most likely, and very slowly, as is always the case with these things, we will restore, or at least digitalize that incomplete title. I believe that I have learnt that work, most of the time, means almost nothing. Furthermore, and above all, I lived with a group that chance brought together, and that chance dissolved. Chance, not by decisions taken but by those enforced by policies, decrees, and figures.

To deal with the biographies of people who were stranded in Barcelona without being able to or wanting to return to Italy in 1914 in order to avoid the war helps to understand, although not explain, how fragile, and sometimes even ridiculous, everything is.

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