RICHARD LESTER. AN ENGLISHMAN CAME TO BILBAO*
In 1953, a young North American filmmaker called Richard Lester (Philadelphia, 1932), decided to settle in England, where he started a long and fruitful international career. In 1960, this Englishman*, absolutely unknown in our country, came to Bilbao with a short film that was titled The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film and the Festival’s International Jury awarded him the Silver Mikeldi for the best short film “for its rich inventiveness and healthy humour”. In this curious, eleven minute-long work, a man with a hat observes the English countryside with a zoom lens when some outlandish characters appear. As José Julián Bakedano points out in Imágenes de un largo viaje. Cincuenta años de cine en ZINEBI (Images of a long journey. Fifty years of cinema at ZINEBI), the book that the Festival has dedicated to present a critical anthology of its list of winners on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, “Richard Lester recovers slapstick […] with an effectiveness and an atmosphere reminiscent of silent-comedy, (this film) is a good introduction to Lester’s oeuvre.
Indeed, The Running, Jumping… heralds the beginning of the development of this director’s talent that throughout the 60’s acquired a true artistic identity; with the same strong surrealist character and hilarious comicality, he shot three of his most widely acclaimed works with huge international success: The Knack… And How To Get It (1965) and the two films he made with The Beatles, because of which many critics and fans consider him to be the father of the music video: A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help (1965). These three films demonstrate an intention of thematic and formal rupture, moving far away from free cinema, the other great paradigm through which British cinema was coming up, together with the French Nouvelle Vague, on the cutting edge of European modern cinema. Richard Lester closes this prodigious decade with a very different film, in my opinion a masterpiece, Petulia (1968), an acrimonious and uncomfortable reflection, in the shape of a comedy, on couples and social relationships in the North American upper-middle class. In 1970, ten years after his first visit, he came back to our city as President of the International Jury. Ever since then, we can say that Richard Lester is an old friend of Bilbao.
In the 70’s, this Englishman who came to Bilbao consolidated his longstanding filmmaking career, directing big productions with outstanding casts, in films such as: The Three Musketeers (1973), The Four Musketeers (1974) and Robin and Marian (1976), another one of his great films, a beautiful and melancholic fable, with Robin Hood as a pretext, about the passing of time, lost ideals and the premonition of death felt by the hero in his twilight days. The 80’s confirm Richard Lester as a successful and profitable filmmaker in productions such as Superman l (1980), Superman II (1983) and The Return of the Musketeers (1989).
A career as long and varied as his is only posible as the result of a mixture of curiosity, talent, courage and, above all, tranquility, a virtue that Richard Lester has had to possess in large quantities if we consider that he has been able to pass, apparently without any difficulty, from authorship to the angry years to the industrial work of a filmmaker with the utmost knowledge of his trade, fully aware of the fact that the images created by him over the last nearly fifty years since he first visited Bilbao are part of the lives of millions of film lovers around the world.
Here at ZINEBI we know that tranquility is not an easily acquired virtue. Therefore, and also for being one of our Festival’s first prize winners, Richard Lester deserves the Honorary Mikeldi of this so very special edition.
Luis Eguiraun
Programmer
*Un inglés vino a Bilbao (An Englishman Came to Bilbao) is a reference to the title of a popular song in Bilbao.
