PERE PORTABELLA, EXTRATERRITORIAL
Considering the position of Pere Portabella within the frame of the spanish cinema pushes into expressing that, for a start, his work (both as a producer and director) gives more than outstanding elements to throw light upon some of the aspects, which should be considered as the richest and most suggestive learning process produced by our cinema along its history. But only as long as we take into account that his career path seems to be essentially eccentric to the dominant cinema by exploring elements of a particular Spanish tradition of the realism (or its more or less distorted derivations) by means of an important part of his work like for example, Factotum by Films 59 (Los golfos, El cochecito, Viridiana) or by putting together the vanguard movement with the more radical aspects of policy on those films directed by him.
Besides, the complexity approach on a kind of work like the one directed by Portabella, should not be possible without taking it out from the narrow frame of cinema to place it over the false bottom of dialogue with different artistic practice and with the society where it should be located. According to Portabella, cinema dos not stand for a separated art from the rest of the arts, to the extend that by searching references to place it on a precise context, seems to be quite clear that keeping oneself within the frame of the limited territory field that represents cinema, does not exhaust the intertextual richness of his work. It is not difficult to discover on the own biography from Portabella his liking for those artistic procedures, which only are different from the cinematographic ones on themselves, it the identity of the movement on which are based and gives sense is ignored. In this sense, we have to take into consideration Portabella* s participation into the activities carried out by El Grup de Treball, an active conceptual performance group, from both an artistic and political point of view, developed in Barcelona between the years 1973 and 1976.
From Portabella’ s first work No contéis con los dedos (1967) until the latest El silencio antes de Bach (2007). it should be stated that throughout his work combines, by using the same procedure, the radical aspects within policy and aesthetics, experimentation and protest, both deliberately in tune with the different historical moments. The overall approach of his work provokes the objection of the Aristotelian narrative canon holding back on the plot “to go straight into the subject matter” (according to Portabella ‘s own words to describe his strategy). the insistency on the rhythmical composition and the exploration within the very same roots of the artistic creation. However, at the same time, different factors have been involved within his work: first of all a hand-to-hand dialogue with a good part of the years when Franco was in power, secondly an awareness regarding the politically active cinema and the underground and lately, the detailed insertion of his work following the attitude of those artists (not just filmmakers) whom their priority to be carried out it should be drafting an statement of the hidden side of things. These artists are interested in that geology of the imaginational aspect which should only be revealed (using this term under its strictly photographical sense) following a patient and methodical work of losing the habit of using those stereotypes which give definition to the most trivial daily life.
Nearly after fifty years of cinematographic practise (as a producer and director), the work from Pere Portabella comes out clearly as a way of persisting on a kind of work which lives on the fringes of the institutional system of representation. The fact of having done this within the frame of such a prudish cinema, like the Spanish one is, where, he has as well ploughed up certain lands, fairly barren before his envolvement, does not prevent from represent a fruitful paradox. We can not ignore it: for many and good reasons, portabella extraterritorial.
An extraterritoriality, a perseverance and a talent that ZINEBI’s 49th edition would like to acknowledge by awarding Pere Portabella with a since long reserved Honorary Mikeldi.
Santos Zunzunegui.
Professor (UPV/EHU)
