The First Film Studies Course was held at the Conciliar Seminary of San Sebastián from 15 to 27 July 1957. This intensive training programme was organised by the San Sebastián Film Club, in collaboration with the Institute for Cinematographic Research and Experiments (IIEC) and the International Catholic Office for Cinema and Audiovisuals (OCIC). Over a hundred participants attended the morning classes on film history, directing and editing, or screenwriting, delivered by IIEC lecturers, and the range of afternoon lectures given by clergymen or film critics on practical issues of social cinema, morality, criticism or amateur filmmaking.

What distinguished the Course from the three Film Training Weeks that preceded it, was that it was specifically aimed at the senior management of the ever-growing number of film clubs, providing them with film knowledge and practical skills for moderating film forums. That is why the sessions during the first week of the Course were complemented by screenings of films provided by the National Film Archive and introduced by its director, Carlos Fernández Cuenca. These served both as an experimental illustration of the morning lessons and as a practical class for applying different film forum formats, under the guidance of the Jesuit priests Félix de Landaburu and Carlos María Staehlin Saavedra, a critic for Film Ideal and Documentos Cinematográficos, as well as a member of García Escudero’s reformist Censorship Board. Staehlin would become known in the 1960s for manipulating, alongside Fernández Cuenca, the dubbed dialogue of Bergman films such as The Seventh Seal, transforming— as Rosario Garnemark highlights in her study Ingmar Bergman y la censura cinematográfica franquista (Ingmar Bergman and Francoist film censorship), —the film’s religious ambiguity and crisis of faith into an unambiguous affirmation of the Creator.

On the occasion of the Film Studies Course, Staehlin produced this analytical outline for his lecture “Film Culture Associations”, preserved in the Aycart Collection of the Festival’s Archive. In it, he set out a theoretical analysis of the pedagogical techniques, characteristics, functions and religious value of film clubs, while also discussing the practical challenges involved in their organisation. He concluded by proposing a model structure for a film forum consisting of an introduction, a screening, and a discussion session.

Faced with such an outline, one can only speculate about the detailed contents that lay behind each heading. By “Religious problem: from prohibition to education”, was Staehlin referring to the attitude of organisations such as Catholic Action, which during the 1950s moved from repressing the “pernicious” influence of cinema to attempting to intervene in its production, exhibition and criticism in order to disseminate God’s message to cinema audiences, finding film clubs to be the ideal vehicle for such “education”? In the section devoted to the recently established National Federation of Film Clubs, formed amid considerable debate, would he have emphasised that membership granted access to films unavailable to commercial cinemas?

Questions such as these, perhaps ultimately irresolvable, emerge and multiply in the face of the archive’s inevitable gaps.

Manuel Hevia Carballido, Beatriz Bizarro Rodrigues (EQZE)