2023-12

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Letter from underground filmmaker Antoni Padrós to Pilar Olascoaga

December 2023

Terrassa (Catalunya), 3 July 1977. Antoni Padrós writes a letter to the San Sebastian Festival referring to participation of the film Shirley Temple Story (1976) in the Otro cine section. The moviemaker raises the question of the film’s 16 mm format as a potential impediment to its screening at the event.

The history of cinematic sub-formats could be understood as a history marked by technical progress, as an updating of cinematic possibilities and an approach to new social strata. Although it may be by reading the situation from another angle, in the endeavour to defend its limitations, that we can refer to the problem of format and highlight its internal shortcomings.

In 1923—a hundred years ago—Eastman Kodak launched a cheaper alternative to the conventional 35 mm format. Paradoxically, by introducing the 16 mm format, the multinational laid the material foundations for the emergence of «other films» which took hold in the Spain of the seventies: an underground cinema with the ability to function independently of the industry and thereby side-step censorship of the Franco apparatus. Partly thanks to its use of the “non-professional” 16 mm format.

Antoni Padrós, often labelled as an underground artist or filmmaker, led a life of contradictions similar to those of the 16 mm format. Combining his work as a bank clerk (Dr Jekyll) in the morning with that of independent filmmaker in the afternoon (Mr Hyde). A tension that highlights his marginalised condition.

Padrós is an example of the filmmaker who succeeds in turning the technical limitations into a formal aesthetic aspect of his work. His feature films Lock-Out (1973) and the self-same Shirley Temple Story (1976) are shot using the short pitch support. A format already employed by Pere Portabella and to which Padrós most likely returns following his contact with the filmmaker in the days of the Escuela Aixelà. This sub-format gives his film a peculiar contrast which, together with resources such as not deleting outtakes, improvisation by the actors and apparently random twists of the script, creates an aesthetic described as «lacking» by Mery Cuesta. However, it has to be said that it wasn’t aesthetic factors that drove Padrós to use this format—as they may have done in the case of Portabella—but rather economic factors. The short pitch cost 5 pesetas a metre, and we must remember that Shirley Temple Story had a budget of 500,000 pesetas. Padrós himself, also quoted by Cuesta, gives the following explanation:

There was a necessarily marginal cinema due to the fact that there was no other option for ideas not toeing the line with those of CIFESA or benefiting from syndicated credit; in other words, the only possibility was to work in 16 mm if you wanted to make films distinct from what was being done at that time.

As Padrós himself recalled in a recent letter, the screening of Shirley Temple Story went ahead in San Sebastian despite the potential tensions arising from its format. At the screening, the filmmaker said that “everybody had a great time, especially Ulrich Gregor, programmer from the Berlin Film Fest, who, in 1978, invited me to show Shirley. Secrets ensconced in the dark archives.”

Jan Baeta Salvany

Document

Letter from underground filmmaker Antoni Padrós to Pilar Olascoaga

Área de identificación

ID: 40262

Signatura: AO1977-1978.0285

Ubicación habitual: M02.B03.C02

Cuadro de clasificación: 4.1.3. Directores/as españoles/as

Título: Letter from underground filmmaker Antoni Padrós to Pilar Olascoaga

Fecha: 1977-07-03

Nivel de descripción: Unidad documental simple

Volumen y soporte de la unidad de descripción: 1 documento