Luis Garcia Berlanga

Luis García-Berlanga Martí (Valencia, June 12, 1921-Pozuelo de Alarcón, Madrid, November 13, 2010) was a Spanish film director and screenwriter.

Biography

Childhood and youth

Luis García-Berlanga Martí was born in Valencia on June 12, 1921, into a family of landowners from Camporrobles, province of Valencia. His grandfather, Fidel García Berlanga (1859-1914), was an active member of the Sagasta Liberal Party at the end of the 19th century, becoming a deputy in Cortes in Madrid and president of the Valencian council. His father, José García-Berlanga (1886-1952), also began his militancy in the Liberal Party, later joining Lerroux's center-right party, the Radical Party, and later joining the bourgeois center-left party of Martinez Barrio, Republican Union.

The origins of his mother, Amparo Martí, were much more humble, since she came from a family of emigrants from Teruel who settled in Valencia. Her maternal uncle, Luis Martí Alegre, became president of the Valencia Savings Bank.

Luis García Berlanga himself tells his biographer Antonio Gómez Rufo in relation to his father:

"And so it was that when 1936 my father was in the Republican Union, in the Popular Front. But it turned out that he was very persecuted by certain factions of the ultra-left, specifically by those with whom I most sympathized, the anarchists, because I do not remember what follions in Utiel and Requena, so he was left with no choice but to flee from Valencia to save himself from persecution. And he went to Tangier, where he lived a year, until the nationals arrested him."

During his youth, he joined the Blue Division to avoid political repression for the position of civil governor that his father had held in Alicante during the Spanish Republic. In 1990, Luis himself admits that he enlisted because many of his friends were prominent young members of the Falange. On his blue ideology in those years there are many testimonies from divisionists who shared the trenches with him in Russia, such as José Luis Amador de los Ríos.

In March 1943, he won the «Luis Fuster» award given by the SEU —Falangist university union— in Valencia for his article that appeared in the Blue Division Campaign Sheet entitled " Fragments of a spring". He used to write:

[...] On a chariot, a chariot of staggered wheels and shafts that shook, in contrast with the eternally illuminated steppe, we carried yesterday his body to Motorowo, and in his garden, head to Spain, buried him... With him were the religious medals, the white swan on the blue shirt, and those roses of the Alps that a German student would give him. He left us, however, an anthology of good death and an arrogant posture to the irremediable. The earth fell upon his body and the silent desire in the struggle descended upon us. Thus, without shouting, we continued, increasingly accelerated, the march towards the limits of our consciousness. The corpses of the Falangists are bleeding, but that blood enters the veins of which we remain, to rejuvenate our momentum.

As a young man, he decided to study Law and then Philosophy and Letters, but later, in 1947, he changed his vocation and entered the Institute of Cinematographic Research and Experiences in Madrid, where he made his first short films.

He was a great fan of eroticism, collecting a huge collection of material on the subject (mainly literature) and he came to co-direct from 1979 to 2004 at Tusquets Editores a literary collection on this subject that awarded an award, the La Sonrisa Vertical Award, in which he was president of the jury.

The term 'berlanguiano' which refers to the surreal, to what is difficult to explain but absolutely possible within the imagination and the way of being of the Spanish, has been admitted by the RAE.

Filmmaker

He made his directorial debut in 1951 with the film Esa pareja feliz, in which he collaborated with Juan Antonio Bardem. Along with this, he is considered one of the innovators of postwar Spanish cinema. His films include famous titles in the history of Spanish cinema, such as El verdugo or Bienvenido, Mister Marshall . He worked seven times with screenwriter Rafael Azcona, and from this association some of the most famous films in Spanish cinema emerged, in addition to those mentioned, such as La escopeta nacional .

Plate Welcome Mr. Marshall. in Guadalix de la Sierra.

His cinema is characterized by its biting irony and its acid satires on different social and political situations. During the Franco dictatorship, his ability to circumvent the censorship of the time with situations and dialogues that were not excessively explicit but intelligently counter-reading stood out, and he managed to carry out projects as daring as Los jueves, milagro .

His film Plácido was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1961. In 1980 he won the National Cinematography Award, in 1981 the Gold Medal of Fine Arts, in 1986 the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts and in 1993 the Goya for best director for his film Everyone in jail. On April 25, 1988, he was elected a member of the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and entered the following year with a speech entitled Cinema, an inexplicable dream .

He won international prizes and awards at the most important festivals, such as Cannes, Venice, Montreal and Berlin. At the Karlovy Vary Festival he was chosen as one of the ten most relevant filmmakers in the world. In addition, he possessed a countless number of national awards.

Family

He married María Jesús Manrique de Aragón (1931-August 4, 2022) in 1954 and they were the parents of four children: José Luis García-Berlanga, television producer, hotelier and cook; Jorge Berlanga (1958-2011), journalist, writer and scriptwriter (he participated in the script for several films by his father) and director of the Mostra de Valencia between 2001 and 2002; Carlos Berlanga (1959-2002), musician, composer and important precursor of the cultural current known as the Madrid movement, in addition to the pop music of the 80s; and Fernando García-Berlanga, broadcaster and president of the now-defunct Spanish channel Somosradio.

His two best-known sons died in Madrid relatively young from liver disease: Carlos on June 5, 2002, at age 42, and Jorge on June 9, 2011, at age 52.

Luis García Berlanga died at the age of 89 of natural causes at his home in the Somosaguas urbanization (Pozuelo de Alarcón, Madrid) on November 13, 2010.

Legacy and influence

In 2008, already in a delicate state of health, he deposited an envelope containing a secret in Box 1034 of the Instituto Cervantes on Calle Alcalá, which he asked not to be revealed until June 12, 2021, on the centenary of his birth. On June 9, 2021, three days after the centenary, his grandsons Fidel ―who accompanied the filmmaker when he deposited the envelope― and Jorge opened the box and revealed the secret content of the envelope: an unpublished script entitled ¡Viva Rusia!, co-written by the filmmaker himself, his son Jorge, Rafael Azcona and Manuel Hidalgo, a project for the fourth film in the Leguineche family saga, which was never filmed.

After the death of Luis García Berlanga, Álex de la Iglesia, president of the Spanish Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences, wrote an obituary in El País recognizing that the film Plácido, by the aforementioned director, changed his life:

Berlanga put a fist in my heart and pulled it out of garlic, while the other hand made me mock. And I laughed, and I cried, at the college movie club, and I didn't know that movie, PlácidoI'd walk in my dreams all my life. The faces of his actors, José Luis López Vázquez, Manuel Alexandre and so many others, would be my family forever.

Alex of the Church

Santiago Segura also explained that his work influenced his, saying that "Berlanga's cinema has influenced my filmography in the best possible way, having a strong impact on my brain and leaving its mark after viewing it", just like Óscar Aibar, who stated that his film El gran Vázquez has influences from Berlanga. Berlanga was one of the first 25 Spanish filmmakers elected by the Board of Directors of the Spanish Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences who had its star on Madrid's Walk of Fame, located on Calle de Martín de los Heros, and made by Óscar Mariné.

Filmography

Short Films

• Three songs (1948)
• Walking for an ancient war (1948). Co-directed with Juan Antonio Bardem, Florentino Soria and Agustín Navarro.
• The circus (1949)
• It sells a tram (1959). Short film for 28-minute television, written by Berlanga and Azcona, and directed by Juan Estelrich March under Berlanga supervision.
• The Four Truths ("Les quatre vérités", 1963), episode Death and the wooder. Adaptation of the fables of Jean de la Fontaine in a Franco-Italian-Spanish-German co-production of excellent distribution. The three remaining episodes were directed by René Clair, Hervé Blomberger and Alessandro Blasetti, and the original footage of the tape was broadcast on the French TV with the title "Les fables de La Fontaine" in 1964.
• The Master's Dream (2002)

Feature films

• That happy couple (1951). Co-driven with Juan Antonio Bardem
• Welcome, Mister Marshall (1953)
• Boyfriend in sight (1954)
• Calabuch (1956)
• Thursdays, miracle (1957)
• Plácido (1961)
• The executioner (1963)
• The piranhas (The boutique, 1967)
• Live boyfriends! (1970)
• Natural size ("Grandeur nature", 1973)
• The national shotgun (1978) Trilogy of the Leguineche family.
• National heritage (1981) Trilogy of the Leguineche family.
• National III (1982) Trilogy of the Leguineche family.
• The locker. (1985)
• Moors and Christians (1987)
• Everyone to jail (1993)
• Paris-Tombuctu (1999)

Other jobs

• Villarriba and Villabajo (television, 1994). Creator of the series and screenwriter, was directed by his son José Luis and by Carlos Gil and Josetxo San Mateo.
• Blasco Ibáñez, the novel of his life (television, 1997)

Curiosities

• In June 2021, the Fábrica Nacional de Moneda y Timbre stamped a stamp on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of the Valencian filmmaker Luis García Berlanga, within the series 'Personajes 2021'[1]

• In December 2022, it was announced that the Ministry of Culture and Sport had completed the acquisition of the archive of Luis García Berlanga for an amount of 357,000 euros. [2]

Awards and distinctions

Oscar Awards

Goya Awards

Festival de Cannes

Venice International Film Festival

Assembly of Directors Spanish Filmmakers

Asociación de Escritores y Escritoras de Cine de Andalucía

L'Alfàs del Pi Film Festival

Mar del Plata International Film Festival

Medals of the Film Writers Circle

Bronze Prizes for the Guide to Leisure

Silver Photogram Awards

International Awards Terenci Moix

Ondas Awards

Princess of Asturias Awards

Sant Jordi Film Awards

Awards of the National Spectacle Union

Turia Awards

Valladolid International Film Week