The Museum of Modern Art presents a retrospective of the films of veteran Catalan political filmmaker Pere Portabella (b. 1929, Barcelona).
Portabella, a director at the forefront of avant-garde Spanish cinema has, over the past 40 years, produced a wide range of narrative and documentary works known for the formal beauty of their composition and complex interrelationship of image and sound, many of them involving symbolic resistance to the 1939–75 regime of General Francisco Franco.
The exhibition includes films that have consistently expanded the expressive potential of the medium through his subverting of the notion of genre, particularly for horror films, fantasy films, and thrillers, and have served as allegorical critiques of the right wing Spanish administration. Presented from September 26 to October 6, 2007, in the Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, Pere Portabella will feature the director's first appearance in the United States for the U.S. premiere of his latest film The Silence before Bach (2007) on September 26.
The exhibition is organized by Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art, and Mark Nash, Professor and Head of the Department Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art, London.
The 14-film series features the avant garde horror films Vampir Cuadecuc (1970) and Umbracle (1972), both starring Christopher Lee; the powerful documentary General Report on Some Interesting Facts for a Public Showing (1976); and The Silence before Bach, which explores the transformation of our experience of the world through music. Throughout his career, Portabella maintained ongoing working relationships with Catalan artists Joan Miró, Carles Santos, and Joan Brossa. Another highlight of this series is a quartet of films chronicling Miró and his works.
"Pere Portabella is an important figure in the development of modern European cinema, who is little known in the States," says Mr. Kardish. "Our retrospective hopes to bring to the attention of those interested in contemporary culture the achievements of this radical artist who extends the boundaries of cinema. I am pleased that Portabella will introduce the premiere of The Silence before Bach and introduce Vampir Cuadecuc 35 years after MoMA premiered it and Portabella's passport was cancelled by the Spanish government."
In conjunction with the retrospective at MoMA, Pere Portabella will make his first U.S. appearances at roundtable discussions with film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, a longtime champion of Portabella's work, and Mark Nash, at New York University, September 27 and 28, 2007, and at the world premiere of The Silence before Bach at MoMA on September 26.
Portabella earned a degree in chemistry before co-founding in 1959, with Francisco Molero, the influential production company Films 59, which was responsible for fiction films implicitly critical of Franco. Among them were Marco Ferreri's El Cochecito (The Wheelchair, 1959), Carlos Saura's feature-length debut Los Golfos (The Hoodlums, 1960), and Luis Buñuel's Viridiana (1961). Portabella had his passport revoked when Luis Buñuel's Viridiana (1961), which he helped to make, embarrassed Spain at the Cannes Film Festival in 1962 and forced Portabella into temporary exile in Italy. Because of the Viridiana furor, the director was not permitted to travel to the United States to introduce MoMA's first screening of a Portabella film, Vampir Cuadecuc (1970), on January 25, 1972. When democracy returned to Spain in 1975, Portabella served as a senator in the Catalan government from 1977–88 and throughout his various careers he continued to make cinema.
Pere Portabella is made possible with the support of the State Corporation for Spanish Cultural Action Abroad (SEACEX). Films and texts for the exhibition were lent by MACBA (Museu d'Art Contemporani, Barcelona) and Portabella's own production company, Films 59. Additional support and programs are provided by two New York University Centers: the King Carlos I of Spain and the Catalan Center. Additional assistance was provided by Anabel García and Marta Rincón of SEACEX, Marcelo Espósito and Jorge Ribalta of the MACBA, and Mary Anne Newman and Laura Turéegano at NYU. -- www.moma.org
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