Textos sobre Eugenio Granell

Alberte Pagán (Litoral. La poesía del cine, Málaga, 2003)






Os ballets mecánicos de Eugenio Granell, cineasta experimental

Alberte Pagán (Congreso Interdisciplinar Eugenio Granell. Actas. Abril de 2006. Fundación Eugenio Granell, 2007) [English translation below]

The Mechanical Ballets of Eugenio Granell, an Experimental Filmmaker

Alberte Pagán (Congreso Interdisciplinar Eugenio Granell. Actas. Abril de 2006. Fundación Eugenio Granell, 2007) [translated into English by Tomás Rodríguez Fernández]

We should not be surprised that Eugenio Fernández Granell, as a good surrealist, took an interest in cinema and that he even made his own films, being as he was an enterprising and multifaceted artist. Even so, his experimental films are the result of his mainly pictorial —rather than artistic— interest: the possibility of creating moving pictures tempted Granell the same way that it had tempted so many other painter-filmmakers.

Granell’s watercolour Retrato de Guillaume Apollinaire viendo bailar a Fred Astaire (1946) announced for the first time his interest in cinema, an art he approached during his life in three different ways: as a critic, although superficially; as a scriptwriter, with three scripts —two of them are clearly in the line with the surrealist tradition and the third is a didactic essay on the history of painting—; and as a filmmaker (in this order). It is symptomatic that Granell relates, in the mentioned watercolour, cinema to dance: his films will be in debt to a key work in the history of cinema that also makes reference to dance (ballet) from its very title, Le Ballet mécanique (Fernand Léger, 1924). But Retrato de Guillaume Apollinaire viendo bailar a Fred Astaire relates as well artistic avant-garde (Apollinaire) to industry (Astaire, Hollywood), that is: art to technique; it will be precisely technique, his mastery of it, what Granell will miss when trying to transfer to the celluloid his surreal visions, feeling unsatisfied with the obtained results. We find a similar reference-tribute to the cinema from Hollywood in the mentioned Ballet mécanique, in which Léger animates a drawing of Charlot that performs a cubist dance.

Granell, an Experimental Filmmaker

In the three years that go from 1960 to 1962 Granell makes six avant-garde movies: Invierno (1960), Lluvia (1961), Dibujo (1961), Trompos (1961), Middlebury (1962) and Película hecha en casa con pelota y muñeca (1962), to which it should be added a last attempt of cinematographic creation found together with his family recordings: Casa (1963).

The production is brief (17 minutes altogether), it never went out of the family circle and it had no continuity. Today, after decades of experimental creation and theory, it is easier to value Granell’s films as artistic works. Taking into account in every moment that they are posthumous and therefore “unfinished” or “abandoned” works, I will try to demonstrate that they are not just the result of “hesitation” and “irrelevant” “idle pursuits” (according to A. Santamarina), but rather that they belong, on their own merit and with all the honours, to the world of experimental cinema. There are evidences that show that Granell knew the avant-garde cinema of the twenties (during his exile in Puerto Rico he participated in the preparation of a surrealist film festival) and it would not be wrong to suppose that he was also familiarized with the experimental cinema made in New York in the sixties (he was exiled in New York at that time and he made friends with artists like Duchamp, what backs this possibility).

Consequently, we can assert, with the caution necessary to value works that were never published throughout the life of the author, that Granell is an honourable follower of the tradition of experimental cinema, and that, although he was not an innovator, he used systematically some techniques that before were only used from time to time.

We can not assure that Granell’s films are concluded and publishable, although the titles may be of great help with this regard, since he stated: “Until the work has a name I suffer quite a lot, because I don’t know what I did. But finally one day you find it. For me the work is that. It is not finished until it has a title”. It is quite true that the titles of the films seem to be simple references to the content of the rolls. Whereas the lack of title implies that a work is not finished, these descriptive and maybe provisional titles leave the pieces halfway between the sketch and the finished work. For example, the title Película hecha en casa con pelota y muñeca (Film Made at Home with a Ball and a Doll) is excessively descriptive (may be because Granell had not found the “true” title yet) and Middlebury, Trompos (Spinning Tops) and Dibujo (Drawing) are merely referential. But this is not the case of Invierno (Winter) or Lluvia (Rain): in these films, paraphrasing J.M. Bonet, the titles form part of the work; they are in reality, and in “surreality”, the authentic themes of the pieces. Though the first titles are descriptive, these last are metaphors that help us to interpret the tapes. In the same way that his “magic landscapes” are falsely abstract paintings whose brushstrokes hide figures, behind the spots and scratches of these two films it is taking place a real winter and it is falling authentic rain, and we are able to perceive it only thanks to the titles, which are “true detonators of the image”, as Pablo Jiménez puts it. This metaphoric and figurative anchorage drives Granell’s work away from abstraction, with which he does not feel really comfortable. And it could be that uncomfortableness what definitely drives him away from painted cinema.

If Granell’s films are pioneering in more than one aspect in and out the country, in the Galician scene are unique (first shown in the Fundación Granell in January, 2003; the only subsequent showings took place in March of the same year in the CGAI of A Coruña and now, in April, 2006, in this Interdisciplinary Congress on Eugenio Granell in Compostela; just because of this, they have to be part of the history of the Galician cinema). The films, on the threshold of the prodigious decade of the sixties of the last century, are the result of former strategies, but they also anticipate strategies that will be very important well into the decade. We have to take into account that Granell makes his films before than Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, Michael Snow, Malcolm LeGrice, Peter Gidal, José Antonio Sistiaga or Ramón de Vargas. Just because of this they deserve our attention.

Six Films

Granell’s six films can be divided in two groups well differentiated: In the first, which includes Invierno, Lluvia and Dibujo, Granell does not use the camera and manipulates directly the celluloid, producing abstract images in movement, a kinetic painting that fits in with the experimental tradition inspired by abstract painting and Dadaism, father of the experimental cinema. In these three films, he uses techniques (painting upon the celluloid and the scrape of the photographic emulsion) that are not new, but that produce original results, because up to that moment filmmakers that did not use the camera either depended excessively on geometric motifs and their narration (Len Lye, Harry Smith), or used this resource in a fragmentary and testimonial way (Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer). The three abstract films of Granell, which precede, with a difference of many years, the painted celluloid of José Antonio Sistiaga, the last painted celluloid of Stan Brakhage and the one of Maurice Lemaître, Une histoire d’amour (1978), coincide with his abstract pictorial period. The titles Invierno and Lluvia could perfectly be the titles of each of the “magic landscapes” he made in that period.

Trompos and Middlebury are also, from a figurative perspective, the continuity of the Dadaist tradition, that is, the tradition that dispenses with the narration, the story and the characters, subverting the form of the artistic object, permitting the physical manipulation and the formal experimentation, and using the screen as if it were a canvas.

Middlebury, inspired by the compound images of Bells of Atlantis (Ian Hugo, 1953) and by the final section of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (Kenneth Anger, 1954), will also be the first to use constant superimpositions created with the help of the camera, a technique used abundantly in the lyrical cinema of the sixties.

On the other hand, the central section of Película hecha en casa… aims to become a surrealist narration. Surrealism, contrary to Dadaism, allows the use of a story and the use of narration and characters, and it perceives the screen as a window open to the world, to a surreal world, respecting the basic magic of the cinema: the framing, the moving figures, the depth of field…

Granell’s painted films turn to painting for inspiration. Película hecha en casa…, as a surreal narration, is in the line of the novels and the scripts of the author. Trompos and Middlebury (and Casa) are the most purely cinematographic productions.

Invierno

Invierno (1960, 5 min.) is the longest film of Granell, and may be the most successful. It is an involuntary outline of the most important work of painted cinema, the monumental …ere erera baleibu icik subua aruaren… (Sistiaga, 1970).

It begins with a live action high angle tracking shot over a landscape in black and white. The rest consists of paint applied directly on transparent (exposed) celluloid. After around seven seconds of blank screen, in which dirt, scratches, corpuscles and other scraps are the accidental prelude to the subsequent painting, the first black spots appear, which sometimes rest on an orange background. The different colours (black, a brown gradient, green, a faded blue, orange, yellow, grey, some touches of red) occupy all the frame, producing a continuous bombing of images on the screen, whose style, although abstract, is similar to the one of REcreation (Robert Breer, 1957), a film in which every frame conveys an independent photographed image. Therefore, the smooth flow of icons from one frame to the other that characterizes Lluvia and Dibujo will not be one of the features of Invierno.

This flow and continuity of motifs will have a place in a special moment of this first film of Granell, when what I have called “the clearest example of animation” of the film occurs: on a transparent background, that soon becomes pink, two black points (which refer to the ubiquitous black spot of La bola negra, the first script written by Granell) move around; they grow and diminish suggesting the movement of a sphere in the third dimension, becoming nines, sixes, questions marks or hyphens that spin and transform into two vertical lines that turn blue. In order to create the animation of this sequence (whose style is taken up again in Dibujo), Granell had to apply painting in every single frame (I refer to this as “transversal painting”), what suddenly slows down the abrupt and continuous movement of the stains made all along the film strip, without respecting the dividing lines of the frames (“longitudinal painting”). Sometimes, Granell combines longitudinal painting (a black line shakes itself vertically on the screen) with transversal painting (a horizontal line “interrupts” in every frame the course of the vertical line, fixing it to the centre of the screen forming a cross).

The prevailing black colour is forceful, rough and cracked and it combines with some browns gradients of soft texture, similar to the texture of the watercolours. All this chromatic mass does not leave any empty space, and the white grooves and cogged cracks on a coloured background simulate, if we trust on the title, snow-capped conifers; at the same time the film reminds us of the visual aspect of Mothlight (Stan Brakhage, 1963), a film equally made without a camera in which the filmmaker stuck directly on the celluloid wings of insects and leaves of grass. The vein structure and the transparency of these are the ones we find in Invierno. Against the predominance of black and white (with a brownish grey gradient) it stands out from time to time some orange or yellow backgrounds that give the winter landscape a warm touch.

Granell applies the painting mainly longitudinally, impregnating all the width of the celluloid, excepting the moments when he works on every frame individually (horizontal painting, that requires to be more meticulous). The results are more acceptable, having into account that the material has a width of 8mm (that actually leaves a width to work of 5mm, if we do not count the sprocket holes), when we compare them to the results of Sistiaga’s work, who painted on frames of 35mm, that is, frames that are sixteen times bigger than Granell’s.

While in Middlebury two independent shots produce, as a result of the superimposition, just a flat space, here the flat and uniform paint simulates a superimposition owing to the different texture of the colours. The poor limpidity of the colours and their cracks suggest winter vegetation and branches, while the warm faded colours make us jump back to an autumnal landscape full of yellow leaves.

Chance is intrinsic to the aesthetic results of the painter’s abstract films. The film is an “experiment”, since the author, facing his painted work, cannot guess the final result he will observe on the screen. Granell follows the steps of Man Ray, who rehearses the striped frames of Le Retour à la raison (1923), one of the first films to dispense partially with the camera, asking himself: “How would that work on the screen? I had no idea”. But we should not forget that this is the method, derived from automatic writing, that the painter applies when carrying out his paintings: “When I start painting, I do not know what I am going to do. The stains incite me to keep on doing something related to them. As time passes by, the work takes form. When I finished it, I do not know what I have done”. The result is a dance of colours and shapes produced by the mechanics of the projection that individualizes 24 frames per second of a celluloid without divisions. This is the particular “mechanical ballet” of Granell.

Lluvia

Like Invierno, Lluvia (1961, 2 min. 20 sec.) starts with a prologue of live action that, with its bluish shade, suggests the sadness of a rainy day.

Blue will be the only colour of the central section of the film. The rain whose presence we may guess in this introduction will have graphic continuity in the subsequent synthetic cloudburst, isolated from any context. Granell creates his cloudburst scraping longitudinally and transversally a black film (developed but without images: the grooves reveal the transparency of the celluloid and, at the edges of the frame, the navy blue colour of the emulsion). As a result, it appears on the screen a continuous flow of white and blue lines (depending on the depth of the scratches) that, sure enough, remind us of the metaphoric title of the film, Lluvia.

Some horizontal scratches increase the panoramic effect: from side to side, the horizontal lines look like a single line in continuous transversal movement, as if the camera moved along a groove. Near the end, a kind of rain more difficult to identify and less marked is followed by a fragment of exposed abstract celluloid that appears photographically blinded by some warm colours coming from the left side. These pastel colours, from white to fuchsia, including orange, yellow and light blue, break with the chromatic uniformity of the former segments and introduce the photographic (although abstract) process in a work that, in all other respects, is synthetic, producing a technical symmetry with the prologue. These gentle chromatic variations remind us of the softness of the manufactured gradated colours of Invierno, as well as the subsequent optical experiments of Rates of Change (Bill Brand, 1972) or the bright abstract and changeable textures of so many films by Brakhage.

Lluvia fluctuates between the manual work on the celluloid and the acquisition of images through the camera. It begins and ends with photographed images: a figurative introduction, of live action, and an abstract coda whose colours are obtained through photographic means. But even the navy blue colour obtained scratching the film is the result of a photographic impression (contrary to the colours in Invierno and Dibujo).

Lluvia is the second film with a metaphorical name. This work, together with Invierno, refers to the immediate reality of New York’s winter scenery as well as to the elaborated reality of the semiabstract “magic landscapes” painted by Granell from 1957 to 1967, in which he changes not just the content but the technique and the brushstrokes juxtapose with a style close to pointillism. The painter himself talks about “reminiscences of children’s tales” and of the “constant mutation” of its landscapes, which transform themselves as they do in dreams. In his abstract films, landscapes go through the same process of continuous metamorphosis.

The constant blue colour of Lluvia, associated to “water” as a content, appears again in many pictures of this period: in the waters of Pescador en aguas tranquilas (1959), in the waterfall of El incendio de la Torre de Babel (1958) and in the total blue of El mar de Orzán se yergue cada noche (1965). In Granell’s paintings the abstraction is not complete, as some figures emerge from the apparent chaos; the titles of his films help us to find the figure or the meaning hidden behind the colour stains. For the transformations referred to by Granell in the former quotation, which he picks up from his previous pictorial periods (the “encounters”, “transformations” and “metamorphosis”, according to Garrido Moreno’s nomenclature), cinema becomes a perfect means of expression: due to the creating method itself, none of Granell’s three painted films has two frames alike, so the movement and the transformations of the images are continuous. Whereas the colour spots are constantly transforming themselves in Invierno, modifying the always-ephemeral landscape, the cloudburst in Lluvia becomes a waterfall in a segment of curved lines or a stream when the horizontal line appears. As it occurs in the case of Invierno, it is the mechanics of the projector what transforms into a dance, into movement, some lines drawn without taking into account the individuality of each frame.

Scraping the emulsion of a film is a simple, lucid and primitive act, like a child’s doodles on a wall or the toy broken to discover how its mechanism works. Therefore, since the first “direct” films of Len Lye or Harry Smith, those made cameraless, it should not surprise us the similarities between some frames (Kaleidoscope, 1935; Colour Flight, 1938, both by Lye) and others (Lluvia), that in some cases are almost identical. Even in the baroque …ere erera baleibu icik subua aruaren… it appears a bluish vertical line similar to the ones that appear in Granell’s film. In the Prelude of Dog Star Man (1964), Brakhage scratches longitudinally a photographed shot: white lines coexist with the green colour of the filmed grass; the effects are similar to the ones produced in Lluvia. “Copycat”, a chapter from Notebook (Marie Menken, 1962), obtains also similar aesthetic results. And a new film by Lye, Free Radicals (1958-1979), shares with Lluvia not only its aesthetic similarities (vertical parallel lines, even one or two common asterisks) but techniques: in both cases the scratches are made on the emulsion of the celluloid.

Dibujo

While Invierno was painted on transparent (exposed) celluloid and Lluvia was scratched on a developed emulsion, the colours of Dibujo (1961, 1 min.) are applied on white non-printable leader and, contrary to those films, this has not got a prologue of live action nor a metaphoric title.

On the white colour of the leader (which, from a graphic perspective, must be considered as one more ink) Granell applies systematically red and black inks, and green and pink (pale red) inks more sporadically.

The film begins with two thick lines, one black and the other red, that slide vertically along the screen. These two inks will be the absolute protagonists of the film, either as vertical stripes that flow and undulate (longitudinal painting) or as circles or stains that settle between the stills (transversal painting).

The white background participates in the chromatic game, offering a kind of limpidity that, for example, Invierno lacks. But Dibujo imitates Invierno in a few concrete moments, when the black and red inks stain the whole screen, dirtying and eliminating the whiteness of the background. In order to emphasize the presence of the white colour as a chromatic, aesthetic and expressive element, Granell incorporates, in the middle of the film, a white strip (not painted) of nine seconds. In this strip we may observe, like in the materialist Film in Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, Etc (Owen Land, 1966), accidental scratches, dust and dirt accumulated by chance and the passing of time. This use of empty shots (white or black) as aesthetic motifs, and not as simple transitions, comes from the always-suggestive Ballet mécanique of Léger, in which the abundant black fragments work, from the point of view of hierarchy and composition, at the same level as the figurative shots.

Dibujo seems to come from the “animated” section of Invierno: its graphic elements transform continuously but without going out of the space framed by the screen, and it could even be guessed certain narrative structure in the succession of the geometrical elements, similar to the one found in the work of Walther Ruttmann or Oskar Fischinger: the black horizontal lines seem to “attack” the vertical red line, until these place on the top of it forming a bicolour cross, which also appears in Invierno and in Lluvia.

Dibujo, like Trompos and Casa, is a simple and natural film, as its non-metaphoric and totally unpretentious title suggests. Again, it should not surprise us the similarity between the images of Dibujo and the works of those filmmakers that painted directly on the celluloid before (Colour Flight, Kaleidoscope) or after (…ere erera bailebu…; Une Histoire d’amour, Maurice LeMaitre, 1978) Granell did. The technique, like in Lluvia, is elementary and the result of a primitive and childish impulse to scratch the surfaces or to discover the entrails of a new toy (in this case cinema), a childish impulse and attitude that the “Explainer” analyses in Granell’s script Ensayo sobre la pintura, in which he recognised that what for adults seem to be just “doodles” had a purpose and a meaning. This automatic approach to the canvas or to the transparency of the celluloid, a creative effort whose results are unpredictable, is the same used by Man Ray in the making of Le Retour à la raison. The photographer and filmmaker asks himself: “How would that work on the screen?” And Granell asserts: “When I start painting, I do not know what I am going to do”. It is the “Dadaist senselessness” that Isabel Castells perceives in Granell’s poetry.

Trompos

The two Japanese spinning tops that appear in Trompos (1961, 40 sec.), ready-made presents that Duchamp had given Granell, are painted with concentric circles that resemble the spinning reliefs of the French artist. But this is not the only connection that the film has with Duchamp: the similarities with Anémic cinéma are obvious.

Trompos consists of four camera shots in black and white. The first shot focuses on a sculptural object that is semi-covered by a white piece of cloth and that stands to the right side of a shadow. Like in Le Ballet mécanique or in Lichtspiel, schwartz-weiss-grau, (Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 1930), in this close-up the camera gets so near to the sculpture that this becomes abstract, since it is not possible to observe the entire object and its context. From this moment we can see high angle, almost zenithal shots of the spinning tops which will spin till the end on a wooden floor whose grain i in tune with their painted circles. The camera trembles slightly in the author’s hands, what hampers our appreciation of the movement of the spinning top.

Trompos is indebted to Anémic cinéma. In Duchamp’s film we find, on the one hand, a few spinning disks that alternate with palindromes and sentences full of puns and, on the other, spinning reliefs (disks with concentric circles that with the rotatory movement acquire a third dimension, becoming spirals), the same disks that Duchamp had given Granell. The spinning reliefs of Duchamp, which rotate constantly on their axis, can work as mandalas, behaving in a similar way to the always revolving and changeable spheres of Lapis (James Whitney, 1966), an explicitly meditative proposal. Granell comes back to the circular movement, but, contrary to Duchamp, whose spinning reliefs rotate in the middle of the screen, he plays constantly with the offscreen space: the spinning tops (“disks” is an optional title that Granell wrote on the box of the reel, maybe thinking of the spinning reliefs of his friend) are in all the shots near the edge of the framing or directly hidden behind it, keeping their balance not just on their point but between the two cinematographic spaces: the interior and the exterior, onscreen and offscreen, vision and darkness.

Anther influence on Trompos is the dance of thumbtacks of Le Retour à la raison, made cameraless (impressing directly the film after placing the thumbtacks in each of the frames). The motionless objects, which have been placed in the same relative position, seem to become alive, obeying the rules of animation cinema. Like in Duchamp’s film, the thumbtacks are in the middle of the picture, but their movement, which is more anarchic, draws them closer to the dance of Granell’s spinning tops.

There is certain aesthetic primitivism (both in the case of Duchamp and of Granell) in this fascination for cinema’s simple capacity to reproduce movement. Both authors feed on the continuous turns of pistons of Le Ballet mécanique that, with its frenetic rhythm, transmit their mechanical nature to the women that swing themselves or go up the stairs. The movement of the spinning tops reflects the mechanic movement of the roll of celluloid in the camera and in the projector. However, the close-up does not take advantage of this capacity of cinema, since this reproduces a static reality from a static camera (for the first time in Granell’s cinematographic works). This close-up, at the beginning of the film, works as a setting shot, though, ironically, the closeness of the object transforms the image into the most enigmatic scene of the film. The strategy of beginning the film with a scene that is completely different to the rest of shots, which forces the spectator to meditate on its pertinence, is the same as the one used in Lluvia e Invierno.

Casa

Granell’s domestic films include some poetic moments with which he tries to go beyond the simple accumulation of images, and a few brief rolls of lyrical inspiration. One of these sketches, which lasts half a minute, is conserved in a different reel with the title of Casa and dated 1963. It shares with Trompos its simplicity and humbleness and the absence of colour, and it consist of three interior shots in which it appears, in this order: several piles of books on a desk; a typewriter with a written sheet of paper on the roll and tobacco smoke ascending in a close-up; and a wall with seven framed photographs and paintings hanging on it. The camera, used without a tripod, trembles slightly.

Middlebury

Middlebury (1962, 4 min.) consists of two tapes of two minutes each that are spliced when the fogged image is transparent, so that the film is not interrupted. These false fade to white, produced by an excess of light, mark the images rhythmically at the beginning and at the end of each tape, being the longest fade the one that works as a transition between the first fragment and the second.

The constant superimposition of two layers of images and of the different shots recorded in each of them is created in camera. The content of both layers are similar: they reproduce a meeting in the countryside of Middlebury, a university city in Vermont (New England).

The first layer presents eleven shots in which a group of people eat and talk before a wood or look for kindling and play next to a rocky stream. Excepting the first couple of shots of the country meeting, most of the footage records people’s comings and goings next to the brook.

The second layer consists of twelve shots with new scenes of the meeting, with people on their feet drinking, eating and talking. In a few cases the framing isolates certain characters.

Although Middlebury’s aesthetic assumptions are apparently simple and primitive (so the film is in this sense the continuity of Trompos), it takes on special interest because of the interweaving of images of both filmed layers, (pro)creating a third cinematographic space that is quite far away from the description we have just made. The described realist space provokes a baroque two-dimensional and abstract combination of images in which the characters from one layer interact with the characters from the other, breaking up the perspective (clearly despised by Granell: “I am not interested in perspective”, he asserts), the depth of field and the coherence of the relative sizes, and producing a spatial contradiction. Defending the fantasy of art and denouncing the lies of realism, Granell refers to the unreal heavens of El Greco, and the lack of coherence of sizes and perspectives in the Adoration of the Magi, by Albrecht Dürer, “a fantasy’s achievement”.

Middlebury’s two-dimensional and flattened space appears again in the prelude and the coda of Película hecha en casa…; in the prelude, because the general darkness does not totally contextualize the lights of the fireworks, transforming them in mere points of light without depth; and in the coda, because the animated object is in itself two-dimensional. But we could also perceive the loss of the three dimensions in Trompos, work in which the zenithal high angle shot flattens the spinning tops against the grained wood. Only their shadow seem to cling on to the third dimension. On the other hand, in his abstract films, it seems that Granell tries to suggest three-dimensional winters and landscapes starting from flat painting.

Going back to Middlebury, the integration of its two strata is such (the same black and white with low contrast, the same scenery, actions and characters) that sometimes it is not easy to distinguish one from the other. The scenes of the stream in the first layer, for example, hide almost completely the simultaneous scenes of the second layer. We have to pay attention to people’s movements, and above all, to the movements of the camera, in order to discriminate one layer from the other, in the abundant examples in which the camera pans across a fixed shot. In these cases, the characters in the static shot seem to move quickly against the mobile background of the panning shot as if they were cut out figures that have been animated in a space without the third dimension. Chance produces happy coincidences.

Middlebury is mostly the result of improvisation, heir to surrealist automatic writing, since the author cannot choose the precise scenes he wants to superimpose when editing in camera. The resultant dance cannot follow some fixed criteria; as it occurs with contemporary dance, the encounters between the figures are the result of improvisation and automatism. Like Invierno, Lluvia and Dibujo, Middlebury shares with Le Retour à la raison the unpredictability of the results, the acceptance of chance as an aesthetic detonator.

The fusion of images mistakes the signifier for the signified, giving this third synthetic space a pictorial and flat character. When the scenes of both layers fuse, the characters loose their individuality and consistence and become mere mobile shadows.

The panning shots and the shakiness of the camera combine with the movement of the people to elaborate an intricate kinetic game. The camera follows a character and then abandons it to follow another one that comes across the way, while in the other layer the static figures are forced to move against a background that is not theirs. The framing games are also interesting. They are not obtained thanks to the planning of the cameraman, but through the continuous changes of position of the people.

Middlebury is an example of how a personal issue (a domestic film about domestic matters: a meeting of friends) can become art. With respect to the theme, the film is included into the domestic production of the painter; and people constantly greeting and looking at the camera emphasize its home movie look. But regarding the style, the film is the result of the enthusiasm Granell feels for the technique that allows to go to the other side of the simple reproduction of reality and that is the essence of Anémic cinéma and Le Ballet mécanique. The film’s aesthetics, together with the personal content, is the same as the one found in the cinematographic diaries of Mekas or in the lyrical cinema of Brakhage, Bruce Baillie or Carolee Schneemann: all of them, inspired by the model of Bells of Atlantis, Bridges-Go-Round (Shirley Clarke, 1959) and of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, consider superimposition ––an aesthetic element and not a mere transitional devise–– as a valuable tool to express poetically personal experiences and everyday life. Chumlum (Ron Rice, 1964), Nº 14 (Late Superimpositions) (Harry Smith, 1965), Castro Street (Bruce Baillie, 1966) and certain films of Mekas are classical examples of the use of superimpositions in camera, using one or several strata of images.

Película hecha en casa con pelota y muñeca

The long title of this short film is so over-elaborated that it cannot be a simple referential label. “I don’t choose titles capriciously,” Granell states. Under its merely descriptive appearance it can be perceived that irony common to so many titles of Granell and that is also present in Owen Land’s Film in Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, Etc. Trompos took the name of the filmed objects; Middlebury took the name of the place where it was filmed; the abstract movies (excepting the concise Dibujo) became metaphors; and this Película hecha en casa con pelota y muñeca defends its filmic nature from the first word and its domestic character with the following, at the same time that it dispels with the last one our doubts about the consideration of the coda as an integral part of the work (at the same level that the “pelota”) or as an independent fragment.

Película hecha en casa con pelota y muñeca (1962, 4 min.) is Granell’s only film photographed in colour (if we do not take into account the introduction to Lluvia; in his abstract films, colour is not the product of a photochemical process) and the only one that is narrative, at least, partially. It shares certain similarities with the script of La bola negra (in both cases there is a ball present in the different sceneries, the ball ends up floating into a puddle, and there appears a black hat) and we are tempted to consider it as an extension of this.

The film is made up of three fragments that differ greatly among them, respecting both their technique and their theme. The first section, which is the shortest, contains images of fireworks, which, looking tiny in the dark long shot, straggle to find their luminous place in the prevailing darkness. The possible splices are hidden behind the absence of light. While Trompos showed a primitive fascination for movement, this strange Dadaist prologue of a surrealist film takes us back to the fascination for the nocturnal mobile lights of Le Retour a la raison or to the “Night Writing” and the “Lights” of Notebook. What is cinema but light and movement?

The lights of the fireworks exploding at night, being lost the three dimensions due to the lack of references, become really similar to the salt and pepper grains sprinkled on the celluloid of the first shot of Ray’s film and then transformed into luminous particles thanks to the light of the laboratory.

The second section, which is the longest, is the repository of the surrealist story. It illustrates the adventures of a red ball in the painter’s studio. However, in Granell’s only film in which we find that space is realistic, coherent and three-dimensional and that it has perspective (excepting Casa), the painter cannot avoid defending, in a brief sequence, the “perpendicular space” present in canvas and sculptures like Guerreros antiguos or Bodegón de Zurbarán: I am referring to three shots in which, forming a similar composition, several vertical objects lined up on a small piece of furniture support successively the red sphere, by means of animation techniques that will be used again in the third section on the film. The vertical immobility of the figures is also perceived in the case of the animated doll of the final section, where it comes back the two-dimensional space, and in the case of the woman in the final scene of this second section, who repeatedly puts on an easel (static and vertical as well) some big cloths that are thrown to her from the offscreen space. At the end, the roll is fogged and the ball lets its power to be seen when a red tone blinds the images. This burst of colour works as a perfect transition to the coda, since the two-dimensional doll, whose legs and arms Granell animates imitating the arms of the woman that picks up the cloths, rests on a red background.

Like Le Retour à la raison, Película hecha en casa… starts from darkness, a two-dimensional space, and an initial abstraction to go into the three dimensional representation. Granell finishes his work coming back to the two dimensions of the doll, which, in this case, are physical. Warm colours are abundant, especially the red colour that the ball seems to transmit to everything it touches and that contrasts with the black colour of the shadows or of the first dress of the woman.

Combining three fragments that are so different among them to make his film, Granell points to Léger’s cubist films, in which a fragmented reality only makes sense and is rebuilt thanks to the interpretative effort of the public. The final doll is a clear reference to Le Ballet mécanique, that began and ended with a flat animated figure of Charlot, and that included a scene in which two legs of a mannequin were sharply animated. The last scene of the central section also refers to the mechanical gestures of the women in Léger’s film. The fact that the head of the woman is cut by the framing and the continuous and repetitive movement of picking and hanging the cloths, dehumanize the figure and transforms her into an object, a mechanical toy or a dancing doll, an imitation of Le Ballet mécanique, where the woman on the swing, with her head moving softly again and again, and the washerwoman that goes up the stairs indefinitely entering into an endless loop, are deprived of all humanity. In his films, the Austrian Martin Arnold will also make a mechanical use of human presence, putting living beings on a level with pistons.

As in the case of Le Ballet mécanique and contrary to the script of La bola negra, in Película hecha en casa… there is not any love story and the woman figure barely has consistency as a character; in fact, since she does not even appear in the title, she is subordinated, regarding her narrative function, to the rest of the objects: the ball, the easel and the doll (the last splice lets us appreciate the similarity between the woman figure moving her arms to hang the cloths and the movements of the doll, that imitates her. The title, so meticulously descriptive at first sight, ironically ignores the woman in the same way that Land does it in the already mentioned Film in Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, Etc, a work whose only figurative element, always present on the screen, is the close-up of a woman.

In Película hecha en casa… the narration is vaguer than in the script of La bola negra and it suffers the counterweight of its abundant non narrative contents: the prologue, the coda or the shoot of the cloths refer to the aesthetics of Trompos and Middlebury more than to the narrative and surreal richness of Granell’s scripts. The only narrative thread (a ball that, leaving the “frame” of the painter, goes around different sceneries until the hands of a woman —his muse?— take it out of the picture) takes no more than a minute and a half. Watching the ball getting around, it may come to our mind the sphere in the first part of Duo Concertantes (Larry Jordan, 1964), which “guide” us through the different sceneries of the film.

The dance ends

Granell’s “mechanical ballets” end that way, with an animated doll that imitates the final animation of Charlot in Léger’s film. But this final dance is heralded by the bursting of the fireworks that feed on Man Ray’s works and Dadaism. On the borderline between Dada and surrealism and between experimentalism and narration, Granell’s films constitute an exceptional case in the Galician cinema (of the exile), and they fill a gap in the paltry national cinema, becoming the first and unique experimental films of its history. After the public discovery of these brief works we should, if I may say so, rewrite the history of Galician cinema.