Wine's nocturne
L'Alternativa 2010
Festival de Cinema Independent de Barcelona
“Ahora es siempre, el siempre de antes y de después, sin relojes ni calendarios. La existencia es la realidad, la verdad es la vida. Esto es más o menos el arte”. That’s a brief extract from the José María Nunes speech for the Second Artistic World Meeting in Valencia in 2002. He was an eccentric filmmaker and had image as his main language because he doubted his speaking ability and for that reason his speech were always very long and halting. His ideas were always an incessant ray the same as his films. He died on 23rd march 2010 just after the premiere of his last work, Res pública (2009).
He was born in 1930 in Faro, Portugal. He moved to Spain at twelve. First, he lived in Sevilla and later in Barcelona sharing a shack with his family in the early years. He began working in the cinema industry as an extra and later as a script. Subsequently, he achieved a job as a scriptwriter and director’s assistant and finally he got the direction of his first film, Mañana… (1957). “Tomorrow” is in his own words “la salida que buscan para engañarse a sí mismos quienes sienten la impotencia, la cobardía de afrontar cara a cara su circunstancia en la vida”. It was a real Nouvelle Vague’s preview in a Spain dominated by Franco and fascism. Even so, the film didn’t work because a bad working conditions but it spread the Escuela de Barcelona followed by filmmakers like Jordà, Aranda, Suárez, Camino or Portabella. Nunes thought that the cinema born from that group is the only real avant-garde cinema made in Spain ever.
He was born in 1930 in Faro, Portugal. He moved to Spain at twelve. First, he lived in Sevilla and later in Barcelona sharing a shack with his family in the early years. He began working in the cinema industry as an extra and later as a script. Subsequently, he achieved a job as a scriptwriter and director’s assistant and finally he got the direction of his first film, Mañana… (1957). “Tomorrow” is in his own words “la salida que buscan para engañarse a sí mismos quienes sienten la impotencia, la cobardía de afrontar cara a cara su circunstancia en la vida”. It was a real Nouvelle Vague’s preview in a Spain dominated by Franco and fascism. Even so, the film didn’t work because a bad working conditions but it spread the Escuela de Barcelona followed by filmmakers like Jordà, Aranda, Suárez, Camino or Portabella. Nunes thought that the cinema born from that group is the only real avant-garde cinema made in Spain ever.
His career achieved his highlight with Noche de vino tinto (1966), a night where two solitudes met and decided to go around every bar in Barcelona looking for a red wine’s heaven and ending in a grey rising without any hope. Then, Nunes experimented with filming without a previous script. But the Spanish censorship didn’t let him a way to do it so he decided to move to Paris in the final sixties. Freedom was always his way and he just returned to Spain with it and for it.
His last film, Res pública, is a reflection on existence as an individual fact. According to Nunes, each person can decide his freedom therefore his death. Since the birth, a person can decide between to live or to die at each moment. The film’s main role is a rebel who looks for a freedom he finally just achieves thanks to love some women or to irony and a subtle sense of humour. It’s a philosophy as well as his filmic chant A la soledad (2007) in which Nunes looks for the age of the sun as the higher level of intelligence. His search was his life.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photo by Sílvia Subirós courtesy of L'Alternativa