Neil Young reports from the Gijón International Film Festival in Spain
Gijón is a city of
cinema, haunted by the ghosts of cinemas past. In 1963, when it first
hosted the event now known as the Festival Internacional de Cine
de Gijón (FICX for short)—for two decades a competitive
showcase of children’s film and TV—there were more than 25
movie-houses in the central area alone, more than in any Spanish city
of similar size. Even in 1986, when the festival’s focus switched
from youth-oriented fare towards more general and adult material
—though always retaining a large chunk of kiddie-friendly
programming—the vast majority of these enterprises were still in
business. All are now gone.
The last survivor was an
unassuming, standard-issue, 90s-style miniplex: the Cines Centro in
the San Agustin shopping centre. It closed its doors in 2015 and the
space is now a branch of the Altafit gym chain. Since then the only
spot to regularly show films in Gijón (largest settlement in the
northern coastal region of Asturias, an area traditionally reliant on
agriculture and fishing, then more recently on the coal and steel
industries) has been the Yelmo multiplex in the suburb known as La
Calzada, a 20-minute bus-ride from the centre. This isn’t by any
means an unusual story in terms of middle-sized European cities, but
most such settlements can’t boast a film festival with more than
fifty editions to its name. The 57th renewal ran from November 15th
to 23rd this year, with the €20,000 top prize going to Pedro
Costa’s Locarno Golden Leopard winner Vitalina Varela.
Since
the demise of Cines Centro, FICX—the X comes from the city’s name
in the Asturian language, Xixón—has depended on the Yelmo: this
year more than a third of all the festival’s sessions were held
there. The opening and closing ceremonies and the most high-profile
screenings did however take place in the city centre, in the opulent
splendour of the 120-year-old Teatro Jovellanos. This grand venue is
named after the city’s most famous son, enlightenment-era
author/philosopher/statesman Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos
(1744-1811), and which upon its opening in 1899 succeeded the
original Teatro Jovellanos around the corner. The latter is now an
impressively stately public library: in its classical portico a
plaque proudly commemorates the fact that in 1896 the first
cinematographic exhibition in Asturias took place within its
walls.
The “new” Jovellanos, mainly used for
concerts and plays, is very much the jewel in Gijón’s cultural
crown—and is maintained in tip-top condition by its owners, the
generally left-leaning local council. I saw two films there during
the latest FICX: Babyteeth, Australian newcomer Shannon
Murphy’s drama about a terminally ill teenager—the muted-but-tragic
climax had the desired emotional effect on many of the
near-full-house audience, myself included—and the next night the
starkly austere Vitalina Varela, a decidedly more slow-paced
and challenging affair which sent several impatient patrons exit-ward
long before the credits rolled.
While neither of these titles
matched up to my great find of the week, Harmony Korine’s casually
sublime, gloriously freewheeling Florida-set celebration of poetic
hedonism, The Beach Bum (which
I saw at the Yelmo just a couple of hours after arriving off the
Madrid train) both Jovellanos screenings took place amid the kind of
film-festival “vibe” which one can never imagine
associating with any soulless multiplex. It doesn’t help that the
Yelmo, part of a nationwide chain, occupies the upper floor of a
neglected mini-mall, most of whose other units are currently
vacant.
The FICX organisers, headed by well-regarded artistic
director Alejandro Díaz Castaño, are all too aware that the current
situation is far from ideal. While they do intend to continue using
the Yelmo, the chiefs have their eyes on a new venue planned for a
bland glass-box shopping centre, Los Fresnos, less than a kilometre
from the Jovellanos. Díaz Castaño gave an interview in September
where he expressed hopes that the projected nine-screen cinema might
even be ready for the 58th FICX in November 2020. I had a look around
the current Fresnos set-up during my visit to the festival, and
formed the impression that such an aspiration is more than a touch
optimistic.
But even if Los Fresnos does become a major FICX
venue in 2020 or 2021, the screening-spaces will still be scattered
too thinly across the city to generate the proper film-festival
buzz—such is to be found in frenzied abundance along the coast in
San Sebastian every September, during Spain’s #1 cinema-related
event. More creative solutions need to be somehow found if the
venerable Gijón equivalent—which this November attracted several
high-profile auteur names such as Costa, Lisandro Alonso and Albert
Serra—wants to maintain and increase its status as one of the
country’s edgier and more adventurous festivals, and even perhaps
carve a bigger niche on the crowded, competitive European
scene.
This year
meeting-rooms in the ornate Escuela de Comercio and the adjacent
Antiguo Instituto, both of them a couple of minutes’ walk from
Jovellanos, were used—along with a smaller number of screenings in
the gigantic Laboral University (by some measures Spain’s largest
building, some 4km from the centre) and a muncipal centre in another
suburb, Pumarín. Walking from the Jovellanos to the Escuela and
Instituto involves passing the venue which was formerly the
festival’s main hub, the Teatro Arango.
This opened as a
classic single-screen, 1100-seat palace of cinema in 1951 with a
screening of Powell & Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, and
operated for 48 years before closing down with Asterix &
Obelix Vs Caesar on the penultimate day of 1999. The Arango later
became a skin-care clinic and then this year suffered the ignominy of
being converted—amid much dismay from those concerned with the
city’s cultural and architectural heritage—into Gijón’s fifth
Burger King.
The Arango was designed, like most of the city’s
more striking edifices—most notably including the glorious
modernist-rationalist concrete frontage of the 1940s bus-station, now
in a sad state of crumbling disrepair—by father-and-son architects
Manuel del Busto (1874-1948) and Juan Manuel Del Busto (1904-1967). A
visit to “Burger King Arango” now provides a
discombobulating, surreal, dispiriting experience for those aware of
what went on here just a couple of decades ago. The listed building’s
bold exterior is essentially intact, albeit now festooned with
“classy” versions of the BK logos. Inside, elaborate
chandeliers dangle from the high ceilings; the large,
immaculately-painted balcony surveys not a cinema screen but a wide
fast-food counter where (mainly) teenage customers pick up the orders
placed on displays at the entrance.
Sufficient elements of
the old space have been retained for the Arango to, in theory at
least, revert to its original use at some future point. Its fellow
city-centre movie-houses weren’t so lucky: the 1400-seat Hernan
Cortes (1958-1994) a couple of blocks away is now a casino, the two
former giants on the main pedestrian shopping thoroughfare Calle
Corrida—the Maria Cristina (1943-1993) and the the thousand-seat
Robledo (1917-1991)—boast few vestiges of their former purpose and
are occupied by branches of Spanish clothing chains Oysho and Pull &
Bear (both owned by Galicia-based multinational Inditex, best known
for its Zara brand). The Roxy (aka Roma, 1933-1970) around the corner
is now a BBVA bank.
The Goya, which as the Versailles was
Gijón’s first purpose-built cinema back in 1910, was located at the
end of an elegant short promenade that begins at the Jovellanos, and
became known for sex and horror films in the 1970s. It closed in 1981
and post-demolition was replaced in 1987 by the Hotel Begoña which,
ironically enough, is now used as one of FICX’s main festival hotels.
Gijón’s principal shopping area is now just that, a shopping area:
dozens of bars and restaurants are just a short walk away, but it’s
easy to imagine a very different scene as patrons of the many cinemas
criss-crossed the district. As Nick Nicolaou, the independent New
York cinema-owner protagonist of Abel Ferrara’s documentary The
Projectionist (my final FICX picture) remarks, “movie theatres
add character to a neighbourhood,” and the sheer density of
giant old-school cinemas during Gijón’s heyday is tantalising and
poignant to consider.
The saddest story of all, however,
concerns the Brisamar, which only operated from 1965 to 1981, in the
Calle Romano Castro up on the windy Cimavilla headland which is the
oldest and most spectacular district of the city. A grassy promontory
is crowned by Basque sculptor Eduardo Childo’s minimalist-abstract
concrete curve Eulogy To The Horizo. It’s
an ideal spot for looking out over the Atlanic Ocean which
brackets Asturias on its northern side, and then back over the roofs,
apartment-blocks and and spires of the city to the distant snowy
ridge of the Picos de Europa, which form the semi-autonomous
principality’s southern border.
The Brisamar was Gijón’s
arthouse, where locals could catch the likes of Last Tango in
Paris, or the latest offerings by the likes of Bergman, Fellini
and Fassbinder. Tucked away in an unremarkable cul-de-sac among the
low-rise residential blocks which comprise the bulk of the likeably
scruffy Cimavilla’s architecture, the Brisamar is now a small parking
garage for the block of flats above. But one striking visual legacy
of the cinema’s 16-year tenure remains: a large bas-relief panel
dedicated to the inventors of cinema, the Lumière brothers. Its
design is deliberately crude, almost Aztec-like in its starkness.
Made of dark brown stone the colour of old wood or damp earth, it is
dominated by a stylised representation of a film-projector; this
appears to be of anachronistically medieval design, with myriad
mysterious circles and the word LUMIERE printed dozens of times, as
if on brickwork. I visited late one afternoon, the short street quiet
apart from the cawing of seagulls overhead, the plaque easy to miss
in its graffiti-strewn, unkempt, unlit vestibule. Dust obscured its
rough surface: I impulsively wet a fingertip and rubbed it onto the
dark brown stone. Old wood, damp earth… and faint but glowing
speckles of gold.