The cameraman’s gaze is primarily on the monuments: churches, cathedrals, convents, monasteries, castles. Above them, time seems to have stopped. And yet, traces of another life emerge here and there. Men and women in costume on Riazor beach in A Coruña, a bagpipe player accompanied by a drum in the Quintana dos Vivos of Santiago de Compostela, a bustling Rúa Real, the epicenter of A Coruña’s marquees, cafes and shops. brings it all together Journey through Galiciathe oldest feature-length documentary about the community.
Photographed by the Palencia photographer Luis Rodríguez Alonso and intended for the Ibero-American Exhibition in Seville in 1929, a copy “in perfect condition” appeared three years ago in the archives of the Deputation of La Coruña. Fifty minutes of his three hours of filming were screened last week at the Museo do Pobo Galego in Compostela.
The film was not unknown. In 1991, the Centro Galego das Artes da Imaxe (CGAI), today Filmoteca de Galicia, restored and created another of his copies. But the quality of it Journey through Galicia This has nothing to do with who is saved today. “The copy kept at the deputation is impeccable.
It shows no marks, it retains its colorful frames and excellent photographic quality, as if it had just left the laboratory. He also has the right speed,” says José Luis Castro de Paz, film historian and professor of audiovisual communication at the University of Santiago de Compostela, to this day.
The Administration employee who discovered it a few years ago immediately understood the danger: nitrate strips can burn by self-combustion. The depository institution deposited it with the Spanish Cinematheque, based in Madrid, which digitized it. Not restored, because it was not needed.
The fact is that Luis Rodríguez Alonso, famous photographer from Palencia de la Restauración, became passionate about cinema at the beginning of the last century. Like so many other professional colleagues, Castro de Paz says in a conversation with elDiario.es that he started making films. He was in charge of the camera in works such as Maruxa (1923), directed by Henry Vorins and set in Galicia, and, as director, The priest’s niece either The madwoman of the house. At the end of the 1920s, Francisco Lloréns, curator of the Galician pavilion at the Ibero-American Exhibition in Seville, commissioned him to make a film on Galicia. “José Gil was very upset,” says Castro de Paz, “how come the work was done by someone from Palencia and not by a filmmaker from As Neves (Pontevedra).” Gil was one of the pioneers of cinema in Galicia and the ideologue of “Galician regional cinema”.
Rodríguez Alonso ended up presenting a primitive documentary. “It’s as if he had filmed it in 1900. Sellier could have done it in 1897 (José Sellier, a Frenchman living in Galicia, pioneer of cinema in the community), in the style of the Enlightenment. He knows nothing about the cinema that was being made in the 1920s,” explains the researcher. Two years remained before the proclamation of the Second Republic, and in the Soviet Union and other parts of Europe, the avant-garde had already revolutionized cinema. The American Robert Flaherty, for his part, had released titles as decisive for reality cinema as Nanook the Eskimo (1922) or Moana (1926). “Journey through Galicia He also has a very old-fashioned way of understanding society. Monuments, churches, etc. The criticism that could have been made then is that it is a collection of Galician postcards to attract the attention of tourists,” he summarizes. But the passage of time changes everything.
“Every film, however leaden or very bad it may be, ends up becoming a train of shadows, a bearer of ghosts,” says Castro de Paz, “the capacity of cinema to collect fragments of life always appears.” The faces of women crossing Praza de Cervantes – formerly Praza do Pan – in Santiago or the bathers on a beach in Santa Cristina, in Oleiros, today the metropolitan area of La Coruña, bear witness to this.
Journey through Galicia It will remain preserved at the Spanish Cinematographic Archives, whose facilities are prepared to house nitrate. The digitization rights belong to him and, at the moment, this copy of the film is not accessible.
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