JOAQUÍN JORDÁ

THE STEADY GAZE
(Notes to celebrate Joaquín Jordá)

BIOGRAPHY

The people in our recent culture who become greater in our memory as time passes are rare indeed. Joaquín Jordá is one of them. Perhaps because we regret his absence like an unequivocal testimony of the weight of his presence. Perhaps because in his voice, in his gestures, in his way of walking, in his gaze, above all in his gaze, a unique and unrepeatable capital of experience came into play. Very probably because Joaquín was the leading actor in all the feats that have been attributed to him and these, like his ideas, –round, exquisite, original even within the orthodoxy–, belonged almost invariably to the order of certainties.

A succinct evocation leads us to pass, hardly leaving a record, over two facets of his polyhedral career: on the one hand, an early communist militancy, and on the other, his exhaustive link with books – supporting the birth of impossible publishers such as Praxis, directing film collections for the publishers, Anagrama, translating, with accredited rigour, a large number of texts, from the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille or any other “classical author” to those drifting from the “new” amorous disorders of Alain Finkielkraut. For a long time, it was not at all strange to find that the most interesting books, those that you could not put down, bore the fingerprints of Joaquín Jordá.

It is necessary to remember his decisive intervention in such a relevant event in the history of Spanish cinemaas the foundation and the life of the so-called School of Barcelona. At the end of the 1960s, a group of people came together to each shoot an episode of a film which was intended to be innovative, shattering, loaded with the future. They were Pere Portabella, Jacinto Esteva, Gonzalo Suárez, Ricardo Bofi ll, Antonio de Senillosa and Joaquín Jordá. Joaquín and Jacinto Esteva saved themselves from scepticism by putting their two episodes into the full-length fi lm, Dante no es únicamente severo (1967), the literal point of ignition of that phenomenon. In a brief interval – even time was different in those days -, three, four, five years, according to who is doing the counting, the recognisable members and those who excluded themselves (Pere Portabella…) shot so much ammunition against themselves that there are historians who deny the existence of the School itself. However that may be, it is a commonplace or a feat to attribute the drawing up of his programmatic manifesto and, subsequently, his directing or his ideological tutelage to the political shrewdness and the intelligence of Joaquín.

Initially a cinema scriptwriter from the early sixties to the end of the century (for Carlos Durán, Mario Camus, León Klimovsky, Germán Lorente and Vicente Aranda, with whom he also worked for television…), his scripts written but not used or his projects (for video too) fascinating, chaotic and condemned to the anonymous bottom of the drawers in his house add up to over fifty.

His first work as a filmmaker, Día de los muertos (1960), is a sarcastic look at 1st November, All Soul’s Day, in the ritual Madrid version, which was inscribed on the tripe of the “documentary” short, a filmic area that he refined as time passed.

For reasons that are explainable although rather longwinded, Joaquín wandered around Europe for a few years and left his mark in the form of “militant” fi lms, Portogallo, paese tranquilo (1969), Il per ché del dissenso (1969), I tupamaros ci parlamo (1969), Lenin vivo (1970) and Spezziamo la catene (1971), are all examples of an imaginative use of want, from an extreme poverty of resources and his link with the political struggle within communist discourse but not its orthodoxy.

Back in Barcelona, he waited for almost ten years until he made Numax presenta… (1979), first, and Veinte años no es nada (2004), later. In the first, the militant witness, now without a party, of the long struggle of the workers of the Numax company and of their self-governing experience; and in the other he turns his view upon the same workers eroded by time on the open furrows in that collective body of workers which does not forget but which has been split into a thousand splinters. That rough and notable diptych is, in the end, the writing in film of the ups and downs of a generation that took the working class as the axis and the subject of the story.

The people in our recent culture who become greater in our memory as time passes are rare indeed. Joaquín Jordá is one of them. Perhaps because we regret his absence like an unequivocal testimony of the weight of his presence. Perhaps because in his voice, in his gestures, in his way of walking, in his gaze, above all in his gaze, a unique and unrepeatable capital of experience came into play. Very probably because Joaquín was the leading actor in all the feats that have been attributed to him and these, like his ideas, –round, exquisite, original even within the orthodoxy–, belonged almost invariably to the order of certainties.

A succinct evocation leads us to pass, hardly leaving a record, over two facets of his polyhedral career: on the one hand, an early communist militancy, and on the other, his exhaustive link with books – supporting the birth of impossible publishers such as Praxis, directing film collections for the publishers, Anagrama, translating, with accredited rigour, a large number of texts, from the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille or any other “classical author” to those drifting from the “new” amorous disorders of Alain Finkielkraut. For a long time, it was not at all strange to find that the most interesting books, those that you could not put down, bore the fingerprints of Joaquín Jordá.

It is necessary to remember his decisive intervention in such a relevant event in the history of Spanish cinemaas the foundation and the life of the so-called School of Barcelona. At the end of the 1960s, a group of people came together to each shoot an episode of a film which was intended to be innovative, shattering, loaded with the future. They were Pere Portabella, Jacinto Esteva, Gonzalo Suárez, Ricardo Bofi ll, Antonio de Senillosa and Joaquín Jordá. Joaquín and Jacinto Esteva saved themselves from scepticism by putting their two episodes into the full-length fi lm, Dante no es únicamente severo (1967), the literal point of ignition of that phenomenon. In a brief interval – even time was different in those days -, three, four, five years, according to who is doing the counting, the recognisable members and those who excluded themselves (Pere Portabella…) shot so much ammunition against themselves that there are historians who deny the existence of the School itself. However that may be, it is a commonplace or a feat to attribute the drawing up of his programmatic manifesto and, subsequently, his directing or his ideological tutelage to the political shrewdness and the intelligence of Joaquín.

Initially a cinema scriptwriter from the early sixties to the end of the century (for Carlos Durán, Mario Camus, León Klimovsky, Germán Lorente and Vicente Aranda, with whom he also worked for television…), his scripts written but not used or his projects (for video too) fascinating, chaotic and condemned to the anonymous bottom of the drawers in his house add up to over fifty.

His first work as a filmmaker, Día de los muertos (1960), is a sarcastic look at 1st November, All Soul’s Day, in the ritual Madrid version, which was inscribed on the tripe of the “documentary” short, a filmic area that he refined as time passed.

For reasons that are explainable although rather longwinded, Joaquín wandered around Europe for a few years and left his mark in the form of “militant” fi lms, Portogallo, paese tranquilo (1969), Il per ché del dissenso (1969), I tupamaros ci parlamo (1969), Lenin vivo (1970) and Spezziamo la catene (1971), are all examples of an imaginative use of want, from an extreme poverty of resources and his link with the political struggle within communist discourse but not its orthodoxy.

Back in Barcelona, he waited for almost ten years until he made Numax presenta… (1979), first, and Veinte años no es nada (2004), later. In the first, the militant witness, now without a party, of the long struggle of the workers of the Numax company and of their self-governing experience; and in the other he turns his view upon the same workers eroded by time on the open furrows in that collective body of workers which does not forget but which has been split into a thousand splinters. That rough and notable diptych is, in the end, the writing in film of the ups and downs of a generation that took the working class as the axis and the subject of the story.