"Quinqui" Film in Spain: Peripheries of Society and Myths on the Margins

By Anthem Press

The recent interest in quinqui film and the uprooted people of the Transition who were relegated to the background or were forgotten has recovered throughout the twenty-first century. The dissemination of the subgenre, paraphernalia and fetishism that surrounds these films, as well as the social groups they represented, have had their maximum exponent in exhibitions around the time that they were displayed in Madrid and Barcelona. During the summer of 2010, specifically from May 25 to September 6, the exhibition “Quinquis de los 80. Cine, prensa y calle” took place at the CCCB (Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona). Echoing this interest and practically simultaneously (from July 9 to August 29), the cultural center La Casa Encendida of Madrid held an exhibition and numerous screenings of Quinqui movies from the 70s and 80s. Both exhibitions enjoyed a great reception and affluent visits, as well as publicity and repercussion in different media, highlighting the large number of press releases published and the multiple reports that were broadcast during the television news shows of the main networks in primetime. Recently, films made with retro aesthetics in remembrance of that era have been released on the big screen, as is the case of revisions such as 7 vírgenes by Alberto Rodríguez (2005), Volando voy by Miguel Albadalejo (2006) or El idioma imposible by Rodrigo Rodero (2010). This last film is based on the homonymous novel by Francisco Casavella that is part of his particular vision of the years of the Transition through the trilogy “El día del Watussi”. In turn, renowned authors integrated into the literary star system of large circulation have published texts that portray this era and these young delinquents, slum dwellers and outcasts that are somewhere between the extreme hedonism of the heroine, the constant escape on board a Seat miriafiori or a Bultaco and survival in the peripheral neighborhoods of post-Franco Spanish cities. Authors such as Javier Cercas, with his novel Las leyes de la frontera (2012), and tributes to this type of cinema now bring this genre to a large audience that always turned its back on Quinqui film and its actors, with a nostalgic look and definitely romanticized of this time to legitimize it and finally integrate it, even within marginality, into what the Transition meant for Spanish society as a critical historical moment, however idealized, from which one cannot separate reality from the most disadvantaged that these films capture.

These films already anticipated much of the failure of the Transition, which failed to accomplish all of the achievements that it promised and that eventually ended up becoming, to a certain extent, just noise. What later is referred to as “the desencanto”, term established by the homonymous documentary of Chávarri in 1976 on the figure of the poet Leopoldo Panero; already anticipated by these films, which, although they do not articulate it theoretically or analyze it explicitly, if they implicitly expose their navajero, chorizo, macarra and yonqui characters, who live with the immediacy and the harshness of an era that did not offer them solutions, in fact one ignores them and sinks them, even more so if possible, in their particular hell in the democratic city. This ethical

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jan 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785272318

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Quinqui Film in Spain

Quinqui Film in Spain

Peripheries of Society and Myths on the Margins

Edited and Translated by

Jorge González del Pozo

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

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and

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© 2020 Jorge González del Pozo editorial matter and selection;

individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019955625

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-229-5 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-229-2 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

Contents

Prologue: Rehearsing Circles

Hilario J. Rodríguez

Introduction: Quinqui Film as a Reflection of the Transition, Illusions and Shadows of the Great Change

Jorge González del Pozo and Juan Laborda Barceló

Chapter 1. Cinema on the Margin: Reflection on the Quinqui Filmography by Eloy de la Iglesia

Javier Sánchez Cortina and Teresa Cortina de la Calle

Chapter 2. Heroes and Antiheroes … from the Neighborhood: The History of Postmodern Robin Hoods

Alberto Pascual Pérez

Chapter 3. The Repercussion of Deprisa, Deprisa in the National Press

Alejandro Gutiérrez

Chapter 4. Siete Virgenes: Quinquis for the New Millennium

Fernando Marañón

Chapter 5. Margin, Marginality and Delinquiency in the Quinqui Space: From Nomadism to the Periphery of Volando voy by Miguel Albaladejo

Agustín Cuadrado Gutiérrez

Chapter 6. Todos me llaman Gato, Animals of the Periphery

Andrés Maté Lázaro

Chapter 7. Women on the Warpath: Perras callejeras , José Antonio de la Loma (1985)

Juan Laborda Barceló

Chapter 8. Quinquilleras, Exploitation and Forced Capitalism in Barcelona sur (1981) by Jordi Cadena: An Atypical Case of Delinquent Women in the Unstructured City of the Eighties during the Spanish Transition

Jorge González del Pozo

Index

PROLOGUE: REHEARSING CIRCLES

Hilario J. Rodríguez

When the great art critic Robert Hughes depicted the cultural landscape of Australia at the beginning of his career as a writer, back in the sixties, he insisted on the difficulties of his compatriots to find Picassos or Kandinskys in the newspaper archives of his country. Almost everything was known indirectly, through catalogs, slides and postcards. What was there—the paintings hanging in the museum halls—was too provincial and diminished, lacking the risk of the avant-garde. But over time Hughes had to accept this state of affairs, as Wim Wenders would say, and understand that, in effect, perhaps Australian art was no more than a footnote to the history of universal art, something that, even without possessing the necessary attributes to amplify the most important aesthetic discourses, inscribed in its center,could at least expand its peripheries.

I think of this very thing while trying to situate quinqui film within the context of Spanish cinema, already in itself quite diminished when compared to French, German, Russian or even British film. The cinematographer wanted it to appear to coincide with our biggest crisis as an empire, as a society and as a culture, and it seems that we would never have recovered from that unfortunate coincidence. Thus, our film history has always been of a local nature, with some exception fostered by artistic exile (Luis Buñuel’s case, to whom, by the way, we could give credit for a quinqui film masterpiece if instead of having done Los olvidados (The Young and the Damned) (1950) in Mexico, a similar story could have been filmed in Spain, around the generation of the disinherited who had left World War II and which Roberto Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Andrzej Wajda and René Clément, among others, gave an account of) or the experimental heterodoxy (with the outstanding case of José Val del Omar, a visionary without continuation within the framework of Spanish cinema if we exclude Víctor Erice). Here it is not that we did not realize the needs of the youth and we did not want to capture them in celluloid, it was that the Civil War put a stop to the projects of the educational missions done by the Free Teaching Institution during the Second Republic, the decade of the forties barely left space for dreams, in the fifties the migratory diaspora from the countryside to the city began, altering the identity of thousands of families, and the years of developmentalism during the sixties did the rest. Despite our promised Gran Familia of Spanish cinema, some films began to detect bodies that would later become quinqui film characters, mapping the large undeveloped spaces of the most important cities, where shantytowns were the common currency, in addition to illiteracy, and the lack of expectations and the cultivation of the most ancestral customs and practices of Spanish culture (with bulls and flamenco as backdrops).

In one of the video letters that Víctor Erice sent to Abbas Kiarostami in 2006 and that later formed part of the Correspondencias exhibition, students from a school in Arroyo de la Luz (Cáceres) are seen during the screening of ¿Dónde está la casa de mi amigo? (Where Is My Friend’s House?) (1983) and later, when the teacher asks them what they would have done had they been the protagonists: Would they have disobeyed their parents? Would they do homework for a friend, so he would not be punished by the teacher the next day? Thanks to those questions, the answers given by the young students and the images of the film, it is made clear how children can easily cross borders that an adult can no longer cross, because they are prevented by common sense, laws, fear, or prejudices. This ability to be above the dividing lines between what society considers good and bad is sometimes very advantageous, but other times not so much.

At this point, when the midday news shows young people who burn a homeless person alive, who sacrifice themselves in a cafeteria in some Israeli city or commit a massacre in their schools, the stories of children who beat or kill each other have almost ceased to surprise us, like the small neighborhood criminals who smile at the camera shortly before trying to rob a bank. Robert Thompson and John Venables, for instance, were barely 10 years old when they tortured and then killed James Bulger, a two-year-old boy who had been kidnapped in a shopping center near Liverpool. It is quite difficult to understand why such things happen, especially in developed countries, but perhaps that is why cinema finds inspiration in those kinds of events.

Of course, quinqui film finds an ancestral echo in the Spanish picaresque novel, from El Lazarillo de Tormes to El Buscón, in which hustlers travel with reckless abandon through borders (social, geographical, or legal); and also connected with and etymology and tradition of junk sellers, or quincalleros, who are the majority members of a separate ethnic group: that of the merchero. One of whom is Eleuterio Sánchez, alias El Lute, master of the elusive and known for the prison escape to which Imanol Arias gave life in an admirable diptych directed by Vicente Aranda. His adventures covered the front pages of the newspapers and occupied long segments on the television news. But what makes the life of a criminal interesting to a society or a film industry? Of course, the heroic aura of the characters outside the law has much to do with the questioning of the power, and Spain in the mid-seventies, with the death of Franco, finally got rid of the gag that had prevented this questioning for decades. Quinqui film, in fact, is bad only up to a point. It does not place bombs, it does not indiscriminately kill policemen and judges (but rather those who are put before them when they have to flee), it does not encourage nationalist or separatist ideas, it does not marry anyone (not with the church, or with the economy, or with politics), except for the girls in their neighborhood, and it does not let itself be manipulated by racial hatred but by social inertia. And what one looks for in this film is something different from the cultured and stylized approaches of Carlos Saura, to become a character of flesh and blood, with a nickname that gives him his own personality: El Torete, El Vaquilla or El Pirri.

Without looking for it, because they were not looking for anything in particular except a little money to show off or to buy heroin, the quinquis preferred to become a pretty corpse rather than being domesticated by a society of the gross, dirty and bad as they describe the films of Eloy de la Iglesia or José Antonio de la Loma. That explains why, like many other young people of the time, many died in an awkward manner (from an overdose or in a traffic accident, and not in a glamorous way, like a shoot-out with the police during a bank robbery). Those who managed to survive, succumbed to film, absorbed directly by an industry in search of an image of Spain different from the one that had been proposed by the Spanish film of the dictatorship (always in a struggle of extremes, very sugary or very bitter, avoiding the middle terms), which culminated in Maravillas (Wonders) (1980) by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, a fictional film that could be read in documentary key because in it they can see traits of what we really were (and perhaps we still are) and of what we hoped to be, small delinquents and sentient beings, exemplified in two actors who are the polar opposites of a tradition: El Pirri, the nickname which José Luis Fernández Eguia was called after his intervention in Navajeros (Switchblades) (1980), and Fernando Fernán Gómez. The first was an actor who ended up becoming a character after his stint in the world of cinema, from which he later left to enter prison in 1987 for a thwarted robbery, and the second a force of nature that never allowed him to swallow the characters he played, probably because he knew that eternity lasts more than 15 minutes, and that fashion is one thing while art is something completely different.

Introduction: Quinqui Film as a Reflection of the Transition, Illusions and Shadows of the Great Change

Jorge González del Pozo and Juan Laborda Barceló

Based on strictly historical criteria, the Transition can be defined as the period of time after the Franco regime in which the restoration of Spain’s democratic institutions took place. Said period starts with the death of Franco on December 20, 1975, although as we will later explain, the phenomenon has deep roots that were established in the years of developmentalism and ended with the electoral victory of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) in February 1982. It is supposed that this completes the historical circle, since the power theoretically returns to those who had lost it at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). This approach continues to be nuanced, since neither literally nor metaphorically were those the same as these. It is worth remembering that the civil war began when a group of left-wing parties called the Frente Popular governed in Spain. The collapse of the Second Republic takes place between an amalgam of various, and often times leftist, forces. In addition, it is notable that the PSOE under Felipe González was not the same as that of Pablo Iglesias, or that of Largo Caballero, but he had renounced Marxist ideology and had become a center-left party interclassist at the height of 1981. Perhaps in that broader profile is the key to his great electoral victory of 1982. It was attempted, therefore, to shelve a key historical period by making use of the totemic date of 1936. Historiography shows results from a latent intention, which indicates not only the end of a previous stage but also the necessary national reconciliation to swiftly recover that effervescent era of the Republic.

As we will analyze below, the echoes, deep meanings and motivations of the much-talked about Spanish Transition are not so simple as to hide in the folds of history. One of the key characteristics that is always highlighted as exemplary in the Transition is the absence of violence that occurred. There is talk of a mature change, of an urban society willing and able to modify its political structures, and most likely it was so. The reality is that there were specific moments of tension, such as the strikes of 1976, the attempted coup d’état of ‘81 or the terrorist actions of both signs that came to fruition in these years (ETA, GRAPO or right extremist groups). What did not happen though was a new fratricidal struggle or a generalization of violence, since all had to give in to some significant point of their ideology. In this sense, some sociologists point out the importance that the shadow of the Spanish Civil War cast as an antagonistic scenario to the ideal. En España se oponían dos concepciones ideológicas y proyectos de vida colectiva incompatibles entre sí (Miguel 1978, 17) (In Spain, two ideological conceptions and incompatible collective life projects opposed each other). That period (referred to in the quote), the thirties, was a time of Cainite confrontation, while the seventies and eighties were marked by a deep desire for coexistence, in the most literal sense of the word.

Another reason that explains the lack of much violence is that the reality of this change was the consensus between the former Francoist ruling elites and the opposition groups, which had to reduce their programs or soften their positions if they wanted to legally enter the political game. This situation brought with it a very controlled evolution from dictatorship to democracy. It seemed obvious to all, if we discount some immobilists of the so-called Búnker as Arias Navarro or Blas Piñar, that Franco’s regime without Franco was nothing more than an entelechy. The reality of this unwritten agreement between ideologically diverse forces had some positive visions and others that are not so. Among the demonstrations of will to reach an agreement, one finds the famous Law for the Political Reform in 1976 in which the first administration of Suarez, at the time driven by the personalist election of King Juan Carlos I after forcing the resignation of Arias, would make a true political hara-kiri to the old Francoist political model.

It must not be forgotten that during the Franco regime there was that sibylline formula that was called organic democracy. The regime kept some Cortes open, but these had no legislative function, nor were they any representation of the people or elected by universal suffrage, but simply spaces of expression for the so-called families of the regime. That farce of democratic appearance was sometimes called a sounding board, because it did nothing more than endorse the decisions that the dictator made unilaterally. For this reason, it is especially striking that from those origins, with the direction of Suarez, it came to these liberties, because the aforementioned law (created by a team led by Torcuato Fernández Miranda) allowed the transformation of that system into a bicameral Cortes (Congress and Senate), where the first would be elected by universal suffrage. Similarly, the government was empowered to convene during the 1977 elections. There was still much to be done, since a fifth of the Senate was still the direct election of the monarch, which reminds us distantly of nineteenth-century practices, but the foundation had been laid of a future democracy.

Another sign of the desire for widespread coexistence was the integration of most of the political forces in that new electoral process. Another moment of great symbolism was the legalization of the Communist Party (PCE) led by Santiago Carrillo. In return, those who follow must accept the monarchical flag, abandon their republican desires and embrace that somewhat decaffeinated formula of Marxism that was Eurocommunism. On April 9, 1977, the party was legalized, making its participation possible in the upcoming elections. It is not the intention of this introduction to capture the development of key political issues, which could range from the electoral results of 1977 to the well-known Pacts of La Moncloa or the still-existing Constitution of 1978, but we intend to address the analysis and reasons that marked the period. Therefore, we must refer to the most negative elements of the fact that the entirety of this movement is embraced by a political class that was inherited from Francoism. When the inadequacy of the inheritance proposed by Franco was demonstrated, there was a rapid mobilization of forces, which allowed the transit to take place without any blunder. This is in reference to the fact that one of the reasons for the absence of generalized violence was that the drivers of this movement are the ones who occupied the positions of importance during the late Franco regime. Now it was not interested in retaliation, but the creation of a new system in which everyone fit. For a very popular party pressure, this question is not an obstacle to changing the political system. We can say that the Transition was the fruit of the action of the masses and of the great political personalities of the moment. In any case, the reflection on Francoist crimes, and the search for responsibility for 40 years of authoritarian rule or the questioning of the legitimacy of those ruling classes that overlap at various historical junctures, never was truly on the table in the process of national reconciliation.

We cannot bring this vision of the curious phenomenon of the Spanish Transition to a close without talking about the so-treated, but not always well-understood, economic issues and mentalities. It seems there is a common agreement among current sociologists and historians to state that there was a previous situation that occurred in such a way to make access to democracy possible. Precisely, the key to such a mystery lies in the evolution of Francoism from the sixties. As is well known, until the fifties, he decided to opt for an autarchic economic model, the result of which was quite negative. En 1948 la producción industrial había alcanzado los niveles de 1929 (Carr 2003, 211) (In 1948 industrial production had reached the 1929 levels). Neither the creation of National Institute of Industry (INI), of clear Italian fascist airs, nor the control of the prices and wages, nor the use of the peasantry-like center of the race could solve an endemic problem of the Spanish economy: lack of raw materials and foreign trade.

They had to live on their own, forced, in addition, by the terrible international isolation due to the proximity to the Axis during World War II. Throughout the forties and beginning of the fifties, only Argentina under Perón and Portugal under Oliveira Salazar gave a small respite to the stifling Spanish foreign policy. Carrero Blanco opinaba que jamás, a lo largo de su historia, España había tenido una presión exterior más fuerte y como consecuencia de ello la única estrategia possible era la de ‘orden, unidad y aguantar’ hasta que el tiempo aliviara las tensions (Eiroa 2001, 67) (Carrero Blanco thought that Spain had never had a stronger external pressure throughout its history and as a consequence the only possible strategy was ‘order, unity and endurance’, until time eased tensions). All of this changed in the wake of the Cold War. In 1953, the pragmatic Franco regime was only exhibited as anti-communist to win the sympathy of the United States. Such a pendular policy will be reflected in the Spanish-American accords of 1953. Spain granted strategic bases within the famous domino theory, according to which capitalists and communists had to win as many seats as possible for their cause, in exchange for a strong economic injection, team goods and the diplomatic support that Spain would need in order to return to international organizations such as the UN. With the helping hand of these agreements came the changes of mentalities, still scarce, but they would materialize in that desire for material and vital improvement that came with the famous developmentalism of the Opus Dei technocrats.

After 1961, a whole series of theorists of the economy made an effort to boost economic activity in Spain. Along with the growth and modification of the country’s lifestyle came tourism, summer vacations, electrical appliances, television and the personal car. All this economic liberalism was not accompanied by political changes but sowed, out of necessity, the seed of change. The desire of the regime itself to modernize meant a distancing from the social bases of the ideological principles that sustained it. With this change of mentalities and economic methods, the basis of that quiet change that was the Spanish Transition can be established. The political proposals that were introduced after the death of Franco are those that had not been able to develop before. In other words, with the advent of democracy, there was no change in the economic model, which kept society in order and allowed all kinds of extremism to be avoided. The sociologist Salvador Giner made it crystal clear in the documentary Genesis of the Spanish Transition, made by the Andalusian Studies Center in 2010: No hay transición económica y por eso no ha habido sangre. En estos años pasamos del capitalismo al capitalismo. (There is no economic transition and that is why there has not been blood. In these years we went from capitalism to capitalism). We are especially pleased to close this historical vision, which precedes an essay on film analysis, with a quotation from a cinematographic work. As is logical, the economy, the development of mentalities and social evolution are evident markers of historical processes. The very particular yet lacking Francoist ideology, as well as its ultimate catharsis, could not be less.

The Transition, with its lights and shadows, opened the way to democracy, and although it had its limitations and impositions it was carried out. All leaders, regardless of their ideology, were apparently convinced that it was time for change. This is demonstrated by the attitude and words of characters as opposite as Santiago Carrillo and Manuel Fraga. The very face of the two Spains learned to live together and to create a future after the physical and emotional disintegration of the dictatorship. The virtues and defects of such a singular period are today one of the key issues to understand the drift of our current democracy. As it usually happens, a part of Spanish society became disenchanted, felt scarcely represented by the new political forces or by the issues previously exposed, and did not find its place. Although this situation was not generalized, the strength of its cultural manifestations has come to us with full force. Either for the new atmosphere of freedom that allowed cultural and oppositional exhibitions, or for the modernization of society, the culture, also subject to pendulum-like swings, showed great dynamism.

The recent interest in quinqui film and the uprooted people of the Transition who were relegated to the