Popular character thanks to his books on Federico Garcia Lorca and the meticulous reconstruction of his murder, also an expert in bunuel Y dalithe three artists who marked the artistic renewal in Spain in the 20s and 30s of the last century, Ian Gibson (Dublin, 1939) lives his old age with a mixture of satisfaction for the work done and indignation because the mortal remains of the great poet from Granada have not yet been found. And of at least 114,000 losers of the war who are still in the ditches.
where does memory enddocumentary directed by the professor of the University of Vigo Pablo Romero-Fresco, has something of a filmic testament of the great Hispanist. The director accompanies Gibson to two places of great relevance to the life of Buñuel and Lorca as Las Hurdesin Extremadura, where the first filmed land without bread in 1933, and Granada, the city where the poet was born and was assassinated at the age of 38, executed by Francoist commandos. Almost 90 years have passed since then, but the places where the tragedy occurred continue to shock Gibson, a man with a passionate temperament.
Romero-Fresco explains about the genesis of the project: “In 2012 I was working in London at the university and was acting as an interpreter at a Spanish Film Festival. There I met producer Mike Dibb, who was looking for almodovar to see if he would finance a documentary on Ian Gibson and Buñuel after shooting two on Lorca and Dalí. Almodóvar was not there, but I was there and we became friends. Then I got some funding, not a lot, and little by little it emerged that I would end up directing it”.
Ten years later, the film hits theaters after countless delays. The worst, that several computers were stolen at the English university where Romero-Fresco worked, including his, with a first version of the montage. “After that I thought it would never be finished,” Gibson confesses.
three universal geniuses
Little by little, against the Hispanist’s own criteria, the documentary ceased to be the third vertex of a trilogy about the three friends from the Student Residence so that it also ended up dealing with Lorca and Gibson himself. “I feel a little embarrassed watching the movie”says the Irishman.
“It’s an intimate thing,” he adds. “I have expressed what I wanted to express in my books but seeing it transferred to the screen makes me a bit inhibited. Go hard, as they say. I think it has some important merits such as that discussion in La Alberca between the locals about the difference between what it’s seen in land without bread and reality. Some still believe that Buñuel only reflected the negative things. That moment when we see the cliff from where they threw the goat for that famous shot… That moved me a lot. Or the intellectual priest critical of the priests of Buñuel’s time is also fantastic”.
[Ian Gibson: “Buñuel estaba surrealizado antes de París”]
The books by Gibson, a resident of Lavapiés, on Lorca, Dalí and Buñuel have marked an era. Investigations like that seminal The nationalist repression in Granada in 1936 and the death of Federico Garcia Lorcapublished in Paris in 1971, with which challenged the Franco regime. In the documentary he recalls that shortly before, in a fit, he sold his house in London, left his well-paid position as professor of Spanish literature and went to walk the streets of Granada to reconstruct what happened that fateful night of August 19, 1936 in which the author of Gypsy romance He was murdered in cold blood.
“My greatest professional satisfaction is having gone to Granada in the 1960s and having been able to interview people who lived through the events. If we had had to wait for the end of the Franco regime, many of them would be dead and thanks to that we have living testimonies”. in his legacy a work of such magnitude”.
Lorca, Buñuel and Dalí, three monumental figures, symbols of artistic excellence, each in their own way and of the tragedy of the Civil War Gibson has dedicated a lifetime to take center stage. The Hispanist explains: “As Carlos Saura says in the film, they are like a three-headed monster. They get to know each other in an extraordinary environment, not only them, but also those around them. In the Student Residence there were very talented people, It was extraordinary. I cannot separate them from the rest, a person like Pepín Bello who died at the age of 104 and did not lose his correspondence is essential. Thanks to this we can reconstruct what happened in those years.”
Monument in memory of Federico García Lorca, assassinated during the Civil War.
Surtsey Films
“Dalí —continues— is like an onion with layers upon layers, you remove them and there are more layers. I never had the feeling with him that I was talking to a normal human being. Lorca was an open guy and the painter was pathologically shy All three are great and complement each other. There is a lot of Lorca in Dalí and of Buñuel in Lorca and the other way around. They do not understand each other. Buñuel in his memoirs says that Lorca was the most fascinating human being that he knew in life. Then at that time they had many disputes. Buñuel told Pepín that Lorca is “disgusting” because he came from the town “Asquerosa” (which is true) and because he “is.” He then criticized the Gypsy romance. They were swearing at each other because there was a rivalry but the next day they were best friends again.”
Gibson admires Buñuel and Dalí, despite his reservations about them its drift in recent years, but he “confesses” that of these three “universal geniuses” the one who is closest to his heart is the poet from Granada. “If I tell the truth from my heart, Lorca for me is a genius. It is also true that I know him better. With Dalí I never had the feeling of reaching the bottom even though I wrote his biography. Having been able to spend my time getting to know Lorca’s friends such as Jorge Guillén, Dámaso Alonso or Dalí himself has been a privilege. It turns traditional romances into something else by adding surrealism as in sleepwalking romance. The following year he goes to New York and there is no reference to Spain. A man capable of these records is incredible.”
Gibson values the spirituality of the poet: “Tenderness is fundamental. It has an evident Christian base. He does not like the God of the Old Testament but there is an evident attraction to Christ. Now we know the youthful work of Lorca and Christianity is fundamental. Christ as a revolutionary who helps the poor, this is Lorca, this tenderness. He said that “being from Granada inclines me to a sympathetic understanding of the persecuted, the gypsies, the black, the Jew, the Moorish… that we all carry inside”. I see that Granada that left in 1936 reflected in Doña Rosita the spinster”.
The dead in the gutters
Says Gibson, who refused to allow photos of his family or childhood to appear in the documentary, that the real subject of where does memory end is Spain”. A Spain to which he has dedicated his life being from distant lands and to which he loves madly. A love, she confesses in the documentary, which is mixed with anger at our shortcomingsIn the first place, that we have difficulty in dialogue because we don’t know how to listen, and he admires our virtues such as the ability to enjoy the present.
In addition to his biographical work, Gibson has achieved great notoriety for his fierce fight to open the ditches and give a decent burial to the more than one hundred thousand Spaniards who never had one, retaliated by an atrocious Francoism with his enemies.
“I have said thousands of times that I feel a lot of admiration for Francisco de la Torre, the mayor of the PP of Malaga. I was at the inauguration of the monument to those shot in the city, it is easy to take others into account and allow them to inform their loved ones decently and continue as close together as possible. Not as enemies, speaking as Spaniards, as a family. And I don’t see this, I see a lot of disdain. We are in Europe, we must be civilized, what example are we setting with these shouts in Congress? I bet for a Federal Iberian RepublicRight now it takes you thirteen hours to get to Portugal from Madrid by train and it doesn’t make sense. I am an Iberian.”
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