The back room of the ‘S’ cinema, with hair and signs, by Carles Cols


Pass word. Contains the ‘S’. Noticeable memory loss or weakness. It is easy. ‘Amnesia’. It is the perfect word to define the growing oblivion into which a short (and unique in the world) history of Spanish cinema has fallen: the six years the ‘S’ rating for bawdy movies was in place. Take the test. Ask anyone under (say a random age) 45 years old. The ‘S cinema’, with what it came to be (not as the seventh of the arts, but sociologically) has fallen into complete oblivion.

The second half of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s are often remembered with emotion. nostalgia for libertarian, ‘underground’, creative and dissolutebut hardly ever because of that backroom that was the ‘cinema S’, which is all memory nonsense that he has decided to settle, even if only partially, Ricard Reguantwell-known theater director, screenwriter, television director and filmmaker, who, despite his extensive curriculum, at dinners with friends always ended up asking him the same thing, to tell anecdotes about that little-known stage of his professional career in which he was a screenwriter, actor and director of ‘S’ movies.

He has compiled them in a book, closer to some clean notes than a canonical memoir, but their documentary value is so exceptional that Esteve Riambau, author of two dozen books on the great icons of cinema history, has decided that it deserves to be presented at the Filmoteca de Catalunya. What less.

Between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius

The quote that follows may seem unexpected or even pedantic. Let’s hope not. It is a reflection by Flaubert on that unique moment in history that goes from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, “when the gods no longer existed and Jesus Christ had not yet appeared, when only man was present”. That’s the thing, what between the death of Francisco Franco and Jordi Pujol’s accession to power there was a cultural and creative sindio in Barcelona in which everything was allowedas recalled by Joan Estrada, agitator of that time through an iconic place then as the Venus Dome, where Christa Leem’s striptease were elevated to the category of one of the fine arts and, in a facet that is less known of him, even an extra in one of the films directed by Reguant, ‘Don’t touch my dick, I get irritated’.

Those were the years of Nazario and Ocaña, of the tenorio del Born, of the Libertarian Days in Park Güell, of the Catalan Dona Days, in which the UB auditorium was about to become a great genital exploration workshop feminine (in the end it was in the corridors and in the toilets, which is no small thing) and, what we were going for, a kind of gigantic Streisand effect ‘avant la lettre’. As it is.

‘Streisand effect avant la lettre’

In 2003, Barbra Streisand demanded that a photo of her Malibu home be removed from the internet database and, of course, she achieved the opposite result. An image that no one had noticed happened to be downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. In 1978 something equivalent happened in Spain. The end of the dictatorship meant the end of prior censorship, not to say literally a torrential mess.

The repression had been so great that the subsequent debauchery was inversely proportional, so the Government of Adolfo Suárez, in an uncalculated decision, ordered that films that could offend the viewers’ sensibilities be shown, as a warning, with the adjective of ‘S’ at the gates of the cinema. That had the unwanted effect. They were absolutely bad movies, but the theaters filled session after session and, with it, the pockets of the producers.

Reguant reviews in the book how some investments of 500,000 pesetas were multiplied by 10, 15 or 20 at the box office. Some of those visionaries, to call them in some way, earned considerable sums of money, enough so that, when the era of ‘cinema S’ came to an end with the accession of Pilar Miró to the Directorate General of Cinematography, they could produce films of demanding bill, such as ‘El Lute’ and ‘El caso Almería’. It could be affirmed that the breasts suckled that time. There is the case of ‘Interviú’, a reference magazine, which with its nudes on the cover and inside pages was able to pay the payroll of investigative journalists.

Reguant’s opportunity

Reguant, looking back on his career, was just the right guy at the right time. He was the son of a family that had a photographic development shop, an establishment that in the dying phase of Francoism was linked by the umbilical cord of the A-7 motorway to Perpinyà. From there his uncle brought movies shot in Super 8 that were sold clandestinely to trusted clients.

With the dictator dead and that stage between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius inaugurated, he entered the world of those filmings, first as a poorly paid screenwriter, then as an actor and, finally, as a director, where he experienced all kinds of comic situations that he recounts in the book . It was certainly not a good idea to shoot in Tunisia and park the van in which the protagonists were changing clothes at the gates of a mosque. But in this trip to the six years of ‘S’, to conclude, more than the joke, a reflection. It is somewhat exotic, you are warned, but here it goes.

Reguant tells through a couple of chapters how difficult it was to really shoot the first scene, as it was said then, ‘slut’. The problem was neither the cameras, nor the set, nor the hiring of women willing to be naked explicitly. They were found, in some cases, in hostess clubs. For the actors, they put an ad in the press. Among those interested, many were surprised that, in addition, they were going to pay them for it. What times. At the moment of truth, however, that was a procession of triggers. Even the bellman of a hotel where they rented a room to shoot a scene applied for himself as a porn actor, with the same unsuccessful result. The atavistic masculine fear of being incapable of satisfying women, a probable cause for so many centuries of machismo, always ready to demonize feminine pleasure, was somehow summed up within those four walls. Obviously, that wasn’t even discussed there then, but, what was said at the beginning, the documentary value of ‘Classified S’, the book, is not how it tells it, but what it tells.

as a postscript

That (and this is already a personal contribution, something that is not recommended in this profession, but lost in the river) was a very strange time. Óscar N., a classmate at a neighborhood school, charged his friends a peseta if they wanted to take a look at a magazine he had made with stapled sheets on which he had pasted cut-out photos from all kinds of publications (a magazine, a anatomy book…) and in which it appeared, in the best of cases, a naked woman and most of the time only half-breasted in the air. That would be in 1971 or 1972. The sight of the naked body was remotely unlikely and, in a flash, just six years later, the stopper of censorship was uncorked and the indecent display of sexuality was omnipresent. It’s not easy to put a date on it, but a member of that group of schoolchildren who paid a peseta to see that fake nude magazine had in his hands, even when he was a minority, a copy of ‘Papus’ in which Susana Estada appeared in four legs, with the body dotted like those posters that used to be displayed in butcher shops to list the parts of the veal. ‘The exploded view of Susana Estrada’. That was the title of those central pages.

In the world of amateur and professional diving, this would have been called a decompression syndrome. The collective rise from the bottom of the repression was so fast that it caused worrying medical charts of anomalous behavior. The appearance of the ‘S’ cinema chronologically with the drop in the birth rate in Spain, something that surely has other causes than cinematographic ones, not that that six-year term had given birth a generation of onanistsbut on one occasion, in an interview, Assumpta Serna recounted a disturbing personal experience that portrays those years with great precision.

Scare at the cinema Carretas

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Serna was one of the actresses who participated in the filming of ‘L’orgia’, a film shot in 1978 that, despite its title, was extremely white. Three years earlier, the pinnacle of full nude had already been trodden with ‘La trastienda’, in which María José Cantudo showed herself as Eva in Eden, come on, that the display of bodies in ‘L’orgia’ was no longer Nothing new, but it was also a very crazy comedy, practically devoid of sex. Seeing Juanjo Puigcorbé on a motorcycle on Carrer de València in Barcelona as a masculine ‘lady Godiva’ cannot, of course, be considered something exciting, and that scene was the climax of the movie. In Serna’s words, ‘L’orgia’ was neither dirty, nor erotic, nor pornographic, and he’s right. He had moments of great comedy, yes. The fact is that the actress was in Madrid one day and she saw that the film was being shown at the Carretas cinema. She entered. “It was four in the afternoon and it was full of jerks.” She couldn’t believe it.

Does this book deserve to be presented at the Filmoteca de Catalunya or not?


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