Goya Three Films.wps

GOYA: Three films John A. Walker (copyright 2009) ----------------------------------------------------------------GOYA IN BORDEAUX (aka GOYA EN BURDEOS, 1999) film review

As befits an art-house film, Goya in Bordeaux (Lolafilms Production, 1999) is much

more ambitious, sophisticated and aesthetically satisfying that the 1959 Goya biopic The Naked Maja (see my review of that film) even though there is some overlap in terms of content and emphasis – the importance given to Goya’s alleged affair with the Duchess of Alba for example. Since a veteran Spanish writer-director – Carlos Saura (b. 1932) – noted for films exploring Spain’s cultural identity made it, the sets, costumes and body language were more authentic.

Carlos Saura. Image may be subject to copyright. ------------------------------------------------------------------------Saura had been interested in Goya for decades and, during the 1950s, he had produced an unfinished documentary entitled The Meadow of San Isidro, which reenacted popular festivals Goya had painted around 1788. In addition, Goya in Bordeaux is dedicated to Saura’s elder brother Antonio (1930-98) who had been a painter and a devotee of Goya and Picasso. Most of the film was shot on an elaborate, theatrical set with transparent sliding panels created at Rome’s Cinecitta Studio. Saura’s film is visually sumptuous and

filmic in the sense that projected coloured lights and virtuoso cinematography were employed self-consciously and creatively. Vittorio Storaro, an Italian master of lighting who has worked for Bernardo Bertolucci and Francis Coppola, was the cinematographer. He had collaborated with Saura a number of times before. Storaro manipulates light levels, shadows and colours via a specially designed lighting console and employs light intensities and hues in a symbolic manner. Storaro and his son Fabrizio have also invented a photographic system called Univision (in English) or Univisium (in Latin) with a new aspect ratio of 1:2, which solves certain compositional problems for directors and provides a standard format across a range of differently proportioned screens. The challenge Saura faced was to transcend the factual character of a documentary on Goya, on the one hand, and the banalities of a Hollywood biopic about him, on the other. Saura’s solution was to penetrate Goya’s mind so that the audience could experience his passions, memories, nightmares and artistic imagination. Fluid oscillations between the subjective and the objective, past and present were thus essential. There is much more of Goya’s art in Saura’s film than in The Naked Maja, sometimes in the form of large semi-transparent images through which the artist moves, sometimes via simulated canvases or murals in progress and sometimes via re-enactments of motifs that had attracted Goya. An instance of the latter was a festive outdoor scene in which several young women toss the effigy of a young man up in the air using a blanket. Goya’s painting of this subject dates from 1791-92. Since the film was made in the late 1990s, it is far more sexually explicit than The

Naked Maja. For example, in one scene Goya draws the nude María and then caresses her body and makes rough love to her. Incidentally, the two versions of the Maja painting – naked and clothed – are shown at one point and the model is said to be Godoy’s mistress Pepita Tudó. During the credits, the camera moves slowly forward across the blood-soaked floor of a slaughterhouse and passes over a steer’s severed head. The animal’s carcass is then dragged along by chains and suspended in the air by pulleys. As the camera closes in on the animal’s internal organs, they metamorphose into the battered features of Goya’s elderly face. (This macabre introduction was surely intended as a metaphor for the wars and atrocities Goya had witnessed during his lifetime.) The film thus begins at the end of Goya’s life with the artist is in his 80s living in exile in Bordeaux with his last companion Leocadia Zorilla de Weiss and his 12-year-old daughter Rosario along with other Spanish political refugees who describe themselves as Liberals. (The actor Francisco Rabal, who is a kind of Spanish Tom Finney, plays Goya as an old man while José Coronado plays Goya as a middle-aged man.) We see Goya struggle against old age, ill health, sleepwalking, hallucinations and total deafness (he can lip read) while continuing to work on lithographs (one of which we see being printed). As the film unfolds, there are more and more flashbacks to key episodes in his life: his passion for María, the Duchess of Alba – played by Maribel Verdú - his years at the Spanish court, his acquaintance with Prime Minister Don Manuel Godoy, the fever followed by deafness that occurred when he was in his 40s, his creation of the print series The Caprices and The Disasters of War plus his murals known as The Black Paintings. The war images are

not directly illustrated but their contents are represented in a dark extended sequence in which the harsh realities – refugees, mass executions, atrocities, and piles of corpses – are re-enacted by the well known Catalan action theatre troupe La Fura dels Baus. Arguably, this sequence was not nearly as effective as Goya’s own prints. Furthermore, modern news footage of contemporary wars and famines has surely eclipsed historical re-enactments of this kind.

Still from Goya in Bordeaux. Image may be subject to copyright. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Saura attempts to elucidate the historical context and explore Goya’s politics but this is a hard task given the brevity of a film compared to the complexity of the socio-historical background to his long life. Goya worked for a succession of

different regimes and witnessed civil war and revolution. Since he was a Liberal serving feudal Spanish rulers, a Spaniard compelled to work for French invaders who also admired aspects of French culture, an artist whose attitude to female flesh and whose morbid imagination were at odds with the doctrines of the Spanish Inquisition, his situation was necessarily conflicted. Saura sums up Goya’s services to the Catholic Church via his 1798 fresco on the cupola of San Antonio de la Florida in Madrid, which depicts one of San Antonio’s miracles. The macabre miracle itself is re-enacted: St Antonio temporarily raises a murdered man from the dead to confirm the innocence of his father who has been falsely accused while also identifying the real murderer. Atheists will find this farcical scene most amusing. Goya often reminisces to Rosario – who is learning to draw - or mutters to himself about his life. His opinions are refreshingly frank: he angrily accuses the Queen of Spain and her lackey Godoy of poisoning María and then stealing her estate; he condemns the corruption and ignorance of Spain and declares himself a Liberal who had once looked to France as a beacon of progress. He shows Rosario his 1797 portrait of María and, after swearing his daughter to secrecy, tells her intimate details of their affair. He even admits weaknesses – how he was seduced by the prospects of wealth and power, how he made artistic compromises during his career, how he kept silent when he should have protested, and so on. In terms of his art, he remarks that he had only four masters: Velásquez, Rembrandt, Nature and Imagination, and boasts of his achievements. In one impressive scene, Goya studies Velásquez’s huge group royal portrait known as Las Meninas or The Maids of

Honour (1656, The Prado Museum). He expresses admiration for Velásquez’s apparently effortless technique and his cunning composition employing mirrors and declares that in Velásquez he has at last found a worthy role model.

Francisco Rabal as Goya. Image may be subject to copyright. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Perhaps the most dramatic sequence in the film occurs when Goya paints the nightmarish Black murals on the walls of his house at night during a thunderstorm. Dozens of candles illuminate the room and he wears a hat with lighted candles attached to its brim. (Goya’s self-portrait dated circa 1786 shows him wearing a comparable hat.) As he paints, he is afflicted with a violent migraine and the ghouls and monsters he is depicting come alive and descend from the walls. However, at least one critic thought this literal interpretation of Goya’s paintings was a mistake

that bordered on kitsch. In the final scenes, Goya’s life ebbs away as a black shadow gradually covers his body but then darkness is replaced by light as a baby is born in an all-white environment. A caption, derived from André Malraux, announces that, after Goya, modern art came into being. The film had a mixed critical reception. Some American critics found the nonchronological narrative ‘confusing, convoluted and fragmented’, and the stately pace of the film ‘plodding’. Other reviewers thought its verbal dimension platitudinous and inferior to its visual dimension. Characterisation too was considered limited especially in the case of Verdú’s Duchess of Alba who was rightly described as ‘a cipher’. Nevertheless, among the words of praise bestowed by critics were: ‘compelling, elegant, exquisite, rhapsodic, ravishing, superb, stunning … an artistic masterpiece.’ Goya in Bordeaux has its weaknesses but remains a finely crafted and well-acted film that deserved the several awards it received. It treats its subject with respect and could well prompt those who know little about Goya’s life and work to learn more. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

VOLAVÉRUNT (1999)

The title of the Spanish film Volavérunt was derived from an etching and aquatint by Goya showing María, the Duchess of Alba flying like a kite with her arms and legs outstretched and her skirt and cloak catching the wind. A huge butterfly on her head symbolises her flightiness and beneath her feet are three grotesque, hunched figures who have been identified as her bullfighting protégés.

The etching ‘The Bird has flown’ or ‘They have flown’ or ‘Gone for Good’ was no. 61 in The Caprices series and was made in 1797-98 after María had ended her affair – if indeed there was one - with Goya. The word ‘Volavérunt’ is also reputed to have been Alba’s personal term for her sexual parts or orgasm. Directed and partly written by J.J. Bigas Luna and based on a historical novel by Antonio Larretta published by the Barcelona company Editorial Planeta in 1980, the film starred Aitana Sánchez-Gijón as María Cayetana, 13th Duchess of Alba, the

noted Cuban actor Jorge Perugorría (b. 1965) as Goya (who incidentally is also a painter) and Penélope Cruz as Pepita Tudó, the mistress of Prime Minister Manuel Godoy played by Jordi Mollà.

Jorge Perugorría as Goya. Image may be subject to copyright. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The film, which cost $8 million, has high production values. It is a lavish costume drama with convincing period dress, interior décor and architecture. Apart from a few scenes that feature men on horseback set against magnificent mountain landscapes and a gypsy encampment, virtually every scene shows the luxurious lifestyles of the Spanish royal family and their courtiers. One would never guess from this production that there were any city slums or poor people in Spain at the

time. Although Goya appears in a number of scenes, he has little to say and is rarely shown painting because the film is primarily a kind of period ‘who dun it?’ that is, who killed the Duchess of Alba. She dies suddenly after hosting a dinner party, possibly from poison, and the suspects are Godoy, Goya, Tudó and others. (Clearly, the filmmakers were not willing to accept the findings of the modern medical report on María’s remains, which found no evidence of foul play.) (1) Goya’s two Maja canvases – nude and clothed – appear in the credit sequence and in the background of several scenes and Tudó is shown posing for Goya in a semi-naked state. (The only original visual element in the film is an equation made at the beginning between the ‘V’-shape of the nude Maja’s Mons de Venus and a ‘V’-shaped wine glass that may have contained the poison.) Otherwise, there is little about Goya’s art and so an extended analysis of the film is not justified. Compared to Saura’s Goya in Bordeaux, which appeared in the same year, Volavérunt is a lightweight affair. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------(1) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,792875,00.html

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GOYA’S GHOSTS (2006, aka Los Phantasmas de Goya)

This English language ‘romantic drama based on historical events’ was the work of the famous and well respected Czech director Miloš Forman (b. 1932) and the French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière. It was produced by Antenna 3 Television and other companies. Forman had the idea for the film at the back of his mind for 50 years - it was originally inspired by a book about the Spanish Inquisition - and the idea was reinforced by a visit during the 1980s to the Prado Museum where he was impressed by the Goyas in the collection. Forman believes in authentic locations and so the film was shot in and near Madrid in 2005. It starred Javier Bardem (a Spanish actor) as Brother Lorenzo, a sinister member of the Holy Office of the Spanish Inquisition, Natalie Portman (an Israeli-American actor) as Inés, a merchant’s daughter and one of Goya’s models, and Stellan Skarsgãrd (a Swedish actor) as Goya. (Portman also plays Alicia, the illegitimate daughter of Lorenzo and Inés, who become a teenage whore.) Goya paints portraits of Lorenzo and Inés and also depicts the latter as an angel in church murals.

‘Goya’ with his portrait of Lorenzo (painted by Antonio Baron). Image may be subject to copyright. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Their lives become intertwined over the period 1792 to 1814. (So the film only deals with part of Goya’s life.) The plot is so complicated, melodramatic and preposterous in places that it is not worth describing in detail. Suffice to say Inés becomes a victim of the Inquisition, makes a false confession as a result of torture and spends fifteen years in prison. Lorenzo seduces her in prison during prayer sessions and as a result she has a baby girl who is then given to nuns to bring up. Lorenzo is disgraced and flees to France. (In his absence Goya’s portrait of him is confiscated and then burnt by the Church. Goya had not been paid for it.) In France, Lorenzo switches his allegiance from the reactionary dogma of the Catholic church to the progressive ideals of the French Revolution and eventually returns to Spain as a prosecutor in the pay of Joseph Bonaparte. (So he performs the same cruel role for

both political systems.) Finally, as a result of the British army’s defeat of the French during the Peninsula War and a further regime change he ends up being garrotted in public. When Inés is released from prison after the French invaders abolish the Inquisition, she finds her parents and brothers are all dead. She seeks help from Goya. He is strongly attached to his young female muse and repeatedly tries to assist her by rescuing her from a mental asylum where Lorenzo consigns her and by trying to reunite her with Alicia. The first third of the film is of most value to those interested in Goya’s art: we see monks inspecting Goya’s famous print series Los Caprichos and arguing about its merits. Some of them think the images are evil and slander Spain but they are constrained from taking action against the artist by the fact that he is court painter to the King; we see him painting portraits not only of Lorenzo and Inés but also an equestrian portrait of Maria Luisa of Parma, the Queen of Spain played by Blanca Portillo. (The Goya-style pictures were impressive and executed by Antonio Baron.) In fact, the real Goya painted the Queen several times. Confidant that his painting is beautiful in its own right, he does not bother to flatter the Queen and depicts her in all her facial ugliness. The King and Queen attend its unveiling. They are clearly disappointed by the likeness because they leave abruptly without saying a word.

‘Goya’ unveils his completed equestrian portrait of the Queen of Spain. Image may be subject to copyright. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Goya, Maria Luisa a caballo, (1799). Madrid: The Prado Museum. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------As is usual in movies about Goya, the artist is shown painting at night with the aid of a hat with lighted candles.

We also see him making a etching on a blackened copper plate and then printing it. Later on, Goya has reason to criticise Lorenzo for his hypocrisy and his willingness to serve whoever is in power. However, Lorenzo rightly ripostes that Goya too is a ‘whore’ who is happy to serve the Spanish nobility at one time and the French rulers of Spain at another time for the sake of money and to maintain his career as a painter. As reviewers of the film have noted, Goya is not the film’s leading character and as a personality he is undeveloped. (At times the characters in the film are the victims of sudden, powerful historical forces that disrupt their lives.) Goya’s primary purpose is to act as a witness/recorder of historical figures and events, and the filmmakers have used his prints and paintings as prompts for their

sets and scenes. On release, the film received a number of negative reviews. Some critics found it historically inaccurate, anticlimactic, dull and slow but others praised the beauty of its imagery and the painterly skill of its cinematography (by Javier Aguirresarobe). The film’s depiction of state-sponsored torture to obtain false confessions caused some reviewers to see parallels with the communist regimes of Eastern Europe which Forman had experienced in his youth and with the America of President George Bush and the Iraq war. As Forman has remarked, ‘history repeats itself’. Given the raw power of Goya’s own depictions of mankind’s vanity and criminal behaviour, one feels that a straightforward documentary about his life and art, and their socio-historical context would have been more effective than Forman’s costume epic with its implausible fictional content. ____________________________________________________________ NB official website of film: http://www.goyasghoststhefilm.com/ -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------John A. Walker is a British painter and art historian. He is the author of Art and Artists on Screen and Art and Celebrity.