Octobre à Madrid (1967) - full transcript
All right.
We already started filming.
You can begin to surprise us.
You will tell me the operations
you are going to do.
Now I'm applying the foundation.
You have to spread it well.
No, the technical details
do not interest me.
Ah, ok.
I just have to mark the
operation changes.
Ok.
-Is she speaking loud enough, José?
-No.
My name is Ana,
and I am an actress.
My name is Ana,
and I am an actress.
So started the script written
four years ago.
And that should be,
or almost,
the first image.
I wanted that to be the first image
of October in Madrid.
Do you think it will take longer
than you told me?
-I have no idea.
-You do not know?
Remember, you need to make your
eyebrows a little harder.
Yes.
It is necessary that
you speak louder.
Now, the eyes.
How many meters?
127 feet
Hello?
Yes.
No, Marcel is filming.
Can you call back later?
In fifteen minutes.
This girl is an actress;
she lives in Madrid.
-Don't lean forward.
-We are not in October.
I associated the words "Madrid"
and "October" for their sonority.
This film is a film both of freedom
and obligation.
A film of truth and fiction.
A film to exist, to become true,
it goes through all the difficulties,
beyond the real difficulties
caused by the contradictions found
by the filmmaker at every moment.
At this very moment, for example,
in which I try to say this text,
to read this text,
because I am writing this text
and I'll reread it later with a
microphone in a recording room.
-Now, I put on my lipstick.
-I am saying it.
I was told:
"You should not comment on
your own images yourself.
Your voice is too serious,
too slow, too sad.
"It would be a mistake."
I catch that word on the fly,
I make it mine,
I'm going to break it,
caress, twist, bend,
let fly, restart and break.
I want it that way,
like I wanted this film.
I'm ready.
Fine, thanks. Finished.
October in Madrid
I've been coming to Spain
regularly for several years.
I'm here this time for a few months.
I liked Spain well before knowing it.
Exile is dear to me.
Exile is a wall
for surrounding yourself.
My first image of Spain
was that of a bull
trapped in his solitude.
I followed him with a telephoto lens
until his death.
The film is called La muerte Del toro.
My second image of Spain
was that of Christ.
I filmed during Holy Week in Valladolid
high place of old Castile.
Le Christ dans la cité
I now have 3,000 meters
of film to impress
with a borrowed camera,
but with the constraint of not knowing
the results until my return to Paris.
For a long time I want to narrate
the bullfighter's private life.
Guillermo introduced me to
two young novilleros.
We start filming their training.
We spent one morning at
the Casa de Campo.
It is of little relevance to know what
made this morning unique
and that this record is unfinished.
I just accepted to make news
reports for television.
Here is Roncal, valley of the Pyrenees.
It was to be about the tribute
that the French shepherds made
to the Spaniards.
I did not film the ceremony itself.
I had no desire to
after walking thirty kilometers
in the rain.
El Verdugo
The Executioner
They asked me to make a documentary about
the filming of this film by Luis Berlanga.
I accompanied Berlanga and his team to
different locations in Madrid for a week.
There, the idea
of October in Madrid brutally shines.
One day
Berlanga was to film in
the Plaza de las Comendadoras.
The sight moves me because of
its rigidity and greatness,
for the oddness of its details.
An electric antenna
planted in the center.
A pendulum that always
marks eight o'clock.
I decide that this square will be
part of the script that I have
left to solve.
I later made
a documentary about Sofia Loren
filming in The Fall of the Roman Empire.
I thought of the scenario for
October in Madrid.
An extra,
a slave of Sofia Loren,
who lives in the Plaza
de las Comendadoras,
every morning she travels
from that square
to the Roman Forum built 15 kilometers
from Madrid.
Opposition of two
anachronistic worlds.
Dream,
daily dazzlement of this extra
Carmen
who goes from one mediocrity to another
more artificial
and more deceptive.
Fall of her dream,
at the end of the filming.
Fall of my dream.
It was obviously impossible
to realize that idea,
even thinking about it under the logic
of the documentary.
Anyway, I have the main character
of the film.
It crystallizes, as in my previous film,
in a woman.
The women of Une simple histoire
and Le Huitième jour.
Ana, the actress,
for a film that never saw the day.
The garden of the Retiro, in Madrid.
It's Sunday.
What will Carmen do?
What will Carmen be?
Who will Carmen do?
What character are we going to shoot?
I have been told from Paris that my
tax collector threatens to seize me.
Seize me with what?
Carmen will not try to escape
her mediocrity by exceptional means.
She will be a seller in a big store
which she'll walk to every morning
from Plaza de las Comendadoras.
She will have a boyfriend,
she will dream of children,
and a good house.
The big store where Carmen will work will
be, for example, Galerías Preciados.
Nadia introduced me to her father.
He is a painter and engraver.
He proposed I use his studio
as a decoration for the film.
Maybe it's Carmen's boyfriend studio,
who will be a painter
and will be called Guillermo.
My name is Carmen.
My name is Carmen.
Marcel, your film will not be easy.
I think you have a
very interesting idea.
The problem will be not
to tire the public
with a story told with too many words
and few images.
Obviously, it can be
done in several ways.
I think that cinema is, above all,
a form of expression through images.
The word can add or
counterpoint the image,
but you can not count on the word
to develop that story.
I'm sure that you'll be able to
overcome this problem
and that you're going to make
a really interesting film.
Continue to tighten them.
What do you think of the film?
Remember that conversation we had
in your house
in front of the television?
I think that the film
shouldn't be linear.
You have to make films like life itself,
or even the brain of man.
It doesn't go in one direction.
There is simultaneity.
Many directors tried to do things
in that sense,
but few have achieved it yet.
Maybe even without knowing it,
artists sometimes achieve...
Nadia likes the idea of the film.
She proposes to help me,
and she does it
with extraordinary brilliance.
... sometimes in a conscious way,
and I hope you do...
Pregnant, and until the day before
delivery, she is by my side.
I happen to be discouraged,
and she gives me energy.
I filmed it in the studio of her house.
She will be part of the film.
Some months after finishing the shots,
I'll return to Madrid to record the
ideas she proposed during the shoot.
She finds them in the smallest details.
... it can be done with images
or through words.
With Nadia
I film a Sunday
the preparations for a
religious procession
in Plaza de las Comendadoras
with the intention of filming
Carmen and Guillermo one day
to convert them, through editing,
into testimonies of this procession.
Carlos' sister will be
Carmen's character.
Carlos is one of my
friends in Madrid.
He gives me an effective
and discreet help
since the first time I was in Spain.
I still haven't found the
character of Guillermo,
Carmen's boyfriend.
Carmen is a tall,
beautiful brunette.
I'll shoot her later.
I live in Madrid,
Plaza de las Comendadoras.
With Nadia,
I film the documentary aspect of the
Plaza de las Comendadoras
I want to describe the place where
Carmen is going to live.
I find it hard to
believe that this place
is not the one of a town
and that it's very close to the store
where I work.
Children and the elderly are
almost intermediate generations.
They tell me,
"We are not beautiful,
why are you filming us?"
I answer that they are beautiful.
That is what I think.
I need money to survive
until the film ends,
to put gas in my car
and move freely.
We have to shoot a boat ride
with Carmen and Guillermo
in the lake of the Retiro Garden,
from Carmen's point of view,
without ever seeing her.
There will be sun in the trees,
and a finger of Carmen in the water.
I want Carmen to come across,
at some point,
a communion of nuns.
Later I will film that communion
in Montreuil sur Bois, near Paris.
Guillermo will take Carmen home
for the first time,
and they will make love
for the first time.
They will have to go dancing.
Time pass.
I go through Madrid.
I'm looking for places,
ideas.
I film everything I want,
everything that is presented
and that I like.
A procession between virgin
and bayonets.
El Rastro, a sort of flea market.
Wouldn't it be very picturesque
to take Carmen there?
How will Carmen be dressed?
La Castellana is a very wide avenue
and very busy around
eleven o'clock in the morning.
A market of old Madrid.
My car's tailpipe is broken.
Death.
A peasant on his donkey
lost in the Paseo Del Prado.
He asks me where is
Glorieta de Cuatro Caminos.
I guide him,
and I give him a tip
for having filmed it.
He refuses with dignity.
A light of my car does not work.
Is the film going to be made?
Is it going to end?
Will I make it to the end?
Néstor Basterretxea.
He is a friend of Nadia.
He proposes to me to photograph
an industrial short that he is making.
I agree
I'm bailed out.
My film is going to be made.
I write a summary on
a page and a half.
Now I want the most free
and different film.
My janitor.
She comes from Asturias,
a mining country.
Luis, I met you while you shot the film
El Verdugo.
I followed you for a week.
I made a documentary about
that film for television.
It's from the film El
Verdugo by Berlanga
that the idea came for
October in Madrid.
On Sunday
I'll film Luis Berlanga at home.
I will seek a new breath
in that encounter.
Maybe an answer to my own problems.
I will record Berlanga's observations
as well as Nadia's,
a few months later.
What has prevented me from seeing it
is that there had been many cuts.
Which are the sequences
that have been deleted.
-I prefer to speak in Spanish.
-Yes
I express myself better in my language.
The cuts they made in my film
can not be free.
That would mean that censorship
would not respond to anything.
It would be so anarchist and surreal
like us as creators.
There was an obviously absurd intention
in making those cuts
because everything
I wanted to say about society
and about the problem of the relationship
between the individual and society
it is still evident in the version
that was exhibited in Spain,
although on the other hand
they have altered
the dramatic progression of the film.
The intention of the censorship
has not been in any way
to eliminate the hardest parts
or stronger showing the executions
of those condemned to death in Spain,
but to suppress the dramatic
accentuation of this conflict of man
and society.
I get happy every time I make movies.
I film in an increasingly vegetative,
spontaneous and sleepwalking way.
I get to wonder if we really do
the cinema we want, that we like,
and if we feel it when we are doing it.
I practically corral my films.
They are there, they exist.
I love them or I let
them love themselves.
Until how it is possible to love or
hate a creature at certain times.
I do not have any project.
I like to do things,
both in the cinema and in love,
in the most vegetative way possible.
It is absurd to talk about projects
for a man like me, who likes to find
unforeseen things along the way.
I have projects,
but precisely because I have them,
I do not like them anymore.
I do not have the least
affection for them anymore.
What do you think
of the young Spanish cinema?
I start from the base of believing
in individuals as good anarchists,
and in the author's policy.
I do not believe in schools
nor in a general definition of what
we could call it "young
Spanish school".
Individually, there are authors
that I like and interest,
and others that interest me less.
We must look for our roots.
Maybe I'm a bit old, but the
Spanish must, in principle,
face that immensity that is ahead,
and external problems.
We are not going to start
being introspective
like the French or Italians.
We are not yet capable of
introspection in the cinema.
It is with this
prescription that Spanish,
by tradition,
not in a pejorative sense
but because of the authentic
Spanish tradition,
it floods all things,
including the cinema.
I think that every young
Spanish filmmaker
can film what is proposed,
but his records usually give
the impersonation of something external,
Foreign,
about him.
This is how you think about something,
but that something is not the truth.
It does not matter
if you are on the street,
in our country, in our geography.
What you must feel is
a violent impression
of chaos before the things
instead of simply reflecting them.
Yesterday,
Sunday.
Guillermo took me to the Retiro Garden.
We rode in a boat.
He was the one who rowed.
I know Maribel from Carlos,
Carmen's brother.
Maribel married a soldier she
hasn't seen in four years.
She must leave for Rio de Oro,
where her husband's garrison is.
My name is Carmen.
I live in a pension of a fat
and kind woman,
whose husband works in Paris.
She is from Toledo, like my family.
The woman who is to become
the one who hosts Carmen
in Plaza de las Comendadoras.
Carmen's family lives
in the province
and Carmen in this
woman's boarding house.
This woman's husband works in Paris,
on the street De la Pompe.
He sends her cash monthly
in exchange for some other adventure
with Parisians skinnier than her.
I was born in Toledo.
I left my mother in Toledo.
I did not know my father.
He died in the civil war
a few days before my birth.
Toledo
Old city of Jews and Arabs.
City of calm and balance,
city of distancing.
Architecture immobile in time.
In a slow train like those
who exist in Spain,
It seems I go back in
time to go to Toledo.
Agustín is not the ideal character
for Carmen's boyfriend.
He will not be a painter.
The studio where he'll take Carmen
will be a studio lent
by a friend painter
At the same time I filmed
Carmen and Guillermo's walk
along the lake of the Retiro Garden,
I capture the ordinary
aspect of the place.
A young girl who looks like a
eighteenth century English painting.
I ask her if she can wait
for me to film her.
the time it takes to go and look
for a roll of film in the car.
She is late
and she tells me
she will be scolded.
It was the first time
I had gone to Guillermo's house.
There were bright
and moving pictures there.
We can see Madrid and many
terraces with hanging clothes.
There are also iron sculptures.
We went for a walk after the
lake of the Retiro Garden.
Carmen abandons me,
she does not want to be filmed anymore.
However, we did the make-up scenes,
and we chose her wardrobe.
Will I be able to make her come back?
This is the party of
the Plaza de las Comendadoras.
Every year there is a procession
in honor of the Virgin.
We saw it with Guillermo.
Afterwards,
we decided to go the dance.
Guillermo is a painter.
Artist and painter.
It was my friend Guillermo Delgado
who suggested the name of
Carmen's boyfriend
and the idea of making him a painter.
With little natural light
and a single lamp
I did Guillermo's scene
as a way to sustain the cinematic aspect
for which we have great resources.
Otherwise, everything is impossible.
These are the draft of a correspondence
with a girl opposite of him,
a French girl,
and for a few mornings she has undressed
in front of him, knowing he watches.
Guillermo, while we were
shooting your sequence,
You asked me something that shocked me
and also gave me pleasure.
-You asked me-
-What do you like what you do?
It's formidable, you found
the same infirmation.
And that's the question I wanted
Do you think it's normal to ask me that
question without knowing me enough?
Do you think I can like that job?
-We're speaking artist to artist, right?
-Yes.
Well, I think that is...
the background of the ethical question
of the artist:
Enjoy what you do.
Particularly in these times, so...
-So?
-So prostituted.
-Prostituted?
In every sense of the word.
My friend Carlos.
He is the brother of the girl
interrogated to make Carmen.
I will never film Carmen.
Her boyfriend forbade it.
Carlos's intervention
could not reverse that decision.
She is Spanish,
and her name is María Carmen Miguela.
Together,
we filmed La muerte Del toro.
I had met her
on my first trip to Spain
where I made my first film.
It's been five years since then.
Five years that passed like a storm.
I lost my actress.
I lost Carmen.
I'm looking for Carmen.
I am looking for a possible Carmen.
I film at random in the street
Will I find Carmen?
The garden of Consuelo.
The mother of Consuelo.
The neighbor of Consuelo.
Consuelo has black eyes
like those of a gypsy.
I have met her in front
of the Prado Museum.
With María Carmen Miguela,
we went to her mother's
to ask her if she allowed
Consuelo to participate in the film.
The mother excused Consuelo
of not being able or wanting to
go to the appointment we had set
where I had saw her
for the first time.
My reflectors wait for Carmen.
My camera waits for the
reflections there.
My friend Jorge.
Poet and mining engineer.
He returned from an oil exploration
in Rio de Oro.
He has been interested in the film,
and has helped me.
I wanted to fix his image.
A mutual friend tells me this news
by a letter from Madrid.
José Antonio, poet.
Correspondent in Madrid
for a Parisian newspaper.
He helped me in filming
Le Christ dans la cité.
The dance hall that I chose
for Carmen and Guillermo
It is almost empty.
It just rained.
The ballroom was almost empty.
It had just rained.
Guillermo wanted to
take me to his house.
I decided to shoot another dance
that does not correspond
to my characters.
There are no Carmens,
there are no actors.
My friends are not free.
I film from a balcony in the rain,
the houses around,
the street.
An accident.
Aranjuez, 60 kilometers from Madrid.
One of the best
bullfights of the season.
Nadia tells me of this bullfight
and she recommends me not to miss it.
New York:
"Jump" screams the crowd to the man
desperately perched on the second floor.
Yemen:
The rebels are shot in the public
square before ten thousand people.
Saigon:
A rebel is shot before
television cameras
for several million viewers.
Atlanta:
White policemen in a car
for several kilometers they chase after
a group of blacks grade-schoolers.
Before losing consciousness,
he pointed his murderer:
his daughter.
Jean-Claude, 19 years old,
kills his cousin with hammer blows,
a beautiful baker who
rejected his advances.
The crew of Russian
American cosmonauts.
It is in its thirty-third revolution.
The two members went out one
by one from the capsule.
A dance in the
surroundings of Madrid.
The dance was never visited by
Carmen and Guillermo.
Jeanette, actress.
Also sells stamps and
butterflies near the Gran Vía.
My name is Carmen.
My name is Carmen.
Every morning
I walk to work.
Two friends introduce me to Jeanette.
Blonde and white, she's cute.
She is not Carmen.
I like her.
She will be Carmen.
The idea of Carmen walking
to work every morning
makes me want to record
with my teleobjective
Jeanette, free in the
streets of Madrid.
I try to show her from multiple angles.
Free of all obligation.
Free like I was and I am,
and how I want to continue being.
Carmen is not going to
know this location,
as we had anticipated in the script.
She will not have met Guillermo.
I will not have met Carmen.
The empty location is useless.
My phone has been cut for several days.
I still have to film the first and last
shots of the film.
Before leaving Madrid,
I organize a flamenco party
in tribute to my friend Juan,
among other friends.
It's September 26, I believe.
The tape recorder that I have
is not synchronized with my camera.
It was backing and advancing
that I could mount these images.
By the way, it doesn't matter.
I did not use the same order to organize
the image reels and the sound reels.
This must be the last image according to
the script written four years ago.
I wanted it to be the last image of
October in Madrid.
Jeanette taking off her makeup,
and so she repeats
the gestures of Ana, the actress.
Subtitles by Swain and Gundenspand
We already started filming.
You can begin to surprise us.
You will tell me the operations
you are going to do.
Now I'm applying the foundation.
You have to spread it well.
No, the technical details
do not interest me.
Ah, ok.
I just have to mark the
operation changes.
Ok.
-Is she speaking loud enough, José?
-No.
My name is Ana,
and I am an actress.
My name is Ana,
and I am an actress.
So started the script written
four years ago.
And that should be,
or almost,
the first image.
I wanted that to be the first image
of October in Madrid.
Do you think it will take longer
than you told me?
-I have no idea.
-You do not know?
Remember, you need to make your
eyebrows a little harder.
Yes.
It is necessary that
you speak louder.
Now, the eyes.
How many meters?
127 feet
Hello?
Yes.
No, Marcel is filming.
Can you call back later?
In fifteen minutes.
This girl is an actress;
she lives in Madrid.
-Don't lean forward.
-We are not in October.
I associated the words "Madrid"
and "October" for their sonority.
This film is a film both of freedom
and obligation.
A film of truth and fiction.
A film to exist, to become true,
it goes through all the difficulties,
beyond the real difficulties
caused by the contradictions found
by the filmmaker at every moment.
At this very moment, for example,
in which I try to say this text,
to read this text,
because I am writing this text
and I'll reread it later with a
microphone in a recording room.
-Now, I put on my lipstick.
-I am saying it.
I was told:
"You should not comment on
your own images yourself.
Your voice is too serious,
too slow, too sad.
"It would be a mistake."
I catch that word on the fly,
I make it mine,
I'm going to break it,
caress, twist, bend,
let fly, restart and break.
I want it that way,
like I wanted this film.
I'm ready.
Fine, thanks. Finished.
October in Madrid
I've been coming to Spain
regularly for several years.
I'm here this time for a few months.
I liked Spain well before knowing it.
Exile is dear to me.
Exile is a wall
for surrounding yourself.
My first image of Spain
was that of a bull
trapped in his solitude.
I followed him with a telephoto lens
until his death.
The film is called La muerte Del toro.
My second image of Spain
was that of Christ.
I filmed during Holy Week in Valladolid
high place of old Castile.
Le Christ dans la cité
I now have 3,000 meters
of film to impress
with a borrowed camera,
but with the constraint of not knowing
the results until my return to Paris.
For a long time I want to narrate
the bullfighter's private life.
Guillermo introduced me to
two young novilleros.
We start filming their training.
We spent one morning at
the Casa de Campo.
It is of little relevance to know what
made this morning unique
and that this record is unfinished.
I just accepted to make news
reports for television.
Here is Roncal, valley of the Pyrenees.
It was to be about the tribute
that the French shepherds made
to the Spaniards.
I did not film the ceremony itself.
I had no desire to
after walking thirty kilometers
in the rain.
El Verdugo
The Executioner
They asked me to make a documentary about
the filming of this film by Luis Berlanga.
I accompanied Berlanga and his team to
different locations in Madrid for a week.
There, the idea
of October in Madrid brutally shines.
One day
Berlanga was to film in
the Plaza de las Comendadoras.
The sight moves me because of
its rigidity and greatness,
for the oddness of its details.
An electric antenna
planted in the center.
A pendulum that always
marks eight o'clock.
I decide that this square will be
part of the script that I have
left to solve.
I later made
a documentary about Sofia Loren
filming in The Fall of the Roman Empire.
I thought of the scenario for
October in Madrid.
An extra,
a slave of Sofia Loren,
who lives in the Plaza
de las Comendadoras,
every morning she travels
from that square
to the Roman Forum built 15 kilometers
from Madrid.
Opposition of two
anachronistic worlds.
Dream,
daily dazzlement of this extra
Carmen
who goes from one mediocrity to another
more artificial
and more deceptive.
Fall of her dream,
at the end of the filming.
Fall of my dream.
It was obviously impossible
to realize that idea,
even thinking about it under the logic
of the documentary.
Anyway, I have the main character
of the film.
It crystallizes, as in my previous film,
in a woman.
The women of Une simple histoire
and Le Huitième jour.
Ana, the actress,
for a film that never saw the day.
The garden of the Retiro, in Madrid.
It's Sunday.
What will Carmen do?
What will Carmen be?
Who will Carmen do?
What character are we going to shoot?
I have been told from Paris that my
tax collector threatens to seize me.
Seize me with what?
Carmen will not try to escape
her mediocrity by exceptional means.
She will be a seller in a big store
which she'll walk to every morning
from Plaza de las Comendadoras.
She will have a boyfriend,
she will dream of children,
and a good house.
The big store where Carmen will work will
be, for example, Galerías Preciados.
Nadia introduced me to her father.
He is a painter and engraver.
He proposed I use his studio
as a decoration for the film.
Maybe it's Carmen's boyfriend studio,
who will be a painter
and will be called Guillermo.
My name is Carmen.
My name is Carmen.
Marcel, your film will not be easy.
I think you have a
very interesting idea.
The problem will be not
to tire the public
with a story told with too many words
and few images.
Obviously, it can be
done in several ways.
I think that cinema is, above all,
a form of expression through images.
The word can add or
counterpoint the image,
but you can not count on the word
to develop that story.
I'm sure that you'll be able to
overcome this problem
and that you're going to make
a really interesting film.
Continue to tighten them.
What do you think of the film?
Remember that conversation we had
in your house
in front of the television?
I think that the film
shouldn't be linear.
You have to make films like life itself,
or even the brain of man.
It doesn't go in one direction.
There is simultaneity.
Many directors tried to do things
in that sense,
but few have achieved it yet.
Maybe even without knowing it,
artists sometimes achieve...
Nadia likes the idea of the film.
She proposes to help me,
and she does it
with extraordinary brilliance.
... sometimes in a conscious way,
and I hope you do...
Pregnant, and until the day before
delivery, she is by my side.
I happen to be discouraged,
and she gives me energy.
I filmed it in the studio of her house.
She will be part of the film.
Some months after finishing the shots,
I'll return to Madrid to record the
ideas she proposed during the shoot.
She finds them in the smallest details.
... it can be done with images
or through words.
With Nadia
I film a Sunday
the preparations for a
religious procession
in Plaza de las Comendadoras
with the intention of filming
Carmen and Guillermo one day
to convert them, through editing,
into testimonies of this procession.
Carlos' sister will be
Carmen's character.
Carlos is one of my
friends in Madrid.
He gives me an effective
and discreet help
since the first time I was in Spain.
I still haven't found the
character of Guillermo,
Carmen's boyfriend.
Carmen is a tall,
beautiful brunette.
I'll shoot her later.
I live in Madrid,
Plaza de las Comendadoras.
With Nadia,
I film the documentary aspect of the
Plaza de las Comendadoras
I want to describe the place where
Carmen is going to live.
I find it hard to
believe that this place
is not the one of a town
and that it's very close to the store
where I work.
Children and the elderly are
almost intermediate generations.
They tell me,
"We are not beautiful,
why are you filming us?"
I answer that they are beautiful.
That is what I think.
I need money to survive
until the film ends,
to put gas in my car
and move freely.
We have to shoot a boat ride
with Carmen and Guillermo
in the lake of the Retiro Garden,
from Carmen's point of view,
without ever seeing her.
There will be sun in the trees,
and a finger of Carmen in the water.
I want Carmen to come across,
at some point,
a communion of nuns.
Later I will film that communion
in Montreuil sur Bois, near Paris.
Guillermo will take Carmen home
for the first time,
and they will make love
for the first time.
They will have to go dancing.
Time pass.
I go through Madrid.
I'm looking for places,
ideas.
I film everything I want,
everything that is presented
and that I like.
A procession between virgin
and bayonets.
El Rastro, a sort of flea market.
Wouldn't it be very picturesque
to take Carmen there?
How will Carmen be dressed?
La Castellana is a very wide avenue
and very busy around
eleven o'clock in the morning.
A market of old Madrid.
My car's tailpipe is broken.
Death.
A peasant on his donkey
lost in the Paseo Del Prado.
He asks me where is
Glorieta de Cuatro Caminos.
I guide him,
and I give him a tip
for having filmed it.
He refuses with dignity.
A light of my car does not work.
Is the film going to be made?
Is it going to end?
Will I make it to the end?
Néstor Basterretxea.
He is a friend of Nadia.
He proposes to me to photograph
an industrial short that he is making.
I agree
I'm bailed out.
My film is going to be made.
I write a summary on
a page and a half.
Now I want the most free
and different film.
My janitor.
She comes from Asturias,
a mining country.
Luis, I met you while you shot the film
El Verdugo.
I followed you for a week.
I made a documentary about
that film for television.
It's from the film El
Verdugo by Berlanga
that the idea came for
October in Madrid.
On Sunday
I'll film Luis Berlanga at home.
I will seek a new breath
in that encounter.
Maybe an answer to my own problems.
I will record Berlanga's observations
as well as Nadia's,
a few months later.
What has prevented me from seeing it
is that there had been many cuts.
Which are the sequences
that have been deleted.
-I prefer to speak in Spanish.
-Yes
I express myself better in my language.
The cuts they made in my film
can not be free.
That would mean that censorship
would not respond to anything.
It would be so anarchist and surreal
like us as creators.
There was an obviously absurd intention
in making those cuts
because everything
I wanted to say about society
and about the problem of the relationship
between the individual and society
it is still evident in the version
that was exhibited in Spain,
although on the other hand
they have altered
the dramatic progression of the film.
The intention of the censorship
has not been in any way
to eliminate the hardest parts
or stronger showing the executions
of those condemned to death in Spain,
but to suppress the dramatic
accentuation of this conflict of man
and society.
I get happy every time I make movies.
I film in an increasingly vegetative,
spontaneous and sleepwalking way.
I get to wonder if we really do
the cinema we want, that we like,
and if we feel it when we are doing it.
I practically corral my films.
They are there, they exist.
I love them or I let
them love themselves.
Until how it is possible to love or
hate a creature at certain times.
I do not have any project.
I like to do things,
both in the cinema and in love,
in the most vegetative way possible.
It is absurd to talk about projects
for a man like me, who likes to find
unforeseen things along the way.
I have projects,
but precisely because I have them,
I do not like them anymore.
I do not have the least
affection for them anymore.
What do you think
of the young Spanish cinema?
I start from the base of believing
in individuals as good anarchists,
and in the author's policy.
I do not believe in schools
nor in a general definition of what
we could call it "young
Spanish school".
Individually, there are authors
that I like and interest,
and others that interest me less.
We must look for our roots.
Maybe I'm a bit old, but the
Spanish must, in principle,
face that immensity that is ahead,
and external problems.
We are not going to start
being introspective
like the French or Italians.
We are not yet capable of
introspection in the cinema.
It is with this
prescription that Spanish,
by tradition,
not in a pejorative sense
but because of the authentic
Spanish tradition,
it floods all things,
including the cinema.
I think that every young
Spanish filmmaker
can film what is proposed,
but his records usually give
the impersonation of something external,
Foreign,
about him.
This is how you think about something,
but that something is not the truth.
It does not matter
if you are on the street,
in our country, in our geography.
What you must feel is
a violent impression
of chaos before the things
instead of simply reflecting them.
Yesterday,
Sunday.
Guillermo took me to the Retiro Garden.
We rode in a boat.
He was the one who rowed.
I know Maribel from Carlos,
Carmen's brother.
Maribel married a soldier she
hasn't seen in four years.
She must leave for Rio de Oro,
where her husband's garrison is.
My name is Carmen.
I live in a pension of a fat
and kind woman,
whose husband works in Paris.
She is from Toledo, like my family.
The woman who is to become
the one who hosts Carmen
in Plaza de las Comendadoras.
Carmen's family lives
in the province
and Carmen in this
woman's boarding house.
This woman's husband works in Paris,
on the street De la Pompe.
He sends her cash monthly
in exchange for some other adventure
with Parisians skinnier than her.
I was born in Toledo.
I left my mother in Toledo.
I did not know my father.
He died in the civil war
a few days before my birth.
Toledo
Old city of Jews and Arabs.
City of calm and balance,
city of distancing.
Architecture immobile in time.
In a slow train like those
who exist in Spain,
It seems I go back in
time to go to Toledo.
Agustín is not the ideal character
for Carmen's boyfriend.
He will not be a painter.
The studio where he'll take Carmen
will be a studio lent
by a friend painter
At the same time I filmed
Carmen and Guillermo's walk
along the lake of the Retiro Garden,
I capture the ordinary
aspect of the place.
A young girl who looks like a
eighteenth century English painting.
I ask her if she can wait
for me to film her.
the time it takes to go and look
for a roll of film in the car.
She is late
and she tells me
she will be scolded.
It was the first time
I had gone to Guillermo's house.
There were bright
and moving pictures there.
We can see Madrid and many
terraces with hanging clothes.
There are also iron sculptures.
We went for a walk after the
lake of the Retiro Garden.
Carmen abandons me,
she does not want to be filmed anymore.
However, we did the make-up scenes,
and we chose her wardrobe.
Will I be able to make her come back?
This is the party of
the Plaza de las Comendadoras.
Every year there is a procession
in honor of the Virgin.
We saw it with Guillermo.
Afterwards,
we decided to go the dance.
Guillermo is a painter.
Artist and painter.
It was my friend Guillermo Delgado
who suggested the name of
Carmen's boyfriend
and the idea of making him a painter.
With little natural light
and a single lamp
I did Guillermo's scene
as a way to sustain the cinematic aspect
for which we have great resources.
Otherwise, everything is impossible.
These are the draft of a correspondence
with a girl opposite of him,
a French girl,
and for a few mornings she has undressed
in front of him, knowing he watches.
Guillermo, while we were
shooting your sequence,
You asked me something that shocked me
and also gave me pleasure.
-You asked me-
-What do you like what you do?
It's formidable, you found
the same infirmation.
And that's the question I wanted
Do you think it's normal to ask me that
question without knowing me enough?
Do you think I can like that job?
-We're speaking artist to artist, right?
-Yes.
Well, I think that is...
the background of the ethical question
of the artist:
Enjoy what you do.
Particularly in these times, so...
-So?
-So prostituted.
-Prostituted?
In every sense of the word.
My friend Carlos.
He is the brother of the girl
interrogated to make Carmen.
I will never film Carmen.
Her boyfriend forbade it.
Carlos's intervention
could not reverse that decision.
She is Spanish,
and her name is María Carmen Miguela.
Together,
we filmed La muerte Del toro.
I had met her
on my first trip to Spain
where I made my first film.
It's been five years since then.
Five years that passed like a storm.
I lost my actress.
I lost Carmen.
I'm looking for Carmen.
I am looking for a possible Carmen.
I film at random in the street
Will I find Carmen?
The garden of Consuelo.
The mother of Consuelo.
The neighbor of Consuelo.
Consuelo has black eyes
like those of a gypsy.
I have met her in front
of the Prado Museum.
With María Carmen Miguela,
we went to her mother's
to ask her if she allowed
Consuelo to participate in the film.
The mother excused Consuelo
of not being able or wanting to
go to the appointment we had set
where I had saw her
for the first time.
My reflectors wait for Carmen.
My camera waits for the
reflections there.
My friend Jorge.
Poet and mining engineer.
He returned from an oil exploration
in Rio de Oro.
He has been interested in the film,
and has helped me.
I wanted to fix his image.
A mutual friend tells me this news
by a letter from Madrid.
José Antonio, poet.
Correspondent in Madrid
for a Parisian newspaper.
He helped me in filming
Le Christ dans la cité.
The dance hall that I chose
for Carmen and Guillermo
It is almost empty.
It just rained.
The ballroom was almost empty.
It had just rained.
Guillermo wanted to
take me to his house.
I decided to shoot another dance
that does not correspond
to my characters.
There are no Carmens,
there are no actors.
My friends are not free.
I film from a balcony in the rain,
the houses around,
the street.
An accident.
Aranjuez, 60 kilometers from Madrid.
One of the best
bullfights of the season.
Nadia tells me of this bullfight
and she recommends me not to miss it.
New York:
"Jump" screams the crowd to the man
desperately perched on the second floor.
Yemen:
The rebels are shot in the public
square before ten thousand people.
Saigon:
A rebel is shot before
television cameras
for several million viewers.
Atlanta:
White policemen in a car
for several kilometers they chase after
a group of blacks grade-schoolers.
Before losing consciousness,
he pointed his murderer:
his daughter.
Jean-Claude, 19 years old,
kills his cousin with hammer blows,
a beautiful baker who
rejected his advances.
The crew of Russian
American cosmonauts.
It is in its thirty-third revolution.
The two members went out one
by one from the capsule.
A dance in the
surroundings of Madrid.
The dance was never visited by
Carmen and Guillermo.
Jeanette, actress.
Also sells stamps and
butterflies near the Gran Vía.
My name is Carmen.
My name is Carmen.
Every morning
I walk to work.
Two friends introduce me to Jeanette.
Blonde and white, she's cute.
She is not Carmen.
I like her.
She will be Carmen.
The idea of Carmen walking
to work every morning
makes me want to record
with my teleobjective
Jeanette, free in the
streets of Madrid.
I try to show her from multiple angles.
Free of all obligation.
Free like I was and I am,
and how I want to continue being.
Carmen is not going to
know this location,
as we had anticipated in the script.
She will not have met Guillermo.
I will not have met Carmen.
The empty location is useless.
My phone has been cut for several days.
I still have to film the first and last
shots of the film.
Before leaving Madrid,
I organize a flamenco party
in tribute to my friend Juan,
among other friends.
It's September 26, I believe.
The tape recorder that I have
is not synchronized with my camera.
It was backing and advancing
that I could mount these images.
By the way, it doesn't matter.
I did not use the same order to organize
the image reels and the sound reels.
This must be the last image according to
the script written four years ago.
I wanted it to be the last image of
October in Madrid.
Jeanette taking off her makeup,
and so she repeats
the gestures of Ana, the actress.
Subtitles by Swain and Gundenspand