Bulletin of the Comediantes

THIS IS THE CATALOGUE of an exhibition at Madrid’s Casa Museo Lope de Vega between May and September 2021 on screen adaptations of Golden Age drama from their beginning in 1914 to the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975. The authors, members of the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona’s Grupo Prolope, organized the display, a rich harvest from a score of Spanish, German, and Russian archives of documents (scripts, proposals, censors’ reports), posters, stills, and film clips, including the full screening of Ludwig Berger’s silent Der Richter von Zalamea (52 minutes, 1920), recently restored in the Filmarchiv of the Bundesarchiv in Berlin. The event was accompanied by a program of guided visits, a concert, showings of five of the films in the famous garden of Lope’s house, and an online roundtable. It was an innovative and highly informative initiative that will have illuminated its many visitors.

The exhibits were housed in a single room with some dozen showcases and screens, as readers can appreciate in the online video of the exhibition (www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR2q_7HOklk). The catalogue, however, is a weighty tome of eleven by seven and a half inches; it is far more than a simple listing of the items on display, constituting a detailed analysis of the cultural and political history of the (attempted) popularization of Spanish baroque drama before and during the dictatorship. The introduction explains that it sprang from Carmona’s doctoral research, recently published as Las reescrituras fílmicas de la comedia nueva. Un siglo en la gran pantalla (Peter Lang, 2020). Preceded by a four-page “opening sequence” by Duncan Wheeler (14–17), the text consists of seven chapters in 127 pages, decade by decade, followed by a full and expert English translation by Simon Breden and nine pages of bibliography.

Almost every leaf of the main text is richly illustrated. The 107 high-quality plates, which reproduce all the exhibition’s graphic content, constitute this publication’s major increment compared to the former book, gathered as they are from a multitude of recondite sources that few students of Golden [End Page 91] Age drama will have had the opportunity to explore. The film stills lend an indispensable visual dimension to the critique and understanding of the adaptations, giving tangible immediacy to the analysis of their cultural aspects (e.g., popularism, or imaginaires of the Golden Age in dialogue with modernity, gender, and class as reflected in costume, landscape, gesture, and so forth), and of their highly charged political implications (not just in contrasting portrayals—or not—of violence and symbols of power and/or populism by left and right-wing directors, but also conflicting takes on such quintessential questions as “race” in its Francoist sense, from native or German and Italian Fascist angles to Bolshevik, Jewish, and exiled anti-Fascist ones). One picture is worth a thousand words: the apophthegm applies in full to this catalogue and holds true as much for students of the original plays as for those of cinema, since the films constitute rewritings which, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, are unfoldings (Entfaltungen) of the great works’ afterlife that transcend mere material content to approach their truth content, “catching fire” from the eternal life of language.

The illustrations are the main increment, then, but not the only one, because for every picture the authors also provide over 250 words of text. These embody new insights and information on the background and nature of the films. Some twenty are covered in detail, of which fourteen were adaptations of Golden Age plays. Four were of Calderón’s El alcalde de Zalamea, from the silent versions by Adrià Gual (1914) and Berger (1920) to José Gutiérrez Maesso’s (1953) and Mario Camus’s La leyenda del alcalde de Zalamea...