Esquizo (1970) dir. Ricardo Bofill
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The Escuela de Barcelona movement thrived in Spain during the 60's to early 70's and was notable for its low budgets and often avant-garde experimentalism. Several of its directors included Vicente Aranda (Fata Morgana), Jorge Grau (Acteón), Pere Portabella (Cuadecuc Vampir), Carlos Durán (Liberxina 90), Jacinto Esteva (Dante no es unicamente severo) etc. Interestingly, Ricardo Bofill, the famous architect whose abstract buildings can be seen in several Jess Franco films (She Killed in Ecstasy, La comtesse perverse, Eugenie - historia de una perversión, La noche de los sexos abiertos), was an active participant in the movement. As an actor, Bofill appeared in Carlos Duran's BiBiCi Story (1969) and the wacky home-movie Barcelona (1967). As a writer, he co-wrote Aranda's Brillante Porvenir (1965) and as a director, he made the short film Circles(1966), which explored the circular geometry of various ancient monuments, and Esquizo (1970), "a fictitious report on the architecture of the brain".
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Synopsis:
The film opens in a mental clinic. A red-haired patient (Serena Vergano, Bofill's wife at the time) lies on an operating table with electrodes plugged in. Her scalp is split open with a scalpel, we enter her brain with a loud jarring noise. Against a white background and nonsensical ramblings, we see the woman with three young men (Jose Luis Argüello, Modesto Fernández, Jesús Sastre) doing various interpretive dance movements for approximately 15 minutes (a restless old man next to me got up and left). The group create various arches with their limbs, they embrace each other, touch private parts, and get naked (some people giggled). We hear the woman wanting to learn the letter 'o'. Eventually, there's an unfocused shot of a disabled kid walking with crutches while a voiceover talks about schizophrenia. There's a long, drawn out scene of various deformed female patients babbling and giggling. We then see naked toddlers playing with one dollar bills at a beach while the crazy patients "dub" the toddlers' dialogue. The toddlers play about in the sand and suddenly, there are close ups of their private parts (at this point, I saw several people get up and leave immediately). A sudden cut to the young adults "attacking" us with their hand gestures, like synapses of the brain firing messages. A toddler cries. The toddlers bury each other up to the neck (the surreal image of their heads popping out of the sand made the remaining audience chuckle). A mixture of all these scenes is edited together. The young adults do more 'attacking'. Then they lay on top of each other crotch-to-crotch. Abattoir footage of animal carcasses being ground up by a machine plays suddenly. More mixing of the various scenes. Finally, we leave the brain and the scalp closes up. The woman takes a shower. There's a narration about man being the new god because of the increasing advancements in technology, some closing text (but the subtitles were too hard to read) and the film ends.
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I saw this rare film at the Melbourne International Film Festival 2016 along with three other Escuela de Barcelona films. Going in, I had no idea what to expect and to say I was baffled and confused is a huge understatement. I had never seen such a large portion of the audience walk out before and when the film ended, I just didn't know what to make of it. In Daniel Kasman's IFFR 2016 article on Mubi, he draws parallels between the film's incomprehensible nature, the inability to speak, and the voices silenced by the Franco dictatorship.1 This parallel might not be completely unfounded since some Escuela de Barcelona films seemed to have anti-Franco themes. For example, in BiBiCi Story, a woman listens to BBC English lessons and becomes indoctrinated into gunning down a crowd of prisoners, while in Liberxina 90, an underground revolutionary group in a dystopian society have access to a rare drug that can erase "establishment" conditioning from the human mind. Even Portabella'sCuadecuc Vampir has been interpreted as anti-Franco by some writers.
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Overall, I can't say I liked Esquizo; it is extremely drawn out, sluggishly paced, and overstays its welcome. With or without nonsense, I feel it probably would have worked better as a short than as a feature. However, I am glad to have had the opportunity to see this rarity directed by Ricardo Bofill and it did ignite a desire within me to track down more Barcelona School films. A DVD release with a director's commentary (andCircles included as an extra) would be most welcome.
Review written by Terence Ng.
Source:
Further reading: https://letterboxd.com/brian_davisson/list/la-escuela-de-barcelona/
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