Director: Javier Vila Galarza
Writer: Javier Vila Galarza & Leticia Salvago Soto
Running time: 1hr 42mins
A documentary like Velintonia 3 puts me in a difficult place. It’s filled with things I love, and which make me sympathetic toward the film, but which depend on a level of prior knowledge which would render it an entirely different watch for many other people. So, I want to champion it, to extoll its apparent virtues from the rooftop, but that really boils down to a recommendation for its subject matter, rather the actual film.
Spanish poet Vicente Aleixandre lived a fascinating life, who made arguably an even greater mark on culture via his advice and criticism, than he did with his own prose. As a member of the ‘Generation of ‘27’, his house on Velintonia street was a hive of creative activity through two defining periods in Spain’s 20th century history.
Before the Civil War, he granted audiences to any poet who made the trip to see him in Madrid – welcoming some of the most influential, radical and inventive writers of his generation, including Federico Lorca, Miguel Hernández and Pablo Neruda. After the Civil War, when many of those voices had been silenced, or driven into exile, Aleixandre remained – prevented from travelling by his poor health.
In this time, it might have seemed wise to keep his head down. After all, the rise of fascism had seen a number of his contemporaries – and cherished companions like Lorca – murdered. But while Aleixandre found his work subject to strict censorship, and aware that he had to be careful who he told about certain aspects of his life, he continued to cultivate a space in which creativity, and criticism of the Francoist dictatorship, could flourish.
In both eras, he would meet with up and coming poets, offering them guidance on honing their craft, and making an impact on wider society through art. And two years after the death of Franco saw Spain begin its transition to democracy, Aleixandre was lauded for this, by being named Nobel Laureate; winning the prize for literature in 1977. This is something which was seen as a kind of cultural watershed acknowledging the end of totalitarian rule in Spain, but also as a way to acknowledge the whole Generation of ’27.
In spite of this, Vicente Aleixandre is far from a household name. Certainly, that is the case for many people who have won the Nobel prize for literature. But I’m not saying everyone has to be as famous as Bob Dylan. I am saying that, considering the importance of his contribution, the fact he is lesser known than say Pablo Neruda, Samuel Beckett, or John Steinbeck – who are also on the list of winners – is conspicuous.
Velintonia 3 does work which I regard as important, then, because it seeks to bring Aleixandre and his legacy out of the shadows. To put new generations in touch with his work, and to use it as a way to explore a century’s worth of explosive Spanish history in the process. And it does this with some appropriately artistic panache, throughout his emptied and ancient house. The climax of the film sees the staging readings of Aleixandre’s poems, amid discordant, metallic clanging in his long-abandoned garden, with hollowed out oranges (a fruit he has once described a sack of as a celestial body) filled with candles lighting the scene. Before, a guided tour of the house has seen the leader particularly draw on the fact so little ever changed in the house, that the sun has bleached clear outlines around artifacts that have ceased to be there – a grandfather clock’s ghost still haunts the otherwise blank walls; a testament to the longevity of a poet who also weathered the storm of post-Civil War Spain long enough to leave an indelible mark on its culture, even if there have been attempts to remove him from the national discussion in the years since. Meanwhile, talking heads – so often the flattest, dullest part of a documentary – spring to life, because they are placed in conversation with each other; aged poets and friends of Aleixandre, reunited in the room where they used to meet and discuss poetry and life with him.
But while it does the equivalent of placing a nice, shiny plaque above the front-door of the now-dilapidated house at Velintonia 3, it stops short of an elaborate, expressionistic statue to commemorate Aleixandre. The form of the poet we are served up is broad, and flat – while the more contentious, and ultimately, interesting details from his life are left in the dark.
For example, while Aleixandre’s bisexuality is noted in the film’s final third, it is only in the most cursory of throwaway admissions. Of course, in Spain’s deeply conservative post-Civil War years, Aleixandre needed to be careful who he trusted with such intimate information – so only his closes friends knew. But in the years since his death, Aleixandre’s love-letters to poet and literary critic Carlos Besuño have come to light.
It is not enough, in my opinion, to simply note Aleixandre was a bisexual, in this case. For the uninitiated, who presumably this film is supposed to inspire a new interest in both the man and his poetry, there needs to be an effort to explore how this impacted both. How did living in a Spain where the LGBT+ community were forced to hide their true selves, or die (one of Aleixandre’s closest allies, Lorca, was murdered amid the backlash against the Spanish Republic, with some claiming the motivation was at least partially his homosexuality) impact Aleixandre on a personal level, and what impact did that have on his approach to his poetry, or to other people’s?
Returning to Lorca, precious little is mentioned of the circumstances surrounding his death. His murder in Granada remains a bone of contention – partially because, like Passolini, there are some (I would say cynical) voices who claim it was an apolitical event. But, leaving it as Lorca returning home to Granada expecting safety, and sadly finding the opposite was the case, is non-committal to the point of becoming almost pointless.
Similarly, in the pre-Civil War segment, it is mentioned that Aleixandre was “a Republican”. But what exactly that means – the ideals he stood for by adopting that position, or why he adopted them – are left for the audience’s own guesswork. Considering the rise of far-right ideologies across Europe – which includes the disgusting glamourisation of Franco by aspects of Spain’s youth – it seems incumbent on director Javier Vila Galarza and co-writer Leticia Salvago Soto to offer insight on the consequences of the ideologies at play here. Yet no such attempt materialises.
This is perhaps the film’s biggest issue. There is no answer to the most obvious question which will be aimed at Velintonia 3: why now? What relevance has this story got to our current world, what lessons can we take from the life of Vicente Aleixandre, or the versions of Spain he lived through? And what does the fact that he remains largely frozen out of literary discussions, airbrushed from cultural history, tell us about the forms of censorship, the social schisms and the ideological feuds which linger in our present day realities?
Clearly, there is something which matters here for modern audiences. There are points which are worth dredging up, aspects of this story which can still have an important impact on the way we see and interact with the world. And filmmakers in Spain understand that. This is why, considering the radio silence beforehand, Indy Film Library has received and reviewed two films about the Generation of ’27 in a month. But they both suffer the same issue. The conclusion of Tony Moore’s review for Lorca in Havana could essentially have been written for Velintonia 3.
The problem here is I know fuck all about Lorca – I am an outsider. OK, I have picked up over the years that Lorca was generally on the side of the angels, was murdered during the Spanish Civil War, that his poetry reflected his Andalusian roots, and that he was a gay man trying to live in a deeply conservative society. But that is all. I would suggest it would have been helpful for the filmmakers to have given some context – why we should be interested in Lorca and an argument for why his poetry matters today.
There are glimpses of something remarkable in Velintonia 3. It manages to be an appropriately poetic documentary – something many people might describe as an oxymoron – and conjures up a number of wonderful visual metaphors to help us get a feeling for its subject, without feeling like we’re having our hands held. The problem is, sometimes you need to do a certain level of hand-holding, if you’re going to introduce a new subject to an audience. You need to be able to offer deeper, and more definitive insight than the subject’s (also sparse) Wikipedia page. And above all, you need to be able to explain why your chosen subject should matter to the lives of the previously uninitiated. So, the potential, the ‘something remarkable’, remains ephemeral, undefined, present only as potential. The actual features of the ancient grandfather clock remain obscured, and rather than using its face to read the time, we are left chasing shadows on the wall.