FILME
Only recently restored, Padrós creates a nightmarish, allegorical world peopled by politically and sexually unsatisfied characters that hover between lethargy and revolution. One of the most fascinating personalities in Spanish cinema, Padros worked as a bank clerk by day while creating this desperate cry for freedom secretly at night. We hope that Antoni Padros will be with us for this rare screening of his film.
Enclosed in a separate world, outside of society, in futility because there is no real opposition, these characters, politically and sexually dissatisfied, represent several years of Spanish history. Without a real political culture to qualify them as ghosts roaming between the dogmatic and the anarchic, the desperate search for freedom remains. Integration, the party – it means death, as opposed to an inability to depart from the seductions that condition oneself. Perhaps, one can only confront them with reality (Paco urinating on the highway amid the crushing silence of dawn gray laughs). In the end, the image of children is violent and the idea of anarchy that any human being needs to have the feeling of freedom. The images we discover confront the reality, at times grotesque, at times expressionistic. Some outbreaks of tones that help create distance between image and content, isolate the characters of cruelty, in a broken world, left to try to interpret a role without much conviction, and all dressed in sub-product, intentional. Finally, it is a meditation on marginality and its consequences.
Antoni Padrós, schizoid, bank clerk in the morning and a filmmaker by night, is undoubtedly a key figure in the Spanish avant-garde. Coming from the pop art painting and self-training as a filmmaker - except for a brief apprenticeship in a private school Aixelà film, Padros makes his film in a completely marginal form, without any protection, often with rotating expired material, and without no second takes. After a first experiment in 8mm, Alice has Discovered the Napalm Bomb (1968), he began working regularly in 16mm, using expired film. Dafni and Cloe (1969) and Pim Pam, Pum, Revolution (1970) marked the birth of an artist poetic, abstract and without limits. Lock Out (1973) represents his first feature film shot with no sound, Orly to be followed by Shirley Tempe Story (1976), a 226 minutes of footage edited in one night, Veronica L. A woman in my garden (1990) and The Rising, fall and rest of Maria von Herzig (1986). Padrós’ work has been consistent, and free of dogma and fashion. An artist fascinated by the movies, Padrós hates anything that reflects the everyday mimetic, everything that brings us to easily palpable realities through explicit illustrations. Hence his images are presented as a film quest for other worlds, other realities that are targeted by the suggestion of the allusion, told with elliptical language. However, this search, this whole way of film research, is well-anchored as it confesses in the socio-political and cultural life of Spain. The speech Padrosiano enters is critical, disruptive, and absolutely dynamite in the outline of historical and socio-political context in which they occur. Thus Padrós is clearly in the tradition that places his work in as "black" that goes to Goya, Arrabal and Luis Buñuel and finding a precedent in Bosco.
