Jaime Camino, chronicle and memory

Multifaceted, a tenacious chronicler of the circumstances surrounding our Civil War, but also a restless film notary of the times in which he lived, Jaime Camino (Barcelona, ​​1936-2015) was also a producer of his own films, a crucial factor that allowed him to preserve his creative independence and that facilitated the cohesion of his career as a director.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
15 August 2022 Monday 01:12
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Jaime Camino, chronicle and memory

Multifaceted, a tenacious chronicler of the circumstances surrounding our Civil War, but also a restless film notary of the times in which he lived, Jaime Camino (Barcelona, ​​1936-2015) was also a producer of his own films, a crucial factor that allowed him to preserve his creative independence and that facilitated the cohesion of his career as a director. A member of that gauche divine who dreamed of utopias in the velvety nights of Bocaccio, Camino nevertheless distanced himself from that School of Barcelona made up of a large part of his friends but whose aesthetic vagaries he tried to flee from. His thing was not experimentalism, but the desire to communicate with the potential viewer. He preferred to take refuge in a classic style, which focused on solidity in technical aspects as a method to become more transparent, more direct. A desire for communication that is now seen posthumously reactivated by the exhibition dedicated to him by the Filmoteca de Catalunya, a heartfelt tribute that is an invitation to immerse oneself in his work, to discover it (or rediscover it).

Jaime Camino was a humanist, someone attracted by the various fields of art and knowledge. He received a law degree, but never practiced. He did eventually work as a music teacher, not in vain had he studied piano and harmony. Passionate about literature from a very young age, in 1960 he presented himself for the Nadal Prize with his first novel, La coraza, which remains unpublished to this day. In that period, the poison of the cinema has already been inoculated into him, and he works as a critic in the magazines Index and Our Cinema.

He made his feature film debut with The Happy Sixties (1963), an intimate and very personal film, a reflection of a Catalan bourgeoisie suffocated between appearances, routines and conventions, a product in which it is easy to detect the traces of some film trends of the time, like the nouvelle vague. A trace that can also be glimpsed in Tomorrow will be another day (1966), although better integrated. This second film offers a greater dynamism, as well as a greater dramatic efficiency, presenting the difficulties of a young couple to find their place in the world. A bitter film, of great documentary value, it reflects a Barcelona far removed from the swinging London of those years or from Parisian cosmopolitanism.

An unusual proposal at the time, Spain, Again (1968) narrates the return to the Catalan capital of a former North American brigade member now, decades later, a prestigious neurosurgeon. The film draws very well the mixed feelings of the protagonist, constituting the first approach of the director to the subject of the Civil War, which will become a great vector of his future filmography. Based on this work, only four Camino titles put aside the question of warfare: A Winter in Mallorca (1969), a curious and minimalist recreation of the stay on the island of George Sand and a tuberculosis-ridden Chopin; My private teacher (1973), an attempt at commercial cinema that was the greatest artistic setback in the career of its director; The bell (1979), an ironic fable about the progressive increase in competitiveness and stress in our society; and Lights and Shadows (1988). The latter, selected in its day in competition by the Venetian Mostra, is configured as a tremendously original proposal, ambitious although not entirely successful: it is a fantasy about the materialization of an old childhood dream, that of literally penetrating the painting of Las meninas and, therefore, fully inserted into the universe of Velázquez and in the court of Philip IV.

Returning to the theme of the Civil War, The Long Holidays of 1936 (1976) presents the issue from the rear, the forced idleness of a family on the fringes of the front but inevitably aware of the ups and downs of the conflict. Produced in the midst of the Transition, the film suffered severe clashes with censorship but ended up becoming the great popular success of its director's career. With hardly any truce, in 1977 La Vieja memoria sees the light, for many the best film of Camino, an extensive documentary with archive images, interviews with numerous historical figures and a wisely dialectical montage, which confronts facts and ideas without making any manipulation ostensible. .

With The Open Balcony (1985) the filmmaker undertakes his particular homage to Federico García Lorca, persuasively dramatizing various poems by the invoked author, as well as some fragments of La casa de Bernarda Alba. In Dragon Rapide (1986), Camino focuses on the days before the military uprising, visualizing an everyday Francisco Franco, not at all heroic, often ridiculous but at the same time potentially dangerous, a poignant portrait that was given credibility by a magnificent and characterized Juan Diego. With The Long Winter (1991), the filmmaker insists on an approach similar to that of The Long Holidays..., with the war taking place off-screen, while the end of Republican Barcelona draws near. The director will bid farewell to cinema with The Children of Russia (2001), a documentary about the complex fate of those children who, after our uncivil conflict, were taken in by the Soviet Union.

During the nineties, Camino resumed his literary vein and published the novel I will die in New York (1996), in which themes such as memory, chance, music –his frustrated vocation, as he confessed– or the loss of the identity. In 1997 he published the didactic volume El oficio de cine director, which reviews the ins and outs of a job that he, with his culture and honesty, contributed to dignify.