Sight&Sound - 04.2020

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April 2020 | Sight&Sound | 89

Lost and Found

By Mar Diestro-Dópido

A typical exchange in José Luis Cuerda’s canonical

Amanece, que no es poco (1989 – ‘Dawn Breaks,

Which Is No Small Thing’) plays out as follows:

• I miss mother...


• OK... but don’t you like the
  motorbike I bought you?


• It’s formidable (...) but why did you kill
  her, father?


• She was evil.


• Oh, come on father!


• I waited until you were a grown-up to tell
  you (...) and now that you have an academic
  post in Oklahoma, why would you need her?


• I don’t know... I’m on sabbatical
  and have nothing to do.


• That’s why a motorbike with a sidecar
  is better; so we can see the world.

Cuerda’s shrewd film is a prime example of

esperpento – a quintessentially Spanish genre

characterised by the representation of a distorted

reality, in which ludicrously black humour, barbed-

wire sociopolitical comments and a scathing

denunciation of religion feature prominently.

Cuerda, sadly, died in February, aged 72, but his

uniquely absurdist take on life survives in the

many filmmakers he influenced, as well as in

his fervent cult followers, those amanecistas, or

‘sunrisers’, who can recite the script’s every word

with a reverence normally reserved for the Bible.

When Amanece... was unleashed on the

Spanish film scene in 1989, it was initially

received with utter stupefaction. The story of

an engineer travelling to an idiosyncratic small

town perched in the Spanish sierra with his

father in tow, as they unknowingly head into

the apocalypse (be it the world’s or that of an

imploding society’s), is almost impossible to

categorise. Yet its bloodline can be traced back

to Goya’s Caprichos, the Buñuel of Viridiana

(1961), Almodóvar at his most socially biting

(particularly What Have I Done to Deserve This,

1984; and Dark Habits, 1983) and, of course,

Cuerda’s beloved collaborations between the

director Luis García Berlanga and the writer

Rafael Azcona, films such as The Executioner

(1963) and The National Shotgun (1978).

Amanece... is a scalpel-sharp satire on

reactionary Spanish society in the years after

Franco’s dictatorship ended in 1975. In a series

of deceptively naturalist scenarios, the film

decries such ills as nepotism, religious dogma,

elitism, casual racism, sexism, domestic abuse,

chauvinism and paedophilia. No character in this

most peculiar of towns is left unscathed. A series

of folkloric vignettes walk a tightrope between

irreverence and grotesquery – singing farmers

delve into dialectical materialism in order to

become intellectuals; visitors can get a room for

the night if they cite Dostoevsky; women give

birth immediately after intercourse; a young

man repeatedly fails to commit suicide. It’s a

world where rice rains from the sky and men

sprout from the ground, at the expense of the

landowners: “You have no idea how much men

suck up, they leave the soil completely dry.”

Amenece... was born out of Total, an hour-long

film made for TV that won the jury prize and

the critics’ award at the Monte Carlo television

festival in 1983. In Total – set in the year 2598,

in a tiny, archaic and isolated Castilian town

called London – a shepherd explains to the

viewer how three days earlier he experienced the

end of the world. This is not unlike the closing

scene of Amenece..., which finds father and son

invited to witness what a civil guard describes

lyrically as the most outstanding sunrise he’s

ever experienced. Except, according to his

watch, the sun is running 15 minutes late, and

then it rises from the wrong direction. Fooled

and furious, he starts shooting at the blazing

sphere while shouting “Goddamn mystery!”

Note that I haven’t used the term ‘surrealism’;

for Cuerda this was impossible in film, since

in his view surrealism’s main characteristics,

immediacy and improvisation, could never co-

exist with cinema’s intrinsic need to plan ahead.

Instead, he referred to his style as ‘surruralism’,

explaining: “What I write tends to be full of ideas

that may seem a load of nonsense, but which are

born from reality itself.” In Amanece..., a sort of

hyper-reality meets Spanish picaresque, giving

birth to a rural comedy of manners in which the

traditions of a particular community – religious

or otherwise – become twisted out of recognition.

Writer-director of internationally praised

titles such as The Enchanted Forest (1987), Cuerda

also produced cornerstones of Spanish cinema

such as the three films that catapulted Alejandro

Amenábar to international prominence,

Thesis (1996), Open Your Eyes (1997) and The

Others (2001). But Amanece..., inexplicably, still

lacks international recognition. Cuerda once

described the purpose of Amanece... as follows:

“What I want is to place the viewer in front of

a mirror, so that s/he can reflect on what s/he’s

watching. After that, each to their own.” RIP.

The late José Luis Cuerda’s satirical

masterpiece has not travelled

outside Spain: it’s long past

time that situation changed

Sidecar with a twist: Antonio Resines and Luis Ciges in José Luis Cuerda’s ‘surruralist’ film

For Cuerda, surrealism’s

immediacy and improvisation,

could never co-exist with

cinema’s intrinsic need to plan

AMANECE, QUE NO ES POCO

‘An ingenious non-sensical

chronicle of an absurdity,

sometimes Marxian and

others typical of the Monty

Python.’

El País 16 October 1990

‘It is a mad, mad, mad film’,

La Vanguardia 4 January 1989

WHAT THE PAPERS SAID

OVERLOOKED FILMS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE ON UK DVD OR BLU-RAY

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