(Images from the Spanish language blog at http://bachilleratocinefilo.blogspot.nl/2015/03/7-dias-de-enero-1979-alejandro-berna.html)
This screening was part of this year’s ¡Viva! Festival’s focus on La transición – the period in which Spain struggled to move from fascism to multi-party democracy in the second half of the 1970s. Advertised as 170 minutes long, I did fear that the film itself might be a struggle, but the archive 35mm print seemed to be intact and ran for around 130 always watchable minutes. The title refers to the seven days in January 1977 when violence enacted against students, workers and Communist Party supporters in Madrid by the police and fascist ‘guerrillas’ threatened to lead to an all-out confrontation. The opening scenes of the film offer newsreel footage and titles hammered out like telex messages detailing the ‘real events’. What follows is a form of dramatic ‘reconstruction’ of some of the events with, as the titles inform us, some ‘narrative invention’. They suggest that the film’s job is to represent the events, not to act as the judicial system.
The film was directed by Juan Antonio Bardem, himself a Communist Party member who had been imprisoned at various times by Franco’s regime but who nevertheless had survived as a practising filmmaker, often disguising the messages of the films he had written and directed himself and with Luis García Berlanga. I was already familiar with aspects of Bardem’s work from a Leeds International Film Festival screening of Death of a Cyclist (1955).
The focus of the narrative is on two sets of mainly young people (i.e. in their twenties and thirties). One group are labour lawyers, mainly Communist Party members or supporters, who are helping independent trades unions in their struggles with both employers and the ‘official’ unions set up by Franco’s regime. These lawyers have rented an office on Atocha Street in the centre of Madrid and close to the streets where left-wing street protests have been met with over-zealous policing. The second group comprises a trio of young men who are part of a right-wing organisation attempting to prevent the return to democracy, primarily by adopting a strategy of ‘creating tension’ (a strategy imported from Italy). Their hope is that the confusion and anger they will create will ‘justify’ a coup d’état by the military and the overthrow of the provisional government established since Franco’s death in 1975. It occurred to me later that Bardem had adopted a similar approach to that adopted recently by Gurinder Chadha in Viceroy’s House (2017) – and which has generated criticism. The approach involves focusing on a romance between two characters as a means of drawing the audience into the personal, ‘human’ stories of individual characters in the hope that this will help us understand the political struggles.
The character who is given most screen time is Luis María Hernando de Cabral, an upper middle-class young man, the son of a decorated soldier killed by the ‘Reds’. His mother Adelaïda (French actress Madeleine Robinson) is the personal assistant to Don Tomás (French actor Jacques François), a powerful man who is secretly the leader of the right-wing forces planning insurrection. Luis María is courting Pilar, the younger daughter of Don Tomás, and also training with two other men for ‘guerrilla activity’. The courtship provides us with evidence of the rigid moral stance of the fascist hierarchy such that Pilar and Luis María cannot even spend a night together. The relationship seems to disappear in the later stages of the film (Andy Willis, who selected the film for the festival, joked that this might account for the ‘missing’ 40 mins – or at least be part of it). The focus on the fascists and this family seems odd. Why not choose one of the young communists – or at least choose both? The clue, I think is in Bardem’s earlier work, such as Death of a Cyclist. That film focused on a university teacher with a wealthy girlfriend who is ashamed of the way he (and by extension his social class) behaved after a cyclist was knocked down. In 7 dias de enero Bardem offers us a weak central character, a young man trapped by devotion to his father’s legacy, who is in practice an ineffective fascist – he doesn’t train well on a shooting range and is unreliable in a crisis. One reading would be that Luis María is the ‘human’ face of the fascists – the others being more ‘typical’ in their thuggish behaviour. These thugs could survive in the new Spain and as we learned in the ‘One Hour Introduction to The Politics of La transición’, one such character could be found in Marshland (La isla mínima, Spain 2014). Gradually the thugs will be replaced. But it’s the characters like Luis María who must change during the transition period.
The other more practical reason for a filmmaker to focus on the right-wing upper class families is the sheer number of characters in the script and the necessity to include non-professional actors (Manuel Ángel Egea as Luis María does not seem to have any previous credits). I suspect that several of the trade unionists and lawyers are played by non-professionals. Their narrative is much more collectivist and only a handful of them are picked out for dialogue scenes. The most charismatic is the trade union leader Joaquín Navarro (I can’t discern if he is played by a professional actor) and from the lawyers, the young woman (see the image above) who was one of the survivors and who is required to pick out the perpetrators from a line-up. The film is accurate in terms of broad details of the events and I won’t spoil the narrative too much, but simply record that the main thrust of the events is a plan to assassinate the Atocha lawyers. If you want to know the details they are available online. The blog from which I’ve taken screengrabs actually explains who many of the characters in the film are and how they refer to the historical figures involved in the real events (see the first image).
Overall, I found this to be a fascinating film and I was taken back to the late 1970s when so much else was happening that I don’t think I paid as much attention to these events as I should. I first visited Madrid in 1981, a few weeks after the attempted coup d’état when army officers attempted to take over the Congress of Deputies. It seemed peaceful enough but obviously I didn’t realise what was happening behind the scenes. In retrospect, the political transición was possibly less violent that many had feared and Spain eventually achieved a return to the European mainstream in not much more than ten years – and certainly by 1992. Bardem’s film (in cinemas in France just over two years after the events depicted) is a valuable resource in understanding many of the emotions and beliefs of the period.
The Case for Global Film 