The personal archive of filmmaker José Luis Sáenz de Heredia opens to public access at Filmoteca Española

Spanish Film Archive The cataloging of the personal archive of José Luis Sáenz de Heredia (1911-1992) has been completed. one of the most extensive and popular careers of Spanish cinema of the 20th century.

The collection, identified with the number A3075 and coming from four successive deposits made by the filmmaker’s family, is from now on accessible for public consultation in the Library Dolores Devesa of the institution, at 10 Magdalena Street in Madrid.

This documentary set makes available to researchers, journalists and interested people a corpus that allows a comprehensive re-reading of the author’s work, while recovering the artistic, technical and professional dimension of a filmmaker whose career encompasses popular comedy, classic melodrama, literary adaptation, the theatrical field and institutional teaching.

The archive is organized into five large sub-funds – cinematographic activity, theatrical activity, teaching and institutional activity, personal life and public projection, and collected materials – and covers since 1934, the year of the typewritten script of ‘How lucky you are, Patrick!’ (his first film foray, at the Ballesteros Studios), until 1992.

Creation documentation predominates: literary, technical and filming scripts, handwritten drafts, notepads, still and filming photographs, professional correspondence and press dossiers.

The documented filmography covers titles as diverse as ‘Raza’ (1942), ‘The Scandal’ (1943), ‘Bambú’ (1945), ‘Mariona Rebull’ (1947), ‘The Harvest is Much’ (1948), ‘Don Juan’ (1950), ‘The Eyes Leave Traces’ (1952), ‘Everything is Possible in Granada’ (1954), ‘Radio Stories’ (1955), ‘Faustina’ (1957), ‘The Pardon’ (1960), ‘Franco, That Man’ (1964), ‘Television Stories’, among others.

Among the pieces with the greatest heritage value, the technical scripts stand out, first of all, of which two stand out in particular: the technical script for ‘The Eyes Leave Traces’ (1952), 333 typewritten sheets with corrections in various inks that preserve, in their margins, a possible self-portrait in pencil, a caricatured face in which the names of Emma Penella and Dalí are read, and two handwritten poems signed in pencil, an authentic window into the creative workshop of the director; and that of ‘Radio stories’ (1955), with a handwritten signature on the cover, a complete list of characters and sets, and a photographic accompaniment of 123 still images numbered in shooting order in which Pepe Isbert, Paco Rabal, Tony Leblanc, Juan Calvo, José Luis Ozores and Alberto Romea coexist.

The second major axis of the collection is the primary sources for the history of 20th century Spanish cinema. The archive preserves the first typewritten copy of the script of ‘Raza’ (1941), with handwritten annotations and erasures, as well as additional fragments of the technical script – a mandatory reference document for the study of cinema from the 1940s.

The third relevant block documents the international projection of the director and his institutional role. The original correspondence with the French filmmaker Abel Gance (1945-1946) stands out, two letters with autograph signature; the photographic albums with portraits with Jean Cocteau at the 1954 Cannes Festival during the presentation of ‘Everything is possible in Granada’; images from the filming of ‘The Princess of Éboli’ (1953) with Olivia de Havilland and Paul Scofield; and the correspondence with Basilio Martín Patino regarding the First National Cinematographic Conversations of Salamanca (1955), which documents the director’s direct dialogue with the generation that was renewing the language of Spanish cinema.

To this is added the full documentation of his time at the head of the Institute of Cinematographic Research and Experiences (IIEC) and the Official School of Cinematography (EOC) between 1959 and 1963: inaugural speeches, study plans with handwritten corrections, correspondence with José María García Escudero and a small comparative library of film censorship codes from Germany, the United States, the United Arab Republic and Japan.