Manuel Jabois: Three kilometers of home movies that tell the passage from Francoism to democracy in Spain

The recording is from 1969 and takes place in Goián, a parish in Tomiño (Pontevedra). There are some children running through a chicken coop, among chicks, and then some adults grab a huge pig, place it alive on a bench (it is hard work, the animal resists and breaks free again and again) and open its guts, They fall with streams of blood into a basin in which a woman begins to knead. There are more recordings: that of the San Campio procession, in 1974; that of the carnival in O Rosal, in 1973; the descent of Monte de Santa Tecla, in 1974. They are extraordinarily well preserved scenes of customs recorded by the camera of the painter Xavier Pousa (Goián, Pontevedra, 1931 – Vigo, 2000). Pousa also documented audiovisual images of a meeting of the Communist Party of Spain in Avignon, in 1970, the Carnation Revolution, in 1974, or the first democratic elections, in 1977. To this enormous archive and that of intimate family scenes ( excursions, baptisms, birthdays) is joined by another, that of live images in the sixties and seventies of his famous friends of the time: Manuel María, Darío Xohán Cabana, Eduardo Blanco Amor, Méndez Ferrín, Álvaro Cunqueiro, Avelino Abuín de Tembra, Fernández del Riego, Uxío Novoneyra, Carlos Oroza, Camilo Nogueira, Gustavo Santiago Valencia, Salvador García Bodaño or Valentín Paz Andrade.

It’s two miles of home movies shot over two decades starting in 1968; about 10 hours of unpublished images that the Xavier Pousa Foundation has deposited in a very original museum, the MOCA (Online Museum of Autobiographical Cinema), which was born at the initiative of La Cinematografía, a cultural management organization from Vigo, with the financial help of the company Cafés Candles. They began the process of recovering and digitizing those tapes after receiving an email from the Pousa Foundation. The agreement was almost immediate, explains Pablo Gómez Sala, director of MOCA: “At first, everyone wants to digitize their films for free, but then they have to find out what all this is for. And this serves to give it a new life, to make it public, to reactivate the materials, to recover memory and also to offer it to documentary artists. The Pousa family agreed, among other things, because this collection was presented as something beyond the familiar.”

Zara Pousa, the painter’s daughter, believes that the initial importance of the project was to recover the family memory from her father’s extensive audiovisual archive. “But then it was revealed that it is not just that: it is the memory of an artist in love with Galicia and now thanks to him we have images and records of years in which things happened in his life and things happened in the history of Galicia,” he says. . He came to MOCA by chance, looking for a way to digitize films. Anthropologist Sara Blas works at the museum and was responsible for the Pousa archive. “There is another dimension to these home videos that has less to do with the content and more to do with the context, the historical value of the films. Furthermore, these types of recordings have their own social life. They pass from one hand to another in families. They are part of inheritances. Sometimes they are forgotten, then they are found or they become completely disconnected from the family and end up in archives. In these films there are many changes in uses and meanings, which is why anthropology is necessary.”

Interviews have been conducted with the Pousa family to learn about the history of these tapes, which are an invaluable treasure and are now available on the MOCA website, where countless archives and domestic recordings of other families, as well as family collections, can be seen.

“Xavier Pousa,” says Gómez Sala, “not only filmed the familiar.” “On the website we have selected several views: the political view, the intellectual and cultural view (because he is in the heart of the Galician intellectuality), the folkloric view, the traveling view. And so many meters of well-shot and well-preserved film is a very exceptional find in the world of domestic cinema archives. At the end of the dictatorship, he recorded the entire Transition and the beginning of democracy. And it does it in a very varied way, and it films very well (…) Domestic cinema has the general reputation of being poorly made cinema. Its problem is that it is a subject little studied by universities, especially here in Europe and Spain, because it has always been studied from a cinematographic perspective, when it has nothing to do with that. But it is not poorly made cinema: it has different codes. And among them are fast movements, blurring, that whole narrative contrary to that of Hollywood. But this man, perhaps due to his training as an artist, understood the camera and how to position itself in a place to find the appropriate portrait at a distance from the objects. Not as if he were a filmmaker or a cinematographer, but with a slow look at what he observes,” he explains.

One of the sections that can be seen on the MOCA website is the interactive exhibition It lands at 18 brushstrokes per second, with paintings by one of the most important impressionist artists in Galicia in the 20th century. There is also the light that Pousa displays as an amateur with the film camera. “Light marks the prominence of a painting and also of an image. Yes, he dominated the light, he dominated the framing, he dominated the movement; He was a good filmer who started out badly, but then he took shape. He always had the camera hanging under his arm, which is why this is an exceptional collection in the world of domestic cinema. We have been working for 12 years and we are in contact with all the domestic cinema organizations in Spain, film libraries and independent groups like ours. I know from my own experience that it is an extraordinary collection due to its historical, political, cultural, and folkloric content. In fact, he also filmed his own work. There are paintings filmed by him, which is also extraordinary: that a painter who films what he sees and that is the same as what he paints, who records what he paints through his filmic eye.