Art and ideas: a dialog with the audience with Pere Portabella
PERFORMERS
Pere Portabella, film director
Esteve Riambau, director de la Filmoteca de Catalunya
PROGRAM
A perspective about the usefulness of art, its affirmations and challenges in dialogue with the public.
Pere Portabella, the undisputed dean of cinema in our country, shares and confronts his ideas and commitments present in his extensive filmography (Silence before Bach, General Report, Warsaw Bridge, Dinner...). The expression against the explanation, the idea above the simple narration, the role of music in his work and the interdisciplinarities...
PERE PORTABELLA
Pere Portabella (Figueres, 1927) kept his political commitment to all the movements concerned against the dictatorship of Francisco Franco from the 1960’s. He was elected Senator in the first democratic election after Franco’s death, and later became member of Catalonia’s Parliament. As a filmmaker, he has kept a relevant activity for more than four decades. As the head of Films 59 he produced some of the most emblematic films of Spanish cinema: Carlos Saura’s Los golfos (The Hooligans, 1959), Marco Ferreri’s El cochecito (The Wheelchair, 1960) as well as Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana (1960). As a film director, he makes his own creations by bringing together the legacy of the avant-garde culture and his search to breach the boundaries of languages. His work has been exhibited at MoMA, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou or Documenta Kassel. In 2008 he is invested Doctor Honoris Causa by the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. In 2019 Cambridge University organised a seminar on his work.