Intervening in the Present: Catalan Cinema’s Radical Years (1968–1978)

Presented by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the momentous month of October (this time, 2018), the "Catalan Cinema's Radical Years (1968-1978)" series was curated by Esteve Riambau, director of the Filmoteca de Catalunya, and Joshua Siegel, curator in MoMA's Department of Film. It capitalized on the unprecedented attention captured by Catalonia worldwide that autumn and succeeded in accomplishing its three goals: to give visibility to a stateless national cinema that is often assimilated by, and shoehorned into, Spanish film production; to recover the historical memory of the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship, which indicted a cultural genocide on Catalan society through suppression of its language, culture, and self-rule; and to address gender politics before and during the so-called destape (uncovering), the period of sexual freedom that followed the abolition of censorship during the democratic transition. Courtesy of loans from the Filmoteca de Catalunya, an immensely diverse film corpus was bookended by two symbolic dates: 1968, a year of political changes around the globe, though less so in Spain at that time; and 1978, a year that marked the first democratic elections after Francisco Franco's death in 1975 and the adoption of a new constitution that granted Catalonia a new statute of autonomy and the authorization to speak its language, after nearly a half-century of censorship.