Many aspects of Portabella’s long career in the service of film, art and politics are tackled in this masterclass, which is moderated by Esteve Riambau, director of the Filmoteca de Catalunya and also, for instance, (co-)writer of the standard work on la Escuela de Barcelona. It looks at how Portabella came into contact with artists and the art world (Antonio Saura, Antoni Tàpies, Joan Brossa) and the world of film. He comes from a family of Catalan industrialists and studied physics in Madrid in the 1950s. He played an essential role from the early 1960s as producer for Luis Buñuel, Carlos Saura and Marco Ferreri, and as scriptwriter for e.g. Francesco Rosi – in the era of Franco-Catholic censorship. As a filmmaker, he is interested in the development of the language of film. Portabella will talk about the balance between his formal experiments and his political commitment, and in this sense of course also about both Informe general films: the first, from 1977, that investigates the transition from dictatorship to democracy, and then Informe general II, which looks for a way out of today’s political/cultural maze. What does citizenship mean after the crisis, certainly now the old parties in Spain (and elsewhere in Europe) have become embroiled in corruption and power games? And how do art and culture relate to this?
