(2016) • 126’
Directed by: Pere Portabella + Debate Social Movements / Future of Europe
Impact of European Crises on Arts and Politics.
Pere Portabella’s latest film, looks at the political, economic, social
and ecological facets of the crisis from the standpoint of networks and
culture. Informe General II represents a dialogue with a new restored
version
of its forerunner, Informe general on certain matters of interest for a
public screening.
In 1976, the Spanish director filmed a vast fresco in motion covering
the last dying embers of Franco’s regime and the process for founding a
democratic State. Portabella assembles the work in a structure in which
the spectator is always aware of the filming device and the type of
narration produced by this.
Informe General II reacts to another historical time, also hectic,
unhinged and pressing, in which the map of politicians and institutions
born in 1976 has been pushed aside for a diagram of multiple open and
changing nodes. How is this new civil society reorganised to recover the
instituting and changing function of politics. How do institutions
respond to this challenge? How do films connect and interact with these
new processes?
Informe General II defends the role of culture as a context for
questioning the present and the role of the museum also as a public
institution in its status as a setting for dissension and critical
imagination from which we can consider what our inherited and immediate
"narrations" are, and what type of subject can appropriate these and
launch them into the future. Science, citizens groups, grassroots social
movements and networks complement the cultural institution, tracing out
an uncertain outlook that Portabella’s film displays and questions at
the same time.
Pere Portabella’s career in the film world starts with the production of
three of the most relevant films appearing in the modern world in Spain:
“Los golfos” by Carlos Saura (1959), “El cochecito” by Marco Ferreri
(1960) and “Viridiana” by Luis Buñuel (1961). The first film directed by
him, “No compteu amb els dits” dates back to 1967. Portabella has thus
been working in films for 56 years, 48 of these as a director. With just
a temporary interruption to get involved in parliamentary politics in
the early 80s, Portabella can be said to be one of Europe’s most veteran
active filmmakers today.
