Luis García Berlanga

Luis García-Berlanga Martí MMT (12 June 1921 – 13 November 2010) was a Spanish film director and screenwriter. Acclaimed as a pioneer of modern Spanish cinema, his films are marked by social satire and acerbic critiques of Spanish culture under the Francoist dictatorship. These include Welcome Mr. Marshall! (1953), which won the International Prize (Comedy Film) at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival, Plácido (1961), nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1962, and The Executioner (1963), winner of the FIPRESCI Prize at the 24th Venice International Film Festival He kept a long-time collaboration with screenwriter Rafael Azcona, with whom he co-wrote the scripts for seven of his films between 1961 and 1987.

Early years
Berlanga was born on June 12, 1921, into an affluent family in the city of Valencia, on the east coast of Spain. His father was a Republican politician in the national parliament who was arrested and sentenced to death after the Spanish Civil war. He enrolled in the Blue Division in the Eastern Front of World War II to avoid having his father executed. In his youth, Berlanga studied law and philosophy, but in 1947 he decided to enter the Institute of Cinematographic Investigations and Experiences (Instituto de Investigaciones y Experiencias Cinematográficas) in Madrid.

Career
His debut as a film director in 1951 was with the film That Happy Couple in which he worked with Juan Antonio Bardem. With Bardem, he is considered to be one of Spanish film renovators after the Spanish Civil War. They cofounded a film magazine, Objetivo, in 1953, which existed until 1956.



Among his films are masterpieces of Spanish cinema such as Welcome Mr. Marshall! (1953), in which he highlighted the stereotypes held by both the Spanish and the Americans regarding the culture of the other, as well as a social criticism of 1950s Francoist Spain, and the black comedy The Executioner (1963), a critical portrait about the capital punishment.

Characteristic of his films are their sense of irony and the satires of different social and political situations. During the Francoist State, his ability to outwit the censors allowed him to make daring projects, including The Rocket from Calabuch (1956) and Miracles of Thursday (1957). His film Plácido (1961), a black comedy about poverty, received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The film also entered into the 1962 Cannes Film Festival, as well as Long Live the Bride and Groom in 1970.



He later filmed  (Life Size, 1974), an international co-production starring Michel Piccoli, which was not released in Spain until six years later due to Franco's censorship. This was followed by La escopeta nacional (1978), Patrimonio nacional (1981), which entered into the 1981 Cannes Film Festival, and Nacional III (1982), a satirical trilogy about the Leguineches, an impoverished aristocratic family. His 1985 film La vaquilla (The Heifer), a comedy about the Civil War, was the highest-grossing Spanish film in Spain at the time.

In 1968, he was head of the jury at the 18th Berlin International Film Festival. Other accolades include the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 1986, a membership at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in 1988, and, in 1993, the Goya for Best Director for Everyone Off to Jail. He was also awarded the Spanish National Cinematography Prize (Premio Nacional de Cinematografía) in 1980, the Italian Commendatore Order, the Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts (Medalla de Oro de las Bellas Artes) in 1982, an honorary degree granted by the University of Valencia in 1997, and the Gold Medal of Merit in Labour (Medalla al Mérito en el Trabajo) in 2002.

He won international prizes at several important film festivals, including Cannes Film Festival, the Venice Film Festival, and the Mar del Plata Film Festival. He has also been awarded a large number of national acknowledgements. At the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival he won a prize as one of the world's ten most prominent film directors.

Personal life and death
He was married in 1954 with María Jesús Manrique, and they had four sons. Two of his sons died in Madrid relatively young from liver diseases: Carlos Berlanga on 5 June 2002, at the age of 42, and Jorge Berlanga on 9 June 2011, at 52 years old.

Berlanga died of natural causes in Madrid on 13 November 2010, at the age of 89.

His closed coffin was on display at the Spanish Film Academy in Madrid before its burial in Pozuelo de Alarcón. Crowds of actors, artists, politicians and other admirers lined up to pay their respects. The president of the Academy, Álex de la Iglesia, stated: "He changed my life", while the director José Luis García Sánchez said: "He dignified an entire aesthetic tradition. On his tomb it should be read, instead of RIP, The End." Pedro Almodóvar, who came to pay his respects to the "master", owner of a talent comparable, in his opinion, to other greats figures in the history of cinema, said "We always talk about Billy Wilder, but if Berlanga had made films in another language, the entire world would surrender before his coffin today. His characters spoke a lot and very fast, which made subtitling in another language very difficult".

Legacy and influence


Berlanga's film style has influenced many contemporary Spanish filmmakers, which include Santiago Segura, Javier Fesser, Borja Cobeaga, Alberto Caballero, and Víctor García León. The term 'berlanguian', which refers to the surreal, to what is difficult to explain but absolutely possible within the imagination and way of being of the Spanish, has been admitted by the Royal Spanish Academy. French actor Michel Piccoli, who worked with Berlanga on two films, said about him "He is Don Quixote... Well, he could also be Sancho." Francisco Franco, upon being told by his ministers that Berlanga was an anarchist, a Bolshevik and a communist, stated "He is much worse than that; he is a bad Spaniard."

In 2008, he deposited in the Caja de las Letras number 1034 of the Instituto Cervantes an envelope containing a secret, which he asked not to be revealed until 12 June 2021, when the centenary of his birth would be celebrated. On 9 June 2021, three days before the centenary, his grandchildren Fidel and Jorge opened the box and revealed the secret contents of the envelope: an unpublished script titled Viva Rusia!, co-written by the filmmaker himself, his son Jorge, Rafael Azcona and Manuel Hidalgo Ruiz, a project for the fourth film of the Leguineche family saga that was never filmed. That same year, the Valencian Audiovisual Awards were renamed the Berlanga Awards by the regional ministry of Education, Culture and Sport from the 4th edition onward to pay homage to the Valencia-born filmmaker.

In 2012, the Berlanga Film Museum (BFM) was inaugurated as an online museum dedicated exclusively to the work of the Spanish director.

Associate producer

 * Tenemos 18 Años (1959)

Honours

 * Medalla al Mérito de las Bellas Artes.jpg Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts (Kingdom of Spain, 28 February 1982)
 * Medalla al Mérito en el Trabajo.jpg Gold Medal of Merit in Labour (Kingdom of Spain, 13 December 2002)