ZINE01 ZINE01 Title: ZINE01 Publication date: Spring 2021 Coordination: Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola Editor: Pablo La Parra Pérez Editorial committee: Maialen Beloki, Joxean Fernández, Carlos Muguiro, Pablo La Parra Pérez Proofreading: Pablo La Parra Pérez, Felipe M. Retamal Graphic design and layout: Sara Zamarro ISSN: - License: CC NY-NC-ND 4.0 Editors: Collaborator: *The opinions expressed in ZINE are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Editorial Board, the institutional editors, or the institution to which the authors are affiliated. 01 BASTERRETXEA’S FACTORY: NOTES TOWARD A CONSTRUCTIVE BASQUE CINEMA Elixabete Ansa Goicoechea 05 02 A HISTORY FOR BASQUE AMATEUR CINEMA: ON THE GURE HERRIA SERIES (1975-1985) BY MARÍA JESÚS "TATUS" FOMBELLIDA INTRODUCTION 30 Enrique Fibla Gutiérrez DU CINÉMA COMME ARTISANAT : LA SÉRIE GURE HERRIA DE TATUS FOMBELLIDA 34 Benoît Turquety TWENTY-SEVEN ROUTES AROUND HACHAS JAUREGI: 37 LIQUID NOTES ON THE FILM AIZKORA (AXE) BY MARÍA JESÚS 'TATUS' FOMBELLIDA Sahatsa Jauregi Azkarate GURE HERRIA SERIES (MARÍA JESÚS "TATUS" FOMBELLIDA, 1975-1985) 41 BASTERRETXEA’S FACTORY: NOTES TOWARD A CONSTRUCTIVE BASQUE CINEMA 01 BASTERRETXEA’S FACTORY: To say that [the subconscious] is produc- tive means we no longer treat it as we have NOTES TOWARD A until now, as a sort of theater representing CONSTRUCTIVE BASQUE CINEMA a privileged drama. We think of the subcon- scious not as a theater but rather as a factory.1 Elixabete Ansa Goicoechea Pontifical Catholic University of Chile FILM AS A FACTORY OF DESIRE Cinema is the result of an experiment that Through a study of the relationship between film and during moments of leisure or recreation in- production, and more specifically, between film and the vents a way of looking in those zones where figure of the factory, we present a proposal for interpret- the factory or the train—those key figures in ing Basque cinema from a 'constructive' perspective. the processes of modern industrialization— The starting point is the film Operación H (1963) by cannot see.2 In what follows, I propose a study Néstor Basterretxea and the need understand the prob- of Basque cinema that creates a dialogue be- lems involved in the ways in which community has been tween film and the factory, taking as a point conceived in Basque film. of departure Néstor Basterretxea’s (1924– 2014) cinematic production from the 1960s, particularly the short film Operación H (1963). Key words: Néstor Basterretxea, cinema, production, For Basque cultural production, the 1960s factory, constructivism were a particularly transformative moment emancipating culture from the imaginative horizons of turn-of-the-century Basque na- tionalism.3 The way in which art and produc- tion embrace one another in Operación H, from the perspective of the factory, is especially original in this sense since, as I will analyze 1 Gilles Deleuze, “Capitalismo e schizophrenia,” Tempi moderni 12 (1972): 51. 2 Román Gubern, in his much-cited Historia del cine [History of cinema] released in numerous editions, calls our attention to the history that precedes the invention of motion pictures. It is a history filled with other inventions—some just as impor- tant as cinema, such as photography—that point to activities associated with play, distraction, or melancholy, activities that via their “disfunction” bring about the appearance of an Other gaze. This is a protohistory of film understood as a gaze Date of Reception: July 1, 2019 that suspends the direct relationship between mechanism Date of Acceptance: February 6, 2020 and discipline. We might recall, for example, the importance License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 [Hyperlink: https://creativecom- of French inventor Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833), mons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.es] “withdrawn and of idle disposition… absorbed in his expe- riments,” who succeeded in capturing the first photograph; ISSN: -- optical toys and games based on retinal persistence; or the How to cite this article: Ansa Goicoechea, Elixabete. “Baster- cinematograph mechanism that occurred to Louis Lumière retxea’s Factory: Notes Toward a Constructive Basque Cine- “during a night of insomnia”; Román Gubern, Historia del cine ma”. Zine: Film Research Series 1 (2020): 5-28. (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2014), 16–20. ZINE01 · 5 ELIXABETE ANSA GOICOECHEA in what follows, there are very few Basque the factory than to its interior, alongside the cultural objects centered on factory life. With machines of (post)industrial production: a conceptual analysis that details some of the emblematic points of the relationship be- Whenever possible film has moved hastily tween film and the factory throughout the away from factories. Factories have not at- history of cinema, the main aim of this article tracted film, rather they have repelled it. If we is to consider, via the concept of the factory, line up one hundred years of scenes of peo- ple leaving factories we can imagine that the the possibility of a “constructive” perspec- same shot had been taken over and over. Like tive in Basque cinema. This proposal inevita- a child who repeats his first word for one hun- bly requires that we note that the factory, as dred years to immortalize its pleasure in that a space of work and category of thought, has first spoken word. Or like Far Eastern artists undergone considerable modifications in the who repeatedly paint the same picture until it last fifty years, modifications that film has is perfect and the artist can enter the picture. amply documented. The first two sections When we could no longer believe in such per- of this article provide a conceptual and con- fection, film was invented.4 textual framework for my relational study of film and the factory. Farocki proposes a reading of film as a The German filmmaker Harun Farocki of- form of expression that contains at its origin fers in his work a point of departure that is the site from which to look once the workday crucial for a dialogic consideration of the is over and work is dead. The scenes that he relationship between film and the factory. compiles over the course of eleven years pro- In 1995, he created Arbeiter verlassen die Fab- ject images of workers leaving the Volkswa- rik/Workers Leaving the Factory, a visual es- gen, Ford, and Siemens factories, and they say that commemorates one of the Lumière show the same sequence repeated to exhaus- brothers’ first moving picture projections, tion: the working multitudes rushing out of La sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon/Employees the factory as though they were propelled Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (1895) [Fig. by a force that expelled them viscerally. The 1]. In Farocki’s film, the voice-over positions dreams of the film industry are projected film in a space that is closer to the outside of onto this exit. In a sequence from this film, Farocki takes us to the exit of an assembly line of a canned foods factory. In a 1952 Fritz Lang film, Clash by Night, Marilyn Monroe meets up with the actor who is her partner in the movie, and they walk away from the factory eating a bar of chocolate—Lang being the same director who demonized industrial production and factory work in the classic si- lent film Metropolis (1927). The camera is po- sitioned outside of the factory, and it follows 3 See Elixabete Ansa Goicoechea, Mayo del 68 vasco: Oteiza y la cultura política de los sesenta (Iruñea-Pamplona: Pa- miela, 2019). Fig. 1: La sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon/Employees Leaving 4 Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik/Workers Leaving the Fac- the Lumière Factory in Lyon (Louis Lumière, 1895). tory (Harun Farocki, 1995), 33´20´´ – 34´42´´´. 6 · ZINE01 BASTERRETXEA’S FACTORY: NOTES TOWARD A CONSTRUCTIVE BASQUE CINEMA the couple’s conversation at an intimate dis- control was already emerging, in relation to tance as they enjoy the chocolate bar. cinema, in 1895. Farocki’s hypothesis aims to prove that film At the turn of the millennium, essayist and looks at and proposes bourgeois leisure as de- artist Octavi Comeron recalls this reading sire, leisure that is shot through with a sub- when analyzing the creation of Volkswagen’s lime grace based on the culture of stardom. “transparent factory” in 2001. In his 2007 In an analysis that grows out of a critique of book Arte y postfordismo. Notas desde la Fábri- the ideological apparatuses of the state, Slavoj ca Transparente (Art and post-Fordism: notes Žižek proposes a similar thesis in Sophie Fi- from the Transparent Factory), he describes ennes’s visual essay, The Pervert’s Guide to the “factory-theater-museum” nature of that Cinema (2006). Žižek’s essay opens with a space: a “factory” that behind glass panels sequence from Clarence Brown’s 1931 movie, functions in the open, with workers dressed Possessed, in which a young working woman in white overalls and smocks constructing from the provinces sees a train go by and is car parts on parquet floors made of Canadian able to admire from afar the charmed life un- maple (a detail that Comeron repeats sarcas- folding inside the train cars: the preparation tically throughout the text). Factory, theater, of a delicious dinner, the ironing of high-end and museum fuse and constitute one self- suits, a woman wearing lingerie, and a couple same condition. It is not surprising, then, as in formal dress dancing to the rhythm of the Comeron notes, that so many factories have music; all in the blink of an eye, while the train become museums in recent decades, such as arrives in the village. That is film: glamour the Lumière brothers’ factory itself that pro- and leisure as desire’s main assets.5 duced photographic plates in Lyon (France), The factory is not a place that inspires this the Tate Modern in the old London power production of desire, which is why film, as an station, the CaixaForum in the Casaramona industry, has distanced itself from the fac- textile factory in Barcelona, or, in the Basque tory, according to Farocki.