La cabina

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Movie
Original title La cabina
Country of production Spain
original language Spanish
Publishing year 1972
length 35 minutes
Rod
Director Antonio Mercero
script José Luis Garci
production José Salcedo
music Carl Orff
camera Federico G. Larraya
cut Javier Morán
occupation

La cabina is a Spanish short film from 1972. It was produced for Spanish television , has received numerous awards and is the most internationally successful Spanish television film of all time.

The film describes a surreal scenario in French-speaking Spain, in which a seemingly harmless span of everyday life develops into an increasingly threatening, ultimately hopeless fate for the protagonist .

action

On a midsummer morning, an open flatbed truck brings a phone booth to an empty space in a new building area. Workers set up the cabin in the middle of the square, anchor it to the ground and drive away. A man comes by with his ten-year-old son and takes him to the school bus. On the way back, he goes into the phone booth and finds that the phone isn't working yet. Since the door can no longer be opened, he cannot leave the house. Passers-by become attentive and try to help him out. A crowd of people forms and follows the action with amusement. But none of the bystanders succeeds in opening or breaking the phone booth door. Two policemen appear. They brusquely ask the man to leave the telephone booth, but they cannot help him either and are laughed at by the crowd. Finally the fire department arrives. A firefighter is about to smash the glass roof of the cabin with a sledge hammer when the telephone company's truck returns. The workers dismantle the phone booth and load it with the man trapped inside onto their vehicle. The trapped man's initial relief gives way when the car sets off on a long journey through the city, during which the captured man feels increasingly uncomfortable. He tries to make himself felt, but is ignored. At a traffic light he sees another truck that is also hauling away an occupied phone booth. The truck is now driving out of the capital through the suburbs and the surrounding area to the central mountains. On the way over a mountain pass, a mysterious helicopter watches the transport. Finally, the truck drives into an underground tunnel system where telephone boxes are cleaned and stored. Behind a gate in a cavern , an automatic magnetic crane lifts the cabin with the desperate man from the loading area and places it on a conveyor belt. The protagonist collapses in horror when he is parked in a hall full of telephone booths in which corpses are in various stages of decomposition. At the end of the film you can see the workers on the square in the city building a telephone booth again and leaving the door ajar, just like the first time.

background

Script, writers

The screenplay was written in the early 1970s as part of a collaboration between Antonio Mercero (1936–2018), José Luis Garci and Horacio Valcárcel (1932–2018), who produced a 13-part series of medium- length films with fantastic films under the working title Trece pasos por lo insólito Planned content, which was not implemented. The idea for La cabina was based on a short story by the Asturian writer Juan José Plans (1943-2014), who was known as a radio and television author for his horror stories . Garci and Mercero are said to have written the script for it within 15 days.

Only after the successful start of broadcasting his home series Crónicas de un pueblo (1971–1974), which describes episodes from everyday life in a fictional Castilian village and was recognized by the regime as valuable for propaganda, was Mercero able to manage the Spanish radio, at whose head Adolfo Suárez at the time stand, convince them to realize the project. After the success of La cabina , Los pajaritos (“The Birds”, broadcast in January 1974), Don Juan (July 1974) and La Gioconda está triste (1977) were also implemented by Mercero for television from the same series . Mercero's well-known TV series Verano azul (1981), Turno de oficio (1986) and Farmacia de guardia (1991-1995) followed.

actor

A difficult task was choosing the main actor. Since there is hardly any talk in the film and the focus is almost continuously on the protagonist, an actor with high gestural and mimic skills was sought who could also meet the tragicomedic requirements of the plot. During a trip to New York by Garci and Mercero in April 1972, the choice fell on the Spanish actor José Luis López Vázquez , who until then had mainly played comic roles and was immediately enthusiastic about the project. In the opinion of many contributors and critics, the size of the film is largely based on López Vázquez's expressive, dramatic interpretation of the role. The participation in La cabina marked his entry into the serious character subject . Some of the supporting actors in the film were also very well known and renowned Spanish actors.

production

Madrid in the 1970s

The film was produced with an unusually high budget of four million pesetas for a 34-minute television film (at that time around 200,000 DM ; adjusted for purchasing power in today's currency: around 325,000 euros). It was shot in cinema format with film cameras . Shooting began on July 17, 1972 in the Plaza de Arapiles , a few years old, quite hidden in the center of Madrid , a private central square of a high-rise estate in the Chamberí district, where the team worked for seven days. Today the square is a private park. The unbearable summer heat particularly affected López Vázquez in his cabin. The long drive through Madrid led to many well-known places in the city center, including the recently completed city motorway junction at Atocha train station with its impressive road bridges, ramps and underpasses, which no longer exist today , based on the contemporary model of the " car-friendly city " . The scenes in the mountains were on the Portuguese border near the dam of Aldeadávila rotated among others in the kilometer-long tunnels of modern hydropower plant Aldeadávila I , a showcase Franco Spain. The magnetic crane in the underground facility, which was not included in the script, was spontaneously built into the plot. For López Vázquez, the over 70 meter high crane journey was a real test of nerves. The final sequence of the film, in which the telephone booth with the protagonist is maneuvered by a mechanical conveyor system to its storage location, was created in the freight terminal of Madrid 's Barajas airport .

The red color of the phone booth should look scary. Although several dozen similar telephone booths were built for the film , López Vázquez was always in the same cell. It was exhibited in 1976 in the Museum of Broadcasting founded by William S. Paley in Manhattan , where it is kept to this day. The panes were made of acrylic glass and could be partially opened to give the occupant fresh air during breaks in shooting.

music

The film music is of great importance because of the lack of dialogues and has a very strong influence on the audience experience. Mercero primarily selected classical pieces of dramatic instrumental music in order to reflect the mood of the protagonist on the different stages of his journey into the unknown. The unsolicited use of Carl Orff's cantata Trionfo di Afrodite (1953), which underlines the final sequence of the film, led to a legal dispute because Orff made high claims for damages. In the end, however, he liked the film so much that the legal dispute was brought to an end, because Orff agreed to an out-of-court settlement.

censorship

The film was made in a phase in which the film censorship of the Spanish regime was marked by greater permissiveness compared to earlier phases , after weighty Spanish directors such as Luis Buñuel or Carlos Saura had presented very successful avant-garde works abroad and the films of Luis García Berlanga and other directors were well received by the audience and critics, despite certain accents critical of the regime.

For fear of the Spanish state apparatus becoming involved, the censors demanded the removal of a scene "in which a ministry can be seen". In reality, no ministry can be seen in the entire film, but the truck drives past the well-known Madrid underground station Nuevos Ministerios at one point . Despite his lack of understanding for the broadcaster, Mercero had to cut out this scene. On the other hand, the censorship took no offense at the parts of the film that were actually critical of authority, for example showing the incompetence of the authorities and ridiculing the police and fire brigade.

reception

Red phone booth from the 1970s

resonance

The film was broadcast on Spanish television on December 13, 1972 and received tremendous attention. At that time there were around 7.5 million televisions in Spain , which were often shared with neighbors and friends or in public places in bars and pubs. All of Spain talked about the film, the viewers were perplexed and shocked. As Garci and other eyewitnesses report, in the days after the broadcast, people were repeatedly observed who, worried about being trapped, left the door open while telephoning on public telephones.

The television film was broadcast in numerous countries and received worldwide attention. Since he can do almost no words, he can be understood immediately even without knowledge of Spanish. It was also broadcast on the BBC channels, at the time the undisputed model of public television in Europe, which is the absolute exception for a fictional Spanish television production from the 1970s.

Almost a year after the first broadcast in the first program , the short film was shown again on November 24, 1973 in the second program of Spanish television . In German-speaking countries, La cabina was shown on October 7, 1974 on Swiss television DRS .

interpretation

Political message, science fiction theme, or psychological metaphor

The film was interpreted differently by the viewers: some saw it as an intelligent criticism of the Franco system, others linked the plot with an alien invasion .

Mercero himself wanted to make a psychological horror film and did not intend any hidden criticism of the regime, if only so as not to endanger his career. In retrospect, he described his intention to create a horror or science fiction scenario with an open structure that enabled each viewer to interpret his or her own personal preferences. The mood of the times, however, quickly tended towards political interpretations. Parts of the criticism saw the anonymous representatives of an unpredictable system of oppression in the mysterious workers' brigade that was carrying away the phone booth with the protagonist. The motif of a grotesquely imprisoned man, who becomes more and more aware of the hopelessness of his situation in the course of the plot, was also understood as a fitting image for the paralyzing lack of perspective and stagnation of the Spanish internal conditions in the time of late Franquism. In France the film was interpreted as an anti-French beacon; the communist French newspaper L'Humanité spoke of the “worst domestic criticism of the Franco regime” that the regime had ever tolerated. Later interpretations moved away from the political level and brought the problem of the loneliness of the individual in the big city into play as an interpretation context . Over time, a psychological interpretation took hold that uses the Kafkaesque film plot as a metaphor for being trapped in life constraints.

Awards

The short film won an International Emmy Award in the fiction category in 1973 . In the same year he was awarded the International Critics' Prize at the Monte-Carlo Festival and the Marconi Prize at the Milan film fair MIFED . In Spain he received, among other things, a Fotogramas de Plata in 1972 for the best actor and in 1973 the Spanish Critics' Prize Quijote de Oro for the best director and the best actor. He also won the Cadena SER's Ondas Radio Prize and the 1973 Spanish National Television Prize.

La cabina was the only Spanish television production ever to be awarded an Emmy until 2018 . In the 2000s, Spanish television programs were nominated for the award - in 2003 and 2005 the historical series Cuéntame cómo pasó ; 2007 the reality show El coro de la cárcel ("The Prison Choir"); In 2011 the talk show El Hormiguero by Pablo Motos and the Spanish- Colombian miniseries Operación Jaque about the fate of Ingrid Betancourt  - but were not among the winners. It wasn't until the 46th edition of the competition in autumn 2018 that the Spanish series Haus des Geldes won an Emmy for best drama series .

Criticism, classification, long-term effect

The production was received extremely positively by the film critics . Despite this, and although the short film developed a lasting and long-term effect in media culture and was regarded as a popular emblem of contemporary Spanish culture at home and abroad, a more detailed treatment of film studies was still lacking in 2015 . Current authors see the film as an expression of the then decisive current of existentialism and recognize in it the characteristics of the absurd theater .

Antonio Mercero called the film "the most important thing I've done" immediately after its production. In 2011 he described himself as “very satisfied, even proud” of having created a timelessly modern film with La cabina , which is authentic and not frumpy and which can still fascinate people today and inspire their own interpretations. As a classic , the film is part of the teaching repertoire of film schools . The English humorist and Netflix series writer Charlie Brooker (* 1971) admitted in 2013 that La cabina was his "favorite production of all time" and that it had inspired the ending of White Bear (2013), the second episode of the second season of his series Black Mirror .

Others

Antonio Mercero 2007 at the San Sebastián Film Festival
The planned location of the memorial telephone booth in the Plaza del Conde del Valle de Súchil in Madrid (2019)

Trivia

  • During a break in filming in the Plaza de Arapiles , one of the approximately 100 extras present went innocently into the phone booth and tried to insert money and make a call.
  • In 2007, José Luis López Vázquez was one of the leading actors in Mercero's film ¿Y tú quién eres? (“Who are you?”) Who deals with Alzheimer's disease . Antonio Mercero himself fell ill with Alzheimer's in 2009 and is said to have been working on ¿Y tú quién eres? showed early symptoms recognized by participating physicians. It was the last film production of their careers for both of them.

La cabina in TV commercials

José Luis López Vázquez then made several advertisements for the Spanish telephone company Telefónica . In the same year he appeared in a television commercial promoting private telephone lines . He was later seen talking on the phone in a telephone booth in the Plaza de Arapiles , which he leaves unhindered after the phone call. In a famous television commercial in 1998, which was supposed to symbolize the liberalization of the Spanish telecommunications market , one sees the aged mimes locked up and still shocked in a telephone booth in the middle of a desert landscape when the door suddenly pops open and the prisoner is released.

Festival La Cabina

The year since 2008 in Valencia aligned Festival Internacional de Mediometrajes de Valencia is an exclusively for Medium Movies reserved between 30 and 60 minutes long international film festival , which was named in honor of the film from Mercero Festival La Cabina carries.

Monument in Chamberí

After Antonio Merceros death in May 2018 was established in the social media campaign for the establishment of an appropriate his famous film in the shape and color of the car phone booth near the historical film set in Madrid to the lasting effect of the work in the Spanish collective memory a monument to put. The proposal was approved by the plenary session of the City Council of Madrid on July 24, 2018 and should be implemented later this year. In March 2019, Chamberí's district administration confirmed that everyone was in talks and that they were working on realizing the project. The actors agreed on the Plaza del Conde del Valle de Súchil as the location of the monument , which is less than 200 meters from the location (the private courtyard immediately to the east on the other side of the high-rise in Calle Rodríguez San Pedro No. 8) .

Archive opening

After the Spanish radio archive had already made several episodes of popular Spanish series classics such as Cañas y Barro ( Rafael Romero Marchent , 1978), Verano Azul (Antonio Mercero, 1981) or Los gozos y las sombras (Rafael Moreno Alba, 1982) permanently available on the Internet, decided RTVE Archivo , the archive of the Spanish channel broadcasting, on 31 July 2019 the film La cabina permanently free and in full on by Antonio Mercero with José Luis López Vázquez YouTube to publish online.

literature

  • Juan Carlos Ibáñez Fernández ( University of Carlos III ): La cabina. TVE1 (1972). Obra única. In: Manuel Palacio (ed.): Las cosas que hemos visto, 50 años y más de TVE. Instituto RTVE, Madrid 2006 (Spanish).
  • Luis Lorente: ¿Para qué te cuento? Biografía autorizada de José Luis López Vázquez. Ediciones Akal, Madrid 2010, ISBN 978-84-96797-52-9 , pp. 171-179 (Spanish).
  • Juan Martín, Eric Garn, Kristine Rohrer: "La cabina" or the horror del absurdo. In: Hispania Vol. 98 (2015), No. 4 (December 2015), pp. 701-713 (Spanish); Zsfg. Online .
  • María Casado : Historias de la tele. Aguilar, Madrid 2017, pp. 159–161 in Google Book Search (Spanish).

Web links

Individual evidence

Note: All information and quotations that are not individually documented in the sections Background and Reception are taken from the Ortega shipment specified in the first itemization and from the book excerpt from Casado mentioned under literature .

  1. ↑ a b c Juan Carlos Ortega: La cabina-Mercero (RTVE series: La mitad invisible ), broadcast on October 8, 2011.
  2. ↑ Isabel Ibáñez: El hombre que aterrorizó con una mancha. In: El Correo , March 19, 2015, accessed August 5, 2018.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f Toni de la Torre: Historia de las series. Roca Editorial, Barcelona 2016, ISBN 978-8-4164-9851-2 (chapter 6).
  4. ^ La Gioconda está triste (1977) in the Internet Movie Database (English) .
  5. ↑ Literally "Mona Lisa is sad". German premiere on 30 May 1979 at the BR under the title The Lost Smile ( full information from the database television dramas from 1952 to 1995 of the DRA , demand in January 2019).
  6. ↑ Bernd Sprenger: 50 years of currency reform. 1948 and the economic policy consequences. In: Historisch-Politische Mitteilungen 5 (1998), Heft 1, pp. 201-218 ( doi: 10.7788 / hpm.1998.5.1.201 ), exchange rate table p. 216 (online) .
  7. ↑ a b Borja Alonso Terán: La escondida y olvidada plaza en el centro de Madrid donde Antonio Mercero rodó 'La Cabina'. In: La Información , May 14, 2018, accessed on August 28, 2019.
  8. ↑ Luis Lorente: ¿Para qué te cuento? Madrid 2010, p. 172. Spain had around 34 million inhabitants in 1970.
  9. ↑ a b Mercero tendrá su cabina roja en Chamberí. In: Chamberí 30 días , September 15, 2018, accessed November 10, 2018.
  10. ↑ German Broadcasting Archive (ed.): Die Fernsehspiele 1973–1977. Compiled and edited by Achim Klünder (= picture and sound carrier directories of the German Broadcasting Archive, Volume 15). Frankfurt am Main 1984, p. 52.
  11. ^ Antonio Mercero, Goya de Honor de 2010. In: Academia. Revista del Cine Español ( Memento of August 2, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 4.9 MB). No. 163 (January 2010). Pp. 8/9 (filmography, p. 9).
  12. ^ Sonia Morales: Antonio Mercero triunfa con "La cabina". In: RTVE, January 31, 2018, accessed on August 5, 2018.
  13. ^ 'El Hormiguero' and 'Operación Jaque', nominados a los Emmy. In: eldiario.es , October 3, 2011, accessed on August 9, 2018.
  14. ↑ Nicky Wong: House of Money: Victory in the most important Emmy category. In: TV Spielfilm , November 20, 2018, accessed on January 19, 2019.
  15. ↑ Juan Martín et al. a .: "La cabina" o the horror del absurdo. In: Hispania 98 (2015), p. 701.
  16. ↑ Luis Lorente: ¿Para qué te cuento? Madrid 2010, p. 175.
  17. ^ Marya González: Antonio Mercero inspiró al creador de 'Black Mirror'. In: The Huffington Post , May 13, 2018, accessed August 6, 2018.
  18. ↑ Luis Martínez: Charlie Brooker: 'La tecnología, como toda droga, deja secuelas'. In: El Mundo , March 18, 2013, accessed August 6, 2018.
  19. ↑ Luis Lorente: ¿Para qué te cuento? Madrid 2010, p. 175.
  20. ↑ Luis Lorente: ¿Para qué te cuento? Madrid 2010, p. 176.
  21. ↑ María Casado: Historias de la tele. Aguilar, Madrid 2017, p. 160.
  22. ↑ TV spot with José Luis López Vázquez from 1998 on Youtube , posted on November 2, 2011.
  23. ↑ Homepage of the festival , accessed on August 6, 2018.
  24. ^ Antonio Mercero: "Poner la cabina, es una forma de percibir el cariño que le tenía la gente". In: COPE , July 18, 2018, accessed August 6, 2018.
  25. ↑ 'La cabina' de Antonio Mercero se instalará en Chamberí (Madrid). In: El Mundo , July 24, 2018, accessed on August 6, 2018.
  26. ^ Diego Casado: El monumento-cabina de homenaje a Mercero, a la espera de la propuesta técnica. In: somos chamberí , March 7, 2019, accessed April 23, 2019.
  27. ↑ Virginia Gómez: Y la cabina pa 'cuando ... In: El Mundo , March 8, 2019, accessed on November 23, 2019.
  28. ↑ La cabina que homenajeará a Antonio Mercero se instalará en Chamberí. In: El Confidencial , March 18, 2019, accessed August 12, 2019.
  29. ↑ RTVE sube a YouTube 'La Cabina' de Antonio Mercero. In: Bluper , August 2, 2019, accessed on August 29, 2019 (with a link to the offer).
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