A Cinema in Transition

From March 23 to June 14, 2009 – Museu del Cinema

The Films of the Political Change in Catalonia (1975-1981)

The death of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in November 1975 brought abrupt changes to many aspects of life. An old world was very slowly dying and a new one was eager to come out onto the street and express everything that had been repressed for 40 years. Between these two opposing worlds there appeared a series of movements that generated the so-called political transition, based on the idea that an agreed reform was possible. The transition managed to guarantee a certain order in the changeover, but it left a lot of unfinished business. The exhibition A Cinema in Transition: The Films of the Political Change in Catalonia (1975-1981) shows us how the cinema desired to be a witness and an agent of all those changes.
The cinema bore witness to the period, as it recorded, with fictional stories and documentary images, everything that was going on. The films saw how Catalonia was building its lost identity, how there emerged a desire to recover the historical memory or how the desire for freedom burst out in a revolt aimed at the world of politics and sexual liberation.
Identity, Memory, Revolt and Disappointment are the four sections of A Cinema in Transition, an exhibition that does not set out to merely wallow in nostalgia for a time and a country, but also to ask some questions about everything that the cinema of the transition was incapable of achieving.