Museum for a cinema great

“He didn’t understand the virtual world very well, though at the same time he was also very curious. I think he would have liked it,” says José Luis García Berlanga of the new website dedicated to the work of his late father, the filmmaker Luis García Berlanga.

But you can’t help thinking that someone as given to fetishizing objects as Berlanga senior (notably women’s high heels) probably would have preferred something more tangible — like a passageway of glass cabinets, theatrical objects and the laughter of visitors — to a virtual stroll through the Berlanga Film Museum. After all, we are talking about the man who said: “A good behind is more important than all ideologies.”

But with a lack of time and money making the setting up of the proposed Berlanga Foundation impossible, virtue has been made of necessity and on Tuesday, the second anniversary of the director’s death, berlangafilmmuseum.com opened its digital doors.

José Luis García Berlanga cares a lot about the legacy of his father. It hurts him that The Royal Academy of the Spanish Language still hasn’t included the term “berlanguiano” (Berlanga-esque) in the dictionary and believes his father’s work, which includes such classics of Spanish cinema as Welcome Mr. Marshall! and El verdugo, offers a tour around 20th-century Spain. “And that’s why I think about scholars, about his films being seen around the world [the filmmakers’ lack of impact in English-speaking countries is particularly curious]. In the future, the virtual museum could be a leg up for the foundation and they could mutually feed off each other,” he predicts.

The Berlanga Film Museum may be the first ever virtual museum devoted to a filmmaker, at least in Europe. “We have done a lot of research and it could be the first in the world, but we are not 100-percent sure,” says the site’s director, Rafael Maluenda, an old collaborator of Berlanga’s and also the director of Valencia’s Cinema Jove film festival.

He says the site, which has a 50,000-euro budget, is a realistic venture for the current economic times. It is run by the Valencian Audiovisual and Cinema Institute (IVAC) of the regional government, but the Filmoteca national film archive, the SGAE royalties management association, the Cervantes Institute, the Cinema Academy and the EGEDA producers association have also all participated. The museum links to EGEDA’s Filmotech.com site, where all of Berlanga’s films are available to view for nine euros a month.

As well as his complete filmography, the museum offers scans of his scripts, dozens of photographs, film posters, and all sorts of essays, poems, documents and reflections on his work by friends and collaborators. The photos of his trip to Los Angeles to promote Plácido after its Oscar nomination are priceless, showing Berlanga accompanied by actresses Angie Dickinson and Jayne Mansfield. He also got time to meet filmmakers such as King Vidor, William Wyler, Josef von Sternberg, Frank Capra, Fred Zinnemann, Rouben Mamoulian and Billy Wilder, who confessed their love for the film.

The real Ali Baba’s cave remains closed however: Berlanga’s attic, which is full of scrupulously ordered material. “My father even kept the pediatrician’s prescriptions for me and my brothers,” says García-Berlanga. This legendary attic and especially chest number 1,034 — a safe closed by Berlanga on May 27, 2008 and due to be on June 12, 2021, the 100th anniversary of his birth — may contain his great secrets. It was just over a year ago that his diaries from his time in the Blue Division, the Franco troops who fought for the Nazis, were revealed (which, by the way, are not in the museum). What else could lie inside?