Berlanga, Fernán Gómez and the Road to a Popular, Tense and Grotesque Iberian Modernity

Abstract

Since the end of the last century, a new historiography, whose methodology is based on film analysis, has revisited Republican Spanish cinema and that of the first post-war decades. This trend constitutes the best starting point to rigorously delve into the deep parallels and intersections of the trajectories of two of the most relevant masters of Hispanic cinema: Luis García Berlanga and Fernando Fernán Gómez. According to that, this article analyzes the determined but difficult career path undertaken by both authors from the sainete (starting from the comic "slightly curved mirror" by Wenceslao Fernández Flórez) to the grotesque (with the extreme concavity of the vallenclanesco Callejón del Gato in their great films of early 1960s). In this trajectory, the literary works of Carlos Arniches and the aforementioned Fernández Flórez will constitute some of the pillars on which a fertile Hispanic and everyday realism will be built; a comic, dark and truthful realism about the miserability of the life of the por Spanish people, bringing to light the scourges and secular backwardness of our country.