Five years ago, the Spanish Film Library began one of its most surprising constant activities. The ‘Room: B’ began in an inaugural session in which Teresa Gimpera acted as godmother of the project by curator Álex Mendíbil, where a triplet was screened consisting of ‘Esencia de verbena’ by Ernesto Giménez Caballero, ‘Lejos de losarboles’ by Jacinto Esteva and ‘Let us take away I danced it’ by Carles Mira.
This week there have been 50 passes like that, and the Filmoteca celebrates it with a special event to celebrate it, and on Friday, September 23, there will be a special live program of ‘El Sótano’ on Radio 3, with Diego RJ at the controls, broadcasting the program from the Doré cinema, with special guests and lots of psychotronic music. Next, the party continues with a delirious selection of B-series movie trailers and other rarities in 35mm, from the inexhaustible archives of the Spanish Film Library, which probably cannot be seen in any other circumstance.
For the last 5 years, the Doré underground has become a place every month to contemplate the avant-garde and bizarre documentaries, coexisting with B-series cinema and experiments outside of regulatory cinematography. Thanks to the support of Filmoteca Española, the Conservation and Restoration Center team, the Doré team and a growing brotherhood of faithful followers, the project was able to go ahead with great success, hosting all kinds of proposals.
Five years of unfindable cinema
Actresses, actors, directors and specialized critics have passed through the room, sharing memories, anecdotes and all kinds of priceless curiosities about lesser-known cinema with the public, with Álex de la Iglesia, María José Cantudo, Sebastián D’Arbó, Victoria Vera, Micky, Esperanza Roy, Antonio Mayans, Silvia Tortosa, Emilio Linder, Sandra Alberti, Luis Revenga, Tony Isbert, Manuel Zarzo, Guillermo Montesinos, Juan Carlos Olaria…
In these five years, 85 feature films, 16 short films, 4 television episodes and 3 documentaries have been screened, all produced or co-produced by Spain. The common point of all programming is that they are titles very difficult to see, not only on platforms but on physical media, either because of difficult access to available copies or because they have never been published commercially. A lot of lost works and incunabula that are not only difficult to find, but also difficult to see in the copies that the film library has.
50 sessions that have been shaping a secret, alternative and very heterodox history of Spanish cinema, where titles like ‘Alice in Wonderland Spain’, ‘Baudelaire Salad’, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘The Flowers of Vice’, ‘Drugged Youth’, ‘Mistress Dracula’, ‘The Devil’s Howl’, ‘A Spaniard at Court of King Arthur’, ‘Rational Animals’, ‘If Women Ruled’, ‘The Third Moon’, ‘The House of Lost Women’, ‘The Chosen One’, ‘The Mount of Witches’, ‘God Bless Every Corner of this house’, ‘Dreams of Tay-Pi’, ‘Tunka the warrior’, ‘Life’, ‘Love and death’, ‘The new aliens’, ‘Hell’s bell’, ‘The red diary’…
The lost art of trailers before montage
There has also been time to investigate the rare examples of queer horror films in our country, specials on cursed children with the revival of series such as ‘Sabbath’ or ‘Crónicas del mal’, the discovery of short films such as the Spanish version of ‘Soy Legend’, possibly the best adaptation ever made of Richard Matheson’s novel and other surprises in double program with the projection of trailers between filmsrecovering the spirit of the old neighborhood cinemas.
That Spanish equivalent of the “grindhouse” experience has been one of the hallmarks of ‘Sala:B’ and it is on this special occasion that the room has decided to dedicate all the session’s attention to them, for which it has gathered a selection of these materials, neglected in all the histories of cinema, that they have found a window there to look out again to the public. With what the program 50 will try to claim the anonymous art in the creation of trailers of cinema prior to the 1980s, when montages began to be normalized.
In the session you will be able to see some trailers that were made with scenes or moments shot specifically by the protagonists to promote the film and it intends to function as a true festival of genres, subgenres and anomalies that will also include several clues as to where the shots will go in the 2022-2023 season, which will bring a few surprises, unusual titles, a lot of cult cinema and new guests eager to spread the passion for less conventional films.