CONTACTOS

A young provincial woman and two men who are partners in illegal business come to stay at the same boarding house. The men are up to something and talk the woman in, although only to a certain extent. One day, two guys come to the boarding house in search of one of the men.
Paulino Viota is a self-taught filmmaker who has made all his films virtually against the Spanish film industry. In his day, Viota was ignored but, with the passing of time, his work became one of the most interesting film projects of the last years of Franco era and the transition to democracy. Contactos is an underground fiction feature film, the first one in Spain about the daily life of anti-Franco clandestine political militants. It was made apart from the legality of the Spanish cinema during dictatorship. The entire film takes place in only four locations (three interiors and one exterior) and five fixed positions for the camera. In the words of its director, “Contactos is Straub’s Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach substituing the music of the great German cantor by the oppresive silence of life under Franco.”

In the still unknown film Contactos made by Paulino Viota, which I still consider one of the most important films of the 70’s, the primitive sight is inscribed in a narrative and representational system based in a radical non-centered look. (Noël Burch)