Bienvenido Mr. Marshall by director Luis G Berlanga - Essay Example

On 'Bienvenido Mr. Marshall!' Table of Contents II. Discussion 4 III. Conclusion 11 References 13 1. Introduction This paper details an analysis of the assertion that the movie 'Bienvenido Mr. Marshall' demonstrates the possibilities of the comedy film genre as a way to induce audience to become receptive, or to induce a climate conducive to a state of reflection on the part of audiences relating to their experiences, bypassing and outfoxing the censorship enforced during the time of the showing of the comedy film. The assertion is that as a comedy film, the movie paved the way for other makers of film to consider the way such films can bypass censorship in a way and reach audiences directly through humor, to elicit reflection among the audiences about the lives that they were leading at the time, individually and as nations and communities. The landmark comedy is said to be one of the finest pieces of film that has ever come out of Spain, and was written and directed by the legendary director Luis G. Berlanga, sharing the writing credits with a few other writers. The film starred Lolita Sevilla, Jose Isbert, and Manolo Moran. In gist the film is about a town in Spain that, upon hearing that American benefactors were due to visit to determine where to put aid money as part of the Marshall plan, went into a frenzy trying to present a different version of itself to impress the American visitors. In so doing they also voiced out, individually and collectively, what they wanted to get out of the Americans, and what they imagined American life was, something better than the lives that they led. The fantasy was that the aid was to change their lives and transform the somewhat ordinary and sometimes hard life wanting in material things and struggling to get by at the end of protracted conflict. In particular, they thought of making the streets more gaudy with color and decorations in order to impress the Americans, and to present its peasants as farmers of Andalusia, by way of putting up a front that would supposedly impress the Americans and induce them into giving some of their aid money to the poor town. There are said to be strong parallels between the puny and laughable attempts of the poor Spanish town to remake itself and to launch a gaudy fiesta for the benefit of the Americans on the one hand,and on the other hand the attempts of the government of Franco to present Spain to the outside world as a romantic place full of bullfights and siestas and romanticized celebrations, opposed to the inner reality of turmoil and poverty and the lack of direction and freedom that really characterized the lives of the people of Spain during that time. It is noteworthy too that seen in this way, the small town becomes a kind of microcosm of the entire state of affairs in Spain during that time and the internal psychology of the people of Spain, wanting to put up a gaudy front to mask deep-seated problems and unable to succeed even at that. They are disconnected from the real state of things in the world and living on false premises about America for instance, and how to attract its attention and its money. The brilliance of the film is that it is able to launch a very strong criticism and satire of the whole of Spanish society and of the Spanish government of Franco at the time too, without overtly doing so and overtly drawing the ire of the authorities and of its censorship powers in particular. Masked in the language and presentation of comedy, outwardly it laughs at the human condition and the humanity and foibles of the residents of a small provincial town. However, viewed from the perspective of the movie and the town being a microcosm of the larger Spanish society and the Spanish government at the time, the movie does manage to evade the censors and to go to the audience directly, putting a mirror in front of the audience so they may see themselves in the residents of the small town and see Spain reflected in the small town too, with its foibles, its sadness, its provincialism, and its foolishness too. Put another way, the film is able to offer a critique of Spanish foolishness and falsehood on a national scale, as foisted on the public and the international stage by the government of the day, without explicitly doing so, but rather through a seemingly innocuous and harmless comedy film. The microcosm aspect of the small town is not apparent, but nevertheless, by presenting the town in that ridiculous way, the movie is able to induce the audience to see the national situation in the same context. The mirror is held, but it is up to the audience to make the connection between the falsely constructed public image of Spain on the one hand, and the sordid reality of the real Spain, with its poverty and its deep social problems, on the other. That small town is Spain, and the antics of the townsfolk are the antics of the government and the citizens of Spain too, but it is up to the audience to make the connection, and they do make that connection. In this way the film opened the floodgates of possibilities with regard to launching scathing attacks on frivolous social conditions at the time without explicitly attracting the attention of the censors and of the government in particular. The rest of the paper explores this line of thought in more detail. II. Discussion There is much to be said about the comedy genre in general and its ability to imbue its laugh lines with what can be construed as subversive messages without attracting attention. Comedy disarms because it induces people to laugh. Without any overt political or social message explicit in the laugh lines and the antics apparent, people come to the theater to watch a comedy film to relax. On the surface the movie 'Bienvenido Mr. Marshall' is that too. Viewed from one vantage point, all it is is is a study of the funny and laughable antics of an entire town eager to attract the attention and the money of the wealthy Americans. This was Spain in the midst of the Marshall Plan. We understand from the historical accounts that Spain would largely be left without much funding from that great funding plan to rehabilitate Europe. On the surface the situation is laughable because of the way the movie portrays a social situation in the context of intimate human portraits. The subject is not the social stresses, the poverty and the superficial and cosmetic solutions adopted by those in power, but dreams, human sketches, daily mundane interactions among people, the unique psychological makeup of individuals imagining better times, stuck in one place, provincial, and trying their best to present a good cosmopolitan front. The movie works on this level, and for sure is able to mine this level of presentation with rich comedic moments that can truly disarm. There are no grand messages here outwardly. A small town with its provincial concerns, truly out of touch with the rest of the world, cannot be a concern for the national authorities. The small town, insignificant, is no threat to the image of the national government. People in the cities too, cosmopolitan and educated, sometimes with sufficient financial means, exposed to the world, surely do not have anything in common with the backward folks of the small town in the movie. This is the movie's charm and the way it is able to cloak its larger and more explosive message and vision. Having disarmed the audience and the authorities, everyone can laugh and let this pass as a harmless diversion. One can laugh after all when one is relaxed and not threatened in any way. From a safe distance one can truly laugh and have a good time. By portraying a small town, the comedy can flourish safe from the intervention of the censors. The larger vision is masked in something non-threatening, small, provincial and laughable. The larger message, disruptive if taken seriously, is something that the movie sneaks in in other words from the blindside of the authorities and the audience. The funny message disarms, and while the authorities are laughing, the movie silently drops its bombs in the consciousness of the audience. It is on this level that the comedy works. It is also on this level, viewed one way, that one can gain insight into the power of comedy to do what it did in the case of 'Bienvenido Mr. Marshall. We take a step back and re-examine the assertion that we are trying to support, and that is the movie, at some fundamental level, paves the way for other artists to foist a message over the walls that the authorities have built in order to censor critical content and stifle dissent, in order to get the audience to think, The above discussion points to the power of comedy in general to make this work. By making people laugh, and by focusing on outwardly harmless portrayals of small towns and ordinary people bumbling their way through their daily lives, the magic is cast. The authorities are disarmed and they let the bogeyman in, so to speak. There are references indeed to the movie and the comedic take on a sometimes tragic Spanish reality during the war to the Trojan war, and how the movie is a kind of Trojan horse bearing a seditious message to the masses. The Trojan horse masks the message inside that could undermine the very foundations of government and its version of reality. Seen in this way, the danger of the movie is made apparent. Outwardly, the Trojan horse seems like a gift ,something that is desirable even to the authorities. The people are hungry and depressed, they are restless and their freedoms are suppressed. Why not make them laugh? The movie presents itself as entertainment and as harmless diversion, but the more one looks into the message the more the subversive vision emerges. The small town is Spain, and the attempts to remake the small town into something more beautiful and special are the attempts of the national government to paint a rosy and romantic picture of Spain to the rest of the world. The reality is hunger, the suppression of freedoms, the lack of opportunities, a world closed in on itself and cut off from meaningful economic and political contact with the rest of the world. The lie is the attempt to cover up the misery with paint, with make-believe romantic tales, bullfights and siestas, beautiful women and music, and all that. In the movie the mayor tries to remake its farmers into people more romantic and beautiful too, more noble. The streets are remade too, to look more beautiful and less depressing than how they find it. They are remaking themselves, moreover, according to a limited image of what they think the foreigners want to see. It is a remaking made from a limited sense of self, cut off from the world. Of course all these are hidden inside the Trojan horse which is the comedy. The movie then, in this way, is able to present to other artists a means with which to launch their own Trojan horses, get their subversive and liberating messages and visions on to the general public, and avoid the censorship and the anger of the authorities. In a way this is a Trojan horse moreover that is also directed at the authorities, to get them to put down their guards so that in turn they can see the mirror that is also being put in front of them, all through the medium of the comedy film. So the genre, comedy, is stealth Trojan horse and a disarmament mechanism that gets the message through the censors and the authorities in a way that even the authorities approve. This much is clear from the preceding discussion. The genre is key to the power of the comedy film to do what it had been able to do, and to pave the way for other artists to mimic and innovate on. There is another aspect of the setting of the movie, on the other hand, an aspect of the misce en scene, that also aids in the disarmament process, and in a way forms part of the constitution of that metaphorical Trojan horse discussed above. Aspects of the setting of the movie, such as the town being set in a time and place removed from the actual historical time period when the film was shown to the audiences, removes the immediacy and the threat of the film's message to the authorities and the audience. The setting, the construction of the set, and the different misce en scene aspects all give the film the flavor of being a kind of modern fable. There are recognizable aspects of the historical time period of course, and the people are easily recognizable as being members of Spanish society, and the town setting is akin to any normal rural town in Spain during that time period. On the other hand, the construction of the town and the framing of the town in fairy-tale like terms, are elements of the misce en scene that disarm the authorities and take away any perceived or actual stings from any overt social message contained within the film. An interpretation of the film's aesthetic vision, moreover, and the crafting of the sets and the composition of the scenes to bring to the screen a vision of what is beautiful, all add further to the disarming qualities of the film. As a piece of art work, focused on beauty and aesthetics, with the misce en scene elements being set in terms of a fable and in terms of supporting an artistic vision of what is beautiful, the movie could and was able to evade the radar of the censors. It took a more nuanced look at the underlying message of the movie for its subversive social message to appear, but by then the movie had been shown widely and the authorities had already given its seal of approval. Moreover, the artistic vision as supported by carefully coordinated misce en scene elements, such as the composition of the sets, is very apparent. The subversive message on the other hand, the presence of the mirror held before the audience so it can reflect on its own condition and its own actions, could be denied as something that is open to interpretation, something that was not intended. In this way the magic of the film is able to work its effects unto the public, over and above the heads of the censors. The composition of the scenes relating to the introduction of Villar del Rio, on the other hand, as further elements of misce en scene, is in one interpretation the unveiling of the mask of comedy that hides the subversive social message. In this interpretation, the comedy has cloaked the subversive message, but the subversive message itself is delivered in such elements of the film as the image depiction of the town as something very ordinary, a typical and totally without any distinction whatsoever, and the ordinariness of this town, its banality and lack of anything special to distinguish it, is the stage where the subversive social critique is delivered. In the same way that Franco tried to paint over a romantic and idealized, but also false, image of the ordinary Spanish town as contented and beautiful, sufficient unto itself, in the same way the residents of Villar del Rio likewise tried very hard to make their town more lively and more beautiful than it actually was. This is kind of like Truman, where the Americans are Truman, and the residents of the town are the also the actors and actresses putting up a front. Franco in this larger scheme of things is the orchestrator and director of the Spanish nation's equivalent of the Truman show. In fact the houses are made of cardboard, and the farmers are not really what they present themselves to be, but are rather ordinary, dull and poor folk with no way out of the misery that they have been forced to live for life. The towns are not self-sufficient but starving. There is no beauty in the small town, but only drab and monotony, and provincial folks who had been neglected by their government and the world. This is the subversive message that is layered beneath the laughter yes, but laid bare by misce en scene elements such as cinematography and the composition of the town shots, among others. The comedy pulls a veil over one's vision, but the misce en scene elements described above places them in plain sight, in broad daylight, for astute eyes to see. III. Conclusion There is a lot of merit in the assertion that the movie 'Bienvenido Mr. Marshal' breaks ground in terms of being able to cloak a subversive and provocative social message through a genre that acts precisely to get people to think in a way that does not threaten the authorities nor rouse their censors to action. The movie is an outstanding example of the way that artists and makers of films can do this to great effect. As discussed here, there are various elements of the genre itself, as well as the misce en scene, that come together in this film to be able to deliver a rich and layered message and vision that hits on many aspects of Spanish social and political life, while being on the surface just a simple form of entertainment, a diversion, a collage of funny observations about an obscure rural town filled with ordinary backward Spanish characters. For sure the genius of the movie too is in being able to present such an effective means of social commentary while at the same time being able to hold out on its own artistic and comedic merits as well. The final take on the film is that in being able to come up with a revolutionary way to get one up on the censors so to speak, one does not have to sacrifice the overall excellence of the film on its technical and genre merits. References Arce, J., 'Irony, espertento, and Parody in the Music of Bienvenido Mister Marshall!'' 2014, http://www.cilam.ucr.edu/diagonal/issues/2011/Arce.pdf (Accessed 31 October 2014) IMDb, 'Welcome Mr. Marshall! Plot Summary' IMDb.com, 2014, http://www.cilam.ucr.edu/diagonal/issues/2011/Arce.pdf (Accessed 31 October 2014) Mestre, R., A. del Rey and K. Stanishevski, 'The Image of Spain as a Tourist Destination Built Through Fictional Cinema', Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing 24 (2-3), 2008, https://roderic.uv.es:8443/jspui/bitstream/10550/32268/1/047026.pdf (Accessed 31 October 2014). Murphy, C., 'Spanish Cinema and Pedro Almodovar', Pace University, 2008, http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1068&context=honorscollege_theses&sei-redir=1&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fscholar.google.com%2Fscholar%3Fstart%3D10%26q%3Dbienvenido%2Bmr%2Bmarshall%26hl%3Den%26as_sdt%3D0%2C5#search=%22bienvenido%20mr%20marshall%22 (Accessed 31 October 2014) Richardson, N., 'Reimagining Nation in Bienvenido Mr. Marshall!' Bowling Green State University/CUNY, n.d., http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v10/richardson.html (Accessed 31 October 2014) Shooting Down Pictures, 'Bienvenido Mr. Marshall', AlsoLikeLife.com, [web blog] 11 November 2009 , http://alsolikelife.com/shooting/2009/11/984-106-bienvenido-mister-marshall-welcome-mister-marshall-1953-luis-garcia-berlanga/ (Accessed 31 October2014) Read More