Wrestling, guateques, bullfights and flamenco: the films with which the artist Nadia Werba captured the Spain of the sixties are resurrected

In

Madrid in October

(1967), by Franco-Tunisian Marcel Hanoun, Nadia Werba authoritatively lights a cigarette in her home-studio in the Spanish capital.

She also appears while painting, or when she explains, sitting on a sofa, what cinema means to her.

Werba (Paris, 98 years old) was a key player in the filming of this innovative essay-film, but her ideas were not limited to enriching the work of others.

During the 12 years he lived in Spain, between the mid-1950s and the late 1960s, he also directed his own documentaries about a country whose beauty, pain and complexity fascinated him, films that now regain all their splendor thanks to the collaboration between the Spanish Film Library, the Association of Women Filmmakers and Audiovisual Media (Cima) and the University Institute of Spanish Cinema, of the Carlos III University of Madrid.

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This is the Berlanga file

The restored set is presented this Friday at the Malaga festival, coinciding with Women's Day and with the intention of putting the spotlight on a pioneering artist and documentary filmmaker in Spain.

San Juan del Toro, Maestros del duende, Some Boys, Some Girls

... and

Catch

are the four documentaries made between 1965 and 1967 by a woman born in Paris in 1926 into a Jewish family that fled Europe due to the advance of Nazism. .

Werba studied Philosophy and Letters in Buenos Aires and, upon returning to France, he studied painting in Paris with Fernand Léger and André Lhote.

In the fifties, she married the American journalist Hank Werba, she crossed the Pyrenees and discovered Spain.

“My father was then the correspondent for

Variety

,” her youngest son, Marco Werba, born in Spain, recalls by email.

Those were the years of the big Hollywood productions on the outskirts of Madrid, at the Bronston studios, and of the drunken nights at Nicholas Ray's bar, at whose opening Nadia Werba's paintings hung.

“The situation was not easy due to the Franco regime, and several years later my father asked to move to Rome.

“My mother was a successful painter in Spain and many famous actresses, like Julie Christie, came to visit her at her studio in Madrid.”

In a clipping from the time, Werba—who was among the artists who represented Spain at the 1964 Venice Biennale—appears alongside other painters such as María Droc, Juana Francés and Isabel Santaló during the opening of a group exhibition at the gallery. Fog.

The headline: “Four women before the canvas.”

Nadia Werba, with Roberto Rossellini, in an interview in Italy.

But the canvas was not the only blank page that interested him.

He “Taught a specialization course on the camera and its use with [the photographer] Claudio Gómez Grau and under the direction of [director of photography] Manuel Berenguer.

And another about editing with Robert Laurence, the editor of

Spartacus

and

El Cid

,” continues her son, who, like her mother, lives in Rome and who believes that the multidisciplinary nature of her mother has diluted the facet cinematic of it.

And Werba worked in Italy with Joseph Losey, William Wyler and Joseph Mankiewicz, investigated the work of Roberto Rossellini or the use of color in Nicholas Ray's cinema during the filming in Spain of King of Kings

(

1961) and

55 Days in Beijing

(1963).

In 1967 she won the Golden Shell for best short film for

Piero Gherardi,

and in the eighties she filmed two fiction films,

My Mother, My Daughter

and

Eva's Dreams.

Undated portrait of Nadia Werba.

Werba's curiosity about moving images led her to approach the Official Film School, which at the time was an oasis within Franco's Spain for a foreign woman who was also a visual artist.

Her four Spanish documentaries had an exceptional team, including two legends of national cinema such as cameraman Luis Cuadrado and editor Pablo G. del Amo.

She signed

the script for

Some Boys, Some Girls... along with Jesús García de Dueñas and Pedro Olea.

“I have a wonderful memory of her, she gave me a painting of hers for the film that I would like to donate to the Film Library,” says Olea in a telephone conversation.

“She was older than us, a very smart and wonderful woman.

She showed up one day at school and we started collaborating on her project, which was a study on youth.

I even dance in the movie... now she makes me so embarrassed!

Although we liked Saura a lot, our favorite teacher was Berlanga, because she took us to social gatherings at a bar that was next to the School.

There we met Nadia.”

Werba's proximity to the world of Bronston studies made her a fascinating woman of the world in a country whose youth showed the consequences of the postwar period, the lack of freedom and the social backwardness of national Catholic education.

Werba's documentaries capture the climate of that country with a very special focus on women.

It stops (

Some Boys, Some Girls...

) on a youth that bought Joan Baez and Bob Dylan records, that danced to Los Brincos and Los Shakers (both bands appear in the film) in front of parents who did not accept these signs of rebellion.

Also, before the flamenco classes of two greats, La Quica and Enrique el Cojo (

Masters of Duende

);

in the roots of the popular festivals (

San Juan del Toro)

, which the director shows in all its crudeness and which is the only one shot in color - the starting point has been an exhibition copy with a significant chromatic degradation -, or before the public that attended the wrestling matches that we see in the impressive

Catch

, whose negatives, as in the case of

Maestros del duende

, were in excellent condition.

Title credits for 'San Juan del Toro' (1965), by Nadia Werba

In a moment in

Madrid in autumn

, its director, Marcel Hanoun, speaks of Werba's “extraordinary devotion” when it comes to helping him with his filming, an enthusiasm that will only slow down the delivery room, since she, who already had two daughters, She was then pregnant with her third child, Marco.

“When I get discouraged, she gives me energy,” says Hanoun's voice about a woman who, minutes before, has sentenced herself on camera: “Films should not be linear, they should be made like life itself, which never goes in one address".

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