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Bullfighters, flying trains and ovations for Franco: the unpublished films of the engineer José Hernández Santorcuato

2022-06-26T10:51:19.494Z


The 1,500 meters of domestic cinema that the director of General Eléctrica Española recorded between 1962 and 1971 comes to light


Two twentysomethings, the Spanish José Hernández Santorcuato and the French Raimonde Bertin, fell madly in love in Toulouse, where he was studying electrical engineering and she was studying philosophy and letters.

They were married one summer day in 1933 and had seven children.

Their photos from then are like those of any other happy couple, full of radiant smiles, complicit jokes and sweet faces.

After turning 46, she died unexpectedly in a routine operation.

When Hernández Santorcuato himself died three decades later, in 1989, his children found a suitcase full of love letters between the two.

Her daughter Marie France now remembers that she decided to throw them away.

“It seemed to me that it was entering her intimacy.

What does it matter what they said to each other?” she muses.

What the family did keep was the other treasure left by the engineer:

a collection of 1,500 meters of home movies.

It is a window to a world that has already disappeared.

The engineer José Hernández Santorcuato and his wife, the Frenchwoman Raimonde Bertin, in 1955. Family collection

Hernández Santorcuato directed during almost the entire Franco regime one of the largest companies in Spain, General Eléctrica Española, a giant based in Greater Bilbao that manufactured train engines and the enormous machines that generated electricity in the famous swamps of the dictator Francisco Franco.

The engineer always went with a camera in hand.

His films, recorded between 1962 and 1971, show the daily life of a family, but also the great technological advances of the time, such as the

flying

train in Châteauneuf-sur-Loire (France), an artifact so modern that it also appears in the futuristic film

Fahrenheit 451

, shot in 1966 by François Truffaut.

The engineer was an exceptional witness of the Franco regime.

His collection, to which EL PAÍS has had access, includes bullfights in El Cordobés, Seat 600 cars, fascist rallies, bishops, miniskirts, slingshots, tobacco everywhere and processions through the streets under construction in the Spain of developmentalism .

Marie France Hernández Bertin, 76, remembers that her father found any technical advance “wonderful”.

“The first plug-in refrigerator that, I believe, was in Spain was brought from the United States.

He sent it by ship and it was at my house, ”she illustrates.

A granddaughter of the engineer, Belén Astorqui, runs a company, Pimpampelis, dedicated to making documentary films with photos and videos of families, but she had never faced her own grandfather's material, shot in 8-millimeter and super-8 formats.

“At the blacksmith's house, a wooden knife”, she jokes.

Until one day she found out that the Online Museum of Autobiographical Cinema (MOCA) and the Galician company Cafés Candelas had started a campaign to rescue home movies stored in storage rooms in Spanish homes.

02:39

José Hernández Santorcuato's granddaughter talks about her grandfather

"I was eight years old when my grandfather died," explains Astorqui.

“He was a very artistically sensitive man, very soft for the stereotype of the director of the moment.

He loved art, photography and, above all, technology.

It was the world upside down: it was your grandfather who had the latest of the latest.

Our first color television was given to us by my grandfather because he had bought a better one”, recalls the granddaughter.

Franco is one of the protagonists of José Hernández Santorcuato's home movies.

The engineer recorded the dictator on June 19, 1964 in Bilbao, in the acts for the twenty-seventh anniversary of the entry of Franco's troops into the city during the Civil War.

In the images, Franco is seen under a canopy, presiding over a massive public mass in Plaza Moyúa, with all the buildings covered by red and white flags.

In another recording, Hernández Santorcuato captures Franco and his wife, Carmen Polo, arriving in the Cantabrian town of Castro Urdiales on their yacht

Azor

, escorted by a warship.

The historian of science Lino Camprubí vindicated in his book

Franco's Engineers

(Editorial Crítica, 2017) "those military, civil and agronomist engineers who were able to place themselves at the heart of the forced modernization of the country through their work with concrete, rice or hydroelectricity”.

The historian, from the University of Seville, stresses that “in the 1960s the growth rates of the Spanish economy were only comparable to those of Japan”.

That is the Spain that José Hernández Santorcuato recorded.

Camprubí argues that science and technology were "a privileged way to facilitate the international alliances of the Franco regime."

The engineer's home movies prove it.

In one of them, shot on January 31, 1969 in Bogotá, Hernández Santorcuato himself delivers four locomotives to the president of Colombia, Carlos Lleras Restrepo.

"Scientists and engineers on important occasions adopted the role of unofficial diplomats," Camprubí explains in his book.

The historian remembers that Franco received the popular nickname of Paco

el rana

, for its habit of inaugurating swamps.

Between 1940 and 1967 some 300 reservoirs were built in Spain, according to Camprubí.

The company General Eléctrica Española participated in this collective effort.

Hernández Santorcuato carefully recorded in 1968 the construction of the Alcántara hydroelectric dam, the largest in Western Europe, on the Extremaduran section of the Tagus River.

One of the 6,000 dam workers explained the strange atmosphere of that pharaonic work in a report in EL PAÍS: “That seemed like a western city.

There were people of all nationalities.

Italians, mostly.

Money was pouring out.

And in the evenings... oops!

In the afternoons, tremendous fights would break out.

A week's wages were at stake on a table, there was a lot of money”.

The director of the Online Museum of Autobiographical Cinema, Pablo Gómez Sala, remembers the fascination he felt when he saw the engineer's films for the first time.

“As we digitized the collection we realized the value of the images he shot and his love for film.

Normally home cinema focuses on family life, but José Hernández Santorcuato went further”, he reflects.

His museum, founded in Vigo in 2020, has already rescued 17 kilometers of old home movies.

Gómez Sala defends “the healing character of autobiography, which makes you feel accompanied by others”.

It is an effect that Hernández Santorcuato's films achieve.

In addition to flying trains and other electrical devices, he also recorded the intimacy of his family, far removed from the icy caricature of Franco's engineers.

The director of General Eléctrica Española appears in the images dancing the conga, lying on the ground and with a permanent joke attitude, as his granddaughter points out: “We see that, in addition to being an engineer, a director and all these things super important and historically relevant, since he was above all the father of seven children in a family where enjoying his own was super important to him”.

Belén Astorqui recalls a fragment of the book

War has no face of a woman

, by the Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexiévich.

“As much as I like to look at the sky or the sea, observing a grain of sand through a microscope fascinates me even more.

The world in a drop of water.

That enormous and unlikely life that I discover there, ”wrote the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

“For me, one person is a lot.

Inside there is everything, more than enough to lose me.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-06-26

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