Introduction to Juan Piqueras: Amateur Cinema in Nuestro cinema

The short 1935 editorial written by Piqueras for Nuestro cinema translated here is of particular scholarly interest as a manifesto for political use of nontheatrical production and exhibition cinematic practices. It articulates the need to move from print to film medium as a means of political organizing while at the same time insisting on the democratization of the medium itself (by taking it out of the hands of capital). Piqueras thus participates in the larger international discussion, between critics and filmmakers, of the revolutionary potential of the new medium. His position aligned him with those who, in the name of radical democracy, sought to abolish individual film authorship and attacked film's status as art, in the hope that cinematic production as well as reception would be opened to the masses: from Dziga Vertov in the Soviet Union in the 1920s to Cesare Zavattini in Italy in the 1930s and 1940s, to Fernando Birri, Julio García Espinosa, and Jorge Sanjinés, among many others, in Latin America in the 1950s through the 1970s.

With its explicit emphasis on the internationalism of this movement, both in references to the Soviet Union, which served as an explicit model for Nuestro cinema, and to other European cine clubs and political movements, such as the efforts in France of Léon Moussinac (whose essays and reports were frequently included in the journal), Juan Piqueras's writings present a vision of a wide-reaching international network of nonprofessional cinematic exhibition that would lie outside the reach of state or commercial censorship or intervention.

Piqueras's discussion of the uses of portable technology also positions him within the recent scholarly developments in the history of "useful cinema."¹ But while much of this recent scholarship focuses on industrial, commercial, and state-mandated uses of portable equipment and nontheatrical exhibition and production practices, Piqueras's work highlights the need to consider alternative cultural functions of such an expanded notion of cinematic apparatus.

Such considerations of this essay point to a clear need for a transnational approach to this alternative history of cinema (located outside of theatrical exhibition and production spaces). In addition, it called for a scholarly reconsideration of the place of Spain (and Southern Europe in general), which has been considered peripheral to the international networks constituting such a history. Translation of a wider array of materials is, needless to say, crucial for this process.

• Juan Piqueras Biography
• Lisa Jarvinen (bio)

The short life of Juan Piqueras, one of Spain's most influential film critics, had an unlikely beginning and a tragic ending. Born in 1904 to a poor family in a small town of Valencia, Piqueras attended school only until the age of eight. Piqueras's parents ran the town's grain mill, but economic circumstances forced the family to send the children into the fields to tend to saffron crocuses. Nevertheless, the young Piqueras was driven to educate himself, and he later attended night school after laboring in the fields. Once his family left the mill and moved to a larger town, Piqueras became a shop assistant and was able to devote his free time to poetry and literature. At the age of sixteen he moved to the city of Valencia, where he continued to work in a shop and also started his first literary journal. By his early twenties he had become part of the city's cultural life and had developed an interest in the cinema. Valencia had film studios that Piqueras frequented, and he became an astute film journalist. In 1928, after a short stay in Barcelona, where he became a correspondent for the leading film magazine, Popular Film, he moved on to Madrid. He quickly became connected to many of the writers, artists, and filmmakers who would later be dubbed the "Generation of '27," including Rafael Alberti, Federico García Lorca, and Luis Buñuel, among others. Piqueras began writing for the Gaceta literaria, the journal then most closely associated with Spain's intellectual vanguard, as well as for other newspapers and magazines.

The intense political divisions in Spain also played...