In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

11 Commerce, Art, and Politics Prior to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Luis Buñuel worked closely with the engineer and impresario Ricardo Urgoiti Somovilla in his cinematic activities, activities that culminated in the production of four featurelength movies for Urgoiti’s company, Filmófono. The son of Nicolás María de Urgoiti, prime mover of the paper manufacturing, publishing, and newspaper industries in Spain at the start of the twentieth century, Ricardo extended these multimedia activities to the audiovisual sector, first to radio—with his Unión Radio station in Madrid and the publication of specialized magazines like Ondas—and next to cinema, covering the areas of exhibition, sonorization, the film society movement, dubbing, and production. Given his frenetic activity, Ricardo Urgoiti deserves the title of Media Baron of the Generation of ’27 and of the Republic. There is nothing surprising, then, about the fact that the General Archive of the Spanish Civil War in Salamanca preserves his Francoist police record, which has him down as a freemason, invoking, as proof of this, his inscription on page 110 of the 1934–35 Anuario Rotario, or Rotary Yearbook.1 Chronologically speaking, the first cinema-related phase of the Urgoiti business empire was devoted to exhibition. In March 1920 Urgoiti’s uncle, Ricardo Urgoiti Achúcarro, became president of the cinema circuit known as Gran Empresa Sagarra, named after its founder, Carlos Viñas Sagarra. In 1923 Antonio Armenta was appointed manager of the company after rising from being the projectionist, ticket seller, and head of personnel at the Cine Príncipe Alfonso.2 After returning in 1924 from studying electronics in the United States, Ricardo Urgoiti Somovilla was named managing director. Armenta, who lived his moment of glory with the opening in 1929 of the Cine Palacio de la Prensa, 187 188 Commerce, Art, and Politics  the circuit’s flagship and an emblem of Republican rationalist architecture, would leave his post in 1931, at the beginning of the sound period, and was to die at the beginning of 1934.3 A floridly rhetorical notice published in the trade magazine Arte y Cinematografía in 1933 gave a measure of the company’s ambitions: “Madrid festoons itself with a wealth of movie houses. Due to the drive and boldness of its managing director, Señor Urgoiti, and to its general manager, Don Roberto Martín, Gran Empresa Sagarra opens the doors of its three cinemas, the Ópera, Monumental and [Palacio de la] Prensa, into which they have put all their love of enrichment; they open their doors, we repeat, sure of the satisfaction of the public, which is the whole of Madrid.” The correspondent went on to praise other movie houses in the capital: the Palacio de la Música, Cine Avenida, Coliseum, Astoria, Callao, Cine Madrid, Cine Génova (formerly the Príncipe Alfonso), Cine Delicias, Cine Actualidades, and Cine Bellas Artes.4 According to J. F. Aranda, prior to the Spanish Civil War Filmófono also acquired control of some four hundred theaters in Latin America, forty of which actually belonged to it.5 On 18 October 1934 Ricardo Urgoiti Achúcarro died, but his nephew went on promoting the company, which in 1935 grew with the incorporation of the cinemas Palacio de la Música, Goya, Argüelles, and Dos de Mayo.6 Born in 1900, Ricardo Urgoiti Somovilla began studying radiotelephony in 1923 at the General Electric head office in Schenectady, New York, before returning to Spain in August 1924.7 In June 1925 he launched his Madrid station Unión Radio (EAJ-7), which on 14 April 1931 broadcast Niceto Alcalá Zamora’s speech proclaiming the Second Republic, and whose film section was in the hands, from 1932 to 1935, of Manuel Villegas López, the first exhibitor of Las Hurdes. In May 1927 Urgoiti introduced the Filmófono system for sonorizing films, based on two synchronized turntables, each with an independent potentiometer for controlling the volume, thus enabling the user to do sound dissolves and add background sound effects or music. This system was employed for the first time in public to sonorize, with gramophone records chosen by the musician Felipe Briones, the projection of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1923) in the seventh session of the Cineclub Español, held on 26 May 1929 in the Cine Goya. Buñuel, who deeply admired the film, had wanted to kick off the sessions of the Cineclub Español with it in...

Share