The director of images and movie restaurant Juan Mariné dies at age 104 | Culture | EUROtoday

The director of images, restorer and movie researcher Juan Mariné, Goya de Honor 2024, has died this Monday in Madrid, at 104 years of age, as introduced by the Film Academy in a press release. The filmmaker, who began within the cinema earlier than the civil struggle, remained energetic till after the pandemic in his workplace (three chained rooms filled with machines and movie materials) within the basements of the movie college of the Community of Madrid ( ECAM), in the midst of the picture, devoted to restoration.

In that workplace hung, from the door of one of many cupboards, the quick movie poster The submarine, Dedicated to his profession: an in depth -up of his face with the fitting facet in gloom and the illuminated left was seen. “Define my life. Until 1947, darkness and hardships. From that moment on, cinema and happiness, ”he informed this newspaper in 2019, a number of days after 99 years previous. And in fact, if one thing had Mariné’s life, it was that he overcamed movie and adventures: he rolled the funeral of Durruti, directed the {photograph} of greater than 140 movies, he was behind the cameras of the primary Spanish movie in Technicolor and devoted his Last a long time to movie restoration, with equipment designed and created by himself.

National Cinematography Award, Gold Medal on Merit in Fine Arts, Goya de Honor 2024 and plenty of extra awards acknowledged Mariné’s footprint, by whose work you’ll be able to journey the historical past of Spanish cinema, a lot in order that he was the primary director of Photography that entered the Film Academy. Until earlier than the pandemic he was nonetheless working with out glasses, he remembered the instructions of the research the place he had collaborated and figuring out conversations in his life in Spanish, French and Catalan, the results of an existence that crossed the nice occasions of the 20th century.

Mariné was born in Barcelona on December 31, 1920. He discovered to learn with 4 years to grasp the posters inserted within the mute movies of Charles Chaplin, which he noticed when he spent the summer time in Arenys del Mar; Those shorts have been the spark with which his love for cinema started. “I was a very good student, and as they scholarship, my father let me continue to go to school. Until some fevers had a long period in bed. I was blind and luckily it touched me in the emergency room, just my birthday, an expert of ophthalmology. I spent months with priests, although he managed to heal my eyes, ”he remembered for the nation in 2019. He didn’t return to the Baccalaureate, and commenced to work carrying portes.

In November 1934 his uncle commissioned him to hold a cinematographic digital camera to shoot sound cinema to the Orphea studio the place he was filmed The eighth commandment. “The instruction manual was in French, and while I waited for the van to arrive to move the camera I read it. Upon arriving at the study, all composed of Swiss, had already had problems with the camera they used. I was the only one capable of understanding that the installation with which the camera synchronized with the sound apparatus and three -phase and monophasic electrical systems had been plugged in. ” Result: They requested him to remain subsequent to the digital camera. Adrien Porchet, the director of images, gave him a recommendation: “If you want to prosper in this, stay at your time and you never feel.” From that second he fulfilled it to Rajatabla, a lot in order that in 2019 he nonetheless used to face earlier than the restorative machines.

Thus he entered the cinema and thus ended up filming a historic burial, that of the chief of the anarchist troops in Madrid, Buenaventura Durruti, useless after receiving a shot in November 1936. “I was from the CNT [el sindicato anarquista] And I was part of the team that filmed his burial in Barcelona. But there were so many people who exhaust the batteries, and I was the only one who knew how to roll by hand dragging the film with the crank. ” Mariné participated in Aurora de Esperanza (1937), anarchist drama precursor of neorealism, and in different movies – as Package, primary public photographer (1938), the place he grew to become buddies with an actor who started, Paco Martínez Soria – earlier than becoming a member of ranks. After being decimated his firm in May 1938 within the battle of Río Segre, Mariné fie destined as a photographer of Lieutenant Colonel Enrique Lister, till that winter crossed the border with France.

Arrested by the Senegalian colonial troops of France, Mariné was held within the focus camp of Algiers-Sur-Mer. “I am the only Spaniard who managed to escape from there, and I did it,” he stated for the nation. Finally, with different refugees he traveled as a prisoner from Pasiaia (Gipuzkoa) to Cádiz. From the Campo de Prisonos de la Rinconada (Sevilla), his father with luck and contacts took him, and Mariné ended the struggle on the Francoist facet, as a photographer of the General Staff of Catalonia. The very first thing he did when he achieved freedom was to go to a room to see The Great Ziegfeld.

He was nonetheless a army when he returned to the cinema, filming in October 1939 of The idiot of the boat (“The original, not the one you all remember”). In 1942 he would movie 4 movies, in 1943, 5 … In 1947 he moved to Madrid and debuted as director of images in an episode of the movie Four girlsby Antonio del Amo, the primary of the 140 movies that rolled till his retirement in 1990 after The crack, by Juan Piquer Simón. Mariné was frequent within the productions of Del Amo, Pedro Lazaga, José María Forqué or Pedro Masó. Television talesby José Luis Sáenz de Heredia; The astronautby Javier Aguirre; María de la Oby Ramón Torrado; The excellent crime, by Fernando Fernán Gómez, and The nice householdby Fernando Palacios, are among the titles of his filmography. Among them, the primary movie shot in Spain in Technicolor, To prepared (1956), with Jorge Mistral, companion of his childhood within the soccer matches of his neighborhood.

At the identical time, Mariné loved as an inventor for movie safeguard. With his technological advances, which he developed in parallel to his work within the photographic course, he achieved, for instance, that he wouldn’t should movie once more The nice household, whose adverse spoiled nearly on the finish of the filming. For years he collaborated in Restoration within the Spanish Filmoteca. “You always have to restore the negative. Doing it on the positive is something else that we cannot call restoration. And we will see how we keep the digital, which is resulting worse storage support. ” He additionally taught this work in ECAM. “After surviving the civil war I swore that my life would dedicate it to cinema.” And he by no means repudiated his oath.