Don’t count on your fingers

(No compteu amb els dits)

Pere Portabella / Spain / 1967 / 26 min
Synopsis

Spanish/Catalan with French subtitles

Portabella considers searching for a new type of narrative by abandoning the institutional production formula: the Aristotelian canon as the perfect tool, efficient and most adequate for producers, attested to by the success demostrated by the massive assistance of audiences in movie theatres, becoming the most popular entertainment of the 20th Century. To carry this out he had recourse to the poet, Joan Brossa. Using the technical rules for publicity films a narrative structure, Portabella’s first film would be unthinkable without Joan Brossa’s poetry. His play on words, his powerful visual metaphors and his fascination for traditional ways of representation, Portabella returns from exile after the Viridiana scandal. The first sentence in this, his first film is: “Defeated… but no vanquished”. The last sequence leaves the spectator rooted in front of a blank screen.

About the Director
Pere Portabella (b. 1929, Barcelona) is a veteran Spanish filmmaker whose narrative features are rich in interludes, atmosphere, and unexpected synchronicity between sound and image, to expand the expressive potential of cinema. Portabella, who began her film career as a producer of fiction films implicitly critical of General Francisco Franco, who revoked her passport for helping make Viridiana by Luis Buñuel (1961), shaming Spain in the Festival de Cannes 1962. When democracy returned to Spain, Portabella served as a senator in the Catalan government. However, throughout his various careers, Portabella continued to make films, to investigate the moving image and bending of the concept of genre-particularly for horror films, movies and fantasy novels black.
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