Film Granell

Eugenio Granell (A Coruña, 1912 - Madrid, 2001) was an artist from Galicia who was widely acclaimed within the surrealist movement. Known mainly for his pictorial works, he was also a poet, teacher and filmmaker. Between 1960 and 1980, he made a series of films, some of which were abstract projects linked to his pictorial works and influenced by the avant-garde movements of the early nineteen-hundreds, as well as a huge number of images from the domestic sphere. The Centro Galego de Artes da Imaxe (the Galician Centre for Image-related Arts - CGAI) contains the Granell Film Collection, comprising 42 films in 8 mm and Super 8 mm.

Seven of these 42 films pertain to works made between 1960 and 1962. These brief pieces are today considered some of the founding, pioneering works of Spanish and Galician experimental film. The corpus is divided into two principal groups: 'cameraless films' (Invierno and Dibujo, both painted by hand directly over the material, and Lluvia, scratched directly onto the inert film) and 'film-poetry' (Trompos, Middlebury, Película hecha en casa con pelota y muñeca and Casa). All were made while Granell was in exile. In 1939, the artist emigrated first to France, then to Central America (Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Puerto Rico) and finally to the United States.

Granell's films were rescued and screened in public for the first time in 2003, thanks to the work carried out by the CGAI and the filmmaker Alberte Pagán. Before their recovery, they had only ever been screened in family settings, and were therefore almost totally unknown by historians and the general public. Following their recovery, the films were digitalised in SD quality, thereby enabling broader access, and are currently available for viewing on YouTube. One of them, Lluvia, was included in the exhibition programme entitled 'Del éxtasis al arrebato', organised by Xcentric at the Barcelona CCCB (Centre for Contemporary Culture). Given the fragility of works directly painted or scratched onto the film, this new digitalisation / restoration proposal aims to create a new 2K digitalisation of Granell's work and then digitally restore it where necessary.

Research team:
Carolina Cappa

Students 2020-2021:
Amaia Badiola, Julia Cortegana de la Fuente, Pablo Adiego

Students 2019-2020:
Borja Rodríguez

Related institutions:
Centro Galego da Imaxe (CGAI), Fundación Eugenio Granell

Chronology:
September 2019 - ongoing