Cinema as Method: Re-vision in Ramón Gómez de la Serna's Film Script Cifras (1930)

Abstract

AnnaTorresCacoullos is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research spotlights practices of experimental film writing in Spain in the early twentieth century, including literary-cinematographic scripts and novelized film plots. m ode rnism / modernity volum e twe nty nine , num b e r four, p p 717–740. © 2023 johns hop kins unive rsity p re ss Cinema as Method: Re-vision in Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s Film Script Cifras (1930) AnnaTorres-Cacoullos In 1927 Luis Buñuel approached Ramón Gómez de la Serna and proposed to the author that they collaborate on a film based on the vanguard writer’s short fiction. In his memoir Buñuel recalled that the film would feature “A man [who] buys a paper from a kiosk and sits down on a nearby bench to read it; as he reads, Serna’s stories appear on the screen, each preceded by a newspaper headline—a local crime, a football match, a political event. When the ‘stories’ are over, the man gets to his feet, crumples up the paper, and throws it away.”1 Although Buñuel referred to the title of the film as “Caprichos” in his personal papers—taking its cue from Gómez de la Serna’s short narrative collection Caprichos (1925)—he also had variously referred to it as “El mundo por diez céntimos” (“The World for Ten Cents”), suggestive of the price of a newspaper at the time and indicative of the Ramonian vignettes that were to be presented as though from the page of a newspaper.2 Agustín Sánchez Vidal’s research claims that another of the film’s tentative titles had been simply “El periódico” (“The Newspaper”).3 If all went according to plan, the film—Buñuel’s first directed motion picture—would premier in October 1928 to coincide with the First Spanish Conference on Cinematography organized by the popular Madrilenian film magazine La Pantalla. Gómez de la Serna, leading figure of the Spanish avant-garde and labeled by Nigel Dennis as “the embodiment of modernity,” was intrigued by the opportunity to engage the emerging moving image medium , which he saw as probing the limits of representation and perception, and which appeared to challenge traditional modes M O D E R N I S M / modernity 718 of literary writing.4 Tasked with writing the film’s script, “Ramón,” as he liked to be called, shifted his gaze from the art of prose fiction to the craft of screenwriting. Ramón defied the influential belief that cinema was a new, so-called “Seventh Art,” expounded in 1923 by film theorist Ricciotto Canudo, who hailed cinema as “a plastic art in motion,” the new, Seventh Art, proposing that it was a synthesis of three rhythmic arts (music, dance, poetry) and three plastic arts (painting, sculpture, architecture).5 Ramón conceived of film as el séptimo procedimiento or the “seventh method,” where he did not suppose cinema to be a new art but rather a distinct way of producing art.6 Significantly, he viewed this “cinematographic method” ultimately as a literary method, declaring in 1928 in Madrid’s most important cultural magazine, La Gaceta Literaria, that cinema, like “todas las artes son evocación literaria, quieran o no quieran” (“La nueva épica”; all arts are a literary evocation, whether they want to be or not). With this radical idea, Ramón experimented with cinema by revisiting and revising his prior work published in his short fiction collections Greguerías (1917), Disparates (1921), Ramonismo (1923), and Gollerías (1926). It is not known whether Ramón ever completed the script for Buñuel’s proposed film, a project that was ultimately abandoned by the following year and never filmed.7 In any case, Ramón could not resist cinema’s methodological potential because in 1930 he published a film script titled Chiffres in the prestigious Parisian film magazine La Revue du Cinéma.8 Critics believe this script is in part the product of Ramón’s partnership with Buñuel, though Chiffres displayed significant discrepancies from what Buñuel...