viva la vista

During the course of an interview, later in his rich life, Luis Bunuel described the arrival of motion pictures in Aragon during the first decade of the 20th century.

At that time, the cinema, like all young forms of expression, was a makeshift operation brought to the people by itinerant projectionists at borrowed venues. Most, if not all of the films were produced elsewhere by people far different than the viewers. And the show was a series of moving shadows, something that we easily forget today. It must have been gloriously engaging and potentially confusing, as it continues to be even now.

At each screening, in an attempt to overcome these dilemmas, a well-traveled member of the community would volunteer to act as the explicador. They would stand at the front of the room, near the screen, and interpret for the crowd the succesion of exotic images, the things they might represent, the traditional stories they inevitably tell or fail to communicate.

I have always imagined that these explicadors, through their voices and gestures channeled knowledge and imagination equally in those darkened rooms.