Film Makers Who Depicted Life Under Franco

“Spanish Cinema: The Politics of Family and Gender” continues tonight at 7:30 in Room 108 in USC’s Cinema and Television Center with Jose Antonio Nieves Conde’s “Furrows” (1951) and Juan Antonio Bardem’s “Death of a Cyclist” (1955).

Designed to call attention to the neglect of the Spanish cinema, this series continues to be a revelation. These films and others make us aware that numerous film makers of talent and courage were able to make honest and even critical depictions of life under Franco.

Inevitably, “Furrows” recalls Visconti’s subsequent “Rocco and His Brothers” as a study of a peasant family disillusioned and corrupted by a move to a big city. In this instance, a farmer, his wife and their two grown sons and teen-age daughter come to Madrid from Salamanca in the hope of a better life. They are part of a flood of rural migrants, and in merely revealing their plight the film becomes an implicit criticism of various ills, especially of an increasingly industrialized society that provides no training for its unskilled workers.

Series coordinator Marsha Kinder has aptly described “Furrows” as a blend of neo-realism and the Hollywood gangster film, and the result is as complex as it is entertaining, a reflection upon patriarchal family life as well as society at large. Based on a story by Eugenio Montes, the film is an intimate epic that unfolds against a documentary-like vision of Madrid.

“Furrows” did create a stir, leaving in its wake the firing of a government official who approved its making and receiving a “seriously dangerous” condemnation from the censor.

“Death of a Cyclist” is one of the most famous of all Spanish films yet is rarely available. It is a mordant study of guilt and responsibility that moves with briskness and implacability.

A beautiful socialite (Lucia Bose) and her lover (Alberto Closas), a mathematics professor, strike a bicyclist as they drive down a lonely highway at night and leave him dying on the road. The woman is as dismissive of the whole incident as the man becomes consumed by guilt, and, as both are members of the aristocracy, the film becomes a commentary on the ruling class. “Death of a Cyclist” has one of those deeply ironic, circular structures, and it is a tribute to Bardem that the film’s ending is poetic rather than mechanical.

The series continues Saturday at 7:30 p.m. in USC’s Norris Theater with “Hooligans” (1959) and “Dressed in Blue” (1983), both of which were shown three years ago at UCLA as part of its “New Spanish Cinema and the Films of Carlos Saura” retrospective.

Like “Furrows,” “Hooligans” (1959), which was Saura’s first film, is shot in a neo-realist style in a breathtakingly beautiful black-and-white. Saura, who was to become Spain’s best-known film maker next to Bunuel, takes a coolly detached view of a Madrid gang of vicious, youthful thieves striving to gather enough money among themselves to launch one of their friends as a bullfighter. That these young men can be so concerned about each other yet so ruthless in their thievery gives them a disturbing, challenging dimension.

Antonio Gimenez Rico’s “Dressed in Blue” is so warm and honest, it’s as enjoyable the second time around as the first. It’s a documentary about six Madrid transvestites who view with humor and great courage their struggle for survival in a macho society. Rico sees each as an individual, although all of them are flashy and forced to resort to prostitution, and all but one is repelled by transsexual surgery, even though they resort to breast augmentation and take female hormones.

Screening Sunday at 7:30 p.m. in CTC 108 are Luis Berlanga’s talky but provocative satire “Placido” (1961) and Fernando Fernan Gomez’s “The Strange Journey” (1964), which was unavailable for preview. Information: (213) 743-6071.