Marks Of Identity - Opening

"Established in Paris comfortably established in Paris with more years of residence in France than in Spain with more French habits than Spanish ones including even the classic one of living with the daughter of a well-known exile a regular resident of the Ville Lumiere and an episodic visitor to his homeland in order to bear Parisian witness to aspects of Spanish life that might serve to epater le bourgeois an expert in that vast European geography that is traditionally hostile to our values and also present in his itineraries the well-known hand of the great bearded saint of that ex-paradise of a Caribbean island transformed today by work and the grace of Red semi-Reds and useful idiots into a silent and lugubrious floating concentration camp evading the realities of the moment with an easy comfortable and advantageous non-comformity showing himself with prudent niceties and calculated tactics in all the social circles of the Boetian world beyond El Ferol in order to gain for us the forgiveness and pardon of the malicious critics beyond the Pyrenees at the same time that the sum of our authentic cinematographic values remains the object of wishful ignorance bolted doors and a conspiracy of silence such are the characteristics of the individual in question and his contacts and coordinates abroad raised to the level of official photographer for France Presse and announced beyond our borders with the bass drum and cymbals of that international and well-worn repertory of noise and show which anything from far or near that smells anti-Spanish is always greeted in certain circles for having filmed a brief documentary that was defective and dull in its planning horribly put together and without photographic grace or poetry a fact that does not startle those of us accustomed as we are to acts and attitudes whose sad reiteration reveals the impotent hatred of our adversaries no matter what the Regime in our homeland since the Counter-Reformation up till the present Spain has suffered under the most unjust irritating and intolerable attacks that any nation could receive attacks which systematically and periodically emerge from the crafty hole of lies resentment ill-intentioned and tendentious information everything that implies an attack against the sovereign decision of a country to govern itself in its own way without outside interference or arbitrary impositions and if these attacks are irritating when they come from a foreign hand they only deserve a sneer when they are the work of a fellow countryman ready to sink his turbine into the sewer with the idea of making himself a famous little person by aligning himself with political positions of which we have had our fill of knowledge at a time like this which is so suspiciously exhausted by restless disagreements it is exceedingly simple to turn out scenes of the poor suburbs nor does one even have to bother to make them real a few extras dressed as policemen can beat a worker strip a little boy cover him with coal dust and seat him on a pile of manure this is within the reach of any careless person but one who does it reveals such moral taste that it is best not to mention him even though all we need is a preposition and two nouns for an all-out attack an artful insult vituperation opprobium and mocking all lit up by the livid lights of a lie there can be no freedom or leeway or any tolerance which would be criminal that there does exist misery and grief in Spain no one can deny taking pictures of miserable huts is a common thing not only in the civilised countries of Europe but also in the golden land of the United States finding some skinny child with hs belly swollen is not hard either in any country no matter how its standard of living when the gangsters of the camera decide to photograph it and reveal the defects of human society to a foreign public made up of intellectuals and snobs but it is not right or honest to see with only one eye one cannot refuse to see the whole understand only the part of course there is hunger drought and lack of housing in the marrow of all these scenes of Murcia and Andalusia but there is also something that the affected little big shot from Paris had forgotten and that something is hope more than anywhere else one must look at these century-old poor regions with clear eyes and an open heart without harboring the stupid idea of transposing their secret through a fleeting and hazy vision more worthy of a second-rate Merimee than that of the heir of a wealthy and respectable family whose father was basely murdered by the Red hordes a fine child with all of his pleasures and whims taken care of with a Christian education in an old reilgious institution under the tutelage and protection of irreproachable and worthy men what is essential we repeat is to go down on one's knees before this broad and arid panorama look up at the sky in an attempt to keep the cloud there and scratch in the earth to find the redeeming spring any other way would be walking blindly wrapped up in the dazzling dust storms of the Yeste mountains living in a dramatic and inconsolable Polyphemus complex bearing witness with the pimples of one's soul insisting on being a know-it-all in mourning and a mendacious pimp..."