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Ángel Fernández-Santos 1934 – 2004
By José Enrique Monterde

Angel Fernández-Santos

Ángel Fernández-Santos has left us, last Tuesday, the 6th of July. The most veteran and recognized figure of the Spanish cinematographic criticism — as he was nowadays — disappears. This to be not only for his position since 1982, as head reviewer of the most important Spanish newspaper, El País, but because of his complete personification of the cinema reviewer per se, that he will remain in being for many of our country's cinema lovers. A few days away from the loss of another figure as indelible as that of Lino Micciché, we remain a little more orphans in a critical tradition style that is in trance of extinction. That is, the kind of criticism capable of uniting knowledge and passion with the attraction for cinema and the creative dimension of writing, for the commitment and pleasure of an audience both attentive and privileged, that these critique developers are part of at the same time.

Owner of the kind of personality that was impossible not to notice at the press rooms of Cannes, Venice, Berlin or San Sebastian, Fernández-Santos (born in Los Cerralbos, Toledo, 1934) leaves behind himself an intense career that went through the last 40 years of Spanish cinema. He moved to Madrid in 1950, where he had his degree in Law, Philosophy and Literature studies, apart from the lessons that he received in directing at the mythical EOC, the "Escuela Oficial de Cine", the National Film School, from where he was expelled because of his leftist political activities. Then he simultaneously combined writing theatre and cinema reviews for magazines such as Índice, Ínsula and Primer Acto, but most remarkably for Nuestro Cine, the most important Spanish specialized magazine of the Sixties and of which it was its editing assistant. He entered, after all those, the critique section at the newspaper Diario 16, before joining El País. They are also owed to him, among other writings, two books as "Maiakovski y el cine" (Maiakovski and the cinema, 1974), and "Más allá del Oeste" (Beyond the West, 1988). The fact is, though, that he was not very keen on long extent writings, as his literary brightness was much more relevant in the brief and nervous space of the journalistic chronicle.

But Ángel's contribution to Spanish cinema was not constricted to the exercise of the critical function, still deeper when we remember his role as co-scriptwriter of "El espíritu de la colmena" (The Spirit of the Beehive, Víctor Erice, 1972), considered as one of the all-time best Spanish films. And neither to forget his works for Francisco Regueiro, in another splendid series of films: "Las bodas de Blanca" (Blanca's Weddings, 1975), "Padre nuestro" (Our Father, 1985), "Diario de invierno" (Winter Diary, 1988) and "Madregilda" (1993). All the density of his cultural knowledge, including literature and cinema, crystallized into those works, as he was capable of composing what resulted effective pieces full of irony and humor, the perfect complement to his work as a critic.

We are not only saying Goodbye to one of our colleagues in our ACCEC (Associació Catalana de Crítics i Escriptors Cinematogràfics', Catalan Association of Cinematographic Critics and Writers) and, as such, member of FIPRESCI. We are in the farewell to who, in a certain way, was considered as the dean of the best Spanish cinematographic critique. After Angel's disappearance, the same it was years ago with José Luis Guarner, the only comparable Spanish cinema reviewer, we remain, all of us, a little more alone. But his memory will be always with us in the difficult work of continuing a critical tradition that must not be truncated by any chance.

José Enrique Monterde
Translated by Ruth Pombo

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