Ricardo Bofill, unpublished filmmaker

Two films presented as previously unpublished by Barcelona-born architect Ricardo Bofill (1939-2022), recently discovered in his archive, will be screened at the twenty-second edition of the Documenta Madrid festival, which will take place next week, from May 6 to 11. These are Imagen de la ciudad (1967), which he co-directed with his colleague Oscar Tusquets, and Alucinación arquitectónica (1967), directed with Peter Hodgkinson and Xavier Bagué, both of his colleagues at the Taller de Arquitectura.

These were the times of the Barcelona School, a local reflection of the French New Wave, which sought to break with the discourse of a certain Spanish neorealism, through an informal and extremely free practice of cinematic storytelling.

The 18-minute Image of the City opens with stills of a young Tusquets dancing uninhibitedly.

The 18-minute " Image of the City " opens with stills of a young Tusquets dancing uninhibitedly. It co-stars Serena Vergano and Beatriz de Moura, with appearances by, among others, Salvador Clotas, sporting a trench coat and sunglasses in a supporting role. These images are mixed with others of Barcelona, ​​filmed from a moving Citroën 2-CV. For example, images of a dirty Pedrera, with grocery stores and smoke shops on the ground floor; trucks parked in rows on the sidewalk on Paseo Picasso, next to the Born market, which was still operating at the time; Las Ramblas, La Boquería, devoid of tourists; the port and the train stations. All of this is a jumble with an unmistakable pop flavor, combining fragments of television commercials with photos of the model Twiggy, Teresa Gimpera, Rafaela Aparicio, and Ursula Andress, comic book vignettes, and sequences from Charlot films. This piece is seasoned with a disjointed discourse on cities and a soundtrack that combines the Stones, echoes of Wagner, Gregorian chant, and proletarian political harangues.

In Architectural Hallucination , lasting 17 minutes, Vergano's presence is also constant, this time interspersed with images of Bofillian works, from those in Barcelona on Bach or Maestro Pérez-Cabrero streets, to Xanadú, in Calpe, when it was still under construction.

Bofill's known film output has so far focused on two works. First, Schizo (1970), a 75-minute documentary subtitled "A Fictional Report on the Architecture of the Brain," which explores the relationship between art and madness. Second, the shorter 24-minute Circles (1966), an exploration of specific geometric forms based on Roman buildings such as the Colosseum and the Pantheon.

Sources familiar with the Bofill Archive indicate that footage of two other works by the architect and his team has also recently been recovered, related, respectively, to his unbuilt project, The City in Space, in Moratalaz, and to a farming village in the Algerian desert, which was built. With some of this material, Héctor Civera created the montage Miratges , which will also be presented at Documenta Madrid.