The book by Pere Portabella published by the Galaxia Gutenberg publishing house “Challenging the Rules. Interventions on art, cinema and politics” is already in the bookstores. The book is a selection of texts and interventions during his multifaceted career by the volume’s editor, Esteve Riambau, and has been published, for the moment, in both Spanish and Catalan versions.
“Pere Portabella’s cinema is inseparable from art and politics. They are disciplines that combine and feed back from a common attitude: to challenge the norms, social but also aesthetic.
This is precisely the title of a volume that gathers dozens of texts written by the author during sixty years, from his beginnings as a producer to the present. Included are articles in newspapers and magazines, presentations of his films, book prologues and exhibition catalogues, conferences, as well as some of his public speeches as senator or deputy during the first legislatures of democracy.
In the same way that the filmmaker has been concerned with preserving his work to ensure its public dissemination, now comes the turn of his writings. In this edition, prefaced and annotated by Esteve Riambau, the texts are divided into three large blocks: the opposition to Franco’s regime, the first years of democracy and the return to cinema after “Warsaw Bridge”, without forgetting a special attention to the role of culture in Europe.
Without ever separating art and politics from cinema, synergies and confrontations arise that offer a very reliable portrait of Portabella’s thought, in turn sustained by interactions with such illustrious characters as Luis Buñuel, Josep Tarradellas, Joan Brossa, Antoni Tàpies, Joan Miró or Carles Santos”.
For more information and to download the table of contents and a fragment of the book, you can visit the publisher’s website: link