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| Images Courtesy of Warner Brothers |
Somehow or another despite the banning of the film in the
country sometime in 1975 Warner Brothers and Stanley Kubrick with the help of a
long running religious film festival, the Seminci in Valladolid one of the
country’s most conservative cities, organized an uncensored screening of the
film right in the heart of the city. It
became a major countercultural event for Spanish filmgoers that forever changed
the artistic landscape for filmgoers and kicked open new, previously kept closed
doors to a whole world of movies. How
was something of this magnitude pulled off?
Well, with voiceover narration provided by the film’s leading actor
Malcolm McDowell and comprised of newly conducted interviews with those
involved in both the screening as well as audience members, the Spanish HBO Max
original documentary A Forbidden Orange helps to try and explain both
how it occurred and what the longstanding impact was on the country.
Partially a documentary about the lore of A Clockwork Orange
but mostly a film about the thought-to-be-Sisyphean task of getting the
film to play in a country that was all but predisposed against the film, A Forbidden
Orange is an eye opening piece highlighting the emergence of what would or
would not become the Valladolid countercultural film scene where movies from
other countries or with some measure of controversy would play against the
cultural norms. Going over every aspect
of how the idea of playing A Clockwork Orange in Spain came about, the
unforeseen obstacles dropping in its path including student protests that
closed down the University of Valladolid, and problems occurring the actual
night of the screening including a bomb threat, A Forbidden Orange is as
indelible to Kubrick disciples as it is to history fans wanting to see a
sociopolitical shift in the cinema scenes of stricter regimes.
Interspersed
with McDowell’s narration and the interviews with the key players involved in
the screening are preexisting photos of the cast and crew on set, images of Valladolid
posters for the film, a never-before-seen interview with Stanley Kubrick
conducted for Spanish radio A Forbidden Orange like Stanley Kubrick: A
Life in Pictures or O Lucky Malcolm! before it is a master class of
sorts from those involved with one of the most important film directors who
ever lived. Overseen by Spanish director
Pedro González Bermúdez who himself made the animated short film 2001 Sparks
in the Dark involving Keir Dullea interviewing Stanley Kubrick, nearly all
of the dialogue is in Spanish save for McDowell’s voiceover narration. Aided by a gentle, Kubrick-inspired score by multi-instrumentalist
Remate and handsomely photographed interviews by Raúl Cadenas, the look and
feel of the documentary has a kind of classiness to it though a chunk of the
film simply reuses footage from the infamous masterwork itself A Clockwork
Orange.
More
of a treatise on the cultural thaw in then-70s Spanish cinema than a rumination
on the value of A Clockwork Orange on the world stage, A Forbidden
Orange while focused on a dark and disturbing film is a hopeful paean to artistic
freedom of expression and the ability to consume controversial art of your own
free will. For good or for ill, the
legendary Valladolid screening of A Clockwork Orange was a chance for Spanish
filmgoers to truly think for themselves and indulge in a work that might not
have gone down as easily as others but nevertheless made them think twice about
the world they’re living in. A testament
to the cultural impact such a film would have on a dictatorship and the measure
of changes fostered by the release of the film which eventually did get a
standard commercial release in the country, A Forbidden Orange is a delightful
and enriching piece on a transformative period in a tight knit country ushered
in by one of the world’s most dangerous works of art.
--Andrew Kotwicki
