I will have several new large prints on display at the old spanish Ambassador's residence on 16th Street in Washington DC as part of this May 12 open house. Under the title "Made in Almeria," I'll be showing new photographs from my ongoing study of movie sets and locations in Almeria, Spain. Come by 10am - 4pm and enjoy Spanish food, wine and dance, and check out the Andalusian patio inside this rarely opened building. 

More details here ...

Enjoy a taste of Spain at the Former Residence of the Ambassador of Spain.

Fancy a visit to Europe this spring? Then join the Delegation of the European Union to the United States, the Embassies of the 27 E.U. Member States to the U.S. and future E.U. member Croatia (joining in 2013) on May 12, 2012, from 10 am to 4 pm, for the sixth E.U. Open House Day.

The annual event, during which E.U. embassies open their doors to the Washington public, is part of Europe Week, which includes seven days of Europe-related events across the United States.

The Open House Day offers a rare look inside the embassies and provides a unique opportunity to experience cultural heritage and national traditions. Free shuttle bus service will be provided throughout the day with stops at embassies and select Metro stations.

The Embassy of Spain will open the gates of the Former Residence of the Ambassador of Spain, built in 1922 and located in the 16th Street Historic District. Visit this Washingtonian landmark while the Spain-USA Foundationis assiduously working to return it to its original splendor.

Get a taste of Spanish food and wine by local restaurants (Taberna del Alaberdero, La Tasca, Grapes of Spain, Tradewinds Speciality Imports) and enjoy our culture with performances of flamenco and contemporary dance:

1. 11 am: Flamenco show by Furia Flamenca.
2. 12 pm: Contemporary Dance Duet Entomo by EA&AE ElíasAguirre&Álvaro Esteban.
3. 1 pm: Castanet and Spanish Folklore dance performance by Carmen de Vicente’s Spanish Dance Academy.
4. 2 pm: Castanet and Spanish Folklore dance performance by Carmen de Vicente’s Spanish Dance Academy.
5. 3 pm: Flamenco show by Edwin Aparicio.

EXHIBITIONS ON SHOW:

1. Made in Almeria, photographs by Mark Parascandola.
2. Works by Pepa León.
3. Display by CIMNE-USA.

Free and open to the public on May 12th from 10 am to 4pm. No RSVP required. Food and wine available for purchase.

Fifty years ago, in April of 1962, the Algarrobico beach on the southeastern coast of spain was bustling with activity as two hundred local workers constructed a replica of the Red Sea port of Aqaba circa 1916 for the filming of Lawrence of Arabia. They took three months to construct 300 false-front buildings and a quarter mile sea wall. The crew planted palm trees, trucked in from Alicante, placed four full-size canons on the hills above, and brought 450 horses and 150 camels from Morocco. Hundreds of local fishermen and gypsies served as extras.

In the film, British officer T.E. Lawrence and his Arab followers make the arduous trek across the Nefud desert to mount a surprise attack from inland; the city’s defenses are all directed out towards the sea. From a ridge overlooking the port, the camera pans to the right, following the stampede of warriors on camels and horses into the city before resting on an impotent cannon pointed at the water. It is one of Director David Lean’s most memorable scenes.

Lean had intended to shoot the entire film in Jordan, on the same terrain where Lawrence had waged his campaign. But by the end of September 1961, Lean and crew had been shooting under harsh conditions in the deserts of Jordan for 117 days, were behind schedule and over budget, and had only 45 minutes of footage. The costs (both financial and psychological) of working 200 miles into the desert were high. Producer Sam Spiegel was worried that Lean had become obsessed with the desert, and he was increasingly nervous about growing political debate in Jordan over the film.

Someone at Columbia Pictures reported that there were deserts in the south of Spain. Independent American producer Samuel Bronston had recently made El Cid and parts of King of Kings in Almeria. So Spiegel shut down the production and informed the crew they would be moving to Spain. Lean felt betrayed. He wrote Spiegel from the desert: “you won’t touch this place for backgrounds, for after all they are the real backgrounds. … You can’t beat Aqaba for Aqaba.”

André de Toth, one of Lean’s second unit directors, was sent ahead to scout for locations. Sixty years old, he was a flamboyant character with an eye patch that gave him the appearance of a pirate. He was also a pilot. “I flew my own plane and went all over the place. Then I found Almeria,” he recalled.

Almeria was barren, dry and rugged, but it lacked the monumental desert vistas of Jordan. Lean planned for closer camera angles to suit the dramatic intensity and action of the second half of the film, which would also serve to make the shift in locations less noticeable. But they still had one expansive scene left--the attack on Aqaba.

Production designer John Box found the ideal location to construct the sprawling set. Outside the small fishing village of Carboneras was a dry river bed running between barren hills and ending at the beach. The rocky coastline beyond stretched out into the sea. When it came time for filming, the attack was done in one take with multiple cameras (among the cameramen was a young Nicolas Roeg). In the end, the scene was far more dramatic than the real city of Aqaba, considerably modernized by the 1960s, could have been.

In the final film, the first view of the landscape of Almeria, and the departure from Jordan, comes when Lawrence and Sheik Ali peer down at the city of Aqaba the night before the attack. The scene cuts abruptly from the wide-open golden desert, enormous twisted rock formations jutting out of the sand, to oscillating peaks and gulches of the spanish coast silhouetted at night.

The second half of Lawrence was made in Spain and Morocco. Sand dunes along the coast of Almeria became the setting for the explosion and attack on the railway. A dry riverbed in Tabernas was planted with palm trees to create the desert oasis that Lawrence’s army stops at on the way to Aqaba. A casino in Seville, originally built for the Iberian-American Exhibition of 1929, became the Damascus Town Hall. And the city streets of Seville and Almeria stood in for Cairo.

After the filming was over, the entire Aqaba set was dismantled and the construction materials given to local farmers. Today the old riverbed has a highway running over it, and alongside the beach lies  a massive uncompleted luxury hotel, seen in the image above. Watching the film again, one can easily recognize the distinctive chiseled rocks extending out into the water.

Seeing Constellation Theater's innovative production of Lorca's Blood Wedding reminded me of the script's explicit references to the barren landscape of Almeria. The set is minimal, as it should be, to highlight the isolation of the characters and the unforgiving environment they inhabit.

In an exchange in the first act, the groom's mother complains of the distance they had to travel to reach the bride's remote house, "a four hour journey and not a house or a tree." The bride's father laments the dry earth and how he "had to labor over it and shed tears to get anything from it."

Lorca based the play on actual events that occurred in 1928. The dramatic story was widely reported in the national press and journalists described the empty, ochre-colored earth for their readers. In his stage directions, Lorca suggests the the bride's home appears in a "panorama of brownish plains, everything hardened like a landscape of ceramic."     

Lorca did make some changes to the location, however. The bride's home is a cave, rather than the expansive Cortijo del Fraile she actually lived in. And the final chase scene and confrontation takes place in a dense forest. These alterations enhance the symbolic impact of the settings. However, at the time the play was premiered, some critics found the overt symbolism to be a weakness.

Constellation Theater's production ends March 4, so go see for yourself! My photographs of the Cortijo Del Fraile are up in the entryway and hopefully help viewers to imagine the setting of the action.

In August 1986, an unlikely crew descended on the Tabernas desert, including Joe Strummer, Courtney Love, Elvis Costello, members of the Pogues, Sy Richardson, and Jim Jarmusch. Even Dennis Hopper and Grace Jones jetted in for a day. The resulting film, Alex Cox’s Straight to Hell, was neither a commercial nor critical success, but it has since achieved a form of cult status. A remastered director’s cut was just released last year. But the fact that the film got made at all was the result of an equally improbable set of circumstances.

In 1984 The Clash were on the verge of self destructing. Mick Jones had already been kicked out of the group, and the new and remaining members collided with eachother and their manager over their future direction. Strummer escaped all this in a series of jaunts to Spain. He’d already been introduced to Andalucía through former girlfriend Paloma Romero of The Slits and had developed an obsession with Federico García Lorca. He produced an album by Spanish rock band 091 and spent many hours in local bars. And he discovered the village of San José on the coast of Almería.

The following year, Strummer recorded two songs for Cox’s film Sid and Nancy. They had the idea to set the video for the song Love Kills in an old Mexican border town, with Gary Oldman as a gunslinger. Cox was aware of the spaghetti western film sets in Almeria, so they decided to shoot the video there, using Texas Hollywood and the set from El Condor.

Joe then accompanied Cox to the screening of Sid and Nancy at the Cannes film festival. The presentation was a disappointment, but over a long night of drinking by the hotel pool, Cox, Strummer, and Dick Rude dreamed up a story about three miserable bank robbers shot as a contemporary spoof on the spaghetti western genre. Cox described the scene the following morning:

“outside the hotel in the bright sunlight, still in their evening wear, black suits, white shirts, black [bow ties] were my roomates, like characters in a film, sweating, drinking coffee, trying to get over their hangovers. That was the origin of Straight to Hell. We were full of the energy of the video in Almeria, and really wanted to go back.”

The film itself opens with its protagonists in black suits lounging by the pool of the Gran Hotel Almería, which had itself hosted dozens of film stars during the 1960s and 1970s.

The project might have remained as just an alcohol-fueled daydream. At the same time, however, Cox was organizing a rock and roll tour of Nicaragua in support of the Sandinista rebels. The tour was to include Strummer, Elvis Costello and the Pogues. Cox would film it. But the project fell through when they couldn’t find a media company interested in supporting the rebel movement. Cox knew he could get funding to make a movie, however, and now he had a cast of musicians who had already committed a month of their time.

Cox and Rude wrote the script in three days and the film was shot over four weeks. The western town they used was originally constructed for the 1973 film Chino starring Charles Bronson. It sits alongside the A-92 highway to Granada, directly across from Mini-Hollywood and Texas Hollywood. Throughout the film highway traffic can been seen passing across the background. Strummer spent most nights on the set sleeping in a beat up ‘71 Dodge, wearing the same black suit every day. Spin magazine sent a reporter to cover the making of the film. Cox later recalled:

“there was a great deal of pleasure attached to being there. In Almeria, in the desert, in midsummer, at night. It's a pleasure I can't explain. There are people who think the desert looks like a slag-heap. That is  their point of view.  For me the greatest pleasure of Straight to Hell was filming in that fantastic, surreal Andalucia landscape.”

The critics hated it, of course. “It’s going straight to nowhere,” Variety predicted. Viewers complained that they couldn’t understand what was happening in the film.

But both Strummer and Cox went on to form long term connections with Almería. Strummer returned to San José regularly with his family during the 1990s, and Cox spent a period living in a house in the Tabernas desert. Cox returned to the site in 2004 and made a video of what remained of the set, accompanied by Zander Schloss’s spoken recollections of the filming. And a recently released documentary Quiero tener una ferretería en Andalucía (“I Want to Have a Hardware Store in Andalucía”) tells the story of Stummer’s longtime connection with southern Spain. Jim Jarmusch also returned to Almeria to film The Limits of Control.

Last year, Cox released Straight to Hell Returns, an extended version of the film with new footage and added digital effects. Cox speaks about his connection to Almeria in a video introduction created for a screening of the film. Also last year, a proposal was introduced in the city of Granada to name a street after Joe Strummer, acknowledging his love for the city and the fact that, in writing the song Spanish Bombs, he “carried the name of Granada throughout the world.”

Today all that remains of the original set are a few piles of crumbled bricks and timbers.

Constellation Theater's Blood Wedding opens this weekend at Source theater on 14th Street!

The lobby will include a few of my photographs of the Cortijo del Fraile, the site of the real-life tragedy that inspired Lorca's play. The image above was taken last November, showing the current state of the old cortijo.

Lovers are torn apart as two families in rural Spain are intricately bound in an unbreakable cycle of murder and revenge. Experience passion and violence mixed with song and ceremony. Federico García Lorca illuminates our deepest desires with gorgeous poetic imagery and the haunting appearance of a human Moon.

Directed by Shirley Serotsky. English Translation by Tanya Ronder. 90 minutes, with live music.

Visit constellationtheatre.org and use the code SPAIN for $20 General Admission Tickets!

Also this Thursday and Friday 2/2/ and 2/3 are Pay What You Can!

In mid-October of 1929, Aldous Huxley and his first wife Maria Nys set out on a road trip through Spain in their scarlet two-seated Bugatti. Starting in Barcelona, where Huxley had attended a conference which left him bored and wanting to escape, they went south along the coast through Valencia and Murcia, on to Almeria, then west to Granada, Cadiz, and Seville, before heading north again to Madrid and back to France. The entire trip took abut five weeks. Shortly after returning, Huxley described Spain as "the strangest country in Europe ... one of the oddest in the world even."

The landscape of Almeria left an indelible impression on Huxley. He expressed the harsh extremes of the environment in a poem which appeared in the collection The Cicadas and Other Poems in 1931:

ALMERIA

Winds have no moving emblems here, but scour
A vacant darkness, an untempered light;
No branches bend, never a tortured flower
Shuders, root-weary, on the verge of flight;
Winged future, withered past, no seeds nor leaves
Attest those swift invisible feet: they run
Free through a naked land, whose breast receives
All the fierce ardour of a naked sun.
You have the light for lover. Fortunate Earth!
Conceive the fruti of his divine desire.
But the dry dust is all she brings to birth,
That child of clay by even celestial fire.
Then come, soft rain and tender clouds, abate
This shining love that has the force of hate

Some thirty years later he recalled his trip in a letter to local professor Arturo Medina (who was married briefly to Almeria cultural fixture Celia Viñas before her death). Huxley saw the dry, barren earth as a kind of philosophical metaphor. The landscape of Almeria, he wrote, "seemed to express my own preocupation with the problem of 'pure' intellectuality, 'pure' spirituality -- too much sun but no rain." As they left the city of Almeria and entered the desert, "there was a tremendous wind and the sun was blazing -- 'the winds of doctrine' in combination with 'spiritual light'; but no moisture, none of the vegetative life of nature itself."

The trip came at a critical time in Huxley's intellectual development, a few years before the publication of Brave New World. He feared that growing materialism and rapid technological advancement would stifle independent thinking and spiritual growth. A fundamental humanistic element, he believed, was lacking from the twentieth century scientific mind.

Huxley recalled that they had driven south out of the city; he was clearly wrong, as such an itinerary would have taken them into the Mediterranean ocean. Instead, as the couple was moving on to Granada, they would have headed north and through the Tabernas desert.

The photograph above was taken in November from a now unused section of the old road to Granada. Huxley surely passed this spot, around the same date eighty two years ago.

The surviving structures of the Denver mining plant hang precariously off the hillside above the town of Rodalquilar, inside the Cabo de Gata natural park. The buildings still bear black painted letters--”Dorm Block B,” “Guard Block D”--from a movie production almost 30 years ago. The foundations of the separation tanks create enormous circles at the bottom of the hill. Across the plain lies the Mediterranean ocean.

The mining industry transformed the landscape of Almeria during the nineteenth century as modern technology allowed for large scale exploitation of iron, lead and other resources. Activity slowed during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, after which the fascist government took control of the site at Rodalquilar. At the time, it was believed there were vast gold deposits hidden under ground. During the 1950s, the state constructed the Denver plant along with dozens of houses for workers, schools, a pharmacy, and other buildings. However, the mine's resources didn't live up to expectations. The mine was closed on March 9, 1966, less than ten years after it opened.

The remains were later rediscovered by filmmakers looking for an otherwordly location. In the early summer of 1985, dozens of technicians and laborers began constructing a massive set on top of the old mine buildings, turning it into a post-apocalyptic prison camp. The movie Solarbabies takes place in the future after a global drought has turned the planet into a desert and a mysterious police state, called The Protectorate, controls all water resources. Children are raised in orphanages where they become prisoners of the system. At the center of the story are a rebellious group of adolescents who escape at night to play a version of lacrosse on rollerskates.

The film was widely derided as a cheap Mad Max imitator and labeled "an apalling stinker" by Leonard Maltin. But it includes several familiar faces from the 80s, including Jami Gertz, Jason Patric, and Lukas Haas, along with rollerskating chase scenes over desert landscapes that were specially paved over for the film. The painted letters still readable on the mine buildings mark the prison dorm and guard buildings. One of the police vehicles, an oversized metal armadillo, still sits on a lot behind an old western movie set in Tabernas.

A few years later the site was transformed again to medieval England. In The Reckoning, starring Willem Dafoe and Paul Bettany, a traveling theater troupe arrives in a strange, isolated town at the base of a castle and then get entangled in solving the mystery surrounding the murder of a local boy. The castle, constructed on top of the mine buildings, towers over the town below. Tudor facades follow the circular foundations at the bottom of the bill, creating a surreal, curving structure, which also provides the round theater the players perform in. The entire landscape is covered with a layer of snow throughout the film. A long stairway which runs up the right side of the mine facility can be picked out in the film, but the site seems otherwise entirely unrecognizable.

The team spent over 6 weeks constructing the set. The film itself received lukewarm reviews, criticized for being unoriginal and pedantic. But Andrew McAlpine’s production design was singled out for its ingenuity. Variety magazine wrote:

The Reckoning’s most impressive player ... is its stunning set. When scouting expeditions in England failed to yield a viable medieval village, the producers opted to create one in Spain. On the ruins of an abandoned gold mine, production designer Andrew McAlpine and his team built a thoroughly convincing 14th century town, complete with a castle for de Guise.

In reality the climate is not nearly so harsh as it appears in either film. Just out of view is the Mediterranean ocean and one of its most stunning, undeveloped beaches.

A production still of the set from The Reckoning, from Andrew McAlpine's website.

“The perspective of Almeria, viewed from the heights of the Alcazaba, is one of the most beautiful in the world.”                                  --Juan Goytisolo, La Chanca

Almeria’s Alcazaba, a Moorish castle perched above the city, overlooks the neighborhood of La Chanca. It is a historically impoverished zone made up of small dwellings built into the hillside on the outskirts of the city. The inhabitants painted their homes using whatever ingredients were available, creating a multicolored patchwork. Ruins still remain of a nineteenth century lead mining and transport operation that ran down the mountain to the nearby port. La Chanca has long been home to a diverse population, including fishermen and their families, a strong community of gypsies, and, more recently, immigrants from Morocco.

The panoramic image above is a composite of several photographs I took from the far tower of the Alcazaba about 11am on a Saturday in August. A version of the image with embedded explanatory notes and links is available on my Flickr page here, and a larger size image with greater detail is available here.

Juan Goytisolo, Spain’s most influential literary exile, described the same view in 1962:

“The district of La Chanca crouches at your feet, luminous and white, like an invention of the senses. In the depths of the valley, the modest houses appear like a game of dice, thrown there capriciously. The geological violence, the nakedness of the landscape is frightening. Tiny, rectangular, the huts climb the slope and set themselves in the broken geography of the mountain, carved like carbuncles. Around La Chanca, the yellow rock extends itself the same as an ocean, the rugged undulations of the moorland cut off in the ridges of the Sierra de Gádor. The overlook takes in an expansive panorama and the observer feels a little like the Diablo Cojuelo.* The inhabitants of the suburb carry on with their wretched lives without worrying that they are being watched from above. From time to time, a guide ponders the marvels of the place and the tourists poke out of the battlements and bombard it with their cameras.”

*The mischievous “Crippled Devil” who, in a popular version of the story, reveals the tricks and misfortunes that occur inside the walls of the apartments of Madrid.

La Chanca has a complex history with photographers and photography. Goytisolo’s book did not include any photographs. In fact, a family he visits tells him about a French couple who had recently shown up with a “portrait machine.” The grandmother wanted her grandchildren to wash and dress up for the photograph, but the tourists told them not to, preferring to photograph them in their disheveled state. They took over 100 photographs. The grandmother later confesses to Goytisolo that she didn’t understand their true intentions at the time. “Sometimes one does things without understanding,” she says, “I think if they came now I would curse them.”

Local photographer Carlos Perez Siquier began documenting the streets and people of La Chanca in 1957. He visited the neighborhood on weekends while free from his day job at a local bank. With limited funds, he sometimes used discarded pieces of unexposed film from movie productions in Almeria. Perez Siquier explained in an interview years later that his intent was not to denounce the conditions of La Chanca or conduct a sociological study, but simply to show the people as they are and reveal their dignity among difficult circumstances. Elsewhere he wrote:

"My attention is directed to daily life, in all its visible manifestations. It is not the strange or unusual that most attracts my eye, as its value depends largely on the unexpected. It is the simple and everyday, the authentic in its vulgarity, that I want to highlight intensely.”

Perez Siquier continued to return to La Chanca over the years. His early photographs, in black and white, are scenes from neighborhood life lived largely in the streets. Children playing, a laughing wedding party, a couple carrying an oversized wardrobe, or a crowd gathered around a tightrope walker. A few of the frames focus on stark abstract shapes, patterns created by hanging clothes and shadows on the ground, a black umbrella hanging upside down against a white wall, or a series of white chimneys rising out of the eroded rock wall. He later began using color film, showcasing the varied palette of the painted houses. In one series of images, he hones in on multicolored layers of peeling paint emerging from walls and doors.

Perez Siquier’s early images were part of a new photography movement emerging in Spain during the 1950s and 60s. The new photography rejected the officially sanctioned images which romanticized the Spanish landscape and traditional village life. Instead, they favored realism and focused on marginalized communities and the urban periphery. Along with Madrid and Barcelona, Almeria became a locus for the photographic vanguard. Perez Siquier’s images of La Chanca first appeared in Afal, an influential photography magazine published out of Almeria.

At the same time, Goytisolo’s book was published covertly in Paris and for years was not openly available in Spain. When a Spanish edition finally emerged in 1981, under a newly-democratic government, it was one of Perez Siquier’s images that was used for the cover.

The topography of La Chanca has changed in recent decades. Orderly rows of newly constructed homes can be seen above the older neighborhood below, and the expanded coastal highway now runs along the top of the hillside. La Chanca has also been gaining international attention for its unique model of social organization and integration. City services do not extend up the steep, winding streets along the hillside, so residents have developed cooperatives to clean and maintain public spaces. The public school includes classes in Arabic language and culture, and students learn about the diverse history of the region through musical performances and festivals. At the same time, however, the neighborhood remains isolated from the rest of the city. A local organization is working to gain UNESCO recognition for La Chanca as a cultural World Heritage site.

Local singer/songwriter Sensi Falán includes more outstanding views of La Chanca in her recent music video.

Mortimer stands eyeing his Colt Buntline Special on the ground, which has just been shot out of his hand. Indio approaches holding a musical watch. Inside the watch is a picture of Mortimer’s sister, who shot herself while being raped by Indio. The two gunmen stand inside a large circle bounded by a low stone wall at the edge of town. In the background is only desert, a few dry shrubs and distant mountains. Manco approaches, offering his gunbelt and pistol to Mortimer before taking a seat on the low wall. The duel begins. As Indio starts to reach for his gun, he is knocked down by Mortimer’s bullet.

The final duel scene from For a Few Dollars More is one of the most memorable in western film history. The scene was shot outside the town of Los Albaricoques in the desert of Níjar. Sergio Leone made use of this location for several scenes throughout the Dollars trilogy.

In recent years the town has grown rapidly, adding plots of modern townhomes. Cars line the narrow lanes. And the modest white houses which once stood in for a dusty Mexican pueblo have been fixed up and repainted. However, local officials have renamed the streets to honor their history -- one famous scene was filmed on what is now Calle Clint Eastwood. The circular ring from the final duel scene has also been reconstructed on the original site, seen in the photo above (click on the photo for a larger image). The row of houses in the background are new. But the small white building and round tower directly in back of the ring can be seen in the film, much as they are today.

In the district of Miraflores in Lima, Peru, new luxury condominium towers hug the edge of the cliffs. At the base of a dizzyingly steep drop, the coastal highway winds along beaches popular with surfers. Miraflores is a privileged neighborhood. It contains some of Lima's best restaurants, upscale shopping, and well-maintained parks and gardens. The district also serves as a base for foreign tourists visiting the city. Walking the paths along the cliffs provides a rare escape from the noisy, smog-filled city of almost 9 million. But the quiet is frequently broken by sounds of demolition and construction, as new glass-filled towers are are erected at a pace as frenetic as that of the city itself.