2023-07-01 19:09:20
Andrés Carranque de Ríos (1902-1936) was a curious character from the first third of the Spanish 20th century. Born in Madrid into a working-class family, he flirted in his first two decades of life with crime and political terrorism linked to anarchism. He also did it with literature, and at the end of the 20’s he found the path of cinema. He participated in films such as ‘Al Hollywood madrileño’ (1927) and the film adaptation of Pío Baroja’s novel ‘Zalacaín el aventurero’ (1929) and combined his two artistic vocations, cinema and literature.
The Nocturna label now recovers one of his main works, the novel ‘Cinematograph’, published in 1936, and “one of the first literary testimonies about the world of European cinema with its lights and shadows, an exciting novel where picaresque, the restlessness for the hardships of the workers and the hope for artistic innovations”, explain the editors.
Admired by Baroja, who prefaced his novel ‘Uno’, Carranque tells in ‘Cinematograph’ the Madrid atmosphere of the 20s and 30s using an avant-garde literary technique, that of alternating the points of view of the characters. This fresco allows the writer to address the social, political and cultural concerns of the moment, such as scientific advances and migration from the countryside to the cities, and to analyze the film industry from his class consciousness.
In his eventful existence, Carranque, a man with an imposing presence, did almost everything: street vendor, sailor, actor, boxing manager, journalist or model for fine arts students. In 1921 he was jailed for distributing anarchist leaflets. The following year he traveled to Paris, where he would learn surrealism at the hands of, among others, René Crevel. He cultivated very varied trades – street vendor, sailor, actor, boxing manager, journalist or model for students of fine arts -, in addition to being a writer. In 1921 he was jailed for distributing anarchist leaflets. The following year he went to Paris, where he would later become friends with the French surrealists, especially René Crevel.
In 1923 he published his collection of poems ‘Nómada’ and dedicated himself to reading verses in casinos in Spain and after a few years devoted to cinema and literary autobiography (recounting his prison and vital experience in several volumes), he released his first novel, ‘Uno’ , in 1934, followed by ‘The difficult life’ (1935). In 1936, when ‘Cinematografo’ had just been published and when the Civil War bombardments of the city began, she died at the age of 34 in Madrid from stomach cancer.
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