Teresa Vilars

Texas A&M University

Familystrip (Luis Miarro, 2009)
Produced, directed, written by Luis Miarro
An Eddie Saeta production with the participation of TVE
With: Maria Luz Albero Calvo, Francesc Miarro Bermejo, Lluis Miarro, and
Francesc Herrero
Familystrip is a powerful, uncannily disturbing documentary. Shot in 2001 in black
and white as a private homage to the directors aging parents, it was not until 2009
that Luis Miarro decided to release it to a larger audience. He revised the editing,
adding a nostalgic-like musical sound track with songs by Jimmy Fontana and
Georges Moustaki, plus some color footage: Serene, almost kitschy scenes of a calm
Mediterranean Sea at the opening; trees in full Fall-color regalia at closing. Beautiful
views serenaded by no less beautiful fragments of classical music perhaps meant to
provide a tranquil cinematic space for a thoughtful reflection on the passing of life.
Familystrip may look at first glance as straightforward, homemade testimonial
movie, a small, simple documentary. It is not. It is a highly sophisticated, complex
film that smoothly engages in a multiplicity of discourses and disciplines fueled by
an intense mediation on the poetics of vanishing. Filmmaking, painting,
anthropology, history (oral and archival; personal and collective) all come to being
in this extremely fierce family portrait that, echoing Diego Velzquezs Las Meninas,
cannot but have a Master Artist (or two) planted in the midst of the oeuvre.
But lets go slow, and strip, like the title of the movie suggest, some of the many
layers of this deeply Lacanian text. First, the outer one: the plot. At its most explicit
level Familystrip offers itself as a personal loving memoir. On occasion of the sixtyfifth wedding anniversary of Luis Miarros parents, the director decided to hire a
young painter, Francesc Herrero, to paint their portrait. Eight posing sessions were
scheduled. And it was only because during the first session the parents, restricted
by the posing exercise, begun to talk about their past that the son Luis Miarro, a
filmmaker after all, decided to grasp the opportunity. At the second session the
camera was already there, in a corner, steady, filming quietly.
Second Layer: A historical archeology. While sitting for the portrait, Luis Miarros
parents engage in an oral narrative that flies through most of the twentieth century:
the 1930s, the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic, the Spanish Civil War,
the fathers interment in a Francoist concentration camp, his coming back, the joys
and fears of parenting, their traditions, their love for each other and for their family.
Stripped of historic overtones, theirs comes as a petit histoire that nevertheless
extends itself to encompass a whole Spanish generation now on the verge of
extinctionand with it a whole system of values, modes, and manners increasingly
alien, even incomprehensible to our contemporary society.

Third Layer: The portrait. The painter Francesc Herrero comes to their apartment
in Barcelona where Francesc Miarro (Luis Miarros father) and his spouse Maria
Luz Albero lived all their married life, and where the director and his five siblings
were born and grew up. In the small, almost claustrophobic flat, the painter sets his
three subjects against an angular window panel in the living room: the son, Luis
Miaro, his arms open and stretched towards his parents stands tall and benevolent,
reminiscent of a Christ with open arms. At his right sits his father, clutching a model
of a1930s airplane of the Spanish Republican Air Force in his hands. At his left the
mother with a baby doll in her lap, an uncanny substitute for the now grown up
children.
Fourth Layer: The eye and the camera. Miarro sets the camera behind the Painter
and in front of the Family. He engages in a sort of Lacanian filmmaking mode: Silent.
Unobtrusive. Detached. And in doing so, the director sets in motion a saber mirar
reminiscent of that old knowing how to look Salvador Dal indicated of the Zeiss
photographic lens in his1927 essay on painting and photography: Knowing how to
look is a mode of invention. And there isnt a purer invention than the one generated
by the anesthetic glance of the most clean eye, devoid of eyelashes, that is the
Zeiss.1
There is no coincidence here, even if that were not the directors intention. True,
Miarros film is all about his parents, all about the family as perhaps Pedro
Almodvar would like to say. It is about courage, and of old age; and of a past life,
and a past history; about the Spanish Civil War, and about the Francoist period. But
is also all about the Eye of the Camera, the Painter, and the Filmmaker looking at
their subjects.
Fifth Layer: The surplus. If, as Dal noticed, knowing how to look is a mode of
invention then Miarros unobtrusive knowing how to look, his Lacanian clean,
detached saber mirar devoid of eyelashes brings into the mix an uncanny surplus.
There is an unexpected turn at the end of the film, a real-life event noted in the
movies final dedication that forces us to look at Familystrip anew. A credit line that,
casting the film in a new light, makes us aware of two crucial facts: that the painter
is in fact always present, from the very beginning of the framed film to its very end;
and that the camera must always pass through him, though his eyes, and his
painting to reach the parents.
Sixth Layer: Mediatic heterogeneity.
Saber mirar es un modo de inventar. Y no existe invencin tan pura como aquella
que ha creado la mirada anestsica del ojo limpsimo, ausente de pestaas, del Zeiss
(Salvador Dal, La fotografa, pura creacin del espritu, 1927)
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Its this eerie surplus that allows all disciplines in Familystrip get connected. They
connect however in a Derridian/Lacanian/Dalinian sensethat is, without
combining, without resulting in an arts combinatoria. Such as life connects with
death without ever touching, so in the film connect without ever combining war
with peace, freedom with imprisonment, young with old age, history passed and
history lived; or dolls with children and model planes with real fighting ones. Or
painting with filmmaking.
And it is precisely in keeping intact the dissymmetry inherent in Film and Art, and
Life and History that Luis Miarro unassumingly has turned an intimate homey
movie into a piece of art. Familystirp is one of the most lucid, moving, and touching
documentaries of the last decades. A meditation on survival and destruction, it is
filmmaking at its best.