Nothing is as it is, but as it is remembered. (Ramón del Valle Inclan)

On the empty balcony is a mythical film directed by jomí (Jose Miguel) Garcia Ascot in Mexico (founder the Cinema Club of Mexico and French Institute for Latin America, together with Jean Francois Ricard and José Luis González de León).

Carried out between 1961 and 1962, based on lyrical autobiographical stories by Maria Luisa Elio, then unpublished, later collected and published, in the book Time to cry and other stories (with a prologue by Álvaro Mutis).

Film shot on Sundays, for 40 weekends, with non-professional actors, all friends, children of Republicans. It was an amateur realization, everyone cooperated with what they could (two paintings donated by famous painters were auctioned). Filmed in different locations: in the Ateneo Español, the Lira Park, the Madrid College, the Condesa Building, the Desierto de los Leones National Park, the Bellinghausen restaurant, the Spanish Pantheon, the Spanish Sanatorium and other places in Mexico City.

This film is a true manifesto of independent cinema and auteur cinema, of a very remarkable aesthetic and literary quality. A film with strong influences from the French New Wave, starring Nuri Perena, Maria Luisa Elío, Conchita Genoves, Jaime Ñuñoz de Baena, Belina García, Fernando Lipkau, Alicia Bergua, Martín Bergua.

“Cinema is face”, said Bergman and in Jomí Garcia Ascot's film it is the expressive face and extraordinary eyes of Nuria Pereña, a little Greta Garbo.

The couple (María Luisa and Jomí García Ascot) maintained a deep friendship with the Spanish poet of the Generation of '27, Emilio Prados, with the Cuban Eliseo Diego and with García Márquez, who dedicated to them one hundred years of solitude:

“María Luisa Elío, with her clairvoyant dizziness, and Jomí García Ascot, her husband, paralyzed by his poetic stupor, listened to my improvised stories as encrypted signals from Divine Providence. So I never had any doubts, from their first visits, to dedicate the book to them.”

Among his closest friends, it is also worth mentioning Octavio Paz, Leonora Carrington, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, Emilio Prados, Remedios Varo, Alejo Carpentier and Álvaro Mutis.

It premiered in 1976, in Mexico, at the National Cinematheque and, in 1996, in Spain. prize winner Locarno Film Festival and the Giano d'Oro award at the Latin American Film Festival, in Sestri Levante, 1963.

The narrator voice (voice-over by María Luisa Elío) is that of a girl-woman who tells us the story of Gabriela Elizondo through her memories as a child, the trauma of war, bombings and family wanderings. The cinematographic texture, its plastic expression (light, colour, planes, etc.), is absolutely pictorial, it makes us think of Vermeer, De Chirico or Zurbarán.

I've prayed to find my childhood again, and it's back, and I feel like it's still as hard as before and growing old hasn't done me any good. (Rainer Maria Rilke)

The film tells us about child exile, the exile of children: how come they lived it, how come they imagined it and how they will remember it.

In those days when it happened,orn era yo muy niña, qué diera yo por ser tan niña ahora, si es que acaso he dejado de ser. Y entonces, había algo en las calles, algo en las casas, que después desapareció con aquella guerra, aquella guerra que una vez la vi por los tejados de las casas, aquella guerra que apareció un día en el grito de una mujer.
La niña tenía miedo. Era un miedo tan grande que no la dejaba moverse. ¿Qué haría la niña con ese miedo que le pesaba tanto? Llevaba ya con él mucho rato, sentada en aquel pasillo sin atreverse apenas a mover. Llevaba también mucho rato pensando por qué tenía miedo y no sabía. Ella sabía cuándo había sido mala de qué tenía miedo. Sabía que no debía desobedecer ni gritar ni pelearse con sus hermanas. Sabía también que debía estudiar y ser buena para que no la castigaran. La niña sabía muchas cosas pero no sabía por qué tenía miedo. No era hoy el diablo lo que la asustaba, porque ella había sido buena. Ni tampoco el coco que se esconde para asustar a los niños malos, no, no era esto, porque ella había sido buena. ¿A qué tenía entonces tanto miedo la niña, si sabía que a los niños buenos no se les castiga? Pero yo seguía encogida en aquel pasillo, con mi miedo ahí tan grande en un cuerpo tan chico para guardarlo, mientras las bombas deshacían la ciudad…

María Luísa Elío wrote the original script, in an exercise of recomposition of that childhood that she felt as "lost". She also collaborated on the script, the critic and historian Emilio García Riera. The first part of the film (Gabriela as a girl) has a linear narrative sequence, and the second part is the imagined, longed-for return of the adult Gabriela to her native Pamplona, which turns into a terrible disappointment, into an agonizing crisis of nostalgia.

Perhaps, just perhaps, with the years, many, many years, that pain will be mitigated, but it is mitigated only because it ceases to be. The same melancholy is but a memory that is ignored. (MLElio)

A film full of absences, full of silences, because exile is also a silence. There are two types of images: the time image, viewed in the girl's consciousness, the static shots, and the movement image, in which the exiles move. Linear memory of events, which are presented in chronological order. But memory is not linear, it is rather circular and repetitive. The memories are uncontrollable, insistent, like the repetitive and insistent music in the movie.

He was not so young when he returned home. Perhaps that was what made him not recognize her. Many years had passed, as many years as the war in Spain had begun; and now it was almost impossible for her to recognize that. The house where she had always lived, where the voice of her parents could be heard, was now occupied by people she did not know and whom she would not have wanted to know either.
But if the furniture was different, if in the place of the chest where she hid as a child there was now a bookcase, the walls, however, were the same. Why then was she having such a hard time recognizing them?
She remembered that as a child she had written with a stone on a balcony: "dad and mom." Would she find him she maybe she now? And she was already on the balcony looking for him when she heard someone call her: "Girl, have dinner!" Wasn't that her father's voice? She must have come home from the office, she thought, and she's in a good mood because I hear Mom laughing. But why am I on the balcony?; What am I doing here?, what were we playing?: “we were playing hide and seek”, she heard her sister tell her, but where was her sister that she didn't see her? Cecily, where are you? "I'm not Cecilia, I'm Carmenchu," she heard her other sister answer, but she didn't see her either.
What was wrong with him that he didn't see anyone? Why was he crying? Why had he grown so much?
"Mom, why am I so tall when I'm only seven years old? Mom, answer me, where are you all? Why are you hiding? I don't want to play anymore, I don't want to hide, get out of where you are. Go out mom, go out, be home again, dad sing me that song I liked, and you, you two sisters, play with me, don't leave me here on the balcony; don't leave me alone, come play with me, don't let those four men with rifles take dad away, don't let those bombs fall on us, can't you see that mom says she's not afraid, but it's a lie? come and play with me, otherwise we won't be able to do anything later, they will have separated us and it will be too late; Don't hide, play with me, come back, be home again, come, help me, please help me, help me because I don't know why I've grown so much.

Chronicle of the pain of exile, which was that of an entire generation. On the empty balcony is a mythical, poetic film about the second generation of Spanish exiles in Mexico. The only film made in exile by exiles on the subject of exile.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, the Elíos had to go into exile in Mexico, when María Luisa was only thirteen years old. Jomí García Ascot immigrated with his family when he was twelve years old. They were married in 1954, separated in 1968.

María Luísa could not return to the land of her childhood until 1970: she returned at the age of 44. The diary of that return trip of hers materialized in a book, Time to cry (The tightrope walker, 1988 -Turner, 2002). He returned to Pamplona with the help of his son, Diego García Elío, who was six years old at the time:

I remember little, I was very small. That trip was everything for my mother. He had imagined that return many times. Then, when we were for real, she realized that the coincidences of her mind with reality were overwhelming. It was a very disconcerting experience for her.says García Elío.

In Time to cry, diary of the return to Pamplona, the city of her childhood, María Luisa write:

It was very cold, it was raining, and on a sign like any other it said: 'Pamplona'. Now she could go back, and she was certain, just by looking at the sign, that the people were dead. (MLElio)

His biographer, Eduardo Mateo Gambarte, recounts:

When in 1970 María Luísa Elío returned for the first time to Pamplona, from which she had left in 1936 and where her memory continued to live, she found herself in a cold season full of shadows, silences and absences. A woman clinging to her past and to the hand of her six-year-old son looking for ghosts of the past on the empty balcony of a house that had been uninhabited since her childhood. She only listens to the voice of all the nostalgia accumulated for more than thirty years. Nobody's voice. No one recognizes her and she doesn't recognize the memories of her either. “To return is to leave”, the author will conclude after this futile attempt to recover her past.

In the second part of the film, Gabriela, an adult, relives her memories in her old house. Rocesvalles avenue, in Pamplona, which is now idle:

Evil is not exile, evil is return. (Cesare Pavese)

The film, dedicated to the Spanish dead in exile, was made twenty-one years after the victory of Franco's side, by people who had lived longer in their host country than in Spain. That is the biggest change in perspective of that generation. Faced with the security of the return of the first exile, the doubt of this second generation of exiles, as Ángel Quintana explains:

“At that time they were in full youth and began to think about the possibility of recovering the memory of their origins. They all wanted to return to the paradise world they had lost as children. The loss of childhood gravitated traumatically in his existence.”

María Luisa Elío never considered herself a writer, she found refuge in the theater. She studied at the school of the Japanese Seki Sano, a refugee from World War II. She was part of the avant-garde theater group poetry out loud, where he met Octavio Paz, Leonora Carrington or Juan Soriano. She until she married my father. She had a chaotic and spontaneous method. Her ideas surprised her at any time. She captured them on pages, half-finished notebooks, cards... she never lived by writing."

In the 1950s, María Luísa collaborated in various period films and published stories in journalistic media such as the 'Mexico in Culture' supplement of the newspaper Novedades and the Revista de la Universidad. She also read her stories (“Of the ladies”, “Of fear and memory”) at the Ateneo Español de México.

The on empty balcony It is a sensitive, intimate, feminine film. In film writing, history is confused with memory. History, memory, imagination. Memory of the senses (the feeling of extreme cold, the sounds of war), the continuous transfers to their homes (Elizondo, Valencia, Barcelona), the border crossing (Le Perthus), the trip to Paris, and then to the port Le Havre, the very long wait for the review of documents, and finally the shipment and the trip, in 1940, to Mexico. Images and indelible memories.

Object memory too: "So I took a stopper with me."

The feeling of time, and the traumatized conscience of a girl who remembers, who cannot forget.

It's incredible how time flies... how many times had I heard this phrase said and now it was there, with me, it was me who repeated it: "It's amazing how time passes".
Why hadn't they told me before what time was? Why didn't you put it in my hands and show it to me? "Look girl, this is the time".
Time is ten fingers to count it, I am seven years old, five on the right hand and two on the left. And then the time is Christmas, "the other Christmas and next Christmas." And then it stops being time and a date becomes, my saint, my birthday and the day of my first communion. And then time recedes, five years after the war, nine years after the war, fifteen years after the war. And then there is no, there is no counted time, there is only time that passes: six years... seven years... or a pleasant afternoon spent at home.

According to Paul Ilie who, in his famous book, Literature and internal exile, defined exile as a non-place (exile is a mental condition much more than a material one). It is clear that the place (not place) from which this film is filmed is exile: the inner world and the experience of María Luísa Elío. The impossible return to return to where she has lived, to where she has been a child.

That is why I know that to return is to leave, to leave, to leave a life, almost a whole life, because I know that now the look is only going to serve to erase, I know, I knew, and in that knowledge the check. Pamplona: just one place.

POEM OF EXILE (Jomi Garcia Ascot)

We have come here since we were very young,

to wait, and to live.

We have been holding hands for many years

and autumn in distant dining rooms

vast desktop and omens.

We carry yellowish lights in our hands,

school homework,

gestures we met

like village churches,

and in gardens that winter lengthened

the little banished friends.