{"id":20430,"date":"2016-02-28T13:50:38","date_gmt":"2016-02-28T18:50:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/?p=20430"},"modified":"2019-03-12T12:10:22","modified_gmt":"2019-03-12T16:10:22","slug":"coming-soon-the-wild-tale-of-the-paneros","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2016\/02\/coming-soon-the-wild-tale-of-the-paneros.html","title":{"rendered":"Coming Soon: The Wild Tale of the Paneros"},"content":{"rendered":"

When a young Spanish director began making a film about a mad family of poets “during the waning days of the Franco dictatorship,” Aaron Shulman writes<\/a> in the current issue of The Believer,<\/em> it was intended to be a short documentary. Titled “El Desencanto” (“The Disenchanted”), the film “ended up spilling into a ninety-one minute feature” and, he reports, has since become “a cult classic in Spain.”<\/p>\n

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Leopoldo Panero<\/p><\/div>\n

Shulman is now writing a collective biography of the family, the Paneros, to be published by the HarperCollins imprint Ecco Books, in 2018. Its cast of characters is nothing less than stunning. The family patriarch was the poet laureate of the Franco regime, Leopoldo Panero, who, as noted by the publisher, betrayed the ideals of his friend Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca during the Spanish Civil War (and later battled with the Chilean poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda). The matriarch was Felicidad (Blanc) Panero, an actress and writer (and obsessive stage manager of the family legacy). Their three sons were also poets — most significantly the subversive Leopoldo Mar\u00eda Panero, who would spend the 1980s living in a mental institution and whose poetry readings drew mobs of fans. Roberto Bola\u00f1o considered him a genius, and in the last interview he gave before his death, in 2003, called him “one of the three best living poets in Spain.”<\/p>\n

“No one’s ever told their story in English, and only in fragments in Spanish,” Shulman, a freelance journalist and former Fulbright scholar, messaged me in an email. “So I feel really lucky to be the one to tell the whole thing for the first time.” Or as he writes in The Believer,<\/em> “the Paneros are the stuff of fiction, which is the best type of reality: the kind that humbles the imagination of novelists but doesn\u2019t deter them from trying.”<\/p>\n

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Felicidad (Blanc) Panero<\/p><\/div>\n

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Leopoldo Panero<\/p><\/div>\n

When “El Desencanto” was released, in 1976, a year after Franco’s death, some “critics roundly dismissed it,” Shulman notes, but others saw it as “an autopsy” of the Franco period. He describes the film as<\/p>\n

a black-and-white throwback to a past era, a badge of cool for the literary set, and an anecdotal curio of Spanish cultural history recalled by older generations. It is a fascinating historical document but above all a singular work of art, both purposeful and accidental. This is largely due to the Paneros themselves, as [the director Jaime] Ch\u00e1varri himself will admit. They<\/em> were a singular work of art … the whole family.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Juan Luis Panero<\/p><\/div>\n

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Michi Panero<\/p><\/div>\n

One of Shulman’s favorite scenes shows the youngest son, Michi, and the eldest, Juan Luis, at a garden table, on a chilly autumn day, arguing “about which better defines the current state of the Paneros: their father\u2019s death or their brother Leopoldo Mar\u00eda\u2019s life.”<\/p>\n

Michi is all boyish good looks and floppy curls, wearing a dark coat with an upturned collar, bristling with the confidence that being twenty-\u00adthree is all about. Juan Luis is balding and vaguely trollish, aged beyond his thirty-two years. He leans back into his chair with a weary seniority reinforced by the coat draped regally over his shoulders.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Have a look:<\/p>\n