Celebrity Biographies
Eusebio Fernandez Ardavin
Spanish cinema has many directors, especially in its early days, who have not been sufficiently recognized. This is the case of Eusebio Fernández Ardavín, who devoted himself to the profession of making films before and after the Spanish Civil War, demonstrating unquestionable talent.
Spanish screenwriter and film director, from a family closely linked to the profession. His father, César Fernández Ardavín, known as Vinfer, was a lithographer, and made, among other works, numerous movie posters. Brother of the theater writer Luis Fernández Ardavín, many of his works were transferred to the cinema, through the company created by both in 1917, Producciones Ardavín. His nephew César Fernández Ardavín Ruiz, also a film director, began working for him, until he won the Golden Bear in Berlin with El lazarillo de Tormes in 1960.
Eusebio began to study industrial engineering, but left it in the first year for the cinema. He created a movie sign lab. The first amateur filming of him was shot with his friend Armando Pou. His films help to get an idea of what Madrid was like at the beginning of the 20th century. The arrival of talkies allowed him to work as a dialogue supervisor and director of Spanish versions of the Paramount subsidiary in Joinville (Paris).
Associated with Jacinto Benavente, Carlos Arniches, the Álvarez Quintero brothers, Pedro Muñoz Seca and Eduardo Marquina, the Fernández Ardavín brothers created CEA (Compañía Española Americana), the first sound studios in Madrid, where Eusebio directed his first sound films. The first is the short Saeta (1933), and Agua en el suelo (1934), the first feature film. He would never abandon his role as art director and poster designer, sometimes for his own films.
His facet as a poster designer made him pay attention to pictorial works of art, which is especially noticeable in Tierra y cielo (1940), which takes place in a Museo del Prado that he undoubtedly visited on many occasions, and which emphasizes the paintings by Velázquez and Murillo, as ideal representatives of earthly and heavenly values. Two years later he would film The Lady with the Ermine , another romantic story set in 16th-century Toledo, in which he imagines the love affair between El Greco’s daughter and a Jewish goldsmith, and in which the famous painter is very present.