Juan Marine

Born on the last day of 1920, in Barcelona, ​​Juan Mariné Bruguera had two soccer players as parents, both his father, Enrique Mariné, and his mother, Josefa Bruguera. As a child he suffered “a very ugly cough”, so his mother sent him to the nearby Barcelona town of Arenys de Mar for a while to get better, where in 1924 he had his first contact with the cinema. Some local antiques dealers organized a screening of early Charlie Chaplin short films . “That was wonderful, it impacted me a lot,” he recalled in an interview. When he returned to his hometown he asked his mother to enroll him in school early to learn how to read silent movie posters.

When he was studying high school, Juan Mariné suffered a fever that left him blind, until an ophthalmologist managed to restore his eyes to normal. When he got better, he didn’t go back to school, preferring instead to start working as an errand boy. His mother kept taking him to spend the summer in Arenys de Mar, where he went to a movie club, whose projector used to break down, so he learned how to fix it. This technical ability would be decisive for his future, since in 1934 his uncle, José Vilaseca, a mechanic, commissioned him to take a camera to the Orphea studios in Barcelona. When he got there, it didn’t quite work, but Juan Mariné read the instructions, and despite the fact that the site workers couldn’t find the problem, he was able to repair it. “The instruction manual was in French, and while I was waiting for the van to arrive to move the camera, I read it to myself”, he recalled. “When the team, all made up of Swiss people, arrived at the studio, they had already had problems with the camera they were using. I was the only one capable of understanding that they had plugged the installation in the wrong way”. As expected, they asked him to come back the next day, and he ended up as meritorious in the photography department. “They gave me ten pesetas per movie, which turned out to be more than my father earned.”

He began his journey in Orphea, as an assistant in Gypsy Love, by Alfonso Benavides, followed by other films. Times were good for Spanish productions (Cifesa exported its products to Latin America) and for the Seventh Art in general. “At that time, theaters were almost always full. I remember the premiere of Fra Diavolo , in 1934, with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy , with those incredible scenes and five hundred spectators dying of laughter”, he comments.

When the Civil War broke out, he joined SIE Films, a production company created by the CNT, the Anarchist Union, to shoot documentaries and even filmed the funeral of Durruti, the leader of this movement, in November 1936. “We ran out of batteries, and I was the only one who knew how to shoot by hand dragging the film with the crank”, he recalled. “We didn’t have sound either, but later we synchronized the images with the sound of the Radio Barcelona broadcast.” At the end of the war, he went into exile in France, and captured by the neighboring country’s army, he ended up in a concentration camp in Argelès-sur-Mer. “I am the only Spaniard who managed to escape from there, and I did it by swimming,” he explained. Back in Spain, he was captured in Pasajes (Guipúzcoa) and imprisoned in a Seville jail. He didn’t spend much time there,

After exercising various trades, he joined the military service, and later moved to Madrid, where he intended to work again in the cinema. He has old friends from the world with whom he has collaborated, so in the end he manages to get hired. He signed for the first time as director of photography the film La sombra iluminada , by Eduardo García Maroto .

He began an important journey at the service of numerous directors, especially Pedro Lazaga, with whom he shot twenty-two feature films (in titles such as Las secretarias or Abuelo made in Spain ). But he also put himself under the orders of Antonio del Amo ( Peach in syrup ) twelve times, nine with José María Forqué ( A million in the trash , etc.), seven with Juan Piquer Simón ( Supersonic Man ) and five with Pedro Masó ( A girl and a man , Premarital experience ).

Juan Mariné married on August 16, 1948 with Carmen Brandy, daughter of El Gallo, a famous bullfighter. Together they had three children, Nuria, Juan Óscar and Jorge Álvaro, before separating in 1968. His fame crossed borders, to the point that Orson Welles invited him to his home to give a lecture at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). ) about your work. “Hollywood didn’t appeal to me, nor did I have any interest in working there, although I respect their efforts to take cinema to where it is now.”

His filmography includes other classics of Spanish cinema such as  Historias de la televisión , by José Luis Sáenz de Heredia , El astronauta , by Javier Aguirre , María de la O , by Ramón Torrado , or La gran familia , by Fernando Palacios , which had to re-shoot completely, because when the filming was about to end the negative was damaged.

After retiring in 1990, he works as a restorer of old films for the Madrid Community Film School (ECAM) and the Spanish Film Library. “For now I have fixed negatives, but we’ll see how we keep the digital, which is turning out to be a worse storage medium,” he warns. He has received the National Cinematography Award and the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts.