L’espace dans le travail de Rafael Azcona, scénariste

Resumen

This study analyses the narrative dimension of screenplays, focusing primarily on the work of Rafael Azcona (1926-2008), comedy writer for cinema and television. Due to the fact that he created and developed on the screen a personal universe that is easily identifiable by the audience, in Spain at least, this screenwriter is considered to be a true auteur. Our primary objective is to understand how Rafael Azcona’s characteristic style could survive even when his text dissolved little by little in the entire process of constructing an audio-visual work. The analytic work is made even more delicate by the fact that we must take into account his collaboration with filmmakers that had their own very personal universes, such as Marco Ferreri, Carlos Saura, or Luis Garcia Berlanga. The main difficulty encountered with regard to Rafael Azcona’s work was finding out which was the original screenplay of the film. The one written before the start of filming? The one modified during filming? The one published once the film was shown in cinemas? The one liked by the audience? Which brought us to a fundamental question: does the screenplay belong to the readers or to those who watch? It is, in fact, important to remember the weight of socio-economic aspects in the film industry when trying to understand screenwriting. Given that a screenplay, due to its structure and form, doesn't generally wish for a reader, but for a camera, to be filmed, we have decided to look at the scenario from the point of view of the spatial construction of a story, that is, an element usually attributed to image architects, such as the director and the editor. The importance given by Azcona’s work to the locations where the story takes place, the special relationship between character and space, and the ubiquitous theme of the search for intimacy invite us to explore in depth the role played by space in the construction of the story. In this study, we try to show how the screenwriter Rafael Azcona, who knew that the screenplay wasn’t written to be read, but to be seen later on a screen, put great effort into describing and constructing in great detail the most cinematic of characteristics: space, that reality which cinema can never leave