Searching for Ramuntcho: foreign filmmakers in the French Basque Country

Abstract

Since the earliest days of the cinema, the French Basque Country has been a place of pilgrimage for great filmmakers from different nations. Since the XIX century Romantic travellers and intellectuals had portrayed it as an exotic, timeless and differentiated topos. Following in their wake the cinema, with its immense capacity for symbolic representation, contributed to popularizing a mythical image of Basqueness, an image that was finally even adopted by the inhabitants of the place themselves. Through an historical analysis of three documentaries made by three great directors and produced in three European countries in the first half of the XX century, this article sets out to describe the filmic origin of that often hegemonic Basque imaginary based on a rural arcadia, understand how it was produced and highlight the different readings made of it; thus reaffirming the complex polysemy of that image of Basqueness.