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TThe macabre Spanish TV drama from the 1970s is being released as two coins: Antonio Mercero’s The Cabin (★★★★★) is a 1972 surreal cult film that lasts only 35 minutes but includes an entire dream world of anxiety. It debuted on television in the spirit of Alfred Hitchcock Presents or Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected, but I can imagine it was shown in theaters as a screen saver before Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel.
La Cabina is a dark comedy in which a middle-aged man, the veteran Spanish comedian José Luis López Vázquez, enters a phone booth that has just appeared on the outskirts of town. But the phone doesn’t work and then he can’t go out; the door is closed. What to do? No cell phone access; in 1972, a mobile phone station he was mobile phone. He is frightened by the waves in the mirror, although he seems to have no power to speak and is hindered by his stupidity. A crowd gathers around and tries to help. A tense, carnivalesque atmosphere ensues. The man sees himself reflected in the mirror held by the viewer: a caged, stupid, bourgeois homo sapiens like a zoo animal.
When the telecom engineers arrive and load the package into their truck and pick him up, they may think that these are the professionals who will take him to the warehouse where they can take him out. But no. Could this not be a coincidence? What is the meaning of all this? La Cabina may be a metaphor for surveillance and brutality in Franco’s Spain; or a vision of death with a phone as a standing box; or just pondering how strange phone boxes were (no wonder Doctor Who used a police phone box as a Tardis). And it also plays on the strange anonymity of the phone, the voice emerging from the ether. You can compare this Joel Schumacher’s claustro-thriller Phone BoothColin Farrell stars as a trapper who finds himself trapped in a New York phone booth that he uses to make outside jobs. There’s also Graham Starks’ clever short film Lust from the 1971 anthology The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins, starring Harry H Corbett as a sad, lustful loser who tries to seduce a woman in a nearby phone box.
In contrast, Spanish horror director Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s Television (★★★☆☆) from 1974 is nothing short of fun: a fun, but sprawling, TV-driven comedy, and a smorgasbord of randomness and fun. The father of the director Narciso Ibáñez Menta plays Enrique, a sad and small boy who works long hours to earn enough money to provide for his wife Susana (María Fernanda D’Ocón) and their two children, who do not spend much time with him. They dream of buying all the mods imaginable, but the white one is the new type of TV (and the popularity of the TV type now seems to be as eternal as the phone box).
But when the expensive TV is installed in Enrique’s study, where he likes to read and listen to classical music, Enrique forgets about work and everything else and is very busy watching TV all day, every day (although the film’s quirk is that it looks like black and white). TV shows seem more real than reality, and certainly no more nonsense than the life-sapping work that paid TV in the first place. But his joy and rapture soon turned to fear; he complains about what he sees on the news: “…napalm…the bodies of Palestinian terrorists…” He thinks about all the people who don’t win in sports and the violence of art, and in the end he believes that the people on TV are talking to him and trying to escape through the glass that he covers with cardboard paper. Almost an hour into its run, El Televisor eventually reaches its breaking point, but all the nonsense is done with theatrical joy.
