Barcelona, a city of cinema (II)
We recently made a post titled Barcelona, a City of Cinema, in which we reviewed films from all times shot and set in the city. That is, the plots take place in Barcelona. Today we want to focus on productions that have used Barcelona locations to represent other places. Some of these examples are: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, The Machinist or 23F: the most difficult day of the King.
Although Perfume is set in 18th century France, parts of the film were shot in the streets of the Gothic Quarter. According to its director, Tom Tykwer, Barcelona, along with Girona, “have better preserved the essence of the architecture of that era”. That's why they chose locations such as the Mercè square, the Main Square of Poble Espanyol, the Sant Felip Neri square, or the Horta Labyrinth Park.
The most striking case is that of The Machinist, a film set in an unspecified city on the North American West Coast. Directed and starred by Americans, it was filmed in Barcelona, El Prat, and Sant Adrià de Besòs, as it is a Spanish production. Of all the locations, the most surprising is Tibidabo, which is unrecognizable as it is integrated into a film that appears to be foreign.
Other cities that Barcelona has been made to represent on the big screen include Hamburg and Havana in The Voyage of the Damned, a 1976 film that tells the desperate journey made in 1939 by a ship full of Jewish refugees fleeing the horrors of Nazi Germany. The port of Barcelona was used to simulate the departure and arrival docks of the ship to Hamburg, while the streets of Ciutat Vella were used to set the scene for Old Havana. Something similar happened with Istanbul 65, for which, in addition to filming in the aforementioned Turkish city, scenes were also shot under the arcades of the Plaza Real, the Pavilions of the Finca Güell, or the winding road of Garraf.
It's already hard to recognize outdoor settings when a movie's plot is set in a different city, but it's even more difficult to identify a place when it's an interior decoration. A clear example is the Granvía Hotel, which was transformed for a few days into the Zarzuela Palace in Madrid, as some scenes of 23F: The most difficult day of the King, the TV-Movie about the 1981 coup d'état told from the perspective of the monarch, were filmed in its lobby and main staircase. It's not the only example of a movie shot in this old 19th-century mansion. Unconscious (2004), The Chair (2006) and 11-11-11 (2011) are some of the productions that have taken advantage of the hotel's spectacular architecture and decoration to shoot scenes there.
Whether it's with the interiors of historic buildings like the Granvía, or with the exteriors preserved by a city with 2,000 years of history, Barcelona continues to be a cinematic city.
