Fructuoso Gelabert

Active - 1914 - 1914  |   Born - Jan 15, 1874   |   Died - Feb 27, 1955   |  

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Biography by AllMovie

Fructuoso Gelabert is widely regarded as the father of Spanish cinema. His contributions are numerous: as producer, director, cinematographer, and manufacturer of film equipment. Gelabert made the first fictional Spanish film as well as the first film from his country to be exported abroad; he was also one of the first filmmakers to replace painted backdrops with three dimensional sets. Gelabert was born and raised in Gracia, a village which has now become part of Barcelona. He started out as a woodworker and a photographer, building his first camera in 1897. Gelabert debuted as a director in 1897 with the 20 meter fictional short Riña en un Café, the first of its kind in Spain. Though the original print has been lost, Gelabert reconstructed a facsimile in 1952. Gelabert made the first Spanish export, the documentary Visita de Doña María Cristina y Don Alfonso XIII a Barcelona/ The King's Visit to Barcelona, in 1898. He first used three-dimensional sets with Guzmán el Bueno/Guzmán the Brave (1909). In 1913, Gelabert was taken to court by Nobel prize-winning playwright José Echegaray for Gelabert's 1913 release Mala Raza/Mean Breed. Echegaray contended Gelabert had misappropriated the title and plot from one of his plays. While the courts found in Gelabert's favor, he re-released the film in 1914 as Nubes Negras (there is another film with the same title and year of release). In the early '20s, Gelabert filmed Barcelona surgeon Dr. Mas performing operations. Gelabert continued making films until the advent of sound, when he left filmmaking to manufacturer cameras and projectors. Though Gelabert devised several potentially innovative theories regarding sound systems and 3-D photography, he lacked the financing to realize them. In the early '40s, Gelabert published his memoirs in a series of articles for the magazine Primer Plano.