The Clandestine Militant Who Would Be Minister: Semprún and Cinema

Abstract

In Jorge Semprún’s first script adapted to screen by Alain Resnais, La guerre est finie, the protagonist is a clandestine militant from the Communist Party of Spain (PCE). On crossing the Pyrenees in 1966, a French police officer checks his passport without detecting its forgery and apologizes, saying: “la politique c’est toujours compliqué. Il y a des types qui sont clandestins et un bon jour ils deviennent Ministres” (“politics is always complicated. You have clandestine operatives that, one fine day, become ministers”). Two decades later, with democracy established in Spain, fiction became reality, and in 1988 Semprún was named minister of culture in the Socialist government led by Felipe González. The memoirist/novelist had predicted his own future.