English Texts

the ‘intellectual’ and the ‘jobless’ as three figures
from the social base that produces and then consumes
commodities, and who are constantly wondering
about the condition from the time they leave their
hands until, far more expensive, they return to them
again. The conversation revolves naturally around the
legitimacy of that process. The merchant seems to have
convinced them that there must be some concealed
secret for the thing to return to their hands with a significant
added value, for which they have to pay again. The
discussion moves on to the very nature of that value
that the ‘merchant’ situates in the extraordinary
character which the producing hands have given to
the thing itself, so that with the passage of time, and the
social game, it has naturally modified its value and
price. It seems that the trio of ‘producers’, in the face
of those reasons and the modest price the ‘merchant’
proposes (he often puts on an innocent tone, like a
social democrat), suppose that they can take some
advantage from the rich budget offered them. Everything
is translated into a scene in which ‘use value’ and
‘exchange value’ appear as misunderstood concepts.
In an elaborate exchange of commodities, to which
we have to add some added expropriation by the
producers, it would seem that the economic scales
have levelled. The theft of the merchant’s wallet is
vital since it powerfully emphasises Marx’s discourse.
The exchange value is no more than the fruit of a social
exchange process and not the natural use value of
the object itself, depicted in the scene by the false
admiration the ‘producers’ show for their acquisition.
Not only that, the ‘producers’ return to their lair
convinced that if they find the secret of the commodity
they have concluded a fabulous business that will
enable them to multiply their fortunes. The final stroke
refers us directly to that ‘making the commodity speak’
Marx refers. In the film the fetish is destroyed and
inside there is nothing more than a useless blah-blah
of newspaper cuttings; and in the wallet, the ‘added
value’ of a Christmas card with the words ‘Happy
Xmas’. Admittedly, in the original plot of the film the
fetish had a fortune of millions of dollars inside. Both
the ‘merchant-usurer’ and the ‘producer-thieves’
accept the overpayments for the different transactions,
which suggest that the commodity contains a secret.
That rumour, spread from the prison itself where the
perpetrator of a fabulous theft of dollars is incarcerated,
is what confers such a valuable character on the
saint, who appears as a shining commodity, laden
with artistic and religious values when all it conceals
is the vulgar rumour of being the perfect hiding place
for the booty. The fetish is fetish insofar as it hides its
secret. But the commodity, the object as such, is
empty, and the product hides nothing more than its
value. The scene in which the saint’s head is removed
brings us face to face with that emptiness; typical of
any revolutionary access, there is nothing to base that
value on. And so I would say that the conditions in
which ‘the fetishism of commodities and the secret
thereof’ are denounced are more radical than the
ones expressed by Marx in his text, lukewarm words
which, as we said at the beginning, have made
that chapter of Capital anathema to many of its
scholars.
For a broader understanding of the importance of
this scene for the work we are now doing in F.X. Archive
we can leave the film and enter its machinery. In the
realities of the production the conditions of the fiction
have quite a few features in accordance with the move
towards the material that the scene represents. The little
figure used by Fernando Mignoni as a ‘Mac Guffin’
in the film comes from Olot, from a batch reclaimed
from the trade union CNT – which had collectivised
its famous cardboard saint factories in the town –
via Madrid and was taken to the capital by the new
production delegate of the National Federation of the
Public Entertainment Industry in Spain, Antonio Polo,
to be used in the unfinished film Caín. That was a strongly
anticlerical film for which a few shocking scenes
were shot. Oddly enough, many of the materials from
that batch and that film were used in the iconoclastic
reconstructions made by Saénz de Heredia for Vía
Crucis del Señor por las tierras de España, a clerical,
fascist propaganda film. The batches of figures of
saints would not reach Madrid until late in 1937, since
the lorries carrying them were commandeered for the
transport of works of art for the Church of San Pere in
Terrassa, which had been turned into a national museum,
and for the return to Olot of some of the Romanesque
and Romantic jewels of the Museo de Arte de Cataluña
in November 1936. During that time they were stored in
a country house near the church, La Románica, now
in Barberà del Vallès. Reports from the Diocese of
Barcelona note with surprise the veneration given
in these parts after the Civil War to Bishop John the
Almsgiver, the patriarch of Alexandria – a figure
represented in the fetish of the film, with a kind of base
which also served as a reliquary – and which is no
doubt due to some deviation of the merchandise
while it was being stored in that place for over a year.
The choice of that imitation of the reliquary of John the
Almsgiver by Mignoni reveals his broad culture and
his ironic intentions, which take the joke beyond what
is shown in the film itself. The miracles of Bishop John
of Alexandria, a rich merchant to whom the Lord
returned his wealth for all the donations and alms he
gave out, are always jokes about this or that load of
commodities. The final joke of his burial – when he was
to be buried in the tomb of the former patriarchs of
Alexandria there was no room and the corpses of the
old bishops moved of their own will to make a space
for him – left many rumours about the busy trade in
his relics: there were seven times the number of thigh
bones and over ten index fingers found. That was a
frequent situation in the world of relics, but when those
of John the Almsgiver were associated with gifts and
alms they had – particularly in Italy where Mignoni
came from – triggered the analogies between the value
of the money and the remains of the saint.
Mignoni’s taste for games of this kind, especially
for the ‘Mac Guffin’ (in his next film, Martingala,
a strange musical with Carmen Amaya, Lola Flores
and Pepe Marchena, which he began under the
libertarian aegis and released under the Franco regime,
the plot revolved round some American millionaires
who wanted to adopt a ‘little Gypsy boy’ and ended
up taking a non-Gypsy dyed a darker colour) denotes
a knowledge of the commodity form that, as Slavoj
744 English Texts