Beyond Pedro – seven great Spanish films you need… | Little White Lies

If You Like...

Beyond Pedro – sev­en great Span­ish films you need to see

24 Aug 2016

A person in a red shirt lying on a patterned rug, looking pensive and smoking a cigarette.
A person in a red shirt lying on a patterned rug, looking pensive and smoking a cigarette.
Before you see Almodóvar’s lat­est seek out these less­er seen Span­ish gems.

Com­pared with oth­er large Euro­pean nations like France, Italy and Ger­many, the cin­e­ma of Spain has long been under­val­ued. Franco’s dic­ta­tor­ship cer­tain­ly played a big part in that, oppress­ing and cen­sor­ing the nation’s top tal­ent between 1939 and 1975. But to some extent the regime para­dox­i­cal­ly fuelled cre­ativ­i­ty by forc­ing film­mak­ers to be imag­i­na­tive and sub­tle in how they got their ideas across. Franco’s opened the flood­gates for new gen­er­a­tions of artists to flour­ish. By far the biggest name to emerge dur­ing this peri­od was Pedro Almod­ó­var, yet beyond the grand mas­ter of con­tem­po­rary Span­ish cin­e­ma there is a trea­sure trove of rel­a­tive­ly unher­ald­ed gems to be found. Here are sev­en of our favourites from before and after Franco.

Along with Almod­ó­var, the most cel­e­brat­ed direc­tor of Span­ish cin­e­ma is Luis Buñuel. Yet for all his sur­re­al com­ic genius, the major­i­ty of his mas­ter­pieces were made abroad – he made the sem­i­nal doc­u­men­tary Land With­out Bread in 1932 before the fas­cist vic­to­ry in the Civ­il War drove him out. Doc­u­ment­ing the ter­ri­ble liv­ing stan­dards of the vil­lagers of the remote Las Hur­des, Buñuel accom­pa­nies images of extreme hor­ror, such as that of an appar­ent­ly dead girl (who may or may not just be sleep­ing) and of a don­key being stung to death by a swarm of bees (that may or may not have been pro­voked by the film­mak­ers them­selves) with a voiceover so detached as to become laugh­able. It would cer­tain­ly fail to pass con­tem­po­rary eth­i­cal stan­dards of film­mak­ing, but it does show­case Luis Buñuel’s tal­ent for get­ting under the viewer’s skin, and did indeed cause a stir among audi­ences alarmed by the sub­jects’ poverty.

The peri­od between the end of the Span­ish Civ­il War and the relax­ing of Franco’s dic­ta­tor­ship in the 1960s did not pro­duce many films that were inter­na­tion­al­ly laud­ed, but there are still some hid­den gems to unearth. One such film is Wel­come Mr Mar­shall! by Luis Gar­cía Berlan­ga, a 1953 com­e­dy that uses the fic­tion­al deploy­ment of Truman’s Mar­shall Plan in Spain to cheek­i­ly satirise the over­sim­pli­fied, stereo­typ­i­cal way cit­i­zens of dif­fer­ent coun­tries – in this case the Span­ish and the Amer­i­cans – can per­ceive each oth­er. The film man­ages to be both crowd-pleas­ing and sub­ver­sive and, as is so often the case in Span­ish cin­e­ma, delves into sur­re­al ter­ri­to­ry via some mem­o­rable dream sequences.

The shad­ow of Fran­co looms large over all Span­ish cin­e­ma, and in Luis Buñuel’s case it seemed to make the noto­ri­ous provo­ca­teur even more eager to shock, incense and scan­dalise. After years in exile from the fas­cist régime he returned to Spain in 1960 to make Virid­i­ana, a film packed with enough allu­sions to necrophil­ia, ménage a trois and blas­phe­mous re-enact­ments of the Last Sup­per to ensure its being banned in Spain until Franco’s death, and prompt Buñuel to once more pur­sue his film­mak­ing abroad. Today we’re pret­ty much immune to such taboos, but its glee­ful­ly cyn­i­cal stance on the epony­mous protagonist’s futile attempts to help make the world a bet­ter place and offer char­i­ty to a group of beg­gars remains bracing.

Quite pos­si­bly the most beau­ti­ful film ever to come out of Spain, Vic­tor Erice’s mas­ter­piece demon­strates how the abstract qual­i­ty of images can explore ideas that would not make it past the cen­sors were they expressed more blunt­ly through words. Set in 1940, and told through the naïve, curi­ous and strik­ing­ly big eyes of a six-year-old girl, the film is set in a qui­et, remote vil­lage in the after­math of Franco’s vic­to­ry in the Civ­il War. Noth­ing much dra­mat­ic hap­pens, and there are few explic­it ref­er­ences to the tumul­tuous polit­i­cal land­scape with the char­ac­ters all pre­oc­cu­pied with more domes­tic con­cerns. Yet there’s a mys­te­ri­ous, eerie qual­i­ty to every scene, with the whole film play­ing out like a pro­found child­hood mem­o­ry, that only after time to look back on and reflect begins to fall into place, both as a polit­i­cal alle­go­ry and a med­i­ta­tion on childhood.

Few child stars can claim to have starred in not one but two of their nation’s cin­e­mat­ic mas­ter­pieces before they’ve reached the age of eleven, but that’s exact­ly what Ana Tor­rent man­aged when direc­tor Car­los Saura cast her to star along­side Geral­dine Chap­lin in Cria Cuer­vos fol­low­ing her appear­ance in The Spir­it of the Bee­hive. Like that film, Cria Cuer­vos (the begin­ning of the Span­ish expres­sion Cria cuer­vos y te sacarán los ojos’, which trans­lates as Raise ravens and they will peck your eyes out’) is an enig­mat­ic dra­ma that uses chil­dren in a domes­tic set­ting to com­ment alle­gor­i­cal­ly on how the youth of the day had been left behind by Fran­co-era Spain, a régime that had only just come to an end with the General’s death the year before in 1975.

Cameron Crowe’s Vanil­la Sky was met with mixed reviews when it was released in 2001, with some crit­ics con­demn­ing it as mere vain self-indul­gence from lead actor and pro­duc­er Tom Cruise. Thank­ful­ly for any­one who can’t quite stom­ach the Hol­ly­wood star’s ego, the Span­ish orig­i­nal of 1997 that film is based on, Abre Los Ojos, is a twisty, high-con­cept mash up of gen­res from one of the nation’s most cel­e­brat­ed direc­tors of the past few decades, Ale­jan­dro Amenábar. The film jug­gles mul­ti­ple time frames and shifts enig­mat­i­cal­ly between fan­ta­sy and real­i­ty while telling the sto­ry of a self-cen­tred play­boy whose life falls apart after he is dis­fig­ured in a car crash. It’s fast, messy, and a daz­zling­ly dis­ori­en­tat­ing ride.

You might like