Speak the Culture: Spain: Be Fluent in Spanish Life and Culture

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1. Identity: the
   building blocks of
   2. Literature
   and philosophy
   3. Art and
   architecture
   4. Performing
   arts
   5. Cinema
   and fashion
   6. Media and
   communications
   7. Food and drink 8. Living culture:
   the details of

In with the New: Carlos Saura and co

The work of Berlanga, Bardem and others associated

with Spain’s understated neo-Realist phase opened the

door to the looseNuevo Cine Españolor New Spanish

Cinema movement. Spain’s incoming Director General of

Cinematography, José María García Escudero, in the job

for most of the 60s, finally committed censorship

guidelines to paper and cut the new generation some

slack in negotiating cuts and revisions. A more socially

aware, critical mode of cinema evolved to rival the

formulaic state-sponsored fare. Carlos Saura, another IIEC

graduate, surfaced as the leading director, making films

that used allegory to comment obliquely on Franco’s

Spain.La Caza(1965) was an early Saura triumph, its terse

story of four hunters in a desolate, violent landscape

emblematic of Spain’s post-war psychosis. Saura produced

another gem soon after –Peppermint Frappé(1967), in

which an isolated, murderous man sets his sights on a

young Englishwoman. It was apparently made in homage

to Buñuel and Hitchcock. Saura is still making films today,

nearing a career total of 40 features.Towards the end of

the Franco years a young director, Victor Erice, took indirect criticism to new

levels with his debut film.El espíritu de la colmena(1973), ostensibly about a

six-year-old girl growing up in isolated post-Civil War Castile, offered haunting

insight into life under the Caudillo. Other directors to emerge within the New

Spanish Cinema period included Mario Camus, José Luis Borau and Ricardo

Franco, all of whom would go on to shape cinema in the post-Franco era. By

the time Borau’sFurtivos(1975) (in which he also starred) came out, film-

makers were damning the regime with little disguise, in this instance with a

masterpiece on repression, sex and murder.

The Barcelona School

While the Madrid-centric New Spanish Cinema movement gathered pace, a

less politicised but more visually radical circle of young film-makers gathered

in Catalonia in the 1960s. Inspired by Pop Art and, less directly, the aesthetics

of advertising, the so-called Barcelona School hoped to draw Spanish cinema

away from traditional modes into something more avant-garde.

It came from above
While New Spanish
Cinema was a genre
within which Spain
finally produced
progressive, often
disobedient directors,
the term was actually
coined by the regime,
used as part of
coordinated efforts to
sell a ‘new’ Spain to the
world in the 1960s.

Carlos and Geraldine
Carlos Saura had a long-
term relationship with
Geraldine Chaplin.
Charlie’s daughter has
starred in nine of
Saura’s films including
Peppermint Frappé, his
first commercial success.