In The Garden of Delights, Carlos Saura infuses his now familiar, archetypal elements of financial crisis, physical disability, infirmity, and game hunting that were introduced in his seminal film, The Hunt as subversive, iconic symbols for the rigidity of Francoist corrupted ideology, with a healthy dose of blunt, tongue in cheek – and pointedly allegorical […]
Peppermint Frappé opens to the image of a pair of hands meticulously cropping images from a fashion magazine for a personal scrapbook. The hands belong to an unassuming and conservative physician named Julian (José Luis López Vázquez) who runs a radiology clinic from his personal residence, assisted by a shy, mild mannered nurse named Ana […]
Anticipating Theo Angelopoulos’ The Hunters in its allegorical dissection of a dysfunctional, polarized, contemporary society engendered by the incestuous and repressive, right-wing regime, Carlos Saura’s taut and subversive magnum opus, The Hunt is a harrowing and potent exposition into the pervasive moral corruption that has surfaced under a corrosive combination of Franco-era class entrenchment and […]
On the surface, Filmoteca Española’s classification of Nemesio M. Sobrevila and Eusebio Fernández Ardavĺn’s romantic comedy The Sixth Sense as an avant-garde film seems like a tenuous designation, loosely supported by an episode in which abstract forms and flicker images momentarily appear in the cueing of a film reel. But The Sixth Sense also functions […]
Like Boris Lehman’s autobiographical essay Looking for my Birthplace, Albert Solé’s Bucharest, Memory Lost is a search for identity – the reconstruction of a past that has been lost in the shadows of turbulent history, exile, and parental silence. For Solé, the ambiguity of his nationality as a young boy – his parents having alternately […]
Similar to Llorenç Soler’s previous film, 52 Sundays, Long Journey to the Rage is also a sobering portrait of poverty and marginalization. And like the bullfighting students of his earlier film, the people in Long Journey to the Rage are also anonymous immigrants who have abandoned a hardscrabble existence in the rural provinces in an […]