ABSTRACT
Old soldiers do die. Franco went in 1975, Buñuel in 1983. In between, the fascist regime of the first was supplanted by the decadent dream of the latter. Four decades of repression had ended, and in its stead came a new age of political and personal freedom that would revitalise Spanish cinema. Democracy was the result of a gradual process, but liberalism, experimentation and explicitness seemed to happen all at once. Film-makers found themselves in an unsupervised candy store of previously forbidden treats, and either stood there gawping at all the bare flesh and blasphemy or gorged themselves sick on the new permissiveness. From Madrid came films that expressed the bleary-eyed bemusement of the first generation to come of age in the democracy, alongside those which reflected the soul-searching of thirty-somethings, for whom the transition was the impetus for reflections on their own lost youth. Meanwhile, from Barcelona, came Vicente Aranda, whose explorations of sexuality offered incisive commentaries on the contemporary socio-political context. Some Spanish film-makers found that commercial pressures were a greater challenge to their creativity than censorship. Others, such as Pedro Almodovar, simply revelled in their time. Camp, kitsch and cosy, his films were playful, rude and fun. And then, when the party ended, and the moral hangover was added to the whiplash of accelerated change, popular disillusionment with democracy was either treated with honesty and imagination, as in Almodovars ever more sophisticated features, or assuaged by a panacea of nostalgia in films that propounded a recreation of Spain from long before the burden of democracy.
