The dialectic reality/ inventiveness in the discourse of Gutierrez Aragon

Abstract

In an analysis about Spanish cinema of the Transition (1973-1984) from the perspective of its ability to show the history and the contemporary reality of Spain, it was essential to understand the figure of the director Manuel Gutierrez Aragon, him being the author of a few significant films of the period. Despite valuing, first and foremost, the poetic or metaphorical dimensions of his film language, we suspected that his work is deeply rooted in Spanish society and history since the Civil War. Thus, we were interested in establishing a link between these roots’ realism and the more poetic, inventive side of a filmography always elusive to categorisations.

Starting from an analysis of each film (Sánchez Noriega, ed., 2014), we carried out a cross approximation to inquire about the constants of his filmography, constants that are better grasped - in our view - from this "dialectical reality / inventiveness". In order to mitigate the subjectivity inherent in our discourse, we have allowed for scholarly essays and the filmmaker’s testimonies, in addition to our cinematic analyses.

The core ideas of this cinematic discourse include: a realism nuanced by distortions which add a poetic quality to Gutierrez Aragon’s filmography; family memories since childhood and the natural spaces linked to them; the representation of the Spanish social and political situation, beginning in the Francoist forties and leading all the way into the tensions arising from the transition to democracy of the seventies; and the creation of characters when developing the figure of the traitor/hero and examining the acquisition of knowledge and persuasion.