Vicente Aranda Ezquerra (Spanish: [biˈθente aˈɾanda eθˈkera]; 9 November 1926 – 26 May 2015) was a Spanish film director, screenwriter and producer.
Due to his refined and personal style, he was one of the most renowned Spanish filmmakers. He started as a founding member of the Barcelona School of Film and became known for bringing contemporary Spanish novels to life on the big screen. Aranda was also noted for exploring difficult social issues and variations on the theme of desire while using the codes of melodrama.
Love as uncontrollable passion, eroticism and cruelty are constant themes in his filmography. The frank examination of sexuality is one of the trademarks of his work, as seen in his most internationally successful film: Amantes (1990) (Lovers).
Vicente Aranda Ezquerra was born in Barcelona on 9 November 1926. He was the youngest son in a large and impoverished family who had emigrated from Aragón to Barcelona twenty years before he was born. He barely knew his father, an itinerant photographer, who died when the child was only seven years old. The Spanish Civil War, in which his family took the side of the losing Republicans, marked his childhood. Thinking that the war was going to be more bearable in a small town than in Barcelona, the family moved early in the war to Peñalba, his mother's native village. The dire situation there, close to the front at Aragon, forced them to return to Barcelona in 1938.
After the war ended, Aranda spent a lot of time in the local movie theatre, much against the wishes of his mother, who took to smelling him on his return for traces of the disinfectant that was sprayed in cinemas of the time. He never finished his formal studies. At age thirteen, he began to work in order to help support his family. He had a number of different jobs in his home town, trying a multitude of trades before following his brother Palmiro to Venezuela in 1952. He emigrated for economical and political reasons. In Venezuela, Aranda worked as a cargo technician for an American shipping business. Later he directed programs at NCR. After seven years, he returned to Spain in 1959.
Wealthy and married upon his return, he intended to become a novelist, but found that he lacked enough talent as a writer. He fell in with the cultural elite of Catalonia and was encouraged to try his hand at filmmaking. He was not allowed to enroll at the School of Cinema in Madrid because he had not graduated from high school. In Barcelona and completely self-taught, Aranda found a way to direct his first feature film.
Nearly 40 years old when he started directing, Aranda did not gain international success until his 60s. He had a long and prolific career, making 27 films in more than 40 years as a director.
Vicente Aranda married twice. His first wife, Luisa, a name he used repeatedly for the female leads in his films, committed suicide years after they divorced. They did not have children. Aranda's second wife, Teresa Font, was thirty years his junior. She was the editor of his movies since the mid-1980s; they had two daughters together, but separated a few years before Aranda's death.
Aranda made his directorial debut with the low-budget Brillante Porvenir (1964) (Promising Future), co-directing with screenwriter Román Gubern to avoid problems with the directors guild of Spain. Loosely inspired by the American novel, The Great Gatsby, the film used the aesthetic of the neorealism in a story of a young man from the provinces who tries to make it into the Catalan middle class. Brillante Porvenir, cut by censors, was received coldly by public and critics. This failure made Aranda turned to an experimental form of film making for his next project.
The director's second film, Fata Morgana (1965), an unusual work in Spanish Cinema, is an experimental film, based on a script written with Gonzalo Suárez. The film took inspiration for its graphic visual style from television commercials and comic strips. Ignored upon release, Fata Morgana would eventually be recognized for inspiring the particular kitsch aesthetic of La Escuela de Barcelona (the Barcelona School of Film), an avant-garde movement which sought creative innovation in Spanish films.
In the following years, Aranda's work played between pushing the artistic envelope and using a virtual style drawn from mass media. In these films, Aranda tackled established film genres with an eye on revising and modernizing them.
Since his first features were not widely seen, Aranda produced a commercially oriented film with fantastic and erotic overtones: Las Crueles (1969) (The Exquisite Cadaver). In it, a mysterious woman elaborates a scheme to avenge the death of her girlfriend by a callous publisher. This filmed was plagued with a series of problems: it was long in the making; Aranda suffered an accident during the shooting, which forced him to work from a stretcher, and finally he had a legal battle with the producers. It would take Aranda many years to recover ownership of this film. The experience made him found his own production company: Morgana Film, which produced his next six features.
In La Novia Ensangrentada (1972) (The Blood Spattered Bride), a loose adaptation of Carmilla, a lesbian vampire recruits a young bride to help her seek revenge against all men. A genre film for the cultural elite, it evaded censors by virtue of its incomprehensibility. By Aranda's own admission, he sacrificed conventional coherence for the cinematographic and phenomenological possibilities of each action. The film was distributed internationally in the United States, France and Italy.
Aranda started to use the codes of melodrama with Clara es el Precio (1974) (Clara is the Price), an offbeat mix of melodrama, parody and surreal comedy. He cast Amparo Muñoz, Spain's future Miss Universe, as a naive housewife adrift in a world without taboo. She pursues a career as a pornographic film actress in order to fund a business project for her impotent husband.
This was made during El Destape, a period in Spanish Cinema that had a proliferation of nudity in film under the new social liberties during the political period following the fall of Franco's regime. The Clara film's effort to shock was also its purpose. Like the Surrealists, Aranda's ability to shock was itself a political statement. "We had lived in a state of consensus and this is fatal for cinema", he complained, "We have become our own censors and all we want to do is forget, be silent, not speak."
Following the fall of Franco's regime, social censorship was lifted. Under the new permissiveness, Aranda shot more daring films such as Cambio de Sexo (1976) (Sex Change), skillfully tackling the subject of transsexuality, and using it as an embodiment of the contemporary political transition. This film marks a switch in Aranda's filmography.
He began to use a more realistic style rather than the stylish aesthetics prominent in his early films. Cambio de Sexo also marks the beginning of his long collaboration with Victoria Abril, who became his favorite actress. Over the next three decades, director and star worked together in a dozen films that would include major artistic triumphs for both. Cambio de Sexo dramatizes the development of the destape – the period in the late 1970s and early 1980s Spain characterized by a much more open portrayal of sex in the press, literature and film.
Cambio de Sexo recounts the story of a young effeminate boy, played by Victoria Abril, who lives in the outskirts of Barcelona and escapes to the city to explore his desire to become a woman. The character of the young man is an embodiment of the changes in Spain, with political extremes of uncompromising orthodoxy and unrestrained anarchy. Cambio de Sexo lured audiences with its controversial theme, and it was released to critical acclaim.