Vicente Aranda (born on 9 November 1926 in Barcelona), is a Spanish film director, screenwriter and producer.

Due to his refined and personal style, he is one of the most renowned Spanish filmmakers. He started as a founded member of the Barcelona School of Film and became known for bringing contemporary Spanish novels to life on the big screen. Aranda is famous for exploring difficult social issues and variations on the theme of desire that employs 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 can be seen in his most internationally successful film: Amantes (1990) (Lovers).

Early life

Vicente Aranda Ezguerra was born in Barcelona on 9 November 1926. ^[1] He was the youngest son in a large and impoverished family who had emigrated from Aragón to Barcelona twenty years before he was born. ^[1]The Spanish Civil War, in which his family took the side of the losing Republicans, marked his childhood.^[1] 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, but the dire situation there made them come back to Barcelona in 1938.^[2]

After the war ended, Aranda spent a lot of time in the local movie theatre, much against the wishes of his parents, who took to smelling him on his return for traces of the disinfectant that was sprayed in cinemas of the time.^[3] He never finished his studies. At age thirteen, he had to begin to work in order to help his family.^[2] He had a number of different jobs in his home town, trying a multitude of trades before following his brother to Venezuela in 1952 ^[3]. He emigrated for economical and political reasons.^[2] In Venezuela, Aranda worked as a cargo technician for an American shipping business and later became responsible for programs at an important electronic company. After seven years, he came back to Spain in 1959.

Wealthy and married upon his return, he had the initial desire to become a novelist, but found that he lacked enought talent as a writer. He fell in with the cultural elite of Catalonia and was encouraged to try his hand at filmaking, even after being denied acces to the School of Cinema in Madrid because he never graduated from high school^[3]. In Barcelona and completely self-taught, Aranda found the way to direct his first feature film.

Aranda started directing films late in life, at almost forty and did not reach international success until his 60s, nevertheless, he has had a long and prolific career making twenty-fisx films in more than forty years as director.^[4] Vicente Aranda is married to Teresa Font, his second wife, editor of his movies since the mid 1980s; they have two daughters.

Film career and later life

Early films (1964- 1974)

Aranda made his directorial debut with the low- budget Brillante Porvenir (1964) (Brilliant Future), co directing with screenwriter Román Gubern. Loosely adapted from the Great Gatsby, the film was naive in its appropiation of the aesthetic of the neorealism for a portrait of the Catalan middle class.^[3] Brillante Porvenir, cut by censors, was received coldly by public and critics, but it served to redirect Aranda towards the more fantastic ambit of film making.^[3].

His 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 visual style from television commercials and comic strips.^[5] Ignored upon release, the film would eventually be recognized for inspiring the particular kitsch aesthetic of the Barcelona School of Film,^[3] an avant garde movement which sought creative renovation of Spanish films.

Aranda’s work over the next decade would reveal much of the same tensions noted in Fata Morgana, name a polarity between certain artistic pretensions and a virtual style drawn from mass media. In these films, Aranda worked within established film genres with and eye on towards revising and modernizing them. ^[5]

Since his first features were not widely seen, Aranda followed up with two commercial films with fantastic and erotic overtones: Las Crueles (1969) (The Exquisite Cadaver) and La Novia Ensangrentada (1972) (The Blood Spattered Bride), in which a female vampire seeks revenge against all men. Both were genre films for the cultural elite, that got around the censors by virtue of their incomprenhensibility. By Aranda own admission he sacrified conventional coherence for the cinematographic and phenomenological possibilities of each action.^[3] Nevertheless both films have reached cult movies status.

Aranda started to employ 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 an innocent adrift in a world without taboo: a young virgin bride, whose infantilised husband is impotent with her alone, and who then pursues a career as a pornographic film actress in order to fund a business project. ^[2] The film’s imprudence was also its purpose. Like the Surrealist, 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” ^[2]

Cambio de Sexo (1976)

With the fall of Francos’s regime, the Catalan director was finally able to shoot more daring films like: Cambio de Sexo (1976) (Change of Sex), skillfully tackling the subject of transexuality. This film was the beginning of a long collaboration with Victoria Abril, over the next three decades director and star would be paired in more than ten films that would include major triumphs for both. Made in the period called the transition, Cambio de Sexo is a salient example of the use of transsexualism to reflect social change. The film dramatizes the development of the destape – the period in the late 1970s and early 1980s 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 with a sex identity problem is an embodiment of the changes confronted by the two sides of Spain with their opposites extremes of uncompromising orthodoxy and unrestrained anarchy. Cambio de Sexo allured audiences with its controversial theme, a real novelty, and was released to critical acclaim.

La Muchacha de las Bragas de Oro (1980)

The final element in the dominant Aranda style came in 1979 when he made a clever film adaptation of the popular novel by his fellow Catalan Juan Marsé: La Muchacha de las Bragas de Oro (1980) (Girl with the Golden Panties).^[5] In it, a Falangist character, writing his memoirs accommodates his past to the new democratic realities.

Over the next fifteen years, Aranda established himself, as Spain’s foremost adapter of popular novels into film. ^[5] Unlike the more traditional adaptation that stressed their classical literary origins, his choices usually were guided by the centrality of an erotically defined female character, and a competemporay story emphasizing the force of the milieu on the shaping of actions.^[5]

Aranda has a very special relationship with literature and a great number of his movies are based on literary works. He has been seen as a director who specializes in adaptations from short narratives to novels, including even biographies. Nevertheless for Aranda, adapting a literary work does not involve complications or absurd problems of faithfulness, or lack of the same, to the original text. For him the novel is a raw material with which to create new forms: “ As for adaptations, I feel very comfortable doing them. I don’t have problem with authorship. I don’t think I am more of an author if I write a screenplay of something I’ve read on the news papers or seen on the street that if I take a novel and make a movie based on its contents”.

Asesinato en el Comité Central (1982)

Aranda’s films after democracy was installed in Spain were politically charged with the aftereffects of Franco's regime as in: Asesinato en el Comité Central (1982) (Murder in the Central Committee). In this thriller, a power cut interrupts the proceedings of the Communist Congress and, when the lights come back on, the leader is found death, murdered. The film was based on one of a series of novels by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán that featured a hard-boiled detective called detective Pepe Carvalho. ^[6]. The intrigue runs a poor second to Aranda’s commentary on the transition. ^[6] “ The truth is that I cannot think of another film that deals with this fascinating period’, he stated, there is a kind of collective amnesia about the time”. ^[7]

Much of the film’s action is filtered through headlines and television reports in imitation of the way in which the Spanish public lived the transition. ^[6]. The televised funeral of the Communist leader is a sly montage of mourners at the funeral of Franco, while La Pasionaria ( the legendary Spanish Communist leader who passed dictatorship in exile in the Soviet Union) appears as a senile old dear who sits next to the victim but does not even realize he is dead. Like La Muchacha de las Bragas de Oro, this was a film about extremist coming together in a democracy, in this case in order to solve a crime. ^[6] Whodunnit ? it does not matter. As the interior minister exclaims: In the same way that we’ve had to forget everything, you should to the same” ^[6]

Asesinato en el Comité Central was Aranda’s first work made in Madrid instead of his native Barcelona. The film was received with a cold commercial response^[6]

Fanny Pelopaja (1984)

Aranda then adapted another popular Catalan novel making a daring rewrite of Andreau Martins noir detective novel, Protésis, in which he transformed the male protagonist into a female retiling the work Fanny Pelopaja (1984)..^[5] The film depicts a violent love hate relationship between a delinquent woman and the corrupt police officer she wants to get even with.

Co financed by French producers, the film was made in Barcelona with a Spanish supporting cast and crew, but with two French actors in the lead, The film failed to find an audience when first released, but now has become one of Aranda best regarded works.

El Crimen del Capitán Sánchez (1984)

Some of Vicente Aranda films present real events, things that happens on the street but that have had the appearance of the exceptional occurrences, where passion, toughness, and violence manage to acquire a tone of unreality that is almost literary as in: El Crimen del Capitán Sánchez (1984) (Captain Sánchez's Crime) that was made for Spanish television, a story in which incest jealousy and death mix in Spain of beginnings of the twenty century, and is the first of four film in which Aranda would recreate a real murder story driven by passionate love.

Tiempo de Silencio (1986)

In Tiempo de Silencio (1986) (Time of Silence), Aranda’s uncompromising treatment of social issues is inspired by Luis Martín Santos’s novel about government failure; individual loss of responsibility, and urban poverty.

El Lute (1987)

One of Aranda’s most successful adaptation was the memoirs of the infamous Spanish delinquent Eleuterio Sánchez, El Lute, that the director made in an extremely popular two- part biopic: El Lute: camina o revienta (1987) (El Lute, Run for Your Life), and El Lute II, mañana seré libre (1988) (El Lute Tomorrow I’ll be Free). The Films are based on the autobiography of Eleuterio Sánchez, “El Lute” forced by social deprivation into delinquency in the 1960s and elevated to folk hero by way of his resistance to authoritarian injustice. El Lute, after an early nomadic period of his life, moves to Madrid slums outskirts, become involved in a burglary and murder, is tortured and condemn to life in prison. He becomes the target of obsessive control and punishment out of all proportion to his original petty crimes. Aranda’s hybrid combination of period drama, thriller and social realism reveals how the criminal career of this petty thief was manipulated and exploited by the authorities as a diversionary tactic at the time of political unrest. The first film has a strong realistic and political tone; the second part has a folkloric approach adopting a more pronounced thriller profile. Both films can be seen as a resounding critique of Franco regime and its brutal treatment of an oppressed minority. The story of a powerful individual response to injustice and the memory of public support to El Lute cause made this film a great success at the box office.

Si te dicen que caí (1989)

Si te dicen que caí (1989) (If They Tell You I Fell), adaptation of a new novel by Juan Marsé, has an intricate narrative: where what is real and what have been imagined blend in a crosswords style. Set in the old quarter of 1940’s Barcelona during the early years of Francoist repression, the main character is a young rag and bone merchant under tight vigilance from the right is associated with the resistant republican guerrilla fighters who remained active after the fall of the republic, he is exploited sexually and economically and falls in love with a prostitute.

Los Jinetes del Alba (1990)

Aranda next project was: Los Jinetes del Alba (1990) (Riders of the Dawn) an adaptation of the novel by Jesús Fernández Santos, made as a five parts TV miniseries that follows the lives of a young woman who greatest ambitions is to be the owner of the resort where she works. The action is set in Las Caldas, a small town in Asturias, where the lives of its inhabitants are forever changed with the arrival of the Asturian revolution of 1934 and the Spanish Civil War.

Amantes (1991)

In the 1990s Vicente Aranda continued to make films that were commercial hits at home and were shown at film festivals worldwide. With Amantes (1991) (Lovers), the director finally achieved wide international exposure and critical acclaim. This tragic story of forbidden passions and betrayed innocence is a film noir, inspired by real events: a love triangle that ended in tragedy in the repressive Spain during the early 1950s. Amantes, considered by many as his best film, marked the beginning of the director most prolific period.

El Amante Bilingüe (1993)

El Amante Bilingüe (1993) (The Bilingual Lover), also an adaptation of a story by Juan Marsé, set in Barcelona, is an ironic film about Catalan linguistic policies, nationalism and eroticism with a pattern of double identity. The central character is a humble man who falls in love with a beautiful rich woman, they marry but his unfaithful wife divorced him later. He is horribly disfigured in an explosion and gradually adopts a new identity in an effort to lure back his former wife.

Intruso (1993)

Intruso (1993) (Intruder) is a psychological thriller with much of the visual atmosphere and exacerbated passions of Amantes. Here a middle class woman is torn between her love for her spouse and her ill ex-husband, both of which were her childhood friends. After ten years of separation, they are entangled in a tragic story.

La Pasión Turca (1994)

La Pasión Turca (1994) (Turkish Passion) an adaptation of the novel by Antonio Gala, is an exploration of female sexual desire where the protagonist after the failure of her marriage, is driven by her pursuit of sexual pleasure to return to her Turkish lover in a path that lead her to an obbssessive dependence, degradation and total collapse of her selfesteem. La Pasión Turca became one of Spain's highest grossing films of the 90s.

Libertarias (1996)

Aranda’s interest in the Spanish Civil War finally found an outlet in: Libertarias (1996) (Women Freedom Fighters) a reconstrucción of the role played by anarquist women during the Spanish Civil War. Set in Barcelona at the star of the war, a young naive nun have to flee her convent and looked for refuge in a brodel where with the hookers she is recluted in the freedom fighters movement, together the group of six women face the perils of war to a devastating climax.

La Mirada del Otro (1998)

La Mirada del Otro (1998) (The Naked Eye), with a script based on the novel by Fernando G Delgado, is an erotic psychodrama; a woman quest for sexual pleasure only brings her loneliness. La Mirada del Otro was spurned by public and critics.

Celos (1999)

Aranda closed the decade in a high note with Celos (1999) (Jealousy), his third entrance in the love triangle trilogy formed with Amantes and Intruso. Once again the director construct a story around destructive passions that end tragically. A truck driver is tormented by jealousy about the man who was the former boyfriend of the beautiful woman he is about to marry, launching a detective labor to find him and know the truth that he feels his fiance is hiding from him.

Juana la Loca (2001)

In recent years, Vicente Aranda, switched to period pieces, initiating a trilogy of historic costume dramas. Juana La Loca (2001) (Mad Love) is a reinterpretation of the tragic fate of the 15th century Spanish Queen, madly in love with her unfaithful husband. The film, a commercial and critical hit, was Spain's entry at the 2001 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film and it became Aranda’s biggest box-office movie.

Carmen (2003)

Carmen (2003), based on the novel by Prosper Merimée that inspired the famous Opera of the same name, was another success; set in Andalusia in 1830, Carmen is a story of desire and death as the filmography of the director. Half witch, half gypsy, Carmen is the ultimate femme fatal that entice men with the wisdom of her body with fatal consequences.

Tirant lo Blanc (2006)

Aranda completed his costume drama trilogy with Tirant lo Blanc (2006) (The White Knight), an adaptation of the classical chivalry novel by Joanot Martorell; The plot follows the adventures of Tirante, a knight in the Byzantine Empire. This Aranda's most expensive film to date, got mixed reviews.

Filmography