Vicente Aranda facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Vicente Aranda
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Aranda in 2010
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| Born |
Vicente Aranda Ezquerra
9 November 1926 |
| Died | 26 May 2015 (aged 88) |
| Occupation | Film director, screenwriter |
| Years active | 1964–2015 |
| Awards | Goya Best Director for Amantes Best Film for Amantes |
Vicente Aranda Ezquerra (Spanish: [biˈθente aɾanˈða 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.
Early life
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, died 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.
Film career and later life
Early films (1964–1974)
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. 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.
After democracy was installed in Spain, Aranda made a film politically charged with the aftereffects of Franco's regime: Asesinato en el Comité Central (1982) (Murder in the Central Committee). The film was based on one of a series of novels by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán that featured a hard-boiled detective called Pepe Carvalho. 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. This was Aranda's first work to be shot in Madrid instead of his native Barcelona. The film was not successful commercially.
Aranda adapted the popular Catalan author Andreu Martín's noir detective novel, Prótesis. He changed the male protagonist into a female and titled his film, Fanny Pelopaja (1984). The film depicts a violent love-hate relationship between a delinquent woman and a corrupt police officer, with whom she wants to get even. Co-financed by French producers, the film was made in Barcelona with Spanish supporting cast and crew, and with two French actors in the lead. Dissatisfied with the French dubbing of the film, done without his oversight, Aranda tried to stop the premiere of the film in France. It was released under the title, Á coups de crosse. As a result of this dispute, Aranda sold the film's shares in Morgana Films, the production company he had created. Fanny Pelopaja failed to find an audience when first released, but now has become one of Aranda's best regarded works.
Needing to make some money, Aranda accepted a job to take part in La Huella del Crimen (The Trace of the Crime), a television series consisting of six episodes. He was one of several renowned Spanish film directors: Pedro Olea, Angelino Fons, Ricardo Franco, Juan Antonio Bardem, Pedro Costa and Vicente Aranda, who were each invited to direct an episode. Aranda's chapter, El Crimen del Capitán Sánchez (1984) (Captain Sánchez's Crime), was considered the best episode of the series.
Aranda's career soared when he made Tiempo de Silencio (1986) (Time of Silence), an adaptation of the famed Luis Martín Santos novel of the same name. The film had a major cast headed by Imanol Arias, Victoria Abril and Francisco Rabal. Set in the 1940s, the story moves from the sordid lives of the poor in shanty dwellings to the hypocrisy of the middle classes under Franco's regime. Though the film was criticized by some for his simplifying the narrative complexity of the Martín Santos novel, Time of Silence was generally well received by audiences.
Aranda took a deconstructive approach to the manipulation of popular myth in his 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), based on two volumes of memoirs by the legendary criminal Eleuterio Sánchez, who had escaped from prison several times. El Lute: camina o revienta (1987) (El Lute, Run for Your Life) concerns the early life of Sanchez, known as El Lute, who claimed to have been forced into delinquency in the 1960s by poverty and lack of education. After an early nomadic period of his life, El Lute moves to Madrid's slums outskirts. He became involved in a robbery and murder; was convicted and, at age 23, lucky to gain a commutation of his death sentence to 30 years in prison. His escapes from jail turned him into a popular folk hero and public enemy number one for the Franco police. Aranda's hybrid combination of period drama, thriller and social realism reveals how the criminal career and media profile of this petty thief were manipulated and exploited by the authorities as a diversionary tactic at a time of political unrest. El Lute: camina o revienta (1987) (El Lute, Run for Your Life) was one of Aranda's most successful adaptations. It was the highest-grossing Spanish film in 1987.
At the request of Pilar Miró, then director of TVE, Aranda took on Los Jinetes del Alba (1990) (Riders of the Dawn) an adaptation of the novel by Jesús Fernández Santos about the Spanish Civil War and the anarchist movement. Made as a five-part TV miniseries, it features a young woman ambitious to own the resort where she works in a small town in Asturias. When she finally achieves her goal, there is little to rejoice about. This is one Aranda's most paradigmatic works.
In the 1990s, Aranda continued to make films that were commercial hits at home and were shown at film festivals worldwide. With Amantes (1991), he finally achieved wide international exposure and critical acclaim. Originally conceived as a television project, Amantes was made with few actors, a small crew, and with few exterior locations. It is widely considered as the director's most accomplished work, becoming a classic of Spanish Cinema. It marked the beginning of Aranda's most prolific period.
Some of Vicente Aranda films present real events, things that happen on the street but that have had the appearance of the exceptional occurrences. In Intruso (1993) (Intruder), Aranda takes the theme of the relationship between love and death through a passionate love to its ultimate conclusion. This film is a psychological thriller. A middle-class woman is torn between her love for her spouse and her ill ex-husband, both of whom were her childhood friends. After ten years of separation, they become entangled in a tragic story.
Aranda returned to the Spanish Civil War in Libertarias (1996) (Libertarians), an epic drama with an ensemble cast that reconstructs the role played by anarchist women during the Spanish Civil War.
Aranda returned to familiar territory with Celos (1999) (Jealousy), his third work in a trilogy exploring the love triangle, together with his earlier Amantes and Intruso.
In the early 21st century, Aranda started to explore period pieces, initiating a trilogy of historic costume dramas with Juana La Loca (2001) (Mad Love), a reinterpretation of the tragic fate of the 15th-century Spanish queen, Joanna of Castile. A commercial and critical hit in Spain, the film was the nation's official entry at the 2001 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film. It became Aranda's biggest box-office movie.
Carmen (2003), a film based on Prosper Mérimée's 1845 novella, was another success with audiences for the veteran director.
Tirant lo Blanc (2006) is an adaptation of a seminal Catalan chivalry novel, written in the 15th century by Joanot Martorell. This was Aranda's most expensive work and was made with a large budget. The film has both humor and drama, and is skillfully composed, but it did not enjoy the success of the director's two previous films.
Aranda's last film, Luna Caliente (2009) (Hot Moon), premiered in October 2009 at the Valladolid International Film Festival, but it failed to find an audience.
See also
In Spanish: Vicente Aranda para niños
