Renaissance of Catalan cinema and desire for emancipation
It wasn't until the 1960s that cinema began to flourish again in Catalonia. As elsewhere in Europe, a wind of modernity began to blow, embodied in particular in the Barcelona School, whose New Wave-inspired cinema, willingly experimental and abstract because of censorship, perpetuated an intellectual and avant-garde spirit characteristic of the city. Vicente Aranda's Fata Morgana (1965) shows a strangely empty Barcelona, a metaphor for the dictatorship, where a serial killer is rampant. One of the members of this school, Ricardo Bofill, went on to become a famous architect whose buildings were in turn appreciated by filmmakers. More light-hearted, but with a similar tendency towards abstraction, Ditirambo (Gonzalo Suárez, 1969), is a kind of action comedy, with one scene taking place at the foot of the statue of Christopher Columbus, erected on the Plaça Portal de la Pau in the port. In 1975, Michelangelo Antonioni set foot in the city to shoot Profession Reporter. Barcelona and Antoni Gaudí's buildings feature prominently, and it's on the roof of Casa Milà that Jack Nicholson meets Maria Schneider. The fact that this story of a man who wants to change his identity and move on takes place in the Catalan capital is almost self-evident. In this city, existential angst goes hand in hand with political questioning. Architecture buffs will want to take a look at Hiroshi Teshigahara's 1984 documentary on Gaudí, which explores not only the city's iconic buildings, but also the influences that nurtured them, such as the region's monasteries and Romanesque churches, or the nearby coves of Montserrat. The transition to democracy led to the emergence of more political cinema, such as La Ville brûlée (Antoni Ribas, 1976) , which recounts the bloody repression that took place during Tragic Week in 1909, a symbol of a Catalonia wounded by the monarchy.
A new youth
The 1970s saw the arrival of a new generation of Catalan filmmakers, Ventura Pons, Bigas Luna and Josep Anton Salgon, coinciding with the advent of democracy. Pons signed Ocaña, portrait par intermittence (1978), a portrait of a well-known figure on Las Ramblas and Plaça Reial, a gay painter and adept at cross-dressing. Throughout his filmography, he never ceases to explore the intimate side of his native city. Bigas Luna's third film, Bilbao (1978), which would later reveal Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, caused a scandal on its release due to its trademark marked eroticism and, contrary to what its title might suggest, is set in Barcelona. The city was gradually opening up, and foreigners were beginning to flock to it. Whit Stillman, before Klapisch and Woody Allen, wrote Barcelona (1994), a delightful comedy of manners recounting the sentimental adventures of an American expatriate, taking us from the Palace of Catalan Music to the cloister of Santa Creu Cathedral, with the obligatory stops in the bars that abound in the city. Ken Loach's Land of Freedom, released in 1995, captures the continuing fascination of the Spanish Civil War, during which Barcelona was one of the bastions of resistance to Franco's putsch. Caresses (Ventura Pons, 1998) is a choral film in which the destinies of its characters intertwine over the course of one night. Pedro Almodovar shot most of the deeply moving All About My Mother (1999) here, where we see the Sagrada familia by night or carrer Allada Vermell, a street the director described as a mix of Havana, Marseille and Naples due to its overflowing vitality. But it was L'Auberge espagnole (2002) that marked the Catalan city's entry into the new century, with Cédric Klapisch making it the emblem of the nascent Erasmus generation. The director's talent for capturing the spirit of the times, in a skilful blend of cliché and naturalness, has earned him great popular success. The Parc Güell and its palm trees, the cable car, the Rambla del Mar and the carrer de les Caputxes all depict a Barcelona that is both touristy and authentic. A year earlier, Gaudi Afternoon (Susan Seidelmann), a little-known, wacky but utterly charming film, replayed this timeless comedy of expatriation, before Woody Allen in turn rode the same wave with Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), which reinforces the idea of a city of vacations and intermittences of the heart, and once again reserves a very special place for the works of Gaudí. It seems, then, that we have to turn to home-grown directors for a slightly more contrasting picture, as in Spanish horror cinema, which regenerated the genre with Rec (Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza, 2007), set in Rambla de Catalunya, or Malveillance (Jaume Balagueró, 2011), about a perverse building janitor who doesn't hesitate to break into the homes of various tenants. Genre cinema also includes the recent Les Derniers jours (Alex Pastor, David Pastor, 2013), which presents a post-apocalyptic vision of a city ravaged by a virus. Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu's Biutiful (2010) lifts the veil on a Barcelona rarely seen in cinema, that of the peripheries and the underprivileged. The wave of series has so far stayed away from the city(La Casa de Papel, a huge global success, is shot mostly in Madrid), but Barcelona's Santa Maria del Mar Basilica has served as inspiration and backdrop for a Spanish historical series, La Catedral del Mar (2018) adapted from a bestseller, set in the 14th century when the city ruled Mediterranean trade. In addition, Game of Thrones, many of whose scenes were filmed in Spain, used Girona's Santa Maria Cathedral and the Sant Pere de Galligants monastery as backdrops. Completely shot in Barcelona and released in summer 2023, Bird Box Barcelona is a "fake" sequel to the Netflix hit Bird Box.
