“The thing that interests me most in films is to create credible subworlds. I prefer not to call them fantasies. I want to explain the stories in logical and realistic forms.” – Bigas Luna
Bigas Luna, born José Juan Bigas Luna in 1946, trained in interior and industrial design before beginning his filmmaking career in his native Barcelona in the mid-seventies. He exploded onto the silver screen with the gritty low-budget thriller BILBAO in 1978. Though many might recognize the name from REBORN (1981), his only American film, starring Dennis Hopper and Michael Moriarty, or ANGUISH (1987), his inventive and intense film within a film horror film, starring Zelda Rubinstein, he is perhaps best known for introducing audiences to Penelope Cruz, and for introducing her to Javier Bardem, in the torrid love triangle JAMÓN, JAMÓN, in 1992. The film would join GOLDEN BALLS (1992) and THE TIT AND THE MOON (1994) to form his Iberian Trilogy, also called his Iberian Passion Trilogy, a trio of seductive, surreal, erotic and painterly melodramas that would bring him critical and commercial success.
His early works BILBAO (1978) and CANICHE (1979), though less polished, maintain an intensity, a provocative power and a rebellious spirit that render them continuously fascinating and disturbing, as shocking and fresh as anything else produced in his career, distinguished as vital films in his filmography and in the whole of Spanish cinema. They belong to a time of renewed freedom in Spanish culture and filmmaking, a period of transition after the death of Franco, in which orthodox ideas could be challenged, icons shattered, and taboos destroyed. This April, in collaboration with The Bigas Luna Tribute and Tierra Extraña NY, Spectacle is proud to present two of his early works, BILBAO & CANICHE.
BILBAO
dir. Bigas Luna, 1978
Spain. 98 min.
In Spanish and Catalan with English subtitles
FRIDAY, APRIL 5TH – 5 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 11TH – 10 PM
MONDAY, APRIL 15TH – 10 PM
FRIDAY, APRIL 26TH – 7:30 PM (W/Q&A)
A disturbed middle-aged man (Ángel Jové) becomes obsessed with a stripper and prostitute named Bilbao on his nighttime prowls through Barcelona’s Chinatown. He follows and studies her, setting a plan in motion for her abduction. Shot in 16mm, the second feature shot by Bigas Luna following TATUAJE (1979) was actually his first to premiere on Spanish screens, shattering the taboos of Spanish society of the era and inaugurating a cinema of iconoclasm and eroticism.
In BILBAO, we share a dangerous intimacy with our obsessive protagonist. His thoughts and words, images and objects, sounds and pieces of music repeat incessantly over the course of the film, haunting him and us, as they reappear in sinister unexpected ways, stained by the rising tides of his lust and shaped by the shifting contours of his perversions. His everyday objects turned fetish objects become our fetish objects, as we join him in the crafting of his idealized sex object and the construction of his ultimate crime.
“Luna’s debut is a wonderful ample catalog of perversions, a voyeuristic exercise full of suggestive imagery… that brings the most fetishistic and twisted Alfred Hitchock to the damned and dirty Barcelona of the late seventies.” -Xavi Sánchez Pons
Each screening of BILBAO will be preceded by a video introduction from Carolina Sanabria, author of Bigas Luna, El ojo voraz.
The April 26th screening of BILBAO will be followed by a special discussion about the film in Spanish with Santiago Fouz-Hernández and Carolina Sanabria of The Bigas Luna Tribute and Casilda García López of Tierra Extraña NY.
CANICHE
(Poodle)
dir. Bigas Luna, 1979
Spain. 90 min.
In Spanish with English subtitles
FRIDAY, APRIL 12TH – 7:30 PM (W/Q&A)
FRIDAY, APRIL 19TH – 5 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 25TH – 10 PM
MONDAY, APRIL 29TH – 10 PM
Brother and sister Bernardo (Ángel Jové) and Eloisa (Consol Tura) lead a cloistered existence in a crumbling Catalan mansion where they subsist on the charity of their wealthy aunt as they await the inheritance they’ll receive from her death. They lavish their attention and affection on their pet poodle Dany, sublimating erotic desires onto their canine companion. Dany is the witness to and the victim of their downward spiral of debasement, which only accelerates as their financial fortunes grow.
Bigas Luna’s odyssey of the perverse continues in CANICHE, a provocative and perturbing dissection of the incestuous, cannibalistic and bestial bourgeoisie.
“… (CANICHE is) the spiritual sister of the John Waters films FEMALE TROUBLE (1974) and DESPERATE LIVING (1977). The first three Bigas Luna films are just as corrosive, free-spirited and punk as Waters’ films from the seventies; they seduce us with a dirty realism -very pop- which turns beautiful and causes Stendhal syndrome.” -Xavi Sánchez Pons
Each screening of CANICHE will be preceded by a video introduction from Santiago Fouz-Hernández, co-organizer of Bigas Luna Tribute, editor of the book and podcast El legado cinematográfico de Bigas Luna and author of the forthcoming book The Films of Bigas Luna.
The April 12th screening of CANICHE will be followed by a virtual Q&A with Santiago Fouz-Hernández.
THE EARLY OBSESSIONS OF BIGAS LUNA is presented in collaboration with The Bigas Luna Tribute and Tierra Extraña NY.
The Bigas Luna Tribute provides audiences with the unique opportunity of seeing some of Bigas Luna’s most critically acclaimed works and participating in in-depth discussions with special guests (academics and members of the Spanish film industry who worked with Bigas Luna).
Tierra Extraña NY is a living social network for New York’s Spanish diaspora, encouraging each other’s feats and initiatives and bringing Spain to life in NYC in events, productions & culture.
Special thanks to Santiago Fouz-Hernández, Carolina Sanabria and Casilda García López.