Vicente Aranda

Vicente Aranda Ezquerra (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.

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.

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.

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.

The frank examination of sexuality is one of the trademarks of his work, as seen in his most internationally successful film: Amantes (1990) (Lovers).