Wild Session

A walk through the golden age of Spanish exploitation cinema, from the sixties to the eighties; a low-budget cinema and great popular acceptance that exploited cinematographic fashions: westerns, horror movies, erotic comedies and thrillers about petty criminals.

2019-12-13 | es

Philippe-Alain Michaud, le réel traversé par la fiction

To be in Venice and see the architecture of New York, to perceive in a painting by Tintoretto the birth of animated images, to look at the burlesque Cretinetti as the ancestor of montage - so many shifts, displacements, and striking telescopings that Philippe-Alain Michaud proposes in this film dedicated to him. To follow this art historian, curator of the cinema collections at the Centre Pompidou, is to go from the oriental carpet to the film, or from the first fireworks to the cinema. And everywhere the animation of the images - projections of Antony McCall, or of Paul Sharits, Column without end of Brancusi, Pasolini's Accatone - everything moves! Under the tutelage of Aby Warburg, the great art historian of the early twentieth century, precursor of iconology and image comparison, to whom Philippe-Alain Michaud was the first in France to devote an important essay, eleven images are placed on the table to describe the singular journey of this art historian.

2016-01-01 | fr

In the Lost City

The city of Madrid as it appears in the Spanish films of the 1950s. A small tribute to all those who filmed and portrayed Madrid despite the dictatorship, censorship and the critical situation of industry and society.

2009-02-04 | es

Franco on Trial: The Spanish Nuremberg?

Franco on Trial is the new film by Dietmar Post and Lucía Palacios. After the success of Franco's Settlers, their first encounter with Franco's dictatorship, they are now setting their sights on one of the darkest chapters of European history: the presumed organized extermination that took place during the coup, the war, and the subsequent dictatorship led by Franco, as well as Argentina's current effort, by invoking the principle of universal jurisdiction, to prosecute Francoists accused of committing crimes against humanity. The film is also a sore reminder of an issue that still stands today: the clear-cut accountability held by Germany, Italy, and Portugal. The film accomplishes to give both sides a voice - those against whom the killing has been directed; and the side of the perpetrators.

2018-02-20 | en

The Savior for Sale

In November 15, 2017, the painting Salvator Mundi, attributed to Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), was sold for an unprecedented $450 million. An examination of the dirty secrets of the art world and the surprising story of how a work of art is capable of upsetting both personal and geopolitical interests.

2021-11-25 | fr

Bones of Contention

A history of the political and social repression carried out by the ruthless regime of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco between 1936 and 1975 that focuses on the lives of gays and lesbians during those dark years and the death of the Spanish gay poet Federico García Lorca.

2018-03-02 | en

Goering's Catalogue: A Collection of Art and Blood

For more than a decade, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler's right-hand man during the infamous Third Reich, assembled a collection of thousands of works of art that were meticulously catalogued.

2021-03-14 | fr

¿Por qué morir en Madrid?

1966-05-02 | es

Max Ernst: Journey into the Subconscious

The inner world of the great painter Max Ernst is the subject of this film. One of the principal founders of Surrealism, Max Ernst explores the nature of materials and the emotional significance of shapes to combine with his collages and netherworld canvases. The director and Ernst together use the film creatively as a medium to explain the artist's own development.

1964-01-01 | en

Picturing the Presidents

We go behind the scenes and into the minds of artists as they capture, commemorate, and, at times, condemn our presidents.

2009-02-10 | en

Caudillo

Caudillo is a documentary film by Spanish film director Basilio Martín Patino. It follows the military and political career of Francisco Franco and the most important moments of the Spanish Civil War. It uses footage from both sides of the war, music from the period and voice-over testimonies of various people.

1977-10-14 | en

Dearest Executioners

This documentary, filmed clandestinely, is based on several interviews with the executioners who worked in Spain during the early 1970s, as well as families of people executed by them.

1977-04-20 | es

Rubens: A Life in Europe

The Flemish painter, humanist and diplomat Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) was fortunate to be recognized during his lifetime as an artist of genius and one of the most prolific among his peers, making him a key figure of the Baroque.

2018-02-18 | de

The Painting

For three and a half centuries, from the same day that Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) applied his last brushstroke to the canvas, the enigma of “Las meninas, o La familia de Felipe IV” (1656) has not been deciphered. The secret story of a painting unveiled as if it was the resolution of a perfect crime.

2019-11-08 | es

Històries de Bruguera

The history of Bruguera, the most important comic publisher in Spain between the 1940s and the 1980s. How the characters created by great writers and pencilers became Spanish archetypes and how their strips persist nowadays as a portrait of Spain and its people. The daily life of the creators and the founding family, the Brugueras. The world in which hundreds of vivid colorful paper beings lived and still live, in the memory of millions, in the smile of everyone.

2012-04-20 | es

Fallas 37: el arte en guerra

In November 1936, a few months since the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, the government of the Second Republic moves to Valencia. In this situation, several Valencian artists and intellectuals decide to build four fallas — satirical plasterboard sculptures created to be burnt — to mock fascism.

2013-03-02 | es

The Original Richard McMahan

The multi-talented outsider artist Richard McMahan is on a quest to painstakingly re-create thousands of famous and not-so-famous paintings and artifacts–in miniature.

2016-09-17 | en

Carceller, the Man Who Died Twice

The life story of Vicente Miguel Carceller (1890-1940), a Spanish editor committed to freedom who, through his weekly magazine La Traca, connected with the common people while maintaining a dangerous pulse with the powerful.

2021-10-24 | es

Black Is the Color: African-American Artists and Segregation

Black Is the Color highlights key moments in the history of Black visual art, from Edmonds Lewis’s 1867 sculpture Forever Free, to the work of contemporary artists such as Whitfield Lovell, Kerry James Marshall, Ellen Gallagher, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Art historians and gallery owners place the works in context, setting them against the larger social contexts of Jim Crow, WWI, the civil rights movement and the racism of the Reagan era, while contemporary artists discuss individual works by their forerunners and their ongoing influence.

2016-07-07 | fr

The Burgos Trial

Documentary about the court martial held following the assassination of Melitón Manzanas, commissioner of the Political-Social Brigade of Guipúzcoa, in an attack carried out by ETA on August 2, 1968. The film includes a series of interviews and testimonies from those imprisoned and prosecuted in that court martial. Following the attack, a state of emergency was declared in Guipúzcoa and hundreds of people were arrested.

1979-08-31 | es