Teatralidad e intimidad en el cine de ventura pons

Abstract

ABSTRACT Prolific author of thirty-five films during his expansion period between 1978 and 2018, Ventura Pons is one of those self-taught Spaniards who fully used the cinematographic machinery to propose a new relationship with reality during the Spanish democratic transition Era, which was a crucial period for the country's reconstruction in general as well as more specifically for the renewal of Catalan cinema. Since his first authored movie was selected in the 1978 Cannes Film Festival in the category « Un certain regard », he stood out with his subversive poetics that breaks the conventional codes of representation, he was mainly driven by the obsession to create a distorted cinema to the detriment of commercial success. Our research focuses on the whole director's filmography, which is mainly based on two major themes: theatricality and intimacy. On the fringes of the dominant aesthetic practices, Ventura Pons was able to impose his writing of light by playing with the polysemy of these two terms. Similar to his artistic career, having previously been a play director in the theater world, he uses his past experience by highlighting the theatrical sign at the heart of his cinematographic grammar. Using an intermedial approach, we will focus on unveiling the mechanisms deployed by the filmmaker to make the most of the power of the theatrical effect. We will see that this dissonant conception is coupled with the filmmaker’s fascination for the representation of the innermost territory by allowing to see a body devoid of any artifice.