After-images and imagination: Image and nation in Bigas Luna's Volavérunt

Abstract

Bigas Luna's critique of national stereotypes is by no means confined to his celebrated Iberian Trilogy. His on-screen exploration of such images can be viewed as the result of his earlier investigations on the nature of visual representation and the cinematic image. These investigations culminated in Bigas Luna's most elaborate proposition on the scopic nature of the cinematic image, the horror film Angustia/ Anguish (1987), which he completed during his US sojourn. In the period thriller Volavérunt (1999), against the backdrop of an eighteenth-century political plot involving painter Francisco de Goya, high nobility and members of government, Bigas Luna put forward a broad array of proposi..