Digesting the Image: Carnal Appetites and Ethical Consumption in the Work of Bigas Luna

Abstract

Josep Joan Bigas Luna was a Catalan artist and film director, whose disparate and prolific production since 1976 includes some of the most commercially and critically successful films made in Spain. His death in 2013 marked a loss to a generation of Spanish filmmakers who came of age after the dictatorship and whose works performed a provocative interrogation of what it might mean to be an artist working in a newly democratic environment. The Franco dictatorship, which endured for almost 40 years after a brutal civil war that overthrew a democratically elected government, not only trampled on the seeds of democracy and modernisation sown by the Second Republic but instilled a hegemonic version of cultural life in Spain that supported a centralist vision of national identity and a conservative Catholic version of gendered national subjects.¹ To uphold such a rigid view of gender and sexuality depended on a version of the body portrayed in cultural production as clean and sanitised, conforming to the purity of established gender norms and behaving as an orderly part of the fascist society promoted by the Franco regime. For Bigas, challenging these norms and the regulation of the body that went along with them, was both playful and political and gave him the opportunity to explore the delights of gastronomy, as food and the body become in his films potent symbols of resistance and dissidence.