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Álex de la Iglesia, initially championed by Pedro Almodóvar, and at one time the enfant terrible of Spanish film, still makes film critics nervous. The director of some of the most important films of the Post-Franco era – Acción mutante, El día de la bestia, Muertos de risa – receives here the first full length study of his work. Breaking away from the pious tradition of acclaiming art-house auteurs, The cinema of Álex de la Iglesia tackles a new sort of beast: the popular auteur, who brings the provocation of the avant-garde to popular genres such as horror and comedy. This book brings together Anglo-American film theory, an exploration of the legal and economic history of Spanish audio-visual culture, a comprehensive knowledge of Spanish cultural forms and traditions (esperpento, sainete costumbrista) with a detailed textual analysis of all of Álex de la Iglesia’s seven feature films.

[...]that we have nothing but his works, will we not recognize in them a river of fire? —Jacques Lacan1 In “Der Dichter und das Phantasieren” (Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming, 1907), one of the few talks Sigmund Freud ever gave to a literary audience, the psychoanalyst explored the nature of literary imagination and aesthetic pleasure.2 It took Freud only about twenty minutes to get his message across to the ninety or so listeners present, in terms the local press the day after reported to have been “subtle and at times clairvoyant”: the poet resembling a selfish fantasist and creative writing analogous to the act of daydreaming, literature’s power lies above all in its ability to allow adult readers an orderly, yet shameless and pleasurable, experience of otherwise repressed wishes and memories of childhood play.3 Freud had begun developing this thesis earlier and would remain interested in it well after his 1907 talk, for his assessment of the function of literature formed part of his more general conviction that modern culture is the product of a renunciation of deep-seated psychological drives.4 This assertion and the heuristic tools psychoanalysis offered to unearth such drives attracted a wide variety of modernist authors and artists to Freud. Along with Adolf Josef Storfer, to whom we will return, Heller is largely forgotten in the histories of both modernism and psychoanalysis.9 In the first decades of the twentieth century, however, Heller was known throughout the German-speaking art and literary world. Running a shop which had opened in 1905 on the Bauernmarkt in Vienna and which distributed books and periodicals on art, literature, and culture intended for children, women, and men, Heller catered mostly to bibliophiles and graphic art buffs through his journal Neue Blätter für Literatur und Kunst (later named Wiener Kunst-und Buchschau), which set out to fight against “kitsch in art and literature, against clichés and mass production.” 11 To distinguish his establishment from the roughly 2,000 bookshops in Austria around the turn of the century, Heller set up many initiatives.12 In the summer of 1906, Heller reached out to the Viennese intellectual and literary crowd with a survey asking to recommend ten good books, the responses to which were published in 1907 in a volume introduced by Hugo von Hofmannsthal.13 The thirty-two respondents included Hermann Bahr, spokesman of the avant-garde Young Vienna group, Schnitzler, Rilke, Stefan Zweig, Hermann Hesse, and physicist Ernst Mach, among others.

Álex de la Iglesia, initially championed by Pedro Almodóvar, and at one time the enfant terrible of Spanish film, still makes film critics nervous. The director of some of the most important films of the Post-Franco era – Acción mutante, El día de la bestia, Muertos de risa – receives here the first full length study of his work. Breaking away from the pious tradition of acclaiming art-house auteurs, The cinema of Álex de la Iglesia tackles a new sort of beast: the popular auteur, who brings the provocation of the avant-garde to popular genres such as horror and comedy.This book brings together Anglo-American film theory, an exploration of the legal and economic history of Spanish audio-visual culture, a comprehensive knowledge of Spanish cultural forms and traditions (esperpento, sainete costumbrista) with a detailed textual analysis of all of Álex de la Iglesia’s seven feature films.

The authors discuss the growth of inter-firm logistics networks. Inter-firm network denotes a complex arrangement of reciprocal, cooperative rather than competitive, relationships between legally independent but economically interdependent firms. They assert that the organisation of the inter-firm logistics network is influenced by the organisation of the network itself. They analyze the respective requirements of the inter-organisational logistics system. They also focus on the question of which specific logistics-related capabilities firms operating in production networks have to develop depending on the respective network type. They present a qualitative study of a production network of a German car manufacturer to identify organisational capabilities and describe possible systemic development.

The Camera called it 'A spectacular discovery which marks a great advance in the photographic process', while Minicam Photography anticipated that 'it will render many pages of instruction in photographic handbooks as obsolete as tin-types'.6 For U.S. Camera, 'Not since the close of the last century when George Eastman first promised popular-priced cameras, daylight-loading film and a processing service has any photographic development caused such a stir' and the usually sedate American Photography hailed a 'revolutionary process', as well as offering a prescient prediction on the collective image-making practice the camera encouraged: 'One can easily foresee a festive group on a picnic or some other joyous occasion producing dozens of snapshots'.7 The invention survived the rapture: in the revised edition of his standard and canonical History of Photography, Beaumont Newhall, writing in 1982, gives his official endorsement to the excited early reactions, calling 'the invention by Edwin H. Land in 1947 of the Polaroid-Land process' 'the most innovative contribution' to photographic technology in the post-World War II epoch.8 Newhall, at various points curator at MOMA and at George Eastman House, wrote from a position of considerable institutional authority, and was in a position to know, having acted as a consultant to the Polaroid Corporation in the 1950s. [...]the punctuation may disclose as much as the content of the sentence. [...]any modern scientific description of the eye will go on to indicate the limits of the comparison. [...]through the intervention of the artist and the strict limitation on availability, Polaroid products were rescued for artifact-uality.

El día de la bestia,released in 1995, is Álex de la Iglesia’s second featurelength film, and marked the beginning of the director’s association with the producer Andrés Vicente Gómez and his Lolafilms organisation. The film was the third to appear from a deal between Gómez and Sogetel to produce around eight to ten features a year, a deal that established both parties at the forefront of film production in Spain. Costing just under 2 million euros, it was a substantial commercial success in Spain, cementing De la Iglesia’s central position in the generation of young directors who had begun

After the first British screening in 2004 ofTorremolinos 73(2003), an audience member complained to director Pablo Berger that Spanish film was obsessed with revisiting the past and thatTorremolinos 73was yet another example of this malady.¹ Berger, one of Álex de la Iglesia’s former collaborators, admitted that the Civil War had been over-represented in Spanish cinema, but argued that the early 1970s, the period in whichTorremolinos 73is set, had hardly been touched at all. AlthoughTorremolinos 73and De la Iglesia’s fourth feature film, Muertos de risa (1999), are neither the first nor the only

Back in March 1999, Álex de la Iglesia told journalist Milagros Martín- Lunas fromEl Mundothat the idea forMuertos de risacame to him on his way to the airport while scouting for locations forLa máscara de Fu Manchú(The Mask of Fu Manchu) – the script on which he and Guerricaechevarría were working at that time and which was meant to be an ambitious and Hollywood-style co-production based on the classic thriller character Fu Manchu (Martín-Lunas 1999). Their financial backer was Andrés Vicente Gómez, continuing a partnership that had started in 1995, as we have seen in

Speaking at the Manchester Spanish Film Festival in 2000, Álex de la Iglesia declared that he was not really a film director. ‘I’m more of a barman’, he declared, ‘I just make cocktails’. His films, he implied, were simply an elaborate montage of quotations from other directors, genres, and film-styles, a self-assessment well borne out byAcción mutante(1993), the De la Iglesia team’s first feature film, which promiscuously mixes science fiction and comedy,film noirand western, Almodóvar and Ridley Scott. Were such a claim, and its associated renunciation of auteur status, to issue from an American independent director,