Target: García Lorca. New cinematographic and television inquisitions on poet’s life, work and death

Abstract

This essay, “Objetivo: García Lorca. Nuevas inquisiciones cinematográficas y televisivas sobre la vida, obra y muerte del poeta”, explores several representations of Federico García Lorca in Spanish film and TV productions of recent decades. The focus on the figure of the author rather than on the adaptations of his plays favors the analysis of the representation of two, closely intertwined processes: that of literary creation-how the creative process is portrayed, and how the artist’s life is seen to intertwine with his work-and that of the cultural construction of the artist, in retrospect, as a historic figure and a cultural icon. This seems a particularly appropriate perspective in the case of García Lorca, whose fame and cultural significance owe as much to the circumstances of his life and death as they do to his plays and poems, and who in recent decades has been vindicated, reinvented, and re-introduced as an emblematic presence and a foundational myth of a contemporary, autonomous Andalucía and a democratic Spain. The article traces all those processes through recent documentaries such as Emilio Ruiz Barrachina’s Lorca, el mar deja de moverse, Magali Negroni’s F.G.L. (1898-1936): Federico cumple 100 años and Basilio Martín Patino’s “mockumentary” El jardín de los poetas.