Movida

   "Movida" means "shaking up," and the term has been used as a way to describe the exploratory spirit of the years immediately following Francisco Franco's death in 1975, as expressed through sexual liberation, a hyperactive nightlife, the first taste of freedom of expression, and an interest in artistic manifestations that assimilated the lessons of various avant-gardes of the period, particularly punk and the Warhol Factory.

   The Movida is a notoriously hard to define cultural phenomenon with no precise boundaries. Indeed, some critics claim that it was the attempt to turn it into something specific (it was even encouraged by the popular Madrid mayor Enrique Tierno Galván) that finished it off around 1983, declaring that "movida" should be something "lived" not something pinned down in discussion. Still, some central aspects included sexual polymorphousness, interest in drugs, irony, and the recycling of established cultural forms (the latter aspect explains why, in the early 1980s, movida was identified with postmodernism).

   The most emblematic cinematic manifestations of the movida spirit are two early films by Pedro Almodóvar: Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (Pepi, Luci, Bom, 1981) and Laberinto de pasiones (Labyrinth of Passion, 1982). Iván Zulueta's Arrebato (Rapture, 1980) also came from the experiences of the period. Other interesting examples of the influence of la movida on film are En penumbra (In the Shade, José Luis Lozano, 1987) and, in the 1990s, Más que amor frenesí (More Than Love, Frenzy, Alfonso Albacete, Miguel Badem, and David Menkes, 1996). In all cases, Madrid constitutes an ideal background for loose narratives about marginal types.