I’m looking for activities that will occupy my brain and give me some moments of not thinking about Eric. So I found a list of the best Spanish movies of all times and started watching a film a day. I don’t like movies and find them as difficult to follow attentively as most people do reading a phone book. It is a constant effort not to get distracted, which is exactly what I need at this moment.
The first movie I watched as part of this plan was EL EXTRAÑO VIAJE (A Strange Voyage.)* It was made in 1964, and Franco’s censorship hid it from viewers for 6 years. Of course, today it’s hard to see what it was that bothered the censors so much about this completely innocent movie. I was baffled, too, until almost the very end of the film. Yes, there was a young woman in a bikini but she appeared only for about 30 seconds and was seen from a distance. And the same young woman walked around in very tight-fitting pants. Still, not even Franco was deranged enough to censor an entire movie just because of that.
The last 15 minutes of the movie made it clear what bothered the dictatorship’s censors about EL EXTRAÑO VIAJE. The culminating scenes are dominated by a male star appearing in a variety of female outfits. There is no convincing explanation for why gender-bending initially becomes necessary to this character but the sudden eruption of queerness at the end of the film is both disturbing and beautiful. We discover that the comatose world of a piss-poor Spanish village of the 1960s conceals pockets of freedom and beauty where people access the liberating potential of shedding gender constraints.
Of course, we are still talking about a movie from 1964, so let’s not expect too much. Everybody who is “tainted” by gender-bending is punished in the end and the chaos seems somewhat contained. The trope of the “evil tr*nny” is integrated into the movie (in an utterly unconvincing way, I might add.) Still, it definitely makes sense to see EL EXTRAÑO VIAJE on the list of the best Spanish movies of all times.
* The movie is available on YouTube with English subtitles if anybody is interested.
Clarissa's Blog 
I am the same way with movies! For whatever reason, it takes so much effort for me to sit down and watch one. Once I am through the inital 30 minutes, I can usually enjoy myself. But it’s such an effort for me to watch those first 30 minutes!
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This is one of the many reasons I love my twin-computer-monitors setup. I can watch something on one of them and do other stuff on the other.
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I totally need something like that.
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Is not liking movies an habit that you consciously choose to acquire?
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I don’t know, is it possible this is one of my ways of being pretentious? Hmm. . .
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I think that Almodovar has occupied so much space as THE Spanish film maker that he obscured other Spanish movies, cinematic trends, and film makers. What do we know about Spanish cinema? What has been written on it?
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