From Madrid to Hell: The City in the Films of Carlos Saura

Abstract

Although he could not be called a Madrid filmmaker, Carlos Saura directed three films set in the city that problematise the Spanish capital as a hostile space and reflect its evolution over different periods. The Delinquents (Los golfos, 1959), Faster, Faster (Deprisa, deprisa, 1980) and Taxi (1996) all deal with the common theme of marginalisation and violence in Madrid, used as a synecdoche for Spanish society as a whole under the Franco regime, during Spain’s transition to democracy, and in the crisis of the 1990s. This article explores the aesthetic and narrative roles of Madrid in these three films. The first two films establish a dialectic between the city and an urban periphery identified with the protagonists, who are rejected by the city centre and equated with urban waste, while the third film depicts a phantasmagorical city that has no room for the marginalised, who are persecuted and annihilated.