Love, loss, melancholy, delirium: an obsessive-delusional styling model in the Spanish cinema of the forties

Abstract

One of the four Models that we have detected in the Spanish cinema of the period 1939-1950 is the Obsessive-Delusional Styling Model consisting of those films formally related to the historical vanguards and the work of the most experimental filmmakers in Hollywood at the time (Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock). The films would be organized on a male point of view haunted and hurt by the loss of the love object, unable to cope with grief, and insanely melancholic. They would also include, at some point in their development, the radical formalization of the delirium. The extreme uniqueness of the model is due to the combination of certain melodramatic issues with concrete solutions whereby certain filmmakers faced, after the war, the formal problems resulting from those and becoming the most relevant, striking and sublime film styling of the Spanish war wound.