In an interview with Gretchen Ladyfinger in Cinepersonal, Pablo Pendiente revealed that, while his De la Madre Mala was based on Lorca’s stark, naturalist drama, the creative impulse for the film arose from what he termed “the aesthetic necessity” of erasing the influence of the opera videos which, as a child, he was forced to watch with a bachelor uncle on Saturday afternoons.
The uncle had agreed to invest in the souvenir shop that Pendiente’s parents had opened on a side street near El Prado on condition that they would allow him to expose young Pablo to what the uncle referred to as “world culture.” World culture, for Pablo’s uncle, consisted in grainy videos of Madrid Opera performances. “You can imagine,” Pendiente told Ladyfinger, “how suffering such abuse as a young, innocent boy, made my path to artistic openness and freedom that much more difficult. My De la Madre Mala was an exorcism of my uncle and his execrable videos, the worst of which was of Albicocca’s La Madre Pazzo, directed by the same buffoon, whom I will not name, who was responsible for RTVE’s infamously bathetic soap opera of the time, Las Uvas Agrias.”
The following excerpt, from the Madrid Opera’s performance of La Madre Pazzo, sung by the flamboyant Dutch soprano, Gooienne Bloemen, is the finale of Act I, Medea’s seduction of Jason by means of the incantation of magic Amazonian thaumaturgia. It is a tribute to Pendiente’s strength of character that he was able to overcome unsavory early influences like this and go on to enrich the art of film with passages of genius such as the excerpt from De la Madre Mala presented before this in La Cinémathèque.
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The uncle had agreed to invest in the souvenir shop that Pendiente’s parents had opened on a side street near El Prado on condition that they would allow him to expose young Pablo to what the uncle referred to as “world culture.” World culture, for Pablo’s uncle, consisted in grainy videos of Madrid Opera performances. “You can imagine,” Pendiente told Ladyfinger, “how suffering such abuse as a young, innocent boy, made my path to artistic openness and freedom that much more difficult. My De la Madre Mala was an exorcism of my uncle and his execrable videos, the worst of which was of Albicocca’s La Madre Pazzo, directed by the same buffoon, whom I will not name, who was responsible for RTVE’s infamously bathetic soap opera of the time, Las Uvas Agrias.”
The following excerpt, from the Madrid Opera’s performance of La Madre Pazzo, sung by the flamboyant Dutch soprano, Gooienne Bloemen, is the finale of Act I, Medea’s seduction of Jason by means of the incantation of magic Amazonian thaumaturgia. It is a tribute to Pendiente’s strength of character that he was able to overcome unsavory early influences like this and go on to enrich the art of film with passages of genius such as the excerpt from De la Madre Mala presented before this in La Cinémathèque.
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