Abstract

A seminal work in independent Spanish cinema of the late Franco years, Contactos is one of the most rigorous Spanish films in articulating the relations between ideology and cinematic form, understood in terms of the aesthetic and political materialism of the Cahiers du Cinema of the time. That relationship is considered here, in addition to links with the thinking of the sculptor Jorge Oteiza, with the main focus being on the aspects that make Viota's film differ from these points of reference. Raul Ruiz's thoughts on the dialectics between fascination and distancing are considered and an analysis provided of the film's other dialectics between fragment and synecdoche. This is a topic central to the understanding of a film that is, at the same time, a fracture of representation and an ideologically determined representation, an immersion as sensorial as it is intellectual, which reveals in its formal mechanisms political prohibitions of an aesthetic nature that profoundly influenced cinematic production of the period.