La Movida Madrileña
[1] La Movida Madrileña featured a rise in punk rock and synth-pop music, an openness regarding sexual expression and drug usage, and the emergence of new dialects such as cheli.
[citation needed] In the years following the death of Francisco Franco, a growing underground punk rock music scene began to form in Madrid.
However, this new counterculture clashed heavily with the Spanish national government, during a time when evening curfew for women, criminalisation of homosexuality, and arrests of people with unorthodox appearances for violating a law regarding "dangerousness and social rehabilitation" were frequent.
[1] Although Francoist elements continued to oppose the increasing liberalization of the city, the government under socialist mayor Enrique Tierno Galván had a more open approach regarding the movement, and subsidized various artistic endeavours.
[2] La Movida Madrileña's central component was an aesthetic influenced by punk rock and synth-pop music, as well as visual schools such as dada and futurism.
[1] The aesthetic permeated into the city's street fashion, photography, cartoons, and murals,[1] manifesting itself in bright colours, voluminous hair, unconventional and revealing clothing, and heavy makeup use among both genders.
[2] In addition to these artistic representations, La Movida Madrileña also effected an emergent LGBTQ+ community, illicit drug use, and the use of the cheli dialect.
[1][2] In moods, looks and attitude, the sound resembled the British punk and new wave scenes and the Neue Deutsche Welle, sometimes (in the case of Mecano) mimicking styles such as New Romantic.
[5] Almodóvar comically reflected the messiness of the freedom of those years, particularly in his films Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón; Laberinto de pasiones;[4] and What Have I Done to Deserve this?
He does this through techniques like comparing and contrasting traditional models versus the franquistas, and to continue questioning the idea that a certain sex are bound to act a certain way to be considered normal.
A variety of films were created to represent the LGBTQ+ community; Almodóvar wanted to bring awareness to their situation and used the Movida as a way to explore different approaches from the conventional lifestyles of the time.
[6] During these years, young photographers like Alberto García-Alix and Ouka Leele focused their art on the bands, concerts, and music scene, while other creators, like Miguel Trillo, were more interested in the urban tribes around the new movement.
In 2012, one of his few signatures left was made into a special cultural interest spot known as Bien de Interés Cultura, where this graffiti cannot be removed.
[4] Many of them, as Gregorio Morales, José Tono Martínez or Ramón Mayrata, were regular collaborators of the art magazine La Luna de Madrid [es].
[4] Another important figure outside the artistic world of the Movida was journalist Francisco Umbral, a writer for the newspaper El País, who wrote about and documented the movement.
Voices were offered through musical production to represent gender and sexuality associated with the queer community, and others that weren't were overlooked during La Movida.
[10] Crossing through Chueca is a book written about La Movida Madrileña, about the lesbian community and navigating their sexual, racial, gender, and class identities.
