A madness as wonderful as breaking the record for Nicolas Cage portraits gathered in an exhibition could only come from the imagination of Paco Alcázar, renowned for his biting and sincere comic strips in magazines such as El Víbora, El Jueves, Cinemanía, or Rockdelux. Of course, he had the complicity of Pedro Toro, director of ALCINE. It is precisely within the framework of the 55th edition of the Alcalá de Henares Film Festival (held from November 5 to 15 this year) where, between the two of them, they orchestrated the miracle.
All of this forms part of the exhibition The History of Cinema According to Paco Alcázar, where the illustrator and comic artist presents his own take on the seventh art, as he confesses: “The title of the exhibition is humorous.” Obviously, for anyone who stops by, it isn’t the history of cinema, but the history of cinema according to my four obsessions. In a sense, it creates a very alternative history of cinema. What the exhibition really is, is all the work I have done that relates to cinema.
And the cinematic world has always inhabited his work: “In addition to collaborating with media connected to cinema, such as Cinemanía, where I have been doing humorous vignette drawings for almost twenty years, I have carried out various illustration projects and other cinema-related endeavors, ranging from a series of illustrations dedicated to Spanish cinema, titled Truenos ibéricos, which portray a range of figures from Spanish cinema, from the Berlanga universe to cult films, such as Arrebato or the early works of Almodóvar, to more commercial films, covering all sorts of Spanish productions that have piqued my interest in one way or another. It began as a small series, eventually numbering nearly 300 characters. In the exhibition, you can see a handful of them—I’m not sure if there are about forty-some, or thereabouts. Then there is Buñuel as well, a director I’ve always liked a great deal and wanted to dedicate some form of project to as an illustrator, and I also created a series of illustrations based on sequences from his films that I found especially compelling, presented in a circular format. Overall, Buñuel’s universe attracts me greatly, and the process of bringing it to life was a lot of fun.”
