his hand at filmmaking. He was not allowed to enroll at the School of Cinema in Madrid because he had not graduated from high school. In Barcelona and completely self-taught, Aranda found a way to direct his first feature film. Nearly 40 years old when he started directing, Aranda did not gain international success until his 60s. He had a long and prolific career, making 27 films in more than 40 years as a director. Vicente Aranda married twice. His first wife, Luisa, a name he used repeatedly for the female leads in his films, committed suicide years after they divorced. They did not have children. Aranda's second wife, Teresa Font, was thirty years his junior. She was the editor of his movies since the mid-1980s; they had two daughters together, but separated a few years before Aranda's death. Film career and later life Early films (1964–1974) Aranda made his directorial debut with the low-budget Brillante Porvenir (1964) (Promising Future), co-directing with screenwriter Román Gubern to avoid problems with the directors guild of Spain. Loosely inspired by the American novel, The Great Gatsby, the film used the aesthetic of the neorealism in a story of a young man from the provinces who tries to make it into the Catalan middle class. Brillante Porvenir, cut by censors, was received coldly by public and critics. This failure made Aranda turned to an experimental form of film making for his next project. The director's second film, Fata Morgana (1965), an unusual work in Spanish Cinema, is an experimental film, based on a script written with Gonzalo Suárez. The film took inspiration for its graphic visual style from television commercials and comic strips. Ignored upon release, Fata Morgana would eventually be recognized for inspiring the particular kitsch aesthetic of La Escuela de Barcelona (the Barcelona School of Film), an avant garde movement which sought creative innovation in Spanish films. In the following years, Aranda's work played between pushing the artistic envelope and using a virtual style drawn from mass media. In these films, Aranda tackled established film genres with an eye on revising and modernizing them. Since his first features were not widely seen, Aranda produced a commercially oriented film with fantastic and erotic overtones: Las Crueles (1969) (The Exquisite Cadaver). In it, a mysterious woman elaborates a scheme to avenge the death of her girlfriend by a callous publisher. This filmed was plagued