Heritage Gothic: Goya Biopics

This chapter considers three Goya biopics as an example of the contemporary Spanish Gothic and the extent to which it coincides with Jerrold Hogle’s notion of neo-Gothic as fakery. In such biopics the figure of Goya himself comes to encompass the concept of the biopic artist hypothesised by Griselda Pollock as both tragically feminised and exemplary of unfettered masculine sexuality. Yet he also becomes the ghost of the real, deterritorialised through a museum aesthetic. The films examined are: Carlos Saura’s Goya en Burdeos (Goya in Bordeaux), Bigas Luna’s Volavérunt and Miloš Forman’s Goya’s Ghosts.