All of this is well done, very well done, with tight and dramatic filming (including selective focus), some innovative editing and surreal sequences, and edgy modern music. He at first showed ordinary people looking ordinary, a realism seen as distasteful, and later showed people as demons, as if we are all possessed in some measure. Goya was asked to appear more than once before the authorities, and managed to survive even though some of his work was unconventional. It surely kept most people quiet and obedient, or on the run to France which in Goya's day saw the 1789 Revolution and a rise of liberal ideas like tolerance and freedom. The reigning threat to the painter's well-being-and to everyone's-is the Spanish Inquisition, that enforcement of moral code by the church with extreme punishment for even small infractions, including saying things that were heretical. Most famously, the Duchess is depcited in a pair of paintings, one nude and one clothed, as a flaunting of Goya's power against authority. Goya and the Duchess have what is historically a speculative love affair, and it is useful in the movie as a device to keep the wide-ranging events of Goya's life contained. Around him is a huge cast of friends and patrons and one particular model, the Duchess of Alba, played by Yugoslavian actress Olivera Katarina (with a passing similarity to the truly Spanish Penelope Cruz). The actor is a Lithuanian powerhouse, Donatas Banionis, and he is both commanding and believable.
Goya the painter is successful and is mostly beholden to his job as a court painter. The lead is a man who wants truth, but he doesn't quite know it at first. The full title is revealing: Goya, or the Hard Way to Enlightenment. The action is mostly set in Madrid (and filmed in the Eastern Bloc). It is also, weird to say, Germanic, filled with big bawdy characters that strike you as not quite "Spanish," and of course Goya is all about the Spanish and Spain. It is certainly earnest and deeply intense. But this is ultimately a test of Communist social and artistic ideals, and any messages in it have to be read in that context. This 1971 epic is actually an innovative, emotional Eastern European (and Soviet) production not in German, and it comes out of an era that in the US would be called New Hollywood, where the rules are made to be broken.
Goya (1971) There are three Goya movies widely available, and this is the one that comes closest to the man's real life, his real world.
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