The Chambermaid on the Titanic

Juan José Bigas Luna (19 March 1946 – 6 April 2013) was a Spanish film director.

He began his professional career in the design world, creating the Estudio Gris with Carlos Riart in 1969. In his earlier exhibitions, at the beginning of the 1960s, he showed a great interest in conceptual art and the emerging visual technologies. Esteemed as an atypical director in the Spanish cinema, in 1986 he retired to Tarragona in order to devote his time to painting. In 1990 the producer Andrés Vicente Gómez persuaded him to return to cinema and entrusted to him the direction of Las edades de Lulú, a film which reached the general public. Without abandoning his dedication to painting and photography, reflected in numerous exhibitions, he began the well-known Trilogía Ibérica with Jamón Jamón (1992), Huevos de Oro (1993) and La teta y la luna (1994). Subsequently, with the short film for internet Collar de Moscas (2001), he revived his interest in avant-garde experimentation and audiovisual formats and at the same time he discovered a vocation for the investigation of digital cinema after the creation of the Taller Bigas Luna project with Catalina Pons in 1999. The experience in the Taller introduced them to the world of new technologies and in 2002 they promoted PLATAFORM BL, dedicated to the creation and promotion of innovative projects and new talents.

Bigas Luna’s varied career as a filmmaker, painter and designer made him a very singular and interdisciplinary artist. An example of that is his project called “Microcosmos”, an evolution of the earlier Cares de l’Ànima which was exhibited in the Galería Metropolitana de Barcelona in 1990. It can now be found on a web site (see external links below), where the visitor can modify and select the works and become, in this way, the creator.

Bigas Luna directed and produced a large-scale multimedia installation for the Spain Pavilion at Shanghai Expo 2010, named Origins, as the first part of the Pavilion’s trilogy on exhibition. The installation fused live Flamenco dance, sculpture and videos on more than 20 projectors.

From 2008 to 2012, Bigas took on the art direction of the oldest musical café in Europe, El Plata, in Zaragoza (Spain). There, he created a cabaret show classified as “Cabaret Ibérico” based on parodies, eroticism, the old burlesque, etc., accompanied by the typical dishes from Spain, such as paella, ham or Spanish omelette.

He died of leukemia on 5 April 2013, while working on the film adaptation of Manuel de Pedrolo’s novel Mecanoscrit del segon origen. —Wikipedia