Ventura Pons and Rosa Maria Sarda: Acting, the nation and cinema as totality

In his lifelong career as a film director, Ventura Pons has been praised for his unique and consistent approach to female roles. Between 1978 and 2018 he worked with virtually all of the most important Catalan actresses and developed a special affinity with some of them, such as Rosa Maria Sarda and Amparo Moreno. The extraordinary interpreting palette of both Sarda and Moreno provided Ventura Pons with a powerful repertoire of acting tones and hues, most notably in comedic genres. This article explores Pons's construction of national discourses through the roles and performances of Sarda, focusing on the interrelated issues of self-image and national allegory. The notion of self-image, as developed by imagologists Beller and Leerssen (2007), is most relevant in the context of the Catalan nation-building project, which runs in parallel to the othering of aspects of Catalan identity that are increasingly felt as alien.