From the beginning of his career, Juan Antonio Bardem was associated with the struggle for a national cinema critical of the establishment (and its vexing censorship) under Franco. 1955 saw a manifesto drawn up by radical young filmmakers meeting in Salamanca. That same year, Death of a Cyclist, Bardem's scathing portrait of the privileged class, heralded the international rebirth of the Spanish cinema in the post-Civil War/postwar period. The film is a study in collisions-of images, in a bold montage pattern; styles (now Eisensteinean, now neorealist); and values, in a bourgeois couple's heightened guilt and improbity following a hit-and-run encounter with a bicyclist. Afraid that their illicit affair will be discovered, the couple-a university professor and the wife of a wealthy industrialist-speed off, leaving the cyclist for dead. The incident leads the professor into a tortured re-examination of his life, while his lover becomes all the more venal in her panic to protect her status. In the background, political ferment among the university students and the level-headed realism of the cyclist's neighbors hold up a mirror to the class that Bardem hopes to expose-albeit in an oblique manner that might circumvent the censor's scissors. (He almost succeeded; the film was cut by some four minutes). Winner of the Critics Prize, Cannes Film Festival, 1955.