Spanish cinema today means just one director, mas o menos, and that’s Pedro Almodovar. Others of course exist but non-Spanish audiences rarely get to see them and anyway, since the 1980s, Almodovar has managed to eclipse them all. There is none better to give a sense of the dynamism, frenzy and creative élan of contemporary Spain – even with a high dose of exaggeration. Certain actors on the other hand have a much higher profile – from Penelope Cruz to Javier Bardem, Antonio Banderas and their forerunner, the late great Fernando Rey.

Wheel back nearly a century to pre-Franco days, and you find two great Surrealist masters who kicked off Spain’s celluloid history: Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel. Dali’s L’Age d’Or (1930) and Buñuel’s Un chien Andalou (1928) were to become the Surrealist classics, though they were far better known in France than in Franco’s Spain which, from 1936 – 1977 put a brake on any other creative movement. Buñuel’s masterpiece actually coincided with the first Spanish cine-club which he founded in Madrid. From then on the capital monopolised film-production, taking over from Barcelona’s pioneering days.

One of Buñuel’s strangest films , Las Hurdes: Tierra sin pan (Breadless Land) is also one of his weirdest as it treads a fine line between fiction and documentary. Shot in what was then a poverty-stricken semi-wasteland, Extremadura, in western Spain, it was Buñuel’s way of making a socio-realist film without the realism. Peasant-women in headscarves and black dresses and little men with flat caps are the stars. It is a strange, silent film but with a strong sense of loss and despair. Franco’s fascist regime propelled many artists into exile, including Buñuel who spent a big chunk of his life in Mexico. He did occasionally return to Spain where he made two other major films, Viridiana (1961) and Tristana (1970). Viridiana was Buñuel’s way of getting his own back at Franco and at the Church, and was immediately banned. Orgies, rape, anti-clerical … This didn’t stop it getting the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. In Tristana, Fernando Rey appears, this time alongside Catherine Deneuve, then in full youthful bloom, though by the end of the film she has become a bitter, ageing cynic. It is yet another chef d’oeuvre, with less than veiled metaphors about Franco’s Spain and the bourgeoisie. It also paints a moving picture of small-town Spain, a reality that continued to exist until the early 1980s.

And then there was Almodovar. This man alone exemplifies post-Franco Spain and is the pure embodiment of the movedad, the wave of social catharsis that followed Franco’s death and brought the country back to life in an orgy of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Madrid in the early 1980s was where it was all at, and no film reflected this better than the fast-paced Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown (1988). This was already his seventh film, but it was the one that brought him international fame and made world audiences sit up to applaud and laugh with Spain’s inherent wackiness. Funky, passionate and eccentric, the drama-queen protagonists were to become Almodovar’s enduring leitmotif.

Tie me up! Tie me down (1990) continued the crazed atmosphere, this time with Victoria Abril and Antonio Banderas. For many people, All about my mother (1999) was one of his best, piling in as many social extremes as possible, from a son’s death to transvestite prostitution, to a pregnant nun to Aids and more and more. Maybe too much. Nonetheless it stacked up the awards from Oscars to Cesars – more than any other Spanish film ever.

With his next film, Talk to her (2002). Almodovar returned to earth so to speak and sketched out a very credible, highly focussed narrative with a moving relationship at its centre. A comatose woman in her hospital bed is their focus. In this film, at last, Almodovar definitively moved on from movedad madness to a calmer, deeper more human level. After the baroque identity efforts of Bad Education (2004) came Volver (2006), the perfect vehicle for a not quite credible though ever glam Penelope Cruz, one of a family trio of women who are survivors, come what may. It’s light and frothy, with a glimpse of La Mancha, that flat plain south of Madrid where Alomodovar hails from. There’ll be more to come, that;s for sure, but for a change it would be interesting to see someone else’s perspective on Spanish society.