Viuda Gómez

Xavier Villaverde


Viuda Gomez was one of the first music videos of Spanish production. In it, the construction of a narrative takes priority over the music: “It is an ironic mix, somewhere in between a thriller, a slapstick comedy and a family funerary drama”. Main character's only solution to a marriage of ill treatment is murder; her offspring – her accomplices – will make everything turn out really badly. As the spanish saying goes, “raise crows and they will poke your eyes out”.

Xavier Villaverde adopts MTV’s incipient music video model in order to update the mythical figure of the black widow, in the tradition of the femme fatale. In this music video he presents a melodrama of baroque film noir overtones with a gothic post-punk aesthetic. Inscribed from his beginnings within the revision of accepted models of audiovisual representation, such as in Tacón and Veneno Puro, here he condenses and re-elaborates cinematographic patterns from an electronic perspective. Giving a sense of drama to the visual changes of the narrative, generating an exhaustive investigation of the concept of negativity to the point of physically inverting the colour of the set – which he later shows once again inverted to its negative – , optically deforming the image, playing with different speeds, inverting luminance and chrominance during moments of tension and thus achieving an oppressive screen presence in keeping with the plot.

As a result of a family row, Mrs.Gómez kills her husband, the first man she ever had, the one with whom she raised her three children. Playing with film noir structures, the police investigate. Playing with horror films’ structures, during the vigil, the mother seduces her children, who remember the abuse. During the funeral, the deceased wakes up, and, during the escape of the mother and children, runs after the former through the quicksand of a marsh and after that, through a cemetery. The children end up leaving the deceased unconscious and locking him up in a niche. Finally, the Gomez widow is cannibalised by her offspring.

Viuda Gómez is an electronic nightmare that resembles the sting of the black widow: a strong local pain, fainting, and mild delirium. (“It is not very common for a normal healthy person to die, but it is possible for young children not to survive after being stung by such a spider”).

Technical datasheet

  • Title: Viuda Gómez
  • Direction: Xavier Villaverde
  • Production: Vídeo Trama S.A.. 1985.
  • Team:

    Script: Xavier Villaverde

    Cast: Rosa Fernández, Antonio Simón, Jorge Fernández, Dani N y Roberto González

    Original Soundtrack: Viuda Gómez

    Artistic Direction: Juan Martínez de la Colina

    Filming: Estudios Trak. Nadal 84

  • Duration: 00:12:40
  • Original format: U-Matic
  • Formats: Betacam Digital - DVD
  • TV systems: PAL
  • License: Copyright