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Spanish film director whose 'Iberian passion' trilogy began with Jamon Jamon

For 39 years, under General Francisco Franco's repressive regime, it was almost impossible for Spain to create a vibrant film industry and for talented film-makers to express themselves freely. However, after the death of the Generalissimo in 1975, there was a burst of creativity, with Pedro Almodóvar paving the way for directors such as Bigas Luna, who has died of cancer aged 67.

After some years as a conceptual artist who experimented with new audio-visual media, Luna became known internationally for his "Iberian passion" feature film trilogy: Jamon Jamon (1992), Golden Balls (1993) and The Tit and the Moon (1994), which explored the darkest depths of eroticism and stereotypical Spanish machismo. The first film introduced Penélope Cruz to audiences and launched Javier Bardem as the embodiment of the Spanish stud. "I owe my career to Bigas Luna," Bardem said in 2001.

In the trilogy, Luna,...

"It may not be true that 'the three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War, and the Titanic,' as one historian has put it, but it's not much of an exaggeration," writes Daniel Mendelsohn in this week's New Yorker. "Since the early morning of April 15, 1912, when the great liner went to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, taking with it five grand pianos, eight thousand dinner forks, an automobile, a fifty-line telephone switchboard, twenty-nine boilers, a jeweled copy of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, and more than fifteen hundred lives, the writing hasn't stopped."

What follows is an epic and irresistibly readable survey of 100 years' worth of Titanic lore. The disaster immediately inspired a "glut" of poems, "more than a hundred songs," countless histories, novels and plays and, of course, innumerable films, both narrative and documentary:

A scant month after the sinking, a one-reel movie...