(Re)viewing Creative, Critical and Commercial Practices in Contemporary Spanish Cinema [1 ed.] 9781783204076, 9781783204069

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(Re)viewing Creative, Critical and Commercial Practices in

Contemporary Spanish Cinema edited by Duncan Wheeler and Fernando Canet

(Re)viewing Creative, Critical and Commercial Practices in Contemporary Spanish Cinema

(Re)viewing Creative, Critical and Commercial Practices in Contemporary Spanish Cinema

Editors Duncan Wheeler and Fernando Canet

intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA

First published in the UK in 2014 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First published in the USA in 2014 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright © 2014 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover designer: Stephanie Sarlos Cover image: F rom La mosquitera/The Mosquito Net (Vila, 2010) courtesy of Luis Miñarro (copyright Eddie Saeta) Copy-editor: Lisa Cordaro Production manager: Claire Organ Typesetting: Contentra Technologies Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-406-9 ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-407-6 ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-408-3 Printed and bound by TJ International, UK

In Memoriam Alberto Elena (1958–2014)

Contents Acknowledgements Editorial Note Chapter 1: Introduction: How and Why This Book Came into Being Fernando Canet and Duncan Wheeler

xi xiii 1

Chapter 2: Spanish Films, 1992–2012: Two Decades of Cinematic Production and Critical Discourse Duncan Wheeler

7

Chapter 3: From the Past to the Present: Contemporising Trends that Define Spanish Cinema Fernando Canet

35

Part 1: Sense and Sensibility: New Forms of Being and Seeing in Recent Spanish Cinema Section introduction by Duncan Wheeler

57

Chapter 4: Back to Africa? Colonial History and Postcolonial Dynamics in Recent Spanish Cinema Alberto Elena

65

Chapter 5: The New Ethos of Gay Culture and the Limits of Normalization Helio San Miguel

79

Chapter 6: Behind the Enigma Construct: A Certain Trend in Spanish Cinema Javier Moral

93

Chapter 7: Reproduction and Rhetorical Processes in the Construction of Reality: En Construcción and La leyenda del tiempo as Case Studies Fernando Canet

105

(Re)viewing Creative, Critical and Commercial Practices in Contemporary Spanish Cinema

Chapter 8: Art and Ethnography: Miquel Barceló and Isaki Lacuesta – Earth Magicians? Wenceslao García Puchades and Miguel Corella Lacasa Chapter 9: The Everyday Affect: Isabel Coixet and the Five Senses Jennie Rothwell Part 2: Revisiting the Past: The Politics of Memory and the Transition’s Cinematic Legacy Section introduction by Duncan Wheeler Chapter 10: Ana Torrent as Palimpsest in Elio Quiroga’s No-Do (The Haunting) Sarah Wright

119 131

145 153

Chapter 11: Victimhood in Contemporary Spanish Documentary: The Politics of Agency in Jaime Camino’s La vieja memoria and Los niños de Rusia Isabel Estrada and Melissa M. González

165

Chapter 12: New Bodies, New Sounds: Rediscovering the Eroticism of the Transition Alejandro Melero

177

Chapter 13: Blood and Unfulfilled Promises: Representations of Terrorism and the Transition Concepción Cascajosa Virino

191

Chapter 14: Back to the Future: Repackaging Spain’s Troublesome Past for Local and Global Audiences Duncan Wheeler

205

Chapter 15: Clowns, Goats, Music and the Comedic Violent: Late Francoism and the Transition to Democracy in Álex de la Iglesia’s Films Vicente Rodríguez Ortega

235

Part 3: Redefining Auteurship, Genre and Stardom in a Transnational Age 249 Section introduction by Duncan Wheeler Chapter 16: Almodóvar in the USA/The USA in Almodóvar Cristina Martínez-Carazo Chapter 17: Acting and Directing in Spain: Historicizing Stardom and the Author Function Duncan Wheeler viii

259

271

Contents

Chapter 18: Sex, Art and Commerce: Penélope Cruz and Isabel Coixet Tackle Philip Roth in Elegy Duncan Wheeler

291

Chapter 19: Deadly Hybridity: Sexykiller, the Female Serial Killer and the New Spanish Horror Film Shelagh Rowan-Legg

311

Chapter 20: Flexing Generic Boundaries: Torrente, [REC] and Adolescent Cinema in Spain Agustín Rico-Albero

323

Chapter 21: The Torrente Tetralogy: A Homegrown Saga Lidia Merás

335

Chapter 22: Hybrid Models: Auteurism and Genre in Contemporary Spanish Crime Thrillers Carmen Herrero

351

Chapter 23: Planet 51 and Spanish Animation: The Risks and Attractions of Globalization Maria Soler Campillo, Marta Martín Núñez and Javier Marzal Felici

365

Coda: Backstage Pass – Engaging with Practitioners and Cinematic Institutions

377

Chapter 24: How to Make Arty Films Now Luis Miñarro

379

Chapter 25: How to Make Commercial Films Now Mercedes Gamero and Duncan Wheeler

389

Chapter 26: San Sebastián: A Film Festival of Contrasts Mar Diestro-Dópido

405

Chapter 27: The Art Director as Architect: The Reconstruction of Deconstructed Memories Sandra Martorell Chapter 28: The Films of Isaki Lacuesta: Hidden Portraits, Multiple Lives Linda C. Ehrlich

ix

419 431

(Re)viewing Creative, Critical and Commercial Practices in Contemporary Spanish Cinema

Chapter 29: Color perro que huye: An Audio-visual Prosumer versus the Institutional Cinematic Model Elena López Riera Chapter 30: New Tendencies in Contemporary Cinema: Round Table Discussion with José Luis Guerin, Isaki Lacuesta and Luis Miñarro Fernando Canet and Duncan Wheeler

441

453

Notes on Contributors

471

Index

477

x

Acknowledgements This book has been published with the support of the Polytechnic University of Valencia, the Institut Ramon Llull and with the help of the research project ‘Study and Analysis for Development of Research Network on Film Studies through Web 2.0 platforms’, financed by the National R + D + i Plan of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation for the period 2011–13 (HAR2010-18648), under the direction of Fernando Canet. Duncan Wheeler’s participation was facilitated by a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship. He would like to thank his colleagues in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Leeds for their support. The editors are very grateful to the contributors who make this volume what it is, and especially to the following practitioners who selflessly took time out of their invariably busy schedules to participate: Mercedes Gamero, José Luís Guerin, Edou Hydallgo, Isaki Lacuesta, Luís Miñarro, Felix Murcia and Josep Rosell.

Editorial Note All translations are the contributors’ own unless otherwise noted. Film titles are given in Spanish and English when first referenced in individual chapters; all subsequent references are in Spanish alone. The only exception is in cases such as Volver (Almodóvar, 2006), where the film was internationally distributed using the Spanish title, or on those occasions where there was no distribution title in English.

Chapter 1 Introduction: How and Why this Book Came into Being Fernando Canet and Duncan Wheeler

The problem of the critic, as of the artist, is not to discount his subjectivity, but to include it; not to overcome it in agreement, but to master it in exemplary ways. (Cavell, 1976: 94)

A

lthough there is a certain arbitrariness in all attempts at chronological division, there are clearly key moments in which, as a result of broader socio-historical factors and/or aesthetic developments, national cinemas appear to undergo serious transformation. In the case of Spain, this has been inextricably linked with changes in political mood or power: therefore, it is customary to refer to its cinema in terms of the period in which it was produced, be that during the Second Republic, the Spanish Civil War or the dictatorship. Even those films produced in the late 1970s and 1980s tended to be viewed and written about in terms of the nascent democracy; hence, a film-maker as ostensibly apolitical as Pedro Almodóvar was often interpreted (especially abroad) in relation to Franco’s death and the dictatorship’s demise. If 1992 was the year in which, through a series of emblematic events – the Barcelona Olympics, the Expo in Seville, Madrid being named City of Culture – Spain announced its democratic credentials to the world, then it also marked the final point at which its cinematic output could be plausibly classified in relation to its sociopolitical Transition. If, for example, we take even a fleeting glance at the film whose image graces the front cover of this volume – La mosquitera/The Mosquito Net (Vila, 2010) – the need to extend our artillery of heuristic tools and the parameters of what is commonly understood by Spanish cinema become apparent. In a twenty-first century continuation of Spain’s rich surrealist tradition, this depiction of a dysfunctional upper-middle-class family is an artfully constructed, psychologically acute and engaging black comedy; nevertheless, it trades in the kind of bourgeois angst more habitually associated with French cinema and whose manifestation in modern-day Barcelona is a symptom, for better or worse, of Spain’s economic and social normalization in relation to its European neighbours. Although the film’s producer, the prolific Luis Miñarro has, to borrow a phrase from Paul Julian Smith (2011: 184), ‘midwifed much of the new Catalan art cinema’, La mosquitera is fairly conventional in many respects: made with television funding, it has a pace redolent of commercial cinema and stars Emma Suárez, a figure familiar to Spanish television and cinema audiences, who first made her name as an adolescent sex symbol in the 1980s. While a few years previously these ingredients would have virtually guaranteed box office success, La mosquitera delivered only a modest financial return, but it was very well received at a

(Re)viewing Creative, Critical and Commercial Practices in Contemporary Spanish Cinema

number of international film festivals which constitute a circuit on which much Spanish cinema is increasingly reliant, implicating even ostensibly national films such as this within a matrix of transnational economic and aesthetic exchanges. The primary aim of this edited volume is to provide a self-reflective and interventionist form of academic criticism which combines aesthetic appraisal with a (re)consideration of the creative, commercial and critical imperatives that inform and underpin the viewing and reviewing of contemporary Spanish films. It makes no claim to be exhaustive or even necessarily representative; there are already numerous excellent companions and guides to the history of Spanish cinema available, many of which will be cited in different chapters. At a time when the entire notion of national cinemas is being increasingly put into question, what we believe this book does provide is the most broad-ranging study of contemporary cinematic practices in Spain – both in terms of objects of study and methodology – with a special emphasis on films produced over the last ten years (2002–12). The majority of the contributors participated in the (S)Movies: Contemporary Spanish Cinema International Conference, which was organized by the Department of Audiovisual Communication, Documentation and History of Art, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, and held in New York in December 20111 – and subsequently were invited to submit a chapter on a topic of their choice that fell within the general rubric of the book’s remit. From reading these initial submissions, we were able to identify some underlying themes and debates; we then commissioned a small number of additional chapters by individuals whose expertise we felt would be uniquely placed to develop these conversations further by addressing the issues raised by the titles of the sections, but not yet addressed in any of the submitted pieces. This vision of the book as a form of dialogue or exchange finds its most explicit manifestation in the final section, in which a series of scholars engage with practitioners and/or institutions. Hence the book ends like the conference before it, with a round table discussion led by Fernando Canet between José Luis Guerin (one of the country’s most respected directors, regularly feted at major international festivals, who first gained major national and international acclaim with En construcción/Work in Progress, 2001, and probably is best known outside of Spain for En la ciudad de Sylvia/In the City of Sylvia, 2007), and Isaki Lacuesta (a formally adventurous and prolific young film-maker who debuted with the short film Caras vs. Caras, 2000 and won the top prize, the Golden Shell, at the 2011 San Sebastian Film Festival for Los pasos dobles/The Double Steps), alongside Luis Miñarro. In addition to his Spanish films, Miñarro has been involved in a series of international co-productions including O Estranho Caso de Angélica/The Strange Case of Angélica (de Oliviera, 2010) and Loong Boonmee raleuk chat /Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Weerasethakul, 2010), the winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes. The exchange between Mercedes Gamero – head of acquisitions and cinema production at the television channel, Antena 3 – and Duncan Wheeler also focuses on the production of both national and international films, but moves away from the reified domain of art films to address the production of commercial cinema that is not so dependent on awards or festivals, but rather on the domestic and/or international box office. 4

Introduction: How and Why this Book Came into Being

Adopting a pluralistic approach from the outset, the two chapters that follow this brief preamble consist of introductory texts authored by the two editors, in which we offer our respective visions of contemporary Spanish cinema that are informed, but hopefully not determined, by our biographical, disciplinary and geographical backgrounds. Duncan Wheeler’s piece focuses not only on the corpus of post-1992 films, but also on the discourse that has surrounded them, and the national cinema, both at home and in Anglo-American contexts. Through this discussion he makes a spirited case for the strength of some Spanish films of the last twenty years, while identifying lacunae in critical discourse which, he suggests in both this text and the various introductions to the individual sections, are addressed by the overarching themes used to structure the book. In the chapter written by Fernando Canet, he returns to the history of Spanish cinema in order to explore some of the defining features which have characterized it in the past and, in many cases he argues, the present. His working hypothesis is that there are clear national antecedents for the majority of ostensibly new trends and tendencies. While it is clearly beyond this chapter’s remit to provide an exhaustive overview, Canet’s contextualization allows the reader to have a better understanding of the many rich and varied contributions that follow. Note 1

This event was able to take place as a result of the support of Spanish General Consulate in New York. In addition, it was enabled by the sponsorship of the Valencian Generalitat and the Institut Ramon Lluch, alongside the collaboration and participation of, among other institutions, the Instituto Cervantes in New York, ESCAC, ECAM and Cahiers du Cinema España.

References Cavell, S. (1976). Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Smith, P. J. (2011). ‘Conference report: (S)Movies, New York City, 12 to 16 December, 2011’, New Cinemas, 9.2–3: 183–87.

5

Chapter 2 Spanish Films, 1992–2012: Two Decades of Cinematic Production and Critical Discourse Duncan Wheeler

F

or Spain, 1992 might have been a euphoric year, but in spite of the release of Belle Epoque/The Age of Beauty (Trueba, 1992) – which, somewhat unexpectedly, would win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film the following year – the national cinema was in no mood for celebration. It was suffering the financial fallout of the costs of Spain joining the European Union (EU), and arguably registered the effects of the global recession earlier than other cultural industries. Even Pedro Almodóvar, who subsequently would become a reliable international ambassador, had failed to capitalize on the success of Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios/Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988). More generally the infamous 1983 Miró Law, designed to replicate French protectionist models, may have delivered a select number of emblematic commercial and critical triumphs such as Los santos inocentes/The Holy Innocents (Camus, 1984) while facilitating a number of young directors in making their debuts, but on the whole it had alienated audiences. Furthermore, a lack of transparency in its practices and a frequent desire to control rather than counteract market forces led to charges of cronyism. As Peter Besas has observed: The criteria for giving subsidies have always been murky, vague enough so that political and private favoritism could be exercised. Nepotism and influence-pulling overshadowed the system and continue to be a key factor in the subsidy system, whether under Franco or under the Socialists. After all, behind all the laws and legal frippery always hovers the human factor. Influence pulling does not alter with political systems. Only the people in it change. Indeed, the tug-of-war for currying favors today is just as fierce as it was in the times of El Cid. (1997: 246) In general, there has been an unwillingness in democratic Spain to implement the so-called ‘arm’s-length principle’ which, according to Robert Hewison, has acted as a buffer against despotic behaviour in the UK: ‘A convention has been established over the years that in arts patronage neither the politician nor the bureaucrat knows best’ (1995: 32). In Spain, 1994 marked a nadir in terms of film production, as well as an about-turn in film policy whereby the Minister of Culture, Carmen Alborch, virtually dismantled Pilar Miró’s reforms and, instead of offering advance credits to a small number of prestigious projects generally heralded by renowned auteurs, gave automatic subsidies on the basis of box office receipts (Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas, 1998: 3). In 1994, the Escuela de Cinematografía y

(Re)viewing Creative, Critical and Commercial Practices in Contemporary Spanish Cinema

del Audiovisual de la Comunidad de Madrid/Greater Madrid Audiovisual and Film School (ECAM) opened in Madrid; its Catalan equivalent, the Escuela Superior de Cine y Audiovisuales de Cataluña/Catalan School for Advanced Study in Film and Audiovisual Communication (ESCAC), came into operation the following year. 1995 also marked a resurgence in production, and Spanish film of the latter half of the decade was widely construed as one of European cinema’s most unlikely and unexpected success stories. This renaissance, be it perceived or real, was due principally to the emergence of a new generation of directors that were very different to the traditional auteur. In the words of Rosanna Maule: ‘What distinguished these newcomers from their predecessors was their determination to attract domestic audiences within a theatrical exhibition circuit dominated by Hollywood films. Yet their responses to the crisis facing Spanish cinema were diverse’ (2008: 134). So, on the one hand – and especially during the legislature of the Centre-Right, market-driven Partido Popular (People’s Party, 1996–2004) – film directors such as Iciar Bollaín, Chus Gutiérrez, Fernando León de Aranoa and Benito Zambrano sought to use social realist cinema as a form of political protest in the vein of British film-makers such as Ken Loach. Conversely, there was a boom in various autochthonous takes on genre films: be they the slick, sophisticated thrillers of Alejandro Amenábar, Álex de la Iglesia’s hybrid fantasies or, to borrow an expression from Núria Triana-Toribio (2003: 151), the ‘neo-vulgarities’ that hit their stride with Airbag (Bajo Ulloa, 1997), and found their most profitable and durable formula in the Torrente saga (Segura, 1998–2011). In spite of their disparate ethical and aesthetic agendas, Carlos Heredero is correct to identify a trait common to these film-makers: ‘They came of age as directors when freedom had already been won, and they do not feel the necessity of coming to terms with the past. Therefore, any reflection on history has practically disappeared from their images’ (2003: 34). Spanish Cinema as an Academic Discipline This resurgence in the commercial fortunes of Spanish cinema coincided with its consolidation as an established academic discipline. Especially in the UK, this nascent field of study had originated within modern languages more than film studies (see TrianaToribio, 2008).1 As Ann Davies remarks, the fact that often it was broached first by critics more used to approaching literature, alongside political sympathies, meant that ‘there was a canon of great directors such as Buñuel and pioneers of the nuevo cine español (New Spanish Cinema) such as Carlos Saura and Víctor Erice, drawing on an allegorical style that hinted at opposition to the Franco regime’ (2011: 3). As she goes on to say, a great deal of excellent work and groundbreaking scholarship was produced within this rubric. However, it was ironic that at a time when Spanish cinema was moving away from its ties with the Francoist past, this remained the dominant subject and heuristic tool through which it often continued to be viewed from abroad, arguably reinscribing a somewhat distorted dynamic from the 1960s by which the policies of the incumbent Director General of Cinematographic Arts, 10

Spanish Films, 1992–2012

José María García Escudero, encouraged dissident work at home to be targeted primarily at international, as opposed to domestic, audiences. Hence, for example, a 2007 retrospective season at the British Film Institute (BFI), generously funded by the incoming Socialist government, included landmark oppositional films such as ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall!/Welcome Mister Marshall! (García Berlanga, 1953), Calle Mayor/Main Street (Bardem, 1956) or El desencanto/The Disenchantment (Chávarri, 1976). As Susan Hayward notes, ‘the writing of a national cinema has predominantly addressed moments of exception and not the “global” picture’ (1993: xi). Films such as these – alongside the Salamanca Conversations of the mid-1950s, at which directors such as Berlanga and Bardem mercilessly critiqued Spain’s national cinema in its entirety and, inspired by neo-realism, called for more socially and politically engaged films – often have been construed as a cornucopian revolution in Spanish film production. However, as I have argued elsewhere, the BFI’s season’s title, ‘Breaking the Code: Daring Films that Mocked the Repression in Spain’: might be an accurate description, but films of the quality of El desencanto or Calle Mayor have an interest that transcends the political. A similar thing occurred when Berlanga died. On the one hand, I was pleased that a newspaper such as The Guardian dedicated nearly a page to his obituary; I was irritated, however, by the emphasis that was placed on his role as a dissident under the regime. Apart from the fact that Don Luis’s ideological convictions are not at all easy to work out, this specifically political approach moves away from an analysis of his virtues as a filmmaker and implicitly undermines his status as an artist deserving the respect of any cinephile. (Wheeler, 2011: 26) For example, the programming of El extraño viaje/Strange Voyage (Fernán-Gómez, 1964) within this season was hardly an amenable context in which to appreciate what Santos Zunzunegui (2002: 17) has astutely identified as the influence of the quintessentially Spanish esperpento (grotesque farce). Elsewhere this academic, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of his national cinema and culture in general, has complained of what is, in his view, the very selective appropriation and misreading that Spanish cinema has been subjected to by North American scholars and criticism (Zunzunegui, 1999). For him, the fact that foreign scholars often use the term nuevo cine español as a catch-all phrase for oppositional cinema under the dictatorship, rather than in relation to a specific group that emerged around García Escudero and the Official Madrid Film School, is evidence of ignorance and cultural appropriation (Zunzunegui, 1999: 26). In the same way that politically and aesthetically committed Spanish theatre under Franco is seen often somewhat simplistically to emerge from almost nowhere, with the premiere of Antonio Buero Vallejo’s Historia de una escalera/Story of a Stairway in 1949 (see Green, 2009), the celebrated meetings at Salamanca have been retrospectively fetishized to the point of caricature. José Luis Castro de Paz and Josetxo Cerdán (2011: 14–16) have 11

(Re)viewing Creative, Critical and Commercial Practices in Contemporary Spanish Cinema

not only provided a concise history of the study of Spanish cinema at home, but more generally, followed Zunzunegui’s lead to suggest that a fuller understanding of traditional Spanish theatrical forms such as the sainete (light farce) and the esperpento allows for dissident readings of films that pre-date the nuevo cine español, while simultaneously facilitating a richer appreciation of individual films and a move beyond a Manichean discourse that taxonomically categorizes films as either pro-Franco or anti-Franco. Although many of the contributions to this volume demonstrate that this critical deficit has been settled to a certain extent, Hispanists often have suggested, implicitly or explicitly, that discourse undertaken on Spanish cinema at home does not always do justice to the quality and diversity of the films being produced, and that critics often employ theory in an obtuse, idiosyncratic and anachronistic fashion. As Paul Julian Smith states: Press critics in Spain are unusually institutionalized, displaying exceptional continuity and homogeneity. Ángel Fernández Santos, scriptwriter of El espíritu de la colmena [The Spirit of the Beehive] and as well disposed to art movies as he is hostile to Almodóvar, has remained chief film critic at the dominant daily El País for some twenty years, even instilling his daughter as second stringer. Likewise, Spanish theorists of film, frequently faithful to abstract and technical codes of structuralist narratology have rarely rehabilitated popular filmmakers, choosing rather to lionize high art directors. In Bordieu’s terms, the Spanish cinematic field remains highly distinctive with texts, producers and institutions combining and continuing to valorize high aesthetic qualities in a way that is not characteristic of other European territories, such as the UK. (2003: 147) The arrival of the iconoclastic Carlos Boyero as El País’s film critic following Santos’ death in 2004 has changed this dynamic radically (see Jordan, 2011)2 – and arguably, not for the better – but, in general, the so-called ‘cultural turn’ remains (in)conspicuously absent from many Spanish universities. In a plenary address at the Hispanic Cinemas: En Transición (Hispanic Cinemas: In Transition) conference held at Madrid’s Carlos III University in November 2012, Jenaro Talens appeared to suggest that this was a good thing: although he is an admirer of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, he argued somewhat idiosyncratically that its work could be effectively brought under the rubric of semiotics, and that most subsequent cultural studies privileged their own theoretical concerns, thereby losing sight of the films themselves. In a similar vein, Zunzunegui clearly (and disparagingly) construes the ‘interpretative pyrotechnics’ (2005: 15) of ‘readers who have preconceived ideas from the outset about the object of study’ (1999: 96), and ignorance of the subject in question, as going hand-in-hand. While these Spanish critics raise some legitimate concerns, they have been debated within the field itself. As Stuart Hall states: At some point in the expansion of cultural studies, culture escaped. It became a kind of balloon, a pumped up critical theory balloon. This is not an argument against theory. 12

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I couldn’t imagine my making an argument against theory. And the sophistication that theory brought leaves early cultural studies looking like kindergarten. Nevertheless, cultural studies ceased to be troubled by the grubby worldliness, to use [Edward] Said’s term, the worldliness in which culture has always to exist. It seems as if cultural studies could operate on its own terms […] everybody could quote everybody else, et cetera, and the literary text comes roaring back. (cited in MacCabe, 2008: 28) In other words, ‘cultural studies’ might not always have lived up to its initial promise, but the answer cannot lie in a naive retreat into a positivist authority which seemingly construes theory as an optional and unnecessary appendage. The Cultural Politics of Public and Private Funding It could be argued that domestic and foreign critics were too uncritical in their veneration of a new generation of social-realist film-makers who came to the fore in the mid- to late1990s. For educators working outside of Spain, they have provided a valuable pedagogical tool, while commentators at home have welcomed what often has been perceived as a return to the values of the Salamanca Conversations. As I have explored elsewhere in relation to the depiction of domestic violence, important but flawed films such as Solas/Alone (Zambrano, 1999) and Te doy mis ojos/Take my Eyes (Bollaín, 2003) were hailed hyperbolically as masterpieces in a wide variety of discursive contexts (Wheeler, 2012). This is not the only example of how the ostensible miracle of Spanish cinema at the end of the last century was, at least in part, the result of exaggeration. First, the box office success of a number of highly profitable films arguably distorted the figures, and made the industry as a whole appear healthier than it actually was. Second, escalating ticket prices ensured that film ceased to be the ‘democratic’ popular art form that it had been for much of the twentieth century, as cinema-going became an increasingly elite activity (Fernández Blanco et al., 2002). Third, what Paul Julian Smith terms ‘the inextricability of cinema and television as twin vehicles for screen fiction in Spain’ (2009: 11) has not always been a positive development. While this critic picks up on comments made by Andrés Vicente Gómez (one of Spain’s most commercially successful producers) to suggest that this transition has led to ‘speedier production schedules and the imposition of more commercial criteria [has] helped to promote artistic independence’ (Smith, 2003: 117), the fact that state television has tended, at least traditionally, to invest a little in lots of projects, while private channels adopt the opposite strategy of investing in a small number of high-budget projects such as Alatriste/Captain Alatriste: The Spanish Musketeer (Díaz Yanes, 2006) or Los Borgia/The Borgia (Hernández, 2006) (Riambau and Torreiro, 2008: 906), is particularly unfortunate, given the simultaneous rise of the multiplex. Paradoxically, Spain, like many countries, now has more cinema screens than ever before, yet the range and number of films 13

(Re)viewing Creative, Critical and Commercial Practices in Contemporary Spanish Cinema

being shown is reducing; as a result, arguably it is more difficult than ever to make films that do not adhere to mainstream commercial criteria. As María Pilar Cousido González and María Estrella Gutiérrez David (2008) have studied at length, nepotism and corruption are hardly the unique preserve of public funding, and there continues to be a worrying lack of transparency in the audio-visual sector in general. Hence, for example, images from the premiere of Tiovivo c. 1950 (Garci, 2004) – an anodyne and arguably revisionist depiction of Francoist Spain – of Mariano Rajoy3 with his arms around the veteran film-maker (whose Volver a empezar/Begin the Beguine (1982) was the first Spanish film to win an Oscar), led many to surmise that the director had been rewarded for his political loyalty by the Partido Popular, when he was subsequently granted the largest ever subsidy awarded to a national film by Madrid City Council to make Sangre de Mayo/ Blood of May (2008). Irrespective of whether or not this claim is true, the fact that it is widely believed betrays a lack of trust in the system as whole. Less commented upon, at least among the popular press, is the fact that this lack of transparency may provide one explanation as to why the promise of increased gender parity through the emergence of more than the occasional female director in the 1990s has not been realized. Between 2000 and 2006 only 7.4 per cent of Spanish films were directed by women, and in the 1990s, 17.08 per cent of new directors were female; however, between 2000 and 2007 this figure fell to 10.4 per cent (Arranz, 2010). Although it is difficult to provide demonstrable evidence, anecdotal stories seem to suggest that nepotism and casual sexism have been an important factor: for example, the veteran actress and film-maker, Silvia Munt, reported that one anonymous negative report from a private television channel on the viability of Pretextos/ Pretexts (Munt, 2008) suggested that the woman who wrote it just needed ‘un buen polvo’ (‘a good fuck’).4 Thus, the seeds for what has been widely perceived as an escalating crisis in Spanish cinema since the ascension of the Partido Socialista y Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) to power in 2004, were arguably in place during the boom years. However, this was exacerbated by their drive to increase production at a time when cinema attendance and the number of films being shown was in decline.5 Some commentators, especially in the press, felt that the incoming Socialist administration had rewarded the industry for its loyalty, given the cinema profession’s general left-wing tendencies embodied in ¡Hay motivo! (2004), a portmanteau film in which many of the country’s leading directors protested against the governing Partido Popular. Tensions had escalated earlier in 2002 when, as leader of the opposition, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero had attended Juan Antonio Bardem’s funeral at which many film practitioners, including the then-president of the Academia de las Artes y las Ciencias Cinematográficas de España/Spanish Film Academy, Marisa Paredes, had raised their fists during a recitation of the Communist International. However, this brief controversy was nothing in comparison to the furore that accompanied the opposition to the Iraq War, voiced continually throughout the 2004 Goya Ceremony televised just prior to the general elections (see Bardem and Bardem, 2005: 595–617; Granado, 2006: 241–56). 14

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Debates came to the fore with the arrival of the Ley del cine (new cinema law) in 2007, which most exhibitors objected to because, in their view, it legally forced them to show unpopular Spanish films. Personal opinions aside, the controversy did little to favour the image of a national cinema depicted as something of a lame duck in need of a constant supply of subsidies.6 This negative publicity was exacerbated subsequently by then-Minister of Culture Ángeles González-Sinde’s attempts to prosecute illegal downloading and pirating: a largely unpopular stance undermined by the director of the Spanish Film Academy, Álex de la Iglesia, who not only voiced his sympathy for the targets of proposed legislation, but also accused his colleagues of being complacent in not appealing to the general public (see Chapter 21). In other words, his view was that their cinema needed to be more concerned about the fact that audiences were not bothering to view Spanish cinema even when they could access it, albeit illegally, for free. The contributors to this volume adopt various often opposing stances as to whether mainstream acceptance and commercial success ought to be determining factors in the kind of films that are made. While in accordance with the ethos of the volume we have adopted no editorial line in this regard, I would suggest that there are two ways of denigrating a national cinema: first, by saying that it can never make money by direct or indirect means; and second, by suggesting that commercial viability is the sole criterion by which films ought to be judged. Sociological and Aesthetic Developments Under Franco, Spain traditionally had been a nation of emigrants, be that for political or economic reasons, but at the turn of the century, immigration made it an increasingly multicultural society, due primarily to rising living standards and European integration – at least until the onset of the current global recession. While in 1993 there were 430,000 people living in Spain that were not born there, by 2010 this figure had increased to 5 million: 10 per cent of the overall population (Aja, 2012: 50). In Volver (2006), Almodóvar establishes a contrast between the town in La Mancha whose local inhabitants have lived there for generations, and the multi-ethnic populations of Vallecas and, even more markedly, Cuatro Caminos. These working-class districts used to be filled with rural emigrants new to the capital, as did Lavapiés, an area whose continued popularity as a film location in, for example, Alma gitana/Gypsy Soul (Gutiérrez, 1996) or El próximo oriente/The Near East (Colomo, 2006) bears testament to the interest on the part of both film-makers and audiences in relation to changing demographics. Similarly, Ventura Pons has depicted twenty-first century Spanish multiculturalism in Forasteros/Strangers (2008), which explores the lives and interactions of the inhabitants of an ethnically and generationally diverse apartment block in Barcelona’s Poblenou. It is, however, problematic that Catalan films of this kind are generally rendered either exclusively in Catalan or dubbed into Castilian, thereby eschewing the multilingual reality that immigrants have to negotiate.7 15

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Popular comedies may trade frequently on popular stereotypes, but increasingly they are viewing characters not born with Spanish nationalities to be citizens that are well integrated into the political and social fabric of the state: see, for example, the depiction of Latin American and Chinese characters in Una hora más en Canarias (Serrano, 2010) and Pelayos/ The Winning Streak (Cortés, 2012), respectively. While these films generally have celebrated multiculturalism, others have focused on the plight of the immigrant. Retorno a Hansala/ Return to Hansala (Gutiérrez, 2008) probes the relationship between the south of Spain and Morocco, while providing a human face to the statistics frequently heard on the news about the deaths and injuries of immigrants attempting to enter Europe illegally. The Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu has provided arguably the most disturbing portrayal of exploitation of immigrant labour in Biutiful (2010), in which he self-consciously eschews the tourist gaze of Barcelona, focusing on the psychic and physical underbelly of an ostensibly advanced global city. Salvajes/Savages (Molinero, 2001) and Alacrán enamorado/Alacrán in Love (Zannon, 2013) both deal with racist skinhead violence and its relationship with the social and economic marginalization of working-class Spaniards in the outskirts of major urban conurbations. In addition, as Isolina Ballesteros (2005) has noted, a feminization of migration flows has found its correlative in Spanish immigration cinema. Both Rabia/Rage (2009), directed by the Ecuadorian Sebastián Cordero, and Amador (León de Aranoa, 2010), have featured Latin American women in domestic labour as their protagonists. Princesas/ Princesses (León de Aranoa, 2005) and more recently, Evelyn (de Ocampo, 2012), have looked at how women living in Spain without official documentation are tricked or coerced into entering prostitution. As Jo Labanyi and Tatjana Pavlović note, ‘the cinema production of Spain’s autonomous communities has made innovative connections between the local and the transnational, bypassing the national by aligning with world markets’ (2013: 3). As discussed throughout section one of this book, there can be no doubt that Catalonia has been at the epicentre of the general resurgence in Spain’s art cinema over the last decade or so, however that nebulous term is defined. This has been both a product and a cause of the success of the Creative Documentary Master’s programme at Barcelona’s Pompeu Fabra University, which has branched into production (see Torreiro, 2010). In addition to providing a training ground for young directors such as Isaki Lacuesta, the programme has served to recuperate the legacy of Joaquim Jordà, a veteran of the so-called Barcelona School, a self-consciously radical avant-garde group of film-makers from the 1960s (see Riambau and Torreiro, 1999), who has taught there and returned to directing films such as Mones de Becky/Monkeys Like Becky (1999) and Más allá del espejo/Beyond the Mirror (2006). This revival has coincided with a reappraisal of this much-maligned earlier movement;8 as Jaume Martí Olivella notes: ‘Catalan cinema is no longer the ugly duckling of the nation’s cultural panorama […] it is currently receiving some special attention, both official and popular’ (2011: 187). Hence, for example, Pa negre/Black Bread (Villaronga, 2010) became the first film in Catalan to be put forward as the official Spanish entry for consideration as Best Foreign Film at the Oscars. While the films discussed in section one may provide little-needed ammunition for 16

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Boyero and his ilk – who often construe these new film-makers as the wilfully obtuse heirs to a mode of film-making best left in the past – they have received extensive coverage and recognition at prestigious international festivals. If Catalonia has been arguably the most successful, and definitely the most visible, exponent of this model, it is paramount that this recognition does not lead to reification. First, it lends itself too easily to essentialist and nationalistic interpretations; hence why ‘the members of the Barcelona School were notoriously reluctant to identify themselves as part of specifically Catalan cultural tradition’ (Vilaseca, 2010: 134). Second, there is the risk of simply transferring cultural hegemony from one centre, Madrid, to another: Barcelona. Not all Catalan film-making is carried out in Barcelona, and not all art cinema made in Spain is made in Catalonia. Also, it is important not to celebrate its cultural achievements at the expense of the other autonomous regions. Basque cinema, for example, has an illustrious, albeit complicated tradition (see Martí Olivella, 2003), which is documented and developed in Aita/Father (de Orbe, 2011), produced by Barcelona-based Luis Miñarro. Elsewhere, a film such as Arriya/The Stone (Gorritiberea, 2011) has, like Vacas/Cows (Médem, 1992) before it, grappled with Basque identity and history through the lens of a long-standing and frequently violent feud between two families. Third, in the same way that art cinema is not the unique preserve of Catalan cinema – or more accurately, cinema made and/or financed in Catalonia – neither does the category envelope all, or even most, of the films made in the autonomous region. Like Miñarro, Edmon Roch has co-produced high-profile international ventures but of a more commercial bent, ranging from the historical epics Lope (Waddington, 2010) and Bruc, la llegenda/Bruc, the Manhunt (Benmayor, 2010) to the animated feature Las aventuras de Tadeo Jones/Tad, the Lost Explorer (Gato, 2012) which, at the time of writing, is number one at the Spanish box office. El orfanato/The Orphanage (Bayona, 2007) and Spanish Movie (Ruiz Caldera, 2009), two overtly commercial films, were directed by graduates of ESCAC; on venturing into production, Catalonia’s official film school’s two initial projects – Lo mejor de mí/The Best of Me (Aguilar, 2007) and Tres dies amb la família/Three Days with the Family (Coll, 2009) – were, especially in the former case, largely indistinguishable from the characterdriven and somewhat melodramatic social realism associated with Madrid. Vicente Aranda may be one of the founding members of the Barcelona School, but he now specializes in erotic period pieces (see Chapter 14), while Bigas Luna’s output over the last twenty years, most notably the so-called Iberian trilogy – Jamón, jamón (1992), Huevos de oro/Golden Balls (1993), and La teta i la lluna/The Tit and the Moon (1994) – were produced and marketed with a much broader (inter)national audience in mind than, say, Bilbao (Luna, 1978). As Alberto Mira notes, ‘Ventura Pons’s extensive body of work is among the most consistent in post-Franco Spanish cinema’ (2013: 56). Barcelona’s unofficial cinematic poet laureate has turned his attention away increasingly from urban comedies to literary adaptations over the last two decades, most noticeably to the plays of the contemporary dramatist Sergi Belbel (see George, 2002). Pons’s films, like Catalan and Spanish cinema in general, have benefited immensely from the talents of theatre practitioners over recent years: performances from 17

(Re)viewing Creative, Critical and Commercial Practices in Contemporary Spanish Cinema

actors who cut their teeth on the stage, such as Lluís Homar, Eduard Fernández, Carmen Machi, Blanca Portillo, José Maria Pou or Rosa María Sardà, have enriched a wide variety of commercial as well as more overtly auteur-based films. En la ciudad/In the City (2003) and Una pistola en cada mano/A Pistol in Each Hand (2012), both directed by Cesc Gay, shot in Barcelona and featuring a large ensemble cast, bear elegant testament to the breadth of performing talent in Spain. As I argue in Chapter 17, one of the keys to the commercial and aesthetic success of the films of Pedro Almodóvar and Isabel Coixet resides in judicious and imaginative casting, alongside a shared capacity – albeit employing radically different methods – to elicit career-best performances from world-class actors whose talents have not always been done justice in prior screen appearances. Collective and Cinematic Memories If Spanish film-making from the early democratic period was informed largely by what Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas have termed a ‘very culture-specific need to recuperate a past which for forty years had been hijacked and aggressively refashioned by Francoism’ (1998: 16), then the ostensible retreat from the past which, as we have seen, characterized much of the film-making of the 1990s, has experienced a complete aboutturn over the last decade. This has been both the cause and consequence of debates which crystallized around the 2007 Law of Historical Memory, designed to acknowledge, but not compensate, the crimes committed against victims during both the Civil War and the nearly forty years of dictatorship that ensued. In Georgina Blakeley’s words, the incoming Socialist government sought to portray this legal milestone as ‘an integral and coherent part of its overall legislative agenda based on extending rights’ (2008: 325). It coincided historically and ideologically with, for example, the introduction of Europe’s most ostensibly progressive laws on gay marriage (see Chapter 5), or for the protection of women suffering domestic violence (see Wheeler, 2008). The Law of Historical Memory has been alternatively portrayed as an antidote to, or betrayal of, the so-called pacto del olvido (‘pact of forgetting’) or pacto del silencio (‘pact of silence’) that is succinctly described and contextualized by Gregorio Alonso and Diego Muro in the following terms: A key pillar of the transition was a political compromise to silence the memory of the civil war and the excesses of the military dictatorship. Consensus politics, it was argued, needed some forgetting about the recent past as much as political crafting, institutional engineering and elite moderation. It was amnesia, not memory, that could secure a pluralistic regime and would prevent Spain from repeating the mistakes of the past. (2011: 5) An irony of the ostensible pact of silence is that certain, albeit partial, memories of the Civil War and the Francoist past were in fact ubiquitous in the Transition’s media. Of course, 18

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strategic forgetfulness – ‘selective memory’ in popular parlance – is not necessarily synonymous with amnesia; as Jo Labanyi, drawing upon the work of Santos Juliá, notes: ‘the consensus politics of the transition were based, not on a pact of oblivion, but on an agreement not to let the past affect the future’ (2009: 27). Seen in this light, the major debate in the memory politics of twenty-first century Spain can be broadly formulated as being a division between those who construe the ‘pacto de silencio’ as an expedient temporary measure, and those for whom it is part of the constitution: a legal and ideological prerequisite for Spain’s social and political well-being. Salvador (Huerga, 2006) about the eponymous Catalan anarchist, Salvador Puig Antich, garrotted by the Franco regime in 1974, can be very much seen as the first film of the incoming Socialist government. More generally, if the new legislation is arguably ‘more important for what it symbolizes politically than for its legal consequences’ (Blakeley, 2008: 324), then clearly the role of film as a highly symbolic medium has performed an important role in articulating and reflecting a discourse which has renegotiated what Labanyi has termed ‘[t]he idea of the incompatability of past and future [which] has helped to create the idea that one has to choose between memory and forgetting’ (2009: 27). On the one hand, Spanish cinema has been guilty on occasions of an opportunist and morally suspect trend, following the publishing sensation of Javier Cercas’ Soldados de Salamina/Soldiers of Salamina – subsequently made into a film directed by David Trueba in 2003 – by which ‘memory has become an industry generating public interest for economic ends’ (Labanyi, 2008: 119). On the other hand, Land and Freedom (Loach, 1995) was heralded widely at the time of its release as the most nuanced and complex mainstream film to have been made about the Civil War, focusing as it did on political divisions within the Left.9 Nearly two decades later, it would find it harder to stake its claim as the definitive or last word on the subject. In addition to high-profile literary adaptations such as Los girasoles ciegos/The Blind Sunflowers (Cuerda, 2008), Las 13 rosas/The 13 Roses (Martínez Lázaro, 2007) or La voz dormida/The Sleeping Voice (Zambrano, 2011), there is now a diverse and hefty corpus of Spanish films about the Civil War. Hence, for example, Mercedes Maroto-Camino (2011: 109–10) has noted how there were only two Spanish films released on the subject of the maquis – the anti-Franco armed guerrilla movement operational in the 1940s and 1950s – between 1982 and 1996, but also that there has been something of a boom in recent years, with such high-profile depictions as El laberinto del fauno/Pan’s Labyrinth (del Toro, 2006), Silencio Roto/Broken Silence (Armendáriz, 2001) and You are the One (una historia de entonces)/You Are the One (A Story of the Past) (Garcí, 2001). According to Annette Kuhn: Memory work has a great deal in common with forms of inquiry which – like detective work and archaeology, say – involve working backwards – searching for clues, deciphering signs and traces, making deductions, patching together reconstructions out of fragments of evidence. (2002: 4) 19

(Re)viewing Creative, Critical and Commercial Practices in Contemporary Spanish Cinema

Therefore, it is very apt that Sandra Martorell uses images of ‘archaeology’ and ‘reconstruction’ in her auteur-based approach to art direction, based largely on interviews with three of Spain’s leading practitioners in this field who have worked extensively on films set in the 1930s and 1940s (see Chapter 27). Her chapter demonstrates how and why the work undertaken by these professionals has raised expectations among audiences in relation to the moral and aesthetic complexity that they can expect of a national film dealing with a conflict that defined the course of twentieth-century Spanish and European history alike. Although the Civil War is the most bloody and infamous eruption of this fratricidal division, its origins and effects can be traced back throughout Spanish history and historiography. In terms of cinematic production of the post-war period, it provided the thematic and narrative underpinning for what Marsha Kinder (1993) characterizes as a ‘siege and crusade’ mentality in films including Raza/Race (Saénz de Heredia, 1942) – famously scripted by Franco himself – and Sin novedad en el alcazár/The Siege of the Alcazar (Genina, 1940), or a range of historical epics such as de Orduña’s Alba de América/Dawn of America (1951), Agustina de Aragón/The Siege (1950) and Locura de amor/Love Crazy (1948). These films celebrated Spanish qualities in relation to its imperial past, privileging the War of Independence waged against the invading Napoleonic forces, and the Golden Age of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries when Spain was a leading world power. While this tradition was never as dominant as it has retrospectively appeared to be, films of this kind have come to constitute a metonym for Francoist cinema in general, and were the principal target of the Salamanca Conversations. For the first time since the 1940s and 1950s, Spanish cinema in the twenty-first century has returned repeatedly to these key historical moments in high-budget films such as Águila Roja, la película/Red Eagle (Ayerra, 2011), Alatriste, Los Borgia or Bruc. This development is largely the result of an increase in co-productions, and the desire to make films that will appeal to domestic and international markets; however, it also bears testament to Henry Kamen’s claim that: One of the most extraordinary aspects of Spain’s sixteenth century is that many Spaniards are still living in it. In a sense, they have never left it. The sixteenth century has dictated a good part of their ideas and aspirations, their vision of the past and of the future. Pick up any newspaper, any novel, and you will find echoes of the sixteenth century somewhere. When politicians wish to make sense of their policies, they look backwards to it for their inspiration […] It was an age that created, and is creating, Spain, not only because of those who still yearn for it but also on account of those who feel they must reject it passionately. (2008: ix) In addition to films that explicitly take the nation’s historical past as their subject matter, it is possible, and indeed useful, to identify a memoristic aesthetic across a broad cross-section 20

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of twenty-first century Spanish cinema. Hence, for example Almodóvar, who was criticized early in his career for an ostensible apoliticism (see Chapter 16), has become increasingly interested in his country’s past and politics over the intervening years. As Marvin D’Lugo (2008: 78) notes, every one of his films since ¡Átame!/Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990) has intertwined cultural nostalgia with personal narratives: La mala educación/Bad Education (2004) made the personal political, while Almodóvar’s appearance in the short film La cultura contra la impunidad del franquismo/Culture Against Francoism’s Impunity (2010) indicates a direct engagement with the debates surrounding historical memory, as does his production company, El Deseo, financing El espinazo del diablo/The Devil’s Backbone (del Toro, 2001). Debates surrounding the Law of Historical Memory have brought the Transition back to the fore, as its (in)adequacies have been widely debated. In cinematic terms, the release of Grupo 7/Unit 7 (Rodríguez, 2012) and, most especially Madrid, 1987 (Trueba, 2011) – starring José Sacristán, arguably the actor most indelibly linked with the Transition through appearances in Asignatura pendiente/Unfinished Business (Garci, 1977) and El diputado/ The Congressman (de la Iglesia, 1978) – fictions that respectively present an anodyne and violent depiction of the period, have demonstrated how its historical and social significance continue to be redefined and renegotiated. A major achievement of the ostensibly peaceful Transition to Democracy was the supposed suture of a previously divided nation. Nevertheless, an opinion poll from 2007 showed more than 50 per cent of respondents replying affirmatively to the question: ‘Do you consider that 70 years later, there are still two confronted Spains?’ (Viejo-Rose, 2011: 162). The controversy that surrounded the release of Camino (Javier Fesser, 2008) – a film based on a true story about a young girl suffering from a terminal disease in the 1980s, who was denied medical treatment in part to allow for her beatification by the Opus Dei religious association – is proof of the continued currency of the term ‘las dos Españas’ (‘the two Spains’). This is an opposition between European liberalization and reactionary conservatism that is explored also in El patio de mi cárcel/My Prison Yard (Macías, 2008), a drama set in Spain’s most famous women’s prison, Yeserías, during the Transition. As Vicente Benet (2012) notes, there has been a renewed interest in Francoist popular culture more generally. This is manifest, for example, in the incredible popularity of cine de barrio (neighbourhood cinema) – television broadcasts of classic Spanish films introduced by Carmen Sevilla, an iconic actress from the dictatorship period; the release of biopics of figures such as Lola Flores: Lola, la película (Hermoso, 2007); screen adaptations of the hugely successful Mortadelo y Filemón comics (Fesser, 2003; Bardem, 2008); or the re-release on DVD of many critically derided but popular films of the 1940s and 1950s. At the time of writing, a musical stage adaptation of Historias de la radio/Radio Stories (1955), a film made by José Luis Saénz de Heredia, who also directed Raza and Franco, ese hombre (1964), is about to open at a major Madrid theatre. In one sense, this return of what Vicente Rodríguez Ortega terms the ‘beasts that refuse to go away’ in Chapter 15, was facilitated by the ‘pacto del olvido’: even if they 21

(Re)viewing Creative, Critical and Commercial Practices in Contemporary Spanish Cinema

ceased to have the prominence that they once had, they did not actually disappear. As Jaime Peñafiel, long-time editor of Hola! – the prototype for the UK’s highly successful Hello! magazine – notes, it is quite unique to Spain that the Franco family retain such a strong media presence: in his words, ‘Spain, even in this, is different’ (2007: 10–11). However, for the first time in decades, early twenty-first century Spain has ceased to see itself as a country in perpetually forward motion; therefore, this can be seen to provide the preconditions for nostalgia. For example, it is noticeable that vintage has come into fashion for the first time, while the mnemomic function of popular song has facilitated the rise of the Spanish musical, not only on the stage but also on-screen: El otro lado de la cama/The Other Side of the Bed (Martinez Lázaro, 2002), ¿Por qué se frotan las patitas?/Scandalous (Begins, 2006) or 20 centímetros/20 Centimetres (Salazar, 2005). A number of studies have looked at the recent upsurge of nostalgia for the popular culture of the early to mid-1980s (e.g. Fouz-Hernández, 2009; Nichols, 2009; Triana-Toribio, 2012) manifest in films such as El calentito (Gutiérrez, 2005), El camino de los ingleses/Summer Rain (Banderas, 2006) or Sinfin (Sanabria and Villaverde, 2005). However, there has not been much detailed scholarly work done on the reappraisal of, and possible nostalgia for, Francoist popular culture. This is arguably a subject matter that much Spanish film studies, with its traditional prioritization of oppositional auteur-based cinema, is ill-equipped to address. On the one hand, the fact that the dictator was not overthrown but died peacefully in his bed has left many commentators, especially in Spain, with the idea that popular culture was the opium of the people (see Chapter 17 on historicizing stardom and the author-function); while also helping to explain the critical repudiation of cultural studies which, as Lawrence Grossberg notes, ‘often writes more about how systems of domination are lived than about the systems of domination themselves’ (1997: 7–8). In other words, the simple, blanket dismissal of Francoist popular culture may have discredited it unfairly in academic circles; but arguably, a refusal to engage critically with its output has allowed its resurrection and perpetuation to occur largely unchallenged. Popular Notions and Notions of the Popular in a Post-National Age As Mette Hjort has noted: the term ‘transnational’ has assumed a referential scope so broad as to encompass phenomena that are surely more interesting for their differences than their similarities. […] That cinematic transnationalism is a ubiquitous phenomenon at the beginning of the new millennium is by now an accepted fact. The time is ripe as a result for work on cinematic transnationalism that goes beyond affirmative description in order to distinguish carefully among tendencies that are more or less positive within a larger scheme of things. (2010: 13, 31) 22

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Part 3 of this book attempts to carry out this task in relation to Spanish cinema, questioning how traditional conceptions of auteurship, genre and stardom have been reconfigured by practitioners and academics. When Conan the Barbarian (Milius, 1982) was shot, Spain’s diverse topography and low production costs were its chief selling point as a filming location. However, over the last two decades, North American productions such as The Cold Light of Day (El Mechri, 2012), The Limits of Control (Jarmusch, 2009), Knight and Day (Mangold, 2010) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Allen, 2008) have delighted increasingly in the specificity of their geographical and cultural settings (see Amago, 2013).10 This tendency to iconize specific locales provides one explanation why North American producers often have found willing production allies in Spain. In the world of the post-Barcelona Olympics, films involving local and national producers frequently function as a surreptitious form of cultural advertising. El Camino/The Way (Estevez, 2010) and 18 comidas (Coira, 2010), for example, depict Galicia as a sensual and spiritual haven, while films as diverse as Todo sobre mi madre/All About My Mother (Almodóvar, 1999) and L’auberge espagnole/Pot Luck (Klapisch, 2002) have promoted the Catalan capital as a privileged signifier of chic European cosmopolitanism (see Wilson, 2012). It is both the cause and consequence of an increased interest in Spain outside its borders that, following in the wake of Antonio Banderas, a number of Spanish actors have become global icons: Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem and, to a lesser extent, Eduardo Noriega and Paz Vega. While cinema may be an important Spanish export, Spaniards generally prefer their films to be imported: the screen share for national cinema consistently fails to reach the European average of 20 per cent (Jordan, 2011: 35). On the one hand, a sustained preference for North American cinema on the part of audiences and distributors alike might seem to provide a paradigmatic manifestation of the Hollywood ‘project’ which, as Paul Cooke observes, ‘has centred upon selling the American way of life to the rest of the world. In so doing, it has generally been pushing at an open door’ (2007: 4). However, this dynamic is counterbalanced by the fact that while Hollywood cinema provided a window to the world during the hermetic Francoist years, a latent – and sometimes blatant – anti-Americanism has underpinned not only the Marxist critical dogma of the intellectual opposition, but also the political worldview of many (although by no means all) Spanish citizens. It also needs to be nuanced through the acknowledgement of the statistic that Spanish, alongside Norwegian and Greek, audiences are reputed to watch more international arthouse films at the cinema than those in any other country in the world (Felperin, 2011). Santos Zunzunegui (2002: 186) – a critic who elsewhere has lamented the absence of star studies in the Spanish context – attibutes the fact that, unlike many Spanish academics, he has not felt the need to distinguish between auteur and popular cinema, to his experiences as a film spectator in 1950s Spain: his cinematic diet was predominantly comprised of North American cinema and this distinction made little sense in what he terms as the Golden Age of the studio system (Labanyi and Zunzunegui, 2009: 96). This historical critical lacuna clearly has important implications for our understanding of the past, present and future of 23

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a national cinema that is increasingly dependent on a nascent return to the traditional star system via the proliferation of commercially successful films, predominantly comedies, such as Lo contrario al amor/The Opposite of Love (Villanueva, 2011), Fuga de cerebros/Brain Drain (González Molina, 2009) and Tres metros sobre el cielo/Three Steps above Heaven (González Molina, 2010), which utilize the pulling power of both male and female actors famous from popular television shows. If the more austere discourse on Spanish cinema is likely to dismiss the meteoric rise of heartthrob Mario Casas out of hand, Carmen Machi’s performances – like  those of Fernando Fernán-Gómez, or Emilio Gutiérrez Caba before her – challenge traditional distinctions. Initially, Machi rose to fame as a result of the television series Aida (2005–), and subsequently has appeared in a wide cross-section of films ranging from the popular comedy Que se mueran los feos/To Hell with the Ugly (Velilla, 2010), aimed primarily at the domestic marketplace, to the internationally distributed Los abrazos rotos/Broken Embraces (Almodóvar, 2009) and La mujer sin piano/Woman without Piano (Rebollo, 2009). In Chapter 25, co-authored with Mercedes Gamero – the head of acquisitions for Antena 3 Television, who also manages their cinematic production wing – she discusses her dual strategy to translate models that have worked on the small screen into viable films primed for the domestic marketplace, while facilitating the production of international co-productions such as Intruders (Fresnadillo, 2011) or Planet 51 (Blanco, Abad and Martínez, 2009) which match Spanish talent with global stars such as Clive Owen and Jessica Biel. Cruz, and to a lesser extent Almodóvar, may have travelled to Hollywood, but far more common over recent years has been the importation of genres and filmic styles from abroad, often with the collaboration of foreign nationals or external funding. As Jay Beck and Vicente Rodríguez Ortega note in the introduction to their excellent edited volume on genre: Spanish cinema exists both inside and outside Spain (understood as an established territorial boundary), and it acquires different conceptual and pragmatic meanings as different players in the film business – from producers to marketing executives, from journalists to scholars – construct diverse forms of signification to promote their differing agendas. (2008: 3) There are, in fact, at least two sides to the transnational debate. On the one hand, as Martínez-Carazo demonstrates in Chapter 16, the films of a director such as Almodóvar mean different things abroad to what they do at home, and this signifies certain ‘national’ specificities. On the other, global film practices have made it increasingly difficult to speak of Spanish cinema as a discrete category. Hence, for example, José F. Colmeiro has complained that El orfanato ‘does not communicate anything which is culturally specific at the diegetic level – any reference to its national origin has been completely removed from its textual surface’ (2011: 104); and yet the trope of the gothic mansion – or for that matter, the casting of Geraldine Chaplin – ensures that the film has a referential scope in relation to ongoing memory debates (see Chapter 10) that is not likely to be detected abroad. What this implies 24

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is that ‘national’ in relation to the production and reception of films is not a redundant category but, as in the case of authorship, is in need of further (re)articulation. According to Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden: For transnationalism, its nationalist other is neither an armored enemy with whom it must engage in a grim battle to the death nor a verbose relic whose outdated postures can only be scorned. From a transnational perspective, nationalism is instead a canny dialogical partner whose voice often seems to be growing stronger at the very moment that its substance is fading away. Like postmodernism and poststructuralism, other discourses that have complicated the notion of unmediated representation, transnationalism factors heterogeneity into its basic semantic framework. (2006: 4) Nevertheless, the commercial success of Planet 51 contrasts heavily with the financial failure of El Capitán Trueno y el Santo Grial/Order of the Grail (Hernández, 2011), an animated feature based on a famous Spanish comic book character. The producer attributed this failure at the box office to lack of institutional support and the simultaneous release of The Adventures of Tintin (Spielberg, 2011): ‘We should have shot it in English and premiered it abroad. If you have success outside of Spain, people will drop their trousers, do anything for you here’ (Mansilla, cited in Anonymous, 2011). Irrespective of whether there is an element of retrospective self-justification in this explanation, the implications of linguistic colonialism should not be underestimated. Mateo Gil has commented how his western Blackthorn (2011) was only made tenable by tailoring the production to the international marketplace: ‘It is shot in English, and the first version of the script had a lot more dialogue in Castilian, and that says it all’ (cited in Miralles, 2012a: 16). However, morally suspect colonial practices that determine what can be said and by whom are not the unique preserve of popular mainstream cinema. The current vogue for co-productions with Latin American countries has helped ailing national film industries; however, productions are also frequently subjected to neo-colonial power dynamics – as explored in También la lluvia/Even the Rain (Iciar Bollaín, 2010) (see Wheeler, 2013). Spain is currently the second largest investor in Latin America, following the United States (see Dennison, 2013), and its special relationship with some of its former colonies provides important leverage in its dealings with the rest of Europe and North America. It is indicative of Spain’s economic development that a country that itself used to be a cheap location in which to film now frequently opts to shoot in the countries of its co-producers as a way to keep production costs down (see Falicov, 2007). Academics are hardly immune from such processes, and an unfortunate collateral effect of Spanish cinema becoming canonized over the last twenty years is that it increasingly has become a hotly-contested corpus of knowledge to be fought over – perhaps explaining some of the traditional antagonisms between Spanish and Anglo-American critics. However, the latter are given an unfair advantage by virtue of the increased pressure on scholars to publish 25

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in English, irrespective of linguistic or disciplinary background. As such, it is highly commendable that Marvin D’Lugo and the co-editors of Studies in Hispanic Cinemas have decided to consider articles in Castilian from 2013 onwards, and to rename the journal Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas, thereby eschewing terminology which, as Stephanie Dennison explains, is ‘increasingly regarded as old-fashioned and neo-colonial in pretensions’ (2013: 3). The Future of Spanish Cinema According to Gabriele Pedullà, ‘[i]f cinema for decades represented the standard and even optimal filmic experience, the touchstone for all other forms of viewing, this formerly undisputed and indisputable centrality is today contested at its very core’ (2012: 1). Hence the suggestive title of Ángel Quintana’s book, Después del cine: imagen y realidad en la era digital (After Cinema: Image and Reality in the Digital Age, 2011). Given this context, there is something self-consciously anachronistic about employing the term ‘backstage pass’ as the heading for the closing section of this book. This decision was taken because virtually all of the practitioners involved accepted that, in principle, seismic changes were taking place in audio-visual production and consumption, while introducing disclaimers to suggest that twentieth-century paradigms still exerted their influence and charm. Mercedes Gamero, for example, explains how and why box office receipts from the initial theatrical run remain the primary source of revenue that makes the films she produces financially viable. In the roundtable discussion José Luis Guerin – a pioneer of the use of digital filming in the Spanish context, who has had his work exhibited in museum spaces usually reserved for the plastic arts (see Puyal, 2012) – asserts his aesthetic and political reticence to relinquish the commercial cinema distribution circuit: a retreat he construes in terms of surrender and marginalization. Even among the most ostensibly radical young film-makers, and in relation to production models which have arisen only as a result of new technologies, Elena López Riera observes a reticence to reject the institutional model outright. In his response to Boyero’s damning critique of Los pasos dobles, Isaki Lacuesta interestingly observes how the critic makes a distinction between those attacks that he puts in print to online editions, implying that it is not a ‘real’ insult if something is ‘only’ posted on the internet (Lacuesta, 2011). The most ardent advocate for a paradigm shift in production and consumption is Luis Miñarro: ironically, the only Spanish producer seemingly capable of consistently facilitating the passage of non-commercial projects to big screens around the world. This ostensible paradox is resolved perhaps if we take into account that his unique position makes him acutely aware of the fact that the financial crisis, alongside the return of the Partido Popular to government in 2011, makes the current model for producing ‘arty films’ untenable (as he laments in Chapters 26 and 30). In addition to imbuing retrospectively with additional significance films which denounce the increasingly aggressive and pervasive nature of corporate culture in Spain,11 a number of post-crisis films have begun to respond to the country’s 26

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financial meltdown. For example, Cinco metros cuadrados/Five Square Metres (Lemcke, 2011) takes corruption in the construction boom as its subject, while references to the economic crisis have been incorporated into films as diverse as the historical epic Lope and Torrente 4: crisis letal/Torrente 4: Lethal Crisis (Segura, 2011) – a significant inclusion for a saga which traditionally has existed in its own fantasy bubble protected from the quotidian repercussions of sociopolitical change. More decisively, the incoming government has instigated ruthless cuts which have resulted in Spanish film production virtually grinding to a halt in 2012 (Lara, 2012); in addition, cinema admissions have been adversely affected by lower disposable incomes and a drastic rise in value added tax (VAT) for cultural activities. In austere times, the logical outcome would seem to be that film-makers either will have to follow the examples of figures such as Pedro Almodóvar, Mercedes Gamero, Santiago Segura or Edmon Roch, who clearly have learned from the commercial and marketing strategies more habitually associated with Hollywood film-making, or alternatively they may opt to adopt more low-budget production methods. Primarily as a result of the remarkable box office success of Las aventuras de Tadeo Jones, Lo imposible/The Impossible (Bayona, 2012) and Tengo ganas de ti/I Want You (González Molina, 2012) – the sequel to Tres metros sobre el cielo – Spanish cinema had a 17.9 per cent share of the overall domestic box office in 2012, the highest proportion since 1986 (FAPAE, 2012). At the other end of the industrial spectrum, one of the year’s unexpected success stories was Carmina o revienta/ Carmina or Blow Up made largely from the money that writer-director Paco León, whose mother is the lead actress, had made as a television star. This low-budget fake documentary, which effectively updates the picaresque mode of Miguel de Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Novels, 1613) for recession-addled twenty-first century Seville, was released simultaneously in cinemas, on DVD and on the Internet. What is clear is that, with a few exceptions, Spanish films are not able to recoup their costs, let alone make a profit, in their initial theatrical run. As Maria Delgado observes: ‘It is undeniably the international market and the branding of Spain that remains the key determinant for film in the second decade of the twenty-first century’ (2013: 5). Ironically, the official Spanish entry to the 2013 Oscars, Blancanieves (Berger, 2012), both partakes in and comments on such processes by simultaneously paying homage to the golden age of silent cinema and the commoditization of Andalucía as a metonym for all things Spanish through the inclusion of, for example, a bullfight in Seville’s most famous ring. More generally, Mar Diestro-Dópido’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 26) explores how the San Sebastián Film Festival has promoted tourism throughout its history, and how a combination of haute cuisine and cultural capital has helped secure the Basque seaside resort the title of European City of Culture for 2016. There is a performative dimension to much academic endeavour: scholars not only comment on, but at times create (or at least facilitate) a field of study. This is clearly the case in relation to Spanish cinema which, as we have seen throughout this chapter, is an increasingly empty signifier for a vast array of industrial and aesthetic reasons. In his report 27

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on the conference from which this book largely derived, Paul Julian Smith raised some very valid concerns over the fact that: The symbiosis, or, to put it more plainly, collusion, between avant garde creators and specialist critics (also treated by Bourdieu), was also much in evidence, with some academics proudly proclaiming their own elitism in a game of mutual legitimation with the artists on whom they are dependent and who themselves rely on critics to complete the social meaning of their studiously enigmatic works. (2011: 186) The danger of this kind of self-endorsing critical endogamy in relation to art cinema also has been raised in the pages of Sight & Sound magazine where, drawing on the work of Albert Serra and Jaime Rosales among others, there has been a debate over the merits of what Jonathan Romney terms ‘slow cinema’. While championing films of this kind, he freely admits that ‘staking one’s colours to austere cinema can allow critics to flaunt their aesthetic and moral seriousness’ (2010: 44), a pitfall then picked up on and developed by Nick James, who notes ‘an implicit threat: admit you’re bored and you’re a philistine’ (2010: 5). This can be seen, for example, in the way Honor de cavallería/Honour of the Knights (Quixotic) (Serra, 2006) is literally sold on the fact that, at least according to the back cover of the DVD release, it is: ‘One of the year’s most acclaimed films by the most demanding international critics (Cahiers du Cinéma, Cinemascope, Film Comment) and, without a doubt, the most original and daring Spanish film of recent years.’ Although the film received positive reviews, it is equally true that much of the audience at Cannes actually walked out of the screening before the end (see Peranson et al., 2007). In all honesty, I do find some austere Spanish cinema tiresome, but the answer is neither to feel guilty, nor to walk out of the cinema and loudly proclaim boredom, à la Boyero. What is incumbent on the advocates of such cinema is to offer readings of these films that illustrate and elucidate their strengths, without reverting to adulation predicated on negation. Too many reviews of art cinema continue to say less about what the films offer, than their strategies for denying traditional pleasures. In any case, it would be a misrepresentation to suggest that all Spanish films of this kind eschew pleasure as a matter of principle: Miñarro’s autobiographical directorial debut film Family Strip (2009), or Joaquim Jordà’s Más allá del espejo are affective and enjoyable precisely because of their lack of austerity, while Tren de sombras/Train of Shadows (Guerin, 1997) takes pleasure in the pleasure that a family from the 1920s finds in using a new technology to film the most appealing aspects of their everyday existence. A principal merit of many of the contributions to Part 1 of this book is that they unashamedly champion a certain kind of art film, but they do so in a critical yet affirmative manner. More generally, the book’s chapters showcase both individually and collectively the breadth and range of filmic styles and production which can be broadly brought under the rubric of that slipperiest of signifiers: Spanish national cinema. 28

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Juan Miralles has described Spanish cinema as ‘a chronically-ill patient with an iron constitution’ (2012b: 18). As is the case of the Habsburg Dynasty, commentary on it over the ages certainly gives the impression that it is perpetually in decline. In terms of distribution, Spain is considered, alongside France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy, to be one of the ‘big five’ in Europe (Finney, 2010: 46). At the time of writing, in its critics’ poll Sight & Sound does not have a section for Spanish film, as it does for the other four countries. In spite of the current obstacles that it has to negotiate, the talent pool working both in and on Spanish cinema is undoubtedly healthier in 2014 than it was twenty-two years ago. If nothing else, this volume bears testament to that talent, and makes a spirited case for its inclusion at the forefront of global canons. Acknowledgement I would like to thank Mar Diestro-Dópido, Belén Vidal and Sarah Wright, alongside Intellect’s anonymous reviewers, for their very useful comments and feedback on an initial draft of this introduction. Notes   1 I, for example, always flatter myself by thinking that I may be largely self-taught in film studies, having read a traditional philological Oxbridge degree followed by a doctorate in Golden Age studies, but I am at least in good company – as this is the path initially trodden by both Peter W. Evans and Paul Julian Smith.   2 Boyero is renowned for walking out of films, saying how bored he is by venerated auteurs such as Kiarostami. Also, he has had multiple high-profile disputes with film-makers as diverse as Pedro Almodóvar and Isaki Lacuesta. His written style and populist iconoclasm is in evidence in a book of his ruminations compiled by his friend and colleague, Borja Hermoso, a pioneer of this kind of journalism in Spain. For example, in this book Boyero refers to the members of the Spanish Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences in the following disparaging terms: ‘They aren’t artists, they are privileged civil servants who want the state to perpetually subsidise them even though nobody is interested in their films’ (2006: 36).   3 The current prime minister of Spain and leader of the Partido Popular who was in opposition at the time.   4 Interview with Duncan Wheeler in Barcelona on 8 July 2011.   5 For example, I have repeatedly found myself the only person in the cinema watching publically-funded films such as ¿Estás ahí?/Are You There? (Santiago, 2011) or Pegado a tu almohada/Stuck to Your Pillow (Navarro, 2012), with no obvious culture remit or specificity.   6 For a legal perspective on the law alongside the various changes that it underwent, see López González (2008). For an overview of the debates that it generated, see Jordan (2011) and Martín-Cabrera (2012). 29

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  7 On writing this piece, the only film that I was aware of to have reflected the multilingual reality of late twentieth-century Catalonia with any degree of accuracy was Maratón/Marathon (Saura, 1992), a documentary about the Olympic Games in Barcelona. I have subsequently seen La plaga/The Plague (Ballus, 2013), a film whose humour and documentary credentials arise in part from the multilingual nature of an industrial estate occupying a liminal space between the urban and rural on the outskirts of Barcelona.   8 According to Joan Ramón Resina, ‘in Spain no other film movement has drawn as much hostility as the School of Barcelona’ (2008: 3). However, there has been a spate of scholarship on the subject over the last couple of years, including a special issue of Hispanic Review edited by Sara Nadal Melsió (2010).   9 Interestingly, this subject is also addressed in La vieja memoria/The Old Memory (Camino, 1978) – discussed in detail by Isabel Estrada and Melissa González in Chapter 11 – but this documentary had been largely forgotten by the mid-1990s and was not, to my knowledge at least, acknowledged as an important antecedent in any of the reviews of Loach’s film. 10 I am very grateful to Samuel Amago for generously sharing ideas and his book proposal with me. For a list of English-language films shot in Spain, see ‘Silver Screen Spain’, available at: www.silver-screen-spain.com/, last accessed on 8 August 2012. 11 See for example, Bienvenido a Farewell-Gutmann/Welcome to Farewell-Gutmann (Pueblo, 2008), Casual Day (Lemcke, 2007), Concursante/The Contestant (Cortés, 2007), La flaqueza del bolchevique/The Weakness of the Bolshevik (Cuenca, 2003) or Smoking Room (Gual and Wallovits, 2002).

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Blakeley, G. (2008). ‘Politics as usual? The trials and tribulations of the law of historical memory in Spain’. Entelequia: revista interdisciplinar, 7: 315–30. Castro de Paz, J. L. and Cerdán, J. (2011). Del sainete al esperpento: relecturas del cine español de los años 50 (Madrid: Cátedra). Colmeiro, J. F. (2011). ‘El discreto encanto del sueño americano: Hollywood y el nuevo cine español’ in C. X. Ardavín Trabanco and J. Marí (eds.), Ventanas sobre el Atlántico: Estados Unidos y España durante el postfranquismo (1975–2008) (Valencia: Publicaciones de la Universitat de València), 99–115. Cooke, P. (2007). ‘Introduction. World cinema’s “dialogues” with Hollywood’ in P. Cooke (ed.), World Cinema’s ‘Dialogues’ with Hollywood (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan), 1–16. Cousido González, M. P. and Gutiérrez David, M. E. (2008). La transparencia en el sector audiovisual: comentarios a la normativa española y comunitaria (Barcelona: Editorial Bosch). Davies, A. (2011). ‘Introduction: the study of contemporary Spanish cinema’ in A. Davies (ed.), Spain on Screen: Developments in Contemporary Spanish Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), 1–18. Delgado, M. M. (2013). ‘Introduction’ in M. M. Delgado and R. W. Fiddian (eds.), Spanish Cinema 1973–2000: Auteurism, Politics, Landscape and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 1–20. Dennison, S. (2013). ‘National, transnational and post-national: issues in contemporary film-making in the Hispanic world’ in S. Dennison (ed.), Contemporary Hispanic Cinema: Interrogating the Transnational in Spanish and Latin American Film (Woodridge: Tamesis), 1–24. D’Lugo, M. (2008). ‘Volver o la contra-memoria’, Secuencias, 28: 77–93. Ezra, E. and Rowden, T. (2006). ‘General introduction: what is transnational cinema’ in E. Ezra and T. Rowden (eds.), Transnational Cinema, The Film Reader (London: Routledge), 1–12. Falicov, T. L. (2007). ‘Programa Ibermedia: co-production and the cultural politics of constructing an Ibero-American audiovisual space’, Spectator: The University of California Journal of Film and Television, 27.2: 21–30. FAPAE (2012). ‘El cine español consigue en 2012 la cuota más alta de los últimos 27 años’, 26 December, available at http://www.fapae.es/verListadoComunicados.asp?id=951&url= noticias, last accessed on 6 January 2013. Felperin, L. (2011). ‘Russian cinema: endangered species’, Sight & Sound, May: 35–37. Fernández Blanco, V., Prieto Rodríguez, J., Muñiz Artime, C. and Gutiérrez del Castillo, R. (2002). Cinéfilos, videoadictos y telespectadores: los perfiles de los consumidores de productos audiovisuales en España (Madrid: Fundación Autor). Finney, A. (2010). The International Film Business: A Market Guide Beyond Hollywood (Abingdon: Routledge). Fouz-Hernández, S. (2009). ‘Me cuesta tanto olvidarte: Mecano and the Movida remixed, revisited and repackaged’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 10.2: 167–87. George, D. (2002). ‘From stage to screen: Sergi Belbel and Ventura Pons’, Anales de la literatura española contemporánea, 27.1: 89–102. Granado, V. P. (2006). 20 años de Goyas al cine español (Madrid: Santillana Ediciones). 31

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Green, S. (2009). ‘“Family” disputes in postwar Spanish theatre: El amor sólo dura 2.000 metros and Como en el primer día’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 86.4: 475–91. Grossberg, L. (1997). ‘Introduction: “Birmingham in Alabama”’ in L. Grossberg, Bringing It All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 1–32. Hayward, S. (1993). French National Cinema (London: Routledge). Heredero, C. (2003). ‘New creators for the new millennium: transforming the directing scene in Spain’, Cineaste, 29.1: 32–37. Hermoso, B. (ed.) (2006). Alerta roja: Boyero.es. Los chats de Carlos Boyero (Madrid: La esfera de los libros). Hewison, R. (1995). Culture and Consensus: England, Art and Politics Since 1940 (London: Methuen). Hjort, M. (2010). ‘On the plurality of cinematic transnationalism’ in N. Ďurovičá and K. Newman (eds.), World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (New York: Routledge), 12–33. James, N. (2010). ‘Passive aggressive’, Sight & Sound, April: 5. Jordan, B. (2011). ‘Audiences, film culture, public subsidies: the end of Spanish cinema’ in A. Davies (ed.), Spain on Screen: Developments in Contemporary Spanish Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), 19–40. Jordan, B. and Morgan-Tamosunas, R. (1998). Contemporary Spanish Cinema (Manchester, Manchester University Press). Kamen, H. (2008). Imagining Spain: Historical Myth and National Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Kinder, M. (1993). Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Kuhn, A. (2002). Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination, 2nd ed. (London: Verso). Labanyi, J. (2008). ‘The politics of memory in contemporary Spain’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 9.2: 119–25. (2009). ‘The languages of silence: historical memory, generational transmission and witnessing in contemporary Spain’, Journal of Romance Studies, 9.3: 23–35. Labanyi, J. and Pavlović, T. (2013). ‘Introduction’ in J. Labanyi and T. Pavlović (eds.), A Companion to Spanish Cinema (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell Publishing), 1–11. Labanyi, J. and Zunzunegui, S. (2009). ‘Lo popular en el cine español durante el franquismo: diálogo entre Jo Labanyi y Santos Zunzunegui’ in Various Authors, Desacuerdos sobre arte, políticas y esfera pública en el Estado español (Arteleku: Diputación Foral de Gipuzkoa, Centro José Guerrero, Mueseu d’Árt Contemporani de Barcelona and Universidad Internacional de Andalucía), 83–104. Lacuesta, I. (2011). ‘La crítica espectacular y otros pasatiempos’, 6 November, available at http:// lacriticaespectacular.blogspot.com.es/2011/11/la-critica-espectacular-en-su-articulo.html, last accessed on 8 August 2012. Lara, F. (2012). ‘El estado de la cuestión’, Academia: Revista del cine español, May: 5–19. López González, J. (2008). ‘Ley del cine 2007’ in C. Padros Reig and J. López Santos (eds.), Estudios sobre derecho y economía del cine (Barcelona: Atelier), 177–207. MacCabe, C. (2008). ‘An interview with Stuart Hall’, Critical Quarterly, 50.1–2: 12–42.

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Maroto-Camino, M. (2011). Film, Memory and the Legacy of the Spanish Civil War: Resistance and Guerrilla, 1936–2010 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Martí-Olivella, J. (2003). Basque Cinema: An Introduction (Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press). (2011). ‘Catalan cinema: an uncanny transnational performance’ in D. Keown (ed.), A Companion to Catalan Culture (Woodbridge: Tamesis Books), 185–205. Martín-Cabrera, L. (2012). ‘The potentiality of the commons: a materialist critique of cognitive capitalism from the Cyberbracer@s to the Ley Sinde’, Hispanic Review, 80.4: 583–605. Maule, R. (2008). Beyond Auteurism: New Directions in Authorial Film Practices in France, Italy and Spain Since the 1980s (Bristol: Intellect). Mira, A. (2013). ‘Ocaña. Retrat intermitent/Ocaña. An Intermittent Portrait (Ventura Pons, 1977): the Mediterranean movida and the passing away of Francoist Barcelona’ in M. M. Delgado and R. W. Fiddian (eds.), Spanish Cinema 1973–2000: Auteurism, Politics, Landscape and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 49–63. Miralles, J. (2012a). ‘Hoy día, Blackthorn sería inviable’, Academia: Revista del cine español, February: 16–17. (2012b). ‘Del patio de butacas al cine de sofá’, Academia: Revista del cine español, July–August: 18–19. Nadal Melsió, S. (ed.) (2010). ‘The Invisible Tradition: Avant-garde Catalan Cinema under Late Francoism’, Hispanic Review, 78.4. Nichols, W. C. (2009). ‘From counter-culture to national heritage: La Movida in the museum and the institutionalization of irreverence’, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 13: 113–36. Pedullà, G. (2012). In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators after the Cinema (London: Verso). Peñafiel, J. (2007). La nieta y el general: tres bodas y un funeral (Madrid: Temas de hoy). Peranson, M., Villamediana, D. V. and Arroba, A. (2007). ‘Battle of honour and humility: Albert Serra’s quixotic experiment’, Cinema Scope, 29: 20–23. Puyal, A. (2012). ‘Cineastas en el museo: José Luis Guerin’, Archivos de la Filmoteca, 69: 104–19. Quintana, Á. (2011). Después del cine: imagen y realidad en la era digital (Barcelona: Acantilado). Resina, J. R. (2008). ‘Introduction’ in J. R. Resina (ed.), Burning Darkness: A Half Century of Spanish Cinema (New York: State University of New York Press), 1–7. Riambau, E. and Torreiro, C. (1999). La Escuela de Barcelona: el cine de la ‘gauche divine’ (Barcelona: Anagrama). (2008). Productores en el cine español: estado, dependencia y mercado (Madrid: Cátedra). Romney, J. (2010). ‘In search of lost time’, Sight & Sound, February: 43–44. Smith, P. J. (2003). Contemporary Spanish Culture: TV, Fashion, Art and Film (Cambridge: Polity Press). (2009). Spanish Screen Fiction: Between Cinema and Television (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). (2011). ‘Conference report: (S)Movies, New York City, 12 to 16 December, 2011’, New Cinemas, 9.2–3: 183–87. Torreiro, C. (2010). Realidad y creación en el cine de no-ficción: el documental catalán contemporáneo (Madrid: Cátedra).

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Triana-Toribio, N. (2003). Spanish National Cinema (London: Routledge). (2008). ‘Miradas distintas: el estudio del cine español en Gran Bretaña, Secuencias, 28: 46–60. (2012). ‘El otro lado de la cama: remixed Transition (1973–82)’ in L. Shaw and R. Stone (eds.), Screening Songs in Hispanic and Lusophone Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 66–82. Viejo-Rose, D. (2011). Reconstructing Spain: Cultural Heritage and Memory after Civil War (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press and Cañada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies). Vilaseca, D. (2010). Queer Events: Post-deconstructive Subjectivities in Spanish Writing and Film, 1960s to 1990s (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). Wheeler, D. (2008). ‘Intimate partner abuse in Spain (1975–2006)’, Cuestiones de género, 3: 173–204. (2011). ‘Lo que entendemos por cine español’, Academia: Revista del cine español, April: 25–27. (2012). ‘The representation of domestic violence in Spanish cinema’, Modern Language Review, 107.2: 438–500. (2013). ‘Támbien la lluvia/Even the Rain (Iciar Bollaín, 2010): social realism, transnationalism and (neo-)colonialism’ in M. M. Delgado and R. W. Fiddian (eds.), Spanish Cinema 1973–2000: Auteurism, Politics, Landscape and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 239–55. Wilson, A. (2012). ‘A broken mirror? Global-local images of Barcelona’ in H. Buffery and C. Caulfield (eds.), Barcelona: Visual Culture, Space and Power (Cardiff: University of Wales Press), 205–18. Zunzunegui, S. (1999). El extraño viaje: El celuloide atrapado por la cola, o la crítica norteamericana ante el cine español (Valencia: Entopías). (2002). Historias de España: De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de cine español (Valencia: Generalitat Valenciana and IVAC). (2005). Los felices sesenta: aventuras y desventuras del cine español (Barcelona: Paidós).

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Chapter 3 From the Past to the Present: Contemporising Trends that Define Spanish Cinema Fernando Canet

A

s we pointed out at the beginning of the prologue which opened this introductory section, as occurs in other national cinemas and cinematic traditions, there are decisive moments which constitute the history of Spanish cinema. I am referring to those decisive moments in which significant changes originate. I believe that these landmarks can be explained from two perspectives: firstly, from the political, sociological and cultural conditions that determine a nation’s history; and secondly, the strictly filmic dimension, how different international trends that configure cinema in global terms have an effect on films within the national sphere. Although both dimensions are always inextricably linked, this is arguably exacerbated in the case of Spanish cinema where the former exerts a specifically strong influence over the latter. As a result, some of the works published on Spanish cinema propose a historical journey in which the political and social events that took place in Spain are decisive in construing the various stages of its trajectory.1 Thus, we can speak of cinema of the Republic (1931–1936), of the Civil War (1936–1939) or of the dictatorship (1939–1975). Taking this last period as my starting point – and to complement the introductory chapter written by Duncan Wheeler – my aim here is to defend the idea that some of the tendencies that define contemporary Spanish cinema are not actually so recent, but rather represent a constant presence throughout much of its history that has evolved in line with the social and political changes that have occurred. It is beyond the remit of this chapter to offer an exhaustive historical overview of Spanish cinema (readers can consult the numerous books that have been written on the subject); rather, the chapter serves to try and defend the hypothesis presented here in order that the reader can be better prepared to approach the individual chapters that comprise this volume. Cinema Under Franco The dictatorship period can be split into four historical moments, each with specific characteristics conditioned by changes in the Francoist regime over time. The first is the cinema of the so-called ‘autarchy’ (1939–50)2 which, as the name suggests, coincides with the period in which the regime was most isolated and attempted to be self-sufficient. This period gave birth to ideological films whose function is centred, on the one hand, on justifying the national uprising and commemorating the heroic nature of the victory, and on the other

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hand, on recuperating the national grandeur of times past which may have been temporarily lost, but needed to be resurrected at all costs. As far as the regime’s ideological apparatus was concerned, the mission of Spanish cinema was, in José Luis Castro de Paz’s expert words, ‘the creation of a culture grounded in incorruptible Hispanic roots, to maintain and reinforce its rich spiritual tradition and to showcase its rich folklore, deep-seated Catholic faith and racial specificities’ (2005: 24).3 Therefore, Spanish cinema looks again at its national history’s great (or perhaps not-so-great) moments with the intention of venerating a certain national ‘race’, in clear counter-opposition to the moral bankruptcy of those on the losing side. An example of this is the film Raza/Race (1941) directed by Sáenz de Heredia, based on a script by Jaime de Andrade (a pseudonym of the dictator Francisco Franco). In addition to inevitable national exaltation, the film also betrays the need to justify the uprising perpetrated against the legitimately elected government that ruled Spain at the time. A year later, Benito Perojo gave impetus to a kind of cinema with films such as Goyescas (1942), which sought its legitimization in the literary text through reconstructing specific historical moments.4 Thus, the tendency we can find currently in Spanish cinema to make historical films has, among others, precedents in this period of the national cinema. Films such as Alatriste/Captain Alatriste: The Spanish Musketeer (Díaz Yanes, 2006) or Los Borgia/The Borgia (Hernández, 2006) are a clear example of this, and are examined among others in chapter fourteen on this subject authored by Duncan Wheeler. In this period there were other, albeit marginal, projects. For example, take the works of Edgar Neville,5 most notably Domingo de carnaval/Sunday Carnival (1945), a film that flirts with the detective genre, and is set in Madrid’s flea market to the backdrop of a carnival. Despite emerging at the height of the autarchic period, Neville’s cinema can be considered an early example of what Santos Zunzunegui refers to as ‘hybridization’, and Marsha Kinder defines as ‘transcultural reinscription’.6 That is to say, works that are the result of combining, at their root, a certain national ‘hummus’ with influences from abroad. In the case of Neville, this feeds from the national popular arts and the formulas developed in the classical Hollywood model alike. In a similar vein – and although it seems incredible, given the political circumstances of the time – it is possible to discover art films at the margins of the dominant cinema which are the fruits of a certain kind of formal experimentation. Examples of these include the films of Carlos Serrano de Osma, Manuel Mur Oti, Antonio del Amo or Lorenzo Llobet Gracia. A kind of cinema that, as Castro de Paz notes, has a clear aesthetic will and forms part of a movement that ‘at the end of the 1940s defines itself as “telluric cinema”’ (1998: 240). Lorenzo Llobet’s only film, Vida de sombras/Life in the Shadows (1947), is a particularly interesting example of this trend, due to its decidedly self-reflexive approach to the cinematic medium itself. With the arrival of the 1950s and following more than ten years of isolation, the Francoist regime began to recognize the need to open up to the outside world to a certain degree. This allowed for the onset of the second period of cinema under the dictatorship 38

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which coincided with the commencement of the new decade and lasted until 1962, the year in which José María García Escudero took control of the national cinema again.7 Some critics define this period as the era of ‘light and shade’ while others describe it as ‘continuation and dissidence’.8 The timid liberalization of the regime meant that there was a gradual diminishment of cultural isolation, yielding cracks through which, in addition to Hollywood films, other influences, primarily from European cinemas, could filter through. Worth highlighting is the effect of Italian neo-realism,9 which allowed two young filmmakers – Juan Antonio Bardem and Luís García Berlanga, trained in the Madrid Film School (the Instituto de Investigaciones y Experiencias Cinematográficas, founded in 1947) – to make Esa pareja feliz/That Happy Couple (1951), one of the first films to ‘break with the triumphalist cinema’ (Seguin, 1999: 43). For the French theorist Seguin, Berlanga and Bardem’s film brings to mind ‘the enchanting neo-realism of Jacques Becker’s Antoine et Antoinette (1947)’, and ‘Arniches’ typically Madrid sainetes’ (1999: 43). As a result, once again we are faced with a clear example of what we previously have termed as ‘hybridization’: the difference now being that influences in the national domain come less from Hollywood than European cinema. Another example from 1951 that shows this certain (inter)national hybridization – in that it can be seen as equally indebted to Italian neo-realism – is Surcos/Furrows (Nieves Conde, 1951). The film offers us a vision far removed from the official image of Spanish society: an image that displeased the more reactionary elements of the regime. They were in no doubt that it would be better to give Alba de América/Dawn of America (1951) – a film defined by Seguin as a ‘late relic of the grandiloquent historical cinema’ (1999: 43) – directed by Juan de Orduña, the National Interest Prize instead of Surcos. Surcos was far more modern than the former, both in terms of content and style. As Seguin notes, this decision on the part of the establishment of the time ‘clearly marks the limits of a regime that was not willing to accept the evocation of Spain’s social situation and that would rather propagate its propagandistic dreams’ (1999: 43).10 In this way, a dynamic was initiated in this decade that would to a certain extent continue until the death of the dictator. This dynamic was characterized by constant tension between a regime that was forced gradually to become culturally and politically more open to foreign influences – and, as such, allowed its subjects’ certain concessions – while nevertheless maintaining a censorship that sought to oppose or at least constrain a number of filmmakers whose creative talents and desire to break away from escapist cinema led them to challenge a number of offically sanctioned myths.11 In May 1955, the cinema club in Salamanca hosted some talks that would constitute a landmark in the history of Spanish cinema. In this context, the participants in the Conversations – who included Basilio Martín Patino and Juan Antonio Bardem – collectively affirmed that ‘Spanish cinema lives in isolation; in isolation not just from the world but also from its own reality’ (Cinema Universitario, 1955: 87). These talks were to have a profound influence with the arrival of a new cohort of film-makers who began to work in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Examples include Carlos Saura with his debut film, Los golfos/ 39

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The Delinquents (1959); Rafael Azcona and Marco Ferreri, who made El pisito/The Little Apartment (1959) and El cochecito (1960); Azcona again, who collaborated with Berlanga on Plácido (1961); and Fernando Fernán-Gómez’s first works. In his dialogue with Jo Labanyi, Santos Zunzunegui referred to this creative upsurge as ‘the appearance of specific radical forms of thinking about Spanish Society’ (2009: 92). As mentioned previously, the return of José María García Escudero to direction of the National Cinematic Arts in 1962 marked the onset of the third stage of cinema under the dictatorship that would last until his dismissal in 1969.12 This phase coincided with the period known as ‘the development years’, characterized as a time of pronounced relaxation in the regime which allowed for certain thematic and expressive licence in some Spanish films. The Official School of Cinema – La Escuela Oficial de Cine – was opened under García Escudero, and from this emerged what was termed at the time the ‘New Spanish Cinema’, centred in Madrid. At the same time, a new movement known as the Barcelona School arose in the Catalan capital, where film-makers looked not so much towards national traditions, as towards European artistic movements. This cinema is of particular interest for its formal experimentation. An example of this is the inaugural Fata Morgana/LeftHanded Fate (Aranda, 1965) which, as Seguin says, ‘manages to fascinate the viewer through an audacious mise-en-scène which reveals his admiration for Jean Luc Godard’s cinema’ (1999: 55). Thus, both movements emerged as a consequence of the movement that began with the French New Wave, and continued at the international level with the explosion of new forms of cinema in different countries. With this rupture, cinema entered modernity and left cinematic classicism behind. García Escudero’s exit from the post of director-general of cinema, once again caused by his disagreements with the more reactionary elements of the regime, provoked the arrival of the last stage of cinema under the dictatorship known as late-Francoism (1970–75) (see Pérez Rubio and Hernández Ruíz, 2005; Torreiro, 2009b). At the beginning of this period, and two years prior to the definitive weakening of the regime caused by ETA’s attack which led to Carrero Blanco’s death in 1973, Basilio Martín Patino completed Canciones para después de una guerra/Songs for After a War in 1971.13 The film was banned and had to wait until the dictator’s death in order to be authorized for release. In a certain respect, this film started a trend in Spanish cinema that would become a constant in the Transition, and which has continued to the present day: the treatment of the Civil War and its effects in the post-war period. In distinction to Patino’s film, we can consider the one made by Pedro Olea with Azcona, Pim, pam, pum … fuego/Pim, Pam, Pum … Fire (1975), in the death throes of the dictatorship. Despite openly addressing the post-war years, this film would not have to wait a number of years to be seen on cinema screens. Another example from the period that also looked back to the most immediate consequences that the Civil War caused in Spanish society was Víctor Erice’s undisputed masterpiece, El espíritu de la colmena/The Spirit of the Beehive (1973). In distinction to the previous examples, he continued with an earlier tradition of depiction through metaphor.

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The Transition and Recuperating the Past The dictator’s death and the Transition allowed for the sudden onset of a liberty that had been so desired, yet curtailed for so many years. Thus the moment arrived in which the vanquished, not without problems, could express themselves by looking to the past with the intention of recuperating historical memory. Within this context, a key film is Jaime Camino’s documentary La vieja memoria/The Old Memory (1978).14 Only three years after the dictator’s death, and at the height of the pact of oblivion that had been tacitly signed, Camino’s intention was to bring together all of the implicated parties and establish a dialogue between them, surreptitiously at least through editing techniques. The aim of this was to try and establish what had occurred – the arrival of the Second Republic, its traumatic rupture and the ensuing bloody conflict – by using a polyhydric approach. Camino depicts this meeting with a certain conciliatory tone: a tone especially necessary, given that the coming together of less radical sections from both sides, the Right and Left, was seen to be crucial in the desire for Spain to be led towards full political democratization. (Camino’s film and its comparison with the more recent Los niños de Rusia/The Children of Russia (Camino, 2001) provides the focus of Chapter 11 of this book.) Thus, one of the constants that has characterized the national cinema following the Francoist period has been the need to recuperate historical memory. This tendency, in specific reference to the cinema of the 1990s, has been previously identified by, among others, Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas in a discussion of cinema from the 1990s in their book on Spanish cinema,15 when they state that ‘one of the most prominent features of Spanish cinema since the end of the dictatorship in 1975 has been its obsessive concern with the past’ (1998: 15). This desire to reconstruct the past – above all, the most traumatic period of Spain’s recent past: the Civil War, and its traumatic consequences – did not abate in the 1990s, and has continued with vigour into the first decade of this century. Examples of this are the following films: David Trueba’s Soldados de Salamina/Soldiers of Salamina (2002), Guillermo del Toro’s El laberinto del fauno/Pan´s Labyrinth (2006), Emilio Martínez Lázaro’s Las 13 rosas/The 13 Roses (2007), Agustí Villaronga’s Pa Negre/Black Bread (2010), Álex de la Iglesia’s Balada triste de trompeta/The Last Circus (2010) and Benito Zambrano’s La voz dormida/The Sleeping Voice (2011). Because of this, it is not surprising that ‘academic attention in Hispanic studies more generally turns towards questions of the recuperation of memories of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco era’ (Davies, 2011: 9). A clear example of this is the special monograph issue published by the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies under the title ‘The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Spain’. This issue, as Jo Labanyi points out, ‘was compiled to coincide with the debates in Spain surrounding the Ley de Memoria Histórica [...] finally approved by Congress on 31 October 2007 [...] and implemented on 26 December 2007’ (2008: 119). More recently – in this case, 2012 – the Bulletin of Spanish Studies released a special issue under the title ‘Agonía republicana: Living the Death of an Era: Essay on the Spanish Civil

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War’.16 In the section dedicated to cinema, I would highlight two articles that both take Emilio Martínez-Lazaro’s Las 13 rosas as their object of analysis. Returning to Davies, her recent book, Spanish Spaces: Landscape, Space and Place in Contemporary Spanish Culture (2012), also echoes this concern with the recuperation of memories of the Civil War and its aftermath during the opening two chapters, but in this case takes the two films dedicated to the subject by Guillermo del Toro over the last decade – El espinazo del toro/ The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and El laberinto del fauno/Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) – as her starting point. Spain has now enjoyed almost as many years of post-dictatorship freedom as it endured the Francoist repression; not only have the the scars yet to heal, but there remains a clear intent and desire to recuperate historical memory. In this regard, there is recurrent question that we can reformulate: why is there still a need for Spanish cinema to depict the Civil War and its traumatic consequences? The answers are clearly controversial and plural. I would like to focus on some recent responses. On April 27 2012, at an event held at the Spanish Academy of the Cinematographic Arts and Science as a result of presentation of the cycle ‘1936: Memories of Silence’, Román Gubern said there that although in: 1977 the democratic parliament passed an amnesty law […] there was still a deficit to be settled with history, with Spanish identity and our personal past […] I am a child of the Spanish Civil War, I was born into a family split into two, one Republican and the other fascists […] in emotional terms, that is very hard for a child. Another possible answer is that given by Julio Pérez Perucha: It is interesting that memory functions like this through history because it is fundamental for the proper development of societies that they are fully aware of those processes by which they have been configured sociologically, ethnically and culturally. To finish, another possible answer is that offered by Alberto Morais in relation to the protagonist of his film Las olas/The Waves (2011): He is a character, Miguel, who makes a journey from Valencia to the south of France. He is a character that does not belong anywhere, his life was split in a specific moment […] he’s a person with a wound […] I’m interested in showing wounds that haven’t healed; that is to say, that there is no possibility of continuity for many people who lived through that period and who had to die with that open wound.17 Thus, it is worth saying that while stories such as that of Miguel remain to narrate, it makes sense to make films about the consequences of the Civil War on Spanish society. In psychoanalytic terms, the only way of solving a problem is returning to the past in search of the original trauma. In the present day, more than one American series undertakes 42

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this psychoanalytic journey. Thus, it is not in vain that some episodes of these series return to the childhood of their protagonists to unveil their traumas, and thereby become more familiarized with their characters. For example, in The Sopranos (1999–2007), Tony Soprano, the protagonist, attends therapy in order that he is able to begin this journey. In other cases, such as Don Draper in Mad Men (2007) or ‘Nucky’ Thompson in Boardwalk Empire (2010), certain situations in the present provide the pretext to introduce a flashback that leads us to childhood trauma. Of course, in the case of Spanish society, this traumatic occurence was the eruption of a fratricidal conflict with terrible consequences; thus it is not surprising that, despite the passage of time, this tendency continues to be topical for Spanish film-makers as one of the means by which to transcend this collective trauma. Among the team of professionals that carry out the production of a film, there can no be doubt that the department or the figure of the art director is the most important in relation to reconstructing the events that compose history. (The work of the three major art directors who have made the Civil War period tangible in the most recent Spanish cinema – Félix Murcia, Josep Rosell and Edou Hydallgo – is Sandra Martorell’s object of study in Chapter 27.) However, the wounds provoked by the Civil War are not the only traumatic themes to have been recuperated over recent decades in Spanish cinema; there are also the atrocities committed by ETA.18 This topic is the driving force behind the chapter written by Concepción Cascajosa. The subject of how the theme of ETA violence is depicted on-screen, especially in the Transition period, is addressed by Cascajosa through the analysis of two films: Yoyes (Taberna, 2000) and El lobo/The Wolf (Courtois, 2004). It is not solely bloody issues that have provided the impetus for a certain recuperation of Spain’s most recent history. Other subjects to be addressed include eroticism. In Chapter 12, Alejandro Melero notes how ‘[t]his proliferation of explicit images can be located during the Transition to Democracy’ (p. 179). Melero analyses the legacy of the erotic cinema of the Transition with contemporary Spanish cinema in the depiction of sex through the analysis of two films: Torremolinos 73 (Berger, 2003) and Los años desnudos/Rated R (Sabroso and Ayaso, 2008). In addition to eroticism, sexual liberty – albeit in a more timid form – had its part to play during the Transition. There were two principal directors who addressed this subject, Jaime de Armiñán and Eloy de la Iglesia, the latter of whom focused on homosexuality in works as Los placeres ocultos/Hidden Pleasures (1976) and El diputado/ The Deputy (1978). In Chapter 5, Helio San Miguel addresses the subject-matter of homosexuality and how the number of films to address the subject has increased from the second half of the 1990s onwards. This is symptomatic of new levels of liberty and equality within Spanish society throughout the democratic period, by which homosexuality has become increasingly normalized. This has been especially marked in the two mandates of the latest Socialist government under the presidency of José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero, which peaked in terms of homosexuality just a year after its first election victory, when a law permitting marriage between homosexuals was passed. 43

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As San Miguel notes in his chapter, Los placeres ocultos was banned on its initial release just two years after the dictator’s death because although Spanish society was ostensibly in the midst of Transition, it was not ready for what can be considered the first post-Franco film to address gay issues openly. However, the ensuing controversy did pave the way so that three years later, with the change of decade and the Constitution now approved and in operation, Pedro Almodóvar’s irreverent Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón/Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (1980) could be afforded a very different reception by both the general public and, noticeably, by politicians. In fact, it would be a film by Almodóvar, Carne trémula/Live Flesh (1997), that would give the title to a book published in 2007 by Santiago Fouz-Hernández and Alfredo MartínezExpósito with the name Live Flesh: The Male Body in Contemporary Spanish Cinema. As Tom Whittaker rightly highlights, ‘since the Transition to Democracy, Spanish cinema has been obsessively concerned with the male body and shifting notions of masculine identity’ (2010: 227). Above all, this book is focused on films from the 1990s and the beginning of this century, and the analysis takes on board queer and feminist theories as important reference points. These are perspectives which have gained relevance in recent years, both in the field of cinema studies generally, and more specifically in Spanish film studies. In April 2013, the fourth workshop organizaed by the research group Género Estética y Cultura Audiovisual,19 under the direction of Francisco A. Zurian, took place at Complutense University in Madrid. The study of new masculinities was the principal subject matter of this meeting. The event was inaugurated with a very well-deserved homage to Professor Paul Julian Smith, who has been the instigator and motivator for gender studies in relation to Spanish cinema, and who is one of the most influential and relevant Hispanists. Professor Román Gubern was charged with delivering an introductory homage to Professor Smith. Another of the invited speakers at this workshop was Chris Perriam, who published a book in 2013 titled Spanish Queer Cinema, which appraises the role that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and queer culture is playing in recent Spanish cinema (from 1998 to 2013). Without a doubt, in time this book will become a vital reference point for all of those interested in this subject matter and how it is addressed in Spanish cinema. The Internationalisation of Spanish Cinema Another of the Transition’s cinema major achievements was the appropriation with total liberty of cultural artefacts that did not belong to national culture. From his first film, Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón, Almodóvar has always felt the need to accumulate cultural references from the American underground. As Martínez-Carazo astutely observes in Chapter 16: Having been nurtured by the underground, pop culture and punk, and fascinated by everything that came out of Andy Warhol’s New York ‘Factory’, Almodóvar found in 44

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Madrid’s Movida the ideal climate for metabolizing these references and finding an outlet for his artistic restlessness, both literary and cinematographic. (p. 262) In other words, one of the characteristics that define the national cinema – national references combined with international influences – becomes increasingly prominent during the Transition. There can be no doubt that Almodóvar’s cinema is a clear example of this. As he recognizes, he has felt as influenced by Andy Warhol as he has by Lola Flores. Perhaps one of the keys to his success, at least in the national domain and in his earliest films, has been his ability to mix these two elements in an audacious fashion. In his own words, ‘in my life I’ve also blended these extremes, the most modern outside influences with the most traditional from within’. (p. 263) Above all, doing it at the right moment: when Spain was undergoing its passage to democracy, it was looking for extravagant proposals that would awaken it from the state of lethargy in which it had been immersed for so many years. Another film-maker who has undertaken this kind of hybrid cinema is Álex de la Iglesia. As Vicente Rodríguez demonstrates in chapter 15: ‘Thus El día de la bestia (1995) is indebted to both a series of globally effective generic modes disseminated through Hollywood, and several idiosyncratic and culturally specific traditions characteristic of Spanish cinema’ (p. 241). El día de la bestia was directed by de la Iglesia nearly a decade after Spain joined what was at the time the EEC;20 therefore, the state had come to feel like a fully-fledged member. This process of Europeanization is illustrated perfectly both at the formal and diegetic levels within this film. Thus, a vision of Spain that is halfway between Europe – and as such, a certain modernity – and its most archaic roots is brilliantly depicted when the protagonist, a priest, arrives in Madrid and the first thing he sees is an advert for the Kio towers, which refers to them as the gateway to Europe. Under this advert, a gypsy family can be seen with the typical keyboard and a goat, thereby symbolizing the most popular working-class side of Spanish culture. Another example of this hybridization is the Torrente saga (1998–2011) directed by Santiago Segura. In Chapter 20, Agustín Rico-Albero looks at the keys to these films’ success among a youth audience. One of them, identified by Carlos F. Heredero and cited by Rico, is that ‘they combine recognizable features of classic American genres (thrillers, high comedy, science fiction, horror/fantasy, etc.) with the codes, stereotypes, stars and tastes of specific Spanish filmic traditions (family drama, surrealism, black/grotesque comedy, social realism, etc.)’ (p. 326) In a similar vein, Shelagh M. Rowan-Legg in Chapter 19 explains that Sexykiller, morirás por ella/Sexy Killer: You’ll Die for Her (Martí, 2008), is another example from Spanish cinema of how you can detect influences ‘of the horror slasher film commonly found in Hollywood’ (p. 313) as much as you can more national approaches such as the ‘dark comedy’, ‘Spanish absurdist tradition’ and ‘esperpento (grotesque farce)’. Rowan-Legg even speaks in terms of the ‘neoesperpento’ as the product of a postmodern cinema that borrows as much from cinematic genres as from nationally specific artistic traditions in the creation of new approaches. Thus, for Rowan-Legg, Sexykiller provides an example of a film that ‘[w]hile giving deference to American high-concept science fiction and horror films, it remains rooted in Spanish 45

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concepts of esperpento and transforms them into postmodern black comedy, parodying not only their influences but also contemporary Spanish culture’ (p. 320). Conversely, this chapter is an example of the kind of approach that Ann Davies has adopted recently in relation to issues of genre and gender in Spanish cinema. In the book she edited in 2011, Spain on Screen: Developments in Contemporary Spanish Cinema, she offers us an analysis of El orfanato/The Orphanage (Bayona, 2007) in which she defends the idea that this film ‘and arguably in Spanish horror elsewhere, women are now those who police their own behaviour, functioning as pursuing heroine in search of the monster, who happens to be herself ’ (Davies, 2011: 14). A film also rooted in the horror genre, and analysed in this volume in Chapter 20 by Agustín Rico-Albero, is the first REC film directed by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza in 2007. This is another hybrid film, but of a very different kind to the earlier examples. In this case, the mix is produced more between the traditional formulas of the horror genre, and the formal and aesthetic characteristics associated with reality television shows. Thus, the local and the global are not the ingredients that give rise to the combination; rather, the protagonists are cinematic genres and television formats. The mixture of genres and formats is one of the characteristics that define cinematic postmodernity not only at the national level, but also at the international level. Perhaps because of this, this product has been one of the most easily exportable films, as is demonstrated by the two Hollywood remakes: Quarantine (Dowdle, 2008) and Quarantine 2 (Pogue, 2011). Another tendency that defines contemporary cinema is its ever-increasing relationship with other media. Due to this growing transmedia, it is not surprising that Jo Labanyi and Tatjana Pavlovic have dedicated a section in their recent publication, A Companion to Spanish Cinema (2013), to the relationship between cinema and other media. They contend that nowadays, contemporary popular Spanish cinema can no longer be understood in isolation from its relationship with television: an issue comprehensively developed by Paul Julian Smith in his texts about both media, such as Spanish Visual Culture: Cinema, Television, Internet (2006). In this book, Smith makes reference to a particular remake of a Spanish film in analysing Vanilla Sky (Crowe, 2001) (originally, Alejandro Amenábar’s Abre los ojos/Open Your Eyes, 1997): a seminal example in the national panorama. As we can see, Spanish cinema in the present day not only imports references but also exports formulas as a result of globalization. Although the subject of transnationalism in Spanish cinema is not new, as Jo Labanyi and Tatjana Pavlovic highlight, it is a key issue in ‘Spanish cinema throughout its history, even under the highly nationalistic Franco dictatorship’ (2013: 17). Moreover, even during his first period when, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, Spain probably lived its most isolated moment – but it is in the present day that it reaches its greatest representation, as is characteristic of an increasingly globalized entertainment industry. Due to this growing transnationalism in Spanish cinema – a characteristic that it shares to a greater or lesser extent with all other nations – scholars have taken this as a recurrent subject matter over the last two decades. As Triana-Toribio highlights: 46

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it comes as no surprise that over the last decade researchers into Spanish cinema have increasingly turned their attention to the contexts of production, distribution and exhibition of global capitalism in which contemporary Spanish cinema is irrevocably immersed. (2007: 151) Marsha Kinder’s seminal work from 1993, Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain, can be considered one of the starting points for these studies. Later, in 1997, she also edited a book in which we can find a relevant chapter written by Marvin D’Lugo (1997) about the work of the Catalan director, Bigas Luna, and how it can be contextualized within a European context. These publications were consolidated at the beginning of the following decade with the book written by Triana-Toribio in 2003, Spanish National Cinema.21 This increasing transnationality can be illustrated through various practices that are being carried out nowadays in Spanish cinema. The most habitual practice throughout its history, as we have seen up to now, has been the application of genre strategies within a national context. This is a soft form of transnationality that we have been defining as ‘hybridity’. One of the most relevant books to address the subject of genre within the panorama of Spanish cinema is the book edited by Jay Beck and Vicente Rodríguez, Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre (2008). In the introduction, the editors highlight that the notion of genre ‘operate[s] within a process of continuous transnational cross fertilization and evolution’ (2008: 12). It is thereby relevant, to borrow a phrase from Whittaker, that the third section of this book ‘looks at the way in which Spanish cinema has found wider audiences through its re-appropriation of American genres like the thriller, the “indie” film and the horror film’ (2010: 226). Both the very notion of genre and its relationship with audiences take on particular prominence in the book edited by Jo Labanyi and Tatjana Pavlovic. Genre is the main category that they have used for organizing the discussion of film texts, and as they note: ‘Given that genre is a classification system aimed at audiences [...] the focus on genre has the advantage of allowing consideration of how films connect with their public’ (2013: 18). A further common transactional pratice is co-productions – what Smith (2006) defines as ‘Transatlantic Traffic’ between Spain and Mexico, a clear example being the film El laberinto del fauno. In this case we are dealing with a non-Spanish director who films in Spanish and in a national context, even though the discourse is constructed following generic formulas. Of course, it is possible to provide examples of co-productions in which the director is Spanish and films in English, and the context of the film is international. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and his film 28 Weeks Later (2007) clearly illustrates this category. This practice had been carried out by de la Iglesia, Isabel Coixet and Amenábar prior to Fresnadillo, and more recently by the young Juan Antonio Bayona, with his film Lo imposible/The Impossible (2012). The success of this film ensured that, in spite of the economic crisis, 2012 was a very successful year for Spanish cinema, taking a market share of 17.9 per cent: the highest 47

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in 27 years. This film has become the most successful Spanish film at the box office of all time, beating the previous recordholder: Los otros/The Others (Amenábar, 2001). It is no coincidence that both films follow the same model: • Filmed in English, and with the participation of Anglo-Saxon stars with international prestige, such as Naomi Watts or Ewan McGregor in the first case, or Nicole Kidman in the second • Forged at the formal level using the schemes and formula of cinematic genres • Primed for an international audience • Not contextualized in either Spanish culture or society (although some references to these may be detected) • Made, produced, directed and promoted following the same parameters established by the Hollywood industry. As is almost inevitable, the two most commercially successful animation films from the national cinema – Planet 51 (Blanco, Abad, and Martínez, 2009) and Las aventuras de Tadeo Jones/The Adventures of Tadeo Jones (Gato, 2012) – are two examples of this extreme form of transnationalism. The first of those is, for its seminal and paradigmatic value, the object of study of Chapter 23 by María Soler, Marta Martín and Javier Marzal. Although from an administrative point of view this film is classified as Spanish, it is a clear case of a film that has been deliberately promoted as American-made. The contracted scriptwriter, Joe Stillman, is known for his work on Shrek (Adamson and Jenson, 2001) and Shrek 2 (Adamson, Asbury and Vernon, 2004): he constructs a pretty standard plot around popular American culture. Furthermore, actors associated with Hollywood were contracted to provide the voice-overs for the characters, while James Brett, conductor of the London Metropolitan Orchestra, was hired to compose the soundtrack. All of this contributes to create, in an absolutely preconceived manner, a transnational product characterized by the feel of a Hollywoodstyle production. In this way, a hypothetical spectator unaware of the administrative ascription of one of these films22 might, quite plausibly, assume they are watching a Hollywood film; equally the potential financial rewards explains the appeal of this extreme form of transnationalism to directors and producers. In sum, this is a model which, from its very foundations, questions any notion of a national cinema. Following the dynamic of how to ensure that a film achieves box office success, everything relating to the promotional campaign is paramount. Within this, the popularity not only of actors, but also of directors, takes on great importance. In Chapter 21, Lidia Merás examines the figure of Santiago Segura to see how his media-friendly status has been instrumental in the success of Torrente and its sequels. In addition to this admittedly extreme case, in which author and director converge in the same person, we can find other examples in the national cinema of what Triana-Toribio terms an ‘autor mediático’ (2008: 260). Triana-Toribio picks up on this term coined by Vicente Benet (2005: 68) in order to refer to those directors 48

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who ‘use a recognizable public persona (and image), which is an integral part of the release campaign of each film’ (2008: 262). The two directors selected by Triana-Toribio to exemplify this type of director are de la Iglesia and Coixet (Coixet’s films are the object of study of Chapter 9, by Jennie Rothwell). Having said this, and as Triana-Toribio recognizes, these are not only two ‘autores mediáticos’ in Spanish cinema: Almodóvar evidently is, as well. Following on from Triana-Toribio (2008), it is also significant to highlight that El Deseo as a production house founded by Almodóvar alongside his brother Agustín on June 14 1985 ‘has played a central role in the careers of both Coixet and de la Iglesia’. Triana-Toribio (2007) defends El Deseo as an example of a production house within the Spanish industry that has known perfectly since its very beginnings how to orientate itself towards the international as much as the national market, without losing its own identity when it comes to making films. Thus we could define the films produced by El Deseo as those that address universal subjects in a particular context – that of a Spain created following practices of national production. We can also define them as having a very particular style – the Almodóvar stamp – at the same time as they are made thinking about their future distribution and exhibition, both inside as well as beyond the Spanish frontiers, thanks to a carefully elaborated promotional plan. In an earlier text – in this case, co-authored with Peter Buse and Andrew Willis (2004) – Triana Toribio utilized the figure of de la Iglesia to question the traditional notion of an auteur. This collaboration had its next manifestation in a book about the Basque director that the three of them wrote together three years later. This book, with the title The Cinema of Álex de la Iglesia (2007), forms part of a series about auteurs edited by Triana-Toribio and Andrew Willis. As the explanation they offer of the series states: [It] sees these figures as more than just auteurs, thus offering an insight into the work and contexts of producers, writers, actors, production companies and studios. The studies in this series take into account the recent changes in Spanish and Latin American film studies, such as the new emphasis on popular cinema, and the influence of cultural studies in the analysis of films and of the film cultures produced within the Spanish-speaking industries.23 As such, their interest and perspective makes a perfect fit with the tendency that predominates among those scholars that study Spanish cinema at the international level. In addition to the cinema of de la Iglesia, other directors such as Julio Médem, Daniel Calparsoro, Iciar Bollaín and Amenábar have been subject to their own monographs. In 2012, Barry Jordan addressed the latter of these as an example of ‘exportable “middlebrow” cinema, designed for a global audience’.24 With case-studies such as these, we can see how popular cinema designed for a mainstream international as well as national cinema is one of the preferred subject matters for scholars of Spanish cinema. One of the first studies to deal with popular cinema as its focus of interest was edited in 2004 by Antonio Lázaro-Reboll and 49

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Andrew Willis: Spanish Popular Cinema. It is hardly a coincidence that the child Marisol, an indisputable icon of Spanish popular cinema, graces the image of the front cover of this book. According to Davies: The move towards star studies ironically coincides with a rediscovery of the director as himself (rarely, herself) a star of sorts, following the earlier theorization of Timothy Corrigan (1991) that posits the director as an industrial rather than artistic phenomenon. (2011: 4) Thus, if the notion of auteurism, which had a certain relevance during the last century, retains its relevance in any respect, it is not for its artistic worth as was once the case, but rather for what it can offer commercially. In this respect, the words of Jo Labanyi and Tatjana Pavlovic are very eloquent: ‘Auteurism still predominates because the “director brand” continues to be a key commercial strategy for marketing films and priming audience reception’ (2013: 18). The complete opposite of this kind of film in formal terms, but similar in its quest to find transnational formulas for its production and distribution, can be found in Andrés Duque’s film Color perro que huye/Colour Runaway Dog (2010). Admittedly in this case, the imported methods in terms of production and distribution are diametrically opposed. They exist at the margins of the industry and, as a result, Duque’s film is a clear example of a marginal product cooked up at the cinematographic fringe. In addition to a certain degree of formal experimentation, Duque takes advantage of new technologies to find alternative production, distribution and exhibition routes to those monopolized by the cinema industry. Furthermore, and as Elena López argues in Chapter 29, these new projects also open up new forms of more democratic and participatory models of consumption, thanks to the advantages provided by social networks to the viewer who ceases to be a spectator – at least in the way in which it has been configured up to now – to take on an active role in the gestation of the project. Thus this volume, with its deliberate attempt to be eclectic, also looks towards that cinema which is different to popular cinema, but which paradoxically shares with it a preference for temporality in place of geography. In other words, this book also takes as an object of study that cinema which is produced at the edges of the industry, which exists at the margins of the canon, and that has more in common with different aesthetic currents that define auteur cinema in any given historical moment than an administratively imposed nationality. In these cases, the reference is not so much Hollywood cinema and its generic formulas, but primarily the European art cinema tradition. In Chapter 6, Javier Moral focuses on this type of alternative cinema which, in spite of being produced at the fringes and with small budgets, also looks towards foreign markets. This cinema might not be supported by the box office, but it is recognized by the foremost international festivals, as well as by critics both at home and abroad. This is a kind of cinema 50

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that embraces and understands the auteur trends that currently impregnate contemporary cinema and, as such, can be seen as transnational projects. This is largely the result of the fact that, on the one hand, the simplicity of the gaze is one of their most important distinguishing features; and, on the other, as Moral rightly notes in his chapter, they are fully aware ‘of their incapacity to encompass reality in all its complexity’ (p. 99). The early 1990s bore witness to a renaissance in a certain form of addressing the complexity of reality. In this case, the results of this process can be classified neither within the parameters of social realism nor traditional documentary practice; rather, they form a part of hybridization. This approach, distinct from its antecedents, constitutes a combination of strategies such as borrowing techniques from fiction such as a certain forms of dramatization in the construction of characters, and other techniques from documentary. There is however a new freedom as the film-makers no longer feel obliged to preserve the ‘illusion of reality’ in their approach towards the world itself. At the national level, early examples include El encargo del cazador/The Hunter’s Assignment (Jordà, 1990) and Innisfree (Guerin, 1990), and the film that Víctor Erice would make two years later in 1992, El sol del membrillo/Quince Tree of the Sun. These three films are reference points in certain trends and movements within contemporary Spanish cinema that have frequently emerged through productions promoted within the Master’s in the Creation of Documentary at Barcelona’s Pompeu Fabra University. With his 1999 film Mones con la Becky/Monkeys Like Becky, Joaquim Jordà inaugurates a fertile production wing for the Catalan university programme, a pioneering collaboration between the academy and film-makers. Thus, just over thirty years after Jordà, one of those who established the basis for the Barcelona School in the 1960s, becomes the promoter of a new school that once again finds its epicentre in the city. It seems as if history is repeating itself and the same dichotomy which at the time derived from the gulf between the New Spanish Cinema and the Barcelona School has re-emerged in the present day. According to Jordi Balló (2010: 107), Jordà’s film, alongside those made by Jean-Louis Comolli, Buenaventura Durruti, anarquista (2000) and José Luis Guerin’s En construcción/ Work in Progress (2002) – all three directors and teachers on the Master’s course – was a commission put forward by the academy and linked to its first year in operation (1998–99), so that its vision of the cinema would not be solely realized theoretically through academic texts, but would also be materialized in practice through the production of films that could serve as a model for future generations. I address this aspect of the national cinema in Chapter 7, with a study of two of the fruits of this school: the recently cited En construcción, and La Leyenda del tiempo/The Legend of Time (Lacuesta, 2006).25 Once again, it is Isaki Lacuesta and, more specifically, his diptych Los pasos dobles/Double Steps and El Cuaderno de barro/The Clay Diaries both made simultaneously in Mali in 2011, which form the central point of interest in Chapter 8 by Wenceslao García and Miguel Corella. In this chapter, the relationship between cinema and the plastic arts, represented by the relationship between Lacuesta and the painter Miquel Barceló, offers the perfect pretext to sketch a reflection on how cinema can become an ‘Other space’ that favours dialogue 51

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between cultures. This meeting of cultures, the European and the African, is sketched from a postcolonial perspective whereby cultural interchange is not constituted from the superiority of some over others, but rather from a position of equality and mutual respect. A renewed interest in Africa is another constant that has defined the most recent Spanish cinema. Although this tendency began to form in the 1990s, it is primarily in the first decade of this century that it has reached a peak. In Chapter 4 by Alberto Elena, the reader is taken on a tour of a significant number of films that have reflected the relationship between Spain and Africa. These are films that adopt a new gaze: one of solidarity towards problems in Africa inspired by social and political motivations, alongside a new ethnographic interest in the neighbouring continent. While some projects are a result of a journey from Spain to Africa, there are cases in which the object of interest is the reverse: a journey in which immigrants risk their lives in search of a better one in Europe. As a result, many films are shot in the Lavapiés area of Madrid, providing the viewer with a portrait of the difficulties that immigrants have to negotiate in the daily struggle for survival. Thus, changes in Spanish society have given rise to new subject-matter to be addressed in the films of the last two decades, such as immigration and, as is increasingly the case, the causes of the profound financial crisis that we are undergoing, which has tragic consequences in society generally, and particularly within the Spanish context. These are subject matter that appear, for example, as the backdrop to Almodóvar’s latest film: Los amantes pasajeros/ I’m So Excited! (2013). Conclusion Throughout this chapter we have seen how the different political and social events that have taken place through the history of modern Spain have been important in determining the path of the national cinema. In 1992, the year that marks the beginning of the period studied in this book, Spain began to reap the first fruits of its process of democratization and opening up to the outside world. The Barcelona Olympics, the Universal Exhibition in Seville and Madrid being named European City of Culture were evident results of the efforts that Spaniards had invested over the years, with the intention of normalizing their situation within the international panorama. From that year onwards, and over the course of the last twenty years, Spain has come to play an increasingly active role in the unfolding of international events. If to this observation we add the fact of ever-increasing globalization, then we find ourselves in a scenario where the crisis of nationality is increasingly pressing. Thus, we are faced with a national cinema that is increasingly transnational, and in which it is increasingly difficult to find traces of what Santos Zunzunegui defines as ‘the richest, most original and creative vein of Spanish cinema’: that is to say, cinema which ‘specific filmmakers and films inherit, transform and revitalize a whole series of aesthetic forms through which the Spanish people have expressed themselves over the course of their history’ (2002: 14). 52

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Notes   1 Perhaps the only exception to this rule is silent cinema, whose typology tends to be related to cinematic rather than political considerations.   2 For more information on the cinema of this period, see the relevant chapters in Bentley (2008), Monterde (2009b) and Pavlovic (2009) as well as Castro de Paz (2002, 2005).   3 José Luis Castro de Paz (2005) has picked up on this dogmatic faith elsewhere. This declaration of principles is cited also by García Segui (1989–90: 40).   4 Another key film of this genre was Lola Montes (1944) directed by Antonio Román. Later in 1948, Juan de Orduña would film Locura de amor, in which the tragic destiny of Juana la loca (Jane, the Madwoman), wife to Felipe el hermoso (Philip the Handsome) and mother of Carlos V was revived.   5 Other examples worthy of note include Rafael Gil and Wenceslao Fernández Flores.   6 These ideas are central to the visions forged throughout these two landmark texts. According to Kinder (1993: 11), transcultural reinscription is concerned with the ideological reinscription of conventions that are borrowed from other cultures and set in conflict with each other: a process of hybridation that is capable of carving out a new aesthetic language. Zunzunegui prefers to use the term ‘hybridization’ to refer to these kinds of films, ‘as a means of typically Spanish negotiation, whose cultural base is in the past’ (2002: 13).   7 José María García Escudero’s first mandate lasted from September 1951 to February 1952.   8 These ideas are picked up and developed in Arocena (2005) and Monterde (2009a). For more details on the cinema of this period, see also the relevant chapters in Bentley (2008) and Pavlovic (2009).   9 In 1951, an Italian film week was held in Madrid. As Kinder notes (1993: 3), this featured a programme of neo-realist films which had a profound influence on Berlanga and Bardem. 10 The fact that José María García Escudero allowed Surcos to be premiered was the principal reason why he had to abandon his position as Director-General of Cinematography first time round. 11 Another example of this is when, in 1960, Carlos Saura and Pere Portabella convinced Luis Buñuel to film in Spain. The regime looked favourably on the return of the Aragonese filmmaker, which allowed him full liberty to work. The fruit of this scenario was Viridiana, which won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1961. However, problems arose when L’Osservatore Romano denounced its blasphemous nature, provoking a series of knock-on effects including, for example, the banning of the film in Spain. 12 For more information on this period, see Torreiro (2009b), Zunzunegui (2005a, 2005b); and the relevant chapters in Bentley (2008) and Pavlovic (2009). 13 Another highly significant film by this director is Queridísimos verdugos/Dearest Executioners (1974), that seemed to anticipate the end of the regime a year prior to its occurrence through a portrait of the daily life of one of the last Spanish executioners. 14 This task of open historical reconstruction was carried out also in fiction films such as Los días del pasado/The Days of the Past (Camus, 1977) or El corazón del bosque/Heart of the Forest (Gutiérrez Aragón, 1978). 53

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15 Their book encompasses the period from the end of the dictatorship in 1975 to its publication in 1998. 16 As Susana Bayó notes in the introduction, ‘the contributions collected in this special issue of the Bulletin of Spanish Studies represent a small selection from over sixty papers presented at the July 2009 Conference organized by the Department of Hispanic Studies in Trinity College, Dublin. The principal aim was to bring together a broad spectrum of experts and young researchers to debate and reflect on the reality for Republicans of losing the Spanish Civil War’ (2012: 1). 17 All of the quotations from this section can be seen on You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=VkNX7Zn4U5o. 18 For instance, Mario Camus addressed the ETA issue in the film Sombras en una batalla/ Shadows in a Battle (1993). 19 Its aim is the sharing of the current state of studies relating to gender, masculinities, women and feminism in relation to audio-visual culture. 20 Spain officially signed to join the EEC – now the European Union – in the Columnas Room of the Royal Palace in Madrid on June 12 1985; this came into effect on 1 January 1986. 21 More recent is the monographic issue of Hispanic Research Journal published in 2007 and edited by Chris Perriam, Isabel Santaolalla and Peter W. Evans (Perriam et al., 2007). In this case, the object of study is broader, as it goes beyond Spanish cinema to address IberoAmerican cinema in general. This monograph includes, among others, names as prestigious as that of Lúcia Nagib. 22 A process of categorization which is guided, among other factors, by film credits, titles, reviews, publicity and press releases (Plantinga, 1987). 23 Quotation can be found at http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer? series=12. 24 These words can be found in the book’s promotional blurb. 25 Isaki Lacuesta belongs to the first year of the Master’s programme and is one of its most prestigious former students, both nationally and internationally.

References Arocena, C. (2005). ‘Luces y sombras. Los años cincuenta’ in J. L. Castro de Paz, J. Pérez Perucha and S. Zunzunegui (eds.), La nueva memoria. Historia (s) del cine español (1939–2000) (La Coruña: Vía Láctea), 78–120. Balló, J. (2010). ‘Cronología de una transmisión (El Máster de Documental de la UPF)’ in C. Torreiro (ed.), Realidad y creación en el cine de no-Ficción (Madrid: Cátedra), 105–21. Bayó Belenguer, S. (2012). ‘Introduction to special issue – Agonía republicana: living the death of an era’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 89.7–8: 1–6. Beck, J. and Rodríguez Ortega, V. (eds.) (2008). Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Benet, V. J. (2005) ‘Estilo, industria e institución: reflexiones sobre el canon del cine español actual’, Archivos de la Filmoteca, 49: 67–81. 54

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Bentley, B. P. E. (2008). A Companion to Spanish Cinema (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer). Buse, P, Triana-Toribio, N and Willis, A (2004). ‘A popular Spanish auteur: Álex de la Iglesia as a polemical tool’, New Cinemas, 2.3: 139–148. (2007). The Cinema of Álex de la Iglesia (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Castro de Paz, J. L. (1998). ‘Vida en sombras’ in J. P. Perucha (ed.), Antología crítica del cine español 1906–1995 (Madrid: Cátedra), 239–43. (2002). Un cinema herido: los turbios años cuarenta en el cine español (1939–1950) (Barcelona: Paídos). (2005). ‘Conflictos y continuidades. Los turbios años cuarenta (1939–1950)’ in J. L. Castro de Paz, J. P. Perucha and S. Zunzunegui (eds), La nueva memoria. Historia(s) del cine español (1939–2000) (La Coruña: Vía Láctea), 12–61. Cinema Universitario (1955). ‘Boletín de las Primeras Conversaciones Cinematográficas Nacionales’, 1. Davies A. (ed.) (2011). Spain on Screen: Developments in Contemporary Spanish Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). (2012). Spanish Spaces: Landscape, Space and Place in Contemporary Spanish Culture (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). D’Lugo, M. (1997). ‘La teta i la luna: The form of transnational cinema in Spain’ in M. Kinder (ed.), Refiguring Spain: Cinema/Media/Representation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 196–214. García Segui, A. (1989–90). ‘CIFESA, la antorcha de los éxitos’, Archivos de la filmoteca 4: 40. Jordan, B. and Morgan-Tamosunas, R. (1998). Contemporary Spanish Cinema (Manchester University Press). Kinder, M. (1993). Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). (1997). ‘Introduction’ in M. Kinder (ed.), Refiguring Spain: Cinema/Media/Representation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 1–32. Labanyi, J. (2008). ‘The politics of memory in contemporary Spain’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 9.2: 119–25. Labanyi, J and Zunzunegui, S. (2009). ‘Lo popular en el cine español durante el franquismo. Diálogo entre Jo Labanyi y Santos Zunzunegui’, Desacuerdos. 5: 83–104. Labanyi, J. and Pavlovic, T. (eds.) (2013). A Companion to Spanish Cinema (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell). Lázaro Reboll, A. and Willis, A. (2004). Spanish Popular Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Monterde, J. E. (2009a). ‘Continuismo y disidencia’ in R. Gubern, J. E. Monterde, J. P. Perucha, E. Riambau and C. Torreiro (eds.), Historia del cine español (Madrid: Cátedra), 239–78. (2009b). ‘El cine de la autarquía’ in R. Gubern, J. E. Monterde, J. P. Perucha, E. Riambau and C. Torreiro (eds.), Historia del cine español (Madrid: Cátedra), 181–229. Pavlovic, T. Alvarez, I., Blanco-Cano, R., Grisales, A., Osorio, A., and Sánchez, A. (2009). 100 Years of Spanish Cinema (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell). Pérez Rubio, P. and Hernández Ruíz, J. (2005). ‘Esperanzas, compromisos y desencantos. El cine durante la transición española’ in J. L. Castro de Paz, J. P. Perucha and S. Zunzunegui 55

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(eds), La nueva memoria. Historia (s) del cine español (1939–2000) (La Coruña: Vía Láctea), 178–242. Perriam, C. (2013). Spanish Queer Cinema. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). , Santaolalla, I. and Evans, P. W. (2007). ‘The transnational in Iberian and Latin American cinemas: Editor’s introduction’, Hispanic Research Journal, 8.1: 3–9. Plantinga, C. (1987). ‘Defining documentary: fiction, nonfiction, and projected worlds’, Persistence of Vision, 5: 44–54. Seguin, J. C. (1999). Historia del cine Español (Madrid: Acento Editorial). Smith, P. J. (2006). ‘Transatlantic traffic in recent Hispano-Mexican films’ in P. J. Smith, Spanish Visual Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 158–76. Torreiro, C. (2009a). ‘¿Una dictadura liberal?’ in R. Gubern, J. E. Monterde, J. Pérez Perucha, E. Riambau and C. Torreiro (eds.), Historia del cine español (Madrid: Cátedra), 295–335. (2009b). ‘Del tardofranquismo a la democracia’ in R. Gubern, J. E. Monterde, J. Pérez Perucha, E. Riambau and C. Torreiro (eds.), Historia del cine español (Madrid: Cátedra), 341–90. Triana-Toribio, N. (2003). Spanish National Cinema (New York: Routledge). (2007). ‘Journeys of El Deseo between the nation and the transnational in Spanish cinema’, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, 4.3: 151–63. (2008). ‘Auteurism and commerce in contemporary Spanish cinema’, Screen, 49.3: 259–76. Whittaker, T. (2010): ‘Recent scholarship in Spanish film studies’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 16.2–3: 225–29. Zunzunegui, S. (2002). Historias de España. De qué hablamos cuando hablamos del cine español (Valencia: Valencia, IVAC-La Filmoteca). (2005a). ‘Llegar a más: el cine español entre 1962–1971’ in J. L. Castro de Paz, J. Pérez Perucha and S. Zunzunegui (eds), La nueva memoria. Historia (s) del cine español (1939–2000) (La Coruña: Vía Láctea), 130–68. (2005b). Los felices sesenta. Aventuras y desaventuras del cine español (1959–1971) (Barcelona: Paidós).

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Part 1I New Theories Sense and Sensibility: New Forms of Being and Seeing in Recent Spanish Cinema Section introduction by Duncan Wheeler

T

he last twenty years may not have witnessed the seismic ideological shifts that have characterized prior epochs in Spanish history, but there have been fundamental sociological transitions which have been documented in a national cinema that continues to perform an important role in articulating, as well as reflecting, discourses surrounding social and political issues. In a book published in 2005, Isabel Santaolalla was able to examine a reasonably large corpus of films dealing with the immigrant figure, but noted the (in)conspicuous lack of colonial narratives (Santaolalla: 227). This point is developed here by Alberto Elena as he charts the subsequent rise in what he construes to be increasingly progressive, sophisticated and sensitive narratives concerning former Spanish colonies in Africa: most specifically, the area of the Sahara which Spain gave up in 1975, effectively leaving a people without a territory. In Wilaya (Pérez Rosado, 2012), the character of Fatucha, who left the Sahara aged ten to live in Valencia, is shown returning to her birthplace. In a reversal of traditional narratives about repression and Spain, other characters in the film are intrigued by the freedoms that they assume she must enjoy, while both they and the camera are fascinated by her tightfitting clothes. Although in this film there is a certain narrative and thematic justification for the specularization of the bodies of immigrants, the sexualization of African men – see for example, A la deriva/Adrift (Pons, 2009) or El dios de madera/Wooden God (Molina Foix, 2010) – and the concomitant objectification and typecasting of actors such as Emilio Buale – an actor from Equitorial Guinea plucked from obscurity in the Madrid underground to star in Bwana (Uribe, 1996) – has been flagged as an area of concern by a number of critics (e.g. Green, 2011; Santaolalla, 2010). The body of the male immigrant reappears as a concern in Helio San Miguel’s discussion of Los novios búlgaros/Bulgarian Lovers (de la Iglesia, 2003), in Chapter 5, on the normalization of representations of gay characters in recent Spanish cinema: in this case, the body of a foreign rent-boy provides the object of desire for the central protagonist, a wealthy professional living in Chueca, Madrid’s famous gay district. San Miguel tells a remarkable story of how Spain has been transformed in the space of a few decades from a remarkably homophobic culture in which homosexuality was criminalized, to having among the most progressive legislation in Europe. While there are clearly lacunae in cinematic depictions with, for example, a continued reluctance to engage with lesbian characters, internationally distributed films such as Cachorro/Bear Cub (Albaladejo, 2004)

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or Chuecatown/Boystown (Flahn, 2007) both reflect and critique how, according to Santiago Fouz-Hernández: the much sought-after equality has resulted in a heteronormative, gay society where the transgressive behaviour of pro-gay rights rallies or brief encounters in a back room seems to have been replaced by non-offensive, conformist couples obsessed by luxuries, and who are able to afford the latest commodities. (2010: 86) In other words, San Miguel is absolutely right to stress the remarkable progress and achievements made. However, future work will need to look at what perhaps has been lost in this process of assimilation, as well as the problematic and ubiquitous representation of the wealthy professional Spaniard and a highly-sexualized, generally muscular, immigrant. If, as I have been suggesting, issues of the gaze and encounters with the ‘other’ have been central to many recent Spanish films, these theoretical concerns become the subjectmatter and governing ethical and aesthetic principles in Isaki Lacuesta’s Los pasos dobles/ The Double Steps (2011) and El Cuaderno de barro/The Clay Diaries (2011), a remarkable diptych shot simultaneously in Mali. In Chapter 8, Wenceslao García Puchades and Miguel Corella Lacasa employ the interconnection between cinema and the plastic arts, manifest through the relationship between Lacuesta and the painter Miquel Barceló, in order to raise important questions about the relationship between narrative legibility and subjugation. Drawing on work undertaken in museum studies, their compelling argument is that these films’ withdrawal from conventional narrative structures has an ethical as well as an aesthetic purpose: to transcend the colonial gaze, escape the traditional power dynamic of the imperial eye, and thereby provide the preconditions for intercultural exchange that recognizes difference, but not superiority. In their view, the challenges raised by such a discourse are the reason why, on winning the Golden Shell award at the 2011 San Sebastián Film Festival, Los pasos dobles was criticized for its ostensible unintelligibility by Carlos Boyero. They suggest that Boyero adopted an inappropriate modernist position, by which he sought the pleasures of rationalist mastery of knowledge – the complete antithesis of what the diptych sets out to achieve.1 This chapter is complemented in the book’s closing section, both by the round table debate in which Lacuesta participates (Chapter 30), and Linda Ehrlich’s contribution (Chapter 28) based on an extended correspondence with the film-maker. As these pieces collectively demonstrate, Lacuesta’s films clearly satisfy the definition and demands of art cinema, as articulated by Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover: In common usage, ‘art cinema’ describes feature-length narrative films at the margins of mainstream cinema, located somewhere between fully experimental films and overtly commercial products. Typical (but not necessary) features include foreign production, overt engagement of the aesthetic, unrestrained formalism, and a mode of narration 60

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that is pleasurable but loosened from classical structures and distanced from its representations. (2010: 6) While the existence of a recent DVD compilation release titled Del éxtasis al arrebato/From Ecstasy to Rapture (2010) provides demonstrable proof of a tradition of experimental filmmaking in Spain which has not always been given due recognition, the release of El sol del membrillo/The Quince Tree Sun (Erice, 1992) was an early suggestion of the resurgence of Spanish art cinema by a director who has acted as an important reference point for many self-consciously ‘artful’ directors such as Jose Luís Guerin or José Luis López Linares and, in the words of Maria Delgado: further auteurs working in Spanish cinema. Javier Rebollo, for example, deploys an economical performance register where the accelerated rhythm of contemporary consumerist culture is expertly discussed. Albert Serra has produced a cinema of gentle observation and slow demeanour, in which eccentric characters incarnated by non-professional actors bring new dimensions to well-known fictional and religious archetypes. Serra, like Jaime Rosales, Isaki Lacuesta, Erice and Guerin, has worked with the museum sector – the CCCB’s [Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona] Correspondence series (2006/2011) – on commissioned works that both take cinema as a mode of discourse – a way of ‘writing’ to a contemporary about what they do and how they do it – and a mode of presenting their relationship with the world through their engagement with art practice. (2013: 12) While the kind of dialogues explored in these correspondence series are discussed in extensive detail in the round table discussion (see Chapter 30), Javier Moral explores Erice’s influence on a new generation of cineastes in Chapter 6. He offers a general overview of some of the major films in this recent resurgence of art cinema, and delineates what he considers to be its essential characteristics: the ‘bare unadorned gaze’ and ‘the enigma construct’ (p. 96). Along similar lines, Mar Diestro-Dópido has described En la ciudad de Sylvia/In the City of Sylvia (Guerin, 2007) as ‘a skilfully orchestrated ode to longing, woman and the city, but above all to the art of looking and cinema itself ’ (2009: 13).2 In a discussion of what Lúcia Nagib and Cecília Mello have termed ‘world cinema’s “realist revival”’ (2009: iv), Tiago de Luca (2012: 183) has grouped Guerin alongside such giants of world cinema as Abbas Kiarostami, Gus Van Sant or Carlos Reygadas. While Solas/Alone (Zambrano, 1999) sought, among other things, to debunk images of Spain’s economic wellbeing and the postcard image of Seville as one of Europe’s most beautiful cities by presenting fictional characters through a social-realist lens, En construcción/Work in Progress (Guerin, 2001) takes a different approach. It depicts real-life characters embroiled, frequently against their will, in the urban regeneration of Barcelona’s traditionally working-class district of 61

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El Raval, through what Natalia Nuñez has termed ‘a symbolically charged and allusive filming style’, which ‘effectively evokes the process of spectralization of the subaltern which results from the alliance between the city government and private interests in late modern city planning’ (2012: 92). In his discussion of En construcción in relation to Lacuesta’s La leyenda del tiempo/The Legend of Time (2006), Fernando Canet marshals compelling evidence to support Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s general point that: neo-realism, as a form of filmmaking which uses the cinema apparatus to remind us in a material way how reality makes us, rather than us commanding reality through our ability to make fictions about it, still has a lesson to impart. (2012: 157) Realism is clearly a relative rather than an absolute term – perpetually in construction, to provide a literal translation of Guerin’s film – and those works with ostensibly similar subject matter can address their ‘reality’ in diverse even antithetical manners. Hence, for example, the legacy of flamenco singer Camarón de la Isla (1952–1992) provides the focus for both Lacuesta’s film and an official biopic, Camarón/Camarón: When Flamenco Became Legend (Chávarri, 2005), but the nature of their truth-claims are radically different, with the former departing from the pre-scripted conventions of biography in terms of both content and form. Ostensibly centred on the lives of a Gypsy child bereaving his father, and a Japanese young woman who travels to Camarón’s hometown as a form of pilgrimage and penitence, perhaps Parvati Nair is right in her appraisal that: Ultimately, this film is not so much about the characters themselves, as it is about flamenco as a complex music form that is shadowed by the spectral, even as it travels the globe and comes to life through individual and contingent performances. (2012: 136) Similarly, very different aspects of the material and sociological effects of rural de-population are addressed in Flores de otro mundo/Flowers from Another World (Bollaín, 1999) and the documentary El cielo gira/The Sky Turns (Álvarez, 2004). Apart from the question of ageing and isolation, there is virtually nothing at the level of content and form to unite La vida empieza hoy/Life Begins Today (Mañá, 2010), a celebration of sexual rediscovery among pensioners, and La lapidació de Sant Esteve/The Stoning of Saint Etienne (Vilà, 2012), a disturbing portrait of an infirm, taciturn old man emotionally and physically removed from his unsympathetic and grasping daughter and neighbours. Through his analysis in Chapter 7, Canet delineates a specific realist ethic and aesthetic in the two films under consideration to substantiate and nuance Ángel Quintana’s opposition of the kind of work being produced in Barcelona, to the resurgence of ostensibly realist film-making which came to the fore within the mainstream Spanish industry centred in Madrid during the 1990s (Quintana, 2007, 2008). 62

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Although differences can be clearly discerned between film-making practices in Spain’s two major cities, the limits of geographical or social determinism are flagged by Jennie Rothwell in Chapter 9 through her sensitive and sensual reading of the films written and directed by Catalonia’s most internationally renowned film-maker, Isabel Coixet, who in Núria TrianaToribio’s memorable phrase, ‘refuses to be a spokesperson for her gender and nation’ (2008: 274). A multimedia artist, Coixet has directed plays, designed advertising campaigns and made socially conscious documentaries, such as the Goya Award-winning Escuchando al juez Garzón/Listening to Judge Garzón (2011). Coixet’s films, like her auteur persona, resist easy categorization and appropriate models from the tradition of European art films, but also (and arguably more prominently) from North American independent film-makers. In her contribution to this volume, Rothwell charts a remarkable synaesthetetic trajectory carefully elaborated to work on the audience’s intellect and senses alike, which suggests the possibility, and even desirability, of employing a transnational mainstream cinematic idiom. Coixet’s character and narrative-driven melodramas may not produce art films in the more traditional sense that they have been described and defined here and elsewhere, but Part 1’s closing chapter makes a compelling argument for them being taken seriously as art. Notes 1 2

For an overview and discussion of the current state of reviewing and criticism in Spain, see Revert et al. (2011). Jean-Luc Godard’s famous maxim about a tracking shot being a moral issue might appear somewhat quaint to twenty-first century sensibilities. However if, as Guerin suggests in the round table discussion, the fast-cutting editing techniques of recent commercial cinema have rendered the beauty of the human body obsolete, then it is possible to ascribe an ethical as well as an aesthetic significance to films such as El árbol/The Tree (Serrano Azcona, 2009), En la ciudad de Sylvia or La mujer sin piano/Woman without Piano (Rebollo, 2009), which effectively stalk their mysterious and sometimes mythical protagonists on their wanderings around cities.

References Delgado, M. M. (2013). ‘Introduction’ in M. M. Delgado and R. W. Fiddian (eds.), Spanish Cinema 1973–2000: Auteurism, Politics, Landscape and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 1–20. de Luca, T. (2012). ‘Realism of the senses: a tendency in contemporary world cinema’ in L. Nagib, C. Perriam and R. Dudrah (eds.), Theorizing World Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris), 183–205. Diestro-Dópido, M. (2009). ‘Tale of the unexpected: interview with José Luis Guerin’, Sight & Sound, April: 13. Fouz-Hernández, S. (2010). ‘Assimilation and its discontents: representations of gay men in Spanish cinema of the 2000s’, Revista canadiense de estudios hispánicos, 35.1: 81–104. 63

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Galt, R. and Schoonover, K. (2010). ‘Introduction: the impunity of art cinema’ in R. Galt and K. Schoonover (eds.), Global Art Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 3–27. Green, S. (2011). ‘(Re)casting the Spanish nation: the “othering” of Emilio Buale’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 12.2: 197–215. Nagib, L. and Mello, C. (2009). ‘Introduction’ in L. Nagib and C. Mello (eds.), Realism and the Audiovisual Media (Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmillan), xiv–xxvi. Nair, P. (2012). ‘Travelling song: music, iteration and translation in La leyenda del tiempo’ in L. Shaw and R. Stone (eds.), Screening Songs in Hispanic and Lusophone Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 134–50. Nowell-Smith, G. (2012). ‘From realism to neo-realism’ in L. Nagib, C. Perriam and R. Dudrah (eds.), Theorizing World Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris), 147–59. Nuñez, N. (2012). ‘Whose vanguardist city? The Barcelona urban model as seen from the periphery in José Luis Guerin’s En construcción’ in H. Buffery and C. Caulfield (eds.), Barcelona: Visual Culture, Space and Power (Cardiff: University of Wales Press), 89–103. Quintana, Á. (2007). ‘Madrid–Barcelona. Dos modelos estéticos contrapuestos’ in N. Berthier and J. C. Seguin (eds.), Cine, nación y nacionalidades en España (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez), 137–44. (2008). ‘Fernando León de Aranoa: Princesas (2005) y el realismo tímido en el cine español’ in P. Feenstra and H. Hermans (eds.), Miradas sobre pasado y presente en el cine español (1990–2005) (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi), 251–63. Revert, J., Gascó, D., Losilla, C. and Salgado, D. (2011). ‘(Des)encuentros: el estado de la crítica en España’, L’Atlante, 12: 78–87. Santaolalla, I. (2005). Los ‘otros’: Etnicidad y ‘raza’ en el cine español contemporáneo (Zaragoza: Prensa Universitaria de Zaragoza). (2010). ‘Body matters: immigrants in recent Spanish, Italian and Greek cinemas’ in D. Berghahn and C. Sternberg (eds.), European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan), 152–74. Triana-Toribio, N. (2008). ‘Auteurism and commerce in contemporary Spanish cinema: directores mediáticos’, Screen, 49.3: 259–76.

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Chapter 4 Back to Africa? Colonial History and Postcolonial Dynamics in Recent Spanish Cinema Alberto Elena

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frica (understood either as the continent as a whole, or in its more limited referent to the Maghreb) has always played a primary role in the Spanish imaginary, most notably in the seemingly perpetual and vitriolic disputes over national identity that have been present in historical discourse since at least the early nineteenth century. In this regard, Susan Martin-Márquez is not mistaken when, in her splendid book on the subject, Disorientations, she speaks of ‘an ongoing effort to assert an always elusive unity, founded as it was upon an absence’ (2008: 16). The Moor (Moro) – the expression traditionally used in Spain to refer to North African Muslims – has cast a long shadow in Spanish culture. Since the onset of anthropological thought in the eighteenth century, study and reflection on the ‘Other’ (generally meaning the African ‘Other’) has served to reaffirm ‘our’ superiority over ‘them’, and to help clarify our own ethnic nature, our deepest and truest identity, in the context of the modest Spanish colonial adventure both in the past and, somewhat extemporaneously, during the Franco dictatorship. In both periods, Spaniards’ historical, geographical and cultural relationship with Africa would be construed as the keystone legitimizing such colonialism (Martin-Márquez, 2008: 70, 51). However, the very nature and flow of this relationship in recent decades, coinciding with the end of the dictatorship and the Transition to Democracy – and most pertinently, as we will see, with Spain becoming a member of the European Union (EU) – is quite different. After so many incursions into ‘our domestic Orient’, or into the more remote heart of the continent that Isabel, the Catholic Queen, urged us to keep conquering in her last testament, it is that very same Africa which now arrives on the Spanish mainland. To borrow a particularly apt formulation from Bernabé López García, the Moor (although we also could speak in general terms of ‘the African’) has ceased to be imagined and represented as somebody to ‘protect’ (2000: 42), and now above all is construed as a ‘migrant’ (2000: 52) – bearing in mind that Morocco was formerly a protectorate, with some areas belonging to France and others to Spain. Not altogether unsurprisingly, cinema – like so many of the other arts and media – has reflected this shift. For decades, a considerable – albeit very irregular – corpus of films provided a running commentary on the Spanish colonial adventure in Africa, although they inevitably did so in a superficial and uncritical fashion, given the problematic political backdrop (see Elena, 2010). It is beyond the remit of this chapter to address the thorny question of a non-existent postcolonial discourse in the cinema of the Transition (see Elena, 2013); my intention in this chapter is instead to look at the renewed interest in Africa – both north and Sub-Saharan – that Spanish cinema began to depict, albeit in tentative terms, in the mid-1990s, but which has really come to the fore over the last decade.

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Contextualizing Colonial History: Sub-Saharan Africa While Los baúles del retorno/Homeward Baggage (Miró, 1995) would look at the hitherto taboo subject of the Saharan problem – without, it must be said, a great deal of subtlety – Lejos de África/Black Island (Bartolomé, 1996) is undoubtedly the first film to incorporate a certain postcolonial reflection along the two parallel axes of what the director terms the ‘drama of colonialism’ and, more expressively, ‘historical amnesia’ (cited in Martín Morán, 2001: 94, 96). Lejos de África – an important film, given the context in which it was made and within the framework of postcolonial reflection in Spain – is built on ‘the metaphor of farewell’, albeit in an autobiographical and unabashedly nostalgic tone. This metaphor can be understood as a final rupture with Africa, and the film ‘presents an image of a society that is trying to define itself in the renunciation of traumatic, frontal and intransigent conflict, to instead think of itself with the serenity imposed by distance’ (Ibáñez, 2001: 30). The precedent set by Cecilia Bartolomé – who spent her childhood and adolescence in what was then called Spanish Guinea – would not be echoed in the work of other film-makers for several years. In fact, Spain’s presence in Equatorial Africa would be referenced only in a series of films of varying quality that were produced ten or twelve years later within the context of a renewed interest in our colonial history, and marked by a kind of official ‘discovery’ of Sub-Saharan Africa. Key films which recover images of the Spanish presence in Guinea, articulated with various degrees of sophistication include El hombre de salacot/The Man in the Salakot (de Biedma, 2005), Bajo una misma bandera/Under the Same Flag (Jiménez Carabe and Salvatierra, 2006), Cazadores de imágenes/Image Hunters (Ortín and Pereiró, 2006) and, most pertinently, Memoria negra/Black Memory (Montanyà, 2006). As Belén Pozuelo Mascaraque (1991) rightly highlighted, relations between Spain and Sub-Saharan Africa (with the sole and easily explained exception of Equatorial Guinea, frequently marked by pangs of conscience due to the sudden end to the Spanish presence in the region, and the de facto tolerance of the abuses committed by the Obiang regime) experienced a fleeting diplomatic upturn at the end of the 1970s, due to a potential debate among the Organization for African Unity over whether or not the Canary Islands were rightly Spanish. Relations also improved in the second half of the 1980s, as a result of the requirements associated with Spain joining the European Economic Community (EEC) (Pozuelo Mascaraque, 1991: 206). On the one hand, Spanish foreign policy experienced a certain reorientation in this regard, and the recently created Spanish Agency of International Cooperation (AECI) began to channel aid to the two areas considered to be of highest priority: Equatorial Guinea and southern Africa. On the other hand, the overall situation did not change a great deal. A modest network of bilateral cooperative efforts may have begun to unfold in the region as Spain started to participate in peace missions in countries such as Angola and Namibia, but even the Action Plan for Sub-Saharan Africa 2001–02 (presented to parliament by prime minister José María Aznar) lacked coherence and, ultimately, the Spanish ‘presence to the south of the Sahara’ was limited predominantly to ‘the activity of missionaries and fishermen’ (Iranzo, 2006).1 68

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Although the Socialist Party’s 2004 electoral programme contained only brief mention of Spain’s policy in Africa, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s government put in place an ambitious programme halfway through its legislature known as Plan África, based on seven major objectives: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Strengthening the region’s democracy, peace and security Cooperation for development Cooperation in the area of migration Implementation of the EU strategy towards Africa Promotion of commercial exchange and investment Spanish–African cultural cooperation Increasing Spain’s political and institutional presence in sub-Saharan Africa.2

Over a period of just a few years, the implementation of Plan África has modified traditional power differentials substantially. It is not just that cooperation funds have multiplied and become more diverse, or that diplomatic action has begun to acquire certain visibility: in the artistic and cultural sphere, the panorama also seems to be redefining itself at a rapid pace.3 Of course, no direct correlation can be necessarily established between these developments and the growing interest that, for different reasons and employing a variety of discourses, Spanish cinema has begun to show in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, it is true that the issue has become more prominent since the appearance of socially and politically engaged, collectively made films such as En el mundo a cada rato/Every So Often in the World (2004), and the more widely-known Invisibles/Invisible (Barroso and Coixet et. al., 2007), produced by Javier Bardem and awarded the Goya for Best Documentary that year. Both films devoted certain sections to various problematic issues and countries in the region: this is the case of the contributions of Pere Joan Ventura (Equatorial Guinea) and Javier Fesser (Senegal) in the former; and of Fernando León de Aranoa (Uganda), Mariano Barroso (Central African Republic) and Wim Wenders (Democratic Republic of the Congo) in the latter. In a totally different register, Viaje mágico a África/Magic Journey to Africa (Llompart, 2009), an ambitious 3D project intended to reach a large audience, would bring the African continent back to Spanish screens, with a hitherto unknown formal exuberance. There are countless further examples, especially if we include short films; for our current purposes, it is sufficient to examine the latest link in the chain to date – Los pasos dobles/The Double Steps (Lacuesta, 2011), which won the top prize at the San Sebastián International Film Festival – in order to comprehend the extent to which Spanish cinema seems to be experiencing a new surge of interest in Africa. In this regard, it is worthwhile recalling some statements made by Lacuesta, in which he defined the project as one ‘in which it is not noticeable that whites are filming blacks’ (cited in Vallés, 2011). What really matters here is that this new sensitivity and sensibility are manifest also within parallel initiatives, such as those of Cineastas en Acción (www.cineastasenaccion. org), which are openly committed to the African continent, or that of the African Film Festival 69

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of Tarifa (FCAT), which moved to Córdoba in 2012 under the new name of FCAT-Córdoba. The original FCAT was inaugurated in 2004 and soon became a vital reference for Spanish– African film dialogue, as well as an unflagging engine for the transformation of imaginaries inherited from periods clearly marked by other sensibilities. A key, albeit largely unnoticed, link in this process is the activity of film-makers living in Spain but of African origin, such as the Egyptian Basel Ramsis, director of El otro lado: un acercamiento a Lavapiés/ The Other Side: A Portrait of Lavapiés (2002), a multi-layered vision of this culturally diverse neighbourhood in Madrid; the Basque-based, Beninese-born Omer Oke, director of two instalments on the plight of Sub-Saharan immigrants in Spain, Querida Bamako/ Dear Bamako (with Llorente, 2007) and La causa de Kripan/The Cause of Kripan (2009); alongside Santiago Zannou. Following the success of his first film, El truco del manco/ The Cripple’s Trick (2008), Zannou – born in Spain to Beninese parents – provided a very sensitive depiction of his father’s return to his homeland for the first time in many years in La puerta de no retorno/The Gate of No Return (2011). Colonial History in Perspective: North Africa As far as most Spanish cinema is concerned, ‘Africa’ has continued to be almost synonymous with ‘northern Africa’. The largest and most relevant corpus of films from recent years has returned incessantly to the rich and complex historical, cultural and geographical relationships, thereby finally overcoming the suspicious amnesia that characterized the Transition to Democracy. The otherwise isolated examination of the ‘Sahara problem’ in Los baúles del retorno would find a certain continuity in titles such as the award-winning short Lalia (Munt, 1999), La Marcha Verde/The Green March (García Sánchez, 2001) and Cuentos de la guerra saharaui/Tales of the Saharan War (Pérez Rosado, 2003), which subsequently would pave the way for an avalanche of documentaries, all very sympathetic to the Saharan cause, such as Sáhara no se vende/The Sahara is Not for Sale (Calderón and Arellano, 2007), Mariem Hassan, la voz del Sáhara/Mariem Hassan, the Voice of the Sahara (Domínguez, 2007), El rumor de la arena/The Whisper of Sand (Prieto and Iriarte, 2008) and Hijos de las nubes: la última colonia/Children of the Clouds: The Last Colony (Longoria, 2011). This sociopolitical engagement, reinforced not only by some significant works of fiction such as the highly problematic Caótica Ana/Chaotic Ana (Medem, 2007) and Wilaya (Pérez Rosado, 2011), but also by initiatives including the highly publicized Sahara International Film Festival (Fisahara) (see Santaolalla and Simanowitz, 2010: 136–50) will reveal the resemanticization of (post-)colonial discourse in Spain in due course. As various authors have indicated, since the mid-1970s solidarity has been usually placed with the Saharawi people in the foreground, with a latent anti-Moroccan sentiment lurking in the background (Elena, 2010; López García, 1993; Martin-Márquez, 2006). The vast legacy of the Protectorate in Morocco – undoubtedly Spain’s longest, most intense and decisive colonial adventure in Africa – is still very much felt in the present. 70

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It is beyond the scope of this chapter to examine the issue of North African immigration (legal and illegal), or its increasingly frequent and diverse depiction in film.4 However, it will look briefly at the new and frequent revisions of that historical legacy. Again, the years comprising the Spanish Transition to Democracy were quite sparing in filmic references to the question. Although at the beginning of the 1990s two prestigious television series, La forja de un rebelde/The Forging of a Rebel (Camus, 1990) and Alquibla/Qibla (Carratalá, 1992) – based on scripts by Juan Goytisolo, with an episode called ‘Aldelkrim y la epopeya del Rif ’ (‘Abdelkrim and the Epic of the Rif ’) – seemed to revitalize the issue, the truth is that for a long time they were isolated examples. The general panorama is reflected aptly in a comment made by historian Eloy Martín Corrales, that ‘the new democratic airs that were gaining strength after 1975 have not been put to use, at least to date, in revising, cinematographically, our past Spanish–Muslim relationships’ (2000: 28–29). However, once again focusing only on the recent history of Spain’s Protectorate and its various ramifications, the first decade of the twenty-first century has delivered a veritable boom in documentaries on the subject, ranging from wholesale attempts at revision – El laberinto marroquí/The Moroccan Labyrinth (Sánchez Veiga, 2007), Rif 1921: una historia olvidada/Rif 1921: A Forgotten History (Horrillo, 2007) and even Arrash: veneno en el Rif/ Poison in the Rif (Rada and El Idrissi, 2007) – to works with a more specific focus, such as Al otro lado de la memoria/The Other Side of Memory (López Rivera and Sánchez-Montes, 2003), about the long-standing population of Spanish residents in Morocco, and Los perdedores/The Forgotten (Deiback, 2006), which looks at the fate of the Moroccan troops that fought alongside Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War. Los perdedores, certainly the best-known and controversial among those mentioned, is the creation of a Melillaborn film-maker of Muslim origin, who was educated in the United States and now lives in Germany. It annoyed certain sectors of the right wing for obvious reasons, and also some on the Left, who felt it inappropriate to make any comparison between Franco’s Moroccan forces and the International Brigadistas of North-African origin. These left-leaning critics characterized, with what might be construed as excessive zeal, the perspective adopted in the film as biased and tendentious (García Hernández, 2008). Borders and Identities A few years earlier, Deiback had made another equally controversial film, which serves as a fitting introduction to the final issue that I would like to explore in this chapter. Natural de Melilla/Native of Melilla (2002) was the first in a growing number of very interesting films, essentially documentaries, which focus on what was known in Spain as the country’s plazas de soberanía (sovereign territories) – although the English term used tends to be Spanish North Africa – border enclaves whose historical and current situations are closely linked to our colonial past, and to the postcolonial reality of Spain at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Of course, Ceuta and Melilla had already appeared in some documentaries, and 71

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across a broad (varied but not numerous) range of fictional works (Martín, 2011). While in some straightforward comedies such as Cupido contrabandista/Cupid the Smuggler (Madruga, 1962), the backdrop could have been any city, tourism-related documentaries and the glorification of the Spanish Foreign Legion elsewhere shared the screen with adventures taking place in (moderately) exotic settings. Never before had Spanish cinema addressed with a minimal degree of rigour the particularity of these North African enclaves, instead always offering idealized or bland visions of an extraordinarily complex reality. With clearly polemical intentions, Natural de Melilla paints an atypical portrait of the city. This portrait is crammed somewhat awkwardly with every possible element that could potentially question the official image of harmonious coexistence among the four cultures (Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Hindu). Nonetheless, Deiback’s film undoubtedly achieves something: it raises some thorny questions that are usually avoided by Spanish cinema, and for this reason it comes as no surprise that it made quite an impression – especially in the local context, where it turned out to be very contentious (Leal Riesco, 2010). All of the important studies on these Spanish enclaves stress the importance of religion above any other category, as the main ascription criteria in a multi-ethnic society (Driessen, 1992: 13). Natural de Melilla reflects this circumstance, as does the penetrating, mediumlength film by Óscar Pérez Salve Melilla/Hail Melilla (2006). The ‘atypical trade’ with Morocco (the term used for what is, in reality, tolerated smuggling), which is the economic backbone to these two cities (and the region in general, irrespective of specific borders), is addressed by Juan Luis de No in Cien metros más allá/One Hundred Metres Away (2008). Emigration is a recurring topic in a myriad of films, and all of these elements come together in Melillenses/Living in Melilla (2004), directed by Moisés Salama, which is undoubtedly the most significant in this series of documentary productions focusing on the problematic of the North-African frontier. Salama, a film-maker born to one of the city’s well-known Jewish families, is not the least bit interested in chronicling a series of more or less delicate stereotypes, or in following a (semi-)autobiographical trajectory. Rather, to use the words of the film’s screenwriter, Ignacio Mendiguchía, his purpose is to urge viewers to accept an ‘invitation to knowledge and recognition’ through a penetrating x-ray of the history and social fabric ‘of a city such as Melilla, whose Spanish-ness is the object of chronic ritual affirmation among us’ (2010: 243–44). Thus Melillenses becomes a large fresco about the city, but it goes even further: to explore its condition of heterotopia and conscientiously dismantle the rhetoric of multiculturalism usually associated with official discourses concerning the city.5 As Parvati Nair astutely notes in reference to a comparable case, ‘to simply say that Ceuta is a border city between North and South, that connects and divides two continents, is to omit in many ways the complexity of the movements present in the city’ (2006: 40). Salama’s film, which coincidentally was produced at the same time as Nair’s study, seems to develop these ideas in an inspired parallel discourse about Melilla.6 Although perhaps the film’s final sequence can be read as an invitation to ‘multicultural utopia’ (Doppelbauer, 2000: 181–82), the truth is that Melillenses has nothing simplistic or complacent about it, and the film-maker’s discourse is governed 72

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by his full awareness of the impossibility of achieving any form of objectivity.7 In this regard, the epistemological modesty of Melillenses is accompanied by a muffled virulence which only becomes perceptible after the initial and superficial impression of placidity has passed. With minimal pyrotechnics, Salama manages to explore many of the clichés which currently abound in the increasingly active academic field of frontier studies: most notably, those which have been traditionally conceived under the rubric of frontier anthropology (Wilson and Donnan, 1998, 1999). Melillenses does not shirk thorny questions about multiple identities and the negotiation of meanings, and neither does it sidestep the tension between the present and the past; yet it avoids focusing exclusively on the idea of Melilla as a European border and its complex implications on the migratory front (Driessen, 1998). For example, Salama pays special attention to the Amazigh factor, which is usually ignored in discussions about the city (both in Spain and in Morocco, and even from more international vantage points). The Amazigh or Berber community is an essential element in the city’s definition of identities, one that bypasses the benevolent rhetoric of the four cultures and ruptures the more ‘comfortable’ confrontations between Christians and Muslims in the ecosystem of the city and its surroundings. While it is true, as mentioned by Parvati Nair (2006: 66), that the existence of these North-African frontiers brings the democratic imagination emanating from the Transition period into direct confrontation with its own limits and inconsistencies, it is no less true that the city’s Muslim population systematically avoids necessary self-criticism and that Morocco, looking after its own interests, silences the complexity of ‘Arab’ identities (Leal Riesco, 2010: 110). Therefore, the great mosaic of these border enclaves is not reducible to touristy visions, publicity slogans or comforting but simplistic portraits. Melillenses reminds us of this to an extent that no other contemporary Spanish film,8 at the time of writing, has been capable of, inviting us – as Mendiguchía pointed out (2010: 243)  – to engage in the ‘knowledge and recognition’ of the object which, in truth, is not just the city, but rather an entire shared culture and history. Conclusion Of course, it is not possible to understand properly this renewed interest in Africa in recent Spanish cinema without taking into account the wider context through which it has emerged. As I have indicated already, Spain’s incorporation into the EU constituted a paradigm shift at multiple levels but, above all, in relation to traditional migration flows in and out of Spain. Incessantly posited as a privileged south frontier of ‘Fortress Europe’, Spain has become a new destination for migratory movements coming largely (although not exclusively) from North Africa. The figure of the immigrant thereby became an everyday presence in both life and the cinema, where a somewhat simplistic denouncement of racism or depictions of the plight of illegal immigrants designed to induce pathos in the viewer has been superseded in more recent times by a significant and enriching normalization in representation(s). However, it 73

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would be erroneous to address this new scenario without taking into account the ramifications of the postcolonial reflections – the genuine key through which to understand the profound transformations of an imaginary necessarily in flux, and linked to questions of national identity – discussed in this chapter. Or, to borrow a phrase from Paul Gilroy and apply it to the Spanish case, ‘how the history of empire and its unhappy endings should be revised has become a significant part of discussion over a divided, post-colonial country’s response to involvement in what looks and feels like endless neo-colonial warfare’ (2011: 13). Acknowledgement This chapter was written as part of the research project ‘Cinema and Television in Posttransition Spain (1979–1992)’, funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the Spanish Government (CSO2011-15708-E). Notes 1

2 3

4 5 6 7

This very graphic expression, which subsequently would be much cited and commented upon, comes from a memorandum written by the Director General of Foreign Policy in the Mediterranean, Near East and Africa, Álvaro Iranzo during the first administration of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, at the launch of Plan África. Besides the aforementioned memorandum written by Iranzo, the philosophy behind Plan África was set forth in detail by Miguel Ángel Moratinos (2006), the Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time. Two often very different assessments of it are Guerrero (2008) and Oda-Ángel (2008). First, Plan África meant a major increase in the official development assistance earmarked for the region – with amounts tripling in just two years – and unprecedented diplomatic deployment, with embassies opening in Sudan, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, GuineaConakry, Niger and Mali. From the cultural perspective, the inauguration of Casa África in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in June 2007 marked a major turning point, although more time needs to pass before we can assess its role and contribution accurately. For an early examination of the problem of the representation of North-African immigration in recent Spanish film, see the relevant sections of the books by Isabel Santaolalla (2005) and Daniela Flesler (2008), and the more specific treatment by Elena (2005). Parvati Nair (2006: 39) applies Foucault’s notion of heterotopia (‘a space filled with numerous, fragmentary, contiguous and contradictory worlds’) to Ceuta, while explicitly underlining the validity of most of her observations for Melilla as well (2006: 37). The bibliography on Ceuta and Melilla – which generally addresses them in conjunction – is relatively extensive. Three of the most important works are Gold (2000), Meyer (2005), and Planet Contreras (1998). As Salama states in the official blurb produced for the film’s release: ‘Full objectivity can be obtained neither from a non-existent privileged perspective nor from the chimerical sum of 74

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8

all the existing ones’ (2004). He ends his contribution with a pertinent quote from Leibniz: ‘The same city viewed from different directions appears entirely different and, as it were, multiplied perspectively.’ A notable exception is the personal portrait of Tangiers drawn by Oliver Laxe in Todos vós sodes capitáns (2010), not dealing in fact with Spanish North Africa, but closely related to the cycle of production studied here.

References Doppelbauer, M. (2000). ‘Das Mittelmeer als multikulturelle Utopie. Der Blick auf die Gesellschaft im Roman Melilla, la codiciada (Juan Berenguer) und die Film Melillenses (Moisés Salama)’ in E. Arend, E. Richter and C. Solte-Gresser (eds.), Mittelmeerdiskurse in Literatur und Film/La Méditerranée: représentations littéraires et cinématographiques (Frankfurt: Peter Lang), 169–83. Driessen, H. (1992). On the Spanish–Moroccan Frontier: A Study in Ritual, Power and Ethnicity (New York: Berg). (1998). ‘The “New immigration” and the transformation of the European–African frontier’ in T.M. Wilson and H. Donnan (eds.), Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 96–116. Elena, A. (2005). ‘Representaciones de la inmigración en el cine español: la producción comercial y sus márgenes’, Archivos de la Filmoteca, 49: 54–65. (2010). La llamada de África: Estudios sobre el cine colonial español (Barcelona: Ediciones Bellaterra). (2013). ‘El silencio de África: La (inexistente) reflexión postcolonial en el cine español de la Transición’ in M. Palacio (ed.), Los medios audiovisuales en la Transición española (1975– 1985): las imágenes del cambio democrático (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva), 135–148 Flesler, D. (2008). The Return of the Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary Moroccan Immigration (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press). García Hernández, C. (2008). ‘Los perdedores: una interpretación distorsionada de los mercenarios norteafricanos’, Mundo Obrero, 29 February, available at http://www.mundoobrero.es/ pl.php?id=850&sec=3&aut=54, last accessed on 6 August 2012. Gilroy, P. (2011). ‘Great games: film, history and working-through Britain’s colonial legacy’ in L. Grieveson and C. MacCabe (eds.), Film and the End of Empire (London: British Film Institute and Palgrave Macmillan), 13–32. Gold, P. (2000). Europe or Africa? A Contemporary Study of the Spanish North African Enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). Guerrero, F. (2008). ‘Las relaciones España–África subsahariana: ¿a remolque o en la vanguardia de la UE?’ in E. Barbé (ed.), España en Europa 2004–2008, Monografías del Observatorio de Política Exterior Europea 4, available at http://iuee.eu/pdf-publicacio/127/ eLBvIf60dJkqDaKD8oe8.PDF, last accessed on 6 August 2012. Ibáñez, J. C. (2001). ‘Sobre adioses, rupturas y pactos cotidianos: sociedad e identidad en el otro cine de Cecilia Bartolomé’ in J. Cerdán and M. Díaz López (eds.), Cecilia Bartolomé: El 75

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encanto de la lógica (Barcelona and Madrid: La Fàbrica de Cinema Alternatiu and Ocho y Medio Libros de Cine), 23–31. Iranzo, A. (2006). ‘El Plan África 2006–2008’, Fundación Carolina, September, available at http://desarrollo.asoluciones.com/07/negocioMarruecos/doc/Cooperación/PlanAfrica2006 FundaciónCarolina.pdf, last accessed on 6 August 2012. Leal Riesco, B. (2010). ‘La Melilla fronteriza e intercultural a través de los ojos de sus creadores: Driss Deiback y Moisés Salama’ in M. A. Ortiz Molina and F. Ramos (eds.), Arte y ciencia: creación y responsabilidad, Vol. I (Granada and Coimbra: Junta de Andalucía, Universidad de Granada and Center for Intercultural Music Arts), 102–08. López García, B. (1993). ‘La historia y las raíces de la xenofobia antiárabe en España’ in Various Authors, Racismo y xenofobia: búsqueda de las raíces (Madrid: Fundación Rich), 203–20. (2000). ‘El cine y las relaciones hispano–marroquíes: de la imagen del “protegido” a la del inmigrado’ in J. U. Martínez Carreras (ed.), Relaciones entre España y Marruecos en el siglo XX (Madrid: Asociación Española de Africanistas), 43–52. Martín, A. (2011). ‘Ceuta, una ciudad de cine’, available at http:/ceutareportajes.blogspot. com/2011/06/ceuta-una-ciudad-de-cine-i.html, last accessed on 6 August 2012. Martín Corrales, E. (2000). ‘Árabes y musulmanes en el cine español de la democracia (1979– 2000)’, Mugak, 11: 28–29. Martín Morán, A. (2001). ‘Lejos de África: Recuerdos de una vida ajena’ in J. Cerdán and M. D. López (eds.), Cecilia Bartolomé: El encanto de la lógica (Barcelona and Madrid: La Fàbrica de Cinema Alternatiu and Ocho y Medio Libros de Cine), 93–101. Martin-Márquez, S. (2006). ‘Brothers and others: fraternal rhetoric and the negotiation of Spanish and Saharawi identity’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 7.3: 241–58. (2008). Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Mendiguchía, J. I. (2010). ‘Voces en la otra orilla: Melillenses y Atlas bereber’ in M. Doppelbauer and K. Sartingen (eds.), De la zarzuela al cine: Los medios de comunicación populares y su traducción de la voz marginal (Munich: Martin Meidenbauer), 241–55. Meyer, F. (2005). Die Städte der vier Kulturen: Eine Geographie der Zugehörigkeit und Ausgrenzung am Beispiel von Ceuta und Melilla (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag). Moratinos, M. A. (2006). ‘España: una nueva política exterior hacia África’, Política Exterior, 111: 57–63. Nair, P. (2006). ‘Entre dos mundos: contigüidad, intercambio y heterotopia en Ceuta, confluencia entre España y Marruecos’ in P. Nair, Rumbo al Norte: inmigración y movimientos culturales entre el Magreb y España (Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra), 37–68. Oda-Ángel, F. (2008). ‘España en el África Subsahariana: multilateralismo eficaz’, Quorum: revista de pensamiento Iberoamericano, 19: 87–93. Planet Contreras, A. I. (1998). Melilla y Ceuta: Espacios-frontera hispano–marroquíes (Melilla and Ceuta: UNED). Pozuelo Mascaraque, B. (1991). ‘La política española de cooperación al desarrollo del África Subsahariana’, Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea, 13: 205–20. Salama, M. (2004). Melillenses, available at http://intercambio.atico7/FTP_FILES/melillenses/ melillenses.html, last accessed on 6 August 2012. 76

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Santaolalla, I. (2005). Los ‘Otros’: Etnicidad y ‘raza’ en el cine español contemporáneo (Madrid and Zaragoza: Ocho y Medio and Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza). Santaolalla, I. and Simanowitz, S. (2010). ‘A cinematic refuge in the desert: the Sahara International Film Festival’ in D. Iordanova and R. Cheung (eds.), Film Festival Yearbook 2: Film Festivals and Imagined Communities (St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies), 136–50. Vallés, M. E. (2011). ‘Isaki Lacuesta lleva al cine a Barceló’, Diario de Mallorca, 29 March, available at http://ocio.diariodemallorca.es/cine/noticias/nws-11415-isaki-lacuesta-lleva-cine-barcelo. html, last accessed on 6 August 2012. Wilson, T. M. and Donnan, H. (eds.) (1998). Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). (1999). Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nations and State (Oxford: Berg).

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Chapter 5 The New Ethos of Gay Culture and the Limits of Normalization Helio San Miguel

A

s a nation, Spain has experienced one of the fastest and most remarkable transformations in the world with regard to homosexuality. What just a few decades ago was a pervasively and even aggressively homophobic society, where homosexuality was legally punishable until 1981, became in 2005 the third country in the world to legalize gay marriage and the first to do so with full equal rights, including adoption.1 In this chapter I will argue that this startling transformation has led to a normalization in both social and media representations, but only within specific boundaries that are clearly delineated in the abundant crop of gay-related films produced in Spain since the mid-1990s. These films illustrate this novel and multi-layered process of normalization and define the new ethos of gay culture as urban, mostly middle-aged, professional, affluent and predominantly male.2 In doing so, they bring to light traditionally contentious issues such as conflicting sexual mores; social class, as the gay population is portrayed for the most part as well-off; and a clash with older generations. They also address the frequent interconnection of homosexuality with immigration: another fundamental issue and a recurrent theme in contemporary Spanish society. At the same time, they depict a chasm between the perception of homosexuality in small towns and rural environments, where prejudices are still deeply felt, versus open, tolerant and vibrant urban centres that are posited as the natural habitat of gay communities. Socio-historical Context The transformation regarding gay issues and their social perception has taken place so rapidly that it is easy to forget the state of affairs in Spain’s recent past, when divorce and civil marriage were not legal – even for heterosexuals.3 During the long decades under Franco, as Alejandro Melero Salvador has explored in his remarkable book, Placeres ocultos (2010),4 so-called prominent scientists championed pseudoscientific theories that explained homosexuality as a ‘sickness’ and a ‘vice’. The depiction of homosexuals as inferior and morally deprived men and women was seen to justify the abuse to which they were subjected: homosexuals were constantly abused, both physically and emotionally, and even prosecuted and jailed for being gay, as homosexuality was legally defined as a crime until 1981. Although gay characters and issues were almost totally absent from cinema during the Franco period,5 Melero Salvador has traced how those theories were still very much present during the last years of the dictatorship and the first years of the political Transition to

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Democracy: they tainted the social perception of gay characters, both in terms of looks and behaviour. This left a powerful and unconscious mark on even politically progressive film-makers, thus perpetuating these stereotypes. Melero Salvador’s exploration turns out to be more revealing, precisely because it shows how many of the ideas that were promoted during Franco’s years did not find a cinematic outlet until after his death, and the lessening and eventual disappearance of official censorship. That they frequently surfaced in horror films and in the famous comedies that were in vogue during the 1970s reveals how deeply ingrained these homophobic ideas had become. Melero Salvador even makes charges against iconic films such as A un Dios desconocido/To An Unknown God (Chávarri, 1977), pointing out how they were unable to escape some of the preconceptions set by those pervasive ideas, and how prone they were to repeat the stereotypes concerning the definition of gay characters and attitudes that emanated from them. However, as democracy developed, progressive views became more visible, and social perceptions, literary works6 and cinematic representations evolved slowly as the country moved into the 1980s.7 A few films presented a more positive view of homosexuality: for example, Un hombre llamado Flor de Otoño/A Man Called Autumn Flower (Olea, 1978), Ocaña, retrat intermitent/Ocaña, Portrait Intermittent (Pons, 1978) and Gay Club (Fernández, 1980), the title of which was adopted by a famous club in Madrid. Among them, two different approaches emerged: one working within the industry, and the other starting at its fringes. In the former category, the mix of didacticism, populism and sensationalism regarding political and social issues became the personal brand of Eloy de la Iglesia, exemplified by films such as Los placeres ocultos/Hidden Pleasures (1977) and El diputado/The Congressman (1978). The second category was marked by the underground, subversive and flamboyant style represented by Pedro Almodóvar and Madrid’s Movida.8 Both trends greatly contributed to increasing the visibility and positive perception of gay characters and issues, earned a fair amount of public attention and coverage in the press, radio and television, and even resulted in box office successes, especially in the case of de la Iglesia’s films. Yet despite all of this activity, the presence of gay people was often still considered marginal and frequently scandalous during those early years of democracy: clearly differentiated in the public perception from what was accepted as socially normal. Initially, Los placeres ocultos – considered the first openly gay film in Spain – was banned, and subsequently attacked even by politically progressive critics and film-makers who did not appreciate the obvious didacticism of a few of its scenes, and who failed to see how ahead of its time this film was in the mid-1970s, less than two years after Franco’s death. Today it is easy to dismiss it as excessively didactic, but at that time it looked subversive, and helped to pave the way for a different approach over the next decade, spearheaded by Almodóvar’s success. The same can be said about Almodóvar himself and his early films, although both his subsequent films and his public persona have evolved towards a much more tame image.9 One can argue that the motivation behind this change is to reach larger, more mainstream audiences, especially abroad (see Chapter 16), but we can interpret it also in terms of the transformation of Spain’s social and political context, in that behaviours primed to provoke scandal are no longer necessary. 82

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Towards Normalization Several other films dealing with gay issues were produced during the 1980s: for example, La muerte de Mikel/The Death of Mikel (Uribe, 1984) which mixes gay issues and the Basque conflict; Si te dicen que caí/If They Tell You I Fell (Aranda, 1989), about Barcelona during and after the Civil War; and Las cosas del querer/The Things of Love (Chávarri, 1989) about a famous singer of traditional Andalusian songs, inspired by the life of Miguel de Molina (Chávarri’s film was so successful that it had a sequel).10 Meanwhile, two recent films compare those years with previous decades: the lyrical and desperate El cónsul de Sodoma/ The Consul of Sodom (Monleón, 2009), which chronicles the decadent and contradictory life of the poet Jaime Gil de Biedma;11 and La mala educación/Bad Education (Almodóvar, 2004), an exploration of repressed homosexuality during Franco’s time and its postdictatorial legacy. The extirpation of those stereotypes and social perceptions would have to wait a few more years, but the seeds had been planted, and the winds of political and social change that swept across the country came to fruition in the mid-1990s. A new normalcy slowly emerged, and gay characters and issues became a common, natural, recurrent and mostly integrated presence in mainstream cinema and television, and in Spanish society in general. Since then, countless films illustrate the defining features of the new ethos of gay culture in contemporary Spain: young or middle-aged, affluent, professional, permissive in sexual mores and frequently shown as flourishing in tolerant urban environments diverse in both ethnic fabric and sexual orientation. When these characteristics do not apply, it is in reference to closeted homosexuals, poor and working-class ones or immigrants, or when homosexuality is found in rural environments or confronted with older generations. This new ethos is epitomized by the transformation of Chueca, a once drug-ridden and rundown neighbourhood in the centre of Madrid that was, until two decades ago, almost completely absent from cinema. When the gay community started to move there it faced initial rejection, but this changed into acceptance, and Chueca soon became the hip area where homosexuals live in modern design apartments, the place where they frequently party, and the film set of gay Madrid.12 This change in attitudes and perceptions began in the mid-1990s, first showing very conflicting and overtly negative views, and then switching gears with the arrival of the new millennium. For example, in Alegre, ma non troppo (Colomo, 1994), Pablo is told that his homosexuality can be overcome, as it is caused by his mother’s overbearing influence and his fear of girls. In Boca a Boca/Mouth to Mouth (Gómez Pereira, 1995), Richard (Josep María Flotats) suffers from his repressed and never exercised homosexuality. At the other extreme, only two years later, Amor de hombre/The Love of a Man (García Serrano and Iborra, 1997) covers a year in the life of a woman who lives surrounded by gay men, with whom she celebrates her birthdays. She has bad luck in her relationships and, we find out later, is a victim of domestic violence. Part screwball comedy, part drama, this film depicts Madrid as a city where all men – waiters, cab drivers, musicians, doctors, pet-store owners, lawyers 83

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and husbands – are gay. For example, in one concert scene everybody is depicted as gay, musicians and spectators alike. Some form stable relationships and quarrel about domestic issues such as dieting and quitting smoking; others just cruise the city in search of easy hook-ups, boasting about the fact that they have slept with everyone. A mere glance appears to suffice to tell if someone is gay and to hook up with them. Straight men are only talked about, and never seen. Even the mention of a heterosexual man prompts the comment, ‘Do they still exist?’ – and trying to reverse prevalent social perceptions, someone observes that with most heterosexuals, you cannot tell. Amor de hombre already hints at many of the chic cosmopolitan traits that I have identified in subsequent films. Along those lines, but much darker in content and tone is Amic/amant/Beloved/Friend (Pons, 1999). This desperate and twisted narrative offers a different take on Death in Venice, with tragic overtones and a series of improbable coincidences. The big city – this time, Barcelona – is the place where professors can declare their love to colleagues and students, and who at the same time moonlight in sadomasochistic male prostitution. However, even in big cities, not all characters openly accept their homosexuality. Segunda piel/Second Skin (Vera, 1999) has a somewhat conventional story, but the director’s deft and meaningful use of colour, along with his talented and restrained cast, transform it into a stylish film made up of small gestures and gazes. In this film it is precisely the openness and size of Madrid that allows a tormented Alberto to keep a secret gay lover (played by Javier Bardem) while living with his wife and child in an affluent suburb. Torn between the warmth of Diego’s apartment and his family, Alberto is unable to overcome his feelings of guilt. At the end, he rides away on his motorcycle, turns a corner and disappears into a grey avenue of the city where his tortured life ends in an accident. Normalization: The New Ethos With the arrival of the new millennium, things clearly lighten up and countless films illustrate this. In Km. 0/Kilometer Zero (García Serrano and Iborra, 2000), the big city becomes the place where ‘talking about sex is like talking about football’, and where a myriad of combinations and easy hook-ups can occur. In I Love You Baby (Albacete and Menkes, 2001), a film with borderline unbelievable characters and situations, Marcos comes to the city to explore his homosexuality, and his affection is divided between two immigrants, Daniel and Marisol. When Daniel kisses him on the mouth on a bench in clear daylight, he asks surprised: ‘Here, in the street?’ To which his lover replies, ‘Yes, this is Madrid.’ In the comedy A mi madre le gustan las mujeres/My Mother Likes Women (Féjerman and París, 2002), three adult daughters from an upper-middle-class class family are confronted with the announcement that their mother, who is around sixty, has found love and is involved with Eliska, a young pianist from the Czech Republic who is in Spain on a scholarship. Their negative reaction is progressively overcome, and the daughters work through their own personal problems. They recognize that maybe ‘everybody is bisexual’, and all eventually go 84

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to Prague to bring Eliska back. They even arrange for her to marry a male friend to secure residency and a work permit, since the law in 2002 did not allow her to do either – gay marriage had yet to be legalized. The passing of gay marriage legislation represents the culmination of this process of normalization,13 although it deserved a better film than Reinas/Queens (Gómez Pereira, 2005), a screwball comedy based around this historical landmark. Nevertheless, its analysis is highly revealing. Reinas was produced at the same time as the debate over gay marriage was gaining momentum, and it opened theatrically when the bill had just been approved. The celebration of the first twenty gay weddings provides the unlikely plot in which parents, mostly the mothers, are not that happy with their kids’ choice of partners. This even includes the female judge in charge of performing the ceremony, who is reluctant to do so. For the most part, the characters are again upper-middle class but, in some cases, the mothers actually have better jobs than the fathers (judge, actress as opposed to policeman, gardener, etc.), which contributes to bringing the issue of class to the fore. The immigrant factor is represented by the gay Argentine gym instructor and his mother, who flies from Buenos Aires for the occasion, as well as by a Cuban kitchen worker who is the lover of his boss Magda, the hotel owner. He is the workers’ union leader and has a wife and five kids in Cuba. Interestingly, too, mothers act for the most part as stereotypical mothers-in-law and, in some cases, accepting homosexuality is an easier pill to swallow than embracing an immigrant or the son of a lower-class gardener into the family. In an unlikely happy ending that shows a rapid change in people’s mentality – of the type that only happens in films – as all the mothers come to terms with their children’s homosexuality, accept their partners and change their ways of thinking regarding sexual orientation, class and immigration. They also wind up organizing the whole ceremony, which prompts Magda to say that women, whether gay or straight, invariably find themselves working for men. Finally, the judge performs the weddings and the reception takes place at the Meyerling, the first hotel exclusively for gays managed by Magda and her husband, who already see the business possibilities of a gay clientele in a society that even allows them to marry. From being jailed just a few decades ago to being perceived as an attractive demographic for businesses and having hotels cater for their lifestyles, indeed things have changed. However, the film that pushes this new normalized ethos the furthest is Los novios búlgaros/The Bulgarian Lovers (de la Iglesia, 2003), which was an adaptation of Eduardo Mendicutti’s novel published in 1993. This was the last film directed by de la Iglesia, barely three years before his death and fifteen years after his previous feature – La estanquera de Vallecas/The Tobacconist Woman from Vallecas (1987) – which indicates his personal commitment to the story. As illustrated in his films, de la Iglesia did not subscribe to the socalled positive image campaigns.14 He was never shy in depicting as normal some patterns of behaviour that cast a negative light on gays from a mainstream heterosexual viewpoint, even if, as is arguably the case here, they could be used to reinforce homophobic images of predatory homosexual males. Los novios búlgaros is narrated in flashback by Daniel, a wealthy consultant who lives in a modern flat with contemporary furniture. His friends 85

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are affluent gay individuals who work as lawyers, chefs, flashy real estate agents and so forth. They populate upscale spas, consume drugs at parties and drink Vega Sicilia Único, with the label prominently displayed on-screen.15 As one character proclaims, it is a new millennium – indeed a whole new world, far from the times of Los placeres ocultos and El diputado. The distance from these films and their period seems so obvious that the director and writer genuinely feel that there is no need for didacticism, or to portray more mainstream gay characters in a positive light. In a manner akin to the way that homosexuality in de la Iglesia’s famous quinqui films made in the late 1970s and 1980s was shown frequently as being connected with petty criminals and marginalized populations from deprived urban estates who sold themselves for money (quinqui is a Spanish slang term for such populations perceived to be involved in crime), here it goes hand-in-hand with immigration. In this new normalized urban environment, the substantial economic development that Spain experienced over the previous decades has provoked a new phenomenon:16 what used to be a country of emigration where workers left for France, Germany or Switzerland now receives millions of immigrants, predominantly from Latin America, North Africa and Eastern Europe. According to Los novios búlgaros, for many of these struggling immigrants, especially young men from Eastern European countries, the fastest route to making a living is to become sex toys for these well-off, middle-aged gay professionals. Two things have changed dramatically: the standard of living of this new gay professional class and, more pertinently, the openness with which it operates. As a secondary character observes, ‘what happens now between them and the immigrants is, in a way, what used to happen in the past with rich widows or wealthy duchesses and their young lovers’. We have come a long way not only from the overtly homophobic films of Franco’s years or de la Iglesia’s early films, but also from the depiction of gay people in the films of the 1970s and 1980s, epitomized by Almodóvar’s early period and Ivan Zulueta’s Arrebato/Rapture (1980). In those films gay culture was ahead of the social curve, but at the same time far removed from mainstream society. It remained marginalized and was perceived as underground, even in art circles. However, current gay culture is claiming its place unabashedly in modern society. Los novios búlgaros glosses over this contrast in the trip that Daniel makes to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, with his lover Kyril. Sofia can be easily seen as a throwback to what Madrid was decades ago: poor, definitely not cosmopolitan, with typical buildings from the 1960s and Fiat cars from previous decades. Nobody has flatscreen televisions and they still listen to music on cassette tapes. Wedding celebrations are tacky, religious imagery is ubiquitous and homosexuality is concealed. The situation is not so different from Los placeres ocultos. Tellingly, when the film cuts back to Madrid, we see Daniel in a fancy convertible driving down an open, tree-lined avenue. At the same time, this modern, open and cosmopolitan gay urban contemporary society offers another significant contrast between Daniel’s world and the one of his parents: a wealthy traditional family living in a rural manor house. Those two poles – Sofia and 86

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his parents’ house – again delineate the boundaries of Daniel’s world and, by extension, of gay normalcy in contemporary Spain. We can see this mirrored in many other films. For example, in Azuloscurocasinegro/Dark Blue Almost Black (Sánchez Arévalo, 2006), a working-class, middle-aged married man secretly goes to be serviced by a male masseur and hides his homosexuality from both his wife, who pretends not to know, and his children. In Ander (Castón, 2009), set in a rural environment in the Basque Country – an unusual location in a predominantly urban genre – Ander’s mother and his Peruvian lover once again affirm the boundaries of normality. However, the film that best summarizes this transformation is Spinnin’ (Pastrana, 2007): a commendable, quirky, poetic and whimsical film set in 1995, when the situation of gay characters was different from previous decades, but still shown to be subject to consistent discrimination. In this film, many things have changed already. Violence is no longer part of the state’s political machine, neither is it overlooked by the mainstream media, but there are still attacks on gay people, the AIDS scourge seems pervasive, marriage and adoption remain very distant goals to fight for, and Chueca is not yet the hip neighbourhood that it will become over the next decade. Longing for a better world, one of the characters proclaims: ‘The world is already filmed. Now we need to change it.’ However, Spinnin’ was made in 2007, and at that time gay marriage was already legal in Spain. That same year, Madrid was the site of Europride, with more than two million people attending; many of the aspirations of characters from Spinnin’, which would have seemed purely utopian just three decades earlier, had become a reality. Thus, Spinnin’ cannot be seen as a militant film demanding rights, but as a chronicle of darker years in the recent past and as a testimony of the dramatic change that had taken place in Spain. The period between the time in which Spinnin’ is set and the one in which it was made, from the mid-1990s to 2007, were the years in which this dramatic change occurred. The passing of the gay marriage law and the metamorphosis of Chueca, now the beating heart of gay Madrid, epitomized this transformation which, as we have seen, was chronicled by a significant number of films. Beyond Normalization: Challenging Stereotypes At the same time that social acceptance was achieved within these well-defined and established boundaries, a slightly different form of gay film began to emerge that reveals a conscious effort to challenge and even reject stereotypes in favour of a more realistic depiction of gay culture. The focus now turns to characters that happen to be gay and have a different lifestyle, but share the same problems as the rest of society. In many of these cases, the fact that they are gay is little more than a backdrop for other concerns. A few examples can illustrate this new phenomenon, starting with the remarkable Cachorro/Bear Cub (Albadalejo, 2004). In this film, when Pedro’s sister is sentenced to jail for a long period of time in India for alleged drug trafficking, this HIV-positive, openly gay 87

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dentist with a relatively active social and sexual life has to take care of her nine-year-old son. From the opening scene, as the titles roll over the moans of a couple of overweight gay men having explicit sex, Cachorro does not apologise for the active and unconventional sexual practices of the main character and his friends. It takes for granted a normalization not yet fully achieved, and demands that the audience accept it. The conflict of opposed social and generational values surfaces when the child’s grandmother tries to blackmail Pedro by threatening to make his condition public if he does not allow the boy to live with her. It is the child who, in a deeply moving scene, shows his grandmother that normalization is a tough but achievable goal. To accomplish this, the director does not hesitate in showing his gay characters having kinky sex and disappearing for urgent trysts to backrooms in unnamed clubs.18 However, he also shows those same characters as members of a community that, in spite of social perceptions, share the same emotional and day-to-day problems as the heterosexual population, including insecurities about committing to a stable relationship, their jobs or being a good role model for a child. This is a community comprised of middle-aged men, some fit, some overweight, holding jobs such as pilots, doctors and schoolteachers, who carry on with their ostensibly normal lives and problems. The director himself recognizes that intention in the statement that he added to the DVD: normalization as a goal beyond gay stereotypes, even socially accepted ones. Chuecatown/Boystown (Flahn, 2007) is another film that goes one step further in this direction. In this crazy comedy, Víctor, an athletic, fashion-conscious, gym-addicted, good looking real estate agent, embarks on a mission to gentrify Chueca according to his aesthetic and social ideal. He buys dilapidated houses and renovates them into modern minimalist ones for the affluent gay clients who are moving into the neighbourhood. In his zeal he becomes a serial killer, assassinating old ladies who refuse to sell their homes. One of his victims leaves her apartment to Ray in her will. Ray is a plumber who lives with his partner Leo, a driving instructor. They are average-looking, middle-class men, overweight and with jobs rarely identified with prevalent social gay stereotypes. Ray and Leo are also very far removed in terms of class and personal style from the world represented by Víctor, who embodies a specific and recognizable gay image. In order to try to get into Ray’s inherited apartment, Victor tries to lure Leo, who is easily dazzled by this new, high-class demimonde of parties and art shows where the crowd, mostly gay, seems to come out of the worlds of Almodóvar or Warhol. A policewoman, whose son works in the same profession and is a closet homosexual, works on the case. At the end, the killer is exposed, the policeman assumes his true sexual orientation and Leo goes back to Ray, returning to their normal existence in a happy ending that is the same one that we have seen in countless love stories among heterosexual couples. A similar outcome can be found in Fuera de carta/Chef ’s Special (Velilla, 2008). Maxi, a successful and flamboyant gay chef, is obsessed with sophisticated dishes and obtaining a coveted Michelin star for his Chueca restaurant, Xantarella. He was married before coming out and abandoning his wife and kids; following her death, he reluctantly has to take care of

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them. The struggle with his teenage son and relationship with his boyfriend, an Argentine football player,19 makes him realign his life’s priorities. Here, there is no opposition between the cool real estate agent and the plumber or the driving instructor. Instead, it is Maxi who undergoes the transformation. At the end of the film, we hear Maxi quickly giving instructions about some traditional dishes before he takes the day off and gets into the car with his partner and kids. We then see that the restaurant has a different decor, has become a traditional home-style eatery and is now called Casa Xantarella. This does not mean that the situation is devoid of problems and persistent traditional stereotypes, nor that full integration has been achieved. In most of these films there are still a few characters that serve as a reminder of homophobic behaviour and the limits of normalization: the grandmother in Cachorro, Maxi’s father in Fuera de carta, and so forth. However, the transformation and substitution of recognizable gay stereotypes, such as those represented by Maxi and Víctor, implies that we are very far from even the Movida and Almodóvar years. Large sections of society have not only accepted the natural presence of the gay community, but have also embraced, within the limits discussed in this chapter, the normalcy of their lives in many other areas that go beyond sexual orientation. Conclusion Absolute normality still might be a little further down the line, but one of the most dramatic changes in contemporary Spanish society is precisely how far the country has gone in this direction. The progress achieved in terms of both legal rights and social acceptance of homosexuality has taken the country to a level simply unthinkable two decades ago. This is even more remarkable given a recent past in which homosexuality was not only considered a legally punishable crime, but also was equated with sickness, abuse and depravation, and where such images were ubiquitous in the films from the early years of Spain’s democracy. Therefore, it is possible to affirm that the cinema produced in Spain over the last twenty years offers a new, positive, more integrated and complex image of a gay social presence that is significantly different from those of preceding decades, or any other period in the past. Spain’s contemporary cinema has defined the new ethos of gay culture and the limits of its normalization, and has been both a privileged witness and participant in this startling transformation. Acknowledgement The seeds of this article sprang from my previous discussion of Madrid’s gay cinema (San Miguel, 2012), and represents a much more elaborate exploration of some of the ideas hinted at there.

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Notes   1 For a legal review of the Spanish gay marriage law and its consequences, see Lianza i Sicart and Navas Navarro (2006); and Zarraluqui Abogados and Lledó Abogados (2008).   2 It would be worth exploring whether the preponderance of films with gay male as opposed to lesbian protagonists can be attributed to factors other than gender imbalance in terms of directors.   3 Divorce was legal before Franco, but did not become legal again in Spain until 1981. Also during Franco’s years, until the 1967 Law on Religious Freedom permitted non-Catholics to register their (non-religious) marriages, only Catholic marriage was legally recognized.   4 This is an exhaustive and revealing study of the depiction of homosexuality during those turbulent years (1975–81), which also brings to light the pseudoscientific research and theories from previous decades.   5 Diferente/Different, directed by Luis María Delgado in 1962, is one of those rare films which, surprisingly, managed to hint clearly at homosexuality and at the same time be passed by the censors. For a more detailed analysis of this film and the circumstances of its production, see Alfeo (1999, 2000).   6 It is worth noting that in the 1970s there were a significant number of gay writers who at the same time were true cinephiles, and even worked as film critics. These include Antonio Gala, Eduardo Mendicutti, Vicente Molina Foix and Terenci Moix, among others.   7 For a discussion on the evolution of the topic of gender in Spanish cinema, see Marsh and Nair (2004).   8 Both directors are studied by Smith (1992) in Chapters 4 and 5, and in Chapter 3 of Ballesteros (2001), who also focuses on Imanol Uribe.   9 Along with his early shorts and films, one can remember Almodóvar’s role in Un hombre llamado Flor de Otoño and his performances with MacNamara, and compare them with his current public image and the films that he makes. 10 A fairly exhaustive survey of gay-themed films in the twentieth century can be found in Lechón Alvarez (2001). 11 The contradictory life of Jaime Gil de Biedma, wealthy entrepreneur, communist and poet – and the controversial book and film that it inspired – illustrate the changes in social perception from Franco’s years to the first decades of democracy. It is worth pointing out that homophobia was not the exclusive preserve of right-wingers. Gil de Biedma was not admitted as a card-carrying member of the Communist Party because of his sexual orientation. Unfortunately, he did not live to see or experience the ensuing transformation, as he died of AIDS in 1990. 12 The most complete study of the evolution of homosexuality and its perception in twentiethcentury Spain can be found in Mira (2004). 13 For a study of the political and social context in which this took place, see Encarnación (2008), especially Chapter 9. 14 The positive image campaigns are initiatives that try to create a positive perception regarding specific issues in order that the public views them more sympathetically. Among them are those that fight for the integration of minorities by promoting models devoid of qualities 90

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16

17 18

19 20

that might be perceived as negative. In the case of homosexuality, positive image campaigns were actively recommended in Kirk and Madsen (1989). Vega Sicilia, the most exclusive winery in Spain and a true international star, did not pay for its top wine to be used in this movie. the prominent display of the label facing the camera in one scene can therefore only be understood as an unequivocal sign that the characters are affluent and sophisticated connoisseurs. Spain’s GDP grew over 1000% between 1975 and the onset of the current financial crisis. Explicit sex is very frequent and prominent in most of these movies and unfortunately limits their exhibition in some countries such as the United States, where they will be rated NC-17 (No Children under 17), or choose to go as Non Rated (which everybody interprets as equivalent to NC-17). Both NC-17 and Non Rated movies are rejected for theatrical release in most areas of the United States. On the other hand, even when gay films do not reach the mainstream movie theatres, they have their own channels of distribution through the circuit of LGTB film festivals, cable channels, and in specialized shopping outlets that cater to a gay clientele. The distribution through these specialized channels is sufficiently important that it has an impact on production patterns in Spain. Although in reality the director held back a little and deleted a couple of graphic scenes from the final cut, especially one in which the nephew inadvertently sees his uncle and a friend in S&M gear. Fuera de carta also touches on the topic of homosexuality in football (soccer) and sports in general. Here, as in other professions, the sought after normalization has yet to take place and few people have voluntarily come out of the closet, although rumours abound and reach newspapers, popular TV programs, and social media. A defining movie regarding gay issues in sports is still lacking.

References Alfeo, J. C. (1999). ‘La representación de la cuestión gay en el cine español’, Cuadernos de la Academia, 5: 287–304. (2000). ‘El enigma de la culpa: la homosexualidad en el cine español. 1962–2000’, lnternational Journal of lberian Studies, 13.3: 136–47. Ballesteros, I. (2001). Cine (ins)urgente: textos fílmicos y contextos culturales de la España postfranquista (Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos). Encarnación, O. G. (2008). Spanish Politics: Democracy after Dictatorship (Cambridge: Polity). Kirk, M. and Madsen, H. (1989). After the Ball. How American Will Conquer its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the ’90s (New York: Doubleday). Lechón Alvarez, M. (2001). La sala oscura. Guía del cine gay español y latinoamericano (Madrid: Nuer Ediciones). Lianza i Sicart, A. and Navas Navarro, S. (2006). Matrimonio homosexual y adopción: perspectiva nacional e internacional (Madrid: Editorial Reus). Marsh, S. and Nair, P. (eds.) (2004). Gender and Spanish Cinema (Oxford and New York: Berg). 91

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Melero Salvador, A. (2010). Placeres ocultos. Gays y lesbianas en el cine español de la transición (Madrid: Notorious Ediciones). Mira, A. (2004). De Sodoma a Chueca. Una historia cultural de la homosexualidad en España en el siglo XX (Barcelona: Ediciones Egales, S.L). San Miguel, H. (2012). ‘Embracing normalcy: Madrid’s gay cinema at the turn of the new millennium’ in L. J. Torres Hortelano (ed.), World Film Locations: Madrid (Bristol: Intellect), 66–67. Smith, P. J. (1992). Laws of Desire. Questions of Homosexuality in Spanish Writing and Film 1960– 1990 (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Zarraluqui Abogados and Lledó Abogados (2008). El nuevo derecho matrimonial: Comentarios a las Leyes 13/2005, de 1 de julio y 15/2005 de 8 de julio (Madrid: Dykinson, S.L.)

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Chapter 6 Behind the Enigma Construct: A Certain Trend in Spanish Cinema Javier Moral

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ome of the most interesting films currently being made in Spain openly challenge mainstream cinema, and venture out on previously uncharted waters. The recent works of directors as diverse as José Luis Guerin, José María de Orbe, Albert Serra, Javier Rebollo, Isaki Lacuesta or Daniel Villamediana have heralded a formal and productive liberty which had been absent from Spanish screens for some time. In fact, as Carlos Losilla (2010) has highlighted, this heterogeneous group could be meaningfully compared to combative film-makers from throughout the peninsula who opposed the hegemonic filmic conventions prevalent in Spain during late Francoism and the Transition, and expanded the parameters of what was understood by cinema in the 1970s. Hence, for example, Paulino Viota pushed legal boundaries in the making of his mythic Contactos/Contacts (1970), which is considered by Noël Burch (1985: 188) to be one of the decade’s most relevant avant-garde films. Other prominent examples include Iván Zulueta and his wild appropriation of promiscuous representations of the New York underground in Arrebato/Rapture (1980), or the films of Joaquim Jordá, Jacinto Esteva and Carlos Durán, all distinguished representatives of the Barcelona School.1 These films, often referenced directly, provide seminal antecedents to the recent surge of experimentation which, not coincidentally, has come to the fore with the explosion of digital technologies which have opened up new shooting possibilities and slashed production costs. Losilla rightly suggests that these new directors are connected to preceding generations ‘by linking themselves to a perpetually truncated modernity in Spanish cinema’ (2010: 6). Nevertheless, it is also the case that it is only by placing these recent manifestations in dialogue with other examples made outside of Spain that we can come to understand their radical stance in its full complexity. This ‘new’ movement is especially receptive to developing a fertile relationship with some of the most exciting films made around the globe, by entering into dialogue with the kind of cinema showcased in a Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia (2010), an excellent and exciting volume edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin. This ongoing conversation with other film-makers and theorists as to how we should, and could, understand cinema is manifest through international visibility. These films may not be widely supported by the general public in Spain, but they have had a major impact due to their inclusion in renowned competitions and festivals. From San Sebastián to Cannes via Locarno, critics and audiences alike have paid significant attention to many of the films that will be dealt with in this chapter. My aim here is to document the refreshing presence of a new kind of cinema that exists on the margins of the Spanish film industry, to question its

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premises, and to try and capture the echoes and rhythms that reveal the shared attitude of these films in contrast to mainstream cinema. However, these concerns raise an inescapable question: beyond the ‘rebellious gesture’ which critics of Cahiers du Cinéma España have ascribed to these film-makers, is it possible to discover common characteristics that allow them to be categorized under a common label? If so, what characteristics might enable them to be understood as a homogeneous group or movement? This endeavour is beset with potential pitfalls. For example, it might appear foolhardy to locate such diverse films as Honor de cavalleria/Honour of the Knights (Quixotic) (Serra, 2006), Los condenados/The Condemned (Lacuesta, 2009), Aita/Father (de Orbe, 2010), La mujer sin piano/Woman Without Piano (Rebollo, 2009), La vida sublime/The Life Sublime (Villamediana, 2010) and Guest (Guerin, 2010) within the same melting pot. For this reason, instead of attempting to shoehorn them into the same category, it is better to adapt the perspective employed by Michel Foucault (1969) in his analysis of the discursive formations which define a society. Paraphrasing the philosopher, these films appear to participate in a kind of dispersion space, an unstable territory open to perpetual reevaluation, through which they share a common network of references, specific theoretical concerns and certain stylistic similarities which thereby provide a certain cohesion. Two aspects seem particularly relevant in this respect: the bareness of their gaze, and the use of enigma as a narrative conceit. The Bare, Unadorned Gaze First and foremost, it is worth noting these films’ ability to create images that seem to resist the recent explosion of our current ‘multi-screen’ reality. As opposed to the ‘excess image’ dominating screens in the contemporary world (Lipovetsky and Serroy, 2007: 77–98), this cinema wholeheartedly opts for simplicity and restraint. There is little evidence of a multilayered staging, even less evidence of a saturation of artistic elements, or even the screen’s subordination to narrative demands. Rather, a sobriety and somewhat candid paucity dominate a filmic construction which leads either to digressions (generally in an ironic sense, as in La mujer sin piano or Guest), or else offers such a bare simplicity that there is little to suggest to the audience that there might be any form of deeper understanding to be gleaned beyond the initial superficial meaning. In Honor de cavalleria and its distilled rendering of Cervantes’s familiar tale, the audience spends two hours witnessing the roaming of Don Quixote and his loyal companion, Sancho Panza, around the mountainous region of Ampurdan.2 The camera is ever-present. The opening shot lays bare the film’s intentions: the camera scrutinizes the wiry old man as he picks up pieces of armour from the floor and carries them to the plump figure waiting patiently under a nearby tree. The old man’s movements, along with the camera’s nervous curiosity, combine to give an unstable, fleeting impression which accentuates an inherent imbalance and distorted vision: at certain points, the faithful squire is relegated to the far 96

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edge of the frame, and in other shots we lose sight of the knight-errant completely. The trend is set from this moment on, as the screen fills with successive shots of unblemished countryside as a backdrop to the aimless wandering of the adventurers,3 reduced at times to mere silhouettes, as in the night shots when it is almost impossible to discern the protagonists, and the audience is left even more clueless as to what they might be doing. A similar effect is seen in the construction of El cant dels ocells/Birdsong (Serra, 2008), which reduces the symbolic journey of the Three Wise Men to the characters’ simple wanderings through stark mountainous areas or across wide open plains where they are mere blots on the landscape and, on many occasions, actually disappear from view. Reducing the plot to this basic scenario leaves the audience free to explore the immensity of the screen, unfettered by the unfolding drama. There are few scenes as semantically illogical as when the Three Wise Men are underwater: the forced, high-angle shot distorts their appearance while the fluid choreography of their heavy, drifting bodies sinking – the backlight denoting the sun entering the water – all dramatically part ways with the pervasive flatness which otherwise governs the film, and removes any possibility of an immediate symbolization. The image says nothing because its raison d’être is not communication; it is simply blissfully unintelligible. This tendency to construct shots through which it is difficult to assign a concrete reading is a radical departure from the usual relationship between film and audience. Rather than aiming for a cognitive cohesion that is all too familiar in classic narrative cinema, it asks instead for affective attachment. In other words, it conjures up an image which requires less work to decode than it does to simply absorb; it is a cinema which one has to see rather than read, even if this does not preclude interpretation. These films often renounce the standards governing ‘good’ film composition. Shots are characterized by a pronounced listlessness and apathy, seemingly indifferent to content. In fact, rather than worrying about removing any error which may stem from bad editing, these film-makers actually seem to revel in choosing the ‘bad take’. Instead of ordering and prioritizing the images that appear, or structuring them in accordance with any recognizable hierarchy that would control the meaning of what is shown on the screen, these film-makers seemingly perceive reality out of the corner of their eye, as if they were trying to catch it unawares. This explains the de-structured, half-built images that barely begin to crystallize before they suddenly start to disintegrate: this is perfectly orchestrated in the closing scene of Guest, where the steady rain streaming down the window actually ends up completely blocking a view of the statue. Perhaps it could be said that these are not even images in the strictest sense, but rather cinematographic sketches or nature studies of the kind that a painter might produce when they venture outside, easel at the ready, to allow themselves to become enchanted by nature: prior to their attempt to capture the richness of perceived sensations, in a few rapid and well-chosen brush strokes designed to provide a split-second impression. Arguably, there has been no other film-maker so aware of this reworking of the image as José Luis Guerin. Images from En la ciudad de Sylvia/In the City of Sylvia (2007) shy from psychological motivation to be carried away by the mere ephemeral exchange of glances, the beauty of a 97

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luminous reflection on a cheek, or the playful build-up of figures filling the screen. In Guest, this stance becomes even more extreme. Guerin himself has noted that: the idea of a sketch, of giving just the merest of indications, which then allows the spectator to complete the image in their own mind and make it personal, is what actually kick starts the movie. (cited in Losilla, 2010: 15) Indeed, just like the young artist’s paintbrush in the previous film, and without the need for an intermediary character, Guerin sets out in Guest to capture the randomness and fleetingness of the seemingly tiny, insignificant things that occur in all their revelatory impact. It is for this reason that, instead of concentrating on the images that ostensibly carry the most meaning, he prefers to scrutinize a far more humdrum reality: the shadow cast by a plane’s wing, the billowing curtains in a hotel room which could be anywhere on the planet, or the silhouette of an equestrian statue framed in an immense sky. Searching for the Enigma, or the Cinema of Uncertainties The second important construct which contributes to this particular kind of fusion can be defined as follows: the enigma is embedded in the very heart of the structure on which these films are predicated. To put it another way, this is a cinema that works against certainties, a cinema of doubt where very often questions are left unanswered or, if answered at all, only with partial or incomplete clarification. Talking about Aita in an interview, José María de Orbe has noted, ‘I start from the premise that I am uncertain about almost everything’ (cited in Heredero, 2010: 10). This is an echo of the blank notebook that faces Guerin in the early scenes of Guest, and affirms the axiom of a primeval metaphor that seems to guide this group of film makers: hence, I would suggest, the importance of journeys in many of their films. Common to Los condenados, Los pasos dobles/The Double Steps (Lacuesta, 2011), En la ciudad de Sylvia, Guest, Honor de cavalleria, El cant dels ocells and even La mujer sin piano are journeys which form the metaphorical narrative in a way that embraces the very act of filmmaking, specifically in the sense of shedding any preconceived notions, and abandoning our own inner navigation to become immersed in an unknown territory with little expectation of arriving at a specific location. Perhaps the best example is found in the opening scene of En la ciudad de Sylvia: a shirt hangs on the back of the door in a room whose walls are dappled with the shadows from outside; the camera picks out a suitcase lying open nearby, followed by some shots of a street map, keys and a notebook. In just two images the film has defined its structure and its protagonist: a traveller willing to undertake a journey through the labyrinthine physiognomy of a nameless city, following the trail of Sylvia’s ghost. In order to understand better the roots of this axiomatic construct, first it is necessary to examine the principal repercussions of the inexorable digitalization of the contemporary 98

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audio-visual world. It was the emergence of the digital image which arguably inspired these works, especially as the changes sparked by this new innovation began to make inroads into film’s existing blueprint. The traditional split between the two great universes which, until this new emergence, had defined the history of the moving image as either fiction or documentary, was placed under increased scrutiny. A deeply ideological division predicated on the ostensible connection between real objects and photosensitive film began to lose its legitimacy. The symbols distinguishing fiction from its worthy opponent fell resoundingly under the thaumaturgy of the new computer technology empire, bestowing validity onto the Godardian idea that, rather than being a slice of reality, all image ‘is just an image’. There have been few responses to this new state of affairs as lucid as that conveyed by Guest: the film-maker’s refusal to be compartmentalized, aware as he is that the ostensible divide was no more than a fictitious obstacle designed to uphold pre-ordained formulas that primarily conformed to commercial criteria. Documentary and fiction thereby reveal themselves to be simply two supplementary approaches to the comprehension of reality; two ways to attempt to get closer to an ambivalent and slippery world. Cinema – or at least a certain kind of cinema – has relinquished the comforts of old, and reflected the uncertainties that demand the viewer’s attention. The globalization and proliferation of heterogeneous forms such as auto-fiction (see Chapter 29), the process of generic hybridization and spread of the mockumentary, are all examples of the combative response of a kind of cinema perplexed by the new order. In a manner akin to Still Life (Zhang Ke, 2006), Tropical Malady (Weerasethakul, 2004), Autohystoria (Martin, 2007), Paranoid Park (Van Sant, 2007) and their ilk, films such as Honor de cavalleria, En la ciudad de Sylvia, Aita and La vida sublime have been constructed around this recognition of their incapacity to encompass reality in all its complexity. Instead, they aim for something that is less ambitious, but ultimately more vital. Rather than trying to represent reality, they prefer to gesture in its general direction, to question it but never to exhaust it or claim it as their own, so as to locate it within a decipherable and deciphered world. It is important not to confuse this underlying position with those offerings in which the enigma is nothing more than a mere narrative pretext. Indeed, the inherently radical construct is not about posing a question that will be answered by the dénouement, but rather in instilling an uncertainty at the very core of the narrative structure which is actually impossible to resolve conclusively. For this reason, contrary to the categorization by the critics of Cahiers du Cinema España, I do not think that Blog (Trapé, 2010) or Tiro en la cabeza/Bullet in the Head (Rosales, 2008) can be considered as participating in the same dispersion space as La mujer sin piano, Los condenados or En la ciudad de Sylvia. This is because in the former set of films, the mysteries which propel the narrative – what are the gang of young women plotting? Who is the character that the audience can see from their innately external vantage point? – are resolved as the story progresses. The young women all agree to fall pregnant during the end-of-year school trip, and he is an ETA terrorist who, feeling threatened because two people have recognized him, kills them and then flees. 99

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However, in the genuinely enigmatic films, uncertainty is presented in such a way that, as the story comes to a close, the audience is still left without the vital clues that would enable them to understand the meaning fully. It is no coincidence that the audience knows little of what is going through the mind of Rosa, La mujer sin piano’s protagonist, when she returns home after her epic nocturnal adventure. Similarly, the resolution of the enigma in the film Los condenados – the revolutionary combatant on the wanted list has been executed by his companions – raises another inexplicable enigma that leaves multiple questions unanswered. What has Martin, the executioner of his companion, turned into? How will the other characters cope with their discovery of the awful truth? This trend is even more overt in En la ciudad de Sylvia. At the end of the film the audience still does not know with any certainty who the young traveller is, or even the identity of the young woman for whom he is searching. The fortuitous encounter with the supposed Sylvia does nothing more than spark more hypotheses and questions: is it the real Sylvia who pretends not to understand? Is she just an unknown woman toying with another stranger’s boldness, or are they both true and false at the same time? The reflection of the young woman’s face in the window of the tram after their conversation does no more than confirm the ghost-like ethereal nature of the evanescent Sylvia, who seems to be incarnated in the bodies and faces of all the women passing across the screen. If all of Guerin’s films can be plausibly considered as reflections on the act of gazing, there is no doubt that the gaze is particularly mesmerizing in En la ciudad de Sylvia. In short, the difference between one type of film or another centres on the authentic shift in the pact that is established between the film and its audience. It is far more than the mere capturing of attention by means of a narrative ruse; instead, it embroils the audience in a world that accepts the hidden mystery behind outward appearances. In contrast to offerings which reward the viewer with the tranquillity of a gaugeable world that is closed in on itself, this type of film aims to offer the audience, who actually makes it all possible, a film for which they must formulate their own hypothesis concerning what is unfolding before their eyes. This firm commitment to the enigma is crystallized perfectly through the habitual presence of a character invested with all the regalia of the ever-alert and expectant sleuth, exploring their surroundings in search of the vital clues that will enable them to solve the mystery with which they are faced. If, in Lo que sé de Lola/What I Know About Lola (Rebollo, 2006), the enigma is represented by the figure of the young Spanish emigrant and her marginal and disconcerting life, the role of sleuth is taken on by León, the impertinent protagonist who sees his monotonous and glacial orphan existence disintegrate on the arrival of his new neighbour. Here, the sleuth could be confused with a voyeur: conscientious to the point of obsession, he records everything about his drab life in his little notebook. Before Lola’s arrival, he writes in detail about his mother’s habits, making a scrupulous list of what she left him when she died. Then, when Lola appears, he promptly begins to write copious details about the minutiae of his new neighbour’s life (the hour she gets up and goes to bed, the different tasks she starts and then leaves, her sporadic sexual encounters with strangers and so on ad infinitum), and he does all this from the standpoint of a good sleuth – at a distance 100

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and with an outsider’s eye. When he follows her to the bars that she frequents, spies on her at the swimming pool or pursues her to Spain, he always does so clandestinely and incognito. Exactly the same definition can be meaningfully applied to the protagonist of En la ciudad de Sylvia, who has the same sleuth or voyeur-like qualities as León; however, this time, instead of writing copious notes, he sketches the faces and figures of the women that he sees around him, but his modus operandi and intentions are identical. When he leaves the hotel he does so in search of the woman he covets, trying to discover her in the gestures and the gazes of the young women thronging the screen, searching for the face of a woman who probably only ever existed in his imagination. As is the case with León, the protagonist of En la ciudad de Sylvia also has to settle for a fleeting, inconclusive encounter with that obscure object of his desire. The presence of an enigma and a sleuth is even more explicit in La vida sublime, candidly presented in the film’s opening scenes. Following a comment from a friend about a trip south made by the protagonist’s grandfather, he adds: There was a secret there because your grandfather never ever told anyone. That’s where the enigma comes from. When nothing is said, it plants a seed in the mind, which germinates and then spreads everywhere. Accepting the challenge with verve, the protagonist sets out, with the ‘seed’ planted firmly in his mind, to encounter a past which becomes increasingly elusive as the journey progresses. The hypotheses then shatter and the memories merge with the sleuth’s own desires. The figure of the grandfather subsequently takes on a mythical and unreachable aura; working as a policeman in Cadiz, a brave bullfighter laid off after being gored, or even a popular folksinger who emigrates to New York. All that is now left is the ritual of emulation – writing a letter on a coffee-stained napkin, eating ninety sardines, simulating a boxing fight on a breakwater in Cadiz, or fighting a young bull. This estrangement is never so acute as in Aita, where the figure of the sleuth takes on a marginal role in spite of being the first character on screen. The archaeologist who, brush in hand, is seen excavating inside the mansion searching for human remains, gives way to the real protagonists of the film: a guard, a priest and the house itself, which the guard is employed to take care of. If in La línea recta/The Straight Line (2007) the enigma is constructed around a notable lack of information as regards the protagonist, here, in the second feature by José María de Orbe, an uncertainty invades the narrative in a gradual and predatory manner, disrupting the immediacy of register that Aita showcases from the outset. Indeed, the documentary tone is felt keenly on the screen: the compositional sobriety; the absence of any artificial lighting effects; the lack of any extra-diegetic music; and the mundane recording of the guard’s banal daily chores. All are clear manifestations of the film’s fundamental mission to be nothing more than a mere audio-visual register of a quotidian, ritualistic reality. However, unease begins to creep in during three disturbing conversations between the guard and the priest; growing in crescendo until it ultimately destroys any kind of coherent 101

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narrative. In the first conversation, they chat about the presence of bones and human remains in the basement and grounds, and about whether the aural senses actually continue to function after death. In the second, the priest relates a miraculous occurrence which took place when he was attending a dead body which suddenly came back to life and sat up, to the obvious shock of all the people at the wake. In the third conversation, using an extreme close-up, the old guard confesses to the priest that an inexplicable phenomenon has been worrying him of late. He goes on to describe it as a great white light which suddenly appears and comes nearer until it completely washes over him: wherever he looks, the light is there. From then on the film is imbued with a sense of unease. Empty shots seem filled with supernatural mysteries; the stains on the walls take on an eerie meaning; the soundtrack begins to be inundated by sounds coming from ambiguous sources; the direction prioritizes nocturnal shots in which hardly anything can be seen; and finally, and most explicitly, the house is swamped by blurry, obscure images that appear on the walls. At first, the bright flash of light appears like a supernova in the stormy night sky; then spectral black and white images slowly begin to take over the house until they dominate the screen. On the stairs, in the window or on the wall of Noelia’s room, the audience is never sure if the guard is daydreaming or if it is the resurrection of a phenomenon from the past brought into the present: ghost-like images which end up engulfing the film in uncertainty and inexplicableness, where the line between the real and the imagined, the mundane and the extraordinary, combine to become inexorably intertwined. Conclusion In the second chapter of a wide-ranging discussion of cinematographic modernity, Adrian Martin asks: ‘What is modern cinema?’ He draws attention to the need for analysts to revise their traditional attitude towards film. Instead of starting from the end of the film, he proposes starting from the beginning, when ‘all is strange, ambiguous, full of multiplepotentiality’ (2010: 30). The Australian critic orientates his analysis not around the concretion of narrative, but rather on the inherent mystery contained in the images. It is no coincidence that he evokes a crucial film in Spanish cinematography as a privileged interlocutor: El espíritu de la colmena/The Spirit of the Beehive (Erice, 1973) is posited as a paradigmshifting embodiment of this need for an analytical shift. For our current purposes, the allusion to this mythic Spanish film is not merely a cinephilic wink, but also sheds light on the roots from which the current cinema of the enigma have sprung, alongside the profound influence that the masterful Erice has exerted on a new generation of film-makers. I do not think it necessary to reiterate in any detail the bond that links him to José Luis Guerin, and the mutual recognition which has cemented their films and their friendship. His influence on Isaki Lacuesta via Guerin – La leyenda del tiempo/The Legend of Time (Lacuesta, 2006) approximates El espíritu de colmena in its dialogue with En construcción/Work in Progress (Guerin, 2001) – is equally clear. Daniel Vázquez Villamediana 102

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has even made explicit reference to the works of the legendary director: La vida sublime – in which the protagonist carries out a telluric voyage to a mythical and dreamy Andalusia where he thinks all enigmas will be solved but, once there, finds them to be inextricable and unsolvable – could be described to a certain extent as a fake imitation of the neverto-be-filmed second part of El sur/The South (Erice, 1983). A similar lineage and chain of influence can be detected in José María de Orbe’s films. In the commercial DVD release of Aita, the critic Carlos Heredero highlights this affiliation in the vibrant resonance evidenced between the Palacio de Murguía, the only set used in the film, and the mansion in Hoyuelos in the province of Segovia, where a young girl embarks on her induction into the adult world. The presence of all things ghostly and monstrous in El espíritu de la colmena (the director insisted on the crew having to whisper throughout the shoot, in order to make the girls feel the presence of something ‘mysterious’ in the air), is echoed in Aita far beyond the straightforward experience of the girls who explore the deserted building with trepidation during their school trip. In short, the immediate antecedents to these film-makers’ works identified by Carlos Losilla, and noted at the outset of the chapter, need to be qualified in order for us to locate them within the tumultuous history of Spanish cinema. If their expressive freedom has its roots in the most cutting-edge experiments of the 1970s, their poetic density and renouncement of the tropes and modus operandi of classical narrative cinema find their strongest anchor in Erice’s cinema. Indeed, the silence and the unspoken, a liminal state between fiction and non-fiction – elements already so magnificently combined by the Madrid film-maker – have returned decades later in what, at least for this author, are some of the most aesthetically stimulating films to be found in recent Spanish cinema. Notes 1 2 3

For a complete evaluation of the Barcelona School and its impact on Spanish cinematography, see Riambau and Torreiro (1999). The strength of the film resides precisely in the exteriority/interiority duality that emerges from Cervantes’ novel (see Moral, 2011: 153–55). An essential feature of the ‘image-pulsion’ described by Deleuze (1983: 174) – and one which applies in great measure to the cinema analysed here – is an image that conveys a kind of ‘original world’ composed of an accumulation of sketches and elements with no internal cohesion.

References Burch, N. (1985). Itinerarios: La educación de un soñador del cine (Bilbao: Caja de Ahorros Vizcaína). Deleuze, G. (1983). Cinéma 1: L’image-mouvement (Paris: Minuit). 103

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Foucault, M. (1969). L’archeology du savoir (Paris: Gallimard). Heredero, C. (2010). ‘Entrevista a José María de Orbe’, Cahiers du Cinéma España, 37: 8–10. Lipovetsky, G. and Serroy, J. (2007). L’écran global : culture-médias et cinéma à l’âge (Paris: Éditions du Seuil). Losilla, C. (2010). ‘El gesto’, Cahiers du Cinéma España, 37: 6–7. Martin, A. (2010). ¿Qué es el cine moderno? (Santiago de Chile: Uqbar Editores). Moral, J. (2011), ‘Honour of the knights (Quixotic)’ in L. J. Torres Hortelano (ed.), Directory of World Cinema: Spain (Bristol: Intellect), 153–55. Riambau, E. and Torreiro, C. (1999). La Escuela de Barcelona: el cine de la ‘gauche divine’ (Barcelona: Anagrama). Rosenbaum, J. and Martin, A. (2003). Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia (London: British Film Institute).

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Chapter 7 Reproduction and Rhetorical Processes in the Construction of Reality: En Construcción and La leyenda del tiempo as Case Studies Fernando Canet

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very film has reality as its point of departure to a greater or lesser extent. Even the most fantastic film imaginable is the product of its creator’s life experience. It is for this reason that even though the diegesis in which the story unfolds, and the characters who inhabit it, may be completely invented, we will always find signs that direct our attention to the most basic, and at the same time most transcendental, aspects of human existence. However, there are films for which reality is not only their ultimate point of reference, but also a cornerstone throughout the whole creative process. This is a type of cinema practised by film-makers who believe in the ontological power of reality, and who also trust in the technical and expressive capacity of the filmic medium to bring that reality to the screen. Undoubtedly, two of the theorists who have advocated the realist approach with the greatest fervour have been André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, both of whom have been champions of the concept of ‘cinema as window’, as Elsaesser and Hagener describe it, which ‘defines the essence of cinema in terms of its ability to record and reproduce reality and its phenomena, including aspects which are invisible to the naked human eye’ (2010: 15). As Prince highlights, ‘Andre Bazin based his realist aesthetic on what he regarded as the “objective” nature of photography’ (1996: 28), while Siegfried Kracauer defined his theory of cinema as ‘an extension of photography and therefore shares with that medium a marked affinity for the visible world around us. Films come into their own when they record and reveal physical reality’ (Price 1996: 29). Other authors have taken up the theoretical framework established by Bazin and Kracauer in order to describe a type of cinema whose function is the observation and reproduction of reality as it is, without any apparent mediation on the part of the film-maker (e.g. Cavell, 1979; Currie, 1996, 1999). This type of cinema could be included under the category of ‘observational documentaries’, to use a term coined by Nichols (1991: 38–44),1 or ‘Documentary as Indexical Record’ (DIR), as described by Plantinga in the following terms: DIR theories have often made much of the ability of the documentary photograph to record the world […]. This led some to think of documentaries as mere ‘re-presentations’ of reality, or simple records, rather than creative interpretations, of their subjects. (2005: 105–6) However, as Heisenberg noted in his day, ‘we have to remember that what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning’ (cited in Monterde, 2001: 16). Or, as many other theorists have asserted, the act of filming itself transforms reality into a

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representation (see Brunette, 1985: 35; Rothman, 1988: 38; Rush, 1990: 5; Tyler, 1979: 255). This means that even in the most straightforward cases of direct observation, directors impose their point of view on reality from the moment that they decide to film it from a particular angle. According to Rudolf Arnheim: To establish the cinema theoretically as a new art it was necessary to show that certain differences between reality and its reproduction on the screen allowed the artist to influence the aspect of real things in a deliberate way. (1939: 32) Therefore, as MacCabe suggests, ‘film does not reveal the real in a moment of transparency, but rather that film is constituted by a set of discourses’ (1985: 62). In short, according to these theorists, film cannot be viewed merely as the objective observation and reproduction of reality; rather, reality constitutes the perfect pretext for embarking on a reflective process, the result of which is a subjective representation of said reality. Furthermore, as Brunette notes, ‘the purpose and the result of this authorial intervention, this mediation, was always to get to a representation that was more “real” than reality itself ’ (1985: 35) – and this continues to be the case at least for those directors who make a pact with reality in their endeavour to represent it as authentically as possible. This might lead us to ask, along with Griffith: Is the art of the film an art of observation, in which the photographed material properly dominates the artist and leads his hand and eye? Or is it an art in which the artist strives to manipulate the material he photographs, to make it express and project his own desire, dreams, fears, obsessions? (1979: 204) In my view, film is both an art of observation and manipulation: indeed, it is a combination of the two. This means that a film can be the result of a patient process of observation of reality, of its interpretation by the film-maker, and of its representation as a consequence of a constructive process whereby the film-maker’s stamp is imprinted like an artistic signature. This type of film could be defined as ‘high descriptive prose in factual narrative’, and it is precisely this quality that aroused Grierson’s admiration for Flaherty’s early work: ‘a sense of dealing with a beautiful, nor merely a true, subject matter’ (Tyler, 1979: 255). Notwithstanding a few earlier examples, it is Flaherty with his first film, Nanook of the North (1922),2 who initiated a highly productive trend in cinematic history. It is a trend located on the blurred border between fiction and documentary, as it shares or borrows strategies from both genres that best suit its purposes. This exchange of resources between fiction and documentary, or the erasure of the border between them, has been described by theorists including Jeff Rush (1990), Jacques Rancière (2006) and Ohad Landesman (2006). Such films are hybrids which by their very nature problematize the dialectic – as old as the film medium itself – between the approach of the Lumière brothers and that of their 108

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countryman and contemporary, George Méliès.3 Various terms have been proposed for this type of film:4 notable among these is ‘half-documentary’, the early term used by Rudolf Arnheim in 1939 to refer to the films made by Flaherty up to that time. Although there is no consensus as to what term should be used to define this type of film, there does appear to be general agreement that there has been a resurgence of this hybrid genre in contemporary cinema (Jones, 2005; Landesman, 2006; Rhodes and Springer, 2006; Vaughn, 1999). Spanish cinema has not been immune to this international movement;5 on the contrary, since the 1990s Spanish film-makers have allowed themselves to be seduced by the trend which in the first decade of this century has achieved a certain prominence. I refer in particular to film-makers of the stature of Víctor Erice, José Luis Guerin and Joaquim Jordà. In 1990, Guerin filmed Innisfree; in the same year Jordà made El encargo del cazador/The Hunter’s Assignment and two years later, in 1992, Erice completed El sol del membrillo/ Quince Tree of the Sun.6 All three were direct influences on the two films that are my focus of interest in this chapter. Following Rothman, my intention is to decipher what these two films ‘reveal about reality’, ‘how they achieve those revelations’ and ‘what they acknowledge about the revelations they do achieve’ (1988: 39). Reality as a Subject As MacCabe notes, in Andre Bazin’s view, ‘for a film to be realistic, it must locate its characters and action in a determined social and historical setting’ (1976: 9). In both La leyenda del tiempo (Lacuesta, 2006) and En construcción/Work in Progress (Guerin, 2001), the location was the inspiration for the story. Without a doubt, as Alain Cavalier famously pointed out, each case is the consequence of an encounter with the location. Both films introduce their stories with archive footage. In the case of En construcción, it is black and white footage from the late 1950s and early 1960s documenting life in the El Raval neighbourhood in the city of Barcelona.7 The sound of seagulls during the opening credits is the first hint that we are offered of the narrative diegesis. Barcelona is a portside city, as confirmed by the first sweeping, bird’s-eye-view panoramic shots, which provide a perspective of the neighbourhood as a whole. The camera then moves inside the neighbourhood, offering the viewer scenes of its streets filled with people going about their daily business. The camera selects different angles of the neighbourhood, some wider and others narrower, to offer us fragments of a reality that is never interrupted or distorted by the presence of the camera which, except for one isolated instance, manages to move unperceived by the neighbourhood’s inhabitants. Finally, one of these people, a drunken sailor, is singled out from the crowd, becoming the privileged object of the camera’s gaze. This sequence is a declaration of principles that Guerin offers the viewer from the very beginning: the images that the viewer is seeing come directly from reality, a concrete reality, chosen according to certain criteria, which is the privileged object of the attentive gaze of the film-maker. This reality is presented following a specific order. First, the setting is presented, 109

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then the people who inhabit it, and finally one of those people is chosen who, on being singled out in this way, changes his condition to that of protagonist of one of the possible stories in this reality. That which is merely suggested in Guerin is represented explicitly in the work of Lacuesta. In La leyenda del tiempo, the film begins with the image of the character: Makiko, a young Japanese nurse who decides to travel to San Fernando de Cádiz with the intention of learning to sing like Camarón de la Isla.8 We hear the famous flamenco singer’s voice as we watch a close-up of Makiko attentively watching the television, thereby constructing the character’s point of view. The obligatory reverse shot does not take long, and in another close-up shot the viewer can see Camarón singing. These two shots form part of the opening credits, during which the view alternates between Makiko’s attentive gaze and archive footage of the singer. In this case, unlike En construcción, the footage is in colour on a television screen where, in addition to Camarón’s performance, we see the day of his funeral in his hometown of San Fernando de Cádiz – the streets crowded with fans offering him a final farewell – and finally, black and white images of Camarón walking through his neighbourhood and visiting his family many years earlier. Thus, although in La leyenda del tiempo the setting in which the action unfolds is very important, it does lose its protagonist status to the figure of the character. While in the opening scenes of En construcción it is the El Raval neighbourhood that is the film’s main protagonist, in the opening of La leyenda del tiempo it is basically the mythical figure of Camarón that acquires special significance. Nevertheless, in Guerin’s film the construction of character is also central to its structure, albeit in a more veiled form. This motif – in addition to the construction of a building, the passage of time portrayed through the alternation of days and nights and the seasons, and the construction of the film itself – is one of the resources that gives the film its continuity. As Sherwood notes, ‘the backbone of every motion picture is the continuity’, and to frame this continuity in Nanook of the North, ‘Mr. Flaherty selected one character, Nanook himself, to serve as the protagonist of his drama’ (1979: 15–16). In the same way, from among the people of El Raval, Guerin selected those who would become the protagonists of the different stories that would form the film’s structure. As noted by Guerin himself, ‘in En construcción, some of those present were emerging as real characters. I think it’s my first character film’ (cited in Rodríguez, 2007: 306). In this way, just as Flaherty had done in his time, the material drawn from reality is constructed ‘to render more vivid the conflict and drama of the “real” subject’ (Rhodes and Springer, 2006: 6). According to Elizabeth Cowie, this allows the viewer to engage ‘with the actions and feelings of social actors, like characters in fiction’ (2011: 3), and consequently to identify with them. As Rodríguez-Mangual suggests, ‘the representation of historical reality here is framed and organized as a synecdoche, in which a few stories attempt to represent the whole’ (2008: 306). However, which stories should be selected and, more important still, what criteria should be applied to make that selection? According to Guerin, ‘the notion of character is closely related to the notion of casting, of choosing those people who, for whatever reasons, are more emblematic, telling, potential dialogists’ (cited in Monterde, 2007: 137). Speaking in a different context, Nichols has spoken of how ‘[p]riority goes to those individuals who 110

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can convey a strong sense of personal expressivity’ (1991: 120). In both cases, one of the most important characteristics is the communicative skill of the person selected. Clearly, this aspect is crucial in these kinds of productions, where in most cases the traditional script is replaced with a few notes that sketch out the different situations that might be filmed,9 and where, as a result, the character’s improvisation is a determining factor in the development of the film’s narrative. Hence, as in cases of pure fiction, casting is crucial to the success of the production. This is even true for the development of the story, as Lacuesta himself acknowledges: In the case of La leyenda, you could almost say that the whole film was based on the casting, because we were not looking for actors to play a role, but for people whose lives were to become our storyline. (cited in Rodríguez, 2007) The case of Israel10 who, together with Makiko, is the main character in La leyenda del tiempo, is a clear example of how knowing how to listen to reality can surprise one by offering more interesting stories than those drawn from fiction. According to Lacuesta,11 although the story’s central focus originally was a boy who lost his remarkable singing ability when his voice broke, Israel’s story seemed far more appealing. Thus the film is constructed through a combination of preconceived ideas, such as the fact that the child was born in the year of Camarón’s death, with nuances proffered by reality: in this case, for example, the reason that this child is no longer able to sing is not that his voice has changed; rather, that he is mourning his father’s death. His true story is recounted in the film, and for that reason Lacuesta speaks of co-authorship.12 Typically, the choice of characters is made prior to filming, but in cases where the film is constructed as it goes along, the characters may emerge as the film-maker sets about filming reality. For example, in Israel’s case, his main role was not firmly decided until filming was already under way. Although Israel’s story had captivated his director, the boy’s poor performance in a screen test conducted prior to filming made Lacuesta question Israel’s involvement in the film. Fortunately, he was given another opportunity when filming began: this time not to play a role, but simply to be himself in front of the camera; this gave reality the chance to flourish, bringing authenticity, naturalness and spontaneity to the film process. Thus, in accordance with Nichols, ‘[t]he impulse is toward social actors who can “be themselves” before the camera in an emotionally revealing manner’ (1991: 120). First Living, Then Filming From the beginning of his career, Jean Rouch realized that the only way to learn from reality is to be part of it. Of course, Flaherty had done this before: it took him three years to shoot Nanook of the North. Thus, as Rouch himself suggests, ‘Flaherty believed that, in order to 111

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film some men belonging to a foreign culture, it was necessary first to know them’ (1985: 71). Three years was also the time that it took Guerin to complete his film. During the first year not a single shot was filmed, as Guerin and his team devoted their efforts to soaking up the reality that they intended to film and establishing a common language through which to represent it as honestly as possible. The following two years were characterized by a creative alternation between filming and editing, through which the film was constructed.13 Thus, in his film En construcción, Guerin seems to apply what he calls ‘the Flaherty work unit’. As Guerin notes, referring to Flaherty, ‘first comes living the experience; before shooting a single image he wants to meet the people he will be filming and out of that knowledge [comes] a movie’.14 Similarly, as Viestenz (2009) observes, the ethos of ‘first living, then filming’ is posited not only by Flaherty but also by Christian Metz in his essay ‘Aural Objects’: ‘In order for me to have tried to dismantle the “objects” which so strike the native […] it was necessary that I be that native myself ’ (1999: 356, 359). Living with reality was also likely to have been a guiding principle for the construction of La leyenda del tiempo. Its director, Lacuesta, accompanied by his crew, lived in the reality that was the object of study for the time needed to achieve what is known as the ‘going native’ stage in the field of ethnography. This extended period of cohabitation with the reality to be filmed is made explicit in Guerin’s film when, after the opening sequence, the black-and-white images from the past give way to colour images of the present. In the background, there is a wall painted with eyes that bear witness to the neighbourhood’s plight. It is a metaphor for a way of approaching the real world; on that same wall, a sign will appear that reads as follows: ‘Things seen and heard during the construction of a new building in Chinatown, a popular district of Barcelona that was born and dies with the century.’ Therefore, those eyes painted on the wall might be construed as the eyes of Guerin and his crew, who have documented the transformation that the El Raval neighbourhood underwent at the turn of the century as a result of property speculation. Thus, as the sign reads, the neighbourhood dies with the close of the century that witnessed its birth, and does so to the noise of huge bulldozers that mercilessly knock down its walls, turning its history into rubble: bulldozers that can be interpreted, in turn, as a metaphor for the heavy machinery of the film industry – the cause of death of a way of understanding cinema in decline at the turn of the millennium. This is a form of film-making with which Guerin identifies and which, rather than being restored, has been demolished, like the buildings of El Raval. Guerin shows the audience the neighbourhood residents’ feelings on the matter, as some graffiti on one of the walls makes the following declaration: ‘Demolition, no! Restoration, yes!’ He also expresses his own position on this issue, or rather the viewpoint from which the filmic text will address this social problem. This viewpoint will not be that of the administration, urban speculators or the ‘colonizers’ (the term used by the film crew to refer to the new owners of the properties), but of the residents, to whom the neighbourhood has belonged for a century but who will be dispossessed of it at the century’s close, as urban reform is intended not for them but for the bourgeoisie: those with the financial resources to pay the ‘twenty million pesetas’ 112

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(approx. €120,000) which, as we are told by one of the Moroccan labourers in the film, the new flats are going to cost. Those very same flats were purchased from their previous owners for only 800,000 pesetas (approximately €4,800). One might well wonder what has become of those owners. The answer to this question finds room in the filmic text itself when, for example, Juani and her boyfriend, two of the neighbourhood residents selected to become protagonists of the film, are left out in the street after their flat has been demolished. Or when we see the old former sailor – another of the protagonists of one of the plot strands that make up the film’s structure – laden with his few belongings and wandering aimlessly amid the rubble, as he searches for a place that used to belong to him but is no longer his: ‘Speculation being the cause of it all’, as can be read in the graffiti that stands out on the walls that line his path. Thus everything appears to come under the power of the bulldozer which, at the end of the film, unhesitatingly demolishes the eyes that have borne witness to its boundless greed. Also falling with them to its death is the kind of cinema championed by José Luis Guerin, who champions Juani and her boyfriend’s cause in the film’s closing sequence. After seeing the colonizers arriving in the neighbourhood and hearing their aspirations of gentrification (‘let’s hope that over the years these houses are all new and have the nicest views’, or, ‘I just don’t want them hanging out laundry on the balcony’), Guerin sides with those who have been his main characters by means of a camera that is no longer a witness, as it stops taking static shots and becomes a moving camera that follows Juani and her boyfriend, until a cut to black gives way to the credits. Control and Randomness: A Delicate Balance As Guerin stated: ‘Renoir once said: “When filming one must always leave one door open for reality,” and I agree totally. Rather than thinking in terms of documentary and fiction, it seems more enlightening to think in terms of control and randomness’ (cited in Monterde, 2007: 121). Meanwhile, Lacuesta has supported this same assertion in different interviews,15 echoing the words of the Dutch director Johan Van der Keuken. In the same vein, Guerin also notes: [T]his dialectic between the calculated and the random was already present in the films of the Lumières, where this dual perspective is already very clear: they choose a topic, an angle, a distance, some characters […] and then leave room for randomness, without knowing what is going to happen in the chaos from which it emerges. (cited in Monterde, 2007: 122) Meanwhile, for Fatimah Tobing Rony, Flaherty was the one who ‘had produced for the first time a form of cinema paralleling participant observation of reality’ (1996: 109). In both cases, to use the words of Nicolas Philibert, ‘a film is a little of that. Being able to welcome the unexpected within a given framework’.16 Thus, another of the determining factors in this type 113

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of cinema so dependent on improvisation is that the film-maker must know how to create the right situations, in order to allow the essence of reality to emerge spontaneously. We find an example of this in La leyenda del tiempo when, after the opening sequence, the film enters fully into Israel’s story. Following a conversation in which Israel’s teacher remarked that he wanted to hold a review class at the end of the first semester, where the students would be asked to look back on the year and identify the best and the worst moments, Lacuesta – who knows how to listen to reality – found a perfect opportunity in this activity to introduce the drama affecting his protagonist right at the outset. Thus the teacher was prompted to add a personal dimension to his questions, thereby encouraging the topic of the death of Israel’s father to come up within the scene. This arrangement with the teacher was the only aspect preconceived by the director before shooting began; the rest of the scene, action and dialogue are the result of spontaneous improvisation. The combination of control and randomness bore fruit and eventually, after the teacher’s question about the saddest moment of the year, Israel replies, ‘what happened to my father’. The moment captured on film is authentic and filled with emotion, particularly because Israel knew nothing about what was going on; this ensured that the situation was real and elicited a genuine emotional response from the character. In order to maintain authenticity, the scene was filmed in real time. Nonetheless, how can this advantage be translated to the screen, when the time available for the scene is shorter than the footage? The only solution is to resort to editing that would allow, on the one hand, a concise rendering of the scene and, on the other, its dramatization. Clearly, success depends largely on selection of the most significant moments, or ordering the sequence. The scene begins with the lighter questions (positive value), then moves onto the bitter dimension (negative value) and from the superficial to the personal, saving Israel’s intervention for the final moment. Thus the scene is built following a clear pattern that shifts from one value to the next, while a dramatic crescendo is reserved for the final, emotional climax, which is filmed with a close-up of Israel. The emotion is not only highlighted by the shot scale, but also intensified by its duration. Finally, another device that is key to achieving an emotional climax is the soundtrack: in this case, it is more due to its absence rather than its presence as, following Israel’s response, the classroom is filled with respectful silence. This silence is prolonged just long enough for the emotion that emerged spontaneously to be transferred to the screen and reach the audience. In this way, Lacuesta introduces Israel’s story with an emotional situation involving the character, since ‘emotional realism selects aspects of a scene in accordance with their emotional importance to characters’ (Nichols, 1991: 155). Conclusion In this chapter I have examined two Spanish films that exemplify the rebirth in the last two decades of a trend in contemporary cinema that is characterized, on the one hand, by its central focus on reality, and on the other, by its condition of formal hybridization. The style of these films 114

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can be described as a cinematic form that employs devices from fiction to achieve identification and subjective engagement that results in ‘a tie between the viewer and the intersubjective domain of the character’ (Nichols, 1991: 156), as well as devices from documentary that give the sense of a reproduction of reality, so that the filmed does not seem staged but instead has the quality of life unfolding before the camera’s gaze. I refer here to the documentary impulse for attaining that utopia of authenticity: that is, to make the film look real. Following the thinking of Panofsky (1995), these films stand at a curious crossroads between the ‘call for transparency’, whereby the screen is to be a true reflection of physical reality, and the ‘call for manipulation’, whereby reality is to be transformed into art. In short, as Quintana points out, they are films that deal with finding ‘a balance between reproduction in film and rhetorical processes in the construction of reality that are characteristic of fiction’ (2003: 69).

Notes   1 Nichols defines this concept as follows: ‘the observational mode stresses the non-intervention of the film-maker. Such films cede “control” over the events that occur in front of the camera more than any other mode’ (1991: 38).   2 As noted by Rhodes and Springer (2006), examples of this type of film can be found in early cinema, such as in Edison’s film Blacksmith Scene (1893).   3 As Jared F. Green notes, ‘in film theory, the hermeneutic problem that is commonly thought to divide nonfiction from fiction is almost invariably traced back to early French cinema’s aesthetic and conceptual scission between the Lumière brothers and George Méliés’ (2006: 67).   4 Ranciere (2006) uses the term ‘documentary fiction’; Jones (2005) uses ‘fiction-documentary hybrids’; Rhodes and Springer propose ‘docufiction’ (2006: 5); and Rodríguez-Mangual opts for ‘fictual faction’ (2008: 299).   5 This movement was pioneered in international contemporary cinema by film-makers such as the Dardenne brothers, Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen and Samira Makhamalbaf, Jafar Panahi, Nicolas Philibert, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Tsai Ming Liang, Kore-eda and Hany AbuAssad, among many others.   6 Other similar Spanish films from this same period that could be included here include: Gaudí (1989) and Las variaciones de Gould/Gould Variations (1992), both directed by Manuel Huerga. For more Spanish landmark works in this genre produced prior to those cited, see Monterde (2001: 15–26).   7 The archive material is: 8mm footage taken by Joan Colom in 1959; the medium-length documentary El alegre paralelo/The Happy Parallel (Ripoll Freixes and Ramon, 1964; the film’s credits only list the former as director, and 1960 appears as the year of completion); and finally, the 1955 film directed by Julio Salvador, Sin la sonrisa de Dios/Without the Smile of God.   8 José Monge Cruz, better known as ‘Camarón de la Isla’, is one of the most important figures in the history of flamenco. A headline published in the Spanish newspaper El País on Friday July 3 1992 reported his death, describing him as ‘the flamenco singer from Cádiz who 115

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  9

10 11 12

13 14 15 16

revolutionized flamenco from a standpoint of absolute purity’ (Yélamo and Rodríguez, 1992). The album to which this revolution is mainly attributed, La Leyenda del Tiempo, gave Lacuesta’s film its title. Lacuesta comments that ‘during filming, the script was a sheet of paper with a list of possible sequences. There was no content, no dialogue; we didn’t know what was going to happen. Basically it just listed the characters who were going to participate in each sequence and the locations where we would be filming’ (cited in Cerdán, 2007: 246). Isaki Lacuesta chose Israel from among hundreds of children, all non-professional actors who formed part of the natural setting chosen as the object of study. Lecture by Isaki Lacuesta at the Fine Arts College, Valencia Polytechnic University, February 2012. According to Guerin: ‘All of the words are the actors’ words and they are exceptional dialogues, so full of life that I think it would be impossible to write them. In a documentary of this kind the characters are decisive not only because they are the face and the presence of the film, but because they transform into co-authors, co-directors’ (cited in MartínezCarazo, 2007: 246). The reason behind the title of En construcción is not only the fact that the construction of a building is one of the fundamental pillars at the disposal of discourse, but also because it is a metaphor for the way in which the film has been realized. Lecture by José Luis Guerin at El Escorial, Madrid, August 28 2003. This information is taken from various interviews (see Rodríguez, 2007; Serra, 2006). Lecture by Nicolas Philibert at the Cinémathèque Québécoise, 2002.

References Arnheim, R. (1939). ‘Fiction and fact’, Sight and Sound, 7: 32. Bazin, A. (2004). ¿Qué es el cine? (Madrid: Rialp). Brunette, P. (1985). ‘Rossellini and cinematic realism’, Cinema Journal, 25.1: 34–49. Cavell, S. (1979). The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Cerdán, J. (2007). ‘Isaki Lacuesta’ in J. Cerdán and C. Torreiro (eds.), Al otro lado de la ficción: Trece documentalistas españoles contemporáneos (Madrid: Cátedra), 209–51. Cowie, E. (2011). Recording Reality, Desiring the Real (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press). Currie, G. (1996). ‘Film, reality and illusion’ in D. Bordwell and N. Carroll (eds.), Post-theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press), 325–44. (1999). ‘Visible traces: documentary and the contents of photographs’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 57: 285–97. Elsaesser, T. and Hagener, M. (2010). Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (New York: Routledge). Green, J. F. (2006). ‘This reality is not one: Flaherty, Buñuel and the irrealism of documentary cinema’ in G. D. Rhodes and J. Parris Springer (eds.), Docufictions: Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking (Jefferson NC: McFarland Company), 64–87. 116

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Griffith, R. (1979). ‘Film and reality: the background’ in L. Jacobs (ed.), The Documentary Tradition (New York: W.W. Norton and Co.), 202–4. Jones, K. (2005). ‘I walk the line’, Film Comment (Jan.–Feb.): 41, 1. Kracauer, S. (1997). Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Landesman, O. (2006). ‘In the mix: reality meets fiction in contemporary Iranian cinema’, Cineaste, 31.3: 45–7. MacCabe, C. (1976). ‘Theory and film: principles of realism and pleasure’, Screen, 17.3: 7–28. (1985). Theoretical Essay: Film, Linguistics, Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Martínez-Carazo, C. (2007). ‘Deconstrucción/Reconstrucción: En construcción de José Luis Guerin (2001)’, Letras Hispanas, 4.2: 2–15. Metz, C. (1999). ‘Aural objects’ in L. Braudy and M. Cohen (eds.), Film Theory and Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 356–59. Monterde, E. (2001). ‘Realidad, realismo y documental en el cine español’ in J. M. Catalán, J. Cerdán and C. Torreiro (eds.), Imagen, memoria y fascinación: Notas sobre el documental en España (Madrid: Ocho y medio), 15–26. (2007). ‘José Luis Guerin’ in J. Cerdán and C. Torreiro (eds.), Al otro lado de la ficción: Trece documentalistas españoles contemporaneous (Madrid: Cátedra), 111–40. Nichols, B. (1991). Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Panofsky, E. (1995). Three Essays on Style (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Plantinga, C. (2005). ‘What a documentary is, after all’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 63.2: 105–17. Prince, S. (1996). ‘True lies: perceptual realism, digital images and film theory’, Film Quarterly, 49.3: 27–37. Quintana, Á. (2003). Fábulas de lo visible: El cine como creador de realidades (Barcelona: Acantilado). Rancière, J. (2006). The Politics of Aesthetics (New York: Continuum). Rhodes, G. D. and Springer, J. P. (2006). Docufictions: Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking (Jefferson NC: McFarland Company). Rodríguez, H. J. (2007). Voces en el tiempo: conversaciones con el último cine español (Madrid: Fundación Colegio del Rey). Rodríguez-Mangual, E. M. (2008). ‘Fictual factions: on the emergence of a documentary style in recent Cuban films’, Screen 49.3: 298–315. Rothman, W. (1988). ‘The filmmaker as hunter. Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North’ in A. Rosenthal (ed.), New Challenges for Documentary (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 23–39. Rouch, J., (1985). ‘¿El cine del futuro?’ in A. Colombres (ed.), Cine, Antropología y Colonialismo (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Sol), 69–78. Rush, J. (1990). ‘Internalizing history: the limits of transforming documentary into fiction’, Journal of Film and Video, 42.3: 5–17. Serra, X. (2006). ‘Les dues vides del mite/Las dos vidas del mito’, Benzina: Revista d’excepcions culturals, 3: 26–28. 117

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Sherwood, R. (1979). ‘Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North’ in L. Jacobs (ed.), The Documentary Tradition (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.), 15–19. Tobing Rony, F. (1996). The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Etnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Tyler, P. (1979). ‘Documentary technique in film fiction’ in L. Jacobs (ed.), The Documentary Tradition (New York : W.W. Norton & Co.), 251–66. Vaughan, D. (1999). For Documentary: Twelve Essays (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Viestenz, W. (2009). ‘Cinematic ethics within the picnoleptic moment in José Luis Guerin’s En construcción’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 86.4: 537–53. Yélamo, A. and Rodríguez, C. (1992). ‘Muere Camarón de la Isla, el cantaor gaditano que revoluciono el flamenco desde la pureza absoluta’, El País, 3 July, available at http://elpais.com/ diario/1992/07/03/cultura/710114411_850215.html, last accessed on 20 April 2014.

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Chapter 8 Art and Ethnography: Miquel Barceló and Isaki Lacuesta – Earth Magicians? Wenceslao García Puchades and Miguel Corella Lacasa

The slimy is docile. Only at the very moment when I believe that I posses it, behold by a curious reversal, it possesses me. (Sartre, 1969: 608)

I

n an article in which the film critic Carlos Boyero (2011a) reported on the award-winners at the 2011 San Sebastian International Film Festival, he stated that Los pasos dobles/ The Double Steps (Lacuesta, 2011) ‘is not only unintelligible, but also vainly pretentious, deadly boring and a narrative failure in its attempt to mix legends and realism’.1 These statements by the provocative journalist gave rise to an immediate response which had a considerable impact in the press and created a slight stir on the internet; specialist journals on Spanish cinema became the battlefield for the film’s champions and detractors (Boyero, 2011b; Lacuesta, 2011; Minder, 2011; Pàmies, 2011). It is worth recalling this heated argument in order to emphasize one of the principal points of debate which will help ground our analysis of both this film and El cuaderno de barro/The Clay Diaries (2011), also directed by Lacuesta, which, stemming from the same idea, could be considered a companion piece to Los pasos dobles. The main issue at hand is the controversy surrounding the supposed unintelligibility of the film, a question that Boyero links to a hypothetical formal defect in the film: the failure to integrate the two levels of legend and reality. Contrary to the film critic’s position, Lacuesta defends the idea that the film could be understood by a child because they have an innocent and primitive perspective uncorrupted by the learning process.2 The fact that the plot of Los pasos dobles is organized around the search for an unknown masterpiece, and El cuaderno de barro is a documentary about an artistic performance, allows us to turn to old topics of artistic literature to analyse these two films. The figure that Baudelaire proposed as ‘the painter of modern life’ was a new artist that had to reflect the spirit of a time embroiled in a constant process of movement and renewal, who abandoned academic formality and eschewed classical influence in order to purify their own vision. Perhaps, like Lacuesta’s Barceló, Baudelaire’s painter adopts the innocence of a child, the ability to rediscover the world with the naivety possessed by those who are still recovering from an illness, those who have been near death, or the energy and the drunkenness of a savage (Baudelaire, 1964[1863]; Balzac, 2000[1831]). Boyero’s criticism reproduces a typical formula in the tradition of pictorial criticism by stating that the principal reason for the film’s failure lies in the fact that it is ‘vainly pretentious’. The excess of pretentions, the wish to reconcile legend and reality, is what supposedly makes the viewing experience more tedious than watching paint dry.

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In line with the logic of the critique, we need to pose the following questions. Where, in the film critic’s opinion, does this failure originate? Where exactly is this excess of pretension which renders Los pasos dobles redundant for him? The answer is in credibility: that is, the translation of legend into reality. Therefore, Lacuesta’s failure is Frenhofer’s failure: the painter protagonist of The Unknown Masterpiece who tries to paint a figure that seems to come out of the painting. Balzac’s great painter goes crazy because he thinks that the woman he has painted is about to come to life and emerge from the painting, while his painter friends just see a scribble of jumbled lines from which only a foot can be distinguished. Frenhofer believes he is Pygmalion’s reincarnation: like Scotty, the protagonist of Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958), they both confuse legend with reality (Stoichita, 2006). They are both victims of an excess in thought and pretentiousness, characteristics identified by artists such as Cézanne, Picasso, Rilke and Schönberg on reading Balzac’s short story (see Ashton, 1991). This initial approach to Lacuesta’s diptych could be summarized in the two views expounded in the most important debate which emerged in relation to the premiere of Los pasos dobles. On the one hand, Boyero believes the film is unable to translate legend into the reality of the film fiction. It is a failure because it has mixed the reality of the legend with the fiction of reality: a failure of the metamorphosis of Augiéras’ biography into Barceló’s life, and the metamorphosis of Barceló’s life into the black protagonist of Los pasos dobles. It is a failure because it has not managed to build a credible story originating from a legend, and has proposed only a ‘folk depiction of rituals and ceremonies from Mali’ (Boyero, 2011b) that leaves the viewers indifferent since they do not recognize any real meaning in something that is only presented as ‘cryptic exoticism’ (Boyero, 2011b). Ultimately, it is a failure of someone who has not managed to provoke in the European viewer the emotion of someone who appropriates a magical object to imbue it with a new meaning. On the other hand, we have the Catalan director’s view, stating that the film can be understood by anyone as long as they adopt the naive perspective of a child or a savage; the perspective of a viewer who observes reality without the typical baggage of the modern western intellectual. ‘Poïpoïdrome’ and ‘Magiciens de la terre’ A curious coincidence can assist us in understanding the epistemological antecedents to this argument. In 1963, the artist Robert Filliou, in collaboration with the architect Joachim Pfeufer, devised the Poïpoïdrome, a space for ‘the functional relation of thinking, activity, and communication’ (Filliou and Pfeufer, 1975). The term ‘Poïpoïdrome’ derives from the expression ‘poipoi’, which was used by the Dogon tribe when two of its members met and had to answer questions such as the following: ‘How is your meadow? How is your family? How are your cattle? How are your poultry? How is your house?’ The answer to these questions could be a simple ‘poipoi’ before leaving, or sometimes the dialogue would be repeated (Filliou and Pfeufer, 1975). 122

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Despite the fact that the Poïpoïdrome plan has not been completely developed, it shows a 24m2 building divided into four halls where different activities are proposed ‘in order to challenge conventional thinking and to bring the viewer to a heightened state of mental and creative activity’ (Higgins, 2002: 201–2). In 1978, as an assignment from the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Filliou and Pfeufer built a version of the Poïpoïdrome as a ‘Hommage aux Dogons et aux Rimbaud’. This installation displayed pictures, videos and objects collected during a trip to the Dogon Country in Mali, which they both had visited years before. The Poïpoïdrome was presented as a space that favoured creative experimenting, since it made possible visitors’ interaction with objects and images from the Dogon culture. While this exhibition took place, Filliou and Pfeufer travelled to Mali again to explain their Parisian installation to the Dogon people. The result of this trip was a film in which the artists intended to show the curiosity and interest aroused there by the Parisian installation (Martin, 1989). The ‘Poïpoïdrome: Hommage aux Dogons et aux Rimbaud’ developed by Filliou and Pfeufer in 1978 appears as the point of reference in another exhibition called ‘Magiciens de la terre’, which took place in the Pompidou Centre more than ten years later. In its catalogue, Jean-Hubert Martin, curator of the exhibition, referred to this piece of art as the testimony of ‘the possibility of a dialogue between people from different cultures’ (Martin, 1989: 8). Martin thinks that the Poïpoïdrome represents a space for dialogue and ways of communication that lead to cultural exchanges which can have unexpected results. On this basis, the curator developed the exhibition as a space where the viewer could ‘talk’ to western contemporary art and the art of those ostensibly peripheral cultures (African, Asian, South American, Australian, etc.) in a new way, thus avoiding using the colonialist categories which modernity has ‘normalized’. From our perspective, Los pasos dobles reproduces (redoubles, to use a pun in relation to the Catalan director’s films) Augiéras’ steps in his trip to Mali in the same way that JeanHubert Martin redoubles Filliou and Pfeufer’s Poïpoïdrome with Magiciens de la terre. Conversely, echoing Filliou and Pfeufer’s return to Dogon country to make a film and confirm the tribe’s interest in their work, El cuaderno de barro documents Barceló’s return to Mali to show its inhabitants his performance of Los pasos dobles: a work that, as stated by the Catalan artist, emerges from his experiences in Dogon country. This coincidence enables us to grapple with the supposed unintelligibility of Lacuesta’s films by using categories that led to an argument prior to the appearance of Magiciens de la terre in the field of art exhibitions at the end of the 1990s. We will try and suggest that the success of Lacuesta’s diptych, as was the case with Martin’s exhibition or Filliou’s Poïpoïdrome, must be understood not as the credible presentation of the translation of cultures emerging from other spaces, but as the construction of an ‘Other’ space to talk with other cultures: a space where objects move from their origin and take place in a rhizomatic relation, by means of which Europe tries to enact a critique through the encounter with different cultures – even if this entails renouncing the logical presentation of words. Thus, we can understand the conflict between the critic and the film-maker as the disagreement between two perspectives towards the cultural other: those of the modern 123

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and the postmodern spectator. Whereas the critic observes the ‘other’ through the prism of logical intelligibility, searching for a credible and univocal sense, the film-maker views it through that which is hidden and believes that sense can only be gleaned from the unexpected experiences, untranslatable into words, of different lives. In what follows, our intention is to develop these questions in further detail from a postmodern way of looking at other cultures, in line with the Magiciens de la terre exhibition. The Postmodern Perspective on Other Cultures in Magiciens de la terre The postcolonial theorist Thomas McEvilley (1992a and 1992b) considers that Magiciens de la terre opens up a process of decentralization of art and recognition to otherness and multiculturalism that could be termed ‘the postcolonial facet of post-modernity’ (see also Guash, 1997). This critic believes that the strategies used by this kind of postmodern exhibition marks a rupture with the model of the modernist exhibitions at the beginning of the twentieth century. These exhibitions were characterized by taking tribal objects out of the small hall of curiosities and the first ethnographic museums where they had been exhibited throughout the nineteenth century, and placing them within the neutral and aseptic environment of the gallery and the white cube (see McEvilley, 1999). Free of their context and gathered under the term ‘primitive art’, all these tribal objects were subordinated to the western historical chain, and presented themselves as simple accessories to the progressive temporality of modern art in order to make it possible to classify and organize all the tribal cultures into a hierarchy, by rendering the superiority of western civilizations legitimate regarding their colonial conquests (McEvilley, 1992a, 1992b). Conversely, the postmodern exhibition was not part of the conflict over the priority of historical centralism; rather, it allowed a dialogue between different cultural systems to occur. The postmodern programme of art history focuses its studies on the canons within the relativity of a time and a culture: therefore, its objective is not only to search for a common linear temporality, but to insist on difference in itself (McEvilley, 1992b: 71). The strategy used by the postmodern exhibition is an attempt to experience different art and tribal objects without a unifying principle; to lead the viewer in their tour around the exhibition. It involves replacing the intensity of the historical sense with the ephemeral encounter by proposing an appropriate relational space, in order to renew intercultural dialogue through the simple experience of the materiality of objects (McEvilley, 1989: 22). In spite of this diversity, all the objects had been selected according to a criterion; as the curator stated in the preface to the catalogue: All the objects gathered have been chosen because they make sense, even if, or perhaps even because, that sense cannot be translated into words. The principal question is to know why the objects that have a precise meaning in their original context are sometimes 124

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understood, appreciated and valued with a new meaning that we give them. When we find out the origin of the misunderstanding, its consequences are fascinating, since the object comes to a sort of second life that has a meaning given by us which it did not have before. This drift, instead of leading to rejection, should stimulate a deeper reflection. (Martin, 1989: 9) However, to what untranslatable sense does the curator of the exhibition refer? Martin believes that the exhibited objects in Magiciens de la terre are not ‘simple functional or material objects or tools’ but also ‘metaphysical-valued receptacles’. Therefore, the exhibition is predicated on the idea that both artistic and tribal objects have an ‘aura’ or ‘magic’ – an ‘energy’ that transcends what is material or rational. In Martin’s words: ‘The term “magic” is the most commonly used to describe the intense and inexplicable influence exerted by art’ (1989: 8–9). The process of creation in the artistic environment appears as the space of activity or discipline that takes the place devoted to what is spiritual or metaphysical in our society. In other words, the artistic act – in a manner akin to ritual or religion – has a common energy shared by human creation, and is incarnated in multiple cultural directions. Martin states that artistic practice represents the moment of metamorphosis when matter turns into something magical, when the earthly and the divine coincide in the same object. The art object, like the tribal one, reveals that original moment. Both forms of practice share ‘the attachment to earth’ and recall the search for the ‘lost paradise of collective creation’ (1989: 10). From this vantage point, non-western cultures rise from the obscurity imposed for so long on them by the West, and turn into the place where that search could be undertaken. Once the exhibition parameters are defined, only the viewer’s subjective appraisal remains. Since the objects are displaced from their original context, the viewer has to interpret them by discovering new meanings which can be reached only by moving away from western rational forms of knowledge. According to Martin, ‘[s]ensitivity, instinct and intuition take on a fundamental role in a judgement that cannot be limited to rational formulas’ (1989: 9). In this situation, it is the viewer’s rather than the artist’s subjectivity which comes to the fore. The postmodern exhibition, states McEvilley (1992b: 59), takes control of the viewer to induce them into its system of definitions, implications and proposals: a mute but converging system. In line with this conception, the postmodern exhibition could be said to transform the museum space into an ‘Other’ space, where the viewer’s perspective has to make do without recourse to the logic of conventional discourse, and commence on a continuous search for new meaning emerging from the encounter with the objects displayed. In short, Magiciens de la terre breaks with modern exhibitions in the following ways. First, it replaces the emphasis of the exhibition experience from the ‘time’ variable to the ‘space’ variable, and makes the western spectator search for new meanings without the orientation of a discourse determined by the progressive and linear logic of western historiography. Second, in the absence of a familiar logos, the exhibition proposes a dialogue around what is hidden, intuitive, and/or emotional. To this end, it uses objects that represent that magical process of incarnation of the creative energy in matter, those elements of the earthly which have a certain 125

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aura. Third, in the realm of what is hidden, in this ‘Other’ space where magic and earth meet, the spectator must search for new forms of dialogue between what is close and far, what is familiar and strange, the ‘us’ and the ‘other’, always avoiding the collapse of this division. The Postmodern Exhibition in Lacuesta’s Diptych As we have suggested, Lacuesta’s diptych could be understood in terms of this ‘Other’ space that favours intercultural dialogue through double images. By using the recurrent image of the traveller in Los pasos dobles, we could say that Lacuesta’s films invite the spectator to explore these images as if they were the hints that a traveller – someone who does not know where they are coming from or going – finds in the middle of the desert. Thus, in this complex task, the traveller is expected to retrace their steps and look at the hints provided by Lacuesta in his film multiple times, in the manner that Lacuesta and Barceló investigate Augiéras’ footsteps, or as Martin did with Filliou. Los pasos dobles – and to a lesser extent, El cuaderno de barro – presents us with the concept of a film space completely different to that of conventional representation. In Deleuzian terms, we could state that this film would show ‘any-space-whatever’: ‘a space which is defined by parts whose linking up and orientation are not determined in advance, and can be done in an infinite number of different ways’ (Deleuze, 1986: 111–22, 120). In order to achieve this, Lacuesta previously has deprived the sense experience of meaning, something that can be achieved, as Deleuze has taught us, only through operations which subtract pure temporality from the narrative rules of action according to the logic of cause and effect – or from the ‘sensory-motor schema’ of ‘action images’ (Deleuze, 1986: 155–59, 197–216). These operations give rise to what Deleuze terms ‘pure optical-sound image’ (1989: 3) or ‘crystal-images’ (1989, 86–69). He states that a film image ‘crystallizes’ (1989: 270–80) when its actual image relates to its own virtual image: that is, when the real and the imaginary become indiscernible. Through what filmic operations does Lacuesta build these meaningless spaces? We would like to suggest that the answer is ‘symbolic montage’. As highlighted by Rancière in reference to Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma/History of Cinema (1988–98) in The Future of the Image, we could say that the symbolic montage used by the Catalan director in Los pasos dobles is constituted simultaneously by a negative and an affirmative operation. Through the former, Lacuesta aspires to the pure presence of the ‘ostensive image’ ‘without signification’, in its ‘being-there-without-reason’. He thereby shows us the images removed from their conventional contexts and assembled with heterogeneous elements initially compatible, causing a clash, a violent conflict (Rancière, 2007: 56–67; 23–4). This transformation of familiar images into strange ones makes us question the conventional meaning ascribed to images within perceptual reality. Following Rancière’s interpretation of Godard’s film, it could be suggested that through the collision and distance of these images, Lacuesta reveals the secret of the world: ‘that is, the other world whose writ runs behind its anodyne or glorious appearances’. By means of this ‘machine of mystery’ the director constructs 126

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a meaningless space, ‘not to contrast worlds’, but to present it as the ‘element that provides the term of measurement of the incommensurables’ (Rancière, 2007: 57–58). Therefore, this destructive or negative operation is linked to a second constructive or affirmative one by which the director restores familiarity, an occasional analogy that attests to a dual relationship, ‘a shared world where heterogeneous elements are caught up in the same essential fabric, and are therefore always open to being assembled in accordance with the fraternity of a new metaphor’ (2007: 57). Through this affirmative procedure, Lacuesta reinstates the iconic potentiality of an original communion by juxtaposing heterogeneous but analogous elements. From our perspective (and as we have stated throughout this text), this figure is simply the communion of the divine and mundane, the magical and earthly, the exceptional and conventional. This is how the juxtaposition of shots of the Dogon people’s tasks and rituals with those surrounding Barceló’s artistic practice must be understood. Emptied of their conventional meanings, the images of natives doing the washing in the river, grinding grain or dancing around the fire, seen together with the images of Barceló painting with watercolours or interacting and beating mud in his performance, are shown according to the intensity of their sounds, colours and forms in motion. Without a logos to depend upon, the viewer has to engage with these ‘pure optical-sound images’ both magical and mundane, through sensations and emotions in search of a renewed meaning. The task undertaken by the director in Los pasos dobles, and continued in El cuaderno de barro, not only consists of representing Augiéras’ legend, but re-presenting ‘the cosmic theatre of the stars’ – something that guided the French writer’s life and that he finally tried to represent in his Unknown Masterpiece: a bunker hidden in the middle of nowhere, whose walls were covered with drawings and paintings. To that end, Lacuesta juxtaposes Augiéras’ fiction with Barcelo’s real life in Mali, previously having emptied his images of their conventional meanings. First, he shows us the legend of the French writer and painter using native African men who, with the exception of the well-known Malian actor Hamadoun Kassogue chosen to play the colonel, had never acted before. Second, he depicts Miquel Barceló’s story in his workshop in Bamako. One night, after telling Augiéras’ legend to a group of friends, he convinces them to look for his hidden bunker. Through these operations Lacuesta blurs the boundaries between fiction and documentary, and manages to make the real and imaginary indiscernible: in other words, he makes the images of myth and reality the same thing. This is the cosmic theatre of images built by Lacuesta: a theatre in which the viewer feels obliged to engage with the images, be they actual or virtual, in order to discover new meanings that question our notions of creativity. Conclusion: From the Intelligible to the Monstrous We would like to end this chapter with a discussion of one of the first scenes from El cuaderno de barro. It is the film’s prologue and shows Miquel Barceló with his Dogon friends talking over the dinner table. They are engaged in a game which consists of creating an 127

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atmosphere for conversation and creative dialogue through inventing a witty and hilarious image. Amassagou claims that he has seen how mermaids are caught; according to him, their human component is thrown into the river and their tail is eaten in Mopti. In some respects this image responds to those beings referred to as ‘monstrosities’ by Jean Paul Sartre in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. According to the French philosopher, a ‘monstrosity’ must be understood in the Greek mythological sense as a being with the features of two or more species at the same time (McEvilley, 1996; Sartre, 1963). Now, in our opinion, this procedure of creative metamorphosis from double or monstrous images is the same as the one Lacuesta turns to in his diptych. We began this chapter with reference to the controversy generated over the intelligibility of the film – a question that the film critic Carlos Boyero linked to a failure to integrate two fields: legend and reality, fiction and documentary. Through our analysis, we hope to have convinced the reader that the result has become a ‘monstrosity’ in a non-pejorative sense. Lacuesta’s diptych offers the viewer a round trip without a map through a space where the only way to find one’s way is via monstrous images: double images that, like the albino’s, synthesize the elements of a disjunction maintaining the distinction between them (cf. Deleuze, 2004). It is a trip where past, present and future gather in a ritual time that invites the viewer to find once again what the West has lost, that for which they feel nostalgia – defined by Martin in terms of ‘magic’ and ‘earth’. Lacuesta and Barceló take on the guise of shamans organizing a ritual by which, through double images, they create a space of creation of meaning travelled by the ‘me’ and the ‘other’, thereby bringing Derrida’s sentence to life: ‘the me as other and other than myself, he makes or I make an exception of the same’ (2005: 16). Notes 1

2

Lacuesta replied to Boyero’s article in the paper La Vanguardia with ‘La crítica espectacular’ (‘The spectacular critique’) (Lacuesta, 2011). This was also a response to an article titled ‘Paso Doble’ by Sergi Pàmies (2011). In addition, Lacuesta’s blog was named after his article: ‘La crítica espectacular y otros pasatiempos’ (‘The spectacular critique and other pastimes’): http://lacriticaespectacular.blogspot.com.es. Lacuesta states this in an interview that can be found on You Tube: http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=6MNxkbWRZCA.

References Ashton, D. (1991). A Fable of Modern Art (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Balzac, H. (2000[1831]). The Unknown Masterpiece (New York: New York Review of Books). Baudelaire, C. (1964[1863]). The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. J. Mayne (London: Phaidon). Boyero, C. (2011a), ‘Rachel Weisz y Barceló, traicionados’, El País, 20 September, available at http:// elpais.com/diario/2011/09/20/cultura/1316469603_850215.html, last accessed on 12 July 2012. 128

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(2011b). ‘Lamentable Concha de Oro al exotismo críptico’, El País, 25 September, available at http://elpais.com/diario/2011/09/25/cultura/1316901608_850215.html, last accessed on 6 June 2012. Deleuze, G. (1986), Cinema 1: The Movement – Image, trans. H. Romlinson and B. Habberjam (London: Athlone Press). (1989). Cinema 2: The Time – Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta (London: Athlone Press). (2004). The Logic of Sense (London: Continuum). Derrida, J. (2005). The Politics of Friendship, trans. G. Collins (London: Verso). Filliou, R. and Pfeufer, J. (1975). 1/2 + 1/2 = Filliou/Pfeufer – Le [ou la] Poïpoïdrome à EspaceTemps Réel Prototype 00, catalogue, trans. B. Hock (Liège: Yellow Now), available at http:// www.artpool.hu/Fluxus/Filliou/Poipoi3e.html, last accessed on 11 July 2012. Guash, A. M. (1997). ‘Multidiversidad y multiculturalismo en el arte de los años noventa’ in A. M. Guash, El arte del siglo XX en sus exposiciones: 1945–1995 (Barcelona: Ediciones del Serbal), 397–400. Higgins, H. (2002). Fluxus Experience (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Lacuesta, I. (2011). ‘La crítica espectacular’, La Vanguardia, 6 November, available at http:// lacriticaespectacular.blogspot.com.es/2011/11/la-critica-espectacular-en-su-articulo.html, last accessed on 12 July 2012. McEvilley, T. (1989). ‘Ouverture du piège: l’exposition postmoderne et «Magiciens de la Terre»’ in J. -H. Martin (ed.), Magiciens de la terre (París: Editions du Centre Pompidou), 20–23. (1992a). ‘Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief ’ in T. McEvilley, Art and Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity (New York: Kingston), 27–55. (1992b). ‘Opening the trap’ in T. McEvilley, Art and Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity (New York: Kingston), 57–72. (1996). ‘History, quality, globalism’ in T. McEvilley and G. R. Denson (eds.), Capacity: History, the World, and the Self in Contemporary Art and Criticism (London: Routledge), 119–33. (1999). ‘Introduction’ in Brian O’Doherty (ed.), Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 11–15. Martin, J-H. (1989). ‘Préface’ in J. -H. Martin (ed.), Magiciens de la terre (París: Editions du Centre Pompidou), 8–11. Minder, R. (2011). ‘Miquel Barceló’s African Adventure’, New York Times, 5 December, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/arts/06iht-Lacuesta06.html?_r=4&pagewanted=1& emc=eta1, last accessed on 11 July 2012. Pàmies, S. (2011), ‘Paso doble’, La Vanguardia, 7 October: link no longer available, last accessed 12 October 2012. Rancière, J. (2007). The Future of the Image, trans. G. Elliot (London: Verso). Sartre, J. P. (1963). ‘Preface’ in F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington (New York: Grove Press), 7–34. (1969). Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. H. E. Barnes (London: Methuen). Stoichita, V. I. (2006). Simulacros: El efecto Pigmalión de Ovidio a Hitchcock (Madrid: Siruela).

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Chapter 9 The Everyday Affect: Isabel Coixet and the Five Senses Jennie Rothwell

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lthough fêted as one of Spain’s premier directors, Isabel Coixet demonstrates her vocation to be a transnational auteur film-maker by experimenting with different genres and formats, mapping out an atypical career trajectory within Spanish cinema. As noted by Núria Triana-Toribio (2006), Valeria Camporesi (2007) and Belén Vidal (2008), Coixet’s work simultaneously invites and rejects notions of national or gender identity, as this multifaceted film-maker attempts to transcend national barriers and avoid categorization as female, Spanish or Catalan. In this process, she creates a liminal space for her films using a wide-reaching intertextuality as the locus for her filmography, combining cinephilic tendencies, literary and artistic references to create a hybrid form of cinema. Drawing on tropes of familiar traditions such as melodrama, film noir and heritage film, she playfully subverts audience and genre expectations through her carefully constructed cinematography, updating these classic categories with visible and stylized editing techniques such as jump cuts and slow-motion. Concurrent to the development of her personal aesthetic, the director’s work has become increasingly skilled at manipulating the affective powers of cinema, with Coixet punctuating her multi-layered texts with the sensual, and appealing to the viewer on a primal level through visual and auditory triggers that invoke psychological responses. Just as Triana-Toribio suggests that cinephilia represents a language that Coixet and other contemporary directors ‘speak’ fluently (2006: 59), the sensual techniques carefully applied to the narratives, like impressionistic brush strokes, also create a vernacular that aids Coixet in inhabiting her liminal space outside national or generic parameters.1 This chapter will discuss her feature-length films Things I Never Told You (1995), A los que aman/For Those Who Love (1998), The Secret Life of Words (2005) and Map of the Sounds of Tokyo (2009) as examples of this sensorial cinema, and chart the progression of the affective through this cross-section of Coixet’s body of work.2 This piece will textually and texturally analyse segments from these works both written and directed by Coixet, as the psychologically fragile protagonists reestablish a meaningful connection to the sensual world. This analysis engages with similar ideas to those suggested in Susan Martin-Márquez’s recent work (2013a; 2013b), but focuses on Coixet’s reawakening of her deadened protagonists and her careful layering of affective techniques in order to create a crescendo of affect. Coixet’s Early Films and Advertising Portfolio: A Feast for the Senses Coixet’s extensive background in advertising provides a clue to her dexterity in conveying the sensory, since this hyper-condensed format necessitates a clear and affective mode of address in order to transmit its desired effect. For example, her commercial for the chocolate

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snack Huesitos (Emiliguirao, 2008) suggests a biological response, inviting the consumer to wink as a signal that they would like to eat one, thus engaging the sensory in order to sell a product. Coixet can translate techniques such as this into her cinematic output in a more complex way, given the much longer screen time at her disposal. In the advertisement, the emphasis on the eye draws the viewer into a dialogue with the mother and child winking on the screen and, as Jennifer Barker notes, ‘viewer and film share certain ways of being in, seeing and grasping the world, despite their vast differences as human and machine, one blood and tissue, the other light and celluloid’ (2009: 8). While acutely aware of this dualistic relationship, Coixet aims to exploit these similarities with her camera-eye as she approaches an affective visual language. Since Coixet operates the camera on her shoots, her direct contact with this mechanical eye facilitates her vocation as an auteur, bringing her closer to the filmed image and extending her control over the cinematography. In Coixet’s early films, her attempts at addressing the five senses were based generally on close camerawork and detail, in order to provide sensory snapshots. In a Deleuzian sense, she ‘envisages’ surfaces in close-up, investigating the textures and reflections they possess, as her mobile camera moves almost imperceptibly closer (Deleuze, 1997).3 For example, Things I Never Told You presents Ann (Lili Taylor) listening to music and making a sandwich, a close-up shot shows her hands squeezing a blob of cheese onto some bread and then gleefully licking her fingers: a small moment of everyday pleasure recreated for the audience. Focusing on the sandwich and involving the audience in this somewhat mundane process synaptically connects us to the protagonist’s fleeting somatic experience through this tight camerawork. The director’s well-documented love for the films of Wong Kar Wai and his hungry protagonists emerges strongly in images of food and eating, highlighting the strange fact that we rarely see characters eating on the screen (Coixet, nd). A need for physical sensations and human contact continues through the film, with Frank (Seymour Cassel) looking for hugs, just as obsessed neighbour Paul (Alexis Arquette) presses his face against his television screen while covertly watching the confessional videos that Ann has made for her boyfriend, expressing his desire to touch her in reality. Paul’s desperate action reveals the flatness of the screen and our inability to physically touch the representations we see on it, yet simultaneously reminds us of how deeply filmed images can affect our sensory perception, inviting a shared subjectivity or intersubjectivity between protagonist and audience. Equally, A los que aman appropriates a sensory mode of address at certain points, with Coixet enlivening the wedding night sequence between Matilde (Olalla Moreno) and León (Christopher Thompson) through detailed shots of the different layers of fabric that the groom peels away from his bride’s body, effectively replacing the sex scene. Through extreme close-ups, the camera photographs the texture of each garment, from Matilde’s thick petticoats to her gauzy veil. When we finally see her illuminated flesh, also tightly framed, the consummation for the viewer is complete, León’s hands now caressing her bare skin. This desire to ignite the senses and impart a sensation of tactility becomes more acute in Coixet’s later films, culminating in her most recent feature at the time of writing, Map of the Sounds of 134

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Tokyo, where even the texture of the fish being prepared at the Tsukiji market is made visible through tight camerawork. In her epilogue to the novelized outline of the film script, Coixet pinpoints the sights, sounds, smells and textures of the place, recounting ‘the smell of fresh tuna, seaweed and oysters, the shouts of the auctioneers, the clamour of thousands of boxes being dragged and that peculiar light from the fluorescent bulbs at four in the morning’ (2009: 115). This evocative scene is brought vividly to life in the film, as short bursts of closeup shots convey the hustle and bustle of the marketplace and the myriad activities taking place. The visceral effect of the dead flesh on display fits with the naked skin depicted later during the high-octane love scenes, as a similarly quivering camera does its utmost to capture every sensation that pulses from the frame and mimic slightly unsteady human vision. Affective Audio Moving from image to audio, Coixet labours to create a soundscape conducive to her representation of the sensual, carefully building up layers of sound in post-production to heighten her depiction of the senses. Throughout her filmography she has demonstrated her innate skill for selecting contemporary songs that fit Claudia Gorbman’s category of ‘auteur music’, creating ‘a platform for the idiosyncratic expression of taste’ (2007: 151), and reflecting the inner feelings of the people on the screen while manipulating those of the audience. Coixet (2005b) also writes extensively about her intimate relationship to music, recalling the shiver that she felt down her spine when she first heard the voice of Antony Hegarty, and the various images that come to mind when she listens to certain songs (Coixet, 2005c). However, this chapter will focus on the effects and affects of her sound design rather than her use of ‘auteur music’ as she operates within Agnès Varda’s ideas of cinécriture, simultaneously composing both sound and image.4 Coixet also exploits voice-over as a narrative device throughout her filmography, as well as using voice-over and dialogue to intensify moments of sensuous pleasure, with smells and tastes described in detail, to be sampled later by our main protagonists in a more reflective and usually solitary manner. By subverting the inherent vococentrism of this narrative style, Coixet can reclaim wordless moments of sensory contemplation and allow these pauses to speak for themselves. Susan Martin-Márquez (2013a; 2013b) has illustrated the haptic aspects of another Coixet film, My Life Without Me (2003), especially powerful in the moments when Ann (Sarah Polley) appears alone on the screen. This critic recounts the dreamlike opening sequence of the film as it triggers the affective through voice-over, with Ann narrating in the second person (‘this is you’) over images of her barefoot self, standing outside while it is raining. She argues that this switching of roles invoked by the voice-over invites the spectator to share in the terminally-ill protagonist’s subjectivity, and henceforth her sensory experiences – or as Vidal notes, this moment ‘encloses the spectator in Ann’s fantasy’ (2008: 224). Although not prompted by voice-over or fantasy, but rather an absence of words and a desire for isolation, a similar intersubjectivity applies to The Secret Life of Words, where the 135

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exposition sets up factory worker and Balkan war survivor Hanna (also played by Sarah Polley) as our cipher for this haptic visuality. She chooses to switch off the hearing aid that she wears, aurally signified by tinny conversations and faraway factory sounds, as her working day draws to an end. As soon as we see the extreme close-up of Hanna turning off her hearing aid, we become unwitting accomplices in her rejection of sound, sharing in her experience of the sensual as she undergoes a gradual emotional and sensorial awakening on meeting Josef (Tim Robbins), an injured man on an isolated North Sea oil rig. The childish voice-over that frames the film remains disembodied and somewhat mysterious: while connected to Hanna and always speaking about her, we deduce that it is not the voice of her conscious self. This mysterious being recounts tactile desires and experiences, such as being held or having her hair touched, in order to remind us of the sensory void in Hanna’s life rather than inviting an embodied response, as per Vivian Sobchack (2004). Similarly, in Map of the Sounds of Tokyo, the voice of an ‘other’ bookends the story of Ryu (Rinko Kikuchi), an assassin who works by day in the fish market, and David (Sergi López), a Catalan man who runs a wine shop in Tokyo, although in this case our narrator (Min Tanaka) is given a physical body to inhabit. His voice-over intensifies his own connection to the protagonist, as his infatuation with the enigmatic Ryu increases and she becomes more distant and unreachable. As well as using voice-over to pinpoint the sensual, Coixet imbues her dialogue with descriptions of the sensory as part of her build-up to more intense moments of sensorial reawakening for her main characters. For example, in The Secret Life of Words, the camerawork takes us gradually closer to Hanna as she sits alone in a corridor of the oil rig and experiences a moment of gastronomic epiphany. We watch her tentatively try the flavoursome food that chef Simon (Javier Cámara) has lovingly described in his kitchen: the same meal that Josef has consumed joyfully in the previous sequence. By this point the viewer can readily imagine the taste and smell of the meal, as the voices work to connect spectator and protagonist synaptically while Hanna eats in silence. Accordingly, Coixet forces us to listen to silences as intensely as we would to words. Anabel Martín (2011) connects The Secret Life of Words to the ideas of Slavoj Žižek, as we ‘hear’ Hanna with our eyes, allowing us to experience a palpable, audible moment of reflection, or something similar to John Cage’s views on silence as a presence rather than an absence. Additionally, María Donapetry (2011: 90) compares Coixet to Harold Pinter and Santiago Kovadloff ’s ideas of tangible, loaded or ‘indesignable’ silences, and Martin-Márquez (2013b: 556) notes how the frame seems to ‘respire’; all three point to the living, carnal quality of these silences as a fundamental aspect of the films. Similarly, the camera takes on a persona, bobbing in a similar manner to Hanna’s head as she starts to wolf down the leftovers of her patient’s dinner tray, the tinkering background music getting louder and more intense, parallel to the rising sound effects created by eating. Thus the spectator transcends the scopophilic look, moving into a deeper, or embodied, relationship with the on-screen image through this intersubjectivity. However, Coixet also exploits the faculty of hearing itself, as the act of listening gains a voyeuristic importance in the films, particularly in Map of the Sounds of Tokyo. The narrator’s need for the sensual borders on the obsessive, as he captures Ryu’s sound effects 136

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on tape and listens to them as intensely as possible, alone and wearing earphones. He is not a hardboiled detective by profession, although he investigates and tries to possess Ryu, noir-style, through his own professional means of sound recording. The audience also hears these tapes as subjective diegetic sound, yet we cannot be certain that their content is real or fantasy, since the sound man listens to conversations and noises he could not possibly have captured, such as Ryu and David laughing. The aerial shots of Tokyo complement this attempt to convey the narrator’s omniscience, with his voice-over prologue and epilogue framing the narrative, and the camerawork adding a sense of surveillance as a god-like vantage point, looking down on the labyrinthine city. His audiophilia encourages similar behaviour in the audience, and justifies our own desire to investigate this neo-fatale figure through fetishized listening while simultaneously magnifying the sensual aspects of the film. As if trying to learn a foreign language through a listen-and-repeat technique, he regurgitates her words in English – ‘Why not?’ – in an attempt to decipher her actions, but remains none the wiser about her true feelings. Listening and speaking become substitutes for touching, and Coixet herself has noted how sound becomes another character in the film (cited in Donapetry, 2009). In a parallel fashion, Hanna also interacts with an audio recording in The Secret Life of Words, obsessively listening to a message left on Josef ’s phone by his lover. Similar to the sound technician, Hanna listens in isolation in her patient’s old bedroom. She also begins to mouth the words, as the message increasingly invades her consciousness and she begins to vocalize her burgeoning sensory desires. Listening becomes a substitute for speaking, as both Hanna and the Japanese narrator absorb the words around them, afraid to utter their own, and only communicating with these desires to speak when they are alone. The considerable attention given to sound design in the films asserts Coixet’s enthusiasm for incorporating the spectator into the scene, with sounds strategically muffled or amplified so that we are equal to the characters on the screen. Furthermore, the audible sounds of cooking, apparent in chef Simon’s kitchen in The Secret Life of Words, and in some of the restaurants visited in Map of the Sounds of Tokyo, aid in evoking a smell for the audience, the steam from the dishes conjuring a sense of an enveloping vapour. In a similar fashion, the voyeuristically shot shower scenes from Map of the Sounds of Tokyo attempt to share scent with us, capturing the noise of the shower while the steam created carries the aroma of the lemon slices used by the women to our sensory imagination. In a more concrete kinaesthetic manner, Josef from The Secret Life of Words tries to inhale Hanna’s essence from a bar of soap that he finds in the backpack she abandons. The camera frames his fingers as he holds the soap and makes lather, gently rubbing his hands together in an attempt to touch Hanna, or a part of his memory of her, through this physical sensation. Although music is playing, the sound of Josef ’s sniff remains perceptible, forging a deeper connection to the sense of smell for the audience. Laura Marks describes the ability of smell to ‘create a pocket of affective experience, a memory or shock that briefly opens a window to the virtual’, which she thinks ‘might help people hang on to life when so much of our experience is deadening’ (cited in Muller, 2008). As a sense so directly related to emotion and nostalgia, Coixet attempts to 137

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touch the olfactory organs of her stifled protagonists, and those of the audience in some way, in a dedicated effort to create a wholly affective cinema. The Return to the Sensual: Crescendos of Affect In Coixet’s films, emotionally repressed characters often undergo a period of sensory deprivation, whether accidental of self-imposed, allowing the director to document their re-acquaintance with the sensual through a crescendo of affect. At the beginning of Map of the Sounds of Tokyo, the listless, taciturn Ryu plays an eastern cowboy, her job as an assassin setting her apart from society and preventing her from forming any tactile relationships other than with her knife (for gutting and preparing the fish at the market) and her gun. Living in a sparse, utilitarian apartment in the suburbs and distanced from the urban hub, Ryu is driven further outside society as a lonely commuter, her only face-to-face human contact seen in regular meals and meetings with the narrator. Similarly, hearing-impaired Hanna from The Secret Life of Words reneges the sensual, but her deprivation remains largely self-enforced in that she chooses when to turn her hearing aid on and off and isolate herself further from society. Additionally, we learn during the course of the film that she is not deaf from birth, thereby providing a clue to traumatic events in her recent life that have led to this extreme and self-inflicted sensory withdrawal, limiting her diet to chicken, white rice and apples, and her physical contact with others to a minimum. Hanna expresses faint signs of life, but subsequently rejects any desire that might engage her senses, only participating passively in her day-to-day routine. For example, when she makes phone calls to an unidentified woman (who we later discover is her counsellor), she does not speak, although she maintains this connection to the other woman’s voice. Further to this, we see her doing some needlework at home and on a bus journey, a sign of a possible creative outlet or a wish to create something textured and tactile, but when she dumps the embroidery hoop into the bin we realize its function as another technique for blocking out the world around her. Hanna does not even admire the scenery out the bus window, preferring to focus her attention on a monotonous, robotic, seemingly unemotional task. Yet both Ryu and Hanna express a budding need for the sensory, the former craving strawberry mochi cakes and devouring them with visible pleasure, while the latter begins to listen in on conversations happening around her with increasing interest. Coixet goes to great lengths to demonstrate the paucity of sensory experience in these characters’ lives, allowing her to document the gradual reawakening of their appetite for life. Like subtle shadows or flecks of colour applied by a painter, these tiny details flesh out each narrative, adding depth and texture to the image rather than heightening the verisimilitude of the film, revealing the repressed desires of the people we see on the screen. Correspondingly, the lovers of the female protagonists undergo their own sensory trauma, with Josef temporarily blinded after an accident on the oil rig, and the grieving David surrounded by memories and mementoes of his girlfriend, Midori, who committed suicide. 138

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Each are given ample time to convey their enthusiasm for taste and the pleasures of food (Josef) and wine (David), confirming their sensual status as the catalysts of reawakening for the female protagonists. The blind Josef makes assumptions about Hanna’s appearance, but ‘sees through’ her attempts to lie to him. He tries to elicit personal information from this reticent nurse, building an imaginary picture of her in his mind, which is only made real when he recovers his sight and goes to visit her counsellor, Inge (Julie Christie), in Copenhagen and is offered a photograph of Hanna, which initially he refuses to see. This photograph corresponds to Roland Barthes’ (2000) ideas around the nostalgia invoked by the photographic image, both as an embodiment of Hanna’s past life and an important clue for Josef in solving the mystery of who she really is. For his part, Josef rejects this invitation of nostalgia, preferring to find Hanna and begin a future with her rather than dwell on the past. This concept resurges in Map of the Sounds of Tokyo, as the men in Midori’s life each interact with photographs of her. Conveying grief through the memories evoked by a photographic image, they also express a yearning to possess this fragment of the dead woman, not to let go. Her father, Nagara (Takeo Nakahara), grips tightly a still image of them together, gently stroking it with his hand, as if it were Midori herself. The photo as proxy also relates to David, who cannot bring himself to change his screensaver, seeing a frozen snapshot of their relationship every time he turns on his computer. Nagara’s assistant, Ishida (Hideo Sakaki), who secretly loved Midori, cries over the torn photograph that he sneaked into his pocket, again demonstrating the futility of a two-dimensional image in replacing a real human presence. Ishida’s Midori is further fragmented, as half the photo is now in the hands of Ryu, who has destroyed, reconstructed, reproduced and enlarged her half depicting David, as she too falls foul of nostalgia. Ryu sticks her larger-than-life David on the wall above her bed, like a teenager would put up a poster of their idol or object of desire. Making a pin-up of the male protagonist not only forms part of Coixet’s attempt to deconstruct typical noir gender roles, but also feeds into the characters’ desire for sensual experiences, as David becomes the stimulus for Ryu’s sensory reawakening. However, tapes of moving images become just as important as the static photographs in Coixet’s world. Just as Paul in Things I Never Told You dares to touch Ann’s face on his TV screen, in a twisted version of the little boy in Bergman’s Persona (1966), Midori’s father is overwhelmed while watching home videos of her splashing about in a swimming pool, the moving images stirring memories of his daughter. The power of film to create a simulacrum becomes more acute in these later films by Coixet, as the filmed footage comes to represent something unknowable or untouchable, despite the protagonists’ attempts to interact with what they see on the screen. Similarly, in The Secret Life of Words, although Josef ’s motivations are clear and his desire overtly expressed, initially he refuses to see the still photo of Hanna, so Inge offers him a video of her testimony and a chance to see and hear what she has not expressed. His hands are framed in close-up holding the symbolic tape, which represents the key that could unlock Hanna’s secret. The room where he stands (the archive room in the real-life International Rehabilitation Centre for Victims of Torture that Coixet investigates in her documentary Viaje al corazón de la tortura/Journey to the Heart of 139

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Torture, 2003) contains thousands of gruesome sensory memories, recounted on videotape by other survivors of horrific torture. However, Josef has heard Hanna tell the beginnings of her story already, rendering this two-dimensional representation void for him, as he hands back the recording, rejecting the spectacle of hatred and horror that it contains. Martín notes that the film awakens the viewer from their ‘moral lethargy’ (2011: 281) and implicates them as a witness to the horrors of the Balkan War; yet in rejecting a visual representation of acts of torture, Coixet respects the collective memory of victims, allowing the physical and mental scars to communicate the devastation of torture and the awful shame felt by survivors. In handing back the tape, Josef chooses not to pursue the mystery of Hanna’s unknowable past, allowing her to deal with it on her own terms, to simply ‘go on living’, as she suggests when Josef enquires how she lives with the dead. Accordingly, Josef ’s hands become an important metaphor for the tactility of cinema, as the close camerawork draws our eye to the things that he touches throughout the film: Hanna’s soap, her backpack, the tape of her testimony and, most importantly, her tortured body. He touches the marks left by her torturers and rapists, in a scene that represents a peak of achievement in Coixet’s depiction of the senses. Following Jennifer Barker’s (2009) idea of the film itself possessing a physical body, the camera engraves Hanna’s scars onto the film negative, just as her captors sliced them into her skin; hence the film itself replicates the torture for the audience through its very medium. Coixet’s hero, John Berger, notes the similarity between Hanna and Tintoretto’s famous painting ‘Lady Baring her Breast’ (c. 1570), and reminds us that Hanna makes an almost identical gesture to the painted image while Josef, blinded and also visibly scarred from his own near-death experience, can only listen and touch (Berger in Coixet, 2005a: 7–10), reading Hanna’s scars as Braille-like hieroglyphs of her ordeal (Donapetry, 2011). Thus the focus shifts from the visual to the tactile, as only the audience can see Hanna’s scars; but the close-up shots of Josef ’s hands trigger our sensory imagination, as we envisage the texture of these indelible marks that we see on the screen. The narrative purposefully progresses towards this climax of affect, as Hanna’s senses are reactivated gradually throughout the film and her trauma finally unlocked by Josef ’s touch. Conclusion Over the course of her feature filmography, Coixet increasingly utilizes a sensory mode of address in order to connect with her spectators in a meaningful way, creating a bridge between the audiovisual and the rest of the senses. She has developed this mode insightfully, from her early experiments in Things I Never Told You and A los que aman to her more recent releases, with the textural and tactile becoming increasingly important within her work, as she struggles to portray human emotion without being pigeonholed by the coded meanings of traditional genre films. While trying to subvert categorization and audience expectations by engaging with well-known narrative structures, and eschewing the politicized gaze of the traditional male spectator, Coixet simultaneously edifies her 140

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texts with this mindful visual sensibility and a precise soundtrack to further arouse the senses and the emotions, creating a lingua franca of affect that helps her films eschew the narrow categorizations of genre cinema. During 2011 she made an advertisement for Estrella Damm beer, documenting a summer romance set around the famous restaurant, El Bulli. The extended three-minute version of the commercial comes replete with tactile imagery: skinny-dipping at Cap de Creus, the heroine nuzzling sea urchins with her nose, and climaxes with head chef Ferran Adrià relishing in a sneaky bite of a fried egg made by one of his kitchen trainees. The tagline, ‘Sometimes the ordinary can be extraordinary’ (‘a veces lo normal puede ser extraordinario’), seems a fitting slogan for Coixet’s own brand of visuality, whether in advertising, documentary or feature film, as she turns the banal into the sensual through her carefully crafted cinematography. This treatment of the senses allows for a biological rather than ideological identification with the lives of the on-screen protagonists, as Coixet tries to add another dimension to the flat screen and synaesthetically transport us into the quirky world that she inhabits. Acknowledgement I would like to thank Susan Martin-Márquez for her insightful plenary at the first GynoCine conference, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Massachusetts, on October 27 2011, and for subsequent publications of the talk which informed some of the ideas that I explore in this chapter. Notes 1

2

Triana-Toribio notes Coixet’s prowess in ‘speaking indie’ or ‘Hollywood’ to the extent that My Life Without Me (2003) was cited as a Hollywood film in British television listings (2007: 57). My Life Without Me’s success on the film festival circuit placed Coixet among a cohort of indie directors, cementing the transnational status that she had desired since her first feature film, Demasiado viejo para morir jóven/Too Old to Die Young (1989). For the purposes of this chapter, I have chosen a cross-section of her work: two early films made before this breakthrough and two produced after. Coixet’s other films also provide a feast for the senses, namely My Life Without Me and her short segment from the collective film Paris, Je t’aime/Paris, I Love You (2006), as well as her investigation of the sensory and tactile in some of her documentary work. The release of Elegy (2008) (an adaptation of Philip Roth’s novella The Dying Animal, 2001) marked the director’s first sex scenes (see chapter 18 in this volume), as well as her usual engagement with a sensory mode of address. Although she made significant changes to the screenplay by Nicholas Meyer, this chapter focuses on the films mentioned in the main text in order to chart a progression of the sensual in work that Coixet has devised, written, directed and shot, rather than adapted. 141

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3

4

Dissecting the two ‘poles’ of the face, Deleuze notes, ‘each time we discover these two poles in something – reflecting surface and intensive micro-movements – we can say that this thing has been treated as a face [visage]: it has been “envisaged” or rather “faceified” [visagéifiée] and in turn it stares at us [devisagé], it looks at us […] even if it does not resemble a face’ (1997: 88). Varda suggests that: ‘[a] well-written film is also well-filmed, the actors are well-chosen, so are the locations. The cutting, the movement, the points of view, the rhythm of filming and editing have been felt and considered in the way a writer chooses the depth of meaning of sentences, the type of words, number of adverbs, paragraphs, asides, chapters which advance the story or break its flow, etc. In writing it’s called style. In the cinema style is cinécriture’ (cited in Smith, 1998: 14).

References Barker, J. (2009). The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Barthes, R. (2000). Camera Lucida, trans. R. Howard (London: Vintage Books). Camporesi, V. (2007). ‘A ambos lados de todas las fronteras: Isabel Coixet y el cine español contemporáneo’ in C. Peña Ardid and M. A. Millán (eds.), Las mujeres y los espacios fronterizos (Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza), 55–69. Coixet, I. (2005a). La vida secreta de las palabras: el guión [The Secret Life of Words: Screenplay] (Barcelona: Ediciones B). (2005b). ‘Antony and Me’, available at http://www.clubcultura.com/clubcine/clubcineastas/ isabelcoixet/vida4.htm, last accessed on 30 March 2012. (2005c). ‘No sin mi iPod’, available at http://www.clubcultura.com/clubcine/clubcineastas/ isabelcoixet/wassabi12.htm, last accessed on 30 March 2012. (2009). Mapa de los sonidos de Tokio [Map of the Sounds of Tokyo] (Barcelona: Tusquets). (nd). ‘Entrevista: Isabel Coixet y Wong Kar Wai’, available at http://www.clubcultura.com/ clubcine/clubcineastas/isabelcoixet/vida2.htm, last accessed on 30 March 2012. Deleuze, G. (1997). Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press). Donapetry, M. (2009). ‘Miss Wasabi habla y canta: Entrevista con Isabel Coixet’, available at http://www.39ymas.com/entrevista-isabel-coixet/, last accessed on 17 April 2012. (2011). ‘Ethics, silence and the gaze in two films by Isabel Coixet’, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, 8.1: 87–100. Gorbman, C. (2007), ‘Auteur music’ in D. Goldmark, L. Kramer and R. Leppert (eds.), Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 149–62. Martín, A. (2011). ‘Los silencios y el lenguaje de la memoria moral: La vida secreta de las palabras de Isabel Coixet’ in R. Cornejo Parriego and A. Villamandos (eds.), Un hispanismo para el siglo XXI: Ensayos de crítica cultural (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva), 278–94. Martin-Márquez, S. (2013a). ‘Isabel Coixet y la teoría fílmica: De la mirada a lo ‘háptico’, trans. Josefina Cornejo, in B. Zecchi (ed.), Gynocine: Teoría de género, filmología y praxis cinematográfica (Zaragoza: Publicaciones Universidad de Zaragoza), 45–58. 142

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(2013b). ‘Isabel Coixet’s engagement with feminist film theory: from G (the gaze) to H (the haptic)’ in T. Pavlović and J. Labanyi (eds.), A Companion to Spanish Cinema (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell), 545–62. Muller, N. (2008). ‘Revealing: new media art according to Laura U. Marks’, interview by Nat Muller, available at http://metropolism.com/magazine/2008-no4/interview-with-laura-u.marks/, last accessed on 22 March 2012. Smith, A. (1998). Agnès Varda (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Sobchack, V. (2004). Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Triana-Toribio, N. (2006). ‘Anyplace North America: on the transnational road with Isabel Coixet’, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, 3.1: 49–66. (2007). ‘Journeys of El Deseo between the nation and the transnational in Spanish cinema’, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, 4.3: 151–63. Vidal, B. (2008). ‘Love, loneliness and laundromats: affect and artifice in the melodramas of Isabel Coixet’ in J. Beck and V. Rodríguez Ortega (eds.), Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 219–38.

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Part 2 Revisiting the Past: The Politics of Memory and the Transition’s Cinematic Legacy Section introduction by Duncan Wheeler

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s Salvador Cardús i Ros notes, ‘memory is not so much the interpretation of the past as justification of the present in terms of certain expectations about the future’ (2000: 24). While meta-cinematic films such as También la lluvia/Even the Rain (Bollaín, 2010), about Columbus’s adventures in the New World, or Rafael Gordon’s La reina Isabel en persona/Queen Isabel in Person (2000) and Teresa Teresa (2003) literally transport Early-Modern icons into the twenty-first century, I argue in my chapter on the recent boom in historical films (Chapter 14) that not only can they be positioned, albeit tangentially, within a pan-European trend for (post-)heritage cinema, but also that they are excessively presentinflected readings of the past which are symptomatic of the absence of a collective historical narrative in Spain. This, I suggest, is manifested most explicitly in films set in the Golden Age, but is also detectable in cinematic portrayals of the War of Independence. More generally, my claim is that the Transition’s inability or unwillingness to forge a consensual vision of the more distant past impacts on personal and political relationships in the twenty-first century, of which the ethics and aesthetics of contemporary representations of life under dictatorship forms an important constituent part. In Chapter 10, Sarah Wright observes how, like The Others (Amenábar, 2001) and El orfanato/The Orphanage (Bayona, 2007) before it, No-Do/The Haunting (Quiroga, 2009) conceives of Spain as an uncanny gothic mansion. In a trend which has continued in more recent films such as Entre lobos/Among Wolves (Olivares, 2010), El laberinto del fauno/ Pan’s Labyrinth (del Toro, 2006) and La lengua de las mariposas/Buttertly’s Tongue (Cuerda, 1999), many oppositional films from the 1960s and 1970s utilized a child protagonist to provide a narrative, identificatory and thematic focus. Wright frames what Eric Thau terms ‘the innocent gaze of saucer-eyed little Ana Torrent’ (2011: 132) in such seminal films as El espíritu de la colmena/The Spirit of the Beehive (Erice, 1973) and Cría Cuervos/Raise Ravens (Saura, 1976), to suggest that the actress’s early screen persona has functioned as a palimpsest for her adult performances. This occurs most notably in those films where she returns to the subject of Spain’s dictatorial past such as No-Do which, in the title, already references the official newsreel shown before all cinema performances during the Franco period. More generally, the boom in Spanish horror can be linked to this return to the ghosts of the past with, for example, the visually arresting Insensibles/Painless (Medina, 2011) literalizing the metaphor of needing to know one’s past in order to move into the future. Insensibles does this by having a protagonist discover that he was taken from his mother, a female prisoner in a Francoist jail, when he requires a life-saving bone marrow transplant.

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While undoubtedly adopting a generally left-wing outlook, La vieja memoria/The Old Memory (Camino, 1978) attempted to provide a balanced overview of the Second Republic, Civil War and ensuing dictatorship – not to settle old scores, but rather to provide a historical contextualization and justification for the nascent democracy. It thereby contributed to the formation of what Laura Desfor Edles has referred to more generally as ‘the new modernist, transitional symbolic framework’ (1998: 118). In Chapter 11, through the comparison of this documentary alongside Los niños de Rusia/The Children of Russia (2001), Isabel Estrada and Melissa González allow us to see how the discourses and politics of memory have changed, becoming increasingly fixated on personal narratives of victimhood, rather than attempts to provide alternative historiographies silenced by the dictatorship. Without ever jettisoning their sympathy for the victims of Francoist repression, Estrada and González join Jo Labanyi (2010) in raising very legitimate concerns about employing victimhood as a dominant historical and cinematic frame through which to view the past in the present. Beyond the individual case-studies, their theoretically informed readings provide the tools which will help enable scholars to analyse other films which focus on the plights and subjectivity of victims. They could, for example, be readily applied to depictions of the economic migrants of the 1960s, be that in a documentary such as El tren de la memoria (Marta Arribas and Ana Pérez, 2005) or a fictional film like Un franco, 14 pesetas/Crossing Borders (Carlos Iglesias, 2006), or Les fenmes de 6ème étage/The Women on the 6th Floor (Philippe Guay, 2010), a French take on Spanish cleaners in the bourgeois Paris of the 1960s; or, say, in conjunction with San Miguel’s contribution in Chapter 5, in order to examine how and why films such as La ciudad sin límites/In the City of No Limits (Antonio Hernández, 2002) and Pájaros de papel/Paper Birds (Emilio Aragón, 2010) have begun to articulate a filmic discourse around the persecution of homosexuality under or, in the case of Pa negre/ Black Bread (Villaronga, 2010) prior to the Francoist dictatorship. Heroína (Herrero, 2005) and Todo es silencio/All Is Silence (Cuerda, 2012), two films about the opportunities afforded by the nascent democracy for drug trafficking and consumption in a Galicia rife with unemployment, suggest that the Transition also claimed its victims. As Concepción Cascajosa Virino discusses in Chapter 13, its reportedly peaceful nature has in fact been overemphasized with, perhaps, the activities of ETA the most visible and bloody manifestation. Terrorism in the Basque country, which often was wielded as evidence that democracy was untenable among right-wing sections of Spanish society, always has been a delicate and controversial choice of subject-matter for Spanish film-makers – arguably even more so than the Civil War. Yet this topic has been addressed by a number of films in recent years: Luna caliente (Aranda, 2009), La pelota vasca: la piel contra la piedra/The Basque Ball: Skin Against Stone (Médem, 2003), Sé quién eres/I Know Who You Are (Ferreira, 2000), Todos estamos invitados/We Are All Invited (Gutiérrez Aragón, 2008), Tiro en la cabeza/Bullet in the Head (Rosales, 2008) and so on. By focusing on two high-profile case studies – Yoyes (Taberna, 2000) and El lobo/Wolf (Courtois, 2004) – Cascajosa Virino analyses their relationship to the historical record, 148

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what this cinematic resurrection of Spain’s ‘bloody’ past in the present can tell us about the Transition, and how its victims have been articulated and treated, both then and now. As she notes, there is an irony that in a blatant case of revisionism, conservative factions tend to vindicate and sacralize the pacto del olvido (‘pact of forgetting’) in the present political climate. In contrast, those on the Left have become increasingly suspicious (and even dismissive) of the ostensible achievements of a tacit agreement seen, at best, to be a pragmatic exigency for a specific socio-historical context. Both Sarah Wright and Vicente Rodríguez Ortega (in Chapter 15) call upon the theories of Alison Landsberg, for whom ‘the technologies of mass culture and the capitalist economy of which they are a part open up a world of images outside a person’s lived experience, creating a portable, fluid, and nonessentialist form of memory’ (2004: 18). Even prior to the recent memory boom, the numerous cinematic depictions of the assassination of Carrero Blanco (then prime minister, and Franco’s preferred successor) in 1973 at the hands of ETA, or the dictator’s subsequent death, in films as diverse as Carne trémula/Live Flesh (Almodóvar, 1997), Entre rojas/Women in Prison (Rodríguez, 1995) or Semen, una historia de amor/Semen, a Love Sample (Féjerman and Paris, 2005), created a ‘prosthetic’ narrative of these events for those too young to experience them directly. Furthermore, prosthetic memory provides a useful theoretical framework through which to examine an important subject-matter which, somewhat remarkably, has been neglected within film and memory studies: a nostalgic return to Francoist popular culture. Rodríguez Ortega’s chapter marks important new ground in this regard by beginning with a detailed analysis of a television appearance by General Franco’s grandson, Francis, to probe how and why Álex de la Iglesia’s films reflect a broader sociological tendency defined by Ángela Cenarro in the following terms: The revisionist phenomenon feeds on a public that craves Francoist ‘truths’ because they feel that their ideas have lost ground against the present ‘avalanche of memory’. Its vast potential lies in the fact that it can form another ‘collective memory’, built around the myths of Francoist propaganda and its old Manichean discourse. (2008: 206) Rodríguez Ortega identifies the avatars of this ideology in El día de la bestia/The Day of the Beast (1995), before discussing how the appearance of Nino Bravo and Raphael – two major icons of the Francoist period – function as mnemonic and phantasmagoric palimpsests in Muertos de risa/Dying of Laughter (1999) and Balada triste de trompeta/The Last Circus (2010) respectively. Their star, Santiago Segura, has been instrumental in vindicating figures from the dictatorship period (see Chapter 21), and Rodríguez Ortega explores how these two films combine a postmodern generic hybridity inspired in part by television aesthetics with sociopolitical commentary. The destape, literally unveiling, soft-porn films of the Transition period have been frequently construed as a continuation of this culture of evasion, whereby the superficial 149

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liberties of the incipient democracy were celebrated at the expense of political comment or engagement. In Chapter 12, through a detailed analysis of the use of sound in Torremolinos 73 (Berger, 2003) and Los años desnudos/Rated R (Sabroso and Ayaso, 2008) – two films which ‘have deployed visual motifs popularised by Almodóvar’ (Delgado, 2013: 3) to cast a retrospective eye on this period – Alejandro Melero demonstrates two things. First, that the sexual explicitness of films in the 1970s has determined expectations of Spanish cinema internationally; and second, how political and technological developments are inextricably linked in relation to the cinematic depiction of sexual acts. In his charting of this development, which dovetails with recent scholarship on Hispanic film as an aural as well as visual medium (see Shaw and Stone, 2012), Melero highlights the contribution made to this process of liberation by actresses such as Susana Estrada, who often were vilified at the time, but have played a vital role in the forging of Spain’s democratic sexual and cinematic cultures. A similar vision underpins No lo llames amor… llámalo X/Don’t Call it Love… Call it X (Capel, 2011). Its narrative depicts the return of a major director from the Transition period who, confused by the hypocrisy and economic ruthlessness of the twenty-first century mediascape, wants to return to more ‘innocent’ times, when soft porn dominated Spanish cinema screens. His comeback, ‘El alzamiento nacional’ (‘The national rising’), in which the Franco character is surrounded by porn stars, and the ‘two Spains’ are depicted as two breasts, is a parody of both the nationalistic films of the early 1940s and the recent glut of Civil War films. As a woman is about to be executed for being an enemy spy by the Francoist troops, her last request – granted by the head of the firing squad – is for them to have an orgy. Love and sex as an antidote to fratricidal violence may appear to be a prurient and simplistic narrative ruse but, as the contributions to Part 2 collectively reveal, there is nothing simple about such an equation. I would suggest that it is symptomatic of the complex and contradictory discourses of cinematic and collective memories in Spain that even an ostensibly light and superficial comedy of this kind is embroiled in a vast array of constantly renegotiated cultural and historical discourses. References Cenarro, Á (2008). ‘Francoist nostalgia and memories of the Spanish Civil War’, International Journal of Iberian Studies, 21.3: 203–17. Cardús i Ros, S. (2000). ‘Politics and the invention of memory. For a sociology of the transition to democracy in Spain’ in J. R. Resina (ed.), Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi), 17–28. Delgado, M. M. (2013). ‘Introduction’ in M. M. Delgado and R. W. Fiddian (eds.), Spanish Cinema 1973–2000: Auteurism, Politics, Landscape and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 1–20. Desfor Edles, L. (1998). Symbol and Ritual in the New Spain: The Transition to Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 150

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Labanyi, J. (2010). ‘Testimonies of repression: methodological and political issues’ in C. JerézFerrán and S. Amago (eds.), Unearthing Franco’s Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press), 192–205. Landsberg, A. (2004). Prosthetic Memories: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press). Shaw, L. and Stone, R. (eds.) (2012). Screening Songs in Hispanic and Lusophone Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Thau, E. (2011). ‘The eyes of Ana Torrent’, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, 8.2: 131–43.

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Chapter 10 Ana Torrent as Palimpsest in Elio Quiroga’s No-Do (The Haunting) Sarah Wright

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poster to advertise the 51st Donostia-San Sebastián Film Festival in 2003 recreated an iconic scene from Víctor Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena/The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) which was to be screened in the festival under the slogan ‘Thirty years later’. The poster recreates the screenshot where six-year-old Ana Torrent stands facing the camera as the train tracks slope away to a perfect perspectival point on the horizon behind her, while her sister Isabel (Isabel Tellería) lies with her head on the tracks to the left of the frame. In the 2003 recreation, the child Ana is replaced by the adult Ana, dressed in similar clothes and with a similar stance, gaze levelled at the audience: ‘the disturbing child played by Ana Torrent has grown up and she returns as the protagonist in the same image some years later’ as one website had it (Anon, 2009a). The poster functioned in part to advertise the fact that Ana Torrent and Isabel Tellería would be joining Víctor Erice in post-screening discussions about the film. However, it is Torrent, not Tellería, who morphs into adult form, creating an unsettling disjunction between the ages of the two protagonists (Torrent and Tellería) and an uncanny doubling of Torrent the adult with Torrent the child. If this is the ‘return of the repressed’ as Freud described the uncanny, it is also the literalization of the sense that Torrent as an adult is always haunted by her previous cinematic incarnations as a child. Tellería did not make any films after El espíritu de la colmena, and her childlike image is frozen in time. Torrent would go on to study acting in New York and a career as an actress in Spain and abroad. The unacknowledged theme of ‘how Ana grew up’ is a subtext of all of her work. Torrent embodies a temporal disjunction between then and now, a ‘present past’: she is a work of memory. Spanish audiences have internalized the image of Torrent as a child (Smith, 2000: 35). The film critic Carlos Boyero has noted the enormous impact that Torrent’s early performances had on him: I don’t think I’ve ever felt such a strong and moving an impact upon seeing a little girl on the screen as was provoked by Ana Torrent […] what I will never forget are her eyes, a gaze with the capacity to express an interior universe as complex and intense as it is fascinating. (Boyero, 1998) In the films she made as a child, Torrent was embodying in part the memories of the Spanish Civil War and the post-Franco era of her films’ creators (Víctor Erice, Ángel Fernández Santos, Carlos Saura) (see Kinder, 1983). Helena Taberna, with whom Torrent made

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Yoyes (2000) (see Chapter 13), cites Torrent’s capacity to evoke the memory of her earlier films as one of the reasons that she was chosen for the role of ETA activist Dolores González Catarian (Thau, 2011: 140). More recently, Elio Quiroga has cited Torrent’s performance in Amenábar’s Tesis/Thesis (1996) as the reason that he had her in mind from the start to star in No-Do/The Haunting of 2009 (Anon, 2009b). However, Quiroga also mentions Torrent’s status as an iconic figure of Spanish cinema, a status that was forged with her first film, El espíritu de la colmena. In an excellent recent article, ‘The eyes of Ana Torrent’, Eric Thau (2011) has traced the intertextual traces provided by Torrent’s gaze beginning with the audience’s and critics’ love affair with her ‘Goyaesque eyes’ from her first films, continuing throughout her oeuvre. Richard Dyer has argued that stars are ‘structured polysemies’, but he also reminds us that ‘some meanings are fore-grounded and others are masked or displaced’ (1998: 3). Torrent is a palimpsest which, like Freud’s mystic writing pad, promises the erasure of her past incarnations with every new character in each new film, but also simultaneously contains the trace of her first iconic performance as well as selected subsequent ones, which are foregrounded or displaced in a series of polysemic intensities. The polysemic discourses surrounding Torrent offer her up as the embodiment of memory: her gaze adds layers of meaning with each new film, but also returns us to her first iconic performance. Meanwhile, the repetitions, temporal dislocations and hauntings involved in the intersections of these polysemic intensities reinforce her status as the embodiment of traumatic memory. Films produced during the Franco era reproduced a ‘Francoist aesthetic’, in that they used allusion and metaphor to circumvent censorship and to make political statements where none seemed apparent. In El espíritu de la colmena Ana/Torrent represented what Hirsch (2012) has called ‘post-memory’: the memories of a previous generation whose trauma is communicated to their children. As I have argued elsewhere (Wright, 2013), Torrent comes to embody ‘prosthetic memory’: the memory that can be acquired through watching films, according to the theories of Alison Landsberg, for her trauma appears to be inherited through her watching of James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), but comes to signify the trauma of a nation. Carlos Saura’s Cría cuervos/Raise Ravens (1976) capitalized on the resonances that Torrent brought with her of the traumatized child, as the Ana of this film sees her dead mother as a ghost. Ana believes that she has poisoned her father, and when he dies (in fact, he suffers heart failure in flagrante with a lover), she is sure that she is responsible for his death. The collective deathwish of a nation against an ageing patriarch is realized in this film: once again, Ana is called upon to inherit Spanish memory. Torrent’s films repeatedly play out a traumatic father complex staged as an ongoing relationship with the legacies of the patriarchal regime that was Francoism. Thus the father complex that Ana experiences in El espíritu de la colmena (the link between Fernando, and the monster), becomes Ana’s deathwish against her father (Héctor Alterio) in Cría cuervos, and is played out further in El nido/The Nest (de Armiñán, 1980) as Goyita (Torrent) is a thirteen-year-old who begins a sexually charged friendship with Alejandro, who in turn is played by Héctor Alterio, her father in Cría cuervos. The latent sexuality hinted at in El espíritu de la colmena (although it was literalized in Francisco Umbral’s sexualization of 156

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Torrent in his interviews with the star; Smith, 2000: 36) and the ‘incestuous and patriarchal desires of the precocious child’ in Cría cuervos are now ‘liberated from the imaginary realm and acted out with a vengeance’ (Kinder, 1983: 66). Alejandro is the victim of a troubled child’s fantasies (she plays Lady Macbeth in the school play), even as the film suggests that the platonic love between two protagonists is made monstrous by an inquisitorial society that will admit no room for alternative lifestyles. The film also offers a critique of patriarchal role models: at one extreme, her father, a civil guard who cannot live up to his obligations as dispenser of punishments (when his wife insists that he beats Goyita, he only pretends to do so), and at the other, an over-zealous sergeant, the legacy of the repressiveness of Francoism.1 At the centre is Goyita, the precocious, vengeful, slightly crazy child unable to reveal what she has seen and how she will develop in the future. Yoyes appears to provide some relief from this model, as the eponymous protagonist detaches herself from the father figure and gains contentment with a husband (Ernesto Alterio, son of Héctor). However, if Torrent brings to the role a sense that ETA activists may have been driven in their actions by the repressiveness of the Franco regime, responsibility is placed clearly with the activists when they shoot Yoyes, who is now attempting to lead a quiet, settled life as a wife and mother. Her shooting in front of her daughter (although in real life Yoyes’ child was male) suggests an ongoing legacy of traumatized girls that cannot be easily overcome. In 14, Fabian Road (de Armiñán, 2008) Torrent plays a jealous daughter angry at the young lover chosen by her father and enacts her revenge: in this film, memories can be stolen by writers and passed off as their own. Torrent’s characters repeatedly represent the legacies of Francoism: her traumas become those of the nation. Elio Quiroga’s 2009 film No-Do is a horror film which uses digital effects to conjure up the ghosts of the past. Francesca (Torrent), a paediatrician married to another physician (Francisco Boira) has lost one child, a daughter, to cot death and is now on maternity leave with her second child, a son. In order to help her to recover, she and her husband move with the four-month-old baby into a large mansion in the middle of nowhere. Meanwhile, an old woman awakes from a sleep lasting forty years and is mumbling something about the bishop and her house. In her new home, Francesca starts to see apparitions and hear voices through the baby monitor. Has the birth of the new baby triggered the trauma of the earlier child’s death, making her crazy, or is the house really haunted? It will emerge that the house was owned by Catholic clergy and, after the death of the bishop, was put up for sale. The house was in fact the witness to dark secrets from the Spanish past. Far from being crazy, Francesca unlocks the secrets to a dark period of Spanish history. In an early scene, the camera moves upwards, taking in the façade of the hospital’s maternity wing. With its sleek glass, huge cross and accompanying celestial music it looks like a modern church. Inside, the camera travels fluidly through the cool corridors and surveys the rows of incubating cots, all containing sleeping babies dressed in white. An alarm sounds and feet run along the corridors, but the thin red line on the monitor screen suggests that this baby cannot be saved. Later, in a dimly-lit room Francesca baptizes the dead baby while her colleague Jean (Rocío Muñoz) observes her from the doorway. At the 157

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sound of her name, Francesca looks up, framed by the screen, her face luminescent in the darkness in the manner of a Spanish still life. Torrent’s luminous face in the darkness recalls the scene from El espíritu de la colmena where six-year-old Ana, who has become fascinated by Frankenstein’s monster during a screening in a makeshift cinema in the village hall of Whales’s Frankenstein, goes to a lake after dark to summon the monster. If Ana is already mute and melancholic – symbolic, as I suggest elsewhere of the post-memory of the postwar generation (Wright, 2013) – here, she will become traumatized. No-Do replicates this repetition with another: the death of a baby in the hospital recalls the death of Francesca’s own baby from cot death some ten years earlier. Francesca now routinely baptizes the babies who die in hospital in an attempt to exorcise her own demons. When she moves to the house out of town, a gothic mansion by anyone’s standards, Francesca starts to imagine that supernatural beings are threatening her child. She hears them running with children’s footsteps over the ceiling; they whisper into the baby monitor, knock on the door before running away, and daub slogans on the wall in fresh blood. Are these just the anxieties of a new mother, fearful that a second child will be taken from her? Francesca manages to negotiate an extension of her four-month maternity leave (standard in Spain), but if this is a form of post-partum depression then the solution provided by her husband and friend comes from the horror genre: they take the baby away to the in-laws, leaving Francesca to sort herself out without her child. Small wonder, then, that she is accompanied by the friendly ghost of her dead daughter, who reliably informs her that the ghosts in the house are ‘niñas sucias’ (‘dirty girls’). Soon the ghost of her daughter, Rosa, is taken over in body by the other child ghosts, hijacking Francesca’s ability to ‘see dead people’ to reveal their own existence. Her daughter, the product of the materialization of a blend of memory and desire, becomes a conduit for the prosthetic memories of the ghostly children from the attic. Like Juan Antonio Bayona’s El orfanato/The Orphanage (2007), No-Do conceives of Spain as an uncanny gothic mansion. Whereas Bayona’s film pulls out the rubble in outhouses to find skeletons, Quiroga’s film has the protagonists tearing down an interior wall to reveal a cache of human bones and rats. As Maria Delgado (2008) has pointed out in relation to El orfanato, these films intersect with the current Spanish climate in the mood to investigate the past so long after the demise of General Franco. According to the theory of the ‘Pact of Silence’, there was a tacit agreement that the past would not be entered into in the name of moving forward into democracy. Now, more than thirty years later, it is possible for the past to be investigated. Since the 1990s, Spain has undergone a ‘memory boom’. If Spain’s Transition to Democracy after Franco’s death was based on a ‘pacto del olvido’ (pact of oblivion), what is needed now is a ‘culture of memory’, a process by which Spanish society confronts the legacy of its traumatic past of war, exile and repression (Ferrán, 2007: 14). The unearthing of mass graves by volunteers working at weekends is just one part of this story; debates over the politics of memory and who has the clearest purchase on the past is another. Certain traumatic aspects of Spain’s history have come to light recently, with more sure to follow. ‘Listen to the dead’ is the tagline for the US trailer for No-Do (named No-Do, The Beckoning for the US market). Torrent, the embodiment of traumatic memory, comes to 158

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encapsulate the temporal dislocation characteristic of this current ‘memory boom’, the ‘time out of joint’ which is the current ‘present past’.2 No-Do makes reference to the state newsreel under Francoism (‘No-Do’ stands for Noticiarios y Documentales, or news and documentaries) and sequences of footage from newsreels are included in the film. The film also intersects directly with documented apparitions of the Virgin Mary and Archangel Michael in Garabandal, near San Sebastían in Cantabria, northern Spain from 1961–65. Four schoolgirls – Mari Loli Mazón (1949– 2009), Jacinta González (b. 1949), Mari Cruz González (b. 1950) and Conchita González (b. 1949) (none of the girls were related) – were out walking when they began to receive messages from the Virgin Mary and Archangel Michael. The girls turned into an overnight phenomenon, and people made pilgrimages from far and wide to witness the girls and be healed by them. The girls’ ecstasies were captured on film and now circulate on YouTube.3 Notably, one particular message to the girls, in 1965, was captured on film and the girls went on to give interviews internationally as they grew up (particularly Conchita González). The premise of No-Do, as reported by the film’s director, is that General Franco requested that the state newsreel, under the cover of filming local fiestas, should record apparitions such as these to send to the Vatican for approval. According to Quiroga: It seems that while almost all the No-Do teams filmed popular fiestas, several crews were working in secret filming all sorts of miraculous events with the aim of converting Spain into a centre for Christianity. Franco wanted his own Catholic theme park, as Portugal had with Fatima and France with Lourdes. These films were made and sent periodically to the Vatican to be studied. (cited in Anon, 2009b) However, apparently they were not successful: None of these supposed films convinced the Vatican which still keeps them in its archives. Indirect sources have confirmed the recording and production of at least thirty-nine secret No-Do films between 1943 and 1954. In several Spanish villages the citizens still remember the arrival of the No-Do cameras to ask the villagers about the extraordinary happenings in the area. The Episcopal Commission has always denied the existence of these films, but Fotofilm Madrid reports that in the 80s it had two films copied for two clergymen who prevented the films’ contents being viewed by the technicians. (cited in Anon, 2009b) The credits for No-Do include reference to the book El tiempo y la memoria by Tranche and Sánchez Biosca (2001), but although real segments of No-Dos appear in the film, it is not at all clear that these sequences refer to the filming of apparitions. A thesis from the Universidad de Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, is also cited in the credits: this thesis apparently tells the story of Samuel Ferren, the inventor of a special type of film which, it was believed, 159

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could capture the supernatural world on film. As one website explains, Ferren disappeared without trace in 1947 (M.A., 2007) – he appears in the film as Marin Sennel, the murdered cameraman and Blanca’s husband.4 However, as of yet I have been unable to unearth the existence of such a thesis from the university archives. Was it a hoax to supplement a rumour supplied by Quiroga in the face of speculation? At the moment it is hard to tell. Jessamy Harvey (2012) documents that the Catholic Church attempted to suppress these apparitions and refused to confirm them as miracles. Given that one of the messages imparted by the girls was that ‘many priests are following the road to perdition, and with them they are taking many more souls’ (Pelletier, 1971: 176), widely reported to refer to the sexual abuse cases by the clergy, or other messages about the return of communism (reportedly told to Weber, 1993), perhaps it is not hard to see why the regime might wish to repress these stories rather than draw attention to them. The thesis put forward by No-Do is that when things went wrong with the apparitions – making the ill even sicker, for example – creating bad press for the Spanish clergy, the girls were murdered. Ultimately this is a fictional tale (the real Garabandal girls went on to live long lives), but we have the sense of uncovering a dark period of Spanish history. No-Do also gestures in prescient ways to recent scandals in Spanish memory: the sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy, babies stolen from their cots in Spanish hospitals and the exhumation of mass graves belonging to victims of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath.5 This, then, is Quiroga’s contribution to a generalized, symbolic patricide circulating in contemporary Spain. Just as Alejandro Amenábar’s Tesis, a psychodrama about snuff films being filmed on a university campus, made much of Torrent’s look of wide-eyed horror in 1996 (the poster showed Torrent’s eyes between fingers in a dissection which recalled Buñuel and Dalí’s famous slitting of the eyeball in Un chien andalou (1929) – an assault on the viewer) – so Quiroga also fetishizes Torrent’s ‘look’ in No-Do. The first of these looks occurs as Francesca and her husband are lying in bed in their gothic mansion. The bedside lamp is on and Francesca has a copy of Emanuel Carrère’s I Am Alive and You are Dead, A Journey Into the Mind of Philip Dick (a work which explores the science-fiction writer’s experiences of parallel universes) in her hands. Francesca hears creaking footsteps overhead and her eyes blink open to a jolting orchestral soundtrack. If the reference to Philip Dick recalls the sci-fi cinematic precedents of Blade Runner (Scott, 1982) and its theme of prosthetic memory as terror, Torrent’s look of terror here recalls Torrent’s look in Tesis. Meanwhile, the creaking footsteps over the ceiling of Francesca’s bedroom recall the scene in El espíritu de la colmena where Ana and her sister Isabel hear ‘the monster’ (really Fernando, Ana’s father) as he moves about in the room above them. Therefore, contained in the palimpsest of Torrent’s face are meta-cinematic allusions both to the film about the child, Ana, who was obsessed with death to the point of summoning Frankenstein’s monster, and the woman, Ángela, who is obsessed with death to the point of exploring who is responsible for the murders on campus: both find horror in films, a twinning which Quiroga also exploits to his advantage. Torrent came of age in Tesis – she was sexual but not sexualized by the camera, self-assured in a way that represented the coming of age of Spanish cinema, which had passed through a period of stagnation and was 160

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energized by this film. Tesis was an act of revenge on the professors who threw Amenábar out of film class, and his use of Torrent in the starring role reprised her role in Cría cuervos, where she was the child with a desire to kill her father. With this film, Amenábar committed symbolic patricide against an earlier generation of directors with film-making which might be judged on an international and global scale (Thau, 2011). Quiroga’s intention with No-Do is not to challenge Spanish cinematic history, but to harness its greatest moments: through Torrent he attempts to harness something of Amenábar’s star quality while invoking the ‘arthouse horror’ coined by Erice’s iconic film.6 If the film has something of the ‘new’ about it, then it is in its use of digital effects to create cinematic ghosts. Part of the appeal of Torrent’s performance in El espíritu de la colmena turned on the delight experienced by scholars and critics at the scene in the film where Ana watches Frankenstein. Torrent is completely absorbed by what she sees, and scholars have written about the capturing of that extraordinary moment, which is at once an example of the indexical trace of the contingent (a moment where film rubs against the ‘real’) and a piece of cinematic magic (see for example, Darke, 2010). Notably, it was the attempt to recapture this magic which led Carlos Saura to cast Torrent in Cría cuervos, although recently he has remarked in interview that as Torrent grew up she lost her earlier magic – a view that is endorsed elsewhere.7 I have written previously of the way that Torrent becomes the lost child, in the sense that the child is always growing, always on the road to death, but in Torrent this gains poignancy: she will never recapture that earlier cinematic magic (Wright, 2013). In the DVD extras to No-Do, Quiroga notes how difficult it was for Torrent to fake her terror in front of the blue screen used for digital effects, a far cry from her assertions that with El espíritu de la colmena she was not acting, but showing the real fear that she felt at the actor in prosthesis playing the monster.8 Nonetheless, how far is it important for film to ‘rub against the real’? No-Do rests on the premise that certain hidden No-Do newsreels may contain the truth to certain hidden events from the Franco regime. Images of the film show the burning of analogue film on its sprockets as a symbol of the disappearance of certain elements of the past. Just as Francesca holds a mirror to her baby’s mouth to ascertain that he is still breathing, an indexical trace to prove that he is alive, she also uses the baby monitor to check that he is still making normal sounds. However, soon the baby monitor becomes the medium by which the dead can communicate with her, revealing their existence. This recalls early filmic attempts to capture the dead on film – the ectoplasm or spectral presences captured through early electronics – and can be traced through to those home movie-style films from YouTube which capture the girls’ witnessing of apparitions on film (see for example, Sconce, 2000). We have seen already in the case of Francesca’s daughter, Rosa, that the appearance of the material can be created through desire and fantasy: thus Rosa appears to Francesca as a ghost, although she looks very solid to the spectator. At the same time, the film plays on the ghostly potential of the digital, as it portrays the Garabandal girl-ghosts as digitized presences. It is not that the film shows nostalgia for analogue; rather, through the actual film footage from No-Do, we see that the digital can come close to the truth of Spain’s past and current traumas through its games, even as the newsreel (whose black and white 161

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aesthetic we have learned to read as ‘history’)9 is revealed as a partial, framed or even wilfully misleading. In Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema (2007), Garrett Stewart suggests that the digital ushers in a preoccupation with viewing the passing of time on screen: where analogue animated the still to create the illusion of movement but at the same time provided an indexical trace to real bodies, the digital concentrates on the ability of time to appear to stand still for internal mutation, while the connection between real bodies and the image may be severed in erosion of the digital’s photographic base. Stewart views this as potentially a political disengagement of the image in a Baudrillardean consciousness. Nevertheless, the severed prosthetic limbs hanging from the ceiling in a boarded-up room in the house are votives which bear more than a passing relationship to the real limb that they represent in the working of miracles. If they also recall Landsberg’s description of ‘prosthetic cinema’, which can be worn like a prosthesis and covers a trauma, this seems a particularly apt image for this film – for whom cinema’s ability to capture history is rendered more truthful through its capturing of psychic contours of Spanish memory than historical referents.10 In No-Do the digital can reconnect with the political, where the official capturing of Spanish historical reality through state newsreel is found to be inadequate in the face of the digitized materialization of Spanish horrors on screen. Acknowledgement Research for this chapter was made possible by an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) fellowship. I am also very grateful to Duncan Wheeler for his helpful suggestions and comments, and to Elisa Costa-Villaverde for being an excellent research assistant. Notes   1 In a very different mode, a similar thing occurs in Pedro Almodóvar’s Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón/Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (1980), in which an insufficiently cruel police officer is unable to satisfy his masochistic wife, who leaves him for a sadistic teenage punk singer.   2 Torrent has made other films in which she appears to embody traumatic memory. In Iris (Vergés, 2004) she is the nurse caring for casualties from the Spanish Civil War, while in Hombre de arena/The Sandman (González, 2007) she plays a mad woman in a sanatorium during the war and in the post-war period. Her most recent international incarnation, which draws on the capital of her appearance as Catherine of Aragon in The Other Boleyn Girl (Chadwick, 2008), sees her play, counter to her usual connotations of resistance to Francoism, the mother of Opus Dei founder Escrivá, in There Be Dragons (Joffé, 2011).   3 These films proliferate; see for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNPDpl3kV eg&playnext=1&list=PL9C0E13BCDA190BC7&feature=results_main, last accessed on 3 August 2012. 162

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  4 The thesis is Rodolfo Ramos Castro, ‘Mirando lo invisible: la leyenda de Samuel Ferren’. Garabandal has its own unexplained death: Father Luis Andreu, the only person besides the girls to see the apparitions, mysteriously died in his car shortly after a vision.   5 On sexual abuse in Spain, see Mitchell (1998). Under Francoism, the children of political prisoners were given new surnames and repatriated with nationalist families (see Vinyes, 2010; and Vinyes et al., 2002). ‘What started as a business for taking children from families deemed to be politically damaging to the regime became an illicit business that continued until the 80s’ (Tremlett, 2011). The Law of Historical Memory was passed in Spain in 2007 under the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and recognizes the victims on both sides of the Spanish Civil War and the victims of the dictatorship. Members of the Assocation for the Recuperation of Historical Memory conduct exhumations of mass graves in the hope of giving news to families about the whereabouts of those assassinated by Francoist forces (see for example, Renshaw, 2011).   6 No-Do did well with horror connoisseurs in Japan.   7 Saura made these comments in an interview with Maria Delgado at the National Film Institute, London, summer 2011.   8 From the DVD extras to the Criterion edition of El espíritu de la colmena.   9 This also may be an implicit critique of the recent surge in nostalgia for the aesthetics and politics of the Franco regime. See also Cenarro (2008) on ‘Francoist nostalgia’ affecting certain Spanish historians, whom she compares to Nazi Holocaust deniers, and Paul Preston’s (2012) comprehensive account of the ‘Spanish Holocaust’. 10 In Landsberg’s (2004) account, viewers in the cinema may experience periods of history through which they did not live. They can wear these ‘prosthetic memories’ of the past like a prosthesis. She draws a parallel between the prosthesis which covers a trauma, and the prosthetic memory which engages with a traumatic period of history.

References Anon (2009a). ‘Múltiples homenajes cinéfilos en colecciones Celsopiñolitas’, 30 September, available at http://imakinarium.net/notis/2009/09/090930_x_baldeon_homenajes/090930_ x_baldeon_homenajes.htm, last accessed on 13 August 2012. (2009b). ‘Elio Quiroga: Franco quería un parque de atracciones católico en España como Lourdes o Fátima’, El Confidencial, 9 June, available at http://www.elconfidencial.com/ cache/2009/06/02/ocioytelevision_17_secretos.html, last accessed on 3 August 2012. Boyero, C. (1998). ‘Las comparaciones no siempre son odiosas. Ana Torrent/Tatum O’Neal’, available at http://www.elmundo.es/larevista/num131/textos/entr2.html, last accessed on 2 August 2012. Cenarro, A. (2008). ‘Francoist nostalgia and memories of the Spanish Civil War’, International Journal of Iberian Studies, 21.3: 203–17. Darke, C. (2010). ‘Les enfants et les cinéphiles: the moment of epiphany in The Spirit of the Beehive’, Cinema Journal, 49.2: 152–58. Delgado, M. (2008). ‘The young and the damned’, Sight and Sound, April, available at http://old. bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/review/4275, last accessed on 5 January 2012. 163

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Dyer, R. (1998). Stars (London: BFI Publications). Ferrán, O. (2007). Working Through Memory in Contemporary Spanish Narrative (Bucknell, PA: Bucknell University Press). Harvey, J. (2012). ‘Holy girl power locally and globally: the Marian visions of Garabandal, Spain’ in J. Helgren and C. A. Vasconcellos (eds.), Girlhood: A Global History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), 179–94. Hirsch, M. (2012). The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press). Kinder, M. (1983). ‘The children of Franco in the New Spanish Cinema’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 8.2: 57–76. Landsberg, A. (2004). Prosthetic Memories: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press). M. A. (2007). ‘No-Dos secretos filmados en Garabandal’, 3 January, available at http://no-do. blogspot.co.uk/2007/01/no-dos-secretos-filmados-en-garabandal.html, last accessed on 3 August 2012. Mitchell, T. (1998). Betrayal of Innocents: Desire, Power and the Catholic Church (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press). Pelletier, J. (1971). Our Lady Comes to Garabandal (Including Conchita’s Diary) (Worcester, MA: An Assumption Publication). Preston, P. (2012). The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain (London: Harper Press). Renshaw, L. (2011). Exhuming Loss: Memory, Materiality and the Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coat Press). Sconce, J. (2000). Haunted Media: Electronic Media from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Smith, P. J. (2000). The Moderns: Time, Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Spanish Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Stewart, G. (2007). Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press). Thau, E. (2011). ‘The eyes of Ana Torrent’, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, 8.2: 131–43. Tranche, R.R. and Sánchez Biosca, V. (2001). No-Do: El tiempo y la memoria (Madrid: Cátedra and Filmoteca Española). Tremlett, G. (2011). ‘Hundreds of Spanish babies “stolen from clinics and sold for adoption”’, The Guardian, 27 January, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/27/spanishbabies-stolen-clinic?INTCMP=SRCH, last accessed on 13 February 2012. Vinyes, R. (2010). Irredentas: Las presas políticas y sus hijos en las cárceles franquistas (Madrid: Temas de hoy). Vinyes, R., Armengou, M. and Belis, R. (2002). Los niños perdidos del franquismo (Barcelona: Plaza y Janés). Weber, A. (1993). Garabandal: Der Zeigefinger Gottes (Meersburg: WETO-Verlag). Wright, S. (2013). The Child in Spanish Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

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Chapter 11 Victimhood in Contemporary Spanish Documentary: The Politics of Agency in Jaime Camino’s La vieja memoria and Los niños de Rusia Isabel Estrada and Melissa M. González

L

a vieja memoria/The Old Memory (1978),1 a documentary by the Catalan film-maker Jaime Camino that premiered in the midst of the Transition, has received relatively little in-depth critical attention despite its relevance to those of us who study how cultural productions negotiate memory trans-historically (Sánchez-Biosca, 2006).2 At first glance, both La vieja memoria’s title and its narrative structure appear to have a great deal in common with several Spanish documentaries, mostly produced in the early twenty-first century, that address the memory of the Spanish Civil War. These include La guerrilla de la memoria/The Guerrilla of Memory (Corcuera, 2002), Rejas en la memoria/Bars in Memory (Palacios, 2004) and El tren de la memoria/The Train of Memory (Arribas and Pérez, 2005). However, when it comes to how these recent documentaries deploy memory, we need to note that if Camino presents the ‘old’ memory of the Civil War in 1978, these subsequent productions present memory that is simultaneously older, in terms of chronological distance from the fratricidal conflict as referent; and newer in terms of the evolving history of how Spain remembers the Civil War. In fact, reading Camino’s ‘old’ memory in the context of these newer documentaries’ retrospective views on the war allows us to perceive and contextualize precisely what is different about Spain’s new memory: it has shifted its focus from urging reconciliation of political differences to voicing victimhood.3 Indeed, Camino’s perspective on memory in the late 1970s focuses on the testimony of political leaders, not victims, with first-hand experience of the war and he visually presents this testimony via a dialogic structure that advocates political reconciliation: a focus that is largely absent from the more recent documentaries on the Spanish Civil War. Moreover, while La vieja memoria showcases historical protagonists in the context of political urgency of the Transition, the more recent documentaries centre on everyday victims’ testimony, echoing victimhood’s status as a major focal point of recent memory studies, both within and beyond Spanish borders. At this point, it is helpful to explore and problematize briefly the concept of the victim that has become so central to the Spanish documentary genre. Alain Badiou, one of our most influential contemporary philosophers, criticizes the deficit of victim’s agency in neoliberal democracies, noting how our thinking of the victim in terms of their suffering and abjection becomes pernicious for the subject and ‘equates man with his animal substructure’ (2001: 11), reducing victims to the most base dimensions of their very being. However, the predominant self-satisfied western conception of ethics and human rights fails to notice that its interventions on their behalf, and in the name of civilization, are rooted in condemnation not only of the injustice addressed, but also of its victims. According to Badiou (2001),

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such is the ‘Catch-22’ as regards ethical human rights frameworks in our era, overturning the commonly held idea that we can simply combat evil with good. This is an ever-present danger – especially when western attention turns to the ‘others’ of developing countries – in operation whenever or wherever people are figured as victims. By identifying strongly with their victimized, compatriot subjects, the film-makers of many contemporary Spanish documentaries generally go beyond sensationalizing victimhood and work (ultimately successfully) towards the political goals of highlighting victims’ past exclusion from political processes and reclaiming their agency. Nonetheless, the danger of sensationalizing victimhood is ever-present in these cultural productions, and has grown more pressing in recent years, given contemporary documentaries’ bent. Camino’s 1978 documentary does not run this risk, largely because it refuses any easy characterization of villains and victims in the early years of the Transition; but his 2001 documentary (Los niños de Rusia/The Children of Russia) fully participates in the contemporary documentary trend of memorializing the victim – a political task made more urgent by the knowledge that those with memories of the war and dictatorship will not be alive forever. The Civil War has been a recurring subject in Camino’s oeuvre, and in the post-Franco era he has returned to representations of the fratricidal conflict and its aftermath, with Dragón Rapide (1986), a docudrama, and El largo invierno/The Long Winter (1992) – a sequel to the 1976 drama, Las vacaciones del ’36/The Vacations of ’36 – but, strictly speaking, neither of these are documentaries. Conversely, Los niños de Rusia is his only Civil War documentary since La vieja memoria, and while it repeats some of Camino’s signature documentary strategies, such as the use of montage to simulate dialogue between speakers in different locations, it also participates in contemporary documentary’s focus on victims’ testimony as necessary for the recuperation of historical memory. The memory depicted in 1978 is undoubtedly old compared with the newer memory explored in the 1990s and beyond, but considering them together produces a new understanding of their commonalities and divergences. In fact, Camino obliges us to undertake an analeptic voyage back to the years of the Transition which, with all of its virtues and failures, becomes an obligatory reference point for reflecting on the contemporary memory documentary boom. On first viewing the black and white La vieja memoria – which won the Critics’ Prize at the San Sebastián Film Festival in 1978 – the film appears to have some common features with contemporary documentaries: namely, the use of archival images, photographs and interviews. As in many historical documentaries, present-day testimony alternates with archival images, both photographic and documentary, but while Camino’s voice is heard occasionally, it is sparse and minimally intrusive. The attentive viewer will notice Camino’s studied mastery over both form and content, exemplified in the narrative structure. The film begins with images and testimonies depicting the euphoria of the recently declared Republic, and ends with the devastation of the conflict and exile of those who had been celebrated only eight years before. Specifically, the first segment consists of archival images of the crowds in Madrid applauding the raising of the Republican flag in front of city hall, accompanied by a festive soundtrack; indeed, it is the first time that the Republican 168

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flag had been shown on-screen since 1939 (Gubern, 1991). In contrast with this jubilant beginning, the final segment of the documentary evokes profound melancholy, not only through the words of communist leader Enrique Líster, who affirms ‘that was the saddest moment’, but also through its visual elements and soundtrack. In this final segment, the credits roll as the camera pans back from a still photograph showing a long line of civilians walking on an unidentified road, their course uncertain and accompanied by a version of ‘The Internationale’ (the famed socialist anthem), in which a cello evokes the gravity of the tragedy: the Left’s political project has failed. La vieja memoria is organized into twelve sections in chronological order: ‘14 April 1931’, ‘17 July 1936’, ‘18 July’, ‘19 July’, ‘Uprising’, ‘Revolution’, ‘The Violence’, ‘The Fortress of Toledo’, ‘Defence of Madrid’, ‘War or Revolution’, ‘The Events of May’ and ‘Defeat’, which is itself divided into sections for ‘Madrid’, ‘Guernica’ and ‘Barcelona’. As this list suggests, the sequences also incorporate reflections on significant issues that arose during the course of the conflict, such as the fatal division among Republicans who prioritized the Spanish Civil War and the proletarian revolution, respectively. According to Sánchez-Biosca, La vieja memoria’s structure ‘suggests drama and compositional cohesion as criteria and determines, along the way, the possibilities and limits of montage’ (2006: 263). In effect, the originality of Camino’s film editing enables the documentary’s sense of drama, and his manipulation of the testimonials represents his greatest innovation in the genre’s methods. Specifically, although the politicians’ interviews were filmed separately, the montage makes them appear as if they were in conversation, weaving together their words and connecting the central themes of their accounts. The interviewed subjects are political figures with first-hand knowledge of the years in question, with the represented ideologies spanning the spectrum from the Falangist Movement (David Jato and Raimundo Fernández Cuesta) and conservatism (Gil Robles) to anarchism (Federica Montseny), Trotskyism (Fernández Jurado of the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista/Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM)) and the Communist Party (Dolores Ibárruri and Enrique Líster). Among those interviewed are also a group of militants from the Trotskyist POUM, who (rather appropriately) always appear together, in the form of a collective protagonist. Furthermore, the speakers’ full names appear on-screen along with their official titles, indicating that they are speaking in an official capacity more than a personal one. This emphasis on officialdom is repeated throughout: for example, Líster is identified as the ‘Commander of the Republican Army’; Jato as an ‘Activist of the Fifth Column in Madrid’; and José Luis de Vilallonga as ‘Second Lieutenant of Requetés’. Their conversations with Camino – who does not appear on-screen and whose voice we hear only on a few occasions – often take place in their own offices, further emphasizing the ‘official’ nature of their testimonies. The director interviews his subjects directly, but puts them into seeming dialogue with each other via the montage, accomplishing this visual dialogue not only by means of the order in which their accounts are presented, but also the position of the camera and careful selection of the words shown. It is no coincidence, then, that the montage was actually designed based on the interview transcriptions (Sánchez-Biosca, 2006: 263). Furthermore, Camino puts into dialogue those 169

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with political differences as well as those with ideologies in common, contrasting not only the Right and the Left, but also different factions within the Left. For example, as Líster explains the negotiations that Franco carried out with the liberal Portela Valladares in order to boycott the 1936 elections, Camino intercuts close-ups of Líster with archival shots of Portela in moments of silence captured during another interview from the past, giving the impression that he is listening to the communist leader recounting Portela’s own negotiations with Franco. The position of the camera also contributes to this suggestion, as the pseudointerlocutors are filmed from opposing angles, a juxtaposition that furthers the illusion that they are conversing, almost as if it were a series of shots and counter-shots. In an analogous fashion, a shot of a silent Jato is inserted between Ibárruri’s declarations about the necessity of agrarian reform. The silence and concentrated gaze of the Falangist appears to tacitly endorse Ibárruri’s assertion, ironically suggesting that they concur in their identification of hunger and poverty as problems in need of urgent resolution. In other sequences, Camino goes further than simply visually putting his subjects into dialogue by carefully editing their utterances. While the communist leader Líster explains the violent character of the Falangist Movement, Camino inserts close-ups of Jato, the Falangist leader, as if he were listening and, immediately after, Jato is filmed beginning with the phrase ‘at any rate’, as he continues to assure us that José Antonio Primo de Rivera had been opposed to the uprising.4 In other words, Camino establishes different testimonies in a sequential and logical fashion so that they defend their respective positions, even in this orchestrated dialogue. By means of putting these constructed versions of already entrenched political disagreements in dialogue via a unique form of intentional faux raccord, the director showcases how historical memory is plagued by the same divisions that informed the original violent conflict that is being remembered. Furthermore, Camino’s technical manipulation itself illustrates how memory can be edited and moulded by agenda and perception. With this technique, the film-maker manages to incorporate a remarkable plurality of perspectives while dramatizing the tensions not only between complex and often contradictory ideologies, but also between different memories. The resulting tension is palpable, and obliges the viewer to pay close attention to the contradictory declarations, unravelling them and assigning them meaning. The lack of voice-over narration to guide our interpretation further encourages viewers to take an active role in creating the meaning of this documentary. La vieja memoria’s montage never allows for any Manichean version of the events that would brand the Republicans simplistically as heroes. Unlike many recent Spanish documentaries on the Civil War and Francoism, La vieja memoria does not feature a voice-over narration that uses testimony to support a dominant narrative explicitly, or privilege a specific political vision. Nevertheless, in spite of the multiplicity of ideologies gathered by Camino in La vieja memoria, the core of the film is a reflection on the politics of the Second Republic, the causes of the uprising and the development of the Civil War, told from a fundamentally Republican perspective. The director concludes the documentary with a profoundly moving scene about the defeat, in which formal elements appeal to our compassion. This 170

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is the only moment in Camino’s documentary in which affect overcomes politics, and the only moment when the director’s own emotional and ideological perspective on the Transition enters explicitly into the frame. In an earlier sequence, Líster himself criticizes the Transition to Democracy, affirming without hesitation: ‘The Spanish people were ripped off. What we have today is no more than a repetition of that fraud.’ ‘What we have today’ refers to the concessions made by the Left during the democratization process that began after Franco’s death in 1975. Using ‘the  old memory’, Camino constructs a narrative about the failures of the leftist project of the Republic, miscarried not only because of the national uprising, but also because of internal Republican politics and irreconcilable factions. Instead of a tale about the victors and the vanquished, we are presented with the protagonists of old memory who see a political deception from their past revived in their present. In the section ‘Defence of Madrid’, we see another key example of how the past survives in the present of the Transition when the montage juxtaposes readings of Rafael Alberti’s famous poem, ‘The Ballad of the Defence of Madrid’, one delivered in 1937 and the other in 1977. Significantly, past and present are fused in this sequence, which begins with shots of the present-day Alberti in the 1970s, but ends by giving the final word to a young Alberti in the 1930s passionately supporting the Republic. Instead of ending with the better-known picture of a smiling, older Alberti disembarking the plane and greeting those who wait for him, and celebrating the triumphant return of the exiled after the end of the dictatorship, Camino privileges the fusion (and failure) of two moments in the history of the Spanish Left. In other words, by exposing and exploring the failed dreams of the Left alongside those of the Right, the documentary refuses any teleological proposal in which the Republican project is depicted as viable in the present. According to Sánchez-Biosca, from the perspective of its cinematographic conception of oral history, La vieja memoria ‘constitutes the end of one cycle and the beginning of another’ (2006: 271). Given our analysis of how Camino’s montage creatively places the testimonies in political tension, we agree with this assessment, but would go even further to assert that this under-studied documentary offers a unique and exemplary use of the cinematographic medium which arrived at a pivotal moment in Spain’s history: precisely in the midst of a ten-year period after Franco’s death and before the start of the memory boom in the mid-1990s  – a period in which Spain sought to silence its past in order to promote itself as a ‘young, brash, ultramodern nation’ that had finally made the ‘“leap” into modernity’ (Labanyi, 2007: 94–95). We also concur with Diego Galán’s description of the film as ‘exceptional’ in his review for Triunfo: an assessment reaffirmed by the fact that the documentary was reshown in commercial cinemas in 1997, exactly when the interest in the ‘recuperation of historical memory’ was reaching its height (cited in Crussells, 2003: 157).5 Both Camino’s and the newer documentaries share a disillusioned view of the Transition, defying the ‘pact of forgetting’ that gained widespread approval in the early years of the Transition precisely because it allowed for perception of a break with the past, ‘masking – conveniently for members of both the political Left and Right – the fact that it was effected 171

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by politicians from within the former Francoist state apparatus’ (Labanyi, 2007: 94). Defying the ‘pact of forgetting’ in the early years of the Transition, Camino anticipated the memory boom that was to come. Significantly, the ‘old’ memory of Camino and the ‘new’ memory of the 1990s do memorialize somewhat different historical periods: the past that matters most for Camino begins with the Republic and concludes with its defeat in the Civil War. Meanwhile, the past that matters most for contemporary Spanish documentaries is the violence caused by the July 18 uprising and the repression of the Francoist dictatorship. Thus, the new memory is most often the memory of the victims of Francoism, who are conspicuously absent from the many testimonies in La vieja memoria. In contrast, the need for reparation for victims of the dictatorship has been constantly urged for by the more recent documentaries alongside the victims and their families. Indeed, the documentary genre has become a sort of spokesperson for those who were silenced not only during the dictatorship, but also after the Transition to Democracy. For example, in Manuel Palacios’ Rejas en la memoria, the metonymic image of the ‘rejas’ (‘bars’) in the title alludes both to the political prisoners under the dictatorship, and the silence surrounding their repression. Palacios’ montage begins and ends with almost identical segments that straightforwardly demonstrate the contemporary documentary’s perspective on memory. Specifically, we see an image of the map of Spain drawn on a chalkboard, with marks to indicate the presence of concentration camps and prisons during the war and the dictatorship; these images are accompanied by the voices of various prisoners who give testimony over the course of the documentary. The image and sound are reinforced by the voice-over narration by the well-known journalist Rosa María Mateo: ‘There are those who say that the country needs to rewrite history using the story of those who were in the concentration camps.’ Indeed, by beginning and ending with these voices and images, Palacios frames his documentary within these auditory and cartographic traces of the victims, suggesting their presence as central to historical discourse. Undoubtedly, Palacios’ contribution alongside other documentaries has not only informed public opinion, but also exerted political pressure on the government and contributed to the passing of the Law of Historical Memory of 2007. In this way, disillusionment with the Transition has been transformed into energetic political activism, predicated on the belief that the insufficiencies of the democratic process are reparable, and that reparation for the victims will lead to genuine democracy. Significantly, while Camino’s main goal is to represent the vicissitudes of Civil War memory and politics in their own right, new documentarians are most deeply involved in the post-memorial project of disseminating and preserving the testimony of the victims of Francoism, with the generational difference between them at least partially explaining the different foci of their respective obsessions (Hirsch, 1996: 662). Nevertheless, when Camino makes his second post-Franco documentary about the Civil War in the twenty-first century, he also participates in the era of the victim generated by the younger generation of documentarians, albeit with significant distinctions. 172

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Los niños de Rusia begins with a short, factual note about the three thousand children who were evacuated to the Soviet Union during the Civil War, their return to Spain unexpectedly delayed for decades (or curtailed indefinitely) because of the war and ensuing dictatorship. Immediately after this caption, the camera cuts to slow, panning shots of Picasso’s famed Guernica painting, accompanied by the discordant notes of Tchaikovsky’s Romance Op. 5 for Piano (Gómez López-Quiñones, 2003: 140). The voice-over, which recalls Alain Resnais’ and Robert Hessens’ 1950 documentary short Guernica, begins after a few seconds of this image and sound, but it is neither that of a political protagonist, as in La vieja memoria, nor that of a journalist, historian or other expert, as in Palacios’ and other recent documentaries. Instead, one of the three thousand children, now in her late seventies or early eighties, recalls the impact of the massacre of Guernica, describing how hundreds upon hundreds of ‘women and children’ were killed on a Sunday, which was traditionally a day of fun and market-going. She cuts herself off to say, ‘Well, you already see the Guernica painting’ – yet it is unclear whether the reference to an artwork famous throughout the western world arises organically, or because she knows that the director will include it alongside her voice-over. The indeterminacy of the voice-over’s role, combined with the anonymity of the interviewed subjects, whose names and locations are not given on-screen until the end of the film, makes the viewer fixate on the subjectivity of the recounted memories and experiences shaped by the montage. Instead of focusing on clearly identifiable historical protagonists, as in La vieja memoria, Camino focuses exclusively on the victims’ testimony, with dark, sometimes all-black backgrounds and well-lit subjects emphasizing that the victim is in the spotlight. As Gómez López-Quiñones (2003: 142) notes, besides the initial reference to Guernica, there is generally little explicit political commentary in Los niños de Rusia, as the interviewees talk mostly about the visceral and affective details of their experiences. Here again, the director’s on-screen presence is almost completely erased, the narrative is strictly chronological, and the device of the dialogic faux raccords is employed to create humorous irony, if not dramatic tension. However, the focus shifts squarely onto the victim. Gómez López-Quiñones (2003: 155–56) sees the general lack of political discord and fissures displayed among the victims as a deficit of Los niños de Rusia. While the editing and dialogic faux raccords in this film do not foreground political discord, they do highlight personal differences. The victims articulate varied and varying responses to the questions of whether they would choose a different past if they could go back in time, and whether they still feel like Spaniards after living in Russia or Cuba – in some cases, for many decades. Some feel that they would not change their past for anything; one sadly asserts that children should never be evacuated, but the montage offers neither resolution nor synthesis. As a counterpoint to the historical caption that opens the film, the closing caption makes it clear that historical memory is now squarely in the realm of the personal, and that the experiential has superseded the factual in its importance for Spain’s collective identity: ‘To all of those, “the Children of Russia”, whose generous testimony speaks to us about their lives and about our own history.’ 173

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The centrality of the victim in contemporary Spanish documentary might seem to suggest that the experience of suffering must be part of all history because, as Reyes Mate reading Adorno explains, ‘suffering is the condition of all truth’ (2008: 29). To this end, the testimonies in both Rejas en la memoria and Los niños de Rusia reference visceral suffering, exploring the hunger, thirst, illness as well as the death of innocent victims. This focus on the victim corresponds to a central tenet of memory studies, both within and beyond Spanish borders: our knowledge of past violence and access to history are incomplete without the victim’s perspective (Felman and Laub, 1992; Juliá, 1999; Mate, 2008; Labanyi, 2010). The need to honour and vindicate the victims of the Spanish Civil War and the ensuing dictatorship was the driving force behind many civic organizations and mobilization, and their political pressure contributed to the drafting of the Law of Historical Memory of 2007. Like Rejas en la memoria and Los niños de Rusia, a slew of recent documentaries memorialize victims, and both reveal and preserve their testimony by bringing to light their voices and faces.6 The critic Diego Galán, in the aforementioned review, affirms that the witnesses in La vieja memoria contribute ‘irreplaceable information’ as protagonists in the conflict about the Civil War (cited in Crussells, 2003: 157). Meanwhile, the contemporary documentary frames its subjects as both protagonists and victims, asserting that their memories have invaluable information that not only enriches, but also enables, historical knowledge. However, ultimately both old and new memories, along with their respective documentary methods, are necessary for the construction of democratic historical memory. In the legislative context, the Law of Historical Memory provided some reparation and recognition, but it is partial at best. It virtually ignores requests by the families of those buried in mass graves to have them unearthed, thus forcing those victims to continue their search for agency and justice. As noted earlier, Badiou points out that the recognition of victimhood in and of itself does not grant agency, but can perpetuate existing power relations. Furthermore, while the dogmatic nature of any legal discourse means that it can never vindicate victims without reifying their status qua victims, polyvalent aesthetic representations have the potential to avoid this pitfall. The documentary genre is based typically on a clear-cut set of power relations: directors and their voice-over narrations have authority over their interviewees. However, directors may choose to step back and dispense with their traditionally authoritative discourse, as Camino does in both La vieja memoria and Los niños de Rusia. Instead, his authority is accomplished unstably by the polyvocal montage, through which the victims’ own voices reclaim their personal and political agency. Acknowledgement We are indebted to Marvin D’Lugo, who obtained a copy of La vieja memoria for Isabel Estrada. 174

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Notes 1

2

3 4 5

6

IMDb gives 1979 as the date of the film while other sources give 1977, the year that the interviews were filmed. However, we know that the film won the 1978 Festival de San Sebastián prize, so this date is most accurate in terms of when the Spanish public first had the opportunity to see it. See Gubern (1991: 111–12) for an exhaustive overview of pre- and post-Franco 1970s films on the Civil War, and a brief but important and enlightening commentary on La vieja memoria. Indeed, while La vieja memoria is cited routinely as a significant film in encyclopedias and monographs, there is little to no extended commentary in many standard points of reference (e.g. Hopewell, 1987; Kinder, 1997; Rodgers, 1999). See Estrada (2013) for an in-depth analysis of victimhood in contemporary Spanish documentary. José Antonio Primo de Rivera was a prominent right-wing politician. He founded the Falange Española, a nationalist party inspired by fascism. Sánchez-Biosca (2006: 262) provides a detailed historical contextualization of the film within the political reforms of the Transition. At the time of writing, La vieja memoria is easily accessible on Google Video and YouTube, suggesting its enduring importance for contemporary audiences. Among them are, to name just a few: Memoria de España/Memory of Spain (García de Cortázar, 2004), El laberinto español/The Spanish Labyrinth (Martínez Reverte, 2006); as well as the well-known trilogy by Montse Armengou and Ricard Belis: Els nens perduts del franquismo/The Lost Children of Francoism (2000), Les fosses del silence/The Graves of Silence (2003) and El comboi dels 927/The Convoy of 927 (2004).

References Badiou, A. (2001). Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. P. Hallward (London: Verso). Crussells, M. (2003). La Guerra civil española: cine y propaganda (Barcelona: Ariel). Estrada, I. (2013). El documental cinematográfico y televisivo contemporáneo: Memoria, sujeto y formación de la identidad democrática española (Woodbridge: Tamesis Books). Felman, S. and Laub, D. (1992). Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge). Gómez López-Quiñones, A. (2003). ‘Identidad y memoria colectiva en Los niños de Rusia’, Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies, 1.1: 129–57. Gubern, R. (1991). ‘The Civil War: inquest or exorcism?’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 13.4: 103–12. Hirsch, M. (1996). ‘Past lives: postmemories in exile’, Poetics Today, 17.4: 659–86. Hopewell, J. (1987). Out of the Past: Spanish Cinema after Franco (London: British Film Institute). Juliá, S. (1999). Víctimas de la Guerra Civil (Madrid: Temas de Hoy). Kinder, M. (1997). ‘Documenting the national and its subversion in a democratic Spain’ in M.  Kinder (ed.), Refiguring Spain: Cinema/Media/Representation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 65–98. 175

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Labanyi, J. (2007). ‘Memory and modernity in democratic Spain: the difficulty of coming to terms with the Civil War’, Poetics Today, 28.1: 89–116. (2010). ‘Testimonies of repression: political and methodological issues’ in C. Jerez-Farrán and S. Amago (eds.), Unearthing Franco’s Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press), 192–207. Mate, R. (2008). Justicia de las víctimas: Terrorismo, memoria, reconciliación (Barcelona: Anthropos). Rodgers, E. (ed.) (1999). Encyclopedia of Contemporary Spanish Culture (London: Routledge). Sánchez-Biosca, V. (2006). Cine y guerra civil española: Del mito a la memoria (Madrid: Alianza Editorial).

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Chapter 12 New Bodies, New Sounds: Rediscovering the Eroticism of the Transition Alejandro Melero

J

ordan and Morgan-Tamosunas’ chapter on ‘Gender and sexuality in Post-Franco cinema’ in Contemporary Spanish Cinema begins by stating that ‘Spanish cinema is known for producing explicit images (of both sex and violence) more than most other contemporary European countries’ (1998: 112). Sophia Petrillo, the oldest lady in Susan Harris’ North American sitcom The Golden Girls, could not have read Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas, but seems to agree when she claims: ‘If you look for surreal drama, go and see a French film; if you look for […] old ladies with stiff faces, see a British film; […] if you look for sex, see a Spanish film.’ From Vicente Aranda’s works (including his most internationally successful film, Amantes/Lovers, 1991) to Bigas Luna and Almodóvar’s filmography, Spanish cinema has projected, both nationally and internationally, the idea that screening sex is, or can be, part of its agenda. Thus, few spectators will be surprised if an explicit sex scene is found at some point (something that would be less expected in a Hollywood production). High-profile films such as Lucía y el sexo/Sex and Lucia (Médem, 2001) and Mentiras y gordas/Sex, Parties and Lies (Albacete and Menkes, 2009) seemingly have reiterated this inclination to provide overt, sometimes gratuitous and even unusual images of sex. This proliferation of explicit images can be located during the Transition to Democracy. In a relatively recent television interview, destape1 star Susana Estrada complained that: What we [the actresses of the 1970s] used to do was no more than what actresses do today […] but we were insulted and never respected [when, in fact] we were the ones who opened the floodgates for future film-makers to express themselves freely. (Qué tiempo tan feliz, 13 November 2010)

Estrada’s comments on her work suggest that sexual discourses and representations in contemporary Spanish cinema have been largely determined by the pioneering films in which she participated. This chapter studies the legacy of the erotic cinema of the Transition in contemporary representations of sex in Spanish film-making. In order to do so, it focuses on two films that examine the Transition to Democracy as the time in which sex was first presented in Spanish film. It analyses two modes of representation of sex that can be associated with the erotic cinema of the late and post-Franco years, and which have helped to determine contemporary representations. First, Torremolinos 73 (Berger, 2003) is studied in order to explore how the arrival of explicit images of sex coincided with technological advances in film-making, thus continuing a tendency that has had various manifestations in cinemas of different nationalities. Second, the film Los años desnudos/Rated R (Sabroso and

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Ayaso, 2008) is taken as an example of the re-elaboration of the body and sound landscapes that took place in the sexploitation cinema of the 1970s.

Screening Eroticism and Film Techniques Recent works on the uneasy relationships between sex and on-screen representation have insisted on the importance of film techniques in order to understand the chronological (albeit swinging) advances in the portrayal of sex in cinema. Linda Williams noticed this in her seminal Screening Sex, which is based on the premise that: [S]ex is an act and more or less of ‘it’ may be revealed but […] it is not a stable truth that cameras and microphones either ‘catch’ or don’t catch. It is a constructed, mediated, performed act and every revelation is also a concealment that leaves something to the imagination. (2008: 2) Following Williams, Krzywinska analyses how ‘cinematic sex is interwoven into a matrix of industrial, economic, social and cultural factors’ (2006: 4). Krzywinska analyses the gradual liberalization of American cinema as far as the representation of sex is concerned. She concludes that the most relevant advances have come at times when new technologies were changing film-making, and even threatening its status as society’s primary source of entertainment. Krzywinska, like Williams, is profoundly interested in how the formal features of a film play a crucial role in the ways that cinematic sex and sexual themes acquire their meanings and shapes: therefore, she analyses lightning, focus, editing, acting, music and camera styles in order to decode how meaning and values of cinematic sex are highly dependent on film techniques and their very machinery (cameras, lenses). She looks at the American comedies of the 1950s in which there was ‘a great deal of (pillow) talk about sex, but this [was] not matched by what is seen’ (2006: 9). Krzywinska goes on to study the melodramas of the late 1950s, such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Brooks, 1958), which were made when Hollywood feared the expansion of television, and saw sex as the best of all possible hooks to attract a potentially evasive audience: Hollywood’s move into more overt sexual realms can therefore be linked to a crisis in the film industry, which went hand in hand with a shift in regulatory and censorship protocols. The use of sexual sensationalism to sell such films, which like many exploitation films of the era have far less sexual content than their advertising suggests, can be seen in the posters. (2006: 14) Although Krzywinska never refers to Spanish sexploitation films, her words can be applied to cinematic models from the Transition. As in Hollywood, censorship regulations 180

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gradually had relaxed in Spain, until their disappearance in 1976. Similarly, most sexploitation films promised more sex than they actually delivered; moreover, advances in film techniques were to arrive and reshape models and practices of film-making, as will be discussed below. The film Torremolinos 73 tells the story of Carmen (Candela Peña) and Alfredo (Javier Cámara), who live on his pathetic salary as a door-to-door encyclopedia salesperson. When his boss Carlos (Juan Diego) tells them that there is an ‘easier’ way to make money – if they are willing to be filmed while having sex – they decide to give it a try. Carmen’s unfulfilled wishes to become a mother contribute to her agreement. However, as they film more and more sex films, Alfredo becomes interested in this new profession (both for him and the rest of Spanish society, as the film clarifies at many points), as well as in the technical aspects of it. Torremolinos 73’s concern with the technologies of cinema can be seen from the very first scenes. The film works with various metaphors that aim to represent the changing tendencies of the Transition, suggesting that they were not transitional at all, but instead very brusque and sudden. Carmen and Alfredo are seen reading encyclopedias in bed, while the show La familia Telerín is aired on their black-and-white television. This show, easily recognizable, is clearly associated with Francoist television and even values, as the Telerín family is an obvious expression of the ‘Large Family’ policy of the dictatorship. The same can be said about the encyclopedias that Alfredo sells and reads while lying in bed with Carmen. This works on two different levels: first, these thick and unwieldy books are compared to the new ways of buying knowledge as advertised on television, through ‘los fascículos’ or the serialized publication of books. Second, this scene is to be compared with subsequent moments in the film in which the couple employ the bed for very different purposes, thus presenting sex as the modern, new substitute for the everyday life of married people. In case there is any doubt, Carlos states it clearly: ‘Door-to-door encyclopedias salesmen are going to disappear.’ Alfredo’s sexual life (apparently limited to reading encyclopedias with his wife) will disappear very soon too, and be incorporated into the film industry. One more representation of the contrast between the vanishing past and forthcoming technological times can be seen later, when Alfredo is presented with a Super 8 camera. Previously, the audience and the characters in the film have been introduced to Super  8 screening via a short film in which a Swedish entrepreneur explains the success of pornographic films. This man, dressed as a scientist, presents some facts about sex and sexology. Carlos explains: ‘The sales for the serialized Audiovisual Encyclopedia of Sex have broken all the records.’ Immediately afterwards, another pertinent character is introduced: Eric (Tom Jacobsen). He is a Swedish film director who is going to teach Alfredo how to use the technical devices, and will be a source of inspiration when Alfredo starts taking his profession seriously. The sequence presenting the Super 8 camera is relevant both in terms of the representation of sexuality, and from the viewpoint of the film’s narrative virtuosity. While Eric is teaching Alfredo the endless possibilities of new film-making, Eric’s wife, Frida (Marie-Ann 181

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Jespersen), is teaching Carmen how sex is performed on-screen. While Eris asks: ‘What is this?’ as he holds a Super 8 camera – and answers himself: ‘It is your eye’ – Frida is explaining to Carmen how to undress cinematically. The film’s very clever editing introduces a fast-speed soundtrack that accompanies Carmen’s striptease and Alfredo’s manipulation of the different parts of the camera; in doing this, both actions are combined and a very clear association is established. This new machine, with its many tiny parts (which Alfredo is putting together), will soon capture Carmen’s body. As she drops the clothes she is taking off, Alfredo is building the technical apparatus that will capture his wife’s body, and the fact that each piece of her clothing comes off as each part of the camera goes in highlights the connections between the creation of cinematic sex and the technological tools that it requires. Additionally, while Frida invites Carmen to be totally naked, Alfredo inserts the tiniest parts into the camera. He then proudly displays the recording device, while Carmen, seminaked, kisses the religious image she carries on her necklace: everything is almost ready for the full exposé, and the editing compares the new technological advances with Spain’s traditional Catholicism. Eric’s voice-over names the different parts of the camera, while Carmen takes her bra off. ‘I’m going to teach you two or three things’, says Frida to Carmela, as she starts a striptease which includes most of the cinematic conventions associated with this ritual since the times of Gilda (Vidor, 1946), a film that has an unusually prominent place in the collective Spanish imagination. Frida shakes her head sensually, so that her hair looks wilder; she raises her hands above her head, and so on. Frida makes clear that these are the conventions that an average Spanish woman of the 1970s had not been taught. The implications here are crystal clear: both technology (presented here as exclusively masculine) and the performance of sex on-screen (feminine) arrive in Spain via more ‘modern’ European countries. Frida confirms this when she says to Carmen: ‘I’ll show you how to dress in modern style’, although what she actually does is show her how to undress (see Vidal, 2010). However, even though the technologies required for filming sex arrive from abroad, the next scene presents the Spaniards as the new experts on this matter, suggesting that the students have exceeded their masters. Alfredo is filming and directing Eric and Frida, who are having sex. Although it is presumably the first time that Alfredo has done this, he shows his efficiency and ability to use the vocabulary and techniques of film-making, much to Eric’s bewilderment. He suggests that his new camera can help film better sex, saying: You see … I think Frida puts you in the shade, and I believe that a high angle is not the best one for … capturing the action. I believe that a low angle with a telephoto lens – from there – would be more satisfying. Eric does not know how to respond to this, and limits himself to quoting Ingmar Bergman again, implying that foreign industries might be better when it comes to auteur cinema but, in terms of sex on-screen, no one can compete with the Spaniards. Not much later in the film Alfredo, always fascinated by audiovisual devices, presents Carmen with a new television set: ‘Supercolor, the latest in the market’, which subsequently 182

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will play an important role when their marriage begins to disintegrate – the machine will break as their relationship is about to come to an end. Their new colourful screen (compared to the times in which the black-and-white television accompanied their readings of encyclopedias) has arrived only after their incorporation into the worlds of film technologies and sex. By using media technologies and technological advances as metaphors for the introduction of new sexual discourses to Spanish cinema, Torremolinos 73 succeeds in continuing with the tradition noted by Krzywinska, in which ‘industrial […] contexts also have a role to play in shaping cinematic sex’ (2006: 12). Only the availability of cheaper and domestic equipment allowed Spain to develop a still-illegal sex industry that would provide the model for the first erotic cinema of the Democracy (the film ratifies this when Alfredo becomes a professional director, once Franco is dead). In fact, some of the ‘Cine S’ films of the Transition had been interested in the technologies of recording and screening sex. One of the most interesting cases is El maravilloso mundo del sexo otherwise known as Las maravillas del sexo/The Wonderful World of Sex (García, 1978). This film was notorious for its last scene, which was the main attraction during its publicity campaign: ‘Don’t miss this film in which Susana Estrada fucks … the camera!’ Estrada, who nowadays argues for recuperation of the cinemas of the Transition as pioneering examples of contemporary sexual filmic discourses, anticipated in the most physical and explicit of ways that screening sex is the result of complex technological procedures. For, as Linda Williams claims, ‘to screen is to reveal on a screen’ (2008: 2), and therefore technical manipulations are always required. For Sandra, there is no need to ‘fuck the camera’; when Alfredo is filming her with her baby (whose father is an actor who made love to her on-screen), Sandra smiles, full of satisfaction. The frustrating and sterile times of the past are over, and screening sex is as much an episode from their past as the dictatorship itself. Screening Sex and Sounds Recent scholarship on the complexities of screening sex has paid attention to a wide range of categories that have expanded theoretical approaches to filmic representations of the body, desire and sexual acts. The inclusion of Sex and Porn Studies in the programmes of prominent universities (such as Berkeley and the State University of New York) has contributed to the development of these questions within the area of film studies. The consideration of ‘sonoric landscapes’ (to use Richard Lappert’s terminology) in the construction of the sexual body in visual arts is one of these recent theoretical contributions. Lappert suggested that the study of visual representations of sexual bodies demands that the sounds that accompany them are taken into account, as the body is as much as ‘an aural phenomenon’ as it is a site of tactile sensation: [T]he body sounds: it is audible; it hears. Sounds constitute the atmosphere supporting and confirming life on and in the terrain of the body. The ether of aurality is vital; it is 183

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constitutive of noise, language and music. The body is a sight and a sound […] the body is sighted and hears; the body sees and makes audible. (1993: 19) The film Los años desnudos is about the struggles of the pioneering film-makers of Spanish eroticism during the Transition: a time in which a new sexual discourse was emerging. The study of the sonoric landscape of this film can provide useful ways to understand how contemporary Spain looks at its past, and remembers the processes involved in the development of sexual narratives in society and cinema. Los años desnudos tells the story of three young women who work in the sexploitation film industry of the late 1970s. Their biographies, which are based on real-life characters, illustrate that convulsive and changing period, and constitute an interesting testimony of the so-called ‘Cine S’ – especially if we take into account that the film-makers went through a long process of research and interviews with the actresses and other practitioners who worked within it.2 The presence of Susana Estrada playing a small cameo role is further evidence of the film’s interest in recuperating the legacy of the eroticism of the Transition. The film is particularly relevant for contemporary debates about the consequences of dubbing in Spanish film history. Hayley opened Pandora’s box when he published a controversial article in which he claimed that: [Spanish cinema’s] biggest problem is a cultural and social one, and has to do with authenticity and individuality. The Spanish language from Spain does not suit cinema […] One only needs to switch the television on to see and hear the theatrical and forced voices, manners and grimaces. (Hayley, 2010) Hayley considered that the Spanish ‘obsession’ with using non-direct sound challenges the very essence of performing for the screen: ‘Most American stars – Marlon Brando, Robert de Niro and Marilyn Monroe – speak in particular ways. They would not have found a job in Spanish cinema.’ Although he admits that ‘most directors and actors achieve performances that are natural in the Spanish context’, he believes that their acting ‘looks artificial for foreigners’ (Hayley, 2010). Many critics and academics such as Díaz Naval (2010) and Vernon (2011) have responded to Hayley’s theories, and the debate has not been limited to strictly academic areas. The Transition is an essential period in order to understand the relevance and potential limitations of dubbing in Spanish cinema. The late 1970s and early 1980s were the times when this common practice became obsolete, as can be seen from the fact that the generation of film-makers who started working during the Transition has been the last to use non-direct recording. Los años desnudos looks at this filming procedure of the past, and connects it to the difficulties of filming sex which, like the incorporation of direct sound, was one of the 184

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novelties of film-making during the Transition. There are various moments in the film in which the process of filming sex is recreated. One scene is particularly relevant for the study of the connections between on-screen sex and sound, and its place in Spanish film history. The three actresses – Sandra (Candela Peña), Lina (Goya Toledo) and Eva (Mar Flores) – are filming an erotic sequence that takes place in a convent, a set-piece that can be found in several films of the period. The director (Antonio de la Torre) is giving them some instructions when one of the actresses admits that she has not learned her lines. Much to Sandra’s indignation, the director confirms that not being able to recite the text is far from being a problem, as no direct sound is going to be used; therefore, the actresses can recite a succession of numbers, ‘but not in order’. This comic situation presents an additional twist when only Sandra says the text while their counterparts recite random numbers. A few minutes earlier, when Lina and Sandra had met to rehearse, Lina had said: ‘I’ve been told that they might dub us’, to which Sandra replied: ‘They’ll dub us for sure.’ Sandra, the only one of the three friends who sees herself as a real actress, knows the mechanisms of the Spanish film industry. Non-direct sound was used commonly in both erotic and non-erotic Spanish cinema. It is a well-established fact that the actor José (Pepe) Isbert very rarely knew his lines, especially in his latter films when his memory was failing. Another key star, José Luis López Vázquez, is known to have been rather lazy when it came to learning his texts. More research needs to be done in order to understand how this practice has set Spanish cinema on a particular trajectory. To cite just one example, in the 1970s and 1980s Antonio Ozores became very popular for his talent for deliberately not making sense when he spoke; in films such as Cuatro mujeres y un lío/Four Women and a Mess (Mariano Ozores, 1985), he capitalized on his ability to speak as quickly as possible. If one pays attention, it is not difficult to see how his lips do not coincide with the text, which was added in post-production (it certainly must have been much easier to say idiotic and extremely fast lines using this method). By recreating this tradition, Los años desnudos is one of the first films to explore the possibilities afforded by a practice that is a very important part of Spanish cinema history; tellingly, this is a practice whose end coincided with sex-on-screen ceasing to be an exception and becoming the norm. The tensions between direct and non-direct sound are not the only aspect of the use of sound in erotic films that interests Los años desnudos. The film’s soundtrack bears testimony to a new tendency in popular film and music that determined the representation of sex in cinema. The 1970s was the decade in which a new music genre emerged and changed the way that people dance and socialize: disco. Richard Dyer wrote what is possibly the first and definitely one of the most influential essays on the subject, ‘In defence of disco’. This piece, which has been reprinted on numerous occasions following its publication in 1979, proves particularly useful for an understanding of the mechanisms that underpinned the sexual discourse of the 1970s. Dyer takes disco music and, after comparing it with previous forms of popular music, considers it the first one to present what he terms ‘full body eroticism’: Popular song’s eroticism is ‘disembodied’: it succeeds in expressing a sense of the erotic which yet denies eroticism’s physicality. This can be shown by the nature of tunes in 185

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popular songs and the way they are handled […] The tune is not allowed to invade the whole of one’s body. (1979: 21) Moreover, Dyer says, disco refuses to ‘place its tunes within a conceptualization of love and passion as emanating from “inside”, the heart or the soul’ (1979: 21), in the way that popular songs traditionally have done so as to ‘express an erotic yearning of the inner person, not the body’ (1979: 21). On the contrary, in disco, ‘not only are the lyrics often more directly physical and the delivery more raunchy […] but, most importantly, disco is insistently rhythmic in a way that popular song is not’ (1979: 21). This conceptualization of passion as emanating from inside is revealed by the presence of human sounds (moans, sighs, laughs, breathing) in the music. Donna Summer’s ‘Love to Love You Baby’ is perhaps the most famous example. Released in 1975, the song became notorious for including the sound of Summer’s twenty-two allegedly real orgasms, which earned the singer the nickname ‘The first lady of love’. Radio stations, including the BBC, banned the song, considering it too ‘graphic’; this in itself poses relevant theoretical questions about how sounds and soundtracks can add graphic information to visual narratives. Los años desnudos participates in this debate by including on its soundtrack the song ‘Aún vivo para el amor’ (‘I Still Live for Loving’), sung by Fernando Fernán-Gómez, in which human sounds accompany the actor’s deep and easily recognizable voice.3 This was not the only Spanish song during the Transition to include human sounds as part of its ‘full body eroticism’. Susana Estrada imported the sexiest disco music with songs such as ‘Gózame ya’ (‘Enjoy Me Now’) or ‘Hagámoslo juntos’ (‘Let’s Do it Together’). In Los años desnudos, Estrada’s song ‘Acaríciame’ (‘Caress Me’) is heard when Sandra is trying to flirt with Ángel (Luis Zahera), the film producer with whom she is in love. When Sandra caresses her hair and prepares herself for the ritual of attracting the object of her desire, Estrada’s sensual moans can be heard; the film’s soundscape provides the sexual allure that this scene requires. Sandra asks Ángel to kiss her while Estrada is singing ‘Caress Me’; while Sandra is waiting for Ángel to respond, Estrada’s orgasms are clearly heard. This use of the soundtrack as an essential element of the sexual landscape of the film is not far from Laura Mulvey’s theories on the limits of screen space. According to her: [T]he function of film is to reproduce as accurately as possible the so-called natural conditions of human perception. Camera technology (as exemplified by deep focus in particular) and camera movements (determined by the action of the protagonist), combined with invisible editing (demanded by realism) all tend to blur the limits of screen space. (2006: 348) Sounds and music, it could be added, are a central element in expanding the limits of what is seen on-screen. The soundscape of Los años desnudos blurs the limits of the screen as it 186

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provides relevant information in terms of storyline and, more importantly, sexual representation. When Sandra’s lips are mouthing the lyrics of the disco song, she is just doing what the characters that she plays do on-screen. The music she listens to is dubbing her own life, letting spectators know that in her desperate search for love, she is being sexually abused. Her life, like that of the nun she plays, needs non-direct sound to uncover what the performance of sex does not reveal. Conclusion This chapter has examined two contemporary films in order to analyse how today’s film narratives look back to the Transition as a landmark in the exploration of sexual discourses. Many of the debates about the representation of sex on-screen flirt with the idea of the limit, and assume that when it comes to filming sex, there is always a line that cannot be crossed. Bazin noticed that as far as sex goes, the ‘cinema can say everything, but not show everything. If we wish to remain on the level of art, “we must stay on the realm of imagination”’ (1971: 174) – but the literature of film studies has shown that ‘the realm of imagination’ is a concept that can be easily problematized. As far as sex on-screen is concerned, the biggest contribution of Spanish cinema of the Transition was to take what had been traditionally elided and place it at the centre of the film. If we take Simón, contamos contigo/Simon, We Count On You (Fernández, 1971) and look at its sex scenes, we can see that despite the relevance of sexual acts for the film’s narrative (it is about a man who cannot help attracting all the ladies he meets), sex is always avoided. Hence, for example, at the beginning of the film Simón (Alfredo Landa) is tempted by his fiancée, with whom he has never had sex. When she is semi-naked and Simón cannot resist temptation, spectators are deprived of the representation of sex, as the editing cuts to a shot of the balcony of their room. Moreover, non-diegetic music is played loudly, as if to block the human sounds that could escape through the window (we can compare this to the sex soundscape of Los años desnudos, in which music not only does not block sex, but actively contributes to its representation). A few years after Ramón Fernández’s film, an ellipsis would not be required for the representation of sex. In many films such as the ones recreated by Torremolinos 73 and Los años desnudos, those scenes were both the main attraction and principal motivation for their production. These novel representations of sex demanded new ways of filming and reworking the technical possibilities of cinema, for there was no tradition or knowledge as to how they should be made. Alongside films such as Días de cine/Cinema Days (Serrano, 2007) and No lo llames amor… llámalo X/Don´t Call It Love… Call It X (Capel, 2011), both Torremolinos 73 and Los años desnudos are good examples of how the study of the representation of sex in Spanish cinema must look at the Transition years, as they constitute a crucial period for understanding contemporary cinematic sexual discourses in Spain. 187

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Acknowledgement This chapter was written as part of the research project ‘Cinema and Television in PostTransition Spain (1979–1992)’ funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the Spanish Government (CSO2011-15708-E). Notes 1

2 3

Destape (literally ‘uncovering’) is a wide category that refers to a popular trend in Spanish film-making during the early 1970s when most of the films included nudity and sexual innuendo. It was followed by the more official category, ‘Cine S’, which legislated these visual representations post-1977. Félix Sabroso says that ‘in order to make the film we talked to many of the actresses of the time, some of them well-known, and others not so famous, although I prefer not to say who they are, as they didn’t want me to’ (cited in Montserrat Zaragoza, 2008). Fernán-Gómez (1921–2007) had one of the most famous voices in Spanish cinema, theatre and television. His succesful career lasted for over sixty years, and includes some of Spain’s most important films.

References Bazin, A. (1971). What Is Cinema? (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Díaz Naval, A. (2010). ‘El doblaje en España’, El País, 3 August, available at http://www.elpais. com/articulo/opinion/doblaje/Espana/elpepiopi/20100803elpepiopi_8/Tes, last accessed on 13 March 2012. Dyer, R. (1979). ‘In defence of Disco’, Gay Left, 8: 21. Hayley, J. J. (2010). ‘El problema más grave del cine español’, El País, 2 August, available at http://www. elpais.com/articulo/opinion/problema/grave/cine/espanol/elpepuopi/20100802elpepiopi_10/ Tes, last accessed on 13 March 2012. Jordan, B. and Morgan-Tamosunas, R. (1998). Contemporary Spanish Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Krzywinska, T. (2006). Sex and the Cinema (London: Wallflower Press). Lappert, R. (1993). The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation and the History of the Body (Los Angeles, CA: Berkeley University Press). Montserrat Zaragoza, D. (2008), ‘Las actrices del destape siguen denostadas hoy’, El Periódico de Aragón, 29 October, available at http://www.elperiodicodearagon.com/noticias/escenarios/ las-actrices-del-destape-siguen denostadas-hoy-_451201.html, last accessed on 13 March 2012. Mulvey, L. (2006). ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ in M. Gigi Durham and D. Kellne (eds.), Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing), 342–52. 188

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Vernon, K. (2011). ‘Buscando a Cecilia [Roth] desesperadamente: voz, cuerpo e identidad en el cine español’, unpublished conference paper presented at II Workshop Internacional Mujer, Género y Audiovisual, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 24–26 May. Vidal, B. (2010). ‘Memories of underdevelopment. Torremolinos 73, cinephilia and filiations at the margins of Europe’ in B. Vidal, D. Martin-Jones, and D. Iordanova (eds.), Cinema at the Periphery (Detroit, IL: Wayne State University Press), 211–31. Williams, L. (2008). Screening Sex (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).

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Chapter 13 Blood and Unfulfilled Promises: Representations of Terrorism and the Transition Concepción Cascajosa Virino

O

n the cool autumnal evening of October 20 2011, the terrorist group ETA announced a permanent end to its military action. Forty-three years and 879 killings after its creation, this announcement closed an unfinished chapter in Spain’s Transition to Democracy. Although Spanish cinema has looked at terrorism in more than forty films, including fiction and documentary (from Comando Txikia/Txikia Command, Madrid, 1976, to La casa de mi padre/My Father’s House, Merchan, 2009), this is a controversial topic, as the reaction to Julio Medem’s La pelota vasca, la piel contra la piedra /The Basque Ball: Skin Against Stone (2003) would prove (see Chapter 26).1 For the purpose of my argument, I will analyse two films on the history of ETA which can help us understand how the representation of terrorism in Spanish cinema was determined by the often-unacknowledged open wounds that the Transition left behind. Both Helena Taberna’s Yoyes/Yoyes (2000) and Miguel Courtois’ El Lobo/Wolf (2004) depict real-life figures who enrolled in ETA in the 1970s.2 The former genuinely believed in its cause, while the latter worked undercover as a secret service agent. Disappointed and betrayed by their comrades and ideals, the respective paths chosen by Maria Dolores Katarain (aka Yoyes) and Mikel Lejarza (aka Lobo) serve as metaphors for a complicated time in which it was not easy to distinguish heroes from villains. ETA (the abbreviation for Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, which means ‘Basque Homeland and Freedom’ in Basque) was founded in 1959 and scored a major coup on December 20 1973 with the assassination of the President of the Spanish Government, Admiral Carrero Blanco.3 In October 1974, ETA split into two different organizations: ETA (pm) (politicalmilitary) and ETA (m) (military). Following Francisco Franco’s death, the two organizations began an intensive campaign of attacks. While ETA (pm) was virtually dismantled by the police force and its leader surrendered, ETA (m) resisted. During the 1980s, the so-called ‘socialization of terror’ strategy was put into operation. This included a series of brutal carbomb attacks, such as those at the Hipercor shopping centre in Barcelona in June 1987 (21 civilian casualties), the Civil Guard Headquarters in Zaragoza in December 1987 (five officers and seven members of the same family were killed, including five young girls), and the Civil Guard Headquarters in Vic in May 1991 (ten casualties, including five children).4 Following unsuccessful peacemaking attempts by successive governments – the Algiers Talks in 1989 and the so-called Meeting in Zurich in 1999 – both major Spanish political parties joined forces to implement a new strategy based on police action and the political marginalization of ETA’s supporters (the Organic Law of Political Parties in June 2002). Following another failed initiative in 2006 (the Loyola Agreements), an increasingly weakened ETA and its supporters were persuaded at last of the necessity to renounce

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violence in order to pursue political action. Thus, the announcement of a new truce in September 2010 paved the way for legalization of the Bildu and Amaiur political parties, both of which achieved excellent results in the local and general elections of 2011.5 The ‘Bloody Transition’ and Debates on Historical Memory Contemporary debates surrounding the Transition have included discussion of the politics of memory and how Spanish society has dealt with the trauma of the Civil War and the ensuing repression. This topic was brought to the fore with the passing of the Law of Historical Memory, advanced by the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in 2007. The result was a challenge to the canonical vision of the so-called ‘Consensus of the Transition’ celebrated, for example, in Victoria Prego’s television documentary series La transición/The Transition (TVE2, 1995), which praised the actions of Adolfo Suárez, Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado, Santiago Carrillo and other key figures of the period. The historian Carmen Molinero has analysed how the Transition – or an idealized vision of what it constituted – now is exalted paradoxically from conservative positions, while at the same time being subject to censure by those on the Left who seek to vindicate historical memory: [I]t is surprising that, in the context of the new readings of the Transition from dictatorship to democracy that are being carried out in Spain, the Left does not highlight the distortion that the Spanish Right makes of the politically meaning expressed by the term ‘national reconciliation’, accepting in some cases conservative groups’ interpretation of the Transition. This is further proof of the evident paradox that, for over a decade, the Transition has been vindicated by those who resisted political change, while some of those who forced the introduction of democracy have allowed their main role to be overshadowed. (2010: 35) This debate has been punctuated by the idea that the Transition was less than idyllic in its development and, in hindsight, allowed Francoism’s elites to continue wielding large amounts of power without being held accountable for what had occurred during the dictatorship. According to the advocates of this position, the outcome of the Transition was not inevitable, but instead the result of choices made by Franco’s heirs and the new political parties, who were eager to gain advantageous positions within the new distribution of power. As the historian Ferran Gallego states: In public opinion the foundational reference to that time has been established thereby attributing to it a reconciliation process eliminating not only the contrasting projects of the regime and the opposition for the country’s future, but also turning the regime’s elite into the motors of change, alongside a generous rhetoric attributed to the ‘People’, without distinguishing the options Spaniards of the time had. (2009: 25) 194

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Political violence is a particularly pertinent topic when it comes to studying the Transition. Álvaro de Soto (2005: 33–34) has remarked how it was seemingly so ubiquitous throughout the Transition that it became representative of it. Moreover, the democratic process was shaped precisely by this violence and an increase in social mobilization (strikes and public demonstrations). They forced Francoist elites to revise their original project of trying to keep the foundations of the old regime intact: ‘Sometimes there was a very real perception that political elites were following the demands of citizens, forcing them to change their discourse and adapt its political action’ (2005: 33). Mariano Sánchez-Soler (2010: 17–20) claims that there were almost 600 fatalities and a few thousand seriously wounded as a result of this violence. These figures explain the noteworthy title of his book, La transición sangrienta (The Bloody Transition). Extreme groups on the Left (ETA, GRAPO, FRAP) and on the Right (Batallón Vasco Español, Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey) both participated in brutal activities, and the repressive police, alongside other security forces such as the Civil Guard and prison officials, violently prosecuted them. Two notorious cases were those of Agustin Rueda Carabanchel, an anarchist who died in prison in March 1978, and José Vivas, a neighbourhood activist accused of belonging to GRAPO, who died in the state security headquarters in Madrid in September 1980. These were not isolated events, as the killing of José Ignacio Arregui in Carabanchel prison and the infamous Almería case proved.6 This constant violence, manifest at all levels, is represented in both Yoyes and El Lobo.

Yoyes: Death of a Heroine/Traitor The assassination of Maria Dolores Gonzalez Katarain was considered one of the milestones in rising social opposition to terrorism in Spain. Yoyes died on September 10 1986 after a member of ETA, the organization of which she gained leadership in the 1970s, shot her in the head while she walked the streets of his hometown, Ordicia. Yoyes was holding the hand of her three-year-old son at the time. She had spent years of exile in Mexico and France, and was protected from legal prosecution under the amnesty laws. When she returned to the Basque country to lead a normal life away from any kind of political activity, ETA accused her of treason. Although she tried to be discreet, she was used in a media campaign that linked her return to the efforts of Felipe González’s government to create a split within ETA. For anthropologist Begoña Aretxaga, her assassination reflected the contradictory position of women in the imaginary of Basque nationalism: The death of Yoyes could be read, in a sense, within the parameters of a classical tragedy: as a result of a conjunction of circumstances that intertwined in a combination of cultural models, historical events and acts of Yoyes herself. (2009: 10) Yoyes’ diaries, whose last chapters dealt with her thoughts about a death she knew was imminent, were the basis for the posthumous award-winning television documentary Yoyes (1988), 195

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written by the novelist and journalist Jorge Martínez Reverte in collaboration with Mario Onaindia, a former ETA (pm) member and leader of the political party, Euskadiko Ezkerra. A decade later, Yoyes was also the inspiration for first-time director Helena Taberna, who wrote the screenplay about her life together with long-time collaborator Andrés Martorell (Michel Gaztambide, a noted screenwriter and others also contributed to the script). Taberna explained in an interview published on the website of the pacifist group Elkarri that after four years in development, the project obtained the necessary funding thanks to the feelings of optimism generated by the truce of 1998: [I]n September 1998 everything came together: ETA announced a truce; in the San Sebastian Film Festival I contacted the producer and [actress] Ana Torrent; and the Basque Government gave me a grant that had been denied the previous year, which ensured a level of institutional support that was important for the producer. I shot the film in the best of all worlds: with excitement, hope and an intense feeling of joy. (cited in Anon, 2002) The film was seen by 200,000 people in its initial theatrical run – a modest box office success, considering that the film’s release came at a particularly unfortunate time: just three months after ETA committed its first killing following the truce in December 1999. Suddenly the project became controversial. This is the standard fate of Spanish films about terrorism. As María Pilar Rodríguez states: The lack of commercial interest of this type of cinema seems to be another relevant factor for explaining the absence of movies dealing with terrorism. It is also worth noting the risk implicit in dealing with the subject, a risk which can be attributed as much to the difficulty of obtaining a final result that is not sensational or excessively one-sided as to the social and political edginess experienced in Euskadi at a time when there appears to be no hope for a peaceful solution in the near future. (2002: 156) However, Yoyes was well received by the critics, and won prizes at international film festivals such as Viña del Mar (Chile), Toulouse (France), Gramado (Brazil) and Cartagena (Colombia). The film combines two timelines. In the first, beginning in 1973, the eponymous protagonist is a young anti-Franco activist who flees to France and, with the support of mentor Argi (Iñaki Arriera), gradually rises to prominence within the leadership of ETA. In the second, Yoyes arrives in Paris in 1984 following several years of exile in Mexico, and then returns to the Basque country, where eventually she is killed. She is depicted as an intellectual woman who falls in love with a quiet philosopher, Josean (Ernesto Alterio). Significantly, she is not attracted by the brute force of their comrades-in-arms, whose sexual advances she rejects in a couple of scenes. Yoyes renounces arms at the same time that 196

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she decides to begin a new life with Josean and have a daughter, who she later sends to the Basque country so she can learn the Euskera language and regain the national identity suppressed by her mother’s exile. Jaume Martí-Olivella has concluded that the sexual and emotional relationships established in the two timelines allow the film to establish a broader commentary on the persistence of patriarchal control structures: Helena Taberna’s film defies that reductive gaze while stressing the critique of the patriarchal condemnation, in this case articulated in the guise of a political rejection by the (male) ex-comrades of ETA. In the context of Basque cinema, Yoyes culminates the process of imagining and/or (en)gendering ETA, thus rendering visible parts of that invisible and spectral historical violence. (2004: 76) In Isolina Ballesteros’s (2001: 148) view, the film deals with the topic of terrorism from a feminist or feminine point of view, and portrays the evolution of its main character from active commitment to disillusionment. So the film deals at the same time with the evolution from supporting violent action to the open condemnation of its consequences, and the difficulty that women face in balancing the personal with the political. The film establishes a dichotomy between Yoyes’ emotional evolution from asexual aloofness to the joys of married life and motherhood within the broader context of historical change. Yoyes’ life is represented as being marked by violence: first, by political repression under Franco – evidenced in a tense scene at the beginning, which depicts the arrest of her brother and the beating that he suffers when he screams ‘Gora Euskadi’. Then, after the dictator’s death, her mentor Argi (the fictional version of José Miguel Beñarán, aka Argala) thinks it is time to pledge their commitment to political ends using violent means. In one scene he tells her: ‘Ours is a class struggle, it is not only about the independence of the Basque country. We need people with intellectual training.’ At the time, ETA’s actions were celebrated within the wider network of Marxist groups fighting Franco’s regime because of their common revolutionary inspiration (a support that many would regret later). In this sense, Yoyes is represented as a political thinker with a strong belief in social justice, which introduces the idea that the first generation of ETA members were idealistic young fighters forced into violence by circumstance. So, when Argi is killed in 1978 by an extreme right-wing group, she finds a new reason to keep fighting the now-democratic Spanish government. Yoyes’ ultimate disillusionment with violence comes with the bombing of Café Rolando in Madrid, which resulted in thirteen civilian deaths. Here the film-makers commit an enormous historical inaccuracy as a result of their excessive commitment to make Katarain a sympathetic figure to the viewer. The film deals too lightly with her involvement in blood crimes. This attack whose targets were police agents – the usual clientele of the café – resulted in thirteen mortal casualties, of which only one belonged to the police force. This created a fissure within ETA that resulted in a split between ETA (m) and ETA (pm). However, this attack did not occur, as in the film, in 1979 (that was the case of the deadly bombing of Café 197

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California 74, attributed to GRAPO) but in 1974, when Yoyes was beginning her activity within the group after fleeing to France a year earlier. Yoyes ends up trapped in an impossible situation. The organization that she belonged to is determined to execute her for betrayal, and the structures of the new democratic state (including the Ministry of Security, led by a Socialist politician, and the influence of a newspaper) exploits her personal sacrifice for their own benefit. However, she knows that something more important is at stake in her return to the Basque country, acknowledging the symbolic value of her former leadership role when she screams: ‘I am not anyone, I am Yoyes, damn it!’ In that last scene Katarain dies fighting for a personal independence that is seen as more important than any political or identity claim: the right to decide what direction her life should take without interference from anyone, whoever they may be  – her former comrades in ETA, the extreme right-wing groups who kill ETA members, the Spanish  socialist government, and even a brother who is still close to the terrorist organization. In one earlier powerful scene, Yoyes dreams about her hometown, seeing traditional marionette dancing: a metaphor for the slow realization that her fate always was going to be subject to the mercy of others. El Lobo: No Turning Back El Lobo is a thriller that recreates the story of Mikel Lejarza, a secret service agent who infiltrated ETA in 1975 and facilitated the arrest of 150 members. This story, as recounted by its main protagonist, was featured for the first time in a non-fiction book written by two investigative journalists from El Mundo newspaper: Manuel Cerdán and Antonio Rubio (2003). In 1997 the newspaper, famous for its coverage of corruption and state terrorism under the socialist government of Felipe González, established an audio-visual division headed by El Mundo’s deputy director, Melchor Miralles, for the production of documentary films both for television and theatrical release, inspired by current events. Lejarza’s story was an obvious choice, but the ambitious scope of the project led to a partnership with veteran producer Julio Fernández (also the owner of the distribution company Filmax). The director, Miguel Courtois, was hired because of his credentials in French cinema and television, and joined the film when a script had been completed already by the playwright Antonio Onetti. Eduardo Noriega was chosen to play Lejarza, named in the film as Txema Loigorry, and was accompanied by José Coronado as Ricardo, Lobo’s boss and French film star Patrick Bruel as Nelson, a fictional depiction of the head of ETA (pm) Iñaki Pérez Beotegi (aka Wilson). Although the reviews were mixed, El Lobo was a major commercial hit, with more than 1.5 million tickets sold, taking almost €8 million at the box office. This success with audiences can be attributed to outstanding production values, a narrative rhythm which is both tense and fast-paced, and Noriega’s charisma. However, it is also relevant that for the first time in Spanish cinema, the main characters in a film that deals with this topic were not the terrorists, but the law enforcement officers trying to hunt them 198

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down. The political and social climate in which the film was released is especially relevant for my reading. As noted previously, following the break of the truce by ETA in 2000, both the People’s Party and the Socialist Party devised an anti-terrorism strategy based on police action and the elimination of groups sympathetic to ETA from public and political life in Euskadi. The Batasuna, Euskal Herritarrok and Herri Batasuna political parties were banned successively, as were the Egunkaria and Egin newspapers. The implementation of various legal actions extended the jail sentences of those convicted of terrorism. Thereby, ETA was stripped of any ideological support, and characterized as just another criminal group. Any possible political negotiation was ruled out, and increased police action ensued. El Lobo came at a time when Spanish society had left behind the prejudice against police forces which had been tainted by their association with Franco’s repression. From a commercial perspective, the story of an agent willing to sacrifice everything (family, identity and even physical appearance) to stop the criminal activity of ETA seemed a good box-office draw. Despite being presented as a historical film, El Lobo alters the names of all the reallife figures, including its main character. This is a dramatic licence which shows that the approach to the period, the final years of Francoism, is based on speculation. An approach of this kind is not altogether surprising, given that the narrative recreates the adventures of a secret agent whose life remains shrouded in secrecy. However, El Lobo, both in promotional material and in interviews with the cast and artistic team, was presented to the audience as being as faithful as possible to the mission carried out by Lejarza. For example, its producer, Melchor Miralles, emphasized this point in a press conference before the premiere (included as an extra in the two-disc edition of the film): ‘If not to the exact millimetre, it can still be said of each and every sequence that things happened just as they are shown in the film.’ This allows El Lobo to engage in political commentary in a manner far more complex than the generic conventions of a thriller traditionally allow. In the same press conference, Miralles tried to clarify that there was no biased agenda in the film: I have never been an active member of any political party and I can, therefore, hardly make a militant movie if I’ve never been a militant. Do I have an ideology? Yes. I have only one militant personal conviction, one on which I think all of us here can agree: that is the absolute rejection of any kind of violence, or the use of violence as a political language. The most obvious manifestation of this position comes with the introduction of a character named Asier (Jorge Sanz), a young ideologue of ETA (pm) who is murdered in cold blood by his own comrades for pushing too hard for the conversion of terrorist activity into political action. It is not difficult to assume that Asier is based on Pertur, a prominent ETA (pm) leader who disappeared in July 1976. Despite the fact that his alleged murder was attributed to both members of ETA (pm) and extreme right-wing groups then operating in France, El Lobo’s choice of one of these two scenarios sends a clear political message to the viewer. Although history shows that the leaders of ETA (pm) took a different path in 1982 (the dissolution of the band and its reintegration into society), El Lobo portrays an 199

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unreconstructed terrorist organization which closes the door to any possible negotiation, and therefore can be defeated only by police action. This reading is supported further by the way that state terrorism figures prominently in the narrative, including the murder and torture undertaken by the Spanish secret services. The film shows the activity of extreme right-wing groups in the French Basque country, including the machine-gunning of restaurants frequented by ETA activists. The violent means are shared by the police in the film. In a pivotal scene, they succeed in planting a bomb at an ETA meeting, almost killing the leaders of the group (and Lobo with them). After one of Lobo’s bosses, Pantxo (Santiago Ramos), is tortured and killed by his own agents, the crime is concealed with an excuse that he is on a secret operation somewhere in Europe. Screenwriter Antonio Onetti explained in an interview (included in the DVD release) that El Lobo’s story is not only about a secret agent fighting a terrorist organization, but also about how key institutions of Franco’s regime refused to accept the arrival of democracy: I was more interested in the time than in the characters. We are talking about the years 1973– 75, which are key moments in the history of Spain. It’s the end of the dictatorship: democracy is coming, and that meant that everything was exacerbated […] It is the time when the mask of the dictatorship is removed, it is not desarrollismo.7 It’s every man for himself. At the end of the film, Mikel tries to keep his cover intact until he can dismantle ETA (pm) totally – but the powers-that-be have decided to bring forward the operation. Mikel finds out that the real purpose of the whole operation was to weaken, not destroy, ETA, and thereby halt the transformative process that was on the horizon. A propaganda coup to manipulate Franco’s imminent death was also part of this strategy. ‘We need them to regulate changes’, Ricardo says to Lobo in order to justify the organization’s survival. In the film’s last scene, Mikel, now with a new face, buys a newspaper announcing the death of Franco. His family, identity and dreams are gone forever. Conclusion Contemporary Spanish cinema has used authentic historical background in order to represent terrorism in Yoyes and El Lobo. Although these films responded to different aesthetic, generic and even political positions, more careful analysis allows us to conclude that they share remarkable similarities in their portrayal of the sociopolitical context of the Transition. Similarly, they also share the same disappointment with how the democratic change took place. Although in Yoyes and El Lobo ETA’s activity is represented in a negative way – and the films do not conceal the disturbed psychology of its members – ETA’s struggle is inserted within a dynamic of action and reaction to the equally bloody attacks of repressive and corrupt police forces. This links the films with traditional approaches to terrorism in Spanish cinema. In Yoyes, when Argi, the member of ETA (m), is killed by an extreme right-wing group, the choice made by Yoyes is clear: ‘If they want war, we will give them war.’ In El Lobo, the 200

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incorruptible secret agent Pantxo is tortured and killed by members of his own unit with connections to extreme right-wing groups not willing to accept the onset of democracy. These explicit links continue with the arrival of democracy. Yoyes’ return to the Basque country coincides with the activity of GAL, a terrorist group which had been funded by senior officials of the Ministry of Security during the Socialist government. In Yoyes’ last minutes, one of the members of GAL meets a ministry official, Don Roberto (Adolfo Fernández) – a relationship that the latter finds embarrassing, but does not disavow. Yoyes and El Lobo suggest that not only do those responsible for crimes committed under Franco’s dictatorship remain unpunished, but also that the new democratic state was unable to purge the totalitarian elements of the old regime – even following the ascent of the Socialist Party to power in the 1982 elections. What Yoyes makes explicit is only suggested in El Lobo, but it is no coincidence that, following the film’s commercial success, its main creative team (Miralles, Courtois and Onetti) came together again for a much less successful film that delved into the state crimes committed under the socialist government: GAL (Courtois, 2006). This sequel was undermined by an overthe-top performance by Jordi Mollá as corrupt policeman José Amedo, although perhaps the mixed feelings in Spanish society about the use of violent means to stop ETA when the group was committing its bloodier attacks was the principal explanation for its commercial failure. During the 1990s, Spanish public opinion underwent drastic changes in how it viewed terrorism. However, as we have seen, contemporary Spanish cinema reveals an awareness of its origins within the context of Franco’s dictatorship. Both Yoyes and El Lobo may be questionable as historical recreations, but they share the idea that despite its overall success, the Transition also involved senseless violence and the inability to establish a state that, freed from the worst excesses of the Franco regime, could be founded on a genuinely democratic basis. The tragedies of Lobo and Yoyes also speak of the failure of democratic institutions and their corruption, as well as of the legacy of endemic violence nurtured by Franco’s dictatorship. A clean slate as regards the past was beneficial not only for many who had fought for democracy, but also for others who had fought against it. Both films thereby speak of broken promises entailed by the model of consensus that was implemented in place of a clear break with the past. Acknowledgement This chapter was written as part of the research project ‘Cinema and Television in PostTransition Spain (1979–1992)’ funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the Spanish Government (CSO2011-15708-E). Notes 1 2

For a thoughtful review of the controversy, see Barrenetxea Marañón (2006). Yoyes and El Lobo are historical representations of the Spanish Transition produced in the same period, and both are based on real, well-known figures, so they are excellent case studies 201

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4 5 6

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for considering how Spanish cinema has approached the past from a factual perspective. At least two equally interesting films from the 2000s also represented the problem of terrorism in the context of the Transition: Sé quién eres/I Know Who You Are (Ferreira, 2000), in which the amnesia suffered by the main character serves as a metaphor for the so-called pacto del olvido (‘pact of oblivion’); and La voz de su amo/His Master’s Voice (Martínez Lázaro, 2001), a violent thriller about corrupt police and business people that delves into the fragile nature of the nascent democratic state. Luis Carrero Blanco was appointed prime minister in June 1973, a position previously held by Franco himself. Carrero Blanco, a close friend of the dictator, was a navy veteran who had served in the Civil War with great distinction. His appointment placed him in a privileged position to supervise the changes that inevitably would occur following Franco’s death. His murder was not only a psychological blow to the regime, but also had important consequences, as his successor, Carlos Arias-Navarro (a prosecutor and former Mayor of Madrid), lacked the same political weight; King Juan Carlos I could easily dismiss him when he began to be an impediment to democratic transformation. A good introduction to the history of ETA is Elorza et al. (2006). An excellent account of the ideological context of Basque nationalism and political violence can be found in Watson (2008). The process of normalization in the Basque country after the end of ETA remains an ongoing process. A good summary of the situation following ETA’s announcement can be found in Abend (2011). The use of torture against suspected members of terrorist groups was a source of frequent complaint by national and international civil rights organizations. The Almeria case was the inspiration for the film El caso Almería/The Almeria Case (Costa, 1983), in which Antonio Banderas played the part of one of the three victims tortured and killed by members of the Civil Guard after being mistaken for members of ETA. Desarrollismo was an economic policy during the 1960s oriented towards the liberalization of the Spanish economy. This policy, driven by the so-called technocrats of the government (most of them members of the religious group Opus Dei), was fundamental in the widespread distribution of consumer goods, alongside development of the tourist industry. This process of modernization and openness was embodied by popular comedies and musicals starring Marisol, Manolo Escobar and Paco Martínez Soria, which offered a sometimes ironic representation of new realities of urban development and the arrival of female Swedish tourists wearing bikinis.

References Abend, L. (2011). ‘ETA declares peace. Is Spain ready to believe it?’, Time, 21 October, available at http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2097522,00.html#ixzz1y4TvVkhA, last accessed on 20 November 2011. Anon (2002). ‘Interview with Helena Taberna’, Elkarri, 1 January, available at http://www.elkarri. org/publicaciones/revistas/object.php?o=222&p=/revista/revista.3.php, last accessed on 19 November 2011. 202

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Aretxaga, B. (2009). ‘La muerte de Yoyes: discursos culturales de género y política en el País Vasco’ in E. Garmendia (ed.), Yoyes, desde su ventana (Irún: Alberdania), 7–33. Ballesteros, I. (2001). Cine (Ins)urgente: Textos fílmicos y contextos culturales de la España posfranquista (Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos). Barrenetxea Marañón, I. (2006). ‘La pelota vasca, la piel contra la piedra: historia de una polémica’, Sancho el sabio, 25: 139–64. Cerdán, M. and Rubio, A. (2003). Lobo: Un topo en las entrañas de ETA (Madrid: Plaza & Janes). de Soto, A. (2005). Transición y cambio en España, 1975–1996 (Madrid: Alianza Editorial). Elorza, A. et al. (2006). La historia de ETA (Madrid: Temas de hoy). Gallego, F. (2009). ‘Los motores del cambio en España’, El País, 1 January: 25. Martí-Olivella, J. (2004). Basque Cinema: An Introduction (Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press/Center for Basque Studies). Molinero, C. (2010), ‘La transición y la “renuncia” a la recuperación de la “memoria democrática”’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 11.1: 33–52. Rodríguez, M. P. (2002). ‘Female visions of Basque terrorism: Ander eta Yul by Ana Díez and Yoyes by Helena Taberna’ in O. Ferrán and K. M. Glenn (eds.), Women’s Narrative and Film in Twentieth-Century Spain: a World of Difference(s) (New York: Routledge), 155–67. Sánchez-Soler, M. (2010). La transición sangrienta: Una historia violenta del proceso democrático en España (1975–1983) (Barcelona: Ediciones Península). Watson, C. J. (2008). Basque Nationalism and Political Violence: The Ideological and Intellectual Origins of ETA (Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press).

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Chapter 14 Back to the Future: Repackaging Spain’s Troublesome Past for Local and Global Audiences Duncan Wheeler

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n 1992, the Spanish Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (Centre for Sociological Research) carried out extensive surveys to gauge public opinion on major events taking place that year: the Barcelona Olympics, the quincentenary of Columbus’s voyage to the New World and the Expo Celebrations in Seville. Their findings revealed that not only did the Spanish population consider the commemorations of the ‘discovery of America’ the least successful of the three events, but also that there was widespread confusion and/or lack of information as regards the activities and initiatives surrounding the historical milestone (Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 1994). In cinematic terms, numerous projects were vaunted and a number even shot, but very few were actually released (Santaolalla, 2005: 171). The only major national film on the subject – the scatological La marrana (Cuerda, 1992) – immediately debunked any possible patriotic pride by announcing at the beginning that 1492 marked a year in which the Jews were expelled from Spain and the Moors thrown out of Granada; the narrative is centred not on the maritime voyage, but rather on the adventures of two picaresque urchins travelling across Spain in the hope of joining Columbus’s fleet and making their fortunes. As a result it was left to international co-productions – 1492: Conquest of Paradise (Scott, 1992) and Christopher Columbus: The Discovery (Glenn, 1992) – to represent and commemorate the Genovese adventurer on film (see Quesada Martínez, 2010). This conspicuous absence is partly a result of budgetary constraints imposed by the costly nature of historical films, a limitation compounded through the pan-global sociocultural zeitgeist by which the quincentenary ‘took place in a climate suited to intemperate attacks on Columbus and one in which potential defenders had mostly abandoned the field’ (Lunenfield, 1993: 2). In this chapter I would like to suggest that it is also symptomatic of the Transition’s inability and/or unwillingness to provide anything approximating a collective historical narrative. First I will examine the tradition of filming the past in the early Francoist years to suggest the patenting of specific cinematic styles and historical periods, followed by analysing the Transition’s frequently knee-jerk rejection of these spectral narratives. Although this distancing of the past is understandable, it effectively has allowed reactionary elements of Spanish society to retain a stranglehold on narratives concerning the nation’s history. On the release of Alatriste/Captain Alatriste: The Spanish Musketeer (Díaz Yanes, 2006) – a film about the adventures of the eponymous anti-hero, a mercenary soldier in Spain’s

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seventeenth-century imperial army – the director responded to a question about the general absence of historical films in the national cinema in the following terms: I think it’s because of censorship, money and also because us Spaniards still have issues with our history and these two factors combined … well, it makes it difficult for us. We have issues with our history, I don’t want to get all political about it but with this Law of Historical Memory which has just emerged. Nobody gives any money for historical subject-matters, especially if they talk about the present, and that has created a deficit. (Díaz Yanes cited in Scola, 2006: 59) Arturo Pérez-Reverte, on whose best-selling series of novels the film is based, concurs, attributing the cause to the legacy of the dictatorship and the pedagogical doctrine of the Transition: ‘Francoism distorted our history with tales of imperial glory, and the educational reforms instituted by [Javier] Solana and [José María] Maravall went to the opposite extreme, throwing all that history overboard’ (cited in Walsh, 2007: 50).1 Prior to being superseded by Agora (Amenábar, 2009), another historical epic, albeit of an ostensibly radically different kind, Alatriste was the most expensive Spanish film ever made. As such it is something of an anomaly in many respects, yet it also formed part of a general return to Spain’s troublesome past, which has been prominent in the national cinema to an extent not seen since the early post-Civil War period. Therefore, to what extent has the Transition’s historical deficit been settled? In order to address this question, I will focus on the cinematic discourse surrounding two pivotal historical periods: the Golden Age of Spain’s imperial period from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries; and the build-up, duration and aftermath of the War of Independence (1808–14) against the French. Broadly speaking, the former can be seen as the birth of the nation – the unification of the different autonomous kingdoms and the reconquest of Muslim Spain under the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella – and the latter as the birth of modern nationalism through the expulsion of Napoleon’s troops following their invasion of the peninsula. I am particularly interested in examining the political, aesthetic and industrial explanations as to why Spanish cinema periodically returns to its tumultuous past, while seeking to position this recent return to the past within the context of a transnational boom in post-heritage cinema. Francoism, Cinema and the Past Reduced to its simplest terms, the Spanish Civil War can be understood as a conflict over the right to define the essence of the nation. A performative and arguably revisionist construct, the discourse of the ‘two Spains’ – one Catholic, conservative and inward-looking; the other, liberal, European and progressive – took on a real and bloody historical import in the wake of the illegal insurrection of July 18 1936, which marked the onset of the fratricidal conflict. In the words of Santos Julià: 208

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The projection towards a past moment of grandeur and the promise of a future as the regeneration or resurrection or what once was the case in the past reappears in all the narratives – irrespective of whether they come from liberals or reactionaries, progressives of conservatives, atheists or Catholics – until sometime after the Civil War; in fact, those who kept thinking and fighting in this framework were those who thought that Spain was the problem as opposed to those who thought that Spain didn’t have any problems. (2004: 45) Through its victory, the Francoist alliance effectively gained the power to define the past positing, for example, the War of Independence as both a manifestation of noble patriotism and a salutary warning against the ubiquitous threat of nefarious foreign invasions, be they physical or spiritual. Hence, although the celebration of the popular uprising of May 2 raised public order issues, and the power of the masses was an ambivalent myth for the selfappointed nationalists, they appropriated it and used it as a precedent for their own uprising, which has begun in Africa (see García, 2008). This ideological patenting was even more overt in relation to the Golden Age: the nation’s imperial past was construed by Francoism as a glorious antecedent to be resurrected in the present day, through a new Spain that would be ‘una, grande y libre’ (‘one, great and free’). This constituted a concerted effort to reject the so-called ‘black legend’ which Helen Rawlings characterizes in the following terms: Spain’s decay as a nation was embodied in the oppressive machinery of the Inquisition, which cut it off from progress and stunted its growth, while its rigid, messianic adherence to the defence of Catholicism led it to commit barbarous atrocities and engage in coercive, rapacious imperialism. (2012: 5) For example, this rebuttal was reflected in the Spanish school curriculum, leading Esther Martínez Tórtola to speak in terms of an ‘anti-black legend’ (1996: 173), and Ángel Luis Abós to coin the phrase ‘pink legend’ (2003: 284). The importance and grandeur of the Catholic monarchs was reiterated constantly, while Spain and Castile’s history were seen to be synonymous; this was a narrative in which the heroes are quintessentially Spanish, and the villains have generally been corrupted by foreign agitators. According to Carolyn Boyd: In the Franco regime, history education was conceived as therapy – a wellspring of inspirational and community-building assertions about national values and purposes that could cure the unjustified inferiority complex from which Spaniards had suffered since the eighteenth century. (1997: 240) Films such as Locura de amor/Love Crazy (de Orduña, 1948) – about the Catholic Monarch’s daughter, Joanna the Mad, who was reputedly driven insane by her love for the errant and 209

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Flemish Philip the Handsome – were hagiographic melodramas which revelled in ‘totalitarian kitsch aesthetics’ (Yarza, 2004: 50), and generally told in flashback so as to communicate the inexorability of historical destiny. Hence, for example, Alba de América/ Dawn of America (de Orduña, 1951) was designed as a riposte to the lies supposedly told about the nation’s imperial adventures in the British Christopher Columbus (McDonald, 1949). The Spanish film contains a close-up of a cross, and Columbus talks of having ‘almas para salvar’ (‘souls to save’). The Catholic monarchs regale him with a bible as he departs, while widespread evangelical enthusiasm for the mission is such that even his dog jumps into the water as the fleet sets sail. Films about the War of Independence – for example, Agustina de Aragón/Augustina of Aragon (de Orduña, 1950), Lola la piconera/Lola, the Coalgirl (Lucía, 1952) or El tambor del Bruch/Bruch’s Drum (Inquino, 1948) – focus on antiFrench activity from around the peninsula, and were particularly well-suited to Francoist discourses which sought to reduce regional differences to folkloric particularities that could be easily subsumed within the Spanish nationalist project. Generally, these historical epics were made by the major studios, CIFESA or Suevia, which established their own star system (see Chapter 17) with, for example, Aurora Bautista’s melodramatic depictions of the major female heroines of Spain’s past becoming a metonym for this filmic tradition. Although retrospectively dismissed as ‘papier mâché’ cinema as a result of its frequent recourse to patently artificial sets, the economic investment that was lavished on the battle scenes in Agustina de Aragón – which required vast numbers of extras and special effects, and whose cost was highly unlikely to be recouped at the domestic box office – is remarkable in times of extreme deprivation for the general population. Therefore, it is possible to interpret these films as somewhat tasteless and self-indulgent exercises in self-aggrandising, at a time when precious resources could have been better directed elsewhere. This is certainly the view adopted by Luis Mariano González González, who has argued that: Strict censorship and the system of conceding import licenses meant that, when putting together films, producers, scriptwriters and directors thought more about pleasing the dictatorship’s representatives, the people who had to give their approval, than the audience who was going to watch these films. (2009: 234) In actual fact, the Golden Age of CIFESA’s historical productions in the late 1940s and early 1950s came a time when the company was far from being at its financial peak (see Fanés, 1982; Téllez, 1990), as it was failing to compete with cinema imported from abroad which was proving to be far more popular with Spanish audiences than domestic output (see Bosch and del Rincón, 1998). On the one hand, these ‘regime’ films can plausibly (and profitably) be read against the grain through, for example, the preponderance of strong female protagonists (see Labanyi, 2000, 2009), or the inclusion of the line ‘visca la indèpendencia’ in Catalan prior to the heroes facing a firing squad à la Goya in El tambor 210

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del Bruch (see Epps, 2013: 50–54), and whole dialogues in the officially non-recognized language in Agustina de Aragón; not only do these historical epics transcend the regional folklorism associated with this tradition, but they also challenge popular wisdom about the complete embargo on Catalan in early Francoist Spain. Conversely, however, it is clear that the films were, as González González suggests, designed primarily to placate those with power to authorize the production of what were intended (somewhat oxymoronically) to be subsidised blockbusters. While I concur with González González that the priority was to make them attractive to the Francoist establishment, and that the relevant authorities might not have had much of a grip on the realities of the international marketplace, perhaps he is too quick to dismiss the commercial imperative in which both the studios and the regime invested so much hope. The production of double versions – one for domestic consumption and another, frequently more risqué cut for export – suggests an eye for the international market; as does the text of a remarkable official document produced by the Spanish Diplomatic Office in pigeon English, which attempts to both promote the national cinema and foster co-productions through reference to their glorious and quintessentially cinematic past (Diplomatic Information Office, 1949). There was undoubtedly an ideological dimension to the attempt to sell Spanish truths to the English-speaking world but market forces were paramount and the ideological hard-sell was more apparent in the Spanish-speaking world, where the regime was keen to establish itself at the helm of a transnational realm – albeit of a spiritual rather than material nature – comprised of its former colonies. Jorge Nieto Ferrando characterizes this belief in the following terms: The nostalgia for empire – now recuperable through cultural influence – economic opportunities and language – a weapon that could be wielded when the time came to sequestrate this important market from North American production – all converged to create an interest in forging closer cinematic relationships with Latin America. While it was true that Hollywood had the technical advantage, the language and customs expressed in its films were foreign and strange to Hispanic culture. Numerous articles emphasized the spiritual community of Spanish-speaking peoples, revealed as much through popular culture as through a shared moral compass. (2009: 129) There was something quixotic about this desire. Although the occasional film such as Locura de amor did have some success, while Amparo Rivelles and Sara Montiel, who first made their names in these historical dramas, went on to have successful careers in the Mexican film industry, this was the exception as opposed to the norm. Especially in the wake of the spectacular commercial failure of Alba de América (see Mira Nouselles, 1999), and the regime’s ostensible liberalization and attempts to ingratiate itself with the United States, historical epics lost their official patronage and soon fell into nearextinction and disrepute. One late entry into the genre, which reunited Aurora Bautista 211

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with the director Juan de Orduña, was Teresa de Jesús (1962), which celebrated the life of the Carmelite saint, an icon of the regime, the remains of whose arm had reportedly been chanced upon by Franco during the Civil War and retained as a holy relic in his bedside table until death (see di Febo, 1988). The film’s principal weakness derives from the fact that its ideology precludes anything more than passing or superficial references to Teresa’s conflictual relationship with the ecclesiastical authorities. While token efforts are taken to communicate this through, for example, the depiction of an over-zealous Inquisition, the narrative shies away from depicting anyone related to the church as a villain, thereby divesting the film of dramatic conflict. From a visual perspective, there is a constant tension between the fetishization of the architectural wonders of splendid convents, churches and cathedrals, and the narrative ideology of the counter-Reformation which preaches humility and austerity in contrast to the chief villain, the Princess of Ebolí, who is seen to be frivolous and extravagant. The Transition and the Emergence of Heritage Culture In the early 1970s, the Golden Age generally would appear on-screen only for comic and/or erotic purposes, providing the backdrop for a series of semi-pornographic films. When it was occasionally depicted in dramatic terms, it was shown increasingly to be a time of religious intolerance and authoritarian despotism: for example, this can be seen in El Segundo poder/The Second Power (Forqué, 1976), a damning critique of the Spanish Inquisition clearly intended to impart lessons on the dangers of intransigence in the present day. This new discourse was not limited to cinema and was, in fact, more prominent and influential on the state television channel. Hence, for example, Fernando Fernán-Gómez directed and starred in El pícaro (TVE, 1974–75), which established frequent parallels between the past and present where, the audience is told, nobles continue to commit worse acts than picaroons; one episode even depicts atrocities committed by the Spanish imperial army in Flanders during the seventeenth century (Palacio, 2012: 66-67). While this controversial and leftleaning series was aired prior to Franco’s death, Paisajes con figures (TVE, 1976–77), which featured Antonio Gala in conversation with various historical figures, was censored. In the first episode, Gala talks to the painter Francisco de Pizarro about the greed which led him to America, and the programme was taken off air following the third episode featuring the poet and satirist, Francisco de Quevedo (Palacio, 2012: 93–94). As late as 1979, an educational slot on the subject of the Golden Age was not broadcast because it was considered to reinforce the ‘black legend’ (Palacio, 2012: 265–66). In the early 1980s, a fusion of erotic and debunking traditions occurred in a series of films such as Cristóbal Colón de oficio descubridor (Ozores, 1982), El Cid cabreador (Fons, 1983) or Juana la loca…de vez en cuando (Larraz, 1983), which lampooned national ‘heroes’. Seen by more than 1,500,000 cinema-goers during its initial theatrical run,2 Ozores’s film, which suggests that Columbus was bisexual and formerly earned money by performing as a drag 212

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artist, was one of the biggest domestic box office successes of the Transition period. It also focuses on the Catholic monarchs’ immorality, and features an Inquisition friar who offers Nazi salutes as they set about their task of expelling the Jews. Like Gala and Fernán-Gómez’s television series before them, these films sought – albeit in a somewhat puerile manner – to establish parallels between the past and present with, for example, frequent jokes about the church’s avaricious nature, and the problems caused by the different autonomous communities which comprise Spain. In terms of both their erotic and political content, they constituted a clear reaction against the previous regime and were symptomatic of the fact that ‘even among the general public, Francoist cinema is first and foremost associated with cinema based on historical themes – primarily that produced during the 1940s – much more so than other no less conspicuous genres’ (Monterde, 1989: 46). In spite of its efforts, the dictatorship was seemingly less well equipped, although not necessarily less predisposed, to patent the War of Independence than the Golden Age. As Paloma Aguilar notes, the commemoration of the initial uprising reportedly led by a fifteen-year old seamstress, Manuela Malasaña, on May 2 1808 performed a contested yet conciliatory role during the Transition: Although both sides had attempted to usurp the other in claiming this date as their mythical reference-point, the Second of May did not evoke a fratricidal conflict, but the union of the Spanish against the French invader. In this sense, it provided an extremely appropriate mythical historical reference-point for commemorating and strengthening the bonds of national identity, as opposed to the reference-point provided by the Civil War, which only served to disunite and arouse disputes. (2002: 205) Nevertheless, more films were made about the War of Independence between 1947 and 1953 than during the rest of the history of Spanish cinema in its entirety (Martínez, 2010: 200). In other words, the symbolic commemorative role outlined above was not reflected on the big screen, arguably because the vision could still be readily appropriated for politically tendentious purposes. A television series on the conflict with clear republican sympathies, made by Mario Camus in 1981, was not broadcast until 1983 and has rarely been seen since (Palacio, 2012: 292–94). As the decade progressed, the Golden Age was screened only intermittently; when it was, it tended to be in unremittingly sombre tones, as is demonstrated by Carlos Saura’s films about Lope de Aguirre and San Juan de la Cruz: El Dorado (1988) and La noche oscura/The Dark Night of the Soul (1989), respectively. The former, about the greed of the conquistadores in their search for mythical treasure, was the most expensive Spanish film ever made at the time of its release. This extravagant cinematic adventure was facilitated by arch-protectionism of the legislation for film funding introduced by Pilar Miró, alongside the ambition of the producer, Andrés Vicente Gómez, who had the ‘necessary broader vision that is capable of translating transnational aesthetics into markets’ (D’Lugo in Dapena et al., 2013: 36). In this case, the veteran producer’s talents 213

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failed to bear fruit: El Dorado only registered modest box office returns at home, and received an extremely limited release outside of Spain. The incessant focus on the project’s budget created the expectation that this would be an action blockbuster (see de España, 2002: 27; Sánchez Vidal, 2013: 65–66), the audience for which would be severely disappointed by a film not grounded on narrative suspense or dynamism, but rather a carefully orchestrated and melancholic mise-en-scène which provided a backdrop to psychological interrogation of the very baroque notion of ‘desengaño’ (‘disenchantment’). In other words, when pre-twentieth-century history was depicted in Spanish cinema over the course of the 1980s, the dominant tone remained commiseration as opposed to commemoration. This was in sharp contrast to much of the rest of Europe, where costume dramas were being superseded by heritage cinema which seeks ‘to depict the past, but by celebrating rather than investigating it’ (Vicendeau, 2001: xviii). Typically this is produced through a reverential and nostalgic mise-en scène and attention to period details: as Andrew Higson notes, ‘the evocation of pastness is accomplished by a look, a style, the loving recreation of period details – not by any critical historical perspective’ (1993: 113). I suspect that it would have been too much of a retreat into the discourse and sensibility of Francoism for the film-makers of the Transition to have applied this aesthetic to depictions of the Golden Age. A Spanish variation on the European heritage film might, however, be detected in the guise of literary adaptations, heavily subsidised by the incoming Socialist administration, set in the dictatorship. Examples of these are Camus’ films La colmena/The Beehive (1982) and Los santos inocentes/The Holy Innocents (1984), which ‘combine the directness of cinema with the medium’s tendency towards a nostalgic revelling in surfaces’ (Faulkner, 2004: 166) – what John Hopewell lamented, both politically and aesthetically, as ‘the tendency to be visually pleasing at any cost’ (1986: 227). Faulkner has argued that these surface similarities with heritage cinema are a red herring because ‘the particular circumstances of a country emerging from dictatorship with a political desire to recuperate oppositional texts of the Franco period are a key difference’ (2013: 265). Historical proximity ensures that the films fail to satisfy Higson’s key definition, by which the pastiche of the visual tableaux put on display ‘in effect imprisons the qualities of the past, holding them in place as something to be gazed at from a reverential distance, and refusing the possibility of a dialogue or confrontation with the present’ (1993: 119). These cinematic depictions of Francoism are nevertheless the closest equivalent to heritage cinema that Spanish cinema had to offer in the 1980s; a state of affairs which is indicative of Spain’s (wilful?) exclusion from a major pan-continental cinematic trend at a time when European integration was so high on the political and social agenda. In fact, not only did the absence of heritage films distinguish Spain from many of its neighbours, but it also served to exclude the national cinema from trends in the other arts which were being transformed through the onset of a nascent cultural tourism that, alongside rural attractions, were providing an alternative to beach holidays for foreign visitors (Afinguénova and Martí-Olivella, 2008: xii). By the onset of the 1990s, visiting heritage sites became an increasingly popular activity among middle-class Spaniards who, for the first time, now 214

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had sufficient collective economic clout for domestic tourism to become a prized cultural commodity (see Smith, 2006; Wheeler, 2012: 207–15). Although the state-run paradores – which converted the kind of buildings showcased in Teresa de Jesús into luxury hotels – had been established by Alfonso XIII in 1928, and were a highly successful proto-manifestation of this ostensibly new kind of tourism, the artists through which the Golden Age and War of Independence were so frequently viewed – El Greco, Diego de Velázquez and Francisco de Goya – were far more highly valued in the democratic than the dictatorship periods.3 In a striking demonstration of Rodney Harrison’s argument that ‘while heritage might be said to be a product of late-modernity, it is also a producer of it’ (2013: 231), it became a sufficiently valued cultural and economic fetish in democratic Spain – an almost universally recognized common good – that sometimes united political divides. For example, a report on the need for more display and storage space presented by Prado leadership in 1994 was taken up by multi-party accord (Borngässer et al., 2009: 105). Given this exponential rise in cultural tourism and the success of a number of European heritage films at the Spanish box-office – for example, Cyrano de Bergerac (Rappeneau, 1990), Much Ado about Nothing (Branagh, 1993) or La Reine Margot (Chéreau, 1994) – there was clearly a potential market for an autochthonous take on the genre, as is demonstrated by the release of El maestro de esgrima/The Fencing Master (Olea, 1992) or El perro del hortelano/ The Dog in the Manger (Miró, 1996). El maestro de esgrima, based on a novel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, was set at court during the tumultuous reign of Isabel II (1833–1868), but focused more on amorous and personal intrigues than wider political matters; frequent calls for the Spanish equivalent to a French Revolution are kept very much in the background in a diegesis that is kept in motion less by narrative than by witty dialogues and Madrid’s historic architecture. Elsewhere I have described El perro del hortelano, based on a play by the great Golden Age playwright, Lope de Vega, as a kind of atemporal fairytale in which: costume functions alongside other semiotic systems (mise-en-scène, star presence, choice of scenes, music) to transfer attention away from the axes of class to gender divides. This transferral ensures that a narrative of desire, repression and evasion is assimilated into the world of romance, a place where quotidian impediments are kept at bay. (Wheeler, 2007: 277) In a similar vein, Sally Faulkner (2013: 201–202) has made a case for El rey pasmado/The Dumbfounded King (Uribe, 1991) not to be categorized, as it traditionally has been, as a late entry into the corpus of films facilitated by the Miró legislation, but rather as a protoexample of a nascent Spanish heritage genre that would come to the fore over the course of the decade. The narrative, based on the homonymous novel by Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, centres on the erotic awakening of the young Philip IV, who provokes a major Inquisition case by asking to see the queen without her clothes after his curiosity about the female form is piqued by the sight of a naked prostitute. I would add that El rey pasmado is effectively a middlebrow variation on the comic-erotic films of the early 1980s, as is suggested by the 215

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casting of Javier Garruchaga – the extravagant, frequently cross-dressing singer of a highly theatrical group, Orquesta Mandragón, who were icons of La Movida – as the Count-Duke of Olivares. In fact, more generally, the principal obstacle to the consolidation of an autochthonous take on the heritage genre in Spanish cinema was arguably an ongoing fixation with eroticism: not only is a fleshy excess often ideologically and artistically suspect, but even when it seduces at the domestic box office, it has done little to enhance international marketability. Films such as La Celestina (Vera, 1996) – based on a medieval text suitably erotic that, despite its canonical status, was not considered suitable for a Francoist educational curriculum (Valls, 1983: 147) – or Volvavérunt (Luna, 1999) – in which both the prime minister Manuel Godoy, and aristocrat Duchess of Alba are shown to be equally promiscuous, and a conspiracy theory over who is the actual model for Goya’s La maja desnuda is unraveled through the opposition between French and Spanish trends in relation to the grooming (or lack thereof) of pubic hair – are examples of costume romances. As Pam Cook notes, this is a filmic tradition which seeks to ‘mobilise history as a site of sexual fantasy rather than a record of great deeds or celebration of national heritage’ (1996: 76). This eroticization, so stereotypical of Spanish cinema since the Transition period (see Chapter 12) also served to self-consciously distance these historical pictures from their Francoist antecedents, as is made most explicit in Juana la Loca/Mad Love (Aranda, 2001) based, however loosely, on a play by Tamayo y Baus which also had provided the title and source material for Orduña’s Locura de amor (see Donapetry, 2005; Martin Pérez, 2004; Smith, 2006). Counter-intuitively, the twenty-first century adaptation is less progressive – at least in terms of gender politics – than its predecessor, which had examined the way in which women often are framed as mad for politically expedient reasons, instead rendering insanity as a product of erotic paroxysm and frustration. As was the case with El perro del hortelano, Juana la Loca underwent a very difficult production process, and yet the film, aided by a much-commented upon and lauded breakthrough performance by Pilar López de Ayala alongside Andrés Vicente Gómez’s tenacious talent, was an unexpected hit at the domestic box office.4 However, it is virtually impossible to recoup investment in historical films without international distribution: as was the case with Miró’s film, there was a chimerical element to this ostensible commercial success. Paul Julian Smith notes: While British heritage films could rely on the familiarity of Masterpiece Theatre to presell costume drama to select US audiences familiar with and friendly towards English actors, themes and locations, Juana la Loca, stripped of national context and lacking in US commercial connections, failed to achieve distinction abroad. (2006: 110) Aranda’s next film, Carmen (2003) fared somewhat better at the European box office (Powrie et al., 2007: 182), largely as a result of the universal nature of the myth and Aranda’s trademark ability to capitalize on lead actress Paz Vega’s sensual and sexual star persona. However, it 216

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would not be until 2006 that either the Golden Age or the War of Independence would return with a vengeance to Spanish screens. As I will detail in the next section, this process has been primarily set in motion by a changing mediascape in which the notion of national cinema as a discrete category has come increasingly under question, as a result of its dependence on both Spanish television and transnational film production. I will suggest that these industrial transformations have enabled a vast array of historical projects to negotiate, but not ultimately overcome, a whole series of structural and ideological challenges which remain largely unresolved from the Transition period. Boom and Bust: the (Post-)Heritage Film in Twenty-first Century Spain The release of Alatriste, a €24 million budget film with 7,000 extras, undoubtedly constituted a milestone in Spanish film production that could not have taken place if it were not for the equity supplied by the popularity of the five source novels by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Spain’s best-selling novelist whose works have been translated into multiple languages, and been made into various international film adaptations (see Deveny, 2006). Alatriste’s production and distribution was also facilitated by the appearance and patronage of the Argentine actor Viggo Mortensen – a global celebrity as a result of his appearances in the Lord of the Rings trilogy (Jackson, 2001–03) – who heads an all-star predominantly Spanish cast; as well as the financial resources at the disposal of Estudios Picasso, an offshoot production company for the private television channel, Antena 3. The film was, in fact, the flagship example of what Jennifer Green referred to in Screen International as ‘the latest trend in Spanish production: costly, internationally ambitious features that pour bankable Hollywood talents with local directors and producers on stories plucked from Spain’s elaborately rich history’ (2006: 17). It is worth briefly highlighting two facets of this new tactic. First, it is inextricably linked with the introduction of legislation which obliges private television channels to invest a certain percentage of their advertising revenue into film production. Unlike the state television channel Televisión Española (TVE), which traditionally had tended to favour medium-budget, prestige projects such as El caballero don Quijote (Gutiérrez Aragón, 2002) – an adaptation of the second part of Cervantes’s novel, following the directors’ adaptation of the first volume for television – they were looking towards funding commercial films that could be primed both for the national and international box office, and subsequently broadcast on prime-time (see Chapter 25). Second, as had been the case with CIFESA’s recourse to expensive period pieces, this was at least as much a reactive as a proactive measure: in order to weather financial crises and compete with foreign films, Spanish cinema needed to deliver ‘event’ movies. Although not quite matching the six to seven hundred copies of Hollywood blockbusters such as The Da Vinci Code (Howard, 2006), 450 copies of Alatriste were distributed – an unusually large number for a national film; for example, Volver (Almodóvar, 2006) was released on 230 screens (Belategui, 2006: 71). There were vast 217

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queues and expectation on the opening weekend, and it was the most successful film of any nationality at the domestic box office in a year in which Spanish cinema was dominated by historical dramas. Alongside Los Borgia (Hernández, 2006), Alatriste succeeded in its goal of attracting a broad audience, who were not necessarily regular cinema-goers, yet alone aficionados of Spanish films. In sharp opposition to what occurred during the dictatorship, when domestic films were designed to counteract the black legend propagated abroad, Spanish cinema now reflects and even exaggerates these macabre images. Hence, for example, the saint-like depiction of Catherine of Aragón in The Other Boleyn Girl (Chadwick, 2008), played by Ana Torrent (see Chapter 10), is more benevolent than one would be likely to find in a Spanish film; while elsewhere, the stereotypically dark and sinister aristocrats and clergy found in Elizabeth: The Golden Age (Kapur, 2007) or Le Moine/The Monk (Moll, 2011), are ubiquitous at home. Los Borgia delights in foregrounding the perverse, bloodthirsty nature of the Valencian dynasty; this is a sharp contrast to Teresa de Jesús, where they had been shown to be pious and righteous. Elsewhere, in Mortadelo y Filemón: Misión – salvar la tierra/Mortadelo and Filemon: Mission – Save the Planet (Bardem, 2008), the two comic-book heroes are transported back in time to the Golden Age, where they have to wrangle with the cruel intolerance of the Holy Office and Torquemada, the infamous royal inquisitor. The clergy is given similarly short shrift in Miguel y William/Miguel and William (Paris, 2007), which depicts a hypothetical Iberian encounter between the literary giants where Shakespeare is shocked by an honour-obsessed Spain in which disfigured old aristocrats marry pretty young girls who experiment with anal sex, so as to technically safeguard their maidenhood. La dama boba/Lady Nitwit (Iborra, 2006), another Lope adaptation, bucked this trend. Befitting the comic tomfoolery of the play-text, costume-designer Lorenzo Caprile and director Manuel Iborra self-consciously sought to eschew the dark atmosphere and fabrics which had become associated with the period. In fact, the film’s mise-en-scène, tone and fabrics had much more in common with Moliere (Tiarard, 2007) than its contemporary Spanish counterparts. Unfortunately, it also evoked the spectre of kitsch historical romps such as Don Juan (Sáenz de Heredia, 1950) from the dictatorship period. In a study of the disastrous reception given to this modest €3 million production largely funded by TVE, I have argued that any film of this kind has to distance itself self-consciously from an earlier tradition of Francoist film-making, if it is not to be rejected by critics and audiences alike (Wheeler, 2012: 188). This general trend was exacerbated by the politically charged atmosphere of the time, in which Zapatero’s Socialist government was attempting to push through a Law of Historical Memory. This was much to the chagrin of the Centre–Right Partido Popular (People’s Party) which, in its eight years in government (1996–2004), had introduced a controversial and conservative agenda that, for the first time since the dictatorship, had sought to employ the Golden Age as an important building for a national and Castile-centric narrative to be taught in schools across the peninsula (see Bermúdez, 2003; Núñez Seixas, 2006: 136–47). 218

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Arguably, this complex and very culturally specific backdrop impedes a simple transposition of the term ‘heritage cinema’ into the Spanish context. In relation to the United Kingdom, I suspect that Paul Julian Smith is probably correct to surmise that: Higson’s (2003) most valuable suggestion is that there is a tension between narrative and spectacle in the heritage film: while the first is often progressive, stressing the conflicts at the heart of inheritance, the second is generally reactionary, consoling threatened audiences for the loss of imperial power or class privilege. (2006: 111–12) While, as I will later suggest, this aesthetic is true in relation to twenty-first-century films about the War of Independence, it is anachronistic in relation to many cinematic depictions of the Golden Age, because so much of its architecture and iconography is already semantically and politically over-determined. It is no coincidence that the whole of El perro del hortelano, and significant sections of Juana la Loca, were filmed abroad. Spanish filmmakers thereby have fewer options at their disposal for fleeing the specificities of history in the heritage mode than their counterparts in, for example, the UK, where it is often possible to divorce space and time through the fetishistic display of the ‘country house’ aesthetic. To take an extreme example, recent cinematic depictions of El Escorial bear testament to the continued currency of Jan Morris’s claim that: More than most countries, Spain feeds upon her own past. Even now her affairs are subject to the gloomy magnetism of the Escorial, or at least to the pole of emotions that this great work of faith and policy represents. (1982: 12) It is, for example, seen as the epicentre of nefarious political machinations in La conjura de El Escorial/The Conspiracy (del Real, 2008) and Alatriste. In Alatriste, it provides the centre of activity for the infamously Machiavellian, almost tyrannical, Count-Duke of Olivares. As Sally Faulkner notes, Alatriste ‘seemed to prove that Spanish cinema was fertile terrain for the newly gritty post-heritage trend’ (2013: 273), inaugurated by films such as Orlando (Potter, 1992) or The Piano (Campion, 1993) which take a less celebratory approach to national narratives, often paying heed to silenced narratives of cruelty and oppression. From what has been said, it should be clear that Spanish films on the Golden Age are more likely to fit into the post-heritage, as opposed to the straightforward heritage, mode. Díaz Yanes’s film distinguished itself from the competition both in terms of cultural significance and the subtlety of its depiction. Without relinquishing a generally damning image of Spain’s imperial past, it adopts a similar narrative and thematic ruse to 1492: Conquest of Paradise by focusing on a protagonist who provides a contrast with the society that brings him forth. This allows for a study in ‘desengaño’ depicted through a painterly mise-en-scène, facilitated by new developments in digital technology and expert post-production (see Ciller Tenreiro, 219

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2009) clearly inspired by the Prado’s collection, that is nevertheless far more uplifting and populist in tone than El Dorado or, indeed, Saura’s subsequent incursion into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with Goya en Burdeos/Goya in Bordeaux (1999). Alatriste thereby had enough intrinsic values to warrant its success at the domestic box office. Nevertheless, its not inconsiderable limitations – principally a very weak script, which unsuccessfully attempts to marshal the contents of five novels into a narrative that, at nearly two-and-a-half hours, often meanders without seeming purpose – explain its failure to secure a place in the international marketplace: a factor which has been largely ignored by sympathetic academic commentators who focus on domestic reception (Camarero Gómez, 2012; Deveny, 2010; Faulkner, 2013: 264–72). In spite of being hawked around the major international festivals, the film was not released in the Anglophone world, and received very limited international distribution: a modest box office hit in Mexico, it was little-seen in other Latin American countries. Whatever its limitations, Alatriste was a professional, albeit solid rather than inspirational, entry into the international post-heritage corpus of films. The same could be said of Los Borgia, which benefited from privileged access to the Vatican facilitated by the Italian coproducers, and whose depiction of sexual intrigue, warring families, cultural displacement and the collision of secular and ecclesiastical authorities lends itself to positive comparison with the similarly-themed The Other Boleyn Girl, a film it far outperformed at the Spanish box office.5 However, there have been a number of other recent Spanish historical films whose failure to find an audience can be explained less by external factors than by limitations in the cinematic text itself, which seemingly embody the worst excesses of critically derided Europuddings (‘a transnational cultural product that ultimately never satisfies’; Cooke, 2012: 265). Speaking of an English-language version of Tirante el blanco/The Maiden’s Conspiracy (Aranda, 2001), which would be subsequently dubbed into both Catalan and Castilian, the young English actor Charlie Cox – who previously had appeared in The Merchant of Venice (Radford, 2004) and Casanova (Hallström, 2005) – commented of the Spanish film: ‘To call it a flop is an understatement. The film made no sense. It hadn’t been translated properly’ (cited in Cripps, 2008: 14). Although Aranda had wanted to adapt the great Catalan novel for the big screen since the late 1960s (cited in Martínez Torres, 1969: 40), when it would have been a prohibitively expensive project that was likely to have irked the censor, there is little evidence of much thought or foresight in a production that focuses on one erotic scenario: the question of whether a young princess will lose her virginity to her father’s chief soldier, the eponymous protagonist, or the grand Turk. In one particularly risible scene, the wounded Tirante is taken with wooden stumps and positioned on top of the generally coy maiden and leveraged into action, as she rapturously relinquishes her virginity in public. While not quite as ridiculous, the scripts of El Greco (Smaragdis, 2007) and La conjura de El Escorial are frequently lacking in coherence: an aspect exacerbated by the fact that often the dialogue is rendered in an exaggerated combination of prose and cod-Early-Modern verse, with the antiquated ‘vos’ employed incongruously and inconsistently. This performance style is inadvertently reminiscent of historical films from the Franco period; a continuity that is exacerbated in El Greco through the narrative being revealed in flashback. 220

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At the level of production, many recent Spanish historical films are reminiscent of their antecedents from the 1940s or 1950s, in that they often seem to have been designed not so much to appeal to audiences, as to convince a variety of funding bodies – often obliged by law to invest in Spanish cinema – that they hold the possibility of gaining a foothold in the global marketplace through the selling of cultural as opposed to spiritual wares.6 The preparation of multilingual versions – to give two concrete examples, the commercial DVD of Los Borgia can be viewed in Castilian or Valencian, and the English-language El Greco in Basque, Castilian or Catalan – often bears testament to the investment by television channels from the autonomous regions. Inspired by the fact that tourism in Úbeda and Baeza had reportedly increased since being showcased in Alatriste, Jaén Town Council invested €200,000 in La conjura de El Escorial to ensure that part of it would be shot there (El País, 2007: 7). This issue is further exacerbated in relation to transnational film-making, with Vicente Aranda, for example, complaining that the Italian co-producer of Juana la Loca replaced his co-script writer, Antonio Larreta, with his own daughter (2003: 146). The verse and declamation coach Alicia Hérmida also told me that she trained up a well-known French actor for the role of Philip the Handsome, only for him to be replaced by Daniele Liotti at the last minute because the Gallic co-producer withdrew from the project.7 In fact, casting is determined often less by the exigencies of the role than by co-production agreements and the perceived status of actors in different territories. The inclusion of Julia Ormond and Jane Asher in La conjura de El Escorial and Tirante lo blanco, respectively, facilitated their production – even if their presence could hardly guarantee distribution – while at least in Anglophone contexts, their faded celebrity simply foreground the somewhat antiquated aesthetic of the films in question. It was a case of particularly good or bad timing, depending on one’s perspective, that the 200th anniversary of the popular uprising in Madrid against the French in 2008 fell within a year in which Spanish cinema was threatening to receive more in subsidies than in box office returns (Jordan, 2011: 22). In stark opposition to both Columbus’s quincentenary and what occurred in 1908, when the government refused to fund commemorations but popular organization made it a huge success (Martínez, 2010: 194), the Comunidad de Madrid provided the single biggest subsidy for a film for the adaptation of Galdos’ €15 million Sangre de Mayo (Garcí, 2008). The fact that the President of the Comunidad, Esperanza Aguirre, and the director were close friends is possibly not a coincidence. Although given a modest cinematic release, this was clearly designed primarily as a prestige television drama, as intimated by its near-simultaneous airing in three episodes by TeleMadrid (Sanz Larrey, 2008: 56), episodic structure and use of techniques such as the dissolve more habitually associated with the small screen. Despite its title, this novel and adaptation were concerned primarily with the quotidian activities of the capital’s population in the build-up to the French invasion. In keeping with the heritage mode, the film also lavished attention on the city’s most iconic buildings – recreated on a remarkable and specifically commissioned set – and adapted the novel so as to focus on a shared notion of benign urban citizenship. Indicative of this approach is the dedication at the end of the film to Madrid’s inhabitants, 221

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past and present, thereby focusing on solidarity rather than addressing the fratricidal nature of the popular uprising which often pitched Spaniards with antithetical attitudes towards the French in conflict with each other, as much as it did with the foreign occupier. An ostensibly more politicized framework was supplied by the international co-production, Goya’s Ghosts (Forman, 2006) which, the director claimed, he had wanted to make for a long time, as the Inquisition had always reminded him of the communist repression in his own native Czechoslovakia (see Goldsmith, 2007). The film adopts a narrative and thematic conceit reminiscent of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) through which uncritical and unscrupulously wielded republican idealism is shown to be as potentially evangelical and oppressive as the Inquisition. However, this political angle was not dramatised particularly well, and the film’s main selling point is its privileged access to Spain’s rich cultural heritage, as Chris Perriam elegantly highlights: Filming in such surroundings greatly facilitated the construction of an elaborate period texture, heightened the degree of visual prestige (and, obviously, the connection to Goya), and allowed an historical memory to emerge. Key developments in Spain’s social and political history were neatly lined up for an attuned audience, and were able to act as a fallback, should plot and dialogue or other aspects of the film’s look fail (as they do). (2011: 118) In other words, the film was an attempt, however ill-conceived, to defy generic expectations by couching the visual delights associated with heritage cinema within a narrative that was far from anodyne. Unfortunately, as Perriam suggests, the former is realized far more successfully than the latter. In Belén Vidal’s scathing but judicious assessment: [T]he distracting mixture of English and Spanish dialogue on the soundtrack, the deployment of clichéd commonplaces of Spanish history and a wooden performance from Spanish star Bardem recall earlier ‘Europudding’ attempts at creating hybrid cultural products and undermine the film’s broad reflection on the mechanisms of political repression. (2012: 71) In practice, the highly subsidized visual tableaux were not sufficient to prevent the film from proving to be an expensive box office flop. If, as Nick Roddick suggests, producers are rendered by current European funding systems as ‘number crunchers whose job it is to assemble production money from a patchwork of sources and leave the limelight to their directors’ (2011: 15), the remarkably prolific and successful Edmon Roch (see Chapter 2) has proved heir to Andrés Vicente Gómez as the chief architect of Spanish historical epics, with Lope (Waddington, 2010) and Bruc, la llegenda/ Bruc, the Manhunt (Benmayor, 2010). These two very different projects – the former a lavish €20 million budget Spanish–Brazilian co-production, and the latter a more modest action 222

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adventure primarily designed for the home market – jointly inaugurated investment by the Spanish telecommunications giant Telefonica in Spanish cinema (Hopewell and Mayorga, 2010: A12). Bruc is a tale of the eponymous protagonist named after the mountain region in which he ostensibly leads a one-man attack against the French army that – at least according to the opening and closing credits – sowed the seeds for the defeat of the Napoleonic army in Europe. While no Spanish film has yet to really embrace the troublesome fact that the War of Independence was in fact something of a civil war – and that it was the intervention of the British that led to the French retreat – Bruc is by some margin the most overtly nationalistic film made on the subject since the early Francoist period. The barbaric actions of the lascivious and tyrannical French army are shown when they torch a village full of innocent women and children: this is a near-replica of a scene from Agustina de Aragón. There is also a celebration of martyrdom and violent self-sacrifice, reminiscent of what Marsha Kinder terms ‘the baroque fetishization of sacrificial death’ (1993: 142) in early-Francoist cinema. In fact, as Brian D. Bunk (2007: 6) notes, the obsession with martyrdom and heroism entered the popular Spanish imagination during the War of Independence, and was exaggerated in the twentieth century when it was appropriated by both sides of the political spectrum, especially in the light of the failed leftist uprising against the Second Republic in October 1934. In the twenty-first century, this aesthetic has seemingly re-entered the cinematic lexicon with both El Greco and La conjura de la Escorial fetishizing the loss of sacrificial innocent life. In La conjura de la Escorial, a Moorish girl is caught up in the machinations of the court: to a melodramatic soundtrack, her head is shaved as she is prepared for execution. While this can be aligned with the increasingly gruesome nature of post-heritage film-making, the fact that this common aesthetic with Francoist cinema has not been recognized (at least to my knowledge), let alone criticized, is likely the result of depictions coming from the other end of the political spectrum. In the case of Bruc, the transferral of a Spanish to a Catalan model not only provided muchneeded distancing from its forebears, but also presumably facilitated the participation of Catalan funding bodies, principally Televisión Catalunya. The film’s relatively poor box office performance was not necessarily an ideological response to the film, but more likely a consequence of it being overly sentimental, as well as budget limitations too frequently apparent through, for example, the ellipsis of major battle scenes, clumsily alluded to by the beating of Bruc’s drum, followed by a blurring effect. Like Miguel and William, Lope is a kind of Hispanic take on the aesthetic and narrative of Shakespeare in Love (Madden, 1998) by which ‘authenticity is replaced by a post-modern irreverence towards canonical narratives, be they historical or Shakespearean’ (Pidduck, 2001: 131). In fact, the cinematic production, first vaunted in the mid-1990s by veteran Spanish producer Elías Querejeta, had languished in development for many years before a number of fortuitous industrial and cultural circumstances transformed it into an attractive proposition. Jordi Gasull – a former employee of Querejeta – took the script that he had co-written with the renowned playwright, Ignacio del Moral, when he went to work with Columbia Pictures’ Madrid office in the 1990s, before Sony decided to close down 223

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its Spanish base.8 It was the interest of Antena 3, the film’s prime investor, that convinced Roch that this could be a viable project, while also providing him with the leverage to bring a renowned Brazilian director, Andrucha Waddington, on board and broker a deal both with Warner Brothers Latin America, and Waddington’s own production company, Conspiricao Film. In distinction to most of Antena 3’s co-productions, the project was not in English (see Chapter 25), but the fact it was in Spanish pleased the Brazilian co-producers, who felt that it facilitated entry into North-American and Latin-American markets far more readily than films in Portuguese (Evans, 2009). While as Isabel Santaolalla notes, in much discourse surrounding Spanish–Latin American co-productions, ‘one can almost hear the echoes of the, unquestionably much more monolithic, rhetoric circulating in the Spanish film industry during the 1940s and 1950s’ (2007: 71), the traditional power relations may well be entering a transitional period. One of the major legacies of the quincentenary celebrations was the creation of the Instituto Cervantes, charged with promoting Spanish culture at the international level. In the last few years, its remit has expanded increasingly to include Castilian-language culture produced outside of the peninsula. In terms of Spanish co-productions, Alejandro Pardo (2007: 107) has suggested that Spain seems to favour European and North-American partners when financial considerations are paramount, and Latin-American ones when it comes to multicultural exchange. Lope seemingly would reverse this general trend, and is perhaps a nascent sign that Latin-American economic growth, and the strength of its cultural industries, may challenge the paternalistic practices of the former colonial power base. In terms of casting, it was both counter-intuitive and commercially astute for the Brazilian actress Sónia Braga to be given the role of the protagonist’s mother, Paquita, in Lope. Born to a part-black father and part-Indian mother, the star is well known for the men with whom she has been linked over the years, such as Robert Redford and Clint Eastwood, and has played the sultry Latino lover in films such as Kiss of the Spiderwoman (Babenco, 1985), The Rookie (Eastwood, 2002) and more recently, Maria, the lesbian lover of the sexually rampant and frisky Samantha (Kim Cattrall) in the North American television series, Sex and the City (1998–2004) (see Dennison, 2006; Shaw and Dennison, 2007: 162–67). However, Lope was plagued with production difficulties, principally the fact that the German-Catalan actor, Daniel Brühl, pulled out at the last minute, claiming that he felt uncomfortable playing the Spanish national playwright. Alberto Amman, an Argentinian-born actor, was brought in twenty-five days before shooting began (Asúa, 2010: 15). Del Moral claims that a general paranoia and uncertainty took hold, resulting in a film that he feels profoundly disappointed with, highlighting the fact that the script’s humour was lost in translation from the page to screen – a loss for which he holds Waddington responsible.9 Considering that the narrative focuses on Lope’s famously scandalous love-life, the film is in fact surprisingly earnest, with little of Shakespeare in Love’s wit or irreverence. This is both the cause and consequence of the fact that the references to the relationship between his life and works always feel somewhat perfunctory, presumably due to the not-unfair assumption 224

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that potential audiences might not be as familiar with Lope’s works as his English counterpart. It is also overly verbose, with too many ruminations on the art of playwriting and a deficit in theatrical action. Ironically, however, where the film does excel is in the performances. The producers struck gold with Amman, who had a meteoric rise to fame through his performance in Celda 211/Cell 211 (Monzón, 2009), and who here has genuine chemistry with his two love interests, Elena and Isabel (played by Leonor Watling and Pilar López de Ayala, respectively). The fact that both of these two actresses have developed a star presence that is partly rooted in their appearance in multiple historical films is demonstrable proof of a nascent, albeit unconsecrated, tradition of Spanish heritage cinema. The film ends with Lope and Isabel riding off into the sunset, and an inter-title informing the audience that the playwright would go on to father fourteen children. This seems to tease the audience with the prospect of a sequel. Del Moral tells me that a second instalment was always part of the game-play, but that Lope’s disappointing box office performance – it did respectably but hardly spectacularly in Spain, and disappeared very quickly from Latin American cinemas – put heed to this strategy. If the Golden Age is to have a future on Spanish screens, it is more likely to be found on television. Águila Roja, la película/Red Eagle (Ayerra, 2011) – a curious hybrid of El Cid and Batman, which uses the seventeenth century as a backdrop for a series of adventures – was able to capitalize on the success of a television series whose remarkable multi-platform content includes online video games, comics (both on paper and digital), various board games, websites and social networking (Costa and Piñeiro, 2012). The fact this was the first time that a film adaptation had been made of a Spanish television programme still being aired was indicative of its popularity – the third season in 2011 had audiences of around 6 million, representing a 30 per cent screen-share (Costa and Piñeiro, 2012: 107) – which also has been registered in relation to other dramas on historical figures, such as the Princess of Ebolí and Isabella, the Catholic queen. Future studies might want to examine why and how television has succeeded where cinema seemingly has failed. A relatively low-budget meta-cinematic film, Baztán (Elizalde, 2012), about the persecution in Navarra of those with agote heritage, set in both the Golden Age and the present, disappeared from Spanish cinema screens almost immediately. When I asked Edmon Roch whether he would continue making historical epics, he responded that he had no immediate plans to do so, although he did not rule out returning to them in the future. At a time of increasing financial uncertainty, perhaps this is understandable, given the precariousness of success in historical films in general. This low hit rate is not restricted to Spain, and it is noteworthy that even Amenábar failed to fulfil the expectations placed in Agora, a €50 million budget historic yarn set in classical times, which failed to match the box office success of his other English-language projects. More generally, a combination of the current economic crisis and the general failure of Spanish cinema to produce credible depictions of either the Golden Age or War of Independence to appeal to domestic, let alone international audiences, signals that this was a short-lived vogue, seeking short-term solutions to wider structural problems in a much beleaguered national cinema. What was 225

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something of a wasted opportunity between 2006 and 2011 is now little more than a quixotic pipedream. Conclusion In the words of Jim Cullen: ‘History is not only a matter of thought but also a matter of feeling – or, perhaps more accurately, a complex interplay between the two’ (2013: 214). This formulation seems to be particularly pertinent to the Spanish context. As we have seen, at least in the cinematic realm – and I suspect more generally – the War of Independence and Golden Age are more likely to provoke feelings than evoke thought. An exhibition curated and designed by Jorge Luis Marzo and Tere Badía at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona in 2010–11, ‘The Baroque Effect: The Politics of the Hispanic Image’, suggested that the aesthetic mode habitually associated with Early-Modern Spain was a privileged tool of both the original colonial project and the cult of the Hispanic from the nineteenth century onwards. The range of their reference points was certainly eclectic: the colonial architecture of Mexican city squares to footage of football matches, and Almodóvar accepting his Oscar for Todo sobre mi madre/All About my Mother (1999). While I would suggest that the exhibition was iconoclastic and monolithic, unlikely to withstand even cursory historical or cultural analysis, nevertheless it bears striking testament not so much to the ‘baroque effect’ as to the affect that allusions to the age that brought it forth are likely to provoke. Ironically, the politicization of this aesthetic mode has helped ensure both its ubiquity and marginality at different historical periods. It survives, for example, in some films about the Civil War which, as is the case with some historical dramas, unwittingly resurrect techniques from cinema of the 1940s and 1950s. Films as ostensibly disparate as Las 13 rosas/The 13 Roses (Martínez Lázaro, 2007), De tu ventana a la mía/From Your Window to Mine (Ortiz, 2011) and La voz dormida/The Sleeping Voice (Zambrano, 2011) all marshal emotional affect in the viewer through identification with the martyrdom of female prisoners facing the reality and/or prospect of firing squads. Even more explicitly and ironically, the merciless gunning down of a homosexual by Falangist thugs in Pájaros de papel/Paper Birds (Aragón, 2010) is filmed in a manner eerily reminiscent of the way in which the murder of the priest at the hands of out-of-control ‘reds’ is depicted in Raza/Race (Saénz de Heredia, 1942). Not only is this mode politically problematic, but it is also rarely popular with audiences: an irony considering the frequent accusation of the baroque being an inherently populist form of propaganda. As we have seen, it is this appropriation and politicization of the period which gave birth to the Hispanic baroque that complicated, and arguably sabotaged, the emergence of heritage cinema in Spain, while allowing the possibility (albeit unrealized) for the production of successful post-heritage films. Like Alba de América before it, El Dorado and Alatriste marked new milestones in budgetary terms for Spanish cinema: none of these films were able to recoup their initial investment or satisfactorily repackage a troublesome past for a global audience. Despite the occasional heritage film about the War 226

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of Independence, it is still a term more applicable to anodyne visions of the dictatorship – a particularly unfortunate legacy of the Transition. No film has developed the heritage aesthetic quite as extremely as the television miniseries on the Duchess of Alba (Antena 3, 2010), which is fixated on her family’s properties and gardens, including El Pardo – Franco’s principal residence as Caudillo – while dwelling on her fascination with her ancestor portrayed in Goya’s La Maja Desnuda (an irony, considering that an earlier film on the artist and his subject was not filmed or released in Spain due to the House of Alba’s objection). Nevertheless, if we take seriously Paul Preston’s conception of what he terms ‘Franco’s investment in state terror’ (2012: 517), then anodyne period pieces such as Atraco (Cortés, 2012), El embrujo de Shanghai/The Shanghai Spell (Trueba, 2002) or Tiovivo c. 1950 (Garci, 2004) – that privilege a carefully elaborated and elegantly staged period mise-en-scène over the human and political cost of living under a repressive dictatorship – are revisionist affronts which run a greater risk of nostalgic amnesia in the twenty-first century than they did in the 1980s, when consensus politics made them arguably more defensible, and less politically dangerous (see Chapter 15). It is seemingly less problematic to depict the Golden Age than the dictatorship in a positive, or at least a non-negative light; that this curious dynamic persists is, I have suggested, indicative of a continued tension over the formulation of anything even approximated a consensual historical narrative. Until serious effort is taken to resolve this issue, it seems highly unlikely that Spaniards will be able to come to terms with either their recent or distant past, let alone make accomplished and marketable films about it. Acknowledgement I am very grateful to Paul Cooke, Sally Faulkner, Lidia Merás and Belén Vidal for their very useful comments and feedback on an earlier version on this chapter. I also would like to thank Nick Maine and the BFI’s Research and Statistics Unit for their cooperation in providing me with the figures on Alatriste and other box office figures quoted throughout the chapter. They use the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) database for the United Kingdom and United States, and Rentrak for Latin American countries. Notes 1

Both Maravall and Solana were noted university academics who had opposed the dictatorial regime before forging important political careers during the democracy. Maravall, the Minister of Education from 1982–88, was the son of José Antonio – a reconstructed Falangist who went on to become arguably the most accomplished Spanish historian of his generation, while in the process doing much to discredit the Golden Age, which he construed, at least in its cultural manifestations, to be an antecedent and precedent for Francoism (see Wheeler, 2013). Solano occupied the post from 1988–92 before subsequently taking on, among other roles, that of being Secretary General of Nato (1995–99). 227

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2 3

4 5

6

7 8 9

This figure is taken, as are all other records of Spanish box office figures in this chapter, from the Spanish Filmoteca’s database available online via the Ministry of Culture website – http://www.mcu.es, Last accessed on 12 March 2013. Jorge Semprún – the former Republican exile, concentration camp survivor and Socialist Minister of Culture (1988–91) – recalls from his clandestine visits to Spain as a communist agitator during the 1950s that he would go to the Prado not only to appreciate the artwork but also because a reflective surface, positioned in an almost invariably empty building next to Las Meninas, would allow him to observe if he was being followed by the secret police (1996: 185). A similar point is made in Barcelona (un mapa) (Pons, 2007) when an elderly woman played by Núria Espert looks back on her childhood and remembers how the museums were so empty that there was no need for security guards: something unthinkable in the post-Olympic city. Nevertheless, Aranda lamented the fact that it was launched on only eighty screens, and had very little advertising revenue. This leads him to speculate how well the film might have done with greater promotion (Aranda, 2002). Less commercially successful but similarly accomplished was Teresa, el cuerpo de Cristo/ Theresa, the Body of Christ (Loriga, 2007): a Spanish–French–British co-production made once again under the aegis of Andrés Vicente Gómez, which paired the iconoclastic Generation X film-maker with Paz Vega as the very earthly saint. Although hardly as sacrilegious as the publicity stills and title suggest, it was the subject of complaints by the church prior to release (see Añón, 2007). In a largely positive appraisal of a dramatically engaging and relatively thoughtful film with high production values, Paul Julian Smith has noted how the devotional public kept away because they had been led to believe that it would constitute ‘blasphemous exploitation. Conversely, a youthful secular audience was not attracted by the casting of Vega against type’ (2012: 107). It is a damning indictment of the quixotic, verging on irresponsible, use of public money that a translated text titled The History of Spain Through Cinema produced by the Spanish International Development Cooperation Agency is arguably even more misguided than earlier efforts by the Francoist Diplomatic Office. See for example the claim that ‘Our film industry, unlike that of other countries, enjoys rich and solid foundations for cinematographic storytelling. Spanish history boasts numerous incidents with immense potential for screen adaptation, an aspect clearly illustrated by the titles contained in the book’ (Spanish International Development Cooperation Agency, 2009: 9). Interview with Alicia Hérmida conducted in Madrid on 29 August 2007. This production history is taken from Evans (2009), and information provided in a personal communication via e-mail with Edmon Roch on 28 March 2013. Personal communication via e-mail with Ignacio del Moral on 27 April 2013.

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Deveny, T. (2006). ‘The club Pérez-Reverte: screen adaptations of best sellers’, Hispania, 89.2: 268–77. (2010). ‘The Spanish Golden Age revisited: Agustín Diaz Yañez’s [sic] Alatriste and Antonio del Real’s La conjura del [sic] Escorial’, Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies, 8: 113–28. Diplomatic Information Office (1949). The Spanish Cinema. (Madrid: Diplomatic Information Office). Donapetry, M. (2005). ‘Juana la Loca en tres siglos: de Tamayo y Baus a Aranda pasando por Orduña’, Hispanic Research Journal, 6.2: 147–54. Epps, B. (2013). ‘Echoes and traces: Catalan cinema, or cinema in Catalonia’ in J. Labanyi and T. Pavlović (eds.), A Companion to Spanish Cinema (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell Publishing), 50–80. de España, R. (2002). Las sombras del encuentro. España y América: cuatro siglo de historia a través del cine (Badajoz: Diputació de Badajoz). di Febo, G. (1988). La Santa de la Raza: Teresa de Ávila, trans. A. Sánchez-Gijón (Barcelona: Icaría). Evans, C. (2009). ‘Spanish financiers tune in to Lope’, Screen International, 24–30 July: 20–21. Fanés, F. (1982). CIFESA, la antorcha de los éxitos (Valencia: Institución Alfonso el Magnánimo). Faulkner, S. (2004). Literary Adaptations in Spanish Cinema (Woodbridge: Tamesis Books). (2013). A History of Spanish Film: Cinema and Society 1910–2010 (London: Bloomsbury). García, H. (2008). ‘¿El triunfo del dos de mayo? La relectura antiliberal del mito bajo el franquismo’ in J. Álvarez Barrientos (ed.), La guerra de la independencia en la cultura española (Madrid: Siglo XXI Editiones), 351–78. Goldsmith, J. (2007). ‘The ghosts of history: Miloš Forman, Jean-Claude Carrière and Goya’s Ghosts’, Creative Screenwriting, 14.4: 60–65. González González, L. M. (2009). Fascismo, kitsch y cine histórico español (1939–1953) (Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha). Green, J. (2006). ‘Spain fires up star power’, Screen International, September: 17–19. Harrison, R. (2013). Heritage: Critical Approaches (London: Routledge). Higson, A. (1993). ‘Re-presenting the national past: nostalgia and pastiche in the heritage film’ in L. Friedman (ed.), British Cinema and Thatcherism (London: UCL Press), 109–29. (2003). English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama Since 1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Hopewell, J. (1986). Out of the Past: Spanish Cinema after Franco (London: BFI Publishing). Hopewell, J. and Mayorga, E. (2010). ‘Easing Spain’s pain: conglom Telefónica to invest in local pics’, Variety, 10 September: A12. Jordan, B. (2011). ‘Audiences, film culture, public subsidies: the end of Spanish cinema’ in A. Davies (ed.), Spain on Screen: Developments in Contemporary Spanish Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), 19–40. Juliá, S. (2004). Historia de las dos Españas (Madrid: Santillana Ediciones). Kinder, M. (1993). Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). 230

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Labanyi, J. (2000). ‘Feminizing the nation: women, subordination and subversion in postCivil War Spanish cinema’ in U. Sieglohr (ed.), Heroines without Heroes: Reconstructing Female and National Identities in European Cinema (1945–51) (London: Cassell), 163–82. (2009). ‘Historia y mujer en el cine del primer franquismo’ in L. Gómez Vaquero and D. Sánchez Salas (eds.), El espíritu del caos: representación y recepción de las imágenes durante el franquismo (Madrid: Ocho y Medio), 85–112. Lunenfield, M. (1993). ‘Columbus-bashing: cultural wars over the construction of an anti-hero’ in M. Mignone (ed.), Columbus: Meeting of Cultures (Proceedings of the Symposium Held at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, October 16–17, 1992) (New York: Forum Italicum), 1–12. Martin Pérez, C. (2004). ‘Madness, queenship and womanhood in Orduña’s Locura de amor (1948) and Aranda’s Juana la loca (2001)’ in S. Marsh and P. Nair (eds.), Gender and Spanish Cinema (Oxford: Berg), 71–85. Martínez, J. (2010). ‘La pervivencia de los mitos: la Guerra de la Independencia en el cine’, Cuadernos de historia moderna, Anejos, 9: 191–213. Martínez Torres, A. (1969). ‘La rivalidad entre el director y el público: entrevista con Vicente Aranda’, Nuestro cine, 87: 35–41. Martínez Tórtola, E. (1996). La enseñanza en el primer bachillerato franquista (1938–1953) (Madrid: Editorial Tecnos). Mira Nouselles, A. (1999). ‘Al cine por razón de Estado: estética y política en Alba de America’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 76.1: 123–38. Monterde, J. E. (1989). ‘El cine histórico durante la transición’ in J. A. Hurtado and F. M. Pico (eds.), Escritos sobre el cine español 1973–1987 (Valencia: Filmoteca de la Generalitat Valenciana), 45–63. Morris, J. (1982). Spain (London: Penguin). Nieto Ferrando, J. (2009). Cine en papel: Cultura y crítica cinematográfica en España (1939–1962) (Valencia: Generalitat de Valencia and IVAC). Núñez Seixas, X.-M. (2006). ‘From national Catholic nostalgia to constitutional patriotism: conservative Spanish nationalism since the early 1990s’ in S. Balfour (ed.), The Politics of Contemporary Spain (London: Routledge), 121–45. El País (2007). ‘Alatriste creó nuevos destinos turísticos’, El País, 1 November: 7. Palacio, M. (2012). La televisión durante la Transición española (Madrid: Cátedra). Pardo, A. (2007). ‘Spanish co-productions: commercial need or common culture? An analysis of international co-productions in Spain from 2000 to 2004’ in S. Barriales-Bouche and M.  Attignol Salvondon (eds.), Zoom Out: Crossing Borders in Recent European Cinema (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing), 89–127. Perriam, C. (2011). ‘Javier Bardem: costume, crime, and commitment’ in A. Davies (ed.), Spain on Screen: Developments in Contemporary Spanish Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), 114–28. Pidduck, J. (2001). ‘Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love: screening the Elizabethans’ in G. Vincendeau (ed.), Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight & Sound Reader (London: British Film Institute), 130–35. 231

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Powrie, P., Babbington, B., Davies, A. and Perriam, C. (2007). Carmen on Film: A Cultural History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Preston, P. (2012). The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-century Spain (London: Harper Press). Quesada Martínez, M. (2010). ‘1492 en 1992’ in F. S. Ventura (ed.), Cine y cosmopolitismo: aproximaciones transdisciplinares a imaginarios visuales cosmopolitas (Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Intramar Ediciones), 90–114. Rawlings, H. (2012). The Debate on the Decline of Spain (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Roddick, N. (2011). ‘In praise of producers’, Sight & Sound, April: 15. Sánchez Vidal, A. (2013). ‘El Dorado (Carlos Saura, 1987): the keys to El Dorado’ in M. M. Delgado and R. Fiddian (eds.), Spanish Cinema 1978–2000: Auteurism, Politics, Landscape and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 64–77. Santaolalla, I. (2005). Los ‘otros’: Etnicidad y ‘raza’ en el cine español contemporáneo (Zaragoza: Prensa Universitaria de Zaragoza). (2007). ‘A case of split identity? Europe and Spanish America in recent Spanish Cinema’, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 15.1: 67–78. Sanz Larrey, G. (2008). El dos de mayo y la Guerra de la Independencia (1808–1814) en el cine (Madrid: Consejería de Cultura y Turismo de la Comunidad de Madrid). Scola, G. (2006). ‘Entrevista a Agustín Díaz Yanes’, Cambio 16, September: 57–59. Semprún, J. (1996). Federico Sánchez se despide de ustedes (Barcelona: Fábula, Tusquets Editores). Shaw, L. and Dennison, S. (2007). Brazilian National Cinema (Abingdon: Routledge). Smith, P. J. (2006). ‘Spanish heritage, Spanish cinema: the strange case of Juana la Loca’ in P. J. Smith, Spanish Visual Culture: Cinema, Television, Internet (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 101–14. (2012). ‘Re-visions of Teresa: Josefina Molina’s Teresa de Jesús (TVE, 1984) and Ray Loriga’s Teresa, el cuerpo de Cristo (‘Teresa, the Body of Christ’ 2007)’ in P. J. Smith, Spanish Practices: Literature, Cinema, Television (London: Legenda), 94–109. Spanish International Development Cooperation Agency (2009). The History of Spain through Cinema (Madrid: Ediciones Polifemo). Téllez, J. L. (1990). ‘De historia y de folklore: notas sobre el segundo periodo Cifesa’, Archivos de la Filmoteca, 4: 50–57. Valls, F. (1983). La enseñanza de la literatura en el franquismo (1936–1951) (Madrid: Antonio Bosch). Vidal, B. (2012). Heritage Film: Nation, Genre and Representation (New York: Wallflower). Vincendeau, G. (2001). ‘Introduction’ in G. Vincendeau (ed.), Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight & Sound Reader (London: British Film Institute), xi–xxxi. Walsh, A. L. (2007). Arturo Pérez Reverte: Narrative Tricks and Narrative Strategies (Woodbridge: Tamesis Books). Wheeler, D. (2007). ‘We are living in a material world and I am a material girl: Diana, Countess of Belflor materialised on the page, stage and screen’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 84.3: 267–86. 232

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(2012). Golden Age Drama in Contemporary Spain: The Comedia on Page, Stage and Screen (Cardiff: University of Wales Press). (2013). ‘Contextualising and contesting José Antonio Maravall’s theories of baroque culture from the perspective of modern-day performance’, Bulletin of the Comediantes, 65.1: 15–43. Yarza, A. (2004). ‘The petrified tears of General Franco: kitsch and fascism in José Luis Sáenz de Heredia’s Raza’. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 5.1: 49–66.

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Chapter 15 Clowns, Goats, Music and the Comedic Violent: Late Francoism and the Transition to Democracy in Álex de la Iglesia’s Films Vicente Rodríguez Ortega

A positive but abrupt understanding of intelligence and human action will always underline the importance of memory in any cognitive process […] A less narrow-minded understanding of memory would easily appreciate the advantages of forgetfulness. Stoic philosophy already pointed them out when it conceived knowledge as a soft surface of wax on which different impressions accumulate, in a way that some erase others and only the stronger or more frequent remain. (Valcárcel, 2010: 49)

W

hen analysing the late years of Francoism and the Transition to Democracy, most serious discussions of both periods in the contemporary Spanish public sphere are characterized by present-infused readings that imply ‘a desire to observe the past according to the needs and postulates of their contemporaneity’ (Palacio, 2012: 19). Moreover, as Paul Grainge has noted, ‘memory suggests a more dialogic relationship between the temporal constituencies of “now” and “then”; it draws attention to the activations and eruptions of the past as they are experienced in and constituted by the present’ (2003: 1). That is, one can only access our past from what David Lowenthal has termed ‘memorial knowledge’: knowledge of the past based on selective and strategic remembering in the present – a mixture of public and personal recollections that become increasingly blurred and indistinguishable (see Drake, 2003: 183). These ruminations raise the question of how to resolve the memory/forgetfulness conundrum within the contemporary Spanish social fabric, alongside the role that cultural and, more specifically, cinematic discourses perform in the processes of mediating historical construction and reconstruction. In this chapter, I would like to grapple with these issues in relation to some films directed by Álex de la Iglesia. First, I will analyse how El día de la bestia/ The Day of the Beast (1995) deals with the rise of conservative ideology in mid-1990s Spain through the utilization of a generically hybrid and popular discourse, before moving on to a discussion of two films, Muertos de risa/Dying of Laughter (1999) and Balada triste de trompeta/ The Last Circus (2010), that depict the later period of the Franco regime, and the early years of the Transition to Democracy. This analysis will focus on how the film-maker constructs an ideological discourse through the ‘contiguous contamination’ of two parallel discourses – the political and the popular – in order to remember and not to forget, signalling the act of mediation in the images instilled in the population’s collective unconscious in relation to that era. De la Iglesia, a self-defined television junkie, instrumentalizes the political–popular

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culture interface, focusing on the power of the small screen and, more broadly, icons of popular culture to forge a shared narrative and collective Spanish imaginary. I will suggest, in fact, that the films explore what Alison Landsberg has called ‘prosthetic memory’: that is, personal memories that ‘derive from engaged and experientially oriented encounters with the mass media’s various technologies of memory’ (2003: 148). These prosthetic tools come into existence through engagement with mediated representations, and are interchangeable and exchangeable through their commodified forms. Far from simply shaping individual subjectivity, they have a collective character. Seen within this context, the films revisit and revise the past to remember it from a contemporaneity that has not necessarily forgotten but appears remarkably immune to many of the lessons that were meant to have been learned, shielded within the fantasy framework of democratic governance. At the same time, De la Iglesia’s films archaeologically revisit key icons of the mass media to rearticulate their meanings, and instrumentalize the power of audio-visual technologies of representation, in order to offer an alternative version of Spanish history. Prosthetic Memory: The Past–Present Interface, Franco and the Transition Channel surfing a few months ago, I came across Intereconomía’s ‘España en la Memoria’ (‘Remembering Spain’).1 The host, Alfonso Arteseros, was interviewing Francis Franco, the dictator’s grandson, about the book he had published recently on his (in)famous relative. Over the course of the show, both the host and his invited guest said several things that, only a few years previously, would have caused public outrage. However, in the contemporary mediascape they have become established doxa for a significant conservative segment of the Spanish population. First, Franco had not been a dictator, but Spain’s ‘former ruler’. Second, Francis’s grandfather was ‘a good man’, living and painting in his residence at El Pardo palace. Following on from this comment, Francis Franco voiced his incomprehension of the current political climate in Spain: the division between Left and Right was apparently something that had been worked through long ago, as people came together to build a new and better Spain.2 This prompted the host to point to a vintage Philips microphone that saluted the spectator from the table around which the two protagonists were seated. Moreover, Arteseros stated that it was not any old artefact, but rather the ‘very microphone with which your grandfather spoke to all Spaniards’. Franco nodded and congratulated himself on the fact. Franco’s Philips microphone, ‘talking’ and ‘looking’ at the spectator from a privileged position of speech, not only dismantles any kind of democratic legitimacy in regard to the show’s ideological fabric, but also positions both Arteseros and Franco as contemporary ventriloquists of Francisco Franco’s voice. Thus they simplify the complexities of Spanish society, turning their heads towards nostalgia for the good old times when the ‘good father’ spoke to his children. Viewed in this light, the show’s message about ‘Spain’s former ruler’ and nearly forty years of dictatorial rule seems to be based upon a double ideological perversion: 238

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the effacement of any memories in relation to the political and social repression carried out during Franco’s regime; and legitimization of the performance of remembering the dictator as a just ruler who did his best to maintain Spain’s territorial unity and guide his ‘flock of sheep’ in the right direction. In this respect, Franco mobilizes the so-called consensus of the Transition – that is, ‘let’s seal all our collective wounds and move on to a democratic Spain’, forgetting the differences, acts of injustice and traumas of the past – as a discursive tool to re-legitimate the dictator, humanize his figure beyond the ideological dichotomy of Left and Right, and erase the fascist connotations that taint his period in power. In Amelia Valcárcel’s (2010) words, Arteseros and Franco attempt to mobilize the ‘advantages of forgetfulness’, accumulating ‘new impressions’ about General Franco with the purpose of effacing others, which have been recently legitimized through the Ley de Memoria Histórica of 2007 (Law of Historical Memory – an official condemnation of Francoism by the Spanish state).3 Extending this argument to the recent rise of media such as Intereconomía, or Federico Jiménez Losantos’ Libertad Digital, which champions an extremist right-wing ideology, it could be argued that pundits of these media outlets are trying to effectively rub out the lasting impressions of Franco and reinvent his figure in the present. At this point, I would like to draw attention to the fact that, as several cultural commentators have already noticed, the Transition’s ostensible amnesia is somewhat questionable. For example, Stanley Payne (2007) remarks that the ‘pacto del olvido’ is an absurd concept, since anyone living during that period was witness to ‘a wave of publications, programs, and symposiums about the Civil War’ that repeatedly revisited Spain’s political past. SánchezBiosca talks about a widespread analytical drive during the Transition which ‘revised, debunked, shred into pieces and examined with a microscope the inherited discourses’ (2007: 110). Álvarez Monzoncillo and Sendra (2013) remark that Francoism was subject to a fierce process of de-legitimization. In this regard, both cinema and state television channels played a decisive role in the creation of symbolic values of democracy and the cultivation of new social imaginaries for a modern Spain (see Palacio, 2006). During Franco’s time, the dictatorship instrumentalized television as a key tool to construct mythologies that seemingly embodied ‘life’ under the regime’s governance. Icons and stars of popular culture (from sports champions such as Bahamontes to folk and pop singers such as Joselito and Lola Flores or toreros [bullfighters] such as Manolete) were utilized to deliver a skewed version of Spain. Progressively, state television became ‘a decisive instrument that widened its public importance’ (Sánchez-Biosca, 2007: 97–98) in the dissemination of these dominant and ideologically tendentious values. However, from the 1960s onwards, during the period known as desarrollismo, Spain became more open to the cultural and social forms of other democratic societies. An immediate consequence of this process within the artistic field was the accentuation of the aesthetic principles of ‘posibilismo’: strategies of opposing the regime from within. In cinema, films such as Carlos Saura’s La caza/The Hunt (1966) or Peppermint Frappé (1967) began to explore deviant forms of political resistance and action by experimenting with the medium’s expressive and aesthetic possibilities. Later on, throughout the mid-1970s, 239

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internationally recognized staples of art cinema such as El espíritu de la colmena/The Spirit of the Beehive (Erice, 1973), La prima Angélica/Cousin Angelica (Saura, 1974), Furtivos/ Poachers (Borau, 1976), Bilbao (Luna, 1978), and documentaries such as El desencanto/The Disenchantment (Chávarri, 1976), Canciones para después de una guerra/Songs for After a War (Martín Patino, 1978) or Ocaña: un retrat intermittent/Ocaña, an Intermittent Portrait (Pons, 1978) firmly implemented a resolutely anti-Francoist discourse. From ‘El Maligno’ to Nino Bravo and Raphael Although a few Spanish critics dismissed El día de la bestia as a trivial, over-the-top ‘gamberrada’ by an able craftsperson but ultimately pedestrian director (Rodríguez Marchante, 1995), the film was recognized generally as a positive step towards the establishment of a commercially viable and aesthetically inventive new type of Spanish cinema. For example, M. Torreiro states in El País that de la Iglesia’s effort is built ‘with intelligence despite erasing with a single stroke the distinction between auteur cinema and genre films’ (1995: 44). Similarly, Beatriz Santori (1995) acknowledges the film’s multifarious set of influences encompassing Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976), trashy Tele 5 programmes, García Berlanga’s Plácido (1961), Fernán-Gómez’ El extraño viaje/Strange Voyage (1964) and William Peter Blatty’s satanic novels. Lluís Bonet Mojica adds Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1968) and Blade Runner (Scott, 1982) to the list, while also noting the presence of Spanish screenwriter Rafael Azcona and his highly influential ‘esperpentic’ comedies (1995: 39).4 Some scholars have tended to classify El día de la bestia alongside a broad cross-section of Spanish films such as La flor de mi secreto/The Flower of My Secret (Almodóvar, 1995) or Nadie hablará de nosotras cuando hayamos muerto/Nobody Will Speak of Us When We’re Dead (Díaz Yanes, 1995), released in the same year which, according to Marsha Kinder, ‘show a growing disillusionment with the libertarian ethos and an attempt to recuperate conservative traditions, yet […] gain international attention by preserving a radical surface of outrageousness’ (1995: 2). Alternatively, for others, the film bears all the traces of ‘transnational postmodernity’: that is, the deployment of video-clip aesthetics with an emphasis on a well-crafted, yet superficial visual and aural style that is lacking in substance (Moreiras Menor, 2000: 139).5 Other cultural commentators have theorized a more nuanced critique of de la Iglesia’s film, indicating both its political stance and subtle utilization of generic hybridity. For Josetxo Cerdán (2004), El día de la bestia epitomizes the disappearance of the Transition’s optimism during the latter days of Felipe González’ Partido Socialista y Obrero Español/Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) adminstration. Building on Cerdán’s arguments, Buse et al. (2007: 57) affirm that El día de la bestia is first and foremost a film comedy that draws on a range of other generic models, and is far from being a neo-conservative take on contemporary Spain. On the contrary, they argue that its unwillingness to provide a fixed political position for the liberal viewer, alongside its generic hybridity, serve to make it one of the most radical Spanish 240

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films of the decade. Thus El día de la bestia is indebted to both a series of globally effective generic modes disseminated through Hollywood, and several idiosyncratic and culturally specific traditions characteristic of Spanish cinema. As a multi-generic work comprised of disparate, in-your-face references pointing in multiple directions, the film partakes in a series of popular audio-visual forms of representation to offer a commercially successful, politically engaging cinematic product. Operating within the parameters of a prevalent slapstick comedic mode, de la Iglesia composes a multi-referential tour de force that offers a poignant critique of the state of affairs in a country, Spain, which recently had embraced its integration into the borderless European Union (EU), and yet reveals the traces of rampant racism towards the non-desirable ethnic other. Thus the film juxtaposes the comedic and the violent while mobilizing other generic conventions – such as low-angle framing, grotesque iconography and musical cues of the horror genre – to compose a hybrid product that frames the specificities of mid-1990s Spain within a European context. As a priest alights from a bus arriving in Madrid, two ostensible disparate images appear on the right-hand side of the frame. First, a billboard of the infamous Kio Towers that labels them ‘Puerta de Europa’: Gateway to Europe. Second, under the billboard, a Gypsy family performs a typical keyboard routine accompanied by a goat (a popular culture signifier of the devil). The Gypsy family is undoubtedly a marker of Spanishness that roots the fabric of the Madrid cityscape within the contours of folk culture. At the same time, de la Iglesia plunges the spectator into Spain-in-Europe, a country that has left behind Francoist tyranny and embraced active membership within the EU. Furthermore, the unfinished Kio Towers not only epitomize the modernizing openness towards the integration of Spain into the EU that the PSOE government had championed; they also remind the spectator of the property scandal that had halted the construction of this emblematic site for a new transnational Spain, thereby self-consciously flagging the downward spiral of corruption that the Socialist government had fallen into since the early 1990s. The film’s foregrounding of emblems of global capitalism, such as the Kio towers, points to the fact that the enemy the priest confronts may not necessarily be ‘El Maligno, but powerful and unchecked capitalism of flexible accumulation and the effects it produces through the way it urbanizes capital and consciousness’ (Compitello, 1999: 212). In addition, armed police viciously beat up a group of North African immigrants as soon as the priest begins walking the Madrid streets. As they perform this brutal act of unjustified aggression, de la Iglesia’s ‘Satánica’ poster for the disco where the priest and his companions subsequently seek the devil is in the background. The director thereby signals the equation between satanism and racism that the film fully exposes in its narrative’s closing section. El día de la bestia later shifts gears to depict a country criss-crossed by racial prejudice and hatred towards non-Europeans. Less than a year after its release, the fourteen-year Partido Socialista y Obrero Español administration came to an end when the Partido Popular/People’s Party (PP) won the national elections, obtaining a majority in congress. Early in the film, de la Iglesia links the racism latent in mid-1990s Spain – represented within the diegesis through the homicidal Limpia Madrid (Clean up Madrid) group – with 241

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a rise in right-wing ideology. El día de la bestia thereby signals the blinding effect that the Europeanization of Spain has triggered, in as much as it has intensified a culture of widespread elitism in the collective Spanish unconscious in relation to those unprivileged bodies who migrate from economically and socially disadvantaged countries. In short, ‘the beasts are still here’. I would argue that even though its ostensible focus is on the present, the film constantly signals towards the past by linking, both ideologically and iconographically, the Limpia Madrid group with the remnants of Franco’s regime. This connection between Spanish history and the contemporary provides the underlying structural logic for both Muertos de risa and Balada triste de trompeta. Muertos de risa follows the rise of a comedy duo, Nino (Santiago Segura) and Bruno (El Gran Wyoming) from a tacky rural club in 1972 to their attempts to kill each other on live television in post-Olympic Spain. Balada triste de trompeta takes the Civil War as its point of departure, following the psychological and physical transformation of a sad clown, Javier (Javier Areces), as he carries out the revenge he promised to his father (himself a clown and a prisoner of Franco’s regime). Javier engages in a killing spree that eventually takes him to El Valle de los Caídos, the supreme signifier and landmark of Franco’s power, in the waning days of the dictatorship. As was the case in El día de la bestia, the film is characterized by excessive violence, foregrounding bloodletting and the repeated ‘penetration’ of the wounded body. As Julián, Nino and Bruno’s manager, notes in relation to the unexpected success of their ‘slap routine’: It was an act of total anarchy, an absolute liberation of any kind of ethical commitment, as someone whose name I can’t recall said in a newspaper. On stage, they did everything we had all wanted to do more than once: slap someone with total impunity, without giving this act any importance, without getting punished. There was something completely amoral in all these acts – something sinister – but couldn’t we say the same thing about all of life’s pleasures? Audiences perceived this cathartic reaction to four decades of repression for what it truly was (Muoyo, 2000): a representation but also a vindication of a liberated human subjectivity, escaping the punishing mechanisms of the paternal dictator. Seen in this light, remembering is not enough: acting (violently) seems to be its derivative and necessary consequence. By contaminating the violent with the comedic to the point of becoming an esperpentic tour de force that thrives on generic hybridity to establish their positions of speech, both films are largely articulated through the impossibility of forgetting. In Muertos de risa, the reciprocal pranks that Nino and Bruno play on each other escalate at first as a symptom of their mutual envy, then ultimately as the epitome of their inability to forgive and forget. In the end they become completely mutually dependent: reciprocal hatred keeps them alive. In Balada triste de trompeta, Javier’s romantic failure to seduce Patricia (Carolina Bang) and his desperation in regard to her self-destructive relationship with Sergio (Antonio de la Torre) trigger a psychological breakdown that leads him to embrace an animalistic 242

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lifestyle that eventually catalyses his transformation into a punishing clown who, in his own monstrous appearance, bears the very nature of those surrounding him: Sergio and Colonel Salcedo in particular.6 It is only on reaching this state that he is able to fulfil the promise made to his father. Muertos de risa and Balada triste de trompeta politicize the past from the present not only to remember it, but fundamentally to make sure that we do not fall into the easy temptation of forgetting it. Both films deal with the persistence of the past in the present, an anachronistic but insistent remnant of Franco’s dictatorship in the ostensibly modern Spain (Buse et al., 2007: 98). Moreover, popular culture – more specifically, televisual and musical discourses – becomes the privileged shaper of historical memory, functioning as a heuristic lens through which to structure perceptions, ideological positions and affective memories within the public sphere. In this respect, each film mobilizes a key figure within the history of Spanish popular music – Nino Bravo and Raphael, respectively – in order to erect a discourse of nostalgia which then is immediately debunked and rearticulated through violence. Whereas Muertos de risa begins with the aggressive reaction of a group of Falange soldiers to Bruno’s accidental killing of his beloved mascot, the goat, while impersonating Nino Bravo, Javier experiences a catharsis watching Raphael performing the song ‘Balada triste de trompeta’ during a screening of Javier Escrivá’s Sin un adios/With No Farewell (1970). Nino Bravo, a romantic balladeer, was one of the most successful pop icons of Francoist Spain who died tragically in a traffic accident on April 16 1973 when he was just twentynine years old. His hits include ‘Libre’ (‘Free’), a timeless song inextricably linked with the imminent arrival of democracy to Spain. Raphael remains one of the most internationally well-known Spanish musical icons. He is characterized by an excessive performance style and his sympathy towards the Franco regime (see Wheeler, 2013). In fact, during a political rally in the 1990s, Raphael not only expressed his admiration for the dictator, but also encouraged then-candidate José María Aznar to win the upcoming election and ‘return Franco to the place he deserved’ (Colectivo Eloy Herrera Pino, 2008), thereby explicitly remarking on the direct connection between Spain’s ‘former ruler’ and Aznar’s Partido Popular – a link that the conservative party actively was trying to downplay in order to bolster its democratic credentials. In the film, Raphael’s singing functions as a catalyst for Javier remembering his promise of revenge, and the familial ties that the national army took away from him. The song’s lyrics read as follows: Balada triste de trompeta For a past that died And cries And moans, How it cries. Javier interprets the lyrics in a personal and literal fashion. The song’s paradoxical understanding of the past that has died, yet continues to cry, is the precise motivation for 243

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Javier’s rampage. His deceased father, brutally murdered by Colonel Salcedo, continues to cry, calling out for the revenge that his son has yet to exact. Possessed from that moment on by Raphael’s excessive and sentimental iconographic and musical power – in an manner akin to the cult worship of Nino Bravo in Muertos de risa, where the attempt to achieve a complete symbiosis with the hero figure results in a grotesque imitation – Javier recontextualizes Raphael’s intervention in Escrivá’s film to transform him into the embodiment of painful memories from the past.7 In other words, the character remembers his father’s plea to avenge his honour and memory through Raphael’s performative sorrow, which precludes any possibility of forgetting. The combination of the political and popular is, in fact, the structural principle at work in Balada triste de trompeta’s opening credits. Accompanied by Roque Baños’ superb increscendo score, de la Iglesia, after showcasing the three main protagonists of the film, fast-forwards through the dictatorship via the juxtaposition of a parade of heterogeneous ‘monsters’: political figures such as Franco, Hitler, Fraga, Arias Navarro, Carrero Blanco or Ronald Reagan; religious ones, such as images of a suffering Christ on the cross, the hooded religious fraternities of Holy Week, El Valle de los Caídos; cinematic references such as Frankenstein, wolfman, Max von Sydow, Christopher Lee, Rachel Welch or stills of Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980); alongside other images from popular culture such as flamenco singer, Lola Flores, comedians Tip y Coll and TV personalities such as Jiménez del Oso. It is no coincidence that the final image of the opening credits is of José Luis López Vázquez in Antonio Mercero’s La cabina/The Phone Box (1972), a science-fiction horror film that has been widely recognized as one of the defining cultural artefacts of the late Francoist period, through its allegorical depiction of the regime’s repressive nature and unwillingness to allow its citizens freedom of thought. This set of juxtapositions attempts to organize diachronically the often chaotic mechanisms of our prosthetic memories in the same way that Muertos de risa and Balada triste de trompeta utilize the constant presence of the televisual within the diegesis. A diverse set of excerpts from television, such as footage of the circus performer Ángel Cristo, the spoon-bending trick performed by the illusionist Uri Geller or Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero’s 1981 coup attempt, constantly frame the film’s narrative and character development within the history of the Spanish media. De la Iglesia resorts to an active and shifting interplay between foreground (the story of the chief protagonists) and background (the use of the televisual screen and icons of popular culture) in order to anchor the films within the specificities of Spanish audio-visual history, thereby vindicating prosthetic memories as valid, historybuilding mechanisms. Taking this process even further in Muertos de risa, de la Iglesia employs digital effects so as to insert Nino into the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, where this figure, who continues to be iconic in democratic Spain, is shown lighting the Olympic torch. Rewriting Spanish history via televisual mediation, both Muertos de risa and Balada triste de trompeta recurrently insert the small screen within the diegetic space, thereby signalling Spaniards’ personal and shared experiences of their country’s historical events via the technologies of audio-visual representation. 244

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Conclusion: Remembrance, Spanish History and the Dangers of Amnesia Vladimir Jankélévich taught us that, when confronted with the temptation or alibi of forgetting: There is only one solution, to remember. There where nothing can be done, at least you may resent, forever […] The feeling that we experience is not a grudge but horror […] a protest against a moral amnesty that is nothing but an embarrassing amnesia. (cited in Valcárcel, 2010: 92) De la Iglesia’s films will not allow us to forget, precisely because we should never unlearn the lessons of the past. If we do, history not only could repeat itself, but also may evolve into a culture of amnesia that legitimates the violence, destruction and cultural bankruptcy fostered by dictatorship. In order to avoid the dangers of amnesia, de la Iglesia vindicates violence – or at least enjoyment of the representation of violence – as a legitimate framework through which to re-semanticize the historical past. In this respect, the films analysed all emphasize the key role of popular discourses in the rewriting of history. Within the Spanish context, utilizing nostalgia to apprehend the past invariably seems to trigger violence as its inseparable companion. De la Iglesia’s engagement with the popular becomes not only a means to evaluate the past ideologically, but also a mnemonic tool that stubbornly places the ‘bloody trauma of violence’ at the core of Spanish history. Acknowledgement This chapter was written as part of the research project ‘Cinema and Television in PostTransition Spain (1979–1992)’ funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the Spanish Government (CSO2011-15708-E). Notes 1 2 3

Intereconomía is a conservative channel that belongs to the Intereconomía Group, a multimedia corporation created in 1995. This claim was somewhat undermined by an advert for La Gaceta newspaper (which belongs to the same media group that owns Intereconomía) aired during a commercial break, which boasted that they were ‘proud of being right-wing’. More information about La Ley de Memoria Histórica can be found at the Spanish Ministry of Justice’s official website: http://leymemoria.mjusticia.gob.es/cs/Satellite/LeyMemoria/ es/inicio. 245

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4

5

6 7

Azcona is one of the most important screenwriters in the history of Spanish cinema, with a career that spanned more than four decades. His credits include El cochecito (Ferreri, 1960), Plácido (García Berlaga, 1961), El verdugo/The Executioner (García Berlanga, 1963), Peppermint Frappé, La prima Angélica and La lengua de las mariposas/Butterfly’s Tongue (Cuerda, 1999). Moreiras-Menor proceeds to mobilize Jean Baudrillard’s theories in order to argue that these films present a collapse in the signifying process. While I do concur with Moreiras Menor that many of these films have turned their gaze towards a horrific space of violence, in my view at least, they do engage directly with the sociocultural problematic of mid-1990s Spain. In addition, the pejorative use of the term ‘video clip’ in her text is over-reductive and simplistic. In my view, Colonel Salcedo stands for the regime’s brutality and violence. Franco is represented as a weak individual who seems to have little control of the regime that he ostensibly commanded. The film’s narrative self-consciously instrumentalizes Raphael’s contemporary standing and recuperation among the musical buffs, bloggers and opinion-makers of the digital age (the hipster musical credos of today’s Spain) as a key icon of popular culture.

References Álvarez Monzoncillo, J. M. and Menor Sendra, J. (2013). ‘La estructura del audiovisual en la transición’ in M. Palacio (ed.), Los medios audiovisuales y la transición política Aspectos televisivos y cinematográficos (Madrid: Universidad Nueva), 15–34. Bonet Mojica, L. (1995). ‘De la Iglesia y el Anticristo’, La Vanguardia, 1 November: 39. Buse, P., Triana-Toribio, N. and Williams, A. (2007). The Cinema of Álex de la Iglesia (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Cerdán, J. (2004). ‘España, fin de milenio. Sobre El día de la bestia (Álex de la Iglesia, 1995)’ in R. Ruzafa (ed.), La historia a través de cine: transición y consolidación democrática en España (Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco), 235–55. Colectivo Eloy Herrera Pino (2008). ‘Raphael vuelve a Málaga, abriendo la temporada que se configura como testamento estético de Salomón Castiel, director del Cervantes’, available at http://www.revistaelobservador.com/sociedad/turismo/2-uncategorised/1721-raphaelvuelve-a-malaga-abriendo-la-temporada-que-se-configura-como-testamento-estetico-desalomon-castiel-director-del-cervantes, last accessed on 3 February 2012. Compitello, M. A. (1999). ‘From planning to design: the culture of flexible accumulation in postcambio Madrid’, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 3: 199–219. Drake, P. (2003). ‘“Mortgaged to music”: new retro movies in 1990s Hollywood cinema’ in P. Grainge (ed.), Memory and Popular Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 183–201. Grainge, P. (2003). ‘Introduction’ in P. Grainge (ed.), Memory and Popular Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 1–20. Kinder, M. (1995). ‘Refiguring Socialist Spain: an introduction’ in M. Kinder (ed.), Refiguring Spain: Cinema/Media/Representation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 1–32. 246

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Landsberg, A. (2003). ‘Prosthetic memory: the ethics and politics of memory in an age of mass culture’ in P. Grainge (ed.), Memory and Popular Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 144–61. Moreiras Menor, C. (2000). ‘Spectacle, trauma and violence in contemporary Spain’ in B. Jordan and R. Morgan-Tamosunas (eds.), Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies (London: Arnold), 134–42. Muoyo, A. (2000). ‘Muertos de risa: Entre la miseria, el odio y la mediocridad’, Mujeres de Empresa, 17 September, available at http://www.mujeresdeempresa.com/arte_cultura/000904-muertosde-risa.shtml, last accessed on 21 January 2012. Palacio, M. (2006). Las cosas que hemos visto. 50 años y más de TVE (Madrid: IORTV). (2012). ‘Marcos interpretativos, Transición democrática y cine. Un prólogo y tres consideraciones’ in M. Palacio (ed.), La Transición Española. Aspectos televisivos y cinematográficos (Madrid: Universidad Nueva), 19–32. Payne, S.G. (2007). ‘¿Tardofranquismo o pretransición?’, Cuadernos de la España Contemporánea 2, available at http://www.uspceu.com/CNTBNR/sitio_ID/pdf/payne.pdf, last accessed 21 January 2012. Rodríguez Marchante, E. (1995). ‘El día de la Bestia: de Madrid al infierno’, ABC, 21 November: 82. Sánchez Biosca, V. (2007). ‘Las culturas del tardofranquismo’, Ayer, 68.4: 89–119. Santori, B. (1995). ‘La bestia está en la calle’, El Mundo, 14 October: 2. Torreiro, M. (1995). ‘Satán en la Gran Vía’, El País, 27 October: 44. Valcárcel, A. (2010). La memoria y el perdón (Barcelona: Herder). Wheeler, D. (2013). ‘At the crossroads of tradition and modernity: Raphael and the politics of popular music in Spain’, Journal of European Popular Culture, 4.1: 55–70.

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s Carlos Ardavín Trabanco and Jorge Marí (2011: 31) note, the relationship between the United States and Spain can be traced right back to the origins of cinema, with the Spanish–American war being the first to be rendered on film in 1898. While the emphasis of many of the chapters in Part 1 was on global arthouse practices, here the focus turns to more commercial genre-based cinema which, rightly or wrongly, often is taken to be synonymous with North American film-making. Even during the period of autarchy in the 1940s, cinema was never completely isolated, with Hollywood providing one of the few images of the outside world to Spaniards of all social classes and political persuasions (see Bosch and Rincón, 1998; Vernon, 1997). This was facilitated by the use of dubbing as opposed to subtitling – a tendency which prevails to the present day – thereby ensuring that language does not prove an obstacle, especially in periods with high rates of illiteracy. From the 1950s onwards, a sizeable number of North American productions – most famously the spaghetti westerns in which Almería typically doubled for Texas or Mexico – were shot in the peninsula (see Fernández Hoyo and Fernández Hoyo, 2009). Director Anthony Mann married Sara Montiel while, in something of an anomaly for 1960s Francoist Spain, the rumoured-to-be bisexual Nicholas Ray opened a late-night restaurant and nightclub in the centre of Madrid, at which John Wayne was a regular. According to José M. Magone: ‘Support for European integration has become probably one of the most salient features of Spanish political culture’ (2009: 67). Any attempts to ally with the United States, be it through NATO or the involvement of Spanish troops in the Iraq War, have been far less popular, and arguably with some justification. As Alfonso Guerra, deputy prime minister to Felipe González – and an alumnus of the Madrid Film School from the 1960s – notes throughout his memoires, the United States was never really viewed as the land of the free in Spain where its complicity with the Franco regime – be that real or perceived – was seen to be such that it was widely believed that the North American government had bankrolled and orchestrated the 1981 coup attempt (Guerra, 2004: 390). At the micro-level of the local film industry, there continue to be frequent accusations that major distributors and exhibitors flaunt European regulations through the use of blockbooking and so on; more work needs to be done to discover to what extent these anecdotal claims have a basis in fact. In addition to unfair competition, I also argue in Chapter 17 that an antipathy to Hollywood within the Spanish cinema establishment is largely a result of a distrust of the popular which, I suggest, has its origins in the dictatorship period, when auteur cinema was placed in opposition to popular cinema sold predominantly on the basis of its leading actors and, most noticeably, actresses.

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Befitting its title as the ‘seventh art’ – a term used far more in Spanish than Anglo-American commentary on cinema – the figure of the author arrived later in cinematic discourse than it did for the previous arts, just at a time when the so-called ‘death of an author’ was being heralded in post-structuralist discourse. According to Michel Foucault: [W]e should ask: under what conditions and through what forms can an entity like the subject appear in the order of discourse; what position does it occupy; what functions does it exhibit; and what rules does it follow in each type of discourse? In short, the subject (and its substitutes) must be stripped of its creative role and analysed as a complex and variable function of discourse. The author – or what I have called the ‘author-function’ – is undoubtedly only one of the possible specifications of the subject and, considering past historical transformations, it appears that the form, the complexity, and even the existence of this function are far from immutable. We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author. (1979: 28) I thereby undertake an etymological and ethnological study of the emergence of the ‘author-function’ within discourse on Spanish cinema conducted at home. Predicated on Christine Geraghty’s suggestive claim that ‘[l]ike genre, work on stars offered the possibility (not always taken up) of looking at the whole cinematic process through work on production, texts and audiences’ (2000: 183), my argument is that auteurist discourse may have provided a valuable heuristic and political tool, but it has been converted into a dogma that is not only counterproductively anti-populist but also gender-biased, in that it lacks a vocabulary with which to discuss performance generally coded as feminine. As Maria Delgado states: ‘The prioritisation of authorship as a singular (historically male) entity […] has too often reduced collaborative relationships between writers and actresses to the all too familiar packaging of the mentor–muse paradigm’ (2007: 272). In Chapter 18 I illustrate this point in relation to the performance by Penélope Cruz as a Cuban émigré in Elegy (Coixet, 2008). Cruz’s eyes ‘have become as important, at least in the Spanish context, as those of actress Ana Torrent and have as many dreadful and liberating things to transmit’ (Perriam, 2005: 41). It is my contention that the actress’s most sexually explicit role since her debut film role, aged fifteen in Jamón, jamón (Luna, 1992), constitutes an expert star performance that functions as a deconstruction of the highly sexualized star image of Cruz who, in Almodóvar’s words, ‘has one of the most spectacular cleavages in world cinema’ (cited in Dawson, 2006). In this respect, the performance is the antithesis of her role in Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Allen, 2008) – or for that matter, her cameo as a sultry Madrid banker, Carmen, in Sex and the City 2 (King, 2010) – which deliberately exaggerates Latin sensuality to the point of caricature. I argue that Spanish critics’ unwillingness and/or inability to recognize the merits of Elegy or Cruz’s performance is symptomatic of a broader resistance to engaging in a meaningful dialogue on stardom and acting, thereby serving to perpetuate auteur-based approaches to critical histories of Spanish cinema which are both sexist and anti-populist. 252

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In his defence of some, although by no means all, modern mainstream cinema, David Bordwell argues that the ‘traditions of Hollywood storytelling, particularly the redundancy built into the system, can make innovation accessible to the audience’ (2006: 17). A recurring preoccupation of all the contributions to Part 3 is whether innovation as opposed to mere imitation can occur when such models are translated to the Spanish context. That this is at least a possibility is suggested by a number of chapters which demonstrate how Spanish cinema at its best has been an active participant, as well as observer, of paradigm shifts in mainstream cinema. In spite (or perhaps because) of the fact that he is as vocal about his worship of classical Hollywood as he is dismissive of much of its twenty-first century output, Almodóvar can be classified alongside a loose grouping of film-makers such as Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, Todd Haynes and the Coen brothers, ‘who have turned generic hybridity into one of their trademarks’, according to Cristina MartínezCarazo in Chapter  16 (p. 265). As Martínez-Carazo’s chapter suggests more generally, transnationalism is hardly an exclusively twenty-first century phenomenon, and the Manchegan director’s style and approach is informed largely by both Hollywood cinema and the North American underground – particularly the works of Andy Warhol and John Waters who were spiritual fathers to La Movida, the drug-fuelled countercultural movement that placed both Madrid and the film-maker firmly on the international cultural map. Shelagh Rowan-Legg suggests in Chapter 19 that Sexykiller, morirás por ella/Sexy Killer: You’ll Die for Her (Martí, 2008) not only replicates but also nuances and develops a trend in horror films by which female protagonists are able to serve as both ‘the advancer of the narrative and the object of the gaze’ (p. 319). Her chapter examines how the esperpento mode combines with Hollywood tropes surrounding the female serial killer in Sexykiller, morirás por ella. Meanwhile, in Chapter 20 Agustín Rico-Albero examines how and why the [REC] (Balagueró and Plaza, 2007, 2009; Plaza, 2012) and Torrente sagas (Segura, 1998–2011), produced initially at least for adolescent audiences, adopted distinct representational and marketing strategies due largely to the fact that [REC] was successfully primed for international distribution, while Torrente was designed primarily for domestic consumption, featuring a protagonist who, according to Núria Triana-Toribio, ‘is a shameless and deliberate affront to the liberal middle-class sensibilities of democratic Europe’ (2004: 149). Lidia Merás in Chapter 21 analyses why and how the first Torrente film – aptly described by Santiago Fouz-Hernández and Alfredo Martínez-Expósito as ‘the most important metafilmic event of recent Spanish cinema’ (2007: 27) – and its sequels have outperformed not only the local competition, but also global blockbusters within the context of a frequently beleaguered national film industry. Through her analysis she shows how the star presence of screenwriter-director-actor Santiago Segura alongside flexible and effective marketing strategies have succeeded in transcending the film’s initial youthful demographic, and attracting an audience which does not habitually frequent the cinema or watch Spanish films. Unlike many in the Spanish film establishment who ‘view Segura’s triumph over Hollywood with more apprehension than pleasure’ (Triana-Toribio, 2004: 150), Merás suggests that the films’ commercial success has important lessons to impart, while her close film analysis 253

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substantiates a claim made by Enrique López Lavigne, a producer best known for this work with Julio Médem: For me Almodóvar and Segura, from two very different viewpoints, are the great portraitists and analysts of Spain. They take things that exist in our spirit, they turn them into fiction and put them on the screen […] They are creators of the Spanish pop universe. The Torrente franchise is an example of this. Santiago has analysed our psyche and our comic films very well […] In twenty years, when we want to know what Spain was like, it will be our most faithful portrait. (cited in Belinchón, 2011) Although the occasional Spanish comedy such as A mi madre le gustan las mujeres/My Mother Likes Women (Féjerman and París, 2002), Días de fútbol/Football Days (Serrano, 2003) or Morir en San Hilario/To Die in San Hilario (Mañá, 2005) is awarded modest international distribution, humour is famously difficult to translate across different cultures and societies. Adolescent comedies such as El asombroso mundo de Borjamari y Pocholo (Cavestany and Lopéz, 2004), Isi-Disi: Amor a lo bestia (de la Peña, 2004) and El oro de Moscú/Moscow Gold (Bonilla, 2003) – in which Segura is a staple star presence – may rarely be distributed outside of Spain but, were they not to exist, the already modest market share for national films at the domestic box office would be significantly decreased. In fact, many of the most commercially successful Spanish films entertain a curious dynamic, whereby the ostensible universality of the blockbuster is modified with a local audience in mind.1 Merás probes this curious dynamic by focusing on a specific technique used by the most famous exponent of this trend: the use of the cameo as a marketing tool in the Torrente films. On the one hand, although Spanish cinema increasingly had given recourse to this technique – for example, Juan Antonio Bardem as a political prisoner in El diputado/The Congressman (de la Iglesia, 1979); singer-songwriter Joaquín Sabina as himself in Isi-Disi: Amor a lo bestia; Baywatch star David Hasselhoff as a reality television judge in Fuga de cerebros 2/Brain Drain 2 (Therón, 2011); former Mayor of Madrid and current Minister of Justice, Alberto Ruiz Gallardón as a secondary character in Holmes and Watson: Madrid Days (Garci, 2012) – this is, in itself, arguably a symptom of a certain Americanization of Spanish cinema. However, Merás illustrates how Segura predominately relies on a local star system likely to be rendered illegible outside of Spain. As such, it will be interesting to see whether the vaunted Hollywood remake of the film – slated to star Ali G – takes place. Initially I was sceptical, but on seeing a Madrid cinema audience laugh throughout The Guard (McDonaugh, 2011), which features a protagonist who is effectively an Irish Torrente – his musical icon is Daniel O’Donnell as opposed to El Fary – then I began to think that comic traffic might communicate equally well in the reverse direction. This is just one instance of how English-language productions have been potentially inspired by Spanish cinema, and there have been a number of Hollywood remakes already: Abre los ojos/Open Your Eyes (Amenábar, 1997) as Vanilla Sky (Crowe, 2001);  [REC] 254

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(Belagueró and Plaza, 2007) as Quarantine (Dowdle, 2008); while there is a mooted adaptation of Celda 211/Cell 211 (Monzón, 2009) to be directed by Paul Haggis. Amenábar bookended his Oscar-winning Spanish-language film Mar Adentro/The Sea Inside (2004) with two English-language projects, The Others (2004) and Agora (2009), starring Nicole Kidman and Rachel Weisz, respectively. Stanley Kubrick greatly admired Julio Médem – even purchasing the Basque film-maker’s own copy of La ardilla roja/The Red Squirrel (1998). On Kubrick’s recommendation, Spielberg attempted (albeit unsuccessfully) to lure the Basque auteur to make his Hollywood debut with what would become The Mask of Zorro (Campbell, 1998) (Stone, 2002: 176). As I note in Chapter 18 on Elegy, Coixet was approached to direct multiple, high-profile commercial productions prior to accepting this specific commission. What these intercultural exchanges suggest is the possibility – admittedly, not always realized – for a fusion to take place between heterogeneous traditions that transcends mere imitation. In Chapter 22, Carmen Herrero argues compellingly that although Jaime Rosales and Daniel Cerdán employ the crime thriller genre as canny dialogical partners, both these film-makers engage with transnational practices without relinquishing national specificities in a manner that allows them to navigate expertly the complex and often contradictory demands of art and commerce, the local and the global. Rosales established his reputation with the atypical thriller Las horas del día/The Hours of the Day (2003), followed by La soledad/Solitary Fragments (2007), which went largely unnoticed by audiences until it won the Goya Award for Best Film, thereby prompting its reappearance on Spanish screens. His subsequent portrait of Basque terrorism divided critics; however, individual appraisals aside, the film signposted him as being, alongside Javier Rebollo, Spanish cinema’s foremost architect of sound. If in many respects Rosales can be classified alongside the directors discussed in Part 1 (see Moral’s contribution in Chapter 6), Herrero unpicks his relationship, albeit frequently antagonistic, with the kind of genre film-making that Cerdán rehearsed in the somewhat derivative La caja Kovak/The Kovak Box (2006), and then fine-tuned in La Celda 211. Celda 211 is a film whose visceral power largely derives from an expert control of tension, and a powerhouse performance by Luis Tosar as the prison inmate and sociopath Malamadre, one of the most iconic characters of recent Spanish cinema. Less positively, in Chapter 23, María Soler Campillo, Marta Martín Núñez and Javier Marzal Felici employ Planet 51 (Blanco, Abad and Martínez, 2009) as a paradigmatic case study, in order to explore the genuine risk that globalization of cinema production and tastes can translate too readily into the relinquishing of cultural diversity. This animated film is categorized administratively as a Spanish production, but it was produced and marketed in an attempt to promote a North American-style production: a phenomenon which the authors construe as unequivocally negative, in line with the Spanish Film Academy’s spokesperson for animated cinema, Pedro Eugenio Delgado (2011). Through an examination of the film’s content, they contend that its postmodern pastiche and hypertrophy of intertextual Hollywood references – also a characteristic of Las aventuras de Tadeo Jones/Tad, the Lost Explorer (Gato, 2012) – is indicative of a dearth of imagination and new ideas. The authors 255

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then focus on Planet 51’s reception in both the United States and Spain to suggest that not only does the film lack the cultural specificity and charm of award-winning animated fare – see, for example, Arrugas/Wrinkles (Ferreras, 2011) or Chico & Rita (Errando, Mariscal and Trueba, 2010) – but is shown also as wanting from both a technical and narrative perspective, in comparison with the films that it seeks to emulate. More generally, genre film-making has facilitated the production of such films as Blackthorn, Los cronocrímenes/Timecrimes (Vigalondo, 2007), No habrá paz para los malvados/No Rest for the Wicked (Urbizu, 2011), La noche de los girasoles/The Night of the Sunflowers (Sánchez-Cabezudo, 2006) or El rey de la montaña/King of the Hill (LópezGallego, 2007), marketed as a kind of Spanish The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sánchez, 1999) – which appeal to home audiences while also often gaining a foothold in the global marketplace. The very existence of Spanish Movie (Ruiz Caldera, 2009), a spoof film in the mode of the Naked Gun series (Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker, 1988–94), was attributable largely to the existence of a series of genre box office successes which, in addition to Amenábar’s English-language projects, included many films in Spanish aimed primarily at domestic audiences. A film of this kind may be frequently lamented and lampooned by local commentators, but uncritical sweeping rejection of Americanized commercial vehicles can lead to something of a Manichean discourse as regards globalization: the reified cosmopolitan internationalism of Spanish cinema’s contribution to world cinema, versus the vulgarization of national films corrupted by their Hollywood inspirations and commercial ambitions. The diverse range of case studies included within Part 3 resist, individually and collectively, such reductive and simplistic notions, in order to provide a far more nuanced vision of commercial Spanish film-making in an ostensibly post-national age. Note 1

Amigos (Cabotá and Mansó, 2012) and Primos/Cousinhood (Sánchez Arévalo, 2011) import the ‘buddy movie’ to the Spanish context. Ángeles, S.A./Angels Inc. (Bosch, 2007) effectively translates and updates Mrs Doubtfire (Columbus, 1993) to Spain in the age of Hannah Montana. The influence of North American television sitcoms can be keenly felt in 8 citas/8 Dates (Romano and Sorogoyen, 2008) or Gordos/Fat People (Sánchez Arévalo, 2009), while Fuga de cerebros/Brain Drain (González Molina, 2009) and Fuga de cerebros 2/Brain Drain 2 (Therón, 2011) place Spanish students in Oxford and Harvard respectively, in culturallyspecific variations of North American gross-out campus films such as American Pie (Weitz, 1999) and its sequels.

References Ardavín Trabanco, C. X., and Marí, J. (2011). ‘Introducción’ in C. X. Ardavín Trabanco and J. Marí (eds.), Ventanas sobre el Atlántico: Estados Unidos y España durante el postfranquismo (1975–2008) (Valencia: Publicaciones de la Universitat de València), 17–41. 256

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Belinchón, G. (2011). ‘Es cine popular, no zafio’, El País, 18 March: available at http://elpais.com/ diario/2011/03/18/sociedad/1300402801_850215.html, last accessed on 20 December 2013. Bordwell, D. (2006). The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Bosch, A. and del Rincón, M. F. (1998). ‘Franco and Hollywood, 1939–56’, New Left Review, 232: 112–27. Dawson, A. (2006). ‘With Volver, Penélope Cruz goes home’, VNU Entertainment News Wire, 25 October: unpaginated. Delgado, M. M. (2007). ‘Beyond the muse: the Spanish actress as collaborator’ in M. B. Gale and J. Stokes (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Actress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 272–90. Delgado, P. E. (2011). ‘Casi los mismos problemas para todo nuestro cine’, Academia: Revista del cine español, October: 58. Fernández Hoyo, G. and Fernádez Hoyo, A. (2009). ‘Construir lo imposible: Samuel Bronston y sus producciones en la historia del cine español’ in J. Marzal Felici and F. J. Gómez Tarín (eds.), El productor y la producción en la industria cinematográfica (Madrid: Editorial Complutense), 189–202. Foucault, M. (1979). ‘What is an author?’, Screen, 20.1: 13–34. Fouz-Hernández, S. and Martínez-Expósito, A. (2007). Live Flesh: The Male Body in Contemporary Spanish Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris). Geraghty, C. (2000). ‘Re-examining stardom: questions of texts, bodies and performance’ in C. Gledhill and L. Williams (eds.), Reinventing Film Studies (London: Arnold), 183–201. Guerra, A. (2004). Cuando el tiempo nos alcanza: Memorias (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe). Magone, J. M. (2009). Contemporary Spanish Politics, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge). Perriam, C. (2005). ‘Two transnational Spanish stars: Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz’, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, 2.1: 29–45. Stone, R. (2002). Spanish Cinema (Harlow: Pearson Education). Triana-Toribio, N. (2004). ‘Santiago Segura: just when you thought that Spanish masculinities were getting better’, Hispanic Research Journal, 5.2: 147–56. Vernon, K. M. (1997). ‘Reading Hollywood in/and Spanish cinemas: from trade wars to transculturation’ in M. Kinder (ed.), Refiguring Spain: Cinema/Media/Representation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 35–64.

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Chapter 16 Almodóvar in the USA/The USA in Almodóvar Cristina Martínez-Carazo

T

his chapter’s objective is to explore the dialectic between the work of Pedro Almodóvar and the United States; more concretely, the influence that this country has exerted on the Manchegan director’s aesthetic approach, in his manipulations of form and genre and in his critical and commercial success in the global market. North American cinema operates as a continuous reference point throughout Almodóvar’s professional life, a catalyst for his international renown and also as a magnet that both attracts and repels him at the same time. Similarly, film festivals, US critics in the media – press, television and internet – as well as in academia, together with promotional campaigns by production and distribution companies, play a fundamental role when it comes to assaying the Spanish director’s presence in the United States. For the purposes of this chapter, I will focus on the role of the aesthetic convergences between North American cinema and Almodóvar’s output, alongside its impact on the universalism of his work. As a vast array of declarations made throughout his more than three decades as a filmmaker demonstrate, Almodóvar’s relationship with the North American public and critics has been shaped by the country’s idiosyncrasies and the variations specific to particular stages in his career. In a recorded conversation with Frédéric Strauss from 2000, the director spoke of the ‘first months of courtship’ and lucidly dissects his complex relationship with the United States. The following paragraph from said conversations clearly illuminates this aspect: I was interesting to the more modern people, which has its advantages and disadvantages. These are the more intellectual folks, a capricious and fickle audience. From the minute I came to have a wider audience my first admirers began to reject me because they prefer to enjoy their pleasures as members of a select committee. These are very snobby, yet well-informed and very interesting people and they’re also very cruel because they’re the style-makers. On the other hand, you have to keep in mind the global change in American society: the return to more reactionary moral values hasn’t really worked in my favour. They see me as some scandalous phenomenon, almost a danger to the American public … Because I haven’t been at all complacent with my modern audience and since I haven’t paid tribute to anyone, I find myself in a no-man’s land. (2000: 108) Here Almodóvar elucidates in a condensed fashion the encounters and misunderstandings that constantly surface in his relationship with the United States, varying from its conservative

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nature to audiences’ fickleness, to the country’s tendency to pigeonhole artists and its lack of creative freedoms. However, this does not prevent his work, especially his more recent films, from seducing critics and regular cinema-goers alike, or from them holding a place of privilege on the American silver screen. This complex relationship with both critics and audiences raises the question of what Almodóvar’s success can be attributed to, and what factors determine his reception in the United States. One of the key factors around which I centre this study is the convergence of his aesthetic approaches with those of American cinema: approaches which have evolved and been reformulated over the course of his cinematic career. Since the première of his first film, Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón/Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (1980), the director has emphasized the strong influence of the American underground on his work: Even though I was open, in general, to punk style which was one of the requirements of the work on the film, I felt a very natural influence coming from […] John Waters, Morrissey, Russ Meyer, everything that came out of the Warhol Factory. (cited in Strauss, 2000: 28, 50) In addition to this identification with North American subcultural scenes and their characteristic features – low budget, the use of amateur actors, natural locations and fragmentation – it is also possible to identify similarities between John Waters’ cinematic work and that of the Manchegan director, principal among them a tolerant and celebratory approach to those living on the margins of society, an unmasking of the dysfunctionality in conventional families and the resulting aberrations that they embody. Many critics, most notably Alberto Mira (2009), have explored this underground aesthetic in Almodóvar’s early films. For Mira, American camp culture, as embodied in the work of the aforementioned underground film-makers and motifs that it shares with the gay subculture present in Almodóvar’s work, create a unique complicity between viewers and the film-maker: ‘This is about creators who turn sexual dissidence into a spectacular, transgressive, rare element, an element that cannot be reduced to the integration and normalization that the gay culture advocates for’ (2009: 97). Given that cinema is one of the cultural products that has exercised the most influence on the consolidation of gay culture in the United States, it is not altogether surprising that Almodóvar incorporates these traits into his work, especially at the outset of his career. Although the Spanish director soon freed himself from the label ‘gay’ because of its reductionist and marginalizing characteristics, there is no doubt that his early films maintain close ties with this aesthetic. Having been nurtured by the underground, pop culture and punk, and fascinated by everything that came out of Andy Warhol’s New York ‘Factory’, Almodóvar found in Madrid’s Movida the ideal climate for metabolizing these references and finding an outlet for his artistic restlessness, both literary and cinematographic. As Txetxu Aguado indicates – alluding to Joan Ramón Resina and to Eduardo Subirats – the Movida as well as Almodóvar’s 262

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filmography lacked ‘theoretical consistency’, and was seen as pure ‘postmodern spectacle, characterized by its vacuity far from the expectations of political and social criticism placed on culture during the Transition’ (2010: 35). Nevertheless, it becomes necessary to revise the approaches that measure the value of his work in terms of any political responsibility or of theoretical aims. Without negating the aforementioned lack, we could object that shifting the parameters linked to ‘sociopolitical commitment’ – or to its absence in this case – limits the reach of this director’s cinematography, and minimizes the registers that govern mass culture, distorting its particular impact within the present-day art scene in the process.1 In another more recent interview with Juan Sardá, published in El Cultural (2008), Almodóvar speaks, with the distance that comes with experience, about his very personal merging of underground influences with traditional Spanish elements, thereby providing a very unique slant on pop culture. To Sardá’s question about the role that the United States has played in his life, he responds: I educated myself in English and American pop cultures (from the second half of the 60s). My first influence was Andy Warhol, but without forgetting about Lola Flores. In my life I’ve also blended these extremes, the most modern outside influences with the most traditional from within. At the beginning of the 80s, along with Carlos Berlanga, Fabio, Alaska, las Costus, Bernardo Bonezzi, Sigfrido Martin Begué, Blanca Sánchez… and many more, we led a very similar sort of life to the Warhol Factory. Drugs, drag, endless parties and hangovers, hedonism and the present as the only thing on the horizon, we all felt like stars, but nobody was thinking about the market […] Before achieving my success in the United States, American culture and cinema had already influenced my films, always from the perspective of a Manchegan. I’m a fan of American films from every period, except, let’s say, the ones from the last 20 years (with some exceptions, of course: Tarantino, Scorsese, Lynch, Eastwood and the Coen brothers). (cited in Sardá, 2008) As these declarations clearly show, one of Almodóvar’s major triumphs stems from his ability to combine the localism of Spanish film with universal references. He has established a place for himself in the international panorama, which forces us to focus on his exceptionality, one which takes him off the beaten track. His immersion in the global dynamic at the level of production, content, distribution and reception has provided Spanish cinema with a new space of its own beyond its borders without having to relinquish its own cultural specificity, deftly combining the local and the global. His ability to generate numerous levels of significance which can attract a heterogeneous audience is key to a full understanding of his international standing His characters, generally established in emotional and physical spaces that are outside the norm, embody desires and passions that reach a wide audience, wherever that may be, because they recognize themselves in the characters or find themselves absorbed in the net of emotions that the director so skilfully weaves. Duncan Wheeler alludes to this ability in reference to Todo sobre mi madre/All About My Mother 263

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(1999), when he affirms that ‘[w]hat is particularly impressive is that multiple references are perfectly integrated into the fabric of the film: while cultural capital may add a layer of meaning, it is never a prerequisite for narrative comprehensibility’ (2010: 826). As Jean Renoir expertly states: ‘The best way for a film to interest everyone is its being rooted in its own homeland, despite the apparent paradox that the local could be universally attractive’ (cited in Marías, 2002). The viewer who feels drawn to the specificities of national cinemas needs to find an intersection with their own culture in order to be drawn into the story, and to not feel completely alien to the universe that these cinematic texts recreate. Far from creating a division between the local and the global, Almodóvar reconciles the two extremes and affirms, in consonance with Jay Beck and Vicente Rodríguez Ortega, that ‘Spanish cinema is a product of local, regional, national and global forces operating in diverse contact zones inside and outside of its geopolitical borders’ (2008: 1). This symbiosis between the local and the global, one of his oeuvre’s constants, exemplifies on the one hand, the hybrid nature of his aesthetic approach and, on the other, the impossibility of delineating sharp boundaries when speaking of national identity. Marsha Kinder is right to draw attention to the fact that ‘the concept of nation has been displaced by the local/global nexus’ (Acland cited in Kinder, 1997: 85): in some respects our modes of thinking about art and reality have been globalized, as we enter the third millennium.Nevertheless, this desirable universality clears the way for a series of appropriations of Almodóvar’s discourse that, even as they propel his international renown, dilute his anchorage in Spanish culture to a certain extent. Andy Medhurst gives clear evidence of this by placing Almodóvar’s cinematography in dialogue with queer culture. In Medhurst’s opinion: There is a process of cultural kidnapping going on here, in the sense that Almodóvar has become such a benchmark figure for certain internationalized version of the queer culture that the precise, rooted core of his cultural belonging is as often as not elided or played down. (2009: 126) Although the dialectic between Almodóvar and queer culture has contributed as much to the director’s universalism as to a kind of standardization of queer culture, it is worth stressing the film-maker’s wish to highlight his Spanishness, as well as his rejection of what is for him the reductionist nature of the queer aesthetic. This position combines with his expertise in internationalizing his cinematographic production. Beyond an initial affinity for underground culture, North American cinema continues to operate as a reference in Almodóvar’s work, as frequent insertions of clips from Hollywood movies within his filmic texts prove. These intertextual references – which the director does not hesitate to categorize as a form of ‘stealing’ (see Correa Ulloa, 2005: 100) – can function as forms of homage, citation and/or pastiche in order to duplicate and expand the plot or anticipate the dénouement. To illustrate this point, all we have to do is to think of the connection between the murder of Gloria’s husband with a leg of ham in ¿Qué he hecho yo 264

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para merecer esto?/What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984) and that of Mary’s husband in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lamb to the Slaughter (1958). We can look to the insertion of a scene from Duel in the Sun (Vidor, 1946) as a prelude to the deaths of the protagonists from Matador (1986); and All About Eve (Mankiewicz, 1951) playing on the TV screen in the beginning of Todo sobre mi madre. Moreover, we can see his insertion of fragments from Buñuel’s 1955 Ensayo de un crimen/The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz into Carne trémula/ Live Flesh (1999); or witness his ‘homage’ (Evans, 2005: 156) to Johnny Guitar (Ray, 1954) in Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios/Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988). These examples, only a small sample of the thirty-seven ‘robberies’ that Almodóvar himself admits (and many others that critics have detected), are a good indication of the weight that American cinema carries in his film-making process.2 The influence of classic melodrama is equally pronounced in much of his work. In reference to this point, Paul Julian Smith (2009) analyses the dialectic between melodrama and neorealism in ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto?, contrasting the characteristics of melodrama in general with its specific use in this film. The genre’s distinctly feminine flavour, its intense emotionality, the female characters’ search for love, the music’s prominence and aesthetic affectation and stylization clearly are projected in many of Almodóvar’s films.Smith alludes to Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce (1945), starring Joan Crawford, and to King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937) as clear references in ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? and Tacones lejanos/ High Heels (1991) respectively, although these melodramatic tendencies do run through a good part of Almodóvar’s films.3 In addition to intertextual references to American films, the convergence of Almodóvar’s creative universe with Hollywood’s more novel approaches – specifically the fusion and/ or confusion of cinematographic genres, self-reflection and the dislocation of a temporal sequence – is key to understanding the Manchegan director’s current success in the United States. The clarity around genre that traditionally has characterized Hollywood’s cinema has been altered through the presence of new directors, among them Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, Todd Haynes and the Coen brothers, who have turned generic hybridity into one of their trademarks. The generic bounds of the western, horror films, melodrama, comedy, film noir, farce, realism and surrealism have been blurred, giving way to what Ira Jaffe terms ‘hybrid cinema’ (2010: 6). Thanks in large part to the efforts of these American directors, spectators have become gradually accustomed to less conventional ways of creating film, thereby facilitating the acceptance of aesthetic options as innovative as those used by Almodóvar. Another common trait between the Spanish director and New Hollywood, which underpins his reception in the United States, is a taste for formal manipulation, especially auto-reflexivity and the rupturing of temporal linearity in his storylines. The continuous references to films within a film, especially the act of filming, establish a common conceit with which the twenty-firstcentury viewer tends to feel comfortable. If for some critics this cinematographic pastiche is symptomatic of thematic and stylistic exhaustion, for others it offers an ample repertoire of interpretations and appropriations that in no way lacks originality, and serves to imbue the 265

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cinematic medium with gravitas. If this conceit during the 1960s and within the context of modernity has enjoyed ‘the validity of critical recognition’ (Lipovetsky and Serroy, 2009: 69) in the hypermodern age, ‘it becomes trivialized, it becomes diverse, it becomes the language itself of a cinema in which reference, re-reading, second levels, parody, homage, quotation, reinterpretation, recycling, humour all form part of the current practice’ (2009: 70). This plurality of signifiers converges in Almodóvar’s films, as shown by his ‘robberies’ and the multiple interpretations to which the presence of film-making, recording and dubbing in almost all of his films lends itself. It is a presence that, as Silvia Colmenero highlights, ‘seems to forewarn of the spectacle that we’re about to attend, preparing us to face a sort of framed realism, paradoxically, in the realm of fiction’ (2001: 24). This innovative control regarding style and form is accompanied by a conventional ideological background in North American cinema. However, in Almodóvar’s case, he puts forth some more risky ethical posturing. This entails a double effect: a contradictory one, in fact. On the one hand, the moral ambiguity that runs through his work creates a distancing effect for the viewer, especially the foreign viewer: one that is open to formal innovations, but little inclined to accept anything that destabilizes their moral values. On the other hand, the common registers that formal experimentation draws on reduce the distance between Almodóvar’s films and Hollywood’s, and draw the North American viewer closer towards his somewhat unconventional universe without assuming unconditional acceptance of seemingly provocative moral codes. As Vicente Rodríguez Ortega points out, ‘since Todo sobre mi madre, [Almodóvar] has become fully recognizable and, most importantly, understandable for American audiences’ (2008: 45). This does not imply that Almodóvar has renounced the complexity inherent in his narrative techniques. In a similar vein, Brad Epps notes, in relation to La mala educación/Bad Education (2004), that ‘[w]hile Almodóvar provides references to make the film accessible to international audiences, he also works to disturb, by way of an elaborate, involute plot, the very notions of accessibility and recognisability’ (2009: 25). The reception of his films is, in good measure, rooted in a fine balance between loyalty to a personal conception of what film-making is, and the accessibility of those self-same films. Ultimately, the positioning of Almodóvar’s work on the global screen and its box office returns depend on this universalism of formal approaches, along with a good number of external factors, including criticism and publicity campaigns largely orchestrated by production and distribution companies. Table 1 illustrates the path of his work’s box office receipts in the United States, as well as its upward turning points. Following the success of Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios, there was a temporary disconnect with an American viewer more receptive to the comedic aspect of Almodóvar’s work, than to the dark stories that dominate his production’s next phase: Átame/Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down (1990), Tacones lejanos and Kika (1993). Curiously, his next film, La flor de mi secreto/The Flower of My Secret (1995), applauded by international critics, did not connect with US audiences, resulting in his lowest net return since the box office success of Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios. He would have to wait until the Oscar for Best Foreign Film was 266

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Table 1:  Almodóvar at the US Box Office US release date

Title

US distributor

US gross

Worldwide gross

10/14/2011 11/20/2009 3/11/2006 11/19/2004 11/22/2002 5/11/1999 1/16/1998 8/3/1996 1/1/1994 12/20/1991 1/5/1990

La piel que habito Los abrazos rotos Volver La mala educación Hable con ella Todo sobre mi madre Carne trémula La flor de mi secreto Kika Tacones lejanos ¡Átame! Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios La ley del deseo Matador

Sony Pictures Classics Sony Pictures Classics Sony Pictures Classics Sony Pictures Classics Sony Pictures Classics Sony Pictures Classics MGM Sony Pictures Classics October Films Miramax Miramax

$3,185,812 $5,014,305 $12,899,867 $5,211,842 $9,285,469 $8,272,296 $1,713,459 $1,032,180 $2,019,581 $1,710,057 $4,087,361

$32,300,305 $30,991,660 $85,585,177 $40,273,930 $51,001,550 $67,872,296          

Orion Classics Cinevista Cinevista

$7,179,298 $245,530 $206,952

 

11/11/1988 3/4/1987 9/16/1988

 

Source: Box Office Mojo, 21 November 2011.

awarded to Todo sobre mi madre before receipts would surpass $8 million.4 Since the release of Todo sobre mi madre, the point at which Sony Pictures Classics takes over distribution, La piel que habito is the only one of his films not to have surpassed $5 million in box office takings: a considerable sum for a foreign film, whose average is around $1 million. Also worth mentioning here are the efforts made by the Spanish government to promote Almodóvar’s films on the national as well as the international level. As Brad Epps and Despina Kakoudaki note: The internationalization of Almodóvar and of the critical writing on him is part and parcel of a complex dynamic that runs from the Spanish state interventions in the form of subsidies to collaborative ventures in the European Union to the ‘indie revolution’ that rocked – and in some respects paradoxically reinvigorated – the hegemony of Hollywood. (2009: 13) Production and distribution companies in turn play a fundamental role in determining these films’ success as much at the national as at the international level. Almodóvar’s production company, El Deseo, dedicates enormous effort to promoting his films, especially in relation to media and distribution companies. It controls the whole promotion process, from press-books to billboard poster designs, carefully selecting the images that wind up as publicity materials. El Deseo pays particular attention to the international sales of its films 267

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and meticulously analyses audience profiles in every target destination. The selection of trailers is also key to the promotional process. As Rodríguez Ortega observes: The trailers of Hable con ella and La mala educación […] provide no information about the narrative fabric of the films, are devoid of dialogue altogether and are legitimated by either critics’ capsules or the acknowledgement of the presence of the film in reputed film festivals. (2008: 58) I would suggest this is indicative of the fact that the Almodóvar’s ‘brand’ has more power than his individual films: US viewers are going to the movies attracted by the artist, not by his specific narratives. A general lack of interest in films not in English also contextualizes the elimination of dialogue from the trailers. Equally important figures in the consolidation of Almodóvar’s presence on the American silver screen are Tom Bernard and Michael Barker, heads of Orion Classics from 1983–92 and, since 1992, co-presidents and founders of Sony Pictures Classics – an independent affiliate of Sony Pictures Entertainment – dedicated to the distribution, production and acquisition of American and international independent films. A clear indication of their weight in the film industry is the list of directors whose films they have distributed: Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Ingmar Bergman, Francis Ford Coppola, Guillermo del Toro, Atom Egoyan, R. W. Fassbinder, Akira Kurosawa, Louis Malle, François Truffaut, Wim Wenders, and so forth.5 Evidence of Sony’s dedication to Almodóvar is a box set titled Viva Pedro, which brings together eight of his films alongside a promotional clip. Clearly, Sony’s expertise and strategies have reaped dividends, as is shown by the box office success of his recent films in the United States, with takings generally oscillating between $5 and $12 million. This commercial prowess reveals Almodóvar’s ability to delineate his own space in such a hermetically sealed atmosphere as the US film industry. In addition to what this implies at the level of individual success, it also has significant repercussions in relation to the internationalization of Spanish cinema. Few film-makers have been able to find an exportable register or a filmic language that is intelligible to an audience hardly predisposed to embrace any deviation from the norm in relation to the cinematic depiction of sexuality, gender, or social and institutional mores. This challenge is exacerbated further when this alternative vision is expressed through a language other than English. Notes 1

Diametrically opposed to this is his current stance, more specifically, his commitment to the recent protests stemming from the Movimiento 15-M/15 March Movement (also known as Movimiento de los indignados/The Indignants’ Movement) in Madrid. A good example of 268

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2 3 4

5

this is his recent interview with Richard Peña at the 49th annual New York Film Festival, in which he devotes the first few minutes to demonstrating his adherence to the protests in Madrid, specifically in defence of the 15M, which for him is a political rather than a humanitarian movement. Javier Herrera (2013) has analysed the various types of intertextuality that Almodóvar employs in his work, many of which relate to cinema from North America. For a more complete version of the dialectic between Almodóvar’s films and melodrama, see D’Lugo (2006: 29–44) and Vernon (1993). In marked contrast to the success of his films, the Broadway adaptation of Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown, which premiered in the Belasco Theatre in New York on November 4 2010, was a complete failure. On the day after the premiere, a vicious critique appeared in the New York Times by Ben Brantley (2010), under the title: ‘Here’s Your Valium, What’s Your Hurry?’. Directed by Barlett Sheer and with a score by Jeffrey Lane, in Brentley’s opinion the musical went at too fast a pace, and failed to grab the spectator’s attention. For more information on Michael Barker and Tom Bernard’s professional trajectory, and of the numerous awards they have received, see: http://www.sonyclassics.com/about-us/.

References Aguado, T. (2010). ‘Pedro Almodóvar, la Movida y la Transición: memoria, espectáculo y antifranquismo’ in J. Herrera and C. Martínez-Carazo (eds.), Buñuel y/o Almodóvar. El laberinto del deseo, Letras Peninsulares, 22.1: 23–44. Beck, J. and Rodríguez Ortega, V. (2008). ‘Introduction’ in J. Beck and V. Rodríguez Ortega (eds.), Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press), 1–23. Brantley, B. (2010). ‘Here’s your valium, what’s your hurry?’, New York Times, 5 November: C1. Colmenero Salgado, S. (2001). Pedro Almodóvar: Todo sobre mi madre (Barcelona: Paidós). Correa Ulloa, J. (2005). Pedro Almodóvar: Alguien del montón (Bogotá: Editorial Panamericana). D’Lugo, M. (2006). Pedro Almodóvar (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press). Epps, B. and Kakoudaki, D. (2009). ‘Introduction. Approaching Almodóvar: thirty years of reinvention’ in B. Epps and D. Kakoudaki (eds.), All About Almodóvar: A Passion for Cinema (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press), 1–34. Evans, P. (2005). ‘Las citas fílmicas en las películas de Almodóvar’ in F. Zurián and C. Vázquez Valera (eds.), Almodóvar: El cine como pasión (Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha), 155–61. Herrera, J. (2013). ‘Almodóvar’s stolen images’ in M. D’Lugo and K. M. Vernon (eds.), A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell), 345–63. Jaffe, I. (2010). Hollywood Hybrids (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc). Kinder, M. (1997). ‘Documenting the national and its subversion in a democratic Spain’ in M. Kinder (ed.) Refiguring Spain: Cinema, Media, Representation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 65–99. 269

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Lipovetsky, G. and Serroy, J. (2009). La pantalla global (Barcelona: Anagrama). Marías, M. (2002). ‘Actualidad de Bienvenido Mr. Marshall’ prologue to A. Tena, 50 aniversario de Bienvenido Mr. Marshall (Madrid: Tf. Editores). Medhurst, A. (2009). ‘Heart of farce: Almodóvar’s comic complexities’ in B. Epps and D. Kakoudaki (eds.) All About Almodóvar: A Passion for Cinema (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press), 118–38. Mira, A. (2009). ‘Camp y underground homosexual en Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!’ in R. Cueto (ed.) ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? (Valencia: Ediciones de la Filmoteca), 89–120. Rodríguez Ortega, V. (2008). ‘Trailing the Spanish auteurs: Almodóvar’s, Amenábar’s and de la Iglesia generic routes in the US’ in J. Beck and V. Rodríguez Ortega (eds.) Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 44–65. Sardá, J. (2008). ‘Mis influencias han sido Andy Warhol y Lola Flores’, El Cultural, 13: 11. Smith, P. J. (2009). ‘La reescritura del melodrama en ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto?’ in R. Cueto (ed.), ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? (Valencia: Ediciones de la Filmoteca), 123–39. Strauss, F. (2000). Conversations avec Pedro Almodóvar (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma). Vernon, K. (1993). ‘Melodrama against itself: Pedro Almodóvar’s What Have I Done to Deserve This’, Film Quarterly, 46.3: 28–40. Wheeler, D. (2010). ‘All about Almodóvar? Todo sobre mi madre on the London stage’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 87.7: 821–41. .

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Chapter 17 Acting and Directing in Spain: Historicizing Stardom and the Author Function Duncan Wheeler

I still think that being an actor in Spain is like being a bullfighter in Iceland; the terrain on which you can operate doesn’t offer much. (Sacristán, cited in Mayo, 2008: 264–65) The actor and director José Sacristán once said that making films in Spain is like being a bullfighter in Iceland. I’d add that, in our country, making films and being a woman is akin to bullfighting with unicorns. (París, 2010: 349)

I

n the words of Núria Triana-Toribio, ‘Spanish cinema is not all that popular with its own “natural” audience, a situation that can no longer be ignored by the government, industry, critics and researchers’ (2007: 154). Elsewhere I have suggested in reference to art forms as diverse as the national classical drama and contemporary music that a suspicion and fear of the ‘popular’ is endemic to much academic discourse in Spain (Wheeler, 2012, 2013). Generally, this antipathy is predicated on the Marxist-inflected model of cultural determination expounded by the Frankfurt School, a legacy of the Communist Party’s hegemony within anti-Francoist intellectual circles; hence, my contention in a journalistic piece commissioned by the Spanish Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences that: There is still a need to go beyond the concept of the director as a solitary genius, pace Víctor Erice; this approach not only ignores the collaborative nature of a film but also bypasses the reality of the twenty-first century mediascape […] This anachronism is closely related to the idea that the artist ought to be above mass culture. In contrast, it is not unusual in the UK for a film lecturer to like commercial US cinema: I had a great time at Universal Studios in Los Angeles. I think that El espíritu de la colmena/The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) is one of the greatest films ever made but, if I am going to go on a rollercoaster in a theme park, I’d rather it be designed by Spielberg than Erice. (Wheeler, 2011: 27) In this chapter, I would like to develop these observations further and probe why and how ‘[l]ike journalists, Spanish academics are also devoted to the author function’ (Smith, 2009: 147). In the process, I hope to deconstruct what Rosanna Maule has termed ‘the gender-based orientation of auteur-informed film discourse’ (2008: 266). My hypothesis

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is that female directors and actresses have been made subservient to the fetish of the male auteur, and that this has been to the detriment of Spanish cinema ideologically, commercially and aesthetically. I will begin with a brief historical and critical overview of the discourse surrounding stardom and auteur theory in Spain, before questioning to what extent it is able to provide a satisfactory account of the working relationship between Spanish cinema’s most internationally renowned professional partnership – Pedro Almodóvar and Penélope Cruz – and the films of Isabel Coixet. Coixet is a Barcelona-based female director whose debut with a major Hollywood studio, Lakeshore Entertainment, Elegy (2008) also starred Cruz (of which I will offer a close reading in Chapter 18). Stardom and (Inter-)national Auteur Theory In major retailers such as FNAC in Spain, there tends to be a section titled ‘cine de autor’ (’auteur cinema’): the same films would be typically classified under ‘world cinema’ in equivalent outlets in the UK. Both terms are beset with ideological and methodological problems (see Benet, 2005; Nagib, 2006), but their very existence bears testament to the fact that in current common usage, auteur cinema has come to represent the antithesis of commercial film-making for which Hollywood has become a byword. Therefore, it is ironic that the concept and term came into being as a means by which to vindicate directors working within the Hollywood machine; and to claim that, contrary to the Frankfurt School, it was possible for individual film-makers to operate within a mechanized cultural industry, yet imbue their works with a personal and artistic imprint which, in the case of the greatest directors, could be identified throughout their oeuvre. As Andrew Sarris states: Why, I wondered back in the mid-fifties, had so many Hollywood movies endured as classics despite the generalized contempt of the highbrows? The auteur theory turned out to be a very workable hypothesis for this task of historical re-evaluation. (2003: 23) While this might help us to trace the etymology of the term, this does not mean that it always has been applied in this way, or that its meaning has not been subject to change. Hence, for example, Jean-Luc Godard views contemporary Hollywood films, embodied in the figure of Spielberg, as a diabolical colonial threat both ethically and aesthetically (see Wheeler, 2009). This can be attributed in part to the changing nature of commercial US cinema; but Colin MacCabe is surely right to observe that ‘if the threat of Hollywood cinema is as great as Godard claims, he has now become incapable of seeing anything other than this threat. The man who loved Tashlin does not appear to have seen The Simpsons’ (2003: 328). This attitude is reflected and replicated frequently in Spain. For example, in his auteur-based study of Elías Querejeta, Tom Whittaker notes: ‘On several occasions, the producer has – somewhat 274

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sweepingly – attacked Hollywood for its apparently duplicitous nature’ (2011: 28). In more general terms, Peter Wollen has argued that: The auteur theory grew up rather haphazardly; it was never elaborated in programmatic terms, in a manifesto or collective statement. As a result, it could be interpreted and applied on rather broad lines; different critics developed somewhat different methods within a loose framework of common attitudes. The looseness and diffuseness of the theory has allowed flagrant misunderstandings to take root, particularly among critics in Britain and the United States. (2012: 186) In the Spanish context, it adopted a decidedly anti-commercial, anti-Hollywood stance from the outset. Josefina Molina, one of Spain’s first major female film directors, recalls from her time at the official Madrid film school in the early 1960s how she felt alienated from many of her co-students and teachers because of their disdain for films made by directors such as John Ford, viewed as too militaristic, Elia Kazan as politically suspect, or Alfred Hitchcock as too commercial (Molina, 2000: 48). José Luis Borau – the award-winning former director of the Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences – wrote in a prologue to Peter Evans’s groundbreaking book, Spanish Cinema: the Auteurist Tradition, that: the work of the auteurs is not the exceptional product of an industry characterized by commercial triumphs and local themes, as was the case of the American cinema in its heyday or of France (and its famous directors) in the 1930s. In Spain it was precisely the auteurs who, above all after the first screening of ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall!/Welcome Mr Marshall! in the spring of 1953, accepted responsibility for guiding and redefining the film industry to which they belonged, trying to endow it gradually – perhaps without too much collective consciousness, but through personal effort and inspiration – with themes, forms, and styles that replaced old practices and created new guidelines, defining our film industry for audiences abroad and – with greater difficulty – for home audiences, at least those sections that were most critical and demanding. (1999: xviii) In one sense, this is a fairly accurate description of what actually occurred and, I would suggest, lionized auteurs such as Berlanga or Juan Antonio Bardem have been responsible for some of the greatest films in Spanish cinema history. Nevertheless, a number of caveats are in order. First, ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! (Garcia Berlanga, 1953) and its director are, in spite of their paradigmatic status, somewhat anomalous to Borau’s general argument. As was the case with Fernando Fernán-Gómez, Berlanga was able to appeal to the general public as well as the intellectual elites, while his films often struggled to be understood abroad. Second, the fact that the situation evolved in this manner does not imply that this 275

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was the only way that it could have unfurled, or that it ought to be the case now or in the future. Finally, the scenario was predicated, as Borau notes, on a certain antagonism with domestic audiences; however, it is telling that he frames this conflict in terms of an ethical and aesthetic superiority on the part of committed film-makers.1 The Spanish narrative surrounding the auteur thereby resembles (somewhat ironically, given its often markedly anti-Hollywood bias) that of the western: the lone no-nonsense outsider who bravely takes on ‘the man’. This reading not only lends credence to Pauline Kael’s damning riposte to Anglo-American auteur criticism – ‘an attempt by adult males to justify staying inside the small range of experience of their boyhood and adolescence’ (1963: 26) – but also contextualizes Daniela Fejerman’s rejection of the whole notion of an auteur: ‘it’s a very masculine myth. It’s a masculine individual figure with a form of unique and original talent’ (cited in Camí-Vela, 2005: 364). As Susan Martín-Márquéz’s (1999) excellent book demonstrates, although women have long been involved at all stages of the film-making process in Spain, only the occasional director such as Pilar Miró, Molina or Ana Marsical has been able to establish a career prior to the 1990s. However, where women shone in Francoist cinema was in terms of performance. According to Ginette Vincendeau, stars are: celebrated film performers who develop a ‘persona’ or ‘myth’ composed of an amalgam of their screen image and private identities, which the audience recognizes and expects from film to film, and which in turn determines the parts they play. (2007: viii) If we accept this definition, then actresses such as Carmen Sevilla, Paquita Rico, Lola Flores and Amparo Rivelles – and subsequently, Marisol or Rocío Jurado – clearly satisfy the criteria. In fact, Spain’s star system was dominated from the 1940s to the 1960s by women (see Ballesteros, 1999; Comas, 2004; Labanyi, 2000). As Sevilla recalls: Some of the biggest stars demanded to be present at the editing stage, to see the film and make their demands. At that time, stars had a lot of power; it wasn’t like now when it’s the directors who have the power. People used to go to see the actors, now they go and see the film based on the director. (Sevilla and Herrera, 2005: 65) Andrés Vicente Gómez, one of Spain’s most powerful producers, concurs, commenting that ‘the directors are the ones who keep our star-system going’ (2001: 67). As his article goes on to say, this is problematic in promotional terms, as actors tend to be better at dealing with the media than film-makers. This is in marked contrast to New Hollywood where, if anything, major actors have become even more important to the production of films at the turn of the millennium, with salaries rocketing and the presence of stars often enabling riskier projects that otherwise would not have been given the go-ahead, as Geoff King has 276

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argued (2002: 159).2 In Sally Faulkner’s book on Spanish cinema of the 1960s, she notes how this was the last decade in which the national cinema actually held a significant part of the domestic market (2006: 8), while a key difference between the new auteur Spanish cinema and more traditional cinema was ‘that of single and plural authorship’ (2006: 175). In other words, the rise of auteur cinema in Spain coincided with a decline in audience numbers and the disappearance of a female-dominated national star system. In fact, the equation of stardom with commerce and artistry with directing is a recurrent theme in film analysis.3 As Richard Dyer notes: Most star/director studies are concerned with the star as a signifying complex in terms of its appropriateness to the director’s concerns or approach. The group of films made by Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg are often read in this way, but they also raise other possibilities. (1998: 156) However, the ostensible antithesis of stardom and artistry is largely a construct: ‘Goddessobject, the star is of course something more than an actress who makes movies. But the star is also an actress who makes movies’ (Morin, 1960: 143). Often, the talent of successful actresses from the Franco period has been sidelined as a result of their supposed complicity with a dictatorial regime that appeared to look on them favourably. For example, the casting of Lola Sevilla, the lesser-known sister of Carmen, was instrumental in ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! being passed by the censors (Bentley, 2008: 133). While it could be argued quite justifiably that their waning stardom was a necessary prerequisite for raising artistic standards and political awareness, it does add an additional gendered dimension to auteurist discourse. Spain’s ‘Golden Couple’: Pedro Almodóvar and Penélope Cruz According to Paul McDonald, ‘Hollywood stardom is the effect of image and industry’ (2000:  2). What Bruce Babington terms as ‘Hollywood’s unquestionable status as the paradigmatic site of stardom’ (2001: 3) was facilitated by consolidation of the studio system (see Balio, 2012; Schatz, 2012). Within the Spanish context, it was the rise of CIFESA and Suevia, clearly modelled on the North American majors, which provided the fertile preconditions for a national star system in the post-Civil War period. Almodóvar’s El Deseo, with its recurrent appearances from a stable of actors, is arguably the closest equivalent that Spain now has to a traditional Hollywood studio. However. both he and El Deseo do appear to be somewhat resentful when its actors’ stardom eclipse that of the film-maker. Prior to his appearance in La piel que habito/The Skin I Live In (2011), Antonio Banderas’s departure to Hollywood marked the end of his relationship with the Manchegan director while, as Marsha Kinder notes in relation to the shooting and promotion of La mala 277

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educación/Bad Education (2004): ‘Despite, or perhaps because of [Gael] García Bernal’s own growing stardom, Almodóvar seems to take pleasure in making the power dynamics of their collaboration very clear, even while mocking his own tyranny’ (2009: 288). Almodóvar generally reserves his most fulsome praise for his female stars, claiming, as Federico García Lorca had before him, that his predilection for female roles is a result of Spanish actresses being superior artists to their male counterparts (Almodóvar, 2000: 246). Belying his reputation for flamboyance and excess, Almodóvar is a patient artisan who encourages patient craftsmanship in actors;4 in a country with a highly rhetorical tradition of acting, this often results in subtle and restrained performances of the most outlandish of roles (see Wheeler, 2010: 829–32). As Maria Delgado (2012) states: ‘There have been a range of chicas Almodóvar over the years but in all cases, it’s possible to make a case that each has produced their finest screen work with this Manchegan director.’ Penélope Cruz is, to borrow Sabrina Qiong Yu’s (2012: 2,3) classificatory system, both a transnational and a transborder star: her fame pre-dated her arrival in Hollywood, while she continues to make films in different countries and, crucially, in different languages. In addition to her appearances in Spanish and Hollywood cinema, she has starred in relatively low-budget British films such as Chromophobia (Fiennes, 2005) or The Good Night (Paltrow, 2007), and has showcased her linguistic virtuosity by acting in French in Fanfan la tulipe (Krawczyk, 2003) and Italian, most noticeably in Non ti muovere/Don’t Move (Castellitto, 2004). Aged just fourteen, she made her screen debut as the love interest in the promotional video for the pop group Mecano’s La fuerza del destino. This brought her to the attention of Bigas Luna, who decided that he want to cast her in an upcoming film (Castro, 1991), and also led to a relationship with the group’s guitarist and composer Nacho Cano. Their jet-set lifestyle, in which they lived together for a time in New York, was central in turning the actress who appeared in hugely popular Spanish films such as Jamón, jamón (Luna, 1992) and Belle Epoque/The Age of Beauty (Trueba, 1992) into a star at home, while she took full advantage of her residency abroad to gain fluency and confidence in English. Cruz’s star status clearly eclipses that of the two other internationally recognizable Spanish actors – Banderas and her husband, Javier Bardem – as a result of her on-screen performances, extra-curricular work as a model for Ralph Lauren, among others, as well as speculation over her affairs with co-stars Nicolas Cage, Tom Cruise and Matthew McConaughey, which have boosted her celebrity status but had a detrimental effect on her critical standing. In the United States she has been nominated for Oscars three times,5 becoming the first Spanish actress to win an award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Allen, 2008). As Vicente Rodríguez Ortega notes, the trailer used for Abre los ojos/Open Your Eyes (Amenábar, 1997) in the North American market focused more heavily ‘on the recognisability of Cruz’s persona and the allure of romantic sex’ (2008: 56). When the film was given a Hollywood makeover in Vanilla Sky (Crowe, 2001), the ante was upped in almost every regard. Filming a scene in a deserted Times Square is logistically more complicated than the equivalent scenario in Madrid’s Gran Vía, while Tom Cruise is clearly a much bigger star that Eduardo Noriega – the one exception was the casting of Cruz. 278

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In Spain, Cruz appears to be the only actress whose name has been virtually able to guarantee box office success. Between 1992 and 2006, sixteen of her films featured in the annual list of the years’ ten highest-grossing films at the domestic box office – her nearest competitor was actor-director-screenwriter, Santiago Segura – and her fifteen Spanishlanguage films averaged more than 1 million cinema-goers (Naughten, 2009: 72, 75). In the five-year period between Sin noticias de Dios/Don’t Tempt Me (Díaz Yanes, 2001) and Volver (Almodóvar, 2006), Cruz made no films at home. Those she made abroad were less commercially successful in Spain and caused her popularity to dip somewhat: often the films were of questionable quality; and Cruz herself admitted that performing in a nonnative language creates tension, and that ‘tension is not a friend of acting’ (cited in Delgado, 2006). Her return to Spanish cinema in Volver as Raimunda – a role for which she was selfconsciously styled as one of the great Italian actresses of the past – was widely perceived as a realization of her potential. Her presence also helped make Volver Almodóvar’s most successful film to date in the US marketplace (see Chapter 16). Geoffrey MacNab has said of Almodóvar and Cruz that ‘[s]he is Marlene Dietrich to his Josef Von Sternberg’ (2009: 4), and the star and director both appear to be complicit in forging this image both on-screen and off. If, as we have seen, the rise of the auteur in Spain coincided with the decline of the actor as star, then many directors have advertised their non-celebrity celebrity status: for example, Smith (2000) has examined the construction of Erice’s reclusive authorial persona cultivated through a compliant media.6 Almodóvar’s superstar status provides one explanation for the suspicion in which he is held at home, but it also generates certain contradictions in his very public relations with his own leading ladies predicated on a remarkably traditional – and arguably reactionary – power dynamic. While, like Javier Bardem, Cruz dedicated her Oscar to Spanish actors in general, she lavished far more time and effusive praise on the male directors whom, she implied, had been the architects of her success. Around 90 per cent of the ostensible conversation between Cruz and Almodóvar in the DVD commentary to Volver is monopolised by him; when they discuss the infamous aerial shot of her ample cleavage while Raimunda is doing the washing up, Cruz notes how she is asked repeatedly whether she was checking the scene on the monitors. They both laugh about this comment, agreeing that this vigilance was completely unnecessary, and show a complete unawareness of their working relationship, which is predicated on the actress’s unconditional trust of the director. On his blog, Almodóvar betrays a proprietal approach in his implicit suggestion that Woody Allen made a mistake in resurrecting Cruz’s dishevelled haircut from Volver in Vicky Cristina Barcelona: ‘I want to try not to repeat hairstyles that Penélope has worn in other films’ (Almodóvar, 2008). Almodóvar has boasted that Stephen Frears cast Cruz in The Hi-Lo County (1998), her debut Hollywood role, after being impressed by a brief eight-minute performance in Carne trémula/Live Flesh (1997) (cited in Bilmes, 2009). He has said elsewhere, albeit in jest, that he rescued her from what Time described as ‘the lost-property department of blond and bland Hollywood’ (Winters Keegan, 2006). In other words, he proudly claims his responsibility for 279

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her being able to shine, both as a star and an actress. This paternalistic approach is, I would suggest, just the latest manifestation in Spain of how the veneration of the auteur, coded as male, is often at the expense of an appreciation of the actor coded as female. How is this descriptive and arguably normative vision able to accommodate, or at least account for, a generation of female directors who established a collective foothold in Spanish cinema for the first time in the 1990s? Isabel Coixet: a Troublesome Auteur The Spanish sociologist María García de León (2002) has noted how there is a chimerical dimension to the increased visibility and prominence of powerful women in Spain, which fails to take into account the fact that they come almost exlusively from elite backgrounds. José Enrique Monterde (1998) has commented on how a high percentage of the female film-makers that emerged in the 1990s were from Barcelona, and had studied abroad. Perhaps it is indicative of the challenges placed on women in what is already a precarious career choice that so many of the directors who constituted the ostensible boom in female talent in the 1990s already were connected in some way to the cinematic establishment. For example, Ángeles González-Sinde, who would go on to be Minister of Culture (2009–11), is the daughter of the founding member and first president of the Spanish Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences, José María González-Sinde; while Gracia Querejeta’s father, Elías, has produced many of her films. In this respect, Isabel Coixet’s credentials are more humble – although not necessarily less useful – in that her grandmother had worked in the box office of a cinema, and therefore she had grown up with free access to film. However, what she does have is significant cultural and educational capital: her English is of near-native standard, and she lived for a year in both New York and San Francisco. As discussed in Chapter 2, the number of new female directors is actually decreasing rather than increasing in the twenty-first century Spain. It is, I suspect, evidence of the increased competition for women in comparison to their male counterparts that so many have chosen to shoot films beyond the peninsula: Iciar Bollaín in Bolivia and Nepal in También la lluvia/Even the Rain (2010) and Katmandú, un espejo en el cielo/Kathmandu Lullaby (2011), respectively; Chus Gutiérrez in New York in Sublet (1991); or Querejeta in Oxford in El último viaje de Robert Rylands/Robert Ryland’s Last Journey (1996). In Coixet’s case, her situation at home has been made even more precarious by the fact that, as a native of Barcelona, she identifies with neither the Catalan nor the Spanish film establishments. In 1996 she bitterly criticized the ‘former for its lack of universal ambitions and for not attempting to cross borders, the latter for its wastefulness and lack of a commercial strategy’ (Triana-Toribio, 2006: 53). As a result, she has shot most of her films abroad in a style which reveals parallels with North American independent cinema (see Camí-Vela, 2008; Camporesi, 2007; García de Lucas and Weinritcher, 2007); as Belén Vidal states, the ‘director 280

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has fashioned herself as the auteur-star at the centre of independently produced projects written in “accented” global English’ (2008: 220). If, in Anglo-American contexts, there is often a simplistic equation of foreign film with arthouse cinema – effectively making films such as Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley/Torrente, the Dumb Arm of the Law (Segura, 1998) or El otro lado de la cama/The Other Side of the Bed (Martínez Lázaro, 2002) invisible – Coixet operates in an equivalent blind spot for Spanish commentators for whom the United States is seen to be synonymous with the blockbuster. Following the release of her debut film, Demasiado viejo para morir joven/Too Old to Die Young (1989), Coixet was nominated alongside Ana Díez for the Best New Director award at the annual Goya Awards. This was the first time that two women had competed in this category. However, more generally, the film received very negative reviews. Although the film has its limitations, these critiques seemed somewhat excessive, and Coixet has attributed them largely to the fact that at that time, ‘being young, being twenty-four years old, having made a film and being a woman was equivalent to a litany of horrors’ (cited in Andreu, 2008: 53). To this, she could have added the fact that her background was openly commercial. She cut her teeth writing about cinema in Fotogramas and, as head of the entertainment section in La Vanguardia Mujer, had designed and directed a number of highly successful publicity campaigns. Coixet is a media-savvy film-maker whose internet homepage, like those of Álex de la Iglesia or Pedro Almodóvar, has ‘responded to the need for publicizing their directors’ products, thus becoming multi-masking marketing tools’ (Triana-Toribio, 2008: 276). Although one of the prime strategies of this marketing approach is promotion of the auteur persona, this commercial nous has done little to ingratiate these figures among the Spanish cinematic establishment. Internationally, Coixet is arguably the best-known Spanish film-maker after Almodóvar and Alejandro Amenábar; the esteem in which she is held is shown by the frequency in which she is asked to contribute to projects such as the portmanteau Paris, Je T’Aime/Paris, I Love You (2006) alongside the Coen brothers, Walter Salles and Wes Craven among others, or to form part of the international jury of the Berlin Film Festival in 2009. In fact, Coixet previously had turned down such high-profile projects as an adaptation of Memoirs of a Geisha (Marshall, 2005) for Stephen Spielberg’s Dream Works production company; Million Dollar Baby (Eastwood, 2004), which she was offered on the personal request of the North American director, who had been impressed by My Life Without Me (2003) (Cerrato, 2008: 162); and various television episodes of Sex and the City (Coixet and Gay, 2008: 11). However, this success is not recognized or replicated often at home, although Coixet was seen by many to vindicate herself through the release of the artfully constructed The Secret Life of Words (2005), which received favourable reviews and was nominated for five Goya Awards, winning four including Best Film, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. While retaining the melodramatic human(e) aesthetic of her earlier films, this film is framed in political as well as personal terms through the study of a young woman psychically and physically scarred by the Balkan conflict. In a culture where an ethical and 281

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aesthetic difference separates commissions from personal projects, her decision to then accept a proposal from a major Hollywood studio to direct Elegy seemingly would tarnish this goodwill. The response from critics was lukewarm; while the film may have given Coixet her biggest opening weekend (García, 2008), this potential was not realized, and it was seen by fewer people in its initial theatrical run at the domestic box office than her two previous films, The Secret Life of Words and My Life Without Me. This was in marked contrast to Álex de la Iglesia’s The Oxford Murders (2008) with which, as I will explain, it is instructive to compare Coixet’s offering. Therefore, Elegy might be seen to be a repeat of the fate that befell Chantal Akerman when she made A Couch in New York (1996) with William Hurt and Juliette Binoche – perhaps Cruz’s only serious rival as the reigning transnational transborder European star – which failed to attract a mainstream audience, or to please the director’s hardcore fanbase. This love story split between Paris and New York ‘became the greatest flop in the director’s career, both in financial and in critical terms’ (Schmid, 2010: 147). Unlike Akerman and de la Iglesia, the Catalan director was able to charm foreign critics and audiences with her foray into the mainstream. In Screen International’s special on the best films of 2008 (Screen International, 2009), Elegy was voted at number twenty – the only entry from a Spanish director – while the film was a modest hit in both the United Kingdom and United States, where it far outperformed The Oxford Murders, as Table 1 demonstrates.7 On accepting the commission, Coixet knew that Penélope Cruz and Ben Kingsley were already committed to the project, and her list of conditions included contracting Patricia Clarkson and Peter Sarsgaard as secondary actors, shooting in Vancouver and with a large part of the crew with whom she had worked there on My Life Without Me (Cerrato, 2008: 162).8 As Coixet’s (2004) published text on the performances in My Life Without Me reveal, actors are important to the director: the fact that Sandra Bullock was contracted originally to star in Million Dollar Baby was the reason she claims to have rejected the project (Cerrato, 2008: 162). Virtually all of the Anglo-American reviews of Elegy heralded Cruz’s performance as the film’s highlight.9 Acting was mentioned only in passing by Spanish critics – one of the few unconditionally positive appraisals made no reference at all to the actors, choosing instead to vindicate Elegy as a bona fide auteur film (Quintana, 2008). This provides a marked Table 1:  Box-Office Returns for Isabel Coixet and Álex de la Iglesia. Film

Spain (€)

UK (£)

US ($)

Elegy The Secret Life of Words My Life Without Me The Oxford Murders

2,464,367.92 3,517,036.77 2,638,259.57 8,206,495.51

288,617 No general release 149,415 230,749

3,581,462 20,678 400,948 4,803

282

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contrast with the critical reception to The Oxford Murders, nominated for six Goyas and widely construed as the consecration of Álex de la Iglesia, a director who previously had been seen as a gifted film-maker unable to make a good film (Buse et al., 2007: 6). Hence, for example, Juan Bolea wrote: You will not, I would say, find in The Oxford Murders one of those out-of-control hilarious comedies to which De la Iglesia has us accustomed, but rather a rigorous adaptation, standardized for the Anglo-American market in the manner of a good detective novel. (2008) Very little detailed commentary was provided as regards the performances by Leonor Watling, John Hurt and Elijah Wood, despite the fact that – as was the case with Viggo Moretensen’s participation in Alatriste/Captain Alatriste: The Spanish Musketeer (Díaz Yanes, 2006) – an international cast was instrumental in the film being given the green light (Hernández, 2008: 37). As her performances in Hable con ella/Talk to Her (Almodóvar, 2002) and My Life Without Me prove, Leonor Watling is one of Spain’s genuinely world-class actresses. Unfortunately for her, here she is saddled with a ridiculous role as a frisky nurse and one absurd sex scene – greeted with unintended raucous laughter at the film’s UK premiere in Oxford – in which, wearing only an apron, she drapes herself and her younger lover in spaghetti. More generally, Anglo-American critics interpreted the low level of acting and/or idiosyncratic casting as indicative of a flawed project, with The Times describing the film to its readers in the following terms: ‘Imagine The Da Vinci Code remade by an idiot, set in Oxford and starring [Elijah] Wood as Tom Hanks – then you are close to the eccentricities, good and bad, that define this half-cocked whodunnit’ (Maher, 2008). Production and press information also highlighted the fact that Spanish producer Gerardo Herrero had commissioned de la Iglesia to make The Oxford Murders far less than in relation to Coixet and Lakeshore Entertainment. It would not be too fanciful to suggest that a certain underlying sexism informed the pride taken in de la Iglesia’s film as opposed to Coixet’s more impressive foreign adventure. Spanish commentators also seemed to pay more attention and take more pride in Javier Bardem’s Oscar victory than they did in the case of Cruz, while generally they are more forgiving of his under-par performances in English-language films such as Love in the Time of Cholera (Newell, 2007) or Eat Pray Love (Murphy, 2010). However, more decisive, I suspect, was the fact that Coixet – who has continued to accept commissions for specific advertising campaigns and even music videos for heartthrob Alejandro Sanz – refuses to disregard the commercial nature of much audio-visual production. As she herself has complained: ‘It annoys me that people constantly say that I’m influenced by advertising. Manohla Dargis, the critic from the New York Times, doesn’t say it. But reviews in Spain mention it incessantly’ (cited in Belzunce, 2008). 283

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Conclusion In a discussion of women film-makers in Spain, Jo Evans notes that: although the names of some of Coixet’s peers may be familiar to arthouse film-viewers, for the wider film-going public Spanish film is Almodóvar and the words ‘Spanish film’ and ‘women’ conjure up female performers like Carmen Maura, Victoria Abril and Penélope Cruz much more readily than film-makers like Chus Gutiérrez, Gracia Querejeta, Patricia Ferreira, and Icíar Bollaín. (2011: 330–1) While it would be a positive development if these directors were better known, there is also a pressing need to celebrate the contribution of female performers. An ability to utilize their talents has helped to make both Almodóvar and Coixet exceptional within the national cinema, and has been instrumental in their becoming so successful, both critically and commercially, at an international level.10 Work conducted under the rubric of ‘star studies’ in Spain has been generally limited to a number of one-off articles (e.g. Díaz López, 2005; Sánchez-Biosca, 2006), often focusing on other issues such as transnationalism. A section dedicated to stars in an upcoming companion edited by Jo Labanyi and Tatjana Pavlović (2013) bodes well, but it remains the case that the most detailed and accomplished works in this field have focused on male stardom from Spain’s democratic period (Fouz-Hernández and Martínez-Expósito, 2007; Perriam, 2003). This has provided an important antidote to the hypervisibility of female stars in relation to their ‘invisible’, ‘unproblematic’ or ‘naturalized’ male counterparts. One unfortunate collateral effect is that female performance is sidelined once again – albeit for radically different reasons than the more traditional scenario, in which the feminization of stars in comparison to the masculine auteur has impeded Spanish film-makers and critics from developing a meaningful dialogue on performance.11 Coixet, who operates her own camera and thereby has a very direct, almost physical contact with her actors, described her relationship with them to me as that of a babysitter, making sure they feel safe and comfortable in order that they can then do their best work. She opposed this working method to that of Almodóvar, whom she described as a ‘puppeteer’.12 When interviewing the Manchegan director alongside Cruz at the British Film Institute on the release of Volver, it was clear that Maria Delgado (2006) frequently tried to provide an opportunity for the actress to enter a conversation largely dominated by the director; while a published exchange between Cruz and Coixet is far more evenly split (Coixet, 2008), much closer in style to an interview between the Cruz and Marion Cotillard (Cotillard, 2009–10), her co-star in Nine (Marshall, 2009). Actors are clearly fundamental to the films of both directors, but Cruz’s performance in Elegy is, as I will explore in the next chapter, intimately related to, yet clearly distinguishable from, her previous screen roles, while being sufficiently instrumental to the film’s meaning and merits that it perfectly embodies some of the major objections to Spanish auteur theory. 284

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Acknowledgement I would like to thank Maria Delgado for her comments on and criticisms of an earlier draft of this chapter. Notes   1 In his own incursion into US film-making, Rio abajo/On the Line (1984), Borau depicts a morally bankrupt violent society that preys on the weak. Drawing on Erice’s comments on the production, Marsha Kinder describes this financially disastrous project as a quixotic dream ‘designed to recapture the cosmopolitan classical Hollywood of the 1940s and 1950s, which had successfully assimilated so many European émigrés and to show its superiority over the postmodernist Hollywood of the 1980s, now dominated by what Borau calls “the childishness of Lucas’s and Spielberg’s movies” that faithfully reflect “prevailing patterns of regressive behaviour in this country”’ (1993: 345).   2 It does appear that this may no longer the case. The success of franchises, 3D films such as Avatar (Cameron, 2009), alongside the seeming failure of even superstars to guarantee box office success – for example, Tom Cruise in Rock of Ages (Shankman, 2012) – combined with the global recession and dwindling audience numbers, suggests that the star’s reign in Hollywood may be on the wane.   3 In spite of their ostensible populism, a similar occurrence actually occurred in the films and statements made by the French New Wave auteurs which, as Geneviève Sellier notes, betray ‘the tendency of elite male culture to distinguish itself from mass culture associated with an alienated femininity’ (2008: 69).   4 This craft-like approach to acting was stressed by Antonia San Juan and Marisa Paredes in their discussion of ‘Acting Almodóvar’ with Maria Delgado at the Ciné Lumière, London on October 1 2012.   5 Cruz was nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role in 2007 for Volver (Almodóvar, 2006), and Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Allen, 2008) and Nine (Marshall, 2009) in 2009 and 2010 respectively.   6 As Carlos Losilla remarks, somewhat sardonically: ‘The convention adopted by dissident factions claims that good Spanish cinema is cinema made by snipers’ (2006: 40). It is certainly the case that certain auteurs continue to cultivate this image. See, for example, Javier Rebollo’s piece titled ‘Hay otro cine silencioso’ (‘There’s another kind of silent cinema’ (2006)).   7 All UK and box office figures are taken from the EDI database available for consultation at the BFI library in London. The Spanish figures are taken from the Filmoteca’s database – available online at http://www.mcu.es/cine/CE/BBDDPeliculas/BBDDPeliculas_Index. html, last accessed on 15 August 2012.   8 These demands, which may serve to boost Elegy’s auteur credentials, were not always to the benefit of the resultant film. Although many scenes in Elegy are constructed through Coixet’s trademark painterly eye (see Chapter 9), too many of the shots designed to signpost the location are rife with cliché. Hence scenes of David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) 285

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  9

10

11

12

walking alone in the opposite direction to a multitude of impassive and indifferent passers-by, or footage of revellers enjoying New Year’s Eve in the neon-lit Times Square, are almost completely indistinguishable from equivalent scenes in The Dictator (Charles, 2012). Lee Marshall wrote: ‘Penelope Cruz proves what a fine actress she has become and we pick up that she has fallen in love with Kepesh well before he does’ (2008: 18). Peter Bradshaw noted that ‘Cruz is excellent, and we can see what Kepesh cannot – what perhaps his creator cannot – that her maturity and intelligence are easily a match for his’ (2008: 7); while Derek Malcolm praised Coixet for being ‘a director who watches her actors like a hawk and is clearly able to get the best out of them’ (2008: 37). This is a point also made throughout Isabel Santaolalla’s (2012) study of Iciar Bollaín, which marks an important precedent in not only addressing her substantial work as an actress, but also then developing this to suggest how and why this has helped her elicit exceptional performances in her own directorial efforts – an ability which, the book convincingly suggests, is central to her commercial and critical success. Future work might want to examine how a rising star such as Verónica Echegui has consistently delivered accomplished performances in otherwise unremarkable films such as Katmandú, un espejo en el cielo, El menor de los males (Hernández, 2007) or Seis puntos sobre Emma/Six Points about Emma (Toledo, 2011). This conversation with Isabel Coixet took place over dinner at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford as a guest of Xon de Ros in September 2009.

References Almodóvar, P. (2000). ‘Pepi, Luci, Bom’ in S. Lowenstein (ed.), My First Movie (London: Faber and Faber), 234–51. (2008). ‘Titles and hairstyles’, available at http://www.pedroalmodovar.es/PAB_EN_03_T. asp, last accessed on 15 August 2012. Andreu, C. (2008). Isabel Coixet: una mujer bajo la influencia (Madrid: Ediciones Autor). Babington, B. (2001). ‘Introduction: British stars and stardom’ in B. Babington (ed.), British Stars and Stardom: From Alma Taylor to Sean Connery (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 1–28. Balio, T. (2012). ‘Selling stars: the economic imperative’ in S. Neale (ed.), The Classical Hollywood Reader (London: Routledge), 209–25. Ballesteros, I. (1999). ‘Mujer y nación en el cine español de posguerra: los años 40’, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 3: 51–70. Belzunce, F. (2008). ‘Isabel Coixet, director de cine: “Penélope se reía de mí”’, Ideal, 18 April: available at http://www.ideal.es/granada/20080418/cultura/isabel-coixet-directora-cine20080418.html, last accessed on 20 April 2014. Benet, V. J. (2005). ‘Estilo, industria e institución: reflexiones sobre el canon del cine español actual’, Archivos de la Filmoteca, 49: 67–81. Bentley, B.A. (2008). A Companion to Spanish Cinema (Woodbridge: Tamesis Books). 286

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Bilmes, A. (2009). ‘Screen embrace’, GQ Magazine, 23 March, available at http://www.gqmagazine.co.uk/entertainment/articles/2012-03/23/pedro-almodovar-interview-penelopecruz, last accessed on 15 August 2012. Bolea, J. (2008). ‘Álex de la Iglesia filma una versión estandarizada y vistosa de Los crímenes de Oxford’, El periódico de Aragón, 29 March, available at http://www.elperiodicodearagon.com/ noticias/opinion/pelicula-enigma_382914.html, last accessed on 20 April 2014. Borau, J.L. (1999). ‘Prologue: the long march of the Spanish cinema towards itself ’ in P. Evans (ed.), Spanish Cinema: The Auteurist Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press), xvii–xxii. Bradshaw, P. (2008). ‘The gripes of Roth’, The Guardian, 8 August: 7. Buse, P., Triana-Toribio, N. and Willis, A. (2007). The Cinema of Álex de la Iglesia (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Camí-Vela, M. (2005). Mujeres detrás de la cámara: entrevistas con cineastas españolas 1990–2004 (Madrid: Ocho y Medio). (2008). ‘Cineastas españolas que filman en inglés: Isabel Coixet’ in P. Feenestra and H. Hermans (eds.), Miradas sobre pasado y presente en el cine español (1990–2005) (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi), 179–91. Camporesi, V. (2007). ‘A ambos lados de todas las fronteras: Isabel Coixet y el cine español contemporáneo’ in M. A. Millán Muñío and C. Peña Ardid (eds.), Las mujeres y los espacios fronterizos (Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza), 55–69. Castro, H. (1991). ‘Penélope Cruz: mi auténtico vicio son los batidos de fresa’, El independiente, 7 August: 32. Cerrato, R. (2008). Isabel Coixet (Madrid: Ediciones JC). Coixet, I. (2004). ‘Los actores de Mi vida sin mí’ in I. Coixet, La vida es un guión (Barcelona: Aleph Editores). (2008). ‘Coixet entrevista a Penélope’, Fotogramas, April: 84–88. Coixet, I. and Gay, C. (2008). Diàlegs a Barcelona: converses transcrites per Xavier Febrés (Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona). Comas, Á. (2004). El star system del cine español de posguerra (1939–1965) (Madrid: T and B Editores). Cotillard, M. (2009–10). ‘Penélope Cruz’, Interview, December/January: 96–105. Delgado, M. M. (2006). ‘Guardian/NFT interview: Pedro Almodóvar and Penélope Cruz’, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2006/aug/04/features, last accessed on 15 August 2012. (2012). ‘Acting Almodóvar’, Latino Life, available at http://latinolife.co.uk/?q=node/66, last accessed on 30 September 2012. Díaz López, M. (2005). ‘Maletas que viajan: Natalia Verbeke, Gael García Bernal, presencia y sentidos en un cine transnacional’, Archivos de la Filmoteca, 49: 109–23. Dyer, R. (1998). Stars, 2nd ed. (London: British Film Institute). Evans, J. (2011). ‘Almodóvar’s “others”: Spanish women film-makers, masquerade and maternity’ in X. de Ros and G. Hazbun (eds.), A Companion to Spanish Women’s Studies (Woodbridge: Tamesis Books), 329–42. Faulkner, S. (2006). A Cinema of Contradiction: Spanish Films in the 1960s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). 287

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Fouz-Hernández, S and Martínez-Expósito, A. (2007). Live Flesh: The Male Body in Contemporary Spanish Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris). García, A. (2008). ‘Elegy conquista la taquilla en el primer fin de semana; la película de Isabel Coixet contó con más de 100.000 espectadores’, El periódico de Catalunya, 23 March: 56. García de León, M. A. (2002). Herederas y heridas: sobre las élites profesionales femeninas (Madrid: Cátedra). García de Lucas, V. and Weinritcher, A. (2007). ‘La conexión indie del cine de Isabel Coixet’ in I. Navarro (ed.), De los que aman: el cine de Isabel Coixet (Madrid: Ayuntamiento de Madrid), 12–25. Hernández, E. (2008). ‘Álex de la Iglesia: “No hay manera de acceder a la realidad”’, Dirigido por, January: 36–39. Kael, P. (1963). ‘Circles and squares’, Film Quarterly, 16.3: 12–26. Kinder, M. (1993). ‘The economics of exile: Borau On The Line of the national/international interface’ in M. Kinder, Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 339–85. (2009). ‘All about the brothers: retroseriality in Almodóvar’s cinema’ in B. Epps and D. Kakoudaki (eds.), All About Almodóvar: A Passion for Cinema) (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press), 267–94. King, G. (2002). New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (London: I.B. Tauris). Labanyi, J. (2000). ‘Feminizing the nation: women, subordination and subversion in post-Civil War Spanish cinema’ in U. Sieglohr (ed.), Heroines Without Heroes: Reconstructing Female and National Identities in European Cinema (1945–51) (London: Cassell), 163–82. Labanyi, J. and Pavlović T. (eds.) (2013). A Companion to Spanish Cinema (Chichester: WileyBlackwell Publishing), 291–342. Losilla, C. (2006). ‘Contra ese cine español: panorama general al inicio de un nuevo siglo’ in H. J. Rodríguez (ed.), Miradas para un nuevo milenio: fragmentos para una historia futura del cine español (Madrid: Festival de Cine de Alcalá de Henares), 39–52. McDonald, P. (2000). The Star System: Hollywood’s Production of Popular Identities (London: Wallflower). MacCabe, C. (2003). Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70 (London: Bloomsbury). MacNab, G. (2009). ‘Penélope Cruz’, The Independent, 31 July: 4–6. Maher, K. (2008). ‘The Oxford Murders’, The Times, 26 April: available at http://www.thetimes. co.uk/tto/arts/film/reviews/article1863761.ece, last accessed on 20 April 2014. Malcolm, D. (2008). ‘Film of the week: Elegy’, Evening Standard, 7 August: 37. Marshall, L. (2008). ‘Elegy’, Screen International, 21 March: 18. Martín-Márquez, S. (1999). Feminist Discourse and Spanish Cinema: Sight Unseen (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Maule, R. (2008). Beyond Auteurism: New Directions in Authorial Film Practices in France, Italy and Spain Since the 1980s (Bristol: Intellect). Mayo, L. (2008). La piel y la máscara: entrevistas con actores del cine español (Madrid: Festival de Cine de Alcalá de Henares and Comunidad de Cine). Molina, J. (2000). Sentada en un rincón (Valladolid: Semana Internacional de cine de Valladolid). 288

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Monterde, J. E. (1998). ‘El largo camino hacia la dirección’ in C. F. Heredero (ed.), La mitad del cielo: Directoras españolas de los años 90 (Málaga: Ayuntamiento de Málaga and Ministerio de Educación y Cultura), 15–24. Morin, E. (1960). The Stars: An Account of the Star-System in Motion Pictures, trans. R. Howard (New York: Grove Press). Nagib, L. (2006). ‘Towards a positive definition of world cinema’ in S. Dennison and S. Hwee Lim (eds.), Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (London: Wallflower), 26–33. Naughten, R. (2009). ‘Spain made flesh: reflections and projections of the national in contemporary Spanish stardom, 1992–2007’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Newcastle. París, I. (2010). ‘La reivindicación de las cineastes: CIMA’ in F. Arranz, J. Callejo, P. Pardo, I. París and E. Roquero, Cine y género en España: una investigación empírica (Valencia: Cátedra), 349–81. Perriam, C. (2003). Stars and Masculinities in Spanish Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Qiong Yu, S. (2012). Jet Li: Chinese Masculinity and Transnational Film Stardom (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Quintana, A. (2008). ‘El romanticismo y lo dionisíaco’, Cahiers du Cinema España, April: 40. Rebollo, J. (2006). ‘Hay otro cine silencioso’ in H. J. Rodríguez (ed.), Miradas para un nuevo milenio: fragmentos para una historia futura del cine español (Madrid: Festival de Cine de Alcalá de Henares), 285–90. Rodríguez Ortega, V. (2008). ‘Trailing the Spanish auteur: Almodóvar’s, Amenábar’s and de la Iglesia’s generic roots in the US market’ in J. Beck and V. Rodríguez Ortega (eds.), Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 44–64. Sánchez-Biosca, V. (2006). ‘The Latin masquerade: the Spanish in disguise in Hollywood’ in A. Phillips and G. Vincendeau (eds.) Journeys of Desire. European Actors in Hollywood: A Critical Companion (London: British Film Institute), 133–39. Santaolalla, I. (2012). The Cinema of Iciar Bollaín (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Sarris, A. (2003). ‘The auteur theory revisited’ in V. W. Wrexham (ed.), Film and Authorship (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University), 21–29. Schatz, T. (2012). ‘Hollywood: the triumph of the studio system’ in S. Neale (ed.), The Classical Hollywood Reader (London: Routledge), 167–78. Schmid, M. (2010). Chantal Akerman (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Screen International (2009). ‘Best Picture Special’, Screen International, 6 January. Sellier, G. (2008). Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema, trans. K. Ross (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Sevilla, C. and Herrera, C. (2005). Memorias (Barcelona: Belacqua). Smith, P. J. (2000). ‘Between metaphysics and scientism: rehistoricizing Víctor Erice’ in P. J. Smith, The Moderns: Time, Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Spanish Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 23–41. (2009). Spanish Screen Fiction: Between Cinema and Television (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). Triana-Toribio, N. (2006). ‘Anyplace North America: on the transnational road with Isabel Coixet’, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, 3.1: 47–64. 289

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(2007). ‘Journeys of El Deseo between the nation and the transnational in Spanish cinema’, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, 4.3: 151–63. (2008). ‘Auteurism and commerce in contemporary Spanish cinema: directores mediáticos’, Screen, 49.3: 259–76. Vicente Gómez, A. (2001). ‘Producir cine’ in J. Vellido, L. P. Rivillas, R. Cuadros and J. García (eds.), Cine español: situación actual y perspectivas: Actas del I congreso de cine español Granada, del 3 al 5 de noviembre (Granada: Grupo Editorial Universitario), 67–70. Vidal, B. (2008). ‘Love, loneliness and laundromats: affect and artífice in the melodramas of Isabel Coixet’ in J. Beck and V. Rodríguez Ortega (eds.), Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 219–38. Vincendeau, G. (2007). Stars and Stardom in French Cinema (London: Continuum). Wheeler, D (2009). ‘Godard’s list: why Spielberg and Auschwitz are number one’, Media History, 15.2: 185–203. (2010). ‘All about Almodóvar? All About My Mother on the London stage’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 87.7: 821–40. (2011). ‘Lo que entendemos por cine español’, Academia: revista de cine español, April: 25–27. (2012) ‘Raphael and Spanish popular song: a master entertainer and/or music for maids’, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 16: 11–30. (2013). ‘Contextualising and contesting José Antonio Maravall’s theories of baroque culture from the perspective of modern-day performance’, Bulletin of the Comediantes, 65.1: 15–43. Whittaker, T. (2011). The Films of Elías Querejeta: A Producer of Landscapes (Cardiff: University of Wales Press). Winters Keegan, R. (2006). ‘How Pedro rescued Penélope’, Time, 12 November, available at http:// www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1558316-1,00.html, last accessed on 15 August 2012. Wollen, P. (2012). ‘The auteur theory’ in T. Corrigan (ed.), Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge), 185–98.

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Chapter 18 Sex, Art and Commerce: Penélope Cruz and Isabel Coixet Tackle Philip Roth in Elegy Duncan Wheeler

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n this chapter I will offer a close reading of the cinematic adaptation of The Dying Animal (2006), a novella by Philip Roth, to suggest that Elegy (Coixet, 2008) provides a compelling counter-example to the kind of dominant discourses on adaptation studies, which Lawrence Venuti has characterized in the following terms: The literary texts that are usually considered in studies of film adaptations are assigned a greater value that reflects not only the assumption of a romantic concept of original, self-expressive authorship and hence the marginalization of second-order creations like adaptations, but also the disciplinary sites to which film studies was most often affiliated in its emergence, particularly academic departments and programs of literature, where romantic assumptions about authorship continue to hold sway. (2012: 90)

This would seem to be particularly true of Roth, often considered the great American writer, whose vast array of official honours include Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for Literature 2012. The Human Stain (Benton, 2002), the first cinematic adaptation of one of his novels in three decades, had been widely panned. The risk is exacerbated further by the ostensibly autobiographical nature of The Dying Animal which, following The Professor of Desire (1978) and The Breast (1973), seemingly completes a trilogy based around the sexual experiences and emotions of David Kepesh.1 Coixet’s recollections of exchanges with Roth nevertheless suggest that the Catalan director was not overcome by an anxiety of influence,2 while a novella aptly described by Aimee Prozorski as ‘one “dirty old man’s” monologue about a doomed love relationship with the beautiful former student Consuela Castillo’ (2004: 123) provides scope for an adaption which chimes with many of Coixet’s narrative and stylistic trademarks. Hence, although it is the director’s first film to focus so heavily on a male protagonist and to include explicit sex scenes, the screenplay by Nicholas Meyer focuses heavily on love and death, two of her most recognizable tropes (see Ardón, 2007). Coixet’s auteur personality is forged frequently through likes and dislikes (Triana-Toribio, 2008: 269), as are fictional creations within her films: for example, being a fan of Joan Crawford films, Nirvana or Milli Vanilli is employed as a privileged form of characterization in My Life Without Me (2003). Therefore, a literary professor and critic, a distinguished aesthete, however misogynist he may be, is a logical character for the director to tackle.

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Although Coixet retained the right to make changes to the script (Cerrato, 2008: 162), Meyer actually renders Roth’s prose style into a series of conversations between two individuals and monologues: another of Coixet’s authorial stamps, central not only to her film aesthetics but also to her star persona. The ostensibly one-to-one address of her website and columns, ability to engage with interviewers at press conferences and the charm of a number of written projects emerging from exchanges with another individual, all appeal to her followers. In line with Coixet’s frequently painterly and sensual aesthetics (see Chapter 9), the screenplay affords the opportunity to channel Edward Hopper’s vast cinematic legacy into a carefully and beautifully composed mise-en-scène: often, individuals and couples are framed in chic yet alienating interiors, or enclosed open spaces generally characterized by an excess of reflective surfaces. While changes have been made to the novella – for example, Kepesh’s son is now a doctor rather than an art restorer – these are, I will suggest, of less importance than the decisive role of the performances. What I think makes Elegy such a fascinating case study is that, although it is hardly a masterpiece – and I think it is clear that Coixet views it is as an interesting but ultimately flawed experiment – it is an example of a ‘second-order creation’ that is actually superior to the novella’s ‘original, self-expressive authorship’ from which it ostensibly derives. In specific relation to cinematic authorship, both the film and Coixet’s working methods interrogate the traditional assignation of creative labour between director and actor (as discussed in Chapter 17). Performance and the Invisibility of Beautiful Women According to Robert Stam: While novels have only a single entity – the character – filmic adaptations have both character (actantial function) and performer. Unlike the purely verbal novelistic character, the cinematic character forms an uncanny amalgam of photogenie, body movement, acting style, gestures, locale, costume, accent and grain of voice, all amplified and molded by dialogue (what a character says and how he/she says it and what the other characters say about the character), lighting, props (mise-en-scène) and music. Like the filmmakers, performers too become, in their way, the adaptors and interpreters of the novel, or at least of the screenplay, as they mold characters through gestural details, ways of walking or talking or smoking. (2005: 22) Aimee Prozorski has described The Dying Animal as ‘a modern elegy for US culture, for the world’ (2004: 132), while it is clearly possible to interpret, as Linda Williams (2008: 143) does, the novella along generational lines. In Elaine Showalter’s dismissive review of what she terms the ‘Viagra monologues’, she notes how ‘[t]o Kepesh, the heiresses of 294

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the American sexual revolution of the Sixties are a “generation of astounding fellators”, bright and beautiful students who do not have to be begged for a blow job’ (2001: 13). On-screen these interpretations become both more nuanced and poignant through, for example, the casting of Dennis Hopper – star of Rebel Without a Cause (Ray, 1955) Easy Rider (Hopper, 1969) and Apocalypse Now (Ford Coppola, 1979), who died in 2010 from prostate cancer – as Kepesh’s best friend and confidant, George, a Pulitzer Prize-winning adulterous poet who suffers a life-threatening stroke at a high-profile reading. Having previously dressed down for a role in My Life without Me, pop singer Debbie Harry – whom Andy Warhol memorably said he would most want to resemble if he were to have a facelift (1989: 787) – plays George’s loyal wife. Again, there is something elegiac about seeing the woman whose sex appeal helped propel Blondie to the top of the popular music charts being rejected in favour of a younger mistress and subsequently nursing her increasingly decrepit husband. According to Peter Matthews, Kepesh suffers ‘a self-conscious addiction to the drama of “staging” his persona’ (2007: 46). This facet of his personality is flagged immediately in the film’s opening scene, where he is framed being interviewed about his new book on the historical triumph of American Puritanism over sexual libertarianism, thereby immediately establishing a link between performance and sexual prowess. In fact, Kepesh on the page is an unreliable narrator, a performer of sorts: his libertarian ethos is undermined by the earlier The Professor of Desire (1978) in which, following a split from an unstable, alcoholic wife who thinks him a young fogey, he finds life as a bachelor almost unbearably lonely. While this awareness nuances the straightforward celebration of Roth’s ostensible surrogate, Elegy is less interested in the distinction between truths and lies than in a psychological examination of how his very identity is grounded in a perpetual, albeit mercurial, performance of life, predicated on aestheticization as a form of mastery. Ben Kingsley is an attractive and engaging screen presence more likely to seduce the viewer than his counterpart on the page. If ‘[o]ne could even call Philip Roth a cartographer of eroticism’ (Trendel, 2007: 61), then Coixet’s camera adopts an almost ethnographic approach to documenting his skill as a performer in the classroom, on television or in the bedroom. If, in The Dying Animal, ‘[t]he professor of desire turns into a humble pupil as he discovers himself illiterate in his speciality’ (Trendel, 2007: 61), then Elegy focuses at least as much on how it is the fear of not mastering his performance in front of Consuela’s family at her graduation party – an event which Kingsley’s character is shown rehearsing for – that causes him to make up an unlikely excuse, thereby precipitating the end of their relationship. Meyer’s screenplay provides the opportunity for Kepesh’s behaviour and psychology to be repeatedly examined by someone other than himself, through the development of Miranda and George as secondary characters and confidantes. A key new line and motif are introduced when the latter claims that the problem with beautiful women is that they are invisible because men are unable to see past their surface beauty. In theory, Elegy ensures that 295

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the woman whom for all we know may be the product of Kepesh’s fantasy and imagination on the page, is rendered as a human being on-screen. As Coixet notes: I guess, as a writer, he had a much more perfect ideal of Consuela than me. But when you’re dealing with an actress, you have to show the sweat in her eyebrows and you have to show her naked. There is no ideal, she is just the reality of the flesh. (cited in Straus, 2008: 33) However, this process is complicated by the fact that Penélope Cruz’s status as a fantasy figure has been foreground by the narratives, and even the titles, of so many of her films.3 In a case of life imitating art, Coixet has commented that Roth was ‘obsessed with Penélope Cruz. He was completely in love with her and we all had to endeavour to make sure he didn’t meet her because what would you do if he just jumped on top of her?’ (cited in Donapetry, 2010). To what extent are we therefore able to see Cruz or Consuela in the film? In order to respond to this question, I would like to draw on Laura Mulvey’s seminal theory of the gaze, in which she argues that: In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leit-motif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire. (1975: 11) While objections have been levelled against this reading, not least by Mulvey herself (1989), it still can be profitably applied to an analysis of Spanish cinema, and Elegy in particular for a number of specific reasons. First, Mulvey’s analysis, which takes the films that Marlene Dietrich made with Josef von Sternberg as paradigmatic of classical Hollywood drama, are less anachronistic in reference to Cruz than many of her contemporaries because (as discussed in the previous chapter), her star persona is anchored in this tradition. Second, these theories have never been meaningfully applied in Spain: a society which, as Mercedes Carbayo-Abengózar states, ‘defines feminism in derogatory terms’ (2000: 121). What Paul Julian Smith terms ‘the apparent impossibility of calling oneself an academic feminist in Spain’ (1999: 8), and the fact that ‘within many linguistic communities in Spain term “feminismo” is considered a counterpart to “machismo”’ (MartínMárquez, 1999: 9), are mutually reinforcing manifestations of this general phenomenon.4 Third, there is a counter-intuitive overlap between the sentiments voiced by Kepesh in The Dying Animal and Mulvey. Take for example Mulvey’s comments as regards the male gaze: The man controls the film phantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen 296

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to neutralise the extra-diegetic tendencies represented by woman as spectacle. This is made possible through the processes set in motion by structuring the film around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify. As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence. A male movie star’s glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror. (1975: 12) Now compare this with Kepesh’s discussion of the jealousy that he feels over Consuela in comparison with pornography: Ordinary pornography is the aestheticizing of jealousy. It takes the torment out. What – why ‘aestheticizing’? Why not ‘anesthetizing’? Well, perhaps both. It’s a representation, ordinary pornography. It’s a fallen art form. It’s not just make-believe, it’s patently insincere. You want the girl in the porno film, but you’re not jealous of whoever’s fucking her because he becomes your surrogate. Quite amazing, but that’s the power of even fallen art. He becomes a standin, there in your service; that removes the sting and turns it into something pleasant. (Roth, 2006: 41–42) As James Bloom (2010) has explored, these overlaps are largely the result of the fact that both Roth and Mulvey are similarly informed by Freud and psychoanalysis. In The Breast, Kepesh imagines his emasculation as he loses his libido, his penis disappears and he eventually mutates ‘into a mammary gland disconnected from any human form, a mammary gland such as could only appear, one would have thought, in a dream or a Dalí painting’ (Roth, 1973: 12). For her part, Mulvey (1975) believes that women display hair, breasts and legs in order to assuage male castration fears. While what is perhaps most remarkable and troubling about Roth’s prose style is that he is simultaneously self-reflective but unapologetic about his misogyny, Mulvey’s subscription to a remarkably similar Freudian logic bring to the fore what Teresa de Lauretis identifies as ‘the contradiction of feminist theory itself, at once excluded from discourse and imprisoned within it’ (1984: 7). Unsettling though it may be, this critical framework can help us to decipher some of the processes at play in Cruz’s filmography. Her fifteen-year old breasts in Jamón, jamón (Luna, 1992) may have enchanted the male characters and facilitated her rise to stardom, but they also exerted a psychic toll on the young actress. Cruz actively distanced herself from her sexualized image, taking on the virginal role of Luz in Belle Epoque/The Age of Beauty (Trueba, 1992) and the Virgin Mary in Per amore, solo per amore/For Love, Only for Love (Veronesi, 1993), while turning down parts in high-profile films such as Como agua para chocolate/Like Water for Chocolate (Arau, 1992), A Walk in the Clouds (Arau, 1995) and Lucía 297

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y el sexo/Sex and Lucia (Médem, 2001) because of the nudity that they entailed.5 Although it was partly necessitated by her taking the role of the innocent Melibea, the contrast between her co-stars Candela Peña and Maribel Verdú, whose breasts are frequently on display, was particularly manifest in La Celestina (Vera, 1996). In spite of these efforts, Cruz’s roles have been consistently sexualized with, for example, prurient albeit fleeting glimpses of her naked upper torso in films such as La niña de tus ojos/The Girl of Your Dreams (Trueba, 1998), Vanilla Sky (Crowe, 2001) or Volvavérunt (Luna, 1999), while the published script of Volver speaks of a character with ‘breasts from whose cleavage it is impossible to look away’ (Almodóvar, 2006: 18). In terms of the other canonical phallic substitutes, the star’s hair is another defining feature. Cruz, like Antonio Banderas before her, has adopted what Laura Isabel Serna terms ‘an expansive definition of latinidad based on shared linguistic heritage or practice that could encompass Spain as well as the Americas’ (2012: 131). Her character from Woman on Top (Torres, 2000) turns into a modern-day female Pied Piper on arriving in San Francisco from Brazil. Men stop whatever they are doing to follow her down the street; and when she is given her own television show, seeing her effect on the opposite sex, a more inhibited North American crew member literally decides to let her hair down. In other words, the film employs this physical asset to participate in and comment on a wider symbolic discourse, with its origins in Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s, that has been aptly characterized by Philip Swanson as ‘a process in which Latinity, in film and consumer culture more widely, would come to stand for the unconscious of the North or the West, the necessary other side of the discipline of capitalism and Protestant morality’ (2010: 73). Whenever Cruz has short hair in films such as Chromophobia (Fiennes, 2005), Non ti muovere/Don’t Move (Castellitto, 2004) or Masked and Anonymous (Charles, 2003), it is generally a sign that she is playing a more troubled character, far removed from the fantasy figure embodied in many of her other roles. Although these often remain sexualized through their work as prostitutes or strippers, this is seen as a result of financial need and mental or physical insecurity. Gothika (Kassovitz, 2003) is perhaps the film that most unsubtly showcases the semiotic and psychosexual connotations of Cruz’s hair. When her character is mistakenly thought to be insane and held in an asylum, it is cropped short; while in an epilogue, where she is depicted as a sexually attractive and psychologically rounded character, it has returned to the length more habitually associated with the actress’s star persona. Nevertheless, where Mulvey’s theory falls short is in its inability to explain female pleasure in cinema and/or the specularization of the male body: for example, how to interpret Sahara (Eisner, 2005) in which Matthew McConaughey’s character is sexualized to a far greater extent that Cruz’s. This is symptomatic of the limitations of psychoanalytic binaries, which has led Michelle Aaron to speak of ‘the over-simplification and troubling autocracy, of the structuring of power through sexual difference: that male/female, active/passive polarity’ (2007: 46). One effect is that it fails to take into account that there may be multiple forms of looking and looked-at-ness. Hence, Almodóvar may fetishize Cruz’s hair and breasts, but he 298

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assumes there to be a huge difference between his way of looking at her and that of other directors. For example, he spoke at a press conference of how American directors ‘allow themselves to be distracted by her undeniably striking physical assets, overlooking her vast cinematic talents’ (cited in Verghis, 2006). Similarly, Consuela distinguishes between David’s way of looking at and appreciating her breasts and those students of desire whom, she tells him, were ‘“just masturbating on my body”’ (Roth, 2006: 131). Of course, it is possible to ascribe these distinctions to male narcissism; however, Almodóvar, Kepesh and Roth are all clearly gifted aesthetes. We need to develop a means by which to categorize different ways of looking – an issue to which I will return in specific relation to Elegy – and, crucially for our current purposes, being looked at. Without this distinction the art not only of the author, but also the actress, disappears. Challenging and/or Returning the Male Gaze As Karen Hollinger notes, ‘early feminist film theory came to view the film actress as merely a construction, a product of culture industrially manufactured and prefabricated by patriarchy as a signifier of sexuality and nothing more’ (2006: 21). In what follows I would like to briefly sketch a riposte to this position, focusing on one particular but crucial aspect of Mulvey’s argument, in which she states that: Mainstream film neatly combined spectacle and narrative. (Note, however, how in the musical song and-dance numbers break the flow of the diegesis). The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. (1975: 11) At the descriptive level, this is a perfect fit for Alastair Phillips and Ginette Vincendeau’s observation that Cruz’s ‘twofold function in Hollywood can be summed up as narrative catalyst and exotic beauty’ (2006: 221). Hence, in Bandidas (Ronning and Sandberg, 2006), Cruz and Salma Hayek play a pair of young Mexican women whose fathers have been ripped off and killed by an avaricious North American banker, and who decide to become bank robbers; the camera fetishistically delights in the physical exertions of their scantily clad bodies during training. In both Blow (Demme, 2001) and Manolete (Meyjes, 2008), the whirlwind romances of the characters played by Cruz are depicted not through narrative, but instead through a montage of flashback scenes in which music replaces dialogue, and the viewer is invited to watch her in a series of orgasmic scenarios. These examples illustrate the paradoxical tension between spectacle and narrative that Mulvey identifies in classical cinema; however, it is also possible to identify a paradox verging on contradiction in her theory through this dynamic. 299

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As Paul McDonald notes: ‘By appearing in a performance medium, all film actors are spectacles. Stars, however, are distinguished from this general ensemble – that is, the general spectacles of actors – for they are spectacular figures’ (2013: 184). Beginning with her debut appearance aged fourteen in Mecano’s La fuerza de destino pop video (1989), Cruz has used a combination of music and movement as a form of spectacular communication: the vast majority of her films contain a dance sequence of one kind or another. This is a good use of her formal ballet training; her performance in Nine (Marshall, 2009) provides an exception to José Luis Guerin’s claim in the round-table discussion (see Chapter 30) that actors no longer have the talent for musicals. Her skilled choreography and body movement have made her well-suited to action sequences in otherwise unremarkable films such as Fanfan la tulipe (Krawczyk, 2003) or Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (Marshall, 2011). In addition, dance has provided her with the opportunity to showcase her versatility as an actress. In Sin noticias de Dios/Don’t Tempt Me (Díaz Yanes, 2001), Cruz plays a male gangster punished by being reincarnated in a female body, in what Chris Perriam characterizes as ‘a brave attempt at playing tomboy on earth as well as wild woman in hell’ (2007: 35). For example, one stand-out scene depicts him/her dancing to the disco classic ‘Kung-Fu Fighting’ before heading out for the night. In a completely different register, her character pays some Gypsies for an illegal abortion in Non ti muovere; this is alluded to elliptically and retrospectively through a drunken, desperate dance in front of the middle-class married man who raped her, leaving her pregnant. Cruz has used dance elsewhere as a means of both reinforcing and reflecting on a star persona predicated on tradition and modernity alike.7 In Jamón, jamón, there is an extended sequence – effectively, a more overtly sexualized variation on her performance in the Mecano video-clip – during which the audience, adopting the viewpoint of various principal characters strategically placed around the dancefloor, watches her character, Silvia, dance provocatively with a female friend. On the one hand, the soundtrack of bacalao/techno music can be associated with Spain’s acclimatization to global musical trends. On the other, this impression is offset by the preceding scene in which Silvia is seen walking across an arid rural environment and, more generally, by Cruz’s performance throughout the rest of the film in which, Peter Evans (2004: 63) notes, her sexual allure is clearly rooted in tradition – even antiquity, in his view – rather than the kind of slick cosmopolitanism epitomized by an Anglo-American actress such as Meg Ryan. Cruz is associated indelibly – in Spain at least – with the chic urbanity of democratic Madrid, her city of birth. However, her hair, which has been repeatedly employed to market L’Oréal hair colouring products, is darker in tone and hue than is typical of the Spanish capital, and often serves as a metonymic link in film not only to the actresses from Italian neo-realism, but also to an earlier generation of Andalucian actresses and singers. For example, in La niña de tus ojos, her character performs a series of song and dance routines in the style of ‘typically Spanish’ actresses of 1930s and 1940s (see Davies, 2012). The effect is completely different to the emulative approach of multi-platinum singer Isabel Pantoja in her screen appearances in the period pieces, Yo soy esa/I’m the One (Sanz, 1990) 300

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and El día que nací yo/The Day on Which I Was Born (Olea, 1991). Cruz holds Spanish modernity and tradition in playful suspension, simultaneously revelling in and parodying Spain’s folkloric past.8 As her dance sequences indicate, Cruz’s performances frequently comment on their own status qua performance and, more generally, many of her roles are self-reflective about her status as a beautiful muse. In Head in the Clouds (Duigan, 2004), Cruz plays a Spanish Republican nurse earning her money for medical training in London by being a human sculpture for a cosmopolitan art crowd; while she takes on the role of the eponymous subject of Goya’s La Maja Desnuda in Volvavérunt. As Chris Perriam notes of Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Allen, 2008), ‘Cruz the actor finds herself increasingly made lapidary or monumental’ (2013: 186). It is no coincidence then, that her infamous lesbian kiss with Scarlett Johansson’s character occurs in the dark room when Cristina is processing photos that she has taken of María Elena around the Catalan capital. These roles and sequences all lend credence to Elena del Río’s claim that it is possible, and indeed desirable, ‘to destabilize the fetishistic emphasis of the feminist psychoanalytical paradigm by drawing attention to the expressive and transformative capacities in both the female body and the film body’s movement’ (2008: 26). In the same way that Roth being self-reflective about his unreconstructed masculinity makes it neither less offensive nor less subject(ed) to pscyhoanalysis’ hetero-normative binaries, it would be a mistake to assume that the self-reflective nature of many of Cruz’s performances automatically transcend the sexual dynamics of Mulvey’s paradigm. Nevertheless, this paradigm does struggle to accommodate an exhaustive interpretation of these performances, and Cruz’s ability to simultaneously communicate multiple complex and contradictory facets to her star persona bears testament to her acting skills, implying an awareness of self and image which transcends the passive muse role assigned to the actress by much feminist and auteur theory. In her discussion of Elegy (2011), María Donapetry calls on the theories of John Berger. This is a sharp move, first, because he has acted as a friend, mentor and colleague to Coixet.9 Second, because his published treatise, Ways of Seeing (1972), follows an argument in many respects similar to Mulvey’s which, nevertheless, escapes many of its pitfalls by marking a distinction between the ways in which women might be looked at: ‘To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become nude’ (1972: 54). There is a prelapsarian innocence about this notion of nudity which, post-Mulvey, is difficult to retain. Nevertheless, Berger’s distinction can be of use if we envisage the relationship between the two states of undress as a continuum. The depiction of Cruz’s body in Elegy is far removed from, for example, the prurient scopophilia by which María Valverde is depicted as an erotic, Lolita-like figure available for the delectation of the character played by José Sacristán and the audience alike in Madrid, 1987 (Trueba, 2011). Seen in this light, I think that it is possible to make a case for Elegy providing Cruz’s best and most naked performance. In addition to her beauty and figure, the actress provides a good match for Roth’s depiction of a cosmopolitan and smart young woman who also 301

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belongs to a ‘bygone era, a throwback to a more mannerly time’ (2006: 11): ‘she dresses like an attractive secretary in a prestigious legal firm’ in an attempt ‘not to desensualize herself but more, it would seem, to professionalize herself ’ (2006: 2–3), thereby anticipating her role in Los abrazos rotos/Broken Embraces (Almodóvar, 2009). Kepesh attributes these traits to Consuela being the daughter of wealthy Cuban émigrés, and Cruz’s accented English is better suited to the role of a young socially aspirational woman who arrived in the United States aged eleven than many of the other Spanish American nationalities that she has adopted. In the novella, Kepesh construes his seduction of Consuela in the following terms: ‘I had pronounced her a great work of art, with all the magical influence of a great work of art’ (2006: 37). This is a concrete manifestation of what is characteristic of much female identity formation, according to Berger: ‘Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated by herself as another’ (1972: 46). In the novella she is compared to the young woman in Velázquez’s Las Meninas, a portrait famous for the interpolation of the painter into the canvas. Nevertheless, it is the case that a complex interplay of gazes ensures that the dynamic between artist and model remains that of subject to object; as Michel Foucault remarks: ‘From the eyes of the painter to what he is observing there runs a compelling line that we, the onlookers, have no power of evading’ (2002: 4). It is indicative of a somewhat different aesthetic and ethic that the film then introduces a comparison, not present in the novella, to La Maja Desnuda; an intertextual reference to Volvavérunt perhaps, but more importantly, this figure has been construed as a ‘nude who transgresses her idealized locus within the painting to confront the viewer’ (Tomlinson, 1992: 120). Cruz is able to foreground this aspect of the painting through Coixet’s decision to incorporate the influence of Lucien Freud – an artist whose models clearly are often far removed from the feminine ideal – in terms of mise-en-scène and lighting in many of the scenes where Conseula is seen posing for Kepesh.10 I would suggest that this is indicative of how both actress and director seemingly collaborate to set in motion a dialectic between the idealization and deconstruction of female beauty throughout the film. As we have seen, Kepesh and Consuela are embroiled in multiple layers of performance and seduction. However, both the novella and the film betray a desire for authenticity. In Roth’s text, the artifice is removed during a violent oral sex scene in which Kepesh aggressively pulls her hair: After I came, when I drew away, Consuela looked not just horrified but ferocious. Yes, something is finally happening to her. It is no longer so comfortable for her. She is no longer practicing scales. Uncontrollably she is in motion within. I was still above her – kneeling over her and dripping on her – we were looking each other cold in the eye, when, after swallowing hard, she snapped her teeth. Suddenly. Cruelly. At me […] At last the forthright, incisive, elemental response from the contained classical beauty. Till then it was all controlled by narcissism, by exhibitionism and despite the energetic display, despite the audacity, it was strangely inert. (2006: 31) 302

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Roth was reportedly very proud of this scene, which Coixet had to battle to keep out of the film. Although on the one hand, Consuela stops performing femininity for her male admirer, this is still framed from the male perspective: Kepesh, and arguably Roth, are sexually excited by her animalesque authenticity which escalates as he becomes obsessed with knowing all the details about Consuela’s past and present sexual exploits. On seeing his friend psychologically damaged by this process, George chastises him: ‘You violated the law of aesthetic distance’ (2006: 99). In other words, in a narrative and thematic conceit typical of misogynist literature, the naked woman is the source of man’s undoing. Elegy reverses this scenario, and focuses on the ethical necessity for both her lover and the audience to acknowledge Consuela – and arguably, by implication, Cruz – as a human being. In my view, Coixet is only partially successful in this endeavour, largely because often the film is easier to admire intellectually than engage with emotionally. It can occasionally reinscribe precisely the aesthetic, and arguably anaestheticizing, distance that it seemingly wants to dispel. As Phillip Lopate noted in his review: ‘A good deal of dialogue and screen time is expended on the beauty of Cruz’s breasts, but they are not enough to rescue the movie from its lugubrious pandering’ (2008: 70). However, the actress is instrumental to those moments where Elegy does come to life, and the film can be meaningfully interpreted as a paeon to her beauty and sexual allure, while at the same time, a deconstruction and subversion of the idealized images of femininity that underpin Kepesh’s fantasy, Roth’s narrative and much of Cruz’s star persona. At the film’s denóuement, Kepesh returns to his apartment to hear a message on his answerphone from Consuela. As Nicholas Meyer notes on the DVD commentary, it is a real test for an actor to act with their voice alone; this is especially marked for such a highly visual actor as Cruz, who nonetheless is able to render plausible an unsettling fragility. When Consuela subsequently arrives at the flat of her former lover, shorter hair immediately intimates femininity under peril, as she proceeds to tell him that she has breast cancer. In Donapetry’s words: ‘It is the very first moment in which he fully recognizes Consuela’s humanity, her vulnerability tied precisely to her physical beauty which is now obviously threatened and ephemeral’ (2011: 96). This underpins the comments that Coixet had made about the most explicit sex scene she has ever shot – or for that matter, that the actress has appeared in since Jamón, jamón: In the novel this moment is erotically charged and I remember trying to explain to Philip Roth why I didn’t see it this way at all […] [I]t is the least erotic naked scene in the story because, when you see Penélope’s breasts, Consuela’s, you are thinking at that time that they are going to be cut off. I wanted people to think of that. (cited in Donapetry, 2010) While the thousands of YouTube viewers who viewed these scenes in isolation most probably concurred with Roth’s erotic interpretation of the scenario,11 the film invited a 303

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more sensitive response. As in much of Elegy, Coixet favours both shot-reverse-shots of individuals in dialogue and medium-shots of the two characters. While the film in general frequently depicts Consuela’s unpredictable responses undermining Kepesh’s rehearsed performances in comic fashion, this becomes tragic here, as she cradles him on realizing that he is in a worse psychological state than she is on hearing the news. In tune with the emotional cadence of the scene, the effect is intensified here by the camera lingering on the sweat of their respective faces, with cuts occurring far less frequently than in other sequences. The performance by Spain’s most famous transnational actress thereby provides a concrete illustration of Diane Negra’s argument that the ethnic female star is ‘a figure of great potential ideological disruption, for she threatens to expose the construction of white, American patriarchy’ (2001: 8). Conclusion Much discourse on Spanish cinema has echoed what Robin Wood has ridiculed as early feminist film criticism’s ‘clear cut choice between mindless surrender to the addictive and reprehensible seductions of mainstream cinema on the one hand and sheer cerebral hard work on the other’ (1998: 299). However, it has not, taken on board what Jackie Stacey characterizes as ‘Mulvey’s challenge to feminists to destroy popular pleasure’ (1994: 46) in relation to the naked female form – quite the opposite, in fact. A remarkably high percentage of actresses – be that Cruz in Jamón, jamón, Paz Vega in Lucía y el sexo or, more recently, Verónica Echegui in Yo soy la Juani (Luna, 2006) – were catapulted first to fame by a sexually explicit role. If we adopt Anneke Smelik’s definition of a feminist narrative film as one that ‘represents sexual difference from a woman’s point of view, displaying a critical awareness of the asymmetrical power relations between the sexes’ (1998: 1), then Elegy satisfies this criterion. I have argued that both Cruz and Coixet’s authorial imprints are essential to the film’s achievements which, although limited in some respects, provide a morally and intellectually engaging deconstruction of cinema’s specularization of the female body. In the process, the actress translates the talent that she has showcased in other films to hold multiple facets of her star persona simultaneously in view to a new scenario and in an entirely different register. This constitutes a remarkable transformation of a novella authored by a man for whom ‘“Others” – especially women and Jews – are objectified to master them’ (Cherolis, 2006: 15). Roth’s prose style is littered with animalistic images of sexual acts, with frequent recourse to terms such as ‘rump’, ‘udder’, ‘pollinated’ or ‘farmed’, which have largely disappeared from the film. In the novella, Kepesh becomes so obsessed with one of Consuela’s ex-boyfriends regularly having watched her menstruate that he successfully requests they resurrect the ritual. In Elegy, the thought of her having done this irks his possessive jealousy, but he does not go as far as to ask for re-enactment. While on the one hand, this is arguably the result of the licences allowed by prose as opposed to film, on the other, it is indicative of the film 304

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seeking to domesticate Kepesh. This desire to bring him into Coixet’s universe is intimated by the fact that the film’s diegetic and extra-diegetic music sound as if they could come from the same record collection. In fact, if the principal weakness of The Dying Animal is solipsistic excess, Elegy suffers from an excess of civility. Edward Hopper is able to reflect ennui and emotional detachment without replicating the effect in the viewer, but Coixet never quite fathoms this balance. Acknowledgement I would like to thank Maria Delgado for her comments and critiques of an earlier draft of this chapter. Notes   1 For a discussion of the book’s critical reaction in relation to the other novels, and the ostensible similarities between Roth and his narrators, specifically Kepesh, see West (2005).   2 She commented in an interview with María Donapetry that: ‘Elegy was a challenge. I never thought that I’d do something of Philip Roth’s. It’s also true that this novel (The Dying Animal, 2001) is a minor work. His great novel is American Pastoral, that is one which does say a lot about American society. I think that The Dying Animal speaks about Philip Roth and the thing he had with a Cuban student and it’s a true story. He’s a complex author, complicated, difficult to negotiate with’. This published piece by Donapetry (2010) is an edited version of the exchange she had with Coixet at the Women in Spanish and Portuguese and Latin American Studies (WISPS) conference held in Oxford in September 2009. Any comments attributed to the director and not referenced are taken from my notes of this interview alongside the conversation I had with Coixet over dinner at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, on the same day as a guest of Xon de Ros.   3 For example, in La niña de tus ojos/The Girl of Your Dreams (Trueba, 1998), she is the filmstar daughter of a Republican soldier who ends up making a film with her director/lover in Nazi Germany, where Goebbels falls madly in love with her – even attempting to rape her in one scene. Elsewhere, in The Good Night (Jake Paltrow, 2007), Gary has recurring dreams in which Cruz’s character is his girlfriend after only seeing her images on advertising billboards. Things are complicated when they meet in real life, and he assumes that they have a complicity of which she is completely unaware.   4 As Steven Marsh and Parvati Nair remark: ‘It is noteworthy that Valeria Camporesi and Eva Parrondo Coppel, whose special edition of the film magazine, Secuencias, on women and cinema in the year 2001 was an unheard of event in Spain’s critical film history, both did their graduate work outside Spain’ (2004: 5). Even Parrondo Coppel has given short shrift to Mulvey, offering elsewhere a reductive and caricatured description of her theoretical contribution and feminism in general: ‘The victim ideology of this “feminist” theory of cinema 305

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  5

  6

  7

  8   9

10 11

which, unfortunately, is the one which has had most impact, has quickly been appropriated by the transnational Secciones Femeninas who, at the time of writing (October 2003) are manipulating things in order to get their own way in matters of audiovisual education through puritancial and repressive interventions in university classrooms’ (2004: 104). As Cruz said in an interview with Paula Ponga: ‘For a time, I was strongly repelled by anything that was sensual or sexual. I cut my hair very short and, for years, I wouldn’t do love scenes, not even kisses. Everyone told me I was risking my career but I followed my heart and I can never regret it. Nobody forced me to make Jamón, jamón. I felt happy making it, but I also suffered a lot’ (cited in Ponga, 2007: 84). More work would need to done to confirm my suspicion, but my hunch is that hair functions as a particularly potent phallic signifier in reference to Latin actresses. For example, it is noticeable in Savages (Stone, 2012) that it is symbolic of the character played by Salma Hayek losing control of her mental stability, family and drugs cartel, that she reveals her long hair to be a wig. Although she ended up wearing a Versace dress because there was allegedly a last-minute problem with the zip of her first choice, originally Cruz had asked Dior to design a dress that would mix a Spanish air, French chic and traditional Hollywood glamour for the 2007 Academy Awards ceremony (Güell, 2009: 165). I think this embodiment of Spain’s past and present helps explain why Cruz’s image, especially from La niña de sus ojos, is so often used for the front covers of publications on Spanish cinema. See for example, Torres Hortelano (2011) and Triana-Toribio (2003). There is a homage to Berger in The Secret Life of Words (Coixet, 2005) in that Hanna carries a copy of Ways of Seeing. Coixet has written of the day that she first purchased the text in a secondhand bookshop on the Charing Cross Road: ‘I began reading on the long underground journey back to the place where I was living at the time, on the outskirts of London. When I stepped out of the carriage, the world was no longer the same; I was no longer the same and my point of view – which, with youthful impertinence, I had considered unshakeable – had been torn to shreds’ (Coixet and Berger, 2009: 12). The above quotation is taken from a book designed to accompany a collaborative exhibition titled ‘From I to J’, for which Coixet filmed a series of actresses including Patricia Clarkson, Penélope Cruz, Isabelle Hupert and Leonor Watling reading out letters from an unknown woman, Aída, written by Berger. Before commencing filming, Coixet sent a text to her director of photography saying ‘Lucien Freud’ (Andreu, 2008: 89). In clips titled, ‘Penélope Cruz topless nude scene’, over 465,000 You Tube viewers have watched instalments of this sequence. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIwnYGcM7Lo, last accessed on 10 April 2014.

References Aaron, M. (2007). Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On (London: Wallflower). Almodóvar, P. (2006). Volver (Madrid: El Deseo and Ocho y Medio). Andreu, C. (2008). Isabel Coixet: una mujer bajo la influencia (Madrid: Ediciones Autor). 306

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Ardón, P. (2007). ‘La muerte en el cine de Isabel Coixet’ in I. Navarro (ed.), De los que aman: el cine de Isabel Coixet (Madrid: Ayuntamiento de Madrid), 77–83. Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series with John Berger (London and Harmondsworth: BBC and Penguin Books). Bloom, J. (2010). ‘Male gazers after Mulvey: Roth and Stone’, College Hill Review, 5, available at: http://www.collegehillreview.com/005/0050701.html, last accessed on 15 August 2012. Carbayo-Abengózar, M. (2000). ‘Feminism in Spain: a history of love and hate’ in L. K. Twomey (ed.), Women in Contemporary Culture: Roles and Identities in France and Spain (Bristol: Intellect), 111–25. Cerrato, R. (2008). Isabel Coixet (Madrid: Ediciones JC). Cherolis, S. (2006). ‘Philip Roth’s pornographic elegy: The Dying Animal as a contemporary meditation on loss’, Philip Roth Studies, 2.1: 13–24. Coixet, I. and Berger, J. (2009). From I to J (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, Actor, Arts Santa Mónica). Davies, A. (2012). ‘Singing of dubious desire: Imperio Argentina and Penélope Cruz as Nazi Germany’s exotic other’ in L. Shaw and R. Stone (eds.), Screening Songs in Hispanic and Lusophone Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 17–29. de Lauretis, T. (1984). Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Basingstoke: Macmillan). del Río, E. (2008). Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Donapetry, M. (2010). ‘Miss Wasabi habla y canta: entrevista a Isabel Coixet’, 39 y más, 13 September, available at http://www.39ymas.com/entrevista-isabel-coixet/, last accessed on 15 August 2012. (2011). ‘Ethics, silence and the gaze in two films by Isabel Coixet’, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, 8.1: 87–100. Evans, P. W. (2004). Bigas Luna, Jamón, jamón: estudio crítico (Barcelona: Ediciones Paidós). Foucault, M. (2002). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge). Güell, C. (2009). El Versace de Penélope Cruz y otras anécdotas de la historia protagonizadas por mujeres (Barcelona: Styria). Hollinger, K. (2006). The Actress: Hollywood Acting and the Female Star (London: Routledge). Lopate, P. (2008). ‘Elegy’, Film Comment, July/August: 70. McDonald, P. (2013). Hollywood Stardom (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell). Marsh, S. and Nair, P. (2004). ‘Introduction’ in S. Marsh and P. Nair (eds.), Gender and Spanish Cinema (Oxford: Berg), 1–11. Martín-Márquez, S. (1999). Feminist Discourse and Spanish Cinema: Sight Unseen (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Matthews, P. (2007). ‘The pornography of destruction: performing annihilation in The Dying Animal’, Philip Roth Studies, 3.1: 44–55. Mulvey, L. (1975). ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen, 16.3: 6–18. (1989). ‘Afterthoughts on “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema”’ in L. Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, IN: Bloomington University Press), 29–38. Negra, D. (2001). Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom (London: Routledge). 307

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Parrondo Coppel, E. (2004). ‘Cine y diferencia sexual. Apuntes feministas’, Trama y fondo, 17: 103–08. Perriam, C. (2007). ‘Victoria Abril in transnational context’, Hispanic Research Journal, 8.1: 27–38. (2013). ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen, 2008): Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem acting strangely’ in M. M. Delgado and R. Fiddian (eds.), Spanish Cinema 1973–2000: Auteurism, Politics, Landscape and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 183–94. Phillips, A. and Vincendeau, G. (eds.) (2006). Journeys of Desire. European Actors in Hollywood: A Critical Companion (London: British Film Institute). Ponga, P. (2007). ‘Penélope Cruz: un ángel de armas tomar’, Fotogramas, April: 82–88. Prozorski, A. (2004). ‘Transnational trauma and the mockery of Armageddon: The Dying Animal in the new millenium’, Studies in American Jewish Literature, 23: 122–34. Roth, P. (1973). The Breast (London: Jonathan Cape). (1978). The Professor of Desire (London: Jonathan Cape). (2006). The Dying Animal (London: Vintage Books). Serna, L. I. (2012). ‘Antonio Banderas, Andy García and Edward James Olmos: stardom, masculinities and “Latinidades”’ in A. Everett (ed.), Pretty People: Movie Stars of the 1990s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), 123–43. Showalter, E. (2001). ‘Tedium of the gropes of Roth’, The Times, 27 June: 13. Smelik, A. (1998). And the Mirror Cracked: Feminist Cinema and Film Theory (Basingstoke: Macmillan). Smith, P. J. (1999). ‘Towards a cultural studies of the Spanish state’, Paragraph 22.1: 6–13. Stacey, J. (1994). Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (London: Routledge). Stam, R. (2005). ‘Introduction: the theory and practice of adaptation’ in R. Stam and A. Raengo (eds.), Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation (Oxford: Blackwell), 1–52. Straus, J. (2008). ‘Battle of the sexes: Isabel Coixet takes on Philip Roth with Elegy’, Moviemaker, summer: 32–33. Swanson, P. (2010). ‘Going down on good neighbours: imagining América in Hollywood movies on the 1930s and 1940s (Flying Down to Rio and Down Argentine Way)’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 29.1: 71–84. Tomlinson, J. (1992). Goya in the Twilight of Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Torres Hortelano, L. J. (ed.) (2011). Directory of World Cinema: Spain (Bristol: Intellect). Trendel, A. (2007). ‘Master and pupil in Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal’, Philip Roth Studies, 3.1: 56–65. Triana-Toribio, N. (2003). Spanish National Cinema (London: Routledge). (2008). ‘Auteurism and commerce in contemporary Spanish cinema: directores mediáticos’, Screen, 49.3: 259–76. Venuti, L. (2012). ‘Adaptation, translation, critique’ in T. Corrigan (ed.), Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge), 89–103.

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Verghis, S. (2006). ‘Beauty can be beastly’, The Sun Herald, 26 November: 10. Warhol, A. (1989). The Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. P. Hackett (New York: Warner Books). West, K. R. (2005). ‘Professing desire: the Kepesh novels’ in D. P. Royal (ed.), Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author (West Point, NY: Praeger), 225–38. Williams, L. (2008). Screening Sex (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Wood, R. (1998). Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press).

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Chapter 19 Deadly Hybridity: Sexykiller, the Female Serial Killer and the New Spanish Horror Film Shelagh Rowan-Legg

M

iguel Martí’s film Sexykiller: Morirás por ella/Sexykiller: You’ll Die for Her (2008) opens in a women’s locker room. Girls in skimpy towels chat about boys and rub lotion on their bodies, eventually leaving one girl by herself. Enter a boy in the killer costume from the Scream film series (Craven, 1996–2011). Looking around for naked girls, he spies someone else in the same costume. That person turns out to be the lone girl, Bárbara (Macarena Goméz), who swiftly cuts off the boy’s head. What begins as a teenage sex comedy becomes a teenage horror comedy. The level of violence perpetrated by Bárbara, and the fact that a woman perpetrates such violence with immense glee, marks a departure from and new direction in contemporary Spanish horror cinema. While violence in Spanish horror films was not new, the comedic coding of the situation, stylized performances and generic hybridity mark the film as decidedly ironic in presentation and intended reception – particularly for a new generation of spectators adept at recognizing tropes and signification from horror films, both Spanish and international. Sexykiller exposes the influence of the horror slasher film most commonly found in Hollywood while at the same time adhering to Spanish roots of dark comedy. The use of direct address and different generic modes and media draw attention to its self-reflexivity. It is not only a parody on this subgenre of horror, but a distortion of it arising from a Spanish absurdist tradition. Bárbara, a female character who is a hybrid of action heroine, psychotic killer and final girl, embodies the postmodern esperpento: she exists in the concave mirror of filmic representation, a new kind of quintessentially Spanish heroine for the new Spanish fantastic film. Spanish Fantastic Film in the Late Twentieth Century

In spring 1992, film industry professionals met in Madrid for a conference, the main purpose of which was to appeal to the Spanish government to change its cultural policies surrounding Spanish cinema. Specifically, they saw the increasing domination of Hollywood films, and the ill-advised Miró Law (1983), as a threat that could erase Spanish film from its own country (Kinder, 1997: 9).1 The fantastic genres had all but disappeared from Spanish cinemas in the preceding twenty years. During that time, literary adaptations, social realism and European-style auteur cinema were the most visible in terms of distribution and exhibition (Sala, 2010: 195). Production companies that produced fantastic films had dissolved and the fantastic was relegated almost to B-movie

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status. This is not to say that there were no fantastic films made during this time: there were several, such as El tesoro de las cuatro coronas/Treasure of the Four Crowns (Baldi, 1983), Operación Mantis/Operation Atlantis (Naschy, 1984) and Slugs: Muerte Viscosa/ Slugs: The Movie (Piquer Simón, 1987). However, these films were mainly imitations of American or European horror and adventure cinema, and generally were unsuccessful, both financially and critically. Agustí Villaronga’s Tras el cristal/In a Glass Cage (1987), which told the story of a former Nazi war criminal and paedophile, and the young man who wants to learn violence from him; and Bigas Luna’s Anguish (1987), about a serial killer in a cinema, went beyond traditional social realism boundaries and graphically depicted horror and violence. This inspired film-makers such as Álex de la Iglesia, Jaume Balagueró and Alejandro Amenábar to use the fantastic, combining influences from European auteur cinema and Hollywood blockbusters, to widespread acclaim. Sexykiller is a neglected yet representative film in this generic cycle, one that self-consciously combines trash aesthetics with social commentary. Marsha Kinder notes that Spanish art, like Spanish history, is marked with graphic violence. This is not to say that violence in art is unique to Spain; rather, that its depiction in Spanish film differs in ‘modes of violent representation and their cultural implications, determinants and reception’ (1993: 137). Violence depicted on screen can seem both less and more real, as Sissela Bok writes: ‘[Film] both mediates violence and makes it seem more immediate, exposing viewers to levels and forms of violence they might not otherwise encounter’ (1998: 37). Both form and content affect reception: the spectator comes to expect a certain degree of violence in fantastic films, particularly horror, as it is considered a transgressive mode of storytelling. This is not to say that there is no violence in realist cinema; rather, that the very fantastic nature of the fantastic makes violence more acceptable. Following on from film-makers such as Jesús Franco, whose films helped create the Spanish horror boom of the 1960s, and Álex de la Iglesia, whose work in the early 1990s sparked a new generation of postmodern fantastic film – one where generically coded violence became acceptable and popular – a film such as Sexykiller would be expected to contain violence. However, what is unexpected is that the perpetrator of said violence is female. Violence against women in film was not uncommon in social realist films. In his work on intimate partner abuse in Spanish cinema, Duncan Wheeler (2012: 444) notes that prior to 1999 there were three modes for its portrayal: comic, passionate and allegorical. These modes often combined in low-brow comedies of the 1990s, such as Acción Mutante/Mutant Action (de la Iglesia, 1993), Airbag (Bajo Ulloa, 1997) and Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley/ Torrente, the Dumb Arm of the Law (Segura, 1998), but the violence was often trivialized or made to seem natural and unavoidable. Violence perpetrated by women in films such as Muertos de risa/Dying of Laughter (de la Iglesia, 1999) and Salir pitando/Blinkers (Fernández Armero, 2007) was treated almost solely as a comic joke (Wheeler, 2012: 442). However, the violence in Sexykiller – the amount, type and perpetration – harkens back to an older mode of Spanish comedy found in early twentieth-century Spain. 314

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The Esperpento In Spain in the 1920s, a new dramatic form emerged called esperpento, created by the writer Ramón de Valle-Inclán. According to Rodolfo Cardona, esperpento was ‘the first attempt to convert the disparate tendencies of the grotesque into a genre’ (Cardona and Zahareas, 1970: 11). Esperpento is ‘a concave mirror [that] catches, distorts and ridicules appearance, so the dramatist reflects in a grotesque framework an imaginative elaboration of reality’ (Zahareas et al., 1968: 82). It creates an absurd black comedy where the audience may laugh at the sorrows of the frequently pathetic characters that are more like caricatures, with ridiculous plots, often of a monstrous nature. The modernist movement operated from the perspective of the periphery, away from a bourgeois representation centred on mimesis and content (Santiáñez, 2004: 186). Valle-Inclán found that realism did not suffice to express the new Spanish culture, and life in Spain at this time could ‘only be portrayed through a systematic deforming language’ (Santiáñez, 2004: 484). Rather than an abandonment of realism, it is a deformation of realism. However, most importantly, it is meant by this deformation to be a farce as opposed to a tragedy, and the disparate elements of style and content lead to the fantastic absurd. Censorship regulations imposed by the Francoist state in the mid-twentieth century were designed to discourage films that reflected anything but the governing ideology. Nonetheless, the somewhat non-ideologically-approving esperpento mode, with its ‘imprecise aftertaste of farce, of operetta with a poor Madrid accent and shrill gesture’ (Zamora Vicente, 1987: 10), occasionally crept into films. Edgar Neville (who spent much of his career in Hollywood) combined the carnivalesque with a murder mystery in Domingo de carnaval/Sunday Carnival (1945), and El Verdugo/The Executioner (García Berlanga, 1963) presented a comic look at execution, elevating and intensifying perspective (Castro de Paz and Cerdán, 2011: 38). Esperpento would resurge again once censorship was lifted. As Paul Julian Smith writes: ‘It has sometimes been argued that Spain passed directly from a premodern oral culture […] to a postmodern visual culture’ (2006: 1). This culture, coinciding as it did with Spain’s reintroduction of democracy and its reintegration into Europe, would manifest itself in Spanish fantastic film frequently through parody and pastiche. Linda Hutcheon calls this kind of parody ‘“ex-centric” […] of those who are marginalized by a dominant ideology’ (1998: 35). Postmodernism borrows from everything, both the reified and the popular, becoming a parody of all things through ubiquitous pastiche. Ángel Sala refers to these Spanish postmodern pastiche films as ‘neoesperpento’ (2010: 13), updating Valle-Inclán for cinema. What remains from esperpento is a distorted realism, a bizarre narrative and pathetic characters. The mix of cinematic genres and aesthetic styles creates the neo-esperpento, examined and understood not only in what, but how, it is presented. According to Catherine Constable’s interpretation of Jean Baudrillard, ‘the parodic aspect of the hyperreal is the result of the total reconstruction of reality as aesthetic spectacle’ (2004: 48). The fantastic film that had been almost completely obscured through the 1980s era of social realism and grand narratives made way for the postmodern film of the 315

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hyper-real, examining contemporary Spanish national and transnational culture through highly self-conscious and parodic works. Sexykiller, rooted in the Spanish esperpento tradition, distorts and parodies not only the horror, exploitation and action genres, but also the media’s presentation of women and examination of the representation of women in film. Sexykiller and the Slasher Film Set in the present day on a university campus, the spectator is introduced to Bárbara, a medical student. She is pursuing a career, worships fashion, likes boys and hopes to marry a plastic surgeon and have a family – and she is a serial killer. She describes her murders and her growing romance with pathologist Tomás (César Camino), whom she believes is also a serial killer, to the audience and another character in flashback. As the police search for the killer, Tomás and his friend Álex (Alejo Sauras) develop a machine that can view the last images that a dead person has seen, in the hopes of aiding the police. Unfortunately, this machine also turns the dead into zombies, and Bárbara and Tomás must fight them off. When Tomás saves Bárbara’s life and she learns that he is not a killer, she finds she must kill him too, leaving her the last person alive. In the 1970s, American horror films began to explore metaphors for the anxiety over sexual experimentation among young people, and several films made a point of killing off teenagers who were having sex, thereby seeming to condemn the practice (Wood, 1988: 214). Films such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1974), Halloween (Carpenter, 1978) and Friday the 13th (Cunningham, 1980) featured a psychotic killer who would prey upon teenagers, leaving one girl to survive the slaughter. This type of character is seen also in much of the work of Spanish director Jesús Franco, who would use beautiful women as bait for a teenager victim. Much of the horror and exploitation film produced in the United States through the 1970s was inspired by the European horror cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, in particular films from Italy and Spain (Shipka, 2011: 7). Franco had been an early purveyor of films with women as both killer and victim. In twisting this form, Martí and screenwriter Paco Cabezas create a parody of the slasher film, making a serial killer who is the antagonist of her progenitors. It is a coded performance: she is no less psychotic than the killers featured in previous slasher films, no less violent or arbitrary in her reasoning of action or choice of victim. However, because the killer is a short, slim woman, the spectator is invited to laugh as much as gasp at her murderous success. Early in the film, a secret admirer sends Bárbara a dog: she calls him Jason, which is a knowing nod to the audience who are to know that this is the name of the serial killer from the Friday the 13th series. When she emerges from her dorm room in a metallic killer costume, it is in marked and comic contrast to the dog. She is carrying a transparent purse with the head of one of her victims. This might seem like a moment of horror, but she enters into a short conversation with other girls in the dorm. Fast editing between Bárbara’s face and the girls’ faces, combined with sharp sound effects of the opening and closing of a knife and their conversation about condoms, make the scene comical. 316

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The film and, by extension, the performance, is coded also through the use of generic tropes from outside the milieu of the fantastic. A familiar American film noir device is a principal character recounting a story to another character. Bárbara does this with one of her victims, describing her tales of murder as a series of flashbacks for most of the film. It also includes musical sequences: when Bárbara is describing her relationship with her mother and her dreams of adulthood, it becomes a musical number reminiscent of pop videos seen on channels such as MTV, with Bárbara and other characters wearing bright costumes and wigs. When one of Bárbara’s early victims, Ángel, is stumbling around her room with his hands tied and a plastic bag around his head, this horrific moment of death is juxtaposed with music reminiscent of a screwball comedy or accompaniment to a silent comedy film. When chasing one of her victims through the woods, the split-screen is used to show Bárbara and her victim at the same time. Both this and the accompanying music are mimicking exploitation films, as well as American crime television shows of the 1970s. In a later scene, Bárbara goes to the morgue to kill Alex. When he attempts to hide from her by pretending to be a corpse, he betrays his position by urinating. Alex has been set up through the film as a stereotype of the handsome, horny college boy, the type of character who is usually the romantic lead. However, Bárbara has chosen the less conventionally handsome Tomás, and the sight of Bárbara killing Alex alternates between comedy and horror. This becomes a representation of Spanish black comedy, horrifying in act and absurd in presentation, so that the only appropriate reaction for the audience is laughter. The Neo-esperpento and the Postmodern It would seem that the film is the epitome of postmodern parody and cliché, where the tropes of past films are recycled and regenerated into a new form. For Fredric Jameson (1991: 17), postmodern pastiche is a blank parody devoid of political or historical meaning; but in the case of Sexykiller, the parodic form is its meaning. By presenting itself both as a postmodern parody of American slasher films and as a Spanish neo-esperpento film, it speaks of the ex-centric who, until recently, have been marginalized by the dominant form of filmic representation in Spain. That is to say, the narrative of the film is recognizable as an homage to slasher film, yet it distorts that subgenre in order to reflect its own parodic nature, as well as its originating culture. The sexually active teenager as the victim of violence is a common trope in horror film, as is the psychotic serial killer. As the audience is reminded frequently, Bárbara is telling the story to a man who is pinned down to his car by a knife that Bárbara has put through his hand. The first scene in which Bárbara beats and traps this man, with fast editing and sound effects reminiscent of animation films, sets the comic tone for the subsequent scenes of retelling. It is a deliberate manipulation, self-consciously played by the film to engage its audience. This self-conscious mixture of genres is embodied within the character of Bárbara, representative of the self-reflexivity of the film and the esperpentic distorted reality. 317

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Sexykiller portrays a woman who is coded as the desirable female: her clothes are provocative; she takes great care with her appearance; she fantasizes about being ‘Sindy Superstar’ (a doll similar to Barbie); and she expresses her desire to marry a plastic surgeon. While Bárbara fulfils many of the associated stereotypes, these are deliberately distorted through her homicidal acts. Linda Williams writes that: [The] male look at women in cinema involves two forms of mastery over the threat of castration posed by her ‘lack’ of a penis: a sadistic voyeurism which punishes or endangers the woman through the agency of an active and powerful male character and the fetishistic overvaluation that masters the threat of castration by investing the woman’s body with an excess of aesthetic perfection. (1996: 22) We can gaze at Bárbara as the passive object, but she also assumes narrative agency. The gaze of the male spectator is distorted through the presentation of Bárbara as both object and subject. Through her narrative agency, the sadistic voyeurism of the male gaze is reversed into a masochistic voyeurism: Bárbara kills several of the characters in the film that imitate the spectator’s gaze. Her excesses extend into her killing, and the threat of castration comes not only through her murders, but her agency and direct address. She is given control of the gaze – and as a serial killer, she would seem to use any and all ‘phallic’ weapons at her disposal: knives, hooks, brooms and, at one point, the heel of her stiletto. She might lack a corporal phallus, but she can use its symbol to commit murder. The character, the use of direct address and engagement with alternative generic modes, encourage that gaze. Early in the film, as Bárbara prepares for a costume party, she recites lines from the film Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976), imitating Travis Bickle in what he would say and do, if confronted. A few minutes later, Bárbara addresses the camera and the spectator, drawing reference to the film, her status as a serial killer and the lack of a rationale for her killings. She then recounts the story to her latest victim. Within these flashbacks, not only does Bárbara address the camera, but Martí also incorporates fantasy sequences into these direct addresses. When Bárbara is about to kill Ángel, she gives a short infomercial address as to the supplies necessary for a killing. When sitting in a class, she reads the magazine ‘Cosmokiller’, and the audience is shown a sequence that uses fashion magazine iconography to describe various killing methods in a style that imitates describing fashion tips. These instructions also include the amount of calories that one could burn while committing these crimes, drawing attention to the syntax of the magazine. This moment is underscored by the song by Aqua, ‘Barbie Girl’, reminding the audience of Bárbara’s previous dream and this impossible ideal of femininity. At one point, her professor asks her who she is speaking to and she replies, ‘To the camera’, although it is invisible to him. Bárbara is not just a killer or a femme fatale, she is also an action hero. Yvonne Tasker notes that the female in the action film is often played for comedy, in contrast to the more serious male hero. In the traditional action film, the male is the figure that advances both 318

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the narrative and the spectacle of the narrative –, a role usually relegated to the female in non-action films (Tasker, 1993: 16). As Marc O’Day writes: ‘Representations of the action heroine as a figure in the landscape allay their active masculine connotations by stressing the heroine’s sexuality and availability in conventional female terms’ (2004: 203). Characters such as Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Alien (Scott, 1979), The Bride (Uma Thurman) in Kill Bill (Tarantino, 2003) and Nikita (Anne Parillaud) in La Femme Nikita/ Nikita (Besson, 1990) have been, like Bárbara, both the advancer of the narrative and the object of the gaze. In Sexykiller, Martí and Cabezas combine the women of these types of action films with the serial killer. Bárbara becomes the monstrous feminine, as both object of the gaze and through embodying phallic symbols by virtue of her murders. In her first kill, she dresses in the killer costume from the film Scream (Craven, 1996) to match the man who would enter the girls’ locker room, thereby emasculating him through his own game. When Ángel hits her after sex, she ties him up while he is still in his underwear, wraps a plastic bag around his head and pushes him out the window. Only the police detective (Ángel de Andrés López) proves a difficult kill, as he is her most worthy opponent. We are not shown how Bárbara overpowers him, as though the fact that she does is the only necessary information. In the final scene of the film, the detective, now a zombie, is about to gain his revenge on Bárbara with a chainsaw, but she is saved by Tomás. This seems for a moment to be a rather stereotypical romantic ending of a film, with the two lovers reunited. Tomás briefly appears to be the one male who would survive through his warning of the zombie invasion and his rescue of Bárbara. The rise in popularity of so-called ‘chick flicks’ – films that feature a young female character who is financially independent, fashion-driven and seems to seek a mate above all else, represented in films such as Bridget Jones’s Diary (Maguire, 2001) and Legally Blonde (Luketic, 2001) – would establish a stereotype of contemporary representations of women in film. Bárbara is an exaggeration of this stereotype: when describing her desired future, she explains that she is attending medical school to meet a husband, and while she intends to be a mother and housewife, she also has plans for a career on television. When Tomás describes their future, Bárbara sees only a life of poverty and despair, so she refuses this rescue by the male. She must kill what she loves, the male, who is less possessed of masculine traits than herself. She then becomes the final girl, a common trope in slasher films. According to Tudor (2003: 62), the final girl has both feminine and masculine traits, and converts in order to save herself. As Clover notes, both male and female spectators are meant to identify with her: ‘The gender of the Final Girl is […] compromised from the outset by her masculine interests, her inevitable sexual reluctance […] her apartness from other girls, sometimes her naiveté’ (1992: 48). As Bárbara is not only the final girl but also the killer, she does not conform to this description altogether. Her interest in serial killing could be described as a masculine trait, and she is depicted in the first scene as being apart from other girls. However, sexual prowess is one of her weapons, and she could never be described as naive. The final girl is usually ‘the only character to be developed in full psychological detail’ (Clover, 1992: 44). Bárbara, then, is both killer and final girl, in an 319

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esperpentic twist on reality. The final shot of the film shows Bárbara walking away in the light of the full moon, carrying the now dead Tomás in her arms. Whether she will continue her killing spree or marry her plastic surgeon is uncertain. What is certain is that Sexykiller is a significant departure from traditional Spanish film and traditional slasher films, while at the same time being part of a new wave of Spanish fantastic films. Conclusion Sexykiller is a variation on the genre awakening of the 1990s, examining contemporary Spanish national and transnational culture through highly self-conscious and ironic works. While giving deference to American high-concept science fiction and horror films, it remains rooted in Spanish concepts of esperpento and transforms them into postmodern black comedy, parodying not only their influences but also contemporary Spanish culture. Rather than the modernist periphery, the postmodern adaptation positions itself at the crossroads of high and low culture. Sexykiller is a vibrant, frenetic film, representative of the current cycle of Spanish fantastic films that are self-reflexive genre hybrids born out of their originating culture and the influence of international fantastic cinema. By distorting both social realism and the coding of the slasher film, Sexykiller presents a representation of a post-national Spanish fantastic film, one in which a woman can kill, zombies can rise and the ex-centric voice can be heard. Note 1

The Miró Law was a cultural policy that gave advance monetary credit of up to 50 per cent to film productions (Evans, 2004). However, these films had to conform to what was considered proper to be shown as the face of Spain, and overwhelmingly were literary adaptations or social realist dramas and comedies.

References Bok, S. (1998). Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley). Cardona, R. and Zahareas, A. (1970). Visión del esperpento: Teoría y práctica en los esperpentos de Valle-Inclán (Madrid: Editorial Castalia). Castro de Paz, J. L. and Cerdán, J. (2011). Del sainete al esperpento: Relecturas del cine español de los años 50 (Madrid: Cátedra). Clover, C. (1992). Men Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (London: BFI). Constable, C. (2004). ‘Postmodernism and film’ in S. Connor (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 43–61. 320

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Evans, P.W. (2004). ‘Contemporary Spanish cinema’ in E. Ezra (ed.), European Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 250–64. Hutcheon, L. (1998). A Poetics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge). Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso). Kinder, M. (1993). Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). (1997). ‘Introduction’ in M. Kinder (ed.), Refiguring Spain: Cinema, Media, Representation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 1–32. O’Day, M. (2004). ‘Beauty in motion: gender, spectacle and action babe cinema’ in Y. Tasker (ed.), Action and Adventure Cinema (London: Routledge), 201–18. Sala, Á. (2010). Profanando el sueño de los muertos: La historia jamás contada del cine fantástico español (Pontevedra: Scifiworld). Santiáñez, N. (2004). ‘Great masters of Spanish modernism’ in D. T. Geis (ed.), Cambridge History of Spanish Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 479–99. Shipka, D. (2011). Perverse Titillation: The Exploitation Cinema of Italy, Spain and France, 1960–1980 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland). Smith, P. J. (2006). Spanish Visual Culture: Cinema, Television, Internet (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Tasker, Y. (1993). Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (London: Routledge). Tudor, A. (2003). ‘Genre’ in B. K. Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader III (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press), 3–11. Wheeler, D. (2012). ‘The representation of domestic violence in Spanish cinema’, Modern Language Review, 107.2: 438–500. Williams, L. (1996). ‘When a woman looks’ in B. K. Grant (ed.), The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press), 35–65. Wood, G. C. (1998). ‘Horror film’ in W. D. Gehring (ed.), Handbook of American Film Genres (New York: Greenwood Press), 211–28. Zahareas, A., Greenfield, S. and Cardona, R. (1968). Ramón Del Valle-Inclán: An Appraisal of his Life and Works (New York: Las Américas). Zamora Vicente, A. (1987). ‘Introduction’ in R. de Valle-Inclán, Luces de Bohemia (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe).

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Chapter 20 Flexing Generic Boundaries: Torrente, [REC] and Adolescent Cinema in Spain Agustín Rico-Albero

T

he 1990s and beginning of the twenty-first century saw a resurgence of genre cinema in Spain, with the release of popular commercial films that attracted large audiences (Heredero and Santamarina, 2002: 50–52). Many of these productions were targeted at adolescents, the group of spectators who best engender the ‘multiplex generation’ (Shary, 2002). The two box office hits that form the focus of this article – Santiago Segura’s Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley/Torrente, the Dumb Arm of the Law (1998) and Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s [REC] (2007) – both fit this category. Analysis of these two films will be framed in relation to the following questions: How can we define adolescent cinema in the Spanish context? What is the relationship between Spanish adolescent cinema and ‘quality’ cinema? How is violence presented, and what purpose does it serve in these films? Do adolescent audiences demand violence and, if so, of what kind? Join the Club: The Appeal of Torrente to the Teenage Market Set in a lower-middle-class district of Madrid, Torrente tells the story of José Luis Torrente (Santiago Segura), a racist, sexist and rude former policeman in his forties who espouses an extreme right-wing ideology. He lives with his elderly father, Felipe (Tony Leblanc). An actor well-known for his roles in the Spain’s sexy (and sexist) comedies of the 1960s and 1970s, the Torrente films introduced Leblanc to a new generation of viewers, and therefore arguably rescued him from oblivion. New neighbours move into Torrente’s apartment building and he befriends newcomer, Rafi (Javier Cámara), in order to get closer to his attractive sister, Amparito (Neus Asensi). Together, Torrente and Rafi, who wants to become a policeman instead of working in a fishmonger’s shop, form a Quixotic pairing. Using a genre-based approach, Thomas Shary has analysed a wide range of films that could be categorized as American youth films, in order to try to establish how adolescents have been represented. He demonstrates not only that these films constitute a genre (youth cinema) that is worthy of study in its own right, but also that they are culturally significant because they ‘question our evolving identities from youth to adulthood, while simultaneously shaping and maintaining those identities’ (2002: 11). He argues that youth cinema encompasses a variety of sub-genres: an approach that becomes problematic, as some films can be classified in multiple ways. Torrente is a good example of this, as it is best understood as a hybrid film shaped by a mixture of sub-genres (Jordan, 2003: 194).

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Building on the aforementioned academic discourses, I would like to propose a definition of youth cinema that not only includes films about teenagers or young adults, but also those films that are adolescent in terms of being ‘new products’, such as the popular movies emerging in Spain in the 1990s aimed primarily at young audiences, even though their principal protagonists may be older. This would include the so-called ‘new vulgarities’, a term used by Núria Triana-Toribio (2003: 151) to denote those comedies that target young Spanish audiences. She notes that these films self-consciously reject the ‘quality cinema’ model, which was promoted by Pilar Miró’s policies in the 1980s, and frustrated those who longed for Spain’s directors to align themselves with the European art cinema tradition (Triana-Toribio, 2003: 151–53). Critical of Spanish cinema histories that overlook these films in favour of ‘the cinematographic art’, Meritxell Esquirol and Josep Lluís Fecé (2001: 27–33) have accused members of the academic and film reviewing communities of failing to consider these films within the context of the entertainment industry. Thus, to start to readdress this imbalance it is important to assess why the Torrente and [REC] films were so successful with teenage cinemagoers. Carlos F. Heredero argues that such films appeal to young spectators ‘because they combine recognizable features of classic American genres (thrillers, high comedy, science fiction, horror/fantasy, etc.) with the codes, stereotypes, stars and tastes of specific Spanish filmic traditions (family drama, surrealism, black/grotesque comedy, social realism, etc)’ (1999: 23): what Segura, Torrente’s director and star, has described as ‘realismo sucio costumbrista’ (‘gritty or crude social realism’) (cited in Jordan and Allinson, 2005: 111). Triana-Toribio (2003: 155) points out that these films combine culturally-specific political incorrectness with the kind of excessive violence used by Quentin Tarantino in the 1990s. She suggests that the ‘new vulgarities’ owe much to ‘the new brutalism’: a cycle of films that includes Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), in which violence forms an integral part of the ‘spectacular show’ that Celestino Deleyto et al. (2002: 64) identified as an essential feature of what constitutes a good film, as far as young audiences are concerned. The Torrente series may have been given an 18 certificate, but it is unlikely that this restricted its reception by young audiences: the Spanish rating system is based on recommendation, meaning that younger spectators could watch it legally at the cinema or elsewhere. This relatively flexible rating system, which could be considered a reaction to censorship under Franco’s regime, differs from most European classification boards, which apply strict rules rather than recommendations. Indeed, it seems likely that the 18 certificate only served to make the film more attractive to adolescents, for whom watching films deemed suitable only for adult consumption is often considered a rite of passage. Also worth considering is what John Ellis calls the ‘narrative image’ (1982: 31): that is, those images that appear not only in the film, but also in the advertising posters and other marketing materials viewed by prospective spectators, which project an idea of what a film will be like. Constructing a narrative that exploits various persuasion strategies, these images are designed to attract specific demographics. The title of the first film, Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley, immediately establishes that rather than a sharp-witted detective, we are 326

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going to encounter ‘the dumb arm of the law’. This introduction is reinforced by Torrente’s scruffy appearance on the poster, the 1970s sunglasses and the poor marksmanship behind him, intimating visually that he is ‘wide of the mark’. The gun and bulletholes promise violence, but the garish shooting target together with the title imply that this will be filtered through a comedic lens. In addition to the posters, Segura marketed the film to Spanish teenagers through an intense promotional campaign on television. What is significant is the informal register that he employed to do this. Segura uses slang, a staple of the adolescent register, and appeals to his ‘amiguetes’ (‘mates’) to join him on his cinematic adventure. This kind of language arguably constitutes a direct sales pitch to potential young viewers in general, and ‘a young male spectatorship’ in particular (Lázaro-Reboll, 2005: 221–22). It also serves as an invitation to become part of a group of friends: a social act of identification that is particularly salient during adolescence (Head, 1997). It is evident that the fascination with the Torrente character is not that he represents the typical hero-policeman figure who, for example, saves humanity from evil in so many American films and TV shows. He is not even a more straightforward anti-hero in the tradition of Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry (Siegel, 1971) who, within a safe fictional space, provides a rebellious figure for adolescent audiences to identify with, as they separate their identities from their parents and other role models (Bostic et al., 2003: 1). Indeed, perhaps Torrente and his sidekick Rafi are better described as comic or even idiotic anti-heroes in the vein of Leslie Nielsen’s ‘dumb cop’ character, Lt Frank Drebin, in The Naked Gun films (Zucker, 1988, 1991; Segal, 1994). This coding of an authority figure, albeit in the form of a former policeman, seems to indulge adolescents’ often negative or ambivalent attitudes towards people in positions of power. The opening credits of Torrente show the protagonist driving through the streets of Madrid at night. A hand-held camera positioned behind him, combined with subjective point-ofview shots, encourage the spectator to adopt his perspective. The iconic police cruisers or envy-inducing cars of American cop films such as Bad Boys (Bay, 1995) are replaced, to comic effect, by a SEAT: a local brand commonly owned by lower-middle-class Spaniards.1 Close-ups of items within the car identify the protagonist as a nationalist, while the Francoist flag on the back of the vehicle points to his fascist tendencies, which are confirmed moments later. In just a few minutes the mise-en-scène works swiftly to connect Torrente with an ideology associated with political and physical violence. At the beginning of the film, Torrente does not seem to care about the presence of either the implicit or explicit violence on the streets, and is not seeking justice for the robberies and assaults that he witnesses. Rather, the language that he uses actually reinforces this violence: for example, his offensively casual comment, ‘Look at all those whores’, as he drives past two prostitutes, or his blatantly inappropriate remark, ‘Love, two lovebirds’, as he watches a man stab his girlfriend after an argument. Such examples establish Torrente as the exaggerated embodiment of the violence inherent in a model of masculinity that has been historically accepted, and even celebrated, in Spain. Typified by attitudes towards women that range from active aggression to the often equally damaging passive acceptance of violence towards 327

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them (in both the private and public spheres), this model had become politically incorrect by the 1990s (see Wheeler, 2012). The film’s violent climax, complete with a deadly explosion and shoot-out between a gang of drug dealers and Torrente’s friends, satisfies the spectator’s expectations of an excessive physical spectacle. Fast-paced editing and special effects intensify the suspense and emphasize the violence, which is made to seem more frenetic by the pressant (urgent) non-diegetic orchestral music. The battle seems to have come to a close when Torrente escapes with a briefcase filled with money. However, the action resumes when he decides to go back and rescue his sidekick, Rafi. Ironically evoking sequences from iconic action films by directors ranging from Sam Peckinpah to John Woo, Torrente is shown in slow motion as he starts shooting people, seemingly flying through the air as he does so. Just as the main drug dealer Farelli (Luis Gutiérrez) is about to kill Rafi, the Chinese girl that the duo had met earlier saves him by shooting ‘the baddie’ from behind. This prompts the lucky survivor to quote a sentence that has come to be associated with parodies of the Rambo films: ‘Dios mío, esto es un infierno!’ (‘My God, this is hell!’) – adding a humorous note to the end of the sequence. Much of the debate in the media surrounding the quality of the film has stemmed from how it represents psychological and physical violence. Critics have tended to take one of two positions, exemplified by a double review published in Fotogramas magazine by the prestigious film commentators Jordi Costa and Nuria Vidal. Costa praised the film, describing it as an ‘authentic apotheosis of politically incorrect humour […] in which punching makes us laugh’ (1998: 11); a return to the quintessentially Spanish comedies of the kind scripted by Azcona. By contrast, Vidal criticizes the representation of violence in the film, and expresses further discomfort at the negative portrayal of disabled characters. Comparing Torrente to other films by American and Spanish directors, she points out that ‘violence by itself is not bad, it depends on how you use it, Tarantino exaggerates it and takes it into the comic realm […] Azcona, alongside Berlanga, Ferreri or García Sánchez, convert violence into the grotesque’ (1998: 11). Justifying her negative evaluation, Vidal argues that although she accepts the richness of popular or trash culture – the category to which she assigns the film – she thinks that Segura’s use of violence is reactionary, as he fails to use irony, humour, cynicism or criticism to ‘establish a distance between images [of violence] and the spectator’ (1998: 11). I agree with Vidal that there is a danger that this film may encourage audience members, especially younger ones, to adopt or identify with the violence of the protagonist’s racist and sexist comments. It is also possible that Segura’s use of parody and humorous tone, which conditions how the film is received, moderates the excesses of violence, making it seem more benign. As Christopher Tookey (1992) has argued, humour found in action films may provide relief in tense scenes. Comedy is located in the gap between the socially expected active aversion to the violence that Torrente sees around him, and his actual apathetic reaction. Further humour is derived from the juxtaposition of images of the Madrid underworld, with a soundtrack that changes from the initial and seemingly more appropriate suspense 328

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music, to a popular Spanish song performed by El Fary.2 In Torrente, humour in the form of parody and irony is combined with different genres (cop drama and thriller), spectacular features, special effects and violence. All these elements work together to create a film that appeals to adolescents. The controversy caused by this polarized reception of the film helped to publicize it, and therefore it is likely that it had a positive effect on viewing figures. [REC]: Exportable Hybrid Horror for a New Generation [REC], another box office success that did not conform to Miró’s notion of ‘good’ films, helped to keep the horror genre alive in Spanish cinema, with proof of its popularity being the continued commercial viability of the sequels [REC]2 (Balagueró and Plaza, 2009) and [REC]3 Génesis (Plaza, 2012). In his analysis of Spanish horror cinema trends, Andrew Willis argues that Jaume Balagueró is a good example of current Spanish directors who make horror films that combine generic unity and realism. He considers another of Balagueró’s films, Los sin nombre/The Nameless (1999), to be an effective illustration of psychological terror with a very sophisticated mise-en-scène. Willis observes that ‘if the audience is laughing and joking too much, they are not going to be unnerved or disturbed by the images in front of them’ (2004: 246). [REC] is a very different film from Los sin nombre, as it is closer to more graphic horror films and sub-genres such as the zombie film. Nevertheless, certain cinematic codes of realism are present in it, and it mobilizes an expressive mode of address that brings the horror and violence to the first person: in other words, into the spectators’ world. In recent decades, the importance of genre films that were box office hits has been often downplayed by scholars and critics alike (see Chapter 17). However, the success of titles such as Los otros/The Others (Amenábar, 2001) and El espinazo del Diablo/The Devil’s Backbone (del Toro, 2001) has persuaded some ‘to address their prejudices and find a way of discussing recent horror films’ (Willis, 2004: 248). [REC] – which enjoyed critical success (Best Director, Best Actress, audience and critics’ awards at the prestigious Sitges Film Festival, as well as other accolades at national and international festivals), and attracted almost a million viewers within three weeks of its release – certainly warrants close analysis. Horror films are perhaps the Spanish film industry’s most exportable product. The [REC] series has inspired Hollywood remakes already in the form of Quarantine (Dowdle, 2008) and Quarantine 2 (Pogue, 2011). [REC] tells the story of a reporter, Ángela (Manuela Velasco), the presenter of While You’re Asleep, a television documentary about the nocturnal activities of a group of firemen in Barcelona. The spectator sees everything from the cameraman Pablo’s (Pablo Rosso) perspective, including the overlaid recording display complete with the red ‘REC’ (recording) symbol that gives the film its title. Nights are normally monotonous for the firemen, with pet rescues or people trapped in lifts. We watch them arrive at a typical apartment block in central Barcelona, where an old woman seems to be trapped and shouting in alarm. However, after twelve minutes of apparent normality, the suspense and horror start when 329

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she suddenly bites a policeman, ripping half of his face off. This extremely violent incident prompts the health authorities to quarantine the building, leaving the film crew, fire crew, police and residents confined within a claustrophobic environment. It is useful to analyse the opening sequence of [REC], in which Ángela makes her entrance looking directly at the camera, as it establishes the direct perspective and reporting format used throughout the film. Furthermore, by using meta-linguistic devices (fiction within fiction) the directors seem to be reflecting, with irony, on the reality shows which have dominated Spanish television screens since the late 1990s. Paco Plaza notes that he and codirector Balagueró fantasized about changing ‘the mechanisms of horror cinema’ (cited in Yáñez Murillo, 2007: 152), and that using the formats and visual language usually associated with television was part of their attempt to rework the genre. He adds that ‘previously, good cinema influenced television programmes, but now we are in a new age in which television influences the evolution of cinema’ (cited in 2007: 152). Hence, the generic, stylistic and narrative features associated with reality television shows are intertwined with elements that firmly belong to the horror film tradition. These elements work together to shape representations of violence in the film, and to influence how it is received. In [REC], all of the residents in the apartment block start out as innocent victims. However, as the narrative progresses they turn into the aggressors in the film, as they are successively bitten and infected by other characters. The fact that these victims/aggressors are ordinary people who live in a domestic context that is very familiar to Spanish audiences lends greater verisimilitude to the story and characters. Some scenes are reminiscent of Álex de la Iglesia’s well-known comedy thriller-horror film, La comunidad/Commonwealth (2000), in which the inhabitants of another Madrid apartment block also face a conflict with macabre consequences. An effective use of mise-en-scène and camerawork intensify the impact of one of the most violent and shocking sequences in [REC], which occurs just after the health officer has given the residents a possible explanation for the events unfolding around them. He confesses that a vet had warned the health authorities about a dog in his clinic which had become very aggressive, and seemed to be infected by a strange illness. The obligatory registration microchip worn by the dog had led them to this building and prompted their decision to quarantine it. Ángela interrupts the health officer when she realizes that the dog belongs to the little girl in the group, Jennifer (Claudia Silva). The image shifts quickly to a mediumlong shot of the little girl and her mother, as the mother tells the group that her daughter just has a sore throat. Using a tracking shot, Pablo trails the health officer as he approaches the mother. While he tries to calm the woman down, a close-up of the child shows her moving towards her mother as if to kiss her, an expectation that is brutally contradicted when Jennifer savagely bites off part of her mother’s face instead. Although acutely aware of this extremely violent act, the spectator does not witness it directly; rather, the screams and intense red make-up on the mother’s face indicate this disturbing action. The fact that it is a seemingly sweet and innocent child who commits this violent act makes the incident more distressing, while also alluding to the tradition of demonic children in cult classics such 330

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as The Omen (Donner, 1976) or the Spanish ¿Quién puede matar un niño?/Who Can Kill a Child? (Ibáñez Serrador) released in the same year. The many violent scenes in [REC] are contrasted with others from which violence is temporarily absent. Not only do the latter have a narrative function, in that they provide information that adds human depth to the situation, they also provide the spectator with a brief respite from the continuous violence present elsewhere. Examples include the scenes in which Ángela interviews some of the neighbours. Balagueró and Plaza use a documentary format to interview all the people affected by this brutally disturbing chain of events, with Ángela’s voice asking the questions off-screen. Affirming the severity of the physical violence, Guillem (Carlos Vicente), the medical assistant, tells her (and thus the spectators) that he has never seen anything like this, and that the victims who have been bitten are seriously injured. Although there is no violence here, the spectator sees its consequences, as the cameraman shows a close-up of the victims’ head and neck injuries. Guillem expresses the overwhelming impotence and sense of imprisonment felt by the quarantined neighbours. Looking directly at the camera, and hence the spectators, he says: ‘I can’t do anything else.’ The use of these kinds of long and real-time shots typical in news reporting, together with hand-held camerawork and diegetic sound, visually mimic documentary footage shot on the run, thereby emphasizing the verisimilitude of the story and the characters’ experiences. Used consistently throughout the film, these stylistic techniques contribute to the arousal that spectators normally demand of this kind of film (Potter, 2003: 128); stimulation that is linked inextricably with violence. According to Plaza, this process is illustrated by the fact that: We wanted the camera to be another character and for the action to flow freely. With Jaume, we explained the initial situation, then we gave a few basic instructions to the actors and we would place the camera in the action. The final result was unpredictable and we were looking for that freshness. Balagueró says that, in a situation like that, the challenge was not letting the improvisations affect the story. We had to make an effort to control the chaos. (cited in Yáñez Murillo, 2007: 152) Plaza also points out that it is not coincidental that most of the actors were unknown: ‘we did not want the spectator to be distracted by a familiar face’ (cited in Yáñez Murillo, 2007: 152). The only well-known actor among the cast was Manuela Velasco: a choice that echoes real life, as Velasco works as a presenter on one of Spain’s private television channels. Ángela is the most important character, as she leads the spectators from the very light scenes at the beginning, where we seem to watch a genuine yet benign television documentary, to the unrelenting laughter of innocent victims through to the very end. Rather than being rescued at the last moment, like many classic horror film heroines, Ángela becomes just another victim of the situation in the final scene. This dénouement could be read as a critical commentary on an increasingly aggressive form of television reporting, 331

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in which everything needs to be taped and there are no limits. At the very beginning of the gory finale, Ángela makes it very clear to the cameraman that he should film everything: ‘Pablo, tape everything, for fuck’s sake!’ Furthermore, she has confrontations throughout the film with a policeman who keeps asking them to stop recording. Her response to him is clear: ‘We have to tape everything, we have come here for this, we need to tell everybody what is happening.’ Her words reinforce the attitude embodied by this character, who thinks that there should be no limits to showing violence as long as it is ostensibly used to inform the public. The film questions these limits (or lack thereof) in the Spanish media: an issue that ironically is portrayed in the film through gore and spectacular violence. As though reinforcing the directors’ strategy, the sentence ‘Pablo, tape everything, for fuck’s sake!’ appears when you enter the film’s official web page. Conclusion: the Coming of Age of Adolescent Cinema in Spain In this chapter, the discussion of these two films has demonstrated that they are examples of what has been called ‘adolescent films’ due to the age of their target audience. However, as a genre or demographic sub-genre, they also represent what I would term an adolescent phase in the recent development of the Spanish film industry. They form part of the re-emergence in the 1990s of commercially successful genres that distance themselves from so-called ‘quality films’. I contend that spectacular violence is an essential element of youth cinema, and that the practice of combining this aspect with popular genre conventions warrants further investigation. I have demonstrated that depictions of violence in its multiple forms are framed or conditioned by genre, narrative elements, stylistic features and finally by adolescent audiences who seem to demand violence. During an actual screening of [REC] at the Sitges International Film Festival, an infrared camera was used to film a video showing the public’s reaction to the scenes of horror (laughing, shouting, jumping off or out of their seats). Interestingly, these images have been used, in turn, to attract viewers, as they form part of promotional and marketing materials for this film on YouTube. As though imitating the unusual freedom of camera movement in the film itself, the video turns the camera around 180 degrees, giving actual or prospective spectators the voyeuristic pleasure of watching themselves. It is a marketing ploy that self-consciously plays on the film’s central theme of giving the audience access to everything, and an apt strategy for the curious teenager eager to watch without limits. Notably, the official websites for the most recent parts of the saga, [REC]2 and [REC]3, offer links to blogs and to the films’ official Twitter and Facebook pages, where thousands of fans show their support. This is a good example of how social networks and blogs – virtual environments predominantly used by adolescents – are becoming key to promotion of this type of film. The first Torrente film made an indelible mark on the history of Spanish cinema, and has spawned a lucrative franchise for Segura in the form of Torrente 2: Misión en Marbella/ 332

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Torrente 2: Mission in Marbella (2001), Torrente 3: El protector/Torrente 3: The Protector (2005) and the latest instalment, Torrente 4: Crisis Letal/Torrente 4: Lethal Crisis (2011). Segura has created films that combine elements of comedy with the commercial ingredient of violence, itself mitigated through humour, in order to entertain while parodying cultural traditions and stereotypical characterizations. He also borrows features from other popular cinematic and literary traditions, especially the esperpento.3 Viewers connected with [REC] because it intelligently mixed horror, a genre that relies on a recognizable narrative formula, with stylistic techniques familiar to television viewers. This integration of disparate yet familiar formal features and conventions to portray the spectacle of violence results in a film that appeals to young audiences. Although irony is present, the film’s representations of violence seem designed to arouse and entertain, rather than to criticize or educate. As explored by Deleyto et al. (2002), the teenage audiences who sustain these kinds of films expect violence, thereby creating a commercial demand that has helped to fuel the renaissance of genre cinema. It will be interesting to see whether this trend persists, as youth cinema continues to develop in Spain. Notes 1

2 3

SEAT, the state-owned manufacturer, dominated the private car market in Spain during the 1960s to the extent that it came to characterize that period. This association has been recently explored in Óscar Aibar’s humorous biopic, El gran Vázquez/The Great Vazquez (2010), which follows the exploits of a flamboyant comic book illustrator, also played by Segura, in 1960s Barcelona. Famous for singing coplas (light, sentimental ballads) the Spanish singer José Luis Cantero, known as El Fary, composed ‘Apatrullando la ciudad’ (‘Patrolling the City’) as the signature tune for the Torrente series. Esperpento is a literary genre created by the novelist, playwright and poet Ramón del Valle-Inclán. A form of black humour, ‘esperpento is the grotesque, the ridiculous, the absurd’ (Hopewell, 1986: 60) (see Chapter 19 in this volume).

References Bostic, J., Schlozman, S., Pataki, C., Ristuccia, C., Beresin, E. and Martin, A. (2003). ‘From Alice Cooper to Marilyn Manson: the significance of adolescent antiheroes’, Academic Psychiatry, 27.1: 54–62. Costa, J. (1998). ‘Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley’, Fotogramas, 1854: 11. Deleyto, C., Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy, C., García Mainar, L. M., Luzón, V., Stacconi, M., Tarancón, J. A. and Azcona, M. D. M. (2002). ‘Forget your troubles and be happy: una aproximación etnográfica a la ideología del entretenimiento en el cine estadounidense contemporáneo’, Atlantis, 24: 59–72. 333

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Ellis, J. (1982). Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Esquirol, M. and Fecé, J. L. (2001). ‘Un freak en el parque de atracciones: Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley’, Archivos de la Filmoteca, 39: 27–39. Head, J. (1997). Working with Adolescents: Constructing Identity (London: Falmer Press). Heredero, C. F. (1999). 20 nuevos directores del cine español (Madrid: Alianza Editorial). Heredero, C. F. and Santamarina, A. (eds.) (2002). Semillas del futuro: cine español 1990–2001 (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal España Nuevo Milenio). Hopewell, J. (1986). Out of the Past: Spanish Cinema after Franco (London: BFI). Jordan, B. (2003). ‘Spain’s “new cinema” of the 1990s: Santiago Segura and the Torrente phenomenon’, New Cinemas, 1.3: 191–207. Jordan, B. and Allinson, M. (2005). Spanish Cinema: A Student’s Guide (London: Hodder Arnold). Lázaro-Reboll, A. (2005). ‘Torrente: El brazo tonto de la ley/Torrente 2: Misión en Marbella’ in A. Mira (ed.), The Cinema of Spain and Portugal (London: Wallflower), 219–28. Potter, W. J. (2003). The 11 Myths of Media Violence (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications). Shary, T. (2002). Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press). Tookey, C. (1992). ‘The arts: promised land for pyromaniacs; Christopher Tookey on Lethal Weapon 3, The News Boys and other releases’, Daily Telegraph, 16 August: 19. Triana-Toribio, N. (2003). Spanish National Cinema (London: Routledge). Vidal, N. (1998). ‘Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley’, Fotogramas, 1854: 11. Wheeler, D. (2012). ‘The representation of domestic violence in Spanish cinema’, Modern Language Review, 107.2: 438–500. Willis, A. (2004). ‘From the margins to the mainstream: trends in recent Spanish horror cinema’ in A. Lázaro-Reboll and A. Willis (eds.), Spanish Popular Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 237–49. Yáñez Murillo, M. (2007). ‘[REC]’, Fotogramas, 1969: 152.

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Chapter 21 The Torrente Tetralogy: A Homegrown Saga Lidia Merás

I

n 1998, a debutant – although not exactly unknown – writer-director released the film, of which he is also the star, that was to be the first part of the most lucrative film franchise in the history of Spanish cinema. Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley/Torrente, the Dumb Arm of the Law (Segura, 1998) and its sequels – Torrente 2: misión en Marbella/Torrente 2: Mission in Marbella (2001), Torrente 3: el protector/Torrente 3: the Protector (2005) and Torrente 4: crisis letal/Torrente 4: Lethal Crisis (2011) – invite reflections on how popular film with a markedly national flavour can compete, from a commercial standpoint, with the Hollywood strategy of aiming its productions at a globalized audience. The tetralogy not only obtained a significant return on investment, but also was more profitable than the US blockbusters with which it has competed. The adventures of José Luis Torrente, a corrupt, sexist and right-wing former police officer, have connected with a wide audience and changed promotional strategies, offering a model of popular cinema that is both successful and very unusual within the context of European film. In a period of profound changes in the industry, legislation and forms of audio-visual consumption, the unprecedented success of these films is an indication of their chameleon-like flexibility over a period of more than a decade. In a particularly buoyant year in terms of consumption in the Spanish market, Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley was the most watched film of the year in Spain with 3,010,664 viewers and box office receipts of almost €11 million. In 2001, Torrente 2: misión en Marbella, became the highest-earning Spanish film of all time. The final box office receipts totalled over €22 million, double the earnings of the first film. At a time when Internet downloads were beginning to have a marked effect on cinema attendance, Torrente 3: el protector earned €8.8 million; in its opening weekend it was seen by more people at the domestic box office than Star Wars: Episode III. Revenge of the Sith (Lucas, 2005). Lastly, the fourth entry in the saga, Torrente 4: crisis letal (2011), took more than €18 million and became Spain’s most popular film that year in terms of audience figures. The rights have been sold for a Hollywood version of Torrente which, it appears, is to star Sacha Baron Cohen (creator of the irreverent characters, Borat and Ali G) and is set to be filmed in Spain – a very rare occurrence for an American adaptation. These films have not only caught the attention of film critics: they have also been debated in the national press (see for example, Muñoz Molina, 2001) and studied by academics, helping to turn the saga into a filmic ‘phenomenon’ (Jordan, 2003). In 2001, Meritxell Esquirol and Josep Lluís Fecé published the first article to study the ‘intertextual dimension’

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(2001: 28) and sociological dimension of the series’ debut film. This chapter is very much indebted to that study and its sequel (Fecé, 2005), published a few months after the opening of the second film. In the former, they placed emphasis on reception alongside Santiago Segura’s ability to offer a specific and profitable demographic – the youth market – exactly what they wanted at a time when patterns of cultural consumption were in a state of flux. In this chapter, I will describe how the series’ different films adapted to the industrial context within which they emerged, their intertextual building blocks, as well as the very specific ‘universe’ created by Torrente. This analysis will pave the way for a discussion of the strategies that might be gleaned from this profitable example and applied more generally to mainstream Spanish cinema. Torrente 1 and 2: Two Anomalous Blockbusters in the Context of an Industry Boom Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley, one of the seven feature films programmed for the Critics’ Week of the 51st Cannes Festival, was released amid a euphoric atmosphere in the Spanish film industry: the period from 1994–2001 was one when Spanish cinema-goers seemed to have become reconciled to national films, attending in numbers not seen for a decade. The major increase in Spanish film’s market share was largely due to the first two Torrentes. Andrés Vicente Gómez, the producer of both films, proudly proposed the first as an example to follow: ‘This film should be a model (not the only one) for directors and producers who are starting out’ (cited in Belinchón and Barriuso, 1999: 6). Nonetheless, the situation was rather less positive than it seemed, for the market share was monopolised by Torrente and very few other films (Álvarez Mozoncillo, 2002; Ansola González, 2003: 66; Pena, 2001: 41). The second half of the 1990s was an interesting period for Spanish cinema due to the release of a large number of debut works, of which Torrente is paradigmatic (see Heredero and Santamarina, 2002). Among these new film-makers, we find Alejandro Amenábar, Álex de la Iglesia and Segura, all ‘heirs to the spectacular narrative tradition of US cinema, not at all in the tradition of Spanish and/or European independent film’ (Pujol Ozonas, 2010: 227). Its release took place a year after another very successful film, Airbag (Bajo Ulloa, 1997): a road movie whose crude sense of humour, indiscriminate use of cameos and mixing of genres make it Torrente’s clearest precedent. Airbag was the precursor to a number of films made by a new generation of directors less disposed to literary adaptations – such as those fostered by the Miró Law in the 1980s – and more interested in attracting a mass audience to cinemas. The references to mainstream Hollywood cinema are made explicit, starting with the title, which alludes to the film Cobra (Cosmatos, 1986) – a title translated into Spanish as Cobra, el brazo fuerte de la ley. Starring a young Sylvester Stallone, it features a police officer who has problems complying with the demands of authority and is accustomed to exceeding his official powers in the use of violence. The trailer for the first Torrente emphasized the connection between the two films and others in the action genre by making the reference 338

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explicit and proposing a Spanish-style alternative: (‘It’s not Sylvester Stallone. It’s not Steven Seagal. It’s … Santiago Segura’). The slogan is doubly interesting because it supports the creation of a vernacular star system, establishing the assimilation of the obese character of Torrente and the man who created and plays him: Segura. Similarly, Hollywood had united certain muscular actors (such as Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal) with characters from action films in the 1980s and early 1990s (Tasker, 1993: 56). In other words, an analogous link is established based on the Segura–Torrente pairing, except in this case the association is carried out for a humorous purpose, making an ironic comment on the anatomical comparisons implied in the references to other stars. This mechanism is crucial for an understanding of the complex relationship between the Torrente series and Hollywood entertainment industry strategies. Esquirol and Fecé (2001) proposed that Torrente 1 was created as a blockbuster but, apart from Segura’s interest in defining the target audience and how he connects with its tastes, they do not examine this is in any detail. However, it is possible, and indeed desirable, to do so. The Torrente films even could be considered ‘high concept’ (Wyatt, 1994), a term used to describe feature films aimed at a mass audience with the following criteria: a star distinguished by his exaggerated physique; continuous allusions to films and television programmes; ironic distance; a mixing of genres; and promotion involving an intense marketing campaign – these criteria are explicitly fulfilled by the Torrente films. If Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley was a production with a mid-size budget for the late1990s, the other films showed a significant increase in this regard. Torrente 1 cost no more than €2 million, while about €10 million was spent on the making of Torrente 4: crisis letal (Belinchón, 2010). In order to attract the largest possible audience, the blockbuster attempts to include other forms of popular entertainment (comics, popular music, the television star system). Segura uses links with other media in a completely non-hierarchical manner, as shown by a list that he published in Academia just after the making of Torrente 2: misión en Marbella (Segura, 2001: 9). The director has no qualms about mixing high and low culture into a very particular concoction that includes literary references to Golden Age Spanish literature (specifically the picaresque genre) and directors, actors, films and programmes from the United States (Martin Scorsese, Groucho Marx, Saturday Night Live) and Spain (Luis García Berlanga, José Luis López Vázquez, Torrente 1). Included here are two concurrent film styles of the late Francoist period: landismo and destape.1 Related to this, Segura mentions Benny Hill and the epitome of sexist advertising in 1960s Spain, the cognac Soberano, whose famous slogan was ‘Es cosa de hombres’ (‘It’s a man’s thing’), which work as anachronistic reference points that warn us about what awaits us when we attend the screening of his new film. Worth separate comment is his reference to comics and their frequent scatological humour: characters such as the ones created by French comic artist Philippe Vuillemin and two classic Spanish publications, El Jueves and El Vívora, have informed his directorial work. Reference is made to some of his favourite authors (Ivà, Francisco Ibáñez) and characters from their comic strips, for example Martínez el Facha, whose extreme rightwing views mean that a link to José Luis Torrente requires no explanation. Segura singles 339

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out characters who share Torrente’s trade (detectives, secret agents) and are resolutely antiheroic. In fact, those he mentions are characterized as clumsy individuals who are both oblivious and unattractive, and in the comedy genre (Mort & Phil; Anacleto, agente secreto). Among all those references, one cultural medium nonetheless predominates: television. Carlos Losilla, one of Segura’s harshest critics, is right when he states it is the inspiration for many of these allusions: I am sure that Segura knows most of this tradition only through television, as has happened with most of his generation, including Álex de la Iglesia, although that makes his discourse even more coherent; understood as a great liquidiser of culture, as a magic container in which the ‘classics’ of Spanish cinema could rub shoulders with variety shows and quiz programmes, television becomes the aesthetic beacon for Segura and his followers. (1999: 68) I will not go into any more detail on the importance of television and its use as a medium for advertising these films, since other authors have already drawn attention to this.2 Suffice to say, in accordance with the strategy of creating a brand, Segura – inextricably linked with the Torrente character – is exploited through a local star system. However, it is important to point out the use of an excellent (and cheap) publicity resource about which little has been spoken: the cameo. As an effective way of building an audience – different from more conventional techniques for attracting viewers – the cameos in these films are not merely the exploitation of the celebrity in their state of celebrity. First, there are ‘prestige’ cameos (in which, for example, Oliver Stone participates in Torrente 3: el protector, playing a Manchester United fan) and, on another level, actors or figures known to the Spanish public (for example, Gabino Diego and Jorge Sanz as muggers in the first of the films). We also could include in this category actors from past eras of Spanish film, including Tony Leblanc, Juanito Navarro and the great José Luis López Vázquez – all comedians introduced in order that an older audience can recognize through them Torrente’s inheritance of the españolada.3 However, a striking feature is the repeated presence of two very famous television presenters who also represent the much praised ‘intelligent humour’ that is a clear contrast to Segura’s gross style: Andreu Buenafuente and José Miguel Monzón Navarro, better known as El Gran Wyoming. Their appearance in each of the films can be understood as a double advertising strategy. They act as a lure for the film and their participation is the perfect excuse to invite the showman Segura onto their programmes to publicize his next release. Second, Segura does not just use comedians with their own television programmes. He employs another, very particular, kind of celebrity that generally is linked to the same medium (Carmena Barrachina, 2006: 85). As Antonio Weinrichter (2011) has said in reference to the cameo technique used in the last film, ‘everyone wants to appear, to be someone’. Consequently, when Torrente 4: crisis letal received criticism from fans for the 340

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inclusion of Belén Esteban – a staple in glossy magazines whose only apparent merit is being a single mother by a famous bullfighter – in order to bring tabloid television viewers to the cinema, Segura defended himself, stating: In a film that tries in each part to satirise, parody and ridicule some of the tastes and habits of sectors of Spanish society, we shouldn’t be surprised to see icons of popular culture and media beasts. I think they are presences who, because of their place in the film and the role they play there, will delight their fans and detractors alike. (Segura, 2011) However strange it may seem, viewers had a more negative reaction to the inclusion of Esteban in Torrente 4: crisis letal than to another regular in the tabloid press, Francisco Franco’s granddaughter, Carmen Martínez-Bordiú, who appears briefly, playing herself.4 Nevertheless, her presence is logical in the context of the film series, since she is a figure who is fully incorporated into the national television panorama. One of her appearances in this medium had been in a series of ¡Mira quién baila!/Look Who’s Dancing! (Univision, 2005), an adaptation of the British television show Strictly Come Dancing, a contest in which a group of celebrities display their recently acquired skills in different ballroom dancing styles. In 2006, Javier Pérez de Albéniz expressed in the newspaper El Mundo his consternation, when faced with the spectacle offered by the dictator’s descendent: Rhythmic sequences and genome apart, the hiring of Carmen Martínez-Bordiú for a Spanish public television programme during a Socialist government has its problematic side. If for no other reason than they could have spent the money, our money, on other things, on other people, on other genetic sequences. (Pérez de Albéniz, 2006) Martínez-Bordiú’s cameo thereby fulfils a function similar to that of the other television ‘freaks’ that appeal so much to Segura. Although it is possible that her presence implies a certain recognition of her popularity – the right to appear as a celebrity – it emphasizes the fact that the public enjoys seeing a public figure who has no qualms about making a fool of herself. Furthermore, it is important to consider the possibility that here, Segura applies a kind of ‘rescue operation’ similar to that undertaken with some of the comedians linked to popular film of the late Franco period. This operation – whose most outstanding case is that of Tony Leblanc – is carried out from a nostalgic point of view. Martínez-Bordiú’s complex-free exhibitionism, politically and morally problematic as it may be, causes a hilarity equivalent to that of the grotesque José Luis Torrente, ignorant of the fact that her behaviour could make her the butt of the joke. To summarize, the incorporation of prominent media figures – in which both recognized professionals (Real Madrid footballers, actors and singers), and social climbers with ephemeral fame are combined indiscriminately – forms part of a deliberate postmodern 341

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attitude. The idea is for the viewer to discover the optimum number of known faces as the film progresses and make the intended link, which in itself is a knowing wink, between the real celebrities and the characters that they play. The cameo offers the chance to laugh at Spanish society and its somewhat underwhelming ‘heroes’ through an interrogation of its specific media star system. In this way, the profusion of cameo roles is established as one of the main attractions of these films, and is an effective resource for attracting viewers who wish to see their favourite personalities once again. Like all successful blockbuster products, the Torrente saga has its own merchandising: in addition to the ubiquitous DVDs and soundtracks, there are a handful of video games, a model of a slot machine and a small plastic figure that pays homage to Torrente’s idol, El Fary. Notwithstanding these examples, there are relatively few merchandising commodities in the Torrente orbit; when they do exist, they tend to be from very different sectors and are unconnected. In other words, these products are not the result of a highly professional distribution and sales plan of the kind that would be desirable for a blockbuster. Their small profits can be attributed to the fact there is not much of a market in Spain (Segura, 2011b). However, it is possible to suggest the inexperience of the Spanish film industry in relation to these kinds of arrangements as another probable cause (Torrejón, 2009: 46). In any case, although the video game Torrente, El juego (Virtual Toys, 2001) did not sell as well as expected, the results were not catastrophic either, given that four video games that recreate the urban spaces of Madrid and Marbella, focusing on their darker aspects (crime, prostitution) were released in total. Specifically, Torrente 3 is an unashamed imitation of the famous and controversial Grand Theft Auto (BMG Interactive, 1997) in which the player has to steal cars, run down pedestrians and even kill them with impunity (Iraola, 2005). The mission in both games is similar, but in Torrente 3 the focus is not on carrying out violent acts – the source of much of the controversy surrounding Grand Theft Auto – as the player is instead invited to imitate the inappropriate conduct of its protagonist in pre-established categories such as ‘sex’, ‘disgusting stuff ’ or ‘Atlético Madrid fan’, attending brothels, urinating outside a toilet or stealing scarves from footballing adversaries. Therefore, both games share the idea of using a kind of avatar or projection of the player through which they can commit the most reprehensible acts in a realistic environment. The difference is that the behavioural acts of the Spanish version of the video game are aimed at maintaining a certain degree of ‘Torrentism’, or political incorrectness. Segura provides the voice for his anti-hero’s speech which encourages or discourages the player according to their actions, in the way that the character of Torrente encourages (or more often, criticizes) his male associate throughout the film series. In their analysis of post-classical theory, Elsaesser and Buckland claim that an axiomatic characteristic of the blockbuster is its ability to provide entertainment for disparate groups, ‘women, Afroamericans, international audiences’ (2002: 79). Formulated in this way, Torrente and its successors are the very antithesis of this model for a number of reasons. First, they are comedies that are not appropriate for all spectators (or sensibilities); second, they make numerous vernacular references, that is to say they were not made for international release; 342

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finally, they are films originally targeted at an audience that is Spanish, male and adolescent (in that order) (see Chapter 20). At the beginning of this analysis, reference was made to the mixture of genres with proven popular success as a usual resource of the blockbuster. However, if we had to limit ourselves to a single genre to describe the Torrente films, it would certainly be comedy, the genre most difficult to export.5 Furthermore, Torrente bases its humour on unashamed misogyny, xenophobia and homophobia, which could offend those viewers who do not participate in the tacit agreement established between the public and the films’ incorrigible protagonist. Without this complicity with the viewer, and lacking a cathartic feeling when faced with the character’s excesses, the humour disappears. This type of black comedy developed throughout is ‘based on a gross caricature of Spain that dodges any kind of apology or moderation’ (Carmena Barrachina, 2006: 85). Foreign viewers unfamiliar with Spanish culture will have difficulties understanding many of the jokes. Therefore, there is a localist content that impedes the appeal to an international audience: this is the reason for their disappointing results abroad. The films were not even successful in Latin America, where the cultural ties are much closer than in other territories and the language barrier should not be an insurmountable obstacle. Although some authors deny that Torrente is a modernday Spanish costumbrista/situation comedy (Carmena Barrachina, 2006: 87; Esquirol and Fecé, 2001: 28), if the Hollywood film references were, as they claim, more important than their domestic counterparts, then surely the saga would be exportable. Esquirol and Fecé base their arguments on the fact that this kind of cinema is aimed at a young, ‘freak’ public; yet, if that were the case, it could have satisfied expectations in other countries where these ‘subcultures’ (to use their own word) also exist. On the contrary, all of the indications appear to suggest that the success of Torrente resides in its ability to transcend this original target demographic. Consolidation of a Franchise in Uncertain Times After the illusory boom of 1994–2001, when Spanish cinema seemed to have won back its audiences, the beginning of the new millennium has shown that the national film industry is facing a serious crisis. With a fall in audience figures of more than 30 per cent in the last decade, the situation is critical. In 2010, there were 11.7 per cent fewer cinema-goers than the previous year (Belinchón and García, 2012) and only the release in 2011 of Torrente 4: crisis letal prevented a further reduction in audience figures. Although there are many factors to take into consideration when it comes to apportioning blame for this crisis, mass downloading via Megaupload – dismantled in 2012 – μTorrent and other similar systems had changed the panorama radically. In this regard, the speech by Álex de la Iglesia as Chair of the Academy of Cinematographic Arts at the 2011 Goya Awards gala was symptomatic of the situation’s gravity (de la Iglesia, 2011). In this and other public statements made when the terms of the so-called Ley de cine/Cinema Law (2007) 343

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were still being debated, de la Iglesia came out in favour of dialogue instead of what might have been expected, blindly supporting the general desire in the film trade to block all free access to audio-visual content subject to copyright and circulating on the Internet. The law, renamed the Sinde Law/Ley Sinde (2011), in reference to the Minister of Culture at the time, Ángeles González-Sinde, proposed the closure of pages linking to content, with the aim of protecting royalties. De la Iglesia’s empathy towards some of the positions of the so-called ‘pirates’ – Internet users who download films for free – annoyed many of his colleagues, and would precipitate his resignation shortly afterwards. The speech is interesting because, unlike the opinion of many around him, de la Iglesia proposed that the citizens accused by his colleagues of being the cause of all the evils afflicting the industry were the lost audience that those in the film industry had to work to recover. De la Iglesia used the Goya ceremony to promote a collective sense of self-criticism among his colleagues, and encouraged them to create alternatives to a business model that had been made obsolete by the arrival of the Internet. In fact, although this is not the only factor in falling audiences, the Internet’s appearance has been a major influence on forms of audio-visual consumption. Furthermore, it has affected all kinds of viewers, and not only those with ‘popular’ tastes. Cinephiles have new ways to see films. The many festivals which had appeared all over Spain in recent years – at least until the economic crisis curtailed their numbers – were joined by a number of companies such as Mubi and Filmin among others which offer films, generally independent productions or new films with major ambitions, over the Internet. Curiously, these options – perhaps because of their minority appeal and, for now, low profitability –, are hardly considered a threat by the industry as a whole. What continues to be thought of as dangerous is that a large number of cinema-goers have stopped attending, and this process has occurred with uncommon speed. I would suggest that the industry’s mentality is erroneous, because this fact is evidence that viewers – however refined their tastes in cinema, and even whether or not they pay to see films – are becoming accustomed to watching films in any format (computer, tablet, mobile) or screen size apart from the one specifically designed for that particular function. Another parallel phenomenon is that regarding the significant reduction in the number of cinemas and their move from city centres to the outskirts of towns as multiplexes. On its website, the Ministry of Culture specifies the number of cinemas in Spain at 1298 in 2000, compared with 752 cinemas or film complexes in 2011. The paradox is that currently there are more screens than ever, but now there are fewer releases: that is, there are fewer films but more copies of the ones that are released, which means that almost all cinemas are screening the same films. This situation, which is hardly exclusive to Spain, fosters the reduction of supply and makes it difficult for films not released by major distributors to survive (Ansareo and Garanto, 2011: 50). Given such a negative backdrop, how was it that Torrente 3: el protector and Torrente 4: crisis letal managed to weather the crisis and even surpass initial expectations? By intelligently using the possibilities of an industry that clearly favoured more commercial 344

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films. First, by taking advantage, as on previous occasions, of the grants provided by the Fondo de Protección a la Cinematografía/Film Protection Fund, subsidies that depend on box office performance. Second, by making alliances with the major distributors and providing cinemas with a large proportion of digital copies – the cinemas which have this technology are also the ones that bring in the most revenue. Lastly, by using the resource of releasing multiple copies simultaneously, as referred to above. In this respect, Torrente 3: el protector opened with 465 copies, when the average for a Spanish release is less than a hundred. In an unprecedented case for either Spanish films or foreign films released in Spain, Torrente 4: crisis letal opened with 666 copies on 855 screens (of a total of 3874 in Spain) (Belinchón, 2011a), and within this system managed to capture more than 58 per cent of the audience share for Spanish films over its opening weekend (Belinchón, 2011b). In an industrial context in which the big money falls to a handful of titles, and the window in which to make a profit on a film is increasingly short, it is crucial to create an image that can be used by the public to identify the product immediately (Álvarez Mozoncillo, 2001: 153, 155). In this regard, it is important to pay close attention to the advertising strategies which were intensified with the last two features of the series. One example might be the poster for Torrente 3: el protector created by Drew Stuzan, who previously had designed film posters for Star Wars (Lucas, 1977–2005), Indiana Jones (Spielberg, 1981–2007), Rambo First Blood (Kotcheff, 1982) and The Goonies (Donner, 1985), but perhaps it would be more pertinent to mention the diversification in the production and exhibition of the trailers. At the time of writing, the latest entry into the saga has an official trailer featuring the former contestant of the very popular musical talent programme Operación Triunfo (TVE 1, 2001– 04), David Bisbal, singing ‘Aquí te pillo, aquí te mato’ – and a number of teaser trailers. The first kind, more elaborate in terms of conception and a lot more expensive to produce, was intended for broadcast on television or as a taster in cinemas; while the second format – shorter than normal, without offering any details from the film, working only to stimulate public interest – is the ideal kind for posting on the film’s official website or on YouTube. For Segura, the Internet is not the enemy, but an ally that allows him to open up horizons with an extremely small outlay. A final strategy that made it possible to circumvent the public’s increased reticence in cinema-going has been the use of the latest technologies to seduce audiences. Filmed in 3D, Torrente 4: crisis letal is the clearest example of this. Segura repeatedly mentioned during television appearances how, through the intercession of their mutual friend, Guillermo del Toro, the director James Cameron had given him advice about the best way to film in three dimensions. In short, the father of Avatar (2009) and master of the use of this technology at the outset of the twenty-first century had enlightened his (illegitimate?) offspring, taking Segura’s project under his wing without even intending to do so. The use of this technology in Torrente 4: crisis letal, of which 55 per cent of copies were in 3D, can be explained as a way of dealing with Internet downloads (a lesson learned after the comparatively modest results of Torrente 3: el protector). In this way, potential viewers were obliged to go to the cinema if they wanted to enjoy the full sensory experience. This is significant in a country 345

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whose citizens make extensive use of the Internet to access audio-visual content without prior payment. Furthermore, this need for the ‘experience’ is another central component of Torrente’s success, given that the films turn into a kind of unmissable event for certain social groups. When trying to understand the attractions of this kind of film, we should bear in mind that they often become generational markers – something that very few Spanish directors other than Segura have achieved. Conclusion The omnipresence of the cameo, poor merchandising and the unusual forms of promotion described appear anomalous in relation to the most successful series of films ever made in Europe’s third most important film industry. On the other hand, it is evident that the Torrente films have adapted well to the great changes taking place in the Spanish film sector, keeping their audience in sight at all times. Torrente was designed at first as a product for the under-thirties, the segment that most attends the cinema (Esquirol and Fecé, 2001: 36); and although this was not the initial expectation, Torrente has attracted viewers of all ages. After all, Segura – who, with his films, tries to fulfil the expectations of his ‘amiguetes’ (‘mates’) or viewers with similar tastes to his own – was over thirty when the first Torrente was released and, at forty-six, well into middle-age when the final one was completed. His greatest achievement has been to attract people who do not normally go to the cinema. As LázaroReboll (2005: 224) has pointed out, the target audience was increased by adding alternative demographic groups, making the sequels into fully-fledged mainstream cinema. The saga’s achievements (breaking audience records, box office takings, number of copies shown simultaneously and licences to use the image of Torrente) are not enough on their own to assimilate fully these practices with those of an archetypal blockbuster. On the contrary, they have their own recipe: a formula that would hardly be the definition of a Spanish variation of a successful model, among other reasons because it would be hard for other Spanish directors or producers to imitate. In fact, if this were possible we would have seen the release of a film with similar content and success levels in the last twelve years. In commercial terms, the only rivals to the Torrente films have been Amenábar’s; however, their use of English, participation in the international star system and the promotional methods employed tell us that these productions follow other paths. On the one hand, this makes the tetralogy’s achievements even more exceptional, but on the other, highlights the fragility of the Spanish industrial structure for promoting popular cinema. Having exhausted the possibilities of the domestic marketplace, Segura may yet take his most (in) famous creation out of Spain. February 2012 marked the European release of Jack and Jill (Dugan, 2011), the new Adam Sandler comedy that featured the brief appearance of a twin of Torrente (Eduardo in the film). Nobody knows what the future will bring, but the international triumph of Spain’s coarsest police officer could be imminent.

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Acknowledgement The author would like to express her gratitude to José Luis Rosado, Ehsan Khoshbakht, and an anonymous reader, whose comments have significantly improved the original. Writing this piece has been possible thanks to an Alianza 4 Universidades Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and a Spanish Ministry of Education Fellowship (Programa Nacional de Movilidad de Recursos Humanos del Plan Nacional de I-D+i 20082011) at Royal Holloway, University of London. Notes   1 Landismo was a current feature of popular Spanish cinema from the 1970s in which portrayals of Spanish males as sexually repressed were common. The term comes from the actor Alfredo Landa, who played a role of this kind in No desearás al vecino del quinto/ Thou Shalt Not Covet thy Neighbour on the Fifth Floor (Fernández, 1970), among other films. Destape is the erotic cinema that appeared in Spain after the end of censorship in 1977. ‘Destape’ means ‘nudity’, but also refers to the liberalization of ideas and practices (see Chapter 12).   2 His own best publicist, the ‘ubiquity’ of Segura (Triana-Toribio, 2003: 155), not restricted to a film’s promotional season, has been analysed by Esquirol and Fecé (2001), Jordan (2003: 203) and, in relation to his media stardom, by Triana-Toribio (2004).   3 Españolada is a term usually applied with negative connotations, referring to a kind of film that exaggerates the Spanish character such as those that exploit folklore, using typically Spanish songs, costumes, characters, etc. They are normally thought of as being limited to the Francoist period, but were already popular during the Second Republic. Españolada is still used to describe films aimed at a mass public, offering a caricatured image of Spain based on national stereotypes.   4 As an example, see the YouTube Downfall parody, ‘Hitler se entera de los cameos en Torrente 4’ (Der Untergang, Hirschbiegel, 2004), in which Adolf Hitler becomes enraged because of the cameos in the last episode, particularly due to the participation of Belén Esteban, who he names twice and alludes to indirectly a third time. However, he does not mention Martínez-Bordiú: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Foz0yRphis (last accessed on 29 April 2012).   5 The plans to make a US version of Torrente seem to contradict the previous statement that comedy is a difficult genre to export. Exploring this is beyond the scope of this chapter, but there is an extensive bibliography which indicates that, with the exception of romantic comedy, translating humour in a localist style involves great difficulties. In this regard, see Craig et al. (2005: 80–103) and Kalviknes Bore (2011: 347–69). At the time of writing there is a script by Mike Bender and Doug Chernack for the Hollywood version, but the project is on hold.

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References Álvarez Mozoncillo, J. M. (2002). ‘Mayores inversiones y consolidación industrial. La producción cinematográfica española de 2001’, Academia, 31: 153–55. Ansareo, A. and Garanto, A. (2011). ‘Paradojas y desafíos de una transición. Crisis de la exhibición en Versión Original’, Cahiers du Cinéma España, 43: 49–53. Ansola González, T. (2003). ‘La industria cinematográfica española en los tiempos del Partido Popular (1996–2002): viejos problemas, viejas recetas’, Archivos de la Filmoteca, 45: 61–73. Belinchón, G. (2010). ‘¿Nos hacemos otra secuelilla?, El País, 18 August, available at http://elpais. com/diario/2010/08/18/revistaverano/1282082401_850215.html, last accessed on 7 July 2012. (2011a). ‘El brazo promocional de Torrente’, El País, 10 March, available at http://elpais. com/diario/2011/03/10/cultura/1299711605_850215.html, last accessed on 7 July 2012. (2011b). ‘Es cine popular, no zafio’, El País, 18 March, available at http://www.elpais.com/ articulo/sociedad/cine/popular/zafio/elpepusoc/20110318elpepisoc_1/Tes, last accessed on 12 August 2011. Belinchón, G. and Barriuso, J. (1999). ‘Como un Torrente. Perspectivas del cine español en un año de récords’, Academia, 25: 23–32. Belinchón, G. and García, R. (2012). ‘Cine: mucha producción, pocos recursos’, El País, 17 March 2012, available at http://cultura.elpais.com/cultura/2012/03/16/actualidad/1331923725_614926. html, last accessed on 7 July 2012. Carmena Barrachina, F. (2006). ‘El caso español. Préstamos, influencias y particularidades’, Secuencias, 24: 75–89. Craig, C. S., Greene, W. H. and Douglas, S. P. (2005). ‘Culture matters: consumer acceptance of US films in foreign markets’, Journal of International Marketing, 13.4: 80–103. De la Iglesia, A. (2011). ‘Discurso de la Gala de los Goya 2011’, El Mundo, 14 February, available at http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2011/02/14/cultura/1297639056.html, last accessed on 17 March 2012. Elsaesser, T. and Buckland, W. (2002). Studying Contemporary American Film (London: Arnold Publishers). Esquirol, M. and Fecé, J. L. (2001). ‘Un freak en el parque de atracciones: Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley’, Archivos de la Filmoteca, 39: 27–39. Fecé, J. L. (2005). ‘La excepción y la norma. Reflexiones sobre la españolidad de nuestro cine reciente’, Archivos de la Filmoteca, 49: 83–95. Heredero, C. F. and Santamarina, A. (2002). Semillas de futuro: Cine español 1990–2001 (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal España Nuevo Milenio). Iraolo, M. (2005). ‘Grand Theft Auto a la española’, Meristation PC, available at http://www. meristation.com/es/pc/torrente-3/analisis-juego/1515835, last accessed on 8 April 2006. Jordan, B. (2003). ‘Spain’s “new cinema” of the 1990s: Santiago Segura and the Torrente phenomenon’, New Cinemas, 1.3: 191–207. Kalviknes Bore, I-L. (2011). ‘Transnational TV comedy audiences’, Television & New Media, 12: 347–69. Lázaro-Reboll, A. (2005). ‘Torrente: The Dumb Arm of the Law /Torrente 2: Mission in Marbella’ in A. Mira (ed.), The Cinema of Spain and Portugal (London: Wallflower), 224–25. 348

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Losilla, C. (1999). ‘El fantasma, su sombra y el lector por horas. Diez apuntes sobre el cine español de 1998’, Banda Aparte, 14–15: 62–70. Muñoz Molina, A. (2001). ‘Cultura espongiforme’, El País, 22 April: 15. Pena, J. (2001). ‘Cine español de los noventa: hoja de reclamaciones’, Secuencias, 16: 38–54. Pérez de Albéniz, J. (2006). ‘¡Mira quién vuelve!’, El Mundo, 19 September, available at http:// www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2006/09/19/descodificador/1158625496.html, last accessed on 29 April 2012. Pujol Ozonas, C. (2010). Cinefilia y crítica de cine en España (1990–2000). Una aproximación sociocultural, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Barcelona: Universitat Ramon Llull. Segura, S. (2001). ‘Un inmenso batiburrillo’, Academia, 30: 9–11. (2011). ‘Encuentros digitales. Santiago Segura’, El mundo, 8 March, available at http:// www.elmundo.es/encuentros/invitados/2011/03/4644/, last accessed on 12 August 2011. Tasker, Y. (1993). Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (London: Routledge). Torrejón, M. (2009). ‘Los socios de Torrente’, El Periódico de Catalunya, 4 May: 46. Triana-Toribio, N. (2003). Spanish National Cinema (London: Routledge). (2004). ‘Santiago Segura: Just when you thought that Spanish masculinities were getting better …’, Hispanic Research Journal, 5.2: 147–56. Weinrichter, A. (2011), ‘Críticas de los estrenos del 11 de marzo’, ABC Cultura, 11 March, available at http://www.abc.es/20110311/cultura-cine/abci-criticas-201103101815.html, last accessed on 26 August 2011. Wyatt, J. (1994). High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press).

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Chapter 22 Hybrid Models: Auteurism and Genre in Contemporary Spanish Crime Thrillers Carmen Herrero

T

he concept of national cinema relies on its projection as a cultural product of the distinctive language, culture and heritage of a nation. Nevertheless, it is increasingly difficult to discern from one another the plethora of transnational border crossing networks, with their growing number of co-productions and exchange of stars, film-makers, genres and aesthetic styles. Thomas Elsaesser has traced how European cinema is changing, suggesting ways in which our perceptions of it might change accordingly. The identity construction that he proposes is one which demotes the concept of national cinema to the level of a ‘floating designation’ (2005: 76). In its place, he opts for a concept of a European cinema based on ‘mutual interference’ (2005: 126) among nation states, a modus operandi institutionalized in the workings of the European Union. Along the same lines, Elsaesser analyses the complex relationship between European and Hollywood film, subverting conventional dichotomies: Europe/Hollywood, art/commerce, elitism/populism, auteur cinema/genre cinema, and so on. Recent contributions to this debate move toward a broader understanding of cinema practices, incorporating the influences of diaspora, exile, the postnational, postcolonalism, consumers, and so forth. While it is still standard practice to discuss Spanish cinema within a national paradigm, it is increasingly common to hear appeals for an approach that is able to encompass cinematic practices from a European or global perspective (Evans et al., 2007; Monterde, 2006).1 In an issue devoted to ‘Transnational Cinema’, Cahiers du Cinema España recognizes the idea of a continuum, acknowledging the increasing multiple cross-breeding of film legacies and influences (Heredero, 2008: 5). In the same dossier, Àngel Quintana remarks on the hybrid nature of Spanish cinema, ‘one of the most thrilling examples of a national cinema adapting to a model where the tensions between the hybridism of cultures and the emergence of the hyper-local coexist’ (2008: 7). Clearly, the increasingly globalized and constantly changing market economy is affecting the audio-visual industry; therefore, it seems appropriate to locate recent Spanish films within this global context. For example, as Núria Triana-Toribio notes, ‘Spanish production companies aspire to finance their projects with overseas money and to make their products internationally available’ (2007: 154). In order to carry out this task, I will apply descriptive criteria developed by Mike Wayne (2002) in his study of British cinema to the Spanish context.2 Basing his study primarily on films produced in the 1990s, Wayne devises a model of four non-exclusive categories to categorize national films with an international profile: 1. embedded films 2. disembedded films

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3. cross-border films 4. anti-national national films. While the criteria for including films in the first three categories ‘are a mixture of economic and cultural factors which determine what markets they are primarily pitched at’, the fourth is characterized by the ‘political combativity of the films’ and the questioning of the nation as ‘a site of shared interests and values’ (2002: 40). Embedded films are aimed primarily at the national market as a result of budgetary constraints and/or their cultural specificity. In sharp distinction, disembedded films ‘have the budgets and the cultural potential to succeed in the American market’ (2002: 42). Cross-border films comprise those that can move in the international market, outside America and particularly in Europe. Wayne (2002: 45) includes national art films as those co-productions whose narratives inscribe a certain permeability of national identities within this category. Anti-national national films are films that assess critically the notion of community and national identity. Wayne points out how these films are marked by a contradiction: [They] are national insofar as they display an acute attunement to the specific social, political and cultural dynamics within the territory of the nation, but they are anti-national insofar as that territory is seen as a conflicted zone of unequal relations of power. (2002: 45) Transnational Auteurs and Genre This chapter proposes a re-examination of the relationship between the auteurist tradition and a transnational production model using popular genre. More specifically, it examines one specific generic trajectory: that of the crime thriller. The films discussed are by two directors who both debuted in the first decade of the twenty-first century: Jaime Rosales’ Las horas del día/The Hours of the Day (2003) and Tiro en la cabeza/Bullet in the Head (2008); and Daniel Monzón’s La caja Kovak/The Kovak Box (2006); and Celda 211/Cell 211 (2009). These case studies are examined in relation to the following questions. 1. How have these film-makers reworked this genre? 2. Is genre used for purely stylistic reasons, as a commercial tool, or does it serve other purposes? 3. To what extent are the films responding to a change in national and international production networks? Before moving to the analysis of the four case studies, first, it is worth outlining a definition of the crime thriller and, second, considering how the popular model of genre film-making has increased its weight as a marketing and stylistic device in contemporary Spanish cinema. It is 354

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difficult to define, categorize and differentiate crime films and thrillers as they are inherently hybrid forms, capable of appropriating devices from several genres. Normally, the thriller is characterized as a genre that uses thrills ‘which are on one level a simple depiction of danger and violence, and on a second level a vicarious psychological experience’ that ‘engages the spectator by causing anxiety’ (Derry, 1988: 19). Although crime thrillers are all films offering a gripping description of the perpetration of a crime (or a failed crime), distinct sub-categories can be loosely classified as crime-thrillers: the gangster film focusing on the criminal; the suspense thriller on the victim; or the cop film on agents of the law. Rosanna Maule has appraised the ‘repositioning of the film author as a professional and symbolic figure’, paying particular attention to film-makers who relocate themselves as authors ‘outside of the circuits of film production and reception established by arthouse and auteur-informed cinematic traditions’ (2008: 17). Among those directors who explore different forms and genres is Alejandro Amenábar, who is: a postmodern author, commercially minded within a transnational framework of reception, yet, nonetheless, maintaining a very distinct and culturally over-determined position [whose] preference for the genre film is at the same time a symptom of cultural conditioning and a way to reposition Spanish films within the contemporary film market. (Maule, 2008: 157) In a similar vein, Jay Beck and Vicente Rodríguez Ortega interrogate the arguments of some Spanish critics, and critique their simplification of the concept of genre and their claim for European art cinema as inherently superior. They also note ‘an inflexible understanding of the concept of national cinema and how genres operate within a process of continuous transnational cross-fertilisation and evolution’ (2008: 12), subsequently proposing a critical model for analysing Spanish cinema by looking into ‘the interrelationships between national cinemas, transnational media flow and genre as discursive frameworks for constructing meaning’ (2008: 18). There is a clear strategy in recent Spanish cinema to engage in a more commercial production model through a genre approach that links Spanish, European, transnational and Hollywood traditions (Herrero, 2007, 2010; Lázaro-Reboll, 2006; Willis, 2008). In what follows, I will examine how two very different, even antithetical, directors have negotiated this complicated terrain of market forces and generic conventions. Jaime Rosales The seemingly increasing gap between commercial film-makers and ‘auteur-directors’ is particularly pertinent in relation to Jaime Rosales, who has been categorized by Carlos Losilla as belonging to a group of cineastes who are ‘dissidents’ (2007: 20–21), preoccupied with making low-budget but personal films. Searching for new styles and forms of expression, 355

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they are minority film-makers whose works reference a wide range of film legacies, linking them to an international auteur tradition that is particularly well received on the global festival circuit. Leading the list of this cine silencioso (silent cinema) are José Luis Guerin, Javier Rebollo, Marc Recha, Albert Serra and Rosales who, with just four feature films, has achieved the international status of auteur (Heredero, 2009). The award-winning psychological thriller Las horas del día was Rosales’ debut film. After graduating in economics from the ESADE Business School, he won a scholarship to the prestigious international film and television school San Antonio de los Baños (EICTV) in Havana. His international training continued when, in 1999, he received another scholarship to study at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in Sydney. Rosales is an example of an auteur-producer, as Las horas del día was produced by In Vitro Films and Fresdeval Films, a company he founded alongside José María de Orbe.3 His directorial debut had a limited impact in terms of cinema-goers, but was very well received by national and international critics (according to the official Spanish Ministerio de Cultura database, http://www.mcu.es, the film was seen by 38,858 spectators and grossed €192,078.11 at the domestic box office). It won the Fipresci Award at the 2003 Cannes Festival for the best film presented during the Directors’ Fortnight, obtaining international distribution through Bavaria Films. In the same year, the film was also nominated for two Goya Awards (Best New Director and Best Original Script). Co-written by Rosales and Catalan dramatist Enric Rufas, Las horas del día focuses on the activities of a serial killer, Abel, who runs a small clothing shop on the outskirts of Barcelona. His existence is depicted through routine activities. Àlex Brendemühl plays the character with a cool distance that does not allow for any psychological understanding of his actions. Two acts of violence disrupt his monotonous lifestyle: these murderous aggressions are not explained or justified, and there is no moral lesson, no ‘social justification’. Rosales has declared that the main theme of Las horas del día is ‘[t]he inability to understand the human being’ (cited in Burgos and Torres, 2011: 16). Following the international critical success of La soledad/Solitary Fragments (2007), Rosales’s third film, Tiro en la cabeza, opened simultaneously in Spanish cinemas and at film portal Filmin (www.filmin.es), a new and challenging strategy within the context of the Spanish film industry.4 The script for the film was written in a week, and it was shot in less than two weeks in San Sebastián and the French region of Les Landes. It is a European co-production between Spanish Freseval Films and Wanda Vision, with the participation of the French company Les Productions Balthazar. This transnational production strategy is also reflected in the film’s narrative, based on the attack carried out by ETA in December 2007, when three members of the terrorist group killed two Spanish policemen in the French town of Capbreton. Rosales’s ‘golden rule’ is to present everything ‘with the maximum lack of expression’ (2004: 80). Las horas del día follows the non-commercial tradition of European art cinema (lack of closure and disruption of classical Hollywood’s reliance on cause and effect), as the narrative is constructed around fragments of reality, linked without a particular logic, in order to emphasize Abel’s monotone existence. Nevertheless, as Manuel Yáñez Murillo 356

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(2006: 378–9) has pointed out, there is a clear, repetitive, internal rhythm in the linking of these scenes using establishing shots, and the shot-reverse-shot pattern during conversations. The principles of Rosales’ filmic style are already manifested in Las horas del día: the display of a sober mise-en-scène; austerity in the cinematography; third person point of view; a soundtrack full of silences and a lack of extra-diagetic music, as the film shooting was done only with direct sound; and a clear preference for naturalism in the photography and realism through the use of non-professional actors and real locations. However, the cinematographic treatment is highly stylized, with images often framed by doorways, windows and walls, which locate the viewer as a voyeur. Overall, Las horas del día is a carefully constructed film with lofty aims: it adopts a subtle approach to human reality, captured from afar so as to encourage the spectator ‘to embrace a critical attitude toward the reality that is presented, as well as the way in which that reality is represented’ (Rosales, 2004: 78). His interest in technical experimentation – demonstrated particularly in La soledad through its use of ‘polyvision’ – is more radical in Tiro en la cabeza: filming with a zoom lens to emphasize a distant point of view; the absence of audible dialogue justified as a way of reflecting the lack of dialogue and communication on both political sides (Vanaclocha, 2008); the preference for direct sound; and the alternation of long shots and close-ups.5 The fictional component of the story is based on a documentary-style recording of the real life of Ion Arretxe, the non-professional actor who plays the lead role; while the non-fiction part – the murder scene – is shot with a fictional approach.6 This hybrid method imbues the feature film with an atmosphere similar to a fake documentary. On the one hand, this way of filming allows the director to move towards his goal of approximating a documentary style, which provides more freedom and a less expensive way of making a film; on the other, this film requires a higher level of implication in order to complete the snapshots that are part of a particular moment in the life of the characters. Las horas del día and Tiro en la cabeza are both overt arthouse filmic exercises. While employing the archetypical model of a crime thriller, they subvert generic conventions and expectations through the deliberate use of a slow pace, and the presence of ostensibly empty moments without any obvious emotional or symbolic value. For example, Jordi Costa praises Rosales’ capacity for combining ‘disturbing scenes with a precise oceanography of tedium’ (2006: 149). Las horas del día showcases Rosales’ personal trademarks: ‘emotional distance’ through off-camera scenes, particularly the murder of the female taxi-driver; the use of silences; and the lack of time ellipses and use of very long takes, which are generally fixed and provide opportunities to use the frame as an immobile boundary between what the viewer sees and what they do not. In Tiro en la cabeza, a plethora of transnational cinephilic resonances can be detected. On the one hand, Rosales’ cinematographic approach is reminiscent of Carlos Saura’s entomological lens in La caza/The Hunt (1966), observing human figures from a distance as well as in close-up;7 while the treatment of daily routine and the distancing effects applied to the narrative and characters links Rosales’ style to Bresson (Torrado Morales and Ródenas, 2009: 181). Rosales uses the thriller genre to establish a 357

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transparent framework in which a calculated disaffection allows the stimulation of ‘the conscience of the spectator’ (Rosales, 2004: 78). As in his opera prima, Tiro en la cabeza forces a deliberate Brechtian distance from the psychological empathy associated with popular thrillers by eliminating explanations about the characters’ personalities, and not including dialogue or voice-over. Again, according to Rosales, the narrative form and style serve to promote a different audience reaction, as the film works toward the ‘deactivation of ideologies’ (Heredero et al., 2008: 18–19). Rosales has stressed the paramount importance of the locatedness of spectators within the specific culture in which films are produced. Therefore, his cinema can be clearly classified as embedded films, as they are conceived, first and foremost, as artistic products linked to the Spanish cultural and social setting. Nevertheless, for Rosales, the best way to achieve success on the national and international levels is to create films that are able to show ‘simultaneously the particular and the universal of our culture in the extreme’ which, in Spanish art, is ‘the essential, the real thing […] the sincere, devoid of all ornamentation’ (Rosales, 2004: 86).8 At the same time, Tiro en la cabeza is an excellent example of anti-national national film, as it criticizes the myth of community (Basque, Catalan, Spanish), questioning the concept of nation and engaging with a contestatory political and aesthetic position. Daniel Monzón Daniel Monzón’s approach, which utilizes a range of genre styles, is quite distinct. After working as a film critic, Monzón debuted as a scriptwriter with Desvío al paraíso/Shortcut to Paradise (Herrero, 1994), a thriller shot in English. His opera prima, El corazón del guerrero/Heart of the Warrior (2000), was an action-fantasy film which proved popular at international festivals, and also achieved a nomination for the Goya Award for Best Film in 2001. The following year, Monzón opted for a hybrid of comedy–action in El robo más grande jamás contado/The Biggest Robbery Never Told (2002). The thriller The Kovak Box (2004) follows a famous science-fiction writer, David Norton (Timothy Hutton), as he and his fiancée attend a conference on the island of Mallorca. Norton’s fiancée leaps out of her hotel window and subsequently dies in the hospital, at the same time that Silvia (Lucía Jiménez) also jumps from a high window after picking up her phone and hearing the song ‘Gloomy Sunday’, performed by Billie Holliday. A casual encounter between Norton and Silvia leads them to investigate the suicides that are taking place all over the island, alongside the possible connection with Franz Kovak (David Kelly). The film, co-written with Jorge Guerricaechevarría, was a European co-production involving Spanish Castelao Productions (a subsidiary of Grupo Filmax), Estudios Picasso and British Future Film. This English-language thriller with an international cast – American, Irish and Spanish – was clearly aimed at the global marketplace, which was increasingly enthusiastic about Spanish genre film, particularly horror and thriller, as exemplified by the horror-fantasy film launched by The Fantastic Factory (part of Grupo Filmax).9 One of the film’s highlights 358

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and key selling points was the use of special effects created by Raúl Romanillos and the Catalan company DDT, which was responsible for the visual effects in Guillermo del Toro’s El laberinto del fauno/Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). Based on the homonymous novel by Francisco Pérez Gandul, and with a script cowritten by Daniel Monzón and Jorge Guerricaechevarría, Celda 211 was co-produced by Spanish Telecinco Cinema, Testimonio Gráfico, Vaca Films Studio and Morena Films, with French production company La Fabrique 2.10 It received funding from several television channels: Telecinco, AXN, Televisión de Galicia and Canal+.11 The film follows an eager new prison guard, Juan (Alberto Ammann), who visits the penitentiary the day before he is due to start. As he is being shown about the place, a violent riot breaks out at the same time that he is left knocked unconscious. When he is taken to the prison leader – a notorious inmate, Malamadre (Luis Tosar) – Juan, who is still in his civilian clothes, must pretend to be a prisoner to survive. Competing against Alejandro Amenábar’s Agora (2009) at the Goya Awards ceremony, Celda 211 won an impressive total of eight awards, including the categories for Best Film, Best Director and Best Actor; it also achieved international success on the festival circuit. It is significant that the film was presented at the Venice Festival in the section dedicated to auteur cinema, and after public screenings at the Toronto Film Festival, IFC Films purchased the distribution rights for the US market, the film having achieved a certain hybrid status between auteur and genre film-making (Redacción General, 2010). Both of Monzón’s thrillers can be seen as imitations of a Hollywood genre model. La caja Kovak, classified by the director as a ‘black fable’, is a conspiracy thriller with a simple narrative based on the misfortunes of the lead characters as they try to solve the mystery and break free from their labyrinthine and claustrophobic entrapment. Linking the origin of the film to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Monzón declared his intention to create a story in which a horrific real event can seem like part of a Hollywood script. In the press notes, the film-maker clearly points out his desire to build an international project based on genre with an entertaining goal; a type of suspense thriller exemplified by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958), Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1995) and David Fincher’s Seven (1995) (Monzón, 2006). The starting point for Monzón’s second thriller is the exact opposite. Pursuing realistic portrayal, Monzón creates a sense of authenticity with a gritty atmosphere. He echoes documentary film-making by casting a mix of professional actors and real inmates, which helps to bring the colloquial dialogue alive. The use of a real, abandoned prison and the projection of scenes through surveillance or CCTV footage (fixed cameras, no editing) alongside TV newsreels, all add credibility to the naturalistic look. Most of the action occurs in the well-lit atrium of the penitentiary, which places the audience in the middle of a riot through fast pacing. Social commentary is prevalent throughout the film, right from the metaphorical opening sequence in which a man (Morao) is seen cutting open his wrists and bleeding into a sink full of water; the death of this character – left to suffer in cell 211 from an undiagnosed brain tumour – establishes how injustice, corruption and lack of care for 359

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inmates are pervasive within the prison system. According to the director, from the outset the film’s narrative is reminiscent of ‘a Greek tragedy, where a character is in the middle of a very happy moment in his life, and suddenly he makes the wrong choice to go into work one day earlier, where his whole life is ruined’ (cited in Kadra, 2011). Monzón skilfully connects the audience with Juan’s point of view, so the spectator can understand his actions, his journey into desperation. The film has been generally received in Spain as an Americanstyle action thriller. For example, there can be no doubt that the dialogue and extreme violence (including the ear cutting scene), alongside the use of flashback, are reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992). It appeals to a demographic within the domestic market that enjoys Hollywood cinema and can respond to the specific national elements, most notably the micro-social groups represented in the film or the three ETA terrorists held hostage by Malamadre to negotiate better conditions for the inmates. However, overall the film relies on more universal values, such as the affective dimension developed by the complex friendship that grows between Malamadre and Juan, and in particular the notions of masculinity and violence on which it is predicated. Both The Kovak Box and Celda 211 draw their cultural reference points from every point on the geographical scale, from the very local to the regional, up through the national and then to the global. In terms of production models, both films have elements that allow them to be included in the disembedded and cross-borders categories proposed by Wayne: they were conceived as ‘quality products’ aimed at a European audience but with potential for further international exploitation, including the US market, as they draw on North American filmic references. Overall, The Kovak Box is a good example of the twenty-first century international co-production model which is ‘financed by global capital, featuring international casts, shot in several countries and often several languages, and foregrounding the hybrid status of their production contexts in both their formal construction and narrative content’ (Baer and Long, 2004: 150). If The Kovak Box fits more into the ‘post-national’ trend that Martine Danan defines as ‘the downplaying or erasure of cultural references unknown or damaging to foreign spectators’ (2000: 356), then the spectacle, themes and geographical settings of Celda 211 more successfully combine national, international and post-national elements at the textual and production levels. It self-consciously connects nations and cultures, rather than simply erasing local specificity.12 In Celda 211 the director juxtaposes aesthetic codes from two traditions: European social realism (images and stories of social deprivation) and the Hollywood hybrid genre (crime film, thriller, gangster, western and prison film).13 It is worth noting how changes in the European distribution market are affecting the programming of arthouse cinemas which are opting for a less adventurous approach, with an markedly increased predilection for genre films. This fact was reflected in 2010 at the European Film Awards, where many of the nominees were thrillers, including Monzón’s Celda 211, Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer (2010) and Olivier Assayas’ Carlos (2010) (Barraclough, 2010). The Kovak Box and Celda 211 both showcase another prominent feature of international co-production: ‘their aesthetic and thematic concern with contingency, chance, and coincidence, and with the lines 360

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between reality and fiction’ (Baer and Long, 2004: 150). In addition, Celda 211 can be seen as an example of an anti-national national film through the amorality of state insitutions and particularly the ETA subplot. It has strong local, regional and national cultural references, placing the prison as a miniature reproduction of a fractured society through the display of social, political and cultural forces in conflict (the Basque and Castilian languages, corruption at different levels, immigration, gang territory, and so forth). Conclusion This chapter has argued that the strategies developed within Spanish cinema to meet the challenges of globalization result in texts that open up hybrid transnational avenues. The four case studies raise deep and relevant questions about how Spanish cinema is responding to the contemporary cultural and political dynamics of European and Hollywood cinema. Rosales’ and Monzón’s films both explore national and transnational strategies: co-productions financed by national and international support; distribution of films through exhibition in festivals and on the Internet; quality films that achieve national and international recognition through positive audience response; and hybrid products that fit in both the genre and auteur film categories. Nevertheless, through analysing the generic conventions of Rosales’ Las horas del día and Tiro en la cabeza in comparison to Monzón’s The Kovak Box and Celda 211, it clear that both film-makers adopt the genre approach with antithetical intentions. Monzón relies on emotions to interpolate the audience in narratives brimming with suspense and tension, and his evolution as a film-maker goes in tandem with some of the most significant trends in recent Spanish cinema, moving from English to Spanish language film, and from fantasy towards a realistic model while maintaining a clear generic identity – in this case, that of the crime thriller. On the contrary, Rosales films are ‘anti-thrillers’, not because they present an opposition to the thriller, but because they start with the basic conceit of the film thriller yet are not constructed using the usual generic components. His idea of focusing on the thriller is to drive the narrative, and then opt for a cinematography that breaks with the psychological empathy associated with popular thrillers, looking for an active response on the part of the spectator. Rosales’ directorial efforts are predominantly ‘national’ films that achieve international projection through their capacity for presenting essentially local stories without costumbrismo (local colour). Notes   1 Núria Triana-Toribio proposes that ‘the first step is to find ways of thinking and writing about national cinema that go beyond the commonsensical one, that interrogate categories such as Spanishness while acknowledging their power and resilience’ (2003: 2). 361

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  2 Alejandro Pardo (2007) uses the taxonomies developed by Wayne (2002), and Palacio (1999) to establish a new typology of Spanish international co-productions.   3 The film obtained the backing of the Institut Català de les Empreses Culturals (Catalan Institute of Cultural Industries) and Instituto de la Cinematografía y de las Artes Audiovisuales (Institute of Cinematography and Audiovisual Arts). Catalan Television (TVCa), as well as TVE and Canal + also provided funding.   4 The actor, director and producer Paco León has successfully applied this model to his opera prima, the fake documentary Carmina o revienta (2012), by releasing it simultaneously in cinemas, on the Internet and on DVD.   5 In his review of the film for Cahiers du Cinema España, José Enrique Monterde (2008) emphasizes Rosales’ capacity to combine his ethical approach to the representation of terrorism with formal experimentation. However, this innovative mode was not successful at the domestic box office: the film with an estimated budget of €501,700 was seen by 6189 spectators and grossed just €34,494.32, according to the Ministerio de Cultura database (see http://www.mcu.es/cine/CE/BBDDPeliculas/BBDDPeliculas_Index.html).   6 Ion Arretxe was the art director in Rosales’s La soledad.   7 In an interview with Cahiers du Cinema, Rosales has declared his desire to combine the distant perspective with close-ups, achieving an image in which the soft focus background ‘reinforces the frontality effect’ (cited in Heredero et al., 2008: 20).   8 Rosales proposes the art of Goya, Miró, Chillida, Lorca, Buñuel, Erice, Zulueta and Guerin as examples of the sublime in Spanish cinema.   9 The film was quite successful at the national box office (295,603 spectators, with a gross of €1,599,398 according to the Ministerio de Cultura database), but it only received a direct TV release in the United States. 10 Telecinco Cinema, Vaca Films and Morena Films, as well as Mod Producciones and Apaches Entertainment, are among the production companies that systematically establish an international approach in their projects, particularly through the use of genre (horror and thriller). 11 With an estimated budget of €3.5 million, the film was extremely successful at the national box office: 2,123,338 spectators and a gross of €13,108,595, according to the Ministerio de Cultura database. 12 The successful international appeal of Cell 211 is reflected in the fact that, at the time of writing, it has attracted the interest of Hollywood. Paul Haggis has been slated to rewrite the script for a Hollywood adaptation, with Russell Crowe in the leading role. 13 Celda 211 has been linked to John Woo’s Face off (1997), Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Das experiment/ The Experiment (2001) and TV series such as Prison Break (2005–09) (Petrus 2009).

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Beck, J. and Rodríguez Ortega, V. (2008). ‘Introduction’ in V. Rodríguez Ortega and J. Beck (eds.), Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 1–12. Burgos, J. M. and Torres, L. J. (2011). ‘Interview with Jaime Rosales’ in L. J. Torres (ed.), Directory of World Cinema: Spain (Bristol: Intellect), 13–18. Costa, J. (2006). ‘El simple arte de matar (un género cinematográfico). Algunas notas sobre el thriller español más reciente’ in H. Rodríguez (ed.), Miradas para un nuevo milenio: Fragmentos para una historia futura del cine español (Madrid: Festival de Cine de Alcalá de Henares), 143–50. Danan, M. (2000). ‘French cinema in the era of media capitalism’, Media, Culture & Society, 22.3: 355–64. Derry, C. (1988). The Suspense Thriller: Films in the Shadow of Alfred Hitchcock (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.). Elsaesser, T. (2005). European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press). Evans, P. W., Perriam, C. and Santaolalla, I. (2007). ‘The transnational of Iberian and Latin American cinemas: introduction’, Hispanic Research Journal, 8.1: 1–8. Heredero, C. F. (2008). ‘Atlas de geografía fílmica’, Cahier du Cinema España, 10: 5. (2009). ‘Hacia una nueva identidad’, Cahiers du Cinema España, 27: 6–8. Heredero, C. F., Losilla, C. and Monterde, J. E. (2008). ‘Entrevista Jaime Rosales’, Cahiers du Cinema España, 16: 18–20. Herrero, C. (2007). ‘Paisajes urbanos y “no lugares” en el thriller español contemporáneo: Fausto 5.0 y La caja 507’, Romance Studies, 25.2: 133–45. (2010). ‘Edgy art cinema: cinephilia and genre negotiations in recent Spanish rural thrillers’, Studies in European Cinema, 7.2: 123–34. Kadra, D. (2011). ‘Interview: Cell 211 Director Daniel Monzón’, DIY Film, 14 July, available at http://www.thisisfakediy.co.uk/articles/film/interview-cell-211-director-daniel-monzon, last accessed on 24 August 2011. Lázaro Reboll, A. (2008). ‘“Now Playing Everywhere”: Spanish horror film in the marketplace’ in V. Rodríguez Ortega and J. Beck (eds.), Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 65–83. Losilla, C. (2007). ‘Insumisos e integrados’, Cahiers du Cinema España, 5: 20–21. Maule, R. (2008). Beyond Auteurism: New Directions in Authorial Film Practices in France, Italy and Spain Since the 1980s (Bristol: Intellect). Monterde, J. E. (2006). ‘Cuando el destino nos alcance. Contextos del último cine español’ in H. Rodríguez (ed.), Miradas para un nuevo milenio: Fragmentos para una historia futura del cine español (Madrid: Festival de Cine de Alcalá de Henares), 53–61. (2008). ‘Crítica Tiro en la cabeza’, Cahiers du Cinema España, 16: 16–17. Monzón, D. (2006). ‘La caja Kovak: Notas del director’, La higuera.net, available at http://www. lahiguera.net/cinemania/pelicula/2033/comentario.php, last accessed on 24 August 2011. Palacio, M. (1999). ‘Elogio postmoderno de las coproducciones in Los límites de la frontera: La coproducción en el cine español’, Cuadernos de la Academia, 5: 221–35. Pardo, A. (2007). ‘Spanish co-productions: commercial need or common culture? An analysis of international co-productions in Spain from 2000–2004’ in S. Barrigales and M. Attignol 363

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Salvodon (eds.), Zoom in, Zoom out. Crossing Borders in Contemporary European Cinema (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing), 89–127. Petrus, A. (2009). ‘La metamorfosis del guardián’, La Vanguardia, 19 November: 27. Quintana, A. (2008). ‘Un cine en tierra de nadie’, Cahiers du Cinema España, 10: 6–8. Redacción Central (2010). ‘Daniel Monzón, crítico convertido en director’, Los Tiempos, 20 November, available at http://www.lostiempos.com/lecturas/cine/cine/20101121/danielmonzon-critico-convertido-en-director_100060_194262.html, last accessed on 24 August 2011. Rosales, J. (2004). ‘Pasado, proceso, utopía’ in Various Authors, V Encuentro de nuevos autores 2003 (Valladolid: SEMINCI), 70–89. Torrado Morales, S. and Ródenas, G. (2009). ‘La figura del terrorista en el cine español: De la lucha justificada a la cotidianeidad’ in P. Fernández Toledo (ed.), Rompiendo moldes: Discurso, géneros e hibridación en el siglo XXI (Sevilla: Comunicación Social), 160–85. Triana-Toribio, N. (2003). Spanish National Cinema (London: Routledge). (2007). ‘Journeys of El Deseo between the nation and the transnational in Spanish cinema’, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, 4.3: 151–63. Vanaclocha, P. (2008). ‘Entrevista: Jaime Rosales, director de Tiro en la cabeza’, available at http:// www.vanavision.com/2011/07/jaime-rosales-director-de-tiro-en-la.html, last accessed on 12 November 2011. Wayne, M. (2002). The Politics of Contemporary European Cinema: Histories, Borders, Diasporas (Bristol: Intellect). Willis, A. (2008). ‘The Fantastic Factory: the horror genre and contemporary Spanish cinema’ in J. Beck and V. Rodríguez Ortega (eds.), Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 27–43. Yánez Murillo, M. (2006) ‘Las horas del día’ in H. P. Rodríguez (ed.), Miradas para un nuevo milenio: Fragmentos para una historia futura del cine español (Madrid: Festival de Cine de Alcalá de Henares-Comunidad de Madrid), 378–79.

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Chapter 23 Planet 51 and Spanish Animation: The Risks and Attractions of Globalization Maria Soler Campillo, Marta Martín Núñez and Javier Marzal Felici

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he latest data published by the Spanish Ministry of Culture on feature films released in the period from January to June 2011 reveals that, first, of the twenty highest grossing films, two were Spanish: Torrente 4: crisis letal/Torrente 4: Lethal Crisis (Segura, 2011) and También la lluvia/Even the Rain (Bollaín, 2010), a Spanish co-production; one is British – the Oscar-winning The King’s Speech (Hooper, 2011); the remaining seventeen are North American productions (Ministry of Culture (nd). Second, five out of the twenty most commercially successful titles were animation films: Tangled (Greno and Howard, 2011); Rio (Saldanha, 2011); Gnomeo and Juliet (Asbury, 2011); Rango (Verbinski, 2011); and Kung Fu Panda 2 (Yuh, 2011). Three basic conclusions can be gleaned from these facts. First, the absolute dominance of North American cinema in Spain is reflected in terms of box office takings. Second, the popularity of animation, a film genre which attracts spectators largely consisting of the family demographic. Third, a consolidation of 3D cinema can be observed, as it has been able to secure the loyalty of a sizeable audience. In fact, 3D cinema is managing to minimize the effects of audiences deserting cinema auditoriums due to the distribution of films on DVD and, perhaps even more significantly, the illegal downloading of films over the Internet (Soler Campillo, 2011). If we also take into account the fact that many mainstream films – Avatar (Cameron, 2009), Alice in Wonderland (Burton, 2010), Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (Marshall, 2011) and so on – employ 3D computer generated images (CGI) to create a spectacular, attractive appearance, then it is clear that CGI as an expressive and narrative technique has acquired a fundamental role within the film industry. Following this logic, we agree with Lev Manovich’s (2005) argument that animation has ceased to be the marginal technique or practice that it once was, and now dominates contemporary audio-visual production: it is ubiquitous in films, television, advertising and videogames alike. Animation films are increasingly common in cinema, with international Pixar and DreamWorks studios’ productions leading the pack. One of the key factors explaining the increase in the animation genre over the last two decades is the fact that the audience for this kind of film has transcended its traditional demographic – children – to reach a broader adult audience. Spanish animated cinema has not been unaffected by this wider international trend, with a notable increase in production over the last decade, characterized by a series of common features: relatively small budgets (an average of around $4.1 million); modest box office returns (around $2.75 million per film); and a limited number of spectators that is rarely upward of 200,000. In short, as Martínez-Barnuevo (2008, 2009) highlights, contemporary Spanish animation cinema finds itself in a blatantly paradoxical situation

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under these conditions: despite having undergone a process of sustained growth, the industry faces huge difficulties in terms of commercial gain, thereby placing the sustainability of the current model in question. In this chapter we would like to discuss Spanish animated cinema produced over the previous decade, paying particular attention to Planet 51 (Blanco, Abad, and Martínez, 2009) which will be analysed from two complementary perspectives. First, an examination of the film’s expressive and narrative resources will yield a textual analysis that will demonstrate how, for example, through international intertextual citations, it moves away from Spanish and European cultural references. Second, we will adopt an industrial perspective to examine how Planet 51 follows the most aggressive rules of Hollywood-style commercialization and promotion in terms of production, distribution and exhibition. Contemporary Animated Cinema in Spain Just over twenty animation films have been produced in Spain during the last fifteen years. If we take into account the almost cottage industry nature of a sector which has failed to consolidate itself, their box-office takings have been relatively successful. Following in the wake of Toy Story (Lasseter, 1995), Megasónicos (González de la Fuente and Martínez Montero, 1997) is considered the first Spanish (and European) 3D CGI animation film. With a budget of $0.82 million and a team of twelve specialists, it won the 1998 Goya Award for Best Animation Film. It was an adventurous film in technical terms, aimed at children; but the script is flawed, with an awkwardly paced narrative. As a result, the film is no match for the excellent quality assurance guaranteed by, say, the Pixar production line. Many of the more successful productions have been the result of hard work carried out by specialized production companies, whose achievement certainly deserves mention for their boldness and dedication. Bren Entertainment took part in the production of Goomer (Feito and Varela, 1999) and has been subsequently responsible for works that have won the Goya Award for Best Animation Film: El Cid: la leyenda/El Cid: the Legend (Pozo, 2003); PK3 Pinocchio 3000 (Robichaud, 2004); El Ratón Pérez (Buscarini, 2006); and Donkey Xote/ Donkey X (Pozo, 2007). It also produced, in cooperation with Filmax Animation, Nocturna (Maldonado and García, 2007), an original and innovative magical adventure that moves away from the hegemonic Hollywood model. The work of Dygra Films also warrants mention. El bosque animado/The Living Forest (de la Cruz and Gómez, 2001) won two Goya Awards, and its commercial success at home managed to attract international distribution.1 In addition to the work carried out by these two Galician production houses, a number of films have been produced by smaller companies, such as the now-defunct Animagic Studio, Dibulitoon Studio or Milímetros Features Animation. Moreover, there have been other personal projects, often difficult to classify, which include De profundis/From the Sea (Prado, 2007), El lince perdido/The Missing Lynx (García and Sicilia, 2008), Chico y Rita/Chico and Rita (Trueba, Mariscal and Errando, 2010) – a 368

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Goya-winning Hispano-British musical film, very well received by critics and nominated for an Oscar in 2012 – or Arrugas/Wrinkles (Ferreras, 2012), the winner of the Goya Award for Best Animation Feature Film in 2012. This admittedly partial review of Spanish animation from the past decade provides the context for some general remarks. First, the animation sector is remarkably complex, for it requires a large number of professionals from very varied specialties, which significantly increases production costs. Second, the films are being increasingly primed for the global market. Third, the life cycle of films is much greater than earlier models – with the sale of television rights, the DVD market and pay-per-view – which were more reliant on box office takings and rarely managed to cover their basic production costs. Fourth, the survival of Spanish production companies can be explained only in relation to substantial subsidies from public administration bodies and television stations, which have made a great financial effort in the past decade, as they believe that this sector has an important strategic value. Fifth, and in relation to this last observation, we should remember that the sparse data available on production budgets may not match reality. Otherwise, production companies’ survival would not have been possible, as the majority of investments can be recouped only once the commercial cycle of the films is complete after several years (or longer, in many cases). Finally, the variety of narratives reveal that many of the films relate to Spanish and European cultures, and target not only children but also adults. Planet 51: Industrial Considerations With a budget that reached almost $75.4 million, Planet 51 is the most expensive Spanish film to date. It was produced by Ilion Animation Studios, run by the Pérez Dolset brothers, who previously had gained considerable experience in videogame production through another company, Pyro, renowned for the incredible success of Commandos (1998). The establishment of Ilion Animation Studios is the result of a business project designed to provide a complex activity with continuity and solidity (Martín-Núñez, 2009), involving research, development and innovation (R + D + i) as a formula for ensuring quality and differentiation in the creation of films. It was clear from the outset that part of the Ilion business remit involved establishing a training department called U-Tad: University Centre of Technologies and Digital Arts. The aim of this centre, integrated into the studio, is to develop new talent and provide the company’s own staff and potential future employees with specialized training which, it is hoped, will bring Ilion considerable medium and long-term benefits. Planet 51’s status as an international co-production is manifest in the assembled artistic and technical team. Hollywood actors with international profiles provided the voices for the film’s leading characters: Dwayne Johnson as Captain Charles T. Baker, Jessica Biel as young Neera, and Gary Oldman as General Grawl. This proved a very effective strategy for attracting the general public. The participation of Joe Stillman – well-known internationally for his work as scriptwriter on Shrek (Adamson and Jenson, 2001) and Shrek 2 (Adamson, Asbury 369

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and Vernon, 2004) – was also an important asset, as was that of James Brett, composer of the soundtrack and conductor of London Metropolitan Orchestra,2 whose contribution was instrumental in recreating the ambience of a Hollywood-style production. However, the major differentiating factor between Planet 51 and the majority of Spanish productions is the enormous care and attention devoted to distribution and exhibition, which was handled by DeAPlaneta in Spain and Sony Pictures International abroad: most notably the advertising budget, estimated at around $205.65 million. In fact, the latter is one of the film’s most important assets, especially in a context in which promotion is considered by economics and marketing specialists to be an issue which has yet to be addressed adequately by European and Spanish cinemas (Camilleri, 2007; Creton, 2009; López-Villanueva, 2008). Prior to release, there was considerable – arguably unprecedented – promotional activity. In addition to the trailer being shown in cinema screens, an advertising campaign was carried out on billboard posts and on television, details about the making of the film were widely circulated, press conferences were held, a promotional videogame was produced, and considerable public expectation was generated through dramatic marketing gimmicks, such a sending a copy of the film to members of the International Space Station on board the Discovery shuttle, on August 28 2009. While more than four thousand copies were distributed for release in the United States and Canada on November 20, the weekend before Thanksgiving Day, Planet 51 was travelling at 17,497.81 miles per hour above the Earth, making a complete orbit of the planet in 90 minutes: the exact duration of the film. In the words of one of the principal producers, ‘without promotion you’re nothing’ (cited in Belinchón, 2009b). In Spain, Planet 51 made $4.1 million over the opening weekend. According to data from the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the film has achieved a cumulative audience of 1,995,063 spectators in Spanish cinemas, grossing a total of $16 million – making it the most successful Spanish animation film ever in terms of audience numbers. The International Movie Database (IMDb) estimated the film’s accumulated gross in US cinemas between its initial release and March 2010 at just over $42 million, with a total global gross of $105.6 million.3 These are considerable figures, especially if we take into account the fact that the film’s financial life cycle also encompasses other assets including television broadcasting rights, pay-per-view, video rental, DVD sales, merchandising, product placement agreements with big brands, and so on. In sum, the industrial conditions and results obtained by Planet 51 are absolutely exceptional within the context of Spanish animated cinema. Statistics aside, it is now incumbent upon us to frame this ostensible success in relation to the content and/or quality of the film itself. Planet 51: Analysis of Defining Expressive and Narrative Features One of the principal explanations for Planet 51’s box office success is that, starting with the title itself, it does not take on the appearance of a Spanish animation film. Instead, it has the feel of a film produced in America by Pixar or DreamWorks. As was the case with the films in 370

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the Shrek saga (Adamson and Jenson, 2001; Adamson, Asbury and Vernon 2004; Miller and Hui, 2007; Mitchell, 2010) one of Planet 51’s defining features is the repeated intertextual reference to North American films and, by extension, US popular culture. Thus, Planet 51 is created largely through discourse hybridization: a mechanism for weaving the meanings of the film through parody and pastiche. In fact, it is a film predicated on remediation (Bolter and Grusin, 2000) and transtextualities (Genette, 1989) which depend on the complicity of the spectator, who thereby becomes actively involved in the construction of the film’s meaning(s). Right at the outset, a young couple sits in a convertible car looking at the view of a neon-lit city, a powerful reminder of images we have seen before in other films, such as E.T., the Extraterrestrial (Spielberg, 1982). Suddenly, a huge alien spaceship makes its appearance and begins to chase the car, until some soldiers unsuccessfully confront the invader. Shortly afterwards we discover that this is in fact a film being watched in a cinema by teenagers. In this way, the reference to cinema itself, the most popular form of entertainment in the 1950s  – a decade when science-fiction B-movies were tremendously successful (films by Gordon Douglas, Robert Wise, etc.) – serves to situate the narrative. The hostility of the inhabitants of Planet 51 strongly recalls many plots from successful films of the Cold War, such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (Wise, 1951) – in which the extraterrestrial comes in peace and, as is the case in Planet 51, is received with hostility by the army – The War of the Worlds (Haskin, 1953), Invaders from Mars (Menzies, 1953) or Them! (Douglas, 1954). The references are bolstered, above all, through the appearance on the soundtrack of popular songs of the time, such as ‘Greased Lightnin’ by Jim Jacobs and Warren Tracy, recalling the famous film Grease (Kleiser, 1978), also set in the 1950s.4 Following the example of Pixar and DreamWorks films, references to cinema abound throughout. Top Secret Base 9 strongly recalls the famous Roswell American army airbase in Area 51 (which appears to have inspired the title of the film), present in the film Independence Day (Emmerich, 1996); a woman’s pet, with a canine appearance, is in fact a monster inspired by Alien (Scott, 1979); the Rover space probe bears an astonishing resemblance to WALL-E (Stanton, 2008), a very appealing character when he dances beneath raining stones to the sound of ‘Singing in the Rain’. Later, when some aliens – whose physical appearance recalls the ogre Shrek – prepare to defend themselves from the Earth astronaut, a character produces an instruction manual referring to an invasion of giant ants (echoing Them!, Douglas, 1954), sea monsters (an iconic reference to the monster in the film Creature from the Black Lagoon, Arnold, 1954) and an invasion by 50-foot women (an explicit reference to Attack of the 50ft Woman, Juran, 1958). When Chuck Baker, the astronaut, first meets Lem, the young astronomer, he wonders whether he is not a kind of ‘thousand-year-old Yoda’, a clear allusion to Star Wars (Lucas, 1977) and, at another point, when Chuck is telling Lem how to win Neera, the tango ‘Por una cabeza’ by Carlos Gardel plays: this is the same music that appears in True Lies (Cameron, 1994). Furthermore, when Chuck is interviewed by a journalist in front of the television cameras, he puts on sunglasses saying ‘Hasta la vista, baby’, in clear allusion to Terminator II (Cameron, 1991). The most explicit references in Planet 51 are, however, to E.T., the Extraterrestrial: the same conceit of a child concealing 371

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a creature from another planet, avoiding its subjugation to scientific experimentation, and helping it return home, is the narrative thread that runs throughout Planet 51. The various intertextual filmic references eventually configure a cinematic text resulting from the crossing, interweaving and overlapping of more or less subtle quotations from dozens of very well-known films. It thereby provides a paradigmatic example of a dominant trend towards discourse hybridization in hegemonic contemporary cinema (Casero Ripollés and Marzal Felici, 2011). Why is it that this trend is so prevalent in mainstream cinema? The answer might reside in the concept of recognition, also known in classical rhetoric as anagnorisis (Aristotle) or anamnesis (Plato), as an explanation of the textual operation of a certain type of story (Balló and Pérez, 2005; Cave, 1988), which has been applied elsewhere in relation to the study of cinematic melodramas (Marzal-Felici, 1998). Recognition is, in itself, a source of pleasure for the spectator, reinforcing the identification effect. Redundancy and seriality in contemporary action cinema and film melodrama repeat the same rhetorical formulae ad nauseam. Recognition constitutes both a formal characteristic and a vehicle for themes of knowledge (Cave, 1988: 4), and is thus of great value as a structural element that can be expressed in different dimensions: iconographic, actantial, spatial, narrative and musical. Terence Cave (1988) highlights that there is a symbiotic relationship between the structural effect of recognition, and the negative and positive emotional relationships that an audience experiences during cultural consumption, which undoubtedly allows the spectator to adopt a position of cognitive superiority over the characters. In our opinion, the recognition or familiarity of the structures mentioned above helps us to understand why many films from the dominant tradition of cinematic animation, to which Planet 51 belongs, are the result of rich, complex audio-visual discourse hybridization. These are texts that weave together elaborate narratives, captivating and seducing audience members in the process. Animated Cinema and Cultural Exception: A Model for Spanish Cinema? Planet 51 is an unusual film in the Spanish context for two fundamental interrelated reasons: first, the clear desire to cleanse itself of its own cultural specificity; and second, because the film is offered as a calculated marketing product. These appear to be one of the main reasons for the lukewarm, even negative, response of Spanish critics when the film was released, who thought it would be less successful at home than in the United States. The film moves away from the from the typical ‘cute’ little animal films of the Disney or Dygra tradition (Belinchón, 2009a). Moreover, it has been noted that the film follows the reference of DreamWorks and Pixar too closely (Martín Núñez, 2009), and that its alien characters do not succeed in connecting emotionally with the audience, which is thereby detrimental to ‘the set of filmic identifications essential for setting off on the immobile journey of the spectator’ (Burch, 1987: 205). The chief protagonist showcases an 372

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exaggerated Americanism, a resource that is too forced for the family audience in a global market, which extends beyond the United States. Put in simple terms, the film lacks the depth or artistry of other ostensibly similar Pixar or Disney films such as Cars (Lasseter and Ranft, 2006) or Up! (Docter and Peterson, 2009), capable of provoking profound reflection on transcendental issues such as friendship, innocence, the meaning of life and so on. North American critics classified the film as an ‘insipid goof on sci-fi conventions’ with ‘nothing funny, provocative or involving’ (McCarthy, 2009), a ‘perky though not terribly imaginative feature’ (Honeycutt, 2009), and as having jokes that ‘are far too weak for adults or children’ (Smith, 2009). It is clear that, in order to obtain the necessary funds, it was essential to design Planet 51 as a transnational film, with a commercial strategy that would generate the financial rewards sufficient to sustain a high-level production. There can be no doubt that its global gross was impressive, especially within the context of Spanish cinema, and the key has been adoption of the commercial strategies used by major companies. Planet 51 was designed as a product to be franchised to multinational outlets such as Burger King, which included toys from the film in its children’s menus, or NASA. The film also utilized product placement as a commercial resource: brands such as Volkswagen, Twix and even a recognizable Apple iPod make an appearance. In addition, Planet 51 has the de rigueur multi-platform videogame. As the Pérez Dolset brothers explained (Benítez and Pascual, 2010), the forecast is that 60 per cent of total income from the film should come from digital channels and other alternative routes to box office takings. The defining feature of Ilion Animation Studios is the business vision of its managers, who came to the film industry from a successful career in the digital content production sector, encompassing products from videogames to smartphone apps. In other words, Planet 51 emerges from an intense economic model that conceives film as a global marketing product. Unlike Planet 51, many of the other Spanish animation films that we have mentioned are characterized by cultural themes specific to Spain and Europe. For example, this is particularly noticeable in many of the aforementioned Bren Entertainment and Filmax Animation studios’ films, which are based on stories about historical characters; or those produced by Dygra, often set in the magical universe of elves, gods and fairies associated with popular Spanish festivities. There are also Spanish animation films with personal narratives that cannot be readily categorized. The common denominator is films which have a very specific character, far removed from Hollywood references, which poses a challenge for international audiences. It is our contention that Spanish animation’s quest for a space in the international market is a very positive phenomenon, but we do not believe that it is necessary to relinquish cultural specificities in the process. In fact, we must not forget that over the last few years, the struggle for ‘cultural exception’ has been transformed into the protection of ‘cultural diversity’, as upheld by the European Union, and included in the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions of 2007 (Arcos Martín, 2010: 13). 373

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Conclusion In light of the aesthetic and industrial analyses carried out in this chapter, perhaps we might ask ourselves whether Spanish animated cinema is in a position to conquer the favour of the American public or other markets? It is our contention that it cannot and/or should not, for a number of reasons. First, we have serious doubts as to the degree of openness of international markets. In our opinion, the major communication conglomerates do not appear to be open to Spanish or, more generally, European products. Second, in order to cross these barriers, it is clear that Spanish animated cinema would have to follow the example of Planet 51, expending considerable effort and making sacrifices in terms of promotion. Third, we must learn from the examples provided by hegemonic North American cinema, which is based on cooperation between administrations in order to promote its international expansion, along with ‘the role played in this sense by the practice of economic and competitive intelligence’ (Arcos Martín, 2010: 15). Tremendous talent and potential have been shown in those Spanish animation production companies which have received financial support from public institutions. It is our contention that this policy of production subsidies must continue, and even increase, given that the field of animation could help consolidate other related sectors such as videogames – an industry clearly on the rise. It is incumbent that policies of this kind become increasingly transparent, and that they are conceived in terms of investment, rather than subsidy. Acknowledgement This text was written with the help of the research project ‘New Trends and Hybridizations of Contemporary Audio-visual Discourses’, financed by the National R + D + i Plan of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation for 2008–11 (CSO2008-00606/SOCI), under the direction of Dr Javier Marzal Felici. Notes 1 2 3 4

The subsequent films produced – El sueño de una noche de San Juan/Midsummer Dream (de la Cruz and Gómez, 2005) and Espíritu del bosque/Spirit of the Forest (Rubin and Peña, 2008) – were notably less commercially successful. James Brett has had a long career in Hollywood, appearing in high-profile films such as The Iron Giant (Bird, 1999), The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (Hopkins, 2004) or The Nanny Diaries (Springer Berman and Pulcini, 2007). Information taken from the Spanish Ministry of Culture website, http://www.mcu.es/cine/, and the Imdb database, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0762125/business. Last accessed on 16 August 2012. Other songs in the film are ‘Mr. Sandman’, by Pat Ballard, from 1954; ‘Ding Ding A Boom Boom’ by Chris Cawte, and, most strikingly, ‘Long Tall Sally’, a blues rocker written by Robert Blackwell, Enotris Johnson and Richard Penniman in 1956. 374

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References Arcos-Martín, R. (2010). La lógica de la excepción cultural: Entre la geopolítica y la diversidad cultural (Madrid: Cátedra). Balló, J. and Pérez, X. (2005). Yo ya he estado aquí: Ficciones de la repetición (Barcelona: Anagrama). Belinchón, G. (2009a). ‘Planet 51, la respuesta española al cine de Pixar’, El País, 25 March, available at http://elpais.com/diario/2009/03/25/cultura/1237935606_850215.html, last accessed on 20 August 2012. (2009b). ‘A la conquista del planeta Hollywood’, El País, 20 November, available at http:// elpais.com/diario/2009/11/20/cine/1258671601_850215.html, last accessed on 20 August 2012. Benítez, J. and Pascual, R. (2010). ‘En portada: Ignacio y Javier Pérez Dolset’, Capital, January: 14–22. Bolter, J. D. and Grusin, R. (2000). Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Burch, N. (1987). El tragaluz del infinito (Madrid: Cátedra). Camilleri, J. -F. (2007). Le marketing du cinéma (Paris: Dixi). Casero-Ripollés, A. and Marzal-Felici, J. (2011). ‘Presentación. Algunas claves para la comprensión de las hibridaciones entre información y entretenimiento en el periodismo audiovisual: el infoentretenimiento en la era del espectáculo’ in A Casero-Ripollés and J. Marzal-Felici (eds.), Periodismo en televisión: nuevos horizontes, nuevas tendencias (Zamora: Comunicación Social Ediciones y Publicaciones), 11–22. Cave, T. (1988). Recognitions (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Creton, L. (2009). Économie du cinéma: perspectives stratégiques (Paris: Armand Colin). Genette, G. (1989). Figuras III (Barcelona: Lumen). Honeycutt, K. (2009). ‘Review of Planet 51’, The Hollywood Reporter, 15 November, available at http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/planet-51-film-review-93752, last accessed on 27 July 2012. López-Villanueva, J. (2008). ‘Vender vino sin botellas: la producción cinematográfica ante su mutación digital’ in J. Marzal-Felici and F. J. Gómez-Tarín (eds.), El productor y la producción en la industria cinematográfica (Madrid: Editorial Complutense), 421–42. Manovich, L. (2005). El lenguaje de los nuevos medios de comunicación: La imagen en la era digital (Barcelona: Paidós). Martín-Núñez, M. (2009). ‘Planet 51 ó la pixarización de la industria de animación española’, L’Atalante, 10: 26–31. Martínez-Barnuevo, M. L. (2008). El largometraje de animación español: análisis y evaluación (Madrid: Ediciones y Publicaciones Autor). (2009). ‘La animación española de largometraje: pasado, presente y perspectivas de una paradoja’, Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 64: 491–507. Marzal-Felici, J. (1998). David Wark Griffith (Madrid: Cátedra). McCarthy, T. (2009). ‘Review of Planet 51’, Variety, 15 November, available at http://variety. com/2009/film/reviews/planet-51-1200477435/#, last accessed on 27 July 2012. 375

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Ministry of Culture (nd). ‘El cine y el vídeo en datos y cifras’, available at http://www.mcu.es/ cine/MC/CDC/index.html, last accessed on 23 October 2011. Smith, K. (2009). ‘Review of Planet 51’, New York Post, 25 November, available at http://nypost. com/2009/11/20/the-atmospheres-all-wrong-on-planet-51/, last accessed on 27 July 2012. Soler-Campillo, M. (2011). ‘El mercado de la imagen 3D: Un análisis desde la perspectiva de las empresas de comunicación’ in I. Bort-Gual, S. García-Catalán and M. Martín-Núñez (eds.), Nuevas tendencias e hibridaciones de los discursos audiovisuales contemporáneos (Madrid: Ediciones de las Ciencias Sociales), 341–48.

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Chapter 24 How to Make Arty Films Now Luis Miñarro

The Abduction of Europe Although it might have been created by him, if we think of Picasso’s painting The Rape of Europa, then it applies to us all. In it, we can see how an unrestrained bull tries to take Europe as its own and rape her. This serves as an apt metaphor for what is happening in relation to Europe and culture. For many years, and up to only a few months ago, Europe boasted of its commitment to culture. When speaking about culture, I refer to all aspects: even that which is selfcontained and aimed exclusively at elites and minority groups of different kinds. One of the characteristics of Europe, and the various countries that it comprises, has been a desire to give a voice to – invest economic resources and energy into – something that might seem somewhat superficial. This has served to shape tastes, attitudes, particularities and decisive images that have been projected to the rest of the world, which have created a glamorous image of the European way of life in contrast to that of other civilizations. It is also true that it has been profitable. The commitment to quality always reaps dividends, even if it sometimes takes time; this was already understood in Renaissance times. The Catholic Church, the equivalent to the lay patronage of the state today, shared this conception. What the popes used to do was what the ministries of culture have done until recently. Therefore, Picasso’s image is not to be disregarded: it reflects the current state of affairs. Europe has been abducted by economic and financial liberalism, and its ‘values’, encouraged for so long, are at risk of extinction. The Calvinistic and industrialized mentality of the North has abducted the hedonistic and bright South. In the same way that conversations over a coffee have disappeared gradually, in the same way that economics have replaced politics in debate, the so-called cultural industries have hijacked genuine culture. Whatever sells is now culture, whether that be restoration, literature or art – and cinema is not exempt from this principle. This brief preamble is designed to show that things have changed, and significantly. Culture has never been a major priority in the overall budget of a state, in spite of the fact that it generates more gross domestic product (GDP) than it costs. To give a concrete example, in Catalonia – the region in which I live – the Generalitat dedicates resources that total less than 1 per cent of its total budget at a time when the aforementioned cultural industries generate more than 3 per cent of annual wealth. Never is a subject related to culture raised in the presidential election debates. Education might be discussed (and

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what is education without culture?), health, crime, pensions, unemployment – but culture does not seem to bring in votes. Culture becomes of interest when things are going well; however, when they are not going so well, it disappears. It is something akin to make-up or an expensive perfume: one can do without it and go out, having just washed one’s face. What is lacking is the conviction to defend something that is health-related, something that makes a collective unique, and something that is directly related to quality of life. Only in a country such as France do they understand culture as an inherent good in a way that does not require justification; the forming of citizens, its very civility, depends to a great extent on the arts. How Arty Films Have Been Produced These are the methods by which arty films have been produced up until now: • Public funding (33 per cent) • Acquisition of television rights (33 per cent) • Investment of producer to be recouped (33 per cent). Within the complex regulations of the European Union, there are a series of laws and principles designed to support the cinema. It has come about in this way because, without this support, linguistic as well as cultural singularities would have disappeared from the film industry, given the emphasis placed on North American cinema and the English language. It might sound a cliché but, given that I originally delivered this chapter as a paper in New York, it is worth recalling that 80 per cent of the cinema consumed in most European countries (with the exception of France) is the product of the North American majors. It is the majors that control distribution, and which have agreements in place with the majority of exhibitors or cinemas. North American cinema is very clear about the fact that it creates tastes, promotes the American way of life and, in the process, an ideological belief system. There is a reason why showbusiness is its second biggest industry. Without this type of financial support, Europe would be left even more exposed to the elements. This is why individual ministries of culture have subsidised aspects of national cinemas, and the European Union itself has created specific monetary funds that do not need to be reimbursed if no profits are forthcoming. Europe has been so generous in this aid that part of these funds is dedicated to cinema created in other continents, on the proviso that they are non-consolidated centres of cinematic production. As a result, European funds such as Huber Bals (Holland), World Cinema Fund (Germany), Ibermedia (Spain), Fond Sud (France), etc. have participated in projects by film-makers from countries as diverse as Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, Mexico, Morocco, Thailand, the Philippines, and so on. In

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fact, any national film industry and all foreign film-makers are eligible for them, apart from those coming from developed countries. Logically. these agreements have been coproductions, and Europeans or European businesses have been involved in the artistic and technical processes. This is an interesting way of discovering new talent, of working out what is new in the world and bringing it home. An intelligent way of seeing the world and not, perhaps, completely selfless. In addition to these European funds to which not all films made in Europe can apply, there is the official support provided by individual countries. In the specific case of Spain, every film can apply to have 33 per cent of the initial investment reimbursed once it has registered a certain number of spectators over its theatrical run. This is more of an industrial than a cultural policy, given that it does not discriminate according to the quality of the film, or whether it has entered the prestigious festival circuit, or wherever else it might have been screened in the world. More risky ventures can opt for support prior to being made, and can obtain a maximum of 50 per cent of the financial cost between the state and the governments of the autonomous regions. Ten per cent of the projects that apply for these funds every year are successful. It is worth bearing in mind that there is more than Pedro Almodóvar in Spain: an average of 140 films are made a year, of which approximately 20 per cent travel around the world. The majority of the films are for internal consumption. Approximately 30 per cent do not even receive a proper commercial release, or if they do, in a very precarious manner. Let us just say that it is a combination of investment and distribution. It is relatively easy to make a debut film; but it is much harder to keep going as a film-maker or producer and go on to make a second film. Another vital source of finance is the purchase of transmission rights from television channels. Once again, the emphasis is obviously on North American cinema as a result of the viewing figures that it is able to generate. Private television channels have an obligation to invest 3 per cent of their advertising revenue in national cinema. This happens throughout the European Community; the television companies do not like it, and they try and shirk the obligation as much as possible. Public television broadcasters financed by taxpayers’ money should work to defend a less commercial and more artistic cinema, but these days they follow the same criteria governed by viewing figures as the private channels. It never used to be like this: public broadcasters used to support projects of all kinds. What I have been trying to do up to now is briefly explain the situation of the cinematographic arts in many European countries. Once again, it is France that has responded best to the needs of auteur cinema, since it has the best distribution channels: specialist exhibition networks, an audience better prepared and more predisposed to accept less commercial fare and more artistic content, and specialist television broadcasters such as ARTE. Europe is a curious puzzle, and it is not the same everywhere; Germany also supports its cinema, having regional support systems and local television stations.

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Case Studies The following detail films that I have produced. O Estranho Caso de Angélica O Estranho Caso de Angélica/The Strange Case of Angélica (de Oliviera, 2010) is a Spanish– French–Portuguese co-production that needed the support of the official cinematic institutions in each country in order to be viable. In Portugal and Spain we applied for the financial advances available for projects of special artistic and cultural value. In 2010, these were available both for a prestigious director such as Oliviera, and new film-makers making their first or second film. This scheme has practically ground to a halt as a result of the current financial crisis. No support of this kind was available at all in Portugal in 2012; in Spain it has been reduced to €3 million: a figure for which more than three hundred projects will compete. Thus, the strategy for financing O Estranho Caso de Angélica would not be viable now, two years later. In relation to this film, we also applied successfully for a reimbursable (through box office returns) financial fund called Ibermedia, which supports co-productions between Spain, Portugal and Latin America. It was for this reason that Sao Paulo’s Mostra Internacional de Cinema Festival became involved in the project. This, combined with the advanced purchase rights for Portuguese television (no Spanish channel wanted to buy them) made one of Oliviera’s most cherished projects viable. The film subsequently opened the ‘A Certain Regard’ section of the Cannes Film Festival, has been seen at festivals around the world, and been hailed by critics as a masterpiece. As tends to be the case, the box office returns were healthiest in France, where it was seen by ten times more spectators than in Spain; not surprisingly, this circumstance favours the Gallic coproducer who owns the exclusive rights for this territory. Loong Boonmee raleuk chat Loong Boonmee raleuk chat/Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Weerasethakul, 2010) is another example of how co-production – this time between five countries – can make an arty film viable: it is a means of minimizing risks for each producer and ensuring that it is released in at least those five countries. Weerasethakul’s films forms part of a series called ‘Primitive’, which also encompasses short films and museum installations. In this case, the Spanish side of the production took the financial risk on itself out of interest in the Thai director’s cinematic universe. I contacted Simon Field from Illumination Films in the United Kingdom, the director’s primary producer. In addition, it was necessary to involve an international sales agent, The Match Factory (Germany), which offered a returnable advance for the film’s production and took charge of international distribution. The film formed part 384

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of the official selection at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, and ultimately won its highest accolade: the Palme d’Or. This unexpected occurrence catapulted the film internationally, where it was sold to thirty-seven territories. In this case, the investment risk paid off, with the sales of television rights to the official Catalan television station as a result of my production office, Eddie Saeta, being located in Barcelona. I also received piecemeal returns from the various international sales beyond the countries of my various co-producers. This process shows the advantage of having, if at all possible, an international sales agent on board from the outset. They have more at stake and, as such, ‘guarantee’ better prospects for the film in the future. This might seem obvious for North American commercial cinema, but it is not always so clear in low or medium-budget projects from other countries. Aita Aita/Father (de Orbe, 2010) is an entirely Spanish film which explores the universal through that which is most private and personal. It is not experimental cinema, but it does involve a major and carefully elaborated engagement with image, sound and post-production. The film took three years to make because it contains re-elaborated fragments from the origins of Basque cinema. Such an ambitious project normally has little chance of being made, due to its limited commercial possibilities. However, it is a brave venture which fully justifies cinema’s claim to be an art: the seventh art. A film of this kind is designed for a niche and elite audience, to be shown at festivals, in museums, art galleries and other alternative circuits. Aita has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate in London, and in the Chicago, Melbourne and Amsterdam Film Archives, etc. It won the top prize at the FICUNAM Film Festival in Mexico City, Best Cinematography at the San Sebastían Film Festival, Special Mention at the TaiPei Golden Horse Film Festival, and so on. It would be absurd to try and make money out of a film of this kind – the most that a producer can do in such cases is hope to recoup their costs. In order to do so, it is necessary to have exhaustive control over the budget, negotiate with all involved, and hope that fate smiles on you – that you are able to sell the film to at least one other country. It is not possible to finance a film such as this on the basis of the screening fees paid by festivals and film clubs alone. In this case, we had the Socialist government’s Ministry of Culture, the Catalan Generalitat and television channel as allies. If these kinds of collaborations disappear, as they seem to be doing, it places the future of projects such as Aita in jeopardy. La mosquitera La mosquitera/The Mosquito Net (Vila, 2010), a black comedy, emerged from the idea of making a film with the cooperation of television channels, using a well-known cast and a more traditional production process. In this case, the script, its dialogue and having the 385

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right technical and artistic teams were paramount. This is a well-honed approach used to make a film ostensibly far less risky than Aita or any of the other titles mentioned in this chapter. However, in cinema nothing can be taken for granted: a film’s success depends on a multitude of factors outside of your control. In commercial terms, La mosquitera has had only modest success, largely as a result of difficulty in circulating European films through the different countries which the continent comprises, and the hijacking of distribution by North American studios, which leaves little space for anything else. The financing was obtained largely through a credit organization (ICO), which advances money that it can then recoup through selling broadcast rights to Spanish television channels. We are, again, talking about a 100 per cent Spanish film, not an international co-production. The film has premiered in Spain, France and Austria. This House of Cards is Falling Apart Private television channels prefer to keep on buying mainstream cinema. Public broadcasters are likely to be privatised in the near future and disappear; in any case, they are tending to dedicate fewer resources to cinema, replicating the policies of private channels in the hope of boosting ratings. They have lost their sense of ‘public service’ in favour of indiscriminate content. Cinematic institutions or individual divisions within the Ministry of Culture are reducing constantly the resources dedicated to supporting cinema. Beyond film, the financial crisis might even claim the Ministry of Culture as one of its victims. Producers are making less and less money out of their films due to declining audience numbers, as a result of being viewed on the Internet for free, or through other circuits. Nothing is profitable. If the producer could traditionally aim to cover the 33 per cent through public aid, this resource also may wind up under threat. Very few films constitute a business. Very few can hope to recoup 100 per cent of their investment through commercial means at home, or through international sales. As a result, what will happen with auteur cinema? My opinion is that the system which has functioned up to now has stopped working. In fact, I now think that when a producer has been awarded public aid, they cannot sell the television rights and vice versa. As a result, their investment has to go up, as does the concomitant risk of not recouping their outlay. No money is left for promotion and advertising – there is no economic way out. New Possibilities I fear that the only way of making artistic or auteur cinema will be from a grass roots (perhaps cooperative) position of marginality. These days, thanks to the democratization of technology and easy access to high-quality digital cameras, cinema has become something else. We can all make cinema. Artistic photography used to be the unique preserve of the 386

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select few; now everyone knows how to take good photographs, how to frame them and optimize the light. Something similar is happening with cinema. In fact, in my country, a huge number of spontaneous film-makers between twenty and thirty years old are coming to the fore. They have a more direct relationship with cinema, without industrial constraints. They have been trained in film schools or simply by watching music videos. They are fresh, quick and know how best to utilize the few resources they have at their disposal. They are outsiders. The traditional channels do not approve of them. They are partaking in ‘disloyal’ competition – but they exist, and they are here. One example is Amanecidos/Dawned (2011), made by Yonay Boix and Pol Aregall. It has been financed by crowdfunding through the Internet. The actors belong to fringe theatre groups or are friends of the director. They worked for free, instead receiving a symbolic share of the rights. This production did not cost more than $30,000, and is going to the same international festivals as productions that have cost $1 million. The film is achieving comparable goals at a much smaller cost. However, it will be a struggle to get access to commercial cinema screens: the ‘professionals’ guard them carefully against young ‘upstarts’. These films might circulate successfully through the Internet, but the channels are also changing. It is a different world. It may yet to be paved, but talent will always find a path. Acknowledgement This paper was originally delivered in Spanish at the (S)Movies: Contemporary Spanish Cinema International Conference, which was organized by the Department of Audiovisual Communication, Documentation and History of Art, Valencia Polytechnic University, and held in New York in December 2011. This text was then translated by Duncan Wheeler for publication in English.

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Chapter 25 How to Make Commercial Films Now Mercedes Gamero and Duncan Wheeler

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 ould you tell me about your professional trajectory, and C how you came to become both head of acquisitions for the television channel, Antena 3, and one, if not the most, influential producer in Spanish cinema? mercedes gamero (mg): I did a Master’s in Audio-Visual Production run by José Jacoste Quesada at the Complutense, University of Madrid. There was a placement as part of the course; I went to work in the acquisitions department at Sogecable, just at the time when the battle between cable and digital providers was being waged. All of the cable channels were finalizing their contracts with the majors, and my first project as a paid intern was to seal the deal for the Spanish acquisition of Friends (Warner Brother Television and Bright/Kauffman/Crane Productions, 1994–2004). Then I went to Canal+, followed by TeleMadrid, where I was responsible for 5 per cent of their output. I came here to Antena 3 in 2004 and, for four years I dealt exclusively with acquisitions. In 2008, I also took charge of production. dw: So you undertake the two roles simultaneously? mg: Yes, I have one boss for acquisitions from the television channel, and another for the production side of things. dw: Has the fact that you started off and continue as head of acquisitions helped you to understand what works, and for whom? mg: Well, I suppose that travelling around the world for years and watching lots of television series must help in some way. The thing is that I’ve never studied script analysis or anything of the sort – I’ve mainly relied on instinct. dw: That instinct has seemingly served you very well because, in the midst of a recession, you have been able to make profitable films with relatively high budgets. Could you perhaps talk me through the process of how you go about making a commercially successful film?

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As you know, we have a legal obligation to invest in Spanish cinema. Given this, what we try and do is fulfil that obligation as best we can with the optimum amount of passion and enthusiasm. Our aim is to maintain a dual strategy. On the one hand, we produce films with genres that don’t travel as well, such as comedies that focus on our cultural idiosyncrasies – I’m thinking here of Que se mueran los feos/To Hell with the Ugly (Velilla, 2010) or Fuga de cerebros/Brain Drain (González Molina, 2009) – which have a budget of between €3 and €4 million, and are designed almost exclusively for domestic consumption. From the perspective of a television channel, we want to produce films that can be shown on prime-time: so you make Fuga de cerebros, and the idea is that you make €7 million at the box office and then screen it on prime-time – that’s the model we’re looking towards. These are the cinematic equivalents to what happens with domestic television series, which do genuinely connect with their audiences; the idea has been to translate this model to the cinema. The second parallel strategy – neither worse nor better, simply different – is to try and support Spanish directors such as Rodrigo Cortés or Juan Carlos Fresnadillo with projects in English. In these cases we form a smaller role within a wider conglomerate, in which we retain support networks and the rights for Spain, but the films are primed for the global marketplace. How do you go about finding partners for international co-productions? It’s normally the co-producers who come to us, we tend not to develop the projects. They develop them, they bring you a script, sometimes they have a director, sometimes they don’t – in the latter case, we look for the director together. I was speaking to Edmon Roch the other day about Lope (Waddington, 2010), a Spanish–Brazilian co-production that he helmed. He was telling me that it was the support of Antena 3 which made the project viable, and allowed him to then seek out partners abroad. The law is designed to encourage this kind of collaboration. The idea isn’t that we do everything ourselves, but that we stimulate production with major international partners. Lope, of course, was filmed in Spanish. How often do you look to fund international projects that are not in English? In the last few days we’ve been negotiating a minority, small-scale co-production with France; but when you produce in Spanish, it’s 392

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very difficult, because Spanish films don’t travel well in the same way that German films don’t do well here. Your room for manoeuvre is very limited. There are very specific examples where it works, normally genre films – and our higher-budget projects are really financed through pre-sales. I was going to ask about pre-sales. Is it possible to make this kind of film without them? No, it would be impossible. That is why you need to have an established director with a proven track record, and a certain degree of prestige in the international marketplace. They also need to be capable of securing a cast who can be used to attract capital. When a film goes well, it breaks even or makes a profit. What are the most important sources of revenue: box office receipts, DVD sales, television rights? The DVD has died. You use television channels, be that Canal + or the non-subscription channels, for pre-financing – but this is not that much money. Really, the thing we are left with is the box office: that’s the key. So, despite the much-heralded death of cinema, and the fact that every time I walk down Madrid’s Gran Vía, another cinema has been closed and musicals appear to occupy more billboards than films, the public auditorium still performs a determining role? Box office receipts are very low, but they remain the most important factor. Has your instinct ever failed you? Have you ever produced a film which you thought would be a big box office success that then failed to materialize? A big success, no – but I thought that Los últimos días/The Last Days (Pastor and Pastor, 2013), a relatively modest €5 million budget film, would do better than it did. I never expected it to be a blockbuster, but its box office returns have been disappointing. What about merchandising? For example, the Torrente saga (Segura, 1998– 2011) has really tapped into the commercial opportunities afforded by the branding of a character and film (see Chapter 21). Well, the thing is that Torrente is such a special case that it cannot really be compared with other Spanish films: it’s a unique phenomenon. More generally, neither marketing nor ancillary rights – be that through iTunes or whatever – perform the role that they do in other territories. It’s true, for example, that there are films in the United States which make huge amounts of money through such routes, but this is unthinkable here. 393

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Spanish cinema has not traditionally invested a great deal of money, or indeed thought, into marketing. I remember being less struck, for example, by the fact that Alatriste (Díaz Yanes, 2006) had the highest ever budget for a Spanish film at the time – €24 million – than the fact that $2 million of that was earmarked for promotion. In the case of Planet 51 (Blanco, Abad and Martínez, 2009), a film you produced, the marketing campaign cost a fortune by anyone’s standards (see Chapter 23). In that specific case, the fact it was a family film facilitated a vast array of licensing contracts. It was used by the Corte Inglés department store for its Christmas campaign, and it formed part of McDonalds’ ‘Happy Meal’, etc. When you have multiple licences around a product – something the North Americans do as standard – it is much easier to sell. Planet 51 certainly would not have made as much money at the box office if we had not had that promotional campaign in mind, right from the word go. Is this something habitual: do you generally think about how to market the film right from the outset? Yes, in relation to Tres metros sobre el cielo/Three Steps above Heaven (González Molina, 2010), for example, we prepared a teaser when we did not even have the lead female actress, we only had Mario Casas. As people were already familiar with the novel by Federico Moccia, you have the picture of Casas on the motorbike and that’s enough: you don’t need the girl – she’s just there in the background. The teaser was in cinemas two months before the film even began shooting. We prepared a teaser for Fuga de cerebros 2/Brain Drain 2 (Therón, 2011) to coincide with the release of Torrente 4: crisis letal/Torrente 4: Lethal Crisis (Segura, 2011) without having the lead actors – it was just a way of positioning the brand. Everyone knew the first film; you advertise it before a screening of Torrente 4 to say, ‘Well, now the guys instead of going to Oxford, are going to Harvard.’ It’s a pure concept, positioning the film within the marketplace so that people know it exists and will be coming out. When a film such as Los ojos de Julia/Julia’s Eyes (Morales, 2010) is released in the United Kingdom, for example, do you collaborate with foreign distributors over the promotional campaign? You might pass on some notes, but not really. They’re the ones who know their markets. So, in other words, you travel to buy things more than to sell them. In terms of marketing, could you talk about the role of social networking sites? 394

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They are playing an increasingly important role, depending of course on the type of film. The effect was incredible in relation to Tengo ganas de ti/I Want You (González Molina, 2012); in other projects, it plays a more minor role. Before a film is promoted and eventually released, do you carry out opinion polls or studies to decide on the potential demographic to be targeted? We tend to do more marketing studies once the film has been made. For example, we might do a screening if we’re not altogether sure about to whom we ought to market a film. In the way that sometimes happens with Hollywood films, have you ever changed the ending on the basis of the feedback given at screenings? Yes – or sometimes you see the ending and just think, this needs to be done again. Do you think audience tastes have changed with the onset of the current financial crisis? Does the general public need or ask for different things for films? I’m wondering, for example, whether Spanish comedies are enjoying a boom because people are consciously or unconsciously looking for escapism? I’m not convinced, because comedies have always been popular. Que se mueran los feos was a huge success for us three years ago. More generally – and I don’t think this is specific to Spanish cinema or Spain – the recession has perhaps accelerated the loss of cinema-going as a habit; the idea of just going to the cinema on a Sunday has disappeared. In any case, the production schedule for films is so long that making them about the current situation is problematic. Something that has struck me is that those films which do reference the crisis – be that Los amantes pasajeros/I’m So Excited (Almodóvar, 2013), El mundo es nuestro/The World is Ours (Sánchez, 2012) or Torrente 4: crisis letal/Torrente 4: Lethal Crisis (Segura, 2011) – often do so in a humoristic tone. Reality is so horrible: if you have a dramatic as opposed to a comic depiction, who’s going to want to see it? People have enough of that in their everyday life. When films have attempted to do it, they haven’t worked, either artistically or commercially. I’d like to return to this idea of translating a model that worked on the small screen to the big screen. It is ironic that commentators often complain about the homogeneity of television production but, as you’ve already mentioned, local production is able to 395

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connect with domestic audiences in a way that has not always happened in terms of cinematic production. Why do you think this is? Well, the question is: why does Spanish cinema have such bad press, such a bad image? Also, why does the general public disregard it, while at the same time Spanish television programmes triumph against imported productions from North America and elsewhere? In relation to subject matter, ways of speaking, acting styles, this obviously hadn’t been effectively translated to the cinema. I think there was a challenge to take on there, especially as younger generations are accustomed to watching Spanish fiction on the small screen. This is something that, if not exclusive to Spain, is at least different to France or Germany, where homegrown television production isn’t able to successful compete with foreign imports such as House (Head and Toe Films et. al., 2004–12), which are the real audience favourites. However, it is paradoxical – or at least ironic – that although cinema continues to be dependent, and arguably subservient, to television in Spain, it still seemingly enjoys a higher cultural standing. I read an interview, for example, with Curro Velázquez: he had written many television scripts before debuting in the cinema with Fuga de cerebros, but he clearly saw the fact he had written a film script as a step up in his professional career – a promotion, for want of a better word. I don’t understand his comments in that way. I think the challenge – and hence the pride – was simply to see if they could translate a successful model from television to cinema, as we have been discussing. If we’ve connected with the general public through Los hombres de Paco/Paco’s Men (Globo Media, 2005–10), can the same team now replicate that success with Fuga de cerebros? That’s how I see it – and in any case, these people have carried on working in television. It’s not as if they have left it behind, following their breakthrough in cinema. The same, of course, goes for actors. Mario Casas, Belén Rueda and Blanca Portillo, for example, all began their screen careers in television, and now combine highly successful careers in both media. Television’s new star system can actually make it hard for those of us who work on Spanish cinema from abroad to be as attuned as we might be to what I’d term ‘performance intertextuality’. I was really struck by this when watching Lo contrario al amor/The Opposite of Love (Villanueva, 2011) with a 396

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young Spanish audience who had been drawn to the cinema largely by the presence of Hugo Silva, another star from Los hombres de Paco. It is in fact impossible nowadays to think of cinema as a discreet medium. I subsequently saw Guadalupe Lancho – another television actress I had been unfamiliar with who also appeared in the film – a few weeks later as one of the star attractions in the musical based on Joaquín Sabina’s songbook, staged on the Gran Vía. Well, it’s evident that there’s no genuine star system in Spain, but whatever star system there is can be found in television – but even Mario Casas can’t guarantee success, as is demonstrated by the modest box office returns of Carne de neon/Neon Flash (Cabezas, 2010) or Grupo 7/Unit 7 (Rodríguez, 2012). I was surprised to read that he has become a heartthrob and celebrity icon in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, where Tengo ganas de ti was a box office sensation. I work on the singer Raphael, and it reminded me of the somewhat incongruous success that his romantic ballads and cinematic star vehicles had behind the Iron Curtain during the 1960s and 1970s. The phenomenon was centred in Russia, and that was because audiences were also familiar with him through Los hombres de Paco. That’s what created the Casas phenomenon. Tres metros sobre el cielo was not released in Russia; the cinematic debut came with Tengo ganas de ti. In the interim Mario had become very famous: they subsequently bought up the DVD rights for Tres metros sobre el cielo – it’s a very curious phenomenon. We always thought of the film as being for the domestic market, and its subsequent international success was a pleasant surprise. Continuing with the connections between film and television, one thing I’ve noticed is that the biographical mini-series produced by Antena 3 and yourself – Marisol, la película/Marisol, the Film (Palacios, 2008), Raphael (Manuel Ríos San Martín, 2010), Sofía/ Queen Sophia (Hernández, 2011) and so on – have been far more commercially successful than the rather limited corpus of Spanish cinematic biopics such as Camarón/Camarón: When Flamenco Became Legend (Chávarri, 2005) or Lola, la película (Hermoso, 2007). Why do you think that is? I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect it’s because people see it as something very intimate when they watch it at home, it’s not a spectacular event movie. What predominates is connection with 397

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the celebrity, and I’m not sure this is sufficient for people to pay for. They don’t generally work in North America either. With a few notable exceptions, biopics in cinema don’t succeed. I also wonder whether it’s a form of address that’s particularly well suited to the kind of multi-generational domestic viewing that is so typical of Spain. For example, you might have a family watching a film about Raphael, with a grandmother telling her grandson about when she saw him live in the 1960s or suchlike. Or a mother and daughter who live apart might ring each other at the end of an episode on a royal favourite to dissect its content, and talk more generally about their day. This dynamic simply doesn’t translate to the cinema. More generally, I find the nostalgia boom in twenty-first-century Spain fascinating: I’m thinking, for example, of the explosion in vintage fashion. As far as I can tell, this is completely unprecedented. You bought up the rights to the BBC series, Life on Mars (2006–2007) set in the 1970s, and translated the action to Spain’s transition period in La chica de ayer/Yesterday’s Girl (Antena 3 Films, 2009) where, as the Spanish title [taken from the title of Nacha Pop’s most famous song] suggests, music performs an affective, almost Proustian function. A similar dynamic is also at play in a number of films you have produced that are set in the present, be that the Torrente saga, or No lo llames amor … llámalo X/Don’t Call it Love … Call it X (Capel, 2011), which looks back at the destape (unveiling) period with fond nostalgia. Is this a general phenomenon of which you are aware? If truth be told, I hadn’t really thought about it – although it is true that I’m now working on a really beautiful project that has a lot of nostalgia in it. More generally, the increasing importance of television funding for cinematic production within the Spanish context does seem to mark a departure from the traditional vision of the film director as auteur, however that nebulous term might be construed. Returning to the interconnectedness yet distinctiveness of the different media, I was wondering whether you could discuss the respective division of labour in film and television. We have already talked about the role of actors, but what about the relationship between director and scriptwriter? For better or worse, often the former has been seen to have more control in cinema while the latter, certainly in the North American context, is generally given far more creative room for manoeuvre in television. 398

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Well, I think both are collective media. As we’ve already discussed, the team behind Fuga de cerebros had collaborated together already on television in Los hombres de Paco. The director invariably will have his vision but, yes, it is true that we deal with groups who work in collaboration, and have a shared team vision of what kind of film they want to produce, what audiences they need to address and the formulas that need to be employed. This is also the case in relation to genre films we have produced, such as Los ojos de Julia or El cuerpo/The Body (Paulo, 2012). What is the hardest or most complicated part of this process for you? Sometimes when you see something clearly, and the director doesn’t. At the end of the day, they are the director and you have to respect their focus. So they have the final word? Yes, of course – because otherwise you would make the film yourself. If you want to make changes like that, you ought not to hire a director, but do it yourself. There are times when you see a subplot in the script which doesn’t work, and you say ‘This is going to ruin the whole thing’; they tell you, ‘It’s going to turn our great’ – and sometimes during the casting process, they see something in an actor and you can’t, but then in the end, they can be right. What happens at the editing stage? I see daily rushes during both shooting and editing, and I send them written feedback; otherwise, I’d be a silent producer who just puts up the money. Different film-makers work in different ways: some work better in teams than others. In any case, however, the director always has the final word. I guess that this avoids the very public fallings-out that, say, Elías Querejeta had with some directors following his often drastic and unannounced interventions in the final cut. It is also completely different to what takes place in the United States, where producers often change things at the editing stage. Well, in the United States, often the directors are not involved in the editing process at all – they sometimes leave when shooting finishes. Focusing on your role as a producer for a moment, one thing that strikes me is that a huge deficit remains in female film directors, yet you and Esther García are two of the major power-brokers in Spanish cinema? 399

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We are very much isolated examples. There are very few female producers, or women anywhere in the industry – I’m always surrounded by guys. Do you think there is a level of institutional sexism? Have you suffered discrimination at any point in your career, or had the sensation that it’s been harder as a result of you being a woman? No, I’ve never had that feeling. Personally, I’ve never really thought about why there are fewer women, it just seems to be the way things are. It’s kind of surprising when we’ve even got CIMA (Asociación de Mujeres Cineastes y de Medios Audiovisuals/Association of Women Film-makers and Audio visual Practitioners). When you are choosing a director, what criteria do you apply? Why is this particular director the most appropriate for a specific project? Because you think that they have the best vision for that specific script, that they can work with this genre, they are au fait with the generic conventions; that they have the same film as you in their head because, of course, the same script can be read in many different ways. Perhaps we want something to be The Three Musketeers, and the director wants it to be Amadeus – if that’s the case, it’s not going to work out. So, an important part of your job is avoiding problems by amassing collaborators who are going to be able to work together and not cause problems during the shoot. I imagine that’s why you often work with the same people: for example, Fernando González Molina directed Fuga de cerebros, Los hombres de Paco, Tengo ganas de ti and Tres metros sobre el cielo. I am wondering to what extent a television channel such as Antena 3 might be seen as a twenty-first century variation on the classic Hollywood studio. Do you work with specific in-house crews? No, not at all. It depends on the project and the film-maker. Every director has their own director of photography and assistant director. Changing direction slightly, but remaining within the industrial framework, what do you think about protectionist methods? Are you in favour of specific screen quotas for Spanish or European films? Well, we have to accept that we are not fighting in equal conditions. In terms of promotion, we simply cannot compete with North American productions, and this ought to be regulated in some way like it is, for example, in France. I don’t think that auteur cinema ought to disappear; I think we need to see Spanish cinema as an industry in which there is room for everything. 400

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Would it be possible to finance a Spanish film without a subsidy and/or the support of a television channel? No, it would be absolutely impossible. Do you not think that television channels could be accused of seeking to control rather than merely counteract market forces? In other words, they might pose a threat for auteur cinema. No, not at all. It’s just that it’s a different kind of cinema that needs to be financed from different sources – perhaps from the state television channel. You are legally obliged to invest in national cinema production, but do you view this financial outlay as an investment or a subsidy? We see it as an obligation, but we try and turn that into something positive, which isn’t always easy. Often, Spanish cinema has been seen as a genre in its own right and, more decisively, it’s a genre viewed negatively by many, many Spaniards. You hear time and time again how ‘rubbish’ Spanish cinema is, irrespective of the film. Fighting against this is extremely difficult. A few years ago, Spanish cinema haemorrhaged money by the bucketload; it’s not as bad now because, thank the Lord, we’ve had some major commercial successes over recent years. More than anything, I think we have to work hard to ensure that Spanish cinema isn’t a genre in itself. It’s cinema, whether it be Spanish or Polish. Spanish Movie (Ruiz Caldera, 2009) is a film made with commercial aims for the local market which enjoyed huge success. I think Spanish cinema has suffered from the fact there have been some great cinematic auteurs who were only interested in making a certain kind of film, not taking into account whether anyone was going to want to go and see it. This resulted in a tremendous disconnection between the general public and Spanish talent and creativity. However, there is a new generation of directors, such as Caldera or Juan Antonio Bayona, who want the general public to go and see their films, for people to like what they do and make that connection. The directors we work with, and many of the alumni of Barcelona’s ESCAC [Escuela Superior de Cine y Audiovisuales de Cataluña/Catalan School for Advanced Study in Film and Audiovisual Communication], don’t have this absurd complex about being commercial – but this is the same everywhere. I do not think that Steven Spielberg is less of an auteur because he wants his films to make a lot of money. This was exactly the sentiment expressed by Juan Antonio Bayona, when he received the award for Best Director at this year’s Goya 401

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Awards. However, you would not invest money in a project with minority appeal? No. My brief isn’t to win Goyas but to produce profitable films. If we get a Goya in the end, even better – but that’s not the end in itself. If, tomorrow, the law was repealed and there was no longer an obligation to make this investment in Spanish cinema, would you continue to do so? We’d certainly do it a lot less. It’d cease to be something habitual, and we’d only participate in very specific and special projects with a precise remit. Do the films or television programmes that you produce or acquire coincide with your own personal tastes? Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t – but these are two different things. I am a big fan of Beginners (Mills, 2010) and Shame (McQueen, 2011), but I’d never buy these films for television. Or to cite another example, I love Mad Men (Lionsgate Television et al., 2007) to watch at home, but I’d never purchase it for non-subscription television. The challenge is to find that equilibrium. There are films that make a lot of money whose success then allows the leverage to take on more risky ventures. Could you give me an example of a more risky venture that you’ve produced? Well, Los últimos días was not an easy film. The concept of a postapocalyptic Spanish film set in Barcelona isn’t necessarily easy to sell. Although it has very high production values, given that the ticket price is the same, your average Spanish cinema-goer would still prefer to go and see The Avengers (Whedon, 2012) than Los últimos días. Yes, it’s revealing that a film such as Spanish Movie, which translated a Hollywood comic formula into the national context, is seemingly better accepted by local audiences, while other more dramatic genres are often dismissed as pale imitations of their Hollywood counterparts. Comedies advertise the fact they are delivered in the vernacular so to speak; they are, as we’ve already discussed, accented for the domestic market. In contrast, dramatic films – be that Planet 51 or The Impossible (Bayona, 2012) – almost need to conceal, or at least underplay, their Spanish origins if they want to appeal to the domestic market. A compounding factor, of course, is that it’s adolescents and young people who go to the cinema the most yet have the lowest opinion of Spanish cinema. When I went to see Los últimos días on Sunday, it was myself and some pensioners which isn’t, I imagine, its target demographic! 402

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No, it’s certainly not designed for them! What did you think of the film? Well, if truth be told, I didn’t like it all that much. Admittedly, it has really good production values, an aspect of Spanish cinema that has improved vastly over the last few years, largely I suspect as result of the involvement of television practitioners. While I admire José Coronado as an actor, something did not work for me. Some scenes just felt very forced, such as when the two male protagonists burst into ostensibly spontaneous laughter in the church. It might also have something to do with the genre and my personal tastes. I didn’t particularly enjoy the dystopian elements in Fin/The End (Torregrossa, 2012). I hope you don’t mind me making this observation. Did you like it? Yes, I liked it a lot, but don’t worry about your comments – I’m always happy to hear constructive criticism. Do you pay attention to reviews then? Well, critics always pan us completely. What bothers me is the lack of respect not towards me personally, but because I think film-making is very difficult – it requires a significant outlay in terms of money, human resources, a lot of work and hope – and the critics just slate them. What really bothers me is that reviewers are far harsher in their appraisals of Spanish commercial films than they are of their Hollywood counterparts. Towards the North Americans, they at least have a respect from an industrial perspective, but they don’t have that for us. How can we expect Spanish cinema to succeed when we are the first to take a pop at it? You might not like what you see, but you should at least speak about the film in your review, not just offer general laments.

Acknowledgements Fernando Canet was able to organize this interview to take place at Mercedes Gamero’s offices at the Antena 3 headquaters in San Sebastán de los Reyes, on April 17 2013 through a mutual acquaintance, Christian Guijarro, to whom the editors are very grateful. Duncan Wheeler would like to express his gratitude towards Fernando Canet, who ably assisted both in the advance preparation of the questions and in the process of the actual interview itself.

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Chapter 26 San Sebastián: A Film Festival of Contrasts Mar Diestro-Dópido

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his chapter focuses on the San Sebastián International Film Festival (known as Donostia Zinemaldia in the Basque language), which currently holds the muchcoveted ‘A-category’ status that it has lost and recovered on several occasions during its volatile sixty-year history.1 The festival is located in San Sebastián, a small coastal city with a population of 186,188 inhabitants.2 It is the capital of Gipuzkoa, which belongs to the autonomous community of the Basque Country (Euskal Herria), and is situated 20km from the border with France in the north of Spain. Notably, this municipality has been awarded European Capital of Culture status for 2016, to be shared with Wroclaw in Poland. A study of the San Sebastián Film Festival inevitably entails analysis of its intrinsically dual identity as both a Basque and Spanish cultural event, which in turn requires a close look at the political tensions between Spain and the Basque country and their repercussions. This duality also manifests itself in the festival’s promotion of Basque and Spanish cinema, as well as its relation to different forms of tourism (cultural, geographical and culinary), the national press and cultural institutions (Cinematheque): a Janus-faced position that is also reflected in the balance the festival attempts to strike between commercial and independent cinema and glamour and culture, and which I will discuss in terms of recent Spanish production. In order to understand and evaluate the changes and innovations that have occurred in the festival’s last two decades, it is important first to sketch the festival’s origins and early history. Concocting the San Sebastián Film Festival The San Sebastián Film Festival was born out of what was a common practice in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s: the development of tourism at a strategic time and place. As such, in 1953 the city celebrated the First Week of International Cinema of San Sebastián from September 21–27, looking to lengthen the tourist season (Tuduri, 1989: 15, 16). The following year, Franco’s government took control of the festival when it was recognized officially as the First International Film Festival of San Sebastián by FIAPF (Federation International des Associations de Producteurs de Film; International Federation of Film Producers Associations).3 Local folklore, events such as the tamborada (drum playing), dance and music, bullfights, fireworks and fashion shows featured in the festival throughout much of its first decade, sometimes at the expense of the films. San Sebastián was involved from the outset in promoting Spanish cinema: in the 1950s, a new generation of film-makers – key directors such as Juan Antonio Bardem, Luis García Berlanga,

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scriptwriter Rafael Azcona and producer Elías Querejeta – and in the 1960s and 1970s, emerging auteurs such as Carlos Saura, Manuel Summers, Basilio Martín Patino and Víctor Erice. All of their films were made in reaction to the staunch conservatism of Franco-approved national cinema, and soon awakened serious international interest. They were regularly garlanded at the most important international A-list film festivals such as Cannes, Venice and Berlin,4 as well as San Sebastián. Franco’s government recognized the potential of endorsing these films, as well as the festival’s pivotal role as an international platform for extolling a benign image of the dictatorship more in keeping with the government’s international economic aspirations. Meanwhile, the gradual opening up of the Spanish economy, and the success of the Carnation Revolution, which defeated António de Oliveira Salazar’s thirty-six-year dictatorship in neighbouring Portugal in 1973, sharpened Spaniards’ appetite for freedom. Nevertheless, even four years before the dictator’s death, in the festival’s 1971 edition no Spanish films were shown, since none of the potential entries had been passed by the censors. The volatile political circumstances that followed Franco’s death in November 1975, and the country’s bumpy Transition to Democracy, inevitably had a disruptive effect on the festival; yet it was clearly the beginning of a new period in Spanish history. The coronation of King Juan Carlos and the first general election in 1977 were followed by the approval of a democratic constitution in 1978. In 1982 the Partido Socialista y Obrero Español/Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) won the first of four consecutive terms. Under the new government, a policy of political autonomy for the Basque country and Cataluña was implemented in 1980, and divorce and abortion were legalized in 1981 and 1984 respectively. It was an era of stark contrasts. The festival was enduring its most difficult period when it lost (for the final time) its A-category status for the 1980 to 1984 editions, just as Spain was enjoying a phase of prolific cultural activity, with Madrid at the centre of a cultural explosion that would become known as La Movida. A new generation of artists avid for change emerged, spearheaded by figures such as Pedro Almodóvar and Iván Zulueta.5 Almodóvar´s first feature, Pepi, Luci & Bom y otras chicas del montón/Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (1981), about the adventures in Madrid of three women – respectively emancipated, a masochist and a lesbian – became the most emblematic of this period and seemed to capture the nation’s zeitgeist perfectly. It premiered in the festival that year, and Almodóvar returned in 1982 with his controversial second film, Laberinto de pasiones/Labyrinth of Passion (1982), which also caused a huge uproar – ‘the Almodóvar phenomenon surpassed the screen and became a social phenomenon’.6 Rethinking the Festival During the following two decades, film-makers from the previous generation such as Pilar Miró, Víctor Erice, Jaime Chávarri, Pedro Olea, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, José Luis Garci and Eloy de la Iglesia made the most of newfound democratic freedoms to direct films in which they offered revisions of the country’s history. The festival also supported and 408

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endorsed a new generation of actors who became the face of the new cinema, such as Antonio Resines and Almódovar’s favourite muse, Carmen Maura, who starred in emblematic films such as ¿Qué hace una chica como tú en un sitio como éste?/What’s a Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? (Colomo, 1978) and Ópera Prima (Trueba, 1980), films which explored their milieu in less confrontational ways than those by Zulueta and Almodóvar. All these figures became regular fixtures at the festival. However, it is significant that if Spanish cinema of a political bent can be said to have experienced its golden age during the late 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, thanks in part to being actively promoted by the festival, it was during the 1980s and 1990s when Basque filmmakers such as Imanol Uribe, Júlio Médem, Montxo Armendáriz, Juanma Bajo Ullóa and Álex de la Iglesia laid the foundations of a modern political Basque cinema. Uribe’s La fuga de Segovia/Escape from Segovia (1981) – based on a true story in which some 40 members of ETA escaped from a state prison in 1976 – screened at the festival in 1981, which would have been unthinkable only a couple of years previously. In the 1990s, all the Spanish films that won the festival’s main prize, the Golden Shell, were directed by Basques: Las cartas de Alou/Letters from Alou (Armendáriz, 1990), Alas de mariposa/Butterfly Wings (Bajo Ulloa, 1991), Días contados/Running Out of Time (1994) and Bwana (1996) – a tie with Trojan Eddie (MacKinnon, 1996) – both by Imanol Uribe. This sea-change coincided with the appointment of a new festival director who would orchestrate the most far-reaching changes: the journalist, historian and highly regarded film critic, Diego Galán. In 1985 Galán, described by the current festival director José Luis Rebordinos as ‘a very imaginative man with an incredible capacity to create; a wonderful seducer who can turn anything boring into something enjoyable’ took charge of the festival,7 first as consultant and the following year as director. FIAPF’s decision to rescind the festival’s A-category status in 1984 had prompted rumours that the festival could close down. It was a tense political moment, with numerous demonstrations taking place in the Basque country; many film professionals and would-be guests refused to attend, fearful of the deteriorating situation. However, in fact this volatility would be part and parcel of the festival for many years to come: almost a decade later in 1993, controversy (both inside and outside the festival) was still an active ingredient. The actor Robert Mitchum experienced first-hand the idiosyncrasies of the city when he was taken to a restaurant for dinner one night. As his party entered, a full-scale riot kicked off in a nearby area, which consequently was besieged by the police. When they emerged from the restaurant later on, there were children playing in the same street. Mitchum commented at such a graphic example of the speed at which changes could take place in the city: ‘Was I drunk before, or am I now?’ (cited in Galán, 2001: 176). In addition, local audiences still thought of the festival as a closed-off, elitist event. This was an issue that had been unsuccessfully addressed as early as 1963 when the then director, the producer and representative of FIAPF, Miguel Echarri, had opened up the festival to the general public (unlike other A-list festivals such as Cannes, which is still exclusively for professionals) by creating a sidebar called ‘Cine de Barrios y Pueblos’ (Neighbourhood 409

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and Town Cinema), which screened competition films an hour after their official screening at a lower price and at another venue, in order to lure local audiences. For Galán this issue became pressing, as he comments: I was going to work on my first day at the festival and the taxi driver who picked me up from the airport was saying: ‘this is rubbish, there are only people from Madrid who come here to eat’. So I made it my aim to convince that taxi driver that the festival could be for the local people. In order to do so, and with the complete approval of the general secretary of the festival since 1960, Pilar Olascoaga – who has famously declared on more than one occasion that ‘the festival is my pimp and I will do anything to defend it against whoever’ (cited in Torres, 1983) – a number of new activities were organized each year in order to bring the festival closer to the city. These included film seasons that ran throughout the year, the usage of new spaces, such as a programme of sea-related films projected on a huge screen floating on the sea, viewed by the public on the beach; or the use of the city’s Antonio Elorza velodrome, with a giant 400m² screen and a capacity of almost three thousand seats. José María Riba, one of the festival’s collaborators, struck a deal with RENFE (the Spanish state railway company) whereby special trains were laid on to ferry children from all the schools in the region to the velodrome for screenings; soon their parents would be targeted too, in a section called ‘Take Your Parents to the Cinema’ – a smart way of introducing younger generations to the festival. In fact, the festival’s long-established focus on both the past and the future most clearly manifests itself in its ongoing collaboration with the Spanish and Basque Cinematheques (Pérez Millán, 2005: 67, 82).8 Ever since Galán’s tenure, three retrospectives are organized each year in collaboration with these cultural organizations – although it is important to note that one of the main reasons that Galán made retrospectives so prominent was in order to cover every screen in the city, so that ‘no Spielberg was shown during the festival’: that is, to avoid competition from big mainstream films being shown in the city. Paradoxically, the festival’s commitment to screening preservation and restoration projects – the equal of its desire to show new, up-and-coming cinema – also seems to reflect the divided nature of the Basque country: at once one of the most modern regions in Spain, but at the same time deeply wedded to tradition and its history.9 The relationship between the festival and the Cinematheque (then called ‘National’ and not ‘Spanish’, as it is now) dates back to 1954, when the first ever retrospective of Spanish cinema (1921–36) was organized for the festival’s second edition, with the Cinematheque producing a catalogue that included the films’ credits and critical commentaries (Santamarina, 2005: 221). This was the precedent for the future annual publication of festival catalogues, as well as the book of essays that has accompanied each retrospective since 1986 (Marías, 2005: 83–100). In fact, many of the Cinematheque’s directors have been involved in one way or another with the festival down the years, from programming films to actually running the festival, such as Carlos Fernández Cuenca, former director of the Spanish Cinematheque, in 1964; the former director of the Basque 410

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Cinematheque, Peio Aldazabal, in 1990; and Koldo Anasagasti, an independent producer and director of ETB (Euskal Televista, the Basque TV channel), in 1991. While the country was readying itself for a burst of intense internationalism in 1992, putting on the Expo in Seville and the Olympic Games in Barcelona, as well as having Madrid as European Capital of Culture, the festival was going through arguably its most chaotic three years, following the resignation of Galán in 1989 (although he would in fact accept an invitation to return in 1993). San Sebastián had three different directors in three years: Peldo Aldazabel, Koldo Anasagasti and the Belgian cultural host Rudi Barnet in 1992. However, the former director of the festival (from 2001–10), Mikel Olaciregui, and long-standing programmer, José Ángel Herrero-Velarde, now agree that the biggest problem with those three transitional years was not only the general feeling that the level of programming had dropped, but mainly that ‘the festival had lost one of its strongest assets: the just-blooming connection with the general public’. For Olaciregui, in a bizarre echo of the festival’s own beginnings, it was almost as if there were two parallel festivals: There was the one with the official screenings at the old Victoria Eugenia Theatre, which was for the bourgeoisie, and the one which the public would carry on attending – the same films but given a very different reception, and watched in a big theatre or in a cinema with more than a thousand seats. It also proved that employing Barnet – essentially a foreigner unaware of the particular political and cultural idiosyncrasies of the festival, region or country, and who openly appeared dispassionate and fostered grudges with the national press – was doomed to be a disaster. However, the festival soon would undergo a dramatic transformation. Galán returned in 1993 (he would stay as director until 2000, and as programming consultant until 2010), and reinstated his programming board comprising practically the same people who left the festival in 1989, including Herrero-Velarde, José María Arriba, Olaciregui, José María Prado, the director of the Spanish Cinematheque since 1990, plus new face Rebordinos (who became director in 2011). Under this new team, the ensuing decade became the festival’s most international period: the glamorous presence of big film stars brought the kind of media attention favoured by local and national governments alike. In 1986 – the year that Spain was finally admitted into the European Community – Galán introduced the Donostia Award. This is a career award given to a world-renowned film personality that exists to this day, luring American and European notables such as Gregory Peck, Bette Davis, Catherine Deneuve, Al Pacino, Max Von Sydow and Julia Roberts to the festival.10 In addition, all these events were broadcast by ETB from 1989 on a channel dedicated almost exclusively to covering the festival initially for eight to nine hours daily. All of this had a galvanizing effect on the public. The slogan of the festival became: ‘Everyone to the Cinema’, and ‘Each Spectator Finds Their Film’. Under Galán San Sebastián was reborn, and the people of the city finally embraced the event to an unprecedented degree. 411

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However, soon the newly recovered stability of the festival was undermined by the instability of the relationship between the government and ETA, particularly from 1996 onwards, when the right-wing Partido Popular (People’s Party) took office after four consecutive terms of the left-leaning PSOE. In 1998, as part of a truce, president José María Aznar’s government relocated more than a hundred convicted ETA members to prisons in the Basque region. However, ETA terminated the truce after 14 months at the end of 1999, which led to a toughening of the government’s stance and withdrawal of the prisoners. Soon, terrorism and the Basque issue were directly implicated in the festival, with the screening in 2003 of perhaps the most polemical film in its history, and arguably in the history of Basque cinema: Médem’s La pelota vasca/The Basque Ball (2003). The violent response to Médem’s film mirrored reactions to films previously screened at the festival, such as Ama Lur (Basterretxea and Larruquert, 1968),11 and Uribe’s El proceso de Burgos/The Burgos Trial (1979). Médem’s documentary confronts Basque independence and identity and ETA head-on and from a myriad of perspectives, through interviews with the most important people involved in the conflict. The film famously led to Médem receiving a death threat (see Diestro-Dópido, 2008 for more details), yet the most scandalous public reaction occurred when the then Minister of Culture, Pilar del Castillo, suggested banning Médem’s documentary, declaring that the film ‘places the Government and ETA at the same level’ (cited in Arenas, 2003). The festival’s response was that it would be banned only if a court decided that it was right to do so. In a macabre turn of events, the repercussions of international terrorism turned national, when Spanish intervention in the Iraq War led to a terrorist attack on March 11 2004 in Madrid that killed 191 people, and injured almost 2000. Three days later, the PSOE won the general election and remained in power until 2011. The trigger for this deadly terrorist attack – the participation of José María Aznar’s right-wing government in the Iraq War – previously had led to mass public demonstrations in which some Spanish film professionals took part, drawing the ire of the right-wing Spanish press. In fact, for Galán, one of the fundamental problems faced by the Spanish film industry is the damaging relationship between Spanish cinema and the national press which, in his opinion, also implicates the audience: Spanish cinema comes in many forms, there’s not just one Spanish cinema. What there is though is a very strong campaign by the right-wing against subsidies for Spanish cinema. In Spain almost everything is subsidized, but the right-wing press only speaks about the subsidized cinema. Back when the UK and Spain got caught up in that mess over the Iraq War, there were many demonstrations against Spain taking part, and many well-known actors – such as Javier Bardem – made it onto the front pages of the newspapers during the demonstrations. There could be hundreds of thousands of people, but they only showed the actors – and because the government back then was pro-war, they started insulting actors and directors. There was a famous front page in the right-wing daily La Razón where they showed the faces of twelve film directors, and wrote next to them how 412

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many millions each had been given, as if the money were for them and not to make films. Ever since then it has grown, become larger and left a mark, and there is hostility towards Spanish cinema in general. I think Spain is the only country that detests its own cinema. Inevitably, the San Sebastián Film Festival also suffers from this attitude. The daily newspapers’ stance towards contemporary cinema is defined by film critic and historian Carlos Heredero as evincing a ‘very serious lack of understanding’: apart from a few exceptions, their views are generally old fashioned (since there has been no generational change yet), anchored in classic cinema and generally averse to risk-taking films. As a result, San Sebastián finds itself in a difficult position. There is a pronounced incomprehension of the kind of cinema that benefits from screenings at film festivals, which is accentuated further by the festival’s own need to strike a balance between glamour and quality films. As the film critic Jaime Pena observes, in San Sebastián, until the mid-1990s, support was geared more towards commercial films and the presence of film stars, but since then there has been a more noticeable balance between big films and smaller independent features, mainly because a new group of people became part of the programming team – Roberto Cueto, Kim Casas and Rebordinos – and ultimately part of the management team in 1996. In this light, legendary Spanish producer and film-maker Pere Portabella’s comment about how new technologies ‘have socialised the means of production and have democratised information’ is fundamental (cited in Diestro-Dópido, 2011). One result of this democratization of knowledge and access is the prolific and often radical film criticism emerging from a younger generation on the Internet. These younger critics regularly attend international film festivals such as Cannes, BAFICI, Locarno and Rotterdam, and are fully aware of what is going on in the (rapidly) changing media world.12 Together with these new Internet platforms for film criticism, there has been a revival of a more specialized film press in print in Spain. The most obvious example is Caimán Cuadernos de Cine (formerly Cahiers du Cinèma España), which is also involved in the DVD distribution of more independent and challenging Spanish films such as Naufragio/Shipwreck (Aguilera, 2010), La vida sublime/The Life Sublime (Villamediana, 2010), Finisterrae (Caballero, 2010) and Caracremada (Galter, 2010). Nevertheless, as Olaciregui illustrates, for San Sebastián the balance lies precisely in the space between these two extremes of film coverage. As an A-list, competitive, non-specialist festival, San Sebastián is expected to cater for all audiences – international, national and Basque – a fact which is not only reflected in its programme, but also in its press coverage. As he notes: There are very specialized media with an elevated level of criticism directed at very informed audiences, and then you go from that to the daily, or the fashion magazine. In a way you have to have a festival that is able to conjugate and introduce elements that interest all these audiences, all these media, because what is clear is that the success of a festival resides in its continuous exposure in very diverse media. For me it’s not 413

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enough if Cahiers du Cinèma [now Caimán Cuadernos de Cine] writes wonderful reviews about us if TVE [Spanish state TV channel] says that we are only screening films mainly aimed at a minority. We must find a very broad spectrum of films that satisfy very diverse sensibilities and ways of watching film. Perhaps the most noticeable change of late in relation to press perceptions of the festival and the government’s attitude to Spanish films programmed at the festival revolve around the appointment in 2009 of Ignasi Guardans as the new Director of the Instituto de la Cinematografía y de las Artes Visuales (Institute of Cinematography and Visual Arts [ICAA], an autonomous body within the Ministry of Culture, albeit exclusively financed from government funds, set up in 1986)13 by the former PSOE Minister of Culture, Ángeles González-Sinde, herself a film-maker. Guardans’ controversial intervention in film funding, and the repercussions that this had for the less-established and more unconventional Spanish cinema made by a new generation of film-makers whose films are programmed at San Sebastián (such as Javier Rebollo, Albert Serra, Isaki Lacuesta, Pedro Aguilera, or key independent producers such as Luis Miñarro, who is behind many of these new films), crystallizes many of the problems that the festival currently confronts. In 2009 the ICAA announced a new law for film subsidies, a law which in the past has existed mainly to provide assistance to independent films. Guardans changed this law so that henceforward a film-maker would have to make a film with a minimum budget of €2 million in order to be able to apply for any kind of assistance; the remaining filmmakers (those with a budget less than €2 million) would have to enter their projects into a competition for funding. Those films not selected, or whose budget is not over €2 million, have no opportunity to apply for any subsidies from the Ministry. The idea is to make fewer films, but with bigger budgets. In response to this new film law, a group of more than two hundred film-makers, Cineastas Contra la Orden (Film-makers Against the Law), appealed to Brussels in November 2009 to have it repealed. In their manifesto, partly quoted in El País (García, 2009), they argued that this law did not comply with European law, as it worked against cultural diversity by marginalizing small projects to the advantage of profitable, big budget enterprises (see Agencia EFE, 2009; García and Belinchón , 2009). They claimed that this law measured films neither by their cost, nor their public interest nor their content – allegations to which Guardans famously responded: ‘Spanish cinema has Agoras [in reference to one of the biggest and most international films made in Spain, Agora, Amenábar 2009] and little nothing films’ (cited in Romero, 2009). Among the film-makers screening ‘little nothing films’ in competition in San Sebastián in 2010 were Trueba, Lacuesta and Rebollo. Guardans was dismissed as director of the ICAA and replaced by Carlos Cuadros in 2011, under whom the law was still passed. However, as Galán explains, ‘What is really terrible is that this country has to live off subsidies, and that a politician can leave his mark just like that.’ Some of these negative reactions towards the promotion and distribution of a more independent Spanish cinema are influenced by Guardans’ solid relationship with FAPAE, the Spanish Producers’ Association. 414

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The new law clearly benefits FAPAE, which is unhappy with the support that the festival is giving to independent Spanish cinema – although such films prove successful within the international festival circuit, this does not translate into box office revenue. I attended the 2010 edition of San Sebastián as an accredited film critic, during which El País published an article that attacked the festival’s promotion of independent Spanish cinema (see García and Belinchón, 2009). It incorporated the opinions of a group of people (mainly FAPAE members), including the likes of Enrique González Macho (President of the Academy of Cinema), who complained that films such as those by Iciar Bollaín, Álex de la Iglesia and Fernando León de Aranoa – all established film-makers – were being ignored in favour of other films that did not represent Spanish cinema.14 During that same edition, Carlos Boyero, the chief film critic of El País (who famously has a long history of giving negative reviews to Almodóvar’s films), also publicly criticized the festival on the basis of the prominence of Spanish independent cinema in the main competition. This is referring to films such as Aita Father (de Orbe, 2010), Pa Negre/Black Bread (Villaronga, 2010) and Elisa K (Cadena and Colell, 2010) and to some extent El Gran Vázquez/The Great Vazquez (Aibar, 2010) (which although not technically low budget, could not be classified as a commercial film), instead of the bigger budget films that Guardans’ new film law (and, as mentioned, FAPAE) was seeking to favour. Yet Pa negre went on to win the Golden Shell, walked off with nine Goya Awards (the Spanish equivalent of the Oscars), was announced as Spain’s foreign-language Oscar candidate in 2012, and ended up being the seventh highest-grossing Spanish film at the box office in 2011, among a total of 209 Spanish films released that year.15 In a way, one cannot help feeling that the wheel has come full circle. Spanish distributors’ tendency to acquire mainly commercial films operates as a new form of censorship, this time by way of the market rather than a dictatorship. Films that do not fit into a neat mainstream category also lack an established screening circuit: this in turn reinforces the position of the San Sebastián Film Festival as an alternative platform within the country, as it has done at key moments in the past. What is more, as Odón Elorza – the mayor of San Sebastián from 1991 to 2011 – mentions in an article published in El País, probably the city’s strongest asset in helping it become European Capital of Culture for 2016 was its link to the film and media industries, what he defines as a ‘singular and differentiating element’ (cited in Elorza, 2010): the fact that the city has an international A-list festival whose presence is pivotal in attracting cinema and the media industry to San Sebastián. Odón’s take on the festival in this article is revealing, as he chooses to focus not only on big-budget films or on the festival’s importance as a platform for Spanish films, but insists more on the internationally regarded auteurs and new film-makers that populate the festival circuit nowadays. Odón ascribes to them a cultural as opposed to an economic value, revealing a will to acknowledge and support this crucial component of the festival. It is a position that the new director, Rebordinos, stoutly defends. In fact, the Golden Shell awarded at his first festival as director in 2011 went to Isaki Lacuesta’s independent, socially minded and formally radical film, Los pasos dobles/ The Double Steps (2011). 415

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Given that the main target of the European Capital of Culture project (which began in 1985) is to ‘raise [a city’s] visibility and profile on an international scale’,16 undoubtedly 2016 will situate the festival once more at the centre of debates around the notion of cultural capital. However, in its intrinsically dual identity, the San Sebastián Film Festival has never forgotten that it is also an event, a celebration of the city and a carnival of sorts. So it should not be a surprise that immediately after the city was announced as co-winner, and at a time when the festival has augmented its scope from promoting Spanish and Basque films to becoming a global platform for Spanish-language cinema through production schemes and a newly-established market, the festival introduced a new section called ‘Culinary Zinema’ in 2011. This is a collaboration with the Berlin International Film Festival and the Basque Culinary Centre which only shows films that are related in some way to food. This strand highlights one of the city’s main features – San Sebastián has more Michelin-starred restaurants per capita than any other city in the world – and by once more turning the local into the global, it gives a clear nod to the festival’s origins, when the city’s attractions (bullfighting, sightseeing, drum-playing) were as loudly promoted as the films themselves. Notes   1 After oscillating between categories, San Sebastián was acknowledged by the Federation International des Associations de Producteurs de Film (International Federation of Film Producers’ Associations, FIAPF) as an A-category festival (international, competitive and non-specialized) in 1957, a status it then retained with the exception of the 1980–84 period, when no major awards were given. More information on the festival is available at the official website: www.sansebastianfestival.com.   2 Information available at the Spanish National Statistics Institute website http://www.ine.es/ jaxi/tabla.do?type=pcaxis&path=/t20/e244/vinculada/l0/&file=01001.px, last accessed on 1 January 2011.   3 FIAPF is also a regulator of international film festivals. For a full list of FIAPF accredited festivals and information on accreditation, see its official website: http://www.fiapf.org/ intfilmfestivals_sites.asp, last accessed on 1 January 2011.   4 It is worth noting that under Franco’s censorship, the films were seen outside Spain at the major international film festivals but not within Spain (or at least not in their completed versions), except at film festivals.   5 Iván Zulueta was the son of Antonio de Zulueta y Besson, director of the festival from 1957– 60. During his tenure, the festival acquired a distinctly cinephile slant in its programming; he also introduced a section on experimental cinema and organized the first conference of film schools ever to be held in the festival.   6 In Historia del Zinemaldia (1953–2010) 2010 [DVD] Spain: ETB/TVE/IBERDROLA (documentary series about the festival narrated and directed by Diego Galán).   7 All uncredited quotes are from the following unpublished interviews conducted by the author: with José María de Orbe at the BFI Southbank press office during the BFI London 416

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Film Festival on 23 October 2010; Diego Galán in Madrid on 8 April 2011; Carlos Heredero at the offices of Caimán Cuadernos de Cine in Madrid on 6 April 2011; Mikel Olaciregui at the festival offices in San Sebastián on 4 May 2010; José Luis Rebordinos at the festival offices in San Sebastián on 5 May 2010; J. Pena at the festival premises in San Sebastián on 21 September 2010; and José Ángel Herrero-Velarde at the festival offices in San Sebastián on 6 May 2010. In Spain there are a total of 14 regional cinematheques. After the foundation of the Spanish Cinematheque in 1953, the Basque Cinematheque was the first regional one to be set up in 1978. The Spanish Cinematheque is involved in joint projects with regional and international ones, such as programming, restoration and book publishing, as well as with the Academia de las Artes y las Ciencias Cinematográficas de España (Spanish Film Academy), Asociación Española de Historiadores de Cine (Spanish Association of Film Historians) and with Spain’s most important film festivals, such as San Sebastián, Seminci in Valladolid, Gijón, Sitges and Mostra de Valencia, as well as universities, museums, television channels, etc. (see Santamarina 2005). Commented upon by José María de Orbe. For a full list, see the San Sebastián Film Festival official website at http://www. sansebastianfestival.com/in/indice.php?ap=2, last accessed on 19 July 2012. Directed by Néstor Basterretxea and Fernando Larruquert, it was the first Basque film (in this case, documentary) ever to be screened at the festival, albeit outside competition, in 1968. The film’s experimental form deals with cultural and ideological elements of the Basque country. Key Spanish websites include: Tren de sombras http://www.trendesombras.com/, Miradas de Cine (http://www.miradas.net/sobre-mdc.html), Lumière (http://www.elumiere.net), Transit (http://cinentransit.com) and Letras de Cine (http://letrasdecine.blogspot.com). For more information see the Ministry of Culture’s official website: http://www.mcu.es/cine/ index, last accessed July 2012. To which Olaciregui responded in an interview for the same newspaper (written on his departure): ‘I was told by the producers of Balada triste de trompeta that the film was not going to be finished on time and then they premiered it at Venice. With regards to También la lluvia it was offered when we already had the program of Spanish films in the official competition closed’ (cited in García and Belinchón, 2010). Provisional data from 1 January to 30 June 2011. The data is compiled from the information received until now from the companies in charge of exhibition centres and published on the website of the Ministry of Culture, Education and Sports. Available at: http://www.mcu.es/ cine/MC/CDC/Anio2011/CineResumen.html. Last accessed in July 2012. For more information see the European Commission’s culture website, available at http://ec.europa.eu/culture/our-programmes-and-actions/doc413_en.htm, last accessed on 10 July 2012.

References Agencia EFE (2009). ‘Bruselas estudiará las alegaciones a la Ley de Cine, lo que retrasará las ayudas’, El Mundo, 24 November, available at http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2009/11/24/ cultura/1259101269.html, last accessed on 10 July 2012. 417

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Arenas J.E. (2003). ‘Del Castillo dice que «La pelota vasca» sitúa al Gobierno y a ETA al mismo nivel’, ABC, 19 September, available at http://www.abc.es/hemeroteca/historico-19-09-2003/ abc/Espectaculos/del-castillo-dice-que-la-pelota-vasca-situa-al-gobierno-y-a-eta-al-mismonivel_208450.html, last accessed on 10 July 2012. Diestro-Dópido, M (2008). ‘Chaos theories’, Vertigo, 3.8: available at http://www.closeupfilmcentre. com/vertigo_magazine/volume-3-issue-8-winter-2008/chaos-theories/, last accessed on 10 July 2012. (2011). ‘Pere Portabella: from Buñuel to Lorca’, Sight and Sound, available at http://old.bfi. org.uk/sightandsound/featuresandinterviews/interviews/pere-portabella.php, last accessed on July 2012. Elorza, O. (2010). ‘San Sebastián, de cine’, El País, 18 September, available at http://www.elpais. com/articulo/pais/vasco/San/Sebastian/cine/elpepiesppvs/20100918elpvas_9/Tes, last accessed on 10 July 2012. Galán, D. (2001). Jack Lemmon nunca cenó aquí, 3rd ed. (Barcelona: Plaza y Janés). García, R. (2009). ‘Cineastas contra la Orden’, El País, 7 August, available at http://www.elpais.com/ articulo/revista/agosto/Cineastas/Orden/elpeputec/20090807elpepirdv_8/Tes, last accessed on 10 July 2012. and Belinchón, R. (2009). ‘Conmoción en el mundo del cine por la decisión de Bruselas de bloquear las ayudas a rodajes’, El País, 25 November, available at http://www.elpais.com/ articulo/cultura/Conmocion/mundo/cine/decision/Bruselas/bloquear/ayudas/rodajes/ elpepucul/20091125elpepucul_1/Tes, last accessed in July 2012. (2010). ‘Mikel Olaciregui: “Me voy sin nostalgia”’, El País, 25 September, available at http:// cultura.elpais.com/cultura/2010/09/25/actualidad/1285365603_850215.html, last accessed on 10 July 2012. Marías, M. (2005). ‘Las misiones de una Filmoteca y su futuro’ in A. Santamarina (ed.), Filmoteca Española: Cincuenta Años de Historia (1953–2003) (Madrid: Filmoteca Española/ICAA/ Ministerio de Cultura), 83–100. Pérez Millán, J. A. (2005). ‘De la Filmoteca Nacional al florecimiento de las Autonómicas (1984– 1986)’ in A. Santamarina (ed.), Filmoteca Española: Cincuenta Años de Historia (1953–2003) (Madrid: Filmoteca Española/ICAA/Ministerio de Cultura), 67–82. Romero, R. (2009). ‘“El cine español tiene agoras y peliculitas.” Ignasi Guardans tranquiliza a los productores en Sitges’, Público, 7 October, available at http://www.publico.es/culturas/258459/ el-cine-espanol-tiene-agoras-y-peliculitas, last accessed on 10 July 2012. Santamarina, A. (2005). Filmoteca Española. Cincuenta Años de Historia (1953-2003) (Madrid: Filmoteca Española/I.C.A.A./Ministerio de Cultura). Torres, M. (1983). ‘Los problemas presupuestarios y de organización hacen reconsiderar a Luis Gasca su continuidad como director del certamen’, El País, 22 September, available at http:// elpais.com/diario/1983/09/22/cultura/433029605_850215.html, last accessed on 10 July 2012. Tuduri, J. S. (1989). San Sebastián: un Festival, una Historia (1953–1966) (San Sebastián: Euskadiko Filmategia/Filmoteca Vasca).

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Chapter 27 The Art Director as Architect: The Reconstruction of Deconstructed Memories Sandra Martorell

My father once asked me: ‘What does the frame of Las Meninas look like?’ Er, I don’t know … But if the frame were not there, you would notice that it was missing, wouldn’t you? That is what art direction in film is like.

T

hese words are from the art director Edou Hydallgo, as he recalled a childhood conversation with his father.1 It is an anecdote which, in this chapter, leads us into a discussion of art direction in film and, more specifically, the role that it plays in films that seek to recreate the Spanish Civil War on-screen. Cinema about this time is inherently ideological as it invariably participates in debates surrounding how we remember the past, or what is frequently termed ‘historical memory’. The detailed interviews I conducted with three art directors from different generations, who have their own personal approaches to a common subject, are designed to complement the work done by Spanish and international scholars on the role of the cinematic imaginary in the construction of memories surrounding the Civil War and its aftermath.2 This chapter is predicated on the basic principle that the effective functioning of art direction far surpasses the mere search for affect. The spectre of fratricidal conflict continues to haunt us in the guise of films that reference it not only through their characters and narratives, but also through their settings, objects, colours and textures which have a cumulative effect, generally designed to increase verisimilitude and foster credulity in the audience. In other words, art direction does not represent merely the aesthetic presentation of the film, but is also the doorway to the realm of the collective imagination. Given the vast corpus of Civil War films, I have narrowed the focus deliberately by examining recent productions whose art directors are Spanish and have worked on more than one film on the subject. The first I will turn to is Hydallgo, who has gone from being the boy who was ignorant of the frame of Velázquez’s best-known painting to providing the art direction for films such as Las 13 rosas/The 13 Roses (Martínez Lázaro, 2007) and Balada triste de trompeta/The Last Circus (de la Iglesia, 2010). The second is Josep Rosell, a former furniture designer who subsequently worked on films such as La pasión turca/Turkish Passion (Aranda, 1994), Juana la Loca/Mad Love (Aranda, 2001) and El Orfanato/The Orphanage (Bayona, 2007) alongside a vast array of Civil War-themed films, including En brazos de la mujer madura/In Praise of Older Women (Lombardero, 1997), La lengua de las mariposas/Butterfly’s Tongue (Cuerda, 1999) and Libertarias/Freedom Fighters (Aranda, 1996). The third is Félix Murcia, who has won five Goya Awards and Spain’s National Prize for Cinematography, and worked alongside such diverse and prominent directors

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as Berlanga, Saura, Buñuel and Almodóvar. In Dragón Rapide (Camino, 1987) and La luz prodigiosa/The End of a Mystery (Hermoso, 2003), he has strived to create a plausible Civil War backdrop to the films. The Research Stage: Finding the Right References Prior to both design and construction, research constitutes an essential preliminary stage in an art director’s work. This consists of a process of investigation which takes the script as its starting point, in order to ensure that the setting for each scene meets the film’s requirements while also imbuing them with their own visual personality. In this section, I will focus on the different sources available to an art director when they come to try and recreate the atmosphere of the Civil War: a conflict that took place three-quarters of a century ago, and yet about which new information is being constantly unearthed. During the almost forty years of dictatorship which followed Franco’s victory, innumerable stories and pictures of the defeated were enclosed by a wall of silence. The dictator’s death and the subsequent Transition to Democracy lifted this taboo, enabling the experiences and sensations of that terrible time to be told. Given this context, distance from the historical event is an advantage, for now we are better equipped to gain a more comprehensive understanding of what occurred. A concrete illustration of this can be found in the discovery of a genuine treasure trove that has come to be known as ‘The Mexican Suitcase’. In 1995, almost sixty years after the end of the war, around 4500 unpublished negatives were unearthed depicting, among other things, scenes from the Battles of Teruel and the Segre, and the mobilization of the defence of Barcelona in January 1939, captured by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour. The change from a totalitarian regime to a democratic system enabled greater plurality of knowledge, and a multiplicity of versions of the events of the conflict to appear and be openly discussed. For the first time, this period in national history could be told from Spain itself, rather than from abroad, as has been manifest in recent cinematic production, which has incorporated memories that have been experienced and felt rather than observed from across the border. Thus, a process of reconstruction and documentation of history began, which included a focus on ways of life, sources of misery and happiness, places and memories, all of which undeniably have enriched the repertoire of models available for set creation in the films with which we are concerned here. One might expect oral testimony to form an important part of the preliminary research process. Yet, somewhat counter-intuitively, such testimony is of little use to an art director – or is at least rarely called upon. According to Murcia , testimonies of this kind are difficult to come upon and, in any case, are often biased or partial. Many of the first-hand witnesses who are still alive have a rather distorted view of events, while others still find such experiences too traumatic to talk about – largely as a result of the fear instilled in them by the war and subsequent dictatorship. Art directors seek out other sources, including archive audio-visual resources. What distinguishes the Civil War from previous conflicts is that although many 422

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of the recording devices that we have today were not available then, events were filmed on numerous occasions. While such material has its limitations, it is at least abundant. There are kilometres of celluloid waiting to be projected, providing us with a wartime chronicle, albeit a partial one largely as a result of the fire that raged through the Cinematiraje Riera laboratories in August 1945, destroying many of the negatives which depicted the footage that both sides had elected to record just a few years previously. These negatives had been collated by the National Department for Cinematography after the conflict had ended, and their incineration (regardless of the poor condition they had been in) represented the obliteration of memories which great efforts had been made to preserve. This is a striking (and frustrating) example of how cinema has helped to represent and (re)construct the world with filmed images, whether as part of a documentary or a fictional work, becoming the art of memory, dreams and history (Quintana, 2003: 167). As Magí Crusells states: [K]nowledge of the past helps us to understand the present, enabling us to build a better future. This is not a cliché – it is the truth. When we lose our memories, we stop being who we are. A people without memory have no identity. (2006: 11) The surviving remnants of this vital legacy are available for consultation at the Filmoteca Española. Just like moving images, photography provides art directors with a reconstruction of space that is superior to many other sources. In the case of the Spanish Civil War, it benefited from the presence of talented photojournalists, both Spanish – for example, Agustí Centelles and Francisco Boix – and foreign, including Capa, Taro and Seymour. They depicted the war with the expectation that it would be the prologue to the future world order. However, despite the great value of photography for art directors, it should be stressed that it is not the sole focus for either research or for the subsequent creation of sets: in many cases it is not the battlefield which is reconstructed, but rather day-to-day life, and this was not photographed so assiduously. As a result, we are often lacking in information beyond the great historical events, so vital in the (re)creation of the past. When it comes to reproducing lived experience through such quotidian backdrops as a shop, bar or house, it is vital to know what could be bought or consumed, the brands of the different products and how payment was made. In relation to the last point, Murcia refers to the relationship between art direction and coin dealers: ‘Money is always part of day-to-day life. It’s part of being human, it’s inherent to it, and that’s why is often appears on film’. While money can be a notoriously sparse commodity in wartime, we are surrounded by many things of which we are barely aware. The transition to a different historical period requires both a concerted effort and a sharp eye in the search for appropriate models. Therefore, it is incumbent on the art director to put all their senses to work so as not to miss anything: restaurant menus, cinema tickets or empty bottles of spirits – everything and anything can be used when trying to recast the past. 423

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In the film En brazos de la mujer madura, Rosell was faced with a scene in which the chief protagonist attends the Palau de la Música Catalana, the famous concert hall in Barcelona. Although there was evidence to call on as regards the concert hall itself, there was a lack of information in relation to specific details, such as what librettos would have been used at the time. A concerted search was undertaken, which eventually paid dividends, as one was found. This particular libretto was not actually from the war years; rather, it was dated January 18 1942, but the chronological proximity was deemed sufficient. In addition to such concrete period objects, art directors also draw inspiration from one of the oldest art forms, pictorial representation, which is used assiduously even when the period in question is documented perfectly through relics or photographs. According to José Luis Borau: Sometimes, whether on their own initiative or at the behest of the director, the art direction department discard their personal preferences and follow the lead set by those masters of painting whose style seems to be the most suitable for reflecting the right atmosphere, almost always that of a different period. (2003: 51) The examples he cities include Lazare Meerson, and the recreation of Dutch paintings from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Kermesse héroïque/Carnival in Flanders (Jacques Feyder, 1935). The same process often occurs in films envisaging the ambience of the Spanish Civil War. All three of the art directors agree that painting is a key reference point, especially when it comes to representing the grotesque, or esperpento. Although this is a literary genre which was founded by Ramón del Valle-Inclán, a member of the Spanish Generation of ’98 literary movement, this deformation of reality, with its emphasis on grotesque features, can be glimpsed in paintings made in earlier periods, and is opportune for depictions of wartime. As Hydallgo remarked, ‘is there anything more grotesque [esperpéntico] than war?’ No doubt this explains the frequent recourse to painters such as Goya and Gutiérrez Solana when they reference the esperpento. In the case of Balada triste de trompeta, a film not initially intended to encompass the esperpento, it emerged spontaneously within the opening scene. According to Hydallgo: When you delve into the more obscure side of Spain, you find echoes of Goya’s Black Paintings, or the work of Solana, without having looked for them; you kind of reach the end of the line, perhaps because esperpento is a sort of spiritual weakness, of the kind that certainly blighted the Spain of the time. In a similar vein, esperpento makes an appearance in the recreation of the carnival in La lengua de las mariposas, again with Solana and Goya as references. Such dark and gloomy images conjure both the turbulent past and the recollection of survivors for those fortunate enough not to have experienced them directly. 424

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As we have seen, there is a range of varied options available in carrying out art direction research. However, ultimately art directors must remain faithful to the parameters established by the script. As a result, often a pragmatic non-exhaustive approach is adopted in relation to ‘what once was’: historical rigour tends to take second place to the dramatization of the content. Rosell recalled that this was the case in the making of Libertarias. In one of the film’s scenes, a group of Republicans remove some works of art from Vic Cathedral, bringing them out into the square. In Rosell’s words: We told a big lie: we brought some large paintings by Sert out into the square to be burnt. Firstly, the paintings were, in fact, frescoes, so it would have been impossible to take them through the door […] the other thing is that the books do say that religious objects were taken out of the chapels, churches and private houses and were taken to the square, but they didn’t burn them – they broke them […] But for dramatic purposes, the scriptwriter said that they had to be burnt, and also at night so that the effect would be much more impressive. This provides concrete evidence of how, in spite of frequently rigorous research methods, art directors have to disregard evidence in order to serve the narrative better, thereby facilitating the dramatization of the material, and making the content more spectacular or coherent with a particular style. Building Sets Following completion of the research process, the art director creates a conceptual design that will form the basis of the construction of the sets on which the narrative will be enacted. These sets may be artificially constructed (scenery), totally natural (landscapes), pre-existing and artificial (buildings) or adapted (real landscapes and buildings with artificial scenery) (Murcia, 2002). Hydallgo proposed an artificially created set for Las 13 rosas. His initial idea was a kind of roundabout or circus which encompassed different scenic components. In this way, the composition of each space could be changed in the same place by modifying details such as the canopy or posters, or by covering the outer surface of a building, making it look like a different one, thus giving shape to a city which had all the settings that the narrative required. However this project could not be undertaken due to budgetary constraints; the idea was shelved and replaced with the decision to film in natural settings and real buildings, altering them through the use of artificial scenery. According to Murcia’s typology, this is an adapted set, and Hydallgo regards this form of working as somewhat ‘traumatic’: ideal settings such as the railway station, which seems to have been frozen in time, used in En brazos de la mujer madura, are not always possible to find. Modern cities tend to form the backdrop to Civil War films, which often have changed considerably in the intervening decades. In the case of Las 13 rosas, Madrid needed to be 425

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broken, sad and grey, but Hydallgo was faced with a cosmopolitan and revitalized capital. However, this is where the magic of the art department has a decisive role to play. In this case, the result was a set which – during breaks in filming in the middle of August, and in the same location where the Feria de la Paloma festival was taking place – became a kind of Civil War theme park, where the elderly went to reminisce and young families came to have their photographs taken. Rosell was faced with the challenge of recreating the Durutti Column in Libertarias. This formation left Barcelona on July 24 1936 to liberate Aragón from the fascists, and comprised around three thousand Republican militia soldiers who counted a significant number of women among its number, as is reflected in Aranda’s film. This historical moment was documented and is available for consultation at the Filmoteca Española. The images were filmed at what is today the intersection of the roads of Paseo de Gracia and Diagonal in Barcelona; thousands of city residents came out to cheer off the militia as they set out on their expedition, amid an atmosphere of euphoria and collective exaltation. When Rosell saw this archive material, his reaction lay somewhere between bewilderment and fear: ‘This is what we have to do? This is impossible [...] we wouldn’t know how to do it, we don’t have the money, the skills or the people.’ The ensuing recreation successful transports the audience back in time to the place where these events occurred, even if it was filmed in a different location with a relatively small crew and few resources: eight people, three lorries and eight cars, to be precise. In this sense, Rosell was of the opinion that the key was to do things in a ‘small’ way, because that is the nature of Spanish cinema: it possesses no airs of grandeur and has technical and financial limitations, but it is still worthy of respect and demonstrates a commitment to the story it attempts to recount. As was the case in Las 13 rosas, the scenery had to be adapted to the urban setting; this is common when working with backdrops which already exist and have not been purposebuilt. Even natural settings require adaptations in most cases. Murcia recalled an example of this from his time on the film El corazón del bosque/The Heart of the Forest (Gutiérrez Aragón, 1979): We had to make artificial trees and rocks and we even had to uproot a field of maize from Córdoba and take it to Santander; a lot of things that the audience does not notice, which is the best compliment that art directors can possibly receive – for the audience not to realize what we have done. On that occasion, the work was carried out for several reasons. First, for narrative purposes, as the forest described in the script was thick and leafy; and second, for technical reasons: a tracking shot was required and the tracks needed to be concealed. Therefore, an artificial bed of ferns was created. These are traditional solutions from within the field of art direction, with other common techniques involving the use of painted models stuck on to surfaces such as glass or aluminium cut-outs, and mock-up figures in miniature. In the twenty-first century, digital technology is used increasingly to recreate backdrops, or to complement 426

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pre-existing locations both functionally and aesthetically. Within these kind of films, the resource is not so much used for spectacular effect but rather to simulate situations which would have otherwise been difficult to capture on film. An example of this can be seen in La luz prodigiosa in which, by means of a panoramic view from Granada, special effects are used to transport the audience from the midst of the Civil War to the city as it was in the 1980s. As we have seen, art directors make great efforts to imbue their sets, and the different elements of which they are comprised, with a coherent shape, especially in those situations where the aim is to be as realistic as possible. For example, in the case of Dragón Rapide, Murcia attempted to reproduce the exact form of the eponymous plane in which El Caudillo travelled. Although historical rigour is not always the most important criterion for an art director, Murcia highlights that this case was different because the journey was widely reported at the time, so it was deemed necessary to be as realistic as possible. It was known that a Dragón Rapide was still in operation and, following an extensive search, it was found being used for aerobatic displays. However, it is rare that an art director does not encounter unforeseen obstacles, and this was no exception. In order for the recreation to be realistic, the plane had to be painted according to the exact design of its (in)famous predecessor, but the fuselage of such planes was made of canvas, and painting it would have meant adding extra weight sufficient to prevent it from flying under normal conditions. As a result, an exact reproduction could not be achieved, despite the central role that the plane played in the story. In a similar vein, Libertarias showcases the work and effort that goes into finding the right props with which to complement the narrative. Religious paraphernalia is employed to recount the story of María, a nun who runs away from a convent and, through a variety of plot contrivances, ends up joining a group of anarchist militia-women. In the first shot following the opening credits, the audience is privy to a cross thrown from high up on a church, which establishes a precedent for the remainder of the film. Barely three minutes later, the chief protagonist seeks refuge from the convent in a brothel, on whose door hangs a picture of the Sacred Heart. Inside, she meets a bishop taking refuge from the anarchists. If we look carefully, we can discern a four-piece folding screen on which the four seasons with attendant angels are depicted. Even if the audience is not fully conscious of such details, they help imbue the set with a coherent aesthetic that adds an additional layer to the filmic narrative. Similar examples can be found throughout the film, where religious motifs are used continually to subtly flesh out the backdrop to the action. Conclusion Sets, the products of the art department, help to shape the cinematic images which go on to form part of the collective imagination. These are backdrops which are born from the legacy of history, brought together specially for the occasion through the research undertaken by art directors. They draw their inspiration from every vestige of the 427

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past which has come down to us today by means of the most varied sources, such as photographs, film archives or the most mundane items. With them, they reconstruct history by combining the different elements, giving shape, colour and texture to the memories, tinged with bitterness, which still remain of the Spanish Civil War. However, as Vicente Aranda states: [O]ne of the noblest things in film is precisely the ability to bear witness to recent history and events which we know actually took place. The cinema of every country has told and re-told its contemporary history dozens of times. But not ours. It’s as if the theme is taboo and there is certainly a need to fill that gap. (cited in Castillejo, 2006: 85) Since Aranda made these comments, more films have been made on the subject – but too few, in my opinion. Even with the passing of the years, the tale of the Spanish Civil War still needs to be told: partly to do justice to the injustices committed, rightly honouring victims on both sides, but also as a remedy against the lingering resentment in the present which, I would suggest, can be resolved only through greater awareness of historical fact. Sánchez-Biosca speaks of the cinema as ‘a pseudo-historicising machine which works on the general public (and their collective memory) in parallel to and in replacement of progress in historical research’ (2006: 15). While it is true that cinema is not completely accurate, it possesses many other qualities which make films valuable historical records. It is not the objective of cinema to usurp the functions of the historian; rather, the aim is to tell stories and make the audience experience them in a way that draws them in as much as possible. Spanish Civil War-themed films, then, seek to immerse the audience in the Spain of the years from 1936–39, making them feel the bombardments, the spirit on the street, the building of a fighting spirit, the crushing of the hopes of a divided people. These things are transmitted to us to a large extent through sets which tell us stories and cry out to us. They ask to be heard and invite us, if we are able, to satirize the absurdity of war. Notes 1 2

Unless otherwise noted, all uncredited quotations come from the author’s own exchanges with the various art-directors. See, for example, Sánchez-Biosca (2006, 2011). Sánchez-Biosca is part of a research group whose objective is to study the role of imagery in the construction of the memory of the Spanish Civil War – from the forging of myths that were already circulating at the time of the conflict, up to its subsequent transformation in memories of the past – with other members of this group including scholars such as Rafael Rodríguez Tranche, Ángel Quintana and Sonia García López. See also Gubern (1986), Berthier (2005) and Oms (1986).

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References Berthier, N. (2005). De la guerre à l’écran: ¡Ay Carmela! de Carlos Saura (Toulouse: University of Mirail). Borau, J. L. (2003). La pintura en el cine: El cine en la pintura (Madrid: Ocho y medio). Castillejo, J. (2006). Vicente Aranda: El cine como compromiso (Alzira: Alzinema Setmana de Cinema i Literatura d’Alzira). Crusells, M. (2006). Cine y Guerra Civil Española: Imágenes para la memoria (Madrid: JC Clementine). Gubern, R. (1986). 1936–1939: La guerra de España en la pantalla: de la propaganda a la historia (Madrid: Filmoteca Española). Murcia, F. (2002). La escenografía en el cine: El arte de la apariencia (Madrid: Sociedad General de Autores). Oms, M. (1986). La Guerre d’Espagne au cinéma: mythes et réalités (Paris: Editions Cerf). Quintana, A. (2003). Fábulas de lo visible: el cine como creador de realidades (Barcelona: Acantilado). Sánchez-Biosca, V. (2006). Cine de historia, cine de memoria: la representación y sus límites (Madrid: Cátedra). (2011). El pasado es el destino: Propaganda y cine del bando nacional en la Guerra Civil (Madrid: Cátedra).

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Chapter 28 The Films of Isaki Lacuesta: Hidden Portraits, Multiple Lives Linda C. Ehrlich

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t home both in the new digital age and with more traditional forms of cinematic expression, director Isaki Lacuesta1 offers a wide range of cinematic productions (short films, feature-length films, museum exhibition pieces) that feature a meandering sense of travel and play, an exploration of parallel lives and the joy of improvisation and receptivity.2 In the special issue of Cahiers du Cinema España devoted to Isaki’s films, Carlos Heredero describes the director as ‘a citizen of the audiovisual galaxy’ (Heredero, 2009: 5) and Ángel Quintana writes of the ‘multiplicity of registers’ in Isaki’s films (Quintana, 2009: 7). In our first interview in Barcelona in 2007, Isaki told me that he prefers to divide films into ‘written cinema’ and ‘unwritten cinema’, rather than terms such as ‘documentary’ or ‘feature film’. With each new film, Isaki builds on previous work while also moving in very new directions. As he elucidated in one of our correspondences, his feature films have moved from the jungle to the desert, from deeply psychological films to the more extrovert. His cinema remains for me a kind of spiral, at times vertiginous but always thought-provoking. If I were to highlight certain images from the work of this masterful cinematic essayist, I would choose a collage approach (with collage described as ‘the rupture of illusionism, the rejection of the idea that the mission of art can be reduced to that of representation’, Weinrichter, 2009: 39). Or as the film scholar Teshome Gabriel put it: ‘every image is a compendium of several images that prepare the way in which each individual image is seen and read’ (1999: 81). Watching a number of Isaki’s films (not necessarily in chronological order), I am inspired to ponder such questions as those that follow: What Portraits Lie Hidden in Our Fluid Years? Fluidity in Isaki’s films consolidates into portraits, and portraits then break up into a free-form kind of play. What could be more playful than Isaki’s first full-length feature film Cravan vs. Cravan (2002), about Oscar Wilde’s nephew known by the pseudonym Arthur Cravan. This film – about a man who was at once a boxer and a Dadaist poet, who mysteriously disappeared in Mexico in 1918 – is a palimpsest of layers, none of which might be completely true. The same could be said about Garbo the Spy (2009), co-written by Isaki, Maria Hervera and director Edmon Roch. The film presents the fascinating true story of Juan Pujol García, a Spanish double agent from the Second World War who earned the trust of the Germans

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but was really working for the Allies, whose main weapon was his fertile imagination. In this docu-thriller, again we can see Isaki’s fascination with altered identities, split-screens and the force of playful invention. The Germans gave Juan Pujol the code name ‘Alaric’, but British intelligence called him ‘Garbo’ because he played his enigmatic role to perfection. Isaki’s second feature film, La leyenda del tiempo/The Legend of Time (2006), set on San Fernando island in the Bay of Cádiz, introduces us to two lives on the point of transition: that of an island boy, Isra, who refuses to sing out of grief; and a young woman from Japan, Makiko, who is seeking a new voice. Those two disparate people are tied together by an island, a legendary singer (Camarón de la Isla) and a sense of loss.3 The film is split into two parts which intersect at points. In La leyenda del tiempo, we also are introduced to a brother of Camarón, Jesús Monje (‘Pijote’) and a host of others who filter through the lives of the two protagonists. In the booklet accompanying the DVD of the film, Isaki writes that he hopes viewers will juxtapose the fresh ‘unwritten’ face of Isra and his younger brother with the chiselled lines on the face of the elderly Pijote. The mixture of story and improvisation in La leyenda del tiempo makes it an excellent example of film-making as a form of ‘being with’ (as Isaki would describe it). What Places Fall Off the Map? Even as evolving technologies such as Google Earth claim omniscience, we find that they have overlooked poorer areas: they have hidden the nature of privilege, and failed to reveal the tragic price of truth. This tendency is explored by Isaki in ‘Lugares que no existen: GoogleEarth 1.0’/ ‘Places that Don’t Exist: GoogleEarth 1.0’ (2009), an installation for the Fundació Suñol and Centre de Creació Can Xalant de Mataró in Barcelona, which explores how Google Earth has taken over the role of cartographer in recent years, but with certain lacunae.4 The director takes us to places that have not so much disappeared from Google Earth, as have been purposely omitted because of class difference, exilic re-mappings, hidden crimes against humanity and the disregard of the plight of women, among other dubious reasons. For example, when residents living next door to a detention centre for new immigrants in Australia have no contact with its inhabitants, it is easy for Google Earth to ‘overlook’ that man-made space. Transcending the Barriers of Memory Isaki’s third feature-length film, Los Condenados/The Condemned (2009), was filmed in the jungles of Peru but with Argentine actors. Thus it is a film that implies much about the struggles of resistance movements without being too specific about place. This film explores the need, and yet the futility, of trying to unearth the remains of memories (both literally and metaphorically). It establishes a contrast between the new generation of children of former 434

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activists who want to focus on the present and future, and a group of ageing revolutionaries who will not relinquish the past. Like his most recent film at the time of writing – Los pasos dobles/The Double Steps (2011)  – Los condenados began as the idea for a documentary. However, the director eventually realized that this would be impossible, and so he built on his short film Soldados Anónimos/Anonymous Soldiers (2008) to create the fictional work. In Soldados anónimos, viewers watch an excavation of what they believe are the remains of Republican soldiers, but realize at the end that they are the remains of a fascist group. In Isaki’s words, these films are about ‘a confrontation with the tragedy of killing another person to defend an idea’ (cited in Iglesias and Losilla, 2009: 13). How Can We Describe ‘Las historias que hay insertas en los rostros’? Regarding ‘the stories inscribed in faces’ (cited in Iglesias and Losilla, 2009: 14), La noche que no acaba/All Night Long (2010) presents Isaki’s 80-minute portrait of actress Ava Gardner for the TCM television channel. It examines the Hollywood actress’s love affair with Spain, ranging from the time of filming Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Levin, 1951) to Harem (Joffé 1985). This exploratory documentary reminds me of the statement by film scholar Bill Nichols that documentary no longer need imply ‘fullness and completion, knowledge and fact, explanations of the social world and its motivating mechanisms [rather, it can imply] incompleteness and uncertainty, recollection and impression, images of personal worlds and their subjective construction’ (1994: 1). In the same sense, in the videocartas exchanged with Japanese director Naomi Kawase as part of the ‘Todas las Cartas’ (’All the Letters’) itinerant exhibition (2011–2012), Isaki presents us with portraits of various kinds. An initial formality in this exchange gradually gives way to a sense of a closeness that respects distance. His first videocarta to Kawase introduces a journey of six months and the music of the voyage. As he stated in the voiceover of another of his films (Las Variaciones Marker, 2007): ‘Voyages are exercises in editing.’ There are also intimate moments in this first correspondence. As Laura Marks reminds us in her books Touch (2002) and The Skin of the Film (2000), as does Jennifer Barker’s The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (2009), the cinema can offer an experience of textures – a kind of ‘visual surface play (looking as if touching)’ (Clepper, 2011: 81). In her first videocarta to Isaki, Kawase’s reply centres around Buddhist ceremonies and a tribute to family. The rack-focus on the floating oil lamps and the soft colours of the robes of the Buddhist priests blend into a meditative flow. Isaki breaks this gentle meditation with a bold foray into the world of nineteenth-century science at its most controversial, in his depiction of a rather odd museum in his hometown of Banyoles, which features a display of taxidermy, mummies and an assorted array of skulls. I asked Isaki if this videocarta should be seen as a rupture of the tone of the first two correspondences, but he replied that he thought of it rather like something akin to a new musical movement. At times, the films of 435

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Isaki play with impossible balances and silly renderings of the unknown, as in his ‘P.S.’ to the chain of videocartas with the Japanese director. Here we see a group of Malian children who run around ecstatically as they chase flying ants which have appeared after a rainstorm. In this ‘P.S.’, he also cites Spanish film pioneer Segundo de Chomón’s rather incongruous tribute to Japan – ‘Kiri-Kis Japanese Acrobats’ (1907) – one of the first Spanish cinematic images of that distant country. How Do Silence and Hidden Music Interact? In another of Isaki Lacuesta’s short films, La música de piedra/Stone Music in Las variaciones Marker (2007), we are introduced to a kind of hidden music and the transformation of objects carved out of stone into something of an anachronistic nature. Isaki posits a playful reference to the columns of the cathedral of his native Girona which reveal, miraculously, the music of Bach. Traços/Traces (2007), a 10-minute piece exhibited on four screens, includes ‘Música callada’ ‘Quiet Music’ which offers us a startling juxtaposition of voice and silence. Singers of cante jondo (a flamenco vocal style, literally ‘deep song’) express intense emotions, and yet we hear music of another register altogether, by the great Catalan composer Frederic Mompou.5 Hidden voices and multiplied voices present a startling and revelatory lack of redundancy between sound and image. This short film reminds me how I find a special kind of ‘silent cinema’ in films by Isaki Lacuesta – a search for a special voice – often an impossible voice. It could be a voice from beyond the grave, or the voice of a memory years past, but in any event it is a muted or even completely silenced voice. Sometimes this sense of muteness is because of a person’s socio-economic or political repression. Isaki does not turn away from tough subjects, but his films are not didactic. In fact, they resist imposing themselves on the viewer. Black and White/Calligraphic/Dance of Triumph I am struck by how many of Isaki’s films involve binary qualities which he both celebrates and begins to deconstruct. This is especially true in Sol/Sun (2008), a four-minute piece shot in 16mm as part of the ‘Reflexos de Chaplin’ (‘Reflections of Chaplin’) exhibition, which ran from the 21 October 2008 to 28 February 2009 at the Museum of Cinema in Girona. Binaries also appear in Cravan vs. Cravan (2002): Isra’s voice and Makiko’s voice singing with silence. In Miquel Barceló’s notebook of paintings shown in the 61-minute documentary El cuaderno de barro/The Clay Diaries (2011), the double pages look like Rorschach psychological tests.6 Los pasos dobles/The Double Steps (2011), inspired by the artist Miquel Barceló’s experiences in Africa, offers a cinematic representation of the fluid narratives of traditional storytelling: an alternative to what Isaki calls ‘the kind of coherency that strangely has become an idol of our times’.7 This most recent film, the winner of the Golden Shell at the 2011 San Sebastián Film 436

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Festival, plays with identity and legend. It shows the protagonist, artist Francois Augiéras, creating a work in the Sahara. As Isaki reported to me, in a way, all of the characters in Los pasos dobles become the protagonist Augiéras, or at least a major aspect of that character that we as viewers can superimpose one upon the other. In Los pasos dobles, different worlds exist simultaneously. The description of Los pasos dobles in its New York Museum of Modern Art preview reads as follows: In this visually striking fantasy, inspired by legendary French painter and writer François Augiéras, a soldier – who believes he is Augiéras – searches for a series of spiritual murals supposedly made by the painter in an abandoned bunker. The renowned Spanish painter and ceramicist Miquel Barceló (playing himself), whose recent work is inspired by Augiéras, soon joins in the search as well. The film’s numerous doublings, conundrums and sexual innuendoes reflect Augiéras’s innovative art and troubled life. (Darghis, 2012: C5) This feature-length film in particular shows Isaki’s preference for what he calls ‘imperfect films’: films that are always en camino (moving to new levels). In Isaki’s view, when one begins to film, one discovers that there is something much stronger in the surroundings – something that the camera cannot capture. Filming as a Form of Writing and Knowledge Herencia/Heritage (2011) is a three-minute short film which forms part of the omnibus film ‘Senses of Home’, coordinated by Kawase after the March 11 earthquake in Japan. Isaki’s contribution is a moving tribute to a family, the director’s own, as well as a metaphorical depiction of the Ages of Man. In a wooded area, men of three generations (Isaki’s little nephew, brother and father, later joined by the director) walk across the space in overlapping studies, like Ernest Trova’s Walking Man. The men are nude, simply so, without any sense of self-consciousness or spectacle. The voice-over by Isaki’s father reveals a painful memory from the years of dictatorship in Spain, as the director himself ponders what kinds of memories are revealed just before death. Seizing the Moment I am struck by the respect and generosity that Isaki shows towards the subjects of his films, whether they are famous artists, as in Rouch, un noir (2004), a young gypsy boy, or a Russian man magnificently playing an unusual instrument (a saw), as seen in his film on Google Earth. The director underscores each person’s inherent dignity. 437

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Many directors experiment with different styles between films, but Isaki often experiments within one film. His films are about parallels, secrets, people on the margins doing the best they can, luxurious meanderings and hard times. What matters a great deal when viewing Isaki’s films is to enter into the particular rhythm that he has established. As Yvette Biró pointed out in her Turbulence and Flow in Film: ‘Rhythm [in film] is […] the melody […] (the sequence of events), the intensity, the tone-color, the texture and, of course, the harmony’ (2008: 232). In thinking of Isaki’s blending of the documentary and the fictional, I am reminded of Johan Huizinga’s description of the nature of play in his book Homo Ludens: Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious,’ but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly […] It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. (1949: 13) Such is the ‘Isakian universe’ – fluid but never truly random, full of hidden portraits and multiple lives. Notes 1 2

3 4 5

6

This chapter draws on my correspondence and occasional meetings with Isaki Lacuesta in Barcelona, the Stanford Humanities Center and New York; therefore, I will refer to the director by his first name. The director himself was born into a Basque family in 1975 and grew up in Catalonia – areas rather distant from the worlds of Andalusia, Colombia, Russia, Mali and other places where he has centred his filming. Isaki’s connection to Barcelona goes back to his time at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, and his place in the first graduating class of the Máster en Documental de Creación at the Universidad Pompeu Fabra. The title of the film, La leyenda del tiempo, is drawn from the name of a 1979 album by Camarón: a recording that marked a change in flamenco because it introduced nontraditional instrumentation into the form. The original name of the installation, in Catalan, is ‘Llocs que no existeixen’. Mompou’s work contains twenty-eight pieces composed between 1959 and 1967. In her study of the composer, Ana Zalkind notes how his work moves between ‘the ethereal and the romantic’, with an aesthetic of ‘simplicity, poetry and grace’ (2002: 137). Mompou draws the title ‘Música callada’ from the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic San Juan de la Cruz. In Mompou’s own words, at the end of Book 1 of his four-book Música callada: ‘Music keeps its voice silent, that is, does not speak, while solitude has its own music’. In diary entries about that film-making, Isaki records a comment that African Dogon legends tell us that we each have a double. Barceló himself noted in an interview with Enrique Juncosa that ‘in Africa […] things go very fast […] there’s also a resistance […] it’s like 438

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two opposing movements (the everyday routine and then growing old quickly)’ (Hancock, 2006: 28). Miquel Barceló first went to Africa in 1988, and now spends some time each year in the Dogon area of Mali. He is associated with artists such as Julian Schnabel, Anselm Kiefer and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

References Barker, J. (2009). The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Biró, Y. (2008). Turbulence and Flow in Film: The Rhythmic Design, trans. Paul Salamon (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Clepper, C. (2011). ‘Review of Jennifer M. Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience’, Film Quarterly, 64.4: 80–81. Darghis, M. (2012). ‘Following an artist’s footsteps in the sand’, New York Times, 1 October: C5. Ehrlich, L. (2011) ‘Todas las cartas (“All The Letters”): An Invitation’, Senses of Cinema, available at http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2011/feature-articles/toda-las-cartas-%E2%80%9Call-theletters%E2%80%9D-an-invitation/, last accessed on 3 June 2013. Gabriel, T. H. (1999). ‘The intolerable gift: residues and traces of a journey’ in H. Naficy (ed.), Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media and the Politics of Place (New York: Routledge), 75–83. Hancock, C. (ed.) (2006). Miquel Barceló: The African Work (Dublin Irish Museum of Modern Art). Heredero, C. (2009) ‘Brumas del presente, esperanzas de futuro’ Cahiers du Cinema España, November: 5. Huizinga, J. J. (1949). Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Iglesias, E. and Losilla, C (2009). ‘Entrevista Isaki Lacuestra: De retratos y ausencias’, Cahiers du Cinema España, November: 13–14. Marks, L. (2000) The Skin of the Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). (2002). Touch (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press). Nichols, B. (1994). Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Quintana, A. (2009) ‘Un cineaste del siglo XXI’ Cahiers du Cinema España, November: 6–8. Weinrichter, A. (2009). ‘Notas sobre “collage” y cine’ in S. Garcia López and L. Gómez Vaquero (eds.), Piedra, Papel, y Tijera: el collage en el cine documental (Madrid: Ocho y Medio), 37–64. Zalkind, A. (2002). A Study of Catalan Composer Federico Mompou’s ‘Música Callada’ (Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press).

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Chapter 29 Color perro que huye: An Audio-visual Prosumer versus the Institutional Cinematic Model Elena López Riera

Collage is, in my understanding, the only possible way to escape traditional narrative. Connecting ideas that produce new meanings. I want to make films in keeping with our time and our new ways of reading and consuming images. To create discourse by acknowledging that we live in a world of digital images interconnected in the net like rhyzomes. And I’m not talking about the future, but the present of cinema. (Duque cited in Oroz, 2011)

I

n a context in which we have been debating the future of cinema, or even a future without cinema, the time is ripe to formulate the question of the present. The development of new technologies – most notably, the introduction of the Internet into the daily life of a large part of the world’s population – has shaken the foundations of cinema as an institution. In order to interrogate cinema in the present, I would suggest that we should pay attention to what is known, arguably too broadly, as ‘hybrid discourses’, in order to analyse what aspects are undergoing a shift in terms of production, representation and consumption. In the highly influential Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2008), Henry Jenkins argued that the development of new technologies would not lead to a definitive paradigm shift, but rather a state of cohabitation between old and new media. In my opinion, this cohabiting is the defining feature of the present model, contaminated by other audio-visual practices but still alive in its institutional version. This is a state of convergence: the emergence of new recording devices, Internet uses, social networks, the proliferation of cinema screens, the development of online video hosting channels and a long list of applications, until recently unknown, are changing the ways in which any audiovisual text is produced and consumed. In this chapter, I will use a paradigmatic case study – Color perro que huye/Colour Runaway Dog (Duque, 2011) – to suggest that we are still in a convergent phase between the Institutional Mode of Representation (IMR)1 in film and new audio-visual practices. Widespread access to the production of audio-visual discourse has been facilitated by the development of home movie cameras (Super 8, 16mm, etc.) and, obviously, the emergence of video.2 However, it is not until the arrival of a tool that allows anyone to construct a discourse in their own private sphere and distribute it, without intermediates, in a public sphere, that a definitive change can be said to have taken place. This has enacted a shift both in the industrial conception of film, and in the way that individuals self-represent both themselves and their private sphere. Logically, this will have important consequences for the

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so-called auto-fiction genre, likely to expand beyond any expectation as a result of the audiovisual prosumer, the principal figure that helps us understand the emancipative dynamic offered by new audio-visual practices in distinction to the industry’s vertical structure. The Audio-visual Prosumer Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt (1972) anticipated the arrival of what we now term the ‘audio-visual prosumer’ when they said that the future would not distinguish between content producers and consumers; thus the neologism merging the terms ‘consumer’ and ‘producer’. To these, I would add ‘distributor’ because, as previously mentioned, the rupture of the barrier between private and public exhibition is paramount. Furthermore, the emergence of a subject who can consume, produce and distribute their own audiovisual discourse, without the need for a legitimizing entity, questions the very foundations of an institutional model that has always required one (or several) gatekeepers – be they practitioners, critics or academics, who patrol the boundaries of inclusion. The arrival of this audio-visual prosumer entails a shift from the film industry’s vertical structure to a horizontal participatory model that is capable of challenging such binaries as public/private, or professional/amateur. In the context afforded by Web 2.03 new audio-visual practices put into question the decisive difference between the professional and the amateur, based on criteria such as broadcast quality – in my opinion, a purely economic logic to determine which products are capable of generating revenue. This interrogation, arguably carried out in a naïve way by prosumers on the Internet, is raising genuine awareness among artistic and creative groups who reject the industrialized model of professional cinema in favour of the prosumer option. Andrés Duque partakes in a trend in Spanish cinema that seeks a space for a hybrid language between traditional and new film practices. In terms of a centre characterized by the industrial model, and a periphery consigned to experimental film (a term which needs to be used with utmost caution), we could define Duque as an ‘outsider’ (de Pedro and Oroz, 2010) from the perspective of hybridization. Having said this, perhaps it is problematic to determine a centre and periphery within a system such as Spanish cinema, which is not in itself a self-sufficient industry. For this reason, I will talk instead in terms of off-centre movements arising, in the face of a weakened industrial system, largely as a result of the production and distribution possibilities allowed as a result of the Internet as a new audio-visual paradigm. Spanish Off-centre Color perro que huye could be defined as a creative documentary,4 film diary, film essay, collage, found footage 2.0. and so on. In short, an off-centre model that can be located somewhere between the institutional model and that which eludes any form of taxonomy. 444

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In Spain, there is an active creative movement in which works are created for the Internet. An awareness of the work undertaken by audio-visual prosumers is necessary to gain a proper understanding of today’s film practices. Numerous groups, blogs, specialist magazines, alternative production channels and proposals are surfacing – for example, Blogs & Docs, Embed, Zemos 98, lacasinegra and so on – that create a space conducive to the creation of off-centre projects that are typically ignored by the industry and public funding bodies. This activity has not gone unnoticed. A recent Spanish Ministry of Culture report by Michael Gubbins titled ‘The Digital Revolution’ analyses structural changes in the cinema, highlighting not only the reduction in production costs, but also changes in distribution and exhibition systems: ‘what the Internet is doing is basically changing the relationship between consumer and contents, between people and commercialization’ (Gubbins, 2011: 10). Broadcast Yourself: The Prosumer and Identity Formation It would be naïve to say that new technologies have invented amateurism, but they have achieved something revolutionary, taking it out of family albums and placing it into the public sphere without the need for intermediaries. This new paradigm clearly enables and fosters a hitherto unknown autobiographical discourse within production embodied in YouTube, which brings together its principal features: participation, remix, popular culture and artistic practices, and the user’s independence from, and perhaps indifference to, vertical media structures. The subtitle to the world’s best known online video channel – ‘Broadcast Yourself ’ – is far from incidental. This huge online archive, often characterized by images of daily life and the proliferation of film diaries, places huge emphasis on firstperson narratives. In fact, there is no more precise description of the prosumer’s ethos than the call to arms, ‘Broadcast Yourself ’, which blurs the line between viewer and creator. This trend of film diaries is present in Color perro que huye. At the outset we are faced with the image of a window with no external view, the physical space from which the film is being made. This is followed immediately by contrasting images of other intimate spaces: different rooms, other users that look at their Internet window rather than out of their own more traditional physical windows. These are individuals who construct their discourse from a private space and release it into the public realm: YouTube images of unknown, distant people who are in the same position as the images of the film’s director. Color perro que huye situates the film-maker’s discourse at the same public/private and virtual/physical interface as that of other people. Clearly, the new technical design of reproduction and consumption spaces has had an important impact on audio-visual rhetoric and, as a result, will have an impact on the means of (re)presenting first-person stories through autofiction and/or forging individual as well as collective memories. Indeed, as Jenkins (2006), alongside many other authors, has suggested, this double movement between the adherence to virtual communities and the inscription of one’s self will be fundamental to a proper understanding of identity politics and aesthetics in the YouTube era. 445

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This double movement underpins the ostensible paradox that a culture of participation through online communities and social networks is being championed via an individualistic – arguably solipsistic – ‘do it yourself ’ ethos. In Color pero que huye, Duque articulates identity formation as a multiple, heterogeneous, micro-fragmented process. It seemingly suggests that we can apply certain sexual, national or ideological categories to the discourse that we construct about the self through social networks such as Twitter or Facebook, or communities created within the framework of channels such as YouTube. This dynamic highlights the disintegration experienced by the subject in the face of different modes of representation in a society that is postmodern, perhaps even post-Internet.5 The manner in which the prosumer construes themselves as an individual and becomes involved in certain communities or social networks through YouTube is hardly coincidental. This is clearly manifest in the activities of the camgirls who can be seen as precursors to the new use of the film diary on the Internet, and whose presence in Color perro que huye is relatively important.6 Given what has been said, it is hardly surprising that the film opens with a statement about the Internet and how the self registers its representations in the world: ‘The Internet is not a utopia, but it solves the fundamental dilemma of how to live together setting distances in common.’ As noted, the people we then see are lone individuals talking to the camera: in this manner the film allows us to be privy to their doubts over their sexual condition, subjugation to prostitution, exile, underdevelopment, race, cannibalism or loneliness. The issue of identity and the conviction that that identity will be heterogeneous and in flux is a constant feature of Color perro que huye. This contradictory search of the subject is patent in the film through the construction of a fragmented discourse belonging to a single enunciating voice. As Duque himself explains: ‘Color perro que huye may be a film where not only do I let myself be represented as body-woman, but also as body-transformable, body-monster, body that rejects one single identity’ (cited in Oroz, 2011). In fact, the issue of identity is raised from the discursive as well as the philosophical perspective, as is manifest in the narrative construction. The film is divided into seemingly unconnected chapters: they are enigmatic and disjointed phrases which evoke that feeling of instability and fracture expressed by the filmmaker himself as subject, and resolved (or not resolved) through dialogue (or no dialogue) with the Other. This is how the filmic discourse articulates its most important questions about identity. Is it possible to talk to the Other when the Other is a stranger’s video on YouTube? Is it possible to talk to the Other when the Other is a country I have left and the Other is the country that has taken me in? Is it possible to talk to the Other when the Other is cinema and I am cinema too? The Cannibalistic Film-maker Duque belongs to a generation that has consumed all manner of audio-visual stimuli, who has grown up with film, television, video and the Internet. He is a genuine prosumer, a voracious and almost cannibalistic consumer of audio-visual bait who, through his 446

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films – which he confesses to having recorded with his own camera and subsequently found on his hard drive – reveals himself as a creator. In his own words: I think that the filmmaker’s work is like that of a vampire, so if I see/record an image and I hold it in my memory, then it becomes mine by universal right. It becomes part of my imagery. And art’s role is precisely this, to let itself be stolen. When you see a piece that you like, you store it in your head (if you can, you buy it), and in this way you possess it as a valuable treasure. It has lost its authorship, metaphorically speaking. And it’s in this ‘theft’ where its success lies. Today, when I see myself confronted with an external hard drive storing a huge amount of digital images, both mine and from others, I feel I have a right to use them, because I am emotionally connected to them, but it’s more cautious to call it a quote. The images I use, even when they’re stolen, are cited alongside their authors in the final credits. (cited in Oroz, 2011) Within this intertextual cannibalistic morass, how then might we locate an intimate and subjective discourse? How might we distinguish the visible (that which can be exhibited) and the invisible (that which cannot) in a world over-saturated with images? How does the film-maker constitute himself as a subject when his identity is seemingly defined through images from heterogeneous sources? Duque is a self-confessed regular YouTube viewer, a ‘bulimic’ consumer of diverse content which have a precise presence and translation in his film. Indeed, this cannibalistic protocol will have consequences in the way other people’s content is reinscribed in one’s own film discourse. In addition to a sequence where the filmmaker eats some of the pages from the Francoist cartoon, Hombres, razas y costumbres (Men, Races and Customs), referencing Arrebato/Rapture (Zulueta, 1979), the cannibal film par excellence, Color perro que huye’s own narrative acts like a phagocyte of all kinds of images. In my view, this tendency towards a reappropriation of material is not just the consequence of nostalgic aesthetics. There is nothing superficial about the audio-visual cannibalism which proliferates in Duque’s films. On the contrary, it raises very important issues about the definition of film-maker as a ‘creator of images’, as an auteur with all the connotations and controversies that the term implies. Indeed, Color perro que huye questions the notion of the film author as the one who creates images. It moves from the definition of cinemaas-system that produces to a system that reinscribes content. For this reason, audio-visual remix will take up a prime position in the new paradigm where, perhaps, we might be busier reorganizing a vast plethora of images than producing new ones. Towards a Remix Culture Construing filmic discourse as intertextual reinscription is hardly a new concept, but as a result of the Internet and online archives such as YouTube, remix practice has become pervasive to a previously unprecedented degree. In fact, remix culture and the audio-visual 447

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prosumer are construed frequently as parallel phenomena. This is a culture accustomed to articulating the collective and/or communal nature of new audio-visual practices through the appropriation of other people’s content and the construction of an intimate, disjointed discourse composed by different pieces. As a result, it might be suggested that remix culture and the creation of communities through YouTube have heralded the arrival of a kind of participatory culture that governs the Internet: for example, practices such as Machinima,7 vlogging or fan videos. The manner in which Duque’s film is assembled, as an audiovisual collage with materials from different sources in which the construction of the filmic discourse eludes homogeneity, calls into question what is specific to cinema. Duque’s appropriation of the materials ‘created’ by others, the irreverent position of the prosumer in relation to the film auteur, actually chimes with comments made by Jean-Luc Godard in his discussion of Film Socialisme/Film Socialism (2010): We once believed we were auteurs but we weren’t. We had no idea, really. Film is over. It’s sad nobody is really exploring it. But what to do? And anyway, with mobile phones and everything, everyone is now an auteur. (cited in Gibbons, 2011) In the veteran film-maker’s view, it appears as if the auteur has outlived cinema. Is there any way

to determine the specificity of film discourse in today’s world? The following words open Duque’s film: I don’t have celluloid or videos. I only have numbers stored in hard drives and memory boxes called QuickTime. From those I have pulled out images that I now assemble, arrange and present with sincerity. Although they are not truths.

This quote raises three important questions as regards the IMR. On the one hand, it questions the sacred value of film material (‘I only have QuickTime files’); on the other, it alludes to the identity crisis that arises from a remix culture (‘images that I assemble/ arrange’) and, finally, it questions the category of truth that has served traditionally as an exchange value to establish the discursive pact between enunciator and viewer of the documentary genre. If we return to the notion of identity’s double dimension – that of the film discourse and the film-maker as individual – is it then possible to discuss the dialogue that Color perro que huye establishes between the ‘self ’ and the ‘other’? In this sense, it is no coincidence that the dialogue that the film establishes with external files is with images from vlogging taken from YouTube: Memorias de subdesarrollo/Memories of Underdevelopment (Gutiérrez Alea, 1968), from Arrebato; or a quote from the unfinished film by Andrés Caicedo and Carlos Mayo: Angelita y Miguel Ángel/Angelita and Miguel Ángel (1971). These citations represent a discourse from the ‘other’ taken from various perspectives that are far from incidental. The quote from Memorias del subdesarrollo serves to introduce the notion of the emigrant’s double 448

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look. Color perro que huye establishes a constant confrontation between images coming from Spain as a developed country, and Latin America through images of tribes, the legacy of underdevelopment as revealed in a Caracas square, or in the bird’s-eye view images of the city’s slums. This unresolved tension between contemporary images and the audio of a film from 1968 represents a dialogue which seems to have been in stalemate for more than forty years. The mention of Andrés Caicedo also provides an important clue to cinema’s relationship with other discourses. Caicedo was a doomed artist who committed suicide at the age of twenty-six, having just published his debut novel, ¡Qué viva la música!/Long Live the Music (1977), and who left behind a great number of unfinished works: three novels, a film and a life. Finally the reference to Arrebato – a provocative film that questioned the IMR from the periphery of Spanish cinema – constitutes a dialogue with both cinema and the ‘other’. Therefore, it could be said that the dialogue that Color perro que huye establishes with other sources not only responds to the fashion or aesthetic attitude of the new context in which we find ourselves, but also with a more fundamental line of questioning about how the self is constructed through discourse in the contemporary world. A line of interrogation which, I would suggest, has only one answer: audio-visual fragmentation, an identity made up of patches of other images, other sounds, other ways of looking. Color perro que huye is fundamentally about constructing a film discourse more interested in arranging than shooting. Exercises of reappropriation and reinscription, remix games typical of the time we live in which have, in other fields such as poetry, already embodied a genuine political stance by creating a space in which it possible to subvert dominant structures of language through which we speak and are spoken (see Jakobson, 1988). Duque alludes to this process when he talks about manipulating image: ‘a compulsive filmmaker accepts the mess in his files. He doesn’t try to organize them or date them, or even understand them, only give them some meaning. Chance as a poetry-making machine’. Why can the director not be regarded as a mixer of ideas, as somebody who is trying to arrange in their head all the images that are composed, instead of using their head to show new images? Probably because if that happened, if somebody suddenly decided that it is no longer necessary to shoot – that images have been produced already, that they are there and accessible to everyone, that our memory counts from 0 to 1 in QuickTime files stored in a hard drive – then one would have to question very seriously some of the premises on which the film industry is founded. Conclusion: Hybrid Objects If we talk about hybrid objects and convergence between various paradigms, it is from a discursive as well as an economic perspective. The development of new communication technologies, the establishment of a Web 2.0 protocol and the tentative steps being taken by some sectors within the industry allow us to talk about an evolution in the way that films are being made, distributed and consumed. Contemporary cinema cannot be conceived as an isolated practice, but as a dialogic crux within a wider context. As I have shown throughout 449

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this chapter, Color perro que huye is a hybrid object functioning between two models: although it establishes a dialogue with new audio-visual practices through the prosumer’s traits, it does not disassociate itself totally from an institutional structure. This institution is not Hollywood, but it does involve staples of the classical model such as production, festivals and distribution. While questioning an institutional model, artists still want their films to be screened at festivals, given a theatrical run and receive positive reviews, albeit within specialized publications. Prosumers – activists with a will for change – find it hard to elude a model whose structure is so firmly embedded: this is why their efforts tend to be characterized by reform rather than revolution. Notes 1 2

3

4 5 6 7

I have appropriated this title for my chapter from Burch (1995). On this matter, it would be very interesting to revise the study carried out by Zimmerman (1995) on amateur cinema, which analyses the political dimension of a non-professional cinema outside of Hollywood. His is a study in which the commercialization of instruments is articulated with the construction of a particular language either associated with an institutional model, or far removed from it. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss the consequence of moving from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. However, it is worth highlighting the importance of social networks as a communication protocol of Web 2.0 and the imposition of a horizontal model. For more information, see O’Reilly (2009). As de Pedro and Oroz (2010) explain, this definition is applied to many new documentaries in Spain, especially those that emerge from the Master’s degree in documentary film at Pompeu Fabra University. I use the term ‘postmodernity’ with the necessary caution and in the sense of ‘condition’, as expressed by Lyotard (1987). Camgirls refers to generally adolescent girls who make a film diary and publish it in blogs (getting started in vlogging) or YouTube. Machinima-based artists, sometimes called ‘machinimists’ or ‘machinimators’, are often fan labourers by virtue of their reuse of copyrighted materials. Vlogging is a form of blogging for which the medium is video, and is a form of web television. Entries often combine embedded video or a video link with supporting text, images and other metadata. Entries can be recorded in one take, or cut into multiple parts. It is also a very popular category on YouTube.

References Burch, N. (1995). El tragaluz del infinito (Madrid: Cátedra). De Pedro, G. and Oroz, E. (2010). ‘Centralización y dispersión: dos movimientos para cartografiar la “especificidad” del documental producido en Cataluña en la última década’ in C. Torreiro (ed.), Realidad y creación en el cine de no ficción (Madrid: Cátedra), 61–82. 450

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Gibbons, F. (2011). ‘Jean Luc Godard interview’, The Guardian, 12 July, available at http://www. theguardian.com/film/2011/jul/12/jean-luc-godard-film-socialisme, last accessed on 12 August 2012. Gubbins, M. (2011). La revolución digital (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura), available at http:// www.calameo.com/read/0000753351c99448c837b, last accessed on 12 August 2012. Jakobson, R. (1988). Linguística y poética (Madrid: Cátedra). Jenkins, H. (2006). Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (New York: New York University Press). (2008). Convergence culture: la cultura de la convergencia de los medios de comunicación (Barcelona: Paidós Ibérica). Lyotard, J.- F. (1987). La Condición Postmoderna. Informe del saber, trans. M. A. Rato (Madrid: Cátedra). McLuhan, M. and Nevitt, B. (1972). Take Today: The Executive as a Dropout (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). O’Reilly, T. (2009). ‘What Is Web 2.0: design patterns and business models for the next generation of software’, Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years, available at http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/ what-is-web-20.html, last accessed on 22 September 2011. Oroz, E. (2011). ‘Andrés Duque: A propósito de Color perro que huye’, Blogs & Docs, 4 July, available at http://www.blogsandocs.com/?p=1032, last accessed on 10 November 2011. Zimmerman, P. (1995). Reel Families. A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press).

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Chapter 30 New Tendencies in Contemporary Cinema: Round Table Discussion with José Luis Guerin, Isaki Lacuesta and Luis Miñarro Fernando Canet and Duncan Wheeler

fernando canet (fc): To start us off, how has your vision of the cinema changed over the course of your careers? isaki lacuesta (il): In my case, it changed above all because I begun by seeing cinema as a kind of writing. I always thought I’d be a writer and then, suddenly, I discovered that cinema was a way of addressing the things that interested me – and when I made my first film, Cravan vs. Cravan (2002), I realized that narrative wasn’t as important to me as the portrait: being able to film the characters’ emotions. josé luis guerin (jlg): Are these two facets mutually exclusive? il: I try to ensure that they’re not, but I am aware that the order of my priorities has changed. That is to say that I often use a story, an anecdote, as a pretext. jlg: I’d like to come at the question from a different perspective. When I had my first cinematic experiences, it was a central part of the world. Cinema had a heavy media presence, it stimulated desire and generated great expectations. Nowadays, its social repercussions are negligible – it is something peripheral, discounting cinephiles such as myself who are extremely passionate about it. Another, perhaps equally depressing, thing to add is that when I was a kid we really wanted to see films; in those days they were difficult to come upon. I had a wonderfully illustrated book on the history of cinema, and I’d dream of photos from The Phanton Carriage (1921), a film by Victor Sjöstrom, or of a Sternberg film, or German expressionist or neo-realist films. Then, suddenly one of these films would be programmed at the National Film Club, and this was a really big deal. I’d go on trips to Paris – something that I continue to do – to see films that I couldn’t see in my own country. Above all, it was motivated by desire. For me, the most intense thing in the cinema is just before the film begins, when I’m in front of an empty screen and anything is possible. That makes my heart pound, as I think that I am about to witness a great revelation. I had that sensation as a lad, and I try to maintain it in present day. The film might not match your

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luis miñarro (lm):

il:

jlg:

expectations, but it’s fundamental to have that hope, that desire. Nowadays it’s a different world, and this notion of the cinema just isn’t there. A film is often out on DVD before you even realize you want to see it. Modes of consumption have changed. Cinema used to be something holy and this, with all its attendant problems and contradictions, has changed. I started off with a production company doing advertising in order to raise the necessary funds to get into cinema. We were successful: it was a good period to be in advertising, and that served to get us started in the world of cinema. You could refer to my trajectory as a process of specialization, in that I started off doing what might be termed more commercial cinema – films like Cosas que nunca te dije/Things I Never Told You (Coixet, 1996) – to occupy an area that was unfortunately something of a no-man’s land. I’ve felt very lonely as a producer in Spain because I’ve had no, or very few, interlocutors with a similar conception of cinema. Where I have found them is in other countries – in Italy, in Great Britain and, of course, in France. You could say that in the Spanish context, I ran with what Paco Poch had done beforehand, but there was really nobody else out there interested in this kind of cinema. In fact, one thing I’ve come to realize is that I was left to my own devices because it was a type of cinema that was not seen as profitable, and did not interest anyone in Spain. If I’d have attempted to occupy a different space, it would have been much more difficult. When I’ve tried my hand at co-productions with Latin America, it’s as if they say to me: ‘This isn’t your terrain, don’t interfere here.’ It’s with these latter kinds of projects that I’ve had a fight on my hands to get them released in Spain, because it’s a terrain already populated by other producers – that tells you something about the state of cinema in my country. There’s a generational issue here. You started in the 1980s, but cinema no longer occupied this central place by the time I arrived on the scene in 2000; therefore I can’t really have this kind of nostalgia. I was aware from the outset that cinema had its set place, and that was that, but I didn’t construe it as something negative – quite the reverse, in fact. Its role is closer to poetry than to football or basketball, and that to me seems like a nice comfortable plain on which to dwell. What happens is that the parameters change every generation. The other day I was speaking with a film critic, Chris Fukiwara, who has published a book of conversations with Jerry Lewis. In 456

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one of these, when he asked him why he hadn’t made a film for a long time, he said he couldn’t. Lewis could have shot a film with a modest budget, but that didn’t make sense to him: as far as he was concerned there was a level at which it was exciting, you made cinema according to that kind of studio logic. Within that framework he couldn’t make a new film. I started to film, to do my Super 8s, in the 1970s, and although I liked classical cinema my reference point was someone like Philippe Garrel who was on the margin of things, but even those margins had a certain social impact. They were discussed in newspapers; even if they weren’t, Spanish film clubs had an incredible vitality at the time. That’s all disappeared. I know that many people belonging to your and future generations are completely happy for their work to circulate via the Internet, but what is your relationship with wider society? How does this motivate you to make cinema? How many people need to have this profile? I think these parameters are renegotiated every generation. The same thing happens with film critics. It’s becoming an increasingly insular practice, academic, almost limited to university circles. Most critics these days don’t even consider the possibility that they could have a wider appeal. These are the things that stop me from being smug, and make me ponder the options, and think about what I can do. But think of the repercussion that Tren de sombras/Train of Shadows (1997) had. The impact of Tren de sombras was ridiculous: it premiered in a very bad cinema, very small. Some people really liked it, and that made the experience worthwhile. Margarita Duras said that 10,000 people went to see her films when they came out – she put the figure at that, and a lot of people thought it ridiculous to make a film for so few people; but many ostensibly more relevant or ambitious contemporary Spanish films don’t even attract those numbers: they get 2000 spectators. But there is a fallacy as regards the figures we’re talking about. If we look at Tren de sombras, for example, the technology of the time didn’t allow for better distribution of the film. As En la ciudad de Sylvia/In the City of Sylvia (2007) demonstrated, a film of that format now has the possibility of being shown at eighty or ninety festivals around the world, and that means 100,000 or 120,000 spectators who aren’t registered. One of the things that has changed the most in recent years is the circuits in which films are shown. Audience numbers in cinemas might have gone down, but 457

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there are new alternatives: an ever-increasing series of small festivals where people are able to see different kinds of projects. What I also want to stress is that whatever we may think, we’re not operating at the margins. Our kind of cinema is, shall we say, made with industry budgets – even if it’s aimed at a select audience, but there is far more ‘out there’, marginal fringe cinema being made. But film-makers such as Ernst Lubitsch, Jean Renoir or Yasujirô Ozu made genuinely popular cinema, and this split now seems to be to be irreversible. There’s another dynamic at play here as well. Previously, it was a very small elite who could create literature or cinema; it was something that belonged to the higher classes. But there’s a certain democratization nowadays: any middle class or even workingclass kid can make films, music, etc. As a result, there’s a lot more things being produced. Yes, fine, but nobody then sees them! If, instead of the five films that would have been produced in the past, there are now three hundred, well yes, it’s obvious that more is being produced than we’ve got time to see. To me, this idea that between us all, we produce far more than we are actually able to see, is very much a contemporary phenomenon. Yes, I don’t think it’s a negative phenomenon, but it is disconcerting. If we understand cinema as an art, we could say that it’s in the process of losing its elitism. The problem with cinema is that it has always been seen as a form of mass entertainment. What’s happening now is that it is actually connecting with prior antecedents – it’s becoming the equivalent of writing a score or painting a canvas. The person creating it does not necessarily think in terms of the size of the audience, but construes it as a reflective process, a contribution, something more personal. In this respect, we could say that cinema is getting closer to the essence of other arts – the other six, so to speak. This isn’t a bad thing, but what is true is that all the rules of engagement have changed. That’s what has disconcerted us all. I’ve spoken to Jonas Mekas about this subject in his capacity, not as a film-maker, but as a conservationist working with the Anthology Film Archive. They do an excellent job preserving films. As they don’t have the money to buy all film negatives, they only used to purchase those that the selection committee genuinely loved – to buy, conserve and put a film in an anthology was a way 458

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of creating the canon, of saying ‘this is important’. It’s a selection process. I asked Jonas what they do now that the majority of experimental art is elsewhere, is often diffused in many different places, in video art, video action, etc. It might be on the Internet, wherever, and the Anthology Film Archive hasn’t responded to this change because they don’t know what’s happening, they don’t have the necessary perspective. In other words, there still isn’t that process of selection. This is the important work of festivals, of critics: to forge us a path among so much confusion. What criteria, then, is to be used? How do we know what’s going on? I’m equally lacking in this regard, my reference points are from decades ago. I asked Jonas, ‘Have these new technologies produced any great works of art?’ – and I’m sure they have – but he couldn’t name me one. If you asked me that question, I could name you six or seven. This idea of reference points interests me, because we always hear about those from the last century. What are your current reference points? You have six or seven works that you could say to José Luis are interesting and worth seeing. José Luis was talking in terms of the Anthology, but this also now exists for digital film. For digital, yes – but I’m talking about the experimental realm. That’s to say, if we think of experimental cinema – the kind of thing that Jonas Mekas took under his wing – there’s Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, people who might have later gone into video but who started out with photochemicals, with cinema. I don’t know who the successors to that whole video tradition are. I think there’s been an important change, but perhaps in an area that’s closer to the plastic arts. I think the current referent points are Bill Viola, Sophie Calle, sometimes people from other backgrounds who also employ an audio-visual language. To tell the truth, I just don’t agree here. I think there are people who can tell me what’s good now, whether they’re from the programming team at the CCCB [Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Barcelona Centre for Contemporary Culture] or from festivals both in Spain and abroad. I think they’re helping to forge a canon in exactly the same way as previous programmers or critics. Give me an example. It might be a bit absurd, but my references – and they’d be shared by many others – would be, I don’t know, Martin Arnold, Matthias 459

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Müller, Tcherkassky, that whole Viennese school, and when I was thinking about digital media, I was thinking of Pedro Costa and his films. I thought that Juventude em Marcha/Colossal Youth (2006) was a masterpiece. Also of people who come from an earlier age, such as Agnès Varda, and made that digital jump; while Chris Marker’s films, like those of Jean-Luc Godard, have clearly been affected by the arrival of digital cinema. This is selfevident, for example, in Éloge de l’amour/In Praise of Love (Godard, 2001). Or Film Socialisme/Film Socialism (Godard, 2010). What is happening (and we would perhaps agree on this) is that when we make a film in the traditional manner, as we always have done – spending a lot of money renting the right camera lenses to preserve the quality of the 35[mm], expending serious time and money on the sound mix, colour grading, etc. – and then you realize that only six thousand people see it in the cinema, but thousands more see it on the computer and on YouTube, well, it does make you question to what extent it’s worth investing so much to achieve something that most people won’t be able to appreciate, due to the viewing conditions. Absolutely – and here we return to the point that you can now do a kind of cinema which can be done much more economically, that is also simpler and more personal. When I do pieces for the Internet, which you edit at home, you know, that’s the way in which it’s going to be seen. It’s a different thing, however, when you do a film such as Los pasos dobles/The Double Steps (2011) – I still think it’s worth it. I’m coming from a position of resistance that I want to maintain. All the names of people you’ve mentioned come from the world of cinema. It’s the same for me. Of all the film-makers who are still alive, Abbas Kiarastami is the one who I follow with the most fascination, and his digital works have been an incredible revelation for me. However, in relation to what you’re saying, I don’t think we can forget about the big screen. It’s often suggested to us that cinemas just aren’t our place: we’re told that we’re better suited to museums or the Internet. I find these hints, which we hear a lot, to be somewhat disrespectful. I don’t think anything would make the media happier than for us to clear off: they say to us, ‘You can put your films on in this or that place, but not in the cinema’. My resistance to this is a political gesture: it’s a very important ethical stance to take at the present moment. It’s very 460

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important – or at least, I think it is – to remain within that dynamic, however horrible it may be, of opening on a Friday. To occupy that space, however small it may be, that the media reserves for films that open on a Friday. At the end of the day, if we want to get paid some royalties, it’s going to be there, not in the other places. Also, there is a big difference between the sound in a cinema auditorium and elsewhere. Just yesterday we went to the Whitney Museum [of American Art] and what they’ve got installed there, supposedly as the crème de la crème of contemporary art, is pitiful. It’s very badly done, not well recorded with awful sound, everything’s dreadful. They wouldn’t be able to cope with even the minimum standard we’d need to impose. It’s true that we don’t have to give up on the idea of the cinematic auditorium as a lost cause, but what we have to look towards is some form of specialization: guaranteeing that there’s a least one space suitable for this sort of project. Because perhaps what’s also going through your mind in relation to the kind of cinema that we do from the margins or whatever is that if we, producers or directors, etc., allow this development to take place, then our films won’t – in our country at least – enter into any exhibition or distribution circuits. That is to say, that there aren’t people with the sensibility, intelligence, desire or cinephilic interest to support us. If there were we’d be in a much better situation, I’m convinced of it. We have the proof of this in the country next-door. In many of your films you’ve used the cinematic medium itself as an object of study: the film-maker as, shall we say, film scholar. How do you go about creating this kind of meta-language, of talking about cinema through cinema? There is also this idea that a film-maker’s home is really the cinema. We’ve recently seen this metaphor used in Les plages d’Agnès/The Beaches of Agnès (Varda, 2008), an autobiographical portrait of Agnès Vada or in Wide Awake (Berliner, 2006), where the director is shown in his house. Personally, this idea fascinates me – film criticism through cinema – in the same way it’s possible to carry out literary criticism through literature. The language of cinema is clearly very well suited to this kind of exercise. Film-makers such as Matthias Müller, Martin Arnold, Chris Marker or Godard, for example, carry out the kind of iconographical work equivalent to that which Gombrich or Panofsky have done with flamenco. They pick up on symbols, gestures, lighting techniques that are systematically 461

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repeated film after film. I’m very interested in this mix, in trying to combine an essayistic and poetic approach in a film without completely renouncing narrative. I don’t think I’ve worked so much in this terrain. Yes, from time to time I’ve thought that I’ve got ideas I’d like to develop to do analysis in films using new technologies. I think this could be an extraordinary field, speculating on images by using images, relating one use of framing to another, to be able to study films in this form. I’d like to do it, but I’ve never thought too much about cinema from the cinephile’s perspective. When I did Innisfree (1990), for example, I didn’t think so much about doing a film about John Ford in his rural setting, experiencing cinema as if it were a living entity. Then, of course, I realized with my memory of cinema that seeing films and making them is a bit like reading and writing – and seeing films is what has, perhaps, broken my relationship with the real world – but I’d say that it’s something instinctual, and that I still haven’t used cinema as a way of speculating on other people’s films. Let’s talk about the subject of editing. When should time be left to flow, and when should editing be used to break it? How do you know when to cut from one scene to another? How long should a shot last? Anything is fair game – all the possibilities are out there. Well, almost everything is legitimate. I’m thinking of a time when I was obliged to see a film of mine: Innisfree. It was a nightmare to watch it again, I suffered a lot. It seemed as if the raw materials were great, but that I’d ruined it completely in the editing process. I’d done too much, there was lots of fragmentation, perhaps because I wanted to show that it was also possible to use editing in documentaries, to demonstrate what I could do, and I think I ruined everything. I remembered the faces I’d filmed in the bar, how they’d become more and more drunk; there is no movement more beautiful than a change in facial expressions – when that happens, you have the impression of following the thoughts and movement of the person you’re filming. I think that’s cinema’s most beautiful and specific movement: I think I destroyed the emotion of the faces in Innisfree. I was very young and I wanted to show a lot of things, and my intrusion as an editor destroyed the material. So, it all depends on what you want to show. If you have something great in front of you, you should be as respectful as possible with what you have. 462

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I’d say that editing normally comes into play when what you have in front of you isn’t sufficient in itself. For example, the Russians edited a lot because at the outset, they didn’t have much money. After the revolution, they didn’t even have virgin film, so what they did was experiment in an extraordinary fashion with films that already existed made by others, and do editing exercises. When Eisenstein was very young, he shot Strike (1925), a film that was made with nothing: they had to edit to give the impression that there was something that actually isn’t there. What happens later? Well the decline of musical cinema, for example. As Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire aren’t around, they film Richard Gere, but he doesn’t know how to dance well, so you have to edit and you juxtapose his face with someone else’s feet. I don’t like modernday musicals at all because they ruin the taste for choreography. There are great theories of editing, but I’d say that it would be too emphatic to apply them now. It’d be a way of announcing things through the editing, signposting things too clearly, an oldfashioned way. As my colleague Luis says, of course anything is legitimate: we shouldn’t foreclose any possibilities. Nevertheless, it does seem more beautiful to me when you can follow the passage of time in real-time, that vital pulsation of life without excessive intervention. However, there are all these film-makers who have an entirely different conception, who construe creation through their ability to manipulate incredibly complex editing techniques. The truth is, I really don’t know. I started out as an editor. I was the typical kid who edited all his classmates’ work. At the same time, I agree with this conception of the beauty of the shot, letting time pass; but I also admire this ability to bring very disparate elements together and extract something from them. This idea that it is mutually exclusive to like a Howard Hawks comedy and something by Peter Jackson, you have to be on one side or the other – how horrible, what a pain, to be forced into making that choice. It’s as if liking Mark Twain meant that you couldn’t like Marcel Proust. Think of the drama of the nouvelle vague crucifying Jacques Guillon or Marcel Carné. I actually like many films by both of them. I think we’ve now become a little more aware of these things, and are now incapable of arguing fully seriously about editing versus continuous shots. I think we can’t have battles like this anymore because we’re more into hybridization and synthesis, we have surreal documentaries and so on. 463

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I think you hit on something very interesting when you spoke about musicals, and you said how these days everything’s effectively resolved through editing. You can see Chicago (Marshall, 2002), and the actress might not be able to dance – but she gives the impression or illusion that she can. I think we might here see one of the reasons for the decline in quality of commercial films, or what we might term ‘hegemonic cinema’. The ease with which technology can be used has had a negative impact on their sensibility: there’s an answer for everything – if a microphone comes into shot, if the shots don’t make the grade, they can be touched up, and so on. As a result, film-makers and the technical crew are being de-skilled. Yes, I think this is a very important point, Luis. The hyperfragmentation of commercial cinema has destroyed the mise-en-scène. This is how I see it. The sensibility for mise-en-scène – that mastery of how actors’ move, a model of working that’s there in Fritz Lang – has been completely lost. I think that this mise-enscène tradition has been lost precisely because of an atomization of individual shots. Even in those films which are sometimes shot as if they were documentaries, in the sense that they follow the bodies of the actors and the like, or there is this direct capturing of reality, there still isn’t this conception of the mise-en-scène, there is this fragmentation of images. Something very traumatic has emerged as a result: movement has disappeared. Motion does not exist in hyper-fragmentized cinema, it’s a very quick succession of instant images. The beauty of the breeze hitting trees, a movement, a gesture, a falling tear, a pause: genuine movement ceases to exist. On the whole, commercial cinema has lost any sense of cadence; its pace, at least for me, is exhausting. After fifteen minutes of one of these films, I feel exhausted. Even the actor’s ability to recite their lines becomes surplus to requirement. It’s no longer necessary for them to know everything for an entire sequence. So there are no longer even actors – they don’t need actors for that kind of cinema. It’s another sign of decline and fallings standards. They’ll soon be done directly by computer. Why operate on an actress if the computer can do it? There’s always a kind of cinema that’s done through computers, and another kind of cinema that, even if it’s done in digital, has this photochemical ethos in its ethical and aesthetic commitment to the unrepeatability of the emotion found in the human face. 464

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I wouldn’t be so apocalyptic about it. Tarantino, for example, is a director who pays a lot of attention to the mise-en-scène. Cinema is not just the mise-en-scène; I don’t want everything to be seen as a lamentation, but rather consternation. There is an art and tradition as regards mise-en-scène which I think is very difficult to find in films today: of course, cinema can be other things too. The criticisms or comments we are making refer predominantly to conventional cinema, aimed at the market which, in one way or another, is the cinema with which we are most familiar. I see what you’re saying very clearly in a film such as Moulin Rouge (Luhrmann, 2001) where there are a multitude of cameras, a multitude of characters and there’s never a still shot. Returning to the Spanish context, I would say that these kind of techniques have been absent from my education and that of my generation. Nobody’s giving classes on mise-en-scène, and the only way to learn it is through trial-and-error. There is a huge generation gap here. Mise-en-scène performed an important function for your generation, but it’s something that doesn’t come as easily to us, it doesn’t form part of our tradition. I’d like to raise the concept of the film-maker as a traveller, as a flâneur: this idea of going for a walk, that your gaze is much more attentive away from home. Isaki and José Luis, I think both of you see films as a means by which to travel and to discover other worlds? Yes, that’s right. I’ve experienced this many times travelling. I observe and am sensitive to details elsewhere that I might then find in my own street. Often the most noble function of travelling is to be able to reinterpret your own street. I like to play with this. After doing Guest (2010), a film about an ongoing trip, I did a film for a festival that was a portrait of the street in which I live. I don’t think I would have seen my street in the same way if I hadn’t experienced this contrast. On the other hand, I’ve always very much liked filming away from home. I like the idea of assembling a group of people and taking them with me for a week or whatever. It’s not the dynamic of going to the office every day, but of creating a new reality with some people in a setting, for a set period of time. It’s an exceptional experience, and this is manifest in the film. Cinema and travel go together – a film is nothing other than a route in time and space, a journey. My sentiments entirely. For that reason, I always try and alternate films where we can go and have adventures with different people, and other ones which are much more domestic. 465

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It seems clear to me that, in the evolution of humanity, there is a definite change in the rhythm of life. I have adolescent children and instead of watching a film, they watch three at the same time. Do you take this change in rhythm into account when making your films? I don’t – it’s an issue that worries me a lot. When I think about today’s viewers, they’re not like me. I ask myself a lot, ‘Who am I making films for? Why am I doing it?’ On the other hand, it’s impossible for me to make a film for a hypothetical spectator who I don’t know. Therefore, the only reference point I can have is myself. I try and think that things I like – because I’m not a complete Martian – should and could interest other people. This is the biggest moral distance I feel with television executives. They always say to me, ‘I like the same things as you’, but the audience is made up of idiots – that’s the starting point; but for me as a director, I have to think that the spectator is at the very least as intelligent as I am. Because of this, I’m not going to look either up or down – and if I had to concern myself about whether today’s viewer is going to get bored in front of one of my films, I’d enter into a crisis from which I’d never emerge. My fundamental relationship with the cinema has been less as a film-maker than as a viewer. I think of myself as a viewer, and think about how I want to be treated in that capacity. I can’t think that I’m going to make a film for a viewer who now sees films on their mobile, or who is switching between one film on Google and another on the television. I have to keep these processes at an abstract distance, otherwise they’d paralyse me. This phenomenon that you mention isn’t exclusive to the cinema. You can see this lack of concentration on the news: you’ll be watching it, and another item will be displayed underneath in writing – and you can’t pay attention or be bothered by either or both. This is a problem in modern-day society. I don’t see this dispersion or lack of concentration as a positive path to follow in the least. You could, shall we say, be making love and preparing a tortilla at the same time. It doesn’t make any sense – or it hasn’t up to now, at least. It could, I guess, give you cheap thrills in some respects. They recently showed my film La noche que no acaba/All Night Long (2010) on the television and they suggested to me that I, who’d never used Twitter before, tweeted with the viewers while they watched the film. It seemed very odd to me: how were they going to watch the film and tweet at the same time? Luckily, hardly 466

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anyone entered as they were concentrating on the film. A short time ago, we also did an exhibition called ‘Retablo de las adivinaciones’, which was a kind of audio-visual tarot. We shot four hours of new material and it could be seen on four screens. There was a switch and a board with three buttons – past, present and future – and the viewer could then choose. Their future, say, would then appear as if it were a tarot card on the four video screens in such a way that they could never see everything. They always had to pick which screen they’d look at: there would be two to their side, and one to which they had to turn their back. We decided that each piece would last two minutes: that gave an average of 30 seconds. It soon became obvious that the viewer’s instinct was to quickly press the button again, but then they’d discover that this option wasn’t available to them until the two minutes was up – and people got frustrated, they had to spend two minutes looking at the four screens. I’m convinced that these things go in cycles. For example, we can see that many advertisements are suddenly using silence to draw the viewer in, still shots – suddenly the person doing their cooking says: ‘Shit, has the television stopped working! Ah, no, it’s just an advert for BMW’ – and this works very well, this general alternating of rhythms, even within the same screen, is what winds up working the best from the point of view of drawing people in that is. In terms of my aesthetic, I’m completely in agreement with José Luis. To what extent do you take these general expectations into account during the creative process? No, as I was saying, I very much agree with what José Luis said. At the end of the day, I think of the audience as concrete individuals: you make the film thinking about four friends of yours, or even yourself; and I’d even go as far as saying that I’ve made things thinking of them as if they were letters sent to one other person. I’m talking about very concrete pieces that haven’t had as wide a diffusion as some of my other works, and this is sometimes enough because, as he says, we’re not that odd. Without wanting to fall into the syndrome of the Japanese tourist who only realizes what they’ve experienced when they’ve seen the photos, are there moments when you only discover what an actor has done, what has occurred in front of you, not when it first took place but when you see it recorded? This has always happened to me at the editing stage. When shooting, you just don’t have the time – it’s a period with the crew 467

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on-hand, which you’ve got to optimize. It’s essentially a time of action, of execution. In that sense, we get time for ourselves at the editing stage – that’s our time to meditate over the images, the weight of the words, the value of a pause – and I often rediscover or, being honest, discover the meaning of a phrase or whatever. In documentary-style films, discovery always take place at the editing stage; the same applies in fiction-films. There is an old woman in Guest who keeps repeating almost incessantly to herself: ‘The light of day is the most beautiful of things.’ I didn’t know what this phrase was meant to mean until much later, I found out the paramilitaries entered her house at night and killed her husband. Ever since then she went about the place murmuring, often almost as a whisper, the phrase: ‘The light of day is the most beautiful of things.’ I find these things very emotional to discover. During the shoot I was curious, and it was only on editing that I realized. This then made me think about how to use editing so that the phrase made sense, so that it had its fullest and true meaning. There’s something we don’t talk about a lot, which is editing during the shoot – in its literal sense of shooting, so as to work out what you’re making and then shooting again. Or even of shooting something and thinking how it could become a film. Sometimes you’re editing something and you think of something that would complement it, and you need to shoot it. In the specific case of Los condenados/The Condemned (2009), to talk about fiction, we were shooting the scene where the young woman appears. This is a sequence which, if I’m not mistaken, lasts about seven minutes – and it was incredible. I’d planned to edit it with jump cuts, but then I realized how well the actress had done it. We did two takes, and in the editing process I saw that they lasted exactly the same time: seven minutes, twenty-three seconds. But then when we looked at these two ostensibly identical takes, we realized their dramatic arcs were completely different. The emphasis in the one was all placed on the absent father and, in the other, on the mother. In the script, I’d focused everything on the father but then, on speaking to the editor, we decided it worked much better for her to be concerned about her mother: that’s how we went on to make the film. I’m sure the actress [Bárbara Lennie] did both takes very spontaneously; I don’t think they were pre-meditated. These kinds of things happen all the time. Yes, sometimes you need to let yourself be guided by life within a take. That’s why Chaplin recorded rehearsals with a camera. He 468

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shot rehearsals because he was shooting something that could not be repeated. There’s always this idea that shooting and editing are two distinct things, and that the latter is where reflection is meant to come into play. That’s what I think makes Chaplin special: he could combine thought with shooting. This is completely anomalous. We’re used to doing everything in editing because the shooting period is so expensive. In this regard, I think the new tools, the ability to edit in our homes, allows for a new way of thinking about cinema. Although editing is the most economic phase of making a film, the fact that you are with a technician in a studio editing obliges you to make that time profitable. This capacity to forget about economic efficiency, of having your tools at home, having a coffee in the morning; this idea of working with an image as something completely integrated into your day-today life – maybe you work on an image you haven’t looked at for a long time, or save a sequence on file while you tackle another. I personally think this is the most relevant and important thing we can glean from new technologies. What I’ve learned from listening to you today is that you agree on a lot of things. What I’d like to know is what you completely disagree about? The thing is that this round table has been put together with people who have a very similar conception of cinema. If we’d had Santiago Segura here, perhaps he and Isaki Lacuesta would disagree about things, but these answers have come from people who understand cinema in a certain way. In any case, I’m not sure we’re in complete agreement about everything.

Note The round table was organized and chaired by Fernando Canet. This chapter was transcribed, translated and edited by Duncan Wheeler.

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Notes on Contributors Fernando Canet is Associate Professor in Film Studies at the Polytechnic University of Valencia. He has been a Research Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London and at New York University. He has taken part in several national and international research projects, and is the author of two books – 2002: narración cinematográfica/2002: Cinematic Narrative and Narrativa Audiovisual: Estrategias y Recursos/Audiovisual Narrative: Strategies and Resources – various chapters in edited volumes in addition to several peer-reviewed articles predominantly on cinema. He has guest edited special issues on Contemporary Spanish Cinema for the Hispanic Research Journal and on Cinephile Directors in the Modern Period for L´Atalante. International Film Studies Journal. He has been a Teaching Assistant Manager in his Department and Head of the Cultural Area of the Polytechnic University of Valencia. Concepción Cascajosa Virino is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Journalism and Media Studies of the Carlos III University of Madrid, where she is a member of the Research Group ‘Television-Cinema: Memory, Representation and Industry’ (TECMERIN). She has written three books and more than thirty essays on television fiction, media history and the representation of terrorism in cinema and television. Currently, she is working on a project about creative women on Spanish television during the Transition. Miguel Corella Lacasa is Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, where he is also head of the Department of Audiovisual Communication, Documentation and Art History (DCADHA) and member of the academic committee of the Master’s Degree in Music, Cultural Management and Artistic Production. He has published numerous papers on topics in aesthetics and is author of the book El artista y sus otros. Max Aub y la novela de artista. His current research concerns the Artistic and Literary Hispanic Avant-garde and relationships between studies on aesthetics, politics, iconography of power and the political imaginary. Mar Diestro-Dópido is a film critic and an academic researcher based in London. She holds an AHRC-funded award for her PhD, which is entitled ‘Film Festivals: Cinema and Cultural Exchange’ (currently being completed). This PhD is a collaboration between the BFI and Queen Mary, University of London. She has a BA in Film and an MA in History of Film and

(Re)viewing Creative, Critical and Commercial Practices in Contemporary Spanish Cinema

Visual Media. She is a regular contributor to, and researcher for, the international film magazine Sight & Sound, and has written for other publications as well as various academic journals. She is also a qualified art and media translator (both to and from English/Spanish). She has translated texts by film-makers, academics, historians and critics. Linda C. Ehrlich – writer, teacher, editor – has published extensively about world cinema and about traditional theatre in such journals as Film Quarterly, Cinema Journal, Senses of Cinema, Film Criticism, Ethnomusicology, Cinema Scope, Framework and Journal of Religion and Film, among others. Cinematic Landscapes, her first book (co-edited with David Desser), is an anthology of essays on the interface between the visual arts and cinemas of China and Japan (University of Texas Press, 1994; reprint in 2008). Her second edited book, The Cinema of Víctor Erice: An Open Window, appeared in the Scarecrow Press Filmmakers’ Series (#72) in 2000 (with an expanded paperback edition in 2007). Alberto Elena was Professor of Media Studies at the Carlos III University of Madrid. Member of the Editorial Boards of New Cinemas and Secuencias, he organised several film retrospectives and was on the jury of a variety of international festivals. His publications include Satyajit Ray (Madrid, 1998), Los cines periféricos (Barcelona, 1999), The Cinema of Latin America (London / New York, 2003; co-authored), The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami (London, 2005) and La llamada de África. Estudios sobre el cine colonial español (Barcelona, 2010), as well as various contributions to specialized journals. Isabel Estrada (Ph.D., Columbia University) is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at Franklin & Marshall College. She is the author of El documental cinematográfico y televisivo contemporáneo: memoria, sujeto y formación de la identidad democrática española/The Documentary Genre in Democratic Spain: Memory, Subject and Identity (Tamesis Books, 2012), which examines how the documentary genre informs the debate centered on the socalled ‘recuperation of memory’ of the Spanish Civil War and dictatorship. Mercedes Gamero is head of television acquisitions of Antena 3 television, a post she has combined since 2008 with coordinating the company’s cinematic production. Her resume includes many of the most commercially successful Spanish films of recent years – e.g. Fuga de cerebros/Brain Drain (Fernando González Molina, 2009), Tengo ganas de ti/I Want You (Fernando González Molina, 2012), Fuga de cerebros 2/Brain Drain 2 (Carlos Therón, 2011) and the Torrente saga (Santiago Segura, 1998, 2001, 2005 and 2011) – alongside a number of international co-productions, generally in English, which have received extensive global distribution such as Los ojos de Julia/Julia’s Eyes (Guillem Morales, 2010) and Planet 51 (Jorge Blanco, Javier Abad and Marcos Martínez, 2009). Wenceslao García Puchades is a Research Associate at the Department of Audiovisual Communication, Documentation and Art History (DCADHA) at the Polytechnic University 472

Notes on Contributors

of Valencia. He was a Research Fellow at the Department of Visual Culture in Goldsmiths, University of London (2009). He has written a thesis on cinema in Badiou’s philosophy. He has published numerous papers on arts, cinema and politics in Rancière and Badiou’s work. His current research concerns the study of new collaborative tendencies in audiovisual art through social networks and mobile devices. Melissa M. González (Ph.D., Columbia University) is an Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at Davidson College. She researches transnational popular culture, literature, and film, with a specialization in gender and sexuality studies. Carmen Herrero is Principal Lecturer in Spanish Studies at the Manchester Metropolitan University. Her more recent articles deal with genre, particularly thrillers, in contemporary Spanish cinema. She is actively involved in the work of film and language education. She is the co-founder and co-director of FILTA (Film in Language Teaching Association, www.filta.org.uk) and is a programme advisor for Viva! Spanish and Latin American Film Festival at Cornerhouse Cinemas (Manchester). She is also adviser on the COLT Project, part of the Routes into Languages North West Consortium. Elena López Riera works as an Assistant at the Comparative Literature Department of Geneva University where she teaches Film Analysis and New Latin American Cinema. She is the author of Albertina Carri, el cine y la furia, and she has also published several articles on cinema, open source thinking and new technologies. In 2009 she founded lacasinegra, a collective focused on audiovisual creation and new audiovisual devices. She has recently submitted her PhD on memory, history and narrative in Argentinian cinema. Marta Martín Núñez is Lecturer in Audiovisual Production at the Universitat Jaume I. She holds a PhD in Communication Sciences, and a Master’s Degree in Infographic Animation Production, both from the Universitat Jaume I. Her PhD thesis is a study of the nature of the digital image applied to infographic animation in advertisements. She is a member of the Editorial Board of L’Atalante. Revista de estudios cinematográficos. Cristina Martínez-Carazo is Associate Professor at the University of California, Davis. Her areas of interest are Spanish Film, the Contemporary Spanish Novel and Spanish Art. She is the author of De la visualidad literaria a la visualidad fílmica en La Regenta de Clarín/From the Literary Visuality to the Cinematic Visuality in La Regenta by Clarín and editor or co-editor of Contemporary Spanish Fiction: Dictionary of Literary Biography; Hispanismo y cine/Hispanism and Film; Spain’s Multicultural Legacies; Contra el olvido: El exilio español en Estados Unidos/Against Forgetting: Spanish Exile in the United States; Buñuel y/o Almodóvar. El laberinto del deseo/Buñuel and/or Almodóvar. The Labyrinth of Desire; and Variantes de la modernidad: Estudios en honor de Ricardo Gullón/Variants of Modernity: Studies in Honor of Ricardo Gullón. She has published around forty 473

(Re)viewing Creative, Critical and Commercial Practices in Contemporary Spanish Cinema

peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. She is the director of several Education Abroad Programs in Spain. Sandra Martorell is a PhD Candidate at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, where she gained her degree in Media Communication after studying at the Université La Lumière de Lyon (France) and Universitat Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona. She has participated in the making of audiovisual productions and developed international artistic projects. She currently combines her work as a journalist with research on art and, in particular, on cinema as a tool to narrate history. Javier Marzal Felici is a Full Professor of Audiovisual Communication and Advertising at the Universitat Jaume I in Castellón. He is the author of various books and articles on photography and cinema, and is co-editor of the collection Guías para ver y analizar cine (50 titles), published by Nau Llibres (Valencia) and Octaedro (Barcelona). He is also the co-Director of the ‘adComunica, Scientific Review on Strategies, Trends and Innovation in Communication’ and director of the Department of Communication Sciences in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Universitat Jaume I. Alejandro Melero is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media at the Carlos III University of Madrid. He has previously worked at Limerick University and Queen Mary, University of London, where he obtained his PhD. He is the author of the books Placeres ocultos: Gays y lesbianas en el cine español de la Transición and Guía ilustrada del cine europeo, as well as several peer-reviewed articles. His main interests include film narratives, and queer and gender studies. Lidia Merás teaches in the Department of Humanities at Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona). She has co-edited four volumes of Desacuerdos: Sobre arte y política en la esfera pública (MACBA), and is currently a visiting researcher at Royal Holloway (University of London), where she undertakes research on Hispano-British co-productions of the fifties and also Masculinity in Spanish TV series. Among her various contributions to film and contemporary art journals, she serves as the member of the editorial staff of Secuencias, a peer-reviewed film journal published by the Universidad Autonóma of Madrid. Luis Miñarro is a film producer and director. He has helped consolidate many emerging film-makers and is a fierce advocate for art cinema. The films he has produced have represented Spain in prestigious international festivals: Cannes, Venice, Berlin, San Sebastián, Locarno, Toronto, Karlovy Vary, Nueva York, Buenos Aires and Shanghai. He has also worked as a film critic, and has been a jury-member in festivals such as San Sebastián Locarno and Barcelona’s L’alternativa, and spoken at various universities. There have been retrospectives of his works at the Paris and Nantes festivals as well as at the Tánger, Valencia, Montevideo and Galicia Film Institutes. He directed Familystrip (2009), shown at Karlovy 474

Notes on Contributors

Vary, and Blow Horn (2009), screened in Locarno. He has recently been distinguished with the City of Barcelona prize. Javier Moral is currently a Professor at the Valencian International University (VIU) and has recently taken over as Head of Audiovisual Productions. He is a member of the Spanish Association of Film Historians (AEHC); has participated in around twenty national and international conferences; and has delivered a broad range of speeches, courses and film workshops. He has published in various research and scientific journals, and has co-written various books. He also edited the volume Cine y géneros pictóricos/Cinema and Pictorial Genres (MUVIM, 2009). Agustín Rico-Albero is currently a Senior Lecturer in Spanish at the University of Hertfordshire where he teaches Spanish Language and Culture, European Film, and also contributes to the MA in Film and Television Aesthetics. He has participated in numerous international workshops, symposiums and conferences dedicated to Spanish film. He is currently working on several articles on Spanish horror films and a joint book about teaching Spanish language through film. Since 2011, he has been a Fellow of The Higher Education Academy (UK). Vicente Rodríguez Ortega is a Lecturer in the Department of Journalism and Communication of the Carlos III University of Madrid. He is the co-editor of Contemporary Spanish Cinema & Genre, and the author of La ciudad global en el cine contemporáneo: una perspectiva transnacional/The Global City & Contemporary Cinema: a Transnational Perspective. He has published essays in a variety of journals such as Transnational Cinemas, Studies in European Cinemas or Film International. He has also written essays for multiple book collections. He made the feature-length documentary film Freddy’s in 2009. Jennie Rothwell is currently completing her PhD dissertation in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College Dublin. In 2011 she was invited to speak about Catalan director Marta Balletbo-Coll at the Universidad de Complutense de Madrid’s Seminar on Spanish Women Directors of the 1990s. Forthcoming publications include an article about Isabel Coixet and melodrama. She has also worked as a theatre translator and as a translatorcontributor for an online news site. Jennie’s research is kindly funded by a TCD School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies studentship. Shelagh Rowan-Legg is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Film Studies, King’s College London, as well as a film critic and programmer for Toronto After Dark Film Festival. Her dissertation is entitled ‘Contemporary Spanish Fantastic Film: A (Post) National Cinema’. Her paper ‘The Nation Fantastic: Contemporary Spanish Fantastic Film & the Question of National Cinema’ was presented at the Time Networks: Screen Media and Memory Conference, hosted by the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies, in 2012. She completed her BA and MA in Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. 475

(Re)viewing Creative, Critical and Commercial Practices in Contemporary Spanish Cinema

Helio San Miguel has a Ph.D. in Philosophy and an M.F.A. in Filmmaking from NYU. He teaches at The New School in New York. He is the editor of World Film Locations: Mumbai (2012); co-editor of World Film Locations: Barcelona (2013); and co-editor of an issue of the Secuencias journal on the current changes in Bollywood (2012). Helio also wrote and directed Blindness, a 32-minute fiction film selected for over thirty festivals, including New Filmmakers New York and the European Film Festival. He has also contributed to World Film Locations: Madrid, The Cinema of Latin America, and Tierra en Trance. Maria Soler Campillo is an Assistant Professor of Audiovisual Enterprise at the Universitat Jaume I in Castellón, where she obtained her PhD in Communication Sciences. She is also a graduate in Economic and Business Sciences from the Universitat de València and holds a Master’s Degree in Tax Advice from the CEU San Pablo in Valencia. She has published the book Las empresas de fotografía ante la era digital. El caso de la Comunidad Valenciana (Madrid: Ediciones de las Ciencias Sociales, 2007) alongside various chapters in the following edited volumes: Eines per a la producció de vídeo documental (Benicarló: Onada, 2008), and Teoría y técnica de la producción audiovisual (Valencia: Tirant Lo Blanch, 2008). Duncan Wheeler is Associate Professor in Spanish at the University of Leeds where he is also a member of the Executive Committee of the Centre for World Cinemas. Until recently, he was a Leverhulme Research Fellow working on the role of arts and cultural institutions in Spain’s transition to democracy, the subject of his second monograph – following Golden Age Drama in Contemporary Spain: The Comedia on Page, Stage and Screen (Universities of Wales and Chicago Presses, 2012) – which will be completed in 2014. A published translator and author of over twenty-five peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, Duncan is also Reviews Editor for New Cinemas, and subject editor of The Literary Encyclopedia. Sarah Wright is Reader at Royal Holloway, University of London where she researches on Spanish film, theatre and cultural studies. She is the author of The Trickster-Function in the Theatre of García Lorca (Támesis, 2000), Tales of Seduction: The Figure of Don Juan in Spanish Culture (I B Tauris, 2007) and The Child in Spanish Film (Manchester University Press, 2013).

476

Index 13 Rosas, Las/The 13 Roses 19, 41–2, 226, 421, 425–6 18 comidas 23 20 centímetros/20 Centimetres 22 28 Weeks Later 47 A A los que aman/For Those Who Love 133–4, 140 A mi madre le gustan las mujeres/My Mother Likes Women 84, 254 A un Dios desconocido/To An Unknown God 82 abrazos rotos, Los/Broken Embraces 24, 267, 302 Abre los ojos/ Open Your Eyes 46, 254, 278 adolescent films [cinema] 325, 332 African immigration 71 Ágora/Agora 208, 225, 255, 359, 414 Águila Roja, la película/Red Eagle 20, 225 Agustina de Aragón/The Siege 21, 211, 223 Aita/Father 17, 96, 98–9, 101, 103, 385–6, 415 Alatriste/Captain Alatriste: The Spanish Musketeer 13, 20, 38, 207–8, 217–21, 226, 283, 394 Alba de América/Dawn of America 20, 39, 210–1, 226 Albacete, Alfonso 84, 179 Albadalejo, Miguel 87 Alegre, ma non troppo 83 Almodóvar, Pedro 3, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, 23–4, 27, 44–5, 49, 52, 82–3, 86, 88–9, 149–50,

179, 217, 226, 240, 252–54, 261–68, 274, 277–79, 281, 283–4, 298–99, 302, 383, 395, 408–09, 415, 422 Alterio, Ernesto 157, 196 amantes pasajeros, Los/I’m So Excited! 52, 395 Amantes/Lovers 179 Amic/amant/Beloved/Friend 84 Amor de hombre/The Love of a Man 83–4 años desnudos, Los/Rated R 43, 150, 179, 184–7 anti-national national film 354, 358, 361 Aranda, Vicente 17, 40, 83, 148, 179, 216, 220–1, 421, 426, 428 Areces, Javier 242 Armendáriz, Montxo 19, 409 Arnheim, Rudolf 108–9 Arrebato/Rapture 86, 95, 447–9 Arribas, Marta 148, 167 art direction, 20, 421, 423–6, art films [cinema], arthouse films [cinema] 3–4, 16–7, 23, 25, 28, 38, 50, 60–1, 63, 240, 281, 284, 326, 355–7, 360 Asensi, Neus 325 Asignatura pendiente/Unfinished Business 21 Átame!/Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! 21, 266–7 audio-visual prosumer 444–5 auteur cinema 50, 182, 240, 251, 274, 277, 313–4, 353, 359, 383, 386, 400–1 aventuras de Tadeo Jones, Las/The Adventures of Tadeo Jones 17, 27, 48, 255 Ayaso, Dunia 43, 150, 180

(Re)viewing Creative, Critical and Commercial Practices in Contemporary Spanish Cinema

Ayerra, José Ramón 20, 225 Azcona, Rafael 40, 240, 328, 408 Azuloscurocasinegro/Dark Blue Almost Black 87

Boyero, Carlos 12, 17, 26, 28–9, 60, 121–2, 128, 155, 415 Bravo, Nino 149, 240, 243–4 Brendemühl, Àlex 356

B Badiou, Alain 167, 174 Bajo una misma bandera/Under the Same Flag 68 Balada triste de trompeta/The Last Circus 41, 149, 237, 242–4, 417, 421, 424 Balagueró, Jaume 46, 253, 314, 325, 329–31 Banderas, Antonio 22–3, 277–8, 298 Bang, Carolina 242 Barceló, Miquel 51, 60, 121, 123 126–8, 437 Barcelona School 16–7, 40, 51, 95 Bardem, Javier 23, 69, 84, 222, 278–9, 283, 412 Bardem, Juan Antonio 11, 14, 39, 53, 254, 275, 407 Barroso, Mariano 69 Bartolomé, Cecilia 68 Baudelaire, Charles 121 baúles del retorno, Los/Homeward Baggage 68, 70 Bautista, Aurora 210–1 Bayona, Juan Antonio 17, 27, 46–7, 147, 158, 401–2, 421 Bazin, André 107, 109, 187 Belle Epoque/The Age of Beauty 9, 278, 297 Berger, Pablo 27, 43, 150, 179, 303 Berlanga, Luís García 11, 39, 40, 53, 240, 246, 275, 315, 328, 339, 407, 422 Bienvenido Mister Marshall/Welcome Mister Marshall! 11, 275, 277 Bilbao 17, 240 black comedy 3, 46, 315, 317, 320, 343, 385 Blackthorn 25, 256 Blancanieves 27 Boca a Boca/Mouth to Mouth 83 Bollaín, Iciar 10, 13, 25, 49, 62, 147, 280, 284, 286, 367, 415 Borau, José Luis 240, 275–6, 424 Borgia, Los/The Borgia 13, 20, 38, 218, 220–1

C Cachorro/Bear Cub 59, 87–9 caja Kovak, La/The Kovak Box 255, 354, 359 calentito, El 22 Calparsoro, Daniel 49 Cámara, Javier 136, 181, 325 Camarón de la Isla 62, 110–1, 434 Camarón/Camarón: When Flamenco Became Legend 62, 397 Camino 21 camino de los ingleses, El/Summer Rain 22 Camino, César 316 Camino, El/The Way 23 Camino, Jaime 30, 41, 148, 167–74, 422 Camus, Mario 9, 53–4, 71, 213–14 Canciones para después de una guerra/Songs for After a War 40, 240 cant dels ocells, El/Birdsong 97–8 Caótica Ana/Chaotic Ana 70 Capitán Trueno y el Santo Grial, El/Order of the Grail 25 Carabe, Jiménez 68 Carmina o revienta/Carmina or Blow up 27 Carne trémula/Live Flesh 45 Casas, Mario 24, 394, 396–7 Castón, Roberto 89 caza, La/The Hunt 239, 357 Cazadores de imágenes/Image Hunters 68 Celda 211/Cell 211 225, 255, 354, 359–61 censorship 39, 82, 156, 180, 208, 210, 315, 326, 415 Chávarri, Jaime 11, 62, 82–3, 240, 397, 408 Chueca 59, 83, 87–8 Chuecatown/Boystown 60, 88 Cien metros más allá/One Hundred Metres Away 72 CIFESA 210, 217, 277 Cinco metros cuadrados/Five Square Metres 27 478

Index

Cuatro mujeres y un lío/Four Women and a Mess 185 Cuerda, José Luis 19, 147–8, 207, 421

cinematic sex 180, 182–3 cinephilia, 133 Civil War 3, 18–20, 37, 40–3, 71, 83, 148, 150, 155, 160, 167–70, 172–4, 194, 208–9, 212–3, 223, 226, 239, 242, 277, 421–8 cochecito, El 40 Coira, Jorge 25 Coixet, Isabel 18, 47, 49, 63, 69, 133–41, 252, 255, 274, 280–6, 293–6, 301–6, 456 colmena, La/The Beehive 214 Colomo, Fernando 15, 83, 409 colonialism 25, 67–8 Color perro que huye/Colour Runaway Dog 50, 443–50 commercial cinema 3, 26, 63, 171, 385, 387, 456, 464 comunidad, La/Commonwealth 330 Conde, Nieves 39 Condenados, Los/The Condemned 96, 98–100, 434–5, 468 cónsul de Sodoma, El/The Consul of Sodom 83 Contactos/Contacts 95 contrario al amor, Lo/The Opposite of Love 24, 396 corazón del bosque, El/The Heart of the Forest 426 corazón del guerrero, El/Heart of the Warrior 358 Corcuera, Javier 167 Coronado, José 198, 403 cosas del querer, Las/The Things of Love 83 Courtois, Miguel 43, 148, 198, 201 Cravan vs. Cravan 433, 436, 455 crescendo of affect 133, 138 Cría cuervos/Raise Ravens 147, 156–7, 161 crime thriller 255, 354–5, 357, 361 cross-border films 354, 360 cross-fertilisation 355 Cruz, Penélope 23–4, 252, 274, 277–9, 282–4, 296–304 cuaderno de barro, El/The Clay Diaries 51, 60, 121, 125–6, 436

D dama boba, La/Lady Nitwit 218 de Andrade, Jaime 38 de Armiñán, Jaime 43, 156–7 de la Iglesia, Álex 10, 15, 21, 41, 43, 45, 47, 49, 59, 149, 237–8, 240–1, 244–5, 281–3, 314, 330, 338, 340, 343–4, 408–9, 415, 421 de la Torre, Antonio185, 242 de No, Juan Luis 73 de la Iglesia, Eloy 43, 82, 408 de Orbe, José María 17, 95–6, 98, 103, 356, 385, 415–7 de Orduña, Juan 20, 39, 209–10, 212 Deiback, Driss 71–2 del Amo, Antonio 38 del Toro, Guillermo 19, 21, 41–2, 147, 268, 329, 345, 359 Deleuze, Gilles 126, 128, 134 Derrida, Jacques 128 desencanto, el/The Disenchantment 11, 240 Deseo, El 21, 49, 267, 277 día de la bestia, El/The Day of the Beast 45, 149, 237, 240–2 Díaz Yanes, Agustín13, 38, 207–8, 219, 240, 279, 283, 300, 394 dictatorship 3, 11, 18, 21, 37–8, 40–1, 46, 54, 67, 81, 147–9, 163, 168, 171–4, 181, 183, 194, 200–1, 208, 210, 213–15, 218, 227, 239, 242–5, 251, 408, 415, 422, 437 Diego, Gabino 340 Diego, Juan 181 diputado, El/The Congressman 21, 43, 82, 86, 254 disembedded films 353, 354, 360 Documentary as Indexical Record 107 domestic violence, see violence 13, 18, 83 Domingo de carnaval/Sunday Carnival 38, 315 479

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F Family Strip 28 Fata Morgana/Left Handed Fate 40 fatricidal violence, see violence 150 Féjerman, Daniela 84, 149, 254 Fernández Santos, Ángel 12, 155 Fernán-Gómez, Fernando 11, 24, 41, 186, 188, 212–3, 240, 275 Ferreri, Marco 40, 328 Fesser, Javier 21, 69 Festivals, see International Film Festivals Flaherty, Robert J. 108–13 Flahn, Juan 60, 88 Flores, Mar 185 Franco, Francisco 3, 9–12, 15, 19–20, 22, 37–8, 41, 46, 67, 71, 81–3, 86, 90, 95, 147, 149–50, 156–9, 161, 163, 170–1, 183, 193–4, 197, 199–2, 209, 212, 214, 220, 227, 238–9, 242–4, 246, 251, 277, 326, 341, 407–8, 422 Franco, Jesús 314, 316 Francoism 18, 40, 156–9, 162–3, 170, 194, 199, 208–9, 214, 227, 237, 239–40, 273 Francoist 10, 14, 18, 20–3, 37–8, 41–2, 148–50, 172, 181, 207, 209–11, 213, 216, 218, 223, 228, 241, 243–4, 251, 276, 315, 327, 339, 347 Fresnadillo, Juan Carlos 24, 47, 392 Fuera de carta/Chef ’s Special 88–9 Fuga de cerebros/Brain Drain 24, 392, 394, 396, 399–400 Fuga de cerebros 2/Brain Drain 2 254, 394

Dorado, El 213–4, 220, 226 Dragón Rapide 168, 422, 427 Dying Animal, The 293–6, 305 Duque, Andrés 50, 443–8 Durán, Carlos 95 E Echegui, Verónica, 304 Elegy, 252, 257, 274, 282, 285, 293, 294, 295, 296, 299, 301, 303, 304, 305 embedded films, 353, 358 En brazos de la mujer madura/In Praise of Older Women 421, 424–5 En construcción/Work in Progress 3, 51, 61–2, 102, 109–10, 112, 116 En el mundo a cada rato/Every So Often in the World 69 En la ciudad de Sylvia/In the City of Sylvia 3, 61, 63, 99, 100, 101, 457 encargo del cazador, El/The Hunter’s Assignment 51, 109 Erice, Víctor 10, 40, 51, 61, 102–3, 109, 147, 155, 161, 240, 273, 279, 285, 362, 408 erotic cinema 43, 179, 183 eroticism, 43, 180, 184–6, 216, 295 Esa pareja feliz/That Happy Couple 39 esperpento (grotesque farce) 11–2, 45–6, 253, 313, 315–7, 320, 333, 424 espinazo del diablo, El/The Devil’s Backbone 21, 329 espíritu de la colmena, El/The Spirit of the Beehive 12, 40, 102–3, 147, 155–6, 158, 160–1, 163, 240, 273 estanquera de Vallecas, La/The Tobacconist Woman from Vallecas 85 Esteva, Jacinto 95 Estevez, Emilio 2 ETA 40, 43, 99, 101, 148–9, 156–7, 193, 195–6, 198–201, 356, 360–1, 409, 412 ETA violence, see violence 43, 193 extraño viaje, El/Strange Voyage 11, 240

G Galán, Diego 171, 174, 409 Gamero, Mercedes 3, 24, 26–7, 391 Garci, José Luis 14, 19, 21, 221, 227, 254, 408 García Escudero, José María 11, 39, 40, 53 García Serrano, Yolanda 83–4 Gay Club 82 generic hybridity, 149, 240–1, 253, 265, 313 Gil, Mateo 25 480

Index

girasoles ciegos, Los/The Blind Sunflowers 19 Golden Age 20, 23, 27, 147, 208–10, 212–5, 217–9, 225–7, 339, 409 golfos, Los/The Delinquents 39 Gómez Pereira, Manuel 83, 85 Goméz, Macarena 313 González Molina, Fernando 24, 27, 392, 394–5, 400 González-Sinde, Ángeles 15, 280, 344, 414 Goya en Burdeos/Goya in Bordeaux 220 Goyescas 38 Gran Wyoming, El 242, 340 Grierson, John 108 Grupo 7/Unit 7 21, 397 Guerin, José Luis 3, 26, 28, 51, 61–3, 95–8, 100, 102, 109–10, 112–3, 116, 300, 356, 362, 455 guerrilla de la memoria, La/The Guerrilla of Memory 167 Guest 96–9, 465, 468 Gutiérrez Caba, Emilio 24 Gutiérrez, Chus 10, 15–6, 22, 280, 284

horror films [cinema] 45, 82, 253, 265, 313, 316, 320, 329–31, 475 Huerga, Manuel19 Hydallgo, Edou 43, 421, 424–6 I I Love You Baby 84 Iborra, Juan Luis 83–4 Iborra, Manuel 218 immigration 15–6, 52, 71, 81, 85–6, 361 imposible, Lo/The Impossible 27, 47 Innisfree 51, 109, 462 international film festivals 4, 196, 413, 416 intertextuality, 133, 156, 255, 264–5, 302, 337–8, 368, 371–2, 447 Intruders 24 Invisibles/Invisible 69 Isbert, Pepe 185 J Jamón, jamón 17, 252, 278, 297, 300, 303, 304 Jordà, Joquim 16, 28, 51, 95, 109 Juana la Loca/Mad Love 216, 219, 221, 421

H Herencia/Heritage 437 heritage cinema, 147, 208, 214, 219, 222, 225–6 Hermoso, Miguel 21, 397, 422 Hernández, Antonio 13, 25, 38, 148, 218, 283, 286, 397 Historias de la radio/Radio Stories 21 historical films 38, 147, 207–8, 216, 220–1, 225 historical memory 18, 21, 41–2, 168, 170–4, 176, 194, 208, 218, 222, 239, 243, 421 hombre de salacot, El/The Man in the Salakot 68 homosexuality 43, 59, 81–7, 89, 148 Honor de cavallería/Honour of the Knights (Quixotic) 28, 96, 98–9 horas del día, Las/The Hours of the Day 255, 354, 356–7, 361

K Km. 0/Kilometer Zero 84 Kracauer, Siegfried107 L laberinto del fauno, El/Pan’s Labyrinth 19, 41–2, 47, 147, 359 Lacuesta, Isaki 3, 16, 26, 29, 51, 54, 60–2, 69, 95–6, 98, 102, 109–14, 116, 121–23, 126–28, 414–15, 433, 436, 438, 455, 469 Landa, Alfredo 187 Lavapiés 15, 52, 70 Law of Historical Memory 18, 21, 163, 172, 174, 194, 208, 218, 239 Leblanc, Tony 325, 340–1 Lejos de África/Black Island 68 Lemcke, Max 27 481

(Re)viewing Creative, Critical and Commercial Practices in Contemporary Spanish Cinema

lengua de las mariposas, La/Butterfly’s Tongue 147, 421, 424 León de Aranoa, Fernando 10, 16, 69, 415 León, Paco 27 leyenda del tiempo, La/The Legend of Time 51, 62, 102, 109–12, 114, 434 Libertarias/Freedom Fighters 421, 425–7 línea recta, La/The Straight Line 101 Llobet Gracia, Lorenzo 38 Llompart, Jordi 69 lobo, El/The Wolf 43, 148, 193, 195, 198–200, 201 Locura de amor/Love Crazy 20, 209, 211, 216 Lola, la película 21, 397 Lombardero, Manuel 421 López Vázquez, José Luis 185, 244, 339–40 Lucía y el sexo/Sex and Lucia 179, 304 Lugares que no existen: GoogleEarth 1.0/ Places that Don’t Exist: GoogleEarth 1.0 434 Luna, Bigas 17, 47, 179, 216, 240, 252, 278, 297–8, 304, 314 luz prodigiosa, La/The End of a Mystery 422, 427

Menkes, David 84, 179 Mentiras y gordas/Sex, Parties and Lies 179 meta-cinematic 147, 160, 225 middlebrow 49, 215 Miñarro, Luis 3, 4, 17, 26, 28, 414, 456 Miró Law (legislation, policies) 9, 215, 313, 320, 326, 329, 338 Miró, Pilar 68, 213, 215–6, 276, 362, 408 Molina, Josefina 275 Mones con la Becky/Monkeys Like Becky 51 Monleón, Sigfrid 83 Montanyà, Xavier 68 Monzón, Daniel 225, 255, 354, 358–61 Morais, Alberto 42 Mortadelo y Filemón. Misión: salvar la tierra/ Mortadelo and Filemon. Mission: Save the Planet 218 mosquitera, La/The Mosquito Net 3, 385–6 Movida, La 45, 82, 89, 216, 253, 262, 408 muerte de Mikel, La/The Death of Mikel 83 Muertos de risa/Dying of Laughter 149, 237, 242–4, 314 mujer sin piano, La/Woman without Piano 24, 96, 98–100 Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios/ Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown 9, 265–7 multiculturalism 15–6, 72, 124 Munt, Silvia 14, 70 Mur Oti, Manuel 38 Murcia, Félix 43, 421–3, 425–7 My Life Without Me 135, 282–3, 293, 295

M Machi, Carmen 18, 24 Macías, Belén 21 Madrid, 1987 21, 301 maestro de esgrima, El/The Fencing Master 215 Magiciens de la terre, 125, 127, 129 mala educación, La/Bad Education 21, 83, 266–8 Map of the Sounds of Tokyo 133, 136–9 Martín Patino, Basilio 39–40, 240, 408 Martínez Lázaro, Emilio 19, 22, 41–2, 202, 226, 281, 421 Más allá del espejo/Beyond the Mirror 16, 28 Médem, Julio 17, 49, 70, 148, 179, 193, 254–5, 298, 409, 412 Melillenses/Living in Melilla 72–3 Memoria negra/Black Memory 68

N national cinema, 3–5, 9, 11, 15, 23–4, 28, 37–9, 41, 45, 48–9, 51–2, 59, 208, 211, 214, 217, 225, 264, 277, 284, 353, 355, 382–3, 401, 408 nationalism 25, 195, 208 Natural de Melilla/Native of Melilla 71–2 neo-esperpento, see esperpento 315, 317 Neville, Edgar 38, 315 nido, El/The Nest 156 482

Index

niños de Rusia, Los/The Children of Russia 41, 148, 168, 173–4 noche oscura, La/The Dark Night of the Soul 213 noche que no acaba, La/All Night Long 435, 466 No-Do/The Haunting 147, 156–62 Noriega, Eduardo 23, 198, 278 novios búlgaros, Los/The Bulgarian Lovers 59, 85–6 nuevo cine español (New Spanish Cinema) 10–2, 40

pasión turca, La/Turkish Passion 421 pasos dobles, Los/The Double Steps 3, 26, 51, 60, 69, 98, 121–23, 126–27, 415, 435–37, 460 patio de mi cárcel, El/My Prision Yard 21 pelota vasca. La piel contra la piedra, La/The Basque Ball. Skin Against Stone 148, 193, 412 Peña, Candela 181, 185, 298 Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón/ Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap 44, 262, 408 Peppermint Frappé 239 perdedores, Los/The Forgotten 71 Pérez Rosado, Pedro 59, 70 Pérez, Óscar 72 Perojo, Benito 38 perro del hortelano, El/The Dog in the Manger 215–6, 219 Pim, pam, pum … fuego/Pim, Pam, Pum … Fire 40 pisito, El/The Little Apartment 40 placeres ocultos, Los/Hidden Pleasures 43–4, 82, 86 Plácido 42, 240 Plan África 69 Planet 51 24, 25, 48, 255–6, 368–74, 394, 402 Plaza, Paco 46, 253, 255, 325, 329–31 Poïpoïdrome, 122–3 political violence, see violence 195 Pons, Ventura 15, 17, 59, 82, 84, 228, 240 popular culture, 21–2, 149, 211, 238–9, 243–4, 341, 371, 445 ¿Por qué se frotan las patitas?/Scandalous 22 postcolonial 52, 67–8, 71, 74, 124 post-Franco, see Franco 44, 155, 168, 172, 175, 179 post-heritage cinema 147, 208 post-modernity, 124 post-war 20, 40, 158 prima Angélica, La/Cousin Angelica 240 prosthetic memory 149, 156, 160, 238

O observational documentaries 107 olas, Las/The Waves 42 Olea, Pedro 40, 82, 215, 301, 408 orfanato, El/The Orphanage 17, 24, 46, 147, 158, 168, 421 ´other´ 60, 67, 123–6, 128, 136, 448–9 otherness, 124 otro lado de la cama, El/The Other Side of the Bed 22, 281 otro lado: un acercamiento a Lavapiés, El/The Other Side: A Portrait of Lavapiés 70 otros, Los/The Others 48, 329 Oxford Murders, The 282–3 Ozores, Antonio 185 Ozores, Mariano 185, 212 P Pa negre/Black Bread 16, 41, 148, 415 pact of forgetting (pacto del olvido) 18–9, 21, 41, 149, 158, 171–2, 202, 239 Palacios, Manuel 167, 172–3 Paredes, Marisa 14, 285 Partido Popular (People’s Party) 10, 14, 26, 199, 218, 241, 243, 412 PSOE (Partido Socialista y Obrero Español/ Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party) 14, 69, 198–9, 201, 240–1, 408, 412, 414 París, Inés 84, 218, 254 483

(Re)viewing Creative, Critical and Commercial Practices in Contemporary Spanish Cinema

puerta de no retorno, La/The Gate of No Return 70

San Sebastian Film Festival 3, 27, 60, 155, 168, 196, 385, 407, 413, 415–17 Sánchez Arévalo 87 Sangre de Mayo/Blood of May 14, 221 santos inocentes, Los/The Holy Innocents 9, 214 Sanz, Jorge 199, 340 Sartre, Jean Paul 128 Saura, Carlos 10, 30, 39, 53, 147, 155–6, 161, 163, 213, 220, 239–40, 357, 408, 422 Screening Sex, see sex on-screen 179–80, 183 Second Republic, see republic 3, 41, 148, 170, 223, 347 Segunda piel/Second Skin 84 Segura, Santiago 10, 27, 45, 48, 149, 242, 253–4, 279, 281, 314, 325–8, 332–3, 337–9, 340–2, 345–7, 367, 393–5, 469 serial killer 88, 253, 314, 316–9, 356 Serra, Albert 28, 61, 95–7, 356, 414 Serrano de Osma, Carlos 38 sex on-screen, see screening sex 182, 185, 187 Sexykiller, morirás por ell/Sexy Killer: You´ll Die for Her 45, 253, 313–4, 316–20 Si te dicen que caí/If They Tell You I Fell 83 Silencio Roto/Broken Silence 19 Sin novedad en el alcazár/The Siege of the Alcazar 20 Sinde Law 344 Sinfín 22 slasher film 45, 313, 316–7, 319–20 socialist Government 11, 18–9, 43, 198, 201, 218, 241, 341, 385 sol del membrillo, El/Quince Tree of the Sun 51, 61, 109 Solas/Alone 13, 61 Soldados Anónimos/Anonymous Soldiers 435 Soldados de Salamina/Salamina Soldiers 19, 41 Spinnin 87 stardom 22–3, 252, 274, 277–8, 284, 297 Suárez, Emma 3 Sub-Saharan Africa, 68–70 subsidies 9, 15, 221, 267, 345, 369, 374, 412, 414,

Q Que se mueran los feos/To Hell with the Ugly 24, 395 Quiroga, Elio 147, 156–61 racist skinhead violence, see violence 16 R Ramsis, Basel 70 Raphael 149, 240, 243–4, 397–8 Raval, El 62, 109–10, 112 Raza/Race 20–1, 38, 226 Rebollo, Javier 24, 61, 95–6, 100, 255, 356, 414 [REC] 253–4, 325–6, 329–33 [REC]2 329, 332 [REC]3 329, 332 Reinas/Queens 85 Rejas en la memoria/Bars in Memory 167, 172, 174 Republic (republican), see second republic 41–2, 168–71, 213, 222, 301, 425–6, 435 rey pasmado, El/The Dumbfounded King 215 robo más grande jamás contado, El/The Biggest Robbery Never Told 358 Rosales, Jaime 28, 61, 99, 148, 255, 354–8, 361 Rosell, Josep 43, 421, 424–6 Roth, Philip 293–5, 296, 301, 303–4 Ruiz Caldera, Javier 17, 256, 401 S Sabroso, Félix 43, 150, 179 Sacristán, José 21, 273, 301 Saénz de Heredia, José Luis 20–1, 38, 218, 226 sainete (light farce) 12, 39 Salama, Moisés 72–3 Salamanca Conversations 11, 13, 20, 39 Salazar, Ramón 22 Salvador 19 Salvatierra, Pablo 68 Salve Melilla/Hail Melilla 72 484

Index

sur, El/The South 103 Surcos/Furrows 39

Tosar, Luis 255, 359 Traços/Traces 436 transcultural reinscription 38 Transition 3, 18–9, 21, 40–5, 59, 67, 70–3, 81, 95, 147–50, 158, 167–8, 171–2, 175, 179–81, 183–7, 193–5, 200–02, 207–8, 212–7, 227, 237–40, 263, 398, 408, 422 transnational 4, 16, 22, 25, 47–8, 50–2, 63, 133, 141, 208, 211, 213, 217, 220–21, 240–41, 253, 255, 278, 282, 284, 304, 306, 316, 320, 353–57, 361, 373 tren de la memoria, El/The Train of Memory 148, 167 Tren de sombras/Train of Shadows 28, 457 Tres metros sobre el cielo/Three Steps above Heaven 24, 27, 394, 397, 400 truco del manco, El/The Cripple’s Trick 70 Trueba, David 19, 21, 41, 301, 414 Trueba, Fernando 9, 227, 256, 278, 297–8, 305, 368, 409

T Taberna, Helena 43, 148, 155, 193, 196–7 También la lluvia/Even the Rain 25, 147, 280, 367 Te doy mis ojos/Take my Eyes 13 Tengo ganas de ti/I Want You 17, 395, 397, 400 Teresa de Jesús 212, 215, 218 terrorism, 148, 193, 195–201, 255, 412 Tesis/Thesis 156, 160–1 The Secret Life of Words 133, 135–9, 281–2, 306 Things I Never Told You 133–4, 139–40, 143, 456 Tiovivo c. 1950 14, 227 Tirante el blanco/The Maiden’s Conspiracy 220 Tiro en la cabeza/Bullet in the Head 99,148, 354, 356–8, 358, 361 Todo sobre mi madre/All About my Mother 23, 226, 263, 265–7 Toledo, Goya 185 Torremolinos 73 43, 150, 179, 181, 183, 187 Torrent, Ana 147, 155–8, 160–1, 196, 218, 252 Torrente 2: Misión en Marbella/Torrente 2: Mission in Marbella 333, 337, 339 Torrente, José Luis (the character) 253–4, 325–9, 332, 337–9, 340–3, 346–7 Torrente 3: El protector/Torrente 3: The Protector 333, 337, 340, 342, 344–5 Torrente 4: crisis letal/Torrente 4: Lethal Crisis 27, 337, 339–41, 343, 345, 347, 367, 394–5 Torrente saga (Torrente and its sequels) 10, 45, 48, 253, 326, 339, 342, 393, 398 Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley/Torrente, the Dumb Arm of the Law 281, 314, 325–6, 333, 337–9 Torrente, El juego 342

U Ulloa, Bajo 10, 314, 338, 409 Un hombre llamado Flor de Otoño/A Man Called Autumn Flower 82 Uribe, Imanol 59, 83, 215, 409, 412 V Vega, Paz 23, 216, 304 Velasco, Manuela 329, 331 Velilla, Nacho G. 24, 88, 392 Vera, Gerardo 84, 216, 298 Verdugo, El/The Executioner 315 Viaje al corazón de la tortura/Journey to the Heart to Torture 139 Viaje mágico a África/Magic Journey to Africa 69 victimhood, 148, 167–8, 174 victims of Francoism, see Francoism 172 Vida de sombras/Life in the Shadows 38 vida sublime, La/The Life Sublime 96, 99, 101, 103, 413 485

(Re)viewing Creative, Critical and Commercial Practices in Contemporary Spanish Cinema

vieja memoria, La/The Old Memory 41, 148, 167–74 Vila, Agustí 3, 385 Villamediana, Daniel 95–6, 102, 413 Villanueva, Vicente 24, 396 Villaronga, Agustí 16, 41, 148, 314, 415 violence 87, 169, 172, 174, 197, 199, 201, 242–3, 245, 313–4, 317, 325–33, 338, 355–6, 360 Viota, Paulino 95 Volver 15, 217, 267, 279, 284–5, 298

world cinema, 61, 252, 256, 274 Y You are the One (una historia de entonces)/ You Are the One (A Story of the Past) 19 Yoyes 43, 148, 156–7, 194–8, 200–1 Z Zambrano, Benito 10, 13, 19, 41, 61, 226 Zannou, Santiago 70 Zulueta, Iván 86, 95, 408–9, 447

W War of Independence 20, 147, 208–10, 213, 215, 217, 219, 223, 226

486

(Re)viewing Creative, Critical and Commercial Practices in

Contemporary Spanish Cinema Formulated around a number of key thematic concerns – including new creative trends; the politics and practices of memory; auteurship, genre, and stardom in a transnational age – this reassessment of contemporary Spanish cinema from 1992 to 2012 brings leading academics from a broad range of disciplinary and geographical backgrounds into dialogue with critically and commercially successful practitioners to suggest the need to redefine the parameters of one of the world’s most creative national cinemas. This volume will appeal not only to students and scholars of Spanish films, but also to anyone with an interest in contemporary world cinema. Duncan Wheeler is Associate Professor in Spanish studies at the University of Leeds, where he is also a member of the Executive Committee for the Centre for World Cinemas. Fernando Canet is Associate Professor in Film studies at the Polytechnic University of Valencia.

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