Spain on Screen: Developments in Contemporary Spanish Cinema 0230236200, 9780230236202

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Spain on Screen

Also by Ann Davies ALMODÓVAR CARMEN: FROM SILENT FILM TO MTV (co-edited with Chris Perriam) CARMEN ON FILM: A CULTURAL HISTORY (with Phil Powrie, Chris Perriam, Bruce Babington) CARMEN ON SCREEN: AN ANNOTATED FILMOGRAPHY AND BIBLIOGRAPHY (with Phil Powrie) DANIEL CALPARSORO MAKING WAVES ANNIVERSARY VOLUME: WOMEN IN SPANISH, PORTUGUESE AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES (co-edited with Parvathi Kumaraswami and Claire Williams) THE METAMORPHOSES OF DON JUAN’S WOMEN: EARLY PARITY TO LATE MODERN PATHOLOGY THE TROUBLE WITH MEN: EXPLORING MASCULINITIES IN EUROPEAN AND HOLLYWOOD CINEMA (co-edited with Phil Powrie and Bruce Babington)

Spain on Screen Developments in Contemporary Spanish Cinema Edited By

Ann Davies Newcastle University

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Ann Davies 2011 Individual chapters © Contributors 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–23620–2

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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To Vanessa Knights, in memoriam

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Contents List of Illustrations

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Acknowledgements

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Notes on Contributors

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1

Introduction: The Study of Contemporary Spanish Cinema Ann Davies

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Audiences, Film Culture, Public Subsidies: The End of Spanish Cinema? Barry Jordan

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Al mal tiempo, buena cara: Spanish Slackers, Time-images, New Media and the New Cinema Law Rob Stone

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Re-visions of Teresa: Historical Fiction in Television and Film Paul Julian Smith

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The Final Girl and Monstrous Mother of El orfanato Ann Davies

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Ensnared Between Pleasure and Politics: Looking for Chicas Bigas Luna, Re-viewing Bambola Santiago Fouz-Hernández

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Javier Bardem: Costume, Crime, and Commitment Chris Perriam

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Children of Exile: Trauma, Memory and Testimony in Jaime Camino’s Documentary Los niños de Rusia (2001) Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla

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93 114

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Index

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List of Illustrations 3.1 Slacker (courtesy Richard Linklater)

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3.2 AzulOscuroCasiNegro (courtesy of Tesela Producciones Cinematográficas)

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3.3 En la Ciudad de Sylvia (courtesy of Eddie Saeta)

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Acknowledgements This volume arose from a one-day symposium held in July 2008 at Newcastle University to discuss trends in contemporary Spanish cinema. Grateful thanks are offered to all who took part: speakers, delegates, chairs of discussion and administrators. The symposium was funded by the Research Group in Film and Media (itself in turn funded by NIASSH, the Newcastle Institute for the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities): thanks go to my co-convenors in the Research Group, Dr Tony Purvis and Dr Melanie Bell, and to NIASSH, for their help and support. The original impulse for the symposium – and for this volume – arose from a joint collaboration between myself and my colleague Dr Vanessa Knights. We intended to provide this symposium as one academic focus for the 2008 ¡VAMOS! Latin and Lusophone cultural festival held every two years in Newcastle/Gateshead. Tragically, Vanessa died before the festival and symposium took place. I have no doubt that delegates and contributors, as well as staff in the School of Modern Languages at Newcastle University, will share in my wish to dedicate this volume to her memory. Ann Davies

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Notes on Contributors Ann Davies is Senior Lecturer in Spanish at the University of Newcastle. She has written various chapters and articles on contemporary Spanish and Basque cinema, and is the author of a study guide on Pedro Almodóvar (Grant and Cutler) and a book on Basque director Daniel Calparsoro (Manchester University Press, 2007). She is co-editor of The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Film (2004, with Phil Powrie and Bruce Babington) and Carmen: from Silent Film to MTV (2005, with Chris Perriam). She is also one of the authors of Carmen on Film: a Cultural History (2007). Santiago Fouz-Hernández lectures in Spanish Cinema at the University of Durham. He is co-author of Live Flesh: The Male Body in Contemporary Spanish Cinema (2007), editor of Mysterious Skin: Male Bodies in Contemporary Cinemas (2009) and co-editor of Madonna’s Drowned Worlds: New Approaches to Her Cultural Transformations (1982–2003) (2004). He is reviews editor of the journal Studies in Hispanic Cinemas and guest editor of the journal’s special issue on the male body (3.3). He is currently preparing a Spanish-language monograph about the representation of the male body in contemporary film and popular culture entitled Cuerpos de cine. Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla is a Assistant Professer of Spanish at the university of southern california. He is author of Queering Buñuel: Sexual Dissidence and Psychoanalysis in his Mexican and Spanish Cinema (2008). His publications on the cinema of Buñuel have appeared in Revista del Centro de Estudios en Diseño y Comunicación de la Universidad de Palermo, Revista de Cine, Hispanic Research Journal, Journal of Romance Studies, and Steven Marsh and Parvati Nair’s Gender and Spanish Cinema. He has published on contemporary queer visual arts and the cinema of Almodóvar. He is currently working on questions of subjective realism and bodily affection in the cinema of Lucrecia Martel and on questions of traumatic memory in recent Spanish fiction and documentary filmmaking. Barry Jordan is Professor of European Cinema and Culture at De Montfort University, Leicester. His major publications include: Writing and Politics in Franco’s Spain (1990); Contemporary Spanish Cinema (1998, co-authored with Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas); Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies x

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(2000, co-edited with Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas); Spanish Culture and Society: The Essential Glossary (2002, editor) and Spanish Cinema. A Student’s Guide, (2005, co-authored with Professor Mark Allinson). In 2003–4, he helped found and thereafter co-edit Studies in Hispanic Cinemas; he also edited special numbers of the International Journal of Iberian Studies (2003) and New Cinemas. Journal of Contemporary Film (2005). He has also completed a monographic study of Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar. He is currently working on film financing in Spain and the role of private television companies. Chris Perriam is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Manchester. He has published on contemporary Spanish cinema, especially in relation to Star Studies; film versions of the Carmen story; queer writing in Spain; and modern poetry in Spanish. Paul Julian Smith is Distinguished Professer of Hispanic and LusoBrazilian Literatures and Languages, City University of New York and a founding editor of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. His most recent books are Spanish Visual Culture: Cinema, Television, Internet (2006) and Television in Spain: From Franco to Almodóvar (2006). Rob Stone is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Swansea. He is the author of Spanish Cinema (2002), The Wounded Throat: Flamenco in the Works of Federico García Lorca and Carlos Saura (2004), Julio Medem (2007), Walk, Don’t Run: The Cinema of Richard Linklater (2010) and co-editor of The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film (2007).

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1 Introduction: The Study of Contemporary Spanish Cinema Ann Davies

The past two decades have seen a rise to greater prominence of Spanish film studies as part of a wider upsurge of interest in foreign-language film that goes beyond the canonical cinematic movements such as Italian neo-realism and the French New Wave, and more recently has begun to look beyond canonical and arthouse films to study popular cinema, genre and commercial cinema and the industry that goes with these, and in addition how the general public – as opposed to the film scholar – experiences Spanish film. This chapter traces the developments in the field and highlights the implications for Spanish film study, before presenting the papers that are to follow, suggesting how they exemplify some of the current trends in the cinema, and how they also draw attention to the aspects of Spanish cinema that today’s students and scholars need to be aware of, opening up these specificities to the student and scholar for further interrogation. Although it has rapidly developed a substantial body of writing, a reasonable core of scholars committed to the study of Hispanic film (some of whom contribute to this volume), dedicated university courses and more recently its own journal (Studies in Hispanic Cinemas), Spanish film studies is still in its infancy if we go by calendar years – a recent upstart addition to the established national cinema canon of American, French, German, Italian and British cinemas and so on. Spanish film studies is not alone in this. There is some irony in that, just as more and more voices are raised in chorus to proclaim that national cinema as a concept is now defunct, there are a plethora of books and journals dedicated to film production from countries outside the canon mentioned above, countries across Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East and Africa, South America, Oceania and Asia. Thus one of the key elements in studying Spanish cinema today is precisely the fact that more 1

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and more academic scholarship is dedicated to a very slippery concept that runs the risk of undermining this academic field even as it grows. The academic uncertainty over the viability of the concept of a national cinema is paralleled by – and in part fuelled by – industrial developments that blur the parameters of a Spanish film scene. Admittedly, the boundaries of the Spanish industry were never so well defined as to prevent interchange with other national film industries, so that even during Franco’s dictatorship US cinema was readily accessible, while cineastes were aware of film movements in Europe and beyond, such as Italian neo-realism that fed into both the dissident Salamanca declarations of 1956 and the officially sanctioned if somewhat controversial Surcos (Furrows, Nieves Conde, 1951). But today the question has become more prominent. In her recent overview of Spanish cinema, Núria Triana Toribio raises the very notion of what Spanish cinema exactly is in an era of international co-production that has contributed to the decline in favour of the concept of a national cinema. Triana Toribio uses as illustration the successful Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar’s film The Others (2001), which used Spanish crew and outdoor locations but was shot in English using Anglophone actors, in particular Nicole Kidman (Triana-Toribio, 2003, pp. 162–3). He is not alone in doing this: others directors who have made a name for themselves through making English-language films include Isabel Coixet and Jaume Balagueró, although the latter has received great acclaim for his recent Spanish-language horror feature [REC] (2007). However, the uncertainty over the viability of Spanish film as a definable concept does not simply arise from the question of co-production but from the ability of Spanish cinema to survive as a viable entity that has an audience. While many critics and scholars, particularly in Spain itself, perceive a crisis in Spanish cinema, Josep Lluis Fecé and Cristina Pujol go further, saying that in fact there is no crisis in Spanish cinema because Spanish cinema does not exist beyond the minds of the industry and the academics. The crucial missing element, they feel, is the fact that audiences in Spain are not interested in their own national cinema, and keep away from it in droves (Fecé and Pujol, 2003, pp. 164–5). Is a film a film if nobody watches it? In fact, the question of audience preference is more complex than this, while there often seems to be a residual pessimism on the part of Spanish critics whenever they are faced with their own product, of which more below. Nonetheless the issue casts some doubt over whether or not the term Spanish cinema is merely an empty signifier. But this very confusion over the field of study may be one of the factors contributing to research in Spanish cinema. If the uncertainty has

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increased, so have the possibilities for profitable scholarship: more and more films are deemed worthy of study, while the self-reflexivity of the field has of necessity increased the academic output. When Spanish film first began to come to the attention of Hispanists in any concerted way, the study of film reflected to some degree the parallel study of literature: 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 then in power; directors who commanded much of the attention that scholars were willing to pay to film. Even as Almodóvar’s films began to impinge on and reshape the understanding of Spanish cinema’s potential, he could still be co-opted in the canon and set on university film courses. In pointing this out I by no means intend to disparage the work that has been achieved under this framework. For example, one of the key texts on Spanish cinema that appeared in English in the 1990s is Peter Evans’s edited collection Spanish Cinema: the Auteurist Tradition (1999), which among other things widened the range of directors considered worthy of consideration. More recently Manchester University Press has launched a series of monographs on individual Spanish and Latin American directors which again serves to broaden and deepen the field. Despite a recent move towards the study of popular cinema and its reception, which I go on to discuss below, august arthouse figures such as Buñuel still provide new interpretations – for example, Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla’s recent Queering Buñuel (2008). The Spanish critical corpus – reviewers and writers for journals such as Dirigido por and more recently, Cahiers du cinéma España – still frequently use the director as a pivot on which to base discussion of Spanish cinema. As Evans notes, directors still occupy a ‘Janus-faced status as the mediators as well as the shapers and purveyors of meaning’ (Evans, 1999, p. 4). While Spanish cinema studies no longer confines itself to the creation of and study of a canon of worthy film directors, directors continue to be a focus that allows for extrapolation of meaning, although nowadays the field includes a discussion of directors that would never have been considered in former times, while auteurial study is not confined to the text as a standalone item but incorporates cultural and industrial context that includes the use of DVD extras, film festival materials, publicity campaigns and so on. Nonetheless, changes in the wider field of film studies, and the impact of cultural studies, suggested the limitations of the canonical approach. A greater awareness of film studies more generally alongside an understanding of the debates and developments that have taken and

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are taking place in the wider field, have begun to enlarge the practice of Spanish film studies beyond representation to take into account how films are made, the techniques used, the industrial imperatives, the role of stars and producers, and so on. A wider filmic reference is also needed as Spanish films themselves quote and nod towards more and more filmic and cultural texts from beyond Spain’s borders. Spanish star studies, to take one example of this expansion, received its seminal work in Chris Perriam’s Stars and Masculinities in Spanish Cinema (2003), and various articles on individual stars have followed his lead. While for the most part Spanish stars in Spain hardly have the high profile afforded to American stars in the USA and internationally (Penélope Cruz might be an exception), Perriam argues for a star stable of sorts (p. 3), and the perceived upsurge of filmmaking coming from new directors in the 1990s has been accompanied by an accomplished roster of actors such as Cruz and Javier Bardem but also (in no particular order) Jordi Mollá, Paz Vega, Eduardo Noriega, Leonor Watling, Fele Martínez, Ernesto Alterio, Natalia Verbeke and so on. Given the fact that some stars criss-cross from arthouse to more commercial products and back again, the study of stars provides a convenient way of wiggling around the problem of adherence to an auteurist canon; but they also problematise and break down the boundaries of the very categories of arthouse and popular. As the need to uphold a canon becomes less imperative, new synergies can be uncovered between different genres and different audiences, through the stars, directors and crew who work on these films (as Sally Faulkner has found in the case of 1960s Spanish cinema: see Faulkner, 2006). The move towards star studies ironically coincides with a rediscovery of the director as himself (rarely, herself) a star of sorts, following the earlier theorisation of Timothy Corrigan (1991) that posits the director as an industrial rather than artistic phenomenon, in which the director’s persona can derive from publicity just as much as from the unifying artistic vision that lay at the heart of earlier conceptualizations of auteurism. Thus the director can become a star like the stars – Almodóvar is the preeminent example in the Spanish case – and researchers must now draw on not only the films themselves but also interviews, gossip columns, feature pieces and DVD commentaries in their study of the work of a particular director. More recently, scholars have begun to look in more concerted detail at genre cinema. In early studies of Spanish film, comedy, cine social (social realist cinema) and surrealism were lumped together in a chronological approach that may have used generic labels as subsections but which did not pay detailed attention to genre theory. That has now

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changed. Individual essays on Spanish horror are now appearing (in particular the seminal article by Willis on contemporary Spanish horror: Willis, 2004) that reflects the increasing prominence of this genre both nationally and internationally. Film noir and thrillers have also received attention (see the chapters by Stone and Davies in Spicer, 2007; also Davies, 2005). Genre has also acquired its own dedicated volume of essays (see Beck and Rodríguez Ortega, 2008). In a related move, we find cross-fertilisation between Spanish film and studies of gender and race. Scholars are now paying due attention to representations of immigration and race in contemporary film, of which Isabel Santaolalla’s Los otros (2005) is in the vanguard, while for gender we have a plethora of articles and chapters plus a dedicated volume in English (Marsh and Nair, 2004). While much of the latter material may also dovetail with a continued interest in social realist cinema that has always figured to some extent in a Spanish film ‘canon’, it can also speak to other, newer areas of Spanish film studies such as stars, popular and global cinema. These moves, too, contribute greatly to the complication of our understanding of what Spanish film studies is: they also enrich it enormously. The wider filmic reference, both in terms of viewing Spanish cinema in the context of filmmaking globally, and in terms of Spanish film scholars drawing on theoretical concepts from film studies and cultural studies more generally rather than simply carrying out close analysis, is in turn having an impact of where research on Spanish cinema is carried out, and by whom. Spanish cinema as a separate field began mostly in departments of Hispanic Studies in Anglo-American universities, although dialogue with departments of film was also initiated. And to some extent this is still the case. In a further irony, Modern Languages departments, in the UK at least, are often those responsible for carrying out general film programmes for students at undergraduate and postgraduate level, since such departments often contain the highest number of scholars dedicated to film – French, Spanish, Italian and so on. But as a result such scholars are often also responsible for delivering modules on film theory and technique regardless of a film’s nationality (my own institution, Newcastle University, follows this practice in part). Some scholars of foreign-language film, however, have found homes in film studies departments. Their published research, while featuring in journals and books with a Hispanic Studies focus, is now also appearing in film journals such as Screen and Sight and Sound, while edited collections on aspects of film studies include chapters dedicated to Spanish cinema. All this suggests a shift towards a more

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seamless integration of Spanish film scholarship and expertise with film studies more generally (as well as with Hispanic studies more generally). In a similar way, Spanish films can be found on general film curricula alongside English-language productions. The wider frame of reference is also to be found at an industrial level. If, as I mentioned above, Spanish film scholars find themselves a little disconcerted as to where to place films like those of Amenábar, Spanish directors and stars are gaining recognition in the global film industry. Cruz and Bardem have both earned their Oscars for performances in English-language films (though they have also received nominations for Spanish-language ones). And while subtitles still appear offputting to Anglophone audiences, directors are making internationally acclaimed films in Spanish as well as English (El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro, 2006) and El orfanato (The Orphanage, Bayona, 2007) being the obvious examples): the success of Latin American directors (such as Guillermo del Toro with El laberinto) also serving to boost the Hispanic film presence in global film. If it is hard to fence off Spanish film as a separate area of study today, it is still clearly possible to perceive a Hispanic presence that calls for comment and study. This allows us therefore to study the co-productions mentioned earlier with greater comfort as part of the remit of Spanish film studies, identifying, discussing and negotiating elements linked to the Spanish industry and Spanish cultures without the need to claim a film as entirely or predominantly Spanish. Co-productions run counter to any latent desire on the part of the academic to draw neat lines round the field of study, and European funding of such films has given rise to a disparaging term for them, namely Europuddings, where any local specificities disappear in a glutinous European mess. The phenomenon is not uniformly bad, however, and co-productions not only offer more opportunities for funding production but also allow an interchange of personnel and locations that can be artistically valuable, creating further layers of meaning that may fudge but not necessarily eradicate specific national cultural elements as far as these can be determined. However, this cinematic border crossing is not simply confined to co-production. The rise of co-productions has also dovetailed with an emphasis on transnational cinema in which Spanish film plays its part; and the phenomenon has caused discussion in the academic field. It is not simply the supposed turn towards Hollywood film-making on the part of more recent film directors: while influence and avowed quotation from Hollywood – and parody – well predate the 1990s (think, for instance, of the parodied Western in Luis García Berlanga’s ¡Bienvenido Mr. Marshall!

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(Welcome, Mr. Marshall) of 1952), there is traffic from Spain headed towards Hollywood. But there is also traffic between Spain and Latin America, in particular Mexico. This transatlantic turn in Spanish film studies has brought to light some of the more uncomfortable implications for the blurring of national boundaries. Paul Julian Smith, for instance, talks of the use of Spanish actresses in Mexican and Argentinian films as a ‘traffic in women’ (2006, p. 165), and further comments: ‘The dangerous liaisons depicted in Amores perros and Y tu mamá también might […] be read symptomatically as replaying the missed encounters of two cinematic suitors in the production arena: Mexico, the darling of Latin America, and Spain, the painted lady’ (p. 172). The emphasis on the transnational does not necessarily free us from the trap of a national cinema either: ‘hybridity [...] is not necessarily a breaking free of the boundaries and binds of the national construct’ (Perriam et al., 2007, p. 4), and the transnational still has the national buried within it. There is still the spectre of Spain as the old colonial power, and transnational co-productions and distribution are useful in part precisely because it helps foster the film industry at the national level. Smith also notes that ‘it seems likely that the licensed heretics González Iñárritu, Cuarón, and their friend and colleague Guillermo del Toro will become the new orthodoxy’ (Smith, 2006, p. 174). We could even argue, at a stretch, that a little reverse colonisation is going on in the Spanish film industry, as Guillermo del Toro appropriates Spanish stories from the Civil War and refashions it so that, in a historically anachronistic way, the left defeat the right (in El laberinto del fauno, 2006). Many would not see it that way, though: there is a sense of mutual benefit as Almodóvar’s production company El Deseo produced El laberinto while del Toro himself produced Bayona’s El orfanato. Smith’s comments are nonetheless a timely reminder that not all such interchange is necessarily benign; and that indeed the roots of this interchange rest on a history of domination, oppression and colonialism. Hispanic film scholars nonetheless have new opportunities to tease out these transatlantic relations, and their role is enhanced precisely because Spanish film studies can no longer be considered a separate field from film studies and Hispanic studies more generally, any more than the Spanish industry can be thus separated. In a comparison with French cinema, José Luis Castro de Paz and Josetxo Cerdán argue that: ‘La historia del cine francés es parte de la Historia del Cine, la historia del cine español, sigue siendo la historia del cine español’ (‘the history of French cinema is part of the History of Cinema; the history of Spanish cinema continues to be the history of Spanish cinema’: 2003,

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p. 37). Such a remark ignores the fact that French cinema can be local (indeed, parochial) as well as global; but I would in any case argue that current industrial trends, towards coproduction and the portability of stars, styles and genres, serve to complicate, although not necessarily invalidate, their perspective as far as contemporary Spanish cinema is concerned at least. The remit of Spanish film studies has also expanded and merged with the wider area of visual studies, so that Spanish film is no longer hermetically sealed from other related areas such as television, and this is valuable considering the crossover between the two media of entities such as stars and actors to name only the most obvious. One of the pioneers in Spanish television studies is Paul Julian Smith, who links his interest in Spanish television with his reclamation of emotion as having moral and political resonance in our understanding of visual cultures (Smith, 2006, p. 9), and who also links his exploration of visual artefacts to the wider debate inaugurated in Spain and beyond concerning historical and cultural memory (p. 12). In such a context it becomes possible to compare, say, Hable con ella (Tak to Her, Pedro Almodóvar, 2002) with the TV series Cuéntame cómo pasó (Tell Me How It Happened), as Smith does in his first chapter (pp. 14–28). For many years film studies in general kept itself carefully separate from media studies: the situation in Hispanic visual studies now suggests an increasing convergence (see Smith, in this volume). Smith’s emphasis on emotion and nostalgia in his book likewise indicates an awareness and acknowledgement of things formerly dismissed as kitsch, feminine and thus unworthy of scholarly attention. We have thus clearly come a long way from older forms of canon formation which presuppose a sense of ‘the best’ in the field: a film no longer has to make a case for itself as a work of art before we can confront its myriad moral, social and political meanings. Nor is film itself fenced off from other media. The interest in television studies also derives from a concerted move away from auteurism and canon formation to popular cinema and audience reception. Rob Stone observes somewhat wryly: ‘it can seem as if the study of filmmaking has been replaced by the study of filmwatching to the extent that voyeurism, once a cornerstone of Truffaut’s testimonial to Hitchcock’s auteurism, has become the prerogative of the audience’ (Stone 2007, p. 5). As with the wider field of film studies, so with Spanish film studies: popular cinema – films audiences actually want to watch as opposed to those that critics and academics assign canonical status to – has now moved to the heart of current Spanish film studies. There are many specific reasons for this, including

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a worthy desire of many academics to refuse to see themselves and film critics as the ultimate arbiters of good taste and artistic credibility, the impact of cultural studies in which artistic criteria and canon formation were no longer essential to the selection of cultural texts, and the incursion of more specific modes of cinema study such as stars and genre cinema. One reason for a reluctance to focus on the popular at an earlier stage in the history of Spanish film studies was an association of arthouse cinema of the Franco era with oppositional filmmaking and thus resistance to the regime: ‘academic studies were reluctant to deal with cinema as popular entertainment as a result of the emphasis placed on its social and political values by intellectuals brought up in a tradition of anti-dictatorship ideology’ (Mira, 2005, p. 1). As Mira goes on to note, the emphasis on political criteria meant a blindness to ‘the more than evident pleasures of some films whose only fault was to be made without taking a stance in political clashes’ (9). Scholars are now, however, working to redress this balance, with volumes that squarely address popular film (in particular Lázaro-Reboll and Willis, 2004) and studies of popular rather than arthouse directors (such as Buse et al., 2007). Moreover, as academic attention in Hispanic studies more generally turns towards questions of the recuperation of memories of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco era (see, for instance, Colmeiro, 2005, and the special issue of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies ‘The Politics of Memory’, 2008, as well as Gutiérrez-Albilla in this volume), Spanish film studies finds itself in step with wider trends in Hispanism, trying to tease out the role of film in the persistence of and the recuperation of memory (to say nothing of its corollary, forgetting). An example of this is the project to record audience memories of cinema-going in the Franco era (see Labanyi, 2005). The emphasis on audience reception of popular vehicles can, however, ignore the contradictions of the approach. Writing of Hollywood cinema, Ava Preacher Collins observes that, ‘the “folk” save tainted, commodified mass culture by wrenching it bodily from the corrupt realm of commodification, rearticulating and circulating it within the valorized realm of everyday experience’ (Preacher Collins, 1993, pp. 93–4). She goes on to note that the valorising of the audience, while overcoming the division between high and low art (with the legitimising of the former): is also dangerously essentialist, romanticizing the daily cultural experience of subcultural groups, ignoring the contradictory relations of cultural power that relegate these groups to subcultural status in the

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first place. Such a view does not usurp or even significantly challenge the foundations of canonical power; the readings and the meanings that these subcultural groups make may express resistance, but a resistance that is contained within the marginalized, dispossessed position these groups occupy, which appears more a site of capitulation to existing power structures than struggle, or true democratic process (Preacher Collins, 1993, p. 94). Those in Spanish film studies who use an audience perspective are not necessarily intending to do – or indeed result in doing – what Preacher Collins suggests; and questions concerning the commodification of mass culture in the Spanish context are not necessarily the same – although the fact that Spanish audiences watch more Hollywood films than Spanish ones strikes more than a note of caution. Nonetheless the audience is one element in a complex nexus of reception and interpretation that surrounds the film text, and it does not necessarily have to be the ultimate arbiter. One puzzling note in the adoption of an audience studies approach is the claim sometimes made that audience views – the real man or woman in the street – are somehow more factual than those interpretations of films scholars disparagingly described as ‘literary’, even though audience views are themselves interpretations that are no less valid than the scholarly ones but no more so either. Since the scholar then goes on to interpret the audience interpretations, the audience may at worst become no more than a convenient alibi or smokescreen behind which scholarly activity goes on much as it did before. Alternatively, the audience becomes a sop to the scholar’s conscience: an audience analysis sounds more worthy than, say, a psychoanalytic close analysis of a film. Thus, somewhat counter to the division between political and non-political texts posited by Mira above, politics still motivates the turn to the popular. In addition to all this, academic study of Spanish popular films may sometimes be guilty of co-opting popular texts to the elite, since the rarefied theoretical approach sometimes used makes the discussion inaccessible to all but trained scholars. But perhaps the greatest risk in adopting research approaches that emphasis popular experience is the rosy hue that can envelop the whole enterprise and against which Preacher Collins warns. It becomes all too easy to assume that because popular cinema carries with it the potential to subvert and resist dominant ideologies, this is what it inevitably does. There are conservative and reactionary cases to be made as well (as occurs, for example, in Leonard, 2004). In the end, the emphasis on the audience will take its place as a useful approach to

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film that affords us valuable insight into one way of negotiating with the film text and context, but which is not the only or the sole authoritative approach to take. As noted by Jim Collins, Hilary Radner and Ava Preacher Collins, no single critical approach can be comprehensive, and to argue for one approach to the exclusion of others is, as they put it, to foreclose rather than develop our understanding of film (Collins et al., 1993, p. 2). The emphasis on audiences and popular film suggests that we have come to the opposite extreme from where Spanish film studies started out, and thus that the field has developed rapidly and widely in the last twenty years. The comparative speed with which it has developed is a necessary corollary of the fact that it started out late in comparison with other national cinemas, and has been able to profit from the elaboration of theories and ideas elsewhere, eluding problems and dead ends encountered by previous scholars. But having done this, it now has the luxury to begin to reflect on itself. This introduction has aimed to lay out some ground on which to carry out some of this self-reflection, by highlighting a few of the salient trends and current potential pitfalls that now confront us, including both the possibilities and the problems caused by the increasing difficulty of delineating the field and defining any borders – and of transgressing them. We need at least to appreciate that the label ‘Spanish film studies’ still means something, and still directs us to specific films, directors and stars, but these can no longer be ring-fenced and sharply – divisively – distinguished. In an era when many now question the validity of talking of a Spanish national cinema, we do not need either to abandon the enterprise or alternatively fight desperately to define something explicitly and specifically Spanish about each film we study in order to justify the exercise. The increased awareness of industrial imperatives, of the need to consider the role of stars, of genre and niche marketing, and of the transnational and transatlantic traffic in film goods, services and personnel, means that Spanish film studies has become a porous entity but a field that can still be discerned if less easily defined. If as individual scholars we select a particular path of research we must still be aware of others not taken: if we wish, explicitly or implicitly, to construct a film canon we must still be aware that other canons can be constructed on other principles. Contemporary Spanish film studies, the subject of this volume, is in particular a moveable feast. It functions not so much as an enclosed academic space but as a nexus or crossing point that in itself shifts. As a field it is heterotopic as Foucault would have it, when he talks of ‘the disconcerting effect of the proximity of

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extremes, or, quite simply, with the sudden vicinity of things that have no relation to each other; the mere act of enumeration that heaps them all together has a power of enchantment all its own’ (Foucault, 1994, p. xvi). With contemporary Spanish film studies we can still permit ourselves to be enchanted by the label, but also be enchanted by our very disconcertion at the profitable hybridity of concepts and approaches than we can find in our field. *** The discussion to this point has aimed to offer a general survey of thought and theorisation on Spanish cinema to the date of writing, an overview of where we have got to in the field. The contributors to this volume proceed from this point to move forward those elements of debate they see to be crucial as Spanish film studies develops further in the twenty-first century. The first two essays in the collection start from questions of definition of what a national Spanish cinema might or should be, given the industrial developments that have seen some divergence between what academics write about and what Spanish audiences go to see. Barry Jordan in his piece addresses issues touched on above concerning the mismatch between those Spanish films that are made (and more particularly, subsidised) and audience expectations. Since government subsidy for cinema is underwritten by the Spanish taxpayer, questions can be and are asked as to whether Spanish people should pay for films they do not want to go to see. Jordan teases out the strands of the debate through the interventions of the independent producer Pedro Pérez, who dithered as to whether Spain was producing too many films, the public letters of director Alex de la Iglesia, who took the newspaper El País to task for its recent negative stance towards Spanish cinema, the attacks on the industry by El País’s chief film critic Carlos Boyero, and scholar Román Gubern’s analysis of current production. Jordan concludes by reviewing the prospects for Spanish cinema under the recent Ley de Cine (Cinema Law) of 2007, inclining to the belief that, after years of domination by director-led cinema, the balance is beginning to tilt in favour of the audience. Rob Stone also takes the Ley de Cine and audience share as elements in his essay on short films in the contemporary industry. Drawing on the time and movement images theorized by Deleuze, Stone claims the short film as another form of time-image that contrasts to the dominance of the movement image in mainstream cinema. While the timeimage was to be found in earlier canonical Spanish works, contemporary

The Study of Contemporary Spanish Cinema 13

time-images have only reappeared with the rise in Spanish cinema of films about slackers, in which many shots and sequences are precisely about wasting time rather than using it ‘profitably’ (and the latter word may ironically underscore the ways in which time-wasting is antithetical to a capitalist position embraced by the movement-image). This is paralleled by the rise of the short film, readily available on YouTube and as DVD extra material, and explicitly acknowledged in the 2007 Ley de Cine. In implicit response perhaps to the concerns raised about government subsidies as outlined in Jordan’s chapter, Stone argues that easily uploadable and downloadable short films are cheap enough not to need subsidy, while nonetheless garnering a word-of-mouth audience who relish the idling – the contemplation of time itself – embraced by directors in an era when time has, as Stone points out, become more precious than money. Jordan and Stone’s chapters speak to many of the issues touched on in the opening discussion; not only the question of national cinema and canon formation which which we began but also more recent developments in the field including the increasing focus on audience studies with which the overview ended. Whereas Jordan explores the downbeat reaction of sectors of the Spanish film industry to subsidised films, Stone posits a more positive response to the situation by both directors and audiences. The two essays taken together demonstrate how we might explore further questions of the current state of the Spanish film industry: commercial considerations clearly have more weight and commercial viability is coming increasingly to the fore to provoke questions as to what films are made and why, but there are also other ways of framing the debate that go beyond the popular as that is which is commercially successful. If Jordan and Stone address issues to do with a national industry and audience reaction, the next chapters pick up on moves away from the study of canonical directors to genre but also to gender, one of the newer frames of reference that, as stated above, have shifted the focus away from canonical texts. Paul Julian Smith also continues his pioneering approach to Spanish visual studies that has fast become, as noted above, an integral part of the field, through his comparison of a TV series and a film, both dedicated to the life of the Spanish Saint Teresa. The differences between the two vehicles derive in part, in fact, from the differences of the two media employed, Smith argues. Drawing on George F. Custen’s theory of the biopic, he examines the 1984 television series Teresa de Jesús and Ray Loriga’s 2007 film Teresa, el cuerpo de Cristo (Teresa, the Body of Christ). Both versions raise questions concerning authenticity and the extent to which Teresa could be regarded

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as a feminist, questions addressed by Smith in his analysis. The lush visuality of the film contrasts with the austerity of the TV series, a contrast further emphasized by the former’s greater emphasis on Teresa’s recourse to emotion and imagination: the TV series, on the other hand, offers a more egalitarian and populist Teresa appropriate to the medium. Ultimately, neither version can claim to be the definitive biopic of the saint: what the comparison reveals is that both media have an equal stake in striving for authenticity and a positive portrayal of a remarkable woman and are equally restricted in the industrial demands of the specific medium at the time. Ann Davies also takes up questions of genre and gender in her analysis of the recent film El orfanato, and draws on genre theory rather than the Spanish socio-political context in order to argue for a conservative reading of this particular offering from horror. She takes up the theories of Barbara Creed and Carol Clover to argue that, in El orfananto 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. With this approach Davies coincides with recent interest in looking at Spanish cinema specifically in terms of genre, within which the study of horror has had a marked emphasis in keeping with contemporary successes in Spanish horror production. Her use of horror theories aims in part to look away from the notion of Spanish cinema simply as a text from which a Spanish reality can be read off and towards other theories deriving from film studies in which Spanish film texts can be perceived much as other national cinematic texts can be, a move away from Spanish cinema as national cinema and nothing but. In this sense, then, her chapter points back to question of a hypothetical national cinema but also the question of audiences and the potential for conservative as well as subversive readings of popular film. Her interest in specific genre theories, alongside Smith’s in his chapter, points to the increasing convergence of film studies in general with the specifically Spanish field, a convergence that Chris Perriam will also demonstrate in his chapter. Continuing with an emphasis on gender, Santiago Fouz-Hernández pushes the notions of the auteur into its more uncomfortable reaches with his study of the role of women in the sex scenes of Bigas Luna’s films. In doing so he demonstrates that study of the auteur continues, as described earlier, but is no longer concerned with canon formation so much as integrating auteur studies with other research frameworks. Bigas Luna is best known for his Iberian trilogy of Jamón, jamón (1992), Huevos de oro (Golden Balls, 1993) and La teta i la lluna (The Tit and the

The Study of Contemporary Spanish Cinema 15

Moon, 1994), but Fouz-Hernández reaches beyond this well-trodden ground to the director’s more recent – and less well known – films, with a primary focus on Bambola (1996). The principal focus of interest for Fouz-Hernández is to discover whether the excessive straight masculinity that this and other Bigas Luna films offer, allows any possibility for identification for female and gay audience members. In this he draws on recent theories of spectatorship such as Vivian Sobchack’s ‘carnal third term’ or Patricia MacCormack’s ‘cinesexuality’ to explore how Bigas Luna’s famous machos can become a pleasurable locus of desire for non-hegemonic audiences: thus Fouz-Hernández offers an intriguing hybrid of auteurism and spectator theory. He concludes not only that female pleasure is possible with films such as Bambola but that prospects have improved for Bigas Luna’s female characters as subjects rather than objects – not necessarily something to be credited to the director, but to the shifts in Spanish society around him. Fouz-Hernández’s use of spectatorship theory draws us back once again to questions of the audience, demonstrating further theoretical approaches in addition to those of Stone and Jordan: his chapter reflects the increasingly complex advances Spanish film studies has made beyond the assessment of artistic merit, that nonetheless continues to see value in older research frameworks such as auteurism. With Chris Perriam’s chapter we move to another developing field, star studies, that is already hinted at in Fouz Hernández’s essay which includes discussion of Bigas Luna’s interaction with his female actors, and which Perriam himself did much to foster through his seminal book Stars in Contemporary Spanish Cinema (2003). In his chapter in this volume, Perriam also taps into the scholarly concerns about transnational traffic between cinemas discussed above in his case study of recent films by the actor Javier Bardem. Although the films considered in Perriam’s essay – Goya’s Ghosts (Forman, 2006) and No Country for Old Men (Coen and Coen, 2007) – are English-language vehicles, Perriam traces links to a specifically Spanish aspect of Bardem’s star persona, his political and social commitment, demonstrated by his support of particular social causes as well as of the Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. While the first film aligns Bardem with a pivotal upheaval in Spanish history, the second, set in the region of the US border with Mexico, nonetheless has particular resonance for those acquainted with Bardem’s back catalogue. Once again the disputed question of national cinema is raised with the consideration of Bardem as national or transnational star: it would seem that he both is and is not. Perriam’s essay shows how the transnational in the Spanish film industry is

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being increasingly foregrounded, but simultaneously it implies that the notion of the national has hardly been superseded. Finally, Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla concludes by considering two questions now coming to the fore in Spanish cinema debate, the role of the documentary and the use of cinema in the recuperation of memories of the Spanish Civil War, taking as an example Jaime Camino’s documentary Los niños de Rusia (The Children of Russia), about the children (of Republicans) who were evacuated to the Soviet Union for their own safety, and who were then not allowed to return to a Francoist Spain for a good many years. By focusing on one particular scene, GutiérrezAlbilla illustrates how the spectator is drawn from a position of distance to trace the traumas of past experience to which the interviewees of the film bear witness. He argues that the documentary has the capacity to go beyond its association with a realist aesthetic in order to bear emotional and ethical witness with which we as the audience can empathise. If the first part of this introduction surveyed key developments and trends to date, these essays, taken together, suggest not only a continuity with much of the history of Spanish film studies, including the changes in approach and focus that that history has encompassed, but also some of the ways in which the field of study may move forward into a new century. In this the essays do not aim at comprehensiveness, which would in any case be impossible: they are not a direct complement to the history described in the first section of this chapter. But they extend the debate on the core issues of what Spanish cinema actually is, where its boundaries lie and where it might nonetheless transcend those boundaries. They also demonstrate the way in which these issues are coming to be integrated seamlessly with other frameworks of study – the director, the star, genre, gender, audience and history – which themselves also inform each other. These concerns ricochet round the essays gathered together here to form a contemporary portrait of our field of study as one of profitable flux, where each contributor takes the opportunity to deploy one of more of these newer frameworks which have come to the fore in the field. My overview of the ways in which Spanish film studies ended with a suggestion that we should relish the heterotopic nature of the field. In their own essays, the contributors here do not necessarily and explicitly subscribe to my viewpoint on this score. But taken together these essays respond to the critical juncture in Spanish film studies as we align concerns with audience and the popular alongside other concerns, the complex nexus of reception and interpretation to which I referred above. They celebrate the hybrid nature of the field as it now is.

The Study of Contemporary Spanish Cinema 17

References Beck, J. and V. Rodríguez Ortega (eds), (2008), Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Buse, Peter, Núria Triana Toribio and Andy Willis (2007), The Cinema of Alex de la Iglesia (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Castro de Paz, J. L. y J. Cerdán (2003), ‘La crisis como flujo’, in L. Alonso García (ed.) Once miradas sobre la crisis y el cine español (Madrid: Ocho y medio), 23–39. Collins, J, H. Radner and A. Preacher Collins (1993), ‘Introduction’, in J. Collins, H. Radner and A. Preacher Collins (eds), Film Theory Goes to the Movies (New York: Routledge), 1–7. Colmeiro, J. E. (2005), Memoria histórica e identidad cultural: de la postguerra a la postmodernidad (Anthropos). Corrigan, T. (1991), A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam (London: Routledge). Davies, A. (2005), ‘Can the Contemporary Crime Thriller be Spanish?’, Studies in European Cinema 2/3, 173–83. Evans, P. W. (ed.) (1999), Spanish Cinema: The Auteurist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Faulkner, S. (2006), A Cinema of Contradiction: Spanish Film in the 1960s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Fecé, J. L. and C. Pujol (2003), ‘La crisis imaginada de un cine sin público’, in L. Alonso García (ed.) Once miradas sobre la crisis y el cine español (Madrid: Ocho y medio), 147–65. Foucault, M. (1994), The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage). Gutiérrez Albilla, J. D. (2008), Queering Buñuel: Sexual Dissidence and Pyschoanalysis in his Mexican and Spanish Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris). Labanyi, J. (2005), ‘The Mediation of Everyday Life: an Oral History of CinemaGoing in 1940s and 1950s Spain: An Introduction to a Dossier’, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 2/2, 105–8. Lázaro-Reboll, A. and A. Willis (eds) (2004), Spanish Popular Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Leonard, C, (2004), ‘Solas and the Unbearable Condition of Loneliness in the Late 1990s’, in A. Lázaro Reboll and A. Willis (eds), Spanish Popular Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 222–36. Marsh, S. and P. Nair (eds) (2004), Gender and Spanish Cinema (Oxford: Berg). Mira, A. (2005), ‘Introduction’ in A. Mira (ed.), The Cinema of Spain and Portugal (London: Wallflower Press), 1–11. Perriam, C. (2003), Stars and Masculinities in Spanish Cinema: from Banderas to Bardem (Oxford: Oxford University Press). ——— (2008), ‘The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Spain’ Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 9/2. Perriam, C., I. Santaolalla and P. W. Evans (2007), ‘The Transnational in Iberian and Latin American Cinemas: Editors’ Introduction’, Hispanic Research Journal 8/1, 3–9. Preacher Collins, A. (1993), ‘Loose Canons: Constructing Cultural Traditions Inside and Outside the Academy’, in J. Collins, H. Radner and A. Preacher Collins (eds), Film Theory Goes to the Movies (New York: Routledge), 86–102.

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Santaollala, I. (2005), Los ‘otros’: etnicidad y ‘raza’ en el cine español contemporáneo (Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza/Ocho y medio). Smith, P. J. (2006), Spanish Visual Culture: Cinema, Television, Internet (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Spicer, A. ed. (2007), European Film Noir, (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Stone, R. (2007), Julio Medem (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Triana-Toribio, N. (2003), Spanish National Cinema (London: Routledge). 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.

2 Audiences, Film Culture, Public Subsidies: The End of Spanish Cinema? Barry Jordan

Since 2005, cinema attendances in Spain have fallen significantly by nearly 35 per cent, from 21 million to 14 million in 2008 (www.mcu.es). But while admissions fall year on year, production levels have shown a relentless, inexorable rise. Even in a period of national and global financial crisis, Spanish film output appears impervious to economic slump. In 2008, for example, a massive 173 film features were made. However, nearly 30 per cent of these did not achieve a release (46) and a further 24 attracted less than 100 spectators (www.mcu.es). So why is it that the more Spanish audiences desert their own national cinema, the more films get made? The answer lies in large part in the availability of a generous and multi-layered subsidy system. This operates at many levels (national, regional, local and European) and across numerous types of institutions (from official national and pan-European government agencies, as well as national, regional and local television companies, right down to local savings banks, art galleries and museums). In 2008, this producer-friendly system resulted in 217 production companies being funded by government, the majority of which were small and set up in that year solely to make one film and then disappear (www.mcu.es). This means that single producer-directors and risk-averse, wannabe auteurs can virtually finance a low-budget feature and make a living from the subsidy system, without needing to commercialize their output. Spanish taxpayers have little idea of how the system works yet, like it or not, they fund the lion’s share of these projects. In the last few years, it has become increasingly apparent that the contradiction between falling audience numbers and the excessive supply of film product (80–90 per cent of which attracts negligible audiences) is unsustainable and makes little economic sense. Also, in times of recession, where the notion of ‘value for money’ looms ever larger in the public 19

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mind, taxpayer support for such a film culture appears wasteful and difficult to justify. Clearly, a degree of reform and restructuring is required. Some measures along these lines were contained in the recently passed Ley de Cine (Cinema Law, 2007); however, they remain to be activated and introduced into law. In this chapter, my aim is not to debate the reforms of the Ley de Cine in any great detail, though this very controversial piece of legislation will form a key backdrop to the present study. Rather, I wish to examine the contradiction outlined above which has dominated film policy and film politics in Spain over the last few years. I seek to do so by exploring a series of interventions from three key protagonists in the industry, who wield significant power and influence within their own specialist areas as well as an ability to shape public opinion and official policy. I also draw supporting data from another two case studies, the first relating to an opinion poll of 2007 concerning audience tastes and preferences. The second reflects the views of a Spanish media academic who has no specific axe to grind and whose relative neutrality may help us weigh up the pros and cons of the issues addressed. In short, I propose a snapshot, a radiography, of the state of Spanish cinema in the first decade of the new millennium.

The producer’s view: Pedro Pérez In September 2004, at the San Sebastian Film Festival, Pedro Pérez, President of FAPAE (Federación de Asociaciones de Productores Audiovisuales Españoles, the Independent Film Producers Federation) gave the organization’s annual address to the festival on the state of the domestic industry. His message was mixed. He noted a welcome upturn of 8 per cent in the number of Spanish films released (from 75 to 81), while also acknowledging a fall in the number of films produced (from 106 in 2003 to 94). His main concern, however, was the state of Spain’s always precarious level of market share. This had slipped from a tolerable 16.6 per cent in 2003 to a troubling 13.4 per cent in 2004, causing Pérez to remark: ‘la recaudación en taquilla sigue siendo el telón de Aquiles’ (‘box office receipts continue to be our Achilles heel’, C.S 2004). In other words, in a country where the overwhelming majority of films are made with official subsidies, most of those which achieve a release fail to make enough money at the box office to cover costs, let alone generate any profits. This also means that taxpayer euros invested in such filmmaking are effectively written off as ‘non-recoverable’. In this connection, Pérez also pointed out that only 16 of the 81 domestic films released up to the end of August 2004 had made more than 10 million pesetas (60,000 euros),

Audiences, Film Culture, Public Subsidies 21

adding ‘La apuesta de los exhibidores sigue siendo por las grandes producciones norteamericanas’(‘Exhibitors continue to bank on the big North American productions’, C.S. 2004). At the San Sebastián Film Festival in 2007, again in his capacity as spokesperson for FAPAE, Pérez delivered his usual annual address. After noting a reasonable bounce in market share in 2005/6 (to 16.7 per cent), this indicator had slipped drastically in 2007 (by September of that year) to a miserable 7.3 per cent. The figure would rise by the end of the year to a more acceptable though still inadequate 12.7 per cent, since in Spain new releases tend to be back-loaded to the final quarter of the year. Yet, the extremely welcome rise in market share was due entirely to the commercial impact of only one film, the blockbuster success El orfanato (The Orphanage, Bayona, produced by Guillermo del Toro and Rodar y Rodar), released on 11 October 2007. The film attracted 4.4 million spectators and earned 25 million euros at the box office (www.mcu.es). Among the reasons for these worrying fluctuations in market share, Pérez emphasized the following: ‘We have to be self-critical. Over recent years, there has been less connect between Spanish film and spectators, sometimes because of the movies themselves’ (Pablos, 2007). Here, Pérez was referring to the lack of alignment between mainstream audience tastes and the sorts of films being made by a significant proportion of Spain’s independent producers. In subject matter and thematics, Pérez hinted, this kind of output tended to reflect broadly the radical, anti-American, non-aligned social and political agenda of the PSOE since coming to power in March 2004 (e.g. with a strong focus on poverty, unemployment, marginal groups, immigration, domestic violence, abuse of children and women, single motherhood, gay and disabled rights etc.). Pérez also noted but did not dwell on the contradiction between a falling market share for Spanish cinema and the exhorbitant numbers of local films actually being made. By 26 August 2007, 95 features and 22 documentaries had been completed, yet market share stood at 7.3 per cent. But by the end of the year, overall Spanish feature production (including documentaries and 57 co-pro projects), stood at a colossal 172 films in 2007 (In 2008, as noted above, this figure stood at 173). Alongside 156 shorts (down from 209 the previous year), these were the highest output totals for 25 years. For Pérez, such excessive levels were undoubtedly a cause for concern. Yet, in his public pronouncements, they were given a positive spin, and presented as a cause of celebration, which put Spain on a par with countries like France, by far the most powerful film producer and biggest film market in Europe. Unlike Spain, of course, France enjoys an annual market

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share of around 40–45 per cent. At this stage, Pérez was loath to sound any alarm bells about overproduction. His organization, FAPAE, had been the prime mover in shaping the agenda and much of the detail of the PSOE’s Ley de Cine of 2007. He himself had also been a resolute champion of ever increasing levels of official subsidy, which under the new government grew from 32 million euros in 2004 to 86 millions in 2008 (www.mcu.es). However, quite unexpectedly, this apparently ‘golden’ political alliance between FAPAE and the PSOE seemed to hit a wall in the period March–April 2009. In mid-March, the Ministry of Culture released some alarming figures which suggested that, for the first time ever, Spanish film producers were getting close to collecting the same sum in taxpayer subsidies that their films were earning at the box office (i.e. 76.3 million euros in ‘ayudas’ or subsidies as compared to 81.6 million in ticket sales). This unsettling news was quickly seized upon by opposition politicians including Senator Juan Van Halen (no relation to guitarist Eddie), of the right-wing Grupo Popular. Van Halen reminded the Minister of Culture, César Antonio Molina, that, two years after the passing of the Ley de Cine, Spanish cinema had lost not only another 6 per cent in box office in 2008 but also 7 million spectators since 2004 (down from 21 million to 14 million). And at a time of economic crisis and massive unemployment (currently 4.2 million), when many Spaniards did not even receive state benefits, why was it, asked Van Halen, that a ‘cine subvencionado’ (subsidized cinema), should receive ‘una prima generosa por parte de las arcas públicas, que es dinero de todos’ (a generous bonus from public funds, which is money that belongs to everyone)? Such largesse might be ‘políticamente útil’ (politically useful), he went on, ‘but ‘no es el modo de sanear el cine español’ (this is not the way to make Spanish cinema healthier: Molina: ‘el cine español’, 2009). A few days later, and quite unexpectedly, Pedro Pérez declared in La Razón: Es una salvajada que produzcamos 173 cintas al año. El gobierno debería redistribuir las ayudas…para lograr hacer un número muy inferior de películas, en torno a las 60 anuales, que puedan tener ambiciones de que se exhiban en salas y competir con las que vienen de fuera (quoted in Carballo, 2009). (It’s madness that we produce 173 films a year. The government ought to redistribute aid...so as to make a far lower number of films, round about 60 a year, that might aim to be shown in cinemas and compete with films from elsewhere).

Audiences, Film Culture, Public Subsidies 23

These remarks constituted a bombshell. They represented an astonishing about-turn by the producers’ supremo. Hitherto, while his tactic had been to keep quiet in public, Pérez was acutely aware that excessive production totals were ultimately bad for business. They were based on a funding model which favoured predominantly small, arthouse, auteur and experimental films, which failed to address mainstream tastes. What caused him to shift his position so radically? Why, if he really believed that public subsidies should be focused on a much smaller number of films, did he not say so during the drafting stage of the 2007 film law? We shall return to these questions later.

Vox populi In early 2007, industry consultations over the draft text of the Ley de Cine gave rise to what El País described as a ‘guerra total’ or total war between the union of commercial television providers (UTECA) and the independent producers lobby (García and Gómez, 2007). At the heart of the dispute, we find a plan by the government to raise the obligatory amount of annual investment by the TV companies in filmmaking from 5 per cent to 6 per cent. The new law also sought to prevent the television operators from making films ‘in house’ by forcing them into co-pro arrangements with the independent producer, i.e. the very members of FAPAE with whom they were in dispute. Against this deeply conflictive backdrop, a survey was carried out to gauge the opinions of ordinary Spaniards towards their national cinema. Historically, neither the film industry nor the Ministry of Culture had shown any appreciable interest in public consultation or spectator pleasures. Moreover, the issue of public tastes, expectations and preferences had played no part in the discussions of the Ley de Cine or its preparation. The survey questionnaire was prepared and coordinated by two academics, the eminent film historian Professor Emilio Carlos García Fernández and the Chair of Journalism at Madrid’s Complutense University, Professor Jesús Timoteo Álvarez. The survey, comprising a telephone poll of 1500 respondents, aged over 18, was carried out between the 9 April and the 16 April, 2007, by Sigma Dos, a polling and market research company, which regularly undertakes surveys and collects polling data for leading, national, daily newspapers such as El Mundo and El País. The findings were made public in early June 2007. This was done via the oddly-named Instituto de Pensamiento Estratégico (Institute for Strategic Thought), a new, scholarly ‘think tank’, originating in the Departamento de Comunicación

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Audiovisual, Facultad de Periodismo (Department of Audiovisual Communication, Faculty of Journalism) at Madrid’s Complutense University. At the press conference called to publicize the release of the data, Professor Álvarez opened proceedings and argued that the poll was crucial and probably unique in terms of its democratic, public service role since it reflected a glaring weakness in the government’s new film law: ‘la voz del público, que no está presente en las negociaciones de la Ley del cine’ (the voice of the public, which has no presence in negotiations over the Cinema Law). It therefore sought to redress the balance and canvass public opinion in order to represent ‘los intereses de los no representados en el Proyecto de la Ley de Cine: las personas que van al cine’ (the interests of those not represented in the proposed Cinema Law: those who go to the cinema: Encuesta de Sigma Dos, 2007). Among the main findings of the poll, over half of respondents (58.7 per cent) said they regarded Spanish cinema as mediocre or ‘nada interesante’ (uninteresting) principally because of its ‘temática’ (subject; as noted above) which, rather than facilitate viewer engagement, made it more difficult or problematic. ‘Other reasons’ underpinning this general finding could also be attributed to the quality of the acting performances (15.3 per cent) and the film direction (4 per cent). By contrast, 66 per cent of respondents preferred American cinema (which was almost always regarded as well-made and entertaining). However, the public took little interest in European or Latin American cinema (sectors which scored 26 per cent and 13.4 per cent ratings respectively). Nearly half of respondents (47.6 per cent) regarded Spanish cinema as a ‘cine para minorías’ (minority cinema), rather than a source of mainstream entertainment; also, only 25 per cent of respondents were able to cite one Spanish film among the last 10 films they had seen. Overall, the survey seemed to confirm a general perception among viewers that Spanish cinema represented a ‘cine de calidad’ (cinema of quality), one made for select rather than mainstream audiences and largely (though not always) divorced from the tastes of the ordinary citizen in the street. The overwhelming complaint was that, while increasingly well made, Spanish cinema ‘no entretiene’ (does not entertain), unlike American products and particularly branded film franchises such as Spiderman, Batman, Superman and Indiana Jones. One of the most surprising findings had to do with audience attitudes towards state subsidies and the lack of official information and guidance on these matters. While 54 per cent of respondents claimed to be aware that the state financed national filmmaking via a mix of subsidies (automatic and discretional), loans and other forms of support, 69.3 per cent

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expressed serious concerns at the way taxpayers’ money was being used. The dominant suspicion was that funding was being squandered by a sectarian, left-wing government on its ideological allies and client groups in the film business. Respondents were also unhappy at the lack of transparency on the subsidy system. They demanded greater clarity concerning how subsidies were adjudicated and distributed, as well as more detail on who received what. Also, a significant 35.6 per cent of respondents rejected the principle of official subsidies entirely. Professor García Fernández concluded the press briefing by reiterating the point that, while the Ley de Cine seemed designed mainly to protect the livelihoods of a particular, PSOE-oriented, filmmaking elite, the interests of the national cinema and the Spanish taxpayer were nowhere represented: ‘La nueva legislación no ayuda al cine español, sino a los que trabajan en este sector, que es muy opaco porque no sabemos cuánto cuesta una película, ni cómo se reparten las ayudas…etc.’ (the new legislation does not help Spanish cinema, but those who work in this sector, which is very opaque as we do not know how much a film costs, or how subsidies are divided up...etc.). He also added that the Ley de Cine ignored the realities of mainstream viewer tastes: ‘Es una ley claramente enfocada al cine de calidad y al productor independiente, algo que ha pasado desde el “decreto Miró”’ (It is a law clearly focused on quality cinema and the independent producer, something which has been going on since the Miró law). He thus drew attention to the long-standing disconnect between a mainly auteur-dominated, filmmaking sector and its national audiences. If government policy was to continue funding high levels of unappealing auteur cinema as a supposed benchmark of quality, without explaining the underlying business model and the criteria for subsidy, then the general, film-going public was likely to conclude that Spanish cinema was a minority pursuit and not for them.1

The director’s view: Alex de la Iglesia Shortly after taking up her post as the new Minister of Culture (April 2009), Ángeles González Sinde was replaced as President of Spain’s Film Academy by another film director, the much admired Alex de la Iglesia, who was elected unopposed, with director Icíar Bolláin and producer Emilio Pina also elected as his vice presidents (see ‘Ángeles González Sinde’, 2009; García, 2009). Over the last few years, de la Iglesia has become a very effective advocate for Spain’s filmmaking ‘gremio’ (union), acting in the manner of a shop steward and cheerleader for the sector as a whole. He has also heavily criticized and directly opposed the head of

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the producers’ lobby, Pedro Pérez, who, as noted earlier, called for radical reductions in the numbers of films being made. In response and in the context of what he called ‘una campaña de desprestigio a la que se debe poner fin’ (a caompaign of disparagement which should be stopped), de la Iglesia was deliberately provocative when he argued: ‘cuanto más películas se rueden, mejor’ (the more films are made, the better, ‘Alex de la Iglesia’, 2009). This engaging, direct and combative style was already in evidence two years earlier in a powerful response to a critical analysis of Spanish cinema, which had significant resonance in the industry and beyond. The critique was submitted to El País by an anonymous contributor and entitled ‘El misterio del cine español’ (the mystery of Spanish cinema: ‘El misterio’, 2008). The article in question attacked Spanish cinema for its falling attendance figures, its general lack of audience appeal and complained that two Oscar nominations for Spanish film professionals in 2007 ( Javier Bardem and the composer Alberto Iglesias) were for work on American not Spanish productions, adding rather dismissively ‘No es exactamente cine español lo que se reconoce con los galardones’ (It is not Spanish cinema exactly that is being recognized with the awards). Overall, the writer’s deeply negative conclusion was that too many Spanish films tended to recycle the same formulae, themes and stereotypes which ‘han acabado por hastiar al espectador’ (have come to bore the viewer). De la Iglesia replied with a long, very detailed and systematic rebuttal of the article (Iglesia, 2008). He entitled his response ‘Carta a El País de un cineasta del país’ (letter to El País from one of the country’s filmmakers), pointedly playing on notions of nation, national identity and cultural belonging while implicitly chiding Spain’s leading national newspaper. His title also suggested that the country’s ‘diario de referencia’ (daily of reference), hitherto a loyal supporter and propagandist for the national film industry (especially via the influential coverage of Ángel Fernández Santos), had abdicated its role as cultural reference point by publishing yet more negative and biased attacks on his colleagues. What de la Iglesia referred to as ‘el puto cine español’ (bloody Spanish cinema) was yet again the victim of another spiteful, unjustified kicking, which would not go unanswered.2 De la Iglesia had little difficulty in putting the record straight. He corrected genuinely erroneous claims on matters of spectator numbers and market share in 2007 and the unfortunate prejudice of the writer against Bardem and Iglesias, as if working abroad on non-Spanish funded projects should somehow be invalid or invite censure. He also totally refuted the claim that ‘el cine español interesa cada vez menos’ (Spanish

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cinema is less and less appealing), rejecting the notion that it continues to rely on ‘tres o cuatro fórmulas- la Guerra Civil, el drama social y la comedia de costumbres’ (three or four formulae – the Civil War, social drama and comedies about local customs). As evidence, he pointed to a number of recent box office hits such as El Orfanato, El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro 2006), Las 13 Rosas (The Thirteen Roses, Martínez Lázaro 2007), [REC] (Balagueró and Plaza, 2007) and Mortadelo y Filemón (Mortadelo and Filemón, Fesser, 2003) which suggested a greater diversity of local output, as seen in blockbuster genre films such as El Orfanato as well as in the acclaimed auteur piece and Goya winner La Soledad (Solitary Fragments, Rosales, 2007). Moroever, he argued that ‘El cine de género ha vuelto’, in particular horror, suspense, fantasy and sci-fi, singling out for praise Nacho Vigalondo’s Cronocrímenes (Timecrimes, 2008). In broad terms, these observations were correct, yet de la Iglesia did not discuss the mechanics of the subsidy system itself, nor did he make any detailed reference to the large numbers of local titles which failed to achieve a viable, commercial release. At the end of May 2009, alongside Fernando Trueba, Eduardo Campoy and another 84 signatories, de la Iglesia rode to the defence of national film workers yet again. This time he headed a collective letter sent to El País, complaining bitterly about the publication of yet another negative report, critical of the Spanish cinema. In a piece entitled ‘No hay salas para tanto cine (español) (there are not enough screens for so much (Spanish) cinema) and subtitled ‘El sector rodó 173 filmes en 2008 gracias a las ayudas oficiales, más que en EE UU o Francia por habitante. Muchas ni se estrenan’ (The sector made 173 films in 2008 thanks to official subsidies, more per head than in the USA or France. Many are never screened), Javier Martín assembled evidence from Ministry of Culture figures which underpinned a devastating critique of official subsidies (Martín, 2009). In times of economic crisis, he argued, with spectator numbers, box office and market share falling significantly, film production had failed to reflect such adverse conditions. Indeed, rather than slow down, it had continued to grow, without any evident rationale. The motor: ‘ayudas oficiales’ (state support). Martín supported his case by using the government’s own figures as well as published comments by producers Pedro Pérez (FAPAE) and Carles Josep Solsona, Director of the Asociación de Productores Independientes de Cataluña (Association of Independent Producers in Catalonia). In brief, Martín regarded Spanish film production as effectively out of control. Excessive numbers of films were being made by too many small producers, far beyond what the market could reasonably absorb and with no evident

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criteria or rationale being imposed to distribute funding. Moreover, in many cases, he alleged, films were being made simply as vehicles for collecting subsidies in order to maintain people in work rather than as products designed for the market place and commercial exploitation. In their strong but measured collective response, de la Iglesia and his colleagues began by criticizing the editors of El País for having provided Martin with a two-page spread for his piece (Iglesia, 2009). Such generous coverage, it seems, reinforced the suspicion that El País had now abdicated its traditional role as unconditional mouthpiece of Spain’s film professionals by aligning itself with their critics. And while the collective letter did not seriously dispute Martín’s copious figures on output and subsidies, it argued that these were an insufficient basis to make a ‘deducción valorativa’ (qualitative judgement) about the quality of Spanish cinema or the competence of its specialists. Moreover, in their own right, de la Iglesia and his colleagues were also deeply concerned by plunging admissions totals, but they argued that conclusions about film spectatorship had to be far more nuanced, since the national situation was very complex and required deeper and more detailed analysis. And echoing sentiments expressed by Pérez earlier, they also admitted for the first time that a serious restructuring of the industry was now necessary. Yet, they rejected outright as fallacious and demagogic a comparison used by Martín, i.e. the idea that making a film could be compared to cultivating ‘lino’ (flax) in a bygone age, without harvesting it, simply to pocket official subsidies. They also called for a more detailed explanation of why it was that fewer screens were available to Spanish films, noting that 50 screens in Madrid were playing the same few American films, thanks largely to their overwhelming financial muscle and ability to invest huge sums in publicity and distribution. In other words, Spanish cinema faced significant disadvantages and inequalities; thus, it was invidious to compare the commercial possibilities of one small national cinema with those of Hollywood. Overall, this was a carefully-crafted, persuasive piece of writing, seeking to emphasize, not belligerence and sectarian interests, but the importance of analysis, nuance and detail in the matter of film policy and its effects. Yet, the collective letter seemed reluctant to engage directly on the substantive terrain of falling market share, subsidies and excess production. It also exploited a deep and unpleasant vein of anti-Americanism, common across the Spanish left, in order to scapegoat Hollywood hegemony yet again, rather than hold the PSOE government to account, for an anomalous distribution situation. And, having taken for granted the vast promotional power and support of PRISA media outlets for so

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many years, de la Iglesia and his colleagues seemed overanxious to remind El País of its prior loyalties and the need for their re-instatement. Such ideological alignments were no longer shared, however, by the new editorial team installed in the Culture and Film sections of the paper. Indeed, the appointments in 2007 from El Mundo of Borja Hermoso (new Cultura editor) and Carlos Boyero (new principal film and culture critic) had totally transformed the nature and tone of much of the paper’s cultural and film coverage. We have to assume that the chief executive, Javier Moreno, who made these appointments, did so for hard-headed, economic reasons (i.e. to reinvigorate a rudderless section of the paper, improve profile and boost circulation in dire, debt-laden conditions). Moreover, Moreno also hired a journalistic double-act who, at El Mundo, had made no secret of their hostility towards Spanish cinema, particularly the auteur variety. Again, we must assume he was aware of this.

The critic’s view: Carlos Boyero Historically, the Venice Film Festival has been one of the world’s premiere, showcase venues for both large and small, commercial and art cinema productions. Amenábar’s Los otros (The Others, 2001) premiered there and was also nominated for the Golden Lion award. In 2008, the 65th edition of the festival ran from 25 August–6 September. It was covered for El País by Carlos Boyero, its principal film critic and replacement for the legendary Angel Fernández Santos (who died in July 2004, after working for the paper since 1982). Over the 11 days of the event, Boyero’s dispatches consistently complained about the quality of the festival, the role of its organizer (Marco Müller) and the narrowness and lack of interest of its screening programme. The following brief selection of his catch-phrases, put-downs and rhetorical flourishes (4–6 September) provide a hint of his unique writing style, which has made him a national ‘diva’: ‘el rollo comprometido de cine de autor’ (the embarrassing spiel about auteur cinema), ‘exóticas cinematografías’ (peculiar films), ‘los coñazos que aquí exhiben’ (‘the crap they are showing here), ‘un pesadilla’ (a nightmare), ‘infinito tedio’ (infinite tedium), ‘imposturas verborreicas’ (verbose posturing), ‘impune ejercicio de sadismo’(free exercise in sadism), ‘calvario de 11 días’ (an 11-day calvary), ‘programa demencial’(a mad programme), ‘tortura’ (torture), and also ‘Gran parte de los festivales sirven exclusivamente para que determinada gente se gane la vida. En nombre de la bendita cultura y con el continuo mecenazgo de las subvenciones públicas’ (A large part

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of festivals simply help certain people make a living. In the blessed name of culture and with the continual patronage of public subsidy). In the week following the festival, on 13September 2008, in its ‘Cartas al Director’ (letters to the editor) section, El País published a letter signed by directors José Luis Guerín and Víctor Erice alongside film critic Miguel Marías and a certain Alvaro Arroba (who claimed the support of over 100 other signatories, all drawn from the world of international cinema). The collective letter, entitled ‘El País y el cine’ (El País and film), expressed its outrage at Boyero’s coverage of the Venice Film Festival. It accused him of unfairly impugning the festival’s emphasis on experimental film and ‘cine de autor’ or auteur cinema (which dominated the programme) by saying it was tedious and lacking in interest. It also attacked him for walking out of an early-morning screening (8.30 am) of Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin (2008), half-way through, and not bothering to return. Boyero’s walkout and his openly-admitted refusal to see the whole film were seen as a further insult and a dereliction of his professional duty as a critic and ‘informador, demostrando su falta de respeto hacia los lectores’ (reporter, demonstrating his lack of respect towards readers). Most seriously of all, perhaps, he was accused of advising Spanish distributors not to book the sort of auteurist films shown at Venice, while also ‘conminando a los exhibidores a no programarlas’ (exhorting exhibitors not to programme them). Boyero’s worrying attitude, argued the letter, was tantamount to the imposition of a ‘censura previa’ or prior censorship, a crude attempt to close down options and deprive spectators of their right to see important examples of noncommercial, World cinema. Finally, the letter expressed a profound concern not so much with the ‘punto de vista del redactor como el del medio al cual representa’ (the editor’s point of view as that of the medium it represents). It thus demanded clarification from the executive management of El País regarding its support for a certain conception of Spanish cinema (i.e. as an auteurist/art/experimental cinema) and whether Spain’s leading national daily was prepared to tolerate any longer Boyero’s insulting and un-professional conduct. In other words, between the lines, the letter called for Boyero to be sacked. Following his return to Spain, Boyero immersed himself in the San Sebastián film festival, kept his head down and made no immediate, personal or direct response to the Venice rumpus. This task was left to two colleagues and friends, fellow film critic for ABC Oti Rodríguez Marchante and film producer, distributor and exhibitor Enrique González Macho, Head of Alta Films, who both supported his stand.

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The so-called Boyero polemic of 2008 was in part a debate over journalistic responsibilities and freedoms and the borderline between legitimate and illegitimate comment. But it was also a conflict over competing definitions of film culture and the raison d’être of a certain kind of noncommercial, international, auteur cinema. Behind their lofty defence of free expression and cultural values, the supporters of the latter claimed that the new critics at El País were part of a campaign to denigrate and marginalize their stock-in-trade. They also painted Boyero as having significant influence and power among distributors and exhibitors and being capable of preventing their preferred forms of auteur cinema from being screened in Spain. Likely or not, they implicitly demanded action from PRISA to remove the source of the threat, and as Spain’s quasi-official, cultural benchmark, called upon El País to re-affirm its earlier commitments to an international, auteurist, (high) film culture. Their vociferous opponents, now in control of the Cultura section, were unlikely to accommodate such sectional interests or special pleading. Indeed what they regarded as cinematic cultural snobbery and pretentiousness clashed with their more commercial, populist notions of spectator pleasures and a concept of film whose main purposes are to engage and entertain. Hermoso and company thus rallied round Boyero and defended his right to free expression, however shrill and insulting. His employers did likewise. The following year, and reflecting a deeper, longstanding, personal antipathy to Spain’s principal international auteur and auteur cinema more widely, Boyero was at the centre of another, more explosive, critical controversy. When Almodovar’s seventeenth and latest feature Los abrazos rotos (Broken Embraces) was released commercially in Spain on 18 March 2009, Boyero’s press review was hostile (Boyero, 2009). His reporting from Cannes at the end of May 2009 (where Almodóvar’s film was in competition) was equally uncomplimentary. Forewarned by El Deseo (his production base in Madrid) and made aware that Boyero had refused to attend the screening at Cannes (having seen the film twice before), Almodóvar finally confronted his critics, i.e. Boyero himself but also his editor-in-chief Borja Hermoso. He did so by way of an extraordinary, 13-page long, 8-section blog on his website, entitled ‘Crónica negra’ (black chronicle) from Cannes, uploaded on 26 May 2009.3 This was followed by a shorter, ‘Segunda Crónica’ (second chronicle), two days later. Almodóvar’s denunciation was in three parts. Firstly, he argued that far from producing a fair-minded, impartial, reasoned piece of film criticism, Boyero had simply projected his well-known phobias, biases

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and dislikes onto his latest film. For the director, Boyero’s review was thus non-critique, 75 per cent of which consisted of ‘despotricar sobre mi persona’ (carrying on about me myself), the other 25 per cent barely mentioned the film save to condemn it as a product of ‘onanismo mental’ (mental onanism). Secondly, Boyero’s ‘thuggish style’ was deeply insulting and a disgrace to film journalism yet it was allegedly supported and encouraged by his editor Borja Hermoso. Almodóvar thus saw himself as a victim of a deliberate, personalized ‘operación de acoso y derribo parásito en la que llevan empeñados tantos años’ (hounding campaign of parasitic demolition which they have insisted on for so many years). Thirdly, the director was aghast that Spain’s most prestigious daily newspaper could not have sent a more professional film critic to provide serious and more measured coverage of the leading film festival in the world. He ended: ‘Vivimos en un país libre. Los críticos y los periodistas no son intocables. Ningún cuidadano debe serlo’ (We live in a free country. Critics and journalists are not untouchable. No citizen should be). A communiqué from an editorial committee of El País, written in defence of Boyero and Borja Hermoso, was immediately prepared, rejecting Almodóvar’s attacks against their colleagues. It also described his blogs as a tantrum (pataleta), fiercely criticized his ‘obsessive campaign’ and reminded him that ‘Es mejor que se aplique el cuento de su propia frase. Él tampoco es sagrado’ (He had better apply his own comment to himself. He is not sacred either: ‘Almodóvar carga contra la cobertura’, 2009). As in the previous case, this episode raised many issues not only in terms of the colossal egos of star critics and directors or the inviolability of their work. It also had to do with the functioning and purposes of film criticism in Spain and beyond, the role of the film critic, his/ her remit and the critic’s obligations towards his employers, festival hosts, fellow critics, readers and fans. For example, Almodóvar wrote: ‘un crítico debe argumentar cada una de sus aseveraciones, para eso le pagan’ (a critic must give reasons for his assertions, that’s what they pay him for, Segunda crónica). He also demanded reasoned argument and impartiality. Yet, given the many forms which film criticism takes, it is arguably unwise to be so prescriptive. In Boyero’s case, the degree of subjective framing of his criticism is particularly high. However uncharitable, deprecatory and outré, Boyero’s festival coverage may have some salutary effects. It can help remind us that sometimes, even the most highly esteemed, international auteur directors might well be treading water or worrying too much about technique, style and cinephilia to the detriment of content, intent and the wider world, not to mention entertainment.

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Such was the fuss over Almodóvar’s mammoth blogs against Boyero that it even provoked the intervention of the ‘defensora del lector’ (reader’s advocate) at El País, a kind of public ombudsman, who deals with readers’ complaints. Created in 1985, the post (for one year only) is currently held by senior, in-house journalist Milagros Pérez Oliva, appointed in February 2009, who used to cover health issues for the paper. Her astute commentary on the Boyero case was published at the end of May 2009 and couched in terms of a clash of cultures, in which freedom of expression was deemed paramount and overrode personal insult. Oliva also drew support for her case from Spain’s foremost, internationally-acknowledged, veteran media scholar, Román Gubern, who suggested: ‘Boyero significa en realidad una vuelta a la crítica de sensibilidad… vuelve a la vieja tradición y cultiva una crítica de la visceralidad, estridente y poco convencional, que en la lucha por el mercado, puede resultar atractiva porque alimenta la controversia’ (Boyero really means a return to a feeling critique...a return to the old tradition and [which] cultivates a visceral critique, strident and unconventional, which in the struggle for market share can prove attractive because it feeds controversy, cited in Pérez Oliva, 2009).

The scholar’s view: Román Gubern At the beginning of 2008, Gubern was asked by El País to write a piece explaining why Spanish films did not seem to be attractive to national audiences. The published version of the article carried the title: ¿Por qué no gusta el cine español? (Why don’t we like Spanish cinema? Gubern, 2008). This wording was criticized by Alex de la Iglesia in his own ‘Carta a El País…’, mentioned earlier, as ‘tendentious’, because ‘parece que existe la intención de darlo por hecho. Sería más respectable decir ¿Gusta el cine español? (it seems that he means to take it [the dislike of Spanish cinema] as a given. It would be better to ask: do we like Spanish cinema?’. Gubern might well have agreed with de la Iglesia’s observation and his request for respect, since his own original and far more neutral title: ‘El cine español ante el Mercado (Spanish cinema in terms of the market)’ was dropped in favour of the more provocative heading. As a result of this editorial change, de la Iglesia (mistakenly) saw Gubern’s analysis as yet more evidence of a negative media campaign emanating from the Culture section of El País, somehow determined to pre-judge Spanish cinema as unpopular and lacking in interest for mainstream audiences. However, had de la Iglesia read Gubern’s text a little more closely, he would have seen that the media scholar explicitly refers

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to the imposed title of his article as a ‘reductionist formulation’, thus acknowledging its weaknesses and expressing some degree of distance from it. He would also have seen in writing that Gubern’s aim (harking back to his original title) was to use the article as a springboard for a ‘reflexión sobre el actual mercado cinematográfico’ (reflection on the contemporary film market). Gubern begins his analysis by placing Spain in context among the five major, European ‘potencias audioviosuales relevantes’ (relevant audiovisual powers), which include France, Germany, the UK and Italy. He also reminds us that historically, Spanish cinema ‘arrastra cierto descrédito cultural’, because of the attitudes and inertia of anti-Franco, intellectual elites. These were the same elites who invested heavily in a certain oppositional filmic discourse and tradition based on ‘una Espana atávica y diferencial’ (an atavistic Spain understood as different) – seen in ¡Bienvenido Mr Marshall! (Welcome Mr. Marshall, Berlanga 1951), Calle Mayor (Main Street, Bardem 1956) and Viridiana (Buñuel 1961) – which thankfully has been swept away by economic modernization. He then briefly mentions the role of Pilar Miró in the 1980s in helping to rehabilitate a quality auteur cinema, by means of generous (though rather less numerous) official subsidies. However, the downside of such a policy was to marginalize post-Francoist commercial cinema and distance it from ‘el gran público’ (the general public), the impact of which is still being felt today. Since then, he argues, the variety of films on offer has widened substantially, to the point where four generations of directors (from veterans such as Saura, Camus, Aranda, Portabella and Guerín right down to debutants like Juan Antonio Bayona and Nacho Vigalondo) produce a range of types including social realism, period film, feminist film, comedies, musicals, action, thrillers, horror, fantasy, animation, experimental cinema, etc. On more specific matters, one of the key issues which seriously trouble Gubern is what he calls the ‘coercive hegemony’ (hegemonía coercitiva) of the American majors, whose branches in Spain continue to exploit block booking to their advantage (i.e. the imposition of ‘lotes’ or bundles of films on exhibitors in order to secure and exhibit an American ‘A’ release or blockbuster), even though this practice is illegal. In other words, the American distributors fail to observe anti-trust laws which, in their own country, the authorities apply with the utmost rigour. He also argues that the Americans also take advantage of ‘nuestro regalo del idioma’ (our gift of language), i.e. the use of dubbing rather than subtitling for foreign language films (a throwback to Francoist cultural policy in the early 1940s). (Unusually, Gubern fails to ask why block booking has not been stamped out in Spain, in a national industry whose market share is

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the lowest among the major producers in Europe. Remarkably, the recent Ley del Cine has nothing to say on this matter).4 And even though Spain enjoys the occasional blockbuster success (such as Mortadelo y Filemón), the Americans seem adept at acquiring remake rights for such national hits as El orfanato and [REC], as well as Amenábar’s Abre los ojos (Open Your Eyes, 1997) and Vigalondo’s Cronocrímenes. On the issue of industrial structure, Gubern reminds the reader of a number of significant Spanish commercial successes over the last decade (Los Otros, Mar Adentro (The Sea Inside, Amenábar 2004), the Torrente trilogy (Segura 1998, 2001 and 2005) Mortadelo y Filemón, Todo sobre mi madre (All about My Mother, Almodóvar 199), Volver (Almodóvar, 2006) El orfanato etc). However, against a handful of such relatively highgrossing, box office draws (from Amenábar, Segura, Almodóvar, Fesser, Bayona, etc.), he counterposes ‘una multitud de fracasos’ (a multitude of failures), i.e. the vast majority of yearly output which does not cover costs, fails to get a release or if released, fails to attract a viable audience. In other words, the current industrial model for Spanish film production is lop-sided and uneconomic. As Gubern points out, market share and industrial stability are so strongly predicated on a few key directors releasing profitable films every year that ‘cuando faltan estas locomotoras, la cuota del mercado del cine español se hunde’ (when these forces are absent, Spanish cinema’s market share plunges). Moreover, in relation to the size of the domestic market and its capacity for successful absorbtion, for Gubern, local, yearly film production ‘parece excesivamente abultada’ (seems overly large), way beyond the 60–70 or so titles recommended by producers’ spokesman Pedro Pérez. Indeed, as noted above, in the last few years, Spain has been producing films at levels only equalled by the USA and France, whose market is a third larger, and whose enormous domestic market share of 45 per cent is unthinkable in the Spanish context. Even the far more modest European average of 20 per cent share remains a virtually unsurmountable challenge. By comparison, Spain’s recent levels of market share have oscillated between 7 per cent and 18 per cent, averaging 13–14 per cent. Such a consistent lack of overall commercial appeal, poor box office and excessive levels of ‘inflation of production’, argues Gubern, reflect the continuing, outmoded structure of the national business. That is, we find a few large film producers (4–5 companies, making 5 or more films per year), alongside ‘la atomización empresarial’ (the atomization of the industry), but with very few mid-sized companies making quality or ‘A’ feature films for big audiences. In other words, the Spanish film ‘industry’ continues to be dominated by well over 100 small producers who make one film per year (low-budget, uncompetitive, auteur/festival cinema, with little appeal to

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wider audiences) and then disband. Such entrenched ‘minifundismo’ (fragmentation), encouraged by official subsidy, fails to generate economies of scale or technological innovation. And given low budgets, low quality levels and virtually no funds for promotion and marketing, the chances of attracting a distributor let alone an audience are slim. Finally, apart from a very few, successful, large-scale productions (The Oxford Murders (de la Iglesia 2008), El orfanato, Los abrazos rotos, Los Otros, Mar Adentro and Amenábar’s forthcoming Ágora), Gubern pointedly reminds us that in foreign markets, Spanish cinema remains ‘the great unknown’, largely invisible, unseen, un-exported and seriously underpromoted. Also, he points out that, although increasingly high quality and more diverse nowadays, Spanish mainstream genre productions are being made in the very areas (action/thriller/suspense/comedy etc.) in which the Americans are also immensely powerful and where they can compete far better via their star system and their massive promotional and distribution budgets. And as if this diagnosis were not enough, in relation to audiences and new viewing platforms, Gubern also emphasises the crucial, spatial shift of the contemporary period ‘del cine en butaca al cine en el sofá’ (from the cinema of the stalls to the cinema of the sofa). Powered by technological change, web downloading and the spread of fast broadband, the domestication and privatization (via multiple platforms and screens) of media consumption are increasingly evident in new habits and practices which continue to challenge the raison d’être of Spain’s film industry in its present configuration.

Conclusion Writing on the financial structure of Spanish filmmaking just over ten years ago, Peter Besas argued that because of ‘a varied system of subsidies and pre-sales, which enable filmmakers to limit the risk factor to a minimum, if not to nil…profits are assured at the financing stage and not at the box office’. Such ‘minimal-risk financing’, proposed Besas, shapes the type and quality of the films made, with ‘audience acceptance treated as an afterthought’. As a result, ‘the films all too often turn out to be insular, self-indulgent, uninspiredly experimental, pretentious… hopelessly amateurish…rarely seen outside Spain and barely within Spain’, mostly ‘ending their aborted careers as a government statistic’ (Besas, 1997, p. 242). More than a decade later, it is difficult not recognize in the present situation strong echoes of Besas’ gloomy conclusions regarding subsidies, financial risk-taking, audiences, film style and poor distribution, at home and abroad. While, in strict terms, it is true to say

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that the new ‘majors’ in Spanish film production, are arguably the television companies Tele5 and Antena3 (with box office takings of 40 million euros, and audiences of 7 million in 2008, source www.mcu.es), Spanish cinema remains a small producer’s cinema, in a still highly atomized sector. Yet, if there is a crisis in the business, it is not in production. As we have seen, since 2000, this area has experienced uninterrupted growth, with a notable ballooning of yearly totals since 2004/5 (www.mcu.es). The problem does not lie primarily in exhibition either, since roughly 350–400 Spanish titles are screened every year (source mcu.es). The main problem lies in the audience (or lack of it) for Spanish cinema. Between 2000 and 2004, average yearly attendance totals at film theatres stood at 20 million. Since the PSOE government came to power in March 2004, these have plummeted by 35 per cent, as noted earlier (www. mcu.es). Unlike the new Minister of Culture, Ángeles González Sinde, I see little evidence of illegal downloading and file sharing via P2P and eMule as a cause of falling attendances for Spanish films. This is because web pirates, by and large, prefer American titles compared to European; as for Spanish titles, ‘cine español, ni gratis’ (you can’t even give Spanish cinema away). However, the Minister is correct to pinpoint the enormous negative impact of illicit downloading on the music CD market (which has virtually disappeared) and on plunging DVD sales, which are suffering the same fate (see García Calero, 2009). As for American hegemony and the issue of unfair competition, the same situation applies in the other main filmmaking countries in Europe. Yet, Italy, Germany, the UK and France normally achieve levels of market share well above 20 per cent, while Spain always struggles, as Pedro Pérez has consistently pointed out. The problem here is that, Spanish filmmaking is not primarily conceived as a commercial operation, which designs products for markets and audience exhibition; rather, it is a predominantly producer-led process whose products are ‘sold’ largely to government funding bodies as ‘cultural goods’, which will guarantee them access to public subsidy. This explains the disproportionate production totals of the last few years, during which producers have concentrated their energies on lobbying government departments and committees, not only in Madrid, but increasingly in the Autonomous Communities (Galicia, Catalonia, Andalusia etc), which all have their own Culture departments and television stations. These transactions are negotiated largely through the rhetoric of art, culture and national identity, often invoking the latter as a defence against globalization and American hegemony. Not surprisingly, the funding of feature production appears not to be capped according to a specific quota nor are the funding criteria well defined.

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At bottom, as Pérez, the Sigma Dos survey and Gubern all make abundantly clear, Spanish producers and directors fail to make enough appealing, mainstream cinema which both engages and entertains wider audiences. This is not only a question of subject matter and production values. Spain’s subsidy system, especially over the last few years, has been guided not so much by a clear policy as a rule of thumb: ‘café para todos’ (coffee for all), that is, a working practice of funding as many projects as possible, in as many areas as possible, almost irrespective of quality or originality. Hence the deluge of small, single company, low-budget, auteur films. It is not surprising that these products struggle to capture the interest of distributors or the support of audiences, since promotion and marketing are not prioritized. Moreover, it makes little sense to fund well over 100 such titles per year, when 20–30 per cent of such output is never screened and the majority of the remainder fail to make any money at the box office. As Gubern argues, in this context, subsidies urgently need to be re-packaged and re-focused on say, 10-20 mid-budget projects, which have a fighting chance of competing in a crowded market for spectators. However, as Boyero’s critiques of what he calls Spain’s ‘insufferable’ auteur cinema suggest, such reforms require a fairly radical change of attitude and mentality. Certain indications of a distinct shift in attitudes are now appearing. As noted near the beginning of this essay, in light of the political fallout from the critical remarks by Senator Van Halen and Pedro Pérez’s extraordinary, public volte-face on production totals, Culture Minister César Antonio Molina was forced to call an urgent meeting of some industry representatives. The meeting took place on 25 March 2009. Those invited included mainly producers and directors. Other interested parties, such as bankers, television companies, the press etc. were left out. The main purpose of the meeting was to address the recent bad press and public criticisms of government policy but also to reaffirm the standing of the Ministry of Culture, the Minister himself and the leading role of ICAA in effectively delivering financial support to the film industry. (In other words, the PR outcome of the meeting was meant to show that the politicians still enjoyed the confidence of key players in the sector). During the meeting of some 22 individuals, firstly, a group of three of the most influential producers (Pedro Pérez, Andrés Vicente Gómez and Gerardo Herrero) and then virtually the whole gathering, expressed their total lack of confidence not only in the Minister but also in the Head of ICAA, Fernando Lara, who was also present. Egged on and ‘steered’ to some extent by the ‘big three’ (Pérez, Gómez and Herrero), the view of the meeting was gradually shifted towards a

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very bad-tempered denunciation of government policy. In particular, regarding the Ley de Cine 2007, profound disquiet was expressed at the abject slowness of policy delivery. After spending well over three years working on the text of the Ley de Cine (2007), vast tracts of the new law had still not come properly into force, eighteen months after ratification (see Heredero and Reviriego, 2009). Very soon after the meeting, during Zapatero’s Semana Santa ministerial review of 2009, Molina was summarily removed from his post and replaced by Ángeles González Sinde. A few days later, Fernando Lara was also replaced by Ignasi Guardans as Head of ICAA (Instituto de Cine y de las Artes Audiovisuales). There is no doubt that the aforementioned ‘big three’ producers, particularly Pedro Pérez, were instrumental in what Cahiers du Cinema España called a veritable ‘seismic’ ministerial reshuffle in Spain’s film administration and Ministry of Culture (Heredero and Reviriego, 2009). It seems likely that much of the present Ley de Cine will be heavily revised in order to incorporate a new set of measures. These will very probably include a more rational distribution of official subsidies, a form of capping or set of quotas across a range of funding categories (and thus a fall in the total numbers of films funded) as well as increased subsidy for mid-sized projects. What may also emerge is a mechanism or overarching body (an Agencia Estatal del Audiovisual) to facilitate policy delivery, i.e. oversee the coordination between the various Ministries (Culture, Work, Home Office, Treasury, etc.) and the main lobby groups involved in the film industry, including television. Moreover, Pedro Pérez has admitted publicly that ‘El cine que producimos no conecta con el que quiere la gente. Eso es incuestionable’ (The cinema we produce does not relate to what people want, that’s irrefutable, cited in Martín, 2009). The erstwhile champion of state subsidies now seems to accept that in their present form, they not only mitigate much of the financial risk for film producers. They also encourage forms of film output which singularly fail to convince distributors and exhibitors to book them. They also fail to attract the interest and engagement of mainstream audiences. What we see here may not quite signal the end of auteur cinema in Spain as the dominant paradigm, but it does suggest the beginning of a rebalancing of Spanish filmmaking in favour of the spectator.

Notes 1. See, ‘¡Extra! ¡Extra! ¡Extra! El cine español no gusta a nadie’ at http://vivir. laoffoffcritica.com/2007/06/13. See also, ‘Más de la mitad de los españoles considera ‘mediocre o poco interesante’ el cine español’, at http://www.

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elmundo.es/elmundo/2007/06/12/cultura/1181653285.html and http:// osukarunokabutowayofthesamurai.blogspot.com/2007_06_01_archive. html. All accessed, 12.11.09. 2. The phrase ‘puto cine español’ had already been adopted and explored by Nacho Vigalondo in his blog. See: http://blogs.elpais.com/nachovigalondo/2007/07/ puto-cine-espao.html. Accessed 16.06.09. 3. See Almodóvar’s blog at:http://www.pedroalmodovar.es/. On the main page, click on ‘español’, go to the ‘textos anteriores’ window for his ‘Crónica Negra’ (26.5.09) and ‘Segunda Crónica’ (28.05.09), at http://www.pedroalmodovar. esPAB_ES_11T.asp Accessed 12.11.09. 4. Regarding the issue of dubbing, see Barry Jordan and Mark Allinson (2005), Spanish Cinema. A Student’s Guide (London: Hodder Arnold), pp. 15–16.

References ‘Alex de la Iglesia: “Se maltrata y se dan falsos datos del cine español”’ (2009), http://ecodiario.eleconomista.es 25 May. ‘Almodóvar carga contra la cobertura de El País sobre el Festival de Cannes’ (2009), El País 27 May. ‘Ángeles González Sinde, nueva ministra de cultura’ (2009), ElCultural.es, 7 April. Besas, P. (1997), ‘The Financial Structure of Spanish Cinema’ in M. Kinder (ed.), Refiguring Spain. Cinema/Media/Representation, (Durham and London: Duke University Press), 241–59. Boyero, C. (2009), ‘Cine, La Película de la Semana Los Abrazos Rotos, “¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto?”’, El País 18 March. Carballo, Antonio (2009) ‘De algunas subvenciones inútiles y otros desencuentros’, Cine y Tele Online 21 May, http://www.cineytele.com/especiales. php?nid=349. C.S. (2004), ‘Alerta por las bajas taquillas del cine español’, Periódico de Aragón 21 September. ‘El misterio de cine español’ (2008), El País 24 January. Encuesta de Sigma Dos (2007), elmundo.es/2007/06/12/cultura/11811653285. García, R. (2009), ‘La Academia de Cine elige como presidente a Álex de la Iglesia’, El País, 21 June. García, R. and R.G. Gómez (2007), ‘Guerra total en el cine español’, ElPaís.com, 21 January. García Calero, J. (2009), ‘Cultura: Ministerio que no ceja’, ABC 7 April. Gubern, R. (2008), ‘¿Por qué no gusta el cine español?’, El País, 6 February. Heredero, C. and C. Reviriego (2009), ‘Crisis, tensiones y cambios en el cine español: crónica de un seísmo’, Cahiers du cinéma: España, 23, 45–50. Iglesia, A. de la (2008), ‘Carta a El País de un cineaste del país’, El País, 6 February. ——— (2009), ‘Puntualización’, El País, 30 May. Martín, J. (2009) ‘No hay salas para tanto cine español’, El Pais, 21 April. ‘Molina: “El cine español no vive de las subvenciones”’ (2009), EcoDiario 24 March, http://ecodiario.eleconomista.es/sociedad/noticias/1120011/03/09/. Pablos, Emiliano de (2007) ‘La industria cinematográfica española, bajo presión, Variety, 24 September, www. variety.com/article/VR1117972604.html. Pérez Oliva, M. (2009), ‘Choque de culturas en la crítica de cine’, El País, 31 May.

3 Al mal tiempo, buena cara: Spanish Slackers, Time-images, New Media and the New Cinema Law Rob Stone

As any good Godardian will attest, the truly unique art of film is not montage, which is the basis of linear narrative, but collage, which is based on association. Likewise, this chapter associates Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Luc Godard with the theory of the time-image, as well as the French New Wave, the New Hollywood of the 1970s, and the successive slacker generations of filmmakers in the American cinema of the early 1990s and now. Gradually, this chapter will come to focus on Spanish cinema as a case study of the convergence of new screen technologies and the Internet that heralds a powerful new beginning, one for which slackers’ use of the time-image provides the form, content and meaning of a relevant and resonant counter-culture. Students of international cinema might well remark upon how the lure of subtitled sex, traditionally an enduring appeal of art-house cinema and DVD distribution, has recently been shoved aside by the crossover thrills of horror. The so-called ‘world cinema’ sections of actual and virtual online stores are currently plagued by what is known and marketed as Asian Extreme, but this horror boom is also associated with Spanish cinema, where ostensibly generic films with sophisticated production values such as Los otros (The Others, Amenábar 2001), El orfanato (The Orphanage, Bayona 2007), El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro 2006,) and the purposefully ad-hoc likes of [REC] (Balagueró and Plaza 2007) have attracted international audiences that unite thrillseeking fan-boys with metaphor-hunting critics. In Spanish cinema, where generic conventions have often provided vehicles for symbolism and metaphor, the monsters of El laberinto del fauno and the haunted house of El orfanato are linked to El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive, Erice 1973) and Cría cuervos (Raise Ravens, Saura 1975), both respectively and respectfully. Metaphors apart, they are scary enough to 41

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be crossover hits; but an industry that relies on the popularity of certain genres will always be chasing fads and prey to a fickle audience. Thus, at the risk of wrong-footing the reader, this chapter will dive under the choppy seas of international markets and look instead for undercurrents that may indicate a more long-term prognosis for Spanish cinema. Speaking of undercurrents, perhaps the most notable ebb and flow yet witnessed in the history of cinema is that which the French philosopher and theorist Gilles Deleuze identified in his comparison of the movement-image and the time-image. In analysing pre-World War Two cinema, Deleuze recognised the movement-image as the basis of narrative film and the vast majority of films as just a linear succession of them. The movement-image was one that served the plot and hurried the narrative’s resolution. It was not so much created by camera movement as by editing, which engineered its meaningful juxtaposition with the succession of movement-images on either side in a sequence that served generic conventions and narrative expectations, thereby satisfying audiences of the ‘movement-image-universe’. The ends and means of this process was, as Deleuze states, that ‘image in movement constantly sinks to the state of cliché’ (2005, p. 20). Essentially, this theorizing proposes that within a narrative based on generic conventions (and therefore movement-images) no true representation of time can be perceived, at least not in the Bergsonian sense that ‘time is what is happening, and more than that, it is what causes everything to happen’ (1992, p. 12). Real time, for Henri Bergson was by nature incomplete: ‘it is flux, the continuity of transition, it is change itself that is real’ (1992, p. 16). In opposition, the intellect of any commissioned film editor did not countenance time as fluid, but sought to chop and change between movement-images so as to bring the resolution closer. The Bergsonian paradox of time as something that is always departing and always arriving, with ‘its essence being to flow, not one of its parts is still there when another part comes along’ (1992, p. 12), was thus subjugated to the purpose of the movement-image, which in its haste to tell a story deliberately avoided the digressive, distracting ‘uninterrupted up-surge of novelty’ (1992, p. 18) of Bergsonian time. Thus, the Hollywood kind of classical narrative cinema was built on movement-images that aimed to narrate and entertain within a cost-effective, standardized duration of a motion picture that sought profit for the studio that made it. The expression of real time within a genre film, whether it be a romance or a western, was thus avoided by an intellectual calibration of the appropriate length of each shot. Time, as it were, was merely subject to the

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movement that took place within shots of such actions as a kiss or a punch, which would last no longer than the narrative required. However, Deleuze contends that a crisis of the movement-image occurred in post-World War Two cinema, when the formula for effecting narrative through a succession of movement-images proved incapable of expressing or reflecting upon the recent horrors of global warfare and the Holocaust. Indeed, the argument persists when a film such as Schindler’s List (Spielberg 1993) attests to a dominion of movementimages that does not allow for adequate reflection but pushes the narrative on with a compulsion to ‘show’ what is unshowable. Here, for example, the real horror of the showers in Auschwitz is not expressed or contemplated but rather assuaged by Spielberg’s hurrying to the movement: images of water instead of Zyklon B being showered upon a cast that is further removed from reality by being filmed in black and white. Nevertheless, at least Schindler’s List does deal with the Holocaust, if only as it concerns the occasion of a non-Jewish hero. As Deleuze observed, most post-World War Two cinema simply failed to express such horrors and, instead, hurriedly bypassed the inexpressible. For Deleuze, this signified a betrayal of the potential of cinema to assume its mission as the art form of the twentieth century. Reflection upon such occurrences required the expression of time, but this was anathema to mainstream cinema and therefore missing from the films of all but a few European filmmakers in the 1950s and 1960s. To wit, Deleuze observed that in certain post-war films ‘the subordination of time to movement was reversed, time ceases to be the measure of normal movement, it increasingly appears for itself and creates paradoxical movements’ (2007, p. xi). He called these instances of time appearing for itself ‘time-images’ and he identified them in films in which the ‘sensory-motor schema is loosened and a little time in the pure state […] rises up to the surface of the screen’ (2007, p. xii). The time-image embodied stasis, reflection, alienation and resistance and its occurrence inspired Deleuze’s observation that the trauma of World War Two brought about a situation in which ‘the sensory motor schema was shattered from the inside’ (2007, p. 39). That is to say, a crisis of the movement-image occurred that Deleuze deemed essential so that what he identified as a new ‘thinking image […] beyond movement’ (2005, p. 219) could reflect upon the unrepresentable: the recent warfare, genocide, whole scale destruction and the crisis of faith that had also inspired existentialist philosophies. Instead of obeying the intellect, which surely warranted some blame for the horrors that had been rationalised by their perpetrators, the artists, filmmakers and

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philosophers of the age revisited Bergson’s theory of intuition as the key to experiencing (their) time. Their interest in and insistence upon the temporality of creation enabled the rejection of the dominant concept of measurable, deterministic time in the cause of new understandings that underpinned the films of several European filmmakers, who consequently shared a concern with the form, content and meaning of the kind of long takes that Deleuze would call ‘time-images’. The ‘time-image’ is a vehicle for a changing, incomplete consciousness that in a Bergsonian sense expresses something like a moral response that is temporalized and in a constant state of becoming (Bergson 2003). This theory is one of many that are threaded through Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement Image (1983, reprinted 2005) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985, reprinted 2007), in which he argues that film does not represent an external reality but a means of arranging and expressing time and movement. Because cinema does not describe figures in movement (as would a still photograph) but rather cinema’s own movement reveals the figures (2005, p. 5) so Deleuze maintains that cinema was ‘capable of thinking the production of the new’ (2005, p. 8). One indisputable example of this is the scene in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (Nostalgia, 1983) where a man makes penance by wading up the aisle of a ruined and flooded church to place a lit candle on the remnants of the altar. The camera moves with him in an excruciating tracking shot that is repeated because the candle is blown out and he has to go back, touch the wall, relight and start again. The shot and the scene express the time it takes for him to complete his penance and ensures that the duration (what Bergson called durée) is experienced by the audience. Thus, this is a true time-image in which the form (the long take) and the content (the penance) are meaningfully fused. Correlatively, Deleuze surmised that the nature of film was to unfold in time and in expounding upon this he destabilized traditional understandings of representation and caused a significant shift in contemporary film studies by treating film ‘as event rather than representation’ (2005, p. 258). He did this by emphasizing the temporal nature of creation and thought on film. He further claimed that by embracing the potential of the time-image, cinema was enabled to shake off its reputation as nothing but a poor copy of other media. It was no longer a composite art that took its structure from the novel, its technology from photography and its modes of distribution and reception from the theatre. Instead and in contrast to this fossilization of spectacle, the time-image was the primary element of a uniquely evolving cinema. Admittedly, writing towards the end of the twentieth century, Deleuze devised a somewhat simplistic division between popular cinema as it

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was perpetrated by Hollywood and the European traditions of ‘art house’ cinema and, besides, he arguably did not see enough films besides the elitist, modernist traditions of Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alain Resnais and others to make his writing on the cinema complete. Nevertheless, he did seek out and identify enough plausible time-images in the work of these and other filmmakers to support his argument that their occurrence was the true and unique art of the cinema. Time-images are those in which we see and experience the passing of time itself without the mediating influence of the protagonist or plot. As shall be argued in respect of Spanish cinema of the time, certain images in films by Carlos Saura and Víctor Erice were thereby released from their subordination to a tradition of narrative in mainstream Spanish cinema that served the official, propagandist exposition of nationhood. Rejecting this official version of history and the present, these images became subject to a more intuitive notion of time instead. Indeed, the political resonance of the time-image in Spanish cinema comes from the fact that, by their very nature, time-images cannot be integrated within narrative and generic conventions. ‘A little time in the pure state’ destabilizes the narrative mastery of space and it releases characters from narrative obligations. Forced to fill the time-image with something other than cliché, they confront the abyss of their existence beyond the narrative, while their dislocation is transmitted to an audience that is similarly adrift without narrative or genre conventions to show them the way. Thus, confrontational thought appears in shots that withhold functional spectacle and closure. The time-image is revolutionary, but by its refusal to act, rather than by its action. Correlatively, it is certainly apt that some of the more striking timeimages of 1960s’ cinema were themselves the product of inaction, alienation and dislocation. In his biography of Jean-Luc Godard, Richard Brody suggests that the filmmaker’s innovative long takes in Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux (My Life to Live, 1962) were simply because Godard could not be bothered to set up and shoot different angles of a scene, with the result that he inadvertently generated a new film language that expressed temporalized reflection and empathy (Brody 2008, pp. 129–41). The key is that ‘not being bothered’ requires a great effort of resistance to established conventions and dominant expectations, because only the authentic ‘wasting of time’ engenders alternative priorities to such things as conformity, tradition, consumerism and nationalism. In À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960), in which Belmondo is obsessed with Humphrey Bogart, Une femme est une femme (A Woman is a Woman, 1961), which riffs on the tropes of musicals,

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Band à parte (Band of Outsiders 1964) and Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Alphaville, a strange case of Lemmy Caution, 1965), which both play with the conventions of gangster films and silent comedies, Godard ensured that although the imagination of the French New Wave had been colonized by Hollywood cool, he, being slothful, had reflected upon this enough to sense and express betrayal. Indeed, it is partly the appearance of the time-image in Pierrot Le Fou (1965) and Masculin féminin: 15 faits précis (Masculine Feminine: In 15 Acts, 1966) that demands reflection on the corruptive power of these films’ images and points to the increasing politicisation of Godard. For example, one of Godard’s greatest time-images is the eight-minute traffic jam in Week End (Weekend, 1967), which prefigures the student riots of 1968 and Godard’s own descent into Maoist dogma. Here, the stuttering, hornblaring passage through a traffic jam takes a full eight minutes, which is also the duration of the impassive tracking shot that allows for a tapestry of bourgeois decay to unfurl before concluding with a limb-strewn accident that indifferent drivers speed past on their way to what Godard signals to be not only the end of the film, but also (in an infamous intertitle) ‘the end of cinema’. The time-image is thus a cinematic form that tends to enshrine alienation as an aesthetic mode (Brody 2008, p. 146). In comparison to mainstream narrative cinema, it strays close to a Marxist philosophy that is put into practice in a fusion of form and content that betrays the consumerist product of the film in which it appears. Its point is a kind of enforced empathy that makes the audience aware of its own lack of agency in a social and political context. The globalizing triumph of the movement-image in mainstream cinema is that it does not give audiences time to think for themselves; which is fine because most audiences do not want to. The subversive power of the time-image, on the other hand, is that it dislocates the protagonist and the audience from the linear narrative, meaning they no longer have the power to influence their situation. Unable to act, the protagonist experiences the passing of time, as does the audience, which often rejects but sometimes can be induced to reflect upon its meaning. As in Week End this reflection may prompt the politicization of time-images, particularly as this relates to the notion of national narratives, or narratives of nationhood. Benedict Anderson famously argued that the nation was ‘an imagined political community’ (1983, p. 6) and that the time of the nation was linear and progressive, ensuring that the nation came to be defined as a ‘solid community moving steadily down (or up) history’ (1983, p. 26). However, Georg Sorenson has more recently observed the dissolution of nation states in Europe and heralded a new ‘community

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of sentiment’ (2003, p. 83) in their place. David Martin-Jones has argued that Deleuze is relevant to this transition because national history and identity is mostly explored through narrative (Martin-Jones 2006). That is to say, although a montage of movement-images constitutes and enables one linear timeline of nationhood, the displacement of the narrative by time-images deterritorializes nationhood and so overthrows its dominant myths. The occurrence of a time-image signifies modernity’s confrontation with its own limitations and is the means by which the films of Godard, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Wenders, Carlos Saura and Víctor Erice acknowledged and reflected upon the difficulties of nations such as France, Italy, the Soviet Union, Germany and Spain. Indeed, it is partly the struggle between movement-images and time-images in the films of Saura and Erice that signals conflict about the national identity of Francoist Spain. In the cinema of Carlos Saura, time-images may be identified in several sequences in La caza (The Hunt, 1966) that allow for reflection on subversive imagery, particularly the perverse observation of a sleeping Paco played by Alfredo Mayo, who may be identified by the audience as a surrogate for General Franco on account of having played the supposed alter ego of the dictator in the film Raza (Race aka. El espíritu de una raza, Sáenz de Heredia 1942), which was based on a story by Franco himself. Saura would further deploy what might be identified as timeimages in the more contemplative and confrontational shots of La madriguera (Honeycomb aka. The Warren, 1969), El jardín de las delicias (The Garden of Delights, 1970), La prima Angélica (Cousin Angelica, 1974) and Cría cuervos. Moreover, Saura’s experimentation with the filming of dance in post-Franco Spain in films such as Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding, 1981), Carmen (1983), El amor brujo (A Love Bewitched aka. Love, The Magician, 1986), Sevillanas (1992), Flamenco (1995) and Salomé (2002) has involved a particularly idiosyncratic investigation into the expression of time on film as it is determined by the compás or rhythm of the dance. Other examples of time-images in Spanish cinema during the period of the dictatorship might also include the overly prolonged closeup that stalls the narrative and has the Surrealist effect of bestowing some unknowable significance on an object such as the false leg in Luis Buñuel’s Tristana (1970). In addition, the dislocation of individuals within time-images is crucial to the effect and meaning of such films as Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena and, post-dictatorship, his El sur (The South, 1983), El sol del membrillo (The Quince Tree Sun aka. Quince Tree of the Sun aka. The Dream of Light, 1992) and short film Lifeline

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in the portmanteau Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet (2002), which all foreground the power of temporal and spatial affectivity. It is in El espíritu de la colmena and El sol del membrillo that time duly contradicts the presumed agency and distinctiveness of, respectively, Ana (played by Ana Torrent) and the artist Antonio López, who as Deleuze describes, ‘saw rather than acted, they were seers’ (2007, p. xi). Given too much time in which to look and think, these characters revealed themselves by a process of painful reflexive awareness ‘where the character does not act without seeing himself acting’ (2007, p. 6). Thus, ‘a cinema of seeing replaces action’ (2007, p. 9) and ‘the action-image disappears in favour of the purely visual image of what a character is’ (2007, p. 13). Deleuze suggests that viewers who observe such temporalized bodies experience the same sense of hollow, hanging time that cannot be reconciled with their exterior life. As López reads the quince tree and Ana reads the many forms of the spirit, so the audience reads them, seeking movement and pondering its infinite potential. Regrettably, however, this trail of time-images in Spanish cinema quickly goes cold. Erice’s output is so scarce (just two and a half films and a ten-minute short in 35 years) that his career is often taken as an easy-to-read symptom of the state of the Spanish film industry. Moreover, in comparison, the time-images of a contemporary, self-styled auteur like Julio Medem are fetishized to the extent that their purpose in Caótica Ana (Chaotic Ana, 2007) appears self-contained and redundant. Consequently, with Erice seeming unlikely to ever make another film, Medem currently estranged from all but his hardcore fan base, and most contemporary Spanish filmmakers engaged in slotting movementimages together to make narrative-based genre films with international appeal, one wonders if the potential of the time-image in Spanish cinema has already been lost. Perhaps, in order to pick up the scent of this trailgone cold of time-images in Spanish cinema, we need to look elsewhere. We could go back to the powerful new beginning of cinema that was the French New Wave, but this was largely denied an audience in Francoist Spain, so we reach another dead end. Instead, the influence of the French New Wave must first be tracked to the American cinema of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In other words, the influence of the French New Wave on Spanish cinema cannot be tracked very far directly, so we must follow it to American cinema instead so that from there we might observe the influence of American cinema on the Spanish. Back then the time-images that featured in the work of Godard, Antonioni and Tarkovsky greatly influenced American filmmakers such as Arthur Penn, Robert Altman, John Cassavetes, Terrence Malick and

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Martin Scorsese. One of the first films to step aside from the narrative of American nationhood was Bonnie and Clyde (Penn 1967), which, in its frequent stalling of narrative conventions, conveyed the disruption of a national discourse offering masticated history as genre. Its time-images, like the glamorous young outlaws, suited the anti-establishment times. Written for François Truffaut to direct and optioned by Jean-Luc Godard, but directed by Penn, Bonnie and Clyde allowed for reflection on the dark side of the American dream and inspired a plethora of characters on highways in other anti-establishment films of the time such as Easy Rider (Hopper 1969), Five Easy Pieces (Rafaelson 1970), Zabriskie Point (Antonioni 1970) and Electra Glide in Blue (Guercio 1973), all of which suggested other routes for America that included purposefully going nowhere. It was by these means that the time-image came to American cinema and became a defining factor in the rebellious cinema of the late 60s and early 70s. Thereafter, Martin Scorsese’s appropriation of New Wave techniques in Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980) aided this deterritorialization of images of America by picking at the threadbare narrative of post-Vietnam nationhood. Here, the function of such nationalized iconography as the gangster, the innocent white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant child (as exemplified by Jodie Foster’s Iris in Taxi Driver) and the ecstasy of sporting triumph was rescued from its enslavement to the movement-image in genre movies and reformulated in ironic, subversive time-images instead. But patience was lacking and the time-image was soon shoved aside by going on three decades of superheroes and spaceships. The time-image survived in the sector of American independent cinema, most particularly in the work of Jim Jarmusch and Hal Hartley, but the link between form and content was arguably not fully realized until the 1990s, when the time-image was adopted by a new generation of filmmakers whose grungy wave of alternative and independent American film illustrated (in form and in content) the antithesis of Reaganomics. They were commonly known as the slacker generation because of Richard Linklater’s richly atmospheric film of the same name and they overlapped with the Generation X-ers (so-called because of Douglas Coupland’s book of that title), who count Barack Obama as a member, even though Michael Moore’s documentary on the 2004 presidential election was four years premature in being called Slacker Uprising (2009). Linklater’s Slacker (1991) appears to celebrate aimlessness in form and content in its potentially endless chain of encounters between passersby in director Linklater’s home-town of Austin, Texas, whereby the fluid camera follows a character for a short while before latching onto another,

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and then another, and then another. Misunderstood as directionless by those whose priorities, direction and leadership it deliberately disrespected, Slacker constitutes and expresses a collage of dissent against the era of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior. It does this by espousing slacking not as laziness, but as an alternative to conformity, consumerism, isolationism and greed, one that prioritises imagination, compassion, collaboration and reflection instead. Moreover, it manages this as a defiantly independent film that was shot and edited for just $23,000, thereby opposing the corporate America that was embodied in the major film studios associated with Hollywood. What Slacker does quite uniquely is follow the movement of ideas, which relates to the techniques of associative thought favoured by the Surrealists and the experiments with film language sought by Godard. Slacker allowed for the expression of ideas that simply could not be voiced or visualized within the pre-existing structures of dominant modes of production. Unsurprisingly therefore, it is here that the time-image appears in American cinema with full awareness of its unique meaning in this time and this space. Slacker is deliberately confrontational because it withholds functional spectacle and closure. As previously stated, the timeimage is revolutionary, but by its refusal to act, rather than by its action. The time-image, in other words, is a slacker.

Illustration 3.1 Slacker (courtesy Richard Linklater)

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Slacker expresses nothing less than the flow of life that was espoused by Bergson and it does this in time-images that, being both form and content, create this incessant flow and dissolve the patterns of impressions and encounters within the film. The reterritorialization of American values thus occurs in this alternative history of the moment and, indeed, would continue in Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993), Before Sunrise (1995) and SubUrbia (1996), as well as in Víctor Nuñez’s Ruby in Paradise (1993) and Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1994), which all feature protagonists who spurn careers, conformity and ambition in favour of just hanging out. This feigned ambivalence to the tail end of the recession of the late 80s was really just a means of protection, so that privately nurtured romantic ideas of the self could be safeguarded instead of surrendering them to social and political expectations. And it is clearly no simple coincidence that the second tenure of George Bush Jr. prompted the return of the slacker ethos with American cinema’s recent Mumblecore movement composed of no-budget, non-professional, digital films like Funny Ha Ha (Bujalski 2002) and Mutual Appreciation (Bujalski 2005), Dance Party, U.S.A. (Katz 2006) and Quiet City (Katz 2007), and In Search of a Midnight Kiss (Holdridge 2007). Each of these films nurtures a fragile, even alienated sense of identity in long takes. Moreover, they were all marketed and received as a truly alternative cinema by virtue of their alternative pacing and affined aesthetics. Other names awarded the already crumbling Mumblecore movement include The New Talkies and Generation DIY, for it is precisely because slackers such as those who make, inhabit, download and watch these films cannot afford to be idle that their deliberate and cultivated appearance of idleness in the face of pressure to conform is a lifestyle choice that is tantamount to a political stance. Hence the time-image – this digression in time and space that rejects the pressure to conform to a narrative – enjoys these infrequent reappearances as a pure cinematic form of expression that is received with respect for its politicized contrariness. Correlatively, it is the relevance of this fusion of form and content to recent Spanish cinema that serves to focus the concerns of this chapter. The Mumblecore movement may have already dissolved but in contemporary art-house cinema, where the legacy of the lengthy, languid look is almost a cliché in itself, authentic time-images may still be perceived in the films of Carlos Reygadas, Wong Kar Wai and Abbas Kiarostami. In Spanish cinema too, we might search for evidence of time-images and related slackerism. In retrospect, there are elements of slacking in the earliest films of Pedro Almodóvar, such as Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom, 1980) and Laberinto

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de pasiones (Labyrinth of Passions, 1982) as well as in Hola, ¿estás sola? (Hi, Are You Alone?, Bollaín 1995) and a few characters in the films written and directed by Julio Medem, such as Jota in La ardilla roja (Red Squirrel, 1993) and, perhaps, Lorenzo in Lucía y el sexo (Sex and Lucia, 2001); but it is only in a wave of recent Spanish films that slackers and time-images have offered a truly meaningful fusion of form and content. Chief amongst these are AzulOscuroCasiNegro (Dark Blue Almost Black, 2006) and En la ciudad de Sylvia (In the City of Sylvia, Guerín 2007). The title of the first of these – Dark Blue Almost Black – is explained by its debut director as ‘un estado de ánimo, un futuro incierto’ (a mood, an uncertain future) (Sánchez Arévalo 2007). The film follows Jorge (Quim Gutiérrez), who works as a janitor, but his brother Antonio (Antonio de la Torre), recently released from prison, asks him to liberate Paula (Marta Etura), another prisoner, by getting her pregnant. Jorge agrees but must keep the deed from Natalia (Eva Pallarés), his own girlfriend. By negotiating a path of least resistance while reflecting on the ramifications of each step, Jorge emerges as an anti-hero of slacker proportions. Fittingly, he finally returns to his janitorial job like Dante and Randall return to their convenience store at the end of Smith’s kindred Clerks. There are several sequences in AzulOscuroCasiNegro that contain what might be recognized as time-images, which convey this

Illustration 3.2 AzulOscuroCasiNegro (courtesy of Tesela Producciones Cinematográficas)

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cautious malaise in shots that feature Jorge contemplating the world from his roof-top or which position him in wordless proximity to Paula or Natalia. Moreover, the eloquence of the cinematography in these long takes makes dialogue superfluous. In one shot of Jorge and Natalia the focus shifts to reveal poignant graffiti on a post that had been centre-frame but unfocused and illegible, while another sequence has them shot from a static camera above them swinging in a hammock like a metronome that seems to count the seconds of the time-image but which clearly responds to a more intuitive notion of time than any calibrated time-piece. It is in these shots that permit reflection that the time-image is revealed as the only cinematic tool and technique capable of expressing the sensation of a life lived in the moment, even at the risk of enshrining a character’s alienation. In En la Ciudad de Sylvia, meanwhile, very little appears to happen. For the first half hour a young man, identified as the Dreamer (Xavier Lafitte) in the credits, sits at a café and sketches the clientele while the framing, point of view shots and changes in focus create deliberately misleading narratives within a layering of time and space. For the second half hour he follows a young woman who might be Sylvia (Pilar López de Ayala) through this anonymous European city (actually Strasbourg), believing he had met her six years ago. In the final third he is rebuffed by the woman who claims never to have seen him before and so retraces his steps, finding the city at dusk is now

Illustration 3.3 En la Ciudad de Sylvia (courtesy of Eddie Saeta)

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different and alien. Although very little appears to happen, this is only true in terms of conventional narrative. In fact, as Lee Marshall writes in Screen International, Guerin creates ‘pure drama without recourse to story’ (Marshall, 2007). Following Marshall, David Bordwell celebrates the film as ‘a dialogue-free exploration of a cinematic space’ (Bordwell, 2007). Indeed, what is crucial about the space in this exquisite film is that it is constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed in time-images. Several long-takes involve tracking shots that literally track the progress of the woman through the city and, most eloquently, remain observant of the ostensibly empty street even when she has passed by. This has the effect of making the spectator protagonize the hollow, hanging time of the shot. Moreover, when the film retraces its own steps, as it were, the repetition of these long takes inspires the active spectator to seek out differences in the time-images. The addition or erasing of graffiti, the position or absence of a down-and-out, and even the changes in the light become vital indicators to the passing of time and its expression in a manner that involves the spectator in an empathetic searching of the city and the screen for such temporalized indicators of change and their accumulative signalling of a lost, perhaps even illusory past love. In addition, the fact that AzulOscuroCasiNegro and En la Ciudad de Sylvia allow for the reappearance of the time-image in Spanish cinema may point to the social context of the filmmakers and their audience. That is to say, the time-image expresses the mood and milieu of dislocated but imaginative and reflective characters like Jorge and the Dreamer, who in turn may be taken as representative of Spain’s so-called mileuristas, the contemporary generation who have been identified as disengaged from an increasingly corporate and competitive economy. Instead, by necessity or even by choice they earn barely mil euros (1000 euros) a month in jobs that may nevertheless allow for the direction of enthusiasm and imagination to more fulfilling tasks. In recent years, it has even become possible to speak of their collectivisation, which is based upon a common and empathetic marginalization from fast-track consumerism, a disillusionment with politics, helplessness in the face of climate change and a sense of victimization from social, racial and gender divisions. Crucially, however, the mileuristas, like their slacker forebears, may have found identity in the term and thereby effected a shift away from a political hierarchy of priorities within Spain towards a pan-European, laterally-minded concept that complies with Sorensen’s aforementioned ‘community of sentiment’. Crucially, this identity is found and displayed in a collective shrug at low wages and a focus, instead, on other priorities, such as solidarity, empathy, environmentalism and activism

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of the kind that is only coincidentally political, being rather more imaginative and philosophical. Moreover, the expression of this anticorporate, anti-globalisation, anti-consumerist mindset is not unique to Spain, for slackers are found in other European countries and films too such as in Idioterne (The Idiots, von Trier 1998) from Denmark, Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei (The Edukators, Weingartner 2004) from Germany and Once (Carney 2006) from Ireland. The protagonists of all these seemingly disparate films from various countries actually have more in common with each other than with those above and below them in the hierarchies of comparative wealth in their home nations. This is because Europe and Europeans are arguably moving on from the fashionable (and fashionably re-created) alienation of the 60s towards a collective identity that is actually being strengthened by access to new media technologies. Indeed, this supports Yasenin N. Soysal’s claim that European citizenship has been transformed ‘from a more particularistic one based on nationhood to a more universalistic one based on personhood’ (1994, p. 137). New screen and media technologies have created a new temporal and spatial concept of a Europe that is located firmly in a virtual world, where pan-European youth, underground, art and political movements cohere on websites, blogs and chat rooms, which thrive because, as James N. Rosenau has argued, people are able to analyse their sense of dislocation more efficiently now because technology brings them knowledge of a shrinking world (Rosenau 1993, 1997). Films such as AzulOscuroCasiNegro and En la Ciudad de Sylvia not only provide fertile ground for the reappearance of the time-image in Spanish cinema and reveal the social context of the protagonists and their audience, but also point to the way that new Spanish filmmakers are learning their trade in the digital arena of the short film. This revolution-in-the-making can be tracked by working backwards from the DVDs of AzulOscuroCasiNegro and En la ciudad de Sylvia, which both contain the short films of their directors. In addition, Sánchez Arevalo’s short films Gol! (2002), Exprés (2003) and La culpa del alpinista (2004), for which he was mentored by Julio Medem as part of a campaign sponsored by Nescafe, can also be found on YouTube, as well as short films by Guerín including Souvenir (1986). And, when found, YouTube will also suggest in a sidebar that you watch La ruta natural (Pastor 2004) and an extract from 7.35 de la mañana (Vigalondo 2003), which both won best international short at the Sundance Film Festival, as well as Diente por ojo (Holmboe 2007) which won the Lawrence Kasdan award for best short at the 2008 Ann Arbor film festival. In fact, there is a vast amount

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of Spanish short films to be found on the Internet, which suggests that some kind of revolution in filmmaking and distribution is clearly happening and, at the same time, that not everyone is aware of it. The Spanish Film Academy has decided that to be eligible for the Goya (the Spanish equivalent of the Oscar) for best short film, films must be no longer than 20 minutes and be shot on film, not video, which contradicts the 60 minute limit and the multi-media definition of short films allowed by section 4d of Spain’s new 2007 Cinema Law, which is almost unique within Europe in supporting such endeavour. Adding insult to injury was the decision that the prize-giving would be cut from the televised ceremony, which prompted an online petition at the evocatively named www.indignados.org in support of this letter of complaint: ‘The Spanish short film is not a lesser genre perpetrated by young fans, but an important part of our cinema that enjoys international prestige on a par with that of full-length films. The presence of Spanish shorts in the most important international festivals and the awards they win proves it. For more than a decade now, seeing Spanish short films in Venice, Sundance, Berlin, Clermont Ferrand and the Oscars has become usual’. The online letter, which to date has 3938 signatories, makes an undeniably valid point. The Spanish Film Academy certainly lags behind the new cinema law, which recognizes that in addition to the 180 short films made each year on 35 mm film, thousands more are now being made on digital video. Unsurprisingly, because the new Spanish Cinema law recognizes the consequences of new screen technologies for a specifically post 11-M Spain in a broadly European context it has been welcomed by the Agencia de Cortometraje Español (Spanish Short Film Agency) for ‘the definition and support of the independent production, distribution and exhibition sectors, the law’s adaptation to new online formats, its support for independent cinemas that show short films with digital projection facilities, and the definition as audiovisual work that which is screened on computers and mobile phones, as well as the support, in financial terms, of those who contribute to the development of cinema’ (http://www.acesp.info/). The agency exists because there are now over 130 annual festivals and/or competitions for short films in Spain, some online such as www.notodofilmfest.com/. Surf here and it will be clear that a large proportion of this creativity comes from those that society traditionally dismisses as slackers anyway: the nerds, geeks and buffs who tune in, drop out and go online, making films that can be seen at the click of a mouse, and who, it might be suggested, are actually upholding a magnificent, often subversive tradition in Spanish cinema.

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Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929) is the most famous short film ever made, while Buñuel’s L’âge d’or (The Golden Age, 1930) and Las Hurdes, aka. Tierra sin pan (Land without Bread, 1933) are no less important, though all three were banned in Spain and the fact that each contains time-images that operate against the narrative of a nation-state is not just coincidental. In the pre-Civil War Republic, short films were an obligatory part of the cinema programme and made by filmmakers such as Edgar Neville. Post-civil war, the Francoist NO-DO newsreel took up all the space on the programme, but in the 60s short films were once again programmed before the main feature in the few special interest ‘art-house’ cinemas (including early pieces from Iván Zulueta), thus ensuring that the short film in Spain retained its somewhat dissident allure. Indeed, the many Basque short films and documentaries made in the 1960s and 1970s, including Fernando Larruquert and Nestor Basterretxe’s Pelotari (1964), constitute a thriving medium of dissent. In addition, the Emmy-winning La cabina (Mercero 1972) in which a man is trapped in a phone box and transported to his doom received the kind of international distribution denied to many full-length features on account of the aforementioned disguising of dissent amidst the tropes and conventions of the horror genre. Nevertheless, in La cabina we have the suspension of time that exudes a sense of entrapment that is appropriate to its intended Spanish audience finding itself trapped and suffocating in the last dragging, interminable years of the dictatorship. Post-Franco, short film production boomed, especially in the regions, because of new technologies, vocational university courses, private TV stations (again, particularly in the regions) and high profile successes such as the romantic, ironic El columpio (The Swing, Fernández Armero 1992), which famously created a word of mouth that drew audiences to cinemas with little interest in the main feature. And again, all of these are on YouTube, as well as short films by Julio Medem, Álex de la Iglesia and Alejandro Amenábar, which are mostly far more than just the calling cards of would-be feature-makers; they are films that just happen to be short. This is why it may be argued that the time-image is re-emerging in many contemporary short films, whose fusion of form and content obliges reflection on their very shortness, which accords with a Modernist concern with the limitations of art and its aesthetics and, moreover, the conclusions of Deleuze, who insisted that ‘reflection is not simply focused on the content of the image but on its form, its means and functions’ (2007, p. 9). Because the time-image is ideal for contextualizing and representing dislocated, reflective characters like Jorge and The Dreamer so the time-image is the basis of many reflective,

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imaginative short films made by Spanish filmmakers that deal with a shrinking world in which they express alienation and dislocation. In sum, therefore, the form and content of this shrinking world is revealed in convergence: the convergence of slackers, time-images, new media, the new Spanish Cinema law and the consequent boom in production of short films for the internet. To conclude, we might wonder just how the 170 official full-length Spanish films made in 2007 could ever reach an audience with the domestic screen quota for Spanish films set at just 13.5 per cent and a DVD market almost dead from competitive downloading, but still conclude that a big hit like El orfanato shows that cinemas and cinema-going are likely to remain viable for some time to come, with genre-hungry audiences still willing to queue for a banquet of movement-images. But a film is no longer just what we see in the cinema and, as Deleuze states, ‘if cinema does not die a violent death, it retains the power of a beginning’ (2007, p. xiii). The aforementioned convergence is democratizing filmmaking, allowing filmmakers to work outside the market and its constraints and beyond outdated distribution, while the convergence of new screen technologies is causing a breakdown of industry film formats and traditional ways of viewing that has left any sense of borders, industry and national cinema far behind. Thanks to new technologies of production and distribution, film is no longer expensive cumbersome celluloid but downloadable, disposable software and funding is no longer the be all and end all of filmmaking. What one needs most is time, which is more precious than money. And, therefore, the seeming wasting of time by slackers in time-images is the most valiant and subversive response possible to overwhelming pressures to use it in literally profitable ways. Admittedly, many short films are narratives and exercises in genres, being mostly illustrated jokes with snappy punchlines or short stories with twist endings, but the most meaningful are about tone and the time it takes to feel it. Which is why it may be investigated and argued that the very best filmmakers are turning the limitations of the form to their advantage and making the time-image newly relevant as the expression of a contemporary counter-culture that determinedly makes time for reflection upon the past and, most importantly, the future. Here, then, almost fifty years on from the French New Wave, is another powerful new beginning for the cinema in general and Spanish cinema in particular, in which new technologies of production and reception are once more essential to the meaning and purpose of film. But what shall we call these new types of feature? It cannot be ‘cinema’ because the cinema is not where we see them. And it cannot be ‘film’

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because they are no longer made out of film. And it should not be ‘movies’ because they are not about movement, they are about time. So I suggest we start calling them ‘timies’. Timies then, made by slackers, who know that the best way to win a tug of war is to let go of the rope. To some this may appear as idleness. And it is. But, as Robert Louis Stevenson points out in his ‘An Apology for Idlers’, ‘idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself’ (Stevenson, 2009: p. 1).

References Anderson, B. (1983), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso). Arévalo, D. S. (2007), ‘Making of’, AzulOscuroCasiNegro, region 2 DVD (Spain: Sogepaq). Bergson, H. (1992), ‘Introduction 2’ in The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (New York: Citadel Press). Bergson, H. (2003), Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (USA: Dover Publications). Bordwell, D. (2007), ‘Three Nights of a Dreamer’, http://www.davidbordwell. net/blog/?p=1457. Brody, R. (2008), Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (London: Faber & Faber). Deleuze, G. (2005), Cinema 1 (Great Britain: Continuum Impacts). Deleuze, G. (2007), Cinema 2, (Great Britain: Continuum Impacts). Marshall, L. (2007), ‘Past Perfect’, Critical Mass with Lee Marshall, 19 October 2007, www.screendaily.com/critical-mass-with-lee-marshall-past-perfect/4035365. article. Martin-Jones, D. (2006), Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Rosenau, J. N. (1993), ‘Citizenship in a Changing World Order’, in J. N. Rosenau and E. O. Czempel (eds) Governance without Government: Order and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 272–95. Rosenau, J. N. (1997), Along the Domestic–Foreign Frontier: Exploring Governance in a Turbulent World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Sorenson, G. (2003), The Transformation of the State: Beyond the Myth of Retreat, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Soysal, Y. N. (1994), Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Stevenson, R. L. (2009), An Apology for Idlers (London: Penguin). [First printed 1877, ‘An Apology for Idlers’ in Cornhill Magazine, July 1877, Vol. XXXVI, 80–6].

4 Re-visions of Teresa: Historical Fiction in Television and Film Paul Julian Smith

Biopics and public history This article treats two screen versions of the life of Santa Teresa de Ávila: the TV mini series directed by Josefina Molina and starring Concha Velasco, Teresa de Jesús (1984) and the feature film directed by Ray Loriga and starring Paz Vega, Teresa, el cuerpo de Cristo (Teresa, the Body of Christ, 2007). Embracing both the particular and the general, the article will analyse the use of mise-en-scène (of costume and art design) in the two works; address the sometimes discordant meanings inevitably brought to the projects by the careers and personae of directors and stars; and examine the extent to which the visual and narrative rhetoric of each can be derived from the distinct characteristics of their respective media. The historical Teresa is distinctive as a subject for the screen as she constitutes a test case for the interpenetration of the factual and the fantastic, if not fictional. In spite of the prominence in these modern versions of the concrete mise-en-scène (including the use, wherever possible, of authentic locations) that is so vital to the heritage genre, so much of Teresa’s original story is subjective, taking place as it does in the inaccessible sphere of the mystical vision, that it blurs the distinction between the real and the imaginative from the very start. I shall argue that in their re-visions of this familiar story, the two texts thus make comparable truth claims with regard to the historical past, but also reinscribe those truth claims within the very different film and television ecologies of the contemporary moments in which they were produced. Evidently, Teresa poses further specific and acute political problems. Championed as a rebel by some feminist theorists and theologians, she 60

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remains a highly institutionalized figure in Catholicism and was proclaimed the first female Doctor of the Church in 1970. Moreover in Spain she is closely associated not only with the distant Counterreformation but with the more recent regime of Francisco Franco. Already in 1937 painter José María Sert’s monumental ‘Intercesión de Santa Teresa de Jesús en la Guerra Civil Española’, which shows the Saint soaring up from a war torn landscape to clasp hands with a hovering crucified Christ, was exhibited at the Pontifical Pavilion at the Paris World Fare (Llorente 1995, p. 187). The discovery or recovery during the Civil War of a relic of the Saint (her immaculate hand) was exploited as part of what Paul Preston calls the ‘providential’ narrative of Franco’s crusade (1995, p. 220). In spite of repeated requests from the nuns for its return, the relic remained with the Caudillo until his death, so attached was he to it. Teresa was also enshrined by Francoist cinema, in the reverent version of her life made in 1961 by Juan de Orduña and starring Aurora Bautista, the last in their cycle of collaborations on historical female figures that began with the hysterical Juana la Loca (Locura de amor, Mad for Love, 1948) and included the feisty Agustina de Aragón (Agustina from Aragon, 1950). All screen versions of historical lives inevitably raise questions as to the conflict between history and narrative, between textuality and visuality, and between fidelity to the past subject and relevance to the present audience. However Teresa de Jesús or de Avila poses those questions with unusually troubling persistence. Students of US biopics are fortunate in having access to an exhaustive and sophisticated study of the classic Hollywood corpus. In the absence of such a study for Spain, I suggest that George F. Custen’s Bio/pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (1992) can serve as a template for later Spanish versions of the genre, throwing into relief the distinctive features of the latter. Attempting to combine approaches drawn from the humanities and the social sciences, Custen give a detailed content analysis of a full third of the three hundred biopics made in the studio era (1927–60), but also draws on archival sources that document industrial practices, star systems, and publicity processes of the period (1992, p. 3). He stresses that even though his chosen films may now seem ‘naïve’, they are the result of a ‘complex social organization’ with its own rules (p. 4). Moreover the biopic, sometimes dismissed by critics and audience alike, is a privileged genre that dates back to the beginnings of cinema. Even in the silent era, it had many variants (hagiographical, psychological, autobiographical) and was already ‘embroiled in controversies about truth, accuracy, and interpretation’ (p. 6).

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For Custen, to study Hollywood biopic is to ‘reconstruct a shifting public notion of fame’ which moved slowly, over decades, from the ‘structural famous’ (such as royalty) to a ‘democratization’ that included anyone in the news (pp. 6–7). The question ‘How “realistic” is Hollywood biography?’ is thus unanswerable for reasons that are at once institutional and textual. Custen cites Hayden White for whom ‘demands for verisimilitude in film … stem from a confusion of historical individuals with the kinds of “characterization” of them required for discursive purposes’ (p. 7). Although this problem of ‘translatability’ (of the movement from an event to its telling or description) is not unique to film, we should nonetheless distinguish between historiography and ‘historiophoty’: ‘What gets lost in the translation of the event from its verbal state to a visual/pictorial one’ (p. 9). Historical accuracy is thus not to be confused with facticity (10) for (following White again) all history, whether written or filmed, is ‘a product of processes of condensation, displacement, symbolization, and qualification’ (p. 11). It remains the case, however, that visual media (once cinema, now television) have tended to serve the purpose of ‘enculturation’ or creating ‘public history’ for national and international audiences. Custen documents how Hollywood biopics were quite literally ‘validated as legitimate carriers of the lessons of history’ through pedagogical tie-ins intended for school children (p. 13). But if such materials transparently supported the maintenance of social order in general, the values of individualism promoted in such films also reflected back quite precisely on the star system and the autobiographies of Hollywood moguls (p. 18). And the standardization of such narratives required that, ironically, ‘the very novelty that makes the celebrated person famous, different from the viewer, must be packaged in a guise familiar to many viewers’ (p. 18). Thus legendary producer Darryl Zanuck consistently insisted that all protagonists should display a clear motivation for their exceptional achievement (a motivation that was established in a telegraphic scene early on in the picture) and that biopics should provide a ‘rooting interest’ that was ‘congruent with audiences’ own [unexceptional] experiences and expectations’ (p. 18). Heroes were thus permitted to be unusual only in their area of special expertise: Edison was shown taking time out to enjoy apple pie with his family, while Alexander Graham Bell was spurred on to invent the telephone to alleviate his wife’s deafness (p. 19). In such ‘secular saints’, history was thus humanized, the public made private. Such a process was not of course unique to film. Custen cites Leo Lowenthal’s seminal work on celebrity biographies in popular magazines, which ‘like the

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earlier “Lives of the Saints” helped prepare average people to accept their place in the social order by valorizing a common, distant, and elevated set of lives that readers could hope to emulate’ (p. 33). In the interests of both efficiency and ideology, then, studios shaped the making of history: ‘through standardization of the great man narrative, through ritualized use of certain actors in certain parts, through control of publicity, and through adherence to legal standards of what could be pictured about the famous’ (p. 22). But such formulae were not themselves immune to historical change. With the decline of the studio system, film biopics no longer found an audience: ‘the ability to shape public history had … been seized by television and the smaller screen constructed the self with a very different image from film’ (p. 29). We can now go on to examine the reflection and refraction of the Hollywood model, so convincingly presented by Custen, in twin Spanish versions of a great life made for TV and film.

Teresa de Jesús (1984): the secular sanctity of an everyday classic The television miniseries Teresa de Jesús was released on DVD in 2006 as part of a collection of ‘classic series’ to mark the fiftieth anniversary of producer Televisión Española. These ‘commemorative editions’ (labelled ‘the best works in the history of our television’ and including Teresa’s near contemporary Cervantes of 1980) were said to mark ‘a historical moment’. There could be no clearer sign that television, often despised, could now present itself as the vehicle of a public history that it did not simply represent but rather embodied. And while TVE, as a generalist broadcaster, may have been too diverse to boast the distinctive ‘house style’ of Custen’s Hollywood studios, still it had a complex social organisation that attempted to legitimize itself as a carrier of historical knowledge. Teresa clearly falls within what Manuel Palacio has called the ‘pedagogy’ of TVE in the Transition: the attempt to use prestige drama, shot on film and on location, to work through privileged moments of the past in the service of a new democratic present (2001, pp. 91–21). Intended to coincide with the four hundredth anniversary of the Saint’s death, the series premiered on 12 March 1984 and its eight hour length episodes continued to play weekly on Monday nights until April 30 (Quílez Esteve 2006, p. 102). Although TVE had as yet no competition for viewers (commercial television remained a decade away) it did not stint in promoting the series, insisting on the quality of this special

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event programming. A respectful ‘making of’ with the emblematic title ‘Producción española’ (Spanish production) aired on 31 July 1983. Here the series’ budget is given as 200 million pesetas, a figure Josefina Molina says is ‘adequate’ (although, she adds, period productions require extensive preparation). Emilio Gutiérrez Caba, already a respected actor for some twenty years, offers a nuanced version of historical fidelity: while he may not embody the physical type of his character, the frail San Juan de la Cruz, he still aims to give a faithful account of his inner life. Protagonist Concha Velasco stresses the ‘simpatía’ (pleasantness) of the Saint (rather than her holiness) and the responsibility she felt in playing a character who ages from a youthful 23 to an infirm 67. In such publicity materials Velasco’s performance is presented and accepted by all as an example of that self-conscious ‘star acting’, which Custen identifies as a crucial element in the Hollywood biopic (1992, p. 62). This is in spite of the fact that Velasco’s lengthy career as a feisty comedienne offered few precedents for a role as serious and demanding as this. A more nuanced discussion with the then respected presenter Mercedes Milá (much later to host Spain’s Big Brother), broadcast just days before the first episode, saw the director and star joined by Salamanca professor Víctor García de la Concha, the historical consultant, and novelist Carmen Martín Gaite, credited as writer of the series’ dialogue. Molina, a distinguished veteran of TV literary adaptations since the 1960s, who stressed as late as 2006 her continued commitment to educational television, emphasizes first of all the ‘research’ that went into the project, a kind of labour also vigorously promoted as proof of quality by the producers of Custen’s biopics, however fanciful such pictures may appear today. While Molina concedes the impossibility of direct access to the historical real of the sixteenth century (for example, many original locations have been lost or altered), she insists that she has aimed not for easy ‘consumption’ on the part of the viewer, but rather for ‘reflection’. When Milá asks, finally, how the director feels after so much effort has culminated in just eight hours of television, Molina attempts to redefine and defend the medium: now, especially with the advent of home video, TV is no longer merely ‘consumed’ but rather watched, as if in a cinema, with proper attention. It was a prediction that would be confirmed by Teresa’s lavish DVD re-release more than twenty years later. Ironically, it is the academic García de la Concha who makes a claim for the immediacy of the series, beyond its historical authenticity. While the three women skirt embarrassedly around the subject of gender, he replies that Teresa was ‘of course’ a feminist who struggled for women’s

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rights (and, equally, was ‘of course’ from a family of converted Jews, although this genealogy cannot serve as an explanation of her life and works). Teresa, he insists, was as much engaged by the world as she was by God and her life spanned a historical arc from reform to reaction that exemplifies the two Spains that still clash today. García de la Concha thus explicitly embraces the enculturation function of the biopic, its ability to shape public history in the interests of the present, even as he insists (like Molina) on the primacy of research in the creative process. Reception of the series mirrored its producers’ aims. Indeed, as is common in the period, press previews simply reproduced TVE’s selfserving promotion, citing the location shooting (which roamed from Avila and Toledo to Úbeda and Seville), the meticulously recreated sets (almost ten thousand square metres in size), and the lengthy production process (three months of rehearsal and ten of filming) (Quílez Esteve 2006, p. 102). Premiered in situ in Avila, Teresa was explicitly authorized by the Church (as was the perhaps unexpected casting of Velasco in the central role). Reviews were likewise reverent, with the exception of licensed heretic Francisco Umbral, who claimed dismissively (1984) that television could never capture the subtleties of the Saint’s prose (this in spite of the fact that consultant de la Concha was the academic who had done most to vindicate Teresa’s reputation as a literary, as opposed to devotional, classic of the Golden Age). At first sight, the series’ narrative and visual style seems to fall well within the classic tradition of film biopic that Custen rightly calls ‘hagiographic’. The credits consist of a single lengthy take in long shot. Overshadowed by the celebrated city walls of Avila, framed by a picturesque tree, and accompanied by an ominous French horn and stirring strings, tiny black figures make their way on foot and in wagons towards the viewer, as if travelling towards us through history. After the credits have rolled (Velasco’s star name precedes Teresa’s), the stately procession then proceeds in the first sequence of episode 1 along rutted roads lined by modest stone houses. When a title announces with ostentatious precision ‘Gotarrendura, Avila, Autumn 1538’, the wan-faced and shining-eyed Teresa descends from a rather sinister sedan chair to be greeted by her affectionate uncle and father (the distinguished Héctor Alterio and Paco Rabal will be given surprisingly little to do over the next eight hours screen time). As the men discuss the state of the world (the ruinous politics and economics of Castile) and hint darkly at past trials (law suits against their father), Teresa retires to bed, wracked by the first of a lengthy series of inexplicable (and unexplained) illnesses that will dominate several episodes.

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While the series does not open, like the classical film biopic, with an authoritative voice over (known appropriately as ‘voice of God’) or with on-screen titles proclaiming the truth and accuracy of the story to be told, it does start (like the Hollywood template) in medias res: Teresa has already entered her first convent and is returning home to recuperate from illness. As Custen describes also, the fact that the screen life begins with an adult protagonist means that the family is deprived of much of its formative function on that protagonist’s personality: it is characteristic that Teresa’s conversa ancestry is not explicitly mentioned until much later in the series. Genealogy is thus not destiny. Rather, repeated shots of the bleak wintry landscape and harsh built environment (even at mass the congregation sit on a cold stone floor) suggest that environment will be a more decisive factor in the future Saint’s hard won achievement. Like her Hollywood sisters once more, Teresa is provided from the start with a close friend. Sister Juana will serve as a mirror, a confidant, and, latterly, a critic, throwing into relief through her timidity the courage of the Saint in defending her visions and initiating her reform of the Carmelite order. Already, a certain distance between them is established in spite of the intimacy of their female friendship: Teresa tells the concerned Juana that there are ‘things that [she] cannot explain’ to her. While dwelling on this passionate companionship, the first episode also appears to offer Teresa a male romantic partner in the small town of Becedes, where she continues to recuperate. The first of Teresa’s many confessors is a darkly troubled young man who himself confesses his mortal sin of concubinage to Teresa. This scene takes place in the unusually pastoral setting of a verdant forest, complete with babbling brook and buzzing bees. Teresa boldly tears off the magical amulet he wears around his neck, thus establishing the centrality of her initiative (a vital element in the biopic career). But the minor character of the bewitched priest remains strangely prominent: the episode ends with him watching tearfully as the Saint leaves his small town for Avila. If Teresa is provided, like the great majority of biopic heroes, with family, friends, and a (vestigial) romance (which serve in traditional style to both dramatize and validate her exceptional destiny), the series, given its extended length and measured pace, lacks the strict causality required of a classic ninety minute feature film. Molina, de la Concha, and Martín Gaite do indeed seem to propose in the first episode a turning point for Teresa, the decisive moment with which the biopic normally opens and on which its narrative turns. This, we are told, is the discovery of Juan de Osuna’s Abecedario espiritual, a manual Teresa

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is later obliged by the Inquisition to burn. But this supposed revelation remains strictly internal: Velasco reads in voiceover lines of text that require her character to work, and suffer, in the strictest of silence. Similarly the series fails to use flashbacks to depict popular episodes from Su vida that cry out for dramatization: the child Teresa’s flight from home in a bid to convert the Moors is (like her conversa heritage) mentioned only obliquely. Typically it is told, not shown. Moreover the scenes of Teresa’s refusal to eat and her daily vomiting suggest to the modern viewer a potential psychological narrative (of hysteria or neurosis) that is in competition with the spiritual career that is so hard to translate from word to image. As incidents proceed at apparently random intervals in the second episode (successive titles read ‘Two Years Later’, ‘One Year Later’, ‘Twelve Years Later’) it is difficult to discern much sense of dramatic urgency and shaping. Indeed much of this episode is taken up with the young Teresa’s apparent death and resurrection at her father’s house, an event that brings her spiritual career to a lengthy halt. Custen identifies three motifs in performer biopics: ‘resistance by the establishment of the field, advice from an older colleague, and a dramatic breakthrough … – often in the nick of time – for the novice’ (1992, p. 70). The indispensable ‘public reception of talent’ (p. 71) is here long delayed. Confessor Gaspar Daza is just the first in a line of male authority figures who resist Teresa’s innovations, claiming that her (as yet unshown) visions are diabolical illusions, the product of the emotions and not the intelligence. But fellow nuns are equally skeptical, with Teresa provided with a full-blown antagonist in the venomous Sister Teodora, in a conflict that is schematically opposed to her growing intimate friendship with wealthy lay supporter doña Guiomar. While the creators put an unusually feminist message into Teresa’s lips at the end of this episode (she claims that a wife’s existence is mere submission to her husband and repeated pregnancy), the alternative satisfactions of convent life and female comradeship have as yet by no means been established. As Custen writes, for female subjects of biopics above all, the ‘price of being different’ (of innovating) is retribution and misfortune: ‘men are defined by their gift, women by their gender or their gendered use of their gift’ (p. 106). Significantly, Molina’s depiction of Teresa’s mystical visions, which begins in episode 3, is as hesitant and circumspect as the historical Teresa’s accounts of them to her confessors and readers, as if the director too feared resistance and rejection by her public. While Teresa is permitted an unusually direct commentary on the Inquisition-inspired book

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burning (she sardonically suggests the unsympathetic Teodora ‘enjoy’ the conflagration), her mystical experiences are represented obliquely through a series of formal framing devices. Thus in a first vision of Christ, Teresa is shown in prayer, reciting in voice over a poem on the fusion of love and pain. Out of the darkness appears what is clearly not a physical person, but a painting of her Beloved. Or again, a little later the Transverberation is not shown to us directly, but rather told to Guiomar as a surrogate for the audience. Hearing the saint’s ecstatic cries, the laywoman enters her cell and cradles Teresa in a Bernini-like pietà. Using the exact words of Su vida (including such distinctive details as the ‘small size’ and ‘shining countenance’ of the angel) Velasco breathlessly recites the description of how an angel pierced her heart with an arrow. The lighting dims behind them to leave the two women in luminous isolation. After Teresa’s tale the sympathetic Guiomar provides confirmation of its truth claim: ‘I know that you are not lying.’ It remains the case, however, that the viewer has, like the character, not been a witness to this most celebrated of scenes. Finally, a single sequence showing hell as a dark tunnel, caked with mud (but lacking the creepy crawlies or ‘sabandijas’ of the original text) is introduced by a slow tracking shot into the back of Teresa’s black hood and a dissolve, which reads as the transition to a dream sequence. Even in a brief scene of levitation, the only example of the supernatural in the whole series that is shown in a clearly objective shot), skeptical detractors such as Teodora are absent, leaving only Teresa’s fervent supporters to spread the word of the miracle around the convent. In the second half of the series Teresa’s reform is shown as a balancing act between innovation and tradition, confirming Custen’s comment that in the biopic innovation leads inevitably to the establishment of a new tradition (p. 153). But the production team of Teresa walk a similar tightrope. While they give some credence to revisionist accounts of the Saint that viewers in the democratizing and increasingly secular Spain of the Transition might be expected to support (Teresa is shown to be a feminist and anti-racist), they must also deliver a series that is historically accurate (as shown by frequent titles indicating dates and places) and devotionally inoffensive (as shown by the swelling strings that accompany Teresa’s visions, however circumspectly the latter are shot). There is some ideological confusion here. But the rooting interest beloved of Zanuck is transparent. Spurred on by resistance, the Saint establishes her foundations against all the odds, receiving the essential acknowledgement from older colleagues only at the end of episode 4 when Daza grudgingly announces: ‘You have done it’.

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But if there are moments of dramatic breakthrough under pressure of time (the convent at Medina del Campo is set up literally over night in episode 5), motivation and causation are less clear. Indeed Teresa herself is made to voice the ‘battle’ between the twin impulses she feels to meditation and to foundation (her twin loyalties to Mary and Martha). But the depiction of worldly works, easier to translate from textual to visual than ineffable visions, is itself somewhat ambivalent. A montage of domestic labour in one new convent illustrates Teresa’s most famous saying (‘God lives amongst the pots and pans’) and offers a chance to show that the exceptional person is (like Edison or Bell) reassuringly normal outside his or her special gift. But the sequence is capped by the Saint vomiting after attempting to gut fish (episode 4). If the televisual Teresa can embrace democratic sociability as well as Catholic spirituality (and the star persona of Velasco is clearly more at home with the first than the second), it cannot stretch to encompass the psychological reading of Teresa as neurotic or hysteric which briefly breaks surface here once more. In spite of this ideological incoherence, so alien to classic Hollywood, Teresa does hold fast to two more of Custen’s biopic conventions: reflexivity and the trial. In the second half of the series there is a continuing commentary on the nature of fame, which might be called Cervantine. Like Don Quixote, Teresa is now acclaimed by the populace when arriving in a new town; and, like the Knight once more, her acquaintances are eager to read her story. The capricious Princess of Eboli asks for a copy of Su vida and is shown skeptically laughing over it with her ladies in waiting (episode 5). Later she and other society figures, spurned by Teresa, will betray the author of the manuscript to the Inquisition. When the aged Teresa returns to her first convent as a Prioress who is imposed by the authorities against the nuns’ will, younger women ask ‘What was she like?’, as if Teresa were a historical figure even before her death. It is no surprise that the last episode should begin with Teresa, now a seasoned author, giving dictation to a young nun. Life is becoming biography before our very eyes. Teresa’s growing fame does lead, finally, to unambiguous acclaim, not just from the future Saint John of the Cross (whom Teresa recognizes as a fellow ‘bicho raro’ or ‘odd ball’) but from an institutional supporter in the form of the loyal and attractive Padre Jerónimo Gracián (episode 6). Seville, the setting for a late foundation, is at first presented as profoundly alien to the industrious and abstemious Castilian Saint: watching the Orientalist spectacle of veiled women and turbaned men and the display of glazed pottery and finely embroidered cloth, Teresa

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remarks wearily ‘Here they are always on holiday’ (episode 7). But it is also in Andalusia, far from the Castile that she says is ‘closer to heaven’, that Teresa receives the most visible accolade of fame as the embodiment of community judgement (Custen 1992, p. 149). After a procession that is unusually picturesque for a historical series that is typically somewhat austere in its mise en scene, the Archbishop of Seville kneels in the street to be blessed by the future Saint. This scene corresponds to a classic moment in the performer’s biopic: the artistic triumph that magically transforms innovation and transgression into tradition and legitimation. In such reflexive scenes, Teresa becomes in part a commentary on that same construction of fame that is the origin of, and justification for, the biopic as genre. Pointedly, this public acclamation comes immediately after Teresa’s gravest and most explicitly staged trial, where she is interrogated by three Jesuits from the Inquisition (episode 7). It is striking that this is the first time that Teresa has faced her accusers directly: when the Town Council of Avila debated her first foundation she was not shown to be present, nor was she when enraged townspeople tried to force their way into the convent (episode 4). As Custen notes, trial scenes were so central to the biopic that, even if the studio’s researchers found no historical evidence for them, they were frequently fabricated (Custen 1992, p. 187). A ‘powerful condensing device’, the trial affords ‘a stage for the drama of fame’ with ‘a clear rooting interest in the roles of defendant and prosecutor’ (p. 186). Moreover the trial serves as ‘a kind of metastructure of fame … vindicating the cause with a finality seldom seen in other real-life contexts’ (p. 187). In the case of Teresa, however, although trial does indeed lead to public triumph (a walk-on by the King will pronounce Teresa a ‘jewel in [his] crown’), vindication is by no means definitive. Already her Discalced order has been sabotaged by rival Carmelites. And in the final episode the young nuns no longer accept Teresa when she returns to her first foundation; she quarrels bitterly with her family over an inheritance; and her increasing infirmity is disrespected by aristocratic patrons who demand she pay them visits. Although an extended deathbed scene is framed by supernatural portents (a wintry almond tree bursts into bloom, a final voiceover recounts her posthumous triumphs), the focus at the end of the series, as throughout, is on the sheer suffering of the physical body. It is perhaps here that Teresa, a series that strains like so many of TVEs in the period for the quality and dignity of film, coincides most closely with the medium for which it was actually made. For, as Custen notes

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once more, TV movies and miniseries have focused more heavily than classic cinema on female protagonists who are often presented as victims, not infrequently of unknown maladies. While the tradition of ‘woman ennobled by suffering’ is inherited from the studio era, the focus on ‘the woman’s body ravaged by illness’ is distinctively televisual (p. 227). Now, Concha Velasco’s early career as the quintessential ‘chica ye-ye’ (the modern girl of the 1960s who danced and sang with more enthusiasm than professionalism) hardly paved the way for her depiction of the ever frail Teresa. But it had begun to earn her the intimate and lasting familiarity with Spanish audiences she had won by the 1980s. Inadvertently, perhaps, by placing such emphasis on Teresa’s everyday physical travails and neglecting her exceptional spiritual vocation, Molina and Velasco coincided with a certain ‘populism of fame’ (p. 224) and ‘egalitarian mode of representation’ (p. 225) that are typical of television, even as their Teresa drew so heavily on the more hallowed template of the cinematic biopic.

Teresa, el cuerpo de Cristo (2007): from historiography to historiophoty The first feature film on Saint Teresa for over thirty years, El cuerpo de Cristo seems to set itself up as irreverent and transgressive from the start. Ray Loriga, who takes the credit for both direction and screenwriting, came to fame as a tattoed and bleached haired generation X novelist, with a reputation for sex, drugs, and rock and roll. With just one feature to his name to date (La pistola de mi amigo (My Friend’s Gun) was based on a self-penned novel), he had also co-written one of Almodóvar’s most disciplined scripts: the noirish Carne trémula (Live Flesh). His chosen leading lady, Seville-born Paz Vega, had made her name on television in street smart sitcom 7 Vidas (7 Lives, 1999–2000), where her character was a daffy, but adorable, Andalusian in Madrid. By now, however, her star persona was less domestic, having achieved her highest profile in Julio Medem’s erotic art movie Lucía y el sexo (Sex and Lucia, 2001) and musical sex comedy Emilio Martínez Lázaro’s El otro lado de la cama (The Other Side of the Bed, 2002). The one sheet poster for her Teresa set the tone for the film: Vega, chestnut hair flowing free and nude from the waist up (albeit seen from the side) looks coyly down as a man’s hand, clearly bearing the trace of Christ’s stigma, caresses her bare arm and shoulder. Given the profile of both director and author, surely this feature would be a willfully controversial and irreverent version of the Saint’s life, intended to wound the sensibilities of the faithful in the service of box office success?

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The Church took the bait. Before the film even opened a bishop attacked it for carnality and for its improper reduction of mystical experience to psycho-sexual complexes. Producer Andrés Vicente Gómez, whose lengthy career embraces both commercial blockbusters (Torrente (Segura 1998) and Isi & Disi (2004 and 2006) and period pictures with some pretension to quality (Belle époque, Libertarias (Freedom Fighters, Aranda 1996) and La niña de tus ojos (The Girl of Your Dreams, Trueba 1996)), rejected this anathematization, noting that the film had at that time only been seen by a select group of critics, who proclaimed it ‘unscandalous’: more respectful than daring, more classical than innovative (Ocaña 2007). Moreover the track record of the rest of the creative team suggest (like that of Vicente Gómez) a certain balance between innovation and tradition that, ironically perhaps, is also typical of the biopic as genre. Thus the lush costumes were by Eiko Ishioka, a Japanese designer best known for her equally extravagant wardrobe for Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Coppola 1992). In the film’s official ‘making of’, she cheerfully confesses to ignorance of Catholicism, although admits to having conducted some research in museums. Veteran José Luis Alcaine, perhaps Spain’s most respected cinematographer, claims rather that his work was based directly on contemporary painting (which was, of course, highly stylized) and on his historical knowledge of light sources in the period. Art director Rafael Palmero, who says that he aimed to create ‘dramatic’ and ‘emotional’ spaces, not faithful reconstruction, had actually worked on the austere Teresa TVE series twenty years earlier. Emilio Ruiz (whom Loriga calls a ‘legend’ of Spanish cinema) had constructed his distinctive foreground transparencies (known in Spanish somewhat misleadingly as ‘maquetas’) for the same Francoist biopics that the TV Teresa of the Transition had been so anxious to distance itself from. Iconoclasm thus held hands with traditional cinematic craft. In this documentary both director and star, treading a tightrope once more, avoid overt polemics and tend to secularize the historical figure in a way that was already apparent in the statements of Molina and Velasco back in 1984. Thus Loriga claims that Teresa was an ‘exceptional person, woman’ whose story is one of both ‘struggle’ against her problems and of ‘love’ and ‘carnality’. Vega enthusiastically calls her subject a ‘revolutionary’ who was ‘ahead of her time’. Female supporting players are anxious (again like the team of the TV Teresa) to reassure contemporary audiences that their characters are not so distant from modern values. Geraldine Chaplin’s chilly Prioress is ‘not bad’, but bored, frustrated, and isolated. Leonor Watling’s Guiomar is no beata, but rather an active

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and vigorous woman. Alluding perhaps to Vega’s hyper-sexualized star persona, Chaplin notes ingenuously that the crew was ‘surprised’ by her performance: Paz, she says, found a ‘balance between the two sides’ (of spirituality and carnality). The film itself reveals, surprisingly once more, an even closer link to the classic biopic template than the TV version, and not simply because a limited screen time of just 97 minutes imposed a greater requirement for narrative condensation. El cuerpo opens in traditional style with a ‘voice of God’ scene-setting narration, albeit less precise than the TV series’ meticulous titles (we are told the action takes place in ‘Castille, in the second half of the sixteenth century’). The male voiceover (like Teresa de Jesús’s male relatives in the opening sequence of the series) highlights the paradoxes of the period: the riches of the Indies and the poverty of the people. It adds that ‘our Church’ was assailed from both outside, by the Reformation, and inside, by heretics and the Inquisition. What is distinctive here, however (and it is already found in what Andrew Higson (2003, p. 197), following Claire Monck, calls the British ‘post-heritage’ films such as Elizabeth (Kapur 1998), is that we are from the start presented with graphic scenes of supposed Illuminist orgies and Inquisitional torture chambers. This shift from textuality to visuality (or from historiography to ‘historiophoty’) will prove to be the significant difference between the Teresa of the Transition and that of the millennium. But, I would argue, the latter is not necessarily less historically accurate or theologically reverent than the former. Indeed in the process of translatability from word to image there is much to be gained, as well as lost, by taking leave of the text. Thus while the TV credit sequence was anchored in the concrete physicality of an authentic location (the familiar walls of Avila), the film credits offer a kaleidoscopic evocation of the mystical experience. Richly dressed in a scarlet gown, Vega’s young and beautiful Teresa (no attempt to echo the ‘authentic’ moles drawn on Concha Velasco’s pallid face), glides into frame with rays of light and doves superimposed. Abstract tactile patterns (fire or fur?) bleed into sensual details (female fingers and richly decorated rosaries). In spite of this over-laden mise-en-scène (Teresa’s first convent is full of gorgeously dressed young society ladies), the film holds fast to traditional narrative conventions. It begins, once more, in medias res with the confessor Daza (here played by veteran Eusebio Poncela) telling Teresa to abandon the ‘madness’ of calling Christ her ‘husband’. We at once dissolve, in a technique also characteristic of classic biopic, to a flashback of Teresa caressed by a first boyfriend, her cousin: a rose thorn suggestively pierces her skin. Cut to the father who, believing that her

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honour is now blighted, packs Teresa off to the nunnery. In telegraphic dialogue he tells her: ‘No man will love you now’; to which she replies ‘I know One who will.’ This brief episode serves as both psychological motivation (Teresa is now free to embrace the love of Christ) and causation (she has no choice but the convent). It thus serves as the classic turning point of biopic in which the subject’s exceptional achievement is both glimpsed at the start and presented as a ‘rooting point’ for an audience primed to accompany that subject in her struggle for vindication against hostile authority. Rejecting the austere landscapes of the TV series, the feature film focuses on interiors that are often lush and sensuous spaces, festooned with Eiko Ishioka’s fantastical costumes. The visuality of Catholic practice is celebrated in one early sequence where Teresa is crowned with a lavish garland of flowers. But this visual extravagance is also to some extent functional. Teresa is, as before, gifted with a best friend called Juana. However here she is a threadbare ‘servant’ who, contradicting Teresa’s claim that ‘We are all equal [in the convent]’, goes barefoot out of poverty not piety. But if Loriga raises the social question of class more evidently than Molina, he also presents Teresa’s visions in a form that is much more direct, more tangible, than on TV. The scene on the poster is indeed briefly shown: bathed in golden light, Christ caresses Teresa’s naked back. The Transverberation is shown, briefly but directly once more, with no angel but with the Saint’s scarlet bodice pierced by a myriad of golden arrows. Later the visions are presented as pictorial tableaux, embodied by actors who, although immobile, are clearly physical beings and not (as in Molina’s version) merely representations. Thus Teresa as the Magdalene (in scarlet, once more) mourns over a handsome Christ, deposed from the Cross, as the Virgin looks on, cloaked in blue. Or again Teresa rises from her bed to fall at the feet of a life size and very corporeal crucified Christ. Elsewhere a foreshortened Christ, laid on a table, clearly cites Masaccio. Unlike in Molina’s version, such scenes are not framed by distancing devices such as the retelling of the story by the Saint or the dissolve that conventionally signals a dream sequence. Loriga is notably more graphic once more in recreating the queasy abjection that is a disquieting characteristic of Su vida: at one point worms and slugs (Teresa’s ‘sabandijas’) swarm over Christ’s immaculate body. Although there is one brief scene of Teresa walking by Avila’s walls, shot in the same spot as the TV series’s credits, Loriga rejects the ‘heritage’ shots of landscape and monuments. But he does not neglect the feminist interpretation already promoted on television twenty years before. Teresa has no real female antagonist here (even Chaplin’s icy prioress

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finally cries out ‘I want to be you!’) and her struggle is focused on male authority figure the Provincial de Avila, played by Manuel Morán, best known as the abusive father in Goya winning social realist drama El bola (Pellet, Mañas 2000). He mutters darkly about Teresa’s conversa lineage and alleges that women have ‘too much imagination and too little order’. Leonor Watling’s youthful Guiomar hosts what appears to be a femalecentred salon, supported by liberal clerics. Given that academic García de la Concha had proclaimed Teresa a feminist twenty years earlier, this interpretation hardly seems controversial today. And feminist heroics are once more reinforced by the trial motif that is beloved of the biopic. Although the emphasis in the feature film, unlike in the miniseries, is on visions not foundations (on Mary not Martha), Teresa is from the opening sequence attacked by those who resist her innovations and faces an explicit trial sequence half way through the film. Interrogated by male accusers as to how she can be sure that her visions are true, she can only reply in the paradoxical terms of Su vida: passionately defending (in Vega’s incongruous Andalusian accent) the ‘sweet wounds’ Christ has gifted her with. We are also shown the trial in absentia, where the hostile town council attempts, unsuccessfully, to block Teresa’s first foundation. Teresa’s final and public triumph is, however, unambiguous. Swapping her rich gown for a more sober habit, she treks over a bleak landscape to ring the old bell of her new convent (the impressively realized image is the product of Ruiz’s ‘maqueta’). A swelling orchestra instructs us to be moved by Teresa’s success, while the traditional titles (familiar from the earliest days of the biopic) reaffirm her legacy: not only did the fragile foundation survive but Teresa went on to be a Doctor of the church and a ‘fundamental’ figure in Golden Age literature. The feature film, given the restricted period it spans, does not treat the reflexivity of fame addressed by the TV series. But nor does it focus on the physicality of the female body, wracked by mysterious illness, which, I have argued with Custen, is so characteristic of the rival medium of television. Molina’s more prosaic presentation may lay claim to a more egalitarian mode of representation; but Loriga’s heightened visuality (his use of the quick cutting and disorientating superimpositions, held to be typical of an ‘MTV’ style) attempt to reproduce more immediately the mystic rapture over which Molina, more modest or more timid, prefers to draw a veil.

Suddenly Last Supper In spite of press support from the Left-leaning El País, Teresa, el cuerpo de Cristo did not find a large audience. Official figures say it was seen by just

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122,460 people (Base de datos, 2008). It seems that the devotional public that, encouraged by the Church’s support, still enjoy Molina’s ‘classic’ series did not take kindly to Loriga’s feature, which the pre-publicity, poster, and personae of director and star had led them to believe would be blasphemous exploitation. Conversely, a youthful secular audience was not attracted by the casting of Vega against type. Yet the two re-visions of Teresa have both been ill served by their respective reputations. In spite of its brief glimpses of Illuminist orgies, El cuerpo de cristo was by no means blasphemous or irreverent in its portrait of the Saint, especially when compared to the overtly pornographic re-workings of Catholic iconography (including of Teresa) made in the same period by still photographer J. A. M. Montoya (2008). Indeed the film preserved more closely than the TV series the hagiographic trappings of the biopic and, arguably, addressed Teresa’s inner life more directly and seriously. Conversely, although the TV series was blessed by the Church, it distanced and qualified the mystical experience in a way consistent with its director’s skeptical humanism (clearly stated at the time), even as it insisted with wearisome frequency on the authenticity of its reproduction of the Saint’s external biography. Moreover Molina’s version suggests more strongly than Loriga’s that Teresa’s condition was perhaps psychological in character. Confronted only by the extended sufferings of the female body (including the anorexia and bulimia that were becoming sadly topical at the time of production) and denied access to the Saint’s ecstatic interiority, viewers are perhaps more likely to read Teresa’s story within the secular ‘disease of the week’ template of the female-targeted TV movie. While Ray Loriga’s vision is much more flashy, glossy, and accelerated than Molina’s static, austere, and leisurely narrative, its MTV aesthetic offers a glimpse at least of a dynamic and ecstatic realm, inaccessible to the lay audience, that is vital to the texture of Su vida. Fidelity, then, is not to be reduced to facticity. The two re-visions (their divergent visual and narrative rhetoric) are also, of course, derived from the distinct characteristics of their respective media. As John Caughie reminds us, cinema commenced as vision without sound, while broadcasting began as sound without vision. Loriga emphasizes the visuality of film, inviting us to dream with Teresa. Molina clings fast to the textuality that is shared by television and her scholarly sources, asking us to meditate on her heroine’s travails. In addition, each version is inflected by the periods in which they were made, presenting as they do distinct ecologies of film and television. Molina was supported in her pedagogical approach by a TVE devoted at that time to quality projects intended to reinforce the prestige of an

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embattled public broadcaster that had only recently emerged from the dictatorship. Loriga, on the other hand, may have been sheltered by a powerful film producer, but he was working within a cinema’s industry beset by perpetual crisis. Official figures for 2006–7, the year in which his film was produced, show that the most assiduous filmgoers were 15–19 years old, the same age group as those who volunteer the most hostile attitudes towards Spanish cinema (SGAE 2000, p. 78). In spite of Loriga’s attempt to connect with these contemporary viewers through the casting of Paz Vega, the youthful and Hollywood-friendly audience was unlikely to be a prime demographic for Teresa. We have seen that for Custen controversies about truth, accuracy, and interpretation are intrinsic to the biopic genre. Indeed they are a major part of its interest for scholars and critics. While Molina’s modest self-presentation, parallel to that of Teresa, managed to avoid damaging polemics when her series was broadcast, her series’s concentration on Teresa’s works was not without consequences. While still disavowing the label ‘realizadora’, Molina claimed in 2006 that her lengthy career, in film as in television, had aimed to show: ‘la libertad de manifestar nuestro punto de vista sobre el mundo a través de nuestra obra, utilizando para ello cualquier oportunidad y cualquier metáfora’ (‘the freedom to show our point of view on the world through our work, using to that end any opportunity and any metaphor’) (Palacio 2006, p. 103) Molina clearly saw Teresa’s saintliness instrumentally as a ‘metaphor’ for what she calls women’s ‘initiative’ in the world, including the maledominated world of television. Loriga, on the other hand, while overtly echoing Molina’s concern for female agency, also attempted to grant his Teresa greater powers of imagination and emotion. These latter qualities are rescued from Teresa’s historical detractors and reinvented for a media-saturated modern audience through dazzling, seductive aesthetics. Hence, while both directors engage in ‘enculturation’ or the creation of ‘public history’ for a national, if not international, audience and both make separate but equal claims to historical truth, it is by no means clear whose re-vision of Teresa can or should be validated as a legitimate carrier of the lessons of history.

References Base de datos (2008). http://www.mcu.es/bbddpeliculas/cargarFiltro.do?layout= bbddpeliculas&cache=init. Custen, G.F. (1992), Bio/pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (Newark: Rutgers UP). Higson, A. (2003), English Heritage, English Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

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Llorente, A. (1995), Arte e ideología en el franquismo (Madrid: Visor). Montoya, J. A. M. (2008), http://www.jam-montoya.es/. Palacio, M. (2001), Historia de la televisión en España (Barcelona: Gedisa). ——— (2006) Interview with Josefa Molina, in Las cosas que hemos visto (Madrid: RTVE), p. 103. Ocaña, J. (2007), ‘Crítica: una mujer enamorada’ [review of Teresa, el cuerpo de Cristo] El País http://www.elpais.com/articulo/cine/mujer/enamorada/elpepuculcin/ 20070309elpepicin_14/Tes. Preston, P. (1995), Franco: A Biography (New York: Fontana). Quílez Esteve, L. (2006), ‘Teresa de Jesús’ in M. Palacio (ed), Las cosas que hemos visto (Madrid: RTVE), 102–3. SGAE (2000), Hábitos de consumo cultural (Madrid: SGAE). Umbral, F. (1984), ‘Tribuna: 22 domingo’ http://www.elpais.com/articulo/ultima/ 22/domingo/elpepiult/19840429elpepiult_5/Tes.

5 The Final Girl and Monstrous Mother of El orfanato Ann Davies

Spanish cinema of the late dictatorship and the transition often suggested an uncomfortable perception of the mother figure, portraying mothers as dangerously castrating, as seminally theorized by Marsha Kinder in her book Blood Cinema (1993). In the contemporary era, the figure has reappeared in a new format: Spanish horror. The upsurge in Spanish cinema dating from 1995 has included a strong contribution from the horror genre to the extent that Spanish horror and horrorthriller hybrids have achieved international distribution. This chapter considers gender issues in the contemporary genre, in particular the increasing emphasis on women as subjects and not objectified victims, following Carol Clover’s theorization of the Final Girl (Clover 1992) as the survivor of the horror film. But earlier conceptualizations of women have not been forgotten. The chapter takes as a case study the recent international success El orfanato (The Orphanage, Bayona 2007) to suggest that horror heroines can also be horror monsters: the monstrous mothers not only of horror theorist Barbara Creed (1993) but also as posited by Kinder as mentioned above. Horror and fantasy become specifically female constructs (since the truth behind the horror turns out to be more mundane, associated with the masculine). Female subjectivity now means that, instead of men investigating the mystery of women, women now investigate themselves. Spanish horror has for some time been a quiet success story. While for some decades Spain has been known among deep-dyed horror aficionados as the producer of some cult classics – the veteran horror director Jess (Jesús) Franco even contributing to the Hammer horror canon – more recently Spanish horror and fantasy have on occasion impinged on the international mainstream. Horror films from East Asia and Europe can hold their own against horror from the dominant US cinema, 79

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a challenge to cinematic hegemony in which Spain plays a pivotal role. ‘Only in Spain is the horror film simultaneously thriving in its classic and modern forms, delivering gruelling ordeals of survival and pointed ghost/fantasy stories’ (Newman 2009, p. 38). A few horror thrillers have acquired notable international success, and not always by pandering to Anglo-American requirements. While Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001) was shot with Anglophone actors, including Australian star Nicole Kidman (but with Spanish crew and Spanish location shooting), Mexican director Guillermo del Toro shot his Oscar-winning El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth, 2006) in Spanish, with a plotline based around the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, thus making little concession to a default assumption of comprehensibility to an Anglophone audience in order to ensure international success. Likewise Jaume Balagueró, who previously made English-language horror – Darkness (2002), Fragile (2005) – turned to the Spanish language for his critical success [REC] (2007). While Spanish horror certainly acknowledges and avows generic characteristics as derived from Hollywood, and uses marketing and publicity techniques familiar to the American scene, it does not fight shy of self-reference. El orfanato is one of Spanish horror’s most notable success stories in recent years. Benefitting from the del Toro effect – del Toro produced the film, and the marketing campaign strongly emphasized his involvement, capitalizing on the international success of El laberinto del fauno – the film grossed over 5 million euros in its opening weekend in Spain and 24 million euros overall, as well as a healthy 7 million dollars in the US and nearly a million and a half pounds in the UK. It also benefitted from quality production values and an understated horror style not dependent on special effects and CGI, which enhanced its attractions beyond horror fans to more mainstream and arthouse audiences who might not like the gorier end of the horror spectrum. Horror in this film turns out in fact to be quite mundane: while the film features ghosts and a child wearing a mask under which we might imagine all sorts of horrors to lurk, there eventually proves to be a natural, if tragic, explanation for the disappearance of the heroine’s son that propels the whole plot. Even moments of frisson, when the heroine turns her back to play the game of her childhood and we experience vicariously the horror of someone or something unknown creeping up behind us, turn out to be benign, as the moment of fear dissolves into childish shouts of play. The plot focuses on Laura (Belén Rueda), who is living with her husband and their adopted son in a house which used to be the orphanage where she lived as a child, and which she is now making over into a

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home for terminally sick and handicapped children. On the day the home opens her son Simón (Roger Princep) goes missing and is never subsequently found. Laura consequently commits herself to search for her son and in the process solve the mystery of the invisible children who Simón appeared to befriend earlier. Although Laura is convinced by supernatural explanations for his absence to the extent of calling in a psychic team (who do in fact make a case for such activity as far as we the audience are concerned), the death of her son has a natural explanation for which Laura herself is culpable: she inadvertently shuts him in his favourite hiding place so that he cannot get out and duly dies there. The mysterious old woman Benigna (Montserrat Carulla) and the masked child Tomás (Óscar Casas) that hint at monstrosity, who turn up intermittently throughout the film, prove to be red herrings, as the real ‘monster’ proves to be Laura herself, the one responsible for her child’s disappearance. Both the old woman and the masked child will, however, be implicated in the film’s central motif of mother as monster, as we shall see below. El orfanato is not the only recent Spanish horror film that offers the mother as both the monster and the monster’s pursuer. A similar structure is found in Amenábar’s The Others, in which the central character Grace attempts to track down the ghosts that appear to haunt her house, only to discover that she and her children are themselves the ghosts; and indeed she is the monster at the heart of the horror, having murdered her own children due to temporary insanity. Less well known is Daniel Calparsoro’s Ausentes (The Absent Ones, 2005), where a mother, Julia, tries to discover the mystery behind the strangely unpopulated suburb where she lives: cuts to different points of view towards the end of the film reveal that the mystery lies within herself and the inability to ‘see’ her neighbours. The violent denouement, as Julia thrashes at an unseen foe with a knife, again offers the suggestion of a mother as monster, underscored further by the hostility between herself and one of her sons (see Davies 2009). In a similar fashion the bulk of El orfanato is taken up with Laura’s search for her son and her increasing incursion into a world of ghosts: her quest, which takes over her whole life, eventually leads her to the basement where Simón had discovered Tomás’s hiding place in the form of a cubby hole, where he thought the ghosts of the other children lived. Laura had previously accidentally blocked the door while Simón was inside, and he died, unable to escape. When she realizes what has happened, Laura appears to commit suicide by swallowing pills and retreat into a supernatural mothering role: at the end of the film she is now caring for all the ghostly children, who were originally her own

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friends when she lived at the orphanage. This retreat is strangely marked as happy and positive, as the husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) returns and the extended nuclear family is now complete. The film ends as Carlos enters the house after laying flowers on the graves of Laura and the children: the inner doors mysteriously swing open wide and Carlos walks forward, a smile on his face as we cut to the credits. He is apparently reunited with his family. This restoration of the normative family comes at a price, however; the suicide of Laura that can be seen as the acceptance of guilt and the need for punishment so that the family can be restored. While in Ausentes the restoration of the family comes at the price of the exclusion of the mother, left alone in her psychotic bubble, here the mother is included but nonetheless dead. While these two films, together with the disturbed Grace of The Others, might not be sufficient to claim a distinct trend in Spanish horror, nonetheless these films pose women as the problem to be solved. They also, not incidentally, present women as the ones to solve the problem, the ones who investigate the horror that is themselves. In this we can see a change from earlier Spanish cinema. Marsha Kinder has written of the specificity of the Spanish Oedipal narrative in which a subconscious desire for patricide is displaced on to the mother, linking this to particular traumatic episodes in Spanish history wherein patriarchal figures were weak or absent (Kinder 1993, pp. 234–8). Since patricidal desires were displaced on to the mother, the mother held the key to the problem to be solved (even in some cases the horror to be solved, although the films Kinder discusses are not usually classified as horror films). However, the mother was not the one to unravel the problem. In the fifteen years since Kinder published her groundbreaking study Spanish cinema has changed in significant ways, including the increased commercialization and efforts towards international distribution of which El orfanato is a part; while Spain itself, although undergoing intermittent traumas (no less shocking for their intermittent nature) of terrorism from ETA and Al Q’aeda (the Madrid train bombings), have achieved comparative political tranquillity compared to the twentieth century. It would be unwise to say that the need for Oedipal analysis of Spanish cinema is past, but perhaps we can tentatively say that for now, the political and historical traumas no longer map neatly on to Kinder’s Spanish Oedipal narrative. But this is not to say that the mother of Spanish cinema is entirely devoid of the force with which Kinder credits her. El orfanato offers mothers who preside over sick children, but even here Simón shows signs of wanting to elude his mother, who in turn effectively castrates/kills him

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for his transgression of trying to elude her, just as earlier mothers held their sons in castrating thrall (Kinder cites Furtivos (Poachers, José Luis Borau, 1975) and Camada negra (Black Brood, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, 1977) as examples). As Paul Julian Smith observed in his Guardian blog, ‘Spain has a great tradition of horror-tinged art movies in which innocent, but creepy, kids are tempted to go over to the dark side […] Moreover these creepy kids are often matched by monstrous mothers, women who love just a little too much’ (Smith, 2008). Now, however, these mothers of contemporary horror police themselves: as subjects of their films they have in effect internalized their own objectification. To understand how this works, I would like to draw on two theoretical strands that have become well known in the study of horror film. Film theory has developed a body of critique that we can apply specifically to horror and more particularly to the function of women within it. To consider the relation of the mother role to horror in El orfanato I shall draw on two seminal theorizations. The first is that of Carol Clover (1992), who suggested the concept of the Final Girl, the fairly sexless heroine who seems to survive the horror and defeat the monster while others around her succumb. The second is that of Barbara Creed’s monstrous feminine (1993), her theorization of the woman as monster in terms of the abject. The horror films that Clover refers to in her book Men, Women and Chainsaws (1992) are slasher films, films about possession and raperevenge films – none of which particularly fits El orfanato. Neither does El orfanato coincide with Clover’s contention that ‘there is something about the victim function that wants manifestation in a female, and something about the monster and hero functions that wants expression in a male’ (Clover 1992, pp. 12–13). Quite apart from the fact that it is hard to determine who the monster is – it could be Laura herself as the one who caused her son’s death – if we assume on first appearances that the ghostly little boy is the monster, then he is hardly a ‘man’ in the sense that Clover means, that is, a fully grown male. But Clover also observes that some female characters combine the role of victim but also that of avenger (p. 17). She elaborates this position more fully into her now seminal concept of the Final Girl, the character in horror films who does not die but survives long enough to be rescued or dispatch the monster herself – and the word is herself advisedly, because as Clover notes, for many years now this figure in the horror film has been female (p. 35). More particularly, Final Girls quickly developed to be not simply survivors but avengers, pursuers of the monsters. Laura in El orfanato is a loose fit on this notion of the Final Girl. Some of the characteristics

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identified by Clover include being virginal or sexually unavailable, overly watchful, intelligent and resourceful, and often with an androgynous sounding name – summarized in one word by Clover as ‘boyish’ (Clover 1992, pp. 39–40). Not all of these apply to Laura, though some of the apparent differences may be smaller than we think, such as her role as mother, very much stressed in the film (and in the ending, where Laura remains to care for her ghostly childhood friends as a sort of surrogate mother). Laura is not biologically a mother, while her singleminded quest to find her son eventually drives her husband away: both render her sexually null and void. Laura’s quest to solve the mystery of her child’s disappearance and of the sinister older woman and strongly masked child, on the other hand, has a strong resemblance to the quest of the Final Girl: […] the Final Girl looks for the killer, even tracking him to his forest hut or his underground labyrinth, and then at him, therewith bringing him, often for the first time, into our vision as well. When, in the final scene, she stops screaming, faces the killer, and reaches for the knife (sledge hammer, scalpel, gun, machete, hanger, knitting needle, chain saw), she addresses the monster on his own terms (Clover 1992, p. 48). This is to some extent what Laura does, going through the labyrinths of the house, finding the buried children in the cellars, and finally facing the children on their own terms by participating once more in the childhood game with which the film opens. Clover’s theorization of the Final Girl in terms of indeterminacy of gender has received criticism (for instance in Hutchings 2004, pp. 2027), but it is this active questing element of the Final Girl figure that I think appropriately apt here. Nonetheless the critique of the theory also has its resonance in relation to El orfanato. Tony Williams comments: Clover’s supposedly progressive Final Girls are never entirely victorious at the end of certain films nor are they devoid of the recuperation into a male order of things that they are supposedly free of (Williams 1996, p. 170). As we shall see, Laura’s solution to the puzzle of the monster implies only a pyrrhic victory at best, and the solution implies that women are the problem to be solved. What I will go on to suggest is that the Final

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Girl still has validity, but it allows for conservative readings of the sort that Williams suggests. But if Laura is the Final Girl, where is the killer? Well, in fact there appear to be two – the old woman Benigna, who originally murdered the other children of the orphanage in revenge for their responsibility for her son Tomás’s death, and Laura herself since she inadvertently locked her own child away to starve to death. Benigna and Laura are monstrous mothers, and here we can now turn to the theorization of Barbara Creed. Creed’s seminal book The Monstrous Feminine (Creed, 1993) does not focus wholly on the mother, but the mother plays an important role in horror due to her fundamental link with the abject. The abject as a concept here derives from Julia Kristeva’s theorization of the abject in terms of the bodily substances we prefer to disavow: urine, semen, faeces, vomit and most particularly blood. The abject has a specific link to the maternal through blood above all: as Kristeva notes: ‘devotees of the abject […] do not cease looking, within what flows from the other’s “innermost being”, for the desirable and terrifying, nourishing and murderous, fascinating and abject inside of the maternal body’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 54). Creed draws on Kristeva’s theorization to argue that horror films are likely to render the maternal as abject, linking the mother and bodily waste together in a relationship that signifies the possibility of regression to a point prior to our incorporation into the symbolic order (Creed, 1993, pp. 8–15). Creed’s theory implies the woman as object rather than subject, as I have previously noted (Davies 2009, p. 167): however, women who combine the role of Final Girl and Monstrous Mother are subject rather than object, as here, where the story is told from Laura’s point of view and we are encouraged to identify with her. Creed posits an archaic mother, ‘going back to mythological narratives of the generative, parthenogenetic mother – than ancient archaic figure who gives birth to all living things’ (Creed 1993, p. 24). Again drawing on Kristeva, she argues: ‘the central characteristic of the archaic mother is her total dedication to the generative, procreative principle. She is … the original parent … outside morality and the law’ (p. 27). Creed goes on to note: The archaic mother is present in all horror films as the blackness of extinction – death. The desires and fears invoked by the image of the archaic mother, as a force that threatens to reincorporate what it once gave birth to, are always there in the horror text – all pervasive,

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all encompassing – because of the constant presence of death (Creed 1993, p. 28). Creed’s archaic mother applies to some extent to Benigna and her own monstrous child Tomás, ugly enough to need to wear a mask constantly, although in the end we do see the face of the child directly. This woman becomes the focus of the film’s horror, particularly when Laura and her husband see her run over and glimpse her crushed and newly deformed body. She is the one who gives birth – outside the moral law – to the deformed and the monstrous (albeit a monster that eventually we come to see more benignly, as one child among the others at the orphanage); and it is this event that sets in train all the others, thus the train of horror originates with her. She is also the one who kills the remaining children at the orphanage in an act of revenge: while killing children hardly seems maternal at first blush, it derives from her maternal rage at the death of her offspring, a rage that devours (and thus reincorporates) all in its path. By searching for the mystery that lies behind the woman, Laura is in one sense searching for the origin of the whole mystery that lies with the woman’s original sin in giving birth to an illegitimate child, whose deformity could be said (in the narrowest terms of morality, though hopefully not to us from a more sympathetic and accepting standpoint) to mark the unnatural act of illicit sex. Laura’s own capacity as a natural mother remains in itself unclear: we do not know if she is physically able to have children or not but we do know her son is adopted. Thus one unnatural mother goes in search of a solution to the mystery of the original unnatural mother whose very act of motherhood precipitated the horror events that are now taking place in the house. Laura is in search of Creed’s archaic mother. This, just as with Clover’s concept of the Final Girl, allows Laura agency independent of her husband – indeed of her son, even though the latter is her immediate motivation for her search. If, as Creed suggests, ‘the concept of the archaic mother allows for a notion of the feminine which does not depend for its definition on a concept of the masculine’ (Creed 1993, pp. 27–8), then the search for this concept also bestows agency. Laura gains agency twice over, through her opposition to the horror events of the film as outlined in Clover’s theory, and her search for the origins of the mystery as embodied in Benigna, and as theorized by Creed. It is notable that Laura only begins to succeed in her search once she is finally left alone in the house without any of the other agencies that also originally participated – Carlos, the police, the medium Aurora (Geraldine Chaplin) and her team of assistants. This

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coincides with Clover’s theory, wherein the Final Girl defeats the monster ultimately through her own wits. However, we could also argue – looking now to Creed’s side of the argument – that Laura alone can solve the mystery and end the horror precisely because she, as an unnatural mother ultimately responsible for the death of a child, can follow Benigna’s motives. Thus Laura only has her agency, in this respect, precisely because of her monstrosity. Again, the other agents – Carlos and the police suggesting rationality, Aurora the supernatural – cannot quite account for Simón’s disappearance. In an ironic twist, the agents of rationality should have had the edge since Simón’s death can be rationally explained; but what appears to be required to explain all the events is that sense of the monstrous, which is what Laura possesses. Furthermore, what Laura is also able to do is break the boundary between the role of mother and of children because of her original status as an inhabitant at the orphanage and her memory of her childhood companions there. Her plans to convert the house to a home for special needs children also imply her preference for children’s company. During the extended final confrontation between herself and the dead children, she makes contact first by following the trail of clues (the importance of this being first indicated to her by Simón), and then by playing their old childhood game in which the ghostly children join in: it is only when she reverts to playing games that contact between herself and the children is finally established. She deliberately aims to go back in time by restoring the house to its old look, the way it looked when she herself was a child. But on the other hand she dresses in the uniform originally worn by the staff at the time (including Benigna, and Laura even wears her way tied back in a bun the way Benigna did in her day). Once Laura has committed suicide, she can perceive the children clearly and they see and recognize her, claiming that it is still Laura but she is now all grown up. This implies the blurring of boundaries between Laura as child and Laura as mother: she is still their childhood friend but also the mother who left but has now returned and will look after them. In an interview the film’s scriptwriter Sergio G. Sánchez observes that the film has links with Peter Pan: the story is Peter Pan in reverse, as the mother waits for her child to return (El orfanato 2007, p. 110). The children indeed refer to the story of Peter Pan and the character of Wendy: they believe that Laura is like Wendy, only grown up now. The Peter Pan references again conflate the role of mother and child. We could even argue that Laura and the children share identities as inadvertent child-killers. Her friends do not necessarily mean to kill Tomás when they abandon him in the (uterine) cave, but they are

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responsible for his death, just as Laura herself is inadvertently responsible for Simón’s death – and the equation is further underlined by the fact that Simón takes over Tomás’s hiding place and dons his mask with the result that he resembles him. The indeterminate border between the role of mother and of child might act as another way of understanding the indeterminacy of the Final Girl, usually figured through indeterminate gender markings. But it can also suggest a constant looking back to one’s point of origin in a different sense now, an assumption of maternal care while simultaneously returning to one’s beginnings as a child. Yet it may also mark Laura out once more as monster. This blurring of boundaries between the mother and child roles is not necessarily benign. The swelling music and emotion of the final scenes, suggesting a happy family reunion, cannot quite disguise the fact that this apparently sugary ending comes at the cost of death. But we can say more: the return of the mother figure threatens the efforts of the child to create a separate identity. In fact, the rebellion of Simón against Laura results in his death: instead of staying with her as commanded, he runs away to Tomás’s hiding place where Laura will subsequently and inadvertently trap him. On one level this rebellion may result from Simón’s perception of Laura as not his mother and proving unsatisfactory in the mothering role: he accuses Laura of lying about being his mother and starts to confront her at almost precisely the point where Laura and Carlos open their home to other children, suggesting his insecurity about his relationship with her and thus about her role as mother. And although it is not immediately apparent, the child responsible for injuring Laura’s hand and shedding her (maternally abject?) blood is in fact Simón, who has discovered Tomás’s mask in the latter’s hideaway under the stairs. The desire for separation – on the part of the child and not the mother – may seem to run counter to the blurring of boundaries that I have posited. But the shedding of blood and the significance in this sequence of the cave where Laura thinks she sees Simón, resembling as it does a womb-like structure, suggest an impulse somewhere to dissolve the boundaries between mother and child. We could also posit that Simón’s preference for Tomás’s hiding place also derives from a desire to revert to the womb of the real mother, since his adoptive mother is proving less than satisfactory. Of course, this desire will again prove malign, since the hiding place is redolent of the archaic mother, the place where she hid her offspring: there is no escaping the monstrous mother after all. It is, of course, a similar blurring of boundaries between Simón and his natural mother that has caused Simón to be ill in the first place: he contracted the HIV virus through sharing his blood with her while still

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in the womb. Thus although he is not of an age to understand that his natural mother is no more benign than his adoptive one, Simón’s natural mother becomes another version of the archaic mother, diseased and destructive yet impelled to give birth to sick offspring. The film’s settings thus insist on the drive to seek out the archaic mother. The uterine cave by the sea is itself destructive and devouring, in that children can drown in its waters (another hint at the maternal abject). Although most of the ghostly action takes place up at the house (of which more below), the first suggestion of the dead children that will haunt the film comes with Laura and Simón’s visit to the cave at low-tide and the latter’s befriending of a ghost that is presumably Tomás. Tomás follows his new friend back to the house (the stones and shells that Simón left along the way back as a trail to follow are subsequently found in a pile outside the front door), and his arrival at the house seems to trigger ensuing events such as Simón’s discovery that he is ill and that Laura is not his real mother. The cave, then, was a site of tension and of secrets which have now been released. But most of the film’s main action takes place at the house, the former orphanage which Laura and Carlos have been subjecting to a makeover. As an orphanage, the building suggested the fallibility of the mother (and father) as permanently absent (Laura proving to be the exception, leaving the orphanage as a child for a new home). In its later incarnation it becomes a home for very sick children (of which Laura’s child is one, having the HIV virus): the parents having (perhaps for very understandable reasons) had to relinquish care. The director Bayona, in interview, claimed that part of the interest, which attracted producer del Toro as well, was that houses with problems attract people with problems (El orfanato 2007, p. 14). We are reminded of del Toro’s own orphanage in his earlier film El espinazo del diablo (The Devil’s Backbone, 2001) in which the building, isolated in the Spanish countryside, provides the focal point for the working out of childhood traumas and conflicts and negotiations with a troubled adult world (and these childhood traumas include those of Jacinto, who, grown up, becomes the villain of the piece). In El orfanato these problems are centred on mother-child relationships (to the extent that Carlos as the father is sketched in only lightly) and the extent to which these become distorted by the notion of the monstrous mother. Houses are, of course, associated with the feminine and the domestic, and are themselves structures of shelter with traditionally the mother at its heart. Houses are also, however, a familiar motif in horror films which goes against the symbolism as a place of familial refuge, suggesting either fragmentation of the family (as in

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The Others, for example) or the terror of the distortion of its closeness (as in the family of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series). Clover has given the label of The Terrible Place to such settings (Clover 1992, pp. 30–1). The house of El orfanato offers plenty of horror touches such as the séance sequence in which Aurora walks through the apparently empty rooms, the swing creaking in the evening light, the cellar in which the children’s bodies are found, the dark staircase which Laura descends on her way to finding her son’s body. On the other hand, in contrast to houses with evil children (such as The Omen (Donner 1976) and The Changeling (Medak 1980)) the children of El orfanato, insofar as they are ghosts, are benign. (It is only as living children that they do harm, such as the children’s cruelty towards Tomás that leads to his death, and Simón’s injury to Laura’s hand). Just as the horror of the film frequently dissipates into simple play, so the supernatural terrors of the house dissipate. They can transform into either the rational as the true source of horror – Laura blocking Simón’s exit from his hiding place – or into a sense of the home as a place of nurture once more, albeit supernatural, suggested above all by the final opening of the doors that Carlos interprets as a gesture of welcome. Thus these sites, linked to the maternal, imply the ambiguity of the maternal figure in the film, suggesting the maternal as both nurturing and as horrific. What is also striking is that so much of Laura’s investigation into herself – her search for answers as to what happened to her son – takes place inside the house. If the cave can be linked to the origin of the horror of the archaic mother, the site that originally precipitated the subsequent events, then the house is the site of investigation into these origins. Thus the two spaces come to reflect the combination in Laura of the Final Girl and the Monstrous Mother. But the confinement of these spaces suggests something else as well. Laura is in the end investigating her own home (in both its earlier and later incarnations) to find the horror that lies at the bottom of it. If this is a maternal space, then Laura is in a sense policing it. With this we come to the ultimate thrust of the combination of the two horror concepts within one character. I would argue that El orfanato offers, among other things, a conservative reading that subverts the active subjectivity of the Final Girl since that impulse to survival and confrontation is now turned inwards. Laura in the end confronts her own self and the horror of what she herself has done: in addition she also confronts, not a monster that is diametrically opposed to her (as in the original conception of the Final Girl, where the monster was usually male), but a concept of monstrous motherhood, one which penetrates the

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boundaries between mother and child, in which she herself participates. Horror and fantasy may lie in the mind of the female (since the explanation for events turns out to be rational and mundane if tragic) and more specifically in the mind of the mother, since only Laura has full access to it. Female subjectivity now means that, instead of men investigating the mystery of women, women now investigate themselves. Again, this strongly implies the need for the investigation to be confined to the house in the final instance, wherein Laura investigates her own space, her own realm, for problems and traumas within it. This conceptualization is not unique to El orfanato: it also applies, for instance, to The Others, in which the mother is confined to the house and grounds, exploring the rooms until she comes to realize that the explanation for events lies with her own murderous self. Julia of Ausentes has a slightly larger area to investigate, her residential neighbourhood with its supermarket and swimming pool, but nonetheless she does not get beyond the bounds of her suburban hell in which her reduction to the role of housewife and mother appears to have driven her mad. In these scenarios the role that men play can vary. While the husband of Ausentes appears to embody the main threat of the film (comparisons could be and were made to Jack Nicholson’s role in The Shining (Kubrick 1980)), he is absent for the most part in The Others where the only other adult male is the elderly (and ghostly) gardener. As for El orfanato, I have already mentioned Carlos as cipher, while other adult male roles are merely the sidekicks to Aurora’s performance as medium. Whatever male authority there is, it does not serve to further the Final Girl’s discovery of a solution to horror. In these films, however, the solution is within herself, so that female subjectivity is prominent but turned in on itself. Christopher Sharrett talks of the way in which the apparent radical nature of horror – allowing the Other subjectivity and thus undermining the notion of Otherness – is co-opted by capitalist culture in order to restore the original position of the Other (Sharrett 1996, p. 254). We can see from Laura’s position in El orfanato that mothers carry the potential to be both subject and object, both self and Other, so that in horror films like this one women are left to chase their own tails, absorbed in their own pursuit. The absence of male subjectivity in El orfanato, and also The Others, suggests that it is left untouched and unaffected. It is absent precisely because it does not need to be questioned. When Smith closes his blog by commenting that ‘home is where the horror is’ (2008), he explicitly acknowledges the Freudian uncanny rendering of the familiar trope of the home and by implication of the mother often assumed to be at its heart. We can also add that El orfanato

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suggests a newer phenomenon: the impulse of the mother, no matter how monstrous she might be, to clean house. Both motherhood and the pressure to live up to an ideal vision of it become the true horror, as Belén Rueda observed of her character: ‘se queda anclada en su papel de cuidadora o madre, pero, a la vez, tiene los sentimientos de culpa y la obsesión porque las cosas no cambien y por lograr lo que quiere de una mujer madura. Su coraje se vuelve en su contra’ (she remains rooted in her role as carer or mother, but at the same time she feels guilt and obsession because things don’t change and because of a need to achieve what she expects of a mature woman. Her courage is turned against her: J.C., 2007). In a sense Laura does achieve the ideal mothering and caring role: she becomes Wendy caring for her lost boys (and girls), as the film makes clear through its explicit references to Peter Pan and the character of Wendy (Rueda refers to Laura as suffering from a Wendy complex). But she achieves this after a self-induced death, her ultimate maternal act of self-abnegation as well as self-inflicted punishment. Spanish horror, then, might be in the forward- thinking vanguard in terms of genre – but not necessarily of gender.

References Clover, C. J. (1992), Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Creed, B. (1993), The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge). Davies, A. (2009), Daniel Calparsoro (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Hutchings, P. (2004), The Horror Film (Harlow: Pearson). J.C. (2007), ‘“Todo drama es terrorífico”’, www.elpais.com/articulo/cine/Todo/ drama/terrorifico/elpepuculcin/2007/1005. Kinder, M. (1993), Blood Cinema: the Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press). Kristeva, J. (1982), Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection, trans. L. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press). Newman, K. (2009), ‘Horror Will Eat Itself’, Sight and Sound 19/5, 36–8. El Orfanato: una película de J. A. Bayona: la película y sus creadores (2007) (Madrid: Ocho y medio). Sharrett, C. (1996), ‘The Horror Film in Neoconservative Culture’, in B. K. Grant (ed.), The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (Austin: University of Texas Press), 253–76. Smith, P. J. (2008), ‘The Orphanage Should Quicken a Few Pulses’, www.guardian. co.uk/film/filmblog/2008/mar/17/theorphanage. Williams, T. (1996), ‘Trying to Survive on the Darker Side: 1980s Family Horror’, in B. K. Grant (ed.), The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (Austin: University of Texas Press), 164–80.

6 Ensnared Between Pleasure and Politics: Looking for Chicas Bigas Luna, Re-viewing Bambola Santiago Fouz-Hernández

Reading through a selection of press cuttings, interviews and other visual and printed materials related to the release of Bigas Luna’s fifteen feature films spanning over thirty years, one can easily identify a relatively short list of key terms that keep recurring in interviews, press conferences, position articles and film reviews, particularly since the release of his second film, Bilbao, in 1978. These include: machismo, eroticism, pornography, exploitation, masculinity, femininity, the body, excess, food, Mediterranean (sea, countries, culture, stereotypes). Of all his works, the trilogy of ‘Iberian Portraits’ released in the first half of the 1990s, and in particular the film Jamón, jamón (1992), has attracted the most academic attention to date. The director’s emphasis on his leading actresses during the promotion of these films contrasts with the focus of reviews on the trilogy’s playful staging of Iberian masculinities. With some exceptions (see, for example, Deleyto (1999) or Evans (2004)), academic articles and studies devoted to Jamón, jamón have also largely focused on men and masculinities. As a result of this, the ‘Iberian Portraits’ Trilogy (Bigas Luna and Cuca Canals, 1994) is now widely known as the ‘masculine trilogy’ and, what was meant to be a follow-up ‘Latin’ trilogy – at the request of French producer Daniel Toscan du Plantier (Caballero, 1996) – with films set in Italy (Bambola, 1996); France (Le Femme de chambre du Titanic (The Chambermaid on the Titanic), 1997) and Spain (which Bigas Luna originally intended to be based on the story of Carmen, although in the end he opted for Volaverunt, 1999) – has become known as the ‘feminine trilogy’. Notably, beyond these three films, at least half of Bigas Luna’s films to date have a woman figure for the title. For all the discussion about the so-called ‘chicas Almodóvar’ (the Almodóvar girls), the same term has not been applied to actresses that have worked for Bigas Luna, despite the fact that he gave career-making, milestone roles to actresses 93

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that thereafter achieved international fame, including Francesca Neri, Penélope Cruz, Leonor Watling or, more recently, Verónica Echegui. This chapter will examine two key aspects of the contentious relationship between Bigas Luna and women. I will first explore the director’s public discourse with regard to women and femininity, as well as his tempestuous relationships with his leading actresses, with the aim of assessing the oft-made accusations of misogyny and exploitation of women. The chapter will then turn to a close textual analysis and, using the rarely discussed but highly controversial Bambola as a case study, it will consider the extent to which these claims about Bigas Luna’s gender politics and his attitudes to women are the consequence not of any misogyny per se but of an ambiguous political orientation towards gender and power. One of the main issues at stake in this essay is the question of whether the films of Bigas Luna can potentially provide any kind of pleasurable and positive viewing experience for non-hegemonic spectators. With this aim in mind, in my analysis of Bambola I will turn to recent and more visceral theories of spectatorship that work through the kinds of incitement enacted by the image onto the human sensorium typical in the films of this director. But first, I will turn my attention to the search for the chica Bigas Luna.

Chicas Bigas Luna: from Bilbao to DiDi (or from Pisano to Pataky) In the Spring of 2009, various Spanish national newspapers covered the news that Verónica Echegui, the young actress discovered by Bigas Luna in 2005 after a year-long nationwide open casting for the protagonist role in a trilogy about ‘women and success’, had been surprisingly replaced by Elsa Pataky for the second instalment of the trilogy (DiDi in Hollywood, 2010). Echegui’s performance in Bigas Luna’s Yo soy la Juani (I am Juani, 2006) as Juani was met with wide acclaim and earned her a Goya Award nomination for best new actress. Since then, she went on to star in a number of fairly important films in Spain and abroad. Pataky (who is seven years older than Echegui) started her acting career in television and went on to become a major celebrity in Spain, due partly to her romantic involvement with Academy Award-winner Adrian Brody, and partly for her modest but much talked about ‘break’ into Hollywood, including some fairly prominent roles in blockbusters such as Snakes on a Plane (Ellis and Halaby, 2006). Importantly, in Spain she is now widely regarded as ‘the most desirable Spanish actress’ and one of the most talked-about ‘sex-symbols’ of the 2000s (Harguindey, 2009).

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If the film’s headline plot is anything to go by, DiDi in Hollywood is indeed well-suited to her: it tells the story of an emerging Spanish actress (Diana Díaz – hence the DiDi of the title, a homage to Brigitte Bardot, who was known by her initials BB) who, like the real-life Pataky, tries her luck in Hollywood with varying success. The replacement of the original actress (who, after all, had been cast for the entire trilogy and would have added an extra layer of consistency to it) despite her Goya-nominated performance in Yo soy la Juani, might be seen as revealing of a putatively tense relationship between the director and his leading ladies, that goes back to his very early films. In her book Sombras de Bigas, Luces de Luna, Isabel Pisano, who had been the protagonist of Bigas Luna’s second film Bilbao (1978), writes unreservedly about her own memories of the film and her (mixed and intense) feelings towards the director. Bilbao received an ‘S’ (R) rating in Spain by the then still active Censorship Board and was advertised as ‘la película más morbosa de la historia del cine español’ (‘the kinkiest film in the history of Spanish cinema’),1 contributing since then, as Soler argues, to the expectation that a Bigas Luna film will include a ‘kinky’ or sexually controversial element of some sort (Soler, 2002, p. 16). As Pisano amply explains in the book, it seems that, in order to attract that kind of attention, the director had to push her to the limits in the role of a street prostitute who is abducted, tortured and eventually killed by a sadistic loner. Yet, despite the commercial and critical success of the film, and of her performance in particular, she was not called for the next film. ‘I felt hurt’, she writes, ‘our film had had a clamorous success: it was invited to be screened at Cannes, it stayed thirteen months in the cinema [in central Madrid], it received the Ministry [of Culture]’s award’ (Pisano, 2001, p. 35). She goes on to explain how she became typecast as a low-life as a result of her role in the film and was never offered a decent role since then, despite doing everything she could to disassociate herself from the film and the director for years, ultimately being unable to resurrect her short acting career. Instead, Bigas Luna cast his then wife (Consol Tura) for the protagonist female role of that next film, Caniche (Poodle, 1978), which became even more controversial than Bilbao. The most talked-about scenes of Bilbao (in which a semi-unconscious and naked prostitute is suspended from the bathroom ceiling held by cables for her abductor to ritually shave her genital area) had an equivalent in Caniche with the polemic bestiality scenes – including one instance in which Tura’s character invites her poodle to lick honey out of her vagina. Retrospectively, as the director confesses to Pisano in their interview, Caniche was as hard an experience for Tura (it is suggested that it

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indirectly caused their divorce) as Bilbao was for Pisano (Pisano, 2001, p. 106). This story seems to repeat itself in almost every film. Leaving aside for now the most famous of the director-actress disputes (Bambola, our main case study), it will be relevant here to briefly turn our attention to another notorious case. The role of Lulú in the also highly controversial Las edades de Lulú (Ages of Lulu, 1990) was turned down by at least six well-known Spanish actresses including Maribel Verdú, Ana Álvarez, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón and Emma Suárez. Ángela Molina, who had already worked with Bigas Luna for the title role of Lola (1985), originally accepted the role and signed the contract, but pulled out when she read the final script. The role went to a then practically unknown Francesca Neri, despite the director’s earlier claim that ‘Molina is so fundamental for this film that I would not direct it without her’ (Muñoz, 1990). There was a very public dispute between Molina and producer Andrés Vicente Gómez, who published a letter in national newspapers accusing the actress of breaking the contract and warning her of a 250 million pesetas lawsuit and ‘serious consequences’ for her acting career. Molina responded with another published letter, describing the producer as a bully, the film as ‘pornographic’ and arguing that there was a clause in the contract that entitled her to withdraw if she did not approve of the final script. Pisano’s book omits the Molina episode, but it is full of anecdotes of this kind. Perhaps seeking personal closure or just revenge for her own past problems with the director, throughout the various interviews done in preparation for the book Pisano confronts Bigas Luna about almost every leading actress that he has worked with. Problems are abundant, even with those who worked with him more than once, often due to disagreements in the inclusion of certain controversial scenes involving specific nude shots or ‘unusual’ sex scenes. He admits to have gone through ‘an uncomfortable period’ with Penélope Cruz between Jamón, jamón and Volaverunt ‘due to some sequences in the film [Jamón, jamón]’ (Pisano, 2001, p. 154). His ‘gastronomic’ and outrageously objectifying description of some of these actresses is telling in itself: Ángela Molina […] is a peach, whilst Francesca Neri is a prawn. Penélope, a tocinillo de cielo (egg yolk and syrup pudding) with cream. Aitana is more about oil and pasta, she is a very delicate thing. You [Pisano] are the jamón, and Sandrelli is soft, like a thin bull stake, Marini is a mortadella di Bologna (p. 172). Later, he goes on to confess a fetishistic obsession with Aitana Sánchez Gijón’s foot (she was barefoot when they first met), as a result of which

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he decided not to show her foot at all in La camarera del Titanic ‘in order to preserve my desire to see it again, perhaps in another film’ (emphasis mine). The desire was to be fully satisfied with the famous footworshipping scene in their next collaboration, Volaverunt (Pisano, 2001, p. 257). To give a final, anecdotal but significant, example, in his conversation with Pisano the director remembers that when Leonor Watling told her mother that she had been offered a role in a Bigas Luna film – for Son de mar (Sound of the Sea, 2001), the mother’s response was: ‘and will you have to show your pussy, my child?’ (Pisano, 2001, p. 263).

Sex-ism With the evidence discussed so far, it would seem that accusations of machismo and exploitation do have a factual basis. One could deduce from all this that Bigas Luna treats his actresses as his personal possessions. Like some of the characters in his films, he gets obsessed with them, objectifies them, uses them and then disposes of them, ready for the next one. Yet, in those same interviews and press conferences, the director seems adamant in wanting to highlight a genuine empathy with women and also his ‘feminine side’. ‘I regard myself as a man with an important feminine part’, he tells Pisano (2001, p. 97 – emphasis mine). In a different interview, published around the same time in a national newspaper, he had this to say in response to the question of whether the type of macho embodied by Bardem in Jamón, jamón and Huevos de oro (Golden Balls, 1993) in the early 1990s was now an ‘obsolete concept’: We live at a time when the concepts of femininity triumph over those of virility. All the successful men that I know are men with an important feminine part. Today, a high-flying executive is someone sensitive, seductive; I mean, with an important feminine part. The difference between macho and virile is a very fine line that I define as follows: the macho carries a knife in his pocket, whereas the virile man does not. The macho is capable of killing if someone insults him in the street, whereas the virile guy is capable of pretending that he has not heard it, even at the risk of being called a coward. The difference is in the knife (Muñoz 2001 – emphasis mine).2 These words are echoed in a number of interviews for various publications after the Iberian Trilogy. When discussing machismo in Bambola he says: I detest machismo but I am attracted to the idea of virility. They are two very different things. The machista is a loser: when he loses

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something or does not get what he desires, he kills or dies which, when you think about it, is the same thing. Men today are pathetic […] Women, on the other hand, have their feet on the ground and for this reason they are able to fly (Calleja, 1996). And a year later as regards La camarera del Titanic: ‘This time I am the one who got naked […] people get it wrong. The fact is that, with the exception of Lulú, actors do not get naked that often in my films. It seems more than it actually is’ (El Dominical de El Periódico, 1997, p. 30). Even years earlier, during the pre-production of what was to be his first literary adaptation (the already mentioned Las edades de Lulú, based on Almudena Grandes’s best-selling erotic novel), he seemed keen on highlighting his intention to respect the female perspective of the original text: ‘It is the story of a woman told by a woman and I will have to use my feminine part, which I have one-hundred-percent. It will not be a machista film’ (Muñoz, 1990). Nevertheless, for all his efforts, the film was read as machista by most critics and those who have studied it, due, in no small part, to the changed ending. For Ballesteros, ‘the point of view, the feminine voyeurism in the novel has been given to the other protagonists/spectators in the film’ and even the ‘generous male nudity’ in the homosexual S&M scenes is ‘conventional and full of clichés in the scenes between Pablo and Lulú’, to the extent that Lulú ends up as ‘a sex toy at the hands of all the male protagonists’ (2001, p. 194). Ballesteros acknowledges that the moralistic ending was already part of the original novel, but was exacerbated in the film with the addition of the words ‘Help me, I need you’, that a broken Lulú utters to her husband, after he rescues her from a strong S&M scenario that could have ended in fatality (p. 195). Pisano threw the exact same accusation to the director: ‘Bigas [you must] change the ending. Get rid of Lulú’s line ‘I need you’ when she hugs Pablo. Make Lulú grow up once and for all and live alone. Solitude is a privilege of the gods, not a disability’ (2001, p. 179). Ironically, the director used the moralizing ending as a defense strategy against those who accused him of making a pornographic film: ‘deep inside Lulú is a woman who loves just one man and she keeps looking for him in others only to devote herself completely to him’, adding that, ‘with the exception of the S&M sequences, which I portray as the world of the baddies, I think I have made a deeply moralizing film’ (El País, 1990). For all his ‘important feminine part’, then, in the light of his public statements at least, Bigas Luna’s approach to, and understanding of, femininity seems to be inconsistent at best and regressive and plainly offensive at worst. Indeed, far from offering a potentially

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liberating experience to the desiring female subject that was present in Grandes’s novel, in Bigas Luna’s adaptation, S&M practices become some sort of punitive learning experience that, as Ballesteros argues (2001, p. 194), serves to reaffirm the female character’s subjugation and dependence on her husband. Nonetheless, one of the aims of this chapter will be to test the extent to which we might be able, however problematically, to make a case for a recuperative reading of Bigas Luna’s films, where, as we shall see, all is not quite as clear as it seems.

Gastronomic eroticism: a cinesexual approach The much talked-about relationship between food and sex in the films of Bigas Luna is perhaps most noticeable in films such as Jamón, jamón or Bambola, where the national gastronomies of Spain and Italy respectively can be said to have a role of their own and are intrinsically and, in some cases, quite literally, linked to sex and sexuality. Indeed, this is apparent in most of his films to date, and has earned them the generic label of ‘gastronomic eroticism’. The director proactively promotes this aspect of his work, often describing the smell or the flavour of his films (garlic and olive oil seemingly the most popular ingredients). He also shows an unusual awareness of the carnality inherent to cinema: ‘In my first films [up until Lola] I was going for the spectator’s head, rather than their stomach, or their skin’ (Mendizábal, 2001) – which suggests that his films since 1985 have been concerned with the spectator’s sensorium. Word of mouth, advertising and other public discourses around a certain film or a director’s public persona can pre-condition our experience of film. As potential mass-market products, a popular film is often targeted at specific sectors of the paying public, be it young, female, adult, gay or working-class audiences, for example. What if one, as a gay man, or heterosexual woman, to mention but two possibilities, were to find some aspects of the films of Bigas Luna pleasurable, even appealing? Should one not take issue with the reductive representation of gay men in films like Las edades de Lulú or Bambola? Should one not be offended by the objectification of women, the sexual and psychological violence, the abundant clichés and stereotyping of gender, sexuality and/or national identities, the repetitive Freudian imagery, the crass jokes, the vulgarity and senselessness of some of the stories? As a man, I do not feel I can even attempt to read how these films may affect female spectators, nor indeed any other group of spectators regardless of

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whether they may share my sex and sexual orientation. Whilst I would not support a simple ‘doing away with’ the kind of binary oppositions that have dominated film studies for the last four decades or so (around categories including gender, sexuality, class or race), I see in Patricia MacCormack’s theorisations of what she terms cinesexuality, and more specifically, her concept of ‘cinemasochism’, an intriguing alternative to prescriptive ways of reading that emphasize positional categories. ‘Contrary to much spectatorship theory that posits the gaze as powerful, cinema primarily requires the viewer to submit to the image’, she writes (2008, p. 36), adding: ‘psychoanalysis emphasizes the masochistic positioning of the female spectator but in the face of the cinematic image all spectators lose themselves’ (p. 36). MacCormack explicitly acknowledges the potential dangers of a ‘future beyond dualisms’ that ‘risks forgetting histories and ignoring memories of suffering and oppression, as well as the acts of power, experienced and expressed by individuals and groups of subjects’ (p. 36), but, drawing on Guattari’s idea of asemiotic bodies, she proposes that the cinesexual emphasizes cinematic pleasure as asignified, pleasure beyond signification that then challenges how genders, and individuals as their own collective of disparate modalities, desire cinema. Rethinking cinema can alter the way women have been both denied a specific gaze and defined as gazing either masochistically or transvestitically, while acknowledging that spectators desire cinema in excess of the meaning of images and their deferral to established sexualities (p. 31). She goes on to explain that ‘there is power in submission to asignified desire’ and that ‘submission to asignification is a step rather than the taking up of a marginal position, which questions the politics and value of desiring positions of power’ (p. 37). Here and elsewhere in her densely theorized book, MacCormack’s ideas echo aspects of the work of Linda Williams (1999), Laura Marks (2000) and Vivian Sobchack (2004) on embodiment and cinema viewing. Speaking of haptic visuality and erotics, Marks writes: ‘by interacting up close with an image, close enough that figure and ground commingle, the viewer relinquishes her own sense of separateness from the image – not to know it, but to give herself up to her desire for it’ (2000, p. 183). Her definition of haptic visuality coincides with MacCormack’s cinexexuality in so far as ‘haptic visuality implies making oneself vulnerable to the image, reversing the relation of mastery that characterises optical viewing’ (Marks, 2000, p. 185).

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Sobchack also argues that ‘we need to alter the binary and bifurcated structures of the film experience suggested by previous formulations and, instead, posit the film viewer’s lived body as a “carnal third term” that grounds and mediates experience and language, subjective vision and objective image’ (2004, p. 60). One of the aspects that these important writings have in common is the call for new ways of experiencing cinema, especially with regards those cases where, as MacCormack puts it, ‘many of the images directly affront the spectator to dislike them’ (2008, p. 40). Going a step further, these writers convincingly challenge the very notion that certain films, images or sexual practices that may be regarded as perverse or even degrading (to women, to homosexuals) are recuperable as pleasurable and desirable for spectators belonging to those groups. In her ground-breaking study of so-called hardcore pornography, Linda Williams helpfully and succinctly spells out the rationale behind, on the one hand, anti-pornography and, on the other, anti-censorship feminists (Williams, 1999, 16–33), arguing that ‘the central fallacy of all the anti-porn feminist positions [is] that a single, whole sexuality exists opposed to the supposed deviations and abnormalities of somebody else’s fragmentation’ (p. 23) – her point being that ‘a whole truth of sexuality […] outside of language, discourse and power’ cannot exist (22–3). We have already seen how many of Bigas Luna’s films have been described by the Spanish press as ‘kinky’, ‘scandalous’, ‘perverse’, or even ‘pornographic’ and how many actresses have taken issue with the ways in which the director shot certain scenes or manipulated certain images that made them feel used and exploited. In the films themselves, the succession of sequences clearly meant to provoke a strong reaction in the spectator (instances of S&M in Bilbao or Las edades de Lulú; bestiality in Caniche; ménage-à-trois in a number of films – most famously perhaps in Las edades de Lulú and Huevos de oro; foot-fetishism in Volavérunt, sexual violence in Bambola and so on) would seem to add to this effect. With their open celebration of excess and abandonment to carnal and culinary pleasures, do these films encourage more physical ways of engagement with the images on the flat screen? Are we meant to smell the garlic or taste the olive oil as well as see and hear what is in front of us? To what extent and in what ways can we touch and feel touched by these images?

Desperately Seeking Pleasure in Bambola Bambola seems an appropriate case study to answer some of these questions in the context of what has been discussed so far. Not only did the

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film provoke perhaps the most famous and most public row between Bigas Luna and one of his lead actresses, in this case Italian television personality Valeria Marini (who played the leading role of Mina), but like Bilbao and Las edades de Lulú, it was also announced as ‘Bigas Luna’s most provocative film’ – this time on the promotional poster itself.3 It is worth pointing out that the PR fiasco orchestrated by Marini and the media focus on those aspects of the film perceived as ‘scandalous’ did not help the critical reception of the film. It is partly due to the poor critical reception that Bambola has not received much academic attention to date. After a disastrous opening at the Venice Film Festival (where an unfinished version of the film was screened and received with boos), the film was universally panned. On reviewing the film that followed, the very well received La camarera del titanic, the late and highly respected critic Ángel Fernández Santos described Bambola as ‘verging on the ridiculous’, a ‘dark well’ from which, as in other notorious flops (referring to Las edades de Lulú and Huevos de oro), he was able to re-emerge triumphant with a career-saving follow-up (Fernández Santos, 1997). Yet, Bigas Luna has described Bambola as the ‘freest’ film of his career (Bonet Mojica 1996), one which celebrates ‘Italian passion, noise, music and food’ and is meant ‘to make the spectator smile’, ‘to reaffirm the will to live intensively’ (Calleja, 1996). Ironically, Marini had personally chosen Bigas Luna to film her in a television advertisement for motor oil, and he then photographed her for the cover of the architecture magazine Domus (Bonet Mojica, 1996). As happened with other actresses, the director-actress relationship seemed a very harmonious one… until the actress saw the final cut of the film. In this case, Bigas Luna argues, Marini was unhappy with the way she looked in some scenes, whereas she claims that it was the shocking intensity of the quasi-animalistic sexual encounters with the appropriately named Furio (played by Cuban actor Jorge Perugorría) that had prompted her to ask first for the cuts and then, following the director’s refusal to cut but one of the frames, to boycott the promotion of the film (Echagüe 2001, pp. 10–12). As ever, Bigas Luna threw in all sorts of contradictory statements in a plethora of interviews published in national newspapers to promote the film, saying to El Periódico: ‘amongst many other things, women are sexual objects’ (El Periódico, 1996) but then insisting that he was not a machista elsewhere. Discussing the film with Payán years later, he argued: ‘Honestly, I am not machista. I love women, I live surrounded by women who adore me and whom I respect’, but then confused the situation further by adding straight away: ‘I am not a machista but I would like to be one.

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When I see the kind of thug that enters a bar and steals my table and then takes the best-looking woman in the room, I am jealous. I hate him but I envy him (Payán, 2001, 78). The Spanish poster of the film shows an item of black lingerie with a label that reads ‘Valeria Marini’s little knickers’ against a white background, further highlighting the objectification of the film’s female star. The trailer opened with a black background, with the title of the film superimposed in large, bright red font, followed by the text ‘a film by Bigas Luna’ and the names of the main actors in white, in a way that is reminiscent of the opening credits of Jamón, jamón (in that case the text was superimposed on the black surface of an Osborne bull). All text apart from the word Bambola then disappears as we hear the screams of Mina in one of the most vigorous sex scenes of the film, metonymically represented by her goat being bounced up and down on the bed due to the (off-screen) movements of the two main characters. The goat appears five times in this two-minute trailer, only to reveal the actual sex scene at the very end. The trailer is packed with extracts from some of the most psychologically brutal scenes of the film, some of which will be analysed later in this essay. It also highlights the key symbolic imagery, which, as one has come to expect from a Bigas Luna film, consists mainly of highly sexualized animals and food. To say that these factors do not predispose the feminist or queer spectator to read the film in a positive light is an understatement. The story itself does not help either. The far from idyllic setting (a run-down trattoria by the delta of the river Po and a nearby prison are the main scenarios) is for Italy what Los Monegros was for Spain in Jamón, jamón: it certainly focuses our attention on the characters and the story. Bambola and Jamón, jamón are also very similar in their basic plotline: against all odds, the beast temporarily seduces the beauty, but that animalistic masculine force inevitably leads to tragedy. The similarities go further: where in Jamón, jamón we had Silvia (Penélope Cruz) constantly preparing paella and tortillas for a family business, in Bambola Mina prepares their Italian equivalent: pasta and pizza… and where we had phallic ham bones we now have phallic mortadella di bologna and eels. In order to develop an analytical trajectory that takes account both of the cinesexual and the sexual political, the essay will now focus on those moments in the film that are particularly violent and unpleasant – the violent sex scenes between Mina and Furio and the rape of Settimio (Manuel Bandera) in prison. First, let us go back to the trailer briefly. Bearing in mind MacCormack’s explanation of cinesexuality and, judging from the way in which the trailer is edited, the film would be

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appealing to cinesexuals and open to a cinesexual reading. ‘Cinesexuals are always in constant want of cinema […] We seek to look before anything can be seen’, writes MacCormack (2008, p. 53). Despite being unusually packed with plot-spoilers, the trailer for Bambola cleverly incites high levels of expectancy by withholding some of the visual information. During the repeatedly shown goat-bouncing scene the spectator may wonder whether the off-screen screams are the result of an assault or a violent sexual act, even a rape. Is the woman whose screams overwhelm the soundtrack trying to fight off a rapist or are her screams the result of an intensively pleasurable consensual sexual experience? The trailer insistently cuts back and forth to this same scene, interspersed with shots from other key scenes, such as the moments prior to Settimio’s brutal rape and Mina’s accidental first encounters with Furio in prison (including the moment when he is taken away by security staff while he screams her name, declaring his love). We see Mina sensually introducing some spaghetti in her mouth (her head tilted backwards as she swallows it) and Furio squeezing a raw eel with his dirty hands, close to Mina’s body, then threatening to make a stew with her pet goat if she disobeys him. Other footage from the prison shows Furio desperately begging Mina to bring him her used knickers, then carving her name on his cell’s wall with a knife. In the midst of all this visual and dramatic intensity, there is talk of pasta, tomato sauce and cooked eels. Despite the message of incongruity and crudeness that the story, as previewed in the trailer, may have sent to the spectators, the rapid succession of highly sexualized images would most certainly have appealed to their senses, encouraging some sort of involvement with them. Applying Lyotard’s concept of ‘passibility’ from fine art to cinema, MacCormack writes: ‘the simple idea of taking pleasure in what we would not presume is pleasurable is an impasse that is possibility’ […] ‘coming to these images with disinterest rather than extreme expectation of unpleasure […] will correlate with our openness of thought’ (2008, p. 57). It is with this ‘openness of thought’ that we approach the first sexual encounter between Mina and Furio here. Mina is persuaded by her gay brother Flavio (Stefano Dionisi) to visit Furio in prison and calm him down so that he leaves his Settimio alone (despite Settimio’s presumed heterosexuality – he had a short fling with Mina – Flavio is in love with him). The prison warder leads her to a meeting place he had arranged with Furio. It is a long and distressing path through a semi-derelict prison building, suggesting that they will be completely isolated. The walk to the meeting place creates an uneasy feeling that will characterize

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each of their sexual encounters, resulting in a disquieting mixture of fear and excited anticipation every time. When Mina eventually reaches the room, it becomes clear that it is not only an isolated part of the building, it is also an insulated, padded cell. As she looks around the unfamiliar, empty and frightening space, POV shots from her perspective on a hand-held camera add to the feeling of unease and disorientation, are further emphasized by her falling on to the floor when one of her high heels catches in a small gap between the floor panels, giving the impression of entrapment (the first of several times she is symbolically ‘hunted-down’ and ensnared) and highlighting what will be a submissive sexual role in the relationship that she is about to initiate with Furio. This image of the hunted-down, vulnerable, precious prey is repeated throughout the film, strengthening her association with her pet goat Lilli (which Furio constantly man-handles and threatens to cook and eat). Far from reassuring, the arrival of Furio into the scene will only heighten the sense of danger. He is naked under a semi-open, stained bathrobe – the main garment he wears throughout the film – revealing a very hairy torso that emphasizes his beastly side. He turns the light off and locks the door behind him as soon as he enters the room, using an intimidating torch to point directly at her face first, then at his arm, to show her the word BAMBOLA carved into his arm, still scabbed over. During the rest of the scene, he aims the torch at different parts of her body, a common S&M practice meant as the ultimate objectification of the human body: the light is directed at those single body parts (usually orifices) that need to be ‘used’ at different times. Regardless of the coincidental sadomasochistic content of this scene, the point of interest for us resides in that the visual dissection and objectification of the body, not the depicted S&M practice, here creates the kind of dehumanizing effect that MacCormack describes in her explanation of cinemasochism (2008, pp. 47–8). Importantly for a cinema spectator, the darkness of the room where the action is taking place evokes the darkness of the cinema. The potent light of the torch directed at Mina in the middle of all this darkness also affects our sight – dormant as a result of the darkness of the cinema and of this scene in particular. This effect enables an easier sensorial identification with her; her sight, like ours, is disturbed by the strong light in the darkness, whilst Furio’s face is further animalized by the indirect lighting coming from the back of the torch. Mina’s heavy breathing (the soundtrack is intensified in this insulated environment) and Furio’s dialogue add to this effect: ‘Do you know where we are?’ he asks, explaining that this was an isolation cell for prisoners with serious mental health problems: ‘if they became unruly, they were locked away

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here so that nobody could hear them. Nobody will hear you either.’ He demands she get up and get undressed, the torchlight following her around the room as she runs, pointlessly attempting to escape. The first surprise comes when she gets undressed and reveals that she is wearing the pair of used underpants that he had sent her. This will be the first of many apparently inconsistent events that will characterize this relationship: one moment she appears to detest him and runs away, the next she wants him. Importantly, beyond the obvious fetishism, the exchange of used underwear will come to symbolize the ‘primal’, animalistic aspect of their sexual attraction to each other, one that is ruled by the senses, one may even say, by their basic instincts; and one that is meant to appeal to the same instinct in the spectator. As he kisses her (a more appropriate way of describing it would be ‘devours her’), close up shots of their mouths and tongues intensify the action in ways that, as Marks has argued in the context of video, underscores the ‘tactile’ quality of the image (2000, pp. 170–6). Furio finally drops the torch, indicating that the power balance has titled slightly as a result of her acknowledgement of her desire for him – no longer a hapless victim. The primal aspect of this sexual encounter is further emphasized by his furious and audible smelling of her neck (‘you smell so good’) before licking her body. Beyond the visual, the senses of touch, smell and taste are heightened for the cinesexual spectator. Furthermore, Mina’s screams can be heard after the camera leaves the prison, during a transitionary travelling shot that leads us away from the prison and, along the river, into the trattoria in the early hours of the morning, perhaps suggesting the extraordinary length of the sexual encounter, but also disjointing image from sound in a way that, as we have seen in the analysis of the trailer, incites further curiosity in those images that we do not see. In the first conversation with brother Flavio, she says that he did not force her but he did hurt her: ‘he is a beast’ (…) ‘I am scared, I am confused because I liked it’. This ‘confusion’, that will characterize their violent relationship, could suggest a negative stereotypization of the female character, but it is also revealing in other ways. Mina seems trapped in a gender economy that dictates that she should love ‘a man with a soul’ as she tells Furio in her second visit. Hence, when discussing their relationship with her brother she often utters the words ‘I love him’ and she asks Furio to kiss her (although the kisses always turn into more aggressive biting). In this second visit Mina wanted to tell him that she was pregnant. Instead, in view of Furio’s response, she keeps quiet about it, and, in tears, swears to herself that he will never know. If in the first visit her secretly wearing his underwear had affected the power balance,

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here the secret knowledge of her pregnancy augments this effect. After the event, she gives him that piece of underwear he had been asking for. Furio pointedly confuses soul and body, offering his sex to her while exclaiming: ‘This is my soul, take it.’ The usual lingerie ripping and forceful penetration follows, to the soundtrack of Mina’s hard-to-read screams. The structure of the first two sexual encounters is characteristic of the other four that will follow. After his early release from prison (due to ‘good behaviour’), Furio turns up at the trattoria and within minutes he is demanding that she kneel down and practice fellatio on him. She pushes him away (into the river) and escapes. The scene that follows, and its accompanying music soundtrack, is a classic cinematic chase. Once again, Mina is the prey, hopelessly trying to escape from the (now armed) hunter, running through a field of flowers. Once again she falls, once again, she gives in to his sexual advances. Again, he rips her underwear apart and, again, he takes her from behind, on a very rough silty surface by the riverbank. She holds on to the soil while he penetrates her, her hands and her face dirty with silt. The screams, the close-up shots of her hands and face covered with silt, once again appeal to the spectator’s sensorium beyond the screen. In all the scenes, sex takes place on rough floor surfaces. The bed is ‘too soft’ for Furio, who insists that everything about him will be ‘hard’. Back home and, as in the other instances, Mina initially resists. Yet, she has another surprise in store that, once again, momentarily reverts the power balance. Despite the initial resistance, when he initiates the sexual contact she asks: ‘Aren’t you going to rip my knickers?’ The scene that follows is the one showed repeatedly in the trailer, where the goat is made to bounce up and down on the bed with the couple’s strenuous movements, while we hear Mina screaming off camera. The notorious eel scene follows, with Mina’s confusion deepening further. She first confesses to her brother that she loves Furio, then tells Furio that she is unhappy because he wants to fuck and she wants to make love. When he asks her to show him how to make love, however, they focus on passionate kissing to start with, but the sex that follows is no different from before. He calls her a whore and rubs an eel against her body. He wraps the wet fish around her legs and then his, going all the way up to her breasts, ending by wrapping it around her neck. Close up shots of his dirty nails as his hands hold and rub the eel, of their sweaty bodies, or of his dirty, worn-out underwear would seem designed to provoke abjection in the spectator. For the cinesexual, however, the visual emphasis on touching, the inferred smell and touch of the fish against the bodies, or the

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graphic tasting of each other’s skin will only heighten the sensorial experience and draw one further in, for one last time. This will be their final encounter. Having tried to kill Flavio, Furio attempts to forcefully have sex with Mina again, but this last chase will end up with him dead, shot from behind by Flavio. Throughout the film, it is suggested that Furio sees Mina’s homosexual brother Flavio as a threat. Not only does he have to share Mina’s love and attention with him, as her brother, Flavio will stand up for her and, in his case, there is no danger of ‘confusion’ with sex, even though Furio makes the point of showing him his penis just after having a shower, perhaps as a way of provoking him or reinstating his own masculinity before the queer threat. Furio will then try to literally exterminate him, first by chasing him with a gun, then by setting fire to the boat where he is hiding from him. In prison, Furio had arranged for the brutal rape of Settimio by some other prison mates, mainly to ‘make’ Settimio forget Mina and, through Flavio, to get her attention (her first few visits to prison were to visit Settimio). In some ways, Settimio’s rape scene visually anticipates the violence that Mina will experience at the hands of Furio, except here, Flavio has no desire for these men and no way of reverting the power imbalance. While he is in the prison kitchen peeling potatoes, three other inmates attack him, first forcefully dunking his head into a bucket full of water. He is then furiously raped by one of them, while the other two pin him down to a table, demanding that he recites out loud a pasta recipe and force-feeding him full heads of garlic, putting a picture of Flavio holding Lilli (the goat) right in front of his face and commenting how they would cook the goat and how tasty it would be. The goat and the pasta (as well as Flavio’s picture) emphasize the link between this rape and Furio’s future sexual relationship with Mina. The parallelism is visually emphasized with the way in which the rape is shot, especially the darkness of some of the shots, which, as we have already seen, will also dominate Furio and Mina’s first sexual encounter shortly afterwards and, in my reading, are a direct reflection of the darkness in the cinema. Shots of Furio voyeuristically looking on, crouching in a corner (smiling and licking his fingers with excitement) also highlight his cruelty, as well as his pansexual appetite. The stress on food during this scene (the recipe, the discussion of tomato sauce, the garlic) may well enhance our sense of taste and smell, the dramatic close-up shots of the faces of the rapists and their victim may well enhance our sense of touch, encouraging us to adopt a cinemasochistic position here. Yet, even with an ‘openness of thought’, the psychological violence of these images brings representational

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politics back into the frame and the cinesexual position goes out of the window. Although there is no room here to discuss the representation of homosexuality in Bigas Luna’s films, it is perhaps enough to point out here that the other well-known example of homosexual representation in his filmography is contained in the S&M sequences in Las edades de Lulú (famous for being Javier Bardem’s first acting role), which are also dominated by extreme brutality and pain, sexual abuse, forceful penetration and psychological violence. The problem is made worse in Bambola with the suggestion that the rape somehow managed to switch Settimio’s sexual orientation, ‘turning’ him gay: ‘Prison is a very strange place: murky issues often become clear and what one may have thought was clear may become murky’, Furio says to Mina following the rape, adding that ‘things are in the process of becoming clearer for Settimio right now’. To make things worse, when Settimio tells Flavio what happened, Flavio finds it amusing that the rapists forced him to recite a pasta recipe while they raped him and downplays the act by laughing and asking which recipe was it. The problematic representational politics do not end there. Flavio tells Settimio not to worry because, as a child, he was also raped: ‘Still, I am happy…’, he says. This is followed by an uncomfortably long pause before adding ‘… [I am] happy to have found my sexuality’. The last scene of the film, set at the train station (the setting of Flavio’s childhood abuses) suggests that Flavio and Settimio end up together as a couple, running the trattoria and keeping Lilli the goat as a stand-in daughter. Mina leaves on a train to give birth and bring up her baby elsewhere and start a new life. To suggest that someone can somehow ‘turn’ homosexual or discover their sexuality as a result of rape is as suspect as the suggestion that Mina discovered real sexual pleasure in the abusive relationship with Furio, and here lies the difficulty with the cinesexual approach: the spectator may try to become ‘emancipated’ and find alternative ways to enjoy asignified images, ‘foresaking the power to look for submission to the affect produced by what is seen’ (MacCormack, 2008, p. 44), but one really would have to become inhuman to reach the level of abstraction required to find these images pleasurable. Yet, beyond the highly problematic gender and sexual politics, Bambola may have a redeeming element in Mina’s motherhood and the promise of a new life as an independent single mother, away from the domesticity implied in her old job at the trattoria. When discussing sexism in the films of Bigas Luna, Pisano writes: ‘masters like [him] know […] that only we women are capable of being really free, that life is in our hands and therefore our ability to transmit [men’s] genetic codes.

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In the worst cases, man, incapable of giving life by himself, executes his power by killing’ (2001, p. 179, n 23). Her words echo those of Adrienne Rich (1976) and many other feminists who, since the 1970s, have been discussing the empowering value of motherhood. These words are also reminiscent of Bigas Luna’s own argument when discussing the concept of the macho, as seen earlier in this essay. One could read Bambola as another attack on machismo. In the end, Furio ends up dead whilst Mina is not only about to start a new life for herself, but also to create one by giving birth. Furio’s excessive masculinity and physicality is not too far apart from other arguably demeaning representations of the macho in Bigas Luna’s filmography (the closest perhaps are the characters played by Bardem in Jamón, jamón and Huevos de oro). The phallic imagery is equally laughable here: at his worst moments, Furio walks around with a gun in his hand, pathetically trying to impose his will on Mina or Flavio, but his handling of the gun proves highly ineffective and it is a gunshot that ends up killing him off. He is the hunter turned hunted. For all his emphasis on phallic sexuality, his penis is never seen and, as happened in those two earlier films, the phallic symbol par excellence is pointedly destroyed, symbolizing the threat of castration for which the character has the need to overcompensate (if, in Huevos de oro, the all-important skyscraper collapses before our eyes, here the eel is vigorously chopped up by Mina just before her last sexual contact with Furio). As shown in this essay, female representation in the films of Bigas Luna and public discourses around them are highly ambiguous and problematic. Through their symbolic excess and an intense and constant appeal to the senses, the films do encourage a visceral reading that may transcend conventional approaches to film. The claims of cinesexuality are that images take us up and possess us in ways that conventional readings have yet to come to terms with. Put another way, conventional readings are not able to take account of our submission to those images, and have instead placed too much emphasis on the Cartesian visual frame. We could describe this move towards cinesexuality as part of a broader tendency that Patricia Clough (2007) calls ‘the affective turn’, that is, the tendency to reinsert the human sensorium into the critical frame. However, what this new tendency has not been fully able to account for, despite reassurances to the contrary, is the extent to which pleasure is always already political. Like Mina/Bambola in the film, we as spectators are ensnared in the filmic machine between the political and the pleasurable, precisely at that place where these two

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elements cannot be made whole. This chapter has tried to maintain this incompleteness, since to foreclose the argument too early (towards the political or towards the pleasurable) will always curtail the radical potential of the filmic idiom itself. As we have seen, hovering around this incomplete dualism of politics and pleasure are a set of public discourses connected to the figure of Bigas Luna himself, which enriches and problematises further any attempt to experience the images in isolation. From his very earliest films, partly due to his own public utterances and the way the films were promoted, questions have always been asked about Bigas Luna’s sexual politics, his attitude to women, his relationships with female actors and the intention behind the violent sex scenes that dominate his films. In other words, in this case, the figure of the director/auteur haunts these films in a way that affects the pleasure/political dualism quite explicitly. His recent films, however, have been less ambiguously favourable towards women. Bigas Luna has described the protagonist of Yo soy la Juani – a ‘poligonera’ who escapes the limitations of her life in the periphery of the city to become a star – as ‘the princess of the twenty-first century, no longer the victim of the macho ibérico’ (Bigas Luna, 2006).4 This suggests that the representation of female friendship, female sexuality and independence signals perhaps not so much a change in the director’s politics of representation, but in the society that his films have strived to represent. One could see in La Juani – who, like Mina, ends the film alone in a train, leaving her past behind – a much more liberated version of previous female characters in Bigas Luna’s films. Signs of this liberation were arguably always there, but prior to Yo soy la Juani, the films can be read as portraying older social models which prevented earlier heroines from confronting their male counterparts in the manner in which Juani famously does: ‘I love it when you get all jealous, but do not push it, mate, I am free. Don’t you ever forget that’.

Notes 1. All translations from Spanish in this chapter are my own. 2. In both cases he uses exactly the same expression in Spanish, which I have italicized and loosely translated as ‘an important feminine part’. The original Spanish is ‘una carga de feminidad importante’. 3. Everyone in the film calls Mina Bambola, but I will refer to her throughout as Mina. 4. A poligonera/o is a young person, or working-class origins and very specific look, who lives in a housing project at the distant margins of the city.

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References Arenas, J. (1990), ‘Angela Molina, tranquila ante las amenazas del productor de la película ‘porno’ ABC (26 May). Ballesteros, I. (2001), Cine (ins)urgente:. textos fílmicos y contextos culturales de la España postfranquista (Madrid: Fundamentos). Bigas Luna, J.J. and C. Canals (1994), Retratos ibéricos: crónica pasional de Jamón, Jamón, Huevos de Oro y La teta y la luna (Barcelona and Madrid: Lunwerg). Bigas Luna, J. J. (2006), Interview included in the ‘extras’ DVD in the special edition of Yo soy la Juani (Madrid: Manga Films). Bonet Mojica, L. (1996), ‘Bigas Luna: Bambola es mi filme más libre, lleno de excesos e ironía’, La Vanguardia (25 October), 47. Caballero, O. (1996) ‘Bigas Luna rodará una trilogía latina en Italia, Francia y España’, La Vanguardia (12 April), 52. Calleja, P. (1996), ‘Las nuevas perversiones de Bigas Luna’, Primera Línea (November). Clough, P. T. (2007), ‘Introduction’, in P. T. Clough with J. Halley (eds.), The Affective Turn: Theorising the Social (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 1–33. Deleyto, C. (1999) ‘Motherland: Space, Femininity, and Spanishness in Jamón, Jamón (Bigas Luna, 1992)’ in P. W. Evans (ed.) Spanish Cinema: the Auterist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 270–85. Echagüe, J. V. (2001), ‘Del jamón al prosciutto’, Bambola booklet in ‘El cine de TVE’ DVD series (Suevia Films). El Dominical de El Periódico (1997), ‘Esta vez me he desnudado yo’ (16 November), 30. El País (1990), ‘El erotismo de Las edades de Lulú llega a los cines de Madrid’ (6 December). El Periódico (1996), ‘Bigas Luna: “Me he divertido mucho haciendo Bambola” ’ (24 October), 49. Evans, P. W. (2004), Jamón, Jamón: estudio crítico (Barcelona: Paidós). Fernández Santos, Á. (1997), ‘El desquite de Bigas Luna’, El País (27 October). Fouz-Hernández, S. (1999), ‘All That Glitters is not Gold: Reading Javier Bardem’s Body in Bigas Luna’s Golden Balls’ in R. Rix and R. Rodríguez-Saona (eds) Spanish Cinema: Calling the Shots (Leeds: Trinity and All Saints), 47–66. Harguindey, Á. S. (2009), ‘Pataky ante el espejo’, El País Semanal (14 June), 36–46. MacCormack, P. (2008), Cinesexuality (Aldershot: Ashgate). Marks, L. U. (2000), The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and The Senses (Durham and London: Duke University Press). Mendizábal, L. M. (2001), ‘La muerte provoca que una pasión continúe para siempre’, Diario de Sevilla, (7 June), 50. Muñoz, D. (1990), ‘Bigas Luna: “Las Edades de Lulú no será Emmanuelle”’, El País (5 May). Muñoz, J. L. (2001), ‘Olas de pasión’ Blanco y Negro Dominical (3 June), 66–73. Payán, M. J. (2001), Cine español actual (Madrid: Ediciones JC). Pisano, I. (2001), Sombras de Bigas, luces de Luna (Madrid: Sociedad General de Autores y Editores).

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Rich, A. (1976) Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton). Sobchack, V. (2004), Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press). Soler, L. (2002), Tres paellas con Bigas Luna (Valencia: Mostra/Ayuntamiento). Williams, Linda (1999) Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’ (Berkeley: University of California Press).

7 Javier Bardem: Costume, Crime, and Commitment Chris Perriam

Javier Bardem’s much commented upon acceptance speech for his 2008 Oscar for Best Supporting actor in the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007) evoked pride in a multiple heritage – professional, familial, linguistic, political, and ethical – whose outline details were already familiar to Spanish audiences and to those studying recent Spanish film culture (Green 2004; Wood 2008), specifically a heritage of resistance to the values of Francoism: I have to say this in Spanish, I’m sorry: Mamá, esto es para ti, esto es para tus abuelos, para tus padres Rafael y Matilde, esto por los cómicos de España que han traído como tú la dignidad y el orgullo a nuestro oficio ... esto para España…[this is for you, for your grandparents, for Rafael and Matilde, this is for the theatre folk of Spain who, like you, have brought such pride and dignity to our profession … this is for Spain] This tribute to his mother Pilar Bardem, and to a whole family tradition – through grandparents Rafael Bardem and Matilde Muñoz Sampedro, and uncle Juan Antonio Bardem – of social commitment and active cultural critique made a straightforward connection, which I shall come to elucidate later, between filmmaking, acting and political responsibility. Oddly aligned to this, at first it seems, was Oscar telecast host Jon Stewart’s presentation of Bardem which compared his playing of the killer Anton Chigurh with Anthony Hopkins’ playing of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991) allotting him, according to the Madrid newspaper El Mundo, ‘un puesto de honor en la galería de los grandes villanos de Hollywood’ [a place of honour in the gallery of Hollywood villains] (Fresnada, 2008). Psychopathic criminality, in an 114

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apparent paradox, came to assert national honour and a sense of right and wrong: ‘Javier Bardem consigue el Oscar en la piel de un asesino psicópata’ [Bardem Wins Oscar as Psychopath Killer] was the headline of that same El Mundo coverage. Bardem’s eccentric Anton Chigurh is, for critic Geoffrey O’Brien, both an ‘angel of death’ and ‘another in a long line of … philosophical assassins’ (O’Brien, 2007, pp. 30–1), and he manifests this in the neutral-retro period clothes of adapted 1980 West Texas, and through the now notorious hairstyle for the role, remarked on by Stewart and Bardem himself at the Oscar ceremony, as also by many commentators in relation to the portrayal of menace and ill omen (for example, Brophy, 2008; O’Bryen, 2008, p. 30; Turner, 2008). Bardem inhabits his character here in a context of repeated violence whose incidents become the hinge for abstract considerations of destiny and temporality on the one side, concerns about the threat of national moral decay and North America’s policing of its borders and its military reach (Mellen, 2008) on the other. These issues become very much the burden of his Oscar-winning performance. In Goya’s Ghosts (Forman, 2006), set in the period 1792 to 1809, Bardem plays an inquisitor in one half of the story (of high status enough to seek out Francisco de Goya – Stellan Skarsgård – as his portrait painter) and, in the other half, an institutionalized revolutionary working for the French, following the Napoleonic invasion of the Peninsula. He embodies in this dual performance certain standard questions about the nature and mutability of truth: these are prompted by a broadbrush treatment of reactionary theology and repressive politics on the one hand, and of revolutionary actions and ideas on the other. Again, the context is that of the repetition of violent events – here in the historical dimension: the torture, incarceration, and ritual burning of individuals in the name of religious and state orthodoxy, and a war of occupation-cum-liberation entailing the disruption of the nation. Although it was released in English-speaking territories in November of 2006 (a year before No Country for Old Men), Goya’s Ghosts only came into its own in Spain in the key anniversary year of 2008, marking both 1808, the 2 May anniversary of the rebellion by the people of Madrid in the face of French occupation (the subject of the famous painting by Goya), and 1978, the year of the coming into law of the new Spanish Constitution of the post-Franco democratic era. The film formed part of the Madrid Círculo de Bellas Artes season of films on the 2 of May events and, to take one of several examples from elsewhere in Spain, was included as part of Jaén’s celebrations of the bicentenary of the Battle of Bailén, and defeat of the French troops on 23–4 July. Like Telemadrid’s

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Dos de mayo: La libertad de una nación (The 2 of May: A Nation’s Freedom: first season commenced May 2008; second, November), Forman’s film had very strong backing from the Comunidad de Madrid’s Fundación Dos de Mayo, Nación y Libertad (Second of May Foundation for Nation and Liberty) whose remit is to: preparar la celebración del Bicentenario de la Constitución de Cádiz de 1812, e impulsar y difundir los valores de nación y libertad que simboliza esa fecha histórica de la que somos herederos en nuestra Constitución de 1978 (pave the way for the celebrations of the bicentenary of the Constitution of Cadiz of 1812, and to promote and disseminate the values of nation and liberty which that historic date symbolizes, and of which our own Constitution of 1978 makes us the heirs) This is a mission and an inheritance in obvious concord with Bardem’s interpretation of his own, and his family’s and fellow actors’ role in post1978 Spain. Both films which are the main part of this essay’s discussion place him at the centre of violence, explore the space of crime and evil, and have particular political resonances. In the North American case, the performance contributes to the ways in which the traditional values of an idealized, pre-Vietnam Texas/USA give way to modern mayhem; in the Spanish case, it is bound up with the millennial transitions of Spain which had so preoccupied Goya himself: Bardem’s role represents a dramatic position at the border between good and evil, between the right to life and not, between one regime and the next.

Politics The speech at the Oscar ceremony not only made an explicit connection between the acting profession in Spain and a commitment to oppositional, anti-right-wing, micropolitics, but it responded also, obviously, to the immediate context of the award-winning performance in the Coen brothers’ semi-metaphorical drama of ethics and catastrophe unfolding in the resonant emptiness and in-between-ness of West Texas and the border at El Paso. It also came soon after the performance in Goya’s Ghosts, of the venal inquisitor Lorenzo – who has to flee Madrid having raped a prisoner and been forced under duress by her father to renounce the methods of the inquisition – and of the cynical revolutionary whose machinations draw attention to the disastrous proximity of personal ambition and political supremacy,

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of the murderous impulse and the territorial instinct. For the wider world cinema audience and followers of festival ceremonies and awards, the actor’s self-positioning in the extra-fictional space of politics and social commitment bound him close to many more famous names (George Clooney, Paul Newman, Warren Beatty) and was in any case no surprise at a time of a resurgence of the topic of a wider sense of ethical commitment in interviews and publicity across a range of talents and political (and religious) sympathies (Guider, 2006). Closer still to home and to the present day the speech reactivated public knowledge of the actor’s involvement in the new Spanish social cinema – specifically his roles in Los lunes al sol (Mondays in the Sun, León de Aranoa 2002) and Mar adentro (The Sea Inside, Amenábar, 2004);1 it would also have reminded a smaller audience of Bardem’s role as producer of the five-hander documentary for Médecins Sans Frontières Invisibles (2007), the winner of the Academia de las Artes y las Ciencias Cinematográficas (Spanish Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) Goya prize for best documentary in 2008; and it anticipated Bardem’s associated involvement in the cause of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic, his backing of and attendance at the 5th Sahara International Film Festival (Fisahara), and the creation of the Plataforma Todos con el Sahara, on whose website the presentation takes the form of a voice-of-god style voiceover by Bardem.2 Bardem’s image, as well as his voice, became prominently connected to the cause. The family associations with activism now extended also to his brother Carlos, who emphasized to television reporters the moral weight of the proposals being put to the government by the Plataforma grouping‘s signatories (RTVE, 2008). As El País’s editorial on the Oscar award put it, ‘no sólo es un gran actor, sino que es, además, un ciudadano comprometido’ (not only is he a great actor, but he is, moreover, a committed citizen: El País 2008c). The Oscar event, and the speech, also meant that his name was to become even more associated than it already was, through his support of the artists’ and creative industries’ alliance in support of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Socialist candidate in the Spanish electoral battle of March 2008 (the Plataforma de Apoyo a Zapatero (PAZ)). All major contenders in the election campaign were quick at the time to send their telegrams or offer their televisual sound bites in response to the award (El País, 2008b). The obvious but none the less significant catch-phrase, tag-line, and header in rapid circulation was ‘Bardem hace historia’ (Bardem Makes History).3 In the Manichean manner of some characters in both the films under discussion, Spanish political and popular comment put Bardem at the

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fulcrum of formal and informal debate whose key word on the one side was titiriteros (puppeteers) used against the actors and intellectuals already aligned with the No a la Guerra (No to the War) campaign and the pro-Zapatero alliance (the PAZ), who were (customarily enough) deemed to be champagne socialists about to grow fat on the new Ley del Cine (2007), a law adjusting state arrangements on grants, subsidies, screen quotas, and the participation of television companies in Spanish film production. On the other side, there was vocabulary linking acting, social commitment, and anti-establishment sentiment and action. On the political right, supporters of the Partido Popular, the Red de Liberales Españoles (Network of Spanish Liberals) and the Zeta Group-backed web newspaper España Liberal (Liberal Spain – the term being understood not in a traditional British sense) – all these were denigrating the campaigning actors and creative industries as well as belittling Bardem’s own achievement.4 On the other side were the members of the Academia de las Artes y las Ciencias Cinematográficas and – not least – Zapatero, using of Bardem such words as ‘referencia’, ‘símbolo’, ‘ejemplo’ (point of reference; symbol; example), and of actors and filmmakers in general the plain powerful term ‘creadores’ (creative), emphasizing their importance to Spanish culture (Europa Press, 2008; Ya, 2008).

Heritage This essay began by making some suggestions about the multiple heritage of national struggles into which these two films have inserted Bardem. Of the two, it is Goya’s Ghosts that most obviously is ‘heritage’ in look, planning, and intent (with more that half an eye on the centenary celebrations already alluded to). The Fundación Dos de Mayo, and behind it the Comisión Ministerial para la Conmemoración del Bicentenario (Ministerial Commission for the Commemoration of the Bicentenary of the War of Independence) were instrumental in opening up access to the prestige locations of Salamanca, Segovia, Ocaña, Toledo, the Prado Museum, and the Royal Monastery of Santa María de Veruela, with its strong Marianist and Jesuit associations. 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). Atmospheric exterior locations as well as variously cavernous

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and lugubrious or spacious and dazzling interiors presented aesthetic and technical challenges to (the famous, and himself iconic) director of photography Javier Aguirresarobe. He found himself working to do justice to these ‘spaces that emanate truth’, as he saw it (Oppenheimer, 2007, p. 24). This lighting and setting of such places of witness, as well as the parade of historical and pseudo-historical figures, contribute to and interact with the modes in which Bardem makes history, giving his performance particular resonance as well, arguably, as going some way to rescuing it from errors and excesses in the film. Aguirresarobe’s efforts (and linked to them the painterly pretext of the bio-pictorial aspect of the film) lighten as well as dignify the convoluted and coagulated plot through which Bardem has to move. As has been noticed (Torreiro, 2008), Bardem shows signs of being hampered by the period paraphernalia, and to be particularly uncomfortable in the role of the inquisitor; at times, however, discomfort is transmitted effectively to the audience, horrified, for example, by the grotesque incongruities of an opulent dinner-table scene at the house of the rich merchant whose daughter, Inés (Natalie Portman) has been taken for questioning by the inquisition and whose torture is the tenor of the smooth talk. Delivery of his lines in English also places the actor at a disadvantage, with out-of-kilter intonation and word stress only sometimes contributing positively to the effect of alien wickedness attaching to the characterisation. Whereas in No Country for Old Men an off-beat accentuation and flattened rhythmic delivery fulfils a genuine purpose, in Goya’s Ghosts it sets up barriers which in many such scenes are not at all helped by a TV drama style over-determination of facial expressions, costume, lighting, furnishings, and terms of reference which are much simplified, with a dependency on stock, if understandable, demonizations of the activities and practices of the Inquisition. The film has been caricatured, not entirely unfairly, as one in which [t]he plot has the cardboard complexity of a lesser 18th century novel, with messengers turning up every ten minutes with bad news about world events … and characters scurrying around bumping into each other in lovely Spanish locations over decades (Newman, 2007). Both as inquisitor and institutionalized revolutionary, and in the absence of a properly dramatic script, Bardem’s exemplary potential gets swamped by superficial narrative complexity as well as by a sumptuousness which despite of and because of its settings and costumes pulls

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strongly away from specificities of time and place (as also is the case, even more disruptively, in Love in the Time of Cholera (Newall, 2007) released in Spain and the UK in January and March 2008 respectively). In a scene set in a carriage in Madrid’s Retiro park, where Lorenzo must try to persuade his daughter (the product of the rape in the inquisition’s jail) to leave for America but without being able to reveal who he is, it would be a heroic performer who would, in their second language, be able to escape the warm embrace of the effects. The sumptuous blue-green-blacks of a carriage interior and of Lorenzo’s clothes contrast with the glittering early summer light outside; the soundtrack floods the scene with the time-honoured clip-clop, birdsong, and background hum of strolling in the park; and the cleavage and perfectly powdered face of Alicia (also played by Natalie Portman) are distractingly emphasized with soft key lights from the carriage window side and by their framing by the white cloth, black frills and red epaulettes of a dress reminiscent of the classic maja of eighteenth-century Spanish art (although not directly so of Goya’s own famous depiction). In as much as the scene’s strong visual and gentle sonic excesses highlight the wickedness of the past – and the make-up team have managed to etch traces of this onto Bardem’s features as he sits darkly opposite Portman – and the futility of Lorenzo’s attempt at rescuing Alicia (who is markedly destined for the prostitution which she is in the park to practice), it becomes – despite itself – another of the film’s spaces of moral differentiation. It allows Bardem to perform the negotiation of bad conscience and the balancing of fear of loss of reputation while also transmitting some glimmer of the character’s recognition of the intense, tragic beauty of Alicia. True to the family-based heritage genre, twisted affiliations at the domestic-sexual level mimic convulsions at the social level. Bardem’s performance is, however, more straightforwardly anchored to this pivotal moment in Spanish history by his character’s association with Goya, whose obsession with the once beautiful Inés, Alicia’s now ruined, disabled and demented mother, is part of what leads Lorenzo on his quest to find the daughter whose existence he cannot fully own to. Lorenzo is painted by Goya full-length, in his prime, as the inquisitor priest; and he is sketched by him at his execution, watched from the balcony by the king (and by Alicia), having become stranded in Spain with the tide turned back towards Church control and monarchy. Opulent priestly robes and an off-the-peg artist’s studio mise-en-scène in the first case, and the penitent’s coned hat and a mist-kissed Salamanca masquerading as Old Madrid in the second give a kind of morality-tale iconicity to Bardem the symbol and exemplar. These are also more or

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less static moments, not only as they are captured by the witnessing Goya, but also on screen. It seems that a proper connection with the moment of political turmoil and ethical choice can only be made when the busy-ness of the ‘scurrying’ and of the mise-en-sce`ne as cumulative bric-a-brac are themselves somewhat stilled. At such moments a certain bold grandeur, gravity, or depravity, flood into the actor’s features. Yvonne Blake’s costume design for the film brings to all the performers who are up to exploiting it something of the cachet of her work on epic historical drama (Nicholas and Alexandra, Schnaffler, 1971; The Four Musketeers, Lester, 1974) but also of three classic Spanish national identity pieces, Cancion de cuna (Cradle Song, Garcí, 1993), Carmen (Aranda, 2003) and Tirante el Blanco (Aranda, 2005). Thus costume also adds depth and anchorage. The peculiar arresting strangeness of Bardem moving solemnly around in the priest’s garb, juxtaposed in the opening sequence with Goya’s own disturbing depictions of clerics in the ‘Caprichos’ being handed round the table at the headquarters of the Inquisition in Madrid, and a curly, slightly unruly wig, give a further intertextual twist too. As with Robert de Niro, with whom anyway he is conventionally associated in looks, in Sleepers (Levinson, 1996) or, more pertinently and notably – with many visual echoes in Goya’s Ghosts – Oliver Reed in The Devils (Russell, 1971), Bardem’s physicality is set in a productive tension with the sobriety of the cloth, and this effectively mirrors the wider tensions of the film. Costumed thus, he embodies naked venality while supposedly pursuing questions of redemption. Captured in the large format portrait, confiscated – in a neat enough piece of film work as the frame is carried through a door frame and then out of frame – and destroyed at the end, his character’s personal history gets fixed to the grander narrative. The static image of the priest and, later, the horrifically immobilized and garrotted image of the revolutionary reflect strongly the violent vicissitudes of the drama and of the era. In No Country for Old Men bewildering social change and erosion of values as perceived by those in pursuit of the killer Chighur is horrifically epitomized by the look which Bardem gives his character and, again, by moments of stillness or of a strange lack of fluency of movement and motivation. Bardem finds himself playing a part in an allegory of American decline. Much of the texture of the film, and of Bardem’s performance and appearance, is, of course, due to Cormac McCarthy’s novel which inspired the script, to McCarthy’s moral ambition (O’Brien, 2007, p. 29), and to the ‘mood of inevitable decay and impending apocalypse’ (p. 31) which pervades the novel’s spacious

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prose. Bardem dons this mood in part through the control of silence, and of voice, rhythm and accentuation. Close to the book, the script, indeed, has Chigurh deal life and death with gnomic utterances as well as focused pauses. As Empire magazine’s reviewer notes, having alluded to The Terminator (Cameron, 1984) as well as to McCarthy’s ‘Biblical prose’, ‘[w]ith his Spanish accent flattened, his voice seems to come from a place not wholly human’ (Nathan, 2008). All this, and Chigurh’s ‘Martian’s eye view of American life’, as the Sight and Sound reviewers point out (Walters and Tyree, 2008, p. 48) is in evidence in the now famous and much web-cached scene at a Texaco filling station (captioned ‘Call It Friend-o’ on the Paramount-Vantage-Miramax DVD edition chapter breakdown). Pitched into chill but playful aggression by the station owner’s innocent observation of a Dallas number plate on the stolen car Chigurgh is using, the latter denaturalizes the former’s standard phrases by throwing them back at him (‘Will there be anything else?’: ‘I don‘t know. Will there?’). Chigurh’s questionings and twistings of everyday discourse create increasingly menacing pauses, and each perplexed response is met with an intense and challenging stare. With the question ‘What’s the most you ever lost in a coin toss?’ the character’s signature quirk is introduced into the film: his interest in treating others’ lives as if there were tokens in a simple gamble and his perverse belief in destiny. When the coin (‘It’s been travelling twentytwo years to get here. And now it’s here’) falls in favour of the station owner, Chigurgh warns him not simply to pocket it: ‘It’ll become just a coin. Which it is.’ A quizzical departing look then arrestingly conflates the satisfaction of Chigurh at having once again made the world bend to his extraordinary code of honour with Bardem’s own wry registering of the dark humorous power of the moment and, perhaps, also satisfaction at his own performance in this take. Towards the end of the film, having tracked down Clara Jean, the widow of Llewellyn who so foolishly made off with loot belonging to Chigurh, the killer tries to enact the same heads or tails ritual with her, saying ‘I got here the same way the coin did’. And this inexorability – with Chigurh, the coin, and Bardem’s construction of presence all melded to become an absolute, inhuman representation of annihilation – is a core motif with resonance out to the destiny of America in the 1980s: ‘You can’t stop what’s coming’, says wise old Ellis (Barry Corbin) to Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). When Ed Tom confides to his El Paso opposite number that he half believes that Chigurh is a ghost, the increasingly mutilated but indomitable monstrousness of Chigurh’s shambling presence, and that sense of his operating from and on another plane, are

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being referenced within the frame of the Coen brothers’ jocular way with the horror and crime genres. However, the image – of Ed Tom’s ghosts – sticks. The strangely coiffed head of Chigurgh5 serves in the film in a similar way to the metonymic silhouette of the classic gangster film as discussed by Bruzzi (1997) and makes a substantial contribution to the alignment of Chighur with the type of the Public Enemy (pp. 71–6). Bardem utilizes the shaped shapelessness of the hair and the strained anonymity of style of clothes in conjunction with facial expressions of closed-in single-mindedness and menacing emptiness. A horrifying vacuum is created where human reactions, values, small connotations of belonging might otherwise would be. It is a void of evil, a highly traditional fictional and religious figuration of hellish intent, alienation, and cruel emptiness of meaning. A ‘dreadful silence’ around Chigurh attracts the attention of Philip Brophy (2008) in a suggestive mini-essay in Film Comment, who points out, much more specifically, how it may associated too with the vacant staring of John Wayne in The Searchers (Ford, 1956). Brophy suggests that the ‘aura’ created by Carter Burwell’s musical score contributes to the particular ‘psychoacoustic power’ of the film, with Chigurh, like the Archangel Gabriel, annunciating the emptiness of Llewellyn and the other victims, whose silences are also part of that aura. ABC’s critic praises Bardem’s skill in making the audience feel the presence of Chigurh ‘como de mal augurio’, repellant and fascinating, hypnotic (like the cobra about to strike) (ABC, 2008). Against this more generic, legendary performance of evil, the emptinesses into which he brings this presence call up slightly more specifically, as Geoffrey O’Brien observes, ‘[f]lashes of a hundred movies that explored analogous American spaces’ (O’Brien, 2007, p. 31). The scenarios of violence which interrupt the emptiness, and the criminal lawlessness, also prompt a leap back in the Bardem fan’s memory to his playing of Romeo Dolorosa in Perdita Durango (de la Iglesia, 1997), and its significant spaces (again including the Mexico/US border) framing a story of crime and national identities. Additionally, though, there is a spatialized echo in the opening moments (and general setting) of the Coens’ film of a Bardem even further back in his career. A series of stills and then a pan across the landscape of Texas at dawn open out the screen space before establishing Chigurgh and an unfortunate sheriff’s deputy on a roadside. In José Juan Bigas Luna’s Jamón, jamón (1992), Bardem’s first big character role, the strutting macho nicknamed El Chorizo, had similarly first appeared onto the screen at the culmination of a grand, space-creating series

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of shots – in that case of the consciously Westernized landscapes of the Aragonese Monegros. His character had then been set off on the path towards a Biblical-sacrificial finale, contextualized by small-town squalor, making the settings and suppositions of No Country for Old Men remotely familiar for the actor, perhaps; and resonant, certainly, for the Spanish viewer or the aficionado of Spanish film. Jamón, jamón of course was drawing on the same heritage as had the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple nine years earlier (in 1983). ‘Mephistophelean’ (O’Brien, 2007, p. 31) in No Country for Old Men and both the cold-blooded political operator and ‘eminently hissable baddie’ (Newman, 2007) in Goya’s Ghosts, Bardem is placed in roles which move backwards and forwards across the line between good and evil, horror and normality. In both films he acts as the agent of a destiny pivoted on a violently idiosyncratic version of the truth. In Goya’s Ghosts, the issue to which Bardem has drawn attention – that ‘Lorenzo … believes that his is the only truth which exists’ (‘Lorenzo ... cree que su verdad es la única que existe’: Arenas, 2006) – creates a strong link between Lorenzo and Chigurh, a link which Bardem’s performance of impassivity in a context of off-tone costuming across the two roles reinforces. The actor’s association of Lorenzo’s lack of ability to distinguish, nuance and tolerate, in the same interview, suggests that what might otherwise come across as an uncomfortable blankness of expression is a more deliberate engagement with the dynamics of the ethical questions involved, despite, in the case of the Forman film, an undoubtedly cavalier approach to the crises of ideas that subtend the historical period supposed to be being represented.

Coda As he gains in transnational prominence and experience, Bardem is an actor drawing on an increasingly wide range of prestigious and politically significant associations. However, a further English-language film of this stage of Bardem’s career, Love in the Time of Cholera (Mike Newell, 2007), is caught up in the currents of transnational, commercial imperatives, tries to play up the former, and has little of the latter. It is tirelessly dependent on the heritage look and stifling for the performers (Bradshaw, 2008, notes some `completely terrible‘ acting from Bardem here). The film purports to be about truth (as Aguirresarobe claimed his cinematography for Goya’s Ghosts was too, by proxy) and so might bring Bardem’s performance back into the ambit with which this essay began, allowing it to negotiate between moral opposites, linking acting by

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Bardem to socio-political significance in character and plot. The fantastical double premise of the original novel by García Márquez, though, makes such connections flimsy and puts considerable strain on verisimilitude as well, only half ironically, as on the reader’s, and now the viewer’s, sexual-political tolerance: that a man, Florentino Ariza, devastated by early unrequited love, will nonetheless construct a pleasant enough life of gentlemanly philandering unaffected by growing age differentials, and that eventually, after 51 years 9 months and 4 days (both in the novel and the film) the woman who was the original object of desire will be lying next to him, in love still perhaps but certainly loved. The themes are grand enough – true love’s persistence, time’s passing, the body’s decay – and in Gabriel García Marquez’s hands they had an equivocal edge to them. However, whether we focus on the film as faithful adaptation and lush reproduction period piece, sentimental sexism in poor taste, a neatly transplanted revisualization of both the Don Juan and the Lolita stories, or as a ‘horrifically boring festival of middlebrow good taste’ (Bradshaw, 2008), Bardem does not come out of it able to connect with seriousness of intent or, even obliquely, with Colombia itself in times of trouble. Bradshaw’s review (2008) sees prominent in Bardem’s acting in general the feature of ‘a dreamy, fish-eyed gaze’, but he is reminded of it particularly by the role of Florentino in Newell’s film. However, in the Coen brothers’ film, an empty stare, a clumsy gait, a flattened accent, distracting hair, and over-determinedly understated costuming, help the performance to focus, by eerie readjustment of values, on distortions of truth, the perversion of a modern humane tradition of doing good, and on history shocked out of true by the percussion of repeated violence. It is of interest, and not a little cinematic, that it should be the gaze – the dreamy or sinister gaze – which marks and scans the borderline space and the fleeting moment of choice between evil and good, drawing attention to the embodied nature of all actorly performance (no matter how much it is directed, cut, reshot, or lit) and to the gestural minutiae of how performances negotiate with history. Bardem’s performances of criminal impassivity in two films align him perversely with questions of national destiny, ethics, and responsibility. A third film, as just briefly discussed, sets these aside in favour of a more everyday imperative to attempt to please. Discourses surrounding his gaining of the Oscar award reinforced, as we saw, Bardem’s positioning as an agent of commitment and focus of social debate in Spain. The cinematic deployment in two cases, at least, of certain paraphernalia of Spanish, and American – perhaps World – heritage, I have been arguing, re-frame Bardem as iconic in particular

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ways which link the actor in the histrionic sense with the actor in a sociological sense, deepening his impact as a mediatic phenomenon, and broadening the range of reception of the ideas embodied in his performance. The third film may or may not succeed in associating him with the literary seriousness and political resonance of García Márquez, the one-time hero of world literature. It does, though, give a rounded, more popular image to Bardem, as the jobbing actor gamely dressing up for a fairly rough rehearsal of some big issues; not afraid of the thespian run-of-the-mill; broadening his range, appeal, and image. The same might well be about to be said, at the time of writing, of Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Allen, 2008). In his Oscar speech, and in many interviews, the term Bardem prefers to ‘actores’, actors, is ‘cómicos’ – something more like ‘players’, something closer to the popular and to everydayness; something which allows Bardem so proudly to take his place in the long domestic and national tradition of cultural intervention (part of which had been Juan Antonio Bardem’s own film of that name, Cómicos, of 1954). Bardem’s recent English-language roles, then, have engaged with high drama, historical and social seriousness, and with romance, cliché and entertainment. Nor might Bardem, invoking the work of his family and his fellow actors, see anything amiss in this: there are more stages than one on which an actor can make and participate in history.

Notes 1. These two films, with Días contados (Uribe 1994) and Boca a boca (Gómez Pereira 1995) were part of the cycle presented in Bardem’s honour by the Academia de las Artes y las Ciencias Cinematográficas, 1–4 April 2008. 2. On line at: http://www.todosconelsahara.com/, date accessed 1 July 2008. 3. For example by Europa Press agency and in El País (2008a). 4. For example the opinion page of Galicia liberal (28 April 2008), the blog by Sebastián Urbina, and the blogspot of Ciudadanos en la Red, for February 2008 (which links Zapatero to Chighur by way of the notion of ‘aliados asesinos’ [murderous allies]). On line at: http://www.galicialiberal.com/20080428-opiniontitiriteros.html; http://www.espana-liberal. com/20080227-opinion-javier-bardem-.html; http://ciudadanosenlared.blogspot.com/2008/02/javier-bardem-oscars-2008-no-es-pais_25.html; also the more measured approach of ABC: García Garzón (2008). 5. As to the origins of the haircut, Bardem’s own version of events is given in interview on Canal+ (26 February), to Sight and Sound (Bell, 2008), and to the press at Cannes. After the team’s scanning of an album of late 1970s low-life photo-portraits (Bell, 2008), the stylist’s experimentation led to a moment of serendipity and the character was, as it were (and in the old cliché), suddenly there (Agencia EFE, 2008).

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References ABC (2008), ‘No es país para viejos’, (27 February), http://www.abc.es/hemeroteca/ historico-27-02-2008/abc/Opinion/no-es-pais-para-viejos_1641679787595. html. Agencia Efe (2008), ‘Javier Bardem desvela que el secreto de su personaje está en el pelo’. http://www.noticiasdecine.net/bardem-desvela-que-el-secreto-de-supersonaje-esta-en-el-pelo-2. Arenas, J. E. (2006), ‘Javier Bardem: «Milos Forman convierte en placer todo lo que toca»’. ABC [Espectáculos] (4 November), http://www.abc.es/hemeroteca/ historico-04-11-2006/abc/Espectaculos/javier-bardem-milos-forman-convierteen-placer-todo-lo-que-toca_1524085637587.html, date accessed 23 June 2008. Bell, J. (2008), ‘It’s the Way He Walks’. Sight and Sound 18/2, p. 49. Bradshaw, P. (2008), ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’. The Guardian (21 March), http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Guardian_review/ 0,,2266922,00.html, date accessed 19 May 2008. Brophy, P. (2008), ‘Blast of Silence. Listening to Nothing in No Country For Old Men’. Film Comment 44/2, 16. Bruzzi, S. (1997), Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies (London and New York: Routledge). El País (2008a), ‘Bardem hace historia’ (25 February), http://www.elpais.com/ articulo/cultura/Bardem/hace/historia/elpepucul/20080225elpepucul_1/Tes. ——— (2008b), ‘“Enhorabuena Javier”: políticos, cineastas y actores felicitan a Javier Bardem tras convertirse en el primer actor español en conseguir un Oscar de Hollywood’ (25 February), http://www.elpais.com/articulo/cultura/ Enhorabuena/Javier/elpepucul/20080225elpepucul_7/Tes. ——— (2008c), ‘Bardem: El actor recibe un merecido Oscar; el cine español no es sólo el que se rueda en España’’ (26 February), http://www.elpais.com/ articulo/opinion/Bardem/elpepiopi/20080226elpepiopi_2/Tes. Europa Press (2008), ‘La Academia de las Artes y las Ciencias Cinematográficas felicita a Bardem por el Oscar’ (25 February), http://www.europapress.es/00128/ 20080225145511/academia-artes-ciencias-cinematograficas-felicita-bardemoscar.html. Fresnada, C. (2008), ‘Javier Bardem consigue el Oscar en la piel de un asesino psicópata’, El Mundo (25 February), http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2008/02/ 25/cultura/1203910189.html. García Garzón, J. I. (2008), ‘La estirpe y los territorios sagrados’ (26 February), http://www.abc.es/hemeroteca/historico-26-02-2008/abc/Espectaculos/laestirpe-y-los-territorios-sagrados_1641675948442.html. Green, J.(2006), ‘It’s a Bardem Thing’, Screen International (10 December), 18. Guider, E. (2006), ‘Smoke & Mirrors: Voiceover: Thesps’ Message Is Garbled’. Variety 404/7. Mellen, J. (2008), ‘Spiraling Downward: America in Days of Heaven, In the Valley of Elah, and No Country for Old Men (Terrence Malick, Paul Haggis, Joel Coen, Ethan Coen)’. Film Quarterly 61/3, 24–31. Nathan, I. (2008), ‘No Country For Old Men’. Empire (June). http://www.empireonline.com/reviews/reviewcomplete.asp?DVDID=117828. Newman, K. (2007), ‘Goya’s Ghosts’. Empire 215 (May). On line at: http://www. empireonline.com/reviews/reviewcomplete.asp?FID=11070.

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O’Brien, G. (2007), ‘Gone Tomorrow: The Echoing Spaces of Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country For Old Men’. Film Comment 43/6, 28–31. Oppenheimer, J. (2007), ‘Production Slate: Immortalizing Spanish Strife’. American Cinematographer 88/8, 22, 24, 26. RTVE (2008). ‘Javier Bardem reclama el reconocimiento diplomático del pueblo saharahui’. (5 May). Embedded recording of broadcast news item. http:// www.rtve.es/noticias/20080505/javier-bardem-reclama-reconocimientodiplomatico-del-pueblo-saharahui/44150.shtml. Torreiro, M. (2008), ‘Los fantasmas de Goya’, Fotogramas, http://www.fotogramas. orange.es/fotogramas/CRITICAS/10673@[email protected]. Turner, C. (2008), ‘I Always Fight Directors’ (9 February), http://film.guardian. co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,2255124,00.html. Walters, B. and J.M. Tyree (2008), ‘Cash and Carrion: No Country for Old Men’. Sight and Sound 18/2, 48–9. Wood, D. (2008) ‘Javier Bardem Finds that Spain is No Country for Stupid Remarks’. The Independent (11 September). Ya [Europa Press] (2008), ‘Zapatero felicita a Bardem por convertirse en “símbolo” de los creadores españoles’. http://noticias.ya.com/espana/25/02/2008/ zapatero-bardem-creadores.html.

8 Children of Exile: Trauma, Memory and Testimony in Jaime Camino’s Documentary Los niños de Rusia (2001) Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla

As I have been reflecting on how to engage both phenomenologically and conceptually with Jaime Camino’s documentary about war and exile,1 as experienced by the children of ordinary, voiceless, faceless Republicans, I keep returning to one scene from the documentary, one fragment that, like the Barthesian punctum – which Roland Barthes describes as the explosive prick of contact with one’s own image repertoire – engenders, unleashes or sparks a powerful intellectual, emotional and affective response in me. In this chapter, I will attempt to focus primarily on this scene and I will tease out my theoretical interpretation of Camino’s documentary by means of a close perceptual and cognitive engagement with this scene. This scene forces us to reflect on and re-think the conventional representational devices that are used in Camino’s documentary beyond the common insistence on interpreting the documentary image in the light of its referential achievements or failures. I want to shift the focus from epistephilia, which is defined as the desire to know (Nichols, 1991), towards an ethical consideration that underpins the intellectual and affective transactions between the documentary image and the spectator. My chapter focuses on how Camino’s Los niños de Rusia (The Children of Russia, 2001), remembers, repeats, confronts or ‘works through’ individual and collective traumatic experiences associated with involuntary and premature exile during the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime. I argue that Camino’s documentary functions as a cinematic mode of witnessing, thereby participating in the public debates of the nation and mediating between subjective and collective experiences and discourses through the documentary image. In his reflections on Nazism, the historian Saul Friedlander has suggested that ‘systematic historical research, which uncovers the facts 129

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in the most precise and meticulous interconnection, provides little understanding of the Holocaust, it rather protects us from the past and keeps it at a distance’ (quoted in van Alphen, 2001, p. 68). Similarly, Jo Labanyi has contended that most of the cinematic and fictional re-creations of the Civil War and its aftermath which have appeared in Spain since 1990 have been concerned with providing a realistic or documentary account of the events, transporting us back into the past. Labanyi rightly argues that such a literalization of the past through the recreation of historical events and through an insistence on verisimilitude on the part of those texts that opt for a realistic or documentary format have ‘the effect of reinforcing the difference of the past from the present with the result that, at the end of the viewing or reading process, we feel a sense of relief on returning to a present free from such barbarism’ (Labanyi, 2007a, p. 103). Instead of a realist or documentary representation of the past, Labanyi identifies the horror film, and its use of the trope of haunting, as the most effective cinematic genre for the representation of the violence of the Spanish Civil War and its repressive aftermath through the use of suggestion rather than statement. According to Labanyi, the motif of haunting emphasizes the effects of the past in the present as a kind of ghostly revenant, forcing us to confront issues of transgenerational transmission and encouraging us to critically reflect on the impossibility of the complete recovery of the past. The documentary genre is conventionally identified as the audiovisual medium that is epistemologically determined to express realistically empirical truths, enhancing its evidential force and positing a relationship to history which exceeds the analogical status of its fictional counterpart (Steel, 2003, p. 331). In this chapter, I rethink the politics and poetics of testimony used in Camino’s documentary in order to argue that Los niños de Rusia functions as a cinematic mode of historiography. As such, the documentary unfolds the traces of the vicissitudes and turbulence of these particular moments in Spanish history less through a complete recreation or reconstruction of the past than through a complex translation of past traumatic experiences. Such a translation acts as a force that impacts on our mind and body, without allowing us succumb to an unreflective empathy that does not acknowledge the impossibility of experiencing the other’s suffering within our own consciousness and body (Hatley, 2000, p. 5). There is a tendency in current cultural discourses on the politics of memory in contemporary Spain, such as Ángel Loureiro’s article (2008) in a recent issue of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies edited

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by Labanyi, to divide the psychic from the social, to consider the individual subject apart from social subjectivity. In this context, the cleavage of endogenous trauma – which is caused by psychic events with no external counterpart – and exogenous trauma – which is caused by external events – is attributed to psychoanalysis itself, which is perceived as a theory of the individual apart from social life. However, one must remember that psychoanalysis was a theory which was elaborated in times of traumatic historical events, a theory which was inexorably immersed in social trauma and in discussions of the impact of traumatic events upon the self. Sigmund Freud’s 1920 ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ has to be contextualized in relation to the destruction that was experienced during the First World War. Psychoanalysis became increasingly concentrated on the question that Freud famously asked in 1933 in his exchanges with Albert Einstein published as Why War? (Nixon, 2007. Similarly, in Moses and Monotheism (1939), Freud established an analogy between the effect of trauma on the individual and the collective guilt inherent in Jewish culture arising from the murder of its founder and lawgiver Moses (Luckhurst, 2008, pp. 9–10). Loureiro implies that psychoanalysis is an impoverishing discourse that reduces complex, multilayered and contentious historical, social and cultural processes to simplistic metaphors associated with physical and psychical pathologies which, as Loureiro claims, cannot be easily translated into social bodies or processes (Loureiro, 2008, p. 225). I contend that psychoanalysis helps us to think about how memories, dreams, altered states of perception impact on the present and, as such, are powerful components in the field of social production (Skoller, 2005, p. xviii). From this perspective, as Joshua Hirsch has put it, ‘the application of trauma theory to culture may offer at least one method of bridging the apparent gaps between a historical approach to culture and a textual approach; between a focus on the past signified by a historical text and a focus of the text’s work of signification in the present; between documentary and fictional modes of representing history; and between individual and collective experiences of history’ (Hirsch, 2004, p. 9).

Reading fragments In the context of psychoanalytic clinical therapy, Julia Kristeva has suggested that the analyst must engage with the depressed patient on the pre-verbal level and must disarticulate the signifying chain or extract the hidden meaning in fragments (quoted in Smith, 1998, p. 41). Inspired by Kristeva’s psychoanalytic interpretative method, like

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the blink that occurs in Chris Marker’s 1962 film La jetée, a film made up of stills except for that one fragment, that moment of the blink of a woman’s eyes as she awakes, this chapter considers how it is that the allegory of engaging perceptually, affectively and cognitively with this testimonial documentary gets encapsulated in this fragment from Camino’s documentary. I propose, then, that the fragment might become the privileged point of contact between the spectator and the documentary image: the discursive hook on to which the viewer may position herself/himself in relation to the documentary’s performative meanings. The documentary, like its spectator, is constructed through the viewing encounter (Cooper, 2006, p. 7). The phenomenologist film critic Vivian Sobchack explains that, although certain cinematic conventions may solicit a specific form of identification of the spectator with cinematic objects, this cannot be determined a priori but only in the viewing experience (Sobchack, 1999). This phenomenological, affective and cognitive encounter between the documentary image and the spectator is shaped by conscious motives and unconscious desires, driven by (historiographical) curiosity and by the spectator’s instincts, impulses, desires or fears (Renov, 2004, p. 101), even if those desires are often directed toward the social and political arenas of everyday experiences as well as towards world historical events (Rabinowitz, 1993, p. 129). As Kristeva argues: The knowing subject is also a desiring subject, and the paths of desire ensnarl the paths of knowledge…We normally assume the opposite of delirium to be an objective reality, objectively perceptible and objectively knowable, as if the speaking subject were only a simple knowing subject. Yet we must admit that, given the cleavage of the subject (conscious/unconscious) and given that the subject is also a subject of desire, perceptual and knowing apprehension of the original object is only a theoretical, albeit undoubtedly indispensable, hypothesis (1986, p. 307). In this phenomenological, affective and cognitive engagement and confrontation with the documentary image, the spectator must also adopt a subjective ethical and political position in relation to the performative act of bearing witness to the other’s experiences, thereby opening up an intersubjective space which reconciles our subjective and collective experiences. Such an ethical responsibility is one of the defining criteria of authentic witnessing to the other’s experiences, as opposed to adopting a position of false witness from which one can slip in and

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out without being conscious of the dramatic consequences of this act (Hirsch, 2004, p. 21).

Listening to the Witness Voice in Los niños de Rusia Camino’s documentary is based on oral testimonies of former children of Republicans who were sent to the Soviet Union during the Spanish Civil War in the Spring of 1937. The evacuation of these children was particularly intensified after the international repercussions of the bombing of Guernica by the German Condor Legion in April 1937, whose most emblematic pictorial representation, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), is shown at the beginning of the documentary by a camera that lingers on the surface of the painting as we hear the sounds of bombs and weapons and a disturbing piece of music by Pyotr Tchaikovsky and the off-screen testimony of one of the witnesses, Araceli Sánchez, who will be introduced in the next sequence. Sánchez’s off-screen oral testimony is thus juxtaposed against Picasso’s Guernica, a painting which, despite having lost its initial political message, due to having been subjected to numerous processes of resignitication and reification, has a symbolic power which still consists in large part in its association with the Spanish exile. As a visual image, Picasso’s Guernica contributes here to the transmission of the oral testimony, and yet it undercuts the narrative function of the testimony by shifting the verbal message to a more figurative level of signification, as though the personal and collective experience which is being narrated by the witness could never be captured. Thus, the documentary emphasises the heterogeneity of its textual construction through the use of a variety of visual and linguistic registers on the image track and the soundtrack. Approximately 30,000 children were sent to France, Belgium, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom or Mexico. While most of these countries facilitated the return of these children to Spain when the Civil War ended, Mexico and the Soviet Union, which did not recognize Franco’s regime, refused to send these children back to a country which was now governed by a fascist dictatorship. Joseph Stalin, who was a dictator himself, famously said that he would only return these children to a Republican Spain (Heras, 2008). These direct witnesses of the experiences of war (first the Spanish Civil War and subsequently the Second World War in the Soviet Union), of premature and involuntary exile and of finding ambivalent refuge in an adopted country in the face of an external threat become the active narrators of the irremediable shock that these traumatic events initially created and its enduring impact on their lives.

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Commenting on the significant impact that the Spanish Civil War had on children, Beatriz de las Heras takes into consideration the ‘traumas psicológicos, las secuelas de los accidentes bélicos y las enfermedades contraídas por la carencia de los más elemental que sufrieron muchos de los niños y niñas. Todo ello afectó en mayor grado a los menores de la zona republicana, obligados por la propia evolución de la guerra a continuos desplazamientos a otras zonas del país o a la evacuación al extranjero (many children suffered from psychological traumas, the after-effects of war accidents and the diseases caused by the lack of the most basic needs. All of which affected to a greater degree the children from the Republican area, who were forced, due to the own progress of the war, to undergo continuous displacements to other parts of the country and abroad)’ (Heras, 2008). In the modern legal system, the testimony of those who have witnessed or who have suffered traumatic experiences is considered as an accurate and unmediated form of documentation of these events. Our society’s notions of truth and justice thus depend partly on the testimonial mode of accounting for past events, which becomes not only the privileged mode of transmission and communication, but also the ultimate confirmation of the veracity of an event. The truth value that is conventionally attributed to testimony is also made manifest in the genre of oral history, which also identifies testimony as a transparent and direct exposition of historical events which have not been manipulated by the personal interpretations and perspectives of a particular historian (Skoller, 2005, p. 200). Skoller rightly points us that such a reduced definition of testimony as a veridical retrospective statement emphasizes the past temporality of the events which are narrativized by the speaker from the temporal perspective of the present, thereby reinforcing the divide between the past and the present and binding the traces of memory, including its absences and uncertainties, into a single narrative. According to Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, ‘testimony does not offer a completed statement, a totalisable account of the events. In testimony, language is in process and on trial, it does not possess itself as a conclusion, as the constatation of a verdict or the self-transparency of knowledge’ (Felman and Laub, 1992, p. 5). Testimony, then, which emphasizes the act of speaking as a process of coming to knowledge, is considered as a public form of witnessing (Davies and Szejnmann, 2007), allowing the witness or survivor to speak to a public, whether to condemn or to accuse the perpetrator, to memorialize the suffering, or to provide a warning against its repetition (Guerin and Hallas, 2007, p. 8).

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These subjective accounts of the children of Russia thus ‘contribute to the collective memory of a time passing away together with the eyewitness generation’ (Hartman, 2001, p. 116), as the events become accessible less through a transparent account of the past than through their reverberations in the present and in the moment of testimonial enunciation, thus producing the ‘truth’ in the process of moving the witnesses toward the linguistic limit of what can be expressed (Skoller, 2005, p. 144).2 If, in testimony, language is used both to clarify and to evade, we can thus rethink testimony in Los niños de Rusia as a form which calls into question direct experience as the most reliable form of historical evidence (Skoller, 2005, p. xliv). From this perspective, as in the psychoanalytic process, one does not have to possess or own the truth in order to effectively bear witness to the process of people struggling with past events which exceed the frame of reference of their current ordinary lives (Hirsch, 2004, p. 133). Camino himself has emphasized his ethical responsibility to release these personal accounts of lives marked by war, alienation, ambivalence, loss, longing, separation and survival – physical and psychological experiences that are clearly associated with painful emotional states – from the limiting frame of private memory (Fraile, 2007, p. 2), thereby using the documentary medium as a transmitter of historical trauma. If testimony has its origin as a genre in the judicial apparatus, Camino’s ethical commitment to documenting the testimonies of those affected by the Civil War and its repressive aftermath, such as the children of Russia, acquires, paradoxically, a great significance given the absence of a transitional justice culture up to the present in Spain and in the light of the increasing social and political concern in Spain not to forget the victims of the Civil War and those who were silenced, persecuted, executed, anonymously buried in common graves, forced to go into exile or to migrate, or were rendered invisible within public history and social memory during the Franco regime.3 This process of social and political mourning was repressed during the Franco regime and it was disavowed during the political transition from dictatorship to democracy. As is well known, once Franco’s dictatorship ended in 1975, there was a desire on the part of the political elites to maintain their silence, which successfully led to the Moncloa pact and the Constitution of 1978. An illusory reconciliation, which resulted in the exoneration of Francoists due to the ‘Amnesty Law’ which was passed in 1977, and a return to normalcy became the facile watchwords of post-dictatorship Spain. Out of this constellation emerged a number of important cinematic practices which were concerned with the politics of

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memory, including Camino’s own 1977 documentary, La vieja memoria (The Old Memory), where Camino confronts dialectically a variety of military and political leaders from different ideologies and political parties through an inclusive montage. In the light of the almost 40 years of political totalitarianism and censorship under Franco’s dictatorship, non-fiction film became the best means of capturing the present and re-interpreting the recent past, even if it only reached a minority intellectual audience (Gómez, 2005). For Joan Ramon Resina, these memorialistic cultural practices anticipated the issue of historical recuperation that will surface decades later in the debate over historical memory (Resina, 2000, p. 104), a debate that is ideologically conditioned by a different historical context through which these historical traumas are re-interpreted. Los niños de Rusia could be seen as part of a recent body of documentary practices that directly participate in these public debates by uncovering such silenced memories and which are mainly addressed to what Marianne Hirsch has defined as the postmemory generation (Hirsch, 1997). For Hirsch, the concept of postmemory describes the relationship of the children (or grandchildren in the case of Spain)4 of survivors of cultural and collective trauma to the experiences of their parents (or grandparents), experiences that they remember only as the narratives and images with which they grew up (Hirsch, 2001, p. 219). According to Hirsch, postmemory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through representation, projection and creation – often based on silence rather than speech, on the invisible rather than the visible (p. 220). The postmemory generation in Spain struggles with the limits and gaps of its knowledge of the experiences of its grandparents (Alted, 2005, p. 17). Freud acknowledges that the space of trauma is one that cannot be simply represented by words, as there is an incomprehensible reality outside the self which has already entered the subject without the mediation of consciousness (Freud, 2003). In the context of psychoanalytic therapy, the process of ‘working through’ thus implies the recitation of events and sequences in order to rehearse less articulated psychic acts. In this performative act, the patient may be able to discern what her or his consciousness overlooked during the event’s unfolding. The process of ‘working through’ implies the possibility of a curative interpretation, which occurs within the psychoanalytic process. Perhaps it is only in subsequent generations that collective and cultural traumas can be witnessed and ‘worked through’ by those who did not suffer those traumas but who received their effects through an intersubjective transgenerational space of remembrance (Hirsch, 2001, p. 222).

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Those memories of state terror are still negated by the political Right, which does not formally accept its historical responsibilities and which is, according to Resina, incapable of distancing itself morally from its fascist antecedents (Resina, 2000, p. 106). For instance, some historians, such as César Vidal or Pío Mora, have been producing popular historical revisionist books which attempt to blame the Republic for provoking the Spanish Civil War as a way of justifying the military coup d’état and the subsequent dictatorial regime (Monegal, 2008, p. 249). In 2007, the current Socialist government passed the Ley de memoria histórica (Law of Historical Memory), which, although it gives moral and symbolic recognition to and expands the rights of those who suffered persecution and violence during the Civil War and the Franco regime, precludes legal action against the perpetrators. The Law could signify an advance and a strengthening of Spain’s young democracy by seeking to restore the legal rights of Franco’s victims and by stating that the re-examination of the past should be the norm. Nonetheless, the Law has generated a whole range of controversial public discourses, articulated by politicians, judges or representatives of historical memory associations, concerning the implications and efficacy of a law that is anti-punitive. This process of coming to terms with the past has now become an almost global project of memory politics in which the Spanish component, with its own historical and cultural differences, could play an important part. Andreas Huyssen notes that such a focus on human rights in the transnational realm opens up new avenues for a political and public role for artistic practices, including film (Huyssen, 2001a, p. 9). In this context of a global discourse about historical trauma, Huyssen contends that the Holocaust functions less as a discourse which is uncritically translated into historically and politically incomparable phenomena than like a prism which energises local discourses about collective traumatic experiences both in their legal and commemorative aspects, through, Huyssen argues, a productive inscription of certain tropes, images, ethical and moral evaluations. Such a general interest in historical memory may be symptomatic of the way in which the public use of history could be reduced to its commemorative dimension, which contributes to an instrumentalization of memory and, by and large, a commodification of a culture of nostalgia. However, I want to contend that the documentary genre, rather than being defined as a political propagandistic medium, could function as a thoughtful cultural practice that brings together subjective and collective memories and discourses as constitutive forces for a rethinking of the fragments of history, thereby embracing the personal and collective

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experiences of Republicans, in general, and of those who were once considered faceless, nameless or voiceless citizens, in particular. As Alicia Alted (2005, p. 469) reminds us, ‘el foco de atención está en las personas “de a pie”, en todos aquellos héroes anónimos sin estelas en plazas que los recuerdan, muchos de los cuales yacen en fosas comunes o en olvidados cementerios lejos de su tierra natal (the focus of attention resides in the common people; in those anonymous heroes without steles on squares that commemorate them; many of them lie in common graves or in forgotten cemeteries far from their native land)’. Such a rethinking of how the historical unconscious haunts the present may allow us to confront our complicity and to reach a more responsible and ethical understanding of what the disturbing remains of the past and its effects mean in the present and in the future. Loureiro asks whether we should also demand that the Republicans who committed assassinations during the Civil War should face charges, establishing a moral equivalence between, for instance, the Nationalists who were assassinated at Paracuellos in 1936 and the Republicans who were assassinated and buried in common graves in El Bierzo. Loureiro attempts to work through the ethical quandaries that the murder of human beings inevitably present beyond the common association of Republicans with the position of being victims versus the association of Francoists with the role of perpetrators. He implicitly warns us of the dangers of fixing the victim in opposition to the oppressor. Indeed, such a reduced polarization could perpetuate a dichotomy between passivity and agency, thereby failing to explore the extent to which one is implicated in the outcomes. Nonetheless, Loureiro’s insistence on looking at Francoist victims could imply a de-empiricization or re-appropriation of the traumas that were suffered by Republicans during the Franco regime on behalf of Francoists. I think that the danger of his suggestions is that they could constitute a symbolic repetition of the original victimisation that was inflicted upon many Spaniards under state terror. As Vicenç Navarro (2004, p. 125) rightly suggests: Poner al Estado republicano y al Estado fascista al mismo nivel, equidistantes en las responsabilidades por el golpe, y en sus consecuencias, incluido el terror, es una enorme tergiversación de la verdad histórica, que se reproduce debido a la enorme influencia de las derechas en España que están promoviendo esta versión de las dos Españas, igualmente responsables por un pasado que es mejor olvidar [to place the Republican state and the fascist state on the same level, equally responsible for the coup d’état and its consequences,

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including the state terror, is an enormous distortion of the historical truth. Such an emphasis is perpetuated due to the significant influence of the Political Right in Spain which promotes this version of the two Spains, equally responsible for a past that it is better to forget]. To return to Los niños de Russia, although the documentary does not rely on the use of a disembodied voice-over narrator of the kind that is often used in documentaries to validate and to award credibility (Steel, 2003, p. 334) – except for the voiceover of the Russian narrator we hear when Camino inserts newsreel footage from Russian archives – the first-person witness accounts compiled in the documentary alternate with the use of conventional documentary rhetorical devices, such as archival footage and non-diegetic music composed by Albert Guinovart. Antonio Gómez suggests that memory in Los niños de Rusia emerges in front of the spectator as the result of an elaborate creative process in which the mise-en-scene, the framing, the selection of testimonies, the use of montage, the insertion of newsreel footage, still photographs, the fadeouts and the music contribute to a dense and complex narrative fabric (Gómez, 2003, p. 135). However, Gómez criticizes the documentary for the insertion of newsreel footage which, according to Gómez, neutralises the kaleidoscopic memorialistic effect that is achieved through the complex juxtaposition of fragmented oral testimonies. For Gómez, this insertion of newsreel footage results in a suture of this polyphonic patchwork of testimonies, precisely because it contributes to the construction of a linear illustration of the historical referent, thereby subordinating the oral testimonies, whose opaqueness, as I suggested earlier, exceeds historical knowledge, to the teleological chronology of the historical events and precluding the spectator from engaging more critically and actively with the documentary. What Gómez does not discuss is the way in which it is, perhaps, the use of a variety of elements on both the image track and the soundtrack that, as I suggested earlier with references to Picasso’s Guernica, creates a visceral and affective impact, figuring or actualizing the traces or fragments of the traumatic past in our bodily memory in the present (Walker, 1997). With particular reference to the testimony of one of the witnesses, Josefina Iturrarán, I shall explore shortly how such an impact could have a strong connotative resonance for particular audiences (Gaines, 1999, p. 99). By focusing on the ways in which acts of bearing witness to individual and collective memory are mediated through the documentary image, I attempt to offer a theoretical interpretation of Los niños de Rusia which moves beyond or rethinks the

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documentary’s own conventional means of dealing with the details of the historical record. Although these witnesses are now elderly, they are still in search of an identity and a place. Some of them currently live in Spain, some of them still live in Russia and some of them have suffered a double exile: first in Russia and now in Cuba. If subjectivity is implicated in how one experiences space and place, these witnesses suffer from an ambivalent physical and psychological sense of displacement and estrangement that is at the core of the experience of forced exile. Labanyi emphasizes a personal narrative told by Iturrarán, which makes us aware of the pain of separation from one’s family and one’s place of origin and the subsequent sense of detachment and the impossible sense of connection to one’s origins that is suffered by those who experience an intensified nostalgia for a past that is already lost. Labanyi tells us that Iturrarán ‘fingers the ring on her hand, telling us that it is her mother’s wedding ring; her mother gave it to her at the moment of departure. Later in the film we hear this same woman’s story of how, on the day of her arrival back in Spain with the first returnees in the mid-1950s [after the death of Stalin in 1953], she failed to establish any relationship with her mother’ (Labanyi, 2007b, p. 445). The wedding ring thus becomes a material signifier that suggests the way in which an ambivalent sensation of pain and loss due to geographical and emotional distance attaches itself to material objects. These material signifiers reveal, paradoxically, the way that the exile remains haunted by the presence of the person with whom and the place with which the physical and emotional bonds have already been severed. These children of Russia are neither Spanish nor Russian; they are both Spanish and Russian. Like Derridean ‘undecidables’, ‘the exiles can be both and neither: the pharmacon, meaning both poison and remedy; the hymen, meaning both the membrane and its violation; and the supplement, meaning both addition and replacement’ (Naficy, 2006, p. 113). The condition of being ‘undecidable’ that these children of Russia suffer from is made manifest in the way that a kind of foreign accent is superimposed on some of the oral testimony of some of them, which is given in a precarious Spanish. The documentary medium enables the voices of these witnesses to be heard directly in an embodied, audiovisual form, which emphasizes the emotional and intimate texture of their oral testimonies. If sound has a corporeal and haptic resonance, such an emphasis on the sense of hearing points to the way that the corporeal is fundamentally implicated in the process of perception and cognition. Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas explain that the ‘corporeal inscription

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of the witness often provides the foundation for both bringing the event into presence and establishing the intersubjective relations between the survivor/witness and the listener/viewer/witness’ (2007, p. 14). If their testimonies are given in a precarious Spanish, the language that connects them to the spoken legacy of their lost homeland, the foreign accent thus becomes the audible, haptic scar that reveals how the residues of a lost world remain inscribed in the language of the exile, thereby transforming the act of listening into a physical immersion in the experience. In psychoanalytic terms, the symbolic control of the subject is based on a repression or disavowal of the subject’s own inability to direct and master discourse and language. If language functions as a barrier between the subject and the Real, the integration of the self has to be established by denying the disruptive aspects of language. From this perspective, the confrontation with the voice of the witness talking a kind of broken Spanish that reveals the witnesses’ ambivalent connection or subjugation to the language that has marked their own exclusion reminds us of those traces that are left behind in the textuality of the unconscious. These traces float without a point of anchor, thereby emerging or appearing not directly, but in an oblique perspective, and the attempt to grasp them directly makes them vanish (Dolar, 1991). The voice of the witness speaking a precarious Spanish suffused by the presence of another language in the documentary makes us think of the way that the subject of enunciation does not always have control over his language. The subject, then, may become anxious on confronting the voice, since he may be reminded of the loss of language. This fear of the loss of language is related to the subject’s fear of losing control over his discourse, which is equivalent to the loss of one’s own self (manque-à-être). From this perspective, the voice of the witness talking a precarious Spanish that is already shaped by the cadences, syntax and intonations of another language does not function to screen the absent referent of the Real. Instead, the voice re-signifies the function of language, which is to make the absence of the thing present. In symbolic terms, the voice of the witness could be read as showing how language can be defined as a discourse without a controlling subject who is identifiable with the Cartesian self-enclosure of the cogito. Instead, the voice of the witness, which seems to cry out from a deep wound, presents the subject in the Real.

Looking at the Face of the Witness in Los niños de Rusia Los niños de Rusia resorts to the traditional device of the talking-head interview that is used pervasively in documentary films. Through the

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repetition of shots of talking-heads, the faces of these witnesses are often juxtaposed against a rather neutral background in front of the camera, as they give an account of what Linda Williams, in a different context, identifies as ‘the fragments, the pieces of the past invoked by memory, not unitary representable truths but, as Freud once referred to the psychic mechanism of memory, a palimpsest, described as the sum total of its rewriting through time’ (Williams, 1993, p. 67). In her discussion of Carlos Saura’s La caza (The Hunt, 1966), Sally Faulkner explores how the film’s cinematic resources are harnessed in order to expose the ageing and the fragility of the imperfect bodies of the film’s characters. Faulkner suggests that, through medium shots and detailed closeups, the camera picks out the characters’ scars, wrinkles and grey hair (Faulkner, 2006, p. 155). The face is the unique locus of human expressivity and it is that part of the human body that the perpetrator denies to his victim in the sadistic process of dehumanizing another human being. If the face has a marked visual impact, a mark that forces us to bear witness to the affect expressed and to the affective impact of the face (Bennet 2005, p. 108), then I shall examine in Camino’s documentary the materiality of the face of Iturrarán, as she attempts to express in language her direct experiences relating to war and exile and her current existential condition of still living in Russia, a country which she considers to be the traumatic result of a failed communist system. In her early feminist psychoanalytic theories of the male gaze and the spectacle of the female object, Laura Mulvey argued that women were rendered passive and fetishized into body parts by the use of the close-up in classical Hollywood cinema. Concerned as it was with the narrative of agency and resolution, Mulvey’s iconoclastic argument also contended that women were usually destroyed in the course of the narrative. According to Mulvey, the close-up allows fragmentary images to be seen as huge, thus changing our interpretation of the text and holding the story in stasis. For Mulvey, the close-up elicits the voyeuristic desires of the male spectator by cutting images of women out from the general flow of the narrative and emphasizing women’s function as a mere spectacle (Mulvey, 1975). Mulvey has more recently been concerned with an ‘aesthetic of delay’ based on repetition and return, noting how new moving image technologies, the electronic and the digital, have transformed the way in which we experience film by the delaying of images, returning to and repeating certain moments and breaking down the linearity of narrative continuity (Mulvey, 2006, p. 183). Mulvey argues that halting the flow of film splits apart the different levels of time that are usually fused together, so that fragments

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acquire the aura that the passing of time bequeaths to the most ordinary objects (2006, p. 192). Fiction can be delayed and fragments can take on this kind of unexpected significance, activating in what she calls the pensive spectator (as opposed to her previous concept of a voyeuristic or fetishistic spectator), the sense of reality that belongs to Roland Barthes’ concept of the punctum (2006, p. 195). As is well known, the use of the talking-head interview can be seen as a rather unimaginative and prosaic documentary film technique, even though its use, as well as the use of photographs or voiceover narration, could serve a variety of purposes in different documentaries.5 However, I associate here the shot of Iturrarán’s face with the cinematic punctum, an association that is even more poignant because we are briefly shown her devastatingly beautiful face in a still photograph taken when she was young, as though the photograph functions as a kind of haunting image of the past resurfacing in the present.6 The association of the shot of Iturrarán’s face with the cinematic punctum allows us to argue that the formal and visual convention of the talking-head is a significant cinematic device which enables the viewer to become part of the process of witnessing less through the communicative than through the affective transaction that operates in the spectator’s phenomenological encounter with the other’s face. Such an encounter mediates the intersubjective relations that are central to any conception of the act of bearing witness. Whether the survivor/witness looks directly at the camera or not, she or he always addresses directly an off-screen interlocutor as a way of constructing a testimonial address to another. In the specific case of Camino’s documentary, the off-screen interlocutors are the interviewer, whose questions are never heard by the audience, and the spectators. Hence, such an impression of the survivor’s/witness’s material presence, which is achieved through our apprehension of her or his corporeal inscription in the film’s sound and image, enhances the face-to-face encounter between her or him and the spectator. It is important to bear in mind that the use of the image of the ‘victim’ in visual culture, in general, and in Camino’s documentary, in particular, as a way of triggering an affective response, even if well intentioned, could be seen as a kind of violation of the subject depicted, as it may fail to respect the dignity, integrity and autonomy of the subject, thereby reducing her or him to a cipher of victimhood and enacting a form of colonisation of the other (Bennet, 2005, p. 64). From this perspective, in his analysis of Javier Corcuera’s documentary La espalda del mundo (The Back of the World, 2000), Gómez argues that such a focus on victimhood contributes to producing a feeling of immediate solidarity with

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the victim that does not require the questioning of the social, historical, economic, political or cultural contingencies that condition and determine the individual and collective experiences of the subject or subjects represented. Drawing on Wendy Brown’s political theories, Gómez suggests that this feeling of immediate solidarity presents itself as something of an anti-politics, a pure defence of the innocent and the powerless against power (Gómez, 2006, p. 105). I focus primarily on the face of the survivor/witness in the moment of testimonial enunciation in order to consider the possibility of an empathic intersubjective encounter that acknowledges the transcendence of the other’s address, thereby engaging in a more self-reflexive level of interpretation of Camino’s documentary which is extracted from or arises through that confrontation with the reconstruction of the fragments of a tangible and yet ephemeral past. My theoretical analysis of the face-to-face encounter thus avoids either the reduction of trauma to a shock-inducing signifier, which could produce the experience of vicarious traumatization, or the perpetuation of an unproductive and unreflective sympathy for a reified ‘victim’ that fails to take into consideration the complex ethical implications underpinning the act of bearing witness to the other’s experiences. Although I draw on Levinas’s account of the face as the paradigm of ethical significance, it is important to mention here that Levinas’s discussion of ethics and of the face challenges any possibility of thinking of the face – as object or encounter – as something visible or tangible (Cooper, 2006, p. 15). As Levinas suggests, ‘the face from the outset carries meaning over and beyond that of the surface plasticities which cover it with their presence in perception’ (2002, p. 535). Thus, Levinas’s iconoclastic ethics sets out to contest the phenomenal world of objects, images and appearances, as the face transcends visual and tactile sensations. However, the phenomenological encounter with the face of Iturrarán in Camino’s documentary may function less as an illustration than as an opening on to Levinas’s philosophical reflections on the ethical implications that underpin the encounter with the other’s face. When the spectator looks at her folds, her lines, her wrinkles, which suggest her durability through time, the accumulation of her experiences, the weakening of her powers, she or he feels an effect of closeness and intimacy, becoming more aware of the fragility and vulnerability that are inscribed on the materiality of her face, which becomes an integral part of the meaning-making process. Levinas argues that the face reveals itself through its ‘nudity’, its vulnerability to violence. By ‘nudity’, Levinas means a ‘non-form, abandon of self, ageing, dying…poverty, skin with

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wrinkles. All of these traits do not depend upon the actual violation of the other for their instantiation but are from the very beginning already a feature of the other’s revelation as other. The face and only the face has already opened up the issue of its violation by means of its own vulnerability’ (Hatley, 2000, p. 83). Like Iturrarán before us, we too will age, we will accumulate experiences, we will find ourselves succumbing to our own mortality. Our skin, like Iturrarán’s skin, will become wrinkled with age. In this manner, we can find ourselves treating Iturrarán’s face before us as an analogy for ourselves, as we constitute the other on the basis of the perceived behaviour of a body analogous to the one that we inhabit (Levinas, 2002, p. 434). Or, in reciprocity, we can find in ourselves an analogy for the other who is before us (Hatley, 2000, p. 83). However, despite this analogy between oneself and the other, in terms of respective vulnerabilities, the suffering that one encounters in the other cannot be taken as being one’s own. Hence, one infinitely fails to contain or translate the other’s ‘nudity’ into an intentional structure within one’s consciousness of the other (Hatley, 2000, p. 84). For Levinas, the encounter with the face of the other is thus based on an asymmetry rather than on a mirroring symmetry between the self and the irreducible alterity that can never be fully comprehended or accessed and that invokes one’s responsibility to the irreducible other before any attempt is made to grasp him or her cognitively. Even though the responsible preservation of the irreducible and inaccessible other does not guarantee reciprocal security or protection, Levinas does not simply reverse the dialectics of mastery, as he is only interested in the transcendence of the weakest of the weak (Cooper, 2006, p. 24). To return to the ethical consciousness that is produced in Los niños de Rusia, the act of bearing witness to the other’s traumatic experiences in Camino’s documentary thus requires an intersubjective relation that is in part grounded in the sensory experience of proximity, thus implicating our body in the visceral and cognitive encounter with the documentary image. This reconceptualization of the documentary image allows us to rethink history as a material force which impacts on our mind and body in the present. Following the emphasis on the asymmetry of self-other relations in Levinasian ethics, I propose that the act of bearing witness also involves the feeling for and empathy with the other without attempting to reduce, fully understand, assimilate or over-identify with her or his suffering. Dominik LaCapra, drawing on Luc Boltanski’s concept of souffrance à distance, has suggested that emotional response comes with respect for the other and the realisation that the experience of the other is not one’s own (LaCapra, 2001, p. 40).

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For LaCapra, to over-identify with the ‘victim’ in the name of morality could have consequences as grave as to over-identify with the ‘aggressor’, as it may incite feelings of anger and hatred that are first turned inwards and subsequently turned outwards. From this perspective, our phenomenological and cognitive encounter with the face and the voice of Iturrarán in the process of viewing Camino’s documentary provokes in us the ethical need for responsibility which is integral to the experience of bearing witness, thereby opening the documentary image to larger social and political meanings (Kaplan, 2005). Such a sense of ethical responsibility which underpins the face-to-face encounter in Los niños de Rusia recognizes the other’s traumatic experiences as real, even if they may be incomprehensible to the witness, and encourages a mode of ethical listening and seeing that can support and tolerate difference rather than either repudiating it or, in Levinasian terms, assimilating the experience of the other to the self (Bennet 2005, p. 105). Drawing on Gayatri Spivak’s theories of alterity and subalternity, Jill Bennett contends that collective activism, which must involve a politics and ethics of listening, is predicated on the listener’s disposition to enter such an encounter with another. In these encounters, Bennett argues, the difference between the testifier and the interlocutor is not necessarily eradicated, although it may be reduced; it is, more precisely, inhabited (Bennet, 2005, p. 105).

Conclusion To sum up, Camino’s documentary integrates the politics of the representation of external references and the poetics of the representation of inner states, evoking the traumatic memories of the past by provoking a reverberation of those effects in our subjectivities and bodies without making us succumb to an over-identification with the other’s suffering. Los niños de Rusia takes into consideration the conflictual tensions that are accessed through perception and cognition, as well as those which are accessed through affect and sensation, thereby introducing a new politics of subjectivation, new configurations of the unconscious within the social field. Camino’s documentary addresses the ethics and politics of memory and reveals the true witnessing and the affective power that the documentary image may bear through an affective and empathetic identification that incorporates critical reflection on the suffering of the other. Los niños de Rusia points to the way in which culture may use documentary images ethically to evoke the persistence of the fragments of the past in the present. Thus, each time the remains of the past

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returns to the present, it allows us to understand the past and the present in a deeper and more complex way. Camino’s documentary proposes an ethics that understands and integrates the fragments of the past in the present, so that an intervention in the present may allow us to imagine a more satisfying future. Finally, returning to the question of the face-to-face encounter to which I referred above, I suggest that Los niños de Rusia encourages us to embrace an ‘ethics of listening and seeing’. If the documentary medium does not transparently ‘reflect’ a reality, but rather it participates in the transformation of people’s consciousness of reality, such an ‘ethics of listening and seeing’ may allow us to sustain a variety of human life which is identified with a certain kind of otherness, encouraging us to work towards a culture in which we pay much deeper attention to caring and to compassion so as to sustain the safety and dignity of all others and their different ways of being-in-the-world.

Notes 1. I would like to express my sincere thanks to Jo Labanyi for reading an earlier version of this chapter and for providing me with invaluable feedback. I would also like to thank Ann Davies, Montserrat Lunati, Susan MartínMárquez and Paul Julian Smith for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. 2. For a study of the impossibility of bearing witness, see Agamben (1999). 3. For a discussion of the relationship between the documentary medium in contemporary Spain and legal theory, see Herrmann (2008). 4. Although Marianne Hirsch refers to the children of Holocaust survivors, I am applying the term ‘postmemory’ to what is defined in Spain as the ‘Third Generation’, which is associated with the grandchildren of the victims of Francoism. See Labanyi (2008). 5. See Waldman and Walker (1999). 6. I would like to express my sincere thanks to Jo Labanyi for making me aware of the contrast between Iturrarán’s elderly face in the present and the photograph of her youthful face in the past. If the Barthesian punctum disrupts the boundaries between the past, the present and the future, such a coexistence of past and present images of Iturrarán’s face in Camino’s documentary enhances my association of the close-up of Iturrarán’s face with the cinematic punctum.

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Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy (Amsterdam: Rodopi), 83–126. Skoller, J. (2005), Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-garde Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Smith, A.M. (1998), Julia Kristeva: Speaking the Unspeakable (London: Pluto Press). Sobchack, V. (1999), ‘Toward a Phenomenology of Non-fictional Film Experience’ in J. Gaines and M. Renov (eds), Collecting Visible Evidence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 241–53. Steel, J. (2003), ‘The Television Documentary and the Real’, Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 8/2, 330–7. van Alphen, E. (2001), ‘Deadly Historians: Boltanski’s Intervention in Holocaust Historiography’ in B. Zelizer (ed.) Visual Culture and the Holocaust (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press), 45–73. Waldman D. and Walker J. (eds) (1999), Feminism and Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Walker, J. (1997), ‘The Traumatic Paradox: Documentary Films, Historical Fictions, and Cataclysmic Past Events’, Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 22/4, 803–25. Williams, L. (1993), ‘Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary’ in A. Rosenthal and J. Corner (eds), New Challenges for Documentary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 59–75.

Index Aguirresarobe, Javier 119, 124 Alcaine, José Luis 72 Almodóvar, Pedro 3, 4, 7, 31–3, 51, 71 Alted, Alicia 138 Alterio, Ernesto 4 Alterio, Héctor 65 Altman, Robert 48 Álvarez, Ana 96 Álvarez, Jesús Timeteo 23–4 Amenábar, Alejandro 2, 6, 29, 35, 57, 80, 81, 82, 91 Anderson, Benedict 46 Antonioni , Michelangelo 47, 48 Aranda, Vicente 34 Arroba, Álvaro 30 Audience 2, 8–11, 12, 14–15, 19–40, 42, 99–101, 103, 105, 106, 107–8, 110–11

Bordwell, David 54 Boyero, Carlos 12, 29–33, 38 Bradshaw, Peter 125 Brody, Richard 45 Brophy, Philip 123 Brown, Wendy 144 Buñuel, Luis 3, 47, 57 Burwell, Carter 123 Bush, George 50 Bush, George W. 51

Balagueró, Jaume 80 Ballesteros, Isolina 98 Bardem, Carlos 117 Bardem, Javier 4, 6, 15–16, 26, 97, 109, 110, 114–28 Bardem, Juan Antonio 114, 126 Bardem, Pilar 114 Bardem, Rafael, 114 Bardot, Brigitte 95 Barthes, Roland 129, 143 Basque cinema 57 Batista, Aurora 61 Bayona, J. A. 6, 7, 21, 34, 35, 79–92 Beatty, Warren 117 Bennett, Jill 146 Bergson, Henri 41, 42, 44, 51 Besas, Peter 36 Bigas Luna, José Juan 14–15, 93–113, 123–4 Biopic 13, 60–77 Blake, Yvonne 121 Bollaín, Icíar 25 Boltanski, Luc 145

Calparsoro, Daniel 81, 82, 91 Camino, Jaime 16, 129–50 Campoy, Eduardo 27 Camus, Marion 34 Cassavetes, John 48 Castro de Paz, José Luis 7 Caughie, John 76 Cerdán, Josetxo 7 Chaplin, Geraldine 72, 73, 74–5 Cine social 4, 5 Clooney, George 117 Clough, Patricia 110 Clover, Carol 14, 79, 83–4, 86, 87, 90 Coen brothers 116, 119, 121–4, 125 Coixet, Isabel 2 Collins, Ava Preacher 9–10, 11 Collins, Jim 11 Comedy 4 Co-production 2, 6–7, 8 Corcuera, Javier 143 Creed, Barbara 14, 79, 83, 85–6, 87 Cruz, Penélope 4, 6, 94, 96 Custen, George F. 13, 61–3, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70–1, 75, 77 Dalí, Salvador 57 Davies, Ann 14 Deleuze, Gilles 12, 41, 42–5, 48, 57, 58 Derrida, Jacques 140 Directors 3, 60, 111

151

152

Index

Documentary 16, 130, 132, 134, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 145, 146, 147 Echegui, Verónica 94 Einstein, Albert 131 Erice, Víctor 3, 30, 45, 47–8 Evans, Peter 3 Faulkner, Sally 4, 142 Fecé, Josep Lluis 2 Felman, Shoshana 134 Fernández Santos, Ángel 26, 29, 102 Fesser, Javier 35 Film noir 5 Forman, Miloš 115–16, 118–21 Foucault, Michel 11–12 Fouz-Hernández, Santiago 14–15 Franco, Jess 79 Friedlander, Saul 129–30 Funding 19–40 García de la Concha, Víctor 64–5, 66, 75 García Fernández, Emilio Carlos 23, 25 García Márquez, Gabriel 125, 126 Gender 5, 13, 14, 79–92, 93–113 Genre 4–5, 13, 14, 27, 36, 42, 92 Godard, Jean-Luc 41, 45–6, 47, 48, 49, 50 Gómez, Andrés Vicente 38, 72, 96 Gómez, Antonio 139, 143–4 González Sinde, Ángeles 25, 37, 39 Goya, Francisco de 115–16, 118–21 Grandes, Almudena 98, 99 Guardans, Ignasi 39 Guattari, Felix 100 Gubern, Román 12, 33–6, 38 Guerin, Frances 140 Guernica (Pablo Picasso) 133, 139 Guinovart, Albert 139 Gutiérrez Albilla, Julián Daniel 3, 16 Gutiérrez Caba, Emilio 64 Hallas, Roger 140 Hartley, Hal 49 Hermoso, Borja 29, 31, 32 Heras, Beatriz de las 134

Herrero, Gerardo 38 Higson, Andrew 73 Hirsch, Joshua 131 Hirsch, Marianne 136, 147n Hopkins, Anthony 114 Horror 5, 14, 27, 41, 57, 79–92 Huyssen, Andreas 137 Iglesia, Álex de la 12, 25–9, 33, 57, 123 Iglesias, Alberto 26 Ishioka, Eiko 72, 74 Iturrarán, Josefina 139, 140, 141, 143, 144–5, 146, 147n Jarmusch, Jim 49 Jordan, Barry 12, 13, 19–40 Kiarostami, Abbas 51 Kidman, Nicole 80 Kinder, Marsha 79, 82, 83 Kristeva, Julia 85, 131, 132 Labanyi, Jo 130, 131, 140 LaCapra, Dominik 145–6 Lara, Fernando 38, 39 Laub, Dori 134 Levinas, Emannuel 144–5, 146 Ley de Cine (Cinema Law) 2007 12, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 35, 39, 55, 58, 118 Linklater, Richard 49–50 Loriga, Ray, 60, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77 Loureiro, Ángel 130–1, 138 Lowenthal, Leo 61 Lyotard, Jean-François 104 MacCormack, Patricia 15, 100–1, 103–4, 105, 109 Malick, Terrence 48 Marías, Miguel 30 Marini, Valeria 102, 103 Marker, Chris 132 Marks, Laura 100 Marshall, Lee 54 Martín, Javier 27–8 Martínez, Fele 4 Martínez Lázaro, Emilio 71 Martín-Gaite, Carmen 64, 66

Index 153 Martin-Jones, David 47 McCarthy, Cormac 121, 122 Medem, Julio 48, 53, 55, 57, 71 Memory 8, 9, 16, 129–50 Milá, Mercedes 64 Mira, Alberto 9, 10 Miró, Pilar 34 Molina, Ángela 96 Molina, César Antonio 22, 38, 39 Molina, Josefina 60, 64, 65, 66, 67, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77 Mollà, Jordi 4 Monck, Claire 73 Montoya, J. A. M. 96 Moore, Michael 49 Mora, Pío 137 Morán, Manuel 75 Moreno, Javier 29 Mulvey, Laura 142–3 Mumblecore 51 Muñoz Sampedro, Matilde 114 National cinema 2, 11, 12, 14, 15 Navarro, Vicenç 138 Neri, Francesca 94, 96 Neville, Edgar 57 Newman, Paul 117 Nicholson, Jack 9 Niro, Robert de 121 Noriega, Eduardo 4 Obama, Barack 49 O’Brien, Geoffrey 115, 123 Orduña, Juan de 61 Osuna, Juan de 66 Palacio, Manuel 63 Palmero, Rafael 72 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 45 Pataky, Elsa 94–5 Penn, Arthur 48 Pérez, Pedro 12, 20–3, 26, 27, 28, 35, 37, 38, 39 Pérez Oliva, Milagros 33 Perriam, Chris 4, 15–16 Peter Pan 87, 92 Pina, Emilio 25 Pisano, Isabel 95–6, 98, 109–10 Ponsela, Eusebio 73

Popular cinema 8–11, 13, 14 Portabella, Pere 34 Pujol, Cristina 2 Rabal, Paco 65 Race 5 Radner, Hilary 11 Reagan, Ronald 50 Reed, Oliver 121 Resina, Joan Ramon 136, 137 Resnais, Alain 45 Reygadas, Carlos 51 Rich, Adrienne 110 Rodríguez Marchante, Oti 30 Rodríguez Zapatero, José Luis 15, 39, 117, 118, 126n Rosenau, James N. 55 Rueda, Belén Ruiz, Emilio 72, 75 Saint Teresa 13–14, 60–77 Sánchez, Araceli 133 Sánchez, Sergio G. 87 Sánchez Arévalo, Daniel 52–3, 54, 55 Sánchez-Gijón, Aitana 96–7 Santaolalla, Isabel 5 Saura, Carlos 3, 34, 45, 47, 142 Scorsese, Martin 49 Segura, Santiago 35 Sert, José María 61 Sharrett, Christopher 91 Short films 12–13, 55–9 Skoller, Jeffrey 134–5 Smith, Paul Julian 7, 8, 13–14, 83, 91 Sobchack, Vivian 15, 100, 101, 132 Solsona, Carles Josep 27 Sorenson, Georg 46 Soysal, Yasenin N. 55 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 146 Stalin, Josef 133 Stars 4, 15–16, 60, 64 Stevenson, Robert Louis 59 Stone, Rob 8, 12–13 Suárez, Emma 96 Surrealism 4, 47, 50 Tarkovsky, Andrei 44, 47, 48 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr 133

154

Index

Television 8, 13–4, 63–71, 76–7 Toro, Guillermo del 6, 7, 80, 89 Transnational cinema 6–7, 15–16 Triana-Toribio, Núria 2 Trueba, Fernando 27 Truffaut, François 49 Tura, Consol 95–6 Umbral, Francisco 65 Van Halen, Juan 22, 38 Vega, Paz 4, 60, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77 Velasco, Concha 60, 64, 65, 69, 71, 72, 73 Verbeke, Natalia 4 Verdú, Maribel 96

Vidal, César 137 Vigalondo, Nacho 34, 35 Watling, Leonor 4, 72–3, 75, 94, 97 Wayne, John 123 Wenders, Wim 47 White, Hayden 62 Williams, Linda 100, 101, 142 Williams, Tony 84–5 Willis, Andy 5 Wong Kar Wai 51 YouTube

13, 55, 57

Zanuck, Darryl 62, 68 Zulueta, Iván 57