Subversive Spanish Cinema: The Politics of Performance 9781788310093, 9781350152458, 9781350152472

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SUBVERSIVE SPANISH CINEMA

SUBVERSIVE SPANISH CINEMA The Politics of Performance

FIONA NOBLE

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 This paperback edition published in 2022 Copyright © Fiona Noble, 2020 Fiona Noble has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xi–xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Charlotte Daniels Cover image: Oscar Jaenada as Alfredo in Noviembre (2003), directed by Achero Manas (© Collection Christophel / ArenaPAL) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Noble, Fiona, 1985- author. Title: Subversive Spanish cinema : the politics of performance / Fiona Noble. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |Identifiers: LCCN 2020019118 (print) | LCCN 2020019119 (ebook) | ISBN 9781788310093 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350152465 (epub) | ISBN 9781350152472 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350152458 Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures–Spain–History–20th century. | Motion pictures–Political aspects–Spain–History–20th century. | Motion picture acting. | Government, Resistance to–Spain–History–20th century. Classification: LCC PN1993.5.S7 N615 2020 (print) | LCC PN1993.5.S7 (ebook) | DDC 791.430946/0904–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019118 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019119 ISBN:

HB: 978-1-7883-1009-3 978-1-3501-9499-1 PB: ePDF: 978-1-3501-5247-2 eBook: 978-1-3501-5246-5

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For S, J and L

CONTENTS

List of Figures  viii Acknowledgements  xi

Introduction  1 1 Performing pastness  29 2 Performing identities  71 3 Metaperformances  113 4 Performance as catharsis and therapy  157 Epilogue  199 Notes  201 References  206 Index  219

LIST OF FIGURES

I.1 Professor Juan Carlos Monedero wears a Noviembre T-shirt. ‘Política, Manual de instrucciones’ directed by Fernando León de Aranoa © Mediapro, Reposado Producciones 2016. All rights reserved  7 I.2 The village as theatrical set. ‘¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall!’ directed by Luis García Berlanga © Unión Industrial Cinematográfica 1953. All rights reserved  16 I.3 The theatrical curtain as backdrop. ‘Cómicos’ directed by Juan Antonio Bardem © Unión Films, Mapol Films 1954. All rights reserved  21 1.1 The mother as absent presence. ‘Blancanieves’ directed by Pablo Berger © Arcadia Motino Pictures 2012. All rights reserved  34 1.2 Sergio disrespects the boundaries of the frame. ‘Balada triste de trompeta’ directed by Alex de la Iglesia © Tornasol Films 2010. All rights reserved  55 1.3 The air stewards strike a pose. ‘Los amantes pasajeros’ directed by Pedro Almodóvar © El Deseo 2013. All rights reserved  67 2.1 Raúl, seduced by capitalist consumerism. ‘Jamón, jamón’ directed by Josep Joan Bigas i Luna © Lolafilms, Ovídeo TV S. A., Sogepaq 1992. All rights reserved  77 2.2 The fragmented male form. ‘Jamón, jamón’ directed by Josep Joan Bigas i Luna © Lolafilms, Ovídeo TV S. A., Sogepaq 1992. All rights reserved  79 2.3 A community of witness. ‘Ocho apellidos vascos’ directed by Emilio Martínez Lázaro © Lazonafilms, Kowalski Films, Snow Films, Telecinco Cinema 2014. All rights reserved  88

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2.4 Leo’s lips. ‘Todo lo que tú quieras’ directed by Achero Mañas © Bellatrix Films S.L., Instituto de Crédito Oficial (ICO), Ministerio de Cultura, Televisión Española (TVE) 2010. All rights reserved  96 2.5 Leo’s reflection. ‘Todo lo que tú quieras’ directed by Achero Mañas © Bellatrix Films S.L., Instituto de Crédito Oficial (ICO), Ministerio de Cultura, Televisión Española (TVE) 2010. All rights reserved  98 2.6 Huma doubled. ‘Todo sobre mi madre’ directed by Pedro Almodóvar © El Deseo, Renn Productions, France 2 Cinéma, Vía Digital 1999. All rights reserved  105 2.7 Manuela doubled. ‘Todo sobre mi madre’ directed by Pedro Almodóvar © El Deseo, Renn Productions, France 2 Cinéma, Vía Digital 1999. All rights reserved  106 2.8 La Agrado as liminal subject. ‘Todo sobre mi madre’ directed by Pedro Almodóvar © El Deseo, Renn Productions, France 2 Cinéma, Vía Digital 1999. All rights reserved  108 3.1 While the camera focuses on Antonio, the female dancers are only visible as blurred reflections. ‘Carmen’ directed by Carlos Saura © Emiliano Piedra, Televisión Española (TVE) 1983. All rights reserved  117 3.2 Contract in close-up. ‘Familia’ directed by Fernando León de Aranoa © Albares Production, Elías Querejeta Producciones Cinematográficas S.L. 1996. All rights reserved  127 3.3 Enrique fixed in the frame as he watches Juan flee. ‘La mala educación’ directed by Pedro Almodóvar © Canal+ España, El Deseo, Instituto de la Cinematografía y de las Artes Audiovisuales (ICAA), Preparatory Action of the European Union, Televisión Española (TVE) 2004. All rights reserved  137 3.4 Neat divisions between fiction (the film set on the left) and reality (the crew on the right)? ‘La mala educación’ directed

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by Pedro Almodóvar © Canal+ España, El Deseo, Instituto de la Cinematografía y de las Artes Audiovisuales (ICAA), Preparatory Action of the European Union, Televisión Española (TVE) 2004. All rights reserved  140 3.5 María (Cassandra Cianguerotti) pointedly points her camera at her textual credit. ‘También la lluvia’ directed by Icíar Bollaín © Alebrije Cine y Video, Morena Films, Vaca Films 2010. All rights reserved  150 4.1 Ocaña reflected. ‘Ocaña: Retrat intermitent’ directed by Ventura Pons © Prozesa, Teide P.C. 1978. All rights reserved  162 4.2 Affective performances, affected spectators. ‘Hable con ella’ directed by Pedro Almodóvar © El Deseo, Antena 3 Televisión, Good Machine, Vía Digital 2002. All rights reserved  175 4.3 Disruptive intertitles. ‘Noviembre’ directed by Achero Mañas © Alta Films, Tesela Producciones Cinematográficas 2003. All rights reserved  192 4.4 Challenging representational hierarchies: Las Meninas. ‘Noviembre’ directed by Achero Mañas © Alta Films, Tesela Producciones Cinematográficas 2003. All rights reserved  194 4.5 Art is a weapon loaded with the future. ‘Noviembre’ directed by Achero Mañas © Alta Films, Tesela Producciones Cinematográficas 2003. All rights reserved  196

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The writing of an academic monograph can be a very solitary project, not least when, as in my circumstances, working on the margins of academia, without fixed or indeed any academic employment. However, as these acknowledgements demonstrate, bringing this book to fruition would not have been possible without a host of individuals who have supported and sustained both myself and my project in various ways. This book project has its origins in my PhD thesis, and I would like to thank my PhD supervisors: Dr Julia Biggane, for her rigorous intellectual interrogation of my work and ideas but also for her kindness, compassion and generosity; and Dr Katherine Groo, for broadening my intellectual horizons and inducting me in the field of film and visual studies. I am also hugely appreciative to my examiners, Professor Santiago Fouz Hernández and Dr Jesse Barker, for their advice in terms of how to approach publication, particularly in terms of selecting the section on performance as the most original and current aspect of the thesis. I would also like to thank my editor, Rebecca Barden, as well as all those at Bloomsbury who made this project possible. Several individuals have shared their wisdom, advice and insight throughout the development of this project. I would like to thank Professor Santiago Fouz Hernández, Professor Janet Stewart and Dr May Darwich for the advice they offered with regard to how to approach writing a book proposal for this project during my time as a Teaching Fellow at Durham University. I am thankful for insightful dialogue, over the years, with Professor Ann Davies, Professor Sarah Wright, Dr Niamh Thornton, Dr Sarah Thomas, Dr Tom Whittaker, Dr Nerea Arruti, Dr Francisca Sánchez Ortiz, Professor Catherine Grant, Dr Tara Plunkett and Marta Suarez. I am also hugely grateful to those who read draft chapters at various points during the preparation of this manuscript: to Dr

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Anna Vives Riera, Samira Nadkarni, Dr Emily Garside and Dr Melissa Schuh for their enormously helpful feedback on my introduction; to Dr Paula Blair who provided so many useful insights on Chapter One; to Dr Nadia Albaladejo García for reading and offering advice on how to improve Chapter Two; to Dr Ana María Sánchez-Arce who generously read and gave feedback on Chapter Three; and to Dr Lorna Muir who kindly provided feedback on Chapter Four. While I am hugely grateful for the intellectual rigour with which they read and offered feedback on my work, I am also, more importantly, thankful for their warm words of encouragement and reassurance at a time when I often doubted my ability to bring this book project to completion. I would also like to extend my thanks to the two anonymous peer reviewers whose positive responses were reassuring and whose criticisms were wholly constructive. In terms of moral support, I am particularly thankful for my virtual academic community, most of whom I have met on or interact with through Twitter. Dr Ana María Sánchez-Arce has been an enormous source of support as we both worked towards the completion of our respective monographs. Others who have frequently offered virtual cheering, motivation and solidarity include Dr Nadia Albaladejo García, Dr Dolores Tierney, Dr Liz HarveyKattou, Dr Leticia Villamediana, Dr Katie Brown, Dr Jade Boyd, Dr Paula Blair, Dr Marieke Rietkhof, Dr Jo Van Every and Dr Melissa Schuh, among others. Over the course of researching, writing and preparing this monograph, life has changed dramatically on a personal level. I am thankful to my husband, Scott, whose unwavering support and reassurance never fail to keep me grounded. I would not have completed this project without him. I would also like to thank my parents, Janette and Harry, as well as my brother David and extended family for their support, encouragement and interest in my academic work. Finally, this book is framed by the two most important people in my life: my two children. I sent the proposal a few days prior to the birth of my first child and submitted the manuscript the day my second child was due to arrive. Of all I have achieved in my life so far, they are by far the thing of which I am most proud. This book is dedicated to them.

Introduction

In 2008, Spanish actor Javier Bardem made history as the first Spanish actor to win an Oscar when he scooped the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as the crazed killer Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men (Coen Brothers 2007). In an impassioned speech celebrating this win, Bardem first thanked the Coen brothers and his fellow cast members before expressing his desire to dedicate the award and his triumph to his mother. ‘I have to say this in Spanish’ he apologizes: ‘Mamá, esto es para ti. Esto es para tus abuelos, para tus padres Rafael y Matilde. Esto es por los cómicos de España que han traído, como tú, la dignidad y el orgullo en nuestro oficio. Esto es para España y esto es para todos vosotros’. (Mum, this is for you. This is for your grandparents, for your parents Rafael and Matilde. This is because of Spanish performers who have brought, like you, dignity and pride to our profession. This is for Spain and this is for you all.1) Delivered in Spanish, Bardem’s speech emphasizes the centrality of performance to Spain and the Spanish people. While Bardem dedicates the award to (para) those in his family who have engaged in artistic practice, he attributes his win to (por) all Spanish performers. His insistence on the dignity and pride attached to performance delivers an important message about the cultural worth and value of the acting profession and other creative pursuits. This is particularly poignant given that Bardem’s Oscar triumph occurred in the immediate aftermath of the global economic crash of 2007–8 and anticipated the range of austerity

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measures introduced by the contemporaneous conservative government headed up by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of the right-wing Partido Popular (People’s Party). Thus, with this dedication, Bardem simultaneously sketches a personal and national history of politics and performance in the context of contemporary Spanish cinema.2 Politics and performance intertwine in Bardem’s genealogy, indicative of a wider paradigm of the political import of performance in contemporary Spain. Both the personal and performative spaces occupied by Bardem are inherently political. He exemplifies the extent to which the family functions as a microcosm for the nation, whereby, as Anne McClintock argues, ‘Nations are frequently figured through the iconography of familial and domestic space’ and as such ‘symbolically figured as domestic genealogies’ (1993: 63, original emphasis). Bardem’s speech firstly highlights his own artistic lineage as a performer. One of three siblings, Javier has a brother, Carlos, and a sister, Mónica, who are also actors, although the latter left the profession to run two family restaurants. His mother, Pilar Bardem, began her screen career in 1965. She boasts an expansive body of work in both film and television, having worked with internationally renowned Spanish directors, such as Pedro Almodóvar, Julio Medem and Josep Joan Bigas i Luna, and having starred in successful Spanish television series such as Un paso adelante (One Step Forward), El inquilino (The Tenant) and Amar en tiempos revueltos (Love in Troubled Times). Daughter of performers Rafael Bardem and Matilde Muñoz Sampedro, cited in Bardem’s speech, Pilar is also the younger sister of acclaimed filmmaker Juan Antonio Bardem. Uncle to Javier, Juan Antonio Bardem is renowned for his subversive filmmaking under Francisco Franco. He was a member of the Communist Party and a participant in the 1955 Conversaciones de Salamanca (Salamanca Conversations), in which critics, directors, academics and those working in state organizations united to discuss the various trends in Spanish cinema since the Civil War (1936–9) between left-wing Republicans and rightwing Nationalists. Bardem’s most famous film, Muerte de un ciclista (Death of

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a Cyclist) (1955), won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival. Although Javier does not explicitly cite his uncle Juan Antonio in his discourse, his selection of the word cómicos constitutes an implicit reference to this aspect of his heritage: Cómicos (Comedians) is the name of a film directed by Juan Antonio Bardem in 1954 and a precursor to contemporary Spanish cinema focused on performance, as I demonstrate later in this introduction. Beyond the political import of his uncle Juan Antonio’s work, Bardem’s actor-mother and siblings along with Bardem himself are avid and outspoken critics of both party politics and globalized political issues. His mother is renowned in Spain not only for her prolific acting career but also for her forthrightness with regard to politics. She is a frequent participant in political demonstrations, protesting military action in Iraq in 2003 alongside other famous Spanish actors as well as petitioning for the working rights of actors, the civil rights of women and a more liberal Catholic Church. Javier appears to have inherited his mother’s political outspokenness. At the 2019 Academy Awards ceremony, he directed a rather thinly veiled criticism both at US President Donald Trump and at aggressive border-enforcing policies such as the maritime pushbacks coordinated by Frontex. Introducing the nominees for Best Foreign Language Film, Bardem declared in Spanish: ‘No hay fronteras ni muros que frenen el ingenio y el talento. En cada región hay historias que nos conmueven y esta noche celebramos la excelencia y la importancia del idioma de diferentes países’. (There are no borders or walls that can stop genius and talent. In each region there are stories that move us and tonight we celebrate the excellence and the importance of the language of different countries (Anon 2019a).3) Moreover, Bardem has previously demonstrated his condemnation of US politics and right-wing military action in the Middle East, participating in an anti-war protest in February 2003 in Madrid, in light of a possible US-led invasion of Iraq and using his award acceptance speech at the 2003 Goyas as a platform to speak out against this military action (Brown 2003). He has also proven to be an outspoken critic of austerity measures adopted by conservative

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governments in Spain since the economic crash of 2007–8, condemning this approach as a means to pay off private bank debt in interviews and attending protests against austerity measures (Tremlett 2012). In addition to his critiques of political leaders and their policies governed by xenophobia or austerity, Bardem has consistently shown himself to be politically motivated in relation to human rights causes. In May 2018, Bardem spoke out against the persecution of NGOs, such as Proactiva Open Arms, trying to rescue migrants in the Mediterranean. He has also shown support for Doctors Without Borders in 2012 and in 2014 signed an open letter contesting Israeli military action in Gaza alongside his wife and fellow Spanish superstar Penélope Cruz as well as renowned filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar (E. Beswick and J. Villagarcia 2018). He additionally works as an Antarctic Ambassador with Greenpeace and in 2012 produced and starred, alongside his brother Carlos, in Hijos de las nubes, la última colonia (Sons of the Clouds, The Last Colony), a documentary about the Sahrawi people of the West Sahara which ‘places blame squarely on Morocco for humanrights abuses against the tribe in the former Spanish colony’ (Paterniti 2012). All of these examples indicate the extent to which performance, a simultaneously slippery and expansive concept for which I offer a definition below, and politics intertwine not just within the Bardem family history, but also more broadly within the wider panorama of those involved with cultural production in contemporary Spain. Bardem’s individual career, political interventions and familial history trace an intriguing paradigm of performance and politics that Subversive Spanish Cinema: The Politics of Performance sets out to explore. Interrogating the pervasiveness of performance and the plurality of its permutations in Spanish cinema since the end of the Francoist dictatorship with the death of Franco in 1975, this book emphasizes the thus far neglected political significances of performance and performers in contemporary Spanish cinema specifically and in contemporary Spain more generally. My contention is that the technical,

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conceptual and narrative functions of performance within the cinematic sphere underscore the political thrust of cinematic performance specifically and of cinema more broadly. The specific context in which this unfolds is that of a democratic Spain that has systematically denigrated the cultural sphere, both through the silence and lack of redress during the Transition to democracy following the death of Franco in 1975 and, more recently, through a series of destructive policies and budget cuts in the name of austerity since the economic Crisis of 2007–8. The interlocking of performance and politics is not just significant within the context of contemporary Spanish cinema. It is additionally crucial within the current political landscape in Spain, most notably with the grass-roots emergence of left-wing populist party Podemos. Founded in the aftermath of the anti-austerity 15-M movement in January 2014 by political scientist Pablo Iglesias, the party appeals to performance and the performative. One of the ways they do this is through social media channels, such as YouTube and WhatsApp, by which to disseminate information regarding their views and policies or through their use of the Ghostbusters theme when the leaders march on stage at political rallies.4 Nowhere is this more apparent than in the documentary Política, manual de instrucciones (Politics: A Handbook) (Fernando León de Aranoa 2016), motivated by a desire to document this developing political movement that presents a stark challenge to the established two-party system that has dominated politics in contemporary democratic Spain. For Bryan Cameron, the film forms part of a wave of documentaries produced since the economic Crisis and constitutes ‘an ambivalent statement on Spain’s political present and, crucially, as an attempt to shape its future’ (2019: 59). He contends that the film fulfils multiple roles: ‘a historical record, a piece of propaganda, an ethical intervention in a time of political and economic uncertainty, an attempt to stimulate dialogue amongst an already engaged audience, and, most obviously, as an instruction manual – or a user’s guide – for understanding and participating in contemporary

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Spanish politics’ (2019: 64). As a documentary claiming spontaneity and immediacy, the deployment of performance with its lexis of rehearsal and staginess creates a tension that exemplifies the constructed and narrativized character of political performativity. The rhetoric of performance permeates both the ethos of the party and the documentary which depicts Pablo Iglesias and fellow Podemos party members backstage and participating in various events including rallies and media interviews. For example the opening sequence begins with a series of still images, symbolically static, and intertitles setting the scene with regard to the impact of the economic Crisis in Spain and the growing political discontent that paved the way for the emergence of Podemos. The accompanying soundtrack takes the form of a drum roll, simultaneously punctuating the still images of civil unrest and simulating the aural aesthetics of the circus. Following a momentary cut to black, the drum roll continues, this time accompanying the setting up of staging and seating in an enormous arena which will form the venue for a Podemos rally. By setting the scene in this way, Política, manual de instrucciones emphasizes the importance of performance with regard to both politics and cinema in contemporary Spain. Given the anti-austerity impetus of Podemos, it is wholly significant that one of the party’s participants, political scientist Professor Juan Carlos Monedero, wears a T-shirt emblazoned with the DVD cover image of the film Noviembre (November) (Achero Mañas 2003) in his talking heads interview segments (Figure I.1). One of the case studies explored in Chapter 4, Noviembre is an epitomic example of the politics of performance in contemporary Spain with director Mañas renouncing his career as a filmmaker due to the cripplingly difficult economic circumstances enforced upon artistic practitioners in the name of austerity. Like the Bardem family genealogy charted at the start of this introduction, both Podemos and Política, manual de instrucciones highlight the inseparability of performance and politics within the landscape of contemporary Spanish society.

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FIGURE I.1  Professor Juan Carlos Monedero wears a Noviembre T-shirt. ‘Política, Manual de instrucciones’ directed by Fernando León de Aranoa © Mediapro, Reposado Producciones 2016. All rights reserved.

The pervasiveness of performance Performance as ideology, and its concomitant rhetoric, saturates most aspects of contemporary life, including business, warfare and, most notably, culture. Although much has changed since its publication at the turn of the twentyfirst century, Jon McKenzie’s 2001 monograph Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance deftly outlines the extent to which performance permeates the everyday in contemporary Western societies with its aim of linking ‘the performances of artists and activists with those of workers and executives, as well as computers and missile systems’ from ‘congressional attacks on performance artists to the performance specs of household appliances, from the iterative training of high performance managers to the performativity of everyday speech’ (2001: 3). As McKenzie suggests, the rhetoric of performance is at once pluralistic and diffuse, applied to and within a vast range of people, products and spheres. This means, as McKenzie himself acknowledges, that ‘anyone trying to map its passages must navigate a long and twisting flight path’ (2001: 4). In short, the diffuseness of performance as term, concept and

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ideology requires that its use as theoretical paradigm occurs within clearly defined parameters, even if those parameters are constantly and consistently challenged by the performances in question. One of the most prevalent functions of performance in contemporary Western contexts is its significance in relation to identity formation, a topic I unpack in more detail in Chapter 2, ‘Performing identities’. Conceptually, the link between performance and the constructedness of identity is not a new phenomenon but one that dates back nearly 100 years to early twentiethcentury examinations of gender identity. For Joan Riviere, writing in 1929, femininity constitutes a masquerade that can be utilized by women in order to conceal masculine traits that may prove threatening to men (1929: 303, 306). Following this framework, 1950s second-wave feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir posit womanhood not as a biological state of being but rather as a process of becoming ([1949] 2014: 293). Dating from the same period, J. L. Austin’s linguistic model of performativity has proved foundational for gender and queer theorists from the 1990s onwards ([1962] 1994). The work of Judith Butler, who contends that gender identity is ‘instituted through a stylized repetition of acts’, is hugely influential in this regard (1988: 519, original emphasis). It is thus unsurprising that in the contemporary context it is within the arenas of gender and queer studies that performance and performativity have become the principal paradigms of identity interpretation. As a caveat to this, however, identitarian ideologies and hierarchies frame these constructed performances insofar as they are governed by standardized assumptions of gender, race and biology. As an example, bell hooks critiques feminist movements that ‘seek to stifle dissent’ in place of encouraging ‘a diversity of voices, critical dialogue, and controversy’ (2000: 10). This means that for those who do not conform, the repetition of stylized acts does not suffice.5 In this regard, performance and the performativity of identity must be understood as a complex paradigm, not wholly affirmative, celebratory or liberating.

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While the diffuseness of performance is at once undeniable and of great interest in the contemporary context, its detailed investigation ultimately lies outwith the parameters of this study, the focus of which is the more specific intersection of performance and contemporary Spanish cinema. Within the cultural sphere and especially in the context of cinema, performance proves a problematic object of investigation due to its elusive and ephemeral character. This may relate to the apparent effortlessness of effective acting when it is in fact, as Claudia Springer and Julie Levinson signal, ‘a product of a performer’s careful labor and the changing conventions in performance styles, which are continually being transformed by technological, industrial, aesthetic, and social developments’ (2015: 1). Although the thematic focus on performance, for example through characters that are performers or the diegetic focus on performance modes such as music, dance, and theatre, lends itself to critical and academic scrutiny, the screen performances of actors are more difficult to analytically pin down. For Dean Allbritton, Alejandro Melero and Tom Whittaker, this is because writing academically about screen performance ‘requires us to single out and momentarily freeze the flow of specific moments of performance within a film, and to break them down to their tiniest details’ (2016: 1). Until recently, studies of screen performance were scarce, with the exception of James Naremore’s Acting in the Cinema. Arguably still the most notable academic text on this topic, Naremore’s work highlights the naturalistic aspect of acting, characterized as ‘variable and vague’, as well as the critical tendency to discuss actors as ‘personalities rather than as craftspeople’ (1988: 1). For the author, this ‘potentially contradictory attitude’ underscores the ‘ideological importance’ of ‘the very technique of film acting’ (1988: 1). His detailed focus on both obvious and invisible ‘conventions of filmed performance’ reveals, in Naremore’s own words, ‘buried, paradoxical assumptions about society and the self ’ (1988: 1). In this vein, what Naremore’s work uncovers and exemplifies is not just the ephemeral qualities of performance styles but also the loaded political significance of performance more generally, which is a

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fundamental aspect of the investigation of cinematic performance undertaken in this monograph. Besides Naremore, Richard Dyer has additionally explored the significance of screen performance in his work within the sub-field of star studies. For Dyer, the studies of performance and character are inextricably linked with literature on the topic divided into two distinct fields: (1) ‘writing from the point of view of the performer, i.e. how to create and present a character’ and (2) ‘writing from the point of view of the audience’, in which terminology along the lines of ‘magic’ and ‘getting it across’ are commonplace (1998: 132–3). Admitting that the gamut of gestures and movements upon which performance depends do not hold intrinsic meaning but rather depend upon cultural context, Dyer acknowledges ‘the problem of interpreting, and discussing interpretations of performance’ (1998: 133). In sum, for Dyer, ‘any attempt to analyse performance runs up against the extreme complexity and ambiguity of performance signs’ (1998: 133). With this in mind, Dyer proposes the following definition of performance: Performance is what the performer does in addition to the actions/ functions s/he performs in the plot and the lines s/he is given to say. Performance is how the action/function is done, how the lines are said. The signs of performance are: facial expression; voice; gestures (principally of hands and arms, but also of any limb, e.g. neck, leg); body posture (how someone is standing or sitting); body movement (movement of the whole body, including how someone stands up or sits down, how they walk, run, etc.). (1998: 134) Dyer’s definition concretizes performance, rendering it more tangible. And yet, it also seemingly restricts performance to the body, rooting the study of performance in the corporeal labour of the actor. Notwithstanding the usefulness of Dyer’s framework for analysing screen performance, the corporeal inflections of the actor are but one of a multitude of

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components comprising the overarching effect of cinematic performance. These include appendages to the physical appearance of the actor, such as costume, make-up and computer-generated enhancements in the contemporary digital context, as well as an array of formal filmic elements, the role of casting and the function of the director, among various other aspects. Allbritton et al. affirm the idea that acting cannot be studied in isolation but rather must be considered in relation to ‘other formal components of film, such as cinematography (camerawork and framing), editing and sound design’ (2016: 2). Springer and Levinson additionally reassert that ‘A performance does not take place in a vacuum; it is part of a complex arrangement of cinematic techniques involving the setting, lighting, costuming, cinematography, editing and sound, and it is inflected by the requirements of particular genre or narrative conventions in addition to a director’s working methods’ (2015: 2). From this, it is clear that the study of cinematic performance should not be restricted to the physique, appearance and corporeality of the actor, as deployments of performance in contemporary Spanish cinema demonstrate. In line with Allbritton et al. and Springer and Levinson, the paradigm of performance I sketch in this monograph adopts a holistic view of performance, addressing how the corporeality of performance outlined by Dyer fits into a wider constellation of contributing factors such as performance styles, casting, cinematography, performance and production histories, and political policies.

Performance in Spanish cinema One of the most important constituent factors with regard to the impact of screen performance is the significance and interpretation of the cultural context within which it is produced. Cinematic performances hold the potential to index a wealth of cultural inflections, histories, appropriations and reinscriptions that must be read within the specific sociopolitical

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circumstances of their production contexts. This is not to suggest, of course, that performance styles remain unaffected by international, transnational and global concerns. As Allbritton et al. note, performance styles in Spain are informed by international approaches, such as method or self-expressive acting (2016: 2–3). Yet the study of acting, as Naremore hints, reveals more than just national performance styles. Academic engagement with cinematic performance elucidates the role of performance more broadly in society, or more specifically its significance in relation to the performance of regional and national identities beyond the cinematic screen. In support of this, Allbritton et al. affirm that ‘analyses of screen performance […] have much to teach about the way we perceive identities, as well as our understanding of the cinematic medium’ (2016: 5). This is, in large part, due to the pervasiveness of performance in contemporary society and the current favouring of paradigms of performativity for understanding identity formations. In contemporary Spain, cinematic depictions and deployments of performance take their lead from oppositional films produced under Francoism (1939–75), such as those by the aforementioned Juan Antonio Bardem as well as by Luis García Berlanga and Carlos Saura. Coming of age and creating cinematic works during the Francoist regime, these filmmakers formed part of the Nuevo Cine Español (New Spanish Cinema), the term applied to the new mostly left-wing directors who emerged in the 1960s and who were, for the most part, opposed to Francoism. These filmmakers were obliged to submit their creative projects, at various stages of production including script, draft cut and final edit, to a board of censors. Their works attest to the creativity that can arise when the conditions in which artists work are restricted, politically, economically or otherwise. With censorship in place until after the death of Franco in 1975, these and other oppositional filmmakers were forced to find discreet and creative ways through which to comment on and/or criticize the politics of the Francoist regime. One of the ways in which they achieved this

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is through the use of performance, in terms of both acting and performance styles and with regard to performance as concept and theme.

Performance precursors: ¡Bienvenido, Mister Marshall! and Cómicos Given that both performance and cinema are historically-contingent concepts, I trace the roots of contemporary cinematic deployments of performance in Spain to leftist alternative filmmaking under Franco, notably the work of Berlanga and Bardem. Emphasizing the legacy of Berlanga within the context of contemporary Spanish cinema, Almodóvar deems him one of the masters of Spanish cinema alongside Luis Buñuel. Almodóvar adds that for him, all Spanish cinema derives from the work of these two auteurs (Almodóvar 2016). Part of the first cohort to graduate from the Madrid Film School in 1950, Berlanga was, according to Steven Marsh, ‘a consistently disruptive presence in Spanish cinema of the second half of the twentieth century’ (Marsh 2010). His debut feature-length film, ¡Bienvenido, Mister Marshall! (Welcome, Mister Marshall!) (1953), is of specific interest with regard to depictions and deployments of performance in contemporary Spanish cinema. A key work of oppositional cinema under Franco, ¡Bienvenido, Mister Marshall! is, as Marsh aptly describes, a film that ‘really did alter the cultural map of Spain’ (2004: 26). Its influence on contemporary films and filmmakers dealing with performance is clear, due to its thematic focus on performance, its emphasis on the performance of national and regional identities and its recourse to techniques associated with metaperformance that underscore the artifice of the cinematic medium. Performance is a crucial element of the film on multiple levels, including narrative, ideology and form.

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¡Bienvenido, Mister Marshall! is the result of a collaborative project between Berlanga and the aforementioned uncle of Javier, Juan Antonio Bardem. Having previously worked together on Esa pareja feliz (That Happy Couple) (1951), the filmmaking duo were commissioned by UNINCI, an independent film company formed in 1949 with the view to making counter-propaganda films, to make a script including Lolita Sevilla and with ‘an Andalusian ambience’ (Stone 2002: 44). The production history of the film is complex. As Stone recounts, UNINCI paid both Bardem and Berlanga in shares, bringing in comic playwright Miguel Mihura to refine the script. Bardem had to relinquish his shares due to his impoverished economic situation and the film was eventually directed solely by Berlanga, who found himself in dispute with the more experienced cast and crew of the film. Despite these tumultuous production circumstances, the film was a success at the 1952 Cannes festival and Berlanga was celebrated by international critics and filmmakers alike (Stone 2002: 45). In terms of plot, the film takes place in a small Castilian town called Villar del Río. At the beginning of the film, the Spanish Delegate (José Franco) arrives to inform the hapless mayor of the town (José Isbert) that they are to receive a special visit from a group of Americans following the establishment of the Marshall Plan, the US financial initiative to assist the post–Second World War rebuilding of European countries. They are asked to prepare an elaborate fiesta as a welcome. The mayor enlists the assistance of Manolo (Manolo Morán), the manager of Carmen Vargas (Lolita Sevilla), an Andalusian flamenco singer at that point performing a series of shows in the local drinking hall. Instructed by Manolo, the village inhabitants begin to construct an ostentatious masquerade whereby they transform their Castilian village into a full-fledged Andalusian town complete with stereotypical dress and performances. The local schoolteacher informs the townspeople about the United States. Carmen Vargas instructs the villagers in terms of how to dance flamenco. The villagers rehearse in earnest. After much anticipation and

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preparation, the Americans pass through the town at top speed, without so much as winding down the windows to wave at the villagers. This brief plot summary evidences the significance of performance at the levels of plot and narrative in ¡Bienvenido, Mister Marshall!. In the first instance, the theme of performance emerges through the character of singer Carmen Vargas. Like most of the case studies featured in this monograph, the film channels its representation of performance through the metaperformances of an actor playing a character who is a performer. Initially, Carmen performs stereotypically Spanish flamenco in the local bar. Dressed in traditional flamenco attire, she sings, dances and clicks her castanets to the delight of the mostly male onlookers. The scene alternates between shots of the audience transfixed by her performance and close-ups of Carmen as she sings and dances, emphasizing her beauty and youthfulness. The mayor of the town confirms the significance of the appealing physical appearance of the young performer in the subsequent scene when quizzed by her manager Manolo about her talents. Rather than comment on her vocals, dancing, or castanet-playing, the mayor remarks instead on how pretty she is and how attractive her legs are. There is an ironic edge to this scene insofar as the mayor is deaf although, it is implied, this is of little relevance to the middle-aged man contemplating the beautiful young performer on stage. Through the character of Carmen Vargas, ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! emphasizes the seductive appeal of performers and performance, not just in relation to attractive young female performers, something also underscored in Bardem’s Cómicos as we shall see below, but also in terms of the image of Spanishness that Carmen projects: the Andalusian stereotype frequently conflated with Spanish national identity. As Marsh contends, ‘The construction of an artificial Andalusia in a Castilian village recalls the well-worked synecdoche whereby Andalusia stands for Spain as a totality’ (2004: 29). In this way, the film prefigures the performativity of identity categories so often deployed in contemporary contexts.

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The film subsequently underscores Carmen’s significance as a figure for the performance of stereotypical Spanishness in the transformation of the Castilian town into an Andalusian village for the benefit of the incoming North American visitors. Immediately after Carmen’s first performance in the local drinking venue, her manager Manolo offers to facilitate the development of a spectacular event for the visitors’ arrival. Here, the film draws parallels between Manolo’s stage management of Carmen and the creation and performance of national identities. After an impassioned, if haphazard, address from both the mayor and Manolo, the villagers set to work reconstructing their Castilian hamlet in the form of an authentically Andalusian town. The inhabitants erect flat-panel constructions reminiscent of a theatrical set as they prepare the village for the visit of the North Americans (Figure I.2), a precursor and possible inspiration for the cinematographic focus on both the Osborne Brandy and Samson underwear billboards in Jamón, jamón (Chapter 2).

FIGURE I.2  The village as theatrical set. ‘¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall!’ directed by Luis García Berlanga © Unión Industrial Cinematográfica 1953. All rights reserved.

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John Hopewell compares these structures that facilitate the transformation of the village to the cardboard props of a film set (1986: 49), emphasizing the centrality of performance with regard to the portrayal of Spanishness in the film. In addition to Manolo’s role as stage manager of the villagers’ performance of stereotypical Spanishness, Carmen herself plays a vital role, though only shown briefly, instructing the female villagers how to dance flamenco. This is one of the ways in which, to paraphrase Marsh, the film simultaneously makes use of national stereotypes, not just in terms of the Andalusian recreation of Castilian Spanishness but also with regard to the ‘imaginary US […] conjured up among the population’ (2004: 30). Moreover, this brief scene emphasizes the importance of rehearsal in this film, which for Marsh is of greater significance than the actual event of the arrival of the Americans (2004: 35). In this way, the film constitutes a precursor to works such as Carmen (Chapter 3), with its focus on the preparations for a performance rather than the performance itself. The fact that the majority of the film depicts the elaborate preparations for their visit, which ultimately occurs minutes before the end of the film and consists in a motorcade that merely passes through the village at top speed without stopping, supports this idea. This is particularly relevant in the context of the Marshall Plan and the reconfiguration of Spain and Spanishness at the time of the film’s release as Franco moved away from the autarchic policies of the 1940s and towards a process of apertura (opening up) whereby, as Mary Nash notes, ‘Spanish society slowly became more permeable to European and North American cultural developments’ (2000: 293). Through the correlation of national stereotype and the emphasis on rehearsal, flamenco performer Carmen Vargas and the film more generally underscore how the framework of performativity applies not just to gender identity categories but also to iterations of national identities. Besides the emphasis on performance in terms of the performativity of identity categories, ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! deploys a mode of metaperformance as a means of evading the strict censorship in place at the

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time of the film’s release. In addition to the presence of an omniscient narrator, a range of cinematographic techniques, such as jump cuts, freeze frames and dream sequences, draw attention to the artifice of the filmic medium. In so doing, the film establishes a line of defence against the censors insofar as the production team behind it can argue for its status as just a film and nothing more. The opening sequence of the film is particularly revelatory in this regard as the narrator, mid-description of the town in which the film is set, remarks ‘¿No sería mejor pararlo todo un cierto tiempo? Es fácil. Ya está’ (‘Wouldn’t it be better to stop everything for a moment? It is easy. There we go’). Highlighting the wry and glib nature of the narrator’s discourse, Marsh describes the narrator as ‘despotic’ due to his interventions that pause the action onscreen and remove or freeze characters (2004: 27–8). More significant for my analysis is the controlling and authoritative character of the narrator in the context of performance. It is he who ultimately dictates how and when the villagers act due to his command over the cinematic image. In this manner, the film prefigures the controlling male auteurs explored in Chapter 3 via the framework of metaperformance. While Berlanga’s ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! centres on the performativity of identity and deals with performance, for the most part, outwith theatrical contexts, Bardem’s Cómicos conversely takes theatrical performance as its core subject matter. The film focuses on a travelling troupe of actors, an interest inspired, as his nephew Javier outlined in his Oscar speech cited at the beginning of this chapter, by a ‘larga tradición familiar en la profesión’ (‘long family tradition in the profession’) (María Teresa García-Abad García 2002: 14). The protagonist of the film is Ana Ruiz (Christian Galvé), a young actress frustrated with consistently being chosen for secondary rather than starring roles. Distinct avenues of escape present themselves to Ana, namely through the male figures in her life. In the first instance, love interest Miguel Solís (Fernando Rey) proposes marriage to allow her to leave the profession, a proposal that Ana rejects. Subsequently, Ana meets businessman Carlos

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Márquez (Carlos Casaravilla) who offers her lead roles in exchange for sex. Though she succumbs to his advances, she eventually asserts her independence, rejecting Carlos and his offer before substituting veteran performer Carmen. While her performance is positively received, the ending of the film is ultimately ambiguous, leaving the spectator to wonder whether Ana will continue in leading roles or whether she will return to her secondary parts and descend, as a result, into dissatisfaction and neuroses. Despite its production at the height of Francoism, the film was treated favourably by Francoist censors, not requiring any modifications. It was even declared a film of national interest by the Junta de Clasificación y Censura (Board of Classification and Censorship) on the 17th March 1954 (GarcíaAbad García 2002: 13–14). However, as Bardem himself admits, this is due to the Manicheanism of state-sponsored production and the lack of awareness with regard to the coded and highly symbolic style of this film in which ‘la historia de la actriz es meramente simbólica y a partir de ella se monta toda una temática de crítica social’ (‘the story of the actress is simply symbolic and from this there emerges a theme of social criticism’) (cited in García-Abad García 2002: 13). While the film undoubtedly pays tribute to the world of the theatre and to female actors in particular, it simultaneously, as María A. Gómez observes, unveils ‘el lado más oscuro de su profesión’ (‘the darker side of the profession’) (2006: 202). Within the context of Gómez’s analysis, this is largely connected to the toxic relations amongst established and aspiring actresses just like the film that inspired it: Joseph Mankiewicz’s All about Eve (1950) (2006: 202). But the darker side of performance, theatre and acting in Cómicos also concerns the interrelations amongst economic and gender oppression in this context, notably channelled through the relationship between Ana and Carlos Márquez and the latter’s attempt to sexually exploit the protagonist in exchange for success. Gómez notes that the denunciation of capitalism and professional exploitation of the performer is hardly surprising given Bardem’s well-known participation in the Communist Party (Gómez 2006: 204). But

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she also commends the director’s condemnation of the sexual exploitation of women and his positioning of Ana as a noble figure due to her ultimate rejection of Carlos and his proposition (Gómez 2006: 204–5). This focus on the economic dimension of performance and the extent to which performers can become vulnerable to various forms of exploitation in this context prefigures contemporary deployments of performance whereby artists and filmmakers respond to the political degradation of the culture industry in the name of austerity following the global financial Crisis. This of course is not to deny the significance of the exploitation of women performers within culture industries or conflate this exploitation with current austerity policies and their impact on culture at large, given the much publicized pay gap between male and female co-stars, ageist discrimination against women actors or the #MeToo movement that have continued to dominate headlines in recent years. Cómicos constitutes a precursor to contemporary cinematic depictions of performance in terms of both cinematography and thematic focus. Cinematographically, the film deploys a number of techniques that seem to have inspired contemporary Spanish filmmakers and their portraits of performance. For example, the opening sequence of Cómicos features an internal monologue from protagonist Ana in which a series of close-ups individually introduces the various members of the travelling troupe of actors, shown in close-up, are introduced. Preceding the release of the first chapter’s final case study Los amantes pasajeros by some sixty years, the sequence appears to have inspired director Almodóvar who introduces the protagonists, minus the internal monologue, through a series of close-ups that resemble a theatrical programme or credit sequence. Cómicos visually underscores the centrality of performance from the outset, with the opening credits appearing superimposed on the backdrop of a closed theatre curtain (Figure I.3). Almodóvar once again cites this image in two of the films examined in this monograph: Todo sobre mi madre (Chapter 2) and Hable con ella (Chapter 4). With regard to thematic focus, gender performativity rests at the core of Cómicos. Citing both Riviere

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FIGURE I.3  The theatrical curtain as backdrop. ‘Cómicos’ directed by Juan Antonio Bardem © Unión Films, Mapol Films 1954. All rights reserved.

and Butler, Gómez contends that the protagonists act both ‘dentro y fuera del escenario’ (‘on and off the stage’) with their reflections questioning ‘el papel de la actuación y de la repetición estilizada de actos en la forja de su identidad’ (‘the role of performance and the stylized repetition of acts in the formation of their identity’) (2006: 202). The extent to which performance spreads beyond the parameters of the stage in this film is apparent with regard to the principal settings in which the action unfolds. As Lucio Blanco Mallada comments, there are three key locales in the film: ‘el de la escena, el de los alrededores del scenario y los camerinos’ (‘the stage, the wings and the dressing rooms’) (2003: 3). A further setting in which the action evolves is the train that transports the performers from one location to the next. The train is a transitory space that, like the performance-infused sites of the theatre and its surroundings, reflects the fluidity of identities as they are shaped and performed. In this way, Cómicos anticipates contemporary cinematic impulses that utilize the framework of

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performance and performativity to interrogate and negotiate manifestations of identity, whether relating to gender, sexuality and/or nationality. The portrayal of performance in Cómicos is not entirely positive. As Gómez notes, Ana’s need to act or to play someone other than herself becomes allconsuming, meaning that she loses touch with reality at various points as her identity becomes confused with those of the characters she is depicting (2006: 204). This is particularly apparent in the closing scenes of the film. Following a triumphant performance in which Ana finally takes centre stage, she returns to the empty auditorium. The dramatic high-angle shot with which the scene begins emphasizes Ana’s vulnerability and fragility at this climactic point in the film. Brief exchanges with Don Antonio, director of the travelling theatre company, and with Carlos Márquez centre on Ana’s prospects both professionally and personally. The camera takes on her perspective as she scans the heights of the empty auditorium before cutting to a reverse shot, once again high angle, from the perspective of the absent theatre audience. As Ana turns to leave the stage, she stops suddenly and looks back into the auditorium. Applause swells on the soundtrack as Ana takes a bow and a series of cuts superimpose her figure over images of the empty auditorium. Both Gómez (2006: 205) and Blanco Mallada (2003: 3) highlight the fleeting nature of Ana’s triumph. The cinematography of this sequence underscores the ephemerality of this moment, by means of both the high-angle shots that isolate and minimize Ana’s presence onstage and within the vast auditorium and by the use of superimpositions which render the protagonist transparent and fragile, herself an ephemeral presence. In addition, the disjuncture between sound and image, insofar as there is no audience to provide the applause we hear on the soundtrack, implies that Ana’s fragility extends to her state of mind. Indeed, for Blanco Mallada, the applause constitutes ‘el preludio de una neurosis, o por lo menos, de una confusión permanente’ (‘the prelude to neurosis or, at least, to permanent confusion’) (2003: 3). Theatre, and by extension performance, becomes a metaphor through which to conduct ‘una radiografía de la miseria

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moral, pero también económica, de la España franquista’ (‘an in-depth analysis of the moral, and economic, misery of Francoist Spain’) (Gómez 2006: 209). In so doing, Cómicos emphasizes the fragility and vulnerability of the figure of the performer, a thread that continues in contemporary Spanish cinema particularly in light of the economic instability enforced on individuals working in this arena in the post-Crisis context.

Subversive Spanish cinema: The politics of performance Films such as ¡Bienvenido, Mister Marshall! and Cómicos employ performance as a technical, conceptual and narrative trope to question and subvert the strictures and structures of the Francoist regime, facilitating subaltern political practices and transgressions that escaped the censors and challenged the overarching ideologies of the regime. Contemporary cinematic works utilize this polemical paradigm of performance in diverse ways, drawing upon the politically subversive undercurrents established by left-wing filmmakers such as Berlanga and Bardem in order to critique the current political derision of performance as profession and of the culture industry more generally. This is a tactic deployed both by internationally recognized Spanish directors, such as Almodóvar whose depiction of performance in its myriad forms could occupy an entire monograph in its own right, and by lesser-known filmmakers, such as Achero Mañas. In the wake of the global economic crash of 2007–8, Mañas vocally publicized his decision to cease making films due to the increasingly challenging conditions faced by filmmakers and other creative practitioners in Spain. However, in 2018 he announced his return to filmmaking with Un mundo normal (A Normal World), scheduled for release in May 2020 at the time of writing. He also vociferously critiques the state of contemporary Spanish politics and, in particular, its systematic demolition of

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the culture industry, notably through his Twitter account. It is precisely this prevalence of performance and its intertwining with politics in contemporary Spanish cinema that Subversive Spanish Cinema: The Politics of Performance navigates. The first single-authored analysis of the technical, conceptual and narrative functions of performance within the cinematic sphere in the specific socio-historical context of contemporary democratic Spain, this monograph addresses this void, seeking to answer the following questions: What is performance and what is its role in contemporary Spanish society? To what extent does performance facilitate political critique? How might performance constitute a form of political activism? My first chapter, ‘Performing pastness’, explores the intersection of performance and the past in contemporary Spanish cinema. While cultural production has, since the late 1990s, demonstrated a preoccupation with recreations of Spain’s Civil War and Francoist past, such works often perform the past in a nostalgic, sentimental and largely uncritical manner. I analyse films that deliberately undermine this romantic approach to the past through their engagement with performance as circular and repetitive. The case studies in question are: Blancanieves (Snow White) (Berger 2012), Balada triste de trompeta (The Last Circus) (de la Iglesia 2010) and Los amantes pasajeros (I’m So Excited) (Almodóvar 2013). Embracing the breadth and depth of performance as concept and theme, these works feature diverse modes of performance including flamenco, bullfighting, circus performance and lipsynched dance routine. Narratively focused on performance, the films in question also centre on characters who are performers. Each of these films engages the duality of performance (Elin Diamond 1996: 2). In so doing, these three films express the notion of history as seemingly advancing towards progress and yet condemned to repeat itself. Ultimately, Chapter 1 contends that while these films revisit and recreate pasts closely connected with the Civil War and Francoism, their performances of pastness express rather a sense of dissatisfaction and disenchantment with the present, specifically the post-

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Crisis context of their shared production dates at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. While Chapter 1 focuses on the reconfiguration of the past via performance as a means to express discontent with the present, Chapter 2, ‘Performing identities’, centres on the ways in which cinematic deployments of performance facilitate the reconfiguration of regional, national and gender identities in theatrical and quotidian, heteronormative and queer contexts. Theoretically informed by the paradigm of performativity, Chapter 2 explores the manners in which contemporary Spanish cinema constructs, deconstructs and reconstructs identity categories via the collapsing of distinctions between performance and reality, artificiality and authenticity. Four case studies form the cinematic corpus for this chapter: Jamón, jamón (Bigas i Luna 1992), Ocho apellidos vascos (A Spanish Affair) (Martínez Lázaro 2014), Todo lo que tú quieras (Anything You Want) (Mañas 2010) and Todo sobre mi madre (All about My Mother) (Almodóvar 1999). Showcasing an ambit of gender and sexual identities, namely masculinity, heteronormativity, paternity/maternity and femininity, these films underscore the significance of performance in relation to the reconfiguration of identities in the contemporary Spanish context. While performance constitutes the core of each of the chapters and case studies explored in this monograph, the framework and films analysed in Chapter 3, ‘Metaperformances’, notably and self-referentially draw attention to the criticality of performance in the context of contemporary Spanish cinema. I focus on four films in this chapter: Carmen (Saura 1983), Familia (Family) (León de Aranoa 1996), La mala educación (Bad Education) (Almodóvar 2004) and También la lluvia (Even the Rain) (Bollaín 2010). Like those analysed in the preceding chapters, the films examined here engage distinct modes of performance incorporating dance (specifically flamenco), theatre and cinema. The performances in question are metaperformances in that they are created by actors who play the role of performers. Organized

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chronologically, the films that populate this chapter span key moments of recent Spanish history, namely the Transition from dictatorship to democracy (Carmen), European integration (Familia), the historical memory push (La mala educación) and the contemporary economic Crisis (También la lluvia). Through the self-reflective framework of metaperformance, these films position the culture industry as a site in which self-aware political critique is still possible, even in light of recent efforts to stifle the culture industry in the name of austerity. Focusing on controlling and manipulative male orchestrators in Carmen and Familia to controlled and manipulated male figures in La mala educación, the chapter concludes by addressing gender imbalances and the privileged status of the white Western male in the context of the cinematic industry and highlighting the inextricability of performance and exploitation with final case study También la lluvia. My final chapter, ‘Performance as catharsis and therapy’, focuses more affirmatively on the cathartic and therapeutic properties of performance for both performers and spectators. There are three case studies: Ocaña: Retrat intermitent (Ocaña: An Intermittent Portrait) (Pons 1978), Hable con ella (Talk to Her) (Almodóvar 2002) and Noviembre (November) (Mañas 2003). While the first three chapters concentrate on performers rather than spectators, Chapter 4 explores interactions amongst individuals who perform and those who absorb performances. In each case, performance constitutes a productive means through which to work through or process grief, loss and heartbreak. Whether through performance art, confession, dance, bullfighting, silent cinema, acting and street theatre, performance in these films is both a site of corporeal and emotional communication and a locale containing the perilous potential for miscommunications. Rather than a straightforward and celebratory affirmation of performance then, the works explored in this chapter ultimately highlight the ambiguousness of performance.

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Overall, the focus on performance in Subversive Spanish Cinema: The Politics of Performance emphasizes this prominent and yet neglected facet of contemporary Spanish cinema. In so doing, this monograph produces a new panorama of the field, establishing performance as a core component of Spanish cinema, culture and society and underscoring its centrality with regard to understanding the dynamics of early twenty-first-century politics in Spain. Moreover, its interrogation of diverse aspects of the interconnections amongst performance and politics – in relation to pastness (Chapter 1), identities (Chapter 2), metaperformance (Chapter 3), and ethics (Chapter 4) – traces a paradigm of performance that resonates beyond the spheres of Spanish cinema and politics. To return to the figure of Javier Bardem and the two Oscar speeches of his cited in the opening section of this chapter, Subversive Spanish Cinema: The Politics of Performance is por (because of) ‘los cómicos de España’ (‘the performers of Spain’) but para (for) those who refuse to be restricted by the attempt to create fronteras (borders) and muros (walls) that ‘frenen el ingenio y el talento’ (‘stop genius and talent’).

1 Performing pastness

The performance of Spain’s Civil War and Francoist past has proved a principal preoccupation of recent Spanish cultural production. As Jo Labanyi notes, while there were few films and virtually no fictional writing that engaged with the topic of Francoism in the first ten years following the death of Franco, there has, since the late 1990s, been ‘a flood of novels and collections of testimonies on the wartime and postwar repression as well as a significant number of fiction films and documentaries’ (2007: 95). A sense of nostalgic sentimentalism dominates creative reconstructions of the past within these works, which in the cinematic context include films such as Belle époque (Trueba 1992), Secretos del corazón (Secrets of the Heart) (Armendáriz 1997) and La lengua de las mariposas (The Butterfly’s Tongue) (Cuerda 1999). Awarded the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1992, the first of these examples, Belle époque, is a light-hearted work that presents a rose-tinted depiction of Republican Spain, a time and place stereotypically, and often unproblematically, characterized by heady liberalism and relaxed attitudes to gender, sexuality and relationships. Such films perform pastness romantically, nostalgically, theatrically. Though they do not deny the violence and horror of the historical periods in which they are set, they tend to present it in fairly uncomplicated Manichean terms of good versus evil. As these films indicate then, the recourse to performance as theme or in the form of historical recreation is not necessarily subversive. My focus in this chapter is on three films: Blancanieves (Snow White) (Berger 2012), Balada triste de trompeta (The Last Circus) (de la Iglesia

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2010) and Los amantes pasajeros (I’m So Excited!) (Almodóvar 2013). Engaging diverse modes of performance including flamenco, bullfighting, circus performance and lip-synched dance routines, these films deliberately undermine the nostalgic approach outlined above through a narrative focus on performance, on characters who are performers and by means of the distinct performance styles of the actors who play them. The films are united by their focus on the themes of circularity and repetition in relation to their depictions and deployments of performance. They engage the dual nature of performance as highlighted by Elin Diamond who underscores the ‘terminology of “re” in discussions of performance, as in reembody, reinscribe, reconfigure, resignify’ (1996: 2). For Diamond, ‘“Re” acknowledges the pre-existing discursive field, the repetition – and the desire to repeat – within the performative present’ (1996: 2). Through this constellation of performance, pastness and repetition, these three films convey the idea that history is cyclical and that the past is condemned to repeat itself. The pasts that these films revisit and recreate connect closely with the Civil War and Francoist eras explored in the romanticized historical memory products of the 1990s mentioned above. Nevertheless, my claim is that they engage these historical periods not to reflect on that past per se, but rather to convey a sense of frustration and disillusionment with the present. Further to their converging engagements with performance, these films are united by their shared production dates around the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century and can be defined as post-Crisis Spanish cinema. Though created prior to the austerity measures aimed at the culture industry introduced by Mariano Rajoy’s conservative government in 2012, the three case studies emerge from the aftermath of the 2007–8 economic crash which hit Spain particularly hard. By indexing distinct periods of twentieth-century Spanish history from this perspective of post-Crisis financial precarity, these three films perform the past to highlight the inadequacies and failings of the present. Violent, hyperbolic and hysterical,

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Blancanieves, Balada triste de trompeta and Los amantes pasajeros undercut the nostalgic romanticism that has dominated contemporary Spanish cinema focused on the past and instead emphasize the potential political subversiveness of performance.

Silencing Snow White (and everyone else): Blancanieves (Berger 2012) A contemporary silent black and white film set in 1920s Spain, Blancanieves performs the past in both its form and narrative. In terms of form, the absence of both colour and audible dialogue is congruous to the temporal setting of the narrative in the pre-sound, pre-colour cinematic era. Through performance styles adapted to the silent mode and formal tropes associated with early silent cinema (iris in/out, dissolves, superimpositions), the film engages a vision of Spain’s past both from a contemporary perspective and via a lens of pastness. By adopting such historically anchored styles, Blancanieves conveys a sense of stasis whereby little has changed in the intervening years between the contemporaneous moment of production and the 1920s setting of the film. The film utilizes the silent mode in conjunction with performance styles, namely flamenco and bullfighting, typically associated with centralizing discourses of Spanish national identity and discourses of otherness imposed on Spain from outwith its own borders. In this way, the centrality of silencing with regard to performance in Blancanieves underscores the ways in which ideas of Spanishness that do not conform to the dominant mode have been quashed or silenced not just in the past, but also in the present day. A brief overview of the plot underscores the centrality of performance in the film. Protagonist Carmencita (Sofía Oria/Macarena Garcia), meaning ‘Little Carmen’, is the daughter of bullfighter Antonio de Villalta (Daniel Giménez Cacho) and flamenco artist Carmen de la Triana (Inma Cuesta). In a

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dramatic opening sequence, bullfighter Antonio is brutally gored in the ring. This sequence emphasizes the centrality and brutality of performance from the outset, since the stress of witnessing such horror in a public performance venue sparks the onset of labour for Antonio’s wife Carmen. Tragically, Carmen dies in childbirth. Paralysed as a result of the goring, Antonio is unable to care for his daughter, who becomes the charge of her maternal grandmother, Doña Concha (Ángela Molina). But when she dies shortly after Carmencita’s First Communion, the child is sent to join her father, who in the interim has married scheming nurse Encarna (Maribel Verdú). While Encarna forbids contact between Carmen and her father, the pair surreptitiously bond by reading books, performing to the flamenco music recorded by Carmen’s mother and practising the art of bullfighting. Discovering their illicit relationship, Encarna disposes of Carmen’s father before instructing her lover Genaro (Pere Ponce) to end Carmen’s life. Carmen survives, is resuscitated by Rafita (Sergio Dorado) and is taken in by his group of bullfighting dwarves. With no memory of her identity, she is rechristened Blancanieves (‘Snow White’) by the dwarves, who form an alternative, even queer, family for the orphaned protagonist (Jesse Barker 2017: 192). The bullfighting knowledge, instilled in her by her father, returns as she enters the ring with them, and she soon becomes renowned as a successful torera. Encarna attends one of Carmen’s fights to gift her a poisoned apple. Succumbing to the poison and having signed her life over to a manipulative bullfighting agent, the unconscious Carmen becomes the star attraction in a freak show where clients line up and pay a fee to see if they can revive her with a kiss. In this way, Blancanieves enacts a formal and physical silencing of its protagonist and yet forces her to continue performing regardless. As this plot summary suggests, performance and silence are inextricably linked in Blancanieves. However, as is widely acknowledged, the label ‘silent cinema’ is something of a misnomer since silent cinema was never actually silent. As Michel Chion notes, ‘silent cinema should really be called “deaf cinema”’ (1999: 7) insofar as early cinema was not devoid of sound. In the pre-sound era, films

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were typically screened accompanied either by a narrator or by a live musical performance (Chion 1999: 7–8). Upon its release, Blancanieves paid homage to this with screenings accompanied by live orchestra performances. Admittedly, this layer of sound performance is only accessible to those who were able to attend such screenings of the film. However, in contradistinction to early silent cinema, Blancanieves, as a contemporary silent film, makes use of a recorded soundtrack to accompany the cinematic, DVD and on-demand streaming releases of the film. This demonstrates the complexities of the interrelations of performance, silence and sound not just in early silent cinema but especially with regard to the absence of voice and dialogue in contemporary cinema. Besides its recorded soundtrack, Blancanieves is, like early silent cinema, not entirely devoid of sound but rather conveys sound in distinct ways. As Mary Ann Doane argues, this occurred in the silent era via the corporeal reemergence of the voice, through gestures and facial expressions, and by means of intertitles, which uncannily detached the speech of the actor from the image of his or her body (1980: 33). With early silent cinema, the need to represent sound in alternative ways was due to technological limitations that privileged the image. Blancanieves alludes to this idea through its emphasis on visual representations of sound which are bound up with the theme of vocal, aural and musical performances. This is most evident with regard to the depiction of flamenco in the film and through the centrality of aural performance technologies such as the records of flamenco performer Carmen de la Triana and a gramophone, gifted to protagonist Carmencita on the occasion of her First Communion by her absent father, upon which she plays her deceased mother’s records. As Chion notes, the isolation of voices from bodies facilitated by devices such as the telephone and the gramophone renders the voice as ‘the voice of the dead’ (1999: 46). The prevalence of such sound technologies within the contemporary silent film thus underscores the spectrality of vocal performance, emphasizing the interconnectedness of performance, death and loss in Blancanieves.

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It is precisely through such sound technologies that Carmen de la Triana, mother to protagonist Carmencita, performs in Blancanieves. In spite of her death in the opening scenes of the film, Carmen de la Triana appears posthumously through flamenco performances facilitated by the aural technologies of the gramophone and the record. Her first posthumous appearance occurs during the celebrations of Carmencita’s First Communion. Carmencita sits sullenly beneath a table, sulking because her father has not attended the event. A fast-paced flamenco rhythm begins on the soundtrack. Carmencita looks to her right to see a close-up image of a record spinning on the gramophone superimposed on the tablecloth. This image fades as another  superimposed image appears, this time of her mother wearing stereotypically Spanish costume and dancing flamenco in time with the accompanying soundtrack, beckoning animatedly to Carmencita (Figure 1.1). Emphasizing both the separation of voice and body and her spectral status,

FIGURE 1.1  The mother as absent presence. ‘Blancanieves’ directed by Pablo Berger © Arcadia Motino Pictures 2012. All rights reserved.

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Carmen de la Triana wears a fixed smile and her lips do not move in time to the spoken interjections on the flamenco track as it begins. These superimposed images are not a product of Carmencita’s imagination but rather indicative of the action occurring outwith the table beneath which the young girl hides. As the superimposed image of her mother fades away, her grandmother lifts the tablecloth and appears beside Carmencita, encouraging her to join in with the celebrations and flamenco, dancing in a manner similar to that just performed posthumously by her mother. The fading of her mother’s image, replaced by her grandmother/substitute mother figure, underscores the disconnect between Carmencita’s absent mother and the flamenco track that she once performed, here played posthumously through the replayable technology of the record. The lyrics of the song, an original bulería (fast flamenco rhythm in twelve beats) entitled ‘No te puedo encontrar’ (‘I Cannot Find You’), evoke loss and mourning, once more highlighting the spectrality of flamenco performer Carmen de la Triana: Te busco y no te puedo encontrar/ Te busco y no te puedo encontrar/ Te llamo y no me contestas/ No sé por dónde estarás. (I look for you and cannot find you/ I look for you and cannot find you/ I call you and you do not answer/ I don’t know where you might be.) The symbolic pertinence of these lyrics is manifold. At the level of performance and technology, their transmission by means of an aural recording rather than a performance witnessed first-hand underscores the flamenco performances of Carmen de la Triana simultaneously, and somewhat contradictorily, as an absent presence and a present absence, a voice detached from its body to use Chion’s terminology (1999: 46). In terms of character and

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plot, Carmen constitutes an absence in the life of her daughter Carmencita, who has never known her mother due to her death in childbirth. Furthermore, the depiction of flamenco singer Carmen de la Triana conforms to Chion’s association of death with narrative voice-over: ‘What could be more natural in a film than a dead person continuing to speak as a bodiless voice, wandering about the surface of the screen?’ (1999: 47). While Carmen de la Triana does not fulfil the role of a narrator in voice-over, her lyrical performance stands out in a work otherwise devoid of audible dialogue and predominantly accompanied by an instrumental soundtrack. In this way, Blancanieves draws attention to the potency of performance with regard to its ability to conjure spectres of the past and to render them present once more. While these aural technologies conjure up the voice and image of the dead mother and facilitate her posthumous presence in the film, they also connect flamenco performance to notions of circularity and of repetition. The initial superimposed image of the record spinning on the gramophone, subsequently depicted in situ, visually indexes the significance of circularity for the technology that facilitates access to the recorded performance of Carmen de la Triana. Close-ups of the elegant wrist movements performed by Doña Concha as she dances further emphasize this connection between performance and circularity. Cinematographically, circularity dominates by means of dizzying camerawork that echoes the movements of Carmencita and her grandmother as they dance opposite one another, performing a range of spins and rotations. Connecting the themes of circularity and repetition, the record as technological mode allows for the repetition and replaying of the recorded performance. At the level of character and narrative, these layers of performance and repetition abound, coming to the fore through the intergenerational transfer at work in this scene. Since the deceased Carmen de la Triana cannot fulfil her role as mother, her own mother, Doña Concha, repeats her performance of motherhood with her granddaughter Carmencita. The film confirms this idea through the substitution of the superimposed image of Carmen de la

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Triana with the vibrant presence of Doña Concha in situ. Tragically, parallels and repetitions connect these characters too in terms of death. As the scene progresses, Doña Concha suffers a fatal heart attack that sees death once again devastate the life of protagonist Carmencita. The child is not only named after her deceased mother Carmen but also performs flamenco just as her mother did. Moreover, by aligning Carmencita with her mother in this way, the scene hints at the morbid fate that awaits the protagonist. Carmencita, like her mother, will perish because of, even if indirectly, her career as a performer at the hands of Encarna, the woman who also denied her father the performance of parenthood. And like her mother, Carmencita will continue to perform posthumously, appearing as a morbid attraction at a travelling freak show. The second sequence featuring the deceased Carmen de la Triana cements this interconnectedness of performance, circularity and repetition with regard to flamenco in Blancanieves. The scene once again emphasizes the significance of sound technologies that allow for the replaying of recorded performances, specifically the records of Carmen de la Triana and the gramophone. Closeups, on the handle that Carmencita turns to start the apparatus, on the centre of her mother’s record as it spins on the gramophone and on the spinning grooves of the record as she lowers the needle, indicate their dependence on circularity. Dressed in folkloric attire, Carmencita performs to another of her mother’s recorded tracks titled ‘De reina, na’ (‘I am no queen’), which as Anna K. Cox notes, ‘tells the story of a woman who disguised herself as a Moorish queen in order to make herself attractive marriage material for the hidalgos of the town during its romería’ (2017: 321). As she dances, her father either imagines or remembers (it is unclear) his wife and the mother of Carmencita. This in turn recalls the first time Antonio sees his daughter, in which she metamorphoses into the image of her mother by means of a dissolve. Both episodes underscore the notion of repetition and circularity that characterizes the mother–daughter relationship in Blancanieves. The recorded voice of Carmen de la Triana is a repeated performance imbued with the rhetoric

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of ‘re’ that permeates discussions of performance (Diamond 1996: 2). Like cinema itself, this recording makes the dead live again and again in a circular, replayable motion.1 Emphasizing the interrelatedeness of performance and pastness, this (imagined?) revival of Carmen de la Triana not only indicates how performance channels memory, but also the extent to which performance simultaneously leads to and yet defies death in Blancanieves. It is tempting to read this nexus of the spectral maternal voice, performance, pastness and memory in Blancanieves in relation to the phenomenon of historical memory. The notion of a hauntingly absent presence maps neatly onto theoretical and cultural studies paradigms that have been used to study the masses of Republicans disappeared during both the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent Francoist regime and whose remains are, to this day, concealed within unmarked mass graves (see, for example, Labanyi 2009). Moreover, the act of silencing at the core of the film underscores the extent to which, as Layla Renshaw succinctly notes, ‘The dominant memory politics of Franco’s regime gave public space and recognition to these losses, while those on the losing side were marginalized and silenced’ (2011: 21). But, as Ann Davies stresses, the academic embrace of Spanish ghosts tends to focus on spectrality as a means of ‘recuperating the traumatic memories of the Spanish Civil War and Francoism’ (2014). This leads Davies to question: ‘do they all speak of Spanish history? Are they all relics of Franco?’ (2014). With Davies’s point in mind, I contend that the interrelations amongst performance, pastness, memory and the silenced maternal voice concern not primarily the ghosts of Francoism but rather the silencing of regional and peripheral identities that do not conform to notions of stereotypical Spanishness or centralized visions of Spanish identity. This resonates with the Francoist period given the prevalence of nationalism and nationalizing discourses at the heart of Francoist ideology. However, with regard to the contemporary context of the film’s production, the silencing of peripheral and non-conforming identities relates more broadly to the wider circumstances of the silencing of the culture industry by means of severe

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austerity measures as well as to continued tensions concerning emergent regionalist and nationalist movements within Spain’s political landscape, notably in the Catalan context. In what way can we read the silencing of peripheral and non-conforming identities in Blancanieves, a film that engages with the most stereotypical of all Spanish performance pursuits: flamenco and bullfighting? This interpretation of the film hinges upon the role of the maternal voice in the context of performance and silence. The singing voice of Carmen de la Triana is not that of Inma Cuesta, the actor who plays her, but rather that of Catalan singer Silvia Pérez Cruz. As Cox observes, Pérez Cruz is ‘known for her work across different genres, including traditional Catalan music’ (2017: 323). The musical maternal voice in Blancanieves, explicitly aligned with the Andalusian art of flamenco, thus conceals and overwrites another female voice that represents the repression of those who do not conform, of peripheral nationalities in the Spanish context. An exploration of the production team further highlights the dynamics between centralizing and peripheral national identities in the film. Director Berger points out the irony of a Basque man winning a Goya Award for the Best Original Song for the aforementioned bulería ‘No te puedo encontrar’, which he co-wrote with Catalan flamenco artist Juan Gómez ‘Chicuelo’ (Cox 2017: 323). For Cox, ‘these voices destabilize both Catalan and Spanish nationalist identities’, signalling a ‘history of unstable national identity markers in Spain’s recent history’ (2017: 323). More specifically, the troubling effacement of regional identities underpins the entire framework of the film. Through its focus on flamenco and bullfighting, both performance modes associated simultaneously with the region of Andalusia and with centralizing discourses of Spanish national identity, Blancanieves ultimately questions contemporary paradigms of Spanishness. The concealment of the voice of female Catalan singer Pérez Cruz and the Basque-Catalan flamenco created by filmmaker Berger and flamenco artist Chicuelo form part of a series of substitutions involving voices, roles and identities in Blancanieves that confirms the duality of performance emphasized

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by Diamond (1996: 2). Just as the figure of Carmen de la Triana and actor Inma Cuesta stand in for the concealed Catalan vocalist Pérez Cruz, the character of Carmen de la Triana is herself subjected to a series of substitutions and replacements throughout the film. While her daughter Carmencita replaces her both in name and through the act of childbirth that leads to Carmen’s death, her mother Doña Concha replaces her as mother figure to Carmencita precisely due to her passing. But Carmen de la Triana is most obviously substituted, in the life of both her daughter Carmencita and her husband Antonio, by nurse Encarna. If Carmen de la Triana, in her brief posthumous appearances, embodies an exuberant performing style associated with flamenco, Encarna represents a more subtle performance style. Maribel Verdú, who plays Encarna, adopts a performance style that conforms to the ‘gestural style’ and the ‘dramatic use of […] bodies and facial expressions’ identified by Springer and Levinson as characteristic of silent cinema performance (2015: 1). Several critics and scholars single out Verdú in their reviews and analyses of the film, noting that she is the star of the film given that she receives first billing in the credits and dominates the marketing material. Yet the specifics of her performance are thus far understudied.2 Restrained facial expressions characterize Verdú’s performance in this film, conveyed in particular via her eyes and mouth. Her eyes are bright and wide. Her lips pout with a hint of discontent. Small wry smiles play at the corners of her mouth. She fixes her eyes and sets her mouth with aggressive determination. The cinematography of the film emphasizes the subtleness of her performance. Low-angle shots frequently frame Encarna as a looming presence, underscoring her villainous status. Her first appearance frames her in a low-angle shot from Antonio’s perspective as he lies prostate in hospital following his goring by the bull. She wears a fixed smile and tilts her head to the left, craning her neck even further to the left when another nurse informs her of Antonio’s status as a rich bullfighter. Close-ups reveal the minute details and subtleties of her facial expressiveness, supporting James Naremore’s assertion that silent cinema

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actors deliver ‘slightly exaggerated ostensiveness to expressive movements of eyes, face and hands’ (1188: 48). In this way, both Verdú’s performance and her cinematographic depiction exemplify the views of Béla Balàzs on the role of the face in silent cinema, whereby film facilitates ‘the “polyphonic” play of features […] the appearance on the same face of contradictory expressions’. For Balàzs, silent cinema in particular isolates the face and its expressiveness from its wider surroundings and in so doing, seems ‘to penetrate a strange new dimension of the soul’ (1952: 64–5). This clarity is further emphasized in the contemporary context through advanced cinematic technology, through the use of black and white rather than colour and through the absence of audible dialogue that encourages an exaggeration of facial expressions and physical gestures.3 The substitution of Carmen de la Triana with the more subtle and understated performance style of Encarna suggests a condemnation of the exuberant femininity expressed through the former’s flamenco performance. Encarna’s gender identity is far more complex in its articulation than that of Carmen. Initially appearing in her modest nurse’s outfit and understated make-up, Encarna subsequently dons a variety of costumes ranging from glamorously feminine outfits, featuring elaborate hats and dramatic coats with exaggerated collars, to sexy corsets paired with thigh-high leather boots and masculinized hunting gear. Both Carmen de la Triana and Encarna encapsulate Judith Butler’s paradigm of gender performativity whereby gender is ‘an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts’ (1988: 519, original emphasis). For Butler, this contingent grounding of gender means that ‘the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style’ (1988: 520). While Carmen de la Triana remains trapped within the realm of stereotype with regard to both gender and national identity, Encarna embodies a more flexible identity whereby both gender and national codes can be negotiated and even subverted.

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Like Encarna, young protagonist Carmencita also subverts paradigms of gender and national identity in Blancanieves. And in her case this occurs by means of intersections amongst performance, pastness and memory. In contrast with the stylized performance of Verdú as Encarna, the actors who play Carmencita as a child, Sofía Oria, then as an adolescent, Macarena García, ground performance within a framework of authenticity and truthfulness. Child actors often collapse boundaries between fiction and documentary insofar as the performance of the child can appear more authentic because it often is more real. As Karen Lury contends, ‘Child actors balance precariously on the divide between seeming and being, and they continually undermine the belief that while performing as an actor (playing a character) this performance is held – not necessarily securely but importantly – as distinct from the actor’s individual, everyday, off-screen performance of self ’ (2010: 151). Drawing upon the hallmarks of childhood and directly contrasting with the maligned expressions of Encarna, the actors who play Carmencita appear innocent, desexualized and trusting. Through performance styles adopted to suit the silent mode, these traits are demonstrated by their eager, smiling faces displaying expressions of wonderment. In a pertinent intertextual link, critics and scholars fixate on the eyes of both Oria and García in a manner that recalls another, if not the epitomic, Spanish cinematic child: Ana Torrent.4 Oria bears a certain resemblance to Torrent, especially when Encarna brutally cuts her hair in a style similar to that of Torrent in El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive) (Erice 1973) and Cría cuervos (Raise Ravens) (Saura 1976). Even García as the adolescent Carmen recalls Torrent’s evocative aesthetic due to her similarly short hairstyle and wide-eyed expression. Torrent’s performances are hailed for their manifestation of the child actor as an authentic presence, as someone who does not act but simply is. Director Erice’s description of how he and cinematographer Luis Cuadrado captured Torrent’s genuinely horrified reaction to seeing James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) is in large part responsible for this:

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Paradoxically, it was filmed in a completely documentary style. It’s the only shot filmed with a handheld camera. Luis Cuadrado shot it sitting on the floor in front of Anna [sic] as I supported his back. He captured Anna in the act of discovering – it was an actual screening. She was really seeing the movie. He captured her reaction to the encounter between the monster and the little girl. So it was an unrepeatable moment, one that could never be ‘directed.’ (Cited in Darke 2010: 154) Indexing emblematic Spanish child actor Torrent, the performances of Oria and García in Blancanieves inscribe the film within a Spanish cinematic history that utilized the child as a figure through which to challenge dominant sociopolitical paradigms and which deployed silence as a mode of political critique. The intricate interplay of performance, pastness and Spanish identities symbolized by the character of Carmencita reaches a climax when she recovers her memory after stepping into the bullring to save one of the dwarves from being trampled by a bull. Like flamenco, bullfighting constitutes an important part of Carmencita’s identity as the daughter of famous bullfighter Antonio de Villalta. Just as flamenco performances characterize Carmencita’s, albeit posthumous, connection with her mother, it is through bullfighting that she initially bonds with her father. Though in a wheelchair, Antonio teaches his young daughter how to bullfight, instructing her in the artistry of capework as well as instilling in her the essentials of the art: ‘Nunca dejes de mirar al toro’ (‘Never take your eye off the bull’). But as was the case with her mother, it is her father’s career as a performer that ultimately leads to his absence from the life of his daughter, firstly insofar as Encarna snatches him away before forbidding them to bond and secondly in that Encarna, whom he only met and married following his goring in the ring, eventually kills him. After Carmencita survives her attempted murder at the hands of Encarna’s lover, it is precisely through her connection to bullfighting and her father, rather than

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flamenco and her mother, that she recovers her forgotten identity. Though she at first cannot remember how she learned to bullfight, the film spectator is of course aware that she was taught by her father. Carmencita slowly earns fame thanks to her bullfighting, culminating in her participation in a fight within the same bullring in which her father was dramatically gored leading directly to her birth, the death of her mother and the chain of events detailed in the film. This circularity imbues the action with a sense of foreboding. Carmen is doomed to repeat the morbid fates previously met by her bullfighting father and flamenco-performing mother. Her father’s former agent approaches Carmen prior to the fight and tells her that her father would be proud of her, sparking a series of flashbacks that enlighten Carmen to her identity, past and heritage. Paralysed by her remembered past, Carmen sobs dramatically as the bull approaches before another wave of memories, described by Barker as ‘an affective archive of lived experience’ (2017: 194) and accompanied by the sound of castanets and flamenco hand-clapping, engulfs her. She turns her back on the bull only to recall her father’s earlier advice never to take one’s eyes off the bull. Urged not to proceed by the dwarves, Carmen asserts that she must continue the work of her father, sparking whispers around the stadium about her heritage. In this way, the film suggests that the key to the recovery of memory and identity lies with performance, specifically bullfighting. Does Blancanieves really propose that a return to stereotypical modes of performance is the key to recuperating a sense of Spanishness in the current post-Crisis climate of unemployment, political upheaval and migration of young professionals? In short, no. Though Carmen defeats the bull, she subsequently succumbs to the poisoned apple offered to her by Encarna, whom she curiously does not appear to recognize despite having just recovered her memory. Having unwittingly signed her life over to a scheming bullfighting agent due to her illiteracy, Carmen is forced to continue performing, despite falling into unconsciousness. She becomes the central attraction in a freak show with clients paying money to kiss her to see if she will arise from her undead

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slumber. A trick panel in the glass coffin in which she lies allows her to be thrust forward and upwards at random, falsely suggesting that she has awoken. The film concludes with an extreme close-up of a tear that emerges from her eye, squeezed tightly shut. Is she in fact awake and aware of what she has become, a silent spectacle of sexualized femininity, forced to perform perpetually, in a manner akin to the replayable and repeatable technologies of both music and cinema? Just as performing as a bullfighter rendered her father paralysed, Carmen’s performance in the ring also leads to her paralysis. The recuperation of memory, heritage and identity by means of performance takes on a renewed and troubling significance. The performance of Spanish national identity via tropes such as bullfighting and flamenco lead only to death or paralysis in Blancanieves, suggesting that nostalgia for a glorious, if hackneyed, national past will only result in stasis. To utilize these performance modes as a means to understand Spanishness in the contemporary context is, Blancanieves suggests, antiquated, inefficient and not representative of the diverseness of cultures and identities present within the Spanish landscape. In Blancanieves, those who are not silent are silenced, those who perform are paralysed. Speaking out and taking action is not only discouraged, but disallowed. By drawing attention to this, Blancanieves reflects upon the usefulness of performance and its plurality as a means of engaging not only with the past but also, more importantly, with the contemporary post-Crisis Spanish context.

Perverting the past: Balada triste de trompeta (de la Iglesia 2010) With a circus troupe at its core, performance permeates Balada triste de trompeta. Rather than focus on the circus spectacle, the film investigates interrelations amongst performance and reality via characters who become dramatic and excessive in their everyday lives. Sad clown Javier (Carlos Areces) epitomizes

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this idea, disfiguring himself and fashioning an elaborate costume from religious attire and Christmas decorations as he elects to transform himself into a clown killer as a means of winning the heart of the woman he loves. Balada performs the past by means of an aesthetic engagement with archival footage and reconstructions of historical events such as the assassination of Luis Carrero Blanco, the individual selected as Franco’s successor, at the hands of Basque separatist group ETA in 1973. The film unfolds in two key temporal settings, which span the Francoist regime, from its origins in 1937 to its final years in 1973. Despite its expansive temporality, the film emphasizes circularity and the perpetuation of violence in contemporary Spain. The combination of this historical backdrop with a narrative centred on circus performers renders Balada potently political, providing not just a rigorous critique of Francoism and its legacy but also a chilling warning with regard to post-Crisis discontent in contemporary Spanish society. A prologue set during the Civil War sees young Javier (Sasha Di Bendetto) witness his father (Santiago Segura) and fellow circus performers become Republican recruits. In 1943 Javier, now an adolescent (Jorge Clemente), visits his father who labours as a prisoner of war constructing el Valle de los Caídos (The Valley of the Fallen), a monument to the Nationalists who died in the Civil War constructed by, and containing the remains of, Republican prisoners of war. Following his father’s advice to seek revenge, Javier attempts to blow up the site, bringing about his father’s death. Cut to 1973, a time described by director de la Iglesia as supposed peace amidst an environment of ‘gran hostilidad y violencia’ (‘great hostility and violence’) (qtd. in Alison Ribeiro de Menezes 2014: 249). Now a sad clown in a Madrid circus, Javier (Carlos Areces) clashes with happy clown Sergio (Antonio de la Torre) over the affections of Natalia (Carolina Bang), a luminous acrobat whose sadomasochistic tendencies see her engaged in a brutal relationship with the infantile and violent Sergio. Natalia seeks affection from Javier, Sergio’s antithesis in both performance and reality but who subsequently becomes like his nemesis in a bid to win Natalia’s

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heart. After attacking and drastically disfiguring Sergio with a trumpet, Javier flees and descends into animalistic behaviour before transforming himself into a hyperbolic clown killer. In a circular gesture, the film reaches a dramatic conclusion at el Valle as Natalia, kidnapped by Javier and pursued by Sergio, leaps to her death. I consider how Balada performs the past through creative engagement with archival footage, historical events, cultural production and monuments associated with the Francoist period. As in Blancanieves and Los amantes pasajeros, the themes of circularity, repetition and repeatability converge in Balada to convey a sense of disillusionment with contemporary Spanish society due to the perpetuation of past inadequacies. While Balada treats the past with derision through its hysterical historical approach, it simultaneously grounds itself in the past through recourse to archival footage and the reconstruction of historical events. The archival images used incorporate Francoist propaganda to emphasize the politics of image cultures and the visual dimension of the Francoist regime. Balada juxtaposes these propagandistic images with popular culture footage to highlight how both ultimately function as a means of distraction from the ugly realities of politics and its impact on everyday life. As Alvaro Moreno Ares argues, the correlation of this footage and newspaper headlines in various languages with the personal drama of Javier and his father demonstrates that which is omitted, namely the personal and familial drama that this conflict inspired, from the celebratory propaganda of the regime (2016: 218–19). In terms of Francoist propaganda, several still images of Franco are included in the opening credits showing the general as a young man in his military uniform as well as him presiding over large crowds. These are juxtaposed with images of Republicans being rounded up at gunpoint and of numerous coffins being carried while planes form the word ‘Franco’ in the sky overhead. The credits also index a series of monsters and other familiar creatures from popular culture, such as Frankenstein’s monster. The reference to Frankenstein’s monster is an intriguing one, insofar as this figure represents the manufacturing of a monster who is at its core in

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deep pain as a result of the senselessly violent actions of others. This citation additionally recalls, as with the child actors of Blancanieves, Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena due to its focus on Whale’s 1931 filmic adaptation Frankenstein. In this way, Balada suggests that the children of those who suffered during both the Civil War and the subsequent Franco regime, namely Ana in Espíritu and Javier in Balada, will themselves become, like Frankenstein’s monster, scarred individuals condemned to repeat, perform and perpetuate acts of violence. The notion of repetition, already explored in relation to Blancanieves, is key to the representation of performance and pastness in Balada. As well as featuring still images of Franco in the opening credits, the film also re-performs Franco by featuring him as a character (Juan Viadas). Balada humanizes Franco as he chastises Colonel Salcedo (Sancho Gracia) for humiliating Javier and treating him like a dog. Despite this potentially redemptive depiction, Franco is subsequently bitten by the feral Javier in a gesture that reads as a form of vengeance against the dictator, akin to the revenge urged by Javier’s father when he encourages his son to seek revenge. As well as re-imagining Franco, Balada conducts further historical reconstructions via the representation of events such as the assassination of Carrero Blanco, the president of the government at the time and the individual marked as Franco’s successor, conducted by Basque separatist group ETA in 1973. Evidently impressed by the theatrics of the (re-performed) assassination, which lifted Carrero Blanco’s car into the air and over a five-storey building, Javier approaches the perpetrators to ask to which circus they belong. The event functions as a parallel to Javier’s kidnapping of Natalia, indicating the interrelations amongst performance and reality as well as the theatricality of the past in Balada. Through this creative engagement with Spain’s Francoist history, Balada demonstrates the ways in which performance and cinema facilitate the reworking of the past through performance. In addition to archival footage and historical reconstruction, the interrelatedness of performance and pastness is evident from the title of the

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film. Balada triste de trompeta is the name of a song performed by Raphael, a singer who starred in films and hosted television shows from 1960 onwards (Duncan Wheeler 2012: 11). For Teresa Fraile Prieto, Balada participates in an early twenty-first-century trend in Spanish cinema of reviving songs from the Francoist period, resulting in the creation of ‘textos nostálgicos al hacer alusión al pasado a través de recursos estilísticos’ (‘nostalgic texts that allude to the past by means of stylistic resources’) (2014: 107). As de Menezes remarks, the lyrics of the song constitute a ‘simple lament “por un pasado que murió”’ (‘for a past that is gone’ (literally, has died)), reinforcing ‘the film’s depiction of an almost existential sense of traumatic loss’ (2014: 250). Like Carmen de la Triana’s records in Blancanieves and the performance of Pointer Sisters classic ‘I’m So Excited’ in Los amantes pasajeros (discussed in the final section of this chapter), the song is a leitmotif that forms part of the rhetoric of repetition and circularity that characterizes the film. It features in three key scenes, emphatically punctuating the narrative. On the first occasion, the song plays on a jukebox in a bar shortly after Javier’s radical transformation into a violent and grotesque killer clown. The song provokes a curious reaction in Javier who approaches the elderly gentleman at the jukebox and asks ‘Who is Raphael?’. The man responds: ‘Un gran cantante y una gran persona’ (‘A great singer and a great man’). A brief interaction with a family, whose children mock Javier for the manner in which he is dressed, sparks a furious outburst from the enraged clown. The irony of the lyrics is evident. The past is not dead but rather all too present for Javier, who is reminded of the loss he has suffered and whose ridiculing at the hands of the youngsters recalls his humiliation by clown counterpart Sergio. Shortly after this scene, Javier enters a cinema only to hear the titular song again, this time witnessing Raphael dressed as a clown in Sin un adiós (Without a Goodbye) (Escrivá 1970). In a surreal episode, Raphael diegetically breaks the fourth wall, addressing a transfixed and visibly moved Javier, instructing him to forget about Natalia and move on. His father, in spirit form, intervenes, insisting that Javier kill Natalia rather than follow Raphael’s

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reconciliatory advice. Raphael challenges Javier’s father before requesting that he vacate his film. Javier’s father in turn responds by asking why Raphael is in Javier’s mind to which the clown replies that he likes the way he sings. This cinematically intertextual moment reinforces the connection of the song to a difficult past that refuses to be condemned to history. The final appearance of the song occurs in the climactic sequence, with Javier projecting the scene from Escrivá’s film onto the walls of the crypts beneath el Valle. Its repetition emphasizes the cyclicality of violence and the past and underscores the pivotal role of cinematic performance which evokes forceful emotions, such as rage and distress, associated with a traumatic and unresolved past. Alongside this song, the circus is central to the depiction of performance in Balada. For Diane Bracco, the bright and colourful world of spectacle contained within the ironically named Wonderland circus is juxtaposed with the grey and sordid character of the 1970s Madrid backdrop of the film (2017). The circus comprises a series of performers: the clowns Javier and Sergio, a motorbike stuntman, an elephant tamer and aerial acrobat Natalia. Like the bullfighting dwarves who adopt Carmen in Blancanieves, the circus constitutes an alternative to the hegemonic family unit, a queer consortium whose affiliative bonds exist outwith conventional kinship structures. While the circus has historical and cross-cultural associations with otherness, this takes on renewed significance in the context of Francoist Spain. For Ares, the circus is a site of marginality and a metaphor for Spain under Franco, ‘nómada y artística, desarraigada y saltimbanqui, que emigra o se exilia y se juega la vida haciendo virguerías para sobrevivir’ (‘nomadic and artistic, rootless and acrobatic, that emigrates or exiles itself and gambles with life working wonders in order to survive’) (2016: 232). If the circus is a locale of subaltern identity, otherness and marginality excluded under Franco, then it also constitutes a politically subversive site. This is apparent in the scene depicting the assassination of Carrero Blanco, in which Javier asks those responsible ‘Vosotros, ¿de qué circo sois?’ (‘Which circus do you belong to?’). In a manner akin to André Breton’s declaration

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that the most pure Surrealist act would be to walk into a crowd firing a loaded gun (1969: 125), violent acts become performance and performance becomes political rebellion. Both Balada and the circus at its core epitomize the impetus of this monograph: that performance is political, performers are key political players and performance-related activities have direct relevance with regard to, and intervene in, politics. The circus spectacle, and other performances such as Natalia’s dance routines in the gentlemen’s club, occupies little screen time in Balada. Of greater significance is the imbrication of performance with reality, exemplified by the actions of Natalia and Enrique, the motorbike stuntman, in the climactic sequence. As Natalia and Javier scale the gigantic cross at el Valle, Enrique insists that he can reach them. Having turbo-charged his bike, Enrique launches himself towards the monument, hurtling at top speed through the air until he crashes directly into the cross. His bike bursts into flames and his body falls to the base of the monument as his colleagues watch on in horror. Natalia also perishes in this sequence, leaping to her death and tumbling the length of the gigantic crucifix in a manner that recalls her aerial acrobatics in the circus. Performing proves fatal for Enrique and Natalia, or in other words, they continue to perform even in death in a manner that recalls Carmen de la Triana’s posthumous flamenco performances, as well as the unconscious Carmencita’s status as a freak show attraction in Blancanieves. As performers that live posthumously through their artistic legacies, each of these characters confirm Federico García Lorca’s idea that while death typically signifies an end elsewhere, ‘A dead man in Spain is more alive as a dead man than any place else in the world’ (1980: 47). Emphasizing repetition and repeatability, death does not signal finality with regard to performance in Balada. The stage upon which the deaths of Enrique and Natalia occur is el Valle, a site which continues to cause controversy in contemporary Spain. In December 2009, a year prior to the release of Balada, the socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero closed the monument to the public due to its state of

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disrepair. Nearly ten years later, in October 2019, Franco’s remains were finally exhumed from the site after a long legal battle with his descendants. That said, debates continue regarding what to do with el Valle more generally. For Nancy Berthier, the conclusion of Balada plays a key role in the emergence of a radical audiovisual discourse around the monument that extends beyond its status as a symbol of Francoist triumph (2015: 109–10). Prior to her death, Natalia is surrounded by human remains as she is held hostage by the deranged Javier in the crypts beneath the cross. In its first artistic recreation (Francisco Ferrándiz 2011: 484), the crypt setting is part of the ‘opressão estética’ (‘oppressive aesthetic’) of the film (Bajonas Teixeira de Brito Junior 2013: 4) as well as part of the film’s neo-gothic presentation of the monument through ‘the lens of esperpentic deformation’ (de Menezes 2014: 250). Buried beneath el Valle, the skeletal remnants symbolize the numerous individuals who perished by means of Francoist persecution and who were never afforded a proper burial. The conclusion of Balada reveals an unjust disjuncture between the Nationalist fallen, visibly honoured by the vastness of el Valle, and the victims of Francoism, whose uninterred bones intermingle beneath its surface. Both Javier’s return and that of the film to the monument emphasize the intergenerational aspect of this narrative and its circularity. For Patricia Keller, Balada posits el Valle as a site of return that ‘hinges on the replaying of violence, horror, and profound loss that “live on,” […] in and through the monument itself ’ (2012: 79–80). Gina Sherriff notes the Greek kirkos as the etymological origin of both circo (‘circus’) and círculo (‘circle’) and the origins of the circus ring, ‘born of the circular space for performances and contests in ancient Rome’ before stating that: ‘In Balada triste de trompeta, the circus is a fitting metaphor for the circularity of conflict, as society revisits violence upon itself well after the end of war. And while the circus is traditionally linked to innocence and youth, de la Iglesia’s circus rejects the fantasy of regeneration and fulfillment through the image of the child’ (2015: 138). With its climactic sequence unfolding within the hidden infrastructure beneath, and upon the

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surface of, this exaggerated, grotesque and surreal memorial to Francoism, Balada is boldly political, in relation to both the historical period in which the film is set and the contemporary Spanish context of its release. The visual meditation on the immense structures of el Valle underscores the extent to which the Transition to democracy overlooked the wrongdoing and injustices of the Francoist regime in favour of a smooth conversion to a supposedly democratic government, as well as highlighting the lack of redress that persists in contemporary Spain. For Keller, the monument perpetuates ‘not the memory of a heroic defeat or a nationalist legacy, but the story of an inherited and thus repeated and repeatable violence as monumentally horrific as it is inexpressible’ (2012: 80). While the Ley de la Memoria Histórica (Law of Historical Memory), implemented by Zapatero’s socialist government in 2007, led to the removal of street names and monuments honouring Franco and his associates around Spain, el Valle has remained a site of commemorative controversy. As well as being the final resting place of Franco until the exhumation of his remains in October 2019, el Valle also houses, as Balada demonstrates, the remains of the prisoners of war who died during its construction. Requiring funding for maintenance, the site has functioned as a shrine and meeting point for Francoist supporters and far-right sympathizers in addition to a locale in which to stage ceremonies, for example commemorating the anniversary of Franco’s death. If el Valle constitutes a shrine to both Franco as an individual and the legacy of Francoism in contemporary Spain, Balada reappropriates and transforms it into a dramatic stage upon which to play out the traumatic legacies of Francoism that continue to permeate Spanish society. Crucial to these legacies is the conflict between the two central characters: Sergio and Javier. While several critics interpret the clowns as symbolizing the two Spains (de Menezes 2014: 249), Balada is not a Manichean portrait of good versus evil but rather about how the lines between these categories are often blurred. Mainly starring in television and short films prior to his role as Javier, Areces previously worked with de la Iglesia and Carolina Bang on Plutón B.R.B.

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Nero (2008–9), a sci-fi series that the director attributes as sparking the genesis of Balada (Landa López 2010). Areces has also played the role of Franco in several works, most of these after the release of Balada.5 The choice of Areces for the role of Javier is an astute move given the complexity of the character whose development entails a personality switch from shy and sensitive to vicious and violent. The actor demonstrates an assured understanding of his craft in his embodiment and characterization of Javier across this spectrum. When not in his clown costume and make-up, Areces uses his posture to convey Javier’s submissiveness, his shoulders hunched, his frame unobtrusive. He speaks softly, his gentle voice mirroring his inconspicuous bodily presence. His neat physical appearance might be described as geek chic: chunky glasses dominate his face, his hair is neatly groomed to one side and he wears knitted sweater vests. Areces’s embodiment of Javier positions him as a visual and emotional counterpoint to the brash machista swagger of de la Torre as Sergio, in an antithetical relationship that extends beyond the parameters of their performance as sad and happy clowns, respectively. This is evident in an early sequence that depicts the circus performers socializing together during which Sergio recounts a distasteful joke. While most of the troupe laughs hysterically, Javier instead asks a question that simultaneously demonstrates his bewilderment at the joke and undermines his rival. This episode reveals a rebellious and resistant kernel beneath Javier’s submissive exterior that will ultimately lead to his transformation into a killer clown, characterized, in terms of performance style, by wide-eyed, manic expressions and dramatic emotional outbursts. As happy clown Sergio, Antonio de la Torre matches Areces in terms of intensity of performance. Though his character does not undergo a transformation like that of Javier, de la Torre’s role as a violent monster that still has to elicit empathy is similarly contradictory. De la Torre boasts an expansive body of work in a career spanning three decades. Like Areces, he has previously worked with de la Iglesia (El día de la bestía (The Day of the

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Beast) (1995) and La chispa de la vida (As Luck Would Have It) (2011)). He has additionally worked with many of the big names in Spanish cinema including Pedro Almodóvar, constituting a further point of connection between him and Areces as both star in Los amantes pasajeros, the final case study explored in this chapter. In Los amantes, the pair swaps the hyperbolically violent machismo of Balada for campness as a seemingly celibate homosexual air steward (Areces) and a married father-of-two and yet closeted homosexual pilot (de la Torre).6 In the role of Sergio, de la Torre channels bluster, bravado and violence characteristic of toxic masculinity. His physical appearance is rugged: his long hair is unstyled, he has a noticeable five o’clock shadow and sizeable sideburns, and he wears a brown leather jacket, the hair on his chest visible thanks to his open shirt. His posture is self-assured, his shoulders back, his chest thrust forward. While Areces, despite his rotundness, embodies Javier as meek and unobtrusive, de la Torre utilizes his corporeal bulk, expanding himself physically to occupy the space of the frame, which at times fails to contain the actor, specifically when Sergio loses control and explodes in violent outbursts (Figure 1.2). This occurs shortly after Javier challenges Sergio with regard to his distasteful joke. Erupting in an infantile and virulent manner, Sergio lashes out viciously and shouts at his colleagues, spitting saliva venomously.

FIGURE 1.2  Sergio disrespects the boundaries of the frame. ‘Balada triste de trompeta’ directed by Alex de la Iglesia © Tornasol Films 2010. All rights reserved.

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Though framed in a close-up, Sergio’s enraged gesticulations have no respect for the boundaries of the cinematic frame. His corporeal expansion beyond the frame constitutes a cinematographic nod to his excessive and exaggerated embodiment of masculinity. Even when physically absent from the frame, Sergio intrudes violently in the mise-en-scène. As Ares notes, Sergio’s first intervention in the film occurs when he throws two dwarves from his trailer (2016: 225). The deferred visual introduction of Sergio, the dominant figure within the hierarchy of circus performers in Balada, suggests that the power and force enacted by controlling bodies operates beyond the visible. Sergio’s first appearance on screen compounds this idea. By way of introduction to both Javier and the audience, Sergio has his back to the camera, initially shielded from view by a red string curtain. A further layer conceals Sergio, insofar as he wears his clown costume at this point. Like his excessive masculinity, his red, black and white clown make-up is hyperbolic. Thick black lines outline exaggerated eyebrows and an inflated lipline. He wears a large prosthetic red nose and a curly red wig with a bald spot on top. Initially, the costumes and make-up worn by the clowns appear as a means of deflection, a distancing device that conceals and protects them. As José Miguel Burgos Mazas argues, Sergio and Javier are ‘todo máscara y, por lo tanto, sin máscara’ (‘all mascara and, because of that, unmasked’), the paint on their faces revealing that ‘no tienen nada que esconder y, en consecuencia, nada que revelar’ (‘they have nothing to hide and, as a result, nothing to reveal’) (2012: 7–8). If the outfit and face of the clown serve as a protective shield, this is confirmed by the two clowns in this scene, whereby both admit that if they were not clowns they would be murderers. Their careers as circus clowns constitute a means of dealing with their difficult pasts. Performing in the circus, at least in the view of the protagonists, nullifies violent desires, though this will of course prove ultimately ineffective. Costumes and make-up become significant beyond the parameters of circus performance in Balada, functioning as a modus operandi for the protagonists.

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In preparation for his first performance alongside Sergio, Javier applies makeup in his trailer. Accompanied by Ramiro the elephant tamer, Javier sits before a dressing table, his reflection visible in the mirror. His face is painted white, his eyes dramatically outlined in black, he has exaggerated black eyebrows drawn on his forehead and wears dark red lipstick. Ramiro praises the clowns Los primos de Pompoff y Teddy (The Cousins of Pompoff and Teddy) on the television set in the trailer for their brilliance, remarking that they do not wear any make-up at all. The heavily made-up Javier throws him an exasperated look before Ramiro backtracks, insisting that everyone has a distinct style. The televised clowns provide a counterpoint to the layers of make-up sported by Javier, just as Javier’s expertly applied make-up in this early scene provides a counterpoint to his disfigured skin following his dramatic self-styled makeover. Their immaculate face paint replaced by facial disfiguration, the two clowns represent the extent to which performance becomes an all-consuming reality and way of life for the characters, literally embedded in their skin. The symbolic weight of the physical scarring of the two antagonistic protagonists is inevitably bound up with the lasting impact of the Civil War and Francoism. For de Menezes, the deformity of both Javier and Sergio functions as a metaphor for ‘Spanish history conceived of as monstrous trauma’ (2014: 251). She notes that Sergio is ‘literally branded with Civil-War battle topography’ when his scarred face is compared to the Battle of Ebro. Furthermore, she describes Javier’s self-disfiguration as an assertion of agency that expresses the ‘need for a violent overturning of the prevailing memory horizon, in order to expose buried, concealed and disguised aspects of the past that have not begun to receive proper recognition’ (2014: 251). Although undoubtedly a reflection on Francoism and its legacy in Spain, the substitution of make-up for mutilation in Balada is also a reflection on the moment of the film’s production in post-Crisis Spain. As Dean Allbritton contends, the emphasis on physical vulnerability functions as a ‘metaphor for vulnerability writ large’ in Spanish post-Crisis cinema (2014: 103). The emphasis on

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circularity and repetition that characterizes Balada renders the film not just a reflection on recent Spanish history but more poignantly an alarming prophecy of the cyclicality of violence and trauma that cannot be confined to the past.

Performing post-crisis Spain: Los amantes pasajeros (Almodóvar 2013) The theme of performance is central to Almodóvar’s oeuvre and his 2013 film Los amantes pasajeros is no exception. Set amidst the aftermath of the 2007–8 economic Crisis, the film explores politics as performance, exposing the incompetence and corruption beneath a glossy veneer of promise and potential. In contrast to the historical settings of Blancanieves and Balada, Los amantes takes place in contemporary Spain. Yet the film performs the past by revisiting the camp aesthetics and screwball comedy genre preferences of Almodóvar’s early works as well as through references to the Transition to democracy following the death of Franco in 1975. In this way, Los amantes underscores a central tenet of this chapter: that these films perform the past to understand its legacies for both the present and the future. Again, unlike Blancanieves and Balada, Los amantes does not primarily concern theatrical performers, focusing instead on a trio of performing air stewards. That said, the parallels between theatre and air travel are manifold, including the rehearsed, performative and staged nature of the various procedures performed by the personnel; the rows of seats facing the same way and the audience/passengers as paying customers with high expectations.7 The centrepiece of the film is a lip-synched rendition of Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I’m So Excited’ enacted by the three air stewards as a means of distracting the passengers from the reality that the aircraft on which they travel is set to crash land. The three air stewards may be service professionals but they also capitalize on their position as the centre of attention on board the doomed flight and as those in control of the situation,

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taking advantage of their passengers as a captive audience. In this way, Los amantes posits performance as diversion, echoing its political deployment as a means of diverting attention from injustice, wrongdoing and corruption. Los amantes is set almost entirely on board a passenger aircraft destined for Mexico. A problem with the landing gear means that the jet never leaves Spanish airspace, endlessly circling the skies above Toledo before ultimately performing an emergency landing at one of the country’s unused airports, remnants of the 2007–8 economic Crisis which left a number of large-scale construction projects either half-finished or unsupported after the global financial collapse. While those in economy, representative of the masses, are drugged and sleep for the duration of the flight, the action of the film unfolds in the Business Class cabin which is populated by a host of troubled individuals attempting to escape the reality of their complex lives involving sexual scandals, financial fiascos and dramatic relationships. The passengers suspect something is amiss and confront the cabin crew who reveal the truth about the ill-fated flight. This is the first in a series of revelations shared by those in the cabin both willingly, as they disclose their morally questionable pasts to one another, and reluctantly, as their private conversations are relayed publicly via the broken cabin phone. As a means of distraction, the exuberant air stewards offer to stage musical numbers and distribute mescalinelaced cocktails. A drug-fuelled orgy ensues, a physical release following the aforementioned emotional baring of souls. Despite those on board fearing the worst, the pilots conduct a successful emergency landing and the passengers disembark playfully and enthusiastically by means of the emergency slides. The excessively dramatic and hyperbolic character of Los amantes, evident from this brief plot summary, is reminiscent of Almodóvar’s early works, notably the comedy Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] (1988) which was nominated for the 1988 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. By recuperating the spirit of the filmmaker’s early works, Los amantes evokes the time period in which

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these works were produced: the 1980s and the post-Franco Transition to democracy. References to this era abound in the film. The song to which the flight attendants perform and which gives the film its Anglophone title, ‘I’m So Excited’, was released in 1982. Dominatrix Norma Boss (Cecilia Roth) explicitly connects the Agua de Valencia cocktail distributed to the Business Class clientele by the air stewards to this particular decade when she remarks that she was a big fan of the cocktail in the 1980s. The character of Norma is particularly important with regard to the indexing of the Transition to democracy and the 1980s as the flight attendants express their admiration for her work and quiz her about the beginning of her career during the destape (the uncovering), the term used to refer to the immediate post-Franco period characterized by increased nudity within Spanish cultural production. Uninhibited thanks to the Agua de Valencia cocktail she has consumed, Norma delivers an intimate monologue about her career, commencing with her posing for the front cover of Interviú, a weekly magazine established in 1976 that publishes articles on political and economic scandals and the first Spanish publication to feature topless women on its cover. She also details her attempts at acting and singing before discussing her turn to bondage. She claims to possess erotic videos, a replayable archive of performances akin to the records of Carmen de la Triana in Blancanieves and the recordings of Raphael’s ‘Balada triste de trompeta’ in Balada, of the 600 most important men in Spain, including the King. King Juan Carlos, the monarch at the time of the film’s release, constitutes another key reference to the Transition to democracy insofar as he was selected as Franco’s successor following the assassination of Carrero Blanco in 1973, re-enacted in Balada. Moreover, in the contemporary context, as Ana M. Sánchez-Arce notes, the choice of King Juan Carlos as a satirical target in the film is significant given that there is an ‘unspoken agreement not to publish compromising news about the monarchy that has partially broken down during the last decade’ (2020). But, as SánchezArce also observes, this implicit arrangement persists to a certain extent with

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artists at risk of censorship if they speak out, demonstrated by the prosecution of rapper Valtònyc in 2018 for his song ‘Tuerka Rap’ in which he criticizes the Spanish monarchy regarding their relationship with the Saudi royal family, their foreign policy and their economic credibility (2020). While Los amantes performs the past through this array of references to the 1980s and the Transition to democracy, it also underscores the continued significance of this period for contemporary Spanish society through the persistence of censorship, albeit in less explicit ways than those of the Francoist era. The interconnectedness of performance and silence, already explored in relation to Blancanieves, cements this nexus of interrelations amongst performance, pastness, censorship and the Transition to democracy in Los amantes. Alluding to the Transition to democracy, Joserra reveals that he and his colleagues formed a Pacto de silencio (Pact of Silence) following the murder of a passenger on board and their decision to cover it up and pretend it was a death of natural causes. As Sánchez-Arce observes, Joserra’s Pact of Silence directly references the Pacto del olvido (Pact of Oblivion), an unwritten political agreement that preceded the formal amnesty of 1977 pardoning all those who had committed crimes in the name of Francoism both during and after the Spanish Civil War (2020). In this way, the film revisits the 1980s and redefines it, SánchezArce argues, as ‘a period of promise, but also a time when distraction was chosen instead of in-depth reform and where new-found social freedom obscured the continuation of the structures of power’ (2020). Sánchez-Arce concludes that Los amantes thus ‘addresses one of the most prevalent ways of dealing with crises or difficult situations in Spain: avoiding the past through silencing it’ (2020). By revisiting the Transition to democracy and its concomitant Pact of Forgetting in the contemporary context, Los amantes emphasizes the problematics of this approach and posits itself as an alternative to this model. Los amantes directly addresses this silencing of difficult pasts from the outset with an introductory disclaimer that immediately and playfully establishes performance and the creation of fictional worlds as a means of both commenting

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on and escaping from reality. Preceding the opening credits, white text appears on a pale blue background, reading ‘Todo lo que ocurre en esta película es ficción y fantasía y no guarda ninguna relación con la realidad’ (‘Everything that takes place in this film is fiction and fantasy and has no relationship with reality’). This statement should not be taken at face value as this film has everything to do with reality. In this regard, Los amantes draws upon tactics of diversion deployed by Almodóvar’s cinematic ancestors, Juan Antonio Bardem and Luis García Berlanga, whose works I discussed in the introduction and who Almodóvar has cited as having a direct influence on his work and specifically on Los amantes (Almodóvar 2013). As with the previous two case studies in this chapter, El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive) is once again a reference here. Espíritu opens with seemingly contradictory opening intertitles that situate the action of the film simultaneously in postCivil War Spain and a mythical fairy tale temporality. Furthermore, the film also includes an explanatory prologue before the diegetic screening of Frankenstein (Whale 1931) whereby the audiences are warned not to take the film too seriously.8 While much has changed in the intervening years and Almodóvar is not making films within a climate characterized by censorship, repression and persecution, the systematic denigration of the cultural sphere by conservative political governments in the twenty-first century has led to a charged atmosphere in which artistic practitioners fear the repercussions of openly expressing critical opinions and/or performing in works that do so. Like rapper Valtònyc mentioned above, the puppeteers of Títeres desde abajo (Puppets From Below) arrested under the charge of glorifying terrorism in Madrid in February 2016 are a case in point. Beneath the seemingly innocuous declaration that opens Los amantes is a thinly veiled statement concerning the political impetus of a film which has largely been dismissed by critics and some scholars as trivial nonsense.9 As Maria M. Delgado notes, though the primary setting of the film is the isolated space of an aeroplane mid-flight, the film is ‘anything but escapist entertainment’ (2016: 253). While the Pacto del

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olvido might seem a distant memory, the textual diversion at the start of Los amantes simultaneously suggests that silence is still a questionable political strategy deployed in contemporary Spain and that performance and cultural production constitute arenas in which this can be challenged. Los amantes also addresses the silencing of the past through the performances of the three flight attendants. This is the case for both the procedures they must enact as part of their jobs on board and the performance they deliver as a mode of distraction for the Business Class passengers. With regard to procedural performance, the safety demonstration enacted by the cabin crew is the epitomic example of the performativity of the everyday. This sequence posits the protagonists of the film, the passengers in Business Class, as a diegetic audience, emphasizing the parallels between air travel and theatre- or cinema-going. As Joserra welcomes passengers aboard, both the cabin crew and passengers are framed in close-ups that introduce them in a manner similar to a theatrical programme or credit sequence. As Delgado notes, the characters ‘are knowingly theatrical types, larger-than-life characters whose self-conscious performance register – associated with the sainete and other populist stage genres – owes much to the lively generation of 1960s actors deployed by […] [Luis García] Berlanga and Fernando Fernán-Gómez’ (2016: 255). Shots of the economy class cabin do not focus on individuals in a gesture that not only underscores their contrastively cramped conditions but also highlights the fact that this film is not interested in the masses. The individual framing of most of the Business Class passengers in this opening sequence emphasizes the space they enjoy as premium customers and, relatedly, their status as the main characters of the film. Los amantes focuses on the privileged few, such as Señor Mas (José Luis Torrijo), a disgraced banker who symbolizes the corruption that characterizes contemporary Spain, or Norma Boss, the high-flying dominatrix who has carved out a career based on the manipulation and extortion of men in positions of authority and power. These characters function, in Delgado’s terms, as ‘potent similes for an irresponsible generation whose vanity and cronyism

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brought the country to the point of bankruptcy’ (2016: 263). Such individuals might be suffering the effects of the economic Crisis but continue to enjoy an array of benefits due to their elevated social status. If the characters themselves become spectators here, then the air stewards are performers there to entertain them. The familiar routine of the safety demonstration becomes a comedic performance. While such demonstrations are typically a formality in that most airline passengers will not be required to act upon the information given, the characters of Los amantes will follow emergency protocols, adopting the brace position prior to landing and evacuating the plane via emergency slides at the film’s conclusion. Just as the Business Class clients are introduced through close-ups, so too are the cabin crew. Joserra, whose voice serves as an aural transition to the space of the aeroplane, is the first crew member to be introduced. Framed in close-up, he wears a jaded expression as he speaks into the red cabin phone, reading his habitual welcome aboard speech. Introductory shots of his colleagues Fajas (Areces) and Ulloa (Raúl Arévalo) immediately follow. The plump Fajas, in a nervous tic, sweeps his long dark fringe to one side while Ulloa, contrastively svelte, stares directly into the camera before blinking slowly, deliberately, flirtatiously. The camera then cuts to the economy cabin, where the same routine is performed by Piluca (Pepa Charro, or La Terremoto de Alcorcón (the Earthquake of Alcorcón) known for her ‘animated Andalusian-inflected cover performances’ of songs such as ‘It’s Raining Men’ and ‘I Will Survive’ (Delgado 2016: 260)). Fajas and Ulloa are then framed together either side of a digital screen that emphasizes their synchronicity in the performance of the demonstration and that will later serve as a prop in their lip-synched rendition of ‘I’m So Excited’. As the trio enact the familiar routine of how to put on a lifejacket, they wear nonplussed expressions that simultaneously convey a sense of seriousness and monotony. Ulloa makes a point of rapidly fastening his lifejacket highlighting his slender figure by emphasizing how much of the strap remains unused. Meanwhile, the rather rotund Fajas struggles to fasten his lifejacket, disrupting their synchronicity and earning him a disdainful look from his colleague as well as an eye roll from

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an exasperated Joserra. Each of the three stewards is shown illustrating how to inflate said safety devices, with Ulloa suggestively blowing into the red tube of his vest. The demonstration ends with single shots of the three cabin crew members as they shake their head in concurrence with Joserra’s statement that lifejackets should not be inflated inside the aircraft. Like the performance style favoured by silent cinema and seen in Blancanieves, this brief sequence signifies the importance of gesture and nonverbal signs for cinematic performance, which comprises ‘facial expression; voice; gestures […]; body posture […]; body movement’ (Dyer 1998: 134). The only character to speak here is Joserra and even then it is his facial expressions that convey his personality and attitude. This is ironic given that throughout the remainder of the film, Joserra will be revealed as being incapable of keeping secrets or telling lies, frequently and honestly oversharing, as mentioned above in relation to the Pact of Silence (which he of course ruptures) regarding the death of a passenger on board another flight. The non-verbal expressiveness of the other flight attendants encapsulates their personalities and prefigures their roles in the denouement of the film. The campness of Fajas and Ulloa is evident in their flamboyant hand gestures, for example in their demonstration of the location of the emergency exits. Fajas’s struggle to fit his life vest underscores his distinctiveness as an individual and his status as an outsider. While the rest of the Business Class inhabitants indulge in a drug-fuelled orgy, Fajas remains outwith the action, praying before his makeshift altar. Ulloa’s suggestiveness and flirtatious interactions with the camera signal his sexual prowess, which emerges later as he and supposedly straight pilot Benito (Hugo Silva) engage in mutual fellatio (though this will remain hidden from view; see Fouz Hernández (2017: 224, 232–4)). This sequence demonstrates the communicative potential of expression, gesture and the non-verbal, or, in other words, the importance of what is not said. In this regard, Los amantes recalls the subversive cinematic strategies of filmmakers such as Bardem, Berlanga, Saura and Erice who deployed irony, subtlety and silence as means of conveying politically unpalatable ideas and slipping those ideas past the

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censors, as discussed in the introduction. Although set in the contemporary economic Crisis, Los amantes performs the past through its recuperation of dissident cinematic approaches utilized by left-wing filmmakers under Franco. Los amantes also engages performance as a form of distraction, underscoring its political co-option to divert attention from injustice, wrongdoing and corruption. Delgado argues that the film ‘offers a denouncement of the empty rhetoric and opinionated posturing peddled by bankers and politicians and adopted in the discursive language of wider Spanish society’ whereby ‘The vocabulary of performance has […] been co-opted to deceptive ends: affirming exploitative political values and a culture of game-play used to advance blatantly material ends’ (2016: 253). She contends that ‘The playful and creative pleasure promoted by the three flight attendants […] is both a challenge to the bland, uninspired and overly recited discourses of austerity promoted by politicians and a mode of facilitating a process of social reflection and self-analysis that is shown to have transformative effects’ (2016: 253). The role of silence is crucial in this regard and manifests by means of the lip-synched performance of ‘I’m So Excited’ enacted by the cabin crew. Having revealed the truth, or rather having failed to remain silent, about the technical hitch affecting the plane, Joserra tells his Business Class clients that he and his colleagues are prepared to entertain them and that they have a list of musical performances they can stage, leaving Fajas to distribute the list of ‘temas’ (‘numbers’) while Ulloa takes a drinks order. The Business Class quarters of the plane become akin to a nightclub or cabaret, reminiscent of similar performance sites in previous Almodóvar films such as Tacones lejanos (High Heels) (1991) and La mala educación (Bad Education) (2004). The lip-synched performance also recalls these earlier films in which Miguel Bosé and Gael García Bernal grace stages in cross-dressed and lip-synched renditions of ‘Un año de amor’ [‘A Year of Love’] and ‘Quizás, quizás, quizás’ [‘Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps’] respectively. In contrast, the cabin crew in Los amantes do not don costumes, cross-dress or perform on stage. Remaining in their stylish pale blue uniforms, the trio

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transform the cabin into an immersive theatrical space. Performing directly to the camera throughout the routine, the stewards collapse the distinction between the diegetic audience of the Business Class passengers and the film spectator. Within the diegesis, the performance is theatrical, staged for the audience of Business Class passengers. For the film spectator, the sequence reads as a music video, an edited and replayable document that underscores the notion of repetition in relation to performance seen throughout this chapter and collapses distinctions between live and non-live performances in a manner that creates tension between performance as presence and the pastness of performance. That they lip-sync rather than sing not only signals the debt that their performance owes to the queer heritage of drag culture explored in earlier Almodóvar films, but also recalls the silent cinema mode re-enacted in Blancanieves, indexing the split between voice and body that characterized early silent cinema (Doane 1980: 33). Similarly, the gestures deployed by the three colleagues evoke both drag culture and the performance styles favoured by silent cinema. Joserra, Fajas and Ulloa gesticulate in a stereotypically camp manner, characterized by pursed lips, hands on hips and an expressive use of hands and fingers as well as posing and vogue-ing (Figure 1.3). The reliance on

FIGURE 1.3  The air stewards strike a pose. ‘Los amantes pasajeros’ directed by Pedro Almodóvar © El Deseo 2013. All rights reserved.

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gesture, coupled with the stillness of their adopted poses, evokes the stasis of the unconscious Carmencita at the end of Blancanieves as well as emphasizing silence as a key approach to dealing with troubling past issues in contemporary Spain. The relations amongst performance, stasis and silence re-emerge in the concluding sequence of Los amantes. The pilots prepare to perform their emergency landing having been given permission to land at the unused La Mancha Airport. For Jorge Marí, this site is an emblem of the ‘despilfarro económico y corrupción política’ (‘economic waste and political corruption’) that characterized the Spanish financial Crisis of 2007–8 (2015: 628). For Delgado, the airport is ‘an empty ghostly space of pristine floors and mirrored surfaces that manifestly references the high-profile white elephant airports of Ciudad Real and Castellón’ (2016: 262). Following final checks and communication with air traffic control, performed directly to the camera in a manner akin to the musical performance of the flight attendants, pilots Alex (Antonio de la Torre) and Benito successfully land the plane. Rather than depict the moment of impact, Almodóvar substitutes images of the deserted terminal building audibly accompanied by screeching, grinding, crunching, sirens and screams. The vivid soundtrack of the emergency landing contrasts with the visual quietness of the images within the empty airport. The camera travels through a vacant waiting area, complete with a large textual display listing various countries all over the world in a jarring image that once again emphasizes stasis. This is an airport out of which there are no flights. The camera continues travelling over an immobile escalator, through a darkened check-in area stacked with empty luggage trolleys and finally into a baggage reclaim zone, tilting downwards to reveal the glossy reflective surface of the unmarked floors. Despite its polished state, the untouched spaces of the terminal are rendered eerie and haunting by the jarring sounds of the plane’s crash landing in a performative use of off-screen space. By using off-screen diegetic sound and image in this way and highlighting the role of projects,

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such as the Ciudad Real airport where these scenes were filmed, and related political corruption in the financial collapse, the conclusion of Los amantes becomes a metaphor for the economic crash. The uncharted territory of La Mancha Airport is itself a performance of sorts, a glossy façade that for so long concealed political and financial ineptitude, inefficiency and corruption. For Delgado, discarded airports such as these ‘are the public wastelands of a nation inebriated by the frenzy to construct at any expense’ (2016: 262–3). Like the introductory disclaimer falsely protesting the distance between reality and fiction, the dramatic conclusion of Los amantes emphatically draws attention to the imbrication of politics and performance in contemporary Spain.

Subverting silence Ultimately, the performance of pastness in Blancanieves, Balada and Los amantes manifests a tension between their historical settings and influences and their contemporary production contexts. While they revisit and recreate distinct pasts notably connected to the Civil War, Francoism and the Transition, these films do so in order to express a sense of disenchantment with the present. Produced in the immediate aftermath of the global economic Crisis of 2007–8, these works are exemplary of post-Crisis Spanish cinema. By focusing on performance, specifically in relation to the concepts of circularity and repetition embedded within this paradigm, Blancanieves, Balada and Los amantes emphasize the parallels between past and present. The discontent with the present expressed by these three films reflects a wider trend characterizing contemporary democratic Spain and, more specifically, at the turning point of the 2007–8 economic crash. Blancanieves, Balada and Los amantes underscore the extent to which silence, silencing and contradicting versions of the truth did not die with Francoism but rather constitute the very foundations of contemporary Spanish society. While this relates, on the one

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hand, to the Pact of Forgetting that facilitated the Transition to democracy as highlighted in Los amantes, it applies equally to more recent phenomena, such as the tensions surrounding Catalan independence, the prosecution of artists and performers for what has been perceived of as terrorism, and scandals of corruption at the heart of Spanish politics to name but a few examples. These films express an urgent need to address these foundational silences at the core of contemporary democratic Spain. It would appear that Spain’s key political players are similarly attuned to this fact. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez described the exhumation of Franco’s remains from el Valle in October 2019 as a step towards reconciliation, commenting that ‘Modern Spain is the product of forgiveness, but it can’t be the product of forgetfulness’ (Anon 2019b). This exhumation itself reads as a subversive performance, a performative redressing of past injustices and a dramatic statement of intent with regard to the need to reconfigure what it means to be Spanish in the present day. It is precisely this nexus of performance and identity that forms the focus of Chapter 2.

2 Performing identities

The centrality of performance during the Transition to democracy following the death of Franco, as seen in my analysis of Los amantes pasajeros in Chapter 1, hinges upon the interrelations amongst performance and identity. For Isolina Ballesteros, performance is key in terms of both the process of transitioning, in political and cultural terms, from dictatorship to democracy and the increased visibility and legitimacy of social and sexual marginalities at this time. She contends that artists ‘deployed the innovative potential of performance to contest long-standing, often deeply oppressive social and moral conventions’ (2009: 72). This chapter unpacks the performativity and intersectionality of structuring categories of regional, national and gender identity in theatrical and quotidian, heteronormative and queer contexts. Its key concern is the manner in which contemporary Spanish cinema epitomizes the collapsing of distinctions between performance and reality, artificiality and authenticity. By attending to the constructedness, and thus de-/re-constructability, of identity categories, I posit contemporary Spanish cinema as a site in which identities are constituted, deconstructed and reconfigured. With regard to theory, a conceptual link between performance and individual identity emerges as early as 1929, when Joan Riviere conceptualizes femininity as a masquerade which women can deploy as a means of concealing their ‘masculine’ attributes and tendencies, perceived by men as threatening (1929: 303, 306). In the 1950s, Simone de Beauvoir picks up on

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this connection, arguing that ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, woman’ ([1949] 2014: 293). This idea threads its way into contemporary feminist and queer conceptualizations of gender, most notably the framework of gender performativity which has become so crucial within these theoretical fields. Inspired by J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, performativity constitutes a key component of contemporary understandings of identity. The work of Judith Butler, who contends that gender identity is ‘instituted through a stylized repetition of acts’, is hugely influential in this regard (1988: 519, original emphasis). Performativity has become an important theoretical paradigm for interpreting cinematic representations of gender, sexuality and national identity both within and beyond the Spanish context, exemplified by the work of Susan Martin Márquez (1999), Tatjana Pavlović (2003), Chris Perriam (2003), Fouz Hernández and Alfredo Martínez Expósito (2007) and Fouz Hernández (2013), among others. The unique approach of this chapter is its reevaluation of the framework of performativity within the paradigm of performance and politics established in this monograph as crucial to alternative filmmaking in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Spain. This is most evident in my analysis of Ocho apellidos vascos (A Spanish Affair) (Martínez Lázaro 2014) which considers the performativity of the heteronormative wedding ceremony in relation to both Austin’s paradigmatic text on performativity as well as its more recent rereading by queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003). In what follows, I analyse four films in which performance and performativity permeate individual identity, collapsing distinctions between performance and reality, artificiality and authenticity. The films in question are Jamón, jamón (Bigas i Luna 1992), Ocho apellidos vascos, Todo lo que tú quieras (Anything You Want) (Mañas 2010) and Todo sobre mi madre (All about My Mother) (Almodóvar 1999). While Jamón and Todo sobre mi madre are canonical texts by canonical filmmakers, the more recent Ocho apellidos and Todo lo que tú quieras have not yet received significant academic attention. These four films

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showcase an ambit of gender and sexual identities encompassing masculinity, heteronormativity, paternity/maternity and femininity. Taken together, they emphasize the extent to which performance facilitates the reconstruction of identity categories in the contemporary Spanish context.

Performing masculinity: Jamón, jamón Jamón, jamón explores everyday identity as performance, with specific emphasis on the categories of nationality, gender and sexuality. Jamón is the first instalment in a trilogy of retratos ibéricos (Iberian portraits) – completed by Huevos de oro (Golden Balls) (1993) and La teta i la lluna (The Tit and the Moon) (1995) – concerned with the negotiation of masculine identities in 1990s Spain. Focusing on the rivalry between Raúl (Javier Bardem), an athletic, attractive and arrogant macho ibérico (Iberian macho), and José Luis (Jordi Mollà), the infantile and slightly built son of a successful business woman, Jamón deploys then undermines motifs of heterosexual masculinity in order to reveal its constructedness. The film has been widely studied, notably in relation to its representation of the male body and of Spanish national identity as well as in terms of the significance of women and the depiction of femininity within the film.1 Through the figure of the Spanish macho, Jamón reveals Spanish masculinity to be a fragile façade, a masquerade to use Riviere’s term (1929), a performance. An array of audiovisual props support the performance of masculinity in Jamón. For Rosalind Galt, the prop constitutes ‘a technique of the pretty in cinema’ (2011: 142), a category which is often the ‘unspoken bad object of successive critical models’, given the tendency for the rhetoric of cinema to denigrate ‘surface decoration, finding the attractive skin of the screen to be false, shallow, feminine, or apolitical’ (2011: 2). She contends that the prop, as a component of the decorative, participates in the reconfiguration of

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‘geopolitics, gender, and sexuality’ (2011: 142) with femininity specifically at stake given its association ‘with an excess of pleasure in material things, particularly decorative, sensual, pretty things’ (2011: 145). In Jamón, however, it is the male characters that take pleasure in the material and the decorative and it is masculinity rather than femininity that requires supportive props in service of its performance. The props of masculinity in Jamón primarily concern industry, commerce and capitalism. A notable example in this regard is the Samson underpants produced in the factory owned by the parents of José Luis. Forming the focus of several close-ups over the course of the film, the Samson underpants are not only mounted on the wall of the office above the factory but also become a key symbol beyond the factory when they are plastered across a huge billboard later in the film. The billboard depicts an image of protagonist Raúl’s crotch encased in the product and carries the slogan ‘En tu interior hay un Sansón’ (‘You’ve got a Samson inside’). As Peter Evans observes, the brand name recalls the eponymous biblical hero who epitomizes ‘un modelo de masculinidad mítica y arcaica’ (a model of mythic and archaic masculinity’) and who was, as Raúl will be, betrayed and metaphorically castrated by a woman (2004: 84).2 The underpants, coupled with their advertising slogan, exemplify the notion of an inner and inherent masculinity linked to the strength and virility associated with the figure of Samson. They also emphasize, as Fouz Hernández argues, the commercialization of the Spanish macho, insofar as ‘the picture of Raúl’s genitals will become just another cultural motif and a modern icon of the new, commercialised Spain’ (2005: 195). While the male protagonists of this film might have an inner Samson, they also contain an internal weakness, bound up with, to continue the Samson metaphor, both physical appearance and women. Other important symbols of masculine identity tied up with industry, commerce and capitalism in Jamón include the Osborne brandy billboard and the oversized, and undeniably phallic, replica leg of ham that advertises

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the company Los Conquistadores (The Conquerors) for which Raúl works. First seen in front of the company warehouse, which is also where Raúl lives, the giant leg of ham is towed around by Raúl as a means of advertising the business. The ham leg is a visual reminder of the centrality of the phallus as a symbol of masculinity, its detachability cuing the susceptibility of the Spanish macho that will unravel throughout the film. A renowned visual icon of the Spanish landscape, the Osborne brandy billboard is a plain black, bull-shaped silhouette, stripped of its textual content.3 As Ballesteros notes, most of the climactic moments of the film take place ‘Debajo de los “cojones” del toro de Osborne’ (‘Beneath the “balls” of the Osborne bull’) (2001: 195). Most of these instances involve the relations amongst the three main protagonists of the film. It is the site in which Silvia (Penélope Cruz) reveals to José Luis that she is pregnant, in which he then proposes to her and in which she later breaks up with him. But it is also the location in which Silvia first has sex with Raúl. The first encounter between Silvia and José Luis beneath the bull billboard begins with a close-up of the animal’s head before panning downwards, revealing its flatness and supporting scaffolding. In this way, the bull billboard is reminiscent of a prop or the scenic background of a theatrical production, recalling the theatrical sets of ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! discussed in the introduction. The bull billboard is a prop that supports performances of both masculine and national identities. While for Celestino Deleyto the billboard, alongside other aspects such as the close-ups of Raúl’s crotch in the opening sequence, constitute ‘all-too-obvious displays of excessive masculinity’ (1999: 273), for Fouz Hernández the bull silhouette is frequently associated with Spain, signified by the commercial popularity of Spanish flags containing an image of the bull printed in the centre (2013: 51). Crucially though, the ‘cojones’ of this particular billboard are cracked, practically severed from the body of the beast. Swinging back and forth in the wind, the two-dimensional testicles will eventually detach themselves and symbolize, in a manner akin to the Samson underpants, the fragility and vulnerability of masculine identity. Each of

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these props – the underpants, the ham leg and the Osborne bull – exemplifies Spanish masculine identity as over-inflated, exaggerated and commercialized with the two-dimensional status of the two billboards epitomizing this image as a façade or a performance. Supported by these props, the masculine identity embodied by Raúl is characterized by vulnerability from the outset. His masculinity is threatened on three fronts: his consumerist desires, his pursuit of performance-based careers (bullfighter and model) and his corporeal vulnerability. Throughout the film, Raúl covets material goods such as a Yamaha motorbike from Conchita (Stefania Sandrelli), the mother of José Luis, in exchange for his role in the break-up of Silvia and José Luis. The object he most desires is a car, specifically a Mercedes, which Conchita – jealous of Raúl’s affections for her son’s ex-girlfriend – promises him if he, in return, ends his relationship with Silvia. In the concluding sequence, Raúl attacks the Mercedes that belongs to Manuel (Juan Diego), who is not only Conchita’s husband and José Luis’s father but also Silvia’s new love interest. As Manuel and Silvia pull up in the former’s Mercedes, Raúl grabs a ham leg and lunges towards the vehicle. He lifts the makeshift weapon high above his head, the muscles of his naked torso exposed and taut, striking the car bonnet with the ham leg. Collapsing to the ground, he snaps off the Mercedes badge from the front of the car and holds it against his chest, as an indicator of how he, the traditional Spanish macho, has been seduced by the lures of upper class wealth and undone by his consumerist desires (Figure 2.1).4 The Mercedes functions as a reflective device, since it is precisely a Mercedes that Conchita promises Raúl if he agrees to end his relationship with Silvia. Raúl’s longing for the acquisition of material goods forms part of the construction of masculinity as a performance in Jamón with the products he desires acting as props in service of that performance in line with Galt’s paradigm. His violent assault on the Mercedes, an icon of his confused consumerist and sexual desires, constitutes a self-defeating attack on his own masculinity and a shattering of his gendered performance of identity.

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FIGURE 2.1  Raúl, seduced by capitalist consumerism. ‘Jamón, jamón’ directed by Josep Joan Bigas i Luna © Lolafilms, Ovídeo TV S. A., Sogepaq 1992. All rights reserved.

Just as Raúl’s quest for the attainment of material symbols of wealth threaten his masculinity, so too does his pursuit of performance-based careers. Raúl first appears immediately after the opening credits, practising bullfighting with a carretón (a small mechanical contraption that replicates the bull) in the open air of the Aragonese landscape. He declares that: ‘Me van a conocer hasta Huesca. Allí, ¡y en el mundo!’ (‘I’ll be famous even in Huesca. At home and in the rest of the world!). Later, Raúl performs a moonlit bullfighting routine in the nude, on this occasion engaging with a live bull. D’Lugo argues that these scenes index ‘the scenario of social ascent that has been a commonplace in Spanish culture for nearly a century: the idea that the corrida represents for Spain’s marginalized southern rural males access to rapid social and economic success’ (1995: 75). Cinematically, this idea recalls the folkloric españoladas of the 1940s and 1950s, which, according to Maria M. Delgado, ‘nurtured a vision of the country as a haven of happy-go-lucky bullfighters’ (1999: 49). By returning to this historical cinematic function of the bullfighter in Francoist cinema, Jamón produces a palimpsestic rewriting of its significance as a performance of masculinity, reinscribing the pursuit of a professional career as

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a bullfighter as one of disillusionment and disappointment rather than ensured success. In this way, the film undermines Raúl’s antiquated performance of masculinity and reveals its ineptitude in contemporary democratic Spain. Bullfighting is not the only profession based on performance in which Raúl is interested. He also auditions as an underwear model for Samson. His pursuit of this professional path proves successful and a huge billboard of his crotch encased in Samson underpants is erected, adorning the Spanish landscape just like the Osborne bull. The transformation of the image of Raúl’s crotch into an over-inflated advertising icon epitomizes, the commercialization of Spanish  masculine identity, its two-dimensionality emphasizing this as a performance. Here, the Spanish male body becomes a product to be ‘empaquetado’ (‘packaged’) and sold. Jamón highlights this process of the objectification of the male body, and its conversion into a commercial product, as a means of making visible the vulnerability of the male body and the constructedness of masculinity as a performance. From its opening sequence, Jamón draws attention to the corporeal vulnerability of the male body. The credits begin on what appears to be a nondiegetic black background, which is then revealed to be the smooth surface of the two-dimensional, over-inflated cojones of the Osborne billboard, the visible crack between them and the body of the bull emphasized by a creaking sound as they sway in the wind. A panning shot of the landscape follows, two figures just visible in the distance, before cutting to Raúl practising his bullfighting technique. The establishing shot of Raúl, like that of the Osborne bull, is an extreme close-up on his genitals, concealed beneath his bright blue, tight-fitting shorts. The extreme close-up simultaneously stresses male genitalia as a privileged locus of masculine identity and accentuates the fragility of the male form through its fragmentation. Raúl’s corporeal vulnerability is also highlighted through his sparse clothing, his thin grey vest and small blue shorts, coupled with his exposed limbs, starkly contrasting with the elaborate traje de luces (suit of lights) typically worn by bullfighters in the arena. A later bullfighting sequence takes this to the extreme when Raúl and

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his friend bullfight by moonlight and in the nude. These sequences emphasize the penetrability of the bullfighter’s body which, as Fouz Hernández argues, ambiguously signifies phallic and penetrative potential as well as a vulnerability to penetration (2013: 53). Through cracked cojones, extreme close-ups and a lack of clothing, the opening sequence of Jamón underscores masculine corporeal vulnerability. The visual fragmentation and objectification of Raúl’s body occurs diegetically within the film in the underwear audition sequence. The scene begins with another extreme close-up of Raúl’s crotch, this time encased in small white briefs. Visible at the edge of the frame is a video camera, focused, like the non-diegetic camera of the film, on the crotch of the protagonist. Both cameras pan upwards to focus on Raúl’s face, as he is asked his name, age and profession. Raúl answers the questions, avoiding looking directly into the camera, his eyes following its trajectory to focus on the crotch of the next contestant in the line-up. In addition to the metacinematic presence of the camera within the frame, the shots of Conchita watching these images elsewhere in the factory emphasize the visual objectification of the male body as a spectacular object for consumption by others (Figure 2.2). As an unseen

FIGURE 2.2  The fragmented male form. ‘Jamón, jamón’ directed by Josep Joan Bigas i Luna © Lolafilms, Ovídeo TV S. A., Sogepaq 1992. All rights reserved.

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spectator, Conchita denies the objectified men, including Raúl, the chance to look back, crucial for the evasion of instabilities attached to the male pinup (Dyer 1982: 63). Besides fragmenting the male form through its visual objectification, Jamón also emphasizes Raúl’s corporeal vulnerability, often by means of the penetration of his skin by a foreign object: he cuts his finger when trying to slice a bit of ham for Silvia and stands on a shard of glass while barefoot. A further dimension to his weakened masculine potential is his inability to ‘perform’ sexually with Conchita. In this way, Jamón repeatedly underscores the extent to which Raúl’s performance of masculinity falls short. The notion of a fragile masculine identity is additionally borne out by the death of José Luis, an event foreshadowed by the cuckoo clock on the wall of Silvia’s kitchen. The clock features in two scenes in the film, both of which concern a dramatic moment in the relationship between José Luis and Silvia, their engagement and then their separation, and both of which contain references to death. The first close-up on this icon occurs after Silvia and José Luis have had a disagreement about him not yet having told his mother about their relationship and engagement. Silvia is seen in her bedroom contemplating her engagement ring, a ring-pull from a soft drinks can, before the image cuts to a close-up on the chiming cuckoo clock. The hands of the clock read midnight and its pendulum swings violently back and forth. The camera pans to Silvia’s mother Carmen (Anna Galiena), preparing to leave to work as a barmaid and sex worker in a local bar by the motorway. Before leaving, Carmen has a conversation with Silvia, who dramatically declares that if she does not marry José Luis, she will commit suicide. Carmen responds that ‘Si te suicidas, yo te suicido a puntapiés’ (‘If you do, I’ll kick the life out of you’). A second close-up on the cuckoo clock occurs after a confrontation between Silvia, Conchita and José Luis, in which the latter vows to kill rival Raúl. The sequence begins with Silvia looking contemplative, sitting at the kitchen table, absentmindedly playing with a cocktail stick – notably, a phallic symbol – rather than her ring-pull engagement ring. The clock starts to chime,

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framed in an extreme close-up. A startled Silvia grabs the closest object to her – what appears to be a bull’s horn (yet another phallic symbol) – and attacks the timepiece. Filmed in slow motion and accompanied by dramatic music, the clock crashes to the floor at Silvia’s feet. The sound of the clock ticking and chiming mark the passage of time and imbue these scenes with a sense of impending tragedy, indicating the forthcoming death of José Luis. As part of the portrait of flawed masculinity depicted in this film, the cuckoo clock underscores the ultimate fallibility of man: his mortality. In Jamón, the fatal victim of Spanish machismo is man himself, underscored not only by Raúl’s self-defeat but also by the death of José Luis at the hands of Raúl. Crucially, José Luis must die in order to nullify the homoeroticism  – the ultimate threat to heterosexual masculinity – between him and Raúl. The fatal blow delivered by Raúl occurs in an overhead shot, a slow-motion closeup of the precise moment of José Luis’s death. A sharp cut reveals a closeup of his lifeless hand, his Rolex watch – another symbol of commercialized masculinity and a prop that supports José Luis’s performance of masculinity – visible on his wrist at the edge of the frame. A cut to a long shot depicts Raúl, his back arched, beside the lifeless body of his rival. As the camera draws closer to the two men entangled on the ground, Raúl leans forward, resting his head on the inert corpse of José Luis. Bare-chested and with his jeans unfastened, Raúl clutches his crotch, the locus of one of José Luis’s blows, emphasizing the palpable homoeroticism of the scene. For Perriam, this ‘homoerotic pietà’ epitomizes the ‘homoerotic courtship based around male rivalry’ between Raúl and José Luis (2003: 114). In this climactic sequence, commercialization, death and homoeroticism all emerge as threats to the construction of masculinity in Jamón. In an attempt to overwrite these threats and sustain the performance of masculinity, the final image of the film – a tableau vivant – replaces the ‘homoerotic pietà’ between the two male protagonists with two heteronormative pietàs, between Raúl and Conchita and Carmen and José

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Luis.5 Within the framework of performance, this tableau vivant is significant both metaphorically and theatrically. Aesthetically, the immobility of the main characters – contrasted with the farmer herding his sheep in the background – resonates with the stillness of the inert corpse of José Luis, the living indistinguishable from the dead. In terms of theatricality, their staged positioning conveys the idea that the actors are awaiting the curtain closing on their production, the cinematic equivalent of which is the end credits rolling. Through the inclusion of the aesthetic device of the tableau vivant, Jamón demonstrates the extent to which the film as a whole is invested in a performance of masculinity.

Performing heteronormativity: Ocho apellidos vascos6 The plot of box-office sensation Ocho apellidos vascos, and its sequel Ocho apellidos catalanes (Spanish Affair 2) (Martínez Lázaro 2015), hinges upon the nuptials of Amaia (Clara Lago). While this is unsurprising given that they are romantic comedies, which typically conclude with weddings (Claire Mortimer 2010: 31), what is surprising is that neither ceremony ultimately takes place, leaving Amaia unmarried, albeit happily and having found the right man for her, at the end of each film. Performance and performativity permeate the marriage upon which Ocho apellidos hinges. Ditched by her fiancé, Amaia enlists Rafa (Dani Rovira) – a slick-haired, silver-tongued waiter from Seville with whom she shares a chaste one-night-stand on her no-longerrequired hen party – to play the role of her beloved so as not to have to admit to her father Koldo (Karra Elejalde) that she has been jilted. The film focuses on Rafa’s transformation from Andalusian into Basque and his performance as Antxón, simultaneously revealing the performativity of regional identity and of the heteronormative wedding ceremony. Their prospective marriage

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also constitutes a utopian unificatory gesture, uniting two protagonists from distinct autonomous regions within Spain. But while Ocho apellidos appears, on the surface, to engage with the regional identities of Andalusia and the Basque Country, what it ultimately proposes, by means of performance and performativity, is the erasure of difference. Ocho apellidos immediately quashes the idealist image of the marriage ceremony. The film begins with scenes of Amaia’s hen party in Seville and the revelation that her fiancé has unceremoniously abandoned her. Once back in her hometown in the Basque Country, Amaia attempts to return her custommade wedding dress, willing to take a cut-price refund for the item. However, all faith in heteronormative romance is not lost as her abandonment provides the pretext for the relationship that will preoccupy the rest of the film: that of Amaia and Rafa. Their mutual antipathy, a staple of the romantic comedy (Mortimer 2010: 4), is largely motivated by their distinct regional identities, explicitly underscored by Andalusian Rafa taking to the stage to entertain the crowd in a Seville bar with stereotypical jokes, delivered in an exaggerated Basque accent, about the stupidity of people from the Basque Country, and by the Basque Amaia subsequently taking offence at the jibes. However, the hostility between them quickly dissipates and the couple transition, from one scene to the next, from arguing heatedly in the street outside the bar to kissing passionately inside Rafa’s apartment. An innocent one-night-stand ensues in which an inebriated Amaia seductively undresses only to collapse, lifeless, onto Rafa’s bed before disappearing the next morning. Declaring, much to the bewilderment of his friends, that he has fallen in love with her, an intrepid Rafa  abandons his beloved Andalusia and sets off for the Basque Country in order to return Amaia’s forgotten handbag but also with the intention of rescuing his Basque Princess from las Vascongadas (the Basque Provinces) and returning with her to his homeland. Amaia instead convinces him to remain with her in the Basque Country in order to assure her father that she  has  not  been jilted. The climactic sequence of the film sees Amaia and

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Rafa at the altar. While Ocho apellidos immediately undercuts the wedding as the romantic ideal, its plot hinges precisely, if falsely, on the sustained promise of the wedding as the climax and ultimate objective of the diegesis. The marriage around which Ocho apellidos pivots is in effect a twofold performance, dependent upon Rafa’s disguise of his Andalusian identity and his assumption not just of a Basque identity but also that of Amaia’s exboyfriend Antxón. In terms of convincing Koldo that they are in a relationship, Rafa consistently persuades Amaia to act in the way thought traditional of heteronormative couples. For example, when they are aboard Koldo’s fishing boat, Rafa dares to place his hand on Amaia’s posterior commenting that they are supposed to be getting married before advising her – much to her consternation – that: ‘Te voy a dar un beso. […] Voy con lengua, aviso’ (‘I’m going to kiss you. […] With my tongue’). With regard to persuading Koldo of Rafa’s Basqueness, this process begins with a physical transformation, a reversal of the makeover paradigm of the romcom genre which ‘insists that without regular fashion makeovers, a girl lives a life of quiet desperation’ (Thomas Doherty 2010: 27). Amaia begins by changing Rafa’s clothes before removing his gold chain from around his neck, piercing his ear and instructing him to stop using hair gel. The performance continues through Rafa’s adoption of a stereotypical Basque identity. He deploys his exaggerated Basque accent, drops Basque phrases (such as aupa (hello) and agur (goodbye)) into conversation and insists that he plays pelota vasca (a sport played with a ball using one’s hand or an implement against a wall) as well as taking part in political demonstrations. Each of these aspects of his performance is subject to scrutiny. A pertinent example is the scene which gives the film its name, whereby Koldo demands to know Rafa’s eight Basque surnames – described by Peter Buse and Núria Triana Toribio as ‘that perfect shorthand for the supposed obsession in the País Vasco with cultural and racial purity’ (2015: 232). This scene epitomizes the connection between performance and marriage since ‘Following the rule

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of eight surnames is a form of endogamic isolationism: the test of a marriage’s validity is that both sides can point to a pedigree going back three generations’ (Buse and Triana Toribio 2015: 232). It is not just previous generations that are at stake with this rule but also, and arguably more importantly, future generations. This is emphasized by Amaia herself who comments, after Koldo’s dismay that Rafa/Antxón’s final Basque surname (‘Clemente’) is not authentically Basque, that ‘tu nieto sí tendría ocho’ (‘your grandchild will have eight’). By interrogating Rafa in this way, Koldo simultaneously, albeit unknowingly, tests his (fake) future son-in-law’s performance of Basque identity and scrutinizes his suitability as his daughter’s future husband and the father of their future children. While Rafa’s enactment of Antxón and performance of Basqueness preoccupy the plot, the performativity of regional identity is foregrounded from the outset. In the opening scene, Amaia ‘embodies a sexualized ideal of Andalusian femininity’ in her pink and white polka-dot flamenco-style dress complete with smoky, sultry eye make-up, slicked-back hair, a carnation behind her ear and tacky hooped earrings (Buse and Triana Toribio 2015: 238, original emphasis). Performance rests at the core of the relationship between Amaia and Rafa. Amaia may be Basque but ‘what Rafa falls for is her masquerade of the Andalusian’ with the remainder of the film demonstrating that ‘with the right costume and props, Basqueness can be faked just as well, even by someone wholly lacking the wherewithal to do so’ (Buse and Triana Toribio 2015: 238). In Ocho apellidos, the performativity of regional identities, and their potential deceptiveness, is embraced by both Rafa and Amaia. Besides demonstrating the performativity of regional identities, the theme of performativity emerges via the link between marriage and performance in Ocho apellidos, in terms of both genre and theory. For Mortimer, performance is central to the romantic comedy genre. She describes ‘mistaken identity, disguise and masquerade’ as typical features of the romcom (2010: 5), which provides ‘moments where performance becomes vital in creating comedy’

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with characters often adopting alternative identities, lying, exaggerating, impersonating or masquerading, creating ‘a layered performance’ (2010: 82–3). While this is precisely what occurs in Ocho apellidos, Mortimer’s observations do not relate performance and its relevance within the romcom to the heteronormative institutions of weddings and marriage. Conversely, the link between marriage and performance lies at the heart of the theoretical paradigm of performativity, inspired by Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, which constitutes a key component of contemporary considerations of identity. Austin stakes a claim for the heteronormative wedding ceremony as the foundational instance of the performative utterance, defined as statements that ‘do not “describe” or “report” or constate anything at all’ but in which ‘the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action’ ([1962] 1994: 5). The very first example given by Austin is ‘“I do (sc. Take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife)” – as uttered in the course of the marriage ceremony’ ([1962]1994: 5). There are fourteen subsequent references to marriage and the performative utterance of ‘I do’ throughout the text, underscoring the centrality of this example for the Austinian paradigm of performativity. The importance of the heteronormative wedding ceremony for the framework of performativity is ironic given its influence within the field of queer theory, epitomized by the work of Butler and Sedgwick, among others. Highlighting this irony, Sedgwick notes that most of Austin’s references to the performative wedding-ceremony utterance ‘are offered as examples of the different ways things can go wrong with performative utterances […] but even more because it is as examples they are offered in the first place – hence as, performatively, voided in advance’ (2003: 71, original emphasis). While Austin’s text admittedly installs ‘monogamous heterosexual dyadic church- and state-sanctioned marriage at the definitional center of an entire philosophical edifice’, it also simultaneously ‘posits as the first heuristic device of that philosophy the class of things (e.g., personal characteristics or object choices) that can preclude or vitiate marriage’ (Sedgwick 2003: 71). In other

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words, although the heteronormative wedding ceremony constitutes the central pillar of the framework of performativity, what Austin ultimately, albeit unintentionally, underscores is its fragility and the conditions by which this performative gesture is at risk of being rendered null and void. The climactic scene of Ocho apellidos exemplifies this concern with the fragility of the performative heteronormative wedding ceremony and the ways in which the epitomic performative statement – the ‘I do’ at the heart of the ceremony – is threatened on multiple fronts. Outside the church, Amaia tells her father that ‘En las bodas se exagera todo un montón’ (‘Weddings are a fuss about nothing’), hinting at the heteronormative wedding ceremony as a performance or charade. Koldo calls her bluff by commenting that when he first arrived Amaia and ‘Antxón’ were behaving bizarrely but that he now realizes how they truly feel about one another. Although Amaia emphasizes the wedding ceremony as performance, Koldo insists that what lies behind this façade is true love. The audience, if not Koldo, is aware that if there is any truth in this prospective wedding ceremony, it lies in the romance between Amaia and Rafa. The link between the wedding and performance is strengthened as the action proceeds to the interior of the church. The priest, aware of Rafa’s true identity, greets the congregation and offers Rafa the chance to reveal himself, stating that ‘esto tiene unas consecuencias con Dios que … y no ya con Dios, también con Koldo y con el pueblo de Argoitia, etcétera, etcétera’ (‘this has consequences with God … Not just with God, with Koldo, with the people of Argoitia, etc.’). With this statement, the priest invokes what Sedgwick describes as the ‘spatialized dynamic of compulsory witness’ upon which the wedding ceremony depends, given that it is ‘the constitution of a community of witness that makes the marriage’ (2003: 72). For Sedgwick, this emphasizes ‘marriage itself as theater’ insofar as ‘like a play, marriage exists in and for the eyes of others […] a spectacle that denies its audience the ability either to look away from it or equally to intervene in it’ (2003: 72, original emphasis). The bird’s eye view of the chapel cinematographically underscores the community of witness gathered to

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FIGURE 2.3  A community of witness. ‘Ocho apellidos vascos’ directed by Emilio Martínez Lázaro © Lazonafilms, Kowalski Films, Snow Films, Telecinco Cinema 2014. All rights reserved.

watch the wedding of the two protagonists (Figure 2.3). The wedding ceremony in Ocho apellidos is thus not only exemplary of Austinian performativity but also of performance more generally, attesting to the theatrical dimension of the wedding and ensuing marriage, as outlined by Sedgwick. Although the nuptials of Amaia and Rafa are shrouded in performance, lies and deceit, there is a kernel of authenticity at the core of the wedding ceremony. The priest asks Amaia the vital question: ‘¿aceptas a … a Antxón como tu legítimo esposo?’ (‘do you take … Antxon for your lawful wedded husband?’). After a brief pause, Amaia replies, much to Rafa’s and indeed the film audience’s surprise, with a tentative ‘Sí, quiero’ (‘I do’). Amaia’s motivations are not disclosed. Is it that she is prepared to take the performance of the relationship between her and ‘Antxón’ further than Rafa? Is it that she cannot face admitting to her father that the relationship she and her ‘fiancé’ have paraded before him has been a sham, that she was in fact jilted by Antxón? Or is she in fact saying ‘I do’ to marrying her sevillano lover Rafa? This supposition is hardly a stretch, given that the concluding sequence details Amaia’s arrival in Seville seeking to rekindle her relationship with Rafa. Amaia’s performative

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assertion during the marriage ceremony is not part of her performance but is rather a moment of authenticity beneath the layers of performance and performativity that dominate the relationship and nuptials upon which Ocho apellidos focuses. While the relationship between Amaia and Rafa consolidates and perpetuates, at least for Koldo, Basque identity through the presumed heteronormative progression from marriage to family, the couple conversely represents the union of two diverse autonomous regions from within Spain.7 This is known to the majority of the characters diegetically as well as to the film audience and constitutes a utopian unificatory politics. The two regions selected to form this union are highly significant. Andalusia, the region from which Rafa hails, has historically been, and continues to be, simplistically aligned and conflated with Spanish identity, both internally and externally (Labanyi 2003: 1). As Joseba Gabilondo affirms, ‘Andalusia has been the site of negotiaton [sic] of Spain’s orientalization from the “golden age” of Spanish cinema in the 1930s to the present’ (2013: 86). Recalling both the transformation of a Castilian village into an Andalusian hamlet in ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! (discussed in the introduction) and the interrogation of Spanish macho stereotypes in Jamón, Ocho apellidos undertakes to scrutinize not just Andalusian identity but Spanishness more generally. On the other hand, the Basque Country, the home of Amaia, has a conflictive relationship with Spain and Spanish identity particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century. Regional desires for autonomy and independence were quashed by the Castilian centralism of Francoism throughout the majority of the twentieth century. Since 1959, sectors of the Basque population violently struck back against this through an armed conflict that continued long after the death of Franco in 1975. It was not until October 2011, following peace talks, that ETA declared a ceasefire. As Buse and Triana Toribio note, Ocho apellidos ‘appeared quite fresh on the heels of that historic agreement, and so was inevitably interpreted in its wake – indeed, taken to be a by-product of the

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recent peace’ (2015: 233). Against this backdrop, cinema has become a site in which to negotiate Basque identity. As Rob Stone and María Pilar Rodríguez Basque cinema is prejudicially viewed as resorting to ‘the stereotypical structural ploy of combining a rural setting and its contrast with urban decay, simmering violence, everyday brutality in response to oppression and a propensity for sacrifice that resembles martyrdom’ (2015: 201). That said, Stone and Rodríguez contend that ‘Basque films are so varied, even disparate, that they disobey more than they heed the notion of a conformist, united, national cinema’ (2015: 201). With this in mind, the prospective wedding of Rafa and Amaia in Ocho apellidos represents a desire to bring together two distinct factions of the Spanish population through the union of marriage. While the wedding does not take place, Rafa and Amaia do remain together, cementing the heteronormative relationship as a means of unifying Spain. This evokes the iconography of early modern Spain and the unification of the Iberian peninsula through the marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon. This union has been historiographically positioned as creating the modern Spanish nation, as argued by Jean Hippolyte Mariéjol ([1892] 1961: 59) among many others. More recently, scholars have acknowledged that this vision is at once romanticized (Lunenfeld 1977: 59) and reductive (Elizabeth Lehfeldt 2000: 32). At the core of Ferdinand and Isabella’s reign was a ‘project of transforming their two rival kingdoms into one nation-state’ which they achieved through ‘the formulation of Spanish identity as exclusively Christian’ (Barbara Weissberger 2003: xiii). Despite its historical representation, the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella only assured the unity of the Iberian peninsula via the assertion of ethnic and religious singularity and the expulsion of those who did not conform to this paradigm.8 The implicit evocation of the iconography of Isabella and Ferdinand through the use of marriage as a nationally unifying device in Ocho apellidos is thus highly problematic and exposes the perilous politics – which hinge upon the erasure of difference – at the heart of the film.

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While Rafa and Amaia are initially presented as being poles apart in terms of their regional identities, the film gradually reveals the superficiality of the gulf between them, eventually positing them as being more alike than different. This is the premise of Buse and Triana Toribio’s analysis of the film, in which they conclude that ‘the film is a careful work of compromise, eliding conflicts and dressing up minor differences as major ones’ (2015: 229). As an epitomic example of such differences, the authors cite Rafa’s transposition of the song ‘Sevilla tiene un color especial’ (‘Seville has a special colour’) to the Basque context, whereby he leads a chant of ‘Euskadi tiene un color especial’ through a megaphone at a political demonstration before exposing the universalism of and ‘real thought’ behind this sentiment: that they are superior to the Spanish (2015: 237–8). Additionally, Buse and Triana Toribio observe that the ‘color especial’ of each region is ultimately shown to be ‘more or less identical’ since green is not only ‘the color of the Andalusian flag, as well as Rafa’s football team, Real Betis’ but is also representative of the Basque Country ‘figuring prominently in the ikurriña’ (2015: 238). Red is also an important colour across both regions with both colours featuring in the Basque flag, a visual reminder of which is constantly present in the film due to the fact that it is emblazoned on the case of Amaia’s mobile phone and in the lanterns that adorn the Seville bar in which Rafa works. While Ocho apellidos at the outset presents regional differences within Spain as irreconcilable, the film conversely and consistently works to show how these distinctions are in fact not so great. Buse and Triana Toribio allude to the significance of the political stakes of this elision of difference when they state that ‘carefully structured minor differences are safely negotiated, and are resolved in a church where the wedding may be abandoned but where a shared Spanish Christian heritage is silently affirmed’ (2015: 240). This once again evokes the iconography of the nationally unifying marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand. Buse and Triana Toribio continue by asking ‘Is contemporary Spain this homogeneous place, unmarked by generations of immigration, not to mention the unresolved antagonisms of the civil war?’ and

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conclude by stating that ‘It is those differences – of religion, race, and politics – that remain out of view in Ocho apellidos vascos’ (2015: 240). Although the film can be seen, at best, as an affirmative declaration of the commonalities, rather than divisions, between Spain’s autonomous regions, it can, at worst, be read as a problematic statement advocating the need for centralization and the erasure of difference; a reading which conjures up national spectres concerned with the expulsion of others. Marriage, religion and the performative wedding ceremony rest at the core of this problematic project of national unification, a gesture which likewise depends upon the negation of those excluded by the paradigm of heteronormativity upon which the institution of church marriage depends.

Performing maternity/paternity: Todo lo que tú quieras Extending the focus of heteronormative performativity from marriage to family, Todo lo que tú quieras reconfigures the heteronormative family unit, foregrounding the centrality of the father figure with respect to the performativity of femininity and maternity. Protagonist Leo (Juan Diego Botto), a lawyer focused on resolving family disputes, is married to Alicia (Ana Risueño) and together they have a four-year-old daughter, Dafne (Lucía Fernández Ramos). The film focuses on the rupture of the family unit when Alicia dies suddenly, leaving both Leo and Dafne struggling to come to terms with their loss. Dafne’s requests for a madre postiza (false mother) eventually lead to Leo, inspired by a cross-dressing client, agreeing to perform the role of Dafne’s mother. The performance is achieved by means of make-up, wigs and clothing. While Leo initially only performs this role within the privacy of their home, Dafne soon expresses her desire that Leo permanently act as her mother. Reluctant to do so, in part due to the concern expressed by Dafne’s teacher

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about the child’s grip on reality, Leo at first refuses but eventually assures her that he will do ‘Todo lo que tú quieras’ (‘Anything you want’). Leo begins to dress as Alicia in public as well as in private. This sparks a range of reactions, including mirth and incredulity from his colleague Pedro (Pedro Alonso) and concern and consternation from Dafne’s teacher, before Leo is eventually badly beaten by a group of young men who label him a maricón (fag). Following his recovery, Leo, still cross-dressed, collects his daughter from her new school as she had been taken in by Alicia’s parents while Leo was in hospital. The film concludes with a touching sequence in a hotel room during which Dafne asks to see Leo as her father and they both decide to move on. Todo lo que tú quieras emphasizes the performativity of both femininity and motherhood insofar as Leo is able to adopt the role of the mother solely through the adaptation of his appearance. The focus on the white straight male father figure appropriating this role within the heteronormative family unit risks heteronormativizing drag, rendering it comprehensible only when embodied by the most conventional and hegemonic of characters and thereby reducing its subversive potential as well as its countercultural specificity. What redeems the film from this fate is the character of Alex (José Luis Gómez), an ageing homosexual theatrical performer who mentors Leo in his quest to adopt the role of Dafne’s mother and who exemplifies the plurality of paternity in contemporary society. In what follows, I analyse the importance of the maternal over the paternal bond; the reconfiguration of familial relations following death through performance; the exploration of feminine and maternal identity as performance; the focus on paternity that emerges as the film unfolds; and, finally, the narrow-mindedness of attitudes towards nonconforming paternal identities. In so doing, I demonstrate that performance, theatricality, impersonation and simulation permeate Todo lo que tú quieras. Todo lo que tú quieras immediately foregrounds the importance of the maternal bond over and above the paternal relationship. The first scene of the

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film unfolds in a court room during a custody hearing. The mother outlines all that she does, and what the father does not do, for their son Marcos, while the father contests her accusations. The camera initially depicts each of the parents individually in closely framed shots, alternating between mother and father, as they respond to the questions asked of them. When the mother occupies the foreground position addressing the court, the father remains blurred and out-of-focus in the background and vice versa. Highlighting the instability of the heteronormative couple, the cinematography of this scene also emphasizes the performativity of the fractured family at the heart of the custody hearing. Both parental parties are required to verbally articulate the actions they carry out for the good of the family with the word of one pitted against the other, emphasized by the presence of both individuals framed within the shot.9 Nevertheless, the impression offered in this opening scene is that the mother fulfils a fundamental role within the family unit while the contribution of the father is cast in doubt. This imbalance of parental responsibilities sets the tone for the film as a whole. The following scene shows Leo, the protagonist of the film and the lawyer of one of the parents from the opening sequence, walking along a busy street talking on his mobile phone. He informs Pedro, his colleague, that he no longer worries about ‘la mierda’ (‘bullshit’) spouted by parents in court. This precedes a scene at the school gates where a young girl runs towards the camera to excitedly greet her mother after a day at school. She has drawn a picture which she eagerly shows to her mother. Her mum asks to whom they will show this drawing. The daughter enthusiastically replies ‘A Papi’ (‘To Daddy’) as her mother scoops her up in her arms. Following the custody battle of the opening sequence, the juxtaposition of these two scenes underscore the conventional and stereotypical division of parental labour within the contemporary heteronormative family unit. While the father spends his days working, the mother is the primary caregiver for the child.

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The unexpected death of Alicia disrupts this traditional familial dynamic, forcing Leo and Dafne to redefine their relationship. Crucially, the primary means by which the pair attempt to come to terms with the loss of Alicia as well as reconfigure their bond is through performance and theatricality, a trope examined in Chapter 4. Specifically, Leo performs the role of mother to his daughter by cross-dressing to appear physically similar to his late wife and by enacting the various tasks performed by her prior to her death. It is Dafne who initially posits the idea of maternal simulation when she informs her father that she would like to ask his friend and former love interest Marta (Najwa Nimri) if she could be her mamá postiza (fake mum). Leo asks where she heard that to which Dafne responds that she made it up herself. After a trip to the theatre together, Marta comes home with Leo, settles Dafne in her bed and reads a bedtime story to her, an activity carried out by Alicia rather than Leo prior to her death. Marta subsequently questions Leo about the notion of the madre postiza, indicating that Dafne has already posed the question to Marta about her fulfilling this role. This concept highlights the function of simulation and substitution in the context of this film as a means of coming to terms with the loss of a loved one and the grief that loss instils, an idea seen in Chapter 1 with the substitutions connected to Carmen de la Triana in Blancanieves.10 The notion of a madre postiza plants the idea in Leo’s head that he could fulfil the role of Dafne’s mother. Dafne’s reaction to Leo’s suggestion is one of incredulity: ‘Tú no puedes hacer de mamá. […] los chicos no pueden hacer de chicas’ (‘You cannot be mum. […] Boys cannot be girls’). Leo explains that some men, known as ‘transformistas’ (‘impersonators’) do this, explaining that these men apply lipstick, wax their legs and wear wigs. Leo then appears to have second thoughts about his proposal. Dafne wonders why her father cannot wear lipstick and hacer de mamá (play mum) for her to which he replies that he does not belong to ‘esa clase de hombres’ (‘this class of men’). In spite of making this judgemental statement, Leo eventually concedes, agreeing

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FIGURE 2.4  Leo’s lips. ‘Todo lo que tú quieras’ directed by Achero Mañas © Bellatrix Films S.L., Instituto de Crédito Oficial (ICO), Ministerio de Cultura, Televisión Española (TVE) 2010. All rights reserved.

to ‘pintar los labios’ (‘apply lipstick’) if Dafne in turn promises to go to sleep. Dafne agrees, insisting that he wear ‘Red Silene’, the exact shade of lipstick Alicia wore and emphasizing that Leo must authentically approximate his wife in his performance. An extreme close-up details Leo clumsily applying bright red lipstick, dark stubble clearly visible around his lips, the absence of sound underscoring the extent to which he concentrates on the task at hand (Figure 2.4). A quick cut frames Leo from the shoulders up as he contemplates his reflection, peering directly into the camera which occupies the position of, and functions as, a mirror, in a cinematographic gesture that emphasizes the externalization of the performativity of gender. He turns off the light beside him and walks away from the camera, accompanied by a sound bridge of him reading to Dafne – an activity previously carried out by his wife. Leo’s application of lipstick in this sequence marks the commencement of his and the film’s exploration of the masculine reappropriative performance of feminine, and specifically maternal, identity. The extreme close-ups with which this scene begins locate the lips and the lipstick they bear as key sites of feminine and maternal identity. In so doing, the film highlights an oft-cited parallel between the two sets of lips possessed by women: facial and genital. The shade of lipstick insisted upon by Dafne – bright

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red – further enhances this parallel, given the association between the colour red and the bodily substance of blood. Positing the lips as the primary locale in which Leo commences his imitation of feminine and maternal identity, the film highlights the specific area in which Leo cannot approximate these particular identity categories: female genitalia. Additionally, these shots mimic the gaze of Leo himself, their extreme proximity indicating his focus on his lips alone as he attempts to apply the lipstick as carefully as he can. By positioning the camera as the mirror within which Leo constructs his performance as Alicia, Todo lo que tú quieras implicates the viewer in a direct relationship with the character of Leo and the actor who plays him, Juan Diego Botto. The camera and thus the viewer are forced to bear witness to this performance of feminine identity by the male protagonist of the film. The interplay between reflections and the assumption of a feminine, maternal identity by protagonist Leo continues as he graduates from cosmetics, in the privacy of his home, to wigs, which he contemplates in public. Walking through the busy streets of Madrid, Leo passes a shop that sells hairpieces. A brief shot from inside the shop, framed as a point-of-view shot from the perspective of the mannequin head that bears one of the shop’s products, shows Leo walking by the window. While the mannequin head is blurred in the foreground of the image, occupying the left-hand side of the frame, its face is reflected in the glass of the shop window. Leo returns to contemplate the display in said window. Shot from the street side this time, the mannequin head is frontally framed and in focus while Leo appears only through his reflection, which merges with that of the mannequin head also reflected in the window pane (Figure 2.5). By situating the camera as mirror once again and deploying reflections in this way, Todo lo que tú quieras self-reflexively engages with the role of cinema as a mode of performance, underscoring the significance of cinema with regard to the shaping and reshaping of identities as they are both performed and understood in contemporary society.

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FIGURE 2.5  Leo’s reflection. ‘Todo lo que tú quieras’ directed by Achero Mañas © Bellatrix Films S.L., Instituto de Crédito Oficial (ICO), Ministerio de Cultura, Televisión Española (TVE) 2010. All rights reserved.

While the film might risk both heteronormativizing drag and positing maternal identity as something that can be performed by means of aesthetic approximation, I argue that the primary identity category at stake in Todo lo que tú quieras is not maternity but rather paternity, or at least a feminized version of the paternal. The film emphasizes the plurality of paternal identity, not just through the actions of protagonist Leo but also through the character of Alex, the ageing homosexual performer who guides Leo in his quest to adopt the role of mother to his young daughter. Initially judgemental towards Alex, Leo gradually comes to appreciate him as both an individual and a performer. During a cabaret performance, Leo is addressed directly by Alex, wearing dramatic goth-style make-up including white powder, dark eye make-up and blood-red lipstick: ‘Tienes la mirada igual de una persona quien quise con toda mi alma y que me dejó’ (‘You have the look of someone I loved with all my soul and who left me’). Although this forms part of his performance, Alex looks genuinely moved by the similarities between Leo and this aforementioned loved one. This constitutes a moment of authenticity as both Leo and the viewer discover later in the film when the protagonist

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asks Alex if he truly reminds him of someone he once deeply loved to which Alex responds affirmatively. Leo jumps to the erroneous conclusion that Alex is talking about a former lover and is surprised to later learn that the person in question was in fact Hugo, Alex’s son. Alex’s declaration to the astounded Leo that ‘Los heterosexuales no tenéis el monopolio de la paternidad’ (‘You heteros don’t have a monopoly on paternity’) becomes the key point of the film, despite its focus on the heteronormative father figure and family unit. While the relationship between Alex and his son remains unexplained, the way in which he offers advice to Leo and cares for him as he recuperates from the vicious attack by a group of youngsters emphasizes Alex’s paternal status. Indeed, he replaces Leo’s father, who is only seen briefly, shortly after the death of Alicia. The revelation that Alex too is a father, as well as his adoption of a paternal role in relation to Leo, function as reminders that the contemporary family is not an exclusively heteronormative domain. Nevertheless, the closing scenes of Todo lo que tú quieras showcase the narrow-mindedness of attitudes towards family configurations that do not conform to the heteronormative ideal. In the final scenes of the film, Leo sets out, dressed as Alicia, to collect his daughter from her new school. Touchingly, it is Alex who applies make-up to Leo’s face before he makes this journey, underscoring his paternal position in relation to the protagonist. Leo leaves with his daughter in his arms and the pair makes the journey back to Madrid. They stop at a hotel but are initially refused shelter, the male porter clearly concerned by the cross-dressed Leo. Though ultimately agreeing to let them stay, the porter makes it clear that he is only doing so for the sake of the child, demonstrating his judgemental stance with regard to Leo as a non-conforming parent. As Leo and his daughter sit in their hotel room, Dafne comments that she is looking forward to seeing her father when they get home. Leo explains that she can see him now if she likes, all he has to do is remove his wig and make-up and he will be her dad again, to which she agrees. Dafne watches from the bedroom as Leo transforms himself in the hotel bathroom. He asks

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her what they should do with her mum now, to which she replies that when she wants to see her, she will close her eyes and wish with all her might. Leo agrees to do the same. Dafne then removes Leo’s make-up, commenting on the bruises still visible from the beating and offering to ‘curar’ (‘fix’) them for him, kissing the bruises gently. They embrace tightly. As the camera spins around them, police sirens can be heard in the distance, gradually building to a dramatic crescendo, their flashing lights visible and yet out-of-focus in the background, before the screen cuts to black. The conclusion is therefore ambiguous. Are the police here for Leo? Have Alicia’s parents reported him for taking Dafne from the school? Has the hotel receptionist, who was reluctant to provide a room for the cross-dressed Leo and his daughter, called them suspecting something untoward? Is Leo about to be arrested? While Todo lo que tú quieras foregrounds a spectrum of paternal identities that function out with the conventional boundaries of heteronormativity, it also ultimately demonstrates the lack of comprehension for, and persistence of prejudices towards, nonconformative identity positions.

Performing femininity: Todo sobre mi madre While Jamón, Ocho apellidos and Todo lo que tú quieras preoccupy themselves with intersections of performance and heteronormativity, Todo sobre mi madre reconfigures the heteronormative family unit by dispensing with the patriarchal father figure and stressing instead the performativity of femininity and the maternal. Directed by Pedro Almodóvar and garnering a surfeit of awards, Todo sobre mi madre is the focus of an expansive body of scholarship not just within the context of Spanish cinema, but also more broadly in film studies in terms of its treatment of universal themes such as motherhood, familial structures, transsexualism, death and mourning. Despite this vast corpus of scholarly criticism, a book on the significance of performance in

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contemporary Spanish cinema would be incomplete without the inclusion of this work, in which performance, in myriad forms, takes centre stage. The film focuses on Argentinean Manuela (Cecilia Roth), mother to seventeen-yearold Esteban (Eloy Azorín) as well as a nurse involved in the co-ordination of organ donation and transplantation in Madrid, Spain. When Esteban dies in a tragic car accident following a trip to the theatre to see A Streetcar Named Desire, Manuela embarks on a quest, sparked by her late son who sought to discover ‘todo sobre mi padre’ (‘all about my father’), travelling from Madrid to Barcelona in search of her estranged husband and Esteban’s father. Whilst in the Catalan capital, Manuela surrounds herself with a cluster of women, including Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes), the actress playing the lead role in Streetcar, La Agrado (Antonia San Juan), a transsexual sex worker and an old friend of Manuela, and Sister Rosa (Penélope Cruz), an HIV-positive nun carrying the unborn child of Lola/Esteban (Toni Cantó), Manuela’s ex-partner. Manuela occupies the maternal role within this complex kinship structure, nourishing and caring for each of these women in manifold ways. In this way, the film denounces the need for the patriarchal and traditionally masculine father figure, configuring a family unit founded upon female solidarity and emphasizing both maternal and sisterly bonds amongst women.11 Performance rests at the core of the reconfiguration of the family unit in Todo sobre mi madre. The film concerns itself primarily with the performativity of both maternal and feminine identity, notably through the character of Manuela. While her status as a mother radically shifts following the death of her son, her identity as a maternal figure does not, as she nurtures and tends to the various women with whom she connects in Barcelona. Besides embodying a performative maternal identity, Manuela is additionally a performer, acting in organ donation simulations at work as well as, eventually, on stage in a performance of Streetcar. These instances, coupled with La Agrado’s monologue in which she details her transformation by means of cosmetic surgery, emphasize the extent to which individuals who are not professional

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actors perform in quotidian contexts. Finally, the film metacinematically engages performance both through a focus on characters who are themselves actors (and therefore actors playing actors), such as Huma, and through an interaction with other performance texts, such as Streetcar and All about Eve. Todo sobre mi madre employs both the performativity of gender identity and the plurality of performance as a means of collapsing distinctions between performance and reality, artificiality and authenticity. While Todo sobre mi madre rejects masculinity and paternity in favour of a focus on femininity and maternity, representations of feminine and maternal identity in their myriad forms conform to certain stereotypes. The most notable of these is the correlation between woman and mother, since most of the female characters mother others in some way. Rosa gives birth to baby Esteban, but before that she takes care of marginalized individuals, including transsexuals and sex workers, within the local community. Huma occupies a maternal role in her lesbian relationship with her co-star Nina (Candela Peña), trying to support her through drug addiction. And La Agrado even offers care and assistance to a client who attacks her, a nod, perhaps, to the self-sacrificing, selfeffacing, even sadomasochistic character of motherhood. Manuela is mother to Esteban, will take responsibility for Rosa’s baby after her death and cares for La Agrado, Huma and Rosa in various ways over the course of the film. Her first diegetic encounter with La Agrado involves her rescuing the sex worker from a violent client and then tending to her wounds before cooking her a wholesome and nourishing breakfast the following morning. The first time Manuela meets Huma, she accompanies the actress as she searches the city centre of Barcelona for her drug-addict lover Nina. She then becomes personal assistant to Huma, taking care of anything the star requires. While Rosa initially seeks to help Manuela following their first meeting, trying to convince her own mother to employ Manuela as a cook, Manuela ultimately becomes the primary caregiver to the HIV-positive pregnant nun, taking her into her home and caring for her as she succumbs to the symptoms of her condition. Furthermore, Manuela is a

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nurse, an occupation traditionally carried out by women and which primarily consists of caring for others. She is additionally regarded as an excellent cook, compounded by the various scenes in which she provides food for those around her, including her son Esteban in the opening scenes of the film and La Agrado following her brutal beating. For Martin Márquez, Manuela is ‘associated with urgently tending to the bodily needs of others, with the immediate provision of sustenance and succor’, providing ‘a steady stream of meals and medical attention to all of the characters she encounters’ (2004: 502). Although this adherence to stereotypes of woman as nurturing and maternal is potentially problematic, a generous interpretation might read this in relation to Riviere’s idea that women can use the masquerade of femininity to disguise any socalled masculine attributes they may possess (1929: 303, 306). The film also provides a significant counterpoint to the many maternal women characters in the figure of Rosa’s mother (Rosa María Sardá) whose maternal instincts appear to be virtually non-existent. This is in spite of the fact that she both has a daughter, Rosa, and cares for her husband, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, ‘como si fuera un niño’ (‘as though he were a child’). Her relationship with her daughter, who is cared for in her dying days by Manuela rather than by her own mother, is noticeably strained. She even admits to Manuela, ‘No sé lo que he hecho mal con Rosa. Desde que nació fue como un extraterrestre.’ (‘I don’t know what I did wrong with Rosa. Ever since she was born, she was like an alien.’) The contrastive relationships between Rosa and her biological mother and between Rosa and Manuela demonstrate the extent to which maternity is not restricted to or indeed guaranteed by biology. In this regard, Todo sobre mi madre underscores the performativity of maternal identity rather than a reductive definition of maternity in relation to biology. Manuela’s role as performer in both quotidian and theatrical contexts underscores the idea that there is no difference between ‘genuine womanliness and the “masquerade” […] whether radical or superficial, they are the same thing’ (Riviere 1929: 306). The first link established between Manuela and

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performance occurs early in the film when she and her son eat dinner together while watching All about Eve on television. Shot side-by-side within the same frame, the camera occupying the position of the television set before them, Esteban looks contemplatively at his mother and asks if she would have liked to have been an actress. Manuela responds that it was difficult enough becoming a nurse, emphasizing the transformation, or process of becoming to paraphrase de Beauvoir ([1949] 2014: 293), required to perform her professional role. The adolescent comments that if she were an actress, he would write parts for her, prompting Manuela to reveal that she did act in an amateur group when she was young. In the following scene, Esteban asks his mother if he can watch her act in the organ donation simulations she does at work. The opening scenes of the film thereby establish Manuela as a performer both in theatrical and in everyday contexts. The organ donation simulation scene that follows emphasizes the extent to which performance permeates everyday scenarios as well as functioning as a(n albeit inadequate) rehearsal for Manuela who will be forced to contemplate this scenario in real life after the death of Esteban in a tragic car accident.12 The episode involves Manuela playing the role of a woman whose husband has just lost his life, thereby becoming a prospective organ donor. Manuela plays the part extremely calmly, conveying a sense of disbelief and denial. This will stand in stark contrast with her reaction to learning of Esteban’s death and the requests made then regarding organ donation when she conversely erupts into a grief-stricken emotional outburst. In the initial shot of the simulation sequence, a camera is visible in the right-hand foreground of the frame, drawing attention to the fact that this is a performance created for the benefit of an audience. During the exchange, the camera pans rapidly to the left to show Esteban sitting on a wooden bench, seemingly looking in the opposite direction, before panning rapidly to the left again to show a crowd of people watching the discussion between Manuela and the doctors on a monitor. Like the aforementioned camera visible within the frame, these rapid pans emphasize the presence of an audience, reinforcing the status of this as

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a performance. The doctors ask Manuela if they can call any family members on her behalf to which she responds: ‘No tengo familia. Solo a mi hijo.’ (‘I don’t have family. Just my son.’) At this precise moment, the camera cuts to a closely framed shot of Esteban looking intently just off-camera. Given that Esteban is indeed Manuela’s son and only family, this audiovisual juxtaposition underscores the parallels between performance and reality (within the context of the diegesis) that permeate Todo sobre mi madre. Besides acting in organ donation simulations, Manuela will also act on stage, substituting Nina in a performance of Streetcar and reprising the role of Stella which she played as a young woman in her amateur drama group. With Nina unable to perform because of her drug addiction, Manuela offers to step in for her, explaining to Huma that she knows it by heart because of hearing it repeatedly over the loudspeakers in the theatre. Huma wonders if Manuela can act, to which she responds: ‘Sé mentir muy bien. Y estoy acostumbrada a improvisar.’ (‘I can lie very well. And I’m used to improvising.’) This shot/ reverse shot sequence frames both Huma and Manuela before a dressing table mirror, doubling both women through the inclusion of their reflections within the frame and thereby emphasizing the duality of performance as theatrical and quotidian in this film (Figures 2.6 and 2.7). The sequence continues through a cut to a frontal shot of the stage with Manuela now in the role of Stella,

FIGURE 2.6  Huma doubled. ‘Todo sobre mi madre’ directed by Pedro Almodóvar © El Deseo, Renn Productions, France 2 Cinéma, Vía Digital 1999. All rights reserved.

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FIGURE 2.7  Manuela doubled. ‘Todo sobre mi madre’ directed by Pedro Almodóvar © El Deseo, Renn Productions, France 2 Cinéma, Vía Digital 1999. All rights reserved.

her fake pregnant belly a visual reminder, or indeed a performance, of the maternal role occupied by Manuela throughout the film. The scene ends with Stanley scooping Stella into his arms to take her to hospital. Manuela, in the role of Stella, cries out dramatically in a manner almost identical to her pained emotive outburst after witnessing the death of her son. In this way, Todo sobre mi madre once again draws attention to the parallels between performance and reality, artificiality and authenticity. Alongside Manuela, La Agrado embodies this duality of performance and the correlations amongst performance and reality, artificiality and authenticity during her monologue. Just as Manuela steps into the role of Stella when Nina is unable to perform, La Agrado takes to the stage as a substitute for both Nina and Huma. Explaining that the performance has been cancelled, she advises audience members that while they are entitled to leave and request a refund for their tickets, she is willing to entertain them with her life story. She begins by explaining the origins of her name, an invented moniker, derived from the fact that ‘durante toda la vida sólo he pretendido hacer la vida agradable a los demás’ (‘throughout my life all I have tried to do is make life more pleasant for others’). She then claims that as well as being ‘agradable’ (‘pleasant’), she is also ‘muy auténtica’ (‘very authentic’) before listing the various cosmetic

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enhancements her body, ‘todo hecho a medida’ (‘all made to measure’), has undergone: eye shaping, nose job, breast implants, silicone injections, jaw reduction and laser depilation. She concludes with the assertion that ‘cuesta mucho ser auténtica señora. Y en estas cosas no hay que ser rácana porque una es más auténtica cuánto más se parece a lo que ha soñado de si misma’. (It’s not easy being genuine. But we mustn’t be cheap with anything relating to our image. Because the more a woman resembles what she has dreamed for herself, the more genuine she is.) Scholars generally agree that this scene confirms the central tenet of the film as the authenticity of artifice and performance. As an example, Patrick Paul Garlinger contends that in this scene ‘Artificiality, as well as theatricality, is shown to be authenticity: authenticity still remains intact as a signifier and value’ (2000: 124).13 However, this discourse on authenticity somewhat contradicts an earlier statement by La Agrado who, when asked by Manuela if her Chanel suit was real, responded that ‘yo lo único que tengo de verdad son los sentimientos y los litros de silicona’ (‘the only authentic things that I have are my feelings and my litres of silicone’). Rather than demonstrating artifice as authenticity, La Agrado represents a liminal identity that emerges from the interstices of established identity categories. And it is precisely through performance, and her occupation of the performance space of the stage, that both she and the film convey this idea. La Agrado positions herself on the stage, but crucially in front of the red curtain (Figure 2.8). In the theatre, the red curtain acts as a barrier between stage and auditorium, between the actors and the spectators, and between the world of the work performed and the space of the theatre. Standing before the curtain, La Agrado presents herself as a liminal subject, occupying a liminal space, indicating how she disavows binary constructions such as performance and reality, artificiality and authenticity, male and female, and man and woman. By blurring boundaries between such dichotomous pairings and calling into question their separateness and mutual exclusivity, the affirmative undertone of La Agrado’s monologue, epitomized by her closing statement,

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FIGURE 2.8  La Agrado as liminal subject. ‘Todo sobre mi madre’ directed by Pedro Almodóvar © El Deseo, Renn Productions, France 2 Cinéma, Vía Digital 1999. All rights reserved.

reveals a fissure in the understanding of identity as performative, whereby the individual subject can subvert and challenge the norms of identity that are themselves performatively reiterated through the stylized repetition of acts and gestures (Butler 1988: 519). La Agrado’s monologue also embodies the duality of performance by means of the relationship between performers and spectators. La Agrado directly engages those in the audience by instructing them to make snoring noises if they become bored, assuring them that she will not take offence. The cinematography of this sequence additionally emphasizes the relationship between performer and spectator. The scene begins with a tracking shot of the curtain, followed by an extreme close-up of La Agrado in profile (Figure 2.8) and then a shot of the audience bleached white by the blinding stage lights. In this way, the camera immediately aligns the spectator of the film with La Agrado. Alternating between shots of the audience and of La Agrado on stage, the film encourages, as Silvia Colmenero suggests, a conflation of spectators between the film spectator and the diegetic theatre spectator (2001: 111–12). With this stress on spectatorship, the film foregrounds the duality of performance, which depends not solely on the presence of the performer but also on that of the audience. Performance in Todo sobre mi madre thus constitutes a reciprocal

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exchange between two or more parties, a form of ethical participation and engagement that facilitates compassion and understanding, as we will see in more detail in Chapter 4. Like La Agrado and Manuela, professional performer Huma symbolizes the conflation of boundaries between performance and reality, authenticity and artificiality. The film is dedicated to such women in text superimposed on a theatrical curtain before the end credits: ‘A Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider … A todas las actrices que han hecho de actrices, a todas las mujeres que actúan, a los hombres que actúan y se convierten en mujeres, a todas las personas que quieren ser madres. A mi madre’. (For Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider … To all the actresses who have performed as actresses, to all the women who act, to the men who act and become women, to all those who want to be mothers. For my mother.) Like those listed here, Huma’s engagement with performance is not restricted to her appearances on stage, but also spills over into her everyday life. Her name, like that of La Agrado, is a self-assigned invention: Huma is a variation on humo (smoke) and derives from both her insistence that ‘humo es lo único que ha habido en mi vida’ (‘smoke is all there has been in my life’) and the actress’s fascination with Bette Davis. This latter connection is emphasized in a scene in her dressing room whereby an extreme close-up of an off-screen Huma lighting a cigarette occurs before a blurred photograph of Davis smoking, which comes into focus after the cigarette is lit and the flame extinguished. Furthermore, she draws on the roles she performs in everyday life, repeating the line ‘Whoever you are – I have always depended on the kindness of strangers’ from Streetcar (Tennessee Williams 2000: 225) when Manuela offers to help her search for Nina. Huma is a performer, both on stage and in everyday contexts, an idea visually replicated in the multitude of scenes that take place within her dressing room, in which mirrors multiply her image highlighting the duality, even multiplicity, of performance. The recourse to other performance texts within Todo sobre mi madre additionally indicates the multiplicity of performance and the crossovers

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between and amongst performance and reality, artificiality and authenticity. Just as All about Eve served to inspire Juan Antonio Bardem with the film Cómicos (discussed in the introduction), Mankiewicz’s work is the inspiration for the title of Almodóvar’s film. This is evidenced in one of the opening scenes in which Esteban and Manuela watch the film on television. Esteban reflects upon the translation of the title into Spanish, ‘Eva al desnudo’, remarking that it should instead be ‘Todo sobre Eva’, to which Manuela replies that it sounds odd in Spanish. Esteban begins to write ‘To …’ in his notebook before a cut shows his pencil from below, as though he is writing directly on the camera lens. A shot of Esteban and Manuela side-by-side on their sofa follows as the title of the film appears superimposed in red and white text on the screen between them. While the diegetic and metacinematic recourse to All about Eve serves to give the film its title, the plot of this intertext also inspires Todo sobre mi madre. The scenes shown from All about Eve detail lead character Margo speaking in a derogatory manner about autograph hunters, as well as the first encounter between Margo and Eve. These scenes prefigure important elements of Todo sobre mi madre’s narrative, specifically Esteban’s desire to capture a signature from Huma and Manuela’s relations with Huma and Nina, respectively. Through this metacinematic interaction with All about Eve, Todo sobre mi madre once again deploys performance as a mode that dismantles dichotomous constructions such as theatricality and reality, artificiality and authenticity. Alongside All about Eve, the aforementioned Streetcar is a crucial intertext for Todo sobre mi madre and particularly for Manuela who proclaims that ‘Un tranvía llamado deseo ha marcado mi vida’ (‘A Streetcar Named Desire has marked my life’). Manuela and Esteban see the play in Madrid on his birthday, the night he is killed when chasing Huma for an autograph. Manuela subsequently attends the production alone in Barcelona, an empty seat next to her signifying her absent son. Her emotional reaction on this repeated viewing conveys her grief as well as her attempt to seek solace in performance and theatre. Additionally, Manuela acts in the play herself, starring in the role of

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Stella when Nina is unable to perform. This is in itself another substitution, another reinscription as Manuela later reveals that she played the role of Stella as a young woman in a production of the play by her amateur theatre group. The feminist rewriting of the play’s ending in the performance enacted by Huma et al. also resonates with Manuela’s life. Stella does not conform to Stanley’s machista demands, but rather leaves with her baby vowing never to return, echoing Manuela’s decision to flee from Esteban/Lola while pregnant with their son eighteen years previously. Streetcar fulfils several functions in Todo sobre mi madre, most notably serving as a form of mourning and catharsis for Manuela regarding both Esteban/Lola and the death of her son. Both performance and spectatorship are key here as she engages with Streetcar as both performer and spectator.14 Todo sobre mi madre thus extols the value of performance as a means through which to come to terms with death, loss and grief – a concept I explore in more detail in Chapter 4. And it does so precisely by collapsing distinctions between performance and reality, artificiality and authenticity, which constitutes the core of the conceptual framework of metaperformance, studied in Chapter 3.

Subverting gender, subverting nation The performance of identities across these four films encompasses a range of distinct categories pertaining to both gender and nation. Some of the case studies selected might appear surprising in the context of subversive cinema given the prevalence of normative and dominant identity categories such as masculinity and heteronormativity. But the works in question centre precisely on the fragility and vulnerability of these conventional identity positions. Jamón posits masculinity as a performance that is persistently under threat, subverting the stability of, and rendering vulnerable, the figure of the Spanish macho. Similarly, Ocho apellidos calls into question the centrality

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of the heteronormative marriage, insisting instead upon the possibility of romance, love and heterosexual relations outwith this institution. While both films work to reconfigure what it means to be masculine and heterosexual in contemporary democratic Spain, they additionally explore the intersection of these identity categories with notions of regional and national identities specific to the Spanish context. Though not without issue, Jamón and Ocho apellidos respectively subvert, through performance, clichés of centralized Castilian Spanishness and of Basque and Andalusian identities. If Jamón and Ocho apellidos engage the intersection of gender and national identities, Todo lo que tú quieras and Todo sobre mi madre focus rather on the subversive interplay amongst gender, sexual and familial identity roles. Todo lo que tú quieras subverts heteronormative paternity through drag and performances of maternal femininity. Todo sobre mi madre dispenses with heteronormative paternity in favour of an exploration of a spectrum of maternal identities. Both films risk remaining within the realms of stereotype either heteronormatizing drag (Todo lo que tú quieras) or equating femininity with maternity (Todo sobre mi madre). That said, they exemplify the extent to which performance facilitates the subversion of identity norms. The selfreferential dedication to actresses playing actresses that closes Todo sobre mi madre encapsulates this idea. Self-referentiality with regard to performance constitutes the core of Chapter 3, which takes the theme of metaperformances as its focus.

3 Metaperformances

Most, if not all, of the case studies examined in this book might be studied within the framework of ‘Metaperformances’. Each of the films considered not only features performances within performances but also draws attention to performance as theme and concept within their diegesis. Self-referentiality is a key aspect of meta creative production, no matter the medium. In the realm of literature, Patricia Waugh defines metafiction as ‘fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact’ (1984: 2). In the cinematic sphere, Jacques Gerstenkorn identifies two categories – cinematic reflexivity and filmic reflexivity – both of which have self-referentiality at their core (1987: 7–8). More specifically, Fernando Canet outlines a particular category of metacinema in which directors deploy this framework as a means of expressing their views on their craft (2014: 20). The four films that form the case studies of this chapter have been selected for their self-aware depictions of performance in its manifold dimensions, as well as for their focus on a male director/auteur figure at the helm of a creative production, cinematic, or otherwise, struggling – and, for the most part, failing – to maintain control. To pay homage to the all-encompassing character of the term ‘performance’, I opt not to focus solely on the metacinematic but rather to embrace the breadth and depth of performance as concept as signalled by Jon McKenzie:

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‘performance assembles […] a vast network of discourses and practices’ and ‘brings together […] diverse forces’ (2001: 4). Hence, the chapter title ‘Metaperformances’. As in the preceding chapters, the films featured as case studies here focus on diverse performance modes including dance (specifically flamenco), theatrical and cinematic, and conform to Marvin Carlson’s notion of performance as the demonstration of skills by trained individuals (2004: 3). These performances are metaperformances, or performanceswithin-performances, insofar as they occur at a diegetic level within another layer of performance: that of the actors who play the role of performers. But beyond this, the films themselves self-consciously draw attention to the status of these performances precisely as performances. The films in question are: Carmen (Saura 1983), Familia (Family) (León de Aranoa 1996), La mala educación (Bad Education) (Almodóvar 2004) and También la lluvia (Even the Rain) (Bollaín 2010). While chronology is not one of the overarching threads of organization in this monograph, this chapter does analyse the case studies in chronological order. As evident from the release dates listed, the films in this chapter stretch from the early 1980s, via the 1990s and early 2000s, into the recent past of 2010. Their dates of production thus span various major events that have influenced Spanish culture, politics and society in recent times: the Transition from dictatorship to democracy, European integration, the historical memory push and the contemporary economic Crisis. That there are examples of works drawing upon metaperformance across this vast time period evidences the continued interest in this style of filmmaking in the Spanish context. The self-reflectiveness of metaperformance provides opportunity for self-aware political critique. This is all the more apparent when considering the extent to which Spanish governments and political institutions have laboured to stifle the culture industry, especially latterly with so-called austerity measures.

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Performing fiction, performing reality: Carmen (Saura 1983) Produced by Carlos Saura in 1983, Carmen is the second instalment in a dance trilogy, also featuring Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding) (1981) and El amor brujo (Spellbound Love) (1986). The film is loosely based on the French novella of the same name, written by Prosper Mérimée in 1845 and adapted into an opera by Georges Bizet in 1875. The text has become the focus of countless retellings in diverse media and in various historical, geographical and political scenarios. In the cinematic context, as Phil Powrie et al. note, there were more than eighty cinematic adaptations of the tale between 1906 and 2007 (2007: ix). The first adaptation of the narrative in post-Franco Spain, Saura’s Carmen depicts the rehearsals of a dance company preparing to stage their flamenco-infused version of the story. Director, choreographer and dancer Antonio (Antonio Gades) struggles to find a suitable dancer to play the lead role in his production. Enter Carmen (Laura del Sol), an amateur dancer and flamenco performer in a local bar with whom Antonio becomes infatuated. Inspired by its eponymous protagonist, the plot of the film starts to mirror the Carmen story. With rehearsals ongoing, Carmen and Antonio begin a love affair. Sharing her character’s free spirit, Carmen resists Antonio’s desire to control her. Carmen subsequently engages in a sexual tryst with fellow dancer Tauro (Sebastián Moreno) despite being married to a man recently released from prison and having an affair with Antonio. Tortured, Antonio confronts these men in the only way he knows how, through dance, as fiction and reality become increasingly intertwined. Carmen attempts to flee from Antonio’s restrictive clutches, only to meet her death at the hands of her lover. The film leaves the question open as to whether Carmen’s death is confined to the fictional performance-within-the-film or whether the dancer also perishes.

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The figure of Carmen is a problematic representative of Spain and Spanishness. A product of the Romanticist and exoticist views of Spain in nineteenth-century France, Carmen is a performance of Spanishness imposed upon Spain from beyond Spanish borders. Embedded within the Carmen narrative, performance constitutes the crux of Saura’s film. This is not the celebratory performance of a polished spectacle, but rather a series of deconstructed performances, an unpacking of the labour that supports creative productions and an exposition of its addictive quality. The metadimension of Carmen posits the cinematic medium as reflexive and reflective, an idea symbolized by the prevalence of mirrors in the mise-en-scène. Saura’s Carmen simultaneously reflects on the figure of the tortured male artist and underscores the inherently performative quality of the Carmen narrative as a French account of Spanishness. The performance of Spanishness at the core of the Carmen narrative has been discussed at length in existing scholarship with Marvin D’Lugo contending that ‘From Saura’s point of view, Carmen needs to be read as the symbol of a doubly-tainted artifice: first, a foreign invention of exotic Spain; then, a domesticated variant of that imposture aimed precisely at the exploitation of Spanishness for domestic consumption’ (1987: 53).1 My focus is on how the meta framework exposes the male artist as a tormented figure, unable to control the work that takes its own shape from his creative vision and that eventually takes control of him. For Canet, metacinema is akin to vampirism, highlighting how films about films expose cinema as addictive (2014: 17). Carmen might not strictly qualify as metacinema insofar as it concerns the creation of a dance show rather than a film. But it does depict an artist so consumed by the work he strives to create and the character he portrays that both he and the audience become unable to differentiate between fiction and reality. In this respect, Carmen is akin to a category of metacinematic films discussed by Canet which focus on ‘the difficulties that have to be overcome for a filmmaking project to succeed’ and most commonly feature ‘a director who has to struggle against the troubles

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that arise during the film shooting’ (2014: 20). From its opening scenes, Carmen underscores the torment that Antonio undergoes as he attempts to pull together his production. The film begins with an audition sequence as Antonio searches for someone to play Carmen, opposite him as male lead, Don José. The women auditioning are extras rather than developed characters, their secondary importance underscored by the visual focus on Antonio in this sequence. The cinematography emphasizes his perspective through both close-ups of his face and point-of-view shots. The women initially appear with their backs to the camera in a high-angle shot before their reflections become visible in the wall of mirrors at one end of the dance studio. As the camera zooms in on Antonio watching the women intently, the women disappear, only visible as blurred reflections in the mirrors behind him (Figure 3.1). The lack of visual attention paid to these women echoes Antonio’s dissatisfaction with these dancers for the role of Carmen. Exasperated, he leaves the group, addressing the production’s composer and music director, Paco de Lucía, and complaining that while the girls present ‘no están mal, […] no las veo para

FIGURE 3.1  While the camera focuses on Antonio, the female dancers are only visible as blurred reflections. ‘Carmen’ directed by Carlos Saura © Emiliano Piedra, Televisión Española (TVE) 1983. All rights reserved.

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la Carmen’ (‘are not bad […] I do not see them as Carmen’). His frustrated search, occupying the first fifteen minutes of the film, reveals his objectification of women, his unrealistic expectations and his struggle to quantify his creative vision with reality. A contemporary version of the Don José character he will embody in his own production, Antonio is unable to differentiate between performance and reality, seeking to feel real passion and for his Carmen to feel it in return, rather than the ability to perform passion.2 This alignment with Antonio’s perspective develops as the film progresses. Close-ups of his face and point-of-view shots give way to internal monologues expressed via voice-over as well as visual access to his imagination, signalling his deepening absorption in his work. One of the fonts of Antonio’s anxiety is the source texts from which his production is derived, exemplified by an internal monologue in which Antonio pronounces the words of Mérimée’s text while watching Cristina put a group of female dancers through their paces. As in the introductory sequence, the camera focuses on Antonio rather than the dancing women, following and refocusing on him as he walks to the front of the group leaving the women visible only through their out-of-focus reflections in the studio mirrors. A voice-over grants us access to Antonio’s thoughts, as he watches the dancers and ponders a physical description of Carmen from Mérimée’s novella that details her ‘belleza extraña y salvaje’ (‘strange and wild beauty’): her full lips, her almond-white teeth, her long shiny black hair, bluetinged like a raven, the expression in her eyes, gypsy’s eyes, wolf-like eyes. This same technique occurs when Antonio sees Carmen for the first time in a local dance school and an internal monologue, in voice-over, narrates the excerpt from Mérimée’s text in which the narrator meets Carmen for the first time. The voice-over as technique emphasizes the subjective perspective proffered by the film, stressing as Sarah Kozloff points out, ‘the fact that stories depend upon who tells them’ (1988: 62). For Mary Ann Doane, instances of interior monologue such as this deploy the voice as a means of revealing the ‘inner lining’ of the body, displaying ‘what is inaccessible to the image, what exceeds

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the visible: the “inner life” of the character’ (1980: 41). She deems the voice in this context ‘the privileged mark of interiority, turning the body “inside-out”’ (1980: 41). An emphatic reminder of the artifice of the medium, Antonio’s voice-over also turns the film itself inside-out, dissecting, and laying bare, the internal workings of both the film and its protagonist. The voice-over functions as a gateway into the imagination of the protagonist. In the scene just described, as soon as Antonio’s voice-over stops, operatic music swells, the track beginning in media res. His voice is literally drowned out and replaced by Bizet’s opera, demonstrating that it is not just Mérimée’s source text that preoccupies Antonio. The film cuts to a point-of-view shot from Antonio’s perspective watching the women perform their bulería flamenco steps while we hear ‘Près des ramparts de Séville’. The selection of this song, in which Carmen seductively appeals to Don José to free her, is poignant. On the one hand, from Antonio’s perspective, Carmen demands to be set free from her textual shackles. On the other, the song represents how constricted Antonio is by these previous versions of the Carmen narrative. ‘Près des ramparts de Séville’ features earlier in the same sequence, with Antonio framed alongside audio equipment as he listens to the track, a visual and aural reminder of the repeatability and replayability of recorded performance like the gramophone and Carmen de la Triana’s records in Blancanieves discussed in Chapter 1. The repetition of the operatic refrain as Antonio watches the female dancers rehearse occurs, it is implied, inside Antonio’s head. The voice-over functions as a bridge into his mind as his imagination hijacks the soundtrack of the film. Through metacinematic techniques, Carmen draws attention to the ways in which the versions of Carmen created by both Mérimée and Bizet haunt Antonio and posit him as a tortured artist struggling to find his own creative voice amidst the others that claim ownership over Carmen. As Antonio becomes increasingly absorbed by his work, his mind takes control of image as well as sound. He becomes, like the voice-over narrator in Kozloff ’s paradigm, ‘the mouthpiece of the image-maker’, creator rather

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than created, having ‘generated not only what he is saying but also what we are seeing’ (1988: 45). In this way, Carmen aligns itself with the viewpoint of its protagonist, reinforcing the idea that the narrative of the meta film exposes the difficulties of filmmaking, or in this case artistic production, through the character of the director (Canet 2014: 20). A key scene in this regard occurs just after Antonio and Carmen have slept together for the first time only for Carmen to abandon him in the early hours of the morning. Like the character she plays in Antonio’s production, this signals her elusiveness, free spirit and desire for independence and demonstrates how fiction and reality are intricately intertwined in this film. The physically and emotionally dishevelled Antonio rehearses in his vast empty studio, signalling his isolation and solitude. As he turns his back on the wall of mirrors at one end of the studio and walks away from his reflection, the camera rapidly zooms in on his concerned face. He runs his hands through his hair highlighting his anxious state. ‘No sé … cómo lo voy a hacer’ (‘I don’t know … how I’m going to do it’) he says out loud as he turns his back on the camera and walks towards the mirrors circling his arms. Antonio’s importance is signalled by the display of both his body in situ and his reflection in the mirror, in contrast with the female dancers in his troupe who are typically only visible as blurred reflections as noted above. Through this visual doubling, the film simultaneously emphasizes Antonio’s status as creator and performer as well as the doubling and blurring of the boundaries between performance and life within the context of the film.3 Antonio here appears to seek to channel Carmen himself, performing a series of dance steps that echo what he has previously asked Carmen to perform. The camera zooms in on his reflection, rendering his body in situ out of focus, as he mutters to himself: ‘con abánico, la peineta, la flor, la mantilla, con todo, el tópico … ¡qué más da!’ (‘with a fan, hair comb, flower, mantilla, with everything, the cliché … why not?’). ‘Près des ramparts de Séville’ swells once more on the soundtrack, recalling the scenes described above in which Antonio first listened to then imagined this track as his dancers rehearsed. Given that the song represents

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Carmen’s seduction of Don José in the opera, its presence in this scene emphasizes how Antonio has been seduced both by the dancer playing the role of Carmen and by the clichéd image of Carmen proffered by Mérimée’s novella and Bizet’s opera. The film succumbs to his imagination as Carmen enters the frame, a full-fledged stereotype of Spanishness with elaborate hair, make-up and a black lace flamenco outfit complete with fan, peineta and mantilla as described by Antonio. She emerges shadow first, the waving of her fan causing rippling shadows across the body of Antonio and underscoring her status as an imagined being, a haunting presence. The camera focuses on Carmen, rendering Antonio a blurred reflection. Despite Antonio’s visual eclipse by the clichéd Carmen, this sequence is not about her but rather about him: his imagination, his vision of Carmen, his (frustrated) desire to control her, his inability to forge his own creative vision of the character. Carmen circles Antonio, a frozen figure rooted to the spot. The camera tracks her obsessively, adopting Antonio’s fixation and conveying the seductive appeal of both the dancer playing the role of Carmen and the original texts and their visions of Carmen. Here, the film emphasizes protagonist Carmen and its own metacinematic significance as simulations of Spanishness. Antonio turns his back on her and walks away, toward the camera. But it is Carmen who remains in focus, he still blurred. The camera tracks back with him until he walks outwith the boundaries of the frame. Meanwhile, Carmen, both her body in situ and her reflection in the mirror, remains visible in shot. Her vivid presence, and her reflection in the mirror specifically, allows for ambiguity as to whether this scene depicts a rehearsal between the two dancers or whether she is a figment of Antonio’s imagination. Davies (2004a: 193), D’Lugo (1987: 55–6) and Evlyn Gould (1996: 168–9) highlight the correlation between Antonio’s imagination and the mirror in this sequence. The mirror acts as a screen onto which Antonio projects his vision of Carmen, a metacinematic cipher for the role of the imagination in the creative process. But the mirror is also metacinematic insofar as it is a figure for an

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imagined audience both in relation to the production of Carmen within the film and the film itself. That the mirrors in the studio also conceal Antonio’s office, allowing him to watch the dancers rehearse while he himself remains unseen, underscores this association between mirror and invisible audience. A third metacinematic function of the mirror is its equation with the cinematic camera (D’Lugo 1987: 55–6), exemplified by the structural use of the mirror in the cinematography of the film. In a spiralling mise-en-abyme, this conflates Antonio’s imagination both with the imagined audience of his production of Carmen and with the audience of the film itself. The conflation of diegetic and extra-diegetic, imagined and real audiences is just one of the means through which fiction and reality intertwine in Carmen. As the love affair between Antonio and his eponymous lead dancer intersects with, and mirrors, the rehearsals of the diegetic production of Carmen, it is not always clear whether an event is occurring in a fictional or real sense within the diegesis. For Linda Hutcheon, ‘The film’s most gripping moments occur when the audience cannot tell in which narrative frame the action is taking place’ ([2006] 2013: 165). This is most apparent in the concluding sequence whereby Antonio appears to stab Carmen to death. While the story of Carmen almost always ends with her death (Powrie et al. 2007: ix), in Saura’s Carmen it is unclear whether Carmen is really killed by Antonio, whether her death is limited to the realm of fiction or indeed whether this solely occurs within Anotnio’s imagination. The sequence begins with a rehearsal in which successful bullfighter Escamillo, cuts in on Antonio as he dances with Carmen. The company divides into two groups to perform a flamenco number about a lover consumed by jealousy, a poignant echo of Carmen’s affairs, before Antonio and Escamillo compete individually through dance. Parallels between fiction and reality abound since, in an earlier scene, Antonio had interrupted an intimate encounter between Carmen and Tauro, the dancer who plays Escamillo. When Carmen storms off, Antonio follows her, physically apprehending her in an uncomfortable display of machista force. She insists that their relationship is

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over and that she does not love him anymore. The flamenco song performed by the rest of the company fades into the background, overwritten by the operatic soundtrack of the ‘Toreador Song’. A heroic song about a bullfight performed by Escamillo, the inclusion of this track indexes the earlier scenes in which Bizet’s score featured as a means of granting access to Antonio’s imagination. Although it is difficult to discern Carmen’s exact words over the dramatic music, she appears to call him ‘Antonio’ rather than ‘José’, which suggests that this confrontation is happening in the diegetic reality of the film rather than forming part of the rehearsal. Carmen backs into the room in which the costumes are stored, also the site of her earlier sexual encounter with Tauro/ Escamillo. Antonio attempts to embrace her, only to be pushed away at the precise moment in which we hear laughter on the operatic soundtrack. He pulls out a knife and stabs into the space of the cupboard, which remains outwith the cinematic frame. Carmen subsequently falls to the floor at his feet, clutching her torso. As the music reaches its dramatic crescendo, the camera zooms out and pans across the studio, revealing small groups of individuals who do not appear to react to the stabbing. The metacinematic frame of Carmen leaves open the question of whether or not Carmen dies. Colmeiro (2002: 102–3), Gwynne Edwards (1995: 110) and Robin Fiddian and Peter Evans agree that Carmen’s stage death ‘is mirrored by the offstage death that meets her impersonator’ (1988: 84). However, as Rosella Simonari notes, ‘no blood is spilled’ casting doubt over whether Antonio kills Carmen in reality as well as in fiction (2008: 191). To add a third dimension to the interplay amongst performance and reality in this film, the inclusion of Bizet’s operatic soundtrack here indicates that this may well be a projection of Antonio’s imagination, much like the clichéd Carmen who appears in Antonio’s studio. Beyond this confusion, Carmen’s stabbing in the backstage space of the costume cupboard underscores the self-reflexivity of the film. It is a site in which fiction and reality meet, in which the dancers, transformed through costume, become the characters they play in the

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production. And while the film makes visible the site of the costume cupboard when Antonio interrupts the sexual encounter between Carmen and Tauro, the costume cupboard here is positioned outwith the filmic frame. If Carmen details the unravelling of its protagonist, derailed by his growing infatuation with Carmen and struggle to maintain creative control over his production, this final gesture reads as an expression of auteurist authority. Both Antonio and Saura reassert their control over their respective works, not only through Antonio’s killing of Carmen but also through the decision to have this occur in an unseen, backstage space. Both Saura and the film deny the spectator the opportunity to decide for themselves whether Antonio really kills Carmen or whether this is purely fictional, part of the performance as directed by Antonio or indeed an imagined event that takes place only within Antonio’s mind. If, as Canet suggests, the self-reflexive metacinematic work is a means for the director to express his views on the filmmaking process (2014: 20), both Antonio and the director of Carmen must be understood as fragile, insecure and machista artists only able to assert their creative control by killing those at the heart of their works.

This is not a family: Familia (León de Aranoa 1996) Like Carmen, Familia interweaves performance and reality within its diegesis. The first feature-length film of Spanish socio-realist filmmaker Fernando León de Aranoa, the critically acclaimed Familia, centres on Santiago (Juan Luis Galiardo), a middle-aged man so lonely he hires a troupe of actors to perform as his family on his birthday. That the family comprises actors is not immediately disclosed to the spectator but revealed gradually as the diegetic actors are pushed to their limits by their increasingly difficult director. Santiago’s testing character is apparent from the outset. In the opening scenes

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of the film, Santiago prepares to get out of bed on his birthday. Meanwhile, downstairs, his family anxiously anticipate his entrance. Santiago opens his gifts: a sports top from his adolescent daughter Luna (Elena Anaya), a stopwatch from his mother Rosa (Raquel Rodrigo) and a pipe from his youngest son Nico (Aníbal Carbonero). Indexing Surrealist artist René Magritte’s painting The Treachery of Images, which features an image of a pipe above the words ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ (‘This is not a pipe’), the pipe symbolizes the gap between representation and reality. Like Magritte’s pipe, the family in Familia is not a family but rather a representation of a family. Upon opening the pipe, Santiago erupts: ‘¿De dónde ha salido este idiota? ¿Por qué no sabe que no fumo?’ (‘Where did you find this idiot? Why does he not know that I don’t smoke?’). His wife Carmen (Amparo Muñoz) urges him to calm down, noting that he is upsetting his son who, in turn, declares that he loves his father. ‘Pues no me lo creo’ (‘Well I don’t believe it’), Santiago responds, adding that ‘Yo no quería un hijo gordo […] ni con gafas’ (‘I did not want a fat son […] nor one with glasses’). Santiago’s behaviour knows no limits. As the film progresses, he tells the actor playing the role of his brother Ventura (Chete Lera) that he just screwed his wife Sole (Ágata Lys) (whether or not this actually happens is left open). He suggests to the woman playing the role of his wife that she cut her hair and insists that she join him for a siesta, coercing her into sexual intercourse. And when stranger-indistress Alicia (Béatrice Camurat) enters the fray, Santiago tells her, much to her consternation, that he finds her attractive and will tell his wife about his feelings for her. The truth fully unravels when Santiago’s mother appears to drop dead. But this is all part of the performance. Just as the action in Carmen takes place primarily in the studio where the dancers rehearse, the events of Familia largely unfold within the restricted space of Santiago’s house. Rather than focus on performance in theatrical or artistic contexts, the film renders the family home a stage and the family unit a performance.

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Familia posits the most commonplace social framework, that of the heteronormative family unit, as a site of performance, or a simulation to use Jean Baudrillard’s terms (1994: 27–9). For Baudrillard, ‘the era of simulation […] is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody’ but ‘a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real’ (1994: 2). In this way, the impetus of Familia is how the image of the family unit is not natural or holistic but rather artificial and constructed. Santiago is a complex character, on the one hand eliciting empathy due to his isolation and solitude but, on the other, sparking reactions of discomfort, disapproval and even disgust at his treatment of those he has hired to play the roles of his closest family members. That the film rapidly reveals the truth about Santiago’s business arrangement with the troupe of actors contributes to this sense of ambiguity. Like Antonio in Carmen, Santiago doubles as both the employer who exploits the people who work for him and an isolated individual, though we might wonder if this isolation is due to his exploitative nature.4 As Isolina Ballesteros points out, the opening scenes of the film shatter the illusion of reality and add another layer to the film insofar as we, as spectators, are made aware that we are watching a performance (within a performance) (2001: 289). Through this meta framework, the film posits the diegetic family unit as a microcosm of the film industry. Within this context, Santiago is the director-producer, the rest of the family constitute the cast and Alicia is the spectator, unaware of the artifice of this family unit. For Ballesteros, the familial interactions in the film replicate the exchange amongst director, actors and audience in any production (2001: 289). Familia emphasizes the contractual dimension of the interrelations amongst the characters, showing the contract between Ventura and Santiago in an extreme close-up as the former contemplates the terms of the agreement (Figure 3.2). Martín (André Falcon) is the agent with whom Ventura peruses the contract, underscoring the economic negotiations that underpin industry relationships. Martín appears at various points throughout the film, a

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FIGURE 3.2  Contract in close-up. ‘Familia’ directed by Fernando León de Aranoa © Albares Production, Elías Querejeta Producciones Cinematográficas S.L. 1996. All rights reserved.

mediator between Santiago and the actors, in control of their contracts and the administrator of their payment at the end of the film. For Carlos Heredero, Martín is a mysterious figure with ‘un cierto rasgo mefistofélico’ (‘a touch of Mephistopheles’) about him, citing the scene in which Ventura receives a paper cut upon accepting his contract from Martín, leaving the document, shown in close-up, smeared with his blood (1997: 534). León de Aranoa contends that this emphasizes how ‘Ventura está dispuesto a dejarse la sangre en ese trabajo: era un poco como si vendiera su alma al diablo, efectivamente, ya que está dispuesto a empujar a su mujer para que se meta en la cama con Santiago a fin de cumplir su contrato’. (Ventura is prepared to give up his blood in this job: it was as though he had sold his soul to the devil, in effect, given that he is prepared to push his wife to sleep with Santiago in the name of fulfilling his contract (Heredero 1997: 534).) Returning to Martín, the filmmaker describes him as the stage-manager, noting that he had considered leaving open the possibility that it was in fact Martín who had organized the entire performance but that in the end he omitted a sequence in which ‘Santiago se marchaba en una moto y Martín quedaba como el auténtico señor de la casa,

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como si hubiera sido él quien hubiera querido ver como se desarrollaba un día familiar’ (‘Santiago left on a motorbike and Martín was revealed as the owner of the home, as if it had been him that had wanted to see how a family day would develop’) (Heredero 1997: 534). Through the figure of Martín, the meta framework of Familia foregrounds the industrial, rather than artistic, dimension of performance and creative production. By turning the family unit into a performance, Familia emphasizes the constructedness of such bonds and social structures. Susana Amestoy argues that the film constitutes ‘a fiction about the simulation of a family that is purchased, but one that is […] recreated by means of paid actors who have their own real families (within the film’s diegesis)’ (2014: 116). The real familial relations she mentions are strained, replicating the simulated squabbles amongst the fake family orchestrated by Santiago. And as Amestoy implies, economic and financial concerns lie at both the heart of such relationships and the film in general. As an example, Carmen, the woman playing Santiago’s wife, is in fact married to Ventura, the actor playing the role of Santiago’s brother. The tensions between the couple emerge in a discussion about their contracts and fee for their performances as Santiago’s family in which Carmen’s frustration at Ventura’s purchase of a top-of-the-range family car on finance is evident. Later in the film, Carmen’s frustration turns to jealousy as she observes that Ventura is acting the role of the attentive, caring husband with Sole, the woman playing his wife in the performance orchestrated by Santiago. Ventura replies that this is him at work and that he is a professional to which Carmen responds: ‘¿hay que pagarte? […] ¿y cuánto cuestas? Porque a lo mejor me compensa’ (‘I have to pay you? […] And how much do you cost? Because perhaps I would benefit from this’). Ventura is a better husband in his performance for Santiago than he is in reality with his wife Carmen. In addition to economic worries, Ventura and Carmen face emotional difficulties. A frank discussion between the pair reveals that they do not have children and that this is a bone of contention in their relationship. This very

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gendered and clichéd explanation for relationship problems underscores the simulated character of the family in this film. While Carmen appears eager to have children, fulfilling the maternal role she plays in the production for Santiago, Ventura’s reluctance to have a family is due to the expense. Emotion circles back around to economy. In both reality and fiction within the diegesis, whether part of the performance or a real familial tie, the family unit in Familia is a site of dissatisfaction, compromise and exploitation. As the relationship between Ventura and Carmen indicates, there are distinct layers of performance in Familia with regard to familial connections. The majority of the characters are actors who play the role of family members to protagonist Santiago. In a self-referential turn, the cast of the film, like the other case studies in the chapter, features actors playing actors. Even Santiago, not a professional actor like the rest of the cast, acts in his role as the paternal figure at the head of the imagined family unit. The characters in Familia thus correspond to James Naremore’s definition of metaperformance in which actors ‘must sometimes signal that they act persons who are acting’ (1988: 71–2). For Naremore, such moments impose ‘contrary demands on the players: the need to maintain a unified narrative image, a coherent persona, is matched by an equally strong need to exhibit dissonance or expressive incoherence within the characterization’ (1988: 71–2). Familia explicitly draws attention to the roles of its characters as actors, calling into question the diegetic performances of the actor-characters throughout the film. On various occasions, Santiago deliberately tries to confuse them or make them look foolish. For example, when Ventura comments to Santiago that his wife Carmen (in actuality Ventura’s wife) is ‘un encanto’ (‘a delight’), Santiago responds ‘La tuya también. Me la acabo de follar en el coche’ (‘Yours too. I just fucked her in the car’). And when the family sit round the table, he initiates a conversation in which he asks them about their memories of various, purely fictional, family vacations. When he absents himself, they discuss how they should respond to Santiago’s imagined memories. Sole even consults their

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documentation to see if there is any information about these supposed trips. Although the audience is made aware of the status of these characters as actors playing the part of Santiago’s family, moments of intimacy between real-life couples in the film, such as Ventura and Carmen, read as incestuous infidelity. These intimate episodes typically take place in the kitchen, a domestic domain stereotypically associated with wholesome womanhood, maternity and femininity rather than female sexuality and infidelity. In the first scene, Santiago enters interrupting an embrace between Ventura and Carmen. In the second scene, it is Alicia who stumbles upon the pair in the kitchen, this time having sex up against the glass that separates the kitchen from the dining room. Carmen grips one of the knives suspended against the glass, hinting at the dangerous nature of this sexual encounter. While the audience are fully cognizant, Alicia is at this point unaware that the family are in fact actors. It is through these slippages that Familia uses its framework of metaperformance to convey the contrary demands on the actor-character described by Naremore. Sex dominates familial relations in Familia in both the metaperformance of the family and the real-life connections between the actor-characters. In addition to Ventura and Carmen, the young actors who play the role of Santiago’s adolescent son and daughter also engage in sexual intercourse and are almost discovered in the act by Santiago. Again although the audience is aware that they are not related, their sexual interaction still reads as quasiincestuous given their performance of siblings in the context of the film. For Agustín Cuadrado, ‘la rebeldía de los hijos y la confesión de sus relaciones sexuales – relaciones que son mantenidas entre “hermanos” ficticiamente emparentados, introduciendo así el tema del incesto’ (‘the children’s rebellion and the confession of their sexual relations – relations which occur between fictionally related “siblings”, introducing the theme of incest’) constitutes just one aspect of the dark side of the family exposed in the film (2014: 250). This scene follows an exchange between Santiago and the young actress playing his

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adolescent daughter, Luna, about her boyfriend. Luna is visibly uncomfortable with this discussion in which Santiago, a middle-aged man she does not know, requests details about her sex life and insists that they should talk about these things as father and daughter. Recalling Antonio’s objectification of Carmen and other female dancers in Carmen, this episode epitomizes Santiago’s misogynistic attitudes towards women as sex objects. Though these women perform the roles of his closest family members, they are of course not connected to him by familial ties. The connection between Santiago and these women is, or at least should be, professional. They have entered into a business relationship with him characterized by their delivery of a service (in this case a performance) in exchange for money. Their association is a financial transaction. And yet Santiago crosses professional boundaries with his sexist and sexualising attitudes towards the actors who play the female members of his fictional family. The metaperformance of the family cannot disguise the ugly reality of his retrograde treatment of women. Through the correlation between simulated and genuine familial connections, Familia exposes the perilous undercurrent of patriachy, misogyny and sexual exploitation within the heteronormative family unit. These moments in Familia test the boundaries between performance and reality and push the actor-characters of the film, and their performances as Santiago’s family members, to their limits. A key scene in this regard, and connected to the theme of sex that permeates both fictional and real familial relations in the film, is when Santiago insists he and ‘wife’ Carmen retire to their bedroom for a siesta. Sleep is not on Santiago’s mind however and he questions why Carmen is not undressing, why she is reading rather than lying down. She tries to shrug him off, insisting that she is cold, not tired, has a headache. But he does not take no for an answer, pulling her top to one side and kissing her shoulder. Just as Luna was visibly unsettled by Santiago’s verbal probing about her sex life, Carmen’s uneasiness is palpable in this scene. As Santiago turns off the light, the image fades to black, cinematographically conforming

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to a representational paradigm of rape highlighted by Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver in which ‘rape exists as an absence or gap that is both product and source of textual anxiety, contradiction or censorship’ (1993: 3). Though the sexual act between Santiago and Carmen is not shown, the film leaves no doubt about what takes place between them when, in a subsequent scene, Ventura meets Carmen exiting Santiago’s bedroom, furious with her husband that she has just had to sleep with another man in the name of her performance as an actress, in order to earn a living. How willingly Carmen consents to Santiago’s predatory sexual advances is unclear given that the film fades to black rather than depict their sexual interaction. If not rape, this is coerced sex at the very least, highlighting marriage as a sexual contract. If Carmen consents to Santiago’s sexual advances, she does so for the sake of her performance as his wife, so as not to jeopardize the economic transaction already agreed between her and her director. The omission of the sexual interaction between Santiago and Carmen might, on the one hand, stem from a desire to avoid visualising non-consensual sex on screen given its erotic potential (Dominique Russell 2011: 10) and the ways in which ‘representations of rape […] contribute to an environment where rape and its threat are pervasive’ (Russell 2011: 7).5 But, like the conclusion of Carmen discussed above, it is also a reminder of the power of the director and producer, of those who control the images we see and the voices we hear. It casts doubt over whether the act has taken place. It removes our ability, as spectators, to come to our own decision about the nature of this interaction, how far it is desired and to what degree Carmen consents. It highlights ‘the unrepresentability of rape as a problem of perspective and competing narrations’ and the elusive character of rape which is ‘always shadowy, possibly not there’ (Russell 2011: 9). Within the meta paradigm that governs the film, this episode probes at the delicate boundary between performance and reality and emphasizes that sex occupies an interstitial site poised between the two modes.

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Further complicating the link between sex and performance during this sequence is the discussion that occurs between the rest of the fictitious family while Santiago and Carmen take their siesta. The scene commences with the grandmother of the fictitious family unit visibly upset, tears rolling down her cheeks. But we quickly learn that this is a performance and that these are artificially stimulated tears. Luna is in awe of the older actress and her ability to produce such visceral emotion and asks her for tips as to how to achieve this. The tears shed by Rosa (Raquel Rodrigo), the actress playing the role of Santiago’s mother, are fake twice over, a performance within a performance within a performance. They simultaneously highlight the artifice of performance and its real effects, the extent to which the actor – Rodrigo – must fake it during a performance. They underscore the corporeal commitment of the actor, whose body is one of the principal methods through which they deliver their performance. As Richard Dyer observes, the body is central to performance, its signs conveyed through diverse corporeal aspects, including facial expression, voice, gestures, body posture and body movement (1998: 134). But Rodrigo’s tears also read as tears shed for, and possibly by, her colleague Carmen. Through sequential editing, the film juxtaposes the tears of the grandmother with the concealed performance of marital sex between faux couple Carmen and Santiago. Her tears allude to the troubling character of the unseen sex scene and evoke questions of consent with regard to performance and sexuality in the context of cinematic production. These uneasy boundaries between performance and reality, particularly with regard to sex, in Familia are problematic from a contemporary standpoint in light of the revelations about the pervasiveness of sexual exploitation in the film industry. Both Luna and Carmen engage in sexual encounters of their own choosing after their uncomfortable and coerced sexual exchanges with Santiago, as though they are asserting their right to consent and reclaiming their sexuality outwith the performance orchestrated by Santiago. Unfortunately, these encounters are still performances demanded, mediated and controlled by a male director, Fernando León de Aranoa.

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Films and frames: La mala educación (Almodóvar 2004) Like Antonio in Carmen and Santiago in Familia, the protagonist of La mala educación, filmmaker Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez), is a male auteur invested in creative production. But rather than explore the filmmaker as controlling and manipulative, La mala educación deploys the framework of metaperformance to emphasize how the filmmaker himself can be the object of control and manipulation. The film is semi-autobiographical, inspired by director Almodóvar’s own upbringing and coming-of-age in Francoist Spain.6 The film begins in Madrid in 1980 with established filmmaker Enrique in the midst of a creative crisis. Cue the arrival of Juan (Gael García Bernal), masquerading as Ignacio, Juan’s older brother and an old school friend and childhood sweetheart of Enrique. Desperate to star in one of Enrique’s forthcoming films, aspiring actor Juan gifts Enrique ‘La Visita’ (‘The Visit’), a semi-autobiographical short story written by Ignacio. The first half of the story is based on their childhood and details the development of their infatuation in a religious institution before their brutal separation at the hands of paedophilic priest Padre Manolo (Daniel Giménez Cacho), who is also the perpetrator of sexual advances towards angelic choirboy Ignacio. The second half of the story is fictional in which Enrique Serrano (Alberto Ferreiro), now married, stumbles across Ignacio performing in drag as Zahara (a role also played by Bernal). The pair have a drunken sexual encounter and Zahara subsequently confronts her abuser, Padre Manolo. Enrique adapts Ignacio’s short story into a film, casting Juan, whom he still believes to be Ignacio at this point, in the starring role of Ignacio/Zahara and altering the ending so that Zahara ends up dead at the hands of the priests. During the film shoot, Enrique learns of Juan’s assumption of his brother Ignacio’s identity. But it is only once the final scene of the film has been shot that he discovers the horrifying truth: that Juan

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and the abusive priest, now known as Señor Berenguer (Lluís Homar), are responsible for the death of Ignacio (Francisco Boira), a transsexual and a drug addict who had been blackmailing Berenguer. Through the inclusion of a meta film-within-the-film, La mala educación depicts the creative impulses that drive filmmaking and documents the filmmaking process. Drawing attention to the artistic labour that underpins each and every cinematic work, the film emphasizes the political significance of filmmaking and the power of cinema with regard to confronting controversy. I focus on two key concepts of the meta framework of La mala educación, the film and the frame, to illustrate the affirmative politics at the heart of creative production in what might otherwise be deemed a bleak, dispirited work. The frame, both narrative and cinematographic, is a crucial metacinematic symbol in La mala educación. In terms of narrative, the principal events of the plot are repeatedly reframed from the perspectives of different characters over the course of the film: Ignacio in his short story ‘La Visita’, Enrique in his film adaptation of the story, and Señor Berenguer in his revelation of Juan’s true identity and the ultimate fate of Ignacio. The result of this repeated narrative reframing is a dizzying plot that interweaves past, present and future; fiction and reality; authenticity and artificiality; all infused with multi-layered performances in which all of the main characters have double, if not multiple, iterations. This may sound confusing but, as Ana M. Sánchez-Arce points out, ‘Almodóvar’s decision to cast different actors for different parts even for the same characters reinforces the idea that they are somehow the same but different’ (2020). La mala educación signals the importance of a plurality of viewpoints over a singular account of events. It emphasizes the absence of an accessible historical truth. By telling and retelling the same story from the standpoints of different characters, the film problematizes the division of its characters along Manichean lines. Rather, it presents its protagonists as flawed individuals, at once guilty of the mistreatment of others as well as victims of their own desires and impulses.

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The cinematography of La mala educación echoes its repeated narrative reframing. Stephen Heath elucidates the connection between cinematographic and narrative frames: What enters cinema is a logic of movement and it is this logic that centres the frame. Frame space, in other words, is constructed as narrative space. It is narrative significance that at any moment sets the space of the frame to be followed and ‘read’, and that determines the development of the filmic cues in their contributions to the definition of space in frame. (1981: 36) Heath also indexes the loss at work in film with regard to the filmic frame, ‘the loss of the divisions, the discontinuities, the absences that structure it – as, for example, the “outside” of the frame, off-screen space, the hors-champ’ (1981: 44–5). Relatedly, Sánchez-Arce detects horror vacui, or fear of empty space, in this film, in terms of both narrative and aesthetics (2020). In an attempt to counter this loss and fear of emptiness, the frame is repeatedly filled with as much detail as possible. For example, Juan and Enrique are frequently framed within the filmic frame by windows and doorways. From the opening scene, these frames-within-the-frame capture Juan, highlighting his slippery character and his resistance to any fixed identities.7 The filmic frame also struggles to contain Juan in various exchanges between him and Enrique. When the pair discuss Juan’s suitability – or lack of it, in Enrique’s view – for the part of Zahara in the filmic version of ‘La Visita’, claustrophobic extreme close-ups of the two men characterize the shot/reverse shot pattern of the scene as the sexual tension and anger mounts. Another metacinematic frame-within-theframe concludes this sequence with Enrique watching from a window as Juan leaves, the bounds of the frame fixing Enrique in place while the evasive Juan escapes (Figure 3.3). Just as the plot of the film repeatedly eludes its narrative frame, Juan’s slippery persona frequently evades the cinematographic frame of the film.

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FIGURE 3.3  Enrique fixed in the frame as he watches Juan flee. ‘La mala educación’ directed by Pedro Almodóvar © Canal+ España, El Deseo, Instituto de la Cinematografía y de las Artes Audiovisuales (ICAA), Preparatory Action of the European Union, Televisión Española (TVE) 2004. All rights reserved.

As well as windows and doorways, metacinematic cameras within the frame also seek to fix Juan in place. This occurs not only with regard to the film-within-the-film in which Juan stars as Ignacio/Zahara, but also in a sex scene between him and Berenguer featuring a Super 8 camera. The pair take turns filming one another with the camera, a gift given to Juan by the former priest. The action alternates between the extra-diegetic camera of the film and the images the two men shoot with the Super 8 camera, which for Julián Daniel Gutiérrez Albilla ‘emphasizes the film medium both as a mediator of subjective and collective experiences and as an embodied practice’ (2013: 338). The video format adds a documentary feel to the images, inducing a sense of authenticity through the handheld camera shots and raw quality of the footage. Like the windows and doorways that frame Juan throughout the film, the Super 8 frame-within-the-frame represents the truth closing in on Juan. Visually echoing the small Super 8 frame, squares dominate the geometric mise-en-scène of Ignacio’s apartment where this sex scene takes place: the once colourful, now faded chequered sofa upon which Berenguer and Juan have sex, the mosaic print on the internal doors, the framed paintings on the wall, the colourful stained-glass window. The miniscule frame of the Super 8

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camera filters and narrows our view within the already restricted filmic frame, underscoring the significance of perspective: who narrates these events and how? How far are we to trust what we see? The frame-within-the-frame functions as a microcosm of the film-within-the-film in La mala educación, metacinematically underscoring cinema, filmmaking and cultural production as means of addressing the revisiting and rewriting of troubled and traumatic pasts. What La mala educación does not offer is a definitive resolution or satisfying closure. Rather, it suggests that resolution and closure lie in the process of repeating and revisiting the past through creative means. In La mala educación, the creative reworking of the past and metacinema combine in Enrique’s cinematic adaptation of Ignacio’s short story ‘La Visita’. This focus follows Canet’s definition of metacinema as ‘the cinematic exercise that allows filmmakers to reflect on their medium of expression through the practice of filmmaking’ (2014: 18). In a jarring temporal disjuncture, finished scenes from the film-within-the-film accompany Enrique’s reading of Ignacio’s short story in the opening scenes. Like the frame-within-the-frame, a reduced aspect ratio of 1:85 underscores the transition to the film-within-the-film from the customary anamorphic size of the principal narrative (Sanderson 2013: 484). For Garrett Stewart, this literalizes ‘the libidinal reframing of the past in the director’s conjuring eye’ (2006: 164). The use of a reduced aspect ratio for the film-within-the-film is akin to the voice-over that details Antonio’s internal monologue in Carmen. It is a metacinematic device that emphasizes the artifice of the medium, simultaneously underscoring the subjective perspective that frames the narrative action and exposing the inner mechanisms of the cinematic medium. The shrinking of the screen not only allows access to the inner workings of Enrique’s creative mind but also replicates the experience of cinema viewing. Curtains at the side of the screen adjust to suit the screen format of the film during projection, propelling forward into the future screening of Enrique’s yet-to-be-made film. In the non-linear chronology of

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the film, completed scenes from ‘La Visita’ precede both Enrique’s decision to adapt Ignacio’s short story into a cinematic work and sequences depicting the making of the film, emphasizing process rather than product, the making of the film rather than the film itself. This is made explicit in a scene that details the inner mechanisms of a camera at work in an extreme close-up that pans across ‘pistons and rotors pumping’ (Stewart 2006: 163). In a revelatory voice-over, Enrique explains that he shot ‘La Visita’ as an homage to Ignacio and as a means of discovering the enigma of Juan, who only allowed Enrique to penetrate him physically and whose true identity remained intact until the final day of the film shoot. As Sánchez-Arce notes (2020), the suggestive thrusting motions of the camera mechanisms, coupled with Enrique’s declarations, recall an earlier sex scene depicting Enrique’s penetration of Juan and also featuring a voice-over from the filmmaker. This recalls Doane’s idea that the voice-over, in its exposition of that which ‘exceeds the visible’, turns the body and the character/actor to whom it belongs inside out (1980: 41). Indeed, for Sánchez-Arce, this sequence signals filmmaking as ‘archaeological or detective work’ (2020). By displaying the inner workings of film equipment in conjunction with Enrique’s voice-overs about the unpacking of Juan’s mystery and the making of ‘La Visita’, La mala educación metacinematically underscores the process of filmmaking as one of invasive discovery, enlightenment and comprehension. It is only in the making of the film-within-the-film that the truth comes to light about the death of Ignacio and the extent of Juan’s deception. La mala educación emphasizes the significance of the final day of shooting during which the concluding scene of ‘La Visita’ is filmed, highlighting that like Almodóvar, Enrique ‘likes shooting in continuity’ (Sanderson 2013: 484). Metacinematic elements abound in this scene, the only sequence we see in the process of being filmed rather than in its final cut. An off-screen voice, presumably that of Enrique, demands silence and rolling cameras before a member of the crew announces the beginning of the take with a clapper board. An off-screen voice,

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again presumably Enrique’s, calls ‘Action!’ This off-screen vocal presence recalls Heath’s notion of the loss, specifically that associated with off-screen space, inherent within the filmic frame. While the action focuses on the concluding scene of ‘La Visita’, a brief shot details Enrique and the rest of the film crew watching attentively, a breaking of ‘the “fourth wall”’ (Sanderson 2013: 484). Once the actors have delivered their final lines, a side-on view depicts the film set on the left and the crew and camera equipment on the right as Enrique yells ‘Cut’ (Figure 3.4). This shot emphasizes the divide between cast and crew, fiction and reality with a precise symmetry that belies the interwoven, and far from separate, character of these binaries within La mala educación. But it also marks the endpoint of the filmmaking process as a moment of partition for Enrique, as it is precisely after this scene that Berenguer will reveal the sequence of events leading to Ignacio’s death and Juan’s involvement therein. This divisive image, and the sentiment behind it, echoes an earlier scene from the film-within-the-film in which the young Ignacio describes how his life was divided in two after first being abused by Padre Manolo. On this occasion, a kitsch digital image splits the young boy’s face in two and pulls it apart as

FIGURE 3.4  Neat divisions between fiction (the film set on the left) and reality (the crew on the right)? ‘La mala educación’ directed by Pedro Almodóvar © Canal+ España, El Deseo, Instituto de la Cinematografía y de las Artes Audiovisuales (ICAA), Preparatory Action of the European Union, Televisión Española (TVE) 2004. All rights reserved.

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each half moves off to the side to reveal a black space from which the horrified face of the fictionalized Padre Manolo emerges as he reads ‘La Visita’ in a scene from Enrique’s film. Stewart describes this as the moment ‘that acts as the true forking (indeed splaying) image for the time machine of the whole retrospective plot’ (2006: 166). He points out its condensation of multiple temporalities, with the voice-over of Ignacio at this point articulating ‘not only the priest’s reading, in internal regress, of this visualized incident’ but also ‘the narrator’s own later and parallel reading of this textual confrontation in the expanded version of the story’ (2006: 166). For Stewart, ‘the ongoing temporal violations of montage, its structuring breaks with duration and continuity, have been manifested as a rupture within the representation: in this case the cut itself as a slicing-in-half of the hereafter divided self ’ (2006: 168, original emphasis). If both sequences emphasize the responsibility of Padre Manolo/ Señor Berenguer with regard to these divisive moments in the lives of Ignacio and Enrique, they also metacinematically manifest the violence of the cut, as called by Enrique, and the ability of the filmmaker and of cinema to drastically reconfigure realities. While it is Ignacio’s reality that is dramatically reshaped at the hands of the abusive priest in the head-splicing sequence, it is Enrique whose world will crumble post-shoot following Berenguer’s declarations. The narrative unravelling sparked by Berenguer at the end of this sequence, and as the film proper reaches its climax, is visually paralleled by the physical dismantling of the set in this scene. After Enrique yells ‘Cut!’, the crew move off in different directions and the director congratulates his lead actors. The camera cuts to a frontal shot of Juan, still dressed as Zahara and sat at the priest’s desk. Attended to by the wardrobe assistant, Juan is visibly upset and begins to sob. Enrique tries to approach him but Juan shrugs him off, saying that he will see him later. His sobs become more pronounced as the music swells. The camera tracks back to reveal the surroundings of the artificial set, erected within a warehouse ‘a natural location being used as an artificial set for the shooting of the

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film-within-the-film: metanarrative at its peak’ (Sanderson 2013: 484). The crew dismantle the set and turn out the lights. Filming is over. The deconstruction of the artificial film set simultaneously prefigures the revelations soon to be disclosed by Berenguer, whom we have already seen lurking in the shadows of the set, and constitutes the metacinematic counterpart of Juan’s emotional breakdown, presumably due to the striking proximity between the fictional and real-life fates of his brother Ignacio. As much as this sequence represents, through the violence of the cut, a moment of division for Enrique who is soon to learn the truth about Ignacio’s death and for Juan who is about to see his web of lies unravel, it also refutes that division, fusing fiction and reality, past and present. La mala educación at once negates and reaffirms the potential of cinema and filmmaking in terms of working through and achieving a sense of closure with regard to a traumatic past. Alter ego of Padre Manolo, Señor Berenguer arrives just as the crew wrap up the final sequence of the film-within-thefilm. The ageing paedophilic priest is now a children’s literature editor, thus still controlling the creativity of others as well as deciding ‘which stories are published and which are confined to the closet’ (Sánchez-Arce 2020). Berenguer outlines his version of events, in which he was blackmailed by Ignacio, now a transsexual drug addict, and courted by Juan with the pair ultimately bringing about Ignacio’s demise by means of a lethal dose of heroin. Flashbacks accompany Berenguer’s narration, aligning this sequence of events with the fictional images of Enrique’s film. Enrique’s invented ending, in which Padre Manolo kills Zahara, thus prefigures Berenguer’s revelations about his and Juan’s disposal of Ignacio. The fact that Berenguer only reveals the devastating truth of Ignacio’s death after the final scene of the filmwithin-the-film has been shot, leading in turn to another series of flashbacks and recounting of the narrative, highlights a lack of closure that can be read metacinematically. The art of prefiguring lies at the core of La mala educación. Fiction might not provide closure but it often succeeds in approximating

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emotional truths in the absence of historical data.8 Enrique’s film, already a retelling of Ignacio’s short story which is in itself a reinterpretation of their childhoods, offers but one possible version of events. It is a fictional working through for the filmmaker who struggles to come to terms with the loss of his first love, Ignacio. But the film and the process of making it does not contain a solution for Enrique’s nostalgic yearning for the past, evidenced by Berenguer’s appearance post-shoot. La mala educación emphasizes the artificiality of the cinematic apparatus as a means of providing closure, highlighting its partiality and ultimate ineffectiveness. The conclusion of La mala educación counters the unsatisfactory ending of the film-within-the-film by means of textual commentaries that propel the film into the future by indicating the fates of the main characters. Having learned the truth about Ignacio’s death, Enrique instructs Juan to leave. As the gate to his property closes, its metal grid provides frames for the text that communicates what happened to each of the characters: Ángel Andrade (Juan’s stage name) became a star and heart-throb after the release of ‘La Visita’ but his career suffered in the 1990s and he ultimately ended up married and working solely in television; Señor Berenguer blackmailed Ángel who eventually killed the former priest in a hit and run incident; and Enrique continues to make films with the same passion. The film linguistically condemns Ángel/Juan and Señor Berenguer/Padre Manolo to the past through the use of past tense in these blurbs, but conversely propels Enrique into the future through the use of the gerund and the verb ‘continuar’ (‘to continue’). The movement of the boxes framing the text visually matches the distinct linguistic temporalities applied to these characters. While the boxes that contain the text concerning Juan and Señor Berenguer retreat backwards into their space on the gate, the square that contains the message about Enrique zooms forward towards the camera until only the word ‘pasión’ remains, blurred and out of focus, within the frame. The frame-within-the-frame, earlier deployed visually to highlight Juan’s unfixable identity, here emphasizes cinema and filmmaking as an uncontainable entity

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whose reach and influence cannot be restricted to the final film product. As Jorge Pérez observes, these ironic narrative bubbles provide ‘a surprising future-oriented narrative close’ (2012: 155). The reference to Enrique’s continuing film career constitutes a forward-reaching gesture that expands not only from the 1980s present setting of the film into its year of release (2004), but also even further into the future of subsequent viewings of the film. If making ‘La Visita’ fails to provide Enrique with a therapeutic working through of past trauma, his sustained commitment to filmmaking appears to be what saves him from the destruction and violence that characterizes the lives of the other protagonists. La mala educación thus demonstrates the affirmative politics at the heart of creative production, underscored by its metacinematic focus on films and frames.

Performing crises: También la lluvia (Bollaín 2010) As in La mala educación, the filmmaking process rests at the core of También la lluvia. Based on a script by Scottish screenwriter Paul Laverty, who is known for his work with Ken Loach, the film is the fifth feature-length work of Spanish female filmmaker Icíar Bollaín. The action takes place in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in the year 2000 at the height of the Water War: a series of protests by the people against the privatization of the municipal water supply. Against this backdrop, producer Costa (Luis Tosar) and director Sebastián (Gael García Bernal) collaborate on a Spanish-Mexican cinematic co-production detailing the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean and featuring key figures such as Spanish missionaries Bartolomé de las Casas and Antonio de Montesinos. Local man Daniel (Juan Carlos Aduviri) is the protagonist of both the film-within-the-film and the demonstrations surrounding the Water War. His metacinematic role as Taíno chief Hatuey, who led a revolt against Columbus, emphasizes the parallels between fiction and reality, past and

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present, colonialism and neo-colonialism. As the situation becomes violent, the film crew relocate and subsequently abandon production. The cynical Costa, motivated primarily by money and less than empathetic throughout the film, reveals a heroic side as he assists Daniel’s wife Teresa (Leónidas Chiri) and daughter Belén (Milena Soliz), who has been injured in the riots. As a result, Daniel and Costa resolve their differences, with the local man gifting the Spanish producer a small glass bottle of water, the most precious substance he owns. The film-within-the-film trope in También la lluvia provides a selfreflexive commentary on the act of filmmaking. It conforms to a category of metacinema in which films ‘narrate the difficulties that have to be overcome for a filmmaking project to succeed’ (Canet 2014: 20). For Canet, the most common formula features ‘a director who has to struggle against the troubles that arise during the film shooting’ and while the challenges vary, the producer as ‘the director’s antagonist and the person responsible for his biggest setbacks’ is a constant (2014: 20). In También la lluvia, Costa constitutes a niggling presence for Sebastián though the director usually succeeds in convincing his producer to do things his way: he insists on the casting of Daniel, for example, despite Costa’s reluctance to work with someone he perceives as a contentious troublemaker. Rather than posit producer as primary obstacle then, the film deploys this trope within a metacinematic discourse condemning conservative austerity measures, in terms of both the privatization of the water supply at the heart of the Cochabamba Water War that provides the historical background for the film and the Spanish cultural sphere following the economic crash of 2007–8. Focusing on the latter, I contend that the metacinematic framework of También la lluvia foregrounds a critique of two key aspects of contemporary Spanish filmmaking: the systematic denigration of the cultural sphere by conservative governments in post-Crisis Spain and the gender dimensions of the film industry. While También la lluvia conveys the idea that cinema and other media can express discontent and affect political change, its

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metacinematic dimension suggests a critical self-awareness that acknowledges the limits of artistic production with regard to making a tangible difference in politics and society. In También la lluvia, there are two films-within-the-film: the historical epic directed by Sebastián and produced by Costa and a behind-the-scenes documentary filmed by María (Cassandra Ciangherotti). While the two films are interlinked, it is the historical film that dominates in terms of both narrative and aesthetics. For Canet, the metacinematic film reflecting on the difficulties faced when creating a cinematic work is ‘the perfect excuse for the filmmaker, through an alter ego, to air his thoughts on cinema’ (2014: 20). With this in mind, También la lluvia reads as an implicit critique of the gender dimensions of the cinematic industry, specifically the male-dominant character of production, direction and acting. The immense scale and level of production of the historical epic dramatically overshadows the raw quality of the documentary, which is shot solely by María with a handheld camera. Scenes from the documentary intervene in the film, their presence marked by a switch from colour to black and white, from high resolution precision to low-grade grainy footage, from steady measured shots and carefully framed images to choppy handheld filming and haphazard framing. Rather than a stylized choice, as in Blancanieves discussed in Chapter 1, this transition to a lower quality of filmmaking equipment marks María’s film as less important. Like her documentary, María is muted in También la lluvia. She frequently appears lurking in the background, camera in hand, recording unobtrusively as the male director, producer, actors and crew proceed with their work. Despite her inconspicuous presence, ‘she is often censored and interrupted by her colleagues’ (Fabrizio Cilento 2012: 250), visibly blocked and audibly silenced by Costa and Sebastián on various occasions. In the first scene featuring point-of-view shots from her camera, María, Sebastián and Costa are in a car travelling to the site of the film shoot. With a playful and yet critical tone, María interrogates the men about the problematic geopolitics of their

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production, since they are incongruously making a film about the arrival of Columbus in the Caribbean in the mountains in Bolivia, and his encounters with indigenous Taíno people with Quechuan extras from the Andes. While Sebastián pokes fun at Costa’s ignorance, Costa unashamedly states that the location choice is due to the presence of starving Indians which means lots of extras. He then begins a xenophobic rant about how all indigenous people are the same. Laughing, Sebastián mimes scissors with his fingers, motioning for María to stop recording. In the subsequent scene, María records Costa and a group of locals haphazardly erecting an enormous crucifix for the climactic scene of the film-within-the-film. The grainy black-and-white images from María’s camera crosscut between the men attempting to erect the cross and Sebastián, anxiously observing from a distance. Though they succeed in their task, Sebastián expresses his discomfort to Costa, insisting that they should have hired professionals and a crane. María skirts the edge of the frame, repositioning herself, and her camera, in front of the two men. As María, camera in hand, tilts her head to one side watching Sebastián pensively, he aggressively tells her to ‘apagues esa chingera, por favor’ (‘turn that fucking thing off ’). María shoots him a scathing look before switching off the camera. This is the second instance of Sebastián silencing María within the opening minutes of the film. También la lluvia might initially foreground the subjective perspective of its only developed female character by filtering its images through her camera. But the film simultaneously underscores how this perspective is stifled by the men that surround her. The most forceful silencing of María and her camera occurs when the police arrive to arrest Daniel as filming concludes. Here, the silencing of María becomes physical, aggressive even, as Costa shoves her camera down towards the ground with such force that she jerks forward. Beyond this verbal and physical blocking, as Ilana Dann Luna points out, it is María, ‘a woman, one whose voice is too often ignored in film industries’, who seeks to give voice to others, namely the silenced Bolivian indigenous workers (2014: 197).

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Meanwhile, white Spanish producer Costa ‘not only refuses to listen to her, but […] refuses to “share” his resources, because his ultimate motivation is profit, not social praxis through art’ (2014: 197). This stifling of the most prevalent female character in También la lluvia is significant given that the film is directed by a female filmmaker who has typically focused on strong female protagonists in female-led casts in her filmography to date (Hola, ¿estás sola? (Hello, Are You Alone?), Flores de otro mundo (Flowers From Another World), Te doy mis ojos (Take My Eyes), Mataharis, Katmandú, un espejo en el cielo (Kathmandu, A Reflection of Heaven)). Returning to Canet’s idea of the reflexive metacinematic film as the director’s expression of his views on cinema (2014: 20), the secondary importance of María’s film-within-the-film and her silencing by male protagonists constitute a decisive statement, from Bollaín, about the role of women in the contemporary film industry, indexing the condemnation of the exploitation of female performers, seen, for example, in my discussion of Cómicos in the introduction. María is still a woman of comparative privilege, underscored in scenes that see her, alongside Costa and Sebastián, within moving vehicles, symbolizing their affluence, mobility and freedom to roam. As Luna contends, ‘Bollaín never allows the audience to forget María’s relative position of privilege’ despite her representation of ‘the thrust toward alternate versions of history […] not remembered or recorded in the great books of colonial history’ (2014: 200–1). This is evident when she interviews Daniel about his reasons for playing Hatuey in Sebastián’s film. Her suggestion that he was inspired by the character as a symbol of indigenous resistance is met with silence from Daniel, a refusal to have his acts and motivations verbalized by those more privileged. While María may be marginalized as a woman in the film industry, the film does not align her with Daniel and those he represents. This, coupled with the metacinematic elements of También la lluvia, conveys a self-awareness about the political limits of filmmaking. Sebastián’s hypocrisy underscores this idea. Though his film concerns the wrongs of colonialism and mistreatment of

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indigenous peoples, Sebastián is ignorant of the injustices occurring around him, to the ways in which his own film contributes to and perpetuates those same inequalities within the contemporary neo-colonialist context. Despite their good intentions, silenced María and idealist Sebastián do not ultimately inspire political action or change. In both the diegetic fiction and reality of También la lluvia, it is the Bolivian locals who forge resistance movements and affect revolution in a gesture that opposes privileged, male, metropolitan versions of history and foregrounds instead alternative historical viewpoints. The female extras starring in Sebastián’s film refuse to participate in a scene that would see them pretending to drown their babies, with Daniel acting as translator and explaining to Sebastián that they are unable to contemplate something so abhorrent. Moreover, in the context of the Water War, it is the local women in the village who stand up to the water company employees in the name of their children. Bollaín foregrounds femininity and specifically motherhood in her portrait of indigenous resistance. But her self-aware critique also suggests that she realizes the political limits of her work as a feminist filmmaker. También la lluvia posits the act of filmmaking alongside the Bolivian Water War not to propose an equivalence between them but to highlight how ineffectual it is to make a film, an act which does not compare to the political mobilization of the people in Cochabamba. Though conscious of its limitations, the metacinematic focus of También la lluvia emphasizes filmmaking as a political arena. Several episodes make visible procedures that occur during the making of a film: casting and auditions, script read-throughs, the rehearsing of lines, blocking of scenes, and the viewing of rushes. Blurring fiction and reality, También la lluvia pointedly utilizes structural cinematographical elements in its playful integration of images from the film-within-the-film. As an example, the opening sequence juxtaposes actor credits for También la lluvia with images of a throng of hopeful locals attending an open audition for the film-within-the-film. The

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aspiring actors mostly appear with their backs to camera as they make their way on foot to the auditions. They are filmed, from a moving vehicle carrying Sebastián, Costa and María, in tracking shots that do not linger on the hopeful extras as individuals and that render them blurred and out of focus, in a manner akin to the blurring of the female dancers in Carmen discussed above. The inequality between the locals and the visiting filmmaking team is all too clear. The opening credits inscribe the names of the stars of the film upon the images of those eager to appear as extras in the film-within-the-film, but who also ultimately play the same role in the film we are watching. Listed after the names of her various male co-stars, Cianguerotti is the only cast member to be featured in shot alongside her textual credit. As she prepares to film the lengthy queue of individuals keen to star in the meta production, her camera points directly at her name digitally imprinted along the bottom of the image (Figure 3.5). This establishes the centrality of María/Cianguerotti and highlights gender biases within the film industry, as discussed above. But it also emphasizes the metacinematic frame that surrounds and permeates También la lluvia. As Costa tells Sebastián to pick those he likes the look of from the line of hopeful locals, the credits continue detailing those responsible for ‘Casting Bolivia’ (Rodrigo Bellott and Glenda Rodríguez) followed by the ‘Directoras

FIGURE 3.5  María (Cassandra Cianguerotti) pointedly points her camera at her textual credit. ‘También la lluvia’ directed by Icíar Bollaín © Alebrije Cine y Video, Morena Films, Vaca Films 2010. All rights reserved.

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de Casting’ (Eva Leira and Yolanda Serrano). The juxtaposition of the casting process for the film-within-the-film with the names of the lead actors and those responsible for casting places emphasis on the filmmaking process and makes visible the labour that typically remains unseen to the audience. But it also functions to remind the audience of the fictional frame of the film, to highlight the artifice of the medium, to underscore its mechanics and internal logic. If the credits of a film ‘can announce the power of the author to control what we see’ as David Bordwell argues (1979: 59–60), Bollaín utilizes this power not to reassert her own authority but rather to point, simultaneously, to gender biases at work in the industry as well as to the collaborative processes that underpin the creative process of filmmaking. Such scenes construct a self-reflexive metacinematic discourse that underscores the labour that supports the film as an end product, equally applicable to the film-within-the-film and to the film we are watching, También la lluvia. These scenes largely feature in the first half of the film with the second half dedicated to the increasing political unrest and the concomitant unravelling of Sebastián and Costa’s creative venture. This is in part due to the conflict that erupts between state and people in the Water War but also because of other tensions affecting the cast and crew including alcoholism, family estrangement and lack of self-belief. Producer Costa frequently repeats how valuable various individuals involved in the film-within-the-film are to the production, including Antón, the actor who plays Columbus (Karra Elejalde), Daniel and Sebastián. In this way, También la lluvia metacinematically reflects on the fragility of filmmaking, precisely due to its collaborative nature and reliance on a vast network of individuals. The precarity of filmmaking is, in large part, economic, given the production of También la lluvia in post-Crisis Spain. The Spanish Crisis occurred during the global financial crash of 2007–8, was exacerbated by the property bubble and affected a drastic economic downturn, extreme levels of unemployment and the bankruptcy of major companies. Borne from the devastating impact

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of the Crisis is a sense of frustration and disenchantment with political institutions (Josep Lobera and Víctor Sampedro 2014: 2). The 2011 emergence of anti-austerity Indignados movement, protesting high unemployment rates, welfare cuts and political corruption, attests to this developing disillusionment. Austerity measures introduced in the wake of the crash have proved fatal for the culture industry and cinema in particular. In 2009, amendments to the subsidy system demanded higher thresholds of private investment in film production while simultaneously decreasing ring-fenced state funds (reduced from 88.3 million euros in 2010 to 33.7 million euros in 2014). A further setback was the radical increase of VAT, from 8 to 21 per cent, in September 2012 (Olga Kourelou et al. 2014: 143). Financial concerns emerge in the opening scenes of También la lluvia when Sebastián and Costa discuss budget limitations and the language of the production. Sebastián, eager to be authentic, has insisted that the film be produced in Spanish. Costa explicitly comments that they would have had double the budget and audience had they made the film in English, a statement that applies equally to the film-withinthe-film and to También la lluvia, also made in Spanish rather than English. Just as María and her documentary metacinematically critiques gender inequalities within the industry, Costa’s remark emphasizes the dominance of Anglophone cinema and the attendant struggle for visibility, recognition and funds for non-Anglophone productions. The subsequent scene depicts the erection of an enormous crucifix for one of the key sequences of the filmwithin-the-film, during which Costa declares that his cost-cutting measures have saved 35,000 dollars. Later in the film, Costa brags and laughs on the phone in English, in Daniel’s presence, about how the local extras are delighted with being paid only two dollars a day. Costa ignorantly assumes that Daniel will not understand. But as Daniel subsequently explains, he worked as a bricklayer in the United States for two years. This highlights the insignificance of Costa’s budget concerns in relation to the economic realities of individuals such as Daniel, forced to migrate to provide for their families, their basic

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rights and needs economically exploited by the greed of profit-hungry private enterprises and politicians. Though the metacinematic commentary reflects upon the precariousness and financial struggles of those working in the film industry in contemporary Spain, También la lluvia puts this into perspective by setting this critique against a wider global backdrop of economic hardship and capitalist exploitation. The parallels También la lluvia draws between those making the film-withinthe-film and those protesting the privatization of the water supply are made explicit when the cast and crew of the film meet the mayor of Cochabamba at the town hall while Daniel leads a demonstration outside. The temporal and spatial simultaneity of these events emphasizes the disparity between Daniel and the rest of the cast of the film-within-the-film. A revelatory conversation occurs between the mayor and Sebastián. While the idealistic and somewhat naïve filmmaker remarks that he thinks the demands of the people are reasonable and that people earning the equivalent of two dollars a day cannot afford a 300 per cent increase in water prices, the mayor retorts that he has heard that is what they are paying their extras. Abashed, Sebastián responds that they are on a tight budget. ‘Eso es lo que nos pasa a todos’ (‘Aren’t we all?’), replies the mayor, reinforcing the hypocritical and privileged status of the filmmaker. The financial concerns of the film industry, Bollaín appears to suggest, is not the most grave of situations. Though mindful of the severity of economic hardship on the poorest sectors of the population, the metacinematic dimension of También la lluvia critiques the political denigration of the culture industry in the context of post-Crisis Spain. Temporal distance accompanies the geographic displacement of the film since the action takes place in 2000 despite being produced in 2010 after the economic crash. If Bollaín metacinematically places emphasis on the financial constraints of filmmaking in 2000, she does this from the perspective of post-Crisis Spain, highlighting that the situation is even more precarious and economically challenging at the time of production. The removal of the

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film from the Spanish context to utilize the setting of the Bolivian Water War connects También la lluvia to subversive political strategies of performance under Franco, as seen in the films of Berlanga and Bardem in the introduction to this book. The removed temporal context and spatial setting of the film facilitates an implicit self-reflexive commentary. Performance, in this instance in the context of filmmaking and via metacinematic discourse, forms a crucial component of this strategy.

Subverting authorship, power and control The framework of metaperformance at the heart of each of these four films opens onto a discussion of authorship, power and control. In Carmen, the notion of authorship pertains not only to the male director figure at the helm of the flamenco production but also to the notion of national stereotypes impressed upon Spain from outwith its borders. If in Carmen Spain turns inward on itself to reimagine the clichés enforced upon it from outwith, Familia intensifies this hermetic focus by transposing such questions of authorship, power and control onto the family unit. Meanwhile in La mala educación fractured performances, coupled with a meta framework, provoke slippages amongst the various iterations of the film’s protagonists that call into question the notion of the male auteur. Finally, in También la lluvia the privileged male author figure completely unravels in a critique of both the gender dynamics and economic disparities of the film industry and society. While performance becomes a means through which to exploit and exert control over others, the framework of metaperformance functions to highlight the fragility of the controlling auteurs at the heart of the works, to cast doubt upon their status. Across the four case studies analysed in this chapter, the framework of metaperformance functions as a self-reflexive mode of critique. The object of critique shifts from controlling and manipulative male auteurs in Carmen

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and Familia to controlled and manipulated male figures in La mala educación. Addressing this gender imbalance and the privileged status of the white Western male, my final case study También la lluvia indexes the problematics of the contemporary Spanish film industry in terms of both male domination and with regard to the economic hardships endured since the Crisis. Tempering this is the film’s focus on even more problematic political exploitation, historically in relation to its metacinematic revisitation of colonialism via Sebastián’s filmwithin-the-film and in the contemporary context due to the setting of the film against the backdrop of the Bolivian Water War. Ultimately, the framework of metaperformance, exposing control, authority and manipulation, explores distinct forms of exploitation. Furthermore, only La mala educación reads affirmatively in terms of the creative process as a means of overcoming such exploitation. With this in mind, Chapter 4 engages with films in which performance more positively facilitates catharsis and liberation.

4 Performance as catharsis and therapy

Although engaging the cathartic and therapeutic potential of performance and its representation, this chapter does not straightforwardly contend that this is a wholly affirmative process. The overarching theoretical framework draws inspiration from Richard Schechner’s notion of performance: ‘Performances can be celebratory; performances can terrorize. Many trials and public executions are both. […] Performance is amoral, as useful to tyrants as to those who practice guerrilla theatre. This amorality comes from performance’s subject, transformation: the startling ability of human beings to create themselves, to change, to become – for worse or better – what they ordinarily are not’ (2003: 1). What Schechner highlights here is the myriad uses, both positive and negative, to which performance is put in our contemporary context, especially with regard to its political manipulations. But Schechner also engages the transformative potential of performance, a key facet of the deployment of performance in relation to the renegotiation of identities both within and beyond the Transition to democracy in Spain, as we have already seen in Chapter 2. Departing from this premise, Chapter 4 explores the ways in which the process of performance is one of transformation, catharsis and working through, for both performers and spectators.

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The case studies in this chapter are: Ocaña: Retrat intermitent (Ocaña: An Intermittent Portrait) (Pons 1978), Hable con ella (Talk to Her) (Almodóvar 2002) and Noviembre (November) (Mañas 2003). Ocaña: Retrat intermitent is a documentary and the first feature-length film of Catalan theatre and film director Ventura Pons as well as a cult text associated with the hedonism of the creative cultural explosion following the death of Franco. Through a series of intimate interviews with its eponymous protagonist, the film posits performance as a means through which to come to terms with death. My rereading of the film through this lens of performance and its cathartic, therapeutic properties constitutes a fresh perspective on a work that has, for the most part, been praised as a celebratory, postmodern product of postFranco Spain in contemporary Spanish cinema scholarship. Rather than focus on death per se, my second case study, Hable con ella, centres on the performing body and its significance when rendered still and inert, performing only in the sense of mechanical corporeal functions. Framing this focus is a paradigm of spectatorship in which performer and spectator, both within and beyond the diegesis, become fused together in an ethically problematic pasde-deux that accentuates the ambiguousness of performance and its potential for grave miscommunications. My final case study, Noviembre, features a group of creative youngsters who seek to unveil the revolutionary potential of performance by means of independent and interactive street theatre, which ultimately leads to the death of an individual mid-performance. Blurring the lines between performance and reality, artificiality and authenticity (as seen in the case studies of Chapters 2 and 3) and bordering at times on the politically incorrect, their revolutionary street theatre exposes the threat carried by performance and artistic production in general, which, for the reasons explored throughout this monograph, heralds the political potential to challenge, subvert and transgress the status quo. The focus of this book thus far has been performers rather than spectators. But in this chapter, and the case studies analysed, the relationships between

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performance and spectatorship and between performers and spectators come to the fore. Audience and spectators are a fundamental component of any performance. As Diana Taylor argues, ‘A performance implies an audience or participants, even if that audience is a camera’ (2016: 19). By engaging the connection between the individuals who perform and those who absorb the performance, the films examined here demonstrate the cathartic and therapeutic potential of performance for both performers and spectators. In each case, performance becomes a means through which to work through or process grief, loss and heartbreak. This is highly significant in the context of post-Franco Spain, playing out on both personal and political levels across the works studied. Cathy Caruth, among others, explores the connection between performance and trauma in the form of testimony as a performative speech act ([1996] 2016). But in the works analysed here, it is performance more generally that becomes a means of providing testimony, of working through traumatic events. Whether through performance art, confession, dance, bullfighting, silent cinema, acting and street theatre, performance in these films constitutes both a site of communication facilitating corporeal and emotional connections and a site containing the perilous potential for miscommunications. Rather than a straightforward and celebratory affirmation of performance then, the works explored in this chapter ultimately highlight the ambiguousness of performance.

Authentic artificiality: Ocaña: Retrat intermitent (Pons 1978) Ocaña: Retrat intermitent epitomizes the pervasiveness of performance in post-Franco Spanish cinema. The debut feature-length film of Catalan filmmaker Ventura Pons, Ocaña documents the life and work of Andalusian artist José Ángel Pérez Ocaña, a key figure in the Barcelona counterculture that

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emerged in the period following the death of Franco in 1975. The documentary alternates between confessional fragments, in which Ocaña openly discusses his upbringing, art and relationships, and performance sequences, in which the artist is recorded performing both on stage and in public places. Performance permeates the film as both theme and methodology, since it features in both the monologues of protagonist Ocaña and as part of the diegetic content of the film. The representation of performance in Ocaña proves influential in terms of later configurations of performers in post-Franco Spanish cinema, evident in the analyses of Hable con ella and Noviembre that follow. The intermittent intermingling of fiction and reality in Ocaña demonstrates how performance is not just confined to the artistic sphere, but rather pervades everyday life. In this film, performance blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality, between artificiality and authenticity. Awarded the Premio de Especial Calidad del Ministerio de Cultura (Special Quality Award from the Spanish Ministry of Culture), Ocaña proved popular on the international film festival circuit and unexpectedly, as Pons himself admits, became a cult success (Anabel Campo Vidal 2000: 41). The scholarly interpretation of the film as a celebratory work depicting the spirit of liberation and new-found freedoms following the death of Franco (Campo Vidal 2000, Jo Labanyi 1995, Teresa Vilarós 1998) means that the work’s focus on complex, emotional subjects, such as death, is often overlooked. While the film indeed evidences the hedonistic cultural explosion that characterized the immediate post-Franco period, my examination of Ocaña through the lens of performance and its therapeutic properties reveals both its political gravitas and emphasis on the perpetuation of prejudices and injustices during the Transition. Although the performances are staged, for the most part, in outdoor and/ or public spaces in Ocaña, the confessional sections of the film take place in the private space of the artist’s bedroom. However, the film refuses a simplistic reading of the outdoor public spaces as sites of performance and artificiality, and the indoor private spaces as sites of truth and authenticity. Instead, it

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confuses these categories, underscoring the blurred boundaries between performance and truth, and between artificiality and authenticity. Despite the private setting of Ocaña’s confessions, this space is invaded and made public by director Pons and his camera. A clear example of Pons’s intervention occurs when the camera tours the apartment independently without Ocaña as a guide. Accompanied by instrumental music, the one-take scene sees the camera enter the door of the artist’s apartment and slowly travel through the space, quietly surveying the artwork adorning the walls. It then rests briefly on a shot of the artist’s bed, the site in which the conversations between the artist and the filmmaker unfold, before exiting the apartment once again. Moreover, by detailing the multitude of Ocaña’s artworks on the walls (both directly and in frames) and in all corners of the apartment, this sequence emphasizes the transformation of his home into a gallery space that is visible to the public, collapsing the boundary between public and private space and fusing them together. While critics and scholars tend to describe the style of the director as transparent (Paul Julian Smith 2003: 125), the intervention of Pons as director epitomizes the centrality of performance to both public and private space in Ocaña. The idea that private space constitutes a locus of performance is not just conveyed through the intervention of the camera in Ocaña’s apartment, but also through the protagonist’s performance of the self within the confessional sequences. Josep Anton Fernàndez states that ‘one of the roles Ocaña performs […] is his “true self ”’ (2004: 90) with Alberto Mira similarly commenting that ‘Authenticity and performance seem to coexist, paradoxically, in his version of the self ’ (2013: 58). The mise-en-scène of these sequences supports this idea, with Pons’s camera framing the artist, lounging in a relaxed manner on his bed alongside his reflection, visible in an elongated mirror placed horizontally above the bed (Figure 4.1). Close-ups focused on the reflection of the protagonist in the mirror frequently occur throughout these sequences. When Ocaña speaks of his friendship with fellow artist and protagonist of the

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FIGURE 4.1  Ocaña reflected. ‘Ocaña: Retrat intermitent’ directed by Ventura Pons © Prozesa, Teide P.C. 1978. All rights reserved.

Transition Camilo, who features in the documentary, the camera focuses on a stone plaque of a cherub fixed to the wall before panning down to the mirror to reveal Ocaña’s reflection and then to the right to focus on the artist in situ. Through this visual doubling, that echoes the cinematographic use of mirrors in Carmen (see Chapter 3), Ocaña utilizes the figure of the mirror to disavow the notion of a singular, true and authentic self. Like the blurred boundaries between art and reality, performance and authenticity that characterize the film, the mirror serves as a visual cipher for the multiplicity of identities embodied by Ocaña. For Mira, the mirror highlights the precariousness of discourses surrounding identity with ‘Ocaña’s reflected image […] often there to blur any notion we might think we have about the “real” Ocaña’ (2013: 59). Fernàndez notes that the mirror renders the formerly invisible Ocaña visible in a portrait that the protagonist ‘considers “truthful”’, free from stereotypes and over which the artist himself ‘is able to

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claim a degree of definitional authority’ (2004: 90). This authority over selfpresentation and self-recognition is, as Fernàndez suggests, limited. As Jaume Martí Olivella points out, the mirror and its fragmented framing reflect the intrusion of Pons’s camera into the protagonist’s private space and the theatrical confessions (2000: 379). While Ocaña takes control of his representation of the self, his filmic portrait is ultimately framed by filmmaker Pons and his camera. Within a Foucauldian framework, the mirror epitomizes this tension or struggle for authority over the image and its presentation. For Foucault, the mirror is simultaneously a utopia and a heterotopia. On the one hand, it is, like Pons’s work, ‘a placeless place […] an unreal virtual space that opens up behind the surface’, and thus a utopia. On the other hand, it is heterotopic insofar as it ‘does exist in reality’ (1986: 24). Both the mirror and Pons’s film function as heterotopic, in that they are ‘unreal, virtual’ spaces (1986: 24) that make visible the invisible, the socially marginalized. In an effort to bring visibility to those who are typically invisible both socially and politically, public spaces and particularly the street become theatrical sites in Ocaña’s Barcelona. The first of Ocaña’s public performances in the film depicts the artist in drag walking up and down Las Ramblas, flanked by his friends Nazario and Camilo, also prominent figures of the counterculture of the Transition in Barcelona. Ocaña engages with passers-by, lifting his dress to reveal his genitals and buttocks to both the diegetic onlookers and the audience of the film. Other instances of performances staged in public spaces include the sequence in which Ocaña incongruously re-enacts the Assumption, an Andalusian festival, in Barcelona’s medieval quarter and the scene in which he enters the Café de la Ópera on Las Ramblas and sings the refrain ‘Yo soy esa’, (I Am That Girl) a song made popular during the Francoist years by Spanish actress and copla singer Juanita Reina. While Mira considers the cannibalization of Francoist popular culture in this scene (2004: 439), what interests me here is the artist’s performative and political reappropriation of public spaces. Ocaña’s performances position marginalized figures – transvestites, sex workers and

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psychiatric patients – centre stage, rendering them and their suffering visible, encouraging their occupation of spaces from which they would have been excluded both under Franco (Layla Renshaw 2011: 53–88, Michael Richards 1998) and during the Transition to democracy. The epitomic example of this attempt to reclaim space for those typically excluded or rendered invisible occurs during a performance set in a cemetery. Santiago Fouz Hernández and Ian Biddle contend that this scene encapsulates the way in which the performances of Ocaña ‘intermittently thematise the multiple histories of long-established cultural forms in Spain, playing with traditional forms of dress and musical forms’ (2012: 35). They argue that ‘Cross-dressing, sentimentalisation and the recuperation of a history of homosexuality before Franco operate in a kind of “blasphemous” discourse, which requires that one both remain in some sense true to something and yet, having accepted that truth, nonetheless transgress against it’ (2012: 35). Here, Fouz Hernández and Biddle emphasize the subversive appropriation of Francoist culture and traditions conducted by Ocaña in his performances. The tensions between tradition and transgression highlighted by these authors exist alongside a series of seemingly incongruous binaries that permeate the sequence, akin to the collapsed boundaries between art and reality, artificiality and authenticity already discussed. The glorious sunshine, emphasized by the low-angle long shot of the clear blue sky that marks the beginning of the sequence, contrasts with the sombre cemetery setting. Dressed in an ornate yellow and black lace dress complete with mantilla, Ocaña enters the frame in the background. The camera slowly zooms in on him, before cutting to a medium shot, as he walks along the wall of niches, crossing himself and paying homage to the dead. He begins to sing about a lost lover and then about the missing body of Federico García Lorca: ‘¿Dónde está tu cuerpo santo que no tuvo sepultura? Se olvidaron de tu cuerpo’ (‘Where is your sacred body that received no burial? They forgot your body’).

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The juxtaposition of this song with the cemetery setting highlights the tensions between visibility and invisibility at stake with regard to the performances that permeate the film. At the time of writing in 2020, 45 years after the death of Franco, the burial site of Lorca is still unknown and various attempts to locate his remains have proved unsuccessful. Controversy continues to surround the death of the poet, assassinated at the hands of Francoist forces during the Civil War. While Lorca is an important cultural figure within the legacy of the conflict and its aftermath, particularly for Republicans and the political left, the descendants of the poet have expressly communicated their wishes that his remains, if located, not be exhumed. This scene thus exposes the uneven processes of memorialization under Franco, in which those who fought for the Nationalists were remembered through ceremonies and monuments, while those associated with Republican Spain were condemned to oblivion (Paloma Aguilar Fernández 2008: 145–52, Renshaw 2011: 53–88). The staging of this particular performance in a cemetery is crucial in this regard. Like the mirror, the cemetery constitutes a heterotopic site for Foucault. He highlights its status as ‘a place unlike ordinary cultural spaces’ (1986: 25). For Foucault, the cemetery is connected to the city, as the resting place for deceased family members of the city’s residents. But the cemetery is also a marginalized site in that such locations are typically located on the outskirts of cities because of the conceptualization of ‘death as an “illness”’ (1986: 25). By selecting the heterotopic cemetery for this performance centred on the missing body of Lorca, both the film and its protagonist allude to the lack of space, both physical and symbolic, afforded to those persecuted, forced into exile or executed by the regime. Moreover, by indexing the infamous assassination and unknown burial site of Lorca, the film stresses how this silencing and forgetting did not only occur under Franco, but also during the Transition, a period in which both rightand left-wing politicians advocated consensus, compromise and reconciliation, rather than the pursuit of retribution and justice for perpetrators and victims of Francoism. This was motivated, at least in part, by the desire to avoid another

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civil conflict.1 Ocaña’s explicit citation of the death of Lorca and his absent body, specifically in the cemetery, underscores the expressly political potency of performance, indexing its ability to convey radical statements that might be more difficult to make outwith the framework of creative performance. The cemetery scene additionally demonstrates the need for an engagement with the performative practices of mourning, specifically through Ocaña’s evocation of the mourning mother of Lorca: ‘Que tu madre está llorando en su habitación de noche delante de un crucifijo y rezando tus oraciones’ (‘Your mother is crying in her room at night, in front of a crucifix, and reciting your prayers’). Besides this sequence, death features prominently in both the theatrical performances of the artist and his confessional discourse, problematizing critical interpretations of the film as nothing but a celebration of the freedoms of the post-Franco era (Campo Vidal 2000, Labanyi 1995, Vilarós 1998: 185–8). In addition to the allusion to Lorca in the cemetery performance, there are two further references to the poet in the confessional sequences of the film. Both moments concern death. On the first occasion, Ocaña discusses ‘la polémica de García Lorca’ (‘the controversy of García Lorca’), whereby ‘le mataron con dos tiros en el culo porque era homosexual’ (‘they killed him with two shots in the backside because he was gay’). For the artist, the perpetrators ‘son homosexual [sic], pero frustrados, porque no llegan a ser personas’ (‘are repressed homosexuals, not human beings’). On the second occasion, Ocaña recounts the night he spent singing García Lorca songs with his close friend, Manolo, after which the latter committed suicide. While the evocation of Lorca in the cemetery performance implicitly invokes the absence of both physical and symbolic space for the mourning of those lost in the name of Republican Spain, these references to the poet within the confessional sequences of the film act as a form of testimony. The intimate setting, the framing of Ocaña in close-up and the sensitive subject matter accentuate this sentiment. Ocaña, Pons and the film interpellate the viewer as witness to this performance of mourning. The theme of death, here tied both

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to performance and to the figure of Lorca, epitomizes the political impetus of the film, produced at a time when the express condemnation of Francoist wrongdoing was actively quashed in favour of a rhetoric of reconciliation. The emphasis on death in Ocaña defies the prohibition of the performance of mourning and memorializing practices, both during Francoism, when grieving Republicans were denied the right to mourn their dead, and during the Transition, which promoted silence and forgetting over remembrance and retribution. By contrast, both the film and its protagonist highlight the cultural significance attached to the mourning of the deceased through performative practices, enacting in addition a queering of the traditions attached to such practices. In a confessional sequence that immediately follows the cemetery scene discussed above, the artist outlines the significance of death in Andalusian culture. He describes his enthralment with death, cemeteries, graves and the way in which women cry in Andalusia. He also details how he, as a child, like all the other children in the village, was eager to see coffins and corpses. He recounts once asking a priest to open a coffin to reveal the face of a dead woman to him, as well as how much of an impact her pale complexion had on him. This emphasis on death and the performative practices of mourning complicates readings of the film as celebratory, at once mocking and paying homage to ‘the persona of an Andalusian beata (an obsessively pious woman)’ and to ‘the spectacle of a putative España profunda (deep Spain)’ (Fouz Hernández and Biddle 2012: 35). In addition, it suggests the need to attend to the deaths of those who perished at the hands of the Francoist regime, prefiguring the impulse that drives contemporary historical memory and related phenomena in Spain. The importance of mourning as performative practice permeates Ocaña’s staged performances, emphasizing the therapeutic potential of performance when dealing with death. Besides his cemetery lament, he enacts the role of a mother mourning the death of her young daughter, whose illness was hidden from her while she was institutionalized. Rather than occurring outdoors

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or amongst crowds of people like many of the staged performances in this film, this performance takes place on a darkened set with papier mâché mannequins created by the artist himself. In an impassioned monologue, the character played by Ocaña chastises her family members for concealing the child’s illness, proclaims her solitude and protests against the need for priests and church bells. Instead, she states her desire to bury and then make clay vessels with the body of the child. She exclaims that she will fill the vessels to the brim with wine, before drinking the wine and then smashing the vessels on the white walls of her house. The viscerality of this desire to consume the dead body of the child recalls, in another reference to Lorca, the grieving mother in Bodas de sangre, who declares that ‘Cuando yo llegué a ver a mi hijo, estaba tumbado en mitad de la calle. Me mojé las manos de sangre y me las lamí con la lengua. Porque era mía’ (‘When I saw my son, he was lying in the middle of the street. I soaked my hands in his blood and licked them with my tongue. Because it was mine’) (Federico García Lorca 1990: 133). More specifically for this monograph, Ocaña’s mourning mother figure functions as a precursor to the mourning and/or mourned mothers of Chapter 2’s Todo sobre mi madre and Todo lo que tú quieras, indicating a pertinent thread connecting performance, mourning and maternity in Spain from the Transition to the present day. The dramatization of death through performance emphasizes once more the importance of conducting performative processes of mourning, a privilege denied to the kin of the Republican fallen. However, the significance of this gesture need not be restricted to the contexts of the Civil War and Francoist Spain. Death and mourning in Ocaña are not solely relevant within this political context, but resonate too within the personal realm. Their treatment in the oeuvre of this artist constitutes a means of coming to terms with the personal losses he has experienced in his own life. Besides facilitating a coming to terms with death, performance also provides a means of working through the multiplicities and contradictory aspects of the artist’s identity, particularly in relation to the notion of gender.

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As highlighted in Chapter 2, performance and gender are historically interlinked in conceptual terms. Twentieth-century theorists in distinct fields, including Joan Riviere, Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler to name but a few examples, foreground an understanding of gender in which performativity is central. This theoretical paradigm has proved vital in contemporary Spanish cinema scholarship, particularly in the work of Susan Martin Márquez (1999), Tatjana Pavlović (2003), Chris Perriam (2003), Fouz Hernández and Alfredo Martínez Expósito (2007) and Fouz Hernández (2013), among others. Performance and performativity are vital to the expression of both gender and sexuality in Ocaña. So too is the fluidity that typifies the interrelations amongst fiction and reality, artificiality and authenticity in the film. In the confessional sequences, the protagonist evidences a contradictory discourse regarding gender and sexuality. He explicitly states that he neither agrees nor identifies with labels and categories such as homosexual or transvestite and he makes bold statements such as ‘a mí me parecía igual ser macho que ser homosexual’ (‘to me it was the same to be macho as it was to be homosexual’). The complexities and contradictions of his discourse on gender additionally permeate his performances. The artist appears in drag, often undressing and/ or revealing his genitals, thereby shattering the core illusion of masculinity masquerading as femininity, upon which drag is based. The deconstruction of fixed gender identities is a core focus of scholarship on the film. Laia Quílez Esteve contends that the film at once reflects upon trans identity and critiques the idea of gender categories as monolithic and immutable (2013: 170), through a character who would have been relegated to a secondary, and usually degrading, role in Francoist Spanish cinema (2013: 178). Adopting a more critical standpoint, Fernàndez suggests that Ocaña’s ‘common sense dressed up as camp allows for some categories of identity (namely gender) to be deconstructed but not all’. He also argues that the protagonist’s repeated revelation of his genitals ‘violates the golden rule of drag, and in so doing […] destroys the illusion of an opposition between

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female appearance and male essence: in showing his genitals to the audience he is not saying that the female appearance is an illusion, but that appearance and essence coincide, and that they are both male’ (2004: 97). While, as Fernàndez points out, Ocaña’s discourse in both confession and performance on gender and sexuality is not without complications, I read this as evidence of the necessary fluidity of identity and the limited liberties of the immediate post-Franco period. Although typically celebrated as a historical moment of both political and sociocultural freedom, the Transition also bore witness to the persistence of certain prejudices, epitomized by Ocaña’s description of his and his friends’ rejection from political demonstrations of libertarianism as well as by the lack of retribution for victims of crimes committed against Republicans and their political sympathizers during the Francoist period. Ocaña is not just victim to prejudices grounded in discomfort over those who do not conform to gendered and sexual conventions. He himself exhibits evidence of prejudiced beliefs, contributing to the perpetuation of some of the categories he criticizes. In the opening sequence, he states his opinion that ‘la mujer, yo pienso que está más predispuesta hacer el amor con la mujer. Lo que pasa es que ha estado tan reprimida por esta puta sociedad, ha estado tan jodida … yo soy un poco misógino’ (woman, in my opinion, is more predisposed to making love with another woman. But the thing is that woman has been so repressed by this fucking society, so screwed over … I’m a little misogynist). This flippant attitude towards female sexuality highlights the way in which misogyny persists both in the immediate post-Franco period and within queer communities. Ocaña demonstrates a similarly contradictory and derogatory attitude towards transvestism throughout the film. He insists that although he likes dressing as a woman, he is not a transvestite or a maricón. He additionally expresses his frustration that the media are more interested in his cross-dressing than in his artwork and eventually states how he is fed up of transvestism. Almodóvar appears to take inspiration from this attitude with the character of La Agrado in Todo sobre mi madre, discussed in Chapter 2.

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Like Ocaña, La Agrado expresses a similar disdain for the exaggerated performance of femininity enacted by transvestites, insisting that they confuse transvestism with circus and mime and think that a woman is just her nails and her lips. At the core of both critiques is a deeply rooted distrust of the artificial performance of gender and the simplification of gender identity as pure theatre. Both Ocaña and La Agrado privilege authenticity over artificiality in the context of performance. While performance permeates the majority of scenes in Ocaña, there are a few brief instances in which we observe the artist au naturel. One such example occurs immediately after the artist has opened up about the loss of his friend Manolo and depicts him perusing the stalls on Las Ramblas. The placement of these scenes sequentially supports the notion of an authentic Ocaña intermittently revealed not through the performances of the protagonist but rather through Pons’s editing. Another instance of authenticity takes place at the end credits, detailing the protagonist slowly meandering along the dimly lit and almost deserted Ramblas. A sound bridge of the applause from the previous sequence – a flamboyant striptease performance in which Ocaña removes his stereotypical Spanish flamenco attire until he is completely naked – initially accompanies the image, before the instrumental music from the opening credits takes over the soundtrack. In his everyday attire, Ocaña is androgynous in appearance, visually denoting the fluid approach to gender identity uninhibited by binarisms such as male and female expressed in his confessions to camera. More so than his contradictory statements about gendered and sexual categories, or his performances based in drag and/or striptease, these quiet observational sequences demonstrate the constructedness of gender categories and the sociocultural association of certain characteristics and qualities with certain gender identities. In Ocaña then, performance, whether theatrical or of the self, facilitates a cathartic and therapeutic working through of both personal and political issues specifically in relation to gender and death.

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Performance, body, communication: Hable con ella (Almodóvar 2002) As in Ocaña, gender, death and performance feature as a central constellation in Almodóvar’s 2002 film Hable con ella. Unusually for Almodóvar’s typically female-focused oeuvre, the film centres on two male protagonists: nurse Benigno (Javier Cámara) and travel writer Marco (Dario Grandinetti). Meeting one another at the hospital in which Benigno works, the men bond over the women in their lives, ballerina Alicia (Leonor Watling) and bullfighter Lydia (Rosario Flores), who have been rendered still and silent through two separate, tragic accidents which leave them both in comatose states. While Lydia quickly disappears from narrative view, eventually passing away, Alicia becomes the focus for both men and the film as a whole. In a revisioning of the Sleeping Beauty narrative that harks back to the dark origins of the fairy tale, a besotted Benigno sparks Alicia’s awakening through what for him is an act of love and corporeal communication, but which ultimately reads as an act of rape. Unsurprisingly, critical accounts of the film have taken issue with this representation and objectification of the female body (see, for example, Jessica Burke 2012). While these criticisms are legitimate, I argue that the correlation of body and performance in Hable allows for a reading of the film which moves beyond the objectification of the female body. Rather than a material body of flesh and bone, Hable prioritizes the body’s lack of objectness and foregrounds its significance as a postmodern site of fleeting exchanges, encounters, acts and gestures. In this regard, performance facilitates catharsis for both performing bodies and the spectators that behold them. In Hable, the body lies at the crux of two interlinked themes: performance and communication. These themes are frequently juxtaposed, at times through contradiction, at times through convergence. As the title indicates, linguistic communication is one of the principal modes of communication in the film.

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The title of the film is inspired by a line spoken by Benigno when giving advice to Marco about how to interact with his comatose girlfriend. Both Benigno and the title of the film highlight two contradictory interpretations regarding the nature of communication. While Benigno is caring and attentive in his role as a nurse, he is also a dangerous, sexually confused, morally compromised rapist. Similarly, communication evades simplistic definition and is revealed instead as complex and riddled with ambiguity. The original Spanish title stresses the notion of reciprocity through the use of the preposition ‘con’ (‘with’). Conversely, the title’s English translation, ‘Talk to her’ rather than ‘Talk with her’, alludes to the possibility that communication is at times a onesided activity. Reciprocal or otherwise, communication is established from the outset as a motivating force, driven by the verbal. Hable repeatedly calls into question this privileging of the verbal and of language through the pivotal role played by staged performances incorporating a range of diverse art forms. Performance structurally frames the film, which begins and ends with dance. The opening sequence includes an excerpt of Pina Bausch’s ‘Café Müller’ while the concluding scenes incorporate another Bausch piece entitled ‘Masurca Fogo’. Bullfighting is, additionally, treated as performance, afforded centre stage on two separate occasions. The centrality of performance is further underscored by numerous dance studio sequences, the highly amusing silent film ‘Amante menguante’ and Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso’s moving performance of the song ‘Cucurrucucú Paloma’. The prevalence of the non-verbal in these sequences – with the exception of Veloso’s performance – ironizes the title of the film, questioning the prioritization of linguistic communication. Protagonists Alicia and Lydia further emphasize this irony, given that their comatose states compromise their aptitude for linguistic communication. The title of the film underscores the primacy of language and verbal communication while the film itself undermines and destabilizes this paradigm. Through its incorporation of distinct types of primarily non-verbal performance modes and its protagonists robbed of the

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ability to communicate orally, Hable reasserts the potential of the body, the gesture and the physical in the context of performance. Of the distinct performance genres incorporated in Hable, it is dance which features most prominently. Dance occupies a privileged position in the opening and closing sequences of the film and appears repeatedly throughout the narrative, channelled in particular by ballerina Alicia. The film features various dance studio interludes, encounters between Alicia and her dance teacher, as well as framed photographs of dance performances, their framed and static character emphasizing the restricted movement of the film’s comatose ballerina protagonist, in Alicia’s hospital room and her bedroom in her apartment. For Gregory Sporton, dance is a unified practice, allowing for ‘a more direct understanding of cultures other than our own, as it becomes a matter of appreciating physical experience that is not dependent on a common language’ (2004: 83–4). As a form of communication not primarily dependent on linguistic communication, dance initiates understanding among individuals whose interaction via other methods would be problematic. In Hable, dance emerges as a communicative process that facilitates empathy and understanding. It is a means through which Benigno connects not only with Alicia but also with Marco, even if this connection is not reciprocated in both instances. Coincidentally sat side by side at the performance of ‘Café Müller’ in the opening sequence, Benigno intently observes Marco, whose tears indicate the extent to which he is moved by the piece (Figure 4.2). Benigno confirms the intimacy and significance of this moment as one of human connection and compassion in his detailed retelling of the performance to the comatose Alicia. He describes Marco as handsome, adding that he felt attracted to him and understood his tears.2 Performance, or rather spectatorship, abounds with therapeutic potential. The dance performance affects spectator Marco; Marco’s reaction in turn affects fellow spectator Benigno. The prospect of mutual contact is of little or no significance to either of these two men, calling into question the consideration of dance as facilitating shared understanding.

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FIGURE 4.2  Affective performances, affected spectators. ‘Hable con ella’ directed by Pedro Almodóvar © El Deseo, Antena 3 Televisión, Good Machine, Vía Digital 2002. All rights reserved.

In contrast with the title’s emphasis on linguistic and verbal communication, the opening performance sequence of Hable posits dance as a means of communication, empathy and understanding, which does not depend on the spoken word and is not necessarily reciprocal in its affective potential. The content of the ‘Café Müller’ performance further compromises the definition of dance as a medium for mutual understanding. The sequence begins with a narrowly framed image of a middle-aged woman wearing a flimsy white nightdress. Zooming out, the camera frames this first woman in the foreground, with a second woman, of a similar age and in similar attire, out of focus in the background. Both women appear dishevelled and frail, their attire simultaneously alluding to nightwear and to the hospital gown worn by Alicia. The dancers move aimlessly around the stage in a somnambulant state, eyes closed and arms outstretched. A male performer moves awkwardly around the stage, attempting to remove chairs and tables from the paths of the female dancers. The performance prefigures the circumstances of the central characters, foreshadowing the struggles Benigno and Marco will face attempting to cope with the comatose states of their significant others. The accompanying dreamlike soundtrack, taken from Henry Purcell’s ‘The Fairy Queen’, underscores the evocation of sleep and of the unconscious state of the

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female protagonists in this sequence. The dancers perform similar movements to one another – sweeping arm gestures, tiptoeing across the stage with outstretched arms, sliding down to the floor. At times, one dancer mirrors the movements of the other; at times, they dance independently. The non-verbal dialogue established between them, solely by means of their movements, produces a tension between the reciprocal nature of communication and its definition as a one-sided activity. Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla emphasizes the isolated performances of the dancers, who are prohibited from engaging in group formations due to the furniture littering the stage and who, as a result, are ‘initially restricted to slow turns on the spot […] focused on their own bodies and their limited paths within the stage […] totally absorbed in their own feelings, with no relation to their surroundings’ (2005: 51). As GutiérrezAlbilla alludes, the overpowering sentiment projected by this performance is one of isolation. This subtly ironizes Benigno’s relationships with both Marco and Alicia. In spite of Benigno’s affirmative experience of this dance performance, the content of the performance piece itself problematizes the definition of dance as a form of universal communication. Hable returns full circle to the themes of performance and communication with a closing sequence also featuring dance entitled ‘Masurca Fogo’ and once again choreographed by Pina Bausch. The first part of the piece depicts a woman being manoeuvred around the stage by a group of men, in movements reminiscent of flight. The accompanying music is the pensive and emotive sound of K. D. Lang’s ‘Hain’t It Funny’. The female dancer exhales heavily into a microphone, held up to her mouth at regular intervals by one of the male dancers. In the second part of the sequence, a line of couples dance barefoot across the stage, performing almost identical movements. One by one they leave their partners and disappear offstage, until only one man and one woman remain, forming a new couple. The helplessness of the male performer in the first sequence, in terms of his inability to ease or to aid the plight of the two female performers, is replaced in this closing piece by an apparent

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synchronization between man and woman. The performance marks the first (conscious) encounter of Marco and Alicia, who, like Marco and Benigno in the opening sequence, are spectators of the Bausch piece sat in close proximity in the auditorium. The intertitle ‘Marco y Alicia’ (‘Marco and Alicia’), coupled with the content of the Bausch performance piece, implies the prospective romantic coupling of Marco and Alicia outwith the diegetic boundaries of the film. Scholars and critics tend to view the closing sequence of Hable optimistically. Marsha Kinder reads the performance as an expression of hope, arguing that the role of dance in this film reveals how couples can transcend traditional romantic limitations by changing partners (2004: 22). Karen Backstein notes the contrast between the ‘blindness and melancholy’ of the opening sequence with the harmony of the closing sequence (2003: 42). It is indeed tempting to conclude, especially in relation to the opening performance piece, that the film ends on a positive note. However, when placed in the context of the film as a whole, the final performance piece appears steeped in irony. The championing of the newly formed heterosexual couple in ‘Masurca Fogo’ must be contemplated in relation to Benigno’s treatment of Alicia since it is only through Benigno’s violent actions that Alicia is conscious at the end of the film and able to begin a new relationship with Marco. Beginning with furtive glances, followed by prolonged periods of looking at her from the window of his mother’s apartment, Benigno’s relationship with Alicia is, from the very start, engineered. Her position as comatose patient, and Benigno’s subsequent qualification as a nurse, allows the latter to continue constructing and fabricating their connection. Aware of her interest in dance and silent cinema, Benigno frequently attends performances, such as the opening Bausch piece, in order to recount them to her, as well as to reaffirm, at least in his eyes, the strength of their bond. Benigno devotes himself to maintaining the physical well-being of his patient, evident in the numerous scenes of him and the other nurses washing and cutting her hair, washing and applying lotions to her body, massaging her skin and so on. His insistence on the

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beneficial nature of talking to Alicia, demonstrated by his advice to Marco that he too should talk to Lydia as it is the best thing to do with women, posits him as a potential destabilizer of hierarchical frameworks, linguistic, sexual or otherwise. This is further underscored by his somewhat ambiguous sexual identity, discussed by his female colleagues at the hospital and pondered over by Alicia’s psychologist father. However, his confusion of care with sexuality, explicitly manifested in his rape of Alicia, problematizes the straightforward definition of his character and supports a rejection of simplistic binarisms that permeates the film. To categorize the concluding performance sequence of Hable as optimistic or pessimistic constitutes a limited framework within which to analyse the lines of argumentation concerning wider issues, such as communication and human relations, put forward by the film. The multifaceted character of Benigno foregrounds the potentially enlightening and perilous dimensions of nonverbal or unilateral communication. Consequently, the film advocates neither an abandonment of one form of communication for another, nor a reversal of the hierarchical structure, from the primacy of the verbal to that of the nonverbal. What Hable highlights is that the potential for misunderstanding and misinterpretation is a fundamental element in communication, in whatever form it takes. It is precisely because of this that the two modes must be read simultaneously. Reading verbal and non-verbal, narrative and gesture in conjunction does not necessarily guarantee total understanding. However, it does limit the potential for misunderstanding, misinterpretation and miscommunication. This correlation between extremes is akin to the spirit of ‘Trencheras’, Alicia’s dance teacher’s idea for a ballet depicting the events of the Second World War. As the male dancers, in the role of soldiers, die, the female ballerinas emerge. From the body emerges the soul; from the masculine emerges the feminine; from the earth emerges the ethereal. The attempt to avoid categorization as one extreme or the other points towards the possibility of finding some sort of middle ground. Thus, the body in Hable is located at a

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series of points of intersection, of which the most pertinent is the connection between performance and reality. The correlation between reality and performance in Hable is most evident in the depiction of the rape of Alicia. As seen in Familia in Chapter 3, rape is not shown directly, occurring outwith the diegetic frame of the film. Hable deploys then extends the figure of the fade to black that constitutes a traditional representational paradigm of rape (Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver 1993: 3). Masking the rape is a silent, metacinematic film-within-the-film entitled Amante menguante (The Shrinking Lover). As with the opening Bausch piece, Benigno uses the silent film as a means of getting closer to Alicia, attending a screening of the film before recounting the details to his comatose patient. The film-within-the-film tells the tale of two lovers, Alfredo and Amparo. The latter is a scientist, who, in an attempt to revolutionize world nutrition, accidentally shrinks her lover to minuscule proportions. With Oedipal undertones, Alfredo returns to live with his mother, only to be sought out, and taken away, by Amparo. Still minute in size, he encourages his lover to go to sleep, evoking, like the dancers in the opening sequence, the comatose states of both Alicia and Lydia. As his lover sleeps, in another nod to the Sleeping Beauty narrative, the miniature Alfredo uncovers Amparo’s naked body and begins exploring its arcs and curves in a childlike manner. The sequence culminates with Alfredo entering Amparo’s vagina, which as Benigno tells Alicia, allows him to remain inside her forever. The framing of the rape with this silent film, narrativized by Benigno, contradicts his aforementioned position as an advocate for nonverbal, unilateral communication. The satisfaction and contentment provided by Benigno’s one-sided relationship with Alicia are ultimately not enough. The bond between them, created and fostered solely by Benigno, results in a need for physical union and reciprocity. In addition, the mutual affection between the two lovers of the silent film serves, for Benigno at least, to justify his actions. By extension, the veiling of the rape with this sequence deliberately complicates the spectatorial reception of the character and his behaviour.

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Rebecca Naughten argues that the interaction between Alfredo and Amparo, precisely because of their reciprocal relationship, is depicted as ‘a seemingly consensual sexual act’ that allows for a ‘non-judgemental stance’ towards Benigno (2006: 83). Nevertheless, the dramatization of the rape in the form of a silent film highlights the potential peril of non-reciprocal communication, as well as to challenge the separation of reality from performance. The representation of rape through performance is a distancing device that functions on multiple levels in Hable. While the scenes of Amante menguante are seen, for the most part, directly by the spectator, this sequence foregrounds Benigno’s narrative perspective and his intervention in our understanding of the film. The viewer sees Benigno arrive at the cinema. The camera pans down the front of the building before revealing the poster for Amante menguante in a close-up. A voice-over reads the title aloud. At this point, the screen fades to black, akin to the representational paradigm of rape outlined by Higgins and Silver (1993: 3), and the following scene begins with an image of the hospital in which Benigno works. A visibly shaken Benigno begins to recount the events of the film-within-the-film (not yet seen by the viewer) to the comatose Alicia. The film is at times seen directly, uninterrupted, and at times narrated by Benigno. The action alternates with shots of Benigno and Alicia in the hospital room, the latter naked under the sheets of her bed, the former massaging her body rigorously, still clearly anxious and disturbed. The rendering of rape as performance constitutes an attempt to distance the character from the act, as well as to encourage in the viewer the same distancing technique. Benigno himself adopts this strategy in his retelling of the film to Alicia. Performance, in terms of both the silent film and Benigno’s oral re-enactment of the film, becomes communication. The silent film simultaneously communicates Benigno’s feelings for Alicia and his actions to the viewer. While performance substitutes, and in so doing, softens and frames reality in Hable, it also functions as a means to conceal violence, wrongdoing and culpability.

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The link between performance and violence is present too in the bullfighting sequences in Hable. Considered the national sport of Spain, this controversial art form constitutes a key element of Spanish culture, often identified along with flamenco, sangría and paella as stereotypically Spanish. There exists a historical connection between bullfighting and cinema given the prevalence and popularity of bullfighting documentaries, a product of what Marvin D’Lugo deems Spanish film’s ‘marked preference toward localist material’ (D’Lugo 1997: 3). As in the sequences featuring dance and silent cinema, the bullfighting scenes in Hable focus on corporeal performance and the communicative potential of the body outwith linguistic and/or verbal paradigms. Bullfighting might be superficially deemed as the masculine counterpart to the feminine forms of ballet. However, as Michel Leiris alludes, the gender dynamics of the bullfight are far from binaristic: The entire corrida is suffused with eroticism. […] the special prestige of the matador (usually at least reputedly a Don Juan); his brilliant costume (comparable to the phosphorescence of lightning bugs or the plumage of birds); the choreographic features of much of his work (in which grace – the way he moves, stretches or bends his body – is a primary element); there is the essentially phallic figure of the bull (whose genitals some connoisseurs, after the fight, are honoured to eat); the proximity of the man and the animal in the succession of passes – united as if dancing together; the backand-forth rhythm of a series of alternating approaches and retreats similar to the movements of coitus; and to conclude this entire amorous spectacle, the entrance of the sword. (1993: 30–1) Furthermore, the film resists simplistic binary divisions, since the bullfighter at the centre of these sequences is a woman, Marco’s lover Lydia. Across the two sequences that feature bullfighting performances, Lydia is masculine in appearance, visually contrasting with the soft ethereal femininity of ballerina

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Alicia as well as the dancers in the Pina Bausch performance pieces discussed above. The initial bullfighting sequence begins with a close-up of Lydia, her back to the camera. Her appearance is masculine, accentuated by her scrapedback hair, her prominent nose and the angular contours of her face. As Leiris’s description suggests, this masculinity is contradicted by the graceful and balletic posturing of the body that follows, as well as the extravagant traje de luces (bullfighter costume) she wears. The camera focuses primarily on the bull in this sequence before depicting in elegant slow-motion Lydia’s billowing red bandera and her sweeping arm gestures. The impact of this sequence is heightened by the absence, in the first instance, of any soundtrack. The second bullfighting sequence concentrates on the preparations for the corrida, rather than the fight itself, in which a distracted Lydia is gored immediately following the release of the bull. The dressing of Lydia in her traje de luces is an intricate and intimate sequence, comprising numerous close-ups of parts of her body as they are embalmed in her costume prior to her performance. Her leg extends before the viewer as her vibrant pink stocking is rolled up and smoothed down. Her hips fill the frame as her gold-embroidered trousers are hoisted up her body and over her supporting tight white underpants. As before, the soundtrack is minimal. The preparatory movements and actions themselves become a performance, not requiring further embellishment. In the context of its bullfighting sequences, performance extends beyond the bullring in Hable. While the presentation of the dance sequences and silent film in their respective sites of exhibition unambiguously draws attention to their status as performances, the bullfighting performances occur in two distinct locations. The arena constitutes the primary stage for the performance. However, the emphasis on Lydia’s preparations for the event behind the scenes becomes part of the performance, blurring reality and performance and calling into question their neat separation. In comparison with Hable’s other performance sequences, these scenes resist definition as closed performance units. The bullfighting routine is not confined within any clear demarcations,

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but rather bleeds into the surrounding scenes. As a result, these interludes prompt an interrogation of performance, specifically in relation to the means by which it is delineated and separated off from the real. The bullfighting interludes therefore trigger a number of pertinent questions. Where does performance begin and reality end, performance end and reality begin again? How do we distinguish the real from the performed? Is it even possible? The blurring of performance and reality manifests in another performance mode in Hable: that of reality television. Reality television is an arena in which the conflation of performance and reality, or in other words in which reality becomes performance, is particularly evident in contemporary society. Almodóvar is critical of reality television elsewhere in his oeuvre, notably in Kika (1993) and Volver (To Return) (2006). In Hable, Lydia appears on a chat show, interrogated by the host about her failed relationship with fellow torero El Niño de Valencia. Incensed, Lydia states that she had forewarned the persistent host that she was not willing to discuss this matter. The host aggressively challenges Lydia, declaring that she told her no such thing, that she did not want the audience to think that she plans interviews in advance, that she is the only one whose interviews are completely live and spontaneous. The attempts of the host to deny the performance and artificiality of these shows further underscore the extent to which the performed and the real converge in postmodern society, particularly in relation to cultural production and to the lives of the rich and famous which dominate all strands of media communication. The comatose bodies of the female protagonists of the film constitute another key site in which performance and reality converge. Hable juxtaposes its predominantly non-verbal performance sequences based on corporeal gesture with the bodies of its female protagonists, whose only hope for communication lies precisely with these modes. In so doing, the film attests to the communicative potential of bodies deprived of the ability to converse orally, verbally, linguistically and the performativity of bodies seemingly denied of their performative attributes. Hable proffers diverse opinions regarding the

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physical states of Alicia and Lydia, with Marco declaring that he is uncertain if vegetative life even qualifies as life and Benigno, conversely, reading small signs of communication in every movement made by Alicia’s almost inert body. The distinct nature of each female character’s comatose state underscores the communicative potential of their bodies. Although Lydia’s automatic bodily functions have ceased, Alicia not only continues to menstruate but also opens her eyes and yawns. The cinematographic presentation of the bodies of Alicia and Lydia differs radically and reinforces their diversity. Lydia’s body is rarely revealed, remaining buried underneath the sheets of her hospital bed. Despite her noticeable scarring from her encounter with the bull, her expression is serene and detached, distancing her both from Marco and from the audience of the film. By contrast, Hable cinematographically encourages a connection between Alicia and the viewer. Camera shots adopting Alicia’s perspective, such as when Benigno shows Alicia the signed photograph of Pina Bausch he has obtained for her, allow for identification with the comatose protagonist. Lingering close-ups revealing her naked body, detailing her regime of corporeal care, invite us to gaze upon the body in its vegetative state. Naughten views these scenes as exemplifying Laura Mulvey’s concept of ‘to-be-lookedat-ness’ since ‘when this occurs, the narrative is brought to a halt, the images only accompanied by Alberto Iglesias’s score (2006: 81–2). This underscores the idea that the comatose body is still capable of giving a performance. While the body of Alicia is clearly sexualized, the scenes displaying her unclothed form are desexualized through the figure of Benigno and his ambiguous sexuality, the presence of fellow nurse Rosa, and finally through the clinical and routine nature of the bathing process. Furthermore, these scenes directly contrast with the scene in which Lydia is dressed in her traje de luces, discussed above, whereby both narrative and soundtrack are brought to a halt. While Lydia’s body is dressed up, strapped in, contained within her confining costume, Alicia’s body is stripped back to its bare physical existence. Even in this state, the presentation of her body emphasizes the performativity and

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communicative potential of the human form. Her body is no less expressive than the bodies of the dancers of the two Bausch pieces, than the body of the sleeping Amparo in Amante menguante or than the body of Lydia both in her preparations for and in the corrida. The juxtaposition of the performing body and of the body outside the performance sequences thus collapses: these bodies are one and the same. Hable recentres the body, by means of the themes of communication and performance, as a site of primary importance with regard to human relations. The film, through its title and its insistence on the importance of talking, concretizes oral and linguistic communication as primary. That said, the range of, mostly non-verbal, performance sequences that frame and permeate the film challenge the primacy of linguistic communication. Just as the film juxtaposes communication and performance, it also emphasizes tensions between verbal and non-verbal, narrative and gesture, mind and body. Performance, dance in particular, underscores the desire for convergence between these binarisms in the film. Initially posited as a unified, and unifying practice, closer examination of its presence in Hable alludes to its limited potential in facilitating mutual understanding beyond linguistic and cultural barriers. The tension between two extremes, ultimately the performed and the real, penetrates the performance sequences and their positioning within the narrative of the film, particularly the silent film Amante menguante, the bullfighting interludes and the talk show excerpt. Hable ultimately attests to the performativity of the human body, regardless of its physical state of being.

Provocative performance: Noviembre (Mañas 2003) If Hable interrogates the extent to which the comatose body retains the ability to perform, my final case study suggests that the body continues to perform

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even in death. The second feature-length film of Achero Mañas, Noviembre, the second feature-length film of Achero Mañas, is as much a manifesto about the political potency of performance as it is a work of art. Although fictional, Noviembre takes as its inspiration El piojo picón, an independent theatre company from the time of the Transition to democracy. Building on these historical grounds, the action alternates between the present-day setting of the film (late 1990s Madrid) and an imagined future in which the former members of El piojo picón, including the director’s mother, Paloma Lorena, pose as participants of the fictional theatre group at the heart of the film and reflect upon their past as street performers and independent artists (Marco Cipolloni 2010: 71). The fictional group upon which Noviembre focuses comprises creative youngsters eager to unveil the revolutionary potential of the arts by means of independent and interactive street theatre. Charismatic aspiring actor Alfredo (Óscar Jaenada) becomes the leader of the group, under the moniker of ‘Noviembre’. The youngsters take to the streets to stage polemical and provocative performance pieces. The aim? To produce art that inspires spectatorial responses and reactions. They dress up in various guises: as clowns that perform music in a metro carriage, as devil cherubs that run riot through the streets of Madrid and as socially marginalized figures, such as gitanos (gypsies), alcoholics and individuals with learning difficulties. The most controversial performance, Atentado (Assassination), sees the group stage a terrorist attack in which an individual appears to be shot in the head in the middle of a busy street. Although the group subsequently face charges of simulating crime and justifying terrorism, their sentences are suspended and the affair buried due to its occurrence at the time of the Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA) ceasefire. After the trial, ongoing tensions amongst those involved in the group, as well as pressures to sign with a theatre producer lead to a dramatic final performance in which Alfredo literally gives his life as part of the act. Noviembre ultimately embodies the ethos of this book: that performance and the arts carry radical political potential in which life – and death – is at stake.

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The political import of this film and its focus on performance extends beyond its diegetic content. Director Mañas is politically committed and engaged. He is an outspoken critic of political and legal wrongdoing in the contemporary Spanish context. Performance permeates Mañas’s family history. The director is the son of writer Alfredo Mañas and actress Paloma Lorena, who was involved in independent theatre group, El piojo picón. upon which Noviembre is based Mañas himself began acting in his adolescence and moved to New York in 1984 to study theatre. He began making short films in 1994 before releasing his critically acclaimed debut feature film, a socio-realist drama about abusive family relationships and toxic masculinity entitled El Bola (Pellet), in 2000. He followed this with two further featurelength films: Noviembre in 2003 and Todo lo que tú quieras (Anything You Want) in 2010 (discussed in Chapter 2). Mañas subsequently abandoned his career as a filmmaker due to his frustration at the political destruction of the culture industry in post-Crisis Spain by means of so-called austerity measures.3 He has uploaded each of his three feature films to date to his YouTube channel, presumably in an effort to circumvent the disproportionate taxes placed upon culture-based products and experiences (raised from 8 per cent to 21 per cent by Mariano Rajoy’s conservative government in 2012 as an austerity measure). He frequently vents his frustrations on Twitter, where he is particularly supportive of fellow culture industry professionals arrested and/or charged for opinions expressed in their creative work. Examples include the puppeteers Títeres desde abajo, arrested and jailed in 2015 due to their supposed promotion and glorification of terrorism in a puppet show performance, and actor Willy Toledo, charged with insulting God and the Virgin Mary after defending three women subjected to a court hearing for parading a giant vagina in the streets of Seville in 2018. Noviembre epitomizes Mañas’s ethos as a filmmaker, insofar as it emphasizes the politics of performance and the potential for revolution embedded within creative and cultural production.

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Although especially pertinent post-2010 and in the wake of the economic crash of 2007–8, the political motivations of director Mañas are visible prior to this in Noviembre. In many ways, protagonist Alfredo reads as a synecdoche for the filmmaker’s take on performance and its political potential. Throughout the film, there are various discussions about performing in exchange for a monetary fee with Alfredo insisting that he does not want to be paid for his work. Instead, he expresses his desire to start an independent theatre group and offer free street shows. Alfredo’s insistence on performing for free rather than in exchange for a fee exemplifies a creative ideology in which arts and performance should be accessible to all as opposed to available to only those with sufficient wealth. This prefigures Mañas’s later gesture of rendering his works free and accessible online. Admittedly, this still retains an element of privilege insofar as one must have access to the internet to be able to view the films. However, it is far more democratic than the extortionate taxes imposed upon cultural products by Rajoy’s conservative government in 2012 in the name of austerity. Despite this rather admirable stance on accessibility to the arts, Alfredo is a somewhat problematic figure with regard to his manipulative use of performance and his skills as an actor. When chastised by his acting teacher Yuta (Hector Alterio) for joking around in class, Alfredo concocts a story about his tragic childhood, the death of his parents in a car crash when he was just six years old and his status as an adoptee. In the next scene, Alfredo reveals to his friend Dani that this was all a lie. And in the interview sequence that follows, both Alicia and Dani as adults reflect on this incident. While Alicia talks about how the revelation that this was all fabrication transformed Alfredo from poor orphan to total jerk in the eyes of his classmates, Dani asks ‘¿No es la interpretación un ejercicio para tratar de hacer creíble y veraz las historias que contamos?’ (‘Is acting not an exercise in bringing credibility to fiction?’). For Dani, this is precisely what Alfredo did. This episode posits the ethics of performance as a core tenet both of the diegetic theatre group and of

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the film as a whole. Alfredo’s seemingly democratic and egalitarian approach to artistic access is thus compromised by his less than ethical attitude with regard to more manipulative uses of performance. To take a more favourable approach to Alfredo’s ethical stance on performance, it is evident that the protagonist of Noviembre uses performance to deal with difficult circumstances or situations in which he feels uncomfortable. In other words, Alfredo retreats into acting and performing as a means of avoiding reality or indeed of making a challenging reality more palatable. In one of the interview segments set in the future, Alfredo’s mother reveals that the puppets he used in his performances were created for his brother who is severely disabled and that it was because of both of these things that he became involved with theatre. That said, Alfredo’s questionable ethical approach to acting and performance opens onto a metacommentary about the significance of acting in the film. Having discovered that Alfredo had fooled them all with his fable about his traumatic family background, acting teacher Yuta questions Alfredo’s motivations for studying acting and condemns him for the ridiculing of his peers with his fabricated personal history. A defiant Alfredo insists that he wants to act because he wants to do something for himself and others, because it is a form of human communication and because he wants to do something to change this fucked-up world. This statement represents not just the ethos of Alfredo as an individual or of his theatre group Noviembre in terms of performance, but also that of the film and the filmmaker behind it. Alfredo’s self-defence for his dubious use of performance and skills as an actor is thus his definition of the core of performance as a mode of human communication. For Alfredo, Mañas and the film as a whole, the emphasis here is on the ethical impetus of performance as a means of making a difference in the world and in changing it for the better. By simultaneously accentuating the ethics of performance as a mode of communication but also as a means of enacting change, Noviembre highlights

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the revolutionary potential of performance, the arts and creativity more generally. After being questioned by Yuta about his motivations, Alfredo quits acting school. This is, in a sense, the first of many revolutionary gestures in the film. The title of the film and the eponymous title of the independent theatre group Alfredo goes on to lead also have revolutionary links. The friends debate what to call their group and contemplate the name ‘October’, which they consider much more revolutionary. But they settle on ‘Noviembre’ due to the fact it followed the October revolution. Echoing religious rhetoric, the group, as adults, also discusses various commandments to which they must adhere. The fifth commandment is inspired by the law of Mohammed, in that they must go to the audience rather than expect the audience to come to them. The seventh commandment prohibits anyone joining who had been involved in film or TV. Another constriction is that it is forbidden to adapt texts, that they must create original material. Finally, the tenth commandment is not to betray the manifesto. In this way, Noviembre underscores performance as a revolutionary act, a message that stretches beyond the diegesis of the film into the political ideology of the filmmaker behind it and the audience that watches it. Alfredo’s motivation to become engaged in street theatre is largely due to his opinions on audience. When he and Alicia sleep together after they abandon acting school, Alfredo talks about how he gets annoyed at the audience, just sitting there, still as statues, not doing anything. Although Alfredo refers here to the diegetic audiences that regard his work, this metacommentary equally applies to us, the audience of Noviembre, recalling Jean-Louis Baudry’s conceptualization of ‘the spectators immobility [sic] […] characteristic of the filmic apparatus as a whole’ (1975: 108). While Alfredo wants reactions and responses from the audience, Alicia disagrees, saying she always liked theatre precisely because of the audience’s stillness and lack of response. Although Alfredo urges Alicia to participate in his and Dani’s street theatre, she is not keen due to the fact that the audience

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are unwilling spectators, unaware that the events unfolding before them are staged, performed. This exchange connects with Alfredo’s vision of performance and acting as a mode of human communication and epitomizes his ethos as a performer. His ultimate desire when performing is to provoke, to incite a response from the spectator. And he soon realizes that this is most apt when the spectator is not fully cognizant of his/her status as such, when the boundaries between fiction and reality, performance or artificiality and authenticity are blurred. The interventions staged by the group depart from the premise that these characteristics – fiction, reality, artificiality, authenticity – are not so clearly demarcated into binarisms. Moreover, they deploy this strategy as a means of provoking and inspiring a reaction amongst their unknowing audiences. As an example, the first performance staged by the group is entitled La dama caliente (Lady Horny) and is reminiscent of the performances staged by Ocaña in the first case study of this chapter. One of the female members of the troupe lifts up her skirt to reveal sexy underwear and simulates an orgasm. The second performance enacted by the group is called Punkis alegres (Happy Punks) and sees the group made up as clowns and performing music in a metro carriage. Alfredo addresses the underground passengers through a megaphone, advising them not to be scared and explaining that they are not there for money or to cause trouble. He tells the audience that they hate money and are there for a noble cause. He states that those present are in need of a gift, something to lift their spirits, to make them feel alive, lucky and free before commencing an enthusiastic and energetic musical performance. These performance pieces exemplify the aforementioned blurring of boundaries that characterize the staging of performances. By taking their creative works outwith the traditional confines of the theatre, the young performers unsettle and call into question the borders between fiction and reality, artificiality and authenticity. The cinematographic presentation of these performances supports this ethos with intertitles displaying the name of the performance piece and date upon which

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FIGURE 4.3  Disruptive intertitles. ‘Noviembre’ directed by Achero Mañas © Alta Films, Tesela Producciones Cinematográficas 2003. All rights reserved.

it takes place accompanying the images on screen (Figure 4.3). Like the talking heads interview segments set in an imagined future, these textual components appeal to the visual rhetoric of documentary, grounding these interventions in reality rather than in fiction. While the onlookers of the group’s street theatre remain unaware of their spectatorial status, the cinematic audience is not afforded the same treatment. The intertitles break the flow of the film, emphasizing the staged nature of the performances in question. They draw attention to the artifice of the cinematic medium, just as Alfredo does, and disrupt, in so doing, conventional modes of cinematic spectatorship.4 In addition to interrogating the relations amongst performance and reality, the performance pieces staged by the group probe at the frontiers of political and social acceptability. One of the most striking interventions in this regard is Los olvidados (The Forgotten Ones), in which the young actors masquerade as socially marginalized individuals such as gitanos, drug addicts and physically and mentally disabled individuals, and beg for money in a bustling Madrid city centre. Like the metro carriage musical performance, this piece features performances within a performance, or multilayered performances, insofar as the youngsters sing flamenco while also performing the role of outsiders. Los olvidados constitutes a breakthrough piece in terms of the political impetus

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of their performance ethos, emphasized by Juan and Dani as adults in the talking heads segments that follow this performance. Juan confirms the extent to which this particular performance dismantles barriers between fiction and reality. He states that it allowed them to break with mainstream methods insofar as they were living inside their characters in a realistic way. For the older Dani, Los Olvidados represents a more socially aware critical theatre than their previous work and he conjectures that this piece was in many ways a reflection of Alfredo’s disabled brother. Los Olvidados is highly reminiscent of Dogme 95 director Lars von Trier’s The Idiots in which a group of individuals seeks to release their inner idiots in an attempt to combat their inhibitions, behaving as developmentally disabled individuals in public as a means of achieving this. Intriguingly, The Idiots was released in 1998, the same year that the performance of Los Olvidados takes place in the film. The assumption of characters such as gitanos, drug addicts and disabled individuals by the actors at the heart of Noviembre evidences a desire to make visible those who often remain unseen both socially and politically, even if this particular method is not in itself wholly unproblematic. In this way, both Los Olvidados and Noviembre demonstrate the extent to which the group’s revolutionary street theatre exposes the threat carried by performance and artistic production in general, which, for the reasons explored throughout this monograph, heralds the political potential to challenge, subvert and transgress the status quo. This desire to conduct a revolution by means of their performances culminates in the birth of, what the older Lucía deems, ‘Documentary Theatre’. The tension between representation and reality characterizes this moment which begins with an extreme close-up on Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (The Ladies-in-Waiting) (1656) in El Prado museum in Madrid. The reference to Velázquez is by no means coincidental. Las Meninas is a revolutionary portrait in the history of Spanish visual culture. Rather than making the King and Queen the subject of the royally commissioned image, the artist instead painted the work from the perspective of the royal couple, who are

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FIGURE 4.4  Challenging representational hierarchies: Las Meninas. ‘Noviembre’ directed by Achero Mañas © Alta Films, Tesela Producciones Cinematográficas 2003. All rights reserved.

only visible in a small mirror in the distant background. In other words, the painting depicts the scene before the royal pair with the spectator occupying the position of the King and Queen. Through subversive perspectival play, Velázquez and Las Meninas challenge hierarchical paradigms of looking and being looked at in a revolutionary political gesture that sheds light upon the dynamics of power contained within such frameworks. As Alfredo and Lucía stand before the painting (Figure 4.4), they exchange a series of increasingly insulting remarks in hushed tones. Alfredo embraces girlfriend and fellow performer Lucía, informing her that he is feeling unwell and starting to feel dizzy. He falls to the ground, his body twitching uncontrollably, seemingly having a seizure. Lucía tends to him as one of the museum guides calls for help. The camera approaches Alfredo as he lies on the ground. As it zooms in on his face, he turns his head sharply, opens his eyes wide and sticks his tongue out at Lucía. This act constitutes another performance from protagonist Alfredo. Lucía has become an unwilling, unknowing spectator, just like the passers-by who witness the group’s street theatre performances. Lucía is furious and her middle-aged voice-over informs the spectator that this moment marked the conception of the ‘Documentary Theatre’ mode adopted by the group, an ethically motivated form of performance with

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regard to its provocation of the spectator, and that she was its first audience. That this occurs before Velázquez’s iconic image exemplifies the significance of spectatorial invocation and engagement for the revolutionary dynamics of performance at work within the street theatre group at the heart of Noviembre. Although working within the confines of a royally commissioned portrait, Velázquez successfully subverted traditional scopic paradigms of artistic creation, production and reception. The visual recourse to Velázquez’s Las Meninas in Noviembre emphasizes the transgressive potential of arts and performance, even if operating within stringent conditions established by those with political power and gravitas. By breaking the fourth wall, both Velázquez’s Las Meninas and Noviembre, notably with its talking-heads interviews, directly and unequivocally draw attention to the spectatorial position of the onlooker and/or film spectator. Just as Alfredo expresses a desire to incite a reaction in the spectator, Velázquez’s work interpellates the onlooker, who ‘sees his invisibility made visible to the painter and transposed into an image forever invisible to himself ’ (Foucault 2005: 6). In both cases, the spectators become part of the works in question, active participants in their aesthetic fields. At stake is the role of the spectator, with Las Meninas, the performance pieces in Noviembre and the film itself all demanding a dynamic, ethically motivated and politically conscious mode of viewing. Nowhere is this mandate more apparent than in the final image of the film. The last performance piece staged by the group is entitled Teatro Real (which translates as both Royal or Real Theatre, epitomizing the group’s appeal to the fusion of performance and reality) and takes place in September 2001. In this dramatic sequence, the troupe are dressed as clowns with some of them positioned amongst the audience, emphasizing the elision of boundaries between performer and spectator, fiction and performance, artificiality and authenticity that characterizes the work of the youngsters. Alfredo emerges over the audience on a swing suspended above the ceiling, declaring that they

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have opted to take over the stage to make sure that their voices are heard. The performers placed in the audience stand up and begin to play music as Alfredo proclaims that they are tired and drained. He laments the decline of theatre and art, exaggerated artificial tears sprouting from his eyes as he mourns the death of art. He flips upside down on his swing, the camera taking on his perspective as the performers amongst the audience are forcibly removed by the ushers in the theatre. Alfredo insists that art has the power to set people free, to bring about social consciousness, to be universal, limitless and free of race, a weapon. As he speaks he gradually removes his costume, a physical undressing that not only evokes the Transitional performances of predecessor Ocaña but that also mirrors the baring of his soul through his powerful declarations. He then pulls a gun, insisting that it is real and that a shot must be heard. But it is not a real gun, it is fake as evidenced by the paper explosion that emerges from it as he pulls the trigger. At this exact moment, Alfredo is shot from within the theatre, his limp and lifeless body hanging precariously from his perch above the theatre audience. The concluding image of the scene and the film as a whole is a close-up of the prop gun lying on the ground, accompanied by an intertitle that reads ‘El arte es un arma cargada de futuro’ (‘Art is a weapon loaded with the future’) (Figure 4.5).

FIGURE 4.5  Art is a weapon loaded with the future. ‘Noviembre’ directed by Achero Mañas © Alta Films, Tesela Producciones Cinematográficas 2003. All rights reserved.

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Alfredo’s death mid-performance emphasizes the ambiguousness of performance. While it can, on the one hand, constitute a site of communication facilitating corporeal and emotional connections, it can also engender miscommunication. Although part of the group’s performance, Alfredo’s interruption of the performance within the theatre that night is interpreted as a threat that needs to be subdued and quelled. Prior to this final performance and Alfredo’s death, the group stage a piece entitled Atentado, in which they enact a street shooting that sees them facing charges of simulating crime and justifying terrorism. These performance pieces recall Surrealist André Breton’s declaration that the purest Surrealist act would be to walk into a crowd firing a loaded gun (1969: 125). Given its production at a time in which terrorism preoccupied the popular imagination on both local (ETA) and national (9/11) levels, Noviembre draws interesting parallels between art and activism, between terrorism and performativity. Despite its release fifteen years ago, the film evidences the political power of performers in Spain. This trend can be traced back, as the introduction to this monograph argues, to artistic attempts to circumvent Francoist censorship and express political discontent. However, it also resonates in the contemporary context with several individuals, such as actor Willy Toledo, rappers César Strawberry and Valtònyc, and puppeteers Títeres desde abajo, detained and/or charged on counts of glorifying terrorism. With its closing mantra, Noviembre lays bare the politics of performance and the performance of politics in our contemporary globalized world.

Subverting the status quo The case studies analysed in this chapter, Ocaña: Retrat intermitent, Hable con ella and Noviembre, are subversive works in which performance and artistic production heralds the potential to challenge, subvert and transgress the status quo. In each case, this potential is not wholly positive or negative, but rather

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ambiguous. In Ocaña, sombre meditations on the correlation of performance and death undermine the oft-cited celebratory quality of performance both within the film and in relation to the wider counterculture of the Transition more generally. In Hable, performance simultaneously facilitates emotional connections and severe instances of miscommunication that lead to violent non-consensual acts. Finally, in Noviembre, radical street performance art is at once revolutionary and wholly problematic, leading to personal tensions, arrest and eventually death. It is precisely this ambiguousness that characterizes the political and subversive potential of performance, insofar as it pushes at the boundaries of acceptability. Ocaña, Hable and Noviembre ultimately highlight an ability to be more controversial within the framework of performance. At the core of each of these works is a probing focus on interrelations amongst performance, spectatorship and ethics. The interrogation and dismantling of boundaries between fiction and reality, artificiality and authenticity rests at the heart of this constellation in each of the films. Both within the diegesis and extradiegetically, these films convey an uneasy vision of spectatorship. Both the films themselves and the performance pieces within them challenge, confront, even assault the spectator. They place demands upon the spectator. They interpellate the spectator within a radical paradigm of performance and spectatorship that pursues revolutionary political aims. In sum, they wholly and utterly embody the ethos of this monograph.

Epilogue

In February 2016, Raúl García Pérez and Alfonso Lázaro de la Fuente, two Spanish puppeteers working with Títeres desde abajo (Puppets From Below), were arrested under charges of glorification of terrorism. The arrests occurred following the staging of a puppet show aimed at children entitled La bruja y Don Cristóbal (The Witch and Don Cristóbal), in which they displayed a placard reading ‘Gora-Alka-ETA’ (Long Live Al Qaeda-ETA). In the aftermath of their arrest, there was a surge of popular support for the pair of puppeteers, and prominent Spanish performers and filmmakers, including Alberto San Juan and Achero Mañas, spoke out in defence of the individuals in question. Furthermore, organizations including Amnesty International and the association Judges for Democracy stressed that these charges should be dropped. In their statement on the matter, Judges for Democracy emphasized that while the placard could be seen to glorify terrorism, ‘it is also more obvious that, when this does not actually occur in reality, but as a form of expression by puppeteers, the meaning and purpose of the performance should be considered’ (Gálvez 2016). While García and Lázaro were acquitted, their arrest under the charges of glorifying terrorism is one amongst a whole host of further detainments along similar lines in recent times, including that of rappers César Strawberry and Valtònyc and actor Willy Toledo. Each of these cases demonstrates the perceived potency of performance and performers in the contemporary Spanish context. Writing about the arrest of

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García and Lázaro, journalist Gabriel Pasquini contends that while the artists do not evidence connections to terrorist groups, they do ‘fit the profile of a different sort of enemy, one that the conservative administration of Mariano Rajoy, Spain’s Prime Minister, and his Popular Party have been targeting of late: the advancing left’ (2016). As Pasquini suggests, those working in the culture industry in Spain have, in recent years, seen themselves pressured and persecuted either through extreme financial measures introduced in the name of austerity or, as with the examples just mentioned, due to the perceived political threat of their performance content. While there may not be censorship in place in the same way that this occurred under Franco, Spanish artists still find themselves in a delicate situation with regard to what they can and cannot say, do or represent in the context of their work. Just as oppositional filmmakers under Franco, such as Luis García Berlanga and Juan Antonio Bardem, deployed the paradigm of performance as a means of outwitting censorship, the films considered in Subversive Spanish Cinema: The Politics of Performance engage performance and its concomitant rhetoric in order to challenge and condemn the political denunciation of the culture industry in contemporary democratic Spain. In counterdistinction to the oft-cited celebratory and affirmative potential of performance, the works unpacked in this monograph underscore the duality of performance and its rhetoric of repetition as a means of emphasizing how little has changed despite the Transition from dictatorship to democracy following the death of Franco in 1975. Evidencing the plurality of permutations of performance in contemporary Spanish cinema, the works explored in this book take their inspiration from oppositional filmmakers such as Berlanga and Bardem as a means by which to critique governing paradigms of identity, at the level of both individual and society. Engaging performances of pastness, performative identities, metaperformances and performance as catharsis, the case studies of Subversive Spanish Cinema: The Politics of Performance subvert and transgress official political narratives, producing an alternative framework through which to understand contemporary society in Spain.

NOTES

Introduction 1 All translations, unless otherwise stated, are my own. 2 I would like to thank the inimitable Professor Santiago Fouz Hernández, who suggested I begin my book with this anecdote. His influence is tangible throughout this monograph and I am immensely grateful for all of his support, both academic and pastoral, over the years. 3 I would like to thank my friend Samira Nadkarni for sharing this insightful observation when providing comments on a draft version of this chapter. Her comments have been invaluable in terms of strengthening the Introduction. 4 It is worth noting here that political parties from across the spectrum have capitalized upon this performative approach to politics and that social media channels are complex sites which lend themselves to the flourishing of populism. It should also be noted that the relationship between social media and performance, mentioned briefly here as well as in relation to director Achero Mañas and his use of social media as a platform to critique contemporary Spanish politics, is a topic that lies outwith the scope of this monograph. For more on this, see, for example, Fleur (2014), Cook and Hasmath (2014), Schwartz and Halegoua (2014). I would like to thank Samira Nadkarni for making and sharing these excellent observations with me. 5 A case in point is South African athlete Caster Semenya whose status as a woman is constantly called into question in connection with race, queerness and the biological construction of womanhood. I would like to thank my friend Samira Nadkarni for making this astute observation and for encouraging me to think about the limitations of such frameworks.

Chapter 1 1 I would like to thank my friend Dr Paula Blair who read an early version of this chapter and made this excellent observation with regard to this aspect of the film. Her comments were vital in shaping the central arguments of this chapter as they now stand and I am grateful for her time and input.

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2 See, for example, Carlos Boyero (2012), Peter Bradshaw (2013), Demetrios Matheou (2013) and Thomas Sotinel (2013). 3 I would like to thank my friend Dr Paula Blair for pointing this out in her reading of this chapter in draft form. 4 See, for example, Ana María Gómez Llorente (2013), Hildy Johnson (2012), Anthony Lane (2013) and A. O. Scott (2013). Even Berger, in the Así se hizo (Making Of) feature that accompanies the DVD release of the film, details Oria’s eyes as being ‘ojos así grandes que hablaban’ (‘eyes so big that talked’) (Blancanieves 2012). 5 These include Tarancón. El quinto mandamiento (Tarancón. The Fifth Commandment) (2010), a TV mini-series about the life of Spanish cardinal Vicente Enrique y Tarancón, a key figure of the democratic Transition, which begins with the assassination of Carrero Blanco (also depicted in Balada); No lo llames amor … llámalo X (Don’t Call It Love … Call It X) (2011), a comedy in which an economically struggling veteran porn director sets out to make the film of his career, a pornographic parody of the Spanish Civil War; Bikini: Una historia real (Bikini: A True Story) (2014), a short film set in the 1950s in which the mayor of Benidorm seeks Franco’s help because he wants women to be able to wear bikinis on beach; and La reina de España (The Queen of Spain) (2016), the sequel to La niña de tus ojos (The Girl of Your Dreams) set in the 1950s, nearly two decades after the events of the first film, which sees Macarena Granada, now a Hollywood star, return to Spain to shoot a film about Queen Isabella I of Castile. 6 The actor who plays one of Areces’s fellow air steward colleagues in Los amantes pasajeros, Raúl Arévalo, also appears briefly in Balada in a scene integral to the interrelatedness of performance and pastness. In the scene in which Javier witnesses Raphael sing on the cinematic screen, Arévalo plays a young man who confronts the clown blocking everyone else’s view and who ultimately suffers his wrath. 7 I would like to thank my friend Dr Paula Blair for this insightful observation. 8 I have written elsewhere (Noble 2015: 24–9) about the ways in which El espíritu de la colmena deliberately overemphasizes the fictitiousness and mythical character of both the cinematic medium and the perspective of the child in order to assert, paradoxically, the opposite: that they are both deeply embedded in, and explicitly reflect on, a specific socio-historical context. 9 As an example, Boyero deemed the film ‘una de las películas más tontas que he visto en mucho tiempo’ [one of the silliest films that I have seen in a long time] (2013).

Chapter 2 1 On the representation of the male body and Spanish national identity in Jamón, see, for example, D’Lugo (1995), Evans (2004), Fouz Hernández (2005; 2013: 46–60), Fouz Hernández and Martínez Expósito (2007: 11–36), and Perriam (2003: 93–120). On

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women and femininity in the film, see, among others, Ballesteros (2001: 191–7) and Deleyto (1999). 2 For more on the significance of Samson in this context, see Kinder (1993a: 221 and 1993b: 35). 3 For a detailed explanation of the significance of the Osborne billboard both within this film and in Spain and Spanish culture more generally, see Fouz Hernández (2013: 49–51). 4 See Fouz Hernández (2005: 197) and Perriam (2003: 98) for alternative interpretations of this sequence. 5 Scholars interpret this image, which forms the backdrop for the end credits, in diverse ways including its casting of female characters in stereotypical roles (Ballesteros 2001: 197) or its representation of the triumph of ‘Possessive and destructive motherhood’ (Deleyto 1999: 280). 6 I have published an extended version of this analysis elsewhere (Noble 2017). 7 Despite Rafa and Amaia remaining unmarried at the end of the sequel Ocho apellidos catalanes, the concluding sequence of this film compounds the heteronormative objective of procreation with the birth of their child – somewhat humorously as Koldo, Merche, Rafa and Amaia are travelling to the Basque Country, prompting Koldo to shift the signpost marking their entry to his homeland so as to ensure that his grandchild is born not in Spain, but in the Basque Country. 8 Further complicating the dynamics of centralization and singularity that pervade the iconic significance of the marital union of these royal figures is the propagandistic use of Isabella by Francoism in the twentieth century. For more on this, see Weissberger (2003: xxvi–xxvii). 9 Interestingly, Austin does not comment to any great extent on the performativity of testifying in court in his lectures on this theoretical paradigm. There are a number of references throughout the text to the performative actions of judges but no specific mention of testimony as performative. 10 It would seem that Leo also wishes to substitute Marta for Alicia. As she is about to leave, Leo requests that Marta spend the night with him as he does not have the strength to be alone with his daughter. They sleep together, Leo calling Marta by his late wife’s name, covering her mouth with his hand when she requests that he not do so and breaking down into tears. The camera focuses on Marta’s face, demonstrating her discomfort. The scene is unsettling to watch, underscoring the extent to which the grieving process is nowhere near complete for Leo. 11 It is not my intention to outline within this analysis the ways in which Todo sobre mi madre dispenses with the father figure as this has been extensively covered in existing scholarship. For more on this, see, among others, Acevedo Muñoz (2004), Allinson (2001: 63), Arroyo (1999), Ballesteros (2009), Bersani (2010), Colmenero (2001: 85), Corbalán (2008: 159), Maddison (2000: 279), Martin Márquez (2004), Riambau (2008: 251), Sofair (2001: 42) and Zecchi (2005: 157).

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12 The organ donation simulation sequence is in itself a repeated performance as a similar episode also appears in the earlier La flor de mi secreto (The Flower of My Secret) (Almodóvar 1995). 13 There is a wealth of scholarship on the significance of the character of La Agrado and of her monologue in particular. See, for example, Acevedo Muñoz (2004: 35) and Ballesteros (2009: 87–8). 14 A third intertext, Haciendo Lorca, which is rehearsed by Huma in the closing scenes of the film, also emphasizes the significance of performance in the context of mourning and specifically in relation to the mother grieving the loss of her son. The lines, in part from and in part inspired by Federico García Lorca’s Bodas de sangre, are pronounced by Huma:

Hay gente que piensa que los hijos son cosa de un día. Pero se tarda mucho. Mucho. Por eso es tan terrible ver la sangre de una derramado por el suelo. Una fuente que corre un minuto y a nosotros nos ha costado años. Cuando yo descubrí a mi hijo, estaba tumbada en mitad de la calle. Me mojé las manos de sangre y me las lamí con la lengua. Porque era mía. Los animales los lamen, ¿verdad? A mí no me da asco de mi hijo. Tú no sabes lo que es eso. En una custodia de cristal y topacios pondría yo la tierra empapada por su sangre. (There are people who think that children are made in a day. But it takes a long time, a very long time. That’s why it is so awful to see your child’s blood spilled on the ground. A stream that flows for a minute and yet cost us years. When I found my son, he was lying in the middle of the street. I soaked my hands in his blood and licked them. Because it was mine. Animals lick their young, don’t they? I’m not disgusted by my son. You don’t know what it’s like. In a monstrance of glass and topaz I would put the earth soaked by his blood.)

Chapter 3 1 See also José Colmeiro (2002), Ann Davies (2004a and 2004b) and D’Lugo (1991), among others. 2 I would like to thank Dr Ana M. Sánchez-Arce for sharing this insightful observation with me upon reading a draft version of this chapter. 3 I would like to thank Dr Ana M. Sánchez-Arce for this excellent observation. 4 I thank Dr Ana M. Sánchez-Arce for sharing this insightful observation with me. 5 I would like to thank fellow academic and Twitter friend Dr Katie Newstead for recommending I read Dominique Russell in relation to representations of rape and for generously sharing her work on rape in Maleficent.

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6 Several critics and scholars address the autobiographical slant of La mala educación: see, for example, D’Lugo (2009), Víctor Fuentes (2009) and Garrett Stewart (2006). 7 I would like to thank José Arroyo who made this observation in an illuminating exchange on Twitter about the framing in this sequence and film. 8 This insightful observation belongs to Dr Ana M. Sánchez-Arce and I thank her for sharing her thoughts on this film and my chapter in draft form. Her comments have been invaluable in redrafting and editing this chapter.

Chapter 4 1 There are a wealth of resources with regard to this aspect of the Transition. See, for example, Manuel Redero San Roman (1993: 34–5), Victoria Prego (1996: 569), Josep Colomer (1998: 174), Javier Ugarte (2006: 213) and Mercedes Camino (2011: 2). 2 Marco’s tears in response to a performance provide a further moment of connection later in the film. In this instance, it is Lydia who is moved by Marco’s emotional reaction to Veloso’s vocal performance, underscoring the affective potential of performance within the film. 3 In July 2018, it was announced that Mañas would return to filmmaking with a dark comedy entitled Un mundo normal starring Ernesto Alterio. At the time of writing, it is scheduled for release in May 2020. 4 I thank my friend Dr Lorna Muir for this insightful observation.

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INDEX

All about Eve 19, 102, 104, 110 Almodóvar, Pedro; see also Hable con ella, La mala educación, Los amantes pasajeros, Todo sobre mi madre Hable con ella 26, 172–85 influences 13, 20, 62, 170 La mala educación 25, 114, 134–44 Los amantes pasajeros 24, 30, 58–69 politics 2, 4, 23 on reality TV 183 role of performance 23, 58 style 68, 139 Todo sobre mi madre 25, 72, 100–11 Andalusian identity in ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! 14–17 in Ocaña: Retrat intermitent 159, 163, 167 in Ocho apellidos vascos 64, 82–5, 89, 91, 112 as Spanish stereotype 39 Areces, Carlos 45–6, 53–5, 64–5, 202 n.6; see also Balada triste de trompeta, Los amantes pasajeros austerity Bardem on austerity measures 1–2, 4 cinema as critique 26, 114, 145 and culture industry 38–9, 200 Mañas’ response to 187–8 Podemos 5–6 performance rhetoric of 66 as production context 30, 152 Austin, J. L. (How to do Things with Words) 8, 72, 86–7, 88, 203 n.9 Balada triste de trompeta 24, 29–31, 45–58, 60, 69–70, 202 n.6; see also de la Iglesia, Alex Bardem, Javier 1–4, 27, 73–82; see also Jamón, jamón

Bardem, Juan Antonio; see also Cómicos ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! 14 Cómicos 18–23, 110 family 2–3 female performers 15 as leftist alternative filmmaker 12–13, 62, 65, 154, 200 Basque identity 39, 46, 48, 82–5, 89–92, 112, 203 n.7 Berger, Pablo 24, 29, 31–45, 202 n.4; see also Blancanieves Berlanga, Luis García; see also ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! 13–18 as leftist alternative filmmaker 12, 23, 62, 63, 65, 154, 200 ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! 13–18, 23, 75, 89; see also Berlanga, Luis García Bigas i Luna, Josep Joan 2, 25, 72, 73–82; see also Jamón, jamón Blancanieves; see also Berger, Pablo alternative families 50 analysis 31–45 death 51, 95 disillusionment with present 47 and El espíritu de la colmena 48, 202 n.4 performance and silence 61, 65, 67 performance of past 24, 29–31, 58, 69–70 repetition 48, 49, 60, 119 style 146 Bollaín, Icíar 25, 114, 144–54; see also También la lluvia Botto, Juan Diego 92–100; see also Todo lo que tú quieras bullfighting; see also Blancanieves, Jamón, jamón, Hable con ella

220

INDEX

in Blancanieves 30, 31, 32, 39, 43–5 in Hable con ella 173, 181–3 in Jamón, jamón 77–8 Butler, Judith 8, 20–1, 41, 72, 86, 108, 169 Carmen; see also Saura, Carlos analysis 115–24 and metaperformance 25–6, 114, 154–5 mirrors 162 objectification of women 131 power of director 132, 134, 154–5 rehearsal as focus 17 voice-over 138 Catalan identity 39–41, 70 censorship 12, 17, 19, 60–2, 132, 197, 200 circus in Balada triste de trompeta 24, 30, 45–6, 48, 50–2, 56 in Política, manual de instrucciones 6 transvestism as 171 Civil War in Balada triste de trompeta 46, 48, 57 cinematic representations of 24, 29, 30, 69 contemporary legacy of 91 death during and since 38 and Federico García Lorca 165 in Los amantes pasajeros 61 Cómicos 3, 13, 15, 18–23, 110, 148; see also Bardem, Juan Antonio Crisis (economic / 2007–8); see also economic crash, post-Crisis Spain austerity measures 5, 20, 145, 155, 187 and Los amantes pasajeros 58, 59, 64, 66, 68 as production context 25–6, 30, 44, 45, 46, 57, 69, 114 and También la Lluvia 151–4 Podemos 6 vulnerability of performers 23 cross-dressing 66, 92–3, 95, 99–100, 164, 170; see also drag, transvestism Cuesta, Inma 31, 39–40; see also Blancanieves

dance; see also flamenco in Balada triste de trompeta 51 in ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! 14, 15, 17 in Blancanieves 36–8 in Carmen 25, 114, 115–18, 120–2 flamenco 14, 15, 17, 25, 36–8, 114, 115–18, 120–2 in Hable con ella 26, 159, 173–9, 181, 182, 185 in Los amantes pasajeros 24, 30 de la Iglesia, Alex 24, 29, 45–58; see also Balada triste de trompeta de la Torre, Antonio 46, 54, 54–8, 68; see also Balada triste de trompeta, Los amantes pasajeros death in Balada triste de trompeta 46, 47, 51–2 in Blancanieves 33, 36–8, 40, 44, 45 in Carmen 115, 122–3 in Hable con ella 172 in Jamón, jamón 80–1 in La mala educación 135, 139–40, 142–3 in Los amantes pasajeros 61, 65 in Noviembre 185–6, 188, 196–7, 198 in Ocaña: Retrat intermitent 158, 160, 165–8, 171, 198 in Todo lo que tú quieras 93, 95, 99 in Todo sobre mi madre 100, 101, 102, 104, 106, 111 drag 67, 93, 98, 112, 134, 163, 169–71; see also cross-dressing, transvestism economic crash; see also Crisis (economic / 2007–8), post-Crisis Spain and austerity measures 1–3, 145 and Bardem 4 effect on culture industry 23–4, 151–2, 153 Los amantes pasajeros as metaphor for 69 and Mañas 23, 188 as production context 30, 145

INDEX

El espíritu de la colmena 42, 48, 62, 202 n.8; see also Erice, Víctor el Valle de los Caídos 46, 47, 50, 51–3, 70 Erice, Víctor 42, 48, 65; see also El espíritu de la colmena Familia 25–6, 114, 124–33, 134, 154–5, 179; see also León de Aranoa, Fernando family unit in Balada 50 Bardem family 1–2, 4, 18 in Blancanieves 32 in Familia 124–6, 128–31, 154–5 Mañas family 187 in Ocho apellidos vascos 89 in Todo lo que tú quieras 92–5, 99 in Todo sobre mi madre 100–1, 105 fatherhood 92–100, 125, 131, 203 n.11; see also paternity femininity in Blancanieves 41, 45 in Familia 130 in Hable con ella 178, 181 in Jamón, jamón 73–4, 202–3 n.1 in Ocaña: Retrat intermitent 169, 171 in Ocho apellidos vascos 85 and performativity 8, 25, 71, 73–4 in También la lluvia 149 in Todo lo que tú quieras 92–3, 96–7, 112 in Todo sobre mi madre 100, 101–3, 112 film-within-a/the-film in Hable con ella 179–80 in La mala educación 135, 137, 138–43 in También la lluvia 144, 145, 147–53 flamenco in ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! 14–15, 17 in Blancanieves 24, 30, 31–7, 39–41, 43–5, 51 in Carmen 25, 114, 115, 119–23, 154 as national stereotype 14–15, 17, 181 in Noviembre 192

221

in Ocaña: Retrat intermitent 171 in Ocho apellidos vascos 85 Foucault, Michel 163, 165, 195 Franco, Francisco; see also Francoism in Balada triste de trompeta 47–8 death of 4, 5, 12, 29, 53, 58, 71, 89, 158, 160 fictional representations 54, 202 n.5 life under 2, 13, 50, 66, 154, 164, 165, 200 policy of apertura 17 remains 52–3, 70 role in Civil War 2 successor 46, 60 Francoism in Balada triste de trompeta 46–50, 52–3, 57 and centralism 89 cinematic representations of 24, 29–30 and contemporary Spain 69 el Pacto del Olvido 61 el Valle de los Caídos 52–3 ghosts of 38 in La mala educación 134 in Los amantes pasajeros 61 oppositional filmmaking during 12–13, 19 as production context of Cómicos 19, 22–3 propagandistic use of Queen Isabella 203 n.8 victims of 52–3, 163–5, 167–9, 170 Garcia, Macarena 31, 42 gender in Blancanieves 41–2 in Cómicos 19–20, 22 in Familia 128–9 in film industry 26, 145–6, 150–2, 154–5 in Hable con ella 172–85 in Jamón, jamón 73–82 in Ocaña: Retrat intermitent 168–71 performativity 8, 25, 71–2, 111–12

222

INDEX

in Todo lo que tú quieras 95–7 in Todo sobre mi madre 102–11 Hable con ella 20, 26, 158, 160, 172–85, 197–8; see also Almodóvar, Pedro heteronormativity in Familia 126 in Ocho apellidos vascos 81–2, 82–92, 203 n.7 performativity of 25, 71–3, 111–12 in Todo lo que tú quieras 92–4, 98–100 historical memory 26, 30, 38, 53, 114, 167 Jamón, jamón; see also Bigas i Luna, Josep Joan analysis 73–82 ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! as influence 16 and performance 25, 72, 100, 111–12 and stereotype 89, 202 n.1 La mala educación 25–6, 66, 114, 134–44, 154–5, 205 n.6; see also Almodóvar, Pedro León de Aranoa, Fernando 5–7, 25, 114, 124–33; see also Familia, Política, manual de instrucciones Lorca, Federico García 51, 164–8, 204 n.14 Los amantes pasajeros; see also Almodóvar, Pedro analysis 58–69 circularity and repetition as theme 47, 49 Cómicos as influence 20 and masculinity 55 performance of past 24, 30–1, 71 male auteur 18, 113, 124, 134, 154 Mañas, Achero career in filmmaking 205 n.3 in Noviembre 26, 158, 185–97 politics 6, 23–4, 199, 201 n.4 in Todo lo que tú quieras 25, 72, 92–100 marriage 18, 37, 82–92, 112, 132; see also wedding

Martínez Lázaro, Emilio 25, 72, 82–92; see also Ocho apellidos vascos masculinity in Balada triste de trompeta 55–6 in Hable con ella 169, 182 in Jamón, jamón 73–82 performativity of 25, 111–12 in Todo sobre mi madre 102 toxic masculinity 55–6, 187 maternity; see also motherhood in Blancanieves 34–8 in Familia 129–30 in Ocaña: Retrat intermitent 168 performativity of 25, 73, 112 in Todo lo que tú quieras 92–8 in Todo sobre mi madre 100–3, 106 motherhood 36, 93, 100, 102, 149; see also maternity mourning 35–6, 100, 111, 166–8, 204 n.14 Noviembre 6–7, 26, 158, 160, 185–97, 197–8; see also Mañas, Achero Ocaña: Retrat intermitent 26, 158, 159–71, 172, 191, 196, 197–8; see also Pons, Ventura Ocho apellidos vascos 25, 72, 82–92 Oria, Sofía 31, 42–3, 202 n.4 Pacto del Olvido 61, 69–70 paternity 25, 73, 92–3, 98–100, 102, 112, 129; see also fatherhood performativity; see also Austin, J. L., Butler, Judith, gender in ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! 15, 17–18 in Blancanieves 41 body 183–5 in Cómicos 20, 21–2 definition 6–8 everyday 63 gender 20, 41, 71–2, 92–4, 96, 100–3, 169 in Hable con ella 183–5 and identity 12, 25, 71–2, 82–3

INDEX

in Los amantes pasajeros 63 and marriage ceremony 82–3, 85–9 in Noviembre 197 in Ocaña: Retrat intermitent 169 regional identity 82–3, 85–9 testimony 203 n.9 in Todo lo que tú quieras 92–4, 96 in Todo sobre mi madre 100–3 Podemos 5–6 Política, manual de instrucciones 5–7; see also León de Aranoa, Fernando Pons, Ventura 26, 158–61, 163, 166, 171; see also Ocaña: Retrat intermitent post-Crisis Spain 57, 58, 145, 151, 153, 187; see also Crisis (economic / 2007–8), economic crash rape 131–2, 172, 178–80, 204 n.5 Saura, Carlos 12, 25, 42, 65, 114–17, 122, 124 sexuality in Familia 130, 133 in Hable con ella 178, 184 homosexuality 164 in Jamón, jamón 73–4 in Ocaña: Retrat intermitent 164, 169–70 performativity 21–2, 72 silent cinema 26, 31–3, 40–1, 65, 67, 159, 177 spectators; see also spectatorship characters as 64, 67, 79–80, 107–9, 126, 177 in Familia 126 in Hable con ella 177 in Jamón, jamón 79–80 in Los amantes pasajeros 64, 67 in Noviembre 186, 190–2, 194–5 as performers’ counterpart 107–9 as provoked by performers 186, 194–5, 198 in Todo sobre mi madre 107–9 unwilling 190–2, 194–5 spectatorship; see also spectators

223

cathartic and therapeutic potential of 26, 157–9, 172, 174–5 as ethical participation 107–9, 194–5, 198 as form of mourning 111 in Hable con ella 172, 174–5 in Noviembre 186, 190–2, 194–5 in Todo sobre mi madre 107–9, 111 También la lluvia 25–6, 114, 144–54, 154–5; see also Bollaín, Icíar therapeutic potential (of performance) 157, 159, 167, 174 Títeres desde abajo 62, 187, 197 Todo lo que tú quieras 25, 72, 92–100, 112, 168, 187; see also Mañas, Achero Todo sobre mi madre; see also Almodóvar, Pedro analysis 100–11 Cómicos as influence 20 and maternity 112, 168 and paternity 203 n.11 and performativity 25, 72, 111–12 and transvestism 170 Transition centrality of performance during 71, 200 lack of retribution 5, 53, 61, 160, 165, 167–8, 170, 205 n.1 in Los amantes pasajeros 58, 59–61, 69–70 in Noviembre 186, 196 in Ocaña: Retrat intermitent 163–4, 167–8, 170 as production context 26, 114, 186, 198 renegotiation of identities during 71, 157 transvestism 163, 169–71; see also crossdressing, drag Verdú, Maribel 32, 40–2 wedding 72, 82–4, 86–92; see also marriage, performativity