Joan Ramon Resina – Burning Darkness. A Half Century of Spanish Cinema

Автор: Joan Ramon Resina
Название книги: Burning Darkness. A Half Century of Spanish Cinema
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Театр и Кино
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

Introduction 1
Joan Ramon Resina
1. Rehearsing for Modernity in ¡Bienvenido, Mister Marshall!
(Luis García Berlanga, 1952) 9
Eva Woods Peiró
2. Existential Crossroads in Muerte de un ciclista ( Juan Antonio
Bardem, 1955) 27
Andrés Lema-Hincapié
3. Viridiana Coca-Cola (Luis Buñuel, 1961) 43
Tom Conley
4. El espíritu de la colmena: Memory, Nostalgia, Trauma
(Víctor Erice, 1973) 61
Chris Perriam
5. A Poetics of Splitting: Memory and Identity in
La prima Angélica (Carlos Saura, 1974) 83
Àngel Quintana
6. Ambiguous Disenchantment in El corazón del bosque
(Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, 1979) 97
Irení Depetris-Chauvin
7. Los paraísos perdidos: Cinema of Return and Repetition
(Basilio Martín Patino, 1985) 105
8. (M)Othering Strategies in El pájaro de la felicidad
(Pilar Miró, 1993) 125
Jaume Martí-Olivella
9. Abjection, Trauma, and the Material Image: La madre muerta
( Juanma Bajo Ulloa, 1993) 143
Jo Labanyi
10. The Catalan Body Politic as Aired in La teta i la lluna
(Bigas Luna, 1994) 161
Dominic Keown
11. Genre and Screen Violence: Revisiting Tesis
(Alejandro Amenábar, 1995) 173
Barry Jordan
12. Conceptualizing “the Impact” in Los amantes del Círculo Polar
( Julio Medem, 1998) 195
Robert A. Davidson
13. Immortal/Undead: The Body and the Transmission of
Tradition in Amic/Amat (Ventura Pons, 1998) 211
Josep-Anton Fernàndez
14. Imitation of Life: Transsexuality and Transtextuality in Todo
sobre mi madre (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999) 235
Esteve Riambau
15. The Construction of the Cinematic Image: En construcción
( José Luis Guerín, 2000) 255
Joan Ramon Resina
Works Cited 277
List of Contributors 295
Index 301

Over the last half century, visual stories have claimed an ever-larger
share of the popular culture, as literature initiated its gradual descent
to a quantitatively and qualitatively more restricted audience. During
this time, fi lm has achieved technical sophistication and social prestige.
It is now fi rmly established as an academic discipline in its own right,
enjoying pride of place within the larger paradigm of Cultural Studies.
But although Spanish fi lm is today the object of teaching and research
in many departments, analytical resources are still scarce in English. The
existence of a few histories of Spanish cinema (the best of which, John
Hopewell’s Out of the Past, has long been out of print), of specialized
work on a few privileged directors (Buñuel, Saura, and Almodóvar), and
a handful of collections of essays (notably those edited by Peter William
Evans and Barry Jordan) does not cover the interpretive needs of the
English-speaking student of Spanish cinema, who is often at the mercy
of reviews of scant exegetical value.
The present volume is intended as a contribution to remedy this
relative dearth by offering a set of original pieces on carefully selected
directors and fi lms spanning the period from the origins of the New
Spanish Cinema in the 1950s to the end of the twentieth century. It
would be easy to draw attention to what is missing and to dispute the
choices made. Every selection entails judgments of value and one chooses
at one’s peril. But it is also true that books have a fate. However, rather
than recounting the history of the editorial choices that have led to this
particular constellation of fi lms, I would like to use this introduction to
provide a broad sense of the directions of Spanish cinema in the years
studied by the contributors. It is not a question of providing a compact
history of a half century of Spanish fi lm but rather of sketching a sense
of its development, however simplifi ed or simplistic the result may be.
Our history of Spanish cinema starts in 1952 with ¡Bienvenido, Mister
Marshall!, the fi rst international success in the post-Civil War period.
Although approved by Franco personally (Díez Puertas 303) and presented
as the offi cial Spanish entry to the Cannes Film Festival the following year,
Bienvenido inaugurated the critical cinematography that comprises the best
Spanish movies of the following decades. Today, Luis García Berlanga’s
¡Bienvenido, Mister Marshall! and Juan Antonio Bardem’s Muerte de un
ciclista (1955) are widely considered the two unquestionable classics from
the period leading up to the New Spanish Cinema of the 1960s. Both
of these works sought, in different ways, to overcome the censor’s zeal
with discourses that hinted at the social conditions toward the end of the
autarchy through the detours of humor (Berlanga) or the crise de conscience
of a wayward member of the hegemonic bourgeoisie (Bardem).
Bardem operated with the basic assumption that guided the social
realist literature of the same period. “Film—he said—will be either a
form of witnessing or nothing” (Cinema universitario n. 4, December
1956, qtd. Heredero, Las huellas 298). Others agreed. But “witnessing”
could be understood in different ways and did in fact give rise to different
methods, each attempting in its own way to circumvent the structural
impossibility of reproducing the lessons of Italian neorealism in a
Spanish context. Thus, alongside Bardem’s deadpan moralism in Muerte
de un ciclista and Calle Mayor (1955), Marco Ferreri launched his biting
satires of Franco’s happy society. Leaning on scripts drenched with the
blustery humor of Rafael Azcona, Ferreri undertook a mordant critique
of the dictatorship’s developmental myths in El pisito (1958), Los chicos
(1959), and, especially, El cochecito (1960), an original crossbreed of Italian
neorealism and Spanish grotesque. The theoretical impulse for a critical
cinema came from the legendary “conversations” at Salamanca in May
1955, pointing the way to the New Spanish Cinema. On this occasion,
Bardem declared, “Spanish cinema is politically ineffective, socially false,
intellectually abject, aesthetically nonexistent and commercially crippled”
(qtd. Besas 41), implicitly turning this fi rst conference on national fi lm
into the zero degree of post-Civil War cinema.
In the meantime, Luis Buñuel, the sole international referent of
Spanish cinema, had continued his career in exile. For the young Spanish
directors, who depended on an anemic industry, his series of low-budget
fi lms shot in Mexico were a usable lesson in the kind of diagnostic realism
that had been advocated at Salamanca. Thus, in 1960 a group of people,
including the young Saura, who had produced Los golfos the previous
year, convinced Buñuel to shoot a fi lm in Spain. Viridiana premiered at
the Cannes Film Festival as the offi cial Spanish entry on May 17, 1961,
but it was subsequently banned in Spain as a result of the Vatican’s irate
reaction. Having become the object of diplomatic persecution, Viridiana
was saved by the fact that the Mexican husband of the lead actress,
Silvia Pinal, was its main fi nancier, and through this circumstance the
fi lm acquired Mexican nationality (Edwards 144).
While Spanish directors centered in Madrid searched for a national
idiom, in Barcelona a young group of aspiring fi lmmakers tried to develop
a cinema based on an international sensibility, though in fact indebted to
the nouvelle vague of Truffaut and Godard. In the past, Barcelona had
pioneered fi lm production in Spain, but the dictatorship’s concentration
of resources in Madrid had led to the dismantling of Barcelona’s fi lm
industry. In the ruins of that industry and deprived of the subventions
that the government reserved for degree-holders of Madrid’s Offi cial
School of Cinema, the members of the School of Barcelona practiced
an antirealist fi lm with hardly any exposure to national audiences and
virtually no attention abroad. Even in Barcelona, this adventure achieved
little more than private repercussion. Aesthetically, the fi lms of the School
strived to be cosmopolitan but did not even manage to become local,
except in the narrowest sense: a neighborhood affair in the upper-class
districts of Sarrià and Sant Gervasi.
It is true that in Spain no other fi lm movement has drawn as much
hostility as the School of Barcelona, but it would be unfair to suggest
that the displeasure was principally motivated by the frustration of the
alternative projects of the New Spanish Cinema and an aborted Catalan
cinema (Riambau and Torreiro 184). There is a measure of truth in Angel
Llorente’s scathing attack in “Cine Made in Barcelona,” published in
Cinestudio in January 1968. In this abrasive article Llorente accused the
Catalan group of elitism, snobbishness, and a mimetic cosmopolitanism
infl ected by the communist icons that were popular among the offspring
of the European bourgeoisie (Riambau and Torreiro 191). But the critique
could also lay bare the conservatism of the proponents of the New
Spanish Cinema. In a letter addressed to Jacinto Esteva on June 8, 1968,
Francisco Regueiro and Antxon Eceiza assailed this promoter of the Barcelona
School because “rumor has it that in your new fi lm you again insult
the Spanish people, that is to say, the Castilian essence of this people,
whose eternal values Francisco and I have defended more than once at
the risk of losing our national identity card.” And: “We have heard, that
is to say, we have been assured in Cuba that in your fi lm people speak in
French, English and Catalan, with the purpose, obviously, that no Spanish
worker can understand it, thus creating an aristocratic minority and
limiting the access of the masses to culture” (qtd. Riambau and Torreiro
194). Although Regueiro now claims that this letter was meant to be
humorous, the truth is that in the 1960s competition between the realist
aesthetics of the New Spanish Cinema and the avant-garde proclivities
of the School of Barcelona was keen. Joaquim Jordà wrote at the time:
“There are two possible cinemas in Spain: one backward-looking, which
explains that we are as we are, and another that explains our present and
tries to show how we could be. The fi rst kind is made in Madrid; the
second in Barcelona” (qtd. Riambau and Torreiro 189).
Over time, the members of the School of Barcelona have tended to
adjust their valuation to the historical judgment on their formal games.
Thus, Jordà now regards that phase “with sympathy but without [fi nding
in it] the least effi cacy or usefulness” (qtd. Riambau and Torreiro 362).
And Pere Portabella, whose Pont de Varsòvia (1989) remains the fi lm
most clearly conceived in the wake of the School’s aesthetic, reminisces
about those earlier experiences: “I believe that all that did not happen
gratuitously, without cause. But I refuse to sublimate the facts. I think
that we must be very critical with the results we achieved” (qtd. Riambau
and Torreiro 362). Notwithstanding the predictable failure of a movement
that turned its back on both the audiences and their cultural memory,
the School’s formal experimentation produced long-term effects in the
visual style of the mature Saura, in the later fi lms of Vicente Aranda
and Gonzalo Suárez, in Bigas Luna, Agustín Villaronga, and, arguably,
in the far more coherent analysis of the image in the unclassifi able fi lms
of José Luis Guerín.