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

by Duncan Wheeler (Editor), Fernando Canet (Editor)

Overview

Formulated around a number of key thematic concerns – including new creative trends; the politics and practices of memory; auteurship, genre and stardom in a transnational age – this reassessment of contemporary Spanish cinema from 1992 to 2012 brings leading academics from a broad range of disciplinary and geographical backgrounds into dialogue with critically and commercially successful practitioners to suggest the need to redefine the parameters of one of the world’s most creative national cinemas. This volume will appeal not only to students and scholars of Spanish films, but also to anyone with an interest in contemporary world cinema.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783204083
Publisher:	Intellect Books
Publication date:	12/01/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	300
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Dr Fernando Canet is associate professor in film and media studies at the Fine Arts College (Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain). He has been a visiting research fellow at the Goldsmiths College (University of London), at New York University and at the University of Kent. He is the author of two books, co-author of another about film narrative and co-editor of three books, special mention to his co-edited book titled (Re)viewing Creative, Critical and Commercial Practices in Contemporary Spanish Cinema (Duncan and Canet 2014, Intellect Ltd). He has been the guest editor of a special issue of Hispanic Research Journal on Contemporary Spanish Cinema and a special issue of L’Atalante on Cinephile Directors in Modern Time. When the Cinema Interrogates Itself. His latest articles have been published in Communication & Society, Studies in European Cinema, Studies in Documentary Films, The Journal of Popular Culture, Popular Communication, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Journal of Film and Video, Journal of Screenwriting and International Journal of Cultural Studies.

Duncan Wheeler is Associate Professor in Spanish studies at the University of Leeds, where he is also a member of the Executive Committee for the Centre for World Cinemas.

Duncan Wheeler is professor and chair of Spanish studies at the University of Leeds where he is also director of international activities. A published translator, he is a fellow of the Spanish Academy of Stage Arts. He is the author of three monographs and over fifty peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. His latest book is Following Franco: Spanish Culture and Politics in Transition (Manchester University Press, 2020). In addition to his academic publications, he regularly receives commissions to write for such media outlets as El País, The London Review of Books, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, The Economist, Jot Down and The Village Voice.

Contact: School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK.

Fernando Canet is an associate professor in media and communication studies at the Fine Arts College (Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain). He has been a visiting research fellow at Goldsmiths College, New York University and University of Kent. He has been the guest editor of four Special Issues: Hispanic Research Journal on contemporary Spanish cinema, L’Atalante on reflexive practices in Spanish cinema, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies on perpetrator documentary film and Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies on documentary film mutations for social change. His latest articles have been published in Studies in Documentary Films, The Journal of Popular Culture, Popular Communication, Journal of Film and Video, Journal of Screenwriting, International Journal of Cultural Studies and International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics.

Contact: Universitat Politècnica de València, Camino de Vera s/n, València 46022, Spain.

Read an Excerpt

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

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By Duncan Wheeler, Fernando Canet

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2014 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78320-408-3

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: How and Why this Book Came into Being

Fernando Canet and Duncan Wheeler

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

(Cavell, 1976: 94)

Although there is a certain arbitrariness in all attempts at chronological division, there are clearly key moments in which, as a result of broader socio-historical factors and/or aesthetic developments, national cinemas appear to undergo serious transformation. In the case of Spain, this has been inextricably linked with changes in political mood or power: therefore, it is customary to refer to its cinema in terms of the period in which it was produced, be that during the Second Republic, the Spanish Civil War or the dictatorship. Even those films produced in the late 1970s and 1980s tended to be viewed and written about in terms of the nascent democracy; hence, a film-maker as ostensibly apolitical as Pedro Almodóvar was often interpreted (especially abroad) in relation to Franco's death and the dictatorship's demise. If 1992 was the year in which, through a series of emblematic events – the Barcelona Olympics, the Expo in Seville, Madrid being named City of Culture – Spain announced its democratic credentials to the world, then it also marked the final point at which its cinematic output could be plausibly classified in relation to its sociopolitical Transition.

If, for example, we take even a fleeting glance at the film whose image graces the front cover of this volume – La mosquitera/The Mosquito Net (Vila, 2010) – the need to extend our artillery of heuristic tools and the parameters of what is commonly understood by Spanish cinema become apparent. In a twenty-first century continuation of Spain's rich surrealist tradition, this depiction of a dysfunctional upper -middle-class family is an artfully constructed, psychologically acute and engaging black comedy; nevertheless, it trades in the kind of bourgeois angst more habitually associated with French cinema and whose manifestation in modern-day Barcelona is a symptom, for better or worse, of Spain's economic and social normalization in relation to its European neighbours. Although the film's producer, the prolific Luis Miñarro has, to borrow a phrase from Paul Julian Smith (2011: 184), 'midwifed much of the new Catalan art cinema', La mosquitera is fairly conventional in many respects: made with television funding, it has a pace redolent of commercial cinema and stars Emma Suárez, a figure familiar to Spanish television and cinema audiences, who first made her name as an adolescent sex symbol in the 1980s. While a few years previously these ingredients would have virtually guaranteed box office success, La mosquitera delivered only a modest financial return, but it was very well received at a number of international film festivals which constitute a circuit on which much Spanish cinema is increasingly reliant, implicating even ostensibly national films such as this within a matrix of transnational economic and aesthetic exchanges.

The primary aim of this edited volume is to provide a self-reflective and interventionist form of academic criticism which combines aesthetic appraisal with a (re)consideration of the creative, commercial and critical imperatives that inform and underpin the viewing and reviewing of contemporary Spanish films. It makes no claim to be exhaustive or even necessarily representative; there are already numerous excellent companions and guides to the history of Spanish cinema available, many of which will be cited in different chapters. At a time when the entire notion of national cinemas is being increasingly put into question, what we believe this book does provide is the most broad-ranging study of contemporary cinematic practices in Spain – both in terms of objects of study and methodology – with a special emphasis on films produced over the last ten years (2002–12). The majority of the contributors participated in the (S)Movies: Contemporary Spanish Cinema International Conference, which was organized by the Department of Audiovisual Communication, Documentation and History of Art, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, and held in New York in December 2011 – and subsequently were invited to submit a chapter on a topic of their choice that fell within the general rubric of the book's remit. From reading these initial submissions, we were able to identify some underlying themes and debates; we then commissioned a small number of additional chapters by individuals whose expertise we felt would be uniquely placed to develop these conversations further by addressing the issues raised by the titles of the sections, but not yet addressed in any of the submitted pieces. This vision of the book as a form of dialogue or exchange finds its most explicit manifestation in the final section, in which a series of scholars engage with practitioners and/or institutions.

Hence the book ends like the conference before it, with a round table discussion led by Fernando Canet between José Luis Guerin (one of the country's most respected directors, regularly feted at major international festivals, who first gained major national and international acclaim with En construcción/Work in Progress, 2001, and probably is best known outside of Spain for En la ciudad de Sylvia/In the City of Sylvia, 2007), and Isaki Lacuesta (a formally adventurous and prolific young film-maker who debuted with the short film Caras vs. Caras, 2000 and won the top prize, the Golden Shell, at the 2011 San Sebastian Film Festival for Los pasos dobles/The Double Steps), alongside Luis Miñarro. In addition to his Spanish films, Miñarro has been involved in a series of international co-productions including O Estranho Caso de Angélica/The Strange Case of Angélica (de Oliviera, 2010) and Loong Boonmee raleuk chat /Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Weerasethakul, 2010), the winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes. The exchange between Mercedes Gamero – head of acquisitions and cinema production at the television channel, Antena 3 – and Duncan Wheeler also focuses on the production of both national and international films, but moves away from the reified domain of art films to address the production of commercial cinema that is not so dependent on awards or festivals, but rather on the domestic and/or international box office.

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

CHAPTER 2

Spanish Films, 1992–2012: Two Decades of Cinematic Production and Critical Discourse

Duncan Wheeler

For Spain, 1992 might have been a euphoric year, but in spite of the release of Belle Epoque/The Age of Beauty (Trueba, 1992) – which, somewhat unexpectedly, would win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film the following year – the national cinema was in no mood for celebration. It was suffering the financial fallout of the costs of Spain joining the European Union (EU), and arguably registered the effects of the global recession earlier than other cultural industries. Even Pedro Almodóvar, who subsequently would become a reliable international ambassador, had failed to capitalize on the success of Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios/Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988). More generally the infamous 1983 Miró Law, designed to replicate French protectionist models, may have delivered a select number of emblematic commercial and critical triumphs such as Los santos inocentes/The Holy Innocents (Camus, 1984) while facilitating a number of young directors in making their debuts, but on the whole it had alienated audiences. Furthermore, a lack of transparency in its practices and a frequent desire to control rather than counteract market forces led to charges of cronyism. As Peter Besas has observed:

The criteria for giving subsidies have always been murky, vague enough so that political and private favoritism could be exercised. Nepotism and influence-pulling overshadowed the system and continue to be a key factor in the subsidy system, whether under Franco or under the Socialists. After all, behind all the laws and legal frippery always hovers the human factor. Influence pulling does not alter with political systems. Only the people in it change. Indeed, the tug-of-war for currying favors today is just as fierce as it was in the times of El Cid.

(1997: 246)

In general, there has been an unwillingness in democratic Spain to implement the so-called 'arm's-length principle' which, according to Robert Hewison, has acted as a buffer against despotic behaviour in the UK: 'A convention has been established over the years that in arts patronage neither the politician nor the bureaucrat knows best' (1995: 32).

In Spain, 1994 marked a nadir in terms of film production, as well as an about-turn in film policy whereby the Minister of Culture, Carmen Alborch, virtually dismantled Pilar Miró's reforms and, instead of offering advance credits to a small number of prestigious projects generally heralded by renowned auteurs, gave automatic subsidies on the basis of box office receipts (Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas, 1998: 3). In 1994, the Escuela de Cinematografía y del Audiovisual de la Comunidad de Madrid/Greater Madrid Audiovisual and Film School (ECAM) opened in Madrid; its Catalan equivalent, the Escuela Superior de Cine y Audiovisuales de Cataluña/Catalan School for Advanced Study in Film and Audiovisual Communication (ESCAC), came into operation the following year. 1995 also marked a resurgence in production, and Spanish film of the latter half of the decade was widely construed as one of European cinema's most unlikely and unexpected success stories.

This renaissance, be it perceived or real, was due principally to the emergence of a new generation of directors that were very different to the traditional auteur. In the words of Rosanna Maule: 'What distinguished these newcomers from their predecessors was their determination to attract domestic audiences within a theatrical exhibition circuit dominated by Hollywood films. Yet their responses to the crisis facing Spanish cinema were diverse' (2008: 134). So, on the one hand – and especially during the legislature of the Centre-Right, market-driven Partido Popular (People's Party, 1996–2004) – film directors such as Iciar Bollaín, Chus Gutiérrez, Fernando León de Aranoa and Benito Zambrano sought to use social realist cinema as a form of political protest in the vein of British film-makers such as Ken Loach. Conversely, there was a boom in various autochthonous takes on genre films: be they the slick, sophisticated thrillers of Alejandro Amenábar, Álex de la Iglesia's hybrid fantasies or, to borrow an expression from Núria Triana-Toribio (2003: 151), the 'neo-vulgarities' that hit their stride with Airbag (Bajo Ulloa, 1997), and found their most profitable and durable formula in the Torrente saga (Segura, 1998–2011). In spite of their disparate ethical and aesthetic agendas, Carlos Heredero is correct to identify a trait common to these film -makers: 'They came of age as directors when freedom had already been won, and they do not feel the necessity of coming to terms with the past. Therefore, any reflection on history has practically disappeared from their images' (2003: 34).

Spanish Cinema as an Academic Discipline

This resurgence in the commercial fortunes of Spanish cinema coincided with its consolidation as an established academic discipline. Especially in the UK, this nascent field of study had originated within modern languages more than film studies (see Triana -Toribio, 2008). As Ann Davies remarks, the fact that often it was broached first by critics more used to approaching literature, alongside political sympathies, meant that 'there was a canon of great directors such as Buñuel and pioneers of the nuevo cine español (New Spanish Cinema) such as Carlos Saura and Víctor Erice, drawing on an allegorical style that hinted at opposition to the Franco regime' (2011: 3). As she goes on to say, a great deal of excellent work and groundbreaking scholarship was produced within this rubric. However, it was ironic that at a time when Spanish cinema was moving away from its ties with the Francoist past, this remained the dominant subject and heuristic tool through which it often continued to be viewed from abroad, arguably reinscribing a somewhat distorted dynamic from the 1960s by which the policies of the incumbent Director General of Cinematographic Arts, José María García Escudero, encouraged dissident work at home to be targeted primarily at international, as opposed to domestic, audiences.

Hence, for example, a 2007 retrospective season at the British Film Institute (BFI), generously funded by the incoming Socialist government, included landmark oppositional films such as ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall!/Welcome Mister Marshall! (García Berlanga, 1953), Calle Mayor/Main Street (Bardem, 1956) or El desencanto/The Disenchantment (Chávarri, 1976). As Susan Hayward notes, 'the writing of a national cinema has predominantly addressed moments of exception and not the "global" picture' (1993: xi). Films such as these – alongside the Salamanca Conversations of the mid-1950s, at which directors such as Berlanga and Bardem mercilessly critiqued Spain's national cinema in its entirety and, inspired by neo-realism, called for more socially and politically engaged films – often have been construed as a cornucopian revolution in Spanish film production. However, as I have argued elsewhere, the BFI's season's title, 'Breaking the Code: Daring Films that Mocked the Repression in Spain':

might be an accurate description, but films of the quality of El desencanto or Calle Mayor have an interest that transcends the political. A similar thing occurred when Berlanga died. On the one hand, I was pleased that a newspaper such as The Guardian dedicated nearly a page to his obituary; I was irritated, however, by the emphasis that was placed on his role as a dissident under the regime. Apart from the fact that Don Luis's ideological convictions are not at all easy to work out, this specifically political approach moves away from an analysis of his virtues as a filmmaker and implicitly undermines his status as an artist deserving the respect of any cinephile.

(Wheeler, 2011: 26)

For example, the programming of El extraño viaje/Strange Voyage (Fernán-Gómez, 1964) within this season was hardly an amenable context in which to appreciate what Santos Zunzunegui (2002: 17) has astutely identified as the influence of the quintessentially Spanish esperpento (grotesque farce). Elsewhere this academic, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of his national cinema and culture in general, has complained of what is, in his view, the very selective appropriation and misreading that Spanish cinema has been subjected to by North American scholars and criticism (Zunzunegui, 1999). For him, the fact that foreign scholars often use the term nuevo cine español as a catch-all phrase for oppositional cinema under the dictatorship, rather than in relation to a specific group that emerged around García Escudero and the Official Madrid Film School, is evidence of ignorance and cultural appropriation (Zunzunegui, 1999: 26).

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Editorial Note

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

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

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

Part 1: Sense and Sensibility: New Forms of Being and Seeing in Recent Spanish Cinema 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 2: Revisiting the Past: The Politics of Memory and the Transition’s Cinematic Legacy 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 3: Redefining Auteurship, Genre and Stardom in a Transnational Age

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coda: Backstage Pass – Engaging with Practitioners and Cinematic Institutions

Chapter 24: How to Make Arty Films Now – Luis Miñarro

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

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

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

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

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

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