The Supernatural Sublime embeds the films in the social histories of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Mexico and Spain, both of which made a forced leap into modernity after historical periods founded on official ideologies and circumscribed visions of the nation. Evoking Kant’s definition of the experience of the sublime, Rodríguez-Hernández and Schaefer concentrate on the unrepresentable and the contradictory that oppose purported universal truths and instead offer up illusion, deception, and imagination through cinema, itself a type of illusion: writing with light.
The Supernatural Sublime embeds the films in the social histories of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Mexico and Spain, both of which made a forced leap into modernity after historical periods founded on official ideologies and circumscribed visions of the nation. Evoking Kant’s definition of the experience of the sublime, Rodríguez-Hernández and Schaefer concentrate on the unrepresentable and the contradictory that oppose purported universal truths and instead offer up illusion, deception, and imagination through cinema, itself a type of illusion: writing with light.
The Supernatural Sublime: The Wondrous Ineffability of the Everyday in Films from Mexico and Spain
336
The Supernatural Sublime: The Wondrous Ineffability of the Everyday in Films from Mexico and Spain
336eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
The Supernatural Sublime embeds the films in the social histories of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Mexico and Spain, both of which made a forced leap into modernity after historical periods founded on official ideologies and circumscribed visions of the nation. Evoking Kant’s definition of the experience of the sublime, Rodríguez-Hernández and Schaefer concentrate on the unrepresentable and the contradictory that oppose purported universal truths and instead offer up illusion, deception, and imagination through cinema, itself a type of illusion: writing with light.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496214973 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2019 |
| Series: | New Hispanisms |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Anxiety, Awe, and the Changing Shape of Fear
Fascinated but not entirely surprised by the sustained interest in all things Gothic in this bicentennial year of Mary Shelley's masterpiece Frankenstein, our project looks at the fate of the supernatural in films produced by Mexico and Spain between the 1960s and the first decades of the twenty-first century. We focus on these films not seeking to explore traditional ways of looking at fear and the monstrous but instead to consider strange and wondrous iterations of the supernatural found in both expected and unexpected hybrid cinematic genres. Our perspective combines close readings of films with theoretical and generic concerns, all framed by the shifting manners in which the natural and the supernatural are inextricably woven together during moments of crisis in Mexican and Spanish culture.
We consider works (and remakes) by Mexican and Spanish directors Chano Urueta, Carlos Enrique Taboada, Juan López Moctezuma, and Narciso Ibáñez Serrador — virtually untouched by critics — alongside a lesser-known early production by Arturo Ripstein. Additionally, we include the Oscar-winning Guillermo del Toro and recent films directed by a younger generation of cult directors that includes Daniel Gruener and Rigoberto Castañeda from Mexico and Spanish directors J. A. Bayona, Alex de la Iglesia, Nacho Vigalondo, and Isidro Ortiz. An intensified fervor in the supernatural in all of its aspects — often unrecognizable amid the comfortable artifacts of everyday life — seems to offer an admixture of challenge, astonishment, awe, and even solace to audiences at different historic junctures. By setting their films in familiar spaces — the home, private school, convents, and the urban sprawl of CDMX(Mexico City) or Madrid — and by populating them with empowered female characters who recycle purportedly dangerous superstitions and myths, these directors ask us to look carefully at what we take for granted and instead seek in the shadows true monsters of modernity that are easily overlooked. Among the fictions of human social progress are the uncanny creatures and beliefs Sigmund Freud recognized as undead survivals of the past we have indeed never left behind.
In her groundbreaking study Contemporary Spanish Gothic, Ann Davies suggests that the recent spate of books dedicated to conventions associated with the Gothic set within Hispanic cultures signals a "catching up" by scholars on "paths already well-trodden by others" (2018, 1). In a global marketplace that has brought together fans and critics, elements of the supernatural bring to life (and light) dark, monstrous, and inexplicable aspects of modernity that evoke the horrors that Mary Shelley wished to address. In the preface to her novel Frankenstein, Shelley elucidates her search for a story "which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror" (Hindle 1992, 7–8). Those mysteries and horrors change shape across the two hundred years since her novel was published.
As Lucie Armitt writes of the resuscitation of the Gothic and the supernatural as unceasingly compelling settings for stories, "in the active pursuit of what most frightens us, we continually reshape our Gothic monsters to fit society's changing fears" (2014, 150). The globalizing trend of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has contributed anew to "a revitalized bestiary of Gothic creatures" (Spooner 2014, 180) derived from intercultural encounters with local myths and folklore, adapting them to recognizable generic conventions. This is true in two ways: the invasion of the nations of the developing world by the myths and technologies of advanced societies, and the revival of terrifying, fascinating, awe-inspiring, sublime wonders and supernatural events of ancient times recast in the cinema of modernity. Mexican and Spanish cinema shares many of the paradigms of the Gothic, transforming them in an engagement with the national past thought to remain in the ruins that dot the landscape but that instead is revived in contradiction to a modernizing present. An increasingly codified look of the Gothic and supernatural comes to life across screens housed in shopping malls and elaborate centers of commerce. Patrons are reminded that their daily concerns might intersect with a past that was equally obsessed with what it means to be human in a world we wish was subordinate to us, but one that constantly reminds us that there is much that escapes our comprehension.
With few exceptions until the last decade, critical studies in Hispanic cinema have by and large focused on national cinemas and on two fundamental aspects of film productions: the auteur, whose recognizable style produces a predictable body of work that audiences come to expect from such authorial figures, and melodrama. Long defined as the genre associated with Latin America in particular but with Spain's Pedro Almodóvar as well, the codes of melodrama are based on the evocation of a universe fraught with conflict, emotion, and pathos, eliciting a catharsis at the end for both audience and characters. Originally connected to theatrical works of the nineteenth century whose narratives upheld nascent bourgeois consumer values on family and home, by the 1920s and 1930s the patriarchal order reflected earlier had begun to make space for women and the often pleasurable but "ultimately masochistic" (Hayward 1996, 205) sacrifices made for the preservation of those traditional values. Held up as films for and about women, at first screened in venues such as the department stores that hawked products aimed at the women's market, melodrama sustained the status quo while it allowed an outlet for emotional experiences not anticipated outside the theater. The empowerment of women through melodrama takes another step in the Gothic as the monstrous feminine acquires knowledge and agency.
A legacy of this association between consumers and melodrama is the excess of content in the mise-en-scène with an overdevelopment of a home's interior. It is in that domestic space, it was presumed, that a woman would find her world, a space she could decorate in accord with available products. Male characters, out of place in such a domestic sphere, become the subject of critical analysis when viewed against more typical gender roles in patriarchy. Films by Mexican and Spanish directors including María Novaro's Danzón (1991); Alfonso Arau's Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate) (1992); Gary Alazraki's Nosotros los Nobles (We the Nobles family) (2013); Vicente Aranda's Amantes (Lovers) (1991); and Montxo Armendáriz's Secretos del corazón (Secrets of the heart) (1997) recycle, celebrate, and ultimately satirize the full force of diegetic space deployed under the comfortable sign of melodrama. The power of the feminine is reflected in the accumulation of material possessions within her domain, allowing female characters to both reflect and reject the masculine world outside. When women revert to witchcraft, then domestic space becomes fully empowered.
One of the more promising but understudied genres is the comic film, viewed by Juan F. Egea as the perfect medium to "problematize the moment of, and the occasion for, laughter" (2013, 3). Models of cinematic comedic conventions and their adaptation to specific circumstances and national cinema traditions offer fertile ground for reviewing productions in the context of cultural debates and societal anxieties. Many darkly comedic films — often grafted onto the structure of melodrama and even the Gothic — function as a respite from documentaries or crime dramas. We might cite Arturo Ripstein's Calle de la amargura (Bleak Street) (2015) for audiences craving Hollywood-inflected entertainment and relief from reality TV shows featuring lighter fare. In the context of Spain's post-Franco challenges to the mass media and cinema, cultural debates related to defining Spanishness, especially toward the end of franquismo, are filled with what Egea tantalizingly underscores as the "hysterically serious" (2013, 127) overtones of caricature and satiric commentary. The coupling of gravity with the formation of the neurosis inherent in hysteria invites delicious speculation on laughter as a social symptom in Mexican and Spanish film. Again spotlighting Almodóvar, Egea begins with the 1960s to examine cultural and political developments framed by gallows humor and a focus on themes often considered taboo. Rather than shock and revulsion, such comedic productions make light of serious issues such as illness, death, crime, and fascist politics to elicit discomfort and irony. Called one of "the bright hopes of contemporary Spanish cinema" (Lázaro-Reboll 2012, 205), Basque director Alex de la Iglesia keeps alive the hybrid mixture of comedy, action thriller, and supernatural horror in productions such as El día de la bestia (The day of the beast) (1995) by embedding the superstitions of premodern Spain within an overtly modern and consumer-driven capital city of Madrid.
Just released, Nilo Couret's 2018 book on the film comedy in Latin America explores the distinctive development of this genre in contexts that demanded a different type of spectator than typical Hollywood fare. His focus on four comedians, among them Mexican Cantinflas, is an intriguing and valuable contribution to the study of a complex film genre based in specific social contexts. The iconic films of the actor and director Mario Moreno (Cantinflas) continue to intrigue and puzzle global audiences. This is due partly to popularity with Mexicans inside and outside Mexico, reminding them of uncanny political absurdities, and partly because of their comedic and linguistic challenges. Insider jokes — difficult for even the best non-native Spanish speakers — create and maintain an identity of a community across geographical borders, relieving anxieties of immigration and economic hardship by harking back to a recognizable figure similar to that of Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp. What Jeffrey M. Pilcher calls "Mexico's most incomprehensible comic" (2000, xi), the character Cantinflas created by actor Mario Moreno embodies with great hyperbole the figure of the poor immigrant to the urban metropolis who retains many of his naïve attributes but must learn new survival skills.
Like Charlie Chaplin's pathos-evoking tramp, there is humor in Cantinflas's improbable escape from serious situations; unlike Chaplin's silent film inter-titles, however, much of Cantinflas's humor is verbal and profoundly satirical. In addition, it calls on the audience's participation in regional and inside jokes as well as physical humor to defuse what otherwise would be a threatening situation. A reminder of the ambiguous links between signifier and signified — for Cantinflas, all but lost in the delivery of speedy nonsense and wordplay — Ahí está el detalle (You're missing the point) (1940) and El bombero atómico (The atomic fireman) (1952), to offer but two examples, are fundamental material for seeking darkness in humor. Recognizable in appearance, Mario Moreno resuscitates characters from the audience's childhood or from challenging personal experiences recently overcome to make propriety an object of humorous derision and empathy. The contradiction between psychological bleakness and physical comedy produces a deeply disturbing effect once spectators ruminate about what they have seen or how they feel after experiencing a logical disjunction between the two.
Expanding on the popularity of the horror genre, science fiction, and the aesthetics of the supernatural over the past five decades, Mexican and Spanish productions, as well as European and Mexican co-productions, have begun to introduce hybrids of the melodrama genre that encompass the Gothic thriller, film noir, and sci-fi conventions. Adapting to the expectations and desires of the marketplace, and investing in superior productions, directors from Mexico and Spain have adapted the Hollywood cinema they grew up with to their own societies and cultures. A 2015 photographic exhibit at the International Film Festival in Morelia, organized by Fundación Televisa, of stills from a variety of Mexican horror films attests to the enduring popularity of this genre in Mexican culture as well as to its multiple generic variants. Entitled Apariciones! México y su cine de horror (casi) gótico (Ghostly Apparitions! Mexico's [almost] gothic horror films) (2017), Jaime Garba writes about the images collected from productions released between 1933 and 1995. They reveal the broad panorama of metaphors that sustain old fears of the audience or introduce new ones with an equal capacity to horrify audiences at critical junctures in Mexican history. From supernatural monsters to improbable yet plausible beings, from the colonial past to the glitz of the present-day city, the aesthetics of horror exploits emotional affect as it provokes anxiety, fear, trembling curiosity, and awe through the creation of atmospheric encounters between the natural and the not-quite-natural universes. The October 2017 exhibit at the San Sebastián Centro Cultural Okendo (Okendo Cultural Center) entitled "A Thousand Screams in the Night: The Stars of 1970s Spanish Horror Films" pays tribute to the early film icons of the destape (uncovering or explosion). In homage to both actors and films, this exhibit casts light on the shadowy horrors persisting at the end of the dictatorship.
Doyle Greene's Mexploitation Cinema: A Critical History of Mexican Vampire, Wrestler, Ape-Man, and Similar Films, 1957–1977 (2005) is the beginning of a reevaluation of films that were considered too campy, eccentric, or strange for critics to pay attention to with any seriousness. Seen as B-movies for cult followers or midnight fare for adult audiences and eccentric adolescents, the fictional villains, horror figures, mad scientists, and aliens all embodied battles with evil that brought profits as well as a counter-cinema where good could still win. Until recently, these films have proved to be terrain too difficult to approach from outside Mexican or Spanish culture with all of their radical internal changes over the course of the twentieth and now twenty-first century. With Spanish-speaking global audiences, this relegation to the periphery is changing as many Mexican productions rely on the recognition factor and previous Hollywood films for a shared cultural familiarity, even with local elements.
Antonio Lázaro-Reboll's Spanish Horror Film (2012) focuses on the notion of cult film audiences and the basis of fandom across many decades of film production, from Eurotrash director Jess Franco to post-1975 Mexican and Spanish directors such as Guillermo del Toro. Part of a series entitled "Traditions in World Cinema" that proposes to explore under-examined film genres globally, this volume does double duty by uncovering lesser-known cinematic narratives and offering cogent theoretical approaches to their production and reception. Lázaro-Reboll's collection is complemented by several volumes dedicated to Spanish-language films with elements of the Gothic, supernatural, and horror. Espectros: Ghostly Hauntings in Contemporary Transhispanic Narratives (2015), edited by Alberto Ribas-Casasayas and Amanda L. Petersen, introduces an innovative theory of spectrality that covers different types of literary and cinematic texts in nuanced and subtle ways. The case studies come from across the Spanish-speaking world and link the historical and cultural past with the present though the metaphor of the ghostly figure that reappears to teach characters a lesson, remind them of a forgotten moment, challenge their perception, or elucidate a mystery. A second book, The Spanish Fantastic (2016) by Shelagh Rowan-Legg, traces the cinematic fantastic and its use by Spanish-language directors with a focus on global films and the influence of Hollywood, an inherited auteurship across generations and genre cinema. All three volumes make the case for the many guises of evil, explore whether it can be recognized, and consider what to do once it has been identified. The popularity as well as cultural value of these films cuts two ways: fandom and critics alike.
Over the last two years, the Gothic in Spanish or Latin American cinema and culture has unequivocally been established as a worthwhile subject of critical exploration and analysis. Ann Davies's Contemporary Spanish Gothic (2018) takes a giant leap in the direction of establishing the Spanish Gothic as a cinematic mode worthy of more sophisticated and nuanced study. Davies's combination of what she refers to as "Heritage Gothic" uses the social shadows of Goya and his society to launch a discussion of the shifting shapes of the monstrous, follows with the phenomenon of the Gothic bestseller, and emerges into the world of Gothic cinema. Davies's work creates an architecture for the reader that immerses us in the wondrous variety of Gothic atmospheres produced across time. Xavier Aldana Reyes's Spanish Gothic: National Identity, Collaboration and Cultural Adaptation (2017) sets the Spanish Gothic inside and outside conventions imported from the English-speaking world, historicizing hybrid genres and politicizing textual readings. The breadth of his study is only surpassed by the admirable and detailed "glocal" analysis of Spanish art, literature, and film. As an adept counterpoint to these two studies of the Spanish Gothic, Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Inés Ordiz published an edited volume in Routledge's Interdisciplinary Perspectives Series dealing with the Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture (2018). Broken down into historical, tropicalized, uncanny, scientific, and contemporary paradigms, the contributors encompass the Americas — from Chile to Mexico, from Brazil to Colombia, from Puerto Rico to Costa Rica, and from Argentina to Peru — in their quest for the "darker realities" haunting modern American cultures. The three books together accomplish a skillful portrait of literatures, arts, and films that synthesize inherited traditions with autochthonous narratives and beliefs, producing amalgamations of the Gothic across the centuries. We propose to contribute to this conversation by focusing on the Mexican particulars of inherited Hollywood Gothic characters, settings, and backstories in cinematic examples — and their remakes for contemporary audiences — over the past six decades.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Supernatural Sublime"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations,
Acknowledgments,
1. Introduction: Anxiety, Awe, and the Changing Shape of Fear,
2. Porous Landscapes of the Modern World: The Witch as Sublime Intruder,
3. Haunted Houses: Inheriting the Supernatural,
4. Evil in the Classroom: The Fascination and Danger of Schools for Girls,
5. A Desperate Longing for Order: The Masks of Innocence,
6. Patterns of Temporal Terror: A Repetition Compulsion?,
7. Conclusion: Sublime Afterimages,
Appendix: Filmography,
Notes,
References,
Index,