Spanish Cinema Against Itself: Cosmopolitanism, Experimentation, Militancy

Spanish Cinema Against Itself: Cosmopolitanism, Experimentation, Militancy Today at Mediático we are delighted to present an essay by Steven Marsh, Professor of Spanish Film and Cultural Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he is currently Head of Hispanic and Italian Studies. Marsh is a specialist in Spanish film and is author of Popular Spanish Film Under Franco: Comedy and the Weakening of the State (Palgrave, 2006) and editor (with Parvati Nair) of Gender and Spanish Cinema (Berg, 2004) The essay he has generously shared with us, below, is adapted from the introductory chapter of his new book Spanish Cinema against Itself (Indiana University Press, 2020). This monograph maps the evolution of Spanish surrealist and politically committed cinematic traditions from their origins in the 1930s—with the work of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, experimentalist José Val de Omar, and militant documentary filmmaker Carlos Velo—through to the contemporary period. Framed by film theory this book traces the works of understudied and non-canonical Spanish filmmakers, producers, and film collectives to open up alternate, more cosmopolitan and philosophical spaces for film discussion. In an age of the post-national and the postcinematic, Marsh’s work challenges conventional historiographical discourse, the concept of “national cinema,” and questions of form in cinematic practice. There will be an online book launch for Spanish Cinema against Itself on November 20 with the participation of Jacques Lezra (UC Riverside), Camila Moreiras (independent scholar and filmmaker), Sarah Thomas (Brown University), Patricia Keller (Cornell University) and Julián Gutiérrez Albilla (University of Southern California). The event will take place at 14:00 Eastern Time (US and Canada) and 19.00 GMT. Zoom link: https://brown.zoom.us/j/96717695324 Published by MEDIÁTICO: http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/mediatico | 1 Spanish Cinema Against Itself: Cosmopolitanism, Experimentation, Militancy SPANISH CINEMA AGAINST ITSELF: COSMOPOLITANISM, EXPERIMENTATION, MILITANCY By Steven Marsh Experimentation with form—all that determines, conditions, and shapes filmic practice—is what defines Spanish Cinema Against Itself. And it is within that framework that I seek to explore the concept of Spain’s national cinema from the margins that outline it and film studies as a discipline. In my new book I attempt to mobilize the politics of global filmic practice and its materialities beyond the nation’s sterile confines. Part of my critical intervention seeks to disentangle films produced within a specific geographical space from the baggage of identity. This title, Spanish Cinema Against Itself, points to the plurality of affiliations at work within the territorial space known as Spain, the otherness that dwells within its frontiers as well as that which seeps beyond them. It’s a title that points to a displacement suggestive of a sense of movement, of the ground itself seismically shifting, and of the yawning abyss of the conflictive and productive void. And it posits, within that transit or passage, a notion of allos, the alter, alterity, the other, the alternative. Spanish critics and commentators have recently coined the phrase the “other Spanish cinema” to define a new era in the history of independent filmmaking in Spain that has emerged in the wake of the popularization of digital technology and the new (often online) formats for the distribution and exhibition of films. The phrase has since been adopted by British and North American critics and commentators as well. I argue against such classification, and any other. I dispute the emphasis on naming, periodization, and historicity that has determined and limited much study of national cinema, and particularly that of Spain. Instead I argue for a disruptive otherness lurking within, beneath, and against such historical formulations and for a heterogeneity or “spectral duplicity” that interrogates claims to origins and undermines efforts to forge an autochthonous canon. Published by MEDIÁTICO: http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/mediatico | 2 Spanish Cinema Against Itself: Cosmopolitanism, Experimentation, Militancy By mapping a genealogy of underground film that harkens back to the surrealists to draw out its traces, my book seeks to disrupt the temporal certainties that conventional historiography defines. The proposal here is to read film and its history otherwise—to create a counterhistory via a live, mobile, unruly, and overflowing archive and to disorder chronology. It is this teleiopoiesis—the play on words that Jacques Derrida conjures by combining telos, poiēsis, and tele (the poetic effects of transformation produced in transmission and telecommunication; the pun on dispatch, distance, and sending; and the impossibility of closure, completion, or arrival at a final destination)—that defines the cosmopolitanism to which I refer in the book’s subtitle. I offer a critical cosmopolitanism, an alternative to economic globalization, and a politicized worldliness. It is a cosmopolitanism marked by the heterodox, or difference, characterized by transference, discordance, and displacement over origin, equivalence, and correspondence. It is an abrasive cosmopolitanism of ill-fitting hybrids over assimilation. At the paradoxical heart of my work is the idea of an outsider cinema operating within, a filmmaking at the periphery that inflects the center. I analyze film production connected with a single territory but only insofar as that territory is singular by virtue of its conflicting regional, national, and transnational elements that, in turn, exceed their own definitions. It examines a cinema that is worldly in ways that are indifferent to identification with a nation- state and exceptional to the interests implicit in such identification. I posit the unfamiliarity of experimentation against the reassurance of home. This is not to deny the specificity of place, nor the sense of belonging associated with it. Of interest here are questions of how film can disturb location while still acknowledging the placeness of place and how film can provoke awkward surprises in the quotidian, and generate discomfort in that sense of belonging. Contrary to dominant discourse and traditional ways of thinking, this sense of belonging has nothing intrinsically to do with origin or an arbitrary birthplace. My project though also maps a counterhistory, though inevitably a selective one. It is a spectral historiography, a subterranean history, and a history of interruption written in the Published by MEDIÁTICO: http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/mediatico | 3 Spanish Cinema Against Itself: Cosmopolitanism, Experimentation, Militancy spirit of Walter Benjamin. It is not so much an untold history (though it is that, too) as it is a different way of conceiving and writing history. Mine is a critique of traditional historiography and particularly of the historicist approach to national cinema that has distinguished and diminished criticism within Spain. I explore, more specifically, time—to which history, of course, is central; how time affects, configures, and constitutes film. Interruptions in temporal flows, the exceptions that disturb efforts to shape and define time, are the points, I argue, at which filmmaking becomes interesting. Temporality is both a discourse of power—the codification and modulation of time for particular interests—and a key feature of the processes involved in film’s diegetic components. Film makes use of time in ways that few other cultural modes are capable of, and in a manner that is uniquely convincing. Flashbacks, rhythm, fast-forwards, slow motion, simultaneity (split screen effects, superimposition, and cross-cutting), and instantaneity are but a few of these filmically specific time effects. More than that, though, film can elongate time through the creation of pauses, intervals, interludes, and temporal parentheses. The recent critical interest in “slow cinema” is a clear symptom of this. If temporality is governed by and shaped discursively into manageable units, film can undo that regulation, and it can divide the instant. One of my key arguments is that it is precisely otherness that undoes such efforts to shape time. The field of operations of film, I propose, is found in the other of time, or, in what Patty Keller, invoking Jacques Derrida, has dubbed “now and other,” the other of now. The paradox of filmic time is that, despite cinema’s characteristic freeze-frame, the film still, and the photogram, it never stands still in the present. The single most visible aspect of time is that of change—backward and forward, past and future, alternation and alteration. Its condition is that of the untimely. This has political potential. I seek to home in on the relation of time to change and to form itself to focus on and propose a filmmaking practice whose very gesture is able to perform a transformation. Part of the project of my book is to argue, in this spirit, for a new definition of the term performative film. Performativity, in the Published by MEDIÁTICO: http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/mediatico | 4 Spanish Cinema Against Itself: Cosmopolitanism, Experimentation, Militancy sense of the word as Derrida conceived of it, not in any theatrical sense, as repetition, the miming of identity, but as radical speech act, is a particularly apt tool of film analysis in the age of digital filmmaking. As a discourse of power, temporality establishes a regime of order that I seek to question. My interrogation of systemization

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