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Home , Angelino Fons, Bad Girls (series 8), Descanso Dominical, Francesco Rosi, Georges Corraface, Ingrid Rubio

FORTHCOMING IN IS (STILL) DIFFERENT, eds. Jaume Martí Olivella and Eugenia Afinoguenova, U of Minnesota P:

Toppling the Xenolith: The Reconquest of Spain from the Uncanny Other in Iberian since World War Two

Patricia Hart, Purdue University

1. The Others Ser ibero, ser ibero es una cosa muy seria, soy altivo y soy severo porque he nacido en Iberia. Y al que diga lo contrario Y al que ofenda a mi terruño Lo atravieso atrabilario Con esta daga que empuño

Fray Apócrifo de la Cruz1

Long before Ruy Díaz de Vivar drove the Moors from Valencia and returned her fragrant orange groves to an ungrateful Alfonso VI—and long before anyone could suspect that in 1983

Angelino Fons would cast lion-tamer Ángel Cristo as the title character in his 1983 comedy, El Cid

Cabreador—Iberian popular culture was often obsessed with monarchic, dictatorial, or hegemonic views of what is “us” and what is “other,” and with good reason! That catch-all category, iberos, was loosely used to name all of those prehistoric people living on the Peninsula before they had been invaded by just about every enterprising group armed with swords or something to sell. Celts,

Phoenicians, Carthaginians on pachyderms, Greeks, Romans, suevos, alanos Vandals, Visigoths,

Moors… no wonder the xenos was traditionally a cause for concern! The blunt, politically- and financially-expedient, medieval interest in the so-called “purity” of blood” and antiquity of Christian conversion served to consolidate power, property, and social stratification.

1 Better known as Moncho Alpuente. Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—2

It is essential to keep this in mind as we talk about tourism on film, as for milenia, the idea of travel for pleasure was something reserved for a very tiny elite (and their servants). Ordinary

Spaniards a hundred years ago may have moved the cows to the summer pasture, or participated in the trashumancia or spent a summer Sunday afternoon near El Jarama or seen the world while on military service, but they did not usually have the luxury of traveling just to relax and look. In most of human history, the chance to experience new cuisine and learn languages came at the cost of invasion, imperialism, and perhaps slavery as well. The modern invention of middle-class tourism has been built, like Cholula in , on top of deeper structures of expectations regarding the confrontation between Self and Other. For example, Americans contemporaries of Edith Wharton and Henry James went abroad to gain a veneer of sophistication, a collection of affectations, some home decoration and couture tips, and bragging rights. They supposed they would incorporate what was superior about the European Other, and become a superior Self, a sort of über-American.

Pilgrims journey to Mecca, Lourdes, or Jim Morrison's grave in because it gives their returning pilgrim Self a spiritual edge over Others in their own group. Ultimately, travel of any kind for humans contains thousands of chances to compare and contrast onesself to others, to judge

Self superior to others (as an imperial Roman or a neo-colonial sex tourist to Thailand might) or to try to adapt or assimilate (as exiles, refugees, slaves, or young students on their jounior year abroad may opt or have to do). I use the word "tourist" in the broadest possible sense in this study because doing so yields rich and surprising insight into Spanish film.

2. Santiago Matamoros Slept Here—Maybe “¡Santiago y cierra España!” Spanish battle cry

Spain’s patron saint, Santiago (James the Elder), one of the original twelve apostles, may have been an early tourist himself and must certainly be considered the unofficial patron saint of Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—3

Spanish Dark Ages tourism, as well as official patron of pilgrims. Christ may have stopped at Éboli2, but according to Iberian legend, James made it all the way to Galicia. The Bible says in Acts that

Santiago was beheaded by Herod Agrippa around 44 AD, but late folklore avers that the saint’s followers sent his remains to Iria Flavia (modern-day Padrón) in an unmanned stone boat. There they slept undisturned until the Ninth Century, when miraculous lights revealed their presence.

Santiago’s role in Spanish foundational fiction does not end there. In the battle of Clavijo in 834 in which victorious Ramiro I defeated Abderramán II, the king reported that the victory was due to an apparition of the apostle himself, riding a white charger into battle against the

Moorish infidels.

The miracles attributed to “Santiago Matamoros” quickly converted Santiago de Compostela

, home of his bones, into an extremely popular goal for pilgrims. These pious travelers definitely did sleep along the famous route of Santiago throughout the Middle Ages and to a lesser extent, up to our day, bringing money, language, customs, and ideas along with them. The saint who inspired the war cry “¡Santiago y cierra España!” was, paradoxically, one of the strongest influences in opening the newly-imagined proto-nation to outsiders. But Santiago’s transition from preacher of the gospel of love into crusader against Islam—lavishly illustrated over the centuries in sculpture, painting, and stained glass in which the saint is often simultaneously chopping an arm or head off one infidel while his charger crushes the skull of another—clearly sends a message that is, to say the least, mixed. Juan Goytisolo put it bluntly. “La transmutación pasmosa del pacífico pescador del lago Tiberíades en un jinete experto y aguerrido, cortacabezas insigne, respondía como es obvio, a la necesidad de las Iglesias” (11).

2 According to Italian folksayings, novelist , and director Francesco Rosi. Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—4

Added to this in the Spanish popular imaginary are numerous other literary versions of anti- islamism, like Cervantes’ bitter five year experience as a POW of the Turks in North Africa, recounted in Los baños de Argel.3 Great men had spoken out on the moro, and tolerance was rarely part of the discussion before such careful modern scholars as Julio Caro Baroja and Américo

Castro. Later novelists Gil Albert and Juan Goytisolo reconfigured the Caliphate of Córdoba as a golden age of tolerance in Spain’s past.4 They concur that this reality had been erased by the crude racism of the Reconquest and then whitewashed by forty years of Francoist historical revisionism. Even as unlikely a source as Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, last president of the Republic in exile, as late as 1975, continued to support a thesis manipulated by fascist Spain and the most reactionary sector of the church:

Temo que otra gran tronada histórica pueda mañana poner en peligro la civilización

occidental, como lo estuvo por obra del Islam en los siglos VII y VIII...La cultura europea

fue salvada por Don Pelayo en Covadonga...¿Dónde se iniciará la nueva reconquista que salve

al cabo las esencias de la civilización nieta de aquella por la que, con el nombre de Dios en los

labios, peleó el vencedor del Islam en Europa? (11)

When the senseless murder of Encarnación López by a mentally ill North African man touched off an explosion of racist violence in El Ejido in early February of 2000, Antonio Burgos said on Onda Cero Radio:

3 Also El trato de Argel, and “el cautivo” intercalated in the Quijote. La gran sultana and El amante liberal have usually been considered apart from the more “realistic” North African work, although recent critics like Ottmar Hegyi argue in favor of looking at all the Islamic-themed works together, and not assuming that the latter are simple fantasies. Francisco Nieva’s adaptation of Baños in the Teatro María Guerrero in 1979 put the play into post-Franco prominence. This, in addition to his anti-semitism, makes some consider him xenophobic, but I think such a view is both anachronistc, and also ignores the fact that Cervantes was also pretty pittiless in his depiction of Spaniards of all varieties and professions, urban and rural. 4Juan Goytisolo, who made his home mainly in Marrakesh, Morocco since the 60s, wrote his best-known reinterpretation of history in La reivindicación del conde don Julián, 1970, But many other books of his touched his interest in islamic themes and history, including Crónicas sarracinas, Makbara, En los reinos de taifas, Las virtudes del pájaro solitario, La cuarentena, Estambul otomano, Argelia en el vendaval, El bosque de las letras, El sitio de los sitios, and De la Ceca a la Meca. Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—5

Arde Almería . . . [y] los plásticos de los invernaderos… [y] las chabolas de los marroquíes en

El Ejido. Como si Santiago Matamoros se hubiera vuelto a montar en su caballo blanco en una

nueva batalla de Clavijo retransmitida en directo por los telediarios.

Spanish popular film was slow to recognize the racist content of their myth of nationhood, possibly because the Reconquest was so successful at expelling or extinguishing the Other. One early silent film, El negro que tenía el alma blanca, directed by Benito Perojo in 1926, starred

Concha Piquer as Emma, a star who torments her black dance partner Pedro, knowing he was in love with her. The movie was remade twice more with the same title, in 1934 by Perojo himself, and in

1951 by Hugo del Carril, who also starred, now with the anglicized name “Peter.” But these three are anomalous. Immigration and racism are topics that began to be explored in Spanish film more as the post-Franco Spain became more diverse, and following a somewhat predictable trajectory. When North and Sub-Saharan African immigrants to Spain became common, they began to appear in films. Early treatement of the theme tended toward melodrama, as in ’s

1996 film Bwana, adapted from Ignacio del Moral’s play, La mirada del hombre oscuro. The center of the film is clearly the Spanish taxi driver Antonio and his wife (played by Andrés Pajares and

María Barranco), while Ombasi, the immigrant, is a childlike Other who provokes their compassion and needs protection as surely as their two children do. Ángel Camiña opines, “ . . .Uribe apuesta sobre seguro, y sin dudar de sus inquietudes sociales . . . prepara . . . un caramelo fílmico . . . y situaciones cargadas de ‘mensajes’ ” (188). ’s Taxi (1996) is similarly simplistic, and audiences have no trouble knowing that they are supposed to identify with the good and sensitive

Dani (), and despise her neo-Nazi taxi-driving father and boyfriend. Says Eduardo T.

Gil de Muro: Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—6

[Taxi] sobre un extraño guión de Santiago Tabernero . . . divide campos sin suficientes

razones . . . los buenos son los buenos y los malos son los malos. Cualquier poibilidad de

discernimiento se nos evapora . . . y acabamos por no creernos casi nada de lo que se nos

dice. (592)

Both directors make clear that racism is bad; what a relief! What is not clear is whether there was an anti-defamation league of taxi drivers, and whether they spoke out!

Montxo Armendáriz’s Cartas de Alou (1990) gave center and voice to the Senegalese protagonist, but its emotional appeal is facile. En la puta calle, directed by Enrique Gabriel in 1996, rises above its somewhat predictable material thanks to the fine acting of protagonists, Juan

(Ramón Barea) and Andy (Luis Alberto García). Juan is an out of work electrician in a yuppified

Madrid, and Andy is doubly marginalized by his race and illegal status. Luis Alberto García graces two other Spanish films in the nineties that give a human face to immigration and the racial hierarchies in colonization (Mambí, 1998, directed by Santiago and Teodoro Ríos; and Manuel

Gutiérrez Aragón’s Cosas que dejé en la Habana, 1997).

Icíar Bollaín’s 1999 film Flores de otro mundo looks lovingly at the other-world “flowers” who journey to “Santa Eulalia”5 in search of husbands and security, and Helena Taberna’s

Extranjeras (2003) documents with sensitivity the wide variety of foreign women who are changing the face of Spain. But it is really only quite recently that the immigrant woman is granted personhood on film, and it is still a hit or miss proposition.

In Miguel Santesmases 1999 Fuente Amarilla, Silvia Abascal plays the daughter of a Chinese mother and Spanish father killed by the Chinese mafia in Madrid. The fact that Abascal is not

Chinese in any way, and that the Chinese are protrayed as bloodthirsty demons caused an uproar in

5 Loosely based on the famous “Plan de Plans” Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—7 the Madrid Chinese community, and the Chinese embassy even tried to stop filming through an injunction based upon the film’s supposedly racist content. Almost the best you can say about the treatment of xenos in the film is that the Asians fare better here than in ’s 1998

Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley. However, I love you, baby (Albacete and Menkes, 2001), treats the relationship between Marcos () and his Dominican girlfriend, (Tiaré Scanda) more sensitively. We would hardly expect less of a film co-written by Lucía Etxebarría, and with a cameo from Boy George.

Daniela Fejerman e Inés París’s 2002 A mi madre le gustan las mujeres Rosa María Sardá’s second act in life includes a lesbian lover who is young Czech immigrant. The Czech woman has personhood, but not protagonism, and what is front and center in the film is the reaction of the daughters to their mother’s news. Meanwhile, in Cosas que dejé en la Habana (1997, Manuel

Gutiérrez Aragón) the real-life problems of Cuban immigrants to Spain takes center stage.

Specifically, the opportunistic relationship that Jorge Perrugoría’s Igor develops with older

Azucena (Kiti Manver), while falling in love with the much younger Nena (Violeta Rodríguez), knocks cockeyed the absurd notion found in the popular Spanish press at that time; namely that one could somehow import a solution to being a single, middle-aged woman in Spain.

Miguel Albaladejo is similarly unsympathetic to Spanish women who want to take their turn at sexual tourism. One of the seven vignettes in Ataque verbal (1999) involves a Spanish woman who had a memorable fling in several years earlier with a nubile Afrocuban, and then returns with the romanticized idea of bringing her lover back to Spain. Things seem to be going according to plan until the lover reveals that she is actually the younger sister of the former fling. The Spanish woman has not been able to tell the difference—blinded, the film suggests, by self-interest and the exotic titillation of the much younger Cuban woman’s black skin. The stereotypical turipepe, off to Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—8

Cuba on a charter flight in search of exotic sex partners is still visible in Spanish film from Sabor latino (Pedro Carvajal, 1996) to Pata negra (Luis Oliveros, 2001) to Cuarteto de la Habana

(Fernando Colomo, 1999), but at least now some of the shoppers who consider “abroad” to be a sexual supermarket are women. It is perhaps in this category that we can include ’s strange adaptation of Antonio Gala’s “sexperpento,” La pasión turca. Timid casting has French-

Algerian actor, play Yaman, and poor Ana Belén’s thankless role as Desideria makes us long for her role in La corte del Faraón. Less emetic is Paco Betriu’s El Paraíso ya no es lo que era (2001), but it still revolves around the Magreb (Tunisia this time) as site for exotic sexual adventure.

3. Viajas más que los baúles de la Piquer”: How Spaniards have seen themselves as world travelers EN TIERRA EXTRAÑA Fue en Nueva York Yo pagué a peso de oro una Por ella brindamos todos una nochebuena . . . receta y fue noche de emoción. Como allí está prohibido por Y compré en la farmacia La nochebuena más buena la ley seca. vino español . . . que soñar pudo un español. . sólo al que está enfermo Que bien que sabe ese vino . despachan vino cuando se bebe lejos de España. Manuel Penella What better example of successful world travel with provincial beginnings could there have been than a little girl from Valencia with a big voice who conquered New York before she turned 15, and learned to speak English practically before Castilian? Cupletista, doña Concha Piquer’s first trip across the ocean at the start of the roaring twenties brought her an apotheosis on Broadway. We can only imagine the spectacle of doña Concha waiting on the docks for one of her tours of North and South America that went on for up to five years at a time. There too would have been the seventy members of her company, her husband, her daughter Concha Márquez Piquer, the dog, the canary, spotlights, scenery, costumes, bedding, and an emergency stock of hard-to-find necessities Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—9 as Spanish wines and olive oil, all packed into some one hundred and seventy steamer trunks!6 It is precisely the atypicality of her case that makes it unforgettable. Remarkably, Doña Concha survived the roaring twenties and the depression with family, honor, and bank accounts largely intact.

The song most closely associated with her debut is a biographical one written by Penella in her honor, telling of her first New Year’s Eve in New York, where prohibition required her to get a doctor’s prescription in order to offer her guests a toast. La nochebuena más buena can only be toasted in with Spanish wine, and this revelation of how far short New York falls is immensely reassuring to those Iberians who did not manage to travel quite as much as doña Concha’s trunks.

4. Indianos, conquistadores, y una pica en Flandes: Successful Spanish Tourists Abroad No os preguntarán por mí, que, español, a toda vena, que, perdiendo ofende a que en estos tiempos a amé, reñí, di mi sangre, todos, nadie pensé poco, recé mucho, que, triunfando alcanza a le da lustre haber nacido jugué bien, perdí bastante, nadie, segundón de casa grande; y, porque esa empresa loca no quise salir del mundo pero si pregunta alguno, que nunca debió tentarme, sin poner mi pica en Flandes. bueno será contestarle Eduardo Marquina, En Flandes se ha puesto el sol

6 As told by Concha Márquez Piquer in «Mi madre me llamaba ‘doña Verdades’» Por Arantza Furundarena. / LA VERDAD18/11/2002. Most Spaniards in the first seven decades of the twentieth century ventured abroad somewhat less grandly than Piquer, and this section will examine the progress from the image of self-consciously insular Spanish innocents abroad that carries over well into the eighties, and even to the present.

The Spanish collective male psyche had permanently lost the self-image of imperial conquistador with the rout of 1898. The pitiful spectacle of the return of pathetic soldaditos de rayadillo7 greatly dirtied the distant myth of the valiant Cortés burning his ships and conquering a continent with only a handful of gallant men, or the indiano, who does “las Américas” and returns home wealthy. Spain’s misadventures in North Africa in the early 20th century added inspiration for daring soldiers of fortune.

It is even harder to find iconic representations of intrepid female travelers in the Spanish imaginary. Historically, famous women travelers of Spain really do not bear aping. There was

Queen Juana I (1479-1555), daughter of Fernando and Isabel, and nicknamed La Loca. Most of her troubles started when she traveled abroad to Flanders to marry a foreigner (Felipe “El Hermoso”).

Legend says she earned the epithet because when her husband was alive, she jealously followed him around the kingdom up to advanced stages of gestation, going so far as to have her fourth baby in an outhouse in Ghent from the strain. The royal couple traveled to Spain after Queen Isabel the

First’s death, and this trip brought more bad news, since it gave her husband, now King, the idea to send her on another unlucky trip. Seems he wanted to run everything by having her put away as mad, but he died before he could accomplish his goal. She then set off with his corpse for Granada to bury him, but this trip was ill-fated too, as she was intercepted by the renaissance equivalent of men in white coats. The last forty-six years of her life were spent in “reclusion.” If this is not a cautionary tale for Spanish girls with an itch to travel, I do not know what is!

7 Valle-Inclán’s esperpento, Las galas del difunto, at once drives a stake through the myth of don Juan and that of the Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—11

Tamayo y Baus’s theatrical version of this story, Locura de amor, served as a base on which at least three films were built, to greater or lesser success. Ricardo Baños made a silent version in

1909, though Juan de Orduña’s 1948 version is surely better known.8 For Orduña, we should speak of Juana as a woman who loved not wisely, but too well, and who, although benighted, had qualities that befitted any self-respecting member of the Sección Femenina.9

Vicente Aranda also started from Tamayo’s play for his 2001 film, Juana la Loca, but his final project is substantially different (unless I have forgotten these sex scenes in the original, or the stage directions indicating Felipe should be played by a Fabio look-alike). Perhaps Aranda’s title is ironic; still the name change produces an unfortunate result. It is virtually impossible for Joaquín

Sabina fans of a certain age to ask for a ticket at the box office without hearing a few bars of

“desde que te pintas la boca en vez de don Juan/ te llamamos ‘Juana la Loca.’”10 Aranda’s Juana, in any case, might be better nicknamed, “Juana the Not All that Bright, but Probably Not Clinically

Insane, Just Really, Really Self-Absorbed In A Society That Only Lets Men Be Narcissists.”

More successful as a traveler, but equally problematic to emulate was Catalina de Erauso,

“La Monja Alférez” (±1585—±1650). The 1944 Mexican film starring María Félix may be most famous for the doña’s ridiculously unconvincing drag (only the blind and deaf in the audience could have ever mistaken her for a man). In 1987, Javier Aguirre (the same director who brought us El insólito embarazo de los Martínez in 1974 (a full 20 years before Arnold Schwarzeneger starred in

Junior); Padre y soltero en la vida; and Una vez al año ser hippy no hace daño, plus a long and equally

invincible Spaniard fighting abroad. 8 An enterprising reader might choose to verify the enduring impact of Orduña’s film by viewing it and then Montxo Armendáriz’s 2001 film, Silencio roto, and verifying that Armendáriz has essentially reproduced the lighting from Orduña’s film—perhaps in deliberate homage to cinematographer José F. Aguayo, a favorite of collaborator of Buñuel’s. Who knows? 9 The Sección Femenina was the Falangist and later National Movement organization for the education and control of women, started by Pilar Primo de Rivera, sister of the founder of the Falange, José Antonio Primo de Rivera. 10 Joaquín Sabina. Ruleta rusa, CBS, 1984. Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—12 frightening etcétera) made another film with the same title. Although I have not been able to see it, I must confess that I suspect the worst.

In Spanish film history, if venturing overseas alone seemed only open to those females cross-dressed and with bound breasts, then domestic travel by unaccompanied women was either a symptom of or a cause for insanity. When a celluloid Spanish woman left her small town until very recently, loss of virtue regularly ensued. Think of both the 1937 and the 1957 versions of La hija de Juan Simón! In the earlier, directed by Sáenz de Heredia, with some help from Luis Buñuel11, humble gravedigger Juan Simón speaks to a coffin about his daughter, whom he believes to be dead.

“Ya ves, ha sío de tós, y ya no é de naide, ni siquiera su familia.” The film’s strangely ambiguous, surreal ending— perhaps Buñuel’s contribution—could could be read as her laudanum induced hallucination before death, or, if the spectator is more forgiving or ingenuous, a genuine happy ending.

There is also a 1957 Gonzalo Delgrás film of the same name, but with a substantially different plot. This one stars beloved songbird, Antonio Molina, soon to become even more famous for marrying a gorgeous foreign actress, Lucia Bosè. In this one, when the fallen woman asks foster brother Juan (Antonio Molina) when he will be able to forgive her for going to the city and losing her purity he basically answers that he will pardon her when she is dead, which she obediently soon becomes. Urban environments are clearly bad for girls, particularly for who have sex with their small-town boyfriends.

11 Although Marsha Kinder asserts that Buñuel is the real director, most experts do not agree. The film was the second production by Filmófono, and playwright and architect Nemesio M. Sobrevila was initially picked to direct, but because he worked so slowly, he was fired. In the interim between the firing and Sáenz de Heredia's coming on board, scriptwriter Eduardo Ugarte and Buñuel himself set about rewriting the script and directing a few scenes so that the project would not get too far behind schedule. Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—13

Even worse disaster befalls “Amparito” Rivelles12 as a direct consequence of traveling alone in a stagecoach in ’s 1944 adaptation of Pedro Antonio de Alarcón’s detective story, El clavo. Blanca (Rivelles), strikes up a conversation in a diligencia with a handsome stranger, Zarco

(Rafael Durán), not telling him that she is fleeing an unhappy marriage. They have an affair, and

Blanca then goes home and murders her husband by driving a nail into his opportunely lush thatch of hair. Nineteenth-Century Spanish Crime Scene Investigation being what it is, the death is considered the result of a stroke. Blanca, though now free, feels too guilty to resume her tryst with Zarco, and leaves him stranded at the rendezvous spot. No one suspects murder until Zarco—

Judge Zarco, that is!—now brooding and moody over his lost love—sits down in a country churchyard to converse Hamlet-to-Yorrick style with a conveniently placed skull and notices that it has a nail through it. Zarco retraces the felonious ferric fastener right back to Blanca, who of course, must die. For Zarco, the case is a rainmaker that solidifies his judicial reputation and adds a tragically romantic sheen to his good looks and sexual magnetism. It is clear he may continue to ride a stagecoach called desire for as long as he is able to climb aboard, but woe unto unhappy women who travel alone! If only they would just stay home and suffer with Christian resignation! As Alejandro

Casona’s Corregidora says in La molinera de Arcos (based on another Alarcón work, El sombrero de tres picos) “Una mujer como yo, cuando ha jurado, no necesita ser feliz para estar dónde debe”

(781). Ouch!

In Juan de Orduña’s 1947 film La Lola se va a los puertos (loosely-based on the brothers

Machado’s musical play of the same name), Lola (Juanita Reina) is left with her illusions bloodied, but her head unbowed after leaving “la isla” and being taken in by a dilettante bullfighter-señorito

12 This movie was apparently made before the young Rivelles lost her…diminutive!

Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—14 who was not the real deal, but just a rich boy slumming. The ending is sad but not tragic, maybe because, with that extra moral wiggle room accorded entertainers, Lola promises to go on.

During the transition to democracy and the Socialist years, travel evolved on film. The practice of smuggling hashish from Morocco is depicted in a number of films of the 80s and 90s like

Colegas 13and Bajarse al Moro.14 El pico, tried to give a crude portrait of the reality of harder drugs; meanwhile use of and traffic in harder drugs appear humorously in films like ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? in which prostitute and hopeful emmigrant to Las Vegas, Cristal (Verónica

Forqué) warns teenager Toni not to use heroin, arguing, “si tú no necesitas rebajar,” and in which ’s Sor Estiércol drops acid and walks on broken glass while Julieta

Serrano’s Abbess shoots heroin in sympathy with her wayward girls, gives it up with relative ease, and finally uses her sororital image to smuggle drugs into Spain from the .

Young people also traveled for schooling and pleasure more during the Transition and early

Democracy, although the initial experiences were mixed, on film at least. In Skyline, for example,

Antonio Resines is defeated by his monolingual provincialism, which causes him to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and return home, tail between legs, on the verge of getting his big break.

Meanwhile on the 80s jukebox, insisted that for Spanish tourists, “no hay marcha en Nueva

York,” and depicted one as asking directions to the Statue of Liberty “como en Hijos de un dios menor,” to disastrous results:

…y cuando adopté la posición de este monumento en cuestión se pensó que era un terrorista

13 Eloy de la Iglesia. 1980. 14 Directed by Fernando Colomo, 1988. Based on the homonymous play by José Luis Alonso de Santos. Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—15

buscando follón y lo tuve…15

It is really not until the 90s that a significant number of films depict Spaniards traveling abroad without panicking or becoming caricatures, and as speaking languages other than Spanish without breaking a sweat. In his 1995 comedy, El efecto mariposa, Fernando Colomo retires the

Skyline stereotypes, and lets both Coque Malla’s Luis and María Barranco’s Olivia communicate with ease in English—much better than the Spanish of Englishmen played by James Fleet and Peter

Sullivan! It is only the previous generation—in the person of Rosa María Sardà at her finest—that gets flustered, and there is every reason to believe that she too will eventually swim, not sink. By

Julio Medem’s Amantes del círculo polar, 1998, Spanish characters Ana and Otto (Najwa Nimri and

Fele Martínez) need not explain how they know English and other tongues.

5. The Allies Stopped at the Pyrennees

During the , the foreign Other played a huge role—both real and symbolic.

Luftwaffe bombs on Gernika, Italian troops sent by Mussolini, and Franco’s North African mercenaries were anathema to Republican Loyalists. On the other side, the Nationalists got great mileage out of propaganda featuring the specter of soulless Soviet troops poised to sweep in and destroy religion, god, motherhood and honor. The non-intervention of England and the U.S. further divided the two , while the individual sacrifices made brigadistas from 53 countries and a broad political spectrum confounded stereotyping by nation. More than 35,000 foreigners, thousands of anti-fascist Italians and Austro-Germans, risked their lives to fight fascism over the course of the war, and at least a third died fighting.

It took a long, long time before any sort of balanced or sophisticated representations of this foreign presence in a war in which two halves of the same country bitterly fought each other;

15 Lyrics by José María Cano. The song is on Mecano’s 1988 , Descanso dominical. Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—16 maybe it is still to come. Some might even theorize over a bottle of chianti that Spain suffered for forty years from Don Camillo envy. Don Camillo was a fictional priest invented by Italian author

Giovanni Guareschi, who, like his character, lived in a small town in Emilia-Romagna called Brescello in the years following World War II. Don Camillo lives to compete with the communist mayor of

Brescello, Don Peppone. Camillo and Peppone symbolize the culture shock between the "two Italys" clashing as they strove to build a nation through two very different ways of looking at life. Don

Camillo embodies the traditional Catholic, Christian Democrat . By contrast, Don Peppone, the communist mayor, fleshes out—literally and figuratively— the revolutionary model. Although the real-life political conflict between these two Italies was long and bitter, these film characters are more alike than different., big-hearted and community minded Italian men and who need each other to exist, despite their frequent disagreements, and who are not above milking cows together and toasting with buckets of milk, when a strike would have let the bovines starve or their udders explode. They both love Brescello, are united against external threats, and prefigure the so-called

"compromiso histórico." While hardly subtle or sophisticated, the films allow the rivals to face each other on the soccer field, not the battle field (although one soon turns into the other after the mayor bribes the one-eyed referee). Although Spaniards in fact saw these films, the dialectical reality they alluded to must have seemed awfully remote.

For Americans, the iconic depiction of the foreign presence in the Spanish Civil war was pretty much limited to For Whom the Bell Tolls, starring Gary Cooper and another Other, twice- removed, the Swedish Ingrid Bergman playing Spanish for an American audience, and based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway. Much has been written about the Civil War films to date; I need not repeat it. In general, it is fair to say that those international presences, and the war itself are all Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—17 but blotted out of film in Spain during Franco's lifetime. An ardent defender of Raza16 in response to the generally-held belief that it gives jingoistic, manichean view of the war, pointed out the the

Germans are completely invisible, calling it a merit in the film! (IMDB review). In Carlos Saura's La caza (1966), the war is only vaguely alluded to, and the appearance of a German pistol is the only clue to the character's nazi collaborationist past. Later, he was increasingly able to address the war with increasingly less elliptical allusions to the erasure of the war's history in El jardín de las delicias (1970), La prima Angélica (1974), or Cría cuervos (1976), but treated it head-on in his adaptation of Sanchis Sinisterra's play, ¡Ay, Carmela! (1990). In that film, Saura adapts the twinkling projector that represents the Italian operetta director and has a host of Italian characters who eat spaghetti, share smokes, sing opera, and are in every way more sympathetic than the Spanish nacionals (although such last sensibility leads Saura's Caudillo to denounce all

Italian men as pansies). , ¡Ay, Carmela! was one of the first films that gave humanizing screen time to a brigadista, as well, in the persons of the "polacos" with whom Carmela and Paulino are incarcerated.

Vicente Aranda's (1996) may well have romanticized the female brigadistas, but they were possible, if not entirely plausible, characters from Spain's history that the filmgoing public wanted to meet. Their slaughter by North African mercenaries at the end put on screen as only Aranda can the horror of the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War. 's Tierra y libertad

(1995), may be argued to have pictured the anarchists in an overly favorable light, ably aided by the stunning performance by Icíar Bollaín, but it was the first coherent attempt to examine the intra-

16 1942, directed by José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, one of the foremost filmmakers in the early Franco years, before arriving at the whimper of his last film, Solo ante el streaking (1975). Sáenz de Heredia, not incidentally a cousin of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Spanish Falange, based his film on a script by General Franco himself, under the pseudonym of Jaime de Andrade. Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—18 and international forces that lead to the Republican defeat and the ideological goals and methods that splintered the Spanish left.

Luis García Berlanga's La vaquilla (1985, with the collaboration of ) marked a turning point in depicting the Spanish Civil War on film, for it accorded humanity to the men and women on both sides of the conflict, and after it, Trueba's La niña de tus ojos (1988) simply seemed opportunistic. Francesc Betriu's La Plaça del Diamant (1981) was a sort of national catharsis for the other Spain, and along with a number other post-Franco films, depicted Republican Spain during the

Civil War and after, to greater or lesser success, but only touched very briefly on the international component the the struggle. More important to both Rodoreda and Betriu was the Castilian Other and the Catalan Haute Bourgeoisie that pacted with them.17

Such Transition-era films as Aranda's screen version of the Vázquez Montalbán novel,

Asesinato en el Comité Central. Made in 1981, in the shadow of the failed coup attempt (23 F), it is a surprisingly blunt look at that complicated and fragile moment in Spanish history, the Transition from dictatorship to democracy. The anomalous positions people find themselves in is forced into high relief by a finger-licking locked room mystery in which the victim is a thinly-veiled Santiago

Carrillo, and the suspects are all members of the Central Committee of the Spanish Communist

Party (PCE). Vázquez Montalbán and Aranda are credited with collaborating on the screenplay, which looks to have been written simultaneously with the novel, and follows the book so closely that the actors practically could have learned their dialogues straight from the paperback. However,

Aranda has made no secret that he differs from Vázquez Montalbán politically. While the novelist was a militant member of the PSUC (the Catalan Communist Party), Aranda proclaimed himself faithful to the anarchic tradition he learned at home. In retrospect, the film is surprising in its

17 Tu nombre envenena mis sueños (1996), Pilar Miró; Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—19 dialectical tension, some of which can certainly be ascribed to tension between novelist and director. Compared to recent films like Montxo Armendáriz’s manichean Silencio roto, where the smallest pretense at even-handedness is cheered by some critics, Asesinato has ambiguous shades of gray to spare. The Party is hardly romanticized in Vázquez Montalbán’s narrative, and even less so by Aranda. Visually, the film exists in dialectical tension as well. Teresa Font, in her first film edited for Aranda, shows her capacity for leaving a shot on screen just long enough, and not a split second longer. As Carmela ( a "militante de la puta base," played by ) drives Carvalho to his first meeting with a cadre of party hardliners cum suspects, just as she expresses disbelief that anyone could wish to kill Garrido/Carrillo, we flash by graffiti that Vázquez Montalbán probably did not suggest or condone. It reads, “Paracuellos vengado” (Paracuellos avenged), an allusion to a tragedy that occurred in the mountain town of Paracuellos del Jarama early in the Civil

War, in November of 1936. In the outskirts of the town, more than two thousand Francoist prisoners, including military personnel but also many civilians—comfortably-off burghers, Falangists, and prominent conservatives, including the relatively innocuous popular comic playwright Muñoz

Seca, were murdered between the 7th of November and the 3rd of December. More than 10,000 prisoners had been moved from Madrid to outlying Paracuellos because of the fear that Franco’s army, already in Alcorcón, Leganés, and Getafe, would march into the capital and liberate them, thereby hugely increasing their forces.

According to Bardavío and Sinova in Todo Franco, the Francoist propaganda machine brought up the event at every possible opportunity to discredit the Communist party and its undisputed leader in exile, Santiago Carrillo, basing the personal accusation on the fact that Carrillo was named

Republican Chief of Public Order of the Junta of Defense of Madrid under General Miaja on Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—20

November 6th, one day before he killings began. Therefore, the logic went, not only must he have known about the sinister events, but in fact have ordered them. Say Bardavío and Sinova:

Carrillo siempre negó tener nada que ver con los asesinatos y afirmó, por el contrario, que

trató de impedirlos y de exigir responsabilidades cuando tuvo noticia de ellos.

(495 Carrillo always denied having had anything to do with with the murders and affirmed,

to the contrary, that he tried to stop them when he got word of them).

Carrillo’s denial, of course, was not heard in Spain until he returned to the country after Franco’s death. Aranda, in any case, stands out for allowing that there is more than one point of view to be had on the matter, and that the worst thing one can do is not discuss it.

6. “Vente a Alemania, Pepiño”

In the last two months of the war and immediately after, some 400,000 Spaniards the border into , and many sailed from there to the New World. About 10,000 more exiles were taken by Republican ship to Tunisia, from whence they scattered widely.18 All this, when combined with the slow leak of Spaniards fleeing from the start of the war through the 1950s amounts a staggering number of Spaniards in exile. These are added to the one and a half million economic refugees who emmigrated to different American countries between 1880 and 1913.19

This huge group of “Outland” Spaniards influenced the peninsula in their absence, through their letters, plays, novels, and films, and formed a number of important literary and cinematic figures. One area in which Republican exiles exerted a huge influence was in the North American

University study of Peninsular Spanish. An entire generation of scholars and schools of thought were formed largely by them, as was the consideration of the canon in 20th century Spanish literature. Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—21

The flow back and forth of exiles between Latin American and Spain also affected cinema on three continents, and not in the simplistic way that is sometimes presented. The Republican in exile is a character in a number of Latin American films, like Argentine Luis Puenzo’s 1985 film, La historia oficial, where Héctor Alterio’s character, Roberto, is the son of an exile who becomes just as reactionary as the forces his father battled.

However, the portrayal of the exiles is not always so flattering. Marcos Zurinaga’s 1997

The Disappearance of García Lorca has a reactionary political subtext in which the Republican exile is portrayed as an unwashed, pusilanimous alcoholic, who has been living the life of Riley in Puerto

Rico, claiming to have suffered for his cause, when actually HE is the lowdown running dog who shot the poet of Fuentevaqueros. Perhaps this highly arguable slant is not surprising, considering that the film stars Miami Cuban Andy García; ironically, García is actually the best thing in the film, a wonderful Lorca, showing he surely studied the existing film records to master the mannerisms.

Still, the film was released with the preposterous claim that it was based on books by Ian Gibson, so one expected better.

Spanish entertainers who triumphed abroad during the Franco decade sometimes presented a sort of stylized lisping metrosexuality (consider Raphael, Camilo Sesto, Joselito, or Julio Iglesias).

Rocío Dúrcal and María Dolores Pradera learned local idioms, but although both Pili and Mili were in

Mexico, they were never of it, just as Hayley Mills was never American. While “genuine” Spanish child stars like Marisol (Pepa Flores) were popular and received almost reverently, nevertheless, when a Spanish character was portrayed by a Mexican actor in film, the intent was usually parodic of the perceived “Thpanith thenth of thuperiority.” A good example of this is the 1984 comedy, Ni

Chana ni Juana, in which La India María (María Elena Velasco, Mexico’s best box-office draw)

18 This information comes from the entry titled, “Exilio,” in Todo Franco: Franquismo y antifranquismo de la A a la Z, by Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—22 directs herself playing twins separated at birth; one raised in poverty in Mexico, and the other in snooty society in Madrid.20

6b. . . . or How Many Gastarbeiter does it take to Screw in a Wirtschaftswunder?

De noche a verte, Ave María de noche a verte, de noche a verte, ¿cómo quie- -res que vaya Ave María? de noche a verte, ¿cómo quie- -res que vaya Ave María de noche a verte? … De noche a verte, yo le te- mo a tu padre, Ave María más que a la muerte . . . ¡Yo que quisiera es que se fue- ra a Alemania, Ave María, y no volviera! sevillana popular in the early 70s

Joaquín Bardavío and Justino Sinova, 2000. 19 From Francisco J. Romero Salvadó, 13. 20 It’s actually hysterially funny, but with that undercurrent of sadness that one finds in Whoopi Goldberg films of the same period—the plucky heroine who is treated with shocking disregard by people whose skin is lighter. In many ways, Velasco appeals to the same sort of audiences as Spain’s Paco Martínez Soria—the ordinary man and woman in the street who are “pobres” or even “probes pero honrados.” Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—23

The emergence from the burnt-out shell of autarchy was slow, as Franco struggled to rehabilitate his image from Fascist to vigorous Christian and prematurely anti-communist. One factor that caused Spaniards to relocate in Europe was the phenomenon of the Gastarbeiter. After

World War II, between war deaths and the disappearance of Nazi slave labor, Germany was seriously short-handed of workers, as were France and Switzerland. Given Spain’s postwar poverty and unemployment it made sense for Franco to export his problems and import German capital subsidies. A majority of these guestworkers were men without their families who worked and sent money home, came on visits, and eventually returned to Spain. Still some resettled with the entire family, and both groups had significant impact on Spanish film. In the late sixties and early seventies, the most frequent Spanish Gastarbeiter on film are men—lonely, horny men who are ultimately attracted more to Spanish good catholic women than to the superficial “liberated” women they supposedly encounter abroad. Writer-director team, Pedro Lazaga and Vicente Escrivà, practically had a small cottage industry with this gag. Some examples are “Vente a Alemania, Pepe,”

(1971), París bien vale una moza (1972), El abominable hombre de la Costa del Sol, (1970) or, Vente a Ligar al oeste (1972). A much more resonant picture of the long-term results of the guestworker upheaval can be seen in Subjúdice (1998, Josep María Forn), in which Icíar Bollaín plays the daughter of Andalusian emmigrants to Germany who returns to Spain, only to be considered an undesirable foreigner in by the Catalan bourgeoisie.21

With the conclusion of bilateral accords in 1953, American military bases were built in

Torrejón de Ardoz (Madrid), Rota (Cádiz), and Zaragoza, and in exchange, Spain received over a billion dollars in humanitarian aid over the next decade. Meanwhile, the soldiers and their families

21 As if we needed another reason to love her, Bollaín speaks very meritorious Catalán in the film. Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—24 brought with them rock and roll, hippie fashions, attempts at free love, and whiffs of marijuana.22

The classic film anticipating this moment was Luis García Berlanga’s 1952 ¡Bienvenido Míster

Marshall! Wendy Rolph sees it as a landmark as “prototypical Castilian villagers enthusiastically prepare to welcome their American visitors by ‘performing’ their Spanishness” . . . (12). The theme of hyper-Iberian performance and regional cross-dressing has recurred since with regularity, often self-consciously, though on occasion, unaware of the show. Ramón Masats’ 1970 Topical Spanish mixes this performance anxiety with the genre of pop band wacky film in which the lads (and lassies) act up and out in photo montages a la Help or Hard Day’s Night. The group is called Los

Iberos, but in fact is a complex hybridization of an essentially Castilian band whose lead singer,

Guillermina Motta, was in reality a rising star of the nova canço catalana. To add to the hilarity, the group sings in English, “como mandaban los cánones del momento” (Santos Zunzunegui 96).23 Like

Berlanga, Masats gets laughs from his Spanish characters’ attempts to perform as typical and topical. Juan Carlos Serrano has a Swedish girlfriend—the coveted sueca!—but she and the other groupies wait modestly, patiently knitting while their men perform on stage. The credits,

“debidamente adobados con un potpourri de zarzuelas y pasodobles,” occur while Juan Carlos and the Swedish girlfriend walk through the kitschy splendor of Barcelona’s Poble Espanyol:

[Juan Carlos] aprovecha el marco y la ocasión para endilgar a la joven (y al espectador, de

paso) toda una colección de típicos tópicos acerca del carácter idiosincrásico de los

españolitos de a pie. Tópicos que encontrarán una réplica adecuada en la joven nórdica que,

22 Emilio Martínez Lázaro’s Carreteras secundarias (1997) includes a fascinating look back at Torrejón after the Yankees have left. 23 Unfortunately, things have not changed as much as Zunzunegui might wish; for a look at another cinematic band that sings in English in a Spanish film, see my discussion of Deviot in “On a Role with Recent Spanish Cinema: Daniel Monzón and El corazón del guerrero,” Cine-Lit, Fall 2004.

Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—25

ante la referencia a la crueldad hispánica, recordará a su pareja que ella vio “en Suecia una

película española en la que se pasaba todo el tiempo matando conejos24.” (97)

In the end, as Zunzunegui concludes, Topical Spanish is far from topical, and anything but typical of the Spanish film of the 70s (97).

Manuel Gómez Pereira continues to play with “playing Spanish,” in Boca a boca (1995).

Javier Bardem’s character, an actor, first auditions for a part by performing a Donald O’Conner- esque dance number in English-sounding gibberish, and then changes out of his normal Spanish clothes into a waiter’s garb unbuttoned almost to the waist, and slicks back his hair with olive oil in order to convince an American casting director that he can play Spanish on film.

7. The City’s not for Paco Martínez Soria, , or Moreover, within Spain the composition of the population had changed drastically. The years between 1959 and 1973 saw the urban migration of some three million Spaniards from rural areas, principally to Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, and Bilbao (Romero Salvadó 148). This reshuffling within Spain had dramatic impact on regional languages, customs, urban growth, and on redefining both city and country. In Postmodern Paletos: Immigration, Democracy, and Globalization in Spanish

Narrative and Film, 1950-2000, Nathan E. Richardson avers:

By the late 1960s . . . [Spanish] audiences flocked to a series of formulaic comedies later

referred to as paleto films . . . [that] playfully reflected the plight . . . and ultimate triumph

of the films’ country bumpkin protagonists over a bewildering urban culture. (72)

Pedro Lazaga contributed generously to comedies based on Spaniards traveling to the city, to resorts, or abroad. Another “paleto” director, Ignacio F. Iquino, and is significantly different in its—dare I say it?—thrust. In his De picos pardos (1969) the mayor and secretary of a small town go to Madrid to buy a bus, and take advantage of the visit to go wild with the captital’s sexy

24 An obvious reference to Carlos Saura’s La caza. Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—26 nightlife. Iquino, who had made over a hundred films before he died in 1994, was arguably little interested in “social therapy by which rural immigrants could ‘face their demons’ . . . while confirming traditional francoist prorural and antiurban values” (Nathan 221)25 and fascinated with titillating viewers.26

Lazaga’s La ciudad no es para mí (1966), based on a play of the same name by Fernando

Ángel Lozano,27 perhaps initiates a new cycle of paleto cinema, but there are numerous films made throughout the forties and fifties that pave the way. In Un viaje sin destino (Rafael Gil, 1942),

Poveda, who works in a tourist agency, organizes a trip that ends up with his clients in a sinister old country house. The film milks laughs out of the city folks’ fear of the country. Juan Antonio

Bardem’s Cómicos (1954), has a significant dose of urban corruption. Later,Recluta con niño (Pedro

Luis Ramírez 1955) and its remake, Cateto a Babor (Ramón Fernández 1970) use the mandatory military service of a country bumpkin in charge of his orphaned little brother to show the urbanizing influence of the mili. Villa Alegre, directed by Alejandro Perla in 1956, has José Isbert playing exactly the sort of obstructionist “atónito palurdo” that Machado immortalized in Campos de Castilla, a man stubbornly trying to keep progress out because he fears losing control in his small domain. In this way, the film is a good example of a constant counterpoint in the Spanish rural/urban tension on film. On the one hand are all of the stories of lives ruined and virtue lost when leaving the country for the city (like Nieves Condes’ much-studied and oft-maligned Surcos,

1951), but on the other is the vast naturalist tradition of seeing rural Spain as a terrifying abyss of

25 Part of this is Richardson’s summary of an article by Mareia García de León, “El paleto” (36-40). 26 If you doubt this, consider a selected list of titles of films Iquino made after Picos: Esas chicas tan pu... (1982), Jóvenes amiguitas buscan placer (1982), Inclinación sexual al desnudo (1982), Los sueños húmedos de Patrizia (1981), La desnuda chica del relax (1981), La caliente niña Julieta (1981), ¿Podrías con cinco chicas a la vez? (1979), Las que empiezan a los quince años (1978), Emanuelle y Carol (1978), Los violadores del amanecer (1978), Fraude matrimonial (1977), Las marginadas (1977), Chicas de alquiler (1974), Aborto criminal (1973), or Busco tonta para fin de semana (1973).

27 Richardson infers that this is a pseudonym for Fernando Lázaro Carreter, but I have not been able to verify it (221). Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—27 ignorance and superstition. Emilia Pardo Bazán’s story, “Un destripador de antaño,” shows this in the extreme when a stepmother kills her husband’s child and renders the girl’s fat to sell to an apothecary as “unto de moza,” believing this horrifying ingredient is what makes his salves effective. Village ignorance is aided and abetted by a priest who, like Unamuno’s don Manuel, conspires to keep the parishoners in happy ignorance.28

Jaime de Armiñán’s 1979 film, El nido, ends in tragedy at least in part because of a small town’s small-mindedness, even though the landed gentry, in the person of don Alejandro (Héctor

Alterio), is a gentleman, not a vile opportunist, and although the parish priest, don Eladio (Luis

Politti), is an understanding liberal who came to the priesthood later in life, after considerable worldly experiences.

It is a mistake to aver that Franco-era films consistently praised a noble countryside and warned of the evils of the city, or that films of the past 20 years have done the opposite. Post

Franco, the tension certainly continues. On the one hand, there is the syndrome of the idealized pastoral, symbolized in Le bonheur est dans le pré (Étienne Chatiliez,1995, starring Maura, and hugely popular in Spain). It is also there in the idealized memories of a remote, happy childhood in the village to which Ricky returns in Átame (Almodóvar, 1990). It enlivens Mónica

Laguna’s 1996 Tengo una casa, and ’s oscar-winning Belle époque, in which the countryside in the spring it is still possible to find a moment of romance and innocent happiness before all hell breaks loose.

On the other hand are films that show how the ignorance of the countryside makes repression worse. This may be in historical like La lengua de las mariposas (José Luis Cuerda

1999), Silencio roto (Montxo Armendáriz 2001), or in psychological thrillers in which horror lurks

28 San Manuel Bueno, mártir. Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—28 just outside urban normalcy. Think of Adosados (1996, directed by and based on the novel by Félix Bayón), or Una casa en las afueras (1995, ), in which bad things happen the minute good people move to the burbs or beyond. Fernando Fernán Gómez’s El viaje a ninguna parte (1986) certainly presents a less than idealized view of rural Spain in the 40s and 50s, and

Pídele cuentas al rey (José Antonio Quirós 1999), is similarly unsentimental in retelling the true story of Fidel, an unemployed Asturian miner who sets out on foot for Madrid to ask the king in person for his constitutional right to be employed. The notion is played for comedy in Garci’s 1979

Las verdes praderas in which Alfredo Landa leaves the city and enters a hell that can only be escaped when his longsuffering wife (María Casanova) torches the chalet for the insurance.

8. Calientes suecas en Ibiza Says Romero Salvadó, “Spain’s successful economic miracle was possible without balance of payment problems . . . owing to three main factors: a huge increase in earnings from foreign tourism; emigrant remittances; and a renewal of foreign investment” (148). So successful was the campaign to attract tourists, says Romero Salvadó, “earnings from tourism almost wiped out Spain’s trade deficit as well as generating jobs in southern areas traditionally plagued by unemployment . . .

“ (149).

In “Selling Spanish Otherness Since the 1960s,” Dorothy Kelly avers:

When in the 1960s the tourist slogan “Spain is different” was launched, the intention was to

attract tourists to an “exotic” destination, with interesting local customs and traditions

differing from the European norm. . . . [T]his slogan fit in well with the Franco regime’s

deliberate effort to promote, both internally and externally, positive constructions of

Spanishness as opposed to negative versions of foreign otherness. . . .Spain’s ills were

blamed on the corrupting influence of foreign ideas imported by the internal “other,” the

left, the working classes, and other opposition groups. (30) Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—29

While this is very true, From Carlos V29 to Queen Sofía, Spain had already seen a parade of monarchs whose Castillian diction was precarious, and this entroned Otherness frequently gave the governed a lot to talk about. This strain explodes in the nineteenth century when the afrancesados contrast with those who would rather cry “¡Vivan las cadenas!” (long live our chains”) than bow to foreign influence. Luis Buñuel’s 1974 film, Le fantôme de la liberté , includes a dying Spaniard who utters this line that seems incongruous and surreal, but is actually historical fact. Although the war cry revealed a certain anti-intellectual bias, it probably also showed great perspicacity regarding the kind of “freedom” the Napoleonic forces were likely to bring with them to Spain. On the other hand Gomaespuma30 saw a continuity with the slogan to the Napoleonic wars of the 19th Century:

De hecho, el eslogan oficial de la Oficina de Turismo de entonces (ya que todavía no se había

inventado lo de Spain is different) era la repetida frase “¡Vivan las cadenas!” . . .frase que,

además de expresar el sometimiento voluntario del pueblo a su dictador, favorecía la venta

de una marca de anís en perjuicio de otras . . . (133)

Be that as it may, the uninhibited sueca who vacationed on the beaches and in the discos created a somewhat different mythology of topless, blond sexual ambition, and to woo her, a

Spanish man could well be assisted by helpful Italian popular crooners like Domenico Modugno

(“Volare” 1958), or practically any other Sanremo Festival winner. Foreign soccer stars helped fill the stadiums, and their popularity sometimes spilled onto the silver screen. Argentine Alfredo Di

Stefano (who won five consecutive European cups for the Real Madrid from 1956-60), had a part in

Rovira Beleta’s classic 1954 soccer film, Once pares de botas, and Hungarian Ladislao Kubala (Barça

29 Moncho Alpuente describes him deliciously as, “un rey con mala sombra en un imperio en el que no se pone el sol” (131). He goes on to tell for laughs another cliché popular among tourists an Latin Americans, “Parece ser que el emperador ceceaba un poco al hablar pero sus cortesanos lo achacaban a su acento alemán, algunos incluso llegaron a imitar su habla . . . y zu ezcelencia no penzaba que le eztaban tomando el pelo” (133). 30 Stage name of two journalists, Guillermo Fesser and Juan Luis Cano, who began collaborating as “Gomaespuma” in 1982 at Antena 3. Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—30 star between 1950-8) actually had a i 1955 film based on him, Los ases buscan la paz (Arturo

Ruiz Castillo), that stressed the soccer ace’s hair-raising escape from the clutches of the Goulash

Gulag.

Foreign women may have been viewed as sexually more liberated, but that does not mean that the average macho ibérico thought this made the foreign female smart, respectable, or desirable in the long term. One horrifying case in point would be the entire career of German-

Polish import Roswitha Bertahasa Honzcar 31, better known in Spain as Nadiuska. Nadiuska’s first

Spanish role was in Vicente Escrivá’s 1973 Lo verde empieza en los Pirineos, which tells the story of three friends who clamber into a seiscientos and putt-putt across the border into France in search of topless beaches, sex, and uncut porn. The irony is that Serafín (José Luis López Vázquez), made impotent by a repressive childhood, falls in love with Nadiuska, who plays a Spanish Gastarbeiter maid in the hotel where the three horny Hispanics are housed. It is ostensibly the home-grown, hard working Spanish girl—educated by nuns and equipped with generous heart, decolletage and savings account—who cures Serafín’s neurosis. Of course, Nadiuska’s dialogues have to be dubbed so that she will not reveal herself to be exactly what the celluloid Spaniards are seeking—a foreign girl with va-va-va-voom. Thus, the film contradicts what Peter Besas calls its “implicit moral . . . that though there may be more bikinis and freedom abroad, Spain, in the last analysis is to be preferred” (98).

The same year Nadiuska appeared in Manolo la nuit, in which the title character (Alfredo

Landa) works as a tourist guide in Torremolinos, living it up with uninhibited foreigners until his long-suffering wife tricks him into returning home with a fake pregnancy. In 1974’s Soltero y padre en la vida (Javier Aguirre), Nadiuska plays Gunilla, a hippy with poor hygiene from . . . well, Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—31 from somewhere else; maybe Denmark. Lit is enough to know that, like the narrator’s love object in the song, “Tatuaje,” our Gunilla has a “nombre extranjero.” The serious political protest and unrest through which Spain was living is completely trivialized by Nadiuska’s character, who states that handwashing is a bourgeois practice and hides out with a morally upright perfumist, Alonso Crespo

Martín (Pepe Sacristán) when her crash pad is raided for drugs by police. During her stay, Alfonso gives Gunilla a good washing and some typical Spanish sperm. She returns from her wandering nine months later, gives birth, and leaves the baby with Alonso and goes to China with Chairman Mao’s little red book in hand. In ten years, she realizes her mistake, and can only remedy her empty communist life by marrying Alonso, becoming Spanish, and accepting her proper place. The sexy foreignness embodied by Nadiuska on film was desirable, but needed domesticating if she were to be a main charracter. Nadiuska made a series of similarly depressing films in Spain from 1974 to

76 and by 1982 the beginning of the end of her career came when she played Conan the Barbarian’s mother and was decapitated by James Earl Jones.

One wishes to report that these stereotypes had disappeared entirely from popular Spanish film, but one recent example serves to contradict such optimism. Cuadri’s Gran vida (2000), for example, has an early scene that shows bus drivers discussing which foreign destination is best for sexual tourism. In 1997, gets a lot of laughs in Airbag from Nathalie Seseña as a prostitute who earns more money by pretending to be an exotic Argentine.

Foreign women’s sex drives are generally depicted in Spanish film as inversely proportional to their IQs. In other words, the thinking seems to run that the woman must not be all that smart to give away what she could sell or trade. In fact, in Cuadri’s film, Carmelo Gómez’s character is suicidal until he meets a beautiful young Mexican Lola (Salma Hayek). Lola is desirable as Other,

31 Maybe this is her real name and nationality; a lot of spelling variations appear in the different tabloids where she was Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—32

but unlike the stereotypical sueca, she speaks proper Spanish, is extremely hard to get, and is more reminiscent of the española of “El beso”32 than of a young Spanish woman today.

Spanish films from the fifties through now are littered with foolish American women

tourists or students who are easily confused and manipulated by savvy Spanish men. Let us call it

the “Tesis de Nancy” syndrome to save time.33 Colomo uses this as recently as 1998 in Los años

bárbaros, where the bravery of two real-life Barbaras—Probst Solomon and Mailer—was substantially diminished by their thinly-veiled portrayal as spoiled rich girls with little or no ideological savvy who nearly faint at the sight of morcilla—which of course the Spanish characters

want to give them literally and figuratively.34 Ultimately, though, the best Spanish film at present succeeds when it is able to balance the ability to look critically, evaluatively, at Self and Other, and likewise, when it is able to have equal humor or vitriol or heart for both.

WORKS CITED

prone to being written about. 32 “La española cuando besa, es que besa de verdad, y a ninguna le interesa/ besar por frivolidad…” by Juan Legido. Made famous by Concha Piquer and Celia Gámez 33 Nancy is a creation of another Republican exile, Ramón J. Sender, and her first adventure appeared in 1962. Nancy is a naïve American student who spends a year living in Alcalá de Guadaira and studying in Seville in order to write a thesis on Gypsies. She tells her story through letters to a friend at home, all of which reveal how little she understands of what transpires, and prove over and over that American women are loose but not very bright. On the first page, she ponders the mystery of “gorilla warfare” in Spain, given that the great apes are not native to the Iberian Peninsula, so we are talking REALLY STUPID. Rosa Montero calls this “humor inteligente” and remarks, “¿qué puede llegar a entender una estudiante americana de la cultura de esa España profunda llena de tópicos? Probablemente nada, pero de demostrárnoslo se encargará Nancy en su tesis.” Spanish literary historians usually either see Sender’s divertissment as a critical view of Spanish society from an exile, or wistful and nostalgic view of the same, though they all seem to agree it is thigh-slappingly funny. Nancy’s misadventures are told in five books: La tesis de Nancy (México: Atenea, 1962), Nancy, doctora en gitanería, (Madrid: Magisterio Españo, 1973), Nancy y el bato loco, (Madrid: Magisterio Español, 1974) Gloria y vejamen de Nancy, (Madrid: Magisterio Español, 1977) and Epílogo a Nancy: Bajo el signo de Taurus (México: Mexicanos Unidos, 1979). What is most funny to me is how many language schools in Spain that specialize in Spanish for foreigners advertise La tesis de Nancy as part of their pedagogical materials on the web. One school even pairs it with Eduardo Mendoza’s Sin noticias de Gurb, so that the Nancy’s alien status is made completely clear!

Turismo y cine Patricia Hart—Purdue—33

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