The Eleventh Pérez Galdós Lecture

Galdós And Spanish Cinema

Dr Sally Faulkner

Tuesday 22nd November 2011 at the University of Sheffield THE PÉREZ GALDÓS LECTURE

The Pérez Galdós Lecture, endowed by the Spanish Embassy, celebrates the work of Benito Pérez Galdós (1843-1920), ’s greatest novelist after Cervantes, and one of the masters of European realism. In the thirty novels which form the core of his achievement, Galdós bears unique wit- ness to the public and private life of Madrid in the years when it began to be a great modern city. Thrustful, yet accident-prone, shaped by powerful impersonal forces, yet full of intensely human passages of life, Galdós’s Madrid is still our kind of city. As one of his finest critics wrote, “he makes us see more clearly when we look around us.” The Spanish Embassy and the University of Sheffield share the hope that the Pérez Galdós Lecture will make that experience available to a widening circle of readers. That is an aim, too, for Sheffield’s Pérez Galdós Editions Project, with which the Lectures are associated. The cover design is based on a photograph of Benito Pérez Galdós reading from his work to a group of his Madrid friends. GALDÓS AND SPANISH CINEMA

I would like to begin by thanking Rhian Davies, Director of the Galdós Editions Project, for inviting me to deliver this lecture; the University of Sheffield for hosting; and the Spanish Embassy for sponsoring the event. It has been frequently noted that the novels of Galdós demand an active reader, so it is in a Galdosian spirit that I begin with a request for the active participation of my audience in a game of, if you will, ‘spot the author’ in this brief clip from Pedro Almodóvar’s 2004 film Hable con ella / Talk to Her. CLIP Hable con ella minute 44.30-45.20 I have chosen this clip to demonstrate what I do want to do, and what I don’t want to do, in the rest of today’s lecture. Like Almodóvar, I want to acknowledge the role of Galdós in Spanish culture, in particular his wonderful chronicles of Madrid, and his great narratives about female characters and gender. Almodóvar is an inheritor of both these roles. Talk to Her, like so many of his films, is set in Madrid, and the title ‘talk to her’ is an order Almodóvar may have observed Galdós obey, in one form or another, in so much of his work. But the fleeting reference to a touristy, tiled portrait of Galdós, while in focus, is in the background, and probably missed by most foreign audiences. This lecture aims, conversely, to propose Galdós as a more sustained reference in Spanish cinema, and move the reference from background to foreground. I’m not going to do this today by arguing that Almodóvar is a Galdosista – though I think the links between the two in terms of urbanism, gender and melodrama are worth pursuing. I’m going to focus instead on film adaptations of Galdós’s novels, and rather than make an exhaustive tour of them all, I select three in order to make two arguments. (For those interested in a tour, I suggest Ramón Navarrete’s Galdós en el cine español, who, in 2003, counts 12 films, 4 further films that he calls ‘inspired in’ Galdós, and 6 TV adaptations; the best place to go for a more recent list is the International Movie Database.)i My examples are drawn from two trends and two media: first auteur, or art, cinema, much admired and much studied in Spanish film scholarship, this tradition is represented by Luis Buñuel and his 1961 Viridiana (I will touch on Tristana too). Next, I turn to the rapidly overlooked Tormento of 1974 – forgotten as just another example of the sleazy (destape) popular cinema of the period, I reclaim it today as a brilliant example of Spanish cinema’s almost always ignored middlebrow trend. Spanish screen scholars have shown in recent years that the boundaries we may wish to draw between film and television often prove porous, and in this spirit I include a further middlebrow example, Televisión Española, or Spanish State TV’s, 1980 classic serial . My texts date from 1961 to 1980, a period characterized by remarkable change: Franco’s economic policies in the late 50s unleashed social mobility, and the consumerist, predominantly middle-class Spain we know today (and we see threatened today) was born in the 60s; political change of course followed socio-economic change in the 70s, when Franco died, democracy returned and monarchy was restored. My first argument is to show that Galdós’s novels spoke to the concerns of filmmakers almost a century later as they ‘worked through’ (I take the phrase from TV studies) these tumultuous transformations.

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It’s not just a question of ransacking the novels for material for plots – though my examples show that filmmakers found inspiration in the ways they refract, through gender, questions like the rise of a new middle class, the birth of a consumerist society, sexuality and urbanism. My second argument is that Galdós provided inspiration in the area of narrative form too. This doesn’t mean re-confirming what Sergei Eisenstein pointed out as long ago as 1942 in ‘Dickens, Griffith and Ourselves’: that the nineteenth-century Realist novel lent film what we would now understand as its classic narrative syntax.ii Rather, I want to enquire into Galdós’s famously playful narrators, his construction of character, use of space and melodramatic elements to show their inspiration for the audio-visual medium. I step carefully regarding the direction of travel. Of course Galdós wrote first, but I refuse to accept the hierarchy of literature-as-superior-to-film that did so much damage to Adaptation Studies until recently. I propose instead a model of ‘mutual illumination’ between the Galdós source texts and the films, whereby each text throws light on the other, inviting newly enriched re-readings, or re-viewings. One brief quote before turning to the films, which I’ve drawn from Robert Stam’s Introduction to Film and Literature in 2005, one of the scholars responsible for invigorating Adaptation Studies by drawing on critical theory and cultural studies. Both of my arguments regarding the importance of context and the process of intertextual, mutual illumination between source text and adaptation are contained in this description of multidirectionality: ‘Every text, and every adaptation, “points” in many directions, back, forward and sideways’.iii First, then, art cinema. That Buñuel was an enthusiastic Galdosista is a gift for research into ‘Galdós and Spanish Cinema’. Despite his post-Civil War exile, the fact that Buñuel returned to make films in Spain twice, and the fact that both films – Viridiana and Tristana iv – draw on Galdós enable Spanish film scholars to claim Buñuel as their own, and incorporate his work into the tradition of Spanish auteurist cinema. I leave for another occasion the squabbling over Buñuel’s ‘Spanishness’ (I see no contradiction in considering him both a transnational director and a Spanish director) but want to explore today the second argument that Buñuel’s work confirms the influence of Galdós in Spanish auteurist cinema.

Viridiana (Angel Guerra 1890-91; Buñuel 1961) Viridiana is not named after a Galdós novel, nor does it announce the intertext in its credits, but it surely shows a lack of imagination on the part of Adaptation Studies if it cannot include a work for which literary intertexts are so key. In a longer study of this filmv I explore the links with Galdós’s Halma (1895), Misericordia (1897) and Angel Guerra (1890- 91), but will limit my example here to the last text. For those who don’t know the film, Viridiana is best summarized as the transgression of a series of taboos, especially in the area of sexual morality that particularly concerned both the Franco regime and the Catholic church. Ultimately a film about the abusing and the disabusing of a would-be nun, it explores incest (Jaime is obsessed with his novice niece, the eponymous protagonist Viridiana), it explores necrophilia (Jaime will drug and almost rape the almost lifeless Viridiana, whom he has dressed in his deceased wife’s wedding apparel) and it ends by trampling over moral, religious, monogamous, and class constraints, when Jaime’s illegitimate son Jorge enjoys unchecked access to both

2 GALDÓS AND SPANISH CINEMA his cousin, the now ex-novice Viridiana, and maid, Ramona, at the end of the film. I’m not sure if this summary attracts or repulses you! Repulsed certainly were the Catholic church and the Franco regime – the latter banned the film before its première in Spain and retrospectively assigned it Mexican nationality. As you might imagine, psychoanalytically-informed critics have had much to say about Viridiana, but, published before psychoanalysis and Surrealism addressed the subjects, it is Galdós’s Angel Guerra that provides inspiration for the key preoccupation of the film: the intertwining of desire and prohibition. With regards to my first argument, that Galdós speaks to filmmakers ‘working through’ change, Buñuel finds in him a means to expose, explore and explode the regime’s convenient alliance with Catholicism. My second argument, concerning mutual illumination at the level of form, moves beyond the suggestion that Galdós just provided Buñuel with salacious content, for narrative self- reflexivity also emerges as key. Let’s look at an example. I’m very aware of the role played by order (if you watch the film first you prefer it to the book and vice-versa) so I’m going to be playful with order in the course of the lecture. For Viridiana I’ll show you the film clip first. CLIP Viridiana minute 5.25-7.30. Picking out just a few details from Angel Guerra, a sprawling work of Spanish literary decadence, we may note that Galdós’s ironically-named protagonist, Angel, is likewise obsessed with a would-be nun, Leré, whom he has charged to care for his daughter. Buñuel and scriptwriter Julio Alejandro take plot development in a different direction, drawing on both Misericordia in the introduction of a gang of beggars, and Halma in Viridiana’s establishment of a charitable institute, but it is the details of key passages in Angel Guerra that I want to explore today. Take this early one, which begins with the narrator’s playful description of an Angel racked by inappropriate desire. Its interlacing of the sexual and the spiritual looks forward to Jaime and Ramona’s nocturnal activities in the film: as we have seen, while master plays sacred music on the organ as he fantasizes about his niece, maid spies on her, then recounts to him her voyeuristic discoveries. In Galdós’s original: Por unas y otras cosas, por lo moral y por lo que no es moral, [Leré] interesaba a [Angel], despertando en él sensaciones y anhelos diversos, que en breve tiempo pasaban de lo más a lo menos spiritual, y viceversa. (For one reason or another, moral ones and immoral ones, Leré was of interest to Angel, awakening in him diverse sensations and longings, which, in quick succession, became more or less spiritual, and viceversa.)vi Especially relevant to the film is the information, relayed to us by the narrator, of the following events. Angel ‘no podía [...] resistir cierta comezón de vigilar [a Leré] de cerca, de sorprenderla en su vida íntima; y movido de ardiente curiosidad, puso en práctica un procedimiento poco delicado para satisfacerla’ (‘couldn’t resist the itch to spy [on Leré] close up, to catch her in private unawares; and, guided by a burning curiosity, he put a rather undignified practice into operation to satisfy it’) (153). Galdós’s voyeur dispatches the house staff so he can make a hole in the door leading from his dead mother’s bedroom to Leré’s, then spends almost the entire night watching her activities of prayer and meditation, only to be denied a glimpse of her body because, despite positioning his spy-hole opposite her bed, she lies down to sleep on the floor. Buñuel seizes on this scene of voyeurism, with

3 GALDÓS AND SPANISH CINEMA the addition of the brilliant detail that the house staff, Jaime’s servant Ramona, does the spying. In this way, Buñuel introduces self-reflexivity, as the viewer realizes he or she is implicated in this grubby, three-way exchange of looks.vii Re-reading Galdós through Buñuel, the self-reflexivity of the scene comes to the fore. At the moment when, it seems, Angel’s desire to see Leré will be satisfied, the narrator shifts in tone with the exclamation ‘Pero ¡ay, qué chasco para el centinela!’ (‘But oh, how disappointing for the sentry!’) (154). This abrupt shift from the preceding third-person narration, in which the protagonist is referred to by his surname, to exclamation and a military metaphor of surveillance, catches the reader off-guard and hints that they might share in the disappointment.viii Buñuel, therefore, predicts the emphasis placed by recent Galdós criticism on the self-reflexive irony of his playful narrators.ix But the illumination is mutual, shining light both ways, for Galdós’s narrator’s subsequent observation regarding the intertwining of religion and desire – the inextricability of its ‘spur’ and its ‘check’ – might serve as an epigraph for Buñuel’s entire oeuvre in the following century. For Angel, Leré’s ‘misticismo le sabía mal porque habiendo sido espuela convertíase en freno de sus deseos’ (‘mysticism was annoying because, having been the spur of his desires, it became their check’) (155). Viridiana is a celebrated milestone of Spanish oppositional art cinema, thus my argument that the film is steeped in references to Galdós points to an attractive thesis: that Galdós was, via Buñuel, a key inspiration for Spain’s admired auteurist cinema. The existence of Tristana apparently confirms this thesis. Galdós and Buñuel scholars alike have flocked to a film in which Spain’s great nineteenth-century novelist meets, on equal terms, its great twentieth-century filmmaker. Questions of feminism, psychoanalysis, and historical reframing have been considered (for those who don’t know source text or adaptation, Buñuel replaces Galdós’s 1890s with 1929-35 – a period of dictatorship, then democracy, ending in the eve of the Civil War – which was especially meaningful to Spain of 1970, still under dictatorship, when democracy was hoped for, but a second Civil War much feared). In 2004, I myself defended a thesis of mutual illumination between novelist and director at the level of form, whereby an analysis of Galdós’s equivocal narrator shone light on the formal stragtegies of Buñuel’s film, and a study of disablement in the film shone light on equivalent imagery in the novel.x But, attractive as it is, the thesis of Galdós, via Buñuel, as beacon of inspiration to Spanish art cinema just doesn’t work. Something puzzled me about this when I wrote on Tristana in 2004. The reason why Viridiana failed to play a leading role in Spanish cinema in 1961 is obvious – Spanish audiences couldn’t see the film for another 16 years, until after Franco’s death. But Tristana wasn’t just tolerated by the authorities, it was even awarded a special subvention and prizes by them – a complete reversal in attitude towards this director which can only be explained by desperate politics of opportunism – and it attracted some 2 million viewers.xi Yet critics have searched fruitlessly for the impact of this film on contemporary auteur cinema in Spain.xii I want to propose in this second half of the lecture that Galdós, via Buñuel, was an inspiration for Spanish cinema, especially in this key decade of far-reaching change, but this was for middlebrow, not art, cinema.

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Tormento (Galdós 1884; Olea 1974) xiii The mini-boom of classic literary adaptations in Spanish cinema of the early 1970s proves the influence of Tristana – some 6 of the 9 films I count in the boom were Galdós adaptations. Films like Tormento were not interested in the aesthetic and intellectual challenges that critics admire in art-director Buñuel. But neither was Tormento an example of Spanish popular cinema – surely at an all time low in this period with endless sleazy sex comedies. In-between films like Tormento were known in the period as the ‘Tercera vía’ (Third Way); they were commissioned by producers who identified the emergence of Spain’s new middle class and targeted it as the audience. I propose ‘middlebrow’ as an alternative description in my current work, because it allows me to connect these films to Spanish cinema today. For those who don’t know them, both novel and film Tormento follow the trials and tribulations of Amparo, working-class maid in a middle-class Bringas household dominated by Rosalía; Amparo becomes engaged to the Bringas’s rich cousin, Agustín, but, to Rosalía’s delight, the marriage plans are spoiled by the revelation of the maid’s past affair with a priest; Agustín makes Amparo his mistress instead, to Rosalía’s intense annoyance. Let’s revisit my two arguments with regards this middlebrow film: first, the ways Galdós spoke to the concerns of 1974, and second, the mutual illumination revealed by close textual analysis. Whereas Buñuel adapts the detail of Angel Guerra, Olea is interested in plot too. Franco’s censors (newly strict in this period after the failed opening-up of the 1960s) fixated on its potential sensationalism – a priest’s love affair – and held up the script three times.xiv They spectacularly missed the point. As with Buñuel, Galdós’s novel provided Olea with a means to work through contemporary anxieties – including a critique of the antiquated regime in the year before the dictator’s death, and tentative speculation about its future. But the critique lies not in the film’s anti-clericalism – from the 1960s on, progressive elements of the clergy had opposed the regime anyway. It lies in the film’s portrayal of the hollow values of the bourgeoisie and the disruptive presence of strong female characters. These two points of critique, originally explored by Galdós in 1884, struck at the ideological core of late Francoism, whose economic policies, from the 1959 Stabilization Plan onwards, focussed on consolidating the middle classes, unleashed social mobility while continuing to protect patriarchy. The critique is tentative – this is not a film which, like Viridiana, set off an explosion and was banned – but a middlebrow film, which, in terms of subject matter I define as serious, but not too challenging. This tentative approach in fact fell in line with the tentative approach to political change that would follow Franco’s death the following year. The novel is appropriately set under the late nineteenth-century Restoration period (named after the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1874), thus anticipating the second restoration of the Bourbon monarchy under Juan Carlos I, who viewers in 1974 knew was Franco’s designated successor. Turning now to my second argument of mutual illumination, I want to concentrate on melodrama, particularly in the areas of female characterization and description of setting and clothes (the latter referred to as mise en scène [aspects within the frame] in film analysis). Let’s look at an example, but this time I will begin with the novel. The engagement of wealthy Agustín and penniless Amparo is a threat both to Rosalía’s femininity and to her class. Her response is power-dressing: after the engagement the maid notes that the mistress dresses more sexily inside the house and out. Olea seizes on

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Galdós’s refraction of anxieties about women and class, attentively reading passage like the following. It begins with a self-reflexive nod, cualquiera, que atentamente observara a Rosalía, podría haber sorprendido en ella [el deseo] de hacer patente su hermosura, realzada en aquella ocasión por el esmero del vestir y por aliños y adornos de mucha oportunidad. Cómo enseñaba sus blancos dientes, cómo contorneaba su cuello, cómo se erguía para dar a su bien fajado cuerpo esbeltez momentánea. (any attentive observer would have discovered in Rosalía the desire to show off her beauty, emphasized on that occasion through carefully-chosen clothes and accessories. How she flashed her white teeth, how she showed off the shape of her neck, how straight she held herself to make her tightly corsetted body look momentarily slender). xv CLIP Tormento minute 1.07-1.09 Director Olea and actress are the ideal ‘attentive observers’ of Galdós. Winning three awards for her performance, Velasco is brilliant as Rosalía, the slightly dim, middle-aged, endlessly scheming petite bourgeoise bent on social ascent. Drawing on her experience in popular comedy, Velasco perfectly judges her portrayal of this shrewish stereotype, presenting Rosalía’s pomposity and hypocrisy as objects of satire rather than caricature. Olea and Velasco take full advantage of the prancing, puffing and preening indicated by Galdós throughout his text (the actress put on 11 kilos to take on the role) and the interpretation is so successful that the director expanded Rosalía’s role in the film compared to the novel. xvi Note also the deployment of mise-en-scène here, with the purple of Rosalía’s fancy clothes matching her tackily pretentious chaise longue. We see socially-climbing Amparo in the clothes Agustín has bought her, but as the comment about the ring in this clip makes clear, middle-class Rosalía, who properly matches her middle-class surroundings, is the proper model for such finery. These elements of a domestic setting, family-focussed plot, strong female characterization and narrativized mise en scène all point, of course, to the film genre of melodrama, which is brilliantly deployed here. Melodrama in literature may have had negative associations for nineteenth-century realist novelists, leading Galdós to parody the ‘folletín’ (penny dreadful) in the first chapter of Tormento. But if we re-read Galdós’s Tormento back through Olea’s adaptation, its explicit melodramatic qualities are clear. Work on melodrama in Film Studies highlights a series of techniques that refract a series of concerns, often concerning sexuality. Bearing in mind this work in Film Studies, we may move beyond considering melodrama as a source of parody in the novel, to consider it a source of enrichment. Fortunata y Jacinta (Galdós 1886-87; Camus 1980) Moving from Tormento of 1974 to Fortunata y Jacinta of 1980, we take in the great change of Spain’s modern era that is still within living memory: the death of the dictator in 1975 and consequent approval of the new democratic constitution in 1978. Black and white accounts of change in the cultural sphere are seductive, and comments like ‘yo empiezo después de Franco’ (I start after Franco) by no less a figure than Almodóvar discourage the investigation of continuities. But my thesis of the middlebrow film and the influence

6 GALDÓS AND SPANISH CINEMA of Galdós stresses uninterrupted continuity between the 1974 film before Franco’s death, and the 1980 TV serial after democracy returned. In fact the two arguments concerning the relevance of Galdós in terms of context, and mutual illumination in terms of form, survive intact the shift of context from dictatorship to democracy, and the shift of medium from feature-length film melodrama to classic TV serial of 10 hour-long episodes. My first argument, that Galdós’s novels spoke to the concerns of filmmakers as they ‘worked through’ tumultuous change is particularly clear in Fortunata y Jacinta. In the past decade, TV historians have pointed out that turning to the past, through historical dramas and classic adaptations, in order to negotiate the present was an explicit policy of Televisión Española in the transition, a Leavsite project termed ‘pedagogy’ by Manuel Palacio.xvii There is therefore continuity between Buñuel turning to Galdós for explosive ends in the 60s, Frade, Olea and Velasco turning to Galdós for witty critique in the 1970s and Televisión Española’s use of Galdós to work through the changes of the transition in the 1980s, with Mario Camus as director, and Ana Belén (insipid Amparo of Olea’s film) as Fortunata. Consider, for example, Fortunata y Jacinta’s convincingly – and expensively – recreated scenes of student riots at the opening of episode one – with its cries of ‘¡Viva la república!’ (‘Long live the Republic!’) – and remember that this was broadcast to Spanish audiences in 1980: democracy was fragile, the fear of Civil War real and we know today that a military coup would be attempted just one year later. xviii And beyond this example of a specific sequence, the parallel Galdós draws and Camus repeats of a Spain shifting from monarchy to republic as Juanito shifts between wife Jacinta and mistress Fortunata, seems especially appropriate to the Spain-in-transition of 1980. For my second argument concerning mutual illumination, I will turn to a clip from the serial first. For those unfamiliar with plot – the serial rather reverently follows the wide sweep of the original – spoilt Juanito is married to childless, bourgeois Jacinta; conducts an affair with fertile, working-class Fortuna, who herself marries sickly Maximiliano: the ins and outs of this situation weave a rich tapestry where historical change is intertwined with questions of gender and class. I’ve chosen a comparatively long clip in order to respect the slow pace of the serial (again, this leisurely pace is expensive): it relates Fortunata’s disasterous wedding night. Maxi, her new husband, has been taken ill; but Juanito is ‘at large’. CLIP Fortunata y Jacinta Chapter 6, minute 24.00-28.43 Narrative events and dialogue derive straight from the novel, so it makes little sense to quote this section to prove it to you. What I have chosen is my favourite sentence, which describes Fortunata’s troubled dream on her wedding night: Se le armó en el cerebro un penoso tumulto de cerrojos que se descorrían, de puertas que se franqueaban, de tabiques transparentes y de hombres que se colaban en su casa filtrándose por las paredes. (Her brain became a painful tumult of locks and doors being opened, transparent walls that men walked through to get into her house).xix

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We are in the context of a middlebrow TV serial with Fortunata y Jacinta, so Camus doesn’t adapt this by including an experimental dream sequence (as Buñuel might have) but by feeding these references to liminal spaces into Fortunata’s waking life. Galdós illuminates our understanding of the TV serial, for Camus finds wonderful audiovisual equivalents for these sliding bolts, swinging doors, transparent partitions and phantom men slipping through walls. In terms of the audio, Juanito’s voice may be heard and is thus uncontainable, crossing boundaries into the bourgeois marital home within which Fortunata has long sought to find her proper place; in terms of the visual, note Belén’s position and movement within the frame, in and out of the marital bedroom three times, and lengthily hesitating in the doorway. This sequence is typical of the sensitive use of space throughout the serial. Framing characters in threshold spaces like doorways, stairwells and attics – some, but not all of which are present in the original – brilliantly challenges clichés of gender and space: bourgeois housewives in the house, or street-walking prostitutes in the street. This 1980 serial shines light back on Galdós’s original for encouraging our sensitive re-reading of its refusal of stereotypes of gender and class – aspects on which literary critics, feminists and cultural geographers began to publish in the 1990s. xx A conclusion. Republican and anticlerical, Galdós, whose novels were blacklisted in the early decades of the dictatorship, had an obvious appeal to anti-Franco art directors. The argument is confirmed by Buñuel’s adaptations: to the celebrated Nazarín (made in Mexico) and Tristana, I hope to have added Viridiana as an undeclared adaptation, steeped in Galdosian intertexts at the level of narrative detail – the intertwining of desire and prohibition in a religious context so subversively relevant to Franco’s Catholic Spain of 1961 – and at the level of narrative form – through voyeurism and self-reflexivity. Galdós’s influence for Spanish cinema is more enduring, however, in its little- acknowledged middlebrow tradition. I have maintained my arguments about a contextually as well as a formally inspirational Galdós in my analysis of two examples of middlebrow audiovisual culture. This is important: it is not the case that only auteurist Buñuel was sensitive to form, while middlebrow directors were only interested in plot. I have shown that Tormento and Fortunata y Jacinta make the gender, class and political questions explored by Galdós persuasively pertinent to 1970s - 80s Spain in transition, a process that is remarkably continuous between a film made under dictatorship and censorship, and a serial produced under a democracy seeking pedagogy in literary classics. Finally, I hope to have shown that Adaptations Studies are at their best when they refuse hierarchy. Re-viewed through Galdós, self-reflexive voyeurism in Buñuel, melodrama in Olea and liminality in Camus come to the fore; re-read through the screen adaptations, these elements acquire new textures in Galdós. In each case, we view and read with renewed attention and pleasure.

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NOTE THESE ENDNOTES SHOULD APPEAR EARLIER i Ramón Navarrete (2003) Galdós en el cine español. Madrid: T&B, p. 31. ii Sergei Eisenstein (1999) ‘Dickens, Griffith and Ourselves [Dickens, Griffith and Film Today]’, in Braudy, L. and Cohen, M., eds. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. New York: Oxford UP, pp. 426-34. iii Robert Stam (2005) ‘Introduction: the Theory and Practice of Adaptation’ in Stam, R. and Raengo, A., eds. A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 1-52, p. 27. iv Buñuel also adapted Nazarín in 1958 in Mexico, where the novelist was popular among the Spanish exile community. v Sally Faulkner (forthcoming, 2012) ‘The Galdós Intertext in Viridiana (Buñuel 1961)’, in Gutiérrez Albilla, J. and Stone, R., eds. Companion to Luis Buñuel. Malden: Blackwell. vi Benito Pérez Galdós (1970) Angel Guerra. Madrid: Hernando, p. 153. Further page numbers are included in the text. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. vii See Peter Evans (2005) ‘Viridiana’ in A. Mira (ed) The and Portugal. London: Wallflower, pp. 99-107, pp. 102-3. viii Such a passage confirms Lou Charnon-Deutsch’s thesis of an implied male reader of female-focussed Spanish realist novels. See (1990) Gender and Representation: Women in Spanish Realist Fiction. Amsterdam: Benjamins. See Sally Faulkner (2004) Literary Adaptations in Spanish Cinema London: Tamesis, Chapter 4, for a development of this idea in relation to the two adaptations, one to film, one to television, of Galdós’s Fortunata y Jacinta. ix As noted by Víctor Fuentes in (2000) Los mundos de Buñuel, Madrid: Akal, p. 140. An example of such recent criticism is Catherine Jagoe (1994) Ambiguous Angels: Gender in the Novels of Galdós. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 154. x Literary Adaptations in Spanish Cinema, Chapter 5. xi http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066491/business. Consulted 17.11.11 xii Katherine Kovács’s observation in 1983 that ‘It would be difficult to find direct evidence of Buñuel’s influence on contemporary cinematographic trends’ in Spain still holds for art cinema (quoted in John Hopewell [1986] Out of the Past: Spanish Cinema after Franco London: BFI, p. 163). xiii For a longer version of this section see Sally Faulkner (forthcoming, 2012) ‘Literary Adaptations’ in Labanyi, J. and Pavolvicć, T., eds. Companion to Spanish Cinema. Malden: Blackwell. xiv Navarrete, Galdós en el cine, p. 134.

9 GALDÓS AND SPANISH CINEMA xv Pérez Galdós (1977) Tormento. Oxford: Pergamon, p. 175. xvi Navarrete, Galdós en el cine, p. 136. xvii Manuel Palacio (2001) Historia de la televisión en España. Barcelona: Gedisa, p. 144. For further discussion see Paul Julian Smith Smith (2006) Television in Spain: From Franco to Almodóvar. London: Tamesis, pp. 30-31. xviii The entire serial, along with many others, is available at www.rtve.es/television/ fortunata-jacinta, consulted 17.11.11. xix Benito Pérez Galdós (1994) Fortunata y Jacinta, Madrid: Cátedra, p. 681; translation Benito Pérez Galdós (1988) Fortunata and Jacinta: Two Stories of Married Women. Trans. Agnes Moncy Gullón. London: Penguin, p. 398. xx For example Jagoe (1994) Ambiguous Angels; Sharon Marcus (1999) Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London, Berkeley: University of California Press.

10 GALDÓS AND SPANISH CINEMA

DR SALLY FAULKNER

Dr Faulkner’s work has been greatly admired on both a national and international scale. She was an undergraduate at Fitzwilliam College, at the University of Cambridge, where she went on to complete her PhD under the supervision of Professor Paul Julian Smith. In 2001 she took up her first appointment as lecturer at the University of Exeter and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2006. Her research on Spanish cinema is interdisciplinary and she has explored the relationship between film and other aspects of culture, such as literature. Her first book Literary Adaptations in Spanish Cinema (Tamesis 2004) focussed on the film adaptations of literary texts such as Luis Buñuel’s Tristana and Nazarín (both of which were inspired by Galdós’s novels), as well as the TV series of Galdós’s Fortunata y Jacinta. This work has been described as ‘a closely argued and important study, packed with ideas from Screen Studies, literary criticism, Cultural Theory and Gender Studies’. It has been also praised for its ‘sensitive yet adventurous use of theory’ and is regarded as a ‘significant contribution to textual studies in both Hispanic literature and film’.1 This was followed by another book A Cinema of Contradiction: Spanish Film in the 1960s (EUP 2006), which contains similarly close textual analysis, and also highlights the particular production circumstances of making art and popular cinema in Franco’s Spain. It has been noted that this work ‘plays a key role in changing [an] established narrative’ and is ‘an essential reference for those working on this era’.2 Dr Faulkner has also worked on memory studies (producing a co-edited collection on memory and exile) and critical history, which is the focus of her current project, ‘which defends the middlebrow as a new critical lever to open up highly original interpretations of the history of Spanish cinema from its origins to the present’. In August 2010 she was awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship for this project, entitled ‘A New History of Spanish Cinema: Middlebrow Films and Mainstream Audiences’ and her work in this area will lead to a major monograph (due to appear in 2013), a symposium, and an edited collection.

1 Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 84, 6, 2007: 810. 2 Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 42, 1, 2008: 187.

11 GALDÓS AND SPANISH CINEMA

12 THE PÉREZ GALDÓS EDITIONS PROJECT

A Project within the Department of Hispanic Studies and the Humanities Research Institute of the University of Sheffield In 1995 the Higher Education Funding Council and the Humanities Research Board of the British Academy created a small number of research awards for long-term projects in the Humanities. Against fierce competition, the University of Sheffield secured one of the first of these Institutional Research Fellowships for its Pérez Galdós Editions Project. The Project seeks to produce fully reliable scholarly editions of Galdós’s novels, whose electronic form with supporting indexes, concordances and background material will both stimulate new modes of reading and build into a valuable resource for future research on Galdós. His vast output makes it essential to secure collaboration (especially with partners from Spain). The progress made during Dr Rhian Davies’ Research Fellowship (1996-2000) has continued since she was appointed to a lectureship and, with Professor Round’s retirement in 2003, she became the Project’s Director. The online edition of Torquemada en la hoguera was published by HriOnline in 2005 (http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/galdos/) and the Project’s other core activity – our outreach towards Galdós scholars in Spain and elsewhere – is also ongoing. If you would like to know more about the Project, or about Galdós, please feel free to contact the Department of Hispanic studies or visit our website at http://www.shef.ac.uk/gep Director of Research (2003-): Dr Rhian Davies Director of Research (1996-2003): Professor Nicholas G. Round Consultant Director (2003-): Professor Nicholas G. Round Consultant Director (1996-): Professor Geoffrey W. Ribbans