The Eleventh Pérez Galdós Lecture Galdós and Spanish Cinema Dr

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), Spain’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 Fortunata y Jacinta. 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. 1 GALDÓS AND SPANISH CINEMA 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.

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