Burning Darkness a Half Century of Spanish Cinema
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Burning Darkness A Half Century of Spanish Cinema edited by Joan Ramon Resina with assistance from Andrés Lema-Hincapié Burning Darkness SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture Jorge J. E. Gracia and Rosemary Geidorfer Feal, editors Burning Darkness A Half Century of Spanish Cinema Edited by Joan Ramon Resina with the assistance of Andrés Lema-Hincapié Published by State University of New York Press © 2008 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production by Marilyn P. Semerad Marketing by Anne M. Valentine Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Burning darkness : a half century of Spanish cinema / edited by Joan Ramon Resina, with assistance from Andrés Lema-Hincapié. p. cm. — (Suny series in Latin American and Iberian thought and culture; 320) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7914-7503-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures—Spain—History. I. Resina, Joan Ramon, 1956– II. Lema-Hincapié, Andrés. PN1993.5.S7B87 2008 791.430946—dc22 2007039249 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents List of Illustrations vii Introduction 1 Joan Ramon Resina 1. Rehearsing for Modernity in ¡Bienvenido, Mister Marshall! (Luis García Berlanga, 1952) 9 Eva Woods Peiró 2. Existential Crossroads in Muerte de un ciclista ( Juan Antonio Bardem, 1955) 27 Andrés Lema-Hincapié 3. Viridiana Coca-Cola (Luis Buñuel, 1961) 43 Tom Conley 4. El espíritu de la colmena: Memory, Nostalgia, Trauma (Víctor Erice, 1973) 61 Chris Perriam 5. A Poetics of Splitting: Memory and Identity in La prima Angélica (Carlos Saura, 1974) 83 Àngel Quintana 6. Ambiguous Disenchantment in El corazón del bosque (Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, 1979) 97 Irení Depetris-Chauvin 7. Los paraísos perdidos: Cinema of Return and Repetition (Basilio Martín Patino, 1985) 105 Tatjana Pavlovic´ vi Contents 8. (M)Othering Strategies in El pájaro de la felicidad (Pilar Miró, 1993) 125 Jaume Martí-Olivella 9. Abjection, Trauma, and the Material Image: La madre muerta ( Juanma Bajo Ulloa, 1993) 143 Jo Labanyi 10. The Catalan Body Politic as Aired in La teta i la lluna (Bigas Luna, 1994) 161 Dominic Keown 11. Genre and Screen Violence: Revisiting Tesis (Alejandro Amenábar, 1995) 173 Barry Jordan 12. Conceptualizing “the Impact” in Los amantes del Círculo Polar ( Julio Medem, 1998) 195 Robert A. Davidson 13. Immortal/Undead: The Body and the Transmission of Tradition in Amic/Amat (Ventura Pons, 1998) 211 Josep-Anton Fernàndez 14. Imitation of Life: Transsexuality and Transtextuality in Todo sobre mi madre (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999) 235 Esteve Riambau 15. The Construction of the Cinematic Image: En construcción ( José Luis Guerín, 2000) 255 Joan Ramon Resina Works Cited 277 List of Contributors 295 Index 301 Illustrations Fig. 1. Villar del Río’s square in ¡Bienvenido, Mister Marshall! Courtesy of Filmoteca Española. 10 Fig. 2. Lucía Bosé as María José and Alberto Closas as Juan in Muerte de un ciclista. Courtesy of Video Mercury Films, S.A.U. 28 Fig. 3. Coca-Cola and the Civil Guard. Courtesy of Criterion Collection DVD. 44 Fig. 4. Ana (Torrent) and Isabel (Tellería) in El espíritu de la colmena. Courtesy of Mercury Video Films S.A.U. 62 Fig. 5. José Luis López Vázquez as Luis and María Clara Fernández de Loayza as Angélica in La prima Angélica. Courtesy of Elías Querejeta P.C. 84 Fig. 6. Angela Molina and Víctor Valverde as Amparo and Suso in El corazón del bosque. Courtesy of Arándano S.A. 98 Fig. 7. Three old women. Courtesy of La Linterna Mágica. 106 Fig. 8. Framing Carmen Figueres (Mercedes Sampietro) in Pilar Miró’s painterly fi lm El pájaro de la felicidad. Courtesy of ANOLA Films. 126 Fig. 9. The poster for La madre muerta. Courtesy of Sogepaq and Filmoteca Española. 144 Fig. 10. Human tower in La teta i la lluna. Courtesy of Lolafi lms. 162 Fig. 11. Ana Torrent as Angela in Tesis. Courtesy of Sogecine. 174 viii Illustrations Fig. 12. Paper airplane at rest. Courtesy of Sociedad General de Cine. 196 Fig. 13. Rosa Maria Sardà and Irene Montalà as Fanny and Alba in Amic/Amat. Courtesy of Els Films de la Rambla. 212 Fig. 14. Cecilia Roth as Manuela. Courtesy of El Deseo. 236 Fig. 15. Iván and Juani. Courtesy of Ovideo TV. 256 Introduction JOAN RAMON RESINA Over the last half century, visual stories have claimed an ever-larger share of the popular culture, as literature initiated its gradual descent to a quantitatively and qualitatively more restricted audience. During this time, fi lm has achieved technical sophistication and social prestige. It is now fi rmly established as an academic discipline in its own right, enjoying pride of place within the larger paradigm of Cultural Studies. But although Spanish fi lm is today the object of teaching and research in many departments, analytical resources are still scarce in English. The existence of a few histories of Spanish cinema (the best of which, John Hopewell’s Out of the Past, has long been out of print), of specialized work on a few privileged directors (Buñuel, Saura, and Almodóvar), and a handful of collections of essays (notably those edited by Peter William Evans and Barry Jordan) does not cover the interpretive needs of the English-speaking student of Spanish cinema, who is often at the mercy of reviews of scant exegetical value. The present volume is intended as a contribution to remedy this relative dearth by offering a set of original pieces on carefully selected directors and fi lms spanning the period from the origins of the New Spanish Cinema in the 1950s to the end of the twentieth century. It would be easy to draw attention to what is missing and to dispute the choices made. Every selection entails judgments of value and one chooses at one’s peril. But it is also true that books have a fate. However, rather than recounting the history of the editorial choices that have led to this particular constellation of fi lms, I would like to use this introduction to provide a broad sense of the directions of Spanish cinema in the years studied by the contributors. It is not a question of providing a compact history of a half century of Spanish fi lm but rather of sketching a sense of its development, however simplifi ed or simplistic the result may be. 1 2 Burning Darkness Our history of Spanish cinema starts in 1952 with ¡Bienvenido, Mis- ter Marshall!, the fi rst international success in the post-Civil War period. Although approved by Franco personally (Díez Puertas 303) and presented as the offi cial Spanish entry to the Cannes Film Festival the following year, Bienvenido inaugurated the critical cinematography that comprises the best Spanish movies of the following decades. Today, Luis García Berlanga’s ¡Bienvenido, Mister Marshall! and Juan Antonio Bardem’s Muerte de un ciclista (1955) are widely considered the two unquestionable classics from the period leading up to the New Spanish Cinema of the 1960s. Both of these works sought, in different ways, to overcome the censor’s zeal with discourses that hinted at the social conditions toward the end of the autarchy through the detours of humor (Berlanga) or the crise de conscience of a wayward member of the hegemonic bourgeoisie (Bardem). Bardem operated with the basic assumption that guided the social realist literature of the same period. “Film—he said—will be either a form of witnessing or nothing” (Cinema universitario n. 4, December 1956, qtd. Heredero, Las huellas 298). Others agreed. But “witnessing” could be understood in different ways and did in fact give rise to differ- ent methods, each attempting in its own way to circumvent the struc- tural impossibility of reproducing the lessons of Italian neorealism in a Spanish context. Thus, alongside Bardem’s deadpan moralism in Muerte de un ciclista and Calle Mayor (1955), Marco Ferreri launched his biting satires of Franco’s happy society. Leaning on scripts drenched with the blustery humor of Rafael Azcona, Ferreri undertook a mordant critique of the dictatorship’s developmental myths in El pisito (1958), Los chicos (1959), and, especially, El cochecito (1960), an original crossbreed of Italian neorealism and Spanish grotesque. The theoretical impulse for a critical cinema came from the legendary “conversations” at Salamanca in May 1955, pointing the way to the New Spanish Cinema. On this occasion, Bardem declared, “Spanish cinema is politically ineffective, socially false, intellectually abject, aesthetically nonexistent and commercially crippled” (qtd. Besas 41), implicitly turning this fi rst conference on national fi lm into the zero degree of post-Civil War cinema. In the meantime, Luis Buñuel, the sole international referent of Spanish cinema, had continued his career in exile. For the young Spanish directors, who depended on an anemic industry, his series of low-budget fi lms shot in Mexico were a usable lesson in the kind of diagnostic realism that had been advocated at Salamanca. Thus, in 1960 a group of people, including the young Saura, who had produced Los golfos the previous year, convinced Buñuel to shoot a fi lm in Spain. Viridiana premiered at the Cannes Film Festival as the offi cial Spanish entry on May 17, 1961, but it was subsequently banned in Spain as a result of the Vatican’s irate Introduction 3 reaction.