Traditions in World Cinema Sampler

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Traditions in World Cinema Traditions in World Cinema Series Editor: Steven Jay Schneider Series Editor: Steven Jay Schneider Associate Editors: Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer Associate Editors: Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer This new series introduces diverse and fascinating movements in world cinema. Each volume This new series introduces diverse and fascinating movements in world cinema. Each volume concentrates on a set of films from a different national or regional (in some cases cross-cultural) concentrates on a set of films from a different national or regional (in some cases cross-cultural) cinema which constitute tradition a particular. Volumes cover topics such as: Japanese horror cinema which constitute tradition a particular. Volumes cover topics such as: Japanese horror cinema, Italian neorealist cinema, American blaxploitation cinema, African filmmaking, global cinema, Italian neorealist cinema, American blaxploitation cinema, African filmmaking, global ‘post-punk’ cinema, Czech and Slovak cinema and the Italian sword-and-sandal film. ‘post-punk’ cinema, Czech and Slovak cinema and the Italian sword-and-sandal film.

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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tin- Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud cidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrudSPANISH HORROR FILM Chapter 1:TheSpanishHorrorBook:1968–75 Chapter 1:AMomentAnd ACounty POST-BEUR CINEMA ITALIAN NEOREALIST CINEMA THE INTERNATIONAL MUSICAL available toindividuals until30 September2014. P&Pnotincluded. Please callMacmillanDistributionLimitedon+441256 329 242 and quote6JG. Discount SAVE 15% SPANISH HORROR FILM Chapter 2:The(Magrebi-) FrenchConnection:DiasporaGoesMainstream Chapter 8:SovietUnionby Richard Taylor

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Cover design: River Design, Edinburgh Cover design: River Design, Edinburgh Jacket image:The Devil’s Backbone Jacket image:The Devil’s Backbone © Canal+Espana/The Kobal Collection © Canal+Espana/The Kobal Collection Edinburgh University Press Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF barcode Edinburgh 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF barcode Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com www.euppublishing.com ISBN 0 7486 3638 9 ISBN 0 7486 3638 9 8. SOVIET UNION1

Richard Taylor

Why Not Stalinist Musicals? A recent article was entitled: ‘Why Stalinist Musicals?’ (Anderson 1995). The manner in which the question was posed is itself signifi cant and refl ects the distorting lens through which both Western and ‘Soviet’ scholars have historically viewed Soviet cinema, even though Anderson’s article did much to refocus that lens. We nowadays take it for granted that audiences in Western countries look for escapist entertainment in times of collective stress. As the British director David Lean once remarked, ‘Films are not real. They are dramatised reality,’ and, ‘A shop girl earning three pounds a week doesn’t pay to see an exact replica of herself on the screen – she pays to see what she would like to be, in looks, dress and mode of living’ (Lean 1947). For some years we have accepted that musicals were the most popular form of entertainment in the United States and much of Europe during the Great Depression, and even that during the Third Reich German audiences preferred to see musicals like Request Concert (1940) rather than the more obvious products of Nazi propaganda such as Triumph of the Will (1935) or The Eternal Jew (1940) (Taylor 1998). Why, then, should we not accept that, in the midst of the forced industrialisation and collectivisation programmes of the early Five-Year Plans, in the maelstrom of the massive economic and social dislocation that these caused, in the thick of the purges and the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet peoples might not also have wanted something to alleviate their mass suffering and give them hope in a better future? So the question that I want to ask fi rst of all is: why not Stalinist musicals?

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The distorting lens through which Western and Soviet scholars have viewed the construct known as ‘Soviet cinema’ has been analysed by Ian Christie (Taylor and Christie 1988). There is a growing literature on Soviet popular culture, and especially on popular cinema, to which a number of scholars have contributed, most notably Denise Youngblood, Richard Stites and James von Geldern, to name only those writing in English. This literature emphasises the continuities in Russian cultural history between the pre- and post-Revolution- ary periods on the one hand, and between the 1920s and the 1930s on the other, while acknowledging the very serious discontinuities and ruptures that have traditionally been the focus of research. I have argued elsewhere that a crucial role in the establishment of a Soviet mass cinema was played by Boris Shumyatsky, who in October 1930 was charged with creating ‘a cinema that is intelligible to the millions’ (Taylor 1991). He argued that a ‘cinema for the millions’ required the establishment of new entertainment genres such as the musical comedy: ‘Neither the Revolution nor the defence of the socialist Fatherland is a tragedy for the proletariat. We have always gone, and in future we shall still go, into battle singing and laughing’ (Shumyatsky 1935: 239–40). As James von Geldern has argued (1992: 62), ‘In the mid-1930s, Soviet society struck a balance that would carry it through the turmoil of the purges, the Great War and reconstruction. The coercive policies of the Cultural Revolution were replaced or supplemented by the use of inducements.’ The exclusive cultural policies of the ﬁ rst Five-Year Plan period (1928 to 1932) were replaced by the inducements of inclusive cultural policies following the dissolution of the self-styled proletarian cultural institutions in April 1932 and their replacement by all-embracing Soviet institutions like the new Union of Soviet Writers. The doctrine proclaimed by the latter was Socialist Realism, which Andrei Zhdanov, who was effectively Stalin’s cultural commissar, claimed meant depicting reality ‘not . . . in a dead, scholastic way, not simply as “objective reality”, but . . . as reality in its revolutionary development’ (1934: 4). Anatoli Lunacharsky, in charge of Soviet cultural policy in the 1920s, tellingly remarked that

The Socialist Realist . . . does not accept reality as it really is. He accepts it as it will be . . . A Communist who cannot dream is a bad Communist. The Communist dream is not a ﬂ ight from the earthly but a ﬂ ight into the future. (1933)

In offi cial terminology this element was called ‘revolutionary romanticism’. The credibility of revolutionary romanticism, the ‘fl ight into the future’, was enhanced by the audience’s apparent complicity in the exercise. Political speeches, newspaper articles, poster campaigns, offi cial statistics and above all

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what Lenin had called ‘the most important of all the arts’ (1922) depicted life not as it actually was but as they hoped it was becoming. The media furnished what Sheila Fitzpatrick has memorably described as ‘a preview of the coming attractions of socialism’ (1994: 262). If the Great Terror of the 1930s was to become the stick with which to modernise the Soviet Union, entertainment cinema was to provide the carrot.

Entertainment and Utopia The musical was in many ways the perfect vehicle for the depiction and promulgation of the Socialist Realist utopia. This is especially true if we bear in mind Richard Dyer’s argument that the central thrust of entertainment is utopianism and that, while ‘Entertainment offers the image of “something better” to escape into, or something we want deeply that our day-to-day lives don’t provide’, it ‘does not, however, present models of utopian worlds . . . Rather the utopianism is contained in the feelings it embodies’ (1977). In fact, the Stalinist musical did both: it presented models of utopian worlds (in the case of the kolkhoz [collective farm] musical, the ‘Potemkin village’) while also embodying the utopian feelings that stimulated audience identifi cation. The task of Soviet cinema in the 1930s and 1940s was to convince audiences that, whatever their current hardships, life could become as it was depicted on the screen: life not as it is, but as it will be. In this reel utopia, if not in everyday reality as then experienced by cinema audiences, the Stalinist slogan ‘Life has become happier, comrades, life has become more joyous’ (Stalin 1935) was made real. The reel realisation of utopia was achieved by both representational and non-representational signs. Dyer’s observation that we pay more attention to the former at the expense of the latter is still largely true (1977). The non- representational signifi cation in the Stalinist musical lies primarily in three areas: the use of fairy-tale narrative conventions; the music itself; and the topo- graphical conventions of the image of utopia, all of which weakened audience resistance to the reception of the utopian model depicted on screen. This essay will focus on the work of the two leading directors of ‘musical comedies’ (the word ‘miuzikl’ was offi cially regarded at the time as too bourgeois), Grigori Alexandrov (1903 to 1984) and Ivan Pyriev (1901 to 1968), while arguing that their fi lms need to be seen in their historical and cultural context, so that the works of other fi lmmakers will also be discussed where relevant. Alexandrov founded the Soviet musical comedy genre with The Happy Guys (1934) and went on to make The Circus (1936), Volga-Volga (1938) and The Radiant Path (1940) in the same mould. Pyriev’s fi rst musical comedy was The Rich Bride (1938), which established the model for the kolkhoz musical. This was followed by Tractor-Drivers (1939), The Swineherdess and the Shepherd

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(1940) and The Kuban Cossacks (1949), the apotheosis of what Khrushchev was later to call the ‘varnishing of reality’ that characterised Soviet cinema’s depiction of the Potemkin village of the Stalin period (Khrushchev 1956).

The Path to Utopia: The Fairy Tale Maya Turovskaya has brilliantly analysed the way in which Pyriev in particular used the conventions of the Russian fairy tale to project his ‘folklorised’ (cf. Miller 1990) vision of the Potemkin village, and Masha Enzensberger has extended this analysis to Alexandrov’s Radiant Path (Enzensberger 1993). The use of these conventions enabled the Soviet musicals to act, in Turovskaya’s own words, ‘not so much as the refl ection of their time’s objective reality, but rather as the refl ection of the reality of its image of itself’ (1988: 132). The plots of these fi lms almost invariably centre on what the Russians call a ‘love intrigue’, but it is not ‘tainted’ by sexual or erotic impulses; rather it is a ‘pure’ romantic love based on its object’s labour profi ciency. In the conventions of the Soviet musical – as, indeed, those of its Hollywood equivalent – it is clear from the beginning when ‘boy meets girl’. But the resolution of this ‘inevitable’ liaison is retarded by a misunderstanding and/or by competition between two male ‘suitors’, one of whom is, in terms of his own labour productivity, ‘worthy’ of the heroine, one of whom is not. The plot develops around the heroine’s journey towards an understanding of which is which. Sometimes, as in Circus, this is obvious from the beginning and the plot therefore revolves around the heroine’s discovery of the true path – the Soviet path – towards that understanding. The exceptions to this rule are the last two fi lms by each director listed above. In Radiant Path, based very closely on the Cinderella story, the heroine has to prove to herself that she is worthy of her suitor by successfully emancipating herself through a Party-sponsored training programme. In Kuban Cossacks the hero has no rival in love; his battle is with his own Cossack male chauvinist pride. In almost all these fi lms, and in all the kolkhoz musicals, the central character, who eventually resolves the diffi culties, is a woman. There are no fundamentally weak or evil women characters in these fi lms. The only evil characters are foreigners, such as the Hitler look-alike von Kneischitz in Circus (Mamatova 1995: 65), or those forces threatening the frontiers of the USSR in Tractor-Drivers. The weak Soviet characters are either marginalised (the bourgeois women in Happy Guys, or Kuzma and his associates in Swineherdess) or won over to the work ethic (Alexei the book-keeper – a truly bourgeois because ‘unproductive’ profession – in Rich Bride, and Nazar the idler in Tractor-Drivers). In utopia, weakness is therefore redeemable; evil is not, but it is externalised. The main characters are depersonalised and universalised, as in a fairy tale.

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They are symbolic fi gures, and the frequent use of choral singing helps this process of generalisation; in both Rich Bride and Kuban Cossacks, for instance, the ‘battle of the sexes’ is fought out in choral form. The Soviet version of the star system helped in this; all of Alexandrov’s fi lms starred his wife, Lyubov Orlova, the ‘prima donna’ of Stalinist cinema (Nikolaevich 1992), and all of Pyriev’s starred his wife, Marina Ladynina. Their appearance in a series of fi lms with similar plot structures but different settings in different parts of the Soviet Union and with different casts helped audiences all over the country to identify with them more directly on the one hand, while broadening the appeal of the fi lms and their message on the other. It must also be said that neither Orlova nor Ladynina conformed to the traditional stereotype of ‘femininity’. While Ladynina in the kolkhoz musicals sometimes appeared in folk costume, both she and Orlova also appeared in ‘masculine’ clothing (Ladynina in Rich Bride and Tractor-Drivers, Orlova in Circus, Volga-Volga and Radiant Path) which desexualised them (pace Enzensberger 1993). For Soviet women caught in the ‘double bind’ of housework and motherhood on the one hand and collective labour on the other this must have represented truly utopian wish fulfi l- ment. The heroine is always depicted in the workplace, be it kolkhoz, circus or spinning mill, and only in the home as a workplace, like the Cinderella heroine of Radiant Path. Some critics have argued that the Soviet musical heroine is a mother fi gure, but this is not true in the conventional sense; domesticity is absent and there is no family but the collective as workplace in microcosm or the collective as country in macrocosm. This elision between the two is effected partly by the use of folklore and partly through the music, to which I shall return. The characters are introduced to one another ‘accidentally’, sometimes through the fairy-tale medium of a picture, updated as a photograph (Tractor- Drivers, Swineherdess). The accident of their initial encounter reinforces the sense of the inevitability of their romance, as if it has been ordained from ‘on high’. Often this is reinforced by a direct or indirect ‘blessing’ from that same source. In Alexander Medvedkin’s The Miracle Girl (1936) (set on a kolkhoz but not a musical), the Stakhanovite heroine is summoned to Moscow where she sees and hears Stalin speak, as a reward for her labour achievements. In Circus the heroine ‘understands’ her situation when she joins the May Day parade in Red Square and sees Stalin, here signifi ed as God by the icon-like image carried at the head of the procession in the immediately preceding shot. In Tractor-Drivers, the wedding feast fi nale is accompanied by toasts and oaths of allegiance to Stalin. In Radiant Path, the heroine is summoned to a fairy-tale Kremlin to receive the Order of Lenin from someone whose aura refl ects light upon her face; this must be Stalin, because in a Soviet fi lm in 1940 it could hardly be anybody else.2 These ‘unforgettable encounters’ occur in numerous other Soviet fi lms, posters, paintings and newspaper articles of the period;

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they form a central thread in the fairy tale of Stalin as father of his people, the genius who has time for everyone, who can solve everybody’s problems, even when Stalin’s divinity is mediated through another Party or State offi cial such as the Soviet President Kalinin or the local Party Secretary (Radiant Path or Kuban Cossacks). Stalin is the omniscient and implicitly omnipresent father of the collective Soviet family, the avuncular patriarch of the peoples (Günther 1997a). Participation in this larger family sublimates the need for the heroines, and indeed the heroes, to participate in nuclear domesticity; sex is absent, and even the kissing is ‘innocent’ (Happy Guys, Volga-Volga). The family is the country itself (Günther 1997b), in which all are equal, or at least all have equal opportunity. A central part of the fairy tale in Alexandrov’s fi lms, though not in Pyriev’s, is the idea that any Soviet citizen, however humble, timid or wretched at the beginning of the fi lm, can make a success of life and rise to the heights that socialist society has to offer. In Volga-Volga, the heroine, a local letter carrier, overcomes numerous obstacles to win the All-Union Olympiad of Song. In Radiant Path, the heroine receives the Order of Lenin and later becomes a deputy to the Supreme Soviet, a sure sign that she has ‘arrived’. These closures are in fact also apertures, allowing the audience to participate in the action (Anderson 1995). Radiant Path has perhaps the most interesting, and certainly the most bizarre, ending of any Stalinist musical. Following the award of the Order of Lenin, the heroine fi nds herself in a Kremlin anteroom decorated only with chandeliers and mirror. Scarcely able to believe that what is happening to her is real, she checks in the mirror. She sees her refl ection and therefore ‘knows’ that it is real. Then she turns her face back to the camera and sings a duet with mirror images of her earlier selves. The image in the mirror then turns into her late mother (also played by Orlova) as fairy godmother, complete with tiara, who opens the frame of the mirror and invites her into the world of mirror (reel?) reality. The two are seated in a car that then takes off, fl ying over the Kremlin, then Moscow, then high mountains, and then back to Moscow to the showpiece All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, landing at the foot of the famous statue by Vera Mukhina of ‘The Worker and the Collective Farm Woman’. The fi nal scene of the fi lm takes place in the Exhibition itself and the one-time Cinderella fi gure, now crowned with success, re-encounters her Prince Charming against a magic background of fountains and other symbols of abundance. Implicitly, now that they have both established their equality in successful careers, they may have time for domesticity, but this is by no means made explicit. Other fi lms use festivals or mass scenes to draw the audience into the action and, above all, the emotional uplift: the ‘storming’ of the Bolshoi Theatre against all obstacles by the hero and heroine of Happy Guys, the Olympiad of Song at the end of Volga-Volga, the wedding feast at the end of Tractor-

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Drivers, the implied weddings that conclude both Swineherdess and Kuban Cossacks. But the device that really involves the emotions of the audience is the use of popular music in its various forms.

The Path to Utopia: The Music The music for all of the Alexandrov and the fi rst and last of the Pyriev musicals was written by the most prolifi c composer of Soviet popular music, Isaak Dunayevsky (1900 to 1955). He was awarded his fi rst Stalin Prize in 1941 for the music to Alexandrov’s Circus and Volga-Volga, and his second ten years later for the score to Pyriev’s Kuban Cossacks. One of the songs from Circus, the ‘Song of the Motherland’, became the call sign for Moscow radio and the unoffi cial state anthem of the Soviet Union until an offi cial anthem was introduced in 1943. The music played a crucial part because it played to the emotions of the audience and helped to weaken any intellectual resistance they may have had to the message of the fi lms (Anderson 1995). As already indicated, the scores made widespread use of choral singing, which helped to universalise the characters and the situations in which they found themselves. Furthermore, the combination of catchy tunes and ideologically loaded texts (mostly by Vasili Lebedev-Kumach, 1898 to 1949) meant that, when the audience left the cinema humming the tune, it also carried with it the message of reel reality into the real world outside. This helped make audiences feel that they were part of the world depicted on the screen; it elided the actual with the utopian ideal, collapsing the ‘fourth wall’ in the auditorium (Anderson 1995). In Happy Guys, the fi rst verse of the theme song extolled the uplifting popularity of song, while the refrain made clear the use to which this uplift was to be put:

A song helps us build and live, Like a friend, it calls and leads us forth. And those who stride through life in song Will never ever fall behind. (Cf. von Geldern and Stites 1995: 234–5)

Further verses enjoined the audience, ‘When our country commands that we be heroes, Then anyone can become a hero,’ and ﬁ nally warned that any enemy threatening ‘to take away our living joy’ would be resoundingly rejected with ‘a battle song, staunchly defending our Motherland’. The idea of song as a central and necessary part of life is echoed in ‘Three Tank Drivers’, by Boris Laskin and the Pokrass brothers, written for Tractor-Drivers: ‘There they live – and singing guarantees it – As a tight, unbroken family.’ That family was not the nuclear family, but the Motherland: the word rodina – deriving from the

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Russian verb rodit’, to give birth to – was resurrected to reinforce this metaphor (Günther 1997a and b). This was the Motherland of ‘Socialism in one country’, a land whose vast size and variety were constantly extolled (Circus, Volga-Volga, Tractor-Drivers, Swineherdess), a land that was largely hermetically sealed against apparently hostile outside forces (Circus, Tractor-Drivers). Dunayevsky’s music carefully refl ected the setting of each fi lm. For Pyriev’s kolkhoz musicals, he wrote scores that were heavily infl uenced by folk music, Ukrainian or Russian as appropriate. The Alexandrov musicals, on the other hand, were urban-orientated and the scores drew upon urban musical forms such as jazz, music hall and military marches, however unlikely that combination may appear. All three are evident in Happy Guys and Circus. Volga-Volga centres on a musical civil war (the device used here for narrative retardation) between the heroine, who has written the ‘Song of the Volga’, which eventually wins the Olympiad of Song, and the hero, who prefers to rehearse classical music with his brass band. For him, the music of Wagner is a sign of culture and civilisation; in 1938 this was a clear indication of ‘false consciousness’. In these three musicals, popular or ‘low’ culture triumphs over ‘high’ culture. In Happy Guys, the respectable buffet party literally becomes a ‘carnival of the animals’, while later on the jazz band ends the fi lm taking the Bolshoi Theatre audience by storm; in Circus, the action largely takes place within the confi nes of a ‘low’ cultural form; in Volga-Volga, it is the popular amateur song that triumphs over professional classical music, and a child maestro who out-conducts the adults. Similarly, in Radiant Path, the least musical of the Stalinist musicals, it is Cinderella who outstrips her ‘ugly sisters’. These fi lms provided confi rmation that ‘When our country commands that we be heroes, Then anyone can become a hero’ – ‘and singing guarantees it’! The texts of the songs in the Stalinist musicals tell us a great deal about the topography of utopia and clarify some of the confusions and errors committed by those critics and scholars who have ignored them.

On Arrival: The Topography of Utopia The Stalinist utopia is hermetically sealed against the outside world; the only depiction of ‘abroad’ (the lynch mob at the start of Circus) is unfl attering, and other references are boldly defensive (Tractor-Drivers). It has been argued that, in this utopia, gender construction was quite straightforward. The man was identifi ed with the city, with industry, defence, modernity, the rational and therefore progress; the woman, by contrast, was identifi ed with the countryside and the land, with agriculture, nurture, nature, the emotional and therefore also with backwardness. This construction reaches its apotheosis in Vera Mukhina’s statue, designed to top the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exhibition, of ‘The Worker and the Collective Farm Girl’, ‘a syntactically sym-

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metrical pair but with the man wielding the mace of modernity: the industrial hammer’ (Stites 1992: 84). This characterisation is, however, an oversimplifi cation and each musical explored different parts of the Stalinist utopia, pars pro toto. We must therefore construct our topography of that utopia by pulling together those parts into a coherent whole. Utopia exists in these fi lms on two levels, which may be broadly characterised as the periphery and the centre. Alexandrov’s musicals are geographically centripetal, Moscow-orientated; Pyriev’s are not, but they are not, as Evgeni Dobrenko has claimed, centrifugal fi lms in which the movement is away from the capital (1996a: 109). Pyriev’s forms merely explore the periphery and validate it as part of utopia.

Exploring the Periphery The Alexandrov musicals begin at the periphery: in Happy Guys it is a resort in the Crimea; in Circus, for once, it is overseas – the USA; in Volga-Volga it is the small provincial town of Melkovodsk (meaning literally ‘little waters’); and in Radiant Path it is a small town in the Moscow region. In the course of the fi lm the action moves to Moscow, where it ends: in the Bolshoi Theatre, in Red Square by the Kremlin, in the Olympiad of Song, and in the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition respectively. The ties that link the periphery to the centre vary; the translation of the main characters from the one to the other is the principal one of these links, but boats provide the main method of interur- ban transport in Happy Guys (although a train is also mentioned but not seen) and in Volga-Volga, where the postal system is also crucial, as it is in Pyriev’s Tractor-Drivers, where the postman sings a song encapsulating the variety and breadth of his vast country. In Circus, trains offer a means of arrival and (interrupted) departure from and to abroad, but not within the USSR itself. Telegrams act as catalysts in both Volga-Volga and Radiant Path, while in the latter the fi rst link between Melkovodsk and the capital is seen when the radio announces ‘Moscow calling’, and the last is effected through the fairy- tale mirror device discussed above. The use of radio is familiar from other fi lms of the period, including Kozintsev and Trauberg’s Alone (1931) and the documentaries of Dziga Vertov and Esfi r Shub, but the virtual absence of aircraft and trains as means of internal communication and linkage, when they featured so strikingly elsewhere, is curious. It is almost as if the periphery is in some ways ‘living in the past’, which would have been present reality for most audiences of the time. The presence of the bourgeois ladies early in Happy Guys strengthens this interpretation. There is surely a visual reference to the women in October (1927) who stab the Bolshevik workman to death with their parasols when the women in Alexandrov’s fi lm ‘spike’ the ‘wrong’ artiste with theirs. In Radiant Path the

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heroine Tanya is employed as a domestic servant, as is Anyuta in Happy Guys – a most un-Soviet occupation, even if still widespread in the 1930s; both liberate themselves from this drudgery as the plot develops. Similarly, Melkovodsk in Volga-Volga is initially depicted in a very unfl attering light; the ferry breaks down, the telephones do not work, the telegram from Moscow ‘slows down’ when it arrives in the provinces, and the population of the town seems to spend its time either petitioning the local bureaucrat Byvalov (meaning ‘nothing new’, hilariously played by the leading comic actor Igor Ilyinsky) or practising their music (Turovskaya 1998). Yet this is itself depicted as a caricature: whereas Byvalov, who regards his recent posting to Melkovodsk as a mere staging post on his long career track to journey’s end in Moscow, claims that ‘There can be no talent in such a dump’, Strelka (‘little arrow’), the letter carrier, insists there is ‘no lack of talented people’ and goes on to prove her point by singing Tchaikovsky and reciting Lermontov. It is, however, the retarded telegram from Moscow announcing the ‘socialist competition’ of the Olympiad of Song that breaks the logjam of stagnation and, in a deliberate irony, it is through Strelka’s efforts that Byvalov, despite his own efforts to obstruct her, eventually arrives with the entire local musical talent in Moscow. In Pyriev’s fi lms, the kolkhoz is largely a self-suffi cient microcosm, a closed world of ‘social claustrophobia’, to use Dobrenko’s term (1996a and b). In Tractor-Drivers the hero does, it is true, enter from outside, but he comes from the fi ghting in the Far East, which is therefore no longer peripheral but strate- gically signifi cant (cf. fi lms like Dovzhenko’s Aerograd [1935]). Furthermore, while in transit to Moscow, this time by train, he has chosen to travel to the Ukrainian kolkhoz rather than to the capital. In Kuban Cossacks the outside world hardly intrudes either, although it is referred to obliquely, as is the war, fought less than a decade previously on this very terrain. The plot in all three fi lms is characterised by what became known as ‘confl ictlessness’ (beskonfl ikt- nost); in other words, it is confi ned to microcosmic personal rivalries expressed in differing personal labour contributions rather than to macrocosmic forces like class confl ict or war, which were all too evident in other Soviet fi lms of the period. The leading characters at the periphery are almost invariably women. It is they who organise and produce, they who resolve the love intrigue by recognising, albeit somewhat belatedly, the production achievements of the hero and therefore his suitability as a partner in labour and love. The exceptions are in Alexandrov’s Happy Guys, where it is the hero who effects the resolution through his talent for improvising in the most adverse circumstances; and in Pyriev’s Swineherdess, where the heroine weakly accepts her fate at the hands of the deceitful locals while the hero has to ride like a knight on horseback to rescue her at the eleventh hour. One reason for the privileging of women in the countryside was the need to encourage them to play a greater part in collec-

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tive, as opposed to domestic, labour in the light of male migration to the cities and the consequent labour shortage in rural areas. Another resulted from the context in which these musicals were made: by male directors to showcase the acting, singing and dancing talents of their wives. Yet another was to emphasise that women were equal and thus to underline the superiority of the Soviet way of life. For these reasons women were never villains; the villainous characters were always men, but they could be cured of their villainy by the intervention of women, unless they were foreigners, like von Kneischitz in Circus.

Exploring the Centre: Moscow Moscow constituted the fairyland at the heart of the Stalinist utopia. It was where unusual, even magical, things happened: the triumph of the jazz band in Happy Guys; the journey to understanding of the heroine in Circus; the victory in the singing competition in Volga-Volga; the translation of Cinderella into the Fairy Princess in Radiant Path; and the labour of love/love of labour that blossoms in Swineherdess. It was to Moscow that characters went to improve their lives and to be rewarded with recognition for their achievements. Within Moscow, the Kremlin and the newly opened Exhibition of Agricultural Achievements played signifi cant and separate roles. The Kremlin was the seat of government and can be seen as a synonym for Party–State power and thus for Stalin. Sometimes this is explicit (Circus or Radiant Path; cf. Miracle Girl), although the general context of contemporary propaganda images rendered such explicitness unnec- essary. The role of the Exhibition is more complex; it features prominently in both Swineherdess and Radiant Path. Dobrenko argues that, in the fi rst of these, ‘the Exhibition represents not Moscow but the “Country” ’ (1996a: 112). This is an oversimplifi cation. In both fi lms the Exhibition offers a dual representation: to the periphery it represents Moscow, while in Moscow it represents the country in all its diversity. In Swineherdess the hero and heroine sing ‘The Song of Moscow’, which opens:

Everything’s ﬁ ne in spacious Moscow, The Kremlin stars shine against the blue sky, And, just as rivers meet in the sea, So people meet here in Moscow.

The refrain includes the lines: ‘I shall never forget a friend, Whom I have met in Moscow.’ Moscow is therefore special. We must remember that most Soviet citizens had never visited Moscow; internal passport controls and sheer cost made the journey impossible, except as a special, ofﬁ cially sponsored reward. Most people ‘knew’ Moscow only from screen images, and for propaganda

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reasons only parts of the ‘great stone city’3 were shown: the Kremlin and/or Red Square, because of their historical and political associations; the Exhibition, because it was very much a ‘preview of the coming attractions of socialism’; the new construction projects, such as the Hotel Moskva (Circus), the river station (Volga-Volga) or the showcase metro (Circus). As Oksana Bulgakova has pointed out, ‘Even more frequently real Moscow was replaced by a painted backdrop, a set’ (1996: 57); this applies to Happy Guys, Circus, Medvedkin’s New Moscow (1937) and it increased the air of unreality for those familiar with the city from personal experience. But most of the audience had nothing real to compare to this reel image, and that enhanced its magic power.

Conclusion The purpose of this essay has been to sketch the basic outlines of the topography of the Stalinist musical, focusing on four ﬁ lms each by the fathers of the genre, Alexandrov and Pyriev. Since these are preliminary remarks, the conclusions can be only tentative. These ﬁ lms were popular and the image of the country that they created, while not ‘real’ in any objective sense, became real in the minds of contemporary audiences. The ‘Potemkin village’, the small town, the capital city of this reel reality created a powerful Soviet equivalent of the ‘Russia of the mind’ (Figes 1998). By entertaining the mass audience with glimpses of utopia, the Stalinist musical promoted the illusion, encapsulated in popular songs, not only that ‘Life has become better, comrades, life has become happier’ but further that ‘We were born to make a fairy tale come true’ (von Geldern and Stites 1995: 237–8, 257–8). As Stalin, who as ‘Kremlin censor’ was in a unique position to know, once remarked, ‘Cinema is an illusion, but it dictates its own laws to life itself’ (Volkogonov 1988).

Notes I am indebted to Emma Widdis, Cambridge, whose as yet unpublished PhD thesis ﬁ rst alerted me to the literature on this subject, and to Julian Graffy, London, for reading an earlier draft of this essay and for supplying numerous relevant materials.

1. Richard Taylor, ‘But eastward, look, the land is brighter: towards a topography of utopia in the Stalinist musical’, from 100 Years of European Cinema (Manchester University Press, 2000), reprinted by permission of the author. The concluding line of the poem ‘Say not, the struggle nought availeth’ by Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–61) has been reversed in this title. The second stanza, even though written in the middle of the nineteenth century, could stand as a summary of the message of the Stalinist musical and of much Socialist Realist art in general: If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars; It may be, in yon smoke concealed, Your comrades chase e’en now the ﬂ iers, And, but for you, possess the ﬁ eld.

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2. These analyses are based almost entirely on the versions now available, either from Polart and Facets in the USA or on off-air recordings from Russian television. These are the versions restored and de-Stalinised in the 1960s and 1970s. A tantalising sequence from the original version of Tractor-Drivers was included in Dana Ranga’s ﬁ lm East Side Story (1997). 3. Much was made in the 1930s of the reconstruction of Moscow as a symbol of the modernisation of the country as a whole. The capital is presented as ‘the great stone city’ in Vertov’s Three Songs of Lenin (1934).

Select Filmography The Circus (Grigori Alexandrov, 1936) The Happy Guys (Grigori Alexandrov, 1934) The Kuban Cossacks (Ivan Pyriev, 1949) The Radiant Path (Grigori Alexandrov, 1940) The Rich Bride (Ivan Pyriev, 1938) The Swineherdess and the Shepherd (Ivan Pyriev, 1940) Tractor-Drivers (Ivan Pyriev, 1939) Volga-Volga (Grigori Alexandrov, 1938)

Bibliography Altman, Rick (ed.) (1981) Genre: The Musical, A Reader. London: British Film Institute. Anderson, Trudy (1995) ‘Why Stalinist Musicals?’, Discourse, 17, 3, pp. 38–48. Bulgakova, Oksana (1996) ‘Prostranstvennye ﬁ gury sovetskogo kino 30–kh godov’, Kinovedcheskie zapiski, 29. Dobrenko, Evgeni (1996a and b) ‘Iazyk prostranstva, szhatogo do tochki’, ili estetika sotsial’noi klaustrofobii’, Iskusstvo kino (1996a) 9, pp. 108–17; and (1996b) 11, pp. 120–9. Dyer, Richard (1977) ‘Entertainment and Utopia’, Movie, 24, 2–13; reprinted in Altman (1981), pp. 175–94. Enzensberger, Masha (1993) ‘We Were Born to Turn a Fairy Tale into Reality’, in Taylor and Spring (1993), pp. 97–108. Figes, Orlando (1998) ‘The Russia of the Mind’, Times Literary Supplement, 5 June 1968, pp. 14–16. Fitzpatrick, Sheila (1994) Stalin’s Peasants. Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Günther, Hans (1997a) ‘Wise Father Stalin and His Family in Soviet Cinema’, in Lahusen and Dobrenko (1977), pp. 178–90. Günther, Hans [Kh. Giunter] (1997b) ‘Poiushchaia rodina. Sovetskaia massovaia pesnia kak vyrazhenie arkhetipa materi’, Voprosy literatury, 4, pp. 46–61. Horton, Andrew (ed.) (1993), Inside Soviet Film Satire. Laughter with a Lash. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Khrushchev, Nikita S. (1976) Speech to the Delegates of the 20th Party Congress in February 1956, translated in The Secret Speech. Nottingham: Spokesman. Lahusen, Thomas and Evgeni Dobrenko (eds) (1997) Socialist Realism Without Shores. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Lean, David (1947) ‘Brief Encounter’, Penguin Film Review 4, London and New York: Penguin. Lenin, Vladimir I. (1922) ‘Of all the arts . . .’, in Taylor and Christie (1988), p. 57. Lunacharsky, Anatoli (1933) ‘Synopsis of a Report in the Tasks of Dramaturgy’ (Extract), in Taylor and Christie (1988), p. 237.

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Mamatova, Lilija (1995) ‘Model’ kinomifov 30–kh godov’, in Kino: politika i liudi (30–e gody). Moscow: Materik, pp. 52–78. Miller, Frank J. (1990) Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudofolklore of the Stalin Era. Armonk: Sharpe. Nikolaevich, Sergei (1992) ‘Poslednii seans, ili Sud’ba beloi zhenshchiny v SSSR’, Ogonek, 4, 23. Shumyatsky, Boris (1935) Kinematograﬁ ia millionov. Moscow: Kinofotoizdat. Stalin, Joseph (1935) Speech at the First All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites, 17 November 1935. Stites, Richard (1992) Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Richard (1991) ‘Ideology as Mass Entertainment: Boris Shumyatsky and Soviet Cinema in the 1930s’, in Taylor and Christie (eds), Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema. London and New York: Routledge. Taylor, Richard (1998) Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, 2nd Edn. London and New York: I. B. Tauris. Taylor, Richard and Ian Christie (eds) (1988) The Film Factory. Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896–1939. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Paperback Edn. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Taylor, Richard and Ian Christie (eds) (1991) Inside the Film Factory. New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema. London and New York: Routledge. Taylor, Richard and Derek Spring (eds) (1993) Stalinism and Soviet Cinema. London and New York: Routledge. Turovskaya, Maya (1988) ‘I. A. Pyr’ev i ego muzykal’nye komedii. K probleme zhanra’, Kinovedcheskie zapiski, 1, pp. 111–46. Turovskaya, Maya (1998) ‘Volga-Volga i ego vremia’, Iskusstvo kino, 3, pp. 59–64. Volkogonov, Dmitri (1988) ‘Stalin’, Oktiabr’, 11. von Geldern, James (1992) ‘The Centre and the Periphery: Cultural and Social Geography in the Mass Culture of the 1930s’, in White (1992), pp. 62–80. von Geldern, James and Richard Stites (eds) (1995) Mass Culture in Soviet Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. White, Stephen (ed.) (1992) New Directions in Soviet History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Youngblood, Denise J. (1991) Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918–1935. Austin: Texas University Press. Youngblood, Denise J. (1992) Movies for the Masses. Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zhdanov, Andrei (1934) Speech to the 1st Congress of Soviet Writers, in Pervyi Vsesoiuznyi s”ezd sovetskikh pisatelei 1934: Stenograﬁ cheskii otchet, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura.

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CREEKMUR PRINT.indd 118 07/12/2011 15:23 TorunnHaaland Studies. Film of field the in workingeveryone Cinema Studies, Italian in scholars and students for read informative and engaging An and themes the in with tendencies neorealist broken with literature. as such along arts, and other evaluated, and negotiated discussed are film neorealist re-adopted, of aesthetics have directors of generations to realist theories and to past and present cinematic traditions. The ways in which successive which in ways The traditions. cinematic present and past to and theories realist to are parallels drawn marginalised knownlesser works, and masterpieces acclaimed both examining By and people. realities under-represented around experiences viewing critical creating to n hs e td,Trn Haad rus ht eraim a a utrl oet ae on based moment cultural a was neorealism that individual argues Haaland Torunn study, new this In representation?and narration cinematic of boundaries the changed cinema neorealist Italian has How an of passion the this to adding period, postwar the in researcher.’authentic Italy of history social and political this of Within capable most period. and postwar brilliant cultural, larger a of part as most history the cinema readingof rigorousa combining with documentation the of of one cinema as world appears book all TorunnHaaland’s on panorama, cinema’s influence Italian emphasize fertile to its contributed and has This centrality scholarship. international within revival a neo-realism – has enjoyed Italian cinema its – highest and moment, in particular ‘In recent years, volume Each cinema. world cross-cultural in tradition. particular cases, a constitute which some cinema movements in or, regional fascinating national, different a from films and of set a on concentrates diverse introduces series This StevenJaySchneider FoundingEditor: Palmer Barton R. and Badley Linda Editors: General Traditionsin WorldCinema www.euppublishing.com riverdesign.co.uk Jacketdesign: Nazionale Cineteca / Cinematografia di Sperimentale CentroFondazione © 1945 Jacketimage: ITALIANCINEMA NEOREALIST presents a new approach to a key cinematic tradition, and so is essential reading for reading essential is so and tradition, cinematic key a to approach new a presents optiques Roma città aperta città Roma h consfrtetaiinscoherence in terms of its moral commitment She accounts for the tradition’s . is Assistant Professor of Italian at Gonzaga University.Gonzaga at is Italian Professorof Assistant TORUNNHAALAND Rossellini, Gian Piero Brunetta, University of Padovaof University Brunetta, Piero Gian ISBN 978-0-7486-3611-2 ISBN NOI LÁZARO-REBOLL ANTONIO NOI LÁZARO-REBOLL ANTONIO

Traditions in World Cinema Traditions in World Cinema Series Editor: Steven Jay Schneider Series Editor: Steven Jay Schneider Associate Editors: Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer Associate Editors: Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer Italian Neorealist Italian This new series introduces diverse and fascinating movements in world cinema. Each volume This new series introduces diverse and fascinating movements in world cinema. Each volume concentrates on a set of films from a different national or regional (in some cases cross-cultural) concentrates on a set of films from a different national or regional (in some cases cross-cultural) cinema which constitute tradition a particular. Volumes cover topics such as: Japanese horror cinema which constitute tradition a particular. Volumes cover topics such as: Japanese horror cinema, Italian neorealist cinema, American blaxploitation cinema, African filmmaking, global cinema, Italian neorealist cinema, American blaxploitation cinema, African filmmaking, global ‘post-punk’ cinema, Czech and Slovak cinema and the Italian sword-and-sandal film. ‘post-punk’ cinema, Czech and Slovak cinema and the Italian sword-and-sandal film.

SPANISH HORROR FILM SPANISH HORROR FILM

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‘. . . one feels that everything was done too fast and with too fi erce a sincerity to run the risk of bogging down in mere artistry or meditativeness [. . .] The fi lm’s fi nest over-all quality [. . .] is this immediacy.’ James Agee, review of Open City, 1946 (2000)

Viewing history What affi nities there are between cinema, urban streets and history had been amply explored before Roberto Rossellini (1906–77) shot Rome, Open City (1945; Roma, città aperta), whose heroine is killed during a Nazi raid in the winter of 1944, a few months before the city is liberated. From the Lumière brothers’ pioneering views on work and quotidian moments in 1890s’ France, to the emergence of urban documentaries in 1920s’ Russian and German cinema and noir cities in 1940s’ Hollywood, the spatiotemporal capacities of the moving image to evoke the life that fl ows, privileging social milieu and collective events over individual confl ict, had made fi lmmakers look to the streets the way Rossellini did only months after the events he depicted had taken place. Few moments in world cinema had, however, captured with such an immediacy those intrinsically cinematic streets where ‘history is made’ that Siegfried Kracauer singled out as a characteristic of cinematic realism (1960: 72; 98). When Pina falls lifeless in via Montecuccioli in front of her son; her fi ancé; a partisan priest, who will soon face the same fate; and a neighbourhood unifi ed in the claim to freedom, the world is brought to a

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standstill in which the forces of destruction are neutralised by the life-giving act of sacrifi ce. What we witness when Pina breaks away from the guards and runs after the truck, her screams and her hand reaching out to seize Francesco, is ‘an irreversible choice’ that affi rms ‘the freedom of thought as a value’; a futile, apparently irrational and decidedly passionate act that demonstrates her identity as a woman who in response to recent national history has assumed an unprecedented place and voice in the public sphere, and as the incarnation of ‘the new individual’, unbendable in her beliefs and prepared to die for her city’s openness.1 Moving away from the fi ction of Pina’s death, the image of Anna Magnani (1908–73) as a defi ant Resistance martyr symbolises the real-life stories of war, destitution and collective battle we all associate with neorealist fi lm. Open City was shot with improvised economic and material means, within the streets where similar brutalities and claims to freedom had been everyday reality, at a time when the north of the peninsula was still fi ghting against Nazi-fascist occupation. Italy’s long and violent struggle for liberation is the focus of Rossellini’s next fi lm, Paisà (1946), which evolves as a series of encounters between Allied soldiers and Italian civilians and partisans. Both rest on dimen- sions of actuality and ordinariness, and like Bicycle Thieves (1948; Ladri di biciclette) and The Earth Trembles (1948; La terra trema) – acts of testimony whereby Vittorio De Sica (1902–74) and Luchino Visconti (1906–76) respectively explore the moral necessity and cinematic possibility of turning unspectacular events into spectacle – they demonstrate how the urgency to chronicle recent or current national realities inevitably also became a matter of making cinematic history.

Interwar cinema and the fabrications of the real Neorealist cinema is inconceivable if detached from the historical exigency and the unprecedented freedom to disclose the country’s ‘here and now’ and give voice to those whom fascism had displaced and excluded. It cannot be seen as an outcome of the Liberation alone, however; although within a culture founded in opposition to the ventennio – the twenty-odd years of fascist rule (1922–43) under Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) that concluded with an additional twenty months of Allied and Nazi-fascist occupation – this was the leading interpretation of a progressive realism that brought prostitutes and street kids to national and international screens. Whether fascism was explained in liberal terms as a parenthetical ‘moral ill’ and a collective ‘loss of conscience’, or along Marxist lines as an anti-proletarian alliance between the regime and the bourgeoisie, the need for reconciliation in the name of national rebuilding produced a collective amnesia rather than a de facto purgation, and ﬁ lms produced between the birth of the talkies and the fall of fascism were

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rejected as products of totalitarian structures that escaped both critical assessment and a radical reform.2 Dismissed as propagandistic or, at best, escapist, the so-called fascist cinema was considered disconnected from the fi lm culture that grew out of the war, despite the fact that several of those who during World War II and in the immediate post-war years experimented with realist fi lmmaking had been trained and often operated within the Duce’s fi lm industry. Continuities in personnel and artistic tendencies were ignored and the cinema moved on ‘as if nothing had happened’; as if the events of the country’s recent past had not taken place.3 Only by acknowledging that fascism, as a ‘form of coercion deeply sedimented at all levels of Italian life, is the repressed of neorealism itself’, can we understand its foundation as a culture of reaction and opposition that, before taking on aesthetic qualities, developed as a moral commitment to anti-illusionist practices and national rediscovery (Re 1990: 113). When critics and cineastes in the mid-1970s rediscovered twenty years of forgotten fi lmmaking, it appeared that much of what one had celebrated in neorealist fi lm – natural locations, non-professionals, ordinary material and characters – was far from miraculously new.4 More recently, an awareness of the circumstances that conditioned fi lm production and viewing experiences in fascist Italy – ideological contradictions and lack of a coherent cultural policy, fi rst and foremost, but also the dominance and infl uence of American fi lm – have convinced fi lm historians to dismiss the notion of a ‘fascist cinema’ altogether.5 The Italian fi lm industry might have been close to bankruptcy in the 1920s, but at the outbreak of the war it ranked among the world’s most developed, including among its institutions: the Unione Cinematografi ca Italiana (Italian Film Union, founded 1919); Istituto LUCE (Institute of Educational Film, founded 1924); Cines production company (founded 1930); Cinecittà studios (founded 1937); and the national fi lm school Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografi a (founded 1937). This systematic cultural and industrial reconstruction in the 1930s was never intended to form a propaganda machine; instead its aim was to bring Italian cinema back to the prominence it had enjoyed in the silent period thanks to epic spectaculars such as Quo vadis? (Guazzoni 1913) and Cabiria (Pastrone 1914), while at the same time creating a fi lm culture that would be popular while also serving to forge unity around the fascist state and nation (Brunetta 2001a: 16–17). The interests were therefore as many and as contradictory as the infl uences at work: those concerned with marketability looked towards Hollywood which Vittorio Mussolini (1916–97) considered a far more suitable model than any European fi lm culture for a national cinema aimed at reinforcing the industry and at bringing the ‘fascist wisdom’ abroad (1965b: 56–7). His father the Duce – a passionate cinephile with a personal preference for cartoons, historical fi lms and newsreels – may, on the other hand, have been terrifi ed by Soviet fi lms but

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he admired Lenin’s approach to the cinema as a weapon with which to control the masses (Argentieri 1974: 37–9). Neither of the models could of course have been ideologically more removed from what the ‘Foundations and Doctrine of Fascism’ – a manifesto co-written by Mussolini and his Secretary of Culture, the philosopher Giovanni Gentile – presented as an ‘anti-individualistic’ movement opposed as much to liberalism as to socialism (Mussolini and Gentile 2000: 48–9). While the cinema became increasingly integrated according to the policies of fascist corporatism, where all interests – economic, social and cultural – were directed towards the state, it was not defi ned as a state organ. Instead, a twofold objective of ‘entertainment’ and ‘education’ demanded that newsreels, documentaries and endless recordings of Mussolini’s speeches be produced by LUCE and screened prior to melodramas, literary adaptations, costume dramas and comedies produced by various private companies (Reich 2002: 6–13). In this way, the Duce became Italy’s uncontested divo (star) and could spin his rhetoric into an evasive web defi ned by Hollywood myths rather than political doctrine.6 Restrictive laws were introduced throughout the 1930s, predominantly to protect indigenous production, but only after American fi lms earned 78.5 per cent of gross income in 1938, were they banned from exhibition. Imperatives of cultural prestige and international viability tended to favour exchanges rather than isolation, and the Venice Film Festival (founded 1932) as well as the presence of Christian Dreyer, Walter Ruttmann and Jean Renoir, who all were invited to work in fascist Italy, suggest what aspirations there were to modernise and internationalise the cinema (Brunetta 2001a: 5; 245; 336–8). All initiatives towards revitalisation were in many ways consecrated by Mussolini’s inauguration in 1940 of Cinecittà and the Centro Sperimentale, whose innovative approaches to fi lm art and instruction were conceived in the early 1930s by Alessandro Blasetti (1900–87). A prolifi c intellectual and uncontested director in fascist Italy, he exposed future cineastes to contemporary avant-garde practices and theories, as well as to more ‘concrete’ ways of seeking ‘contact with reality’ by visiting hospitals, jails, and sanatoriums (quoted in Faldini and Fofi 1979: 40). What relative ideological openness the Centro Sperimentale offered during the years of the regime has been documented by ex-students such as Giuseppe De Santis (1917–97) who considered the encounter with Soviet cinema and Marxist theories in 1939–41 as having played a pivotal role in bringing him from anti-fascist sentiments to militant resistance. The fusion of exploited women and gangsters, class solidarity and boogie-woogie in Bitter Rice (1949; Riso amaro) – one of the most popular and internationally successful fi lms from this period – epitomises the contradictory cinematic and ideological infl uences that formed post-war directors.7 In light of this, we can more easily perceive why those who had been active

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in interwar cinema could move into the realm of neorealism without seeking to excuse past affi liations. While there was a shared sense that theirs had been a professional rather than an ideological compromise, there was also an awareness that the cinema during fascism had offered a ‘neutral ground’ and a ‘free harbour’ for exchanges of ideas and infl uences that somehow set their work apart from the political context (Brunetta 1987: 74–6). The relative freedom Italian directors enjoyed compared to their German and Russian colleagues is not ultimately measured by a few cases of state intervention and prohibitions; this refl ected, according to Cesare Zavattini (1902–89), effi cient self-censorship rather than tolerance among the fascist hierarchy (quoted in Faldini and Fofi 1979: 24). Most illuminating is the conviction espoused by Luigi Freddi, the Director General of Cinema during the 1930s, that a propaganda machine on the German model would harm not only the industry, but also the ultimate purpose of imposing totalitarian structures on a nation that still, some sixty years after its unifi cation, was marked by enormous regional and socio-economic disjunctions. To foster unity and a sense of nationhood, the cinema should not merely offer ‘bread and circuses’, although most fi lms of the ventennio were produced under this banner; the new Italian cinema should also create celebratory images of current and concrete local realities. From a neorealist perspective, authenticity and immediacy are synonymous with an anti-fascist stance and demystifying intentions, but a realist aesthetic had already been advocated by fascist leaders and intellectuals to create a unique, national, culture that was social, yet not socialist (Ben-Ghiat 1995: 631–2). Politically, as well, Mussolini and Gentile wrote, ‘fascism aims at realism’, crucially implying that the anti-liberal and anti-socialist revolution they envisioned would be embedded in the ‘actual historical conditions’ of a corporate state formed by hard-working Italians (2000: 48–9). Related ideals of ‘Italianness’ and ‘the fascist man’ created a web of collective myths that sought to encourage identifi cation between the people and fascism.8 Mussolini’s public appearances were unmistakably keyed towards this perspective: when interacting with small-town and rural communities he would emphasise his rustic origins and the rural essence of the ‘Italian race’; during encounters with urban audiences the Duce’s public image was crafted to perpetuate ideals of antique roots and imperial rebirth. While both the folkloric and the colonial myths reproduced visions of fascism as the outcome and the protector of the people’s roots and values, they also aimed to fabricate and align rhetorical practices with their everyday experiences. 9 Within artistic and intellectual life, these strategies of consensus-making found parallels in two opposite, equally essentialist, movements – strapaese (Ultra-Country) and stracittà (Ultra-City) – that both emerged independently of, but in conjunction with, Mussolini’s declaration of dictatorship in 1925.

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The fi rst, associated with the Tuscan periodical Il Selvaggio (founded 1924) would denounce bourgeois and urban elements in fascist culture by promoting rural traditions and community structures. By contrast, stracittà grew out of the Rome-based, French-language periodical Novecento (founded 1926) and celebrated the modernist aspects of fascism within a cosmopolitan perspective, spreading its ideas abroad while also challenging the europhobic and anti-American stance of the fascist state. Both were, however, essentially anti- bourgeois tendencies driven towards the dual objective of infl uencing fascist leaders and bringing the people closer to the regime.10 Considered as comple- mentary consolidating forces, they responded to fascism’s twofold exigency of establishing populist relations with the masses without excluding the middle class from which it drew both political and fi nancial support.11 Considered, instead, as myths that could also be contested, strapaese and stracittà created a space of negotiation where non-hegemonic infl uences could intrude and where critical views could masquerade as legitimate discourse. That the promotion of realism became a far more ambiguous endeavour than fascist hierarchs may have wanted was partly due to concurrent and ideologically contradictory realist practices in European and American culture (Ben- Ghiat 1995: 632). The interwar years, marked by social crisis and unrest, the rise of socialist movements in wake of the Bolshevik revolution and the effects of the Great Depression, but also the transition to modernity and the emergence of urban societies, created a wide-ranging and manifold urgency among artists and intellectuals to give pressing social realities a voice and an image. In Weimar Germany, disillusioned artists formulated a Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) of concreteness to voice a cynical critique of post-World War I conditions and solidarity with the lower classes, whereas Soviet directors conveyed revolutionary propaganda of proletarian unity through dialectical realism. Among French fi lmmakers, radical opposition to the rise of Nazism forged the bleak forms of ‘poetic realism’, whereas American writers and directors sought forms of reportage and documentation, as well as stylised depictions of pre- and post-war anxieties. What role these and other infl uences played in the formation of neorealist poetics shall be explored more closely in Chapter 2. At this point, it is clear that whether realism involved social commentary (Walter Ruttmann’s experimental documentaries), or an endorsement of social realism (Sergei Eisenstein), or whether it articulated anti-fascism and pacifi sm within the Popular Front (Jean Renoir), or social awareness within the parameters of Hollywood entertainment (King Vidor), it contradicted everything fascism stood for. Yet such realist discourses circulated among Italian artists and critics and were in part offi cially endorsed as aesthetic and industrial models for a cinema of the fascist revolution. One of the fi rst signs in Italy of the turn towards the real is Alberto Moravia’s (1907–90) novel Gli indifferenti (1929). Giving concrete images

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to illicit sexual relations, conformism and corruption within a middle-class family in 1920s’ Rome, it displays an atmosphere of indifference that denies offi cial ideals of commitment to state and family, deconstructing any notion of stracittà without offering strapaese as a viable alternative. It was in response to Moravia’s concrete language and merciless social and psychological analysis that critics started to speak of ‘neorealism’. Etymologically rooted in Neue Sachlichkeit, the term was occasionally used in the 1930s to connect some young Italian writers to the larger panorama of new realisms, suggesting their rejection of the solipsist forms of contemporary bourgeois art as well as of the aggressive forms associated with futurism (Brunetta 2001a: 202–3). The ‘neo’ suggested, however, also a clear distinction, not only from contemporary foreign trends, but also from past national traditions, in particular the late-nineteenth-century tradition of verismo (‘truism’) whose major expo- nent was Giovanni Verga (1840–1922). His short stories and novels depict marginal, Southern communities and aspire, on the model of French natural- ism, to a detached, total view of the society represented. However, whether Verga’s focus is on dishonoured women or exploited fi shermen, he rejects the Darwinian determinism so central to the French school and adheres neither to the positivist faith in social progress or the objective or scientifi c literary descriptions of Émile Zola (Aitken 2006: 20). Instead, by assimilating regional syntax, terms, and proverbs within free indirect discourse and in choral voices, Verga seeks to convey both individual and collective experiences in more expressive, at times even lyrical and ironic rather than mimetic ways, while at the same time relating mental life to the wider social and natural ambi- ence. The adaptation of Verga’s I Malavoglia (1881) in Visconti’s The Earth Trembles is the most obvious indication of the infl uence his regional poetics and attention to long-neglected Southern Italy would have on neorealist art.

National revitalisation and cinematic innovation: the 1930s It would take more than a decade before a cause célèbre of confrontational realism manifested itself in the cinema, but Moravia’s example and the vision, more specifi cally, of a cinematic gaze directed towards ‘rural dramas in rice-fi elds [and] fi shermen in the morning’ started soon to act upon certain cineastes and critics as well (Alberti, quoted in Brunetta 1969: 36). The idea of the need to reject scripts and ‘spectacular’ values, an idea Zavattini presented in 1944 as fi lmmakers’ ‘responsibility’ to tell ‘humble’ stories of a destroyed country and in the 1950s as a radical neorealist thought, had already emerged in the early 1930s (2002: 664). At that time, his ideal of immediacy between life and image was paralleled by that of the journalist Leo Longanesi who envisioned fi lms shot in the streets to expose what usually tends to be ignored (1980: 118–20), inciting directors to take the time to observe ‘the life of the

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anonymous’ (1965: 292). Both demonstrated an affi nity with contemporary avant-garde cinema, in particular that of Diziga Vertov, whose convictions regarding the ‘kino-eye’ pinpointed the camera’s ability to reveal all that which escapes the human eye (1989: 69–72). However, whereas the revolutionary truth Zavattini promoted presupposed humanistic and increasingly universal values, Longanesi favoured an anti-bourgeois discourse that in promoting fascism and national ‘myths’ avoided the imitation of foreign cinema. When he criticised Blasetti’s Terra madre (1931), which embraced fascist ideals of realist representations, it was precisely for its engagement with Russian formalism. Blasetti would later emphasise the importance both of Soviet fi lmmakers and of German and French directors in inspiring the ‘humanistic’ visions that unify his vast and varied oeuvre, which includes costume dramas, melodramas, comedies and Vecchia guardia (1936) – one of the three explicitly fascist fi lms made during the ventennio (Faldini and Fofi 1979: 28). Although the Duce considered his work a salvation for the national cinema, Blasetti was fi ercely opposed to a state organ and aimed to revitalise Italian fi lm alongside foreign trends and in contact with the concrete elements of local life (Brunetta 2001a: 125–8). Regional specifi city and ordinary characters are privileged concerns of 1860 (1934) which draws on historical accounts of the liberation of Sicily by Giuseppe Garibaldi and his ‘thousand’ volunteers during the Risorgimento – the decades-long process of national unifi cation concluded in 1871. The narrative follows a shepherd, Caemeniddu, on his mission to bring the provisional army from Genoa to Sicily; once the battle against foreign rulers is won, Caemeniddu declares to his wife, Gesuzza, that ‘we have made Italy’, without at all having grasped the political and institutional implications of this nation-making. Both the use of local non-professionals for the main characters and the foregrounding of the Sicilian countryside through panoramic views and natural lighting, draw on the regional poetics of verismo and Neapolitan silent cinema – a little known branch of Italian fi lmmaking that promoted realist practices as opposed to contemporary epic spectaculars (Bruno 1993). Where Blasetti deviates from these traditions is in his failure to view History (macrohistory) from ‘below’ and present the events as lived by the lower-class characters and in the light of their everyday life and social environment. The perspective of 1860 is predominantly that of the nation, and while it pays exceptional attention to regional varieties of speech and culture as well as to socio-economic and ideological disjunctions, the scope is ultimately to reduce such barriers and project the historical moment of national unifi cation onto fascist myths of regeneration. Regional peculiarities are, on the contrary, a defi ning element of Acciaio (1933) which in its innovative approach to community life in the Umbrian town of Terni demonstrates what room the offi cial celebration of work rela-

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tions and local structures left for alternative infl uences. The fi lm was drawn from a short story Mussolini had requested from the internationally acclaimed dramatist Luigi Pirandello (1867–1937) and Walter Ruttmann was commis- sioned to direct it. With his experience of Neue Sachlichkeit documentaries such as Berlin: The Symphony of a City (1927), he was considered capable of fulfi lling Cines’ twofold objective of internationalising Italian cinema and of communicating more current images of Italy abroad (Garofalo 2002: 240). Shot in and around Terni’s steelworks, the story of modern machinery and destructive passions follows Mario, who upon his return from military service fi nds his best friend Pietro engaged to his sweetheart, Gina. His selfi sh behav- iour at the factory where they work provokes a confl ict that causes Pietro’s death and suspected of murder, Mario escapes. It is ultimately Pietro’s father who brings him back – to Gina and to the community – so that order is restored and individualism is condemned in favour of collective production. Enacted by local and non-professional actors, the narrative is conveyed through sophisticated variations in shots and lighting, a constant juxtaposition of images, and a suggestive harmony between the visuals and the musical score that reproduces the rhythms of the factory machines (Garofalo 2002: 241). All of this attests to Ruttmann’s sense of montage-cinema and its ability to convey social and interpersonal tensions, but as the rather traditional storyline moves unambiguously towards the norm of the community, these techniques ultimately fail to affi rm the dialectical thought he would have aspired to communicate. Their innovations notwithstanding, neither Blasetti nor Ruttmann changed the standardised codes of interwar Italian fi lm, but they suggest the range of infl uences and interests involved in the twofold project of national and cinematic revitalisation. Both fi lms engage with ideals of bonifi ca (reclamation): a socio-cultural project of rustic revival launched to raise demographic and agricultural growth, something that became increasingly urgent following Italy’s Colonial War against Ethiopia in 1935–6 when economic autarchy was introduced in response to sanctions from the League of Nations. Another objective of this ‘reclamation of soil and souls’ was to reduce an increasing migration to the cities, since fascist hierarchs feared that urbanisation would facilitate the formation of a political opposition (Ben-Ghiat 2001: 80–1). It was precisely the growth of Northern cities, which with their long traditions of workers’ unions and political radicalism in effect would see the fi rst initiatives to resistance, that inspired Mario Camerini’s (1894–1980) Gli uomini che mascalzoni! (1932). Shot on location in the rapidly expanding centre of Milan, this romantic comedy features the city as protagonist and setting for social analysis with a basis in the romance between Mariuccia, a salesgirl in a luxurious drugstore, and Bruno, a soon-to-be-unemployed driver eventually re-employed as a street-advertiser. Both aspire to the wealthy and degraded world that keeps

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Figure 1.1 Bruno and Mariuccia in Camerini’s Gli uomini che mascalzoni! Courtesy of the Fondazione Centro Sperimentale di Cinematograﬁ a.

them employed, but ultimately they fi nd happiness with each other. While the morally evaluative representation of social classes and denial of social mobility in favour of the lower-middle-class family does little to contest offi cial discourse, the treatment of unemployment and economic dependence exposes social inequalities, while also emphasising the individual private and professional opportunities offered by urban modernity. Ultimately, notions of collective revitalisation are undermined by an individualistic view of the present as a question of fi nding one’s place. The twofold search for concrete portrayals and popular appeal is encapsulated in the prominence given to an ordinary romantic couple, and contemporary box-offi ce fi gures relied to a great extent on the presence of De Sica who starred as a whimsical, but solid hero in several of Camerini’s comedies. In Mister Max (1937; Il Signor Max) he portrays a newsstand attendant who masquerades as well-off and sophisticated to pursue a rich lady, before falling in love with her maid. In Grandi magazzini (1939), we see him as a delivery

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boy in a world of consumer-goods, criminal traffi cking and illicit relations who is fi nally ‘saved’ by a salesgirl: both fi nd protection from the threats of the corrupt surroundings in lower-middle-class family life and domestic safety. In contrast to the authenticity achieved in Gli uomini che mascalzoni!, however, this fi lm was almost entirely shot in the studio, retreating from the city’s socio-geographic realities in order to convey a moralistic approach to urban modernity while the deliberately artifi cial world of fashion and the successful lives it presents falsely portray pre-war Italians as wealthy and modern. This reactionary escapism refl ects sensitivities towards the policies of self-suffi ciency with which Italy faced its increasing economic and political isolation in the late 1930s. While the constant display of Italian products can be interpreted as satirising disastrous policies that severely lowered standards of living, rather than as serving a consolidating function (Spackman 2002: 276–92), the contemporary reviewer Umberto Barbaro, granted Grandi magazzini no such critical merit, discerning within it an illustrative indicator to the current state of ‘crisis’ in Italian cinema (1939: 9). As he was well aware, the problem was not merely artistic, but it was ultimately neither material shortage nor pre-war tensions that made directors seek to convince audiences that they were as happy as fascist ideals of rural regeneration and imperial rebirth implied. At stake was rather the awareness that by 1939 such myths had lost their power to convince. Several events were instrumental in the gradual decline of fascism, both prior to and during the fi rst years of the war. If Mussolini’s ‘Declaration of the Empire’ in 1936 marked the peak of popular consensus,12 his successive moves – the support of Franco in the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) and the alliance with Hitler and the introduction of Racial Laws in 1938 – alienated the people from the regime and gave rise to an anti-fascist consciousness that increased following Italy’s declaration of war as Germany’s ally in 1940. Massive military defeats in Greece and Russia, causing thousands of dead and missing, as well as an estimated 50 per cent reduction in national consumption between 1938 and 1944, left the country in ruins and created discontent even within fascist circles (Corni 2000: 157). These circumstances reinforced restrictive laws and surveillance of cultural as well as political activity. No longer open to Soviet cinema and French anti-fascist directors, the Venice Film Festival became a parade of Nazi-fascist propaganda (Stone 2002: 296) and Luigi Freddi, who had previously expressed disgust for Goebbels’ Nazi pictures, redefi ned the LUCE’s ‘educative’ purposes, launching a series of military documentaries that sought to prepare the nation for war (Brunetta 2001a: 15; Fanara 2000: 128). Only a few feature fi lms were made along this propagandistic line: it was far more common to offer evasion from the current confl ict through portrayals of claustrophobic, upper-class worlds, whether by translating late-nineteenth-century novels that favoured so called ‘calligraphic’, or superfl uously

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decorated and formalist, pictures, or a type of parlour-comedy later referred to as ‘white-telephone fi lms’ for their tendency to foreground glossy status symbols to evoke a fake social mobility. Although neorealism, as an anti- rhetorical, demystifying and nonconformist practice, emerged in opposition to all of these tendencies, the passage from propagandistic docu-dramas or easy evasion to innovative chronicles of evolving national history could be shorter and involve more overlap than has often been recognised. Nowhere are these continuities between pre-war and post-war cinema as evident as in the work of De Sica whose Maddalena zero in condotta (1940) and Teresa Venerdí (1941) range among the more sophisticated ‘white- telephone fi lms’. If they still have a power to amuse, it is in particular thanks to elaborate characterisation and the performance of established comic actors, headed by De Sica as the romantic male lead. Maddalena follows a businessman tracking an anonymous letter whose author turns out, after much ado, to be a marriageable school teacher. The gratuitous complications that arise allow for, fi rst and foremost, a satire of hypocritical school authorities who profess nationalist discourses and threaten to fi re the nonconformist young teacher, but the play with identity deception and masquerade, so central to De Sica’s work as actor and director, seems also to draw parallels between falsities in the claustrophobic world represented and the isolated and intolerant world it implicitly refl ects (Landy 2000: 110). Questions of true and false identity are even more central to the Cinderella story of Teresa Venerdì, whose title character was born into a family of travelling performers. Her passion for acting is penalised at the orphanage where she lives, but it conquers the aristocratic, albeit poor and completely unqualifi ed, Doctor Vignali who, for his part, fakes the necessary medical expertise to be hired by her administrators. Having rescued him from credi- tors, a cabaret-dancing ex-fi ancé played by Anna Magnani, and an unsophis- ticated pursuer of nouveau-riche parents, Teresa can fi nally run away with her debt-free prince, abandoning a world of institutional rigour and falsity for a journey of undefi ned destination. Products of studio-fabricated illusionism, De Sica’s comedies are comfort- ably abstracted from historical realities and, with the exception of an aerial view of Rome in Maddalena, from any geographic anchorage, but the protection formed by escapist formulas and vapid images has allowed for potentially critical messages. While the subtle critique disguises itself in levels of performance, it appears more overtly in the evaluative juxtaposition of the hypocritically condemnatory upper class, on the one hand, and the sincerity and imperfection of the harassed school teacher in Maddalena as well as in the ingenuous orphan girl deprived both of roots and a voice. Giuseppe De Santis, then a critic severely opposed to ‘the general situation of the Italian cinema’ welcomed De Sica’s ‘sincerity and spontaneity’ and the ability of

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Teresa Venerdì ‘to set free, with itself, a humanity now afraid to manifest itself [. . .] now highly expansive’ (1942: 198). Retrospectively, we can see not only which humanity De Santis referred to a year before Northern workers’ protests announced the emergence of an organised Resistance movement, but also that the sympathetic presentation of such marginalised characters foreshadowed De Sica’s future commitment to the underprivileged. If, during the war, the repertoire of romantic comedy served to obfuscate messages that may, at the time, have been received as a form of political opposition, we should also expect to fi nd comic elements in his postwar fi lms the way we do in Open City and in a series of ‘minor’ neorealist works (Landy 2000: 110–11; Wagstaff 2007: 93). In part, this refl ects the authorial contributions of the extraordinar- ily imaginative Zavattini – unaccredited but as palpable in Teresa Venerdì, as in De Sica’s successive fi lms – but it also suggests that past experiences with comedy continued to shape his vision of the cinema, even when it produced stories of victimisation.

Rossellini and the fascist war It was in reference to such continuities in personnel and poetics that André Bazin, founder of Cahiers du Cinéma (1951) and one of the fi rst and most infl uential critics of neorealism, insisted, against common opinion, that although the ‘rebirth’ of Italian cinema was decisively imprinted by the Liberation, it was no ‘unprepared miracle’. If critics during the war, he wrote in 1948, had not ‘been, and rightfully so, of a preconceived opinion, fi lms like SOS 103 or Rossellini’s La nave bianca might better have caught our attention’ (2002: 276). Like Francesco De Robertis’ (1902–59) Uomini sul fondo (1941; ‘SOS 103’), which reconstructs an real-life rescue story, La nave bianca (1942) takes a documentary approach to the naval war, enjoying not only De Robertis’ contribution to the extent of complicating questions of authorship, but also collaboration with the armed forces, approval from the Committee of War and Political Film, and the supervision of Vittorio Mussolini, affi liations that subsequently supported Un pilota ritorna (1942) and L’uomo dalla croce (1943) (Ben-Ghiat 2000: 20–4). Although the offi cial intention of such projects was to convey the continuity of the war as an everyday and ‘serenely accepted’ fact among soldiers (Brunetta 2001a: 152), for Rossellini, who later emphasised his disassociation with fascism and association instead with the Duce’s son, they offered an opportunity to develop experience through assisting on projects that experimented with documentary fi lmmaking (quoted in Faldini and Fofi 1979: 48). When he retrospectively traced the birth both of neorealism and of his own cinematic vision to these ‘fi ctionalised documentaries’ it was, however, not fi rst and foremost for the fusion of historical material, realist aesthetics and melodramatic narratives, although such hybridisations become increasingly

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prevalent in the post-war years, but for the ‘choral quality’ and ‘spirituality’ that often subvert the fi lms’ bellicose and ideological thematics.13 La nave bianca is introduced by a caption presenting us with the fi lm’s theme and the director’s method: the characters are the actual crew of a warship, and they are captured – ‘dal vero’ (from real life) in their own environment and with verismo in sentiment. Both the authenticity of locations and characters, as well as the rapid editing that structures documentary footage of actual naval combats in the fi rst part of the fi lm reveal at least an indirect knowledge of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) and of his theories of dialectical montage (Rondolino 1989: 58). More specifi cally, the fi lm’s claim to authenticity evokes Verga’s commitment to provide verisimilar representations by assimilating the characters’ speech patterns and collective voice, radically reducing authorial comments on the world portrayed. The camera works with similar strategies of detachment, observing the navy operatives’ singular features of regional speech and individual interests within the frame of their collective life. It also captures their union when they work together to defend the ship under attack and when they pay tribute to the king and the Duce (‘Viva il Re’ ‘Saluto al Duce’) once the battle is won. Like the sequence covering their fraternal relations with German sailors, these were diplomatic elements that would have been obligatory less than a year into the war (Rondolino 1989: 58). Such semi-documentary tendencies fade, however, in the second half of the fi lm, which is sentimental and patriotic in tone and which is centred around Elena, a school teacher serving as a nurse on the hospital ship, Arno. She decides to suppress her secret love for a wounded sailor since such feelings would compromise her duty to serve all the naval heroes equally.14 The dialectics between the individual and the collective, between self-interest and self-sacrifi ce, fi nd no unequivocal synthesis. The melodramatic narration may reinforce heroic commitment, but the detached, overall view of social ambi- ence also encompasses severe injuries and deaths occurring during the attack, and while these disquieting ‘facts’ are left to ‘speak for themselves’, as Verga prescribed, they unavoidably come to speak for all those who lost their lives to the fascist war and, by extension, for those whose individual freedom was suppressed by totalitarian structures. A success among audiences and critics alike, La nave bianca aroused little enthusiasm among fascist offi cials, and Un pilota ritorna, which Vittorio Mussolini scripted, depicts, as a result, all the rhetorical heroism Rossellini sought to avoid, ignoring entirely that at the time of production the war was practically already lost (Rossellini 1987a: 93–5). To showcase the air force, the fi lm moves to Italy’s invasion of Greece, omitting the details of a campaign that was launched as a sure ‘walk-over’ in the autumn of 1940, only to end disastrously in a rescue by Hitler the following spring (Corni 2000: 157). Although the attention to collective life and hierarchical structures within the

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air force and the inclusion of spectacular battle scenes partly constructed from documentary footage achieves a verisimilar representation of pilots at war that is reinforced by the presence of lesser-known actors and non-professionals, this tentatively unbiased perspective is ultimately undermined by anti-Allied messages and by the patriotic-romantic endeavours of Lieutenant Rosati to whom Massimo Girotti (1918–2003) lent his latent stardom. Escaping from a British prison camp on the Greek front, he leaves his new-found love Anna, who looks after the prisoners, to take off with an Allied aircraft and return to duty in Italy. Although the portrayal of innocent victims and the solidarity within the prison camp can be said to condemn the war, questions of guilt and responsibility are unequivocally related to the enemy’s cruelty without ever challenging fascist ideals of sacrifi ce or the legitimacy of a rapidly declining regime. Encapsulating the contradictions between a political order unwilling to recognise its defeat, and a tired population longing for freedom, L’uomo dalla croce is just as far-fetched in its bellicose propaganda as it is prophetic of Rossellini’s future work. Scripted by the fascist ideologist Asvero Gravelli, it glorifi es the Italian expedition to Russia in the summer of 1942 – a disastrous event that more than any other marked the failure of the fascist war. Once it was released in June 1943 it was already passé and enjoyed a limited run. It is important to recognise that both the extensive battle scenes and the anti- communist stereotypes are challenged by the historically far more accurate and ideologically rather ambiguous story of an army chaplain, modelled on Father Reginaldo Giuliani who was actually killed on the Russian front (Rondolini 1989: 60–5). Determined to prove a hidden spiritual vision in everyone, the ‘man with a cross’ presents himself in apolitical terms as God’s soldier and dies while absolving a Russian adversary. Like Un pilota ritorna, L’uomo dalla croce was shot in natural, if not authentic locations, and it adopts the same reserved style, but its focus on a fi gure of unconditional charity, invested with the anonymity of an non-professional actor and the community gathered around his Christian humanism, ultimately leads us away from any purely patriotic heroism, demonstrating better than any other fi lm the many uncer- tainties and contradictions in which neorealism was formed.

Towards a new culture: from Verga to Visconti and beyond The ideal Rossellini developed of a ‘veristic’ look at historical realities was, from his side, never outlined as an artistic aim, but it engaged with a contemporary debate wherein the premise for a cinema of honesty and concreteness was established with aspirations to political and national reorganisation. In an article titled ‘Truth and Poetry: Verga and the Italian Cinema’, Mario Alicata (1918–1966) and De Santis looked towards the Sicilian author for inspiration

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for narrative cinema and a ‘revolutionary art inspired from a humanity that suffers and hopes’. Besides having created ‘a country, a time, a society’ (Alicata and De Santis 1941b), Verga’s stories about farmers, fi shermen, fallen women and brigands contained, beneath their formal elaboration, elements traceable in oral culture and popular novels and had therefore the power ‘to communicate with a vast audience’ – an invaluable lesson for cineastes determined to support a ‘national reawakening’, a detachment from ‘all that which merged in fascism’ and a ‘maturation of a new way of feeling and of being’ (Argentieri 1996: 112). The article provoked a wave of responses within the periodicals Bianco e nero (founded 1937) and Cinema (founded 1936); the former was the organ of the Centro Sperimentale, the latter was co-founded by Luigi Freddi, but both operated with considerable liberty from offi cial polices. In the politically critical years 1938–41, Cinema enjoyed the ideological legitimacy of its director, Vittorio Mussolini, who called for images of the beauty (not the possible ugliness) of the ‘Italian race’ (1980: 33) and for documentaries showcasing ‘the power and greatness of Italy’ to promote the government’s ‘actions’ while leaving relative room for alternative views (1965a: 7). It became therefore much more than a periodical, enabling encounters and exchanges for critics and future fi lmmakers gathered around the collective objectives that made Cinema the cradle both of neorealist thought and of Rome’s Resistance movement. That critics in these years looked beyond their cultural objectives transpires from Visconti’s critique of a fi lm industry that tied the hands of young directors with ‘loads to say’: for a new cinema to take form, he wrote in 1941, certain conformist ‘cadavers’ would have to be buried (1986a). The funeral he prophesied as a presupposition for rebirth indexed, in its purifying scope, a new political order wherein the cinema would serve as a socio-political as well as cultural agent devoted to engage and activate spectators around critical viewing experiences. Visconti’s initiatives towards cinematic renewal were programmatically outlined in his article ‘Anthropomorphic Cinema’, which discusses the ideal of freedom of artistic ‘specialisation’ as a ‘human responsibility’ to tell stories about real people in real-life situations. Rather than allowing the artist to evade society as had traditionally been the case, creativity should serve realities constantly made and changed by humanity (1943: 108). This perspective inspired several projects that were censored, but it was intrinsically connected to Obsession (1943; Ossessione) wherein Verga’s regional poetics and social pessimism encounter James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), which Visconti had obtained from Renoir.15 Having inexplicably passed preliminary censorship, this fi lm about adultery and murder emerged in 1941–2 as a collective manifesto among De Santis, Alicata and other Cinema critics, and while Visconti’s private funds guaranteed freedom from industrial ‘cadavers’, their work was closely observed as police control intensifi ed pro-

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Figure 1.2 Gino and Giovanna in Visconti’s Obsession. Courtesy of the Fondazione Centro Sperimentale di Cinematograﬁ a.

portionally with rising anti-fascist activity and as several of the collaborators were arrested (Visconti 1976a; Argentieri 1996: 111). Two months before Mussolini’s arrest on 25 July 1943, the fi lm was edited despite disapproval from censors who had already eliminated several scenes, and a private viewing was arranged that astonished critics and cineastes: ‘people saw a fi lm they did not think they could possibly see’, Visconti later recalled (1976a). It was his editor, Mario Serandrei, who fi rst referred to the anti-aesthetic visuals as ‘neorealist’ (quoted in Faldini and Fofi 1979: 68) and Umberto Barbaro, who since the late 1920s had applied this term to Russian fi lm and literature, welcomed the ‘improvised and screaming realism’ that demanded as much engagement from spectators as the authors had invested in it (1976: 504–8). Reversing the critical strategy of Gli indifferenti, Obsession deconstructs ideals of strapaese without presenting stracittà as a viable alternative, but it goes several steps further both in displaying unacknowledged realities and in rejecting existing codes of representation. Gravitating towards the edges of society, it traces squalid milieus and provincial monotony in the Po Plains – a territory so far unknown to the cinema and destined to reach international screens though Paisà and Bitter Rice. Our guide into this anti-escapist world is a vagrant who wanders right into Giovanna’s trattoria-kitchen where her beauty is equally shadowed by the bleak surroundings and by her own

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discontent. She feeds her broke and attractive guest and will soon talk him into plotting against her old husband, Bragana. This representation of Clara Calamai (1909–1998), a stylish diva of 1930s fi lm, and of Massimo Girotti, known to many as Rossellini’s patriotic aviator (from whom Visconti’s wan- derer has inherited the name Gino), and the atmosphere of melancholy without the sense of meaning and purpose would have had a de-familiarising effect and is clearly aimed at destroying their previous, conformist characters. Split by divergent interests, the miserable lovers are unable to enjoy the life insurance, not to mention the freedom they killed for, and their attempt to run away towards a new start ends with a car accident that kills the pregnant Giovanna. Besides italianising Cain’s errant characters, the scriptwriters also invented Lo Spagnolo, a travelling artist who, like the prostitute-fi gure, Anita, distracts Gino from Giovanna. Conceived of as an ex-partisan from the Spanish Civil War whose frequent (dis)appearances are meant to simulate a political conspirator on constant missions (Ingrao 2002: 16), he would, according to Alicata, have signifi ed a proletarian vagrant who in professing anti-fascist and communist ideals seeks to direct Gino towards more important matters, but censorship made him so ambiguous that he has often been read in terms of sexual transgression rather than as ‘the fi lm’s political conscience’ (quoted in Faldini and Fofi 1979: 65–6). Two years later, the unprecedented freedom of speech unleashed by the Liberation nurtured illusions that a revolutionary art founded on a hopeful suffering humanity was possible, but there were ‘cadavers’ ready to succeed those buried with fascism and they would continue, we shall see, in many ways far more effi ciently, to tweak, distort or mute, the voice of those with too much to say. Mussolini would not have recognised political subtleties and certainly not himself in the decapitated Signor Bragana, because while local state representa- tives banned Obsession as soon as it appeared and archbishops blessed the theatres where it was screened, he extended its tormented distribution by a few weeks before it was removed and eventually confi scated by Nazi troops.16 More representative of offi cial views was Mussolini’s last Minster of Culture, Gaetano Polverelli, who denounced it as a ‘bomb of anti-conformism [. . .] it mirrors an Italy immersed in misery and in pain that has nothing in common with the offi cial face spread by governing authorities’, without evidently realis- ing that these were the very reasons for the fi lm’s success (quoted in Argentieri 1974: 57–8). What most troubled an already edgy establishment may not have been Visconti’s sympathy towards the murderous lovers, but that the ordinariness of his gallery of outcasts and the unmistakable socio-geographic anchorage made it impossible to ignore the country’s unoffi cial truths. More than its ‘realism’, debatable considering the narrative rigour, the implausible coincidences and the frequent use of close-ups and expressionist lighting to dramatise inner and interpersonal tensions, what marked the fi lm’s novelty

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was its concreteness and the contact it sought with the nation. The cast, the basis in American noir, the story of sex, murder and tragic death, and the cin- ematography of the innovative Aldo Tonti all imply an intent to make a ‘soft impact on spectators’ in order to engage them in a new culture of confrontation and social consciousness (Argentieri 1996: 111). No other fi lm before Open City manifested such a break with contemporary cinematic paradigms or with rhetorical images of Italy’s natural and human landscapes and few artefacts conveyed the sentiments of a nation exhausted by the war as well as Obsession. Nonetheless, a similar sense of unease drawn from unspectacular and un-narratable realities infuses I bambini ci guardano (1942) which bridges the tentative critique of Teresa Venerdì with the narratives of children’s exposure to moral degradation, poverty and social injustice in De Sica and Zavattini’s post-war fi lms. Based on Cesare Giulio Viola’s rather obscure novella Pricò (1924), the melodrama depicted in De Sica’s retrospective view is a compromise between the old and the new cinema, and certain though it is that the story of a middle-class woman whose infi delity drives her husband to suicide is both moralistic and abstracted from the war and its casualties, their seven-year-old son Pricò’s isolation and abandonment to unspeakable suffering are as far from cathartic resolution as they are from Depression-era comedies (De Santi and De Sica 1999). As implied in the title (The Children Are Watching Us), we follow perceptions of a world denounced for its false respectability through the foregrounding of a child as the focaliser and source of a study of inner life. This innovative approach to cinematic narration is encapsulated during a nocturnal journey in which Pricò reviews the events that have caused his present trauma. Looking out into the dark, the feverish boy sees images of his mother walking away with her lover and also superimposed images of his incomprehensible grandmother yelling at him and these merge with his own and his father’s refl ections in the rainy train window. This visualisation of a psychological state of mind is reinforced by subjective shots that align our viewing with the child’s gaze, inviting us to share his ambiguous feeling of not seeing clearly and yet of having seen far too much. Like Obsession, I bambini announced convictions shared among a new generation of cineastes and critics, as well as the poetic visions of its authors. Although no references are made to the war except for the sense of economic scarcity that hits even Rome’s bourgeoisie, the fi lm moves through different contemporary environments, from the city to the provinces and to a decadent seaside resort, laying bare the hypocrisy and judgemental attitudes that prevail everywhere without excusing anybody’s neglect of the sensitive child. Socio-geographical markers and thematic concerns are enough to make us perceive 1940s’ Italy as a time, above all, when children were suffering because of adults and, as such, as a time when actions obfuscated by deception and pretence were revealed as betrayals. Herein lies also the premise for the

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Figure 1.3 Pricò and his father in De Sica’s I bambini ci guardano. Courtesy of the British Film Institute.

child-subjectivity that characterises the successive collaborations between De Sica and Zavattini. Inherent in the fatally voyeuristic boy named appropriately ‘precautious’ (Pricò), there is already present the pain of lost childhood that we will later recognise in Giuseppe and Pasquale in Shoeshine (1946; Sciuscià) and Bruno in Bicycle Thieves. For these boys, the premature entrance into adult- hood is the effect of post-war conditions of which Pricò is still unaware. He lives through the painful experience of seeing traditional pillars of security fall, suggesting how, beyond the massive material losses and increasing levels of disintegration the war would come to cause, there were also existential losses involved that a truthful cinema would have to account for. No tragedy, but a light-hearted and ironic treatment of loss and nostalgia on the one hand and repressive social conventions on the other prevails in Quattro passi fra le nuvole (1942), widely considered to be Blasetti’s pre-neorealist ﬁ lm. The rhetorical ruralism of 1860 is gone, thanks in part to Zavattini’s contribution to the script, in favour of a bitter-sweet story that leads from the city to the country and back again, evidently leaving no way of escape from urban malaise to regional idyll. The narrative follows Paolo, a travelling salesman who is easily distracted from the economic motives of his journey when one of his fellow travellers – the young and melancholic Maria – insists that he comes along to her parents’ farm. There, he acts as the husband she does not have and

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the father of the child she is expecting. The celebration of their alleged union creates an ironic exposition of provincial power-relations and repressive ideals of family honour, all of which are juxtaposed in evaluative terms to Maria’s innocence and sincerity. When their deception and her moral fall are disclosed, Paolo delivers a polemical speech on true honour that saves her position in the family, while he returns to the humdrum life of a travelling salesman and a loveless marriage. Paolo’s transient immersion in peaceful pastoral landscapes establishes an evaluative opposition between the lost Eden of his childhood which this unexpected encounter evokes and the mundane city life he now lives, but the melancholy and uncertainty inherent in the protagonists and in their story, are ultimately not associated with the disintegration of traditional societies. Rather, they point to an existential condition that, like Gino’s rootlessness and Pricò’s pain, may be interpreted as the expression of disillusion and quiet dissent. Wrapping illicit relations and social commentary within the comic framework of identity deception and a search for authenticity in natural and human ambiences, Quattro passi avoids both the scandal and the destructive fatalism of Obsession and Children, but by uncovering the more general implications of its immediate concerns, reading the critique of intolerant traditions as a denunciation of totalitarian structures, the fi lm appears equally suggestive in its call for political and cultural renewal. All of these works demonstrate a signifi cant re-elevation of the cinematic potential of ordinary life, throwing glossy telephones out in favour of dusty roads, milk bottles and kitchen curtains, and the rejection of escapist formulas is reinforced by the prominence given to marginalised characters that are allowed to view History from the perspective of those who had suffered the most from and had the least impact on its course. The production of these fi lms in in the years 1942–3 – a diffi cult time market-wise, as well, that hindered immediate mass distribution and the critical acknowledgment they later acquired – is a testimony to a hunger for freedom that after decades of muted existence could no longer be held back.17

Voices of Resistance Anti-fascist forces had been offi cially non-existent since Mussolini declared Italy a totalitarian state in 1925 and the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti, who was assassinated by the fascists in 1924, had been one of the last to openly criticise the anti-democratic laws introduced during Mussolini’s fi rst years as a ‘democratically’ elected prime minster. Of the parties that had stood in opposition to fascism before 1925, only the Italian Communist Party (PCI; founded 1921) survived and L’Unità (founded 1924), its offi cial party organ, circulated clandestinely in Italy and France during the ventennio. Communists who were not jailed, as was the case of the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci

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(1890–1937), or killed, would like other anti-fascists keep a low profi le and still risk political internment, or seek exile, as did the legendary party leader Palmiro Togliatti, who in 1943–4 started to broadcast to Italy from Moscow. Along with the PCI, the French-based exiled groups Concentrazione anti- fascista (founded 1927) and Giustizia e libertà (founded 1929) had already organised clandestine units in Italy when Mussolini was arrested on 25 July 1943 (Corni 2000: 158–62). More than national unrest and the vote of no confi dence in the fascist Grand Council, however, it was Allied bombing that made King Vittorio Emanuele III regret having appointed this man to lead the country two decades earlier. An armistice was reluctantly signed on 8 September 1943, while the King and the newly elected cabinet led by Marshal Badoglio, Italy’s commander in the Ethiopian war, fl ew to the South where Allied forces offered protection from vengeful Nazi troops pouring in from the North. Having split the country into two and reduced it to a battleground for foreign forces, the highly anticipated and for many desired defeat saw a revival of fascism in northern-central areas where the Germans established the neo- fascist Italian Social Republic. While its administration was in the town of Salò and Mussolini was rescued by Hitler’s men to act as its pro-forma leader, neither the ‘decapitated’ Duce nor the Italian soldiers who joined the Nazis’ scheme of violence and persecution, or fascist leaders who sought to restore the ‘old’ fascism, left much doubt about the republic’s dependence on The Reich (Mack Smith 1997: 414–19). Attempts to revive the cinema in Venice after Cinecittà was destroyed by Allied bombing and most equipment was confi scated and shipped to Germany, failed, since all actors and directors with any degree of credibility went into hiding. Rossellini embarked on months of wandering and became attached to the Cinema critics who now constituted the centre of Rome’s Resistance movement, whereas Visconti was arrested when he was about to enter the partisan war. In refusing summonses both from Mussolini and Goebbels, De Sica found an alibi in La porta del cielo (1945); a fi lm produced but never released by the Catholic Film Centre. His major concern in the winter of 1944 was to prolong production until Rome had been liberated and to house as many refugees as possible in the Basilica of San Paolo where shooting took place (Faldini and Fofi 1979: 70–8). While it was far from the case that the entire nation suddenly became anti-fascist or indeed that all of those who did, or who had long nurtured anti-fascist sentiments, now let thought materialise into action, the months of lawlessness following Mussolini’s arrest created a climate of enthusiasm and opposition against a background of mass demonstrations and strikes in the Northern cities and appeals in the anti-fascist press for peace and solidarity between workers and soldiers returning from the front (Pavone 1994: 6–13). The state of unrest intensifi ed following the armistice which rather than

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peace and defascistation brought the war closer to home, and while soldiers on the run from German capture formed the fi rst partisan groups, communists, socialists and Giustizia e libertà devotees came out of hiding to face the logistics of systematising anti-fascist sentiments and action (Cooke 2011: 5). The Resistance movement was subsequently centralised under the multi-party CLN (Committee for National Liberation) and by the winter of 1944, it had reached out from organisational centres in Rome and Milan to most of the German-occupied areas. Partisan action ranging from guerrilla wars; attacks; sabotage; weapon smuggling and intelligence provision tended however to be concentrated in the Alps, the Po Valley and the Apennine Mountains, and as several towns in these areas reclaimed temporary liberation from Nazi- fascist control, they were transformed into provisional Partisan Republics lead by the CLN and the local populace (Corni 2000: 158; 175). Besides such concrete accomplishments, what made post-war political activists and artists celebrate the revolutionary potential of the popular war for liberation was its democratic constitution. Of the 200,000 formally recognised as members of the Resistance, 35,000 fi ghters and 20,000 patriots were women, and while a majority belonged to the political left, it also included liberals and conserva- tives, and Catholics collaborated with Jews just as much as intellectuals and students fought alongside workers, peasants and ex-soldiers.18 Some partisans had joined the Republicans’ battle against Franco in the Spanish Civil War in 1937 and considered the two anti-fascist struggles as continuous; others found inspiration in the revolutionary forces of the Risorgimento and the peasant protests and working-class activism that fascism had emerged to suppress; but many were driven to the mountains by opportunism and taste for adventure rather than by ideological or patriotic intentions.19 If a common motivation among those who fi rst took up arms against Nazi- fascist violence was the instinctive freedom to choose and to express disobe- dience towards those who illegitimately claimed obedience, the increasingly centralised struggle developed, as the ex-partisan Claudio Pavone relates, into three distinct wars. Besides the war for national liberation, there was a class struggle, wherein workers and peasants saw an occasion to claim freedom from an exploitative bourgeoisie, and a civil war where the neo-fascists who had gone on to fi ght for Mussolini’s republic were often considered a fi ercer enemy than the Nazis themselves (Pavone 1994: 23–39; 225ff.). In the years of the Reconstruction, these two facets of the Resistance which were both motivated by a vision of socio-political reorganisation were largely undermined by an opposite interest in reclaiming the Resistance as a unitary national battle against the German enemy – as if fascism and social disjunctions had not and did not continue to divide the country. Although the Resistance was a far less harmonious and consequential force than the myths of national memory account for, this does not diminish its contribution to the Allied war effort or

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the function it initially played as an inspiration to moral and cultural renewal. The anti-fascist coalitions in power between 1945 and 1947 continued the unitary, albeit far from unproblematic, line of the CLN and while these admin- istrations remained sadly inconsequential, they kept the hope alive that what had motivated the most progressive factions of the Resistance – the vision not of a restored pre-fascist order, but of socio-political reform – was historically achievable. Only in the light of this climate of a long-desired liberation and projects of national reclamation across socio-economic and geographical divisions can we understand the speciﬁ c objectives, manifold manifestations and undeniable shortcomings of neorealist ﬁ lm.

A new way of seeing: receptions and perceptions Unquestionably the most formidable and critically acclaimed area in modern Italian culture, neorealist cinema has often been celebrated for its masterpieces and questioned for its practical and political limitations. Of the 822 feature fi lms produced in Italy between 1945 and 1953, only 90 can be defi ned as neorealist. Signifi cantly, none of these were the works of the two most prolifi c directors of the 1930s, Blasetti and Camerini, although they were equally active in the post-war years, but instead of directors who had emerged in the 1940s. What is more, with the exception of Open City, Bicycle Thieves and Bitter Rice, most were commercial failures that in some cases proved more successful with foreign audiences.20 That Italian moviego- ers preferred Hollywood heroes once the fascist ban was lifted explains only in part this unpopularity. More signifi cant was the spectators’ increasing desire to move on from recent disasters without seeing their own misery on the screens. Neorealist fi lm became therefore out of tune with a society in which the socio-cultural transformations launched by Marshall Aid soon made bombed-out buildings, guerrilla fi ghts and black markets passé, but it was also clear that the fi lms in most cases had been either too elitist, sentimental or populist to reach an authentically popular dimension. Such, at least, was the critique featured on the pages of Cinema nuovo (founded 1952) in the mid-1950s when the ‘involution’ of progressive fi lmmaking was discussed in relation to Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (1954) and De Sica’s Stazione Termini (1954), accused respectively of spiritualism and conformism, whereas the historicist perspective of Visconti’s Senso (1954) was welcomed as a promising ‘passage from neorealism to realism’, from observation to critical participation (Aristarco 1980: 19; 46–8; 64). According to Pier Paolo Pasolini, a prominent heir but also a severe critic of these directors, this moment so rich in revolutionary potential had suffered from a lack of systematic ‘thought’ for cultural reorganisation and had as a consequence produced nothing but a ‘vital crisis’ (1965: 231). A systematic project would,

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he maintained, have promoted relations between intellectuals and the people established during the Resistance and thus have forged the type of ‘national- popular’ art Gramsci described as based on the authors’ identifi cation with their lower-class subjects and their responsibility to foster unity and consciousness among them (1996: 71–2). To what extent the neorealists found a model in Gramsci’s prison writings once these started to be systematically published in late 1947 is a crucial question to be considered more closely in Chapter 3 (Chemotti 1999: 61). Some accuse the directors of exploiting the power of their humble characters to stir emotions and ‘passive contemplation’ rather than operating didactically among the spectators (Kolker 2009: 64). The political failure of neorealism also refl ects the state of a country that, after the Christian Democrats defeated the Popular Front in the 1948 elections and processes of Reconstruction were subjected to Marshall Aid, Cold War sensitivities and the Catholic Church, was hardly a place for social revolution. Committed fi lmmaking was systematically hindered by intensifi ed censorship and laws that, after initial years of ‘lawlessness’ and ad hoc production outside established systems, recast the cinema as a state-supervised culture industry of productive, ideological and cultural standardisations.21 We can accordingly delineate an initial phase of neorealism between 1945–9 that embraces most of its masterpieces and a second phase that only the most generous critics stretch to include Federico Fellini’s Le notti di Cabiria (1957). By 1950, what initially was an improvised and economically risky form of fi lmmaking had become systematised by industrial imperatives and state regulation, and the term neorealism had achieved decisive political connotations (Sorlin 1996: 89). In both phases, the fi lms that strictly speaking qualifi ed as ‘neorealist works’ occupied a numerically marginal position alongside popular genre fi lms attuned to the twofold challenge of increasing competition from Hollywood productions and audiences in search of spectacle, without however ignoring post-war conditions of unemployment, exploitation, and social disintegration. At the margins of, but in dialogue with, the aesthetic and moral ideals encapsulated in the works of Rossellini, De Sica and Visconti, these works may, as Farassino has suggested, be defi ned as fi lms ‘of neorealism’ (1989a: 21–32) and frequently it is their fi ctionalisation of the real that best illustrates the thematic and aesthetic distinction of neorealism, as we shall see. The notion of a second phase of systematisation also points to the critical refl ection the reborn Italian cinema started to awaken as represented by the writings of Bazin and Zavattini between 1948 and 1953. Up until that point, between 1943, when neorealist thought among critics and fi lmmakers had started to take form, and 1948, working theories came not from critical formu- lations of a poetics, but from historical and material circumstances (Farassino 1989a: 32). To the extent that any thoughts were formalised, they were so by

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a handful of ﬁ lms that according to De Sica never reﬂ ected prescribed criteria or adherence to a movement:

There were no studios, nor cameras or fi lm [. . .] Still, neorealist cinema was coming to life, as a vast collective movement of everyone [. . .] It was not that one day we sat down around a table in via Veneto, Rossellini Visconti, I and the others and said to each other: now let’s make neorealism. We hardly even knew each other. One day they told me that Rossellini had started to work again. ‘A fi lm about a priest,’ they said. (quoted in Faldini and Fofi 1979: 80; 90)

Recent stories, already turned legend, of loss, betrayal, repression and sacrifi ce inspired Rossellini to go out into the streets and cast citizens who had lived through similar events, but with scarce equipment, hazardous funding and a disintegrated industry, he had little choice but to improvise solutions and ‘invent’ a technique that proved perfect for the urgency of the material (Rossellini 1987a: 107). The same artistic freedom – inconceivable within conventional systems of production – and commitment to lived experiences saw De Sica embark on a fi lm project based on Rome’s street kids a year later, but Shoeshine offers a thematically and formally very different image of Rome during the last year of the war. Their successive fi lms, Germania anno zero (1948) and Bicycle Thieves, incidentally both trace life in destroyed cities through the eyes of young boys, but what strikes us is their affi rmation of a personal poetics rather than a certain set of norms, an impression that the radically different The Earth Trembles, produced in the same year (1947–8), certainly reinforces. What unifi es these fi lms, which all represent the ‘artistic freedom and commercial disarray’ of the fi rst phase of neorealism, is the search for a relation of immediacy between the cinematic eye and current socio-historical realities (Wagstaff 2007: 13). To some extent they all address the ideals formulated in pre-neorealist criticism, but not even Visconti let theoretical preconception of realism exclude his lyricist and often stylised approach to an underprivileged community at the country’s remotest margins. As a result, the question as to whether a neorealist visual language actually existed came to occupy critics as soon as the phenomenon itself was recognised. Tired of being referred to as the father of neorealist literature, Elio Vittorini objected in 1951 that ‘there are as many neorealisms as there are principal authors’, an argument Bazin evoked a couple of years later, insisting that ‘neorealism per se does not exist, but there are more or less neorealist directors’ (1975: 690). More recently, Pierre Sorlin has recognised the homogeneous nature of the phenomenon while suggesting that only for those ‘critics, intellectuals and politicians’ who grouped certain fi lms and labelled them as neorealist did they represent a genre (1996: 91–3).

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In similar terms, Peter Bondanella disputes the existence of a ‘group identity’ since shared thematic concerns never embraced ‘a programmatic approach’ (2009: 34), whereas Lino Micciché defi nes it as an avant-garde phenomenon on the basis of the deliberate and decisive separation it represented from preceding trends in national cinema (1999b: 21–8). Considering the absence of the intellectually elevated ‘theoretical tables’ and a centralised leading group around which avant-garde movements tend to take form, neorealism constituted, according to Alberto Asor Rosa, an ‘a posterior’ poetics of what it actually was rather than of what it may have wanted to be. In that sense, we can talk of a ‘fortunate combination’ of largely unrepeatable elements and ‘a bundle of highly individualised energies’ converged by moral, political and cultural exigencies (1975a: 1610–13). This evaluation evokes both Bazin’s anti-essentialist concept of a ‘revolutionary humanism’ (2002: 263) and Zavattini’s related observations that neorealism would always be defi ned by a ‘moral position’ (2002: 913). Inherent in these views there is a conviction that, more than ‘aesthetics’, it was an ‘ethics of the aesthetics’ con- solidated by the awareness among young fi lmmakers of their role in promoting human and social growth (Micciché 1999a: ix-xxiii); in that regard, Millicent Marcus’s observation that the ‘ethical impetus’ in effect produced a ‘certain school’, seems justifi ed (1986: 23). The diffi culty in arriving at an aesthetic def- inition sheds light on the essentially hybrid nature of the phenomenon. Carlo Lizzani, who like Zavattini lived the neorealist experience as cineaste and critic, looks back at it as an extraordinary moment of ‘interlinguistic dialogue’ [and] reciprocal fertilization’ that, by activating a range of models, styles, and genres, changed completely the frames of cinematic narration and the relations between its characters and the world (Lizzani 1998: 13–15). These ideas of a moral coherence and formal eclecticism suggest that what took place in post- war Italy was not as much a question of realism, but rather of a reinvention and re-combination of past and current traditions to form new artistic and ideological perspectives on reality. As will become clear, this objective tended to be reached through unconventional visions of history and country and of time and space.

Cinematic journeys and national discoveries The notion, fundamental to this study, that more than a movement, neorealism was a moment, rests on a presupposition of the cinema’s relation to and position in history. In exploring works that operate within and between socio- economic circumstances and artistic as well as critical practices, this study will seek to account both for individual poetics and for the common intentionality and consciousness that, as Giulia Fanara observes, created a ‘circularity of discourse’ (2000: 101). Its manifold manifestations in literature and ﬁ lm as

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well as in other visual arts form a web of aesthetic, thematic and narrative continuities and move, with ‘unitary convergences’ within a ‘cultural, moral, social and ideological space’ virtually open to all anti-fascist forces (Brunetta 2001b: 347–8). Considering Zavattini’s notion that the only rule neorealism knew was ‘Don’t do today what you did yesterday’ (2002: 887), the fusion of styles and conventions and individual articulations of something essentially collective appear in themselves programmatic, implying a collective ‘refusal’ of the culture of the ventennio (Bettetini 1999: 136); a reaction to the ‘cultural standstill of fascism’ (Pasolini 1965: 231) and an antithesis to the aestheti- cism of epic spectaculars, Italian and American alike (Bazin 2002: 260–2). To capture both coherent forms of opposition and variations of individual expression, neorealism will be considered an optique, a term that etymologically denotes both vision and option and that as such will direct our focus towards correlations between a given ocular and ideological perspective and a set of aesthetic and thematic possibilities available within a moment of cultural history. As Dudley Andrew writes in an exquisite study of French ‘poetic realist’ cinema, the concept of optique has the advantage of accounting for elements both of style and genre, while going beyond these in distinguishing ‘the specifi c type of experience offered by a set of fi lms to the public’ (1995: 19; 233). As such, it will enable us to appreciate the specifi c choices and solutions that distinguish not merely individual directors but singular fi lms, while also tracing coherences in the critical practice with which they sought to engage post-war audiences. Among the constants that allow us to view neorealism as something coherent is the search for an anti-rhetorical language with which to redefi ne relations with the people, an imperative that in particular motivated those who had witnessed and even actively engaged in the popular anti-fascist forces. An unprecedented experience of democracy and socio-geographical representation, the Resistance fostered an awareness, fi rst, of the need to reach a social mass that for the fi rst time had claimed the position of a historical agent and, subsequently, to create politically creative art without renouncing the aesthetic uniqueness and spontaneity of the fi rst neorealist works (Asor Rosa 1975a: 1607). These motivations may have proved illusory or defective, but they were nonetheless authentically felt, and they allow us to see why Open City, anchored as it was within the themes and ethics of the popular war for national liberation, achieved the status of a sudden invention and, at the same time, why Obsession may be considered an anti-fascist, but not yet neorealist fi lm insofar as it preceded the fall of fascism and the Resistance. These events had seen the lower classes imposing ‘themselves as protagonists of history and of the destinies of our country’, De Santis wrote in 1951, and assimilating this new reality, the cinema had opened its screens to ‘orphans [. . .] widows [. . .] a suffering and ruffl ed humanity’ (quoted in Fanara 2000: 83). Along

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these lines, Italo Calvino emphasised the oral culture that had evolved among partisans like himself, spreading out through the nation and giving life to the choral, anonymous mode of the neorealist narrative. More than a ‘school’, he wrote in the retrospective preface to his Resistance novel Il sentiero del nido dei ragni (1947), neorealism had been ‘a togetherness of voices, in major parts peripheral, a manifold discovery of the different Italies’ (Calvino 1993: vi). The search for a truthful art conducted as an act of resistance had, as we have seen, engaged fi lmmakers before the armistice and writers since the early 1930s, but not until it emerged from clandestinity and assumed a reborn freedom of speech; a national identity to construct from zero and hopes, however short-lived, of reform and justice, did the thought of renewal manifest itself as a journey of national and cinematic discovery that radically changed perspectives on the nature and scope of cinematic narration.22 Moving from the streets of war and sacrifi ce in Open City, to the quest for freedom that leads from Sicily via Naples, Rome and Florence, to the Po Valley in Paisà and returning to a cultural and existential quest in Naples in Viaggio in Italia, the journey that is illustrated here by Rossellini’s trajectory but that takes multiple paths, alongside, across and far beyond his, proceeds as a socio- geographical investigation and fi nds a constant in the concern of recomposing the landscape and rebuilding the city in relation to processes of modernisation (Shiel 2006: 15). Tracing this act of reclamation and redefi nition through its manifold pathways and common destinations, Italian Neorealist Cinema begins with a discussion of realism as a mode of representation and with an outline of the traditions and critical thought that led towards neorealism, as well as the theoretical refl ections it provoked in the works of Bazin, Zavattini, and Gilles Deleuze. The complexity of the terrain is mapped out further in Chapter 3 through an exploration of Resistance writing and neorealist fi ction, whereas Chapter 4 examines Rossellini’s project of chronicling war-ridden cities in Rome, Open City, Paisà and Germany Year Zero. Chapter 5 follows walks at the margins of the post-war city in De Sica’s Shoeshine, Bicycle Thieves, Umberto D. (1950) and Miracle in Milan (1951; Miracolo a Milano), whereas Visconti’s vision of historical action in country and city is discussed in Chapter 6 with reference to The Earth Trembles, Bellissima (1951), and Senso. Chapter 7 explores fi lms that bring neorealist spaces and practices into contact with conventions of popular genres, focusing on Alberto Lattuada’s Il bandito (1946) and Senza pietà (1948), Pietro Germi’s Gioventù perduta (1947) and Il cammino della speranza (1950) and Giuseppe De Santis’ Bitter Rice and Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi (1950). The dialogue with neorealism leads towards its most immediate as well as its more recent inheritors, moving from Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Pasolini to Lina Wertmüller, Gianni Amelio and Nanni Moretti, among others. In following some of the many ways in which the concretised narratives, anti-heroic characters, dislocated spaces and civic

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engagement have found new life in the works of such very diverse directors, it reinforces the sense of neorealism as having constituted a vast, hybrid and travelling phenomenon that recreates itself through cinematic experimentation and in confrontation with individual or shared struggles as well as the universal human condition.

Notes 1. See Brunetta (1996: 37; 23). The title refers to the fact that although the Holy City had been declared ‘open’ or a demilitarised zone, and the Germans had agreed to maintain this status, as soon as city was occupied in September 1943 it became subject to military command and to Allied bombing. ‘Open city’ subsequently became a slogan of the anti-fascist and popular resistance that Open City celebrates (Forgacs 2000: 33). 2. The historical-pathology thesis is associated with the philosopher Benedetto Croce (1856–1952) – one of few openly non-fascist intellectuals who escaped jail and exile – while the Marxist thesis represents the view of fascism as a universal expression of capitalist forces and bourgeois means of self-preservation, denying the quintessentially Italian and anti-bourgeois revolution that fascism often presented itself as (Gentile 2002: 36–7). 3. The loss of collective memory that Brunetta describes was far from exclusive to the cinema (2001a: 359–60). The major voice of consciousness with regard to the country’s fascist past and to past compromises belongs, as ever, to Cesare Zavattini whose writings will be studied more closely in Chapter 2. A few months after Rome was liberated, he called for a collective confession as the start to a new cinema: ‘All the same, it is not a question about liquidating demagogically the work of twenty years but to identify what our individual sins were [. . .] we will not load onto fascism all individual responsibilities [. . .] We no longer have the right to be hypocritical and poverty will provide us with all privileges’ (2002: 663–4). 4. Spurred by the post-1968 climate and contemporary cultural debates, the revision- ing of fascism that took place in the 1970s involved historians, social scientists and cultural critics, as well as a community of fi lmmakers and critics whose ‘paradigm shift’ was marked by a convention held in 1974 in Pesaro, which confronted both the many continuities that exist between fi lms made during and after fascism, and the nature and shortcomings of neorealism itself (Farassino 1989a: 22). In the cinema, which after the war had approached fascism in various, mostly stereotypi- cal ways, and with scarce historical analysis, the 1970s saw a tendency to evoke the past for the parallels it offered to the present (Zinni 2010: 179–237). This connection will be illustrated with reference to Lina Wertmüller in Chapter 8. 5. For recent works on the cinema during fascism, see in particular Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garofalo (ed.) (2002), Re-Viewing Fascism. Italian Cinema, 1922–1943, and Steven Ricci (2008), Cinema and Fascism. Italian Film and Society 1922–1943. 6. For studies of the Duce’s status as ‘divo’ see Gundle (2000) and Brunetta (2001a: 110–11). Vittorio Mussolini discusses both his father’s viewing habits and his awareness that the scarce success of the only truly fascist fi lms produced during the ventennio – Camicia nera (Forzano 1933), Vecchia guardia (Blasetti 1934) and also Il grande apello (Camerini and Soldati 1936) – proved the people’s low tolerance for propaganda (quoted in Faldini and Fofi 1979: 22; 32). 7. Besides De Santis (quoted in Faldini and Fofi 1979: 42), among the students of the Centro Sperimentale we also fi nd Michelangelo Antonioni, Pietro Germi and Carlo Lizzani, as well as critics and actors such as Gianni Puccini, Mario Alicata,

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Leopoldo Trieste and Alida Valli. Several others who were not enrolled in the school, such as Visconti, took part in its cultural exchanges and debates (Faldini and Fofi 1979: 40–7). 8. Whereas italianità evoked the singularity and self-suffi ciency of Italy’s imperial past, Gentile’s idea of the loyal and consistent uomo fascista drew on Nietzsche’s Übermensch and aimed at producing soldiers and workers: ‘the ideal fascist man is the Black Shirt. He is the soldier ready to risk everything [. . .] he aspires to become Mussolini’s new Italian who corresponds to the great, dynamic fatherland . . .’ (Gentile 2000: 264). 9. I have explored this topic in ‘The “I” and the “We” in Mussolini’s Bread and Circuses: Performing a Fascist Communitas’, La Fusta. Journal of Italian Studies, Fall, 2006: 53–66. The Duce’s speeches are published in Benito Mussolini (1959), Opera Omnia, ed. Edoardo Susmel and Duilio Susmel, 36 vols, Firenze: La Fenice; and U. Hoepli (1934), Scritti e discorsi, Dal 1932–1933, Milano: U. Hoepli; or can be viewed in Balconi e canoni: i discorsi di Mussolini. Istituto LUCE, 1990. 10. The concepts of ‘strapaese’ and ‘stracittà’ are dealt with in Franco Masiero’s 1975 article (‘Strapaese e stracittà’ in Problemi: Periodico Trimestrale di Cultura, 44: 260–90), and, more recently, in Ben-Ghiat (2001: 26–7). Anti-bourgeois tendencies were recurrent not only within singular nationalist and fascist writers and ideologists, among whom may be included the Duce himself, but also within offi cial fascist organs such as the periodical, Il Bargello which in particular attracted young intellectuals (Asor Rosa 1975b: 111). 11. The collaboration of the privileged middle class was essential to fascism from its beginnings in the 1920s when the fascist squadristi (armed squads) were set up to suppress popular insurrections that emerged following World War I in rural communities as well as in the northern cities (Gentile 2002: 11–12). In relation to the lower middle classes, the regime introduced economic redistribution that guaranteed a fi xed income and permanent social distinction from the proletariat (Candela 2003: 24). 12. Renzo De Felice’s understanding of the Ethiopian war as Mussolini’s ‘political masterpiece’ was grounded in the consensus it allegedly met within the public (De Felice 1974: 642). 13. Rossellini’s statement dates back to 1952 (1987b: 85) – decades before critics started to explore the ‘Fascist War Trilogy’ and its continuity with his neorealist fi lms (Rondolino 1989; Bondanella 2004); and, as Ben-Ghiat has recently demonstrated (2000), with fi lms such as Luciano Serra, pilota (Alessandrini 1938) to which he contributed as scriptwriter and assistant director. Reception has otherwise ranged from Visconti’s insistence on separating Rossellini’s ‘fascist fi lms’ from other pre-neorealist cinema (quoted in Faldini and Fofi 1979: 67) to Gallagher’s assessment of their opposition to fascist ideals (1998: 72). 14. The division of the fi lm into a ‘documentary’ fi rst half, where montage editing is frequently used, and the sentimental storyline in the second half refl ects the dual contribution to the fi lm by De Robertis and Rossellini respectively (Faldini and Fofi 1979: 60; Bondanella 2004). 15. One of these was a script based on Verga’s epistolary story about a woman’s relation to a brigand in L’amante di Gramigna (1880), but Cultural Minster Alessandro Pavoloni had had ‘Enough of these brigands!’ (Faldini and Fofi 1979: 61). 16. The negatives of Obsession were confi scated by Nazi forces along with other pre- cious fi lms and equipment stored at Cinecittà and the version we see today is a copy Visconti had made for himself (1976a). 17. Having enjoyed brief distribution before Mussolini’s arrest in 1943, Obsession

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and Children were shown in cut versions in Venice during the Salò Republic, but both lacked publicity due to the cancellation of the Venice Film Festival that year and once they were screened in Rome after the Liberation, they could not rival the immediate popularity of Open City. Both were re-released between 1948–50 along with Four Steps and other pre-war fi lms that somehow seemed to anticipate neorealist cinema, including the popular comedies Avanti c’è posto (Bonnard, 1942) and Campo de’ fi ori (Bonnard, 1943), both of which starred Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi, as well as remakes of the Neapolitan silent fi lms Assunta Spina (Mattoli; 1948; originally Serena, 1915) and Sperduti nel buio (Mastrocinque, 1947; originally Martoglio, 1914), which had been destroyed during the German occupation (Lughi 1989: 54–8). 18. See Jane Slaughter (1997), Women and the Italian Resistance, 1943–1945, Denver: Arden Press, 33. Corni (2000; 164) estimates that 9,000 men were actively fi ghting in the winter of 1943–4 and the following year the number had grown to 12,000– 13,000. The largest faction of the armed Resistance was the Communist Garibaldi brigade. See also Cooke (2011: 6). 19. See Corni 2000: 165. Carlo Roselli’s famous motto ‘Oggi in Spagna, domani in Italia’ (‘In Spain today, in Italy tomorrow’), suggests both what a formative, anti- fascist experience the Spanish Civil War was for young Italians and the continuity in solidarity, modes of warfare and objectives to be achieved that connected the two Resistance movements. 20. See Micciché (1999b: 20–2). Christopher Wagstaff has usefully observed that, while most of the critically acclaimed neorealist fi lms individually failed at the box offi ce, as a group, they did no worse and at times better than generic groups such as melodrama and comedy (2007: 18). 21. See Grignaffi ni (1989: 42). As will be shown more clearly in Chapter 5, in 1947 the Under Secretary of Culture Giulio Andreotti reintroduced censorship and preven- tive review commissions as practiced during fascism. The objective was to discour- age producers, who freely presented scripts to the commissions, from investing money in projects that would later face obstacles from censors and, in the worst of cases, not be granted release permission. The infamous Andreotti laws, which also had a fascist precedent promised incentives to artistically qualifi ed fi lms on the basis of their box-offi ce profi t (Grignaffi ni 1989: 40–2). 22. Initially presented in Zavattini’s writings (2002), the view of neorealism as a journey of national rediscovery is elaborated in Melanco (1996); Brunetta (1996); and in Fanara (2000: 101) and post-neorealist continuities of this discovery are discussed in Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema (Steimatsky 2008).

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Cover design: River Design, Edinburgh by WillHigbee Cover design: River Design, Edinburgh Jacket image:The Devil’s Backbone Jacket image:The Devil’s Backbone will higbee © Canal+Espana/The Kobal Collection © Canal+Espana/The Kobal Collection Edinburgh University Press Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF barcode Edinburgh 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF barcode Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com www.euppublishing.com ISBN 0 7486 3638 9 ISBN 0 7486 3638 9 Macintosh HD:Users:Raydens:Public:RAYDENS IMAC JOBS:14123 - EUP - HIGBEE:HIGBEE 9780748640041 PRINT

2. THE (MAGHREBI-)FRENCH CONNECTION: DIASPORA GOES MAINSTREAM

In many respects, and with few notable exceptions, Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking in France during the 1980s and 1990s has been characterised in both critical and academic discourse by notions of peripheral and auteur-led modes of production and limited exposure to niche audiences, not to mention struggles relating to funding, distribution and exhibition (Bluher 2001). The films have often been treated by academics and critics as a kind of socio-cultural document, rather than an entertainment ‘product’ aimed at mass audiences: a cinema more of interest to sociologists, journalists and academics as a reflection of contemporary socio-political realities facing North African immigrants and their French-born descendants than to producers in search of popular box-office success. This conception has been further endorsed by a broader scholarly analysis of diasporic, exilic or postcolonial filmmaking in the West over the past decade focusing on inter- stitial, experimental, marginal or hybrid cinema (Naficy 2001; Marks 2000; Berghahn and Sternberg 2010). Of course, the image that has emerged of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking of the 1980s and 1990s in academic and critical discourse is grounded in the very real difficulties that many of these filmmakers have experienced in securing funding as well as adequate distribution for their work – a fact that has restricted audiences for and thwarted the wider ambitions of a number of these filmmakers. Even Abdellatif Kechiche, whose films have garnered a string of awards as well as in the case of La Graine et le mulet (Kechiche, 2007) over one million spectators in France, has spoken of

26 the maghrebi-french connection the difficulties he has confronted in securing funding for his films even after the breakthrough success of L’Esquive (Kechiche, 2004):

It’s true that there’s racism in France and sometimes it’s quite flagrant. But I think that it’s more a matter of a certain milieu that owns cultural property and doesn’t want to loosen its grip on this sort of ownership. It’s a privilege to make movies and function within an artistic environment and this milieu doesn’t want to give up its privileges.[. . .] This surfaced in certain rather aggressive attacks against the film. (Kechiche in Porton 2005: 4)

One way to explain the apparent marginalisation of much Maghrebi-French and North African émigré audiences from mainstream production and distribution networks is to view these filmmakers as belonging to a transitional mode of production, defined by Marks as ‘intercultural’ cinema (2000: 2–5) that is largely oppositional in its politics as well as experimental in its aesthetic practice and representation of displacement and hybridity. However, with the exception of earlier short films shot on video by beur directors such as Farida Belghoul (C’est madame la France que tu préfères? [1981]; Le Départ du père [1983]) or the work produced by the more militant Collectif Mohammed in response to police violence in the banlieue, Maghrebi-French and Algerian émigré filmmakers have preferred to work within relatively conventional approaches to narrative, mise en scène and genre. The social realist drama, often based around an episodic narrative, is by far the most common mode employed by these filmmakers in the 1980s and 1990s, for example Le Thé au harem d’Archimède (Charef, 1985), Bâton Rouge (Bouchareb, 1985), Miss Mona (Charef, 1987), Cheb (Bouchareb, 1991), Hexagone (Chibane, 1994), and Bye-bye (Dridi, 1995). Comedy – the popular French genre, par excellence – has also emerged as a genre of choice, particularly amongst Algerian émigré directors (see, for example, the work of Bahloul, Allouache and above all Zemmouri), as well as amongst Maghrebi-French directors such as Chibane and Bensalah. All of these directors use a consensual approach to the genre, employing comedy as a means of drawing attention to the ridiculous nature of many prejudices and stereotypes held against the North African immigrant population by certain sections of French society, while relishing the opportunities offered by the comedic mode to subvert received opinions through laughter. Indeed, it is important to note that, in terms of box-office results, the most successful films at reaching a broad audience in the 1990s were indeed comedies. The most important of these is arguably Bensalah’s Le Ciel, les oiseaux et . . . ta mère! (1999), a low-budget comedy that was a surprise hit at the French box-office. The film not only launched the screen career of Maghrebi-French star Jamel

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Debbouze and director Bensalah, but it also effectively established a pathway via mainstream genre (comedy) and the use of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré stars who were popular with youth audiences to secure a place within mainstream cinema of the 2000s. Arguably the most consistently commercially successful Maghrebi-French filmmaker working in France today, Bensalah’s co-option into the mainstream is not without its complications due to the reductive and essentialised stereotypes of both majority and ethnic minority French protagonists often found in his comedies. An analysis of Bensalah’s prominent position in the industry in the 2000s later in this chapter will therefore allow us to consider how far Stuart Hall’s assertion (1996: 468) that there is always ‘a price of incorporation to be paid when the cutting edge of difference and transgression is blunted into spectacularisation’ holds true in relation to the mainstreaming of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking in the 2000s.

La Guerre de la culture de masse: (Re-)defining Mainstream Culture in France In English, ‘mainstream’ denotes a prevailing direction or dominant norm in terms of opinion, political ideology, popular taste or representation. As a descriptive term, it is associated with the groups, individuals, demographics, institutions, creative personnel or organisations that reside in this space of the dominant norm and can be applied to pretty much anything: from music, literature and film to politics and education. In a cinematic context, it can apply to both representation (standard codes in editing, lighting, narrative conventions, sound design, genre and so on) and to industrial practices of production, distribution and exhibition. Above all, it suggests a conventional, commercially minded approach that has broad popular appeal and is neither experimental in its style nor oppositional or subversive in its politics. As such, mainstream shares common ground with terms such as ‘popular’ and ‘middlebrow’, although these various labels are not synonymous with one another. The middlebrow certainly can be mainstream, for example, the massive popularity of the heritage film in France during the 1980s and 1990s. However, the mainstream is not necessarily middlebrow insomuch as it is not exclusively concerned with fusing elements of high and low culture for an audience with middle-class aspirations. While the terms ‘mainstream’ and ‘popular’ are, arguably, more analogous, they also require certain nuanced distinctions to be made. Like mainstream, popular cinema can also be deemed a commercial cinema, in the sense of films that are viewed by mass audiences and have broad box-office appeal. However, as Dyer and Vincendeau remind us (1992: 4), the popular also has an anthropological meaning more closely related to folk culture as an

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expression of the traditions, values and experiences of the people. In contrast, the mainstream connotes a commercial imperative that looks towards a globalised mass culture to define its aesthetics and narrative form as well as modes of production and distribution more than it does to the traditions and values of one specific nation or people. The second way in which the idea of the mainstream intersects with the popular is found in the dismissive or derogatory notion of forms of mass entertainment culture aimed at the widest possible audience and with little intellectual, creative or artistic merit. For his part, Hall (1981, 232–3) suggests that there is ‘no whole, authentic autonomous popular culture’: not only does our notion of what constitutes popular culture change as a result of the historical and socio-political context in which it is experienced, but also cultural indus- tries have the power to rework and reshape what they represent; imposing definitions (ideological positionings or cultural representations) of ourselves and others that fit more easily with the dominant societal norm. This is the way in which the French film industry has traditionally distinguished its artistic quality (as an artisanal, auteur-led cinema) against the ‘crass’ popular spectacle of Hollywood blockbusters (see Karmitz in Martel 2010). Such a description is, of course, a gross oversimplification of the multifaceted nature of French cinema production, which has its own mainstream or popular sector in which genres, stars and big budget spectacle are employed in the market place in an attempt to compete with Hollywood at the box-office (Frodon 1995: 692–4). This type of cinema, most recently labelled as a cinéma des producteurs, has been revitalised at the French box-office since the early 2000s (Ciment 2000; Higbee 2005: 297–307). As this chapter aims to illustrate, as writers, directors, producers and stars, Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers have played a significant role in this recent revival of popular or mainstream French cinema. If the term mainstream is relatively anodyne in English, its recent appearance and application in France has proved more controversial. As a conceptual term, le mainstream – there is, significantly, no French translation – gained public attention in France with the publication in 2010 of Mainstream: enquête sur une culture qui plait à tout le monde by Frédéric Martel, a journalist, researcher and former diplomat to the US. The arguments about mainstream culture in France proposed in the book, which became a bestseller in 2010, were widely debated in the French media, including articles and reviews in Libération and Le Monde, interviews and discussions of the book on radio stations such as France Culture, and an appearance by the author on France 3’s flagship book review show Un Livre Un Jour. The influential weekly culture magazine Les Inrockuptibles devoted its front cover and a ten-page article to Martel’s project (see figure 2.1) to coincide with the book’s publication. One of the few negative reviews of the book, by François Cusset, a French professor of

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Figure 2.1 Cover of Les Inrockuptibles, which included a special dossier on Martel’s Mainstream (2010).

American history, published in Le Nouvel Observateur (Cusset 2010), resulted in a very public and highly personal media spat between Martel and Cusset. The essential thrust of Martel’s argument is that the mainstream represents both the dominant current within a given culture (one that has mass popular appeal) and one that produces content with a ‘standardised diversity’. It is this standardised diversity, along with advances in communication and digital technologies, that allows mainstream culture to be disseminated today on unprecedented levels; a form of global mass culture that can reach, but also be transformed by, local audiences across the globe. While Martel argues that much of the formula for production and content is derived from American popular culture (he uses Hollywood as a key example in his study) he does not suggest that this is simply a case of the American domination of a global monoculture. Instead, he identifies the existence of multiple mainstreams – a simultaneous homogenisation and heterogenisation of mainstream culture, formed via a series of production hubs from which cultural content is exported regionally and globally.1 Mainstream is also a manifestation of ‘soft power’ in action: the potential of mass cultural forms to influence, inform and shape ideas and attitudes of society without force or coercion. Martel sees Europe (and France in particular), or at least the policy-makers, gatekeepers and artists who hold considerable influence over cultural production in Europe, as unwilling or unable to fully embrace his understanding of a global mainstream

30 the maghrebi-french connection culture. The antidote to this elitist, anti-mainstream environment, in Martel’s opinion, comes in part from the cultural works produced by non-European immigrants and their descendants, which he sees as one of the key drivers for much of this globalised mainstream culture and the means by which Europe ‘can become once again a more dynamic society which is open to the rest of the world’ (Martel 2010: 439). There are, of course, limitations to Martel’s approach. He repeatedly speaks of the complexity and local variation of a global mainstream culture but is prone to broad and sweeping generalisations of how this mainstream culture functions and develops. Moreover, his analysis largely sidesteps the issues of how such mainstream culture is for the most part produced, disseminated and consumed within a neoliberal system (of either advanced or emerging capitalist economies) that creates massive imbalances of economic power, political influence and cultural capital. Similarly, his view of mainstream culture outside of Europe as unproblematically and wholly embracing immigrant culture needs nuancing to say the least. Nevertheless, Martel’s idea of mainstream culture as locally grounded and globally connected, his application of the concept of soft power which potentially makes the mainstream a site of negotiation and contestation between centre and margin, as well as his insistence on the importance of immigrant or diasporic culture to the development of a dynamic cultural landscape in Europe all offer useful starting points for an analysis of this apparent move towards the mainstream for North African émigré and Maghrebi-French filmmakers in France in the 2000s.

Bidding for the Mainstream in the 2000s An analysis of production, distribution and exhibition trends in French cinema of the 2000s reveals that there are, broadly speaking, three areas associated with Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers. The first finds these filmmakers and their films marginalised in relation to access to funding and distribution. The majority of Maghrebi-French or North African émigré filmmakers who work on medium- to low-budget features, where the focus tends to be on social realist, episodic narratives, or low-budget comedies that focus almost exclusively on the North African diaspora in France (for example Zemmouri, Bahloul and Chibane), can be placed in this category. The second area is the middle ground, or what has recently been termed the cinéma du milieu, the domain of medium-sized budget, auteur-led productions that have potential to crossover to a more substantial audience (Vanderschelden 2009). Here the emphasis is on the artisanal and the artistic vision of the auteur, in the mould of a filmmaker such as Abdellatif Kechiche – whose output in the 2000s will be analysed in detail in Chapter 4. The first two categories outlined above essentially encompass similar

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practices and positions occupied by Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers in the 1980s and 1990s. In contrast, the 2000s have seen the emergence of a third, more mainstream space for a limited but nonetheless significant number of filmmakers of Maghrebi origin. This concerns a group of films, directors and actors (some of whom have now obtained star status) who have enjoyed notable and continued success at the French box-office throughout the 2000s; a success that far outweighs the number of filmmakers involved. These include stars such as Gad Elmaleh and Jamel Debbouze and directors such as Rachid Bouchareb and Djamel Bensalah. This movement towards the mainstream has already been acknowledged by a range of academics: Tarr (2005), Hargreaves (2011), Waldron (2007), Vanderschelden (2005) and Austin (2003). However, such analysis has tended to be confined to a specific actor, star or film. A more comprehensive and systematic study of the statistical data relating to production, distribution and exhibition in the 2000s – such as that proposed by this chapter – reveals that, rather than a few isolated successes, it is indeed possible to speak of a qualitative and sustained move to the mainstream for a group of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers. If we refer to the figures in Table 2.1 that relate to distribution and box- office statistics, we find that between 1999 and 2010 nine films written, directed by or starring filmmakers of North African origin attracted more than one million spectators at the box-office including: Le Raïd (Bensalah, 2001) 1 456 267; Chouchou (Allouache, 2003) 3 876 572; Indigènes (Bouchareb, 2006) 3 069 888; Neuilly sa mère! (La Ferrière, 2009) 2 526 475; and Coco (Elmaleh, 2010) 3 008 677. Moreover, four of the films listed attracted more than four million spectators. Evidence of this mainstream appeal is further supported by the respective box-office ranking of these films in Table 2.1. In virtually every year of the 2000s a film directed by or starring Maghrebi-French or North African émigré filmmakers is placed in the top 10 most popular French films of the year, with more films arriving in the top 20 (see Table 2.1). This consistent presence at the top of the box-office is even more impressive when it is understood that, since 1999, no more than eight features produced or co- produced in France by directors of Maghrebi origin have been released in any given year. With the exception of La Graine et le mulet, 1 007 254 spectators in France, which is quite clearly an auteur-led independent production and therefore not included in the tables below, the films listed in Tables 2.1 and 2.2 are overwhelmingly identified with mainstream modes of cinematic production, distribution and marketing. While box-office results can offer a crude indication of mainstream success, such figures are, on their own, insufficient to accurately explain the level of market penetration and sustained popularity enjoyed by any given film. A comparative analysis of box-office figures contained in Table 2.1 (for example,

32 Table 2.1 Mainstream distribution and exhibition of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers in the 2000s.

Title Year Director/star/producer Distributor Spectators Prints Spectators per (of Maghrebi origin) (France) (rank)* (France) print (France) Le Ciel, les oiseaux et . . . ta 1999 Bensalah (dir.) Ocean Films 1 224 936 (11) 128 9 570 mère! Debbouze (star) Taxi 2 2000 Naceri (star) ARP 10 349 454 (1) 831 12 454 Le Raïd 2002 Bensalah (dir.) GBVI 1 456 267 (14) 619 2 353 Zem (star) Chouchou 2003 Allouache (dir.) Warner 3 876 572 (2) 402 9 643 Elmaleh (star) Taxi 3 2003 Naceri (star) ARP 6 151 691 (1) 969 6 348 Il était une fois dans l’oued 2005 Bensalah (dir.) Gaumont 893 437 (20) 266 3 359 Indigènes 2006 Bouchareb (dir.) Mars 3 069 888 (8) 460 6 674 Debbouze (star and producer) Zem (star) Naceri (star) Bouajila (star) Mauvaise foi 2006 Zem (dir. and star) Wild Bunch 789 733 (27) 250 3 656 Distribution Taxi 4 2007 Naceri (star) ARP 4 562 928 (2) 867 5 263 Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis 2008 Boon (dir. and star) Pathé 20 489 155 (1) 793 25 838 Merad (star) Neuilly sa mère! 2009 Bensalah (writer and producer) UGC 2 526 475(5) 389 6 497 Coco 2010 Elmaleh (dir. and star) StudioCanal 3 008 677 (4) 871 3 454 Hors-la-loi 2010 Bouchareb (dir.) StudioCanal 461 613 (44) 400 1 079 Debbouze (star) Zem (star) Bouajila (star)

Source: CBO cine-chiffres [www.cbo.fr] *Indicates ranking within all French films released in that year. Macintosh HD:Users:Raydens:Public:RAYDENS IMAC JOBS:14123 - EUP - HIGBEE:HIGBEE 9780748640041 PRINT for French productions in the same year 2.7 2.60 3.08 3.08 3.06 1.49 6.46 5.01 4.06 4.9 Budget ( € m) Median budget ( € m)

14.52 2.82

10.95 3.40

14.5 3.99 20.55 3.99 Genre Comedy/teen romance Action comedy 10.7 2.91 Action comedy 17.71 2.82 Action comedy 13.67 2.60 Comedy Comedy War film Romantic comedy Action comedy 15.38 3.08 Comedy Comedy Comedy Thriller/historical drama (of Maghrebi origin) Debbouze (star) Naceri (star) Zem (star) Elmaleh (star) Bensalah (dir.) Bouchareb (dir.) Debbouze (star and producer) Zem (star) Naceri (star) Bouajila (star) Naceri (star) Merad (star) Bensalah (writer and producer) Elmaleh (dir. & star) Debbouze (star) Zem (star) Bouajila (star) Year Director/star/producer 1999 Bensalah (dir.) 2000 2002 Bensalah (dir.) 2003 Naceri (star) 2003 Allouache (dir.) 2005 2006 2006 Zem (dir. and star) 2007 2008 Boon (dir. and star) 2009 2010 2010 Bouchareb (dir.) . ta mère!

Mainstream production of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking in the 2000s.

Table 2.2 Title Le Ciel, les oiseaux et . Taxi 2 Le Raïd Taxi 3 Chouchou Il était une fois dans l’oued Indigènes Mauvaise foi Taxi 4 Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis Neuilly sa mère! Coco Hors-la-loi Source: CBO cine-chiffres [www.cbo.fr] and CNC [www.cnc.fr]. the maghrebi-french connection numbers of spectators and ranking) against all films released in France during the same year, combined with information about distribution (the number of prints that a film is released on; average number of spectators per print) provide a more detailed evaluation of a given film’s relative success. It also provides an indication of the extent to which these films are considered by both distributors and exhibitors as mainstream product. For example, com- paring a combination of the figures in Table 2.1 and Table 2.2 as they relate to budget, box-office and average number of spectators per print, we see that Neuilly sa mère! (2009), scripted and produced by Djamel Bensalah, attracted over 2.5 million spectators, placing it fifth in the ranking for French films of that year, and was distributed in extremely favourable conditions on nearly 400 prints nationwide, averaging a considerable 6 497 spectators per print. This impressive set of scores is further enhanced by the fact that the film was produced for a relatively modest budget of €4.9m, making Neuilly sa mère! profitable for both its distributors and the film’s producers, since the film’s relatively modest budget obviously lowers the risk of recuperating production costs. In contrast, Hors-la-loi (Bouchareb 2010) had a budget of €20.55m, was released on a total of 400 prints, though only attracted just over 400 000 spectators – clearly a less profitable release for its producers and distributors. And yet, despite the relative commercial failure of Hors-la-loi, particularly when compared to Bouchareb’s other historical epic, Indigènes, the film’s production budget and distribution conditions clearly show that Hors-la-loi was operating within the structures of mainstream production and distribution. Put differently, producers and distributors in the French industry were confident that there was a market for this kind of film amongst a mainstream cinema audience in France. This issue of exactly which distribution and production companies are backing films by Maghrebi-French and North African émigré directors is an important one, as the example of Bensalah’s second feature, Le Raïd, shows. Following the crossover success of Le Ciel, writer/director Djamel Bensalah obtained funding from Gaumont for a far more expensive action comedy that attempted to emulate the successful formula established in his debut feature: rapid-fire humour grounded largely in the street culture of the cité and a comedy narrative focusing on a young, multi-ethnic male cast forced to adapt to unfamiliar surroundings. However, instead of a trip to the Cote d’Azur, in Le Raïd, the banlieue youths are mistakenly hired as assassins to carry out a hit on a wealthy Canadian heiress. The heiress is involved in a televised adventure game show (Le Raïd of the film’s title) that provides the perfect excuse for lavish spectacle and action sequences, as the incompetent assassins journey from the housing projects of the neuf-trois to the jungles and mountains of South America in pursuit of their ‘target’. Despite a hefty €17.71m budget, exotic locations and lavish production values, the far-fetched

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narrative and reductive misogynistic humour of Le Raïd was poorly received by French critics who had previously embraced Le Ciel. Nevertheless, the film still managed to attract 1 456 267 spectators in France, higher than the audiences for Le Ciel. However, this apparent success must be seen in relation to the weight that was placed behind the film through access to Gaumont’s mainstream distribution channels that saw the film released on 619 prints in cinemas across France, compared to 128 for Le Ciel. Thus while the average number of spectators for Le Ciel is far higher (9 570 compared to 2 353 for Le Raïd), overall audience figures for the latter are higher, largely because of the distribution conditions. Further analysis of the data for Le Raïd’s box-office performance seems to support this observation. After the second week interest was already waning in the film, an indication that success at the box-office had been greatly assisted by the distribution and marketing mechanisms in place behind the Le Raïd, rather than a growth of audience numbers as the result of favourable reviews or audience recommendations. Moreover, if we combine figures for average number of spectators per print with the overall production budgets for both films, Le Ciel appears on balance to be the more commercially successful film. Figures for production budgets of the films listed in Table 2.2 offer a further justification fordefining certain Maghrebi-French and North African émigré authored films from the 2000s as mainstream features. With the exception of Le Ciel all of the films listed are above the median budget, in some cases four or five times above – thus placing them in the top 15 to 20 per cent of French production in terms of their funding, according to annual data on production published online from the Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC). Even if a relatively small group of filmmakers re-appears across this list (Bensalah, Bouchareb, Debbouze, Naceri, Elmaleh) such a sustained presence at the centre of the industry was unheard of for Maghrebi-French filmmakers in the 1980s and 1990s, confirming a qualitative (if selective) movement towards mainstream French production. This is not to say, however, that such crossover success in the 2000s is solely due to elevated production budgets and improved channels for distribution – as important as these elements undoubt- edly are. A closer inspection of the genres of the films listed in Table 2.2 reveals that the majority are either comedies or a comedy hybrid, for example Taxi 2 and Le Raïd are action comedies, while Mauvaise foi (Zem, 2006) is a romantic comedy. A number of factors explain this bias towards comedy, not least the overall popularity of the genre in France. In this respect, the preference for comedy serves as a further indication that these Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers are now located, and choosing to locate themselves, within mainstream production trends of French cinema. There is also, of course, the fact that comedies, in comparison to other genres such as the

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heritage film or action movie, are relatively cheap to produce. Often the biggest expense for a comedy will come in the fees paid to established stars appearing in these films. Thus, Le Ciel capitalises on Jamel Debbouze’s existing celebrity status and young fan base outside of cinema (as a comic and TV/radio presenter) to ensure his collaboration in a low-budget comedy film, prior to his rise in the 2000s to a position of considerable influence in French film industry. Finally, this preponderance of comedy films reflects the fact that many of the biggest Maghrebi-French stars of the 2000s, such as Jamel Debbouze, Gad Elmaleh and Danny Boon (like Smaïn before them in the 1980s) began their careers as stand-up comics. Indeed, in the case of Boon and Debbouze, these Maghrebi-French stars have adapted characters and successful stage acts from their stand-up comedy shows into their films, as was the case for Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis, Chouchou and Coco. That said, we must also acknowledge that comedy is not unique to these more mainstream filmmakers of Maghrebi origin and has been employed by a variety of directors across French cinema since at least the mid-1980s as a means of more subversive social commentary around issues of ethnicity and cultural difference. Indeed some of the most successful French comedies of the 1980s and 1990s directed by majority ethnic French directors – Les Keufs (Balasko, 1987); Romuald et Juliette (Serreau, 1989); Blac mic mac (Gilou, 1986) – have explored similar issues of immigration, integration, multiculturalism and difference, albeit from a quite different perspective (Tarr 1997: 67, 72). For these directors, comedy may be the preferred vehicle for discussing these potentially sensitive issues since, for the most part, comic films remain ideologically ambivalent as part of a genre that is ‘mimetic of social reality and yet distanced from it’ (Vincendeau 2001a: 24). French comedies of the 1990s and 2000s are thus able to address social issues affecting France’s ethnic minorities that rarely appear elsewhere in mainstream genre cinema. At its best, comedy becomes a means for challenging and subverting the societal norm. At its worst, it falls back on crude and problematic stereotypes; and Maghrebi-French or North African émigré filmmakers are not necessarily immune to such crude stereotyping, as the later detailed analysis of Neuilly sa mère! will demonstrate. Returning to Table 2.2, we can also see that genre plays a further role in deter- mining funding (the size of budgets) in the sense that certain genres will almost require larger budgets due to the kind of stories they are telling and the type of spectacle they aim to provide for audiences. In both Indigiènes and Hors-la-loi the epic nature of the transnational historical narratives that these films bring to the screen (the Allied liberation of southern Europe from Nazi occupation; the French massacre of Algerians in Sétif) obviously requires a considerable amount of capital. This is not to say that films dealing with history cannot be made on smaller budgets – see for example Les Sacrifiés (Touita, 1982),

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Inch’allah dimanche (Benguigui, 2001); Vivre au paradis (Guerdjou, 1999) and more recently Les Chants de Mandarin (Ameur-Zaïmeche, 2012). However, in general, such films are forced to focus on more localised, individual narratives (the arrival of an immigrant family in a provincial French town; life in the bidonville of Nanterre; the activities of a small band of outlaws in eighteenth- century France) in order to engage with their historical subject matter. The overwhelming majority of the films listed in Tables 2.1 and 2.2 have thus ensured access to mainstream audiences by virtue of conventional production and distribution practices. Virtually all are taken to market by mainstream distributors such as Pathé, Gaumont, ARP, UGC and Studiocanal, who can secure favourable conditions for the release of their films. In this context another telling statistic from Tables 2.1 and 2.2 relates to the number of prints on which these films are released. With the exception of Le Ciel, all of the films listed have benefited from distribution on more than 200 prints; a privileged position enjoyed by only 25 per cent of the 500 to 580 films distributed in France each year according to data provided by the CNC (2012). The very fact that this group of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré films can secure such favourable conditions for distribution suggests two things. Firstly, that exhibitors and distributors in France now believe there is a mainstream market for certain films starring and directed by Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers – a position that was largely unthinkable in the 1980s and even 1990s. Secondly, it confirms that a select group of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers have themselves established a place within the mainstream, not only as directors, but also as producers and stars. It is to the rise of the Maghrebi-French star in the 2000s that we shall now turn our attention.

From the Cité to the Croisette: The Fabulous Destiny of Maghrebi- French and North African Émigré Stars in the 2000s Although ‘French cinema has been slow to acknowledge the ethnic diversity of the [French] population’ (Vincendeau 2000: 41), as Guy Austin correctly asserts: ‘this is not to say that ethnicity is not at stake in the images of French film stars’ (Austin 2003: 92). As Dyer argues, ‘to represent people is to represent bodies’ (Dyer 1997: 14). Screen actors and film stars, due to the devotion and fascination that they arouse amongst audiences, connect and are more directly associated with the representations (or indeed mis-representations) of ethnicity that they embody than is the case for the ethnic-minority director behind the camera. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a select group of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré screen actors struggled to establish a presence on French screens. A common complaint from these actors, as outlined by Abdellatif Kechiche in an interview from 2007, was of a dearth of

38 the maghrebi-french connection roles beyond the stereotype of immigrant, delinquent or criminalised Other (Lalanne et Fevret 2007). And yet, even during this period, French cinema already had its first beur star in the form of Isabel Adjani, the French-born daughter of an Algerian-immigrant father and German-immigrant mother. Attracting box-office success and critical acclaim, including César awards and an Oscar nomination, Adjani was ‘the French star of the 1980s’, with a star image characterised by dark hair but pale porcelain skin and pale blue eyes (Austin 2003: 97–100). Despite (belated) public declarations of her Algerian origins, prompted by a ‘hysterical negotiation of her star image’ in the late 1980s, as well as limited attempts to link her on-screen star image to her ethnicity, such as Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran (Dupeyronm, 2003), Adjani’s star image has been ‘recuperated’ by French audiences and critics since the 1990s in a way that de-emphasises ethnicity, or rather replaces a marked (Arab) ethnicity with a star ethnicity of the ‘unmarked kind: visible whiteness, stellar luminescence’ (Austin 2003: 100–5). If Adjani was the first beur film star, she is also notable as the first and still the only (at the time of writing) female star of Maghrebi immigrant origin in France.2 The situation of male actors of North African origin is, however, quite different. A list of the twenty most commercially successful actors of the 2000s – compiled by CBO Box-Office3 and based on the cumulative number of spectators for all the films that they have appeared in over the decade – includes no less that five male actors of Maghrebi-origin: Kad Merad (born Kaddour Merad, in Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria); Danny Boon (born Daniel Hamidou to a father of Kabyle origin and a French mother); Samy Naceri (born in Paris to an Algerian father and French mother); Zinedine Soualem (French of Algerian origin); and Gad Elmaleh (a Jewish Moroccan émigré), with Jamel Debbouze and Roschdy Zem a little further down the list at numbers 25 and 27 respectively. Given that they only measure box-office success, the CBO listings are, on their own, insufficient to indicate star status in the more traditional sense of the persona or myth developed by a given screen actor that is ‘composed of an amalgam of their screen image and their private identities, which the audience recognises and expects from film to film, and which in turn determines the parts they play’ (Vincendeau 2000: 7). In this respect, we might say that the only actors who truly approach consideration as screen stars are Debbouze, Naceri, Elmaleh and possibly Zem. Nevertheless, as the notion of stardom in French culture has become more ambiguous, applied across a range of popular cultural forms and increasingly confused with celebrity in recent years (Austin 2003: 2; Vanderschelden 2005: 62), the statistics offered by the CBO listings provide a useful measure of popular (box-office) or mainstream appeal of these screen actors. Two of the names included on the list (Boon and Soualem) appear largely due to the phenomenal success of one film (Bienvenue chez les

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Ch’tis). However, the other actors who feature on the list have arguably earned their place through a more diverse body of work. Kad Merad co-starred in both Les Ch’tis and the Oscar-nominated feel-good comedy Les Choristes (Barratier, 2004) as well as starring more recently alongside Daniel Auteuil in the remake of Pagnol’s La fille du puisatier (Auteil, 2011). The CBO rank- ings are certainly not exhaustive in terms of actors of Maghrebi origin who have imposed themselves on French screens. However, the significance of this transformation in the 2000s should not be underestimated, a point that was reinforced by Roschdy Zem in an interview to mark his acceptance of a special achievement award at the Marrakech film festival in December 2011:

You know, when we [actors of Maghrebi origin] started out, we had no point of reference in French cinema. Today films are produced around actors such as Jamel, Gad and many others [. . .] For cinema to evolve, attitudes must evolve too. France, as it exists today, coloured, cosmopolitan, cannot help but be presented in French films. (Zem in Lahrach 2011)

The two actors singled out by Zem in the above interview – Jamel (Debbouze) and Gad (Elmaleh) – are two of the biggest screen stars of Maghrebi-origin (or indeed any origin) working in French cinema today. Both have made a considerable impact in terms of crossing over to the mainstream, as well as using their celebrity status and capital value as stars to extend their influence into the realms of production and direction. Although an unlikely screen star given his diminutive stature, darker skin and physical disability (in 1990 he lost the use of his right arm after being struck by a high-speed train that was passing through a station), Debbouze had risen to become arguably the most influential Maghrebi-French star by the mid-2000s. Born in 1975 to Moroccan immigrant parents living in a modest housing estate in the Parisian banlieue, Debbouze, a natural performer, starred in various minor roles in film and theatre from the early 1990s. Eventually, though, he came to prominence as much as a result of his stand-up comedy shows and work as a TV presenter. Following a highly successful career in radio, television and stand-up, including working on Canal Plus as part of the influential comedy series Nulle part ailleurs, Debbouze’s cinematic breakthrough came with his lead role in Le Ciel. Debbouze’s performance in the film accentuates the traits that had already made him popular with audiences on the small screen and stand-up circuit: a playful, inventive use of language, rapid-fire delivery and irreverent humour that is inspired by (and makes liberal reference to) his background and identity as a Maghrebi-French youth from the banlieue. The references that shape Debbouze’s performance style and wider star persona are at once global and local, combining references to American

40 the maghrebi-french connection cinema and TV with football and rap as well as contemporary French politics as they relate to immigration, poverty, racism, violence, and social exclusion (Vanderschelden 2005: 64). Above all, though, it is Debbouze’s quick wit and his ability to improvise, combined with his use of French street-slang, Arabic and English that suggests a ‘humorous (mis-)use of language (approximations, surprising collocations, neologisms), and creative exploration of sociolin- guistic traits such as accent and inflected language, identifiable elocution and dialect’ (Tellier 1998 cited in Vandershelden 2005: 65). All of these aspects were brought firmly and deliberately to the fore in Jamel’s performance as Youssef in Le Ciel. While such elements continue to inform Debbouze’s star image, they have since been augmented by the variety of roles (both leading and supporting roles) that he has subsequently played in the 2000s. The perception of both his public and on-screen persona has, furthermore, been refined by his now obvious celebrity – his status as one of France’s most famous entertainers – and by his creative and commercial influence as both a film star, producer and most recently a director, as well as continuing to work in TV and stand-up. Following on from the success of Le Ciel, Debbouze’s capital value at the box-office increased as a result of his show-stealing performance as Numérobis in Astérix & Obélix: Mission Cléopâtre (Chabat, 2002) – a secondary role written especially for him by the film’s director and one of his former collaborators from his days at Canal Plus, Alain Chabat. The film attracted over 14 million spectators in France, reputedly making Debbouze the best-paid actor in 2002 due to the combination of his fee for the movie and a cannily negotiated points deal on the overall gross (Vanderschelden 2005: 47). This success coincided with his nomination for a best supporting actor César for his role as Lucien, the put-upon greengrocer’s assistant in Amélie (Jeunet, 2001), another massive box-office success, leading to a starring role in Angel-A (Besson, 2005). While both of these films essentially offered Debbouze the opportunity to play a role that was less explicitly socio-ethnically marked than that of Le Ciel, the audience’s knowledge of Debbouze’s background as a Maghrebi-French youth from the banlieue, means that, to a certain extent, such performances remain potentially marked by Debbouze’s own social and ethnic origins. Indeed, Debbouze’s next series of collaborations as both actor and producer was to prove just how central his Maghrebi origins were to be to his star image. In 2006 he starred in and co-produced Indigènes, Rachid Bouchareb’s Second World War epic about the role played by African soldiers in liberating Europe from Nazi Germany. As Hargreaves notes, Debbouze’s celebrity connections, popularity and influence were instrumental in ensuring that the film (which at that point represented the largest budget for any film directed by and starring Maghrebi-French actors) was brought to the screen (Hargreaves 2007: 205–6). Moreover, in his dealings with politicians in Morocco, Algeria

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Figure 2.2 ‘Nos stars beurs’: promotional poster for Indigènes (Bouchareb, 2006).

and France (including photo opportunities with the then conservative president, Jacques Chirac), Debbouze, along with the director Rachid Bouchareb, personally ensured that the film’s political message about the inequality in war pensions for colonial veterans became a prominent political issue in France. Though the public figure of Debbouze dominated much of the media attention around Indigènes, the film’s significance in terms of announcing the presence of not one but four Maghebi-French ‘stars’ should not be underestimated. Alongside Debbouze, the film showcased the considerable talents of Roschdy Zem, Samy Naceri and Sami Bouajila. Promotional material for the film presented an image in which the four ‘band of brothers’ were staring out towards the audience – effectively announcing the film as a star vehicle for the four actors (see Figure 2.2). Debbouze, Zem, Naceri and Bouajila were collectively awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2006 for best actor while in interviews, described as ‘nos stars beurs’, they offered a sense that the Maghrebi-French star’s time had come (Pliskin 2006).4 Of equal significance was the diversity of acting styles and range of star personas showcased by the four stars in Indigènes. Firstly, Samy Naceri played Yassir, a Berber conscript and small-time crook, who initially uses the chaos of war to plunder booty from all sides. Following the death of his brother, however, Yassir is transformed from petty thief to war hero as he sacrifices his own life in order to defend the French inhabitants of an Alsatian village from the retreating German troops. Though crafting a less charismatic persona than in his earlier career-defining role as charming taxi driver Daniel in the Taxi series, Naceri nonetheless combines in his performance as Yassir the everyday,

42 the maghrebi-french connection unrefined (‘blokish’) traits of Daniel with a physical presence that hints at a potential menace beneath the smile. His performance is thus indicative of a star type ‘balanced between lawlessness and order that positioned him as a potential successor to Belmondo’ (Austin 2003: 136). This potential was, however to remain unrealised in the late 2000s, as Naceri became embroiled in a series of high-profile court appearances and two short spells in prison resulting from drug and alcohol abuse, violent assault, road-rage and charges of racially abusing police officers in a series of incidents between 2003 and 2005. Finally in 2007 (one year after sharing the Palme d’Or for best actor at Cannes with his co-stars from Indigènes), Naceri was sentenced to nine months in prison for stabbing a security guard in Aix-en-Provence. Co-starring alongside Naceri in Indigènes, Roschdy Zem plays Messaoud, an Algerian conscript who becomes romantically involved with a French woman he meets in one of the towns liberated by the allies – a relationship that is ultimately prohibited by the military authorities. Zem, who arguably pos- sesses an even more imposing physical presence on screen than Naceri, essentially acts as a foil to Yassir/Naceri in the film. Whereas the latter is a selfish, petty thief, who eventually sacrifices himself for others, Messaoud is shown to be a character of integrity, if a little naïve. His noble belief in the cause for which he is fighting and essential decency are ultimately betrayed by the French military authorities, who intercept the letters he and his French lover send one another. The character played by Zem in Indigènes thus draws on the actor’s conventional ‘decency’, his physical presence and (sexual) attractiveness that has seen him enjoy one of the longest and most consistently successful careers of any Maghrebi-French actor. Since coming to the attention of French audiences in a supporting role in J’embrasse pas (Téchiné, 1991), Zem has successfully moved between roles in low-budget social dramas (L’Autre côté de la mer [Cabrera, 1997], Sauve-moi [Vincent, 2000], Vivre au paradis [Guerdjou, 1999]), popular genre films (Le Plus beau métier du monde [Lauzier, 1996], Chouchou [Allouache, 2003], 36 Quai d’Orfèvres [Marchal, 2004]) and epic blockbusters (Indigènes, Hors-la-loi). Like a number of these other Maghrebi- French stars who have come to prominence in the 2000s, Zem has also used his success as an actor to move into directing, first with the romantic comedy Mauvaise foi and most recently Omar m’a tué (2011), the dramatisation of a miscarriage of justice from the 1990s in which a Moroccan immigrant working as a gardener was falsely accused of the murder of a wealthy French woman on the on the Côte d’Azur. The third of the four Maghrebi-French leads in Indigènes, Sami Bouajila (French of Tunisian origin), is arguably the least commercially oriented and thus the least likely to be deemed a star. Nonetheless his inclusion in this film brings further artistic weight to Indigènes in the sense that Bouajila has built a highly successfully career for himself as a ‘serious’ actor working mostly but

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not exclusively in the auteur-led independent sector of French cinema. Since his first appearance on French screens in 1991, Bouajila has attracted considerable critical success, embodying a range of characters, some of whom make explicit reference to his Maghrebi origins, while others offer little or no attempt to situate either actor or protagonist in relation to his Tunisian immigrant heritage. The roles interpreted by Bouajila in films such as Drôle de Félix (Ducastel and Martineau, 2000), La Faute à Voltaire (Kechiche, 2001), Embrassez qui vous voudrez (Blanc, 2002), Vivre me tue (Sinapi, 2003), and Les témoins (Téchiné, 2007) are also notable for the breadth of characters interpreted in relation to class, familial ties, ethnicity and sexual difference. Throughout his career Bouajila has therefore embodied ‘a range of subject positions’ that ‘when coupled with an ambiguous ethnic background or heritage and tied to issues of kinship’ allow the character and the star to be ‘read as a site where ethnicity, sexuality, belonging and citizenship can be reimagined’ (Pratt and Provencher 2011: 194–208). In the case of Indigènes, Bouajila’s role as the principled (unofficial) leader of the North African troops, Abdelkader, makes him arguably a more emotionally distant character than in other films. Nonetheless it also allows him function in the narrative as the protagonist who is able to lead the other characters towards a different understanding of brotherhood and belonging in the context of both Algerian and French national identity. Working as part of this ensemble of Maghrebi-French actors, Debbouze’s performance in Indigènes confirms his existing star type at the same time as it opens new avenues to his on-screen persona. Given the nature of the film (a serious, historical epic set in World War II), the playful improvisation, tchatche (gift of the gab) and scattergun references to contemporary American, French and North African popular culture are (understandably) absent from Debbouze’s performance and his verbal delivery is far more restrained. However, there are also moments when the contemporary persona of Debbouze clearly imposes itself over the character of Saïd; most notably in the sequence where, following the liberation of a French town in Provence, Saïd/Debbouze enters into a conversation with a young female local, proudly declaring ‘when I liberate a country it becomes my country’. The potential effect of this claim is to shift the association away from Saïd (the character) and towards Debbouze, transforming the utterance into an impassioned plea for the rightful place of the French-born descendants of North African immigrants in contemporary France. Elsewhere the demands of the genre (a war film) and the emphasis on action means that Debbouze’s physical limitations as an actor that arise from his disability are highlighted against the physicality of Zem or Naceri and the leadership of Bouajila. Thus Debbouze’s character is an assistant to the pied noir Sergeant Martinez (Bernard Blancan): fetching food and drink, holding the mirror as his superior shaves, standing beside his commanding

44 the maghrebi-french connection officer in battle. In a sense, this leads us back to the perceived vulnerability of Debbouze’s on-screen persona that, it is claimed, forms part of his attraction to female spectators (Vandershelden 2005: 68). Moreover, as the put-upon assistant, there are shades of his subservient performance as Lucien in Amélie. However, there are also moments in Indigènes that allow for a tougher side to emerge in Debbouze’s character, in particular the sequence where Saïd is ridiculed by Messaoud for the photo he keeps of his mother. To the surprise of all the other soldiers present, Saïd responds to this goading by drawing a knife and holding it to the throat of (the much larger) Messaoud, who is forced to capitulate. This more aggressive and ruthless side to the performance offered by Debbouze in Indigènes would be further exploited in his next collaboration with Bouchareb, Hors-la-loi, where he plays an underworld gangster in Paris during the Algerian war. Like Debbouze, Gad Elmaleh is an actor-turned-director whose rise to stardom during the 2000s has been built on his existing success as a stand-up comedian. Unlike the other actors of Maghrebi origin considered here thus far, Elmaleh is different in that he is a Moroccan Jew and that he emigrated first to North America (Québec) at the age of sixteen, before moving to France in 1991 at the age of twenty-one, where he has been based ever since. Like his contemporaries Jamel Debbouze and Danny Boon (and like Smaïn before him in the 1980s and 1990s), Elmaleh made a name for himself as a stand-up comic before gravitating towards screen acting. His first leading role came in Algerian director Merzak Allouache’s low-budget, socially aware comedy Salut Cousin! (1996). In the film Elmaleh plays Alilou, a naïve Algerian who initially journeys to Paris to deliver a consignment of designer clothes to a merchant in Barbès but ends up staying with his Maghrebi-French cousin, Mok, and finds romance with a West African immigrant who lives alongside his cousin in the 18th arrondissement. The film offers a nuanced portrayal of the North African diasporic community in Paris, from the recently arrived Algerian immigrant to the former Algerian policemen now eking out a living selling counterfeit watches in Barbès; as well as a Jewish pied noir, who speaks nostalgically of life in Algeria prior to Independence. Allouache evokes both the sense of a settled diasporic community that has a place in Paris and the proximity of Algeria to France through the arrival of new members of this Algerian diaspora. Yet he also suggests that the presence of the second generation is, in many ways, just as precarious as that of the newly arrived immigrant. At the end of the film it is Mok who is deported to Algeria for his role in an arson attack on a Parisian nightclub, while Alilou remains as an undocumented immigrant, taking his chances in Paris with his new love.5 Like Debbouze, Elmaleh has also used his celebrity status and capital value as an established star to bring favoured projects to the screen in the 2000s. In so doing, Elmaleh has arguably become more important to the films he has

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starred in than many of the directors he has worked alongside. In this respect Merzak Allouache (one of the most influential figures of Algerian cinema) was given the opportunity to direct the comedy Chouchou (2003), which attracted 3 million spectators in France, as a thank you from Elmaleh for the director giving him his first leading screen role in the late 1990s with Salut Cousin! Like the earlier film, Chouchou also tells the story of a young clandestine Maghrebi- immigrant recently arrived in Paris (the eponymous Chouchou) but this time he is a gay transvestite who performs in a Parisian club. The film’s central protagonist is, moreover, based on a stand-up character created by Elmaleh and thus aligns itself more towards the popular crossover success of camp comedies such as Pédale douce (Aghion, 1996) or La Cage aux folles (Molinaro, 1978) than the politically aware Drôle de Félix or the more sombre Miss Mona in which the Algerian immigrant’s homosexuality is used as a metaphor for his own exclusion.6 The subsequent moves made by Allouache and Elmaleh respectively seem to confirm the importance of the star in this move to the mainstream for filmmakers from the North African diaspora. Elmaleh went on to direct Coco, a €15m production released on nearly 900 prints in France that attracted over 3 million spectators and further underlined his mainstream credentials. Allouache followed Chouchou with Bab-el-web (2005), a low- budget romantic comedy (including a cameo from Elmaleh) based in Algiers that attempts to rehabilitate the image of the working-class district where the director grew up, which despite being distributed on a respectable 100 prints, attracted a meager 50 087 spectators. Allouache then abandoned the light comic tone of Chouchou for Harragas (2009), a sombre realist drama about African immigrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean and arrive illegally in Europe. Unsurprisingly, given its tough subject matter and niche audience appeal, Harragas attracted little more than 10 000 spectators in France. Although Elmaleh’s screen debut in Salut Cousin! locates him firmly within the North African community, the role is, in some respects, a false ethnic/ national marker in the sense that unlike the character he plays in the film he is neither Algerian nor a Muslim. Similarly in Chouchou he again plays an Algerian immigrant. Whilst we could counter this position as a rather reductive line of argument (Elmaleh is not an Algerian immigrant but nor is he a homosexual or a transvestite like the character he plays in Chouchou), the extent to which Maghrebi-French stars remain in what Austin refers to as ‘ethnically marked’ (Austin 2003: 136) roles or the degree to which they obtain what Hargreaves describes as ‘trans-ethnic plasticity’ (Hargreaves 2002, cited in Austin 2003: 136) is a significant one in relation to their acceptance by mainstream audiences. As Dyer reminds us, audiences can choose to endorse or reject star performances at the box-office if they feel that the star type or performance strays too far from the existing star image (Dyer 1998: 98). Potentially, this has more loaded implications for the perceived acceptance or

46 the maghrebi-french connection rejection of actors of Maghrebi origin by both mainstream audiences and producers through casting for specific roles. Unlike Debbouze, whose ethnic and socio-economic origins have remained a clear part of his star persona, Elmaleh has arguably been able to negotiate a more fluid relationship between star type and his ethnic, national and religious difference than that any other screen actor of Maghrebi origin. Thus screen performances that have been endorsed by French audiences in terms of commercial success, as well as gaining critical acclaim, have seen Elmaleh occupy a variety of roles in relation to his status as émigré/North African/Moroccan (Salut cousin!, Chouchou) as well as others that have accented his Jewishness – La Vérité si je mens! 2 (Gilou, 2001), La Rafle (Bosch, 2010), Coco. Yet this has not restricted Elmaleh’s ability to take on a number of high profile roles – most obviously La Doublure (Veber, 2006) and Hors-de-prix (Salvadori, 2006) – in which characterisation transcends, rather than negating or occluding, his ethnicity. Why might this be the case? We could argue that his physical appearance (fairer skin, clear blue eyes) endows Elmaleh with ‘trans-ethnic plasticity’, which allows him to play less ethnically coded roles in the manner that Hargreaves has suggested was possible for Naceri in Taxi, but not for Debbouze (Hargreaves 2002, cited in Austin 2003: 136). We might also consider that his own ethnically and religiously marked performances as a North African émigré are complicated in terms of both his Moroccan Jewish roots and his time spent studying in Canada before arriving in France at the age of twenty-one. As well as exposing him to a form of multiculturalism quite different to that found in France, this time spent in Canada meant that his arrival in France was not the typical route of migration from Maghreb to France, burdened with the symbolic colonial baggage of a journey from ex-colony to former Métropole (mainland France). Finally, the fact that his parents were wealthy enough to send him to finish his education in Canada immediately distances him in socio-economic terms from the majority of other Maghrebi- French stars (in particular Debbouze), whose star persona is intimately linked not only to their origins as the French descendants of North African immigrants, but also as residents of the working-class French urban periphery. In all these respects, Elmaleh is granted a greater scope for social mobility than a young actor emerging from the cité, such as Jamel Debbouze, and is not so obviously hindered by the same barriers (both real and imagined) that typically limit the horizons of many Maghrebi-French citizens.

Crossing Over or Selling Out? The Case of Djamel Bensalah The above issues concering casting, characterisation and ethnic markers in relation to stars such as Elmaleh and Debbouze also point to the broader question of the potential price of incorporation (in terms of artistic freedom,

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political expression and the ability to exert control over the identity and representation of character/actor/star) for Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers in the 2000s. The margins can be reclaimed as a space of resistance and opposition for minority or excluded groups, as well as a space of artistic creativity, ‘authenticity’ and possibility, as bell hooks suggests in her well-known essay ‘Choosing the Margin as the Space of Radical Openness’ (hooks 1990). However, to reside in the mainstream is often negatively coded as occupying a space of ‘dubious complicity’ in artistic and ideological terms, or as a streamlining of culture, or a ‘subordination of cultural specificity to one hegemonic cultural strand (i.e. white and commercial)’ (Korte and Sternberg 2004: 8). This interpretation leads us to the idea of the mainstream as part of an immutable, fixed, hegemonic centre as well as the notion that moving to that centre necessarily means selling out, politically and artistically, in order to gain access to the cultural property and audiences controlled by the dominant societal norm. In the context of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking, analysis of individual films such as the immigrant and queer politics of Chouchou (Waldron 2007; Rees-Roberts 2008) seems to endorse the idea that by crossing over to the mainstream these films and their creators must, necessarily, re-negotiate a position that retreats from any militant or political engagement with socio-political realities in order to win the consensus of its popular audience. Viewed more positively, as Korte and Sternberg have suggested in their study of contemporary Black British and British Asian cinema, ‘bidding for the mainstream’ does not inevitably imply submitting to or adapting to hegemony. Rather it suggests ‘actively participating and chang- ing a predominant cultural stream whose structures already are in the process of redefinition and which has already set in motion its own decentralization’ (Korte and Stornberg 2004: 9). In order to explore both sides of this argument, let us now turn in the final part of this chapter to the films of Maghrebi-French screenwriter, director and producer Djamel Bensalah. While a select group of directors of Maghrebi origin may have enjoyed greater box-office success in France with individual films in the 2000s,7 arguably the most consistently successful director in terms of audience popularity is Djamel Bensalah. Following the largely unexpected success of his debut feature Le Ciel (1 224 963 spectators), Bensalah has enjoyed box-office success in France with nearly all of his subsequent features: Le Raïd (1 456 267 spectators); Il était une fois dans l’oued (Bensalah, 2005) (893 437 spectators); Neuilly sa mère! (directed by La Ferrière, produced and written by Bensalah, 2009) (2 527 422 spectators); and, most recently, Beur sur la ville (Bensalah, 2011) (412 351 spectators). Even the comparative failure of his fourth feature Big City (Bensalah, 2007), a comedy/adventure/western with a cast of children, still managed to attract 313 687 spectators – far beyond the audiences achieved by most other Maghrebi-French or North African émigré directors

48 the maghrebi-french connection of the 2000s and, according to the data on average audience attendances provided by the CNC (2012), more than most French feature films released during that decade. Precisely because of this considerable and consistent success throughout the 2000s, Bensalah has operated and received the support of mainstream production and distribution networks, working most frequently with French majors Gaumont and UGC. Moreover, occupying this mainstream position has not led Bensalah to avoid narratives that reflect his origins as the French-born descendant of Algerian immigrant parents. With the exception of Big City, all of Bensalah’s films draw directly on his own experiences as a Maghrebi-French youth from the suburbs of St Denis, engaging with questions of integration, racism and cultural identity as they pertain to multicultural banlieue youth. And yet Bensalah’s films receive little if any scholarly or critical attention in France or the Anglo-American academy. There is, for example, no entry on Bensalah in the second edition of the otherwise exhaustive Dictionnaire du cinéma populaire français des origines à nos jours (Bosséno and Dehee 2009). Nor, with only a few exceptions, have any scholarly articles (in English or French) been produced that are devoted to his work.8 Indeed, when Bensalah’s films are directly referred to in the context of a broader analysis of Maghrebi- French filmmaking, the response is largely negative (see, for example, Tarr 2005: 170–1). Like many other Maghrebi-French and North African émigré directors (Chibane, Bahloul, Allouache, Zemmouri, Zem), Bensalah employs comedy to explore the socio-political realities facing the North African diaspora in France in a non-threatening way that aspires to connect with a crossover (ethnic- majority) French audience. What marks Bensalah out as somewhat different from his Maghrebi-French contemporaries, however, is the extent to which, from the very start of his career, he has made a conscious attempt to bid directly for a mainstream audience. Indeed we could go as far as to identify a formula within Bensalah’s filmmaking that has projected him towards this commercial success in France. Beyond his obvious investment in genre cinema (comedy, and in the case of Le Raïd, action comedy) is the fact that Bensalah’s comic protagonists from Le Ciel, Le Raïd and Il était une fois dans l’oued through to his most recent successes as co-writer on Neuilly sa mère! and writer/director of Beur sur la ville are all drawn from a quite specific socio-cultural milieu (the world of male banlieue youth). Secondly, while his protagonists may originate from the banlieue, the action in Bensalah’s films is almost never set in the deprived urban periphery itself. Instead, he generates much of the humour in his films from a ‘fish-out-of-water’ scenario that places these banlieusard characters in environments that are unfamiliar geographically and in a socio- cultural context: the affluent beach resort of Biarritz; the South American jungle or slopes of the Dolomites; or a white banlieue youth ‘returning’ to the

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bled in Algeria. Indeed, it is telling that the one perceived ‘failure’ in box-office terms was Big City, a film which drew away from this tried and tested formula – a formula to which he returned with his subsequent project, Neuilly sa mère! The film, which tells the story of a young Maghrebi-French schoolboy who swaps his cité in the provinces for the exclusive and super-rich Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Mer, derives its humour from questions of class distinction as a much as it does from comedic tension that might arise due to ethnic difference. The formula applied by Bensalah is clearly popular with French audiences – after the failure of Big City, the more familiar territory of Neuilly sa mère! attracted over 2.5 million spectators in 2009. However, it is not without its risks, and for two main reasons. Firstly, by removing his youthful protagonists from the banlieue there is the potential to isolate them from any grounding in a relevant socio-political context, thus reducing the characters to barely believable caricatures (Tarr 2005: 171). Secondly, as a consequence of this displacement and the fact that the comedy in his films is largely derived from mainstream perceptions of the banlieusard (in terms of attitudes, mannerism and, crucially, in a film such as Le Ciel, language), Bensalah runs the associated risk of entrenching his Maghrebi-French and banlieusard protagonists in the very stereotypes that he aims to transcend. Born in the working-class Parisian suburb of St Denis in 1976 to Algerian immigrant parents, Bensalah began his career as an actor with appearances in TV advertisements and minor roles in the French TV series Navarro and the film L’eau froide (Assayas, 1994). In 1996 he directed his first short film Y a du foutage de gueule dans l’air, working with friends Jamel Debbouze (already well known for his work as a stand-up comedian and his TV appearances), Julien Courbey and Stéphane Soo Mongo. The sixteen-minute comedy, with its focus on the adventures of a group of school friends in St Denis, established the context for Bensalah’s debut feature, Le Ciel, les oiseaux et . . . ta mère! Le Ciel was an unexpected crossover success at the box-office, attracting over 1.1 million spectators. To put this success into perspective, this was only the second ever feature directed by a filmmaker of Maghrebi origin, after Smaïn’s Les Deux papas et la maman (co-directed with De-Caunes, 1996) to attract more than one million spectators in France since the first Beur Cinema features began to appear in French cinemas in the early-1980s. Moreover, in Jamel Debbouze, French cinema had discovered a Maghrebi-French comic star with the potential to surpass the popular success of Smaïn in the 1980s and 1990s. In a sense, Le Ciel is the film that announces the breakthrough into the French mainstream that then occurred for Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers in the 2000s. Not only did it launch the career of Bensalah and establish Jamel Debbouze as a Maghrebi-French comedy screen actor with true crossover potential, but it also proved to French producers, distributors and exhibitors that there was a mainstream market for genre

50 the maghrebi-french connection cinema directed by, starring and promoting the experiences and outlook of Maghrebi-French protagonists. Thus, when considering the mainstreaming of North African émigré and Maghrebi-French filmmaking in France during the 2000s, we must, necessarily, being with Le Ciel.

Le Ciel, les oiseaux et . . . ta mère! Banlieusards on the Beach Bensalah’s debut feature opens with Youssef (Jamel Debbouze) Christophe (Lorant Deutsch) and Stéphane (Stéphane Soo Mongo) shooting a spoof documentary about life in their cité. They convince a friend, Mike (Julien Courbey), to pose as a drug dealer, as they think that this will play better with the mainstream French audience for whom the documentary is intended. The trio’s understanding of how such stereotypes are recognised and ‘authenti- cated’ by mainstream France is turned to their advantage as their film wins a competition, with the prize of a holiday in Biarritz. As a film about banlieue youth exploring and exploiting their image on screen and the debut feature of a director of Algerian immigrant origin from the cités of St Denis, Le Ciel is clearly self-reflexive text. It begins by suggesting, much like La Haine (Kassovitz, 1995), that the blanc-black-beur trio at the centre of the narrative are only taken seriously when they conform to the role of the disenfranchised banlieusard. However, Bensalah refuses to relegate his protagonists to the position of helpless victims who are unable to determine their own future or, indeed, take control of the way they present themselves to others. Firstly, they implicitly understand the power of the stereotypes that are used to identify them and employ these prejudices in a positive way to win the filmmaking competition. Moreover, the trio simultaneously challenge and conform to middle-class French prejudices surrounding multicultural banlieue youth through their interaction with affluent middle-class holidaymakers in Biarritz, principally the group of teenage girls who are renting the apartment next to the boys. By giving the three youths a camera to record their exploits on holiday, Bensalah returns the means of representation to the hands of those who are normally denied it. The film therefore offers a self-reflexive commentary on the alternative perspective of the socio-political realities of the banlieue offered by the trio, at the same time as it allows Bensalah to consider his own role – as a filmmaker who originates from the deprived urban periphery – in either endorsing or perpetuating such mainstream stereotypes. Nor is this reflection on how banlieue youth are represented in mainstream audio-visual culture in France restricted to the trio’s use of the camcorder. Le Ciel is replete with different kinds of images capturing Youssef, Christophe, Stépahne and Mike going about their daily lives: from the CCTV footage in the supermarket to the view through the peephole in the front door of the rented holiday apartment.

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Figure 2.3 Boyz on the beach: Le Ciel, les oiseaux et . . . ta mère! (Bensalah, 1999).

In a similar way, Bensalah and his cinematographer Martin Legrand eschew the straightforward set-ups and camera positions that we might expect to find in a more conventional comedy film. Instead they employ unexpected angles, camera movement and framing, even when capturing everyday activities, such as Stéphane cooking pasta in the apartment. The film’s self-reflexive impulse is even extended to a discussion of the current state of French cinema in the late 1990s. As the three youths stand outside the cinema in Biarritz trying to decide what film they want to see, they reject the various French films on offer, including the popular comedy hit La Vérité si je mens! Instead they opt for the Hollywood police thriller Cop Land (Mangold, 1997) starring Sylvester Stallone. However, Bensalah is careful to balance these moments of self-reflexivity with a comedy that derives much of its popular (youth) appeal from its rapid-fire comic exchanges, often irreverent tone, and the central standout performance by Jamel Debbouze. Moreover, the film’s consistent references to American and French banlieue culture brings credibility to Le Ciel at the same time as it renders the film attractive to a mainstream French youth audience. In her discussion of Le Ciel, Tarr praises the virtuosity of Jamel’s performance, as well as the attempt by Bensalah to mock the media stereotype of banlieue youth as criminalised other. However, Tarr is equally critical of what she perceives as the film’s casual misogyny, its evacuation of ethnic minority girls and women from the diegesis, as well as the suggestion of anti-Semitism that runs through certain scenes in the film – such as when Youssef recoils from an embrace with the middle-class Lydie (Olivia Bonamy) upon noticing the Star

52 the maghrebi-french connection of David on her necklace (Tarr 2005: 106–7). In response to this final point, we could argue that, rather than endorsing an anti-Semitic position adopted by the film and its director, the scene shows the potential for prejudice to exist in all social groups even those minority or marginalised communities (such as the North African immigrant population in France) who have themselves been subjected to similar prejudice and hostility from the dominant societal norm. Youssef is, after all, shocked in this sequence by Lydia’s accusation of racism and is subsequently forced to assess his own preconceptions of others – indicated somewhat heavy-handedly in the film by his introspective walk along the rainy coastline soon after the confrontation with Lydia. Moreover, in narrative terms, the confrontation functions dramatically as a means of setting up the final reconciliation between Youssef and Lydia in the airport, a sequence that endorses Le Ciel’s generic categorisation as a romantic comedy or teen romance as much as it is a simple ‘fish-out-of-water’ comedy narrative. This association is important, since it indicates Bensalah’s desire to use the rom-com genre to engage with a mainstream youth audience in France, combining the edgy credibility of banlieue culture (reflected by Debbouze’s participation in the film) with the more conventional appeal of the teen romance. In this respect, Le Ciel adheres more than one would think to the narrative structure of the romantic comedy; from the cute meet, to circumstances and misunderstanding potentially thwarting the mismatched couple from getting together, and the couple’s ultimate reconciliation. The problematic romance between Youssef and Lydia is, furthermore, mirrored by the other narrative coupling of Christophe and Christelle, whose own difficulties in relating to one another result more directly from a question of class than they do from ethnic or religious difference. However, this is not to say that in exploiting the mainstream potential of the romantic (teen) comedy, Bensalah eviscerates all trace of the socio-political realities of race and class from the film’s narrative. Indeed, one of the most telling scenes occurs, precisely, as Youssef is racing to the airport in order to speak to Lydia before she returns for Paris. The suggestion in this scene is then that, despite temporarily inhabiting the same city, the pair move in such different social circles back home in Paris that any chance of them meeting again would be almost impossible. Of even greater symbolic significance is the exchange on the bus travelling to the airport, where the young banlieusard is challenged by the conductor for not possessing a valid ticket. Refusing to believe Youssef’s explanation, as well as denying his request for dispensation given the circumstances of his journey to the airport, the heavy-handed ticket inspector ends by demanding to see Youssef’s national identity card. This thinly-veiled act of racism simultaneously questions Youssef’s right to be in the country (let alone on the bus), a demand that is unlikely to be used against a white youth caught committing the same offence. Tellingly, the confrontation on the bus serves no obvious

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purpose in advancing the narrative: it is already abundantly clear by this point that Youssef is in danger of arriving too late at the airport to see Lydia. Its inclusion enacts a conflict that punctuates the expected dramatic tension of the final reconciliation from the romantic comedy for a quite different purpose. For it serves to remind the spectator that the obstacles faced by young banlieusards (especially those of non-European immigrant origin) are frequently compounded by an additional level of prejudice that mobilises ethnic and religious difference as insurmountable barriers to integration and social mobility. Bensalah’s desire to engage his audience with the familiarity and consensual comedy of the rom-com at the same time as he forces them to confront their own prejudices and those across French society towards banlieue youth is further underlined by the ending of Le Ciel. Rather than focusing on the reconciliation between Youssef and Lydia, the film instead returns to the trio of banlieusards, who, having fallen out while loading up the car, endure the lengthy car journey back to Paris from the Cote d’Azur in brooding silence – an indication of the mundane reality that awaits them in the cité upon their return from the holiday in the south of France. Indeed, as the extras on the French DVD release of Le Ciel show, Bensalah had planned an alternative ending for the film. In a fashionable Parisian apartment several months after the holiday, Youssef and Lydia were to be depicted living together and waiting for their friends to arrive for a dinner party. Clearly the decision by the director to eschew this more utopian ending for the one we see in the film suggests a desire to confront his audience with the more likely outcome for the young banlieusards after the holiday ends. However, the portrayal of the sullen teenagers journeying back to Paris is not the final image that Bensalah leaves us with at the very end of Le Ciel. As the credits roll, rough hand-held footage of the car travelling along the seafront in Biarritz – clearly meant to have been shot by the boys during their holiday – shows Youssef engaging in playful banter with the car’s other passengers (and by extension the audience), eventually proposing that ‘this [the video being shot] would make a good film’. On the one hand this short, closing scene can be perceived as a throw-away remark inserted with the credits as an in-joke, spontaneously offered by Debbouze (more than his character Youssef) for the director, crew and spectators to share. On the other hand, by effectively closing Le Ciel with this statement, Bensalah returns to the very issue that began the film: the role of cinema in forging a perception and (mis)representation of a given social reality (specifically, the lived social reality of banlieue youth) and the responsibilities that such a role brings with it. With its combination of a cultural codes and references to a multi-ethnic urban culture, allusions to French and American popular culture, verbal humour and improvisation (centred on, though not limited to, the virtuoso performance of Debbouze) as well as the use of the structure and narrative

54 the maghrebi-french connection pleasures of the romantic/teen comedy, Bensalah was quite clearly aiming for a mainstream audience in Le Ciel. However, we cannot entirely say that the film occludes or eradicates questions of difference, prejudice and exclusion in order to appease its mainstream youth audience. Instead, and at key moments, Bensalah chooses to foreground these problematic issues, thus forcing his audience to undertake a more searching questioning of the continuing prejudices that exist in contemporary multicultural France in a manner that belies the apparently superficial and irreverent pleasures and intentions of a genre such as the teen romantic comedy.

Neuilly sa mère! From banlieue to beurgeoisie? Neuilly sa mère!, on which Bensalah collaborated with director Gabriel Julien- Laferrière as both producer and co-writer, represented a returned to more familiar territory for the Maghrebi-French filmmaker after the relative failure of the child western Big City. The film sees Bensalah employing the now- familiar fish-out-of-water narrative, whereby Sami (Samy Seghir), a Maghrebi- French teenager from a working-class housing estate in Chalon-sur-Saône (a small town in the Burgundy region of France) is forced to relocate to the exclusive, upscale Parisian district of Neuilly-sur-Seine, one of the wealthiest communes in France, to live with his aunt while his mother works away on a cruise ship. As with his earlier films, Neuilly sa mère! sees Bensalah, this time as writer and producer, applying a series of comedy scenarios based largely on the prejudices and preconceptions held by both Sami, as the young banlieusard, and the pupils of the exclusive private school that he attends while living with his aunt. The narrative begins with a voice-over by Sami that immediately challenges (mainstream) misconceptions of the banlieue as a site of lawlessness, exclusion and social breakdown in a way that is resonant of Le Ciel. The spectator is shown idyllic images of Sami and his friends laughing by a lake behind the apartment blocks of the working-class estate. Indeed, the cité is deemed as ‘paradise’ in comparison to the picturesque centre of Chalon, where Sami and his friends are viewed with suspicion and subjected to searches by the local police. Sami’s point of view appears to be confirmed visually by an elaborate crane shot near the start of the film that sweeps up a grass bank and into the cité – instantly beautifying and rendering more spectacular the mundane environment of the housing estate. Moreover, as the crane pulls up, the cité is clearly shown as located next to open countryside, again confounding the notion of the banlieue as an urban wasteland. The spatial location of the cité also offers a visual link to earlier Maghrebi-French authored banlieue films such as Hexagone (Chibane, 1994) and Wesh-wesh: qu’est-ce qui se passe? (Ameur-Zaïmeche, 2001), in which the cité borders countryside. However,

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while the opening of Neuilly sa mère! presents a positive, even romanticised, image of life on the estate that perpetuates the cité/city binary of the 1990s banlieue film (albeit in inverted form), it does not entirely ignore the limited opportunities for the young inhabitants on the housing estate. As part of the opening sequence to Neuilly sa mère! the camera also contemplates two young men, one working as a supermarket security guard, the other collecting litter on the estate. As Sami informs us, after listing the academic qualifications both men have obtained, ‘here, the only thing a degree is for is to make your family happy’. The opening sequence of the film located in the cité then gives way to a narrative twist that leads to a somewhat implausible transition to Paris where Sami is sent to live with his aunt. Aunt Djamila (Rachida Branki), we learn, is a qualified barrister, who married the (white) aristocratic owner of a multina- tional food producer after completing a work placement in one of his factories and now lives in an exclusive gated community in Neuilly-sur-Seine, effectively running the home and looking after her two step-children. The film proposes a Janus-faced image of the aunt. On the one hand, a potentially empowering image of the Maghrebi-French protagonist in which she appears as a qualified professional, a member of what Whithol de Wenden and Leveau term the beurgeoisie (2007). On the other hand, the backstory to Djamila’s place in the narrative undercuts her successful social mobility by effectively portraying her as a kept woman to a wealthy white, conservative French businessman, the eccentric Stanislas de Chazelle (Denis Podalydès). Djamila’s characterisation thus pushes the idea of the beurette from the cité who has made a success of herself to such excessive and improbable limits at the service of Neuilly sa mère!’s comic narrative that it renders her little more than a caricature of the beurgeoise she is supposed to be. Alongside her well-meaning, if neurotic, husband, the Chazelle household is completed by Djamila’s step-children: the rebellious Caroline (Chloé Coulloud), who welcomes Sami’s arrival though befriends him largely to challenge the privileged background in which she has been raised, and her younger brother, Charles (Jérémy Denisty), an arrogant teenager who harbours political ambitions and preposterously models himself on the gestures, rhetoric and demeanour of French president Nicholas Sarkozy (mayor of the Neuilly-sur-Seine commune between 1993 and 2002). During the first meal with the family, Charles refers to Sami as ‘racaille’ (scum), a direct reference to the insulting description infamously attached by Sarkozy as the then Interior Minister to the disenfranchised inhabitants of the deprived urban periphery who were involved in the outbreaks of rioting across the banlieues of France in the winter of 2005. Charles’s character is clearly meant to embody the perceived prejudices of the privileged residents of Neuilly to an outsider from the projects – and by locating them in the words and gestures of a pompous, privileged teenager, Bensalah immediately encourages us to ridicule them.

56 the maghrebi-french connection

Figure 2.4 Sami as ‘fish out of water’ in Neuilly sa mère! (La Ferrière, 2009).

As in Bensalah’s previous films, the Maghrebi-French youth from the banlieue encounters prejudice in this new environment at the same time as his own prejudices towards the unknown are challenged. Upon arriving at the Place de la Défense, the Parisian financial district that borders Neuilly, Sami immediately dismisses the city as a ‘wasteland’. He periodically sends messages back to his friends in Chalon, making them think that he is living in one of the rougher districts of the Parisian banlieue. In response, his friends ask him if there are tanks on the street, revealing that they are just as susceptible to the media misrepresentations of the deprived urban periphery as Sami’s new classmates in the private school he now attends. (And, as if the spectator needed any further reminders of the class divisions upon which the film is also based, one of Sami’s new classmates is a young girl named Sophie Bourgeois.) The comment by Sami’s friends from Chalon also suggests that the fish-out-of- water comic narrative employed by Bensalah in Neuilly sa mère! has as much to do with the differences between Paris and the provinces as it does with ethnic difference. Nevertheless, in the eyes of his Neuilly classmates, Sami is unambiguously qualified as an outsider from the cité as the site of both socio- economic exclusion and the site of the ethnic Other. In a similar approach to that found in Le Ciel, references to both banlieue street culture (such as the soundtrack by Cut Killer, who famously performed as the DJ in La Haine) and American popular culture abound in Neuilly sa mère! The film’s opening sequence from the estates in Chalon uses a track by US West Coast rapper Dr Dre, while the method of introducing each of Sami’s friends with a freeze-frame and name tag offers an inter-textual reference to

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both La Haine and in turn to Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1974), from where Kassovitz borrowed the idea in the first place. Such cultural references provide a counterpoint in the narrative to the bourgeois residence of the de Chazelle’s and Saint-Exupéry, the Catholic private school attended by Sami and Charles. However, they also function to engage with a mainstream French youth audience, for whom a commercialised version of the American-influenced multi- culture of the banlieue has now been firmly incorporated into popular youth culture in France. The reality of this cultural crossover is illustrated when Sami’s classmate and rival for Marie’s (Joséphine Japy) affections confronts him with a spontaneous rap performance in the playground, intended to intimidate the Maghrebi-French youth from Chalon. Filmed from a low angle with the young, white would-be rappers aggressively postulating directly into the camera – the classic set up for the kind of music rap video that dominates channels such as MTV in France and across the western world – Sami’s classmates claim to deliver ‘true’ rap with a ‘real message’. Aside from the obvious humour derived from a trio of white, privately educated teenagers mimicking rappers from the working-class cités, the vignette also serves to emphasise the extent to which hip-hop has become firmly integrated (since at least the mid- 1990s) into mainstream French youth culture. In this respect the sequence also mirrors the type of crossover appeal derived from Bensalah’s screenplay that places a banlieue youth in one of the most affluent and conservative areas of Paris. The second key way in which the narrative of Neuilly sa mère! echoes that of Le Ciel is through the teen/school romance that blossoms between Sami and Caroline, the daughter of the Chazelle’s neighbours. As in Le Ciel, Neuilly sa mère! operates through the conventional generic structures of the cute meet to the misunderstanding between the potential couple, opposition to their union from a third party, and a final reconciliation that provides narrative resolution. Despite these narrative similarities, the experimentation with camera angles and different modes of surveying the Maghrebi-French banlieusard found in Le Ciel is replaced with far more conventional (mainstream) modes of lighting, camerawork and editing, all of which are placed firmly at the service of the teen romantic comedy narrative.9 The final scene in Neuilly sa mère! further confirms the more conventional path taken by the film, in contrast to the ending of Le Ciel discussed earlier. Despite Sami’s protestations at the start of the film that Chalon was the only place he would live, he and his mother relocate to the Cité Pablo-Picasso, a neighbouring HLM estate in Nanterre, in order for Sami to attend Saint- Exupéry. Just as importantly, the relocation allows Sami to be with Marie, who is now clearly identified as his girlfriend. Unlike in Le Ciel, then, the banlieue boy finally gets his uptown girl. However, any temptation to read this as progress towards the mixed-race couple that Tarr notes is so consistently denied

58 the maghrebi-french connection in French cinema and even in films by Maghrebi-French directors in the 1980s and 1990s (Tarr 2005: 10–12) should be tempered by the context of Neuilly sa mère!’s narrative resolution. For the final message of the film appears to be that, in order for the Maghrebi-French banlieusard to get the white girl, he must detach himself from his origins in the multi-ethnic cité and integrate into the conservative, bourgeois environment of Neuilly-sur-Seine (though still being kept at a safe distance in the Cité Pablo-Picasso). Early in the narrative, soon after Sami arrives in the de Chazelle household, he recoils in disgust from the pork products that he finds in the kitchen while looking for a snack – an obvious reference to the cultural and religious difference of his North African immigrant origins. Aunt Djamela comments on the mix of food found in the family fridge in the following way: ‘we don’t force anyone to do anything here: everyone does as they please’. Despite the apparently liberal attitude in the de Chazelle household, Sami eventually discovers that the key to his successful integration into the affluent society of Neuilly-sur-Seine is, in fact, far more closely aligned with the advice given to him by the head teacher at Saint-Exupéry (Josiane Balasko) soon after his arrival at the school: ‘it’s up to you to make an effort to fit in’.10 In the final analysis, the impression left by Neuilly sa mère! is quite unlike Bensalah’s earlier films: in order for the Maghrebi-French community to access the mainstream they must ultimately leave their difference behind.

Conclusion Popular or mainstream culture, and, in the case of this chapter, mainstream cinema, may indeed be the cultural terrain where the most intense manifestations or representations offered by hegemony in relation to difference (ethnicity, class and sexuality) are to be found. And yet it is precisely for this reason that the mainstream is the arena in which such reductive representations can and should be most actively (and effectively) contested. In other words, the mainstream is the terrain in which Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers can most directly challenge the political and socio-cultural influence of the dominant societal norm. It is also (and, just as importantly) the arena in which the modes and methods of representation employed by the dominant norm to win and shape consent – ensuring that the power of the social majority over subordinate groups appears as both legitimate and natural – can be most exposed to scru- tiny and before the biggest possible audience. In this chapter we have certainly found evidence that a shift to the mainstream has occurred in the 2000s for some Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers. In particular this can be seen in the way that a growing number of bone fide Maghrebi-French and North African émigré stars have an increasing influence within the French film industry. However, as the analysis in this chapter of Djamel Bensalah’s career since the crossover success of Le Ciel has shown, while certain of Bensalah’s

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post-beur cinema

comedies display the potential to foreground the difference of the North African diaspora in a way that is both productive and challenging to mainstream audiences, too often his films appear to fall back on the largely reductive practices, structures and representational tropes employed by other mainstream, majority-ethnic-authored comedies dealing with issues of exclusion, difference and multiculturalism in contemporary French society. Indeed with Beur sur la ville (2011), it appears that Bensalah may have reached something of an impasse insofar as the film attracted smaller audiences than his previous features and was roundly panned by most critics for its unimaginative use of stereotypes in relation to immigrant minorities and banlieue culture (Ardjoum 2011). And yet, the realm of popular comedy in which Bensalah operates is not the only mainstream space, in terms of genre, where Maghrebi-French filmmakers have announced their presence in the 2000s. In the next chapter we shall turn our attention to the way in which certain directors of Maghrebi origin, most obviously Rachid Bouchareb, have, in far more confrontational ways than Bensalah, attempted to redefine the Eurocentric focus of the French historical epic or heritage film’s take on colonial history.

Notes 1. Examples of such multiple mainstreams offered by Martel include: Bollywood cinema’s popularity in India and with Indians resident outside India; the regional influence of Manga, J-pop et K-pop in East-Asia; and telenovelas in Brazil which are exported across central and South America. 2. At the time of writing (June 2012) one of the most prominent actresses of Maghrebi origin is Aure Atika (who was born in Portugal to a Moroccan mother and a French father and grew up in Paris), though she cannot be classed as a star and has only enjoyed lead roles in a small number of films. Two other young Maghrebi-French actresses who have begun to establish themselves following success in films directed by Abdellatif Kechiche in the 2000s are Hafsia Herzi and Sabrina Ouazani. 3. Source: http://www.cbo-boxoffice.com. 4. The award was also shared with Bernard Blancan, who plays the role of Sergeant Martinez in Indigènes. 5. For a detailed analysis of this film, see Rosello (2002). 6. For a detailed discussion of Maghrebi-French protagonists in queer French cinemas of the 2000s, see Provencher (2007), Rees-Roberts (2008) and Waldron (2009). 7. Indigènes (Bouchareb, 2006) attracted over 3 million spectators in France; Chouchou (Allouache, 2004) 3.8 million spectators in France; and Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis (Boon, 2008) 20.4 million. 8. Tarr has written sections on Le Ciel, les oiseaux et . . . ta mère!, Le Raïd and Il était une fois dans l’oued (Tarr 2005; 2009) though these form part of chapters or articles looking at a range of films and filmmakers, not specifically Bensalah. 9. We could argue that this change comes as a result of the fact that Neuilly sa mère! is written and produced, not directed, by Bensalah. However, as Bensalah’s input into the commentary on the French DVD release of Neuilly sa mère! shows, his involvement on set went beyond that of the producer or writer. 10. One of French cinema’s leading comic stars, Balasko also appeared in a cameo role in Le Raïd.

60 molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla ~acilisis at vero eros et eros vero at ~acilisis nulla feugiat eu dolore illum vel consequat, molestie Lázaro-Reboll Antonio consequat. commodo ea ex aliquip ut nisl lobortis suscipit ullamcorper exercitation nostrud quis tin- euismod veniam, minim ad enim nibh wisi Ut nonummy diam volutpat. erat aliquam magna sed dolorelaoreet ut cidunt elit, adipiscing consectetuer amet, sit dolor ipsum Lorem vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero erosesse molestie et consequat, accumsan et iusto. ut nisl lobortis suscipit velit vulputate in hendrerit in dolor ullamcorper iriure eum vel autem Duis tation exerci consequat. commodo ea nostrud ex aliquip quis veniam, minim ad enim wisi Ut volutpat. erat aliquam ISBN 0 7486 3638 9 3638 7486 0 ISBN www.euppublishing.com 9LF EH8 Edinburgh Square, George 22 PressUniversity Edinburgh Kobal Canal+Espana/The Collection © Jacketimage: oe ein ie ein Edinburgh Design, River Coverdesign: magna dolore laoreet ut tincidunt euismod nibh nonummy diam sed elit, adipiscing consectetuer amet, sit dolor ipsum Lorem facilisi. nulla feugait te dolore duis augue delenit zzril luptatum sent prae- blandit qui dignissim odio iusto et accumsan et erosvero at ~acilisis nulla feugiat eu dolore illum vel consequat, molestie esse velit vulputate in hendrerit in dolor iriure eum vel autem Duis consequat. commodo ea ex aliquip ut nisl lobortis suscipit ullamcorper exercitation tin- euismod nostrud quis nibh veniam, minim ad enim wisi Ut nonummy diam volutpat. erat aliquam magna dolore sed laoreet ut cidunt elit, adipiscing consectetuer amet, sit dolor ipsum Lorem global filmmaking, African cinema, blaxploitation American cinema, neorealist Italian cinema, particular a constitute which volume cinema Each cross-cultural) cinema. cases some (in worldregional or national different a in from films of movementsset a on concentrates fascinating and diverse introduces series new This Palmer Barton R. and Badley Linda Editors: Associate StevenJaySchneider Editor: Series Traditionsin WorldCinema ‘post-punk’ cinema, Czech and Slovak cinema and the Italian sword-and-sandalfilm. Italian the and cinema Slovak and Czech cinema, ‘post-punk’ SPANISHHORRORFILM The Devil’sThe Backbone ANTONIOLÁZARO-REBOLL us ue vl u iir oo i hnrrt n uptt vlt esse velit vulputate in hendrerit in dolor iriure eum vel autem Duis oue cvr ois uh s aaee horror Japanese as: such topics cover Volumes tradition. NOI LÁZARO-REBOLL ANTONIO NOI LÁZARO-REBOLL ANTONIO

This new series introduces diverse and fascinatingbarcode movements in world cinema. Each volume This new series introduces diverse and fascinating movements in world cinema. Each volume concentrates on a set of films from a different national or regional (in some cases cross-cultural) concentrates on a set of films from a different national or regional (in some cases cross-cultural) cinema which constitute tradition a particular. Volumes cover topics such as: Japanese horror cinema which constitute tradition a particular. Volumes cover topics such as: Japanese horror cinema, Italian neorealist cinema, American blaxploitation cinema, African filmmaking, global cinema, Italian neorealist cinema, American blaxploitation cinema, African filmmaking, global ‘post-punk’ cinema, Czech and Slovak cinema and the Italian sword-and-sandal film. ‘post-punk’ cinema, Czech and Slovak cinema and the Italian sword-and-sandal film.

SPANISH HORROR FILM SPANISH HORROR FILM

ANTONIO LÁZARO-REBOLL ANTONIO LÁZARO-REBOLL

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NOI LÁZARO-REBOLL ANTONIO Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendreritEdinburgh in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla ~acilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit prae- dolore eu feugiat nulla ~acilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit prae- sent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, sent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, ANTONIO LÁZARO-REBOLL consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna ANTONIO LÁZARO-REBOLL consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. aliquam erat volutpat. SPANISH HORROR Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto. esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto.

Antonio Lázaro-RebollDuis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse Antonio Lázaro-RebollDuis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse The SpanishHorrorBook:1968–75 9780748636396 IMar 2014 IPaperback I£19.99 molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla ~acilisis at vero eros et molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla ~acilisis at vero eros et SPANISHHORRORFILM A Sample From Chapter 1: A SampleFromChapter1: by AntonioLázaro-Reboll ANTONIOLÁZARO-REBOLL

Cover design: River Design, Edinburgh Cover design: River Design, Edinburgh Jacket image:The Devil’s Backbone Jacket image:The Devil’s Backbone

© Canal+Espana/The Kobal Collection FILM © Canal+Espana/The Kobal Collection Edinburgh University Press Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF barcode Edinburgh 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF barcode Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com www.euppublishing.com ISBN 0 7486 3638 9 ISBN 0 7486 3638 9 1. THE SPANISH HORROR BOOM: 1968–75

In a résumé of Spanish cinematic activity in 1973, published in the fi lm review yearbook Cine para leer, the country’s fi lmic production was described with the following graphic visual image: ‘There was a time when Spanish cinema was tinged with red . . . bloody red’ (1974: 21). It could well characterise the period 1968 to 1975, when the Spanish fi lm industry went into horror overdrive, producing around 150 horror fi lms, which accounted for more than a third of the national industry’s output. ‘Our producers, scriptwriters and fi lmmakers’, the review reads, ‘have released a whole “vile rabble” of sadists, traumatised victims, prostitutes, homosexuals, lesbians, werewolves, vampires, tramps, schizophrenics, fetishists, nymphomaniacs, necrophiles and people of dissolute life’, populating our screens with the ‘grossest depictions of physical, moral and sexual violence’ in a ‘maelstrom of crime, orgy and erotic morbidness’ (1974: 21). Attempting to account for this ghoulish invasion and the sexual perversions generated by contemporary Spanish horror fi lms, the reviewer wonders whether this horror boom is a desire on the part of the Spanish fi lm industry to ‘synchronise with a certain type of world cinema’ or is simply a crude form of ‘escapism, which unconsciously reveals the [repressive] social situation of the country’ (1974: 22), concluding, in an explicit reference to Franco’s dictatorial regime that, with the passing of time and with hindsight, this popular form of cinematic production might come to refl ect ‘an ideology of repression, terror and silence’ (1974: 22). Spanish horror fi lm was certainly synchronous with a variety of horror products emerging from other national contexts, in particular Great Britain, Italy

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and the United States. Producers and distributors all over the world were interested in horror fi lms, no matter where they came from. The changes occurring in European low-budget fi lmmaking during the 1960s and the 1970s allowed the production of horror fi lms in Italy, France, Germany, Great Britain and Spain, as well as co-productions between the different countries. Equally valid is the reviewer’s association of escapism with repression. The ideological interpretation of contemporary Spanish horror – ‘an ideology of repression, terror and silence’ – is a sign of the times and a statement informed by psychoanalyti- cal and Marxist ideas about social repression and unconscious desires,1 as a close examination of contemporary critical reception in the second section of this chapter shows. Spanish horror fi lms provided, in common with the genre’s counterpart in the Hollywood of the 1950s, a barometer of the decades’ con- tradictorily overt conformism and latent dissent, a time when the repressed was on the verge of making a return, in monstrous form. Spanish horror’s extensive repertoire of monsters – and response to international traditions of horror cinema – is refl ected both in the titles of many fi lms and in the heterogeneity and variety of horror production. Although hardly scratching the surface of genre production, a partial overview of titles reveals takes on classic monsters (La marca del hombre lobo / Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror (Enrique Eguíluz 1968), El Conde Drácula / Count Dracula (Jesús Franco 1969), La maldición de Frankenstein / The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein (Jesús Franco 1972)), as well as monstrous encounters which followed the tradition of Universal multi-monster narratives of the 1940s (Los monstruos del terror / Assignment Terror (Hugo Fregonese and Tulio Demicheli 1969), Drácula contra Frankenstein / The Screaming Dead (Jesús Franco 1971), Dr Jekyll y el hombre lobo / Dr Jekyll and the Werewolf (León Klimovsky 1972)). The exploitation of the latest international horror cycle success, such as the Night of the Living Dead (George Romero 1968) formula or The Exorcist (William Friedkin 1973) phenomenon, spawned Spanish off- spring (for example, No profanar el sueño de los muertos / The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (Jorge Grau 1974) or Exorcismo / Exorcism (Juan Bosch 1975)).2 In true exploitative manner, some titles promised more titillation than they delivered (La orgía nocturna de los vampiros / The Vampires’ Night Orgy (León Klimovsky 1972), La orgía de los muertos / Terror of the Living Dead (José Luis Merino 1973)). In fact, as a contemporary journalist claimed in the popular fi lm magazine Cine en 7 días, ‘in this genre once you have the title, the rest – the actual making of the fi lm – is a cinch’ (García 1973a: 16). And horror fi lm was so commonplace by the early 1970s that it was prime fodder for spoofi ng, this same journalist suggesting a series of alternative titles based on topical news stories in his weekly column: ‘Dracula at the United Nations’, ‘Frankenstein vs Moshe Dayan’, ‘Watergate Zombies’ or ‘The Mummy in the Europe of the Nine’ (1973b: 10), to mention just a few. Many a sneering

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critic resorted to culinary analogies in the opening paragraphs of their reviews, reducing horror fi lms to a list of ingredients which would allow almost anybody to concoct ‘una de vampiros’ (a colloquial expression in Spanish for a horror movie); as the opening lines of a less than favourable review for La noche de Walpurgis instructs, ‘take an abandoned monastery, a werewolf, a devil countess, a stormy night, one or two skeletons, some fake fangs and a few litres of thick, red liquid . . .’ (A. M. O. 1971). Spanish horror fi lm of the 1970s is commonly associated with fi lmmakers such as the prolifi c Jesús Franco, Argentinian-born León Klimovsky and Amando de Ossorio, among others. While most of their fi lms were low-budget, having low production values and short shooting schedules, there is a general misconception that all Spanish horror fi lms of this period were cheap and cheerful exploitation fare; Franco and Aured, for example, had respectable budgets to fi nance some of their fi lms, 99 mujeres / 99 Women (1969) in the case of the former and El retorno de Walpurgis / Curse of the Devil (1974) in the case of the latter. This presumed homogeneity is soon dispelled by looking at the middle-brow genre projects of directors as different as Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, whose fi lms are the subject of Chapter 3, and Juan Antonio Bardem. Ibáñez Serrador, a household name in Spanish television, had 40 million pesetas at his disposal for his fi rst feature fi lm, La residencia, which spear- headed the ‘boom’, whereas Bardem, an established auteur associated with oppositional fi lmmaking throughout the 1950s and the 1960s, had more than 50 million pesetas and Spanish star Marisol to distinguish his La corrupción de Chris Miller / The Corruption of Chris Miller (1973) from contemporary low- brow horror. The period also offers the isolated incursions of up-and-coming art-house directors moving into commercial production, such as Vicente Aranda (La novia ensangrentada / The Blood-Spattered Bride (1972)), Claudio Guerín Hill (La campana del infi erno / Bell of Hell (1973)) (see Figure 2) and Jorge Grau (Ceremonia sangrienta / Bloody Ceremony (1973) and No profanar el sueño de los muertos). Experimental fi lmmaker Javier Aguirre made commercial genre products El gran amor del Conde Drácula / Count Dracula’s Great Love (1972) and El jorobado de la morgue / Hunchback of the Morgue (1973) in order to be able to fi nance his more radical, underground projects. There are also one-off, experimental refl ections on the vampiric nature of fi lmmaking, such as Vampir Cuadecuc (Pere Portabella 1970), an experimental documentary shot in 16 mm during the making of Franco’s Count Dracula, which combines disconcerting editing (scenes from the fi lm, on-set footage, images of the cast and crew) and a dissonant soundtrack,3 and collaborative projects like Pastel de sangre (1971), in which four young fi lmmakers offered their personal vision of the genre.4 And, arguably, other fi lms, El bosque del lobo / The Ancine Woods (Pedro Olea 1970) (see Figure 3) and El espíritu de la colmena / The Spirit of the Beehive (Víctor Erice 1973), which are not readily

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Figure 2 La campana del inﬁ erno was directed by Claudio Guerín Hill, a director with ‘art-house’ ﬁ lm credentials.

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Figure 3 Spanish actor José Luis López Vázquez played a lycanthrope in El bosque del lobo, a story rooted in anthropological studies of the myth.

associated with the horror genre, form part of the same industrial and cultural milieu. Spanish horror therefore came from different directions and was made in a variety of budgetary conditions. With the exception of Profi lmes S. A. and some short-lived production companies, many producers fi nanced one or two fi lms and then disappeared from the market.5 Such was the case with Eva Films (El jorobado de la morgue), Galaxia Films (Odio mi cuerpo / I Hate My Body (León Klimovsky 1974)) and Huracán Films S. A. (El asesino de muñecas / Killing of the Dolls (Miguel Madrid 1975)). There were a few companies whose names were linked to various horror projects. Plata Films was the name behind two commercial successes – La noche de Walpurgis (co-produced with the German Hi-Fi Stereo) and La noche del terror ciego (with Portuguese InterFilme P. C.); Maxper Producciones Cinematográfi cas produced two werewolf fi lms – La marca del hombre lobo (co-production with the German Hi-Fi Stereo) and La furia del hombre lobo / The Wolfman Never Sleeps (José María Zabalza 1972) – and returned to the genre some years later with El colegio de la muerte / School of Death (Pedro Luis Ramírez 1975); Ancla Century Films

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were involved in the production of three Amando de Ossorio fi lms (El ataque de los muertos sin ojos (1973), El buque maldito / The Ghost Galleon (1974) and La noche de las gaviotas / Night of the Seagulls (1975)), as well as a Paul Naschy project (Inquisición / Inquisition (1976)); Janus Films and Lotus Films also produced commercial vehicles for Paul Naschy – the former produced El gran amor del Conde Drácula, the latter El retorno de Walpurgis and La venganza de la momia / Vengeance of the Mummy (1973)). Established names in fi lm production and distribution, like Arturo González, who specialised in comedies and spaghetti westerns,6 also had a slice of the horror market, mainly through his distribution arm Regia Arturo González, selling commercial hits such as La residencia, Dr Jekyll y el hombre lobo and Una gota de sangre para morir amando. Co-productions with other European countries, mainly Italy, Germany and France, were the norm.7 As for the distribution of horror fi lms, there were no major players and the market was divided up into small companies (Belén Films, D. C. Films, Exclusivas Floralva, to name but a few) and established commercial fi rms (Hesperia Films, Mercurio, Hispamex) which exploited the horror fi lm bonanza. This cursory overview of production and distribution companies refl ects the fragmentation of the Spanish fi lm industry in general and the lack of a suffi ciently strong industrial infrastructure to create specialist genre companies. The only attempt to develop and sustain a company with a profi le in horror came from a Barcelona-based company called Profi lmes, S. A., managed by Ricardo Múñoz Suay (1917–92), a fi gure well versed in the intricacies of the Spanish fi lm industry,8 and José Antonio Pérez Giner, in the capacity of executive producer. Múñoz Suay’s commercial savoir-faire, his publicity skills and his connections within the industry were put at the service of genre fi lmmaking. With a capital of 100 million pesetas, Profi lmes was a calculated commercial venture aimed at producing low-budget movies in a variety of genres, with an annual target of seven fi lms. This chapter concludes with a detailed look at Profi lmes’ output and its international projection in pressbooks. At a time when Hammer House of Horrors was in decline and no longer a dominant force in the European horror market, Profi lmes was one of a number of European production companies feeding the international demand for horror. Indeed, in industry magazines and in his writings for Nuevo Fotogramas, Múñoz Suay promoted and publicised the company as the ‘Spanish Hammer’. Profi lmes not only had the domestic market, mainly neighbourhood cinemas, in mind, but primarily intended its product for international distribution and consumption on specialised exploitation circuits as far away as the US or Hong Kong; as Múñoz Suay admitted, sales abroad amply recouped the production costs, and box-offi ce takings in Spain were a welcome bonus. Between 1972 and 1975, Profi lmes produced a signifi cant number of horror, action and adventure movies. As we will see later on in this chapter when we examine

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Profi lmes’ pressbooks, it is possible to argue for a Profi lmes ‘look’, since there was some continuity in the production strategies and marketing tactics with the presence of recognisable national and foreign genre actors and actresses, the recycling of sets and locations, and the exploitation of successful commercial cycles of the early 1970s. Profi lmes horror fi lms, like the bulk of the low- to medium-budget Spanish horror fi lms, were the staple of the ‘cines de barrio’ (cheap neighbourhood cinemas), whose core audience was mainly a male, urban working class. Many horror fi lms were released for double-bill programmes, Saturday matinees and the circuit of ‘cines de verano’ (summer cinemas), aimed mainly at a teen and youth audience. Films with considerable fi nancial support, like La residencia and La corrupción de Chris Miller, on the other hand, were premiered in fi rst- run and mainstream cinemas, and delivered well above the average Spanish commercial fi lms at the box offi ce: La residencia 104 million pesetas and 2,924,805 spectators and La corrupción de Chris Miller 62 million pesetas and 1,237,013 spectators. They were also widely promoted and distributed in Europe by Cinespaña. The vast majority of Spanish horror production regularly attracted audiences of 300,000 to 500,000 spectators, and averaged box-offi ce takings of between 5 million and 13 million pesetas.9 Bankable autochthonous horror stars like Paul Naschy proved to be commercially successful, with regular takings over the 13 million mark and reaching up to 40 million pesetas. As far as distribution abroad is concerned, Spanish horror fi lms were not only fully exploited by the European co-producers and let loose on the European horror circuit, but also roamed the American exploitation circuit at the drive-in, where foreign distributors retitled them, dubbed them into English, added nudes and sexually suggestive scenes, cut scenes or reels for marketing purposes, and repackaged them as Euro-horror. Many 1960s and 1970s Spanish horror movies therefore form part of the global history of exploitation and sexploitation, and their distribution histories are common currency in genre magazines and fanzines, as well as DVD extra features. The following pages focus on the national context of their production and reception. An initial look at the cinematic context in which Spanish horror fi lm production emerged considers the circumstances that led to the proliferation of horror fi lms in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time which corresponds to crucial changes in Spanish society and culture – economic boom, consum- erism and the last years of Francoism – and situates the genre in relation to other cinematic trends: namely, other popular genres and art-cinema. The fi rst section of this chapter argues how Spanish horror fi lm departs from the norms and ideals of contemporary Spanish cinema: on the one hand, from traditional forms of Spanish popular cinema production such as comedies, melodramas or folkloric fi lms (known as españoladas), and, on the other, from the auteurist-led production philosophy promoted by the government, in particular what was to

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be labelled as ‘Nuevo Cine Español’ (New Spanish Cinema, NCE). A look at the industrial and cinema policies, led by José María García Escudero, Director General de Cinematografía, establishes how the production of horror fi lms is shaped by a number of economic, legislative and aesthetic considerations affecting the fi lm industry between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s. Like other international horror fi lm traditions before (American and British), Spanish horror cinema had to contend with the institution of censorship, and fi lmmakers adopted a number of formal and stylistic strategies to avoid the censor’s scissors. The second section of the chapter focuses on critical attitudes towards horror, which were profoundly infl uenced by the aesthetic and cultural views of fi gures such as García Escudero, pioneering critics such as Juan Manuel Company and Román Gubern, and mainstream review journalism. By judging horror according to their own standards and perceiving it as commercialising fi lm culture, these critics not only neglected other rich areas of enquiry, such as how Spanish horror fi lms of the period engaged with international examples of horror or how their consumption is linked to the development of a horror subculture; they also, more importantly, hampered the critical development of the genre in subsequent histories of Spanish cinema. While any critical study of Spanish horror fi lm ought to consider the local context of production, the analysis must acknowledge the commercial realities of the genre, which are exploited at the level of marketing, publicity and consumption. The last section of the chapter turns to the examination of some of the cinematic riches of Spanish horror fi lm of the period, relating marketing and publicity tactics to a long-standing tradition of exploitation and consumption practices of popular genre fi lms.

Departing from the Norms and Ideals of Spanish Cinema The arrival of José María García Escudero as Undersecretary of Cinema (1962–8)10 at the ‘Dirección General de Cinematografía y Teatro’ (Secretariat of Cinema and Theatre) brought key changes to the Spanish fi lm industry: namely, the restructuring of the economy of commercial cinema, the introduction of censorship norms and the promotion of the NCE, which aspired to compete aesthetically with other new European fi lm waves of the 1960s. García Escudero’s measures were directed against foreign fi lm, the impact of television, and the declining audience numbers for national fi lm in an attempt, on the one hand, to protect an ailing fi lm industry and, on the other hand, to create the institutional conditions to improve the quality of Spanish cinema through the production of a ‘cine de calidad’ (quality cinema). Other policies involved the granting of ‘Cine de Interés Especial’ awards (Special Interest Films) to those fi lms which offered suffi cient quality in their inclusion of relevant moral, social, educative or political values, the regulation of co- productions, the introduction of box-offi ce controls in 1966, the opening of

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‘Salas de Arte y Ensayo’ (Experimental Arts Cinemas), and the promotion of the work of graduates from the ‘Escuela Ofi cial de Cinematografía’ (Offi cial Film School, EOC).11 In his own writings on Spanish cinema, in particular El cine español (1962), García Escudero ‘lays out the critique of Spanish [popular] cinema which he had been expounding in contemporary articles and through his political decisions’ (Triana-Toribio 2003: 66): namely, ‘a market-driven production (the absence of good producers [. . .]), a defi cient subsidy system (well meaning but inept [. . .]), and a bad audience in its majority’ (2003: 67). The fi rst two critiques would be addressed through a number of economic and legislative policies, whereas his views on popular audiences and tastes would infl uence the subsequent critical reception of horror fi lms, as I demonstrate in the next section of this chapter. As Triana-Toribio has persuasively argued, ‘García Escudero (and his followers) does not allow for any measure of agency in its public, nor for the pleasures these texts gave, and certainly not for the resistant readings that they might conjure up in their audiences’ (2003: 69).12 The economic measures introduced in August 1964 encouraged the fi nancial restructuring of the Spanish fi lm industry:

each Spanish fi lm was granted one million pesetas in medium-termed credit from a Protection Fund which the Banco de Crédito Industrial could increase to up to 50 per cent of the production budget. All fi lms received a grant equal to 15% of their box-offi ce takings. ‘Special Interest’ fi lms received 2 million pesetas credit, 30% of box-offi ce takings, and counted as two normal Spanish fi lms for the purpose of distribution and screen quotas. The State subsidy could be increased to 5 million pesetas (with a ceiling of 50% of a fi lm’s budget), only repayable from the 30% of box- offi ce takings; and if commercial performance did not allow repayment, it was waived. (Hopewell 1986: 64)

This costly production system, however, led with the passing of time to delays in the payment of government subsidies to producers and exhibitors, leaving the administration with a debt of more than 250 million pesetas; this eventually provoked the dismissal of García Escudero from his role as Undersecretary of Cinema in 1968. The economic failure of the NCE and the impact of television in the country (in 1960, for instance, only 1% of households had a TV set, but by 1976 90% owned one), as well as the new position of cinema within the leisure industry, accentuated the crisis in fi lm production and consumption. Between 1968 and 1975 the Spanish fi lm industry – never very healthy – was witness to the closure of one-third of its total number screens (in 1968 there were 7,761 screens, by 1975 5,076) and a decrease in the sector’s income.13 By 1968, therefore, the Spanish fi lm industry was in a critical state, the ‘Dirección General de Cinematografía y Teatro’ was replaced by the ‘Dirección General

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de Cultura Popular y Espectáculos’, and the NCE was practically defunct. As fi lm historian John Hopewell has pointed out, ‘only a few forms of fi lm-life survived and festered in such an economic climate’ (1986: 80). The survivors were the lowly ‘genre’ or ‘subgeneric’ fi lms, the most commercially successful being the Iberian sex comedy and the horror fi lm, which could easily recoup production costs and which consistently drew audiences to the cinemas. While the sex comedy was intended only for internal consumption, addressing as it did a series of issues related to the Spanish society of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the horror genre was intended for both internal and external markets and competed with other European productions. The Spanish audience continued to consume the squeaky-clean, censored versions of fi lms whose more explicit originals were exported for international consumption, following a late 1950s policy whereby double versions were produced for home and overseas. In addition to the economic and cultural changes engineered by the Dirección General de Cinematografía y Teatro, García Escudero also legislated on the ideological and moral values that would govern Spanish cinema until the end of the dictatorship by establishing offi cial guidelines on fi lm censorship. Although censorship had existed since the beginning of the dictatorship, the creation of the ‘Junta de Clasifi cación y Censura’ (Board of Classifi cation and Censorship) in September 1962, the compulsory offi cial examination of all fi lm scripts from February 1963 onwards, and the establishment of a set of censorship rules established what was acceptable and what was not.14 Modelled, to a certain extent, on the Hollywood production code, the thirty-seven norms covered a wide spectrum of subjects and situations, codifying the acceptable and the unacceptable, although in a very ambiguous and arbitrary manner, as we will see in the case of individual fi lms. In theory, the 1963 norms codi- fi ed the borders between the acceptable and the forbidden, the orthodox and the transgressive, and good and bad taste, but in practice some norms were ambiguous on paper and their application was highly inconsistent. Keeping Spanish screens free from explicit political content was relatively easy. However, the limits put on sexual and violent images had to adjust constantly to more ‘liberal’ attitudes to sex across the Western world in the 1960s and 1970s and, above all, to the economic demands of the market. In the context of the later part of the Francoist regime, the realities of the dictatorship – political repression, strict control of sexuality through Catholic morality, strict control of cultural production through censorship – ran parallel to an intense process of socio-economic transformation, facilitated by tourism revenue, foreign investment and the infl uence of those Spanish emigrants who had witnessed change abroad, that begins to align Spain with Western consumer society and introduces a changed set of values in moral and religious attitudes. Horror participates in various ways in the representation of these complex and contradictory changes. In a fi lm like La noche del terror ciego,

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for instance, as one reviewer observed, the fi lm mixes ‘bikinis and shrouds, monastic skeletons and curvaceous females, abbey ruins and ultramodern swimming-pools’ (Anon. 1972c); tourism, eroticised bodies and the satisfac- tions of consumer society sit alongside traditional religious values and institutions. This fi lm is analysed in Chapter 2. The question is, how far did changes in social mores allow for the screening of violence, gore and deviations from the sexual norm, particularly in the case of a genre whose formal and stylistic conventions rely on graphic depictions of physical, moral and sexual violence? And, more generally, what were the institutional constraints faced by contemporary horror fi lmmakers? The general censorship norms announced offi cial sensitivity towards the world of the fi lm (‘each fi lm will be judged according to not only specifi c images or scenes but as a whole . . . in relation to the totality of its content’) and the generic idiom (‘each fi lm will be judged . . . according to the characteristics of different genres and fi lmic styles’). With regard to the horror genre, the censorship norms made direct references to one of the genre’s defi ning characteristics, the representation of evil (‘mal’) – a term which censors were obsessed with, for it was the main subject of norms 2, 4, 5 and 6. This conception of evil as wrongdoing evidently responded to a Christian dualistic view of the world. More explicitly related to the horror genre and other horror-related forms was the norm that prohibited ‘images and scenes of brutality, of cruelty towards people and animals, and of horror presented in a morbid or unjustifi ed manner’. As for the explicit references to sex, ‘the representation of sexual perversions’ and ‘images and scenes that may lead to the arousal of base instincts in the normal spectator’ were also prohibited. Still, a whole ‘vile rabble’ of sexual perverts and perversions found their way on to Spanish screens. As David J. Skal has observed with reference to horror fi lms on 1930s American screens,

censors, of course, were primarily interested in sex, and sex was fairly easy to contain, at least on screen. The rituals of erotic exorcism were, by then, ﬁ rmly established. There were certain words, elements of costume, cleavage, the proximity of a bed – the danger signs were fully recogniz- able. (1993: 161)

Although Spanish censors were ready to cut scenes of a sexual nature, fi lmmakers and audiences were used to exerting self-censorship and reading sexual meanings into narrative ellipsis. Other tactics were regularly used by Spanish fi lmmakers in general, whereby sexuality and eroticism were traditionally inscribed in foreign female actresses. Like other Spanish fi lm directors working under the institutional restraints of Francoism, horror fi lmmakers had to abide by the censor’s rules, resorting thereby to their own formal and stylistic strategies, to their own ‘aesthetics of censorship’. According to Águilar:

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Spanish horror took care of obvious geographical and narrative questions (the action was set outside Spain, the story-lines dealt with universal archetypes, the shooting locations were unusual) and deployed more subtle resources, mainly concerning the cast: the actors were dubbed (so that the regular ﬁ lmgoer could not identify the voices of the actors with those of other Spanish ﬁ lm genres) and they used to be either foreign (Americans like Jack Taylor and Patty Shepard, French like Silvia Solar and Howard Vernon, Central European like Dyanik Zurakowska, Barta Barcy and Helga Liné, Argentinean like Alberto Dalbes, Rosanna Yanni and Perla Cristal) or Spanish who did not work – or hardly worked – outside the genre. (1999a: 24)

The coding of the source of horror as foreign, which was also typical of US horror fi lms of the 1930s and 1940s set in mostly European settings, was a must. Nevertheless, universally understood locations, such as castles, abandoned houses, isolated villages or forests, came with the generic territory, while in other cases the international popular consumption of horror fi lms demanded modern, cosmopolitan settings such as London or Paris. That said, specifi c elements did often connect the fi lm with the Spanish landscape, for many locations are recognisably Spanish. Cuts were always likely in the areas of politics, religion and sex. Horror fi lms, whether Spanish or foreign, were censored on the grounds of their religious or sexual content. Dracula – Prince of Darkness (Terence Fisher 1965), which was not granted exhibition rights until 1972, suffered alterations at the stage of dubbing: ‘suppress all specifi c allusions to “religion”, “religiosity” or “Church” replacing them by terms such as “brotherhood” or “brethren”,’ read the censor’s fi le; The Exorcist, according to the censors, was irreverent both towards the Virgin Mary, in the scene where a disfi gured image of the saint appears briefl y on screen, and towards Christian symbols (‘suppress those sequences in which the crucifi x is used as a weapon’). Some Spanish horror fi lms were massacred: Eloy de la Iglesia’s La semana del asesino, for instance, suffered sixty-four cuts (up to a hundred, according to other sources). The Francoist censorship board delayed its screening until 1974, and imposed a narrative closure whereby the assassin Marcos hands himself in to the police. The censors’ imposed ending can be interpreted as an attempt to master the text. The authors of the script, de la Iglesia and Antonio Fos, were also obliged to include the following disclaimer: ‘there is not the slightest sign of homosexuality in the character of Néstor’ (‘No hay un solo atisbo de homosexualidad en Nestor’). Disclaimers and all, the offi cial fi lm classifi cation rated the fi lm as ‘severely dangerous’ (‘gravemente peligrosa’). La semana del asesino is discussed in detail in Chapter 4. Other fi lms were dramatically shortened and the cuts demonstrated the existence of double standards in reference to the

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notorious double versions: the exhibition of Franco’s 99 mujeres was ‘muti- lated in twenty-four minutes’, the dialogues were changed, and ‘the ending differed from that in other countries’ (Franco in Olano 1973: 10). Indeed, Franco’s fi lms were regularly subjected to the censors’ scissors, as he himself acknowledged in numerous interviews of the period (‘my most important fi lms have not been exhibited in Spain or have been heavily cut’ (Franco in Olano 1973: 10); Las vampiras (1971) was intended to be ‘a re-reading, a refashioning of the myth of Dracula’ but, in the director’s own words, was left ‘like a sieve. It was impossible to understand it’ (Franco in Bassa and Freixas 1991b: 43). Provocation and sensationalism were at the centre of the planned marketing campaign for Aranda’s La novia ensangrentada, but the question, ‘the fi rst sexual encounter: matrimonial consummation or rape?’ [‘el enfrentamiento con la primera experiencia carnal: ¿matrimonio o violación?’], splashed in red lettering across an image of a bride dressed in virginal white, was censored and removed from the fi nal posters. The lurid title was kept but seventeen minutes were cut from the fi lm. The censors neutralised the sexual and gender dynamics proposed by director Aranda, and in the end the imagery of the female vampire subgenre was to communicate the story of the fi lm.15 Sexual perversions were duly dealt with, in particular lesbian intimations: in Franco’s 99 mujeres, scenes of a lesbian nature taking place in a prison hospital had to be removed, while Ibáñez Serrador’s La residencia experienced similar cuts. Prospective viewers of the latter were also denied identifi cation with a female character whose point of view might have triggered the arousal of inappropriate sexual urges (the censor’s notes ordered the suppression of ‘close ups of lascivious, wet lips when the character is thinking about the scene that took place in the shed between one of the inmates and the delivery man’). Cinemagoers, journalists and critics frequently noted the application of different standards, depending on the fi lm under consideration and its potential impact on audiences. A reader in Nuevo Fotogramas entitles his letter to the editor ‘99 mujeres (Madame Censorship)’:

A date for history: 16 June 1969. The fi rst decidedly pornographic fi lm is released in Madrid: ‘99 mujeres’. Not even the cuts ordered by the censors have been able to lighten the complete treatise on sexual pathologies this fi lm presents us with.

A catalogue of sexual pathologies follows (a sadist transvestite, a fetishist lesbian, several narcissists exhibiting their bodies, prostitutes, drug addicts and murderers) and the reader closes with a reference to the disconcerting ways of ‘Madame Censorship’:

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while ‘99 mujeres’, a typical example of how to exploit the most base instincts reaches our screens, ‘Viridiana’, ‘Belle de jour’, ‘¡Viva Maria!’, ‘Blow-Up’, ‘La dolce Vita’ . . . and many other ﬁ lms by Godard, Bergman, Bellochio, Visconti, Rocha, to name but a few, sleep the sleep of the just.16

With reference to Pedro Olea’s El bosque del lobo, fi lm historian Gubern observed that, while the censors allowed the screening of graphic ‘bloodsheds performed by British and Spanish Draculas’, El bosque del lobo was made more palatable by severely softening the depiction of violence and brutality, therefore neutralising the critique contained in this ‘study of criminal anthro- pology’ (1981: 266) (see Figure 3). And, in a more tongue-in-cheek manner, critics recorded their awareness of the existence of a more explicit version made for the foreign market. A Nuevo Fotogramas reviewer is convinced that the Spanish version of La noche de Walpurgis is ‘a light snack’ (Picas 1971c: 41) in comparison to the more meaty German cut. Reviewing La campana del infi erno for the newspaper ABC, the journalist takes it for granted that ‘the complete version will be highly valued abroad’ (López Sancho 1973). I return inevitably to the cuts and splices which shaped the fi lms under analysis in the next three chapters, in order to appreciate how far and in what ways individual fi lms were affected by the actions of the censors. But what is there to be said about the role of fi lm critics in shaping contemporary (and future) attitudes towards the genre?

Critical Reception In this section I focus on the critical reception of Spanish horror fi lm, both in contemporary mainstream media reviews and original critical analyses of the genre. Although many popular fi lms were not reviewed at national level or were not reviewed at all, added to the fact that some newspaper critics simply reproduced the promotional material included in the pressbooks, a look at this material gives us an idea of how these fi lms were discussed and evaluated by mainstream critics,17 sheds light on the reading protocols and critical tastes of the time,18 and, more generally, places these critical responses in their wider historical and cultural context. These are documents that also, in some instances, describe cinemagoers’ responses to individual fi lms and the genre in general, information which would otherwise only be accessible through ethnographic research that has yet to be undertaken. We know, for instance, that during the screening of La noche de Walpurgis on 16 May 1971, at the Fuencarral cinema in Madrid, many spectators ‘clapped spontaneously [in response to specifi c sequences] and at the end of the fi lm’ (Anon. 1971d) and that the few spectators who attended one of the screenings of Klimovsky’s Odio mi cuerpo in that same venue on 10 June 1974

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laughed a lot, particularly during those erotic scenes in which the image of the male character, whose brain had been transplanted on to the female character, is superimposed on to the image of the female protagonist resulting in bizarre moments of homosexuality. (Arroita-Jaúregui 1974)

It is possible to identify a series of recurrent themes surfacing in reviews. In the context of the endemic crisis of the Spanish fi lm industry and the constraints imposed by the censorship board, references to economic and institutional matters were common. Many critics commented on the commercial and popular success of the genre, expressing their preoccupation with the subgeneric status of most horror products, while many others overtly condemned its pursuit of profi t and its cheap mode of production. Engagement or lack of engagement with the textual features of the genre made for very different interpretations and judgements. But perhaps the most consistent interpretive frames were those which labelled horror fi lms as mindless, repetitious fodder for the masses and explained horror narratives as refl ections of social (read sexual) repression. The initial reception of Spanish horror cinema in the industry magazines and the daily press was, to a certain extent, welcoming and encouraging as to the commercial and cultural possibilities of the genre, but individual fi lms were heavily criticised for their slipshod mode of production and their exploitative aesthetics. La marca del hombre lobo was a ‘frustrated fi lm’ on many narrative and stylistic levels, since it ‘accumulates with some simplicity [. . .] all the primary elements of the horror genre’ (Martialay 1971), wrote El Alcázar. However, Eguíluz’s fi lm suggested interesting thematic and generic possibilities embodied in the ‘evident effeminate streak of the character played by actor Ugarte [vampire Janos Mikhelov]’ (Martialay 1971), which added an original homoerotic undertone worthy of note. La furia del hombre lobo (José María Zabalza 1970), which was not released until 1972, admittedly suffered from visible budget and time constraints – ‘low budget [. . .], a hasty shooting schedule [and] poor production values’, although the reviewer conceded in a receptive mood that there was enough evidence of ‘the necessary foundations for future projects’, which, with better fi nancial backing, ‘would yield more satisfactory results’ for the genre (Peláez 1973a). A year earlier, La noche de terror ciego had offered a ‘completely new experience’ to audiences and marked ‘new directions’ with the horrifi c creations of de Ossorio, the Knights Templar, whose slow-motion movements and ghastly look were described as ‘accomplished moments of spectacle’ (Anon. 1972c) by the Pueblo reviewer. The initial novelty of de Ossorio’s characters and special effects soon wore off when three sequels appeared in the following years, so that, by the time that La noche de las gaviotas was exhibited in 1976, one critic summed up his views on the Knights Templar saga thus:

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the truth is that the ﬁ rst ﬁ lm of the cycle captured our attention in its brilliant use and characterization of the cadaverous characters. But since then Amando de Ossorio has been resting on his laurels, repeating time and again the same effects. (Peláez 1976)

Innovation and repetition were two aspects addressed in many a horror ﬁ lm review. Trade journal Cineinforme acknowledged in its brief review of José Luis Merino’s La orgía de los muertos that

it is true that make-up and special effects are getting more successful with every ﬁ lm. It is also true that there is a small variation, no matter how insigniﬁ cant, from what we have seen the previous week. But all in all everything is a repetition. However, taking into account that there is a huge sector of the public who really enjoys this type of production, one has no other option than to admit that they are still commercially successful. After all, their main goal is to entertain. (Anon. 1975b)

While the journalist reluctantly showed a certain resignation regarding the popular success of the genre, his fi nal comment revealed a dismissive attitude towards popular fi lm as just entertainment. Yet it is precisely in the said ‘small variation’ that the interest lay for the horror fi lm consumer, who already knew the plots and structures, was familiar with stock characters and images, and recognised patterns of meaning. What becomes important for many horror audiences and fans is how the fi lm reworks and exceeds the textual features of the genre. A clear example of the different meanings which fi lms had for critics and audiences was the work of Paul Naschy, whose commercial success was hardly matched by critical acclaim; in fact, many Paul Naschy commercial vehicles were panned by reviewers. In his review of Jack el destripador de Londres / Seven Murders for Scotland Yard (José Luis Madrid 1973), Miguel Rubio wrote that ‘any relation between this fi lm (?) and cinema is pure coincidence [. . .] I can understand that this fi lm was made but it is beyond my compre- hension that it is being distributed and that some cinemas are prepared to exhibit it’ (1972a); La rebelión de las muertas / Vengeance of the Zombies (León Klimovsky 1972) could only be described as ‘puerile’ and ‘idiotic’ fare (Anon. 1973b) by the Pueblo reviewer; El espanto surge de la tumba (Carlos Aured 1973) deserved ‘no other comment than silence’ (1973) for the Arriba reviewer; and after the release of Exorcismo one critic warned La Vanguardia readers that ‘the Devil, conspiring with producers and distributors, will be among us for a long time’ and closed his review with a ‘God help us!’ (1975).19 But the more hostile dismissals of Spanish horror fi lms – and of subgeneric cinema in general – came from sources associated with oppositional politics

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and art-fi lmmaking practices: namely, the School of Barcelona. Two examples of such critical interventions will be considered here: fi rstly, journalist Jaume Picas reviewing a Jesús Franco fi lm for Nuevo Fotogramas, and, secondly, media sociologist and fi lm historian Román Gubern writing on Spanish subgeneric cinema in the preface to Cine español, cine de subgéneros (1974), co-authored by the Equipo ‘Cartelera Turia’ (Juan Manuel Company, Vicente Vergara, Juan de Mata Moncho and José Vanaclocha), a pioneering volume devoted to Spanish subgeneric fi lm products such as the spaghetti western (or ‘paella western’), the musical, the sexy Iberian comedy and the Spanish horror fi lm.20 The evaluations and reactions of critics can be seen as authentic, individual subjective responses to fi lms; however, Picas and Gubern display a signifi cant performative element with a specifi c agenda in mind.

The reader will think that Jesús Franco’s ﬁ lm [El proceso de la brujas / Night of the Blood Monster (1970)] is just an excuse to pose a series of grave issues affecting Spanish cinema. And my reply to the reader is afﬁ rmative,

confesses Picas in Nuevo Fotogramas. ‘Where is the relevance in talking about a minor, ridiculous fi lm, which lacks in interest and is nothing other than a grotesque product?’, the critic continues. And, punning on the title of the fi lm (literally, ‘Trial of the Witches’), he claims that the real witch hunting is happening within the Spanish fi lm industry because current fi lm legislation makes ‘the existence of auteur cinema an impossibility’, as the failure of the NCE and the prohibition to exhibit many School of Barcelona fi lms had demonstrated (1971a: 39). Picas’s diatribe was a vehicle enabling him to articulate his views on the state of the Spanish fi lm industry and the directions that Spanish cinema ought to take. More damning for subsequent considerations of Spanish horror cinema were Gubern’s introductory remarks on subgeneric production for the co-edited volume Cine español, cine de subgéneros, which was published in the heyday of horror fi lmmaking. The book examines Spanish popular genres ‘through the fi lter of subgéneros, or sub-genres: a term used here to classify Spanish genre fi lmmaking as subpar to American and European genres’ (Beck and Rodríguez- Ortega 2008: 5). Gubern’s preface is followed by a chapter entitled ‘El rito y la sangre. Aproximaciones al subterror hispano’ (Company 1974: 17–76), the fi rst ‘study’ of Spanish horror fi lm. In the preface Gubern articulated his views on all forms of subgeneric cinema around the prefi x ‘sub-‘, which ‘stands both for subgenre and a subnormal [person]’ (1974: 12), the latter echoing García Escudero’s description of popular fi lm consumers as ‘bad audiences’. Gubern’s linguistic explanation was not limited to defi ning a mode of production and a type of audience, crudely marked as artistically and intellectually

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inferior, but also reached sites of exhibition and critical reception. For him this type of cinema is destined for ‘specialist sub-cinemas, comparable to “porno-cinemas” (which do not yet exist in Spain)’ (1974: 13), to be found in Pigalle in Paris, Soho in London and the fl ea-pits of 8th Avenue in New York. This preface to the volume encapsulated a series of critical discourses that were being rehearsed in contemporary mainstream criticism and that would become typical of subsequent academic histories of Spanish cinema. Gubern’s prophesy – ‘this insubstantial Spanish fi lmic production will never make it into histories of Spanish cinema, unless it is dealt with in a succinct footnote’ (1974: 16) – held sway until very recently. The critical discourses at work in Gubern’s observations had wide-ranging generic, thematic, ideological and sociological implications. According to Gubern, Spanish horror fi lms ‘are mimetic and repetitive products in their imitation of previous models [German expressionism, Universal Pictures and Hammer fi lms], which are also repetitive but have at least a genuine and autochthonous cultural character’ (1974: 13). In his chapter ‘El rito y la sangre’, Company reiterated Gubern’s interpretation by stating that, in Spanish horror fi lms, ‘the deterioration and trivialisation of the linguistic codes of the American genre cinemas has reached unimaginable heights or rather depths’ (1974: 50). Unlike British horror cinema, which could claim ‘a heritage of horror’ – to use David Pirie’s expression from his seminal 1973 study on British horror cinema, A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema 1946–1972 – steeped in Gothic literature, Spanish horror was rooted in neither an autochthonous literary tradition nor a local cinematic tradition. By not being associated with a literary tradition, the genre could not be artistically or aesthetically legitimated and attain respectability. Horror for Gubern and Company, therefore, was not peculiarly Spanish. Subsequently, some fi lm historians have even categorised the horror genre as ‘non-Spanish’ (García Fernández 1992: 22). ‘The Spanish disposition is fundamentally realist’ (1971: 12), wrote Guarner in ‘Spanish Speaking Terror . . .’, a claim that would be seconded by Picas, Gubern and Company in their critical privileging of a realist aesthetic. If these cinematic forms had any relevance at all, its signifi - cance had to be consigned to the realm of ‘sociological interest’, thus Gubern’s declaration that his real interest in subgeneric production came from his position as ‘mass media sociologist’ (1974: 11) and his distancing from consumers of subgeneric cinema (‘I am a very occasional consumer’ (1974: 12)). Spanish horror fi lms are dismissed as disreputable commercial products and described as conformist and dupe entertainment for the popular masses, more specifi - cally for male proletarian audiences, for the horror genre is a misogynist genre ‘made by men and for men’ (1974: 13). But the Spanish fi lm industry as a whole could be described thus. Moreover, this male domination, or to use Gubern’s words, ‘[fi lms] made by men and for men’, could arguably describe

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art-quality and experimental cinema, made by male directors and exhibited and consumed in the masculinised space of cine-clubs and art-house cinemas, which these very same critics frequented. It is here that we return to the quotation with which we opened this chapter: Spanish horror fi lms are a crude refl ection of an ‘escapism, which unconsciously reveals the [repressive] social situation of the country’ (in Cine para leer 1974: 22). For Gubern, the representation and mythologisation of sex and power, which are at the centre of subgeneric products, are sympto- matic of wider social issues like ‘frustrated collective desires’ or ‘real lacks in the spectator’ (Gubern 1974: 15). Company’s study exemplifi es these views in relation to horror fi lms, which ‘are just another example of the reactionary ideological chain that informs all our sub-cinema’ (1974: 69). Whether the main protagonist is Dracula, a hunchback, a werewolf or the living dead, Company argued, the textual and ideological schema common to local horror production is repression. In order to illustrate his theoretical position, Company analyses the works of Naschy and de Ossorio. All Naschy characters respond to a self divided and torn between good and evil. The narrative pattern is simple: a beautiful and candid female character, who embodies values such as love, purity and goodness, falls irredeemably in love with the Naschy character. Their erotic encounter is never fulfi lled, being displaced on to other objects and characters and sublimated into scenes of an S&M nature. Finally, their love is annihilated by a destructive force within the male character (1974: 51–61, 67). De Ossorio’s fi lms always present a confrontation between ‘tradition’ (the Knights Templar in La noche del terror ciego, Lorelei in Las garras de Lorelei / The Lorelei’s Grasp (1974) or voodoo cults in La noche de los brujos / Night of the Sorcerers (1973)) and a series of ‘modern elements’ personifi ed in heterosexual relationships (love affairs, eroticism, sexual perversions) which lead to violent punishments in the form of blood- shed or death. Chapter 2 explores this rift between the past and the present in a different manner. The consumption of these horror fi lms, argued Company, acts as a sublimation of repressed and unsatisfi ed sexual needs, which has an exorcising and gratifying function. Spanish horror audiences, therefore, if the argument is to be followed to its logical conclusion, harboured basic repres- sions which needed gratifying. And Company, as critic turned sociologist and psychoanalyst, observes that the behavioural pattern of subgeneric audiences, whether they are watching a martial arts movie or a horror movie, responded to such sublimation:

there is a general uproar because of the photogenic virtuosities of the ﬁ lm (the equivalent of Bruce Lee moves are the zombies marching to the rhythm of music [. . .] in La rebelión de las muertas) and everybody is holding their breath religiously when beheadings, gushes of blood and

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eyes coming out of their sockets ﬁ ll the screen. Sexual repression has been sublimated into aggression. (1974: 69)

These studies offer a valuable barometer of the critical landscape against which the genre was considered from certain academic and journalistic quar- ters. In the specifi c historical and political context of late Francoism, these critical acts have to be understood as political and ideological needs of the moment: an oppositional culture infl uenced by Marxism, critiques of mass culture, and contemporary understandings of reactionary and progressive texts. But this does not mean that their critical operations should not be questioned, for what is at stake here is an important aspect of Spanish popular culture, popular fi lm, enjoyed and consumed by a large number of Spaniards. By condemning Spanish horror fi lm for its commercial nature, they privileged the political (and cultural) economy sustaining ‘legitimate’ cinema; by staking out a bourgeois conception of cinema, they excluded genre and subgenre fi lm production from accounts of Spanish national cinema; by signifying cultural hierarchies of aesthetic value, they established an aesthetic order that is deeply entrenched in narratives of Spanish fi lm history; and, by positioning themselves as guardians of taste, they ignored other ways in which audiences used and made meanings from the commodities they consume. Aesthetically and ideologically, therefore, the horror genre did not fi t within established cinematic trends in Spain. Horror fi lms did not form part of the more respectable art-cinema represented by the ‘Nuevo Cine Español’, which received offi cial and critical support. Nor could it be easily related to the aesthetics prevalent in other forms of Spanish popular cinema (musicals, melodramas or comedies).21 Both cinematic visions privileged a realist aesthetic mode which was promoted, as we have seen, by offi cial institutions and the industry, and, in turn, policed by critics, and which came to represent ‘the “national cinema” by their defenders and deemed non-representative of the nation by their detractors’ (Triana-Toribio 2003: 71). Neither rooted in local cinematic traditions nor apt as a vehicle for the representation of real Spanish themes and concerns, Spanish horror fi lm merely amounted to a mimetic relationship to its (superior) American and European counterparts and was systematically devalued by mainstream criticism. By not being peculiarly Spanish, the horror genre was far removed from the distinctive Spanish ‘reality’ portrayed in contemporary cinematic models and cast out from Spanish fi lm historiography. Yet Spanish horror fi lm of this period established a dialogue with international horror traditions by engaging economically and generically with other horror commodities in the marketplace and sharing the modes of production and aesthetic attributes typical of exploitation and genre fi lmmaking. Sometimes this dialogue took the form of cheap, exploitative imitations; at other times, higher production values yielded fi lms that made critics react with

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statements such as ‘this doesn’t look like a Spanish fi lm.’ Either way, Spanish horror fi lms displayed thematic, generic and cultural specifi cities, which offered something different to national and international horror audiences. It is important, therefore, to recognise that Spanish horror fi lms were as much the product of their context of production as the product of international market differentiation.

The Cinematic Riches of Horror The exploitative richness of Spanish horror production has been untapped. Like any other popular genre, the commercial realities of horror are exploited in the processes of production, marketing, distribution and consumption. Indigenous horror fi lms presented audiences not only with a familiar stock of horror iconography but also, in many cases, with the promise of ‘taboo’, ‘shocking’ or ‘forbidden’ subjects, which were duly exploited in the marketing of and publicity for the fi lms. In the context of mid-1960s apertura (liberalisa- tion), Spanish horror fi lms did not differ radically from other fi lm commodities in their representation of sexuality and sexual desires. Popular fi lm genres – comedies and melodramas – and art-house fi lms both exploited sexual imagery and various taboo subjects within the constraints imposed by censorship. Conceived as NCE ‘quality cinema’, La tía Tula / Aunt Tula (Miguel Picazo 1964) and Nueve cartas a Berta / Nine Letters to Bertha (Basilio Martín Patino 1965), for example, relied on the display of sexuality for their advertising campaigns. The photographic image of a woman in her lingerie studiously fasten- ing her suspender and stocking was used as one of the publicity posters for La tía Tula to represent the main female protagonist Tula, a sexually repressed spinster in a provincial Spanish town;22 other posters depict the image of Ramiro, Tula’s brother-in-law, forcing himself upon her. Nueve cartas a Berta presented a young heterosexual couple kissing passionately, a de rigueur image in the publicity of many a European New Wave fi lm, in particular French ones. The avant-garde fi lm movement known as the Barcelona School used the bodies of actresses Serena Vergano, Romy (Carmen Romero) or Teresa Gimpera, whose physique responded to contemporary canons of beauty in the worlds of fashion and advertising, as marketing attractions for many of their projects. At the other end of the exploitative spectrum, the popular Iberian sex comedy traded in female imagery and sexual titillation, using cartoon- like representations as the predominant visual idiom. The promotional poster for No desearás al vecino del quinto / Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Fifth Floor Neighbour (Ramón Fernández 1970), for example, depicts a caricature of a highly effeminate ‘gay’ dressmaker fl anked by two female clients who have stripped down to their sexy underwear. Lo verde empieza en los Pirineos (Vicente Escrivá 1973) combined comedy and naughtiness in equal measure.

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It ironically captured the real journeys of (male) Spaniards to France to watch fi lms which were banned in Spain for their adult content. The publicity poster reproduced a map of the the Iberian peninsula shot through by caravans of cars and coaches heading towards the French border and three middle-aged males in the foreground running eagerly towards the Pyrenees, whose green and snowy peaks offer pleasurable rewards to the average male Spaniard: six attractive women hold signs to a world of adult entertainment (cabarets, night- clubs, sex shops, and two fi lms banned from Spanish screens, A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick 1971) and Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci 1972)). While Spanish horror fi lms partake of the general permissiveness to reveal (parts of) the body and exploit the imaging of sexuality, the sale and marketing of 1970s horror must also be linked to a long-standing tradition of classical exploitation tactics23 and consumption practices of popular genre fi lms. As consumers of genre products, fi lmgoers were used to recognising conventions and interpreting familiar images and motifs, and expected a variety of emotional and physical pleasures. There is a wealth of advertising and promotional material that enables us to document the ways in which Spanish horror fi lms were sold to Spanish audiences and the ways in which they circulated and were consumed. A more complex picture emerges away from home, where some Spanish horror fi lms played at drive-in cinemas on the US exploitation circuit and many others led a more disreputable and sleazy life in adult and sexploitation cinema circuits in Europe and the US. Foreign distributors, in particular Italian, French and American, used more provocative and daring ads to sell these products on their respective exhibition circuits. Jesús Franco was the fi rst Spanish fi lmmaker to break into these specialised international markets. One of the specialised exhibition markets he entered was the Times Square grindhouse circuit in New York. Here his Succubus (also known as Necronomicón (1967)) was hailed as ‘THE sensual experience of ’69’, pack- aged as Eurosex and given an X rating. According to exploitation fi lm historians Landis and Clifford, the fi lm ‘benefi ted enormously at the box offi ce’ from the fact that it was ‘among the fi rst [fi lms] to be awarded X tags’ and ‘from its stylish ad campaign [. . .] designed and funded by the fi lm’s producer, Pier A. Caminnecci’ (2002: 179–80), which simultaneously promised the bizarre and the sophisticated in a typical juxtaposition of exploitation and European art-house selling ploys: ‘Because of the unusual nature of the title, we suggest you call . . . for the full meaning so that you will not be surprised by the sophisticated subject matter of the fi lm.’ In France the adult content was suggested visually by a sadomasochistic image of a dominant female character ready to crack a whip and the phrase ‘de la perversion jusqu’au sadisme!’.24 Titles and print material have always been key ingredients in the sale of horror. Trailers usually completed the initial commercial campaign. Gimmicks

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and other classical exploitation tactics in exhibition sites such as ambulances parked outside the cinema door or fi rst aid stretchers in the lobby were also used before and during the fi lms’ theatrical release. Throughout the 1960s there were some established Spanish distribution companies which promoted this latter aspect of fi lm marketing and exhibition. Mercurio Films S. A. produced a lavish, detailed pressbook for Miss Muerte / The Diabolical Dr Z (Jesús Franco 1966), suggesting ways in which the fi lm might lure audiences into the cinemas. Promotional campaigns covering various media and resorting to a variety of selling ploys, were hardly within the economic means of the average Spanish producer, distributor and exhibitor during the ‘boom’ period; instead, the sale of horror had to rely mainly on print material and pressbooks that producers sold or rented to distributors and exhibitors to back the advertising and publicity campaigns of fi lms. The marketing material under analysis in this fi nal section refl ects the diversity of Spanish horror production and the contemporary international cinematic trends to which they relate. In order to include a wide range of marketing tactics deployed by producers, I look at the press materials used to advertise a number of Franco’s fi lms and the horror output of production company Profi lmes S. A., grouping the material around three different manifestations of horror: fi rstly, those fi lms which had a classic monster at the centre of their marketing campaigns, more specifi cally Dracula and Frankenstein as seen by Franco; secondly, those Franco products which exploited the sale of horror and sex; and, fi nally, a group of horror and horror-related fi lms produced by Profi lmes S. A., whose advertising strategies mobilised different generic features targeting different audiences. There is a common thread running through these visual materials: namely, the work of illustrator Jano (Francisco Fernández-Zarza Pérez (1922–92)), the creator of many horror fi lm posters throughout this period. Jano’s signature appears in the publicity material of the works to be analysed: El Conde Drácula, Drácula contra Frankenstein, Bésame, monstruo / Kiss Me, Monster (1969), 99 mujeres, Las vampiras, El espanto surge de la tumba and Los ojos azules de la muñeca rota / Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll (Carlos Aured 1973).25 The pressbook for prospective Spanish distributors and exhibitors of Franco’s El Conde Drácula will give the reader an idea of the publicity material on offer: for sale, ‘one-sheet posters, two-sheet posters, leafl ets, colour pressbooks’; for hire, ‘colour trailer, colour blow-up stills, colour standard stills, press stills, press releases’ and two types of print, ‘70 m/m. Super-Panorama’ and ‘35 m/m. Cinemascope’. Apart from the visual material available for pur- chase or hire, the pressbook provided written information about the fi lm in the form of plot synopsis, credit listings, news items (‘gacetillas de prensa’), to be planted in local and national newspapers, and a selection of publicity slogans and stills for the marketing campaigns and for displays on cinema fronts and in lobbies. Ready-made slogans to be adapted to specifi c venues and playing

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dates were also available. Stock lines which have served to advertise horror fi lms time and again all over the world found their Spanish equivalent in the pressbooks. Foreign and local products were put on the same marketing level and shared long-established advertising tactics, whether one was tempted by a foreign horror fi lm like Terence Fisher’s The Curse of Frankenstein (La maldición de Frankenstein in Spain), advertised as ‘The most terrifying of all times’, or contemporary Spanish horror products like Franco’s El Conde Drácula – ‘The culminating work of horror and suspense’ – or Aured’s El espanto surge de la tumba – ‘Horror cinema has been surpassed in this most horrifying fi lm.’ Hyperbolic excess also reached extraordinary heights with some Spanish producers and distributors; Drácula contra Frankenstein was ‘THE anthology of horror on cinema screens’, the publicity for Los ojos azules de la muñeca rota advanced the proposal that ‘The unexpected and the start- ling have fi nally arrived to the horror genre,’ but perhaps the most preposter- ous cutline was that for El buque maldito, ‘A fi lm that has not been awarded an Oscar because it was not entered in the Academy Awards’. Of course, Dracula, Frankenstein and the werewolf were internationally established brand names. Audiences around the world were familiar with these classic horror archetypes and knew more or less what to expect from the latest remake. The most obvious exploitation of the brand names in Spain is the foregrounding of the monsters’ names. While Paul Naschy offered a distinctive take on the werewolf in his debut as Waldemar Daninsky in La marca del hombre lobo, establishing this character in a number of subsequent fi lm episodes (see Chapter 2), the main two stars of the horror genre, Dracula and Frankenstein, were seldom treated by Spanish fi lmmakers. It was only Franco who tackled these two classical monsters in a horror cycle in the early 1970s, with El Conde Drácula, Drácula contra Frankenstein (1971) and La maldición de Frankenstein (1972). Franco’s cycle established a visual dialogue with the classic monsters Dracula and Frankenstein. In El Conde Drácula, Franco and screenwriter Augusto Finocchi embarked upon the adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel. Producer and director proclaimed in the pressbook – and in the fi lm’s opening credits – that their Count Dracula was the fi rst faithful ‘adaptation of Bram Stoker’s original Count Dracula’, hence different from any previous Dracula fi lm version. The announced literary respectability of this Spanish– German–Italian co-production would be endorsed by critics. In large part, cinematic respectability came in the form of Christopher Lee, who had become an established horror star since his success in Hammer’s Dracula (Terence Fisher 1957).26 A sense of loyalty to and love for Bram Stoker’s original work came with Lee, whose collaboration was itself expressive of his much-publicised dissatisfaction (in trade journals, mainstream publications and monster-movie magazines throughout the 1960s) with the Hammer conception of the vampire and of his stated desire to take part in a fi lmic project that would faithfully

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resemble Bram Stoker’s book. The producers’ and Franco’s claims to be true to the original were therefore embodied and confi rmed in the fi gure of Lee, who lent the fi lm authenticity, his powerfully erotic and predatory rendition of the Count polished in the Hammer Dracula series and, above all, guarantee- ing international sales.27 Lee was the main selling point, as his central position in posters told distributors, exhibitors and fi lmgoers.28 The fi lm’s letter of introduction in the pressbook is a gentlemanly portrait of Lee, hoary-headed and moustached, his face illuminated by the candelabrum he holds aloft. The title ‘El Conde Drácula’, in Gothic lettering below his image, denotes his aristocratic status in the world of horror fi lm. Contemporary reviews echoed the fi lm’s main selling assets, Christopher Lee and the various fi lmic reimaginings of the Count. One critic recommends the fi lm to Dracula fans in general, ‘those spectators who are familiar with Dracula and its different fi lmic versions’ (Crespo 1973a), whereas another critic observes that the main attraction lies in the actor playing Dracula:

Christopher Lee has proven his skills to play the character and many horror fans reckon that he is better than Lugosi. As we know, these com- petitions between vampires attract spectators, who remember the different actors and directors in Dracula’s Daughter [Lambert Hyllier 1936], The Return of the Vampire [Lew Landers 1944], House of Dracula [Erle C. Kenton 1945], The Brides of Dracula [Terence Fisher 1960], and others. (de Obregón 1973)

If Lee’s presence was not enough for contemporary male and female audiences, the poster artwork also reminded fi lmgoers of Franco’s ‘erotic’ brand of horror by displaying a female fi gure whose nakedness is tantalisingly hidden (just) behind loosely held furs, perhaps a subtle visual reference to his 1969 Venus in Furs and the unnerving presence of Klaus Kinski, who had already collaborated with Franco in Eugenie / Eugénie . . . The Story of Her Journey into Perversion (1969), both fi lms free adaptations of Leopold von Sacher- Masoch’s novels (see Figure 4). None the less, the portrait of Lee becomes the focal point of all the posters, complemented by the recurrent Dracula imagery of coffi ns, stakes and incisions. Dracula fans were guaranteed the main ingredients of the myth (‘An old castle . . . A fl ock of bats fl ying in the night . . . And Dracula transformed into a horrifying bat seeking the blood he needs to live on’) and the affective qualities of horror (‘Fear, shivers and terror! A fantastic and beguiling spectacle that will test if you can keep your nerve’). Producers and publicists have exploited the popular Dracula character, which, as Hutchings has argued, ‘is a focus for cultural and economic activity as fi lm-makers periodically seek to resurrect the vampire in a form that will be both interesting and profi table’ (2004: 44).29 For the second fi lm in

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Figure 4 Illustrator Jano brought together the key generic markers of horror in El Conde Drácula’s ofﬁ cial poster.

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the series, Franco resurrected and confronted two monsters, Drácula contra Frankenstein, and moved from the canon of Gothic literature to the pulp literature of kiosks. As an economic venture, the project was part of the fi lmmaker’s association with French producer Robert de Nesle from Comptoir Films to produce a numbers of fi lms at low cost, using the same technical crew and cast (Howard Vernon, Alberto Dalbés, Britt Nichols, Anne Libert, Luis Barboo, Fernando Bilbao, Doris Thomas), and the same locations and sets, based around similar plots and stock characters. The distribution of cold and hot versions was a key production strategy, as the explicitness of some of the international titles attests: Les Démons / The Sex Demons / She-Demons (1973 as Clifford Brown),30 La maldición de Frankenstein / Les Expériences érotiques de Frankenstein / The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein (1972) and La hija de Drácula / La Fille de Dracula / Daughter of Dracula (1972). Culturally, Drácula contra Frankenstein was a homage to the fi lms of Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, and also to comics. Franco moves away from the literary exercise of retelling Stoker’s novel and returns to the popular visual representations of the monster archetypes, as depicted in Universal fi lms and comic magazines. As Franco himself acknowledged in the pressbook, the fi lm was conceived as a ‘comic-strip. A silent comic full of monsters’. And full of monsters it is. Besides the eponymous monsters of the title, there is a hoard of female vampires, a werewolf, and the deformed assistant to a scientist, Dr Steward, whose sole obsession is to see the world rid of monsters. Silent it is, too, since dialogues, in actual fact, were minimal – the script reduced merely to a couple of pages. Drácula contra Frankenstein is a strip of classic horror conventions, motifs, images and moments, and the comic idiom and the classic monster-movie imagery are captured in Jano’s designs for the promotional material (see Figure 5). The fi lm title follows the old-fashioned hand-lettered titling of classical horror fi lms, while the monsters are depicted in all their Gothic splendour, as they appeared in Universal posters, or the pages of popular horror comics such as Creepy and popular horror movie magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland. The drawing of Frankenstein conjures up the gigantic fi gure of Karloff in the Universal incarnations of the creature, whereas a close-up of Dracula, half-enveloped in shadows and surrounded by bats, peering menacingly, fangs ready for his next prey. The return of Dracula and Frankenstein, announced the pressbook, is a veritable ‘anthology of horror cinema’, thus placing the fi lm in the tradition of Universal’s 1940s monster rallies. Press releases emphasised how the fi lm was working within this tradition, while at the same time it offered something different to what had gone before: Franco not only ‘brings together a myriad of scenes from all the previous fi lms featuring these two sinister characters’ but also provides genre enthusiasts with ‘new and hitherto unseen sequences’. Rather like the opening text-box in a comic, which is used to frame the action, the plot synopsis in

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Figure 5 llustrator Jano’s take on two classical monsters in Jesús Franco’s Drácula contra Frankenstein.

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the pressbook was preceded by a quotation (also used as a voiceover in the opening credits) attributed to a certain David H. Klunne:

The vampire, sinister dweller of the night, was resting in his eternal sleep, when DOCTOR FRANKENSTEIN, attempted to take possession of him. A ﬁ ght between these two Titans of Death broke out, awakened other monsters from their state of lethargy, like an other-worldly and devastat- ing chorus.

David H. Klunne was none other than a pseudonym used by Franco. The pressbook for Drácula contra Frankenstein therefore draws very self-consciously on old mythologies, genre stereotypes, the history of horror cinema itself, and comic aesthetics. Drácula contra Frankenstein offered a multi-monster narrative, which, while drawing upon universally familiar characters, engaged in a process of product differentiation that exceeded the expectations of domestic and international audiences. The advertising of Franco’s Bésame, monstruo sends up classical monsters – ‘Dracula . . . Frankenstein . . . the werewolf . . . How candid they are! Beautiful women are really terrible when it comes to taking possession of the perfect man’ – and brings an altogether different type of ‘monster’ to the attention of Spanish audiences: beautiful women who use ‘ALL sorts of weapons in their search for the magic formula to make the perfect man’. Released in Spain in 1970,31 the fi lm combined women detectives, mad scientists, deformed assis- tants and mutant supermen. ‘Female monstrosity’ was the speciality of Franco, whether in spoofs of the spy genre, female vampire fi lms or women-in-prison movies. It would be disingenuous to deny Franco’s commercial exploitation of images of female sexuality. And the label of ‘pornographer’ that was attached to Franco would never leave him. But it would be imperceptive to shut one’s eyes to the ways in which his representations of female characters departed from conventional gender stereotypes in the context of contemporary Spanish cinema, as I discuss in Chapter 2. On the one hand, the spectacle of the female body must be related to the commercial exploitation of female sexuality (sexploitation); on the other hand, it can be read as a counterpoint to the dominant images of women within horror fi lms, as mere love interests for the male pro- tagonists32 or as the passive victims of horror crimes. Bésame, monstruo also sent up the Bond girl stereotype and contemporary spy movies, and reinscribed the iconography of these popular genres into sites of female pleasure. The publicity material made the most of the statuesque bodies of Janine Reynaud and Rosana Yanni, and was meant to function as ‘eye stoppers’.33 The one- sheet poster designed by Jano showed pop-art representations of two young women in short mini-skirts and low-cut tops, sporting weapons in a very Bond-girl pose (see Figure 6). Other posters playfully subverted exploitative

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Figure 6 ‘Eye-stoppers’ at work in Jano’s poster for Bésame, monstruo.

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female imagery; depicting the fi lm’s male zombie mutants as beefy bodybuild- ers, almost like replicas of magazine advertisements promising the perfect male body, the male body is objectifi ed since the dwarfed, scantily clad male model is easy prey for the female detectives. Franco and Jano were consummate connoisseurs of popular fi lmic traditions, contemporary subgenre production cycles and pulp fi ction imagery. Las vampiras and 99 mujeres drew on the openly exploitative nature of horror for their marketing campaigns. The exploitative aspects of 99 mujeres were already built into the title. The advertising offered the promise of multiple women on display, playing with imagery from the subgenre of women-in-prison fi lms – the attractive and probably wrongfully imprisoned young woman, the sadistic, menacing warden, and the no less menacing, aggressive inmates. Some press releases and taglines moved away from erotic adventuring, sadomasochistic scenarios and hints of lesbianism, and promoted the fi lm as a drama in which the prison acts as a backdrop against which human relationships are explored; by framing the fi lm in melodramatic terms (’99 women, each and every one of them with their dramatic past, and nothing but a tragic future’), a broader audience could be reached. In the early 1970s, a time when female vampires were getting their commercial teeth into audiences across Europe, Franco contributed to the female vampire exploitation cycle with Las vampiras, which was not released theatrically in Spain until May 1974.34 Franco shifted the emphasis to the feminine with a narrative loosely inspired by Bram Stoker’s short story Draculas’s Guest. The advertising material played up the director’s fame as pornographer and traded on the sadomasochistic iconography. The one-sheet poster for Las vampiras depicted a Gothic ‘necro-tableau’: the ecstatic face of a female vampire in the foreground alongside the body of a young woman lying (in implicit post-coital languor) on a slab (see Figure 7). This mise-en-scène of desire and death alludes to forbidden sexual practices and promises sophisticated adult entertainment since the scenario might also be read as an erotic show.35 The all-female Gothic scenario invited the male heterosexual viewer to pleasures – voyeurism, fetishism and S&M –other than the ones usually associated with vampire fi lms. The publicity taglines, on the other hand, played up the mysteriousness and sinisterness of vampirism (‘The black curtains of mystery are drawn back, laying bare the sinister image of vampirism’) and focused on predatory relationships (‘Like the innocent but- terfl y she was trapped in the web of the scorpion’). Critics, however, focused neither on atmospherics nor on the libidinal dynamics of the fi lm. In Las vampiras, Franco ‘[is] bordering on the pornographic’ and ‘responding to the demands of a certain international market not particularly bothered about aesthetic standards’ (Peláez 1974b). Takes on classic monsters and low-budget or semi-art horror variants of the female vampire subgenre, as well as other manifestations of horror, were just

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Figure 7 Jano captured Jesús Franco’s distinctive brand of horror and erotica in Las vampiras.

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part of the cinematic offering dished up for Spanish audiences. In this com- petitive milieu, producers and distributors had to differentiate their products from other horror fi lms. By offering a range of generic pleasures, Profi lmes S. A. sought to fi nd a niche in the horror marketplace. In order to appeal to a broad cross-section of cinematic tastes, Profi lmes’ marketing campaigns for individual fi lms evoked different generic categories. Most of their output shared a number of production and advertising strategies destined to attract different segments of the audience. Such is the case with a group of fi lms in which Múñoz Suay and Pérez Giner joined forces with up-and-coming Spanish horror star Jacinto Molina: La rebelión de las muertas, El espanto surge de la tumba, Los ojos azules de la muñeca rota, Una libélula para cada muerto / A Dragonfl y for Each Corpse (León Klimovsky 1973) and Exorcismo.36 All these fi lms featured Jacinto Molina both as scriptwriter and protagonist under his artistic name Paul Naschy. They were all set in international locations, offered reworkings of successful horror cycles, and presented narratives and stock characters that were highly recognisable for domestic and international audiences. Profi lmes promoted these production strategies in their pressbooks and posters by presenting a variety of modes of address to which domestic audiences could easily respond. Audiences, in turn, could consider these fi lms in relation to each other and in relation to other contemporary Naschy products.37 Moreover, when the movies were read alongside each other, audiences could also place them in relation to different international horror cycles of the 1960s and early 1970s, like the gialli, the living dead genre or The Exorcist phenomenon, and consume them in an intertextual way. Naschy’s mere appearance designated the horror genre, even though he appeared in roles that were different from his werewolf trademark: a double act in La rebelión de las muertas, in which he plays Krisna, a London-based Hindu guru, and his raving mad, disfi gured brother; another double act in El espanto surge de la tumba, where he embodies both a resurrected fi fteenth-century French knight (Alaric), sentenced to death because of his hideous crimes and seeking revenge for his family in contemporary France, and a Parisian professional (Hugo), who is a direct descendant of the knight; in Los ojos azules de la muñeca rota, ex-con Gilles imprisoned because of a rape attempt and looking to start a new life in the idyllic French countryside; the tough Milanese police inspector Paolo Saaporella in Una libélula para cada muerto; and, in Exorcismo, an English priest fi ghting against demonic forces in contemporary London. Apart from signifying the horror genre, the producers pointed towards other generic markers in the titles and the publicity material. While La rebelión de las muertas and El espanto surge de la tumba positioned themselves in relation to the living dead / zombie subgenre, the titles Los ojos azules de la muñeca rota and Una libélula para cada muerto were clearly reminiscent of the contemporary Italian giallo. Exorcismo announced itself as the Spanish

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Exorcist, even though Friedkin’s fi lm had not yet arrived on Spanish screens due to censorship. Spanish audiences saw the imitation before the original. In the international pressbooks, the image of Paul Naschy made way for photographic stills of the fi lm. Spanish and English plot synopses destined for the Latin American and American markets, respectively, occupied the central pages. The front cover for El espanto surge de la tumba featured a medium close-up of a blank-eyed member of the living dead against a dark background, positing a direct relationship between the fi lm and the post-Night of the Living Dead cycle so that international distributors and exhibitors could capitalise on this successful commercial subgenre (see Figure 1). The back cover captured a specifi c fi lmic moment where the knight Alaric, in his medieval attire, is strangling one of his victims, dressed in contemporary clothes. Similarly, the front cover for Exorcismo referred to the Exorcist phenomenon as a way of driving the point home for international buyers: the tagline read, ‘A theme that has thrilled audiences all over the world, now terrifyingly set forth’; in the foreground, there is a demonic male face and a photograph of a possessed female character. This and other stills reproduce key ‘exorcist’ moments like the possession of the sick young girl or the priest performing the exorcism. But, for the Spanish market, Paul Naschy was the main selling point. For El espanto surge de la tumba, the upper section of the Spanish one-sheet poster depicted a female zombie about to claim her female victim, and a further two female zombies in the sleep-walking postures typical of the subgenre to which the fi lm belonged. The cast combined female beauty and sophistication with the participation of Romy, the muse of the Barcelona School, and Mirta Miller, while the names of male actors Paul Naschy and Vic Winner (also known as Víctor Alcázar) were readily associated with male-oriented genres, the horror genre and the spaghetti western, respectively. The publicity lines supplied by the producers – a total of twenty-three – mobilised a range of genre expectations and pleasures. The exotic and the erotic, the ancient and the modern were brought together in this tagline: ‘The ancient rites of African voodoo and the secrets of Indian magic, with all their morbidness and eroticism, meet in contemporary London.’ Horror and a constellation of terms associated with horror were invoked in various taglines: ‘Horror cinema through the paths of black magic’ or ‘Once they were dead they were revived as monstrous devils.’ Other publicity taglines framed the fi lm as a revenge plot – ‘A revenge that trespasses the limits of life and uses black magic to commit horrifi c crimes’ – whereas on other occasions the murderer is gender-specifi c, a misogynistic psy- cho-killer (‘He promised his revenge on all women’ or ‘He murdered women in order to use them after their death’). Los ojos azules de la muñeca rota is a whodunnit with a twist, set in contemporary rural France. The arrival of Gilles (Paul Naschy), an ex-con convicted of rape, in the region of Angers coincides with a spate of brutal murders which

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terrorise the area. All the victims are blonde, blue-eyed young females – the recurrent woman-as-doll cliché of the horror tradition. The murderer slits the victims’ throats and gouges out their eyes. Giles fi nds work as an odd-job man in an isolated countryside house inhabited by three sisters: the sexually repressed older sister Claude (Diana Lorys), the sexually insatiable Nicole (Eva León) and Yvette (Maria Perschy), who has been wheelchair-bound since she suffered a traumatic accident. Their only contact with the outside world is a doctor (Eduardo Calvo), who visits Yvette and Gilles, the presence of the latter heightening the tensions between the sisters. When Nicole is murdered, the local gendarmerie turn their attention to Gilles, hunting him down and killing him. But when the dead body of Yvette is subsequently found, the gendarmerie’s investigations lead them to the doctor, who has been hypnotising Yvette and inducing her to commit the murders. His motive: his visually impaired, blonde, blue-eyed daughter had died in an operation due to the negligence of a nurse. Most of the publicity for Los ojos azules de la muñeca rota revolved around the genre’s association with ‘eyes watching horror’ (Clover 1992: 185). In the pressbook, characters, locations, situations and mood were explicitly linked to the ‘THE EYES . . .’. ‘Three women tormented by their past and always watched over by “THE EYES . . .” ’, read one tagline in reference to the sisters. ‘When [the killer] looked at “THE EYES . . .”, her / his sick mind was transformed into that of a murderer thirsty for death’ described to audiences the killer’s uncontrollable urges. The house, too, acquired human qualities – ‘Death looked through “THE EYES . . .” from the dark corners of this gloomy house.’ The pressbook generically defi ned the fi lm as horror cinema (‘Horror fi lm has found a new approach, horrifi c, horrendous and macabre’), yet the whodunnit structure is emphasised via references to the detective genre (‘The police were unable to put an end to the perverse spate of crimes and discover the motive behind them’). The desire to fi nd the murderer and disclose the motive for the murders was transferred to the fi lmgoer in a series of open questions that acted as publicity slogans: ‘Why were the victims blonde, blue-eyed girls?’ or ‘What was the dreadful motive behind the perverse criminal wanting the blue eyes of the victims?’ Critics responded to the generic classifi cation deployed by Profi lmes in their promotional material, defi ning the fi lm as yet another ‘Spanish horror fi lm’ or classifying it more specifi cally as ‘psychological horror’. But they also positioned the fi lm in relation to the foreign cinematic tradition of the gialli, a generic classifi cation that was not addressed textually in the pressbook. Santos Fontenla opened his review in Informaciones thus: ‘With a title à la Italian, this is a new horror fi lm à la Spanish,’ (1974: n.p.) and Peláez admitted that, as an average Spanish genre product, Los ojos . . . ‘is superior to the vast majority of overtly pretentious and sensationalist Italian gialli’ (1974: n.p.). The visual material designed by Jano, however, did mobi- lise the iconography of the giallo format. The posters draw our attention to the

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Figure 8 Title and imagery à la giallo in this Naschy vehicle, Los ojos azules de la muñeca rota.

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female cast (rather than to Naschy) and to the representation of multiple eyes piercing the darkness, although it is ambivalent whether these are ‘THE EYES . . .’ of the all-seeing murderer, the eyes of the female victims, or a combination of both – or those of the audience. In his artwork for the one-sheet poster, Jano combined drawings and photography. The drawings occupy the right-hand side of the poster and feature a blonde, doll-like fi gure freefalling among four pairs of eyes. Photographs of reaction shots of the three female characters ran along the left-hand side: a scared Claude looking into the eyes of her attacker, a traumatised-looking Yvette and a disdainful-looking Nicole. These reaction shots convey the victimised female imagery characteristic of the Italian gialli cycle, together with the lurking presence of a sadistic killer in the form of a black-gloved hand clenching a knife in the bottom left-hand corner of the poster, which subtly marked a threat coming from the outside (see Figure 8). Profi lmes, in association with local horror star Paul Naschy and the dexter- ous hand of illustrator Jano, drew upon established iconography and generic markers which catered for the expectations and tastes of domestic and international audiences alike. The riches of Spanish horror fi lm advertising reveal the cultural interaction between the different traditions of horror cinema and the international nature of horror production, reception and consumption.

Notes 1. The association between horror fi lm and repression has come to defi ne an infl uential critical approach to horror fi lm, which was theorised by Robin Wood in ‘An Introduction to the American Horror Film’ (1979) and ‘The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s’ (1986). Here Wood argued that horror monsters are expressions of social and psychological repression that can reveal the truth about the political and social structures in which we live. 2. There is a whole plethora of titles for Grau’s Let Sleeping Corpses Lie: Don’t Open the Window or Breakfast at the Manchester Morgue. 3. The fi lm was never released theatrically. It was shown, however, on the cine-club circuit. More recently, the fi lm has been shown in festivals and fi lm institutes, acquiring a cult status. 4. The participants were José María Vallés (Tarota), Emilio Martínez Lázaro (Víctor Frankenstein), Francesc Bellmunt (Terror entre cristianos) and Jaime Chavarri (La danza). 5. This is not exclusive of the horror genre and can be applied to Spanish cinema in general. 6. Arturo González was brother of Cesáreo González, one of the great producers in the Spanish fi lm industry from the mid-1940s until the late 1960s. 7. Co-productions with Italy occurred regularly throughout the 1960s and 1970s: in the early 1960s, straight black-and-white Gothic horror Horror / The Blancheville Monster (Alberto de Martino 1963) and La maldición de los Karnstein / Crypt of the Vampires (Camillo Mastrocinque 1964), which featured Christopher Lee; in the late 1960s, a series of fi lms infl uenced by the comic format (fumetti), featuring fantastic characters Kriminal (La máscara de Kriminal / Kriminal (Umberto Lenzi 1966) and its sequel Il marchio di Kriminal (Fernando Cerchio 1968)), Satanik

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(Satanik (Piero Vivarelli 1968)) and Superargo (Superargo, el hombre enmascarado / Superargo Versus Diabolicus (Nick Nostro 1966) and its sequel Superargo, el gigante / Superargo (Paolo Biancha 1968)); and, in the early 1970s, following the success of the gialli genre, Una lagartija con piel de mujer / Una lucertola con la pelle di donna / Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (Lucio Fulci 1971), Días de angustia / Le foto proibite di una signora per bene / Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion (Luciano Ercoli 1970) and La muerte camina con tacón alto / La morte cammina con i tacchi alti / Death Walks on High Heels (Luciano Ercoli 1971). 8. Critic, scriptwriter, producer and distributor, Múñoz Suay’s name has been linked to the industry from the 1930s until his death in 1997. In the 1950s and early 1960s, he was associated with UNINCI, the production company supported by the Spanish Communist Party while in exile, which co-produced, among other nuevo fi lms, Buñuel’s Viridiana (1961). In the late 1960s, via his weekly column in Fotogramas, Múñoz Suay manufactured and sponsored, the cinematic label ‘Escuela de Barcelona’ (Barcelona School) in response to the Madrid-based ‘New Spanish Cinema’; it was modelled on contemporary European New Wave cinemas, bringing together a number of avant-garde and politically committed fi lmmakers (Jacinto Esteva, Joaquín Jordá, Carlos Durán, Gonzalo Suárez, Jorge Grau, Vicente Aranda, Jaime Camino) under a coherent cultural label. He was not only the main publicist of the Barcelona School but also the executive producer of many of their fi lms between 1965 and 1970 through production company Filmscontacto. Thus, by the time Profi lmes S. A. was created, Múñoz Suay’s knowledge of the industry, as well as his expertise in art-house, avant-garde and mainstream practices, had been translated into commercial genre fi lmmaking. 9. These fi gures are taken from the Spanish Ministry of Culture database (www.mcu. es). 10. García Escudero had already held the post from July 1951 to March 1952. His second term commenced in July 1962 and ended in November 1968. 11. For further detail on García Escudero’s policies and the NCE, see Caparrós Lera (1983: 41–59) and Triana-Toribio (2003: 70–4). 12. For a detailed discussion of ‘García Escudero’s judgments of taste’, see Triana- Toribio (2003: 65–9). 13. See ‘Evolución de la Exhibición Cinematográfi ca en España, 1968–1995’, in Fernández Blanco (1998: 19). 14. Ministerial Order 9/02/1963. 15. The US title for the American exploitation market, Till Death Do US Part, certainly retained the marriage theme, although the fi lm suffered cuts of another nature. 16. Miguel Ángel Diez (Madrid), ‘99 mujeres (Madame Censura)’, Fotogramas, 11 July 1969. 17. Among the critics whose names are recurrent in the reviewing of horror fi lms in the daily press, one fi nds Pascual Cebollada (Ya), Marcelo Arroita-Jaúregui (Arriba) and Pedro Crespo (Arriba) – all of them members of the censorship board as well. Other journalist regulars were Miguel Rubio (Nuevo Diario and El Alcázar), Félix Martialay (El Alcázar), Jesús Peláez (El Alzácar), Lorenzo López Sancho (ABC), Pedro Rodrigo (Madrid and Pueblo) and Tomás García de la Puerta (Pueblo). There is a second group of critics – Jaume Picas, Román Gubern, José Luis Guarner and Juan M. Company – identifi ed with the leftist, anti-Franco opposition and intellectually and culturally linked to art-fi lmmaking, who mediated between texts and audiences with their reviews and articles on the genre from the pages of Nuevo Fotogramas and other publications. A fi nal group of contributors to the fi eld of horror came from the pages of genre magazine Terror Fantastic, whose role in

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contemporary horror fi lm cultures is examined in detail in Chapter 5. 18. With the exception of a handful of fi lms produced in the fi rst years of the boom, horror fi lms were not reviewed in the serious specialist fi lm magazines of the period. Film Ideal (1960–70), close to a moderate Catholicism, could be described as cahier-ist in its agenda, whereas Nuestro Cine (1965–71) followed a materialist critique of cinema as it was closer to the Spanish Communist Party. 19. The reviewer was right. Around the same time there was a spate of fi lms which dealt with exorcism, demonology and spiritism (El juego del diablo (Jorge Darnell 1975), El espiritista (Augusto Fernando 1974) and La endemoniada / The Possessed (Amando de Ossorio 1975)). 20. A regular contributor to Nuevo Fotogramas since the mid-1960s, Picas had appeared in some of the Barcelona School fi lms and championed the movement’s cinema from his position as critic (see Riambau and Torreiro (1999: 108–9)). Before becoming a full-time academic, Gubern had co-directed Brillante porvenir (1964) with Vicente Aranda, was also an active member of the so-called School of Barcelona and was a regular contributor to the specialist fi lm magazines Nuestro Cine and Positif. He was also a member of the PCE (Spanish Communist Party) and the PSUC (the Unifi ed Socialist Party of Catalonia). Around the time that he was working on the preface to Cine español, cine de subgéneros, he was writing a number of works on the interpretation of mass media from a Marxist perspective (Mensajes icónicos en la cultura de masas (1974), Comunicación y cultura de masas (1977)). 21. And yet audiences were drawn to horror fi lms. A detailed look at audience fi gures for comedies and ‘New Spanish Cinema’ fi lms makes interesting reading since, generally speaking, horror fi lms are on a par with popular comedies and are above auteur fi lms. 22. The publishers of Los ‘Nuevos Cines’ en España. Ilusiones y desencantos de los años sesenta, a volume devoted to the analysis of the fi lmic production of both the ‘New Spanish Cinema’ group and the School of Barcelona used an image of La tía Tula on the front cover, while the back cover features a photograph of Romi, one of the muses of the Barcelona School, on the set of Cada vez que . . . (Carlos Durán 1967). 23. In Bold!, Daring!, Shocking!, True!, Eric Schaefer analyses the ‘singular attributes and unique history’ (1999: 2) of classical exploitation cinema, examining its production, distribution, marketing and exhibition. For Schaefer, the term exploitation derives from ‘the practice of exploitation advertising or promotional techniques that went over and above typical posters, trailers and newspaper ads’ (1999: 4). ‘During the 1960s and 1970s’, he argues, ‘the term was modifi ed to indicate the subject that was being exploited, such as “sexploitation” and “blaxploitation” movies’ (1999: 4). 24. There are many examples of the exploitation of Spanish horror fi lms on European and American specialised circuits. For example, the ad campaigns for the Italian version of Ceremonia sangrienta, which was retitled Le vergini cavalcano la morte, openly used sexploitative artwork in its foregrounding of female sexuality, in contrast to the more restrained Spanish poster. 25. Many Spanish producers and distributors used the talents of Francisco Fernández- Zarza Pérez (1922–92), artistically known as Jano. Associated with distribution companies such as Hispamex, Chamartín or Mercurio Films, his signature appears in the publicity material of hundreds of fi lms. See www.cinejano.com for a selection of his work. 26. Dracula was distributed by Hispanomexicana Films S. A. in Spain and exhibited in 1960 (72,860 spectators and takings of 13,574.19 euros). Interestingly, Dracula

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Has Risen from the Grave (Freddie Francis 1968) was distributed in 1971 by Warner Española S. A. (872,439 spectators and takings of 130,375.71 euros) before Dracula Prince of Darkness (Terence Fisher 1965), which would not reach Spanish screens until 1972 (742,590 spectators and takings of 128,108.14 euros). As we can see, Spanish horror movies were effectively competing with international horror in the early 1970s. 27. Lee also worked on other Franco projects around this time. Fu Manchu y el beso de la muerte (1968), which had its theatrical release on 16 March 1970 in Barcelona and on 26 October 1970 in Madrid, was followed by the release of El Conde Drácula in Barcelona later on that year, 16 November 1970, and in early 1971 in Madrid. The exhibition of these fi lms was followed by El castillo de Fu Manchu (1969) on 18 September 1972 in Barcelona and Drácula contra Frankenstein (1972) on 18 November 1972; Madrid would have to wait until 1973. Lee’s appearances in the Spanish horror of the early 1970s also stretched to other commercial co-productions, such as El proceso de las brujas (Franco 1970) and Pánico en el Transiberiano (Eugenio Martín 1973), and avant-garde projects Vampir Cuadecuc and Umbracle (1972), both by Pere Portabella, which were outside traditional circuits of fi lm production and exhibition. 28. British producer Harry Alan Towers brought Christopher Lee into the project. 29. See Hutchings’ section on the ‘Prince of Darkness’ for a number of possible expla- nations ‘for the ceaseless popularity of Dracula’ in fi lm (2004: 48). 30. Some critics regard this fi lm as a sequel to El proceso de las brujas. 31. German producers Karl-Heinz Mannchen and Adrian Hoven helped to produce Necronomicon in 1967. After the success of the fi lm in Germany and the US, they decided to cash in with two other Franco fi lms the following year, Kiss Me, Monster and Sadiserotica. According to Tohill and Tombs, the success of Necronomicon in the US can be explained thus: ‘It was pitched at the audience who’d been wowed by La dolce vita and Boccaccio ’70 and the trailers and promotional material emphasised the daring and sophisticated naughtiness of the fi lm’ (1995: 94). 32. Even in the more sophisticated fi lms of the NCE, women ‘were mere “love interests” and sometimes not even given a proper name in the credits’ (Triana-Toribio 2003: 73). 33. Here I follow Eric Schaefer’s use of the term, originally coined by Vance Packard in The Hidden Persuaders (1957), in his article ‘Pandering to the “Goon Trade”: Framing the Sexploitation Audience through Advertising’ (2007: 19–46). ‘Eye stoppers’ are ‘those sexy images [used in fi lm advertising] that can arrest the eye’ (2007: 21). 34. The fi lm was fi nanced by German producer Arthur Brauner, introduced to Franco by Karl-Heinz Mannchen. Brauner also produced She Killed in Ecstasy / Sie Tötete in Ekstase / Mrs Hyde (1970). 35. Franco’s 1960s horror production regularly featured night-clubs and strip clubs where female singers’ performances and striptease acts, reminiscent of American post-war burlesque fi lms, functioned as moments of spectacle. Around the time that the fi lm was produced, Karl-Heinz Mannchen was Franco’s ‘regular companion in out on the town [visits to Berlin’s] strip clubs and sex shows. They’d see striptease acts featuring lesbian numbers, or pseudo lesbian numbers’ (Tohill and Tombs 1995: 98). 36. Other fi lms which featured Paul Naschy were: El mariscal del infi erno / Devil’s Possessed (León Klimovsky 1974) and La maldición de la bestia / The Werewolf and the Yeti (Miguel Iglesias Bonns 1975). Amando de Ossorio was also on the company’s books with Las garras de Lorelei, La noche de los brujos and La noche de las gaviotas. The horror production of Profi lmes is completed with El refugio del

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miedo / Refuge of Fear (José Ulloa 1974). Among the cycle of adventure fi lms, the company produced the following: Tarzán y el misterio de la selva (Miguel Iglesias 1973), Tarzán y el tesoro de Kawana (José Truchado 1974), La diosa salvaje (Miguel Iglesias 1974) and Kilma, Reina de las Amazonas (Miguel Iglesias 1975). 37. Naschy’s contribution to Profi lmes overlaps chronologically with the fi lms of his werewolf cycle, as well as with other fi lms.

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