Hogan, Erin K., "The Transatlantic Dialogism in Narrative and Aesthetics of Bildungsfilms: La Lengua De
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Chapter Title: The Transatlantic Dialogism in Narrative and Aesthetics of Bildungsfilms: La lengua de las mariposas, Machuca, El espíritu de la colmena, El premio, El laberinto del fauno and Infancia clandestina Book Title: The Two cines con niño Book Subtitle: Genre and the Child Protagonist in over Fifty Years of Spanish Film (1955-2010) Book Author(s): Erin K. Hogan Published by: Edinburgh University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.3366/j.ctv7n0b9p.14 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Edinburgh University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Two cines con niño This content downloaded from 95.183.180.42 on Sun, 02 Aug 2020 20:36:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 164 the two cines con niño CHAPTER EIGHT The motifs of the lost paradise of childhood beside gained knowledge of the adult world pervade the bildungsfilms at the heart of this chapter. With attention to national acculturations, I will pair select Spanish and Latin The Transatlantic Dialogism in American films to reveal common political use, motifs, and aesthetics of Narrative and Aesthetics of Bildungsfilms: cinematic childhood across national cinemas. Scholarship on contemporary Latin American cinema falls on both La lengua de las mariposas, Machuca, sides of the genre studies divide. These features correspond to Stephen El espíritu de la colmena, El premio, M. Hart’s nation-image in contemporary Latin American cinema: ‘The emergence of the protagonist-as-nation genre . it was that the 35mm El laberinto del fauno and Infancia clandestina paradigm of the 1970s to 1990s tipped Latin American films into a tried and tested genre of the “national drama” ’ (2015: 65). By contrast, Carolina Rocha and Georgia Seminet resist defining child-starred films Introduction in generic terms: ‘they represent a hybrid of existing genres and share In this monograph, I have thus far illuminated the rich dialogism of particular, identifiable features; however, they do not constitute any child-starred cinemas in Spain. The final chapter will broaden this study’s single cinematic genre’ (2012: 15). By contrast, The Two cines has fol- geographic scope to provide an overview of the dialogism and aesthetics of lowed Altman’s insistence on genre as process and not as an immutable bildungsfilmsacross the Atlantic in the 2000s. Latin American cinema, with category with fixed definition and borders: ‘Genres are not justpost facto films hailing from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela, categories, then but part of the constant category-splitting/category- has enjoyed its own bumper crop of approximately fourteen child-starred creating dialectic that constitutes the history of types and terminology’ bildungsfilms over eleven years.1 The bildungsfilms, defined as ‘películas de (Altman 1999: 65; italics in the original). Therefore, my genre study aprendizaje o formación con protagonistas que son niños’ (Deveny 2012: shares more commonality with the observations of Stephen M. Hart, Jay 397) (coming-of-age films with child protagonists), that I will examine here Beck, and Vicente Rodríguez Ortega; the latter two: ‘provide a thorough link sexual and political awakening at the time of military or paramilitary investigation of contemporary Spanish cinema within a transnational coups in Spain, Chile, and Argentina.2 Compared with other subgenres framework by positing cinematic genres as the meeting spaces between of the nuevo cine con niño enumerated in the monograph’s introduction, a variety of diverse forces that necessarily operate within but also across the bildungsfilm is the variant that most closely resembles the definition of territorial spaces’ (Beck and Rodríguez Ortega 2008: 1). I set out to show cinema of ‘childhood’ in the Diccionario temático del cine: how national cinemas drink from the font of international genre cinema, specifically thebildungsfilm in this chapter, to paradoxically address [C]ontrasta con retratos más realistas, imaginativos o con mayor voluntad de inda- gación en el estadio infantil con historias sobre la nostalgia del paraíso perdido de la national specificities. Thereby, the binary at the heart of genre cinema infancia, los recuerdos filtrados por la memoria, experiencias sorprendentes (felices o readily transforms from the two Spains to the two Chiles and even two traumáticas), procesos de aprendizaje y conocimiento del mundo, etc. Obviamente, Argentinas. en muchos de ellos es el punto de vista cognitivo del niño–más o menos verosímil – In the first part of the current chapter, I analyse the narrative and lo que otorga a la historia un carácter híbrido, muy capaz de combinar la tragedia con aesthetic similarities of an enriching if unlikely friendship and its dev- la mirada ingenua, la fabulación sobre realidades cotidianas con la distorsión de los astating betrayal at the time of Generals Francisco Franco’s 1936 and hechos. (Sánchez Noriega 2004: 270) Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coups, respectively, in La lengua de las mari- [[I]t contrasts with more realistic, imaginative or critical portrayals of the phase of posas (Butterfly) (José Luis Cuerda 1999 Spain) and Machuca (Andrés childhood and stories of the nostalgia of the lost paradise of childhood, recollections Wood 2004 Chile).3 I will argue that national division and duality appear filtered by memory, surprising (happy or traumatic), processes of learning and dis- as organising concepts in the two Spains of La lengua de las mariposas covery of the world, etc. Obviously, in many of them it is the cognitive point of view of the child – more or less credible – that which grants the story a hybrid character, and the two Chiles of Machuca. The focus on schooling in both films very capable of combining tragedy with the naïf gaze, story-telling of daily realities highlights the first noun of the compound noun, bildungs-film, meaning with distortion of the facts.] education. In the second part of this chapter, I compare two pairs of This content downloaded from 95.183.180.42 on Sun, 02 Aug 2020 20:36:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms the transatlantic dialogism 165 The motifs of the lost paradise of childhood beside gained knowledge of the adult world pervade the bildungsfilms at the heart of this chapter. With attention to national acculturations, I will pair select Spanish and Latin American films to reveal common political use, motifs, and aesthetics of cinematic childhood across national cinemas. Scholarship on contemporary Latin American cinema falls on both sides of the genre studies divide. These features correspond to Stephen M. Hart’s nation-image in contemporary Latin American cinema: ‘The emergence of the protagonist-as-nation genre . it was that the 35mm paradigm of the 1970s to 1990s tipped Latin American films into a tried and tested genre of the “national drama” ’ (2015: 65). By contrast, Carolina Rocha and Georgia Seminet resist defining child-starred films in generic terms: ‘they represent a hybrid of existing genres and share particular, identifiable features; however, they do not constitute any single cinematic genre’ (2012: 15). By contrast, The Two cines has fol- lowed Altman’s insistence on genre as process and not as an immutable category with fixed definition and borders: ‘Genres are not justpost facto categories, then but part of the constant category-splitting/category- creating dialectic that constitutes the history of types and terminology’ (Altman 1999: 65; italics in the original). Therefore, my genre study shares more commonality with the observations of Stephen M. Hart, Jay Beck, and Vicente Rodríguez Ortega; the latter two: ‘provide a thorough investigation of contemporary Spanish cinema within a transnational framework by positing cinematic genres as the meeting spaces between a variety of diverse forces that necessarily operate within but also across territorial spaces’ (Beck and Rodríguez Ortega 2008: 1). I set out to show how national cinemas drink from the font of international genre cinema, specifically thebildungsfilm in this chapter, to paradoxically address national specificities. Thereby, the binary at the heart of genre cinema readily transforms from the two Spains to the two Chiles and even two Argentinas. In the first part of the current chapter, I analyse the narrative and aesthetic similarities of an enriching if unlikely friendship and its dev- astating betrayal at the time of Generals Francisco Franco’s 1936 and Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coups, respectively, in La lengua de las mari- posas (Butterfly) (José Luis Cuerda 1999 Spain) and Machuca (Andrés Wood 2004 Chile).3 I will argue that national division and duality appear as organising concepts in the two Spains of La lengua de las mariposas and the two Chiles of Machuca. The focus on schooling in both films highlights the first noun of the compound noun, bildungs-film, meaning education. In the second part of this chapter, I compare two pairs of This content downloaded from 95.183.180.42 on Sun, 02 Aug 2020 20:36:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 166 the two cines con niño features that display two main aesthetic trends in the representation of childhood and resistance under military dictatorship: the arthouse, natu- ralist aesthetics of biopolitical childhood in El espíritu de la colmena and El premio (The Prize) (Paula Markovitch 2011 Mexico-Argentina) versus the fantastic, expressionist aesthetics of the paramilitarised child in El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth) (Guillermo del Toro 2006 Mexico- Spain) and Infancia clandestina (Clandestine Childhood) (Benjamín Ávila 2011 Argentina).