Spanish Spaces

Spanish Spaces Davies_SpanishSpaces.indd 1 29/03/2012 14:47 Contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures Series Editor Lisa Shaw, University of Liverpool L. Elena Delgado, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Series Editorial Board Jo Labanyi, New York University Chris Perriam, University of Manchester Paul Julian Smith, University of Cambridge This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contemporary hispanic and lusophone cultures and writing. The volumes published in Contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical practices and theoret- ical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural and social developments that have taken place over the past few decades. All manifestations of contemporary hispanic and lusophone culture and expression are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary culture. 1 Jonathan Mayhew, The Twilight of the Avant-Garde: Contemporary Spanish Poetry 1980–2000 2 Mary S. Gossy, Empire on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown 3 Paul Julian Smith, Spanish Screen Fiction: Between Cinema and Television 4 David Vilaseca, Queer Events: Post-Deconstructive Subjectivities in Spanish Writing and Film, 1960s to 1990s 5 Kirsty Hooper, Writing Galicia into the World: New Cartographies, New Poetics Davies_SpanishSpaces.indd 2 29/03/2012 14:47 Spanish Spaces Landscape, Space and Place in Contemporary Spanish Culture ann davies liverpool university press Davies_SpanishSpaces.indd 3 29/03/2012 14:47 First published 2012 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2012 Ann Davies The right of Ann Davies to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-184631-822-1 cased Typeset in Borges by Koinonia, Manchester Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY Davies_SpanishSpaces.indd 4 29/03/2012 14:47 To Jackie, Joanne, Jayne, Elaine and Zoe, who were with me in the early years. Davies_SpanishSpaces.indd 5 29/03/2012 14:47 Davies_SpanishSpaces.indd 6 29/03/2012 14:47 Contents Acknowledgements page ix List of illustrations xi 1 Introduction 1 2 Memory: landscapes of the past in Guillermo del Toro’s Spanish films 21 3 Forgetting: the landscapes of Gonzalo Torrente Ballester 40 4 Landscape and identities in the Basque Country 60 5 Crime scene: landscape and the law of the land 82 6 Crime, scene, investigation: women, detection and the city 101 7 Coasting: tourism and landscape 120 8 Immigration: north (of) Africa 142 9 Conclusion 164 Filmography 167 Bibliography 175 Index 185 Davies_SpanishSpaces.indd 7 29/03/2012 14:47 Davies_SpanishSpaces.indd 8 29/03/2012 14:47 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following for their help: Ian Biddle for support and the loan of his copy of Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, Mitch Rose for discussion of his work and directing me to other useful ideas, Kirsty Hooper for discussions about traces and tracing, Beate Müller for helpful comments on some sections of my work, Sarah Leahy for drawing my attention to the work of Fiona Handyside, Deborah Shaw for sharing her work on Guillermo del Toro, Belén Vidal for allowing me to see an early draft of her work on Torremolinos 73, and Tom Whittaker for sharing his work on landscape in Spanish cinema. Parts of Chapters 2, 4, 5, 6 and 8 were given at conferences or as invited papers: thanks to participants and attendees who gave useful comments. Part of Chapter 4 originally appeared as ‘Roads to Nowhere: How Terrorists Cross Space and Place in Cinema’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 82/3 (2005): 343–55. Part of Chapter 5 originally appeared as ‘Can the Contemporary Crime Thriller be Spanish?’, Studies in European Cinema, 2/3 (2005): 173–83. All translations from Spanish and French are my own. Davies_SpanishSpaces.indd 9 29/03/2012 14:47 Davies_SpanishSpaces.indd 10 29/03/2012 14:47 List of Illustrations 1 The orphanage and plain in El espinazo del diablo (dir. Guillermo del Toro; prod. Pedro Almodóvar et al.) 25 2 The maquis in the woods in El laberinto del fauno (dir. Guillermo del Toro; prod. Belén Atienza et al.) 35 3 Conchita looks at the threatening plain in El espinazo del diablo 36 4 Rural landscape in Ama lur (dir. Néstor Basterretxea and Fernando Larruquert; prod. Frontera Films) 62 5 Displaced interviewees: Bernardo Atxaga in La pelota vasca (dir. Julio Medem; prod. Julio Medem and Koldo Zuazua) 65 6 Arián is ordered to execute the hostage in El viaje de Arián (dir. Eduard Bosch; prod. Ángel Blasco) 74 7 Arián awaits death in El viaje de Arián 76 8 Pardo and his wife on the jetty in La caja 507 (dir. Enrique Urbizu; prod. Fernando Victoria de Lecea) 91 9 The luxury development that motivates the action of La caja 507 93 10 Charli’s discomfort in the country in La voz de su amo (dir. Emilio Martínez-Lázaro; prod. Andrés Vicente Gómez) 96 11 Charli on a Bilbao bridge at the end of La voz de su amo 99 12 Eva as detective in Mataharis (dir. Icíar Bollaín; prod. Santiago García de Leániz) 113 13 Inés observes the city in Mataharis 114 14 Niña comforts Trini in Hola, ¿estás sola? (dir. Icíar Bollaín; prod. Fernando Colomo et al.) 127 15 Anna and Montserrat at the beach in Costa Brava (dir. and prod. Marta Balletbò-Coll) 130 16 The beach as pleasure and labour in Torremolinos 73 (dir. Pablo Berger; prod. Tomás Cimadevilla et al.) 137 17 The hinterland that inspires aspiration in Torremolinos 73 138 18 Shared roots: Curro and Adbembi on the beach in Poniente (dir. Chus Gutiérrez; prod. Ana Huete) 150 19 The disappearing immigrant: Adbembi in Poniente 151 Davies_SpanishSpaces.indd 11 29/03/2012 14:47 xii Spanish Spaces 20 Susanna and Said on the outskirts of Barcelona in Susanna (dir. and prod. Antonio Chavarrías) 156 21 The deserted Moroccan beach in Ilegal (dir. Ignacio Vilar; prod. Jorge Maroto and Mario Pedraza) 159 22 The romantic Spanish beach in Ilegal 160 Davies_SpanishSpaces.indd 12 29/03/2012 14:47 chapter ONE Introduction The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain. Alan Jay Lerner Despite all you may have heard to the contrary, the rain in Spain stays almost invariably in the hills. Michael Flanders his book derives from my readings from the field of cultural geography in Tan attempt to reflect on the terrain of the entity known as Spain, through the prism of my scholarly interest in contemporary Spanish cinematic and literary texts. A further motivation is the difficulties I and others wrestle with in Hispanic Studies as we try to investigate questions bounded by an idea of nation, in an era when the whole notion of a nation is open to dispute and indeed discredit. Some scholars now talk of an era of ‘post-nationalism’ and sometimes by implication post-nation-ism, but the concept of nation, including that of the Spanish nation, still has some currency. As Joan Ramon Resina puts it, ‘political subjects themselves continue to correlate with their national foundation in ways that cannot simply be bracketed out of the political discourse’ (Resina 2002: 377); the same could be said of cultural discourse as well. To take just one example, the field of Spanish film studies increasingly encounters difficulties over the now strongly questioned concept of a Spanish national cinema as if the latter simply reproduced an essential, authentic Spain within its films and were impervious to outside influence. Guarding against the impulse to be normative as to what Spanish cinema is has proved vital, particularly in an era of co-production and the ever-pervasive influence of American cinema (as first among other cinemas), but it does then raise questions as to what Spanish cinema actually is, and also it complicates the process of writing about the topic while trying to pick one’s way through a normative minefield. I have great difficulties with the idea of a cultural text simply acting as a surface which we can scrape away to find an essential Spain underneath, thus the avoidance of essentialism in Spanish film studies as well as Spanish cultural studies more widely is something I find welcome; but it Davies_SpanishSpaces.indd 1 29/03/2012 14:47 2 Spanish Spaces sometimes conflicts with not only my desire but my academic responsibility to write about something called ‘Spain’. A similar difficulty arises when talking of Spain in terms of cultural geography. Landscape in particular (I will talk later about definitions of landscape as well as of space and place) can come to function as a surface which points to a national or regional entity lying behind it. As Mike Crang observes, ‘landscapes may be read as texts illustrating the beliefs of the people. The shaping of the landscape is seen as expressing social ideologies, that are then perpetuated and supported through the landscape’ (Crang 1998: 27). If a landscape – or other spaces and places – can be read as a text, the same danger of essentialism lies behind it. Yet the desire persists to endow landscape, space and place with specific meaning, including that of national and/or regional specificity. ‘Spain’ as a term may be heavily compromised, to the point of cliché at times, but it must still mean something.

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