The Militant Cinema of Joaquim Jordà: The Essay Film as Form

Steven Marsh, University of Illinois at Chicago
Numax presenta… is a singularly democratic film. I refer to its democratic form as discordant, out-of-synch with the dominant narrative concerning the ‘democracy’ under negotiation at the time of the film’s production. The film documents the dispute, subsequent strike, occupation, and self-management by a group of workers of a domestic appliance factory in the center of Barcelona between 1977 and 1979. Shot in 1979, at the initiative of the workers themselves and financed by what remained of the strike fund, the film is a performative intervention in the period of transformation of the Spanish state from dictatorship to liberal democracy. By ‘performative’ I allude to its title, the suggestion within it of a presentation; the dotted coda that hangs off the title is suggestive of both an ellipsis and of open-endedness, of unfinished business, of the inconclusive, of an uncertain future lying ahead. The film offers up a dense set of temporal relations at odds with its time; an unruly counter-current flowing surreptitiously to shape its formal diegesis; it points to a critique of traditional working practices as determining and conditioning life. Significantly, Numax presenta… is a re-presentation; it was shot after the announcement that the conflict at its heart — the collective self-operation of the factory — was over, a fact made explicit in its opening sequence. Both Numax presenta… and its 2004 sequel Veinte años no es nada are events in the sense that both films, like performative linguistic speech acts, enact what they signify (with no effort to edit out, mask or conceal the lapses and time lags involved). The event-ness of the films is key to their distinctive politics. It highlights a rupture in the everyday continuum — the norm — marked out by representational politics. Not only do the two films mark telling moments in an alternative history of democracy of the Spanish state, they are also exemplary of the formation, the forging, of a filmic site of the demos, as a voice of those habitually excluded from the discourse of democracy. In this vein I will argue here that Jordà reconfigures militant film so as to pose a challenge to conventional and enduring assumptions regarding both the cinematic and political regimes as conceived during late Francoism and the Transition.

Numax presenta… is staged in the present yet only after the event of its action. It is thereby paradoxically a documentary articulated through a fictional strategy. The film itself under workers control is a literal re-presentation that seeks therein to shape its own character, its own autonomy as demos, not only — as in the industrial dispute — from the official representatives of trade unions but also from the institutional exigencies of filmmaking. Factory workers whose daily task involved operating machines in order to shape objects extraneous to their needs and aspirations, would in this introductory declaration of intentions, give shape to their lives in the form of the film. Shape, of course, is — beyond the purview and criteria of critical discourse — a synonym for form. This chapter seeks to address questions of form; form, that is, that exceeds the limits and limitations of formalism as traditionally conceptualized in the history of cultural theory; form which is marked and conditioned by temporal-historical, social, and ideological factors. Reenactment is arguably the form of these essay films. This chapter considers thus the relation between cultural and political form at a historical juncture when both, as we will see, were in crisis. Nonetheless, the form of Numax presenta… is marked by an alternative shaping to that — the discourse — of the dominant narrative of the time ‘period’ of the production of Numax presenta…. Its historical framing, its extra-filmic reference — the Transition — notable for establishing the rarely questioned ideology of consensus, the critique of which has only recently been expressed as dissensus.

Numax presenta… is a film about organized working-class action that departs from the conventions and confines (at least those defined and practiced within the Spanish state) of most militant cinema. Jordà himself has observed that “es una película militante que rompe todos los esquemas de las películas militantes de aquel momento” [“a militant film that breaks all the molds of militant film of that moment”] (Jordà 56). In an interview with the filmmaker, Carles Guerra quotes Jordà to argue that the film’s claim to militancy is grounded in “biopolitics”:

«primero los trabajadores parten de un objetivo intentan mantener el poder obrero dentro de la fábrica, hasta que se impone una segunda reflexión. Al final, abandonamos ese simulacro de poder y vamos a la vida». A partir de este punto la gestión política pasa a ocuparse de algo más que la economía, los horarios o las condiciones laborales. Se ocupará de la vida dejando el terreno preparado para una militancia que, recordando el curso impartido por el filósofo francés Michel Foucault en los primeros meses del año1979 – justo en el momento que se filma Numax presenta…– , será de corte biopolítico.

[the workers first began with the objective of keeping workers’ power within the factory, until a second reflection took hold. In the end we abandoned that simulacrum of power and opted for life itself”. From that point on, politics becomes more significant than economics, working hours or labor conditions. Life is spent pre-paring the terrain for a militancy that, to recall French philosopher Foucault’s course offered in the first months of 1979—at the very moment that Numax presenta… was being filmed—was of a biopolitical nature]. (Guerra 52).

It is in such statements that we can see the underlying influence of Jordà’s erstwhile involvement with Autonomía, a significantly different project to that of Foucault’s thought not altogether unconnected to it — more biopolitical than disciplinary. During his years in exile in Italy Jordà had met (and planned a filmed interview with) Toni Negri, one of the ideologues of Autonomia. Negri was, of course, also influenced by biopolitics. Upon return to Barcelona Jordà came into contact with Spanish/Catalan autonomistas such as Santiago López Petit who were critical of what they termed the “authoritarian Left” (particularly the Communist Party, but also other groupings such as the LCR, who were active in the Numax occupation). Jordà had clearly traveled a long way from the time of the 1970 Lenin vivo, that he co-directed with Gianni Toti. One of the many interesting things about the sequel to Numax presenta…, Veinte años no es nada, is that we learn how the fragmentation and dispersal of the Numax collective after the end of the occupation mirrors (in some ways) that of the Lotta Continua, Potere Operaio and other Italian workerist groups who would from 1973 onwards form “Autonomia Operaia”. A rejection of traditional working class representatives as hopelessly compromised — and institutionalized — with the State apparatus (itself in crisis), a rejection of salaried work (that many of the members of the Numax collective express in the party that marks the end of the occupation and the film) and even the recourse to armed struggle by a minority element of the Italian workerists. Much of this critique of representation manifested itself (particularly in the case of Potere Operaio) in terms of formal practices. I want then to map the complex relations (noting the departures, the non-correlations) between formal filmic practices and the form of politics practiced by the workers themselves. Jordà’s earlier work as a traditional militant filmmaker at the service of the Communist Party (that of Lenin vivo [1970] and Portugallo, paese tranquillo [1969]) brings with it a change in formal practice. If form is historically marked then questions of form (political and artistic) and those of crisis are perhaps relevant to the year Numax was shot. 1977-78 witnessed unprecedented upheaval in Italy among workers and students — notably in Bologna — inspired by the extra-parliamentary left in opposition to the State, which counted on the complicity of the PCI. It also saw corresponding repression on the part of the State in collaboration with extreme right-wing paramilitaries. Likewise, the critique of capitalism and the reformist Left expressed in Numax presenta… came at precisely the same time as in Spain leftist political parties (in particular the PCE/PSUC) and the trade union movement were negotiating their legalization, that is their incorporation into the orbit of the State and its institutions. In this sense, Numax presenta… is a political intervention in direct opposition to the political moment of its production that has left, in turn, a legacy that goes beyond mere historical anecdote. Numax presenta… is the story of those left out of political discourse, of those who have no voice in the historical process — the order of discourse — but who, irrespective of their status, act politically so as to give shape to their lives. Their struggle is within a tradition of workers taking control of production, indifferent to the connivance between union bureaucrats and management (from the shop floor to the national stage), from which they are excluded.

Autonomía obrera extends the idea of work beyond the factory walls. Or rather society becomes the factory, within which transformation is as much about individuals — notably questions of subjectivity and desire — as it is about institutional change or economic demands. While Numax presenta… coincides with and offers a commentary on the Transition, it also provides a rare critique of the dominant consensus of the time, at odds with what proved to be the outcome of the negotiations that would bring into existence what, following the mobilizations of the 15 May, 2011 [15M] movement, would come to be known as the Regime of 1978, and most significantly — for working class organization — it provides a rare example of a critique en directo of the “Pactos de Moncloa” at the very moment of their negotiation. The film thus marks a convergence of a historical moment with a contemporaneous local action at odds with that moment but also, like the 15M, it posits an alternative: the desire to change the way — the form — of life of its protagonists, to break with — via rejection and refusal — the grinding alienation of the factory and the assembly line even if self-management brought about a consciousness of the realities of capitalist production.

If Numax presenta… constitutes a critical intervention in the Transition, it is also a film that combines within its own structure different forms of representation: reenactment, theater, real archive footage material, photographs, newspaper clippings, and oral testimony. Representation is the key word here not only of cultural critique but also of the political moment. The word Transition, until recently discursively established within the Spanish state as synonymous with democracy, is just the most glaring example of the politics of representation. But within that discourse and simultaneous to the filming, class representation (the trade unions and the PCE/PSUC), the official doctrine of representation that remains in place today was being forged. The groundwork for monopolizing the definition of democratic discourse — an order that has been firmly policed ever since to the exclusion of the demos — was was being established.

 
The first two thirds of Numax presenta… is punctuated by staged sketches that Jordà shot with the assistance of theater director Mario Gas and his workshop actors that recount the history of the Numax factory (the dubious Nazi past of the company’s German owners who arrived in Catalonia in the aftermath of World War II, the asset stripping prior to their flight and decampment to Brazil, the ongoing dispute that commenced two years previous to the shoot, and the complicity of the official Left and the union bureaucracy with the process). Theater is a mode that has interested Jordà in later films too. The combination of the seemingly incompatible registers of theater and film contribute to the discordant tone. Clearly, an element of this involves Brechtian distanciation. There is an effort on Jordà’s part to correlate the alienation of factory work with that of cultural work, to unravel and expose its mechanics onscreen. This though, in turn, produces a seepage that unfolds to reveal other aspects of political and filmic practices. In a film whose initial — and expressed — intent was a collective enterprise, it is noteworthy that Jordà shot the staged commentary at his own initiative and without the assistance or participation of the Numax workers. Indeed, this points to a disruption of the theoretical paradigm in modern film theory that would suggest a theoretical tension arising from the de facto equality established between the collectivity and the film auteur.

That said, substantial sections (and arguably the film in its entirety) of Numax presenta… are also staged, but within the setting of the factory itself. The ostensibly naturalist style of filming contrasts with the evident artifice of the theater production. Shot in color (the factory sequences are mostly in black and white) the theatrical interjections within the diegesis draw attention to their fake quality (a belly dancer, a tightrope walker, a juggler, — the proscenium stage setting itself, the stilted text articulated in the mouths of the jobbing actors). Meanwhile the workplace ‘stagings’ are more ironic and integrated within the factory environment. Emblematic of this is when one of the workers is shot delivering a pre-prepared speech while framed within a cubicle. The camera slowly withdraws to reveal the man seated on a toilet, one of a line of identical stalls. As he finishes and stands to pull up his trousers, he rounds off his scatological diatribe with the commonplace: “una imagen vale más que mil palabras”/ “one image is worth more than a thousand words”. Sequences such as this one mirror the set of shots that introduce the film. A written text, establishing the background, the motives and the terms of the film as part of the collective project, read by a single worker in a medium shot that expands to incorporate a surrounding circle of applauding workers, followed in turn by a lengthy, looping tracking shot that opens up the space of the shop floor and the mass meeting of the occupiers, a shot that captures in its arc the machinery, the factory layout, the assembled self-managing workers. Both instances are stylistic components — formal elements — of the film as a whole: the factory dispute and the form by which it is articulated in filmic language. Both highlight, bring to the surface, the tension and the stress lines between the visual effect and the written text, the image and the word.
In the interview with Guerra, Jordà disavows the specificity of mise-en-scène in favor of what he calls narrative technique. In particular, in striking contrast to the worker Jordà films in the toilet cubicle, Jordà claims a disinterest in the image altogether. He claims he does not look through the camera viewfinder during the shoot, leaving questions of visual composition to the judgement of the operator and the cinematographer. Disingenuous though this may be (mise-en-scène — a term whose origins lie in theater — is fundamental to Jordà’s work), it does say something regarding the form of the essay, the essay film in particular and, indeed, form itself. Whatever else form is it is not immovable, it is flexible. Moreover, the traditional dichotomy between form and content proves (and, once more, this returns us to performativity) to be false. In an echo (albeit a contradictory one) of the worker’s sentiments, the antecedents of the essay form do indeed lie in the written word rather than in the image. But the essay is also the form of crisis, it is perhaps crisis writing itself. I will return to this point in the conclusion of this chapter.

If theater is important to the cinema of Jordà, it is also important to the thinking of Ranciére in his definition of politics, both in the literal and the metaphorical sense of the term. As I suggested in the very first paragraph of this chapter, the title of the film Numax, presenta… contains the suggestion of a performance. Rancière, meanwhile, conceives politics as organized in terms of a staging of the way power is perceived. While I do not wish to suggest any direct influence of Rancière on Jordà, the theatrical interludes contribute to this element of staging. What is often presented as fly-on-the-wall documentary (particularly in the case of the mass meetings or assemblies) transpires to be reenactment. This is more explicitly the case when the workers recollect the beginnings of the dispute: the first meetings, the roughing-up of one of the managers, the breaking of an office window in one of the protests, the alternation between the direct testimony and its fictional recreation. But it is also there at the very end of the film, precisely when we are most led to believe in its naturalism. In the final sequence, the only one in which Jordà himself — a self-parodic signature — appears (though we occasionally hear his voice asking questions earlier), the workers celebrate the end of the occupation. A group of workers form the band that performs the music that accompanies the farewell bash, notably the tango Adios muchachos, popularized by Carlos Gardel. Jordà, meanwhile circulates, microphone in hand, and interrogates the workers as to their future plans. Someone shouts out the question “¿Qué opinas de Lamas?”/“What do you think Lamas?” (Lamas being the supervisor who had earlier been beaten by the female workers). In jocular fashion, one of the older men assumes the role of Lamas and the women slap him around. Within the representation, at the very moment when the film displays its apparatus, that is, when it is at is most Godardian (with the presence of Jordà, armed with the filmmaking sound apparatus, conducting interviews), the workers themselves re-represent, they act out, an instant of their own narrative, a narrative that exemplifies its politics of refusal in its refutation of the dominant idea of the Transition as model, as peaceful and consensual.

That this should come in the final sequence of the film is significant. The film is bookended (in two sequences that are marked out by being shot in color) and given form precisely by the kind of performativity I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter; it is brought into being, instituted or constituted by it at the very moment when a new state is being born under the auspices of a Constitution. Numax presenta… thus functions as an antagonistic alternative to the official historical narrative, but this is characterized by the absorption of the film’s thematic substance into its form. The traditional binary collapses and the two critical dichotomous terms become indistinguishable precisely at a moment in conflict with the conjuncture. While the film is marked by a style that reflects both the concept of collectivity: the workers (who financed the film) and the act of speaking for themselves, it also gives performativity a sense that links the theatrical notion of performance to the linguistic version. The first sequence — the reading of a written text (an essay within an essay) — is a declaration of intentions and it is one that poses a challenge to the institution of film itself; it institutes a counterinstitution, one that vies with the parodic narrative of professional actors provided by Mario Gas’s troupe on an actual stage.

In the age of neoliberalism the words democracy and demos from which it derives have taken on particular formal connotations. One of the interesting things about Numax presenta… is the year it was shot — 1979 — coincides with the arrival on the world stage of neoliberalism as a dominant discursive political and cultural formation. The scenario of the demos, a word much deployed nearly thirty years later, is the disputed stage upon which the struggle of the film is acted out. Demos, the domain of the excluded, what Rancière calls “the part that has no part” (Dissensus 70) — literally and metaphorically frames the film. The complications of autonomous production under capitalism, self-organization, self-governance, and control, not only of ‘the means of production’ but also over one’s life, are the themes of the discussions staged throughout the film. In direct contrast to the parallel negotiations regarding and, more to the point, defining the limits of democracy that were taking place at the same time in Madrid. Thus, the formal organization of the film — its central trope which gives voice to the hitherto voiceless — corresponds to the wider antagonisms, their discourses and definitions, debated beyond the frame of the screen. This too makes the film a political — militant — intervention, an event.

In spite of Jordà’s disavowal style is an important feature of Numax presenta… The use of color in the introductory and final sequences of the film denotes actuality, the now of the conflict and the film itself, their common coincidence in time at the beginning and end of the film, in contrast with the repetition and recreation of the dispute itself (almost — though not quite — in sepia-style). Given the use of color to shoot the theatrical episodes, a sense of disruption to the form itself develops; a disruption, moreover, that is historicized by the formal innovation.

Transformation in social forms, meanwhile, is what exercised — and continue to exercise — the autonomists, in their endeavors to take the struggle of the factory to the wider world beyond. Filmic, historical, political, and social forms are marked by limits and barriers to which disciplinary concerns subject them in the same way as aesthetic forms. There is a transference inherent in the idea of transformation. The placing of Numax within the city of Barcelona is realized filmically by the shots of the hazy silhouette of the Sagrada Familia — emblematic of the Barcelona skyline — against which the group of women workers discuss the situation as they smoke on the roof or the terrace of the factory. Form is of course many things that work within and without the text: tropes, figures, genres, among them. Numax presenta… is part of the factory film genre, its essay form, a mode of filmmaking that Jordà specialized in throughout his career. Prior to embarking on his Communist Party-sponsored projects, the director had made what is arguably a performative essay in which Catalan writer Maria Aurèlia Capmany discusses her novel Un lloc enter els morts. Jordà’s essays are defined by filmic speech acts that challenge the traditional separation of form from content. At the same time they historicize form; text and context entwine, align, and integrate with each other.

 

Veinte años no es nada (2004)

Jordà’s question to the Numax workers regarding their future at the party with which the film culminates is met with a unanimous refusal to contemplate a future devoted to salaried labor and assembly-line factory work: in what is paradigmatic of the autonomists rejection of work gives rise to a dissensus.

Twenty-five years after Numax presenta… Jordà, as if in response to the open-ended coda appended to the title of the earlier film, and so as to provide concrete answers to his original question, sought out the protagonists of the earlier film and persuaded them to participate in a second production. The relation between the historical moment and the filmic diegesis in Numax presenta… is marked by a concentrated, saturated and complex set of contradictions that bind and hold in abeyance the collective and the conjuncture. Veinte años no es nada, on the other hand, is about the dispersal and the consequential singularity of each individual experience. While the collective has evaporated, in the previous film’s logic of reenactment, the staged reunion of 20 años no es nada carves out a return. Although there is no theatrical narration, it is clear that many of the encounters are set up for the purposes of the film. The very evident differences in the filmic compositions of Numax presenta… and Veinte años no es nada, wittingly or not, have a relation (if not exactly a correspondence) with the shifts in the political forms that the passage of time has wrought. The point is important. Dissensus and dispersal raise formal questions too. At the heart of the displacement is a paradox: a contradictory condensation.

Once more while these films are not reducible to the conjuncture alone, there is a relation between their on-screen interiority and the off-screen exteriority. Just as Numax presenta… has a discordant relation to its historical moment that prompts its internal debate, so too 20 años no es nada is highly conscious of its place in relation to the broader world. These films though are not allegories of their respective periods. Their exemplary quality is as exceptions, they are allusive symptoms of their times rather than metaphors. They are films that, in their very different ways, give voice to the unheard, those excluded from dominant discourse; to recall Rancière, the part that has no part.
If the first film was inspired by the collective experience (almost nobody is identified, except by their first names and in passing, even in the credits of the film), the focus of the second, two and a half decades later, is on the stories of the individuals. The shift of subjectivities is a notably distinguishing factor between the two pieces. Names, in this second film, are used throughout. The traditional notion of the working class as concentrated in one place is dislocated; mobility and individualization prove the characteristics of 20 años no es nada. The common experience shared by the individuals now atomized points to a new and different sense of crisis, a crisis of collective action. The point however is how such abstraction — the relation between time, and individual/collective experience — might be filmed. Although there is no repetition of the theatrical commentary of Numax presenta… the entirety of Veinte años no es nada is in a sense staged, corseted within the parameters of its predecessor. The film establishes a scenography. As well as being a film about the evolution of a group of once-militant workers, it is a film about a film, a metafilm. Numax presenta… is screened during the reunion dinner of Veinte años no es nada. The condition of filmmaking itself — its essayistic quality — is wrapped within the interrogation of the concept of political militancy in the era of neoliberalism. As Jordà’s final film (he would die in 2006), it also brings to an end the director’s trajectory as a militant filmmaker; it points to a conclusion of sorts, a drawing together of life and representation in a very personal expression of biopolitics.

There is though an element that disrupts — a further dislocation — any tidy, sentimental ending: the demos, that which has been left out of discourse, the remainder, not only of that which is rendered surplus to needs but discounted altogether, excluded from the count, off sets succinct calculation. The labor market itself in these two and half decades between the two films has changed dramatically. By 2004 many of the benefits for workers of the Moncloa Pacts, for which the representatives of the working-class movement had willingly sacrificed their labor power in exchange for benefits — most notably stable employment, job security — had been whittled away in the name of corporate exigency. Unemployment had rocketed and created an army of alternative labor that threatened the conditions and security of salaried workers. Though never articulated as such the discourse of precariousness is characteristic of the post-1979 period. Meanwhile, autonomism emphasizes creative resistance, self-education, and re-education. It is about reclaiming the time that would otherwise be given up to work for oneself. If the initial project of Numax presenta… concerned the crises prompted by collective self management, Veinte años no es nada is about what each of the protagonists subsequently went on to make of their own lives; much of which deals with new and different forms of waging the struggle that Numax initiated. Autonomism concerns refusal, it is about refusing to conform to the discipline — the bodily discipline — imposed by the rules of everyday life, a rejection of temporal and spatial order, symbolized by the regulatory conditions of the daily routine of factory work. Discipline has extended to the world beyond the factory walls and even beyond the frontiers of the human body. Paradoxically though — and herein lies the nub of the film, the contradiction at its center — Veinte años no es nada is also a film about losing the collective spirit. Indeed, a significant part of the film focusses on individuals who now work, if not exactly for themselves, alone (the taxi driver, the artisan, the school teacher, the owner of a bar, the sales rep). Precariousness, given material form in the uncertain future contained in the title of Numax presenta… , is what distinguishes the labor market of 2004 but it also characterizes other aspects of life, such as housing and affective relations. The body is more fragile. We get a sense of this early on in the film when Emilia, a woman who heralds from León (and who says “Cataluña ha sido como una universidad”/“Catalonia has been like a university”.). Now she runs a bar which, after many years, she is in danger of losing owing to speculation and gentrification. Meanwhile, another former Numax employee, Blanca, works as an elementary schoolteacher of evidently underprivileged, marginalized children in Cordoba. Blanca’s charges and Emilia’s situation point to a shift in historical temporality governed by new uncertainties.

Time enfolds in this second film; the apertures in its creases are revealed by promiscuous plundering of archive material, of memories, and testimonial. Time also reveals the presence and the uneven shifts, the new forms of protest and new subjects of resistance. Veinte años no es nada was released at a significant historical juncture. While not as emblematic as 1979, 2004 is also a watershed year. Arguably it is the year when the street and the public square become singular sites of struggle. It is the moment of the anti-globalization movement and when popular mobilization first pose a serious threat to the institutions of 1978 in Spain. 2004 is the year in which the demos took center stage of political struggle and began to effect real change. The year prior to the making of the film was marked by what is arguably the world’s largest ever mass mobilization in opposition to the second Gulf war. In Spain the ¡No a la guerra: otro mundo es posible! moment (that had developed out of the anti-globalization movement, itself a response to neoliberalism) had momentous effects. A year after the US-led invasion, the Aznar government was brought down following the exposure of its deception following the commuter train bombings by Islamic militants on March 11, 2004 during the general election campaign. This led to protests outside the headquarters of the ruling party and a sudden reverse in the predicted vote. Veinte años no es nada was of course made quite independently and prior to these events — the fact it emerged in the same year is coincidence and no mention is made of them in the film — but in light of the politics of the two films, it is perhaps relevant. This is particularly so given that the anti-globalization movement is arguably heir to Autonomía, with which Jordà had once been associated.

The interim between the first film and the second sees a world transformed unimaginably for the participants in both pieces. The Cold War has ended, neoliberalism, whose symptoms were signaled by Foucault in 1979, has seemingly triumphed. If Numax presenta… turned on the collective experience, Veinte años no es nada’s focus on the life stories of the individuals gives rise to a tension here between the autonomist refusal of the factory model and the neoliberal conceptualization of the individual. Carlos, who features in the final moments of the earlier film and who now works as a taxi driver in the streets of Barcelona captures this ambiguous change in conversation with two of his erstwhile workmates: “Hay mucha individualización,”/“There is a lot of individualization”, he says, lamenting the contemporaneous absence of solidarity that his generation experienced in the late-1970s. The desire for “una forma de vida diferente”, “a different way of life”, to cite one of the women who formerly worked at Numax. The irony regarding the formation of political subjectivity is pointedly made in the respective soundtracks: while the first film ends with a tango, the second culminates with a screening of the original film followed by a collective rendition of the Internationale.

Reminders abound of the social factory beyond the confines of the old traditional Fordist model of industry. If in the first, the Sagrada Familia appears shrouded in cloud, its grey outline providing the backdrop to the ongoing debate filmed in black and white, in the second it is shot in glorious color as Carlos the taxi driver, points it out to his Italian clients. Tourism, always important to the national economy, has replaced manufacturing. The city and color provide the visual signs of changing times but, as the singing of the Internationale suggests, Veinte años no es nada also has a particular soundscape Sound, music, and speech are key elements of both films. The tango of the first film is countered in the second with another Gardel tango Volver (“Return”), giving its title a double meaning: the passage of time and a return to the past. Title aside tango is a genre tinged with affect, with desire, loss, and pain; the affective inflections of biopolitics. There is an aspect of oral history in the second film, while verbal debate is at the heart of the first. If, as I suggested earlier, the camera captures those voices, there are other implications too. The reunion takes place in a Barcelona restaurant and one of the first people introduced is the deaf-mute son of one of the workers, now dead, who participated in the original dispute. There is a hint here of Plato’s Phaedrus, when Socrates distinguishes between the writing and speech: “they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves”. While clearly the philosophical point is different, it is striking that the figure here is both an “orphan” and he is a figure who lacks the power of speech. We might read into this a somewhat different configuration: film qua writing, the mute orphan as demos. This idea might be reinforced by another example. A yawning absence in the film is that of Juan Manzanares. A silent figure who died prematurely of liver disease, he is represented in the film by his loquacious former lawyer. One of the interesting features, given the previous reference to Plato and my reading of the presence of the mute boy, is that the interview with the lawyer provides the sole occasion in Veinte años no es nada for Jordà himself to appear on screen.

In a film about legacy, a film constructed around testimony, the figure of the deaf mute heir to the class struggle is charged with symbolic and affective power: he is in a sense an exemplary case of the (literally) voiceless, the demos that is the focus of Ranciére’s work. Amid the sonorous and auditory continuum in the film (and in many ways both films are oral and musical accounts) he represents a silence, a void or gap in the discursive narrative, a certain formal autonomy or supplement in the absence of his deceased father. In an affective gesture that exceeds the confines of the body, as the screening of Numax presenta… comes to an end, he wipes away the tears rolling down his cheeks as if the whale bones that line the confines of the metafilm had failed to fully contain its interior content within its corporeal limits. It is perhaps significant that Carlos, the taxi driver who a quarter of a century earlier at the party that marked the end of the occupation of the Numax factory and the film played drums and thus maintained the regulatory beat of the musical arrangement, tapping out the rhythm of an alternative order. It is apt then that he now passes the time when he is without passengers interacting with language tapes. Not only an autonomist use of working hours for his own benefit but a technological self-education in oral expression.
While individualizing what was a collective struggle the film centers upon questions of affect. Juan Manzanares is spoken of with greater dignity and understanding by his partner Pepi (Josefa Sánchez), one of the more vocal participants in the film of the original dispute, than by his lawyer. A key figure whose story occupies a significant proportion of this second film, — she now runs a shop in Barcelona selling her own artisan products— she and others took up arms in the aftermath of Numax and held up banks at gunpoint to sustain their militancy. Pepi talks movingly about Juan, his life and his death, “era muy humana, extremadamente humana, muy sensible” “He was very humane, extremely humane, very sensitive”. We learn from television archive material the story of Juan’s final robbery in 1985 of a branch of the Banco de Sabadell in Valls, in which Pepi did not participate. Manzanares took the employees hostage, demanded the presence of the then Minister of the Interior, José Barrionuevo, and shot and seriously wounded the then Civil Governor of the Tarragona province, Vicente Valero, who entered the bank in representation of Barrionuevo, as a supplement and a substitute. There is an interesting correlation here with the artifice of the theatrical stage reenactments of history in Numax presenta… . Providing an interestingly skewed perspective on cultural memory; the footage from the television archives’ report embedded within the filmic text of Veinte años no es nada posits two immediacies, two nows, two present moments, as events viewed (by us, the spectators) in hindsight. The now indexed by the sequences shot in color of the initial and final sequences of Numax presenta… is echoed (with concomitant distance or remove) here. The immediacy of the figure of the direct witness of the 1979 film is articulated through reminiscence, by the rhetoric of defeat, in a register of melancholia condensed in the collective singing of the Internationale.

Demos refers to the uncounted or the un-recounted, that which has been left out of written accounts of history, that has been institutionally muted and not permitted a voice of its own. A trace though remains in the spoken word, this condition of oral testimony, in the fragments of memory that provide another kind of legacy unrepresented in statistics or official narratives. The voiceless demos is, in this sense, empowered by such an inheritance. The performative quality of the lived remembrance of the witnesses themselves is there in the conscious act of disputing versions of memory that by 2004 had become one of the dominant academic and political discourses in Spain. Veinte anos no es nada ends with an intriguing image of inheritance and legacy. While in 1979 Jordà had asked the Numax workers as to their future plans, in 2004 he does not have the same opportunity. The final shot of the film frames a child of around three, apparently Carlos’s young daughter, her doll in one hand, the fist of the other raised, while the collective, their backs turned to her, sing the revolutionary hymn. Seemingly overdetermined, clichéd, even perhaps opportunistically staged; it is an image of the militant future, of struggles yet to come.

 

Conclusion: the essay as the form of/for crisis

This rather forced ending, theatrically set up as a reaffirmation, is the visual image, the incarnation, of the open-ended “…” that hangs off the end of the title of Numax presenta… , the pending, ongoing and future resistance in a different configuration. Earlier I cited filmic texts set in the factory set very much apart from one another and, in turn, from Jordà’s films by time. Both the Fassbinder TV series and the Portuguese The Nothing Factory are fictions, Jordà’s films are — in theory at least — documentaries. The way they broaden to incorporate fictional strategies facilitates the undoing of film’s claim to naturalism, they provoke a rupture, formal ruptures of the conventions of fiction and non-fiction, or that suggested by Jordà himself between word and image; they enact crisis. The cinematic essay is the form of crisis that, in turn, generates something unassimilable — like the demos itself — an excess or supplement within critical practice itself. The crisis the essay form aptly responds to is political crisis, not as a passive correlation but as active intervention, as subjective participant in an act of resistance. In this refusal there is a performativity that links protest with theatricality.

For anyone who has been involved in grassroots politics in Spain over the last two decades, it is a strange and slightly unnerving sight to see video artist and activist Marcelo Expósito presiding over that most theatrical of stages and the most institutional of institutions, the Spanish Congress. However, as — prior to the Spanish general election of April 28, 2019 — fourth in the hierarchical chain of house speakers and member of parliament for the formation “En Comú Podem” this has indeed happened in recent years. ‘En Comú Podem’ — the Catalan sister organization of Podemos — is very much part and product of the 15M movement and the mass mobilizations of 2011 that saw the central squares of almost all of the cities of the Spanish state occupied by protesters.
In 2004, the same year as Veinte años no es nada, Expósito, based (if not born) in Barcelona, released an hour-long video essay that exemplifies the kind of formal filmic engagement with politics that this chapter has sought to demonstrate in Jordà’s work. Expósito depicts the evolution and operation of the social factory, and does so by focusing directly on the work of one of the original autonomists, Paulo Virno (who appears in the film). Primero de Mayo (la ciudad-fábrica) was shot largely in the city of Turin, at the site of one of Fiat’s most emblematic factories now transformed into a commercial center. Former factory workers and immigrants, recruited as private police, battle against their excluded cohorts, the unemployed, music techies, wifi geeks, punks, situationists, and other cast-outs from society who seek to resist the speculators. This staging of the demos is a sign of neoliberalism’s brutal conquest of space and the resistance to it, the antiglobalization movement that in time would give rise to the world-wide revolts of 2011. Gerald Raunig describes Primero de Mayo (la ciudad-fábrica) in the following terms reminiscent of the apparent shift that has taken place between Numax presenta… and Veinte años no es nada:

“Marcelo Expósito’s video… outlines a complex introduction to the shift from
the Fordist paradigm of the factory to the post-Fordist paradigm of virtuosic cognitive
and affective labor. He takes as his model the Fiat factory Lingotto, a proud center of
automobile production in the 1930s and now—having been transformed into a
multifunctional hotel and conference center—a hotbed of the service industry and an
example of the fabbrica diffusa. (The operaist term refers to the factory that has been
diffused into the city, into the private spheres, into the forms of life.).”

With this in mind, I want to conclude with reference to what Laura Rascaroli has called “the potentiality of all essay films to question and challenge their own form” (300). It is the essay as the critically shaping subject productive of its own subject matter via the performance of commitment, that points to a continuation of the militant tradition of filmmaking (of which Expósito is only one of Jordà’s heirs). In the same volume as Rascaroli, Elizabeth Pazian and Caroline Eades, describe the essay form as “dialectical thought that gravitates towards crisis. Thus it fosters the development of new forms”. There is within and between these two films a temporal dialogue and dialectic between enactment and reenactment, between chronology and anachronology, a spectral relation between the militant event and its representation. That the two films discussed here focus on crisis (the collective crisis of the Numax dispute and the individual crises of its participants decades later) at two different moments of political crisis whose effects endure suggests a convergence that exceeds anecdotal coincidence, one that points to an openness to future political change and the filmic response to it.

 

Works cited
Díaz Valcárcel, José Antonio and Santiago López Petit, El discreto encanto de la política. Crítica de izquierda autoritaria 1967-1974. Ruedo ibérico. Edición especial 40 años. Editorial Icaria, Barcelona, 2016

Garcés, Marina, ‘Numax, nuestra universidad. Conversación con Joaquim Jordà’, Revista Zehar nª58, Donosti (2006). 10-13.

Guerra, Carles, ‘La militancia biopolítica de Joaquín Jordá : The Biopolitical militancy of Joaquín Jordá’, Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. II · Núm 5. · 2014 · 50-55
– – N for Negri: Antonio Negri in Conversation with Carles Guerra. Grey Room, No. 11 (Spring, 2003), pp. 86-109.

Hallward, Peter, ‘Staging Equality: Rancière’s Theatocracy’, New Left Review 37 January-February 2006. 109-129.

Jordà, Joaquim, ‘Numax presenta … y otras cosas’ , Nosferatu, Revista de cine. 9. 1992. pp. 56-59.

Pazian, Elizabeth A. and Caroline Eades (eds), The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia (London and New York, Wallflower Press). 2016.

Rancière, Jacques, Dissensus (London: Continuum), 2010.
– – -‘The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics’, in Reading Rancière. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (eds) (London: Continuum), 2011. pp. 1-17.

Raunig, Gerard, ‘Modifying the Grammar. Paolo Virno’s Works on Virtuosity and Exodus’, Art Forum, January 2008.

Lucía Bosé (1931-2020)

Abajo posteo el texto de mi intervención en el reciente simposio sobre la obra de Pere Portabella en la Universidad de Cambridge. Mi ponencia ofrecía una lectura de la película Nocturno 29, protagonizada por Lucía Bosé que ha muerto hoy (23 de marzo).

* * * * * *

An early shot in Nocturno 29 (similar to another in Portabella’s 2007 Silencio antes de Bach) shows the naked body of the protagonist framed in the transparent door of a shower, her mottled image fused with the frosted glass in a blurred yet revealing barrier to vision.

Via frame and fuzziness, the anonymous woman is indexed as object of the erotic gaze. Poised on the threshold of the 1970s, the film reveals subtle signs of the year of its production. It exhibits symptoms of the seismic shifts taking place around the year 1968. As will become clear, the title of Nocturno 29 contains an oblique reference to the year of its production. On the face of things, then—and, almost inevitably, it has been interpreted in this way—Nocturno 29 possesses certain elements of national allegory. I would suggest though that it is precisely the formal experimentation of this film rather than the thematic indicators that brings into question the notion of allegory.
Writing in 1969, Michel Mardore proclaimed Nocturno 29 “the first political Spanish film.” Although this is certainly not the case, it is true that the film’s title refers to the twenty-nine years that had passed since the end of the Spanish Civil War. Meanwhile, the allegorical aspects of the film have been emphasized and exhaustively outlined by Josep Torrell, who focuses on the film’s title, the cryptic references to the war, and the depiction of the bourgeoisie that financed the regime. Torrell also highlights a singular sequence (one of only two shot in color) in which a visual gag alludes to the red, yellow, and purple of the national flag of the defeated Spanish Second Republic, together with the pointed suggestion of exile in Lucia Bosé’s departure by airplane at the end of the film.
Although there is little doubt that these references to the regime are deliberate and that, in this sense, Nocturno 29 is unquestionably a political film, such an interpretation tends to relegate its formal innovation to that of conventional political discourse in the spirit of Portabella’s later (and decisive) work of the mid-1970s. Here, though, I am more interested in how the politics of Nocturno 29 emerge via the interstices of the film’s composition in ways that extend beyond the limitations of a univocal interpretation as allegory, as only anti-Francoist discourse. Indeed, filmic form and politics complement and supplement each other. Rather than functioning as an extended metaphor of Francoism, the film I argue shadows the regime. It is its other, its ghost.
Cowritten with Brossa, with poet and novelist Pere Gimferrer’s translation of Brossa’s original text from Catalan to Castilian, the film also features, in discordant choral form composer Carles Santos, who vehemently punctuates the film with a fiercely emphatic and violent piano intervention. Nocturno 29 is structured musically and poetically rather than narratively. It is, in its initial composition, an intermedial work, and that intermediality—that is, the film’s formal properties—marks its relation to the political conjuncture. The film’s soundtrack—not just the music but the array of noise (the clatter of dishes, typewriters, footsteps on gravel, lengthy silences)—generates a spectrum of virtual sound. It forms a spectral sonic backdrop to the dictatorship, with an agonized, haunting melody and screeching, groaning, and gasping that are often at odds with the placid visual images. The no of nocturne, its negative—both as denial and as filmic material—reinforces this sense of the ghost. The film’s title, furthermore, evokes a musical form ironically. The stark black-and-white photography that dominates the film holds suggestive echoes of the horror genre, whereas the musical nocturne is an ensemble piece devised for light evening entertainment.
Torrell observes that the film is composed of twenty-nine sequences, reflecting the twenty-nine years of the dictatorship. However, while the twenty-nine sequences shape the film formally, they also draw attention to the filmic apparatus, its artifice, and the nature of its experimentation. The rejection of narrative order is also a rejection—paradoxically—of chronological order, which would suggest an undoing or at least a questioning of the twenty-nine-year period since the onset of the dictatorship or, indeed, of the importance of the year 1968. Time in this film is set off against itself, putting in doubt the significance of its historical moment. This is the spectral paradox, the elusive quality of Nocturno 29, by which time and measurement (temporality, the year, the order of filmic sequences) interrogate themselves. While the significance of the emblematic year can only be reckoned with retrospectively, its putative intent might best be understood performatively rather than allegorically. History becomes charged and destabilized by the discordance between experimentation and experience, sound and image, structure, rhythm, and time. The following sequence in Nocturno 29—a tour de force of editing and mise-en-scène—are exemplary of this disturbance of hermeneutic equivalence.

Despite the film’s languid tone, it contains few long shots in any spatial sense of the word long, as in a long distance. The film does, however, contain many lengthy shots in the temporal sense, with detailed close-ups that, bolstered by the high-contrast sound-negative stock, give the film’s texture a particular graininess. Throughout the film is an interesting tension between movement through space and temporal (dis)continuity. Such discontinuity is both compositional and diegetic. In a film that has a disengaging couple at its center, the decoupage editing technique of cutting within the frame is symptomatic of the ongoing decoupling that plays out across the film. These shots are paradigmatic of the surfaces, sensuality, and circularity that prevail throughout Nocturno 29 in a deceptively continuous discontinuity. The contrasting editing foregrounds the relation between light and surface, of elision, ellipsis, and eclipse.

The first shot in this sequence, a close-up of the doorknob, is suggestive of the nocturne of the film’s title. At first sight, it resembles a full moon at night, the raw element to be eclipsed. The moon, of course, is also an erotic symbol whose mythological associations are with the feminine. Critical writing’s focus on the political allegory of Nocturno 29 has been at the detriment of the film’s erotic mode. Not only is the erotic present in the amorous triangle of the film’s incidental narrative; it is also there in the sensuality of almost every sequence, and, significantly, it is connected to the surrealist spirit that pulsates throughout Nocturno 29. It is an eroticism closely allied with the filmic apparatus—or, at the very least, juxtaposed with it in a tension between the disordered effusiveness of eros and the regulatory logos of the apparatus (including the frame itself) or the time period—the twenty-nine years of Francoism. The erotic is political.
The sequence suggests an erotic encounter with the machinery itself, a relation between the caressing and rotating fluency of the camera in its engagement with other mechanical artifacts (the factory equipment, the car wheel, the viewfinder, and the aspect ratio). They highlight a disturbance of logos by eros with an uncoupling and a set of uncouplings revolving around the thematic couple of the film itself. Technological supplements and nature—hard metal and human flesh—are engaged on the plane of the filmic and the erotic, while the star presence of the iconic Lucia Bosé is mobilized in counterpoint to spectatorial expectations. Surface movement in the swirling, sensual circularity both of Bosé in the delicacy of her touch and of the rounded objects her character encounters—from the doorknob to the teeth of the rotary mechanical device, from the phallic control stick to the wheel of the car—parallel her movements through the city within an economy of desire. This free-flowing, revolving camera movement, the play on distances, the detailed shots, the reframings, the mirroring and reflections on shiny surfaces, the film work, and the editing all combine in dense silence to produce an intoxication with the filmic process itself. This spinning, swirling hint of turbulence suggests eddying interruptions in a flow, a turmoil, a maelstrom, and a sense of vertigo and of displacement or disorientation.

Such disorientation and circularity are also present in the urban confines of Nocturno 29. Barcelona is a subtle but pervasive presence throughout the film. Toward the end of the film, the symbol of the maze comes to the forefront, captured in a long take at the city’s Laberinto de Horta. This sequence is marked by a set of formal ruptures. Initially shot in color, the focus of the artificial lighting beating down from beneath a shade on the green card table and anonymous hands distributing playing cards is on the sharp edges of concentrated space. Filmed at shoulder height of the card players, their faces are concealed amid the shadows. The startling color is reinforced by the rigorous quadricularity of the cards and table in contrast not only to the black and white but also to the circularity that has dominated the film to this point. Only Bosé’s face—round, full, and curvaceous—becomes apparent in the sequence, her porcelain complexion emerging from the swirl of cigarette smoke. She is the sole woman among a group of men. Meanwhile, a kind of sonic regulation imposes itself in the form of a metronomic ticktock of a clock followed by the sound of winding-up time mechanisms. Bosé is summoned away by her lover’s secret sign, and suddenly, in a match shot triggered by the doorway (she is associated with entrances and exits throughout the film), she steps across the threshold into the black-and-white exterior high above the fuliginous city.

In an extraordinary sequence a man, apparently Bosé’s lover is filmed as he climbs a spiral staircase, enters his modernist apartment, and sits before a television set (foreshadowing the effects of visual technology that Portabella would return to more than twenty years later in Puente de Varsovia). On the TV we see the military parade that the man has just passed on the street below. We then see the man, silhouetted from behind as he removes his prosthetic eye. The false eye here coincides thematically with the roundness of the machinery sequence discussed earlier and makes explicit the centrality to the film of the combination of artifice, the erotic, and the visual.

Nocturno 29 commences with an ostensibly lyrical and naturalistic sequence of an anonymous young couple on a misty mountainside at the point of making love amid the undergrowth. The image is overtracked by the prosaic cranking rhythms of a film camera. Once more the process of naturalization is undone by the artificial mechanism of the apparatus, and the visual is subverted by the sonorous. In another link in the metonymic chain connecting surrealism, this introductory sequence—itself supplementary and seemingly disconnected from the diegesis of the body of the film—was shot in Port Lliget, the area where Dalí lived in the early 1930s. Port Lliget is close to Cap de Creus, where Dalí and Buñuel shot some of the famous sequences of L’age d’or. Man Ray also took well-known photographs at Cap de Creus during a visit in 1933, and the spectacular rocky outcrop provides the backdrop to Dalí’s 1934 painting “Espectro del sex-appeal”. The area is also the site of several films from the late 1960s and early 1970s most notably the unfinished Hortensia-Beancé, directed by Spain’s singular cineaste maudit of the 1960s, Antonio Maeza, and produced by Portabella. Meanwhile, Glauber Rocha’s chaotic Cabezas cortadas (1970), was shot nearby at the Pere de Rodes Monastery, a shoot that, according to Agusto Torres’s Diario de Rodaje, Portabella visited.
This trace structure—of personalities, films, paintings, and places—forms a locus around a surrealist genealogy haunted, in turn, by the figure of the Gradiva. The Gradiva so fascinated Dalí that it became his pet name for his wife, Gala. André Breton appropriated the name for his Parisian bookshop, the door of which was designed with a double aperture by Duchamp. The Gradiva is there in the enigmatic, muted figure of Lucia Bosé—the naked figure framed in the shower sequence mentioned earlier. She is the “walking woman” who traverses the labyrinthine city, silent and sculptural, set in frozen, flowing motion (the flare of her trouser suit mirrors the sweep of the Gradiva’s gown) in the bas-relief of the filmic frame—as in a freeze-frame—against domestic alienation and the urban landscape of Barcelona. The sense of movement in the frieze-like sequentiality of the bas-relief form and the framing of the original is in Portabella’s version also a reframing. Bosé passes through as a transient captured briefly in her seemingly estranged husband’s gaze from the other side of a delineating threshold. This is a gathering together of all the elements of the filmic text in an image that quite literally produces a standing out. If the image of the Gradiva is impressed in the stone, that of Lucia Bosé—a flaneuse gliding through the streets of Barcelona—is reflected fleetingly in the mirror on the wall. The Gradiva is exemplary of indexicality, of the material relation between the thing and its representation, of the other. Aptly then this spectral or ghostly impression of a doubled woman is both an inscription and engraving.

Clinicians, Corpses, Cadavers: Medical Discourse and Institution in the Films of the Transition

The Spanish Transition witnessed the emergence of a group of radical often “underground” films that detailed life in clinical and other such medical institutions, and that in turn say something about the very idea of institutions themselves. Most famously among this locus of work is perhaps Jaime Chávarri’s El desencanto but among lesser known and critically neglected films are the documentaries El asesino de Pedralbes (the story of a murderer condemned to death, which includes the testimony of the killer himself, filmed in the prison at which he was being held), and Animación en la sala de espera, which recorded the everyday life of patients in a psychiatric hospital. I want today though — for reasons of time — to focus on only one of these films, Ángel García del Vals’ remarkable Cada ver es… (1981), a film that combines within a discourse of temporality, forensics with cinephilia, dissection and documentary, labor and love. In this short consideration of the film, I want to think about the relationship of film to death.

There is a tradition of this kind of film beyond the boundaries of Spain and in different forms and formats. I will register just two antecedents in particular (though there are many more): Frederick Wiseman’s Titticut Follies and Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes. I cite these two because of their differences: the first, as always with Wiseman, concerns the Institution, while the second revolves around the practice of autopsy and the fleshy all-too-human meatiness of the recently deceased body. Cada ver es… differs from both. Above all else, Cada ver es… centers on its protagonist. In essence it is an extended interview within the confines of the institution. Unusually, it is a film that — as its title suggests — does not shirk before the sight of death. The corpses in García del Vals’s piece lack the heat — the human warmth — of Brakhage’s film (or the prurience that the American experimentalist indulges in). Indeed, the distinguishing feature of these cadavers is their coldness, their frozen lifelessness, the brutal fact of their embalmed condition.

Juan Espada Coso is a working man and this film is tailored to a single working day in his life. In this alone the film might be considered biopolitical: a man defined by his physical labor who at the same time works with bodies, the bodies of others, with corpses preserved in formaldehyde; otherness here defined as the others of life. But Espada also works in the interior depths, the bowels as it were, of the body of an institution, the Medical Faculty building of the University of Valencia. Espada’s domain is marked by an architectonics of the necrophile: the high concrete archways and the ghoulishly stark corridors of the deserted university hallways that he traverses, the cold surfaces of the clinician’s marble slabs. The institution itself is a site of terror – – a feature enhanced by the soundtrack, the borrowings from Bernard Herrman’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), a film whose title in Spanish is tellingly De entre los muertos. The partially lit spiral staircase, that casts long shadows and is shot from below is, in turn, reminiscent of German expressionism, the flickering florescent lighting whose phantasmagoric illumination indexes the haunted quality of the dissection room, the dilapidated and the interpolating signs, whether arrows that direct visitors in and out of University’s maze, or red-lit commands that order silence. And, finally the detailed close-ups of faucets, sinks, the swirl of water in the plughole, in reference to Psycho. Or the eerily sinister and repeated shots of Espada’s mouth framed amid his beard moments after — in the vein of Frankenstein – – we see him sewing up — suturing — a dead man’s throat. As if to bring home the point, the film cites with original footage and on two separate occasions near the beginning and once more at the end, Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds.
Cada ver es… is then also a film about film. While filmic references abound in the direct quotes from the Hitchcock films I have mentioned and its deployment of the narrational tics of the horror film, the incongruity lies in the fact that it is a documentary. That alone is startling. But when I say it is a film about film I refer not to its intent but to its materiality or its material reality. Andre Bazin in what is probably the most famous essay ever written on cinema, referred to film as freezing or — and this is the word he actually uses –“embalming” time. It is apt that his point concerns precisely the dead and mortuary practices, the mummification of corpses in ancient Egypt. In a film in which Espada celebrates his own solitary nature he engages enthusiastically with his unseen interlocutor (he lives alone, he works alone and is perfectly happy, seemingly, to embrace solitude, in the company of ghosts),. At one stage though in the film we see him surrounded by the film crew and periodically throughout the film we see parallels between the celluloid being fed into the camera and the reels that turn the pulleys used to transfer preserved corpses from their liquid location beneath the floor, in which they are maintained in embalming fluid, to the dissecting room. The reference here, it seems to me, is not so much a Godardian point to reveal the filmmaking apparatus, but rather the question of labor: there are two sets of working practices in operation to produce the film and they are connected. Once more the bodies — alive and dead – – come to be mobilized within a relation that links film to work. I might add that throughout the film Espada regards death as a natural process while, manifestly, both the preservation of dead bodies and film production are artificial.
I want to return then – – in the context of death as marked by a life-span – – to the importance of time in this relation. We have seen time frozen both in the filmic process and in the mortician’s practice The film, after all, is structured around a single day in Juan Espada’s working life; from when he wakes in the morning to the point late at night as he stares at the camera after finishing his evening meal. There is a concentration of time, a dilation of time in the dissection room. (as an aside, we shouldn’t forget the “period” aspect associated with this film and that I mentioned at the start of this paper and that I will return to later on: the Transition is a singularly dense and critically saturated moment). There are moments when the camera speeds up in slapstick fashion, others when slowness is emphasized. At one point, in one of the very many unnervingly detailed close shots the camera focuses on Espada’s watch. The brusque shifts in the internal rhythms of the film, point to time dis-adjusted, disjointed. In this context, the overlap between the processes of filming and that of bodily preservation, emerges in the articulations — the joints — of the human body, frozen in a time that is not its own, disjointed. In a beguilingly complex sequence shot, composed with the elements of horror contained in a Francis Bacon painting, Espada removes a body from the underground pool where the cadavers are stored. Here, in the following clip, we watch — as is the way of long takes — the shot in real time. We experience the physical labor involved, the weight of the corpse between Espada’s arms, the stiff but malleable joints of the corpse.

Clip of three minutes:

The experience then is sensorial. The unbroken, uncut duration of this shot involves endurance not only on the part of the protagonist of the film but of ours too. This in turn point to other senses. The ver of the film’s punning title (the see of vision, the sight of spectacle – and the site en situ, the particularity of the place, the placeness of the place, its clinical location). Visibility here chimes with cinema’s capacity to unveil, to reveal the concealed, and – – to recall the Brakhage film – – the literal meaning of the word autopsy: to see with one’s own eyes. Nonetheless the verb ver is given particular significance in the figure of Juan Espada. Espada is extraordinarily short-sighted, a point emphasized on various occasions in the film. He is almost blind, a point emphasized in the close-ups of his weighty bulgingly thick spectacles. Furthermore, we learn his personal history – – his first encounter with a corpse – – in the context of his glasses. As a teenager, as a member of the so-called Quinta del Biberón, Espada was conscripted into the Republican army and sent to the Ebro to fight in the latter stages of the Civil War. Shortly after his arrival he broke his glasses and was obliged to travel to a nearby town for new ones. It was on his return, late at night, that he came upon a dead body in the road. It would appear from his testimony that this constituted a primal moment: corpse and sight converge, as in the title of the film. Intriguingly they do so in a key moment in modern Spanish history, and that of defeat. The fact of defeat (Espada would soon be captured and spend time in a concentration camp, something he mentions only in passing) suggests not so much a metaphor that substitutes for the national but a metonym for the national, one that displaces the national, decenters it. Espada’s disjointed portrayal as a near-blind marginalized figure is a shard, a fragment of the totality of the historical loss, which was the Civil War or the ‘official’ historical narrative of the Transition as national reconciliation. History, of course, as an institutional discipline – – historiography – – shapes and is shaped by the discourse of time. Once more, a seemingly anecdotal aspect – – sight – – destabilizes, disjoins the anatomy of discourse – – among that national discourse – – itself.

I want to end then by continuing this reflection on the time of this film’s making. The Transition might itself be considered the institutionalization of period. The difficulties Cada ver es… experienced with the State institutions of the day have been well documented by Josetxo Cerdán and Sonia García López, among others. In a manner of speaking it is a film of its time at odds, ill-fitting with the national discourse, then and now. Suppressed and denied a license or state subsidy thanks to the then directora general de cine Pilar Miró, the film was censored by default. It was and remains practically impossible to see (it has occasionally been screened at the Filmoteca in recent years). I want finally then to refer to another film that was equally discordant with its time — though paradoxically symptomatic of it. Almost contemporaneous with Cada ver es… , Iván Zulueta’s much better known Arrebato while a fiction, nonetheless also manifests similar preoccupations to those of García del Vals’ film. Both films center on the solitary obsession of marginal figures. An absorption with film in Arrebato becomes an addiction which saps the vitality of Will More’s character Pedro P and eventually consumes him. There is then a clear relation (one that links Arrebato to Cada ver es…) between film and death. The two films though also share – – albeit in different and departing ways – – a precariously-balanced tightrope-walk through consideration of the ontology of the image, its common capacity for both conservation and for destruction.

¡Reactivación!

He decidido reactivar este blog después de algo más de dos años. A finales de agosto comenzará mi nuevo seminario de posgrado que gira en torno a cuestiones de forma en el cine ibéroamericano y me planteo la posibilidad de canalizar el blog para coordinar mi enseñanza, apuntes, lecturas etc.

Cualquier aportación y ayuda será muy bien recibida. Por ahora voy a iniciar el diálogo con un texto mío (sin revisar) que presenté en abril en Portland, Oregon en el congreso de CineLit.

Filmic Form and the Gaze Revisited in Virginia García del Pino’s El Jurado

This is the text of a paper I delivered here at UIC in Chicago last Friday as part of our ongoing encounters on “Critical Theory, Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Archive in Spanish Cinema”.

Virginia García del Pino has long been interested in symmetry and asymmetry, in diverted correspondence and the distortions of reflective surfaces and reflected images. Whether it be subtly expressed via maids and their mistresses in Mexico (Sí Señora, 2012); by two sisters in Mi hermana y yo (2009); through the defining relation of jobs to the workers who perform them (Lo que tú dices que soy, 2007); or explicitly in her 2010 film titled Espacio simétrico. Writing on Lo que dices que soy, Javier Garmar describes the film — in terms of its diegetic subjects — as being like “a deforming mirror.” In this sense, El Jurado/The Jury (2015) is no different. Indeed, in interview García del Pino also describes her piece as a mirror, but, unlike Lo que dices que soy, it is one that reflects back on us, the spectators. In this disconcerting imbalance — that generates a certain disquiet, a vulnerability, or an anxiety on the part of the viewer — lies a complex relation between spectator, the filming, the object of the filming by the camera, the theme and subject of the film, and what we might term the “gaze”. The gaze here is ineludible, at the center of the frame (in every sense of the word frame), at every moment of the film. El Jurado is a film defined by the “gaze.’ What is in doubt, however, is what exactly is meant when we talk about the “gaze.”

Joan Copjek observes that “…the gaze is always the point from which identification is conceived by film theory to take place” (22). Meanwhile Todd McGowan makes the provocative claim that “Film theory today is almost nonexistent” (ix). Tracing a thumbnail genealogy of film theory, the latter points out that the turn to cultural studies in the 1980s (and this persists to the present day) meant abandoning theoretical approaches to film in favor of discussion of production, industry, and reception. Simultaneously, he takes to task (and does so by following the work of Copjek) the theorists of the 1960s and 1970s, and particularly those around the influential British film journal Screen, who sought to politicize film studies through psychoanalysis, with recourse to a Lacan read through the work on ideology as conceived of by Louis Althusser. McGowan however makes the incisive point that these theorists, whose work revolutionized the discipline (Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, Stephen Heath, and others) based their thought on misreadings of Lacan and gaze theory. McGowan notes, quite rightly, that these thinkers focused on the ideological effects — via Althusser’s refiguring of the Imaginary — of the filmic apparatus as constitutive of the spectator as subject with the on-screen action as object of the gaze, positioned by the gaze. “Gaze” in Lacan, McGowan maintains, however, is not so much about visually situating the object of the male spectator as it is about realizing its own subjectivation. Gaze is contained within the structure of the film itself, rather than an exterior element that focuses on a screen that in turn acts as mirror, within which the spectator identifies himself (or misrecognizes himself, hence ideology).

In what is unquestionably one of the most celebrated essays in the history of film theory — and emblematic of that which McGowan criticizes — Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ builds on Baudry’s apparatus theory and Metz’s work on the Lacanian Imaginary to speculate (in devastating fashion) on the ideological processes of the Hollywood narrative, within which the (hypothetical) male spectator, interpellated as subject, whose controlling and determining (sadistic/voyeuristic) scopophilic gaze leads to identification with the principle male on-screen actor. The leading male actor is thereby subjectified, while the female protagonist is objectified by the male fantasy as passive (as exhibitionist masochism), she is rendered object by both active male protagonist and the projecting male spectator. McGowan argues though that the emphasis on the Imaginary, within which Mulvey (and later Heath on suture) locate the gaze, is founded on a misreading. McGowan insists that contrary to these thinkers, screen spectatorship takes place in the realm of the Lacanian Real. “The gaze,” McGowan insists, “compels our look because it appears to offer access to the unseen, to the reverse side of the visible” (6). Rather than the spectator’s exterior and panoptic vision, the gaze forms part of the internal structure of the filmic experience; it is desire motivated by the intangible, the sense of incompletion; the unrealizable desire to see that which is beyond the visible, it is the objet petit a. Which is to say, while the gaze is content as object rather than subject (the active gaze of the male spectator), the question of the gaze is a negative one and a formal one that shapes the structure of the film itself. And, I would add, in the case of the film I will discuss today El Jurado, the spectator becomes thus enmeshed in the formal practices of the film, rather than in any narrative content. The form of the film and our place as spectators within and without the film points to an underlying inaccessible structure to film akin to what I have sought to describe in McGowan’s understanding of the Real.

Form draws attention to itself by displacing convention. While El Jurado is a film that makes use of the traditional cinematic genre — that is, the form — of the courtroom drama it does so in order to disturb the premises of that genre and it does so precisely by its focus on the gaze. Unlike conventional commercial film El Jurado shifts our attention to the gaze as theme rather than seeking to direct our gaze itself. It is a film of people on screen looking out into offscreen space. Critic Gonzalo de Pedro alludes to the problematic of the film when he describes it as — in terms that recall the idea of the filmic experience as structure — “un triángulo especular” (“a specular triangle”): involving, the jurors who look on, the courtroom action, and us, the spectators. Importantly, and relevant in terms of dialogue with Mulvey’s pioneering work, El Jurado is also a film that has gender at its center. Its director is a woman. The hour-long film consists of a series of shots of mainly (though not exclusively, three out of four) female jurors as they hear testimony in a murder trial of a man accused of killing his girlfriend, whose body it seems was abandoned in the street on a bench. A crime of domestic violence. The entire trial takes place off screen beyond the visual reach of the spectator whose desire is in this way negated, repressed, shut away in some kind of off-screen unconscious. It is, in this sense, an internal dialectic (or at least a dialogue) between distinct structural elements marked by the positive and negative form of the film: on-screen and off, sound and vision. And most of the film consists of comments on video evidence together with background detail gleaned from another screen, that of the victim’s cellphone. The spectator is privy to nothing other than the faces of the jurors. Nonetheless we hear the questioning of the defense lawyers and the prosecutor, the interventions of the judge, and the testimony of the expert witnesses as well as the man accused of the murder. The entire film is also punctuated by the shuffling of papers and inaudible murmuring. There is also no denoument. We never learn the outcome of the trial, it is denied us. Nor are we present during the deliberations of the jury. What we share with the jury is not the tension of the judicial encounter but, as I will discuss later, the tedium of the experience.

Largely overlooked by Cultural Studies approaches (owing to the interest of Cultural Studies in factors external to the filmic text), filmic form concerns, among other things, genre, mise-en-scène, the specificity of the technology employed (analog or digital), camera positioning, lighting, sound, etc. Form is what goes largely unnoticed, if the spectator is successfully sutured within the text. And yet El Jurado is a film that foregounds its own form, that makes the positioning of the spectator part of the filmic process itself. It is the enunciation of a structural division of labor but also of a psychic division between that which is visible and that which is not.

El Jurado is a film of portraits, fragmented portraits. Two things can be said about the portrait. The first is that the portrait concerns appearance, surface — quite literally the sur/face. The second is, of course, that there is an entire cinematic genre called “the portrait film.” Again, de Pedro has noted a connection with Ten Minutes Older (Herz Frank) and Miren el rostro (Pavel Kogan) but this critic also observes that, unlike these antecedents, García del Pino never shoots the faces full on. The gaze for most of the film is not diegetic in that the women jurors gaze into off screen space. Irrespective of our gender as spectators our gaze can never coincide with theirs precisely because we are denied access to that space. The gaze (as conceived of in non-Lacanian terms) is always profilmic, it is that of the camera, of the camera operator, or the director (they are the same person in this case), who is a woman. Here though the jurors are filmed from above and at an angle. Shot with a digital camera from the distance of the press benches where García del Pino was seated, these faces are consequently pixelated, the camerawork depicts flickering patchy headshots that dominate the screen. These slightly out-of – focus, distorted, blurry images, medium shots of the jurors focus on their tics, the boredom of the proceedings. There is no contact with the spectator, no identification or recognition of one’s mirror image. There is though a shared alienation in the ordeal of the filmic process itself. It is as if the notion of duty, of the onorous civic duty of jury service, of its labor were being experienced by the spectator. Just as the aspect of the thriller, or the melodrama of the courtroom is beyond the frame, the imprecision produced of the digital technology effects a humanizing blurring that departs from the cosmetic emulsion of cinema. Indeed the angle of the camera, filming from above, violates the traditional conceptualization of Renaissance perspective (that has dominated visual culture ever since), that point at which the gaze comes into focus. Here the camera remains unfocused throughout the film. Further, the jurors are, at first, seemingly oblivious to the fact they are being filmed. On our part the alienation we experience provides the negative charge of the film; we are denied the filmic satisfaction to which we are accustomed. In any case, the traditional conception of the gaze does not pertain here. The shared alienation between spectator and juror is not the same as identification. We feel as we do because of the structure of the film itself, the tedium built into it (by the formal setting and the filming, by that is, the form of the film) and not because we identify with any character on screen. Very much not part of the proceedings, visually denied to us, the film puts us to the test, as the trial does with the jurors themselves, the experience in both instances is a question of endurance; compulsion, obligation, laborious duration. This is not so much a matter of squandering what Karl Schoonover calles the “prized narrative economy” of commercial cinema as a wholesale violation of the notion of continuity. Fragmentation is everywhere, from the interrupted trial proceedings to the pixelated images, the incompetence of the officials, the truncated and malfunctioning technology of the courtroom from which we are marginalized (“Lamentablemente la ciencia no es tan rápida como la justicia,” (“Lamentably, science is not as swift as justice”) someone anonymous off-screen says without a hint of irony in a country where the legal process is notoriously slow. This is a cinema of mind-numbing boredom, of time distorted, elongated, of negation. If the conventional courtroom drama of commercial film depends on rarefied, exceptional circumstances in a race against time, here urgency has also been banished off-screen, to the sidelines of invisibility: “The gaze,” writes McGowan, “is the point at which the subject loses its subjective privilege and becomes wholly embodied in the object” (7). And this embodiment is absorbed within the film’s dilatory, its molasses-like lethargy.

In an interview with García del Pino, Miquel Martí Freixas describes the play of “judging” in El Jurado as similar to that of a game of Russian dolls, multiple dolls contained within another, each smaller than the previous one. However, while that is certainly the case, what is equally interesting about El Jurado is not so much this kind of replacements (configurations of criteria — courtroom evidence, witnessness, experts, video proof; the jurors themselves and their facial and other bodily reactions, the judgement of the camera as it focuses on them, our judgement of them and of the film, as spectators and critics), as it is of the displacements. Metonymy outweighs the metaphor. The metonymic field is there in the administration of justice and the evidence presented unseen by us. It is there contiguous to what we see but separate invisible to us. We are partialized and made metonym, made desiring objects. There is in this marginalization, in this negative charge to the film, an off-screen surplus, an excess beyond the frame that lures us as it partializes us, the spectators.

 

The part of the trial upon which we are eavesdropping largely consists of video evidence. The evidence provided by street surveillance cameras. We quite literally watch a video of the jurors watching a video. It is, in a way, a film about surveillance. And at the same time we are privy to the comments and the interrogation of experts who continually return at the behest of the lawyers to the video evidence, to the series of recordings (and we are listening, of course, to a recording). Elena Oroz links the notion of video evidence to the eternal debate in film studies concerning indexical relation of the thing filmed to the film itself (a debate fuelled by the onset of video and then digital video – the pixelation of the images is a constant reminder that we are watching the jurors in digital format). That is to say, the debate over the reliability of digital video as opposed to celluloid here takes on the question of truth in a courtroom. Truth and justice, the reliability of evidence in the pursuit of culpability. What then is on trial here? The man accused of murdering his partner or the format of how it was recorded? The trial here is of the veracity of the visual image, that of a visual image we never actually see and the one we do. The trial proper — to recall the early idea of metonymy — provides the off- screen soundtrack to the film: the negative image, a discharge of unseen excess displaced to the outer margins beyond the screen, an externality, exterior to the frame but acoustically present. What we are left with are the inarticulable portraits of the anonymous jurors caught up in a swirling discourse on truth and justice, charged with determining a guilt that is never actualized. In this, the two “institutions” (to paraphrase de Pedro) that of law and the digital documentary film are subject to a critique forged in a discourse on truth and visibility, on the reliability of visual evidence. This meanwhile returns us to the notion with which I started, that of symmetry. We conceive of symmetry in terms of mirror images, yet these are consistently thwarted in El Jurado. While absent except in auditory form, the off-screen courtroom drama provides snippets of speech that bookend the film itself in a form of filmic self-reflexivity. “Es que es formato de dvd” (“The format is that of dvd”) is the first sentence we hear spoken. The last (or at least the penultimate) is “Estamos interpretando unas imágenes.” (“We are interpreting some images”). We might add that Foucault’s claim of law as productive of desire is at the heart of Copjek’s Lacanian critique of the former, precisely as it concerns film theory.

Simultaneous to the hesitant, paused, and fumbling speech of the lawyers and court officials (an auditory correlation to the defective digital image of which we are spectators, as well as the deficient video screened in the courtroom), the rustling of papers, the murmurs and the whispers, the camera zooms in to the final juror of the film. While the previous jurors were all female, this final sequence is a lengthy single shot of a male juror. This juror is young and attractive, a conventionally handsome man, and as such is “objectified” by García del Pino’s camera. None of the previous female jurors had turned her head upwards toward the camera but this one does. In this final sequence of the film his eyes meet the lens of the camera. In the course of some 10 minutes this exchange of looks from the camera to the male juror and back is repeated again and again. For the first time, and at the very end of the film, we witness a gaze that is diegetic, one marked by reciprocity with the camera but with a look that is deprived of agency; the juror is unable to act upon the camera’s gaze. This is emphatically not a gaze constitutive of subjectivity. In a film in which we hear a significant amount of commentary on surveillance, this man is unable to see his own image (as we are incapable of seeing ours in him). This is not the kind of self-observation or self-surveillance that psychoanalysis associates with conscience.

“The relation between apparatus and gaze creates only the mirage of psychoanalysis,” writes Copjek. And she goes on to say in her critique of 1970s film theory, “There is, in fact, no psychoanalytic subject in sight.” It is an asymmetrical encounter and subjectivation is divided and incomplete. While the camera maintains the juror in the frame, we hear a witness proclaiming the unreliability of the video evidence. Owing to its poor quality of the film, the expert witness in question declines to evaluate it, he says that he cannot offer an opinion based on such evidence. Then we see more of the male juror chewing his nails, looking upwards, trapped in the gaze of the camera. And in the courtroom out of the frame we hear a desembodied comment referring presumably to the surveillance cameras of the video evidence: “At 2 hours 44 minutes and 9 seconds the camera focuses and zooms increasing the size of the image.” The screen fades to black, the unknown and the unfathomable, and thus the film ends.

 

Primal Events: The Early Films of Gonzalo Suárez

Primal Events: The Early Films of Gonzalo Suárez[1]

                                                                   Steven Marsh, University of Illinois at Chicago

The most literary of filmmakers, Gonzalez Suárez is celebrated not only as a novelist, a writer of fiction, but also for his screen adaptations of classics of literature (La Regenta, Beatriz, Parronda, among others), his fascination for literary antecedents, and for his reimagining of figures of literary history (Frankenstein, Don Juan, Hamlet, Faust). He is moreover interested in the processes of writing itself. His films abound with images of typewriters, letters and notes, written wills and testimony. His literary interest in naturalism (he adapted Pardo Bazán’s Los Pazos de Ulloa for television) is, significantly, measured against his interest in technology (among them writing machines) in ways that query the status of the human condition. His 1960s films preempt many of today’s concerns in philosophy and theoretical writing in that they are notable for the presence of nonhuman species and that of the post-human. Animals abound in his work as do the prosthetic addenda of the human. Linked to this is a highly personalized environment, a filmic world in which the protagonists are often—like Suárez himself—writers or journalists, solitary, obsessive figures moving across a topography of forms shaped by artifice and nature, by language and landscape.

Suárez is a singular figure among Spanish auteurs; an author of books whose fiction is transferred or translated to the screen, whose dialogues are fiendishly complex in ways perhaps more appropriate to written rather than filmic texts, and whose palindromic narratives are eminently novelistic. And yet, in spite of the imprimatur of the auteur whose signature distinguishes his films, he is equally well known for the autographical diffusion of the proper name in the multifaceted persona that he has cultivated, not only as filmmaker and novelist, but also as sports journalist (writing under the pseudonym of Martín Girard), actor, producer of advertising spots, as well as tactical advisor to football teams FC Barcelona and Internazionale de Milan in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The convergence, moreover, of the writer and the filmmaker brings into focus not only the encounter between the two important yet discrete elements in his work (the word and the image) but also the philosophical bedrock underlying his work: both these elements are means by which nature assumes or is given form. Indeed, I will propose that the same diffusion that characterizes Gonzalo Suárez operates formally in his poetics, both in the flowing and rupturing narratives and in the fragmented imagery that predominates in his work.

            In this article I will argue that the pronounced individuality impressed upon us in the figure of Gonzalo Suárez belies a flowing multiplicity that raises questions about the subject and subjectivity in relation to filmic form. I will focus primarily on the films Suárez directed in the late 1960s, and whose very first short film (Ditirambo vela por nosotros) was described by Ricardo Muñoz Suay in the magazine Fotogramas as, “el primer intento que se hace en España de un cinema independiente y señalado” (Qtd. by Riambau 433). In spite of Muñoz Suay’s hyperbole—in fulfillment of his promotional role for the Escuela de Barcelona (discussed below)—there is a general critical consensus that the early films of Suárez mark something unprecedented. In filmic terms sentiments such as those expressed by Muñoz Suay point to the kind of modernist filmmaking associated with Bresson. Indeed, Suárez was originally a participant in the initiatives of the avant-garde group of filmmakers dubbed the Escuela de Barcelona (the EdeB), and particularly as a collaborator in the early films that Vicente Aranda directed: Fata morgana (1966), for which he wrote the screenplay, and Las Crueles (1969), based on one of his short stories. Nonetheless, Suárez’s individualism and his reluctance to form part of any group, resulted in him distancing himself from the EdeB.[2] Meanwhile the innovative character of his work that Muñoz Suay identified produces early on a corpus seemingly at variance with his later work in its experimentation.

Introducing his most recent book on film, Jacques Rancière has written of two tendencies in cinema that once more echo the encounter between word and image: “Hitchcock’s classical narrative cinema, a detective thriller plot containing the plan for a sequence of operations to create and then dissipate an illusion; and Bresson’s modernist cinematography, constructing a film based on a literary text to demonstrate the specificity of a language of images” (11). Suárez is particularly fond of the detective-like character but he also has a predilection for the visual and its effects. As we see in the introductory sequence of his third film Aoom (1969), his camera hones in on the weather-beaten, wave-lashed stone of the rock face with its “natural” hieroglyph carved in moss in its crevice-ridden surface. Equally well, Suárez looks to visual contrivance, to the sight gag, the gestures to his surrealist legacy (as when the character of Ditirambo, a spoof “investigative journalist” played by Suárez himself, drinks milk from a shoe in Ditirambo vela por nosotros [1965]).

In 1997 Gonzalo Suárez made a short 13-minute film about Eduardo Chillida’s frustrated project in which the Basque sculptor planned to hollow out the Tindaya mountain on the island of Fuerteventura, a holy place for the early (and now extinct) inhabitants. Commissioned by the regional government of the Canary Islands, Tindaya Chillida is about the sacred, the primordial, and the primeval. The film, although about Chillida, is arguably symptomatic—or perhaps a condensation—of the totality of Suárez’s work. It concerns structure and space, the material mass of nature as molded by man; it is a film whose images focus on the horizon, the sun and the moon, the curl and coil of the waves of the ocean, and the unnerving landscape as subject to the creative impulse and its proximity to destruction. In these suggestive ways—it is very much an impressionistic rather than expository piece of work—Tindaya Chillida is a film about form, about man’s capacity—or desire—to shape nature, to play God. Although commissioned, it is not difficult to comprehend the personal interest of Suárez in Chillida’s project. When Suárez’s first feature, Ditirambo, failed miserably at the box office he set out to rupture the orthodoxy he saw in Spanish film by producing what he termed the “Diez películas de hierro del cine español,” which, he claimed, would mark a break with the inert and moribund “cine comercial” prevailing at the time (Hernández147-148). More than a rupture, however, his project has the characteristics of an attempt to begin from scratch, from the nothing, the void itself. The signature of both creators—Suárez and Chillida—lies in their common interest in spatial form, and the trace of the archaic in modernist form, the imprint on nature by man and its reverse. The calligraphic-like profiles of the craggy promontories that proliferate in Suárez’s other work parallels the prehistoric symbols carved by hand into the rock of Tindaya that he frames in close up. Notably, Martin Heidegger’s short essay Die Kunst und der Raum, dedicated to Chillida, appeared in a limited edition in 1969, the same year two of the films discussed in this article appeared. “El espacio,” writes Heidegger, “¿es aquel que mientras tanto coloca al hombre moderno de una manera cada vez más tenaz ante el desafío de su última posibilidad de dominio?” (15).[3]

Another writer fascinated by Chillida and the idea of space was the poet José Ángel Valente who wrote about the sculptor in terms similar to those expressed by Heidegger.[4] Moreover, Valente’s own poetics point to an affinity with the idea of nothingness, a creative void, an empty screen-like space:

O por toda memoria,
una ventana abierta,
un bastidor vacío, un fondo
irremediablemente blanco para el juego infinito
del proyector de sombras

                                                              Nada.
De ser posible, nada.[5]

Suárez, like Chillida and Valente, sees in carving out a hole in nature, in the nothingness, something beyond conquest or dominion. He is interested, as we will see, in the transference between nature and man. The resonance and the residue produced of the contact between the two, or at least the possibilities generated in the space—the intervals, the gaps—where the two meet. Like Chillida’s hollowed-out mountain, Suárez’s work is marked by a resounding emptiness at its center; a primal, originary space, like the sound of Aoom, the title of one of his 1969 films, defined in the film’s very first spoken words that resound enigmatically in the booming, off-screen voice, the roar of the sea in a shell, the original echo, the sound of an interior space: “ese ruido que se oye cuando no se oye nada,” says the resonating unidentifiable voice. It is, to return to the analogy with Chillida, the space of creation.

This void or gap which, to extend Rancière’s discussion of literature and film, is a “passage between two regimes of meaning…” (13), is complemented by the concept of the double to become central motifs in Suárez’s work.[6] Both are spatial configurations.[7] The passage is an in-between space while the double is present in multiple configurations in Suárez’s films: from the mirror to the combat, it proves invariably a disturbing and violent encounter that marks the conflictive outer limits of inner space. Such a multiplicity of doubling in Suárez is complex and contradictory: the autography, the palindromes, the echoes, stories within stories, the fictionalizing itself, all form part of this enfolding, self-referential and self-reflexive body of work. More than anything else though it points to a way of considering interiority and exteriority. From the outside it is concerned with the translation from written text to screen image, the relation between literature and film. From the inside, however, the transferences produced are within the diegeses themselves. It is a relation that turns on questions of form. This mutating relationship between the interior and the exterior is often expressed in the figure of exergue: the space at the margin of the principle inscription or on the reverse of a “coin or medal” (The Concise Oxford Dictionary).

Aoom (1969)

Aoom points to this space of exergue in terms suggestive of the void, the resounding emptiness at the fringe of being and meaning. In Suárez’s third film, actor Ristol (Lex Barker),[8] tired of life and tormented by questions of identity, tele-transports himself mentally from his own body into that of a plastic doll, leaving the shell of his own inert corpse behind. After further mutations, Ristol eventually ends up trapped within a stone. Like the narrative structure of the film itself, the name of Ristol’s lover, Ana (Teresa Gimpera)—a favorite name of Suárez’s that, as we will see, he uses elsewhere—is, of course, a palindrome. In her written name the letter N occupies a space between the two As. Its fold doubles inwards from the exterior margins that frame the letter N. There is a subtle connection here concerning the void, the in-between space, of “Ana,’ the film’s narrative structure, and its content. Just as the title of the film onomatopoeically defines it—that is, performatively as a primal speech act—we learn from the distorted and disembodied voice that introduces Aoom, its ending: “el espíritu del actor se quedó atrapado para siempre en una piedra.” Palindrome and void, duplication and framing, movement and paralysis, are the elements that define the formal terms of the entire film.

The initial image of this introductory sequence is that of the hues swirling in the pearly interior of an abalone shell. The camera up close to the rugged, barnacled surface of its exterior shifts to register the frozen petroleum-tinged flow of the running colors of its inner layer. This visual sense of delirium is reinforced aurally by the booming explanatory voice off-screen echoing in a cave-like chamber of rock and the crash of waves. There is a sense, in the swirl of the camera and the shots of the unbridled sea, of ecstasy, understood in the Greek sense of the word ekstasis—or ex-stasis—as standing outside of oneself (as exergue is also “outside” a central body). The word ‘ecstasy’ expresses in these images both its ancient and modern senses: that of transference and intoxication. Both also point to an exceeding of the limits that define and demarcate the self. Hence too the understated (and hitherto unobserved by the critics) importance of animals and non-human extensions of the human present in many of Suárez’s films.

In a further example of interior subjectivity submitted to the excesses of exterior forces, the characters of Aoom vie with the wildness of the natural surroundings of the northern coastline. They battle through dense woodland, are over-shadowed by the craggy rock face they clamber across, with its inaccessible caves into which crowds the foam of the ebbing sea; the sea itself that swarms around them, its tidal flows are a constant threat.

The bumbling detective Williams (Bill Dykes) hired by Ana to investigate Ristol’s strange and inexplicable death is the most extreme example of this engagement between order and disorder. On one level he is a parody of a detective; on another, however, he is a figure who embodies the conduit between Rancière’s two regimes. Barely verbal (at best he is monosyllabic), he is denied the word, subject and subjugated to his spectacular surroundings and the (often loquacious) characters he encounters. Early on in the film he is trapped (like Ristol in the rock) in quick sands on the beach; in a bubbling, swarming example of active and menacing nature—nature that is alive rather than inert—he is sucked up to his waist in the sinking soil, in its groundlessness. Like Heidegger’s abgrund or abyss, this is an example of ungrounding, but it also suggests a hollow subterranean space in close proximity (he is on the beach) to the foaming waves of the wild sea, intoxicating, evanescent and ecstatic in its swirl.

The hapless detective caught up like flotsam in the general maelstrom that surrounds him is, on one level, spun around in a dance move by the lascivious witch who pursues him, while on another, is left literally rudderless to float out to sea sprawled on his back with no oars, exhausted and feeble, in a rubber dingy, subject to the unpredictable tides, the capricious sea currents.

            Another figure without apparent agency—though in different ways to the detective—is Constantino (Luis Ciges), Ristol’s seemingly (and significantly) mute manservant. He is a creature of nature, bereft of the word, with whom Ristol has a Pygmalion-like relation (he teaches him to read and write) and takes it upon himself to ‘civilize’. Faced with Ristol’s corpse, Constantino reacts in panic to his employer’s displaced voice emanating from the doll, and smashes the effigy to pieces against a rock before tossing it over the cliff. Uncontrollable and impulsive, he will later attempt and fail to hang himself; he briefly swings in mid-air, an unmoored pendulum undulating against the horizon, before being rescued and cut down. Later when a full wineskin turns up as a piece of marine debris on the beach he drinks greedily from it to the point of inebriation. While both Constantino and the detective are ungrounded, their subjectivity, their interiority, is defined by forces external to them: by savage nature and intoxicants. Once again, this recalls Heidegger for whom, in his text on Hölderlin’s Ister, the polis (or the pole) is defined by the swirl around the vortex, the pre-polis of Wirbel, within which these secondary “actors” find themselves. If Chillida, for the German philosopher, gives corporal plasticity to “being” thus shaping, instituting the void, the empty hollowed-out space, then the unruly flow of water (in the instance of Heidegger the river) marks out that space (1996, 81).

            While the cruel and rugged natural habitat of the Cantabrian littoral reflects the interiority of these characters, their fate is determined structurally in the film in the fragmentation of its narrative swirl. The film’s subplot sees an anonymous fisherwoman (Carmen Romero “Romy”)—pursued by a lunatic who has escaped confinement—murdered twice, having been resuscitated by the spirit of Ristol transferred to her in the penultimate of his reincarnations.[9] The figure of the fisherwoman is firmly grounded in the sand of the beach, the seabed, the soil. She trawls for seaweed to fertilize the land surrounding her isolated house. Her first appearance on screen is of her silhouette against the horizon, rowing counter-current in her boat against the flow of the sea. In a foretaste of a similar sequence in Suárez’s 1984 film Epílogo, she wrestles with her assailant (identified only as “un loco de amor”) on the beach up to her knees in the water. The beach is one of Suárez’s signature locations. It is a space like Freud’s mystic writing pad that can be written on and cleaned off by a sweep of the waves that leaves it wiped afresh as if untainted; a play on writing and emptiness.

            No explanation is provided in the film for this subplot but it does suggest the theme of amour fou that recurs throughout these early Suárez films, indeed arguably throughout all his work, and that highlights the proximity (and its importance for this director) of love and death. It is significant that the theme of aurality present in the film’s title and introduction—the soundscape so fundamental to Aoom’s mise-en-scène— is later reintroduced via Ristol’s bugle which, he stipulates in his will, can only be played by the person who truly loves him. This, in turn, proves not to be Ana but Constantino, who blows the bugle over the dismembered body of the (now recuperated) doll in a pastiche burial ceremony (and, by another means of doubling, Ristol’s second funeral like the fisherwoman’s second death).[10]

El extraño caso del doctor Fausto (1969)

Javier Hernández Ruiz rightly identifies the visual impact or play on imagery as the key element of Suárez’s second full-length feature, El extraño caso del doctor Fausto. The most formally experimental of his films, El extraño caso del doctor Fausto has an ahistoricity at odds with its own contemporaneity. Filmed over a two-week period, it was shot during the 1969 State of Exception and yet there is no suggestion of the political conjuncture or of its historical moment other than as an absence, a trace, a displacement or perhaps a translation, like Suárez’s engagement with naturalism, as the product of fictionalizing; a veil cast over the crisis of state, one that defies efforts at interpretation. While not a commentary on the political situation in Spain, the film does, quite self-consciously, complicate the relation between reality and fiction or more precisely, representation. It is seemingly a fantasy; a film that stretches the limits of realism, abstract in that it extracts elements of representation, subtracting or negating them. This is important, as we will see, given the role of Mephistopheles in the film. Furthermore, Hernández has drawn attention to the presence of non-professional actors: boxer José Arranz, the Catalan businessman and cultural patron (very much associated with the Gauche divine) Alberto Puig Palau, Suárez’s own young daughter Silvia and the fact that in interview Suárez has insisted—with habitual irony—that the film is a “documentary” (Hernández 152). There is then a node of realism in the fantasy. Rather than faithfully adapting the Faust legend Suárez deploys a series of images prompted by the story that in different ways coalesce around or adhere to the idea of mutation. It is a stream of consciousness science-fiction version of a Faust (played by Puig Palau) consumed by his own dreams. Oneiric, ritualized, and visually hypnotic, El extraño caso del doctor Fausto—shot only months before Aoom—is a film about flows, about people in motion and motion within people. Like Ristol in the later film, its duplicitous narrator/ Mephistopheles undergoes a series of transformations which determine the film’s fluctuating narrative. Such changes also affect other characters in the film. The literary figure of Faust is, of course, also one who seeks to exceed all existential limits and boundaries.

Peppered by figures from literature and mythology; among them in allegorical fashion, the Sphinx (Teresa Gimpera), Helen of Troy (Olga Vidalia), and Euforión (Arranz), the name of the son Faust has in a previously time fathered with Helen, Suárez presents us in El extraño caso del doctor Fausto with an enigma. However this is not enigma as plot device (as in the detective narratives of which he is so fond) but the film as enigma, as structure or form. The enigma of the Sphinx prompts the puzzle of the filmic form. As if to foreshadow Aoom the Sphinx is washed ashore on a beach close to Faust’s residence and, grateful for her rescue, reciprocates by offering Faust—telepathically, she never actually opens her mouth— a story or, in the words of the film’s narrator: “En lugar de plantearle una enigma contaba una historia pero la historia era un enigma.” Once again the paradox of the riddle is palindromic and performative. The enigma is what it does. It—as it transpires—provides the meandering narrative thread of the film. What follows though is a descent into a spiraling rabbit hole, into an ensemble of tumbling, dream-like images (ably marshaled by the extraordinary cinematography of Carlos Suárez, Gonzalo’s brother) each turning upon the other and which, in combination with the floating, swerving and kaleidoscopic camerawork, the generic hybridization, and the formal claims implicit in the allegorical naming of the characters are rendered susceptible to the film’s vertiginous flux.

Euforión yearns to fly (in an echo of the endless curiosity of the literary Faust) and bounces euphorically from place to place, doing handstands and cartwheels until eventually he launches his swerving body into the air from the rooftop of an apartment building and dies, crashing onto a patio below in an eerily cacophonic sequence marked by the cronish cackling grotesquerie of the neighbors, set to the discordant sound of a clarinet, and shot from the ballooning perspective of the eye of a wandering cat. Euforión is quite literally ungrounded by his Icarus-like fall to earth. While his son’s body spectacularly somersaults its way to destruction, Faust’s own body becomes the shell that hosts the “pheromones” (discussed below) that leads to it being rejuvenated by Mephistopheles (significantly informed by the voice of the narrator [Suárez himself, doubled and divided, plays both roles], “Este lugar en que te encuentras se llama cuerpo de hombre”) and then once more, by the conventional family man, the mundane Octavio Beiral. In a sense, just as the film is an assemblage, this Faust is also a composite, an amalgam of the other characters he has absorbed within his bodily frame.

            The transformation or assimilation of extraneous elements within the self—or within the shell of being—is brought about by means of messages and messengers: the first emissary dispatched from the ether is the Señorita Preceptón, followed by Margarita (Gina Hodgkinson). After the death of Euforión, Helen of Troy (whose presence in the film is limited to exotic dancing—another body in motion), vaporizes into memory, into the melancholic reminiscence of Faust that takes possession of him. In order to restore the happiness that Helen provided a neighbor, Margarita, is infused with the spirit of Helen by means of “una maquina instructora hecha carne” and tasked with seducing Faust. Significantly, in view of Suárez’s later work on Chillida, the image corresponding to the frenzied process of fusion is that of a hollowed-out, primeval stone, the camera zooming in and out in dazzling hallucinatory rhythm to the drumbeat of the soundtrack.

            Mephistopheles himself is an “extraterrestrial” being, literally other-worldly, a trickster in a spaceship, “de un lugar no identificado del universo.” His name is given to the “interferometro” sent to Earth to aide the seduction of Faust by Margarita. Throughout the film the means of transmission of messages is in the form of a pheromone: the chemical infiltration of one element secreted in another. If the Sphinx communicates telepathically con Faust, pheromones are also passed on silently, in an unspoken erotic “passage” communicating—as in Rancière’s description—“between two regimes of meaning,” like mutation or translation; a chemical transfer, provoking sexual attraction, a subtle movement between bodies. The unseen (though sometimes embodied) pheromones are associated with the film’s poetic structure: the bottle containing the message that chimes with the riddle of the Sphinx (both wash up on the beach); its visual rhyme marking the film’s pulsation—the incandescence—within and beyond it, across and throughout Suárez’s work, the fizzing sound and the close-up image of the evanescent bubbles of a pill dissolving in a glass, like the sea foam on the beach that races around the cascade of the Sphinx’s blonde mane.

            The riddle, the Sphinx’s secret, like the pheromone, is transmitted clandestinely, arbitrarily cast out to sea like the message in the bottle retrieved miraculously by Faust or the paper plane that flies into his office. In a five-minute beguiling (albeit baffling) succession of images, a visual saturation whose interpretation remains elusive in the general flow of the film’s dreamscape, we are led to assume that this is the transmission of the message itself converted into subaquatic translucence.

Amid the watery flows, there are a series of Faustian attempts to overcome the impossible, to achieve the unthinkable, and to stretch the frontiers of the plausible; contact between the machines of alien life and Earth-bound humans and also between man and animals. Possibly the most faithful aspects of the translation from the film’s literary antecedents to screen are to be found in the flowing diegesis, the experimental sweep and sway of the camera movements, the flowing elements that all combine to interrogate the stability and integrity of the human subject. The Sphinx is, of course, a mythological hybrid beast with a human head and a lion’s body. As if to draw attention to the taut encounter between interiority and exteriority, in one of the many bizarre sequences a giraffe in a zoo coils its tongue outwards—Faust makes the discovery that “el cuello de la girafa crece desde dentro,” the narrator informs us—as it stretches and bends its neck in chiming parallel to the squirm and wriggle of the laboratory tadpoles in their tank of liquid. In a visual variation of mise-in-abîme—in the turbulent swirl, the Wirbel—this latter shot forms part of a sequence that is embedded within that of the message in the bottle to produce a bewildering, spiraling set of infinitely reproducing images within images.

Such fluidity exceeds, seeps beyond the formal parameters of the diegesis itself. In the course of the Sphinx’s slide into destruction early in the film, she is imprisoned in what appears to be a stable or cave, an inner chamber. Thirstily she drinks from the same stone with a hole—a void— at its center that later in the film will serve to facilitate the mutation of the spirit of Helen into Margarita, foregrounded here in the telescopic focus of the camera. This, moreover, is the same (distinctively recognizable) stone that re-emerges in the later film, Aoom, in which Ristol, trapped like the Sphinx, is definitively ensnared. The sequence points to the motif of the void in the rock and suggests the idea of a yet-unwritten futurity.[11]

In the same sequence there are two cross-cut images. The prostrate Gimpera drinking the water that overflows its receptacle pouring onto her face and the castaway posture in which she is found on the beach, water flows around and over her, her hair cast like a halo around her, the sand and the water spilling over her lips, chin and neck. As in Aoom, the dominant image is that of fluidity: water, flows; elements that enter and exceed the body. The film’s liquid texture offers up stories within stories, distorted and unanchored mirror effects, the hollow soundscape, the fissures and shards that generate their own mise-en-abîme, a continuous and connecting swirl that traces the void with the notion of doubling, the abyss of abîme.

The abyss here is further complicated by its translation from text to screen. While loosely based on Goethe’s version of Faust, El extraño caso del doctor Fausto complicates further the question of adaptation in that while essentially a film about transference and both the movement of and the flow between bodies, there was no written script before the shoot. Its formal experimentation, fragmentary and narratively convoluted, produces an ellipsis between word and image, another abyss; a yawning gap. This interval, the aperture, the in-between of an original and its adaption, between the word and the image, returns us once more to that space of creation, the nothing, the negative, the negation of representation, abstraction, Valente’s “nada,” Chillida’s hollowed-out mountain (the excavation—extraction—of its center), to Suárez accurate portrayal of Goethe’s Mephistopheles, “the spirit of perpetual negation,” a figure “that endlessly denies” (Goethe 75).

Ditirambo (1967) and Ditirambo vela por nosotros (1966)

            Ditirambo, Suárez’s first feature, is a quirky detective story and is much less experimental in its formal filmic practice than his subsequent two films. If El extraño caso del Doctor Fausto was improvised on set without a screenplay, Ditirambo is, on the face of it, the opposite; plot driven, structured around a clearly delineated narrative with abundant nods and winks to the noir genre (Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock) and grounded in social reality. It is nonetheless a filmic form of trompe l’oeil, an optical illusion. Following the sudden death of novelist Julio Urdiales his widow (Yelena Samirina) hires the impecunious and failed investigative journalist José Ditirambo to track down her husband’s putative former lover, Ana Carmona (another palindromic ANA), and destroy her life. Framed between a death at its beginning and a declaration of love near its end, Ditirambo deploys the generic framework of an investigation to advance an early instance of Suárez’s enduring fascination for thanatos and eros (examples of which we have already seen).

It is a film that delights in its own generic play. Ditirambo (played by Suárez) [12] has a distinctive “look” in the sunglasses he wears at all times of the day (and night), the cheap suit, and the perpetually nonplussed demeanor. He is a man for whom truth is paramount and non-negotiable, who tells the widow that he does not read novels because “son mentira.” Thenceforth he is a man committed to his mission. His suppressed—yet wistful—desire contrasts with the women in the film—Castilian femme fatales—and contribute to the erotic-psychic tensions and the legacy of cine noir that Suárez mobilizes. This is particularly the case in the casting of the young Charo López (who plays Ana Carmona) and whose role faintly echoes that of Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep.

Although it adopts the tone of parody—it does not fully respect the grammar of noir, it is full of knowing comic moments from early cinema, the physicality of the silent period—it is also a film packed with gestures to the timid and tepid cosmopolitanism of 1960s Spanish counterculture (of which the figures of the Gauche Divine and the EdeB were emblematic). The soundtrack to the film is provided by the jazz organist Lou Bennet, who appears briefly in the film. Erstwhile Barcelona FC and Inter de Milan coach Helenio Herrera (who was Suárez’s “de facto” stepfather[13]) has a cameo role. Francesc Català Roca, the celebrated photographer, plays a small but significant part as Pack Spack, the retired boxer who passes on key information to Ditirambo. These are all elements that contribute to the structure of social anxiety that belies the film.

This sense of disquiet—that connects to the other films discussed in this article— is reinforced by the film’s narrative and—in the vein of noir—by the sense that agency is limited to typology and outcomes are pre-destined though modifiable according to certain limited options. While the mystery story, the enigma to be resolved, determines the action, it is once again self-reflexive—recursive, twisted and turned only to return to itself like a Möbius strip. Ditirambo deploys the forms of noir only in the sense of using such a model as a void, a vacuum, a space within which a series of motifs are mobilized. In a fortuitous encounter on a train (in an echo of Hitchcock, as too is the plot twist) between Ditirambo and Dalmás (who, it will later transpire, is one of gangster Jaime Normando’s henchmen), Dalmás (Ángel Carmona) says that, although they have never previously met, he recognises Ditirambo from a dream in which the latter assassinated him with a single bullet to the head. This in time proves the case, although in slightly skewed fashion. Dalmás is indeed shot to death but by contract killer Bill (Bill Dykes), Ditirambo’s taller and blonder comic foil (both are bound by professional ethos). The self-fulfilling prophecy is further multiplied at the end of the film when Angela, Urdiales widow, explains that Ditirambo has completed the plot of the novel that Urdiales had left unwritten at the time of his death. Ditirambo, obligated by inflexible principles to fulfill his commitments, has paid his debt in accordance with his personal code of honor.

The noir ambience of the film is sustained by a series of doubles, shadows and mirrors—often very real reflections—that help cement the film’s discourse of death and love within the context of vision to distorting effect. Ditirambo declares his love for Ana Carmona, thus disturbing the order of the detective plot and seconds before she is murdered by a hidden sniper. A psychodrama emerges as Ana, moments previously, has spoken of being watched without knowing by whom. The unsettling heteronymous and spectral sensation of surveillance is produced in a moment of affective intensity in which the spectator is misled, cleverly deceived into assuming the assassin is Urdiales’s widow, filmed concealed behind the wooden slats in an opening in the wall. Misrecognition is displaced by dissymmetry, by what Derrida calls the “visor effect” (7); that is, the sense of being observed without seeing who is watching you. In this instance such an effect is extended to the spectator, in noir fashion, as a false lead in the investigation.

The effect of the double—habitually associated with the uncanny—is emphasized in at least two ways—in terms of content and structure—early on in Suárez’s filmic career. I have already mentioned the surrealist elements of his very first piece, the short film, Ditirambo vela por nosotros (and there are others, Ditirambo eating a cheque, an apparent conversation with a dog, among them). In the surreal, the supplement of the real, there is an element of the fantastic, of the phantasmagoric, the spooky. The overlap of the registers of the realist and the phantasy is also a doubling not only of modes but also the coexistence of contradictions held in suspension, in abeyance. The verb velar has connotations of vigilance, of guarding or accompanying, it is related etymologically to the word veil, to enshrouding, to the velatorio, to ver, to see, to watch over the dead in consonance, once more with the “visor effect.” It also, as Derrida, has noted conjures up textual notions of the textile, the silky material of the veil, like a screen that divides and is at the same time translucent, the material of transference and projection. Tellingly, the film’s written epigraph cites Antonio Machado: “El ojo que ves no es ojo porque tú lo veas; es ojo porque te ve.”[14] Sight and blindness, the seen and the unseen are the key motifs of this film.

            Connected to this, unusually in the history of Spanish cinema, Ditirambo vela por nosotro is a ghost story, that of the specter of Ditirambo’s neighbor, señor Estepa’s wife, who inhabits a sixth-floor apartment years after her death. Meanwhile, the early, pre-life encarnation of Ditirambo is also ghostly, a representation of Ditirambo returned from the future.[15] Indeed, Ditirambo vela por nosotros contains within it many of the elements and images that Suárez will return to in the future. In a sense the piece constitutes an index of Suárez’s future work, a film whose uncertainty mirrors its own unknown future. This spectral interpretation of Suárez’s wider oeuvre is reinforced by the specific film’s pointed self-reflection, and by the presence of the real ghost of the señora de Estepa, the disembodied voice of a woman emanating from the plughole of the bathroom sink (a conduit, a passage and a hole, a voice from the void in the space of the communicating piping) in a declaration of love. There is a play here on materiality and immateriality. There are, furthermore, two contradictory impulses in this film, again an aporetic encounter. Firstly, that of order, that of Ditirambo himself (the commitment to truth etc.), the filing cards, the archives of indexes, the black and white symmetry of the chessboard, the regular linearity of the rooftop tiling over which Ditirambo clambers, the tubular logic of the plumbing of his own apartment. Alternatively, there is the circularity of the swirl of water that emits ghoulish voices from within its inner realm, expressing an irrational love.

            The central image of Ditirambo vela por nosotros, that of the water turning in the plughole, recalls the more sinister precedent of Hitchcock’s Psycho. While framed in comic and scatological terms (and there is much more detail than I analyze here), it is a film about the unknown itself, about the inexpressible, the ineffable: “Yo estoy enamorada de usted, Ditirambo, pero nunca podrá verme” says the floating voice; hers is an unsettling, intangible love offered by an invisible immaterial presence, a distorted echo resounding from the bathroom sink. The voice provides a haunting and pervasive soundscape that seeps and mixes with the incidental music, the growl of the dog, the eerie creak of the 19^th century Madridian building and its strange inhabitants; the weirdness of its mise-en-scène. Interiority here is disturbing, exteriors sites of devastation: bleak and broken ceramics, endless dark corridors that disappear into the vortex like the swirl of water in the sink disappearing into the plughole, a sense of vertigo—from the rooftops to the belly of the building—of the architectural uncanny.[16] And at the heart of the film’s enigma, another void, a blind spot, a telling omission, a missing piece in the jigsaw of the diegesis. The riddle here concerns the subject, that of subjectivity, of autography. In one of the final sequences of the film Suárez films himself in a self-portrait. His alter-ego, Ditirambo, removes his sunglasses, the camera hones in to his own reflection in the mirror. Ditirambo’s inner voice decries the (offensive) absence of logic to the events of the film before he declares “lo tengo, lo tengo,” and he takes the mirror in his hands, wrenches it from the wall, and turns to reveal—in a suggestion of mise-en-abîme—the three-man camera crew huddled in the frame of the doorway behind him in the reverse of the shot. It is a self-reflexive filmic moment, the first initial steps in Suárez’s illustrious career. The mirror of Machado’s poem[17]—“mis ojos en el espejo”—takes visual, doubled form, is recast in Suárez’s original omission from the film’s epigraph; the hole, the void, the film’s ellipsis from the Machado poem, is given self-conscious shape.

Epilogue/Epílogo (1984)

More than a decade after the last of these early films premiered, Suárez, now an established filmmaker, returned to the character of Ditirambo. The first sequence of Epílogo could easily be read as a parody of a Dashiell Hammett novel: an anonymous city street at night, the autumnal rain, the street traffic, and the crowded sidewalks. The camera stops before an electrical appliances shop full of broadcasting TV sets and closes in to dwell upon one of the screens. Slowly the camera advances to fill the frame with the image reframed within of a hotel corridor: an image within an image of a line of identical doors facing one another in the seemingly endless—abîme-like—parallel optics aimed towards a vanishing point. A pair of shiny black shoes in the hallway outside one of the rooms breaks the symmetry of the shot.

Drunk and dowdy, washed up and shrouded in the cigarette smoke that coils around her silhouetted profile in the low-lit hotel room, a whisky flask to hand, Laína (Charo López) reminisces to the wide-eyed and naïve young literature student (Sonia Martínez) interviewing her. The now more mature and more cynical López embodies the noir stereotype of sleeze. A TV screen flickers static white fuzz silently in the background as Laína recalls her relationship with Ditirambo (José Sacristán) and Rocabruno (Francisco Rabal). This mise en scène—a self-reflexive commentary on the artifice of genre itself—sets the tone of the film.[18]

What follows in Laína’s subjective narration, as related to the literature student, is a combination of flashbacks, a mass of dense literary references, and three discrete stories embedded within the main narrative (they function, like Cervantine historias intercaladas, as supplements to the central storyline). The film is about fictionalizing but its title also hints at the closure of a particular body of Suárez’s work. However, such an enclosure is incomplete, it is marked by seepage. Like the motif of the mirror shattered by Rocabruno’s bullet (an image reiterated in the film but also present in other earlier Suárez films), the multiple time frames suggest the fragmentation of the film’s structure, but the image of the shattered mirror also brings into focus the unfathomable black hole at its center.

Rivals and accomplices, Ditirambo and Rocabruno write their books together. Although their mutual hostility is manifest each is unable to work without the other. After a 10-year separation Ditirambo travels to the country house where Rocabruno lives to persuade him to renew their collaboration. Ana (Sandra Toral), Rocabruno’s 16-year-old helper/maid acts as intermediary between the two combative men. She is (like Constantino in Aoom) another Pigmalion figure, incapable of pronouncing the word “Ditirambo,” who struggles to read. But she is also an occasional ventriloquist who provides the words she has difficulty pronouncing in the transactions between the two adversaries. Seemingly malleable and without agency, she was “purchased” by Rocambruno as a child, and is “shaped” by both writers. However, she proves a deceptive ingenue transfixed and moved by the fiction she is interpreting. She is also an androgynous figure (a key part of her role is an interestingly, albeit subtly articulated “queer” theme running throughout the film, she cross-dresses on two separate occasions as other characters). As befits her function as interpreter or translator she is yet another palindromic A-N-A. The N at the center of her name, the N of the nothing, of the nada (as in the Valente poem) that maintains the equilibrium of the triangle of characters as well as the formal structure of the film.

Like Ana, Laína is also an in-between character. Loved by both men she is the erotic ‘material’ exchanged in a Faustian bargain between the two men. An agreement that whispered inaudibly—an important fact, given the inarticulacy of Ana and the significance of words in the film—but that we are led to understand requires that Ditirambo deliver Laína to Rocambruno in exchange for his agreeing to write. Both Ana and Liana, apparently subject to the affective whims—the wordlessness—of the protagonists prove “dangerous supplements.” They are figures in excess of the main plotline whose condition as erotic fantasy or noble savage eludes the laws of genre.

There is a primal moment in Epílogo. The second and the longest of the embedded stories is a contemporary recasting of the Hamlet narrative, with particular emphasis placed on the Freudian readings of the Shakespearian original. The troubled young boy, the protagonist of the piece, awakes in the middle of the night and wanders the house. Holding the bedroom door ajar he spies his mother in orgasmic rapture, the fetishized red socks of the murderous uncle/stepfather poking out at the end of the bed index the ongoing oral sex. Here the question of literature and eroticism merge in the psychoanalytical event precisely in an excessive moment, within a surplus element of the film itself. Hamlet is, of course, famously a work that turns on a violation of generational legality, of that of legacy and inheritance, in another breach of the ‘law of genre’. Furthermore, the red socks that identify the uncle/stepfather incestuous murderer chime with Buñuel’s well-known interest in fetishism (and feet in particular) and they do so—as befits the story of Hamlet—in an subsequent—and heavily stressed—Oedipal scenario. The fetish as phallic substitute in the context of oral sex might arguably be read as an inability to perform penetration. The ‘oral’ rings true to the film’s subtle discourse on writer’s block as impotence and to the prevailing discussion on inarticulacy and wordlessness. Laína proves the key to solving both “problems”. She facilitates the renewal of the contract and, importantly, the film is told in Laína’s words, it is her point of view, her subjectivity, not that of the two writers.

The prefix “epi” means in addition to. Logos means speech or speaking, the word over the image. The logo of Epílogo, the word, is exceeded and destabilized throughout Suárez work. It is a consistent source of contention in this film and beyond. This conflict between image and word, between film and literature is habitually associated—in critical writing—with adaption (and thus conformity) rather than translation (that is to say, transference and transgression). It is also about displaced subjects, marginalized figures that emerge from within the crevices, the abysses, the in-between emptiness or void of the creative event.

[1] I am grateful to Isaak Marragui for his help with some of the points raised in this article.

[2] The presence of stalwart actors from the EdeB (Teresa Gimpera, Romy, Luis Ciges) as well as technical support (Carlos Durán, among them) in Suárez’s early films suggest that the break was not entirely clean-cut.

[3] Later in the same essay Heidegger asks another question “¿Qué sucedería, empero, si la objetividad del espacio cósmico objetivo resultara ser irremisiblemente el correlato de la subjetividad de una conscience a la que le resultan extrañas las épocas que precedieron a la edad moderna europea?” (17).

[4] See Valente’s article in the cultural section of ABC 26.06.1992.

[5] “Criptomemorias”.

[6] The title of one of Suárez’s later films is Mi nombre es sombra (1996). It is a variation on the theme of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

[7] Suárez has claimed in interview that the tactical footballing advice that he provided in the form of written reports concerned the uses of space on the pitch. One of his later films was about football and was called El portero (The Goalkeeper). Chillida, of course, before achieving fame as a sculptor had been a professional footballer, the goalkeeper for the San Sebastian team La Real Sociedad.

[8] Suárez had initially wanted Orson Welles to play this role. Welles declined Suárez’s proposal.

[9] Given the bodily transfers and transmissions in Aoom but particularly in El extraño caso del Doctor Fausto , it is notable that the words employed by Heidegger concern the aesthetic shaping of bodies, a “corporalization.”

[10] I am grateful to Julián Gutiérrez-Albilla for pointing out the hint here of Lacan’s notion of the “second death” in his discussion of Antigone. For reasons of space I have not pursued Gutiérrez-Albilla’s insight though it is clearly relevant.

[11] Suárez was writing the script for Aoom when the shoot of El extraño caso del Doctor Fausto began.

[12] The name “Ditirambo” is another example of literary self-consciousness. It is the Spanish translation of the ancient Greek lyrical form, the dithýrambos.

[13] In the absence of legal divorce in Spain at the time.

[14] This is only a fragment. Other verses are perhaps more relevant to the film as a whole and their omission is telling. Interestingly, a fuller quote serves as the epigraph to Suárez’s earlier novel Rocabruno bate a Ditirambo (1965):

Mis ojos en el espejo

son ojos ciegos que miran

los ojos con que los veo.

[15] I refer here to Derrida’s insistence that the focus on the first syllable of the word “representation” the “re” of a repetition of a “presentation” has traditionally ignored the second syllable, the “pre.” Focus on this syllable disrupts temporality in the terms suggested by this film: the repetition or return of something “sent” prior to its having been sent. I have discussed this in more detail in my recently completed book manuscript Alter/Nation(s): Cosmopolitanism, Experimentation, Militancy (currently under review).

[16] The apartment where the film was shot in an apartament on the Calle Narvaez in Madrid which belonged to Suárez’s father.

[17] Machado’s poem of course also involves a pseudonym, that of the apocryphal author, Abel Martí.

[18] Xon de Ros has very usefully provided an outline of this film’s complex narrative and temporal structure (214). I am less convinced by de Ros’s recourse to Raymond Williams’s notion of “flow” to demonstrate the influence of television on film, in the context of 1980s Spanish cinema and its many crises. As we have seen “flow” is a constant presence in Suárez’s work from his earliest films. It is certainly true though that the proliferation of television sets is, as de Ros puts it “the film’s leitmotif” (215).

Intermediality, Intoxication and the Infrathin

This is the text of a paper I gave last week. It is a fragment of something much larger (of course).

Steven Marsh

“When the tobacco smoke smells also of the mouth which exhales it, the two odors marry by infrathin.” – Marcel Duchamp (View March 1945).

I propose in this paper to consider the paradox of the specificity – its materiality –of film in the context of the fashionable term intermediality (with all its suggestion of ‘contaminating’ influences of other media at work within film). I want to focus on the idea of experimentation and the avant-garde at a “watershed” moment in historical time 1968 in a particular place, the city of Barcelona. The emblematic year 1968 points to a central nucleus in an uncontrollable turbulence, like the eye of a whirlwind, a wild displacement that also interrogates the notion of hybridization in ways that distinguish intermediality from intertextuality. The latter is more readily a term applicable to literature than to film for reasons that concern their very different procedures. Intertextuality tends to seek dialogic fusion rather cacophonic confusion.

My interpretation of intermediality concerns an encounter, a discordant encounter, with and between different media that results in ill-fitting formulations rather than the telos of assimilation by one of the others. It is an irresolvable and immeasurable encounter, in a sense, aporetic. It occupies the liminal space – an otherwise, elsewhere – where ingress and excess meet; where, what we might say with Georges Perec, the infra lurks imperceptible to the naked eye or ear. Marcel Duchamp – who practiced a form of intermediality avant la lettre throughout his life – calls this the “infrathin” [inframince], by which he means the indescribable differences between things that one can only discern implicitly beyond the senses, and define only by example. According to Duchamp the effect is as follows: “The possible, implying the becoming – the passage from one to the other takes place in the infrathin.”

In the spirit of Duchamp’s infrathin, this paper considers intermediality as transference; transference as translation or intoxication, among other terms. While media means measure, to mediate signifies to intervene and maintain equilibrium between two elements or parties. There is the hint of a paradox here,—an incommensurability— of media not so much as moderator but as the field of taut, potentially electric tension between opposites each transmitting sparks that ignite and activate the other. I am more interested however in the immeasurable. If we think in terms of the Spanish word desmesurado, unmeasured excess (or perhaps actively de-measured), we are faced with the swirlingly unbalanced, the supplementary or the surplus. The idea of excess here might too be conceived of as a form of intoxication. The margin between measure and de-measure produces a relation not dissimilar to the infrathin. It is this implausible, nigh impossible ‘between’ generated by transference that I am interested in, the aporetic space between elements or concepts, that corresponds to something like Derrida’s ‘differance’. The lingering, in-between residue produced of the passage from one field to another; not so much in the displacement from one cultural form to another as the transference through a porous skein from one language to another, from one discipline to another, from one country to another, from one mental state to another, from life to death, and from truth to falsehood and/or vice-versa – shifts, transfers that leave traces in their wake.

In an early shot in Pere Portabella’s Nocturn 29 we see the naked body of the female protagonist (Lucia Bosé) framed in the transparent door of a shower, her mottled image fused with the frosted glass, a blurred yet revealing barrier to vision: frame and fuzziness, the anonymous woman as object of the erotic gaze. Poised on the threshold of the 1970s, the decade that heralds what is generally held to be the most important ‘period’ in experimental filmmaking (in Spain and elsewhere) the films I will discuss today also point up subtle signs of the year of their production; symptoms of the seismic shifts ongoing in and around the cypher 1968. Indeed, the title of Nocturn 29 contains within it a reference to the year of its production. On the face of things – and almost inevitably it has been interpreted in this way – Nocturn 29 contains certain elements of national allegory.

These allegorical aspects of the film – the film as a metaphor for Spain in 1968 – have been emphasized and exhaustively outlined by Josep Torrell, who focuses on the film’s oblique references to the Civil War, the depiction of the bourgeoisie, the Banco Hispano Americano that financed the regime, to a singular sequence in color (one of only two sequences shot in color) in which a visual gag suggests an allusion to the red, yellow, and purple colors of the national flag of the defeated Spanish Second Republic (1931-1939), together with the pointed suggestion of exile in Lucia Bosé’s departure by airplane at the end of the film, among other things.

Torrell observes that the film is composed of twenty-nine sequences, reflecting (in Torrell’s argument) the twenty-nine years of the dictatorship. However, while the twenty-nine sequences shape the film formally, they also draw attention to the filmic apparatus, to its artifice, and the very nature of experimentation. The rejection of narrative order is also a rejection – paradoxically – of chronological order, which would suggest an undoing or at least a questioning of the twenty-nine year period lapsed since the onset of the dictatorship or, indeed, of the signifier “1968.” Time in this film is set off against itself, the significance of its historical moment put in doubt. This is the spectral paradox, the elusive quality of Nocturn 29, by which time and measurement (temporality, the year, the order of filmic sequences) interrogate themselves. While the significance of the emblematic year can only be reckoned with retrospectively, its putative intent might best be understood performatively rather than allegorically. History becomes charged and destabilized by the discordancy between experimentation and experience, sound and image, structure, rhythm and time. The following shots from a sequence in Nocturn 29 – a tour de force of editing and mise-en-scène – are exemplary of this disturbance of such hermeneutic equivalence.

One of the earliest images of Deux fois – a film shot in Barcelona – focuses upon at least three of the central features of Raynal’s remarkable piece of work: autobiography (Raynal herself appears in almost all of the film’s sequences), the filmic process in the form of photographic material (the film draws consistently attention to its own cinematic practices), and luminosity (the flash of a small mirror). Light, which illuminates, here blinds, obscures and distracts vision. ‘Pure’ light is here ‘unmediated’ and dazzling.

Deux fois points to a kind of politics that facilitates a new, different reading of Portabella’s film. While both films are self-reflexive, they are equally well texts brimming with extra filmic cultural influence. There is in both a fugitive quality, enigmatic certainly but more elusive, a sense of the arbitrary; a sense, indeed, of the slick and intangible movement of light. It is in this conjuncture between matter and methodology, media and materiality, and between text and context that politics – feminism in the case of Raynal, Francoist repression in that of Portabella – might become relevant without recourse to allegory.

The image reproduced above of the flash of light in the small mirror with Raynal standing in the shadows behind her own hand suggests the doubling of the subject that all mirrors produce, a doubling – that becomes, in time, a multiplicity – contained in the tongue-in-cheek “deux” of the film’s title. The flash of light, moreover, disperses that doubling, points to the extra element of projection – another central material feature of film and light itself – beyond the screen itself. It both suggests that there is a connection between all of these different elements contained in the photogram and, more significantly, a formal play, a blurring of the limits dividing on-screen and off-screen space. In this vein of doubling, Jonathan Rosembaum, who has described the film as being about “coupling” insightfully, extends that to other forms of “duplicity.”

In the following clip, we see the alluring, erotic yet disconcertingly mesmerizing image of Raynal in black stockings, topless, apparently vulnerable yet defiant – perhaps for this very reason – ambiguous to the spectatorial gaze as she urinates while staring directly at the camera. Directed towards the off-screen “voyeuristic” spectator, while accompanied by two on-screen male actors, her look challenges the identificatory framing of classical narrative film that Laura Mulvey would write so cogently about a few years later.

What Rosembaum calls “secret points of accord” here lie in the relation between the hermetic interiority of the film and exteriority as seepage, the secret as secretion, as a kind of distillation, or extract to paraphrase Jean-Luc Nancy (Intoxication 16-17). The overflow – quite literally – of both body and screen, that exceeds the limits of the body at a moment when the body exceeds the focus of the gaze, it reveals the beyond of the outside. In this convergence of excesses (the body, the screen) the division between what Nancy calls “exteriority and interiority is dissolved” (18). The gauze-like border of the tights pressed tight to the skin as a kind of membrane, hymen-like, a textile-bodily infrathin, a breach of the dammed-up surface text – the skin – of the film, the pellicule; but also a loss of control to the point of rupture. This flow beyond the body and beyond the screen questions the off-screen space, breaks the division not only between Raynal’s body and the exterior within the mise-en scène, but also breaches the boundaries of the frame itself. The excess streaming from the body turns the tables on the sadistic-voyeuristic masculine gaze, exceeds the filmic conventions of internal screen space and external spectatorship.

Such liquid excess extends to the porous epidermis of national boundaries. Deux fois is a “French” film shot in Barcelona, while, the first public screening of Nocturn 29, whose director heralds from Barcelona,was in France. Nation is uncontainable within state boundaries and the concept of national cinema rendered redundant. In a sense and for the purposes of national classification these films are contraband, smuggled across the frontiers of patrimonic classification, the inundation indifferent to illusionary national borders.

This spatial violation extends also to temporality. In a further conceptualization of infrathin; contraband becomes contretemps – a wildly unanticipated counter-time, unanchored to chronological order. This notion of excess and overflow in the context of subjectivity resonates once more with Nancy’s short book Intoxication. Nancy writes of “the sea swell where the abyss swirls around, man’s wine-dark sea of a thousand turns, which ceaselessly returns to the self” (13). The idea here of the abyss, the void, the whirlpool or the maelstrom is here explicitly linked to the propio – the Spanish word for “self” – the loosening of the manacles of both media discipline and all other forms of identity, the flow that unbinds its confines and facilitates in its spillover access to an exterior. This, it seems to me, is one of the means by which we might understand the significance and the politics of intermediality.

Reflexiones acerca de LA MORT DE LOUIS XIV (2016) de Albert Serra*

La mort de Louis XIV (2016) reafirma a Albert Serra como uno de los directores más interesantes del actual panorama cinematográfico español. Ganadora del prestigioso premio Jean Vigo (2016) y del premio a la mejor película en la pasada edición del Festival de cine de Jerusalén (2016), el reconocimiento a La mort de Louis XIV supone también la constatación de la excelente trayectoria del director, quien ha dejado de ser un desconocido en la escena cinematográfica española y catalana para convertirse en su enfant terrible. Después de su estreno internacional en Cannes con Honor de cavalleria (2006), película sobre la que la prensa del país apenas se hizo eco, sus siguientes producciones, todas galardonadas en los más prestigiosos festivales de cine, han ido lentamente ganándose la atención de la crítica y de los espectadores, quienes han pasado del escepticismo inicial al reconocimiento actual. La mort de Louis XIV no es, sin embargo, una película más de Albert Serra. Tres rasgos fundamentales la separan del resto de sus producciones: la lengua, la profesionalidad de (algunos) actores y la estética del film.

La lengua

La mort de Louis XIV es la primera película de Albert Serra grabada en una lengua distinta a la catalana. Filmada en francés, el cambio de lengua tiene una explicación aparentemente sencilla: la película es fruto de un encargo que el Centre Pompidou le hizo hace cinco años a Albert Serra y que implica la colaboración con un equipo de trabajo y producción franceses. La pregunta por las posibles implicaciones ulteriores de dicho cambio lingüístico, no obstante, se mantiene. Habrá que ver si en las próximas producciones Serra seguirá este camino de colaboraciones internacionales o si, por el contrario, volverá a lo que hasta el momento ha sido su habitual proceso de concepción y práctica cinematográfica: la búsqueda de motivos de inspiración artístico-culturales y el trabajo local con el equipo que conforma Andergraun Films SL, su productora.

Serra no ha hecho nunca del empleo de la lengua catalana una cuestión política. Sus películas son en catalán porque esta es la opción más razonable y práctica: el catalán es la lengua materna común del equipo de actores y profesionales con los que el director trabaja. En sus películas la lengua funciona como medio para conseguir el fin estético que pretende alcanzar, no como objeto de reivindicación nacional. Ya en 2008, en el contexto de la proyección de su segunda película, El cant dels ocells (2008), en Cannes y ante la pregunta que la periodista Cristina Savall le realizara sobre el hecho de rodar en catalán, Serra aclaró: “[Lo hago] primero porque es la lengua de los actores, salvo uno que habla en hebreo. Para mí es natural. Cannes no tiene ningún problema. Elige un cine artístico, en el que importan otras cosas”.[1] En efecto, El cant dels ocells está filmada en catalán (la lengua que hablan los tres reyes magos, personajes protagonistas del film) y hebreo (hablado por José). Aunque, de hecho, ya en su primera película Honor de cavallería (2006), una producción sobre las andanzas de Quijote y Sancho, ambos personajes, iconos de la literatura española, se comunican también en lengua catalana. Por ende, en las películas de Albert Serra  poco importa que los diálogos se produzcan en francés, catalán, hebreo, o en cualquier otro idioma, ya que la lengua es un modo de expresión sometido a los fines artísticos del film, nunca una meta en sí mismo.

No obstante, si atendemos a cuestiones de categorización y representación territorial, la elección de una determinada lengua resulta un foco no exento de controversia. ¿Son las obras de Serra propias del cine catalán o del cine español en lengua catalana? ¿Pertenece su última película en lengua francesa al cine catalán en francés, al cine francés o al cine español en lengua francesa? En 1972, el crítico José María Caparrós Lera escribía: “Podrá denominarse cine catalán […] toda aquella creación fílmica que retrate el carácter, los sentimientos y los problemas del hombre de esta tierra; toda obra cinematográfica que tenga una temática catalana o se preocupe de la amplia problemática de este país y de los que en él viven, sin que por ello deje de tener contacto con los diversos problemas y formas de vida de otras regiones y nacionalidades españolas”.[2] Atendiendo a tales palabras, el cine de Albert Serra no sería necesariamente catalán, al no “retratar el carácter, los sentimientos y problemas del hombre catalán” (recordemos que las películas del director giran en torno a temas literarios y/o universales). Asimismo, si en la cita aquí traída a colación sustituimos el término ‘catalán’ por el de ‘francés’ o ‘español’ vemos que dicha cita tampoco resulta realmente aplicable a la obra de Serra ya que ésta escapa a “la amplia problemática de este país [sea cuál sea al que nos refiramos] y de los que en él viven”.

Ante estas consideraciones parecería que el cine de Serra tiene un talante universal que lo hace nacionalmente inclasificable, mas es bien sabido que no existen producciones culturales neutras. Sea a nivel de financiación, producción, actuación o dirección, toda película es, de un modo u otro, vinculable a, como mínimo, un territorio. Por ello, Marie-Soledad Rodríguez resuelve la cuestión de la siguiente manera: “No se trata pues para la Generalitat de defender un cine que sea ante todo la expresión de las vivencias de los catalanes, de su pasado, de sus valores o de sus señas de identidad, sino de construir un producto de calidad autóctono susceptible de enriquecer la economía regional”.[3] Bajo esta perspectiva bien se puede argumentar que el cine de Serra pertenece a la categoría de cine catalán. Aunque La mort de Louis XIV sea una coproducción entre Francia, España y Portugal[4] y esté grabada en lengua francesa, el trabajo de la productora Andergraun Films SL, radicada en Barcelona y capitaneada por el propio director, supone un claro vínculo y estimulo económico para la región.

La profesionalidad de los actores

Hasta La mort de Louis XIV Albert Serra sólo había trabajado con actores no profesionales, conocidos suyos de su pueblo natal, Banyoles. En esta última producción, sin embargo, Serra contradice sus hasta ahora principios sobre el carácter amateur de los actores[5] e incorpora a una de las caras más conocidas de la cinematografía francesa, el actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, en el papel protagonista del Rey Sol. La elección de dicho actor no fue, sin embargo, un acto de traición a los propios principios del director. Serra afirma que siempre ha sentido respecto por Léaud al ser éste un actor no corrompido que sólo ha trabajado con los directores que admiraba y nunca como vía de supervivencia económica.[6] En el estreno de la película en el festival de cine de Cannes, Serra reafirmó su entusiasmo:

 

Como persona, yo lo admiraba mucho. No tanto por su obra, sino porque me caía bien: su mujer, el ambiente que desprende… cosas importantes cuando empiezo a filmar. Todo se decidió de una forma muy natural. Y eso quizás también se nota en la película. Él, evidentemente, es Jean-Pierre Léaud y alguien pude ver incorporado en su rostro y actitud un cierto pasado del cine. Pero a mí eso no me impresionaba. Creo que ofrece al film una interpretación totalmente alejada de cualquier tipo de cliché anterior. No remite a sí mismo ni está embobado ni autocomplaciente con su pasado. […] Aunque es vanidoso. ¡Eso sí que me gusta! Nunca va a ver sus películas […] pero sí que lee todos los artículos y todo lo que publiquen sobre él.[7]

Tanto Léaud como el resto del equipo actoral (que cuenta con algunos de los actores no profesionales que han participado en las anteriores propuestas de Serra, tales como Vicenç Altaió o Lluís Serrat Sanchini) se sometieron a las mismas directrices y exigencias del cineasta. Coherente con su forma de trabajar que tan bien le ha funcionado hasta el momento, Serra hizo de la espontaneidad bandera. En La mort de Louis XIV no hubo ensayos iniciales antes de la grabación de cada toma y, si bien el director se tuvo que amoldar al plan fijo de 14 días de grabación que le habían marcado los franceses, no dejó de atender a su inspiración, a las sensaciones que le transmitían los actores y a lo espontaneo e inesperado del momento. Consecuentemente, el espectador percibe una gran coherencia interpretativa y queda absorto por las fantásticas actuaciones, especialmente, la de Jean-Pierre Léaud. Léaud brilla en su lento proceso de degradación, sufrimiento y muerte y lo hace, y eso es lo más relevante, consiguiendo que el público olvide al actor icono y sólo vea al rey muriente. Tal es su inmersión en el personaje que lo que empieza siendo un reconocible Léaud representando a Luis XIV pronto se transforma en un verosímil acercarse a la muerte del Rey Sol.

Aunque con un papel mucho menor, es destacable también el personaje de Vicenç Altaió. Altaió es una persona conocida dentro del círculo cultural catalán pero no fue hasta Història de la meva mort (2013), el anterior largometraje de Serra, que dio el salto a la gran pantalla, estrenándose como actor. En La mort de Louis XIV Altaió representa a Brun, un médico que, llegado de Marsella y con métodos poco ortodoxos, pretende curar la enfermedad que azota la pierna del rey. Los médicos de la Sorbona (que también se han desplazado hasta Versalles para prestar sus servicios al rey) pronto intuyen que Brun es un charlatán, sin conocimientos científicos de medicina, pues, al preguntarle su experiencia como facultativo éste contesta con parrafadas esotéricas y naturalistas. Su discurso, no obstante, resulta mucho más que una mera anécdota de la trama de película. Todos los elementos que lo componen (las asociaciones ideas, el absurdo, la sorpresa, la reflexión de estilo filosófico, etc.) son, para aquellos espectadores seguidores de las películas de Serra, un rasgo estético distintivo de sus creaciones.

La estética del film

Desde la realización de su primer largometraje (Honor de cavalleria, 2006) Albert Serra ha ido desarrollando un método de creación y filmación propio que él mismo ha denominado ‘método Andergraun’, en referencia al nombre de su productora. En el libro Apocalipsi Uuuuuuuaaaaaaa. Diari de rodatge d’Història de la meva mort d’Albert Serra (2015),  Jaume C. Pons Alorda establece lo que para él son los quince rasgos distintivos de dicho método creativo. Acorde con el carácter del mismo (Serra procura contantemente evitar todo acomodamiento, eludir lo previsible de cada situación), el decimoquinto decálogo empieza negándose a sí mismo:

No es un método. No es forma de hacer ni transferible ni compartible ni imitable. Nace y muere en sí mismo.

1. Caos. Descontrol. Desorganización. No planificación.
2. La Naturalidad. Realismo. Lo verídico. Contraste violentísimo entre lo verosímil y lo inverosímil.
3. La Psicodelia. El rock’n’roll propiamente dicho para esta generación nacida en los años 60.
4. El Surrealismo. La asociación no pensada.
5. Performance perpetua que no acaba nunca
6. Iconoclastas. Andergraun Films SL cambia las concepciones preconcebidas.
7. La técnica tiene que ser un potenciador, nunca un impedimento.
8. La estética. Palabra clave.
9. Sublime, ya que Andergraun Films SL requiere el sublime. Nace y muere en sí. Eso no quiere decir irresponsabilidad, sino psicodelia para conseguir momentos culminantes.
10. Montaje. La selección es esencial.
11. Original. Nunca visto antes. Único.
12. La diversión. Lo lúdico. Pasarla genial durante la experiencia, poderlo recordar como una cosa fundamental el resto de la vida, que haya valido la pena vivirlo.
13. Dinero. Serra siempre habla de ello y siempre ha creído que, de no haberse dedicado a Andergraun Films SL, hubiese sido multimillonario.
14. Paisaje. El cine de Albert Serra como la creación de un mundo con identidad propia.[8]

A esta conclusión llega Pons Alorda después de haber vivenciado gran parte del rodaje de Història de la meva mort. Dichos rasgos no deben ser, sin embargo, entendidos como exclusivos de dicha película sino como representativos del conjunto de las producciones de Serra, inclusive La mort de Louis XIV. A pesar de que en ella se pueden identificar la mayoría de tales rasgos, el resultado se distingue sustancialmente distinto. Dos aspectos contribuyen a ello. El primero, en La mort de Louis XIV destacan los espacios interiores, sucediendo casi la totalidad de la acción en una única estancia: el dormitorio del rey. Al contrario de lo que sucedía en las anteriores películas del director, en las que dominaban las imágenes de extensión panorámica, en La mort de Louis XIV los espacios exteriores se reducen a dos únicos planos exteriores: la primera escena de la película, en la que aparece el rey Sol en los jardines de su palacio y un plano del paisaje cercano a la residencia real que Luis XIV contempla a través de la ventana de su habitación. El segundo, la iluminación de la película y el predominio de claroscuros. El aposento del rey, iluminado por la luz entrante por la ventana (durante el día) y por las velas (durante la noche) ofrece bellas composiciones plásticas en las que frecuentemente el cuerpo de los actores permanece en la penumbra y sólo una parte de sus cuerpos, a menudo el rostro, es iluminado. Especialmente en la segunda mitad del film, cuando el dolor gangrenoso en la pierna del rey es ya insoportable, el ambiente que impregna el dormitorio del enfermo se vuelve denso y, tal como afirma el crítico Olivier Père, la fotografía creada por Serra nos ofrece unas imágenes que parecen “arrancadas de las tinieblas, tendientes a lo sublime”.[9]

Esta apuesta por la plasticidad de las imágenes, por la cuidadosa puesta en escena, por el trabajadísimo montaje posterior, concuerda con los principios artísticos que Pons Alorda entrevió y que posteriormente Serra confirmó: un arte autónomo, no utilitario, que arriesga e innova y está siempre en busca de la perfección y el sublime. Al ser preguntado, en una entrevista radiofónica, por el eterno debate entre contenido y forma, Serra responde:

[El arte] sólo es forma. Para mí el contenido, digamos, no existe. Todo se traduce a través de la forma, a través de las imágenes […] El diálogo se ha utilizado de una forma un tanto más poética, por ejemplo: para sugerir, no tanto para dar una información […] yo lo utilizo bastante. Otros elementos: el sonido, como enseña Godard. ¿Por qué tiene que estar en la misma dirección que la imagen? Puede tener un valor en sí mismo, puede ir en contra de la imagen. Es una manera de trabajar en que sinceramente sólo cuenta la forma.[10]

La innovación en el empleo de la forma que La mort de Louis XIV desprende no parece, no obstante, ser una razón suficiente para suponer un cambio radical en la estética de las películas de Serra, un cambio lo suficientemente significativo como para que el público habitual de las películas del director catalán pasara de corresponderse a un reducido número de espectadores para transformarse en ríos de gente haciendo cola para comprar la entrada y ver el film. A pesar de ello, La mort de Louis XIV fue muy bien recibida en Cannes y el público congregado para visualizar la obra en el festival salió de la sala gratamente satisfecho. Por bien que ello resulta un caso aislado, sólo comparable con otros estrenos en festivales de cine de clase A, tal amplia reacción positiva despertó la desconfianza en Serra, quien afirmó estar decepcionado por la buena y vasta aceptación del público de Cannes. En declaraciones para El Món, proclamó: “Sí, a la gente le gusta. Por esto estoy un poco avergonzado… Pienso que alguna cosa va mal objetivamente. Alguien me ha dicho que, con esta película, conseguiré muchos más espectadores que con todas mis anteriores películas juntas”.[11] Sin duda, la decepción de Serra se debe a su concepción del deber del auténtico artista, según la cual “todo artista tiene la obligación de hacer una cosa que la gente no pueda entender por más que se esfuerce”,[12] mas quizás Serra tendría que haber previsto que tan buena recepción era posible al escoger el actor principal. En La mort de Louis XIV, Serra, en parte, se traiciona a sí mismo al crear una película con Léaud, un actor atrayente para el gran público y una trama más narrativa que se ve favorecida por escenas más cortas y un montaje más dinámico que en sus anteriores producciones.

En conclusión, las declaraciones de Serra aquí traídas a colación, que bien podrían interpretarse como un acto de prepotencia por parte del director, son más bien una exposición de su carácter provocador. Con ellas Serra consigue sorprender en cada entrevista, discurso o película, pero sus provocaciones no son ni vanas ni vacías. Son más bien un reflejo indirecto de su modo de entender la creación artística. Trabajando sin guión (con un guión que sirve como puro marco de referencia o, incluso, en contra del propio guión propuesto a las instituciones de financiación pública), apelando, durante el rodaje, a la improvisación, a lo auténticamente espontáneo, a la verosimilitud, al goce del momento y, durante la fase de montaje, al rigor, a la experimentación y a la ruptura de estereotipos visuales, Serra construye productos cinematográficos del más alto nivel artístico. En La mort de Louis XIV dicho modo de proceder se mantiene inalterable. Los cambios introducidos con respecto a la localización y la participación de algunos actores profesionales no contradicen, sin embargo, la apuesta estética que característica de anteriores películas. Con La mort de Louis XIV Serra se mantiene fiel a su concepción del arte, a su original manera de llevarlo a cabo, aquella que se rinde a la experimentación, al desafío de lo previsto, a lo lúdico y a la belleza.

*Reseña publicada en Romanische Studien, Núm 6, 2017.

[1] Cristina Savall, “Entrevista a Albert Serra director de cine”, El Periódico de Aragón, 22 de Mayo 2008, http://www.elperiodicodearagon.com/noticias/escenarios/albert-serra-director-cine-sentirse-amado-no-va-caracter_411595.html, consultado el 15 de agosto de 2016.

[2] José María Caparrós Lera, “Ayer y hoy del nonato cine catalán”, Nuestro tiempo 216 (1972), 82.

[3] Marie-Soledad Rodríguez, “En busca de un hipotético cine castellano o castellano-leonés”, en Cine, nación y nacionalidades en España, ed. Nancy Berthier y Jean-Claude Seguin (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2007), 103.

[4] Recordemos que en el marco de las coproducciones sólo se habla de colaboraciones entre estados.

[5] En una entrevista para la revista Transit, y ante la pregunta del entrevistador sobre si se veía haciendo una película con actores profesionales, Serra contestó: “Nunca”. Pablo García Conde, “Entrevista a Albert Serra”, Transit, 7 de Enero 2014, http://cinentransit.com/entrevista-a-albert-serra/, consultado el 21 de agosto de 2016.

[6] Imma Merino, “Albert Serra: tot artista té l’obligació de fer una cosa que la gent no pugui entendre per més que s’hi esforci”, Diari Ara, 13 de Marzo 2016, http://www.ara.cat/suplements/rar/AlbertSerra-entrevista_0_1537646374.html, consultado el 22 de agosto de 2016.

[7] Vicenç Batalla, “Albert Serra: Jean-Pierre Léaud és un vanitós i m’agrada”, El Món, 29 de Mayo 2016, http://www.mon.cat/cat/notices/2016/05/albert_serra_jean-pierre_leaud_es_vanidos_i_m_agrada_164437.php, consultado el 22 de agosto de 2016. Traducción propia.

[8] Jaume C. Pons Alorda, Apocalipsi Uuuuuuuaaaaaaa. Diari de rodatge d’Història de la meva mort d’Albert Serra, Barcelona, Comanegra, 2015, 169-181. Traducción propia.

[9] Olivier Père, “Cannes 2016 Jour 11: La Mort de Louis XIV de Albert Serra (Hors compétition, séance spéciale)”, Arte, 21 de Mayo 2016  http://www.arte.tv/sites/olivierpere/2016/05/21/cannes-2016-jour-11-la-mort-de-louis-xiv-de-albert-serra-seance-speciale/, consultado el 25 de agosto de 2016. Traducción propia.

[10] Juan Carlos Morales: “Entrevista a Albert Serra”, Radio Nacional de España, 6 de Julio 2016, http://mvod.lvlt.rtve.es/resources/TE_SELOJO/mp3/4/2/1466446309324.mp3, Min. 10:40-11:35, consultado el 25 de agosto de 2016.

[11] Cf. Batalla, “Albert Serra: Jean-Pierre Léaud és un vanitós i m’agrada”, s.p. Traducción propia.

[12] Cf. Merino, “Albert Serra: tot artista té l’obligació de fer una cosa que la gent no pugui entendre per més que s’hi esforci”, s.p. Traducción propia.

This is a talk I recently gave at the MLA, and which I hope to further develop for ALCESXXI

Documenter or Documented?: Madronita Andreu-Klein and the Trouble with ‘Directing While Female’
Leigh Mercer

Between 1922 and 1980, Madronita Andreu, one of the first women in Spain to operate a cinematographic camera, obsessively recorded her life on film, creating more than 900 16mm and Super 8 home movies. The daughter of Doctor Andreu, famous for his pharmaceutical business and the urbanization of Barcelona’s Sant Gervasi and Tibidabo districts, and the wife, first of Colombian diplomat Mauricio Obregón, and later of Jewish-American Max Klein, then the President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Spain, Madronita Andreu moved among the most elite social and cultural circles of her era, both in Spain and abroad.
Since 1995, 528 of Andreu’s films have been archived at the Filmoteca de Catalunya, donated by her widower, Max Klein. They represent an incomparable history of a woman’s domestic life and her public engagement during a period in Spain in which few if any women had access to film technology. This bequest to the Catalonian film archive, however, was not complete, as numerous films were not included in the donation, most notably a home movie in which Max Klein teaches dictator Francisco Franco how a Polaroid camera works. Yet despite such important exclusions, Madronita Andreu’s documentation of the self from the 1920s through the 1960s, in particular, stands as an utterly revolutionary act in an era when, as Ian Aitken has argued, personal subjectivity was considered anathema to the documentary enterprise, which was largely practiced as a means of knowing the outward social and material world.
Taking advantage of only a fraction of the Legado Klein archive at the Filmoteca de Catalunya, the 2003 documentary Un instant en vida aliena (titled A Glimpse of Other Lives in English) first made the larger public aware of the Andreu home movies. Directed by José Luis López Linares, the film went on to win the Goya for best documentary in 2004. López Linares, in an interview with El Periódico de Aragón, has admitted that, given the 150 hours of home movie footage available to him, “podría haber hecho ocho películas distintas” (“El legado de Madronita Andreu…”). It is thus curious that the film that López Linares ultimately made never fully addresses the role of Andreu as both a documentarian and a documented subject. Instead, as the film’s title suggests, its primary focus is the unique glimpses of Andreu’s bourgeois social milieu in Catalonia, Switzerland, and New York captured by her familial filmmaking. This will include glimpses of such figures as Salvador Dalí and even Julio Iglesias, with López Linares shifting into slow motion cinematography to make sure his audiences capture these glimpses. However, Andreu’s choices as a self-taught director, and her personal subjectivity as the artist protagonist in many of her home movies, are frequently glossed over and even erased in this 2003 documentary.
Briefly, in what follows, I want to explore how Un instant foregrounds a very constrained reading of Andreu as the protagonist seen in her own films, and moreover undermines her agency as a filmmaker who directs the subjects and stages the terrains of her home movies. As Jim Lane has shown, autobiographical documentaries, despite their focus on the themes of self and personal identity, or perhaps because of this focus, have the capacity to raise serious questions about broader cultural life (The Autobiographical Documentary in America). Building on Lane’s ideas, I would suggest that Andreu’s filmic self-examination and the 2003 documentary treatment of her oeuvre have much to say about the challenges of “directing while female” in modern and contemporary Spain.
The most obvious way in which López Linares’s documentary undermines the artistic merit of Andreu’s cinema is through omission. Kathleen Vernon has argued that, “in watching and analyzing the film we can only speculate on the distance and differences between the 150 hours of raw material and the finished 80-minute documentary… [though] one thing that is clear is that López Linares intended to maintain our awareness of the original domestic character of the films” (122). Certainly, despite the fact that Andreu’s home movies from the 1920s and early 1930s might be considered the most unique and revolutionary filmic works in her catalog, given that almost no other Spanish women were working as filmmakers during that era, this period is given short shrift in López Linares’s documentary. Un instant only includes images from the family album from this era, so to speak – Madronita’s son learning to walk, her husband dancing the Charleston in the garden, or her children driving toy cars on Tibidabo Avenue and around the family mansion’s grounds. However, my own consultation of the Klein archive at the Filmoteca de Catalunya makes it clear that this was a strict curatorial choice on the part of López Linares. From this same era, the archive holds footage that Madronita shot in 1933 at a professional bike race on Montjuic, and this same film reel includes a panning shot of the grounds of Barcelona’s 1929 International Exposition. Another reel from 1929 shows the Kleins visiting the Ibero-American Exposition in Seville and captures views of the Giralda and the city’s street life. Yet another reel, filmed in the early 1930s includes a guided visit to the ruins at Empuries. Although brief clips from the Seville reel are in fact included in the López Linares documentary, their ethnographic nature is quashed by the voiceover that accompanies them (and which I’ll discuss further momentarily). This voiceover states that the footage is important because it was the first Andreu filmed after her first husband’s death. So while Un instant will later suggest that Andreu had a strong ethnographic eye in the images she captured during her travels to Africa and India in the 1960s, López Linares’s film at the outset shows little interest in Andreu’s engagement with the public sphere during her first decade of filmmaking. In this way, elements that were in fact present even in Andreu’s earliest home movies are, in López Linares’s telling, only attributable to Andreu because of her advanced age and cumulative years behind the camera.
Un instant also regularly denies the idea of Andreu as an artist, and goes so far as to attribute any artistic sensibility she might have to masculine influence. The crucial opening sequence of the film shows take after take of Madronita walking in front of her camera, arranging fresh flowers in her living room, and sitting down on her sofa. This sequence is overlaid with the distinctive sound of a home movie projector, which will become a leitmotif of the soundtrack, reminding the viewer that Andreu’s films were not meant for public consumption and were made without the pretenses of commercial cinema. Thus, within the first two minutes of the documentary, visual and aural cues function together to frame Madronita herself and her home movie obsession within the realm of frivolous domesticity. Furthermore, subtitles – the only ones that are employed in the film beyond acknowledgement at the end of the documentary of her date of death and the ownership of the footage used — are displayed below these repetitive takes, stating starkly that Andreu “no va tenir mai pretensions artistiques i va mantenir l’obra dins de l’ambit familiar i privat.” Another subtitle likewise frames Madronita within a domestic discourse, outlining her family tree, particularly noting that her mother was the sister of famous Catalonian painter Francisco Miralles.
This seemingly innocuous information will take on new meaning later in the film, when we are subsequently presented with a “talking head,” a fictitious film and TV editor named Salvador Guardiola, who states that he met Madronita later in her life when she asked him to transfer her home movies to videotape and organize them, sharing many anecdotes about her films with him along the way. From this point on, Guardiola’s voice will become the narrator of the documentary, a device used to create a coherent storyline for the roughly 30 home movies that make up the remainder of the visual content of this film. Despite speaking at length of the charms of Madronita as a “gran seductora”, in what follows, Guardiola only once remarks upon Andreu’s abilities with regards to the formal composition of her films, stating that the beautiful aesthetic of Madronita’s footage of New York City is surely an inherited trait from her maternal uncle, painter Francisco Miralles.
There is much to unpack here, so I will highlight just a few things. First, it is striking how this documentary takes the autobiographical cinematographic record of one of the earliest women filmmakers in Spain and invents a fictitious male archivist to give meaning to her work. That this fictitious archivist narrator shows himself to be conflicted over the value of her work on numerous occasions is equally remarkable. In one instance he notes that he is unsettled by the happiness he finds in Andreu’s films, not believing it to be true, since he is accustomed to the pathos so often found in commercial cinema. The narrator’s comments on the formal achievements of Madronita’s cinema, by citing Andreu’s genetic inheritance from a male forebear, unbelievably suggest that Madronita’s abilities as a director couldn’t possibly be her own. Narrating over footage that Madronita filmed of Manolete’s penultimate bullfight in 1948, Guardiola does note that this is the first color film created in Spain, but it is stated in passing, with greater emphasis placed on Manolete’s impending death in Linares. Finally, even when Guardiola’s voiceover recognizes the extent to which Madronita directed her daughters as the main actresses in her films, styling their performances in shoots that could last all day long, dealing with questions of lighting and costuming, he undermines the power of her interventions by stating that Andreu’s daughters were clearly her biggest victims.
Ultimately, even though Un instant en vida aliena fails to discursively register the multiple modes of self-inscription present in Andreu’s autobiographical filmmaking, her self-definition as both the director and documented protagonist of her films shines through in the home movie footage included in López Linares’s documentary. The Madronita we see on screen often shows awareness of the camera and positions her body for maximum effect. In one early clip, Kathleen Vernon has argued, Andreu even mugs for the camera in a way that signals her knowledge of the acting style of Hollywood starlets of the 1930s. One can also appreciate the way in which she carefully constructs and frames the scenes she captures, often entering the frame from the side after having completed her camera set up and positioning her friends and family members. Madronita often fills her home movies with staged physical comedy of a very cinematic quality, such as in this home movie on the beach at Cadaques, and other scenes, particularly of technology or landscapes, seem captured for their ability to communicate an emotional tone or a particular aesthetic. Though López Linares’s documentary should be lauded for shedding light on the Klein archive and helping to integrate Andreu’s home movies into the canon of Spanish film, the troubling absence of recognition of Andreu’s agency as a filmic artist is sadly all too emblematic of the way in which female filmmakers have been treated by scholars of Spanish film history. As Barbara Zecchi has reminded us in her 2014 book, Spanish women cinema pioneers remain “desenfocadas,” and we must strive to “superar la apreciación de que es relativamente reciente el hecho de que las mujeres hayan participado en las áreas de dirección [cinematrográfica]” (Anna Solà and Marta Selva 18).

Syllabus for graduate seminar on Spanish cinema and the uneven experience of modernity

SPAN 596/ CMS597: Spanish Cinema and the Uneven Experience of Modernity

Class: Tuesdays, 2:30-5:20 in MGH 228
Professor Mercer
Office: Padelford B219
Office hours: Thursdays 1:40-3:00 and by appointment
Telephone: 543-2059
Email: lmercer@uw.edu

Course materials:

***All films are available to stream on our course Canvas website, unless otherwise noted*** https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/1097973/pages

• El hotel eléctrico (The Electric Hotel); Segundo de Chomón (1905?)

• Barcelona en tranvía (Barcelona by Trolley), Ricardo de Baños (1908)
(http://www.europafilmtreasures.eu/fiche_technique.htm?ID=245)
• Las hurdes, tierra sin pan (Land Without Bread), Luis Buñuel (1933)
• ¡Bienvenido, Mister Marshall! (Welcome, Mr. Marshall!)and El verdugo (The Executioner) , Luis García Berlanga (1953 and 1963)
• Cría cuervos (Raise Ravens), Carlos Saura (1976)
• Laberinto de pasiones (Labyrinth of Passion, Pedro Almodóvar (1982)
• Jamón, jamón, Bigas Luna (1992)
• Te doy mis ojos (Take My Eyes), Icíar Bollaín (2003)
• Princesas, Fernando León de Aranoa (2005)
• El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth), Guillermo del Toro (2006)
• Biutiful, Alejandro González Iñárritu (2010)
• Arrugas (Wrinkles), Ignacio Ferreras (2011)
• Con la pata quebrada (Barefoot in the Kitchen), Diego Galán (2013)
• En tierra extraña (In a Foreign Land), Icíar Bollaín (2014)
• 10.000 km, Carlos Marques Marcet (2014)
• All readings are available under “Files” on our Canvas course webpage: https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/1097973/files

Course Goals and Requirements:

This course examines the construction of the Spanish nation in the context of cinematic production stretching from the silent era to the present day. We will interrogate common assumptions regarding Spain’s uneven experience of modernity, at the same time as we consider and complicate the canonical periodization of Spanish cinema. Topics will include: “Las dos Españas, or the two Spains; childhood and the Franco dictatorship; the decadence of Iberian machismo; the culture of crisis; and Spanish responses to immigration and globalization.

• Class attendance is essential, because your active participation is required for this course to function properly. Students should come to class having screened the films and prepared the readings, and ready to participate regularly in discussion.
• Students must submit an abstract and minimal bibliography as a proposal for their final paper. An abstract is a summary of about a page (300-500 words) of the topic to be discussed, the primary texts and theories to be studied, the arguments to be undertaken, and the anticipated conclusions to be reached. If you are unfamiliar with this genre of writing, please ask me to provide you with models.
• Final papers for the course should be 9-10 pp. plus a bibliography, and of a conference presentation quality. What does this mean? While you will research and studiously craft this presentation as much as you might a standard article-length paper, you should use a more informal register and keep in mind the oral delivery of this work.
• To broaden class discussion and the support the pedagogical formation of students, pairs of students will present on one of the films under study. Students will present for 30-40 minutes on topics of their choosing. Topics must be cleared with Prof. Mercer via email at least 48 hours before class. Students will be graded individually on their preparedness and ability to facilitate class involvement by engaging their classmates in discussion and critical analysis. As much as possible, students should make their presentations interactive and engage with the critical readings assigned for the day of their presentation.
• Students are responsible for writing one-page reaction papers to each of the films under study. These reaction papers will be collected at the end of each seminar meeting, so always bring a printed copy of your essay to class. These short essays are not meant to be summaries of what you have seen, nor a complete review of the film, but rather offer a sense of your initial critical reflections on the technical, thematic, or affective importance of each cinematic work.
• So that accommodations can be made, please let me know as soon as possible if you have a physical or learning disability that you believe may affect your performance in this class.
• No late papers will be accepted, unless you provide a written medical excuse.

Grading:

Abstract: 25%
Presentation: 20%
Participation and reaction papers: 20%
Final Paper: 35%

Course Schedule:

January 3: Introduction to the course. Las dos Españas, or the Two Spains. Barcelona by Trolley, The Electric Hotel, and Land Without Bread.

Reading: “Silent Cinema and Its Pioneers,” “Surrealism and the Advent of Sound,” “Interior and Internal Spain,” and “History of Spanish Cinema.”

January 10: The Franco Dictatorship and the U.S.A. Welcome, Mr. Marshall!

Reading: “Film Studies Basics,” “¡Bienvenido Mr. Marshall! and the Renewal of Spanish Cinema,” and a selection from Simon Barton’s A History of Spain.
Optional reading: “¡Bienvenido Mr. Marshall!” by Wendy Rolph
Presentation:

January 17: Dictatorial Decadence. The Executioner

Reading: “The Liberal Dictatorship and its Agony”
Presentation:

January 24: The Children of Franco. Raise Ravens and Pan’s Labyrinth

Reading: “Cría cuervos, Raise Ravens” and “Malevolent Fathers and Rebellious Daughters.”
Presentation:

January 31: “El futuro ya está aquí/ The Future Is Already Here”. Labyrinth of Passion

Reading: “Blind Shots” (read only the introductory pages and the section on Labyrinth of Passion)
Presentation:

February 7: Research consultations with Deb Raftus, Hispanic Studies librarian. TURN IN ABSTRACT via email by Feb 10 at 12pm.

February 14: Decadence of the Iberian macho man and the Ave/Eva myth. Spanish women on film. Jamón, jamón and Barefoot in the Kitchen

Reading: “From España ye-yé to España je-je,” and
https://pragda.com/film/barefoot-in-the-kitchen/
Presentation:

February 21: Social horrors. Take My Eyes and Wrinkles

Reading: “Regarding the Pain of Others,” “Representations of Violence” and http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/wrinkles-arrugas-film-review-237302
Presentation:

February 28: Immigration and Globalization.
Princesas and Biutiful

Reading: “The Politics of Looking,” “Transnational Reciprocity,” and “A Biutiful City.”
Presentation:

March 7: The culture of crisis. Spain beyond Spain. In a Foreign Land and 10,000 km.

Reading: “The Socialists Strike Back,” http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/movies/review-in-10-000-km-lovers-an-ocean-apart-struggle-to-connect.html, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/a-foreign-land-en-tierra-736112, and

Presentation:

***March 10***: TURN IN FINAL PAPER TO PDL B-219. SLIDE UNDER THE DOOR.

Reference Works of Interest:

100 Years of Spanish Cinema, Tatjana Pavlovic
A Companion to Spanish Cinema, Jo Labanyi and Tatjana Pavlovic
A History of Spanish Film, Sally Faulkner
Spanish Cinema, Rob Stone
Spanish Cinema, A Student’s Guide, Barry Jordan and Mark Allinson,
Spanish Cinema in the Global Context, Samuel Amago
Spanish Cinema: The Auteurist Tradition, Peter William Evans
Spanish National Cinema, Núria Triana Toribio