Spanish Practices

Literature, Cinema, Television

Paul Julian Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351192859
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

"This book is the first to explore the interaction of three media in contemporary Spain. Focusing on some of the best known and most important books, feature films, and television series in the country (including novelist Antonio Munoz Molina, director Pedro Almodovar, and the Spanish version of telenovela Ugly Betty), it addresses three pairs of linked issues central to Hispanic studies and beyond: history and memory, authority and society, and genre and transitivity. Much of the material is very recent and thus as yet unstudied. The book also focuses on the representation of gender, sexuality, and transnationalism in these texts. Drawing on approaches from both the humanities and social sciences it combines close readings of key texts with the analysis of production processes, media institutions, audiences, and reception."

Introduction

Spanish Practices

This book is the first to explore the interaction of three media in contemporary Spain. Focusing on some of the best-known and most important books, feature films, and television series in the country (including texts by novelist Antonio Muñoz Molina and director Pedro Almodóvar and the Spanish version of telenovela Ugly Betty), it addresses three pairs of linked issues central to Hispanic studies and beyond: history and memory, authority and society, and genre and transitivity. While much of the material is very recent and thus as yet unstudied, the book also focuses on issues that have long been central to scholars: the representation of gender, sexuality, and transnationalism. Drawing on approaches from both the humanities and social sciences, Spanish Practices combines close readings of key texts with the analysis of production processes, media institutions, audiences, and reception.

Historical memory is arguably the most important topic in contemporary Spain, the subject of a Law by the Socialist government in 2007. The first three chapters of the book address this topic by making connections between literature and visual media. Thus the first bloody years of Franco’s dictatorship are explored in very different ways by a successful film on the young female martyrs who lost the War and an autobiography by one of Spain’s best known women novelists, who grew up amongst the winners. The second chapter treats two versions of the death of the dictator: a fable on the resurrection of Franco written by the most popular comic writer of the 1970s and the special episodes on the same theme by Spain’s most popular TV drama, some thirty years after the event. Finally, a third chapter sketches the audiovisual ecology of the Transition to democracy and investigates the role of film and television in a prize-winning novel by the best-known writer of his generation.

The second section of the book explores questions of authority and society as depicted mainly in cinema. It begins by examining unpublished works by Spain’s most famous filmmaker, Pedro Almodóvar, short stories that stake a precocious claim to authorship even before his first feature, and relating them to his subsequent cinema. A second chapter contrasts two very different fiction films on the same traumatic topic: a missing child. While one is an accomplished and popular horror movie, the other is an austere art film. Pursuing a further urgent social issue, the final chapter in this section addresses the small and much-studied canon of feature films on the vital social issue of immigration and ethnicity, contrasting it with the less-known (but much larger) corpus of episodes of television series on the same theme.

The final section focuses mainly on television, as yet little researched for Spain and hence the medium that is treated at greatest length in the book. This section addresses the questions of genre and transitivity, or the passage between both formats and nations. The first chapter examines the key figure of Saint Teresa of Avila, a litmus test for the discussion of spirituality and sexuality, as depicted in a studiously respectful TV series and a wilfully scandalous feature film. The second explores the blurring of boundaries in two long-running and innovative series that hybridize situation comedy with soap opera and pseudo-documentary. The final chapter addresses perhaps the most famous of the transnational TV formats that have originated in Latin America, Ugly Betty, in its very different Spanish and US versions, which are read as examples of ‘bridge-crossings’ between genres and continents.

It is my hope that Spanish Practices will be of interest to academics and researchers in the fields of both Hispanic studies and general media and cultural studies. If this book has claims to originality, they are that it treats a wide range of new or little-studied material (from popular novels to art movies via national TV series) and that it makes new links between Spanish texts and more general contexts (queer and gender studies, world cinema, TV studies). It aims to shape knowledge by engaging literary scholars with visual culture and vice versa; and the subject areas covered are not only key questions in Spanish studies, but also debates in media and cultural studies and gender and queer studies.

There remains much to be done in making connections between these diverse fields. It is striking that there is still little contact between Peninsularists, who came to film overwhelmingly from a literary background, and specialist media scholars. For example at the Fiftieth Annual Conference of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies, held in Los Angeles on 17–21 March 2010, there was only one panel in over four hundred that treated Spain: ‘C12 The Reality/Fiction Paradigm in Contemporary Spanish Film and Television’ was proposed by myself and Norberto Mínguez Arranz, and also boasted a paper from Marsha Kinder, one of the very few distinguished media scholars who also has an interest in the Peninsula.

But if it is urgent to continue to make connections between Hispanism and media studies, it is also important to acknowledge that the former remains deeply engaged in literary studies, especially in the United States. I have thus returned to literature myself here in an attempt to investigate the parallels between print and the visual culture that has become my own specialization. In this spirit I make close analyses of three texts in diverse genres: autobiography, popular fiction, and prestigious novel.

In spite of this literary address, the book’s methodology draws more on current trends in media studies. Thus I carry out empirical, historicizing accounts of production, distribution, and exhibition, investigating how texts of all kinds are created, circulated, and consumed. This research turns up some surprising results in the first section of the book. For example, Las 13 rosas (‘The 13 Roses’, 2007) was directed by Emilio Martínez Lázaro, a filmmaker better known for contemporary romantic comedies than tragedies of the Civil War; and, unseen abroad, it was exploited in Spain by ‘psycho-pedagogues’ who sought to reproduce the experience of Francoist terror in the young schoolchildren of the now established democracy. Conversely Fernando Vizcaíno Casas, the best selling and ubiquitous novelist of the Transition (1975–82), is almost forgotten today, although his fantasy cum satire on the resurrection of the Generalísimo is, I argue, comparable to the replaying of the past in Spain’s most prestigious and best loved TV series, Cuéntame cómo pasó (‘Tell Me How It Happened’, TVE 2001–). Returning to the same period, we discover curious connections between two works, simultaneous in time, by Víctor Erice, Spain’s most prominent and austere film auteur, and Antonio Mercero, the country’s most durable and best-loved creator in television. Meanwhile the rapidly changing experience of the media is indelibly incorporated into Antonio Muñoz Molina’s epic novel encompassing the Civil War, Dictatorship, Transition, and new democracy, El jinete polaco (‘The Polish Horseman’, 1991).

In the book’s second section film studies are put to uncommon uses. Thus I retread the hallowed ground of auteur theory, but in an attempt to account for unknown print texts by Almodóvar, short stories which also go back to the time of the late dictatorship. Addressing vital social themes, I explore how Bourdieu’s account of ‘the rules of art’ (of the twin competing economies of commerce and aesthetics) comes under pressure when a popular and an art house director (J. A. Bayona and Jaime Rosales, respectively) treat the same topic in the same year (2007). My account of the important and recent cinema and television on immigration and ethnicity draws heavily on a Hispanist and humanist cinema scholar (Isabel Santaolalla) and a Spanish TV specialist with a social science background (Charo Lacalle). In general I aim to reconcile such qualitative and quantitative interpretations, asking both ‘What kind of meanings do texts take on?’ and ‘What precise position do these texts occupy in the cultural field?’ My intention here is in part to avoid Hispanism’s continuing focus on a small body of feature films (such as those on immigration), which are held (erroneously) to embody both social conditions and cultural preferences in Spain.

The final and lengthiest section of Spanish Practices begins by confronting a meticulous study of the Hollywood genre of the biopic (by George F. Custen) with two texts on the vital historical and proto-feminist figure of Saint Teresa, contrasting her representation in different periods and different media. More recent changes in the genre formats of both telecomedia and telenovela (serials aired during daytime in Spain) are related closely to the industrial conditions under which Spain has evolved an impressively professionalized TV fiction sector that is comparable only to the US in the quantity and quality of its series drama. For much invaluable detail on production and reception I rely here on Spanish scholars such as Mario García de Castro (also a practitioner) and the research team in the Universidad de Navarra led by Mercedes Medina.

On the other hand, my emphasis in this final section on ‘travelling narratives’ (the way foreign formats break down the barriers between genres and nations) and ‘indigenization’ (the way in which they are adapted to fit local circumstance) draws heavily on Milly Buonanno, the doyenne of European television studies. Buonanno is herself openly indebted to such British sociologists as Zygmunt Bauman and Anthony Giddens (on bridge-crossing and mediated experience, respectively) and to Indian-born Arjun Appadurai (on mediascapes). In a rather similar example of cross-cultural fertilization, Spanish TV itself borrows from and exports to its European neighbours and American rivals (both Northern and Latin). Such empirical and theoretical sources permit me to propose that a soap opera, no less than a critically praised novel or an award winning feature film, can be an exploration of possibilities and imagined alternatives that are not alienating but rather enriching of everyday life.

The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the phrase ‘old Spanish custom or practice’ (which it characterizes as ‘jocular’) means ‘a long-standing though un author ized or irregular practice’ (s.v. ‘Spanish’). I trust readers will forgive me the negat ive associations of my rather archaic punning title. While some of the textual practices discussed in this book may well be long-standing (the scabrous humour in Spanish sitcoms dates back to the picaresque novel, if not earlier), they are by no means unauthorized or irregular. Rather the literature, cinema, and television analysed and celebrated here offer examples of cultural and industrial sophistication that have few equals elsewhere.

CHAPTER 1
Winners and Losers in Cinema and Memoirs

Emilio Martínez Lázaro's Las 13 rosas (‘The 13 Roses’, 2007) and Esther Tusquets’ Habíamos ganado la guerra (‘We Had Won the War’, 2007)

Affect and aesthetics

Since the Transition to democracy, Spanish cultural and media producers have compulsively returned to the tragic inheritance of Civil War and Dictatorship. Most recently, with the seventieth anniversary of Franco’s victory, they have turned their attention to the earliest and most brutal years of that legacy. In Madrid in the summer of 2009 the Conde Duque arts centre presented ‘Presas’, a major exhibition documenting Francoist women prisoners and drawing on the rich archives of the Communist Party; and the Reina Sofía art museum rehung its collection, exhibiting new photographic and documentary material to place in context a revised display of Picasso’s Guernica. Arguably the most consistent and prominent exploration of the so-called ‘years of hunger’ comes from a less expected source: Televisión Española’s daytime serial Amar en tiempos revueltos (‘Loving in Troubled Times’), whose expert and surprisingly distressing first season premiered in 2005.

This first chapter treats two very different texts on the legacy of the Civil War and the early period of Francoist repression, which both appeared in Spain in 2007, the year that the Law of Historical Memory was passed by the Spanish Congress. Emilio Martínez Lázaro’s feature film Las 13 rosas is a dramatic reconstruction (based in part on Carlos Fonseca’s historical study) of a celebrated case of young women executed in Madrid in 1939 (they also featured in the exhibition ‘Presas’). Well received by audiences, if not critics, it still won four Goya awards. Esther Tusquets’ Habíamos ganado la guerra is a first volume of personal memoirs from a major writer best known for her pioneering novels with a lesbian theme, published some thirty years earlier. This book also begins in 1939, with the Francoist occupation of Barcelona when the author was just three years old.

Las 13 rosas focuses exclusively on the earliest victims of the Regime, offering an extreme case of terror, repression, and violence. The fact that some of the women had left written testimony to their experience (their words used in the film itself) heightens the pathos and immediacy of their predicament, personalizing a grand historical narrative in a unique way that connects with modern viewers. Arguably, however, Martínez Lázaro (a director better known for romantic comedies than historical tragedies) aestheticizes the women’s plight through insensitive use of the picturesque mise en scene typical of the costume drama or heritage picture. As we shall see, his film was also used nonetheless in an unprecedented way as a pedagogic tool for Spanish schoolchildren, who were encouraged to engage in educational activities such as the reconstruction of their own family history through discussion with grandparents.

Tusquets’ narrative is very different and, indeed, overtly polemical. Claiming that the losers’ point of view on the early Francoist period has already attracted great attention in memoirs and fiction, Tusquets sets out to document the perspective of the winners, in this case the privileged Barcelona bourgeoisie into which she was born. Far from being triumphalist, however, the book focuses on the subjective, and indeed eccentric, experience of a child and adolescent and on the perils (but also pleasures) of everyday life, necessarily distant from the grand narrative of the new regime.

Taken together, these texts thus clearly suggest two conflicting ways in which writers and filmmakers of contemporary Spain continue to work through the trauma of the earliest years of the Franco regime. And their evident success belies the impression of ‘memory fatigue’ that has greeted other recent treatments of the period, such as the recent feature film Los girasoles ciegos (‘The Blind Sunflowers’, an impeccably correct account of a Leftist in hiding after the War), which, against all expectations, received no major prize at the Goya awards of February 2009.

In this chapter, then, I take it for granted that artistic representations of the past are always also a comment on or an intervention in the present, thus risking the instrumentalization of historical tragedy. And it is worth making three more initial propositions and reservations to frame our readings of the two chosen texts: firstly, history and story are not easily separable (although the truth claims of narrative in documentary and fiction are clearly distinct); secondly, cognition and emotion need not be opposed (although the effects of affect remain unruly and unpredictable); and, thirdly, the objective and the subjective often go hand in hand in film and memoirs (although certain points of view are more generalizable than others). We shall return at greater length to this meshing of history and story in Chapter 7.

Clearly such considerations are inseparable from gender, when treating texts on or by women; and we should take care not to reconfirm the continuing subordination of the feminine when vindicating imagination, emotion, and subjectivity, albeit in newly defined terms. In general my position coincides w...