Subversive Spanish Cinema

The Politics of Performance

Fiona Noble

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350194991
• eBook ISBN: 9781350152465
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art & Politics

A camp lipsynched routine by three air stewards distracts unsuspecting passengers from the fact that their plane is to make a crash landing. Performance functions as a diversion from unsavoury realities. In this way, Pedro Almodóvar's 2013 film I'm So Excited adopts a strategy of subversive anti-establishment censor-evading filmmaking practices under Franco. Contemporary cinematic performance in Spain intersects with politics to provide a platform for views and voices that do not conform to the dominant political narrative. An essential text for scholars, students and aficionados of Spanish cinema, Subversive Spanish Cinema: The Politics of Performance is the first single-authored monograph to focus on performance in this context. The book analyses interactions between performance and politics in technical and conceptual terms considering, for example, performance styles, the narrative role of performance and political interventions by actors such as Javier Bardem and Juan Diego Botto. Ultimately, Subversive Spanish Cinema: The Politics of Performance posits performance, within the specific context of contemporary Spanish cinema, as a politically-potent device and proposes that it is precisely for this reason that the arts have borne the brunt of aggressive austerity measures enforced by Spain's conservative government in recent years.

1

Performing pastness

The performance of Spain’s Civil War and Francoist past has proved a principal preoccupation of recent Spanish cultural production. As Jo Labanyi notes, while there were few films and virtually no fictional writing that engaged with the topic of Francoism in the first ten years following the death of Franco, there has, since the late 1990s, been ‘a flood of novels and collections of testimonies on the wartime and postwar repression as well as a significant number of fiction films and documentaries’ (2007: 95). A sense of nostalgic sentimentalism dominates creative reconstructions of the past within these works, which in the cinematic context include films such as Belle époque (Trueba 1992), Secretos del corazón (Secrets of the Heart) (Armendáriz 1997) and La lengua de las mariposas (The Butterfly’s Tongue) (Cuerda 1999). Awarded the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1992, the first of these examples, Belle époque, is a light-hearted work that presents a rose-tinted depiction of Republican Spain, a time and place stereotypically, and often unproblematically, characterized by heady liberalism and relaxed attitudes to gender, sexuality and relationships. Such films perform pastness romantically, nostalgically, theatrically. Though they do not deny the violence and horror of the historical periods in which they are set, they tend to present it in fairly uncomplicated Manichean terms of good versus evil. As these films indicate then, the recourse to performance as theme or in the form of historical recreation is not necessarily subversive.

My focus in this chapter is on three films: Blancanieves (Snow White) (Berger 2012), Balada triste de trompeta (The Last Circus) (de la Iglesia 2010) and Los amantes pasajeros (I’m So Excited!) (Almodóvar 2013). Engaging diverse modes of performance including flamenco, bullfighting, circus performance and lip-synched dance routines, these films deliberately undermine the nostalgic approach outlined above through a narrative focus on performance, on characters who are performers and by means of the distinct performance styles of the actors who play them. The films are united by their focus on the themes of circularity and repetition in relation to their depictions and deployments of performance. They engage the dual nature of performance as highlighted by Elin Diamond who underscores the ‘terminology of “re” in discussions of performance, as in reembody, reinscribe, reconfigure, resignify’ (1996: 2). For Diamond, ‘“Re” acknowledges the pre-existing discursive field, the repetition – and the desire to repeat – within the performative present’ (1996: 2). Through this constellation of performance, pastness and repetition, these three films convey the idea that history is cyclical and that the past is condemned to repeat itself.

The pasts that these films revisit and recreate connect closely with the Civil War and Francoist eras explored in the romanticized historical memory products of the 1990s mentioned above. Nevertheless, my claim is that they engage these historical periods not to reflect on that past per se, but rather to convey a sense of frustration and disillusionment with the present. Further to their converging engagements with performance, these films are united by their shared production dates around the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century and can be defined as post-Crisis Spanish cinema. Though created prior to the austerity measures aimed at the culture industry introduced by Mariano Rajoy’s conservative government in 2012, the three case studies emerge from the aftermath of the 2007–8 economic crash which hit Spain particularly hard. By indexing distinct periods of twentieth-century Spanish history from this perspective of post-Crisis financial precarity, these three films perform the past to highlight the inadequacies and failings of the present. Violent, hyperbolic and hysterical, Blancanieves, Balada triste de trompeta and Los amantes pasajeros undercut the nostalgic romanticism that has dominated contemporary Spanish cinema focused on the past and instead emphasize the potential political subversiveness of performance.

Silencing Snow White (and everyone else): Blancanieves (Berger 2012)

A contemporary silent black and white film set in 1920s Spain, Blancanieves performs the past in both its form and narrative. In terms of form, the absence of both colour and audible dialogue is congruous to the temporal setting of the narrative in the pre-sound, pre-colour cinematic era. Through performance styles adapted to the silent mode and formal tropes associated with early silent cinema (iris in/out, dissolves, superimpositions), the film engages a vision of Spain’s past both from a contemporary perspective and via a lens of pastness. By adopting such historically anchored styles, Blancanieves conveys a sense of stasis whereby little has changed in the intervening years between the contemporaneous moment of production and the 1920s setting of the film. The film utilizes the silent mode in conjunction with performance styles, namely flamenco and bullfighting, typically associated with centralizing discourses of Spanish national identity and discourses of otherness imposed on Spain from outwith its own borders. In this way, the centrality of silencing with regard to performance in Blancanieves underscores the ways in which ideas of Spanishness that do not conform to the dominant mode have been quashed or silenced not just in the past, but also in the present day.

A brief overview of the plot underscores the centrality of performance in the film. Protagonist Carmencita (Sofía Oria/Macarena Garcia), meaning ‘Little Carmen’, is the daughter of bullfighter Antonio de Villalta (Daniel Giménez Cacho) and flamenco artist Carmen de la Triana (Inma Cuesta). In a dramatic opening sequence, bullfighter Antonio is brutally gored in the ring. This sequence emphasizes the centrality and brutality of performance from the outset, since the stress of witnessing such horror in a public performance venue sparks the onset of labour for Antonio’s wife Carmen. Tragically, Carmen dies in childbirth. Paralysed as a result of the goring, Antonio is unable to care for his daughter, who becomes the charge of her maternal grandmother, Doña Concha (Ángela Molina). But when she dies shortly after Carmencita’s First Communion, the child is sent to join her father, who in the interim has married scheming nurse Encarna (Maribel Verdú). While Encarna forbids contact between Carmen and her father, the pair surreptitiously bond by reading books, performing to the flamenco music recorded by Carmen’s mother and practising the art of bullfighting. Discovering their illicit relationship, Encarna disposes of Carmen’s father before instructing her lover Genaro (Pere Ponce) to end Carmen’s life. Carmen survives, is resuscitated by Rafita (Sergio Dorado) and is taken in by his group of bullfighting dwarves. With no memory of her identity, she is rechristened Blancanieves (‘Snow White’) by the dwarves, who form an alternative, even queer, family for the orphaned protagonist (Jesse Barker 2017: 192). The bullfighting knowledge, instilled in her by her father, returns as she enters the ring with them, and she soon becomes renowned as a successful torera. Encarna attends one of Carmen’s fights to gift her a poisoned apple. Succumbing to the poison and having signed her life over to a manipulative bullfighting agent, the unconscious Carmen becomes the star attraction in a freak show where clients line up and pay a fee to see if they can revive her with a kiss. In this way, Blancanieves enacts a formal and physical silencing of its protagonist and yet forces her to continue performing regardless.

As this plot summary suggests, performance and silence are inextricably linked in Blancanieves. However, as is widely acknowledged, the label ‘silent cinema’ is something of a misnomer since silent cinema was never actually silent. As Michel Chion notes, ‘silent cinema should really be called “deaf cinema”’ (1999: 7) insofar as early cinema was not devoid of sound. In the pre-sound era, films were typically screened accompanied either by a narrator or by a live musical performance (Chion 1999: 7–8). Upon its release, Blancanieves paid homage to this with screenings accompanied by live orchestra performances. Admittedly, this layer of sound performance is only accessible to those who were able to attend such screenings of the film. However, in contradistinction to early silent cinema, Blancanieves, as a contemporary silent film, makes use of a recorded soundtrack to accompany the cinematic, DVD and on-demand streaming releases of the film. This demonstrates the complexities of the interrelations of performance, silence and sound not just in early silent cinema but especially with regard to the absence of voice and dialogue in contemporary cinema.

Besides its recorded soundtrack, Blancanieves is, like early silent cinema, not entirely devoid of sound but rather conveys sound in distinct ways. As Mary Ann Doane argues, this occurred in the silent era via the corporeal re-emergence of the voice, through gestures and facial expressions, and by means of intertitles, which uncannily detached the speech of the actor from the image of his or her body (1980: 33). With early silent cinema, the need to represent sound in alternative ways was due to technological limitations that privileged the image. Blancanieves alludes to this idea through its emphasis on visual representations of sound which are bound up with the theme of vocal, aural and musical performances. This is most evident with regard to the depiction of flamenco in the film and through the centrality of aural performance technologies such as the records of flamenco performer Carmen de la Triana and a gramophone, gifted to protagonist Carmencita on the occasion of her First Communion by her absent father, upon which she plays her deceased mother’s records. As Chion notes, the isolation of voices from bodies facilitated by devices such as the telephone and the gramophone renders the voice as ‘the voice of the dead’ (1999: 46). The prevalence of such sound technologies within the contemporary silent film thus underscores the spectrality of vocal performance, emphasizing the interconnectedness of performance, death and loss in Blancanieves.

FIGURE 1.1 The mother as absent presence. ‘Blancanieves’ directed by Pablo Berger © Arcadia Motino Pictures 2012. All rights reserved.

It is precisely through such sound technologies that Carmen de la Triana, mother to protagonist Carmencita, performs in Blancanieves. In spite of her death in the opening scenes of the film, Carmen de la Triana appears posthumously through flamenco performances facilitated by the aural technologies of the gramophone and the record. Her first posthumous appearance occurs during the celebrations of Carmencita’s First Communion. Carmencita sits sullenly beneath a table, sulking because her father has not attended the event. A fast-paced flamenco rhythm begins on the soundtrack. Carmencita looks to her right to see a close-up image of a record spinning on the gramophone superimposed on the tablecloth. This image fades as another superimposed image appears, this time of her mother wearing stereotypically Spanish costume and dancing flamenco in time with the accompanying soundtrack, beckoning animatedly to Carmencita (Figure 1.1). Emphasizing both the separation of voice and body and her spectral status, Carmen de la Triana wears a fixed smile and her lips do not move in time to the spoken interjections on the flamenco track as it begins. These superimposed images are not a product of Carmencita’s imagination but rather indicative of the action occurring outwith the table beneath which the young girl hides. As the superimposed image of her mother fades away, her grandmother lifts the tablecloth and appears beside Carmencita, encouraging her to join in with the celebrations and flamenco, dancing in a manner similar to that just performed posthumously by her mother. The fading of her mother’s image, replaced by her grandmother/substitute mother figure, underscores the disconnect between Carmencita’s absent mother and the flamenco track that she once performed, here played posthumously through the replayable technology of the record. The lyrics of the song, an original bulería (fast flamenco rhythm in twelve beats) entitled ‘No te puedo encontrar’ (‘I Cannot Find You’), evoke loss and mourning, once more highlighting the spectrality of flamenco performer Carmen de la Triana:

Te busco y no te puedo encontrar/

Te busco y no te puedo encontrar/

Te llamo y no me contestas/

No sé por dónde estarás.

(I look for you and cannot find you/

I look for you and cannot find you/

I call you and you do not answer/

I don’t know where you might be.)

The symbolic pertinence of these lyrics is manifold. At the level of performance and technology, their transmission by means of an aural recording rather than a performance witnessed first-hand underscores the flamenco performances of Carmen de la Triana simultaneously, and somewhat contradictorily, as an absent presence and a present absence, a voice detached from its body to use Chion’s terminology (1999: 46). In terms of character and plot, Carmen constitutes an absence in the life of her daughter Carmencita, who has never known her mother due to her death in childbirth. Furthermore, the depiction of flamenco singer Carmen de la Triana conforms to Chion’s association of death with narrative voice-over: ‘What could be more natural in a film than a dead person continuing to speak as a bodiless voice, wandering about the surface of the screen?’ (1999: 47). While Carmen de la Triana does not fulfil the role of a narrator in voice-over, her lyrical performance stands out in a work otherwise devoid of audible dialogue and predominantly accompanied by an instrumental soundtrack. In this way, Blancanieves draws attention to the potency of performance with regard to its ability to conjure spectres of the past and to render them present once more.

While these aural technologies conjure up the voice and image of the dead mother and facilitate her posthumous presence in the film, they also connect flamenco performance to notions of circularity and of repetition. The initial superimposed image of the record spinning on the gramophone, subsequently depicted in situ, visually indexes the significance of circularity for the technology that facilitates access to the recorded performance of Carmen de la Triana. Close-ups of the elegant wrist movements performed by Doña Concha as she dances further emphasize this connection between performance and circularity. Cinematographically, circularity dominates by means of dizzying camerawork that echoes the movements of Carmencita and her grandmother as they dance opposite one another, performing a range of spins and rotations. Connecting the themes of circularity and repetition, the record as technological mode allows for the repetition and replaying of the recorded performance. At the level of character and narrative, these layers of performance and repetition abound, coming to the fore through the intergenerational transfer at work in this scene. Since the deceased Carmen de la Triana cannot fulfil her role as mother, her own mother, Doña Concha, repeats her performance of motherhood with her granddaughter Carmencita. The film confirms this idea through the substitution of the superimposed image of Carmen de la Triana with the vibrant presence of Doña Concha in situ. Tragically, parallels and repetitions connect these characters too in terms of death. As the scene progresses, Doña Concha suffers a fatal heart attack that sees death once again devastate the life of protagonist Carmencita. The child is not only named after her deceased mother Carmen but also performs flamenco just as her mother did. Moreover, by aligning Carmencita with her mother in this way, the scene hints at the morbid fate that awaits the protagonist. Carmencita, like her mother, will perish because of, even if indirectly, her career as a performer at the hands of Encarna, the woman who also denied her father the performance of parenthood. And like her mother, Carmencita will continue to perform posthumously, appearing as a morbid attraction at a travelling freak show.

The second sequence featuring the deceased Carmen de la Triana cements this interconnectedness of performance, circularity and repetition with regard to flamenco in Blancanieves. The scene once again emphasizes the significance of sound technologies that allow for the replaying of recorded performances, specifically the records of Carmen de la Triana and the gramophone. Close-ups, on the handle that Carmencita turns to start the apparatus, on the centre of her mother’s record as it spins on the gramophone and on the spinning grooves of the record as she lowers the needle, indicate their dependence on circularity. Dressed in folkloric attire, Carmencita performs to another of her mother’s recorded tracks titled ‘De reina, na’ (‘I am no queen’), which as Anna K. Cox notes, ‘tells the story of a woman who disguised herself as a Moorish queen in order to make herself attractive marriage material for the hidalgos of the town during its romería’ (2017: 321). As she dances, her father either imagines or remembers (it is unclear) his wife and the mother of Carmencita. This in turn recalls the first time Antonio sees his daughter, in which she metamorphoses into the image of her mother by means of a dissolve. Both episodes underscore the notion of repetition and circularity that characterizes the mother–daughter relationship in Blancanieves. The recorded voice of Carmen de la Triana is a repeated performance imbued with the rhetoric of ‘re’ that permeates discussions of performance (Diamond 1996: 2). Like cinema itself, this recording makes the dead live again and again in a circular, replayable motion.¹ Emphasizing the interrelatedeness of performance and pastness, this (imagined?) revival of Carmen de la Triana not only indicates how performance channels memory, but also the extent to which performance simultaneously leads to and yet defies death in Blancanieves.

It is tempting to read this nexus of the spectral maternal voice, performance, pastness and memory in Blancanieves in relation to the phenomenon of historical memory. The notion of a hauntingly absent presence maps neatly onto theoretical and cultural studies paradigms that have been used to study the masses of Republicans disappeared during both the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent Francoist regime and whose remains are, to this day, concealed within unmarked mass graves (see, for example, Labanyi 2009). Moreover, the act of silencing at the core of the film underscores the extent to which, as Layla Renshaw succinctly notes, ‘The dominant memory politics of Franco’s regime gave public space and recognition to these losses, while those on the losing side were marginalized and silenced’ (2011: 21). But, as Ann Davies stresses, the academic embrace of Spanish ghosts tends to focus on spectrality as a means of ‘recuperating the traumatic memories of the Spanish Civil War and Francoism’ (2014). This leads Davies to question: ‘do they all speak of Spanish history? Are they all relics of Franco?’ (2014). With Davies’s point in mind, I contend that the int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Performing pastness
• 2 Performing identities
• 3 Metaperformances
• 4 Performance as catharsis and therapy
• Epilogue
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint