Spanish National Cinema

Nuria Triana-Toribio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781135124878
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This study examines the discourses of nationalism as they intersected or clashed with Spanish film production from its inception to the present. While the book addresses the discourses around filmmakers such as Almodóvar and Medem, whose work has achieved international recognition, Spanish National Cinema is particularly novel in its treatment of a whole range of popular cinema rarely touched on in studies of Spanish cinema. Using accounts of films, popular film magazines and documents not readily available to an English-speaking audience, as well as case studies focusing on the key issues of each epoch, this volume illuminates the complex and changing relationship between cinema and Spanish national identity.

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INTRODUCTION

La Comunidad is not, what do you call it, a homenaje [homage] to directors like Berlanga, Cukor, George Lucas. I'm not paying homage – I'm just copying. I'm not really a director: I'm more of a barman – I make cocktails.

Alex de la Iglesia¹

A SPANISH NATIONAL DIRECTOR?

The director Alex de la Iglesia is, in many ways, the present and possibly the future of Spanish national cinema. At the same time, his films may also be the death-knell of the very idea of a Spanish national cinema. Acción mutante (1993), El día de la bestia (1995), Perdita Durango (1997), Muertos de risa (1998) and La Comunidad (2000) could not have emerged from any nation other than Spain, so shot through are they with references to Spanish popular culture, references that only an indigenous audience would recognize and understand. For instance, the opening credits of El día de la bestia copy the opening credits of Historias para no dormir, a Spanish television horror serial of the 1960s and 1970s; Muertos de risa celebrates Spanish television comedy of the 1970s and 1980s; and La comunidad wryly concludes with characters in a bar dancing traditional chotis, surrounded by ‘typical' natives of Madrid. In other words, nothing is more castizo, more genuinely Spanish, than the films of Alex de la Iglesia, even if it is precisely the castizo that these films parody.

And yet, here is a director who is not in fact Spanish, who was born in the Basque country, but nevertheless declines to be associated with Basque cinema. He has made a film in English which was co-produced in Mexico (Perdita Durango) and cites among his influences that most Spanish of directors, Luis García Berlanga, but also two giants of Hollywood, George Cukor, master of the woman-centred melodrama, and George Lucas, master of the deep space melodrama. What sort of representative of Spanish National Cinema could he possibly be, this semi-auteur who considers Star Wars a formative cinematic experience? He is, in a word, a nightmare for a once standard definition of national cinema, a definition that Stephen Crofts claims has had its day:

Prior to the 1980s critical writings on cinema adopted common-sense notions of national cinema. The idea of national cinema has long informed the promotion of non-Hollywood cinemas. Along with the name of the director-auteur, it has served as a means by which non-Hollywood films – most commonly art films – have been labelled, distributed, and reviewed. As a marketing strategy, these national labels have promised varieties of ‘otherness' – of what is culturally different from both Hollywood and the films of other importing countries.

(Crofts 2000: 1)

This common-sense idea of national cinema applies perfectly to Spanish art cinema of the 1960s onwards, that is, to the auterist tradition which should be familiar to any student of Spanish cinema (from Carlos Saura, Basilio Martín Patino, Víctor Erice and Jose Luis Borau to Pedro Almodóvar and Julio Medem). It clearly does not apply so well to Alex de la Iglesia, who on the one hand affirms his debts to Hollywood, and on the other hand is not particularly marketable for his ‘otherness', since his very local allusions and intertexts are only intelligible to a native audience: his films are at once not Spanish enough and too Spanish to be included in a canon of national cinema.

If it seems perverse to invoke someone who is a problem for the idea of Spanish national cinema at the very outset of a book on Spanish national cinema, it is because this book takes issue with the ‘common-sense' idea of national cinema that Crofts so ably critiques. It is an idea which has for some time held currency in debates about Spanish cinema and continues to do so, but it is perhaps time that it was called into question, or even put to rest. This is more easily said than done, for the ‘national' persists in complex ways in both films and (especially) the ways they are spoken and written about. The first step is to find ways of thinking and writing about ‘national cinema' that go beyond the commonsensical one, that interrogate categories such as ‘Spanishness' while acknowledging their power and resilience.

NATIONS AND NATIONALISM

Like the other books in the National Cinemas series, Spanish National Cinema proceeds from certain basic assumptions about the vexed terms ‘nation' and ‘nationalism'. Since there is so much disagreement about the origins and meaning of nations and nationalism, it seems sensible to declare my affiliations from the outset. This book's theory of the nation is drawn, broadly speaking, from the work of Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson, who, together, have forced a critical rethinking of the concept and its history. These thinkers argue that, contrary to what nationalists themselves believe, nations are far from naturally occurring entities, expressions of primordial forces which awaken to their destiny at a given moment. They are not natural; they are mythical; they do not awaken; they are created. In the words of Gellner,

Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent though long-delayed political destiny, are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-existing cultures: that is a reality, for better or worse and in general an inescapable one.

(Gellner 1983: 48-9)

Hobsbawm puts it this way:

[M]odern nations and all their impedimenta generally claim to be the opposite of novel, namely rooted in the remotest antiquity, and the opposite of constructed, namely human communities so ‘natural' as to require no definition other than self-assertion.

(cited in Hutchinson and Smith (eds) 1994: 76)

Here, then, is the fundamental principle of modern analysts of the nation: however much nations might claim to be timeless, they can only do so by means of a fiction, what Hobsbawm has designated ‘invented tradition'. Anderson, meanwhile, gives what he calls an ‘anthropological' turn to the question, and has come up with the term ‘imagined community' to describe the way in which members of a nation experience their invented traditions. Like Gellner and Hobsbawm, Anderson emphasizes the chimerical aspects of national identity when he states that a nation ‘is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion' (1991: 6). And like Gellner and Hobsbawm, Anderson makes clear that national identity is no less powerful for being imagined rather than real.

What, then, is the task of the historian in the face of the regrettable fact of nationalism? In the first place it is to demonstrate constantly that the nation is neither ‘a primary nor…an unchanging social entity' and that it ‘belongs exclusively to a particular, and historically recent, period' (Hobsbawm 1990: 9). This exercise is necessary as an antidote to nations and nationalisms, which consistently contrive to forget their own origins, or rather, to remember what suits them. As Gellner points out, nations may be invented, but they are not invented from nothing, and one of the key projects of the historian of nationalism is the reconstruction of the process of selection and transformation of ‘pre-existing cultures' carried out by nationalism in its creation of a nation. Some of the factors which nationalism might select or exclude are language, religious beliefs, ethnicity, territory, skin pigmentation, folk tales, peasant traditions, ‘traditional' songs and dances.

When does nation-formation happen? Whose interests does it serve? What are the economic and social conditions that make it possible? These are some of the questions asked by Gellner, Hobsbawm and Anderson. In Europe it happens largely from the early nineteenth century. According to Gellner nationalist movements generally benefit most an educated bourgeois elite who can expect to take up governmental and bureaucratic posts in a newly established nation, and benefit less a proletariat which is nevertheless ideologically enlisted in the project (1983: 58-62). Hobsbawm accepts Gellner's view that nations are ‘constructed essentially from above' but he also emphasizes that they ‘cannot be understood unless also analyzed from below, that is, in terms of the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary people' (1990: 10). There is something of a consensus that nationalism only comes about under conditions of modernization, and more specifically, when modernization is taking place in an uneven fashion. Finally, Anderson helpfully moves the focus from economic base to superstructure by examining the importance of the vernacular press and the printed word in general in the narration and representation of the nation to itself. His emphasis on the way signifying processes contribute to nation formation will clearly be of much use in a study of the links between a ‘nation' and its cinema.

SPANISH NATIONALISM

In the case of the Spanish ‘nation', there are three points worth noting:

1 it was one of the oldest and most established political units in Europe, but

2 ideas of the nation came to it slightly later than in the rest of Europe, and finally

3 whereas the nineteenth century was the era of successful nation building in Europe, in Spain it was an unqualified failure.

The growth and vicissitudes of Spanish nationalisms in the nineteenth century has recently been explored in Nationalism and the Nation in the Iberian Peninsula, a volume edited by Angel Smith and Clare Mar-Molinero; and the essay by José Álvarez Junco in that volume, ‘The nation-building process in nineteenth-century Spain', is particularly illuminating on this early period. Much of what follows draws on the insights of Álvarez Junco, who argues that a Spanish ‘ethno-patriotism' existed as early as the sixteenth century (1996: 89-91) but that Spanish nationalism only emerges in the wake of the Peninsular War (1808-14), when the Napoleonic forces were repulsed from Spain. As Gellner and Hobsbawm have claimed, all nationalist movements need founding mythologized moments, and for Spanish nationalism this victory was it, and it was accordingly renamed, spuriously and after the fact, the ‘War of Independence'. All subsequent myths of Spanish national identity draw on this supposedly key moment of the Spanish nation rising up to resist the invader and express its will. As Álvarez Junco (1996: 91) points out, to call this a war of ‘independence' was ‘an enormous simplification, not to say an outright falsification', because Napoleon had been careful to respect the territorial integrity of Spain as well as the autonomy of its monarchy in the treaties he arranged.

Whether or not the struggle against Napoleonic forces had been the expression of nationalist feeling, it was eventually interpreted thus; but perhaps more tellingly, the greatest enthusiasts for this new-found Spanish identity were other Europeans, and particularly romantic writers. It was the likes of Byron, Mérimée and Bizet who replaced one set of stereotypes about Spanish national identity derived from the Black Legend – ‘idle nobility, ignorance, cruelty, arrogance, fanaticism' – with a new set of stereotypes – ‘bravery, pride, dignity, intense religious feelings, closeness to death and scorn for it' (Álvarez Junco 1996: 94). It was only in the wake of such Europe-wide myth-making about Spanish identity that Spanish nationalists themselves attempted to imagine a nation. Broadly speaking, this Spanish nationalism took two competing forms, the Liberal-Progressive and the Conservative-Catholic. The first imagined its origins in medieval Spain and saw as its goal the founding of a ‘liberal state, which was going to undertake the programme of political and social modernization of the country' (Álvarez Junco 1996: 97). The continuing power of the clergy was considered the main obstacle to the advent of the nation by this liberal version of nationalism, but for the conservative version, the Catholic Church was central to an imagined nation whose mythical founding moment was the reign of the Catholic monarchs, who were supposedly the last to bring ‘unity' to Spain.

While it could be argued that the Conservative-Catholic version of Spanish identity reached its apogee during the autarky under Franco (1939-45) and that the Liberal-Progressive version of nationalism was instrumental in the refashioning of Spain after the death of Franco (1975-82), neither model had any real success in the nineteenth century, or in the early twentieth. Álvarez Junco cites various reasons for this failure of nation building in Spain: the constant political crises in the Spanish state throughout this period, the rulers' unwillingness to promote a nationalizing process that might undermine their position, the absence of the major conflagrations experienced by the rest of Europe which brought about a ‘nationalisation of the masses'. However, one reason seems to take priority over all the others. As Hobsbawn and Gellner have demonstrated, there is one basic condition for nation building, and it is a condition which was absent from Spain: modernization. Even in the early twentieth century, the moment where this book starts, ‘the poverty of the Spanish State, poor communications, the inadequate education system and a restricted cultural market ensured that the construction of national identity out of a multiplicity of local references was very incomplete' (Mar-Molinero and Smith 1996: 3). And when modernization did come about, the idea of a Castilian-centred Spanish identity was soon to find powerful competition in a whole range of anti-Spanish national movements (Basque, Catalan, Galician).

THE NATION AND ITS CINEMA

The analysts of nationalism and nation formation have regularly pointed out the centrality of narrative forms to nation-building efforts. No nation can be imagined without the help of biased historians who reconstruct in good faith the ‘origins' of the nation, and whose accounts eventually filter down to school textbooks to be consumed by young nationals who thereby imbibe the story of their own putative origins. Poets and novelists have an equal, perhaps even greater, share of responsibility in disseminating tales of their nation's epic struggle to come into being, celebrating its victories, lamenting its setbacks and cataloguing all the threats to its integrity. A nation is nothing without the stories it tells itself about itself. Since nations are intimately tied up with narrative acts, it seems inevitable that cinema, the most powerful narrative machine of the twentieth century, has had something to say in the formation of national identities, Spanish included. However, this inevitability admitted, a series of rather less straightforward questions and problems must be addressed. Leaving aside for the moment how we decide which films make up the ‘Spanish national cinema', we might ask, to use old-fashioned language, whether this cinema simply reflects or actively shapes Spanish identity at any given moment. Or, to modify this question somewhat, how is Spanishness inscribed in Spanish films? If we accept that ideas of the nation are flexible and change, and that they are never uniform but are contested at different points in time, does it follow that cinema will also present overlapping and contradictory accounts of the nation? We might furthermore want to ask what demands have been put on Spanish cinema (by the state, but also by others) in the name of the Spanish ‘nation', and whether or not the cinema was able to meet those demands in the face of generic or commercial imperatives. While nations rely heavily on narrative forms, it would certainly be foolish to imagine that narrative forms are exclusively dedicated to nation building.

In this book, these questions return again and again in various forms as I address different historical epochs. The most problematic of these recurring questions relates to the rather unattractive term, ‘Spanishness' (españolidad). It is a term which refers to the essential features of Spanish identity, and as such, it is a fiction, a fantasy. It is the sort of term favoured by nationalists and thoroughly discredited by the type of historical analysis of nations carried out by Anderson, Gellner and Hobsbawm. As I have already noted, Álvarez Junco, working in the tradition made possible by these pioneers, has identified the ‘origins' of contemporary notions of ‘Spanishness' at the end of the Peninsular War. That national identity of any sort is now usually agreed to be contingent or constructed rather than essential is a credit to work done by theorists of nationalism starting in the early 1980s. At that time, their work was counterintuitive and a massive challenge. In critical circles nowadays it is the doxa. It is nevertheless worth repeating because it goes radically against what many of the proponents of Spanish cinema proclaimed and continue to proclaim. The term ‘Spanishness' cannot be avoided in discussion of Spanish national cinema: it has been in effect ‘imposed' on me by its continuous appearance, in two different forms (as españolada (generally pejorative) and españolidad (usually complimentary)) in the discourse on Spanish cinema of all epochs throughout analyses of all kinds, from debate which took place in intellectual fora to popular film magazines.

In her ground-breaking work, Para grandes y chicos: Un cine para los españoles 1940-1990, Valeria Camporesi traces the ubiquity of the terms españolada and españolidad in debates about Spanish cinema, and the ways in which, from as early as the 1920s, Spanish films were evaluated on the basis of these terms. Camporesi carries out a systematic discursive analysis of popular film magazines and film reviews in order to demonstrate how films were consistently praised or attacked for their capacity to faithfully convey ‘Spanishness'. Her study reveals that, remarkably, the promotion of españolidad in Spanish cinema cut across the political spectrum, acting as a shared value of both left and right. However, ‘Spanishness' proves to be an astonishingly slippery signifier. It may hold out the promise of an essence, but as soon as we examine it historically, we discover that this essence has had innumerable different manifestations. It is in fact an entirely contingent concept, a sort of empty vessel to be filled with the nationalist ideology of any particular moment. Camporesi examines for the most part the critical discourse on Spanishness, but it could also be argued that this discourse was translated more or less successfully into images and that changing notions of Spanishness also found expression in films, although it should be added that this filmic rendition of españolidad is not intelligible without the discursive support system (and vice versa).

Let us take only two examples which Spanish National Cinema addresses: the ways in which very different film stars and film genres are claimed to embody Spanish identity. In the 1930s, the Buenos Aires-born Imperio Argentina (Magdalena Nile del Río) was considered the most representative of Spanish (feminine) ideals. This dark-haired star sang and danced flamenco, could play gypsy parts convincingly, and exuded the rural virtues of religiosity and chastity. Some thirty years later an altogether different star was the darling of Spanish audiences and stood for the authentically Spanish. Marisol (Josefa Flores), a blonde, sang and danc...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• SPANISH NATIONAL CINEMA
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Half Title
• CONTENTS
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Cinema in Spain from 1896 to 1939
• 3 A constant concern for the popular classes, 1939-62
• 4 For and against Franco's Spain, 1962-82
• 5 How to ‘reconquer' signs of identity, 1982-9
• 6 Spanish cinema of the 1990s onwards: looking north but heading west
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index