Architecture and the Urban in Spanish Film

Susan Larson, Susan Larson

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781789384918
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Design General

This will be the first edited collection in English on urban space and architecture in Spanish popular film since 1898. Building on existing film and urban histories, this innovative volume will examine Spanish film through contemporary interdisciplinary theories of urban space, the built environment, visuality and mass culture from the industrial through to the digital age.

Architecture and Urbanism in Spanish Film brings together the innovative scholarship of an international and interdisciplinary group of film, architecture and urban studies scholars thinking through the reciprocal relationship between the seventh art and the built environment. Some of the shared concerns that emerge from this volume include the ways cinema as a new technology reshaped how cities and buildings are built and inhabited since the early twentieth century; the question of the mobile gaze; film's role in the shifting relationship between the private and the public; film and everyday life; monumentality and the construction of historical memory for a variety of viewing publics; the impact of the digital and the virtual on filmmaking and spectatorship.

Primary readership will be those researching, teaching and studying Spanish film, international film studies, urban cultural studies, cultural studies, and architects who are interested in interdisciplinary endeavours.

Part 1

Architecture and the Urban

1

Architecture, Urbanistic Ideology and the Poetic-Analytic Documentary Mode in Mercado de futuros (2011) by Mercedes Álvarez

Benjamin Fraser, University of Arizona

Mercado de futuros quería ser sólo una cosa: un retrato cinematográfico sobre el mercado de la vivienda. El caso español constituía un buen ejemplo. La fiebre inmobiliaria, agudizada durante la última década, había transformado como nunca las ciudades, sus centros y periferias, había mordido sin piedad el paisaje y había convertido la costa del levante español en la mayor conurbación del mundo.

Mercedes Álvarez and Arturo Redin, ‘Escribir el espacio, habitar el lenguaje’¹

Mercado de futuros (Futures Market) (2011), the second full-length film directed by Mercedes Álvarez (Soria, 1966–present), is many things. First, it is a stunning artistic product that engages the visual sense in order to explore the theme of the crisis in Spain. In this respect, it is a complement to other post-15M works of visual art: for example, the performance piece Los encargados (2011), staged by Santiago Sierra and Jorge Galindo in Madrid’s Gran Vía, and the 15M graphic novel Lo que (me) está pasando: diarios de un joven emperdedor (2015), created by comics artist Miguel Brieva.² Second, understood as a critical text in its own right – thus irreducible to the medium through which this critique is carried out – the film complements wider interest in thinking through the root causes and persisting consequences of the crisis in Spain. The film synthesizes and comments on economic, political, social and aesthetic discourse, exploring the same issues brought to light in the 15M dossier organized by Bryan Cameron and published in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies (2014), in Jon Snyder’s Poetics of Opposition in Contemporary Spain: Politics and the Work of Urban Culture (2015) and in Luis Moreno-Caballud’s Cultures of Anyone (2015), for example. It also builds on a tradition of cultural studies approaches to Barcelona’s urban culture (Balibrea 2017; Bou and Subirana 2017; Degen 2008; Epps 2001, 2002; Illas 2012; Mercer 2013; Resina 2008; Vilaseca 2013). And third, it is a visual, critical text that reflects deeply on the urban phenomenon. What arguably makes Mercado de futuros a masterpiece is the emphasis that Álvarez places on interconnected themes of space, architecture and urban form. The result is a filmic challenge to the urbanistic ideology that continues to drive the production of space in the contemporary city.

The first section of this chapter, ‘The Documentary of Creation: Architectural Coordinates and Urban Context’, introduces the readers to Álvarez’s work as a director and sets the coordinates for the analysis to follow. Striving to be concise, rather than precise, it introduces the cinematic genre of the documentary of creation as well as key details of the film’s aesthetics, content and organization. The second section, ‘The Poetic-Analytic Mode as Vehicle for and Critique of Capitalist-Urbanistic Ideology’, articulates the value of the film’s explicit urbanization of capitalist political economy. In line with the work of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey and Barcelona-based urban theorist Manuel Delgado Ruiz, I assert the fundamental role played by urbanism and urbanistic ideology in capitalism’s reproduction of city space since the nineteenth century. I take as my starting point the idea that the housing bubble is a contemporary – and specifically urban – manifestation of the periodic crises inherent to advanced capitalism (Harvey 2012; Lefebvre 1976, 1991), and instead I devote more time to analyzing key sequences from the film in light of Álvarez’s visual poetics of representation. This section also references the classifications of documentary modality theorized by Bill Nichols (1991, 2001). Whereas Nichols describes how the poetic mode has often been seen as incompatible with politics, I explore how Álvarez uses its key tropes precisely as an analytic attack on the ideology of urbanized capitalism. It is here that the director portrays and politicizes urban architecture – within capitalistic, neoliberal contexts – as a surface. The visual allure of architecture in Mercado de futuros is depicted as the façade for a more crass and triumphalist urban modernity.

The Documentary of Creation: Architectural Coordinates and Urban Context

Mercado de futuros has received awards at the Premio Miradas Nuevas del Festival de Hyon, Vissions du Réel, the Premio ‘Navaja de Buñuel’ Película Revelación, TVE, the Premio Mejor Documental, Festival de Cine de Nantes, Francia, and the Mención Especial de Jurado, Festival Internacional de Cine de Buenos Aires – all in 2011. Beyond its own merits, the film is also important on account of its director’s connection with the tradition of the documental de creación in Spain. Many point to Joaquim Jordà’s film Mones com la Becky (1999) as the origin of this form of cinematic expression, also emphasizing a debt owed to his work with the Escuela de Barcelona dating back to the second half of the 1960s (e.g. Riambau 2010: 11).³ What is certain is that at the end of 1998, the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona inaugurated the Máster en Teoría y Práctica del Documental Creativo (Viveros y Català 2010: 123), and the Máster en Documental de Creación program began at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF). Notably, ‘La UPF, durante muchos años, no solo lideró el resurgir del documental en Cataluña, propició el surgimiento de autores que debutaban en el campo de la no-ficción’ (For many years, the UPF did not only lead the resurgence of documentary film in Catalonia but promoted the emergence of authors that made their debut in the field of nonfiction film) (De Pozo and Oroz 2010: 67). Álvarez was among the first students in the program, along with other notable figures such as Isaki Lacuesta and Ariadna Pujol (see De Pozo and Oroz 2010: 68).

Like director Abel García Roure (Una cierta verdad [2008], see Fraser 2016), Álvarez had been a member of the team working with José Luis Guerín (Balló 2010: 108–09). Specifically, she was the montadora/editor on Guerín’s film En construcción (Balló 2010: 113). Her first film project as director was El cielo gira (2004). Reduced to its barest content, this film explores the dwindling rural population of the small town Aldealseñor in Soria. Yet Álvarez uses this basic premise, along with paintings of Pello Azketa, an artist who is losing his sight, to forge a cinematic meditation on temporality, disappearance and human landscape. As Jordi Balló notes, this first full-length film is concordant with the broader aims of the documental de creación, in that, ‘Con El cielo gira se ratificaba que la frontera entre documental y ficción era solo una cuestión nominal y de dramaturgia, y que en este cine de lo real anidaba una nueva poética y un nuevo sentido de la emoción’ (El cielo gira confirmed that the boundary between documentary and fiction film was only a nominal matter of production and that this cine de lo real [real film] had a new poetics and a new sense of emotion) (Balló 2010: 115).⁴ Themes of spatiality, time and memory were already interconnected in El cielo gira, and they were implicated in its critical success. Yet, as noted by critic Javier Serrano, in the director’s sophomore effort these themes are notably and more directly urbanized.

With her second full-length film, Álvarez continues to question the border between documentary and fiction and to explore the way emotions are implicated in space/place. By effectively urbanizing El cielo gira’s cinematic insights regarding time, memory and loss, Mercado de futuros contributes to an urban subtradition of the documental de creación. Two figures are obligatory references for understanding what she accomplishes with this effort. Álvarez has been inspired by her mentor Víctor Erice’s El sol del membrillo (1991) and is following closely in the footsteps of José Luis Guerín’s En construcción (2001).⁵ These two films played with documentary approaches to urban themes, and both were in dialogue with a poetic mode of urban representation.⁶ Yet Mercado de futuros pushes both of these dimensions of the director’s work to an extreme impossible in those earlier films. To explain: running through Erice’s undoubtedly complex film there is also a more easily digestible biographical focus. The centrality of painter Antonio López García’s artistic process to El sol del membrillo is a device that quite naturally supports the introduction of philosophical themes and subtly induces a poetic response in the spectator. Likewise, Guerín’s challenging film centers on easily recognizable and iconic spaces that have long proven central to Barcelona’s shifting identity as a global city. It is notable that Mercado de futuros does not rely on either of those advantages. Instead, the director has accepted the challenge of building a philosophical, poetic and urban narrative from scratch.

The film is defined by and constructed through a series of tensions. It is both inaccessible and inviting, conceptual and topical. At the beginning of the film, after a section of animation that is worthy of critical attention in its own right, a voice-over by Álvarez outlines the contemplative agenda for the film:

Una noche, hace más de dos mil años, el poeta griego Simonides de Ceos acudía a una casa con más de veinte invitados. Durante la cena, mientras Simonides se ausentaba unos momentos, se hundió el techo de la casa, sepultando a todos los habitantes. Los cadáveres quedaron tan destrozados que nadie podía identificarlos. Pero Simonides sí pudo hacerlo. Porque recordaba el lugar exacto donde estaba sentado cada uno de los invitados. Se dice que Simonides inventó el arte de la memoria, y que fue utilizado durante siglos. Pero ese arte carece, desde hace mucho, de la más mínima importancia.⁷

(Álvarez 2011)

There is a coldness to this introductory voice-over, as t...