Abre los ojos!

Open your eyes!

Today´s post is taken from the article "Millenarian Visions in Spanish Cinema", by Leora Lev, http://vc.bridgew.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1389&context=br_rev

FOR TOMORROW, try to read the article "Tom Cruise and the Seven Dwarves" by Christopher Weimer, in http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Tom+Cruise+and+the+seven+dwarves%3a+cinematic+postmodernisms+in+Abre...-a0133810108

What will the new millennium bring humankind? Will we know ourselves and our "others" better and more humanely than we now do? Will kaleidoscopically shifting technologies provide virtual worlds in which to experience multiple versions of ourselves? Do we have a consciousness, a soul, that are separate from our physical selves, and that might be freed by cryogenics or virtual space even as the body (or "meat") decays? Would this be desirable? Will we be able to alter whichever mysterious interplay of chance and destiny shapes our life stories and thus exert more control over our dénouements? Will media-filtered, Western consumer obsession with surfaces, celebrities, and image(s) cede to renewed interest in the existential, spiritual, and psycho-emotional complexities of real-life human beings? Will there be an apocalypse?

Amidst the barrage of media journeys into these realms is a series of Spanish films that innovatively imbue these questions with an explicit or implicit fin de millennium urgency. These films eschew the simplistic pablum too often proffered by corporate Hollywood media machines.
In young Spanish director Alejandro Abenámar's darkly dreamlike Open Your Eyes (Abre los ojos, 1997), César (Eduardo Noriega) is the man who has everything. A gorgeous, wealthy twenty-something playboy, he tools about Madrid in his sports car and throws parties in his ultra-chic pad. However, at a fateful party he pursues Sofia (Penélope Cruz), the lovely girlfriend of his soulful buddy Pelayo (Fele Martínez), enacting the wrongdoing alegorized in the biblical injunction against "the rich man stealing the poor man's ewe." César also spurns Nuria (Najwa Nimri), one of the many women whom he has romanced and discarded.

But Nuria literally proves to be a femme fatale; when César accepts a ride home, she drives them both off the side of the road, metaphorically signaling the narrative's shift into a nightmarish roller coaster that switches precipitously between different psychic registers. César awakens in an institution for the criminally insane, accused of murder, his face now hideously disfigured. The question of how he got from "there" to "here" is one, of course, that we might all well ask ourselves, albeit less dramatically, at many junctures. Rich, glamorous swinger, or mad, scarred assassin – which is the illusion, which the reality? To complicate matters, César repeatedly dreams of a televised spokesperson for cryogenics and the letters "ELI," giving a new twist to questions posed by such films as The Matrix (1998, starring Keanu Reeves).

Through these confusing challenges to our understanding of being and knowing, Abenámar meditates non-didactically, and in ethically and philosophically interesting ways, upon César's predicament. The scarlet-clad, seductive Nuria is allied with the dark forces, and the insouciant César is clearly being punished for his traitorous, Don Juan-of-the '90's ways. When César does return to his life outside the asylum (sans fabulous looks), he labors toward redemption and a possible winning back of Pelayo's friendship and Sofia's love. Shots of the masked César in trendy nightspots dancing alone point to the lethal obsession with surface that haunts our fin de millennium psyches, the dehumanizing focus on image and exterior packaging rather than our interior make-up. And when César and his empathetic psychiatrist Antonio (Chete Lera) discover a cryogenics institute with the acronym ELI, which is a transcription of the Hebrew for "my God," the film examines the metaphysics of future technologies: what if a client had the ability to freeze not only her body but her happiest dreams and memories, but something went awry, and she opened her eyes instead to a world of her worst nightmares? And has this happened to César?

The film links these gripping questions back to the thinking of the great Golden Age Spanish playwright Calderón de la Barca in his masterpiece Life is a Dream (La vida es sueño, 1665), whose protagonist Segismundo, a philosophical forebear of César, muses: "Life is a dream, and dreams are dreams as well" ("La vida es sueño, y los sueños sueños son"). Far from being able to shape our destiny as we would wish, we may not even be able to distinguish our waking lives from dream states or chimeric projections. But whether it's all a dream or not, we must still try to navigate, to borrow again from Calderón, some sort of conscious and conscience-driven vessel through the ocean of existence.

What Have I Done to Deserve This?

After today’s class discussion I wanted to make sure that in my comments about ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto/What Have I Done to Deserve This? I touched on the issue of possible influences for the film. I also think that it’s important to bring into such a critique the elements of analysis that appear in the reading by Kathleen Vernon (available on PDF at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1212901.pdf?acceptTC=true), some of which might illuminate and other that might obscure our own analysis of the work.

 

From the films we have watched we could say that Almodóvar’s work cannot be defined by a specific movie style or genre, but rather represents a pastiche, a mix-and-match of genres and influences that form a collage that defines his very personal style. Vernon’s essay echoes some of the points that we had made prior to seeing today´s film. Mostly, the influence of neorealism, the film genre developed in Italy after WWII and discussed in the readings of Death of a Cyclist. Neorealism shifted the tradition of Italian cinema from an epic style that had developed in the early history of Italian film (mostly under fascism), and which glorified the deeds of heroic individuals in a way similar to the basic tradition of the Western in US cinema –although in a much more grandiose style, sometimes tied to deeds of Italian history, much like Spanish film had done under Franco's earlier years-- and towards a style that centered on the struggles of the working class and the enormous gaps that separated, culturally and economically, the “two Italies”, the rural south and the industrial north. Italian neorealist films were also infused with very strong doses of melodrama, the genre Vernon most closely identifies as the root of this specific work by Almodóvar. Some prominent examples of Italian neorealism include Bicycle Thieves, by Vittorio de Sica (1948), the story of a struggling working man whose world falls apart when his bicycle, his sole mode of transportation, is stolen and he can find no other work to feed his beautiful young wife and cute little boy in the big city, and Riso Amaro (Bitter rice, 1949) by Giusseppe de Santis, which focused, on the other hand, on the struggle of the peasant families. Italian neorealism’s huge doses of melodrama highlighted dramatic situations in order to stretch the emotion of an audience that, in the eyes of the filmmakers, would be driven to political action.

This type of what we could call political neorealism was rescued in the early years of the post-Franco regime by a series of Spanish filmmakers interested in portraying the struggles of a new working class population that arrived from the provinces to the urban areas to participate in the economic boom of the time, and which the city had a difficulty absorbing. I referred to these films as kinki (meaning young delinquent) or urchin films; last week we watched a clip from Colegas, (de la Iglesia, 1982) and from Carlos Saura’s Deprisa, deprisa (Fast, Fast!, 1981). These films tended to focus on the lives of children of rural immigrants to the city who, due to lack of parental supervision, and influenced by their environment (most plots take place in the projects) fell into lives of crime, with very dramatic consequences for themselves and for society. The filmmakers’ intent was also geared towards generating empathy towards these characters by invoking the roughness of their upbringing, and highlighting the enormous socioeconomic and cultural divide that would need to be overcome to modernize Spain. I have no doubt that these stories are the source for the characters of the children in What Have I done… Here, I have to disagree with Vernon’s political reading of the film depicting the “urban non-planning of the Franco years, growing out of a policy that actively sought by neglect of urban social services to discourage immigration to the ‘corrupt’ cities” (33) --I encourage you to read the discussion alluded to in note 15 of Vernon’s article to see the counterpoint to her position, which argues that, instead, the projects where these characters, including Gloria and her family, lived, were supposed to serve as launching platforms for a new urban working class, and their failure being one of lack of awareness, on the part of Franco’s planners, of the enormous socioeconomic and cultural gap that separated their idealized vision of what Spain from its reality, a gap created precisely by their own inability to see beyond their own social condition.

The film also shows influence from the French New wave. The French New Wave develops in the late 50s and early 60s as a response, on the one hand to the exhaustion of neorealism as a genre (too rural, politically too manipulative, to self-aggrandizing), and an attempt on the part of French filmmakers to offer newer perspectives on "reality” and a realistic portrayal of modern life and the alienation it produced in the working class. Issues of consumerism, of the tensions and limits that modern life forced on the imagination and free will are at the heart of many of the plots of films of the new wave (we mentioned Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), but other new wave stiles, such as those exemplified by both Jan Luc Godard’s A bout the soufflé(Breathless, 1960), and Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianist (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960), also are important for two reasons: one is the infusion of humor into what is mostly a tragic plot, the other the homage both films pay to a golden age of Hollywood. Almodóvar’s love of the New Wave and especially of classical Hollywood films are apparent in What Have I done... The representation of the children as cogent beings (like in 400 Blows), the “comic” new wave, exemplified by the man who makes car noises in the bar, as well as to the golden age of Hollywood referenced openly in the incorporation of Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass (1961) to the plot, and of Alfred Hitchcock (in the shower scene, and in the appropriation of the murder method from the TV series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents") are only a few examples.

 

In this analysis, I believe understanding Almodovar’s own position is fundamental. In a1984 interview where he speaks specifically of What Have I done… he talks of the film as something he can relate to precisely because of his own experience moving from the Spanish countryside to the city. This ties it to what is Vernon’s most interesting family tree when talking about the film. That is its relation to a series of dark comedies from the 1950s and 1960s about the struggles of the emerging urban middle class in Spain, all of them produced under Franco, but that could also be given a subversive twist thanks to the use of dark humor. These films come out of the neorealist tradition (one of its most important representatives is Marco Ferreri, who was Italian but worked in Spain as a filmmaker), a genre that in Spain had been actually appropriated by fascism to offer a positive spin on the rural condition of post-war Spain. The humor in the majority of these comedies, which are intended as appealing to a mainstream Spanish audience, was used to downplay the type of hardship and alienation that this transition to modern life could bring, and was therefore allowed by the very harsh censors of the time precisely because it downplayed the financial struggles implied in moving into the middle class, which also meant becoming part of consumer society. However, filmmakers like Ferreri and especially Luis García Berlanga in El verdugo used humor to subvert the principles on which the genre stood, and used it, like Almodovar, to critique the dehumanizing nature of a system that emphasized consumerism in order to fuel economic growth. Thus, Vernon mentions García Berlangas’ The Executioner, the story of a young man who is forced to accept becoming the successor of his father in law’s practice as a state executioner in order to be able to afford the lifestyle he wants to give his new bride. Like in What Have I Done…?, humor is used in that piece to mask the grotesque tragedy of the situation, a grotesqueness made even worse by the fact that state executioner was a real job in Franco’s Spain.

Finally, it is important to reiterate that What Have I Done’s main twist on the Spanish neorealist tradition of the 1970s is that it focuses on the plight of several women. Vernon quotes Almodovar and explores the claim that the film is about motherhood, but it is also important to point out that it is about a mother whose role is challenged by the expectations and the demands (and the tensions and conflicts) generated by the conflict between tradition and modernity. Consumerism, or the material comforts modernity promises society, have a much higher cost for the working class, for whom the access to money implies sacrifices that are both psychological –Gloria is “on the verge of a nervous breakdown”— and physical –Gloria sells her child to the dentist in order to buy the hair curler, and sometimes require confronting certain taboos imposed by social tradition –women are not supposed to work —or by the legal imposition of the state (Gloria’s oldest son makes his money selling drugs, an endeavor that although very capitalistic, is sanctioned by the law, while Cristal shows perhaps the most clear example of these two contradictions, prostitution as being something that is sanctioned by the law because of its social stigmatization). Like in the previous Almodóvar films we have seen, Gloria’s liberation comes from her ability to break out of the traditionally imposed restrictions on her self reliance; here though, independence is also presented as an acceptance of the hardships that come with it, perhaps as represented by the enormous, ugly, dirty, balconies that she stares at from her window, and also as a choice, since Gloria chooses these hardships over the easy life that returning to the village might represent.

Reading for Wednesday

For tomorrow´s class, please read the article in the following link:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1212901.pdf?acceptTC=true

If you are not able to access the document through the link, go into the Kramer Family Library website, choose "Select a database", from "choose a Subject" Select "Film Studies", then select "JSTOR" and enter the article's information:Melodrama against Itself: Pedro Almodóvar's "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" Author(s): Kathleen M. Vernon Source: Film Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Spring, 1993), pp. 28-40


And, please, don´t forget to write your blog entry.

!Qué overdose!

On Laberinto de Pasiones

Almodóvar´s film is the first in the class made after Franco´s death in 1975. We spoke in class of how it is representative of the “Movida,” the artistic underground that developed in Madrid at a time when democracy opened cultural spaces that would have been unthinkable at the time of the dictatorship.

While Erice and Saura (in The Spirit of the Beehive, 1973, the former, and Cría Cuervos, 1976, the latter), had used young people to raise the specter of the future, Almodovar represents the generation that IS the future (traumatized, but with a very different personality than that of the woman who plays “future Ana” in Saura´s movie).

Almodóvar represents a generational voice that had little say in the transformation of the arts or politics in Spain. In the period after Franco´s death there is an intense focus on constructing and establishing a national democratic infrastructure –the writing of the constitution, the amount of power granted to the king, etc. The task was left to a political elite that had to find compromise between the freedoms expected after the end of the dictatorship and the economic demands of the transition. It seems that in focusing on those matters, Spaniards forgot about the generation of kids that had no connection to the politics of the war. For this younger generation, the war was in the remote past, and to them, modern democracy was a practical, as well as a theoretical matter. Their concerns focused on the type of laws that were drafted, their effect on their everyday life, their education, their jobs, etc. 

Almodóvar represents the first generation of the Spanish rural working class that moves into the urban lower-middle class. This social mobility was achieved in the 60s, with the Francoist policies of industrialization and modernization. Almodóvar´s biography is an interesting example of this growth. He moved to Madrid from “the provinces”;  his father died when he was young and was raised mostly by his mother and her family. Almodovar´s rural origins are fundamental to the meaning of his films. He is able to relate much of the conflict between tradition and modernity in Spain to the contrast between life in the village and life in the city. The difference between Almodóvar´s rural vision –or vision of rural characters—is that his is often different than the view of the countryside held by the more bourgeois directors (Buñuel, even Erice).

Of course, that is not very clear in Laberinto, which is a purely urban film. It is important to point out that it is a film made by young people, about young people, and that such a representation has to be valued along with the symbolism created by a 60-year-old, crusty middle-class filmmaker.

There is a relationship between the moral attitudes displayed in  Talk to Her and Laberinto in how Sexilia´s definition of the limit of sexual interaction parallels the one drawn by Marco in the first film we saw, here with limits that were way more elastic than in Talk to Her.

Laberinto touches on a variety of issues that can be given a political twist. The contrast between traditional and modern structures is important here, and, as we have seen in other films, there is a questioning of the traditional mores on the grounds of their inefficacy, or their inability to account for the broader spectrum of behaviors in “real life”. The numerous dysfunctions that affect the families in the film (incest, infidelity, betrayal), are associated with the power structure of the traditional family (including the Shah of Tyrán´s desire to father most of his citizens), one that, Almodovar seems to tell us here as well as in Talk to Her, comes from the social inability to discuss traditional taboos. The enjoyment of sexuality also is an important theme for Almodovar: fulfillment of desire through harmless fantasy (including the pseudo-incest of Queti and Sexilia´s father, or the grotesque, masochistic scene where Almodovar directs Fabio´s torture and murder with a drill, while (s)he is talking on the phone). Similarly, unfulfilled desire leads to unhappiness, and the notion of unhealthy or mechanical love takes the form of the test-tube experiments of Sexilia´s father. The doctor´s parakeets don´t sing because they are not happy… and the scientist tells Queti: what is the purpose of bringing life into the world if it is not perfect? But all of the issues resolve with an optimism and humor that is very distant from the social critique of the British punk era, which was responding to unemployment, social and economic stagnation, in contrast with the expanding Spanish economy of the time.

Finally, it's important to note that although the film builds on the contrast between “liberated” gay sensibility and the traumas created by traditional impositions on sexual relations,  the climax of the film is the consummation of Sexi and Riza´s (heterosexual) relation in the airplane once they have become free of their neuroses. Like all the other films we have seen, there seems to be a conclusion that challenges traditional structures but ends up reproducing them.

El Espiritu de la Colmena / Cría Cuervos

On El espíritu de la colmena (1973) and Cría Cuervos (1976)

We discussed briefly at the opening of Thursday's class that like their European counterparts, Spanish filmmakers were concerned with developing a cinematic language that would define them from a national perspective. Spanish cinema was a flag that needed to be unfurled , said José María García Escudero, general director of cinema in the 1960s. The combination of narrative melodrama and neorealism that we saw in Death of a cyclist and also, with its culturally significant grotesque (esperpento) twists, in Viridiana, was a unique and valuable aesthetic achievement that set Spanish film apart from other European cinemas. The French had achieved great financial success with their attempt at a unique cinematic voice, a movement called la nouvelle vague that broke the narrative conventions of Hollywood by developing a kind of introspective, philosophical style that gained acceptance throughout Europe and was labeled “intelligent cinema." In Franco´s Spain we heard of the "Franco aesthetic," that style that resulted from filmmakers´ attempts at creating narrative voids in the story for the audience to complete with what might be political ideas that challenged the Francoist establishment.

Victor Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive, 1973) and Carlos Saura’s Cría Cuervos (Raise Ravens/Cría!, 1976) show the evolution of a cinematic language that continued to stage the struggle between tradition and change that characterized Spanish cultural discourse. Now, however, the imminent death of General Franco also offered the opportunity for a narrative shift. 

Don José needs eyes to see...

In The Spirit of the Beehive, the narrative parallels the plot of the 1931 film Frankenstein, but takes a few twists. There is a clear attempt on the part of the filmmaker to create direct relationships between the scene of the murder of the little girl, and the awakening of Ana´s conscience. “Why did he kill her?”, “Why did they kill him?,” Ana asks her sister Isabel. “You don´t know,”  “I´ll tell you later.” “Why not?” “I don´t want to.” It seems that Isabel is avoiding the question, perhaps because she doesn´t know the answer. In her questioning, we also sense that Ana doesn´t have a sense of an “eye for an eye” justice: she asks why did the people kill the monster? The answer is, because he had killed the girl, but no one gives her that answer. There is a suggestion that the child has an inherent sense of values, one that is guided by her innocence, and therefore seems uncontestable. Erice seems to reiterate this to us, that is why Ana places the eyes to Don José, the cardboard figure that the teacher uses as a prop. People need eyes to see.

Ana is at the end of that moment of innocence. Her sister has just passed it: she almost strangles the cat, then, uses her own blood, in the most primitive of gestures, to paint her lips, a gesture that seems to bring her into the adult world.  

Who is Don Fernando? What does he do? What is his relationship to Frankenstein? Is he a Dr. Frankenstein to the girls? If so, that would make them his monsters. He tells the story of a friend who saw his glass beehive and observed how the bees had constructed separate compartments, the genetically-determined role each of them plays in the perfect functioning of the hive, the way they communicate to maximize their efficiency. And the friend said something about a world where there were no graves or anyone to speak about the dead, and looked away sadly. Don Fernando´s narrative is repeated twice, at the time he writes it, and towards the end of the film, while searching for Ana. This can be read as a key reference to the struggle between the traditional and the modern. Don Fernando is saying that tradition, which is also represented here by the baroque image of St. Mark, with its memento moris, (the skull in the painting of the evangelist, which in the late renaissance was incorporated to many paintings as a reminder of the mortality of men), that adorns his office. Awareness of death, perhaps a sense of history are what differentiates humans from the bees. Don Fernando embodies another fundamental element of the traditional Spain, that of the Hidalgo, the “hijo de algo,” “son of something,” a character who, even though he might not be in good economic position, relies on his ancestral standing in the community to maintain his status, a position we had brought up in relation to the characters in Death of a Cyclist. Thus, the family lives in a very old country manor, we would believe his ancestral home. Don Fernando´s authority is reiterated through the way he is addressed by others in the village and by his very faithful dog. And so well does Don Fernando represent this status of being something, that we don´t really know if the stark furniture that adorns his home is the result of financial difficulties, or if it is a sign of the Catholic stoicism that a true Castilian gentleman lives by.

It seems that Ana runs away because Don Fernando finds out that she was the one who had given his coat to the guerrilla. And Ana finds out the guerrilla is dead because she went into the hut and found the blood. Then she walks out, and runs into her father. Is Ana associating her father to the death of the guerrilla? Is this a political allusion that links the traditional aristocracy to the end of the dream of the republic?

And what is Don Fernando in the other symbolic story that drives the narrative, the story of Frankenstein? Is he Dr. Frankenstein, father of the monster? In that case, his children are the monsters… what have they learned? Are they learning what they need to know? He teaches them about mushrooms… is there a symbolic meaning to that? There must be, it takes up quite some time in the movie, and don Fernando´s foot stomping the poisonous mushroom offers a violent accent to an otherwise tame, quite pace… Is Don Fernando an angry man? Could he have turned in the guerrilla to the Guardia Civil? Could it have something to do with the letter that his wife was writing? Why does she burn it? As it burns, we see it is addressed to someone in a Red Cross Camp in France… As the fire consumes it, so it consumes the stamp, which has an effigy of Franco. The letter would have been for someone who left Spain after the war as a refugee… the person to whom Teresa writes an anguished letter at the beginning of the film? Is he a lover? Perhaps Ana´s father (he has dark hair like Ana, and unlike everyone else in the family)? Is he the same character his sister has seen? If he is, why does he arrive by train? Where has he been? How would Don Fernando´s wife know that he is there? The relationship between Don Fernando and his wife is not most cordial. They don´t talk. When he comes to bed in the morning she pretends to be asleep (although she tucks him in and takes off his glasses at the end of the film). Does she not send the letter because she has seen him? Or because she knows he is dead? Did he come into Spain just to see her? Does she know he is dead? Did Don Fernando, knowing he would be there, notify the Guardia Civil, and has not told his wife he is dead?

The Ana in The Spirit... represents the child as an empty vessel, and by the end of the film it will be filled with the principles that guide the rest of her life. And what does Ana´s encounter with the monster represent? Is it an awakening? If so, to what? What political allegory can we derive from this? It is interesting that The Spirit... uses Hollywood popular cinema –horror films are considered a minor genre in some academic circles-- as the basis for the exploration of the story. This suggests that Erice, who is clearly preoccupied with creating a unique filmic language—as proven by the meticulously unconventional cinematography— is acknowledging a debt to Hollywood in his craft. There is also a debt to neorealsim in the quasi-anthropological representation of the village, and finally, some of the faces, and the image of the bugle-blowing woman who announces the film are a clear homage to the tradition of the grotesque celebrated by Buñuel.

In the end, what is perpetuated in the film, through the image of the burning letter that represents the impossibility of the idealized nation proposed by the republic, is the cordial family meal around the kitchen table, an echo of the traditional patriarchal structure… (and they lived happily ever after, we could say, since the story is introduced as a fairytale). Perhaps what subverts this apparently reactionary narrative is the use of the popular children´s song “Vamos a contar mentiras”, “Let´s tell lies”, which becomes then another twist that lets the viewer know it is watching an inverted narrative…

Ana and her mother in Cría Cuervos

The two films have been inscribed into a tradition of Spanish filmmaking that challenges “the Oedipal Narrative”, the classical parricidal tale of individuation. “Freud and his poststructuralist followers argue that the Oedipal drama is reenacted in every generation because it is the primary means of transforming the small animal into a human gendered subject, that is, one who accepts either the male or female role and everything that goes with that sexual identity, including heterosexual tastes, which are essential to the reproduction of the species and the nuclear family.” (Kinder 197). Kinder studies at some length how the plot of many modern Spanish films reenact different aspects of the Oedipal narrative in order to reinforce the values promoted by the state. But oftentimes, Kinder argues, thanks to its ideological function, the Oedipal narrative can be used by filmmakers not to reinforce, but to subvert the logic of the state. This, we could say, is what Erice and Saura do in these stories.

That is also the case in Saura´s Cría Cuervos. Perhaps because we are associating her with the other Ana we just watched, we want to see this new Ana as innocent and pure. But Carlos Saura thinks more like Buñuel, and doesn´t believe in innocence or children. The title of the film is the first clue as to the demon hidden behind the innocence of the children. “Cria cuervos” is part of a popular saying: “Cria cuervos y te quitarán los ojos” (Raise ravens and they´ll peck your eyes out). Whereas in The spirit… the coming in contact with the world is a traumatic experience that leaves the child in shock, in Saura's movie the children seem to be picking up on the adults’ behavior but their untreated trauma (no one believes poor Ana when she tells dad was with another woman) becomes dysfunctional behavior. To complicate matters more, Saura reveals that Ana’s childhood is being filtered through the memory of Ana the adult, the woman who is also played by Geraldine Chaplin but who has a different voice, and who becomes the film’s narrator in certain scenes. Is Ana the adult remembering her mother’s face as her own because of her own psychological problems? Or is Saura telling us that children become their parents? But Ana’s mother was an inspiration to her… she had wanted to be a pianist, but ended up married with children, then bitterly unhappy. Ana witnessed this, the same way she witnessed so many other things in the house (no women have been happy: Rosa lost a child, grandmother doesn't seem to have enjoyed her life, and now cannot even talk about it. She is a prisoner in the house, in her own brain.)

What we see as the film progresses is that, whether by the influence of what she has heard and seen, even without understanding, as she confesses when Rosa is telling her the story of the girl who got pregnant, or because we are in the memories of the woman who is narrating the story, is that Ana slowly shows she is lost to any moral cause. We can see the short time Ana has to be saved by contrasting her behavior with that of her older sister Irene. When the girls are putting on make up, Irene is applying it quickly and discreetly, while Ana simply slaps some lipstick on. Ana’s trauma slowly takes over her personality. There is a moment when she begins to sing the bubbly rock song she has played over and over, and to dance while she plays with her hair, staring directly at the camera. The story becomes a cautionary tale that in a simplistic political reading might suggest only that we need to teach our children well and behave morally. But there is another warning: although the nasty male authority figure is dead now, we can’t just be taken over by rock and roll.

You can read more about the film Cría cuervos in the article on the Criterion edition:
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/527-cria-cuervos-the-past-is-not-past

Homework for Thursday

:

• Read the article on Viridiana, as well as the blog entry, and write a 300-700 response exploring how the film relates to any of the issues we have discussed in class: gender roles, the critique or authority, the contrast between tradition and modernity, the political allegories related to Franco or the Spanish Civil war). 
• READ article on El espíritu de la colmena  (http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/447-the-spirit-of-the-beehive-spanish-lessons) 

On Viridiana

On Viridiana

Follow this link to read Michael Wood´s article for the Criterion´s Collection, a review of Viridiana that includes interesting insights into the context and intent of the film. 

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/423-viridiana-the-human-comedy

There are many controversies surrounding Buñuel´s Viridiana (1961), among others, whether it is really a Spanish film, since the director had not returned to his native country since 1926. Some Spanish critics say that, because his films were forbidden in Spain under Franco, he might not even have influenced any of the emerging directors of the 1960s and 70s. But that is easily refuted. In an interview regarding his return to Spain in 1960 in order to prepare the filming of Viridiana, Buñuel mentions meeting with Bardem (we know him, the director of Death of a cyclist), Carlos Saura (we will meet him soon), and others to discuss the state of cinema in the country, and after the scandal created by Viridiana the latter two directors even joined forces to  create a production company that tried to distribute Buñuel´s films in Spain --they almost went broke, because after the Viridianda fiasco Franco´s government forbade the showing of films by Buñuel. 

The beggars´supper

Michael Wood argues, as we mentioned in class, that Buñuel   insisted his films were not meant as political critiques, but rather as explorations of the human psyche. His explanation fits his own Freudian beliefs, developed from the influences of surrealism. But through psychoanalytical theory we could argue that Buñuel´s "subconscious" also deals with the social, political, and cultural concerns he confronts in his everyday life, and therefore will be reflected in his plots and characters. One example is the reference Jorge makes to the land he has inherited from his father, which "has not been tilled for 20 years" (the same time it had passed since the end of the Spanish Civil War).

On the other hand, perhaps because he had not lived in Spain for such a long time he might have been able to perceive traits of the Spanish character not noticeable to the Spaniards themselves.  That geographical distance might have made him more sensitive to  more extreme --more stereotyped?-- expressions of the national character: we discussed in class the role of the "esperpento", the grotesque figures explored in the paintings of Goya, a tradition of cartoonish representation that dates back to pre-Christian times in the Iberian Peninsula. That tradition has informed Spanish artwork through the 20th and 21st century, (we will see how some of these traits apply to the work of other directors', including many of Almodóvar´s characters), also including the work of a good friend of Buñuel´s, the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, who admired and imitated those distorted figures because they  represented a society corrupted by vice, and perhaps spoke more loudly to him as to what it is to be Spanish, than it did to the Spaniards.

Compare Spanish Painter Francisco de Goya's "esperpento" with Buñuel´s paupers

Perhaps because he did not live in Spain, Buñuel had the opportunity to explore from a different perspective the relationship between the psychoanalytical theories that sprouted Surrealism and the Volkgeist of the Spanish, especially when it comes to the influence of myth and religion.

One of the aspects that caught my attention in Wood´s article is his view that Buñuel has created a universal tale, and that his critique is not specific to the Spanish circumstances, but "a reminder that pleasure and curiosity and appetite can always turn to destruction and violence. This is not an argument against pleasure and curiosity and appetite, or an appeal for law and order. It is a picture of a society that doesn’t understand its own needs." This, of course, could be a reference to Franco´s Spain (or a broader critique of the Spanish character), but Wood´s consideration that "Buñuel’s skepticism and his sense of outrage concern the smallness of our vision of progress, our narrow attempts to achieve it through rational or moralistic planning, and our anxious disregard of the disruptive forces without which no society would be human" lends it that broader, universal significance (and can be applied, I think, to a reading of Almodóvar´s Talk to Her).

 To support that universalizing ideal, we can point at Buñuel´s appropriation of some easily identifiable elements the Western cultural tradition. The reference to Goya applies here, since he is a Spanish artist but also considered a universal one; another Western referent is the music: from the opening we hear the notes of the Messiah, by German composer George Friederic Handel, one of the most famous pieces of classical choral music, echoes through Don Jaime´s estate. There is even a reference to the  Western literary canon that adds to the symbolic meaning of the story: In the first part of the film, as Viridiana is exiting the barn, her hair covered with a scarf, her shoulders wrapped in a woolen cape, she runs into her uncle Jaime. Viridiana comments on how early he is up: "The longer to see you", is his reply, a clear allusion to Little Red Ridinghood. The reference to Leonardo Da Vinci´s "Last Supper" is also part of this inscription of the story into the Western tradition, and of the history of religious imagery. Jorge´s "freethinking" attitude, including his attitude towards marriage, charity, etc. can also be read as a critique of Spain in the context of European humanistic values versus the Catholic tradition promoted as key to the Spanish heritage by the Franco regime.

But, intentionally or not, the journey of Viridiana from the convent to the world of her family´s country home is full of referents to the conflicts between tradition and modernity that we have argued are at the heart of the tensions that both the state and the artists are trying to resolve in Spain in the 1960s.

On Muerte de un Ciclista

MUERTE DE UN CICLISTA

This post is film critic Fernando Croce's review of the film, published in Slant  magazine in April, 2008.



Death of a Cyclist is Spanish director Juan Antonio Bardem's response to a national cinema he famously denounced as "politically ineffective, socially false, intellectually worthless, aesthetically nonexistent, and industrially crippled." Fittingly, his portrait of the complacent and disaffected upper class during Franco's regime opens with a crash, as adulterous couple María José (Lucia Bosé) and Juan (Alberto Closas) accidentally run over a man on a bicycle and, fearing discovery, leave the wounded cyclist behind. The man's death brings guilt upon Juan's shoulders, yet it also precipitates a painful new awareness: A former idealist hollowed out by the country's civil war, he comes to see the emptiness of his bourgeois ways as well as experience a renewal of his rebelliousness. María José, on the other hand, has no intention of trading the gilded cages supported by her husband Miguel (Otello Toso) for spiritual redemption, and soon becomes the femme fatale promised by the film's noir-tinged strains. The most intriguing aspect of Bardem's social critique is the way Juan's increasing need for exposure is contrasted with the sardonic insinuations of Rafa (Carlos Casaravilla), the slimy art critic whose observations on his decadent companions ("All the ugly things you hide, I dig them up and lay them before you") show that, within bourgeois circles, even self-critical impulses have become utterly corrupted. Unfortunately, many of Bardem's insights are blunted by his unsubtle technique, which provides redundant dialogue ("A new bracelet versus a thousand impoverished customers" is typical party chatter) and enough shock cuts for an entire John Frankenheimer retrospective. (Bosé's presence irresistibly invites comparison with Story of a Love Affair, but where Michelangelo Antonioni dissected his couple's alienation with a diamond-cutter's delicacy, Bardem for the most part merely parades it unilluminatingly.) Explicitly designed as a shock to the system, Death of a Cyclist too often settles for academic subversion.

HOMEWORK FOR TUESDAY'S CLASS:

1. Read the blog entry on Talk to Her and write a reaction to an element of the film within the context of the class discussion. At this time, simply explore your personal reaction: what did you think of the film and of the way director Pedro Almodovar explores the issues of stereotypes of masculinity and femininity and of the challenges of modern vs. traditional expectations in the modern world. Use specific scenes or the development of specific characters to explain your reaction. Your piece should be 300-700 words and should be incorporated to the blog in the form of a "comment" to the blog entry on Talk to Her. The comment is due Tuesday BEFORE class. 

2. Please read the article below before tomorrow's class. You will be asked to incorporate the information  into your next blog comments due on WEDNESDAY before class. Please wait until we have watched and discussed the film in class before you post it. The article is:

 "Death of a Cyclist: Creating Modern Spanish Cinema," by Marsha Kinder:

http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/550-death-of-a-cyclist-creating-a-modern-spanish-cinema

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me via e-mail. 

On Pedro Almodóvar´s Hable con ella/Talk to Her (2002)

Talk to Her (Pedro Almodovar, 2002)

I wanted to begin our screenings with Pedro Almodovar's "Talk to Her" because I think it represents the culmination of the variety of processes I would like us to explore in the class. 

Mostly I think the film allows for a very transparent view of what the process of cultural redefinition of Spain, from dictatorship to modern democracy, represents aesthetically as well as ideologically, in the evolution of Spanish film, although this will become more apparent as we see some earlier films.  

Pedro Almodovar and Rosario Flores in the set of Hable con ella

Aesthetically it is representative of that process of redefinition because, as we will see over the following weeks, it is the culmination of a process of articulation of a very unique, modern, narrative style that builds on the aesthetic traditions of Spanish and international film and art histories, incorporating elements from Spanish high art and popular culture –music, literature, film, art— but also of other nations' (someone in an earlier class commented how the images of Alicia in the hospital, and her nakedness echoed religious iconography of the European renaissance). This generates a vision of culture that effectively subverts many of the more negative aspects of the values assigned to the established tradition of Spain by appropriating that tradition and giving it a broader meaning, more in line with the principles of a new, democratic, European, Spain.

Ideologically, the film can be read as a complex and also highly individualized and insightful reading of Spain’s struggle to overcome the challenges of deeply ingrained prejudices. In that sense, Talk to Her is also symbolic of the trauma that results from not dealing with unresolved issues (for all of the principal characters, except, perhaps, Alicia). A political reading of the film could suggest that Almodóvar presents a Spain that seems to have come to terms with its cultural conflicts but where prejudices persist not only in the surface, but also at the psychological level, preventing the society from healing. The secretary is capable of talking about her bowel movements on the telephone, but Benigno, Marcos, and Lidia are not able to express their feelings clearly or openly to each other, with disastrous consequences –Benigno, perhaps, because the dysfunctional nature of his environment (fatherless, with a domineering mother-figure have not allowed him to…) the others, we could argue, for something similar, but would have to dig a bit deeper into the dialogue to decipher it.

It is not surprising that the film addresses many of these issues through the prism of sexuality and gender. During the Franco dictatorship strict social mores were imposed through education, censorship and information manipulation, that is, by using propaganda, hiding and/or distorting information. Gender roles were strictly defined and enforced through social pressure and legislation that, for example, required a woman to have her husband’s written permission to have a driver’s license. In the post-Franco years, addressing issues of gender equality represented a challenge to the traditional mores that were symbols of the oppression of the fascist regime; in the 21^st century Spain the film represents, these traumas seem to linger in the subconscious of the characters despite having been, at least theoretically, overcome in everyday society (for example, nobody is supposed to ask Benigno about his sexual orientation, but the matter is dealt with in the crudest terms in the private conversation of the nurses. The reaction of Alicia’s father, a psychiatrist, when he sees Benigno massaging Alicia’s thigh also hints at the persistence of this dysfunction). It could be argued that it is precisely the tension between the expected social attitude towards certain behaviors and the persisting prejudice that is behind  Benigno’s inability to recognize (and even feel and confront) his traumas –although none of the characters of the film seem to do this in a “healthy” manner…     

But it is also possible that Almodovar is cautioning us about something. The society that the characters inhabit is not perfect. One unresolved tension is perhaps represented by how, despite the fluidity of gender roles allowed by modern society, all the characters suffer from "emotional scars" that are associated not to direct political events, but to society’s inability to confront them directly (in the prison, the booth Marcos speaks into is called “communication”, the center where there are all these strict rules about how inmates (excuse me, interns) are to initiate communication with the outside world, an apparently imposed attempt at guiding these prisoners towards establishing ties with the outside world. This prison communications center seems to bring even more attention to the emotional damage inflicted by the fact that the characters live in a dehumanized culture that assigns them roles into which no one can fit perfectly, and therefore can seem arbitrary. And although this modern world seems accepting of these characters’ “minor flaws”, there remains an undercurrent of old closed-mindedness: Although everyone seems accepting of Marcos’ emotional tears, these still catch peoples' attention. Lidia’s femininity is openly challenged in the confrontation with the television host, who insists she has made her way in a male-dominated medium (ironically breaking the glass ceiling by throwing women like Lydia under the bus). This suggests stereotypes still weighted heavily on gender roles despite appearances. Similarly, the nurses’ coffee break conversation, as was mentioned in class, shows that some of those stereotypes remain in the “collective unconscious”.

In previous class discussions, when I have screened this film students have talked about the moral relativism of the story: We want to hate Benigno for what he has done, but he seems to be depicted as too nice a guy. But Almodóvar and society seem to punish Benigno; his life is ruined, he dies. Although Marcos is his friend, and he helps him get a lawyer, he had warned Benigno of the consequences of his infatuation with Alicia when the male nurse confessed to wanting to marry the dancer.  The limit of morality seems to be there where one’s desire runs into someone else’s space: "She cannot say no to you with any part of her body" Marcos yells at Benigno when the nurse is confessing his love for Alicia. That sets the limit of personal freedom, the point at which barriers become necessary.

The film then seems to address also the pursuit of fulfillment –the desire not to be alone—and draws on very complex process of communication that do not work well as absolutes. The film takes a moral position, although it also stresses how all the characters are flawed.  Marcos’ growth seems to sprout from his acceptance of Benigno’s women’s magazine wisdom, his seemingly candid, simplistic worldview.  Peace might be achieved by the recognition and acceptance of one's own weaknesses and those of others, and perhaps by the achievement of a sense of personal freedom through the fulfillment of desire ("from the earthly rises the ethereal" Katarina tells Alicia and Benigno). 

Is Almodovar rejecting every myth about gender roles in Spanish society? Does Benigno, who shares all kind of advice about women ("talk to her"), really "know everything about women", as he claims? His argument is laughable, and has echoes of another film sociopath, Alfred Hitchcock’s Norman Bates from the movie Psycho. Benigno claims he knows all about women because he "lived 20 years with one and has taken care of this one for four". But it is the advice Benigno gives Marcos that seems to be the stepping stone to a new way of approaching relationships, which is why, as we said in class, we can't hate Benigno despite what he does. It is why we think that now Marcos is going to have a successful relationship with Alicia, because he has grown, (which contributes to the notion of a happy ending, although we don't really see an ending, that is, there really isn't an ending because this is a movie and the actors wrapped up the shoot and went home). 

Perhaps there are critiques in the story as well. Perhaps Almodovar is telling us that history is a tale told by an idiot--perhaps made of contradictions-- about the way gender roles are adopted and performed? After all, the women are not heard in the film. Lidia complains about it: When Lydia tells Marcos they need to talk before the bullfight, he tells her: "We have been talking for an hour", Lidia replies: "No. You have". 

Such a reading, and if we looked at the film as an allegory (a symbolic representation) of what Spain is confronting as a society --or should confront, it is being told that it should confront its identity crisis by embracing itself as a global space.