Spanish Cinema in the Global Context

Film on Film

Samuel Amago

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135010720
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Across a broad spectrum of media, markets, and national contexts, self-reflexivity continues to be a favored narrative mode with wide ranging functions. In this book Amago argues that, in addition to making visible industry and production concerns within the film text, reflexive aesthetics have a cartographic function that serves to map the place of a film (geographic and cultural) within the global cinemascape, and thus to bring into sharper relief images of the national. Focusing on films in the contemporary Spanish context that in some way reflect back on themselves and the processes of their own production, that purposefully blur the distinction between reality and fiction, or that draw attention to the various modes of cinematic exhibition and reception, Amago proposes ways in which these movies can be employed to understand Spanish national cinemas today as imbedded within a dynamic global system.

Part I
Art, Commerce and Reflexivity in Contemporary Spanish Cinema

1
Historical Reflection and National Allegory in La mala educación (“Bad Education”) (Pedro Almodóvar, 2004) and Los abrazos rotos (“Broken Embraces”) (Pedro Almodóvar, 2009)

the sight of a map in a film often makes visible the history of the form producing the film, in other words, the archive held within and generating the tactics of the diagram.

—Conley (15)

Reflected in the collected works of Pedro Almodóvar’s filmography we can perceive a dynamic image of the complete potential life cycle of a movie, from the writing of a script through casting, location scouting, shooting, editing, dubbing, projecting, broadcasting, then viewing, discussing, imitating, recalling, quoting and remaking. From preproduction through postproduction, distribution and reception, the manifold forms of work associated with the manufacture and interpretation of movies appearing in Almodóvar’s films provide viewers with an evolving picture of moving-image culture in democratic Spain. Given the array of metacinematic conceits foregrounded in his films, a comprehensive analysis of their function would represent a massive undertaking deserving of its own monographic study. This chapter’s goal is more modest: I analyze how reflexivity functions in what are perhaps the director’s most self-reflexive films to date, La mala educación (“Bad Education”) (2004) and Los abrazos rotos (“Broken Embraces”) (2009), in terms of their representation of personal memory, modes of historical discourse and questions of the national.

These two movies are ideally suited to historical analysis because they both figure directors similar to Almodóvar himself who endeavor to make sense of their own personal histories through filmmaking. In this regard and quite in spite of what the director has said about the films (Marr 123), both may be interpreted as autobiographical texts.¹ La mala educación and Los abrazos rotos are historiographical in that they make history itself the object of their narrative and symbolic structures. Both films emphasize the process of mining the media archive in order to assemble a coherent narrative account of the past and to gauge its impact on the present. Similarly, geographic and familial motifs appearing within these films signal the director’s allegorical-national aspirations.²

Reflexivity and Radiography in Los Abrazos Rotos

In keeping with its indebtedness to film noir, the narrative structure of Los abrazos rotos relies heavily upon the antithetical tension between opposing forces: Martel, as the bad father figure, is contrasted with Mateo, as good father figure. Aside from the fact that both men are literally fathers with a son each, these two male characters are held together symmetrically through their romantic relationships with Lena, whose body is the object and intermediary of their battle to possess her. She is also the central object/actor of their films: Mateo’s various cameras lovingly document her body, committing her image to film, whereas Martel orders his son Ernesto Jr. (later identified as Ray X) to shoot a documentary of the making of “Chicas y maletas” (“Girls and Suitcases”) in order to subject her to surveillance. Functionally, then, Lena mediates the men’s relationship; her body creates a reciprocal if not homosocial affiliation. Indeed, the relation between the two men in the film is clearly coded in terms of what Gayle Rubin called the “traffic in women,” which Eve Sedgwick identifies as a central component of the construction and dominance of homosocial male desire. Homosocial desire in Los abrazos rotos functions as a way in which both Mateo and Martel establish and defend their masculinity, with unfortunate results for Lena, who occupies the position of object of their controlling gazes. Thus, although in the end patriarchy is refigured positively in the film, a violent heterosexual masculinity nonetheless continues its violent and repressive pattern in Almodóvar’s films. In keeping with the film’s reflexive form, masculinity aspires to violent power through control of visual apparatuses.

Lena’s body as intermediary object of homosocial desire and locus for filmic/video representation and site of violence is emphasized in the hospital sequence after Martel—in the film’s most overtly noir scene—has pushed her down the stairs. In the sterile context of a hospital room the film’s dramatic development slows as the camera lingers on several X-ray images of Lena’s bones and skull as her physician documents possible fractures. Although a variety of imaging technologies appear in the film, I begin this chapter by looking more closely at Almodóvar’s novel use of the X-ray in Los abrazos rotos in terms of its function as a visual and thematic motif.

In the history of visual imaging technologies, the X-ray occupies a privileged place because, almost from the beginning, it brought together overlapping discourses of representation and identity, ontology and epistemology. As Jose van Dijck elaborates in The Transparent Body, quoting Lisa Cartwright, the X-ray functioned historically as a socially transgressive and highly gendered instrument that “exposed the private interior of women to the gaze of medicine and the public at large” (van Dijck 89). Tracing the emergence of that technology through scientific and journalistic discourses from the late nineteenth century to the present, van Dijck shows how the X-ray came to be associated with the idea of a “photography of death,” by which viewers could apprehend in the radiographic image a picture of his or her own mortality:

Perhaps more than penetrating the flesh to reveal agents of disease, and more than baring the secrets of the heart, Röntgen’s new device allowed people to steal a glance at their future fate as a skeleton. The shadows of bones on skiagraphs were strongly associated with mortality; death was imprinted in the living body and X rays made it visible to the naked eye. (van Dijck 93)

Van Dijck notes that from the moment of its invention by the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen in 1895, the X-ray was not only perceived as a penetrating technology—making the flesh transparent—but it was “also thought to have predictive qualities: literally foreshadowing man’s deadly destination and turning the body into a transcendent object” (94). Thus, the piercing power of the X-ray would seem to be a logical annex to Martel’s oppressive and violent masculine attention, which is almost always mediated through imaging technologies.

In Los abrazos rotos, the X-ray images that appear so prominently and deliberately after Lena’s fall down the stairs serve several purposes. They represent at once Lena’s bones (although we do not see any clear signs of breaking in the X-rays) while also prefiguring her violent death by car accident in Lanzarote. Further, the X-rays of Lena’s skeleton evoke the concept of forensic archeology, because they depict visually the unearthing of bones and the uncovering of past violence. It is worth noting that when the film begins, Lena is already dead, so the X-rays appearing in this scene function to remind the viewer that she is deceased (at the present time of Mateo’s remembering and telling) at the same time that they eerily predict her future death (from the past point of historical reference). In Almodóvar’s film, the X-ray works to blur the temporality of Lena’s life and death, a temporality already rendered opaque by the film’s complex narrative structure (see Figure 1.1). Simultaneously, and more abstractly, the X-ray also suggests the photographic erosion of Lena’s subjectivity, because by definition this particular technology works to diminish the cognitive distinction between interior and exterior, between alive and dead, rendering—to borrow a phrase from Akira Lippit—“interiority as photographic phenomenon” (“Phenomenologies” 76). The X-ray scene in Los abrazos rotos contributes precisely to the ontological uncertainty of Lena; in a film that includes within itself a variety of imaging technologies that are arrayed expressly to document, surveil, preserve, remember and diagnose her, Lena nonetheless remains intangible. Her personality, her subjectivity and her interiority all remain utterly opaque to her masculine suitors and the viewer. As the object of nearly all the visual technologies figured in the film, Lena is ultimately an absent and obscure object of male desire. She stands symbolically as part of a cinematic apparatus that has functioned historically as “an institutional

Figure 1.1 The X-ray is one of many imaging technologies appearing on-screen in Los abrazos rotos. Although the viewer learns very little about her real identity, the radiograph renders an elusive image of Lena’s physical interiority.

site in which the male appropriation of the scopic drive defines the woman irrefutably as object-image of the look” (Flitterman 244). What is noteworthy about Los abrazos rotos is that the film does not attempt to conceal this gendered operation. Throughout the film the apparatus of cinematic enunciation is signaled reflexively, making itself visible through self-reference. Lena is a floating signifier or “woman-image,” in Flitterman’s terms, who is the erotic object of both men’s look. She is “a locus for the gaze of male characters and of viewers” (Flitterman 245) whose masculine heterosexual vision is exposed in the film as the originating violence leading to her death. The X-ray thus emerges as yet another metaphor standing concurrently as a cause and evidence of an aggressive masculine gaze that seeks steadfastly to erase her subjectivity.

The X-ray in Los abrazos rotos serves other functions. As a mode of representation, it also offers an illusion of transparency that has important epistemological ramifications, because it forces the viewer to consider instantaneously the coetaneous interior and the exterior of the body. As Lippit posits, “the surface of the X ray opens onto an impossible topography, a space that cannot be occupied by either the subject or object, or rather, a space in which the subject and object are dissolved into a phantasmatic hybrid or emulsion—an atopos” (“Phenomenologies” 80). In Los abrazos rotos, the impossible topography of the X-ray points to Lena’s uncertain ontological status in the film, as she is both alive (in the past) and dead (in the present) yet constantly made present in the film through Mateo’s memory, the archival footage shot by Ray X in which she appears and within the fictional film “Chicas y maletas.” Lena is a photographic trace visible only through the imaging qualities of film, video and human memory. She is the ghost in the cinematic machine that ultimately escapes (through death) all masculine efforts to know—and therefore control—her. The X-ray promises the erasure of the dividing line between inside and outside, between the body’s limits and its interiority and between life and mortality. This uneasy relationship between interior and exterior embodies one of the central paradoxes of Los abrazos rotos: We at once see everything of Lena’s body, her face, her hair adorned with a variety of wigs, her body dressed in an array of dresses, and even X-rays of her bones, yet at the film’s conclusion we are left with very little sense as to who she really is. Lena is a hieroglyph. For Martel, Mateo and the viewer, she is a mystery, “an inaccessible though desirable otherness” (Doane 75); she is all surface and no depth. If we consider Lena through the lens of feminist film theory as it has been variously formulated by Mulvey, Doane, Flitterman and others, in Los abrazos rotos Lena can be understood as the image orchestrating Almodóvar’s cinematic gaze; like the woman-as-screen theorized by Mary Ann Doane, Lena’s “beauty, her very desirability, becomes a function of certain practices of imaging—framing, lighting, camera movement, angle” (Doane 76). Throughout the film, Penélope Cruz, like Doane’s hieroglyph, is “more closely associated with the surface of the image than its illusory depths, its constructed 3-dimensional space which the man is destined to inhabit and hence control” (Doane 76). Like the image of Vera (Elena Anaya) appearing in Almodóvar’s next film, La piel que habito (“The Skin I Live In”) (2011), Lena is an object or medium manipulated by men wielding other media. (The list of men and their media must also include Almodóvar himself.) Lena stands as the film’s thematic and structural core, the center of the love triangle on which the entire flashback narrative relies, but even though the viewer perceives her from just about every perspective—including an internal one—the only evidence of her interiority or subjectivity is, in the end, photographic or radiographic. It is perhaps most tragic, then, that the film’s resolution—in which the Spanish nuclear family is symbolically reconstituted—relies on her violent death, the breaking of her body and the dissolution of her self. Almodóvar’s new nuclear family is built on Lena’s corpse. (The viewer recalls that Mateo’s emergence from the hospital after the accident that has claimed Lena’s life is rendered in a full shot of Judit, Mateo and a young Diego standing at the top of the stairs, preparing to descend hand in hand.) Mateo survives his ordeal, but after she dies Lena becomes a ghost, a phantasm perceived only through the imaging powers of video and film stock.

Almodóvar’s New Nuclear Family

In a review of the film Marsha Kinder describes the final scene of Los abrazos rotos, in which “Mateo, Judit, and Diego sit together in front of a small screen, like a family watching television, enjoying the restored version of the movie” (“Restoring” 34). Yet, these three characters are not like a family at all. Mateo, Judit and Diego in fact represent the very definition of the traditional biological family: Diego is Mateo’s and Judit’s son. Given the tradition of family deviancy that Hardcastle sees developing across nearly all of Almodóvar’s films, what is noteworthy about Los abrazos rotos is precisely this apparently traditional emphasis on a heteronormative family structure. It would seem, in fact, that the strangest thing about the family appearing at the end of Los abrazos rotos is the fact that its existence and functionality are perhaps purely ad hoc and therefore dependent on the recovery and reconstruction of the film within the film. The path to family restoration is certainly not traditional, but nonetheless, the film’s conclusion presents a reconstituted nuclear family as the ultimate outcome of narrative development. Divorced from the official Francoist ideology and Catholic dogma that inscribed and defined the traditional Spanish family for nearly forty years, Mateo Blanco, Diego and Judit function together as an economic unit whose functionality depends on the context of filmmaking. With the death of Martel, the evil financier, they are able to confront their past, reconcile and put their movie back together again.

More important than the actual reformation of the nuclear family in Los abrazos rotos is the process through which it is reformed: it is through the protagonists’ attention to history, to uncovering and understanding the past, which makes possible the happy—if problematic—denouement. It has become nearly impossible to discuss contemporary Spanish culture without referring to the country’s authoritarian history and its extraordinary transition to democracy after 1975. And although Almodóvar, especially early in his career, has been widely quoted as insisting that he approaches movie-making as if Franco had never existed (Vernon 28), the broader patterns of his filmography would suggest otherwise (Vilarós; Morgan-Tamosunas).³ What is significant about Los abrazos rotos and his earlier La mala educación, however, is that both films portray a fictional director very similar to Almodóvar himself who is reflexively engaged in uncovering and understanding the past. This process is thematized in the photography of Los abrazos rotos, which is constituted through visual contrasts between light and dark, perception and nonperception. The film’s opening and closing scenes, for example, draw the viewer’s attention to light as a changing value. In the opening title sequence lighting assistants gauge the illumination and orientation of Lena’s lighting double relative to the camera, and the photography of the final scene emphasizes the transition from light to darkness, as the light filter closes gradually until we only see the brightness of the characters’ faces before the fade to total black. The focused light of the monitor in front of Mateo, Judit and Diego purposefully illuminates them as a rebuilt nuclear family unit: The filmic medium constitutes them even as it functions as the object of their attention.

The film’s final fade to black at once emphasizes the blindness of the film’s central character, while also bringing to bear the question of light as a motif. Earlier in Los abrazos rotos, while Mateo and Diego view Ray X’s video footage of the accident that had cost Lena her life and him his sight, an important topic of their discussion is the lighting that made possible the shooting of the video. And the projector that Martel uses...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Art, Commerce and Reflexivity in Contemporary Spanish Cinema
• PART II Spanish National Histories on Film
• PART III Spain in/and the Global Cinema
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index