The Spanish Fantastic

Contemporary Filmmaking in Horror, Fantasy and Sci-fi

Shelagh Rowan-Legg

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786720788
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

In recent decades, the Spanish 'fantastic' has been at the forefront of genre filmmaking. Films such as The Day of the Beast, the Rec trilogy, The Orphanage and Timecrimes have received widespread attention and popularity, arguably rescuing Spanish cinema from its semi-invisibility during the creativity-crushing Franco years. By turns daring, evocative, outrageous, and intense, this new cinema has given voice to a generation, both beholden to and yet breaking away from their historical and cultural roots. Beginning in the 1990s, films from directors such as Alex de la Iglesia, Alejandro Amenabar, and Jaume Balaguero reinvigorated Spanish cinema in the horror, science fiction and fantasy veins as their work proliferated and took centre stage at international festivals such as Sitges, Fantasia International Film Festival and Fantastic Fest. Through an examination of key films and filmmakers, Shelagh Rowan-Legg here investigates the rise of this unique new wave of genre films from Spain, and how they have recycled, reshaped and renewed the stunning visual tropes, wild narratives and imaginative other worlds inherent to an increasingly influential cinematic field.Its emergence is part of a new trend of postnational cinema, led by the fantastic, which approaches the national boundaries of cinema with an exciting sense of fluidity.

1

Álex de la Iglesia: The Father of a Generation: Mutant Action and The Day of the Beast

In the early 1990s, it seemed that Spain had emerged from the shadow of the Fascist era. The economy was stable, and various sporting and cultural events in 1992, such as the Barcelona Olympics, the World’s Fair in Seville, and the designation of Madrid as the European Capital of Culture, announced that the nation was now integrated into the democratic western world. It was this new Spain that cried out in a roar for a new cinema, one that challenged not only the dominant middle-of-the-road comedies and dramas of the 1980s, but also the vision of Spain perpetuated by those films. It was the dawn of a new era, where popular genre forms could be appropriated and put to use in Spanish cinema. At the forefront of this era was Álex de la Iglesia.

Born in 1965 in Bilbao into a middle-class family, de la Iglesia grew up as one of five children; his father was a professor of sociology, and his mother a painter. Their left-leaning ideology meant that de la Iglesia grew up exposed to a wide range of cultural influences. As a child, he watched Japanese animation and old movies, both Spanish and international, on television. He was as obsessed with Godzilla and Tintin as he was with Alfred Hitchcock and Luis Buñuel. He loved role-playing games and was fascinated by the African battles of World War II. At 13, inspired in part by the magazine ‘Famous Monsters of Filmland’, he began drawing comic books, which he would photocopy at school and give out to his friends. He took philosophy at university, but claims that he frequently fell asleep in class; his desire to compare the ancient Greek philosophies of Plotinus with Marvel comics found little support. He continued to work in the underground comic scene in Bilbao, and eventually found his way into art design and set decoration in television, working with Enrique Urbizu, and on short films, including Pablo Berger’s ‘Máma’ (1988). De la Iglesia made his first short, ‘Mirindas asesinas’, in 1991, and it was popular enough to catch the attention of Pedro Almodóvar.

It was the cultural influences of underground comics and heavy metal music in his native Bilbao, with their ‘fondness for gory violence, two-dimensional characterization, improbably proportioned women, and a generalized non-realist aesthetic’, that lead to de la Iglesia’s rejection of the dominant cinema of that time.¹ Although the themes and characters of their films are extremely different, Almodóvar saw a kindred spirit in de la Iglesia, who, like him, was challenging the hegemony of arthouse cinema, and wanted to use popular genre forms in new ways. El Deseo, Almodóvar’s production company, was branching out to produce films not directed by Almodóvar, and wanted to get behind films that stretched the boundaries of Spanish cinema. El Deseo would become the initial production company behind Mutant Action.

De la Iglesia was not interested in what he described as the contemporary ‘conspiracy of boredom’ he saw in most mainstream Spanish film of the 1980s,² and combined cinematic influences from around the world. He would never deny the influence of non-Spanish filmmakers on his work, and often cites popular cinema directors such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, as well as auteur directors such as Ingmar Bergman. As for Spanish filmmakers, the influence of horror directors such as Jesús Franco and Paul Naschy can be seen, as well as Luis Berlanga and Juan Antonio Bardem. Certainly, de la Iglesia has adapted both early Spanish motifs and genres, and various foreign influences, to his particular brand of cinema, and he was prepared to wage an intellectual battle for the importance of fantastic cinema.

The fantastic in Spain has manifested over the centuries in forms that may be designated grotesque. Painters such as Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Goya created works that modern art historians have labelled grotesque: the former in his paintings of fools and dwarves of the seventeenth-century Spanish court, and the latter in his black paintings and Capricho prints.³ During the nineteenth century, several Spanish authors wrote naturalist novels, which aimed to represent that which was repugnant to the senses, with descriptions of the vile and miserable; much of this work was found offensive by the traditionalist and religious establishment of Spain at the time.⁴ Philip Thomson writes that the ‘grotesque mode in art and literature tends to be prevalent in societies and eras marked by strife, radical change or disorientation’.⁵ For many artists, the grotesque was viewed as ‘an appropriate expression of the problematic nature of existence’.⁶ Modernist artists used the grotesque through experimental and dislocated language, dissolution of personal identity, emphasis on discourse over story, and philosophical speculation.⁷ Painters such as Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso explored the surreal (connected to the grotesque through themes and styles of dislocation and experimentation), as did Luis Buñuel and writer Federico García Lorca.

In Spain in the 1920s, a dramatic form called esperpento emerged, created by playwright Ramón del Valle-Inclán. Valle-Inclán’s plays were affected by and reflected concerns over post-war trauma, social and political problems, industrial strife, and the shift to a more secular culture. He was criticizing the political practices and social decadence of his age through esperpento, which was ‘the first attempt to convert the disparate tendencies of the grotesque into a genre’, and included an ‘absurd, deformed caricature [and] deranged vision of the human condition’.⁸ It used grotesque characters, situations and language, but was also meant to be rooted in everyday experience. Esperpento is ‘a concave mirror [that] catches, distorts, and ridicules appearance, so the dramatist reflects in a grotesque framework an imaginative elaboration of reality’.⁹ Rather than an abandonment of realism, it is a deformation of realism. Most importantly, this deformation is meant to be both farcical and tragic.

Spain’s postmodernist cultural era coincided with the introduction of democracy in 1977 and its integration into the European Union in 1986. The fantastic films that followed would frequently manifest parody and pastiche. Linda Hutcheon calls postmodern parody the mode of the ‘“ex-centric”… of those who are marginalized by a dominant ideology’.¹⁰ She writes that parody is part of a dialogical relationship between identification and distance; a parody might echo the past, but it also changes the past to suit its contemporary culture. De la Iglesia’s films are what Ángel Sala refers to as ‘neo-esperpento’, updating its themes and style to a postmodern perspective, to represent the contemporary filmmaker and be applicable to a contemporary spectator.¹¹

De la Iglesia and co-writer Jorge Guerricaechevarría made a point of avoiding themes that had dominated Spanish cinema in the 1980s, such as the Civil War and post-war era, realistically-portrayed social problems, and the recreation of childhood trauma. Like Valle-Inclán in his time, de la Iglesia looks at Spanish culture of the late twentieth century as a strange carnival, a mix of both the disparate regional cultures within Spain and the mainstream versus subcultures, with influence from Europe and North America. Jordi Sánchez Navarro writes that the ‘cinema of Álex de la Iglesia is purely postmodern in its irreverent fusion of genres, a reinvention of film tradition and a hyperconscious appeal to pop culture’.¹²

De la Iglesia frequently collaborates with the same people, both behind and in front of the camera, such as Guerricaechevarría and actors Santiago Segura and Álex Angulo, which suggests their like-minded perspective and desire to bring certain themes and ideas of their generation to the screen. De la Iglesia’s cinema is a fusion of the influences of popular culture combined with a sharp, critical eye on Spanish cinema and society that propelled him and his first two feature films into cult status.

Mutant Action

De la Iglesia and Guerricaechevarría showed their script for Mutant Action, at first a short film, to Almodóvar in 1991; it was Almodóvar who suggested that they make it into a feature. It was another two years before the film went into production, financed by El Deseo and CIBY 2000. At the time, they envisioned it as the nerviest, ‘cheekiest’ film in Spanish history. It was a moderate success at the Spanish box office, grossing a little under €1 million. But it went on to win three Goya Awards, for Best Production Design, Best Special Effects, and Best Make-Up. While some critics at the time wrote that it was empty of content, despite its appearance as a pastiche and homage to extreme genre cinema, the film is arguably criticizing not only 1990s Spanish society, but also the homogenous film culture it produced.

Set in a dystopian future, Mutant Action is the frenetic tale of a ragtag group of terrorists and their attempt to extort money through kidnapping Patricia, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. Their leader Ramón, recently released from prison, leads his mutant group in the slaughter of a wedding party and the kidnapping. Successful in their capture of Patricia, they set out to a distant planet to exchange her for the ransom. While en route, Ramon kills all but one of the mutants in turn in order to keep the ransom money for himself. Crash landing on the planet, now with a willing hostage, Ramon fights off both her father and the galactic military in a shoot-out in an Old West bar.

The film combines the semantics of several genres, including horror, science fiction, and western, through tropes of violence and murder, a futuristic setting both on Earth and in outer space, and its main characters who refuse civilization in favour of barbarism. The syntactical connection between semantic staples such as spaceships, saloons, and mutants highlights the film’s intertextual references to other films in which those semantics usually appear. According to de la Iglesia, ‘Science fiction was a reference to create a comedic situation… a way to make a savage comedy with black humor, very bloody, with hyperviolence, with a look between madness and filth’.¹³ Peter Podol points out that black humour and the grotesque are often ‘characterized by an inherent dialectical quality which is generally expressed in an extremely visual manner’.¹⁴ The esperpento, as a distortion of realism, can be expressed through a combination of disparate visual elements that enhances the grotesquerie.

In her examination of contemporary Spanish film, Cristina Moreiras Menor sees postmodern Spanish culture as embracing image and appearance as a way of selling itself to Europe.¹⁵ She interprets this through Fredric Jameson’s theory of postmodernism, and specifically through three conditions of the relationship between the subject and their experience that she sees as characteristic of postmodernism:

1.A privileging of the culture of image and simulacrum

2.A lack of historicity

3.A waning of affect¹⁶

In Mutant Action, the first condition would seem to be met: the emphasis is placed on spectacle, images of violence, and the intertextuality of esperpento with the semantics of the various genres, privileging images and imagery through an emphasis on the body politic. The spectator is meant to engage with the visual flamboyance as much as the story. The second condition might seem to be met at first glance, given that the story is set in an unspecified future in a non-specific location. However, the presentation of the characters, and the deliberate use of and engagement with television within the story, belies this. The film is deliberately engaging with imagery found in contemporary Spanish culture and television, distorting it for political engagement.

The third condition is met in part: the excessive violence and its almost nonchalant portrayal suggests the waning of violence’s effect on the contemporary spectator. However, it is not entirely met; Jameson might view postmodernism as ahistorical, but de la Iglesia is in part creating a history of the present. By setting the film in a dystopian future, as opposed to the present, de la Iglesia is making a critical point as to the ways in which contemporary Spanish film frequently ignores the more frivolous excesses of its society. It is both nonchalant in its portrayal of violence and excess, and making a critical point of both Spanish society’s dismissal of underground culture and Spanish film’s disdain for popular culture through that nonchalance. De la Iglesia is critically revisiting representations of Spanish society through the fantastic neo-esperpento mode.

The opening of the film suggests science fiction, given its futuristic setting as indicated through mise-en-scène, and also black comedy, given the absurdity of the opening actions and situation. Yet it also a heist, as indicated by the kidnapping and request for ransom, and a western, shown in the planet to which they travel, its desert setting, and the barbaric characters the mutants encounter there. De la Iglesia mutates (pun intended) traditional genre semantics, imposing a syntactic resignification on spectacle. Barry Keith Grant writes, ‘[g]‌enre movies may reflect, reinforce, question or subvert accepted ideology, but viewers enjoy them as movies whether they fulfill, violate or thwart conventions and expectations’.¹⁷ While genre mixing does not in and of itself thwart expectations, the particular combination, representation and extremes of the film can be considered as a challenge to the dominant cinema of the 1980s rejected by de la Iglesia.

In classical realist cinema, production design is constructed so that the spectator may focus on the narrative. If a film is set in the present, production design elements such as set decoration are made to be ‘invisible’, meeting expectations so that they can be ignored in favour of character and action. However, in a fantastic film, the setting is frequently different from empirical reality, and the production design must create this fantastic world so that it can be understood in the context of the story. The production design in Mutant Action is retro-futurist (a mixture of future and contemporary signifiers), reminiscent of Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982): the mutants drive their van beneath bridges, through a concrete jungle, which is filled with refuse both inanimate and human. Both films showing grungy streets populated by the underclasses juxtaposed against the extravagance of the rich, and indicators of both the imagined future (advanced technology) and the contemporary (parking meters). The design of the spaceship is similar to that in films from the 1970s, such as Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), where the ships are dirty and their inhabitants seen performing crude maintenance (also associated with retro-futurist production design). In Mutant Action, the spectator would actively register the production design as part of the narrative, which connects more to a generic verisimilitude of past science fiction films, representing the retro-futuristic vision of science fiction that is both imagining the future, yet analogous to the present. The bright, pastel-coloured world of the wedding pa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsment
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Bastard Sons: Contemporary Spanish Fantastic Film
• 1 Álex de la Iglesia: The Father of a Generation: Mutant Action and The Day of the Beast
• 2 Heroes and Villains: The Birthday and The Backwoods
• 3 Alejandro Amenábar: The Drop-Out Auteur: Open Your Eyes and The Others
• 4 The Haunting of Houses: The Abandoned and The Orphanage
• 5 Jaume Balagueró: The Horror Aficionado: The Nameless and Darkness
• 6 The Spanish Fantastic Woman: Sexykiller and Hierro
• 7 Guillermo del Toro: The Outside Man: The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth
• 8 Franchising the Spanish Fantastic: The [REC] Films
• 9 Nacho Vigalondo: The Illegitimate Inheritor: Timecrimes and Extraterrestrial
• Conclusion: The End of an Era?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography