Spanish Cinema against Itself

Marsh Steven

Description

Spanish Cinema against Itself maps the evolution of Spanish surrealist and politically committed cinematic traditions from their origins in the 1930s—with the work of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, experimentalist José Val de Omar, and militant documentary filmmaker Carlos Velo—through to the contemporary period. Framed by film theory this book traces the works of understudied and non-canonical Spanish filmmakers, producers, and film collectives to open up alternate, more cosmopolitan and philosophical spaces for film discussion. In an age of the post-national and the postcinematic, Steven Marsh's work challenges conventional historiographical discourse, the concept of "national cinema," and questions of form in cinematic practice.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Différance. Otherness. Experiment.

1. Interrogations of the National Allegory: Trance film and Ethnography

2. Intermediality, Intoxication, and the Infrathin

3. The Discontinuous Legacies of Pere Portabella: Between Heritage and Inheritance

4. History, Hauntology, Representation: Spanish Cinema Against Itself

5. The Ex of Experimentation: Against Periodization

6. The Catacoustic and the Cosmopolitan: Rhythm and Timbre in the Films of Andrés Duque

7. Turns and Returns, Envois/Renvois: The Postal Effect in Recent Spanish Film

8. Retrospective Future Perfect: History, Black Holes, and Time Warps in the Films of Los Hijos and Luis López Carrasco

9. ¡No nos representan!: Performativity as Militant Film, the 15-M Archive

Afterword: Unruly Archives. La décima carta and Buenas noches, España

Index

Sujets

• Techniques
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Película fotográfica
• Spanish Civil War
• Heritage
• Spain
• History of Europe
• History of film
• Spain (groupe)
• Pere Portabella
• Technique
• Film
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 11 février 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253046338
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

SPANISH CINEMA AGAINST ITSELF
NEW DIRECTIONS IN NATIONAL CINEMAS
Robert Rushing, editor
SPANISH CINEMA AGAINST ITSELF
Cosmopolitanism, Experimentation, Militancy
Steven Marsh
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2020 by Steven Marsh
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Marsh, Steven, [date-] author.
Title: Spanish cinema against itself : cosmopolitanism, experimentation, militancy / Steven Marsh.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019011399 (print) | LCCN 2019012412 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253046345 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253046307 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253046314 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures-Spain-History-20th century. | Motion pictures-Spain-History-21st century. | Motion pictures-Social aspects-Spain-History and criticism.
Classification: LCC PN1993.5.S7 (ebook) | LCC PN1993.5.S7 M29395 2019 (print) | DDC 791.430946-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019011399
1 2 3 4 5 25 24 23 22 21 20
For Tatjana
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Diff rance . Otherness. Experiment.
1 Interrogations of the National Allegory: Trance Film and Ethnography
2 Intermediality, Intoxication, and the Infrathin
3 The Discontinuous Legacies of Pere Portabella: Between Heritage and Inheritance
4 History, Hauntology, Representation: Spanish Cinema against Itself
5 The Ex of Experimentation: Against Periodization
6 The Catacoustic and the Cosmopolitan: Rhythm and Timbre in the Films of Andr s Duque
7 Turns and Returns, Envois / Renvois : The Postal Effect in Recent Spanish Film
8 Retrospective Future Perfect: History, Black Holes, and Time Warps in the Films of Los Hijos and Luis L pez Carrasco
9 No nos representan! : Performativity as Militant Film, the 15-M Archive
Afterword: Unruly Archives. La d cima carta and Buenas noches, Espa a
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T HIS BOOK HAS BEEN A LONG TIME IN the making and would not have been possible without the help, support, and enthusiasm of many people who have contributed to its gestation over the years. In Spain, many filmmakers were among the first to understand the nature of the project and help shape it in productive conversations. I would like to express my gratitude to the members of the Collective Los Hijos: Luis L pez Carrasco, Natalia Mar n S ncho, and Javier Fern ndez V zquez. I thank Flavio G. Garc a, Miguel Llans , Ramiro Ledo Cordeiro, Carlos Serrano Azcona, Cecilia Barriga, Antoni Padr s, Pere Portabella (and Films 59), Adri n Onco, Anna Petrus, Virginia Garc a del Pino, Gonzalo de Pedro Amatria, Raya Mart n, Sylvain George, Guillermo G. Peydr , Andr s Duque, Victor Moreno, skar Alegr a, and Gonzalo Garc a Pelayo-all of whom generously shared their work with me. I thank David Varela Alvarez and Samuel Alarc n for inviting me to participate in a roundtable discussion on the filmic dialogue between Ramon Ledo Cordeiro s VidaExtra and Portabella s El sopar during a cycle of militant cinema in Spain. Diego Rodr guez Bl zquez at M rgenes cine has consistently backed my work, as has Marta S nchez from Pragda.
Many of my academic colleagues in Spain have proved stimulating interlocutors and have helped me access films and other material. I thank Elena Oroz, Albert Alcoz, Joan M. Minguet Batllori, Josetxo Cerd n, Miguel Fern ndez Labayen, Rom n Gubern, Sonia Garc a L pez, and Lidia Mateo Leivas.
Preliminary sections and early drafts of this book were presented as lectures in Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Among those who invited me to deliver such talks are Jill Robbins of the University of Texas, Austin, Juan Egea of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Sara Nadal-Melsi of New York University, Bryan Cameron of the University of Cambridge, John Kraniauskas and Mari Paz Balibrea of Birkbeck College, London, and Eduardo Ledesma of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Vicente Benet of the Universitat Jaume I in Castell n kindly invited me to give a talk to his seminar. Elena Oliete and Beatriz Oria hosted me at the University of Zaragoza. I had the honor to be the keynote speaker at the Hispanic Studies graduate student conference at Indiana University and at the conference Aqu y Ahora that Rosi Song and Adri n Gras-Vel zquez organized at Swarthmore. The first time I spoke publicly about this project was at the Chicago Film Seminar at the invitation of Sara Hall.
Over the years, I have benefited from being able to teach successive generations of extraordinary graduate students who are too numerous to name here. I want, though, to single out for gratitude Yanire M rquez, Dag Sasha Lindskog, Lorenzo Gattorno, Daniel S nchez Bataller, and Susana Domingo Amestoy.
I have had the privilege of receiving rich feedback on my work from colleagues such as Bel n Vidal, Tom Whittaker, Oscar Cabezas, Alberto Moreiras, Elixabete Ansa Goicochea, Karen Benezra, Pablo P rez Wilson, Brad Epps, Marvin D Lugo, Carmelo Esterrich, Palmar lvarez, and Sebastiaan Faber. Anna Cox and Rob Trumbull generously shared their work with me. I have also worked intensely over the last few years with a group of colleagues that promises to continue its work of making waves in the rather moribund field of Spanish film studies. These collaborators are Teresa Vilar s, Patty Keller, Cristina Moreiras Menor, Sarah Thomas, Juli n Guti rrez Albilla, and Camila Moreiras.
Carl Good and Sam Steinberg invited me to participate in the Discourse issue they coedited, and the result was an early version of what would become chapter 7 of this book. Iv n Pinto invited me to contribute to the important online journal La Fuga in Chile-a contribution that was a fragment of what in time would be chapter 9 . Earlier versions of chapters 8 and 3 appeared in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies and Hispanic Review , respectively.
I am fortunate to work at an institution with a vibrant intellectual community at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I owe a special debt to my colleagues Margarita Saona, Rosilie Hern ndez, Imke Meyer, and Heidi Schlipphacke. I benefited from a fellowship in 2010 at the Institute for the Humanities at UIC that allowed me time away from teaching and enabled me to lay the foundations of the project. Dan Streible, Susan Courtney, Ina Rae Hark-the original members of the Film and Media Studies Program at the University of South Carolina-were there when I first began to think about this book. As ever, Jo Labanyi has consistently believed in and encouraged my work.
This book is dedicated to my wife and compa era , Tatjana Gajic, who, together with my daughter, Jana, means more to me than anything in the world.
SPANISH CINEMA AGAINST ITSELF
INTRODUCTION
Diff rance. Otherness. Experiment .
E XPERIMENTATION WITH FORM-ALL THAT DETERMINES, CONDITIONS, AND disciplines formal filmic practice-is what defines this book. Spanish Cinema against Itself: Cosmopolitanism, Experimentation, Militancy explores, within that framework, the concept of Spain s national cinema from the margins that outline both the nation and the discipline of film studies. This work is an attempt to mobilize, in ways hitherto unexplored in Spanish film studies, the politics of global filmic practice and its materialities beyond the sterile confines of the nation. The aim is to theorize the terrain on which such discourse is constructed by focusing on largely neglected experimental and independent film produced within the boundaries of the nation-state but that exceed the national narrative. Part of this book s critical intervention is to disentangle films produced within a specific geographical space from the baggage of identity. Indeed, the title, Spanish Cinema against Itself , points to the plurality of affiliations at work within the territorial space known as Spain, the otherness that dwells within its frontiers as well as that which seeps beyond them. The book s title also hints at the idea of transmission-analogic and electronic-contained within the complex, alternating wavelengths of moving-image technology. It points to a displacement or translation suggestive of a sense of movement, of the ground itself seismically shifting, and of the yawning abyss of the conflictive and productive void. And it posits, within that transit or passage, a notion of allos , the alter , alterity, the other, the alternative.
Cosmopolitan Teleiopoiesis
Spanish critics and commentators have recently coined the phrase the other Spanish cinema to define a new era in the history of independent filmmaking in Spain that has emerged in the wake of the popularization of digital technology and the new (often online) formats for the distribution and exhibition of films. 1 The phrase has since been adopted by British and North American critics and commentators as well. While acknowledging the honest intentions behind the usage of the term, this book argues against such c