(Re)viewing Creative, Critical and Commercial Practices in Contemporary Spanish Cinema

By Duncan Wheeler

Formulated around a number of key thematic concerns – including new creative trends; the politics and practices of memory; auteurship, genre and stardom in a transnational age – this reassessment of contemporary Spanish cinema from 1992 to 2012 brings leading academics from a broad range of disciplinary and geographical backgrounds into dialogue with critically and commercially successful practitioners to suggest the need to redefine the parameters of one of the world’s most creative national cinemas. This volume will appeal not only to students and scholars of Spanish films, but also to anyone with an interest in contemporary world cinema.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Dec 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781783204083

Book preview

Chapter 1

Introduction: How and Why this Book Came into Being

Fernando Canet and Duncan Wheeler

The problem of the critic, as of the artist, is not to discount his subjectivity, but to include it; not to overcome it in agreement, but to master it in exemplary ways.

(Cavell, 1976: 94)

Although there is a certain arbitrariness in all attempts at chronological division, there are clearly key moments in which, as a result of broader socio-historical factors and/or aesthetic developments, national cinemas appear to undergo serious transformation. In the case of Spain, this has been inextricably linked with changes in political mood or power: therefore, it is customary to refer to its cinema in terms of the period in which it was produced, be that during the Second Republic, the Spanish Civil War or the dictatorship. Even those films produced in the late 1970s and 1980s tended to be viewed and written about in terms of the nascent democracy; hence, a film-maker as ostensibly apolitical as Pedro Almodóvar was often interpreted (especially abroad) in relation to Franco’s death and the dictatorship’s demise. If 1992 was the year in which, through a series of emblematic events – the Barcelona Olympics, the Expo in Seville, Madrid being named City of Culture – Spain announced its democratic credentials to the world, then it also marked the final point at which its cinematic output could be plausibly classified in relation to its sociopolitical Transition.

If, for example, we take even a fleeting glance at the film whose image graces the front cover of this volume – La mosquitera/The Mosquito Net (Vila, 2010) – the need to extend our artillery of heuristic tools and the parameters of what is commonly understood by Spanish cinema become apparent. In a twenty-first century continuation of Spain’s rich surrealist tradition, this depiction of a dysfunctional upper-middle-class family is an artfully constructed, psychologically acute and engaging black comedy; nevertheless, it trades in the kind of bourgeois angst more habitually associated with French cinema and whose manifestation in modern-day Barcelona is a symptom, for better or worse, of Spain’s economic and social normalization in relation to its European neighbours. Although the film’s producer, the prolific Luis Miñarro has, to borrow a phrase from Paul Julian Smith (2011: 184), ‘midwifed much of the new Catalan art cinema’, La mosquitera is fairly conventional in many respects: made with television funding, it has a pace redolent of commercial cinema and stars Emma Suárez, a figure familiar to Spanish television and cinema audiences, who first made her name as an adolescent sex symbol in the 1980s. While a few years previously these ingredients would have virtually guaranteed box office success, La mosquitera delivered only a modest financial return, but it was very well received at a number of international film festivals which constitute a circuit on which much Spanish cinema is increasingly reliant, implicating even ostensibly national films such as this within a matrix of transnational economic and aesthetic exchanges.

The primary aim of this edited volume is to provide a self-reflective and interventionist form of academic criticism which combines aesthetic appraisal with a (re)consideration of the creative, commercial and critical imperatives that inform and underpin the viewing and reviewing of contemporary Spanish films. It makes no claim to be exhaustive or even necessarily representative; there are already numerous excellent companions and guides to the history of Spanish cinema available, many of which will be cited in different chapters. At a time when the entire notion of national cinemas is being increasingly put into question, what we believe this book does provide is the most broad-ranging study of contemporary cinematic practices in Spain – both in terms of objects of study and methodology – with a special emphasis on films produced over the last ten years (2002–12). The majority of the contributors participated in the (S)Movies: Contemporary Spanish Cinema International Conference, which was organized by the Department of Audiovisual Communication, Documentation and History of Art, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, and held in New York in December 2011¹ – and subsequently were invited to submit a chapter on a topic of their choice that fell within the general rubric of the book’s remit. From reading these initial submissions, we were able to identify some underlying themes and debates; we then commissioned a small number of additional chapters by individuals whose expertise we felt would be uniquely placed to develop these conversations further by addressing the issues raised by the titles of the sections, but not yet addressed in any of the submitted pieces. This vision of the book as a form of dialogue or exchange finds its most explicit manifestation in the final section, in which a series of scholars engage with practitioners and/or institutions.

Hence the book ends like the conference before it, with a round table discussion led by Fernando Canet between José Luis Guerin (one of the country’s most respected directors, regularly feted at major international festivals, who first gained major national and international acclaim with En construcción/Work in Progress, 2001, and probably is best known outside of Spain for En la ciudad de Sylvia/In the City of Sylvia, 2007), and Isaki Lacuesta (a formally adventurous and prolific young film-maker who debuted with the short film Caras vs. Caras, 2000 and won the top prize, the Golden Shell, at the 2011 San Sebastian Film Festival for Los pasos dobles/The Double Steps), alongside Luis Miñarro. In addition to his Spanish films, Miñarro has been involved in a series of international co-productions including OEstranho Caso de Angélica/The Strange Case of Angélica (de Oliviera, 2010) and Loong Boonmee raleuk chat /Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Weerasethakul, 2010), the winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes. The exchange between Mercedes Gamero – head of acquisitions and cinema production at the television channel, Antena 3 – and Duncan Wheeler also focuses on the production of both national and international films, but moves away from the reified domain of art films to address the production of commercial cinema that is not so dependent on awards or festivals, but rather on the domestic and/or international box office.

Adopting a pluralistic approach from the outset, the two chapters that follow this brief preamble consist of introductory texts authored by the two editors, in which we offer our respective visions of contemporary Spanish cinema that are informed, but hopefully not determined, by our biographical, disciplinary and geographical backgrounds. Duncan Wheeler’s piece focuses not only on the corpus of post-1992 films, but also on the discourse that has surrounded them, and the national cinema, both at home and in Anglo-American contexts. Through this discussion he makes a spirited case for the strength of some Spanish films of the last twenty years, while identifying lacunae in critical discourse which, he suggests in both this text and the various introductions to the individual sections, are addressed by the overarching themes used to structure the book. In the chapter written by Fernando Canet, he returns to the history of Spanish cinema in order to explore some of the defining features which have characterized it in the past and, in many cases he argues, the present. His working hypothesis is that there are clear national antecedents for the majority of ostensibly new trends and tendencies. While it is clearly beyond this chapter’s remit to provide an exhaustive overview, Canet’s contextualization allows the reader to have a better understanding of the many rich and varied contributions that follow.

Note

1 This event was able to take place as a result of the support of Spanish General Consulate in New York. In addition, it was enabled by the sponsorship of the Valencian Generalitat and the Institut Ramon Lluch, alongside the collaboration and participation of, among other institutions, the Instituto Cervantes in New York, ESCAC, ECAM and Cahiers du Cinema España.

References

Cavell, S. (1976). Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Smith, P. J. (2011). ‘Conference report: (S)Movies, New York City, 12 to 16 December, 2011’, New Cinemas, 9.2–3: 183–87.

Chapter 2

Spanish Films, 1992–2012: Two Decades of Cinematic Production and Critical Discourse

Duncan Wheeler

For Spain, 1992 might have been a euphoric year, but in spite of the release of Belle Epoque/The Age of Beauty (Trueba, 1992) – which, somewhat unexpectedly, would win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film the following year – the national cinema was in no mood for celebration. It was suffering the financial fallout of the costs of Spain joining the European Union (EU), and arguably registered the effects of the global recession earlier than other cultural industries. Even Pedro Almodóvar, who subsequently would become a reliable international ambassador, had failed to capitalize on the success of Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios/Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988). More generally the infamous 1983 Miró Law, designed to replicate French protectionist models, may have delivered a select number of emblematic commercial and critical triumphs such as Los santos inocentes/The Holy Innocents (Camus, 1984) while facilitating a number of young directors in making their debuts, but on the whole it had alienated audiences. Furthermore, a lack of transparency in its practices and a frequent desire to control rather than counteract market forces led to charges of cronyism. As Peter Besas has observed:

The criteria for giving subsidies have always been murky, vague enough so that political and private favoritism could be exercised. Nepotism and influence-pulling overshadowed the system and continue to be a key factor in the subsidy system, whether under Franco or under the Socialists. After all, behind all the laws and legal frippery always hovers the human factor. Influence pulling does not alter with political systems. Only the people in it change. Indeed, the tug-of-war for currying favors today is just as fierce as it was in the times of El Cid.

(1997: 246)

In general, there has been an unwillingness in democratic Spain to implement the so-called ‘arm’s-length principle’ which, according to Robert Hewison, has acted as a buffer against despotic behaviour in the UK: ‘A convention has been established over the years that in arts patronage neither the politician nor the bureaucrat knows best’ (1995: 32).

In Spain, 1994 marked a nadir in terms of film production, as well as an about-turn in film policy whereby the Minister of Culture, Carmen Alborch, virtually dismantled Pilar Miró’s reforms and, instead of offering advance credits to a small number of prestigious projects generally heralded by renowned auteurs, gave automatic subsidies on the basis of box office receipts (Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas, 1998: 3). In 1994, the Escuela de Cinematografía y del Audiovisual de la Comunidad de Madrid/Greater Madrid Audiovisual and Film School (ECAM) opened in Madrid; its Catalan equivalent, the Escuela Superior de Cine y Audiovisuales de Cataluña/Catalan School for Advanced Study in Film and Audiovisual Communication (ESCAC), came into operation the following year. 1995 also marked a resurgence in production, and Spanish film of the latter half of the decade was widely construed as one of European cinema’s most unlikely and unexpected success stories.

This renaissance, be it perceived or real, was due principally to the emergence of a new generation of directors that were very different to the traditional auteur. In the words of Rosanna Maule: ‘What distinguished these newcomers from their predecessors was their determination to attract domestic audiences within a theatrical exhibition circuit dominated by Hollywood films. Yet their responses to the crisis facing Spanish cinema were diverse’ (2008: 134). So, on the one hand – and especially during the legislature of the Centre-Right, market-driven Partido Popular (People’s Party, 1996–2004) – film directors such as Iciar Bollaín, Chus Gutiérrez, Fernando León de Aranoa and Benito Zambrano sought to use social realist cinema as a form of political protest in the vein of British film-makers such as Ken Loach. Conversely, there was a boom in various autochthonous takes on genre films: be they the slick, sophisticated thrillers of Alejandro Amenábar, Álex de la Iglesia’s hybrid fantasies or, to borrow an expression from Núria Triana-Toribio (2003: 151), the ‘neo-vulgarities’ that hit their stride with Airbag (Bajo Ulloa, 1997), and found their most profitable and durable formula in the Torrente saga (Segura, 1998–2011). In spite of their disparate ethical and aesthetic agendas, Carlos Heredero is correct to identify a trait common to these film-makers: ‘They came of age as directors when freedom had already been won, and they do not feel the necessity of coming to terms with the past. Therefore, any reflection on history has practically disappeared from their images’ (2003: 34).

Spanish Cinema as an Academic Discipline

This resurgence in the commercial fortunes of Spanish cinema coincided with its consolidation as an established academic discipline. Especially in the UK, this nascent field of study had originated within modern languages more than film studies (see Triana-Toribio, 2008).¹ As Ann Davies remarks, the fact that often it was broached first by critics more used to approaching literature, alongside political sympathies, meant that ‘there was a canon of great directors such as Buñuel and pioneers of the nuevo cine español (New Spanish Cinema) such as Carlos Saura and Víctor Erice, drawing on an allegorical style that hinted at opposition to the Franco regime’ (2011: 3). As she goes on to say, a great deal of excellent work and groundbreaking scholarship was produced within this rubric. However, it was ironic that at a time when Spanish cinema was moving away from its ties with the Francoist past, this remained the dominant subject and heuristic tool through which it often continued to be viewed from abroad, arguably reinscribing a somewhat distorted dynamic from the 1960s by which the policies of the incumbent Director General of Cinematographic Arts, José María García Escudero, encouraged dissident work at home to be targeted primarily at international, as opposed to domestic, audiences.

Hence, for example, a 2007 retrospective season at the British Film Institute (BFI), generously funded by the incoming Socialist government, included landmark oppositional films such as ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall!/Welcome Mister Marshall! (García Berlanga, 1953), Calle Mayor/Main Street (Bardem, 1956) or El desencanto/The Disenchantment (Chávarri, 1976). As Susan Hayward notes, ‘the writing of a national cinema has predominantly addressed moments of exception and not the global picture’ (1993: xi). Films such as these – alongside the Salamanca Conversations of the mid-1950s, at which directors such as Berlanga and Bardem mercilessly critiqued Spain’s national cinema in its entirety and, inspired by neo-realism, called for more socially and politically engaged films – often have been construed as a cornucopian revolution in Spanish film production. However, as I have argued elsewhere, the BFI’s season’s title, ‘Breaking the Code: Daring Films that Mocked the Repression in Spain’:

might be an accurate description, but films of the quality of El desencanto or Calle Mayor have an interest that transcends the political. A similar thing occurred when Berlanga died. On the one hand, I was pleased that a newspaper such as The Guardian dedicated nearly a page to his obituary; I was irritated, however, by the emphasis that was placed on his role as a dissident under the regime. Apart from the fact that Don Luis’s ideological convictions are not at all easy to work out, this specifically political approach moves away from an analysis of his virtues as a filmmaker and implicitly undermines his status as an artist deserving the respect of any cinephile.

(Wheeler, 2011: 26)

For example, the programming of El extraño viaje/Strange Voyage (Fernán-Gómez, 1964) within this season was hardly an amenable context in which to appreciate what Santos Zunzunegui (2002: 17) has astutely identified as the influence of the quintessentially Spanish esperpento (grotesque farce). Elsewhere this academic, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of his national cinema and culture in general, has complained of what is, in his view, the very selective appropriation and misreading that Spanish cinema has been subjected to by North American scholars and criticism (Zunzunegui, 1999). For him, the fact that foreign scholars often use the term nuevo cine español as a catch-all phrase for oppositional cinema under the dictatorship, rather than in relation to a specific group that emerged around García Escudero and the Official Madrid Film School, is evidence of ignorance and cultural appropriation (Zunzunegui, 1999: 26).

In the same way that politically and aesthetically committed Spanish theatre under Franco is seen often somewhat simplistically to emerge from almost nowhere, with the premiere of Antonio Buero Vallejo’s Historia de una escalera/Story of a Stairway in 1949 (see Green, 2009), the celebrated meetings at Salamanca have been retrospectively fetishized to the point of caricature. José Luis Castro de Paz and Josetxo Cerdán (2011: 14–16) have not only provided a concise history of the study of Spanish cinema at home, but more generally, followed Zunzunegui’s lead to suggest that a fuller understanding of traditional Spanish theatrical forms such as the sainete (light farce) and the esperpento allows for dissident readings of films that pre-date the nuevo cine español, while simultaneously facilitating a richer appreciation of individual films and a move beyond a Manichean discourse that taxonomically categorizes films as either pro-Franco or anti-Franco.

Although many of the contributions to this volume demonstrate that this critical deficit has been settled to a certain extent, Hispanists often have suggested, implicitly or explicitly, that discourse undertaken on Spanish cinema at home does not always do justice to the quality and diversity of the films being produced, and that critics often employ theory in an obtuse, idiosyncratic and anachronistic fashion. As Paul Julian Smith states:

Press critics in Spain are unusually institutionalized, displaying exceptional continuity and homogeneity. Ángel Fernández Santos, scriptwriter of El espíritu de la colmena [The Spirit of the Beehive] and as well disposed to art movies as he is hostile to Almodóvar, has remained chief film critic at the dominant daily El País for some twenty years, even instilling his daughter as second stringer. Likewise, Spanish theorists of film, frequently faithful to abstract and technical codes of structuralist narratology have rarely rehabilitated popular filmmakers, choosing rather to lionize high art directors. In Bordieu’s terms, the Spanish cinematic field remains highly distinctive with texts, producers and institutions combining and continuing to valorize high aesthetic qualities in a way that is not characteristic of other European territories, such as the UK.

(2003: 147)

The arrival of the iconoclastic Carlos Boyero as El País’s film critic following Santos’ death in 2004 has changed this dynamic radically (see Jordan, 2011)² –and arguably, not for the better – but, in general, the so-called ‘cultural turn’ remains (in)conspicuously absent from many Spanish universities. In a plenary address at the Hispanic Cinemas: En Transición (Hispanic Cinemas: In Transition) conference held at Madrid’s Carlos III University in November 2012, Jenaro Talens appeared to suggest that this was a good thing: although he is an admirer of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, he argued somewhat idiosyncratically that its work could be effectively brought under the rubric of semiotics, and that most subsequent cultural studies privileged their own theoretical concerns, thereby losing sight of the films themselves. In a similar vein, Zunzunegui clearly (and disparagingly) construes the ‘interpretative pyrotechnics’ (2005: 15) of ‘readers who have preconceived ideas from the outset about the object of study’ (1999: 96), and ignorance of the subject in question, as going hand-in-hand. While these Spanish critics raise some legitimate concerns, they have been debated within the field itself. As Stuart Hall states:

At some point in the expansion of cultural studies, culture escaped. It became a kind of balloon, a pumped up critical theory balloon. This is not an argument against theory. I couldn’t imagine my making an argument against theory. And the sophistication that theory brought leaves early cultural studies looking like kindergarten. Nevertheless, cultural studies ceased to be troubled by the grubby worldliness, to use [Edward] Said’s term, the worldliness in which culture has always to exist. It seems as if cultural studies could operate on its own terms […] everybody could quote everybody else, et cetera, and the literary text comes roaring back.

(cited in MacCabe, 2008: 28)

In other words, ‘cultural studies’ might not always have lived up to its initial promise, but the answer cannot lie in a naive retreat into a positivist authority which seemingly construes theory as an optional and unnecessary appendage.

The Cultural Politics of Public and Private Funding

It could be argued that domestic and foreign critics were too uncritical in their veneration of a new generation of social-realist film-makers who came to the fore in the mid- to late-1990s. For educators working outside of Spain, they have provided a valuable pedagogical tool, while commentators at home have welcomed what often has been perceived as a return to the values of the Salamanca Conversations. As I have explored elsewhere in relation to the depiction of domestic violence, important but flawed films such as Solas/Alone (Zambrano, 1999) and Te doy mis ojos/Take my Eyes (Bollaín, 2003) were hailed hyperbolically as masterpieces in a wide variety of discursive contexts (Wheeler, 2012).

This is not the only example of how the ostensible miracle of Spanish cinema at the end of the last century was, at least in part, the result of exaggeration. First, the box office success of a number of highly profitable films arguably distorted the figures, and made the industry as a whole appear healthier than it actually was. Second, escalating ticket prices ensured that film ceased to be the ‘democratic’ popular art form that it had been for much of the twentieth century, as cinema-going became an increasingly elite activity (Fernández Blanco et al., 2002). Third, what Paul Julian Smith terms ‘the inextricability of cinema and television as twin vehicles for screen fiction in Spain’ (2009: 11) has not always been a positive development. While this critic picks up on comments made by Andrés Vicente Gómez (one of Spain’s most commercially successful producers) to suggest that this transition has led to ‘speedier production schedules and the imposition of more commercial criteria [has] helped to promote artistic independence’ (Smith, 2003: 117), the fact that state television has tended, at least traditionally, to invest a little in lots of projects, while private channels adopt the opposite strategy of investing in a small number of high-budget projects such as Alatriste/Captain Alatriste: The Spanish Musketeer (Díaz Yanes, 2006) or Los Borgia/The Borgia (Hernández, 2006) (Riambau and Torreiro, 2008: 906), is particularly unfortunate, given the simultaneous rise of the multiplex. Paradoxically, Spain, like many countries, now has more cinema screens than ever before, yet the range and number of films being shown is reducing; as a result, arguably it is more difficult than ever to make films that do not adhere to mainstream commercial criteria.

As María Pilar Cousido González and María Estrella Gutiérrez David (2008) have studied at length, nepotism and corruption are hardly the unique preserve of public funding, and there continues to be a worrying lack of transparency in the audio-visual sector in general. Hence, for example, images from the premiere of Tiovivo c. 1950 (Garci, 2004) – an anodyne and arguably revisionist depiction of Francoist Spain – of Mariano Rajoy³ with his arms around the veteran film-maker (whose Volver a empezar/Begin the Beguine (1982) was the first Spanish film to win an Oscar), led many to surmise that the director had been rewarded for his political loyalty by the Partido Popular, when he was subsequently granted the largest ever subsidy awarded to a national film by Madrid City Council to make Sangre de Mayo/Blood of May (2008). Irrespective of whether or not this claim is true, the fact that it is widely believed betrays a lack of trust in the system as whole. Less commented upon, at least among the popular press, is the fact that this lack of transparency may provide one explanation as to why the promise of increased gender parity through the emergence of more than the occasional female director in the 1990s has not been realized. Between 2000 and 2006 only 7.4 per cent of Spanish films were directed by women, and in the 1990s, 17.08 per cent of new directors were female; however, between 2000 and 2007 this figure fell to 10.4 per cent (Arranz, 2010). Although it is difficult to provide demonstrable evidence, anecdotal stories seem to suggest that nepotism and casual sexism have been an important factor: for example, the veteran actress and film-maker, Silvia Munt, reported that one anonymous negative report from a private television channel on the viability of Pretextos/Pretexts (Munt, 2008) suggested that the woman who wrote it just needed ‘un buen polvo’ (‘a good fuck’).⁴

Thus, the seeds for what has been widely perceived as an escalating crisis in Spanish cinema since the ascension of the Partido Socialista y Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) to power in 2004, were arguably in place during the boom years. However, this was exacerbated by their drive to increase production at a time when cinema attendance and the number of films being shown was in decline.⁵ Some commentators, especially in the press, felt that the incoming Socialist administration had rewarded the industry for its loyalty, given the cinema profession’s general left-wing tendencies embodied in ¡Hay motivo! (2004), a portmanteau film in which many of the country’s leading directors protested against the governing Partido Popular. Tensions had escalated earlier in 2002 when, as leader of the opposition, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero had attended Juan Antonio Bardem’s funeral at which many film practitioners, including the then-president of the Academia de las Artes y las Ciencias Cinematográficas de España/Spanish Film Academy, Marisa Paredes, had raised their fists during a recitation of the Communist International. However, this brief controversy was nothing in comparison to the furore that accompanied the opposition to the Iraq War, voiced continually throughout the 2004 Goya Ceremony televised just prior to the general elections (see Bardem and Bardem, 2005: 595–617; Granado, 2006: 241–56).

Debates came to the fore with the arrival of the Ley del cine (new cinema law) in 2007, which most exhibitors objected to because, in their view, it legally forced them to show unpopular Spanish films. Personal opinions aside, the controversy did little to favour the image of a national cinema depicted as something of a lame duck in need of a constant supply of subsidies.⁶ This negative publicity was exacerbated subsequently by then-Minister of Culture Ángeles González-Sinde’s attempts to prosecute illegal downloading and pirating: a largely unpopular stance undermined by the director of the Spanish Film Academy, Álex de la Iglesia, who not only voiced his sympathy for the targets of proposed legislation, but also accused his colleagues of being complacent in not appealing to the general public (see Chapter 21). In other words, his view was that their cinema needed to be more concerned about the fact that audiences were not bothering to view Spanish cinema even when they could access it, albeit illegally, for free.

The contributors to this volume adopt various often opposing stances as to whether mainstream acceptance and commercial success ought to be determining factors in the kind of films that are made. While in accordance with the ethos of the volume we have adopted no editorial line in this regard, I would suggest that there are two ways of denigrating a national cinema: first, by saying that it can never make money by direct or indirect means; and second, by suggesting that commercial viability is the sole criterion by which films ought to be judged.

Sociological and Aesthetic Developments

Under Franco, Spain traditionally had been a nation of emigrants, be that for political or economic reasons, but at the turn of the century, immigration made it an increasingly multicultural society, due primarily to rising living standards and European integration – at least until the onset of the current global recession. While in 1993 there were 430,000 people living in Spain that were not born there, by 2010 this figure had increased to 5 million: 10 per cent of the overall population (Aja, 2012: 50). In Volver (2006), Almodóvar establishes a contrast between the town in La Mancha whose local inhabitants have lived there for generations, and the multi-ethnic populations of Vallecas and, even more markedly, Cuatro Caminos. These working-class districts used to be filled with rural emigrants new to the capital, as did Lavapiés, an area whose continued popularity as a film location in, for example, Alma gitana/Gypsy Soul (Gutiérrez, 1996) or El próximo oriente/The Near East (Colomo, 2006) bears testament to the interest on the part of both film-makers and audiences in relation to changing demographics. Similarly, Ventura Pons has depicted twenty-first century Spanish multiculturalism in Forasteros/Strangers (2008), which explores the lives and interactions of the inhabitants of an ethnically and generationally diverse apartment block in Barcelona’s Poblenou. It is, however, problematic that Catalan films of this kind are generally rendered either exclusively in Catalan or dubbed into Castilian, thereby eschewing the multilingual reality that immigrants have to negotiate.⁷

Popular comedies may trade frequently on popular stereotypes, but increasingly they are viewing characters not born with Spanish nationalities to be citizens that are well integrated into the political and social fabric of the state: see, for example, the depiction of Latin American and Chinese characters in Una hora más en Canarias (Serrano, 2010) and Pelayos/ The Winning Streak (Cortés, 2012), respectively. While these films generally have celebrated multiculturalism, others have focused on the plight of the immigrant. Retorno a Hansala/Return to Hansala (Gutiérrez, 2008) probes the relationship between the south of Spain and Morocco, while providing a human face to the statistics frequently heard on the news about the deaths and injuries of immigrants attempting to enter Europe illegally. The Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu has provided arguably the most disturbing portrayal of exploitation of immigrant labour in Biutiful (2010), in which he self-consciously eschews the tourist gaze of Barcelona, focusing on the psychic and physical underbelly of an ostensibly advanced global city. Salvajes/Savages (Molinero, 2001) and Alacrán enamorado/Alacrán in Love (Zannon, 2013) both deal with racist skinhead violence and its relationship with the social and economic marginalization of working-class Spaniards in the outskirts of major urban conurbations. In addition, as Isolina Ballesteros (2005) has noted, a feminization of migration flows has found its correlative in Spanish immigration cinema. Both Rabia/Rage (2009), directed by the Ecuadorian Sebastián Cordero, and Amador (León de Aranoa, 2010), have featured Latin American women in domestic labour as their protagonists. Princesas/Princesses (León de Aranoa, 2005) and more recently, Evelyn (de Ocampo, 2012), have looked at how women living in Spain without official documentation are tricked or coerced into entering prostitution.

As Jo Labanyi and Tatjana Pavlović note, ‘the cinema production of Spain’s autonomous communities has made innovative connections between the local and the transnational, bypassing the national by aligning with world markets’ (2013: 3). As discussed throughout section one of this book, there can be no doubt that Catalonia has been at the epicentre of the general resurgence in Spain’s art cinema over the last decade or so, however that nebulous term is defined. This has been both a product and a cause of the success of the Creative Documentary Master’s programme at Barcelona’s Pompeu Fabra University, which has branched into production (see Torreiro, 2010). In addition to providing a training ground for young directors such as Isaki Lacuesta, the programme has served to recuperate the legacy of Joaquim Jordà, a veteran of the so-called Barcelona School, a self-consciously radical avant-garde group of film-makers from the 1960s (see Riambau and Torreiro, 1999), who has taught there and returned to directing films such as Mones de Becky/Monkeys Like Becky (1999) and Más allá del espejo/Beyond the Mirror (2006). This revival has coincided with a reappraisal of this much-maligned earlier movement;⁸ as Jaume Martí Olivella notes: ‘Catalan cinema is no longer the ugly duckling of the nation’s cultural panorama […] it is currently receiving some special attention, both official and popular’ (2011: 187). Hence, for example, Pa negre/Black Bread (Villaronga, 2010) became the first film in Catalan to be put forward as the official Spanish entry for consideration as Best Foreign Film at the Oscars. While the films discussed in section one may provide little-needed ammunition for Boyero and his ilk – who often construe these new film-makers as the wilfully obtuse heirs to a mode of film-making best left in the past – they have received extensive coverage and recognition at prestigious international festivals.

If Catalonia has been arguably the most successful, and definitely the most visible, exponent of this model, it is paramount that this recognition does not lead to reification. First, it lends itself too easily to essentialist and nationalistic interpretations; hence why ‘the members of the Barcelona School were notoriously reluctant to identify themselves as part of specifically Catalan cultural tradition’ (Vilaseca, 2010: 134). Second, there is the risk of simply transferring cultural hegemony from one centre, Madrid, to another: Barcelona. Not all Catalan film-making is carried out in Barcelona, and not all art cinema made in Spain is made in Catalonia. Also, it is important not to celebrate its cultural achievements at the expense of the other autonomous regions. Basque cinema, for example, has an illustrious, albeit complicated tradition (see Martí Olivella, 2003), which is documented and developed in Aita/Father (de Orbe, 2011), produced by Barcelona-based Luis Miñarro. Elsewhere, a film such as Arriya/The Stone (Gorritiberea, 2011) has, like Vacas/Cows (Médem, 1992) before it, grappled with Basque identity and history through the lens of a long-standing and frequently violent feud between two families. Third, in the same way that art cinema is not the unique preserve of Catalan cinema – or more accurately, cinema made and/or financed in Catalonia – neither does the category envelope all, or even most, of the films made in the autonomous region.

Like Miñarro, Edmon Roch has co-produced high-profile international ventures but of a more commercial bent, ranging from the historical epics Lope (Waddington, 2010) and Bruc, la llegenda/Bruc, the Manhunt (Benmayor, 2010) to the animated feature Las aventuras de Tadeo Jones/Tad, the Lost Explorer (Gato, 2012) which, at the time of writing, is number one at the Spanish box office. El orfanato/The Orphanage (Bayona, 2007) and Spanish Movie (Ruiz Caldera, 2009), two overtly commercial films, were directed by graduates of ESCAC; on venturing into production, Catalonia’s official film school’s two initial projects – Lo mejor de mí/The Best of Me (Aguilar, 2007) and Tres dies amb la família/Three Days with the Family (Coll, 2009) – were, especially in the former case, largely indistinguishable from the character-driven and somewhat melodramatic social realism associated with Madrid. Vicente Aranda may be one of the founding members of the Barcelona School, but he now specializes in erotic period pieces (see Chapter 14), while Bigas Luna’s output over the last twenty years, most notably the so-called Iberian trilogy – Jamón, jamón (1992), Huevos de oro/Golden Balls (1993), and La teta i la lluna/The Tit and the Moon (1994) – were produced and marketed with a much broader (inter)national audience in mind than, say, Bilbao (Luna, 1978).

As Alberto Mira notes, ‘Ventura Pons’s extensive body of work is among the most consistent in post-Franco Spanish cinema’ (2013: 56). Barcelona’s unofficial cinematic poet laureate has turned his attention away increasingly from urban comedies to literary adaptations over the last two decades, most noticeably to the plays of the contemporary dramatist Sergi Belbel (see George, 2002). Pons’s films, like Catalan and Spanish cinema in general, have benefited immensely from the talents of theatre practitioners over recent years: performances from actors who cut their teeth on the stage, such as Lluís Homar, Eduard Fernández, Carmen Machi, Blanca Portillo, José Maria Pou or Rosa María Sardà, have enriched a wide variety of commercial as well as more overtly auteur-based films. En la ciudad/In the City (2003) and Una pistola en cada mano/A Pistol in Each Hand (2012), both directed by Cesc Gay, shot in Barcelona and featuring a large ensemble cast, bear elegant testament to the breadth of performing talent in Spain. As I argue in Chapter 17, one of the keys to the commercial and aesthetic success of the films of Pedro Almodóvar and Isabel Coixet resides in judicious and imaginative casting, alongside a shared capacity – albeit employing radically different methods – to elicit career-best performances from world-class actors whose talents have not always been done justice in prior screen appearances.

Collective and Cinematic Memories

If Spanish film-making from the early democratic period was informed largely by what Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas have termed a ‘very culture-specific need to recuperate a past which for forty years had been hijacked and aggressively refashioned by Francoism’ (1998: 16), then the ostensible retreat from the past which, as we have seen, characterized much of the film-making of the 1990s, has experienced a complete about-turn over the last decade. This has been both the cause and consequence of debates which crystallized around the 2007 Law of Historical Memory, designed to acknowledge, but not compensate, the crimes committed against victims during both the Civil War and the nearly forty years of dictatorship that ensued. In Georgina Blakeley’s words, the incoming Socialist government sought to portray this legal milestone as ‘an integral and coherent part of its overall legislative agenda based on extending rights’ (2008: 325). It coincided historically and ideologically with, for example, the introduction of Europe’s most ostensibly progressive laws on gay marriage (see Chapter 5), or for the protection of women suffering domestic violence (see Wheeler, 2008). The Law of Historical Memory has been alternatively portrayed as an antidote to, or betrayal of, the so-called pacto del olvido (‘pact of forgetting’) or pacto del silencio (‘pact of silence’) that is succinctly described and contextualized by Gregorio Alonso and Diego Muro in the following terms:

A key pillar of the transition was a political compromise to silence the memory of the civil war and the excesses of the military dictatorship. Consensus politics, it was argued, needed some forgetting about the recent past as much as political crafting, institutional engineering and elite moderation. It was amnesia, not memory, that could secure a pluralistic regime and would prevent Spain from repeating the mistakes of the past.

(2011: 5)

An irony of the ostensible pact of silence is that certain, albeit partial, memories of the Civil War and the Francoist past were in fact ubiquitous in the Transition’s media. Of course, strategic forgetfulness – ‘selective memory’ in popular parlance – is not necessarily synonymous with amnesia; as Jo Labanyi, drawing upon the work of Santos Juliá, notes: ‘the consensus politics of the transition were based, not on a pact of oblivion, but on an agreement not to let the past affect the future’ (2009: 27). Seen in this light, the major debate in the memory politics of twenty-first century Spain can be broadly formulated as being a division between those who construe the ‘pacto de silencio’ as an expedient temporary measure, and those for whom it is part of the constitution: a legal and ideological prerequisite for Spain’s social and political well-being.

Salvador (Huerga, 2006) about the eponymous Catalan anarchist, Salvador Puig Antich, garrotted by the Franco regime in 1974, can be very much seen as the first film of the incoming Socialist government. More generally, if the new legislation is arguably ‘more important for what it symbolizes politically than for its legal consequences’ (Blakeley, 2008: 324), then clearly the role of film as a highly symbolic medium has performed an important role in articulating and reflecting a discourse which has renegotiated what Labanyi has termed ‘[t]he idea of the incompatability of past and future [which] has helped to create the idea that one has to choose between memory and forgetting’ (2009: 27). On the one hand, Spanish cinema has been guilty on occasions of an opportunist and morally suspect trend, following the publishing sensation of Javier Cercas’ Soldados de Salamina/Soldiers of Salamina – subsequently made into a film directed by David Trueba in 2003 – by which ‘memory has become an industry generating public interest for economic ends’ (Labanyi, 2008: 119). On the other hand, Land and Freedom (Loach, 1995) was heralded widely at the time of its release as the most nuanced and complex mainstream film to have been made about the Civil War, focusing as it did on political divisions within the Left.⁹ Nearly two decades later, it would find it harder to stake its claim as the definitive or last word on the subject.

In addition to high-profile literary adaptations such as Los girasoles ciegos/The Blind Sunflowers (Cuerda, 2008), Las 13 rosas/The 13 Roses (Martínez Lázaro, 2007) or La voz dormida/The Sleeping Voice (Zambrano, 2011), there is now a diverse and hefty corpus of Spanish films about the Civil War. Hence, for example, Mercedes Maroto-Camino (2011: 109–10) has noted how there were only two Spanish films released on the subject of the maquis – the anti-Franco armed guerrilla movement operational in the 1940s and 1950s – between 1982 and 1996, but also that there has been something of a boom in recent years, with such high-profile depictions as El laberinto del fauno/Pan’s Labyrinth (del Toro, 2006), Silencio Roto/Broken Silence (Armendáriz, 2001) and You are the One (una historia de entonces)/You Are the One (A Story of the Past) (Garcí, 2001).

According to Annette Kuhn:

Memory work has a great deal in common with forms of inquiry which – like detective work and archaeology, say – involve working backwards – searching for clues, deciphering signs and traces, making deductions, patching together reconstructions out of fragments of evidence.

(2002: 4)

Therefore, it is very apt that Sandra Martorell uses images of ‘archaeology’ and ‘reconstruction’ in her auteur-based approach to art direction, based largely on interviews with three of Spain’s leading practitioners in this field who have worked extensively on films set in the 1930s and 1940s (see Chapter 27). Her chapter demonstrates how and why the work undertaken by these professionals has raised expectations among audiences in relation to the moral and aesthetic complexity that they can expect of a national film dealing with a conflict that defined the course of twentieth-century Spanish and European history alike.

Although the Civil War is the most bloody and infamous eruption of this fratricidal division, its origins and effects can be traced back throughout Spanish history and historiography. In terms of cinematic production of the post-war period, it provided the thematic and narrative underpinning for what Marsha Kinder (1993) characterizes as a ‘siege and crusade’ mentality in films including Raza/Race (Saénz de Heredia, 1942) – famously scripted by Franco himself – and Sin novedad en el alcazár/The Siege of the Alcazar (Genina, 1940), or a range of historical epics such as de Orduña’s Alba de América/Dawn of America (1951), Agustina de Aragón/The Siege (1950) and Locura de amor/Love Crazy (1948). These films celebrated Spanish qualities in relation to its imperial past, privileging the War of Independence waged against the invading Napoleonic forces, and the Golden Age of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries when Spain was a leading world power. While this tradition was never as dominant as it has retrospectively appeared to be, films of this kind have come to constitute a metonym for Francoist cinema in general, and were the principal target of the Salamanca Conversations.

For the first time since the 1940s and 1950s, Spanish cinema in the twenty-first century has returned repeatedly to these key historical moments in high-budget films such as Águila Roja, la película/Red Eagle (Ayerra, 2011), Alatriste, Los Borgia or Bruc. This development is largely the result of an increase in co-productions, and the desire to make films that will appeal to domestic and international markets; however, it also bears testament to Henry Kamen’s claim that:

One of the most extraordinary aspects of Spain’s sixteenth century is that many Spaniards are still living in it. In a sense, they have never left it. The sixteenth century has dictated a good part of their ideas and aspirations, their vision of the past and of the future. Pick up any newspaper, any novel, and you will find echoes of the sixteenth century somewhere. When politicians wish to make sense of their policies, they look backwards to it for their inspiration […] It was an age that created, and is creating, Spain, not only because of those who still yearn for it but also on account of those who feel they must reject it passionately.

(2008: ix)

In addition to films that explicitly take the nation’s historical past as their subject matter, it is possible, and indeed useful, to identify a memoristic aesthetic across a broad cross-section of twenty-first century Spanish cinema. Hence, for example Almodóvar, who was criticized early in his career for an ostensible apoliticism (see Chapter 16), has become increasingly interested in his country’s past and politics over the intervening years. As Marvin D’Lugo (2008: 78) notes, every one of his films since ¡Átame!/Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990) has intertwined cultural nostalgia with personal narratives: La mala educación/Bad Education (2004) made the personal political, while Almodóvar’s appearance in the short film La cultura contra la impunidad del franquismo/Culture Against Francoism’s Impunity (2010) indicates a direct engagement with the debates surrounding historical memory, as does his production company, El Deseo, financing El espinazo del diablo/The Devil’s Backbone (del Toro, 2001).

Debates surrounding the Law of Historical Memory have brought the Transition back to the fore, as its (in)adequacies have been widely debated. In cinematic terms, the release of Grupo 7/Unit 7 (Rodríguez, 2012) and, most especially Madrid, 1987 (Trueba, 2011) – starring José Sacristán, arguably the actor most indelibly linked with the Transition through appearances in Asignatura pendiente/Unfinished Business (Garci, 1977) and El diputado/The Congressman (de la Iglesia, 1978) – fictions that respectively present an anodyne and violent depiction of the period, have demonstrated how its historical and social significance continue to be redefined and renegotiated. A major achievement of the ostensibly peaceful Transition to Democracy was the supposed suture of a previously divided nation. Nevertheless, an opinion poll from 2007 showed more than 50 per cent of respondents replying affirmatively to the question: ‘Do you consider that 70 years later, there are still two confronted Spains?’ (Viejo-Rose, 2011: 162). The controversy that surrounded the release of Camino (Javier Fesser, 2008) – a film based on a true story about a young girl suffering from a terminal disease in the 1980s, who was denied medical treatment in part to allow for her beatification by the Opus Dei religious association – is proof of the continued currency of the term ‘las dos Españas’ (‘the two Spains’). This is an opposition between European liberalization and reactionary conservatism that is explored also in El patio de mi cárcel/My Prison Yard (Macías, 2008), a drama set in Spain’s most famous women’s prison, Yeserías, during the Transition.

As Vicente Benet (2012) notes, there has been a renewed interest in Francoist popular culture more generally. This is manifest, for example, in the incredible popularity of cine de barrio (neighbourhood cinema) – television broadcasts of classic Spanish films introduced by Carmen Sevilla, an iconic actress from the dictatorship period; the release of biopics of figures such as Lola Flores: Lola, la película (Hermoso, 2007); screen adaptations of the hugely successful Mortadelo y Filemón comics (Fesser, 2003; Bardem, 2008); or the re-release on DVD of many critically derided but popular films of the 1940s and 1950s. At the time of writing, a musical stage adaptation of Historias de la radio/Radio Stories (1955), a film made by José Luis Saénz de Heredia, who also directed Raza and Franco, ese hombre (1964), is about to open at a major Madrid theatre.

In one sense, this return of what Vicente Rodríguez Ortega terms the ‘beasts that refuse to go away’ in Chapter 15, was facilitated by the ‘pacto del olvido’: even if they ceased to have the prominence that they once had, they did not actually disappear. As Jaime Peñafiel, long-time editor of Hola! – the prototype for the UK’s highly successful Hello! magazine – notes, it is quite unique to Spain that the Franco family retain such a strong media presence: in his words, ‘Spain, even in this, is different’ (2007: 10–11). However, for the first time in decades, early twenty-first century Spain has ceased to see itself as a country in perpetually forward motion; therefore, this can be seen to provide the preconditions for nostalgia. For example, it is noticeable that vintage has come into fashion for the first time, while the mnemomic function of popular song has facilitated the rise of the Spanish musical, not only on the stage but also on-screen: El otro lado de la cama/The Other Side of the Bed (Martinez Lázaro, 2002), ¿Por qué se frotan las patitas?/Scandalous (Begins, 2006) or 20 centímetros/20 Centimetres (Salazar, 2005). A number of studies have looked at the recent upsurge of nostalgia for the popular culture of the early to mid-1980s (e.g. Fouz-Hernández, 2009; Nichols, 2009; Triana-Toribio, 2012) manifest in films such as El calentito (Gutiérrez, 2005), El camino de los ingleses/Summer Rain (Banderas, 2006) or Sinfin (Sanabria and Villaverde, 2005). However, there has not been much detailed scholarly work done on the reappraisal of, and possible nostalgia for, Francoist popular culture. This is arguably a subject matter that much Spanish film studies, with its traditional prioritization of oppositional auteur-based cinema, is ill-equipped to address. On the one hand, the fact that the dictator was not overthrown but died peacefully in his bed has left many commentators, especially in Spain, with the idea that popular culture was the opium of the people (see Chapter 17 on historicizing stardom and the author-function); while also helping to explain the critical repudiation of cultural studies which, as Lawrence Grossberg notes, ‘often writes more about how systems of domination are lived than about the systems of domination themselves’ (1997: 7–8). In other words, the simple, blanket dismissal of Francoist popular culture may have discredited it unfairly in academic circles; but arguably, a refusal to engage critically with its output has allowed its resurrection and perpetuation to occur largely unchallenged.

Popular Notions and Notions of the Popular in a Post-National Age

As Mette Hjort has noted:

the term ‘transnational’ has assumed a referential scope so broad as to encompass phenomena that are surely more interesting for their differences than their similarities. […] That cinematic transnationalism is a ubiquitous phenomenon at the beginning of the new millennium is by now an accepted fact. The time is ripe as a result for work on cinematic transnationalism that goes beyond affirmative description in order to distinguish carefully among tendencies that are more or less positive within a larger scheme of things.

(2010: 13, 31)

Part 3 of this book attempts to carry out this task in relation to Spanish cinema, questioning how traditional conceptions of auteurship, genre and stardom have been reconfigured by practitioners and academics.

When Conan the Barbarian (Milius, 1982) was shot, Spain’s diverse topography and low production costs were its chief selling point as a filming location. However, over the last two decades, North American productions such as The Cold Light of Day (El Mechri, 2012), The Limits of Control (Jarmusch, 2009), Knight and Day (Mangold, 2010) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Allen, 2008) have delighted increasingly in the specificity of their geographical and cultural settings (see Amago, 2013).¹⁰ This tendency to iconize specific locales provides one explanation why North American producers often have found willing production allies in Spain. In the world of the post-Barcelona Olympics, films involving local and national producers frequently function as a surreptitious form of cultural advertising. El Camino/The Way (Estevez, 2010) and 18 comidas (Coira, 2010), for example, depict Galicia as a sensual and spiritual haven, while films as diverse as Todo sobre mi madre/All About My Mother (Almodóvar, 1999) and L’auberge espagnole/Pot Luck (Klapisch, 2002) have promoted the Catalan capital as a privileged signifier of chic European cosmopolitanism (see Wilson, 2012). It is both the cause and consequence of an increased interest in Spain outside its borders that, following in the wake of Antonio Banderas, a number of Spanish actors have become global icons: Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem and, to a lesser extent, Eduardo Noriega and Paz Vega.

While cinema may be an important Spanish export, Spaniards generally prefer their films to be imported: the screen share for national cinema consistently fails to reach the European average of 20 per cent (Jordan, 2011: 35). On the one hand, a sustained preference for North American cinema on the part of audiences and distributors alike might seem to provide a paradigmatic manifestation of the Hollywood ‘project’ which, as Paul Cooke observes, ‘has centred upon selling the American way of life to the rest of the world. In so doing, it has generally been pushing at an open door’ (2007: 4). However, this dynamic is counterbalanced by the fact that while Hollywood cinema provided a window to the world during the hermetic Francoist years, a latent – and sometimes blatant – anti-Americanism has underpinned not only the Marxist critical dogma of the intellectual opposition, but also the political worldview of many (although by no means all) Spanish citizens. It also needs to be nuanced through the acknowledgement of the statistic that Spanish, alongside Norwegian and Greek, audiences are reputed to watch more international arthouse films at the cinema than those in any other country in the world (Felperin, 2011).

Santos Zunzunegui (2002: 186) – a critic who elsewhere has lamented the absence of star studies in the Spanish context – attibutes the fact that, unlike many Spanish academics, he has not felt the need to distinguish between auteur and popular cinema, to his experiences as a film spectator in 1950s Spain: his cinematic diet was predominantly comprised of North American cinema and this distinction made little sense in what he terms as the Golden Age of the studio system (Labanyi and Zunzunegui, 2009: 96). This historical critical lacuna clearly has important implications for our understanding of the past, present and future of a national cinema that is increasingly dependent on a nascent return to the traditional star system via the proliferation of commercially successful films, predominantly comedies, such as Lo contrario al amor/The Opposite of Love (Villanueva, 2011), Fuga de cerebros/Brain Drain (González Molina, 2009) and Tres metros sobre el cielo/Three Steps above Heaven (González Molina, 2010), which utilize the pulling power of both male and female actors famous from popular television shows. If the more austere discourse on Spanish cinema is likely to dismiss the meteoric rise of heartthrob Mario Casas out of hand, Carmen Machi’s performances – like those of Fernando Fernán-Gómez, or Emilio Gutiérrez Caba before her – challenge traditional distinctions. Initially, Machi rose to fame as a result of the television series Aida (2005–), and subsequently has appeared in a wide cross-section of films ranging from the popular comedy Que se mueran los feos/To Hell with the Ugly (Velilla, 2010), aimed primarily at the domestic marketplace, to the internationally distributed Los abrazos rotos/Broken Embraces (Almodóvar, 2009) and La mujer sin piano/Woman without Piano (Rebollo, 2009).

In Chapter 25, co-authored with Mercedes Gamero – the head of acquisitions for Antena 3 Television, who also manages their cinematic production wing – she discusses her dual strategy to translate models that have worked on the small screen into viable films primed for the domestic marketplace, while facilitating the production of international co-productions such as Intruders (Fresnadillo, 2011) or Planet 51 (Blanco, Abad and Martínez, 2009) which match Spanish talent with global stars such as Clive Owen and Jessica Biel. Cruz, and to a lesser extent Almodóvar, may have travelled to Hollywood, but far more common over recent years has been the importation of genres and filmic styles from abroad, often with the collaboration of foreign nationals or external funding. As Jay Beck and Vicente Rodríguez Ortega note in the introduction to their excellent edited volume on genre:

Spanish cinema exists both inside and outside Spain (understood as an established territorial boundary), and it acquires different conceptual and pragmatic meanings as different players in the film business – from producers to marketing executives, from journalists to scholars – construct diverse forms of signification to promote their differing agendas.

(2008: 3)

There are, in fact, at least two sides to the transnational debate. On the one hand, as Martínez-Carazo demonstrates in Chapter 16, the films of a director such as Almodóvar mean different things abroad to what they do at home, and this signifies certain ‘national’ specificities. On the other, global film practices have made it increasingly difficult to speak of Spanish cinema as a discrete category. Hence, for example, José F. Colmeiro has complained that El orfanato ‘does not communicate anything which is culturally specific at the diegetic level – any reference to its national origin has been completely removed from its textual surface’ (2011: 104); and yet the trope of the gothic mansion – or for that matter, the casting of Geraldine Chaplin – ensures that the film has a referential scope in relation to ongoing memory debates (see Chapter 10) that is not likely to be detected abroad. What this implies is that ‘national’ in relation to the production and reception of films is not a redundant category but, as in the case of authorship,