The cinema of Álex de la Iglesia

By Andy Willis, Nuria Triana-Toribio and Peter Buse

Álex de la Iglesia, initially championed by Pedro Almodóvar, and at one time the enfant terrible of Spanish film, still makes film critics nervous. The director of some of the most important films of the Post-Franco era – Acción mutante, El día de la bestia, Muertos de risa – receives here the first full length study of his work. Breaking away from the pious tradition of acclaiming art-house auteurs, The cinema of Álex de la Iglesia tackles a new sort of beast: the popular auteur, who brings the provocation of the avant-garde to popular genres such as horror and comedy.

This book brings together Anglo-American film theory, an exploration of the legal and economic history of Spanish audio-visual culture, a comprehensive knowledge of Spanish cultural forms and traditions (esperpento, sainete costumbrista) with a detailed textual analysis of all of Álex de la Iglesia’s seven feature films.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781847796295

Andy Willis

Andrew Willis is Senior Lecturer in Media and Performance at the University of Salford

Book preview

The cinema of Álex de la Iglesia

Spanish and Latin American Filmmakers

Series editors:

Núria Triana Toribio, University of Manchester

Andy Willis, University of Salford

Spanish and Latin American Filmmakers offers a focus on new, and reclaims previously neglected, filmmakers, and considers established figures from new and different perspectives. Each volume places its subject in a variety of critical and production contexts.

The series sees filmmakers as more than just auteurs, thus offering an insight into the work and contexts of producers, writers, actors, production companies and studios. The studies in this series take into account the recent changes in Spanish and Latin American film studies, such as the new emphasis on popular cinema, and the influence of cultural studies in the analysis of films and of the film cultures produced within the Spanish-speaking industries.

Already published

Julio Medem Rob Stone

The cinema of Álex de la Iglesia

Peter Buse, Núria Triana Toribio and Andy Willis

Copyright © Peter Buse, Núria Triana Toribio and Andy Willis 2007

The right of Peter Buse, Núria Triana Toribio and Andy Willis to be identified as the

authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 7136 2

First published 2007

16  15  14  13  12  11  10  09  08  07        10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Typeset

by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon

Printed in Great Britain

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Contents

List of illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1    Acción mutante (1993): against the conspiracy of boredom

2    El día de la bestia (1995): comedy, subcultures, television

3    Perdita Durango (1997): the body, sex and Mexico

4    Muertos de risa (1999): comedy, television, history

5    La comunidad (2000): modernity and the cinematic past

6    800 balas (2002): undoing the ignominy of boyhood

7    Crimen ferpecto (2004): the mise-en-scène of mise-en-scène

Conclusion

Filmography of Álex de la Iglesia

Bibliography

Index

List of illustrations

Frontispiece to Introduction: image from Acción mutante (Joaquín Manchado). Courtesy of El Deseo.

1     Image from Crimen ferpecto (Mónica de Pascalis). Courtesy of Pánico Films.

2     Image from 800 balas (Paola Ardizzoni and Emilio Pereda). Courtesy of Pánico Films.

Frontispiece to Chapter 1: image from Acción mutante (Joaquín Manchado). Courtesy of El Deseo.

3     Poster for Acción mutante (Joaquín Manchado). Courtesy of El Deseo.

Frontispiece to Chapter 2: image from El día de la bestia (Pipo Fernández). Courtesy of Lolafilms.

4     Image from El día de la bestia (Pipo Fernández). Courtesy of Lolafilms.

Frontispiece to Chapter 3: promotional image for Perdita Durango (Eníac Martínez and Drew Carolan). Courtesy of Lolafilms.

5     Image from Perdita Durango (Eníac Martínez and Drew Carolan). Courtesy of Lolafilms.

6     Image from 800 balas (Paola Ardizzoni and Emilio Pereda). Courtesy of Pánico Films.

Frontispiece to Chapter 4: image from Muertos de risa (Paola Ardizzoni and Mónica de Pascalis). Courtesy of Lolafilms.

7     Image from Muertos de risa (Paola Ardizzoni and Mónica de Pascalis). Courtesy of Lolafilms.

Frontispiece to Chapter 5: image from La comunidad (Paola Ardizzoni and Mónica de Pascalis). Courtesy of Lolafilms.

8     Image from La comunidad (Paola Ardizzoni and Mónica de Pascalis). Courtesy of Lolafilms.

Frontispiece to Chapter 6: promotional image from 800 balas (Ricky Davila). Courtesy of Pánico Films.

9     Image from 800 balas (Paola Ardizzoni and Emilio Pereda). Courtesy of Pánico Films.

10     Photograph of 800 balas set (Paola Ardizzoni and Emilio Pereda). Courtesy of Pánico Films.

Frontispiece to Chapter 7: image from Crimen ferpecto (Mónica de Pascalis). Courtesy of Pánico Films.

11     Image from Crimen ferpecto (Mónica de Pascalis). Courtesy of Pánico Films.

Acknowledgements

Parts of the Introduction appeared in a different form in New cinemas, as did Chapter 1 in Tesserae: Journal of Spanish and Latin American Studies. The School of Modern Languages at Liverpool University and the School of Media, Music and Performance at Salford University provided us with timely sabbaticals during the writing of this book, and the British Academy funded a research trip to Madrid. Linda Pariser of Cornerhouse, Manchester, Jennifer Green of Screen International, Isabel Santaolalla, Carrie Hamilton, Nerea Barragán, Josep-Lluís Fecé, and Valeria Camporesi all provided us with research materials and advice. Valuable feedback on the final manuscript were provided by Chris Perriam and the anonymous reviewer at MUP. Special thanks to our editor at MUP, Matthew Frost, without whom no activity is ever as enjoyable, and to Dani Caselli and Manu Basile for taking us to the Pinacoteca Brera at just the right moment. Purificación García at Pánico Films was immensely helpful in assembling images for us. Finally, thanks of course to Álex de la Iglesia, who fielded so many questions and has patiently awaited the appearance of this book.

Introduction

Hatchet job

A hatchet in the head is a cheap novelty item obtainable from a party shop. The blade is plastic, the arc where it fits round the skull has been removed, and a strap under the chin secures the whole contraption in place. The effect is ludicrous, the intent puerile, a Halloween trick with a number of variants: the saw, the arrow, the axe. In cartoons, it can have an indexical value, signifying a headache. A hatchet in the head is also a minor feature in the iconography of martyrdom in fifteenth-and sixteenth-century century painting. This tradition coincides with the rise of illusion in figurative art, but abides only sporadically by the rules governing the illusionist regime. It portrays sainted martyrs as if alive, but adorned with the object or weapon that brought their suffering or deaths. These may be gravity-defying stones, which perch on shoulders or foreheads, or the spiked wheel upon which Saint Catherine was tortured, or, in the case of St Peter Martyr (d. 1252), a broad blade slicing into the brainpan of a bald head. Key exponents of this image of the martyred Dominican monk are Giovanni Bellini, Lorenzo Lotto and Giovan Battista Cima de Conegliano. The type of blade varies, from the pointed machete of Cima de Conegliano’s St Peter Martyr with Saints Nicholas and Benedict (1504) to the more cleaver-like weapon in Lotto’s Virgin and Child with Peter Martyr (1503).

The image also appears in two of Álex de la Iglesia’s films. In Acción mutante, Ramón, the leader of a band of ‘mutant’ terrorists, murders his comrades one by one, dispatching Juan Abadie, one half of a pair of conjoined twins, by the same method suffered by St Peter Martyr. Juan’s brother Álex survives Ramón’s killing spree and drags his brother, meat cleaver and all, around with him for the duration of the film. Meanwhile, in Crimen ferpecto, Rafael, head of ladies’ wear in Yeyo’s department store, accidentally murders the head of men’s wear, Don Antonio. With the help of Lourdes, who is handy with a meat cleaver, Rafael disposes of Don Antonio’s corpse, dismembering it and burning it in the department store’s incinerator. Lourdes deposits the cleaver in Don Antonio’s skull before incinerating it as well. When Don Antonio returns as a ghost, the cleaver returns with him, positioned in the classical manner found in the depiction of St Peter Martyr.

Where is the true lineage of the cinema of Álex de la Iglesia to be found? In the clown’s prop or in the iconography of saints? St Peter Martyr wears his blade with tranquil dignity; it is an emblem of his sacrifice and guarantees his passage to higher rewards. The clown suffers no pain, but sacrifices his dignity in his efforts to obtain our approving laughter. For the saint, the body is no longer of any consequence, while for the clown this tool of the trade is a turbulent thing: pure matter, denuded of spirit. Dignity and tranquility are certainly scarce commodities in the films we analyse in this book, and the lines of affinity in De la Iglesia’s cinema lead more obviously to the irreverence of the clown than to the sanctity of St Peter Martyr. However, it would be a mistake to dismiss too lightly the importance of the latter. The hatchet in the head of crude physical comedy and the hatchet of saintly iconography share in common a disregard for verisimilitude, insisting that a blade severing the cerebellum leaves the skull intact and is not always an impediment to waking consciousness. It does not really matter whether the cleaver in Don Antonio’s head is a direct allusion to St Peter Martyr or just a cut-rate sight gag. It is both; it is neither. Nor are the potential sources of the hatchet in the head exhausted by these two possibilities: we would have to consider, at the very least, the conventions of horror movies, with their walking mutilated complete with instrument of mutilation. What matters is the willingness to diverge from a realist tradition born in the fifteenth century and hegemonic ever since. The hatchet is the marker of a rupture, the head an index of intelligence, of the bien pensant realist tradition. This rupture is neither absolute nor unique, but it is an essential starting point in the understanding of the cinema of Álex de la Iglesia and the first reason that he commands our attention.

1 Cleaver in head: Luis Varela as Don Antonio, Guillermo Toledo as Rafael in Crimen ferpecto

The second reason is directly related to the first. We argue in this book that Álex de la Iglesia represents a special phenomenon in Spanish cinema. He is what we might call a ‘popular auteur’, a term we use with the understanding that for many it is an oxymoron. Scholarship on Spanish cinema, for the most part, still subscribes to an unquestioned dichotomy which privileges art-house cinema and neglects its supposed opposite, ‘popular’ cinema. As a result, this scholarship, whether it concentrates on the broader development of Spanish cinema or on individual film-makers, tends to rely heavily on the high art concept of auteurism at the expense of an understanding of cinema as a mass form. This attitude is the product of decades of Europe’s cultural rhetoric of aesthetic and cultural distinctiveness, which set its products apart from the industrial ‘standardization’ of Hollywood. However, recently there has been a move in European cinema studies to reassess the ‘non-auterist’ genre cinema in order to understand better the entirety of European production, a move that has been trickling down into Spanish film studies.¹

The need to dismantle this paradigm has become more urgent in light of recent cinema production in Spain. Since the 1990s particularly, Spanish cinema has witnessed the emergence and consolidation of film-makers who, like De la Iglesia, have achieved considerable box-office success by appropriating Hollywood formulae and mixing them with the autochthonous non-art-house traditions, whilst not relinquishing their status as auteurs. That is, a director like De la Iglesia draws on popular genres and seeks much wider audiences than the art-house elite, but still possesses the typical attributes of the auteur: he is director-screenwriter of all the films, enjoys considerable autonomy in the production process, experiments at the level of form and content, and has developed a distinctive visual style. As Steven Marsh and Parvati Nair (2004) argue, Pedro Almodóvar must be considered the recent trailblazer in this trend, but as they also point out, there is a rich line of Spanish cineastes who have drawn on popular forms (7). This line goes back to the Second Republic, but most relevant in relation to De la Iglesia are Luis García Berlanga and Fernando Fernán-Gómez, whose brand of black comedy known as esperpento De la Iglesia updates and most typically fuses with elements of horror. The affinities with Berlanga and Fernán-Gómez and the debts owed to them we explore in depth in Chapters 2 and 5.

It is also worth noting that the category of the ‘popular auteur’ is elastic and not based on box-office receipts alone. After all, Carlos Saura, who is most decidedly not a popular auteur, achieved box-office success with the literary adaptations Carmen (1983) and ¡Ay, Carmela! (1990), while Alejandro Amenábar, who is (or at least was) a popular auteur, outgrossed all other films in Spain in 2004 with Mar adentro / The Sea Inside, a film whose sobriety and calculated social conscience bear little resemblance to other works of Spanish popular auteurism. At the same time, it is constructive to contrast the figure of the popular auteur with another striking development in Spain in the late 1990s, the low-brow blockbuster. Santiago Segura, a sometime collaborator of Álex de la Iglesia, is writer, director, and star of Torrente: el brazo tonto de la ley / Torrente: the Stupid Arm of the Law (1998) and its sequel Torrente 2: Misión en Marbella / Torrente 2: Mission in Marbella (2001). The broad appeal and financial success of the Torrente franchise have been matched for the most part by its critical marginalization in Spain. The general horror with which these films are met in middle-brow Spanish critical circles should of course come as no surprise, given the ‘art-house auteurist’ biases of the establishment. Santiago Segura is not a ‘popular auteur’ because he is easy for the establishment to dismiss, while Álex de la Iglesia is a popular auteur because he is hard to dismiss, but also hard to include.

Santiago Segura, in spite of being a director-screenwriter, is never in danger of troubling the canon of auteurs, because traditional auteurist methodology not only sees the auteur as the individual ‘responsible, in the last instance, for a film’s aesthetics and mise-en-scène’ (Stam 2000, 85) but also conceives film-making as a mode of self-expression which rejects or subverts formulae of the kind that commercial and genre cinema provide. If these are the parameters within which to study a film-maker, then what is to be done with an output like De la Iglesia’s, which is at once resolutely commercial and draws freely on Hollywood codes and genres, and yet which also receives retrospectives at the Lincoln Center in New York (2002) and is dense with allusion to Spanish film history, as well as avant-garde traditions, in particular surrealism and dadaism? The exemplary symptomatic statement on the work of De la Iglesia comes from Tomás Fernández Valenti (2001):

Álex de la Iglesia es el cineasta que mejor filma de su generación, podría hacer cosas mejores de las que hace … siempre y cuando no ceda facilmente a la puerilidad: a La comunidad, por ejemplo, le falta un poco más de madurez para estar bien del todo. (48)

Since Álex de la Iglesia is the most talented film-maker of his generation, he could make better things than he has so far … provided he does not give in so easily to puerility: La comunidad, for example, is too lacking in maturity to be consistently good.

The frustration with De la Iglesia, who is apparently a potential auteur who refuses to conform to the qualities of the auteur, is captured perfectly by Valenti’s paradoxical and perhaps incomprehensible claim that De la Iglesia is at once the most accomplished film-maker (que mejor filma) of his generation and has failed yet to make a decent film. It is a strange sort of judgement – to acclaim a film-maker’s talent without being able to point to any firm evidence – but Valenti is not alone in this stance. Film-maker Chus Gutiérrez confirmed this point in a conversation with the authors of this book during the Spanish Film Festival in Manchester in 2003: De la Iglesia is a good film-maker who cannot seem to make good films. Or, more precisely, he fails to make mature films, if we paraphrase Gutiérrez, using the vocabulary of T. S. Eliot which Valenti deploys.² What this means, we think, is that De la Iglesia is highly accomplished technically, but that he continues to insist on telling stories in which, for example, a hatchet in the head is a source of much mirth.

One might well ask, why auteur studies now, even if it is done with this compromise category of the popular auteur, and why invoke an outmoded term like ‘art cinema’? These two questions are far too infrequently posed in contemporary Spanish film studies, especially in Spain, but also in the UK. Too often in the study of Spanish cinema there is a silent endorsement of the concepts of the auteur and art cinema and not enough acknowledgement that approaches to film that are anchored in authorship are both historically contingent – the product of a specific set of polemics in Cahiers du cinema in the 1950s and in Movie in the early 1960s – and, since the 1970s, increasingly discredited, having been displaced by subsequent waves of structuralism, post-structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, all suspicious of the unified creative subject the idea of the auteur presupposes. In the field of popular cinema journalism, in contrast, the idea of the auteur has remained significant and reviewers in the UK broadsheets will constantly refer to directors without questioning their authorial status. But it is hardly the politique des auteurs they are implicitly invoking. Instead it tends to be the traditional view of the European auteur which predates the 1950s work of Cahiers and which we might call ‘art-house auteurism’. This tradition, which is alive and kicking in language-based departments, if not in film studies departments, embraces, for example, Lang and Renoir, but only in their pre-Hollywood phases, whereas the point of auteurism in the 1960s and 1970s was that certain directors ‘transcended’ the limitations imposed by working in genre cinema for Hollywood studios.

Vestiges of this art-house auteurism are particularly strong in writing on Spanish cinema. A good example is Rob Stone’s recent text, Spanish Cinema (2002). Stone devotes auteur-driven chapters to personalities such as producer Elías Querejeta and director Carlos Saura, as well as to newly canonized figures such as Julio Medem. In analyzing the latter, he resorts uncritically to the romanticism of early author-centred critics, enthusing that ‘It’s all there in Julio Medem’s eyes: a much darker creative sensibility than the texture of his films might suggest’ (158). Not for Stone the colder, structuralist notion of Medem as a system of signs: he confidently asserts that it is the ‘real’ person, Medem, who is the ultimate source of the work, and goes on to detail how Medem’s personal life can be read against the films. Medem is the artist in control of what we see on the screen, his life experiences forging his artistic expression; without these personal experiences, Stone implies, the films would be drained of merit. This is not to say that we are not interested in the very distinctive star persona of Álex de la Iglesia, but only in the sense that it is a persona, constructed in the para-filmic space of publicity and criticism and functioning to shape the reception of films released under his name. As for De la Iglesia’s ‘creative sensibility’ and his life experiences, we would prefer to leave them to one side and consider instead the ways in which his films are the products of a team that has been involved in the labour behind the images on the screen as well as a set of social structures and cultural contexts which make possible certain utterances and exclude others.

If we are trying to revisit the notion of the auteur today in Spanish cinema it is in order to challenge the outmoded and yet still highly prevalent notion of the art-house auteur. We therefore propose to ask what it might mean to think of Álex de la Iglesia as an auteur, precisely because he is an auteur very unlike Julio Medem. It should already be clear that we do not engage in such an activity without reservations. We admit from the outset that we view the concept of the ‘auteur’ with a good deal of suspicion and recognize that its function is to organize cinema for film critics and teachers of cinema, and that tied up with the concept is a whole set of assumptions about genius and creativity, not to mention gender, which makes the concept of the auteur at best anachronistic if it is not approached with eyes wide open. However, since it is very difficult to escape the formal structures by which knowledge of cinema is organized, we hope to attack Spanish auteur studies from within rather than without. We are therefore taking De la Iglesia as a borderline case, who sits on the cusp of the auteurism/popular cinema divide and causes as a result many difficulties for unreconstructed art-house auteurism. What we hope is that as well as shedding light on De la Iglesia’s cinema, this case study of the 1990s and early 21st-century Spanish cinema will contribute to reorient debates on Spanish cinema in general and help to break the tight conceptual grip of traditional auteurism.

‘Álex de la Iglesia’: the work, the team, the star

In this book we concentrate our attention on the seven feature films De la Iglesia directed between 1992 and 2004, devoting a chapter to each: Acción mutante / Mutant Action (1993), a science-fiction comedy; El día de la bestia / The Day of the Beast (1995), a ‘satanic action comedy’; Perdita Durango (1997), a violent and visceral tale set on either side of the US–Mexico border; Muertos de risa / Dying of Laughter (1999), a mock biopic of two Spanish comedians of the 1970s; La comunidad / Common Wealth (2000), a story of hidden treasure and vicious neighbours; 800 balas / 800 Bullets (2002), a tribute to the Spanish stuntmen of spaghetti westerns; and Crimen ferpecto / Ferpect Crime (2004), a satire of consumerist culture in a Hitchcockian vein. However, this list is by no means a complete account of De la Iglesia’s contributions to visual culture. After a youthful period in Bilbao’s alternative comics scene, he worked first in cinema as scriptwriter and artistic director on the short film Mama (Pablo Berger, 1988). He designed the poster for Enrique Urbizu’s Tu novia está loca / Your Girlfriend Is Crazy (1988) and was artistic designer on the same director’s Todo por la pasta / Everything for the Money (1991), as well as the short Amor impasible / Impassible Love (Iñaki Arteta, 1992). He has also directed two short films, Mirindas asesinas / Killer Mirindas (1991) and Enigma en el bosquecillo / Enigma in the Little Wood (2000); an interactive video-game, Marbella antivicio / Marbella Vice (1994); and two television advertisements for FNAC (2002). Work in television punctuates much of this basic chronicle. In the early years of Basque regional television, De la Iglesia worked on set decoration for the talk-show Detras del sirimiri / Behind the Sirimiri (1988) and for Doctor Livingstone, supongo / Doctor Livingstone, I Presume, both on Euskal Telebista; for about four months he directed the sketch show Inocente, Inocente (1993) which was broadcast on Tele Madrid and Euskal Telebista; and in 2005 he directed for Tele 5 La habitacion del nino / The Baby’s Bedroom, one of a series of TV movies under the collective title Películas para no dormir / Movies to Keep You Awake (screened in 2006). Finally, De la Iglesia has acted as producer for the theatrical work Dos hombres sin destino/Two Men without a Destiny (2004), and provided the voice for the character of the ‘Underminer’ in the Castilian dubbed version of The Incredibles (Brad Bird, 2004).

We do not, in The Cinema of Álex de la Iglesia, go into any sustained analysis of the director’s work outside feature films, but even this very condensed summary of