Ensayos de la Mirada. El hombre y su proyección en el cine contemporáneo (Spanish Edition)

---

The substance of the new power relations constitutes a re-articulation of those old structures that the continent experienced two hundred years ago. But instead, Leiziaga is trapped in his fantasies: Finally he could realize his great dream. In short the islet would be full of people drawn by the magic of the oil. Factories, towers, enormous cranes, drills and gray warehouses: II The Ruins and the Archeologist Michael Foucault has referred to an epistemological shift that displaced the traditional conception of history, and brought it closer to archeology.

Previously, that discipline aimed at the restitution of a lost past, from the starting point of what documents said; they were the language of a silenced voice. Nonetheless, the author says, a mutation has altered our posture towards the document, inviting us to rework it, to develop it from the inside out. This is not inert material anymore through which we reconstruct that which was, but a dynamic presence that communicates itself, from its tangible nature, a history not necessarily cancelled.

We could say that history now works more with what exists than with that which was; the document becomes, Foucault says, monument. History aspires then to the condition of archeology, to the intrinsic description of monuments that exist today, that speak of the present from its materiality Foucault, From the formal point of view, Cubagua and La Galera de Tiberio are articulated in relatively autonomous series that operate via sedimentation, one story upon another, displacing the structure of the lineal narrative constituted of successive stages. Even more, this displacement of the teleological operates not only in the structure of the narrative, but also in the implicit conception of the story.

As a consequence of this order disorder, as was thought by certain critics there is a proliferation of discontinuities in this case, temporal and spatial ruptures and the surging of long periods of time that connect the project of the Conquest with the U. The connection with Foucault becomes clearer when we remember that in his reflections about the archeological method, the author highlights precisely that his project of transversal reading tries to establish discontinuities and the relationships between them, which produce sudden affinities through time or discontinuities: Something similar occurs in the novels that we are commenting on.

On the other hand, the appearances of Friar Dionisio throughout the novel connect a man of the cloth that integrated himself into the Amerindian world of the Conquest era, with another who lives in a Venezuelan province in the middle of the XX century. And immediately the narrator points out: It had the same features as Friar Dionisio. This temporal intersection and the historical experiences brought on by the image of the friar could be read as an anti-colonial reflection when we remember one of the conversations between Leiziaga and Friar Dionisio.

He turned around and found himself in front of Friar Dionisio. He looked taller, skinnier and looking like he was about to turn into a mound of ashes. His fingers slid through his beard, a beard that almost hid his sunken mouth. The location is excellent. Easy access from everywhere. Four hundred years ago they also brought it in with barrels. Again the leavings, the inassimilable ruin that stays and connects distinct and, at the same time, kindred temporalities.

Likewise, we find Leiziaga, incapable of reading the traces of things, and of who the narrator later on tells us: In closing, this notion of archeology as a synchronic analysis of discontinuous remains, of strata formed by residues, is what to me would seem worthy of study in these novels. III The Ruins and the Collector Collectors seem to coincide in the capacity of objects to interpellate; however, this common point is also an important place of divergence, where there are at least two variants. In the first case, the interpellation of the fetish does not transcend the object itself; the second case, suggests a metonymic relationship with the process-context that gave it life.

La Galera de Tiberio reveals the first possibility which I mentioned, through the character of Miss Ayres, a language professor who sells antiques in Panama. Idols, huacas, good luck necklaces, caiman pelts. The store window was dressed up with a small galley embellished with mother-of-pearl and silver. Stuffed birds with marvelous plumages, crystal hoops.

Symbols to chronicle the letters in the work of Camphausen. Articles for tourists and sailors Miss Ayres is in that way the collector who gets close to the object by making it into a fetish, converting it into mere merchandise and erasing the relationships of production in which they originated. There is in her something similar to the blindness of Leiziaga, in Cubagua: Nonetheless, this vain attempt at erasing the historical violence collides with the evidence that the story itself provides, showing us the co-existence of the colonial and neocolonial series through the ruins brought together by the narrator, that other collector who inhabits the story.

His project sheds light on the devastation of the past in the present, and invites us to think in trans-historic parallelisms. IV Conclusion Walter Benjamin was also fascinated by the subject of the ruins. In his insistence in distancing himself from causality, and in order to expose the materiality of the objects, he proposes the idea that the past reveals itself in those things that have been forgotten and elude inclusion in the great narratives.

Hanna Arendt explained this well when she stated that for Benjamin: Here, the writing confronts teleological time with a vertical trace, digging through superimposed strata and constructing a fractured or discontinuous plot that, simultaneously, reveals fundamental connections across the paradigmatic axis of our history. This gesture reveals the sedimentation and the synchronic coexistence of oppressive forces; it also reunites and connects fragments that modernity has razed and isolated.

The ruins thus reveal their auratic character, vividly convening the experience of coloniality. Los revolucionarios eran concientes del poder que el cine les daba para beneficiar a su causa. Su obra encapsula dos tendencias mayores del desarrollo del cine nacionalista mexicano. La clave de la brillantez del filme es la influencia transnacional del mismo. La propia existencia de Maria es una afrenta a las tradiciones sexistas de la comunidad. Ella personifica los miedos del hombre tradicionalista acerca de la mujer moderna: Espaldas mojadas y Macario Los resultados fueron no menos que milagrosos.

Finalmente, El lugar sin limites critica seriamente la inhabilidad de la cultura machista de aceptar su trasfondo homosexual. El cine era primero en la lista de despojos. Translation - English Border Crossings: Despite featuring an internationally renowned cast, U. Mexican cinema, like all of Latin American cinema, had been transnational since its origins.

Thomas Edison soon followed suit with his Vitascope films appearing in January Their very titles reveal the no-frills, seemingly objective stances the films inhabited: By , Mexico City hosted twenty-two exhibition sites, which were often crowded, ill-ventilated, and constructed with extremely flammable material.

Furthermore, films were intermittently exhibited with cheap live acts that often led to fights between actors and audience. After a rash of press articles and audience complaints, twenty of the twenty-two sites were shut down, forcing exhibitors to take to the road. By doing so, a new, more democratic representation of Mexico began to emerge. As one exhibitor wrote: This would cause much excitement among the townspeople.

bahana-line.com: Angel Romano: Books

At the stated time, they would crowd together, jostle for close-ups and gesticulate wildly in front of the camera. Needless to say, all the improvised actors would attend the show on the night of the premiere. There was much enthusiasm when they recognized themselves or their friends on the screen! Yet all of the films remained stylistically tied to a positivist spirit by emphasizing a documentary approach with minimal camera movement and set-ups. This all changed with the arrival of the Revolution.

As various oppositional forces liberated the country from the Porfiriato, cinema was similarly liberated from its ideological moorings. In a moment of incredible foresight and political opportunism, Francisco Villa signed an exclusive contract with the North American Mutual Film Company, promising to stage battles and executions by daylight to ensure optimum filming conditions. The s mark the U. With the arrival of sound in the late s, the U. At the same time, the state made a more concerted effort to foster domestic film production through direct economic support and the establishment of quotas upon foreign imports; therefore, the years from represent a period of artistic and economic growth.

At the same time, Mexico began attracting well-reputed international directors to film its landscapes, history, and people. Eisenstein began shooting the independently financed Que Viva Mexico! But financial and political troubles left the film unfinished. A few years later Paul Strand was invited to Mexico to film The Wave , which chronicles the collective political awakening and organization of a group of fisherman from a small village. Based upon real events, shot on location in Vera Cruz, and using local inhabitants as actors, The Wave foreshadows a neo-realist aesthetic that would soon be associated with post-WWII Italian films.

Although one does not want to overstate the influence such productions had upon Mexican filmmakers, they nonetheless encouraged domestic filmmakers to develop themes and aesthetic styles that had been largely marginalized until that time. Fernando de Fuentes stands as the most important of s Mexican directors. His body of work encapsulates the two major tendencies in the development of a nationalist Mexican cinema. The film provided such a bleak outlook that the government felt it necessary to censor its original ending which revealed revolutionary goals as hypocritical at best.

Rancho grande initiated the genre of the ranchera comedy, which proved to be a huge commercial success both domestically and internationally. More meaningful still is the use that Diamante makes of a man who is perhaps the best representative of this endangered breed of actor: At one moment in the film, in his role as Aristides Sobrido, a militant Germanophile who even has under his command a group of pubescent boy scouts to whom he tries to teach the benefits of German discipline, we hear him say we need to inject the germs of militarisation in every vein of the nation.

There is an obvious ridiculousness in these words being spoken by Isbert, whose particular physique of course quite lacking in any hint of Germanic svelteness combines with his inimitable guttural voice, rushed and almost unintelligible in his most brilliant moments for example, in the trial scene in La vida por delante, By giving him the role of the Germanophile with a love of discipline, Diamante seems to know how to use Isbert s capacity for invalidating whatever he asserts, whatever he says, with his own presence physical and vocal , in a clear example of that dialectic produced by an acting style that is not entirely acting.

Perhaps this is why one of the assessments of the film s censors related to deficient performances, as if the director had not known what to do with the actors. By this I mean that it cannot be fully credible as a period film when these characters, who are characters only up to a certain point, undermine the possibility of believing in the historical illusion of what we are watching; it is difficult to strip these comic actors of the uniqueness that irremediably anchors them in a particular time period.

As a result, the contribution of the actors is decisive in bringing the meaning of the film towards a war that is chronologically closer to the bodies acting out the story, to the actual time of these comedians. To this end I will refer to an article by film historian Santos Zunzunegui Los cuerpos gloriosos in which he uses Greimas s semiotic square to develop a typology of actors. The axis of opposites on this square would be formed, on the one hand, by actors in the traditional conception of the term those who adopt various acting methods to play a fictional character as faithfully as possible , while on the opposite end would be the Bressonian model, who reveals his essence through a flattening of expressiveness [and a] mechanisation of gestures and poses Zunzunegui, Applying the laws of opposition, the contrary axis for the two types described above would comprise the notactor and the not-model.

Not-actors would refer to what Sergei M. Eisenstein had theorised about using the term tipazh, [a technique in which] the aim is to present to the audience a face a figure capable of expressing everything on the basis of his social and biological experience Zunzunegui, Finally, the fourth category, the not-model, would refer to bodies with autonomy.

Autonomy that sustains their ability to go from one film to another, from one topos to another, from one story to another, from one narrative situation to another, without ever ceasing to be themselves Zunzunegui, In this category Zunzunegui places our supporting actors, who move constantly between the two poles from the Bressonian model to the actor proper Zunzunegui, Returning to my analysis in the first part of the article, i. It could therefore be argued that while the past is represented in Los que no fuimos a la guerra, the present is also presented by certain faces that cannot hide completely behind the masks of their characters.

The discussion in this article points to a question that is in a sense methodological: The Role of Supporting Actors in the context of their tradition. We have seen here how focusing the analysis on the question of performance in a specific film makes it possible to expand the framework to a theoretical level, while at the same time addressing the origins of the acting method studied in a related field like the theatre. This way of looking at a film or a film tradition will ultimately lead us to some productive albeit also paradoxical conclusions, such as the fact that cinematic traditions in countries subject to censorship may arrive at innovative formal solutions at the same time as or even before they are developed in free countries.

It is a conclusion as paradoxical, at least, as the old fable attributed to Aesop.

Notes 1 Uncanny even in the Freudian sense unheimlich , since this absurd battle dream is the fratricidal episode known since ancient times, which, repressed, returns unexpectedly. On one side were certain official agencies that sought to eliminate sainetes and popular films that they deemed to be associated with the Second Republic, while on the other were certain studios that were far from willing to give up the audiences attracted by the actors or comedians with theatrical origins who appeared in these types of films.

It could be said while admitting the simplified nature of the definition that the solution, an intermediate one, was to soften the popular content of the films while keeping the familiar faces on the screen. Berlin; quoted by Walter Benjamin In Brecht s theatre the aim was not so much to act as to make it obvious that one is acting and, as a result, a distance, visible and palpable, arises between the role portrayed and the audience, from the actor working and not so much from the work of the actor.

In the performances of Spanish supporting actors, however, the aim is not to make it obvious that one is acting, but to act on the basis of an awareness of certain traits of one s own that are recognisable and recognised by the audience.

Product details

In both cases, the illusion of reality is partial and the audience s disbelief is, necessarily, only partially suspended. As if the director hadn t known what to do with the actors ; and: El grano de la voz secundaria. Coleccionistas de cine, 28, De la idea al film. El cuerpo del actor. Ediciones de la Filmoteca. El hombre sin atributos. Las cosas de la vida: In general terms, the evolution of its use would move from an initially extradiegetic location, exercising from this privileged position a full command over everything that occurs on screen, to the progressive adoption of an enunciative complexity that would have the voice alerting the spectators to what they are going to see or are already seeing, speaking directly to them as if expecting an immediate answer, or attempting to provoke their emotional involvement.

This complexity would ultimately result in the insertion of narrators into the story, embodying the voice in the figure of a particular character, which may or may not be the protagonist.

Film & Video

Whatever mode is adopted, the intervention of the narrator positions us clearly in the terrain of a kind of fiction that is conscious of its condition as such, with a centre of reflexivity and thought removed from what the images are showing us, which, whether through nostalgia, melancholy or humour, impregnates a remarkable number of the most unique titles of the early Francoist period.

I will now explore, at least briefly, how from the theoretical point of view the insertion of a voiceover as a prominent element that configures the textual framework raises essential questions of filmic enunciation. First of all, the kind of relationship established between that voice and the subject-spectator, out of which arises other equally important issues concerning the organisation of the story, such as the extent of the knowledge of the facts that the spectator should be given or the doses of information that the spectator receives.

The Voiceover in Spanish Fiction Films might in turn discern who is showing us what we see, who sees it at the same time as the spectator, and who narrates it and from what position in the story, and on the basis of these questions we may attempt to outline the figure of a maker of the images. In considering the intervention of this narrator and his or her degree of involvement in the narrative material, it will be important to keep in mind Gerard Gennette s affirmation that [a]bsence is absolute, but presence has degrees Genette, The analytical overview offered here of a representative corpus of films that adopt the voiceover as a key element of the story will focus on establishing this degree of intervention, the particular focalisation that operates on the narrative material and, in short, the method of organising our access to the knowledge of the events narrated and, consequently, to their meaning.

This overview will also be adopted from a historical perspective that takes into account the evolution that the voiceover underwent in the period. Any reconstruction of the trajectory followed by the voiceover up to its appearance in major Spanish films of the s must first consider its presence in film newsreels and the didactic, persuasive and politicised documentaries of the s.

And attention will also have to be given to its presence in the newsreels and documentaries of the Spanish Civil War, which made use of voiceover commentary to give the collage of images typical of these documentary corpora their characteristic tone between Any reconstruction of the trajectory followed by the voiceover up to its appearance in major Spanish films of the s must first consider its presence in film newsreels and the didactic, persuasive and politicised documentaries of the s informative and propagandistic.

The subsequent onset of the Second World War would only lead to a notable relapse of analogous use of such voiceover commentary in film. And in terms of consumer habits, it is also important to mention the acousmatic voices of the radio, which prepared the ground for the future sound film spectator and, more specifically, for the spectator of films that included these incorporeal voices, as noted by various theorists who have either addressed the use of voiceover commentary in the classical documentary or studied the introduction of sound.

It would also be useful, with respect to the particular relationship that can be established with the subject-spectator, to give at least a little attention here to certain intertitles used in silent films. With respect to newsreels and documentaries, Sarah Kosloff notes, citing Lewis Jacobs, that narration appeared in these filmic forms before it became a common resource in fiction films, but its use in fiction films was not widespread prior to , probably because in the early years of sound film audiences would have felt cheated by anything other than synchronous speech, and the voiceover was thus only fully established in fiction films once the novelty of synchronicity had worn off Kosloff, Once this habit of use and reception had been established, the transfer of the voiceover to fiction occurred as a natural progression.

Already in the s we can find it in a few Hollywood films, as documented by Sarah Kozloff An earlier film, Forgotten Commandments Louis J. Gasnier, William Schorr, , also uses a voiceover, in this case belonging to the character of a priest who, in a similar manner, comments on some scenes taken from The Ten Commandments Cecil B. The fact that both cases involve a particular practice of appropriation points to a key question in any analysis of the voiceover: Una de fieras , Una de miedo , and Y ahora una de ladrones This series also offers an early case of the use of a narrating voiceover, except in the last title in the trilogy.

This mark of reflexivity is taken to its fullest extent here through the adoption of the form of clear enunciative self-consciousness in a thought-provoking metacinematic strategy that constantly seeks the spectator s complicity.

This version is not supported by Behance.

At the opposite extreme from humour and parody, the omnipresent voiceover of newsreels and documentaries on the war, with its powerful command over the visuals, over which it maintains a clearly tutelary, orientational and persuasive position, would later be transferred, as suggested above, to fiction, as evidenced in numerous films of the post-war period. It would be in a period of transition, in the moments immediately after the end of the conflict, when it would appear in that hybrid product represented by Edgar Neville s short film Vivan los hombres libres Here, the visual document of a now occupied Barcelona is mixed with brief insertions offering a dramatised recreation of the terror and torture in the prisons.

The highly marked propagandistic intention is thus supported not only by the probative nature of the images that characterises the canonical practice of the expository documentary, but also by a certain emotional dimension evoked by the narrating voiceover s reading of the desperate letters of the prisoners. Bearing in mind that my period of study covers the years of the Second World War and immediately thereafter, it is worth highlighting Sarah Kosloff s observation that in the early s there was a veritable avalanche of Hollywood films that used the voiceover Two acclaimed films from this period, Casablanca Michael Curtiz, and To Be or Not To Be Ernst Lubitsch, make use of an initial voiceover, as an extradiegetic narrator who, from a position outside the story narrated, fills the need to explain, contextualise and frame the story in specific spatiotemporal coordinates which of course relate to the Second World War, in the same way as such voiceover was being used in newsreels and documentaries reporting on the conflict.

Curtiz s film, incidentally, also makes use of the wellworn device of animated maps. Trajectory of the voiceover through Spanish cinema In the above-mentioned films by Curtiz and Lubitsch the war appears as a primary reference which underpins the story and which, in turn, is explained through the intervention of a voiceover that anchors the images and assigns them their meanings. In Spain, the indelible mark left by the painful experience of the Civil War could was fittingly evoked by this narrating voiceover which, having accompanied so many films during the war itself, was transferred to numerous fiction films of the s and continued to be used, also with significant variations, in the decades that followed.

An initial approach to this idea can be found in the research of Castro de Paz, who notes that the voiceover appears to have seen an early but painful shift to fiction from the wartime newsreels. Castro de Paz discusses this in his analysis of El hombre que se quiso matar Rafael Gil, , shot in Castro de Paz, The voiceover is thus the element that leads the grey and mediocre reality of the post-war era into the realm of fable, towards a certain degree of unreality and atemporality that will soften what ultimately cannot be concealed: The Voiceover in Spanish Fiction Films struggle for subsistence in a harsh and hostile environment, and also the possibility of realising dreams of salvation like climbing the social ladder through marriage.

And speaking of fable, understood here in literary terms as a narrative-didactic genre with an illustrative purpose Platas, Its demiurgical and omniscient nature, the finality of its affirmations and the control it exercises over the characters and their fates are some of the main attributes of this voiceover, which presides over what is shown on screen, chiefly at the beginning of the story. A common styleme in numerous films of the early Francoist era, it not only appears to serve the obvious function of locating and introducing the story, but also shows signs of a certain task of containment, of control and subjection, in an effort to cushion the harsh reality of its time which, whether intentionally or not, and in spite of the reassuring discourse underpinning the words of the narrator, will ultimately evoke and expose the scars left by the war experience.

Any analysis that begins with a consideration of the voiceover as an element of continuity between the newsreels that had been fully established by the post-war era and fiction films must necessarily make mention of the long shadow cast by the NO-DO newsreel series. Its uninterrupted presence for so many years in Spain s film theatres seemed to contaminate certain fiction films whose use of the voiceover imitates, reproduces or recreates that of the official newsreel, thereby associating them with a tendency towards Figure 2.

Of course, such an approach is far from surprising in the case of this film, but it is worth highlighting the projected voice, with its tone of gravity and importance, the strict seriousness the speaker seeks to convey with this particular modulation of his voice, in contrast with the irony, double-entendres or appeals to the spectator s complicity in other titles that will be analysed below. Iquino, , with reference in these cases to another semantic universe, of the religiosity and traditional family values that shaped the Francoist period.

On the other hand, the use of voiceovers also denotes an interest in staging a story that is self-conscious, vesting the agents involved in the filmic communication with an eloquent presence, so that the reflexivity is transferred to the subject-spectator, who is invited more or less explicitly to participate in everything that will be shown and narrated.

And as everything is a question of degree, following Genette s assertion quoted above, this selfconsciousness would evolve towards greater levels of engagement with the story and with the story s audience. And this evolution, in the case of Spanish post-war cinema, could in general terms take one of two possible paths: As a paradigmatic example of the homodiegetic narrator, and as a landmark work against which to measure what would be done in Spain in these years, it is important to mention Rebecca Alfred Hitchcock, Kosloff argues that this voice is so firmly inscribed in the film that it seems generated not only by what she sees, but also by what we, the spectators, are seeing However, this controversy extended in general to what at that time was considered an excessive use of subjectivity beyond its expression through the voiceover.

In his opinion, the staging would almost always be demonstrative and omniscient, seeking to introduce the subjectivity of the character without resorting at least excessively to the orthodox subjective POV so as not to fall into the realm of morally reprehensible psychodrama CAS- TRO DE PAZ, This question has also been analysed this way from different perspectives by other authors, including Rubio Munt Cerca de la ciudad Luis Lucia, In both cases, the story begins with a dolly shot giving a POV approaching an old building, a place that holds the memory of death.

In both films, the voiceover, positioned inside the story, activates the memory of an event from the past and makes explicit the feelings that this memory provokes.

As it is not the filmic expression of a dream, as in the approach to Manderley, the scene begins with a detail shot of some hands cutting some flowers, which then appear in the foreground when the movement towards the sanctuary begins. The fact that the narrative focus is made to depend on a character has already been noted by Juan Miguel Company in a brief but revealing analysis of Spanish cinema in the s, which proposes a constant fluctuation between the points of view of the narrative and of the characters participating in it, the articulation of which contains much of the textual richness of the films I accepted the invitation from that stranger.

He told me all of this that you have just seen. A later film by Ruiz Castillo, Dos As a paradigmatic example of the homodiegetic narrator, and as a landmark work against which to measure what would be done in Spain in these years, it is important to mention Rebecca caminos , also makes use of a voiceover that focuses the plot on the main characters of the film, giving way to respective flashbacks to then return to the theme of possible reconciliation, suggested in the values of reformation, redemption or compassion for the vanquished.

Later in the post-war period, a larger degree of intervention in the narration would be proposed through techniques associated with the enunciative strategy, thereby reinforcing what has already been stated through a clearly selfreflexive representation. Moreover, the inspiration identified above in the documentary and the newsreel is evident in a film like Cerca de la ciudad Luis Lucia, The first intervention of the voiceover is already powerful: Although the voice is maintained off camera, the presence in the frame of the film crew reaffirms the ironic, parodic and self-conscious nature of filmic discourse.

Finally, it is the last of these options that is chosen. The purpose of making a documentary about Madrid is also maintained, although it is to be a Madrid very different from the one that appeared in the NO-DO newsreels. The camera followed the priest through the centre of the capital on his journey to a neighbourhood on the city s outskirts, to that space of the story situated cerca de la ciudad near the city , as if a neorealist approach to the social context of this specific space were indeed being attempted, although obviously all the narrative material is organised according to the codes of priest films.

The credits mark this boundary between the initial intention to make a documentary of the style of the urban symphonies and a fictitious construction that begins after entering the suburban belt, where widespread social decay, exemplified in juvenile delinquency or parental absence due to imprisonment in the harsh post-war reality can only be resolved by the welfare work initiated by the priest. This boundary also marks the abandonment of the voiceover. Crossing to this other side of the border ultimately entails the abandonment of the strict focalisation explicitly signalled by the voiceover in following what the characters are doing and is accompanied by the reverse shot that shows us the supposed film crew, to give way to a greater liberation of the gaze through an omniscient enunciation.

The film, which is also constructed on the humour and parody provided by the voiceover, begins with recurring wide shots of Madrid, with an aerial angle that allows the camera to bring this omniscient, demiurgical narrator down from on high into the bustle of the capital to seek out the protagonist in the working-class neighbourhoods. And the voice will seek him out by calling to other characters who, by looking to one side of the camera to reply, evading the lens, incorporate this invisible narrator into the story.

Berlanga, , who looks directly at the camera and thus establishes a very different relationship as it employs self-referentiality, thereby developing a story that is conscious of its status as such. In Torrado s film, the narrator s intervention in the development of the plot will be so significant that this voice will even incite the character to commit the theft that will change the course of his life. Ordinary people, working-class neighbourhoods, the daily struggle to get ahead: Also here, the voiceover that introduces and frames the narrative appears to establish an ironic distance from what is, in short, the consideration of theft and fraud as legitimate ways of combating the oppression of everyday life in a meanspirited and unsupportive society.

This voice which, as I have suggested above, explained, persuaded or exhorted in war films, is maintained in numerous important fiction films of the post-war period, acting on realities that speak to us of impoverishment, of fraud or of speculation. The irony, already hinted at in the title, is that this figure will add to his role of narrator that of a character when he appears as the victim in the last of the stories. As a final example of what I have intended here as a significant sample of titles from Spanish post-war cinema underpinned by the presence of a voiceover, I cannot help but conclude with Bienvenido Mr.

Here, as has been extensively analysed, the voiceover does not merely introduce the story at the beginning, but will also have the ability to manipulate what is shown at whim, for example through freezing the image, or to enter into the dreams of the story s characters and give the spectator access to them. The significant use of voiceover in Spanish post-war films clearly demonstrates that fiction picked out from newsreels and documentaries an expressive resource which, while in itself alluding in a certain sense to the traumatic experience of the war, at the same time represented a bold new formula for relating to the universe of the story and to the spectator to whom that story was being told.

Archivos de la Filmoteca, 45, Kosloff, Sara University of California Press. Berthier and J-C Segin coords.

Eres una abeja?/Are You A Bee? (Juguemos en el jardin/Let's Play in the Garden)

In Various Authors, La herida de las sombras. Cine y Guerra Civil. Del mito a la memoria. El tiempo y la memoria. He is the author of Carlos Velo. Bibliography Bentley, Bernard E. A Companion to Spanish Cinema. Cuerpo s para nuestras letras. Castro de Paz coord. The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Company, Juan Miguel Formas y perversiones del compromiso. An Essay in Method. Desde la ruinas de un legendario santuario castrense: El santuario no se rinde Arturo Ruiz Castillo, To restore friendly relations, or to bring unrelated or estranged elements into agreement.

Customer reviews

To bring a person who has strayed from church doctrine back into the community of the Church. To hear a brief or minor confession. To bless a sacred place, due to its having been violated. To confess certain offences that are minor or were forgotten in another confession recently made. To make a confession, especially a brief one or one of minor offences.

The film tells the story of Rafa, a Spanish exile who secretly enters the country to take part in an attack organised by anti-franco guerrilla forces. Spaces of Reconciliation and Dissidence in s Literature and Cinema in On his wanderings, the character waivers between fascination for the city reclaimed and the oppression of knowing he is being hunted down. In an effort to secure an escape he knows is impossible, he takes a hostage: A thematic and aesthetic analysis of the film reveals some bold narrative propositions and combinations of genres which, being in keeping with the historical, political and cultural context in which they were produced the end of Franco s autarky and the subsequent alliance of his regime with the Western powers during the Cold War , make Alexandre and Torrecilla s film valuable material for studying the guiding principles that came into play in Spanish cinema during these years.

It was a moment when the triumphalist and revanchist rhetoric of cine de cruzada, predominant during the first years after the Spanish Civil War, necessarily gave way to discourses which generally with rabidly anti-communist sentiments offered products that were more easily digestible in the liberal democracies of the Western block. This no doubt gave rise to a greater ambivalence towards the topic of the Civil War, beginning with the possibility that the vanquished would be given space on the screen and might awaken some kind of sympathy or affection in the audience.

However, in Francoist discourse, the restitution of the vanquished back into Spanish society invariably required confession and repentance the reference to Catholic concepts was not accidental for the errors committed in the past. But La ciudad perdida went beyond this. Based on this approach, in the pages that follow I will offer a thematic and aesthetic analysis of the novel and the film, without losing sight of the context of the cultural discourses which, in the early s, gave rise to the complex atmosphere described above.

An unprecedented film In thematic terms, La ciudad perdida forms part of a series of films resulting from the evolution of cinema inspired by the Civil War and its aftermath, now heavily coloured by the international context of the Cold War Gubern, Cerca del cielo Domingo Figure 1. The same reassuring propaganda underpinned the subsequent film Rostro al mar by Carlos Serrano de Osma, which also showed the horrors suffered in the Soviet internment camps, in harmony with the global ideological battle of the Cold War.

However, La ciudad perdida did not appear so much to try to please the anticommunist block through the depiction of a hero who was repentant or wracked with guilt as to articulate a view that sought to integrate the vanquished in the Civil War back into Spanish society. On the other hand, from the perspective of aesthetics and genre, Alexandre and Torrecilla s film bears some interesting resemblances to popular detective drama formulations which boosted by the new interest in appealing to the Western powers and their cultural forms that the regime began to promote in the early s proliferated in those years.

Iquino s Barcelona studio specialising in detective films, 4 held distribution rights for 20th Century Fox productions at a time when Fox had begun filming on location with non-professional actors cf. This is exactly what happened in the case of Margarita Alexandre and Rafael Torrecilla s film, which was mutilated by the political and moral objections alleged by the censors AGA, Spaces of Reconciliation and Dissidence in s Literature and Cinema prompt us to reflect on the unprecedented nature of Alexandre and Torrecilla s film in a context marked by the emergence of new discourses on the Civil War, far removed from the pro-franco propaganda of cine de cruzada, and from visual approaches that connect with international trends like Italian neorealism or American or European film noir.

While the film studied here clearly reflects the elements of theme and genre described, it is equally true that it constitutes a kind of mutation in which the detective story serves as a pretext to push the depiction of the vanquished to use the official terminology of the era and the representation of the past to the very limits of permissiveness.

The combination of a commercial formula that was considered inferior to the type of cinema promoted by official agencies and the use of novels clearly supportive of Falangism became a calculated strategy from the moment that the incipient dissidence began seeking political alternatives in the realm of cultural representations. It is hardly surprising that Margarita Alexandre should have asserted that those of us in the film industry began doing things, often with books or ideas of the Falangists, because we thought that, being the story of a Falangist, [the censors] would be more benevolent.

It was sort of an opportunist idea of finding a way around the censorship M. Alexandre, personal communication, 23 June In a curious mixture of publisher marketing and personal reflection, Caralt asserted on the back flap of the book s dust jacket: The atmosphere of a nocturnal Madrid full of contrasts and the stage for a dramatic tale is masterfully described, and the [narration of the] chase and capture of the fugitive is reminiscent of Graham Greene s best writing. Caralt concluded his review by linking the novel to the literary movements in vogue around the world and, in a display of unquestionable optimism, or perhaps of sharp business savvy, Figure 3.

The publisher also had numerous credentials placing him in the ranks of Francoist officialdom, 7 a fact which, although it probably influenced the attitude of the censors, did not prevent certain frictions with which Caralt was in any case already familiar: In a context in which moral issues were almost as important as the political orientation of the cultural product, the development of a story that openly called up the ghosts of the Civil War in the invariably unorthodox context of a police chase Is it dangerous, politically speaking, for a besieged resistance fighter to evoke sympathy?

The legitimation of the book through the various mechanisms of publishing strategy thus proved essential. La ciudad perdida Margarita Alexandre and Rafael Torrecilla, Fausto Tozzi, in the role of Rafa, dressed as a republican militiaman beginning by Spanish and international titles of recognised prestige, alongside other more commercial products. According to Abio Villarig Perhaps taking this legitimising ambition a little further, and in view of the publisher s clearly commercial intention to position the book as a detective novel, 8 La ciudad perdida was published in the Spanish authors series of the Gigante collection, reserved for the most select works of world literature, in an effort to give the tale of intrigue the stamp of high culture that authors like the aforementioned Graham Greene had begun to give the genre in the English-speaking world.

Although it was a degraded and kitsch version of the novels of the great American anti-franco novelists that Caralt bragged of having published after the end of the dictatorship Moret, From this perspective, La ciudad perdida is a novel that reflects the ghosts of its author, as she explains in her memoirs: Ultimately, this was what led many of the old shirts of the Falange, under Dionisio Ridruejo, to join an early dissident movement within Franco s regime.

The literary techniques employed obviously play a fundamental role in the series of identifications articulated in the novel and which, inevitably, would be adopted in the film. Resorting to a multiple focalisation Figure 5. Cosetta Greco and Fausto Tozzi joined in a passionate embrace with numerous paralepses, each instance of enunciation gives access to the thoughts and emotions and thus, to an understanding of the motivations not only of the kidnapped and imperilled woman, but also of her kidnapper and of other characters who together compose a mosaic of the moral bankruptcy of post-war Madrid.

Otherwise, it is a story with a markedly impressionist character, where the urban spaces operate as an objective correlative of the emotions of the characters, which seem to be projected onto the landscape chaste light, hostile city, etc. In tune with the central nature of dialogue and the creation of meeting spaces for characters who embody irreconcilable positions from the perspective of the institutional discourses, the idea of reconciliation, in its sense of to resume a friendly relations, or to bring unrelated or estranged elements into agreement is powerfully expressed in statements like: Who were the ones responsible for the fact there was no dialogue?

Why don t you tell me what s wrong? As noted above, the descriptions of these spaces in the novel, together with the paralepses that give access to the thoughts of the characters, make it possible to explain and thus understand their reasons for choosing a life of what the public discourse classified as vice, sin or crime. Underlying their behaviour is the terrible social inequality which the regime made efforts to gloss over and which the detective genre, with its realist focus, exposed in both literature and cinema, again and again.

This is something which, many years later, allowed Alexandre herself to affirm: A man who had to leave at a particular moment of his youth. That was what interested us. The rest was anecdotal. Would you like to tell us about a lower price? Read more Read less. Kindle Edition File Size: Not Enabled Screen Reader: Enabled Average Customer Review: Be the first to review this item Would you like to tell us about a lower price? Customer reviews There are no customer reviews yet. Share your thoughts with other customers.

• Separate from the World: An Amish-Country Mystery
• Prescription for Excellence: Leadership Lessons for Creating a World Class Customer Experience from
• DESIGN AND EMOTION
• Gone Native in Polynesia: Captivity Narratives and Experiences from the South Pacific (Reference Gui
• SAP R/3 Implementation: Methods and Tools (SAP Excellence)
• A Mighty Long Way: My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School
• Never His Sword