Studies in Hispanic Cinemas (new title: Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas) - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2004

The purpose of the journal is to foster and publish high quality research into a range of areas. These include: film as text and representation, film history (in the widest sense of technological innovation in relation to film style, institutional change and unexplored cinemas), film genre, modes of production and reception (audience studies in relation to the wider social context in which Hispanic Cinemas are consumed), star and performance studies, film theory, alternative/avant garde forms as well as regional and local film practices. We are also keen to encourage work in areas we feel are somewhat underrepresented in the field such as early film history (1896–1920s), documentary, cinema and urban studies as well as the relations between film and television, new forms of spectatorship and developing media technologies.

This article examines the recycling of stereotypes of Spanishness in film versions of the Carmen story and in Pedro Almodóvar’s Matador (1986). It discusses these in terms of masquerade, the masquerade of the femme fatale as posited by Mary Ann Doane and of the nation as posited by Susan Hayward, and suggests that the latter can be figured through the former. The film versions offer a putative ‘authentic’ Spanish identity in opposition to the masquerade of the femme fatale, an authentic identity which ultimately cannot be sustained; alternatively, Almodóvar offers a celebration of masquerade as the blurring of gender differences. In all cases, the masquerade disguises a lack of identity at its heart: there is at bottom no true, fixed Spanish identity to be found. We are left with the spectacle of ersatz identity embodied as much by the stereotype of Spanishness as by the femme fatale.

This article re-examines the critical orthodoxy which has emerged in analyses of the literary adaptations subsidized by the UCD and PSOE governments in the 1980s. Through a reading of one of the more successful films of the period, Mario Camus’s 1982 adaptation of Camilo José Cela’s novel La colmena/The Hive of 1951, it challenges the received wisdom that film adaptations necessarily betray their literary originals and reduce the representation of the past to mere nostalgia. By focusing on the question of authenticity in La colmena, the article reveals that this literary adaptation examines the possibility of recuperating the past in a manner reminiscent of revisionist accounts of postmodernism.

Edgar Neville is not only one of the most significant film-makers of the 1940s, his overall influence on the subsequent history of Spanish cinema has proven unparalleled and stretches from the critical films of his inmediate heirs, Luis García Berlanga and Juan Antonio Bardem, to the contemporary work of Pedro Almodóvar. Neville, moreover, combined his Hollywood training with a background in popular Madrid theatre (as well as an intimate knowledge of his native city), to establish a cinematic legacy that endures to this day. This article argues that, while Neville’s ideological sympathies fluctuated, his placing in the interstices of popular culture and Francoist cultural populism provides rich material for a Gramscian interpretation of his work and the historical context that produced it. Such an approach enables the possibility of an unmasking of class and gender relations in film that avoids both the ‘mechanical’ pitfalls of classical Marxism and subverts as ‘totalizing’ the thrust of Foucauldian discourse analysis.

This article looks closely at two of Almodóvar’s later films, La flor de mi secreto/The Flower of My Secret (1995) and Todo sobre mi madre/All About My Mother (1999). The director drew part of his inspiration for both screenplays from the work done by the newly formed Organización Nacional de Trasplantes (National Transplant Organization). The article looks at the way that the representation of this organization in the two films overlaps with versions of Spanish identity and the idea of the nation state as a logistically useful and therefore politically acceptable entity. Using models derived from Cultural Studies’ interpretations of transplant narratives, the article reads the inclusion of scenes dealing with organ donation in the two films as indicative of meanings with social gift-exchange dimensions. The article determines what is specific to the practice of Spanish ‘soft presumed consent’ alongside data which place Spain at the top of the league table for organ transplant success and at the bottom of the table for young persons’ road deaths. Other films from Europe and North America with a transplant narrative are considered, compared and contrasted with the Almodóvar examples.

Spanish National Cinema, Núria Triana-Toribio (2003) London: Routledge, 210 pp.

Stars and Masculinities in Spanish Cinema: From Banderas to Bardem, Chris Perriam (2003) Oxford: Oxford University Press, ix + 221 pp., ISBN 0-19-815996-X, £35