Studies in Hispanic Cinemas (new title: Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas) - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2005

Ramn Salazar described his 2002 film Piedras/Stones as la historia de cinco mujeres [] contada desde el punto de vista de sus zapatos (the story of five women [] told from the point of view of their shoes). This comment, along with two highly personal and contradictory Internet responses, forms the starting point for the present analysis of the way that the framing of women's shoes in Piedras tilts the heterosexual field of the gaze. Lacan's well-known demonstration with Holbein's The Ambassadors, together with his (less well-known) analogy of the tattooed penis are used to illustrate the potential tilting of the field. This article argues that Piedras highlights the irrelevance of the heterosexual gaze and desexualizes the traditional celluloid fetish (woman/shoe), placing it back within the iconography of frustrated female desire in a way that provides an important part of the narrative of heterosexual difficulty in the film. It also suggests that, with the tilting of the frame, the heterosexual male usurps the fetishized and fatal female role.

In broad terms, this essay considers the role and impact of popular commercial film comedy in Franco's Spain in the early 1970s, shortly before the dictator's death and the country's relatively bloodless transition to a democratic monarchy. The essay is a companion piece to a previously published article in the same area (Jordan 2003: 16786). The article dealt with the subgenre of the comedia sexy ibrica or comedia de destape (iberian sex/sleazy comedy) and was based on a case study of Ramn Fernndez's No desears al vecino del quinto (1971) (Thou shalt not covet thy 5th floor neighbour) , Spain's biggest-ever grossing popular film under Franco (Losilla 1997: 681; Font 1976: 313) The previous study explored various aspects of the film narrative (structure, point of view, drive and closure) and the interplay between male sexual identities. Here, I propose a return to the same film in order to explore a rather more contentious issue. I ask - rather unfashionably perhaps - whether the film functions as a reactionary film text. In other words, how far does No desears (as I will refer to the film from now on) seek to (re)capture the spectator for the ruling ideology, binding him/her into dominant, traditionalist, patriarchal, Francoist values?

This Introduction summarizes the aims and scope of the research project on which the following dossier is based. It stresses the project's focus on memory work as the basis for an exploration of the history of subjectivity and everyday life practices.

This article looks to the recent work of Guiliana Bruno and to that of Michel de Certeau to analyse the ways in which oral testimony might be mapped in terms of spatial affectivity. With reference to the responses of a small selection of interviewees, I seek to draw parallels between the physical movement involved in the act of cinema-going during the 1940s and 1950s in Madrid and the narration of the memory of such activity half a century later. The discussion here interrogates traditional views of nostalgia within a context of habitus and aims to establish other connections of space (city, domestic or sonic spaces).

The dictatorship of Francisco Franco is often associated with the strict control of sexuality. Yet within the nation's cinemas, which provided countless war-shattered Spanish citizens with their principal source of distraction, sexual practices underwent constant negotiation. The oral histories of movie-goers from the 1940s and 1950s confirm the panoptical reach of the dictator's hypocritical sexual puritanicalism, as well as the extent to which Spaniards sought to express their sexuality by engaging in dissident acts within the ambivalently public/private space of the movie theatres. Thus, during a time in which sexuality and ideology were closely intertwined, the cinema functioned as a microcosm of the complex power relations prevalent in the society at large.

Through the analysis of a select number of interviews from the oral history project of Spanish cinema-going of the 1940s and 1950s, this essay draws preliminary conclusions about how film-goers characterized their engagement with film as a process entirely disengaged from politics. Taking as its point of departure the premise that the production of fantasy life of film-goers during this period was much more sophisticated than previously imagined, this essay examines how the tactic of disconnect allowed cinema-goers to read film and star texts across class, ethnic, political, and sex-gender boundaries. Such reading against the grain often took place when spectators viewed filmic melodrama, a genre that encouraged the expenditure of emotion that could not be shown in public. Refusing middle-class condemnations of popular film empowered spectators to retain some control over their affective life, which further enabled them to produce new forms of meaning, pleasure and identity that could potentially make a difference in their lives. In this way, the cinema helped its viewers cope with everyday life.

Situated at the juncture of oral history research and the study of material culture, this article analyses a specific case of the cinema spectator as collector. It draws on a growing body of collection theory to examine the multiple meanings and functions of collecting and collectable objects within the specific socio-economic and political context of post-Civil War Spain. This study is grounded in two extended oral history interviews with a single informant conducted in the room where his collection of film memorabilia is housed. It thus seeks to read both the collector's narrative account and the objects on display for their role in the elaboration of a self, an identity assembled from the selected traces of pre-existing stories, bodies and gestures and anchored in the historical moment of Francoism and its aftermath.

A Companion to Latin American Film, Stephen M. Hart, (2004) Woodbridge: Tamesis, 227 pp., ISBN 1-8556-106-3 (hbk) 45

The Cinema of Spain and Portugal, Alberto Mira (ed.), (2005) London: Wallflower, 268 pp., ISBN 1-904764-44-4 (pbk), 16.99.