Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas - Volume 12, Issue 1, 2015

This special issue pays tribute to José Luis Borau’s unique and innovative career in Spanish film spanning more than four decades. It assesses his influence on the larger development of a modern Spanish cinema in national and transnational contexts. Throughout his multifaceted career, Borau was instrumental in shaping a modern cinematic language that helped bring Spanish cinema international acclaim. His unique contributions to Spanish and international cinema include landmark films like the Oscar-nominated black comedy My Dear Señorita (1971), co-scripted with director Jaime de Armiñán; B Must Die (1974); Furtivos (1975); La Sabina (1979); and On the Line (1984). Borau’s collaborations on films with his former students from the National Film School (Iván Zuelueta, Antonio Drove, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón) would assure his influence on future generations of Spanish audiences. His more recent television series Celia (1991) and Goya award-winning film Leo (2001) confirm Borau’s range as a uniquely gifted film author.

Borau’s refusal to accept the ghettoization of Spanish film through the imposition of ‘national’ cinema is one of the hallmarks of his career. He is the first in his generation of Spanish directors to develop an aesthetic strategy to reframe Spanish cultural identity through a series of international co-productions. This article looks at two films and two decisive moments in Borau’s career when that transnational aesthetic first emerges. Hay que matar a B/B Must Die (1974) and La Sabina (1979) elaborate counter-narratives of the nation that interrogate the relationship between place and power and the identity shaped by the politics of location.

Featuring a provincial spinster named Adela, who eventually becomes a man named Juan, Jaime de Armiñán’s My Dearest Señorita (Mi querida señorita, produced by José Luis Borau, 1971) became the first Spanish film to deal with the topic of transsexuality. Resorting to allegorical readings, previous scholarship has associated the film’s hermaphrodite with the Francoist cultural and ideological anomaly. While acknowledging the film’s progressive political critique of the Francoist regime, others have seen the protagonist’s eventual integration into heterosexuality as a symptom of the film’s conservative gender and sexual politics. This article moves from a focus on identity politics to an emphasis on queer subjectivity and from an allegorical reading to an emphasis on the film’s revolutionary stylistic choices. I read the film from a queer subject position that points towards a political form of a ‘becoming subjectivity’ that escapes, if only partially, a representational form of politics and the logic of identity. By focussing on seemingly inconsequential fragments and transitory details, this article explores how the film self-referentially mobilizes a queer body and subjectivity at key moments.

In November 1975, José Luis Borau initiated a strategy to promote the American distribution of his award-winning film Furtivos/Poachers by enlisting the support of noted Spanish film historian Román Gubern to present the film in Los Angeles to a gathering of members of the Hollywood press. By chance, the screening on 20 November coincided with the death of Francisco Franco, which gave a symbolic aura to the screening. The momentous date marked the beginning of a long friendship and scholarly dialogue between the two men. As a witness to Borau’s American career, Gubern brings to light the film-maker’s multifaceted efforts to realize his ambition of becoming part of the Hollywood film industry, including his plan for a remake of his Oscar-nominated film, My Dear Señorita (1971). Gubern recounts Borau’s scholarly efforts to document the presence of other Spaniards in the Hollywood industry, which would eventually culminate in the publication of his Diccionariodel Cine Español (1998).

The objective of this article is to demonstrate that under the deceptive appearance of realism, Borau’s cinema reveals a rich layer of symbolism rooted in intellectual depth. The article begins by reviewing Borau’s unique contributions promoting film culture in Spain through his activities as president of the Spanish Film Academy (AACC). It then focusses on Borau’s most emblematic film Furtivos (Poachers, 1975), which, among its other qualities, also inscribes the features of the multifaceted personality of the famed Aragonese film-maker.

An eye-witness account of the preparation, production, post-production and release of José Luis Borau’s On the Line (Río abajo, 1984) by the American producer of the film, Steven Kovacs. This article details the relationship between Borau and Kovacs and the evolution of the production from screenplay to finished film, including the way decisions were made and the problems that plagued the production. In telling the narrative, the author attempts to evaluate Borau’s intention, vision, and directorial style.

Set on either side of the Rio Grande, Rio abajo/On theLine (1984), Borau’s powerful border drama, touches on his constant themes of marginality, conflicted relationships, love and violence. It was beset by many problems, and earned mixed reviews in the United States and Spain, but remains a key work in Borau’s film career. This article examines the mise-en-scène and character construction in the light of Borau’s comments that, in Río abajo, his characters are personajes-consecuencia (consequence characters), inseparable from their physical and emotional contexts. An analysis of the challenges faced by border societies on either side of the Rio Grande, and of compromised individuals struggling to reconcile conflicting needs and desires, reveals the formal intricacy and psychological depth of the film.

In much of his varied career, José Luis Borau vowed he would never work on television, undertake the adaptation of a literary work or direct a historical film. Yet, in 1991, in collaboration with his long-time friend and novelist Carmen Martín Gaite, Borau took on the task of producing and directing a television series based on the popular children’s books of Republican-era writer Elena Fortún. Told from the perspective of the precocious 7-year-old protagonist Celia Gálvez, the series offers a glimpse into the world of the pre–Civil War Madrileñan bourgeoisie. Although the child of privilege, Celia insistently questions accepted hierarchies, from gender roles and class divisions to the dominant role of religion. Born from Borau’s conviction that children deserve the best in cultural offerings, the series also marked an opportunity to revisit their own childhoods and childhood readings for the director and his co-scriptwriter Martín Gaite.

Although Borau started out making genre films he hoped would have global reach, using strategies pioneered by European film-makers working in Hollywood, he experienced his greatest success with Furtivos (1975), his most exclusively Spanish film. This article explores how he returned to a transnational vision of Spain in Leo (2000), winner of Borau’s first Goya for best direction. Set in contemporary Spain, this melodrama converts the incestuous mother/son relationship from Furtivos into complex relations between a seductive young Leo and her paternalistic East European coach. Dealing with border-crossing, as he had done in Río abajo/On the Line (1984), Leo includes Romanian émigrés within Spain, who evoke the subaltern Romanis associated with Carmen. The narrative model being subverted is not only the Hollywood genre of noir but also the colonizing myth of Carmen, which limited Spaniards to national stereotypes. Drawing on his previous works, Leo demonstrates that transnational film-making is possible within Spain.