Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas - Volume 13, Issue 1, 2016

José Juan Bigas Luna (1946–2013) was one of Spain’s most influential film directors of the last five decades, enjoying considerable national and international success. His films are often associated with controversy due to his penchant for taboo subjects, including rape, sadomasochism, incest or bestiality. While these scandals brought much publicity to the films, they also often eclipsed their critical reception at home and abroad. This special issue of Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas brings together specialists from around the world in order to revisit some of his most critically acclaimed works (the English-language horror film Anguish, the ‘Iberian Portraits Trilogy’), but also to draw attention to the more recent and perhaps less known work of the last two decades: what Carolina Sanabria has described as the ‘historical diptych’; and the unfinished trilogy about women and success.

Personal tribute by director Ventura Pons to his colleague and friend Bigas Luna. Originally written for La Vanguardia newspaper on the day of Bigas Luna’s passing.

The cinema of Bigas Luna tends to resist the notion of ‘genre film’. With the exception of his first feature Tatuaje/Tattoo (1978), which clearly fits the ‘police crime’ genre, his films are often quite hybrid. However, the director seems to have a clear and sustained interest in a central figure of the horror genre: the psychopath. Noticeably present in Bilbao (1978) and Angustia/Anguish (1987), more subtle examples can be found also in Caniche/Poodle (1979) or Reborn (1981). Out of all these films, Angustia stands out as the Bigas Luna film that most clearly fits the horror genre. Here he uses classic conventions that go back to Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (1929) to reflect not only on alterity but also on cinema itself as a construct where ‘reality’, ‘fiction’ and ‘meta-fiction’ are all at play. Angustia can be singled out not only as a paradigmatic example of the horror genre, but also as a very modern film.

The ‘Iberian Portraits’ trilogy is arguably Bigas Luna’s most personal work. After the four-year adventure in an unfamiliar and even hostile environment while working in the United States, the director carefully crafted what would become his bestknown work, especially the first film in the trilogy: Jamón, jamón (1992). The trilogy memorably establishes a link between the feminine and the senses, while implicitly connecting femininity to the earth. All three films also explore a new kind of subjectivity where intimacy is associated with sensuality and is best represented by the consumption of food (and the rituals surrounding it), and the visual attention paid to the different shades of the earth. The trilogy also establishes a contrast between individuality (perhaps bets illustrated in the figure of the unscrupulous social climber of Huevos de oro/Golden Balls [1993]) and collectivity (sublimely exemplified in the castellers that open La teta y la luna/Tit and the Moon [1994]). It is an emotional – rather than geographical – journey that inevitably leads to the nostalgia that taints the lost candour of childhood.

Bigas Luna’s career as graphic designer and film-maker embodies Andy Warhol’s credo of the interchangeability of art and commerce, most famously depicted in his comic masterpiece Jamón, jamón (1992). Less frequently noted by commentators are the strategies he uses to critique the way consumerist culture has fetishized art as a mere commodity. This theme achieves a new narrative centrality in La Femme de Chambre du Titanic/La camarera del Titanic/The Chambermaid of the Titanic (1997). His version of the story of the ill-fated ocean liner, embodied in a postcardsized photograph, becomes the object of multiple commercial and erotic exchanges between the characters and their audience. Bigas’s interest here is twofold: to underscore the erotic impulse in his audiences; to combine that impulse with a parody of Hollywood’s obsession with a cinema of spectacle. In the film’s design, the commodification of desire embodied in the ship mirrors the commodification of the audience’s desire in cinema.

Bigas Luna’s critique of national stereotypes is by no means confined to his celebrated Iberian Trilogy. His on-screen exploration of such images can be viewed as the result of his earlier investigations on the nature of visual representation and the cinematic image. These investigations culminated in Bigas Luna’s most elaborate proposition on the scopic nature of the cinematic image, the horror film Angustia/ Anguish (1987), which he completed during his US sojourn. In the period thriller Volavérunt (1999), against the backdrop of an eighteenth-century political plot involving painter Francisco de Goya, high nobility and members of government, Bigas Luna put forward a broad array of propositions about image formation – from the pictorial to the cinematic and from the iconographic to the symbolic. Joan Ramon Resina’s notion of the ‘after-image’, which invokes the capacity of the visual image to reverberate in the mind after its retinal impact has ceased (hence fostering the creation of mental images, as anticipated by Paul Virilio and Gilles Deleuze), points to a cluster of theoretical possibilities based on the image’s temporal displacement, sequentiality, supersession and engagement. This article makes use of this notion to explore Bigas Luna’s meditation on the nature of images, and on the creation of complex images of the nation, in Volavérunt.

Despite his mainstream success and prolific production, in all his films Bigas Luna demonstrates a preference for the peripheral and the marginal – in terms of the subjects he depicts as well as through his representational practices. In this article I investigate the new peripheral subjects in his 2006 film Yo soy la Juani/My Name is Juani: young women on the cusp of adulthood, at the margins of Spain (Tarragona) and the edges of mainstream culture. I argue that Bigas Luna’s resistance to hegemonic power structures and his marginal politics face a new challenge in the twenty-first century as the mediatized and pervasive culture of celebrity alters our reading of his female star, Verónica Echegui, and his relationship with her. Bigas attempts in this film to present a specific version of Spanish femininity as a point of resistance to a manufactured female subjectivity yet he also imitates it and shows that these young female characters are in thrall to the culture that he claims to resist. As the film negotiates a tricky path between these media discourses and the images of resistance in the film itself the end result is an ambiguous text that neither resists nor entirely complies with a culture that commodifies the bodies and aspirations of its peripheral female stars.

Masculinities in Contemporary Argentine Popular Cinema, Carolina Rocha (2012) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 228 pp., ISBN: 9780230338180, h/bk and e-book, $100.00

Culture of Class. Radio and Cinema in the Making of a Divided Argentina, 1920–1946, Matthew B. Karush (2012) Durham and London: Duke University Press, 275 pp., ISBN: 9780822352648, p/bk, $23.95

White Gypsies: Race and Stardom in Spanish Musicals, Eva Woods-Peiró (2012) London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ix–xii, 1–337 pp., ISBN: 9780816645855, h/bk, $75; p/bk, $25

Hispanic and Lusophone Women Film-makers: Theory, Practice, and Difference, Parvati Nair and Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-albilla (eds) (2013) Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press and Palgrave, 288 pp., ISBN: 9780719083570, p/bk, £65

The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo Del Toro, Ann Davies, Deborah Shaw and Dolores Tierney (eds) (2014) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 210 pp., ISBN: 9781137407832, h/bk, £62.50

A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar, Marvin D’lugo and Kathleen Vernon (eds) (2013) Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, xvi+568 pp., ISBN: 9781405195829, h/bk, £125