Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas - Mobilizing Affect in Spanish Film and Screen Media from the Great Recession to the Present, Dec 2022

This article examines post-fiction affect in filmic landscapes produced in Spain over the last decade, focusing on La plaga/The Plague (Ballús 2013) and Estado de malestar/State of Distress (Ruido 2019). It suggests post-fiction affect as an innovative type of audio-visual discourse that confronts neo-liberal logic following the global financial crash of 2007–08 and the ensuing crisis years in Spain (2008–14). What characterizes these documentary-inspired works is that they do not intend to represent reality but rather intervene in it. Going beyond Steven Shaviro’s work on affect in cinema, this text examines the specific post-cinematic paradigms at the turn of the twenty-first century and renewed forms of sensibility through emergent technologies and political affect.

Video games that tackle the political discontent that sprang from the 2008 crisis in Spain pose a particular representation of Spanish politics. It is representation that is mainly at stake both in the dynamics of the political field and in the engagement of video games with politics. From mobile games to bigger productions like Riot designed for quick consumption, video games deploy visuals but also user interaction to articulate political positions that renegotiate social interpellation, mobilizing the affective (feelings of playful enjoyment) to re-conceptualize the political. Referencing concepts from Louis Althusser and Ian Bogost, I claim that video games’ cultural specificity is a particular rationale of interpellation and an ambivalent agency that, in the case of political games, plays against – but also within – Ideological State Apparatuses.

Comedy in Perdiendo el norte/Off Course (2015) and its sequel Perdiendo el este/Off Course to China (2019) is a tool for mitigating national anxieties related to migration and economic exchange following the global financial crisis. Both films follow Spaniards who emigrate in the wake of the economic crisis. While Perdiendo el norte follows a tradition of comedic españoladas (typically Spanish films), employing the familiar foil of Germany, Perdiendo el este introduces China as an economic challenger. Perdiendo el norte borrows heavily from its predecessor, Vente a Alemania, Pepe/Come to Germany, Pepe (1971), but ultimately flips the script on Vente’s nationalist nostalgia, advocating for greater transnationalism. Perdiendo el este, on the other hand, reinscribes a nationalist agenda by framing the Chinese as incompatible with Spanish national identity. Its preoccupation with Chinese investment in post-crisis Spain can be read as a reflection of the region’s angst about its own economic and cultural capital in the twenty-first century.

Centring on the politics of compassion in migrant films produced from the Great Recession of 2008 to the present, this article examines the affective strategies deployed by two Spanish melodramas featuring African protagonists who endure physical and psychological trauma in search of a better life. Engaging recent scholarship on global melodrama, I argue that Diamantes negros/Black Diamonds (Alcantud 2013) and Adú (Calvo 2020) look beyond European borders to identify the sociopolitical coordinates of suffering on a worldwide scale.

In this article, I explore the use of cultural emotions in state-aligned post-ETA poetics by analysing the role that illness and disability play in post-ceasefire filmic – Fuego/Fire (Marías 2014) – and literary – Patria/Homeland (Aramburu 2016) – representations of the Basque national conflict. Recent critical discussions interpret disability in Spanish film and literature as harbingers of inclusivity and cultural pluralism (Fraser 2013; Marr 2013). However, if placed in the intensely polarized context for media and cultural representations of the Basque conflict in Spain, disability plays a less salutary role. Concretely, I argue that the possibility of post-ETA closure is often envisaged via the spectacularization (and thus the instrumentalization) of disabled and ill bodies, which are used to ‘mobilize affect’ towards a series of state-sanctioned positions with regard to victimhood, forgiveness and post-conflict reconciliation.

The indignados movement has suggested that the roots of Spain’s political and economic bankruptcy are to be found in the ‘Regime of 78’, allowing Francoist ills to continue after the Transition to Spain’s parliamentary democracy. This article critically accesses how and why two recent television series – Fariña/Cocaine Coast (2018) and Patria/Homeland (2020) – depict drugs and terrorism, major blights to everyday lives in Galicia and the Basque Country, respectively, during the post-Franco period. The article asks how these twenty-first-century screen narratives rewrite canonical accounts of the Transition during a time of crisis in which the success of local television drama has provided a rare light of optimism – Fariña was bought by Netflix and Patria is the first Spanish drama to be produced by HBO Europe.