This essay focuses on the two films that Isaki Lacuesta directed in Mali in 2011. Both films feat... more This essay focuses on the two films that Isaki Lacuesta directed in Mali in 2011. Both films feature the Majorcan artist, Miquel Barceló. They were shot simultaneously and, in different ways, address questions of artistic processes. Los pasos dobles, is a work of fiction loosely based on the apocryphal stories surrounding the life and legacy of François Augiéras, the US-born French writer and artist maudit, who spent a number of years in different parts of northern-central Africa in the 1950s. The accompanying documentary, El cuaderno de barro, centers on the performance of Barceló and Serbian choreographer and dancer Josef Nadj titled "El Paso Doble" that takes place in the same locations as the work of fiction, and the preparations in advance of the performance. As the very notion of "paso doble" suggests, these films draw on the motif of the double that characterizes most, if not all, of Lacuesta's filmic corpus. The article considers the idea of surface in all its forms: the desert landscape, the artist's canvas, the wall of a cave, the screen, and the skin of the human body, among others. It seeks to tease out the respective spatial and tactile configurations of each and all of them; their secrets, as it were. At the same time, it maps a filmic and artistic genealogy that links Augiéras to Barceló, Lacuesta with Jean Rouch, and the historical avant-garde with contemporary art and filmmaking.
My aim in this chapter is to conceptualize landscape in Spanish film as a destabilizing element o... more My aim in this chapter is to conceptualize landscape in Spanish film as a destabilizing element of national, regional, or even transnational cinema. With a handful of exceptions, critical writing on cinema in Spain has largely overlooked the distinctive properties of film in shaping our perception of landscape. While Patricia Keller's recent and important book, Ghostly Landscapes: Film, Photography and the Aesthetics of Haunting in Contemporary Spanish Culture (2016), has gone some way towards remedying this and there has been a considerable amount of writing on "the rural," the attention paid to landscape films in Spanish cinema is often more concerned with thematic questions than formal ones. There is, however, a long tradition of films that focus on the land and nature, something particularly resonant today with the phenomenon of "la España vaciada" ("The Emptied Spain"), the plight of Spain's rural hinterland, as a social, political and cultural trope. Indeed, one of the most pressing issues in the contemporary national discourse of recent decades has been the systematic depopulation of the Spanish countryside as employment possibilities in the cities have beckoned and the birthrate has plummeted. My interest here, however, is slightly different. First and foremost, I center on the relation between different dimensional spaces as they are determined by the screen itself with respect to landscape to examine questions of range and scale within mise-en-scène. Art history (as Octavian Esanu has pointed out) has established a division between "horizontality," the spatial expanse of landscape and "verticality" in which the figure (usually but not always a human being) has a presence (at times an interruptive presence) in landscape. Tom Gunning adds a useful third dimension to these criteria. Gunning writes of the prehistory of landscape in the following terms: "Placing a view of nature within a frame, fixing that view within a geometrical frame of reference, defined landscape as an art form. A frame that organizes a composition geometrically, while simultaneously opening a view into a depth-this describes the double aspects of the landscape" (Cinema and Landscape 33). While Gunning's interest is primarily on the relationship between landscape and technology in early US cinema, I want to build on this insight regarding form to analyze three recent Spanish films in which landscape figures in prominent, though different, ways. In each of the films I will discuss in this chapter landscape is the subject rather than a mere stage against or within which human activity is played out or the action of the film 42 LANDSCAPE AS EVENT Geometrics and Geopoetics in Contemporary Spanish Cinema
What do we need to know about “art” or “class struggle” before considering their relation to one ... more What do we need to know about “art” or “class struggle” before considering their relation to one another? Could you describe a specific work or text that might serve as an illustration of class struggle or as an exploration of the problem of representing it? Let us say that visual art, broadly speaking, does express the worldview of the dominant class. What kind of art then expresses the worldview of, say, hedge fund managers? Does the dialectic of the visible and invisible still hold for conceptual and post-conceptual art? What alternative critical apparatus would you propose, since neither Lenin nor John William Cooke seemed to care much for art. Why should we?
2011 was a remarkable year in the annals of popular unrest. Commencing with the self-immolation o... more 2011 was a remarkable year in the annals of popular unrest. Commencing with the self-immolation of a street hawker in Tunisia, what would become known as the Arab Spring exceeded geographical frontiers as it spread tumultuously from Tunis to Tahir Square, Cairo, and from there to Europe, to the central squares of almost all of Spain's major cities (the 15th May or 15M movement), to London and across the Atlantic, to New York, to the occupation of high schools in Santiago de Chile. None of these uprisings was the result of cultural or ethnic questions, they were not inspired by religion or identity, they were responses to economic injustice, to the austerity measures imposed by national and supranational governing entities and the international lending bodies responsible for the crisis in the first place. Never was this more the case than in Spain, where the banking sector, construction companies and local municipal authorities had conspired for decades to build up a network of corruption, often with the connivance of the trade union bureaucracy and aided by a reserve army of mass unemployment to inhibit workers resistance. The financial crash of 2008 (followed by the events of 2011) exposed the contradictions of "democratic" discourse and shook the foundations of its institutions. It laid bare the fragility of the 1978 consensus that inaugurated Spain's current political system. To put it in terms favored by Antonio Gramsci, the conjunctural crisis revealed a deeper, longer-standing organic crisis that has yet to be resolved. My aim in this chapter is to suggest that, in spite of voices to the contrary, a Gramscian analysis of the contemporary political situation of Spain remains productive in mapping the upheavals of the last decade or so. While Britain is where Gramsci has exercised the greatest influence outside of Italy (British Cultural Studies is, historically at least, Gramscian), in Spain his work was introduced by and remained the preserve of a handful of eccentric Marxists operating on the provincial fringes of the State itself during the latter stages of the dictatorship. They were often marginalized by the very Spanish Communist Party with which they were associated (even after their theses had come to be officially-and only very partially-adopted by the same party). 1 Notable among these are the texts,
This article is an intervention in a debate within film studies over the concept of the "gaze". U... more This article is an intervention in a debate within film studies over the concept of the "gaze". Under the influence of 1960s and 1970s "apparatus" theory and particularly feminist thinkers of film like Laura Mulvey, the gaze has long been considered a key
This essay focuses upon the politics of place-in so far as they concern the city of Madrid-in Fer... more This essay focuses upon the politics of place-in so far as they concern the city of Madrid-in Fernando León de Aranoa's 1997 film Barrio/Neighbourhood. Drawing on the writings of Michel de Certeau and particularly recent work by Guiliana Bruno, it offers an analysis of the ideological and historical implications of both municipal urban development-above and below ground-and mobility through the landscape of the city. Human movement, it argues, disturbs and nuances a space that is undergoing continual renewal and reproduction, an urban field in which the past and present coexist in the city's architectonics.
El título de la película más reciente del joven director gallego Ramiro Ledo Cordeiro, VidaExtra ... more El título de la película más reciente del joven director gallego Ramiro Ledo Cordeiro, VidaExtra (2013), evoca (e invoca, performativamente 1 ) una imagen de suplementariedad. El suplemento, la adenda de algo más grande, tiene también un
This article analyzes the "imperfect" cinema of the Madrid-based filmmaking collective Los Hijos ... more This article analyzes the "imperfect" cinema of the Madrid-based filmmaking collective Los Hijos and the individual work of one of their members, Luis López Carrasco. Focusing primarily on disrupted and disruptive temporalities, it argues that filmic materiality and its evolution are key factors in the political critique to which these pieces point. Drawing upon the work of Jacques Derrida and J. Hillis Miller on aporia, the essay maintains that Los Hijos' films (Los materiales [2009] and Árboles [2013]) weave complex passages between the traditional conceptual binary of physis and technē and in doing so complicate temporal paradigms of legacy, heritage and generation. These films, moreover, precisely because of their filmic literacy and political awareness disturb not only the "natural" but also the "national" and its representation. The performative quality of their work, its futurity, is incompatible with claims to national allegory. In the same vein, the question of collective filmmaking and the individual subjectivities of the filmmakers complicate, as the article suggests, the traditional concepts of authorship and of the cineaste. The article appropriates the title of one of Hillis Miller's late books, to propose that the motif of the black hole of astrophysicsthat connects, absorbs, and dilates time -is suggestively reproduced in the literal appearance of black holes in the surface of the celluloid of López Carrasco's film El futuro (2013).
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