Post-Franco Theatre

In the multiple realms and layers that comprise the contemporary Spanish theatrical landscape, “crisis” would seem to be the word that most often lingers in the air, as though it were a common mantra, ready to roll off the tongue of so many theatre professionals with such enormous ease, and even enthusiasm, that one is prompted to wonder whether it might indeed be a miracle that the contemporary technological revolution – coupled with perpetual quandaries concerning public and private funding for the arts – had not by now brought an end to the evolution of the oldest of live arts, or, at the very least, an end to drama as we know it

Contemporary Spanish Cinema

Any national cinema may be approached from various perspectives. It may even be explored from the perspective of its own negation; that is, from a transnational perspective that questions its national identity. Spanish cinema as studied in this issue is no exception to this point, but rather an example that illustrates it with all its consequences. On the one hand, when referring to the cinematic medium in general, it is not possible to speak of a single type of cinema, but of different ways of conceiving of this medium of expression: commercial or popular films, genre films, auteur cinema, experimental films, and so on. An exhaustive overview of the national cinema of a country such as Spain needs to include all these cinematic variations. Similarly, a truly comprehensive study needs to incorporate different theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches. To take on such a variety of perspectives and classifications — and, furthermore, to propose a dialogue between them — will in no way undermine our understanding of the object of study (in this case, Spanish cinema); on the contrary, it will enrich it.Canet Centellas, FJ. (2014). Contemporary Spanish Cinema. Hispanic Research Journal. 15(1):1-9. doi:10.1179/1468273713Z.00000000077S1915

<i>La flor de mi secreto</i> (Almodóvar, 1995): La literatura como seducción

The multiple references to writing in Pedro Almodovar’s <i>La flor de mi secreto</i> (1995) have arguably made this film his most literary. Reading and writing function as the structural axis of the movie because they define the existence of the main character - Leo/Amanda Gris. But beyond the constant literary allusions, what makes the “literarity” of this film is, on the one hand, the construction of the protagonist according to literary models and on the other the exploration of her subjectivity through her writing. Leo as a character is created as a replica of the tormented writers that she admires. In their stereotypical tradition, she is an alcoholic, addicted to sleeping pills, suicidal, obsessed with her loneliness and installed in her writing as a survival space. Furthermore, the spectator accesses her subjectivity through her career as a writer because her melodramatic life gets entangled with her novels. Almodóvar projects his literary ghosts in <i>La flor de mi secreto</i> and in the process, subverts the parameters of literature, the canon, the gender and genre categories and the question of authorship. He also resists a stable definition of literature as art by inserting it in a filmic text, favoring a complex intertextuality which contributes to dissolving the frontiers between high and low culture and to opening a common ground for the arts.<br><br>Las múltiples referencias a la escritura presentes en <i>La flor de mi secreto</i> (1995) han llevado a etiquetar esta película como la más literaria de Pedro Almodóvar. La lectura y la escritura funcionan como hilo conductor de la película en la medida en que articulan la existencia de la protagonista, Leo/Amanda Gris. Pero más allá de este despliegue de alusiones literarias, lo que en realidad determina la literaridad del film es, por un lado, la construcción de dicho personaje a partir de modelos literarios y por otro la exploración de su subjetividad a partir de la escritura. Leo se perfila como réplica de las escritoras “atormentadas” a las que admira; alcohólica como ellas, adicta a los tranquilizantes, suicida, abrumada por la soledad e instalada en la escritura como espacio de supervivencia. Además, el espectador accede a su subjetividad a partir de su trayectoria como escritora ya que su melodramática existencia se funde/confunde con su escritura. Almodóvar proyecta en <i>La flor de mi secreto</i> sus fantasmas literarios y subvierte en el proceso los parámetros de la literatura, el valor del canon, las categorías genéricas, tanto literarias como sexuales, las leyes del mercado y las cuestiones de autoría. Opone además una clara resistencia a una definición estable del fenómeno literario al insertarlo en el cinematográfico, activando con ello un complejo juego de intertextualidades que en última instancia contribuyen a disolver las fronteras entre la alta y baja cultura y a abrir un espacio de convergencia entre las artes

Crash and return:"choque", allusion and composite structure in Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Amores perros" (2000)

Composite structure, a feature of Freud’s dreamwork theory, is relevant to understanding cinematic works in which a range of viewpoints and narratives, dense and diverse themes, highly distinguishable productive elements (here, sound and cinematography) coalesce under a powerful ‘binding’ concept. In the case of what I have termed cine de choque, that concept is the car crash and, more specifically, the Spanish word choque, which can be translated as crash, shock or clash. This category of film refers to a number of recent works (from the late 1990s onwards) by Spanish-speaking directors in which car crashes feature strongly both as pivotal plot devices and as linguistic metaphors informing the aesthetics of the films in question. These films include Alejandro Amenábar’s Abre los ojos (1997), Julio Medem’s Los amantes del círculo polar (1998), Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams (2003) and Lucrecia Martel’s La mujer sin cabeza (2010). Here, I deal specifically with the relevance of composite structure to the narrative aesthetics of González Iñárritu’s Amores perros (2000), referring also to the theories of Gilles Deleuze on shock and violence, those of Sergei Eisenstein on organic unity and those of Christian Metz on the 'filmic state'. As well as discussing the movement of the film's aesthetic and thematic content from physical to emotional choque, I explore the dimensions of the crash as a plot device, a symbol of the clash between humanity and modernity and, ultimately, the way in which it is significant as much for what it fails to cause (resolution by figures of authority) as for what it triggers in the lives of the characters