Introduction: Contemporary Spanish Screen Media and Responses to Crisis and Aftermath

The articles collected in this Screen Arts issue arise from a conference — Contemporary Spanish Screen Media and Responses to Crisis and Aftermath — held at the University of Manchester on 31 March and 1 April 2017 and supported by the British Academy.¹ The conference set out to explore the diverse ways in which Spanish screen media had responded to the economic crisis dating back to 2007–2008 in Spain, not so much with the luxury of hindsight as in the awareness of a still ongoing process of economic and social attrition bringing new forms of precariousness to bear on citizens and seeing ever more transformation in Spanish film production, distribution and audiences. Many of the papers, and the discussions around them, focused on such immediate material conditions as these; others explored historical precedents; and yet others sought to show how crisis and post-crisis have brought about a shift in the aesthetics of Spanish screen media and a renewed emphasis on innovative and experimental forms. Core to all was an engagement with the discourses and visual conceptualization of such matters as: the shortcomings of the state’s political projects before, during and after the crisis; the effects in Spain of neoliberalism and global capitalism, on communities and the physical conditions of individuals; austerity; activism; agendas for change; gender and precarity. A keynote lecture by Professor Uta Felten (Universität Leipzig) explored the emergence of an intergenerational and intermedial network of new ‘Women’s Cinema’ in Spain — an alternative historical account of the torn social fabric and devastated lives of the micro-era;² and the interactions of gender, genre, temporality were constant reference points in the conference’s formal and informal discussions. In a second keynote session, filmmaker and video-artist Juanma Carrillo presented a collage of his work over the past decade, marked by the image of the vulnerable body (and the vulnerable heart) and by narrative, sonic and visual disruption. Engaging with risk and precarious, non-heteronormalized desire and resisting shame, exclusion and prohibition, Carrillo’s work points particularly to queer perspectives on Spain’s globally resonant processes of crisis and vividly brought these perspectives to bear on the conference discussions.

The new networks and perspectives explored by Carrillo and Felten during the conference, as well as the fine-grained accounts of alternative audiovisual practice offered in many of the papers — revealing little known aspects and effects of crisis and aftermath in Spanish creative output — should perhaps be placed in the necessarily less nuanced categorical context of the much used ‘el cine de la crisis’, or ‘Spanish “crisis cinema”’ (Allbritton 2014, 103). As Pérez (forthcoming) points out, the several phases of the large-scale economic adversity that affected Spain in the period 2007–2008 to 2017 and, of course, beyond have prompted responses in this loose category that range across melodrama, social-issues drama and dark or grotesque comedy, involving big names such as Álex de la Iglesia (La chispa de la vida, 2012), Isabel Coixet (Ayer no termina nunca, 2013), and Pedro Almodóvar (Los amantes pasajeros, 2013) and smaller independent productions that have built a substantial profile at festivals, online and on alternative circuits, such as Terrados (Demián Sabini, 2011), or Murieron por encima de sus posibilidades (Isaki Lacuesta, 2014). Variously, this crisis cinema offers a critique of the neoliberal economic policy in Spain, austerity, corruption and fraud, and a picture of the social consequences of these: unemployment, foreclosures and evictions, economic emigration, precarity, exacerbated gender inequality (Pérez forthcoming). As is now well known, Spanish government funding and institutional support for culture fell abruptly during these years (Bustamente Ramírez 2013; Rubio-Arostegui and Rius-Ulldemolins 2016; Hopewell 2017). In the middle of the period, the industry was facing its own crises, with the budget of the Fondo de Ayuda a la Cinematografía falling from €89 million in 2010 to €33 million in 2014, with huge across-the-board cuts in funding via the Instituto de la Cinematografía y las Artes Audiovisuales (ICAA) in 2012–2013 (Badillo 2013; Zurro 2013), VAT on cinema tickets (and other forms of cultural consumption) rising to 21% in 2012 (only now, as we write 6 years on, being reduced back to 10%), and Treasury Minister Cristóbal Montoro in October 2013 linking radical cuts to funding with perceived low quality filmmaking and a consequent reduction in box office takings (El País 2013; discussed in detail by Pérez forthcoming).

The period of economic deterioration and political unrest in Spain has in part led to a critical revision of its recent past. As Kornetis has argued, the recession ‘prompted a need to reassess post-authoritarian phenomena, as in moments of deep social, political and economic crisis the recent past tends to become an issue of contention’ (2014, 83). As such, re-readings of the transition to democracy have sought to challenge the once dominant narrative that it was a peaceful and exemplary process. The signing of the Moncloa Pacts in 1977 and the Constitution of 1978, which confirmed Spain’s status as a capitalist democracy, while limiting the power of collective action by the unions, in turn created the conditions for a depoliticized and individualistic culture. Now a key point of reference in contemporary Cultural Studies scholarship on the crisis, as well as in cultural commentary more widely, Guillem Martínez’s edited collection of essays and interventions, CT o la cultura de la Transición: crítica a 35 años de cultura española (2012) criticizes the consensual nature of cultural production in Spain from the Transition onwards, which in its complicity with market forces has found itself unable to imagine an alternative model of social relations. Martínez and his fellow contributors argue for the existence of a culture (the ‘CT’ of the volume’s title) that has long been structured by a series of limitations on what can be openly discussed in Spanish culture. In Amador Fernández-Savater’s words, elsewhere, the cultura de la Transición ‘impone ya de entrada los límites de lo posible: la democracia-mercado es el único marco admisible de convivencia y organización de lo común, punto y final’ (2012, 668).

Several of the films discussed in this issue seek to break with such a hegemonic culture. Through their renewal of established modes of realism, formal experimentation, and new modes of collaborative production, much recent filmmaking in Spain resonates — whether implicitly or explicitly — with the ethos of 15-M. In contrast to CT, 15-M has fostered a collective model of social relations, one which has been described by Bryan Cameron as a ‘non-elitist, horizontal approach to collaborative culture that short-circuits neoliberal ideology (shaped by competition and individualism)’ (2014, 2). The narratives of several of these post-crisis films frequently revolve around what have been called vidas subprime, referring to victims of neoliberal austerity and the withdrawal of the state who have been excluded by the official culture of Spanish democracy — lives that embody the experiences of being at biopolitical risk in the context of the crisis of 2008–13 (Labrador Méndez 2014).

The cultural and social responses to the 15-M movement in Spain, as well as the material conditions of austerity more broadly, have, then, provided the subject of much recent debate in Spanish Cultural Studies. Just one year after the demonstrations that gave the movement its name, Hispanic Review published a special issue on the topic in 2012, followed by an influential special double issue in Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies in 2014 (to which Allbritton and Labrador Méndez, cited above, contributed) and a two-part issue entitled ‘Culture, Crisis and Renewal’ in Romance Quarterly in 2017. The indignados movement has also been explored in recent monographs such as Luis Moreno-Caballud’s Cultures of Anyone: Studies on Cultural Democratization in the Spanish Neoliberal Crisis (2015) and Jonathan Snyder’s Poetics of Opposition in Contemporary Spain: Politics and the Work of Culture (2015). Through its particular focus on screen media responses to the crisis, this special issue seeks both to engage with this rich seam of scholarship and to provide an original contribution to the field. The selection of articles here focusses on a broad range of cinematic productions, from the exportable art cinema that has become known as otro cine español and grassroots documentaries, to the mainstream comedies and cine negro of Álex de la Iglesia and Alberto Rodríguez. The richness and diversity of productions here are testament to the creativity and tenacity of the Spanish film industry in the face the savage cuts from the Central Film Production Fund. They also presage and inform a phase of gradual revival as flagged up in the industry magazine Academia’s upbeat summary report for the 2017 Goya Awards ceremony (Academia 2017, 52) or Variety’s overview for 2016 (Hopewell 2017) whose focus is on the box office, rather than production, but a box office buoyed up by Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona’s English-language Hollywood-produced A Monster Calls (2016).

As already mentioned, Juanma Carrillo had spoken at the conference about his own work as a response to crisis and precariousness, seeing in his own projects small-scale representations — and anticipations — of the wider phenomenon of the economic crisis and the associated crisis of values in Spain. A conversation with him in Madrid, on 30 October 2017, was designed to follow up on some of the conference’s findings and to track more recent creative work. What was of particular interest was the perspective of a practitioner who had worked through, but been restricted, by the phases and processes of the crisis and its aftermath. The following guiding questions were used: ‘¿Cuáles han sido —en el ambito audiovisual— las respuestas estéticas y técnicas a crisis y poscrisis que más alcance han tenido?’; ‘¿El giro social en cine español de hace 10 años —más o menos— sigue teniendo repercusiones? O ¿ha sido reemplazado ya por otros medios y por otras vías creativas?’; and ‘¿Hasta qué punto ha tenido repercusión en discursos socio-políticos esa creatividad que que nació —o sigue naciendo— de la ira, la indignación, y la precariedad?’.

Carrillo began by recalling a paper given by Rui Oliveira, on the horror genre, and made a link to the recent film Verónica (Paco Plaza, 2017) and its recreation of the feel of the early 1990s in Vallecas and the recession and devaluation crisis of 1993 through a deliberate and auteurist aesthetic of austerity of means and look. Using the story of supernatural possession, this film, for Carrillo, had resonances of Berlanga’s brand of esperpento as well as of the horror genre more internationally while having a strong debt, also, to socially committed cinema and the sub-genre of the barrio-set film, such as Barrio (Fernando León de Aranoa, 1998) and Tarde para la ira (Raúl Arévalo, 2016). While Verónica interestingly picks up on the early 1990s, Fe de etarras/Bomb Scared (Diego San José, Borja Cobeaga, 2017; Netflix Spain release) referenced, he thought, a more recent history of disruption and the September 2010 declaration by ETA of a ceasefire in its campaign for Basque independence. In parodic mode, the film centres on four ETA fighters holed up in Madrid, awaiting instructions, unaware that the terror campaign is over. Carrillo suggested that the film’s featuring of Spanish flags on a Madrid balcony — marking the Spain vs Switzerland match in the 2010 FIFA World Cup but reinterpreted sardonically by the four men — uncannily chimed with contemporary displays, in October 2017, of the national flag in outraged defiance of Carles Puigdemont’s government’s push for and conflicted declaration of an independent Catalunya, another profound crisis for Spain. As he pointed out, Netflix’s controversial street publicity for the film itself (Ormazabal 2017) made the link between the nationalistic football anthem ‘Yo soy español, español, español’ and the damaging conflict whose dying days are portrayed with rough parodic comedy in the film. The release on Netflix itself (immediately following the San Sebastián première) had drawn attention to the rapid and crisis-driven move away from traditional modes of distribution of cinema in Spain, showing the precariousness of the industry’s traditional modes of operation and yet also offering a new and more efficient channel of production. In this way, Carrillo felt that the drama series La zona (Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo and Gonzalo López-Gallego 2017–; produced by Movistar+), whose premise is a huge nuclear accident in the north of Spain and which deals with corruption, cover-ups, and environmental and health damage, was a good example of an agile and appealing creative response to topics, or the mood, of crisis. So too, looking to other genres and platforms, was theatrical work such as that by Teatro El Barrio, whose El Rey placed a spotlight on the monarchy or the more radical and stand-up productions at the El Pavón Teatro Kamikaze (in the Embajadores district of Madrid).

In short, the sort of immediate and sustained response to social change that is associated with the feature-film makers of the late 1970s and early 1980s is seen by Carrillo as an improbable phenomenon in the 2010s: from his perspective, the ‘giro social’ of recent years in Spanish cinema has perhaps turned again — towards more oblique, and more visually and dramatically complex approaches to crisis and damage, such as in Carlos Vermut’s Magical Girl (2014) (discussed by Vidal at the conference, and in this issue). And there has been a shift of attention to other genres — to networked television, theatre, as already noted, but also to new documentary filmmaking — away from cinema. The relative accessibility of the documentary mode, in particular, has provided a rich seam for filmmakers to reflect upon the material conditions of post-crisis Spain, and the now dominant use of digital technology in documentary has enabled filmmakers to keep costs down. The scarcity of funds has also led to more imaginative and creative approaches in the funding and exhibition of films, with filmmakers making use of crowdfunding platforms (see Altabás 2014) and low-budget films being premiered on subscription video-on-demand services like Mubi and Filmin. If the current ‘giro social’ in Spanish film establishes an aesthetic dialogue with the cinema of the earlier economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s, it is also in turn shaped by the inventive use of new cinematic practices and technological innovations.

The Articles

The re-engagement of contemporary Spanish film with the country’s recent past informs Núria Triana-Toribio’s article, ‘Spanish Cinema of the 2010s: Back to Punk and Other Lessons from the Crisis’, which opens the special issue. Triana-Toribio provides both a much needed overview of the film production in Spain during the economic crisis, outlining key trends in both commercial and independent cinemas of the past decade, as well offering discussion of the current trend of independently financed music documentaries about the musical subcultures of the 1980s and early 1990s. In particular, she shows how, in revisiting this period, these documentaries reflect on the shortcomings of the process of democratization.

The focus of Enrique Fibla-Gutiérrez’s article, ‘Cinema of Crisis and the Documentary Impulse: the UPF Masters in Creative Documentary’, is on the significant role the renowned Masters in Creative Documentary at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra has played during the Spanish recession. Fibla-Gutiérrez shows how the programme has fostered a unique documentary culture that, through formal experimentation and new temporalities of production, has sought to critique Spain’s embrace of neoliberalism. He explores how these new modes of film production are put into practice through a close analysis of La plaga (Neus Ballús, 2013), a documentary that explores the vidas subprime of the victims of global capitalism.

Belén Vidal’s ‘A Somatic Poetics of Crisis Cinema: The Gesture of Self-Harm in Three Spanish Films’ primarily explores the female body as a site of crisis in contemporary Spanish film. Through a fine-grain analysis of individual performances, Vidal shows how in La herida (Fernando Franco, 2013), Stockholm (Rodrigo Sorogoyen, 2013) and Magical Girl, the image of women wounding themselves recurs as a visual pattern. Unlike La plaga, the women in these films are not defined by economic precarity. Rather, as Vidal shows, the visual significance of self-harm here calls our attention more subtly to the internalization of crisis. The materiality of wounds, pain and other forms of deliberate injury is explored as a means of making visible the ‘fractures in the social fabric in times of crisis’. Disconnected from the flow of the narrative, the detached style of these performances, she argues, speaks to a broader structure of social links that have been severed by neoliberalism.

The final two articles of this issue focus more specifically on the new political landscape in Spain which, emerging as a response to austerity and entrenched corruption practices, has finally broken with the hegemonic two-party system that was established during the Transition. In ‘Documenting Podemos and the Rise of DIY Politics in Fernando León de Aranoa’s Política, manual de instrucciones (2016)’, Bryan Cameron shows how León’s recent documentary depicts the breaking down of consensual rule in Spain. He examines how the exploration of time in the documentary in turn echoes the distinctive temporality of the crisis, one that is illuminated through Gramsci’s understanding of times of crisis as ‘interregna’, or extraordinary periods in which the political elite relies on ‘coercive force’ to maintain its dominance. Through its ambiguous engagement with time, the film depicts Spain on the precipice of a ‘new political order that has not yet been fully imagined’.

In the final article of the issue, Abigail Loxham provides a close reading of Alcaldessa (Pau Faus, 2016), a recent documentary that charts the rise of Ada Colau, the activist mayor of Barcelona. Through examining various media texts, Loxham explores the contradiction of how Colau’s public persona simultaneously holds in tension both political activism and discourses of neoliberal postfeminism. She shows that responses to the economic crisis that seek social change, such as those of Colau, nonetheless still have to battle with conservative views on gender that permeate the media discourses in which Colau operates.

Spanish cinema of the crisis reflects the unravelling of the social, political, and economic consensus. Yet, as the articles of this special issue ultimately show, recent Spanish media has drawn on the tide of indignation and political mobilization, harnessing its energy. It has found ways of revitalizing and remaking film form and practice so as to think beyond the impasse of the neoliberal order that is so often pointed to when Spanish visual culture, present or past, takes a ‘giro social’. To that extent, the aftermath is reparative as much as it is disruptive: the images point both ways.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chris Perriam

Chris Perriam is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Manchester and writes and researches on contemporary Spanish cinema and poetry. He is co-author of French and Spanish Queer Film: Audiences, Communities and Cultural Exchange (2016) and author of Spanish Queer Cinema (2013) (both with Edinburgh University Press) as well as of a range of essays on stars, performance, culture and social issues.

Tom Whittaker

Tom Whittaker is Associate Professor at the University of Warwick and a specialist in Spanish film and cultural studies. He has recently completed a monograph entitled The Spanish Quinqui Film: Delinquency, Deviance and Sound for Manchester University Press. He is co-editor of, and contributor to, Performance and Spanish Film (Manchester University Press, 2016) and Locating the Voice in Film: Global Practices and Critical Approaches (Oxford University Press, 2016) and author of The Films of Elías Querejeta: A Producer of Landscapes (University of Wales Press, 2011).

Notes

1 British Academy Grant SG160029, Responses of Spanish Cinema and its Audiences to Social Crisis post-2008. The conference was conceived as part of the activities of a Regional Research Network in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Cinema involving colleagues at the University of Leeds, University of Liverpool, Manchester Metropolitan University, University of Manchester and University of Salford. We are especially indebted to Nicola Tomlinson (University of Manchester) for her work in helping to organize and run the conference and for her editorial assistance during the preparation of this issue.

2 A version of the lecture will appear in Felten’s book Las máscaras del deseo. Eros, cuerpo y mirada en la cultura hispánica (Frankfurt am Main: Lang [forthcoming 2019]).