Rural Homeplaces and the Roots of Affect in El olivo (2016) and Amama (2015)

Abstract

Spanish filmmakers have produced no shortage of screen fiction attuned to the struggles, intrigues, heartbreak, farces, and even the horrors of homeownership or, more modestly, home-occupancy—and loss—in Spain’s urban milieu of the economic crisis and its aftermath. But how have directors engaged with contemporary rural homeplaces? Is there a putative rural sensibility in recent Spanish cinema, especially with respect to the lensing of house and home? Through an analysis of Icíar Bollaín’s El olivo (2016) and Asier Altuna’s Amama (2015), this essay addresses these matters from an affirmative perspective, showing how these films’ inflections vis-à-vis contemporary agrarian homeplaces reveal a noteworthy turn toward place-based affect: a sensibility much less conspicuous in those fictional productions of the economic crisis and its aftermath which couple urban and residential real-estate motifs. Notwithstanding contrasts in their stylistic, cultural, and linguistic profiles, El olivo and Amama both sensitively broach the problematics of rural rootedness in recent Spain (while drawing, too, on similar arboreal motifs). Along the way, they confront broader notions of what home itself means, as well as how it feels across generationally contrastive subject positions, ideas explored in humanist geography by theorists including Yi-Fu Tuan, Edward Relph, Gaston Bachelard, and Pierre Bourdieu.

RESUMEN

Los cineastas españoles han explorado plenamente en su ficción de la pantalla las luchas, las intrigas, las angustias, las farsas e incluso los horrores de ser propietario de una vivienda o, más modestamente, de la mera ocupación del hogar —junto con la experiencia de su pérdida— en el contexto de la España de la crisis económica y sus secuelas. Pero ¿cómo se han dirigido los cineastas contemporáneos al tema de la vivienda o el hogar en zonas rurales? ¿Existe una aparente sensibilidad rural en el cine español reciente, particularmente en torno a la representación de casa y hogar? A través de un análisis de El olivo (2016) de Icíar Bollaín y Amama (2015) de Asier Altuna, este ensayo aborda estos temas desde una perspectiva afirmativa, mostrando cómo las formas en que estos filmes tratan las casas rurales contemporáneas suponen un notable giro hacia el afecto y sus vínculos con el lugar: una sensibilidad mucho menos evidente en aquellas producciones ficticias de la crisis económica y sus secuelas que juntan motivos urbanos, residenciales e inmobiliarios. A pesar de los contrastes en sus perfiles estilísticos, culturales y lingüísticos, tanto El olivo como Amama tratan con tacto la problemática del arraigo en el ámbito rural de la España reciente (mientras recurren, además, a semejantes motivos arbóreos). Sobre la marcha, se indaga sobre nociones más amplias de lo que significa el hogar en sí, así como sobre cómo se siente desde las posiciones contrastivas del sujeto en términos generacionales, ideas que han sido examinadas ya en la geografía humanista por teóricos como Yi-Fu Tuan, Edward Relph, Gaston Bachelard y Pierre Bourdieu.

Keywords:

• Spanish film
• homeplaces
• rural
• affect
• humanist geography
• trees

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• cine español
• lugar
• hogar
• rural
• afecto
• geografía humanista
• árboles

Disclosure Statement

The author has not declared any potential conflict of interest.

Notes

1 I use the term “new sincerity” as it has come into popular circulation: that is, to denote the emotive tone of certain reactions against postmodern irony. My intention is not to invoke Collins’s specific application of the term to filmmakers’ 1990s-era gestures toward an ostensible “lost purity” (Collins 1993, 260) vis-à-vis genre conventions.

2 The crisis-era migration of young, well-educated Spaniards to northern Europe (especially to Germany) is central to fictional films like Júlia ist (Elena Martín 2017), Un otoño sin Berlín (Lara Izagirre 2015), and Perdiendo el norte (Nacho G. Velilla 2015). See Britland (2019) for perceptive comments on this theme in the context of recent comedy.

3 Juan Miguel de Castillo’s Techo y comida (2015), winner of a Goya for Best New Director, stands out as a fictional film whose engagement with the problematics of urban housing brings affect into play to striking ends.

4 Maria Jolas’s translation from the French employs the term “the house,” as opposed to “homeplace.” In the decades following Bachelard’s work, the latter term has come into broad circulation among humanist geographers.

5 Considered as the entry for Spain at the 2016 Oscars, El olivo was eclipsed by Pedro Almodóvar’s Julieta.

6 The motif of uprooting connects with the graphic design of the film’s title in the opening credits, where the “i” of “olivo”—suggestive of a human figure (arguably of Alma, given its central position)—stands positioned above a sketch of unearthed roots.

7 This facet of the film is analysed by Corujo Martín in an article that delves into an area of ecocritical theory known as “Human-Plant Studies” (Corujo Martín 2017, 223), an approach the author contextualizes with reference to the broader politics of the Spanish degrowth movement.

8 Noting that Altuna’s depiction of trees as “markers of Basque identity” nods toward “two of the best-known Basque films”—Tasio (Montxo Armendáriz, 1984) and Vacas (Julio Medem, 1982)—Deveny briefly synthesizes extant observations by Martí-Olivella (2003), Stone (2002), Richardson (2002), Martínez (2015), and Kim (2005) on the importance of the rural and arboreal imaginary in Basque cinema and culture (2019, 3).

9 Amaia’s topophobia seems anything but a reaction against the sundry chores cycled into the film as signs of movement across the seasons (scything and baling hay, clearing brush, tending to sheep, chopping firewood, planting a garden plot): tasks carried out industriously by the entire Eitzeta family, including the protagonist, whose contributions are performed matter-of-factly without a tone of disaffection.

10 The DVD version of Amama offers a dubbed track in Spanish, the source of this passage, which varies slightly from the Spanish subtitles of the original Euskera version.

11 These painted trees in a forest inevitably reference Agustín Ibarrola’s Bosque de Oma (1982), a work of Land Art which features paintings on and across tree trunks located amidst the pines of the Urdaibai preserve near Kortezubi, a village just a few kilometers northeast of Guernika.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew J. Marr

Matthew J. Marr is Associate Professor of Spanish at The Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Politics of Age and Disability in Contemporary Spanish Film: Plus Ultra Pluralism (2013) and, most recently, co-editor (with Samuel Amago) of Consequential Art: Comics Culture in Contemporary Spain (2019). His current research explores Spanish cinema’s engagement with homeplaces from the real-estate bubble through the COVID-19 pandemic.