A Somatic Poetics of Crisis Cinema: The Gesture of Self-Harm in Three Spanish films

Abstract

This article looks at three fiction films released between 2012 and 2014 that, while not directly addressing the recessionary context, figure the female body as the visual site of crisis. La herida, Stockholm, and especially Magical Girl construe a vocabulary of embodied gestures. One in particular recurs time and again: a woman wilfully wounding her body. In films otherwise fraught with narrative gaps and ambiguities, gashes and wounds stubbornly remain visible evidence in search of a cause. Furthering ongoing critical conversation about cinema in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, this paper connects performative gestures with states of diminished agency and the stagnation of the narrative of social change underpinning the Spanish cinema of the democracy. I look in particular at the acting styles on display in these films, and the ways that they bring to the fore the alienation that estranges subjects from their bodies. Eschewing allegorical readings of the wounded female body as a symptom of the national body in crisis, a somatic poetics is deployed to capture the de-nationalized filmic construction of affective states that speak of broken social links contaminated by the dynamics of neo-liberal debt.

RESUMEN

Este artículo examina tres largometrajes de ficción estrenados entre 2012 y 2014, los cuales no interrogan abiertamente el contexto de recesión económica sino que visualizan el cuerpo femenino como lugar mismo de la crisis. La herida, Stockholm y especialmente Magical Girl se apoyan en un vocabulario de gestos corporales. Estos films hacen uso de un gesto recurrente: una mujer que se auto-lesiona intencionadamente. En historias colmadas de lagunas narrativas y ambigüedades, las heridas corporales permanecen visibles como evidencia en busca de una causa. Continuando debates críticos en torno al cine producido tras la crisis financiera de 2008, este artículo conecta la performatividad del gesto con estados en que la capacidad de acción es limitada, y la narrativa de cambio social característica del cine español de la democracia se ha estancado. El artículo se concentra en los estilos de actuación en estos films, y la forma en que subrayan los estados de alienación que resultan en un extrañamiento de los sujetos con respecto a sus cuerpos. Rechazando lecturas alegóricas del cuerpo femenino herido como síntoma del cuerpo de la nación en crisis, este artículo propone una poética de lo somático que capture la construcción fílmica, más allá de lo nacional, de estados afectivos representativos de vínculos sociales que se han roto a causa de la dinámica de deuda impuesta por el sistema neoliberal.

Keywords:

• Spanish cinema
• financial crisis
• affect
• embodiment
• self-harming women

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• cine español
• crisis financiera
• afecto
• corporealidad
• mujeres que se auto-lesionan

Acknowledgements

Belén Vidal has written this article in the context of the Research Project ‘Transnational relations in Spanish-American digital cinema: the cases of Spain, Mexico and Argentina’ (CSO2014-52750-P) funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of the Spanish Government and co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Most notably, in April 2012, bypassing parliamentary decision, a royal decree reduced health coverage from universal to employment-based, a shift in policy that severely restricted the access to care of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants as well as a significant proportion of unemployed youth (which at the peak of the crisis reached 50% of the total youth population). See Legido-Quigley, et al. (2013, 18–20).

2 This detail was brought to my attention by Fernando Franco in a film analysis workshop he conducted at the University Jaume I de Castelló, Spain on 23 July 2015. I am grateful to Franco for sharing his insights into La herida’s technical aspects and dramatic construction, some of which inform my analysis. For a detailed look at the use of sound and space in La herida, as well as Marian Álvarez’s performance, see Franco’s commentary track in La herida [DVD]. Cameo Media, 2014.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Belén Vidal

Belén Vidal is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London. She works on Spanish cinema and theories of cinephilia and on the historical genres in contemporary European cinema. She is the author of Heritage Film (Columbia University Press/Wallflower, 2012) and Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic (Amsterdam University Press, 2012), and the co-editor of The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture (Routledge 2014). She has published on Spanish cinema in the collections Cinema at the Periphery (also co-editor) (Wayne State University Press, 2010), Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre (Manchester University Press, 2008), and Middlebrow Cinema (Routledge, 2016), and in journals such as Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film and Screen.