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Abstract
Beginning with a discussion of the development of a transnational approach in Film Studies, this article argues that Miguel Gomes' transnational and festival-award-winning film Tabu (2012) engages with Portugal's legacy of colonialism, which is still part of living memory, by adopting a self-conscious, cinephilic address. Just as Gomes deploys a strategic, transnational cinephilia in his self-presentation through interviews, so Tabu as a film text may also be analysed through cinephilia, in particular, through its characterization of a cinephile protagonist in its contemporary Part 1, and its redeployment of silent cinema and Hollywood films about Africa in its 1960s-set Part 2. While recognizing shared filmic references flatters the viewers' knowledge, Gomes simultaneously stresses their lack of knowledge by also gesturing towards the unrepresentable. As the world of the unnamed Portugese colony in Africa begins to self-destruct, the unrepresentable unborn child indicates a postcolonial experience that lies beyond the reach of Gomes' cinephilic world. The article concludes by returning to the scene that connects Parts 1 and 2, and arguing for the centrality of the character of Santa in acknowledging this unrepresentability.
Notes
* This work was supported by The Leverhulme Trust (grant number PLP-2013-031).
1 On the ‘game’ see, for example, Mark Peranson, ‘Interviews. The Rules of the Game: A Conversation with Miguel Gomes’, Cinema Scope, n.d., <http://cinema-scope.com/cinema-scope-magazine/interviews-the-rules-of-the-game-a-conversation-with-miguel-gomes/> (consulted 12 December 2014); on the ‘pact’, see Zachary Wigon, ‘The Pact: Miguel Gomes on Cinema and Tabu’, Filmmaker, 26 December 2012, <http://filmmakermagazine.com/61331-the-pact-miguel-gomes-on-cinema-and-tabu/#.VI2qYelyacw> (consulted 12 December 2014).
2 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Cinephilia Or the Uses of Disenchantment’, in Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, ed. Marijke de Valck & Malte Hagener (Amsterdam: Amsterdam U. P., 2005), 27–43 (p. 40); Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 8.
3 Paul Julian Smith, Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro of Almodóvar (London/New York: Verso, 1994); Agustín Sánchez Vidal, Luis Buñuel: obra cinematográfica (Madrid: Ediciones JC, 1984); Marvin D’Lugo, The Films of Carlos Saura: The Practice of Seeing (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1991); Marsha Kinder, Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993) (e.g. Chapter 5); Barry Jordan & Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas, Contemporary Spanish Cinema (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 1998) (e.g. Chapter 1). Smith, Desire Unlimited, offered a theoretical reading of Almodóvar; for a psychoanalytic reading of Buñuel, see Peter W. Evans, The Films of Luis Buñuel: Subjectivity and Desire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
4 John Hopewell, Out of the Past: Spanish Cinema after Franco (London: British Film Institute, 1986); Román Gubern et al., Historia del cine español (Madrid: Cátedra, 1995).
5 Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction. The Struggle for Modernity, ed. Helen Graham & Jo Labanyi (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1995). I took the phrase ‘Text and Context’ from French Film: Texts and Contexts, ed. Susan Hayward & Ginette Vincendeau (London: Routledge, 1990) to describe this approach in the Introduction to my Literary Adaptations in Spanish Cinema (London: Tamesis, 2004), and to respond to Santos Zunzunegui's 1999 attack on supposedly de-contextualized theoretical approaches to Spanish cinema written in North America, especially Kinder, Blood Cinema (Santos Zunzunegui, El extraño viaje: el celuloide atrapado por la cola, o la crítica norteamericana ante el cine español [Valencia: Episteme, 1999]).
6 Quoted in Evans, The Films of Luis Buñuel, vii.
7 Spanish Cinema: The Auteurist Tradition, ed. Peter W. Evans (Oxford/New York: Oxford U. P., 1999).
8 Antología crítica del cine español 1906–1995: flor en la sombra, ed. Julio Pérez Perucha (Madrid: Cátedra/Filmoteca Española, 1997); Susan Martin-Márquez, Feminist Discourse and Spanish Cinema: Sight Unseen (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1999).
9 Belén Vidal, ‘Memories of Underdevelopment: Torremolinos 73, Cinephilia, and Filiation at the Margins of Europe’, in Cinema at the Periphery, ed. Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones & Belén Vidal (Detroit: Wayne State U. P., 2010), 211–31 (p. 211).
10 Núria Triana-Toribio, Spanish National Cinema (London/New York: Routledge, 2003), 143.
11 Popular European Cinema, ed. Richard Dyer & Ginette Vincendeau (London: Routledge, 1992); Popular Spanish Cinema, ed. Antonio Lázaro-Reboll & Andrew Willis (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 2004); see also: José Luis Castro de Paz Un cinema herido. Los turbios años cuarenta en el cine español (1939–1950) (Barcelona: Paidós, 2002) and José Luis Castro de Paz & Josetxo Cerdán, Del sainete al esperpento. Relecturas del cine español de los años 50 (Madrid: Cátedra, 2011).
12 Sally Faulkner, A History of Spanish Film: Cinema and Society 1910–2010 (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013); Tatjana Pavlović, The Mobile Nation: España cambia de piel (1954–1964) (Bristol: Intellect, 2011).
13 On well-known directors, for example: on Luis García Berlanga, Steven Marsh, Popular Spanish Film under Franco: Comedy and the Weakening of the State (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla, Queering Buñuel: Sexual Dissidence and Psychoanalysis in His Mexican and Spanish Cinema (London/New York: I. B. Tauris, 2008); on new directors, for example: Isabel Santaolalla, The Cinema of Iciar Bollaín (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 2012); on forgotten directors, for example: Asier Aranzubia Cob, Carlos Serrano Osma: historia de una obsesión (Madrid: Filmoteca Española, 2007).
14 Sally Faulkner, A Cinema of Contradiction: Spanish Film in the 1960s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 2006); Spanish Cinema 1973–2010: Auteurism, Politics, Landscape and Memory, ed. Maria Delgado & Robin Fiddian (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 2013); La nueva memoria: historia(s) del cine español 1939–2000, ed. José Luis Castro de Paz, Julio Pérez Perucha & Santos Zunzunegui (A Coruña: Vía Láctea, 2005); Chris Perriam, Stars and Masculinities in Spanish Cinema (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2003); Tom Whittaker, The Films of Elías Querejeta: A Producer of Landscapes (Cardiff: Univ. of Wales Press, 2011).
15 Manuel Palacio, Historia de la televisión en España (Barcelona: Gedisa, 2001) and La televisión durante la Transición española (Madrid: Cátedra, 2012); Paul Julian Smith, Television in Spain: From Franco to Almodóvar (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2006), Spanish Screen Fiction: Between Cinema and Television (Liverpool: Liverpool U. P., 2009), Spanish Practices: Literature, Cinema, Television (London: Legenda, 2012); Faulkner, Literary Adaptations in Spanish Cinema; Duncan Wheeler, Golden Age Drama in Contemporary Spain: The ‘Comedia’ on Page, Stage and Screen (Cardiff: Univ. of Wales Press, 2012).
16 Isabel Santaolalla, Los ‘otros’: etnicidad y ‘raza’ en el cine español contemporáneo (Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza/Madrid: Ocho y Medio, 2005); Cristina Pujol Ozanas, Fans, cinéfilos y cinéfagos. Una aproximación a las culturas y los gustos cinematográficos (Barcelona: Editorial UOC, 2011); Antonio Melero, Placeres ocultos. Gays y lesbianas en el cine español de la Transición (Madrid: Notorious, 2010); Screening Songs in Hispanic and Lusophone Cinema, ed. Lisa Shaw & Rob Stone (Manchester/New York: Manchester U. P., 2012); Hispanic and Lusophone Women Filmmakers: Theory, Practice and Difference, ed. Parvati Nair & Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla (Manchester/New York: Manchester U. P., 2013).
17 Jo Labanyi & Tatjana Pavlović, ‘Introduction’, in A Companion to Spanish Cinema, ed. Jo Labanyi & Tatjana Pavlović (Malden/Oxford/Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 1–11 (p. 1).
18 A Companion to Spanish Cinema, ed. Labanyi & Pavlović; Samuel Amago, Spanish Cinema in the Global Context: Film on Film (London: Routledge, 2013). A further illustrative case is the work inspired by Emma Wilson's excellent transnational volume Cinema's Missing Children (London: Wallflower, 2003). This work re-introduces the national, as the titles make clear: Roger Pitt, ‘Italian Cinema's Missing Children (1995–2005)’, PhD thesis (University of Exeter, 2012); chapter title ‘Spanish Cinema's Missing Children’, in Smith, Spanish Practices, 60–78.
19 To name three of many examples, Perriam's work on transnational stars in the Spanish context (Stars and Masculinities) informed his co-editorship, with Lúcia Nagib and Rajinder Dudrah, of Theorizing World Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012); Sarah Wright's monograph, The Child in Spanish Cinema (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 2013), lay the foundation for her leadership of an international project ‘Childhood and Nation in World Cinema: Borders and Encounters Since 1980’. My approach to the middlebrow in A History of Spanish Film informs my editorship of the transnational collection Middlebrow Cinema (London: Routledge, forthcoming).
20 For example, The Cinema of Spain and Portugal, ed. Alberto Mira (London: Wallflower, 2005); Screening Songs in Hispanic and Lusophone Cinema, ed. Shaw & Stone; Hispanic and Lusophone Women Filmmakers, ed. Nair & Gutiérrez-Albilla; Las imágenes del cambio. Medios audiovisuales en las transiciones a la democracia, ed. Manuel Palacio (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2013). In tandem, cultural initiatives like the ‘Harvard at the Gulbenkian’ season have sought to encourage dialogue between Portuguese and world cinemas.
21 For example, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, Embodying Memory in Contemporary Spain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Chapter 5.
22 Alison Landberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in an Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia U. P., 2004).
23 Antoine de Baecque, La Cinéphilie. Invention d’un regard, histoire d’une culture. 1944–1968 (Paris: Fayard, 2003); translation from Elsaesser, ‘Cinephilia or the Uses of Disenchantment’, 28.
24 Marijke de Valck & Malte Hagener, ‘Down with Cinephilia? Long Live Cinephilia? And Other Videosyncratic Pleasures’, in Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, ed. Valck & Hagener, 11–24 (p. 11); Geneviève Sellier, Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema, trans. Kristin Ross (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2008); French original La Nouvelle vague, un cinéma au masculin singulier (Paris: CNRS, 2005); for a gender critique that looks beyond the French case, see Pujol Ozanas, Fans, cinéfilos y cinéfagos.
25 Elsaesser, ‘Cinephilia or the Uses of Disenchantment’, 30–31.
26 Jan Baetens, ‘Review of Antoine de Baecque, La Cinéphilie. Invention d’un regard, histoire d’une culture. 1944–1968, Paris, Fayard, 2003’, Image & Narrative (2004), <http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/issue08/janbaetens_debaecque.htm> (consulted 12 December 2014); Susan Sontag, ‘The Decay of Cinema’, New York Times, 26 February 1996, <https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/12/specials/sontag-cinema.html> (consulted 15 December 2014).
27 Elsaesser, ‘Cinephilia or the Uses of Disenchantment’, 40. See also, Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Cinema and Academia: of Objects of Love and Objects of Study’, in Europe and Love in Cinema ed. Luisa Passerini, Jo Labanyi & Karen Diehl (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), 27–42 (p. 34).
28 Guarner, quoted in Iván Tubau, Crítica cinematográfica española. Bazin contra Aristarco: la gran controversia de los años 60 (Barcelona: Publicacions Edicions Univ. de Barcelona, 1983), 52. An excellent example of work on partial and frustrated cinephilia is offered by Belén Vidal who, rather than lamenting the existence of censorship, interprets Torremolinos 73 (Berger, 2003) as a reimagining of film history (‘Memories of Underdevelopment’).
29 For a definition of ‘smart’, see Jeffrey Sconce, ‘Irony, Nihilism and the New American “Smart” Cinema’, Screen, 43:4 (2002), 349–69.
30 Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, 8.
31 Texts: Peranson ‘Interviews. The Rules of the Game’; Mar Diestro-Dópido, ‘White Mischief’, Sight and Sound, 22:9 (2012), 24–27; Wigon, ‘The Pact: Miguel Gomes on Cinema. Recorded: ‘An Informal Interview at TIFF’ 12’ (Intermedio DVD Extras, 2013); also for TIFF 2012 at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OApKuDY6Dw8> (consulted 12 December 2014); for Cineuropa at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9nKKRzZXvg> (consulted 12 December 2014); for Abordar at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZHzTXYDum0> (consulted 12 December 2014). For a discussion of ‘media-savvy’ directors in the Spanish context, see Núria Triana-Toribio, ‘Auteurism and Commerce in Contemporary Spanish Cinema: directores mediáticos’, Screen, 49:3 (2008), 259–76.
32 Belén Vidal, ‘Love, Loneliness and Laundromats: Affect and Artifice in the Melodramas of Isabel Coixet’, in Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre, ed. Jay Beck & Vicente Rodríguez Ortega (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 2008), 219–38 (pp. 221, 224).
33 Diestro-Dópido, ‘White Mischief’, 27; ‘An Informal Interview at TIFF’12’; ‘Interview for TIFF 2012’.
34 ‘An Informal Interview at TIFF’12’.
35 Vidal, ‘Love, Loneliness and Laundromats’, 223.
36 ‘An Informal Interview at TIFF’12’.
37 Elsaesser, ‘Cinephilia or the Uses of Disenchantment’, 36–38.
38 Diestro-Dópido, ‘White Mischief’, 27.
39 Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, 8.
40 Trevor Johnston, ‘Review of Tabu’, Sight and Sound, 22:9 (2012), 92–93 (p. 92).
41 Diestro-Dópido, ‘White Mischief’, 24.
42 Gomes scarcely shows the animals in his own depiction of big-game hunting. He also associates the activity with Aurora rather than male characters—its purpose is mainly to show off her colonial hunting wardrobe, and reveal that she is pregnant when she can no longer shoot with accuracy, though this does not prevent her from murdering Mário.
43 Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, 8.
44 ‘An Informal Interview at TIFF’12’.
45 Seamus Heaney, ‘Act of Union’ (1975), in Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996 (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), 127–28.
46 Heaney, ‘Act of Union’, 127.
47 ‘An Informal Interview at TIFF’12’.
48 Johnston, ‘Review of Tabu’, 92.
49 Laura Marks, The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2000). Other haptical scenes include Santa's reading of Robinson Crusoe Part 1, where Gomes’ camera lingers on the curling plume of smoke of her cigarette, or the portrayal of the African rains in Part 2, where the drops of water drip down the camera lens.
50 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean Howard & Katharine Maus, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton & Company, 2008 [1st ed. 1997]), 3064–115 (p. 3075); The Tempest was first performed in 1611.
51 See the chapter ‘Lusophone Africa on Screen: After Utopia and before the End of Hope’, in Fernando Arenas, Lusophone Africa: Beyond Independence (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2011), 103–58, which demonstrates that ‘in the specific case of Lusophone African nations like Mozambique and Angola, cinema played a pivotal role in representing the liberation struggles and in galvanizing support for the triumphant political movements that came to power after independence and built the postcolonial nation’ (104). I am very grateful to Fiona Handyside, Mariana Liz, Ana Martins, Nicholas McDowell, Licinia Pereira and Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, as well as the contributors to the ‘Iberian Transitions’ workshop (Centre for Translating Cultures, University of Exeter, July 2014), which I co-organized with Maria Thomas, for discussing with me some of the ideas that appear in this article.