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Newsreels, documentary, experimental film, shorts and animation
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Newsreels, documentary, experimental film, shorts and animation
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| dc.contributor.author | Sánchez-Biosca, Vicente | |
| dc.contributor.author | Cerdán, Josetxo | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2013-09-07T07:25:08Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2013-09-07T07:25:08Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2013 | |
| dc.identifier.citation | Josetxo Cerdán y Vicente Sánchez-Biosca, "Newsreels, documentary, experimental film, shorts and animation" en A Companion to Spanish Cinema, edited by Jo Labanyi and Tatjana Pavlović, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, pp. 521-542. | es_ES |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10550/29916 | |
| dc.description.abstract | One of the obsessions of Spanish critics writing about Spanish cinema has been the issue of “realism.” This dates back to the initial attempts at constructing a national cinema in the late 1920s, which set up an opposition between the españolada (stereotypical representation of Spain) and a cinema that would depict Spain as it “really” was; that is, an opposition between the artificial and the genuinely Spanish. This was reactivated after the Civil War by Francoism, which equated realism with its own discourse (initially Falangist, later National-Catholic) on the essence of Spain. The topos took on new life with the impact on Spain of Italian neo-realism and the European New Waves. And it has been revived recently by critics who reject the “postmodernity” of Spanish cinema as a sign of its disconnect from the country’s reality. It is striking that there have been few critical texts devoted to the reflexive side of Spanish cinema, when this has been an evident feature throughout its history (Castro de Paz and Cerdán 2007). Reflexivity is understood here in the sense given to the term by Robert Stam (1992) as a “ different tradition” from that of realism – one that formally highlights the process of textual construction. Stam’s key examples are taken from Spanish culture: Cervantes, Velázquez, Goya. This reflexivity, as widespread as it is understudied, is even more marked, if such a thing is possible, in those cinematic forms on the industry’s margins – for example, it has been claimed as a characteristic of Brazilian cinema (Vieira 1982). There is no need to insist on the reflexivity of Spanish experimental cinema, since experimentalism by definition involves reflexivity. But attention does need to be called to the reflexivity of shorts, since this is where it is most evident, especially in periods when cinematic models have tended, through various strategies of erasure, to hide their enunciative mechanisms. Early works such as the already mentioned El sexto sentido or Edgar Neville’s Yo quiero que me lleven a Hollywood / Take Me to Hollywood (1931), a film that revolves around the mechanics of stardom, are clear examples of this reflexivity. But it is even more striking in the series of three shorts – Una de fieras / Wild Animal Movie; Una de miedo / Scary Movie; Y, ahora, una de ladrones / And Now a Gangster Movie – made by Eduardo García Maroto between 1934 and 1936, which parody successful film genres of the time. The first, Una de fieras, starts by showing a three-thousand-peseta check – the money raised to make the film – and continues with images of the film crew together with the actors, a selection of the settings to be used, and so on; in a nutshell, it is a film about its own making. If we consider the contemporary period, some of the most outstanding Spanish shorts of the 1990s and early twenty-first century have a similar reflexive note of parody of Hollywood genres. This is the case, for example, with Mirindas asesinas (Álex de la Iglesia), Perturbado / Disturbed (Santiago Segura, 1993), and 7:35 a.m. – the last of these being a reflexive, hypertextual parody of the musical. The marginal condition of Spanish cinema in the transnational market has from early on been a factor in these parodic retakes on genre cinema. This is evident in short fiction films, which, being made at the far edge of the industry’s margins, are especially prone to plotlines that reflect on their own forms and limits. However, conditions of production alone do not explain the existence of shorts such as Vicente Lluch’s Documento secreto / Secret Document, a parody of the spy film with a female protagonist who travels to the French–Spanish border to realize a dangerous secret mission while her boyfriend stays at home. This sixteen-minute film was made in 1942, when the Franco regime had not yet started to disengage itself from the Axis powers. Reflexivity, then, is about the renewal of cultural forms. There is, however, a kind of reflexivity that is not concerned with parody. This is the case with the previously mentioned documentary compilation film Canciones para después de una guerra, in which Martín Patino takes apart the historical memory of Francoism. A non-parodic mode of reflexivity characterized the whole of documentary production during the transition to democracy, as seen in El desencanto (1976), El asesino de Pedralbes / The Murder of Pedralbes (Gonzalo Herralde, 1978), Ocaña, retrat intermitent, Rocío (Fernando Ruiz Vergara, 1980), Animación en la sala de espera / Animation in the Waiting Room (Carlos Rodríguez Sanz and Manuel Coronado, 1981), and Cada ver es / Every Sight Is (Ángel García del Val, 1981; the title is a pun on the Spanish for “corpses”). A similar non-parodic form of reflexivity is found in Aute’s Un perro llamado Dolor, which comprises seven reflections in animated form on a series of Spanish and non-Spanish visual artists – particularly Goya and including Velázquez and Buñuel – with the director appearing on screen in person. Several recent reflexive documentaries are similarly anything but parodic. Andrés Duque dedicated his first film Iván Z (2003) to the figure of Iván Zulueta. Much more than a survey of Zulueta’s life and work, Duque’s film takes up the challenge of Zulueta’s experimental project, adapting it to his own creative agenda. The result avoids imitation by offering a reflection on the forms of experimental documentary at the time of the film’s production. Duque would use one of the phrases spoken by Zulueta in Iván Z as the title of his No es la imagen sino el objeto / It’s not the Image but the Object (2008), a performative film that takes further the circle of meditations woven around Zulueta’s figure. Equally striking is Carlos García Alix’s El honor de las injurias / The Honor of the Wronged (2007), which tells the story of the anarchist Felipe Sandoval by resemanticizing iconic shots in the history of international documentary production together with others from Spanish fiction film, generating a highly productive interaction between both visual traditions. | es_ES |
| dc.language.iso | en | es_ES |
| dc.subject | Documentary | es_ES |
| dc.subject | Cine español | es_ES |
| dc.subject | Spanish cinema | es_ES |
| dc.title | Newsreels, documentary, experimental film, shorts and animation | es_ES |
| dc.type | book part | es_ES |
| dc.subject.unesco | UNESCO::CIENCIAS DE LAS ARTES Y LAS LETRAS | es_ES |
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