W5 – History, Allegory, Spectacle
From a national to a transnational Spanish cinema
Part of an emerging
Spanish transnational
cinema?
1. National production context:
New legal framework: since 1999, Spanish television
channels must invest at least 5% of their income to
finance European audiovisual works (including
Spanish cinema and TV drama produced in Spain)
Main funders:
Tele 5 (privately owned
media conglomerate)
Televisión Española – public
(state-wide) television
1. National production context: History as spectacle: bigger
budgets, blockbuster ambitions
2006 (funding: private channel Tele 5
– in the UK, straight to DVD under the
title The Spanish Musketeer)
2010 (funding: private channel
Antena 3)
2. Cultural shifts: as the traumatic past grows distant (thirty years of democracy) a
new appetite for exploring the Civil War & the dictatorship in cinema and television
The Spanish traumatic past has become a theme for GENRE films (melodramas,
comedies). A cycle of popular Spanish heritage films (sample 1990-2011)
2. Cultural shifts
Changes in the representation of the Civil War & the
dictatorship in the cinema from the 90s-2000s:
From allegory (e.g. indirect or metaphoric allusion to the past) to
spectacle (films that show traumatic past events, even exploit the
iconography of the past through genre narratives)
allegory – according to the Oxford English Dictionary:
“The use of symbols in a story, picture, etc., to convey a hidden
or ulterior meaning, typically a moral or political one; symbolic
representation”
Ismail Xavier, “Historical Allegory” (in A Companion to Film Theory
pp. 333-362) (cited in article “Horror of Allegory” by E. AcevedoMuñoz):
• Allegory: linked to nation and national narratives
• Allegory mediates historical experience related to cultural shock:
a mode of telling foundational or traumatic histories.
• Allegory can be intentional (symbolic encoding that requires a
shared context to be decoded) or unconscious (to be decoded by a
“competent reader”)
• Intentional allegories are often found in modernist works;
unconscious allegories are associated with mass-media production,
particularly genre films such as horror films.
• awareness of national and cultural context (histories, traditions)
becomes crucial in the decoding of allegory
From allegoric art cinema of the 1970s
to the spectacular fantastic genre in the 2000s
El espíritu de la colmena,
Cría cuervos
The family house as metaphor
for the Francoist state: a
dysfunctional nation/family
The family house is literally the scene
of collaboration with AND struggle
against fascist oppression: El
laberinto del fauno (Guillermo del
Toro, 2006)
The child’s gaze
as a vehicle for
allegory
Cría cuervos (1976):
set in the present, the
child’s gaze enables a
parody and a critique
of the family unit and
the ideology that
cements it.
The child’s gaze as allegorical and narrative trope
El espíritu de la colmena
(1973)
El laberinto del fauno
(2006)
Cría cuervos (1976)
The Spirit of the Beehive
(1973)
El laberinto del fauno(2006): set in the past, the diegesis is also filtered
through the child’s gaze, but metaphoric symbols become narrative
images of terror, obedience and rebellion in an identifiable
historical/fantasy world
Transnational histories:
balancing history and myth
1943
3. Transnational genre films: an iconography of evil
El laberinto del fauno (2006)
Allegory is replaced
by spectacle:
onscreen violence
and the monstrous
‘bad father’
Direct reference to
political violence
through generic
representation
El espinazo del diablo (2001)
History as Myth
Pan’s Labyrinth
The child who won’t grow up: removed from history, and
‘frozen’ in the mythical temporality of the fairytale?
Transnational production context: genre films benefit from
foreign funding and foreign creative input
Guillermo del Toro, 2001
Alejandro Amenábar,
2001
Films that travel: continuity and change - from a political
imperative to an economic imperative
From the metaphorical El espíritu de
la colmena…
Geraldine Chaplin in
El Orfanato: the
“medium” between
two worlds
… to the generic El Orfanato (JA Bayona,
2007): Spanish horror film free of context