Week 7: Realism and Social
Cinema at the turn of the 2000s
A state-of-the-nation cinema:
• Solas (Benito Zambrano, 1998)
• Flores de otro mundo (Bollaín, 1999)
• Los lunes al sol (Fernando León de
Aranoa, 2002)
• Cachorro (Miguel Albaladejo, 2004)
etc, etc.
Films that signal a politicisation
of Spanish cinema during the
government of the right-wing
Popular Party (PP), under
José María AZNAR (in office
from 1996 to 2004)
Te doy mis ojos (Icíar Bollaín, 2003) (
Social cinema = representative of the nation?
A model of ‘realismo tímido’ (Angel Quintana)
Los lunes al sol (2002);
unemployment and men in crisis
Mar adentro (2004):
on assisted suicide
Quintana. ‘Modelos realistas en un tiempo de emergencia de lo político.’ (2005): a
cinema in which form serves the social message: ‘important’ subjects,
character-driven stories, seeking empathy with individual problems, sense of
closure.
A middlebrow, quality cinema: well-crafted, medium-budget films that support
the ‘average-man/woman’ qualities of its leading actors: Javier Bardem, Luis
Tosar, Laia Marull, Lola Dueñas.
(2007)
Icíar Bollaín: working in the
realist tradition – films
concerned with women’s
experience
1) Paul Begin calls it “social issue cinema”
(in “Regarding the pain of others…” – in
module reader, p. 31)
2) Hallam and Marshment:
distinguish between social issue
drama and social realism
(in Realism and popular cinema – in
module reader: p. 190).
3) “A love story that can only be
understood through reference to the
underlying patterns of social relationships
and patriarchal family structures. “
(Isabel Santaolalla, The Cinema of Icíar
Bollain, p. 146)
4) MELODRAMA as a way into the film’s
formal strategies AND its political
function
Te doy mis ojos - directed by Bollaín, co-written with Alicia Luna
- Fully fictional film based on research into actual cases of domestic
violence
- Shot and set in the provincial town of Toledo, near Madrid
- Focus on characters: Pilar (Laia Marull) and Antonio (Luis Tosar), a
couple under pressure.
Melodrama re-enacts traumatic events that
straddle the domains of the private and the public
E. Ann Kaplan, “Melodrama, Cinema and
Trauma”, Screen, issue 42.2 (Summer 2001). pp.
201-204.
Watching trauma – modes of spectatorship:
-the melodrama spectator: engages with trauma
through the film’s themes and techniques while
getting the comfort of closure or ‘cure’
- the ‘witnessing’ spectator: the spectator of
experimental and research documentaries that seek
direct political intervention
Take my eyes: appealing to a melodrama and a witnessing spectator? Working on diff. levels:
- Didacticism: social realism - to make a problem visible in a specific social context
- Bearing witness to the women who suffer situations of domestic violence
- A melodramatic, affective mode: a film that fulfils the pleasures of narrative and resolution
A film that calls for an emotionally involved ‘spectator’ as the first step for an ethically committed one.
Toledo: spaces of tradition, spaces of change
A view of the Alcázar of Toledo,
symbol of traditional values in
Catholic Spain
Appropriating traditional
spaces:
Pilar gets a job alongside her
sister Ana at the cathedral
museum: a religious space that
bears the traces of women’s
oppression is re-mapped as a
secular space that allows Pilar
to gain independence
Trauma and melodrama
“All the afflictions and injustices of the modern, postEnlightenment world are dramatized in melodrama…
In a post-sacred world, melodrama represents one of the
most significant, and deeply symptomatic, ways we
negotiate moral feeling”
Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revisited”
in Refiguring American Film Genres. Theory
and History, p. 53, p 61