Abstract In this paper, through a close reading of the documentary film Alcaldessa (Pau Faus 2016... more Abstract In this paper, through a close reading of the documentary film Alcaldessa (Pau Faus 2016), and with reference to a selection of media texts and interviews, I examine the ways in which Ada Colau has come to represent a type of post-crisis politician that unsettled the established political elites in Spain in the years following the crisis. This mediatized version of the new mayor of Barcelona is both dependent on her femininity but also limited by it. In a reading informed by celebrity studies and accounts of our mediatized relationships with public figures I consider this as part of a global media and political landscape which constructs politicians through recourse to personality, and which foregrounds, in certain media, biography rather than policy. I examine the ways in which the (contradictory) discourses of neoliberal postfeminism are challenged when a female politician seeks an autonomous political power and continued activism which threatens to undo the politics of neoliberalism that have ‘granted’ her this platform in the first place. I will use the documentary as a case study and examine its attempts to counteract or perhaps contradict this limiting view of Ada Colau which foregrounds her gender and her motherhood, but which in doing so establishes her femininity as a pivotal element of her continued political success.
... Access Statistics: 8 Abstract Views, 0 File Downloads - Detailed Statistics. Created: Mon, 17... more ... Access Statistics: 8 Abstract Views, 0 File Downloads - Detailed Statistics. Created: Mon, 17 Oct 2011, 15:43:53 EST by Fergus Grealy on behalf of Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies - Detailed History. The University of Queensland. ...
This article examines the role of audio-visual media in the negotiation and representation of cul... more This article examines the role of audio-visual media in the negotiation and representation of cultural memory in contemporary Spain. The political silencing of one version of history during the Francoist dictatorship and the Transition to democracy sees the country battling with over 70 years of ideological manipulation of history and silencing of personal recollections. This article looks at the way in which the media are playing a significant role in sustaining, renegotiating and remediating memory in the light of the silence that precedes it. It argues that testimony, television and other popular media forms deserve sustained critical attention with regard to the creation of memory in Spain and should not be dismissed as simply vehicles for nostalgia or as spurious recreation of a brutal past but that, in line with work on the dynamics of cultural memory, should be seriously considered as part of attempts to redress the legacy of silence and mobilise a discourse of memory.
Josep Joan Bigas Luna was a Catalan artist and film director, whose disparate and prolific produc... more Josep Joan Bigas Luna was a Catalan artist and film director, whose disparate and prolific production since 1976 includes some of the most commercially and critically successful films made in Spain. His death in 2013 marked a loss to a generation of Spanish filmmakers who came of age after the dictatorship and whose works performed a provocative interrogation of what it might mean to be an artist working in a newly democratic environment. The Franco dictatorship, which endured for almost 40 years after a brutal civil war that overthrew a democratically elected government, not only trampled on the seeds of democracy and modernisation sown by the Second Republic but instilled a hegemonic version of cultural life in Spain that supported a centralist vision of national identity and a conservative Catholic version of gendered national subjects.1 To uphold such a rigid view of gender and sexuality depended on a version of the body portrayed in cultural production as clean and sanitised, conforming to the purity of established gender norms and behaving as an orderly part of the fascist society promoted by the Franco regime. For Bigas, challenging these norms and the regulation of the body that went along with them, was both playful and political and gave him the opportunity to explore the delights of gastronomy, as food and the body become in his films potent symbols of resistance and dissidence.
ABSTRACT This article analyses the video letters that were exhibited in the exhibition ‘Totes les... more ABSTRACT This article analyses the video letters that were exhibited in the exhibition ‘Totes les cartes’/‘Todas las cartas’/‘All the Letters’ at the CCCB in Barcelona and interrogates their formal properties in relation to moving images displayed in the gallery. It analyses the representation of the documentary subjects and their relationship to the film-makers that depict them—Isaki Lacuesta and Naomi Kawase, Jonas Mekas and José Luis Guerin, So Yong Kim and Fernando Eimbcke—highlighting issues of corporeality, proximity, memory and mortality and in particular how these tropes might be altered by our experience of viewing these images in the gallery. The notion of the moving image as a form of correspondence raises questions of the ethics of documentary form in the gallery and the intimacy of these individual pieces develops this notion of our embodied presence and our relationship with and responsibility to these images and the subjects of them.
The works of popular Spanish film directors Julio Medem, Juan Jose Bigas Luna, and Jose Luis Guer... more The works of popular Spanish film directors Julio Medem, Juan Jose Bigas Luna, and Jose Luis Guerin are newly appraised in relation to their engagement with alternative national and cinematic subjectivities. Their films examine the limitations of the cinematic gaze, as the author shows, highlighting the ways in which these directors make recourse to hybridity, contact, and interface to overcome the binary power dynamic previously thought to be a feature of cinema. This book explores their status as solely "Spanish" filmmakers while focusing on their diverse and immensely creative output, offering new readings that engage with current debates in visual culture surrounding psychoanalytic theory, phenomenology, and theories of documentary practice.
Despite his mainstream success and prolific production, in all his films Bigas Luna demonstrates ... more Despite his mainstream success and prolific production, in all his films Bigas Luna demonstrates a preference for the peripheral and the marginal – in terms of the subjects he depicts as well as through his representational practices. In this article I investigate the new peripheral subjects in his 2006 film Yo soy la Juani/My Name is Juani: young women on the cusp of adulthood, at the margins of Spain (Tarragona) and the edges of mainstream culture. I argue that Bigas Luna’s resistance to hegemonic power structures and his marginal politics face a new challenge in the twenty-first century as the mediatized and pervasive culture of celebrity alters our reading of his female star, Verónica Echegui, and his relationship with her. Bigas attempts in this film to present a specific version of Spanish femininity as a point of resistance to a manufactured female subjectivity yet he also imitates it and shows that these young female characters are in thrall to the culture that he claims to resist. As the film negotiates a tricky path between these media discourses and the images of resistance in the film itself the end result is an ambiguous text that neither resists nor entirely complies with a culture that commodifies the bodies and aspirations of its peripheral female stars.
In 2007 Paulo Cherchi Usai apocalyptically announced 'The Death of Cinema', a startling... more In 2007 Paulo Cherchi Usai apocalyptically announced 'The Death of Cinema', a startling reaction to a receding cultural history threatened by the loss of celluloid and the advancement of the digital. The text itself is framed by the question its author poses in the introduction,“Why is our culture so keen on accepting the questionable benefits of digital technology as the vehicle for a new sense of history?”(1) The films En construcción (José Luis Guerín, 2001), Bucarest, la memòria perduda (Albert Solé, 2008), Nedar (Carla ...
Despite his mainstream success and prolific production, in all his films Bigas Luna demonstrates ... more Despite his mainstream success and prolific production, in all his films Bigas Luna demonstrates a preference for the peripheral and the marginal – in terms of the subjects he depicts as well as through his representational practices. In this article I investigate the new peripheral subjects in his 2006 film Yo soy la Juani/My Name is Juani: young women on the cusp of adulthood, at the margins of Spain (Tarragona) and the edges of mainstream culture. I argue that Bigas Luna’s resistance to hegemonic power structures and his marginal politics face a new challenge in the twenty-first century as the mediatized and pervasive culture of celebrity alters our reading of his female star, Verónica Echegui, and his relationship with her. Bigas attempts in this film to present a specific version of Spanish femininity as a point of resistance to a manufactured female subjectivity yet he also imitates it and shows that these young female characters are in thrall to the culture that he claims to resist. As the film negotiates a tricky path between these media discourses and the images of resistance in the film itself the end result is an ambiguous text that neither resists nor entirely complies with a culture that commodifies the bodies and aspirations of its peripheral female stars.
This article examines the role of audio-visual media in the negotiation and
representation of cul... more This article examines the role of audio-visual media in the negotiation and representation of cultural memory in contemporary Spain. The political silencing of one version of history during the Francoist dictatorship and the Transition to democracy sees the country battling with over 70 years of ideological manipulation of history and silencing of personal recollections. This article looks at the way in which the media are playing a significant role in sustaining, renegotiating and remediating memory in the light of the silence that precedes it. It argues that testimony, television and other popular media forms deserve sustained critical attention with regard to the creation of memory in Spain and should not be dismissed as simply vehicles for nostalgia or as spurious recreation of a brutal past but that, in line with work on the dynamics of cultural memory, should be seriously considered as part of attempts to redress the legacy of silence and mobilise a discourse of memory.
This article analyses the video letters that were exhibited in the exhibition ‘Totes les cartes’/... more This article analyses the video letters that were exhibited in the exhibition ‘Totes les cartes’/‘Todas las cartas’/‘All the Letters’ at the CCCB in Barcelona and interrogates their formal properties in relation to moving images displayed in the gallery. It analyses the representation of the documentary subjects and their relationship to the film-makers that depict them—Isaki Lacuesta and Naomi Kawase, Jonas Mekas and José Luis Guerin, So Yong Kim and Fernando Eimbcke—highlighting issues of corporeality, proximity, memory and mortality and in particular how these tropes might be altered by our experience of viewing these images in the gallery. The notion of the moving image as a form of correspondence raises questions of the ethics of documentary form in the gallery and the intimacy of these individual pieces develops this notion of our embodied presence and our relationship with and responsibility to these images and the subjects of them.
In 2007 Paulo Cherchi Usai apocalyptically announced 'The Death of Cinema', a startling reaction ... more In 2007 Paulo Cherchi Usai apocalyptically announced 'The Death of Cinema', a startling reaction to a receding cultural history threatened by the loss of celluloid and the advancement of the digital.
Abstract In this paper, through a close reading of the documentary film Alcaldessa (Pau Faus 2016... more Abstract In this paper, through a close reading of the documentary film Alcaldessa (Pau Faus 2016), and with reference to a selection of media texts and interviews, I examine the ways in which Ada Colau has come to represent a type of post-crisis politician that unsettled the established political elites in Spain in the years following the crisis. This mediatized version of the new mayor of Barcelona is both dependent on her femininity but also limited by it. In a reading informed by celebrity studies and accounts of our mediatized relationships with public figures I consider this as part of a global media and political landscape which constructs politicians through recourse to personality, and which foregrounds, in certain media, biography rather than policy. I examine the ways in which the (contradictory) discourses of neoliberal postfeminism are challenged when a female politician seeks an autonomous political power and continued activism which threatens to undo the politics of neoliberalism that have ‘granted’ her this platform in the first place. I will use the documentary as a case study and examine its attempts to counteract or perhaps contradict this limiting view of Ada Colau which foregrounds her gender and her motherhood, but which in doing so establishes her femininity as a pivotal element of her continued political success.
... Access Statistics: 8 Abstract Views, 0 File Downloads - Detailed Statistics. Created: Mon, 17... more ... Access Statistics: 8 Abstract Views, 0 File Downloads - Detailed Statistics. Created: Mon, 17 Oct 2011, 15:43:53 EST by Fergus Grealy on behalf of Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies - Detailed History. The University of Queensland. ...
This article examines the role of audio-visual media in the negotiation and representation of cul... more This article examines the role of audio-visual media in the negotiation and representation of cultural memory in contemporary Spain. The political silencing of one version of history during the Francoist dictatorship and the Transition to democracy sees the country battling with over 70 years of ideological manipulation of history and silencing of personal recollections. This article looks at the way in which the media are playing a significant role in sustaining, renegotiating and remediating memory in the light of the silence that precedes it. It argues that testimony, television and other popular media forms deserve sustained critical attention with regard to the creation of memory in Spain and should not be dismissed as simply vehicles for nostalgia or as spurious recreation of a brutal past but that, in line with work on the dynamics of cultural memory, should be seriously considered as part of attempts to redress the legacy of silence and mobilise a discourse of memory.
Josep Joan Bigas Luna was a Catalan artist and film director, whose disparate and prolific produc... more Josep Joan Bigas Luna was a Catalan artist and film director, whose disparate and prolific production since 1976 includes some of the most commercially and critically successful films made in Spain. His death in 2013 marked a loss to a generation of Spanish filmmakers who came of age after the dictatorship and whose works performed a provocative interrogation of what it might mean to be an artist working in a newly democratic environment. The Franco dictatorship, which endured for almost 40 years after a brutal civil war that overthrew a democratically elected government, not only trampled on the seeds of democracy and modernisation sown by the Second Republic but instilled a hegemonic version of cultural life in Spain that supported a centralist vision of national identity and a conservative Catholic version of gendered national subjects.1 To uphold such a rigid view of gender and sexuality depended on a version of the body portrayed in cultural production as clean and sanitised, conforming to the purity of established gender norms and behaving as an orderly part of the fascist society promoted by the Franco regime. For Bigas, challenging these norms and the regulation of the body that went along with them, was both playful and political and gave him the opportunity to explore the delights of gastronomy, as food and the body become in his films potent symbols of resistance and dissidence.
ABSTRACT This article analyses the video letters that were exhibited in the exhibition ‘Totes les... more ABSTRACT This article analyses the video letters that were exhibited in the exhibition ‘Totes les cartes’/‘Todas las cartas’/‘All the Letters’ at the CCCB in Barcelona and interrogates their formal properties in relation to moving images displayed in the gallery. It analyses the representation of the documentary subjects and their relationship to the film-makers that depict them—Isaki Lacuesta and Naomi Kawase, Jonas Mekas and José Luis Guerin, So Yong Kim and Fernando Eimbcke—highlighting issues of corporeality, proximity, memory and mortality and in particular how these tropes might be altered by our experience of viewing these images in the gallery. The notion of the moving image as a form of correspondence raises questions of the ethics of documentary form in the gallery and the intimacy of these individual pieces develops this notion of our embodied presence and our relationship with and responsibility to these images and the subjects of them.
The works of popular Spanish film directors Julio Medem, Juan Jose Bigas Luna, and Jose Luis Guer... more The works of popular Spanish film directors Julio Medem, Juan Jose Bigas Luna, and Jose Luis Guerin are newly appraised in relation to their engagement with alternative national and cinematic subjectivities. Their films examine the limitations of the cinematic gaze, as the author shows, highlighting the ways in which these directors make recourse to hybridity, contact, and interface to overcome the binary power dynamic previously thought to be a feature of cinema. This book explores their status as solely "Spanish" filmmakers while focusing on their diverse and immensely creative output, offering new readings that engage with current debates in visual culture surrounding psychoanalytic theory, phenomenology, and theories of documentary practice.
Despite his mainstream success and prolific production, in all his films Bigas Luna demonstrates ... more Despite his mainstream success and prolific production, in all his films Bigas Luna demonstrates a preference for the peripheral and the marginal – in terms of the subjects he depicts as well as through his representational practices. In this article I investigate the new peripheral subjects in his 2006 film Yo soy la Juani/My Name is Juani: young women on the cusp of adulthood, at the margins of Spain (Tarragona) and the edges of mainstream culture. I argue that Bigas Luna’s resistance to hegemonic power structures and his marginal politics face a new challenge in the twenty-first century as the mediatized and pervasive culture of celebrity alters our reading of his female star, Verónica Echegui, and his relationship with her. Bigas attempts in this film to present a specific version of Spanish femininity as a point of resistance to a manufactured female subjectivity yet he also imitates it and shows that these young female characters are in thrall to the culture that he claims to resist. As the film negotiates a tricky path between these media discourses and the images of resistance in the film itself the end result is an ambiguous text that neither resists nor entirely complies with a culture that commodifies the bodies and aspirations of its peripheral female stars.
In 2007 Paulo Cherchi Usai apocalyptically announced 'The Death of Cinema', a startling... more In 2007 Paulo Cherchi Usai apocalyptically announced 'The Death of Cinema', a startling reaction to a receding cultural history threatened by the loss of celluloid and the advancement of the digital. The text itself is framed by the question its author poses in the introduction,“Why is our culture so keen on accepting the questionable benefits of digital technology as the vehicle for a new sense of history?”(1) The films En construcción (José Luis Guerín, 2001), Bucarest, la memòria perduda (Albert Solé, 2008), Nedar (Carla ...
Despite his mainstream success and prolific production, in all his films Bigas Luna demonstrates ... more Despite his mainstream success and prolific production, in all his films Bigas Luna demonstrates a preference for the peripheral and the marginal – in terms of the subjects he depicts as well as through his representational practices. In this article I investigate the new peripheral subjects in his 2006 film Yo soy la Juani/My Name is Juani: young women on the cusp of adulthood, at the margins of Spain (Tarragona) and the edges of mainstream culture. I argue that Bigas Luna’s resistance to hegemonic power structures and his marginal politics face a new challenge in the twenty-first century as the mediatized and pervasive culture of celebrity alters our reading of his female star, Verónica Echegui, and his relationship with her. Bigas attempts in this film to present a specific version of Spanish femininity as a point of resistance to a manufactured female subjectivity yet he also imitates it and shows that these young female characters are in thrall to the culture that he claims to resist. As the film negotiates a tricky path between these media discourses and the images of resistance in the film itself the end result is an ambiguous text that neither resists nor entirely complies with a culture that commodifies the bodies and aspirations of its peripheral female stars.
This article examines the role of audio-visual media in the negotiation and
representation of cul... more This article examines the role of audio-visual media in the negotiation and representation of cultural memory in contemporary Spain. The political silencing of one version of history during the Francoist dictatorship and the Transition to democracy sees the country battling with over 70 years of ideological manipulation of history and silencing of personal recollections. This article looks at the way in which the media are playing a significant role in sustaining, renegotiating and remediating memory in the light of the silence that precedes it. It argues that testimony, television and other popular media forms deserve sustained critical attention with regard to the creation of memory in Spain and should not be dismissed as simply vehicles for nostalgia or as spurious recreation of a brutal past but that, in line with work on the dynamics of cultural memory, should be seriously considered as part of attempts to redress the legacy of silence and mobilise a discourse of memory.
This article analyses the video letters that were exhibited in the exhibition ‘Totes les cartes’/... more This article analyses the video letters that were exhibited in the exhibition ‘Totes les cartes’/‘Todas las cartas’/‘All the Letters’ at the CCCB in Barcelona and interrogates their formal properties in relation to moving images displayed in the gallery. It analyses the representation of the documentary subjects and their relationship to the film-makers that depict them—Isaki Lacuesta and Naomi Kawase, Jonas Mekas and José Luis Guerin, So Yong Kim and Fernando Eimbcke—highlighting issues of corporeality, proximity, memory and mortality and in particular how these tropes might be altered by our experience of viewing these images in the gallery. The notion of the moving image as a form of correspondence raises questions of the ethics of documentary form in the gallery and the intimacy of these individual pieces develops this notion of our embodied presence and our relationship with and responsibility to these images and the subjects of them.
In 2007 Paulo Cherchi Usai apocalyptically announced 'The Death of Cinema', a startling reaction ... more In 2007 Paulo Cherchi Usai apocalyptically announced 'The Death of Cinema', a startling reaction to a receding cultural history threatened by the loss of celluloid and the advancement of the digital.
The works of popular Spanish film directors Julio Medem, Juan José Bigas Luna, and José Luis Guer... more The works of popular Spanish film directors Julio Medem, Juan José Bigas Luna, and José Luis Guerín are newly appraised in relation to their engagement with alternative national and cinematic subjectivities. Their films examine the limitations of the cinematic gaze, as the author shows, highlighting the ways in which these directors make recourse to hybridity, contact, and interface to overcome the binary power dynamic previously thought to be a feature of cinema. This book explores their status as solely “Spanish” filmmakers while focusing on their diverse and immensely creative output, offering new readings that engage with current debates in visual culture surrounding psychoanalytic theory, phenomenology, and theories of documentary practice.
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representation of cultural memory in contemporary Spain. The political silencing
of one version of history during the Francoist dictatorship and the Transition to
democracy sees the country battling with over 70 years of ideological manipulation
of history and silencing of personal recollections. This article looks at the way in which
the media are playing a significant role in sustaining, renegotiating and remediating
memory in the light of the silence that precedes it. It argues that testimony, television
and other popular media forms deserve sustained critical attention with regard to
the creation of memory in Spain and should not be dismissed as simply vehicles for
nostalgia or as spurious recreation of a brutal past but that, in line with work on the
dynamics of cultural memory, should be seriously considered as part of attempts to
redress the legacy of silence and mobilise a discourse of memory.
representation of cultural memory in contemporary Spain. The political silencing
of one version of history during the Francoist dictatorship and the Transition to
democracy sees the country battling with over 70 years of ideological manipulation
of history and silencing of personal recollections. This article looks at the way in which
the media are playing a significant role in sustaining, renegotiating and remediating
memory in the light of the silence that precedes it. It argues that testimony, television
and other popular media forms deserve sustained critical attention with regard to
the creation of memory in Spain and should not be dismissed as simply vehicles for
nostalgia or as spurious recreation of a brutal past but that, in line with work on the
dynamics of cultural memory, should be seriously considered as part of attempts to
redress the legacy of silence and mobilise a discourse of memory.