Chapter 11

Admiring European Films: Culture and Commerce

In This Chapter

Defining European cinema nationally and transnationally

Making major advances in European film language

Contrasting popular and art cinema

Many people in the US and the UK see European cinema as being intellectual, arty and difficult, and it can be all these things (the kinds of films that Europe exports often are). But if you take a closer look at the sort of films that people in Paris, Berlin or Madrid watch (and sometimes make), you see that European cinema also contains silly comedies, exhilarating thrillers and glossy star vehicles. Just like Hollywood in fact – though sometimes with exotic settings and sexier dialogue.

In this chapter I spend time on the best-known intellectual and art-cinema movements, including Italian Neorealism and German Expressionism, but I also look at popular genre films and exploitation cinema. You get to meet some familiar and less familiar film stars, and examine the workings of the industry including national film policy and international film festivals.

Answering a Not-So-Simple Question: What Is European Cinema, Anyway?

The most obvious definition of European cinema is films produced by the countries within Europe. Simple, right? Well, not really. To begin with, you have to address the issue of which countries belong within the constantly changing and shifting borders of the European continent. Is Turkey in Europe or Asia? How about Russia? Then you also have to consider the fact that Europe as a political entity comprises other groupings such as the financially integrated Eurozone and the larger European Union. Not to mention the fact that co-production arrangements mean that several nations (often within and outside of Europe) produce many European films.

If simply counting the number of films made within the region doesn’t do the situation justice, how can anyone conceive of national or regional cinema instead? As Andrew Higson discusses in an often-cited film studies article from 1989, people use the term national cinema to mean three different things:

• The film industry of a particular country that produces movies for audiences to consume at home or abroad: National governments most often use this model to design policies that protect or promote domestic production.
• The kind of films that a country produces, the themes these films explore and how they conceive of national identity: This text-based approach is common within film studies (see Chapters 10 and 12 of this book), but it can also be unfairly selective about which films qualify as being nationally significant.
• The ideas of art over commerce and of personal, auteur projects over mass-produced movies: The problem with this critical focus on art cinema is that it results in too little attention being paid to popular films that European audiences actually watch.

Higson recommends that film studies shift its focus away from film production to include film consumption. In this sense, all films distributed and enjoyed by audiences within a particular country are part of its national cinema culture. For example, one important question facing the national cinemas of the former Eastern-Bloc countries (for instance Poland or what used to be East Germany) is the effect of the sudden rise of Hollywood imports in the 1990s. If you look only at local film production, you don’t get the bigger picture on this issue. See the nearby sidebar ‘Raising the Iron (Cinema) Curtain’ for more.

One of the advantages of a consumption-led approach is that is avoids the need to give films a clear-cut national identity – because in reality, many films are products of several nations working together. Film financing and co-production arrangements are particularly complex across Europe, where pan-European structures bring together nations of different sizes and with different agendas.

For all these reasons many film scholars now discuss European film-making as a transnational cinema, where borders between countries have become increasingly insignificant. However, this approach makes structuring an analysis involving many countries rather tricky. So, in the interests of clarity I have used a traditional national categorisation in this chapter, but have tried to emphasise areas of crossover and exchange wherever possible. The countries I focus upon – France, Germany, Italy and Spain – are the largest film producers and the most historically significant cinemas from the European region.

Making a Rendezvous with French Cinema

Although the French probably didn’t invent film – Mr Edison has the strongest claim on that front – they almost certainly invented cinema, in the sense of projected moving images. They were definitely the first to industrialise film-making fully, because Pathé Frères was the global leader in world film distribution long before the Hollywood majors got into their stride. The French have had a natural affinity with cinema ever since.

In this section I guide you through the key moments of French cinema history, check out how the French have defended their film industry from Hollywood and don my tux for a trip to the Cannes Film Festival.

Travelling from poetic realism to new extremism

Trying to get to know the output of a prolific national cinema like that of France can feel daunting. If you’re a film enthusiast, you may have seen a good number of recent French films and maybe even a few of the classics. But putting it all into context can be challenging.

Luckily, the history of European cinema tends to be constructed out of movements: moments when everything comes together to produce a distinctive body of films.

The preponderance of movements is partly because production levels in Europe can be sporadic, but also because critics love finding the current hot directors or uncovering hidden gems from the past. Either way, you can’t claim to know much about French cinema unless you recognise the most important movements or periods. The following are good places to start:

• Belle époque: From the beginnings of cinema to World War I, France led the way. The Lumière brothers ran public screenings as early as 1895, and by 1910 Pathé Frères was a global film distributor. Georges Méliès produced spectacular fantasies (see Chapter 5), Alice Guy-Blaché was a pioneering female director (check out Chapter 19) and thrilling crime serials such as Fantômas (1913–4) entertained the world.
• Poetic realism: Critics applied this term to a group of popular and well-received French films of the 1930s, linked by a stylistic darkness and pessimistic narrative tone. Key examples include Jean Vigo’s dreamlike Zero de Conduite (Zero for Conduct) (1933); Jean Renoir’s dark comedy of manners La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game) (1939); and Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise) (1945), often voted the greatest French film of all time.
• Nouvelle vague: The original ‘New Wave’ broke in France in 1959. A group of critics and directors with a passion of cinema rallied against so-called quality films to produce fresh and experimental movies full of youthful vigour. Check out the freewheeling spontaneity of François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (Jules and Jim) (1962), the choppy jump-cuts of Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless) (1960) and the Hitchcockian chills of Claude Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge (literally, Handsome Serge) (1958).
• Cinéma du look: A glossy, stylised and genre-driven set of films from the 1980s to the 2000s. They foreground visual spectacle and advertising influences the colour, lighting and composition as much as film. Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Betty Blue (37°2 le matin) (1986) was responsible for millions of posters on students’ walls, Leos Carax’s Les Amants du Pont Neuf (1991) launched the career of Juliette Binoche and Luc Besson’s Nikita (1990) gave audiences a stylish and deadly hit-woman.
• New extremism: A brutally violent and sexually explicit set of films made around the start of the 21st century by a group of male and female directors in France (and elsewhere). Beware, these films aren’t for the faint-hearted. If you think you can take it, try Gasper Noé’s Irréversible (2002), a non-linear rape revenge narrative, or Catherine Breillat’s Romance (Romance X) (1999), which shows porn actor Rocco Siffredi doing what he’s normally paid to do.

Making an exception for French cinema

The French have always had a love/hate relationship with Hollywood. The critics of the influential French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma were basically responsible for the idea that critics and scholars should take Hollywood cinema seriously. They made auteurs out of Charlie Chaplin, Howard Hawks and John Ford (see Chapter 14) while dismissing their own directors. Bizarrely, serious French cinéastes also love daft American comedians such as Jerry Lewis and Jim Carrey. But does this mean that Hollywood is welcome to dominate French cinema screens? Mais non!

The French are adamant in defending their precious cinema culture from too many outside influences. Since the 1990s, they’ve expressed this protection in terms of l’exception culturelle (the cultural exception), which French film-makers use to justify film policies during trade negotiations. Whenever the Americans cry foul against restrictive quotas or unfair advantages for subsidised film, the French call upon their exception, often backing it up with the imperative to protect the French language itself.

Why does the French government feel the need to protect its cinema – and what measures does it use?

• In 1928, the French film industry had all but disappeared, decimated by World War I and American and German imports. As a result the government introduced an import/export ratio to benefit French producers. It tightened up this measure over the coming decades, specifying a maximum number of foreign imports per year.
• After the complete isolation from American movies imposed by World War II, an exhibition quota was put in place, forcing cinemas to show French films for 4 weeks out of every 13.
• The Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC) was also established following World War II. This film body is responsible for stimulating film production and promoting film heritage and education. The CNC financially supports all French films produced via a levy on box-office receipts, as well as offering larger loans to selected high-quality or otherwise valuable projects.

In theory, these film policies and others assure the health of the domestic film industry by reducing competition from imported titles, providing a guaranteed place on local cinema screens and assisting with the difficult early stages of film finance. In practice, however, they rarely seem to work exactly as planned. For example, the French quota system struggled from its inception in the late 1920s due to the rapid expansion of cinema screens during the following decade. Good quality French films simply didn’t exist in sufficient quantities to fill the required proportion of an expanding number of screens.

Even if its film policies don’t always have the planned effect, the French film industry today is in relatively good health. The French produce more films per year than any other European country and have higher cinema attendances than at any point since 1946. A recent run of highly successful French films including The Intouchables (Intouchables) (2011) has put the French share of box-office receipts up to almost 50 per cent. This figure is way above the share of the domestic market captured by other European nations, including Italy (around 30 per cent) and Spain (only around 12 per cent). So the French are doing something right.

Appreciating a glamorous business: The Cannes Film Festival

Each May, a strange cinematic pilgrimage occurs. Practically the entire film industry dusts off its tuxedos and gowns and jets off to the south of France for two weeks of back-to-back film screenings and glamorous photo opportunities. Cannes media coverage is pure glamour, as the biggest stars and directors dazzle fans on the famous Croisette runway, and films compete for the main prize: the Palme d’Or. But behind the scenes, the Cannes Film Festival is about cold hard cash: deals are done, contacts are made and rooms are ‘worked’ to within an inch of their lives.

Behind all this frivolity, you can forget that the major European film festivals grew out of the international tensions of World War II. The Venice Film Festival came before Cannes, launching in 1932 as fascism was rising across Europe. Not surprisingly, German and Italian films tended to win the awards, but when Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion (Grand Illusion) (1937) lost out to films made by Nazi Minister Goebbels and Mussolini’s son, the French were understandably outraged.

Their response, the inaugural Cannes Festival of 1939, was unfortunately timed, running for only one day before the outbreak of war shut it down. After the war, the Cannes Festival played an important role in rebuilding the infrastructure of the French film industry. It was also vital in building the reputations and launching the films of the French New Wave and the other movements of European art cinema (see the earlier ‘Travelling from poetic realism to new extremism’ section).

Here are just a few of Cannes’s defining moments over the years:

• 1953: Nubile French star Brigitte Bardot poses for photographs on the beach at Cannes, cementing the Festival’s star-making status.
• 1959: François Truffaut’s film debut Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows) (1959) wins Best Director, launching the French New Wave.
• 1968: Directors Louis Malle and Jean-Luc Godard bring the Festival to a halt when they protest in support of the student uprisings in Paris.
• 1993: Jane Campion is the first female director to win the Palme d’Or for The Piano. In 2014 she returned to head the festival jury.
• 2004: Michael Moore wins the top prize for Farenheit 9/11, the first documentary to win for almost 50 years. The French never miss an opportunity to antagonise US politicians.

In today’s film industry, festivals play several important roles. They’re fantastic publicity for films and film-makers: many reputations and careers have been built out of the exposure and prestige the festivals can generate. The major festivals (Cannes, Berlin, Sundance) are like huge conferences for industry folk and have marketplaces where people finance and sell films into distribution. Smaller festivals can help regenerate local arts activity or tourism, or even act as a forum, drawing attention to political issues (for example, look up the lively gay, lesbian and queer cinema festival circuit). Finally, as the number of festivals continues to grow, you can consider the festival circuit as an alternative means of distributing films and reaching audiences.

Stepping Out of the Darkness: German Cinema

For a brief period between the two world wars, German cinema came close to rivalling Hollywood as an industrial-scale dream machine – and far surpassing it in terms of artistic ambition. The films of German Expressionism employed stylised set design, shadowy lighting and broken narratives, and were widely admired and imitated across the world.

Germany lost most of its film-making talent during the tragic years of Nazi rule, but by the 1970s it found a new voice. Since reunification of East and West Germany in 1990, many German film-makers have faced and explored the darkness of their recent history on the cinema screen.

Lurking in the shadows: German Expressionism

Many of the most vivid and unforgettable images of early cinema come from German Expressionist films. The horrible shadow of Count Orlok the vampire creeping up the stairs to feed (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (Nosferatu: eine Symphonie des Grauens) (1922)), the angular, disjointed world of Dr Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari) (1920)) and the beautiful but deadly female cyborg from Metropolis (1927) were all brought to life during this amazingly fertile period. The influence of this moment upon the development of cinema as an art form is immense, especially because many of its film-makers and technicians were forced to leave Germany soon afterwards to work across Europe and in Hollywood.

Expressionist is one of those terms that more pretentious film critics and bloggers love to throw around without always understanding its meanings. Don’t fall into this trap. Here’s a solid film studies definition:

• Expressionism was a broader artistic movement that flourished in Germany in the early 20th century, including painters, writers and even architects. One way to think of it is as the opposite of Impressionism, which is concerned with surface reality, whereas Expressionism sees the world through the filter of human perception and emotion.
• Expressionism in film creates stylised worlds using clearly artificial, often geometric set design, elaborate costuming and unnatural makeup. The cinematography emphasises bold contrasts of dark shadows and bright highlights. The acting style is heightened and (to modern tastes) rather theatrical.
• Expressionist film protagonists experience extreme psychological states, which are reflected in their strange environments. Key themes are madness, criminality and the fracturing of identity.

Film scholars have argued that a conflict between traditional notions of German identity and modernity characterise Expressionist cinema, embodied by machines and technology. Nowhere is this conflict more evident than in Fritz Lang’s proto-sci-fi Metropolis (1927). Its convoluted story boils down to two elements. The first is a traditional love story: boy meets girl, girl gives her face to an evil cyborg, boy watches evil cyborg getting burnt at the stake. The second has something to do with man versus machine in a huge futuristic factory. It’s seriously confusing.

Do watch Metropolis: it has so much going on that you’re unlikely to notice that the story doesn’t make sense. The enormous sets of beautiful art deco machines are crammed with thousands of marching extras (see Figure 11-1). The gleaming cityscapes are clear influences on the visual design of later sci-fi films, particularly Blade Runner (1982), and the transformation sequence that creates the woman/robot was endlessly copied in Hollywood horror movies such as Frankenstein (1931). Metropolis throws so many ideas at the screen at such a bewildering rate that you can forgive a bit of incoherence.

Recreating (New) German Cinema

World War II caused the majority of German film-makers to emigrate, split the country into two halves and destroyed international demand for German films. East German film-makers inherited the country’s formerly glorious UFA studios (which produced Lang’s Metropolis in 1927), but the Soviet-aligned Stasi secret police assumed control of all production. In West Germany, genre cinema recovered to some extent, with the nostalgic and rural Heimatfilm (literally ‘homeland-film’) remaining popular, but underlying economic problems and rapidly falling cinema attendances brought the industry to the brink of collapse by the 1960s.

If ever a national cinema needed a radical break with the past, it was post-war Germany’s – not least because the question of German national identity remained a toxic and largely taboo issue. So, in 1962, with New Waves breaking all over Europe, German film-makers got together to produce a bold statement of intent for a new national cinema. The Oberhausen Manifesto called for a new method of film production, one free from the conventional film industry and the outside interests of commerce.

As with many political manifestos, the detail of how film-makers would achieve their goals was somewhat lacking. But its signatories succeeded in lobbying the West German government to set up a funding stream driven by artistic impulse rather than commercial demand. Thus New German Cinema was born. Here are its main leaders:

• Wim Wenders: His accessible fiction films rework American genres such as the road movie or the crime thriller. His 1987 fantasy Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin) was a crossover hit internationally, and he’s also made successful documentaries.
• Rainer Werner Fassbinder: The most abrasive and individual of the New German Cinema directors. Fassbinder was openly gay and worked prolifically to produce avant-garde reinterpretations of the Hollywood melodrama. For example Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf) (1974) is effectively a remake of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955). He died in 1982 from a drug overdose.
• Werner Herzog: His films of the New German Cinema period are grandiose epics starring his volatile best friend and occasional enemy Klaus Kinski, including a remake of Expressionist classic Nosferatu: The Vampyre (1979). He remains an important voice in world cinema, working between fiction and documentary films (see the section ‘Weighing Documentary Ethics’ in chapter 8), and has probably the best accent in cinema.

Melding Style and Substance: Italian Cinema

If Italian cinema was to be remembered only for the handful of revolutionary Neorealist films made after the devastation of World War II, it would still be one of the most influential in the history of world cinema. But Italy has much more to offer, including a rich tradition of popular genre film-making, autori (Italian for auteurs) such as Federico Fellini, eccentric exploitation movies and comedy stars such as Toto, who’s a comedy saint in his home nation but virtually unknown overseas.

Finding heroes on the street: Neorealism

Neorealism means ‘new realism’, and the term was first applied to film-makers working in the devastation of post-World War II Italy. All realist movements claim to be more realistic than what came before, and so what were the Neorealists reacting against?

Before Neorealism, Italian cinema was known for historical spectacles such as Cabiria (1914), and, after 1922, Benito Mussolini’s Fascist government engineered a safe and uncontroversial genre cinema. The period of post-war reconstruction saw Italian film-makers and audiences keen to overthrow the past and re-embrace the world.

As its name suggests, Neorealism was a new form of realism, but it shares some of the stylistic characteristics and concerns of earlier films, particularly the poetic realism of French cinema during the 1930s (see ‘Travelling from poetic realism to new extremism’ earlier in this chapter). Unlike the bleak pessimism of earlier realist forms, however, the Italian writers and theorists who contributed to Neorealism were driven by a more optimistic humanism, which emphasises emotional connections between people as a force of narrative and historical change. Marxist ideals, such as giving voice to the repressed proletariat (see Chapter 13), and Catholic notions of guilt and redemption also have a place.

The key films of Italian Neorealism include the following:

• Ossessione (Obsession) (1943): An uncredited adaptation of the hard-boiled novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. Director Luchino Visconti shot this steamy tale of adultery and murder entirely on location in Italy’s Po Valley, giving it a similar gritty look to later Neorealist films. The Fascist regime hated it so much that they destroyed the original negative, but Visconti saved one print and his film for later generations.
• Roma, città aperta (Rome Open City) (1945): Roberto Rossellini’s tale of heroism among the Italian resistance movement was an enormous popular hit at home and won international prizes including the Palme d’Or at Cannes. The film’s an exciting thriller with established stars, including comedian Aldo Fabrizi, and features the debut of fiery Anna Magnani who became one of Italy’s best-loved actresses. Its championing of the common man (and woman) makes it a Neorealist classic.
• Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) (1948): A moving fable of poverty on the streets of Rome and probably the most famous Neorealist film. Director Vittorio de Sica used non-professional actors for a naturalistic feel, although Neorealist theorist Cesare Zavattini’s screenplay is tight and controlled (the nearby sidebar ‘Neorealism according to Zavattini’ contains more on Zavattini’s theories).
• La Strada (The Road) (1954): Federico Fellini developed his film-making craft with Rossellini, and his first international success displays elements of Neorealist style, including location shooting and a narrative interest in the margins of society. But La Strada also has a fantastical quality that foreshadows Fellini’s later magical-realist films. A wonderful, childlike performance from Fellini’s wife Giulietta Masina, whose face is as expressive as any great silent comedian, drives the film.

The importance of Neorealism for international cinema was profound. Many of the films associated with the movement benefitted from critical attention gained through the European film festival circuit, which developed around the wartime period. Popular films such as de Sica’s Ladri di biciclette received very wide international exposure and influenced later New Waves across the world, including Britain, Brazil and India (check out Chapter 12).

A good recent point of comparison is with Iranian cinema since 1997, with directors including Abbas Kiarostami (see Chapter 19) producing films that bear comparison with the best of Neorealism in terms of style and ethos.

Featuring swords, sandals and naughty nuns: Italian genre and exploitation films

The Neorealist directors won international renown, but they didn’t always set the box office on fire at home in Italy. The movement did, however, provide a confidence and global profile for Italian cinema, which grew during the decades after World War II.

Although the deposed Fascist regime had restricted the freedom of cinema, it had at least provided a strong infrastructure for film-makers, particularly the studio set up at Cinecittà just outside Rome. Although damaged during the war and used for a time as a camp for displaced persons, by the 1950s it had been rebuilt and become a favourite shooting location for Hollywood epics such as Ben-Hur (1959).

But not only international productions filled Cinecittà’s sound stages. Italian cinema also had a strong tradition of genre film-making that was enormously popular at home and (in some cases) abroad. Here are the most significant genres:

• Peplum films: Named after the distinctive toga costumes their stars wore, these ‘sword and sandals’ movies were lively and light-hearted adaptations of classical mythology boasting scantily clad muscle men and buxom beauties fighting mythical creatures of all shapes and sizes. They were relatively cheap to make and sold well overseas: for example: Le Fatiche di Ercole (Hercules) (1958) starring American body-builder (and former Mr Universe) Steve Reeves.
• Commedia all’italiana: Literally ‘comedy Italian style’ – with a dark satirical bite. International hits include Divorzio all’Italiana (Divorce, Italian Style) (1961) starring Marcello Mastroianni as a Sicilian nobleman who forces his wife into adultery so that he can murder her; Una Giornata Particolare (A Special Day) (1977) again featuring Mastroianni playing against type as a gay man; and Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto (which becomes a much more concise Swept Away in English) (1974), remade in 2002 by Madonna to absolutely no acclaim whatsoever.
• Spaghetti westerns: Between 1963 and 1973 more than 400 westerns were made in Italy, driven by the international success of Sergio Leone’s trilogy of films starring Clint Eastwood. Leone took elements of the classic Hollywood western and added gratuitous violence, stylised close-ups and Ennio Morricone’s atmospheric music.
• Giallo films: Named after the yellow cover of pulp-fiction books published in Italy, these schlocky thrillers or gory, visually ornate horror films pre-date the American slasher movie. See the films of Mario Bava or Dario Argento.

Within commercial film industries worldwide, the boundary can blur between fairly respectable genre film-making and the rather less reputable exploitation cinema: low-budget films with an emphasis on spectacle, sex or violence. For example, 1970s Italian cinema featured a distinctive cycle of films referred to as ‘convent-sexy’ in their home market and ‘nunsploitation’ movies by cult-film fans. You can guess what happens in these films from their (English) titles: Sinful Nuns of St Valentine (1974), Behind Convent Walls (1977) or – best of all – Killer Nun (1978). It may be tough to take such trashy films seriously, but they can be read as a kind of safety valve for a deeply Catholic culture that routinely represses female sexuality.

Meeting the prince of laughter: Totò

Think ‘Italian movie stars’ and you probably see a mental image of sultry Sophia Loren or suave Marcello Mastroianni. You probably don’t picture a skinny, aging comedian with sad eyes and an unnerving puppet-like quality. Well, you may after reading this section.

Totò was an unlikely looking movie star, but for a period between the 1940s and 1960s he was the biggest draw in the Italian film industry. Italians continue to remember Totò fondly, and his films play regularly on Italian TV. Yet practically nobody outside of Italy has heard of him.

Totò is the stage name of Antonio De Curtis, who was born into poverty in Naples. His tough start in life and his strong connection to the Neapolitan region are important elements of his star image or persona (see Chapter 3). On screen, the Totò character is usually poor, hungry and scheming, but fundamentally honest. The trademarks of his performance style are physical dexterity, a talent for mimicry and impersonation, and an odd, disjointed walk that brings to mind a puppet or marionette.

Totò made more than 100 movies during his long career. Among the best known are the following:

• Totò a colori (Totò in Colour) (1952): The first Italian film made in colour was such a big hit that it still features among the top-grossing films of all time in the Italian market when adjusted for inflation.
• L’Oro di Napoli (The Gold of Naples) (1954): Made up of six stories set in Naples, the hometown of Totò and the film’s director Vittorio de Sica. As a sign of de Sica’s international profile, the film was entered into competition at the Cannes Film Festival.
• Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows) (1966): Directed by radical poet and film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini, this film illustrates Totò’s ability to unite low and high culture. It’s also a showcase for his physical skills, as Totò hops around like the titular sparrow with remarkable agility for a comedian of his advanced years.

Given Totò’s special status in Italian popular culture and his apparent lack of appeal outside his home nation, he arguably fulfilled a valuable social function for Italian audiences. In a country where Catholicism still exerted control over cinema through censorship, he was favoured by the Vatican as the embodiment of a traditional type of Italian-ness for most of his career. For audiences living through post-war reconstruction, Totò must have been a reassuring figure, an emblem of tradition in the face of rapid social change.

Watching Freedom Explode: Spanish Cinema

Spanish cinema-goers represent one of the largest national groupings within Europe, and Spanish-speaking people worldwide add further potential audiences for Spanish films. But the country’s film industry remains somewhat of a poor relation to those of France, Germany and Italy, and the box-office takings captured by local films in Spain are only around 12 per cent, which is among the lowest in Europe.

For much of its history, Spanish film was doubly marginalised, left out of the Hollywood mainstream and the exclusive European art-cinema club. This section considers why this is the case.

Considering Fascism and Catholicism

The Spanish film industry struggled while its French and Italian counterparts thrived for several key reasons:

• During cinema’s early years, Spain was economically unable to sustain large-scale film production and instead relied on imports from its neighbouring countries. Historians estimate that only six fiction films were made in Spain from 1896 and 1905, compared to hundreds from its European neighbours.
• By the 1930s Spain had developed a genre cinema, focused upon the distinctively Spanish folk tales or españoladas, full of bull-fighting and flamenco dancing. But the brutally violent Civil War of 1936–9 and then the immediate onset of World War II destroyed the Spanish economy, and the country took much longer to recover than other regions of Europe.
• General Franco’s fascist government maintained power for more than a third of the 20th century (1939–75) and also kept strict control over Spanish culture including cinema. The Catholic Church joined Franco’s censors to exercise one of the most repressive regimes of recent history.

The fascist government and the Church imposed their control over cinema in three important ways:

• Censorship: The government and the Church had to approve screenplays, which along with the finished films were often cut or altered. Decision-making was arbitrary but without appeal. When official guidelines were put in place in 1962, film-makers were at least able to work out ways around them.
• Compulsory dubbing: Foreign films had to be dubbed into Spanish, which became a subtle form of censorship. For example, the Spanish dub of John Ford’s Mogambo (1953) turned a married couple into brother and sister to legitimise the wife’s adultery. Although forced dubbing was intended to protect the Spanish language, the move only strengthened the audience appeal of Hollywood cinema.
• State newsreels: Cinemas were legally obliged to begin every film programme with an official newsreel from the Franco government, which were a mix of explicit propaganda and other subjects including sport and entertainment. Cinemas were unable to screen supplementary material such as shorts or animation, and so film-making training suffered as a result.

Returning of the repressed: Pedro Almódovar

Historians often discuss what happened in Spain and with Spanish cinema after Franco’s death in 1975 in psychoanalytical terms. Sigmund Freud claimed that humans can never fully repress their darkest and most secret desires, because in the end they emerge more powerful than ever (see Chapter 13). In the same way, the conventional history goes that after years of repressive fascist rule, Spain entered a period of non-stop sex, drugs and rock and roll.

Of course this behaviour was literally true for only a small section of the Spanish population living in wealthy urban areas. But one of the reasons why this image of a hedonistic Spain became so widespread is that it provides the compelling setting for many of the early films of Spain’s first internationally recognised auteur (who didn’t have to work abroad): Pedro Almodóvar. For many audiences outside Spain, Almodóvar is Spanish cinema.

In fact Almodóvar’s earliest experiments with film-making happened well before the liberalisation of Spanish society in the early 1980s. Moving from rural La Mancha to Madrid in 1969, he became part of an underground scene of artists, musicians and other radical types who inspired many of his eccentric characters, as well as providing his early film’s recognisable punky aesthetic. He’s a self-taught film-maker who gradually replaced the rough edges of his early work with an accomplished style.

Almodóvar’s films are characterised by the following concerns:

• A female perspective: Many of Almodóvar’s stories are based around the experiences of strong female characters, often played by his favourite actresses Carmen Maura and Penelope Cruz. For example, Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) (1988) was his breakthrough international hit. His films about men, such as Carne trémula (Live Flesh) (1997), tend to be less well received.
• Queer as folk: Almodóvar is openly gay and many of his films feature assertive, well-rounded gay characters. Film critics and academics, however, often discuss his films from a broader queer perspective (see Chapter 15) due to their fluidity around gender. For example, La ley del Deseo (Law of Desire) (1987) is about a gay film director whose brother is a transgender lesbian.
• Expressionistic visuals: Although Almodóvar has worked across a variety of visual styles, he’s best known for his brightly coloured compositions achieved with bold décor and costuming. Credit here also goes to his regular art director Antxon Gomez and cinematographer José Luis Alcaine.

Although Almodóvar is certainly one of the most respected directors in international cinema, as his many prizes and accolades demonstrate, several film scholars have noted an ambivalence in his reputation in his native Spain. He has suffered a backlash, with some critics tiring of his frivolity and calling for a more serious engagement with Spain’s difficult recent history. His dominant status can also tend to eclipse other ambitious Spanish film-makers such as Alejandro Amenábar or Julio Medem. Perhaps one director can’t bear the weight of an entire national cinema alone, but Almodóvar wears his responsibilities lightly and with charismatic flair.