KATHLEEN M. VERNON

Reading Hollywood in/and Spanish Cinema: From Trade Wars to Transculturation

When one talks of cinema, one talks of American cinema. The influence of cinema is the influence of American cinema.... For this reason, every discussion of cinema made outside Hollywood must begin with Hollywood.—Glauber Rocha

Mixed in with 1993's steady stream of press reports on the resurgence of nationalist aggressions in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union came a series of news stories noting the outbreak of a less violent, perhaps, but to some commentators equally troubling, form of Western European cultural nationalism provoked by proposals to include the audiovisual sector—that is, film, television, and radio productions—in the upcoming international free trade accord known as GATT. Though the talk of economic and artistic crises among European national cinemas was nothing new, the combined stimuli of the GATT threat to eliminate various national subsidy policies and screen quotas that had kept French, Italian, and Spanish cinemas (barely) afloat against the ever rising tide of a U.S.-dominated multinational film industry and the impending European release of the Spielberg behemoth Jurassic Park provoked a vitriolic war of words between a number of influential European directors and their American counterparts that spilled from the pages of the trade publication Variety to the foreign affairs coverage of the New York Times.

Although this essay in some sense represents a response to the current crisis as well as to its historical roots, it is by no means a study of the influence or, rather, domination of Hollywood cinema over the European or Spanish film industries. In the case of Spain, that story has been told in detailed economic and political terms in books such as Santiago Pozo's La industria del cine en España, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's La penetración americana en España and, most recently, in the epilogue to Marsha Kinder's Blood Cinema. Nor is it, strictly speaking, a study of the influence of the representational modes of Hollywood, understood somewhat monolithically as "classic narrative cinema," on both cinematic creation and reception in Spain. Rather than the "real" of American cultural-economic hegemony, I am interested here in the strategie uses of American film in constructing an alternative "imaginary" in opposition to dominant cultural practices in Spain.

Thus, I base my study in the analysis of the intertextual presence of Hollywood cinema, in the form of "direct quotations" or film clips, in a selected number of Spanish films. I will argue that these transnational juxtapositions have provided a space in which to construct an oppositional imaginary of resistance, initially against attempts by an official Francoist cinema to impose a self-serving national imaginary modeled by the repressive religious and militaristic values of the regime, and that later, after Franco's death, this interface of cultures and discourses continues to offer an opportunity to speak from (and listen to) the margins, to question the dominant fictions that have shaped Spaniards' views of their present as well as their past. The potential repertory of Spanish films that employ these intertextual quotes includes, surely not coincidentally, some of the most historically and aesthetically significant films made in Spain since the end of the Civil War: from Lorenzo Llobet Gràcia's Vida en sombras (Life in Shadows, 1947-48), Luis García Berlanga's Bienvenido, Mr. Marshall (Welcome, Mr. Marshall, 1952), and Víctor Erice's El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive, 1973) and El sur (The South, 1983) to Pedro Almodávar's ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto! (What Have I Done to Deserve This!, 1984), Matador (1986), Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, 1988), Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón's Demonios en el jardín (Demons in the Garden, 1982), Pilar Miró's Beltenebros (1992), and Francisco Regueiro's Madregilda (Mother Gilda, 1993). And their respective American intertexts, Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1941), genre films (Western and film noir), Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931), Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943), Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan, 1961), Duel in the Sun (Charles Vidor, 1946), Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954), and Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946), for their part, provide a cannily representative roster of classic Hollywood film history.

One possible, and intended, consequence of this type of approach to what have generally been treated as closed systems, discreet national cinemas—Spanish versus American—is to challenge our understanding of the way global mass culture operates today and thus to restructure the terms of the debate. Whereas trade war rhetoric reaffirms the center-periphery model of American cultural colonialism, the focus I am proposing seeks to foreground a process of transcultural exchange, producing new readings that question the underlying ideological assumptions of both cultures. My intention is to read these films in their intertextuality as instances of a process of "semiotic layering," a concept I borrow from Maureen Turim, who defines it as "the accrual and transformation of meaning associated with an artifact as it passes through history, or as it is presented in different versions." The advantage of this notion of semiotic layering over more familiar accounts of literary and filmic intertextuality is that the former explicitly allows for the intervention of extratextual discourses and effects of reception,...