This study demonstrates the crucial importance of Hitchcock to the development of cinema in Spain and Latin America far beyond what has been acknowledged before. Five of the most successful filmmakers in the Spanish-speaking world, as defined by awards and box office returns, modelled their transnational careers on Hitchcock’s and mined the aesthetics of his films in their own. Several themes are also apparent in what Hitchcock distinctively represented in Spain and Latin America.
First, as his films premiered and also as the five filmmakers studied here reinterpreted them in recent decades, Hitchcock meant technical and artistic innovation, synonymous with modernity and progress. His successful crossover from a more marginal national European cinema to Hollywood supremely illustrates this model. In Spain an important liberal sector celebrated Rebecca both as technical innovation and as a resistance to a repressive moral code. Even the hegemonic critics of ABC and Film Ideal, though they abhorred Hitchcock’s ‘vulgarity’, or sexual freedom, could not avoid recognising his artistic talent. In Mexico on the other hand, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, rather than the period piece Rebecca, was hailed as Hitchcock’s crossover and the apogee of modernity. Both films furthermore celebrated couples in more open relationships. Mr. and Mrs. Smith reflected a new Mexico of capitalist aspirations. The ability of brand new Mexican theatres to screen Hitchcock’s film, as the latest in cinematographic art, and to showcase the stars of Hollywood due to direct flights into the country spoke of progress and to national pride.
Second, in Spain and Latin America Hitchcock’s films were not just appreciated as suspense or thrillers, but for a much broader generic mix, and furthermore for their glamour and glitz and sexual innuendos. Emblematic of this reception, Notorious was launched and continues to be known with the more melodramatic titles of Tuyo es mi corazón (My Heart is Yours) or Encadenados (Coupled). In Spain North by Northwest’s Eva Marie Saint left the public star struck by her erotic attraction. In Mexico Ingrid Bergman’s suits in Cuéntame tu vida (Spellbound) were sold as the latest fashion, the new ‘chic’.
Third, although licentious elements in his films were celebrated, in Spain and Latin America Hitchcock, who was educated by Jesuits, was recognised as a Catholic director. In Spain he spoke of the exact number of churches in his films and The Wrong Man inaugurated the Week of Religious Cinema in Valladolid. Subsequently major Latin filmmakers also explored religious iconography and moral issues from their own Catholic upbringing and tradition while alluding to Hitchcock’s aesthetics. Close analysis shows vivid examples in Almodóvar’s Bad Education, De la Iglesia’s Day of the Beast and Amenábar’s Open Your Eyes, as well as almost all of Del Toro’s films.
Fourth, the combination of comedy and drama epitomised the view of Hitchcock’s work in Spain and Latin America. Humour was essential both in his initial reception as well as in his later impact on the five major filmmakers. Reviews of Hitchcock’s films celebrated his humour. Significantly, as seen in close analysis, the early career building films of the five Latin Hitchcocks – Labyrinth of Passions, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Day of the Beast, Thesis, Cronos and Love Walked In – evidenced strong comic elements. Comparing John Orr’s analysis in Hitchcock and Twentieth-Century Cinema of American Hitchcock, of US filmmakers who were Hitchcock disciples (David Lynch and Christopher Nolan) or French Hitchcock (Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol) to our director studies shows that humour plays a far greater role in Latin Hitchcock.
Fifth, the study and imitation of Hitchcock began in the earlier stages of filmmakers’ careers and were a major factor in their respective success. The key films for each constituted as follows: for Almodóvar, it was initially Spellbound, but later Rear Window and Dial M for Murder, The Trouble with Harry, Topaz and Vertigo; for De la Iglesia, Vertigo and Saboteur, Dial M for Murder, The Trouble with Harry and Strangers on a Train, North by Northwest and The Man Who Knew Too Much; for Amenábar, Psycho and Vertigo; for Del Toro, Psycho and Notorious; for Campanella, The Thirty-Nine Steps and North by Northwest.
Not surprisingly these five directors seldom looked to what I have termed Hitchcock’s crossover moment in Spain or Latin America, but rather studied and drew on the films that marked Hitchcock’s acknowledged Hollywood success. Only Amenábar looked directly to Hitchcock’s crossover film, Rebecca, as inspiration for his first English-language film, The Others. For his early film Labyrinth of Passions, Almodóvar turned to Spellbound, a film still profoundly associated with Spanish cultural history. In his breakout film Day of the Beast, De la Iglesia turned to Vertigo, a film also embedded in the same Spanish cultural imaginary, and Saboteur. However, what these five filmmakers selected from Hitchcock often reflected an appreciation of how Hitchcock made ‘magic’, as Spanish critics termed his work, with limited resources. For instance in their debut films, Del Toro with Cronos and Amenábar with Thesis looked to Psycho, which Hitchcock made with less costly TV filming techniques. Like Hitchcock, most came to directing from a field of artistic design.
Finally, critics have rarely acknowledged these connections, i.e. the debt to Hitchcock, or more significantly neither have the filmmakers themselves. In fact they often hid or underplayed it. When the huge Almodóvar exhibition was staged in Paris at the French Cinematheque in 2006, on which he collaborated, the room dedicated to filmic influences did not include any allusions to or mention of Hitchcock. Although it is still only available in Spanish, Almodóvar’s commentary on The Skin I Live In and Vertigo marks a change in this pattern. Amenábar simply dismisses Hitchcock as overvalued. De la Iglesia has given the most direct responses in recent years claiming to have adapted Hitchcock’s Weltanschauung, though he, too, says that he ‘stole’ from Hitchcock, implying that he surpasses the master. Del Toro turns academic in his director’s tracks; he talks and publishes about Hitchcock. Campanella underplays the idea of influence by calling it ‘osmosis’.
Conventionally we can speak of Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, but Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge (1995) and Discipline and Punish (2002) are more productive as a critical approach to understand ‘osmosis’ or influence in a globalised landscape. For Foucault, first, the author (here a director or filmmaker) as subject only exists within the discursive practice – that is, in a globalised landscape of commercial and cultural reception. Just as the interpretation of the film text is produced cross-culturally, so too are the filmmaker’s image and connection to the text generated in the cultural discourse. Second, according to Foucault the relationships of power that are generated at this historical juncture are now self-policing strategies. Hence, for example, the aesthetic heritage of a film as product is elided to sustain its marketability, or to recall Walter Benjamin, its ‘aura’ as a ‘unique’ entity. As García Canclini observed to his later regret, Hitchcock in Latin America was long dismissed as a commercial quantity. He was disparaged as the ‘master of sensationalism’. Likewise similar negative critiques dismissed the work and public image of the directors we have studied here. Campanella’s The Secret in Their Eyes was called ‘middle brow’. Yet the artistic and the commercial came together in Hitchcock. This combination strongly defines his followers.
All five Latin directors studied in this book became notorious. They not only made it in the Spanish-speaking world, but they also made it to Hollywood. Although some eschew the opportunity, they all can and have done interviews and director’s commentary tracks in English. Three of them – Almodóvar (All About My Mother), Amenábar (The Sea Inside) and Campanella (The Secret in Their Eyes) – won Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film. Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) was nominated for that category, but won in three others in the overall competition – art direction, cinematography and make-up – an equal or more impressive showing. Almodóvar also won another Academy Award in 2002 for Best Original Screenplay for Talk To Her. De la Iglesia is the underachiever of this group, having never been nominated for an Academy Award. His most significant awards were the 1996 Goya for Best Director for Day of the Beast, the 2010 Silver Lion for Best Director for The Last Circus (called A Sad Trumpet Ballad at the Venice Film Festival) and the 2009 Spanish National Film Prize, a lifetime achievement award. His career most parallels that of Hitchcock, who also never won an Academy Award.1 Hitchcock received an honorary award from the Academy in 1968, and then in his decline was feted with the lifetime American Film Institute award in 1979. These recognitions mean a place in the canon, longevity in the profession and more support for subsequent projects.
These five filmmakers are connected in ways that go beyond their own films, mostly in terms of their roles as producers. Like Hitchcock as their careers progressed they made new investments. The production companies they established have enabled them to function independently, mostly without state-sponsored protectionism. For Almodóvar, producing his own films has given him the unique freedom, or luxury, to shoot his films linearly, that is, to follow sequentially the written script. Almodóvar gave De la Iglesia his first break by producing Mutant Action for El Deseo.2 He also produced Del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone. El Deseo’s twenty-first-century productions represent a wide generic range that spans melodrama, drama and comedy: Isabel Coixet, My Life Without Me (2003) and The Secret Life of Words (2005); Lucretia Martel, La niña santa (The Holy Girl, 2004) and La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman, 2008); and Damián Szifrón, Relatos Salvajes (Wild Tales, 2014).3
Del Toro (sometimes, but not always with his friends and fellow filmmakers Cuarón and González Iñarritu)4 has actively produced and promoted new talent for some time. Notably Del Toro produced Sebastián Cordero’s debut Crónicas (Chronicles, 2004) and Rabia (Rage, 2009), both thrillers for Tequila Gang, his own production company, as well as J. A. Bayona’s extremely successful first film, El orfanato (The Orphanage, 2007), a mystery thriller reminiscent of Pan’s Labyrinth. Although I limited my selection for this book, the Ecuadorean filmmaker Cordero deserves to be in this company, for he is a Latin Hitchcock for a new generation.5 Likewise Amenábar has moved on to produce films besides his own in backing Oskar Santos’ El mal ajeno (For the Good of Others, 2010), a sci-fi thriller derivative of Open Your Eyes.6 Besides producing some of his own films and the sci-fi television series, Plutón B. R. B Nero (2009), De la Iglesia has begun to produce the work of young Spanish talent with Esteban Roel and Juan Fernando Andrés’ Musarañas (Shrew’s Nest, 2014), a psychological and claustrophobic thriller. To launch this initiative to produce fantasy, suspense and thriller movies, De la Iglesia founded a new company, Pokeepsie Films, with Carolina Bang, who starred in several of his films. Even more than De la Iglesia with Plutón B. R. B. Nero, Campanella is known for producing many television series, both in Argentina and in the US. His collaboration, as producer of Daniel di Fellipo and Gustavo Giannini’s animated feature film, Plumíferos (Free Birds, 2010), the first 3D movie made with open source ware, marked new generic and artistic directions for Campanella that culminated in the box office hit Underdogs, his directorial debut in animation. The work of these five directors as producers, which is both a supportive and gate-keeping role, is how the influence of, and their take on, Hitchcock will continue into another generation. Future studies will undoubtedly explore how and to what extent the director/producer impacts the artistic direction, distribution and exhibition, as well as the reception of the films produced under the brand of a ‘popular auteur’ (Buse, Triana Toribio and Willis 2013: 4).
A few comments are perhaps due rearding these filmmakers as people and how they may have imitated Hitchcock’s distinctive presence and perhaps his physique, too. Almodóvar, for the photographer Juan Gatti, assumed well-known poses of Hitchcock in his own publicity photos. The struggles of Almodóvar, De la Iglesia and Del Toro with excessive weight over the years have also been well documented. Hitchcock and Orson Welles, who is enjoying a renaissance, too, with new films about him in Spain and Latin America, were known as overweight men.7 Someone else may want to explore if these are feminised men who found in Hitchock’s soft body and overactive mind a kindred body type and a way to self-esteem. As a woman, who moreover began this project confronting a new trend toward the stereotypically ‘masculine’ thriller genre, I will point out the obvious – that these major imitators of Hitchcock are all men. In my research I did not find any case of a major woman filmmaker in Spain or Latin America who built her transnational career looking to Hitchcock. More recently, Isabel Coixet in Mapa de los sonidos de Tokio (Map of the Sounds of Tokyo, 2009) and Lucrecia Martel in The Headless Woman have delved into genres and moral dilemmas that could be considered Hitchcockian, and have worked in a transnational context. Their films come, however, at a mature stage of their careers, which have also been built more through art-house than commercial productions. Many other individual films from across Latin America and Spain allude to Hitchcock’s films in a myriad of ways. I will only name a few examples here, merely to reconfirm the breadth of his influence over the time period studied in this book: Gustavo Graef-Marino’s Johnny Cien Pesos (Johnny One Hundred Pesos, Chile, 1994), Luis Ospina’s Soplo de vida (Breath of Life, Colombia, 1999), Fabián Belinsky’s Nueve reinas (Nine Queens) and El aura (The Aura), Rodrigo Plá’s La zona (The Zone, Mexico, 2007), José Luis Guerín’s En la ciudad de Sylvia (In the City of Sylvia, Spain, 2007), and Juan Carlos Maneglia and Tana Schembori’s Siete cajas (Seven Boxes, Uruguay, 2012). I hope that this study will give future critics and filmgoers reason to pause to evaluate seriously the local and transnational adaptations of commercial cinema, and to discover and interpret other connections to the Hitchcockian canon in the Spanish-speaking world. At the very least I have tried to begin to draw attention to these areas of research. Hitchcock seldom disappoints. As a coda to this study, let me add a brief anecdote about such an unlikely experience.
When I have told friends that according to the newspapers, Champagne was Hitchcock’s first movie to open in both Spain and Mexico, they have given me a blank stare, followed by the befuddled comment, ‘Hitchcock made a movie called Champagne?’ It truly was an inauspicious beginning in international distribution. Yet in studying the trajectory of how Hitchcock’s films were first received in Spain and Mexico and how five major Spanish and Latin American directors began their transnational careers studying Hitchcock we have seen that the early stages, although not necessarily the first film advertised, were the most significant. As these five directors consolidate their impact on a younger generation of filmmakers, I suspect and hope that Hitchcock’s presence will continue to be felt as an extension of our humanity, not as a shadow of a forgotten original but as the creation of a new work, in another language. By celebrating how films nurture each other across borders this book salutes these six masters.
NOTES