Alfred Hitchcock is arguably the most influential director of the twentieth century, or of the first century of film history. Significantly, the reach of his work has long been international. As befits a canonical artist, the Hitchcock bibliography, in print and in other media, is prodigious. There are more than a few lifetimes worth of criticism written on his works, certainly enough to give one pause before setting off to write more. The essential, hefty biographical tomes of Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (1999), disavowed by the Hitchcock clan, and Patrick McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light (2003), more favoured by them, are locked in a virtual duel. Two recent bio-pics, focusing on Hitchcock’s interactions with women, show not only the enduring fascination for all things Hitchcock but also the staying power of Spoto and McGilligan’s diametrically opposed views of him. The Girl (2012), a TV film based on Spoto’s book, depicts Hitchcock’s treatment of Tippi Hedren during the filming of The Birds (1963) as abuse, whereas Hitchcock (2012), lovingly foregrounds his working relationship with wife Alma Reville during the filming of Psycho (1960). Moreover, new critical books in English, such as Jerome Silbergeld’s Hitchcock with a Chinese Face: Cinematic Doubles, Oedipal Triangles, and China’s Moral Voice (2004), Hitchcock and His Rivals (2005) and After Hitchcock: Influence, Imitation, and Intertextuality (2006) continue to explore his enduring impact on filmmakers. Yet works in English until now regularly exclude filmmakers from Spain or Latin America, with the rare exception of two anthologised essays on individual Almodóvar films by Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz.1 Even Spanish-language publications from Spain or Latin America – such as Guillermo del Toro’s Alfred Hitchcock (1990) or José Luis Castro de Paz’s Alfred Hitchcock (2000) – notably lack any discussion of the influence of Hitchcock on films in Spanish. My aim in this volume is not to dress Alfred Hitchcock up in a charro hat or a traje de luces, though Mr. Hitchcock was certainly known to have enjoyed donning costumes and playing pranks, but to acknowledge, query and interpret the reception of Hitchcock in the Spanish-speaking world. To do so is to begin to understand important intersections of global and local cultures, and to trace these in terms of two languages, Spanish and English, which are on the ascendancy worldwide.
In the 1990s young Spanish directors, such as Álex de la Iglesia, Julio Medem and Alejandro Amenábar, began to produce ‘cine de terror’, thrillers or suspense films. These films looked new and different and were immensely popular at the box office, a rarity for Spanish films in Spain. As a woman I saw this genre of films more often associated with young adolescent males as an obligation. Anticipating a transmigrated Scream (1996) franchise, I was not a happy camper going to see Día de la bestia (Day of the Beast, 1995) in Madrid the first time. Over the years I had company in my initial lack of enthusiasm. These Spanish thrillers were looked down upon by some filmmakers of the earlier generation. When I interviewed Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, one of the major filmmakers of the period of the transition to democracy (1975–1982), he spoke of the new ‘cine de terror’ as technically brilliant, but devoid of ideas.2 My own attitude changed when I began first to look carefully at the aesthetics of these films, and second, to think in terms of a more general cultural landscape, about how these films interfaced with local and global referents. These thoughts became persistent as I taught film analysis through Amenábar’s popular Tesis (Thesis, 1996) in my classes, and published on humour and politics in Álex de la Iglesia’s Muertos de risa (Dying of Laughter, 1998). When I chatted on the bus from the Spanish film archives about Rear Window (1954) with Spanish film students who had never heard of Laura Mulvey, just how differently Hitchcock has been received in Spanish film criticism became clear. This book traces where my classroom and mass transit experiences, and my subsequent archival research, have taken me.
While I had always thought of and taught the tradition of a particular satirical black humour, common both to Spanish film of the 1950s and to much of Buñuel, the humour, which was so important to the ‘cine de terror’ in the 1990s, was often quite different. Moreover, these were not just art house films in Spain. Thinking about the ‘cine de terror’, I kept coming back to a Hitchcock paradigm: comic thrillers, immense box office success and international reach. The time period of the ‘cine de terror’ also coincided with the Hitchcock centenary in 1999. Spanish film journals, such as Dirigido, published major retrospectives. Yet none of these retrospectives dealt in depth with the impact that Hitchcock had, or was having, in film in Spanish. They were aimed at helping a Spanish audience interpret a world in English. As a publishing strategy, the approach was logical as young Spaniards, now Europeans, and Latin Americans too, were looking at a global economy and a media culture dominated by English.
It has often been observed that Hitchcock was not perceived as a great director, as a true artist, until François Truffaut conducted his extensive interviews in the fall of 1962 and proclaimed Hitchcock great. His book, Alfred Hitchcock: A Definitive Study (1967), based on these conversations is now a classic. The American filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, who also interviewed Hitchcock around the same time as Truffaut and who likewise published a book, The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock (1963), lauding his achievements, also played a part in the revaluation of Hitchcock. It may be slightly simplistic, but not untrue, that before Truffaut and Bogdanovich, Hitchcock’s body of work was critically overlooked and considered pure entertainment. What is interesting about the exchanges with Truffaut and other Cahiers du cinéma writers is that they were aimed at a transnational audience, published in French and then translated into English. Indeed criticism of Hitchcock’s work is multilingual, but English is its lingua franca, yet there are significant bibliographical gaps in how much of this material finds its way into English translation.
When I began to look at the interviews with Hitchcock that had been published in English – Truffaut’s in translation, of course, but also the collection by Sidney Gottlieb, Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews (1995) – I found translations of interviews from several European languages, but nothing that had originally been in Spanish appeared in these collections. Not that Hitchcock had not been to Spain or Latin America; he had twice won the Silver Shell at the San Sébastián Film Festival, which only began giving international prizes in 1955, for Vertigo (1958) and North by Northwest (1959). Each time he dutifully attended the festival, met the press and received the award in person. In the broadest terms then, it became clear to me that whereas Spain and Latin America have been marginal to a concept of global film, which Hitchcock epitomised, his work has been crucial to the development of film with global aspirations from those cultures. The purpose of this book, therefore, is to explore this cultural terrain initially suggested by my work with Spanish cinema of the 1990s.
Although Hitchcock made only three, or stretching it five, films with a Spanish or Latin American location, a great majority of his career total of 53 films – not just Spellbound (1945) which could immediately be identified as ‘Spanish’ due to Dalí’s dream sequence in it – were shown in Spain and Latin America. Almost always dubbed into Spanish, they became an integral part of Spanish and Latin American culture. In light of the work of Benedict Anderson, especially Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1983), we can speak of a ‘Latin Hitchcock’. By this denomination, I mean to highlight the place of Hitchcock’s films and his legendary career in the cultural imaginary of Spain and Latin America. Close analyses of the films will show how five Spanish and Latin American directors borrowed significantly from Hitchcock, to the extent that we can say they largely learned their craft through these borrowings and patterned their careers in the hope of achieving his international success, which they did.
A word needs to be said about the choice of the word ‘Latin’ in the title to include both Spain and Latin America. Since I deal with filmmakers whose first language is Spanish and who sometimes cross over to make films in English focusing on a common language, ‘Hitchcock in Spanish’ would not do. Nor would ‘Spanish Hitchcock’, using the modifier to designate heritage, because it would exclude Latin Americans, whose proud heritage is as often indigenous or mestizo as Spanish. On the other hand, Spaniards generally do not call themselves Latin, and certainly not Hispanic either. Not all their languages, notably Basque, have Latin roots; moreover the Roman era was a long time ago.3 Nowadays it is acceptable, and relatively common, to call them European. Only within the United States is Latin, the English translation of the Spanish ‘latino’, a category that includes people from Spain and Latin America. It is a term for a cultural rather than racial or ethnic umbrella. This represents the imperfect context and perspective from which I write. In the current charged US political climate that fractures into ideological camps over immigration and demographic shifts, ‘Latin Hitchcock’ stands as a provocation to recognise a common cultural imaginary not only for Spain and Latin America but for the US as well.
Although I began this project to understand a localised phenomenon in Spain in the 1990s, as I proceeded my interest sharpened to focus on a limited generational cadre of filmmakers in whose work references to Hitchcock repeatedly surfaced. I limited the selection to those who had completed a major body of work and hence established a career profile that I could compare to Hitchcock’s trajectory. I closely analysed the films of these directors tracing the presence of Hitchcock’s motifs and aesthetics in them, and explored how and when these filmmakers reached for a global market, and/or crossed over to making films in English.
At the same time as I studied the careers of these filmmakers in terms of negotiating their authorship in local and global terms, I also began to think analogously about how Hitchcock was first received in Spain and Latin America to provide a historical framework for the contemporary directors whom I was calling ‘Latin Hitchcocks’. I wanted to know when Hitchcock was perceived to have crossed over or become more global, and whether the initial reaction to his films in the Spanish-speaking world was in any way unique. Since existing Hitchcock criticism, or historical studies of Spanish or Latin American cinema in general, did not provide answers to my questions about reception I began to explore the archives, first in Spain and also in the US. Finding premiere dates, an essential precursor to locating and reading newspaper reviews, however, was difficult for Spain, but unbelievably discouraging for Latin America. Many a librarian and archivist whom I contacted, all of notable good will, were as stymied as I was in this seemingly basic search to establish a timetable of Hitchcock openings for any major Spanish-speaking city in Latin America. Because I was developing chapters on contemporary Mexican and Argentinean filmmakers I looked most intensively for the records for Mexico City and Buenos Aires. Finally, since I was able to find more complete sources for Mexico City than for any other capital, I chose it for my case study. The decision to include two reception chapters and research limitations impacted the eventual structure of the book, which is divided into two parts corresponding to Spain and Latin America. Each part opens with a historical overture to a city. For Spain there is a case study of the initial reception of Hitchcock in primarily Madrid, but also with references to San Sebastián and Barcelona. This case study also includes a more general discussion about what a Spanish or Latin American location meant for Hitchcock. Thematic auteur studies follow on Almodóvar, De la Iglesia and Amenábar, which are organised chronologically according to when they began their careers. The second part of the book on Latin America opens with a case study of Mexico City, followed by studies of Del Toro and Campanella. The resulting structure is a two-pronged attack – representing archival research and interpretative analysis – to the topic of Hitchcock in Spain and Latin America. This framework allows the reader to appreciate historical and aesthetic connections as well as to review Hitchcock’s own career in an original context. I have tried to strike a balance that allows for a depth of critical interpretation in each chapter.
Although I hope the reader will also take pleasure in making new connections as a result of this study, some may see gaps between how the chapters fit together as defects rather than possibilities. For Paolo Antonio Paranaguá, a great critic of Latin American cinema, nationally identified auteurs are a particular bane of existence, which he calls ‘deslindes’ (demarcations) of a problem. In Tradición y modernidad en el cine de América Latina (Tradition and Modernity in Latin American Cinema) he notes in exasperation: ‘Reductionism is only applied to peripheral or dependent cinemas, which are subordinated or marginalized in the same dominant historiography: no one would have the gall to reduce French cinema to Renoir or Godard’ (2003: 15).4 While I by no means see Del Toro and Campanella as the only possible representatives, respectively, of Mexican or Argentinean cinema, and certainly not of Latin America as a whole, it is worth noting, as Paranaguá himself observes shortly after the above comment, that the debate about depth versus breadth is culturally charged, and generationally inflected: ‘While the old encyclopaedic ambition looks for ways to renovate through the convergence of collective work and the plurality of focuses, popularisation seems to narrow the horizon instead of broadening it’ (ibid.). While by Paranaguá’s standards my study may seem reductionist, my approach, however, is informed by and aspires to a US/UK tradition of cinema scholarship that is on the whole more thematic and often auteur driven and which differs starkly from many more encyclopaedic critical works that have come out of Spain.5
As my ‘Latin Hitchcock’ project took shape, I developed three main theses. I offer them now to the reader as a guide to the general outline of my argument:
Thesis One: The reception of Hitchcock in the Spanish-speaking world has been largely ignored in world film history and criticism. ‘Latin Hitchcock’ has certainly been overshadowed by ‘French Hitchcock’ because of Truffaut, but it has also been ignored in the numerous books on the international reception of Hitchcock.
Thesis Two: Because he represented a model of a localised director moving successfully onto a broader international stage, Hitchcock was crucial to the individual development of major Latin and Spanish directors. His influence, which exceeded Buñuel’s, is an important factor in the rise of Spanish national cinema from the period of the transition to democracy up to the present day. Increased interest in Hitchcock is, moreover, directly tied to the rise of film studies in Spanish and Mexican universities.
Thesis Three: The reception of Hitchcock in the Spanish-speaking world has been different. Not only is his cinematic style repeatedly alluded to in major recent films, in great specificity, but also his humour is appreciated and plays an important role in Latin suspense films.
Although I began to think about ‘Latin Hitchcock’ because of the Spanish 1990s ‘cine de terror’, the more I worked on the project the greater variety I found in the Hitchcockian influence. Whereas Hitchcock is known as ‘the master of suspense’, anyone who has seriously studied his work knows that this is a promotional tag and that his generic range was in fact huge. As I delved into the work of specific Spanish and Latin American filmmakers, it became clear I was looking at serious students of Hitchcock, or at least, as Almodóvar and De la Iglesia refer to themselves (echoing Picasso’s dictum – ‘good artists borrow; great artists steal’), talented ‘robbers’. Surprisingly, since Almodóvar is not even remotely associated with the ‘cine de terror’, the key to noting this range of allusions is precisely the generically hybrid films of Pedro Almodóvar. Although this study did not begin with Almodóvar, the interpretation of his films and career from the perspective of Hitchcock is in many senses the fulcrum of this book. After an overview, chapter one, entitled ‘First Loves, First Cuts: The Initial Response to Hitchcock’s Films in Spain’, about the commentary on Hitchcock’s films in the decades of their release in Spain, chapter two, ‘Pedro Almodóvar’s Criminal Side: Plot, Humour and Cinematic Style’, will address both the intense referencing of Hitchcock’s films in Almodóvar’s and the impact of Hitchcock as a global model for Almodóvar’s career.
Almodóvar has served as the metaphorical godfather to a number of the other filmmakers discussed here through his production company El Deseo. He gave Álex de la Iglesia his start when El Deseo produced the latter’s first film Acción mutante (Mutant Action, 1993). Likewise, El Deseo stepped in to help redefine and produce Guillermo del Toro’s El espinazo del diablo (The Devil’s Backbone, 2001) when that project was floundering in Mexico. It is not too far-fetched to argue that an intellectual, or visceral, kinship based in Hitchcock drew Pedro Almodóvar and his brother Agustín to the work of these other filmmakers. Chapter three, ‘Drawing on a Darker Humour, Cultural Icons and Mass Media: Álex de la Iglesia’s Journey from Outer Space to the Spanish Academy’, and chapter six, ‘Guillermo del Toro’s Continuing Education: Adapting Hitchcock’s Moral and Visual Sensibilities to the World of Horror’, explore the work of these two directors in the light of Hitchcock and may lead us to posit a Latin school of Hitchcock. Schooling is the operative term here, for all three directors – Almodóvar, De la Iglesia and Del Toro – learned their craft studying Hitchcock. The Mexican Del Toro went further. He was a film studies professor in Guadalajara and wrote a book on Hitchcock before he made his own feature film debut.
To enrich our reading of Del Toro’s undertakings, Chapter Five, ‘Latin American Openings: The Reception History for Mexico City’, traces an enthusiastic and nationally inflected welcome for those films there. On the one hand, how Hitchcock’s movies were marketed to highlight melodrama, rather than crime or mystery, circles back to themes of humour and melodramatic hybridisation, seen earlier in the Almodóvar chapter, but on the other hand, it also locates them within the specific context of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema. Emphasising the impact of a national narrative on film reception this chapter details some surprising revelations regarding how Hitchcock’s movies became part of a major historical event, Trotsky’s arrival in Mexico City, as well as how they fit into the narrative of the county’s economic development and progress, especially through the expansion of movie houses and airline travel.
Like Del Toro in Mexico, Alejandro Amenábar was intimately, and conflictingly, involved with a film school in Spain. He depicted the film school experience in his debut film Thesis. Many say he revenged himself on the professor who failed him. Internationally Amenábar’s career has evolved as a rival to that of Almodóvar. In 2005 they battled for critical acclaim with Mala educación (Bad Education, 2004) opening the Cannes Film Festival and Mar adentro (The Sea Inside, 2004) winning the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award. The operative term here is opposition, for early on in his career Amenábar cagily disparaged Hitchcock’s exalted place in cinema history. Yet chapter four, ‘Against Hitchcock: Alejandro Amenábar’s Meteoric Career’, will show how Amenábar, too, has drawn on Hitchcock’s work for inspiration.
The book’s seventh and final chapter, ‘Understanding Osmosis: Hitchcock in Argentina Through the Eyes of Juan José Campanella’, returns to an exploration of the role of suspense and the thriller genre in Latin American cinema. Seeing Campanella’s Academy Award-winning film El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes, 2009) as I did at the 2009 San Sebastián Film Festival was a revelation for many, myself included, who had dismissed his films, to put it unkindly, as melodramatic pap. Yet seeing that film and intervening at the press conference – the title of the chapter refers to Campanella’s response to one of my questions, that Hitchcock influenced him ‘by osmosis’ – sent me to research his career trajectory and to study the considerable impact of Hitchcock on his films. Campanella left Argentina to attend film school in the US at New York University and subsequently to direct for TV. His US training complicated the critical reception in Argentina when he returned to filmmaking there. How Campanella melded film cultures and genres, especially with an appreciation of humour, will be the focus of this final auteur study.
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In Diferentes, desiguales y desconectados: mapas de la interculturidad (Different, Unequal and Disconnected: Maps of Interculturality, 2004) Nestor García Canclini called for a re-examination of intercultural communication. He differed from anthropologists who attempt to assume completely the internal point of view of the elected culture because he argued instead for studying the interactions between cultures. Further, he defines the cultural not as the collection of characteristics that differentiate one society from another, but as, quoting in part Arjun Appadurai, a ‘system of relationships that identifies “differences, contrasts and comparisons”’ (2004: 21). García Canclini argues that to rethink what culture is also necessitates a new method of study:
Instead of comparing cultures that would operate like pre-existing and compact systems, with the inertias that populism celebrates and ethnographic good will admires for their resistance, one tries to pay attention to the mixes and misunderstandings that link the groups. In order to understand each group one has to describe how it appropriates and reinterprets other peoples’ material and symbolic products: the musical and soccer related fusions, the television programmes that circulate according to heterogeneous cultural styles, the Christmas decorations and the Early American furniture made in the Asiatic Southeast (2004: 21).
García Canclini calls for a shift in emphasis that ‘leads to conceiving the politics of difference as something more than the need to resist’ (ibid.) and moves beyond ‘the indiscriminate exultation of fragmentation and nomadism’ (2004: 22) which has characterised postmodern theory. In the penultimate chapter of his book, Latin American cinema serves as a model for his theory of intercultural communication, for it is the ideal terrain on which to critique the aesthetic and economic effects of deregulation and the opening of borders.
García Canclini cites studies from various Latin American countries that show ‘the convergence of the tastes of audiences and the styles of US cinema’ (2004: 200), namely a preference for action genres (thriller, adventure and spy films). He concludes: ‘In sum, US cinema succeeds in imposing its global hegemony by combining the politics of aesthetic and cultural development, which thereby take advantage in a more clever way than those of other producers of the trends in media consumption through policies of authoritarian control of the markets that are destined to convert demographic majorities into cultural minorities’ (ibid.). García Canclini finds in the movies ‘divergence in the ways of conceiving social multiculturality within the US and, on the other hand, politics of rejection of diversity in cultural industries, as much within the nation as in its control of international markets’ (2004: 201; emphasis in original). Overall he laments that the speed of change in the culture industry ‘reduces the variety of information and the historic density of cultures with respect to matters of public interest’ (ibid.). Moreover he cautions that ‘it is also disturbing that it is in the more diffuse zones of cultural and political formation, such as the movies, music and television, the promises of global interconnection, once and for all, are diluted into monolinguism or the dissemination of isolated pieces of a few cultures’ (ibid.).
At various junctures, the career trajectories of the five major Spanish and Latin American directors studied in this book illustrate the contraction of diversity under the aggressive policies of free market globalisation. Del Toro’s long and ultimately unsuccessful search to find Mexican funding to make The Devil’s Backbone, a film set during the Mexican Revolution, is a prime example. We will note many others in this book. Yet at the same time the work of these Hispanic filmmakers, from cultures of majorities but operating globally as minorities, as termed by García Canclini, is a very rich terrain of contemporary intercultural communication which begs to be explored in order to understand both the evolution of global culture and its current state today. It is time that their work be evaluated not just in light of national film histories, as resisting hegemonic Hollywood, but also in the context of the global standards to which they aspire. These filmmakers adapted the work of Hitchcock to be recognised, to become auteurs themselves, and thereby to survive economically from their positions of inequality in the global market. Yet, most especially, they looked to Hitchcock to speak in the emerging fusion language of their own Latin cultures.
At the end of Diferentes, desiguales y desconectados, García Canclini himself returns to Hitchcock. He confesses in a personal and generational remark that because of Marxist prejudices against the commercial he never paid any attention to Hitchcock, until he was ‘discovered’ by Truffaut. Through Truffaut on Hitchcock, however, he found that the relationships between commercial cinema and auteurship were more complex than had been proclaimed in Marxist criticism. He uses this confession to argue that ‘the world would be much more comprehensible, habitable and even enjoyable, if the arts and ideas that transnational companies broadcast, even within the US, were to take into account what isn’t written in English and is filmed far from Hollywood’ (2004: 205). I hope by quoting from film criticism in Spanish in this book, and by interpreting lesser known as well as the well distributed foreign standards of major Latin filmmakers, to contribute to expand the horizons, and maybe the enjoyment, of an English-speaking audience.
NOTES