Literature and film have established an interdependent relationship since the beginning of the film industry at the turn of the twentieth century. From the first silent films, which the brothers Lumière and Georges Méliès made and which followed theatre’s spatial laws and dramatic structure, to the innovations introduced by David Griffith, which turned cinema into a narrative language structured according to the models of the nineteenth-century novel,1 cinema invariably appears as a mechanical form of reproducing a story.2
Cinema flirted with poetry for a short, intense period of time. The artistic avant-garde discovered film’s potential to break with the old order and “dehumanize art,” as well as its power to express political ideologies. Cinema could summon and mobilize an essentially popular audience through a new medium of mass communication. Cinema also articulated in images the ruptures produced in aesthetics or ideology in the first third of the century, and while continuing to be linked intrinsically to literature, it emerged, as Peña-Ardid writes, as a necessary life raft if one were to “abandon rancid realism.” Thus cinema became a powerful instrument “for expressing the imaginary, the unreal, or the dreamed.”3
The surrealists saw cinema as an instrument of provocation, one promoting intellectual and artistic ruptures with the Western capitalist tradition. Un chien andalou (1929) and L’âge d’or (1930) by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí are two prime examples of the early, brief convergence between film and surrealist poetry, considered to be, in the words of Octavio Paz, “a place of generic intersection between film and poetry,”4 and whose scripts were constructed as the product of automatic writing.5 In the same way Viaje a la luna, Lorca’s film script written during his stay in New York in 1929, must be interpreted as a filmic poem or a poetic film, that is, as “a poetic discourse that draws support from the very organizational structures it explores.”6
Years later, when literature and film severed their lyrical ties and again converged along a realist vein, Buñuel, in 1958, yearned for the cinematic experiments of the avant-garde:
For many years now, because of the economic risks involved, cinematographic art seems to have renounced its immense creative possibilities, which currently move in only one direction: that of the strictest realism. [ . . .] As [ . . .] a marvelous instrument for the expression of poetry and dreams – of the subconscious – cinema is confined to the role of being simply a REPEATER of stories, already expressed by other art forms [ . . .] Our age is one of uncertainty and the conscious man longs, albeit only in the imagination, to flee the agonizing reality that surrounds him [ . . .] Isn’t a work of art, a film, for example, which reflects the concerns and hopes of present-day humanity, the least he can ask for? The POETIC FILM, which would be at the same time the NEW FILM, sought so enthusiastically by today’s producers, can fulfill that desire better than any other.7
When film resumed its role as “repeater of stories,” literary works were the principal source of inspiration for filmic creation. Via a process of reciprocal interests, literature was adapted to film to popularize the former and dignify the latter. As Rafael Utrera points out, “literature is offered as a synonym of a guarantee for an expressive medium [cinema], which seeks prestige among the most educated classes.”8 The potential of cinema to become literature’s new “printing press” – had been discovered.
The most explicit filmic reference/reverence to literature comes in the form of cinematographic adaptations of dramatic works and, above all, novels. The cinema of adaptations, notes Francisco Ayala, introduced literature to the wider field of collective representation.9 The alliance between the two media and the convergence of their narrative patterns took place for two major reasons: film became a useful instrument to “illustrate, serve, and propagate” literary texts,10 and was seen as a potential medium for the expression of culture, also as a political, economic, and social arm.11
Cinema participates in the culturally significant act of disseminating ideology, which the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser defines as “the representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”12 According to Althusser, the state uses a series of ideological apparatuses to constitute and affirm its legitimacy; among these are culture, including the arts, literature, cinema, and even sports, and the systems of mass media (press, radio, and television). These apparatuses share their status with a series of other institutions, whether political, legal, educational, or religious. In line with these ideas, Mas’Ud Zavarzadeh reinterprets Althusser’s theories. In Seeing Films Politically he writes that “films [ . . .] do not so much ‘report’, ‘reflect’ or even ‘interpret’ (in the conventional sense of the word) the world ‘out there’ or ‘in there’ as they do in fact ‘produce’ it and produce it historically; that is to say, within the frames of intelligibility available to a culture at a particular moment.”13 In this sense, Zavarzadeh sees cinema as a cultural vehicle “through which the dominant ideology attempts to maintain its authority over the affairs of society [ . . .]”; cinema is also used as a guide to show the viewer “how to recognize, and, above all, ‘experience’ the real in culture” (p. 77).
The explicit “literaturization” of cinema – the transfer to images of a text that forms part of a literary canon, previously classified as part of an artistic heritage – reinforces cinema’s potential to “produce” cultural and ideological discourses. Within the Spanish cinematographic context, the adaptation of literature to film operates as a cultural referent enjoined to produce a national identity through the rewriting/reviewing of the past in various historical moments of the twentieth century. The initial moment corresponds to the first decades of official Francoist cinematography, whose goals included the reenactment of the imperial past through the rescue of literary master works and the reification of the concept of Spanishness through traditional popular genres like sainete (light musical comedy) and zarzuela (traditional Spanish operetta). In the 1940s, coexisting with historical, folkloric, and religious dramas, literary texts identified with imperial splendor and the Spanish tradition were adapted to film, as were texts by authors whose political proximity to the regime garnered respect (e.g. Blasco Ibáñez, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, José María Pemán, Armando Palacio Valdés, Jacinto Benavente, and the Álvarez Quintero brothers).14
In 1942 the playwright Joaquín Álvarez Quintero, a faithful representative of the precepts of the Francoist regime, declared to the magazine Primer Plano (an ideological tool of the Falange) that the “rising” (naciente) and “stammering” (balbuceante) new art would only triumph if it drew support from what was exclusive and essential to the race: “our way of feeling, our idiosyncracy, our accent, our nationality, rich and picturesque [ . . .] our Spanishness!”15 Urrutia points out that such attitudes caused the “literary” cinema of the immediate post-war period to draw largely on the Andalusian-flavored dramatic works by the Álvarez Quintero brothers; between 1939 and 1957, nineteen filmic adaptations of works by these playwrights were made (Imago Litterae, pp. 25–6). With the help of the theater, especially the national genres of zarzuela and sainete, the cinema of the 1940s appropriated certain defining elements: “recognizability” (reconocibilidad), produced through the cultivation of costumbrismo or the picturesque, and “unlikeliness” (inverosimilitud), a quality involved in figuring spaces, characters, and situations. Through the effects of “unlikeliness,” playwrights sought to manipulate an audience, promoting a kind of escapism from the social and political reality of post-war Spain.16
A second moment of political and cultural reconstruction of the nation, styled as an ideological inversion of the Francoist initiative of the 1940s and 1950s, occurs during the years of the transition to democracy (1975–82). This movement maintains its hegemony in the socialist period (1982–95), primarily in the 1980s. From 1982 on, socialist policy generated a system of protection for the cinema. This system sustained the anti-Francoist policy initiated in the transition, and attempted to readjust production via certain criteria related to the questions of quality and competitiveness.17
In order to promote cultural patronage and regenerate the cinematographic industry, Pilar Miró was placed in charge of promulgating a new law that supported Spanish cinema. This “Miró Law” put into practice a series of measures that included the following: the creation of a system of subsidies comparable to those of other European countries; strict government control of coproductions; the creation of categories to control the quality of the product; promotion of films in international festivals and the consolidation of relations between the cinematographic industry and Televisión Española, which brought about the showing of Spanish films on television. This system of subsidies, maintained throughout the socialist period, sustained a political ideology that considered cinema fundamental to the nation’s cultural development; thus protection by the state was absolutely necessary. As John Hopewell points out in the Spanish edition of Out of the Past, “if heritage is in danger it must be protected,” and such protection is a political issue: “If Spaniards consider the ostentatious practice of recreational activities to be the decisive aspect of their lives, to provide for such activities with similar ostentation has to become the decisive aspect of the political practice of a party. A cinema directed by the state is a noticeable announcement of a State directed by a party.”18 This notion received immediate support from institutions of regional governments, which began to subsidize a large percentage of all the films produced in their regions with themes related to their culture, and which incorporated autochthonous language and local actors. Nevertheless, the critics of the Miró Law alleged that the system of subsidies favored the production of a cinema that turned its back on the spectators. The law was criticized for cultural elitism and excessive protectionism, for raising the cost of productions without assuring box-office results, fomenting inefficiency, favoritism, and lack of interest in market strategies, all of which led Pilar Miró to resign from her position in 1985; however, she had installed a system that for the first time promoted the quality of the national film industry.19 According to Peter Besas, with the goal of raising cinematographic quality, support was directed toward those firms considered “artistic” to the detriment of those labeled “for entertainment” or “commercial.” “In effect,” writes Besas, “the Miró Law decimated the ranks of those not within the inner circle of ‘serious’ production. It lavished money on new ‘talent’ and on the by-now aging anti-Franco centurions with their penchants for politics, the Spanish Civil War, and ‘educating’ audiences.”20
Reinterpreting the historical and cultural heritage became a priority for undoing the secrecy and manipulation of the Francoist past, while making evident the need for the socialist present and its expediency. With ideological and economic aid from the state, cinema began deconstructing the national-Catholic mythology, preparing to rescue myths either forgotten or distorted by the regime. Cinema applied its art to the redefinition of genres, such as historical cinema or the filmic adaptation of literary works, once appropriated by Francoism to aggrandize national values. Cinema also focused on the reevaluation of popular traditions and the reinscription of a cultural identity distanced from stereotypes. An important part of this project was the rescue of certain canonical literary texts which, in their day and despite censorship, had exposed the social conditions of those dark years. Thus the two-fold goal involved in the recuperation of culture marked the developing relationship between Spanish cinema and literary texts. Through the patronage of the state, an effort was made, using all the resources at hand, to acculturate a population that had suffered nearly four decades of repression. At the same time there was a desire to lend prestige to a cultural apparatus discredited as much for the mediocrity of the official Francoist commercial product as for the inaccessibility of the independent product, relegated to “art” circles (cinemas of arte y ensayo).
Across different genres and periods, the most successful literary adaptations of the 1980s shared two principal motives: an urgent need to make cultural icons out of the works of writers who had been ignored or victimized by the Franco regime, as in the case of poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, and to expose the situation of those defeated in the Civil War who survived the post-war period. These literary adaptations function simultaneously as an historical testimony of Francoism and as a symbolic discourse of post-Francoism. Some of the most successful are adaptations of García Lorca’s dramas – Bodas de sangre (‘Blood Wedding’, 1981) by Carlos Saura and La casa de Bernarda Alba (‘The House of Bernarda Alba’, 1987) by Mario Camús; adaptations of Camilo José Cela’s social novels – Pascual Duarte (1979) by Ricardo Franco and La colmena (‘The Hive’, 1982) by Mario Camús; Tiempo de silencio (Time of Silence, 1986) and Si te dicen que caí (The Fallen, 1989) by Vicente Aranda, based on the novels by Luis Martín Santos and Juan Marsé, respectively; La Plaza del Diamante (Time of the Doves, 1982), first released as a four-episode series for Televisión Española and then as a shortened version for the big screen, and Requiem por un campesino español (Requiem for a Spanish Peasant, 1985), by Francesc Betriu, films based on the novels by Mercè Rodoreda and Ramón J. Sender, respectively; Los santos inocentes (‘Holy Innocents’, 1984) by Mario Camús, based on Miguel Delibes’s novel; Las bicicletas son para el verano (‘Bicycles Are for Summertime’, 1983) by Jaime Chávarri, based on the play written by Fernando Fernán Gómez; and El sur (The South, 1983) by Víctor Erice, based on a story by Adelaida García Morales.
Some film critics and historians criticized the recuperative policy of the socialist government for being excessively formulaic and homogenous, both aesthetically and ideologically. Estève Riambau refers to the socialist cinema as a “polyvalent cinema,” designed to achieve several specific goals by means of a series of standard formulas.21 In the treatment of “rescued” themes and genres John Hopewell finds a certain manicheism that at times reduces and simplifies the history of Spanish cinema to an opposition between Francoist regression and censorship, on the one hand, and socialist ideas of progress and freedom, on the other. Moreover, he writes, “Spanish films (under socialist patronage) steer clear of contemporary problems [unemployment, ETA] and attack, somewhat superficially, the supposedly unequivocal target of Francoism in the past.”22 Santos Zunzunegui, in particular, points to the political servitude and lack of creativity that characterize transpositions into film of the 1980s, comparing these to adaptations carried out in the 1940s. In each case, a film was merely “an operation that consisted of changing names while serving ancient rhetorical discourses” (“El cine español,” p. 179).
Leaving aside any judgment about the propagandistic nature of the socialist project of cultural recuperation, I will discuss some of the aforementioned adaptations, selecting films that best represent the fusion of literary text and cinema, culture and ideology; these films today define the canon and cultural identity of that period. Alterations in the text that result from the transposition of one medium to the other constitute a set of strategies for the transmission or suppression of ideological and cultural values. Thus these films exhibit the hagiographic tribute paid to the intellectuals and artists of the Republic who suffered under the Franco regime, epitomized by Federico García Lorca and achieved through adaptations of works such as Bodas de sangre (1981), La casa de Bernarda Alba (1987), and El balcón abierto (‘The Open Balcony’, 1984). Other features include the adaptation of texts written in the “other languages,” once silenced by the Franco regime, which stand as symbols of the cultural resistance of the autonomous regions to the nation-state. La Plaza del Diamante (1982) by Betriu is an example. Variations on this theme include pedagogically minded popularizations of experimental narrative through films intended to “acculturate” audiences by making the original text easier to understand; this is a trend that finds expression in Aranda’s version of Tiempo de silencio (1986). These are strategies that promote a new reading of the literary text in light of the optimistic impulses of the socialist era. Another notable example is Los santos inocentes (1984) by Camús.
Federico García Lorca’s recovery and reevaluation of traditional forms of popular culture in music and in verse, as well as the incorporation of these to his own poetic and dramatic art, had profiled him as a pivotal figure in the 1920s and 1930s. His work had to be recognized by the socialist government, now aspiring to continue the cultural projects initiated by the Republic and to return Spain to its proper place within the international sphere. In 1922 Lorca had collaborated with Manuel de Falla in the organization of a Festival of Cante Jondo. Their objective was, in Lorca’s own words, “to save the cante jondo [flamenco ‘deep song’] from the trash of cuplés [Spanish variety song] and flamenquerías [clichéd flamenco styles]”23 and to destroy the stereotypical concept of la españolada, the false image of Spanish culture.24 The cuplé and the flamenquería to which Lorca refers made their appearance later in the cinema of the Republic. The genre of the “españolada,” already developed by directors such as Florián Rey, Benito Perojo, Edgar Neville, and Saénz de Heredia, reached its apogee in the official Francoist cinema that proliferated in the 1950s and 1960s. This genre represented an ideology characterized by folkloric reductionism, xenophobic nationalism, anti-feminist machismo, and ultra-conservative religious views.25 As a representative of the extensive project of socialist cultural recuperation and with the same objective of saving Spanish cultural identity from stereotype, Carlos Saura first rescued three of the classics that had been, in one way or another, associated with Spanishness – Lorca’s Bodas de sangre, Carmen, by Merimée or by Bizet, and Manuel de Falla’s ballet El amor brujo (‘Love the Magician’) – reinterpreting them within the tradition of flamenco. Later Saura recovered classical and popular forms of flamenco from the cultural ghetto of the españolada and from the touristic tablao-style show in the subsequent films Sevillanas and Flamenco, produced in the 1990s.26
The project of dignifying flamenco and stylizing popular elements began in 1981 with the adaptation of Bodas de sangre, produced in cooperation with Antonio Gades, dancer and director of the Spanish National Ballet. The originality of Saura’s film resides in its condition as a double adaptation of Lorca’s work, carried out through two representations: Gades’s choreography for his own dance company and a simulated general rehearsal filmed by Saura in the dance studio. To emphasize the documentary quality of the film and its nature as a work in progress, Saura introduces the performance with prior images of dressing rooms where dancers get ready and talk about their origins and artistic careers. This strategy shows a social commitment to the art of flamenco musicians and dancers, generally gypsies, an ethnic group that had experienced racial and social discrimination in Spain. In this way Saura continued the work begun by Lorca.
Saura’s Bodas de sangre achieves the dramatic tension of Lorca’s work through a fusion of choreography and cinematographic technique. The cinematographic medium serves dance: it adjusts to the dancers’ steps, captures their gestures and expressions in close-ups, and creates contrasts between their movements and pauses.27 For example, in the wedding dance the technique of the classic shot/reverse shot captures the sexual desire of the bride and Leonardo and the impossibility of expressing that desire openly.28 At the same time, Gades’s choreography adjusts itself to the cinematographic medium.29 In the final duel between Leonardo and the groom, music is eliminated and dancers simulate slow motion with their steps and symmetrical movements, thus recognizing and incorporating into their representation the technical elements of the medium used to take the performance to completion. Gades and Saura eliminate language but provide Lorquian rituals and rhythms via flamenco and the cinematographic set.30
In 1987 Mario Camús completed the filmic adaptation of La casa de Bernarda Alba with a sober, realist production that established once again the connection between Lorca’s work and flamenco. This connection reflected the commitment of the socialist government to the celebration of cultural heritage, emphasizing, above all, the allegorical tone of the house and the mother figure, symbolic foreshadowers of Spain under the authoritarian regimen of the dictatorship. María Dolores Perea notes that the adaptation is framed by cante jondo music, which announces and closes the pathos of the drama with its wrenching cry.31 The film establishes a greater visual and auditory contrast between the masculine exterior (luminous and noisy) and the feminine interior (dark and silent) via the staging and the movement of a camera that breaks the boundaries of the theatre stage and moves freely through rooms and garden, church and streets, reinforcing the sensation of enclosure.32
Paul Julian Smith finds that Camús’s adaptation maintains academic rigor but neglects to incorporate the most avant-garde and lyrical aspects of Lorca’s work, choosing a purely documentary setting and placing dramatic emphasis on the authoritarianism of the mother:
Camus’s film lacks almost completely the spiralling dramatic intensity of García Lorca’s original [ . . .]. It is a style typical of Camus’s literary adaptations, a style promoted as exemplary by Pilar Miró [ . . .]. The hidden history of Camus’s Bernarda Alba is that of a Socialist government which sponsored a cinema intended to mirror its own consensus politics, a cinema specializing in adaptations of literary classics with unimpeachable anti-authoritarian credentials [ . . .]. The glossy production values of Camus’s Bernarda Alba are thus not merely the result of an individual director’s artistic temperament, they also betray the ideological commitment of the Spanish government to the celebration of a certain cultural heritage.33
In 1989 Jaime Camino, who had achieved great success and recognition for La vieja memoria (‘The Old Memory’, 1977), a documentary about the Republic and the Civil War, endeavored to find a visual equivalent for Lorca’s poetic images in El balcón abierto. Years later Frédéric Amat achieved this goal in his artistic adaptation of Lorca’s cinematographic script Viaje a la luna (‘Journey to the Moon’, 1998). El balcón abierto is a visual, lyrical exercise whose narrative is made up entirely of Lorca’s texts: letters, essays, poems, and excerpts from some of his dramatic works. It can be considered an example of the film-poetry that Lorca envisioned in his script of Viaje a la luna, of what Buñuel sought in his surrealist collaborations with Salvador Dalí or to what Buñuel referred when he defended a poetic film that did more than “repeat stories.” Similarly, Camino’s film reproduces and illustrates Lorquian texts visually via the following techniques and materials: linking dislocated images that bear a surrealist stamp; emphasizing the presence and repetition of certain symbols, such as the horse, which are central to the Lorquian vision; incorporating excerpts from performances of plays like Bodas de sangre and La casa de Bernarda Alba, combining them with archival images of the period; using documentaries of the cityscape of New York and of the lives of underprivileged peoples; and the obligatory dramatization of the poet’s murder in a ravine in Víznar.
However, Camino’s film does not evade the didacticism characteristic of cinematic production during the socialist period. That didacticism became an accomplice to Lorca’s own pedagogical project. Camino’s visual exercise is framed within the context of a school in which students are preparing a homage to the poet. Among other activities, including cut-outs of photographs, conversations about the poet, a theatre performance, and a puppet show, the students see Jaime Camino’s film, which inevitably begins and ends with the reproduction of Lorca’s murder. Cinematic adaptations of García Lorca’s life and work have been, and are, inseparable from pedagogical projects and commemorative events, emerging inextricably linked to the context of flamenco. Lorca’s premature death made his life and works into icons of artistic, political, and sexual freedom. These iconic, didactic, and allegorical visions have prevailed up to the recent centenary (1998) of his birth.
From the first years of the transition to democracy, film played an important role in the process of recovering Catalan as well as other autochtonous languages, Basque and Galician, within the public space of the media. As a result, the screening of films made by Catalans, with Catalan themes, and/or spoken in Catalan became true political demonstrations. Some of the key titles of this first moment of nationalist restoration were the following: La ciutat cremada (‘The City Burned’, 1976), by Antoni Ribas; Companys, procés a Catalunya (‘Companys, Catalonia on Trial’, 1979), by Josep Maria Forn, and La Plaza del Diamante (1982) by Francesc Betriu.
Betriu’s adaptation of Rodoreda’s novel exemplifies the fusion of the main cultural apparatuses in the multicultural definition of the socialist nation (literature, film, and television)34 and of two social segments, women and Catalan linguistic and cultural autonomy, formerly marginalized by the unidimensional Francoist vision. Both segments were used to defend nationalist restoration. The alienation and the physical and linguistic oppression suffered by Natalia, the main character of the novel, become metaphors for Catalonia’s alienation; the survival story of the former becomes an epic tale of the survival of the latter. Natalia’s inability to express herself, manifested in the novel through the repetition of phrases like “I couldn’t complain,” “I couldn’t tell him,”35 metaphorically expresses in the film Catalonia’s enforced silence. Natalia’s final cry in the Plaza del Diamante is interpreted in the novel as a failed attempt at expression on the part of the female voice suffocated for years by patriarchal repression, while in the film it also expresses a lament for Catalan culture, silenced during forty years of political repression.
The film reinforces visually the political/nationalist symbolism of the novel. In the novel the pigeons represent Natalia’s oppression. Like her, they live as prisoners in the dovecote built by Quimet, Natalia’s husband, who calls her Colometa (‘little pigeon’). The obsessive burden that the pigeons represent for Natalia in the novel is diminished in the film. Nonetheless the birds emphasize the symbolic nature of the oppression of the Catalan people, established in the novel by gesture – Quimet frees them on the day of the proclamation of the Second Republic – and by analogy: the birds are enclosed and sacrificed as was Quimet during the Civil War. According to the political reading favored by the film, the doves symbolize Catalonia’s position within Republican Spain, invaded by Franco’s nationalist forces.
As Juan Company notes, in Betriu’s film the step from the individual to the collective is taken via a “metonymic figuration” so that “the most ideologically restorative aspects of the literary original [are made to] emerge.”36 To that end, the film visually develops historical episodes and typical scenes of Catalonia, either absent or insignificantly portrayed in the novel. Some examples are the reactions of joy or hopelessness at the elections, the proclamation of the Republic, and the start of the Civil War (the front, the sirens, the bombardments, the refugees), as well as the representations of Catalonian high or popular culture (Gaudí’s architecture in scenes filmed in Guell Park and the popular festivals with sardana music, castellers (human towers), and gigantes y cabezudos (elaborate giants and costumed “big-heads”).37 The film version of La Plaza del Diamante failed to convince members of feminist circles and certain nationalist sectors because of its emphasis on cultural restoration. Ultimately, the film diminishes the initiative of the female protagonist and uses the novel for what some critics see as an opportunistic, provincial, and utilitarian aim.38
Since one of the objectives of adaptations is to popularize literature not likely to penetrate the social corpus as effectively as cinema, most “literary” films are constructed as realist, documentary, mimetic texts; these tend to turn formal experimentation into conventional formats. In so doing, such films adapt original literary texts to more traditional visual and narrative patterns to facilitate the reception of a political message by a popular audience. This is precisely the case of Vicente Aranda’s adaptation of the novel by Martín Santos. The film version of Tiempo de silencio favors the novel’s neorealistic, existential tone over elements of formal experimentation. The film also eliminates the novel’s mythical dimension and intellectual development. Aranda avoids the creation of a filmic language that incorporates such literary strategies as irony, parody, hyperbole, repetition, erudite expressions, neologisms, and interior monologue, so essential to the text of Martín Santos. The film version gives priority to the social context of the novel – existential frustration, social misery, scientific backwardness in research, the weakness of the hero – and employs the novel’s Marxist ideology and critique of the social differences that existed in the Madrid of the 1940s. Allegorical readings by critics of the Muecas family and their life in Madrid shanty towns are those that prevail in the film: “Muecas’ family stands as a degraded image of the patriarchal authoritarianism of Franco’s Spain”;39 “the book presents an allegorical picture of the family of Spain. The country is depicted as an organic community harboring apparently hereditary diseases which are spread across virtually the entire class spectrum, reaching into every national institution and affecting women [ . . .] in a particularly insidious way.”40
Ironically enough, Tiempo de silencio emerged in 1962 as a symptom of the intransigent reaction in intellectual circles against the artistic poverty of mid-century novels, perceived as stuck in social realism. With his novel Martín Santos had denounced his contemporary reality without limiting himself to telling the story; rather he transformed that story into a narrative discourse in which the action is seen from the realm of philosophy and conveyed through irony. While Aranda’s film recovers the “socialization” of the literary product, it favors historic implications over discursive function. Aranda’s adaptation, whose purpose is principally pedagogical or commercial, must be understood as a simplification of Martín Santos’s text.
Los santos inocentes (1981) by Miguel Delibes expressed new narrative tendencies that coincided with political change. Post-modern Spanish literature offers reflections on central, cultural aspects of the country, representing them through an ironic, disenchanted filter. In a way similar to that of cinema, narrative fiction (testimonial novel and memoir) claimed as its own the restorative project of personal and historical memory; it recovered the pleasure of telling stories, of creating fictions. Narrative abandoned the dictatorship of experimental formalism, of the “technical pirouette”41 that had marked the literature of the previous decade and gave preference to the traditional procedures of realism and to the preponderance of the environment. The projection of the past onto the present, the re-creation of the Spanish Civil War and of Francoism, appear frequently as themes in the historical novel, while signs of identity, the shift in the role of the narrator vis à vis the reader, and oral discourse characterize the memoir.42
Delibes’s text, written in 1981, returns to a rural and calculatedly timeless space to reproduce feudal hierarchy and the inherent inequities of lord and serf. The narrative mimics the simplicity of speech of the peasants, protagonists of the novel; at the same time, the complexity of a rural lexicon, based on the hunt, shapes a discourse utterly foreign to the majority of readers. The combination of an intensely regional setting, practice, and speech, seen nonetheless as a timeless mode of feudalism, expresses the attitudes of the two social segments represented in the novel, lords and serfs, and the impotence and immobility of the serfs under the dominance of the lords.
Delibes’s novel belongs to a realist tradition of “sociological dependence,” which, according to Mario Camús, for generations has defined the essence of Spanish literary production and enjoyed the preference of the public. In line with the cultural vision of the socialist era, after the film’s premiere Camús declared that, when adapting literature to film, it is appropriate from a sociological and commercial point of view to choose the mode that tells the story of the country: “[C]inema has always achieved great success when it has dealt with Spanish themes or when it has adapted Spanish literary works.”43 Citing the example of Los santos inocentes, Camús insisted that “[t]he cinema of today must be related to reality, to a culture, to the knowledge of a country and its people” (p. 41). Favorable critiques and reviews praised the film (as well as the two previous films, Fortunata y Jacinta [1979–80], produced for television, and La colmena [1982]) for its origins in Spanish “tragedy,” “history,” and “tradition,” also for its connection to “the hidden soul of this country.”44
The preoccupation with the goal of creating a cinema that tells “Spanish stories” recalls, albeit from a different and more distant ideological perspective, the nationalistic enterprise of the Franco regime; further, as in the case of the other arts, to conceive of cinematographic production as bound to the eternal repetition of certain social and cultural patterns is reductive and produces a paradox: the effort to replace the stereotyping of cinema during the Franco regime with a project of cultural recuperation often results also in stereotypical tendencies. The inclination to reproduce tradition or, more accurately, the cultural clichés associated with Spain as seen from the outside persists into the 1990s, continuing to be the identifying sign that marks every film aspiring to international recognition. Cinema appears incapable of erasing the impress of time-worn cultural clichés. In an article entitled “Lo que se espera de España” (‘What is Expected of Spain’), published in 1996, Marvin D’Lugo rightly points out that the Spanish cinematic product that finds itself sustained by certain signs of national identity which for decades have helped create a kind of “black legend” of Spanishness – religious fanaticism, political and social intolerance, sexual repression – is precisely the kind of film that enjoys international acclaim. In D’Lugo’s view, this fact applies as much to the filmic creations of Buñuel and Saura in the 1960s and 1970s as to films produced during the transition and socialist periods, such as Furtivos (‘Poachers’, 1975), Los santos inocentes, or even the recent films – Matador (1986) and La flor de mi secreto (‘The Flower of My Secret’, 1995) by Pedro Almodóvar, the representative par excellence of post-modern Spain. The success of these films is related intrinsically to the capacity of the director for maintaining “the cultural cliché” – a recognizable “familial and physical geography” – and for expressing “particular themes via a rhetoric of Spanishness.”45
Unquestionably the retrieval of “signs of identity” not only attracted international audiences but also proved essential to the project of redefining the ideological and political character of cultural apparatuses during the socialist period. In this regard, Los santos inocentes achieves an almost exemplary status within the socialist political agenda as the film is seen as a politically correct reinterpretation of a dominant cliché: Los santos inocentes represents a literary adaptation in the service of historical restoration and social criticism, and as such achieved one of the most sensational successes at the box-office – nationally and internationally – in the entire history of Spanish film.46
Camús’s film represents a continuation of the novel in two ways: it benefits from the cinematographic strategies inherent in Delibes’s text while it complicates and captures the novel’s sociological reality. As Patricia Santoro has noted, in many instances Delibes’s novel can be read as cinematographic prose. Some features are: beginning and ending in medias res; the lack of punctuation; the use of temporal narrative links created to support oral storytelling; a sense of timelessness; and a narrative style that “frequently includes descriptions of facial movements, body gestures, background noises, and voice inflection,” similar to those of a film script.47 Santoro finds that if Camús has based his adaptation upon the novel’s own cinematographic character, emphasizing narrative objectivity with pictorial/photographic staging, some of the structural and spatial-temporal changes in the film also facilitate the interpretation of Camús’s adaptation as an ideological (as well as artistic) rereading and re-creation of the master text (Novel into Film, p. 160).
The film is structured as a retrospective story told from the “present,” which is some time in the 1960s. On the screen children appear, freed from the serfdom of the estate; now they are to benefit from the opportunities afforded by emigration to urban centers. Through the juxtaposition of images of the present and flashbacks of past time, the film depicts an exterior world beyond the estate. The novel, in turn, concentrates on the isolation of the estate to which social changes have not yet arrived. The filmic text emphasizes the dichotomies associated with the binomial structure of the lord/serf relationship, focusing on the character of el señorito (‘mister’) Iván in order to create in the spectator an identification with Azarías and thus justify his crime. The novel ends when Azarías murders Iván by hanging him from a tree. Patricia Santoro notes that Ivan “is the embodiment of all that is inherently evil in this pseudo-feudalistic society [ . . .]. His death, therefore, [ . . .] is more strongly advocated [ . . .] by the film whose images have made his deeds more heinous to the viewer” (p. 167).
The film also depicts imaginatively the consequences of Azarías’s crime to the family, consequences implied also in the novel: the children have been able to leave the estate and the parents are both punished by being expelled and returned to La Raya (the wretched shack on the outskirts of the estate where they had lived at the beginning of the novel/film), relieved of the burden of the two retarded (innocent) members – la Niña Chica dies and Azarías is placed in a mental institution. Santoro indicates that the role of la Niña Chica and Azarías, in the novel and in the film, is to “point to the retardation of the Spanish nation in relation to the rest of modern Europe” (p. 153). Santoro’s view is that this new temporal dimension signifies an optimistic reading of the end of the novel:
[T]he new, more liberal Spain of the mid-1960s has replaced the traditional, retrogressive ideology of the old Spain with a new set of progressive and more liberal values [ . . .]. [T]he departure of Quirce and Nieves from the estate signifies that Spain’s youth has recognized this potential for change. The new generation has found its own voice, and it is one that rejects the oppresive social structures that have permanently damaged and closed off hope to their parents’ generation.
(ibid., p. 175)
The film version is rife with the optimism of the socialist era in deliberate contrast to the pessimism of the novel, a view more suited to the actual social conditions of the time. The view of new possibilities open to youth arises from the context of the economic miracle and the rural exodus of the 1960s; at the same time, this view anticipates the spirit of economic bonanza and political euphoria of the socialist present (1984) in which the film was made. To confine Azarías to a sanatorium robs his action – taking justice into his own hands to eliminate the principal representative of oppression – of its symbolic, revolutionary, and universal value, relegating it to madness.48 His punishment is much less severe than is appropriate since his “crime was deemed that of an ‘innocent’ driven to murder by powerful social circumstances that were totally beyond his comprehension.”49
A symbolic interpretation of this film ending – which undoes the uncertainty marking the end of the novel and depicts isolation for Azarías, degradation for Paco and Régula, and hope for Nieves and Quirce – suggests as well that “Cainite” Spain, of two opposing sides in which revenge and violence are the means for resolving differences, is no longer acceptable in the new, democratic Spain. Azarías’s isolation in an asylum (the last thing that Régula would have allowed to happen to her brother in the novel) implies reconciliation. Punishment for his crime is meted out in exchange for the plan that allows the parents to dwell within the margins of the estate and, above all, for the freedom of youth and the betterment of their way of life. The past cannot be modified, once it has been registered in historical records (family photograph, film); the past must be left behind (on the estate/in the sanatorium) so that people may face the present and future with optimism – prospects of betterment for youth in the factory or urban center.
Regarding Camús’s adaptation, Santos Zunzunegui denies the efficacy of the cultural vehicle that, in principle, motivated the film adaptations of the socialist years. He finds that these works, which insist on defining themselves as mere faithful reproductions, actually carry out an “implacable chore [ . . .] of cultural deactivation,” managing “to bury definitively the original work with the pretext of respecting it” (‘El cine español’, pp. 180, 181). What Zunzunegui complains of in the “literary” filmic product is the inability to create a personal vision of a literary work, an inability arising from the goal of achieving homogenization both ideological and aesthetic. We may apply this view to the entire acculturation project of the early years of the socialist period, in which writers and directors espoused the project of reclaiming history according to the new democracy, globally characterized by “lightness” and an end to ideology. Cultural tradition, past and present, faced the challenge of constructing a new image, beginning in 1975 and culminating in 1992. The façade or simulacrum of democratic practice and cultural sophistication, developed programatically during the socialist decade, constitutes an essential element in the re-creation of Spanish cultural identity at the end of the twentieth century.
Since the means to knowledge in our time of post-modernity is the image, cultural and literary transmission becomes inseparable from the media of mass communication – cinema and its domestic reproducers, television and video. Relegating literature to visual representation may be seen as a process that empties culture, for the vision of literary works only reaches the public through the filter of the ideological apparatus in power. As Baudrillard shows, “mediators” (political, intellectual, technical, or operational apparatuses) are used to free the masses from “the obligation of being responsible, of enduring philosophical, moral, and political categories.”50 Mediators, by definition, adapt themselves to the purpose of managing, as Baudrillard says, “by delegation, by procuration, this tedious matter of power and of will, to unburden the masses of this transcendence for their great pleasure and to turn it into a show for their benefit” (Selected Writings, p. 216). Thus the general public of the post-Francoist era are progressively turned into voyeurs, spectators of their historical and literary past. Such a public has delegated to the cultural apparatuses of the state the task of choosing, mediating, and “turning into a show” the literary texts that best represent, according to the socialist ideological filter, the darkened Francoist past. For many spectators who did not experience either the war or post-war, the cinema of adaptations (historical or literary) is no longer a case of imitation or reduplication of a real or textual origin. Rather, as Baudrillard points out, cinema represents the visual substitution of the sign for the real or textual itself (p. 167).
Along the same lines, in La cultura como espectáculo (‘Culture as Spectacle’, 1988), Eduardo Subirats notes that in post-modernity, culture is produced as a technological simulacrum whose ultimate consequence is “the production of self-conscious and subjective [and collective] identity as a virtual and fictitious reality: the self as the drama of the person, history as a show performed via the media, the subjective spirit as the unreality of a scenographic fiction.”51 The literary canon produced by and through the media becomes representation (simulacrum), its essence configured for the viewers exclusively through the image. In effect, the successful release of a film adaptation of a literary work is followed by a new edition of the book, which uses a photogram of the film to illustrate the cover and promote the sales of both book and film. The literary entity is replaced by its filmic replica and the reader by the spectator, who reveres this reproduction as the only way of achieving knowledge about reality. The socialist cultural product bears the post-modern stamp; therefore, one way to conceive the reinterpretation of history is necessarily via the filmic/visual mediation and simulation of the literary text.
1 P. Gimferrer, Cine y literatura (Barcelona: Planeta, 1985), p. 11.
2 Georges Méliès (1861–1938) was one of the most important pioneers of early cinema. A successful magician and owner of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris, Méliès attended the first screening of the Lumière Cinématographe on 28 December 1895. That same year he started making films, using a home-made camera and projector. Méliès established basic techniques for the special effects of most modern films (stop motion, dissolve, fading, masking, etc.). He painted all his stage settings himself and was also the main actor in most of his works. Méliès’s best-known film, A Trip to the Moon (1902), was one of the longest and most elaborate of his trick film epics. David W. Griffith (1875–1948) is considered the pioneer of American silent film. Actor, screenwriter, producer, and director, he is best known for exploiting the potential of film as an expressive medium and for his controversial perceptions of race and class in American society. Griffith’s best-known and most controversial film is Birth of a Nation (1915). Further to this note, I wish to thank Sean McNeal for his collaboration in the translation of the present essay from Spanish into English and Harriet Turner and Adelaida López de Martínez for their rigorous editing. A version in Spanish appears as a chapter titled “Convergencias y alianzas culturales: las adaptaciones fílmicas de obras literarias en el período socialista” in my book Cine (ins)urgente: Textos fílmicos y contextos culturales de la España postfranquista (Madrid: Fundamentos, 2001), pp. 153–74.
3 C. Peña-Ardid, Literatura y cine. Una aproximación comparativa (Madrid: Cátedra, 1992), p. 58.
4 Quoted in J. Talens, El ojo tachado (Madrid: Catédra, 1986), p. 48.
5 L. Buñuel, Mi último suspiro (Madrid: Plaza y Janés, 1992), p. 126.
6 A. Monegal (ed.), Viaje a la luna (guión cinematográfico) by Federico García Lorca (Valencia: Pre-Textos, 1995), p. 37.
7 A. Sánchez Vidal, Vida y opiniones de Luis Buñuel (Teruel: Instituto de Estudios Turolenses, 1985), pp. 33–4.
8 Quoted in Peña-Ardid, Literatura y cine, p. 35.
9 F. Ayala, El escritor y el cine (Madrid: Aguilar, 1988), p. 162.
10 V. Molina Fox, “El mirón literario (el cine de Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett y Eugene Ionesco),” Revista de Occidente 40 (September 1984), p. 34.
11 J. Urrutia, Imago Litterae/Cine. Literatura (Seville: Ediciones Alfar, 1984), p. 17.
12 L. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, tr. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 162.
13 M. Zavarzadeh, Seeing Films Politically (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), p. 92.
14 See, for example, S. Zunzunegui, “El cine español en la época del socialismo,” in Cuatro años de cine español (1983–1986), ed. Francisco Llinás, IMAGFIC VIII (Festival de cine de Madrid: Discrefilm, 1987), p. 179; also the films of Rafael Gil: Don Quijote de la Mancha (1947); El clavo (1944), and La pródiga (1946), based on texts by Alarcón; La fe (1947), an adaptation of a text by Palacio Valdés; and El fantasma de Doña Juanita (1944), an adaptation of a text by José María Pemán (J. E. Monterde, Veinte años de cine (1973–1992). Un cine bajo paradoja [Barcelona: Paidós, 1993], pp. 225–6).
15 Cited in Urrutia, Imago Litterae/Cine, p. 23.
16 Ibid., p. 27; Álvaro del Amo, Comedia cinematográfica española (Madrid: Cuadernos para el diálogo, 1975), p. 18.
17 Monterde, Veinte años de cine, p. 101.
18 J. Hopewell, El cine español después de Franco (Madrid: El Arquero, 1989), p. 400. Originally published as Out of the Past. Spanish Cinema after Franco (London: British Film Institute, 1986).
19 See P. Miró, “Ten Years of Spanish Cinema,” in Literature, the Arts, and Democracy. Spain in the Eighties, tr. Alma Amell, ed. Samuel Amell (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1990), pp. 38–46, and J. Hopewell, “‘Art and Lack of Money’: the Crises of the Spanish Film Industry, 1977–1990,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 13: 4 (1991), pp. 113–22.
20 P. Besas, “The Finance Structure of Spanish Cinema,” in Refiguring Spain. Cinema / Media. Representation, ed. Marsha Kinder (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 247.
21 E. Riambau, “La década ‘socialista’ (1982–1992),” in Historia del cine español, ed. Román Gubern et al. (Madrid: Cátedra, 1995), p. 421.
22 Hopewell, Out of the Past, p. 241.
23 This sentence by Lorca comes from the paper he read in 1922 at the Artistic Center of Granada: “The Historical and Artistic Importance of the Primitive Andalusian Song Known as Cante Jondo,” included in Manuel de Falla y el ‘Cante Jondo’, ed. E. Molina Fajardo (Universidad de Granada, 1962), pp. 117–208.
24 A. Soria Ortega, “Notas sobre el andalucismo de Lorca,” in Valoración actual de la obra de García Lorca (Madrid: Universidad Complutense, 1988), pp. 195–6.
25 R. Gubern, El cine sonoro en la II República (1929–36) (Barcelona: Lumen, 1977), pp. 126–7.
26 B. Jordan and R. Morgan-Tamosunas, Contemporary Spanish Cinema (Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 28.
27 A. Sánchez Vidal, “Bodas de sangre,” El Cine de Carlos Saura (Zaragoza: Caja de Ahorros de la Inmaculada, 1988), p. 157.
28 Most commonly used for dialogue, shot/reverse angle-shot (shot/counter-shot) is a set of two alternative shots, generally in a medium close-up (frames a character from the waist, hips, or knees, up or down), that frame in turn the two speakers.
29 Vidal, “Bodas de sangre,” p. 155.
30 See also Marvin D’Lugo’s analysis of the film in his book The Films of Carlos Saura. The Practice of Seeing (Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 193–201.
31 M. D. Perea Barberá, “La casa de Bernarda Alba: Lorca y Camús,” Anuario de Cine y Literatura en Español 1 (1995), p. 85.
32 Perea Barberá, “La casa de Bernarda Alba,” p. 95.
33 P. J. Smith, “García Lorca / Almodóvar: Gender, Nationality and the Limits of the Visible,” in Vision Machines. Cinema, Literature and Sexuality in Spain and Cuba, 1983–1993 (London and New York: Verso, 1996), pp. 24–5.
34 The project for La Plaza del Diamante was chosen in a competition for best scripts, sponsored by Radio Televisión Española in 1979; it was made first for television in a four-hour series filmed entirely in Catalan, and was adapted later to a cinematographic version dubbed in Spanish by the same actors.
35 See the chapter on La Plaza del Diamante in P. Rodríguez, Vidas Im/Propias. Transformaciones del sujeto femenino en la narrativa española contemporánea (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2000).
36 J. M. Company, “Variaciones sobre un oso de juguete (La plaça del diamant),” Contracampo 30 (August/September 1982), pp. 18, 19.
37 Patricia Hart analyzes the details that speak of the oppression, division, and annulment of Natalia’s identity in the novel and that are absent in the film: omission of problematic, disagreeable, or ambiguous scenes, and the correction and beautifying of characters and episodes; additions of images with political content; reordering of events; juxtaposition of the voice-over; and images that contradict the implicit message of the voice. See P. Hart, “More Heaven and Less Mud: The Precedence of Catalan Unity over Feminism in Françesc Betruiu’s Filmic Vision of Merçé Rodoreda’s La plaça del diamant,” in The Garden across the Border. Merçé Rodoreda’s Fiction, ed. Kethleen McNerney and Nancy Vosburg (Selingsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1994), pp. 42–60. See also P. Rodríguez, “Experiencia, literatura y cine: traducciones y traiciones en La plaza del diamante,” Anuario de Cine y Literatura en Español 1 (1995), pp. 111–120, and L. Ball, “El lenguaje de la división y el silencio en Rodoreda,” in Cine Lit. Essays on Peninsular Film and Fiction I, ed. George Cabello Castellet, Jaime Martí-Olivella and Guy Wood (Portland State University, Oregon State University, Reed College, 1992), 92–8.
38 L. Miñarro Albero, “La Plaça del diamant,” Dirigido por 91 (March 1982), pp. 61–2.
39 J. Labanyi, “Fiction as Mask: Tiempo de silencio,” in Myth and History in the Contemporary Spanish Novel (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 71.
40 R. W. Fiddian and P. W. Evans, “Tiempo de silencio: ‘Los españoles pintados por sí mismos,’” in Challenges to Authority: Fiction and Film in Contemporary Spain (London: Támesis, 1988), p. 39.
41 M. Vázquez Montalbán, “La novela española entre el postfranquismo y el postmodernismo,” in La renovation du roman espagnol depuis 1975, ed. Y. Lissorgues (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1991), p. 24.
42 See D. Villanueva, “La novela,” in Letras españolas 1976–1986, ed. A. Amorós et al. (Madrid: Castalia, 1987), pp. 19–64.
43 J. Cobos and M. Rubio, “Cinco horas con Mario,” Casablanca 42 (June 1984), p. 43.
44 P. M. Lamet, “Los santos inocentes. Gañanes y señoritos,” Reseña 151 (July/August 1984), pp. 29, 30.
45 M. D’Lugo, “Lo que se espera de España,” Academia 15 (July 1996), p. 44.
46 John Hopewell, in El cine español despues de Franco, views Los santos inocentes as the paradigm of a cinematographic policy based on the heritage of anti-Francoism. Nevertheless, he considers the liberal assumption permeating the film to be excessively transparent, and even “dangerously manichean” if compared with certain cinematographic classics by authors from the first stage of anti-Francoism, such as Bardem or Berlanga: “the film reveals socialist cinematography’s basic liberal assumption: that repression is foreign to the Spanish people and that once eliminated, these people will reap the fruits of their own goodness,” p. 412.
47 P. Santoro, Novel into Film. The Case of “La familia de Pascual Duarte” and “Los santos inocentes” (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), pp. 136, 135.
48 In an interview in La Révue du Cinéma, Camús makes clear that for him the most important, and most logical, rebellion is not that of Azarías, but rather that of the young people, who, as of the crime, will no longer live as before (C. De Béchade, “Entretien avec Mario Camus,” La Revue du Cinéma 401 (January 1985), p. 58.
49 Santoro, Novel into Film, p. 175.
50 M. Poster (ed.), Jean Baudrillard. Selected Writings (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 215.
51 E. Subirats, La cultura como espectáculo (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988), p. 94.