Spanish Cinema in the Global Context by Samuel Amago

Author:Samuel Amago [Amago, Samuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138243354
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

Kinder described the children of Franco appearing on screen as “emotionally and politically stunted children who were no longer young; who, because of the imposed role as ‘silent witness’ to a tragic war that had divided country, family, and self, had never been innocent; and who, because of the oppressive domination of the previous generation, were obsessed with the past and might never take responsibility for changing the future” (“Children of Franco” 58). Building on Kinder’s description of Franco’s children, D’Lugo suggested later that Saura’s Ana in Cría cuervos is perhaps the director’s richest and most complex character, because she at once is the center of “a moving tale of a sensitive child’s loss of innocence” while also serving as an allegory for modern-day Spaniards’ efforts to “‘reason’ their own emotional liberation from captivity in the prison-house of Francoist ideology” (The Films of Carlos Saura 131).

D’Lugo bases his analysis of Cría cuervos on Nick Browne’s much-anthologized essay on spectator positioning in the narrative cinema, in which Browne critiqued the (at the time) dominant notion in film theory of ideological suture. Browne’s central premise was that point of view was much more fluid than previously acknowledged. Drawing examples from key sequences of Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939), Browne noted how spectators are “defined neither in terms of orientation within the constructed geography of the fiction, nor of social position of the viewing character. On the contrary, our point of view […] is tied more closely to our attitude of approval or disapproval and is very different from any literal viewing angle or character’s point of view” (33). Browne’s essay illustrates how camera positioning works simultaneously with spectator identification to situate the viewer in two places at once, “where the camera is and ‘with’ the depicted person,” a technique that in turn functions to create a “double structure of viewer/viewed” (33) in the movies. In principle, the viewer does not identify with the camera or its point of view but rather with the film’s characters. Hence, we do not tend to “feel dispossessed by a change in shots” because, from our position as spectators, “as distinct perhaps from a character, point of view is not definitively or summarily stated by any single shot or even set of shots from a given spatial location” (34). Browne hypothesized that the double structure of viewer/viewed in fiction film contributes to the construction of a powerful emotional process that throws into question “any account of the position of the spectator as centered at a single point or at the center of any simply optical system,” so that viewer identification “necessarily has a double structure in the way it implicates the spectator in both the position of the one seeing and the one seen” (33).

Browne’s semiotic analysis of what he calls the “specular text” is particularly useful for describing the formal structure of feature films that emphasize looking, gazing and viewing within their narratives. The power of Villaronga’s cinematic depiction lies in his expert exploitation of the inherent

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