The Spanish quinqui film by Tom Whittaker

Author:Tom Whittaker [Whittaker, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Performing Arts, Film, History & Criticism
ISBN: 9781526131775
Google: WRZKyAEACAAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2020-01-15T00:40:25+00:00

In her exploration of the place of the breath in film, Davina Quinlivan builds on Laura Marks's model of haptic viewing and extends her work into an audiovisual context. If, as Quinlivan argues, Laura Marks tends to privilege the image over sound, Quinlivan's work explores how the embodied exchange between viewer and film can also take place in the soundtrack through what she calls a ‘breathing encounter’. For Quinlivan, this encounter ‘envisages the point of contact according to the ways in which breathing unsettles the borders between inside and outside’ (Quinlivan, 2012: 20–21). Through addressing the soundtrack in her analysis, Quinlivan's writing prompts a ‘shift away from haptic visuality towards “haptic hearing”, reconciling the act of listening to the proximal gestures of touch which pervade Marks's thinking’ (Quinlivan, 2012: 21). Through the close miking of breath, the two scenes here might be said to similarly disturb the border between inside and outside, moments that generate particularly intense intersubjective encounters with the film. That the ‘haptic hearing’ should be emphasised through the presence of the knives is significant. Like images of the tattoos, the knife alerts us to the surface contact of skin, whose tear we also saw in the opening sequence.

Navajeros is the most musical of all of de la Iglesia's quinqui films, and the director has said that when Goicoechea and he were devising the script, they wanted to achieve a ‘copla popular de niño bandido’ (popular copla of a young outlaw), which was constructed ‘casi con ritmo de tebeo’ (almost with the rhythm of a comic) (A.S.H., 1980). Several songs by the rock urbano band Burning can be heard non-diegetically in the film, including ‘Una canción dedicada al Jaro’ (A song dedicated to el Jaro), which was composed especially for the film. A genre of rock music to emerge from Madrid from the early to mid-1970s, rock urbano combined the Anglo-American sounds of hard rock and blues with lyrics that dealt with social problems within Spanish cities. Described in the script as ‘Comienza a sonar, a todo volumen, un rock and roll. Música dura, urbana, proletaria’ (Rock and roll starts to be played at full volume. Hard, urban and proletarian music), we first hear the music non-diegetically in the opening title sequence, after the journalist lists el Jaro's criminal record to date. As well as providing further exposition for the protagonist, the song ties the noise of the music thematically to his deviant status as an outlaw. In addition to the music of the group Burning, el Jaro and his friends are depicted listening to the rumbas ‘Vivía errante’ by Los Chichos and ‘Ya no te quedan lágrimas’ (You have no tears left anymore) by Rumba Tres. As chapter 5 will also show, rumbas had become an enormously popular genre of music with marginal teenagers in Spain at the time, and was associated in particular with the district of Vallecas where Manzano grew up. In particular, two scenes which take place in Almudena Cemetery emphasise their shared listening

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