Thursday 24 November 2011

Spain Made Flesh: Penélope Cruz and La niña de tus ojos (Fernando Trueba, 1998)


      The stardom of Penélope Cruz can be dated precisely as beginning in 1992 with the release of Jamón jamón (Bigas Luna, 1992) and Belle epoque (Fernando Trueba, 1992). The two films side by side encapsulate two facets of her star image; on the one hand, Cruz’s position as what Eugenia de la Torriente describes as the ‘mito erótico nacional’ [‘national erotic myth’] (2004: 38) as Silvia in Jamón jamón, and on the other, the virginal ideal in the character of Luz in Belle epoque. But they also caused her to debut on the national stage in two films that either consciously questioned and parodied Spanish identities or conflated contemporary Spain with Spain’s past; Cruz’s emergence at a time when Spanish identity was openly being discussed and Spain was actively (and publicly) trying to redefine itself has shaped the form and content of her stardom, the ways in which she interacts with the national, and the image of Spanishness that she represents as an end result. From the outset of her career, Penélope Cruz has also been constructed as a star who specifically ‘belongs’ to Spain: a number of Spanish female stars have emerged in the last twenty years but none are so possessively claimed as she. Cruz is commonly referred to in the Spanish press as ‘nuestra Penélope’ [‘our Penélope’] and her star image is presented as signifying innate aspects of Spanish womanhood, and she is seen as embodying Spain, or ‘España hecha carne’ [‘Spain made flesh’] in the words of director Bigas Luna (Trashorras 1999: 132).
      Peter Evans notes how many daughters she has played onscreen and describes her as ‘la “niña”, es decir, la de todos los espectadores, la de toda España, a la que se refieren a menudo como “nuestra Penélope”’ [‘the little girl, that is to say, that of all the spectators, that of all of Spain, she who they refer to at least as “our Penélope”’] (2004: 54-55). This is further emphasised by the roles that are located within a specifically Spanish context: the arrival of the Second Republic in Belle epoque; incarcerated as a ‘political subversive’ during the last years of the dictatorship in Entre rojas (Azucena Rodríguez, 1995); a ‘gran estrella’ recalling Imperio Argentina in La niña de tus ojos / The Girl of Your Dreams (Fernando Trueba, 1998); Goya’s model for ‘La maja vestida’ and ‘La maja desnuda’ in Volavérunt (Bigas Luna, 1999); as well as her short role in the prologue (set during the ‘state of exception’ in 1970) of Carne trémula / Live Flesh (Pedro Almodóvar, 1997). These films position Cruz and her star image within narratives that have cultural and historical significance to Spain and therefore embed her within the cultural imaginary: ‘a nation is nothing without the stories it tells itself about itself’ (Triana-Toribio 2003: 6). This post examines the representation of Penélope Cruz as embodying Spain, specifically in the film La niña de tus ojos, the film for which she won her first Goya for Best Actress in 1999.

Thursday 10 November 2011

Another Book Added to List


Resina, J.R. (ed) (2008) -Burning Darkness: A Half Century of Spanish Cinema, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. ISBN: 978-0791475041

A collection that covers an interesting range of films with the aim of contributing to the as-yet still scarce range of English-language analytical resources that address Spanish cinema. The selection of films and directors has been done so as to span 'the period from the origins of the New Spanish Cinema in the 1950s to the end of the twentieth century' (p.1).

  • Introduction -Joan Ramon Resina
  • 1. Rehearsing for Modernity in ¡Bienvenido, Mister Marshall! (Luis García Berlanga, 1952) -Eva Woods Peiró
  • 2. Existential Crossroads in Muerte de un ciclista (Juan Antonio Bardem, 1955) -Andrés Lima-Hincapié
  • 3. Viridiana Coca-Cola (Luis Buñuel, 1961) -Tom Conley
  • 4. El espíritu de la colmena: Memory, Nostalgia, Trauma (Víctor Erice, 1973) -Chris Perriam
  • 5. A Poetics of Splitting: Memory and Identity in La prima Angélica (Carlos Saura, 1974) -Ángel Quintana
  • 6. Ambiguous Disenchantment in El corazón del bosque (Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, 1979)  -Irení Depetris-Chauvin
  • 7. Los paraísos perdidos: Cinema of Return and Repetition (Basilio Martín Patino, 1985) -Tatjana Pavlović
  • 8. (M)Othering Strategies in El pájaro de la felicidad (Pilar Miró, 1993) -Jaume Martí-Olivella
  • 9. Abjection, Trauma, and the Material Image: La madre muerta (Juanma Bajo Ulloa, 1993) -Jo Labanyi
  • 10. The Catalan Body Politic as Aired in La teta i la lluna (Bigas Luna, 1994) -Dominic Keown
  • 11. Genre and Screen Violence: Revisiting Tesis (Alejandro Amenábar, 1995) -Barry Jordan
  • 12. Conceptualizing "the Impact" in Los amantes del Círculo Polar (Julio Medem, 1998) -Robert A. Davidson
  • 13. Immortal/Undead: The Body and the Transmission of Tradition in Amic/Amat (Ventura Pons, 1998) -Josep-Anton Fernández
  • 14. Imitation of Life: Transsexuality and Transtextuality in Todo sobre mi madre (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999) -Esteve Riambau
  • 15. The Construction of the Cinematic Image: En construcción (José Luis Guerín, 2000) -Joan Ramon Resina


The book has been added to the Books on Spanish Cinema, Part Two post.