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Representing Masculinities in Spanish Film Introduction Inma Cívico-Lyons ary and multicultural. Men are seen by modern sociologists as “the product of a complex system of factors and forces which combine in a variety of ways to produce a whole range of different masculinities” (Edley and Wetherell 37). Hegemonic masculinity, or as Robert Hanke defines it, the “social ascendancy of a particular version or model of masculinity that operates on the terrain of common sense and conventional morality that defines ‘what it means to be a man’” (190) is understood as one more variety of masculinity, and one that is in crisis. This much talked-about “masculinity crisis” is revealed as a line drawn between an understanding of men as subjects, and the established definition of men as the beneficiaries of hegemonic masculinity. This crisis in masculinity is also addressed in Spanish film, where stereotypes of the Iberian macho are being challenged. As Barry Jordan and Rikky Morgan-Tamosunas contend regarding cotemporary Spanish film, “The assault on traditional notions of masculinity constitutes a significant trend in contemporary Spanish cinema.” Film representations of traditional masculinity reveal not only its destructive consequences for women and men, but also “demonstrate that male identity is fragile, provisional and constantly under threat” (140-1). Juan Bruce-Novoa states that film is one of the most important modes of representation, and “delivering convincing portrayals of identifiable cultural performance is at the heart of filmmaking” (3). Film is a popular medium which weighs heavily in people’s Embedded within the broadening panorama of gender studies, the last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed a rise in the study of men and masculinities. Drawing from feminist investigations into gender as a system of power, men studies began an inquiry on different and varied male experiences, as well as on the significations of these experiences within specific cultural frames. In addition to the literary study of male character representation, the significance of images of men in advertising, television, and film were also examined. Since the 1990s, and thanks in part to Judith Butler´s inquiry on issues of gender performance, work on representations of masculinities on screen began to take on more importance (Powrie et all 1-2). Today, images of men continue to be investigated as sites for the construction and deconstruction of males within cultural imaginations. Our purpose in this issue of Post Script is to offer careful consideration to questions of Spanish film representations of masculinities and masculine identities. We look to examine how, in light of traditional definitions of Spanish masculinity, which include the Iberian macho archetype, Spanish films work out and negotiate assumptions regarding masculinity. An overwhelming number of current sociological investigations espouse the concept of masculinity as socially constructed, encompassing practices that change with cultural/historical shifts; therefore, the examination of masculinity in Spanish film calls for approaches that are interdisciplin- Volume 30, No. 3 3 Post Script imagination. If we consider masculinity as a cultural performance, then, through different modes of representation, film contributes to the production and reproduction of, as R.W. Connell affirms regarding the social environment, “expectations,” “ stereotypes,” and “role models.” Be that as it may, and due to the historical, political, and social shifts that occurred in Spain during the 20th century, many Spanish films offer intriguing representations of men: from images of males that fit the hegemonically prescribed way of masculinity to the so-called “deviant” forms of masculinity, or masculine identities which have been displaced from the center of the hegemonic paradigm. The Iberian macho, a stereotypical representation of Spanish men that has dominated the cultural imagination, and which portrays Spanish men as strong, powerful, and subjugators of women, has also been revised in cinematic representations. Following Stuart Hall’s definition of “identities” as “points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us” (6), masculine identities are represented in film as products of the always changing natures of history, language, and culture, and thus, the masculinity crisis is also represented. Connell defines masculinity as a “personal practice which cannot be isolated from its institutional context,” and emphasizes the importance of three institutions for the organization of gender: the state, the workplace/ labor market, and the family (599-602). And it is irremediably within the context of the state, the workplace, and the family that film representations of masculine identities are considered by the authors represented in this issue. Just as questions of masculinity are analyzed in this issue, so are the cultural artifacts, themes, and stylistic conventions of cinematic tendencies, such as Neorealism, Hollywood classical film, and Spanish popular cinema. Film genres such as the musical and the melodrama weigh heavily on both the spectators’ and government’s expectations, and produce a variety of dis- Volume 30, No. 3 courses to which male protagonists either adhere to or reject. All the authors in this special issue demonstrate the importance of film genre and cinematic conventions for the representation of gender tensions and gender constructions. The masculine identities represented in the films featured in this issue echo the tensions and negotiations that are required to either submit to or resist the powers at large. A major event in 20th century Spain is the Civil War of 1936, which resulted in the establishment of the Franco dictatorship. A vast majority of films allude directly or indirectly to the Civil War and the dictatorship as memories that resist erasure, perhaps because their consequences are still being felt today. Men were at the forefront of the dictatorship’s nationalist project. As heads of the state, the workplace, and the family, men were in charge of preserving the ultraconservative political and religious values mandated by the Franco regime. A hegemonic concept of men represented in films during the early Franco regime (1940s) included traits of strength, courage, dominance, and Catholicism. However, as the dictatorship strengthened its hold, the image of the no-longer-needed “warrior” began to appear as obsolete, and a more “feminized” image of men began to appear in films of the 1950s. Edgar Neville’s El ultimo caballo (1950) shows subtle indications of a subversion of the Franco regime’s recommendations for masculine identity. The article analyzes film trends of the 1950s such as Italian Neorealism and Hollywood film conventions, which combined with literary modes of representations (the “sainete”) and themes such as the peculiar masculinity of Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha, offer a portrayal of masculine identity characterized by vulnerability and displacement from the norm advocated by the political powers. This model of masculinity that would certainly be “considered undesirable by previous film standards,” points the way towards the modern male model of capitalism in his economic dealings and in his relationship with the other gender. Even though the model of 4 Post Script and stability of heteronormative patriarchal ideology.” The author studies the sexual ambiguities that male figures represented in musical films. Dapena studies coded signs throughout the film that reveal a “different” type of masculinity, an “otherness that is revealed indirectly” through the film’s mise-en-scène, as well as through “physical gestures, sartorial choices, the exhibition of cultural tastes, and a generalized anxiety of all things sexual.” Even though the film creates a space for the representation of a non-normative, non-conformist type of masculinity, the final scene, permeated by fear of punishment and castration, reveals the impossibility of a different kind of masculinity within the heteronormative system of Franco´s Spain. The decade of the 1960s in Spain was witness to the “most accelerated, deepseated social, economic, and cultural transformations in Spanish history” (Borja de Riquer 259). The country’s opening-up led to an increase in tourism and emigration. In this era of “Desarrollismo” [Developmentalism], Ana Vivancos in “Failure to Deliver: Alfredo Landa in the Wonderland of Spanish Development,” analyzes the role of the popular actor Alfredo Landa and his very popular film comedies as sites for the representation of the conflict between tradition and modernity, basic plot in Landa’s comedies. Vivancos characterizes Landa as the body where Spanish masculine contradictions are inscribed; a place that reenacts the tensions between gender and politics during the decades of the 60s and 70s. Landa represents the flawed masculinity of the average Spaniard, a caricature of the Spanish ideal of masculinity. The playingout of gender tensions in Landa’s films analyzed by Vivancos unveils the failure of patriarchal authority, a masculine authority undermined by the feminine. El mar, a film studied by Dean Albritton in “On Infirm Ground: Masculinity and Memory in El mar,” explores a de-centralized type of masculinity that does not conform to traditional portrayals of men as strong and robust. The sickly and homosexual male masculinity represented in this film differs from previous cinematic representations of men, the happy ending would appeal to general audiences, and would also satisfy government regulators in their attempt to offer to the rest of the world a modern, more liberal image of Spain. Federico Bonaddio’s “Being Good: Manliness and Virtue in Gonzalo Delgrás El Cristo de los faroles (1957), studies tensions of masculinity as represented by the musical film genre and the melodrama. In its interrogation of what makes a good man, the film sets Catholic morality in direct opposition to traditional models of masculinity. Through this film, the author explores the transition from war films, prevalent in the 1940s, to films of home and family. The domestication of Spanish men becomes a necessity in Spain’s new relationship with the world at the end of the 1950s. Notwithstanding the notion of change and progress, the representation of masculinity in this film conceals ideology’s deception. The domestication of the sexually promiscuous male protagonist ends with a terrible punishment from “above,” the death of his son. As Bonaddio reveals, the film’s beginning and end in the Plaza del Cristo de los Faroles with high and low angle shots from above and beneath Christ’s cross, “convey a sense of the characters’ and the spectators’ subjection to a higher principle, a divine will.” This film portrays the submission of masculine subjectivity to the moral principles dictated by the political powers and the Catholic Church. A detailed account of masculinity at odds during Franco’s time is given by Gerard Dapena in “Diferente: Queering Spanish Masculinity.” Dapena explores a littleknown cult film directed by Luis María Delgado in 1961, and starred by Alfredo Alaria, “the first self-proclaimed homosexual in the history of Spanish cinema.” A musical and melodrama film, at a time when the folkloric musical was in decline in Spain, Diferente offered a worldlier, cosmopolitan flavor to Spanish spectators. Unlike many of the musical films produced in Spain during the 40s and 50s, this film resists the “continuity Volume 30, No. 3 5 Post Script All the authors represented in this issue chose to study films that describe resistance to traditional models of men as prescribed by the powers at large, especially the Franco regime and the Catholic Church. In an attempt to transcend traditionally established models of masculinity, these films represent masculinities displaced to the margins of the hegemonic model; masculinities that transform themselves along with history, culture, and language; masculinities fragmented and ambiguous, at odds with the dominant culture. In their representations of cultural discourses of masculinity, these films define masculinity as a cultural manifestation which equally affects men and women; a set of impositions upon male and female subjects which the institutions of power manipulate. Political, social, and gender tensions are represented as male protagonists attempt to survive a world in crisis by either submitting to or resisting the impositions of power through forces such as institutionalized religion, political mandates, and the socially prescribed behavior for men and women. body in El mar is at the root of a masculinity that destabilizes the popular discourses of war and violence as inherent to the masculine model. El mar examines the lingering memories of the Spanish Civil War in the Spanish society of the postwar. The film is an adaptation of a novel of the same name by Mallorca author Blai Bonet published in 1958. The fact that film director Agustí Villaronga decides to create the film in 2000 speaks to the lingering effects of the Spanish Civil War of 1936 and the Franco dictatorship in today’s Spanish society. The author contends that popular discourses of masculinity, violence, and war are unsettled by portrayals of sick masculinity. Civil war and dictatorship as symbols of infectious diseases that undermine the masculine body is a powerful metaphor that also embodies the impossibility of purity and cleanliness. Both masculine protagonists in El mar, in the attempt to cleanse their bodies through water and prayer, see themselves as trapped within a violent past they cannot escape. The film begins and ends with the same images of a sick man’s prayer for mercy. This circular structure illustrates the unfeasibility of a cure; a cure which, as the author suggests, can only be achieved through the telling and retelling of these stories. In many ways, the circular structures of some of the films analyzed in this issue mirror a pervasive model that represents the futile struggles of men against prescribed masculine standards. Models of hegemonic masculinity in modern Spain, which incorporates dominance over women and gender discrimination, seem to linger in circles traditionally dominated by men. Cynthia Miller’s interview with filmmakers Gemma Cubero and Celeste Carrasco is testimony to such prevalence. Cubero and Carrasco’s film Ella es el Matador (2009) explores gender inequalities inside the hyper-masculine world of bullfighting through the portrayal of two female bullfighters, Maripaz Vega and Eva Florencia. The documentary is, in Cubero’s words, a “feminist project,” and in the course of this venture there was a disclosure about masculine dominance, a fact that resists elimination in democratic Spain. Volume 30, No. 3 Works Cited Connell, R.W. “The Big Picture: Masculinities in Recent World History.” Theory and Society 22.5 (1993): 597-623. Edley, Nigel and Margaret Wetherell. Men in Perspective: Practice, Power and Identity. London: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1995. Hall, Stuart. “Introduction: Who Needs Identity?” Questions of Cultural Identity. Eds. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay. London: Sage Publications, 1996. 1-17. Hanke, Robert. “Redesigning Men: Hegemonic Masculinity in Transition.” Men, Masculinity, and the Media. Ed. Steve Craig. London: Sage Publications, 1992. 185-98. Jordan, Barry and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas. Contemporary Spanish Cinema. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1998. 6 Post Script Cinema. London: Wallflower Press, 2004. 1-15. Riquer, Borja de. “Adapting to Social Change.” Spanish Cultural Studies, an Introduction. Eds. Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. 259-282. Novoa, Juan Bruce. “Hispanic Film: An Introduction.” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 16.1 (Fall 1996): 3-4. Powrie, Phil, Ann Davies and Bruce Babington, Eds. “Introduction: Turning the Male Inside Out.” The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Volume 30, No. 3 7 Post Script