Literary Adaptations in Spanish Cinema

LITERARY ADAPTATIONS
IN SPANISH CINEMA
Sally Faulkner
Monografías A
Colección Támesis
SERIE A: MONOGRAFÍAS, 202
IN SPANISH CINEMA
Literary Adaptations in Spanish Cinema offers new readings of liter-

ary and cinematic texts, and demonstrates that adaptations from lit-
erature to film can be creatively energetic and conceptually
challenging. Attentive to historical context and informed by cultural
theory, the book surveys the history of Spanish cinema in the dicta-
torship and democratic periods, and argues that studies of adapta-
tions must simultaneously address questions of ‘text’ – formal issues
central to the study of film and literature – and ‘context’ – ideolog-
ical concerns crucial to late twentieth-century Spain. It examines
three themes of particular importance to contemporary Spanish
culture – the recuperation of history, the negotiation of the rural and
the urban, and the representation of gender – and considers the
related stylistic issues of the affinities between cinematic expression
and nostalgia, the city and phallocentrism. The study concludes with
an analysis of the formal question of the narrator in film and liter-
ature by assessing Buñuel’s previously unacknowledged stylistic debt
to Galdós as manifested in his adaptations of Nazarín and Tristana.
SALLY FAULKNER is a lecturer in the Department of Hispanic
Studies at the University of Exeter.
SALLY FAULKNER
IN SPANISH CINEMA
TAMESIS
© Sally Faulkner 2004
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First published 2004

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ISBN 1 85566 098 9
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from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Faulkner, Sally, 1974–
Literary adaptations in Spanish cinema / Sally Faulkner.
p. cm. – (Colección Támesis. Serie A, Monografías ; 202)
Filmography: p.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1–85566–098–9 (alk. paper)
1. Motion pictures – Spain. 2. Spanish literature – Film and video
adaptations. I. Title.
PN1993.5.S7 F34 2004
791.43'6 – dc22 2003015317
This publication is printed on acid-free paper
Printed in Great Britain by

Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
1. Introduction: Texts and Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
2. Post-Franco Films of the Post-War Novel: Aesthetics and History . . 15
La colmena (Camus 1982): In Search of Authenticity . . . . . . . . . 24
Time of Silence, Time of Protest: Tiempo de silencio (Aranda 1986) . 33
3. Rural and Urban Spaces: Violence and Nostalgia in the Country

and the City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Rural Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Pascual Duarte (Franco 1976): Violence in Absolute Space . . . . . . 54
Los santos inocentes (Camus 1984): Nostalgia for Absolute Space . . 60
Urban Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Historias del Kronen (Armendáriz 1995): Violence in Abstract Space 67
Carícies (Pons 1998): Beyond Abstract Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
4. Re-vising the Nineteenth-Century Novel: Gender and the

Adaptations of Fortunata y Jacinta and La Regenta . . . . . . . . . . 79
Clipped Wings: Film and Television Adaptations of Fortunata y
Jacinta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
Fortunata y Jacinta (Fons 1970) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Fortunata y Jacinta (Camus 1980) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
The Government of the Gaze: Film and Television Adaptations
of La Regenta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
La Regenta (Gonzalo Suárez 1974) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
La Regenta (Méndez Leite 1995) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
5. Artful Relation: Buñuel’s Debt to Galdós . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126

Nazarín (Buñuel 1958): From Uncertainty to Censure . . . . . . . . . 136
Tristana (Buñuel 1970): From Ambiguity to Sabotage . . . . . . . . . 148
6. Conclusion: Cinema and History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
Filmography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
For my parents, Anthony and Helen Faulkner
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is a revised version of a doctoral thesis submitted to the University

of Cambridge in 2001, supervised by Professor Paul Julian Smith. It was a
privilege to be guided by such an inspirational scholar. I would also like to
thank Professor Alison Sinclair and Dr Dominic Keown, both University of
Cambridge, for nurturing my interest in modern Spanish culture as an under-
graduate, encouraging me to continue with postgraduate research and
sustaining me with their generous advice ever since. Professor Peter Evans of
Queen Mary College, University of London, offered many valuable insights
as examiner of the thesis. Many thanks also to Professor D. Gareth Walters of
the University of Exeter for his helpful comments on a draft of this book.
My doctoral thesis was funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Board
Postgraduate Award. I would also like to thank Fitzwilliam College, Univer-
sity of Cambridge, for my election to the E. D. Davies Scholarship for
research in the arts from 1999 to 2001. The Fitzwilliam College Trust
Research Fund and Jebb Fund Grant funded my research trips to Spain. The
School of Modern Languages Research Committee and the Department of
Hispanic Studies, both University of Exeter, aided with the final stages of
publication.
Parts of chapters two–five have been presented as papers in 2000–2002 at
the following gatherings: the 6th Forum for Iberian Studies devoted to
‘Cinema and History’, University of Oxford; the ‘Screening Identities’
Conference, University of Wales at Aberystwyth; the Centre for Research in
Film Studies Seminar, University of Exeter; the Twentieth-Century Graduate
Reading Group, University of Cambridge; the Hispanic Research Seminar,
University of Cambridge; the Hispanic and Latin-American Film Seminar,
Queen Mary College, University of London; the ‘Travelling Texts: Spain and
Latin America’ Conference, University of Stirling; the ‘Gendered Spaces’
Conference, University of Huelva, Spain and the Annual Conference of the
Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland, University of Cork,
Ireland. I am grateful to all organizers and participants for their helpful
suggestions.
Some of the material in chapters two, three and five has previously
appeared in ‘The Question of Authenticity: Camus’s Film Adaptation of
Cela’s La colmena’, ‘Catalan City Cinema: Violence and Nostalgia in
Ventura Pons’s Carícies’ and ‘Artful Relation: Buñuel’s Debt to Galdós in
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Nazarín and Tristana’. My thanks to the editors of Studies in Hispanic

Cinema, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film and the Hispanic
Research Journal respectively for allowing me to reprint this material here.
I would finally like to thank, for his emotional and intellectual companion-
ship, Dr Nicholas McDowell.
INTRODUCTION: TEXTS AND CONTEXTS
INTRODUCTION:
TEXTS AND CONTEXTS
Narrative film is as we know it today due to literature. From the consolida-

tion of the still prevailing ‘Institutional Mode of Representation’ in early
sound film, based on the techniques of the nineteenth-century novel,1 to the
purchase of the rights of bestsellers by contemporary global film conglomer-
ates, and from the recherché literary intertextuality of art house cinema to the
lucrative commercial exploitation of a pre-sold book title of Hollywood
movies, the influence of literature on film, Raymond Durgnat’s ‘Mongrel
Muse’ (1977), is a fact of all cinematic fiction. The history of the relationship
between literature and cinema is therefore logically the history of cinema
itself, but the study of one particular aspect of this relationship, cinematic
adaptations of literary texts, fosters the investigation of two important and
specific questions. Firstly the formal nature of cinema in comparison to liter-
ature, and secondly the dialogue generated between the different historical,
cultural and industrial contexts in which the literary text and its screen adap-
tation are produced.
Approaches to Adaptation
A field of academic study which is so richly suggestive for the analysis of
both aesthetic and ideological questions has, however, been hampered by
limiting critical and theoretical approaches.2 This is because literary adapta-
1 Noël Burch coined the term ‘Institutional Mode of Representation’ to refer to the
structures of the classic narrative system (see Cook 1995, 208 and 212–15). A
much-quoted 1942 article by Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Dickens, Griffith and Ourselves’ (1999),
demonstrates how D. W. Griffith’s narrative techniques developed from the nineteenth-
century novel; Griffith’s work in turn formed the basis of the IMR (see for example,
Peña-Ardid 1996, 128–54). While it is generally taken as axiomatic that, as James Monaco
affirms, ‘The narrative potential of film is so marked it has developed its strongest bond
not with painting, not even with drama, but with the novel’ (2000, 44), it should be noted
that the development of filmic syntax was influenced by plural media, including the novel,
theatre and the magazine serial (Brewster and Jacobs 1997, vi). Ben Brewster and Lea
Jacobs’s work (1997) goes some way to redressing what they see as the over-emphasis on
the novel in their study of the influence of drama on cinema of the 1910s.
2 For a (hostile) overview of the development of adaptation criticism, see Ray 2000.
2 SALLY FAULKNER
tions have constantly been the battleground over which film’s status was
fought. In the early years, films based on books and plays triggered debate
over whether film could be defined as an autonomous art, and, if so, what the
‘essence’ of that art was. Later, adaptation studies were the casualty of the
development of film as a legitimate object of academic enquiry.
Early debates about literary adaptations in cinema betray extreme bias.
For those seeking to hush up the new medium’s lowly beginnings as a fair-
ground spectacle and justify film as a new art – thereby attracting
middle-class audiences – adaptations of canonical texts were proof of film’s
artistic credentials.3 For others, literary adaptations were cited as evidence of
precisely the opposite. Since such films foreground their debt to another
artistic medium, cinema was pronounced dependent on literature and wanting
of its own modes of expression.4 In both cases, appreciation of the specific
nature of literary adaptations was obscured by other ideological agendas.
We find that this was also the case when in the 1950s literary adaptation
gave rise once again to discussions regarding the nature of cinema. In the
pages of the Cahiers du Cinéma, the influential thinkers of the French New
Wave championed the film director as ‘auteur’ (ironically adopting a literary
concept of authorship) as opposed to the ‘metteur-en-scène’ or ‘littérateur’
who merely transcribed literary works into the cinematic medium. Conve-
niently side-stepping the fact that the Hollywood films these critics revered
were themselves based on literary texts, like Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (based
on a novel by John Buchan) or Sabotage (based on a novel by Joseph Conrad)
(Naremore 2000b, 6–7), the contemporary French tradition de qualité was
attacked for its excessive recourse to literary adaptation.5 What these critics
apparently reveal is a fear that literary adaptations might obliterate film as a
distinct medium, an anxiety echoed by a Spanish critic as late as 1989 with
the argument that literary adaptation ‘c’est le renoncement à l’autonomie du
langage cinématographique’ (Carlos Heredero quoted in Losilla 2002, 125
n. 5).
3 At the same time as the Vitagraph Company in New York and the Societé de Film
d’Art in Paris were producing literary adaptations (Naremore 2000b, 4), in Spain, Films
Barcelona and La Hispano Films appealed to the Spanish literary canon (e.g. Don Quijote
de la Mancha, Cuyàs 1910). Subsequently Adriá Gual headed Barcelona-based
Barcinógrafo, which produced a number of literary adaptations, for example, El alcalde
de Zalamea (Gual 1914) (Seguin 1996, 9 and 13).
4 For example Virginia Woolf, writing before the introduction of sound, argues that
literary adaptations have been ‘disastrous to both [film and literature]’, and that cinema
should aim to convey ‘innumerable symbols for emotions that have so far failed to find
expression’ (1977, 265–6).
5 See François Truffaut’s attack on the ‘tradition de qualité’ and call for ‘une
politique des auteurs’ in his 1954 article ‘Une certaine tendance du cinéma français’
(Truffaut 1976). Italian cineastes also repudiated literariness in forging the similarly
influential neorealist movement (M. Marcus 1993, 4–10).
INTRODUCTION: TEXTS AND CONTEXTS 3
Scholarly work on literary adaptations was also a casualty of the birth of

film studies as an academic discipline. Adaptations of canonical texts
became the bridge between literary and film studies (for a typical account see
L. Friedman 1993a, xi–xii), and scholars with academic training in the older
art interpreted film adaptations from the perspective of literary criticism.
Keen to emphasize the autonomy of film as an academic discipline, film
scholars, on the other hand, followed the ideas of the French New Wave and
either saw literary adaptations as insufficiently ‘cinematic’ and neglected
their study altogether (Braudy and Cohen 1999, 397),6 or they simply ignored
literary origins and interpreted adaptations like any other film (Peña Ardid
1999b, 13). Their study thus continued to fall to literary scholars with little
knowledge of the new medium.7
As a result an approach which has been termed ‘Fidelity Criticism’
emerged, which displayed this disparity in knowledge. Fidelity critics judge
the extent to which a film is faithful to the text, but since their expertise in the
latter outweighs their understanding of the former, such studies tend to take
the artistic superiority of literature as an a priori, and, through the compar-
ison of a canonical text and its adaptation, simply reconfirm this hierarchy
and demonstrate ‘adaptation-as-betrayal’ (Horton and Magretta 1981b, 1).
Robert Ray offers a convincing account of the development of this approach,
arguing that many scholars of adaptation studies simply transposed the
insights of New Criticism, with its ‘reified notion of the text’ and its ‘famous
hostility to translation’, to ‘sponsor [. . .] the obsessive refrain [that] cine-
matic versions of literary classics failed to live up to their sources’ (2000, 45).
The problem with Fidelity Criticism is not therefore that literary text and
film adaptation are compared according to how faithful they are. One diction-
ary definition of adaptation is ‘something that is produced by adapting some-
thing else’ (Collins Concise English Dictionary 1992, 13). The study of
adaptation is therefore logically a comparison of ‘something’ and ‘something
else’, and any comparison has fidelity as its core principle because difference
is logically dependent on the possibility of sameness. The problem with
Fidelity Criticism is that it is ideologically compromised because it assumes
the superiority of literature, and thus a hierarchy between the arts.
The first book-length study of literary adaptation, George Bluestone’s
Novels into Film (1973, first published 1957), presupposes such a hierarchy.
Written at the same time that European filmmakers were rejecting literary
6 Ginette Vincendeau notes (2001b, xv) that film studies textbooks, like The Cinema
Book (Cook and Bernink 1999), The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (Hill and Church
Gibson 1998) and Film Art: An Introduction (Bordwell and Thompson, first published
1979), tend to ignore literary adaptations.
7 Surprisingly, authors of published studies on literature and cinema occasionally still
cheerfully admit they have no formal knowledge of film (Becerra Suárez 1997, 21;
Villanueva 1999, 185).
4 SALLY FAULKNER
adaptations in their respective national cinemas, Bluestone takes the artistic

superiority of the novel as a given, and selects mediocre American film adap-
tations as his source material. The resulting study is a lengthy illustration of
the tautology that novel and adaptation are different because literature and
cinema are different, or in his own words, ‘the two media are marked by such
essentially different traits that they belong to separate artistic genera’
(Bluestone 1973, viii). While unilluminating, this statement is at least uncon-
troversial. However, claims such as ‘only language can appropriate [. . .]
tropes, dreams, memories’ (Bluestone 1973, viii) not only bespeak a simple
lack of cinematic knowledge (surrealist film for example had explored
precisely these areas) but betray his ideological bias towards the older art.
With almost stereotypical reverence for the elitist and disdain for the popular
and the mass, he observes that ‘an art whose limits depend on a moving
image, mass audience and industrial production is bound to differ from an art
whose limits depend on language, a limited audience and limited creation’
(Bluestone 1973, 64).
Bluestone’s distinction between a ‘mass audience’ and a ‘limited audience’
reveals modernist thinking regarding artistic hierarchies, according to which
Fidelity Criticism is a logical approach. It is rewarding to consider the issue
of literary adaptations in the light of John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the
Masses (1992). Carey provokingly argues that the phenomenon of wide-
spread literacy in late nineteenth-century Europe threatened what had up to
that point been the exclusivity of high literary art. ‘The purpose of modernist
writing’, Carey suggests, ‘was to exclude these newly educated (or
“semi-educated”) readers, and so to preserve the intellectual’s seclusion from
the mass’ (1992, vii). Prior to this, a distinction had existed between ‘the
intellectuals’ and ‘the masses’ owing to disparities in education. Carey draws
on the leading Spanish philosopher of the modern period, Ortega y Gasset, to
show that modernism in art sought to maintain that difference and, by devel-
oping its notoriously recondite aesthetics, ‘divide the public into two classes
– those who can understand [. . .] and those who cannot’ (1992, 17).8
Carey’s compelling argument throws light on the question of literary adap-
tation because there are telling similarities between modernist denigration of
the type of literary works read by the newly-educated ‘masses’, and hostile
criticism of film adaptations of works of the revered literary canon. The
modernist intelligentsia condemned popular literature ‘for the masses’, like
the early novels of J. B. Priestley (Carey 1992, 38), as it meant literature was
no longer their exclusive preserve. Their response was to enshrine obscurity,
abstraction and difficulty, in order that ‘what is truly meritous in art is seen as
8 It may be noted that in twentieth-century Spain, the cultivation of the abstract in art
can often be explained by the desire to elude the censorship of repressive regimes like
Franco’s.
the prerogative of a minority, the intellectuals’ (Carey 1992, 18). What a

disaster, then, that the literary canon, and even modernist literary works
themselves, might be adapted to film, and thus be made accessible to all. It
comes as no surprise that a quintessential modernist like Virginia Woolf
should call literary adaptations ‘disastrous’ and ‘unnatural’ (1977, 265). How
could it be otherwise if she considers film watching a practice of ‘the savages
of the twentieth century’, whereby ‘The eye licks it all up instantaneously and
the brain, agreeably titillated, settles down to watch things happening without
bestirring itself to think’ (Woolf 1977, 264)? With a telling reference to the
advent of state education, Woolf protests that in such a medium great liter-
ature is ‘spell[ed] out in words of one syllable written in the scrawl of an illit-
erate schoolboy’ (1977, 266). What is surprising is that this distrust of the
new medium should continue to have such influence. The language may have
been moderated, but the sentiments remain the same.
Fidelity Criticism now tends to condemn the ‘betrayal’ of a subjectively
perceived ‘essence’ of the inevitably superior literary text. Critics of both
American and European cinemas, often drawing on the postmodernist repu-
diation of ‘the idea of a pure originating text spawning debased copies’
(Vincendeau 2001b, xvi), have lined up to attack Fidelity Criticism as a ‘glo-
rified exercise in personal taste’ (M. Marcus 1993, 16) (Horton and Magretta
1981b; Andrew 1999; C. Orr 1984; Gould Boyum 1985; Rentschler 1986b;
M. Marcus 1993; Fernández 1996; McFarlane 1996; Mínguez Arranz 1998;
Whelehan 1999; Naremore 2000b; Ray 2000; Stam 2000). But the ideolog-
ical doubtfulness of Fidelity Criticism should not make us banish the word
fidelity from the vocabulary of adaptation studies altogether. We must bear in
mind John Ellis’s observation that ‘the whole marketing strategy of adapta-
tions from literary classics or from “bestsellers” encourages [. . .] assessment
[based on fidelity]’ (1982, 3). What must be avoided is the elitist assumption
of a hierarchy between the arts. In the following chapters fidelity is therefore
implicit in my comparisons of texts and their adaptations, but never is the
superiority of one or the other assumed.
While previous critical repudiations of Fidelity Criticism have been
persuasive, alternative methodologies proposed for the study of adaptation
prove less convincing. Since it is the subjective nature of Fidelity Criticism
which generates greatest censure, critics have revealed a special desire
conversely to inject objectivity into the analysis of adaptations. Thus to rede-
fine the field of adaptation studies, critics firstly proposed various typologies
of adaptations, according to which it was hoped adaptation might be objec-
tively categorized (Wagner 1975; Beja 1979; Andrew 1999; Quesada 1986;
Sánchez Noriega 2000; Jaime 2000, 105–17). For example José Luis Sánchez
Noriega proposes a convoluted classification system by which novelistic
adaptations may be categorized according to fidelity or creativity
(‘ilustración [. . .] transposición [. . .] interpretación [o] libre’), type of narra-
tive (‘coherencia estilística [o] divergencia estilística’), extension (‘reducción
6 SALLY FAULKNER
[. . .] equivalencia [o] ampliación’) or aesthetic or cultural aims (‘saqueo:

simplificación y/o dulcificación [o] modernización o actualización’) (2000,
76). But such typologies simply classify and offer no alternative method for
comparing texts and their adaptations.
Secondly, theoretical approaches developed during the 1960s have proved
enduringly attractive to those wishing to counter the nebulous subjectivity of
Fidelity Criticism with systematic objectivity. Barthes’s formulation of
Structuralism in his early work, Metz’s application of this theory in his study
of the semiotics of cinema, and its development in Genette’s narratology, all
provided adaptation critics with the tools to compare literature and film and
avoid the hierarchy implicit in the discourse of fidelity. According to the
structuralist model, the cinematic and the literary are considered codes,
whose point of contact at the level of narrative makes adaptation between
media possible.
Brian McFarlane’s recent Novel to Film (1996) testifies to the way adapta-
tion critics continue to be seduced by this structuralist model, yet also betrays
the paradox that this approach has obvious shortcomings. After a conven-
tional rejection of Fidelity Criticism, McFarlane proposes a quasi- scientific
methodology of comparing novel and adaptation in terms of literary and
cinematic codes using Barthes and Metz respectively. Relying on the stan-
dard structuralist strategy of analysing all narrative according to a division
between ‘histoire’ and ‘discours’, McFarlane argues that these categories
translate into ‘that which can be transferred from one narrative medium to
another (essentially, narrative) and that which, being dependent on different
signifying systems, cannot be transferred (essentially, enunciation)’, enabling
the critic to establish ‘the kind of relation a film might bear to the novel it is
based on’ (1996, vii, original emphasis).
What is attractive about this approach is that it banishes the subjective
hierarchies of Fidelity Criticism, but the problem with structuralism is that it
cannot account for ideological context. Thus despite his concern to offer only
‘rigorous, objective statements’ (1996, 195), McFarlane can barely stop the
question of ideology from creeping into the study. In his introduction he tries
to repress ideological questions with the vague disclaimer that ‘it is difficult
to set up a regular methodology for investigating how far cultural conditions
(e.g. the exigencies of wartime or changing sexual mores) might lead to a
shift in emphasis in a film as compared with the novel on which it is based’
(McFarlane 1996, 22). However, on realization that such issues are crucial to
an understanding of Martin Scorsese’s adaptation Cape Fear (1991) which he
assesses as a case study, he adds a most interesting section on evolving ideo-
logical contexts, but separates it from the rest of his interpretation as an area
of ‘Special Focus’ (McFarlane 1996, 187–93). By the time he concludes his
study, although still typographically and conceptually bracketing ideological
questions, the repressed returns. McFarlane indirectly confesses the limita-
tions of his ‘quantifying’ structuralist approach:
The fact that the effect on the spectator of other texts [. . .] and of other
pressures (e.g. [. . .] extra-cinematic inf luences such as the prevailing ideo-
logical climate) is not readily susceptible to the quantifying possibilities
referred to above does not mean that the critic of adaptation can afford to
ignore them. (1996, 201, emphasis added)
It is surprising that, over thirty years on, structuralism remains attractive to

adaptation critics like McFarlane. Quite apart from the intellectual inconsis-
tencies of the approach pointed out long ago by post-structuralist philoso-
phers like Derrida, and even the rejection of the model by Barthes and Metz
themselves in their later work, the preceding discussion of the specific ques-
tion of adaptation from literature to film reveals that a structuralist analysis is
inadequate. The comparison of the two media in terms of narrative codes
addresses the question of form, but cannot account for the equally important
ideological questions raised by the contact between the social, political and
cultural contexts so crucial to the text and film.
In Spanish cinema, such a disjuncture between artistic practice and critical
response is particularly marked. Twentieth-century Spanish history teaches
us nothing if not that creative activity is embedded in its ideological context,
especially during the Francoist dictatorship and subsequent democratic emer-
gence from that era. Yet many scholars of literary adaptations in Spanish
cinema (Gordillo 1992; Monegal 1993; Caparrós Lera 1995; Bikandi-Mejias
1997; Gómez Blanco 1997; Mínguez Arranz 1998; Sánchez Noriega 2000)
disappointingly avoid these very patent ideological issues and adopt a
structuralist approach. This book aims to fill the void created by that
contradiction.
Texts and Contexts in Spanish Cinema

This study examines both texts and contexts in its analysis of literary
adaptations of Spanish cinema.9 It thus follows Susan Hayward and Ginette
Vincendeau, who have affirmed in the introduction to their French Film:
Texts and Contexts that ‘Film texts emerge from a complex network of
contexts’ (2000b, 2, original emphasis) and Dudley Andrew, a contributor to
Hayward and Vincendeau’s collection (Andrew 2000), who has called for the
study of ‘the sociology and aesthetics of adaptation’ (Andrew 1999, 458). In
the field of Spanish film studies, Román Gubern has argued that a contextual
approach is especially apt:
9 For the purposes of brevity, here as elsewhere I include television under cinema as
an umbrella term.
8 SALLY FAULKNER
el caso particular de la cinematografía española, inmersa en unos vaivenes

sociopolíticos tan pronunciados, permite como pocas detectar estas
turbulencias en la escritura de sus textos, incluso más allá de la voluntad o
de la conciencia de sus cineastas. (1995, 17)
One argument that runs through this book is that a modernist hierarchy
between the media is not only ideologically dubious, but also demonstrably
mistaken. I offer close readings of both literary texts and their film adapta-
tions throughout to reveal the different, but equally profound, expressive
possibilities of both novels and plays, and films and television. Another
thread is this book’s aim, following Andrew and others, to counter the
ahistoricism of structuralist studies of adaptation, an approach which, like
Gubern, I show is particularly inappropriate to the study of Spanish cinema.10
Questions of context are addressed here through both examination of histor-
ical background in general, and analysis of the reception of the films in
particular.11 This book is not however a comprehensive survey of literary
adaptations in Spanish cinema as a whole, but a study of twelve adaptations
both as texts, and within their contexts.12 My examples are drawn from
cinema and television of the late dictatorship, transitional and democratic
periods, but a brief examination of literary adaptations during the dictator-
ship at this stage demonstrates why a historicist approach is so necessary.
While the criteria for selecting literary texts for adaptation during the
silent period of Spanish cinema were largely commercial (Mata Moncho
Aguirre 1986, 4), under the dictatorship that process of selection was also
determined by an ideological programme.13 With regard to cine oficial, the
10 This book thus responds to Jorge Urrutia’s lament that ‘no existen prácticamente
estudios que [. . .] intenten explicar [las adaptaciones] en virtud de los motivos sociales e
ideológicos’ (1994, 27) and Peña-Ardid’s affirmation that an ideological analysis is ‘la
más adecuada para cualquier estudio global e histórico sobre la adaptación en España’
(1996, 30). While scholars of the Anglo-American tradition have criticized the ‘scientism’
(Smith 2000b, 23) of peninsular hispanism (López, Talens and Villanueva 1994b, ix–xii;
Smith 2000b, 23–41), Santos Zunzunegui (1999) has provocatively attacked North-Amer-
ican work on Spanish cinema as excessively concerned with ideological themes (e.g.
‘cainismo’, Oedipality, violence) at the expense of questions of form. My approach to lit-
erary adaptation promotes however the analysis of both form and ideology.
11 My arguments regarding reception are based on the examination of press clippings
held at the Filmoteca Nacional. The amount of material available for different films varies
considerably, and clippings often lack page references and full attributions.
12 This book is neither, therefore, a study of the related question of the impact of
cinema on contemporary writers, a field first addressed by C. B. Morris in This Loving
Darkness (1980). See in particular the work of Rafael Utrera (1981; 1982; 1985; 1987;
1989; 1998); also Susana Pastor Cesteros (1996) and Juan Antonio Hormigón (1986).
13 It may be erroneous to claim that the propaganda exercise mounted by Francoist
Spain through its national cinema was equal to that of fascist Germany or Italy (Labanyi
1995a, 207), and the fact that Franco himself scripted Sáenz de Heredia’s Raza (1941) has
perhaps been overstated. Nonetheless cinema under the dictatorship was ideologically
promotion of certain texts from the national literature, and the preclusion of
others, through their adaptation to film may be readily interpreted as a func-
tion of propaganda. The process of selecting texts for adaptation was analo-
gous to the activities of the censorship office. As Carmen Peña-Ardid
stresses, selection of texts for adaptation was governed by ‘condicionantes
[. . .] nada desdeñables de tipo ideológico que actuaron [. . .] bajo la forma de
una palpable censura política – y eclesiástica – que seleccionaba obras,
autores e introducía modificaciones en los guiones escritos a partir de las
obras literarias’ (1996, 30). Thus in his survey of the literary adaptations
between 1939 and 1953, Rafael de España demonstrates that Francoist
cinema was an ‘escaparate cultural [que reflejaba] los criterios ideológicos
dominantes en esa época: principio de autoridad, patriotismo irracional y
defensa de los valores morales más tradicionales (familia y religión en primer
lugar)’ (1995, 70). España shows that the literary texts adapted during this
period, which amounted to 33.2% of total production (1995, 71), tended to
marry grassroots popularity with party line politics. The clichéd Andalusian
sainetes of the Álvarez Quintero brothers, which were both popular and
consensual, top the list of most adapted authors, followed by Luisa María
Linares’s novelas rosas, which reinforced the gender roles defended by the
regime. As might be expected the list includes the work of other conservative
writers such as Wenceslao Fernández Flórez, Jacinto Benavente, Armando
Palacio Valdés and Concha Espina, but of course excludes ideologically
dissident and non-Castilian Spanish texts, for example by exiled writers, and,
most notably, Benito Pérez Galdós, who is discussed in chapters four and five
of this book.14 Perhaps more revealing of the drive to promote monolithic
ideology is the treatment of Antonio Machado. The selection of those texts
written with his right-leaning brother Manuel for adaptation, La Lola se va a
los puertos (Orduña 1947) and La duquesa de Benamejí (Lucia 1949), not
only smothered his dissident voice but, according to España (1995, 76), the
plays were adapted in such a way as virtually to transform him into a
Francoist sympathizer.
If the texts selected, and rejected, for adaptation in this period matched the
preferences of the censors, the way the filmmaker might manipulate the
material could therefore be another matter. Román Gubern (2002, 57) has
argued that the choice of texts was probably as opportunistic as it was
actively political, since if a book had previously passed through the censors it
regulated through censorship, and the regime sought self-justification and aggrandizement
through state-sponsored films and its Noticiarios y Documentales Cinematográficos, the
NO-DO, newsreels obligatorily screened before all film showings from 1943–75 (Tranche
and Sánchez-Biosca 2002, 15). The category of interés nacional, established in 1942, also
bore an obvious resemblance to the Nazi Film der Nation (España 1995, 73).
14 España notes that in fact certain Catalan authors were adapted in the period, though
naturally the films were produced in Spanish (1995, 77).
10 SALLY FAULKNER
was likely the film would also be passed, and Juan de Mata Moncho Aguirre
(1986, 5) similarly notes that owing to the ‘respetable carácter literario’ of lit-
erary adaptations, ‘la censura permitía cierto atrevimiento moral’. John
Hopewell goes a step further than this to suggest that adaptation became part
of a tradition of dissent. One way to ‘get round the censor’, he points out, was
to ‘base your film on a classic, then subvert that classic’s sense’ (Hopewell
1986, 77, original emphasis). However, Hopewell is referring to the later
auteurist tradition of dissent here, and his example of such a smoke screen
strategy is Mario Camus and Antonio Drove’s La leyenda del alcalde de
Zalamea, an adaptation of Calderón and Lope de Vega’s two versions of El
alcalde de Zalamea, made as late as 1972. In the period discussed by España,
it seems that while consensual filmmakers adapted potentially radical texts in
such a way that they promoted Francoist ideology, there is little evidence to
suggest, conversely, that ideological opposition was voiced by subversively
adapting conservative texts. (The adaptations of Pedro Antonio de Alarcón’s
El escándalo [Sáenz de Heredia 1943] and El clavo [Gil 1944] discussed by
Mata Moncho Aguirre [1986, 5] may be exceptions here.) In fact dissident
film adaptations during this period tended to be based on dissident texts over-
looked by the censor. Ábel Sánchez (Unamuno 1917; Serrano de Osma 1946),
La sirena negra (Pardo Bazán 1908; Serrano de Osma 1947), Las inquietudes
de Shanti Andia (Baroja 1911; Ruiz-Castillo 1946), Nada (Laforet 1944;
Neville 1947) and Historia de una escalera (Buero Vallejo 1949; Iquino
1950) would be the major examples, all of which presented ‘un mundo menos
edulcorado y edificante que el que contenían las novelas adaptadas antes’
(Mata Moncho Aguirre 1986, 5).15
The oppositional legacy of these film adaptations was inherited by the
dissident directors of the 1960s and 1970s, whose influence can in turn be
perceived in adaptations of the transition and beyond. For many of the direc-
tors of the Nuevo Cine Español (see chapter four for a discussion of this
movement) literary adaptation, as Hopewell suggests, was a means of ques-
tioning, if not denouncing, Francoist ideology. Miguel Picazo’s outstanding
1964 adaptation of Unamuno’s La tía Tula (1921), which has been described
as the best Spanish film of the 1960s (Torreiro 1995b, 314), therefore mani-
fests a debt to Carlos Serrano de Osma’s work, and launched an attack on the
gender ideology promoted by the regime. Similarly, Angelino Fons in his crit-
ically acclaimed début La busca (1966) adapted Baroja’s novel of social
critique of the same title (1904). Such a questioning of Francoist ideology
15 See Jo Labanyi’s study of how Unamuno’s novel and film noir in Carlos Serrano de
Osma’s Ábel Sánchez ‘might have served as an indirect expression for Spanish audiences
of anxieties closer [. . .] to home’ (1995b, 11). Her study, which pays attention to both the
specificity of film (the conventions of film noir) and addresses the ideological signifi-
cance of adapting this text at this time, provides a model of how literary adaptations in the
early Franco period might be studied.
recurs in the most commercially successful film of the movement, Fons’s

1970 adaptation of Galdós’s Fortunata y Jacinta. Though perhaps ultimately
limited in its resistance, this film was important as, along with Buñuel’s
Tristana, it triggered a number of adaptations of black-listed nine-
teenth-century novels, as I discuss in detail in chapter four.16 In part, the
present study traces one of the legacies of the Nuevo Cine Español, this
quickly forgotten and often overlooked movement, which was the will to
articulate opposition through literary adaptation.
Whatever the political position promoted by the adaptation – whether one
of consent or dissent, in harmony with or in contrast to the original literary
text – an examination of literary adaptations during the Franco regime which
overlooks ideological questions is therefore untenable. Four of the twelve
adaptations discussed in this study were made, if not released, in this period,
Fortunata y Jacinta (Fons 1970), Tristana (Buñuel 1970), La Regenta
(Gonzalo Suárez 1974) and Pascual Duarte (Franco 1976) (Buñuel’s Nazarín
[1958] was made in Mexico). However, ideological context remains crucial to
a discussion of films of the post-Franco period. Some are testimony to the
legacy of the literary adaptation as an expression of dissent (for example
Vicente Aranda’s Tiempo de silencio [1986]). Others echo the tendencies of
Francoist cine oficial and offer images of consent (for instance Fernando
Méndez Leite’s La Regenta [1995]).
While literary adaptations are often considered a pedestrian area of film
practice, this overview of the Franco period demonstrates that they could
reveal both artistic creativity and subversive intent. It is tempting, therefore,
to emphasize only these auteurist and dissident aspects in the present study,
especially as the literary adaptations of Spanish auteurs like Luis Buñuel,
Carlos Saura and Víctor Erice readily lend themselves to such examination.17
Furthermore a number of judicious critical revisions of literary adaptations
have successfully repudiated both Fidelity Criticism and structuralism by
adopting an auteurist approach (Horton and Magretta 1981b; M. Marcus
1993; Orr and Nicholson 1992, part one), and thus far such an analysis has
not been undertaken with regard to Spanish cinema.
However, although an auteurist study might redress a critical imbalance, it
promotes a distorted account as it only addresses one particular and excep-
tional area of literary adaptations as a whole. For instance, Andrew Horton
16 In chapter four, note 22, I count eight such adaptations. Antonio Santamarina lists
nine adaptations of Golden Age texts in the same period, 1968–77 (Santamarina 2002,
171). Further work on these Golden Age films, especially in comparison with adaptations
of texts from this period in the early dictatorship years which used them to ‘evocar el
glorioso pasado español’ (España 1995, 75), would be very valuable.
17 For example Saura’s Bodas de sangre (Saura 1981; Lorca 1933) and Carmen (Saura
1983; Mérimée 1847; Bizet 1875), and Erice’s El sur (Erice 1983; Morales 1985); for
Buñuel’s literary adaptations see chapter five.
12 SALLY FAULKNER
and Joan Magretta’s study – conceived in response to George Bluestone’s

selection of mediocre films in his 1957 work – aims to show ‘adaptation as
an art’ (1981b, 1–2, original emphasis), and the volume consists of
twenty-three papers on the adaptations of heavy-weight European auteurs
including Godard, Pasolini, Wenders and Buñuel. But there is a tendency for
the study to emphasize the achievements of the filmmakers at the expense of
the writers and it thus repeats, despite the fact it inverts, the assumptions
about artistic superiority of Fidelity Criticism. For Horton and Magretta, like
the New Wave theorists (much of whose work is included in the volume), the
director is supreme and the writer lowly (see the paper on Buñuel’s adapta-
tion of Galdós’s Tristana for a representative example of this assumption
[Eidsvick 1981, 173–87]). This hierarchy is implicit in their stated aim to
demonstrate that adaptations ‘provide a privileged map of the “creative road”
a filmmaker has “traveled” ’ (Horton and Magretta 1981b, 2).
In diametric opposition, literary adaptations might alternatively be read as
a manifestation of popular culture, or as ‘a new type of popular cinema’, as
Ginette Vincendeau has claimed recently (2001b, xxi). Following this argu-
ment one could trace the commercially successful adaptations of the sainete,
zarzuela and novela rosa during the Franco period, and address the contem-
porary commercial exploitation of the bestseller, examples of which are as
abundant in Spain as in any cinema.18 However, this approach would gener-
ally focus on adaptations that have been subsumed into other popular genres,
most notably the musical or españolada and film noir (see Fernández 1996,
18–19).19
The fact that this book addresses both dissident, auteurist films and work
that might be described as consensual and commercialized is important
because as such it reflects the wide range of ways that literary adaptations
have been used in Spanish cinema. The adaptations examined here are linked
by the fact that they all foreground their literary origins by sharing the same
title, and often highlight them through marketing (the jacket of the video of
Mario Camus’s La colmena distributed by Suevia Films for instance
proclaims that the film is ‘la obra maestra de Camilo José Cela’). Some are
classically art house (for instance Buñuel’s Tristana [1970]),20 and some may
be described as popular cinema (for example Montxo Armendáriz’s desire to
capitalize on the success of recent bestseller Historias del Kronen [1995]),
but most fall somewhere between the two as they simultaneously combine
cultural and commercial aims. Literary adaptations have proved particularly
18 See Labanyi’s overview of contemporary Spanish narrative (2002) in which she

indicates which novels have been adapted.
19 Film noir was born of the desire to adapt ‘hard-boiled’ fiction to the screen, and its
name is derived from the term for the series of such books, série noire (Cook 1995, 93).
20 See Paul Julian Smith’s examination of the term ‘art house cinema’ in his reading of
Víctor Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena (2000a, 23–41).
responsive to the impact on art of changes in the sociology of spectatorship in

the post-Franco period. As Luis Miguel Fernández has pointed out, ‘la
adaptación literaria mantiene un alto grado de aceptabilidad en la medida que
satisface las expectativas de un público cada vez más escolarizado e
informado [y] conocedor de los modelos literarios canónicos’ (1996, 18).
Another way of describing how literary adaptations marry ‘high’ and ‘low’
cultural forms is with a third term, the ‘middlebrow’.
The anomaly that critics dichotomously address ‘highbrow’ esoteric art,
and ‘lowbrow’ popular culture, again recalls the modernist prejudices exam-
ined by Carey. In the early twentieth century there was a vested interest in
keeping art of the ‘intellectuals’ separate from art of the ‘masses’, for the
latter was less threatening if kept entirely separate from the former. To turn to
Woolf again, it could be argued that her condemnation of middlebrow art in
her famous quip against the ‘betwixt and between’ (1943a, 115) is even more
energetic than her denunciation of the art of the ‘masses’. For Woolf, the
middlebrow is a polluting hybrid which might taint or adulterate highbrow
art. In this context, her opprobium of the practice of film adaptations of liter-
ary classics, which dangerously mesh elements of high- and lowbrow
cultures, is even more understandable. In the light of these modernist preju-
dices, this study seeks in part to question the assumption that the middlebrow
is necessarily conservative and reactionary (a criticism which has been
levelled at the ‘Miró adaptations’ of the 1980s in particular) and thus synony-
mous with artistic conformity and ideological orthodoxy.
This book’s twin objectives of addressing questions of text and questions
of context are married by discussing certain topics, and by the application of
critical theory pertaining to these topics, where appropriate or illuminating.
Of the twelve adaptations discussed over the following four chapters, all but
one are based on novels, and all but two texts are adapted to the cinema rather
than to television. With regard to the genre of the source text, while on the
one hand we must acknowledge a difference between novelistic and theatrical
adaptation – as we have seen (note 1 of this chapter) the novel is generally
considered more cinematic – on the other exactly the same theoretical issues
are raised by theatrical adaptations as by novelistic ones. Peter Evans has
pointed out in this regard that ‘even though plays, unlike novels, normally
exist to be performed, with playgoers accustomed to seeing different produc-
tions staging the text in a variety of ways, the problem of fidelity remains’
(1997, 2). In any case my interest in the play adaptation included here
(Carícies, Pons 1998, chapter three) is its relevance to the topic examined,
the negotiation of urban space. Similarly, while again recognizing that televi-
sion is a medium distinct from film – especially in terms of consumption – I
have included two television adaptations (Fortunata y Jacinta, Camus 1980
and La Regenta, Méndez Leite 1995, chapter four) owing to their bearing on
the theme under discussion of gender and representation. Likewise, I have not
differentiated between adaptations of texts in Castilian and Catalan, but
14 SALLY FAULKNER
incorporated both in the discussion of particular topics, although a study of

literary adaptation in non-Castilian cinemas would be a potential line of
further investigation.
In chapters two, three and four I foreground questions of historical context
by examining three themes crucial to late twentieth-century Spain: the recu-
peration of the history of the dictatorship in the post-Franco period (chapter
two); the representation of rural and urban spaces following massive industri-
alization from the 1960s onwards (chapter three); and the negotiation of
feminism and patriarchy in the period of social change spanning the late
dictatorship, transition and democracy (chapter four). Each topic is placed in
the framework of relevant theoretical discussions of postmodernism and
historicity (chapter two), urbanism (chapter three) and feminism (chapter
four), and each raises related formal questions of the affinity between cinema
and nostalgia (chapter two), cinema and the city (chapter three) and cinema
and phallocentrism (chapter four). In chapter five I conversely place stylistic
questions centre stage, and demonstrate the previously unconsidered
aesthetic influence of Galdós on Buñuel. In this final chapter I adduce theor-
etical considerations of the narrator in cinematic fiction (the ‘mindscreen’),
and relate the formal issue of the subversion of realism to the ideological
question of the transgression of orthodoxy. Questions of text and context are
therefore inseparable, and every cinematic adaptation holds in tension its in-
fluence by, or its inflection of, the form and ideology of the literary text on
which it is based.
POST-FRANCO FILMS OF THE POST-WAR NOVEL
POST-FRANCO FILMS OF THE POST-WAR NOVEL:

AESTHETICS AND HISTORY
The 1980s Literary Adaptation Genre

The coincidence of a number of social, political and industrial factors
from the late 1970s onwards gave rise to a flourishing of the literary adapta-
tion genre in 1980s Spanish cinema.1 These were: the will to recuperate a
previously colonized past which characterized Spanish culture from the
mid-1970s; the victory of Felipe González’s Socialist party in the elections of
1982 and their policy to subsidize art which projected their vision of a new,
democratic, European Spain; and the changes in film funding which crystal-
lized in the cinema-TVE deal of 1979 to co-produce films based on the
Spanish literary canon, a policy formalized by the PSOE’s ‘Miró’ decrees of
1983.2 While in the previous decade there had been a short-lived burst of
enthusiasm for adapting nineteenth-century novels (see chapter four of this
study) the death of Franco and Spain’s transition to democracy generated an
interest in filming literature banned by, or conceived in opposition to, the
regime. Thus as well as biopics (Lorca, muerte de un poeta, Bardem 1987),
the 1980s saw a number of film versions of Lorca and Valle-Inclán’s plays
(e.g. La casa de Bernarda Alba, Camus 1987; Bodas de sangre, Saura 1981;
Luces de Bohemia, Díez 1985; Divinas palabras, García Sánchez 1987) and
the cinematic adaptation of major post-war novels (e.g. La colmena, Camus
1982; La plaza del diamante, Betriu 1982; Réquiem por un campesino
español, Betriu 1985; Tiempo de silencio, Aranda 1986). Clearly forming
part of the drive towards the recuperation of literature and history evidenced
elsewhere in Spanish culture, these films complemented the ideology of the
1 This decade saw a boom in literary adaptations in other European cinemas, like
France and Britain. It is odd therefore that Ginette Vincendeau’s Film / Literature / Heri-
tage (2001a) should only focus on the 1990s.
2 On the first film-television financing deal, ‘El concurso de los 1.300 millones’ of
1979, see Gómez Bermúdez de Castro 1989, 151–4. The Miró decrees, named after Pilar
Miró, Director-General of Film (1983–85), set up a subsidy system based on the French
model of avance sur recettes. See Gómez Bermúdez de Castro 1989, 95–142; Losilla
1989; Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas 1998, 1–5. On the French system see Hayward
1993.
16 SALLY FAULKNER
liberal, centrist governments and were financed either by the cinema-TVE or

Miró subsidy policies.3
From the late 1980s onwards, there has been a remarkable homogeneity of
hostile critical response to these adaptations (Hopewell 1986; Company
Ramón 1989; Monterde 1989; Smith 1995; Riambau 1995; Jordan and
Morgan-Tamosunas 1998).4 This criticism tends to stress three problematic
areas. Firstly a questioning of the contentious issue of state subsidies,
secondly a Fidelity Criticism approach to the film versions of the literary
originals which is inclined to demonstrate ‘adaptation-as-betrayal’ and
thirdly an appeal to sceptical accounts of postmodern historicity, especially
those offered by Marxist critics.
The 1980s literary adaptation genre has then firstly been interpreted fore-
grounding the PSOE’s cultural policy (inherited from the UCD) of producing
films which were both ‘solidly middle-brow’ (Hopewell 1986, 226) and
ensured ‘the maintenance of certain cultural standards’ (Jordan and Morgan-
Tamosunas 1998, 2). As Paul Julian Smith writes of the state-subsidized La
casa de Bernarda Alba (Camus 1987), its ‘hidden history [. . .] is that of a
Socialist government which sponsored a cinema intended to mirror its own
consensus politics, a cinema specialising in adaptations of literary classics
with unimpeachable anti-authoritarian credentials’ (1995, 12).
Secondly, critics have censured the directors’ treatment of the literary orig-
inals. By appealing to the discourse of fidelity, the literary adaptations have
been judged as invariably wanting. This is explained by the fact that the
policy of adaptation coincided with far-reaching changes in production in the
Spanish film industry. Thanks to the generous subsidies, far more money was
available for film making than ever before, and hence this genre is character-
ized by high production values including costly mise en scène and the casting
of star actors.5 In other words, films based, for example, on the post-war
novel of hardship (e.g. La colmena, Cela 1951) were filmed using all the
aesthetic hallmarks of luxury (La colmena, Camus 1982). This combination
of ‘Spanish themes and American production values’ (Hopewell 1986, 227)
proved a particularly unhappy one, and critical responses to the genre have
followed John Hopewell’s assertion that the subsidized Spanish cinema
displays a will to be ‘visually pleasing at any cost’ (1986, 227). For example,
Carlos Losilla similarly observes that the 1980s literary adaptation was ‘un
3 See Jo Labanyi on the ‘recuperation industry’ of post-Franco Spanish culture

(1995c, 402). On retrospective tendencies in Spanish cinema, see Hopewell 1986; Jordan
and Morgan-Tamosunas 1998, chapter one.
4 This criticism echoes much contemporary commentary on the films, notably in the
Catalan press. On Tiempo de silencio, for example, see Guarner 1986; López i Llavi 1986;
Quintana 1986; Marinero 1988.
5 Accounts of similar changes in the 1980s French film industry state the cost of an
average film tripled (Powrie 1997, 2).
POST-FRANCO FILMS OF THE POST-WAR NOVEL 17
Film bonito, fino, agradable para la vista y para el oído aunque trate el tema
más escabroso’ (1989, 41).
Besides this censure or ‘betrayal’ at the level of content, critics have also
noted filmmakers’ inability to emulate the formal nature of the literary texts.
Thus intense interiority becomes facile specularity (Company Ramón 1989,
60, on La plaza del diamante), disorientating fragmentation becomes
comforting coherence (Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas 1998, 35–6, on La
colmena) and unsettling narrative distance becomes familiar identification
(Company Ramón 1989, 81, on Réquiem por un campesino español). In sum,
the failure of the adaptations to live up to the literary originals lies in their
excessive prioritization of mimetic, over poetic, aspects:
El carácter fallido de las múltiples adaptaciones literarias perpetradas por

el último cine español estriba, sustancialmente, en el abandono de las
sugerencias poéticas que toda narración literaria encierra, dejándose llevar
por la susodicha ilusión mimética; ref lejando [. . .] el texto sin leerlo.
(Company Ramón 1989, 79, original emphasis)
Thirdly and finally, the historical mise en scène of these literary adapta-
tions (mainly the civil- and post-war periods) has been interpreted according
to Marxist accounts of postmodern superficiality, which were published in
the same period the films were released. Barry Jordan and Rikki
Morgan-Tamosunas for example conclude their reading of Los santos
inocentes and La colmena citing Fredric Jameson’s ‘Postmodernism or the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ (1982) to suggest that the films’
aestheticization of history generates ‘a new connotation of “pastness” and
pseudo-historical depth, in which the history of aesthetic styles displaces
“real” history’ (Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas 1998, 37). Smith has more
recently suggested a point of coincidence between Belle Époque (Trueba
1992) – a film he sees as the ‘culmination’ of 1980s historical cinema – and
Jean Baudrillard’s thesis of ‘History: A Retro Scenario’ elaborated in
Simulacra and Simulations (Baudrillard 2000). Smith (2000b, 42) cites
Baudrillard’s argument that in the postmodern era ‘history [. . .] invades the
cinema [. . .]. The great event of this period [is] these death pangs of the real
and of the rational that open onto an age of simulation [. . .] history has
retreated, leaving behind it an indifferent nebula, traversed by currents, but
emptied of references. It is into this void that the phantasms of a past history
recede’ (Baudrillard 2000, 43–4).6
6 Many other accounts of post-Franco culture demonstrate the pertinence of

postmodern theory. Teresa Vilarós (1998, 173–4) interprets the treatment of history by the
‘consensus culture’ of transitional Spain according to Jameson and Baudrillard. Rikki
Morgan (1995), Marvin D’Lugo (1998) and Barry Jordan (1999) have all reiterated the
relevance of Jameson’s theory of ‘pseudo-history’ to film. These studies echo criticism of
18 SALLY FAULKNER
Given the notorious commercial failure of most of the costly adaptations

funded by the Spanish taxpayer in the 1980s, it seems incontestable that, on
the whole, the Miró policy was misguided. The argument that the literary
originals upon which these films were based were often more complex and
innovative also seems convincing; and during the ‘desencanto’ of the 1980s
Spanish culture did exhibit nostalgic tendencies analogous to those identified
globally, therefore making the theory of the postmodern phenomenon
adduced pertinent.
It may be pointed out, however, that these critical accounts of the 1980s
literary adaptation genre in fact contain a more or less hidden narrative of the
transformation of Spanish cinema after Franco: the story of its European-
ization and its adaptation to changes in cinema audiences. ‘Europeanization’
entailed an improvement in production values which might enable Spanish
films to compete in an international market, a process tempered by simulta-
neously affirming autochthonous tradition by appealing to the literary canon
(Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas 1998, 32). The Real Decreto of 1 December
1977 demonstrated that ‘el cine español empieza a querer ser europeo’
(Losilla 1989, 35), a tendency which was reinforced by the Miró legislation
of 1983 (Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas 1998, 32).
On the one hand this Europeanization of the Spanish cinema during the
1980s had its vocal advocates, on the other commentators mourned the older
genres, which were seen as more ‘Spanish’. Antonio Lara in his survey of
Spanish films of 1982 for Ya argues for instance that ‘el cine es parte
insustituible de la cultura y necesita ser ayudado y sostenido por los poderes
públicos’, and that ‘el indiscutible desarrollo comercial [del cine] debe
adecuarse a unas exigencias claras de política cultural’ (Lara 1983), clearly
lending public support to the Miró decrees. Meanwhile, in a hostile review of
Las bicicletas son para el verano (Chávarri 1983), Félix Martialay of the
conservative El Alcázar perhaps surprising lends support to popular culture,
lamenting ‘ya no podrán existir esos films serie B más propios del cine
español que estas grandes producciones supermillonarias’ (Martialay 1984).
Amongst later scholarly responses, Losilla (1989, 33) has noted that, while
far fewer films were produced in the 1980s, they were of a higher quality – a
kind of ‘historia ascética de una purificación’ – but Hopewell (1986, 227)
echoes the El Alcázar article, pointing to a disjuncture between European and
Spanish cinematic practices: ‘the problem with Spain’s new glossier films is
that, for Spanish audiences at least, rather than connoting improved produc-
tion standards they merely suggest a glossier fictional reality, one which
seems a lie’.
Thus the literary adaptation genre of the 1980s became synonymous with
similar tendencies in British and French culture (Walsh 1992; Higson 1993; Powrie 1997;
Austin 1996).
the bemoaned Europeanization of the Spanish cinema, and also came to be

associated with the transformation of the cinema-going audience which
occurred during that decade. In his industrial survey of Spanish cinema from
1973–87, Losilla (1989, 33) states that at the start of that period eighty-six
million Spaniards saw Spanish films in 5632 cinemas, and at the end of it the
number had dropped to less than thirteen million in 2234 cinemas. These
figures of course tell the tale of the fierce competition cinema faced from
television and home video, a problem not unique to Spain at the time. The
subsidized 1980s films responded to these transformations: fewer films were
produced due to the dramatic drop in audience figures, and the films made
were of a higher ‘quality’ as the closure of cinemas in rural areas and the
barrios meant audiences became, as Francesc Llinás has noted, ‘increasingly
[. . .] middle-class, educated and liberal’ (summarized in Jordan and
Morgan-Tamosunas 1998, 32).
Since the state-subsidized films responded so well to these two transfor-
mations, Europeanization and audience change (Jordan and Morgan-
Tamosunas 1998, 32), it seems to be the case that the literary adaptation
genre of the 1980s became the arena in which these new directions taken by
post-Franco Spanish cinema were critically contested. Yet there is a critical
tendency to view the policy of subsidy as somehow responsible and to place
the blame on the effect rather than the cause. Jorge de Cominges writing in El
Periódico, for instance, mocks Camus’s ‘impeccably produced literary adap-
tations which aim more to fill the state television screen quotas than to attract
the general audiences who attend cinemas’ (quoted in Smith 1998b, 116).
While these comments are targeted at the policy of subsidy, Cominges in fact
mourns the transformation of Spanish cinema to which this policy responds.
Audiences had deserted cinemas for television, occasioning the need for
films intended for both cinema and television screenings. Additionally,
although many of the 1980s adaptations were commercial flops, Camus’s
films have in fact been remarkably successful at the box office.
Reappraisals of the Genre

This chapter seeks to go beyond the ‘standard’ critical view of 1980s liter-
ary adaptations, which has condemned these films on three counts. Firstly, as
betrayals of their literary originals, secondly as works which nostalgically
evoke a ‘pseudo-past’ and thirdly as examples of the shortcomings of state
interference in art by means of the system of subsidies.
La novela y el cine (1998) by Norberto Mínguez Arranz suggests a
possible model of reappraisal. Mínguez Arranz studies five post-war novels
including La colmena and Tiempo de silencio within a structuralist frame-
work of an ‘análisis comparado de dos discursos narrativos’ (1998, subtitle).
While the standard view of the 1980s literary adaptation genre delineated
above rightly foregrounds questions of industrial context, namely the Miró
20 SALLY FAULKNER
decrees, this focus on the extratextual is occasionally achieved at the expense

of the textual. By prioritizing close readings of the films as visual codes,
which are compared to the verbal codes of the novels, Mínguez Arranz’s
account is a welcome attempt to redress the critical balance. This critical
approach therefore allows Mínguez Arranz to bypass one problematic area of
the standard critical view, the debate on the policy of subsidies. His
structuralist ‘comparación directa de los distintos lenguajes y mecanismos
narrativos’ (Mínguez Arranz 1998, 183) also allows him to transcend the
problem of Fidelity Criticism, as the subjective categories of ‘better’ and
‘worse’ which underpin accusations of ‘betrayal’ are simply irrelevant to his
‘objective’ comparison of codes. Similarly, the tricky issues of history and
nostalgia within a postmodern context are extraneous to his linguistic
analysis.
However, as discussed in chapter one with respect to the work of Brian
McFarlane (1996), it is critically untenable to bypass the key ideological
questions which are so crucial to the reasons why film adaptations are
produced. As was the case with Spanish cinema under Franco discussed in
chapter one, ideology is equally crucial to an understanding of 1980s literary
adaptations, when so many works of twentieth-century oppositional Spanish
literature were adapted in this period that in total they constitute a genre. The
adoption of a structuralist model seems particularly odd in the case of
Mínguez Arranz’s study. Like McFarlane, he offers a detailed overview of
‘theoretical aspects’ (Mínguez Arranz 1998, part two) which are universal in
their application; but unlike McFarlane, who reads a wide range of adapta-
tions to demonstrate this universality, Mínguez Arranz’s case studies (part
three) pertain to the specific and localized phenomenon of Spanish adapta-
tions of the Spanish post-war novel. Moreover, no reference is made to the
standard critical view of these films.
An alternative strategy for reappraisal, which accounts for ideological
questions without aping the standard critical view and includes textual anal-
ysis of the films without appealing to structuralism, is a reading of the 1980s
literary adaptation genre as a history of that decade. Such an examination
would therefore focus less on what the genre fails to tell us about the literary
texts it is based on, or fails to tell us about the historical periods in which it is
set, and more on what it does tell us about the social, political and cultural
history of the 1980s. In other words, this approach would be cognate with
that frequently adopted to analyse Pedro Almodóvar’s early work. While
Almodóvar’s early films are ostensibly set in a present-without-a-past, an
assumption supported by the director’s statements regarding the desmemoria
of his generation, critics (e.g. D’Lugo 1991a, 47) have exposed the many
ciphers of the Francoist era contained within them. A reappraisal of the liter-
ary adaptation genre would aim to reveal that while apparently set in the past,
the films indirectly refer to the present.
Such an interpretation would also respond to the criticism frequently
levelled at Spanish cinema of the period that national films (Almodóvar’s

notwithstanding) wilfully ignore the contemporary experience of the country
(Heredero 1989; Alonso Barahona quoted in Morgan 1995, 164), a phenom-
enon Carlos Heredero has named the ‘historia de un desencuentro’ (1989). It
would furthermore link the ‘European’, supposedly ‘un-Spanish’ new cinema
of the 1980s to indigenous filmic tradition, and rightly redirect critical evalu-
ation away from regarding Spanish literary adaptations as simply an Iberian
inflection of the ‘heritage film’ genre identified in other European cinemas
(Higson 1993; Austin 1996; Powrie 1997).
Due to the strictures of Francoist film censorship, dissident directors
developed the estética franquista, an oblique, metaphorical cinematic idiom
with which they made indirect reference to the present. While the most
famous example of this is Saura’s use of the metaphor of the hunt to refer to
the Civil War in La caza (1965), it was also common for directors to use the
past as a metaphor for the present (e.g. La busca, Fons 1967). As Jordan and
Morgan-Tamosunas note, ‘the practice of making oblique reference to the
present by reference to the past continued well into the transition period, not
only because of the delay in the abolition of film censorship in November
1977, but also because of its well established effectiveness’ (1998, 19).
Thus Robin Fiddian and Peter Evans read Prosper Mérimée and Georges
Bizet’s nineteenth-century narratives of passion and jealousy in Saura’s
Carmen (1983) as allegories of contemporary processes of social and polit-
ical change in Spain – the transition and the entry into Europe. Saura’s film is
hence a ‘Europeanization’ of the myth (Fiddian and Evans 1988, 7), ‘the testi-
mony of a nation attempting to pick up the pieces of its lost identity’ (Fiddian
and Evans 1988, 83). Again, Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas appeal to this
theory of ‘retrospective presents and contemporary pasts’ in which ‘period
film functions as a two-way mirror reflecting both images of the past and
contemporary perspectives’ (1998, 52). They interpret Antonio Drove’s La
verdad sobre el caso Savolta (1978) for example as a ‘vision of the period of
the political transition through the prism of historical events in Barcelona in
1917’; or the turbulent eighteenth-century politics of Josefina Molina’s
Esquilache (1989) as a metaphor for contemporary Spanish political experi-
ence (Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas 1998, 53–4).
There seems to be considerable potential in interpreting the 1980s literary
adaptations based on the post-war novel in this way. On a textual level, an
analysis of Camus’s La colmena for example reveals an encoding of the
consensus politics of the transition. Set in Spain after the momentous change
of the Civil War, Spaniards, whether losers or winners, are depicted getting
on with everyday life, like so many drones in a beehive. As mentioned above,
critics have censured Camus’s failure to portray the hardship of life in the
1940s, but according to this reading the similarity between the fictional
post-war characters on screen and the considerably better-off Spaniards of
1982 is precisely the point. Camus draws a parallel between the (enforced)
22 SALLY FAULKNER
consensus between Spaniards after the Civil War, and the (voluntary)
consensus between Spaniards during the transition. This interpretation
echoes Román Gubern’s reading of a parallel between contemporary
consensus transition politics and the Civil War films produced during that
period, like Retrato de familia (Giménez Rico 1976) and Las largas
vacaciones del 36 (Camino 1976):
The process of transition to a democracy based on a consensual political

reform between the right and the left was reflected in a cinematic discourse
which was predominantly centrist (everyone lost the war) and in a look
back without anger. (1991, 104)
Likewise, Francesc Betriu’s La plaza del diamante could be read as

encoding a number of the key transformations in contemporary Spain. Firstly
its adoption of a female point of view on the turbulent events of the civil- and
post-wars reflects the increasing visibility of women in Spanish life after the
collapse of Franco’s patriarchy. Secondly, La plaza del diamante was the first
literary adaptation set in this period with a working-class protagonist
(Gubern 1991, 104), and is thus representative of the hoped-for inclusive,
egalitarian Spain inaugurated by democracy. And thirdly, as the film and
subsequent television series place Catalonia centre stage, they reflect the
invigoration of Catalan political, historical and cultural identity following the
establishment of the estado de las autonomías in the 1978 constitution. La
plaza del diamante is a box-ticking adaptation in this respect. Not only were
two versions produced in both Castilian and Catalan languages, but the film
and television series also give prominence to Catalan historical experience.
Furthermore, the film raises the profile of Catalan literary heritage as it is
based on the most acclaimed novel of Barcelona native and exile of
Francoism, Mercè Rodoreda.7 The adaptation thus seems to exemplify José
Enrique Monterde’s assertion that the greater the weight of contemporary
social and political issues on a director, the more likely the historical film
produced will be a ‘presentización’ (1989, 48) of that historical period.
In a similar vein, adaptations such as Camus’s Los santos inocentes and
Betriu’s Réquiem por un campesino español respond to the rural exodus
experienced in Spain shortly before these films were produced. This
‘presentización’ of history through the treatment of rural space will be exam-
ined in chapter three.
7 This said, the film was curiously more successful in Madrid than in Barcelona, and
was consequently broadcast on Catalan television at a low audience time, while on
Spanish television it was scheduled at a high audience time (Casals 1984). This could be
explained by a specifically Catalan rejection of historical literary adaptation films in this
period. See note 4 of this chapter for criticism of the PSOE’s policy to subsidize such
films in the Catalan press and my reading in chapter three of the urban nostalgia implied
in Carícies as a uniquely Catalan phenomenon.
On an extratextual level, and considering the 1980s literary adaptation

genre as a whole, the tendency towards ‘presentización’ informs our under-
standing of post-Franco Spain. While the films are apparently faithful to the
historical settings of the original literary texts, which are often carefully
reconstructed through mise en scène, these settings in fact become a reflec-
tion of contemporary times. If many of these films seem to re-write the past
so it would tally with the present, it may be suggested that the system of
subsidy was a mechanism which enabled the UCD, then the PSOE, to project
their visions of the new Spain. It should be noted however, that the tendency
to re-write the past, or reinterpret the literary canon, in accordance with the
present is suspiciously similar to the Whig version of history and literature
pedalled under Francoism. The interpretation of the 1980s literary adaptation
genre in this chapter seeks to account for this equivocal approach to history
in these works.
History and Historicity

While on the one hand the treatment of history in the literary adaptation
genre of the 1980s recalls non-conformist cinematic practice in which the
past was used as a metaphor for the present, on the other these literary adap-
tations paradoxically repeat the way Francoist historical films, for example
those produced by CIFESA, used the past to carry the ideological message of
the regime. Thanks to this untimely echoing of the Francoist practice of
exploiting the past to justify the present, Monterde has observed that the
‘gran y contradictoria característica del cine histórico español de la transición
[es] la voluntad de recuperación histórica’ (1989, 47).
As discussed above, the literary adaptation genre of the 1980s firstly
displays symptoms of the postmodern historicity of contemporary global
culture and secondly constitutes in itself an important historical document of
1980s Spain. The genre furthermore bears witness to the ambiguous heritage
of the history film in Spain – in both its Francoist and oppositional guises.
Rather than an interpretation of the genre in line with hostile accounts of
postmodern ‘pseudo-history’, or a reading of it as a cipher of 1980s society,
in this chapter I therefore propose an analysis which accounts for the contra-
dictory nature of its representation of history in the context of the Spanish
historical film. I will refer to the revisionist account of postmodernism
offered by Linda Hutcheon (1989), who interprets postmodern culture as
uniquely combining questions of aesthetics and history. I will furthermore
address the issue of literary adaptation with specific reference to the question
of the representation of history. Avoiding the reductive discourse of fidelity, I
will approach the cinematic adaptation of texts written in a previous histor-
ical period as a privileged site for the interaction of aesthetics and history.
The texts selected for close analysis are two of the more successful manifes-
tations of the genre, in terms of commercial profitability (La colmena) and
24 SALLY FAULKNER
critical acclaim (Tiempo de silencio). Both are based on canonical post-war

novels and are set in the post-war period.
LA COLMENA (CAMUS 1982): IN SEARCH OF AUTHENTICITY
Mario Camus: Craft and Commerce
With a third of his feature films to date based on literary texts, and having
directed three television versions of well-known novels, Mario Camus is the
filmmaker most associated with the literary adaptation genre in Spain.8
Recipient of state subsidies for his adaptations of La colmena, Los santos
inocentes and La casa de Bernarda Alba, Camus is also a figure identified
with the Miró policy.9 As such, the standard criticism of the 1980s literary
adaptation genre outlined above is frequently levelled at this director.
Antonio Castro in Dirigido Por, for example, contrasts Buñuel’s cinema of
transgression with Camus’s cinema of conformity, the latter, ‘se ha
convertido con el tiempo en el más solicitado de los especialistas en limar
aristas, en hacer aceptable y digerible para la burguesía, textos más o menos
famosos’ (quoted in Sánchez Noriega 1998, 181).
Just as criticism of 1980s literary adaptation encodes a response to the
transformation of post-Franco Spanish cinema, the consistently hostile recep-
tion of Camus’s œuvre perhaps reveals critical discomfort over the changes in
the role of the director. Castro’s comparison with globally recognized veteran
auteur Luis Buñuel is telling. Whereas previously a distinction existed
between artist and artisan, or auteur and director de encargo, the rise of the
1980s literary adaptation genre muddied the waters. Although exalted for
directing artistically prestigious films – or films with high production values
and based on the literary canon – filmmakers like Camus were commissioned
directors, working on demand under political and commercial pressures
rather than pursuing a personal esoteric artistic project. Before Almodóvar
and a new generation of directors successfully combined art and commerce,
critics lamented the demise of an industry divided between Buñuelian
masterpieces (though of course Buñuel was never really part of that industry)
and escapist pulp fiction, and its replacement by a homogenous, European
and middlebrow cinema in the 1980s.
Camus’s filmography refracts these transformations in the Spanish
cinema. Trained at the Instituto de Investigaciones y Experiencias
Cinematográficas, then the Escuela Oficial de Cinematografía, the young
8See http://us.imdb.com/Name?Camus,+Mario.
9Note that the funding for La colmena derived from the UCD cinema-TVE deal of
1979, not the PSOE Miró subsidy system, as has been claimed (Jordan and Morgan-
Tamosunas 1998, 2).
Camus was influenced by neorealism and the ‘new cinemas’ of the 1960s,
and worked as a scriptwriter on Saura’s Los golfos (1959) and Llanto por un
bandido (1963) (Sánchez Noriega 1998, 20–34). With regard to his early
films Young Sánchez and Los farsantes (both 1963), Camus has affirmed ‘yo
pertenezco a una generación que creía en una revolución’ (quoted in Sánchez
Noriega 1998, 68). But like so many of the directors of the paradoxical Nuevo
Cine Español (see chapters one and four of this study) Camus was to
succumb to ‘commercial compromise’ (Hopewell 1986, 69), passing through
bread-and-butter pop-star vehicle films before finding a niche in the
commercially orientated literary adaptation – which also allowed him to
fulfil a paternalist ambition to ‘dar a concocer la literatura a la gente que no
lee’ (Camus quoted in Martínez Aguinagalde 1989, 699).10
As such, José Luis Sánchez Noriega’s auteur study of the director seems
misconceived. He proposes that through the analysis of a director’s filmog-
raphy, his or her authorial identity may be constructed (Sánchez Noriega
1998, 9) – an outdated auteur studies approach suited, if at all, to a director
like Buñuel. In fact, the point about Camus is that he consistently effaces
himself from his work. Thus Sánchez Noriega writes of the minimal disrup-
tions to narrative linearity, clarity and realism in Camus’s ‘estilo de tono
menor’ (1998, 379, original emphasis), or Smith criticizes his ‘anaemic style’
(1995, 4). Camus displays a similar neutrality in life as in work, thus despite
his commercial and critical success he has avoided the creation of a director
‘persona’, refusing to court publicity by attending first nights and rarely
conceding interviews; as a contemporary review puts it ‘rodar y callar’
(Hidalgo 1983).
This neutrality in fact makes Camus the ideal director of the kind of liter-
ary adaptation genre promoted in the 1980s. As Phil Powrie points out
regarding contemporary French cinema (1997, 20), literary adaptations
require directors who are auteurist – and thus place a stamp of respectability
on the work – but not so auteurist as to obscure the author of the literary orig-
inal. Given his background training, early collaborations and first politically
committed films, Camus has this air of auteurist respectability, but always
emphasizes his ‘humility’ (Frugone 1984) and deference to the literary
authors he adapts. Both respectable yet neutral enough for the emphasis to be
placed on the original texts, Camus was thus ideally suited to the post-Franco
cultural project to elaborate a new Spanish identity by co-opting twentieth-
century contestatory literature, as his adaptation of La colmena exemplifies.
10 The work of Carlos Saura displays a similar trajectory. After his brilliant
oppositional work during Francoism, in the 1980s the dissident auteur found himself in a
transformed industry, and made his commercially orientated dance trilogy and even a
state-subsidized commercial flop, El dorado (1987) – at the time the most expensive
Spanish film ever made.
26 SALLY FAULKNER
La colmena was a high-profile film production: an adaptation of the

canonical post-war novel of future Nobel-prize-winner Camilo José Cela,
with a massive ninety million peseta budget and a cast including almost every
Spanish star of the day. Contemporary press reviews scrutinized the project
closely – especially Cela’s views (which were positive), details of production
and the administrative problems over payment of the state subsidies.11 But
the film played to commercial and critical acclaim: La colmena was the high-
est-grossing Spanish film of 1982 (Gómez Bermúdez de Castro 1989, 229)
and won the Golden Bear at the 1983 Berlin film festival. After firstly
assessing this criticism, I will secondly address the discourse of authenticity
which, I argue, is crucial to the film.
In contrast to contemporary commendation, subsequent Fidelity Criticism
of the adaptation has listed its shortcomings, especially focusing on stylistic
questions. As mentioned above, while Cela was lauded for achieving a
perfect ‘encaje’ between form and content, Camus was criticized for allowing
the excessively pictorial cinematography of Hans Burmann to shatter this
synthesis. Consider for instance Enrique Alberich’s review for Dirigido Por:
Cela empleaba un lenguaje [que] encaja de forma excelente con el triste

trasfondo social que reflejaba. En cambio [. . .] la fotografía de Hans
Burmann parece empeñada en conseguir todo lo contrario, convirtiendo en
un bello espectáculo los ambientes más deprimentes y claustrofóbicos,
desarrollando una estética que podría denominarse como de
‘endulzamiento de la frustración’, desechando la más consecuente opción
de un feísmo concordante con la vulgaridad de esas vidas casi inexistentes.
(quoted in Mínguez Arranz 1998, 139–40)
Despite the director’s insistence that ‘no he caído en ninguna concesión para
suavizar los hechos [. . .] El resultado es una película muy, muy, muy dura’
(Santa Eulalia 1982), examples of what Alberich calls ‘endulzamiento’ are
not difficult to find. Take, for instance, the depiction of Jesusa’s prostitutes,
whom we repeatedly see wrapped up against the cold in tattered blankets,
then stripping to parade for the clients. Where Camus could have emphasized
their hardship and thus the irony of their performance, Burmann’s soft-focus
images of voluptuous female nudity displayed in the brothel sabotage the
novel’s portrayal of their misfortunes (see for instance, Cela 1998, 309–16).
Another problematic area of the adaptation is the transformation of the
labyrinthine formal layout of Cela’s text into conventional cinematic
11 For contemporary press reports of Cela’s responses see review of La colmena

1982b; on details of production and administrative problems see review of La colmena
1982a and 1982c. For a later summary of the scandal surrounding the film’s financial
support see Guillot 1995, 38.
language. Indeed Dru Dougherty is flabbergasted at a film which should

even attempt the adaptation of ‘una novela que insiste en negarnos su fábula’:
¿Qué pensar de una película que pretende adaptar una novela cuyos
sucesos, personajes y ambientes se multiplican hasta formar un enjambre
de vidas sin ninguna unidad aparente y, lo más problemático para una indu-
stria de estrellas, sin ningún protagonista señalado? (1990, 19)
Some critics have thought to read the film against the supposedly cinemat-
ographic elements of the novel (Deveny 1988; Mínguez Arranz 1998). Cela’s
La colmena consists of a fragmented series of urban vignettes, all written in
the present tense, which cross-cut from one to another achronologically over
three days in the wintry Madrid of December 1943. While fragmentation,
parallel montage and simultaneity may all be properties of a medium whose
language is one of cutting between sequences – which may be edited together
achronologically – and the inevitable representation of events in the present
tense, a novel which exploits such characteristics does not necessarily adapt
easily to the screen. This is because classical narrative film labours to secrete
these mechanisms of its language. Thus the cinematic cut is hidden by suture,
parallel montage is rare and must be justified by plot (e.g. a car-chase) and
film conceals its limitation to the present tense by recounting linear narra-
tives. In the majority of Camus’s adaptation of La colmena, the director
adopts this conventional cinematic idiom, using in most cases continuity
rather than parallel editing and following a comparatively linear – if mean-
dering – plot. Camus therefore paradoxically erases the filmic nature of the
original text by adapting it to film.
Camus and producer/scriptwriter José Luis Dibildos adapt Cela’s novel as
though it were a transparent realist document of post-war Madrid. Dougherty
pertinently observes (1990, 21) that Camus is more faithful to Cela’s primary
material than the novelist himself, arguing that ‘la realidad primaria [. . .]
irrumpe en la película de una manera directa y desnuda [. . .] que el discurso
novelístico no puede igualar’ (1990, 20). Cela was clearly influenced by the
descriptive practices of naturalism, developing its Spanish inflection
tremendismo in La familia de Pascual Duarte (1942) and looking forward to
the techniques of the nouveau roman in La colmena. He even updated the
nineteenth-century image of the Naturalist novelist – who visited city slums
with notebook and pencil in hand – with the following description of his
work of 1951: ‘lo que quise hacer no es más que lo que hice [. . .]: echarme a
la plazuela con mi maquinilla de fotógrafo y revelar después mi cuidadoso y
modesto trabajito ambulante’ (Cela quoted in Urrutia 1998, 13). Nonetheless
the resulting novel is of course anything but a disingenuous photographic
snapshot. It is a stylistically contrived exposé of Francoist Spain during its
años triunfales, debunking official rhetoric – despite Cela’s links to the
regime – through the ironic perspective of the narrator.
28 SALLY FAULKNER
Camus replaces this unreliable narrator, who oscillates between the

conversational subjectivity of the picaresque and the quasi-objectivity of
naturalism, feigning ignorance then exhibiting omniscience, with an ‘objec-
tive’ camera, thus the satire effected by repetition and juxtaposition is largely
lost. The two hundred and thirteen fragments of Cela’s ‘beehive’ portray an
overwhelming two hundred and ninety-six characters (Urrutia 1998, 29). If
this number had to be reduced to twenty-three in the film for practical
reasons (Deveny 1988, 277),12 the introduction of a protagonist in the film
adaptation of a novel which does not have one (Dougherty 1990, 19) reveals
Camus’s unwillingness to replicate Cela’s formal challenges. The viewer
does not experience the unsettling void at the heart of Cela’s novel when
scriptwriter Dibildos emphasizes Martín Marco’s role as protagonist, and
Camus casts the familiar disaffected hero of transition films José Sacristán to
portray him.13
Although Mínguez Arranz has claimed that ‘si ya resulta difícil en la
novela establecer con precisión el desarrollo temporal de la historia, en la
película resulta aún más complicado’ (1998, 131), Dibildos’s script in fact
imposes chronology on an original novel which refuses linearity, making the
film far more accessible. As the scriptwriter stated, ‘era preciso dotar a la
novela de una estructura dramática de la que carecía’ (Dibildos quoted in
Mínguez Arranz 1998, 124). A telling example of this imposition of dramatic
structure is the treatment of Victoria Abril’s Julita. Symbol of little more than
furtive extra-marital relations within the strict moral codes of Francoism, and
provider of viewer titillation in the contrived scene of destape at the casa de
citas, Dibildos’s development of Julita follows a conventional character arc.
Gradually disabused regarding her boyfriend Ventura’s intentions towards
her, she develops from her early simpering demands of ‘¿me querrás
siempre?’ to her final resigned exclamation (not included in the novel): ‘esto
ni es amor, ni es nada’.
Furthermore this ‘dramatic structure’ imposes closure on a novel which so
disorientatingly lacks one. The film makes clear the link between Martín and
Margot’s death – he is accused then exonerated of murder – but the novel is
stubbornly ambiguous. Cela’s Martín fails to read about an unnamed crime
for which the authorities wish to question him in his newspaper, and the
reader is left with the equivocal and disturbing juxtaposition of Martín’s ‘mal
asunto’ with the image of a dying dog (Cela 1998, 325–6). Camus’s version
ends, however, in the café La Delicia, with a voice-over from the novel.
While the scenes in the café are among the best in the film – with an absence
of establishing shots, a proliferation of tracking and depth of field shots and a
12 The video jacket of the video distributed by Suevia Films claims there are sixty
characters in the production.
13 As no casting director is listed in the film’s credits, the choice of this actor must be
attributable to Camus.
mise en scène of mirrors and a revolving door all efficaciously exploited to

connote the repetition and monotony expressed in the voice-over (Cela 1998,
320) – the constant return to this space transforms it into a central pivot of
community in the film, whereas the novel uncompromisingly portrays atom-
ized alienation.
History and Authenticity

The above interpretation of Camus’s adaptation in fact tells us little more
than that the novel is worth reading and the film not worth watching.
However, we may more profitably explore the fascinating points of conver-
gence and divergence between the original text and its cinematic adaptation
through consideration of the question of history. Cela defused the rhetoric of
the regime which sought to justify the present through reference to the past by
setting his novel in a stagnant, cyclical present. Conversely, democratic
Spain’s cultural policy during the 1980s sought to recuperate the past to inter-
pret the present as part of a process of progress. While the one laments that
history is destined to repeat itself, the other celebrates the fact that it has not.
In the context of postmodern accounts of historiographic metafiction this
chapter examines the tension between a novel which eschews history in order
to challenge the doxa, and a film which seeks to represent history in order to
create the doxa.
‘Authenticity’ as a concept may have been buried long ago by postmodern
and post-structuralist theories as a disingenuous fallacy in historical repre-
sentation, but in the context of transitional Spain it was still a vital concern.
This is not to argue that 1970s and 1980s Spain was characterized by histor-
ical naïvety, but rather, following Paul Julian Smith (2000b), to recognize the
specifically Spanish ‘modernity’ of that period and not let our analysis of it
merge into a general thesis of global ‘postmodernity’.
Accounts of the production of La colmena and contemporary press
reviews on the film’s release reveal a striking convergence over this question
of authenticity. In an interview with Ya published on the day of the film’s
premiere, for instance, Camus emphasizes the attention he paid to authentic
recreation in mise en scène. ‘Lo que predomina’, his interviewer explains, ‘es
el ambiente [. . .] de la miseria que recorre las páginas del libro y que
impregna “con bastante exactitud”, según Camus, la versión cinematográfica
del mismo’ (Santa Eulalia 1982, emphasis added). Camus’s explanation for
the interpolation of actual film footage from the period is particularly inter-
esting with respect to this quest for ‘exact’ or ‘authentic’ period recreation,
although his equation of authenticity with the NO-DO – the notorious propa-
ganda machine of the regime – is slightly alarming:
Me faltaba Madrid; el exterior. Me armé de valor y me atreví a hacer algo

que quizá rechace algún espectador. Busqué unos planos en el NO-DO de
30 SALLY FAULKNER
aquellos días y los he incluido. Así la ciudad es la auténtica y no creo que

se despegue del resto más que por la diferencia de la técnica fotográfica y
las deficiencias del blanco y negro en que esas secuencias estaban
filmadas. Su función es testimonial. Me parece que debía contarse con
ellas. (quoted in Santa Eulalia 1982, emphasis added)
Producer and scriptwriter Dibildos echoes this faith that the film was an
authentic representation of the period. At the time he explained that ‘yo,
como niño de la época, aún no he visto ninguna película que refleje aquellos
años tal y como fueron realmente. Y, desde luego, a todo creador le apetece,
por encima de todo, hacer lo que nadie ha hecho.’ He, like Camus, highlights
mise en scène, ‘posiblemente sea uno de los grandes logros de la película.
Todos los detalles están cuidados con mimo de entomólogo’ (Dibildos quoted
in Mínguez Arranz 1998, 138–9, emphasis added).
This entomological fidelity to the period – which, as Dougherty observes,
surpasses Cela’s work in its documentary realism – was achieved through a
minutely detailed recreation of 1940s Madrid. Almost everything within the
frame (for example magazines, ration coupons, matches and cigarettes) dated
from the period (Deveny 1999, 71). Of the three hundred bottles behind the
bar of the La Delicia café, half were authentic (Deveny 1999, 71) and only
twelve of the costumes had to be made: all the other clothes were antiques
from the period (Mínguez Arranz 1998, 139). Small wonder that contempo-
rary commentators wrote of Camus’s ‘auténtica realidad española’. Diego
Galán’s review in El País (1982), for instance, contrasts the compromised
portrayal of reality in Cela’s novel due to censorship with the authentic por-
trayal of reality in Camus’s film – ‘sólo muchos años después se ha podido
relatar [la auténtica realidad española] con libertad’. That transparent
mimesis was Cela’s aim is of course highly debatable, and in any case the
novelist made no concessions to censorship, first publishing La colmena in
Argentina. Nonetheless, the reviewer’s insistence that in 1980s Spain prog-
ress was such that previously compromised artistic realism could now be
‘authentic’ is fascinating.
The film adaptation can be understood as organized around the quest for
authenticity. The soundtrack consists of dialogue from the novel, archive
recordings from Radio Nacional de España and contemporary music (Ojos
verdes, Mi caravana, La lirios de Ochaita and A media luz are listed in the
credits) which is only occasionally punctuated by music director Antón
García Abril’s original composition. The imagetrack incorporates both orig-
inal footage of street scenes from 1940s Madrid and a NO-DO sequence on
Holy Week in Spain. In the above quotation Camus expresses his concern
that these interpolations jar with the tone of the rest of the film, but – such
was the energy devoted to mise en scène – the point is that they do not. For
example, in the cut from the footage of street scenes back to La Delicia there
is a graphic match between the street lamps and the lighting of the café. Even
though the film is in colour and the original footage in monotone, the browns
and greys selected for mise en scène smooth over the differences. The film
thus displays what Juan Miguel Company Ramón has pertinently described
(1989) as a will for ‘la conquista del tiempo’, employing a discourse of
authenticity to counter the stubborn presentness of all cinematic language.
As such, rather than an example of the new cinema of democratic Spain,
we may understand this early 1980s literary adaptation as set squarely within
the context of the transition. La colmena is a late manifestation of the docu-
mentary film which flourished during the 1970s. There are obvious parallels
between the desire to film an ‘auténtica realidad española’ and the documen-
tary genre characterized by ‘its reintroduction of previously excluded points
of view and its appeal to authenticity’ (Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas 1998,
20). With its interpolation of contemporary archive film footage, the film
bears clear resemblance to a documentary like Jaime Camino’s La vieja
memoria (1977), which also splices original footage along with interviews of
key figures of Civil War. But in its merging of both documentary and
fictional dramatic forms, La colmena found commercial success, whereas
1970s documentaries had largely been box office failures.
However the fictional referent of La colmena marks a crucial departure
from previous documentary forms. It may be argued that the film sidesteps
the problem of the original text’s fictionality by treating it as a disingenuous
realist account of the period. Indeed the novel itself, and even its author, seem
to be subsumed in the general drive for authenticity in the adaptation, as if
they too were ‘authentic’ period articles to add to mise en scène! We might
interpret Cela’s brief cameo in the film in this context: he appears as Matías
Martí (a character from one of his short stories that Dibildos incorporated in
the script [Mínguez Arranz 1998, 123]) and places a kind of seal of authorial
authenticity on the work. Similarly the introduction of a copy of the novel
itself in the bedroom scene between Martín and Purita (when he reads from it
to her) apparently points to the way the adaptation gives unmediated access
to the ‘authentic’ original text. And finally, the voice-over quotation of a
passage from the end of chapter six of the novel (Cela 1998, 320), as the final
images of the film roll, gives the impression too of a transparent relationship
between film, novel and the historical period represented.
Alternatively, we may explore the possibility that this merging of immis-
cible documentary and fictional genres is a conscious problematizing of the
representation of history in any aesthetic form. The documentary presup-
poses the possibility of authenticity, or an unmediated representation of the
past, but the dependence of a historical film on a pre-existing fictional
referent – and a very well-known one in this case – questions that faith in
authenticity, perhaps suggesting that the representation of the past is neces-
sarily mediated. The foundations of the two genres are mutually under-
mining, and hence La colmena as a historical representation of 1940s Madrid
is a contradictory amalgam of authenticity and aesthetics.
32 SALLY FAULKNER
It could be argued that this combination of documentary authenticity and

fictional aestheticization in La colmena betrays a self-consciousness about
the representation of history. In other words, we may read La colmena as an
example of what Linda Hutcheon calls postmodern ‘historiographic
metafiction’, as such revealing an awareness that
we know the past today [. . .] through its discourses, through its texts – that
is, through the traces of historical events: the archival materials, the docu-
ments, the narratives of witnesses . . . and historians. [. . .] Postmodern
fiction merely makes overt the processes of narrative representation.
(1989, 36)
Camus’s interpolation of contemporary film footage and NO-DO material

is particularly interesting in this respect. The seamless merging of the archive
footage of 1940s street scenes and Camus’s 1980s reconstruction of the
post-war city, which is achieved using graphic matches and similar colour
palettes as mentioned above, suggests a parallel between the two, implying
that the two forms are so many ‘discourses’ in the ‘narrative representation’ of
history. This splicing of archival and fictional documents would therefore
exemplify Hutcheon’s observation that ‘postmodern texts consistently use
and abuse actual historical documents and documentation in such a way as to
stress both the discursive nature of those representations of the past and the
narrativized form in which we read them’ (1989, 87).
Such an exposure of the constructedness of representation has particular
resonance in the context of the discourses of Francoist ideology. Camus’s
interpolation of the footage from the NO-DO could be read as a deconstruc-
tion of these discourses.14 Hence a reading of the film as a historiographic
metafiction (Hutcheon 1989) would suggest that the cross-cutting between
the sober account of Catholic ritual of the NO-DO and Julita and Ventura’s
love-making in the cinema is not just played for laughs, but deflates –
deconstructs – the official rhetoric. Like the earlier sequence in which trium-
phal military music is played against the pitiful images of the soup line,
Camus’s ludic parallel montage reveals the disparity between the orthodox
ritual described by the NO-DO commentator and the illicit behaviour of the
fictional narrative. Thus this interweaving of various discourses, an official
archival document (NO-DO) and a dissident fictional account (Cela’s novel),
reveals an awareness of the mediation of reality through narrative
representations.
14 Although the NO-DO had been questioned in earlier dissident films like Luis
García Berlanga’s ¡Bienvenido Míster Marshall! (1952), Camus was one of the first to
scrutinize its ideological intent in the period following its dismantling in 1981. (From 22
August 1975 it was no longer obligatory to screen the newsreels before all films [Tranche
and Sánchez-Biosca 2002, 15].)
Since these discourses ostensibly give access to the historical period of the
film’s setting, by extension we may argue that Camus’s La colmena demon-
strates the limits of the thesis of authenticity which underpins the documen-
tary genre. Camus and Dibildos’s recourse to a famous fictional referent in
their representation of history, and their suggestion of an equivalence
between this fictional text and the archival texts of original footage and the
NO-DO, demonstrates Hutcheon’s assertion that historiographic metafiction
reveals that ‘the representation of history becomes the history of representa-
tions’ (1989, 58).
The difficulty with this interpretation is the question of self-conscious-
ness. If in La colmena there is a problematization of the question of authen-
ticity in line with that of the historiographic metafiction studied by Hutcheon,
it is at best extremely subtle, in keeping with the understated tone of Camus’s
filmography described by Sánchez Noriega and Smith. It is probably more
accurate to conclude that Camus’s La colmena is an equivocal combination
of an artless quest for authenticity and an artful exposure of the
constructedness of historical representations, with the emphasis on the
former. Such an ambivalence regarding the question of historical representa-
tion explains why La colmena can be interpreted as both mimicking the
Francoist colonization of the past (the 1980s subsidized films turned to the
past to justify the present) and interrogating monolithic Francoist discourses
(the NO-DO). Or, in the terms of Hutcheon’s account of the politics of
postmodernism, the film simultaneously imitates and criticizes the doxa and
is a typically postmodern combination of ‘complicity and critique’ (1989, 11).
TIME OF SILENCE, TIME OF PROTEST: TIEMPO DE SILENCIO

(ARANDA 1986)
On first examination, Mario Camus’s La colmena and Vicente Aranda’s

Tiempo de silencio seem strikingly similar, and thus symptomatic of the
insidious uniformity of 1980s Spanish cinema lamented by critics. Both were
subsidized by the state, both were based on major post-war novels and both
were adapted by directors associated with the literary adaptation genre in
Spain. Aranda is to a certain extent like Camus, the kind of director suited to
literary adaptation discussed above. His filmography likewise includes early
experimental work – such as Fata Morgana (1966) which founded the Barce-
lona School – and he too has subsequently found a niche in the literary adap-
tation, with a special interest in adapting the work of Juan Marsé (La
muchacha de las bragas de oro 1980; Si te dicen que caí 1989; El amante
bilingüe 1993).15 Like Camus, Aranda embodies that equivocal mix of
15 Half of Aranda’s feature films to date are literary adaptations (see

http://us.imdb.com/Name?Aranda, +Vicente and Colmena 1996, 75).
34 SALLY FAULKNER
auteurist individuality and artisanal accommodation which is supposedly

ideal for literary adaptation; as a contemporary review puts it, Aranda’s is ‘un
cine personal [pero] paradójicamente fiel a los textos’ (Guarner 1986).
However, in interview Aranda has remarked on his aim to control every
aspect of film production (Vera 1989, 165), and he tends to work with the
same group of professionals, which Enrique Colmena calls the ‘cuadra de
Aranda’ (1996, 83–92). Furthermore, the fact he owns his own production
company Morgana Films – which co-produced Tiempo de silencio – should
not be underestimated. Whereas La colmena can be regarded as much
producer/scriptwriter Dibildos’s project as Camus’s, Aranda lays far more
authorial claim to Tiempo de silencio.
To return to the three problematic areas of the standard critical interpreta-
tion of 1980s literary adaptations identified above, Aranda’s Tiempo de
silencio has also been censured as a recipient of state subsidy through the
mechanism of the Miró decrees. Premiering in March 1986 after Miró’s fall
from grace (Brooksbank Jones 1997, 148) Aranda’s film coincided with the
moment the policy of state subsidy began to be seriously questioned (it was
finally dismantled in 1994). An El País report of 1985 had revealed details of
the subsidy policy to some outrage: twenty-three of the thirty-three requested
film projects had been passed, and the three most costly films included
Tiempo de silencio, which had received thirty-four million pesetas of taxpay-
ers’ money (summarized in Losilla 1989, 33). Small wonder that some
contemporary reviewers used Aranda’s adaptation as a target for their criti-
cism of government policy (see note 4 of this chapter), as Diario 16 reports,
‘[en Tiempo de silencio] se tiene la sensación de que todo está montado para
responder a las bases inéditas por las que el Ministerio de Cultura debe
guiarse para conceder las subvenciones anticipadas’ (Marinero 1988).
Director Fernando Trueba was later to quip that the PP’s criticism of the Miró
films ‘parece llevar implícito que las películas de esos años las ha hecho el
PSOE’ (quoted in Prout 1999, 55). But this was almost the case with Tiempo
de silencio: Luis Martín-Santos was a key figure in the banned PSOE from
1957 till his death in 1964 (Labanyi 1989, 54), and his left-wing politics were
shared by the director (Colmena 1996, 14–15).
Again like Camus’s film, Tiempo de silencio was criticized according to a
discourse of fidelity for failing to match the literary masterpiece on which it
was based. Martín-Santos’s Tiempo de silencio shares the labyrinthine frag-
mented structure and ironic narrator of La colmena, but conversely charts a
chronological series of events through a polyphony of textual voices. One
critic has described it as ‘a novel written by an intellectual, about intellectuals
and intended to be read by intellectuals’ (Jordan 1990, 179). Unsurprisingly
critics have compared such a challenging reading experience to that of
watching the film unfavourably: ‘lo que en Martín-Santos era adivinación e
instinto, es en Vicente Aranda prosecución y lógica’ (Gil de Muro 1986).
Finally, the period setting of Tiempo de silencio may be interpreted
according to hostile theoretical accounts of postmodernism. As a crushing

narrative of lost illusions, defeat and annihilation, Aranda’s film may not im-
mediately lend itself to the interpretation of postmodern nostalgia. Indeed at
the level of plot, both novel and film demolish the characters’ nostalgic urges
to return to the womb, which is shown to be violently evacuated through
abortion. Nonetheless, like Camus’s exaggeration of a love affair between
Martín and Purita in his La colmena (which is only suggested in the novel
[Cela 1998, 258]), Aranda also excessively romanticizes the relationship
between Pedro and Dorita in his adaptation of Tiempo de silencio (in the
novel we learn Pedro is rather indifferent, wanting ‘otra clase de mujer’
[Martín-Santos 1995, 112]). The portrayal of these characters by handsome
stars Imanol Arias and Victoria Abril to some extent detracts from the narra-
tive of bitter failure, possibly suggesting a reading of the film as a nostalgic,
pseudo-historical treatment of the post-war period.
Creative Recreation
Notwithstanding this possible hostile interpretation, there is general
recognition in contemporary reviews and subsequent scholarly criticism that
Tiempo de silencio is one of the most artistically successful of 1980s literary
adaptations (Quintana 1986; Guarner 1986; Company Ramón 1989;
Monterde 1989). This is explained by the fact that the film stands up compar-
atively well to an analysis according to the dictates of Fidelity Criticism.
While Aranda would later declare a cavalier approach to adaptation, by
which the original novel ‘es un material bruto que hay que transformar en
película, pero olvidándose de las trascendencias y considerándolo como algo
simplemente utilizable’ (quoted in Costa Ferrandis 1991, 234), his comments
regarding the cinematic version of Tiempo de silencio reveal a desire for
reverent fidelity. Although he was forced to cut half of the novel in the script
(Quintana 1986) and only focus on the aspects related to the plot,16 Aranda
also expressed his aim to maintain the ironic tone of the original and
conserve the ‘spirit’ of the novel’s non-diegetic elements (Mínguez Arranz
1998, 172). Such, in fact, was his desire for fidelity that it was reported in the
press (‘Fascinación por un texto’ 1985) that all actors were obliged to carry
underlined copies of the book with them during the shoot!
Company Ramón’s laudatory Fidelity Criticism of the film (1989, 82–5)
has formed the basis of its subsequent scholarly reception (cited in Mínguez
Arranz 1998, 174 and 176–7; and Carmona 1991, 213–17). He quotes two
16 Aranda has also declared that he sees this process of ‘condensing’ a novel in a film
as a source of inspiration: ‘Me gusta más el problema de síntesis que plantea la hora y
media u hora y tres cuartos que la serie televisiva, me parece que esto obliga a una
condensación, a una tensión y un esfuerzo que conllevan a un producto final superior’
(quoted in Palacio 2002, 521). Recreation for Aranda is creation itself.
36 SALLY FAULKNER
sections of the novel, Pedro and Matías’s visit to a bar during their drinking
binge (Martín-Santos 1995, 91–2) and Ortega y Gasset’s speech
(Martín-Santos 1995, 157–8), and offers shot-by-shot analyses of their filmic
translations. In the first instance, Aranda shoots the entire bar scene from
outside and behind the windows, thus efficaciously replicating the narrative
distance of the novel, self-consciously drawing attention to the unnaturalistic
mode of narration and – by recalling the first images of the film of caged
dogs – conveying the claustrophobia and entrapment of the characters who
drunkenly sing the line ‘gozando el amor y la libertad’ from En los pueblos
de mi Andalucía. The sequence furthermore introduces a menacing and ubiq-
uitous off-screen presence (the dictatorship) through the repressive authority
figure of the night watchman, who puts an end to the song and thus restores
‘silence’ to the film’s soundtrack – from which non-diegetic background
music is completely absent. In his second analysis, Company Ramón
describes Aranda’s introduction of the perspective of an inquisitive Siamese
cat in the cinematic translation of Martín-Santos’s parody of the speech, and
shows that each ironic parenthetical insertion in the novel is matched by a
cinematic cut in the film. By finding such inventive formal filmic equiva-
lents, Company Ramón concludes therefore that Aranda carries out an
‘operativa lectura’ of the novel (1989, 83).
Company Ramón’s excellent close readings of these two sequences of the
film serve as a point of departure for the interpretation proposed here. At its
best, the Fidelity Criticism approach affords a sophisticated formal analysis
of the film under discussion, as is the case here. But Company Ramón’s anal-
yses using this critical method reveal its limitations. In his first close reading
he observes that the film, like the novel, conveys the entrapment and claus-
trophobia experienced by the characters. In fact this experience, and the
complementary notion of circularity, are key motifs in the whole film, and
Aranda departs from the novel and transforms its ending to emphasize these
elements. But while Fidelity Criticism can account for similarities between
literary text and filmic adaptation, it is unable to negotiate changes (which in
unrefined criticism tend to be dispatched as ‘betrayals’ of the original, and
evidence that film cannot do what literature can). This chapter, however, aims
to interpret both similarities and differences from the point of view of the
representation of history. In his second close reading Company Ramón
demonstrates Aranda’s ability to replicate formally the parody found in the
novel. But as Fidelity Criticism cannot account for the different ideological
contexts in which text and film were conceived, Company Ramón overlooks
the effect of the satire of Ortega’s speech and how this functions differently in
Martín-Santos’s novel and Aranda’s film. This chapter seeks rather to inter-
pret the distinct roles played by the parodies of the 1898 Generation philos-
ophy in both the novel and the film in the context of historical representation.
Whereas my analysis of La colmena began with a consideration of
‘authenticity’, and then showed how the film could also be read as a
postmodern reflection on historical discourses, in this reading of Tiempo de

silencio the reverse approach is adopted. Firstly Aranda’s adaptation will be
analysed as postmodern historiographic metafiction. Just as Jo Labanyi has
shown (1989) that Martín-Santos interrogates discourse to reveal the impos-
sibility of the representation of reality, I will firstly suggest that Aranda simi-
larly questions the representation of history. However I will secondly argue
that the film conveys a faith in authentic historical representation owing to
Aranda’s unambiguous critique of Francoism, and that, between novel and
film, we move from silence to protest.
The Representation of History: From Interrogation to Affirmation

Company Ramón’s reading of the formal creativity of Tiempo de silencio
reveals Aranda’s concern with aesthetics. As the film foregrounds its setting
in the post-war dictatorship period, Aranda is equally preoccupied with the
representation of history. While hostile Marxist accounts of postmodernism
would argue these two concerns are mutually exclusive, Hutcheon suggests
they may be mutually reinforcing. For her, postmodern historiographic
metafiction focuses on the textuality of history and deconstructs (as we saw
with the respect to the NO-DO in La colmena) the discourses of which
history is composed.
The remarkable achievement of Martín-Santos’s Tiempo de silencio is the
way the author uses formal strategies not only to satirize Franco’s regime, but
also to expose the resignation and culpability of Spaniards living under it.
Thus for Labanyi (1989) the novel is a double-deconstruction both of the
myths erected by the dictatorship and those erected by its citizens. Both types
of demythification are dependent on the novel’s form. The regime could not
be satirized using a standard realist mode as ‘an authoritative narrator only
served to reproduce the authoritarianism [one] wished to denounce’ (Labanyi
1989, 55); similarly the characters’ self-deception could not be exposed
through an omniscient third-person narration as only by adopting the charac-
ters’ point of view through inner monologue can we see the way they ‘use
language as a tool of mythification to give their lives a false appearance of
solidity’ (Labanyi 1989, 55). As Labanyi summarizes ‘it is by ironically
exposing the ways in which language allows man to mythify the world that
Martín-Santos destroys the realist notion that words reflect reality’ (1989,
55).
By the time Aranda adapted the novel in 1986, that ‘reality’ had become
‘history’, and just as authoritative narration might replicate the authority of
the regime for Martín-Santos in 1961, a formally naturalistic, mythifying
version of Francoist history might replicate the way Francoist films them-
selves mythified history. If, as Hutcheon has argued, ‘postmodernism works
to “de-doxify” our cultural representations and their undeniable political
import’ (1989, 3), and Camus achieves this by splicing references to Cela’s
38 SALLY FAULKNER
fictional novel with ‘authentic’ film footage and the NO-DO, Aranda seems
to accomplish a similar end by de-naturalizing film form to a certain degree
in Tiempo de silencio. Aranda thus echoes some of Martín-Santos’s formal
strategies in the cinematic idiom, exposing – as Company Ramón has demon-
strated – the film’s mode of enunciation and drawing attention to the disjunc-
ture between representation and (historical) reality.
If Martín-Santos’s novel innovatively explored the ways language could be
used as a tool to trick and distort, Aranda conveys scepticism over representa-
tional authenticity in his film. Since, as Aranda himself declared, the script
aimed to follow the novel as closely as possible, the passages in which
Martín-Santos’s narrator reveals the duplicity of language are transposed. For
example, in both novel and film, during Pedro’s interrogation by the police
officer, his words unwittingly implicate him in Florita’s death. But as cinema
is composed of images and sounds not just language, the scene in the film
adaptation does not achieve the same self-reflexivity as in the original
passage in the novel. A more accurate recreation of Martín-Santos’s
self-conscious reflection on language would involve images, the primary
means to access ‘reality’ in film.
Just as Martín-Santos shows that language hides the truth, Aranda shows
that images can hide the truth, for example through the treatment of low-life
tough guy Cartucho. Boyfriend of the butchered Florita, Cartucho’s role
throughout the film until his final act of revenge is to spy on events and he is
thus in a sense the viewer’s on-screen surrogate. He spies on Pedro and
Amador on their first visit to Muecas’s chabola, observes the events there
when Muecas and the curandero perform the ill-fated abortion on Florita and
again spies on Pedro and Amador when they arrive after the abortion. On
each occasion, Cartucho’s interpretation of events is erroneous. Pedro first
goes to Madrid’s shanty-town to enquire about the cancerous mice not, as
Cartucho concludes, to deflower Florita who has in fact already been incestu-
ously impregnated by her father. Pedro’s second visit is not to perform the
abortion as Cartucho supposes, but is engineered by Muecas to implicate
Pedro in the crime. In this way the film seems to question whether the image
is a reliable source of ‘truth’.17
This argument that the film self-consciously problematizes access to ‘real-
ity’ also extends to the treatment of its protagonist. The portrayal of Pedro’s
subjectivity challenges the convention of ‘objectivity’ upon which access to
‘reality’ depends. While most of the inner monologues contained in the novel
are incorporated into dialogue in the film, Aranda retains the subjective
perspective of Pedro. Besides the standard cinematic portrayal of subjectivity
17 In his earlier La muchacha de las bragas de oro, Aranda also questioned this link
between image and ‘truth’ by staging the clearly fraudulent memories of ex-Falangist
Forest in flash-back sequences.
through the point of view shot and the inclusion of two sequences of
voice-over quotes of monologues from the novel (Pedro’s famous existential
speech in prison and his final monologue of resignation as he leaves Madrid),
Aranda also experiments with multiple casting to convey Pedro’s perspective
(a technique he would repeat in Si te dicen que caí). Thus Victoria Abril (who
is only listed in the credits as Dorita) not only plays the precocious
‘Carmencita’ of the guest-house, but also a writer Pedro meets in the café
during his night out with Matías and a prostitute in Doña Luisa’s brothel
where the hapless drinkers end up. This multiple casting conveys Pedro’s
desire for Dorita (not to be found in the novel) culminating in their union on
his return to the guest-house, when he smugly crosses himself before an
effigy of the virgin in the hallway before entering Dorita’s room to take her
virginity (which is rather portrayed as unpremeditated quasi-rape in the
novel). Again Charo López’s double role in the film as both the haggard
prostitute Charo and Matías’s aristocratic mother (both acknowledged in the
credits) expresses Pedro’s suspicion of Matías’s Oedipus complex. Finally
the grotesque sight of Florita’s lifeless, bloody body incongruously
stretched out on the floor at Matías’s mother’s drinks reception quite clearly
represents Pedro’s culpability over his involvement in the botched abortion
practised in Muecas’s chabola the previous night.18 This distortion of objec-
tivity through the manipulation of film form to convey Pedro’s point of view
seems to short-circuit our access to ‘reality’ – and by extension ‘history’ – in
the film.
However, the differences between Martín-Santos and Aranda’s treatments
of Pedro and Dorita’s affair mentioned above point to a significant difference
between novelist and director with respect to the representation of (historical)
reality. If the multiple casting of the actress Abril suggests Pedro’s fascination
for Dorita, then the film narrative actually confirms his attraction towards
her. Similarly, if he subjectively assigns her the role of a prostitute (he calls
the writer from the café ‘puta’ and Abril later plays a whore in the brothel),
the narrative bears out that Dorita’s mother and grandmother to all intents
and purposes prostitute her. Again, Pedro’s subjective impression of an
Oedipal relationship between Matías and his mother seems accurate. In other
words, Pedro’s subjective impressions demonstrably correlate with narrative
‘reality’.
It would therefore seem that despite the fact that Aranda cinematically
replicates some of the postmodern deconstructive strategies of Martín-
Santos’s novel, his version of Tiempo de silencio paradoxically reveals a faith
in ‘authentic’ representation which postmodernism questions. To explain this
18 These manifestations of Pedro’s perspective which are far more subjective that the
point of view shot may also be profitably analysed using Bruce Kawin’s theory (1978) of
the ‘mindscreen’. See chapters four and five of this book.
40 SALLY FAULKNER
faith in ‘authenticity’ we may return to the differing effects of the parody of

Ortega y Gasset’s speech in the novel and the film. In Martín-Santos’s work,
the parodied speech in fragment thirty-three (Martín-Santos 1995, 154–8) is
only one of many manifestations of his satire on the philosophy of the 1898
Generation. As Labanyi points out, the presence of the writers of the 1898
Generation in Tiempo de silencio ‘is due to the fact that their ideas were taken
up by the founders of the Falange in the 1930s and came to constitute the
backbone of Nationalist ideology’ (1989, 55). It is thus quite clear that –
given the context of censorship in which he was writing – Martín-Santos
parodied the ideology of the 1898 Generation as an indirect critique of
fascism. Comparing the treatment of the 1898 Generation philosophy in
Martín-Santos’s novel and Aranda’s film, Salvador Company Gimeno
laments that in the adaptation references to this thinking are ‘pocas y
desvaídas’ (n.d., 7). But this Fidelity Criticism does not account for the
changed circumstances in which Aranda filmed Tiempo de silencio. Whereas
Martín-Santos carried out an indirect critique of the regime, Aranda’s film
constitutes a direct, unequivocal denunciation, and thus the 1898 Generation
parody is simply less important. As a protest against the ‘reality’ of Franco’s
Spain from which Aranda himself emigrated in 1952 – the same period in
which the film is set – it therefore manifests a faith in accurately portraying
that historical period.
Unlike Camus and Dibildos’s conception of La colmena, Aranda lays no
claim to ‘authenticity’ in Tiempo de silencio, but his criticism of Francoism
presupposes an accurate historical representation of the post-war period. The
reconstruction of Madrid’s shanty-town in the film adaptation is a case in
point. Martín-Santos’s narrator describes Pedro’s first visit to this area with
an ironic, obfuscatory description phrased in exaggerated baroque language
(1995, 47–51). In the film adaptation Aranda removes this camouflaging
filter and through a point of view shot we share Pedro’s shock as he looks
down on the chabolas, reconstructed in all their stark poverty. Aranda admits
bowing to commercial pressure in casting the good-looking Abril and Arias
as his leads (Vera 1989, 168) – ‘la pareja salvapelículas del cine español’
(review of Tiempo de silencio by V. Aranda 1988) who were also to star
together in his later El Lute (1988) – but almost every other element in the
film adheres to an unforgiving neorealist aesthetic. While it would be naïve to
equate historical accuracy with neorealist conventions, Aranda’s directness in
portraying the period recalls Dougherty’s analysis of Camus’s La colmena as
‘directa y desnuda’ compared to Cela’s (1990, 20). The camera focuses in
cruel close-up on Ricarda’s hands ruined by toil, the sweaty bosom of
Enriqueta Claver’s grotesque brothel madame and the gold teeth of López’s
ragged prostitute. The criticism that the 1980s literary adaptation genre
indulges in pictorial aesthetics is thus mistaken in this case. Far from the
visual pleasures associated with the conventions of period drama, Aranda’s
immediate filmic influence in this piece appears to be the Italian neorealism
which had similarly inspired oppositional artists during the dictatorship.19

Moreover the nightmarish scene of the abortion Pedro performs on the
dying Florita, including the chilling sound of the scalpel scraping her womb
(apparently taken from a recording of an actual abortion [Jaime 2000, 166])
and the intrusive shots at the autopsy are extremely harsh, in keeping with
the explicit portrayal of sex and violence that characterizes Aranda’s
filmography.
In the light of this desire to denounce Francoism through an accurate
historical representation of the period, we might explain Aranda’s significant
departures from the novel in his adaptation. Unfortunately the novel’s impor-
tant illness metaphor fails in the adaptation: the intertext with Camus’s La
Peste in which illness is equated with fascism is a literary not a filmic refer-
ence; the flatulent police officer in the film seems more an esperpento
parody than a reference to the all-pervading sickness of Spanish society; and
Aranda disastrously portrays Amador as a family man, whose wife has a
healthy baby (perhaps to contrast the fertile working classes with the sterile
bourgeoisie?) sabotaging the novel’s suggestive description of her ‘vientre
sin hijos, todavía concupiscente’ (Martín-Santos 1995, 185).20 However,
Aranda’s transposition and elaboration of the metaphor of entrapment in the
novel, and the development of the motif of circularity, are efficacious. In a
sense Aranda shrewdly transforms Martín-Santos’s linguistically suggestive
time of ‘silence’ into a visually expressive time of ‘entrapment’; furthermore
the almost complete absence of music on the soundtrack has been more liter-
ally related to the novel’s title (Vera 1989, 169). In a visual echo of the
opening images of caged ferrets of Carlos Saura’s dissident masterpiece La
caza (1965), Aranda similarly begins with trapped animals. Tiempo de
silencio’s opening images of caged dogs, bandaged from injuries sustained
during experiments in the laboratory, over which we read the intertitle
‘Madrid, finales de los cuarenta, principios de los cincuenta’, is a synopsis of
Aranda’s film. The insistent recurrence of the entrapment imagery is not
therefore just a playful prefiguration of Pedro’s literal imprisonment, but a
sober portrayal of Francoist Spain as a figurative (though for some literal)
society of imprisonment. Company Ramón has noted that the image of the
caged dogs is echoed in the scene when Pedro and Matías are framed through
the window panes of the bar, as mentioned above. The image also recurs in a
subtle way at the end of the scene of Matías’s mother’s reception, when Pedro
is shot from outside the glass doors, whose framework recalls the bars of the
cage; and again in an obvious way when Pedro is framed through the bars of
his cell. Crucially, on Pedro’s ‘release’ Aranda elaborates a telling visual echo
19 On the influence of Italian neorealism on film see Kinder 1993, particularly

chapter one, 18–53; on its influence on literature see Jordan 1990, 101–15.
20 On the illness metaphor in the novel, see Fiddian and Evans 1988, 37–40.
42 SALLY FAULKNER
of the image of Pedro behind bars in his cell. On the stairs outside the
guest-house he and Dorita are framed through the bars of the railing, after
she avows ‘no consentiré que te me escapes’.
Aranda’s interpretation of Franco’s Spain as a society of entrapment is
complemented by the leitmotif of claustrophobic stasis and circularity. This
is inspired by the novel’s emphasis on the ‘ever-repeating vicious circle’ of
incest and abortion pointed out by Labanyi (1989, 69). Circularity is key to
both the formal composition and figurative content of Aranda’s Tiempo de
silencio. The recurring images of circularity in the imagetrack of the film are
matched by the tracing of circularity in its structure. An image taken from the
novel of Pedro’s meal of a whiting eating its own tail (Martín-Santos 1995,
69), which occurs early in the film, serves – like the image of the caged dogs
– as a synopsis. Circularity is also emphasized in the depiction of Florita’s
burial. The sequence is framed by two matching long shots of the façade of a
church. In the first, Florita’s funeral party walks behind her coffin carried by
a hearse from the left-hand side of the screen to the right, as a second party
leaves with their empty, identical hearse from the right-hand side to the left.
The second long shot ends the scene of the funeral, and Florita’s party bears
the now empty hearse from right to left as they leave, while yet another party
approaches with their coffin on yet another identical hearse from left to right.
The formal symmetry of the two matching shots conveys a wearisome sense
of circularity and repetition. Likewise, when Pedro is discharged from prison
Aranda frames a symmetry between foreground and background: as Pedro is
reunited with Matías and Dorita after his release in the background, another
prisoner is detained in the foreground.
These references to cyclical repetition in the film culminate in the final
sequence, when Pedro, Dora and Dorita go to a fair, at which Cartucho
murders the girl. The revolving big wheel and merry-go-rounds in the back-
ground at the start of the sequence may initially appear innocuous, but the
insistent recurrence of circular imagery – alongside Cartucho’s brooding
presence – introduce a menacing tone. When Dorita requests a song the street
organist winds up the instrument in a circular motion; when the couple dance
together they whirl round in circles and Dorita demands Pedro spin her round
more and more; then the pair go round in circles together on the
merry-go-round. This culminates in the murder: as Cartucho stabs the girl
and she bleeds to death, Aranda’s camera circles around them. Martín-Santos
also sets this scene at a fairground, but Aranda filmically exploits that setting
to the full. He firstly recalls the murder sequence of Hitchcock’s Strangers on
a Train (1951) as Cartucho stalks his victim, and, like Hitchcock, points to
the incongruity between the jaunty fairground music and the brutal murder.
Aranda is furthermore able to insist on the motif of circularity in this setting,
framing a ridiculous Pedro clutching a string of circular churros (recalling
his whiting meal) as he peers at his fiancée’s lifeless body, then tilting the
camera upwards to take in an image of the ever-revolving big wheel and
merry-go-round, now symbolic manifestations of Pedro’s entrapment, and of

repetition (Mínguez Arranz 1998, 182).
Aranda echoes this formal imagery in the film’s structure. Whereas
Martín-Santos’s Cartucho stabs Dorita in the side, Aranda’s Cartucho thrusts
his knife lower down into her womb (Deveny 1999, 264–5), thus emphasizing
the symmetry between her murder and Florita’s, whose death also results
from the thrusting of a metal instrument into the uterus. Further, Aranda
alters the final sequence of the novel in his adaptation to reinforce this struc-
tural circularity. The novel’s Pedro is sacked from his laboratory and leaves
Madrid to become a provincial doctor, which allows Martín-Santos to elabo-
rate a magisterial parody of the 1898 Generation eulogy of Castile in the
protagonist’s final monologue (1995, 279–87). However the adaptation’s
Pedro remains in the laboratory, and Aranda draws the film full circle as the
final image of Pedro matches the first one of him. The only difference is that
at the start Pedro industriously peers through his microscope, but at the end
he vacantly gazes into the distance. As Mínguez Arranz comments:
el rostro de Pedro, en primer plano, está encerrado, atrapado en el

encuadre. [. . .] Su final es una clausura, pues el final es el principio, y la
vida de Pedro parece condenada a girar sin avanzar repitiendo siempre el
mismo ciclo, igual que la noria o el tiovivo a los que icónicamente ha sido
encadenado. (1998, 181–2)
The present reading of entrapment and circularity in the film would extend
this metaphor of imprisonment and repetition to the entire society portrayed
by the film.
One last alteration that Aranda makes to the novel which is pertinent to the
present discussion is his transformation of the character of Dorita, who
becomes the hero to Pedro’s antihero. Little more than eye-candy that her
Celestina grandmother offers to Pedro in the novel, Aranda significantly
expands the role of Victoria Abril’s Dorita in the film. This is in part to take
advantage of a commercially marketable actress and Aranda’s muse who had
starred in all but one of his films by 1986, and in part to add reasonably
explicit sex scenes.21 But Aranda also develops Dorita’s character so she is
everything that Pedro is not. When Pedro deludes himself with the dream of
winning the Nobel prize, she is under no illusion regarding her role in order
that her grandmother might ‘tener un médico en la familia’ (a fact which is
hidden from her in the novel);22 nor is she taken in by her grandmother’s
21 See Rosa Alvares Hernández and Belén Frías’s Vicente Aranda/Victoria Abril: el
cine como pasión (1991).
22 Dorita’s transformation into Pedro’s betrothed is conveyed by the symbol of the
apple. Dorita eats a raw apple (‘nature’) on the evening prior to her deflowering by Pedro,
but a manufactured toffee apple (‘culture’) on her outing with Pedro as his formal fiancée.
44 SALLY FAULKNER
eulogy of her ‘muy hombre’ (Martín-Santos 1995, 18) dead husband, who,
Dorita matter-of-factly informs Pedro, was a diseased adulterer, sterile after
contracting syphilis from a Philippine prostitute (in the novel we learn this
from the grandmother’s monologues [Martín-Santos 1995, 18]). When
Pedro’s response to his implication in the abortion befits the spinelessness
and ineffectuality of the classic existential hero,23 Dorita is conversely
cunning – she does not tell the police of Pedro’s whereabouts – shrewd – she
finds Pedro in the brothel long before the police – energetic – she accompa-
nies Matías on a visit to a Francoist official to discuss the affair and flings his
glasses across the room in frustration at his condescending unwillingness to
see the truth – and resourceful – she visits Muecas’s chabola as she realizes
only Ricarda’s testimony can save Pedro, as later proves to be the case (none
of these instances are to be found in the novel). While in the novel Ricarda,
the wife who finally rebels against her abusive husband to save Pedro, is the
only character who represents a glimmer of hope in dark times (Fiddian and
Evans 1988, 43–6), in the film it is Dorita. If, despite its bitter indictment of
Franco’s Spain, Martín-Santos’s Tiempo de silencio harbours some optimistic
belief in change (Labanyi 1989, 95), by investing Dorita with such positive
qualities only to sacrifice her at the end, Aranda’s adaptation of the novel is
thus wholly pessimistic.
As a member of the same generation (Martín-Santos was born in 1924,
Aranda in 1926), Aranda has claimed he wanted to adapt Martín-Santos’s
novel ever since he first read it on its publication (Fernández-Rubio 1986).
Despite his cinematic replication of some of the novel’s deconstructive
aesthetics, his adaptation of Tiempo de silencio betrays a faith in authentic
historical representation as a means to effect a critique of Francoism. One has
the impression that this is the film Aranda would have liked to have made in
1961. Indeed this film and his subsequent Si te dicen que caí have been inter-
preted as manifestations of the director’s ‘deseo de ajustar cuentas con el
pasado’ (Guarner 1989), a desire also revealed by the way the filmmaker has
taken the unusual step of making second, unabridged, versions of those of his
films which were edited under censorship after its abolition in 1977 (Vera
1989, 26).
However, with respect to period dramas of the Franco period Barry Jordan
and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas have warned that
whilst images of hunger, repression, moral extremes, religious obsession,

and so on present a critical view of the values and effects of Francoism,
23 It is questionable if existential concerns – dependent as they are on the construction

of the self through language – can be translated to film. Miguel de Unamuno’s master-
piece Niebla has been adapted, however, as Las cuatro novias de Augusto Pérez (Jara 1975),
but the title would suggest that the focus is on romantic, rather than ontological, concerns.
The novella was also adapted to television by Fernando Méndez Leite in the same year.
they also function as a measure of the distance which separates contempo-

rary, democratic Spain from the repressive backwardness of the past. A
discourse of self-congratulatory democratic liberalism is thus inscribed
within their critique of the past. (1998, 55–6)
It would seem that if filmmakers soften their images of the past they are
damned – as in the criticism of Camus’s La colmena – and if they harden their
images they are damned – Aranda’s Tiempo de silencio could be accused of
‘self-congratulatory liberalism’ as it emphasizes the harshness of the
post-war period. (Given this reception small wonder that in the 1990s direc-
tors turned to the exploration of subjectivity and fantasy in their historical
films.) But if we censor ourselves in the way Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas
suggest from representing any past event or situation which has improved –
the holocaust, slavery, fascism – we will effectively eradicate historical film
altogether, which is clearly absurd. Aranda’s adaptation of Tiempo de silencio
is a repudiation of a wasted period of Spanish history which is even more
poignant than Martín-Santos’s original because the director carries the
burden of knowledge that the dictator was to die in bed. It should be cele-
brated as a historical achievement, not denigrated as liberalist back-patting.
Conclusion: History and Postmodernism

If we consider them as a pair, we might well swap over the original novels
on which Camus and Aranda’s film adaptations are based in the name of
fidelity. Cela’s La colmena portrays the circularity and stasis of life under
Franco, as does Aranda’s film of Tiempo de silencio; and Martín-Santos’s
Tiempo de silencio points to an optimistic future, as does Camus’s La
colmena. In another curious parallel, each film adaptation seems to accom-
plish what the other aimed to achieve. Despite Camus and Dibildos’s
frequently voiced desire for ‘authenticity’ and their adoption of a largely
naturalistic cinematic idiom so different from the form of the novel, their La
colmena is, perhaps malgré soi, an aestheticized splicing of various historical
discourses, which, perhaps surprisingly, lends itself to interpretation as a
postmodern reflection on historical textuality. Conversely, although Aranda’s
creative recreation of Martín-Santos’s deconstructive form suggests a will to
effect a postmodern contestation of the writing of history, his desire to be
faithful to the bitter satire of the original novel in his film adaptation of
Tiempo de silencio leads to an unequivocal denunciation of Francoism which
is dependent on authentic historical representation.
This chapter shows that history and aesthetics are not immiscible, and that
history may be practised from within historicity. In her work on postmodern
historiographic metafiction, Linda Hutcheon challenges Marxist views of
postmodern ‘dehistoricization’, such as those of Fredric Jameson who
laments the ‘loss of history’ in nostalgic postmodern films. For Hutcheon,
46 SALLY FAULKNER
such fiction is not nostalgic and is historical, not in a Marxist sense of

‘History’, but in its portrayal of the discourses of histories, and its recogni-
tion that in a postmodern context ‘we can only know – and construct – the
past through its traces, its representations’ (1989, 113). For her then, the
postmodern preoccupation with aesthetics is paradoxically precisely what
makes it, in her sense of the word, historical. Whereas a 1990s period drama
such as Fernando Trueba’s Belle Époque (1992) clearly fits with hostile
accounts of postmodern nostalgia (Jordan 1999), the 1980s adaptations
examined in this chapter explore the tensions between Jameson and
Hutcheon’s thinking. In the name of recovering an ‘authentic’ Marxist
History, Camus’s La colmena in fact reveals the ‘textuality’ of history; and
despite its ostensibly deconstructive form, Aranda’s Tiempo de silencio
demonstrates that Marxist History is still retrievable in a postmodern
context.
RURAL AND URBAN SPACES
RURAL AND URBAN SPACES:

VIOLENCE AND NOSTALGIA
IN THE COUNTRY AND THE CITY
The Country and the City in Twentieth-Century Spain

In his classic 1973 study of rural and urban spaces in English literature,
The Country and the City, Raymond Williams asserts that ‘the English ex-
perience is especially significant, in that one of the decisive transformations
in the relations between city and country occurred there very early and with a
thoroughness which is still in some ways unapproached’ (1985, 2). If the sig-
nificance of English experience of rural and urban spaces lies in its early
industrial revolution, the concepts of the country and the city in Spanish
culture are important precisely for Spain’s tardy industrialization. Williams
continues: ‘even after the society was predominantly urban its literature, for a
generation, was still predominantly rural; and even in the twentieth century,
in an urban and industrial land, forms of the older ideas and experiences still
remarkably persist’ (1985, 2). When critics emphasize the urban nature of
modernism and postmodernism, Williams’s work is a welcome reminder of
the cultural significance of the rural.1 If his final assertion that ‘there is
almost an inverse proportion, in the twentieth century, between the relative
importance of the rural economy and the cultural importance of rural ideas’
(R. Williams 1985, 248) is still pertinent to English culture, its relevance to
Spanish is clear. Indeed, the work of Federico García Lorca, Spain’s most
influential and marketable twentieth-century writer both inside and outside
that country, is imbued with rural culture.
While the nineteenth century is the key period of English industrialization
and urbanization, in Spain (notwithstanding pockets of accelerated develop-
ment like nineteenth-century Madrid, discussed below in chapter four) it is
the twentieth century which has seen an analogous transformation of country
and city. While in 1900 two-thirds of the Spanish working population were
employed in agriculture, this figure had dropped to just under half in 1940
(Álvarez Junco 1995, 82), dwindling to a mere fifth by 1976 (Riquer i
Permanyer 1995, 262) – the decade in which the rural exodus began to cease
(Hooper 1995, 23). A curiously similar tendency may therefore be seen
1 See Bradbury 1976; Timms 1985; R. Williams 1992; Harvey 1990; Clarke 1997a.
48 SALLY FAULKNER
between late nineteenth-century English culture, when authors like Thomas

Hardy retrospectively set their ruralist dramas in a period roughly fifty years
previous,2 and late twentieth-century Spanish culture. It seems that the more
agricultural work declines in a country’s economic life, the greater currency
rural themes acquire in its cultural life. In Spain, film in particular has tapped
into the nostalgic desire of first- and second-generation urban immigrants to
revisit a rural space left behind. These depictions of rural spaces, located in
period settings, and projected through the lens of contemporary concerns
would be further examples of what José Enrique Monterde terms the
‘presentización’ (1989, 48) of history discussed in chapter two. Fernando
Trueba’s Oscar-winning Belle Époque of 1992, which is set in a fantastical
1930s pastoral idyll, is a representative, if exceptionally successful, example.
As the division between the rural and the urban has existed since urbaniza-
tion began, sweeping generalizations regarding the country and the city are
attractive. But as Williams persuasively argues, for this very reason we must
stress the historicity of our experience of both. ‘The temptation’, he notes,
is to reduce the historical variety of the forms of interpretation to what are

loosely called symbols or archetypes: to abstract even those most evidently
social forms and to give them a primarily psychological or metaphysical
status. The reduction often happens when we find certain major forms and
images persisting through periods of great change. (R. Williams 1985, 289)
The historical facts of Spain’s industrialization and concomitant urban immi-

gration outlined above are thus crucial to a reading of country and city in
Spanish cinema. Moreover, the ideological co-option of rural and urban
spaces under the dictatorship was equally influential in subsequent cultural
responses. The eulogy of peasant life which characterized twentieth-century
fascist thought is prevalent in Francoist rhetoric. As Mike Richards has
pointed out, ‘Spanish nationalism, as an expression of the ideology of the
Spanish political right, was deeply rooted in a specifically agrarian notion of
Spain’ (1995, 175). Furthermore, Francoist ideology appropriated the myth of
nationality created by the writers of the 1898 Generation. The rural land-
scape, most notably that of Castile, was posited as the site for the construc-
tion of national identity – which, as we have seen in chapter two, would be
parodied by later subversive writers like Martín-Santos. In the early years of
the regime in particular, Francoist propaganda promoted the image of Spain
to its people as a rural idyll, ‘un bosque en paz’. In contrast, the city was
disparaged as a place of perdition.3
2 Hardy’s novels of 1871–96 were set in the pre-Enclosure rural England of the 1830s
(R. Williams 1985, 9).
3 This instance of an intellectual preoccupation of the turn of the century later
feeding into fascist thought is characteristic of the overlap between modernism and
RURAL AND URBAN SPACES 49
As the century of the existence of film parallels the ideological manipula-

tion, and economic transformation, of rural and urban spaces in Spain, Belle
Époque’s nostalgic representation of the country for an audience of city
dwellers is only one of many possible cultural responses. During the regime,
for instance, a powerful tradition of dissent was articulated through ruralist
film. This oppositional current, which includes Ricardo Franco’s Pascual
Duarte discussed in this chapter, portrayed the hostility of rural space in
order to debunk the Francoist myth of nature and, by implication, attack the
entire ideology of the regime. Post-Franco, postmodern celebrations of the
freedoms and pleasures afforded by the city therefore seem radically discon-
nected from this earlier tradition. But while manifestly divergent in terms of
form, ruralist and urbanist film may be said to converge at the level of
ideology. The cinematic homage to urban life deliberately demolishes the
dictatorship’s vilification of the city, and therefore similarly deconstructs
Francoist ideology. The four films to be discussed in this chapter will there-
fore be examined against these evolving ideological and historical contexts.
Violence and Nostalgia

In addition, two apparently opposing questions which recur in the repre-
sentation of rural and urban spaces in Spanish cinema will be discussed:
violence and nostalgia. Following Raymond Williams, the historicist
approach adopted will enable us to subject the apparently binary oppositions
of country and city, and violence and nostalgia, to empirical critique, rather
than abstract reconfirmation. A particular concern here is to question an
apparent affinity between rural space and nostalgia, and urban space and
violence, which seems to have emerged in post-Franco Spanish film, because
such a pattern would paradoxically corroborate the Francoist opposition of
the rural idyll and the urban nightmare. In the four film adaptations to be
discussed, an equivocal overlap between questions of violence and nostalgia
in both the country and the city may in fact be perceived, which I will show is
thrown into relief by a comparison of the films with the literary texts on
which they are based.
The violence portrayed in Ricardo Franco’s Pascual Duarte (1975,
released 1976), the first ruralist film to be examined, is consonant with the
traditions of dissident, ruralist cinema discussed above, although the question
of nostalgia is raised by a 1976 film which is based on a 1942 literary
masterpiece. Mario Camus’s ruralist Los santos inocentes (1984) inherits the
tradition of politically symbolic violence, but also ambiguously looks
Nazism described in John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses, 1992. For references
to the cult of the peasant see 33–8, and on Hitler’s appropriation of ruralism in Mein
Kampf, 206.
50 SALLY FAULKNER
forward to a nostalgic treatment of rural space discussed with respect to Belle

Époque. The first urbanist film to be discussed, Montxo Armendáriz’s
Historias del Kronen (1995), portrays the violence figuratively enacted upon,
and literally enacted by, inhabitants of the city. Nostalgia for a politicized
rural space, framed elsewhere in Armendáriz’s filmography, would seem to
be implicit in these images. The theme of urban violence is apparently con-
tinued in Ventura Pons’s Carícies (1998), though this city chronicle culmi-
nates in a fascinating articulation of nostalgia for what may be termed the
‘humanist’ city.
Visuality and Hapticality

This historicized interpretation of the ideological concepts of violence and
nostalgia will be framed by a discussion of the formal cinematic portrayal of
rural and urban spaces. The contrast between what David Clarke has called
the ‘visuality’ and ‘hapticality’ of the filmic medium (1997a, 8–9) is particu-
larly pertinent to this discussion. In the first instance it is more rewarding to
turn to film practice rather than film theory to trace this distinction. Wim
Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987) (based on Elvira Notari’s 1928 film Two
Heavens [Bruno 1993, 216]) sketches the opposition between ‘visuality’ – or
space as perceived by the detached, voyeuristic eye – and ‘hapticality’ – or
space as perceived by the mobile, sentient body. Berlin, the city-protagonist
of Wenders’s film, is now shot from the perspective of the angels, gazing
down on the city from a position of detachment on high, now from the point
of view of Berlin’s mortal inhabitants, for whom the noise and movement of
the city is a corporeal experience. While ‘visuality’ implies a relationship to
space governed by distance and power, ‘hapticality’ indicates the possibility
of film to portray space as tactile and proximate.
Film theory, as Emma Widdis has argued in ‘Projecting a Soviet space’
(1998), has tended to emphasize the ‘visuality’ of the medium, and focus on
the gaze and its relation to narrative (see chapter four of this book for a dis-
cussion of these from the perspective of gender). Widdis, however, turns to
the non-narrative film of the Soviet avant-garde and contemporary Formalist
theory to demonstrate that the representation of space reveals the ‘haptical’
(though she does not use this word), as well as ‘visual’, dimension of the
medium. ‘Cinema’ she affirms, ‘is able to represent embodied perception,
vision as a mobile, physical experience. [. . .] The process of cinematic
perception is situated between cognitive and physical experience’ (Widdis
1998, 97 and 101, original emphasis).
In Wings of Desire, as in much critical discussion of the question of space,
it is the representational ‘problem’ posed by the city which triggers the dual
exploration of the ‘visual’ and ‘haptical’ possibilities of the medium. Michel
de Certeau, in his analysis of city ‘spatial practices’ in The Practice of
Everyday Life, elaborates a theoretical model strikingly similar to spatial
representation in Wings of Desire and the ‘visuality’/‘hapticality’ paradigm

discussed above. In a well-known passage, Certeau describes the city as expe-
rienced by either ‘voyeurs or walkers’. The ‘voyeur’ gazing at the city from
on high (his example is the city of New York, as viewed from the World Trade
Center) is transformed into a ‘solar Eye, looking down like a god’. This
panopticon perspective ‘makes the complexity of the city readable, and
immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text’.4 However,
the ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below’, below the thresh-
olds at which visibility begins. They walk – an elementary form of this ex-
perience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies
follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they will write without being
able to read. (Certeau 1988, 92–3)
Cinematic art, which is both visual and mobile, is able to adopt the position
of both the ‘voyeur’ and the ‘walkers’, as Wings of Desire demonstrates. In
this chapter I propose reading both urban and rural spaces with these concep-
tual tools of ‘visuality’ and ‘hapticality’.
Absolute and Abstract Spaces

These questions of history and form can usefully be explored with refer-
ence to Henri Lefebvre’s account of space, in particular the distinction
between ‘absolute’ and ‘abstract’ spaces investigated in The Production of
Space (1999, first published in 1974). Lefebvre’s simultaneous examination
of not only the history of spaces (from early feudal structures to the contem-
porary metropolis) and the cultural negotiation of those spaces (from art to
architecture) makes his project both original to philosophy, and suggestive to
the present discussion. Lefebvre seeks to account for the specific nature of
‘social space’. He argues that this area has previously been neglected in
favour of ‘mental space’, which has itself never been clearly defined
(Lefebvre 1999, 3–7). His twin concepts of ‘absolute’ and ‘abstract’ realms is
a duality which may be used to explore social space. ‘Absolute’ space privi-
leges space as ‘lived’ (what Lefebvre calls ‘representational space’), as
opposed to ‘abstract’ space, in which space as ‘lived’ is eclipsed by space as
‘conceived’ (what he terms ‘representations of space’). In ‘absolute’ space,
Lefebvre argues, man populates nature, retaining a bond with his environ-
ment which is severed in the ‘abstract’ realm, which is governed by the logic
of capitalism (1999, 33 and 46–53). In Derek Gregory’s words, Lefebvre
differentiates between the ‘ “abstract space” of capitalism’s economic and
4 There is a long tradition which traces the significance of this position of visual
control. See for instance, Jeremy Bentham: The Panopticon Writings (Bentham 1995), or
Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1991) and ‘The Eye of Power’ (1980).
52 SALLY FAULKNER
political systems – externalized, rationalized, sanitized – and the swirling,

kaleidoscopic “lived space” of everyday life’ (Gregory 1994, 275). Thus the
shift between ‘absolute’ and ‘abstract’ spaces corresponds to the transition
between the pre-Modern (the countryside or the ancient city) and the Modern
(the urban metropolis). It should be noted that these realms are not neces-
sarily discrete and may co-exist.
The violence staged in the ruralist and urbanist films to be discussed will
be examined in the context of ‘absolute’ and ‘abstract’ spaces; the former
characterized by symbolic rituals which tie man to the land, the latter by
processes of abstraction which alienate man from his environment. The ques-
tion of nostalgia in these four films may also usefully be considered in the
light of Lefebvre’s spatial theory. Lefebvre suggestively observes that if on
the one hand there is an epistemological ‘fetishism’ of ‘a visual, intelligible
and abstract space’, on the other there is a ‘fascination’ with ‘a natural space
which has been lost and/or rediscovered, with absolute political or religious
spaces [. . .]’ (1999, 140). We may contend that the ‘visuality’ of film is able
to satisfy the ‘fetishism’ for the former, yet the ‘hapticality’ of film can
respond to the ‘fascination’ – or nostalgia – for the latter.
There is a particularly interesting parallel between Lefebvre’s discussion
of the place of the body in his meditations on ‘absolute’ and ‘abstract’ spaces
and these questions of ‘hapticality’ and ‘visuality’ in film. The proximity
between the experience of space of the mobile, sentient body – Certeau’s
‘walkers’ – which is captured by the ‘hapticality’ of film suggestively
matches the proximity between the body and space which characterizes
Lefebvre’s ‘absolute’ space. To demonstrate this proximity, Lefebvre notes
for instance that in the ‘absolute’ realm, space could be measured by the
human body itself (feet, palms and so forth), observing that
the body’s relationship to space, a social relationship of an importance

quite misapprehended in later times, still retained in those early days
[‘absolute’ space] an immediacy which would subsequently degenerate and
be lost: space, along with the way it was measured and spoken of, still held
up to all the members of a society an image and a living reflection of their
own bodies. (1999, 110–11)
Conversely, the displacement of the body by the eye in a ‘visual’ representa-

tion of space in film – Certeau’s ‘voyeur’ at the top of the World Trade Center
– parallels the estrangement of the body in space which characterizes
Lefebvre’s ‘abstract’ space. In a realm in which representations of space
displace representational spaces (space as ‘conceived’ displaces space as
‘lived’), we witness ‘the elimination of the body’ (1999, 111).
With respect to Spain’s industrialization in the second half of the twentieth
century, John Hooper has observed, ‘the “economic miracle” changed almost
everything about Spain – from how and where people lived to the way in
which they thought and spoke’ (1995, 25). The cultural response to this trans-
formation of country and city in Spain, or the shift from what Lefebvre terms
‘absolute’ space to ‘abstract’ space, has been powerfully articulated in the
ruralist and urbanist films to be discussed below by means of violence and
nostalgia.
RURAL SPACE
Cinema’s much-commented role as a vehicle for urban expression cannot

only be explained by the temporal parallel between cinematic and urban
development in the twentieth century. Daniel Bell links the urban and the
cinematic thus:
Life in the great city and the way stimuli and sociability are defined
provide a preponderance of occasions for people to see, and want to see
(rather than read and hear) things, [. . .] it is the visual element in the arts
which best appeases these compulsions. (1996, 106, original emphasis)
As discussed above, it is not only this shared ‘visuality’ that accounts for the
affinity. At the same time as Soviet filmmakers and theorists were exploring
questions of movement and montage, Ezra Pound noted in relation to Eliot’s
The Waste Land (1922) that ‘in a city the visual impressions succeed each
other, overlap, overcross, they are cinematographic’ (quoted in Timms 1985,
3), which seems to respond to Virginia Woolf ’s demand (discussed in chapter
one) that cinema should represent experience that has ‘so far failed to find
expression’ (1977, 266). Michael Minden, in his reading of cinematic explo-
rations of the city from 1926–28, similarly underscores the ‘cinematographic’
nature of the city:
Used in a certain way, montage can approximate to the visual experience of
being in a city [. . .] namely a succession of different images and angles
constructing a perception in strong contrast to the unifying and uniform
perception of a village or a landscape; a perception radically more rapid
and less continuous than that encouraged by the traditional forms of liter-
ature, sculpture and painting. (1985, 203)
The theoretical attention paid to urban space in film contrasts with a crit-
ical neglect of rural space. The convincing arguments for the overlap of the
city and the cinematic imply that the ‘perception of a village or a landscape’
might be more suited to ‘traditional forms of literature, sculpture and paint-
ing’. Such an assumption is at variance with Spanish cinematic practice. In
the post-Franco period the Spanish film industry may have spawned a gener-
ation of internationally visible urbanist filmmakers, but, taken as a whole,
rural settings and ruralist themes have been fundamental to the national
54 SALLY FAULKNER
cinema.5 In this section I will discuss the ways Ricardo Franco and Mario
Camus utilize the cinematic medium in their adaptations of two ruralist texts,
and demonstrate that the filmic portrayal of what Lefebvre terms ‘absolute’
space is particularly revealing in terms of violence and nostalgia.
PASCUAL DUARTE (FRANCO 1976): VIOLENCE IN ABSOLUTE SPACE
Despite the fact that both Cela and Delibes displayed Nationalist sympa-
thies in their youth (Labanyi 1989, 42), their La familia de Pascual Duarte
(1942) and Los santos inocentes (1981) variously debunk the Francoist
mythification of rural space. Cela’s work, the first important novel to be
written since the Civil War (Ward 1978, 200), graphically depicts rural depri-
vation in bitter contrast to the Franco government’s rhetoric that the Spanish
peasant was ‘probably the noblest [. . .] of all creatures populating the globe’
(Hopewell 1986, 128). Withdrawn from circulation by Franco’s censors in
1943 owing to the shock generated by its direct portrayal of violence,6 La
familia de Pascual Duarte inaugurated tremendismo, a brutal literary realism,
which was influential throughout the 1940s.
Only the second feature of the young director Ricardo Franco, Pascual
Duarte was made in 1975, though not released until 1976 after the dictator’s
death. The film was produced by veteran dissident Elías Querejeta, who also
backed such influential contemporary pieces as El espíritu de la colmena
(1973), La prima Angélica (1973), Cría cuervos (1975) and El desencanto
(1976). Like these later works, Pascual Duarte is a key film of the early tran-
sition, which I take as dating from the assassination of Carrero Blanco in
1973 (Grugel and Rees 1997, 182). In addition, along with Borau’s Furtivos
(also 1975), it makes an important contribution to the auteurist ruralist genre
inaugurated by Saura’s La caza (1965). As is typical of a transition film,
Pascual Duarte is profoundly rooted in the contemporary experience of polit-
ical change, yet also urgently concerned to reflect on the experience of dicta-
torship. On the one hand its shocking portrayal of violence and direct
references to the Civil War indicate the comparative aesthetic and political
freedoms of the mid-1970s. Yet as the literary adaptation of a novel published
in 1942, set in the first decades of the twentieth century, on the other it also
5 In particular, these are key to genres like the folkloric musical and the rural drama
(on the latter see González Requena 1988, 14–26). In general, Katherine Kovács has
argued that, owing to the instrumental role played by geography and terrain in shaping
Spain’s history and sense of identity, ‘Landscape and setting occupy a central position in
Spanish film’ (1991, 17). Although he does not mention Spanish film, see also Ian
Christie on a ‘recognizable genre of film in which landscape, or setting, has more than
background significance’ (2000, 166; also 173, n.s 2, 3 and 4).
6 Publication was eventually reauthorized (Vernon 1989, 91–2).
contributed to the cultural project of recuperating the past which was to

extend well into the 1980s, as previously discussed in chapter two. Pascual
Duarte is in fact doubly retrospective in this sense, revealing a will both to
recuperate a dissident post-war novel, as was the case in both Camus’s La
colmena and Aranda’s Tiempo de silencio, and to replay a period of Spanish
history previously co-opted by Francoist propaganda.
Named by John Hopewell in 1986 as the most shocking Spanish film ever
made (1986, 128), the theme of violence lies at the heart of Pascual Duarte.
The role of rural space as a setting for the violence in this film will be
discussed with reference to Henri Lefebvre’s work. Whether the recuperative
project of Pascual Duarte may be termed nostalgic, however, is questionable.
While the film revisits a rural past from an urban present in the manner
described by Williams above, both the subject matter, and Franco’s manipula-
tion of film form, bar the viewer from such an unproblematic, pleasurable re-
lation to the past.
A comparison of the novel and the film in terms of ‘absolute’ space is
revealing with respect to the role played by violence in each. Cela’s La
familia de Pascual Duarte portrays an ‘absolute’ space independently of its
depiction of violence. This is firstly achieved through the narrator Pascual’s
description of location in chapter one of the narrative proper. Like the medi-
eval city which Lefebvre also locates in the ‘absolute’ realm, the setting of
Cela’s novel is a ‘natural space populated by political forces’ in which space
is ‘“lived” rather than conceived’ (Lefebvre 1999, 48 and 236). Pascual writes
that his village is organized around a central square containing town hall,
church and the mansion of local landowner, Jesús González de la Riva (Cela
1971, 26–7). In other words, rural space is ordered around this trilogy of
symbolic power. As a rural community, the tie between power and land
remains, thus space is ‘lived’ (a ‘representational space’) rather than ‘con-
ceived’ (a ‘representation of space’). As Lefebvre observes, such a symbol-
ization of power through the organization of space is typical of a hierarchical
feudal system (1999, 229–30). Further, the town hall clock, Pascual recalls,
was ‘parado siempre en las nueve como si el pueblo no necesitase de su
servicio’ (Cela 1971, 26). Through this image Cela suggestively conveys the
stasis of this rural backwater, and also highlights the irrelevance of time to a
pre-capitalist system. The absence of this element of abstraction in the rela-
tionship between man and land again characterizes ‘absolute’ space
(Lefebvre 1999, 95). Finally, Pascual measures the distance between the
village and his own house as ‘unos doscientos pasos largos’ (Cela 1971, 27).
As noted above, in the ‘absolute’ realm, space is measured by the body, again
removing any element of abstraction between man’s relation to his
environment.
The role of the body in the narrative form of Cela’s La familia de Pascual
Duarte is particularly interesting in the context of Lefebvre’s ‘absolute’
space. The tie between man and environment enunciated in this chapter is
56 SALLY FAULKNER
underwritten by the mode of enunciation. Playfully framed by notes from the

text’s transcriber, letters and testimonial extracts, Pascual’s tale is recounted
in the first person, thus all textual information regarding environment is
relayed through the subjective filter of his memoirs. His autobiography
reveals how, in Lefebvre’s terms, ‘absolute space assumes meanings
addressed not to the intellect but to the body’ (1999, 235). In the first para-
graph the condemned Pascual laments the unfair hand dealt to him by fate by
means of an eloquent corporeal image. Born on an arid plain under a
punishing sun, he notes: ‘hay mucha diferencia entre adornarse las carnes
con arrebol y colonia, y hacerlo con tatuajes que después nadie ha de borrar’
(Cela 1971, 25). Cela thus establishes that space is indelibly printed on the
body of man, and in subsequent paragraphs the body becomes the conduit for
the experience of the environment. Pascual recalls the village’s whitewashed
houses, for instance, as ‘tan blancas, que aún me duele la vista al recordarlas’
(Cela 1971, 26), and later he describes the plain he can see from his cell as
‘castaña como la piel de los hombres’ (Cela 1971, 70).
This personification of space through the specifically literary means of
metaphor and simile poses a problem to the cinematic adaptor. Take, for
instance, the following simile. Pascual the condemned man describes his
Badajoz village as ‘agachado sobre una carretera lisa y larga como un día sin
pan, lisa y larga como los días – de una lisura y largura como usted para su
bien, no puede ni figurarse – de un condenado a muerte’ (Cela 1971, 25–6).
When the narrative point of view is emphasized to the extent that the reader
‘cannot even imagine’ what is described, its translation to the screen – in
which environment may be objectively viewed – is problematic. In Lefebvre’s
terms, the depiction of ‘absolute’ space in the novel is emphasized by
presenting space as ‘lived’ (a ‘representational space’), and this is dependent
on literary form.
However, through the representation of violence in Pascual Duarte,
Ricardo Franco constructs a very different, though similarly ‘absolute’,
space. Although Pascual’s life in the film adaptation is notionally conveyed
from his point of view through a flash-back structure, Franco’s intention is
not faithfully to repeat the subjectivity of the original novel, but rather, as
Norberto Mínguez Arranz notes, ‘eliminar el componente retórico o literario
para ceñirse a los componentes de la fábula’ (1998, 96). The preservation of
the shocking murders in the adaptation (six, including Pascual’s own execu-
tion), yet abandonment of any sense of subjectivity or possibility for
spectatorial identification, explain the many hostile responses to Pascual
Duarte on its release, which ranged from the aesthetically disconcerted to the
morally outraged. I will firstly examine how the apparently unmotivated
violence in the film is anything but gratuitous, as it allows Franco to replicate
the ‘absolute’ space of the novel and effect a powerful critique of the rural
idyll; and secondly discuss the way the formal strategies adopted annul a
nostalgic response to the film.
Whether it be a deliberate literary strategy or a compromise enforced

owing to censorship, the instrumental role played by the environment, either
that of rural poverty or political unrest, in motivating Pascual’s crimes is
understated in Cela’s novel. That is not to say that environmental deter-
minism is unimportant with respect to the violence of La familia de Pascual
Duarte – rural space is carefully constructed through the description of
setting, and the reader, like a detective, follows a series of clues regarding
Pascual’s murder of Jesús, starting with the ambiguous allusion of the
epigraph, which point to the Civil War. However, the novel is also a psycho-
logical study of criminality. Ricardo Franco simultaneously increases motiva-
tion in terms of environment and decreases motivation in terms of
psychology in his adaptation. As Kathleen Vernon observes:
with the elimination of any introspective, psychological motivation or justi-

fication of Pascual’s actions, the more contextual, historical explanation
comes to the foreground. For if, in the novel, the historical references are
secondary, muted in their effect, in the film the correspondences between
the life of the individual Pascual and the collective reality of Spain in the
nineteen twenties and thirties are made explicit, going far beyond the
simple, subordinate relation of background to foreground. (1989, 93–4).7
The politicization of the film may be understood in the context of the new
freedoms experienced during the transition. As John Hopewell notes,
scriptwriters Emilio Martínez-Lázaro, Querejeta and Franco, ‘were among
the first Spanish film-makers to adapt material to accentuate its political rele-
vance rather than diminish it out of fear of censorial reprobation’ (1986, 128).
Thus the symbolic matricide and patricide towards the end of the film can be
readily interpreted as acts motivated by the Civil War. Prior to both murders,
Franco focuses on the political graffiti seen by Pascual from the train window
and then has him witness the aftermath of the bloody clashes in the village,
two incidents which clearly indicate the Civil War and neither of which are
contained in Cela’s text.
While the contextual significance of the war is emphasized, rural space is
also foregrounded through Franco’s elimination of narrative motivation in his
adaptation. The outrage felt by many viewers on the film’s release, most
notably, and most virulently expressed, by foreign film-goers, results from a
failure to recognize the role played by location in Franco’s depiction of
violence.8 Pascual’s attacks on his dog and mule, which are real, the director
7 It is strange, therefore, that in interview Franco points to psychoanalytical dimen-

sions of the film, suggesting all Pascual’s murder victims are substitutes for his sister
Rosario, the forbidden love object (quoted in Kinder 1993, 192).
8 On the hostile response of Spanish audiences to the violence of the film see
Quesada 1986, 359. Despite José Luis Gómez’s award for best actor at Cannes, the French
press was particularly critical of the violence (see Baroncelli 1977; Grant 1977); and
58 SALLY FAULKNER
admitted in interview (Puig 1976), are particularly interesting in this respect,

as they are not related to the Civil War context. The murder of these animals
is apparently entirely unmotivated in the film, whereas in the novel Cela
explains the murder of Chispa (albeit retrospectively) and the mule by associ-
ation with his wife’s miscarriage (1971, 33 and 96–7). (The novel’s
monstrous characterization of Pascual’s mother and his growing resentment
towards her also give forewarning of the matricide [see for example Cela
1971, 62].) However, seemingly unprovoked, José Luis Gómez’s Pascual
shoots Chispa at point-blank range after an unbearably tense pause accentu-
ated by a static camera. Subsequently, the viewer suffers the harrowingly
lengthy scene of Pascual’s apparently unmotivated murder of his mule, which
he repeatedly hacks with a knife, likewise uncompromisingly shot in one take
with a static camera, compared to its description in ‘six quite casual lines’ in
the novel (Hopewell 1986, 129). Franco relates this attack to Pascual’s wife’s
death only by casual juxtaposition, omitting a sequence which would explain
the causal link. As Rafael Utrera notes, the sequence ‘prescind[e] del plano
de apoyo que en una narración clásica aportaría la clave al espectador – la
caída de Lola desde el animal’ (1990, 70).
Hopewell offers a convincing rejection of the response that such violence
borders on crude gratuity:
Actions in many Spanish films seem undermotivated [. . .] the driving force

of conduct lying outside the film in Spanish history itself. Hence the
extreme importance of background detail and secondary characters in
Spanish films. (1986, 28, emphasis added)
To return to the killing of the mule, that sequence is preceded by a long shot
of Pascual running across the plain. Recalling the camera-work of Saura’s La
caza, this shot is the distinctive cinematographic feature of the piece, recur-
ring at key narrative points such as this one, the opening shot, the killing of
the dog and the farewell between Pascual and his sister when she leaves for
Trujillo. Stylistically the long shot may appear to sever the link between man
and environment, physically reducing him to a speck on the landscape.
However, in terms of narrative content, this long shot, along with its acoustic
accompaniment of the whistling wind sweeping across the plain, is imbued
with motivational significance. Preceding both the killing of the dog and the
mule, it points to rural space as the only motivation behind these actions.
The question of motivation reinforces the tie between man and the land,
and thus constructs in Lefebvre’s terms an ‘absolute’ space, because only
landscape or location explains violence in Pascual Duarte. It is thus note-
North-American reviews of the film expressed unadulterated outrage (see Barrett 1979;
Saenz 1979).
worthy that in the film’s press file Franco states: ‘hay [. . .] una cierta
insistencia en el plano muy general para que en ningún momento se pueda
olvidar la desolación física en la que se mueven los sujetos de la acción’ (see
‘Press file for Pascual Duarte’ 1976). Thus through film form, Franco, and
Querejeta’s veteran cinematographer Luis Cuadrado, underscore rural space
as, however terribly, ‘lived’. This renders it a ‘representational space’ in
Lefebvre’s terms.
It is also by formal means that Pascual Duarte eradicates any possibility
of a nostalgic response to the piece. Quite apart from the violence, in stylistic
terms the film systematically denies the viewer any visual pleasure.9 It is
furthermore relentless in the demands it makes on the intellectual contribu-
tion of the viewer. The film contains scarcely any dialogue, and is character-
ized instead by narrative ellipsis and a disorientating cinematography of long
takes (culminating in the unbearable forty-second freeze frame of Pascual’s
face as he is garrotted), long shots, a static camera and a chiaroscuro compo-
sition for which cinematographer Cuadrado is well-known (Kinder 1993,
131). All of these erect a Brechtian distance between spectator and film,
negating any possibility of identification. The few point of view shots from
Pascual’s perspective and the four extreme close-ups of his face, the only
such shots in the whole film (Vernon 1989, 90), stand out as particularly rare.
The stylistic blueprint of the piece is rather, as we have seen, the long shot.
While the narrative function of this shot may be to link the character to space,
it also paradoxically estranges the viewer from that space as we adopt the
dehumanized position of a distant voyeuristic eye. In other words, the depic-
tion of rural space in Pascual Duarte depends on the ‘visuality’ rather than
the ‘hapticality’ of the medium. The spectator must adopt the position of the
detached observer, and experience space uniquely through the eye rather than
through the body.
Thus on the one hand the film narrative, like the novel, traces a bond
between body and space through the questions of violence and motivation,
yet on the other the spectator’s relationship to the image negates the experi-
ence of space as ‘embodied perception’. The former means that the depiction
of violence is instrumental in denouncing the deprivation of rural space; the
latter, that the viewer’s relationship to that depiction can never be one of
nostalgia.
9 Strangely some contemporary reviewers commented on the beauty of the landscape

shots (Fernández Santos 1976; Mohrt 1977).
60 SALLY FAULKNER
LOS SANTOS INOCENTES (CAMUS 1984): NOSTALGIA FOR ABSOLUTE

SPACE
Novelist Miguel Delibes is in a sense the contemporary poet laureate of

Castilian Spain. His eulogies of rural life and the Castilian peasant, which
echo the myths of the 1898 Generation and Nationalist ideology, enjoyed
official support during the regime and were frequently fêted with literary
awards (García Domínguez 1993b, 29–51). If he began the process of ques-
tioning the rural idyll in ruralist novels like El camino (1950) and Las ratas
(1962), these works simultaneously and thus contradictorily celebrated
country life. His Castilla, lo castellano y los castellanos, which was
published in 1979 following Spain’s industrialization and urbanization, might
be termed nostalgic in the manner described by Williams above. Los santos
inocentes of 1981 contains all the familiar Delibes themes of a bucolic
setting, peasant life and hunting. The novel is simultaneously nostalgic and
critical in its evocation of rural life, a conceptual shift written into the
geographical transposition of the novel’s setting from Delibes’s native Castile
to Extremadura (García Domínguez 1993a, 163–4).
Delibes’s novels have continued to delight Spanish readers (Perriam et al.
2000, 138) and critics, and rumours of his candidature for the 2001 Nobel
prize for literature were even circulated (Forjas 2001). He is the contempo-
rary Spanish novelist most frequently adapted to film (García Domínguez
1993a, 21), confirming the predilection of Spanish cinema for rural nostalgia
noted above. The most commercially successful and critically acclaimed of
the nine adaptations of Delibes’s work produced in the democratic period
(Utrera 2002, 319–20),10 Mario Camus’s 1984 adaptation of Los santos
inocentes has also attracted bitter rebuke from Spanish film scholars
(Hopewell 1986, 226–8; Company Ramón 1989, 85–6; Losilla 2002, 130–1).
The acerbic criticism of a work which was the most commercially successful
Spanish film to date in 1984, and still figured among the four most profitable
Spanish films ever made in 1991 (Evans 1999a, 3), may be addressed with
reference to the transformation of the Spanish film industry discussed in
chapter two. Los santos inocentes, like La colmena, also received Miró
subsidies.
As in Pascual Duarte, Los santos inocentes culminates in an act of
symbolic violence. Ricardo Franco’s Pascual and Camus’s Azarías are both
impoverished peasants whose narratives culminate in politically symbolic
patricide: Pascual shoots the condescending landowner Jesús, and Azarías
hangs the malevolent marquis Iván. However, notwithstanding changing
10 At the time of writing, José Luis Cuerda’s version of El hereje is still in production
(Intxausti 2002).
industrial circumstances, the differences between these two films, separated

by only eight years though the original texts are distanced by forty, is
astounding and lays testimony to the social and political transformation of
Spain in the intervening consolidation of the transition. The varying signifi-
cance of the acts of violence in Los santos inocentes compared to Pascual
Duarte will be briefly considered, but this section will be largely devoted to a
reading of Los santos inocentes as a work of nostalgia. Consideration will
also be given to the construction of an ‘absolute’ space in novel and film, and
Lefebvre’s argument that such nostalgia for rural space is typical in ‘abstract’
space (Lefebvre 1999, 122–3).
Patricia Santoro has pertinently described the ideology underwriting
Delibes’s Los santos inocentes as paradoxical (1996, 161). Set in 1962
(Torres Nebrera 1992, 59, n.51), it is quite clear that in the novel the vilified
landowner Iván stands for the dictator Franco and the social hierarchy
maintained by his regime.11 As it was common knowledge that the caudillo
was a keen hunter, in his 1965 La caza, Saura had also exploited the
metaphor of the hunt to criticize the dictatorship. However, Delibes himself is
also an enthusiastic huntsman, and his enjoyment of the sport and adoration
of the natural environment in which it takes place, accounts in part for the
ambiguity of Los santos inocentes. For while his characterization is mani-
chean and his plot symbolic, Delibes’s critique is undermined by an undis-
guised celebration of hunting and the countryside. In Lefebvre’s terms, rather
than a portrayal of ‘absolute’ space, the novel portrays nostalgia for that
space.
The novel’s innovative form may initially appear suggestive of an ‘abso-
lute’ space. Delibes’s Los santos inocentes, unlike the film adaptation, does
not contain its pastoral eulogy within a non-pastoral frame; rather the rural
nature of its themes seems to be reflected in the rural nature of its form.
Susan Paun de García has argued that, with its single-sentence chapters, the
piece conveys the orality of ‘a tale told by a peasant [who] while omniscient,
is clearly speaking in the vocabulary and tone of a “pobre” ’ (1992, 71).
However, this claim of rural authenticity is debatable. The narrative may have
an oral quality owing to its lack of punctuation, but Delibes’s inclusion of
incongruous lyrical passages such as ‘surgieron cinco zuritas, como cinco
puntos negros sobre el azul pálido del firmamento’ (1994, 167; see also 11;
16; 18; 166) gives the lie to Paun de García’s notion of the ‘tale told by a
peasant’ (1992, 71). Rather than the novel as a representation of ‘absolute’
11 Delibes’s willingness to criticize Francoism has, however, its limits. Asked to edit
Antonio Larreta, Manuel Matjí and Camus’s script of Los santos inocentes prior to
production, he removed the scene in which Iván takes communion, which would have
emphasized the complicity of the Catholic church in the social inequalities promoted by
the regime (Utrera 1997, 857).
62 SALLY FAULKNER
space, such passages reveal, conversely, a nostalgic evocation of that space.

The novel may appear to give a voice to its peasant characters, but the
episodes devoted to exposing their limited literacy reveals the gulf which
separates these characters from written language. Paco’s spelling classes
result in his bewildered frustration (Delibes 1994, 34–8), and, when Iván
requests Paco and others write their names, they do so with excruciating
difficulty (Delibes 1994, 104–6). Delibes may remove the punctuation which
distinguishes the labourers’ dialogue from the narrator’s account but, by
including grammatical mistakes in the former (e.g. Delibes 1994, 25; 63; 82)
but not the latter, the difference between the two is evident.
Los santos inocentes is not, therefore, Paun de García’s authentic peasant’s
tale, nor is it, as Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas suggest, a
‘first-person narrative [. . .] delivered through the words of the mentally defi-
cient, but sharply observant Azarías in a carefully-constructed phonetic,
lexical and syntactical recreation of his language and thought processes’
(1998, 35). Thus, unlike La familia de Pascual Duarte in which narrative
events are subjectively filtered through Pascual’s memoirs, in Los santos
inocentes neither Azarías, in many senses the protagonist of Delibes’s tale,
nor any of the peasant characters, govern its form. This is especially signifi-
cant with respect to ‘absolute’ space. Azarías would be, in Lefebvre’s terms,
the quintessential occupant of ‘absolute’ space: an agricultural labourer for
whom the rural environment is ‘lived’ space. The following description of
Daniel in El camino is pertinent to the kind of symbiosis between man and
land that Delibes later reflects through Azarías: ‘sintió [. . .] que la vitalidad
del valle le penetraba desordenada e íntegra y que él entregaba la suya al
valle en un vehemente deseo de fusión, de compenetración íntima y total’
(quoted in García Domínguez 1993b, 27).
It is highly significant that in Los santos inocentes the quintessential
man-of-the-land has been transformed into a simpleton. Our response to him
as readers, however benevolent and kindly we find him, is therefore one of an
adult to a child – inevitably governed by superiority and distance. Crucially,
this is, therefore, the way Delibes encourages us to respond to the rural envi-
ronment which Azarías represents: it is an object of nostalgia as is the lost
innocence of childhood. Gregorio Torres Nebrera expresses this idea by what
he calls the ‘Arcadia amenazada’ leitmotif (1992) of Delibes’s work, which is
exemplified in Los santos inocentes. The 1981 novel is, in Torres Nebrera’s
words, ‘la amorosa elegía de un espacio vital – y social – en el que empieza a
sentirse, más que nunca, como utópica la equilibrada comunicación del
individuo con su semejante, del hombre con su medio’ (1992, 60). In sum
Delibes’s Los santos inocentes simultaneously effects a critique of a
symbolic representative of Francoism, yet paradoxically also echoes a funda-
mental tenet of its ideology, a celebration of the ‘España eterna’ of the rural
idyll.
The nostalgia of Delibes’s novel was repeated in its cinematic adaptation
with great popular success.12 However, by the addition of a temporal frame,

Mario Camus reveals a self-awareness regarding the question of nostalgia not
to be found in the novel. ‘Absolute’ space, the object of nostalgia, is not
constructed in the film adaptation as a motivation for violence as in Pascual
Duarte. Unlike the earlier film, narrative and characterization amply account
for the violent acts in Los santos inocentes. Iván’s dehumanizing attitude
towards the peasants explains his disregard for Paco, causing him to fracture
his leg twice, and Azarías’s motive for murdering the señorito is fittingly
simple, an act of revenge for the shooting of his pet kite. Although rural
poverty may be understood as a contributive factor to the murder, it is far
more tangential here than in Pascual Duarte, as the uncomprehending
Azarías carries out the act, rather than one of the exploited peasants.
As in the novel, the film indicates ‘absolute’ space through the character
of Azarías. Like the novel, we do not adopt Azarías’s point of view in the
adaptation, but Camus cinematically highlights the affinity between this
character and his rural environment by means of the ‘hapticality’ of the
medium. The prologue to Los santos inocentes, which conditions our
response to the whole film, is an excellent illustration of cinema as
‘embodied perception’. The pre-credit sequence opens with Francisco
Rabal’s Azarías in the act of what Delibes calls ‘correr el cárabo’ (1994, 20).
Firstly, mise en scène draws a parallel between man and land, as Rabal wears
ragged, earth-coloured clothes, and the published script indicates moreover
that ‘las manos y la cara tienen el color de la tierra’ (Larreta, Matjí and
Camus 1984, 1). This affinity between Azarías and rural space is also indi-
cated by camera-work: as he runs along the crest of a hill, the camera follows
him in a tracking shot which matches his speed and allows us to glimpse him
through the foliage. Furthermore, there is an acoustic match between his cries
and the owl’s hoots. Finally, the subjectivity depicted here continues as the
theme music of the film gradually begins. The drumbeats and percussion of
the soundtrack match the sound of Azarías’s footsteps. Santoro suggests they
also correspond to the running man’s heart-beats (1996, 171), which would
correspond to the novel’s description of the activity in which Azarías ‘oía
claramente los rudos golpes de su corazón’ (Delibes 1994, 20). Thus Camus
utilizes the way the filmic medium may approximate the body’s experience
of space to elaborate a hymn to ‘absolute’ space in his prologue.
However, as in the novel, the fact that the retarded Azarías is the conduit
for our experience of such space is highly problematic. Again, like the novel,
our identification with the character is one of sympathy yet distance. This
complex response is partly attributable to Rabal’s convincing portrayal of the
character. A typical contemporary review paid homage to his contribution in
an article entitled ‘Paco Rabal: santo, inocente, actorazo’ (Bonet Mojica
12 For the laudatory response of the contemporary press, see for instance Egido 1984;
San José 1984.
64 SALLY FAULKNER
1984), and his performance earned him a best actor award at Cannes in 1984,
shared with co-star Alfredo Landa for his Paco (Sánchez Noriega 1998,
258).13
In both novel and film, our relationship to the rural space depicted is one
of nostalgia. If Delibes’s text occasionally lapses into an incongruous lyrical
style, Camus’s cinematographer Hans Burmann, also responsible for the
picturesque nostalgia of La colmena, at times similarly indulges in an exces-
sive pictorialization of the image. It is this tendency which John Hopewell
censures in his influential interpretation of the film. While acknowledging its
social critique at the level of narrative content, Hopewell is scathing of its
formal treatment. ‘The film portrays a family living in squalor, but its
polished camera-work creates an effect of picturesque poverty’ (1986, 227).
This criticism of ‘the tendency to be visually pleasing at any cost’ (Hopewell
1986, 227) is echoed by Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas, who also observe a
disjuncture between ‘rough’ narrative content and ‘smooth’ narrative form in
the film (1998, 35).
Such an interpretation of Los santos inocentes as a pleasurably nostalgic
collection of ‘moving postcards’ (the phrase is Giuliana Bruno’s [1993, 208])
wilfully ignores several more troubling aspects of the narrative. While the
bond between man and nature may be enjoyably revisited in the manner
intended by Delibes, occasionally this bond is transformed in the film narra-
tive into a far more disturbing link between man and animal. We may find the
way Azarías cries out to communicate with his beloved ‘milanas bonitas’,
like the owl in the prologue, rather gratifying. But such bestial sounds are
extremely disturbing when emitted by the niña chica, the family’s disabled
daughter. The animalization of man culminates in the notorious scene in
which Landa’s Paco, complicit in Iván’s dehumanizing treatment of him as a
dog, drops onto all fours to sniff out the whereabouts of a missing partridge.
Thus if Camus’s portrayal of the countryside is occasionally punctuated by
picturesque camera-work, taken as a whole Los santos inocentes seems to
address the contradictions of nostalgia.
The themes of memory and nostalgia are foregrounded in an obvious way
by the structure of the film. It is organized around four flashbacks, intro-
duced in intertitles by the names of ‘Quirce’, ‘Nieves’, ‘Paco, el bajo’ and
‘Azarías’. The relationship between past and present is the issue addressed
here, not varying cinematic representations of four different subjective
perspectives. Memory and nostalgia are also introduced as themes immedi-
ately after the prologue, as the credits roll to a photograph of the family
fading in and out of view. This photograph, we later discover, is one taken by
a comparatively rich, urban visitor to the cortijo, who wishes to record, we
13 Rabal went on to portray an ageing, out of touch country-man in another Delibes

adaptation, Antonio Giménez Rico’s 1986 El disputado voto del señor Cayo, in an echo of
his role in Los santos inocentes.
assume, the curious and alarming spectacle of the family’s poverty. How,
Camus seems to be asking us, does our position as spectators differ from that
of this photographer? And further, if the cortijo and surrounding countryside
are places of leisure and diversion for the demonized Iván, and we similarly
enjoy the pictorialized landscapes of the film, he may even be asking us how
our position relates to Iván’s.
Camus’s Los santos inocentes does not provide the answers, but explores
the contradictions that give rise to these questions. Initially we may enjoy the
‘haptical’ experience of space provided by the film’s prologue, especially as
Camus sets up a contrast between this vital experience of space and that of
Quirce and Nieves in the city. The mobile camera of the ‘cárabo’ sequence
contrasts favourably with the static camera which records Quirce’s arrival in
Zafra by train – an obvious symbol of industrialization and urbanization.
While the camera matches Azarías’s movement in the earlier sequence,
signalling space as ‘lived’ in Lefebvre’s ‘absolute’ realm, in the later one the
relationship between man and space is rather characteristic of the ‘abstract’
realm. Quirce moves towards us in the train, but the camera is still and thus
registers a disjuncture between man and space. Similarly, Nieves is located in
a factory in which our view of her is initially obscured, just as the sound of
the factory machines drowns out the human voices. This exemplifies the
elimination of the body in ‘abstract’ space, which the viewer momentarily
experiences through an inability to see or hear.
The emphasis on Quirce and Nieves’s literacy, their location in an urban
environment, Nieves’s employment in a factory and even the inclusion of a
train and a coach as modern forms of transport, all serve to make the contrast
Camus is drawing between this environment and the rural space recalled in
flashback obvious. Our equivocal feelings regarding that remembered space
are conveyed in the adaptation by the disjuncture between the pictorialized
landscapes and the hardship experienced in them. A particularly poignant
illustration of this is the juxtaposition of Iván’s cruel treatment of Paco
regarding his broken leg with a picturesque shot of the countryside at dawn
on the following day.
In 1980s Spain such exploitative, feudal hierarchies have been largely
dismantled. Nonetheless the somewhat contradictory experience of nostalgia
for the countryside persists, and Camus has found the means to convey this
conflicting memory of suffering tinged with regret. The final images of the
film serve as a summary of this equivocal experience of nostalgia. Quirce,
the urban immigrant, stands in a city street and looks up to a flock of birds in
the sky. The novel ends with a similar description of birds, but they are seen
by Azarías after his murder of Iván and thus underscore his motive of
avenging the murder of his pet kite (Delibes 1994, 176). In the film adapta-
tion, this image eloquently symbolizes a hesitant rapprochment between the
rural and the urban, and in this way Camus’s Los santos inocentes gives cine-
matic expression to the experience of the city and the country in 1980s Spain.
66 SALLY FAULKNER
URBAN SPACE
If the representation of the city has been posed as an aesthetic problem, the
representational capacity of cinema has equally been proposed as a solution.
As discussed above, it was the new medium of film which seemed to respond
to the new experience of the city, whose representation apparently eluded the
traditional arts. Thomas Hardy wrote of late nineteenth-century London that
‘[the city] appears not to see itself. Each individual is conscious of himself but
nobody of themselves collectively’ (quoted in R. Williams 1985, 215).
However the ‘visuality’ of film seems to permit the representation of the city
as a whole (Certeau’s ‘voyeur’), and its ‘hapticality’ apparently approximates
to the experience of its inhabitants (Certeau’s ‘walkers’).
With reference to Lefebvre’s insights into the production of space, in this
section I will explore the parallel between the ‘visuality’ of film and the ex-
perience of the modern city as an ‘abstract’ space. For Lefebvre, this evacua-
tion of ‘lived’ experience in ‘abstract’ space is intimately linked to
urbanization, a process he describes as ‘abstraction in action’ (1999, 269).
This ‘abstract’ space of the modern city is further linked to the development
of the bourgeoisie and capitalism:
Productive activity (labour) became no longer one with the process of

reproduction which perpetuated social life; but, in becoming independent
of that process, labour fell prey to abstraction, whence abstract social
labour – and abstract space. (Lefebvre 1999, 49)
In his recent study of urbanism in contemporary Spain, Paul Julian Smith

notes that Lefebvre’s image of the city as an ‘abstract’ space seems ill fitted
to the modern Spanish city, which is apparently characterized by its
communality. Nonetheless, issues like unemployment, violence and privatiza-
tion have meant even ‘the Spanish city is [. . .] not immune to the global
“flows” which have dislocated and evacuated urban life’ (Smith 2000b, 109).
Through the questions of violence and nostalgia, Montxo Armendáriz’s
Historias del Kronen and Ventura Pons’s Carícies explore the Spanish city as
an ‘abstract’ space. With reference to the literary texts these films adapt, I
will discuss the extent to which the ‘visuality’ of film is complicit in the
creation of such ‘abstract’ space, and how its ‘hapticality’ might alternatively
point to ‘absolute’ space.
HISTORIAS DEL KRONEN (ARMENDÁRIZ 1995): VIOLENCE IN ABSTRACT

SPACE
Labelled the Spanish version of Douglas Coupland’s landmark novel

Generation X, Tales for an Accelerated Culture (Fouz-Hernández 2000, 96
n.3), José Ángel Mañas’s 1994 Historias del Kronen is an essay on the
pasotismo of contemporary urban youth.14 Mañas adopts the point of view of
Carlos, a bored niño de papá and member of a peña of youths killing time
over the summer of 1992 in Madrid. Hugely popular (reprinted several times
since its original publication in 1994) and critically acclaimed for its formal
virtuosity (short-listed for the premio Nadal in 1994), the apparently vacuous
content of Historias del Kronen is significant. Like Coupland’s account of a
generation with ‘nowhere to direct their anger, no one to assuage their fears,
and no culture to replace their anomie’ (quoted in Fouz-Hernández 2000,
83–4), the repetitive cycle of violence, drugs and sex in Historias del Kronen
draws a circle around a disturbing emptiness. The quest for increasingly unat-
tainable satisfaction culminates in the innovatively narrated sequence of
Fierro’s accidental murder (Mañas 1999, 248–58). Carlos’s ‘solipsistic intro-
version’, affirm Chris Perriam et al., ‘is textually inscribed in the penultimate
section he narrates in which his friends’ voices are deleted and replaced by
empty parentheses’ (2000, 217–18), a process of alienation concluded by his
final words, ‘sois todos unos débiles. ( ) En el fondo, os odio a todos’ (Mañas
1999, 258).
Adapted to film in the year following the novel’s publication, Montxo
Armendáriz’s Historias del Kronen enjoyed similar commercial success (see
for example, García 1995, 38). This urban, youth film, which has been
likened to Kids (Clark), La Haine (Kassovitz) and Trainspotting (Boyle),
which were all released in 1995, is Armendáriz’s fourth feature and his only
Madrid film. But the filmography of this Navarrese director, protégé of
fellow Basque and seasoned transition producer Elías Querejeta, who also
produced this film, in fact bears out the centrality of ruralist themes and
settings in Spanish cinema discussed above. Following two shorts entitled
Navarrese Riverside and Navarrese Charcoal Burners (Hopewell 1986, 271),
Armendáriz’s early features continued with ruralist themes, but shifted to
San Sebastián with his 1990 Las cartas de Alou, then Madrid with Historias
del Kronen. Significantly he has returned to his native Navarre with the
nostalgic rites-of-passage movie Secretos del corazón (1997), and, more
recently, with his exploration of the ‘silenced’ history of the maquis, Silencio
roto (2001). Following a discussion of the depiction of the city in Mañas’s
novel and in Armendáriz’s film adaptation with reference to Lefebvre’s
14 See Fouz-Hernández 2000 for an account of the similarities and differences

between Coupland and Mañas’s works.
68 SALLY FAULKNER
‘abstract’ space, in the second part of this section I will consider the implicit
question of nostalgia in the film.
Of particular interest to the present discussion is that Mañas’s portrait of
the violence of a discontented Spanish youth is linked both to the city and the
cinema. In his reading of the novel and film versions of Historias del Kronen,
Santiago Fouz-Hernández has suggested that ‘space, or rather, territories
become a major ground for youth resistance’ (2000, 93). Night-time Madrid,
he argues, is appropriated by the fictional characters ‘by transgressing all the
boundaries and rules imposed by daytime society’ (Fouz-Hernández 2000,
93). While such spaces may be, as Fouz-Hernández indicates, sites of rebel-
lion for the youths, the argument that their deeply anti-social behaviour
(sexism, racism, theft, casual sex, dangerous driving) also constructs an
alternative communality is questionable. On the one hand the characters
obtain pleasure from the urban environment (its bars, clubs, parks and roads
afford them the thrills of alcohol, drugs, sex and danger), in contrast to the
older generations for whom it is a place of fear and regret. Carlos’s aunt
naïvely warns him that ‘hay gente muy mala por la calle, muchos drogadictos
que roban a los viejos para drogarse’ (Mañas 1999, 90), and his grandfather
similarly laments: ‘no hay más que ver en qué se ha convertido Madrid. La
ciudad moderna es monstruosa [. . .]. Yo todavía me acuerdo cuando era
joven y vivía cerca de la puerta de Toledo en una finca’ (Mañas 1999, 92).
Carlos’s response to his older relatives is stereotypically offensive, but none-
theless interesting in spatial terms, ‘los viejos son personajes del pasado,
fósiles. Hay una inadecuación entre ellos y el tiempo que les rodea’ (Mañas
1999, 52, emphasis added). His disgust at their ‘lack-of-fit’ contrasts implic-
itly, therefore, with his own occupation of the city.
On the other hand, however, Carlos also points to his own generation’s
dislocation. In his censure of his father’s ‘rollo sesentaiochista pseudoprogre
de siempre’, he grumbles ‘los viejos [. . .] lo tienen todo: la guita y el poder.
Ni siquiera nos han dejado la rebeldía: ya la agotaron toda los putos
marxistas y los putos jipis de su época’ (Mañas 1999, 74). In fact throughout
the novel Mañas stresses that the leisure pursuits of Carlos’s generation are
never enough. The pleasure they derive from the city is unsatisfactory, and
their occupation of the urban environment is only ever transitory. The youths’
night-time forays only ever skirt around a space which is not theirs. Mañas
conveys their experience of the city streets, for instance, as fleeting,
nocturnal glimpses beheld from a car seat.
This ephemerality is presented in the novel by means of minimalist strings
of names of highways and barrios which link up the various ‘historias’. In
chapter six, for instance, Carlos’s arrival at the Kronen bar is signalled thus:
‘Santa Bárbara, Colón, Avenida de América, Francisco Silvela’; and ‘Avenida
de América, Emetrienta’ conveys his return home (Mañas 1999, 99 and 110).
This listing technique, which omits verb or pronoun, formally conveys the
evacuation of the characters from the urban environment, which is character-
istic of Lefebvre’s ‘abstract’ space. It is significant that Mañas also uses this
technique, which Fouz-Hernández likens to scanning newspaper headlines
(2000, 84), for descriptions of the socio-political context of the novel’s 1992
setting. This indicates that the youthful characters are removed from their
socio-political context as they are from urban space (see for example, Mañas
1999, 113).
If a parallel is drawn between urban life and ‘abstract’ space in Mañas’s
novel, this is underscored by the ‘visuality’ of his narrative, which thus far we
have discussed exclusively with reference to film. Mañas’s protagonist states
that his generation conceives of experience through the visual media:
La cultura de nuestra época es audiovisual. La única realidad de nuestra

época es la de la televisión. Cuando vemos algo que nos impresiona
siempre tenemos la sensación de estar viendo una película. [. . .] Somos los
hijos de la televisión, como dice Mat Dilon. (Mañas 1999, 45)
His comments are born out by his narrative, which includes descriptions such
as ‘el monólogo de Amalia, que es como la voz en off que ilustra mi toma de
la Gran Vía’ (Mañas 1999, 80). Roberto’s comments in the epilogue of the
novel are particularly interesting in this respect: ‘[Carlos] nos veía a todos
como si fuéramos personajes de una película, de su película. Pero él era como
si no estuviera ahí. No le gustaba vincularse afectivamente . . .’ (Mañas 1999,
272–3). As discussed above, this experience of the city in terms of ‘visuality’
rather than ‘hapticality’ is characteristic of the evacuation of ‘lived’ space,
and prioritization of ‘conceived’ space, in Lefebvre’s ‘abstract’ field. If
Carlos conceives of urban life in terms of ‘visuality’, like Certeau’s ‘voyeur’,
he cannot therefore participate in it – he is never part of his own film.
Mañas’s narrative of the violence enacted by Madrid’s discontented youth
thus traces an ‘abstract’ space which is both urban and cinematic.
The adaptation of such an ‘abstract’ space to film is therefore in a sense
effortless, given the obvious affinity between the cinema and ‘visuality’
previously discussed. It is worth noting that while film is equally capable of
portraying the city as an ‘absolute’ space, especially though its ‘hapticality’,
cinematic cities have tended to be negative. As Rob Lapsley points out:
The city [on film] is rarely the object of idealisation. Rather surprisingly,
given the preference of many people for the freedoms, excitements and
energies of urban existence [. . .] overwhelmingly, fictional representations
of the city have been hostile. From the London of Griffiths’ (sic) Broken
Blossoms (1919) to the New York of Seven (1995) the modern city has been
presented as inimical to human happiness. Instead of idealising the city the
predominant strategy has been to conjure into existence an elsewhere free
of lack and ruinance. (1997, 195)
After firstly examining the ways Armendáriz cinematically constructs an

70 SALLY FAULKNER
‘abstract’ space as a context for the violence of Historias del Kronen, I will
examine whether the film ‘conjures into existence’ an idealized ‘elsewhere’,
which may be understood as a symptom of nostalgia.
While the cityscape of Madrid framed at the start of Historias del Kronen
adheres to the classical cinematic convention of the establishing shot, the
repetition of the cityscape shot throughout the narrative alerts us to its sig-
nificance in the film. This shot punctuates the film narrative, marking the
beginning of each of the eight days narrated, indicating that, like the long
shot examined in Pascual Duarte, it goes beyond its conventional subordinate
role as mere background. A close reading of the cityscape shots of the
prologue points to what Lefebvre terms ‘abstract’ space. The Madrid skyline
in these shots initially recalls Woody Allen’s fond portrayal of New York at
the beginning of Manhattan (1979). However, unlike Allen’s images of New
York, which he couples with the celebratory tones of George Gershwin’s
Rhapsody in Blue, Armendáriz’s Madrid is linked to the discordant notes of
traffic, church bells and voices on telephones and loudspeakers. Thus the
human voice may only figure in this acoustic metropolis if relayed by
machine, which suggests the evacuation of the body from the ‘abstract’ space
previously discussed. Furthermore, in the cityscape shot, urban life is viewed
from on high, as by Certeau’s ‘voyeur’. This abstraction also points to the
‘phallic-visual-geometric’, or ‘conceived’, spaces of Lefebvre’s ‘abstract’
space (1999, 289).
If such cityscape shots make use of the ‘visuality’ of the film medium,
emphasizing space as perceived by the eye and indicating an ‘abstract’ space,
other aspects of the narrative of Historias del Kronen seem to question such
abstraction. For instance the credit sequence of the film shifts from the long
shots discussed above, to a medium shot of the Kronen bar, to rest finally on
a close-up of Carlos, who is thus established as our object of identification
and takes us into the Kronen bar and into the Historias del Kronen narrative.
As the soundtrack changes from the cacophony mentioned above to the
rhythmic beats of pop music, we may interpret this sequence as a movement
away from the ‘abstract’ space of the metropolis to an ‘absolute’ space
constructed by the youths.
However, as in Mañas’s novel, the city is portrayed as an ‘abstract’ space
by the way it is described. Apart from the cityscape shots, Madrid’s streets
are perceived as so many blurred glimpses from a car seat during the adoles-
cents’ nocturnal city tours of alcohol- and drug-abuse. These give visual
expression to the incoherence of their perception of the city and their spatial
dislocation. This experience of space as ‘abstract’ is reinforced by the choral
function of the film’s soundtrack: ‘No hay sitio para ti’ and ‘¡Harto!’ screams
the group’s band. The violent act with which the film culminates, the
‘snuff-movie’ murder of Fierro, recorded on a camcorder which is the cine-
matic equivalent of Carlos’s monologue in the novel, could be seen as moti-
vated by the ‘alienating, urban, nocturnal wasteland of low-life Madrid’,
which this ‘lost generation of middle-class youngsters’ inhabit (Jordan and

Morgan-Tamosunas 1998, 198 and 99). Indeed Armendáriz’s afore-
mentioned repetition of the cityscape shot would seem to point to its role in
motivating the crime, as Ricardo Franco’s landscape shots do in Pascual
Duarte. But while in Pascual Duarte the link between motivation and envi-
ronment was interpreted as indicating the tie between Man and nature –
‘absolute’ space – in Historias del Kronen it is rather evidence of the violence
visited upon the occupant of ‘abstract space’. The difference is the ample
alternative motivation for Carlos’s delinquency given in the film narrative,
not least the exaggerated offensiveness of his character.
Despite the popular success of the film, this manichean depiction of the
hostility of the urban environment, reinforced by the antipathy of its occu-
pants, was the source of much critical censure of the film aired in the press on
its release. The director himself hinted at his paternalist attitude towards the
material in interview, exhorting ‘muchas veces, los adultos tratamos de
obviar las partes menos agradables de la realidad’ (Armendáriz quoted in
García 1995, 38). Not surprisingly, Armendáriz was criticized for this moral-
izing stance. Fernando Herrero, of El Norte de Castilla, writes for instance
that Historias del Kronen is ‘un film pretendidamente subversivo que en
realidad resulta moralista y vacío’ (1995), a point echoed in Jesús Palacios’s
review for Fotogramas, who describes the film as ‘una simple muestra más
de la ola de moralidad reaccionaria que pretende, con cierto disimulo y
seriedad, estigmatizar la juventud y sus valores’ (quoted in Fouz-Hernández
2000, 87; see also Norberto Alcober in Fouz-Hernández 2000, 97, n.19).
Indeed, the film does at times regretfully lapse into a kind of treatise for
good parenting and a platitudinous description of pasotismo. Carlos is
selfish, from a non-communicative family (the television is the most vocal
interlocutor at the dinner table), without goals, a textbook adolescent and to
boot sexist, racist, light-fingered, irresponsible and sadistic in his treatment
of others (as illustrated by his response to Roberto’s homosexuality). The
offensiveness of his character is in fact emphasized in the film by the
episode, absent from the novel, in which he steals from his mother and lets
the maid be blamed and sacked.
El País film critic Ángel Fernández-Santos seems to be alone in his inter-
pretation of Historias del Kronen as ‘ejemplar’, and vastly superior to the
novel it adapts, which he describes as ‘tópico’ (1995). ‘La película [. . .] nos
sitúa’, he argues, ‘a la inversa que [su pretexto literario], no ante lo que un
grupo de niños pijos madrileños tiene de diferente (cosa irrelevante), sino de
lo que tiene de igual (cosa seria)’. It is the critic, of course, who defines ‘seri-
ousness’, which is for him the rather nebulous metaphor of the ‘cuestiones
permanentes de la vida en cualquier lugar y tiempo: la rutina y el tedio que
envuelven los estados de indefinición del carácter’ (Fernández-Santos 1995).
It is rather these very questions that the film deals with in a clichéd manner,
and the one-dimensionality of its depiction of the city possibly also implies a
72 SALLY FAULKNER
nostalgia for what Lapsley calls an ‘elsewhere’. That idealized other place
would seem to be the countryside framed in Armendáriz’s earlier and subse-
quent filmography. In Tasio, for instance, Armendáriz stresses ‘the centrality
of the rural environment to [a] sense of identity’ (Jordan and
Morgan-Tamosunas 1998, 48), and that film ends with the protagonist’s
refusal to move to the city. This refused transferral to what is understood to
be a hostile urban space indicates the association of the city with the nefar-
ious characteristics of ‘abstract’ space. This association is confirmed in
Historias del Kronen which is a kind of hostile, urban sequel to the earlier,
rural film.
CARÍCIES (PONS 1998): BEYOND ABSTRACT SPACE
First published and performed as a play in 1992, Sergi Belbel’s Carícies

expresses the alienation and solitude of contemporary urban life. Lauded in
the press as Catalonia’s most ‘international theatre director’ (Costa 1998,
11), Belbel explores in this play archetypal human relations through the inter-
action of nameless characters in a nameless city. The openness of Carícies
has been indicated by the playwright himself, who in press interviews has
underlined the pessimistic nature of his portrait of ‘[gent que en el fons]
busca carícies, encara que no ho aconsegueixi [. . .] en un món en el qual, a
l’acostar-nos a la fi del millenni, cada vegada ens costa més expressar
l’amor’, yet has conversely also affirmed ‘muchos dicen que es una obra
negra y dura, pero yo la veo positiva y optimista’ (Cabeza 1998, 41; review of
Carícies, 1998). As such the play is a suggestive template for the cinematic
adaptor, who, like the theatre director, may ‘perform’ a text in such a way as
to suggest its interpretation.
Ventura Pons’s adaptation of the play was the third film of what has been
termed his Catalan literary trilogy (El perquè de tot plegat 1994, based on
Quim Monzó’s sketches; Actrius 1996, based on Josep María Benet i Jornet’s
play; Carícies 1998) (see review of Carícies 1997; T. Rubio 1997, 58).
Originally a stage director, Pons spent much of his early career making crude
comedia catalana films which were never exported outside Catalonia. His
return to literature in these 1990s films however has enabled him even to
make inroads into the international market (Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas
1998, 171–2). The creation of his own auteurist brand of urban, literary
cinema has proved enduringly successful both inside and outside Catalonia.
In 1999 he adapted another Belbel play Morir (o no) which similarly exploits
fluid temporality, a Barcelona setting and a structure of interlocking
vignettes.
However Pons’s 1990s urban cinema is a far cry from the celebration of
Barcelona which he framed in his cult transition documentary of Catalonia’s
best-known transvestite, Ocaña, retrat intermitent (1978). The austerity of
this more recent work is also contrary to his background in comedy films –
indeed Pons’s sober film adaptation of Belbel’s Carícies contrasts with the
many theatrical productions of the play which had emphasized its humour.
Despite the geographical shift from Madrid to Barcelona, and the industrial
differences between mainstream and art house cinema, the grave questions of
violence and alienation in the modern metropolis therefore concern Carícies
as much as they did Historias del Kronen, although the spatial dislocation
experienced by Mañas and Armendáriz’s rich Madrid youngsters seems to
effect inhabitants of Belbel and Pons’s Barcelona regardless of age and class.
As in the above study of Historias del Kronen, in this section I will read the
violence that unfolds in Pons’s modern metropolis in the context of ‘abstract’
space. Whereas nostalgia for an ‘absolute’ space appeared to be implicit in
Armendáriz’s film, I will consider here the remarkable ending of Pons’s
Carícies as explicitly nostalgic.
While Pons is extremely faithful in his adaptation of Belbel’s play,
retaining almost every word of its dialogue and thus its La Ronde-inspired
carousel structure, his representation of urban space in Carícies is entirely
cinematic.15 In terms of the representation of space, Carícies exemplifies the
difference between the media of literature and film. Notwithstanding its use
of the Catalan language, Belbel’s play eschews all references to location.
Despite his replication of every sequence, Pons’s Carícies demonstrates that
film’s closer indexical relationship to reality prevents the construction of a
hypothetical space in the same manner as in literature. While in a literary text
a space may remain unnamed, this is far more difficult in cinema as the
filmed image, unlike the written word, bears the mechanical imprint of place
in the very essence of its form. Thus while Belbel may set scene seven of the
play, for instance, in a non-specific ‘estació central’ (1998, 49), the corre-
sponding sequence in the film adaptation takes place in the actual geographic
location of Barcelona Sants station.
However it is significant that, while Barcelona as a city is recognizable in
the film (Pons even holds the shot which focuses on the name ‘Barcelona
Sants’), at no point do we see its most idiosyncratic monuments. As Núria
Bou and Xavier Pérez note in a contemporary press review, the film is
located in ‘una gran ciutat contemporània que es deixa reconèixer fàcilment,
tot i que el retrat no s’aturi en les llargues ombres de la Sagrada Família o en
traç del dit de l’estàtua de Colom’ (1998, 57). In other words, unlike
Almodóvar’s love affair with Madrid, and in Todo sobre mi madre (1999)
Barcelona, Pons’s Carícies is not a cinematic ‘caress’ of the Catalan capital.
The way Pons shoots Barcelona in fact recalls Lefebvre’s ‘abstract’ space
15 The prominence of dialogue in this film, which is characteristic of art cinema

generally, has led some critics to lament its excessive literariness (Herrero 1998; Marinero
1998, 24).
74 SALLY FAULKNER
in a manner similar to Armendáriz’s cityscapes. The disorientating fast-

forward shots of traffic speeding through a night-time city inserted between
each of the eleven vignettes of the diegesis do more than just link the
sequences. These traffic shots, which adopt the perspective of both cars
above the ground and the metro beneath, also seem to offer an explanation for
the antagonistic human relationships contained within the vignettes. The
alienation and solitude of the characters which surface in literal and figura-
tive violence are accounted for by their occupation of a hostile urban
environment.
These fast-forward linking shots are the filmic representation of
Lefebvre’s ‘abstraction in action’, and recall Mañas’s sparse listing descrip-
tions in Historias del Kronen discussed above. In The Production of Space,
Lefebvre in fact described the driver of a car as an ‘abstract subject’, for
whom space is only experienced through ‘the eye’, and thus ‘appears solely
in its reduced forms. Volume leaves the field to surface’ (1999, 313, original
emphasis). This process of estrangement from space, and its reduction from
volume to surface, is accelerated in the fast-forward images. These images
evidently lie outside natural human perception because they depict space in a
manner the body may never know. They thus signal the evacuation of the
body in ‘abstract’ space, and are the antithesis of ‘hapticality’, or film as
‘embodied perception’. The link-up sequences thus emphasize the ‘visuality’
of film, or the way film may depict space uniquely through the eye.
‘Visuality’, therefore, may not only convey actual phenomena, like the
perspective of Certeau’s ‘voyeur’, but also indicate conceptual preoccupa-
tions, such as the urban alienation of Lefebvre’s ‘abstract’ space.
The estrangement of the body from ‘abstract’ space which is implied by
the fast-forward shots is echoed in many of the narrative vignettes them-
selves. In the first sequence, for instance, the body is subjected to confus-
ingly unmotivated violence as a young couple engage in a banal conversation
about what to have for dinner. Thus the denial of the body in the fast-forward
sequences frames the abuse of the body in the narrative vignettes. The
romantic connotations of the title therefore seem ironically negated by the
film.
In a later sequence, we witness the only explicit sexual encounter of the
film, which takes place between a middle-aged man and a rent-boy. This is a
doomed attempt on the client’s part to achieve existential affirmation through
corporeal stimulation. Bodily experience, the film seems to stress, is a
simulacrum, since the man is as concerned to watch the sexual act in a mirror
as he is to engage in it. Like Mañas’s Carlos, who conceives of life as a film
in which he does not feature, the middle-aged man erases his own participa-
tion in the event. On contemplating firstly his mirror image, secondly his
lover’s mirror image and thirdly his lover, he comments ‘vosaltres tres . . . els
únics que m’estimeu’ – the missing fourth participant being himself (Belbel
1998, 64). This seems to demonstrate Lefebvre’s observation that ‘over
abstract space reigns phallic solitude and the self-destruction of desire. The
representation of sex thus takes the place of sex itself ’ (1999, 309).
However, this construction of ‘abstract’ space in Pons’s Carícies is coun-
tered by the question of motivation. Just as Ricardo Franco linked man to
environment in this way in Pascual Duarte, the fact that our only explanation
for the violence in Carícies is the hostility of the city indicates that Pons like-
wise points to ‘absolute’ space. The important final sequences of the film
also indicate ‘absolute’ space. Using a tactic he would repeat extensively in
Morir (o no), Pons reverses time in this final vignette, as the beaten-up man
has only just emerged from the scene of domestic violence we witnessed
back at the very beginning of the film. The link-up sequences which frame
this final vignette are of particular interest with respect to the depiction of
urban space. While the portrayals of alienation in the narrative sequences of
the rest of the film have been preceded and succeeded by fast-forward
images, the final encounter between the mother and the beaten-up man is
different, signalling its thematic contrast. It is introduced by a shot of the
street from the woman’s perspective in which her son walks at normal speed
(this echoes the shot of the same, but empty, street of the first sequence) and
is followed by slow motion images of traffic moving in that same street.
These markedly different framing shots underscore the narrative difference of
this single scene in which a caress does not result in rejection (scene three),
incest (six) or payment (nine).
In this sequence there is a harmony for the first time in the film between
the speed of the action in the diegetic space and in the urban backdrop: the
link-up at normal speed is followed by a narrative sequence at normal speed,
and the next link-up in slow motion follows the sequence of the caress in slow
motion. This alignment between the representation of space in the link-up
sequences and in the narrative vignettes, or between man and his environ-
ment, indicates a transition to Lefebvre’s ‘absolute’ space. The beleaguered
body is also reintroduced in these final sequences. At last the city is
represented as a space known by the body, as it is for Certeau’s ‘walkers’
(1988, 92–3), or the occupant of Lefebvre’s ‘absolute’ realm (1999, 110–11).
And just as the view of the street concurs with the body’s experience of
space, the body is nourished in the final narrative vignette by the only
genuine caress of the film. In another contrast, in these final sequences Pons
introduces the human voice on the soundtrack of the film which up to this
point has been uniquely instrumental. As the speed of the images slows
down, the melancholy tones of María del Mar Bonet’s Jo em donaría a qui
em volgués increase in volume, and the song’s lyrics finally articulate the
solitude which racks all but the final two characters in the film.
By releasing the tension built up through the film thus, Pons revises and
points beyond that wholly pessimistic vision of the urban which precedes it,
charting a progression from the portrayal of human relations as the product of
alienating urban space to human beings as producers of their own space in a
76 SALLY FAULKNER
kind of ‘humanist’ city. This resolution at the end of Carícies recalls that of
Wender’s Wings of Desire. In both there is a transition from ‘abstract’ to
‘absolute’ space, and in both this is triggered by romantic love. In Wenders’s
film Damiel’s renunciation of space as known by the angels (defined by its
‘visuality’, thus ‘voyeuristic’ in Certeau’s terms or in Lefebvre’s, ‘abstract’),
for space as known by humans (‘haptical’, thus the space of Certeau’s ‘walk-
ers’ or Lefebvre’s ‘absolute’), is brought about by his love for a mortal
named, significantly, Marion. Similarly, Pons’s depiction of a mother’s caress
also demolishes the hitherto alienating city. The ‘abstract’ space of the city,
conveyed cinematically by ‘visuality’, is replaced by an ‘absolute’ space,
represented by ‘hapticality’.
In comparison to the preceding episodes, the ending of Carícies depicts an
idyll, which might be termed nostalgic. The object of this nostalgia seems to
be ‘absolute’ space, a realm in which there is a harmony between man and his
environment. However, standard interpretations of nostalgia are insufficient
here. In both play and film, Belbel and Pons problematize the tempting inter-
pretation of nostalgia as a return to the nourishing plenitude of the maternal
womb with the following line. The mother-figure soothingly assures the
young man: ‘No pateixi. El tractaré com si fos una mare. Millor i tot’ (Belbel
1998, 72, emphasis added).
In the film Pons similarly checks the critical response which might inter-
pret these final scenes as nostalgic. Unlike Los santos inocentes and
Historias del Kronen, Pons does not portray nostalgia for a lost rural space
which might be explained in terms of Spain’s recent urbanization. Pons’s
1998 portrait of Barcelona demonstrates that rural nostalgia is less relevant
to a city which, with Northern Europe, industrialized in the nineteenth
century (Mackay 1985, v). The idyll Pons evokes at the end of his narrative of
urban alienation – what Lapsley calls the ‘elsewhere’ – is not a rural one.
Neither is Carícies nostalgic for a lost urban space, which might be particu-
larly tempting in the specific context of Catalonia. In Emma Dent Coad’s
account of the continuing centrality of modernista architecture to notions of
Catalan identity, Barcelona is described as ‘pre-eminent in the number of
buildings commissioned and in the number which still exist, immaculately
restored; the same political forces that precipitated modernisme have ensured
the survival of historical examples’ (1995, 58). If those ‘political forces’ have
ossified urban Catalan identity by associating it with a certain architectural
period, Pons’s studied avoidance of its most famous manifestations (Bou and
Pérez 1998, 57) is especially significant. Carícies rejects both nostalgia for
rural space which is evident elsewhere in Spanish film, and nostalgia for
urban space which is aligned with a static definition of Catalan identity. What
emerges in Pons’s film is a more complex examination of the relationship of
city and citizen.
Lapsley’s ‘elsewhere’ of the end of Carícies is emphatically the urban
‘here’ depicted in the rest of the film narrative as the same settings are used.
This idyll is thus neither nostalgically rural, rejecting the city wholesale as
hostile, nor simplistically idealized, appealing to images of Barcelona’s cele-
brated architecture. The ending of Carícies rather recalls Lefebvre’s descrip-
tion of the city prior to its abstraction, a space which is both urban and
‘absolute’. In a passage which is particularly evocative of the harmony
between urban and domestic spaces indicated at the end of Pons’s film by the
parallel between the link-up sequences and the narrative vignettes, Lefebvre
calls such a city one in which, ‘for the citizen and city-dweller, representa-
tional space [‘lived’] and the representation of space [‘conceived’], though
they did not coincide, were harmonious and congruent’ (1999, 247).
Conclusion: Continuity and Change

In post-Franco cinema, the questions of violence and nostalgia have
proved particularly suggestive to directors depicting the rural and urban
spaces of late twentieth-century Spain. A comic approach to the portrayal of
the country and the city, such as Berlanga’s irreverent parodies of Franco’s
rural idyll, or Almodóvar’s ludic disclaimers of Franco’s urban nightmare,
has also been adopted with success to lampoon the dictatorship. But the
exploration of violence and nostalgia in rural and urban spaces has been more
enduringly expressive.
In the early transition film Pascual Duarte, Ricardo Franco repeats Cela’s
shocking depiction of violence to demolish Franco’s mythification of the
Spanish countryside as a peaceful idyll. Conversely, Mario Camus’s Los
santos inocentes has been criticized as ‘una imagen de la campiña que se da a
sí misma algo exótico para el espectador urbano [. . .] un “enlatado” de la
vida rural para los espectadores de las grandes ciudades’ (Losilla 1989, 41), a
criticism which might be better levelled at Delibes’s original novel. With
enormous popular success, Camus’s film in fact both echoes the violence of
Franco’s 1976 film, and recursively explores the contradictory experience of
nostalgia for a rural space.
Whereas José Ángel Mañas’s novel Historias del Kronen shocks through
its graphic portrayal of violence in a manner which perhaps recalls both
Cela’s novel and Franco’s film, Montxo Armendáriz’s depiction of violence
in the city in his film version of the text unwittingly echoes the regime’s vili-
fication of urban life. Armendáriz’s moralizing approach towards the mate-
rial makes his picture insipid whereas Ricardo Franco’s had been so potent.
As Palacios quips in his review for Fotogramas:
al eliminar la carga de violencia psicológica y pornográfica [de la novela]

que podía convertir la película en repulsiva y original dentro del cine
español, sólo queda el superficial y vacío moralismo de la víctima
designada, rodadas igual que uno de esos anuncios-amenaza de la
Dirección General de Tráfico. (quoted in Fouz-Hernández 2000, 89–90)
78 SALLY FAULKNER
Finally Pons’s Carícies eschews a comic interpretation of Sergi Belbel’s play

to show that the violence of the city can be portrayed with austerity, yet
without adopting a moralizing stance which echoes Francoist ideology. The
seemingly nostalgic end of this film points beyond the polarity of violence in
urban space and nostalgia for rural space to an alternative kind of ‘humanist’
city.
Questions of violence and nostalgia in rural and urban spaces thus channel
both continuity and change in the country and the city of modern Spain. A
consideration of these four films thematically rather than chronologically
throws this into relief. Vastly different in every other sense, the discourse of
violence common to both Franco’s politicized Pascual Duarte and
Armendáriz’s commercialized Historias del Kronen shows how environment,
whether rural and urban, may repress the individual. However the former film
satirizes the Francoist sound bite of the rural idyll, whereas the latter implic-
itly reconfirms it. Similarly the apparently opposing populist Los santos
inocentes and auteurist Carícies share a discourse of nostalgia in their depic-
tions of space. But while the earlier film explores the contradictions of a
nostalgic portrayal of the impoverished countryside, the later piece reveals a
longing for urban communality not necessarily found in the past.
This comparison between literary texts and cinematic adaptations reveals
that both literature and cinema may construct what Lefebvre calls ‘absolute’
and ‘abstract’ spaces. However, much theoretical discussion of film implies
that the medium lends itself to the portrayal of ‘abstract’ space in particular.
Mary Ann Doane, for instance, argues that modern technology, including
cinema, effects a ‘despatialization of subjectivity’ (1991, 190), which
Lefebvre would describe as a severing of the bond between man and environ-
ment which is typical of ‘abstract’ space. Yet film also enjoys an especially
proximate relation to space as in its form it bears the imprint of place – a fact
Italian neorealists were first to emphasize by on location shooting.
This contradiction might be hesitantly resolved if we consider film’s
unique potential to represent space both as it is perceived by the eye, and
space as experienced by the body. Film may thus aesthetically satisfy both
what Lefebvre calls our ‘fetishism’ of ‘abstract’ space, yet also our contradic-
tory ‘fascination’ for ‘absolute’ space (1999, 140). The ‘visuality’ of film
sates our desire for the former and its ‘hapticality’ responds to the appeal of
the latter. Cinema is thus a unique instrument to explore aesthetically both
the country and the city.
RE-VISING THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL
RE-VISING THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL:

GENDER AND THE ADAPTATIONS OF
FORTUNATA Y JACINTA AND LA REGENTA
The evidence of an affinity between the nineteenth-century novel and

screen narrative, and hence the particular felicity of adapting that source, is
both theoretical and actual. Film theorists have persuasively argued that film
is more suited to adapting novels than plays using the Dickens/Griffith
model,1 although drama offers equal potential for cinematic creativity, as we
have seen with respect to Carícies. The supposed parallel between the
mimetic capacity of nineteenth-century literary realism and classic narrative
film apparently explains adaptors’ attraction to novels of that particular
period.2 Approaching the question from a historical rather than theoretical
standpoint, we may alternatively account for the affinity by the two media’s
chronological contemporaneity and contiguity.3 However, neither of these
positions sufficiently accounts for the continued preference for adaptations of
novels from this period. Critical responses to such adaptations of English lit-
erature emphasize ideological explanations. The popularity of the ‘bust and
bustles’ period drama formula, such as the Merchant/Ivory productions of the
1980s and the staple of Victorian novel adaptations in British television, is
considered a manifestation of the nostalgia of the ‘heritage film’ genre as a
whole, discussed in chapter two.4 However, just as in the preceding chapters I
have shown that the relationship between the historical context of a film
adaptation and that of its literary source raises issues more complicated than
1 See chapter one, note 1; also Bazin 1977, 14; Mínguez Arranz 1998, 54–7.
2 For this reason, the further the novel moved away from the conventions of
nineteenth-century realism in the twentieth century, the less easily it translated to the
screen. See Gimferrer 1999, 81–3, for an account of this process.
3 Many late nineteenth-century novelists took advantage of the commercial rewards
of collaborating in cinematic adaptations (see the example of Thomas Hardy in Sweet
2000). It is interesting to speculate that had Galdós’s career shifted forward a decade,
rather than making a somewhat unsuccessful conversion to the novela dialogada and then
to drama, the novelist might have turned his hand to screen-writing.
4 On Merchant/Ivory productions see Craig 1991; on British television, see Reynolds
1993, 4.
80 SALLY FAULKNER
mere nostalgia, a consideration of gender also points beyond the impasse of

interpreting the heritage phenomenon exclusively in terms of postmodern
superficiality.5
The novels of Benito Pérez Galdós, one of Spain’s most renowned and
prolific nineteenth-century authors, have been the most frequently adapted in
the history of Spanish cinema and television.6 Nonetheless, considering his
œuvre comprises seventy-seven texts, relatively few of these have been
adapted, as Spanish screen culture does not seem to share the Anglo-
American fixation with the nineteenth-century novel. As detailed in chapter
two, in the post-Franco period, Spanish filmmakers have rather turned to the
texts of, or about, the civil- and post-war periods as source material for adap-
tation. This is symptomatic of the neglect of an author such as Galdós,
marginalized by political circumstance both in and outside Spain (Jagoe
1994, 1–2). His Fortunata y Jacinta and Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta, consid-
ered to be Spain’s finest nineteenth-century novels, have only been adapted to
film once, in 1970 and 1974 respectively. This is astonishing compared to the
fate of, say, Dickens or Austen.7 In fact, in post-Franco film and television
the nineteenth-century novel has been largely the preserve of the latter,
though the dates of production of the television series (Fortunata y Jacinta
1980; La Regenta 1995; consider also Juanita la larga 1982 and Los Pazos de
Ulloa 1985) reveal that such adaptations – however popular – were not part of
a sustained policy, as in British television.
These facts of production history mean that this chapter will address an
intriguing three-way dialogue between novels written at the end of the 1800s
(Pérez Galdós’s Fortunata y Jacinta of 1886–87 and Alas’s La Regenta,
1884–85), films made at the end of the regime (by Fons in 1970 and Gonzalo
Suárez in 1974 respectively) and television series produced under democracy
(by Camus in 1980 and Méndez Leite in 1995 respectively). It will attempt to
balance the immense critical interest in these important novels, especially
recent studies of questions of gender, with the scant attention which has thus
5 On the question of gender and the heritage film genre in British cinema, see Monk
1995 and 1996–97. In response to Andrew Higson’s work she asserts ‘monolithic
dismissals of heritage films as overridingly “conservative” produced in the early 1990s
were achieved and were only achievable by silencing questions around the gendering and
sexuality of the films’ (Monk 1996–97, part one, 4).
6 Galdós is the most frequently adapted novelist, but playwrights Serafín and Joaquín
Álvarez Quintero and Carlos Arniches have lent more work to the screen (Utrera 1989, 8).
7 Contributive industrial factors must be taken into account here. While other
Western countries allowed their national televisions and cinemas to develop in harmony,
collaboration between the two in Spain only occurred as late as 1979. On such collabora-
tion in the US see Gomery 1983; on the situation in the Spanish industry, see Gómez
Bermúdez de Castro 1989, chapter five. Hollywood’s insatiable appetite for ‘British’
costume drama is also of significance here (see Hipsky 1989).
RE-VISING THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 81
far been paid to Spanish films of the late dictatorship period,8 and to Spanish
television in general (Smith 2000a, 189).
Feminist criticism of the nineteenth-century Spanish novel has flourished
over the last decade, and more recently this area has expanded to include
other media, such as images of women in the contemporary press
(Charnon-Deutsch 2000). This growing body of work – which has yet to
include screen adaptations – will inform the theoretical framework adduced
here.9 In the section devoted to Fortunata y Jacinta entitled ‘Clipped Wings’,
I will draw on the established importance of the ángel del hogar within
Galdosian scholarship (Aldaraca 1991; Jagoe 1994), and suggest the perti-
nence of that ideology to the study of the adaptations. Lou Charnon-Deutsch
has studied the ways a ‘traditional male observer’ is constructed in the novel
La Regenta (1990, 105); I will suggest an analogous observer is positioned in
the adaptations of Alas’s work in the second section of this chapter entitled
‘The Government of the Gaze’. The ideology of the domestic angel and the
question of gendered spectatorship are not, however, discrete theoretical
concerns, as this necessary division might suggest; thus both areas will
overlap in both sections.
El ángel del hogar

Literary critics have shown that the imagery relating to the ángel del hogar
is highly revealing in Galdós’s novels and this importance is echoed in their
screen adaptations. The imagery of woman as angel, which suggestively
overlaps with that of woman as bird in novels like Fortunata y Jacinta, relates
to the question of blurring between nature and culture. Nineteenth-century
discourses concerning gender difference proposed that femininity entailed a
complex composite of these two. The belief that woman was ‘naturally’
8 It seems incomprehensible that a recent publication devoted to literary adaptations

in Spanish cinema which aims to offer a ‘recorrido historiográfico’ of such films and
‘estudiar los perfiles dominantes, o más representativamente caracterizadores’ (Heredero
2002a, 13) should leave out the period 1967–75. The editor of the collection, Carlos
Heredero, may call on us in his introduction to appreciate that this period is a ‘hueco
maldito’ or ‘especie de agujero negro para el cine de nuestro país, mal documentado,
huérfano de catálogos oficiales y poco estudiado hasta el momento’ (2002a, 14), but
surely his collection offered an ideal opportunity to fill this gap? How can a volume
devoted to literary adaptations miss out one of the periods when it was precisely these
films which were of key importance? It is also surprising to discover that Santos
Zunzunegui’s article on the Nuevo Cine Español in this collection (2002) focuses not on
the important literary adaptations of that movement, like Miguel Picazo’s La tía Tula
(1964) and Angelino Fons’s La busca (1966), but on a nebulous series of literary ‘roots’.
9 This gender focus explains the absence of Buñuel’s Galdós adaptations in this
chapter. As I will argue in chapter five, the director’s concerns in these films are not ones
of gender. (Peter Evans’s monograph [1995] on gender and sexuality in Buñuel’s œuvre
focuses on neither of these films.)
82 SALLY FAULKNER
unruly and lustful and was ‘civilized’ by man through marriage, inherited
from classical texts, gave way in bourgeois patriarchal ideology to the angelic
ideal, in which woman was considered ‘cultured’, but also denied sexuality.
As Catherine Jagoe puts it, ‘for the first time in Western history, woman as
sex was constructed as morally superior to man. The price, however, was the
renunciation of female desire’ (1994, 8). Nonetheless, both possible locations
of woman on the nature/culture, or bird/angel, divide coexisted. As Jo
Labanyi summarizes in relation to Galdós’s work:
On the one hand [his novels] stress the ways in which women are moulded
by society (the result being a ‘clipping of their wings’), but on the other
hand they contrast woman as an image of society’s natural (and
unchanging) foundations. (1993b, 12)
Another key aspect of the ideology of the ángel del hogar concerns space.
As Jagoe points out, ‘one of the most pervasive changes in nine-
teenth-century cultural and psychic life occurred in Western perceptions of
social space, which underwent a division into two distinct, engendered, and
sharply differentiated spheres, public and private’ (1994, 15). Aldaraca draws
particular attention to the spatial definition of the bourgeois angel, noting
‘[she] is ultimately defined not ontologically, not functionally but territori-
ally, by the space which she occupies’ (1991, 27). Quoting Fray Luis de
León’s La perfecta casada – written in 1583, but an especially influential text
in the discourse of domesticity – she continues, ‘the frontier of her existence
as a virtuous woman begins and ends at her doorstep, “assí la buena mujer
quanto, para sus puertas adentro ha de ser presta y ligera, tanto para fuera
dellas se ha de tener por coxa y torpe” ’ (Aldaraca 1991, 27). In a language
that still retains the distinction between a ‘mujer pública’ (prostitute) and a
‘hombre público’ (‘el que interviene activamente en la política’) (Moliner
1998, II, 409; I, 1497), the location of the characters discussed, in either the
home or the street, dictates their social status.10 Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar, in their study of nineteenth-century woman writers, The Madwoman
in the Attic (1980), assert that images of spatial confinement and entrapment
proliferate in such writers’ work. The sensitivity of male writers and directors
to this question will be examined here.
This gendering of domestic space promoted by the nineteenth-century
ideology of the ángel del hogar interacted with and reinforced other contem-
porary discourses, especially those concerning the opposition between the
home and the street, or domestic and urban spheres. Drawing in part on the
recent and growing intellectual field of feminist geography (e.g. Rose 1993),
10 ‘Public woman’ carries this meaning in the English language also, but the last
example of its use given by the OED was in 1892 (The Oxford English Dictionary 1989,
XXII, 780).
Sharon Marcus’s impressively documented Apartment Stories (1999) ques-

tions both the division between these two, and the gendering of each. Firstly,
she demonstrates that the spatial specificities of the apartment building made
it a unique site for the interweaving of domestic and urban spheres. Secondly,
she questions the received wisdom that in the nineteenth century woman was
located in the private realm and man in the public. Thus,
unlike the single-family house and the barely livable tenement, which
opposed the city to the home, apartment buildings linked the city and its
residences in real and imagined ways, and nineteenth-century discourses
about apartment buildings registered the connections and coincidences
between urban and domestic spaces, values and activities. [. . .] By
dissolving the boundary between residential and collective spaces, the
apartment house produced an urban geography of gender that challenges
current preconceptions about where women and men were to be found in
the nineteenth-century city, allowing us to see, for example, that the home
was often a masculine domain, and that heterosexual imperatives
demanded the presence of women in streets as well as homes.
(S. Marcus 1999, 2–3)
While her source material is nineteenth-century Paris and London,

Marcus’s study is also pertinent to Madrid. She charts a shift in spatial policy
between the ‘open house’ Parisian apartment buildings of the July monarchy,
to Haussmann’s project of ‘enclosure’ in the third Republic. A similar debate
regarding the merits of the apartment house raged in nineteenth-century
Madrid, whose population expanded from 206,435 in 1845, to 487,169 by the
end of the century (Díez de Baldeón 1986a, I, 139), a period which saw the
emergence of the capital’s working class. The merits of the ‘casa mixta’ or
‘inmueble cuartelaria’ (an apartment building which constituted the major
form of habitation under Isabel II in which bourgeois and proletarian families
lived separately but under the same roof) were contrasted with the (largely
utopian) proposals which flourished during the sexenio and the Restoration to
impose ‘zonificación’ on Madrid, and encourage working-class ownership of
single-family houses. Both humanitarian and politically expedient motives
are discernible in these projects. Hygiene was a very real problem in the
over-crowded capital, but ideologues were only too aware that working-class
barrios, unlike the apparently class-levelling mixed houses, fostered revolu-
tionary unrest, as the experience of nineteenth-century Paris made clear.11
Galdós, the most illustrious chronicler of nineteenth-century Madrid,
engages with this contemporary architectural polemic in his novels. Marcus’s
identification of an overlap between public and private spaces in the apart-
11 On the nineteenth-century debate regarding working-class housing, see Díez de

Baldeón 1986b. On the interaction between architecture and social class in nineteenth-
century Madrid, see Díez de Baldeón 1986a.
84 SALLY FAULKNER
ment house, what in Madrid would be the ‘inmueble cuartelaria’, immediate-

ly brings to mind the prologue to his Nazarín (1895), and her comments on
the fluidity of gendered spaces could have been written after reading
Galdós’s satire on Isabelline society and the September revolution, La de
Bringas (1884). The debate is a particular concern in Fortunata y Jacinta, his
masterpiece of Madrid life published towards the end of the twenty-eight year
period in which Madrid’s population doubled (1860–88) (Díez de Baldeón
1986a, 139). The novelist raises the questions of working-class housing (Cava
de San Miguel street and the slums), zonificación (the Santa Cruz family
embodies the bourgeois ideal of spatial separation but Galdós reveals its
flaws) and charitable ‘miracle’ solutions to the urban problem (Guillermina),
but full discussion of these falls outside the scope of this book. The refraction
of these preoccupations through gender – the characterizations of the
street-roaming, working-class Fortunata and her housebound, bourgeois
counterpart Jacinta – will be considered.
Literary critics have read the construction of imagery and space in these
novels deconstructively, or ‘against the grain’. Hence ‘clipped’ wings or a
‘caged’ bird/angel may be read as metaphors of female oppression – culmi-
nating in Galdós’s work with the amputated leg of the eponymous heroine of
Tristana (1892). If scholars have demonstrated that this bourgeois ideal of
femininity was ‘thoroughly and fundamentally contradictory’ (Jagoe 1994,
41), the question I hope to answer here is to what extent film and television
directors also explore those contradictions.
Gender and Spectatorship

These adaptations of Fortunata y Jacinta and La Regenta must be consid-
ered on their own terms as visual narratives and it is revealing to compare
them in the light of feminist theories of identification in the cinema and the
possible visual pleasures such texts offer to spectators. The starting point in
this discussion is the overlap between Laura Mulvey’s influential examina-
tion of the implied male spectator of mainstream narrative cinema (1999,
first published 1975), and Lou Charnon-Deutsch’s formulation of the implied
male reader of the Spanish feminocentric realist novel (1990). For both these
critics, cultural representations of womanhood are to be understood
according to psychoanalytic theory, as they provide a space for the male
subject to ‘rework unresolved fantasies and fears that survived from infancy’
(Charnon-Deutsch 1990, 164). Literary critics have thus far shown them-
selves to be more responsive to this conspicuous parallel than film critics.
Charnon-Deutsch herself has argued that ‘cinematic theories of the subject
[have] direct bearing on the subjects of classical narrative fiction’ (1994, 65)
and interpreted La Regenta using cinematic theories of suture (1994), yet to
date no criticism of the adaptations combines both literary and cinematic
gender theory.
In Gender and Representation, Charnon-Deutsch argues that nineteenth-

century Spanish novels like Fortunata y Jacinta and La Regenta ‘prescribe
[. . .] a male reading of texts’ (1990, xi) and that ‘[it is] the task of the femi-
nist critic [to] expose the way structures of male power and male seeing are
divinized in our literature’ (1990, xii, original emphasis). In the following
chapter I will therefore examine the thesis that the screen adaptations of these
texts similarly encourage the viewer to adopt ‘male seeing’. Mulvey’s theory
that female characters on screen tend to be objectified and ‘connote
to-be-looked-at-ness’ (1999, 837), compared to male characters who are
active subjects and control narrative agency and point of view, seems
ready-made for this task. Although developed in response to classic Holly-
wood film, the psychoanalytically-informed examination of identity forma-
tion in the essay is universal, thus it may be transferred to a European
context. Mulvey argues that audiences experience visual pleasure by identi-
fying with male characters, and hence pronounces that the gaze is male.
As Mulvey herself has subsequently pointed out (1989, 29–38), there are
all sorts of problems with this argument, not least the question of the female
spectator, who must adopt a masculinized viewing position by identifying
with male characters on the screen. Mulvey’s original insights into the way a
film might ‘position’ a spectator are important, but it is problematic that the
essay brackets the real ‘flesh and blood’ film-goer, and thus the cultural spec-
ificity of the context of viewing, in favour of the hypothetical masculinized
subject, or implied male spectator.12 This is not the place to rehearse the
numerous responses to and developments of Mulvey’s argument, especially
as many excellent published summaries do just that (Gledhill 1991a, xiii–xx;
Mayne 1998; L. Williams 1994a; Stacey 1998, especially chapter two, ‘From
the Male Gaze to the Female Spectator’, 19–48), but work carried out on the
analysis of responses of actual female audiences to female film stars is es-
pecially relevant to the following discussion.
The role of the Spanish star Emma Penella in both Angelino Fons’s
Fortunata y Jacinta and Gonzalo Suárez’s La Regenta problematizes the
interpretation of these films as patriarchal illustrations of the male gaze.13
Countering the failure to account fully for the role played by certain actors in
12 In a rather unhelpful proliteration of terminology, this opposition has also been

called that between cinematic ‘address’, by which a film ‘positions’ the spectator in an
Althusserian sense, and cinematic ‘reception’, or the empirical study of the practices of
actual audiences influenced by cultural studies (Mayne 1998, 80). Alternatively again it
has been termed the ‘dichotomy of the “textual” versus the “empirical” spectator, or the
“diegetic” versus the “cinematic” spectator’ (Stacey 1998, 23).
13 I call Penella a ‘star’ in the broadest sense of that term as a ‘well-known player [. . .]
assigned to major roles and likely to attract audiences’ (Bordwell and Thompson 2001, 20)
and note that the contemporary press referred to her as such (e.g. Martialay 1970). My
reading of her performance in Fortunata y Jacinta and La Regenta is not intended as a full
star study and empirical evidence regarding actual film-goers’ responses to her is as yet
86 SALLY FAULKNER
the construction of a film’s meaning, star studies have proved a popular field
of film criticism since the publication of Richard Dyer’s Stars in 1979. Femi-
nist critics have contributed to this scholarship by examining the possible
identifications which may occur between female stars and female specta-
tors.14 In the context of Spanish cinema, some initial work has taken place on
female stars of the Francoist era. Labanyi has studied the ways 1940s Spanish
folklóricas encouraged audience identifications with strong female leads
such as Imperio Argentina, who were often cast alongside male characters
played by unknown actors (Labanyi 1997, especially 224–5).15 Similarly, in
Fortunata y Jacinta Penella is cast alongside the unknown Italian actors
Máximo Valverde, who is passable in his role as Juanito, and Bruno
Corazzari, who is simply inadequate, and in La Regenta her co-stars are the
mediocre British actors Keith Baxter and Nigel Davenport. In both films
Penella is clearly the star, and in Fortunata y Jacinta, as in some of the films
Labanyi studies (1997, 225), her name appears first in the credits, even
before the title.
In her work on Ana Mariscal, a popular Spanish star of the 1940s, Susan
Martin-Márquez has suggested that ‘for women spectators of the time’ this
actress perhaps had a ‘uniquely oppositional appeal’ (1999, 86). Similarly,
Peter Evans (1997, 4) has indicated the symbolic resistance to dominant
ideology performed by Amparo Rivelles in Fuenteovejuna (1945). In the
following I will suggest that Penella’s star image as a dynamic, forceful
‘mujer de rompe y rasga’ (Belategui 1999, 1), which is thrown into relief by
her insipid male co-stars, offers the possibility of positive identifications for
female spectators. Owing to a lack of empirical research on contemporary
audiences this point can only, however, be speculative. It seems plausible to
propose nonetheless that Penella’s presence counters the ways Fons’s
Fortunata y Jacinta and Gonzalo Suárez’s La Regenta otherwise encourage
patriarchal readings.
An application of either the theory of the male gaze or the insights of star
studies to television drama is problematic. Mulvey’s account of visual
pleasure is predicated on a psychoanalytic understanding of the processes of
identification which take place once the spectator’s ego is loosened and his
‘voyeuristic phantasy’ (1999, 836) unleashed in the darkened auditorium of
the film theatre. Television, normally consumed in a domestic, family
context, is entirely different. In his comparative work on these two media,
unavailable. Further work on audience reception and the relevance of her off-screen
persona would be immensely valuable.
14 For instance Jackie Stacey’s Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female
Spectatorship (1998).
15 The forthcoming publication of Labanyi et al.’s empirical research on the practice
of cinema-going in the early Franco period, An Oral History of Cinema-Going in 1940s
and 1950s Spain, will contribute considerably to the study of Spanish stars of this period.
John Ellis contrasts cinema’s ‘regime of looking’ (2000, 89) with the ‘glance’
elicited from the television viewer, whose attention is distracted in the dom-
estic context and whose viewing is thus intermittent (2000, 163). Whereas in
the cinema, ‘The spectator is given a position of spectatorship, of voyeurism
[and] the possiblity of seeing events and comprehending them from a position
of separation and of mastery’ (Ellis 2000, 81), there is ‘a lack of a truly
voyeuristic position for the TV viewer. It is not the viewer’s gaze that is
engaged, but his or her glance, a look without power’ (Ellis 2000, 163).
If the avenue for exploring identification in television as a psychic process
is closed, perhaps looser definitions of identification offered by star studies
like ‘sympathising or engaging with a character’ (Stacey 1991, 147) might
have more purchase. We must accept the proviso, however, that television
does not produce ‘stars’ in the same way as film, but rather, as Ellis notes,
‘fosters “personalities” ’ (Ellis 2000, 91).
In the discussions of Mario Camus and Fernando Méndez Leite’s televi-
sion adaptations of Fortunata y Jacinta and La Regenta I therefore suggest an
alternative model for audience identification, the ‘reaction shot’ (Caughie
1990, 54). But in the context of these two works, I also argue that studies of
identification in the cinema are relevant. Literary adaptations on television
like the two examined here are unusual events in broadcasting schedules and,
as noted above, they are especially rare in Spanish television. Camus’s
Fortunata y Jacinta is a case in point. With a budget of one hundred and forty
million pesetas (the average for a film at the time was ten million) it dazzled
audiences with a set and cast of a size never seen before on Spanish television
(Palacio 2002, 528).16 Television adaptations such as this potentially attract
the attentive concentration of the viewer. I suggest therefore that television
viewers may be active and observant, against the received wisdom that televi-
sion watching is passive (Morley 1991, 16).17 Moreover, as they are
high-profile productions, cinema stars play key roles in such literary adapta-
tions. As it would be in a film, the selection of Carmelo Gómez as the
Magistral in Méndez Leite’s La Regenta is significant, although neither Ana
Belén, who plays Fortunata in Camus’s Fortunata y Jacinta, nor Aitana
Sánchez-Gijón, who portrays Ana in La Regenta, contribute to the series in
such radical ways as Penella does in the two films. In what follows, while I
16 Tele Radio reported details of its twenty thousand square metres set, thirty-one
main actors, one hundred supporting players and three thousand five hundred extras
(quoted in Palacio 2002, 528).
17 Furthermore, society has coded this passive television viewer as feminine (Seiter et
al. 1991, 1; for a summary of feminist responses to this assumption, see Stacey 1998,
37–9). This is an interesting echo of the way an intelligentsia suspicious of the mass read-
ership commanded by newspapers in the early twentieth century also coded such readers
as feminine (Carey 1992, 8).
88 SALLY FAULKNER
attend to the specificities of television as a distinct medium, some of the

insights of film scholarship regarding gender and spectatorship are applied.
The suggestion of the title of this chapter that adapting a novel to the
screen is akin to ‘re-vising’ that novel is an allusion to Adrienne Rich’s
well-known affirmation that ‘Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing
with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for
women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival’ (1980,
35).18 By exploring the extent to which these screen versions repeat or rework
the discourse of the ángel del hogar through their depiction of imagery and
space, and the extent to which they reproduce or resist dominant viewing
practices, this chapter will show that the film and television adaptations of
Galdós and Alas’s canonical texts may also perform Rich’s act of re-vision.
CLIPPED WINGS:
FILM AND TELEVISION ADAPTATIONS OF FORTUNATA Y JACINTA
The challenge of adapting Galdós’s masterpiece was first undertaken by

Fons in 1969, whose Fortunata y Jacinta (released 1970) became the most
commercially successful film of the Nuevo Cine Español, grossing over
twenty-one million pesetas (Caparrós Lera 1983, 235–6). While contempo-
rary reviews responded positively to the piece, heralding it as ‘quality’
cinema, and offered benign praise of its fidelity to the source, later critics use
precisely the issue of infidelity to lambast it.19 Camus’s television version of
the novel, broadcast in 1980, enjoyed a ‘popularidad insospechada’ as both
television programme and video (López-Baralt 1992–93, 95);20 and is said to
have made the career of Ana Belén, who portrays Fortunata (J. López 1993,
35). It has been largely ignored by later critics, and is indeed omitted from
José Luis Sánchez Noriega’s 1998 monograph on the director (1998; his
earlier Cine en Cantabria: las películas de Mario Camus y los rodajes en
Comillas does include it in its list of items shot in Comillas).
The parallels between the prose of this novelist – who sketched cartoons of
his characters before writing about them – and contemporary visual arts, has
been previously investigated (Bly 1986); it has also been suggested that
Galdós’s prose prefigured cinematic technique (Madariaga de la Campa
18 Rich’s quotation inspired the title of a collection of essays on feminist film criti-
cism, whose introduction uses the sentence cited here as its epigraph (Doane, Mellencamp
and Williams, 1984a, 1).
19 For contemporary reception see Martialay 1970; Cebollada 1970. For later hostile
criticism, see López-Baralt 1992–93, 94; Torreiro 1995a, 364.
20 That success was indeed surprising given the industrial context of production. TVE
had no fewer than eight directors in the period 1975–82, when national television was
subjected to political pressure during the turbulence of the transition (Barroso and
Tranche 1996).
1989), though the flimsy argument that detailed description is equivalent to a

panning shot could be applied to any realist novelist. Mercedes López-
Baralt’s article (1992–93) remains the only consideration of the relations
between Fortunata y Jacinta and the moving picture. Locating these adapta-
tions in the framework of feminist theory allows us to add to López-Baralt’s
introduction.
FORTUNATA Y JACINTA (FONS 1970)
Fons’s adaptation of 1970 must first be considered in relation to its indus-

trial and socio-political contexts. His film was not only commercially profit-
able, but, along with Buñuel’s Tristana, also launched the 1970s sub-genre of
cinematic adaptations of nineteenth-century texts.21 These literary adapta-
tions constituted one of many attempts to form a commercial Spanish cinema
in the period. Faced with North-American industrial hegemony, competition
from television, an ultraconservative head of Cinematography (Enrique
Thomas de Carranza, 1969–74) and a series of debilitating political measures
between 1970 and 1971 – all catalysed by the state’s unpaid debt of two
hundred and thirty million pesetas to Spanish producers – the industry under-
went one of its most severe crises from 1969–77 (Torreiro 1995a, 346–8).
Commissioning the direction of commercially orientated films to film-
makers of the avant-garde Nuevo Cine Español in this period can now be seen
as typical of the future fate of the dissident director, seen to be compromising
principle in order to survive in the competitive film industry of democratic
Spain. Such was the experience of Fons, contracted by producer Emiliano
Piedra who astutely predicted the commercial potential of a Fortunata y
Jacinta film after the success of a recent play version by Ricardo López
Aranda. In these films the role of the producer is paramount, and Luis
Quesada affirms that Fortunata y Jacinta might be termed ‘una película de
productor más que de autor’ (1986, 87). Not only was Piedra’s wife Emma
Penella cast in the star role, but the literary adaptation film was the hallmark
of Piedra’s cinema (he had worked on Orson Welles’s unfinished version of
Don Quijote, had also produced Welles’s Campanadas a medianoche [1965]
which was based on a number of Shakespearean plays, and would go on to
produce La Regenta, discussed below, and the 1992 television adaptation of
Cervantes’s classic). Further, Galdós’s Madrid masterpiece must have been
especially attractive to a man the Espasa dictionary of Spanish cinema
describes as ‘madrileño por los cuatro costados’ (Torres 1994, 376)!
Besides changes in the film industry, these film adaptations of progressive
21 Pedro Mario Herrero’s ¡Adiós, Cordera! (1966) predated it, but was not successful.
It is not even listed in Román Gubern et al.’s Historia del cine español (1995).
90 SALLY FAULKNER
nineteenth-century novelists also reveal the cultural politics of Franco’s

regime. The fate of Galdós’s œuvre on screen is exemplary. Following three
adaptations of his work prior to the Civil War, only one novel was adapted
during the dictatorship (Marianela, Benito Perojo 1940; Nazarín was
produced in Mexico [1958]) owing to what Quesada terms the ‘recelo con
que se consideró por parte de la España oficial, desde 1939, a Galdós’ (1986,
82). Alongside commercial concerns, and the fact that 1970 was the
fifty-year anniversary of Galdós’s death, the rash of adaptations of the
novelas contemporáneas which followed Fortunata y Jacinta in the 1970s
may be interpreted as an expression of the gradual liberalization of the
regime.22 As Francisco Aranda notes, by 1970 ‘[Galdós] was beginning to be
officially praised. His work, till recently considered dangerous, was now
acceptable with the “new look” the Government wanted to give to their future
activities’ (1971, 6).
Previously, the regime had promoted Galdós’s historical novels for
patriotic reasons, but rejected his early and later work for its anticlericalism
(Labanyi 1993a, 57). Additionally, the ambivalent attitude to womanhood
revealed in those works hardly married with the ideal of femininity advo-
cated by such bodies as the Sección Femenina. The parallels between the
nineteenth-century ángel del hogar and the regime’s promotion of an “ideal”
image of womanhood as “eternal”, passive, pious, pure, submissive woman-
as-mother for whom self-denial was the only road to real fulfilment’ (Graham
1995, 184) are unsurprising given the anachronism of Francoism as a whole.
As Carmen Martín Gaite notes in her survey of gender roles under the
regime, the women’s education programme advocated by the Sección
Femenina ‘no distaba sustancialmente del baño de “cultura general” [. . .] de
las burguesitas casaderas del siglo XIX retratadas por Galdós o Pérez Lugín’
(1998, 59). Moreover, the reinstatement of the Civil Code of 1889 (by which
women were considered minors in the law) constituted a legal return to the
period when the angel ideology was in its heyday (Graham 1995, 184).
Galdós’s revelation in Fortunata y Jacinta that the ideological reverence of
the sexless bourgeois angel was co-dependent on her lustful proletarian sister,
which therefore exposed the contradictions of the cult of the former, seems
particularly poignant in a society in which brothels were legal until 1956, and
22 Consider: Tristana (Pérez Galdós 1892; Buñuel 1970); Marianela (Pérez Galdós
1878; Fons 1972); La duda (based on El abuelo, Pérez Galdós 1897; Gil 1972); Tormento
(Pérez Galdós 1884; Olea 1974); Doña Perfecta (Pérez Galdós 1876; Fernández Ardavín
1977). Note also: Alas’s ¡Adiós, Cordera! (Alas 1893; Herrero 1966) and La Regenta
(Alas 1884–85; Gonzalo Suárez 1974); and Valera’s Pepita Jiménez (Valera 1874; Moreno
Alba 1975). These film adaptations might be considered alongside information on publi-
cations of those novels. That La Regenta was re-published in 1966 ‘tras décadas de
ostracismo y prohibición’ and that a new edition of Fortunata y Jacinta appeared in 1969
(Sánchez Salas 2002, 198 and 199), for instance, indicate the same liberalizing impulses.
their prohibition was never enforced (Hooper 1995, 166). We might consider
Galdós’s text therefore in the light of Helen Graham’s observation that in
authoritarian Spain ‘the highest price [. . .] was paid by the thousands of
women who experienced in their own lives the most acute contradictions
between state ideology/policy and the material reality of autarkic Spain’
(1995, 191). The potential for Fons to relate Fortunata y Jacinta to the
eroding ideology of femininity, and evolving sexual mores of late Francoism,
was great.
Animality and Spirituality: Iconographical Resources

Mercedes López-Baralt asserts that the symbolic register of Fons’s adapta-
tion, in particular the imagery of birds and meat, is the film’s most successful
element (1992–93, 94). An interpretation of these symbolic codes is essential
in order to appreciate Fons’s representation of femininity. Feminist film
critics have expressed concern that ‘In film even the most blatant stereotype
is naturalized by a medium that presents a convincing illusion of a flesh and
blood woman. [. . .] For the cinematic sign [. . .] is primarily iconic and
indexical, while the literary sign is primarily symbolic’ (Doane, Mellencamp
and Williams 1984a, 6). Close reading of the iconography of animality and
spirituality in the adaptation of Fortunata y Jacinta allows us to dispel the
mimetic illusion of cinema and reveal Fons’s construction of character.
With what López-Baralt finds to be surprising astuteness, the director
echoes Galdós’s ornithological characterization of Fortunata, by introducing
her in a room above a poultry shop. The scene, to be discussed in further
detail below, magnificently conveys the novelist’s description of the
prójima’s reaction to Juanito:
En el momento de ver al Delfín, se infló con él, quiero decir, hizo ese
característico arqueo de brazos y alzamiento de hombros con que las
madrileñas del pueblo se agasajan dentro del mantón, movimiento que les
da cierta semejanza con una gallina que esponja su plumaje y se ahueca
para volver luego a su volumen natural. (Pérez Galdós 1994–95, I, 182)
The analogy is reiterated by Fons’s addition of a sequence in which Fortunata

sleeps with Juanito on the feathers of her aunt’s poultry stall, a dead bird
hanging beside them. Neither is Fons hesitant in reinforcing Galdós’s exploi-
tation of the polysemy of pájara as both bird and ‘mujer de malas
costumbres’ (as defined in Moliner 1998, II, 537). While the novelist has
Estupiñá describe Fortunata and her friend as ‘un par de reses muy bravas’
(Pérez Galdós 1994–95, I, 189), Fons adds a scene in which Barbarita and her
servant spy on Fortunata working at a meat stall in the market in order to
extend the word play on the purchase of ‘carnes’.
This portrayal of Fortunata as a bird/prostitute is even more entrenched in
92 SALLY FAULKNER
the film’s symbolic code than López-Baralt suggests. For example, when
Jacinta confronts her husband regarding his relations with Fortunata, she
does so by showing him a box of feathers she has picked off his clothes, figu-
ratively reducing Fortunata to the metonym of a feather. This detail is not
present in the novel – although Galdós’s Jacinta does hoard incriminating
hairs and buttons later (Pérez Galdós 1994–95, II, 58–9). While her links
with the poultry shop are diegetic ones, Fons’s addition of Fortunata’s further
association with doves is a romantic gesture, bringing with it inappropriate
connotations. For example, Fortunata and Juanito first meet in a dovecot to
the sound of cooing birds – in Galdós’s original it is merely a room on the
first floor (1994–95, I, 182) – a clichéd locus amoenus which unfortunately
recalls the romantic literature that Galdós was in fact parodying (Rodgers
1987, 136).
In another oversight, Fons misses the opportunity of contrasting
Fortunata’s birdlike wings with Jacinta’s angelic ones. The absence of
Jacinta’s characterization as an angel is particularly conspicuous as, along-
side the ave/carne symbolism discussed, Fons also manipulates Christian and
classical iconography. While Galdós highlights the parallel between Juanito
and Christ, the emphasis on this imagery and its counterpoising with pagan
models are original to Fons. The introduction of this visual vocabulary is
furthermore entirely appropriate to the medium of film. Following a credit
sequence consisting of various shots of a faded cover of the novel, the film
proper opens with an extreme close-up of a model of the baby Jesus, then
pans over other icons of the nativity scene, of the type Almodóvar would
famously parody a decade later, in continued extreme close-up. The camera
finally rests on another model of the infant Christ, which Estupiñá caresses
shortly before he is apprised of the birth of the Santa Cruz heir.23 This icono-
graphical code is of such importance in the film that while we see the biblical
family in extreme close-up in this sequence, the real family is virtually
absent. In a carefully composed shot, Fons uses depth of field to contrast
Estupiña holding the infant Christ model in the foreground with Baldomero
holding his new-born son Juanito in the background. The parallel alluded to
between these two nativity scenes thus clearly associates the Santa Cruzs
with the Holy Family and Juanito with the Messiah, a point which is rein-
forced by a subsequent pan from Juanito as a child to a model of the child
Christ. His passage to adulthood is then conveyed by a fade from the child to
an adult Jesus, then a corresponding pan to an adult Juanito.
Aside from the ludic blasphemy of comparing Juanito, a useless philan-
derer, to God’s only son, attributable to both Galdós and Fons, this symbolic
23 This is an addition to the novel. Although Galdós describes the Santa Cruzs’ antici-
pation of their son’s arrival as ‘deseándole como los judíos a Mesías’, he is born in
September not at Christmas (1994–95, I, 142).
code is particularly significant when considered alongside the classical

iconography associated with Fortunata, which is original to Fons. This is first
introduced when Emma Penella’s Fortunata is juxtaposed with a glimpsed
statue of a female nude in Villalonga’s art studio, then a painting of one, and
becomes particularly clear when Fons’s camera pans from a painting of a
classical nude (which bears a resemblance to Bacchus, the Roman god asso-
ciated with sensual indulgence) to Juanito and Fortunata in bed. Of course,
juxtaposing love scenes with classical images was one way of conveying
physical congress while getting round the censor. But when even the impo-
tent Maximiliano’s first meeting with Fortunata is preceded by a point of
view shot in which he gazes at a painting of another classical goddess
hanging from the ceiling of his pharmacy, Fortunata’s consistent association
with pagan art is rather more symbolic. Her relationship with Juanito falls
outside holy matrimony and her characterization as a whole is conveyed as
irreligious. Unlike her bourgeois sisters, for whom, Tony Tanner writes, adul-
tery was ‘an activity not an identity’ (1979, 12), through symbolism Fons
points out – as feminist critics would subsequently (Charnon-Deutsch 1990,
159) – that for this proletarian heroine, adultery governs her entire existence.
The symbolic resources of the film portray Fortunata as a wild, impas-
sioned and godless creature. Importantly, this iconographical code remains
unchanged, thus the introduction of Fortunata in a poultry shop replete with
images of birds, meat, slaughter and fertility (eggs and a baby’s cries) exactly
matches her death in that same place after giving birth to the Santa Cruz heir.
The subtext of a feminist bildungsroman which critics such as Jagoe have
perceived in this and other Galdosian texts is therefore apparently erased
(1994, chapter four). In the filmmaker’s hands, it would seem, Galdós’s novel
becomes a didactic tale, in which Fortunata joins the ranks of the literary
women whose beauty in death is presented for the admiration of a male
onlooker (Bronfen 1993), and the nineteenth-century heroines who are
symbolically punished – by arsenic, by the wheels of a train, by a post-natal
haemorrhage – for their transgression.
The Male Gaze and the Female Star

While the significance of the iconographical resources of the film there-
fore seems clear, Fortunata y Jacinta is perhaps more ambiguous with respect
to audience identification. In the opening sequence of the twin nativity scenes
already discussed the symbolic register of the film inscribed is evident, but
the establishment of perspective is equivocal. After the extreme close-ups of
the nativity models, this opening sequence is shot in two long takes. As these
are unusual in mainstream cinema, they draw our attention to the perspective
of the camera. On the one hand, we might argue that childbirth is presented
from a male point of view, as the camera waits outside the delivery room with
Estupiñá. On the other, it could be said that a respectful distance is main-
94 SALLY FAULKNER
tained. Alternatively again, we might call this a critical distance, rendering us

unable to identify with any character.
The scene of Juanito’s introduction to Fortunata seems less ambiguous
however and apparently illustrates the thesis of a masculinized spectator of
the film. The comparison between the novel and the film’s introduction of
Fortunata is revealing. In the quotation cited above, the novel’s narrator
describes Fortunata puffing herself up like a bird when the couple first see
each other (Pérez Galdós 1994–95, I, 182). However the narrator points out
that while Juanito spies on Fortunata (‘miró hacia dentro’), she spies on him
too: ‘Parecía estar en acecho, movida de una curiosidad semejante a la de
Santa Cruz, deseando saber quién demonios subía a tales horas por aquella
endiablada escalera’ (Pérez Galdós 1994–95, I, 182). It is thus unclear who is
spying on whom. The ambiguity is reinforced by the setting of this sequence
in an ‘entresuelo’ (Pérez Galdós 1994–95, I, 182), which we might literally
understand as a flat between the ground and first floors, but figuratively
interpret as dress circle. The question of who is in the dress circle looking,
and who is on-stage being looked at, is left open.
Fons does not replicate this ambiguity, however, and thus follows Galdós’s
references to Juanito spying on Fortunata, and ignores those to Fortunata
spying back at Juanito. In the adaptation Juanito is active: he controls narra-
tive movement by approaching Fortunata as he climbs the stairs, and is
presented as the subject who looks. Fortunata, conversely, is passive, both
physically stationary in the dovecot and at first oblivious to Juanito’s prying
gaze: she is presented as the object who is looked at. As such she takes on the
role of woman as spectacle, which Laura Mulvey describes as tending ‘to
work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in
moments of erotic contemplation’ (1999, 837). But here, as in the classic
Hollywood films Mulvey analyses, this instance of narrative arrest is sewn
into the text by our identification with Juanito, the male viewing subject, thus
‘the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are
neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude’ (1999, 838).
Further, Fons’s Juanito gazes from the shadows of the doorway, whereas
Fortunata is bathed in a shaft of light, which recalls Galdós’s allusion to the
dress circle but makes it clear that the male character is off-stage looking and
the female on-stage being looked at.
This interpretation of the introduction of Fortunata as a male fantasy of
scopophilic mastery is reinforced if we consider the sequence in the light of
Bruce Kawin’s analysis of cinematic subjectivity in Mindscreen (1978).
While Kawin’s main interest is the radical subjectivity of avant-garde cinema,
which will be discussed with respect to Buñuel’s work in the following
chapter, his concept of the ‘mindscreen’ might be profitably applied here. He
draws a useful distinction between explicit subjective shots, or point of view
shots, which invite the viewer to share the character’s ‘eyes’, and implicit
subjective shots, which invite us to adopt their ‘perspective, [. . .] emphases’
or ‘mindscreen’ (Kawin 1978, 190). Fons’s introduction of Fortunata begins

with the adoption of Juanito’s point of view. After Fortunata leaves him to
answer a call from her aunt, spellbound, Juanito returns to the room in which
he has just met her. The door swings open on its own accord, like a magic
box, and a fantastical space unfolds before him. The scene is bathed in white
light, the doves coo and a snow-white bird hovers flapping its wings in
precisely the spot he first saw Fortunata. Then, again magically, the door
swings shut, closing this fantasy world. Given the sexual associations of the
pájara and the dovecot discussed above, this scene might be interpreted as
Juanito’s mindscreen, reinforcing our identification with him which has
already been established by the point of view shots.
Fortunata is symbolically objectified by the camera on further occasions
in the narrative. Juanito and Jacinto significantly gaze down on her in the
music hall when she has returned from Paris (in the same way as Ana Ozores
is also depicted in La Regenta, both verbally and visually) and Maximiliano’s
first sighting of her is analogous to Juanito’s introduction discussed. What
might be termed the patriarchal nature of the film also extends to most of the
aural field. Fons not only makes excessive recourse to voice-over – a non-
cinematic mode of narration – presumably in a doomed attempt to condense
this vast novel, but the speaking narrative voice is male. As Mary Ann Doane
(1980) and Kaja Silverman (1988) have shown, ‘disembodied voice-overs are
usually exclusively male, and the female voice is usually synchronized with
the image so that it can remain closely identified with (and thereby subor-
dinate to) the spectacle of the female body’ (summarized in Kinder 1993,
331). Of particular interest here is the sequence concerning Jacinta’s ‘Pitusín
affair’, which is recounted in voice-over in its entirety. This drama of the
barren woman is not only portrayed without any visual communication of
Jacinta’s point of view through cinematography, but she seems visually to
perform her entrapment in a female body, which is paternally explained by
the male voice-over narrator.
However the difference between Fons’s portrayals of Jacinta and Fortunata
is telling, and throws into question the contention that the film is a patriarchal
reading of the novel. Bourgeois Jacinta, played by mediocre Italian actress
Liana Orfei since the film is a Spanish-Italian co-production, is characterized
as smug and sanctimonious, which is not the case in the novel, whereas
working-class Fortunata, portrayed the Spanish star and Madrid-born
Penella, is, as in the novel, unaffected and plucky. In other words Jacinta, the
conduit for the ideology of the ángel del hogar – and by extension that of the
Francoist Sección Femenina – is insipid, whereas Fortunata, who challenges
that ideology, is strong.
Penella’s performance in this role reinforces the strength and resilience of
her fictional character. Diego Galán, in his monograph on her husband, the
producer Emiliano Piedra, reports that Piedra, director Fons and scriptwriter
Alfredo Mañas were united in their determination that Penella should play
96 SALLY FAULKNER
the part, and despite an interval of four years from acting owing to marriage
and childbirth (a break, Galán reports, she accepted ‘seguramente [. . .] con
alegría’ [1990, 53]), Penella enthusiastically took on the part. This was to be
the role of her career, and Galán quotes her comment (which is unfortunately
undated) that ‘Si Dios me dijera qué película querría hacer otra vez, no hay
duda: Fortunata’ (Penella quoted in Galán 1990, 55).24
It is telling that Penella conflates the title of the film with the name of her
own character here, and without doubt she carries the picture. This creates a
number of tensions in the film, of the type that have been analysed so fruit-
fully in ‘against the grain’ feminist criticism. One such tension is the oppo-
sition between cinematography and her star presence. Even when point of
view shots, like the one examined in detail of Juanito’s first sighting of her,
apparently control and objectify her character, Penella’s own defiant look,
physical gestures and bearing seem to allow her to break free of the control-
ling cinematic frame. Galán recounts that the actress’s stoutness and propen-
sity to gain weight were a source of anguish to her (1990, 51), and that her
deep, throaty voice was often dubbed (1990, 56). But in this film Penella’s
figure reinforces the robustness of her character, as does her voice which was
not dubbed in this film.
Another tension in the film is that between the supposedly male gaze
encouraged by cinematography and the plot. There are two notable juxtaposi-
tions which augment our sympathy for Penella’s Fortunata. Firstly, when
Juanito promises Fortunata they will live together, Fons slyly cuts to an image
of the philanderer’s wedding to Jacinta. Secondly, an image of the then aban-
doned pregnant Fortunata is juxtaposed with that of Guillermina’s orphans,
indicating the heroine’s own parentlessness and the possible future fate of her
bastard child.
The resistance to gender ideology embodied by Penella’s Fortunata culmi-
nates towards the end of the film in Fons’s depiction of her visit to the bour-
geois busybody, Guillermina. Fortunata’s forceful attack on the restrictive
ideology which bars her contact with Juanito, the father of her children, is a
rousing repudiation of the kind of comportment advocated by the Sección
Femenina. Her blunt response to Guillermina’s accusation that she is
breaking ‘todas las leyes divinas y humanas’, is ‘para usted es fácil pensar así
. . . como es santa . . . pero yo soy de este mundo. [. . .] Para mi sólo hay una
ley: querer a quien se quiere no puede ser cosa mala’. This rejection of bour-
geois hypocrisy is particularly convincing, not least due to Penella’s forceful
performance.
The argument that Fons’s adaptation pulls against itself in contradictory
directions is again suggested by the ending of the film. Fortunata, at times
24 It is noteworthy that Penella has thus far not received attention as an individual
artist, but has rather been described in a chapter called ‘Emma’ in a book on her husband
(Galán 1990).
almost a proto-feminist heroine, is strangely tamed by the end of the picture.

A comparison with the novel is particularly revealing in this respect. Galdós’s
protagonist dies declaring ‘soy ángel . . . yo también’ (1994–95, II, 528),
which Catherine Jagoe argues is a ‘radical redefinition’ of the ideology of the
ángel del hogar which has been challenged throughout the novel (1994, 119).
Alfredo Mañas’s script25 replaces these words, however, with an incongruous
reconfirmation of the dominant gender ideology from the lips of Fortunata.
‘Yo soy la verdadera mujer del Delfín . . . pero muerta yo, Jacinta será su
mujer y tú su hijo’, Penella’s moribund Fortunata whispers to her newborn
child, in resigned recognition that her death will put the world (read: bour-
geois, patriarchal order) to rights.
Perhaps this defeatist ending, along with the construction of a male gaze
and the film’s static symbolic code, ultimately temper the challenge Penella’s
Fortunata poses to dominant gender ideology. At times a disturbing misogy-
nous undercurrent even surfaces in the film. For instance Fons includes a
minute-long sequence in which one of Fortunata’s lovers brutally castigates
her for her infidelity with Juanito. These sustained images of a man’s phys-
ical violence to a woman in a mainstream, commercial movie might now be
uncomfortable for audiences. Nonetheless it seems plausible to speculate that
Penella’s Fortunata offered the possibility of positive identification to
contemporary female audiences. Galdós’s novel Fortunata y Jacinta may
initially support a patriarchal reading, but finally resists it through its decons-
truction of the ángel del hogar and pájara imagery and the irony surrounding
its bourgeois narrator. Similarly Fons’s adaptation could be interpreted as
reconfirming patriarchal ideology and titillating a masculinized voyeuristic
gaze, but Penella’s performance, and occasionally plot, problematize this
interpretation. The contradiction is ultimately embodied by Penella herself as
a female star, who is simultaneously a postitive figure of identification as a
strong independent character and a focus of visual pleasure to the male
gaze.26
FORTUNATA Y JACINTA (CAMUS 1980)
It has been some seventy years since Marxists of the Frankfurt school
condemned mass culture as conservative and reconciliatory, compared to ‘art’
which could uniquely convey such nebulous qualities as negation and tran-
scendence (David Morley quoted in Kaplan 1983a, xii). Yet theorists as
25 The film credits Ricardo López Aranda, author of the play version of Fortunata y
Jacinta discussed above, and Fons for the script also, but following Galán (1990, 53), I
take Mañas to be the principal writer.
26 This concept of contradiction follows that outlined by Christine Gledhill in her
introduction (1991a, xv) to Stardom: Industry of Desire.
98 SALLY FAULKNER
different as Raymond Williams and Jean Baudrillard echo this criticism with
respect to television, describing it as non-discriminatory ‘flow’ which unifies
discrete items (R. Williams 1990), or a medium ‘delivering its images indif-
ferently, indifferent to its own message’ (Baudrillard quoted in Giles 1993,
70). Such criticism has been subsequently challenged for relating exclusively
to North-American practice (John Caughie quoted in Giles 1993, 70), but
continues to colour views of the medium. Television scholarship has thus
confronted the same kind of institutional ‘fetishization’ which characterized
the birth of film studies – the supposed superiority of literature over film
which still frames some approaches to adaptation, as discussed in chapter
one. Television is still considered ‘the movies’ poor relation’ (‘A very British
stew’ 2000), ‘journalism’ to its ‘literature’ (Mamoun Hassan quoted in Giles
1993, 79).
However, critics have begun to address the academic neglect of a medium
which is today, as Paul Giles has argued with respect to British television,
‘the focal point of social narratives and popular memory’ (1993, 72). Formal
analyses of television are pertinent to our discussion of Camus’s adaptation
and point towards the propensity of this medium for the adaptation of the
nineteenth-century novel. A matter as simple as length (Fons’s one and a
half-hour film compared to the ten, hour-length chapters of Camus’s series)
indicates that television is far more suited to convey the Balzacian broad
sweep of these novels. Furthermore, as John Ellis has pointed out in his
comparison of the aesthetics of cinema and television fiction, television is
‘orientated towards the repetition of a basic dilemma’ unlike film which aims
for ‘the resolution of an onward narrative movement’ (2000, 170). This
constantly arrested nature of television narrative, or the viewing experience
as what Fernando Lara calls ‘emoción interrumpida’ (1995), suggests that
television might better communicate the lengthy intricacies of the nineteenth-
century novel.
Produced and broadcast during the upheaval of the transition, the histor-
ical parallels between the political uncertainties of Galdós’s 1870s and
Camus’s 1970s are clear. The student riots with which the director
commences the first chapter of his ten-part series would have been particu-
larly relevant to the television audiences of a country only recently emerging
from dictatorship.27 More disturbing perhaps would have been Camus’s
27 Such scenes also document the abolition of censorship in 1977. Only eight years
previously similar scenes were cut from Fons’s adaptation. David Sánchez Salas has spec-
ulated that they were censored because of current legal proceedings against Emilio
Castelar (2002, 200). The fact that from the 1960s until Franco’s death the major Spanish
cities frequently witnessed often violently-repressed student rioting, culminating in the
abolition of the student union in 1965 and reaching an ‘unprecendented level of activity’ in
1968 (Grugel and Rees 1997, 92), was surely also relevant. Juan Antonio Bardem did
manage to include images of student riots in his Muerte de un ciclista (1955), though they
were greatly reduced in number by the censors (R. Stone 2002, 49).
portrayal of the precarious politics of Galdós’s Spain – shifting from

monarchy to republic with the flippancy with which Juanito flits between
wife and mistress – at a time when the country’s inchoate democracy seemed
constantly threatened, and was threatened in a very real way by the Tejerazo
of 1981.
Tremendously successful with audiences, the adaptation also seems to be a
kind of template for Spanish television series in general. Hugh O’Donnell
has observed that ‘a striking feature of the Spanish telenovelas and soaps
taken as a whole is the frequency with which the theme of inheritance
appears’ (2000, 302). Camus’s Fortunata y Jacinta not only takes the ques-
tion of inheritance as one of its themes, as it ends with working-class
Fortunata’s relinquishment of her bastard child (symbol of a new Spain?) to
bourgeois Jacinta. Broadcast at a time when Spain hovered between its auth-
oritarian past and democratic future (to use the well-worn trope of the ‘two
Spains’) it furthermore dramatizes the question of historical legacy by
turning back to Galdós’s nineteenth-century classic. Although he does not
mention Fortunata y Jacinta, O’Donnell’s more detailed description of
Spanish telenovelas is therefore particularly pertinent to Camus’s 1980
series:
Constant clashes over the link between past and present, and the competing
sets of values which swirl around them, are best seen as a narrative enact-
ment of the struggle of Spain’s younger generations to demand their rights
to a modern and participatory society from a dictatorial and self-seeking
past. (2000, 302–3)
This clash between ‘past and present’, which characterizes both the transi-
tion period, and, according to O’Donnell, the telenovela generally, is chan-
nelled through the portrayal of femininity in Fortunata y Jacinta. Much of the
background to Fons’s film elucidated above is equally relevant here, although
we might note also that the rapid and surprisingly smooth shift from patriar-
chal to egalitarian society – as rapid and surprisingly smooth as all the
changes of the transition – led to what Anny Brooksbank Jones has labelled a
‘value disorientation’ (1995, 390) with respect to femininity and the family. It
is this type of disorientation that Galdós had already explored in Fortunata y
Jacinta in the context of the nineteenth-century ‘woman question’, and which
Camus successfully echoes in his television series in the context of the
transition.
That the series was produced when Spain was poised between past and
future is conveyed by Camus’s casting, which efficaciously complements
Galdós’s original text. Veteran figures such as Fernando Fernán Gómez and
Francisco Rabal, emblematic of the left-wing dissident tradition, rub shoul-
ders with artists who were to become symbols of a modern Spain like Ana
Belén and Charo López. Belén in particular, who portrays the lusty prole-
100 SALLY FAULKNER
tarian Fortunata in a felicitous echo of her role as Amparo, the rebellious

heroine in Pedro Olea’s 1974 adaptation of Galdós’s Tormento, also alongside
Rabal, was to become the archetypal progre of a new Spain.
Birds and Angels

With respect to the winged imagery associated with the ángel del hogar,
Mercedes López-Baralt contrasts Fons’s reiteration of Galdós’s ave/carne
imagery with Camus’s neglect of it (1992–93, 94). It is sometimes difficult
for the viewer to make certain connections, for example the link between the
introduction to Juanito frying eggs in the back of the hall during a lecture,
and the introduction to Fortunata sucking a raw one in Camus’s chapter
one.28 But although the director’s exploitation of this imagery is more
sparing, it is equally revealing. After our introduction to Jacinta, for example,
the camera cuts to images of caged birds, after which Fortunata enters the
narrative sucking eggs in the poultry shop. This may be immediately under-
stood as distinct from Fons’s use of bird imagery merely to emphasize
Fortunata’s characterization as a pájara. Jacinta’s ‘clipped’ wings –
especially considered in the light of recent feminist scholarship – are an
evocative metaphor for the curtailment of her freedom as a bourgeois ángel
del hogar, who was charged, as a superior moral being, with the ‘civilization’
of her husband, and simultaneously denied desire. In fact this early image
signals Camus’s interest in Jacinta as well as Fortunata’s plight which is
lacking in Fons’s version. In the light of the above sequence alone, Fortunata
as a pájara compares favourably with Jacinta as an ángel. Finally, Fortunata
and Jacinta’s association through this bird symbolism prefigures the bond
which develops between the two women, to be discussed below.
The feminist association of the caged bird and the wifely angel recurs after
Fortunata’s reconciliation with her husband in Camus’s chapter eight. Camus
adds a sequence of Francisco Asenjo Barbieri’s El barberillo de Lavapiés,
first performed in 1874 and not present in Galdós’s text, in part to offer some
musical interlude, as does Fons with the inclusion of Antonio Gades’s
flamenco sequence, and in part in a costumbrista gesture to recreate
nineteenth-century Madrid. But unlike Gades’s Caracoles, Barbieri’s
zarzuela is charged with symbolic meaning. For Fortunata, recently resolved
to become her husband’s domestic angel, the song featured, ‘Coser y Cantar’,
is particularly pertinent. Furthermore the song is actually sung to a caged bird
on-stage: the synonymity of angelicness and entrapment could not be clearer.
28 On the significance of this imagery in the novel, see Labanyi 1988.

The Doorway and the Stairwell: Fortunata and Liminality

Unlike Fons, Camus also interrogates the ideology of the ángel del hogar
through the symbolization of space. The association of Fortunata with liminal
spaces is present in the novel, but this becomes a leitmotif in Camus’s
television series. Fortunata resists the sharp division of space associated with
nineteenth-century bourgeois patriarchy, which found its supreme symbol in
the housebound domestic angel. Rather than a romanticized dovecot, or an
‘entresuelo’, Camus introduces his Fortunata in a stairwell. On the one hand,
this may be understood as a reference to the convention that figures rising or
descending staircases were often used to represent the approach of adulthood
or descent to senility in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century iconography
(Charnon-Deutsch 1994, 75). Thus Juanito’s experience with Fortunata is
presented as one stage in his personal trajectory towards maturity. On the
other, this first meeting halfway up the stairway introduces a symbolic
register which is significant throughout the series.
Although Maximiliano meets Fortunata in a doorway, here Camus follows
Galdós’s text, like Juanito he propositions her in a stairwell, a departure from
the text. After their first meeting in the doorway of Feliciana’s flat which is
situated halfway up a staircase, it is significant that Camus chooses a flat at
the top of that staircase for Maximiliano to install Fortunata as his kept
woman. In Galdós’s novel the whereabouts of the room is not given, just that
it was ‘un cuarto que estaba desalquilado en la misma casa’ (1994–95, I,
480). Although this may slyly indicate a culmination of his manhood
according to the stairway/adulthood metaphor outlined above, Fortunata’s
residence in an attic flat both reinforces her status as a liminal creature and
shows Camus’s sensitivity to the traditional association of the attic and
transgressive literary women (Gilbert and Gubar 1980), thus playfully under-
mining Maximiliano’s Pygmalion project to mould Fortunata into a ‘decent’
bourgeois wife.
While Fortunata is introduced in the stairwell, the viewer’s first image of
Jacinta, not to be found in the text, is of her safely inside the doors (closed by
Barbarita) of her family home and laundry room, cheerfully attending to
domestic labour with a green ribbon, symbolizing innocence, in her hair.
Thus Barbarita finds her: the ideal domestic angel to civilize her son.
Jacinta’s fate is conveyed by this thoughtful way in which Camus introduces
her to the viewer. Literally, Barbarita closes the doors of the laundry room,
but figuratively she both categorizes Jacinta as an ángel del hogar and
entraps her as a caged bird.
Fortunata, in contrast, resists such angelic confinement, just as she later
resists confinement by the marriage bond, and ultimately resists any simplistic
categorization. Camus’s visualization of Fortunata’s first adulterous tempta-
tion deserves particular examination in this regard. Consider the following
description of the five-minute sequence, which I transcribe below:
102 SALLY FAULKNER
1. City street, night-time.

A long take of the newlyweds walking home. Fortunata turns to look at a
man in the shadows on the other side of the street.
Fortunata’s point of view shot of the man, whom she realizes is Juanito.
The series theme music begins.
Cut back to the couple.
Cut to another point of view shot of Juanito.
Cut back to the couple entering the house. The theme music stops.
2. The marital home, moments later.

The bedroom. Maximiliano is in bed with a migraine. Fortunata gives him
his medicine. Fortunata leaves the room.
Cut to the hall. Fortunata hears a horse gallop, then footsteps, then she
returns to the bedroom.
Cut to the bedroom. Fortunata unpins her hair, then hears a knock at the
front door, which her maid answers. Fortunata hears unintelligible, whis-
pering voices. The camera and Fortunata remain in the room.
Fortunata opens the bedroom door and stands in the doorway; the maid
tells her about the conversation. Fortunata leaves the room.
Cut to the hall; Fortunata locks the front door and returns to the bedroom.
Cut to the bedroom. Fortunata removes her jewellery. Another knock at the
front door (the camera cuts briefly to the door then back to the bedroom in
which Fortunata remains). This time the maid does not answer. The theme
music starts and continues to the end of the sequence, increasing in volume
as Fortunata’s agitation grows. Fortunata leaves the bedroom.
Cut to the hall. Fortunata puts her ear to the peephole of the front door and
hears Juanito call her. She opens then closes the peephole. She hears foot-
steps and returns to the bedroom.
Cut to the bedroom. The camera pivots to follow Fortunata to the window.
Fortunata’s point of view shot as she sees Juanito walking away down the
street.
Cut to the bedroom. Fortunata pauses at the window, then goes over to the
sleeping Maximiliano and finally sits in a chair beside him.
Juanito’s increasing excitement as Fortunata prolongs her hesitation on the

threshold of her bedroom and house, and the limits of her marriage contract,
has in fact been prefigured by a spatial metaphor: his growing impatience to
discover whether Fortunata is either inside, or outside, Las Micaelas. As we
see, while Maximiliano lies alone in the marital bed, Fortunata lengthily hesi-
tates at the doorway of the bedroom and the house, and actually goes in and
out of the room three times in the sequence. Here Camus spatially conveys
Fortunata’s adulterous temptation, exploiting the metonym of marital
bedroom for marriage, and recalling the territorial confinement of the ángel
del hogar. This is both visually creative and inspired by Galdós’s text, who
also conveys Fortunata’s adulterous temptation through her dream of spatial
transgression. The above reading may be considered alongside the corre-
sponding passage of Galdós’s text, which describes the nightmare Fortunata

has on her wedding night:
Se le armó en el cerebro un penoso tumulto de cerrojos que se descorrían,

de puertas que se franqueaban, de tabiques transparentes y de hombres que
se colaban en su casa filtrándose por las paredes. (1994–95, I, 681)
The growing solidarity between Fortunata and Jacinta and its final crystal-
lization in the exchange of Juanín is also underscored by Camus’s use of
space. Fortunata’s resolution to reject Juanito on his second break with her is
conveyed by slamming her bedroom door in his face. Admittedly a standard
manifestation of anger, this becomes significant through repetition. After
Jacinta’s acquisition of the baby, it is Juanito who must adopt the liminal
position at the doorway when he feels he is losing control over his wife. And
indeed Jacinta subjects him to exactly the same treatment as Fortunata by
rejecting him and slamming the door on him. Interestingly, at this point
Jacinta asserts herself, yet remains within the limits of the comportment of
the ángel del hogar. She stays in the house yet exerts her power from within
it.
Streetwalkers and Housewives: Reconsidering Gender and Space

Thus space understood on a micro-level seems to indicate a feminist
reading. On a macro-level, there is an apparently similar suggestion of
empowerment through the association between femininity and urban space.
This may be understood in the context of contemporary discourses regarding
the ideological division of space, and Galdós, then Camus’s, resistance of
them. As noted above, Sharon Marcus’s work revises some of the basic
assumptions about those discourses and points towards a more sophisticated
understanding of the novelist and director’s strategies.
The opposition of a male-gendered public, urban space and a
female-gendered private, domestic one in nineteenth-century cultural and
psychic life is summarized in the Baudelarian notion of the f lâneur. This
conveys the concept of the street as an arena of male adventure and observa-
tion, just as Madrid was both historically for Galdós as a young student
(Brenan 1963, 347–8) and fictionally for Juanito and Jacinto. However the
f lâneur trope barely veils the incongruities of this gendered division. Woman
was simultaneously absent from this male space, but was logically also
present if the peripatetic voyeur was to have anything to spy on. Hence a
series of stereotypes were developed to bolster this constructed gendered
divide. As Elizabeth Wilson summarizes, ‘woman is present in cities as
temptress, as whore, as fallen woman, as lesbian, but also as virtuous
womanhood in danger, as heroic womanhood who triumphs over temptation
and tribulation’ (1991, 5–6).
104 SALLY FAULKNER
In the novel and television adaptation of Fortunata y Jacinta, Fortunata is

associated with urban space. However, rather than a symbol of female
empowerment this may be considered as one of the above stereotypes. Galdós
conveys Fortunata’s association with the street in part by her use of
street-language. López-Baralt is critical of Camus’s failure to convey
Galdós’s linguistic association of Fortunata and the street (1992–93, 101),29
but Camus conveys this link visually (and thus appropriately in this medium)
by the insertion of non-narrative pastiches of street scenes, which often frame
sequences focusing on Fortunata. This is most evidently the case when such
an interlude follows our introduction to the egg-sucking protagonist and
follows the scene of her death. Camus’s soundtrack also underscores the re-
lation of Fortunata to the street as she is associated with the melody of the
street organ, and Ana Belén is renowned equally as a singer and an actress.30
This musical motif is particularly emphasized in Fortunata’s relation to
Feijoo, and we recall that this character actually picks Fortunata up on the
street. Again the association is reinforced in the death scene: Fortunata
breaths her last and the street organ ceases.
However, these representations of an apparently ‘feminist city’ in fact rein-
force the platitudes of the street-woman as a prostitute. Sharon Marcus’s
work on this area points beyond this critical impasse regarding representa-
tions of gender and space. The symbol of the stairwell discussed above may
be reconsidered in the light of Marcus’s description (1999, part one) of the
apartment building as an ‘open house’, eliding any division between public
and private, urban and domestic. Galdós emphasizes the apartment nature of
the building which houses his heroine, describing it as one of the tallest in
Madrid (1994–95, I, 180). The Cava de San Miguel street building contains
both the poultry shop, thus commerce and exchange, metonyms of the street
and the public sphere, and at least two different family homes – Fortunata’s
and Estupiñá’s, thus the private, domestic sphere. This intermixing is
revealed in the text through the description of its entrance, ‘portal y tienda
eran una misma cosa en aquel edificio característico del Madrid primitivo’
(Pérez Galdós 1994–95, I, 181). Like the doorway, the intermediary space of
the stairwell is an eloquent metaphor for this fluidity, and Fortunata whom
we meet there is henceforth characterized as intermediary too. Given the
emphasis on Fortunata’s proletarian roots – her ‘earthy’ background is cited
as a major reason for all her suitors’ interest throughout the novel – we may
explain the spatial fluidity associated with her in terms of class. The division
of private and public spaces, or of the domestic and the urban, was a bour-
29 This criticism also ought to be levelled at both Camus and Ricardo López Aranda,
the scriptwriters of the series, and Pedro Ortiz Armengol, its literary consultant.
30 López-Baralt (1992–93, 101) points out that this recalls the link between Emma
Bovary’s death and the blind-man’s song accompanied by the street organ in Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary (1857).
geois phenomenon which Galdós and Camus show was irrelevant to the
working classes.
Thus Camus would again appear to reinforce stereotype: the proletarian
Fortunata resists spatial prescription and the bourgeois Jacinta complies with
it. However, the strength of Galdós’s text, and subsequently Camus’s adapta-
tion, lies in the deconstruction of this opposition between the two female
characters. Through her marriage to Maximiliano and quest for decencia,
Fortunata upsets this divide between bourgeois ángel and proletarian pájara.
Apart from the first view of Jacinta in the laundry room, it is henceforth
Fortunata who is seen engaged in domestic tasks: washing, cooking, sewing,
child-minding (Juanín), caring for invalids (Maximiliano and Mauricia). (Of
course the bourgeois ángel del hogar would oversee the servants’ completion
of many of these labours.) As discussed above, in the novel this culminates in
Fortunata’s declaration of her angelicness on her deathbed. Although Camus
removes this statement of self-affirmation from his television version, no
reconfirmation of patriarchy takes its place, as at the end of Fons’s film.
Camus’s treatment of Jacinta likewise eschews a one-dimensional por-
trayal of an ángel del hogar, as his characterization of Fortunata does a
pájara. López-Baralt notes that Camus’s sensitive study of Maribel Martín’s
Jacinta is a forerunner for critical re-evaluation of this character, citing the
director’s exploration of Jacinta’s sexuality (the angel is, of course, officially
sexless) and noting the addition of a sequence to Galdós’s text in which
Jacinta visits Estupiñá (1992–93, 99–100). This visit follows Juanito’s
encounter with Fortunata, and his future spouse passes the notorious poultry
shop and hears birds squawking and an anonymous woman singing
(Fortunata?), a sequence which looks forward to the future rivalry between
these women and their final solidarity.
Thus despite her introduction within the home, the complexity of Jacinta’s
character is developed spatially. In contrast to Fons’s clumsy treatment of the
Pitusín affair, Camus develops this maternal quest. Jacinta is shot on the
street in her search, and, as in Galdós, visits the slums to look for the child,
while cinematography – point of view shots and a hand-held camera – fosters
our identification with her. Camus, following Galdós, thus challenges the
spatial prescription of the bourgeois angel as ‘quick and lively’ in the home,
yet ‘lame and dull-witted’ in the street (Aldaraca 1991, 27).
As in Galdós’s original, the character Guillermina also troubles spatial
divisions. Supreme embodiment of certain aspects of the angel ideology –
religiosity, selflessness, asexuality, charity – and of Wilson’s ‘heroic woman-
hood’, Guillermina as street-wise businesswoman conversely suggests
‘masculine’ qualities. Breaking down the boundary between interior and
exterior, and the strict gendering of those spaces, Guillermina is both
arch-supporter of female permanence inside buildings, yet herself organizes
the construction of buildings, orphanages and is a landlady. Her simultaneous
urban, public power and domestic, private influence is suggestively similar to
106 SALLY FAULKNER
that of the female porter of the Parisian apartment building analysed by

Sharon Marcus (1999, 63–80), who, like Guillermina, operates ‘between
space and place’ (1999, 71). It is also revealing to compare Guillermina to
Graham’s discussion of Franco’s Sección Femenina cadres, figures who
would still be in the minds of the older members of the television audiences.
While the ideology of the Sección Femenina was ‘deeply conservative’, its
cadres ‘were single, economically independent women with an unusually
self-sufficient lifestyle. The discrepancy between this and the message they
disseminated [. . .] was remarkable’ (Graham 1995, 193). Both these cadres,
and Galdós’s Guillermina, paradoxically undermine the ideology they seek to
promote.
The spatial tropes associated with the f lâneur are repeated in Fons’s adap-
tation, but Camus perceives the areas of resistance to them in Galdós’s novel
and develops these. In the context of gender, these areas of resistance lend
support to a feminist reading in their refusal to confine their female charac-
ters to stereotype and their exposure of the constructedness of those stereo-
types. Such resistance also looks forward to critical re-evaluation of these
discourses undertaken in the field of feminist geography (e.g. S. Marcus
1999).
Writing on the gender politics of urban space, Elisabeth Mahoney follows
Gillian Rose (1993) in arguing that ‘the traditional coding of public space as
masculine (which implies and encodes the invisibility of women in the urban,
their presence always problematic and transgressive)’ is obsolete, and in
insisting that a ‘different lived experience of the urban [. . .] calls for a
different theoretical paradigm [. . .]. Theoretical space [. . .] is under pressure
to jettison linearity and the desire for panoptic vision, to bring otherness,
difference and the eclectic into view’ (1997, 171 and 169). Mahoney’s work
is based on a reading of the postmodern cinematic city, yet it curiously
echoes Marcus’s challenge to nineteenth-century spatial stereotypes and
Camus’s creative response to Fortunata y Jacinta.
Point of View in Television

If this study of symbolic and spatial registers points to a feminist interpre-
tation, we must next consider whether there is a complementary transcen-
dence of the traditional cinematic objectification of woman in the series. Like
Fons’s film, Camus’s television adaptation begins by inscribing this main-
stream gendered gaze. Fortunata is initially reduced by metonymy, like the
box of feathers in the earlier film, as our awareness of her existence is first
filtered through Barbarita’s concerns about her son. At the beginning of the
series she is nothing more than a giggle escaping from a carriage which
arrives at the Santa Cruz house late at night. In the novel, her influence on
Juanito is then perceived by Barbarita through her son’s changes in speech.
As we have noted, scriptwriters Camus and López Aranda are not sensitive to
the linguistic richness of Galdós’s work. However the director does repeat
Galdós’s depiction of Juanito’s changes in dress due to his contact with
Fortunata (1994–95, I, 187–9), which is fitting for the visual medium. Again,
as in Fons’s introduction of Fortunata, in his version of the egg-sucking
sequence Camus also overlooks the fact that both characters spy on each
other in Galdós’s original (1994–95, I, 182), and inscribes the male/female,
active/passive paradigm. Finally we only learn of the first period of Juanito
and Fortunata’s relationship from Juanito’s perspective, in flashback when he
reminisces about the affair during his honeymoon. This male perspective is
reinforced when Maximiliano’s introduction to Fortunata is also framed from
his point of view.
In relation to other areas of narrative communication we might perceive a
challenge to this gendered gaze. With respect to the aural field we have
already noted Fortunata’s domination of the soundtrack. Further, not only are
the patriarchal connotations of the male narrator in voice-over absent in this
piece, but the use of voice-over is divided equally between Fortunata and
Maximiliano – they are each assigned identical monologue sequences in
which they reflect on their forthcoming marriage. Again, unlike Fons’s por-
trayal of the Pitusín affair, Camus relates this episode entirely from Jacinta’s
point of view. In her visits with Guillermina to Madrid’s slums, Camus uses a
hand-held camera which encourages our identification with her perspective
and conveys Jacinta’s unease in such a place.31 Finally, the only two dreams
included in the series – a clear invitation to the spectator to identify and also
an area of particular interest to Galdós – are those of Jacinta (concerning her
infertility) and Fortunata (concerning her love for Juanito).
This focus on the female characters erodes the male perspective originally
encouraged by the narrative. Jagoe’s feminist reading of Fortunata y Jacinta
is not only relevant to Camus’s emphasis on female solidarity, it is also appro-
priate here in its use of the vocabulary of the gaze:
Whereas Juanito’s objectifying gaze as he looked at Fortunata dominated

the beginning of the story, the most powerful image at the end is that of the
imaginary mutual gaze connecting the two women, Fortunata and Jacinta,
who have affirmed their own subjecthood and feminine solidarity despite
the class gulf that separates them: ‘bien podría ser que se miraran de orilla
a orilla, con intención y deseos de darse un abrazo.
(1994, 118, emphasis added)
31 The use of the hand-held camera in the slums might be cited as evidence of
Camus’s equivalent of Galdós’s bourgeois narrator. This conveys the novelistic narrator’s
distance from the proletariat, but Camus is unable to convey what critics have called the
narrator’s Cervantine irony. On the question of the cinematic narrator, see chapter five
below.
108 SALLY FAULKNER
Camus conveys this sisterly ‘mutual gaze’ without charting a female

appropriation of the patriarchal film vocabulary of the male gaze. The
communication of both Jacinta and Fortunata’s perspective in this series is
rather conveyed through what media scholars term television’s ‘reaction
shot’, which is thus appropriate for this medium. This is demonstrated for
example by the way the two dream sequences do not posit Fortunata or
Jacinta’s visual point of view, but feature the two characters reacting to
events. We simultaneously watch the characters, but are aware that the
perspective is their own point of view. As John Caughie points out, ‘if the
point-of-view shot [. . .] is a fundamental figure for cinematic identification
[. . .] the reaction shot forms an equivalent figure for the ironic
suspensiveness of television’ (1990, 54).
Claire Monk, writing on gender and the heritage film, suggests that such a
lack of conventional point of view shots is not unique to television, but a
formal characteristic of the heritage genre generally (1996–97, part two, 4).
Her reading of these films (her examples are taken form Merchant/Ivory’s
work) as a kind of ‘woman’s genre’ is also pertinent to the feminist nature of
Camus’s work. The formal characteristics outlined by scholars of television
and heritage film convey how Camus evokes, then rejects, the male point of
view in Fortunata y Jacinta, allowing us to take up a position of identifi-
cation with the female protagonists by sharing their reaction to the events of
their lives, both in terms of clipping and spreading their wings.
THE GOVERNMENT OF THE GAZE:

FILM AND TELEVISION ADAPTATIONS OF LA REGENTA
Given the historical parallels in production history between Fortunata y

Jacinta and La Regenta mentioned at the start of this chapter, much of the
historical and theoretical material already discussed is relevant here. Thus, in
terms of ideology, the film adaptation of a novel officially considered suspect
could be interpreted as progressive.32 With respect to the film industry,
producer Emiliano Piedra was keen to repeat the popular success of Angelino
Fons’s Fortunata y Jacinta, and with Gonzalo Suárez’s La Regenta (1974) he
reproduced the literary-adaptation-starring-Penella formula and made his
most commercially successful film ever (Hernández Ruiz 1991, 246).
Contemporary reviews range from benign praise (‘una gran película
española’, ‘una referencia inesquivable en cualquier estudio del cine
español’) to scepticism regarding Gonzalo Suárez’s simplification of Alas’s
32 The regime thought La Regenta an ‘admirable novela, pero no apta para señoritas’
(article in El Español published in 1945, quoted in Martín Gaite 1998, 149). See note 22
of this chapter on the novel’s republication in 1966.
text, to outright polemic when Asturias Semanal published ‘No a La Regenta

cinematográfica’, in which six Oviedo university lecturers (and a priest)
expressed their doubts about the project, claiming the adaptation of such a
text was deserving of a foreign director!33 Fernando Méndez Leite repeated
the film’s success with an astoundingly popular television version (1995)
which attracted over six million spectators (Lara 1995, 19). Contemporary
reviews were buoyant. Fátima Rodríguez of Cambio 16, for example,
enthused that ‘La televisión consigue a veces rebelarse contra su sambenito
de “caja tonta”. [El] éxito [de las series] resucita la “tele” de calidad [. . .]. La
Regenta consiguió atraer casi tantos espectadores como el intocable fútbol’
(quoted in Jaime 2000, 183). Neither the film nor the series, however, has
received critical attention.
The ideology of the ángel del hogar is less pertinent to La Regenta than to
Galdós’s work. The principal actors in the drama are aristocratic, and the
bourgeois ones – notably Visitación – are remarkable for their outright tran-
scendence of the domestic angelic role. Aptly named, Visitación is forever
paying visits and never at home, leaving childcare and housekeeping to a
textually absent husband. Ana’s one foray into domesticity in the novel is
short-lived (Alas 1995, 549) and neither film nor television director include
it. Nonetheless, the iconographical and spatial registers discussed remain
applicable as they belong to the contemporary ideology of womanhood to
which Alas also responded.
A possible advantage that the adaptor of Alas’s novel might enjoy over
Galdós’s is the primacy of vision in the text. Laura Rivkin has remarked that
the plot of La Regenta turns on the ‘surface combat of eye battles and figura-
tive blindness’ (1987, 318–19). One obvious example of this is Ana’s refusal
to express her adulterous temptation in language, as she prefers to engage in
complex visual intercourse with her suitor. For the other characters of the
novel, showing and looking are all important too, as the sequence of Ana’s
barefoot penitence makes clear: ‘Vinagre admiró como todo el pueblo,
especialmente el pueblo bajo, los pies descalzos de la Regenta’ (Alas 1995,
574). In fact the case could be made that the drama of the novel is the
dialectic of innocently showing (Ana’s bare feet) versus knowingly revealing
(Obdulia’s plunging necklines), in other words, either exposing oneself for
scrutiny, or playing the game of keeping up appearances (the ten con ten).
If a feminist understanding of the power relations which govern the look is
therefore pertinent to the novel alone, it is especially so in our reading of its
screen adaptations. Alison Sinclair’s comments on the text’s visual dimen-
sions are also revealing in the present discussion:
33 Press articles referred to in order: M. Rubio 1974; Martialay 1975; Review of La

Regenta 1975; ‘No a La Regenta cinemátografica’ 1972. The same interviewees consulted
in the 1972 survey contributed to a later ‘Polémica asturiana en torno a la película La
Regenta’ (Álvarez 1975), in which they were predictably critical of the film.
110 SALLY FAULKNER
it is on the public ‘showing’ of Ana [. . .] whether that of adulteress or that

of religious daughter, that the main drama of the narrative hangs. In this
very ‘hysterical’ theatricality, the novel, and its hysterical protagonist,
follow in the best nineteenth-century traditions of the ‘showing’ of the
hysterics at La Salpêtrière. (1998, 29)
Mindful of the connotations of ‘showing the hysteric’ we may approach

Gonzalo Suárez and Méndez Leite’s ‘showings’ of Ana Ozores.
In this section I will follow Charnon-Deutsch in her work on the construc-
tion of a paradigm of a male viewing subject to the female viewed object in
Alas’s text. As in the discussion of Fortunata y Jacinta, possible identifica-
tions of female spectators with Penella’s Ana, and the different processes of
identification which operate in television, will also be considered. The recent
critical tendency to consider La Regenta as a text of ‘dissolution’ (Labanyi
1986), ‘digressiveness’ (Gold 1995) and ‘entropy’ (Sieburth 1987) is less
relevant here as both film and television versions lend a comparative coher-
ence to the novel.
LA REGENTA (GONZALO SUÁREZ 1974)
Histories of Spanish cinema are dismissive of Gonzalo Suárez’s piece –

‘olvidable’ gibes Casimiro Torreiro (1995a, 364); only Javier Hernández
Ruiz’s monograph (1991) on both Gonzalo Suárez’s considerable literary and
cinematic output offers a sustained examination of his La Regenta. Beginning
his film career in the late 1960s, Gonzalo Suárez’s early work, like that of
Vicente Aranda, is associated with the Barcelona School, a later corollary of
the Nuevo Cine Español, regarded as more intellectual, experimental and
influenced by European models.34 Given that the aesthetic politics of the
School were largely derived from the French New Wave – a movement
defined in opposition to the ‘quality’ tradition of respectable literary adapta-
tions, as discussed in chapter one – La Regenta was a project reluctantly
undertaken by Gonzalo Suárez, who was later to confess it was his ‘única
película absolutamente mercenaria’ (quoted in Hernández Ruiz 1991, 241).
Commissioned as director by Piedra, after Pedro Olea had refused the job,
Gonzalo Suárez had no intervention on Juan Antonio Porto’s script or on
casting. Despite the felicitous link to her role as Fons’s transgressive
Fortunata, Penella’s weight, age and star image made her an entirely inappro-
priate Ana Ozores, but this choice was forced on the director because, as in
34 Gonzalo Suárez collaborated with Aranda on his Fata Morgana (1966), and later
produced his own El extraño caso del Dr Fausto (1969). On the Barcelona School and
Nuevo Cine Español see Torreiro 1995b and Caparrós Lera 1983; on Gonzalo Suárez’s in-
volvement, Hernández Ruiz 1991, chapters four and five.
Fortunata y Jacinta, Piedra wanted his wife to star.35 Gonzalo Suárez,

himself from Oviedo where novel and film are set, did however enjoy the
collaboration of seasoned cinematographer Luis Cuadrado, and the film in
fact served to consolidate his position as a director, increase his fee and boost
his career (Hernández Ruiz 1991, 242–6).
Despite the attention he pays to imagery in his later television adaptations
of Los Pazos de Ulloa and La madre naturaleza (1985), in this 1974 film
Gonzalo Suárez does not echo the pervasive imagery of the novel which
symbolically blurs the categories of animal and human, and is unable to
rectify Porto’s omission of the notorious and eloquent scene of Ana’s entrap-
ment in Víctor’s fox snare (Alas 1995, 192–3). The use of space in the film
also inscribes the gendered conventions outlined above, as the sequence of
Fermín’s city-gazing to be discussed below patently reveals.36 In the film
adaptation it is Gonzalo Suárez’s exploration of the question of voyeurism –
pertinent to both the novel and the filmic medium – which is most revealing.
A City of Voyeurs
The scene in which Alas’s Fermín de Pas climbs to the top of the cathedral
tower, unambiguously aligning the phallus with power in the symbolic
register of the novel, and surveys the city of Vetusta, ‘su pasión y su presa’
(Alas 1995, 14), with his, equally phallic, spyglass has not gone unheeded by
literary critics. The patriarchal power allied with this gaze is summarized by
James Mandrell thus, ‘to exist in this world is to exist within the purview of
the phallus, be it the law of the Father or the spyglass of the Magistral’ (1990,
23).
Gonzalo Suárez’s translation of this sequence to film is firstly significant
in spatial terms. Silent and inert – like Ana on the cathedral floor at the end
of the adaptation – Vetusta stretches out before Fermín as virginal terrain to
be conquered by his colonizing gaze. Secondly, Fermín’s perspective from on
high is significant as we have already noted with reference to Fortunata y
Jacinta. In the novel, Fermín’s fondness for climbing to the top of the tallest
tower or mountain in any place he visits is attributed to his prowess as a
hunter (Alas 1995, 14–15), but Alas also makes the Magistral’s sexual enjoy-
ment of this position of mastery explicit: ‘llegar a lo más alto era un triunfo
voluptuoso para de Pas’ (1995, 14). Gonzalo Suárez reveals this dimension of
35 The filming of this portrait of a childless young woman also had to be postponed
until after the birth of Piedra and the then forty-three-year-old Penella’s third daughter.
Olea would not accept the delay caused by the pregnancy and thus the film passed to
Gonzalo Suárez (Galán 1990, 59).
36 This is not the case in the novel. While Alas also commences with this archetypal
instance of male urban panopticism and omnipotence, it is in fact female characters such
as Visitación and Obdulia whom he describes flitting about Vetusta’s muddy streets.
112 SALLY FAULKNER
Fermín’s gaze by slyly juxtaposing him with a phallic bell-clapper in the

belfry, and by having the priest then immediately train his lens on La
Regenta.
Further, the way Gonzalo Suárez shoots this sequence invites us to recall
Laura Mulvey’s theory of visual pleasure, examined above with respect to
Fons’s introduction to the egg-sucking Fortunata. After a short sequence
which sketches Fermín’s financial corruption, Gonzalo Suárez’s camera tilts
up the cathedral tower and the film’s credits are rolled against a static shot of
this symbol of power, to the sound of peeling bells and majestic music. Next
the camera again pans up the tower then cuts to the dark, swirling skirts of a
priest also making his ascent. At the top of the tower, a close-up reveals the
priest extending and raising his spyglass, but his face is not shown: he
remains a dark, anonymous figure. This position therefore replicates our own
in the darkened auditorium as we share his gaze on Ana. In contrast to the
voyeur, she is fully visible in broad daylight – her silhouette/outline clear
compared to his indeterminate shape – and unaware of her exhibition. This
sequence thus exactly fulfils the requirements for mainstream film to play on
the spectators’ ‘voyeuristic phantasy’ (Mulvey 1999, 836). Only after this
portrayal of furtive spying is the identity of the dark figure revealed by a
close-up of his face.
This prologue indicates Gonzalo Suárez’s transformation of the novel La
Regenta into a film of illicit scopophilia. The above sequence is followed by
another of Fermín spying on Ana from his confessional. Ana is then also
peeped at from the windows of the casino. Fermín’s suspicion of Ana’s adul-
terous temptation is again conveyed by his spying on the Vegallana mansion.
Of course Ana, conversely, is almost always the object, never the spying
subject. The film thus conveys Charnon-Deutsch’s assertion that in the novel
‘the space in which Ana Ozores is the moving figure is criss-crossed by
probing gazes’ (1994, 68).
Gonzalo Suárez’s communication of Ana’s self-torment through dreams,
‘ataques’ and self-flagellation, lends weight to his inscription of the text in
the register of patriarchy. Although we are privy to the content of her first
dream, as we are those of Fortunata and Jacinta in Camus’s television series,
it is preceded by suggestive images of a voluptuous Penella writhing on her
bed, which she continues to do throughout. However the content of later
dreams – and thus Ana’s subjective perspective – is removed, leaving only the
image of a sighing dishevelled woman who ‘performs’ for the viewer –
recalling both the hysteric’s ‘performance’ outlined by Sinclair, and cine-
matic voyeurism by Mulvey. The sleeping woman, like the dead one as
Bronfen has shown, patently plays to the voyeur’s need for the exhibitionist to
be unaware of their position as such. The sequence of a half-dressed Ana
whipping herself also recalls the sadistic male spectator versus masochistic
female spectacle described by Mulvey.
Critics have been quick to comment snidely that a film such as this, and
other nineteenth-century novel adaptations in the period, did nothing but

satisfy the appetite of an audience starved of titillating references to randy
priests and lusty bourgeois housewives (e.g. Monterde 1989, 50). Gonzalo
Suárez’s Fermín is portrayed, however, by the British actor Keith Baxter,
suggesting the country was not quite ready for a naughty Spanish cler-
gyman.37 Certain elements of the film may be regrettable, notably the casting
of Penella, the uneven script and generally low production values – the period
costumes and settings of Wolfman Burman’s mise en scène are particularly
gaudy. Nonetheless the exploration of voyeurism in Gonzalo Suárez’s adapta-
tion not only reveals a willingness to explore a key area of cinematic expres-
sion, but also pertinently highlights this aspect of the original text.
The Democracy of the Gaze

The ending of Gonzalo Suárez’s La Regenta is not only an important
departure from the novel, but problematizes this reading of the film as an
illustration of the male gaze. This may be demonstrated by close examination
of the changes Gonzalo Suárez makes to the ending of Alas’s original, and, as
in Fons’s Fortunata y Jacinta, consideration of Penella’s contribution to the
picture.
Firstly then, the alteration of the ending of the novel means that the foun-
dations of the edifice of male subjectivity constructed in the film adaptation
begin to crumble in the final scenes. After her adulterous fall (which occurs
in the gap between chapters twenty-eight and twenty-nine of the novel) Alas
famously banishes Ana from the text. She is conspicuously absent from the
narration of the events which will transform her life: namely the duel in
which her husband Víctor is killed and from which her lover Álvaro flees.
Gonzalo Suárez, however, chooses to render this event from the heroine’s
specific perspective. This change is brought about through cinematography
and performance style rather than script, hence I attribute it to the director
rather than the scriptwriter.
The armed confrontation between wronged husband and treacherous lover
is preceded by a shot of a pensive Ana, then Gonzalo Suárez cross-cuts
between the duel in slow motion and long takes in close-up of a praying Ana,
ending with an extreme close-up of the heroine’s eyes, suggesting her respon-
sibility and guilt for the events we see unfold. Those eyes are then the ones
which confront Álvaro’s now cowardly gaze, shortly before she rushes to her
37 Another British actor, Nigel Davenport, plays Álvaro, Vetusta’s Don Juan, and this
casting of non-native actors perhaps diminished the subversiveness of these characters.
This could explain the selection of Nickolas Grace to play Lorca in Lorca, muerte de un
poeta (Bardem 1987), although the appeal to Anglo-American audiences of this British
star was surely an important factor. My thanks to D. Gareth Walters for drawing my atten-
tion to casting in this film.
114 SALLY FAULKNER
husband’s side, begging for his forgiveness. Gonzalo Suárez also draws a
circle in this ending from the opening shot of Fermín’s voyeurism. In the
penultimate sequence, we share a total of four point of view shots with Ana
as she spies on the Vetustans gossiping about the duel, and then follow her as
she flees to the cathedral to receive Fermín’s rejection as he glares down on
her – this time without spyglass – from a high angle shot which matches that
of the start. But while at the beginning of the film this panopticon perspective
framed Ana as an object or spectacle, by the end it possibly encourages us to
sympathize with the heroine as a subject.
As in Fons’s Fortunata y Jacinta, Penella’s commanding screen presence is
of relevance here, as it encourages us to identify with her desperate plight,
especially as up to this point her performance as the feeble Ana has been
unconvincing.38 Probably owing to the fact that Penella was not his own
choice for the role, Gonzalo Suárez fails to render this an instance of casting
against type. Penella herself has subsequently spoken of the difficulties she
encountered interpreting this character, which contrasts with her experience
as Fortunata. A number of factors contrived to make it especially difficult for
the actress, the delay occasioned by childbirth mentioned above and the
necessity of losing weight, then the death of her mother on the day before
shooting began (Galán 1990, 59). Penella has later admitted of the character
that: ‘Llegué a odiarla, a amarla, a aburrirme, a entusiasmarme y así
sucesivamente’ (quoted in Galán 1990, 59).
It seems plausible to conclude that Penella ‘hated’ the character and was
‘bored’ earlier in the film, but ‘loved’ her and felt ‘enthused’ towards the end.
In the final sequences of Ana’s desperation, Penella is imposing and
convincing and a portrait emerges of Ana as a thinking, sentient being, in
contrast to Alas’s protagonist, whom Charnon-Deutsch describes as nothing
more than ‘a lump of silent, swooning flesh awaiting the frog’s kiss’ (1994,
70). Without empirical evidence regarding audience identification, we can
only speculate about contemporary responses, but the suggestion that Penella
offers a positive model for female identification at the end of the film seems
credible.
As a cultural artefact, if not on occasions as a film, Gonzalo Suárez’s La
Regenta is therefore interesting because, like Angelino Fons’s Fortunata y
Jacinta, it explores the tension surrounding gender roles which characterize
the dying days of the dictatorship. It simultaneously reconfirms the patriar-
chal tenets of both the nineteenth century and Francoism, yet also apparently
questions that gender ideology. If in Alas’s novel social critique is achieved
38 The seven interviewees of the afore-mentioned ‘Polémica asturiana en torno a la

película La Regenta’ share the ‘opinión unánime: Emma Penella nunca debió ser elegida
para interpretar a Ana Ozores’ (Álvarez 1975).
through a stinging satire of Vetustan society,39 in Gonzalo Suárez’s film it is

rather less complex. Close reading of cinematography reveals that the ‘dicta-
torial’ male perspective at the beginning of the film simply contrasts with
Ana’s perspective at the end, which thus indicates a more ‘democratic’ distri-
bution of the narrative point of view. Consideration of the casting of Penella
reveals an actress struggling to embody the contradictions of her role, contra-
dictions Penella herself perhaps alludes to in the declaration examined above
of her simultaneously loving and hating Ana Ozores.
However the suggestion that Gonzalo Suárez ultimately invests Penella’s
Ana with a sense of self that she is denied in the novel may be over-generous.
Our adoption of her perspective on the duel could be read as a means of
reinforcing the guilt of the adulteress. Alternatively we may interpret both
female and male protagonists, namely Ana, Álvaro and Fermín, as controlled
by the malignant social force embodied by Visitación in the novel. We note
that the scandal surrounding, or potentially surrounding, Ana is conveyed as
Vetusta’s desire to see. After the Germán episode of her childhood, Alas
writes that Vetustans ‘querían verla, desmenuzar sus gestos, sus movimientos
para ver si se le conocía en algo’ (1995, 71), or again, the collective desire for
Ana to commit adultery is expressed by Visitación thus: ‘quería ver aquel
armiño en el lodo’ (1995, 161). The suggestion here is that the desire to see
infamy transcends gender, and also extends to male characters. Gonzalo
Suárez includes an interesting shot of the members of the adulterous triangle
at the Vegallanas’s lunch. Ana (the battle-ground) is flanked by Álvaro and
Fermín (the combatants, although the Magistral is replaced by his surrogate,
Víctor, in the actual duel) who face each other in precise symmetry on either
side of her. These two rivals thus battle for domination of Vetusta through the
body and mind of La Regenta. This shot also exactly corresponds to one
conjured up in Visitación’s mind’s eye, ‘quería ver al confesor y al diablo, al
tentador, uno frente de otro’ (Alas 1995, 268). In Gonzalo Suárez’s Vetusta, it
would seem that all characters are framed by the prying, cinematic gaze.
LA REGENTA (MÉNDEZ LEITE 1995)
Fernando Méndez Leite’s decision to direct an adaptation of this literary

classic for television is typical of his policy as Director-General of Film from
1985–88. Taking over after Pilar Miró’s resignation, he kept in place the
system of subsidies she introduced, which, as discussed in chapter two,
tended to favour cinematic adaptations of the Spanish literary canon.
Ironically, however, this 1995 adaptation was not subsidized and, in order for
39 Alas was a university law professor in Oviedo, for which Vetusta is the fictional
surrogate, when he was writing the novel.
116 SALLY FAULKNER
TVE to accept the work, Méndez Leite was forced to cut it from the
ten-and-a-half hours filmed to six, then finally to four-and-a-half – much to
the director’s chagrin, as maximum fidelity to the text was, he claims, his
main aim (1995, 111).
Separated by over a century which took Spain from the Bourbon restora-
tion to fully fledged democracy, we might expect Méndez Leite’s television
adaptation to register the transformation of gender roles between the publica-
tion of the novel (1884–85) and the broadcasting of the series (1995). As in
the preceding discussions, the question of gender and representation will be
considered with respect to imagery, space and narrative point of view.
Imagery: Trapped Animals

Owing perhaps in part to its longer running time, in his adaptation of La
Regenta Méndez Leite includes a range of imagery derived from the novel, in
turn inherited from the ángel del hogar and other contemporary stereotypes
of femininity, which is absent from the film. In Alas’s text, the confusion
between Ana and the animal world is evident from her association with the
tiger skin (1995, 51) and her accidental entrapment in her husband Víctor’s
fox snare (1995, 192–3). It is also conveyed in ornithological terms. After
Ana’s first hysterical attack, Alas has Víctor, who is a keen hunter, take leave
of his wife thus: ‘¡Buenas noches, tórtola mía! Y se acordó de las que tenía
en la pajarera’ (1995, 60). The homology between Ana and the caged bird is
further reinforced by the juxtaposition of her husband’s visit to see her with a
visit to that ‘pajarera’. Víctor’s blurring of the two does not escape the
mordant irony of Alas’s narrator. Described as the ‘primer ornitólogo y [el]
cazador sin rival de Vetusta’ (1995, 61), Víctor can neither perform as a
hunter – Fermín mocks him as such during their rainy outing from El Vivero
(1995, 608), and he is unable to shoot his adulterous rival both when he sees
him climb from Ana’s window (1995, 651) and during the duel (1995, 686) –
nor keep his bird caged.
Méndez Leite only indicates the bird-like associations of Ana in a late
sequence at the end of his part two, which regrettably eradicates its function
of prefiguring her entrapment in the fox snare, featured in his part one.
Álvaro takes leave of the Quintanars as he departs from Vetusta for the
summer and Méndez Leite builds on the novel’s reference to Álvaro’s habit of
stroking a stuffed peacock in Víctor’s study (Alas 1995, 414). The director
has Álvaro absently stroke such a peacock as he waits for the arrival of Ana
in the study. He has just arrived from the casino, where we have witnessed
him recount his conquests as a Don Juan. Seducing his friend’s wife will be,
Méndez Leite seems to suggest, an analogous trophy for Álvaro to display in
the casino, just as the bird is displayed in the study as a symbol of Víctor’s
hunting success. The consequently identical status between Ana and the bird
is conveyed by the formal arrangement within the frame when she arrives: the
two occupy symmetrical locations indicating their equivalence. Mise en

scène reinforces this equivalence as the bird’s black feathers match the colour
of Aitana Sánchez-Gijón’s hair, the actress who plays La Regenta. The fact
that this bird is so obviously inanimate is also significant. Not only does it
echo critical readings of Alas’s Ana as a ‘lump of flesh’, but it also points to a
feminist interpretation of clipped wings.
This complements a sequence from chapter nine of the novel, unfortu-
nately not included by Méndez Leite, in which Ana collects her thoughts
during a country walk and compares herself to the bird she has been
watching: ‘Ese pajarillo no tiene alma y vuela con alas de pluma, yo tengo
espíritu y volaré con las alas invisibles del corazón, cruzando el ambiente
puro, radiante de la virtud’ (Alas 1995, 175). Not only is the play-off that Ana
envisages of freedom versus soul unrealized, but her invisible wings are
symbolically clipped, like the inanimate ones glued to the side of the bird
hunted down by Víctor.
While this depiction of the interchangeabilty of the human and the bestial
in the television series possibly suggests a feminist reading of the novel, this
is far less effective here than in Camus’s adaptation of Fortunata y Jacinta.
Firstly, the contrast between the ángel del hogar and the pájara de la calle is
not relevant to La Regenta, even though Víctor does interchange the words
‘bird’ and ‘angel’ in his references to Ana. Secondly, the overlap between
human and animal extends to other characters as well. Like Ana in the fox
trap, Alas also describes Fermín as ‘una fiera en su jaula’ (1995, 254).
Méndez Leite includes the fox trap sequence in his part one then conveys
Fermín’s analogous entrapment at the end of his part two. Visually repre-
senting the above quotation, he juxtaposes an image of Fermín impatiently
staring from his study window with a point of view shot in which the priest
gazes at a dog trapped on a balcony in the opposite house.
Space: A Trapped Wife?

However, Méndez Leite’s emphasis on the theme of entrapment in the tele-
vision adaptation seems to indicate that his visual reading of the novel is
sensitive to the question of gender. Like Camus in Fortunata y Jacinta,
Méndez Leite draws attention to the boundaries of enclosed spaces. While
Ana’s ‘liminality’ is not as entrenched in the symbolic vocabulary of this
series as it was with respect to Fortunata in Camus’s, the heroine’s location on
the boundary is nonetheless conveyed through the repeated shots of her at the
windows and gates of the Ozores mansion and through the trellis of the
confessional. The link between Ana physically migrating to the edges and
mentally positioning herself on the ‘edge’ of her marriage contract, through
adulterous temptation, is thus suggested. This is made clear in a sequence
which derives from the novel (Alas 1995, 196–8) in which, racked by her
frustrating entrapment in an empty marriage, Ana clings to the gate of the
118 SALLY FAULKNER
mansion’s park and there confronts Álvaro, the manifestation of her adul-
terous desire.
Fermín’s realization that Ana is straying to these limits is conveyed
spatially by Méndez Leite through the priest’s symbolic desire to (re-)capture
her. Thus a number of shots representing Fermín’s point of view of his
confessee appear to trap and contain her behind the confessional mesh. This
point is reinforced when he summons up her face in his mind’s eye, or
mindscreen, from a page on which he has just sketched a cage- or confes-
sional-like grid. Ana’s corresponding visualization of her confessor’s face
takes place in the countryside, and so conversely connotes freedom.
The Illusion of Interiorization: A Note on Space in Alas’s Novel

This apparently similar manifestation of gender trouble through the use of
space in both Fortunata y Jacinta and La Regenta works, however, in
crucially different ways in the original novels. This therefore problematizes a
feminist reading of symbolic spaces in Méndez Leite’s adaptation. The
yoking of woman to domestic and private space is socially-imposed in
Galdós’s novel but self-imposed in Alas’s work. While Galdós explores and
explodes the contemporary ideology of the ángel del hogar through the
female characters of Fortunata y Jacinta, through Ana, Alas stages the elabo-
rate power games of a society of simulacrum. On the one hand, therefore,
Fortunata and Jacinta transgressively resist contemporary spatial ideology.
On the other, ironically, Ana rebels against Vetustan society by her very
attempt to adhere to spatial ideology. The fluidity between public and private
spaces discussed by Sharon Marcus (1999, 2–3) is all pervasive in Alas’s
Vetusta, if thinly veiled by ‘keeping up the appearances’ of social order.
The novel’s images of blurred categories, like the intermixing of ‘human’
and ‘animal’ in the fox trap sequence, are echoed spatially. Visitación, for
example, weaves her way in and out of public and private spaces, like
Vetusta’s streets and Ana’s bedroom, and is the principle conduit by which
private information regarding Ana, such as her hysterical attacks, reaches the
public forum. Similarly, the Quintanars’ servant Petra is the channel by which
details of Ana’s private life, most notably her adultery, reach her confessor.
Images of boundary-blurring which critics have previously perceived in the
novel (Labanyi 1986; Sinclair 1998, 35–58) might therefore be read as meta-
phors for the criss-crossing of public and private spaces. Little, it seems, is
free of such illicit mixing: from the animate – Obdulia’s body bulges out of
the tight dresses which ought to contain it (Alas 1995, 30) – to the inanimate
– the stuffing is said to burst out of the ripped lining of the de Pas’s chairs
which ought to seal it (Alas 1995, 204). Even Ana’s bare feet incongruously
enter the public sphere on the occasion of her notorious public penitence
(Alas 1995, 577).
Ana’s response to this intermixing is to withdraw into an illusory private
space, which paradoxically becomes more public the greater her attempts to
make it private. This ironically subverts the feminist drive to escape spatial
entrapment apparent in Fortunata y Jacinta, though there is no sustained
attempt on Ana’s part to be a bourgeois angel: her withdrawal is now
explained by her emulation of a wifely ideal; now her hysterical illness; now
her religious mysticism.
In this spatial reading of the novel, adultery may be understood as the in-
evitable consequence of the contradictions of Ana’s project of interiorization.
Alas’s metaphor of Ana’s marriage as a building is significant in this respect.
The conjugal building is constructed on her union with Víctor, whom she
later reflects was ‘la muralla de la China de sus ensueños’ (Alas 1995, 108),
and the prospect of infidelity is conveyed through images of the penetrability
of this building. Álvaro thus initially refers to Ana as ‘una fortaleza
inexpugnable’ (Alas 1995, 127), and to his seduction of her as a siege (Alas
1995, 434). But just as the opacity behind which Ana tries to hide is illusory,
the walls of her marital home are transparent. Álvaro’s friendship with Víctor
allows him access to her home and, just as Fortunata dreams of permeable
boundaries in a manifestation of her adulterous desire (Pérez Galdós
1994–95, I, 681), during the play of Don Juan Tenorio Ana also writes
herself into an adultery narrative in symbolically spatial terms:
Ana se comparaba con la hija del Comendador [de Zorrilla]; el caserón de

los Ozores era su convento [. . .] y don Juan . . . ¡Don Juan aquel Mesía que
también se filtraba por las paredes, aparecía por milagro y llenaba el aire
con su presencia!’ (Alas 1995, 357, emphasis added)
It would therefore seem that, unlike Camus’s Fortunata y Jacinta, Méndez

Leite’s depiction of Ana’s ‘liminality’ should not be read as resistant to patri-
archal ideology. In the following final section, I will discuss whether the
manipulation of narrative point of view in his television adaptation resists or
reinforces that ideology.
The Dictatorship of the Gaze

As mentioned above, in her work on Spanish realist fiction, Gender and
Representation, Lou Charnon-Deutsch has provocatively suggested that this
genre was ‘written by men from a male perspective’ (1990, xii). This state-
ment seems contradictory when the novels examined place female protago-
nists centre stage and thus take female subjectivity as their main concern.
With respect to La Regenta Charnon-Deutsch explains this paradox thus:
As Alas’s most psychologically developed character, Ana’s thoughts and

motives are dissected in detail unmatched by the author’s contemporaries.
But in describing the relationship between narrator and protagonist in La
120 SALLY FAULKNER
Regenta, one is constantly measuring a distance instead of a proximity.

There is sympathy without bond, and there is occasional pleasure-seeking
in the form of voyeurism, not only in the scenes of Ana rubbing against her
sheets or her tiger skin, but also of her masochistic surrenders to the men
who wish to dominate her. (1990, 105)
Laura Mulvey similarly argues that mainstream narrative cinema displays

a tendency to depict the female as object, in contrast to the male as subject. In
Fons’s film adaptation of Fortunata y Jacinta and Gonzalo Suárez’s version
of La Regenta discussed above, I have shown that the casting of Emma
Penella, and her performance style, may resist what has been termed the
‘male gaze’, and offer alternative possibilities of identification for female
audiences. Gonzalo Suárez in fact uses the point of view shot towards the end
of his film tentatively to transform Ana’s objectification into subjectivity. In
Camus’s television adaptation of Fortunata y Jacinta, the ‘reaction shot’
similarly offers an alternative to Mulvey’s paradigm. Broadcast in 1995,
when gender equality had at least been notionally accepted as integral to
Spanish life, we might expect Méndez Leite to adopt some of these strategies
in his television adaptation of La Regenta.
In this context, it might therefore seem significant that Méndez Leite
removes the scene of Fermín’s voyeuristic use of the spyglass in chapter one
of the novel, which in Gonzalo Suárez’s adaptation aligned power with both
the voyeuristic eye and the phallus, as discussed above. However, such a
patriarchal power structure in fact informs every shot of Méndez Leite’s tele-
vision series. This is illustrated by our introduction to Fermín. Rather than
furtively spying from the belfry with his spyglass, we first see the priest
rehearsing a speech on the infallibility of the clergy to his mother and maid,
who remain silent, then voice their admiration of his rhetorical virtuosity.
Next, Fermín is aligned with the cathedral tower – supreme symbol of power
as we have already discussed – by a shot which matches his figure in the fore-
ground to the silhouette of the tower in the background. Lest the viewer miss
it, this affinity is made explicit in a later sequence, not to be found in the
novel, in which the maid tells her master that ‘¡el señorito se parece a la torre
de la catedral!’ Fermín’s point of view is then conveyed by a lengthy subjec-
tive tracking shot in the cathedral – he is staring at women, beatas, of course
– and his more specific control of the narrative is conveyed by a point of view
shot from his perspective of Ana and Visitación inside the cathedral. After
this character sketch, the narrative informs us that Fermín will inherit La
Regenta as confessee from the archpriest, Ripamilán. It is surely significant
that just as the archpriest recounts Ana’s biography to his successor, Fermín
will now take up the task of controlling the narrative of Ana’s life from here
on.
Méndez Leite in this way establishes the visual, linguistic and phallic
nature of Fermín’s power. Such a focus on the Magistral may be explained by
his portrayal by acclaimed Spanish star Carmelo Gómez, who conveys

Fermín’s corrupt megalomania throughout the series particularly well.
Furthermore, in Méndez Leite’s own reflections on his adaptation, he refers
to the primacy he gave to characterization, but significantly cites the
complexity of Fermín, rather than Ana, as his example: ‘el Magistral [es] el
gran protagonista de la novela y a mi juicio el personaje más rico y más
apasionante que tiene La Regenta’ (1995, 112). This statement reveals that
the director overlooks Alas’s exploration of his female protagonist’s subjec-
tivity in favour of a focus on a male hero. This shift of emphasis is highly
significant in terms of gender and representation: by removing the psycho-
logical exploration of Ana’s character, Méndez Leite reduces Alas’s heroine
to a mere object, or spectacle.
This argument that Méndez Leite’s adaptation traces a facile opposition
between male spectator or subject, and female spectacle or object, may be
challenged. For all his phallic power, Fermín is nonetheless dominated by his
tyrannical mother Paula. In the aforementioned sermon sequence, for
instance, Fermín’s pomposity is humorously deflated when his mother warns
her ‘Fermo’ not to be late home for his dinner. But whereas in the novel, as
Alison Sinclair has demonstrated (1995), this relationship between mother
and son dramatizes the terrifying conflicts of the pre-Oedipal mother-child
dyad, in the adaptation this aspect of their relationship seems to be included
for mere comic relief.
Furthermore, by the logic of our argument, we might expect the scene of
Ana on her tiger skin to be the culmination of the male subject/spectator
versus female object/spectacle division. Consider Alas’s original description
of this sequence:
Después de abandonar todas las prendas que no habían de acompañarla en

el lecho, [Ana] quedó sobre la piel de tigre, hundiendo los pies desnudos,
pequeños y rollizos, en la espesura de las manchas pardas. Un brazo
desnudo se apoyaba en la cabeza, algo inclinada, y el otro pendía a lo largo
del cuerpo, siguiendo la curva graciosa de la robusta cadera. Parecía una
impúdica modelo olvidada de sí misma en una postura académica impuesta
por el artista. (1995, 51)
Charnon-Deutsch has interpreted this scene as ‘pornographic’ in the sense

that a desiring male spectator is posited, who ‘robs [Ana] of her subjectivity’
(1990, 109). While in his visualization of this scene Méndez Leite does
voyeuristically focus on Ana undressing, and also incorporates full length
nude shots of Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, he briskly cuts to a flashback
concerning Ana’s memory of her adventure with Germán, and leaves out the
smutty business of the tiger skin altogether. He thus apparently replaces Ana
as sexual object with Ana as reminiscing subject. Nonetheless, the modera-
tion of this sequence probably derives from the fact that Méndez Leite
122 SALLY FAULKNER
wanted the series to be screened at prime time. We may even speculate that
much of it ended up on the cutting-room floor when Méndez Leite was
forced to reduce the length of his adaptation by more than half.
The argument that Méndez Leite stages a patriarchal reading of the novel
is in fact reconfirmed throughout the series. In Ana’s further dreams and
hysterical attacks, we are not privy to her thoughts through ‘reaction shots’,
but only see her dishevelled – yet beautiful – dreaming, hysterical or
swooning body. This voyeuristic perspective recalls Gonzalo Suárez’s focus
on the voluptuous Penella, and contrasts with Camus’s subjective treatment
of Jacinta and Fortunata’s dreams. As such, our response to Ana is aligned
with that of the lecherous male characters, Fermín and Álvaro. This is made
clear when Visitación describes one of Ana’s ‘ataques’ to an eager Álvaro –
the viewer has already seen the lewd images Visitación conjures up in the
rake’s imagination.
With respect to the ending of Méndez Leite’s adaptation, a comparison
with Gonzalo Suárez’s film is revealing. As previously mentioned, Alas
expels his heroine from the text after her adulterous fall. Despite Méndez
Leite’s strange claim that in the last section of the adaptation he transforms
the novel (1995, 118), the director in fact faithfully adheres to the word of
Alas’s text: after succumbing to Álvaro, Ana largely disappears from the nar-
rative, and the events of the duel are filtered through the gossip of the cabildo
and casino. Thus, while in his 1974 film adaptation Gonzalo Suárez mounts a
challenge to the preceding phallic/visual hegemony by changing the end of
the novel, in the television series Méndez Leite simply reconfirms patriarchal
dominance.
Méndez Leite therefore offers a version of Alas’s text which displays
Mulvey’s familiar paradigm of male visual pleasure and eschews the formal
possibility of television, exploited by Camus, to inscribe a potentially femi-
nist ‘reaction shot’. This reading of the gaze as authoritative and male is
underscored by an analysis of the role of the voice in the series. The very first
scenes are significant in this respect, as they portray Ana in her garden as she
is addressed by her husband and her friend. In blatant contrast to the previ-
ously discussed introduction to the pontificating Fermín, Ana is symbolically
silent in our first images of her – both Víctor and Visitación simply speak for
her.
Méndez Leite’s use of the voice-over is of particular interest in this
respect, as it features both at the adaptation’s opening and its close. Just as a
‘dictatorial’ male gaze visually objectifies Ana, a similarly authoritative
voice linguistically objectifies her. As previously mentioned, in her study of
the voice in mainstream Hollywood film, Kaja Silverman lays bare the
empirical fact that, with one exception, the disembodied voice-over is exclu-
sively male (1988, 48–9). With reference to psychoanalytic theory, she
furthermore makes the case that such voice-overs
align [the] male subject with potency, authoritative knowledge, and the law
– in short, with the symbolic father. [. . .] The female subject, on the other
hand, is excluded from positions of discursive power both outside and
inside the classic film diegesis; she is confined not only to the safe place of
the story, but to safe places within the story (to positions, that is, which
come within the eventual range of male vision or audition).
(Silverman 1988, 163–4)
Whether it be to condense lengthy novels, the case with Fons’s Fortunata y

Jacinta, or to include favourite passages, the case with Méndez Leite’s La
Regenta, the use of the disembodied male voice-over brings with it these
gender connotations.
At the start of Méndez Leite’s series, a visually absent male narrator reads
famous extracts from the first two paragraphs of Alas’s novel (1995, 7)
against the backdrop of an image of the cathedral tower which is being
described. Benign in itself, this introduction forms the impression in the
viewers’ minds that the entire narrative is to be a tale told by a man about a
woman, and establishes the male voice as all-powerful. (The bathetic irony of
the words quoted – ‘la heroica ciudad dormía la siesta’ and ‘la muy noble y
leal ciudad [. . .] hacía la digestión’ – is not, however, explored.) By the end of
the adaptation, the return of this authoritative voice quoting the notorious last
lines of the novel is menacing: ‘Ana volvió a la vida rasgando las nieblas de
un delirio que le causaba náuseas. Había creído sentir sobre la boca el vientre
viscoso y frío de un sapo’ (Alas 1995, 700). These lines conclude a male
description of the female adulteress: they simultaneously bolster patriarchal
ideology by aligning the male voice with narrative authority, and objectify the
female as spectacle.
In the final images of the series the camera gradually pulls back from
Ana, lying prostrate on the cathedral floor, with the toad-belly kiss on her
lips, to a triumphal score of drum music. It symbolically recoils from her in
repulsion in exactly the same way as Fermín has just done, and thus
reinforces our identification with him rather than her. This is a fitting ending
to a series in which Méndez Leite exploits the authoritative, dictatorial
potential of film to reconfirm patriarchy through both its image- and
sound-tracks. The director’s reading of the novel eschews Alas’s psycholog-
ical development of Ana’s character, reducing her to object or spectacle. La
Regenta is thus displayed as a stuffed bird, a trapped animal, a swooning
body in Álvaro’s arms, or a dishevelled yet beautiful hysteric in a worrying
echo of the ‘showing’ of the hysterics at La Salpêtrière, but never a thinking
subject. She is an object or a thing for inquisitive examination, as she was
when a child at the start of the novel, ‘Ana fue objeto de curiosidad general’
(Alas 1995, 71), and when an adult at the end, ‘en todo Vetusta no se
hablaba de otra cosa’ (Alas 1995, 682). Like the locket containing a picture
of a woman featured on the cover of the 1995 Alianza edition of the
124 SALLY FAULKNER
novel, Ana is a trinket, to be examined or hidden away at the will of its

owner.
While Camus exploits the particularities of the televisual medium to estab-
lish a female point of view, Méndez Leite’s series reveals how the
masculinized gaze of mainstream narrative cinema may be translated to tele-
vision with ease. It is significant in this respect that the director has glibly
asserted that for him film and television are indistinguishable (Méndez Leite
1995, 109). Consequently he not only fails to explore the gender ambiguities
of Alas’s novel, but misses the opportunity to match the intertwining plots,
lack of resolution and ‘digression’ (Gold 1995) of this ‘text of flight’
(Sinclair 1998, 32) to the way television narration works as interrupted, frag-
mented and distracted. He therefore fails to keep his vows of fidelity to the
novel.
Conclusion: Nostalgia for Sexual Difference?

In Nostalgia and Sexual Difference, Janice Doane and Devon Hodges
argue that recent American nostalgia literature contains anti-feminist
impulses. They propose that nostalgic writers, like Christopher Lasch, John
Irving and Harold Bloom, retreat to a past era of stable sexual difference to
escape the gender turbulence of the present. ‘Nostalgic writers’, they
observe, ‘locate [woman’s] place in a past in which women “naturally” func-
tion in the home to provide a haven of stability [. . .] nostos, the return home’
(Doane and Hodges 1987, 14). Although these are debatable generalizations,
if Doane and Hodges’s ideas are applied to the texts under discussion here,
they suggest that ‘disorientation’ (Brooksbank Jones 1995, 390) regarding
gender in late twentieth-century Spain led male filmmakers, television direc-
tors, or producers, to retreat to a time of gender security in the literature of
the previous century.
The first irony which undermines this temptingly simplistic argument is
that the late nineteenth century was itself a period of tension regarding
gender, and was thus curiously parallel to the evolving society of the late
twentieth century. Secondly, the novels of Galdós and Alas – as feminist
re-readings have shown – explore these gender tensions, and even work
towards the corrosion of bourgeois patriarchy. Of course the Doane and
Hodges counter-argument might then be that adaptors may choose to ignore
such tensions and ambiguities in the originals if they are determined to
portray gender stability.
The screen adaptations of Galdós’s Fortunata y Jacinta and Alas’s La
Regenta discussed here may be measured against both Doane and Hodges’s
arguments. In Angelino Fons’s 1970 adaptation of Galdós’s novel the
symbolic codes of mise en scène portray Fortunata as a pájara de la calle and
Jacinta as an ángel del hogar, and cinematography seems to masculinize the
viewer. In Doane and Hodges’s terms this would make the film ‘nostalgic’ in
its portrayal of gender stability. Fortunata’s characterization and her portrayal

by Emma Penella offer a significant resistance to patriarchal ideology
however. Owing to the anachronism of Franco’s regime, there is a telling
parallel between nineteenth-century and Francoist gender ideology, so,
despite its period setting, Fons’s Fortunata y Jacinta is important as it chal-
lenges actual – rather than historical – gender relations.
Mario Camus’s television series responds to the radical alteration of
women’s roles in the transition and may be described as feminist. It troubles
some of the patriarchal aspects which Fons’s film puts in place, such as
imagery, space and the implied narrative perspective. Any one of these
elements in isolation might not correspond to feminist emancipation, just as
Sharon Marcus warns that the fluidity between gendered spaces in early
nineteenth-century Paris did not create a ‘feminist city’ as there was no corre-
sponding political feminist project (1999, 8). But considering all these
elements together, Camus’s series may be seen as a feminist celebration of
increasing emancipation and an attempt to re-appropriate a previously colo-
nized past, literature and urban space.
We may expect to observe an analogous current of change between
Gonzalo Suárez and Fernando Méndez Leite’s adaptations of Alas’s La
Regenta. Gonzalo Suárez’s 1974 film sketches the archetypal, omni-
scient/omnipotent male cinematic subject in its prologue, and thus initially
appears to be a phallogocentric paean which simultaneously offers both
mainstream visual pleasures and a reinforcement of patriarchal gender
ideology. However, in its final images it tentatively traces the transformation
of its heroine from viewed object to viewing subject, and thus cautiously
looks forward to imminent social change.
Méndez Leite’s 1995 television adaptation of La Regenta might be the
most recent text discussed here, but it is in fact the most reactionary in terms
of gender. Erasing Alas’s psychological development of his heroine, Méndez
Leite instead portrays Ana Ozores as an object in both visual and auditory
terms. This adaptation alone may be interpreted as what Doane and Hodges
call ‘nostalgic’. From the perspective of the apparently ‘feminist’ Spain of the
nineties, it conservatively frames a world of unquestioned patriarchal
hegemony.
ARTFUL RELATION: BUÑUEL’S DEBT TO GALDÓS
ARTFUL RELATION:
BUÑUEL’S DEBT TO GALDÓS
In the preceding chapters I have compared the work of a number of direc-

tors, whose adaptations have been inspired by a number of writers, within the
context of three topics – history, space and gender. In this final chapter I will
take Buñuel’s adaptations of Galdós as a case study, not least because Buñuel
and Galdós are among Spain’s most influential artists, in the national cinema
and modern literature respectively. For this reason Buñuel’s Nazarín of 1958,
in many respects a Mexican film, has been included.1 Unlike some of the
adaptations considered in previous chapters, there is a wealth of criticism on
Buñuel’s work – especially on Tristana, although the Mexican films are
attracting increasing attention – thus I engage with these previous approaches
accordingly.
Consideration of Luis Buñuel as literary adaptor may initially appear a
contradiction. How can this reputedly irreverent subversive be associated
with what has traditionally been considered, both in terms of form and
content, a reactionary area of film art? Michael Wood highlights this discrep-
ancy, noting that ‘for a powerfully original moviemaker, Buñuel works rela-
tively rarely from original scripts’. Some twenty-one of Buñuel’s thirty-two
films were adaptations, and the remaining were ‘full of allusions and
borrowed themes’ (Wood 1981, 331). It is also noteworthy that in his investi-
gation of the literary influences on Buñuel’s early development Antonio
Monegal concludes ‘la poética que vertebra la obra de Buñuel no se agota en
el ámbito del lenguaje cinematográfico, no es cuestión de “cine puro”, sino
del más impuro de los cines, contaminado de literatura’ (1993, 15).2 The
obvious riposte to this apparent questioning of the director’s originality is to
emphasize the superiority of a Buñuelian adaptation compared to its literary
source. Such an account of Buñuel as an adaptor therefore confirms his
creative integrity.
1 For a consideration of Buñuel’s status as a Spanish director see Kinder 1993,
chapter six, especially her assertion that ‘since the nationality of virtually all of Buñuel’s
films is hybridized, his exile status helps to demonstrate that nationality is an ideological
construct’ (1993, 287).
2 Consider also Buñuel’s use of ‘literary’ scriptwriters, like Jean-Claude Carrière,
who would later work on literary adaptations such as Un amour de Swann (Schlöndorff
1983) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kaufman 1984).
ARTFUL RELATION: BUÑUEL’S DEBT TO GALDÓS 127
It would be folly to discard this view outright; one need only consider
Buñuel’s transformation of Joseph Kessel’s ‘trite’ (Buñuel quoted in Havard
1982, 64) Belle de jour (1929) into his potent attack on the bourgeoisie (Belle
de jour 1966), or his knowing reconstruction of the exoticized Spain of Pierre
Louÿs’s La Femme et le pantin (1895) (Kovács 1979–80) in his cerebral,
surrealist Cet obscur objet du désir (1977). The director also leaves behind
him a host of interviews and statements in which he frequently defines his
source texts as poor, as if to discourage the would-be student of adaptation.
While it is possibly ill-advised to disregard such indications of authorial
intent, it seems more logical to scrutinize any of the director’s statements in
the same way we would approach any apparently simple image in his films.
Critical assumption of an a priori superiority of any Buñuelian film over
its literary source is particularly misguided in the case of the director’s
Galdós adaptations. Notwithstanding Buñuel’s red herring declarations that
the novels Nazarín (1895) and Tristana (1892) were inferior, ‘not one of
[Galdós’s] best’ he said of Tristana (1994, 246), close examination of the
adaptations reveals a surprising debt to the texts. As Antonio Monegal has
noted (1993, 234), it is significant that, while Buñuel transforms the work of
Daniel Defoe, Mercedes Pinto, Rofoldo Usigli, Octave Mirbeau, Kessel and
Louÿs among others in his film versions of their work (Robinson Crusoe
1952; Él 1952; Ensayo de un crimen 1955; Le Journal d’une femme de
chambre 1964; Belle de jour; Cet obscur objet du désir), in his adaptations of
Galdós and Charlotte Brontë (Nazarín 1958; Tristana 1970; Abismos de
pasión 1953), he makes far fewer changes.
The debate regarding the superiority of literary text or filmic adaptation
hinges here on the question of auteurism. As I briefly discussed in chapter
one, there is a clear distinction between ‘commercial’ and ‘auteurist’ adapta-
tions. In the former case, the director may be commissioned, and the literary
original is usually considered superior to the film; the latter will conversely
be an expression of the director’s creative vision, and the literary text will
often be regarded as the mere pretext for a superior film. There may be some
potential in comparing Buñuel’s Nazarín (1958) and Tristana (1970)
according to this division. A late film in his ‘Mexican period’, during which
Buñuel had to conform to the commercial dictates of the industry, Nazarín
adhered to generic prescriptions of a linear plot, unambiguous characteriza-
tion and filmic realism. Indeed Buñuel persuaded his previous producer
Pancho Cabrera that Galdosian realism would appeal to Latin-American
audiences and Cabrera footed the bill for the purchase of the rights to
Nazarín, and also Doña Perfecta 1876, from the novelist’s daughter (Baxter
1995, 206).3 On the other hand, the production history of Tristana was one of
3 Manuel Barbachano Ponce in fact produced Nazarín, but Cabrera did produce
Doña Perfecta in 1950 (released 1951), but it was directed by Alejandro Galindro. On this
film see Gramley 1995.
128 SALLY FAULKNER
greater autonomy, belonging as it does to Buñuel’s final period of relative

independence.
Closer scrutiny reveals such a division between these films is untenable.
There is compelling evidence that Nazarín was in every sense auteurist.
Gabriel Figueroa’s accounts of working with the demanding Buñuel on set
are highly revealing: an acclaimed Mexican director of photography,
Figueroa’s hallmark was the aestheticism of his work, yet he was forced to
comply with Buñuel’s requirements for unadorned cinematography. Further,
although three weeks was the standard allocation for filming in the Mexican
industry, Buñuel was exceptionally allowed six for Nazarín (Sánchez Vidal
1984, 219).4 Indeed, when Peter Evans initially differentiates between the
‘commercial’ and ‘Surrealist auteur’ films during Buñuel’s Mexican period,
he places Nazarín in the latter category (1995, 36). Equally, with respect to
Tristana the director had to acquiesce to the demands of his French, Italian
and Spanish producers, which included the casting of Franco Nero as Horacio
and Catherine Deneuve, although Buñuel originally wanted Silvia Pinal as
Tristana (Sánchez Vidal 1984, 221).5 He also had to deal with Franco’s
censors, still reeling from the well-documented Viridiana (1961) debacle,
who had farcically blocked Tristana in 1962 on the grounds that it encour-
aged duelling (Eidsvick 1981, 173)!
This brief discussion reveals the reductiveness of a fabricated opposition
of ‘commercial’/‘auteurist’. Firstly it is clear that Buñuel was remarkable in
his control of every aspect of film production, even capable of transforming
the apparent straitjacket of censorship into a means for self-expression – as
Charles Eidsvick puts it ‘a muzzle into an eloquent mask’ (1981, 187) – of
which the final scene of Viridiana is the most notorious example. It is thus
self-evident to state that Buñuel was an auteur. Indeed, it has been suggested
that the director’s work also reveals the limitations of auteurism as a theoreti-
cal approach in film studies. Linda Williams argues in her overview of crit-
ical approaches to Buñuel’s work that auteurism is ‘the critical method that
most mystifies and mythifies the Buñuelian œuvre’ (1996, 203). Such inter-
pretations of Buñuel tend to be, she argues, excessively static and ahistorical
in their readings of recurring symbols and themes; further, the notion of indi-
vidualism on which the theory is predicated is somewhat at odds with the col-
lective nature of the surrealist movement, which was, for Buñuel, a constant
influence (L. Williams 1996, 202–3).
Many critical readings of his Nazarín and Tristana fall into the ‘auteurist
trap’. Accepting the director’s own suggestions that the novels were mere
4 Buñuel contradicts this in his autobiography, reporting that only for Robinson
Crusoe was he permitted a shoot of more than twenty-four days (Buñuel 1994, 190).
5 Although some critics describe her as unsuitable for the part (Evans 1991, 96;
Sánchez Vidal 1984, 327), physically, Deneuve exactly replicates the Tristana described in
Galdós’s novel (1982, 10).
springboards for his creative project, critics cite the surrealist flourishes
added to Galdós’s Nazarín, and affirm the obvious link between the director’s
much commented foot fetishism and the severed leg in Tristana (e.g. Sánchez
Vidal 1984, 330–1; Edwards 1982, 240). A case in point, Gwynne Edwards’s
response to the suggestion that the original Tristana may be superior to the
adaptation is to dismiss it as ‘a view of someone (and it is not uncharacter-
istic) who does not understand Buñuel’ (1982, 225). This is an inverted form
of Fidelity Criticism as previously discussed with respect to Andrew Horton
and Joan Magretta’s anthology in chapter one. Any demonstration of an
assumed hierarchy between novel and adaptation is autotelic, relying on a
previous understanding of the superior text, in this case the film, and
restating it. It is discouraging that such film critics are so quick to forget the
prejudices which surrounded cinema’s own admission into the academy as an
art form. Once again adaptation between the media is the battleground, and
the assumed superiority of the literary author effortlessly shifts to an
assumed superiority of the film auteur.
More recently, alternative critical approaches to Buñuel’s work have been
adopted, especially as auteurism has lost its theoretical appeal in film studies.
With respect to work on Buñuel’s films of Galdós’s novels, a curious
dichotomy has emerged between critical approaches which hold the novels to
be incidental to the films’ meaning, political/historicizing or psychoanalytic
readings, or fundamental to it.
Illustrative of the first tendency, Dominic Keown (1996) elaborates a
Marxist/Althusserian reading of Buñuel’s œuvre according to which his
protagonists rebel against then acquiesce to ideological dictates, articulated
by Althusser as ‘ideological state apparatuses’, which is independent of the
original novels. Thus the eponymous priest of Nazarín fails in his emulation
of a Christian life in the context of ‘a patently hypocritical and capitalistic
society’, and the amputation of Tristana’s leg is a metaphor for the constric-
tion imposed on the individual in a patriarchal system (Keown 1996, 63).
Historicizing accounts similarly bypass novelistic origins. Marcel Oms for
instance interprets Tristana as an ‘allégorie politique’ of the specific histor-
ical events of its setting, which ‘dépassait largement l’anecdote romanesque
de l’origine’ (1985, 160–3). As this setting shifts from the twilight of Primo
de Rivera’s dictatorship (1929), to the declaration of the second Republic
(1931) and the bienio negro (1933–35), Buñuel’s plot development and char-
acters become imbued with symbolic meaning.6 Tristana, for Oms, is the
symbol of Spain, caught between the despotic liberalism of Lope and the
ineffectual intellectualism of Horacio. She elopes with the artist, and the
Republic’s bloody repression of proletarian rebellion from 1933 coincides
6 Buñuel was living in Madrid towards the end of this period, as he recounts in My
Last Breath (1994, chapter twelve).
130 SALLY FAULKNER
with the amputation of her leg; in the first scene following the operation,
Tristana plays Chopin’s Revolutionary Study on the piano. Tristana and
Saturno are both symbols of Spain for Oms, who describes the latter as a
‘symbole d’une classe ouvrière encore muette et refermée sur elle-même’
(1985, 161). In a similar historicizing account, Beth Miller also reads the
crippled Tristana’s turn to religion at the end of the film as reflecting the
power of the new Catholic party, the CEDA, after the elections of 1933
(1983a, 346–7).
Oms cites Miguel Bibatua’s 1970 review of the film as a representation of
the failure of a number of different ‘Spains’ (bourgeois, liberal, intellectual,
oppressed) prior to the Civil War (Oms 1985, 163), and his and Miller’s
accounts generally echo contemporary Spanish reviews of the film as a
reflection on the historical period (Julio Pérez Perucha in El Urogallo 1970,
quoted in Company 1997, 676) or ‘una parábola sobre España’ (‘Tristana de
Luis Buñuel’ 1979). That specific context of the 1930s was also linked to
1970s Spain, for example by Francisco Aranda (1971, 11). Likewise Juan
Miguel Company observes:
La exhibición de la mutilada desnudez de Tristana – una libertad
amputada, desgarrada – ante Saturno (sordomuda representación del
pueblo) para alimentar solamente un intangible imaginario masturbatorio,
trasciende ampliamente las coordenadas históricas en las que se desarrolla
la ficción para inscribirla, ejemplarmente, en el aquí y ahora del
tardofranquismo de los años setenta. (1997, 676)
Psychoanalytic readings of Buñuel’s work proliferate alongside

historicizing criticism, both similarly omitting the importance of Galdós’s
novels. Marsha Kinder, for example, reads the aforementioned sequence of
Tristana’s exposure to Saturno not as a reference to historical events (of the
1930s or otherwise) but as a cinematic metanarrative of exhibitionism and
voyeurism, and a Freudian negotiation of phallic empowerment and lack
(1993, 318). Similarly, Evans’s psychoanalytic interpretation of sexual desire
in Tristana (1991), which anticipates his exploration of subjectivity and
desire in his monograph on the director (1995), interprets the film according
to Freud’s writings on femininity and sexuality. For him, therefore, Tristana
turns on ‘male strategies of coping with the perceived threat of the female’
(Evans 1991, 92).
Among critical works which posit the literary antecedent as fundamental
to the films, structuralist comparisons are of course prominent. Two such
readings of Galdós’s work have been published recently by Spanish critics.
Part two of Antonio Monegal’s previously mentioned Luis Buñuel de la
literatura al cine (1993) follows a linguistic model – ‘entre lenguajes’ – to
compare the ‘composición del signo’ and ‘montaje del discurso’ of nine
Buñuelian adaptations, including Nazarín and Tristana. He demonstrates that
since literary and filmic languages are different, adaptation is always an act
of transgression. Monegal’s stated aim to ‘aportar algún dato sobre el

funcionamiento comparado de los lenguajes’ (1993, 12) therefore echoes the
approach of a long line of Spanish semioticians, the limitations of whose
work in the field of literary adaptation has been discussed in chapter one.
Monegal himself includes a contradictory caveat to that stated aim in the
same paragraph as the above assertion, confessing his narrow focus means
‘las implicaciones teóricas que se extraen no son necesariamente aplicables a
otros posibles modelos’ (1993, 12). Aitor Bikandi-Mejias’s monograph on
Tristana (1997) is similarly based on a linguistic model of comparison
between literature and film, but, rejecting Monegal’s assertion that the two
media are irremediably different, he argues that ‘ambos son lenguajes y, por
consiguiente, ofrecen operaciones semejantes’ (Bikandi-Mejias 1997, 178).
Bikandi-Mejias describes this field of study as a ‘galaxia textual’, and the
consequently broad range of aesthetic, narrative and semiotic theory adduced
leads to a neglect of the specific question of adaptation.
Rather than carrying out a comparison of the novels and their adaptations
as formal constructs, Anglo-American critics have focused on the ideological
significance of the Galdós novels, particularly in formulating a reading of
Buñuel’s Tristana. Charles Eidsvick for instance argues that, considered
independently from the novel, the film was mild in its critique of social
reality, partly in order to slip by the Spanish censors. Its subversive critique
was to be appreciated only on comparison with Galdós’s novel:
Buñuel quietly reversed the thesis of the novel – that people will adjust
happily to just about anything – and thus indirectly attacked the most
fundamental assumption of repressive regimes such as Franco’s. [. . .]
[Tristana made] a social, psychological, and political statement, though a
statement decipherable only to those who take the trouble to compare
Galdós’s original with Buñuel’s adaptation. (Eidsvick 1981, 174–7)
Eidsvick’s proposal that ‘the theory of human adaptability presented in

Galdós’s novel is almost exactly the psychological basis on which repressive
regimes [. . .] predicate their power’ (1981, 177–8) is extraordinary. Firstly,
far from being Francoism’s unwitting proponent, the anticlerical and liberal
Galdós was considered dangerous by the dictatorship. Even if this antipathy
attenuated during the regime’s twilight (Aranda 1971, 6), the very act of
adapting one of his novelas contemporáneas – as I argue in chapter four –
could be interpreted as subversive. Secondly, literary studies of Galdós’s
œuvre reveal the all-pervasive irony of the novelist, and in this respect
Tristana, and thus its alleged ‘theory of adaptability’, is no exception.
Ideological comparisons with the novel have also led some critics to inter-
pret Buñuel’s film as cautiously feminist. Robert Havard (1982) and Beth
Miller (1983a) read such a message in the adaptation, but both betray a
misunderstanding of the ambivalence at the heart of Galdós’s Tristana.
Havard for instance implies that a comparison between the film and the
132 SALLY FAULKNER
author’s work reveals an adoption of feminism on the part of Buñuel: ‘While

Galdós leaves Tristana defeated, Buñuel’s ending is more open, for Tristana
will certainly fight on, and with freedom now a better prospect. Buñuel’s
Tristana stands the pierna quebrada theme on its head’ (1982, 67). Firstly the
duplicitous irony of Galdós’s narrator and presentation of the novel’s
dénouement is overlooked here, and secondly, while the reading of Tristana’s
final transformation in the film is correct, to attribute such changes to
Buñuel’s feminism is problematic. As Kinder and Evans have argued, an
exploration of monstrous femininity seems to lie behind Buñuel’s portrayal
of Tristana’s empowerment towards the end of the film – rather than the
director’s benevolent sympathy for liberal politics.
This point has been most persuasively argued by Jo Labanyi, in her study
of fetishism and sexual difference in Buñuel’s film (1999). Renowned Galdós
scholar as well as film critic, Labanyi’s interpretation draws in part on a
comparison between the novel and film. Initially, the study of fetishism
demonstrates her thesis of ‘the collusion between desire and repression’
(Labanyi 1999, 76) independently from the novel. The development of this
into the argument that Buñuel’s Tristana is itself a ‘fetishistic text’ relies on
an account of what Buñuel removes from, or ‘represses’ in, Galdós’s novel.
This is firstly, pace Havard, the omission of the proto-feminism that contem-
porary feminist authors and late twentieth-century critics have perceived in
the text (see for instance, Pardo Bazán 1993); and secondly, the removal of
the ‘extraordinary homoerotic relationship’ that Labanyi shows develops
between Lope and Horacio in the novel (1999, 86–7). Thus while demon-
strating that Buñuel’s Tristana ‘masks full acknowledgement of the gender
ambiguity which the novel shows to be present in both men and women’
(1999, 87), Labanyi is implicitly asserting the importance of the fact that the
film is an adaptation.
This overview of previous criticism demonstrates that, although Buñuel’s
Galdós adaptations of course stand alone as texts, consideration of their
status as adaptations can reveal further layers of interpretation. Rather than
focusing on what Buñuel adds to Galdós, or, more interestingly, what he
removes or represses, this chapter will consider the significance of the
similarities.
Equivocal Narrators
Scholarly reception of Buñuel’s work is especially remarkable as his films
seem to support absolutely opposing critical approaches, some of which have
been summarized above as ‘historicizing’ and ‘psychoanalytic’. Author of
Figures of Desire (1992), an important Lacanian reading of the surrealist
films, Linda Williams has retrospectively criticized her own work as
‘posit[ing] an ultimately static statement of meaning that it has been the work
of the Buñuelian cinema to perpetually evade’ (1996, 205). In her revisionist
review of the centrifugal tendencies of Buñuelian criticism, she concludes

that ‘undecidability’ is the hallmark of a cinematic œuvre which ‘refuses to
commit itself to a univocal meaning’ (L. Williams 1996, 205 and 199). In an
unusually disparate body of critical work, such assertions of ambiguity in fact
provide some continuity. Kinder, for example, argues that ‘Buñuel’s career of
exile dialogizes the auteurist and national contexts, revealing that neither
perspective is sufficient by itself ’ (1993, 291), and Wood describes a Buñuel
who teaches us ‘to suspect all explanations’ (1981, 340). In his autobiography
the director himself reflects on critical analysis with wry detachment, ‘all this
compulsion to “understand” everything fills me with horror’ (Buñuel 1994,
175).7 Wood explains this resistance to interpretation as Buñuel’s surrealist
legacy, a movement at whose ‘heart [. . .] is a flight from meaning’ (1981,
337).
While critics have attributed such a perpetual evasion of meaning to
Buñuel’s surrealism, these affirmations of ambiguity are in fact strikingly
reminiscent of critical response to the novels of Galdós. In 1966, Gerald
Gillepsie argued for instance that ‘basically, the Galdosian method of narra-
tion comprises several points of view; the author’s “reality” is multi-dimen-
sional, in keeping with his Cervantine heritage’ (1993, 97); and more recently
critics have stated the logical consequence of this as a resistance to interpre-
tation. Catherine Jagoe, for instance, writes that in Galdós’s work, ‘no single
discourse ever succeeds in subjugating the others, thanks to a masterly exer-
cise of an ambiguous style of narrative presentation’ (1994, 181), a descrip-
tion which surely also fits Buñuel’s films.
It is the contention of this chapter that the plurality of critical response to
Buñuel is encoded in the formal nature of his filmic narration; it is its conten-
tion furthermore that this formal ambiguity and unreliability are to be found
in the pages of Galdós and that the director’s adaptations of Nazarín and
Tristana foreground this overlap. Thus, while Buñuel’s debt to Brontë can be
explained by his surrealist fascination with amour fou in Wuthering Heights,
the influence of Galdós can be attributed to the ironic, unreliable nature of
the author’s narration, which Buñuel creatively imitates and develops in the
filmic medium. This approach thus accounts for the multiplicity of critical
responses to Buñuel. The formal analysis offered here will neither overlook
the psychological aspects of Buñuel and Galdós’s work as these are
dependent on narrative form, nor be divorced from specific socio-political
contexts as these equally influence formal strategies. Ambiguous narration
7 With respect to the disparate interpretations of La Voie lactée (1969), for example,
he summarizes: ‘Carlos Fuentes saw it as an antireligious war movie, while Julio Cortázar
went so far as to suggest the Vatican must have put up the money for it. The arguments
over intention leave me finally indifferent, since in my opinion The Milky Way is neither
for nor against anything at all. [. . .] It can represent, finally, any political or even aesthetic
ideology’ (Buñuel 1994, 245).
134 SALLY FAULKNER
reveals Galdós and Buñuel’s shared resistance to monolithic discourse and

ideology, which both writer and filmmaker encountered through their respec-
tive historical experiences.8
This focus on stylistic aspects enables us to bypass the kind of critical bias
that characterizes previous responses to the question of why Buñuel adapted
Galdós. The argument that this author was for Buñuel a conduit of national
cultural tradition is both vague and politically expedient. It enables critics
keen to demonstrate coherence in a national cinema compromised by
twentieth-century historical experience to lay claim to the director as Spanish
‘cultural property’. While this contrasts with the earlier tendency to omit
Buñuel from anthologies of Spanish cinema written during the regime, its
ideological bias is not dissimilar.9
While necessarily foregrounding Buñuel’s Spanish artistic heritage by
focusing on the Galdós films, it is my intention neither to re-state those
autochthonous references nor to defend a ‘Spanish Buñuel’, as his influences
are clearly myriad. In this examination of the adaptations of Nazarín and
Tristana, I use theoretical discussions of the specificity of the cinematic
narrator and ask to what extent Galdós’s infamously equivocal narrators are
replicated in the adaptations. Thus, while in chapter four I examined the
filmic reproduction of Galdós and Alas’s masculinized readers, the focus
here is shifted to the related question of the narrator.
When addressing the particular qualities of cinematic narration, film theo-
rists have been prudently sceptical about directly transposing literary models.
However, as we have seen before, the desire to demonstrate the specificity of
cinema has led to a neglect of many useful points of comparison with liter-
ature. Thus influential accounts of filmic narration such as David Bordwell’s
Narration in the Fiction Film (1985), and Edward Branigan’s Point of View in
the Cinema (1984), both reject the notion of the cinematic narrator as an
‘anthropomorphic fiction’ (Bordwell 1985, 62; Gunning 1999, 470). While
acknowledging the perils of directly transposing the literary notion of the
implied author, or narrator, more recent narrative theorists have revised
Bordwell and Branigan’s affirmation of impersonal narration in film to show
‘the usefulness to cinematic theory of a figure akin to the implied author’,
and – significantly for Buñuel’s work – ‘especially to discuss those films in
which there are clearly several competing versions, from whose differing
claims the viewer must construct [. . .] the whole story’ (Braudy and Cohen
1999, 398). Tom Gunning, for instance, argues that even though film is
predisposed to ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’ – there is, as he puts it, ‘an
excess of mimesis over meaning’ (1999, 464) – this does not preclude the
8 Given the job of editing Nazi propaganda movies during his stay in America in
1938, Buñuel was no stranger to the translation of these into film (Buñuel 1994, 179–80).
9 For example, Historia del cine español by Fernando Méndez Leite (senior) (1965)
omitted Buñuel. See Gubern et al. 1995, 10.
existence of an organizing function, a theoretical entity, which we could call

‘the filmic narrator’ (Gunning 1999, 472). Similarly Seymour Chatman
rejects Bordwell’s notion of impersonal narration, proposing that a governing
narrative agency, or ‘cinematic narrator’, is a means by which the viewer can
‘rationalize the presentation of shots’ in all film (Nick Browne quoted in
Chatman 1999, 476). Bringing to mind Buñuel’s narrative strategies,
Chatman argues that when narration in film is unreliable – his main example
is Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950) – such a narrative agency is exposed, for
instance in the case of a ‘discrepancy between what the cinematic narrator
presents and what the film as a whole implies’ (Chatman 1999, 479).
That specific question of narrative ambiguity can be explored using Bruce
Kawin’s previously mentioned examination of subjectivity in cinema,
Mindscreen (1978). As we have seen in chapter four, Kawin initially provides
a taxonomy for the study of the subjectivity of fictional characters in cinema,
differentiating between what a character sees (‘share my eyes’), a character’s
perspective (‘share my perspective, my emphases’) and a character’s thoughts
(‘share my mind’s eye’) – the latter being the ‘mindscreen’ (1978, 190).
While Buñuel adopts a Brechtian aesthetics, eschewing conventional estab-
lishment of identification between spectator and character, he selectively
uses the mindscreen, often, as we shall see in Tristana, with disruptive narra-
tive effect. Kawin’s more complex category of self-conscious mindscreen
cinema (‘share my reflexive perspective’ [1978, 190]) also provides a theor-
etical tool to examine Buñuel’s narrative practice. In this category are films
which present a visual field which can be understood as the product of a mind
which is not that of any fictional character, but is the mindscreen of an
off-screen narrator. Kawin argues that such films may therefore be under-
stood as ‘first-person cinema’, since the ‘off-screen narrator’, ‘authorial
persona’ or ‘fictitious author’, who is not to be simply equated with the
director, is the subjective source of enunciation.10 This chapter will explore
the hypothesis that Buñuel’s cinematic solution to Galdós’s knowing
first-person literary narrators is the mindscreen.
Linda Williams has already suggested that the director’s first short, Un
chien andalou (1928), may be understood as an example of Kawin’s first-
person cinema:
If [. . .] the prologue triggers the mindscreen of the rest of the film, subse-
quent moments of violence trigger localized progressions to mindscreen
that can be read as the subjective fantasies and unconscious projections of
individuals within the initial mindscreen: mindscreens within mindscreens.
(1992, 102)
10 For Kawin, Ingar Bergman’s Persona (1966) (mentioned by Buñuel as a favourite

[Buñuel 1994, 224]) is exemplary of such self-conscious first-person narration. The film,
he argues, ‘continually appeals outside itself to a dreaming mind that it would be
simplistic to identify as either Bergman’s or the [character’s]’ (Kawin 1978, 11–12).
136 SALLY FAULKNER
One corollary of such a labyrinthine formal layout is that a ‘mindscreen

within a mindscreen’, or first-person narration within an overall first-person
narration, would transform that overall first-person frame into a third-person
frame. Such a point of slippage echoes the unsettling shifts from first- to
third-person narration in Galdós’s novels. It furthermore recalls the perme-
ability of the boundary between first- and third-person in indirect free style, a
device common in late realist fiction, and, we note, one employed by Galdós.
Hence Galdós’s artful relation, or formal strategies for subverting realist
convention, constitutes Buñuel’s debt to the novelist. This is not to say,
however, that Buñuel does not exploit certain ‘realist’ elements of the novels,
such as linear narrative progression, and some coherence at the level of plot
and characterization, as these aspects are marked in the Galdós adaptations
compared to his earlier and later French work. Yet it is short-sighted to look
no further than this superficial fidelity to the novels Tristana and Nazarín.
Just as surface conventionality often acted as smoke screen for Buñuel to
develop other concerns, we must not let it obscure our analysis of his repro-
duction of Galdós’s challenges to realism.
NAZARÍN (BUÑUEL 1958): FROM UNCERTAINTY TO CENSURE
The production history of Nazarín discussed above demonstrates Buñuel’s

ability to work as an auteur even in the context of a heavily commercialized
industry. The success of this film has been amply documented elsewhere, for
example by Agustín Sánchez Vidal, who enthuses over a work which, he
reports, generated more interest than any other film in the history of Mexican
cinema (1984, 220). It is also noteworthy that following the award of the crit-
ics’ prize at Cannes in 1959, Nazarín was ‘the film that decisively relaunched
Buñuel on the international scene and became the foundation for the second
and richest part of his career’ (Baxter 1995, 248).
Simultaneously a Mexican and a Spanish film, Nazarín exemplifies the
contradictions of exile. Funded by a Mexican producer, Manuel Barbáchano
Ponce, it also has a native cast (except Francisco Rabal), production team,
and historical and geographical setting. Yet Nazarín is also Buñuel’s first
adaptation of Spain’s great nineteenth-century novelist, Benito Pérez
Galdós.11 It is perhaps to be expected therefore that Buñuel holds an equiv-
ocal position in the Mexican film industry, just as he does in the Spanish. He
11 All but written out of Spanish cultural life in Franco’s Spain (for further details see
chapter four of this book), Galdós was the darling of the Spanish exile community. The
centenary of his birth in 1943 was therefore celebrated by Spanish exiles, but ignored in
Spain (Fuentes 2000, 141). This despite the fact that some, like Buñuel, had rejected
Galdós’s work in their youth (Harold Bloom’s thesis of the ‘anxiety of influence’ [1973]
seems readily applicable here).
is simultaneously visible yet invisible in accounts of Mexican cinema. As

Carl Mora pointed out in 1982, Buñuel is at once ‘to many Mexicans, es-
pecially those living in the United States [. . .] the only name that comes to
mind when Mexican filmmaking is mentioned’, yet ‘the effect of [his] work
on the Mexican film industry was neglible’ (1982, 91).
Just as the director’s œuvre as a whole has inspired an unusually disparate
body of criticism, contemporary reception of Nazarín was remarkably het-
erogeneous. Buñuel critics gleefully recount that the contemporary Catholic
newspaper, La Croix, thought Nazarín ‘profunda y auténticamente cristiana’
and that the ‘Oficina Católica Internacional del Cine’ nearly awarded the film
a prize for its exaltation of Christian values, an incidence that occasioned
Buñuel’s now infamous ‘Gracias a Dios todavía soy ateo’ (Sánchez Vidal
1984, 218 and 228).12 But equally, the Communist newspaper, L’Humanité,
acclaimed the film as expounding Marxist doctrine (Rodgers 1995, 59). It is
therefore not surprising that Buñuel’s critics also reach remarkably diverse
conclusions. The final sequence, unscripted and apparently added spontane-
ously by Buñuel on set (Julio Alejandro quoted in Sánchez Vidal 1984, 218),
is a case in point. Following the film’s diegesis of Nazarín’s brutal disabusal
of his Christian values, the standard interpretation of his acceptance of a
pineapple by a fruit vendor is as ‘a symbolic gesture of humanity which tran-
scends the question of whether or not he is Christian’ (Higginbotham 1979,
109). For Dominic Keown, however, it is in fact Nazarín’s original refusal of
the fruit which would indicate such a rejection of religion. His acceptance of
it signals a return to his Messianic delusion, which is mordantly parodied by
the director:
Nazarín strides out, apparently more convinced than ever about his identity
with the king of kings. The masterful final image reiterates the standard
icon, which is magnificently subverted as we become aware that the orb of
majesty he proudly holds in his left hand is, in fact, a pineapple! (1996, 64)
Another alternative is offered by María Dolores Boixadós. The pineapple’s

similarity to a hand grenade confirms her argument that Buñuel’s film traces
the evolution of Nazarín from Christian pacifist to armed revolutionary anar-
chist (Boixadós 1989, 102).13
This diversity of response matches literary criticism of Galdós’s original.
Eamonn Rodgers gives a detailed summary of the schism he perceives in crit-
ical approaches to this work, ranging from those who read the priest as an
12 This Catholic praise perhaps partly explains why Buñuel was allowed back to
Franco’s Spain to shoot Viridiana. Nazarín was, however, banned until 1968 (Quesada
1986, 82).
13 These multiple interpretations of the pineapple recall the debate over the enigmatic
box, the contents of which the spectator never sees in Belle de jour. When asked what was
in it, Buñuel of course disarmingly responds: ‘whatever you want there to be’ (1994, 243).
138 SALLY FAULKNER
unequivocal Christ figure, such as Alexander A. Parker, in his ‘Nazarín, or

the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to Galdós’ (1967), and
Gwynne Edwards (1982, 117), to more enlightened appreciations of the
novel’s ironies and complexities (Rodgers 1995, 51–3). This duality curiously
reflects the Christian/Communist excitement over the film mentioned above,
and the link is of course the ambiguous narration of both. As Rodgers
summarizes: ‘Buñuel is not so much subverting or contradicting the novel as
focusing on certain ironic implications which are already present in Galdós’s
text and developing them in a more radical direction’ (1995, 53).
‘Sagaz cronista’: Galdós’s Prologue and Buñuel’s Mindscreen

The irony which underscores Galdós’s Nazarín partly derives from its dual
intertextual references. The novel sketches a version of Don Quijote, in
which the chivalry novels are replaced by the Gospels. Thus the latter-day
Christ Nazarín undertakes an episodic journey south of Madrid, applying a
literal reading of the New Testament to nineteenth-century society as his
fellow Manchegan did the chivalry romance to sixteenth-century Spain.14
This Cervantine inspiration at the levels of characterization and plot is
repeated in the formal structure of Galdós’s novel, which is similarly
metafictional. Cervantes’s self-conscious use of what Diane Urey calls the
‘chronicle device [which] reveals fictionality by claiming history’ (1982, 66)
is reproduced through references to the unreliable ‘crónicas nazaristas’ in
Nazarín (e.g. Pérez Galdós 1999, 236) and Galdós’s novel like Cervantes’s
commences by foregrounding the narrator’s perspective in the prologue.15
For Peter Bly, this prologue constitutes a ‘lesson in reading strategies’
(1991, chapter one). Not only does Buñuel heed such instruction – ‘apurando
la lección’ as Rodgers puts it (1995) – but he reworks the ‘multiple
perspectivism encouraged by the methodological lesson of Part I’ (Bly 1991,
27) into a self-conscious cinematic mindscreen. Galdós’s plural perspectives
14 Galdós’s sequence of Nazarín’s interview with Don Pedro de Belmonte (1999,

121–44) is specifically indebted to Cervantes’s novel. It may be related to the interview
between Don Quijote and the Duke and Duchess in Part II (e.g. chapter thirty-one), as Jo
Labanyi (1993c, xix) and others have pointed out, or Don Quijote’s taming of the lion
(Part II, chapter seventeen), as suggested by Peter Goldman (1974, 105). Alternatively,
Belmonte himself may be seen as a Quixotic figure: ‘está más loco que una cabra [. . .] se
metió en tales estudios de religión y de tiología, que se le trabucaron los sesos’ (Pérez
Galdós 1999, 144–5) (see Goldman 1974, 107). Furthermore the relationship between
Galdós’s Nazarín and the novel’s sequel Halma (1895) is akin to that between Parts I and
II of Don Quijote (Urey 1982, 67).
15 The influence of the Quijote is also crucial in Tristana. William Shoemaker affirms
that Cervantes’s text is ‘the most enduring and persistent of Galdós’ literary recreations
which appears in reminiscent linguistic quotations and adaptations, in similar, parallel
episodes and situations, in a substratum of jocoserio humor and irony, and in deep reincar-
nations’ (quoted in Condé 2000, 25).
stem from his elaboration of a slippery, shifting narrator. The subjectivity of

that narrator’s perspective is indicated not only by the grammatical first
person, but also by the attention drawn to the class divide between the subject
and object of narration. The bourgeois narrator and his journalist friend from
‘Madrid alto, [. . .] nuestro Madrid’ can barely contain the disgust they feel
towards the occupants of the working-class boarding house: ‘lo más abyecto
y zarrapastroso de la especie humana’ (Pérez Galdós 1999, 39 and 16). This
emphasis on narrative partiality opens up the possibility for what Bly would
call multiple perspectives (1991, 27) and the invitation to identify different
points of view is reinforced by Galdós’s sly revelation of his narrator’s ques-
tionable epistemological credentials. Like the (same?) narrator of the sequel
novel Halma (1895), the middle-class observer who filters our view of tía
Chanfaina’s boarding house displays his pompous erudition with bombastic
descriptions of himself as ‘sagaz cronista’ (Nazarín, Pérez Galdós 1999,
9–10) or ‘erudito investigador’ (Halma, Pérez Galdós 1913, 5), yet his knowl-
edge is revealed to be shaky – either conjectured (Nazarín, Pérez Galdós
1999, 10) or absurdly exaggerated (Halma, Pérez Galdós 1913, 5–7). This is
not to say that his commentary is not occasionally insightful, indeed in the
first sentence of Nazarín he points out the gulf between signifier and referent
in the following: ‘una calle cuya mezquindad y pobreza contrastan del modo
más irónico con su altísono y coruscante nombre’ (Pérez Galdós 1999, 9). As
Bly explains, ‘what is ironic is the contrast between the narrator’s inability to
perceive the significance of some of his own remarks and his extreme sensi-
tivity to the deceit of language at other times’ (1991, 10).
The reader’s encouragement to recognize the ‘deceit of language’ and
extend this to a distrust of the narrator culminates in Galdós’s treatment of
the source of narration. Recalling Cervantes’s Cide Hamete Benengeli, the
narrator of Nazarín defers the origin of his tale in a flagrant parody of the
empiricist tenets of earlier realism and contemporary naturalism. Initially
suggesting the story may be the work of the aforementioned journalist – char-
acterized, we note, as a scandal-hungry hack, unlike our ‘sage chronicler’ –
the prologue ends with an extraordinary elusion of narrative origin.
Self-consciously responding to hypothetical questions regarding his own role
in the creation of the character Nazarín, the narrator infinitely defers the
source of narration and thereby effects a startling and unconvincing
self-effacement from the text:
‘¿Quién demonios ha escrito lo que sigue? ¿Ha sido usted, o el reportero, o

la tía Chanfaina, o el gitano viejo? . . .’ Nada puedo contestar, porque yo
mismo me vería muy confuso si tratara de determinar quién ha escrito lo
que escribo. (Pérez Galdós 1999, 40)
Buñuel’s filmic response to this prologue works on a number of levels.

There is of course a superficial similarity between plot, characterization,
140 SALLY FAULKNER
dialogue and setting: both Galdós and Buñuel’s priests are introduced in poor,
run-down boarding houses, whose fellow occupants are prostitutes and the
generally destitute or disreputable. More revealing is Buñuel’s scrutiny of the
stylistic ambiguity of this episode and its replication in the cinematic
mindscreen.
The film credits roll over a series of engravings of street scenes, to the
sound of street music, horses, cattle and vendors’ cries, ending in a cut
between an engraving and a matching shot in which the actors initially strike
the same poses. Similarly used by Saura who opens his Carmen (1983) with
Gustave Doré’s engravings, such a beginning self-consciously foregrounds
the constructedness of representation, as does Galdós’s prologue.16 Next, the
camera tilts to take in the name of the guest-house, ‘Mesón de Héroes’ – as
the street organ continues and a donkey brays – then fades to a group of
gossiping prostitutes. This transposes the novelistic narrator’s knowing
reflection on the disjuncture between the street name and its squalid reality
(cited above) and his advice that the reader ‘no tome [. . .] al pie de la letra lo
de casa de huéspedes [. . .] pues entre las varias industrias de alojamiento que
la tía Chanfaina ejercía [. . .] que todos hemos conocido en edad estudiantil
[. . .] no hay más semejanza que la del nombre’ (Pérez Galdós 1999, 10–11).
Recalling the opening lines of La Regenta, the irony of which was overlooked
by Fernando Méndez Leite, Buñuel’s camera, like Alas’s narrator, points to
the contrast between the heroism of the name, and the humbleness of the
nature of the inn.
Ironic juxtapositions such as this are named by Gwynne Edwards as a
principal stylistic feature of this film (1982, 136). Edwards argues that these
juxtapositions point to the gulf between the protagonist and the environment
he fails to understand, but this is wrongly summarized as ‘characteristic
Buñuelian irony’ (1982, 118). Thanks to his misreading of the novel (Rodgers
1995, 51), Edwards fails to appreciate that the irony is Galdosian, and that the
Cervantine references he attributes to Buñuel are also Galdós’s. Further, the
juxtapositions might more fruitfully be understood as evidence of an
off-screen controlling presence: the cinematic narrator or the mindscreen.
An overview of the editing of Buñuel’s Nazarín reveals a consistently wry,
ironic perspective which gives the impression of what Kawin terms the
‘mindedness’ of the camera eye (1978, 114). The bathos created by the
repeated opposition contrived between the worldly and the otherworldly
leads the spectator to surmise a satirical, secular off-screen narrator. Like the
ironic contrasts of the prologue, a particularly eloquent opposition is set up
when Nazarín begins to explain major theological questions and the funda-
mental tenets of Christianity to Ándara. Before he begins the camera deliber-
16 In Kawin’s terms this would be a ‘mindscreen [. . .] in which the film itself, or the
fictitious narrator, is aware of the act of presentation’ (1978, 18–19).
ately cuts to an image of a pot on the stove. While his voice trails away
addressing the first question ‘¿por qué nacemos?’, the action has jumped
forwards and Ándara comes into view adding meat to the stew. This may be
an indication of Ándara’s subjective response to the priest’s sermon – she
forgets it in favour of more urgent corporeal needs – but could also plausibly
be evidence of a narrator pointing to the gulf between spiritual speculation
and earthly necessity.17
A graphic match between the fire at the inn and the stove on which choco-
late is prepared for Nazarín and Don Ángel (the name is not accidental) not
only highlights the difference between basic and luxury foods, but also simi-
larly reveals Nazarín’s detachment from all practical concerns. Following the
sequence of the priests drinking hot chocolate (a favourite Buñuelian object
of satire, to be repeated in Tristana), there is a conspicuous graphic contrast
between an unusual high-angle shot of Nazarín’s snack of chocolate and
cakes, and an eye-level horizontal shot of the railway labourers at work. Such
a juxtaposition of clerical ineffectuality and working activity clearly looks
forward to Buñuel’s more elaborate development of this technique in the
famous cross-cut sequence between the Ángelus prayer and the building site
in Viridiana.
If we return to the novel’s prologue, it seems possible to make the case that
the first-person mindscreen, whose presence is felt through these ironic
juxtapositions, is akin to Galdós’s bourgeois visitor to the calle de las
Amazonas. The tracking shot of the inn’s name could be a point of view shot
of one of the wealthy gentlemen who is surveying the building for electrical
installation, who then observes the prostitutes, and in turn is one of the two
who interviews Nazarín, like Galdós’s narrator and his journalist friend in the
novel. These two men, who are revealed to be the proprietors of the house,
and one of them a pimp to boot, seem to fulfil the role of narrator. They act as
‘on-screen observers’ (to borrow Marvin D’Lugo’s phrase)18 for the initial
descriptive shots of the inn, and as mouthpieces for the narrator in the inter-
view with Nazarín, which triggers the narrative of the film.
However this coincidence between the cinematic narrator and a bourgeois
on-screen observer is only sustained during the prologue. The presence of
these men in the squalid boarding house is in fact another juxtaposition char-
acteristic of the mindscreen. Their clothing, accent and activity of electrical
installation (this detail is original to Buñuel) serve to counterpoise those of
the inhabitants of the inn. Moreover, as Rodgers notes (1995, 54), Buñuel’s
17 Velázquez’s Christ in the House of Mary and Martha (bearing the date 1618),
which subordinates Mary and the Messiah to the background and focuses on Martha
cooking in the foregound, seems to have influenced this sequence. I am indebted to Xon
de Ros for pointing out the relevance of this painting to me.
18 D’Lugo 1991b, 7. His concept develops Nick Browne’s ‘spectators-in-the-text’
(D’Lugo 1991b, 38; Browne 1999).
142 SALLY FAULKNER
transformation of Galdós’s narrator and journalist into a house-owner and

pimp renders Nazarín’s sermon to them on Christian poverty and humility
even more ironic.
The opening pastiche of costumbrista street scenes and accompanying
soundtrack, rather than those bourgeois observers, indicates the narrative
perspective of the rest of the film. Rodgers notes that this soundtrack sets up
the first ironic contrast of the film. The sounds of the street throw into relief
Nazarín’s ‘naïve asceticism’ and ‘detachment from reality’ and are echoed
throughout the film to the same effect (Rodgers 1995, 53). If Rodgers shows
that the soundtrack serves ironically to contrast with Nazarín’s philosophy,
the same is also true of the imagetrack, both of which form part of the
mindscreen.
Just as Buñuel’s ironic narrator is revealed through editing, the presence of
this off-screen consciousness is also betrayed through cinematography and
mise en scène. A comparison of Buñuel’s biopic of a latter-day Christ and
contemporary cinematic treatments of biblical subjects is revealing here.
During the 1950s Hollywood spawned a number of frequently turgid,
large-scale biblical epics, such as David and Bathsheba (King 1951), The
Robe (Koster 1953), Salomé (Dieterle 1953) and The Ten Commandments
(Mille 1956); Christ’s life in particular was the subject of King of Kings (Ray
1961) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (Stevens 1965). The stylistic
resources of such films are those of ‘elaborate and expensive sets, wide-
screen formats with brilliant colors, pounding musical scores, and a cast of
thousands’ (B. Stone 2000, 69). In order to portray the messianic nature of
their subject matter, these features are also characterized by grandiose cine-
matography of breathtaking sweeps of the firmament and low-angle shots of
Christ-like figures gazing up to the heavens. The ending of William
Dieterle’s Salomé, which culminates with Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, is
one of many possible examples. After an extremely long shot of the crowds
of spellbound listeners, the virtuoso camera tilts upwards to reveal a vast sky
filled with celestial light emanating from the speaking man.
In diametric opposition to such features, Buñuel appeals to minimal
aesthetics, despite his perverse observation that he shot the film in ‘varios
bellísimos pueblos de [. . .] Cuautla’ (quoted in Sánchez Vidal 1984, 216).
The comments of Gabriel Figueroa regarding his experience as director of
cinematography for Nazarín are particularly revealing in this respect:
He encontrado el truco para trabajar con Luis [. . .] No hay más que plantar
la cámara frente a un paisaje soberbio, con nubes magníficas, flores
maravillosas, y cuando estás listo le vuelves la espalda a todas esas bellezas
y filmas un camino lleno de pedruscos o una roca pelada.
(quoted in Sánchez Vidal 1984, 219)
This comment often serves as an epigraph to Buñuel’s work as an auteur, and

has now become a famous anecdote (for example see Carlos Saura quoted in
Hopewell 1986, 227), but also describes the narrative mindscreen which
governs the imagetrack of this film. Just as the soundtrack contrasts with
Nazarín’s delusion as Rodgers has shown, Buñuel’s insistence on unobtrusive
eye-level or high angle shots of the dull, gritty and ugly also ironically throw
into relief the priest’s high-flown tender-hearted ideals. As Figueroa laments,
there is an unrelenting denial of visual pleasure to the viewer in terms of mise
en scène and cinematography. Barely one long shot of the Cuautla landscape
intrudes, and when it is glimpsed from the hilltop upon which Nazarín and
his followers take refuge the camera immediately tilts downwards to witness
the dwarf Ujo threading his way through the undergrowth. Again, when the
prisoners march through the countryside, Buñuel is careful to train his
camera on the actors and dusty road with eye-level and high angle tracking
shots ensuring that only the shabby convicts fill the frame.19
Just as cinematography reveals the work of a cinematic narrator, mise en
scène similarly provides an ironic commentary on the film’s protagonist. The
picturesque villages Buñuel mentions are either plague-ridden or teeming
with animals – the train of prisoners marches through the picturesque Cuautla
countryside but we only see the dusty track; in short we are treated to none of
the bucolic pleasures of which Nazarín himself dreams as he thinks of ‘el olor
de las flores del campo’ from the stinking inn/brothel.20
A final aspect of the mindscreen in Nazarín concerns recontextualization.
Julio Alejandro, who co-wrote the scripts for both this film and Tristana with
Buñuel, has reflected: ‘Galdós es enormamente fílmico: el problema está en
que hay que envolverle en un ambiente que necesita, que le urge’ (quoted in
Sánchez Vidal 1984, 325). Thus, just as Tristana is transposed to 1929, the
late nineteenth-century Madrid of Galdós’s novel becomes military dictator
Porfirio Díaz’s Mexico, and for Rodgers (1995, 57) this refers, by implica-
tion, to Franco’s Spain. It is owing to the way the mindscreen is aligned with
an off-screen narrator, transcending identification with any fictional charac-
ter, that it may effect an ironic treatment of both Nazarín who is detached
19 Jean Luc Godard’s development of a ‘Non-Bourgeois Camera Style’ (Henderson,

1970–71) in his political work from the late 1960s is an interesting point of comparison.
Brian Henderson shows that in Weekend (1967), the film which launched this second
period of his work, Godard’s cinematography and mise en scène create a ‘flatness’ which
demystifies the bourgeois world. ‘The tracking shot and single-plane construction suggest
an infinitely thin, absolutely flat bourgeois substance that cannot be elaborated but only
surveyed’ (Henderson 1970–71, 14).
20 Gilles Deleuze has related the role of milieu in the work of Buñuel and Von
Stroheim to the French Naturalist tradition of Zola: ‘Stroheim and Buñuel are realists:
never has the milieu been described with so much violence or cruelty’ (1996, 125). The
Galdós adaptations could be the link between Buñuel’s work and this Naturalist literary
tradition.
144 SALLY FAULKNER
from his environment, and that very environment itself. Two additions relo-
cate the novel in Díaz’s dictatorship. Firstly the railway workers’ dispute
which is triggered by the penitent’s offer to undertake unsalaried work, and
secondly Nazarín’s rebuke of the stock figures of a colonel, a priest and a
bourgeois woman for mistreating a peasant. It is because the narrative
perspective is not aligned with that of the bourgeois proprietors of the
prologue that this satire can take place on so many levels. In the first
instance, Nazarín’s naïvety is parodied in his unbrotherly act, but, in the
second, our protagonist shows solidarity with the working man so the
narrator can critique a military, Catholic, bourgeois society.
Buñuel’s manipulation of narration in this way also highlights one of the
unintended contradictions of Galdós’s novel. To have a bourgeois narrator of
such a novel is highly problematic, as it embraces then recoils from the class
implications of its message. As Jo Labanyi explains:
By making Nazarín read a political message into Christ’s teachings, only to

deny the political implications of that message, Galdós is able to tackle the
urgent contemporary issue of social injustice while avoiding conclusions
that justify revolutionary violence against his own class. (1993c, xii)
Unencumbered by such equivocal ideological views, Buñuel is able to indi-

cate the logical political conclusions of Nazarín’s experience. Buñuel’s
Nazarín is censorious, but, as the differing interpretations of the film attest,
at no point does the film adopt a partisan perspective, which would only
serve to replicate the monolithic ideological discourses of regimes like Díaz’s
or Franco’s. This is thanks in part to the ironic overall mindscreen discussed
here, but perhaps also due to the inclusion of plural discourses.
Multiple Perspectivism and Mindscreens within Mindscreens

As mentioned above, in her reading of Un chien andalou Linda Williams
shows that instances of violence in the film ‘trigger localized progressions to
mindscreen’ (1992, 102). Since these mindscreens correspond to the subjec-
tive psychic experiences of characters within the overall framework of the
governing self-conscious mindscreen, they are thus ‘mindscreens within
mindscreens’ (L. Williams 1992, 102). There are two clear examples of these
in Nazarín. Both Beatriz and Ándara, the Sancho Panzas to Nazarín’s Don
Quijote, experience subjective fantasies. Beatriz’s mindscreen is prompted,
as in Un chien andalou, by a moment of violence. During Ándara’s fight with
Camella, the writhing bodies of the two prostitutes trigger Beatriz’s sexual
fantasy about Pinto, the lover who has rejected her. This is clearly an instance
where we are invited to share the character’s thoughts, or her mind’s
eye/mindscreen, but it contrasts with the overall mindscreen discussed above
as it is not self-conscious (Kawin 1978, 190). Ándara’s hallucinatory vision
of a laughing Christ, which transforms the conventional icon of the humble

martyr seen by Nazarín into a grotesque, sneering figure, is a similar moment
of subjectivity, though in this case it is not directly prefaced by an act of
violence.
Unlike conventional cinematic representations of subjectivity, like the
point of view shot and mindscreen of Juanito in Fons’s Fortunata y Jacinta
discussed in chapter four, these instances of subjective cinema do not foster
spectator identification with the characters. As both fantasies emphasize the
flesh over the spirit, or the lowly over the lofty, they may rather be read as
functions of the overall mindscreen. Just like their corpulent literary pre-
decessor Sancho Panza, both the beautiful Beatriz – the lover of Pinto and in
love with Nazarín, suffering sexualized hysterical fits and suicidal tendencies
– and the ugly Ándara – a violent, aggressive prostitute – stand for the body
to Nazarín’s spirit. During her period of refuge with the priest, Ándara admits
she had hitherto set store by the ideas of an atheist (again self-consciously
named) ‘Señor Tripas’ rather than by the tenets of Christian faith.21 The cine-
matic narrator also constructs a moment of knowing contrast between spirit
and body during Ándara’s retreat to Nazarín’s rooms following her brawl.
When the unworldly priest uncovers the woman’s shoulder to expose her
knife wound, critics have commented on its ironic similarity to the vagina
(Sánchez Vidal 1984, 225), hence the situation comedy of the sequence
which ends with Nazarín carrying the unconscious prostitute to a bed
(Edwards 1982, 136). It furthermore recalls the wounded body of the cruci-
fied Christ in standard Christian representations of the subject. Thus, while
Nazarín embodies the repression of the flesh, Ándara’s wound serves as a
reminder that at the heart of his religion’s iconography lies a fascination with
the body.22 Gérard Gozlan also relates this emphasis on the body, which
stands in diametric opposition to the priest’s perspective, to the formal nature
of the film which I have called the narrator’s mindscreen:
[Para Buñuel] la noción humano se precisa al situarse por principio y

constantemente al nivel de la carne . . . En lugar de una puesta en escena
majestuosa en que lo corporal y lo físico son enviados a dimensiones
convenientes, una puesta en escena notablemente sensible a las necesidades
más naturales: el sexo, el hambre, el frío.
(quoted in Sánchez Vidal 1984, 230, original emphasis)
Whereas the women’s fantasies are explicit shifts to first-person cinema,

there initially seems to be an implicit treatment of the priest’s subjectivity.
21 Buñuel alters Galdós’s name for the same character, Bálsamo, which, with its
connotations of the provision of comfort, is similarly knowing (Pérez Galdós 1999, 54).
22 See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, on the permeable interface between the
sublime and the abject (1982, 11–12).
146 SALLY FAULKNER
The opposition between Nazarín’s religiosity and the secular mindscreen

structures the film, charting Nazarín’s apparent progress from delusion to
disabusal. A particularly eloquent portrayal of the clash between these two
follows the disturbance created by the peripatetic penitent among the railway
workers. Nazarín leaves as a brawl begins between employees and employer:
we hear the gunshot as the oblivious priest picks an olive branch from a tree.
The biblical symbol of the olive branch is thus exposed by the mindscreen as
utterly irrelevant to the present situation – actually caused by the clergyman’s
blunders – but all the while we are aware of our protagonist’s very different
point of view. Nazarín again turns to nature in order to transcend the human
condition that surrounds him when he absently picks up a snail and watches it
crawl along his hand, while Ándara admits her jealousy of his preferential
treatment of Beatriz. Here again the clash between the earthly emotions of
the women and the priest’s abstraction is conveyed through the contrast
between the protagonist’s perspective and the framing, ironic mindscreen.
However, although the priest may name the film which traces an appar-
ently conventional character arc from his madness to sanity, Nazarín is
remarkable as it avoids portraying the protagonist’s subjectivity. A formal
analysis of the treatment of this character according to Kawin’s taxonomy of
subjectivity in cinema is revealing. Reverse angles are used when Nazarín is
in conversation, but there is no subjective camera-work which affords us
Nazarín’s ocular perspective. This is particularly noticeable when he looks at
a view, as he does from the inn, or from the hilltop. Since we do not share this
view by means of a point of view shot, he appears to be staring blankly, in a
state of abstraction the viewer cannot share.23 As noted above, unlike Beatriz
and Ándara, we are never privy to Nazarín’s mindscreen and his implicit point
of view is always ironically counterpoised with the framing mindscreen.
Possibly the only moment of subjectivity is afforded by the inclusion of the
Calanda drums on the soundtrack at the very end of the film as Nazarín
carries the pineapple. But whether this is subjective sound, or an ironic addi-
tion by the framing mindscreen, is left open to question, hence the continued
debate over the meaning of that ending discussed above.
The elaboration of an ironic narrator in Buñuel’s film version of Nazarín
replicates Galdosian irony in part, but cannot sustain the uncompromising
undecidability at the heart of Galdós’s novel. Despite contemporary mis-
readings of the film which praise its portrayal of Christian morality, there is a
stubborn refusal to afford Nazarín, the conduit of that ideology, any subjec-
tivity. On the one hand this allows Buñuel to develop a sophisticated equiva-
lent of a self-conscious Galdosian narrator, especially through editing,
cinematography and mise en scène, but, on the other, reduces the tension
23 Labanyi notes (1999, 88) that it is a Buñuelian convention to frame characters who
stare at something off-screen.
between the narrator’s and the protagonist’s ideological perspectives which

underscores Galdós’s text.
The sequence concerning the smallpox plague illustrates these different
treatments. While the Galdosian approach is characteristically ironic in its
exaggerated use of language, and Nazarín’s masochism is hinted at, it is
possible for the reader to perceive the priest’s efforts as positive (Pérez
Galdós 1999, 146–63). Buñuel’s treatment omits Nazarín’s helpfulness, and
includes a recreation of Sade’s Dialogue entre un prêtre et un moribond, in
which the protagonist’s efforts to persuade a dying woman to abandon earthly
love for the riches of heaven prove utterly ineffectual. In the novel, on the
arrival of medical help to one plague-ridden village Nazarín affirms, ‘aquí no
hacemos falta ya’ (Pérez Galdós 1999, 161). As Antonio Monegal notes, the
inclusion of a similar phrase in the film, ‘aquí ya nada tenemos que hacer’,
transforms the meaning of the original as it comes after Nazarín is rejected
by the dying woman. ‘La primera afirmación está hecha después de un labor
eficaz [. . .]. La segunda es el resultado de un fracaso [. . .]. Resulta evidente
que “su reino no es de este mundo”’ (Monegal 1993, 129). Thus Buñuel’s
Nazarín looks forward to later notorious treatments of the messianic subject,
both inside and outside of Hollywood, such as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The
Gospel According to St Matthew (1966) or Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temp-
tation of Christ (1988).
Towards the end of Galdós’s novel, a confounded mayor concludes:
o era don Nazario el pillo más ingenioso y solapado que había echado Dios
al mundo, como prueba de su fecundidad creadora, o era . . . ¿Pero quién
demonios sabía lo que era, ni cómo se había de discernir la certeza o
falsedad? (1999, 195–6)
However this uncertainty is not upheld in Buñuel’s Nazarín. Apart from the
instance of solidarity between the priest and the mistreated peasant which
Buñuel added to Galdós’s text, Monegal may summarize ‘de la película se
borran las acciones eficaces del personaje galdosiano para subrayar, por el
contrario, la vertiente destructora de su pasividad: su pulsión irrumpe en el
mundo como una amenaza a la razón’ (1993, 188). It is this threat to reason
which leads Rodgers (1995, 53) to conclude that Buñuel develops Galdós’s
irony in a more radical direction to a censorious treatment of the character.
Considering, however, that the reader of Galdós’s novel cannot even be sure
where the limits of reason lie, the 1895 text which inspired Buñuel must be
seen as more radical.
148 SALLY FAULKNER
TRISTANA (BUÑUEL 1970): FROM AMBIGUITY TO SABOTAGE
While Franco’s government stripped Viridiana of its Spanishness and

assigned it Mexican nationality, Tristana was released in Spain in 1970
without event (Eidsvick 1981, 174; Kinder 1993, 314). The scandal provoked
by the previous film that Buñuel made in his home country led to a
seven-year ban on the Tristana project, but when the film was finally released
the regime’s ‘Sindicato Nacional del Espectáculo’ acclaimed it as the best
Spanish picture of 1970, and a previously unexamined press clipping from
the Francoist Solidaridad Nacional held in the library of the Spanish film
archives in Madrid reveals that the film was celebrated as ‘entrañablemente
[. . .] netamente española’ (Munsó Cabús 1971).
If initially ‘both the form and the content were widely perceived as fairly
conventional, and realistic’ (Kinder 1993, 314), subsequent criticism has
conversely emphasized the ‘profoundly subversive’ nature of all aspects of
Buñuel’s cinematic expression in Tristana (Observer quoted on the jacket of
the video distributed by Black Star). No doubt to Buñuel’s amusement,
scholarly responses discussed above have been uncommonly disparate,
running the gamut from political, historicizing, psychoanalytic, feminist and
structuralist.
Like Galdós and Buñuel’s Nazarín, this history of the critical reception of
the film conspicuously parallels that of the novel. Three years prior to
Nazarín, the publication of Tristana went virtually unnoticed in 1892 (Pardo
Bazán 1993, 49), yet a century later literary criticism of the text has so
‘mushroomed’ that Lisa Condé can claim that ‘Tristana is now recognized as
an eminently modern literary production of great narratological complexity’
(2000, 12). The characteristic Galdosian ambiguity which underpins this
novel has also led to extraordinary differences in critical opinion. If in
Nazarín these hinged on the question of Christianity, in Tristana these arise
from the equivocal treatment of feminism, or what would be more properly
termed in the nineteenth century, ‘the woman question’. Thus some critics
read the novel as an attack on feminism, in which the amputation is inter-
preted as the author’s punishment of his heroine, but others take it as a ‘femi-
nist allegory’, in which the author sides with Woman’s rotten lot (summarized
in Jagoe 1994, 127 and 209–10, n.s 27 and 28). The latter conclusion has
been reached both because of and in spite of the profound irony of the text.
Edward Friedman argues that we cannot read Tristana’s symbolic castration
and narrative silencing at the end of the novel ‘straight’, as the irony of her
marriage to Lope is ‘consciously absurd’ (1982, 223); however this narrative
ambiguity surely extends to the narrator’s apparently sympathetic treatment
of the protagonist’s feminist aspirations at the beginning of the novel too.
Condé also concludes that Tristana is ‘a distinctly pro-feminist novel’, but
this is only ‘notwithstanding all the irony and ambiguity’. She ventures that
the ambiguity itself may serve to satirize patriarchal convention, but like
Friedman fails to note that it is more often aimed at the novel’s feminist
heroine (Condé 2000, 85).
Galdós’s take on feminism is clearly problematic, but this is not what
interested Buñuel in the text. He was not, as Condé proposes, ‘fired by the
plight of Galdós’s Tristana’ (2000, 70), but rather by the equivocal narrative
presentation of the character.24 The tendency to discuss the adaptation in
terms of feminism is explained partly by the change Buñuel makes to
Galdós’s ending by empowering Tristana, and partly because equivocal narra-
tion and ‘the woman question’ are inextricably linked in the original text. It is,
however, far more profitable to separate the two with regard to Buñuel’s film:
if we set aside both Galdós’s feminism and Galdós’s narrator in our examina-
tion of the adaptation, we would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
In his film version Buñuel draws on Galdós’s formal techniques, albeit to
develop other interests in narrative content.
The Uses of Uncertainty: Galdós and Buñuel’s Narrators

The artifice of Galdós’s narration in Tristana is displayed in the novel’s
opening pages. As was the case in Nazarín, the first-person narrator immedi-
ately exhibits his subjectivity as both an acquaintance of the characters, ‘tuve
conocimiento de tal personaje’ (Pérez Galdós 1982, 7), and an ideologically
biased observer. Just as the narrator of the 1895 novel discloses his implica-
tion in the illicit trade of tía Chanfaina’s boarding house (‘que todos hemos
conocido en edad estudiantil’ [Pérez Galdós 1999, 11]), or the narrator of La
de Bringas reveals he was a former lover of Rosalía (‘[ella] quisó repetir las
pruebas de su ruinosa amistad’ [Pérez Galdós 1993, 305]), the acquaintance
who tells the story in Tristana is simultaneously condemning and compro-
mised in the following description of Don Lope’s libertinage:
Cuantos conocían a Garrido, incluso el que esto escribe, abominaban y

abominaban de tales ideas, deplorando con toda el alma que la conducta
del insensato caballero fuese una fiel aplicación de sus perversas doctrinas.
Debe añadirse que a cuantos estimamos en lo que valen los grandes
principios sobre que se asienta, etcétera, etcétera . . . se nos ponen los pelos
de punta sólo de pensar cómo andaría la máquina social si a sus
esclarecidas manipulantes les diese la ventolera de apadrinar los disparates
de don Lope. (Pérez Galdós 1982, 24)
24 Of course Buñuel himself claimed he adapted it because of the severed leg

(Sánchez Vidal 1984, 330). The 1640 ‘miracle of Calanda’ (Buñuel’s home town) no
doubt also played a part: ‘the Virgin restored the amputated leg of a male peasant who
each day had rubbed his stump with holy oil, as Buñuel never tired of telling’ (Labanyi
1999, 80).
150 SALLY FAULKNER
Jagoe efficaciously interprets this passage as ‘a balloon of hot air which

collapses at the pinprick insertion of an “etcétera, etcétera” ’ (1994, 128).
Unsurprisingly, narrative unreliability goes hand in hand with such
conspicuous subjectivity. Looking forward to the practices already examined
in Nazarín and Halma, the narrator of Tristana oscillates between partial and
absolute knowledge, questionable conjecture and omniscient authority. This
unpredictability extends to his treatment of the main characters, leading to
the uncertainty over whether the narrator is feminist or misogynist, as
discussed above.
Unlike the flamboyance surrounding the novel’s narrator, the hallmark of
Buñuel’s equivalent narrator is, rather, subtlety. Whereas the explicit unreli-
ability of the novelistic narrator is ironic and often humorously jocose to
satirical effect,25 the implicit unreliability of the cinematic narrator discreetly
sabotages the viewer’s sense of narrative certainty.
If the film gives the overall impression of an off-screen ‘mindedness’
(Kawin 1978, 114) which generates a mindscreen akin to the literary
narrator, this is often revealed in relation, and especially in contrast, to the
subjectivity of the protagonists, as shall be considered below. Nonetheless
that mindscreen may also be perceived in isolation. Just as the opening of
Nazarín self-consciously highlights its status as mediated representation
through the fade from the engraving to the street scene, the mindscreen of
Tristana subtly indicates recursive awareness through its first image of a
cityscape of Toledo. The long shot chosen to frame the credits both recalls
Toledo-resident El Greco’s treatment of the subject and contrasts with it, as
the shabbier side of the city is shown (Edwards 1982, 226). As in Nazarín,
then, this opening shot gives forewarning that the film’s narrator is
self-conscious, yet paradoxically eschews stylistic virtuosity in favour of
minimalist aesthetics.
Even if their effect is understatement, certain formal techniques are identi-
fiable in the film, and contribute to the impression of an off-screen narrator’s
mindscreen. In his comparison of the novel and film of Tristana, Colin
Partridge claims that Buñuel replicates Galdós’s narrative devices of ‘short
scenes, sudden leaps in the action and different opinions about a character’
(1995, 208), which result in what we might call an aesthetic of interruption.
He argues that these are echoed in the formal nature of Buñuel’s adaptation:
Tightly dramatized scenes are pared down to their barest essentials; abrupt
shifts between scenes break smooth narration; different protagonists may
enter and dominate different consecutive sequences; dream imagery
possesses an actuality more powerful than normal reality; time changes are
25 For example, the narrator mixes up Tristana and Horacio’s love letters, ‘ “Te quise
desde que nací . . .” Esto decía la primera carta . . ., no, no, la segunda’ (Pérez Galdós
1982, 44), thus deflating the trite sentiments expressed.
inferred more often than indicated; and subtle, almost non-existent, camera
movements suggest a watchful analytical presence as the camera takes the
place of Galdós’s hidden narrator. (Partridge 1995, 208)
Although my point is precisely that Galdós’s narrator is frequently far from

hidden, the narrative devices Partridge lists here as those of a ‘watchful
analytical presence’ indicate the mindscreen.
Thus beneath the banal surface realism perceived on the film’s first release
in Spain, which led Francisco Aranda to comment that it had ‘not a single
scene of brilliance’ (1975, 241), lies a subtle essay in narrative disruption.
The mindscreen engenders uncertainty at every level, disrupting continuity in
space and time, appealing to interruption as a force of discursive sabotage
and eroding the boundary between waking and dreamed reality. The opening
sequences which correspond to Tristana’s initial period of innocence illus-
trate these salient features of form outlined by Partridge, and also hint at an
unreliable cinematic narrator’s mindscreen. Each sequence is cut to its ‘barest
essentials’; little more than a series of eloquent ‘vignettes’ serve to establish
characterization. In fact, essentials of the narration are removed: while there
is an establishing shot of Tristana’s parental home none is given prior to the
first scene inside Lope’s flat, which is misleading as this will be the setting
for the main narrative action. Deprived of almost all establishing shots, and
without stylistic adornments like graphic matches – save when they serve no
discernible purpose, such as the cut from Lope’s round brazier to the
barquillero’s wheel (Labanyi 1999, 90) – the narrative flow is, as Partridge
notes, abrupt or interrupted rather than smooth.26 Thus the ambiguous
mindscreen, which promotes what Jo Labanyi calls a ‘resistance to intelligi-
bility’, is revealed in such formal strategies as the ‘use of deceptive conti-
nuity editing, and [. . .] the converse strategy of cutting the opening
establishment shot and closing frames of almost every sequence’ (Labanyi
1999, 90).27 In fact the closing frames of the first sequence of the football
match are perversely played at the end of the film.
With such omissions, spatial and temporal coherence must be deduced –
as the jarring juxtaposition of the scene of Lope rejecting a duel with that of
Tristana at the belfry with the deaf boys demonstrates.28 An early cut from
the deaf boys’ football match to the period immediately following Tristana’s
26 For Partridge, ‘interruption becomes a major narrative force’ in Tristana (1995,

208). It is interesting to compare this to Michael Wood’s recent observation of the impor-
tance of interruption in the Buñuel œuvre. For Wood (2000), interruption is crucial to the
question of desire, which is never satisfied in Buñuel’s films: ‘desire and insatisfaction
form two sides of the same thing’.
27 Francisco Aranda notes (1971, 10) that this cutting of ‘frames at the beginning and
end of almost every shot’ was inherited by filmmakers of the French New Wave from
Buñuel.
28 The published script of the French version of Tristana mentions an establishing shot
152 SALLY FAULKNER
bereavement is particularly unsettling, as the flashback only catches up with

the present of the football match (never mentioned again) at least twenty
minutes into the film. The subtle camera-work Partridge mentions recalls the
minimalist cinematography discussed above with respect to Nazarín and
Godard’s political work (Henderson 1970–71), as all sequences are shot with
as little intrusion by montage or camera movement as possible. The sequence
in Tristana’s parental home, for example, which lasts over two minutes,
contains only two different camera positions and one cut. The action unfolds
to an eye-level camera which merely tracks to keep the characters in view.
As in Nazarín, the stylistic nature of the film is perversely austere:
Tristana goes to the bell-tower for the ‘vue magnifique’, yet the spectator can
only see Tristana and Saturno staring at it off-screen. In his biography of the
director Francisco Aranda reports that Tristana’s camera-man José Aguayo
took a panoramic shot from the cloisters and Buñuel responded: ‘But it’s
nice. Cut it!’ (quoted in Aranda 1975, 241). Narrative uncertainty comes to a
head when the seemingly realistic sequence of the belfry ends with Tristana’s
surrealist vision of Lope’s severed head in the place of a bell-clapper, then
cuts to her awakening as from a nightmare.29
The malaise created in the spectator from such manipulation of film form
by the mindscreen is foreshadowed by the previously mentioned football
game, not to be found in the novel. A stylistic element not mentioned by
Partridge, it is the use of sound which is crucial here.30 Following the shot of
the Toledo cityscape to the sound of church bells, we see Tristana and
Saturna walk towards the football game. Some continuity is afforded by the
constant chimes of the bells on the soundtrack, but inexplicably gushing
water can also be heard, whereas the river seen in the cityscape shot is stag-
nant. The sounds of the voiceless game are at first confusing, but the spec-
tator eventually finds explanation as the boys’ deafness is revealed.
Significantly, Buñuel removed a scene planned out in the script in which a
group of pupils is seen using gestures, which would have made the deafness
immediately clear to the viewer (Buñuel 1971, 15–16).31 The sound of a
nearby train which accompanies Saturno’s argument during the game is
perhaps only retrospectively comprehensible as Saturno’s rebellion on the
pitch matches Tristana’s rebellion on leaving Toledo with her lover by train.
of the cathedral and of the tower (Buñuel 1971, 36); but these have been subsequently
removed.
29 For a psychoanalytical interpretation of the severed head image, see Labanyi 1999.
Note also the significance of the Toledan legend that when the Moors took the city, they
used Christians’ heads as bell-clappers (Sánchez Vidal 1984, 336).
30 See Kinder on the importance of sound in Buñuel’s work in general. Despite the
fact that his first two films were silent, she notes he began his career as a director in 1928,
a moment when cinema was converting to the sound film (Kinder 1993, 292).
31 Antonio Lara (2001, 66) is wrong to claim that the changes Buñuel made to the
script when shooting and editing never deprive the viewer of ‘información esencial’.
(This is not a naturalistic detail as the railway station is not nearby in Toledo.)
The sound of the bells is later playfully and obliquely referred to when the
bell-ringer tells Tristana that people no longer understand the language of
bells. This is not, however, an explanation and the spectator can only ever
guess at the meaning of the various sounds. This position of epistemological
disadvantage experienced by the viewer brilliantly parallels, nevertheless, the
disability of the deaf boys. In other words, the cinematic narrator engineers a
kind of figurative deafness, or disability, in the spectator, which echoes the
visual action and looks forward to disablement as the main theme of the film
through Saturno’s deafness then Tristana’s amputation.32
Prefiguration of the amputation through word play originates with
Galdós’s playful narrator, which Buñuel replicates in the mindscreen. The
repeated close-ups of legs in the film obviously recall Buñuel’s interest in
foot fetishism (see for example Le journal d’une femme de chambre 1964),
but also patently foreshadow Tristana’s operation. In fact such prefigurative
images (the presence of the amputee outside Lope’s café in the scene
preceding the one when Tristana meets Horacio; or the amputee on crutches
who crosses Tristana and Lope’s path as they are walking in the park, shortly
after Lope suspects Tristana’s infidelity and confronts her about it) rather
brutally transpose the subtle verbal puns in the text. Robert Havard argues
that:
The visual medium has a two-fold advantage over the novel with regard to
the vital issue of amputation. The shock effect of deformed beauty is
presented with a clinical directness which avoids sentimentality, yet, at the
same time, the persistence of visual focus on legs provides a prophetic
context which reduced the arbitrariness of the event [in the novel].
(1982, 65)
With the closer proximity of cinematic signifier to referent (its ‘excess of

mimesis’ [Gunning 1999, 464]) Havard is right to note the different effect
caused by the film’s directness; but he overlooks the fact that the prophetic
context of the amputation is derived from Galdós, and hence that the opera-
tion is far from arbitrary in the novel.
As many literary critics have observed, Galdós’s Tristana is a dramatiza-
tion of the phrase ‘la mujer en casa con la pierna quebrada’, which is never
mentioned in the novel, but voiced by Lope in Buñuel’s film. Through
knowing word play Galdós’s narrator both foreshadows the amputation and
indicates the patriarchal power structure behind it, which is so starkly
expressed by the coarse saying. Tristana’s fate is first indicated with
32 Buñuel’s own deafness, which grew worse in the year 1969 when Tristana was shot
(Aranda 1975, 239), may also be significant in this context. I am again grateful to Xon de
Ros for drawing my attention to this important biographical detail.
154 SALLY FAULKNER
Saturna’s warning not to ‘saca[r] los pies del plato’ (Pérez Galdós 1982, 29):
but Tristana does allow her feet to wander, and one is removed. Indeed the
narrator slyly reports that Tristana’s first thoughts after the operation are of
her ‘pasito ligero que la llevaba en un periquete al estudio de Horacio’ (Pérez
Galdós 1982, 148), thus implying that the leg has been removed because of
this activity.
This association between feet or legs and moral errantry is further devel-
oped by the use of the verb ‘claudicar’, both to limp, and figuratively ‘fallar
por flaqueza moral en la observancia de los propios principios o normas de
conducta’ (Diccionario de la lengua española 2000, I, 487). This semantic
play therefore makes it clear that the removal of the leg, or permanent
limping, is a direct consequence of moral waywardness – as Lope makes
obvious when he reprimands his ward ‘sé que has claudicado moralmente,
antes de cojear con tu piernecita’ (Pérez Galdós 1982, 125). Although in a
similar vein the cinematic narrator draws attention to the equivalence
between the piano bought for Tristana and her removed limb, which trans-
poses the pun on ‘órgano’ in the novel (Labanyi 1999, 80), in general the
cinematic mindscreen must rely on a direct transcription, while the literary
narrator may convey double meaning through pun.
Finally, the filmic mindscreen can be understood as responsible for the
recontextualization of the novel, and the parallels made through cross-cutting
between the narrative and historical events. To transform the personal lives of
his characters into emblems of contemporary socio-political events is of
course one of the hallmarks of Galdós’s novelistic art; this is often more diffi-
cult on screen, and Mario Camus is only able to hint at the marriage/adultery,
monarchy/republic metaphor in his television adaptation of Fortunata y
Jacinta, as we have seen in chapter four. However, the suggestive parallels
between the diegesis of the film and the contemporary events of 1929–35,
noted by Marcel Oms and others, seem to suggest the work of an off-screen
consciousness akin to the one that transposes the Madrid of Galdós’s Nazarín
to Díaz’s Mexico. This is firstly indicated by the transposition of the work to
Toledo. The long take of the cityscape mentioned above enables viewers to
reflect that this city is both the seat of the Catholic Church, and is historically
linked to the siege of its Alcázar, defended by Nationalist soldiers during the
Civil War (Labanyi 1999, 76): in other words Toledo is associated with these
two cornerstones of Francoist repression.33 With this in mind, the camera cut
which links Tristana’s seduction by Lope to the proletariat riot and its
33 The stoicism of the Alcázar’s defenders, and in particular the forbearance of

Colonel Moscardó, whose son was executed by the Republicans, was subsequently trans-
formed by Francoist propaganda into a legend of Nationalist bravery, especially by the
film Sin novedad en el alcázar (Genina 1940) – which was actually Italian, but adopted by
the government as a symbol of Spanishness (Monterde 1995b, 209, n.14).
suppression by the Guardia Civil seems significant in foreshadowing her

rebellion and the amputation of her leg.
Buñuel himself of course had remarked that ‘like all my films [Tristana]
would contain no social criticism or condemnation of this or that’ (quoted by
Aranda 1975, 218), but subsequent critics also warn that ‘any political
reading of the images of police, Church, and patriarchal repression in
Tristana must take into account the film’s demonstration, through its treat-
ment of fetishism, that deviance and restraint go together’ (Labanyi 1999,
88). The film’s re-historicization of the novel is, therefore, fraught with
narrative ambiguity: Buñuel constructs a slippery cinematic mindscreen
spawning multiple interpretative possibilities thanks to the inheritance of
Galdós’s equivocal narrators. On the one hand the uncertainty engendered by
this overall mindscreen through stylistic minimalism is more disturbing than
the literary narrator’s ludic ambiguity; on the other, the way it translates the
irony and word play of the literary narrator is stark rather than equivocal.
Abusers and Abused: Narrative Detachment and Involvement

Unlike Buñuel’s Nazarín, which astoundingly omits any portrayal of the
hero’s subjectivity, evidence of the mindscreen in Tristana is displayed by the
interaction between that overall cinematic narrator and the characters’ subjec-
tivity, or their ‘mindscreens within mindscreens’ (L. Williams 1992, 102). A
survey of the formal portrayal of the protagonists’ subjectivities seems to
suggest that there is an equality between Tristana and Lope. Using Kawin’s
taxonomy of cinematic subjectivity, it emerges that we are privy to many
aspects of each character’s first-person perspective. Through subjective
camera-work (‘share my eyes’), we share the erotic gazes of both Lope and
Tristana at different points in the film: Tristana when she first sights Horacio
in the courtyard; and Lope when he ogles a girl in the street and then pursues
Tristana herself. The mindscreen proper of both characters (‘share my mind’s
eye’) is traced by the inclusion of dreams: Tristana’s surrealist vision of
Lope’s severed head; and Lope’s nightmare of Tristana and Horacio’s
embrace. Finally each character’s point of view (‘share my perspective’) is
discernible: Tristana’s innocence, then rebellion and revenge after her prema-
ture deflowering by an abusive guardian; and Lope’s rakishness, then repen-
tance and docility after Tristana’s operation. Yet with Buñuel it is as ever
fruitless to ask with whom spectators are encouraged to identify; a more
profitable question is: given that both characters’ subjectivity is represented,
with whom and when is the narrator either involved or detached and why?
As Robert Havard has noted (1982, 69), the establishment of character in
Tristana recalls the eighteenth-century exempla, derived from the contempo-
rary didacticism of vignette genres such as the fable, sketch or sainete. Hence
the narrator who paints the picture of Lope’s gentlemanly-yet-libertine char-
acter in the first pages of the novel is replaced by a series of eloquent
156 SALLY FAULKNER
sketches which deftly reveal his character in the film. Thus after the school-
master’s description of Lope as ‘un grand monsieur’ – which acts as a sound
bridge to our first image of Fernando Rey’s Lope – there follows a brilliantly
succinct contrast between the character’s moustache-twirling flirtation with a
woman in the street, immediately followed by his hat-doffing servility
towards an older bourgeois woman passing by with her child. In a similar
vignette, Lope is shown directing a thief ’s pursuers down the wrong street to
demonstrate his liberal principle of defending the underdog. Finally two
exempla reveal his gentlemanly disdain for commercial matters, on pawning
his silverware to an antique dealer, and honour-bound refusal to fight a duel if
it be concluded at first blood, in a meeting with the seconds.34
Although the cinematic narrator does not afford the spectator the mocking
view of Lope in his slippers brandishing his now ornamental foils, the ironic
treatment of this character is one of comic detachment, rather than the
ambiguous condemnation of his ideology we have seen in the novel. Signifi-
cantly, certain positive elements of his characterization found in the novel are
removed, such as the fact he is poor because he sold a house and his paintings
to help Tristana’s financially ruined father, then his collection of arms to pay
for her mother’s medication and funeral (Pérez Galdós 1982, 16 and 20). In
the film we can only assume the impoverishment which forces him to pawn
his belongings is a result of his previous life of dissipation, and Buñuel and
Julio Alejandro’s reference to Lope’s ‘fortuna dilapidada en gustos’ in their
synopsis of Tristana makes this clear (quoted in Lara 2001, 34). However,
lest the viewer become complacent and entertain an illusion of moral superi-
ority, this is deflated by the formal treatment of Lope’s seduction of his ward.
We are denied voyeuristic titillation when Lope slams the door in our face
after throwing the dog out of the room. As John Hopewell puts it, ‘the spec-
tator, slyly looking forward to the scene (whatever his judgement of Don
Lope’s morality), is caught by Buñuel and left with his tail between his legs
in a delightful denial of (here visual) omniscience typical of the oral ironist’
(1986, 164–5).
At this point the cinematic narrator emphasizes his distance from the char-
acter Lope, which is akin to the ironic detachment between the cinematic
narrator and the priest in Nazarín, as previously discussed. By contrast, the
off-screen narrator of Tristana apparently creates a sense of involvement with
the abused heroine. She is described in the published script as having ‘an air
of almost childlike innocence’ at the start of the film (Buñuel 1971, 15), and
her future fate as Lope’s concubine and an amputee is prefigured as the cine-
matic narrator focuses on the picture she polishes of one of Lope’s conquests,
and includes a number of close-ups of legs. The early sequence of her
pretending to play the piano on a table eloquently expresses both her affinity
34 In the script Lope’s participation in a duel was planned (Buñuel 1971, 34–6); on the
censors’ behest it was not shot.
with the deaf-mute Saturno, whose world is also silent and who only commu-
nicates through mime, and her future disablement. As already discussed this
also recalls the viewer’s figurative disablement, by which the mindscreen
seems to reinforce further our affinity with her. Thus her first nightmare of
Lope’s severed head generates a sense of fear and foreboding shared by the
viewer, suggesting also the sympathy of the cinematic narrator.
If we return to the novel, we see that Galdós’s narrator is also initially
sympathetic in his treatment of the heroine, but that this is cast into doubt by
an undercurrent of ambiguity. Thus while the literary narrator does not
condemn Tristana’s unconventional proto-feminist ideas, the way in which he
frames them is revealing. While Lope’s ‘sistema seudo-caballeresco’ (Pérez
Galdós 1982, 15) is described with ambiguity, it is framed in indirect free
style; thus the narrator’s complicity in the character’s rakish philosophy is
conveyed by the formal overlap between first- and third-persons. The descrip-
tion of Lope’s ideology by means of indirect speech in chapters one–four
contrasts with the use of direct speech to express Tristana’s ideas in chapter
five. This first exposition of Tristana’s ‘feminist’ ideology is framed in direct
speech in its entirety as a dialogue with Saturna. The overall impression,
therefore, is of the narrator’s implication with the male character, yet detach-
ment from the female.
Despite the impression that the first part of Buñuel’s film adaptation,
which corresponds to Tristana’s innocence, traces an opposition between
condemnation of the abuser and sympathy for the abused, Galdós’s ambiguity
is echoed in the mindscreen. The ultimate act of betrayal performed by
Tristana upon her guardian – implication in his murder – is slyly indicated by
her first action in the film: despite her pale, fragile girlishness at this point,
Eve-like, she offers an apple to Saturno.35 Furthermore the disruptive formal
characteristics discussed in the previous section hinder any establishment of
viewer sympathy with her. The involvement of the cinematic narrator with the
character is problematized by the ceaseless insistence on uncertainty. For
example the interruptive way the narrator presents Tristana’s nightmare, and
later Lope’s, problematizes an interpretation of it as a mindscreen. Had the
narrator employed a conventional formal treatment of the subject – we, with
Tristana, see the bell-clappers, we see her return home, we see her go to bed,
then we see her vision of Lope’s severed head – this might be read as a sketch
of her subjectivity. But the off-screen narrator removes these two linking
sections, the closing shots of the first scene and the opening shots of the
second, rendering the sequence an unsettling surrealist disruption of the logic
which divides the waking from the dreaming.36
35 Beth Miller argues that Buñuel’s characterization of Tristana depends on familiar

‘stock images’ of femininity (1983a, 340).
36 This disruption is typical of Buñuel. The waking and the dreaming are blurred
notably in Belle de jour and Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie.
158 SALLY FAULKNER
In the novel, the ambiguous or unsettling portrayal of Tristana culminates

in the treatment of her affair with Horacio, and this relationship also triggers
the transformation of Tristana which occurs in the film. Thus while novel and
adaptation are apparently distinct because Buñuel removes the epistolary
section,37 and allows Tristana to go to Paris with Horacio, there is similarity
at the level of form. In the novel, the hitherto suspicious treatment of Tristana
by the enigmatic narrator becomes particularly interesting with respect to her
affair with Horacio. Given that the sexual relationship between the ageing
Lope and his youthful charge has all the trappings of stereotype, the reader
may expect that Tristana’s relationship with the young galán Horacio will put
right the wrongs of the earlier relationship. But Galdós frustrates any expec-
tation of such a fairy tale or novela rosa idyll by, literally, subjecting the
affair to grotesque parody. Tristana meets both Saturna’s son, a minor charac-
ter in the novel, and Horacio at the same time in chapter seven, as a group of
deaf-mute and blind children pass by. Critics have previously observed that
this may lie behind Buñuel’s transformation of Saturno (Labanyi 1999, 90),
but the narrative presentation of the meeting of the young couple and the sig-
nificance of corporeal disablement regarding their relationship are also note-
worthy. As Tristana first sees the painter, the narrator slips into indirect free
style (‘Who was that man?’), but then immediately recoils from such involve-
ment to report the rest of the sequence in direct speech. He adds, furthermore,
a moralizing, prefigurative element by juxtaposing Tristana’s first sight of
Horacio with a warning about playing with fire, and also throws in a refer-
ence to the protagonist’s ignorance for good measure.
¿Qué hombre era aquél? Habíale visto antes, sin duda; no recordaba
cúando ni dónde, allí o en otra parte; pero aquélla fue la primera vez que al
verle sintió sorpresa hondísima, mezclada de turbación, alegría y miedo.
Volviéndole la espalda, habló con Saturno para convencerle del peligro de
jugar con fuego, y oía la voz del desconocido hablando con picante viveza
de cosas que ella no pudo entender. (Pérez Galdós 1982, 40)
As in the case of the previously examined significance of the verb

‘claudicar’, Galdós’s narrator links the young couple’s relationship to
imagery of disablement and illness in a clear forewarning of Tristana’s fate
for conducting an affair outside the home. The narrator knowingly repeats the
significance of the presence of the disabled children on their meeting, citing
Tristana’s exclamation ‘necesito que me hable, aunque sea por telégrafo,
como los sordomudos’ (Pérez Galdós 1982, 41), and later referring to their
meeting as ‘la tarde aquella de los sordomudos’ (Pérez Galdós 1982, 44). It is
not accidental that the f lechazo causes aphasia in both characters (Pérez
Galdós 1982, 41) and, as Jagoe observes (1994, 131), the narrator obliquely
37 Some critics wrongly call the whole novel epistolary (Sánchez Vidal 1984, 328).
refers to the beginning of their sexual relationship in terms of disablement

‘desde aquel día ya no pasearon más’ (Pérez Galdós 1982, 75). Finally,
despite the deforming effect the relationship has on Horacio, the thought of
a future with Tristana inspires a ‘terror sordo’ (Pérez Galdós 1982, 95), he
may ‘recover’ from it as from a ‘dulce enfermedad’ (Pérez Galdós 1982,
87). However, it obviously leads directly to Tristana’s permanent disable-
ment. Echoed in the scene in which Tristana mimes piano-playing in the
film, the novel’s narrator slyly describes Tristana’s piano teacher as
someone ‘que habría convertido en organista a un sordomudo’ (Pérez Galdós
1982, 173).
In the adaptation, Tristana’s first meeting with Horacio is similarly equiv-
ocal in formal terms. Just as the self-conscious presence of the cinematic
narrator is clear in the previously discussed scene when the viewer is thrown
out of the bedroom with the dog, the narrator’s interruptive participation is
similarly explicit when Tristana subsequently meets Horacio. Tristana and
Saturna reach a forked path, whereupon the maid goes to see the commotion
aroused by a rabid dog, and Tristana wanders into a courtyard whereupon she
fixes her gaze on Horacio. The establishment of an expectation of ‘bourgeois
romance rather than lowlife picaresque adventure’ (Kinder 1993, 317),
reinforced by the portrayal of Horacio by Italian cinema darling Franco
Nero, whom the script specifies ‘recuerda por su vestimenta la imagen
estereotipada del pintor parisiense’ (quoted in Havard 1982, 64), is subverted
by artful camera-work. We follow Tristana as she enters the courtyard and
share a point of view shot with her as she first sees Horacio. But our expecta-
tion for an insight into Tristana’s subjectivity is ventured then negated, just as
Galdós’s narrator adopts then rejects indirect free style. As the couple first
look at each other the camera cuts to the dog, then a guardia civil approaches
the dog with a gun, and the camera cuts back to the courtyard, this time from
a high angle travelling crane shot. This extreme distance from the characters,
along with the sound of building work, all but drowns out the couple’s
conversation, forcing the spectator to occupy, once again, a position of
disablement. The camera then cuts back to the dog-story, but just as we have
missed the climax of the ‘bourgeois romance’, we miss the action of the
‘picaresque adventure’ as the dog has already been shot. In terms which
suggestively indicate the presence of a cinematic narrator or mindscreen,
Marsha Kinder summarizes the sequence thus: ‘we are reminded that an
absent enunciator stands outside of Tristana’s narrative, for the film intercuts
between the two alternative episodes [and] we miss the dramatic climax of
both’ (1993, 317–18).
In her interpretation of the shifting narrator of Galdós’s novel, Catherine
Jagoe observes that ‘as the novel progresses, a curious network of complicity
emerges between the increasingly misogynistic narrator and the two male
characters’ (1994, 138). In the film, as Tristana’s character arc transforms her
from innocent abused into an ‘archetypal bitch’ (Miller 1983a, 353), it seems
160 SALLY FAULKNER
logical that this might be counterbalanced by an increasingly sympathetic in-

volvement with Lope. Just as Tristana’s nightmare features in the first half of
the film, in the second half corresponding to Tristana’s increasing rebellious-
ness and vengefulness, Lope has an analogous nightmare in which he sees the
two young lovers embrace. It is important to note that this hypothesis of
increasing sympathy with Lope, which is akin to that which Jagoe observes in
the novel, does not hinge, as in the novel, on the question of feminism, but is
rather a response to Tristana’s transformation into the incarnation of
monstrous femininity. Galdós’s Tristana becomes a shadow of her former self
after the amputation, a tamed bird, who loses her narrative voice as she
ceases to write letters. ‘Tristana drops her pen’, writes Lisa Condé, to
become ‘a creation “penned” by man’ (2000, 65–6). Conversely Buñuel’s
Tristana is horrifically empowered by her disfigurement, an embodiment of
‘man’s “inevitable” terror of woman’ (Labanyi 1999, 90). In other words, the
possible misogyny of the former is social, while that of the latter is psycho-
logical. The unsettling narrative nature of the film leads Kinder to comment
enigmatically that it ‘serves the interests of those patriarchs who designed it’
(1993, 317), presumably referring to both Galdós and Buñuel.
If it is tenable that the narrator of the novel is a misogynist, the proposed
analogous complicity between the cinematic narrator and Lope in the film is
compromised by the interruptive interventions of that narrator. Like
Tristana’s bell-clapper dream, the removal of continuity editing deprives of
any sense Lope’s nightmare of Tristana and Horacio’s embrace, which also
forms part of the preceding perfectly conventional sequence between Tristana
and Horacio in the painter’s studio. It therefore cannot be interpreted as a
conventional mindscreen representing Lope’s point of view. Also, far from
counterbalancing the portrayal of Tristana’s increasing shrewishness with a
sympathetic treatment of Lope, the cinematic narrator betrays a parallel
antipathy towards the decrepit libertine, whose advancing age and hypocrisy
are mercilessly parodied.
In the eloquent penultimate sequence of the film, the mindscreen frames a
vampire-like Tristana ominously pacing on her crutches, and a pathetic old
Lope, drinking chocolate with the priests. It is revealing to compare this to
the final passages of the novel in which a vapid Tristana bakes cakes and an
ageing Lope delights in raising chickens. As has been frequently noted, the
final words of the novel express the ultimate ambiguity, casting some doubt
on the anti-feminist position of the narrator: ‘¿Eran felices uno y otro? . . . Tal
vez’ (Pérez Galdós 1982, 182). Yet the impression left by the film, after the
final reprise of key images of the narrative in reverse order against a sound-
track of the opening bell rings played backwards, is one of irreducible
enigma. In other words, while many readings of Galdós’s Tristana are
sustainable, in Buñuel’s version none is. That the viewer cannot identify with
either Tristana or Lope is hardly surprising given the disruptive interventions
of the cinematic narrator, but neither can the viewer fix a stable interpretation
on a single scene thanks to their position of figurative disablement engi-

neered by the sabotaging role of the narrator’s mindscreen.
Conclusion: Histoire and Discours

In John Hopewell’s summary of Buñuel’s work he asserts ‘histoire contin-
ually cedes to discours’ (1986, 164). The reading of the cinematic narrator in
Nazarín and Tristana in this chapter offers an analysis of the ways this is
achieved. Rather than attribute cinematic form to the manipulative interven-
tion of the auteur, it is more profitable to conceive of an off-screen ‘minded-
ness’ (Kawin 1978, 114), which is independent of biographical evidence
regarding the director. This frees the scholar from the tyranny of auteurism in
film studies, and properly foregrounds the specificity of formal cinematic
narration. Buñuel critics frequently mention an element variously named as a
‘watchful analytical presence’ (Partridge 1995, 208), an ‘absent enunciator’
(Kinder 1993, 317) or an ‘oral ironist’ (Hopewell 1986, 165), but this chapter
is the first study to synthesize these using the concept of the mindscreen.
Buñuel’s adaptations of Galdós show some of the myriad similarities and
differences between filmic and literary enunciation, but also reveal the often
neglected question of the director’s debt to that author. If, as Jenaro Talens
observes, Buñuel ‘systematically denounced and denied realism’s pretence to
represent the truth in every single film he made’ (1993, xvii), in the novels of
Galdós, which Buñuel avidly read since his youth, the mimetic fallacy of
realism was likewise exposed, and an assumed correlation between realism
and stylistic naïvety was similarly questioned. To assert that Buñuel therefore
learned all his skills of narrative duplicity from the pages of Galdós would be
to overstate the case;38 however, Galdós’s influence was, as Colin Partridge
notes, ‘more fundamental than [only] two adaptations suggest’ (1995, 208). If
one searches hard enough, it may be possible to find a statement by Buñuel
which seemingly supports any critical position; nonetheless, the director did
declare in an interview with Max Aub ‘es la única influencia que yo
reconocería, la de Galdós, así, en general, sobre mí’ (quoted by Utrera
1989, 6).
This chapter demonstrates that the ‘aesthetic of ambiguity’ (Goldman
1974 of Nazarín; Jagoe 1994, 134–5 of Tristana) which Galdós developed
through his narrators and the subsequent analytical distance these narrators
fostered between reader and character, what we anachronistically term
Brechtian, underpin Buñuel’s adaptations of Nazarín and Tristana. In the
earlier film, Buñuel explores the potential of utilizing the cinematic narrator
for satirical effect, which we see repeated most clearly in the treatment of the
38 The ironic voice-over of Las Hurdes (1930) which Buñuel wrote with Pierre Unik is
an early example of formal self-consciousness, thirty years prior to his first Galdós
adaptation.
162 SALLY FAULKNER
novice of Viridiana.39 In Tristana the kind of sabotage visited on narrative

reliability was to be highly influential in the subsequent, final period of the
director’s work.
In his account of narrative unreliability in film, Narration in Light (1986),
George Wilson notes that while films such as Bergman’s Persona ‘fail to
satisfy a wide variety of classical strictures on narrational form’, in the
context of modernism, these ‘classical strictures do not have a definite appli-
cation’. Thus
Modernist films are not strictly to be counted as examples of unreliable

narration, because the concept of ‘unreliability’ presupposes in this context
a notion of truth about the fictional world of the film – truth about which
the narration may then be unreliable – which the history of events in these
films is deliberately too fractured to support. (G. Wilson 1986, 42)
If Nazarín and Tristana are, as I have argued here, examples of unreliable

narration, it is because the premise of realism, though beleaguered, remains
intact. As in Galdós’s novels, despite the significant challenges posed to
realist convention, the genre remains a touchstone.
The experimental films of Buñuel’s final creative period following
Tristana are properly modernist in Wilson’s sense, but nonetheless Galdós
remains a tacit influence. The Galdós adaptations, and more specifically the
director’s replication of the novelist’s artful formal strategies, help to explain
the genesis of Buñuel’s late French films.
39 Critics have previously noted the ‘Galdosian’ feel of this film (Monterde 1995a,
292), or, more specifically, that it draws on Halma (Hopewell 1986, 261 n.10), but it is
debatable to regard it as another, unacknowledged, Galdós adaptation as Román Gubern
has done recently (2000). It is nonetheless intriguing that Buñuel used the same script-
writer for Nazarín, Tristana and Viridiana, Julio Alejandro, and that the director originally
intended to combine both Galdós’s Nazarín and Halma in the 1958 film adaptation, but
later rejected the idea (Sánchez Vidal 1984, 224).
CONCLUSION: CINEMA AND HISTORY
CONCLUSION:
CINEMA AND HISTORY
It is revealing that the topic of an unpublished doctoral thesis on Buñuel

written in Franco’s Spain was the apparently ‘safe’ question of literary adap-
tations in the director’s work (Lara 1973; see Lara 2001, 9, for a retrospective
account of studying Buñuel in this period). If Buñuel has subsequently been
recovered by critics, in Spain and elsewhere, as the quintessential cineaste of
dissent, film adaptations of literary texts remain shrouded by a suspicious air
of conformity. Adaptation studies have consequently languished. The field
has been dominated by structuralist critics who adopt an ahistorical approach
and literary scholars keen to dabble in a new medium.
Literary adaptations have too long been the Cinderella of film studies.
Drawing examples from Spanish cinema and television of the late dictator-
ship, transitional and democratic periods, this book has sought to demon-
strate that these films highlight important questions about cinema and
history. I have focused on cinema from the points of view of form, authorship
and industry. Close readings of literary texts in comparison with their screen
adaptations highlight key formal differences between the media. For instance,
with its inevitable focus on the visible, cinema seems predisposed to
nostalgia, because the visible is always potentially reducible to mere surface.
This study analyses film’s tendency to evoke sentimentally a former politi-
cized past, a lost rural space or a previous period of stability regarding gender
and sexual difference. However, it also demonstrates that film may
problematize nostalgia by appealing to a discourse of authenticity, for
example in La colmena, or by juxtaposing violence and pictorialization, for
instance in Los santos inocentes. This book also demonstrates that the
manipulation of space is particularly expressive in film. The motif of entrap-
ment may be employed, for instance, to effect political satire, a point illus-
trated by Tiempo de silencio, or to perform a deconstruction of patriarchy, as
in Mario Camus’s Fortunata y Jacinta. Further, the unique combination of
‘visuality’ and ‘hapticality’ in the film medium (space as experienced by the
eye or body) enables cinema uniquely to portray rural and urban environ-
ments as what Lefebvre terms either ‘absolute’ or ‘abstract’ spaces. This
comparison between the media also questions the assumption that film is
limited to omniscient third-person narration, whereas literature may manipu-
late its mode of enunciation at will. My investigation of point of view
164 SALLY FAULKNER
considers the overlap between feminist theories of the masculinized viewer of

mainstream narrative cinema and assertions regarding the masculinized
reader of the realist novel, but also reveals how film and television might
portray female subjectivity, for instance through casting. The disruptive
mindscreen narrator of Nazarín and Tristana demonstrates that film, like lit-
erature, may engender narrative ambiguity.
Literary adaptations also highlight issues of authorship in the cinema.
Post-structuralist theory has proved particularly helpful in correcting an
excessive reverence for the film director, or auteur, in film studies, as it was
in re-thinking biographical approaches in literary studies. Literary adapta-
tions foregound plural authorship and perform intertextuality in a quite
unique way. Take Barthes’s much-quoted assertion from his 1968 essay that
‘a text is not a line of words releasing a single “theological” meaning (the
“message” of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a
variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’ (1977, 146).
Adaptations clearly presuppose dual authorship, that of writer and director,
but in the preceding discussions the multiple roles played by producers,
scriptwriters, cinematographers and actors in the construction of meaning
have also emerged. These roles are of course not unique to literary adaptations,
but such films throw the process of intertextuality into relief. In Angelino
Fons’s Fortunata y Jacinta, for example, the different readings of the original
novel stage the way multiple texts ‘blend and clash’ as the film pulls in so
many different directions, equivocally combining both reactionary and
progressive elements. The text is, in Barthes’s terms, ‘multi-dimensional’, as
it combines Galdós’s liberal vision in Fortunata y Jacinta with those of
oppositional director Fons, conservative scriptwriter Alfredo Mañas, forceful
actress Emma Penella and commercially orientated producer Emiliano Piedra.
Literary adaptations are furthermore revealing of the way cinema operates
as an industry, particularly with regard to the question of state subsidies. It is
telling that governments keen to reinforce national identity have enthusiasti-
cally funded literary adaptations, which have consequently tended to be asso-
ciated with paternalistic notions of educating the nation. In Spanish cinema
of the early Franco period, when the works of literature adapted to the screen
illustrated the regime’s view of Spanishness, this might be interpreted as
straightforward propaganda. When Francoist Director-General of Film José
María García Escudero subsidized the films known collectively as the Nuevo
Cine Español in the 1960s, the case was more complex. As many of these
films were made by respected directors and were based on the works of
acclaimed authors like Unamuno, Baroja and Galdós, they promoted a posi-
tive image of Spain as a country at the intellectual vanguard. But directors
also exploited the ways the literary works challenged Francoist ideology, thus
their adaptations, like Fons’s Fortunata y Jacinta, may be read as contradic-
tory. In the post-Franco period, the systems of subsidies set up by the UCD
and PSOE, which tend to be subsumed under the heading of the Miró
CONCLUSION: CINEMA AND HISTORY 165
decrees, were criticized for reproducing these propaganda practices of the

dictatorship. It was pointed out that the texts selected for film adaptations,
like the work of Martín-Santos, Cela and Lorca, seemed suspiciously to
promote the governments’ liberal image of a ‘New Spain’. Nonetheless, the
films themselves, like Camus’s La colmena, reflect on their inscription in a
process whereby a sense of identity in the present is forged through the rela-
tionship with literary works of the past.
When a period of time lapses between the publication of a literary text and
the production of its film version, questions of history become crucial. With
respect to literary adaptations in Spanish cinema, three models for describing
this process have emerged. Firstly, a historical period may be co-opted in a
later one to reflect that later period’s concerns. The appropriation of Golden
Age texts through state-subsidized adaptations in early Francoist Spain, like
Fuenteovejuna (Román 1945), would be the key example here. Secondly, the
relationship between past and present might be described as one of nostalgia.
Of the twelve adaptations examined here, three might be termed as nostalgic
in this sense, and it is interesting that they were all produced in the 1990s.
The 1995 television version of La Regenta avoids the gender trouble evident
in the original text and projects a reactionary portrait of nineteenth-century
provincial Spain. The representation of the contemporary city in Historias
del Kronen of the same year implicitly evokes a former rural community, and
Carícies of 1998 charts urban life in a way that recalls a previously ‘human-
ist’ city.
Thirdly, literary adaptations may contest nostalgia, and the other adapta-
tions examined here do so in important ways. Chronologically, these adapta-
tions fall in between the early Francoist co-option of history of the 1940s and
1950s, and the nostalgic responses to history of the 1990s. This indicates that
the period in which the modernization of Spain took place, broadly speaking
the geographical, economic, political and social transformations of the late
1950s to the late 1980s,1 was the period in which the representation of the
past became a site of struggle which reflected those changes. The two
versions of Fortunata y Jacinta and the film adaptation of La Regenta, for
instance, show how adapting a text from the past may be a means of exam-
ining (and criticizing) the present with respect to gender. The depiction of the
turbulent political climates of Díaz’s Mexico and pre-Civil War Spain in
Buñuel’s Nazarín and Tristana might similarly be read as critically encoding
the present of the Francoist dictatorship.2 Pascual Duarte and Tiempo de
1 This broadly corresponds to the period between the Francoist modernizers’

Stablization Plan of 1959 and democratic Spain’s entry into the European Community in
1986.
2 These adaptations of Galdós’s Fortunata y Jacinta, Nazarín and Tristana offer an
important corrective to the tendency of twentieth-century Spanish culture as a whole to
denigrate or ignore this important author.
166 SALLY FAULKNER
silencio eschew nostalgia and appropriate the potential directness of the cine-
matic image to depict violence and suffering in ways that politicize their
representations of the past. La colmena and Los santos inocentes are more
equivocal as they combine the directness of cinema with the medium’s
tendency towards a nostalgic revelling in surfaces. This simultaneous adop-
tion and critique of the discourses of nostalgia seems to exemplify the contra-
dictions of representing history in film. Since ‘reconstructing the past’
(Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas 1998, v) has been identified as a key feature
of Spanish film and culture of the post-Franco period, it is important to reas-
sess what has previously been understood as a uniquely postmodern tendency
in the light of the ways literary adaptations connect cinema and history.
FILMOGRAPHY
FILMOGRAPHY
Carícies (1998)
Director: Ventura Pons
Producer: Ventura Pons
Production Companies: Els Films de la Rambla; Televisión Española;
Televisió de Catalunya
Scriptwriters: Sergi Belbel; Ventura Pons
Director of Photography: Jesús Escosa
Editor: Pere Abadal
Main Actors: Rosa María Sardà (woman)
David Selvas (young man)
Running Time: 90 minutes
La colmena (1982)
Director: Mario Camus
Producer: José Luis Dibildos
Production Companies: Ágata Films; José Luis Dibildos; Televisión
Española
Scriptwriter: José Luis Dibildos
Director of Photography: Hans Burmann
Editor: José María Biurrún
Main Actors: María Luisa Ponte (Doña Rosa)
José Sacristán (Martín Marco)
Fortunata y Jacinta (1970)

Director: Angelino Fons
Producer: Emiliano Piedra
Production Companies: Emiliano Piedra Producción; Mercury
Produzzione
Scriptwriters: Ricardo López Aranda; Angelino Fons; Alfredo
Mañas
Director of Photography: Aldo Tonti
Editor: Pablo G. del Amo
Main Actors: Bruno Corazzari (Maximiliano)
168 FILMOGRAPHY
Liana Orfei (Jacinta)

Emma Penella (Fortunata)
Máximo Valverde (Juanito)
Fortunata y Jacinta (1980). Ten-part television series

Executive Producer: Salvador Augustín
Production Companies: Televisión Española; Televetia; Telefrance
Scriptwriters: Mario Camus; Ricardo López Aranda
Director of Photography: Juan Martín Benito
Main Actors: Ana Belén (Fortunata)
François Eric Gendron (Juanito)
Maribel Martín (Jacinta)
Mario Pardo (Maximiliano)
Running Time: Ten episodes of approximately 60 minutes
Historias del Kronen (1995)

Director: Montxo Armendáriz
Producer: Elías Querejeta
Production Companies: Elías Querejeta; Claudie Ossard Productions
Scriptwriters: Montxo Armendáriz; José Ángel Mañas
Director of Photography: Alfredo Mayo
Editor: Rosario Saínz de Rozas
Main Actors: Juan Diego Botto (Carlos)
Jordi Mollá (Roberto)
Nazarín (1958)
Director: Luis Buñuel
Producer: Manuel Barbáchano Ponce
Production Company: Producciones Barbáchano Ponce
Scriptwriters: Luis Buñuel; Julio Alejandro
Director of Photography: Gabriel Figueroa
Editor: Carlos Savage
Main Actors: Marga López (Beatriz)
Rita Macedo (Ándara)
Francisco Rabal (Nazarín)
FILMOGRAPHY 169
Pascual Duarte (1976)

Director: Ricardo Franco
Producer: Elías Querejeta
Production Company: Elías Querejeta
Scriptwriters: Emilio Martínez Lázaro; Elías Querejeta;
Ricardo Franco
Director of Photography: Luis Cuadrado
Editor: Pablo G. del Amo
Main Actors: Maribel Ferrero (Lola)
José Luis Gómez (Pascual)
Diana Pérez de Guzmán (Rosario)
La Regenta (1974)
Director: Gonzalo Suárez
Producer: Emiliano Piedra
Production Company: Emiliano Piedra Producción
Scriptwriter: Juan Antonio Porto
Director of Photography: Luis Cuadrado
Editor: José Antonio Rojo
main Actors: Keith Baxter (Fermín)
Nigel Davenport (Álvaro)
Emma Penella (Ana)
La Regenta (1995). Three-part television series

Director: Fernando Méndez Leite
Executive Producer: Eduardo Ducay
Production Companies: Classic Films Producción; Televisión Española
Scriptwriter: Fernando Méndez Leite
Director of Photography: Rafael Casenave
Editor: Nieves Martín
Main Actors: Juan Luis Galiardo (Álvaro)
Carmelo Gómez (Fermín)
Aitana Sánchez Gijón (Ana)
Running Time: Three episodes of approximately 90 minutes
170 FILMOGRAPHY
Los santos inocentes (1984)

Producer: Julián Mateos
Production Companies: Ganesh Producciones Cinematográficas;
Televisión Española
Scriptwriters: Antonio Larreta; Manuel Matjí; Mario Camus
Director of Photography: Hans Burmann
Main Actors: Alfredo Landa (Paco)
Terele Pávez (Régula)
Francisco Rabal (Azarías)
Tiempo de silencio (1986)

Director: Vicente Aranda
Executive Producer: Carlos Durán
Production Companies: Lola Films; Morgana Films; Televisión
Española
Scriptwriters: Vicente Aranda; Antonio Rabinad
Director of Photography: Juan Amarós
Editor: Teresa Font
Main Actors: Victoria Abril (Florita)
Imanol Arias (Pedro)
Tristana (1970)
Director: Luis Buñuel
Executive Producers: Joaquín Gurruchaga; Eduardo Ducay
Production Companies: Época Films; Talía Films; Selenia
Cinematográfica; Les Films Corona
Scriptwriters: Luis Buñuel; Julio Alejandro
Director of Photography: José F. Aguayo
Editor: Pedro del Rey
Main Actors: Catherine Deneuve (Tristana)
Lola Gaos (Saturna)
Franco Nero (Horacio)
Fernando Rey (Lope)
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INDEX
Ábel Sánchez (film), 10 Tiempo de silencio (film), 11, 15, 19,

Abismos de pasión (film), see Buñuel, Luis 24, 33–45, 46, 55, 165–6
Abril, Victoria, 28, 35, 39, 40, 43 Argentina, Imperio, 86
‘absolute space’, 54, 55, 56, 58, 61–3, 65, Arias, Imanol, 35, 40
66, 69, 71, 75, 76, 77, 78, 163 Armendáriz, Montxo, 12, 67
defined, 51–3 Las cartas de Alou, 67
‘abstract space’, 61, 65, 66, 68–71, 72, Historias del Kronen (film), 50, 66,
73–5, 76, 78, 163 67–72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 165
defined, 51–3 Navarrese Charcoal Burners, 67
Actrius, see Pons, Ventura Navarrese Riverside, 67
Aguayo, José, 152 Silencio roto, 67
Alarcón, Pedro Antonio de, 10 Tasio, 72
Alas, Leopoldo Aub, Max, 161
La Regenta (novel), 80, 81, 84, 95, audiences
108–9, 110–24, 140 changes in Spanish audiences, 13, 18–19
Alberich, Enrique, 26 female spectatorship, 85–6, 97, 114, 120
alcalde de Zalamea, El (play), 10 Austen, Jane, 80
Alejandro, Julio, 143, 156 auteurs/auteurist cinema, 2, 10, 11–12, 24,
Allen, Woody 34, 54, 72, 73, 78, 89, 127, 128, 129,
Manhattan, 70 133
Almodóvar, Pedro, 20, 21, 24, 77, 92 auteur studies, 11–12, 25, 128–9, 161,
Todo sobre mi madre, 73 164
Althusser, Louis, 129 see also Buñuel, Luis; Erice, Víctor;
Álvarez Quintero, Joaquín and Serafín, 9, Saura, Carlos
80n authenticity, 29–33, 36–7, 38, 39–40, 44,
amante bilingüe, El (film), see Aranda, 45, 163
Vicente
Andrew, Dudley, 7, 8 Barbáchano Ponce, Manuel, 136
ángel del hogar barberillo de Lavapiés, El (zarzuela), see
nineteenth-century discourse of, 81–2, Barbieri, Francisco Asenjo
88, 90, 109, 116–17, 119 Barbieri, Francisco Asenjo
in Benito Pérez Galdós’s work, 81, 82, El barberillo de Lavapiés (zarzuela),
92, 95, 97, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 100
109, 118, 124 Barcelona, 72, 73–4, 76, 77
Aranda, Francisco, 90, 130, 151, 152 see also Catalonia
Aranda, Vicente, 33–4, 41, 110 Barcelona School, 33, 110
El amante bilingüe (film), 33 Baroja, Pío, 164
Fata Morgana, 33 La busca (novel), 10
El lute, 40 Barthes, Roland, 7, 164
La muchacha de las bragas de oro Baudelaire, Charles, 103
(film), 33 Baudrillard, Jean, 17, 98
Si te dicen que caí (film), 33, 44 see also postmodernism
190 INDEX
Baxter, Keith, 86, 113 Le Journal d’une femme de chambre

Belbel, Sergi, 72 (film), 127, 153
Carícies (play), 72–7, 78 late French period, 128, 136, 162
Belén, Ana, 87, 88, 99–100, 104 Mexican period, 126, 127, 128
Bell, Daniel, 53 Nazarín (film), 11, 90, 126, 127, 128,
Belle de jour (film), see Buñuel, Luis 129, 130, 133, 134, 136–47, 148,
Belle de jour (novel), see Kessel, Joseph 149, 150, 152, 156, 161, 162, 164,
Belle Époque, see Trueba, Fernando 165
Benavente, Jacinto, 9 Robinson Crusoe (film), 127
Benet i Jornet, Josep María, 72 Tristana (film), 11, 12, 89, 126, 127–8,
Bergman, Ingmar 129, 130, 131–2, 133, 134, 135,
Persona, 162 136, 141, 143, 148–61, 162, 164,
Betriu, Francesc 165
La plaza del diamante (film), 15, 17, Viridiana, 128, 141, 148, 162
22 Burman, Wolfman, 113
Réquiem por un campesino español Burmann, Hans, 26, 64
(film), 15, 17, 22 busca, La (film), see Fons, Angelino
Bibatua, Miguel, 130 busca, La (novel), see Baroja, Pío
bicicletas son para el verano, Las (film),
18 Cabrera, Pancho, 127
Bikandi-Mejias, Aitor, 131 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 10
Bizet, Georges, 21 camino, El (novel), see Delibes, Miguel
Blanco, Carrero, 54 Camino, Jaime
Bloom, Harold, 124 La vieja memoria, 31
Bluestone, George, 3–4, 12 Campanadas a medianoche, see Welles,
Bly, Peter, 138–9 Orson
Bodas de sangre (film), see Saura, Carlos Camus, Albert
body, 144–5 La Peste, 41
and space, 50, 52, 55–6, 59, 63, 65, 70, Camus, Mario, 19, 24–5
74–5, 78 La casa de Bernarda Alba (film), 15,
Boixadós, María Dolores, 137 16, 24
Bonet, María del Mar, 75 La colmena (film), 12, 15, 16, 17, 19,
Borau, José Luis 21–2, 23, 24–33, 34, 35, 36–8, 40,
Furtivos, 54 45, 46, 55, 163, 165, 166
Bordwell, David, 134, 135 Los farsantes, 25
Bou, Núria, 73 Fortunata y Jacinta (television series),
Branigan, Edward, 134 13, 80, 87, 88, 97–108, 117, 119,
Brechtian aesthetics, 59, 135, 161 120, 122, 125, 154, 165
Bringas, La de (novel), see Pérez Galdós, La leyenda del alcalde de Zalamea
Benito (film), 10
Brontë, Charlotte Los santos inocentes (film), 17, 22, 24,
Wuthering Heights (novel), 127, 133 49, 60–5, 77, 78, 163, 166
Brooksbank Jones, Anny, 99 Young Sánchez, 25
Bruno, Giuliana, 64 Cape Fear, see Scorsese, Martin
Buñuel, Luis, 126–7, 134, 136, 161 Carey, John, 4–5, 13
Abismos de pasión (film), 127 Carícies (film), see Pons, Ventura
as auteur, 11, 12, 24, 25, 127–8, 136, Carícies (play), see Belbel, Sergi
142, 161, 163 Carmen (film), see Saura, Carlos
Belle de jour (film), 127 Carranza, Enrique Thomas de, 89
Cet obscur objet du désir (film), 127 cartas de Alou, Las, see Armendáriz,
Un chien andalou, 135, 144 Montxo
Él (film), 127 casa de Bernarda Alba, La (film), see
Ensayo de un crimen (film), 127 Camus, Mario
INDEX 191
Castile, 43, 48, 60 Claver, Enriqueta, 40

Castilla, lo castellano y los castellanos, clavo, El, 10
see Delibes, Miguel Colmena, Enrique, 34
Castro, Antonio, 24 colmena, La (film), see Camus, Mario
Catalonia colmena, La (novel), see Cela, Camilo José
identity, 22, 76 Cominges, Jorge de, 19
literature, 9n, 22, 72 Company, Juan Miguel, 130
see also Barcelona Company Gimeno, Salvador, 40
Catholicism, 130, 137, 154 Company Ramón, Juan Miguel, 31, 35–6,
anticlericism, 141, 142, 143, 144, 147, 37, 38, 41
160 Condé, Lisa, 148–9, 160
iconography, 39 Corazzari, Bruno, 86
rituals, 30, 32 country, the, representations of, see rural
Caughie, John, 108 space
caza, La, see Saura, Carlos Coupland, Douglas
Cela, Camilo José, 26, 31, 54, 165 Generation X, Tales for an Accelerated
La colmena (novel), 12, 16, 24–33, 34, Culture, 67
35, 37–8, 40, 45 Cría cuervos, see Saura, Carlos
La familia de Pascual Duarte, 27, Cuadrado, Luis, 59, 111
54–9, 62, 77
censorship under Franco, 8–9n, 9–10, 30, Davenport, Nigel, 86
54, 57, 128 David and Bathsheba, 142
abolition of, 21, 44 Defoe, Daniel, 127
avoidance of, 4n, 10, 21, 93, 131 Delibes, Miguel, 54, 60
as creative catalyst, 40, 128 El camino (novel), 60, 62
see also estética franquista Castilla, lo castellano y los castellanos,
Certeau, Michel de, 50–1, 52, 66, 69, 74, 60
75, 76 Las ratas (novel), 60
Cervantes, Miguel de, 133, 140 Los santos inocentes (novel), 54, 60–5,
Don Quijote (novel), 138, 139, 144, 77, 78
145 Deneuve, Catherine, 128
Cet obscur objet du désir (film), see Dent Coad, Emma, 76
Buñuel, Luis Derrida, Jacques, 7
Charnon-Deutsch, Lou, 81, 84–5, 110, desencanto, El, 54
112, 114, 119–20, 121 ‘desencanto’, the, 18
Chatman, Seymour, 135 Dialogue entre un prêtre et un moribund,
chien andalou, Un, see Buñuel, Luis see Sade, Marquis de
Chopin, Frédéric, 130 Díaz, Porfirio, 143, 144, 154, 165
Christianity, 137, 140, 145, 146, 148 Diblidos, José Luis, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33, 34,
iconography, 92–3, 137, 138, 142, 145, 40, 45
146, 157 Dickens, Charles, 79, 80
Bible Dieterle, William
Epic films of, 142, 147 Salomé, 142
New Testament, 138 disability/disablement, 153, 157, 158–9,
see also ángel del hogar; Catholicism 161
CIFESA (Compañía Industrial del Film deafness/deaf-muteness, 152–3, 157,
Español, S.A.), 23 158, 159
cinema-TVE deal of 1979, 15, 16 Divinas palabras (film), 15
city, the, representations of, see urban D’Lugo, Marvin, 141
space Doane, Janice, 124, 125
Civil War, 17, 21, 22, 31, 54, 57–8, 80, 90, Doane, Mary Ann, 78, 95
130, 154 documentary, 30, 31–2, 33
Clarke, David, 50 see also authenticity
192 INDEX
Don Juan Tenorio (play), 119 film criticism, 84–5, 86, 108, 109, 112,
Don Quijote (novel), see Cervantes, 120
Miguel de literary criticism, 81, 82, 84–5, 88, 93,
Don Quijote (television series), 89 97, 107, 109–10, 117, 119–20, 121,
Don Quijote (unfinished film), see Welles, 124, 148–9
Orson ‘the woman question’, 99, 148–9, 157
Doña Perfecta (novel), see Pérez Galdós, Femme et le pantin, La, see Louÿs, Pierre
Benito Fernán Gómez, Fernando, 99
Doré, Gustave, 140 Fernández, Luis Miguel, 13
Dougherty, Dru, 27, 30, 40 Fernández Flórez, Wenceslao, 9
Drove, Antonio, 21 Fernández-Santos, Ángel, 71
La leyenda del alcalde de Zalamea Fiddian, Robin, 21
(film), 10 ‘Fidelity Criticism’, 3–4, 5, 6, 11, 12,
La verdad sobre el caso Savolta 16–17, 20, 26, 34, 35–6, 40, 129
(novel), 21 Figueroa, Gabriel, 128, 142, 143
duquesa de Benamejí, La (film), 9 film noir, 12
Durgnat, Raymond, 1 f lâneur, 103, 106
Dyer, Richard, 86 Fons, Angelino
La busca (film), 10, 21
Edwards, Gwynne, 129, 138, 140 Fortunata y Jacinta (film), 11, 80, 85,
Eidsvick, Charles, 128, 131 86, 88, 89–97, 98, 100, 101, 105,
1898 Generation, 36, 40, 43, 48, 60 106, 107, 108, 111, 112, 113,
Él (film), see Buñuel, Luis 114, 120, 123, 124–5, 145, 164,
Eliot, T. S., 53 165
Ellis, John 5, 87, 98 Fortunata y Jacinta (film), see Fons,
Ensayo de un crimen (film), see Buñuel, Angelino
Luis Fortunata y Jacinta (novel), see Pérez
Erice, Víctor Galdós, Benito
as auteur, 11 Fortunata y Jacinta (play), see López
El espíritu de la colmena, 54 Aranda, Ricardo
escándalo, El (film), 10 Fortunata y Jacinta (television series), see
España, Rafael de, 9, 10 Camus, Mario; López Aranda, Ricardo
españolada/folklórica, 12, 86 Fouz-Hernández, Santiago, 68, 69
Espina, Concha, 9 Franco, Francisco, 61
espíritu de la colmena, El, see Erice, death of, 15
Víctor Franco, Ricardo, 54
Esquilache, see Molina, Josefa Pascual Duarte, 11, 49, 54–9, 60–1, 63,
estética franquista, 21 71, 75, 77, 78, 165–6
see also oppositional cinema Francoism, 28, 32, 78, 90, 131, 143, 144,
europeanization of Spanish cinema, 18–19, 148, 154, 165
21, 24 post-war period (años de hambre),
Evans, Peter, 13, 21, 86, 128, 130, 132 21–2, 26, 27, 37
exile, 22, 133, 136–7 women’s roles, 9, 22, 90, 114, 125
existentialism, 39, 44 see also censorship under Franco;
representations of the past; rural
familia de Pascual Duarte, La, see Cela, space; Sección Femenina;
Camilo José Spanishness
farsantes, Los, see Camus, Mario Francoist cinema (cine oficial), 8–9, 10,
Fata Morgana, see Aranda, Vicente 11, 23, 37
feminism, 132, 148–9, 160 Frankfurt school, 97
female perspective, 22, 94, 95–7, 103, French New Wave, 2, 3, 12, 110
105, 107–8, 113–15, 120, 125, Freud, Sigmund, 130
148–9, 164 Friedman, Edward, 148, 149
INDEX 193
Fuenteovejuna (film), 86, 165 Hitchcock, Alfred

Furtivos, see Borau, José Luis Sabotage, 2
Gades, Antonio, 100 Stage Fright, 135
Galán, Diego, 30, 95–6 Strangers on a Train, 42
García Abril, Antón, 30 The 39 Steps (film), 2
García Berlanga, Luis, 77 Hodges, Devon, 124, 125
García Escudero, José María, 164 Hollywood, 1, 2, 85, 94, 122, 142, 147
García Lorca, Federico, 15, 47, 165 Hooper, John, 52–3
gendered spaces, 82–4, 101–6, 111–12, Hopewell, John, 10, 16, 18, 55, 57, 58, 64,
117–19, 125 156, 161
Generation X, Tales for an Accelerated Horton, Andrew, 11–12, 129
Culture, see Coupland, Douglas Hutcheon, Linda, 23, 32, 33, 37, 45–6
Genette, Gérard, 6 see also postmoderism
Gershwin, George, 70
Gilbert, Sandra, 82 identification
Giles, Paul 98 in film, 17, 56, 59, 63, 70, 93–5, 97,
Gillepsie, Gerald, 133 110, 114, 120, 135, 143, 145, 157
Godard, Jean-Luc, 152 feminist theories of, 84–5, 86, 94
golfos, Los, see Saura, Carlos in television, 87–8, 105, 107–8, 110,
Gómez, Carmelo, 87, 121 120–1, 122–4
Gómez, José Luis, 58 implied male perspective
González, Felipe, 15 in film, 84–5, 94–5, 97, 111–12,
Gospel According to St Matthew, The 113–15, 124, 125, 163–4
(film), see Pasolini, Pier Paolo in literature, 81, 84–5, 94, 97, 111,
Gozlan, Gérard, 145 119–20, 121, 160, 164
Graham, Helen, 91 in television, 106–7, 120–4, 125
Greatest Story Ever Told, The, 142 see also feminism
Greco, El, 150 industrialization, 22, 47, 48, 52–3, 60, 65,
Griffith, D.W., 69, 79 76
Gubar, Susan, 82 inquietudes de Shanti Andia, Las (film), 10
Gubern, Román, 7–8, 9–10, 22 intertextuality, 1, 41, 138, 164
Gunning, Tom, 134 Irving, John, 124
Isabel II, 83, 84
Haine, La, 67 Italian Neorealism, 2n, 25, 40–1, 78
Halma (novel), see Pérez Galdós, Benito
‘hapticality’, 50–1, 52, 59, 63, 65, 66, 69, Jagoe, Catherine, 82, 93, 97, 107, 133,
74, 76, 78, 163 150, 158–9, 160
Hardy, Thomas, 48, 66 Jameson, Fredric, 17, 45–6
Haussmann, Baron, 83 see also postmodernism
Havard, Robert, 131–2, 153, 155 Journal d’une femme de chambre, Le
Hayward, Susan, 7 (film), see Buñuel, Luis
Heredero, Carlos, 21 Jordan, Barry, 17, 21, 44, 62, 64
‘heritage film’, 21, 79–80, 108 Juanita la larga (television series), 80
Hernández Ruiz, Javier, 110
Historia de una escalera (film), 10 Kawin, Bruce, 94–5, 135, 140, 146, 155
Historias del Kronen (film), see Keown, Dominic, 129, 137
Armendáriz, Montxo Kessel, Joseph
Historias del Kronen (novel), see Mañas, Belle de jour (novel), 127
José Ángel Kids, 67
historical film, 17, 20, 23, 45, 163, 165, Kinder, Marsha, 130, 132, 133, 159, 160
166 King of Kings, 142
see also postmodernism;
representations of the past
194 INDEX
Labanyi, Jo, 37, 40, 42, 82, 86, 132, 144, Mandrell, James, 111
151 Manhattan, see Allen, Woody
Lacan, Jacques, 132 Mañas, Alfredo, 95, 97, 164
Landa, Alfredo, 64 Mañas, José Ángel
Lapsley, Rob, 69, 72, 76 Historias del Kronen (novel), 12,
Lara, Antonio, 18 67–72, 74, 77
Lara, Fernando, 98 Marcus, Sharon, 83, 103, 104, 106, 118,
largas vacaciones del 36, Las, 22 125
Lasch, Christopher, 124 Marianela (film), see Perojo, Benito
Last Temptation of Christ, The, see Marianela (novel), see Pérez Galdós,
Scorsese, Martin Benito
Lefebvre, Henri, 51–3, 54, 55, 56, 58–9, Mariscal, Ana, 86
61, 62, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 73–6, 77, 78, Marsé, Juan, 33
163 Martialay, Félix, 18
see also ‘absolute space’; ‘abstract Martín, Maribel, 105
space’ Martín Gaite, Carmen, 90
León, Fray Luis de Martínez-Lázaro, Emilio, 57
La perfecta casada, 82 Martin-Márquez, Susan, 86
leyenda del alcalde de Zalamea, La (film), Martín-Santos, Luis, 34, 48, 165
see Camus, Mario; Drove, Antonio Tiempo de silencio (novel), 33–45
liminality, 101–3, 117–19 Marxism, 97, 129, 137
Linares, Luisa María, 9 see also postmodernism
literacy, 4, 5 Mata Moncho Aguirre, Juan de, 10
Llanto por un bandido, see Saura, Carlos McFarlane, Brian, 6–7, 20
Lola se va a los puertos, La (film), 9 memory, 64–5
Lope de Vega, 10 see also nostalgia
López, Charo, 39, 40, 99 Méndez Leite, Fernando
López Aranda, Ricardo Director-General of Film, 115
Fortunata y Jacinta (play), 89 La Regenta (television series), 11, 13,
Fortunata y Jacinta (television series), 80, 87, 95, 109, 115–24, 125, 140,
106 165
López-Baralt, Mercedes, 89, 91, 92, 100, Merchant/Ivory films, 79, 108
104, 105 Mérimée, Prosper, 21
Lorca, muerte de un poeta, 15 Metz, Christian, 7
Losilla, Carlos, 16, 18, 19 Mexican cinema, 126, 128, 136–7
Louÿs, Pierre ‘middlebrow’, the, 13, 24
La Femme et le pantin, 127 Miller, Beth, 130, 131
Luces de Bohemia (film), 15 Minden, Michael, 53
lute, El, see Aranda, Vicente ‘mindscreen’, 14, 94–5, 135–6, 140–7,
150–3, 154–61, 164
Machado, Antonio, 9 Mínguez Arranz, Norberto, 19–20, 28, 43,
Machado, Manuel, 9 56
madre naturaleza, La (part of Los Pazos de Mirbeau, Octave, 127
Ulloa television series), see Suárez, Miró, Pilar, 34, 115
Gonzalo ‘Miró adaptations’, 13, 15–16
Madrid ‘Miró’ decrees, 15, 16, 18, 19–20, 24, 34,
nineteenth-century, 47, 83–4, 100, 103, 60, 115, 164–5
104, 107, 139, 143 modernism, 4–5, 8, 13, 47, 162
post-war, 27, 29–30, 31, 40 modernisme, 73, 76
contemporary, 67–71 see also Barcelona
Magretta, Joan, 12, 129 Molina, Josefa
Mahoney, Elisabeth, 106 Esquilache, 21
male gaze, see implied male perspective Monegal, Antonio, 126, 127, 130–1, 147
INDEX 195
Monk, Claire, 108 nineteenth-century novel, 80

Monterde, José Enrique, 22, 23, 48 affinity with film, 1n, 79
Monzó, Quim, 72 affinity with television, 98
Mora, Carl, 137 nostalgia, 18, 19, 35, 45–6, 56, 59, 62–3,
Morgan-Tamosunas, Rikki, 17, 21, 44, 62, 67, 73, 76, 78, 124–5, 163, 165–6
64 see also postmodernism; rural space
Morir (o no) (film), see Pons, Ventura Notari, Elvira, Two Heavens, 50
muchacha de las bragas de oro, La (film), Noticiarios y Documentales (NO-DO),
see Aranda, Vicente 29–30, 32, 33, 37, 38
Mulvey, Laura, 84–5, 86, 94, 112, 120, 122 novela rosa, 9, 12, 158
Nuevo Cine Español, 10–11, 25, 88, 89,
Nada (film), 10 110, 164
narration in film, 27, 133
imagery, 91–3, 100 Ocaña, retrat intermitent, see Pons,
‘Institutional Mode of Representation’, Ventura
1 O’Donnell, Hugh, 99
narrator, 14, 134–6, 140–7, 150–3, Olea, Pedro, 110
154–61, 164 Tormento (film), 100
first-person, 135–6, 141, 150 Oms, Marcel, 129–30, 154
third-person, 136, 163 opposition to Franco in culture, 4n, 15, 25,
self-consciousness, 32, 33, 36, 38, 63, 41
144, 150 in cinema, 10–11, 20, 21, 23, 25,
subjectivity, 38–9, 56, 62, 135, 145–6, 40–42, 44, 45, 49, 54, 89, 163
150, 155, 157, 159 in literature, 10, 15, 20, 55, 62, 131
see also identification; ‘mindscreen’; see also estética franquista; rural space
voice-over Orfei, Liana, 95
narration in literature, 163 Ortega y Gasset, José, 4, 36, 40
imagery, 56, 91–3, 97, 100, 111,
116–17 Palacios, Jesús, 71, 77
narrator, 27–8, 34, 37, 94, 97, 116, 119, Palacio Valdés, Armando, 9
132–6, 138–9, 140, 141, 142, 144, Parker, Alexander A., 138
146–7, 148, 149–50, 151, 153–4, Partridge, Colin, 150–1, 152, 161
155, 157, 158–9, 160 Pascual Duarte, see Franco, Ricardo
first-person, 37, 55–6, 69, 136, 139, Pasolini, Pier Paolo
149–50, 157 The Gospel According to St Matthew
third-person, 37, 38, 40, 62, 136, (film), 147
157 Paun de García, Susan, 61, 62
self-consciousness, 38, 138, 139 Pazos de Ulloa, Los (television series), see
subjectivity, 38, 56 Suárez, Gonzalo
narration in television Penella, Emma
imagery, 100, 116–17 in Fortunata y Jacinta (film), 85–6, 87,
narrator, 123 89, 93, 95–7, 125, 164
see also ‘reaction shot’ in La Regenta (film), 85–6, 87, 108,
narrator, see narration in film; narration in 110–11, 112, 113, 114–15, 120, 122
literature; narration in television as star, 85, 86, 95
naturalism, 27, 28, 139 Peña-Ardid, Carmen, 9
Nazarín (film), see Buñuel, Luis Pérez, Xavier, 73
Nazarín (novel), see Pérez Galdós, Benito Pérez Galdós, Benito, 9, 11, 12, 14, 80,
Neorealism, see Italian Neorealism 83–4, 88, 90, 98, 103, 126, 127, 131,
Nero, Franco, 128, 159 133, 134, 136, 154, 161, 164
New Spanish Cinema, see Nuevo Cine Doña Perfecta (novel), 127
Español Fortunata y Jacinta (novel), 80, 81, 84,
New Wave, see French New Wave 85, 88–108, 118, 119, 124, 164
196 INDEX
Halma (novel), 139, 150 PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español),

La de Bringas (novel), 84, 149 15, 16, 23, 34, 164
Marianela (novel), 90 psychoanalysis, 39, 84, 85, 86, 121, 122–3,
Nazarín (novel), 84, 127, 129, 133, 129, 130, 132, 148
136–47, 148, 150, 154, 156, 162
Tormento (novel), 100 Querejeta, Elías, 54, 57, 59, 67
Tristana (novel), 12, 84, 127, 129, Quesada, Luis, 89, 90
131–2, 133, 148–61, 162
see also ángel del hogar Rabal, Francisco, 63–4, 99, 136
perfecta casada, La, see León, Fray Luis de ratas, Las (novel), see Delibes, Miguel
period drama, 40, 44, 79 Ray, Robert, 3
Perojo, Benito ‘reaction shot’, 87, 108, 120, 122
Marianela (film), 90 realism, 14, 30
perquè de tot plegat, El (film), see Pons, in film, 25, 30, 79, 127, 136, 151, 161,
Ventura 162
Perriam, Chris, 67 in literature, 31, 37, 54, 79, 84, 89, 119,
Persona, see Bergman, Ingmar 127, 136, 139, 161, 162
Peste, La, see Camus, Albert Regenta, La (film), see Suárez, Gonzalo
Picazo, Miguel Regenta, La (novel), see Alas, Leopoldo
La tía Tula (film), 10 Regenta, La (television series), see
Piedra, Emilio, 89, 95, 108, 110–11, 164 Méndez Leite, Fernando
Pinal, Silvia, 128 representations of the past, 23, 31–3, 40,
Pinto, Mercedes, 127 41, 45, 163, 165
plaza del diamante, La (film), see Betriu, co-option under Francoism, 23, 29, 33,
Francesc 37, 55, 165
plaza del diamante, La (novel), see recuperation under democracy, 15, 16n,
Rodoreda, Mercè 23, 29, 55, 166
Pons, Ventura, 72 see also historical film; postmodernism
Actrius, 72 Réquiem por un campesino español (film),
Carícies (film), 13, 50, 66, 72–7, 78, see Betriu, Francesc
79, 165 Retrato de familia (film), 22
Morir (o no) (film), 72, 75 Rey, Fernando, 156
Ocaña, retrat intermitent, 72 Rich, Adrienne, 88
El perquè de tot plegat (film), 72 Richards, Mike, 48
popular cinema, 12, 18 Rivelles, Amparo, 86
Porto, Juan Antonio, 110, 111 Rivkin, Laura, 109
postmodernism, 29, 39, 47, 49, 106, 166 Robe, The, 142
‘historiographic metafiction’, 29, 32, Robinson Crusoe (film), see Buñuel, Luis
33, 37–9, 45–6 Rodgers, Eamonn, 137–8, 141, 142, 143,
and Marxism, 16, 17, 37, 45–6 147
‘nostalgia’/‘pseudo-history’/ Rodoreda, Mercè
‘historicity’, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 23, La plaza del diamante (novel), 22
34–5, 37, 45–6, 80 Rodríguz, Fátima, 109
original/copy/‘simulacra’, 5, 17 Ronde, La (play), 73
see also historical film; representations Rose, Gillian, 106
of the past rural space, 47–8, 53–4
post-structuralism, 7, 164 co-option under Francoism, 48, 49, 54,
Pound, Ezra, 53 60, 62, 77, 78
Powrie, Phil, 25 in film, 49, 53–4, 57–9, 63, 64, 67, 72,
Priestley, J.B., 4 78
prima Angélica, La, see Saura, Carlos dissident ruralist cinema, 49, 54,
Primo de Rivera, Miguel, 129 61
propaganda, 8–9n, 9, 29, 164–5 in literature, 55–6, 57, 61–2, 63, 64
INDEX 197
nostalgia for, 48, 49–50, 52, 55, 59, 60, star studies, 85–6, 87
61–5, 70, 72, 76–7, 163, 165 see also Penella, Emma
see also ‘absolute space’; ‘hapticality’ Strangers on a Train, see Hitchcock,
Alfred
Sabotage, see Hitchcock, Alfred structuralist approach to adaptation, 5–7,
Sacristán, José, 28 8, 11, 19–20, 130–1, 163
Sade, Marquis de Suárez, Gonzalo, 110
Dialogue entre un prêtre et un La madre naturaleza (part of Los
moribund, 147 Pazos de Ulloa television series),
sainete, 9, 12, 155 111
Salomé, see Dieterle, William Los Pazos de Ulloa (television series),
Sánchez Noriega, José Luis, 5–6, 25, 33, 80, 111
88 La Regenta (film), 11, 80, 85, 86, 89,
Sánchez Vidal, Agustín, 136 95, 108–9, 110–15, 120, 122, 125,
Sánchez-Gijón, Aitana, 87, 117, 121 165
Santoro, Patricia, 61, 63 subjectivity, see narration in film;
santos inocentes, Los (film), see Camus, narration in literature
Mario subsidies, 15, 16, 19, 20, 23, 24, 26, 33,
santos inocentes, Los (novel), see Delibes, 34, 60, 164–5
Miguel see also ‘Miró’ decrees
Saura, Carlos, 143 surrealism, 4, 127, 128, 129, 132, 133,
as auteur, 11, 25n 152, 155, 157
Bodas de sangre (film), 15
Carmen (film), 21, 140 Talens, Jenaro, 161
La caza, 21, 41, 54, 58, 61 Tanner, Tony, 93
Cría cuervos, 54 Tasio, see Armendáriz, Montxo
Los golfos, 25 Tejerazo, the, 99
Llanto por un bandido, 25 television adaptations, 13
La prima Angélica, 54 see also nineteenth-century novel
Scorsese, Martin television studies, 86–8, 97–9, 108, 122,
Cape Fear, 6 124
The Last Temptation of Christ, 147 Ten Commandments, The, 142
Sección Femenina, 90, 95, 96, 106 theatre adaptations, 1n, 13, 72, 79
second Republic, 129 39 Steps, The (film), see Hitchcock, Alfred
Secretos del corazón, see Armendáriz, tía Tula, La (film), see Picazo, Miguel
Montxo tía Tula, La (novel), see Unamuno, Miguel
Shakespeare, William, 89 de
Si te dicen que caí (film), see Aranda, Tiempo de silencio (film), see Aranda,
Vicente Vicente
Silencio roto, see Armendáriz, Montxo Tiempo de silencio (novel), see Martín-
Silverman, Kaja, 95, 122 Santos, Martín
Sinclair, Alison, 109–10, 112, 121 Todo sobre mi madre, see Almodóvar,
sirena negra, La (film), 10 Pedro
Smith, Paul Julian, 16, 17, 25, 29, 33, 66 Tormento (film), see Olea, Pedro
Spanish Civil War, see Civil War Tormento (novel), see Pérez Galdós,
Spanishness Benito
of Buñuel, 134 Torreiro, Casimiro, 110
in film, 18, 21 Torres Nebrera, Gregorio, 62
Francoist view of, 164 Trainspotting (film), 67
see also exile transition to democracy, the, 15, 21, 22,
Stage Fright, see Hitchcock, Alfred 29, 31, 54, 57, 61, 98–9, 125
stars, 16, 28, 86, 87 tremendismo, 27, 54
female, 43, 85, 86, 95–7 Tristana (film), see Buñuel, Luis
198 INDEX
Tristana (novel), see Pérez Galdós, Benito political, 49, 60, 166
Trueba, Fernando, 34 see also urban space
Belle Époque, 17, 46, 48, 49, 50 Viridiana, see Buñuel, Luis
Two Heavens, see Notari, Elvira ‘visuality’, 50–1, 52, 53, 59, 66, 69, 70,
74, 76, 78, 163
UCD (Unión de Centro Democrático), 16, voice-over, 29, 31, 39, 95, 107, 122–3
23, 164
Unamuno, Miguel de, 164 Welles, Orson
La tía Tula (novel), 10 Campanadas a medianoche, 89
urban space, 47–8, 66 Don Quijote (unfinished film), 89
in literature, 68–9, 73, 103–6 Wenders, Wim
in film, 50–1, 53, 65, 66, 68, 69–71, Wings of Desire, 50, 51, 76
73–5, 78, 163, 165 Widdis, Emma, 50
in television, 103–6 Williams, Linda, 128, 132–3, 135, 144
violence in, 49–50, 67, 70, 71, 73, 74, Williams, Raymond, 47, 48, 49, 55, 60, 98
77, 78 Wilson, Elizabeth, 103, 105
see also ‘abstract space’; ‘visuality’ Wilson, George, 162
Urey, Diane, 138 Wings of Desire, see Wenders, Wim
Usigli, Rodolfo, 127 Wood, Michael, 126, 133
Utrera, Rafael, 58 Woolf, Virginia, 2n, 5, 13, 53
Wuthering Heights (novel), see Brontë,
Valle-Inclán, Ramón María del, 15 Charlotte
Valverde, Máximo, 86
verdad sobre el caso Savolta, La (film), Young Sánchez, see Camus, Mario
see Drove, Antonio youth, 67, 68–9, 70–1
Vernon, Kathleen 57
vieja memoria, La, see Camino, Jaime zarzuela, 12, 100
Vincendeau, Ginette, 7, 12
violence, 41, 49–50, 52, 54, 55, 56–9, 61,
63, 77, 144, 163

Literary Adaptations in Spanish Cinema

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LITERARY ADAPTATIONS

Literary Adaptations in Spanish Cinema offers new readings of liter-

All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation

First published 2004

ISBN 1 85566 098 9

Tamesis is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd

A catalogue record for this book is available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

This publication is printed on acid-free paper

Printed in Great Britain by

3. Rural and Urban Spaces: Violence and Nostalgia in the Country

4. Re-vising the Nineteenth-Century Novel: Gender and the

5. Artful Relation: Buñuel’s Debt to Galdós . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126

6. Conclusion: Cinema and History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163

This book is a revised version of a doctoral thesis submitted to the University

Nazarín and Tristana’. My thanks to the editors of Studies in Hispanic

Narrative film is as we know it today due to literature. From the consolida-

Scholarly work on literary adaptations was also a casualty of the birth of

adaptations in their respective national cinemas, Bluestone takes the artistic

the prerogative of a minority, the intellectuals’ (Carey 1992, 18). What a

[. . .] equivalencia [o] ampliación’) or aesthetic or cultural aims (‘saqueo:

It is surprising that, over thirty years on, structuralism remains attractive to

Texts and Contexts in Spanish Cinema

el caso particular de la cinematografía española, inmersa en unos vaivenes

recurs in the most commercially successful film of the movement, Fons’s

and Joan Magretta’s study – conceived in response to George Bluestone’s

18 See Labanyi’s overview of contemporary Spanish narrative (2002) in which she

responsive to the impact on art of changes in the sociology of spectatorship in

incorporated both in the discussion of particular topics, although a study of

POST-FRANCO FILMS OF THE POST-WAR NOVEL:

The 1980s Literary Adaptation Genre

liberal, centrist governments and were financed either by the cinema-TVE or

3 See Jo Labanyi on the ‘recuperation industry’ of post-Franco Spanish culture

El carácter fallido de las múltiples adaptaciones literarias perpetradas por

6 Many other accounts of post-Franco culture demonstrate the pertinence of

Given the notorious commercial failure of most of the costly adaptations

the bemoaned Europeanization of the Spanish cinema, and also came to be

Reappraisals of the Genre

decrees, this focus on the extratextual is occasionally achieved at the expense

levelled at Spanish cinema of the period that national films (Almodóvar’s

The process of transition to a democracy based on a consensual political

Likewise, Francesc Betriu’s La plaza del diamante could be read as

On an extratextual level, and considering the 1980s literary adaptation

History and Historicity

critical acclaim (Tiempo de silencio). Both are based on canonical post-war

LA COLMENA (CAMUS 1982): IN SEARCH OF AUTHENTICITY

Mario Camus: Craft and Commerce

La colmena was a high-profile film production: an adaptation of the

Cela empleaba un lenguaje [que] encaja de forma excelente con el triste

11 For contemporary press reports of Cela’s responses see review of La colmena

language. Indeed Dru Dougherty is flabbergasted at a film which should

Camus replaces this unreliable narrator, who oscillates between the

mise en scène of mirrors and a revolving door all efficaciously exploited to

History and Authenticity

Me faltaba Madrid; el exterior. Me armé de valor y me atreví a hacer algo

aquellos días y los he incluido. Así la ciudad es la auténtica y no creo que

It could be argued that this combination of documentary authenticity and

Camus’s interpolation of contemporary film footage and NO-DO material

TIME OF SILENCE, TIME OF PROTEST: TIEMPO DE SILENCIO

On first examination, Mario Camus’s La colmena and Vicente Aranda’s

15 Half of Aranda’s feature films to date are literary adaptations (see

auteurist individuality and artisanal accommodation which is supposedly

according to hostile theoretical accounts of postmodernism. As a crushing