Performance and gesture as crisis in La aldea maldita/The Cursed Village (Florián Rey, 1930)

Through a close analysis of the 1930 version of La aldea maldita, this chapter reflects on the influences ushered in by Spain’s embrace of modernity. Touted as ‘Spain’s last silent film’ as well as its most important one, La aldea maldita presents a harsh, minimalist beauty that has long been praised by audiences and critics. The chapter shows that the acting style is influenced not just by trends of the time but also by the film’s relationship to sound: after the disastrous experience with the sonorisation of a previous film, Rey decided to film La aldea maldita as if it were silent, when in fact the first showing of the film included sound. It also addresses the performance in the version of this film, questioning the sense of anachronism that now pervades them and reflecting on attitudes to aesthetics, acting and the cinematic medium itself.

Introduction: approaching performance in Spanish film

The importance of screen acting has often been overlooked in studies on Spanish film. While several critical works on Spanish cinema have centred on the cultural, social and industrial significance of stars, there has been relatively little critical scholarship on what stars are paid to do: act. This is perhaps surprising, given the central role that acting occupies within a film. In his essay ‘Why Study Film Acting?’, Paul McDonald argues that acting is not only crucial to understanding the affective charge of movies, but integral to the study of film as a whole (2004: 40). Yet, despite its significance, performance remains one of the most elusive and difficult aspects of film analysis. One of the reasons for this, according to Pamela Robertson Wojcik, is its apparent transparency (2004: 1). A ‘good’ actor supposedly renders their performance ‘invisible’, thereby concealing the process of acting from the audience, and engaging us within the emotional universe of the character. To this effect, discussion on acting is all too frequently evaluative: we think in terms of how convincing or naturalistic a given performance is, or are invited to appreciate the actorly skills and techniques that are brought to bear on the film....

Los amantes pasajeros/I’m So Excited! (2013): ‘performing’ la crisis

This chapter examines Almodóvar’s film Los amantes pasajeros/I’m So Excited! against the backdrop of Spain’s economic crisis. Describing the shift of director Pedro Almodóvar from melodrama to drawing room farce made evident in this film, the chapter highlights its theatricality; in so doing, it argues that the Los amantes pasajeros owes much to broad traditions of theatre acting that range from vaudeville, to mime to classic Shakespearian. The language of theatrical acting that the film employs, to that end, incorporates gestures and dramatic histrionics in order to make a clear indictment of the current state of Spain in crisis. By making clear the links between the politics of acting and acting out politics, the chapter’s account of performance further demonstrates just how nuanced the landscape of Spanish acting can be.

The future of nostalgia: revindicating Spanish actors and acting in and through Cine de barrio

This chapter considers the impact of the Spanish television programme Cine de barrio on popular discourses surrounding national film and performance styles. First airing in 1995, Cine de barrio pairs the viewing of a classic national film (generally made sometime between 1950 and the late 70s, after the death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco) with a talk show segment between a host and an invited guest. By linking discourses on cultural and historical memory with the subsequent revival of classic national cinema brought about by Cine de barrio, the chapter explores the relationship between actors, their films and their audiences; the affective response produced in this encounter, it argues, generates a nostalgia for classic national cinema that also influences contemporary Spanish film. The chapter also addresses the links between the seemingly disparate Spanish films of the 70s and the comedic box office blowouts of the 2010s, as well as arguing for a sustained reflection on nostalgia, memory, and their connections to acting and performance.

Performing fatness: oversized male bodies in recent Spanish cinema

This chapter looks at three actors who have gained weight for roles—Javier Bardem, Santiago Segura, and Antonio de la Torre—in order to discuss the role of fatness and fat masculinities in their performances. The substantial weight gain of each actor in all three films becomes a metric for understanding the way that their bodies are represented, filmed, and discussed. The chapter questions the limits of performance and acting, particularly when the body one inhabits is so drastically altered for a role. These physical alterations between the actors’ general appearance and their personal appearances, in turn, negatively mark the masculinity of their characters, the chapter argues.

Disabling Bardem’s body: the performance of disability and illness

This chapter questions what it means to ‘perform’ sickness and disability, and in particular, how common perceptions of the two may be revealed in their cinematic reiteration. Analysing Javier Bardem as emblematic of a whole branch of Spanish acting expertise, the chapter discusses the appearance of disability and illness in Mar adentro/The Sea Inside (Alejandro Amenábar, 2004) and Biutiful (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2010). Rather than assume that illness and disability are already understood phenomena, the chapter instead argues that their threat is kept at bay, that the performance of the two serves to reify the importance of the healthy body. Bardem, for this reason, is emblematic, as his physicality has long been praised and admired in Spanish cinema. For that reason, the chapter concludes, acting choices, cinematic styles, and the artificiality imposed by the camera keep illness and disability at arm’s length, constantly eluding audiences and actors alike.

Performing the nation: mannerism and mourning in Spanish heritage cinema

This chapter explores the relationship between performance and identity in ‘Spanish heritage films’, a type of national cinema that operates from within intermedial, intertextual, and transnational networks. It discusses the particular cases of El perro del hortelano/The Dog in the Manger (Pilar Miró, 1997) and Alatriste/Captain Alatriste: The Spanish Musketeer (Agustín Díaz Yanes, 2006), and describes their domestic popularity and international failure. It argues that these successes and failures ultimately produce a national cultural discourse that (despite the adoption of foreign cinematic aesthetics) fails to be legible to foreign audiences familiar with those very aesthetics. In studying the foreign-influenced performance style of the actors of these two films, the chapter tracks their attempts to reach local and foreign audiences. The history of these particular acting styles—and in spite of the transnational aesthetics that guide these films—are haunted by earlier performances and roles that ultimately provide a national opportunity for Spanish audiences to experience history, cinema, and mourning.

Askance, athwart, aside: the queer plays of actors, auteurs and machines

This chapter juxtaposes the Spanish ‘comedia de mariquitas’ [‘poofter comedy’] No desearás al vecino de quinto (Ramón Fernández, 1970) with Lucrecia Martel’s La niña santa (2004). By dissecting Alfredo Landa’s performance in No desearás al vecino de quinto, the chapter studies how the actor’s on-and off-screen persona as modern-day everyman and his flamboyant character highlight the split between actor and his craft. It also shows how this performance brings to fore a queer performance of identity that dovetails with the ‘queer sensibility’ of Martel’s directorial hand. While insisting on the multiple positions available to queerness, particularly in two films that seem to teeter on its edge, this chapter questions what it can mean to perform humanity through utterances, gestures and glances, through objects, positions, and gestures.

The influence of Argentinian acting schools in Spain from the 1980s

This chapter analyses the legacy of Argentinean performers and acting schools in contemporary Spanish cinema. It begins by studying how different waves of migration between Spain and Argentina resulted in rich collaborations, both in terms of industry and familial bonds (which favoured the appearance and continuation of families of actors such as the Alterios and Diosdados). The arrival of these Argentinean actors and actresses during the Transition to democracy contributed to the disappearance of traditional acting styles in Spanish cinema and promoted innovative modes and methods of performance. Thus, this chapter shows that the generation led by Cecilia Roth provided Spanish cinema with new ways of representing the body and performing femininity and sexual freedom, in films as influential as Iván Zulueta's Arrebato/Rapture (1979). The chapter concludes with a discussion on how the proliferation of Argentinean schools of acting, such as those of Cristina Rota and Juan Carlos Corazza, has contributed greatly to the success of recent generations of actors such as Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem.

Acting for the camera in Spanish film magazines of the 1920s and 1930s

This chapter locates specific instances in which writers, directors, and actors of the twenties referenced the actual object of the camera in relationship to Spanish film acting and performance. It further shows how, contrary to how Spaniards have been represented or have portrayed themselves throughout history, the phenomenology of technological mediation—in this case, acting—is deeply embedded in Spanish filmic culture. This chapter includes extensive archival work in order to analyse how Spanish critics of silent film regularly theorised on complex ideas concerning the need for actors to physically and psychologically adjust their performances to the requirements of the camera medium, the fragmentation and monotonisation of acting, and ultimately its commoditisation. It finally documents the ways in which the camera influenced acting styles and performances, and how the consciousness of cinemagoers participated in the policing, self-policing and racialization of subjects as readers of film magazines.