Venecia prosaica y literaria, entre Eduardo Mendoza y Pere Gimferrer

Considering two very different novels, Fortuny by Pere Gimferrer and La isla inaudita by Eduardo Mendoza, which indicated a clear recovery of Venice as a narrative space in the 1980s, this essay proposes to contextualise this renewed interest in Spanish Peninsular literature, including, due to his direct relationship with Pere Gimferrer, also some examples from Spanish-American literature and Italian cinema.

Aspectos de la desaparición

This essay discusses issues related to disappearances in urban space, in particular cases that affect streets and subways, the mismatched equivalences of lines on the surface of urban space and what lays underground. Taking as a point of departure David Pike’s concept of threshold, which is key to defining a topography of the “vertical city”, a reading of plans and literary texts and films is proposed. This will illustrate the ways in which surface and other underground spaces overlap and the many differences that exist.

Peleando engaños

Jesús Franco is the filmmaker who undoubtedly shot more movies than John Ford. His remains were lost, celebrating his farewell, in a public park in Malaga, which in the end is not such a bad place. In this chapter certain events, experiences, observations and some shared experiences are related by the one whom he affectionately called El Chino, or Mr. Quererber: his assistant, co-writer, second unit director and, at all times, his friend, about the most prolific film director of all time, who authored more than two hundred films using nearly seventy pseudonyms.

Espacios, sombras, no-lugares

The present contribution aims to study two pieces of the Catalan drama author Lluïsa Cunillé, Barcelona, mapa d’ombres and Islàndia, and the rhapsodic pulsion of these texts in their relation to space: dramatic space and literary space. It also focuses on non-places and the notion of nowhere, and finally we examine the function of some touristic guides.

La construcción cinematográfica del espacio en la alegoría política

The film Alice in Spanish Wonderland / Alicia en la España de las maravillas, directed by Jordi Feliu in 1978, was saluted by international critics as the first open questioning of Franco’s dictatorship on screen. The film was well received in the festival circuit before being dubbed into Catalan in the early 1980s. Yet, it soon fell into relative oblivion due to its demanding visual language and political content. Like other political allegories of Spain’s Transición, this film makes a complex use of cinematic space. Visual rhetoric of space includes instances of realistic, symbolic, and allegorical compositions. Intertextual allusions to Lewis Carroll’s Alice books further compound the construction of spaces in the film. The film makes use of four main strategies for the composition of space: discontinuity, incongruity, over-signification, and symbolism. Furthermore, the film’s powerful Catalan subtext generates a particularly complex set of hybrid spaces in which Spanishness and Catalanness are ambiguously expressed.

Espacio y memoria en Tánger

The historical singularity of Tangier during the 20th century has produced a number of literary works and a myth of sorts, and has shaped memory and spatial images. Some of them are examined through works, mostly narrative, by Ángel Vázquez, Umberto Pasti, Antonio Lozano and Ramón Buenaventura.

El paréntesis como arquitectura en Aub, Borges, Cervantes y Pessoa

This chapter discusses parentheses as a graphic expression and its ability to delimit spaces within a text. We study, using exemplary cases, how parentheses have been inscribed with the aim of constructing spaces (verbal and architectural). The orthographic sign as a place, as a delimitation of boundaries and as primary architecture is also investigated in several works by Max Aub and Jorge Ibargüengoitia; Fernando Pessoa through Álvaro de Campos; William Faulkner as translated by Jorge Luis Borges and, in reversed chronology, also in Miguel de Cervantes and Anne Carson. In conclusion, the concept of parenthetic space is proposed as a denomination and is defined as a concept.