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L
ANTONIO LZARO-REBOLL
TRADITIONS
IN WORLD
CINEMA
SAMPLER
Series Editors:
Linda Badley & R. Barton Palmer
This series introduces diverse and fascinating movements
in world cinema. Each volume concentrates on a set of flms
from a diferent national, regional or, in some cases, cross-
cultural cinema which constitute a particular tradition.
Volumes cover topics such as Japanese horror cinema, new
punk cinema, African cinema, Italian neorealism, Czech
and Slovak cinema and the Italian sword-and-sandal flm.
S
P
A
N
I
S
H

H
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Edinburgh
b
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H
O
R
R
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R

F
I
L
M
SPANISH HORROR FILM
A
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T
O
N
I
O

L

Z
A
R
O
-
R
E
B
O
L
L
ANTONIO LZARO-REBOLL
CONTENTS
THE INTERNATIONAL MUSICAL, Edited by Corey Creekmur and Linda Mokdad
Chapter 8: Soviet Union by Richard Taylor
ITALIAN NEOREALIST CINEMA, by Torunn Haaland
Chapter 1: A Moment And A County
POST-BEUR CINEMA, by Will Higbee
Chapter 2: The (Magrebi-) French Connection: Diaspora Goes Mainstream
SPANISH HORROR FILM by Antonio Lzaro-Reboll
Chapter 1: The Spanish Horror Book: 196875
SAVE 15% off the books featured in this sample
Please call Macmillan Distribution Limited on +441256 329 242 and quote 6JG. Discount
available to individuals until 30 September 2014. P&P not included.
S
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.
Edinburgh
b
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P
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H
O
R
R
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F
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M
SPANISH HORROR FILM
A
N
T
O
N
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L

Z
A
R
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B
O
L
L
ANTONIO LZARO-REBOLL
THE INTERNATIONAL
FILM MUSICAL
Edited by Corey Creekmur and Linda Mokdad
A Sample From Chapter 8: Soviet Union
by Richard Taylor
S
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ANTONIO LZARO-REBOLL
THE INTERNATIONAL FILM MUSICAL
COREY K. CREEKMUR AND LINDA Y. MOKDAD

9780748634774 I Jan 2013 I Paperback I 19.99
105
8. SOVIET UNION
1
Richard Taylor
Why Not Stalinist Musicals?
A recent article was entitled: Why Stalinist Musicals? (Anderson 1995). The
manner in which the question was posed is itself signicant and reects the dis-
torting lens through which both Western and Soviet scholars have historically
viewed Soviet cinema, even though Andersons article did much to refocus that
lens. We nowadays take it for granted that audiences in Western countries look
for escapist entertainment in times of collective stress. As the British director
David Lean once remarked, Films are not real. They are dramatised reality,
and, A shop girl earning three pounds a week doesnt pay to see an exact replica
of herself on the screen she pays to see what she would like to be, in looks,
dress and mode of living (Lean 1947). For some years we have accepted that
musicals were the most popular form of entertainment in the United States and
much of Europe during the Great Depression, and even that during the Third
Reich German audiences preferred to see musicals like Request Concert (1940)
rather than the more obvious products of Nazi propaganda such as Triumph of
the Will (1935) or The Eternal Jew (1940) (Taylor 1998). Why, then, should we
not accept that, in the midst of the forced industrialisation and collectivisation
programmes of the early Five-Year Plans, in the maelstrom of the massive eco-
nomic and social dislocation that these caused, in the thick of the purges and the
Great Patriotic War, the Soviet peoples might not also have wanted something
to alleviate their mass suffering and give them hope in a better future? So the
question that I want to ask rst of all is: why not Stalinist musicals?
CREEKMUR PRINT.indd 105 07/12/2011 15:23
RICHARD TAYLOR
106
The distorting lens through which Western and Soviet scholars have viewed
the construct known as Soviet cinema has been analysed by Ian Christie
(Taylor and Christie 1988). There is a growing literature on Soviet popular
culture, and especially on popular cinema, to which a number of scholars have
contributed, most notably Denise Youngblood, Richard Stites and James von
Geldern, to name only those writing in English. This literature emphasises the
continuities in Russian cultural history between the pre- and post-Revolution-
ary periods on the one hand, and between the 1920s and the 1930s on the
other, while acknowledging the very serious discontinuities and ruptures that
have traditionally been the focus of research.
I have argued elsewhere that a crucial role in the establishment of a Soviet
mass cinema was played by Boris Shumyatsky, who in October 1930 was
charged with creating a cinema that is intelligible to the millions (Taylor
1991). He argued that a cinema for the millions required the establishment of
new entertainment genres such as the musical comedy: Neither the Revolution
nor the defence of the socialist Fatherland is a tragedy for the proletariat.
We have always gone, and in future we shall still go, into battle singing and
laughing (Shumyatsky 1935: 23940).
As James von Geldern has argued (1992: 62), In the mid-1930s, Soviet
society struck a balance that would carry it through the turmoil of the purges,
the Great War and reconstruction. The coercive policies of the Cultural
Revolution were replaced or supplemented by the use of inducements. The
exclusive cultural policies of the rst Five-Year Plan period (1928 to 1932)
were replaced by the inducements of inclusive cultural policies following the
dissolution of the self-styled proletarian cultural institutions in April 1932 and
their replacement by all-embracing Soviet institutions like the new Union of
Soviet Writers. The doctrine proclaimed by the latter was Socialist Realism,
which Andrei Zhdanov, who was effectively Stalins cultural commissar,
claimed meant depicting reality not . . . in a dead, scholastic way, not simply
as objective reality, but . . . as reality in its revolutionary development
(1934: 4). Anatoli Lunacharsky, in charge of Soviet cultural policy in the
1920s, tellingly remarked that
The Socialist Realist . . . does not accept reality as it really is. He accepts
it as it will be . . . A Communist who cannot dream is a bad Communist.
The Communist dream is not a ight from the earthly but a ight into
the future. (1933)
In ofcial terminology this element was called revolutionary romanticism.
The credibility of revolutionary romanticism, the ight into the future,
was enhanced by the audiences apparent complicity in the exercise. Political
speeches, newspaper articles, poster campaigns, ofcial statistics and above all
CREEKMUR PRINT.indd 106 07/12/2011 15:23
SOVIET UNION
107
what Lenin had called the most important of all the arts (1922) depicted life
not as it actually was but as they hoped it was becoming. The media furnished
what Sheila Fitzpatrick has memorably described as a preview of the coming
attractions of socialism (1994: 262). If the Great Terror of the 1930s was to
become the stick with which to modernise the Soviet Union, entertainment
cinema was to provide the carrot.
Entertainment and Utopia
The musical was in many ways the perfect vehicle for the depiction and
promulgation of the Socialist Realist utopia. This is especially true if we bear
in mind Richard Dyers argument that the central thrust of entertainment is
utopianism and that, while Entertainment offers the image of something
better to escape into, or something we want deeply that our day-to-day lives
dont provide, it does not, however, present models of utopian worlds . . .
Rather the utopianism is contained in the feelings it embodies (1977). In fact,
the Stalinist musical did both: it presented models of utopian worlds (in the
case of the kolkhoz [collective farm] musical, the Potemkin village) while also
embodying the utopian feelings that stimulated audience identication. The
task of Soviet cinema in the 1930s and 1940s was to convince audiences that,
whatever their current hardships, life could become as it was depicted on the
screen: life not as it is, but as it will be. In this reel utopia, if not in everyday
reality as then experienced by cinema audiences, the Stalinist slogan Life has
become happier, comrades, life has become more joyous (Stalin 1935) was
made real.
The reel realisation of utopia was achieved by both representational and
non-representational signs. Dyers observation that we pay more attention
to the former at the expense of the latter is still largely true (1977). The non-
representational signication in the Stalinist musical lies primarily in three
areas: the use of fairy-tale narrative conventions; the music itself; and the topo-
graphical conventions of the image of utopia, all of which weakened audience
resistance to the reception of the utopian model depicted on screen. This essay
will focus on the work of the two leading directors of musical comedies (the
word miuzikl was ofcially regarded at the time as too bourgeois), Grigori
Alexandrov (1903 to 1984) and Ivan Pyriev (1901 to 1968), while arguing that
their lms need to be seen in their historical and cultural context, so that the
works of other lmmakers will also be discussed where relevant.
Alexandrov founded the Soviet musical comedy genre with The Happy Guys
(1934) and went on to make The Circus (1936), Volga-Volga (1938) and The
Radiant Path (1940) in the same mould. Pyrievs rst musical comedy was The
Rich Bride (1938), which established the model for the kolkhoz musical. This
was followed by Tractor-Drivers (1939), The Swineherdess and the Shepherd
CREEKMUR PRINT.indd 107 07/12/2011 15:23
RICHARD TAYLOR
108
(1940) and The Kuban Cossacks (1949), the apotheosis of what Khrushchev
was later to call the varnishing of reality that characterised Soviet cinemas
depiction of the Potemkin village of the Stalin period (Khrushchev 1956).
The Path to Utopia: The Fairy Tale
Maya Turovskaya has brilliantly analysed the way in which Pyriev in particu-
lar used the conventions of the Russian fairy tale to project his folklorised
(cf. Miller 1990) vision of the Potemkin village, and Masha Enzensberger has
extended this analysis to Alexandrovs Radiant Path (Enzensberger 1993). The
use of these conventions enabled the Soviet musicals to act, in Turovskayas
own words, not so much as the reection of their times objective reality, but
rather as the reection of the reality of its image of itself (1988: 132).
The plots of these lms almost invariably centre on what the Russians call
a love intrigue, but it is not tainted by sexual or erotic impulses; rather it is
a pure romantic love based on its objects labour prociency. In the conven-
tions of the Soviet musical as, indeed, those of its Hollywood equivalent
it is clear from the beginning when boy meets girl. But the resolution of
this inevitable liaison is retarded by a misunderstanding and/or by competi-
tion between two male suitors, one of whom is, in terms of his own labour
productivity, worthy of the heroine, one of whom is not. The plot develops
around the heroines journey towards an understanding of which is which.
Sometimes, as in Circus, this is obvious from the beginning and the plot
therefore revolves around the heroines discovery of the true path the Soviet
path towards that understanding. The exceptions to this rule are the last two
lms by each director listed above. In Radiant Path, based very closely on the
Cinderella story, the heroine has to prove to herself that she is worthy of her
suitor by successfully emancipating herself through a Party-sponsored training
programme. In Kuban Cossacks the hero has no rival in love; his battle is with
his own Cossack male chauvinist pride.
In almost all these lms, and in all the kolkhoz musicals, the central char-
acter, who eventually resolves the difculties, is a woman. There are no
fundamentally weak or evil women characters in these lms. The only evil
characters are foreigners, such as the Hitler look-alike von Kneischitz in Circus
(Mamatova 1995: 65), or those forces threatening the frontiers of the USSR in
Tractor-Drivers. The weak Soviet characters are either marginalised (the bour-
geois women in Happy Guys, or Kuzma and his associates in Swineherdess)
or won over to the work ethic (Alexei the book-keeper a truly bourgeois
because unproductive profession in Rich Bride, and Nazar the idler in
Tractor-Drivers). In utopia, weakness is therefore redeemable; evil is not, but
it is externalised.
The main characters are depersonalised and universalised, as in a fairy tale.
CREEKMUR PRINT.indd 108 07/12/2011 15:23
SOVIET UNION
109
They are symbolic gures, and the frequent use of choral singing helps this
process of generalisation; in both Rich Bride and Kuban Cossacks, for instance,
the battle of the sexes is fought out in choral form. The Soviet version of the
star system helped in this; all of Alexandrovs lms starred his wife, Lyubov
Orlova, the prima donna of Stalinist cinema (Nikolaevich 1992), and all of
Pyrievs starred his wife, Marina Ladynina. Their appearance in a series of
lms with similar plot structures but different settings in different parts of the
Soviet Union and with different casts helped audiences all over the country to
identify with them more directly on the one hand, while broadening the appeal
of the lms and their message on the other. It must also be said that neither
Orlova nor Ladynina conformed to the traditional stereotype of femininity.
While Ladynina in the kolkhoz musicals sometimes appeared in folk costume,
both she and Orlova also appeared in masculine clothing (Ladynina in Rich
Bride and Tractor-Drivers, Orlova in Circus, Volga-Volga and Radiant Path)
which desexualised them (pace Enzensberger 1993). For Soviet women caught
in the double bind of housework and motherhood on the one hand and col-
lective labour on the other this must have represented truly utopian wish full-
ment. The heroine is always depicted in the workplace, be it kolkhoz, circus or
spinning mill, and only in the home as a workplace, like the Cinderella heroine
of Radiant Path. Some critics have argued that the Soviet musical heroine is
a mother gure, but this is not true in the conventional sense; domesticity is
absent and there is no family but the collective as workplace in microcosm or
the collective as country in macrocosm. This elision between the two is effected
partly by the use of folklore and partly through the music, to which I shall
return.
The characters are introduced to one another accidentally, sometimes
through the fairy-tale medium of a picture, updated as a photograph (Tractor-
Drivers, Swineherdess). The accident of their initial encounter reinforces the
sense of the inevitability of their romance, as if it has been ordained from on
high. Often this is reinforced by a direct or indirect blessing from that same
source. In Alexander Medvedkins The Miracle Girl (1936) (set on a kolkhoz
but not a musical), the Stakhanovite heroine is summoned to Moscow where
she sees and hears Stalin speak, as a reward for her labour achievements. In
Circus the heroine understands her situation when she joins the May Day
parade in Red Square and sees Stalin, here signied as God by the icon-like
image carried at the head of the procession in the immediately preceding shot.
In Tractor-Drivers, the wedding feast nale is accompanied by toasts and oaths
of allegiance to Stalin. In Radiant Path, the heroine is summoned to a fairy-tale
Kremlin to receive the Order of Lenin from someone whose aura reects light
upon her face; this must be Stalin, because in a Soviet lm in 1940 it could
hardly be anybody else.
2
These unforgettable encounters occur in numerous
other Soviet lms, posters, paintings and newspaper articles of the period;
CREEKMUR PRINT.indd 109 07/12/2011 15:23
RICHARD TAYLOR
110
they form a central thread in the fairy tale of Stalin as father of his people, the
genius who has time for everyone, who can solve everybodys problems, even
when Stalins divinity is mediated through another Party or State ofcial such
as the Soviet President Kalinin or the local Party Secretary (Radiant Path or
Kuban Cossacks). Stalin is the omniscient and implicitly omnipresent father of
the collective Soviet family, the avuncular patriarch of the peoples (Gnther
1997a). Participation in this larger family sublimates the need for the heroines,
and indeed the heroes, to participate in nuclear domesticity; sex is absent, and
even the kissing is innocent (Happy Guys, Volga-Volga). The family is the
country itself (Gnther 1997b), in which all are equal, or at least all have equal
opportunity.
A central part of the fairy tale in Alexandrovs lms, though not in Pyrievs,
is the idea that any Soviet citizen, however humble, timid or wretched at the
beginning of the lm, can make a success of life and rise to the heights that
socialist society has to offer. In Volga-Volga, the heroine, a local letter carrier,
overcomes numerous obstacles to win the All-Union Olympiad of Song. In
Radiant Path, the heroine receives the Order of Lenin and later becomes a
deputy to the Supreme Soviet, a sure sign that she has arrived. These closures
are in fact also apertures, allowing the audience to participate in the action
(Anderson 1995). Radiant Path has perhaps the most interesting, and certainly
the most bizarre, ending of any Stalinist musical. Following the award of the
Order of Lenin, the heroine nds herself in a Kremlin anteroom decorated only
with chandeliers and mirror. Scarcely able to believe that what is happening
to her is real, she checks in the mirror. She sees her reection and therefore
knows that it is real. Then she turns her face back to the camera and sings
a duet with mirror images of her earlier selves. The image in the mirror then
turns into her late mother (also played by Orlova) as fairy godmother, com-
plete with tiara, who opens the frame of the mirror and invites her into the
world of mirror (reel?) reality. The two are seated in a car that then takes off,
ying over the Kremlin, then Moscow, then high mountains, and then back to
Moscow to the showpiece All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, landing at the
foot of the famous statue by Vera Mukhina of The Worker and the Collective
Farm Woman. The nal scene of the lm takes place in the Exhibition itself
and the one-time Cinderella gure, now crowned with success, re-encounters
her Prince Charming against a magic background of fountains and other
symbols of abundance. Implicitly, now that they have both established their
equality in successful careers, they may have time for domesticity, but this is
by no means made explicit.
Other lms use festivals or mass scenes to draw the audience into the action
and, above all, the emotional uplift: the storming of the Bolshoi Theatre
against all obstacles by the hero and heroine of Happy Guys, the Olympiad
of Song at the end of Volga-Volga, the wedding feast at the end of Tractor-
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Drivers, the implied weddings that conclude both Swineherdess and Kuban
Cossacks. But the device that really involves the emotions of the audience is the
use of popular music in its various forms.
The Path to Utopia: The Music
The music for all of the Alexandrov and the rst and last of the Pyriev musi-
cals was written by the most prolic composer of Soviet popular music, Isaak
Dunayevsky (1900 to 1955). He was awarded his rst Stalin Prize in 1941 for
the music to Alexandrovs Circus and Volga-Volga, and his second ten years
later for the score to Pyrievs Kuban Cossacks. One of the songs from Circus,
the Song of the Motherland, became the call sign for Moscow radio and
the unofcial state anthem of the Soviet Union until an ofcial anthem was
introduced in 1943.
The music played a crucial part because it played to the emotions of the
audience and helped to weaken any intellectual resistance they may have had
to the message of the lms (Anderson 1995). As already indicated, the scores
made widespread use of choral singing, which helped to universalise the
characters and the situations in which they found themselves. Furthermore,
the combination of catchy tunes and ideologically loaded texts (mostly by
Vasili Lebedev-Kumach, 1898 to 1949) meant that, when the audience left the
cinema humming the tune, it also carried with it the message of reel reality into
the real world outside. This helped make audiences feel that they were part of
the world depicted on the screen; it elided the actual with the utopian ideal,
collapsing the fourth wall in the auditorium (Anderson 1995).
In Happy Guys, the rst verse of the theme song extolled the uplifting popu-
larity of song, while the refrain made clear the use to which this uplift was to
be put:
A song helps us build and live,
Like a friend, it calls and leads us forth.
And those who stride through life in song
Will never ever fall behind. (Cf. von Geldern and Stites 1995: 2345)
Further verses enjoined the audience, When our country commands that we be
heroes, Then anyone can become a hero, and nally warned that any enemy
threatening to take away our living joy would be resoundingly rejected with
a battle song, staunchly defending our Motherland. The idea of song as a
central and necessary part of life is echoed in Three Tank Drivers, by Boris
Laskin and the Pokrass brothers, written for Tractor-Drivers: There they live
and singing guarantees it As a tight, unbroken family. That family was not
the nuclear family, but the Motherland: the word rodina deriving from the
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112
Russian verb rodit, to give birth to was resurrected to reinforce this meta-
phor (Gnther 1997a and b). This was the Motherland of Socialism in one
country, a land whose vast size and variety were constantly extolled (Circus,
Volga-Volga, Tractor-Drivers, Swineherdess), a land that was largely hermeti-
cally sealed against apparently hostile outside forces (Circus, Tractor-Drivers).
Dunayevskys music carefully reected the setting of each lm. For Pyrievs
kolkhoz musicals, he wrote scores that were heavily inuenced by folk music,
Ukrainian or Russian as appropriate. The Alexandrov musicals, on the other
hand, were urban-orientated and the scores drew upon urban musical forms
such as jazz, music hall and military marches, however unlikely that combina-
tion may appear. All three are evident in Happy Guys and Circus. Volga-Volga
centres on a musical civil war (the device used here for narrative retardation)
between the heroine, who has written the Song of the Volga, which eventu-
ally wins the Olympiad of Song, and the hero, who prefers to rehearse classical
music with his brass band. For him, the music of Wagner is a sign of culture
and civilisation; in 1938 this was a clear indication of false consciousness.
In these three musicals, popular or low culture triumphs over high culture.
In Happy Guys, the respectable buffet party literally becomes a carnival of
the animals, while later on the jazz band ends the lm taking the Bolshoi
Theatre audience by storm; in Circus, the action largely takes place within the
connes of a low cultural form; in Volga-Volga, it is the popular amateur
song that triumphs over professional classical music, and a child maestro who
out-conducts the adults. Similarly, in Radiant Path, the least musical of the
Stalinist musicals, it is Cinderella who outstrips her ugly sisters. These lms
provided conrmation that When our country commands that we be heroes,
Then anyone can become a hero and singing guarantees it!
The texts of the songs in the Stalinist musicals tell us a great deal about the
topography of utopia and clarify some of the confusions and errors committed
by those critics and scholars who have ignored them.
On Arrival: The Topography of Utopia
The Stalinist utopia is hermetically sealed against the outside world; the only
depiction of abroad (the lynch mob at the start of Circus) is unattering, and
other references are boldly defensive (Tractor-Drivers). It has been argued
that, in this utopia, gender construction was quite straightforward. The man
was identied with the city, with industry, defence, modernity, the rational
and therefore progress; the woman, by contrast, was identied with the coun-
tryside and the land, with agriculture, nurture, nature, the emotional and
therefore also with backwardness. This construction reaches its apotheosis in
Vera Mukhinas statue, designed to top the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris
Exhibition, of The Worker and the Collective Farm Girl, a syntactically sym-
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metrical pair but with the man wielding the mace of modernity: the industrial
hammer (Stites 1992: 84). This characterisation is, however, an oversim-
plication and each musical explored different parts of the Stalinist utopia,
pars pro toto. We must therefore construct our topography of that utopia by
pulling together those parts into a coherent whole.
Utopia exists in these lms on two levels, which may be broadly character-
ised as the periphery and the centre. Alexandrovs musicals are geographically
centripetal, Moscow-orientated; Pyrievs are not, but they are not, as Evgeni
Dobrenko has claimed, centrifugal lms in which the movement is away from
the capital (1996a: 109). Pyrievs forms merely explore the periphery and
validate it as part of utopia.
Exploring the Periphery
The Alexandrov musicals begin at the periphery: in Happy Guys it is a resort
in the Crimea; in Circus, for once, it is overseas the USA; in Volga-Volga it
is the small provincial town of Melkovodsk (meaning literally little waters);
and in Radiant Path it is a small town in the Moscow region. In the course of
the lm the action moves to Moscow, where it ends: in the Bolshoi Theatre,
in Red Square by the Kremlin, in the Olympiad of Song, and in the All-Union
Agricultural Exhibition respectively. The ties that link the periphery to the
centre vary; the translation of the main characters from the one to the other is
the principal one of these links, but boats provide the main method of interur-
ban transport in Happy Guys (although a train is also mentioned but not seen)
and in Volga-Volga, where the postal system is also crucial, as it is in Pyrievs
Tractor-Drivers, where the postman sings a song encapsulating the variety
and breadth of his vast country. In Circus, trains offer a means of arrival and
(interrupted) departure from and to abroad, but not within the USSR itself.
Telegrams act as catalysts in both Volga-Volga and Radiant Path, while in
the latter the rst link between Melkovodsk and the capital is seen when the
radio announces Moscow calling, and the last is effected through the fairy-
tale mirror device discussed above. The use of radio is familiar from other
lms of the period, including Kozintsev and Traubergs Alone (1931) and the
documentaries of Dziga Vertov and Esr Shub, but the virtual absence of air-
craft and trains as means of internal communication and linkage, when they
featured so strikingly elsewhere, is curious.
It is almost as if the periphery is in some ways living in the past, which
would have been present reality for most audiences of the time. The presence
of the bourgeois ladies early in Happy Guys strengthens this interpretation.
There is surely a visual reference to the women in October (1927) who stab
the Bolshevik workman to death with their parasols when the women in
Alexandrovs lm spike the wrong artiste with theirs. In Radiant Path the
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114
heroine Tanya is employed as a domestic servant, as is Anyuta in Happy Guys
a most un-Soviet occupation, even if still widespread in the 1930s; both liber-
ate themselves from this drudgery as the plot develops. Similarly, Melkovodsk
in Volga-Volga is initially depicted in a very unattering light; the ferry breaks
down, the telephones do not work, the telegram from Moscow slows down
when it arrives in the provinces, and the population of the town seems to spend
its time either petitioning the local bureaucrat Byvalov (meaning nothing new,
hilariously played by the leading comic actor Igor Ilyinsky) or practising their
music (Turovskaya 1998). Yet this is itself depicted as a caricature: whereas
Byvalov, who regards his recent posting to Melkovodsk as a mere staging
post on his long career track to journeys end in Moscow, claims that There
can be no talent in such a dump, Strelka (little arrow), the letter carrier,
insists there is no lack of talented people and goes on to prove her point by
singing Tchaikovsky and reciting Lermontov. It is, however, the retarded tel-
egram from Moscow announcing the socialist competition of the Olympiad
of Song that breaks the logjam of stagnation and, in a deliberate irony, it is
through Strelkas efforts that Byvalov, despite his own efforts to obstruct her,
eventually arrives with the entire local musical talent in Moscow.
In Pyrievs lms, the kolkhoz is largely a self-sufcient microcosm, a closed
world of social claustrophobia, to use Dobrenkos term (1996a and b). In
Tractor-Drivers the hero does, it is true, enter from outside, but he comes from
the ghting in the Far East, which is therefore no longer peripheral but strate-
gically signicant (cf. lms like Dovzhenkos Aerograd [1935]). Furthermore,
while in transit to Moscow, this time by train, he has chosen to travel to the
Ukrainian kolkhoz rather than to the capital. In Kuban Cossacks the outside
world hardly intrudes either, although it is referred to obliquely, as is the war,
fought less than a decade previously on this very terrain. The plot in all three
lms is characterised by what became known as conictlessness (beskonikt-
nost); in other words, it is conned to microcosmic personal rivalries expressed
in differing personal labour contributions rather than to macrocosmic forces
like class conict or war, which were all too evident in other Soviet lms of
the period.
The leading characters at the periphery are almost invariably women. It is
they who organise and produce, they who resolve the love intrigue by recognis-
ing, albeit somewhat belatedly, the production achievements of the hero and
therefore his suitability as a partner in labour and love. The exceptions are
in Alexandrovs Happy Guys, where it is the hero who effects the resolution
through his talent for improvising in the most adverse circumstances; and in
Pyrievs Swineherdess, where the heroine weakly accepts her fate at the hands
of the deceitful locals while the hero has to ride like a knight on horseback to
rescue her at the eleventh hour. One reason for the privileging of women in the
countryside was the need to encourage them to play a greater part in collec-
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tive, as opposed to domestic, labour in the light of male migration to the cities
and the consequent labour shortage in rural areas. Another resulted from the
context in which these musicals were made: by male directors to showcase the
acting, singing and dancing talents of their wives. Yet another was to emphasise
that women were equal and thus to underline the superiority of the Soviet way
of life. For these reasons women were never villains; the villainous characters
were always men, but they could be cured of their villainy by the intervention
of women, unless they were foreigners, like von Kneischitz in Circus.
Exploring the Centre: Moscow
Moscow constituted the fairyland at the heart of the Stalinist utopia. It was
where unusual, even magical, things happened: the triumph of the jazz band in
Happy Guys; the journey to understanding of the heroine in Circus; the victory
in the singing competition in Volga-Volga; the translation of Cinderella into
the Fairy Princess in Radiant Path; and the labour of love/love of labour that
blossoms in Swineherdess.
It was to Moscow that characters went to improve their lives and to be
rewarded with recognition for their achievements. Within Moscow, the
Kremlin and the newly opened Exhibition of Agricultural Achievements played
signicant and separate roles. The Kremlin was the seat of government and can
be seen as a synonym for PartyState power and thus for Stalin. Sometimes
this is explicit (Circus or Radiant Path; cf. Miracle Girl), although the general
context of contemporary propaganda images rendered such explicitness unnec-
essary. The role of the Exhibition is more complex; it features prominently in
both Swineherdess and Radiant Path. Dobrenko argues that, in the rst of
these, the Exhibition represents not Moscow but the Country (1996a:
112). This is an oversimplication. In both lms the Exhibition offers a dual
representation: to the periphery it represents Moscow, while in Moscow it
represents the country in all its diversity. In Swineherdess the hero and heroine
sing The Song of Moscow, which opens:
Everythings ne in spacious Moscow,
The Kremlin stars shine against the blue sky,
And, just as rivers meet in the sea,
So people meet here in Moscow.
The refrain includes the lines: I shall never forget a friend, Whom I have met
in Moscow. Moscow is therefore special. We must remember that most Soviet
citizens had never visited Moscow; internal passport controls and sheer cost
made the journey impossible, except as a special, ofcially sponsored reward.
Most people knew Moscow only from screen images, and for propaganda
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RICHARD TAYLOR
116
reasons only parts of the great stone city
3
were shown: the Kremlin and/or Red
Square, because of their historical and political associations; the Exhibition,
because it was very much a preview of the coming attractions of socialism;
the new construction projects, such as the Hotel Moskva (Circus), the river
station (Volga-Volga) or the showcase metro (Circus). As Oksana Bulgakova
has pointed out, Even more frequently real Moscow was replaced by a painted
backdrop, a set (1996: 57); this applies to Happy Guys, Circus, Medvedkins
New Moscow (1937) and it increased the air of unreality for those familiar
with the city from personal experience. But most of the audience had nothing
real to compare to this reel image, and that enhanced its magic power.
Conclusion
The purpose of this essay has been to sketch the basic outlines of the topog-
raphy of the Stalinist musical, focusing on four lms each by the fathers of
the genre, Alexandrov and Pyriev. Since these are preliminary remarks, the
conclusions can be only tentative. These lms were popular and the image of
the country that they created, while not real in any objective sense, became
real in the minds of contemporary audiences. The Potemkin village, the small
town, the capital city of this reel reality created a powerful Soviet equivalent of
the Russia of the mind (Figes 1998). By entertaining the mass audience with
glimpses of utopia, the Stalinist musical promoted the illusion, encapsulated in
popular songs, not only that Life has become better, comrades, life has become
happier but further that We were born to make a fairy tale come true (von
Geldern and Stites 1995: 2378, 2578). As Stalin, who as Kremlin censor
was in a unique position to know, once remarked, Cinema is an illusion, but
it dictates its own laws to life itself (Volkogonov 1988).
Notes
I am indebted to Emma Widdis, Cambridge, whose as yet unpublished PhD thesis rst
alerted me to the literature on this subject, and to Julian Graffy, London, for reading an
earlier draft of this essay and for supplying numerous relevant materials.
1. Richard Taylor, But eastward, look, the land is brighter: towards a topography of
utopia in the Stalinist musical, from 100 Years of European Cinema (Manchester
University Press, 2000), reprinted by permission of the author. The concluding
line of the poem Say not, the struggle nought availeth by Arthur Hugh Clough
(181961) has been reversed in this title. The second stanza, even though written in
the middle of the nineteenth century, could stand as a summary of the message of
the Stalinist musical and of much Socialist Realist art in general:
If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase een now the iers,
And, but for you, possess the eld.
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2. These analyses are based almost entirely on the versions now available, either from
Polart and Facets in the USA or on off-air recordings from Russian television. These
are the versions restored and de-Stalinised in the 1960s and 1970s. A tantalising
sequence from the original version of Tractor-Drivers was included in Dana Rangas
lm East Side Story (1997).
3. Much was made in the 1930s of the reconstruction of Moscow as a symbol of the
modernisation of the country as a whole. The capital is presented as the great stone
city in Vertovs Three Songs of Lenin (1934).
Select Filmography
The Circus (Grigori Alexandrov, 1936)
The Happy Guys (Grigori Alexandrov, 1934)
The Kuban Cossacks (Ivan Pyriev, 1949)
The Radiant Path (Grigori Alexandrov, 1940)
The Rich Bride (Ivan Pyriev, 1938)
The Swineherdess and the Shepherd (Ivan Pyriev, 1940)
Tractor-Drivers (Ivan Pyriev, 1939)
Volga-Volga (Grigori Alexandrov, 1938)
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ANTONIO LZARO-REBOLL ITALIAN NEOREALIST
CINEMA
by Torunn Haaland
A Sample From Chapter 1:
A Moment And A Country
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ANTONIO LZARO-REBOLL
9780748636129 I Dec 2013 I Paperback I 24.99
ITALIAN NEOREALIST CINEMA
TORUNN HAALAND
In recent years, Italian cinema and in particular its highest moment, neo-realism has enjoyed
a revival within international scholarship. This has contributed to emphasize Italian cinemas
centrality and its fertile influence on all world cinema of the postwar period. Within this
panorama, Torunn Haalands book appears as one of the most brilliant and most capable of
combining rigorous documentation with a reading of cinema history as part of a larger cultural,
political and social history of Italy in the postwar period, adding to this the passion of an
authentic researcher.
Gian Piero Brunetta, University of Padova
How has Italian neorealist cinema changed the boundaries of
cinematic narration and representation?
In this new study, Torunn Haaland argues that neorealism was a cultural moment based on
individual optiques. She accounts for the traditions coherence in terms of its moral commitment
to creating critical viewing experiences around under-represented realities and marginalised
people. By examining both acclaimed masterpieces and lesser known works, parallels are drawn
to realist theories and to past and present cinematic traditions. The ways in which successive
generations of directors have re-adopted, negotiated and broken with the themes and
aesthetics of neorealist film are discussed and evaluated, along with neorealist tendencies in
other arts, such as literature.
An engaging and informative read for students and scholars in Italian Studies, Italian Neorealist
Cinema presents a new approach to a key cinematic tradition, and so is essential reading for
everyone working in the field of Film Studies.
Torunn Haaland is Assistant Professor of Italian at Gonzaga University.
Jacket image: Roma citt aperta Rossellini,
1945 Fondazione Centro Sperimentale
di Cinematografia / Cineteca Nazionale
Jacket design: riverdesign.co.uk
www.euppublishing.com
Traditions in World Cinema
General Editors: Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer
Founding Editor: Steven Jay Schneider
This series introduces diverse and fascinating movements in world cinema. Each volume
concentrates on a set of films from a different national, regional or, in some cases, cross-cultural
cinema which constitute a particular tradition.
ITALIAN NEOREALIST CINEMA
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ISBN 978-0-7486-3611-2
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1. A MOMENT AND A COUNTRY
. . . one feels that everything was done too fast and with too erce a sin-
cerity to run the risk of bogging down in mere artistry or meditativeness
[. . .] The lms nest over-all quality [. . .] is this immediacy.
James Agee, review of Open City, 1946 (2000)
Viewing history
What afnities there are between cinema, urban streets and history had been
amply explored before Roberto Rossellini (190677) shot Rome, Open City
(1945; Roma, citt aperta), whose heroine is killed during a Nazi raid in the
winter of 1944, a few months before the city is liberated. From the Lumire
brothers pioneering views on work and quotidian moments in 1890s France,
to the emergence of urban documentaries in 1920s Russian and German
cinema and noir cities in 1940s Hollywood, the spatiotemporal capacities
of the moving image to evoke the life that ows, privileging social milieu
and collective events over individual conict, had made lmmakers look to
the streets the way Rossellini did only months after the events he depicted
had taken place. Few moments in world cinema had, however, captured
with such an immediacy those intrinsically cinematic streets where history
is made that Siegfried Kracauer singled out as a characteristic of cinematic
realism (1960: 72; 98). When Pina falls lifeless in via Montecuccioli in front
of her son; her anc; a partisan priest, who will soon face the same fate; and
a neighbourhood unied in the claim to freedom, the world is brought to a
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ITALIAN NEOREALIST CINEMA
2
standstill in which the forces of destruction are neutralised by the life-giving
act of sacrice. What we witness when Pina breaks away from the guards and
runs after the truck, her screams and her hand reaching out to seize Francesco,
is an irreversible choice that afrms the freedom of thought as a value; a
futile, apparently irrational and decidedly passionate act that demonstrates her
identity as a woman who in response to recent national history has assumed
an unprecedented place and voice in the public sphere, and as the incarnation
of the new individual, unbendable in her beliefs and prepared to die for her
citys openness.
1
Moving away from the ction of Pinas death, the image of Anna Magnani
(190873) as a deant Resistance martyr symbolises the real-life stories of war,
destitution and collective battle we all associate with neorealist lm. Open City
was shot with improvised economic and material means, within the streets
where similar brutalities and claims to freedom had been everyday reality, at
a time when the north of the peninsula was still ghting against Nazi-fascist
occupation. Italys long and violent struggle for liberation is the focus of
Rossellinis next lm, Pais (1946), which evolves as a series of encounters
between Allied soldiers and Italian civilians and partisans. Both rest on dimen-
sions of actuality and ordinariness, and like Bicycle Thieves (1948; Ladri di
biciclette) and The Earth Trembles (1948; La terra trema) acts of testimony
whereby Vittorio De Sica (190274) and Luchino Visconti (190676) respec-
tively explore the moral necessity and cinematic possibility of turning unspec-
tacular events into spectacle they demonstrate how the urgency to chronicle
recent or current national realities inevitably also became a matter of making
cinematic history.
Interwar cinema and the fabrications of the real
Neorealist cinema is inconceivable if detached from the historical exigency
and the unprecedented freedom to disclose the countrys here and now
and give voice to those whom fascism had displaced and excluded. It cannot
be seen as an outcome of the Liberation alone, however; although within
a culture founded in opposition to the ventennio the twenty-odd years of
fascist rule (192243) under Benito Mussolini (18831945) that concluded
with an additional twenty months of Allied and Nazi-fascist occupation this
was the leading interpretation of a progressive realism that brought prostitutes
and street kids to national and international screens. Whether fascism was
explained in liberal terms as a parenthetical moral ill and a collective loss of
conscience, or along Marxist lines as an anti-proletarian alliance between the
regime and the bourgeoisie, the need for reconciliation in the name of national
rebuilding produced a collective amnesia rather than a de facto purgation, and
lms produced between the birth of the talkies and the fall of fascism were
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A MOMENT AND A COUNTRY
3
rejected as products of totalitarian structures that escaped both critical assess-
ment and a radical reform.
2
Dismissed as propagandistic or, at best, escapist,
the so-called fascist cinema was considered disconnected from the lm culture
that grew out of the war, despite the fact that several of those who during
World War II and in the immediate post-war years experimented with realist
lmmaking had been trained and often operated within the Duces lm indus-
try. Continuities in personnel and artistic tendencies were ignored and the
cinema moved on as if nothing had happened; as if the events of the countrys
recent past had not taken place.
3
Only by acknowledging that fascism, as a
form of coercion deeply sedimented at all levels of Italian life, is the repressed
of neorealism itself, can we understand its foundation as a culture of reaction
and opposition that, before taking on aesthetic qualities, developed as a moral
commitment to anti-illusionist practices and national rediscovery (Re 1990:
113).
When critics and cineastes in the mid-1970s rediscovered twenty years of
forgotten lmmaking, it appeared that much of what one had celebrated in
neorealist lm natural locations, non-professionals, ordinary material and
characters was far from miraculously new.
4
More recently, an awareness of
the circumstances that conditioned lm production and viewing experiences in
fascist Italy ideological contradictions and lack of a coherent cultural policy,
rst and foremost, but also the dominance and inuence of American lm
have convinced lm historians to dismiss the notion of a fascist cinema alto-
gether.
5
The Italian lm industry might have been close to bankruptcy in the
1920s, but at the outbreak of the war it ranked among the worlds most devel-
oped, including among its institutions: the Unione Cinematograca Italiana
(Italian Film Union, founded 1919); Istituto LUCE (Institute of Educational
Film, founded 1924); Cines production company (founded 1930); Cinecitt
studios (founded 1937); and the national lm school Centro Sperimentale di
Cinematograa (founded 1937). This systematic cultural and industrial recon-
struction in the 1930s was never intended to form a propaganda machine;
instead its aim was to bring Italian cinema back to the prominence it had
enjoyed in the silent period thanks to epic spectaculars such as Quo vadis?
(Guazzoni 1913) and Cabiria (Pastrone 1914), while at the same time creat-
ing a lm culture that would be popular while also serving to forge unity
around the fascist state and nation (Brunetta 2001a: 1617). The interests
were therefore as many and as contradictory as the inuences at work: those
concerned with marketability looked towards Hollywood which Vittorio
Mussolini (191697) considered a far more suitable model than any European
lm culture for a national cinema aimed at reinforcing the industry and at
bringing the fascist wisdom abroad (1965b: 567). His father the Duce a
passionate cinephile with a personal preference for cartoons, historical lms
and newsreels may, on the other hand, have been terried by Soviet lms but
HAALAND 9780748636112 PRINT.indd 3 29/05/2012 08:13
ITALIAN NEOREALIST CINEMA
4
he admired Lenins approach to the cinema as a weapon with which to control
the masses (Argentieri 1974: 379). Neither of the models could of course have
been ideologically more removed from what the Foundations and Doctrine of
Fascism a manifesto co-written by Mussolini and his Secretary of Culture,
the philosopher Giovanni Gentile presented as an anti- individualistic move-
ment opposed as much to liberalism as to socialism (Mussolini and Gentile
2000: 489).
While the cinema became increasingly integrated according to the policies
of fascist corporatism, where all interests economic, social and cultural
were directed towards the state, it was not dened as a state organ. Instead, a
twofold objective of entertainment and education demanded that newsreels,
documentaries and endless recordings of Mussolinis speeches be produced
by LUCE and screened prior to melodramas, literary adaptations, costume
dramas and comedies produced by various private companies (Reich 2002:
613). In this way, the Duce became Italys uncontested divo (star) and could
spin his rhetoric into an evasive web dened by Hollywood myths rather than
political doctrine.
6
Restrictive laws were introduced throughout the 1930s,
predominantly to protect indigenous production, but only after American
lms earned 78.5 per cent of gross income in 1938, were they banned from
exhibition. Imperatives of cultural prestige and international viability tended
to favour exchanges rather than isolation, and the Venice Film Festival
(founded 1932) as well as the presence of Christian Dreyer, Walter Ruttmann
and Jean Renoir, who all were invited to work in fascist Italy, suggest what
aspirations there were to modernise and internationalise the cinema (Brunetta
2001a: 5; 245; 3368). All initiatives towards revitalisation were in many
ways consecrated by Mussolinis inauguration in 1940 of Cinecitt and the
Centro Sperimentale, whose innovative approaches to lm art and instruction
were conceived in the early 1930s by Alessandro Blasetti (190087). A prolic
intellectual and uncontested director in fascist Italy, he exposed future cine-
astes to contemporary avant-garde practices and theories, as well as to more
concrete ways of seeking contact with reality by visiting hospitals, jails, and
sanatoriums (quoted in Faldini and Fo 1979: 40). What relative ideological
openness the Centro Sperimentale offered during the years of the regime has
been documented by ex-students such as Giuseppe De Santis (191797) who
considered the encounter with Soviet cinema and Marxist theories in 193941
as having played a pivotal role in bringing him from anti-fascist sentiments
to militant resistance. The fusion of exploited women and gangsters, class
solidarity and boogie-woogie in Bitter Rice (1949; Riso amaro) one of the
most popular and internationally successful lms from this period epitomises
the contradictory cinematic and ideological inuences that formed post-war
directors.
7
In light of this, we can more easily perceive why those who had been active
HAALAND 9780748636112 PRINT.indd 4 29/05/2012 08:13
A MOMENT AND A COUNTRY
5
in interwar cinema could move into the realm of neorealism without seeking
to excuse past afliations. While there was a shared sense that theirs had
been a professional rather than an ideological compromise, there was also
an awareness that the cinema during fascism had offered a neutral ground
and a free harbour for exchanges of ideas and inuences that somehow set
their work apart from the political context (Brunetta 1987: 746). The rela-
tive freedom Italian directors enjoyed compared to their German and Russian
colleagues is not ultimately measured by a few cases of state intervention and
prohibitions; this reected, according to Cesare Zavattini (190289), efcient
self-censorship rather than tolerance among the fascist hierarchy (quoted in
Faldini and Fo 1979: 24). Most illuminating is the conviction espoused by
Luigi Freddi, the Director General of Cinema during the 1930s, that a propa-
ganda machine on the German model would harm not only the industry, but
also the ultimate purpose of imposing totalitarian structures on a nation that
still, some sixty years after its unication, was marked by enormous regional
and socio-economic disjunctions.
To foster unity and a sense of nationhood, the cinema should not merely
offer bread and circuses, although most lms of the ventennio were produced
under this banner; the new Italian cinema should also create celebratory
images of current and concrete local realities. From a neorealist perspective,
authenticity and immediacy are synonymous with an anti-fascist stance and
demystifying intentions, but a realist aesthetic had already been advocated
by fascist leaders and intellectuals to create a unique, national, culture that
was social, yet not socialist (Ben-Ghiat 1995: 6312). Politically, as well,
Mussolini and Gentile wrote, fascism aims at realism, crucially implying
that the anti-liberal and anti-socialist revolution they envisioned would be
embedded in the actual historical conditions of a corporate state formed by
hard-working Italians (2000: 489). Related ideals of Italianness and the
fascist man created a web of collective myths that sought to encourage iden-
tication between the people and fascism.
8
Mussolinis public appearances
were unmistakably keyed towards this perspective: when interacting with
small-town and rural communities he would emphasise his rustic origins and
the rural essence of the Italian race; during encounters with urban audiences
the Duces public image was crafted to perpetuate ideals of antique roots and
imperial rebirth. While both the folkloric and the colonial myths reproduced
visions of fascism as the outcome and the protector of the peoples roots and
values, they also aimed to fabricate and align rhetorical practices with their
everyday experiences.
9
Within artistic and intellectual life, these strategies of consensus-making
found parallels in two opposite, equally essentialist, movements strapaese
(Ultra-Country) and stracitt (Ultra-City) that both emerged independently
of, but in conjunction with, Mussolinis declaration of dictatorship in 1925.
HAALAND 9780748636112 PRINT.indd 5 29/05/2012 08:13
ITALIAN NEOREALIST CINEMA
6
The rst, associated with the Tuscan periodical Il Selvaggio (founded 1924)
would denounce bourgeois and urban elements in fascist culture by promoting
rural traditions and community structures. By contrast, stracitt grew out of
the Rome-based, French-language periodical Novecento (founded 1926) and
celebrated the modernist aspects of fascism within a cosmopolitan perspec-
tive, spreading its ideas abroad while also challenging the europhobic and
anti-American stance of the fascist state. Both were, however, essentially anti-
bourgeois tendencies driven towards the dual objective of inuencing fascist
leaders and bringing the people closer to the regime.
10
Considered as comple-
mentary consolidating forces, they responded to fascisms twofold exigency of
establishing populist relations with the masses without excluding the middle
class from which it drew both political and nancial support.
11
Considered,
instead, as myths that could also be contested, strapaese and stracitt created a
space of negotiation where non-hegemonic inuences could intrude and where
critical views could masquerade as legitimate discourse.
That the promotion of realism became a far more ambiguous endeavour than
fascist hierarchs may have wanted was partly due to concurrent and ideologi-
cally contradictory realist practices in European and American culture (Ben-
Ghiat 1995: 632). The interwar years, marked by social crisis and unrest, the
rise of socialist movements in wake of the Bolshevik revolution and the effects
of the Great Depression, but also the transition to modernity and the emer-
gence of urban societies, created a wide-ranging and manifold urgency among
artists and intellectuals to give pressing social realities a voice and an image. In
Weimar Germany, disillusioned artists formulated a Neue Sachlichkeit (New
Objectivity) of concreteness to voice a cynical critique of post-World War
I conditions and solidarity with the lower classes, whereas Soviet directors
conveyed revolutionary propaganda of proletarian unity through dialectical
realism. Among French lmmakers, radical opposition to the rise of Nazism
forged the bleak forms of poetic realism, whereas American writers and
directors sought forms of reportage and documentation, as well as stylised
depictions of pre- and post-war anxieties. What role these and other inuences
played in the formation of neorealist poetics shall be explored more closely in
Chapter 2. At this point, it is clear that whether realism involved social com-
mentary (Walter Ruttmanns experimental documentaries), or an endorsement
of social realism (Sergei Eisenstein), or whether it articulated anti-fascism and
pacism within the Popular Front (Jean Renoir), or social awareness within the
parameters of Hollywood entertainment (King Vidor), it contradicted every-
thing fascism stood for. Yet such realist discourses circulated among Italian
artists and critics and were in part ofcially endorsed as aesthetic and indus-
trial models for a cinema of the fascist revolution.
One of the rst signs in Italy of the turn towards the real is Alberto
Moravias (190790) novel Gli indifferenti (1929). Giving concrete images
HAALAND 9780748636112 PRINT.indd 6 29/05/2012 08:13
A MOMENT AND A COUNTRY
7
to illicit sexual relations, conformism and corruption within a middle-class
family in 1920s Rome, it displays an atmosphere of indifference that denies
ofcial ideals of commitment to state and family, deconstructing any notion of
stracitt without offering strapaese as a viable alternative. It was in response
to Moravias concrete language and merciless social and psychological analy-
sis that critics started to speak of neorealism. Etymologically rooted in Neue
Sachlichkeit, the term was occasionally used in the 1930s to connect some
young Italian writers to the larger panorama of new realisms, suggesting their
rejection of the solipsist forms of contemporary bourgeois art as well as of
the aggressive forms associated with futurism (Brunetta 2001a: 2023). The
neo suggested, however, also a clear distinction, not only from contempo-
rary foreign trends, but also from past national traditions, in particular the
late-nineteenth-century tradition of verismo (truism) whose major expo-
nent was Giovanni Verga (18401922). His short stories and novels depict
marginal, Southern communities and aspire, on the model of French natural-
ism, to a detached, total view of the society represented. However, whether
Vergas focus is on dishonoured women or exploited shermen, he rejects the
Darwinian determinism so central to the French school and adheres neither
to the positivist faith in social progress or the objective or scientic literary
descriptions of mile Zola (Aitken 2006: 20). Instead, by assimilating regional
syntax, terms, and proverbs within free indirect discourse and in choral voices,
Verga seeks to convey both individual and collective experiences in more
expressive, at times even lyrical and ironic rather than mimetic ways, while
at the same time relating mental life to the wider social and natural ambi-
ence. The adaptation of Vergas I Malavoglia (1881) in Viscontis The Earth
Trembles is the most obvious indication of the inuence his regional poetics
and attention to long-neglected Southern Italy would have on neorealist art.
National revitalisation and cinematic innovation: the 1930s
It would take more than a decade before a cause clbre of confrontational
realism manifested itself in the cinema, but Moravias example and the
vision, more specically, of a cinematic gaze directed towards rural dramas
in rice-elds [and] shermen in the morning started soon to act upon certain
cineastes and critics as well (Alberti, quoted in Brunetta 1969: 36). The idea of
the need to reject scripts and spectacular values, an idea Zavattini presented
in 1944 as lmmakers responsibility to tell humble stories of a destroyed
country and in the 1950s as a radical neorealist thought, had already emerged
in the early 1930s (2002: 664). At that time, his ideal of immediacy between
life and image was paralleled by that of the journalist Leo Longanesi who
envisioned lms shot in the streets to expose what usually tends to be ignored
(1980: 11820), inciting directors to take the time to observe the life of the
HAALAND 9780748636112 PRINT.indd 7 29/05/2012 08:13
ITALIAN NEOREALIST CINEMA
8
anonymous (1965: 292). Both demonstrated an afnity with contemporary
avant-garde cinema, in particular that of Diziga Vertov, whose convictions
regarding the kino-eye pinpointed the cameras ability to reveal all that
which escapes the human eye (1989: 6972). However, whereas the revolu-
tionary truth Zavattini promoted presupposed humanistic and increasingly
universal values, Longanesi favoured an anti-bourgeois discourse that in
promoting fascism and national myths avoided the imitation of foreign
cinema. When he criticised Blasettis Terra madre (1931), which embraced
fascist ideals of realist representations, it was precisely for its engagement with
Russian formalism.
Blasetti would later emphasise the importance both of Soviet lmmakers
and of German and French directors in inspiring the humanistic visions that
unify his vast and varied oeuvre, which includes costume dramas, melodramas,
comedies and Vecchia guardia (1936) one of the three explicitly fascist lms
made during the ventennio (Faldini and Fo 1979: 28). Although the Duce
considered his work a salvation for the national cinema, Blasetti was ercely
opposed to a state organ and aimed to revitalise Italian lm alongside foreign
trends and in contact with the concrete elements of local life (Brunetta 2001a:
1258). Regional specicity and ordinary characters are privileged concerns
of 1860 (1934) which draws on historical accounts of the liberation of Sicily
by Giuseppe Garibaldi and his thousand volunteers during the Risorgimento
the decades-long process of national unication concluded in 1871. The
narrative follows a shepherd, Caemeniddu, on his mission to bring the pro-
visional army from Genoa to Sicily; once the battle against foreign rulers is
won, Caemeniddu declares to his wife, Gesuzza, that we have made Italy,
without at all having grasped the political and institutional implications of this
nation-making. Both the use of local non-professionals for the main characters
and the foregrounding of the Sicilian countryside through panoramic views
and natural lighting, draw on the regional poetics of verismo and Neapolitan
silent cinema a little known branch of Italian lmmaking that promoted
realist practices as opposed to contemporary epic spectaculars (Bruno 1993).
Where Blasetti deviates from these traditions is in his failure to view History
(macrohistory) from below and present the events as lived by the lower-class
characters and in the light of their everyday life and social environment. The
perspective of 1860 is predominantly that of the nation, and while it pays
exceptional attention to regional varieties of speech and culture as well as to
socio-economic and ideological disjunctions, the scope is ultimately to reduce
such barriers and project the historical moment of national unication onto
fascist myths of regeneration.
Regional peculiarities are, on the contrary, a dening element of Acciaio
(1933) which in its innovative approach to community life in the Umbrian
town of Terni demonstrates what room the ofcial celebration of work rela-
HAALAND 9780748636112 PRINT.indd 8 29/05/2012 08:13
A MOMENT AND A COUNTRY
9
tions and local structures left for alternative inuences. The lm was drawn
from a short story Mussolini had requested from the internationally acclaimed
dramatist Luigi Pirandello (18671937) and Walter Ruttmann was commis-
sioned to direct it. With his experience of Neue Sachlichkeit documentaries
such as Berlin: The Symphony of a City (1927), he was considered capable of
fullling Cines twofold objective of internationalising Italian cinema and of
communicating more current images of Italy abroad (Garofalo 2002: 240).
Shot in and around Ternis steelworks, the story of modern machinery and
destructive passions follows Mario, who upon his return from military service
nds his best friend Pietro engaged to his sweetheart, Gina. His selsh behav-
iour at the factory where they work provokes a conict that causes Pietros
death and suspected of murder, Mario escapes. It is ultimately Pietros father
who brings him back to Gina and to the community so that order is restored
and individualism is condemned in favour of collective production. Enacted by
local and non-professional actors, the narrative is conveyed through sophisti-
cated variations in shots and lighting, a constant juxtaposition of images, and a
suggestive harmony between the visuals and the musical score that reproduces
the rhythms of the factory machines (Garofalo 2002: 241). All of this attests to
Ruttmanns sense of montage-cinema and its ability to convey social and inter-
personal tensions, but as the rather traditional storyline moves unambiguously
towards the norm of the community, these techniques ultimately fail to afrm
the dialectical thought he would have aspired to communicate.
Their innovations notwithstanding, neither Blasetti nor Ruttmann changed
the standardised codes of interwar Italian lm, but they suggest the range of
inuences and interests involved in the twofold project of national and cin-
ematic revitalisation. Both lms engage with ideals of bonica (reclamation):
a socio-cultural project of rustic revival launched to raise demographic and
agricultural growth, something that became increasingly urgent following
Italys Colonial War against Ethiopia in 19356 when economic autarchy
was introduced in response to sanctions from the League of Nations. Another
objective of this reclamation of soil and souls was to reduce an increasing
migration to the cities, since fascist hierarchs feared that urbanisation would
facilitate the formation of a political opposition (Ben-Ghiat 2001: 801). It
was precisely the growth of Northern cities, which with their long traditions
of workers unions and political radicalism in effect would see the rst initia-
tives to resistance, that inspired Mario Camerinis (18941980) Gli uomini che
mascalzoni! (1932).
Shot on location in the rapidly expanding centre of Milan, this romantic
comedy features the city as protagonist and setting for social analysis with a
basis in the romance between Mariuccia, a salesgirl in a luxurious drugstore,
and Bruno, a soon-to-be-unemployed driver eventually re-employed as a
street-advertiser. Both aspire to the wealthy and degraded world that keeps
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ITALIAN NEOREALIST CINEMA
10
them employed, but ultimately they nd happiness with each other. While the
morally evaluative representation of social classes and denial of social mobil-
ity in favour of the lower-middle-class family does little to contest ofcial
discourse, the treatment of unemployment and economic dependence exposes
social inequalities, while also emphasising the individual private and profes-
sional opportunities offered by urban modernity. Ultimately, notions of collec-
tive revitalisation are undermined by an individualistic view of the present as a
question of nding ones place.
The twofold search for concrete portrayals and popular appeal is encapsu-
lated in the prominence given to an ordinary romantic couple, and contem-
porary box-ofce gures relied to a great extent on the presence of De Sica
who starred as a whimsical, but solid hero in several of Camerinis comedies.
In Mister Max (1937; Il Signor Max) he portrays a newsstand attendant who
masquerades as well-off and sophisticated to pursue a rich lady, before falling
in love with her maid. In Grandi magazzini (1939), we see him as a delivery
Figure 1.1 Bruno and Mariuccia in Camerinis Gli uomini che mascalzoni! Courtesy
of the Fondazione Centro Sperimentale di Cinematograa.
HAALAND 9780748636112 PRINT.indd 10 29/05/2012 08:13
A MOMENT AND A COUNTRY
11
boy in a world of consumer-goods, criminal trafcking and illicit relations
who is nally saved by a salesgirl: both nd protection from the threats
of the corrupt surroundings in lower-middle-class family life and domestic
safety. In contrast to the authenticity achieved in Gli uomini che mascalzoni!,
however, this lm was almost entirely shot in the studio, retreating from the
citys socio-geographic realities in order to convey a moralistic approach to
urban modernity while the deliberately articial world of fashion and the
successful lives it presents falsely portray pre-war Italians as wealthy and
modern. This reactionary escapism reects sensitivities towards the policies
of self-sufciency with which Italy faced its increasing economic and political
isolation in the late 1930s. While the constant display of Italian products can
be interpreted as satirising disastrous policies that severely lowered standards
of living, rather than as serving a consolidating function (Spackman 2002:
27692), the contemporary reviewer Umberto Barbaro, granted Grandi maga-
zzini no such critical merit, discerning within it an illustrative indicator to the
current state of crisis in Italian cinema (1939: 9). As he was well aware, the
problem was not merely artistic, but it was ultimately neither material short-
age nor pre-war tensions that made directors seek to convince audiences that
they were as happy as fascist ideals of rural regeneration and imperial rebirth
implied. At stake was rather the awareness that by 1939 such myths had lost
their power to convince.
Several events were instrumental in the gradual decline of fascism, both
prior to and during the rst years of the war. If Mussolinis Declaration of the
Empire in 1936 marked the peak of popular consensus,
12
his successive moves
the support of Franco in the Spanish Civil War (19369) and the alliance with
Hitler and the introduction of Racial Laws in 1938 alienated the people from
the regime and gave rise to an anti-fascist consciousness that increased fol-
lowing Italys declaration of war as Germanys ally in 1940. Massive military
defeats in Greece and Russia, causing thousands of dead and missing, as well
as an estimated 50 per cent reduction in national consumption between 1938
and 1944, left the country in ruins and created discontent even within fascist
circles (Corni 2000: 157). These circumstances reinforced restrictive laws and
surveillance of cultural as well as political activity. No longer open to Soviet
cinema and French anti-fascist directors, the Venice Film Festival became a
parade of Nazi-fascist propaganda (Stone 2002: 296) and Luigi Freddi, who
had previously expressed disgust for Goebbels Nazi pictures, redened the
LUCEs educative purposes, launching a series of military documentaries
that sought to prepare the nation for war (Brunetta 2001a: 15; Fanara 2000:
128). Only a few feature lms were made along this propagandistic line: it was
far more common to offer evasion from the current conict through portray-
als of claustrophobic, upper-class worlds, whether by translating late-nine-
teenth-century novels that favoured so called calligraphic, or superuously
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ITALIAN NEOREALIST CINEMA
12
decorated and formalist, pictures, or a type of parlour-comedy later referred
to as white-telephone lms for their tendency to foreground glossy status
symbols to evoke a fake social mobility. Although neorealism, as an anti-
rhetorical, demystifying and nonconformist practice, emerged in opposition to
all of these tendencies, the passage from propagandistic docu-dramas or easy
evasion to innovative chronicles of evolving national history could be shorter
and involve more overlap than has often been recognised.
Nowhere are these continuities between pre-war and post-war cinema
as evident as in the work of De Sica whose Maddalena zero in condotta
(1940) and Teresa Venerd (1941) range among the more sophisticated
white- telephone lms. If they still have a power to amuse, it is in particu-
lar thanks to elaborate characterisation and the performance of established
comic actors, headed by De Sica as the romantic male lead. Maddalena
follows a businessman tracking an anonymous letter whose author turns
out, after much ado, to be a marriageable school teacher. The gratuitous
complications that arise allow for, rst and foremost, a satire of hypocriti-
cal school authorities who profess nationalist discourses and threaten to re
the nonconformist young teacher, but the play with identity deception and
masquerade, so central to De Sicas work as actor and director, seems also
to draw parallels between falsities in the claustrophobic world represented
and the isolated and intolerant world it implicitly reects (Landy 2000: 110).
Questions of true and false identity are even more central to the Cinderella
story of Teresa Venerd, whose title character was born into a family of
travelling performers. Her passion for acting is penalised at the orphanage
where she lives, but it conquers the aristocratic, albeit poor and completely
unqualied, Doctor Vignali who, for his part, fakes the necessary medical
expertise to be hired by her administrators. Having rescued him from credi-
tors, a cabaret-dancing ex-anc played by Anna Magnani, and an unsophis-
ticated pursuer of nouveau-riche parents, Teresa can nally run away with
her debt-free prince, abandoning a world of institutional rigour and falsity
for a journey of undened destination.
Products of studio-fabricated illusionism, De Sicas comedies are comfort-
ably abstracted from historical realities and, with the exception of an aerial
view of Rome in Maddalena, from any geographic anchorage, but the protec-
tion formed by escapist formulas and vapid images has allowed for poten-
tially critical messages. While the subtle critique disguises itself in levels of
performance, it appears more overtly in the evaluative juxtaposition of the
hypocritically condemnatory upper class, on the one hand, and the sincerity
and imperfection of the harassed school teacher in Maddalena as well as in
the ingenuous orphan girl deprived both of roots and a voice. Giuseppe De
Santis, then a critic severely opposed to the general situation of the Italian
cinema welcomed De Sicas sincerity and spontaneity and the ability of
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A MOMENT AND A COUNTRY
13
Teresa Venerd to set free, with itself, a humanity now afraid to manifest itself
[. . .] now highly expansive (1942: 198). Retrospectively, we can see not only
which humanity De Santis referred to a year before Northern workers protests
announced the emergence of an organised Resistance movement, but also that
the sympathetic presentation of such marginalised characters foreshadowed
De Sicas future commitment to the underprivileged. If, during the war, the
repertoire of romantic comedy served to obfuscate messages that may, at the
time, have been received as a form of political opposition, we should also
expect to nd comic elements in his postwar lms the way we do in Open City
and in a series of minor neorealist works (Landy 2000: 11011; Wagstaff
2007: 93). In part, this reects the authorial contributions of the extraordinar-
ily imaginative Zavattini unaccredited but as palpable in Teresa Venerd, as
in De Sicas successive lms but it also suggests that past experiences with
comedy continued to shape his vision of the cinema, even when it produced
stories of victimisation.
Rossellini and the fascist war
It was in reference to such continuities in personnel and poetics that Andr
Bazin, founder of Cahiers du Cinma (1951) and one of the rst and most
inuential critics of neorealism, insisted, against common opinion, that
although the rebirth of Italian cinema was decisively imprinted by the
Liberation, it was no unprepared miracle. If critics during the war, he wrote
in 1948, had not been, and rightfully so, of a preconceived opinion, lms like
SOS 103 or Rossellinis La nave bianca might better have caught our attention
(2002: 276). Like Francesco De Robertis (190259) Uomini sul fondo (1941;
SOS 103), which reconstructs an real-life rescue story, La nave bianca (1942)
takes a documentary approach to the naval war, enjoying not only De Robertis
contribution to the extent of complicating questions of authorship, but also
collaboration with the armed forces, approval from the Committee of War and
Political Film, and the supervision of Vittorio Mussolini, afliations that sub-
sequently supported Un pilota ritorna (1942) and Luomo dalla croce (1943)
(Ben-Ghiat 2000: 204). Although the ofcial intention of such projects was
to convey the continuity of the war as an everyday and serenely accepted fact
among soldiers (Brunetta 2001a: 152), for Rossellini, who later emphasised his
disassociation with fascism and association instead with the Duces son, they
offered an opportunity to develop experience through assisting on projects
that experimented with documentary lmmaking (quoted in Faldini and Fo
1979: 48). When he retrospectively traced the birth both of neorealism and of
his own cinematic vision to these ctionalised documentaries it was, however,
not rst and foremost for the fusion of historical material, realist aesthetics and
melodramatic narratives, although such hybridisations become increasingly
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ITALIAN NEOREALIST CINEMA
14
prevalent in the post-war years, but for the choral quality and spirituality
that often subvert the lms bellicose and ideological thematics.
13
La nave bianca is introduced by a caption presenting us with the lms theme
and the directors method: the characters are the actual crew of a warship, and
they are captured dal vero (from real life) in their own environment and
with verismo in sentiment. Both the authenticity of locations and characters,
as well as the rapid editing that structures documentary footage of actual
naval combats in the rst part of the lm reveal at least an indirect knowledge
of Eisensteins Battleship Potemkin (1925) and of his theories of dialectical
montage (Rondolino 1989: 58). More specically, the lms claim to authen-
ticity evokes Vergas commitment to provide verisimilar representations by
assimilating the characters speech patterns and collective voice, radically
reducing authorial comments on the world portrayed. The camera works with
similar strategies of detachment, observing the navy operatives singular fea-
tures of regional speech and individual interests within the frame of their col-
lective life. It also captures their union when they work together to defend the
ship under attack and when they pay tribute to the king and the Duce (Viva il
Re Saluto al Duce) once the battle is won. Like the sequence covering their
fraternal relations with German sailors, these were diplomatic elements that
would have been obligatory less than a year into the war (Rondolino 1989:
58). Such semi-documentary tendencies fade, however, in the second half
of the lm, which is sentimental and patriotic in tone and which is centred
around Elena, a school teacher serving as a nurse on the hospital ship, Arno.
She decides to suppress her secret love for a wounded sailor since such feel-
ings would compromise her duty to serve all the naval heroes equally.
14
The
dialectics between the individual and the collective, between self-interest and
self-sacrice, nd no unequivocal synthesis. The melodramatic narration may
reinforce heroic commitment, but the detached, overall view of social ambi-
ence also encompasses severe injuries and deaths occurring during the attack,
and while these disquieting facts are left to speak for themselves, as Verga
prescribed, they unavoidably come to speak for all those who lost their lives
to the fascist war and, by extension, for those whose individual freedom was
suppressed by totalitarian structures.
A success among audiences and critics alike, La nave bianca aroused little
enthusiasm among fascist ofcials, and Un pilota ritorna, which Vittorio
Mussolini scripted, depicts, as a result, all the rhetorical heroism Rossellini
sought to avoid, ignoring entirely that at the time of production the war was
practically already lost (Rossellini 1987a: 935). To showcase the air force,
the lm moves to Italys invasion of Greece, omitting the details of a campaign
that was launched as a sure walk-over in the autumn of 1940, only to end
disastrously in a rescue by Hitler the following spring (Corni 2000: 157).
Although the attention to collective life and hierarchical structures within the
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A MOMENT AND A COUNTRY
15
air force and the inclusion of spectacular battle scenes partly constructed from
documentary footage achieves a verisimilar representation of pilots at war that
is reinforced by the presence of lesser-known actors and non-professionals,
this tentatively unbiased perspective is ultimately undermined by anti-Allied
messages and by the patriotic-romantic endeavours of Lieutenant Rosati to
whom Massimo Girotti (19182003) lent his latent stardom. Escaping from
a British prison camp on the Greek front, he leaves his new-found love Anna,
who looks after the prisoners, to take off with an Allied aircraft and return
to duty in Italy. Although the portrayal of innocent victims and the solidarity
within the prison camp can be said to condemn the war, questions of guilt and
responsibility are unequivocally related to the enemys cruelty without ever
challenging fascist ideals of sacrice or the legitimacy of a rapidly declining
regime.
Encapsulating the contradictions between a political order unwilling to
recognise its defeat, and a tired population longing for freedom, Luomo dalla
croce is just as far-fetched in its bellicose propaganda as it is prophetic of
Rossellinis future work. Scripted by the fascist ideologist Asvero Gravelli, it
glories the Italian expedition to Russia in the summer of 1942 a disastrous
event that more than any other marked the failure of the fascist war. Once it
was released in June 1943 it was already pass and enjoyed a limited run. It
is important to recognise that both the extensive battle scenes and the anti-
communist stereotypes are challenged by the historically far more accurate and
ideologically rather ambiguous story of an army chaplain, modelled on Father
Reginaldo Giuliani who was actually killed on the Russian front (Rondolini
1989: 605). Determined to prove a hidden spiritual vision in everyone, the
man with a cross presents himself in apolitical terms as Gods soldier and
dies while absolving a Russian adversary. Like Un pilota ritorna, Luomo
dalla croce was shot in natural, if not authentic locations, and it adopts the
same reserved style, but its focus on a gure of unconditional charity, invested
with the anonymity of an non-professional actor and the community gathered
around his Christian humanism, ultimately leads us away from any purely
patriotic heroism, demonstrating better than any other lm the many uncer-
tainties and contradictions in which neorealism was formed.
Towards a new culture: from Verga to Visconti and beyond
The ideal Rossellini developed of a veristic look at historical realities was,
from his side, never outlined as an artistic aim, but it engaged with a contem-
porary debate wherein the premise for a cinema of honesty and concreteness
was established with aspirations to political and national reorganisation. In an
article titled Truth and Poetry: Verga and the Italian Cinema, Mario Alicata
(19181966) and De Santis looked towards the Sicilian author for inspiration
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ITALIAN NEOREALIST CINEMA
16
for narrative cinema and a revolutionary art inspired from a humanity that
suffers and hopes. Besides having created a country, a time, a society (Alicata
and De Santis 1941b), Vergas stories about farmers, shermen, fallen women
and brigands contained, beneath their formal elaboration, elements traceable
in oral culture and popular novels and had therefore the power to communi-
cate with a vast audience an invaluable lesson for cineastes determined to
support a national reawakening, a detachment from all that which merged
in fascism and a maturation of a new way of feeling and of being (Argentieri
1996: 112). The article provoked a wave of responses within the periodicals
Bianco e nero (founded 1937) and Cinema (founded 1936); the former was
the organ of the Centro Sperimentale, the latter was co-founded by Luigi
Freddi, but both operated with considerable liberty from ofcial polices. In the
politically critical years 193841, Cinema enjoyed the ideological legitimacy
of its director, Vittorio Mussolini, who called for images of the beauty (not
the possible ugliness) of the Italian race (1980: 33) and for documentaries
showcasing the power and greatness of Italy to promote the governments
actions while leaving relative room for alternative views (1965a: 7). It became
therefore much more than a periodical, enabling encounters and exchanges
for critics and future lmmakers gathered around the collective objectives that
made Cinema the cradle both of neorealist thought and of Romes Resistance
movement. That critics in these years looked beyond their cultural objectives
transpires from Viscontis critique of a lm industry that tied the hands of
young directors with loads to say: for a new cinema to take form, he wrote
in 1941, certain conformist cadavers would have to be buried (1986a). The
funeral he prophesied as a presupposition for rebirth indexed, in its purifying
scope, a new political order wherein the cinema would serve as a socio-politi-
cal as well as cultural agent devoted to engage and activate spectators around
critical viewing experiences.
Viscontis initiatives towards cinematic renewal were programmatically
outlined in his article Anthropomorphic Cinema, which discusses the ideal
of freedom of artistic specialisation as a human responsibility to tell stories
about real people in real-life situations. Rather than allowing the artist to
evade society as had traditionally been the case, creativity should serve reali-
ties constantly made and changed by humanity (1943: 108). This perspective
inspired several projects that were censored, but it was intrinsically connected
to Obsession (1943; Ossessione) wherein Vergas regional poetics and social
pessimism encounter James M. Cains The Postman Always Rings Twice
(1934), which Visconti had obtained from Renoir.
15
Having inexplicably
passed preliminary censorship, this lm about adultery and murder emerged in
19412 as a collective manifesto among De Santis, Alicata and other Cinema
critics, and while Viscontis private funds guaranteed freedom from industrial
cadavers, their work was closely observed as police control intensied pro-
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A MOMENT AND A COUNTRY
17
portionally with rising anti-fascist activity and as several of the collaborators
were arrested (Visconti 1976a; Argentieri 1996: 111). Two months before
Mussolinis arrest on 25 July 1943, the lm was edited despite disapproval
from censors who had already eliminated several scenes, and a private viewing
was arranged that astonished critics and cineastes: people saw a lm they did
not think they could possibly see, Visconti later recalled (1976a). It was his
editor, Mario Serandrei, who rst referred to the anti-aesthetic visuals as neo-
realist (quoted in Faldini and Fo 1979: 68) and Umberto Barbaro, who since
the late 1920s had applied this term to Russian lm and literature, welcomed
the improvised and screaming realism that demanded as much engagement
from spectators as the authors had invested in it (1976: 5048).
Reversing the critical strategy of Gli indifferenti, Obsession deconstructs
ideals of strapaese without presenting stracitt as a viable alternative, but it
goes several steps further both in displaying unacknowledged realities and in
rejecting existing codes of representation. Gravitating towards the edges of
society, it traces squalid milieus and provincial monotony in the Po Plains a
territory so far unknown to the cinema and destined to reach international
screens though Pais and Bitter Rice. Our guide into this anti-escapist world
is a vagrant who wanders right into Giovannas trattoria-kitchen where
her beauty is equally shadowed by the bleak surroundings and by her own
Figure 1.2 Gino and Giovanna in Viscontis Obsession. Courtesy of the Fondazione
Centro Sperimentale di Cinematograa.
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ITALIAN NEOREALIST CINEMA
18
discontent. She feeds her broke and attractive guest and will soon talk him
into plotting against her old husband, Bragana. This representation of Clara
Calamai (19091998), a stylish diva of 1930s lm, and of Massimo Girotti,
known to many as Rossellinis patriotic aviator (from whom Viscontis wan-
derer has inherited the name Gino), and the atmosphere of melancholy without
the sense of meaning and purpose would have had a de-familiarising effect and
is clearly aimed at destroying their previous, conformist characters.
Split by divergent interests, the miserable lovers are unable to enjoy the life
insurance, not to mention the freedom they killed for, and their attempt to
run away towards a new start ends with a car accident that kills the pregnant
Giovanna. Besides italianising Cains errant characters, the scriptwriters also
invented Lo Spagnolo, a travelling artist who, like the prostitute-gure, Anita,
distracts Gino from Giovanna. Conceived of as an ex-partisan from the Spanish
Civil War whose frequent (dis)appearances are meant to simulate a political
conspirator on constant missions (Ingrao 2002: 16), he would, according to
Alicata, have signied a proletarian vagrant who in professing anti-fascist and
communist ideals seeks to direct Gino towards more important matters, but
censorship made him so ambiguous that he has often been read in terms of
sexual transgression rather than as the lms political conscience (quoted in
Faldini and Fo 1979: 656). Two years later, the unprecedented freedom of
speech unleashed by the Liberation nurtured illusions that a revolutionary art
founded on a hopeful suffering humanity was possible, but there were cadav-
ers ready to succeed those buried with fascism and they would continue, we
shall see, in many ways far more efciently, to tweak, distort or mute, the voice
of those with too much to say.
Mussolini would not have recognised political subtleties and certainly not
himself in the decapitated Signor Bragana, because while local state representa-
tives banned Obsession as soon as it appeared and archbishops blessed the
theatres where it was screened, he extended its tormented distribution by a
few weeks before it was removed and eventually conscated by Nazi troops.
16

More representative of ofcial views was Mussolinis last Minster of Culture,
Gaetano Polverelli, who denounced it as a bomb of anti-conformism [. . .] it
mirrors an Italy immersed in misery and in pain that has nothing in common
with the ofcial face spread by governing authorities, without evidently realis-
ing that these were the very reasons for the lms success (quoted in Argentieri
1974: 578). What most troubled an already edgy establishment may not
have been Viscontis sympathy towards the murderous lovers, but that the
ordinariness of his gallery of outcasts and the unmistakable socio-geographic
anchorage made it impossible to ignore the countrys unofcial truths. More
than its realism, debatable considering the narrative rigour, the implausible
coincidences and the frequent use of close-ups and expressionist lighting to
dramatise inner and interpersonal tensions, what marked the lms novelty
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A MOMENT AND A COUNTRY
19
was its concreteness and the contact it sought with the nation. The cast, the
basis in American noir, the story of sex, murder and tragic death, and the cin-
ematography of the innovative Aldo Tonti all imply an intent to make a soft
impact on spectators in order to engage them in a new culture of confronta-
tion and social consciousness (Argentieri 1996: 111).
No other lm before Open City manifested such a break with contemporary
cinematic paradigms or with rhetorical images of Italys natural and human
landscapes and few artefacts conveyed the sentiments of a nation exhausted
by the war as well as Obsession. Nonetheless, a similar sense of unease drawn
from unspectacular and un-narratable realities infuses I bambini ci guardano
(1942) which bridges the tentative critique of Teresa Venerd with the narra-
tives of childrens exposure to moral degradation, poverty and social injustice
in De Sica and Zavattinis post-war lms. Based on Cesare Giulio Violas
rather obscure novella Pric (1924), the melodrama depicted in De Sicas
retrospective view is a compromise between the old and the new cinema, and
certain though it is that the story of a middle-class woman whose indelity
drives her husband to suicide is both moralistic and abstracted from the war
and its casualties, their seven-year-old son Prics isolation and abandonment
to unspeakable suffering are as far from cathartic resolution as they are from
Depression-era comedies (De Santi and De Sica 1999). As implied in the title
(The Children Are Watching Us), we follow perceptions of a world denounced
for its false respectability through the foregrounding of a child as the focaliser
and source of a study of inner life. This innovative approach to cinematic nar-
ration is encapsulated during a nocturnal journey in which Pric reviews the
events that have caused his present trauma. Looking out into the dark, the
feverish boy sees images of his mother walking away with her lover and also
superimposed images of his incomprehensible grandmother yelling at him and
these merge with his own and his fathers reections in the rainy train window.
This visualisation of a psychological state of mind is reinforced by subjec-
tive shots that align our viewing with the childs gaze, inviting us to share his
ambiguous feeling of not seeing clearly and yet of having seen far too much.
Like Obsession, I bambini announced convictions shared among a new
generation of cineastes and critics, as well as the poetic visions of its authors.
Although no references are made to the war except for the sense of economic
scarcity that hits even Romes bourgeoisie, the lm moves through differ-
ent contemporary environments, from the city to the provinces and to a
decadent seaside resort, laying bare the hypocrisy and judgemental attitudes
that prevail everywhere without excusing anybodys neglect of the sensitive
child. Socio-geographical markers and thematic concerns are enough to make
us perceive 1940s Italy as a time, above all, when children were suffering
because of adults and, as such, as a time when actions obfuscated by deception
and pretence were revealed as betrayals. Herein lies also the premise for the
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ITALIAN NEOREALIST CINEMA
20
child-subjectivity that characterises the successive collaborations between De
Sica and Zavattini. Inherent in the fatally voyeuristic boy named appropriately
precautious (Pric), there is already present the pain of lost childhood that we
will later recognise in Giuseppe and Pasquale in Shoeshine (1946; Sciusci) and
Bruno in Bicycle Thieves. For these boys, the premature entrance into adult-
hood is the effect of post-war conditions of which Pric is still unaware. He
lives through the painful experience of seeing traditional pillars of security fall,
suggesting how, beyond the massive material losses and increasing levels of
disintegration the war would come to cause, there were also existential losses
involved that a truthful cinema would have to account for.
No tragedy, but a light-hearted and ironic treatment of loss and nostalgia on
the one hand and repressive social conventions on the other prevails in Quattro
passi fra le nuvole (1942), widely considered to be Blasettis pre-neorealist lm.
The rhetorical ruralism of 1860 is gone, thanks in part to Zavattinis contribu-
tion to the script, in favour of a bitter-sweet story that leads from the city to
the country and back again, evidently leaving no way of escape from urban
malaise to regional idyll. The narrative follows Paolo, a travelling salesman
who is easily distracted from the economic motives of his journey when one of
his fellow travellers the young and melancholic Maria insists that he comes
along to her parents farm. There, he acts as the husband she does not have and
Figure 1.3 Pric and his father in De Sicas I bambini ci guardano. Courtesy of the
British Film Institute.
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A MOMENT AND A COUNTRY
21
the father of the child she is expecting. The celebration of their alleged union
creates an ironic exposition of provincial power-relations and repressive ideals
of family honour, all of which are juxtaposed in evaluative terms to Marias
innocence and sincerity. When their deception and her moral fall are disclosed,
Paolo delivers a polemical speech on true honour that saves her position in the
family, while he returns to the humdrum life of a travelling salesman and a
loveless marriage.
Paolos transient immersion in peaceful pastoral landscapes establishes
an evaluative opposition between the lost Eden of his childhood which this
unexpected encounter evokes and the mundane city life he now lives, but the
melancholy and uncertainty inherent in the protagonists and in their story,
are ultimately not associated with the disintegration of traditional societies.
Rather, they point to an existential condition that, like Ginos rootlessness
and Prics pain, may be interpreted as the expression of disillusion and quiet
dissent. Wrapping illicit relations and social commentary within the comic
framework of identity deception and a search for authenticity in natural and
human ambiences, Quattro passi avoids both the scandal and the destructive
fatalism of Obsession and Children, but by uncovering the more general impli-
cations of its immediate concerns, reading the critique of intolerant traditions
as a denunciation of totalitarian structures, the lm appears equally suggestive
in its call for political and cultural renewal. All of these works demonstrate a
signicant re-elevation of the cinematic potential of ordinary life, throwing
glossy telephones out in favour of dusty roads, milk bottles and kitchen cur-
tains, and the rejection of escapist formulas is reinforced by the prominence
given to marginalised characters that are allowed to view History from the
perspective of those who had suffered the most from and had the least impact
on its course. The production of these lms in in the years 19423 a difcult
time market-wise, as well, that hindered immediate mass distribution and the
critical acknowledgment they later acquired is a testimony to a hunger for
freedom that after decades of muted existence could no longer be held back.
17
Voices of Resistance
Anti-fascist forces had been ofcially non-existent since Mussolini declared
Italy a totalitarian state in 1925 and the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti,
who was assassinated by the fascists in 1924, had been one of the last to
openly criticise the anti-democratic laws introduced during Mussolinis rst
years as a democratically elected prime minster. Of the parties that had stood
in opposition to fascism before 1925, only the Italian Communist Party (PCI;
founded 1921) survived and LUnit (founded 1924), its ofcial party organ,
circulated clandestinely in Italy and France during the ventennio. Communists
who were not jailed, as was the case of the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci
HAALAND 9780748636112 PRINT.indd 21 29/05/2012 08:13
ITALIAN NEOREALIST CINEMA
22
(18901937), or killed, would like other anti-fascists keep a low prole and
still risk political internment, or seek exile, as did the legendary party leader
Palmiro Togliatti, who in 19434 started to broadcast to Italy from Moscow.
Along with the PCI, the French-based exiled groups Concentrazione anti-
fascista (founded 1927) and Giustizia e libert (founded 1929) had already
organised clandestine units in Italy when Mussolini was arrested on 25 July
1943 (Corni 2000: 15862). More than national unrest and the vote of no
condence in the fascist Grand Council, however, it was Allied bombing that
made King Vittorio Emanuele III regret having appointed this man to lead
the country two decades earlier. An armistice was reluctantly signed on 8
September 1943, while the King and the newly elected cabinet led by Marshal
Badoglio, Italys commander in the Ethiopian war, ew to the South where
Allied forces offered protection from vengeful Nazi troops pouring in from the
North.
Having split the country into two and reduced it to a battleground for
foreign forces, the highly anticipated and for many desired defeat saw a revival
of fascism in northern-central areas where the Germans established the neo-
fascist Italian Social Republic. While its administration was in the town of
Sal and Mussolini was rescued by Hitlers men to act as its pro-forma leader,
neither the decapitated Duce nor the Italian soldiers who joined the Nazis
scheme of violence and persecution, or fascist leaders who sought to restore
the old fascism, left much doubt about the republics dependence on The
Reich (Mack Smith 1997: 41419). Attempts to revive the cinema in Venice
after Cinecitt was destroyed by Allied bombing and most equipment was
conscated and shipped to Germany, failed, since all actors and directors with
any degree of credibility went into hiding. Rossellini embarked on months of
wandering and became attached to the Cinema critics who now constituted the
centre of Romes Resistance movement, whereas Visconti was arrested when
he was about to enter the partisan war. In refusing summonses both from
Mussolini and Goebbels, De Sica found an alibi in La porta del cielo (1945);
a lm produced but never released by the Catholic Film Centre. His major
concern in the winter of 1944 was to prolong production until Rome had been
liberated and to house as many refugees as possible in the Basilica of San Paolo
where shooting took place (Faldini and Fo 1979: 708).
While it was far from the case that the entire nation suddenly became
anti-fascist or indeed that all of those who did, or who had long nurtured
anti-fascist sentiments, now let thought materialise into action, the months
of lawlessness following Mussolinis arrest created a climate of enthusiasm
and opposition against a background of mass demonstrations and strikes in
the Northern cities and appeals in the anti-fascist press for peace and soli-
darity between workers and soldiers returning from the front (Pavone 1994:
613). The state of unrest intensied following the armistice which rather than
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A MOMENT AND A COUNTRY
23
peace and defascistation brought the war closer to home, and while soldiers
on the run from German capture formed the rst partisan groups, commu-
nists, socialists and Giustizia e libert devotees came out of hiding to face the
logistics of systematising anti-fascist sentiments and action (Cooke 2011: 5).
The Resistance movement was subsequently centralised under the multi-party
CLN (Committee for National Liberation) and by the winter of 1944, it had
reached out from organisational centres in Rome and Milan to most of the
German-occupied areas. Partisan action ranging from guerrilla wars; attacks;
sabotage; weapon smuggling and intelligence provision tended however to
be concentrated in the Alps, the Po Valley and the Apennine Mountains, and
as several towns in these areas reclaimed temporary liberation from Nazi-
fascist control, they were transformed into provisional Partisan Republics
lead by the CLN and the local populace (Corni 2000: 158; 175). Besides such
concrete accomplishments, what made post-war political activists and artists
celebrate the revolutionary potential of the popular war for liberation was its
democratic constitution. Of the 200,000 formally recognised as members of
the Resistance, 35,000 ghters and 20,000 patriots were women, and while a
majority belonged to the political left, it also included liberals and conserva-
tives, and Catholics collaborated with Jews just as much as intellectuals and
students fought alongside workers, peasants and ex-soldiers.
18
Some partisans
had joined the Republicans battle against Franco in the Spanish Civil War in
1937 and considered the two anti-fascist struggles as continuous; others found
inspiration in the revolutionary forces of the Risorgimento and the peasant
protests and working-class activism that fascism had emerged to suppress; but
many were driven to the mountains by opportunism and taste for adventure
rather than by ideological or patriotic intentions.
19
If a common motivation among those who rst took up arms against Nazi-
fascist violence was the instinctive freedom to choose and to express disobe-
dience towards those who illegitimately claimed obedience, the increasingly
centralised struggle developed, as the ex-partisan Claudio Pavone relates, into
three distinct wars. Besides the war for national liberation, there was a class
struggle, wherein workers and peasants saw an occasion to claim freedom
from an exploitative bourgeoisie, and a civil war where the neo-fascists who
had gone on to ght for Mussolinis republic were often considered a ercer
enemy than the Nazis themselves (Pavone 1994: 2339; 225ff.). In the years of
the Reconstruction, these two facets of the Resistance which were both moti-
vated by a vision of socio-political reorganisation were largely undermined by
an opposite interest in reclaiming the Resistance as a unitary national battle
against the German enemy as if fascism and social disjunctions had not and
did not continue to divide the country. Although the Resistance was a far
less harmonious and consequential force than the myths of national memory
account for, this does not diminish its contribution to the Allied war effort or
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ITALIAN NEOREALIST CINEMA
24
the function it initially played as an inspiration to moral and cultural renewal.
The anti-fascist coalitions in power between 1945 and 1947 continued the
unitary, albeit far from unproblematic, line of the CLN and while these admin-
istrations remained sadly inconsequential, they kept the hope alive that what
had motivated the most progressive factions of the Resistance the vision not
of a restored pre-fascist order, but of socio-political reform was historically
achievable. Only in the light of this climate of a long-desired liberation and
projects of national reclamation across socio-economic and geographical divi-
sions can we understand the specic objectives, manifold manifestations and
undeniable shortcomings of neorealist lm.
A new way of seeing: receptions and perceptions
Unquestionably the most formidable and critically acclaimed area in modern
Italian culture, neorealist cinema has often been celebrated for its mas-
terpieces and questioned for its practical and political limitations. Of the
822 feature lms produced in Italy between 1945 and 1953, only 90 can
be dened as neorealist. Signicantly, none of these were the works of the
two most prolic directors of the 1930s, Blasetti and Camerini, although
they were equally active in the post-war years, but instead of directors who
had emerged in the 1940s. What is more, with the exception of Open City,
Bicycle Thieves and Bitter Rice, most were commercial failures that in some
cases proved more successful with foreign audiences.
20
That Italian moviego-
ers preferred Hollywood heroes once the fascist ban was lifted explains only
in part this unpopularity. More signicant was the spectators increasing
desire to move on from recent disasters without seeing their own misery
on the screens. Neorealist lm became therefore out of tune with a society
in which the socio-cultural transformations launched by Marshall Aid soon
made bombed-out buildings, guerrilla ghts and black markets pass, but
it was also clear that the lms in most cases had been either too elitist,
sentimental or populist to reach an authentically popular dimension. Such,
at least, was the critique featured on the pages of Cinema nuovo (founded
1952) in the mid-1950s when the involution of progressive lmmaking was
discussed in relation to Rossellinis Viaggio in Italia (1954) and De Sicas
Stazione Termini (1954), accused respectively of spiritualism and conform-
ism, whereas the historicist perspective of Viscontis Senso (1954) was wel-
comed as a promising passage from neorealism to realism, from observation
to critical participation (Aristarco 1980: 19; 468; 64). According to Pier
Paolo Pasolini, a prominent heir but also a severe critic of these directors,
this moment so rich in revolutionary potential had suffered from a lack of
systematic thought for cultural reorganisation and had as a consequence
produced nothing but a vital crisis (1965: 231). A systematic project would,
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A MOMENT AND A COUNTRY
25
he maintained, have promoted relations between intellectuals and the people
established during the Resistance and thus have forged the type of national-
popular art Gramsci described as based on the authors identication with
their lower-class subjects and their responsibility to foster unity and con-
sciousness among them (1996: 712).
To what extent the neorealists found a model in Gramscis prison writings
once these started to be systematically published in late 1947 is a crucial ques-
tion to be considered more closely in Chapter 3 (Chemotti 1999: 61). Some
accuse the directors of exploiting the power of their humble characters to
stir emotions and passive contemplation rather than operating didactically
among the spectators (Kolker 2009: 64). The political failure of neorealism
also reects the state of a country that, after the Christian Democrats defeated
the Popular Front in the 1948 elections and processes of Reconstruction were
subjected to Marshall Aid, Cold War sensitivities and the Catholic Church, was
hardly a place for social revolution. Committed lmmaking was systematically
hindered by intensied censorship and laws that, after initial years of lawless-
ness and ad hoc production outside established systems, recast the cinema
as a state-supervised culture industry of productive, ideological and cultural
standardisations.
21
We can accordingly delineate an initial phase of neorealism
between 19459 that embraces most of its masterpieces and a second phase
that only the most generous critics stretch to include Federico Fellinis Le notti
di Cabiria (1957). By 1950, what initially was an improvised and economically
risky form of lmmaking had become systematised by industrial imperatives
and state regulation, and the term neorealism had achieved decisive political
connotations (Sorlin 1996: 89). In both phases, the lms that strictly speak-
ing qualied as neorealist works occupied a numerically marginal position
alongside popular genre lms attuned to the twofold challenge of increasing
competition from Hollywood productions and audiences in search of specta-
cle, without however ignoring post-war conditions of unemployment, exploi-
tation, and social disintegration. At the margins of, but in dialogue with, the
aesthetic and moral ideals encapsulated in the works of Rossellini, De Sica and
Visconti, these works may, as Farassino has suggested, be dened as lms of
neorealism (1989a: 2132) and frequently it is their ctionalisation of the real
that best illustrates the thematic and aesthetic distinction of neorealism, as we
shall see.
The notion of a second phase of systematisation also points to the critical
reection the reborn Italian cinema started to awaken as represented by the
writings of Bazin and Zavattini between 1948 and 1953. Up until that point,
between 1943, when neorealist thought among critics and lmmakers had
started to take form, and 1948, working theories came not from critical formu-
lations of a poetics, but from historical and material circumstances (Farassino
1989a: 32). To the extent that any thoughts were formalised, they were so by
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ITALIAN NEOREALIST CINEMA
26
a handful of lms that according to De Sica never reected prescribed criteria
or adherence to a movement:
There were no studios, nor cameras or lm [. . .] Still, neorealist cinema
was coming to life, as a vast collective movement of everyone [. . .] It was
not that one day we sat down around a table in via Veneto, Rossellini
Visconti, I and the others and said to each other: now lets make neo-
realism. We hardly even knew each other. One day they told me that
Rossellini had started to work again. A lm about a priest, they said.
(quoted in Faldini and Fo 1979: 80; 90)
Recent stories, already turned legend, of loss, betrayal, repression and sac-
rice inspired Rossellini to go out into the streets and cast citizens who had
lived through similar events, but with scarce equipment, hazardous funding
and a disintegrated industry, he had little choice but to improvise solutions
and invent a technique that proved perfect for the urgency of the material
(Rossellini 1987a: 107). The same artistic freedom inconceivable within
conventional systems of production and commitment to lived experiences
saw De Sica embark on a lm project based on Romes street kids a year
later, but Shoeshine offers a thematically and formally very different image of
Rome during the last year of the war. Their successive lms, Germania anno
zero (1948) and Bicycle Thieves, incidentally both trace life in destroyed cities
through the eyes of young boys, but what strikes us is their afrmation of a
personal poetics rather than a certain set of norms, an impression that the
radically different The Earth Trembles, produced in the same year (19478),
certainly reinforces.
What unies these lms, which all represent the artistic freedom and com-
mercial disarray of the rst phase of neorealism, is the search for a relation
of immediacy between the cinematic eye and current socio-historical realities
(Wagstaff 2007: 13). To some extent they all address the ideals formulated in
pre-neorealist criticism, but not even Visconti let theoretical preconception of
realism exclude his lyricist and often stylised approach to an underprivileged
community at the countrys remotest margins. As a result, the question as to
whether a neorealist visual language actually existed came to occupy critics as
soon as the phenomenon itself was recognised. Tired of being referred to as the
father of neorealist literature, Elio Vittorini objected in 1951 that there are as
many neorealisms as there are principal authors, an argument Bazin evoked a
couple of years later, insisting that neorealism per se does not exist, but there
are more or less neorealist directors (1975: 690). More recently, Pierre Sorlin
has recognised the homogeneous nature of the phenomenon while suggesting
that only for those critics, intellectuals and politicians who grouped certain
lms and labelled them as neorealist did they represent a genre (1996: 913).
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A MOMENT AND A COUNTRY
27
In similar terms, Peter Bondanella disputes the existence of a group identity
since shared thematic concerns never embraced a programmatic approach
(2009: 34), whereas Lino Miccich denes it as an avant-garde phenomenon
on the basis of the deliberate and decisive separation it represented from pre-
ceding trends in national cinema (1999b: 218).
Considering the absence of the intellectually elevated theoretical tables and
a centralised leading group around which avant-garde movements tend to take
form, neorealism constituted, according to Alberto Asor Rosa, an a posterior
poetics of what it actually was rather than of what it may have wanted to be.
In that sense, we can talk of a fortunate combination of largely unrepeatable
elements and a bundle of highly individualised energies converged by moral,
political and cultural exigencies (1975a: 161013). This evaluation evokes
both Bazins anti-essentialist concept of a revolutionary humanism (2002:
263) and Zavattinis related observations that neorealism would always be
dened by a moral position (2002: 913). Inherent in these views there is a
conviction that, more than aesthetics, it was an ethics of the aesthetics con-
solidated by the awareness among young lmmakers of their role in promoting
human and social growth (Miccich 1999a: ix-xxiii); in that regard, Millicent
Marcuss observation that the ethical impetus in effect produced a certain
school, seems justied (1986: 23). The difculty in arriving at an aesthetic def-
inition sheds light on the essentially hybrid nature of the phenomenon. Carlo
Lizzani, who like Zavattini lived the neorealist experience as cineaste and
critic, looks back at it as an extraordinary moment of interlinguistic dialogue
[and] reciprocal fertilization that, by activating a range of models, styles, and
genres, changed completely the frames of cinematic narration and the relations
between its characters and the world (Lizzani 1998: 1315). These ideas of a
moral coherence and formal eclecticism suggest that what took place in post-
war Italy was not as much a question of realism, but rather of a reinvention
and re-combination of past and current traditions to form new artistic and
ideological perspectives on reality. As will become clear, this objective tended
to be reached through unconventional visions of history and country and of
time and space.
Cinematic journeys and national discoveries
The notion, fundamental to this study, that more than a movement, neoreal-
ism was a moment, rests on a presupposition of the cinemas relation to and
position in history. In exploring works that operate within and between socio-
economic circumstances and artistic as well as critical practices, this study will
seek to account both for individual poetics and for the common intentionality
and consciousness that, as Giulia Fanara observes, created a circularity of
discourse (2000: 101). Its manifold manifestations in literature and lm as
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ITALIAN NEOREALIST CINEMA
28
well as in other visual arts form a web of aesthetic, thematic and narrative
continuities and move, with unitary convergences within a cultural, moral,
social and ideological space virtually open to all anti-fascist forces (Brunetta
2001b: 3478). Considering Zavattinis notion that the only rule neorealism
knew was Dont do today what you did yesterday (2002: 887), the fusion of
styles and conventions and individual articulations of something essentially
collective appear in themselves programmatic, implying a collective refusal
of the culture of the ventennio (Bettetini 1999: 136); a reaction to the cultural
standstill of fascism (Pasolini 1965: 231) and an antithesis to the aestheti-
cism of epic spectaculars, Italian and American alike (Bazin 2002: 2602). To
capture both coherent forms of opposition and variations of individual expres-
sion, neorealism will be considered an optique, a term that etymologically
denotes both vision and option and that as such will direct our focus towards
correlations between a given ocular and ideological perspective and a set of
aesthetic and thematic possibilities available within a moment of cultural
history. As Dudley Andrew writes in an exquisite study of French poetic
realist cinema, the concept of optique has the advantage of accounting for ele-
ments both of style and genre, while going beyond these in distinguishing the
specic type of experience offered by a set of lms to the public (1995: 19;
233). As such, it will enable us to appreciate the specic choices and solutions
that distinguish not merely individual directors but singular lms, while also
tracing coherences in the critical practice with which they sought to engage
post-war audiences.
Among the constants that allow us to view neorealism as something coher-
ent is the search for an anti-rhetorical language with which to redene rela-
tions with the people, an imperative that in particular motivated those who
had witnessed and even actively engaged in the popular anti-fascist forces. An
unprecedented experience of democracy and socio-geographical representa-
tion, the Resistance fostered an awareness, rst, of the need to reach a social
mass that for the rst time had claimed the position of a historical agent
and, subsequently, to create politically creative art without renouncing the
aesthetic uniqueness and spontaneity of the rst neorealist works (Asor Rosa
1975a: 1607). These motivations may have proved illusory or defective, but
they were nonetheless authentically felt, and they allow us to see why Open
City, anchored as it was within the themes and ethics of the popular war for
national liberation, achieved the status of a sudden invention and, at the same
time, why Obsession may be considered an anti-fascist, but not yet neorealist
lm insofar as it preceded the fall of fascism and the Resistance. These events
had seen the lower classes imposing themselves as protagonists of history and
of the destinies of our country, De Santis wrote in 1951, and assimilating
this new reality, the cinema had opened its screens to orphans [. . .] widows
[. . .] a suffering and rufed humanity (quoted in Fanara 2000: 83). Along
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A MOMENT AND A COUNTRY
29
these lines, Italo Calvino emphasised the oral culture that had evolved among
partisans like himself, spreading out through the nation and giving life to the
choral, anonymous mode of the neorealist narrative. More than a school,
he wrote in the retrospective preface to his Resistance novel Il sentiero del
nido dei ragni (1947), neorealism had been a togetherness of voices, in major
parts peripheral, a manifold discovery of the different Italies (Calvino 1993:
vi). The search for a truthful art conducted as an act of resistance had, as
we have seen, engaged lmmakers before the armistice and writers since the
early 1930s, but not until it emerged from clandestinity and assumed a reborn
freedom of speech; a national identity to construct from zero and hopes,
however short-lived, of reform and justice, did the thought of renewal manifest
itself as a journey of national and cinematic discovery that radically changed
perspectives on the nature and scope of cinematic narration.
22
Moving from the streets of war and sacrice in Open City, to the quest for
freedom that leads from Sicily via Naples, Rome and Florence, to the Po Valley
in Pais and returning to a cultural and existential quest in Naples in Viaggio
in Italia, the journey that is illustrated here by Rossellinis trajectory but that
takes multiple paths, alongside, across and far beyond his, proceeds as a socio-
geographical investigation and nds a constant in the concern of recomposing
the landscape and rebuilding the city in relation to processes of modernisation
(Shiel 2006: 15). Tracing this act of reclamation and redenition through
its manifold pathways and common destinations, Italian Neorealist Cinema
begins with a discussion of realism as a mode of representation and with an
outline of the traditions and critical thought that led towards neorealism, as
well as the theoretical reections it provoked in the works of Bazin, Zavattini,
and Gilles Deleuze. The complexity of the terrain is mapped out further in
Chapter 3 through an exploration of Resistance writing and neorealist ction,
whereas Chapter 4 examines Rossellinis project of chronicling war-ridden
cities in Rome, Open City, Pais and Germany Year Zero. Chapter 5 follows
walks at the margins of the post-war city in De Sicas Shoeshine, Bicycle
Thieves, Umberto D. (1950) and Miracle in Milan (1951; Miracolo a Milano),
whereas Viscontis vision of historical action in country and city is discussed in
Chapter 6 with reference to The Earth Trembles, Bellissima (1951), and Senso.
Chapter 7 explores lms that bring neorealist spaces and practices into contact
with conventions of popular genres, focusing on Alberto Lattuadas Il bandito
(1946) and Senza piet (1948), Pietro Germis Giovent perduta (1947) and
Il cammino della speranza (1950) and Giuseppe De Santis Bitter Rice and
Non c pace tra gli ulivi (1950). The dialogue with neorealism leads towards
its most immediate as well as its more recent inheritors, moving from Fellini,
Michelangelo Antonioni and Pasolini to Lina Wertmller, Gianni Amelio and
Nanni Moretti, among others. In following some of the many ways in which
the concretised narratives, anti-heroic characters, dislocated spaces and civic
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ITALIAN NEOREALIST CINEMA
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engagement have found new life in the works of such very diverse directors,
it reinforces the sense of neorealism as having constituted a vast, hybrid and
travelling phenomenon that recreates itself through cinematic experimentation
and in confrontation with individual or shared struggles as well as the univer-
sal human condition.
Notes
1. See Brunetta (1996: 37; 23). The title refers to the fact that although the Holy City
had been declared open or a demilitarised zone, and the Germans had agreed to
maintain this status, as soon as city was occupied in September 1943 it became
subject to military command and to Allied bombing. Open city subsequently
became a slogan of the anti-fascist and popular resistance that Open City celebrates
(Forgacs 2000: 33).
2. The historical-pathology thesis is associated with the philosopher Benedetto Croce
(18561952) one of few openly non-fascist intellectuals who escaped jail and
exile while the Marxist thesis represents the view of fascism as a universal expres-
sion of capitalist forces and bourgeois means of self-preservation, denying the
quintessentially Italian and anti-bourgeois revolution that fascism often presented
itself as (Gentile 2002: 367).
3. The loss of collective memory that Brunetta describes was far from exclusive to
the cinema (2001a: 35960). The major voice of consciousness with regard to the
countrys fascist past and to past compromises belongs, as ever, to Cesare Zavattini
whose writings will be studied more closely in Chapter 2. A few months after Rome
was liberated, he called for a collective confession as the start to a new cinema:
All the same, it is not a question about liquidating demagogically the work of
twenty years but to identify what our individual sins were [. . .] we will not load
onto fascism all individual responsibilities [. . .] We no longer have the right to be
hypocritical and poverty will provide us with all privileges (2002: 6634).
4. Spurred by the post-1968 climate and contemporary cultural debates, the revision-
ing of fascism that took place in the 1970s involved historians, social scientists and
cultural critics, as well as a community of lmmakers and critics whose paradigm
shift was marked by a convention held in 1974 in Pesaro, which confronted both
the many continuities that exist between lms made during and after fascism, and
the nature and shortcomings of neorealism itself (Farassino 1989a: 22). In the
cinema, which after the war had approached fascism in various, mostly stereotypi-
cal ways, and with scarce historical analysis, the 1970s saw a tendency to evoke the
past for the parallels it offered to the present (Zinni 2010: 179237). This connec-
tion will be illustrated with reference to Lina Wertmller in Chapter 8.
5. For recent works on the cinema during fascism, see in particular Jacqueline Reich
and Piero Garofalo (ed.) (2002), Re-Viewing Fascism. Italian Cinema, 19221943,
and Steven Ricci (2008), Cinema and Fascism. Italian Film and Society 19221943.
6. For studies of the Duces status as divo see Gundle (2000) and Brunetta (2001a:
11011). Vittorio Mussolini discusses both his fathers viewing habits and his
awareness that the scarce success of the only truly fascist lms produced during the
ventennio Camicia nera (Forzano 1933), Vecchia guardia (Blasetti 1934) and also
Il grande apello (Camerini and Soldati 1936) proved the peoples low tolerance
for propaganda (quoted in Faldini and Fo 1979: 22; 32).
7. Besides De Santis (quoted in Faldini and Fo 1979: 42), among the students of
the Centro Sperimentale we also nd Michelangelo Antonioni, Pietro Germi and
Carlo Lizzani, as well as critics and actors such as Gianni Puccini, Mario Alicata,
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A MOMENT AND A COUNTRY
31
Leopoldo Trieste and Alida Valli. Several others who were not enrolled in the
school, such as Visconti, took part in its cultural exchanges and debates (Faldini
and Fo 1979: 407).
8. Whereas italianit evoked the singularity and self-sufciency of Italys imperial
past, Gentiles idea of the loyal and consistent uomo fascista drew on Nietzsches
bermensch and aimed at producing soldiers and workers: the ideal fascist man is
the Black Shirt. He is the soldier ready to risk everything [. . .] he aspires to become
Mussolinis new Italian who corresponds to the great, dynamic fatherland . . .
(Gentile 2000: 264).
9. I have explored this topic in The I and the We in Mussolinis Bread and
Circuses: Performing a Fascist Communitas, La Fusta. Journal of Italian Studies,
Fall, 2006: 5366. The Duces speeches are published in Benito Mussolini (1959),
Opera Omnia, ed. Edoardo Susmel and Duilio Susmel, 36 vols, Firenze: La Fenice;
and U. Hoepli (1934), Scritti e discorsi, Dal 19321933, Milano: U. Hoepli; or can
be viewed in Balconi e canoni: i discorsi di Mussolini. Istituto LUCE, 1990.
10. The concepts of strapaese and stracitt are dealt with in Franco Masieros 1975
article (Strapaese e stracitt in Problemi: Periodico Trimestrale di Cultura, 44:
26090), and, more recently, in Ben-Ghiat (2001: 267). Anti-bourgeois tenden-
cies were recurrent not only within singular nationalist and fascist writers and
ideologists, among whom may be included the Duce himself, but also within ofcial
fascist organs such as the periodical, Il Bargello which in particular attracted young
intellectuals (Asor Rosa 1975b: 111).
11. The collaboration of the privileged middle class was essential to fascism from its
beginnings in the 1920s when the fascist squadristi (armed squads) were set up to
suppress popular insurrections that emerged following World War I in rural com-
munities as well as in the northern cities (Gentile 2002: 1112). In relation to the
lower middle classes, the regime introduced economic redistribution that guaran-
teed a xed income and permanent social distinction from the proletariat (Candela
2003: 24).
12. Renzo De Felices understanding of the Ethiopian war as Mussolinis political
masterpiece was grounded in the consensus it allegedly met within the public (De
Felice 1974: 642).
13. Rossellinis statement dates back to 1952 (1987b: 85) decades before critics
started to explore the Fascist War Trilogy and its continuity with his neorealist
lms (Rondolino 1989; Bondanella 2004); and, as Ben-Ghiat has recently dem-
onstrated (2000), with lms such as Luciano Serra, pilota (Alessandrini 1938) to
which he contributed as scriptwriter and assistant director. Reception has other-
wise ranged from Viscontis insistence on separating Rossellinis fascist lms from
other pre-neorealist cinema (quoted in Faldini and Fo 1979: 67) to Gallaghers
assessment of their opposition to fascist ideals (1998: 72).
14. The division of the lm into a documentary rst half, where montage editing is
frequently used, and the sentimental storyline in the second half reects the dual
contribution to the lm by De Robertis and Rossellini respectively (Faldini and Fo
1979: 60; Bondanella 2004).
15. One of these was a script based on Vergas epistolary story about a womans
relation to a brigand in Lamante di Gramigna (1880), but Cultural Minster
Alessandro Pavoloni had had Enough of these brigands! (Faldini and Fo 1979:
61).
16. The negatives of Obsession were conscated by Nazi forces along with other pre-
cious lms and equipment stored at Cinecitt and the version we see today is a copy
Visconti had made for himself (1976a).
17. Having enjoyed brief distribution before Mussolinis arrest in 1943, Obsession
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ITALIAN NEOREALIST CINEMA
32
and Children were shown in cut versions in Venice during the Sal Republic, but
both lacked publicity due to the cancellation of the Venice Film Festival that year
and once they were screened in Rome after the Liberation, they could not rival the
immediate popularity of Open City. Both were re-released between 194850 along
with Four Steps and other pre-war lms that somehow seemed to anticipate neore-
alist cinema, including the popular comedies Avanti c posto (Bonnard, 1942) and
Campo de ori (Bonnard, 1943), both of which starred Anna Magnani and Aldo
Fabrizi, as well as remakes of the Neapolitan silent lms Assunta Spina (Mattoli;
1948; originally Serena, 1915) and Sperduti nel buio (Mastrocinque, 1947; origi-
nally Martoglio, 1914), which had been destroyed during the German occupation
(Lughi 1989: 548).
18. See Jane Slaughter (1997), Women and the Italian Resistance, 19431945, Denver:
Arden Press, 33. Corni (2000; 164) estimates that 9,000 men were actively ghting
in the winter of 19434 and the following year the number had grown to 12,000
13,000. The largest faction of the armed Resistance was the Communist Garibaldi
brigade. See also Cooke (2011: 6).
19. See Corni 2000: 165. Carlo Rosellis famous motto Oggi in Spagna, domani in
Italia (In Spain today, in Italy tomorrow), suggests both what a formative, anti-
fascist experience the Spanish Civil War was for young Italians and the continuity
in solidarity, modes of warfare and objectives to be achieved that connected the two
Resistance movements.
20. See Miccich (1999b: 202). Christopher Wagstaff has usefully observed that,
while most of the critically acclaimed neorealist lms individually failed at the box
ofce, as a group, they did no worse and at times better than generic groups such
as melodrama and comedy (2007: 18).
21. See Grignafni (1989: 42). As will be shown more clearly in Chapter 5, in 1947 the
Under Secretary of Culture Giulio Andreotti reintroduced censorship and preven-
tive review commissions as practiced during fascism. The objective was to discour-
age producers, who freely presented scripts to the commissions, from investing
money in projects that would later face obstacles from censors and, in the worst of
cases, not be granted release permission. The infamous Andreotti laws, which also
had a fascist precedent promised incentives to artistically qualied lms on the basis
of their box-ofce prot (Grignafni 1989: 402).
22. Initially presented in Zavattinis writings (2002), the view of neorealism as a
journey of national rediscovery is elaborated in Melanco (1996); Brunetta (1996);
and in Fanara (2000: 101) and post-neorealist continuities of this discovery are dis-
cussed in Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema (Steimatsky
2008).
HAALAND 9780748636112 PRINT.indd 32 29/05/2012 08:13
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9780748640041 I Jul 2013 I Hardback I 70.00
POST-BEUR CINEMA
WILL HIGBEE
North African migr and Maghrebi-French Filmmaking in France since 2000
WILL HIGBEE
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North African migr and Maghrebi-French Filmmaking in France since 2000
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Since the early 1980s, flmmakers of Maghrebi origin have made a key contribution to the
representation of issues such as immigration, integration and national identity in French cinema.
However, they have done so mostly from a position on the margins of the industry. In contrast,
since the early 2000s, Maghrebi-French and North African migr flmmakers have occupied an
increasingly prominent position in on both sides of the camera, announcing their presence on
French screens in a wider range of genres and styles than ever before.
This greater prominence and move to the mainstream has not automatically meant that these
flms have lost any of the social or political relevance of Beur cinema of the 1980s or the banlieue
flm of the 1990s. Indeed in the 2000s these flms have increasingly questioned the boundaries
between national, transnational and diasporic cinema, whilst simultaneously demanding, either
implicitly or explicitly, a reconsideration of the very difference that has traditionally been seen as
a barrier to the successful integration of North African immigrants and their descendants into
French society.
Through a detailed study of this transformative decade for Maghrebi-French and North African
migr flmmaking in France, this book argues for the emergence of a Post-Beur cinema in the
2000s that is simultaneously global and local in its outlook.
An absorbing introduction to this key development in contemporary French cinema, Post-Beur
Cinema is essential reading for students and scholars in Film Studies, French Studies and
Diaspora Studies.
Will Higbee is Senior Lecturer in French and Film Studies at the University of Exeter.
Cover design: riverdesign.co.uk
Cover image: Hafsia Herzi in La Graine et le Mulet
Path Renn Productions/The Kobal Collection.
www.euppublishing.com
E
d
i
n
b
u
r
g
h
ISBN 978-0-7486-4004-1
Traditions in World Cinema
General Editors: Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer
Founding Editor: Steven Jay Schneider
This series introduces diverse and fascinating movements in world cinema. Each volume
concentrates on a set of flms from a different national, regional or, in some cases, cross-cultural
cinema which constitute a particular tradition.
26
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2. THE (MAGHREBI-)FRENCH
CONNECTION: DIASPORA GOES
MAINSTREAM
In many respects, and with few notable exceptions, Maghrebi-French and
North African migr lmmaking in France during the 1980s and 1990s
has been characterised in both critical and academic discourse by notions
of peripheral and auteur-led modes of production and limited exposure to
niche audiences, not to mention struggles relating to funding, distribution
and exhibition (Bluher 2001). The lms have often been treated by academics
and critics as a kind of socio-cultural document, rather than an entertainment
product aimed at mass audiences: a cinema more of interest to sociologists,
journalists and academics as a reection of contemporary socio-political reali-
ties facing North African immigrants and their French-born descendants than
to producers in search of popular box-ofce success. This conception has
been further endorsed by a broader scholarly analysis of diasporic, exilic or
postcolonial lmmaking in the West over the past decade focusing on inter-
stitial, experimental, marginal or hybrid cinema (Nacy 2001; Marks 2000;
Berghahn and Sternberg 2010).
Of course, the image that has emerged of Maghrebi-French and North
African migr lmmaking of the 1980s and 1990s in academic and critical
discourse is grounded in the very real difculties that many of these lmmak-
ers have experienced in securing funding as well as adequate distribution for
their work a fact that has restricted audiences for and thwarted the wider
ambitions of a number of these lmmakers. Even Abdellatif Kechiche, whose
lms have garnered a string of awards as well as in the case of La Graine et le
mulet (Kechiche, 2007) over one million spectators in France, has spoken of
THE MAGHREBI-FRENCH CONNECTION
27
the difculties he has confronted in securing funding for his lms even after the
breakthrough success of LEsquive (Kechiche, 2004):
Its true that theres racism in France and sometimes its quite agrant.
But I think that its more a matter of a certain milieu that owns cultural
property and doesnt want to loosen its grip on this sort of ownership. Its
a privilege to make movies and function within an artistic environment
and this milieu doesnt want to give up its privileges.[. . .] This surfaced
in certain rather aggressive attacks against the lm. (Kechiche in Porton
2005: 4)
One way to explain the apparent marginalisation of much Maghrebi-French
and North African migr audiences from mainstream production and dis-
tribution networks is to view these lmmakers as belonging to a transitional
mode of production, dened by Marks as intercultural cinema (2000: 25)
that is largely oppositional in its politics as well as experimental in its aesthetic
practice and representation of displacement and hybridity. However, with the
exception of earlier short lms shot on video by beur directors such as Farida
Belghoul (Cest madame la France que tu prfres? [1981]; Le Dpart du pre
[1983]) or the work produced by the more militant Collectif Mohammed in
response to police violence in the banlieue, Maghrebi-French and Algerian
migr lmmakers have preferred to work within relatively conventional
approaches to narrative, mise en scne and genre. The social realist drama,
often based around an episodic narrative, is by far the most common mode
employed by these lmmakers in the 1980s and 1990s, for example Le Th
au harem dArchimde (Charef, 1985), Bton Rouge (Bouchareb, 1985), Miss
Mona (Charef, 1987), Cheb (Bouchareb, 1991), Hexagone (Chibane, 1994),
and Bye-bye (Dridi, 1995).
Comedy the popular French genre, par excellence has also emerged as
a genre of choice, particularly amongst Algerian migr directors (see, for
example, the work of Bahloul, Allouache and above all Zemmouri), as well
as amongst Maghrebi-French directors such as Chibane and Bensalah. All of
these directors use a consensual approach to the genre, employing comedy as
a means of drawing attention to the ridiculous nature of many prejudices and
stereotypes held against the North African immigrant population by certain
sections of French society, while relishing the opportunities offered by the
comedic mode to subvert received opinions through laughter. Indeed, it is
important to note that, in terms of box-ofce results, the most successful lms
at reaching a broad audience in the 1990s were indeed comedies. The most
important of these is arguably Bensalahs Le Ciel, les oiseaux et . . . ta mre!
(1999), a low-budget comedy that was a surprise hit at the French box-ofce.
The lm not only launched the screen career of Maghrebi-French star Jamel
POST-BEUR CINEMA
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Debbouze and director Bensalah, but it also effectively established a pathway
via mainstream genre (comedy) and the use of Maghrebi-French and North
African migr stars who were popular with youth audiences to secure a place
within mainstream cinema of the 2000s. Arguably the most consistently com-
mercially successful Maghrebi-French lmmaker working in France today,
Bensalahs co-option into the mainstream is not without its complications
due to the reductive and essentialised stereotypes of both majority and ethnic
minority French protagonists often found in his comedies. An analysis of
Bensalahs prominent position in the industry in the 2000s later in this chapter
will therefore allow us to consider how far Stuart Halls assertion (1996: 468)
that there is always a price of incorporation to be paid when the cutting edge
of difference and transgression is blunted into spectacularisation holds true in
relation to the mainstreaming of Maghrebi-French and North African migr
lmmaking in the 2000s.
La Guerre de la culture de masse: (Re-)dening Mainstream
Culture in France
In English, mainstream denotes a prevailing direction or dominant norm
in terms of opinion, political ideology, popular taste or representation. As a
descriptive term, it is associated with the groups, individuals, demographics,
institutions, creative personnel or organisations that reside in this space of
the dominant norm and can be applied to pretty much anything: from music,
literature and lm to politics and education. In a cinematic context, it can
apply to both representation (standard codes in editing, lighting, narrative
conventions, sound design, genre and so on) and to industrial practices of
production, distribution and exhibition. Above all, it suggests a conventional,
commercially minded approach that has broad popular appeal and is neither
experimental in its style nor oppositional or subversive in its politics. As such,
mainstream shares common ground with terms such as popular and mid-
dlebrow, although these various labels are not synonymous with one another.
The middlebrow certainly can be mainstream, for example, the massive popu-
larity of the heritage lm in France during the 1980s and 1990s. However, the
mainstream is not necessarily middlebrow insomuch as it is not exclusively
concerned with fusing elements of high and low culture for an audience with
middle-class aspirations.
While the terms mainstream and popular are, arguably, more analogous,
they also require certain nuanced distinctions to be made. Like mainstream,
popular cinema can also be deemed a commercial cinema, in the sense of
lms that are viewed by mass audiences and have broad box-ofce appeal.
However, as Dyer and Vincendeau remind us (1992: 4), the popular also
has an anthropological meaning more closely related to folk culture as an
THE MAGHREBI-FRENCH CONNECTION
29
expression of the traditions, values and experiences of the people. In contrast,
the mainstream connotes a commercial imperative that looks towards a glo-
balised mass culture to dene its aesthetics and narrative form as well as modes
of production and distribution more than it does to the traditions and values of
one specic nation or people.
The second way in which the idea of the mainstream intersects with the
popular is found in the dismissive or derogatory notion of forms of mass enter-
tainment culture aimed at the widest possible audience and with little intellec-
tual, creative or artistic merit. For his part, Hall (1981, 2323) suggests that
there is no whole, authentic autonomous popular culture: not only does our
notion of what constitutes popular culture change as a result of the historical
and socio-political context in which it is experienced, but also cultural indus-
tries have the power to rework and reshape what they represent; imposing
denitions (ideological positionings or cultural representations) of ourselves
and others that t more easily with the dominant societal norm. This is the
way in which the French lm industry has traditionally distinguished its artistic
quality (as an artisanal, auteur-led cinema) against the crass popular spectacle
of Hollywood blockbusters (see Karmitz in Martel 2010). Such a description
is, of course, a gross oversimplication of the multifaceted nature of French
cinema production, which has its own mainstream or popular sector in which
genres, stars and big budget spectacle are employed in the market place in an
attempt to compete with Hollywood at the box-ofce (Frodon 1995: 6924).
This type of cinema, most recently labelled as a cinma des producteurs, has
been revitalised at the French box-ofce since the early 2000s (Ciment 2000;
Higbee 2005: 297307). As this chapter aims to illustrate, as writers, directors,
producers and stars, Maghrebi-French and North African migr lmmakers
have played a signicant role in this recent revival of popular or mainstream
French cinema.
If the term mainstream is relatively anodyne in English, its recent appear-
ance and application in France has proved more controversial. As a conceptual
term, le mainstream there is, signicantly, no French translation gained
public attention in France with the publication in 2010 of Mainstream:
enqute sur une culture qui plait tout le monde by Frdric Martel, a jour-
nalist, researcher and former diplomat to the US. The arguments about main-
stream culture in France proposed in the book, which became a bestseller in
2010, were widely debated in the French media, including articles and reviews
in Libration and Le Monde, interviews and discussions of the book on radio
stations such as France Culture, and an appearance by the author on France 3s
agship book review show Un Livre Un Jour. The inuential weekly culture
magazine Les Inrockuptibles devoted its front cover and a ten-page article to
Martels project (see gure 2.1) to coincide with the books publication. One of
the few negative reviews of the book, by Franois Cusset, a French professor of
POST-BEUR CINEMA
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American history, published in Le Nouvel Observateur (Cusset 2010), resulted
in a very public and highly personal media spat between Martel and Cusset.
The essential thrust of Martels argument is that the mainstream represents
both the dominant current within a given culture (one that has mass popular
appeal) and one that produces content with a standardised diversity. It is
this standardised diversity, along with advances in communication and digital
technologies, that allows mainstream culture to be disseminated today on
unprecedented levels; a form of global mass culture that can reach, but also
be transformed by, local audiences across the globe. While Martel argues that
much of the formula for production and content is derived from American
popular culture (he uses Hollywood as a key example in his study) he does
not suggest that this is simply a case of the American domination of a global
monoculture. Instead, he identies the existence of multiple mainstreams a
simultaneous homogenisation and heterogenisation of mainstream culture,
formed via a series of production hubs from which cultural content is exported
regionally and globally.
1
Mainstream is also a manifestation of soft power
in action: the potential of mass cultural forms to inuence, inform and shape
ideas and attitudes of society without force or coercion. Martel sees Europe
(and France in particular), or at least the policy-makers, gatekeepers and
artists who hold considerable inuence over cultural production in Europe, as
unwilling or unable to fully embrace his understanding of a global mainstream
Figure 2.1 Cover of Les Inrockuptibles, which included a special dossier on Martels
Mainstream (2010).
THE MAGHREBI-FRENCH CONNECTION
31
culture. The antidote to this elitist, anti-mainstream environment, in Martels
opinion, comes in part from the cultural works produced by non-European
immigrants and their descendants, which he sees as one of the key drivers for
much of this globalised mainstream culture and the means by which Europe
can become once again a more dynamic society which is open to the rest of the
world (Martel 2010: 439).
There are, of course, limitations to Martels approach. He repeatedly speaks
of the complexity and local variation of a global mainstream culture but is
prone to broad and sweeping generalisations of how this mainstream culture
functions and develops. Moreover, his analysis largely sidesteps the issues of
how such mainstream culture is for the most part produced, disseminated and
consumed within a neoliberal system (of either advanced or emerging capitalist
economies) that creates massive imbalances of economic power, political inu-
ence and cultural capital. Similarly, his view of mainstream culture outside of
Europe as unproblematically and wholly embracing immigrant culture needs
nuancing to say the least. Nevertheless, Martels idea of mainstream culture
as locally grounded and globally connected, his application of the concept
of soft power which potentially makes the mainstream a site of negotiation
and contestation between centre and margin, as well as his insistence on the
importance of immigrant or diasporic culture to the development of a dynamic
cultural landscape in Europe all offer useful starting points for an analysis of
this apparent move towards the mainstream for North African migr and
Maghrebi-French lmmakers in France in the 2000s.
Bidding for the Mainstream in the 2000s
An analysis of production, distribution and exhibition trends in French cinema
of the 2000s reveals that there are, broadly speaking, three areas associated
with Maghrebi-French and North African migr lmmakers. The rst nds
these lmmakers and their lms marginalised in relation to access to funding
and distribution. The majority of Maghrebi-French or North African migr
lmmakers who work on medium- to low-budget features, where the focus
tends to be on social realist, episodic narratives, or low-budget comedies that
focus almost exclusively on the North African diaspora in France (for example
Zemmouri, Bahloul and Chibane), can be placed in this category. The second
area is the middle ground, or what has recently been termed the cinma du
milieu, the domain of medium-sized budget, auteur-led productions that have
potential to crossover to a more substantial audience (Vanderschelden 2009).
Here the emphasis is on the artisanal and the artistic vision of the auteur, in the
mould of a lmmaker such as Abdellatif Kechiche whose output in the 2000s
will be analysed in detail in Chapter 4.
The rst two categories outlined above essentially encompass similar
POST-BEUR CINEMA
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practices and positions occupied by Maghrebi-French and North African
migr lmmakers in the 1980s and 1990s. In contrast, the 2000s have seen
the emergence of a third, more mainstream space for a limited but nonetheless
signicant number of lmmakers of Maghrebi origin. This concerns a group
of lms, directors and actors (some of whom have now obtained star status)
who have enjoyed notable and continued success at the French box-ofce
throughout the 2000s; a success that far outweighs the number of lmmak-
ers involved. These include stars such as Gad Elmaleh and Jamel Debbouze
and directors such as Rachid Bouchareb and Djamel Bensalah. This move-
ment towards the mainstream has already been acknowledged by a range of
academics: Tarr (2005), Hargreaves (2011), Waldron (2007), Vanderschelden
(2005) and Austin (2003). However, such analysis has tended to be conned
to a specic actor, star or lm. A more comprehensive and systematic study
of the statistical data relating to production, distribution and exhibition in the
2000s such as that proposed by this chapter reveals that, rather than a few
isolated successes, it is indeed possible to speak of a qualitative and sustained
move to the mainstream for a group of Maghrebi-French and North African
migr lmmakers.
If we refer to the gures in Table 2.1 that relate to distribution and box-
ofce statistics, we nd that between 1999 and 2010 nine lms written,
directed by or starring lmmakers of North African origin attracted more than
one million spectators at the box-ofce including: Le Rad (Bensalah, 2001)
1 456 267; Chouchou (Allouache, 2003) 3 876 572; Indignes (Bouchareb,
2006) 3 069 888; Neuilly sa mre! (La Ferrire, 2009) 2 526 475; and Coco
(Elmaleh, 2010) 3 008 677. Moreover, four of the lms listed attracted more
than four million spectators. Evidence of this mainstream appeal is further sup-
ported by the respective box-ofce ranking of these lms in Table 2.1. In virtu-
ally every year of the 2000s a lm directed by or starring Maghrebi-French or
North African migr lmmakers is placed in the top 10 most popular French
lms of the year, with more lms arriving in the top 20 (see Table 2.1). This
consistent presence at the top of the box-ofce is even more impressive when
it is understood that, since 1999, no more than eight features produced or co-
produced in France by directors of Maghrebi origin have been released in any
given year. With the exception of La Graine et le mulet, 1 007 254 spectators in
France, which is quite clearly an auteur-led independent production and there-
fore not included in the tables below, the lms listed in Tables 2.1 and 2.2 are
overwhelmingly identied with mainstream modes of cinematic production,
distribution and marketing.
While box-ofce results can offer a crude indication of mainstream success,
such gures are, on their own, insufcient to accurately explain the level of
market penetration and sustained popularity enjoyed by any given lm. A
comparative analysis of box-ofce gures contained in Table 2.1 (for example,
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THE MAGHREBI-FRENCH CONNECTION
35
numbers of spectators and ranking) against all lms released in France during
the same year, combined with information about distribution (the number
of prints that a lm is released on; average number of spectators per print)
provide a more detailed evaluation of a given lms relative success. It also
provides an indication of the extent to which these lms are considered by
both distributors and exhibitors as mainstream product. For example, com-
paring a combination of the gures in Table 2.1 and Table 2.2 as they relate
to budget, box-ofce and average number of spectators per print, we see that
Neuilly sa mre! (2009), scripted and produced by Djamel Bensalah, attracted
over 2.5 million spectators, placing it fth in the ranking for French lms of
that year, and was distributed in extremely favourable conditions on nearly
400 prints nationwide, averaging a considerable 6 497 spectators per print.
This impressive set of scores is further enhanced by the fact that the lm was
produced for a relatively modest budget of 4.9m, making Neuilly sa mre!
protable for both its distributors and the lms producers, since the lms
relatively modest budget obviously lowers the risk of recuperating production
costs. In contrast, Hors-la-loi (Bouchareb 2010) had a budget of 20.55m,
was released on a total of 400 prints, though only attracted just over 400 000
spectators clearly a less protable release for its producers and distributors.
And yet, despite the relative commercial failure of Hors-la-loi, particularly
when compared to Boucharebs other historical epic, Indignes, the lms
production budget and distribution conditions clearly show that Hors-la-loi
was operating within the structures of mainstream production and distribu-
tion. Put differently, producers and distributors in the French industry were
condent that there was a market for this kind of lm amongst a mainstream
cinema audience in France.
This issue of exactly which distribution and production companies are
backing lms by Maghrebi-French and North African migr directors is an
important one, as the example of Bensalahs second feature, Le Rad, shows.
Following the crossover success of Le Ciel, writer/director Djamel Bensalah
obtained funding from Gaumont for a far more expensive action comedy
that attempted to emulate the successful formula established in his debut
feature: rapid-re humour grounded largely in the street culture of the cit
and a comedy narrative focusing on a young, multi-ethnic male cast forced
to adapt to unfamiliar surroundings. However, instead of a trip to the Cote
dAzur, in Le Rad, the banlieue youths are mistakenly hired as assassins to
carry out a hit on a wealthy Canadian heiress. The heiress is involved in a
televised adventure game show (Le Rad of the lms title) that provides the
perfect excuse for lavish spectacle and action sequences, as the incompetent
assassins journey from the housing projects of the neuf-trois to the jungles
and mountains of South America in pursuit of their target. Despite a hefty
17.71m budget, exotic locations and lavish production values, the far-fetched
POST-BEUR CINEMA
36
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narrative and reductive misogynistic humour of Le Rad was poorly received
by French critics who had previously embraced Le Ciel. Nevertheless, the
lm still managed to attract 1 456 267 spectators in France, higher than the
audiences for Le Ciel. However, this apparent success must be seen in relation
to the weight that was placed behind the lm through access to Gaumonts
mainstream distribution channels that saw the lm released on 619 prints in
cinemas across France, compared to 128 for Le Ciel. Thus while the average
number of spectators for Le Ciel is far higher (9 570 compared to 2 353 for Le
Rad), overall audience gures for the latter are higher, largely because of the
distribution conditions. Further analysis of the data for Le Rads box-ofce
performance seems to support this observation. After the second week inter-
est was already waning in the lm, an indication that success at the box-ofce
had been greatly assisted by the distribution and marketing mechanisms in
place behind the Le Rad, rather than a growth of audience numbers as the
result of favourable reviews or audience recommendations. Moreover, if we
combine gures for average number of spectators per print with the overall
production budgets for both lms, Le Ciel appears on balance to be the more
commercially successful lm.
Figures for production budgets of the lms listed in Table 2.2 offer a further
justication for dening certain Maghrebi-French and North African migr
authored lms from the 2000s as mainstream features. With the exception of
Le Ciel all of the lms listed are above the median budget, in some cases four
or ve times above thus placing them in the top 15 to 20 per cent of French
production in terms of their funding, according to annual data on production
published online from the Centre National de la Cinmatographie (CNC).
Even if a relatively small group of lmmakers re-appears across this list
(Bensalah, Bouchareb, Debbouze, Naceri, Elmaleh) such a sustained presence
at the centre of the industry was unheard of for Maghrebi-French lmmak-
ers in the 1980s and 1990s, conrming a qualitative (if selective) movement
towards mainstream French production. This is not to say, however, that such
crossover success in the 2000s is solely due to elevated production budgets and
improved channels for distribution as important as these elements undoubt-
edly are.
A closer inspection of the genres of the lms listed in Table 2.2 reveals that
the majority are either comedies or a comedy hybrid, for example Taxi 2 and
Le Rad are action comedies, while Mauvaise foi (Zem, 2006) is a romantic
comedy. A number of factors explain this bias towards comedy, not least the
overall popularity of the genre in France. In this respect, the preference for
comedy serves as a further indication that these Maghrebi-French and North
African migr lmmakers are now located, and choosing to locate them-
selves, within mainstream production trends of French cinema. There is also,
of course, the fact that comedies, in comparison to other genres such as the
THE MAGHREBI-FRENCH CONNECTION
37
heritage lm or action movie, are relatively cheap to produce. Often the biggest
expense for a comedy will come in the fees paid to established stars appearing
in these lms. Thus, Le Ciel capitalises on Jamel Debbouzes existing celebrity
status and young fan base outside of cinema (as a comic and TV/radio pre-
senter) to ensure his collaboration in a low-budget comedy lm, prior to his
rise in the 2000s to a position of considerable inuence in French lm industry.
Finally, this preponderance of comedy lms reects the fact that many of the
biggest Maghrebi-French stars of the 2000s, such as Jamel Debbouze, Gad
Elmaleh and Danny Boon (like Sman before them in the 1980s) began their
careers as stand-up comics. Indeed, in the case of Boon and Debbouze, these
Maghrebi-French stars have adapted characters and successful stage acts from
their stand-up comedy shows into their lms, as was the case for Bienvenue
chez les Chtis, Chouchou and Coco.
That said, we must also acknowledge that comedy is not unique to these
more mainstream lmmakers of Maghrebi origin and has been employed by
a variety of directors across French cinema since at least the mid-1980s as a
means of more subversive social commentary around issues of ethnicity and
cultural difference. Indeed some of the most successful French comedies of
the 1980s and 1990s directed by majority ethnic French directors Les Keufs
(Balasko, 1987); Romuald et Juliette (Serreau, 1989); Blac mic mac (Gilou,
1986) have explored similar issues of immigration, integration, multicultur-
alism and difference, albeit from a quite different perspective (Tarr 1997: 67,
72). For these directors, comedy may be the preferred vehicle for discussing
these potentially sensitive issues since, for the most part, comic lms remain
ideologically ambivalent as part of a genre that is mimetic of social reality
and yet distanced from it (Vincendeau 2001a: 24). French comedies of the
1990s and 2000s are thus able to address social issues affecting Frances ethnic
minorities that rarely appear elsewhere in mainstream genre cinema. At its
best, comedy becomes a means for challenging and subverting the societal
norm. At its worst, it falls back on crude and problematic stereotypes; and
Maghrebi-French or North African migr lmmakers are not necessarily
immune to such crude stereotyping, as the later detailed analysis of Neuilly sa
mre! will demonstrate.
Returning to Table 2.2, we can also see that genre plays a further role in deter-
mining funding (the size of budgets) in the sense that certain genres will almost
require larger budgets due to the kind of stories they are telling and the type of
spectacle they aim to provide for audiences. In both Indigines and Hors-la-loi
the epic nature of the transnational historical narratives that these lms bring
to the screen (the Allied liberation of southern Europe from Nazi occupation;
the French massacre of Algerians in Stif) obviously requires a considerable
amount of capital. This is not to say that lms dealing with history cannot
be made on smaller budgets see for example Les Sacris (Touita, 1982),
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Inchallah dimanche (Benguigui, 2001); Vivre au paradis (Guerdjou, 1999) and
more recently Les Chants de Mandarin (Ameur-Zameche, 2012). However,
in general, such lms are forced to focus on more localised, individual narra-
tives (the arrival of an immigrant family in a provincial French town; life in the
bidonville of Nanterre; the activities of a small band of outlaws in eighteenth-
century France) in order to engage with their historical subject matter.
The overwhelming majority of the lms listed in Tables 2.1 and 2.2 have
thus ensured access to mainstream audiences by virtue of conventional pro-
duction and distribution practices. Virtually all are taken to market by main-
stream distributors such as Path, Gaumont, ARP, UGC and Studiocanal, who
can secure favourable conditions for the release of their lms. In this context
another telling statistic from Tables 2.1 and 2.2 relates to the number of prints
on which these lms are released. With the exception of Le Ciel, all of the lms
listed have beneted from distribution on more than 200 prints; a privileged
position enjoyed by only 25 per cent of the 500 to 580 lms distributed in
France each year according to data provided by the CNC (2012). The very fact
that this group of Maghrebi-French and North African migr lms can secure
such favourable conditions for distribution suggests two things. Firstly, that
exhibitors and distributors in France now believe there is a mainstream market
for certain lms starring and directed by Maghrebi-French and North African
migr lmmakers a position that was largely unthinkable in the 1980s and
even 1990s. Secondly, it conrms that a select group of Maghrebi-French and
North African migr lmmakers have themselves established a place within
the mainstream, not only as directors, but also as producers and stars. It is to
the rise of the Maghrebi-French star in the 2000s that we shall now turn our
attention.
From the Cit to the Croisette: The Fabulous Destiny of Maghrebi-
French and North African migr Stars in the 2000s
Although French cinema has been slow to acknowledge the ethnic diversity
of the [French] population (Vincendeau 2000: 41), as Guy Austin correctly
asserts: this is not to say that ethnicity is not at stake in the images of French
lm stars (Austin 2003: 92). As Dyer argues, to represent people is to repre-
sent bodies (Dyer 1997: 14). Screen actors and lm stars, due to the devotion
and fascination that they arouse amongst audiences, connect and are more
directly associated with the representations (or indeed mis-representations)
of ethnicity that they embody than is the case for the ethnic-minority direc-
tor behind the camera. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a select group of
Maghrebi-French and North African migr screen actors struggled to estab-
lish a presence on French screens. A common complaint from these actors, as
outlined by Abdellatif Kechiche in an interview from 2007, was of a dearth of
THE MAGHREBI-FRENCH CONNECTION
39
roles beyond the stereotype of immigrant, delinquent or criminalised Other
(Lalanne et Fevret 2007). And yet, even during this period, French cinema
already had its rst beur star in the form of Isabel Adjani, the French-born
daughter of an Algerian-immigrant father and German-immigrant mother.
Attracting box-ofce success and critical acclaim, including Csar awards and
an Oscar nomination, Adjani was the French star of the 1980s, with a star
image characterised by dark hair but pale porcelain skin and pale blue eyes
(Austin 2003: 97100). Despite (belated) public declarations of her Algerian
origins, prompted by a hysterical negotiation of her star image in the late
1980s, as well as limited attempts to link her on-screen star image to her eth-
nicity, such as Monsieur Ibrahim et les eurs du Coran (Dupeyronm, 2003),
Adjanis star image has been recuperated by French audiences and critics
since the 1990s in a way that de-emphasises ethnicity, or rather replaces a
marked (Arab) ethnicity with a star ethnicity of the unmarked kind: visible
whiteness, stellar luminescence (Austin 2003: 1005).
If Adjani was the rst beur lm star, she is also notable as the rst and still
the only (at the time of writing) female star of Maghrebi immigrant origin in
France.
2
The situation of male actors of North African origin is, however, quite
different. A list of the twenty most commercially successful actors of the 2000s
compiled by CBO Box-Ofce
3
and based on the cumulative number of spec-
tators for all the lms that they have appeared in over the decade includes
no less that ve male actors of Maghrebi-origin: Kad Merad (born Kaddour
Merad, in Sidi Bel Abbs, Algeria); Danny Boon (born Daniel Hamidou to
a father of Kabyle origin and a French mother); Samy Naceri (born in Paris
to an Algerian father and French mother); Zinedine Soualem (French of
Algerian origin); and Gad Elmaleh (a Jewish Moroccan migr), with Jamel
Debbouze and Roschdy Zem a little further down the list at numbers 25 and
27 respectively.
Given that they only measure box-ofce success, the CBO listings are, on
their own, insufcient to indicate star status in the more traditional sense of
the persona or myth developed by a given screen actor that is composed of an
amalgam of their screen image and their private identities, which the audience
recognises and expects from lm to lm, and which in turn determines the
parts they play (Vincendeau 2000: 7). In this respect, we might say that the
only actors who truly approach consideration as screen stars are Debbouze,
Naceri, Elmaleh and possibly Zem. Nevertheless, as the notion of stardom in
French culture has become more ambiguous, applied across a range of popular
cultural forms and increasingly confused with celebrity in recent years (Austin
2003: 2; Vanderschelden 2005: 62), the statistics offered by the CBO listings
provide a useful measure of popular (box-ofce) or mainstream appeal of
these screen actors. Two of the names included on the list (Boon and Soualem)
appear largely due to the phenomenal success of one lm (Bienvenue chez les
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Chtis). However, the other actors who feature on the list have arguably earned
their place through a more diverse body of work. Kad Merad co-starred in
both Les Chtis and the Oscar-nominated feel-good comedy Les Choristes
(Barratier, 2004) as well as starring more recently alongside Daniel Auteuil
in the remake of Pagnols La lle du puisatier (Auteil, 2011). The CBO rank-
ings are certainly not exhaustive in terms of actors of Maghrebi origin who
have imposed themselves on French screens. However, the signicance of this
transformation in the 2000s should not be underestimated, a point that was
reinforced by Roschdy Zem in an interview to mark his acceptance of a special
achievement award at the Marrakech lm festival in December 2011:
You know, when we [actors of Maghrebi origin] started out, we had no
point of reference in French cinema. Today lms are produced around
actors such as Jamel, Gad and many others [. . .] For cinema to evolve,
attitudes must evolve too. France, as it exists today, coloured, cosmopoli-
tan, cannot help but be presented in French lms. (Zem in Lahrach 2011)
The two actors singled out by Zem in the above interview Jamel (Debbouze)
and Gad (Elmaleh) are two of the biggest screen stars of Maghrebi-origin (or
indeed any origin) working in French cinema today. Both have made a con-
siderable impact in terms of crossing over to the mainstream, as well as using
their celebrity status and capital value as stars to extend their inuence into the
realms of production and direction.
Although an unlikely screen star given his diminutive stature, darker skin
and physical disability (in 1990 he lost the use of his right arm after being
struck by a high-speed train that was passing through a station), Debbouze
had risen to become arguably the most inuential Maghrebi-French star by the
mid-2000s. Born in 1975 to Moroccan immigrant parents living in a modest
housing estate in the Parisian banlieue, Debbouze, a natural performer, starred
in various minor roles in lm and theatre from the early 1990s. Eventually,
though, he came to prominence as much as a result of his stand-up comedy
shows and work as a TV presenter. Following a highly successful career in
radio, television and stand-up, including working on Canal Plus as part of
the inuential comedy series Nulle part ailleurs, Debbouzes cinematic break-
through came with his lead role in Le Ciel. Debbouzes performance in the
lm accentuates the traits that had already made him popular with audiences
on the small screen and stand-up circuit: a playful, inventive use of language,
rapid-re delivery and irreverent humour that is inspired by (and makes liberal
reference to) his background and identity as a Maghrebi-French youth from
the banlieue.
The references that shape Debbouzes performance style and wider star
persona are at once global and local, combining references to American
THE MAGHREBI-FRENCH CONNECTION
41
cinema and TV with football and rap as well as contemporary French politics
as they relate to immigration, poverty, racism, violence, and social exclusion
(Vanderschelden 2005: 64). Above all, though, it is Debbouzes quick wit and
his ability to improvise, combined with his use of French street-slang, Arabic
and English that suggests a humorous (mis-)use of language (approximations,
surprising collocations, neologisms), and creative exploration of sociolin-
guistic traits such as accent and inected language, identiable elocution and
dialect (Tellier 1998 cited in Vandershelden 2005: 65). All of these aspects
were brought rmly and deliberately to the fore in Jamels performance as
Youssef in Le Ciel. While such elements continue to inform Debbouzes star
image, they have since been augmented by the variety of roles (both leading
and supporting roles) that he has subsequently played in the 2000s. The
perception of both his public and on-screen persona has, furthermore, been
rened by his now obvious celebrity his status as one of Frances most
famous entertainers and by his creative and commercial inuence as both a
lm star, producer and most recently a director, as well as continuing to work
in TV and stand-up.
Following on from the success of Le Ciel, Debbouzes capital value at the
box-ofce increased as a result of his show-stealing performance as Numrobis
in Astrix & Oblix: Mission Cloptre (Chabat, 2002) a secondary role
written especially for him by the lms director and one of his former collabo-
rators from his days at Canal Plus, Alain Chabat. The lm attracted over 14
million spectators in France, reputedly making Debbouze the best-paid actor
in 2002 due to the combination of his fee for the movie and a cannily negoti-
ated points deal on the overall gross (Vanderschelden 2005: 47). This success
coincided with his nomination for a best supporting actor Csar for his role as
Lucien, the put-upon greengrocers assistant in Amlie (Jeunet, 2001), another
massive box-ofce success, leading to a starring role in Angel-A (Besson, 2005).
While both of these lms essentially offered Debbouze the opportunity to play
a role that was less explicitly socio-ethnically marked than that of Le Ciel, the
audiences knowledge of Debbouzes background as a Maghrebi-French youth
from the banlieue, means that, to a certain extent, such performances remain
potentially marked by Debbouzes own social and ethnic origins.
Indeed, Debbouzes next series of collaborations as both actor and producer
was to prove just how central his Maghrebi origins were to be to his star
image. In 2006 he starred in and co-produced Indignes, Rachid Boucharebs
Second World War epic about the role played by African soldiers in liberating
Europe from Nazi Germany. As Hargreaves notes, Debbouzes celebrity con-
nections, popularity and inuence were instrumental in ensuring that the lm
(which at that point represented the largest budget for any lm directed by
and starring Maghrebi-French actors) was brought to the screen (Hargreaves
2007: 205 6). Moreover, in his dealings with politicians in Morocco, Algeria
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and France (including photo opportunities with the then conservative presi-
dent, Jacques Chirac), Debbouze, along with the director Rachid Bouchareb,
personally ensured that the lms political message about the inequality in war
pensions for colonial veterans became a prominent political issue in France.
Though the public gure of Debbouze dominated much of the media atten-
tion around Indignes, the lms signicance in terms of announcing the pres-
ence of not one but four Maghebi-French stars should not be underestimated.
Alongside Debbouze, the lm showcased the considerable talents of Roschdy
Zem, Samy Naceri and Sami Bouajila. Promotional material for the lm pre-
sented an image in which the four band of brothers were staring out towards
the audience effectively announcing the lm as a star vehicle for the four
actors (see Figure 2.2). Debbouze, Zem, Naceri and Bouajila were collectively
awarded the Palme dOr at Cannes in 2006 for best actor while in interviews,
described as nos stars beurs, they offered a sense that the Maghrebi-French
stars time had come (Pliskin 2006).
4
Of equal signicance was the diversity of acting styles and range of star
personas showcased by the four stars in Indignes. Firstly, Samy Naceri played
Yassir, a Berber conscript and small-time crook, who initially uses the chaos
of war to plunder booty from all sides. Following the death of his brother,
however, Yassir is transformed from petty thief to war hero as he sacrices his
own life in order to defend the French inhabitants of an Alsatian village from
the retreating German troops. Though crafting a less charismatic persona than
in his earlier career-dening role as charming taxi driver Daniel in the Taxi
series, Naceri nonetheless combines in his performance as Yassir the everyday,
Figure 2.2 Nos stars beurs: promotional poster for Indignes (Bouchareb, 2006).
THE MAGHREBI-FRENCH CONNECTION
43
unrened (blokish) traits of Daniel with a physical presence that hints at a
potential menace beneath the smile. His performance is thus indicative of a star
type balanced between lawlessness and order that positioned him as a poten-
tial successor to Belmondo (Austin 2003: 136). This potential was, however
to remain unrealised in the late 2000s, as Naceri became embroiled in a series
of high-prole court appearances and two short spells in prison resulting from
drug and alcohol abuse, violent assault, road-rage and charges of racially
abusing police ofcers in a series of incidents between 2003 and 2005. Finally
in 2007 (one year after sharing the Palme dOr for best actor at Cannes with
his co-stars from Indignes), Naceri was sentenced to nine months in prison for
stabbing a security guard in Aix-en-Provence.
Co-starring alongside Naceri in Indignes, Roschdy Zem plays Messaoud,
an Algerian conscript who becomes romantically involved with a French
woman he meets in one of the towns liberated by the allies a relationship that
is ultimately prohibited by the military authorities. Zem, who arguably pos-
sesses an even more imposing physical presence on screen than Naceri, essen-
tially acts as a foil to Yassir/Naceri in the lm. Whereas the latter is a selsh,
petty thief, who eventually sacrices himself for others, Messaoud is shown
to be a character of integrity, if a little nave. His noble belief in the cause for
which he is ghting and essential decency are ultimately betrayed by the French
military authorities, who intercept the letters he and his French lover send one
another. The character played by Zem in Indignes thus draws on the actors
conventional decency, his physical presence and (sexual) attractiveness that
has seen him enjoy one of the longest and most consistently successful careers
of any Maghrebi-French actor. Since coming to the attention of French audi-
ences in a supporting role in Jembrasse pas (Tchin, 1991), Zem has suc-
cessfully moved between roles in low-budget social dramas (LAutre ct de la
mer [Cabrera, 1997], Sauve-moi [Vincent, 2000], Vivre au paradis [Guerdjou,
1999]), popular genre lms (Le Plus beau mtier du monde [Lauzier, 1996],
Chouchou [Allouache, 2003], 36 Quai dOrfvres [Marchal, 2004]) and epic
blockbusters (Indignes, Hors-la-loi). Like a number of these other Maghrebi-
French stars who have come to prominence in the 2000s, Zem has also used
his success as an actor to move into directing, rst with the romantic comedy
Mauvaise foi and most recently Omar ma tu (2011), the dramatisation of a
miscarriage of justice from the 1990s in which a Moroccan immigrant working
as a gardener was falsely accused of the murder of a wealthy French woman on
the on the Cte dAzur.
The third of the four Maghrebi-French leads in Indignes, Sami Bouajila
(French of Tunisian origin), is arguably the least commercially oriented and
thus the least likely to be deemed a star. Nonetheless his inclusion in this lm
brings further artistic weight to Indignes in the sense that Bouajila has built
a highly successfully career for himself as a serious actor working mostly but
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not exclusively in the auteur-led independent sector of French cinema. Since his
rst appearance on French screens in 1991, Bouajila has attracted considerable
critical success, embodying a range of characters, some of whom make explicit
reference to his Maghrebi origins, while others offer little or no attempt to
situate either actor or protagonist in relation to his Tunisian immigrant herit-
age. The roles interpreted by Bouajila in lms such as Drle de Flix (Ducastel
and Martineau, 2000), La Faute Voltaire (Kechiche, 2001), Embrassez qui
vous voudrez (Blanc, 2002), Vivre me tue (Sinapi, 2003), and Les tmoins
(Tchin, 2007) are also notable for the breadth of characters interpreted in
relation to class, familial ties, ethnicity and sexual difference. Throughout his
career Bouajila has therefore embodied a range of subject positions that when
coupled with an ambiguous ethnic background or heritage and tied to issues of
kinship allow the character and the star to be read as a site where ethnicity,
sexuality, belonging and citizenship can be reimagined (Pratt and Provencher
2011: 194208). In the case of Indignes, Bouajilas role as the principled
(unofcial) leader of the North African troops, Abdelkader, makes him argu-
ably a more emotionally distant character than in other lms. Nonetheless it
also allows him function in the narrative as the protagonist who is able to lead
the other characters towards a different understanding of brotherhood and
belonging in the context of both Algerian and French national identity.
Working as part of this ensemble of Maghrebi-French actors, Debbouzes
performance in Indignes conrms his existing star type at the same time
as it opens new avenues to his on-screen persona. Given the nature of the
lm (a serious, historical epic set in World War II), the playful improvisa-
tion, tchatche (gift of the gab) and scattergun references to contemporary
American, French and North African popular culture are (understandably)
absent from Debbouzes performance and his verbal delivery is far more
restrained. However, there are also moments when the contemporary persona
of Debbouze clearly imposes itself over the character of Sad; most notably in
the sequence where, following the liberation of a French town in Provence,
Sad/Debbouze enters into a conversation with a young female local, proudly
declaring when I liberate a country it becomes my country. The potential
effect of this claim is to shift the association away from Sad (the character)
and towards Debbouze, transforming the utterance into an impassioned
plea for the rightful place of the French-born descendants of North African
immigrants in contemporary France.
Elsewhere the demands of the genre (a war lm) and the emphasis on
action means that Debbouzes physical limitations as an actor that arise
from his disability are highlighted against the physicality of Zem or Naceri
and the leadership of Bouajila. Thus Debbouzes character is an assistant to
the pied noir Sergeant Martinez (Bernard Blancan): fetching food and drink,
holding the mirror as his superior shaves, standing beside his commanding
THE MAGHREBI-FRENCH CONNECTION
45
ofcer in battle.

In a sense, this leads us back to the perceived vulnerability of
Debbouzes on-screen persona that, it is claimed, forms part of his attraction
to female spectators (Vandershelden 2005: 68). Moreover, as the put-upon
assistant, there are shades of his subservient performance as Lucien in Amlie.
However, there are also moments in Indignes that allow for a tougher side
to emerge in Debbouzes character, in particular the sequence where Sad is
ridiculed by Messaoud for the photo he keeps of his mother. To the surprise of
all the other soldiers present, Sad responds to this goading by drawing a knife
and holding it to the throat of (the much larger) Messaoud, who is forced to
capitulate. This more aggressive and ruthless side to the performance offered
by Debbouze in Indignes would be further exploited in his next collaboration
with Bouchareb, Hors-la-loi, where he plays an underworld gangster in Paris
during the Algerian war.
Like Debbouze, Gad Elmaleh is an actor-turned-director whose rise to
stardom during the 2000s has been built on his existing success as a stand-up
comedian. Unlike the other actors of Maghrebi origin considered here thus far,
Elmaleh is different in that he is a Moroccan Jew and that he emigrated rst
to North America (Qubec) at the age of sixteen, before moving to France in
1991 at the age of twenty-one, where he has been based ever since. Like his
contemporaries Jamel Debbouze and Danny Boon (and like Sman before him
in the 1980s and 1990s), Elmaleh made a name for himself as a stand-up comic
before gravitating towards screen acting. His rst leading role came in Algerian
director Merzak Allouaches low-budget, socially aware comedy Salut Cousin!
(1996). In the lm Elmaleh plays Alilou, a nave Algerian who initially jour-
neys to Paris to deliver a consignment of designer clothes to a merchant in
Barbs but ends up staying with his Maghrebi-French cousin, Mok, and nds
romance with a West African immigrant who lives alongside his cousin in the
18th arrondissement. The lm offers a nuanced portrayal of the North African
diasporic community in Paris, from the recently arrived Algerian immigrant
to the former Algerian policemen now eking out a living selling counterfeit
watches in Barbs; as well as a Jewish pied noir, who speaks nostalgically of life
in Algeria prior to Independence. Allouache evokes both the sense of a settled
diasporic community that has a place in Paris and the proximity of Algeria to
France through the arrival of new members of this Algerian diaspora. Yet he
also suggests that the presence of the second generation is, in many ways, just
as precarious as that of the newly arrived immigrant. At the end of the lm it
is Mok who is deported to Algeria for his role in an arson attack on a Parisian
nightclub, while Alilou remains as an undocumented immigrant, taking his
chances in Paris with his new love.
5
Like Debbouze, Elmaleh has also used his celebrity status and capital value
as an established star to bring favoured projects to the screen in the 2000s. In
so doing, Elmaleh has arguably become more important to the lms he has
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starred in than many of the directors he has worked alongside. In this respect
Merzak Allouache (one of the most inuential gures of Algerian cinema) was
given the opportunity to direct the comedy Chouchou (2003), which attracted
3 million spectators in France, as a thank you from Elmaleh for the director
giving him his rst leading screen role in the late 1990s with Salut Cousin! Like
the earlier lm, Chouchou also tells the story of a young clandestine Maghrebi-
immigrant recently arrived in Paris (the eponymous Chouchou) but this time
he is a gay transvestite who performs in a Parisian club. The lms central pro-
tagonist is, moreover, based on a stand-up character created by Elmaleh and
thus aligns itself more towards the popular crossover success of camp comedies
such as Pdale douce (Aghion, 1996) or La Cage aux folles (Molinaro, 1978)
than the politically aware Drle de Flix or the more sombre Miss Mona
in which the Algerian immigrants homosexuality is used as a metaphor for
his own exclusion.
6
The subsequent moves made by Allouache and Elmaleh
respectively seem to conrm the importance of the star in this move to the
mainstream for lmmakers from the North African diaspora. Elmaleh went
on to direct Coco, a 15m production released on nearly 900 prints in France
that attracted over 3 million spectators and further underlined his mainstream
credentials. Allouache followed Chouchou with Bab-el-web (2005), a low-
budget romantic comedy (including a cameo from Elmaleh) based in Algiers
that attempts to rehabilitate the image of the working-class district where the
director grew up, which despite being distributed on a respectable 100 prints,
attracted a meager 50 087 spectators. Allouache then abandoned the light
comic tone of Chouchou for Harragas (2009), a sombre realist drama about
African immigrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean and arrive illegally
in Europe. Unsurprisingly, given its tough subject matter and niche audience
appeal, Harragas attracted little more than 10 000 spectators in France.
Although Elmalehs screen debut in Salut Cousin! locates him rmly within
the North African community, the role is, in some respects, a false ethnic/
national marker in the sense that unlike the character he plays in the lm he
is neither Algerian nor a Muslim. Similarly in Chouchou he again plays an
Algerian immigrant. Whilst we could counter this position as a rather reduc-
tive line of argument (Elmaleh is not an Algerian immigrant but nor is he a
homosexual or a transvestite like the character he plays in Chouchou), the
extent to which Maghrebi-French stars remain in what Austin refers to as eth-
nically marked (Austin 2003: 136) roles or the degree to which they obtain
what Hargreaves describes as trans-ethnic plasticity (Hargreaves 2002, cited
in Austin 2003: 136) is a signicant one in relation to their acceptance by
mainstream audiences. As Dyer reminds us, audiences can choose to endorse
or reject star performances at the box-ofce if they feel that the star type or
performance strays too far from the existing star image (Dyer 1998: 98).
Potentially, this has more loaded implications for the perceived acceptance or
THE MAGHREBI-FRENCH CONNECTION
47
rejection of actors of Maghrebi origin by both mainstream audiences and pro-
ducers through casting for specic roles. Unlike Debbouze, whose ethnic and
socio-economic origins have remained a clear part of his star persona, Elmaleh
has arguably been able to negotiate a more uid relationship between star type
and his ethnic, national and religious difference than that any other screen
actor of Maghrebi origin. Thus screen performances that have been endorsed
by French audiences in terms of commercial success, as well as gaining critical
acclaim, have seen Elmaleh occupy a variety of roles in relation to his status as
migr/North African/Moroccan (Salut cousin!, Chouchou) as well as others
that have accented his Jewishness La Vrit si je mens! 2 (Gilou, 2001), La
Rae (Bosch, 2010), Coco. Yet this has not restricted Elmalehs ability to take
on a number of high prole roles most obviously La Doublure (Veber, 2006)
and Hors-de-prix (Salvadori, 2006) in which characterisation transcends,
rather than negating or occluding, his ethnicity.
Why might this be the case? We could argue that his physical appear-
ance (fairer skin, clear blue eyes) endows Elmaleh with trans-ethnic plas-
ticity, which allows him to play less ethnically coded roles in the manner
that Hargreaves has suggested was possible for Naceri in Taxi, but not for
Debbouze (Hargreaves 2002, cited in Austin 2003: 136). We might also con-
sider that his own ethnically and religiously marked performances as a North
African migr are complicated in terms of both his Moroccan Jewish roots
and his time spent studying in Canada before arriving in France at the age of
twenty-one. As well as exposing him to a form of multiculturalism quite dif-
ferent to that found in France, this time spent in Canada meant that his arrival
in France was not the typical route of migration from Maghreb to France,
burdened with the symbolic colonial baggage of a journey from ex-colony to
former Mtropole (mainland France). Finally, the fact that his parents were
wealthy enough to send him to nish his education in Canada immediately
distances him in socio-economic terms from the majority of other Maghrebi-
French stars (in particular Debbouze), whose star persona is intimately linked
not only to their origins as the French descendants of North African immi-
grants, but also as residents of the working-class French urban periphery. In
all these respects, Elmaleh is granted a greater scope for social mobility than
a young actor emerging from the cit, such as Jamel Debbouze, and is not so
obviously hindered by the same barriers (both real and imagined) that typically
limit the horizons of many Maghrebi-French citizens.
Crossing Over or Selling Out? The Case of Djamel Bensalah
The above issues concering casting, characterisation and ethnic markers in
relation to stars such as Elmaleh and Debbouze also point to the broader
question of the potential price of incorporation (in terms of artistic freedom,
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political expression and the ability to exert control over the identity and rep-
resentation of character/actor/star) for Maghrebi-French and North African
migr lmmakers in the 2000s. The margins can be reclaimed as a space of
resistance and opposition for minority or excluded groups, as well as a space
of artistic creativity, authenticity and possibility, as bell hooks suggests in her
well-known essay Choosing the Margin as the Space of Radical Openness
(hooks 1990). However, to reside in the mainstream is often negatively coded
as occupying a space of dubious complicity in artistic and ideological terms,
or as a streamlining of culture, or a subordination of cultural specicity to one
hegemonic cultural strand (i.e. white and commercial) (Korte and Sternberg
2004: 8). This interpretation leads us to the idea of the mainstream as part of
an immutable, xed, hegemonic centre as well as the notion that moving to
that centre necessarily means selling out, politically and artistically, in order to
gain access to the cultural property and audiences controlled by the dominant
societal norm. In the context of Maghrebi-French and North African migr
lmmaking, analysis of individual lms such as the immigrant and queer
politics of Chouchou (Waldron 2007; Rees-Roberts 2008) seems to endorse
the idea that by crossing over to the mainstream these lms and their creators
must, necessarily, re-negotiate a position that retreats from any militant or
political engagement with socio-political realities in order to win the consen-
sus of its popular audience. Viewed more positively, as Korte and Sternberg
have suggested in their study of contemporary Black British and British Asian
cinema, bidding for the mainstream does not inevitably imply submitting to
or adapting to hegemony. Rather it suggests actively participating and chang-
ing a predominant cultural stream whose structures already are in the process
of redenition and which has already set in motion its own decentralization
(Korte and Stornberg 2004: 9). In order to explore both sides of this argument,
let us now turn in the nal part of this chapter to the lms of Maghrebi-French
screenwriter, director and producer Djamel Bensalah.
While a select group of directors of Maghrebi origin may have enjoyed
greater box-ofce success in France with individual lms in the 2000s,
7
argu-
ably the most consistently successful director in terms of audience popularity
is Djamel Bensalah. Following the largely unexpected success of his debut
feature Le Ciel (1 224 963 spectators), Bensalah has enjoyed box-ofce success
in France with nearly all of his subsequent features: Le Rad (1 456 267 spec-
tators); Il tait une fois dans loued (Bensalah, 2005) (893 437 spectators);
Neuilly sa mre! (directed by La Ferrire, produced and written by Bensalah,
2009) (2 527 422 spectators); and, most recently, Beur sur la ville (Bensalah,
2011) (412 351 spectators). Even the comparative failure of his fourth feature
Big City (Bensalah, 2007), a comedy/adventure/western with a cast of chil-
dren, still managed to attract 313 687 spectators far beyond the audiences
achieved by most other Maghrebi-French or North African migr directors
THE MAGHREBI-FRENCH CONNECTION
49
of the 2000s and, according to the data on average audience attendances pro-
vided by the CNC (2012), more than most French feature lms released during
that decade.
Precisely because of this considerable and consistent success throughout the
2000s, Bensalah has operated and received the support of mainstream produc-
tion and distribution networks, working most frequently with French majors
Gaumont and UGC. Moreover, occupying this mainstream position has not
led Bensalah to avoid narratives that reect his origins as the French-born
descendant of Algerian immigrant parents. With the exception of Big City, all
of Bensalahs lms draw directly on his own experiences as a Maghrebi-French
youth from the suburbs of St Denis, engaging with questions of integration,
racism and cultural identity as they pertain to multicultural banlieue youth.
And yet Bensalahs lms receive little if any scholarly or critical attention in
France or the Anglo-American academy. There is, for example, no entry on
Bensalah in the second edition of the otherwise exhaustive Dictionnaire du
cinma populaire franais des origines nos jours (Bossno and Dehee 2009).
Nor, with only a few exceptions, have any scholarly articles (in English or
French) been produced that are devoted to his work.
8
Indeed, when Bensalahs
lms are directly referred to in the context of a broader analysis of Maghrebi-
French lmmaking, the response is largely negative (see, for example, Tarr
2005: 1701).
Like many other Maghrebi-French and North African migr directors
(Chibane, Bahloul, Allouache, Zemmouri, Zem), Bensalah employs comedy to
explore the socio-political realities facing the North African diaspora in France
in a non-threatening way that aspires to connect with a crossover (ethnic-
majority) French audience. What marks Bensalah out as somewhat different
from his Maghrebi-French contemporaries, however, is the extent to which,
from the very start of his career, he has made a conscious attempt to bid directly
for a mainstream audience. Indeed we could go as far as to identify a formula
within Bensalahs lmmaking that has projected him towards this commercial
success in France. Beyond his obvious investment in genre cinema (comedy,
and in the case of Le Rad, action comedy) is the fact that Bensalahs comic
protagonists from Le Ciel, Le Rad and Il tait une fois dans loued through to
his most recent successes as co-writer on Neuilly sa mre! and writer/ director
of Beur sur la ville are all drawn from a quite specic socio-cultural milieu (the
world of male banlieue youth). Secondly, while his protagonists may originate
from the banlieue, the action in Bensalahs lms is almost never set in the
deprived urban periphery itself. Instead, he generates much of the humour
in his lms from a sh-out-of-water scenario that places these banlieusard
characters in environments that are unfamiliar geographically and in a socio-
cultural context: the afuent beach resort of Biarritz; the South American
jungle or slopes of the Dolomites; or a white banlieue youth returning to the
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bled in Algeria. Indeed, it is telling that the one perceived failure in box-ofce
terms was Big City, a lm which drew away from this tried and tested formula
a formula to which he returned with his subsequent project, Neuilly sa mre!
The lm, which tells the story of a young Maghrebi-French schoolboy who
swaps his cit in the provinces for the exclusive and super-rich Parisian suburb
of Neuilly-sur-Mer, derives its humour from questions of class distinction as a
much as it does from comedic tension that might arise due to ethnic difference.
The formula applied by Bensalah is clearly popular with French audiences
after the failure of Big City, the more familiar territory of Neuilly sa mre!
attracted over 2.5 million spectators in 2009. However, it is not without its
risks, and for two main reasons. Firstly, by removing his youthful protagonists
from the banlieue there is the potential to isolate them from any grounding
in a relevant socio-political context, thus reducing the characters to barely
believable caricatures (Tarr 2005: 171). Secondly, as a consequence of this
displacement and the fact that the comedy in his lms is largely derived from
mainstream perceptions of the banlieusard (in terms of attitudes, mannerism
and, crucially, in a lm such as Le Ciel, language), Bensalah runs the associated
risk of entrenching his Maghrebi-French and banlieusard protagonists in the
very stereotypes that he aims to transcend.
Born in the working-class Parisian suburb of St Denis in 1976 to Algerian
immigrant parents, Bensalah began his career as an actor with appearances in
TV advertisements and minor roles in the French TV series Navarro and the
lm Leau froide (Assayas, 1994). In 1996 he directed his rst short lm Y a
du foutage de gueule dans lair, working with friends Jamel Debbouze (already
well known for his work as a stand-up comedian and his TV appearances),
Julien Courbey and Stphane Soo Mongo. The sixteen-minute comedy, with
its focus on the adventures of a group of school friends in St Denis, established
the context for Bensalahs debut feature, Le Ciel, les oiseaux et . . . ta mre!
Le Ciel was an unexpected crossover success at the box-ofce, attracting
over 1.1 million spectators. To put this success into perspective, this was only
the second ever feature directed by a lmmaker of Maghrebi origin, after
Smans Les Deux papas et la maman (co-directed with De-Caunes, 1996) to
attract more than one million spectators in France since the rst Beur Cinema
features began to appear in French cinemas in the early-1980s. Moreover, in
Jamel Debbouze, French cinema had discovered a Maghrebi-French comic star
with the potential to surpass the popular success of Sman in the 1980s and
1990s. In a sense, Le Ciel is the lm that announces the breakthrough into
the French mainstream that then occurred for Maghrebi-French and North
African migr lmmakers in the 2000s. Not only did it launch the career of
Bensalah and establish Jamel Debbouze as a Maghrebi-French comedy screen
actor with true crossover potential, but it also proved to French producers,
distributors and exhibitors that there was a mainstream market for genre
THE MAGHREBI-FRENCH CONNECTION
51
cinema directed by, starring and promoting the experiences and outlook of
Maghrebi-French protagonists. Thus, when considering the mainstreaming of
North African migr and Maghrebi-French lmmaking in France during the
2000s, we must, necessarily, being with Le Ciel.
Le Ciel, les oiseaux et . . . ta mre! Banlieusards on the Beach
Bensalahs debut feature opens with Youssef (Jamel Debbouze) Christophe
(Lorant Deutsch) and Stphane (Stphane Soo Mongo) shooting a spoof
documentary about life in their cit. They convince a friend, Mike (Julien
Courbey), to pose as a drug dealer, as they think that this will play better with
the mainstream French audience for whom the documentary is intended. The
trios understanding of how such stereotypes are recognised and authenti-
cated by mainstream France is turned to their advantage as their lm wins a
competition, with the prize of a holiday in Biarritz.
As a lm about banlieue youth exploring and exploiting their image on
screen and the debut feature of a director of Algerian immigrant origin from
the cits of St Denis, Le Ciel is clearly self-reexive text. It begins by suggest-
ing, much like La Haine (Kassovitz, 1995), that the blanc-black-beur trio at
the centre of the narrative are only taken seriously when they conform to the
role of the disenfranchised banlieusard. However, Bensalah refuses to relegate
his protagonists to the position of helpless victims who are unable to determine
their own future or, indeed, take control of the way they present themselves
to others. Firstly, they implicitly understand the power of the stereotypes that
are used to identify them and employ these prejudices in a positive way to win
the lmmaking competition. Moreover, the trio simultaneously challenge and
conform to middle-class French prejudices surrounding multicultural banlieue
youth through their interaction with afuent middle-class holidaymakers in
Biarritz, principally the group of teenage girls who are renting the apartment
next to the boys.
By giving the three youths a camera to record their exploits on holiday,
Bensalah returns the means of representation to the hands of those who are
normally denied it. The lm therefore offers a self-reexive commentary on
the alternative perspective of the socio-political realities of the banlieue offered
by the trio, at the same time as it allows Bensalah to consider his own role
as a lmmaker who originates from the deprived urban periphery in either
endorsing or perpetuating such mainstream stereotypes. Nor is this reection
on how banlieue youth are represented in mainstream audio-visual culture
in France restricted to the trios use of the camcorder. Le Ciel is replete with
different kinds of images capturing Youssef, Christophe, Stpahne and Mike
going about their daily lives: from the CCTV footage in the supermarket to the
view through the peephole in the front door of the rented holiday apartment.
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In a similar way, Bensalah and his cinematographer Martin Legrand eschew
the straightforward set-ups and camera positions that we might expect to nd
in a more conventional comedy lm. Instead they employ unexpected angles,
camera movement and framing, even when capturing everyday activities, such
as Stphane cooking pasta in the apartment. The lms self-reexive impulse
is even extended to a discussion of the current state of French cinema in the
late 1990s. As the three youths stand outside the cinema in Biarritz trying
to decide what lm they want to see, they reject the various French lms on
offer, including the popular comedy hit La Vrit si je mens! Instead they
opt for the Hollywood police thriller Cop Land (Mangold, 1997) starring
Sylvester Stallone. However, Bensalah is careful to balance these moments of
self-reexivity with a comedy that derives much of its popular (youth) appeal
from its rapid-re comic exchanges, often irreverent tone, and the central
standout performance by Jamel Debbouze. Moreover, the lms consistent
references to American and French banlieue culture brings credibility to Le
Ciel at the same time as it renders the lm attractive to a mainstream French
youth audience.
In her discussion of Le Ciel, Tarr praises the virtuosity of Jamels perfor-
mance, as well as the attempt by Bensalah to mock the media stereotype of
banlieue youth as criminalised other. However, Tarr is equally critical of what
she perceives as the lms casual misogyny, its evacuation of ethnic minority
girls and women from the diegesis, as well as the suggestion of anti-Semitism
that runs through certain scenes in the lm such as when Youssef recoils from
an embrace with the middle-class Lydie (Olivia Bonamy) upon noticing the Star
Figure 2.3 Boyz on the beach: Le Ciel, les oiseaux et . . . ta mre! (Bensalah, 1999).
THE MAGHREBI-FRENCH CONNECTION
53
of David on her necklace (Tarr 2005: 1067). In response to this nal point,
we could argue that, rather than endorsing an anti-Semitic position adopted
by the lm and its director, the scene shows the potential for prejudice to exist
in all social groups even those minority or marginalised communities (such
as the North African immigrant population in France) who have themselves
been subjected to similar prejudice and hostility from the dominant societal
norm. Youssef is, after all, shocked in this sequence by Lydias accusation of
racism and is subsequently forced to assess his own preconceptions of others
indicated somewhat heavy-handedly in the lm by his introspective walk along
the rainy coastline soon after the confrontation with Lydia. Moreover, in nar-
rative terms, the confrontation functions dramatically as a means of setting up
the nal reconciliation between Youssef and Lydia in the airport, a sequence
that endorses Le Ciels generic categorisation as a romantic comedy or teen
romance as much as it is a simple sh-out-of-water comedy narrative. This
association is important, since it indicates Bensalahs desire to use the rom-com
genre to engage with a mainstream youth audience in France, combining the
edgy credibility of banlieue culture (reected by Debbouzes participation in
the lm) with the more conventional appeal of the teen romance.
In this respect, Le Ciel adheres more than one would think to the narrative
structure of the romantic comedy; from the cute meet, to circumstances and
misunderstanding potentially thwarting the mismatched couple from getting
together, and the couples ultimate reconciliation. The problematic romance
between Youssef and Lydia is, furthermore, mirrored by the other narrative
coupling of Christophe and Christelle, whose own difculties in relating to
one another result more directly from a question of class than they do from
ethnic or religious difference. However, this is not to say that in exploiting the
mainstream potential of the romantic (teen) comedy, Bensalah eviscerates all
trace of the socio-political realities of race and class from the lms narrative.
Indeed, one of the most telling scenes occurs, precisely, as Youssef is racing to
the airport in order to speak to Lydia before she returns for Paris. The sugges-
tion in this scene is then that, despite temporarily inhabiting the same city, the
pair move in such different social circles back home in Paris that any chance of
them meeting again would be almost impossible.
Of even greater symbolic signicance is the exchange on the bus travelling
to the airport, where the young banlieusard is challenged by the conductor
for not possessing a valid ticket. Refusing to believe Youssefs explanation,
as well as denying his request for dispensation given the circumstances of his
journey to the airport, the heavy-handed ticket inspector ends by demanding
to see Youssefs national identity card. This thinly-veiled act of racism simul-
taneously questions Youssefs right to be in the country (let alone on the bus),
a demand that is unlikely to be used against a white youth caught committing
the same offence. Tellingly, the confrontation on the bus serves no obvious
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purpose in advancing the narrative: it is already abundantly clear by this point
that Youssef is in danger of arriving too late at the airport to see Lydia. Its
inclusion enacts a conict that punctuates the expected dramatic tension of the
nal reconciliation from the romantic comedy for a quite different purpose.
For it serves to remind the spectator that the obstacles faced by young ban-
lieusards (especially those of non-European immigrant origin) are frequently
compounded by an additional level of prejudice that mobilises ethnic and reli-
gious difference as insurmountable barriers to integration and social mobility.
Bensalahs desire to engage his audience with the familiarity and consen-
sual comedy of the rom-com at the same time as he forces them to confront
their own prejudices and those across French society towards banlieue youth
is further underlined by the ending of Le Ciel. Rather than focusing on the
reconciliation between Youssef and Lydia, the lm instead returns to the trio
of banlieusards, who, having fallen out while loading up the car, endure the
lengthy car journey back to Paris from the Cote dAzur in brooding silence
an indication of the mundane reality that awaits them in the cit upon their
return from the holiday in the south of France. Indeed, as the extras on the
French DVD release of Le Ciel show, Bensalah had planned an alternative
ending for the lm. In a fashionable Parisian apartment several months after
the holiday, Youssef and Lydia were to be depicted living together and waiting
for their friends to arrive for a dinner party. Clearly the decision by the direc-
tor to eschew this more utopian ending for the one we see in the lm suggests
a desire to confront his audience with the more likely outcome for the young
banlieusards after the holiday ends.
However, the portrayal of the sullen teenagers journeying back to Paris is
not the nal image that Bensalah leaves us with at the very end of Le Ciel. As
the credits roll, rough hand-held footage of the car travelling along the seafront
in Biarritz clearly meant to have been shot by the boys during their holiday
shows Youssef engaging in playful banter with the cars other passengers (and
by extension the audience), eventually proposing that this [the video being
shot] would make a good lm. On the one hand this short, closing scene can
be perceived as a throw-away remark inserted with the credits as an in-joke,
spontaneously offered by Debbouze (more than his character Youssef) for the
director, crew and spectators to share. On the other hand, by effectively closing
Le Ciel with this statement, Bensalah returns to the very issue that began the
lm: the role of cinema in forging a perception and (mis)representation of a
given social reality (specically, the lived social reality of banlieue youth) and
the responsibilities that such a role brings with it.
With its combination of a cultural codes and references to a multi-ethnic
urban culture, allusions to French and American popular culture, verbal
humour and improvisation (centred on, though not limited to, the virtuoso
performance of Debbouze) as well as the use of the structure and narrative
THE MAGHREBI-FRENCH CONNECTION
55
pleasures of the romantic/teen comedy, Bensalah was quite clearly aiming for
a mainstream audience in Le Ciel. However, we cannot entirely say that the
lm occludes or eradicates questions of difference, prejudice and exclusion in
order to appease its mainstream youth audience. Instead, and at key moments,
Bensalah chooses to foreground these problematic issues, thus forcing his audi-
ence to undertake a more searching questioning of the continuing prejudices
that exist in contemporary multicultural France in a manner that belies the
apparently supercial and irreverent pleasures and intentions of a genre such
as the teen romantic comedy.
Neuilly sa mre! From banlieue to beurgeoisie?
Neuilly sa mre!, on which Bensalah collaborated with director Gabriel Julien-
Laferrire as both producer and co-writer, represented a returned to more
familiar territory for the Maghrebi-French lmmaker after the relative failure
of the child western Big City. The lm sees Bensalah employing the now-
familiar sh-out-of-water narrative, whereby Sami (Samy Seghir), a Maghrebi-
French teenager from a working-class housing estate in Chalon-sur-Sane
(a small town in the Burgundy region of France) is forced to relocate to the
exclusive, upscale Parisian district of Neuilly-sur-Seine, one of the wealthiest
communes in France, to live with his aunt while his mother works away on a
cruise ship. As with his earlier lms, Neuilly sa mre! sees Bensalah, this time
as writer and producer, applying a series of comedy scenarios based largely
on the prejudices and preconceptions held by both Sami, as the young ban-
lieusard, and the pupils of the exclusive private school that he attends while
living with his aunt.
The narrative begins with a voice-over by Sami that immediately challenges
(mainstream) misconceptions of the banlieue as a site of lawlessness, exclu-
sion and social breakdown in a way that is resonant of Le Ciel. The spectator
is shown idyllic images of Sami and his friends laughing by a lake behind the
apartment blocks of the working-class estate. Indeed, the cit is deemed as
paradise in comparison to the picturesque centre of Chalon, where Sami and
his friends are viewed with suspicion and subjected to searches by the local
police. Samis point of view appears to be conrmed visually by an elaborate
crane shot near the start of the lm that sweeps up a grass bank and into
the cit instantly beautifying and rendering more spectacular the mundane
environment of the housing estate. Moreover, as the crane pulls up, the cit
is clearly shown as located next to open countryside, again confounding the
notion of the banlieue as an urban wasteland. The spatial location of the cit
also offers a visual link to earlier Maghrebi-French authored banlieue lms
such as Hexagone (Chibane, 1994) and Wesh-wesh: quest-ce qui se passe?
(Ameur-Zameche, 2001), in which the cit borders countryside. However,
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while the opening of Neuilly sa mre! presents a positive, even romanticised,
image of life on the estate that perpetuates the cit/city binary of the 1990s
banlieue lm (albeit in inverted form), it does not entirely ignore the limited
opportunities for the young inhabitants on the housing estate. As part of the
opening sequence to Neuilly sa mre! the camera also contemplates two young
men, one working as a supermarket security guard, the other collecting litter
on the estate. As Sami informs us, after listing the academic qualications both
men have obtained, here, the only thing a degree is for is to make your family
happy.
The opening sequence of the lm located in the cit then gives way to a nar-
rative twist that leads to a somewhat implausible transition to Paris where
Sami is sent to live with his aunt. Aunt Djamila (Rachida Branki), we learn, is
a qualied barrister, who married the (white) aristocratic owner of a multina-
tional food producer after completing a work placement in one of his factories
and now lives in an exclusive gated community in Neuilly-sur-Seine, effectively
running the home and looking after her two step-children. The lm proposes
a Janus-faced image of the aunt. On the one hand, a potentially empowering
image of the Maghrebi-French protagonist in which she appears as a quali-
ed professional, a member of what Whithol de Wenden and Leveau term the
beurgeoisie (2007). On the other hand, the backstory to Djamilas place in
the narrative undercuts her successful social mobility by effectively portraying
her as a kept woman to a wealthy white, conservative French businessman,
the eccentric Stanislas de Chazelle (Denis Podalyds). Djamilas characterisa-
tion thus pushes the idea of the beurette from the cit who has made a success
of herself to such excessive and improbable limits at the service of Neuilly sa
mre!s comic narrative that it renders her little more than a caricature of the
beurgeoise she is supposed to be. Alongside her well-meaning, if neurotic,
husband, the Chazelle household is completed by Djamilas step-children: the
rebellious Caroline (Chlo Coulloud), who welcomes Samis arrival though
befriends him largely to challenge the privileged background in which she has
been raised, and her younger brother, Charles (Jrmy Denisty), an arrogant
teenager who harbours political ambitions and preposterously models himself
on the gestures, rhetoric and demeanour of French president Nicholas Sarkozy
(mayor of the Neuilly-sur-Seine commune between 1993 and 2002). During the
rst meal with the family, Charles refers to Sami as racaille (scum), a direct
reference to the insulting description infamously attached by Sarkozy as the
then Interior Minister to the disenfranchised inhabitants of the deprived urban
periphery who were involved in the outbreaks of rioting across the banlieues of
France in the winter of 2005. Charless character is clearly meant to embody the
perceived prejudices of the privileged residents of Neuilly to an outsider from
the projects and by locating them in the words and gestures of a pompous,
privileged teenager, Bensalah immediately encourages us to ridicule them.
THE MAGHREBI-FRENCH CONNECTION
57
As in Bensalahs previous lms, the Maghrebi-French youth from the ban-
lieue encounters prejudice in this new environment at the same time as his
own prejudices towards the unknown are challenged. Upon arriving at the
Place de la Dfense, the Parisian nancial district that borders Neuilly, Sami
immediately dismisses the city as a wasteland. He periodically sends mes-
sages back to his friends in Chalon, making them think that he is living in one
of the rougher districts of the Parisian banlieue. In response, his friends ask
him if there are tanks on the street, revealing that they are just as susceptible
to the media misrepresentations of the deprived urban periphery as Samis
new classmates in the private school he now attends. (And, as if the spectator
needed any further reminders of the class divisions upon which the lm is also
based, one of Samis new classmates is a young girl named Sophie Bourgeois.)
The comment by Samis friends from Chalon also suggests that the sh-out-of-
water comic narrative employed by Bensalah in Neuilly sa mre! has as much
to do with the differences between Paris and the provinces as it does with
ethnic difference. Nevertheless, in the eyes of his Neuilly classmates, Sami is
unambiguously qualied as an outsider from the cit as the site of both socio-
economic exclusion and the site of the ethnic Other.
In a similar approach to that found in Le Ciel, references to both banlieue
street culture (such as the soundtrack by Cut Killer, who famously performed
as the DJ in La Haine) and American popular culture abound in Neuilly sa
mre! The lms opening sequence from the estates in Chalon uses a track by
US West Coast rapper Dr Dre, while the method of introducing each of Samis
friends with a freeze-frame and name tag offers an inter-textual reference to
Figure 2.4 Sami as sh out of water in Neuilly sa mre! (La Ferrire, 2009).
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both La Haine and in turn to Scorseses Mean Streets (1974), from where
Kassovitz borrowed the idea in the rst place. Such cultural references provide
a counterpoint in the narrative to the bourgeois residence of the de Chazelles
and Saint-Exupry, the Catholic private school attended by Sami and Charles.
However, they also function to engage with a mainstream French youth audi-
ence, for whom a commercialised version of the American-inuenced multi-
culture of the banlieue has now been rmly incorporated into popular youth
culture in France. The reality of this cultural crossover is illustrated when
Samis classmate and rival for Maries (Josphine Japy) affections confronts
him with a spontaneous rap performance in the playground, intended to
intimidate the Maghrebi-French youth from Chalon. Filmed from a low angle
with the young, white would-be rappers aggressively postulating directly into
the camera the classic set up for the kind of music rap video that dominates
channels such as MTV in France and across the western world Samis class-
mates claim to deliver true rap with a real message. Aside from the obvious
humour derived from a trio of white, privately educated teenagers mimicking
rappers from the working-class cits, the vignette also serves to emphasise the
extent to which hip-hop has become rmly integrated (since at least the mid-
1990s) into mainstream French youth culture. In this respect the sequence also
mirrors the type of crossover appeal derived from Bensalahs screenplay that
places a banlieue youth in one of the most afuent and conservative areas of
Paris.
The second key way in which the narrative of Neuilly sa mre! echoes that
of Le Ciel is through the teen/school romance that blossoms between Sami and
Caroline, the daughter of the Chazelles neighbours. As in Le Ciel, Neuilly sa
mre! operates through the conventional generic structures of the cute meet to
the misunderstanding between the potential couple, opposition to their union
from a third party, and a nal reconciliation that provides narrative resolution.
Despite these narrative similarities, the experimentation with camera angles
and different modes of surveying the Maghrebi-French banlieusard found in
Le Ciel is replaced with far more conventional (mainstream) modes of lighting,
camerawork and editing, all of which are placed rmly at the service of the
teen romantic comedy narrative.
9
The nal scene in Neuilly sa mre! further conrms the more conventional
path taken by the lm, in contrast to the ending of Le Ciel discussed earlier.
Despite Samis protestations at the start of the lm that Chalon was the only
place he would live, he and his mother relocate to the Cit Pablo-Picasso,
a neighbouring HLM estate in Nanterre, in order for Sami to attend Saint-
Exupry. Just as importantly, the relocation allows Sami to be with Marie, who
is now clearly identied as his girlfriend. Unlike in Le Ciel, then, the banlieue
boy nally gets his uptown girl. However, any temptation to read this as pro-
gress towards the mixed-race couple that Tarr notes is so consistently denied
THE MAGHREBI-FRENCH CONNECTION
59
in French cinema and even in lms by Maghrebi-French directors in the 1980s
and 1990s (Tarr 2005: 1012) should be tempered by the context of Neuilly
sa mre!s narrative resolution. For the nal message of the lm appears to be
that, in order for the Maghrebi-French banlieusard to get the white girl, he must
detach himself from his origins in the multi-ethnic cit and integrate into the
conservative, bourgeois environment of Neuilly-sur-Seine (though still being
kept at a safe distance in the Cit Pablo-Picasso). Early in the narrative, soon
after Sami arrives in the de Chazelle household, he recoils in disgust from the
pork products that he nds in the kitchen while looking for a snack an obvious
reference to the cultural and religious difference of his North African immigrant
origins. Aunt Djamela comments on the mix of food found in the family fridge
in the following way: we dont force anyone to do anything here: everyone
does as they please. Despite the apparently liberal attitude in the de Chazelle
household, Sami eventually discovers that the key to his successful integration
into the afuent society of Neuilly-sur-Seine is, in fact, far more closely aligned
with the advice given to him by the head teacher at Saint-Exupry (Josiane
Balasko) soon after his arrival at the school: its up to you to make an effort
to t in.
10
In the nal analysis, the impression left by Neuilly sa mre! is quite
unlike Bensalahs earlier lms: in order for the Maghrebi-French community to
access the mainstream they must ultimately leave their difference behind.
Conclusion
Popular or mainstream culture, and, in the case of this chapter, mainstream
cinema, may indeed be the cultural terrain where the most intense manifesta-
tions or representations offered by hegemony in relation to difference (ethnicity,
class and sexuality) are to be found. And yet it is precisely for this reason that the
mainstream is the arena in which such reductive representations can and should
be most actively (and effectively) contested. In other words, the mainstream is
the terrain in which Maghrebi-French and North African migr lmmakers can
most directly challenge the political and socio-cultural inuence of the dominant
societal norm. It is also (and, just as importantly) the arena in which the modes
and methods of representation employed by the dominant norm to win and
shape consent ensuring that the power of the social majority over subordinate
groups appears as both legitimate and natural can be most exposed to scru-
tiny and before the biggest possible audience. In this chapter we have certainly
found evidence that a shift to the mainstream has occurred in the 2000s for some
Maghrebi-French and North African migr lmmakers. In particular this can
be seen in the way that a growing number of bone de Maghrebi-French and
North African migr stars have an increasing inuence within the French lm
industry. However, as the analysis in this chapter of Djamel Bensalahs career
since the crossover success of Le Ciel has shown, while certain of Bensalahs
POST-BEUR CINEMA
60
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comedies display the potential to foreground the difference of the North African
diaspora in a way that is both productive and challenging to mainstream
audiences, too often his lms appear to fall back on the largely reductive prac-
tices, structures and representational tropes employed by other mainstream,
majority-ethnic-authored comedies dealing with issues of exclusion, difference
and multiculturalism in contemporary French society. Indeed with Beur sur la
ville (2011), it appears that Bensalah may have reached something of an impasse
insofar as the lm attracted smaller audiences than his previous features and was
roundly panned by most critics for its unimaginative use of stereotypes in rela-
tion to immigrant minorities and banlieue culture (Ardjoum 2011). And yet, the
realm of popular comedy in which Bensalah operates is not the only mainstream
space, in terms of genre, where Maghrebi-French lmmakers have announced
their presence in the 2000s. In the next chapter we shall turn our attention to
the way in which certain directors of Maghrebi origin, most obviously Rachid
Bouchareb, have, in far more confrontational ways than Bensalah, attempted to
redene the Eurocentric focus of the French historical epic or heritage lms take
on colonial history.
Notes
1. Examples of such multiple mainstreams offered by Martel include: Bollywood
cinemas popularity in India and with Indians resident outside India; the regional
inuence of Manga, J-pop et K-pop in East-Asia; and telenovelas in Brazil which
are exported across central and South America.
2. At the time of writing (June 2012) one of the most prominent actresses of Maghrebi
origin is Aure Atika (who was born in Portugal to a Moroccan mother and a French
father and grew up in Paris), though she cannot be classed as a star and has only
enjoyed lead roles in a small number of lms. Two other young Maghrebi-French
actresses who have begun to establish themselves following success in lms directed
by Abdellatif Kechiche in the 2000s are Hafsia Herzi and Sabrina Ouazani.
3. Source: http://www.cbo-boxofce.com.
4. The award was also shared with Bernard Blancan, who plays the role of Sergeant
Martinez in Indignes.
5. For a detailed analysis of this lm, see Rosello (2002).
6. For a detailed discussion of Maghrebi-French protagonists in queer French cinemas
of the 2000s, see Provencher (2007), Rees-Roberts (2008) and Waldron (2009).
7. Indignes (Bouchareb, 2006) attracted over 3 million spectators in France;
Chouchou (Allouache, 2004) 3.8 million spectators in France; and Bienvenue chez
les Chtis (Boon, 2008) 20.4 million.
8. Tarr has written sections on Le Ciel, les oiseaux et . . . ta mre!, Le Rad and Il
tait une fois dans loued (Tarr 2005; 2009) though these form part of chapters or
articles looking at a range of lms and lmmakers, not specically Bensalah.
9. We could argue that this change comes as a result of the fact that Neuilly sa mre!
is written and produced, not directed, by Bensalah. However, as Bensalahs input
into the commentary on the French DVD release of Neuilly sa mre! shows, his
involvement on set went beyond that of the producer or writer.
10. One of French cinemas leading comic stars, Balasko also appeared in a cameo role
in Le Rad.
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SPANISH HORROR FILM
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ANTONIO LZARO-REBOLL
9780748636396 I Mar 2014 I Paperback I 19.99
SPANISH HORROR FILM
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Cover design: River Design, Edinburgh
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ANTONIO LZARO-REBOLL
Traditions in World Cinema
Series Editor: Steven Jay Schneider
Associate Editors: Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer
This new series introduces diverse and fascinating movements in world cinema. Each volume
concentrates on a set of films from a different national or regional (in some cases cross-cultural)
cinema which constitute a particular tradition. Volumes cover topics such as: Japanese horror
cinema, Italian neorealist cinema, American blaxploitation cinema, African filmmaking, global
post-punk cinema, Czech and Slovak cinema and the Italian sword-and-sandal film.
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11
1. THE SPANISH HORROR BOOM: 196875
In a rsum of Spanish cinematic activity in 1973, published in the lm review
yearbook Cine para leer, the countrys lmic production was described with
the following graphic visual image: There was a time when Spanish cinema
was tinged with red . . . bloody red (1974: 21). It could well characterise
the period 1968 to 1975, when the Spanish lm industry went into horror
overdrive, producing around 150 horror lms, which accounted for more
than a third of the national industrys output. Our producers, scriptwriters
and lmmakers, the review reads, have released a whole vile rabble of
sadists, traumatised victims, prostitutes, homosexuals, lesbians, werewolves,
vampires, tramps, schizophrenics, fetishists, nymphomaniacs, necrophiles and
people of dissolute life, populating our screens with the grossest depictions of
physical, moral and sexual violence in a maelstrom of crime, orgy and erotic
morbidness (1974: 21). Attempting to account for this ghoulish invasion
and the sexual perversions generated by contemporary Spanish horror lms,
the reviewer wonders whether this horror boom is a desire on the part of the
Spanish lm industry to synchronise with a certain type of world cinema or
is simply a crude form of escapism, which unconsciously reveals the [repres-
sive] social situation of the country (1974: 22), concluding, in an explicit
reference to Francos dictatorial regime that, with the passing of time and with
hindsight, this popular form of cinematic production might come to reect an
ideology of repression, terror and silence (1974: 22).
Spanish horror lm was certainly synchronous with a variety of horror prod-
ucts emerging from other national contexts, in particular Great Britain, Italy
LAZARO 9780748636389 PRINT.indd 11 13/10/2012 11:24
SPANISH HORROR FILM
12
and the United States. Producers and distributors all over the world were inter-
ested in horror lms, no matter where they came from. The changes occurring
in European low-budget lmmaking during the 1960s and the 1970s allowed
the production of horror lms in Italy, France, Germany, Great Britain and
Spain, as well as co-productions between the different countries. Equally valid
is the reviewers association of escapism with repression. The ideological inter-
pretation of contemporary Spanish horror an ideology of repression, terror
and silence is a sign of the times and a statement informed by psychoanalyti-
cal and Marxist ideas about social repression and unconscious desires,
1
as a
close examination of contemporary critical reception in the second section of
this chapter shows. Spanish horror lms provided, in common with the genres
counterpart in the Hollywood of the 1950s, a barometer of the decades con-
tradictorily overt conformism and latent dissent, a time when the repressed
was on the verge of making a return, in monstrous form.
Spanish horrors extensive repertoire of monsters and response to inter-
national traditions of horror cinema is reected both in the titles of many
lms and in the heterogeneity and variety of horror production. Although
hardly scratching the surface of genre production, a partial overview of titles
reveals takes on classic monsters (La marca del hombre lobo / Frankensteins
Bloody Terror (Enrique Eguluz 1968), El Conde Drcula / Count Dracula
(Jess Franco 1969), La maldicin de Frankenstein / The Erotic Rites of
Frankenstein (Jess Franco 1972)), as well as monstrous encounters which
followed the tradition of Universal multi-monster narratives of the 1940s
(Los monstruos del terror / Assignment Terror (Hugo Fregonese and Tulio
Demicheli 1969), Drcula contra Frankenstein / The Screaming Dead (Jess
Franco 1971), Dr Jekyll y el hombre lobo / Dr Jekyll and the Werewolf (Len
Klimovsky 1972)). The exploitation of the latest international horror cycle
success, such as the Night of the Living Dead (George Romero 1968) formula
or The Exorcist (William Friedkin 1973) phenomenon, spawned Spanish off-
spring (for example, No profanar el sueo de los muertos / The Living Dead at
Manchester Morgue (Jorge Grau 1974) or Exorcismo / Exorcism (Juan Bosch
1975)).
2
In true exploitative manner, some titles promised more titillation than
they delivered (La orga nocturna de los vampiros / The Vampires Night Orgy
(Len Klimovsky 1972), La orga de los muertos / Terror of the Living Dead
(Jos Luis Merino 1973)). In fact, as a contemporary journalist claimed in the
popular lm magazine Cine en 7 das, in this genre once you have the title,
the rest the actual making of the lm is a cinch (Garca 1973a: 16). And
horror lm was so commonplace by the early 1970s that it was prime fodder
for spoong, this same journalist suggesting a series of alternative titles based
on topical news stories in his weekly column: Dracula at the United Nations,
Frankenstein vs Moshe Dayan, Watergate Zombies or The Mummy in
the Europe of the Nine (1973b: 10), to mention just a few. Many a sneering
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THE SPANISH HORROR BOOM: 196875
13
critic resorted to culinary analogies in the opening paragraphs of their reviews,
reducing horror lms to a list of ingredients which would allow almost
anybody to concoct una de vampiros (a colloquial expression in Spanish for
a horror movie); as the opening lines of a less than favourable review for La
noche de Walpurgis instructs, take an abandoned monastery, a werewolf, a
devil countess, a stormy night, one or two skeletons, some fake fangs and a few
litres of thick, red liquid . . . (A. M. O. 1971).
Spanish horror lm of the 1970s is commonly associated with lmmak-
ers such as the prolic Jess Franco, Argentinian-born Len Klimovsky and
Amando de Ossorio, among others. While most of their lms were low-budget,
having low production values and short shooting schedules, there is a general
misconception that all Spanish horror lms of this period were cheap and
cheerful exploitation fare; Franco and Aured, for example, had respectable
budgets to nance some of their lms, 99 mujeres / 99 Women (1969) in the
case of the former and El retorno de Walpurgis / Curse of the Devil (1974) in
the case of the latter. This presumed homogeneity is soon dispelled by looking
at the middle-brow genre projects of directors as different as Narciso Ibez
Serrador, whose lms are the subject of Chapter 3, and Juan Antonio Bardem.
Ibez Serrador, a household name in Spanish television, had 40 million
pesetas at his disposal for his rst feature lm, La residencia, which spear-
headed the boom, whereas Bardem, an established auteur associated with
oppositional lmmaking throughout the 1950s and the 1960s, had more than
50 million pesetas and Spanish star Marisol to distinguish his La corrupcin de
Chris Miller / The Corruption of Chris Miller (1973) from contemporary low-
brow horror. The period also offers the isolated incursions of up-and-coming
art-house directors moving into commercial production, such as Vicente
Aranda (La novia ensangrentada / The Blood-Spattered Bride (1972)), Claudio
Guern Hill (La campana del inerno / Bell of Hell (1973)) (see Figure 2) and
Jorge Grau (Ceremonia sangrienta / Bloody Ceremony (1973) and No profa-
nar el sueo de los muertos). Experimental lmmaker Javier Aguirre made
commercial genre products El gran amor del Conde Drcula / Count Draculas
Great Love (1972) and El jorobado de la morgue / Hunchback of the Morgue
(1973) in order to be able to nance his more radical, underground projects.
There are also one-off, experimental reections on the vampiric nature of lm-
making, such as Vampir Cuadecuc (Pere Portabella 1970), an experimental
documentary shot in 16 mm during the making of Francos Count Dracula,
which combines disconcerting editing (scenes from the lm, on-set footage,
images of the cast and crew) and a dissonant soundtrack,
3
and collaborative
projects like Pastel de sangre (1971), in which four young lmmakers offered
their personal vision of the genre.
4
And, arguably, other lms, El bosque del
lobo / The Ancine Woods (Pedro Olea 1970) (see Figure 3) and El espritu de la
colmena / The Spirit of the Beehive (Vctor Erice 1973), which are not readily
LAZARO 9780748636389 PRINT.indd 13 13/10/2012 11:24
SPANISH HORROR FILM
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Figure 2 La campana del inerno was directed by Claudio Guern Hill, a director
with art-house lm credentials.
LAZARO 9780748636389 PRINT.indd 14 13/10/2012 11:24
THE SPANISH HORROR BOOM: 196875
15
associated with the horror genre, form part of the same industrial and cultural
milieu.
Spanish horror therefore came from different directions and was made in
a variety of budgetary conditions. With the exception of Prolmes S. A. and
some short-lived production companies, many producers nanced one or two
lms and then disappeared from the market.
5
Such was the case with Eva Films
(El jorobado de la morgue), Galaxia Films (Odio mi cuerpo / I Hate My Body
(Len Klimovsky 1974)) and Huracn Films S. A. (El asesino de muecas
/ Killing of the Dolls (Miguel Madrid 1975)). There were a few companies
whose names were linked to various horror projects. Plata Films was the name
behind two commercial successes La noche de Walpurgis (co-produced with
the German Hi-Fi Stereo) and La noche del terror ciego (with Portuguese
InterFilme P. C.); Maxper Producciones Cinematogrcas produced two were-
wolf lms La marca del hombre lobo (co-production with the German Hi-Fi
Stereo) and La furia del hombre lobo / The Wolfman Never Sleeps (Jos Mara
Zabalza 1972) and returned to the genre some years later with El colegio de
la muerte / School of Death (Pedro Luis Ramrez 1975); Ancla Century Films
Figure 3 Spanish actor Jos Luis Lpez Vzquez played a lycanthrope in El bosque
del lobo, a story rooted in anthropological studies of the myth.
LAZARO 9780748636389 PRINT.indd 15 13/10/2012 11:24
SPANISH HORROR FILM
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were involved in the production of three Amando de Ossorio lms (El ataque
de los muertos sin ojos (1973), El buque maldito / The Ghost Galleon (1974)
and La noche de las gaviotas / Night of the Seagulls (1975)), as well as a Paul
Naschy project (Inquisicin / Inquisition (1976)); Janus Films and Lotus Films
also produced commercial vehicles for Paul Naschy the former produced
El gran amor del Conde Drcula, the latter El retorno de Walpurgis and La
venganza de la momia / Vengeance of the Mummy (1973)). Established names
in lm production and distribution, like Arturo Gonzlez, who specialised in
comedies and spaghetti westerns,
6
also had a slice of the horror market, mainly
through his distribution arm Regia Arturo Gonzlez, selling commercial hits
such as La residencia, Dr Jekyll y el hombre lobo and Una gota de sangre para
morir amando. Co-productions with other European countries, mainly Italy,
Germany and France, were the norm.
7
As for the distribution of horror lms,
there were no major players and the market was divided up into small com-
panies (Beln Films, D. C. Films, Exclusivas Floralva, to name but a few) and
established commercial rms (Hesperia Films, Mercurio, Hispamex) which
exploited the horror lm bonanza. This cursory overview of production and
distribution companies reects the fragmentation of the Spanish lm industry
in general and the lack of a sufciently strong industrial infrastructure to create
specialist genre companies.
The only attempt to develop and sustain a company with a prole in horror
came from a Barcelona-based company called Prolmes, S. A., managed by
Ricardo Moz Suay (191792), a gure well versed in the intricacies of the
Spanish lm industry,
8
and Jos Antonio Prez Giner, in the capacity of execu-
tive producer. Moz Suays commercial savoir-faire, his publicity skills and
his connections within the industry were put at the service of genre lmmak-
ing. With a capital of 100 million pesetas, Prolmes was a calculated com-
mercial venture aimed at producing low-budget movies in a variety of genres,
with an annual target of seven lms. This chapter concludes with a detailed
look at Prolmes output and its international projection in pressbooks. At a
time when Hammer House of Horrors was in decline and no longer a domi-
nant force in the European horror market, Prolmes was one of a number of
European production companies feeding the international demand for horror.
Indeed, in industry magazines and in his writings for Nuevo Fotogramas,
Moz Suay promoted and publicised the company as the Spanish Hammer.
Prolmes not only had the domestic market, mainly neighbourhood cinemas,
in mind, but primarily intended its product for international distribution and
consumption on specialised exploitation circuits as far away as the US or Hong
Kong; as Moz Suay admitted, sales abroad amply recouped the production
costs, and box-ofce takings in Spain were a welcome bonus. Between 1972
and 1975, Prolmes produced a signicant number of horror, action and
adventure movies. As we will see later on in this chapter when we examine
LAZARO 9780748636389 PRINT.indd 16 13/10/2012 11:24
THE SPANISH HORROR BOOM: 196875
17
Prolmes pressbooks, it is possible to argue for a Prolmes look, since there
was some continuity in the production strategies and marketing tactics with
the presence of recognisable national and foreign genre actors and actresses,
the recycling of sets and locations, and the exploitation of successful commer-
cial cycles of the early 1970s.
Prolmes horror lms, like the bulk of the low- to medium-budget Spanish
horror lms, were the staple of the cines de barrio (cheap neighbourhood
cinemas), whose core audience was mainly a male, urban working class. Many
horror lms were released for double-bill programmes, Saturday matinees and
the circuit of cines de verano (summer cinemas), aimed mainly at a teen and
youth audience. Films with considerable nancial support, like La residencia
and La corrupcin de Chris Miller, on the other hand, were premiered in rst-
run and mainstream cinemas, and delivered well above the average Spanish
commercial lms at the box ofce: La residencia 104 million pesetas and
2,924,805 spectators and La corrupcin de Chris Miller 62 million pesetas
and 1,237,013 spectators. They were also widely promoted and distributed
in Europe by Cinespaa. The vast majority of Spanish horror production
regularly attracted audiences of 300,000 to 500,000 spectators, and averaged
box-ofce takings of between 5 million and 13 million pesetas.
9
Bankable
autochthonous horror stars like Paul Naschy proved to be commercially suc-
cessful, with regular takings over the 13 million mark and reaching up to 40
million pesetas. As far as distribution abroad is concerned, Spanish horror
lms were not only fully exploited by the European co-producers and let loose
on the European horror circuit, but also roamed the American exploitation
circuit at the drive-in, where foreign distributors retitled them, dubbed them
into English, added nudes and sexually suggestive scenes, cut scenes or reels
for marketing purposes, and repackaged them as Euro-horror. Many 1960s
and 1970s Spanish horror movies therefore form part of the global history of
exploitation and sexploitation, and their distribution histories are common
currency in genre magazines and fanzines, as well as DVD extra features.
The following pages focus on the national context of their production and
reception. An initial look at the cinematic context in which Spanish horror lm
production emerged considers the circumstances that led to the proliferation
of horror lms in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time which corresponds
to crucial changes in Spanish society and culture economic boom, consum-
erism and the last years of Francoism and situates the genre in relation to
other cinematic trends: namely, other popular genres and art-cinema. The rst
section of this chapter argues how Spanish horror lm departs from the norms
and ideals of contemporary Spanish cinema: on the one hand, from traditional
forms of Spanish popular cinema production such as comedies, melodramas or
folkloric lms (known as espaoladas), and, on the other, from the auteurist-led
production philosophy promoted by the government, in particular what was to
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18
be labelled as Nuevo Cine Espaol (New Spanish Cinema, NCE). A look at
the industrial and cinema policies, led by Jos Mara Garca Escudero, Director
General de Cinematografa, establishes how the production of horror lms is
shaped by a number of economic, legislative and aesthetic considerations affect-
ing the lm industry between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s. Like other
international horror lm traditions before (American and British), Spanish
horror cinema had to contend with the institution of censorship, and lmmakers
adopted a number of formal and stylistic strategies to avoid the censors scissors.
The second section of the chapter focuses on critical attitudes towards horror,
which were profoundly inuenced by the aesthetic and cultural views of gures
such as Garca Escudero, pioneering critics such as Juan Manuel Company and
Romn Gubern, and mainstream review journalism. By judging horror accord-
ing to their own standards and perceiving it as commercialising lm culture,
these critics not only neglected other rich areas of enquiry, such as how Spanish
horror lms of the period engaged with international examples of horror or
how their consumption is linked to the development of a horror subculture;
they also, more importantly, hampered the critical development of the genre
in subsequent histories of Spanish cinema. While any critical study of Spanish
horror lm ought to consider the local context of production, the analysis must
acknowledge the commercial realities of the genre, which are exploited at the
level of marketing, publicity and consumption. The last section of the chapter
turns to the examination of some of the cinematic riches of Spanish horror lm
of the period, relating marketing and publicity tactics to a long-standing tradi-
tion of exploitation and consumption practices of popular genre lms.
Departing from the Norms and Ideals of Spanish Cinema
The arrival of Jos Mara Garca Escudero as Undersecretary of Cinema
(19628)
10
at the Direccin General de Cinematografa y Teatro (Secretariat
of Cinema and Theatre) brought key changes to the Spanish lm industry:
namely, the restructuring of the economy of commercial cinema, the intro-
duction of censorship norms and the promotion of the NCE, which aspired
to compete aesthetically with other new European lm waves of the 1960s.
Garca Escuderos measures were directed against foreign lm, the impact
of television, and the declining audience numbers for national lm in an
attempt, on the one hand, to protect an ailing lm industry and, on the other
hand, to create the institutional conditions to improve the quality of Spanish
cinema through the production of a cine de calidad (quality cinema). Other
policies involved the granting of Cine de Inters Especial awards (Special
Interest Films) to those lms which offered sufcient quality in their inclusion
of relevant moral, social, educative or political values, the regulation of co-
productions, the introduction of box-ofce controls in 1966, the opening of
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THE SPANISH HORROR BOOM: 196875
19
Salas de Arte y Ensayo (Experimental Arts Cinemas), and the promotion of
the work of graduates from the Escuela Ocial de Cinematografa (Ofcial
Film School, EOC).
11
In his own writings on Spanish cinema, in particular El
cine espaol (1962), Garca Escudero lays out the critique of Spanish [popular]
cinema which he had been expounding in contemporary articles and through
his political decisions (Triana-Toribio 2003: 66): namely, a market-driven
production (the absence of good producers [. . .]), a decient subsidy system
(well meaning but inept [. . .]), and a bad audience in its majority (2003: 67).
The rst two critiques would be addressed through a number of economic and
legislative policies, whereas his views on popular audiences and tastes would
inuence the subsequent critical reception of horror lms, as I demonstrate in
the next section of this chapter. As Triana-Toribio has persuasively argued,
Garca Escudero (and his followers) does not allow for any measure of agency
in its public, nor for the pleasures these texts gave, and certainly not for the
resistant readings that they might conjure up in their audiences (2003: 69).
12
The economic measures introduced in August 1964 encouraged the nancial
restructuring of the Spanish lm industry:
each Spanish lm was granted one million pesetas in medium-termed
credit from a Protection Fund which the Banco de Crdito Industrial could
increase to up to 50 per cent of the production budget. All lms received
a grant equal to 15% of their box-ofce takings. Special Interest lms
received 2 million pesetas credit, 30% of box-ofce takings, and counted
as two normal Spanish lms for the purpose of distribution and screen
quotas. The State subsidy could be increased to 5 million pesetas (with a
ceiling of 50% of a lms budget), only repayable from the 30% of box-
ofce takings; and if commercial performance did not allow repayment,
it was waived. (Hopewell 1986: 64)
This costly production system, however, led with the passing of time to delays
in the payment of government subsidies to producers and exhibitors, leaving
the administration with a debt of more than 250 million pesetas; this eventu-
ally provoked the dismissal of Garca Escudero from his role as Undersecretary
of Cinema in 1968. The economic failure of the NCE and the impact of televi-
sion in the country (in 1960, for instance, only 1% of households had a TV set,
but by 1976 90% owned one), as well as the new position of cinema within
the leisure industry, accentuated the crisis in lm production and consumption.
Between 1968 and 1975 the Spanish lm industry never very healthy was
witness to the closure of one-third of its total number screens (in 1968 there
were 7,761 screens, by 1975 5,076) and a decrease in the sectors income.
13
By
1968, therefore, the Spanish lm industry was in a critical state, the Direccin
General de Cinematografa y Teatro was replaced by the Direccin General
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SPANISH HORROR FILM
20
de Cultura Popular y Espectculos, and the NCE was practically defunct. As
lm historian John Hopewell has pointed out, only a few forms of lm-life
survived and festered in such an economic climate (1986: 80). The survivors
were the lowly genre or subgeneric lms, the most commercially successful
being the Iberian sex comedy and the horror lm, which could easily recoup
production costs and which consistently drew audiences to the cinemas. While
the sex comedy was intended only for internal consumption, addressing as it
did a series of issues related to the Spanish society of the late 1960s and early
1970s, the horror genre was intended for both internal and external markets
and competed with other European productions. The Spanish audience con-
tinued to consume the squeaky-clean, censored versions of lms whose more
explicit originals were exported for international consumption, following a late
1950s policy whereby double versions were produced for home and overseas.
In addition to the economic and cultural changes engineered by the Direccin
General de Cinematografa y Teatro, Garca Escudero also legislated on
the ideological and moral values that would govern Spanish cinema until the
end of the dictatorship by establishing ofcial guidelines on lm censorship.
Although censorship had existed since the beginning of the dictatorship, the
creation of the Junta de Clasicacin y Censura (Board of Classication and
Censorship) in September 1962, the compulsory ofcial examination of all lm
scripts from February 1963 onwards, and the establishment of a set of censor-
ship rules established what was acceptable and what was not.
14
Modelled, to
a certain extent, on the Hollywood production code, the thirty-seven norms
covered a wide spectrum of subjects and situations, codifying the acceptable
and the unacceptable, although in a very ambiguous and arbitrary manner,
as we will see in the case of individual lms. In theory, the 1963 norms codi-
ed the borders between the acceptable and the forbidden, the orthodox and
the transgressive, and good and bad taste, but in practice some norms were
ambiguous on paper and their application was highly inconsistent.
Keeping Spanish screens free from explicit political content was relatively
easy. However, the limits put on sexual and violent images had to adjust con-
stantly to more liberal attitudes to sex across the Western world in the 1960s
and 1970s and, above all, to the economic demands of the market. In the
context of the later part of the Francoist regime, the realities of the dictatorship
political repression, strict control of sexuality through Catholic morality,
strict control of cultural production through censorship ran parallel to
an intense process of socio-economic transformation, facilitated by tourism
revenue, foreign investment and the inuence of those Spanish emigrants who
had witnessed change abroad, that begins to align Spain with Western con-
sumer society and introduces a changed set of values in moral and religious
attitudes. Horror participates in various ways in the representation of these
complex and contradictory changes. In a lm like La noche del terror ciego,
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THE SPANISH HORROR BOOM: 196875
21
for instance, as one reviewer observed,

the lm mixes bikinis and shrouds,
monastic skeletons and curvaceous females, abbey ruins and ultramodern
swimming-pools (Anon. 1972c); tourism, eroticised bodies and the satisfac-
tions of consumer society sit alongside traditional religious values and institu-
tions. This lm is analysed in Chapter 2.
The question is, how far did changes in social mores allow for the screening
of violence, gore and deviations from the sexual norm, particularly in the case
of a genre whose formal and stylistic conventions rely on graphic depictions of
physical, moral and sexual violence? And, more generally, what were the insti-
tutional constraints faced by contemporary horror lmmakers? The general
censorship norms announced ofcial sensitivity towards the world of the lm
(each lm will be judged according to not only specic images or scenes but
as a whole . . . in relation to the totality of its content) and the generic idiom
(each lm will be judged . . . according to the characteristics of different genres
and lmic styles). With regard to the horror genre, the censorship norms made
direct references to one of the genres dening characteristics, the representa-
tion of evil (mal) a term which censors were obsessed with, for it was the
main subject of norms 2, 4, 5 and 6. This conception of evil as wrongdoing
evidently responded to a Christian dualistic view of the world. More explic-
itly related to the horror genre and other horror-related forms was the norm
that prohibited images and scenes of brutality, of cruelty towards people and
animals, and of horror presented in a morbid or unjustied manner. As for
the explicit references to sex, the representation of sexual perversions and
images and scenes that may lead to the arousal of base instincts in the normal
spectator were also prohibited. Still, a whole vile rabble of sexual perverts
and perversions found their way on to Spanish screens. As David J. Skal has
observed with reference to horror lms on 1930s American screens,
censors, of course, were primarily interested in sex, and sex was fairly
easy to contain, at least on screen. The rituals of erotic exorcism were, by
then, rmly established. There were certain words, elements of costume,
cleavage, the proximity of a bed the danger signs were fully recogniz-
able. (1993: 161)
Although Spanish censors were ready to cut scenes of a sexual nature, lm-
makers and audiences were used to exerting self-censorship and reading sexual
meanings into narrative ellipsis. Other tactics were regularly used by Spanish
lmmakers in general, whereby sexuality and eroticism were traditionally
inscribed in foreign female actresses. Like other Spanish lm directors working
under the institutional restraints of Francoism, horror lmmakers had to abide
by the censors rules, resorting thereby to their own formal and stylistic strate-
gies, to their own aesthetics of censorship. According to guilar:
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SPANISH HORROR FILM
22
Spanish horror took care of obvious geographical and narrative ques-
tions (the action was set outside Spain, the story-lines dealt with univer-
sal archetypes, the shooting locations were unusual) and deployed more
subtle resources, mainly concerning the cast: the actors were dubbed (so
that the regular lmgoer could not identify the voices of the actors with
those of other Spanish lm genres) and they used to be either foreign
(Americans like Jack Taylor and Patty Shepard, French like Silvia Solar
and Howard Vernon, Central European like Dyanik Zurakowska, Barta
Barcy and Helga Lin, Argentinean like Alberto Dalbes, Rosanna Yanni
and Perla Cristal) or Spanish who did not work or hardly worked
outside the genre. (1999a: 24)
The coding of the source of horror as foreign, which was also typical of US
horror lms of the 1930s and 1940s set in mostly European settings, was a
must. Nevertheless, universally understood locations, such as castles, aban-
doned houses, isolated villages or forests, came with the generic territory,
while in other cases the international popular consumption of horror lms
demanded modern, cosmopolitan settings such as London or Paris. That said,
specic elements did often connect the lm with the Spanish landscape, for
many locations are recognisably Spanish.
Cuts were always likely in the areas of politics, religion and sex. Horror
lms, whether Spanish or foreign, were censored on the grounds of their reli-
gious or sexual content. Dracula Prince of Darkness (Terence Fisher 1965),
which was not granted exhibition rights until 1972, suffered alterations at the
stage of dubbing: suppress all specic allusions to religion, religiosity
or Church replacing them by terms such as brotherhood or brethren,
read the censors le; The Exorcist, according to the censors, was irreverent
both towards the Virgin Mary, in the scene where a disgured image of the
saint appears briey on screen, and towards Christian symbols (suppress those
sequences in which the crucix is used as a weapon). Some Spanish horror
lms were massacred: Eloy de la Iglesias La semana del asesino, for instance,
suffered sixty-four cuts (up to a hundred, according to other sources). The
Francoist censorship board delayed its screening until 1974, and imposed a
narrative closure whereby the assassin Marcos hands himself in to the police.
The censors imposed ending can be interpreted as an attempt to master the
text. The authors of the script, de la Iglesia and Antonio Fos, were also obliged
to include the following disclaimer: there is not the slightest sign of homosexu-
ality in the character of Nstor (No hay un solo atisbo de homosexualidad
en Nestor). Disclaimers and all, the ofcial lm classication rated the lm
as severely dangerous (gravemente peligrosa). La semana del asesino is
discussed in detail in Chapter 4. Other lms were dramatically shortened and
the cuts demonstrated the existence of double standards in reference to the
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THE SPANISH HORROR BOOM: 196875
23
notorious double versions: the exhibition of Francos 99 mujeres was muti-
lated in twenty-four minutes, the dialogues were changed, and the ending
differed from that in other countries (Franco in Olano 1973: 10). Indeed,
Francos lms were regularly subjected to the censors scissors, as he himself
acknowledged in numerous interviews of the period (my most important
lms have not been exhibited in Spain or have been heavily cut (Franco in
Olano 1973: 10); Las vampiras (1971) was intended to be a re-reading, a
refashioning of the myth of Dracula but, in the directors own words, was
left like a sieve. It was impossible to understand it (Franco in Bassa and
Freixas 1991b: 43). Provocation and sensationalism were at the centre of the
planned marketing campaign for Arandas La novia ensangrentada, but the
question, the rst sexual encounter: matrimonial consummation or rape? [el
enfrentamiento con la primera experiencia carnal: matrimonio o violacin?],
splashed in red lettering across an image of a bride dressed in virginal white,
was censored and removed from the nal posters. The lurid title was kept but
seventeen minutes were cut from the lm. The censors neutralised the sexual
and gender dynamics proposed by director Aranda, and in the end the
imagery of the female vampire subgenre was to communicate the story of the
lm.
15
Sexual perversions were duly dealt with, in particular lesbian intimations:
in Francos 99 mujeres, scenes of a lesbian nature taking place in a prison
hospital had to be removed, while Ibez Serradors La residencia experienced
similar cuts. Prospective viewers of the latter were also denied identication
with a female character whose point of view might have triggered the arousal
of inappropriate sexual urges (the censors notes ordered the suppression of
close ups of lascivious, wet lips when the character is thinking about the scene
that took place in the shed between one of the inmates and the delivery man).
Cinemagoers, journalists and critics frequently noted the application of dif-
ferent standards, depending on the lm under consideration and its potential
impact on audiences. A reader in Nuevo Fotogramas entitles his letter to the
editor 99 mujeres (Madame Censorship):
A date for history: 16 June 1969. The rst decidedly pornographic lm
is released in Madrid: 99 mujeres. Not even the cuts ordered by the
censors have been able to lighten the complete treatise on sexual patholo-
gies this lm presents us with.
A catalogue of sexual pathologies follows (a sadist transvestite, a fetishist
lesbian, several narcissists exhibiting their bodies, prostitutes, drug addicts and
murderers) and the reader closes with a reference to the disconcerting ways of
Madame Censorship:
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SPANISH HORROR FILM
24
while 99 mujeres, a typical example of how to exploit the most base
instincts reaches our screens, Viridiana, Belle de jour, Viva Maria!,
Blow-Up, La dolce Vita . . . and many other lms by Godard, Bergman,
Bellochio, Visconti, Rocha, to name but a few, sleep the sleep of the just.
16
With reference to Pedro Oleas El bosque del lobo, lm historian Gubern
observed that, while the censors allowed the screening of graphic bloodsheds
performed by British and Spanish Draculas, El bosque del lobo was made
more palatable by severely softening the depiction of violence and brutality,
therefore neutralising the critique contained in this study of criminal anthro-
pology (1981: 266) (see Figure 3). And, in a more tongue-in-cheek manner,
critics recorded their awareness of the existence of a more explicit version
made for the foreign market. A Nuevo Fotogramas reviewer is convinced that
the Spanish version of La noche de Walpurgis is a light snack (Picas 1971c:
41) in comparison to the more meaty German cut. Reviewing La campana del
inerno for the newspaper ABC, the journalist takes it for granted that the
complete version will be highly valued abroad (Lpez Sancho 1973). I return
inevitably to the cuts and splices which shaped the lms under analysis in the
next three chapters, in order to appreciate how far and in what ways individual
lms were affected by the actions of the censors. But what is there to be said
about the role of lm critics in shaping contemporary (and future) attitudes
towards the genre?
Critical Reception
In this section I focus on the critical reception of Spanish horror lm, both in
contemporary mainstream media reviews and original critical analyses of the
genre. Although many popular lms were not reviewed at national level or
were not reviewed at all, added to the fact that some newspaper critics simply
reproduced the promotional material included in the pressbooks, a look at
this material gives us an idea of how these lms were discussed and evalu-
ated by mainstream critics,
17
sheds light on the reading protocols and critical
tastes of the time,
18
and, more generally, places these critical responses in their
wider historical and cultural context. These are documents that also, in some
instances, describe cinemagoers responses to individual lms and the genre
in general, information which would otherwise only be accessible through
ethnographic research that has yet to be undertaken. We know, for instance,
that during the screening of La noche de Walpurgis on 16 May 1971, at the
Fuencarral cinema in Madrid, many spectators clapped spontaneously [in
response to specic sequences] and at the end of the lm (Anon. 1971d) and
that the few spectators who attended one of the screenings of Klimovskys
Odio mi cuerpo in that same venue on 10 June 1974
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THE SPANISH HORROR BOOM: 196875
25
laughed a lot, particularly during those erotic scenes in which the image
of the male character, whose brain had been transplanted on to the female
character, is superimposed on to the image of the female protagonist
resulting in bizarre moments of homosexuality. (Arroita-Jaregui 1974)
It is possible to identify a series of recurrent themes surfacing in reviews.
In the context of the endemic crisis of the Spanish lm industry and the con-
straints imposed by the censorship board, references to economic and institu-
tional matters were common. Many critics commented on the commercial and
popular success of the genre, expressing their preoccupation with the subge-
neric status of most horror products, while many others overtly condemned
its pursuit of prot and its cheap mode of production. Engagement or lack
of engagement with the textual features of the genre made for very different
interpretations and judgements. But perhaps the most consistent interpretive
frames were those which labelled horror lms as mindless, repetitious fodder
for the masses and explained horror narratives as reections of social (read
sexual) repression.
The initial reception of Spanish horror cinema in the industry magazines
and the daily press was, to a certain extent, welcoming and encouraging
as to the commercial and cultural possibilities of the genre, but individual
lms were heavily criticised for their slipshod mode of production and their
exploitative aesthetics. La marca del hombre lobo was a frustrated lm on
many narrative and stylistic levels, since it accumulates with some simplicity
[. . .] all the primary elements of the horror genre (Martialay 1971), wrote El
Alczar. However, Eguluzs lm suggested interesting thematic and generic
possibilities embodied in the evident effeminate streak of the character played
by actor Ugarte [vampire Janos Mikhelov] (Martialay 1971), which added an
original homoerotic undertone worthy of note. La furia del hombre lobo (Jos
Mara Zabalza 1970), which was not released until 1972, admittedly suffered
from visible budget and time constraints low budget [. . .], a hasty shooting
schedule [and] poor production values, although the reviewer conceded in a
receptive mood that there was enough evidence of the necessary foundations
for future projects, which, with better nancial backing, would yield more
satisfactory results for the genre (Pelez 1973a). A year earlier, La noche
de terror ciego had offered a completely new experience to audiences and
marked new directions with the horric creations of de Ossorio, the Knights
Templar, whose slow-motion movements and ghastly look were described as
accomplished moments of spectacle (Anon. 1972c) by the Pueblo reviewer.

The initial novelty of de Ossorios characters and special effects soon wore off
when three sequels appeared in the following years, so that, by the time that La
noche de las gaviotas was exhibited in 1976, one critic summed up his views on
the Knights Templar saga thus:
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SPANISH HORROR FILM
26
the truth is that the rst lm of the cycle captured our attention in its
brilliant use and characterization of the cadaverous characters. But since
then Amando de Ossorio has been resting on his laurels, repeating time
and again the same effects. (Pelez 1976)
Innovation and repetition were two aspects addressed in many a horror lm
review. Trade journal Cineinforme acknowledged in its brief review of Jos
Luis Merinos La orga de los muertos that
it is true that make-up and special effects are getting more successful with
every lm. It is also true that there is a small variation, no matter how
insignicant, from what we have seen the previous week. But all in all
everything is a repetition. However, taking into account that there is a
huge sector of the public who really enjoys this type of production, one
has no other option than to admit that they are still commercially success-
ful. After all, their main goal is to entertain. (Anon. 1975b)
While the journalist reluctantly showed a certain resignation regarding the
popular success of the genre, his nal comment revealed a dismissive attitude
towards popular lm as just entertainment. Yet it is precisely in the said small
variation that the interest lay for the horror lm consumer, who already knew
the plots and structures, was familiar with stock characters and images, and
recognised patterns of meaning. What becomes important for many horror
audiences and fans is how the lm reworks and exceeds the textual features of
the genre.
A clear example of the different meanings which lms had for critics and
audiences was the work of Paul Naschy, whose commercial success was hardly
matched by critical acclaim; in fact, many Paul Naschy commercial vehicles
were panned by reviewers. In his review of Jack el destripador de Londres
/ Seven Murders for Scotland Yard (Jos Luis Madrid 1973), Miguel Rubio
wrote that any relation between this lm (?) and cinema is pure coincidence
[. . .] I can understand that this lm was made but it is beyond my compre-
hension that it is being distributed and that some cinemas are prepared to
exhibit it (1972a); La rebelin de las muertas / Vengeance of the Zombies
(Len Klimovsky 1972) could only be described as puerile and idiotic fare
(Anon. 1973b) by the Pueblo reviewer; El espanto surge de la tumba (Carlos
Aured 1973) deserved no other comment than silence (1973) for the Arriba
reviewer; and after the release of Exorcismo one critic warned La Vanguardia
readers that the Devil, conspiring with producers and distributors, will be
among us for a long time and closed his review with a God help us! (1975).
19
But the more hostile dismissals of Spanish horror lms and of subgeneric
cinema in general came from sources associated with oppositional politics
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THE SPANISH HORROR BOOM: 196875
27
and art-lmmaking practices: namely, the School of Barcelona. Two examples
of such critical interventions will be considered here: rstly, journalist Jaume
Picas reviewing a Jess Franco lm for Nuevo Fotogramas, and, secondly,
media sociologist and lm historian Romn Gubern writing on Spanish sub-
generic cinema in the preface to Cine espaol, cine de subgneros (1974),
co-authored by the Equipo Cartelera Turia (Juan Manuel Company, Vicente
Vergara, Juan de Mata Moncho and Jos Vanaclocha), a pioneering volume
devoted to Spanish subgeneric lm products such as the spaghetti western
(or paella western), the musical, the sexy Iberian comedy and the Spanish
horror lm.
20
The evaluations and reactions of critics can be seen as authentic,
individual subjective responses to lms; however, Picas and Gubern display a
signicant performative element with a specic agenda in mind.
The reader will think that Jess Francos lm [El proceso de la brujas
/ Night of the Blood Monster (1970)] is just an excuse to pose a series
of grave issues affecting Spanish cinema. And my reply to the reader is
afrmative,
confesses Picas in Nuevo Fotogramas. Where is the relevance in talking about
a minor, ridiculous lm, which lacks in interest and is nothing other than a
grotesque product?, the critic continues. And, punning on the title of the lm
(literally, Trial of the Witches), he claims that the real witch hunting is hap-
pening within the Spanish lm industry because current lm legislation makes
the existence of auteur cinema an impossibility, as the failure of the NCE and
the prohibition to exhibit many School of Barcelona lms had demonstrated
(1971a: 39). Picass diatribe was a vehicle enabling him to articulate his views
on the state of the Spanish lm industry and the directions that Spanish cinema
ought to take.
More damning for subsequent considerations of Spanish horror cinema were
Guberns introductory remarks on subgeneric production for the co-edited
volume Cine espaol, cine de subgneros, which was published in the heyday
of horror lmmaking. The book examines Spanish popular genres through the
lter of subgneros, or sub-genres: a term used here to classify Spanish genre
lmmaking as subpar to American and European genres (Beck and Rodrguez-
Ortega 2008: 5). Guberns preface is followed by a chapter entitled El rito
y la sangre. Aproximaciones al subterror hispano (Company 1974: 1776),
the rst study of Spanish horror lm. In the preface Gubern articulated his
views on all forms of subgeneric cinema around the prex sub-, which stands
both for subgenre and a subnormal [person] (1974: 12), the latter echoing
Garca Escuderos description of popular lm consumers as bad audiences.
Guberns linguistic explanation was not limited to dening a mode of produc-
tion and a type of audience, crudely marked as artistically and intellectually
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SPANISH HORROR FILM
28
inferior, but also reached sites of exhibition and critical reception. For him
this type of cinema is destined for specialist sub-cinemas, comparable to
porno-cinemas (which do not yet exist in Spain) (1974: 13), to be found in
Pigalle in Paris, Soho in London and the ea-pits of 8th Avenue in New York.
This preface to the volume encapsulated a series of critical discourses that
were being rehearsed in contemporary mainstream criticism and that would
become typical of subsequent academic histories of Spanish cinema. Guberns
prophesy this insubstantial Spanish lmic production will never make it into
histories of Spanish cinema, unless it is dealt with in a succinct footnote (1974:
16) held sway until very recently. The critical discourses at work in Guberns
observations had wide-ranging generic, thematic, ideological and sociological
implications.
According to Gubern, Spanish horror lms are mimetic and repetitive prod-
ucts in their imitation of previous models [German expressionism, Universal
Pictures and Hammer lms], which are also repetitive but have at least a
genuine and autochthonous cultural character (1974: 13). In his chapter El
rito y la sangre, Company reiterated Guberns interpretation by stating that,
in Spanish horror lms, the deterioration and trivialisation of the linguistic
codes of the American genre cinemas has reached unimaginable heights or
rather depths (1974: 50). Unlike British horror cinema, which could claim
a heritage of horror to use David Piries expression from his seminal 1973
study on British horror cinema, A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic
Cinema 19461972 steeped in Gothic literature, Spanish horror was rooted
in neither an autochthonous literary tradition nor a local cinematic tradition.
By not being associated with a literary tradition, the genre could not be artisti-
cally or aesthetically legitimated and attain respectability. Horror for Gubern
and Company, therefore, was not peculiarly Spanish. Subsequently, some lm
historians have even categorised the horror genre as non-Spanish (Garca
Fernndez 1992: 22). The Spanish disposition is fundamentally realist (1971:
12), wrote Guarner in Spanish Speaking Terror . . ., a claim that would be
seconded by Picas, Gubern and Company in their critical privileging of a
realist aesthetic. If these cinematic forms had any relevance at all, its signi-
cance had to be consigned to the realm of sociological interest, thus Guberns
declaration that his real interest in subgeneric production came from his posi-
tion as mass media sociologist (1974: 11) and his distancing from consumers
of subgeneric cinema (I am a very occasional consumer (1974: 12)). Spanish
horror lms are dismissed as disreputable commercial products and described
as conformist and dupe entertainment for the popular masses, more speci-
cally for male proletarian audiences, for the horror genre is a misogynist genre
made by men and for men (1974: 13). But the Spanish lm industry as a
whole could be described thus. Moreover, this male domination, or to use
Guberns words, [lms] made by men and for men, could arguably describe
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art-quality and experimental cinema, made by male directors and exhibited
and consumed in the masculinised space of cine-clubs and art-house cinemas,
which these very same critics frequented.
It is here that we return to the quotation with which we opened this
chapter: Spanish horror lms are a crude reection of an escapism, which
unconsciously reveals the [repressive] social situation of the country (in Cine
para leer 1974: 22). For Gubern, the representation and mythologisation of
sex and power, which are at the centre of subgeneric products, are sympto-
matic of wider social issues like frustrated collective desires or real lacks in
the spectator (Gubern 1974: 15). Companys study exemplies these views
in relation to horror lms, which are just another example of the reaction-
ary ideological chain that informs all our sub-cinema (1974: 69). Whether
the main protagonist is Dracula, a hunchback, a werewolf or the living
dead, Company argued, the textual and ideological schema common to local
horror production is repression. In order to illustrate his theoretical position,
Company analyses the works of Naschy and de Ossorio. All Naschy charac-
ters respond to a self divided and torn between good and evil. The narrative
pattern is simple: a beautiful and candid female character, who embodies
values such as love, purity and goodness, falls irredeemably in love with the
Naschy character. Their erotic encounter is never fullled, being displaced on
to other objects and characters and sublimated into scenes of an S&M nature.
Finally, their love is annihilated by a destructive force within the male char-
acter (1974: 5161, 67). De Ossorios lms always present a confrontation
between tradition (the Knights Templar in La noche del terror ciego, Lorelei
in Las garras de Lorelei / The Loreleis Grasp (1974) or voodoo cults in La
noche de los brujos / Night of the Sorcerers (1973)) and a series of modern
elements personied in heterosexual relationships (love affairs, eroticism,
sexual perversions) which lead to violent punishments in the form of blood-
shed or death. Chapter 2 explores this rift between the past and the present in
a different manner. The consumption of these horror lms, argued Company,
acts as a sublimation of repressed and unsatised sexual needs, which has an
exorcising and gratifying function. Spanish horror audiences, therefore, if the
argument is to be followed to its logical conclusion, harboured basic repres-
sions which needed gratifying. And Company, as critic turned sociologist and
psychoanalyst, observes that the behavioural pattern of subgeneric audiences,
whether they are watching a martial arts movie or a horror movie, responded
to such sublimation:
there is a general uproar because of the photogenic virtuosities of the
lm (the equivalent of Bruce Lee moves are the zombies marching to the
rhythm of music [. . .] in La rebelin de las muertas) and everybody is
holding their breath religiously when beheadings, gushes of blood and
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eyes coming out of their sockets ll the screen. Sexual repression has been
sublimated into aggression. (1974: 69)
These studies offer a valuable barometer of the critical landscape against
which the genre was considered from certain academic and journalistic quar-
ters. In the specic historical and political context of late Francoism, these
critical acts have to be understood as political and ideological needs of the
moment: an oppositional culture inuenced by Marxism, critiques of mass
culture, and contemporary understandings of reactionary and progressive
texts. But this does not mean that their critical operations should not be ques-
tioned, for what is at stake here is an important aspect of Spanish popular
culture, popular lm, enjoyed and consumed by a large number of Spaniards.
By condemning Spanish horror lm for its commercial nature, they privileged
the political (and cultural) economy sustaining legitimate cinema; by staking
out a bourgeois conception of cinema, they excluded genre and subgenre lm
production from accounts of Spanish national cinema; by signifying cultural
hierarchies of aesthetic value, they established an aesthetic order that is deeply
entrenched in narratives of Spanish lm history; and, by positioning them-
selves as guardians of taste, they ignored other ways in which audiences used
and made meanings from the commodities they consume.
Aesthetically and ideologically, therefore, the horror genre did not t within
established cinematic trends in Spain. Horror lms did not form part of the
more respectable art-cinema represented by the Nuevo Cine Espaol, which
received ofcial and critical support. Nor could it be easily related to the aes-
thetics prevalent in other forms of Spanish popular cinema (musicals, melodra-
mas or comedies).
21
Both cinematic visions privileged a realist aesthetic mode
which was promoted, as we have seen, by ofcial institutions and the industry,
and, in turn, policed by critics, and which came to represent the national
cinema by their defenders and deemed non-representative of the nation by
their detractors (Triana-Toribio 2003: 71). Neither rooted in local cinematic
traditions nor apt as a vehicle for the representation of real Spanish themes
and concerns, Spanish horror lm merely amounted to a mimetic relationship
to its (superior) American and European counterparts and was systematically
devalued by mainstream criticism. By not being peculiarly Spanish, the horror
genre was far removed from the distinctive Spanish reality portrayed in
contemporary cinematic models and cast out from Spanish lm historiography.
Yet Spanish horror lm of this period established a dialogue with inter-
national horror traditions by engaging economically and generically with
other horror commodities in the marketplace and sharing the modes of
production and aesthetic attributes typical of exploitation and genre lmmak-
ing. Sometimes this dialogue took the form of cheap, exploitative imitations; at
other times, higher production values yielded lms that made critics react with
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statements such as this doesnt look like a Spanish lm. Either way, Spanish
horror lms displayed thematic, generic and cultural specicities, which
offered something different to national and international horror audiences. It
is important, therefore, to recognise that Spanish horror lms were as much
the product of their context of production as the product of international
market differentiation.
The Cinematic Riches of Horror
The exploitative richness of Spanish horror production has been untapped.
Like any other popular genre, the commercial realities of horror are exploited
in the processes of production, marketing, distribution and consumption.
Indigenous horror lms presented audiences not only with a familiar stock
of horror iconography but also, in many cases, with the promise of taboo,
shocking or forbidden subjects, which were duly exploited in the marketing
of and publicity for the lms. In the context of mid-1960s apertura (liberalisa-
tion), Spanish horror lms did not differ radically from other lm commodities
in their representation of sexuality and sexual desires. Popular lm genres
comedies and melodramas and art-house lms both exploited sexual imagery
and various taboo subjects within the constraints imposed by censorship.
Conceived as NCE quality cinema, La ta Tula / Aunt Tula (Miguel Picazo
1964) and Nueve cartas a Berta / Nine Letters to Bertha (Basilio Martn Patino
1965), for example, relied on the display of sexuality for their advertising cam-
paigns. The photographic image of a woman in her lingerie studiously fasten-
ing her suspender and stocking was used as one of the publicity posters for La
ta Tula to represent the main female protagonist Tula, a sexually repressed
spinster in a provincial Spanish town;
22
other posters depict the image of
Ramiro, Tulas brother-in-law, forcing himself upon her. Nueve cartas a Berta
presented a young heterosexual couple kissing passionately, a de rigueur image
in the publicity of many a European New Wave lm, in particular French
ones. The avant-garde lm movement known as the Barcelona School used
the bodies of actresses Serena Vergano, Romy (Carmen Romero) or Teresa
Gimpera, whose physique responded to contemporary canons of beauty in the
worlds of fashion and advertising, as marketing attractions for many of their
projects. At the other end of the exploitative spectrum, the popular Iberian
sex comedy traded in female imagery and sexual titillation, using cartoon-
like representations as the predominant visual idiom. The promotional poster
for No desears al vecino del quinto / Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Fifth Floor
Neighbour (Ramn Fernndez 1970), for example, depicts a caricature of a
highly effeminate gay dressmaker anked by two female clients who have
stripped down to their sexy underwear. Lo verde empieza en los Pirineos
(Vicente Escriv 1973) combined comedy and naughtiness in equal measure.
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It ironically captured the real journeys of (male) Spaniards to France to watch
lms which were banned in Spain for their adult content. The publicity poster
reproduced a map of the the Iberian peninsula shot through by caravans of
cars and coaches heading towards the French border and three middle-aged
males in the foreground running eagerly towards the Pyrenees, whose green
and snowy peaks offer pleasurable rewards to the average male Spaniard: six
attractive women hold signs to a world of adult entertainment (cabarets, night-
clubs, sex shops, and two lms banned from Spanish screens, A Clockwork
Orange (Stanley Kubrick 1971) and Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci
1972)).
While Spanish horror lms partake of the general permissiveness to reveal
(parts of) the body and exploit the imaging of sexuality, the sale and marketing
of 1970s horror must also be linked to a long-standing tradition of classical
exploitation tactics
23
and consumption practices of popular genre lms. As
consumers of genre products, lmgoers were used to recognising conventions
and interpreting familiar images and motifs, and expected a variety of emo-
tional and physical pleasures. There is a wealth of advertising and promotional
material that enables us to document the ways in which Spanish horror lms
were sold to Spanish audiences and the ways in which they circulated and
were consumed. A more complex picture emerges away from home, where
some Spanish horror lms played at drive-in cinemas on the US exploitation
circuit and many others led a more disreputable and sleazy life in adult and
sexploitation cinema circuits in Europe and the US. Foreign distributors, in
particular Italian, French and American, used more provocative and daring
ads to sell these products on their respective exhibition circuits. Jess Franco
was the rst Spanish lmmaker to break into these specialised international
markets. One of the specialised exhibition markets he entered was the Times
Square grindhouse circuit in New York. Here his Succubus (also known as
Necronomicn (1967)) was hailed as THE sensual experience of 69, pack-
aged as Eurosex and given an X rating. According to exploitation lm histori-
ans Landis and Clifford, the lm beneted enormously at the box ofce from
the fact that it was among the rst [lms] to be awarded X tags and from
its stylish ad campaign [. . .] designed and funded by the lms producer, Pier
A. Caminnecci (2002: 17980), which simultaneously promised the bizarre
and the sophisticated in a typical juxtaposition of exploitation and European
art-house selling ploys: Because of the unusual nature of the title, we suggest
you call . . . for the full meaning so that you will not be surprised by the sophis-
ticated subject matter of the lm. In France the adult content was suggested
visually by a sadomasochistic image of a dominant female character ready to
crack a whip and the phrase de la perversion jusquau sadisme!.
24
Titles and print material have always been key ingredients in the sale of
horror. Trailers usually completed the initial commercial campaign. Gimmicks
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THE SPANISH HORROR BOOM: 196875
33
and other classical exploitation tactics in exhibition sites such as ambulances
parked outside the cinema door or rst aid stretchers in the lobby were also
used before and during the lms theatrical release. Throughout the 1960s
there were some established Spanish distribution companies which promoted
this latter aspect of lm marketing and exhibition. Mercurio Films S. A. pro-
duced a lavish, detailed pressbook for Miss Muerte / The Diabolical Dr Z
(Jess Franco 1966), suggesting ways in which the lm might lure audiences
into the cinemas. Promotional campaigns covering various media and resort-
ing to a variety of selling ploys, were hardly within the economic means of the
average Spanish producer, distributor and exhibitor during the boom period;
instead, the sale of horror had to rely mainly on print material and pressbooks
that producers sold or rented to distributors and exhibitors to back the adver-
tising and publicity campaigns of lms. The marketing material under analysis
in this nal section reects the diversity of Spanish horror production and the
contemporary international cinematic trends to which they relate. In order
to include a wide range of marketing tactics deployed by producers, I look
at the press materials used to advertise a number of Francos lms and the
horror output of production company Prolmes S. A., grouping the material
around three different manifestations of horror: rstly, those lms which had
a classic monster at the centre of their marketing campaigns, more specically
Dracula and Frankenstein as seen by Franco; secondly, those Franco products
which exploited the sale of horror and sex; and, nally, a group of horror and
horror-related lms produced by Prolmes S. A., whose advertising strategies
mobilised different generic features targeting different audiences. There is a
common thread running through these visual materials: namely, the work of
illustrator Jano (Francisco Fernndez-Zarza Prez (192292)), the creator of
many horror lm posters throughout this period. Janos signature appears
in the publicity material of the works to be analysed: El Conde Drcula,
Drcula contra Frankenstein, Bsame, monstruo / Kiss Me, Monster (1969),
99 mujeres, Las vampiras, El espanto surge de la tumba and Los ojos azules de
la mueca rota / Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll (Carlos Aured 1973).
25
The pressbook for prospective Spanish distributors and exhibitors of
Francos El Conde Drcula will give the reader an idea of the publicity material
on offer: for sale, one-sheet posters, two-sheet posters, leaets, colour press-
books; for hire, colour trailer, colour blow-up stills, colour standard stills,
press stills, press releases and two types of print, 70 m/m. Super-Panorama
and 35 m/m. Cinemascope. Apart from the visual material available for pur-
chase or hire, the pressbook provided written information about the lm in the
form of plot synopsis, credit listings, news items (gacetillas de prensa), to be
planted in local and national newspapers, and a selection of publicity slogans
and stills for the marketing campaigns and for displays on cinema fronts and
in lobbies. Ready-made slogans to be adapted to specic venues and playing
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34
dates were also available. Stock lines which have served to advertise horror
lms time and again all over the world found their Spanish equivalent in the
pressbooks. Foreign and local products were put on the same marketing level
and shared long-established advertising tactics, whether one was tempted
by a foreign horror lm like Terence Fishers The Curse of Frankenstein (La
maldicin de Frankenstein in Spain), advertised as The most terrifying of
all times, or contemporary Spanish horror products like Francos El Conde
Drcula The culminating work of horror and suspense or Aureds El
espanto surge de la tumba Horror cinema has been surpassed in this most
horrifying lm. Hyperbolic excess also reached extraordinary heights with
some Spanish producers and distributors; Drcula contra Frankenstein was
THE anthology of horror on cinema screens, the publicity for Los ojos azules
de la mueca rota advanced the proposal that The unexpected and the start-
ling have nally arrived to the horror genre, but perhaps the most preposter-
ous cutline was that for El buque maldito, A lm that has not been awarded
an Oscar because it was not entered in the Academy Awards.
Of course, Dracula, Frankenstein and the werewolf were internationally
established brand names. Audiences around the world were familiar with these
classic horror archetypes and knew more or less what to expect from the latest
remake. The most obvious exploitation of the brand names in Spain is the
foregrounding of the monsters names. While Paul Naschy offered a distinc-
tive take on the werewolf in his debut as Waldemar Daninsky in La marca
del hombre lobo, establishing this character in a number of subsequent lm
episodes (see Chapter 2), the main two stars of the horror genre, Dracula and
Frankenstein, were seldom treated by Spanish lmmakers. It was only Franco
who tackled these two classical monsters in a horror cycle in the early 1970s,
with El Conde Drcula, Drcula contra Frankenstein (1971) and La maldicin
de Frankenstein (1972). Francos cycle established a visual dialogue with the
classic monsters Dracula and Frankenstein. In El Conde Drcula, Franco and
screenwriter Augusto Finocchi embarked upon the adaptation of Bram Stokers
novel. Producer and director proclaimed in the pressbook and in the lms
opening credits that their Count Dracula was the rst faithful adaptation
of Bram Stokers original Count Dracula, hence different from any previous
Dracula lm version. The announced literary respectability of this Spanish
GermanItalian co-production would be endorsed by critics. In large part, cin-
ematic respectability came in the form of Christopher Lee, who had become an
established horror star since his success in Hammers Dracula (Terence Fisher
1957).
26
A sense of loyalty to and love for Bram Stokers original work came
with Lee, whose collaboration was itself expressive of his much-publicised
dissatisfaction (in trade journals, mainstream publications and monster-movie
magazines throughout the 1960s) with the Hammer conception of the vampire
and of his stated desire to take part in a lmic project that would faithfully
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THE SPANISH HORROR BOOM: 196875
35
resemble Bram Stokers book. The producers and Francos claims to be true
to the original were therefore embodied and conrmed in the gure of Lee,
who lent the lm authenticity, his powerfully erotic and predatory rendition of
the Count polished in the Hammer Dracula series and, above all, guarantee-
ing international sales.
27
Lee was the main selling point, as his central position
in posters told distributors, exhibitors and lmgoers.
28
The lms letter of
introduction in the pressbook is a gentlemanly portrait of Lee, hoary-headed
and moustached, his face illuminated by the candelabrum he holds aloft. The
title El Conde Drcula, in Gothic lettering below his image, denotes his aris-
tocratic status in the world of horror lm. Contemporary reviews echoed the
lms main selling assets, Christopher Lee and the various lmic reimaginings
of the Count. One critic recommends the lm to Dracula fans in general, those
spectators who are familiar with Dracula and its different lmic versions
(Crespo 1973a), whereas another critic observes that the main attraction lies
in the actor playing Dracula:
Christopher Lee has proven his skills to play the character and many
horror fans reckon that he is better than Lugosi. As we know, these com-
petitions between vampires attract spectators, who remember the differ-
ent actors and directors in Draculas Daughter [Lambert Hyllier 1936],
The Return of the Vampire [Lew Landers 1944], House of Dracula [Erle
C. Kenton 1945], The Brides of Dracula [Terence Fisher 1960], and
others. (de Obregn 1973)
If Lees presence was not enough for contemporary male and female audi-
ences, the poster artwork also reminded lmgoers of Francos erotic brand of
horror by displaying a female gure whose nakedness is tantalisingly hidden
(just) behind loosely held furs, perhaps a subtle visual reference to his 1969
Venus in Furs and the unnerving presence of Klaus Kinski, who had already
collaborated with Franco in Eugenie / Eugnie . . . The Story of Her Journey
into Perversion (1969), both lms free adaptations of Leopold von Sacher-
Masochs novels (see Figure 4). None the less, the portrait of Lee becomes the
focal point of all the posters, complemented by the recurrent Dracula imagery
of cofns, stakes and incisions. Dracula fans were guaranteed the main ingre-
dients of the myth (An old castle . . . A ock of bats ying in the night . . . And
Dracula transformed into a horrifying bat seeking the blood he needs to live
on) and the affective qualities of horror (Fear, shivers and terror! A fantastic
and beguiling spectacle that will test if you can keep your nerve).
Producers and publicists have exploited the popular Dracula character,
which, as Hutchings has argued, is a focus for cultural and economic activ-
ity as lm-makers periodically seek to resurrect the vampire in a form that
will be both interesting and protable (2004: 44).
29
For the second lm in
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SPANISH HORROR FILM
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Figure 4 Illustrator Jano brought together the key generic markers of horror in El
Conde Drculas ofcial poster.
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THE SPANISH HORROR BOOM: 196875
37
the series, Franco resurrected and confronted two monsters, Drcula contra
Frankenstein, and moved from the canon of Gothic literature to the pulp
literature of kiosks. As an economic venture, the project was part of the lm-
makers association with French producer Robert de Nesle from Comptoir
Films to produce a numbers of lms at low cost, using the same technical
crew and cast (Howard Vernon, Alberto Dalbs, Britt Nichols, Anne Libert,
Luis Barboo, Fernando Bilbao, Doris Thomas), and the same locations and
sets, based around similar plots and stock characters. The distribution of cold
and hot versions was a key production strategy, as the explicitness of some of
the international titles attests: Les Dmons / The Sex Demons / She-Demons
(1973 as Clifford Brown),
30
La maldicin de Frankenstein / Les Expriences
rotiques de Frankenstein / The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein (1972) and La
hija de Drcula / La Fille de Dracula / Daughter of Dracula (1972). Culturally,
Drcula contra Frankenstein was a homage to the lms of Lon Chaney, Boris
Karloff and Bela Lugosi, and also to comics. Franco moves away from the
literary exercise of retelling Stokers novel and returns to the popular visual
representations of the monster archetypes, as depicted in Universal lms and
comic magazines. As Franco himself acknowledged in the pressbook, the lm
was conceived as a comic-strip. A silent comic full of monsters. And full of
monsters it is. Besides the eponymous monsters of the title, there is a hoard
of female vampires, a werewolf, and the deformed assistant to a scientist, Dr
Steward, whose sole obsession is to see the world rid of monsters. Silent it is,
too, since dialogues, in actual fact, were minimal the script reduced merely
to a couple of pages. Drcula contra Frankenstein is a strip of classic horror
conventions, motifs, images and moments, and the comic idiom and the classic
monster-movie imagery are captured in Janos designs for the promotional
material (see Figure 5). The lm title follows the old-fashioned hand-lettered
titling of classical horror lms, while the monsters are depicted in all their
Gothic splendour, as they appeared in Universal posters, or the pages of
popular horror comics such as Creepy and popular horror movie magazines
like Famous Monsters of Filmland. The drawing of Frankenstein conjures up
the gigantic gure of Karloff in the Universal incarnations of the creature,
whereas a close-up of Dracula, half-enveloped in shadows and surrounded
by bats, peering menacingly, fangs ready for his next prey. The return of
Dracula and Frankenstein, announced the pressbook, is a veritable anthology
of horror cinema, thus placing the lm in the tradition of Universals 1940s
monster rallies. Press releases emphasised how the lm was working within
this tradition, while at the same time it offered something different to what had
gone before: Franco not only brings together a myriad of scenes from all the
previous lms featuring these two sinister characters but also provides genre
enthusiasts with new and hitherto unseen sequences. Rather like the opening
text-box in a comic, which is used to frame the action, the plot synopsis in
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Figure 5 llustrator Janos take on two classical monsters in Jess Francos Drcula
contra Frankenstein.
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THE SPANISH HORROR BOOM: 196875
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the pressbook was preceded by a quotation (also used as a voiceover in the
opening credits) attributed to a certain David H. Klunne:
The vampire, sinister dweller of the night, was resting in his eternal sleep,
when DOCTOR FRANKENSTEIN, attempted to take possession of him.
A ght between these two Titans of Death broke out, awakened other
monsters from their state of lethargy, like an other-worldly and devastat-
ing chorus.
David H. Klunne was none other than a pseudonym used by Franco. The press-
book for Drcula contra Frankenstein therefore draws very self-consciously on
old mythologies, genre stereotypes, the history of horror cinema itself, and
comic aesthetics. Drcula contra Frankenstein offered a multi-monster narra-
tive, which, while drawing upon universally familiar characters, engaged in a
process of product differentiation that exceeded the expectations of domestic
and international audiences.
The advertising of Francos Bsame, monstruo sends up classical monsters
Dracula . . . Frankenstein . . . the werewolf . . . How candid they are! Beautiful
women are really terrible when it comes to taking possession of the perfect
man and brings an altogether different type of monster to the attention of
Spanish audiences: beautiful women who use ALL sorts of weapons in their
search for the magic formula to make the perfect man. Released in Spain in
1970,
31
the lm combined women detectives, mad scientists, deformed assis-
tants and mutant supermen. Female monstrosity was the speciality of Franco,
whether in spoofs of the spy genre, female vampire lms or women-in-prison
movies. It would be disingenuous to deny Francos commercial exploitation of
images of female sexuality. And the label of pornographer that was attached
to Franco would never leave him. But it would be imperceptive to shut ones
eyes to the ways in which his representations of female characters departed
from conventional gender stereotypes in the context of contemporary Spanish
cinema, as I discuss in Chapter 2. On the one hand, the spectacle of the female
body must be related to the commercial exploitation of female sexuality (sex-
ploitation); on the other hand, it can be read as a counterpoint to the dominant
images of women within horror lms, as mere love interests for the male pro-
tagonists
32
or as the passive victims of horror crimes. Bsame, monstruo also
sent up the Bond girl stereotype and contemporary spy movies, and reinscribed
the iconography of these popular genres into sites of female pleasure. The
publicity material made the most of the statuesque bodies of Janine Reynaud
and Rosana Yanni, and was meant to function as eye stoppers.
33
The one-
sheet poster designed by Jano showed pop-art representations of two young
women in short mini-skirts and low-cut tops, sporting weapons in a very
Bond-girl pose (see Figure 6). Other posters playfully subverted exploitative
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Figure 6 Eye-stoppers at work in Janos poster for Bsame, monstruo.
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THE SPANISH HORROR BOOM: 196875
41
female imagery; depicting the lms male zombie mutants as beefy bodybuild-
ers, almost like replicas of magazine advertisements promising the perfect male
body, the male body is objectied since the dwarfed, scantily clad male model
is easy prey for the female detectives.
Franco and Jano were consummate connoisseurs of popular lmic tradi-
tions, contemporary subgenre production cycles and pulp ction imagery. Las
vampiras and 99 mujeres drew on the openly exploitative nature of horror for
their marketing campaigns. The exploitative aspects of 99 mujeres were already
built into the title. The advertising offered the promise of multiple women on
display, playing with imagery from the subgenre of women-in-prison lms
the attractive and probably wrongfully imprisoned young woman, the sadistic,
menacing warden, and the no less menacing, aggressive inmates. Some press
releases and taglines moved away from erotic adventuring, sadomasochistic
scenarios and hints of lesbianism, and promoted the lm as a drama in which
the prison acts as a backdrop against which human relationships are explored;
by framing the lm in melodramatic terms (99 women, each and every one
of them with their dramatic past, and nothing but a tragic future), a broader
audience could be reached. In the early 1970s, a time when female vampires
were getting their commercial teeth into audiences across Europe, Franco con-
tributed to the female vampire exploitation cycle with Las vampiras, which
was not released theatrically in Spain until May 1974.
34
Franco shifted the
emphasis to the feminine with a narrative loosely inspired by Bram Stokers
short story Draculass Guest. The advertising material played up the direc-
tors fame as pornographer and traded on the sadomasochistic iconography.
The one-sheet poster for Las vampiras depicted a Gothic necro-tableau: the
ecstatic face of a female vampire in the foreground alongside the body of a
young woman lying (in implicit post-coital languor) on a slab (see Figure 7).
This mise-en-scne of desire and death alludes to forbidden sexual practices
and promises sophisticated adult entertainment since the scenario might also
be read as an erotic show.
35
The all-female Gothic scenario invited the male
heterosexual viewer to pleasures voyeurism, fetishism and S&M other than
the ones usually associated with vampire lms. The publicity taglines, on the
other hand, played up the mysteriousness and sinisterness of vampirism (The
black curtains of mystery are drawn back, laying bare the sinister image of
vampirism) and focused on predatory relationships (Like the innocent but-
tery she was trapped in the web of the scorpion). Critics, however, focused
neither on atmospherics nor on the libidinal dynamics of the lm. In Las
vampiras, Franco [is] bordering on the pornographic and responding to the
demands of a certain international market not particularly bothered about
aesthetic standards (Pelez 1974b).
Takes on classic monsters and low-budget or semi-art horror variants of the
female vampire subgenre, as well as other manifestations of horror, were just
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Figure 7 Jano captured Jess Francos distinctive brand of horror and erotica in Las
vampiras.
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part of the cinematic offering dished up for Spanish audiences. In this com-
petitive milieu, producers and distributors had to differentiate their products
from other horror lms. By offering a range of generic pleasures, Prolmes
S. A. sought to nd a niche in the horror marketplace. In order to appeal to
a broad cross-section of cinematic tastes, Prolmes marketing campaigns
for individual lms evoked different generic categories. Most of their output
shared a number of production and advertising strategies destined to attract
different segments of the audience. Such is the case with a group of lms in
which Moz Suay and Prez Giner joined forces with up-and-coming Spanish
horror star Jacinto Molina: La rebelin de las muertas, El espanto surge de
la tumba, Los ojos azules de la mueca rota, Una liblula para cada muerto
/ A Dragony for Each Corpse (Len Klimovsky 1973) and Exorcismo.
36
All
these lms featured Jacinto Molina both as scriptwriter and protagonist under
his artistic name Paul Naschy. They were all set in international locations,
offered reworkings of successful horror cycles, and presented narratives and
stock characters that were highly recognisable for domestic and international
audiences. Prolmes promoted these production strategies in their pressbooks
and posters by presenting a variety of modes of address to which domestic
audiences could easily respond. Audiences, in turn, could consider these lms
in relation to each other and in relation to other contemporary Naschy prod-
ucts.
37
Moreover, when the movies were read alongside each other, audiences
could also place them in relation to different international horror cycles of the
1960s and early 1970s, like the gialli, the living dead genre or The Exorcist
phenomenon, and consume them in an intertextual way.
Naschys mere appearance designated the horror genre, even though he
appeared in roles that were different from his werewolf trademark: a double
act in La rebelin de las muertas, in which he plays Krisna, a London-based
Hindu guru, and his raving mad, disgured brother; another double act in El
espanto surge de la tumba, where he embodies both a resurrected fteenth-cen-
tury French knight (Alaric), sentenced to death because of his hideous crimes
and seeking revenge for his family in contemporary France, and a Parisian pro-
fessional (Hugo), who is a direct descendant of the knight; in Los ojos azules
de la mueca rota, ex-con Gilles imprisoned because of a rape attempt and
looking to start a new life in the idyllic French countryside; the tough Milanese
police inspector Paolo Saaporella in Una liblula para cada muerto; and, in
Exorcismo, an English priest ghting against demonic forces in contempo-
rary London. Apart from signifying the horror genre, the producers pointed
towards other generic markers in the titles and the publicity material. While
La rebelin de las muertas and El espanto surge de la tumba positioned them-
selves in relation to the living dead / zombie subgenre, the titles Los ojos azules
de la mueca rota and Una liblula para cada muerto were clearly reminiscent
of the contemporary Italian giallo. Exorcismo announced itself as the Spanish
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Exorcist, even though Friedkins lm had not yet arrived on Spanish screens
due to censorship. Spanish audiences saw the imitation before the original.
In the international pressbooks, the image of Paul Naschy made way for
photographic stills of the lm. Spanish and English plot synopses destined for
the Latin American and American markets, respectively, occupied the central
pages. The front cover for El espanto surge de la tumba featured a medium
close-up of a blank-eyed member of the living dead against a dark background,
positing a direct relationship between the lm and the post-Night of the Living
Dead cycle so that international distributors and exhibitors could capitalise on
this successful commercial subgenre (see Figure 1). The back cover captured
a specic lmic moment where the knight Alaric, in his medieval attire, is
strangling one of his victims, dressed in contemporary clothes. Similarly, the
front cover for Exorcismo referred to the Exorcist phenomenon as a way of
driving the point home for international buyers: the tagline read, A theme
that has thrilled audiences all over the world, now terrifyingly set forth; in
the foreground, there is a demonic male face and a photograph of a possessed
female character. This and other stills reproduce key exorcist moments like
the possession of the sick young girl or the priest performing the exorcism. But,
for the Spanish market, Paul Naschy was the main selling point. For El espanto
surge de la tumba, the upper section of the Spanish one-sheet poster depicted
a female zombie about to claim her female victim, and a further two female
zombies in the sleep-walking postures typical of the subgenre to which the
lm belonged. The cast combined female beauty and sophistication with the
participation of Romy, the muse of the Barcelona School, and Mirta Miller,
while the names of male actors Paul Naschy and Vic Winner (also known as
Vctor Alczar) were readily associated with male-oriented genres, the horror
genre and the spaghetti western, respectively. The publicity lines supplied by
the producers a total of twenty-three mobilised a range of genre expecta-
tions and pleasures. The exotic and the erotic, the ancient and the modern
were brought together in this tagline: The ancient rites of African voodoo and
the secrets of Indian magic, with all their morbidness and eroticism, meet in
contemporary London. Horror and a constellation of terms associated with
horror were invoked in various taglines: Horror cinema through the paths of
black magic or Once they were dead they were revived as monstrous devils.
Other publicity taglines framed the lm as a revenge plot A revenge that
trespasses the limits of life and uses black magic to commit horric crimes
whereas on other occasions the murderer is gender-specic, a misogynistic psy-
cho-killer (He promised his revenge on all women or He murdered women
in order to use them after their death).
Los ojos azules de la mueca rota is a whodunnit with a twist, set in contem-
porary rural France. The arrival of Gilles (Paul Naschy), an ex-con convicted
of rape, in the region of Angers coincides with a spate of brutal murders which
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terrorise the area. All the victims are blonde, blue-eyed young females the
recurrent woman-as-doll clich of the horror tradition. The murderer slits
the victims throats and gouges out their eyes. Giles nds work as an odd-job
man in an isolated countryside house inhabited by three sisters: the sexually
repressed older sister Claude (Diana Lorys), the sexually insatiable Nicole (Eva
Len) and Yvette (Maria Perschy), who has been wheelchair-bound since she
suffered a traumatic accident. Their only contact with the outside world is a
doctor (Eduardo Calvo), who visits Yvette and Gilles, the presence of the latter
heightening the tensions between the sisters. When Nicole is murdered, the
local gendarmerie turn their attention to Gilles, hunting him down and killing
him. But when the dead body of Yvette is subsequently found, the gendarm-
eries investigations lead them to the doctor, who has been hypnotising Yvette
and inducing her to commit the murders. His motive: his visually impaired,
blonde, blue-eyed daughter had died in an operation due to the negligence of
a nurse. Most of the publicity for Los ojos azules de la mueca rota revolved
around the genres association with eyes watching horror (Clover 1992: 185).
In the pressbook, characters, locations, situations and mood were explicitly
linked to the THE EYES . . .. Three women tormented by their past and
always watched over by THE EYES . . . , read one tagline in reference to the
sisters. When [the killer] looked at THE EYES . . ., her / his sick mind was
transformed into that of a murderer thirsty for death described to audiences
the killers uncontrollable urges. The house, too, acquired human qualities
Death looked through THE EYES . . . from the dark corners of this gloomy
house. The pressbook generically dened the lm as horror cinema (Horror
lm has found a new approach, horric, horrendous and macabre), yet the
whodunnit structure is emphasised via references to the detective genre (The
police were unable to put an end to the perverse spate of crimes and discover
the motive behind them). The desire to nd the murderer and disclose the
motive for the murders was transferred to the lmgoer in a series of open ques-
tions that acted as publicity slogans: Why were the victims blonde, blue-eyed
girls? or What was the dreadful motive behind the perverse criminal wanting
the blue eyes of the victims? Critics responded to the generic classication
deployed by Prolmes in their promotional material, dening the lm as yet
another Spanish horror lm or classifying it more specically as psychologi-
cal horror. But they also positioned the lm in relation to the foreign cinematic
tradition of the gialli, a generic classication that was not addressed textually
in the pressbook. Santos Fontenla opened his review in Informaciones thus:
With a title la Italian, this is a new horror lm la Spanish, (1974: n.p.)
and Pelez admitted that, as an average Spanish genre product, Los ojos . . . is
superior to the vast majority of overtly pretentious and sensationalist Italian
gialli (1974: n.p.). The visual material designed by Jano, however, did mobi-
lise the iconography of the giallo format. The posters draw our attention to the
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Figure 8 Title and imagery la giallo in this Naschy vehicle, Los ojos azules de la
mueca rota.
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female cast (rather than to Naschy) and to the representation of multiple eyes
piercing the darkness, although it is ambivalent whether these are THE EYES
. . . of the all-seeing murderer, the eyes of the female victims, or a combination
of both or those of the audience. In his artwork for the one-sheet poster, Jano
combined drawings and photography. The drawings occupy the right-hand
side of the poster and feature a blonde, doll-like gure freefalling among four
pairs of eyes. Photographs of reaction shots of the three female characters ran
along the left-hand side: a scared Claude looking into the eyes of her attacker,
a traumatised-looking Yvette and a disdainful-looking Nicole. These reaction
shots convey the victimised female imagery characteristic of the Italian gialli
cycle, together with the lurking presence of a sadistic killer in the form of a
black-gloved hand clenching a knife in the bottom left-hand corner of the
poster, which subtly marked a threat coming from the outside (see Figure 8).
Prolmes, in association with local horror star Paul Naschy and the dexter-
ous hand of illustrator Jano, drew upon established iconography and generic
markers which catered for the expectations and tastes of domestic and interna-
tional audiences alike. The riches of Spanish horror lm advertising reveal the
cultural interaction between the different traditions of horror cinema and the
international nature of horror production, reception and consumption.
Notes
1. The association between horror lm and repression has come to dene an inuen-
tial critical approach to horror lm, which was theorised by Robin Wood in An
Introduction to the American Horror Film (1979) and The American Nightmare:
Horror in the 70s (1986). Here Wood argued that horror monsters are expressions
of social and psychological repression that can reveal the truth about the political
and social structures in which we live.
2. There is a whole plethora of titles for Graus Let Sleeping Corpses Lie: Dont Open
the Window or Breakfast at the Manchester Morgue.
3. The lm was never released theatrically. It was shown, however, on the cine-club
circuit. More recently, the lm has been shown in festivals and lm institutes,
acquiring a cult status.
4. The participants were Jos Mara Valls (Tarota), Emilio Martnez Lzaro (Vctor
Frankenstein), Francesc Bellmunt (Terror entre cristianos) and Jaime Chavarri (La
danza).
5. This is not exclusive of the horror genre and can be applied to Spanish cinema in
general.
6. Arturo Gonzlez was brother of Cesreo Gonzlez, one of the great producers
in the Spanish lm industry from the mid-1940s until the late 1960s.
7. Co-productions with Italy occurred regularly throughout the 1960s and 1970s: in
the early 1960s, straight black-and-white Gothic horror Horror / The Blancheville
Monster (Alberto de Martino 1963) and La maldicin de los Karnstein / Crypt of
the Vampires (Camillo Mastrocinque 1964), which featured Christopher Lee; in
the late 1960s, a series of lms inuenced by the comic format (fumetti), featuring
fantastic characters Kriminal (La mscara de Kriminal / Kriminal (Umberto Lenzi
1966) and its sequel Il marchio di Kriminal (Fernando Cerchio 1968)), Satanik
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(Satanik (Piero Vivarelli 1968)) and Superargo (Superargo, el hombre enmascarado
/ Superargo Versus Diabolicus (Nick Nostro 1966) and its sequel Superargo, el
gigante / Superargo (Paolo Biancha 1968)); and, in the early 1970s, following the
success of the gialli genre, Una lagartija con piel de mujer / Una lucertola con la
pelle di donna / Lizard in a Womans Skin (Lucio Fulci 1971), Das de angustia / Le
foto proibite di una signora per bene / Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion
(Luciano Ercoli 1970) and La muerte camina con tacn alto / La morte cammina
con i tacchi alti / Death Walks on High Heels (Luciano Ercoli 1971).
8. Critic, scriptwriter, producer and distributor, Moz Suays name has been linked
to the industry from the 1930s until his death in 1997. In the 1950s and early
1960s, he was associated with UNINCI, the production company supported by
the Spanish Communist Party while in exile, which co-produced, among other
nuevo lms, Buuels Viridiana (1961). In the late 1960s, via his weekly column
in Fotogramas, Moz Suay manufactured and sponsored, the cinematic label
Escuela de Barcelona (Barcelona School) in response to the Madrid-based New
Spanish Cinema; it was modelled on contemporary European New Wave cinemas,
bringing together a number of avant-garde and politically committed lmmakers
(Jacinto Esteva, Joaqun Jord, Carlos Durn, Gonzalo Surez, Jorge Grau, Vicente
Aranda, Jaime Camino) under a coherent cultural label. He was not only the main
publicist of the Barcelona School but also the executive producer of many of their
lms between 1965 and 1970 through production company Filmscontacto. Thus,
by the time Prolmes S. A. was created, Moz Suays knowledge of the industry,
as well as his expertise in art-house, avant-garde and mainstream practices, had
been translated into commercial genre lmmaking.
9. These gures are taken from the Spanish Ministry of Culture database (www.mcu.
es).
10. Garca Escudero had already held the post from July 1951 to March 1952. His
second term commenced in July 1962 and ended in November 1968.
11. For further detail on Garca Escuderos policies and the NCE, see Caparrs Lera
(1983: 4159) and Triana-Toribio (2003: 704).
12. For a detailed discussion of Garca Escuderos judgments of taste, see Triana-
Toribio (2003: 659).
13. See Evolucin de la Exhibicin Cinematogrca en Espaa, 19681995, in
Fernndez Blanco (1998: 19).
14. Ministerial Order 9/02/1963.
15. The US title for the American exploitation market, Till Death Do US Part, cer-
tainly retained the marriage theme, although the lm suffered cuts of another
nature.
16. Miguel ngel Diez (Madrid), 99 mujeres (Madame Censura), Fotogramas, 11 July
1969.
17. Among the critics whose names are recurrent in the reviewing of horror lms in the
daily press, one nds Pascual Cebollada (Ya), Marcelo Arroita-Jaregui (Arriba)
and Pedro Crespo (Arriba) all of them members of the censorship board as well.
Other journalist regulars were Miguel Rubio (Nuevo Diario and El Alczar), Flix
Martialay (El Alczar), Jess Pelez (El Alzcar), Lorenzo Lpez Sancho (ABC),
Pedro Rodrigo (Madrid and Pueblo) and Toms Garca de la Puerta (Pueblo).
There is a second group of critics Jaume Picas, Romn Gubern, Jos Luis Guarner
and Juan M. Company identied with the leftist, anti-Franco opposition and
intellectually and culturally linked to art-lmmaking, who mediated between texts
and audiences with their reviews and articles on the genre from the pages of Nuevo
Fotogramas and other publications. A nal group of contributors to the eld of
horror came from the pages of genre magazine Terror Fantastic, whose role in
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contemporary horror lm cultures is examined in detail in Chapter 5.
18. With the exception of a handful of lms produced in the rst years of the boom,
horror lms were not reviewed in the serious specialist lm magazines of the
period. Film Ideal (196070), close to a moderate Catholicism, could be described
as cahier-ist in its agenda, whereas Nuestro Cine (196571) followed a materialist
critique of cinema as it was closer to the Spanish Communist Party.
19. The reviewer was right. Around the same time there was a spate of lms which dealt
with exorcism, demonology and spiritism (El juego del diablo (Jorge Darnell 1975),
El espiritista (Augusto Fernando 1974) and La endemoniada / The Possessed
(Amando de Ossorio 1975)).
20. A regular contributor to Nuevo Fotogramas since the mid-1960s, Picas had
appeared in some of the Barcelona School lms and championed the movements
cinema from his position as critic (see Riambau and Torreiro (1999: 1089)).
Before becoming a full-time academic, Gubern had co-directed Brillante porvenir
(1964) with Vicente Aranda, was also an active member of the so-called School of
Barcelona and was a regular contributor to the specialist lm magazines Nuestro
Cine and Positif. He was also a member of the PCE (Spanish Communist Party)
and the PSUC (the Unied Socialist Party of Catalonia). Around the time that he
was working on the preface to Cine espaol, cine de subgneros, he was writing a
number of works on the interpretation of mass media from a Marxist perspective
(Mensajes icnicos en la cultura de masas (1974), Comunicacin y cultura de masas
(1977)).
21. And yet audiences were drawn to horror lms. A detailed look at audience gures
for comedies and New Spanish Cinema lms makes interesting reading since,
generally speaking, horror lms are on a par with popular comedies and are above
auteur lms.
22. The publishers of Los Nuevos Cines en Espaa. Ilusiones y desencantos de los
aos sesenta, a volume devoted to the analysis of the lmic production of both the
New Spanish Cinema group and the School of Barcelona used an image of La ta
Tula on the front cover, while the back cover features a photograph of Romi, one
of the muses of the Barcelona School, on the set of Cada vez que . . . (Carlos Durn
1967).
23. In Bold!, Daring!, Shocking!, True!, Eric Schaefer analyses the singular attributes
and unique history (1999: 2) of classical exploitation cinema, examining its pro-
duction, distribution, marketing and exhibition. For Schaefer, the term exploitation
derives from the practice of exploitation advertising or promotional techniques
that went over and above typical posters, trailers and newspaper ads (1999: 4).
During the 1960s and 1970s, he argues, the term was modied to indicate the
subject that was being exploited, such as sexploitation and blaxploitation
movies (1999: 4).
24. There are many examples of the exploitation of Spanish horror lms on European
and American specialised circuits. For example, the ad campaigns for the Italian
version of Ceremonia sangrienta, which was retitled Le vergini cavalcano la morte,
openly used sexploitative artwork in its foregrounding of female sexuality, in con-
trast to the more restrained Spanish poster.
25. Many Spanish producers and distributors used the talents of Francisco Fernndez-
Zarza Prez (192292), artistically known as Jano. Associated with distribution
companies such as Hispamex, Chamartn or Mercurio Films, his signature appears
in the publicity material of hundreds of lms. See www.cinejano.com for a selection
of his work.
26. Dracula was distributed by Hispanomexicana Films S. A. in Spain and exhibited
in 1960 (72,860 spectators and takings of 13,574.19 euros). Interestingly, Dracula
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Has Risen from the Grave (Freddie Francis 1968) was distributed in 1971 by
Warner Espaola S. A. (872,439 spectators and takings of 130,375.71 euros)
before Dracula Prince of Darkness (Terence Fisher 1965), which would not reach
Spanish screens until 1972 (742,590 spectators and takings of 128,108.14 euros).
As we can see, Spanish horror movies were effectively competing with international
horror in the early 1970s.
27. Lee also worked on other Franco projects around this time. Fu Manchu y el beso de
la muerte (1968), which had its theatrical release on 16 March 1970 in Barcelona
and on 26 October 1970 in Madrid, was followed by the release of El Conde
Drcula in Barcelona later on that year, 16 November 1970, and in early 1971 in
Madrid. The exhibition of these lms was followed by El castillo de Fu Manchu
(1969) on 18 September 1972 in Barcelona and Drcula contra Frankenstein
(1972) on 18 November 1972; Madrid would have to wait until 1973. Lees
appearances in the Spanish horror of the early 1970s also stretched to other com-
mercial co-productions, such as El proceso de las brujas (Franco 1970) and Pnico
en el Transiberiano (Eugenio Martn 1973), and avant-garde projects Vampir
Cuadecuc and Umbracle (1972), both by Pere Portabella, which were outside tra-
ditional circuits of lm production and exhibition.
28. British producer Harry Alan Towers brought Christopher Lee into the project.
29. See Hutchings section on the Prince of Darkness for a number of possible expla-
nations for the ceaseless popularity of Dracula in lm (2004: 48).
30. Some critics regard this lm as a sequel to El proceso de las brujas.
31. German producers Karl-Heinz Mannchen and Adrian Hoven helped to produce
Necronomicon in 1967. After the success of the lm in Germany and the US, they
decided to cash in with two other Franco lms the following year, Kiss Me, Monster
and Sadiserotica. According to Tohill and Tombs, the success of Necronomicon in
the US can be explained thus: It was pitched at the audience whod been wowed by
La dolce vita and Boccaccio 70 and the trailers and promotional material empha-
sised the daring and sophisticated naughtiness of the lm (1995: 94).
32. Even in the more sophisticated lms of the NCE, women were mere love inter-
ests and sometimes not even given a proper name in the credits (Triana-Toribio
2003: 73).
33. Here I follow Eric Schaefers use of the term, originally coined by Vance Packard
in The Hidden Persuaders (1957), in his article Pandering to the Goon Trade:
Framing the Sexploitation Audience through Advertising (2007: 1946). Eye stop-
pers are those sexy images [used in lm advertising] that can arrest the eye (2007:
21).
34. The lm was nanced by German producer Arthur Brauner, introduced to Franco
by Karl-Heinz Mannchen. Brauner also produced She Killed in Ecstasy / Sie Ttete
in Ekstase / Mrs Hyde (1970).
35. Francos 1960s horror production regularly featured night-clubs and strip clubs
where female singers performances and striptease acts, reminiscent of American
post-war burlesque lms, functioned as moments of spectacle. Around the time that
the lm was produced, Karl-Heinz Mannchen was Francos regular companion in
out on the town [visits to Berlins] strip clubs and sex shows. Theyd see striptease
acts featuring lesbian numbers, or pseudo lesbian numbers (Tohill and Tombs
1995: 98).
36. Other lms which featured Paul Naschy were: El mariscal del inerno / Devils
Possessed (Len Klimovsky 1974) and La maldicin de la bestia / The Werewolf
and the Yeti (Miguel Iglesias Bonns 1975). Amando de Ossorio was also on the
companys books with Las garras de Lorelei, La noche de los brujos and La noche
de las gaviotas. The horror production of Prolmes is completed with El refugio del
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miedo / Refuge of Fear (Jos Ulloa 1974). Among the cycle of adventure lms, the
company produced the following: Tarzn y el misterio de la selva (Miguel Iglesias
1973), Tarzn y el tesoro de Kawana (Jos Truchado 1974), La diosa salvaje
(Miguel Iglesias 1974) and Kilma, Reina de las Amazonas (Miguel Iglesias 1975).
37. Naschys contribution to Prolmes overlaps chronologically with the lms of his
werewolf cycle, as well as with other lms.
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