Live Flesh For Christian and for Ignacio Live Flesh The Male Body in Contemporary Spanish Cinema Santiago Fouz-Hernández and Alfredo Martínez-Expósito Published in 2007 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com In the United States and Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © Santiago Fouz-Hernández and Alfredo Martínez-Expósito, 2007 The right of Santiago Fouz-Hernández and Alfredo Martínez-Expósito to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN (Hb) 978 1 84511 449 7 (Pb) 978 1 84511 450 3 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress catalog card: available Typeset in Garamond by Dexter Haven Associates Ltd, London Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall Contents List of illustrations vi Preface and acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1. Stereotypical bodies 11 2. Young bodies 37 3. Muscular bodies 62 4. (Dis)abled bodies 83 5. Homosexual bodies 111 6. Transformed bodies 135 7. Foreign bodies 161 8. The genitals 187 Notes 213 Bibliography 235 Filmography 253 Index 261 List of illustrations 1. Victoria Abril and Jorge Sanz in Amantes. Pedro Costa Producciones Cinematográficas. Madrid. 14 2. Alessandro Gasmann and Javier Bardem in Huevos de oro. Lola Films. Madrid. 20 3. Javier Bardem and Tomás Penco in Jamón, Jamón. Lola Films. Madrid. 25 4. Javier Bardem in Jamón, Jamón. Lola Films. Madrid. 26 5. Santiago Segura in Torrente 3: El Protector. Amiguetes Entertainment. Madrid. 31 6. Eloy Yebra, Críspulo Cabezas and Timy Benito in Barrio. Elías Querejeta P.C., S.L. Madrid. 51 7. Pablo Galán, Juan José Ballesta and Alberto Jiménez in El Bola. Tesela P.C. Madrid. 53 8. Jordi Vilches and Fernando Ramallo in Krámpack. Messidor Films. Barcelona and Avatar Films. New York. 55 9. Fernando Ramallo and Joan Joel in El corazón del guerrero. Tornasol Films S.A. Madrid. 76 10. Javier Bardem (with Tamar Novas) in Mar adentro. Sogecable. Madrid. 101 11. Liberto Rabal and Javier Bardem in Carne trémula. El Deseo S.A. Madrid. 107 12. Josep María Pou and David Selvas in Amic /Amat. Els Films de Las Ramblas. Barcelona. 131 13. José Pérez Ocaña in Ocaña, retrat intermitent. Producciones Zeta S.A. Barcelona. 145 14. Emilio Buale in Bwana. Origen P.C. Madrid. 173 15. Pedro Almodóvar, Jaime Chávarri, Verónica Forqué and Carmen Maura on the set of ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? El Deseo S.A. Madrid. 201 16. Antonio Banderas and Victoria Abril in ¡Átame! El Deseo S.A. Madrid. 206 All illustrations except 4, 5, 10 and 12 were provided by the graphics department at the Filmoteca Española in Madrid and we are grateful to the staff there for their help and attention. Still 4 (used also on the front cover) was provided by Sonia Lázaro Arriola at Lola Films, Still 5 by Beatriz Morillas at Amiguetes Entertainment (photograph by Mónica de Pascalis and Paola Ardizzoni) and Still 12 by Ventura Pons, for which we are very grateful. Every reasonable effort has been made to contact copyright holders in order to acquire the necessary permissions. Preface and acknowledgements The idea for this book originated in 2000, when we initiated email correspondence about a film that we had both separately written about. The film was Almodóvar’s Live Flesh (fatefully, its title has turned out to be an ideal one for this book too). Having identified a clear compatibility in our research interests, we organized a six-month teaching exchange in 2002 (between the Universities of Durham in the United Kingdom and Queensland in Australia). We then brought together our shared research interests (Spanish cinema and men’s studies) in an extended project. This book is its main outcome. Spanish director Bigas Luna once confessed that his fascination with the concept of ‘Spanishness’ had been stimulated by a visiting English friend. Those national customs and everyday objects that we take for granted in our own culture were perceived as surreal by the visitor. Our experience as Spanish nationals who have spent most of our formative years in Spain but most of our professional lives as academics in English-speaking countries has also given us a new perspective on our own culture. We feel privileged to have been exposed to the Anglophone theory and criticism on Spanish cultural studies and film studies and, at the same time, to have kept in touch with the ongoing academic discourses around this ever-growing field in Spain. The rapid changes that have taken place in our country of origin since we both left it over ten years ago have been all the more surprising and noticeable for us from abroad, particularly in what relates to issues of gender and sexuality and their representation in Spanish film and media. One of our main purposes when conceiving this book was to use such experience as the basis for the analysis of Spanish filmic texts produced during the last three decades. Scholarly work in the fields of Spanish gender and film studies has been immensely productive during that time in both the English-speaking and Spanish-speaking worlds. Parallel to this, the growing attention paid to the representations of masculinity and the male body in English-language films has prepared the ground for a study dedicated to the representation of the male body in Spanish cinema. | vii viii | L I V E F L E S H This project would not have been possible without the support of various institutions that funded periods of research leave and various research trips during 2004–6. We would like to start by thanking our institutions (Durham University and University of Queensland) for making the 2002 teaching exchange possible in the first place and for supporting our research project with their respective research leave schemes. The Ministerio Español de Asuntos Exteriores y de Cooperación and Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional funded Alfredo Martínez-Expósito’s stay in Madrid in late 2004. The British Academy funded a two-month stay in Madrid for Santiago Fouz-Hernández in early 2005 and also a six-week stay in Queensland later that year, whilst the University of Queensland Travel Award for International Collaborative Research covered his travel expenses to Queensland. Extended periods of research leave were funded by AHRC, The Arts and Humanities Research Council (Fouz-Hernández) and by the University of Queensland Research Development Grant and Centre for the History of European Discourses Research (Martínez-Expósito). The British Academy also granted an overseas travel award that subsidized a trip to Spain to present material of this book at a conference. Our thanks also go to the anonymous readers of the grant proposals for the invaluable feedback that helped shape the content and structure of the book. At I.B.Tauris we would like to thank our editor Philippa Brewster for her help, encouragement and confidence in this project, Gretchen Ladish and everyone else involved in the production of this book. At the Filmoteca Española we thank all staff that assisted us in the library, graphics department and screenings, but especially Margarita Lobo and Trinidad del Río for their advice and for facilitating the daily viewing of films during December 2004, February and March 2005. We would like to thank the following colleagues for their advice and feedback on earlier drafts of various parts of the material included here: Mark Allinson, Ian Biddle, Roy Boyne, Joe Hardwick, Barry Jordan, Peter Lehman, Morris Low and Chris Perriam. We have presented versions of different parts of the book at conferences and research seminars held at universities in Australia (Adelaide, Flinders, Monash, Queensland, Sydney, University of Technology Sydney), Ireland (Limerick), Portugal (Braga), Spain (Valencia, Sevilla), UK (Bath, Cambridge, Institute of Romance Studies and Queen Mary and Westfield London, Newcastle upon Tyne, Glasgow) and USA (Chicago, University of California Los Angeles, University of California Santa Barbara) and we would like to thank the organizers for inviting us and the audiences for their feedback. P R E F A C E A N D A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S | ix Ian Biddle, Christian Mieves and Tony Roberts very kindly proof-read drafts of the manuscript and Christian Mieves designed the concept and artwork for the book cover. Special thanks go to Sonia Lázaro Arriola at Lola Films for providing us with a high-resolution reproduction of the exact still that we wanted for the cover and for granting us permission to reproduce various stills on behalf of Lola Films. We are also grateful to Pedro Costa, Marta Esteban (at Messidor Films), Jason Leaf (at Avatar), Beatriz Morillas (at Amiguetes Entertainment), Ventura Pons and Christina Sutherland (Tessela) for granting us copyright permissions for the reproduction of various stills. Earlier versions of the analysis of Jamón, Jamón, Barrio, El Bola, Krámpack, Live Flesh and Mar adentro were published in the following books and journals: Revisiting Space: Space and Place in European Cinema, ed. by Wendy Everett and Axel Goodbody (Oxford: Peter Lang); Youth Culture in Global Cinema, ed. by Timothy Shary and Alexandra Seibel (Austin: Texas University Press); Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics 7 and Proceedings of the AHGBI Annual Conference ‘Antes y después del Quijote: en el cincuentenario de la Asociación de Hispanistas de Gran Bretaña e Irlanda’, ed. by Robert Archer, Valdi Astvaldsson, Stephen Boyd and Michael Thompson (València: Biblioteca Valenciana). We are grateful to the editors of those publications for their permissions. Finally, we would like to thank our students of Spanish cinema at the Universities of Durham and Queensland and our families and partners for their support and encouragement. Film titles are given in the original Spanish and in their commercial English translation when available (we have provided our own translation in all other cases). Release dates, audience and box-office takings figures are based on data available at the electronic film database published in the Spanish Ministry of Culture website (www.mcu.es), consulted throughout 2005 and checked in August 2006. All translations from Spanish sources are ours, unless otherwise specified. English subtitles available in commercial releases of the films were followed only if they literally conveyed the meaning of the Spanish or in ways that satisfied the authors of this book.