Refiguring Spain. Cinema/Media/Representation (review)

220 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Refiguring Spain. Cinema/Media/Representation Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997 Edited by Marsha Kinder The image chosen for the cover of this important volume on Spanish cinema and media comes from Victot Erices recent film, Solde membrillo. A plumb bob at the end of a plumb line slices vertically through a visual field, which includes a quince tree and movie camera. The plumb bob image is reproduced on rhe book's back cover as well. Here it breaks the linked pair Spanish Cinema/ Culrural Studies used by Duke Univetsity press to characterize the book's content and market it. Design issues aside, the image of the plumb bob dividing the dyad of Spanish Cinema and Cultural Studies provides an interesting visual image and instructive point of entry into a discussion of Marsha Kinder's volume. Kinder's book is one that Hispanists and othets interested in contemporary Spain and the reshaping of media in a multi-national environment will find much into which to sink their teeth. Its publication by a major English-language university press validates the following assertion with which Kinder begins her collection of essays. "Spain is an ideal case study for exploring the process of redefining national , regional, and cultural identity over the past twenty years, primarily because its rapid transition from Francoism to democracy prefigures the sudden collapse of the entire cold-war paradigm" (1). She then explains that the apparenr collapse of Socialist hegemony over Spanish politics with its electoral defeat by the Partido Popular in the 1996 general elections provides a vantage point from which to examine the tefiguring of Spain and its cultural industry. She illustrares her arguments with reference to three films released in 1995: Almodovar's La flor de mi secreto, Alex de la Iglesias's El dÃ-a de L· bestia and AgustÃ-n DÃ-az Yanes's Nadie hablará de nosotros cuando hayamos muerto. All three illustrate a changing relationship between filmmakers and the Socialist government's political, economic and cultural policies. The rest of Kinder's introduction is devoted to presenring the essays that compose her volume. These are grouped into three categories. Essays by Kathleen M. Vernon, Marsha Kinder, Dona M. Kercher and Roland B. Tolentino are grouped under the rubric of "Historical Recuperation." These essays "examine textual strategies that have been used to recuperate earlier historical images as a means of reinscribing Spanish cultutal identity in the presenr and renegotiate the nation's political and economic power. The strategies usually involve an intertextual engagement with texts generated outside of Spain, which serves to demonstrate the nation's full participation in the global sphere" (24). Essays by Stephen Tropiano, Paul Julian Smirh, Marvin D'Lugo andjaume MartÃ--Olivella form the collection's second grouping enrirled "Sexual Reinscription." They "analyze the political use of sexuality and genre in works by Spanish auteurs who achieved commercial success in the international market" (26). Issues of reconfiguring national identity are also foregrounded in the essays by D'Lugo and MartÃ--Olivella. Book Reviews 221 "Marketing Transfiguration (Money/Politics/Regionalism)" is comprised of essays by Peter Besas, Richard Maxwell, Iñaki Zabaleta and Selma Reuben HoIo. They focus on "issues of cultural survival wirhin the political economy of Spain and its autonomous regions in the 1980s and early 1990s" (28). Kinder provides an excellent summary of each of the sophisticated articles she has assembled in this rich contribution to the critical literature on Spanish cinema and media and its place in an evolving Spanish environment. As the book points out, this evolution is itself tied increasingly to the shifting nature of European identity and the changing nature of what Noam Chomsky years ago labeled predatory capitalism. Theory and its role in construcring the object of study ate central to Kinder's book. She points out that the essays in the first two sections "share common poststructutalist assumptions and methodologies" (25). The essays in the third section "come from ourside the field and are therefore much more varied in their methodology, object of study, writing style and basic assumptions" (28). Kinder's distinction is significant. It draws us back to the image of...