"Democrazy" in Spain: Cinema and New Forms of Social Life in the Twenty-First Century

The term "democrazy" in the title of my essay is not one that I coined myself, but one that I have appropriated from the massive protests that took place in Spain in May 2011.¹ The use of English on many of the banners has to do with the fact that these protests were part of what we know as the Occupy Movement. In Spain, the largest demonstrations took place on May 15, 2011, and for that reason they are now known as the 15M movement. This was followed by a three-week occupation of the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, the square at the city's geographical center, with further occupations in Spain's other major cities.² This social revolution should be understood both in the global context, as a result of the 2008 financial crisis which laid bare both the pervasive presence of neoliberalism and the shortcomings of today's democracy, and as a critique of the Spanish democratic regime first established in 1978. My essay will address this dual nature of the crisis in order to later explain both how the situation has been portrayed by a new generation of filmmakers and how their cinematic practices attempt to create new forms of social life. That is, their ground-breaking cultural output—which includes collective modes of production and experimental cinematic language, necessitating the active participation of the audience—illustrates alternative modes of cultural intervention and plays a key role in defining Spain's democracy at the beginning of the twenty-first century. My understanding of their filmic intervention on the status quo is informed by an analysis of filmmakers' engagement with the cinema and the politics of the 1960s and 1970s, a phenomenon that I have identified as the most significant trend of the past few years. This essay examines the political and cinematic implications of this dialogue.

The roots of the 2008 financial crisis lay in neoliberalism, the dominant theory of current political economic practice. Economist David Harvey defines neoliberalism as a theory "proposing that human well-being can best be advanced by the maximization of entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework characterized by private property rights, individual liberty, unencumbered markets, and free trade" (22). This definition comes from his article entitled "Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction," where he argues that "Neoliberalism has not proven effective at revitalizing global capital accumulation, but it has succeeded in restoring class power" (29). Wealth, he maintains, has therefore accumulated in the hands of the dominant classes who comprise the top 1% of the population, and has been taken away from the subordinate classes who make up the other 99%. As indicated by Amador Fernández Savater, who has theorized the Spanish 15M movement, neoliberalism "is self-evident in a myriad of life situations where one must think of oneself as a business and of the other as a competitor. It becomes desirable through a myriad of signs that carry its promise of success, of self-realisation, of freedom" (par. 3). For neoliberalism, freedom is a sacrosanct concept, and yet individual freedom is constantly being compromised by wider political and economic interests.

The concept of freedom is equally sacrosanct to democracy but, as political scientists have been discussing for a number of years, democracy too is in something of a crisis. For example, Wendy Brown has identified four ways in which the rule of the people, the demos in the word "democracy," has been eroded in present-day democratic regimes (44–48). First, in major democracies, corporate and state power have merged in such a way that people are left powerless, lacking the means to stand up to them. Second, electoral processes follow well-defined marketing and management strategies. Third, the basic democratic principles of constitutionalism, legal equality, and political and civil liberties have been replaced with market criteria of efficiency and profitability. Finally, Brown adds, with the expanded power and reach of the judicial system, "governance by courts constitutes democracy's subversion" (48).

In Spain, political scientists and cultural critics have expressed their dissatisfaction with the...