Introduction: Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis in Spanish Cinema

This special issue evolves from a series of productive intellectual encounters between contributors to this volume at various academic conferences, including an ACLA seminar in Boston; an SCMS panel in Atlanta; a conference at the University of Southern California; a workshop in Zaragoza; and a conference at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Our conversations have been transformative and galvanizing. They raised several important questions with regard to the past, present, and future of critical theory and psychoanalysis in Spanish film studies, without settling any of them.

First of all, how can we remain faithful to the events, understood in Badiou's terms (I shall come back to this point later), of critical theory and psychoanalysis in a so-called post-theory or post-cinema era in our academic field? Critical theory—broadly understood as a critical inquiry that demonstrates a willingness to engage with other theorists in order to bring abstraction, self-reflexivity, and meta-critique to one's own analyses—has largely been absent in academic approaches to Spanish film, both in film studies and Hispanism (although I should acknowledge here Paul Julian Smith's pioneering work, which introduced French theory to the study of Spanish literature). Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, could be considered a foundational methodology in Anglo-American film criticism on Spanish cinema, and features in Hispanist writing as well (for instance, in Marsha Kinder's Oedipal readings of Spanish Cinema in Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain, as an example of the first case, or Peter Evans's The Films of Luis Buñuel: Subjectivity and Desire, as an example of the second). But the use of psychoanalysis was belated. By the time it took hold, it seemed that the time for grand theories had passed, and it was quickly superseded by other critical approaches.

My initial question could, then, be rephrased as a second: can we remain faithful to the events of critical theory and psychoanalysis in Spanish film studies and Hispanism when those events may not have happened, when the thought that critical theory and psychoanalysis have generated in English, French, and Comparative Literature since the 1970s has largely been ignored or treated with skepticism in Spanish literary and cultural studies? Many eminent Hispanists and film scholars have engaged with critical theory, psychoanalysis, or both in their work. But historical and empirical approaches have been privileged over philosophical or theoretical approaches to the study of film in Spain itself, which did not need to take an anti-theory turn like the one that followed the publication of David Bordwell and Noël Carroll's 1996 book, Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies—because there was little serious engagement with theory to begin with (Rodowick, Elegy for Theory). Those working on Spanish cinema in the Anglo-American academy have recently tended to mirror the Spanish case. Many writers have abandoned critical theory and psychoanalysis, which they consider obsolete, to focus instead on questions of production, distribution, and reception.

These areas of inquiry certainly helped the field move beyond a narrow focus on what Ann Davies calls "the creation of and study of a canon of worthy film directors" (3). In her overview of developments in Spanish film studies, Davies argues convincingly that we need to move beyond such a traditional auteurist approach, so often reduced to close analysis. Instead, she argues, we should incorporate the "cultural and industrial context that includes the use of DVD extras, film festival materials, publicity campaigns and so on" (3). Spanish film should no longer be thought of as "hermetically sealed from other related areas such as television, and this is valuable considering the crossover between the two media of entities such as stars and actors to name only the most obvious" (8). While Davies's work bears witness to the heterogeneity in Spanish film studies, it is possible that focusing on the industrial aspects of cinematic production might lead to neglect of the continuing necessity of critical, slow, differentiated, and differentiating readings of cinema that foreground the aesthetic, ethical, and political implications of the film medium—without, to be...