Dark Laughter: Spanish Film, Comedy, and the Nation

Introduction

3 Introduction Introduction The early 1960s in Spain witnessed a series of dark cinematic comedies that all but constitute an autochthonous variation on that genre in the film medium. El pisito (Marco Ferreri, 1959), El cochecito (Marco Ferreri, 1960), Viridiana (Luis Buñuel, 1961), Plácido (Luis García Berlanga, 1961), El verdugo (Luis García Berlanga, 1963), and El extraño viaje (Fernando Fernán-Gómez, 1964) are all comedic film narrations that seem to problematize the moment of, and the occasion for, laughter. These are also movies that address—and that in many ways question—the new phase of economic modernization and development that Franco’s dictatorial regime entered after two long decades of postwar autarchy . Laughter, dictatorship, developmental capitalism, and cultural identity are, thus, the basic building blocks of this study on Spanish cinema and culture whose critical objective is threefold. First, I am interested in identifying the conditions of possibility of the Spanish dark comedy film genre and, subsequently, in evaluating its place within European cinematic modernity as well as the particular concept of modernity it helped to reframe. What makes all these films dark comedies, what makes them Spanish, and in what ways they engage with the modern are the crucial questions at this stage, questions that inevitably point toward the role played by film genres in the conceptualization of that fraught and contentious entity called “national cinema.” My second objective is to explore the ways in which cinematic texts mediate the socioeconomic context in which they are produced and exhibited. Hence I am interested not only in understanding cinema as cultural praxis but also in examining cinema’s relations with the cultural discourses that surround it. 4  Introduction Neither reflections nor documents, these Spanish dark narratives are, more exactly, interventions in a dictatorship’s picture-producing machine bent on projecting images of socioeconomic bliss. A significant reflection on the processes of film spectatorship will therefore be an integral part of what this book does with a series of movies that, first and foremost, do not allow for a moral safe haven from which to watch them. The third and final objective of my research program is to give an account of the manner in which these film productions contribute to the understanding of a culturally specific identity in the realm of the visual and the province of the comic. In the literature about Spanish cinema, it has become commonplace to invoke the names of the painter Goya and the playwright Valle-Inclán—and their respective aesthetics, lo goyesco and el esperpento—to elucidate the particularities of the country’s film production. The sixteenth-century picaresca genre; the work of Cervantes; the eighteenth-century short, comic theatrical pieces with stock social types known as sainetes; and even the musical genre zarzuela (or Spanish popular operetta) are also liberally used as cultural and aesthetic references in the study of Spanish film. Cultural specificity, indeed, is the name of the game, and the way to play it is to incorporate into one’s film criticism not only a distinctively Spanish history (which could include the country’s much-discussed belated or “uneven” modernity, its civil war, and the subsequent thirty-six-yearlong dictatorship) but also the plastic arts, popular music, and literature. More or less explicitly, Spanishness is the frequently invoked term at this juncture, a term whose suspicious essentialism does not spare us from the need to investigate its actual contexts and contours within the country’s cultural production. Spanishness is, in fact, the concept that this study will present not so much for consideration but rather as a means for interrogation within the context of cultural and visual studies. The first chapter of this study will deal with all these questions and establish the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of my research project. Questions of film genre, or “family resemblances,” will find a place there, as will disquisitions about imagining rather than imagined communities, the visual expression of nationhood, the modalities of film modernity, and what it means to laugh darkly. After this introductory section, four chapters—what may be considered the core of this book—focus on four of the movies enumerated above. While El cochecito investigates the dawn of a consumerist society that is also the beginning of an uncharted moral order in a brand new world of desires and commodities (chapter 2), El verdugo dissects the mechanisms by which an ordinary citizen becomes the accomplice of...