A New “Cinema of Attractions”?: The Barcelona School’s Exhibitionist Loops

In this essay, I read Jacinto Esteva Grewe’s Lejos de los árboles (1972) as the exemplar of the Barcelona School’s struggles under the late-Francoist film industry to develop its own brand of exhibitionism to expose and denounce the dictatorship’s methods of producing and reproducing the nation through cinema. In the first part of my essay, I attend to the nationalist cinema; in the second, I turn back to the early cinematic activity of the nineteenth century; and in the third and final part, I demonstrate the Barcelona School’s attempts to demythify Spanish nationalist cinema through the use of certain techniques such as repetition and interpellation that have been staples of the medium since its advent. Thus I filter the Barcelona School’s mimicry of nationalist cinema through Tom Gunning’s lens of the early “cinema of attractions.” I propose the disruptive exhibitionist cinematic loop as the aesthetic form the Barcelona School’s political position takes. My reading of the way the loop functions in Esteva’s film works toward an understanding of this configuration as constitutive of the School’s entire body of work.