Spanish Cinema in the Global Context: Film on Film by Samuel Amago (review)

A reflexive aesthetics, in varying levels and with wide-ranging functions, Samuel Amago insists, has permeated the narrative style of contemporary international moviemaking. Amago’s monograph, the twenty-sixth installment of the Routledge Advances in Film Studies series first launched in 2008, offers an engaging study of contemporary self-reflexive Spanish cinema and how the country’s place within the global mediascape can be understood by a close analysis of the function of reflexive aesthetics. The subject matter of Amago’s book attests to film scholars’ growing attention to Spanish film production and confirms that Spain still provides an effective model “for looking at the productive interplay between globally circulating visual texts and localized regimes of production, consumption, interpretation and narration” (6).

Amago’s exceptional study diverges from work by prominent Spanish film scholars such as Marsha Kinder (Refiguring Spain: Cinema, Media, Representation, 1997), Núria Triana-Toribio (Spanish National Cinema, 2003), and Paul Julian Smith (Spanish Visual Culture, 2006) that have explored Spain’s national, regional, and cultural identity and that have sought to describe Spanish cinema production and its relationship with global historical and industrial frameworks. Recent critical work by Ann Davies (Spain on Screen, 2001) and Antonio Lázaro-Reboll and Andy Willis (Spanish Popular Cinema, 2004) have attempted to describe the local/global nexus more elaborately, yet most of the aforementioned texts have understood Spanish cinema often in terms of the distinctive cinematic production of Spanish “auteurs.” Amago considers, rather, Spanish commercial cinema production and ruminates an often ignored account of the “dynamic flow that has always characterized the real functioning of all national film industries and popular cultures” (8): the dynamic process of constant cultural translation in Spanish cultural life, particularly, that of Anglo-American culture.

The scope of Amago’s book builds on a vast array of theoretical premises, a bold approach the author compellingly defends in his introduction as a means to avoid conceptual limitations that may arise from an exclusive commitment to one theoretical school. The scholar’s hybrid approach embraces Robin Wood’s model of “synthetic criticism,” engaging with, among many other influences, Andrew Higson’s analyses of the concepts of the national in English film, Tom Conley’s description of the cartographic impulse in cinema, and Nick Browne’s theorization of spectator positioning. With the aid of an eclectic array of theoretical framing, Amago offers a line of case-studies across seven chapters that are unhindered by the book’s moderate length which measures in just under 200 pages (including the bibliography and index). The author organizes the book into three parts: 1) “Art, Commerce and Reflexivity in Contemporary Spanish Cinema”; 2) “Spanish National Histories on Film”; and 3) “Spain in/and the Global Cinema.” Each part except for the final section consists of three chapters that are productively juxtaposed. While the reflexive mode functions differently in the author’s film selection, Amago persuasively reveals the common thread in all of them: self-reference as a means to understand the ways that Spanish culture imagines itself in the twenty-first century (5).

The book’s initial pages deliver a schematic introduction, followed by the first chapter, “Historical Reflection and National Allegory in La mala educación (“Bad Education”) (Pedro Almodóvar, 2004) and Los abrazos rotos (“Broken Embraces”) (Pedro Almodóvar, 2009),” a reading of special interest to Almodovarian scholars and viewers alike. In this compelling case-study, Amago considers both films historiographical and figures of national allegories, positing that the use of “geopolitical movement and cartographic specificity” create a national-spatial and national-historical consciousness (13). The attention to national geographies and place is continued in chapter two, “Mapping the Global Popular in 800 balas (“800 Bullets”) (Álex de la Iglesia, 2002) and Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright, 2007),” where in contrast to Almodóvar’s arthouse cinema, here Amago celebrates commercial European cinema as a means to think about film cultures in the global context. In these films, Amago traces the theme of fandom and...