Bigas Luna's Huevos de oro: Regional Art, Global Commerce

Bigas Lunas Huevos de oro: Regional Art, Global Commerce Marvin A. D'Lugo Clark University Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art— Andy Warhol1 Huevos de oro (1993), Bigas Luna's ninth feature-length film, is as much an effort to capitalize on the huge commeicial success of his previous Jamón Jamón (1992), as to expand his sciutiny of a series of subjects and characters introduced in that film. Huevos fixes on rwo interconnected themes: the transformation of national cultural identity that has accompanied Spain's aggressive entrance into European and global markets in recent decades, and the particular image of the Iberian macho as a symptomatic reflection of the shifting parameters between local and global cultures. Like Jamón, Huevos is a self-referential film, affirming and yet interrogating its own condition as the product of transnational cultural production, principally through an intense focus on a specific male stereotype, the chorizo or small-time punk. Through this formula, Bigas once again restages within his film the double imperative of his work in general: to address film audiences outside of Spain by "folklorizing" certain cliches and stereotypes of Spanish culture and to engage national audiences in the self-reflection of their own status. What makes Huevos distinctive, and not merely the clever exploitation of an earlier commercial success, is the way Bigas constructs a highly Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 1, 1997 64 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies original reciprocal narrative. Contemporary Spanish identity politics is made to illuminate the symptomatic condition of individuals formed in the shadow of globalization. Bigas's own condition as film auteur becomes self-consciously implicated in this ironic structure as the figure of the individual, understood as a manifestation of the authorial, poses questions about national culture. Through this narrative mirroring, Huevos plays allegories of authorship and of national identity against one other. This textual dualism that blends individual and collective narratives into a single ironic text reflects Bigas's own self-definition as a liminal figure: a Catalan filmmaker whose career has insistently challenged the assumption of a Castilian-based national cinema by playing the margins of Spanish culture against the center; a self-styled auteur who has consciously positioned himself both within and against the territorial ideology of Castilianized Spain, as he did in Jamón, reaffirming the vitality of the very cliches of Spanishness he otherwise rejects. Bigas's approach to filmmaking may be productively viewed as a variation of what Hamid Naficy has called transnational auteurism (Naficy 123), with his work embodying a dialectical vision within and beyond national spaces, similar to that of filmmakeis such as Raúl Ruiz (Chile) or Fernando Solanas (Argentina). Those directors, however, shaped their transnational aesthetic through difficult periods of political exile, while Bigas derived his sense of identity as a transnational filmmaker from his own precocious awareness of the commercial and artistic limits of both Catalan and Spanish cinemas. His career began in the immediate aftermath of the Franco dictatorship, when, in films such as Bilbao (1978) and Caniche (1979) he was drawn toward sensationalist themes intended to shock audiences while establishing his own identity as a film auteur. In such films, Bigas clearly repudiated the parochialism of Francoist cultural mores and fiercely affirmed the consumerist culture that was taking shape during the early years of transition. Like Andy Warhol, whose career as a graphic artist turned filmmaker suggests certain illuminating parallels with his own, Bigas fashioned himself an entrepreneurial auteur. Promoting himself became a way of promoting his films and vice versa, thereby blurring the distinction between filmic art, celebrity, and commerce. By cultivating his own celebrity persona through a combination of highlighted personal idiosyncracies (always appearing in public dressed in black, for instance) and the seemingly scandalous nature of some of his films, he self-consciously sought to construct the perception of himself and his cinema as continuing the line of Spain's best known international filmmaker of resistance to dominant Spanish culture, Luis Buñuel.2 Marvin A. D'Lugo 65 Almost from the start of his filmmaking career, the same entrepreneurial logic that guided Bigas's self-packaging began to...