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The Transnational in Iberian and Latin American Cinemas: Editors' Introduction

2007; Routledge; Volume: 8; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1179/174582007x164294

1745-820X

Chris Perriam, Isabel Santaolalla, Peter William Evans,

Cinema History and Criticism

Transnationalism is as old as cinema, which from its earliest days has been a hybrid art. In Hollywood, for instance, the great emigre directors — for example, Lubitsch, Lang, Sirk, Hitchcock — brought with them the tastes and mannerisms of their European heritage. Lubitsch’s romantic comedies are film equivalents of Marivaux or Wilde; Lang’s German Expressionism casts a lugubrious and creative shadow over the visual style of his great films noirs; Sirk’s Universal melodramas are shot through with Euripidean irony; Hitchcock uses English novelists (Daphne du Maurier) and actors (Cary Grant) for some of his otherwise most American of films. In Spain and Latin America transnationalism has an equally venerable history. The Spanish pioneers learnt from Melies and Lumiere; Bunuel’s Un chien andalou (1929) pays homage to the Hollywood slapstick stars. The extent of the interest from the 1930s onwards in transnational projects is illustrated by the meeting of the first Congreso Hispanoamericano de Cinematografia in Madrid in 1931, as well as by the productive interchange of films between Spain and Latin America, and the economic as well as ideological concerns that led to equally fruitful co-production agreements over the years. This rapprochement with Latin America continued in the early Franco years (Gonzalez Acevedo 2005: 149), especially in relation to Mexico, and fostered co-productions involving stars like Carmen Sevilla, Jorge Negrete and Dolores del Rio. The pattern continued into the 1950s and 1960s with films directed, on the Spanish side by, for instance, Leon Klimowsky, and on the Spanish American by, for instance, Leopoldo Torre-Nilsson. Later, Borau — often packing his films with international stars (such as Stephane Audran in Hay que matar a B., 1975, or Jon Finch in La Sabina, 1979) — cast the ninety-year-old Sam Jaffe in a minor role in Rio abajo (1984), expecting audiences to remember his cameo in The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950). In more recent times, how would Almodovar’s films fare without that playful intertextuality that through allusion to, for example, Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954), Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946), or All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950), forms so vital a part of his every film?