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Catalan beauty and the transnational beast: Barcelona on the screen

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 3; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1386/trac.3.2.157_1

2040-3534

Celestino Deleyto, Gemma Gorga López,

Cultural Industries and Urban Development

ABSTRACTThis article explores the case of Barcelona as paradigmatic global city in such transnational productions as Vicky Cristina Barcelona by Woody Allen (2008) and Biutiful by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (2010). Allen's film shows the extreme dilution that national and linguistic identity undergoes under foreign eyes in its rendition of a ‘hip Barcelona’ for tourists ‘invaded’ by transnational subjects in search of bourgeois pleasures. Maybe in pursuit of a more ‘real’ city, Inarritu's Biutiful moves to the Barcelona of the immigrants and the undocumented, a transnational and paradoxical location inhabited by those who need to cross borders in order to survive. Through reference to the work of Manuel Castells, Saskia Sassen, Neil Smith and Michel De Certeau among others, we argue that neither of these representations of the city is more real or unreal than the other. In their drastically divergent ways, both films contribute their external perspectives to the imaginary construction of Barcelona as a f...