Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Architecture and the Urban in Spanish Film ed. by Susan Larson (review)

2024; Volume: 27; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/hcs.2024.a920075

1934-9009

Caglar Erteber,

Spanish Culture and Identity

Reviewed by: Architecture and the Urban in Spanish Film ed. by Susan Larson Caglar Erteber Architecture and the Urban in Spanish Film Intellect, 2021 Edited by Susan Larson The collective and interdisciplinary work Architecture and the Urban in Spanish Film concentrates on the crucial role of urbanism and architecture through filmic medium. It demonstrates how they reshape and penetrate the individual and public spheres regardless of city dwellers’ social classes. The authors introduce their in-depth analyses of the relevant connection among ideology, modernity, popular and mass culture, monumentality, tourism, architectural and urban design, political economy, and audiovisual productions such as documentaries, newsreels, and films. The mobile eye/flâneur gaze captures and depicts the everyday life of the big cities from the very beginning of Spanish Cinema. The result is that the boundaries between the private and the public spaces are eroded and intertwined with the depiction of quotidian lives on screen. The book is divided into six parts: “Architecture and the Urban,” “Mobility,” “Surface Tensions,” “The Everyday,” “Memory and the Monumental,” and “The Virtual.” Susan Larson initiates and concludes the introduction with a photograph, also on the book cover, in which Spanish set designer Emilio Ruiz del Río appears on the set of Operación Ogro (1979). The emblematic image of Ruiz del Río holding the small-scale model of the Francoist Prime Minister Luis Carrero Blanco’s car before the separatist group ETA caused its explosion (1973) not only revitalizes collective memory but also encapsulates “the power of film to reshape urban space and to play with space and time” (18). Benjamin Fraser focuses on “a poetic mode of urban representation” (25) of Barcelona through Mercedes Álvarez’s documentary Mercado de futuros (2011) in the first chapter of “Architecture and the Urban.” The author’s analysis stresses the visual contrast between the dehumanizing modern architecture and the humanizing contact with objects in a flea market. In this way, the text and filmic gaze emphasize the principal argument of political economy based on the dichotomy between exchange value and use value, and the city itself transforms into an exchange value. In the same part, Jorge Gorostiza’s analysis explores how an aerial view projects big Spanish cities from early to more contemporary cinematic productions such as ¡Viva Madrid que es mi pueblo! (1928), Trío de damas (1960), Una gota de sangre para morir amando (1973) and 27 horas 1986. The bird’s eye view captures and conveys the symbols of power, representing the monumental history of modernity. On the other hand, the angle from the human’s point of view in Día tras día (1951), Crimen imperfecto (1970), El alegre divorciado (1976), and Taxi (2004) juxtaposes the quotidian urban dynamics with the cities as a monument. Moreover, as a public gaze on the ground level, the camera enters the peripheries to screen the hidden side of modernity, challenging the heroic visual narrative of desarrollismo. The second part’s authors center on the relationship between mobility, the urban, and cinema from different angles. On one hand, Nuria Rodríguez-Martín’s text shows the evolution of the motorization of Madrid and the growth of the urban space in terms of sidewalks, parking, and transportation. On the other, Tom Whittaker discusses the vertical mobility and political connotation of the elevator metaphor in Spanish films. In this regard, the elevator as a transitional space connects the domestic sphere with the public. Also, David Foshee establishes a connection between the infant protagonists of Spanish Cinema in the 50s and the picaresque of Spanish literature in his analysis. He states that Luis García’s Cerca de la ciudad (1952) strategically depicts the history of the children in Madrid’s shantytown on screen, using them as an “ornamentation” to provide a moralistic and religious message to the audience in the end. In the third part, Juli Highfill and Patricia Keller highlight that the film goes beyond visual or optic boundaries by reminding us of the haptic dimension of the cinema. At this point, this analysis portrays “surface tensions” and “architexture” on screen. The film uses its cinematographic techniques, such as close-ups of surfaces and objects, to...