A decade ago, distinguished scholars such as Paul Julian Smith, Chris Perriam and Alberto Mira noted that LGBTQ+ film cultures in Spain have had to grapple with this tension since the 1990s. While many films have been successful at making visible the everyday experiences of those affected by social discrimination because of their gender presentation or their sexuality, some of their modes of representation risked moving toward assimilation to normative agendas. Truly queer projects that challenged the move toward assimilation found obstacles to be produced, distributed, and exhibited.
A decade after Chris Perriam stated in Spanish Queer Cinema (2013) that the fate of much lgbtq+ filmmaking in Spain was to reach “audiences never yet constituted,” it seems opportune to reflect on whether this is still the case. This session will present new work by junior and established scholars who explore films that cast light on the lgbtq+ experiences from angles that depart from the representation of the lifestyles of young, urban, white, gay men that is still predominant within lgbtq+ cinema in Spain. Presenters will address in 15-minutes presentations topics such as the queering of traditional genres, the reversal of the normative film gaze, the articulation of a queer visual memory paradigm, and the links of cult stardom to the politics of queer bodies.
We will begin with “Quiero ser una actriz de terror italiana:” Marc Ferrer’s transfeminist cinema in ¡Corten! (2021). In this presentation, Ana Almar contends that the film ¡Corten! (Marc Ferrer) queers the conventions of the Italian giallo with a metafictional plot that simultaneously makes a commentary on the precarity of young queer filmmakers. Furthermore, this presentation puts forward the question of whether this film may lay the foundations of a transfeminist cinema in twenty-first century Spain.
Santiago Fouz-Hernández also takes up questions about the politics of the visual aesthetics in the context of lgbtq+ filmmaking in “Ageing Gay Men in the Films of Ventura Pons.” Fouz-Hernández shows how Catalan filmmaker Ventura Pons works with the pattern that Thomas Waugh defined as ‘the third body’, a visual economy for intergenerational relationships based on the Greek model where the younger man is usually seen as the object of the gaze and the older one as the subject. What’s remarkable in Pons’ case, however, is that this pattern is often reversed, making a spectacle of the older man. This presentation analyzes examples from Barcelona (un mapa) (2007), Mil cretins (2011), and El virus de la por (2015) as the basis for identifying innovative strategies of representation of older men and same-sex desire.
In “Recovering the LGBTIQ+ historical memory through documentary cinema”, Alfredo Martínez-Expósito examines documentary films that seek to uncover the historical memory of the cycle of homosexual liberation movements that emerged in Spanish and several Latin American countries between 1967 and 1982. The documentaries La Memoria Homosexual (dir. Espino Diéguez, Spain, 2019), Lemebel (dir. Joanna Reposi Garibaldi, Chile/Colombia, 2019) and Sexo y revolución (dir. Ernesto Ardito, Argentina, 2021) are described in the context of current memorialist trends in global lgtbq+ studies. This discussion draws on the queer visual memory paradigm (Anamarija Horvat), the concepts of global memory (Levy and Sznaider), postmemory (Hirsch), prosthetic memory (Landsberg), and right to memory (Reading).
Jorge Pérez closes the panel exploring in “Cult Stardom and the Queer Body” the significance of cult stardom by focusing on multimedia star Brays Efe. Pérez argues that Efe has generated cult appreciation (with mainstream crossovers) for his film and television roles through the creation of a highly-reflexive acting style – an acting idiolect—based on bodily and emotional excess. Red carpet performances, bold statements in interviews and involvement with fans on social media have further helped him shape a cult star persona that flaunts a non-normative and critically queer body that he uses as a platform to interrogate the underlying values that create oppressive structures in society for lgtbq+ populations.