Elliptical life in (post)crisis cinema from Spain

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay tracks the long-term effects of the global financial crash of 2008 in two films produced during the so-called postcrisis period in Spain (2014–). Borrowing Lauren Berlant’s term elliptical life, I examine Adán Aliaga and David Valero’s El arca de Noé (2014) and Polo Menárguez’s El plan (2019), which center on the disorientations facing recently fired security guards who draw up blueprints or make plans for alternative imaginaries in the context of ongoing crisis. Elliptical life, as a liminal space for nonsovereign subjects and an aesthetic form that deploys a loose filmic language, captures what Berlant calls “flailing” as characters express their desire for a surrogate reality free from the constraints of biopower. Through form and content alike, elliptical life embraces negativity as a strategy for chipping away at entrenched hegemonies, welcoming encounters with estrangement and/or incoherence. It sets its sights on transformational structures, privileging states of incompletion over endgame scenarios and revolutionary triumph. In the end, as both films work through the vicissitudes of elliptical life in contemporary Spain, they contemplate failure as a mode for interrogating aspirational notions of self-legitimation and control in a reality structured by the logic of late capitalism.