Spain, Reincarnated: Julio Medem’s Caótica Ana and New Spanish Media(tion) in the World

Abstract

Spanish director Julio Medem’s visually stunning yet controversial 2007 film Chaotic Ana was panned for its ostensibly Manichaean treatment of gender relations and its crudely scatological ending, both of which have distracted attention from the work’s fascinating incursions into global politics. While the film’s complex layering of hawk and dove imagery figures centuries of male violence against women, it is also imbricated with an extended meditation on the divergent roles of the United States and Spain on the contemporary world stage. Through the male protagonist Said, a Saharawi painter, the film artfully shifts postcolonial guilt for the fate of the Western Sahara from the former colonizer Spain to the United States. Even as the film obfuscates Spain’s multifaceted imperial past, it engages in a withering indictment of U.S. foreign policy in the post-9/11 era, indicating through a web of symbolic references to the Statue of Liberty that Americans have turned away from their once-vaunted mission. That mission, the film (problematically) suggests, must now be taken up by Spain, which, together with other enlightened European nations, serves as a beacon for global justice, drawing upon the Spanish National Court’s declaration of universal jurisdiction to prosecute the U.S. government’s neocolonial crimes against humanity. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol33/iss2/6 Spain, Reincarnated: Julio Medem’s Caotica Ana and New Spanish Media(tion) in the World Susan Martin-Marquez Rutgers University The obsession with birth and death that figures so prominently in Julio Medem’s work is perhaps only trumped by the Basque filmmaker’s dramatic narratives of rebirth. Medem’s cinematic landscapes are riddled with symbolic holes that are as likely to swallow up sentient beings, presumably for all eternity, as to expel them into the world anew. While his characters seek desperately to rescue life from the grave, Medem’s viewers, too, may find their own fantasies of resurrection fulfilled in his works, as protagonists are snatched from death, only to venture off into sun-drenched futures.1 However, none of Medem’s films features an endless cycle of death and rebirth as insistently as does Caotica Ana ‘Chaotic Ana,’ 2007, whose eponymous heroine is presented as the reincarnation of countless women, all of whom have died, tragically in the flower of youth, and violently at the hands of men. Although she may occasionally have drug-induced visions of her past abusers, Ana has remained largely ignorant of her former lives. Abandoned by her mother, she has been raised by her German father in a cave in Ibiza, where she leads a carefree life selling colorful pastels in a local market. All that will change when Ana’s work catches the attention of Justine, a French art connoisseur, who invites Ana to join her artists’ colony in Madrid. There Ana meets Linda, a feminist video artist, and Said, a Saharawi painter, to whom she is irresistibly attracted. After a hypnosis session draws out one of Ana’s previous incarnations, however, Said mysteriously disappears. Ana subsequently undergoes numerous past-life regression sessions with a hypnotherapist named Anglo, but it will not be until the end of the film, after 1 Martin-Marquez: Spain, Reincarnated: Julio Medem’s Caotica Ana and New Spanish Me Published by New Prairie Press