The presence of an absence: Framing capital in Mercado de futuros/Futures Market (Álvarez 2011), La mano invisible/The Invisible Hand (Macián 2016) and Cerca de tu casa/Near your Home (Cortés 2016)

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The extensive bibliography devoted to Spanish austerity tends to centre on representations of a suffering population, Spanish politics or the legacy of the Transition to democracy. Invoking Fredric Jameson’s concept of cognitive mapping, this article argues that Mercado de futuros/Futures Market (Álvarez 2011), La mano invisible/The Invisible Hand (Macián 2016) and Cerca de tu casa/Near Your Home (Cortés 2016) expose capitalism’s responsibility for creating the crisis and propose alternative critical responses. These three films synecdochally identify housing, labour relations and the media as ideal battlegrounds on which to confront capital, while presenting affect as an asset open for all. All three films deny capital the status of an incontestable totality: Mercado alludes to a world beyond capitalism while Mano and Cerca adduce populist antagonisms to its long-standing hegemony. These texts reveal their vocation as cinematic critical pedagogies, producing political subjects on-screen in order to generate them in an array of off-screen contexts.