The Spanish Quinqui Film: Delinquency, Sound, Sensation by Tom Whittaker

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Spanish Quinqui Film: Delinquency, Sound, Sensation by Tom Whittaker Caglar Erteber Whittaker, Tom. The Spanish Quinqui Film: Delinquency, Sound, Sensation. Manchester UP, 2020. Pp. 233. ISBN 978-1-5261-3177-5. Tom Whittaker’s The Spanish Quinqui Film: Delinquency, Sound, Sensation explores juvenile delinquency during the Transición and makes valuable contributions to our understanding of quinqui, a colloquial term for delinquents in Spain. Popularized in the late seventies and early eighties, the quinqui genre is marked by the filmmakers’ focus on the daily lives of these delinquents as they move through specific urban spaces, especially the suburbs of Madrid and Barcelona. By following the lives of genuine quinquis, these films depict the post-dictatorship period’s complex economic, political, and social panorama, inviting discussion and analysis from a variety of disciplines, including urban studies and criminology. The text concentrates on how “the place of the delinquent in cine quinqui is marked by its dislocation, one that is both spatial and sonic” (1). Whittaker investigates the essential function and role of sound in these movies and demonstrates how sonic and environmental effects are embodied in marginal communities and their spaces. The book prompts readers to reconsider quinqui films as a form of “acoustic experience” (209). Beyond sound studies, the book also addresses the real and reel quinquis in terms of sociological and criminological aspects to craft a general profile of juvenile delinquency. In the first chapter (“Unruly Speed in the Perros Callejeros Cycle”), the role of uncontrollable speed in quinqui movies is emphasized in the case of Perros Callejeros (1977), directed by José Antonio de la Loma with a focus on the automobile SEAT 124, which is a metaphor for the modernization of the country. Car theft was common among young delinquents during the Transición, and Whittaker implements criminological and socioeconomic perspectives in order to place this practice in its context. These films, he argues, are much more than mere crime stories or typical B movies. The quinqui filmmakers capture street rhythms of the Transición, a time during which people lived under the pressure of insecure conditions and anxiety. Whittaker quotes Keith J. Hayward and Jock Young to emphasize the close links between criminology and fiction: this is “a world in which the street scripts the screen and the screen scripts the street” (56). Throughout the book, the dynamic relation among the actors, space and the sonic experience is elaborated by means of references to the certain films of the quinqui filmmakers such as José Antonio de la Loma, Eloy de la Iglesia, Carlos Saura, Ignacio F. Iquino, Francisco Lara Polop, among others. The second chapter (“Soundscapes of Anxiety: Civil Insecurity, Democracy and the Home”) employs political and social concepts to understand the transformation of the country during the Transición, contextualizing the public and domestic spaces and soundscapes in relation to the world of quinquis. The author meticulously describes the “social malaise” (101) in Spanish society after the dictatorship. In the popular imagination, the rise in delinquency was also linked to the rise in terrorist attacks. Whittaker concentrates on themes such as transgression, violence, terrorism, victimhood, and insecurity, explaining also how the quinqui filmmakers were influenced by sainete, erotic cinema, and tercera vía. As a result of these influences, cine quinqui acquired its heterogenous identity whose movies blended aspects of both commercial and art cinema. The third chapter (“Sound and Skin in the Quinqui Films of Eloy de la Iglesia”) carries out an in-depth analysis of the movies of a well-known director from cine quinqui, Eloy de la Iglesia. The filmmaker’s movies reflect the themes of everyday marginal suburban life, from drug trafficking [End Page 319] to drug addiction. Eloy de la Iglesia’s filmmaking emphasizes the delinquent body as an aesthetic prompt for breaking moralistic and paternalistic narrative boundaries. The author highlights aural and kinesthetic experience in his movies and makes a connection between the cinematic body and the human body, considering the screen as “an affective interface” (110). In the fourth chapter (“Listening to the Delinquent Voices”) the author underlines that these films bring the common and public spaces of quinquis to the screen, such as the discotheque...