Uncanny Identity: Violence, Gaze, and Desire in Contemporary Basque Cinema

Abstract

Abstract In the history of representations of Spanish national and ethnic identities, there is a text that, in its manifold transformations, has defined the relationship between Spanish identities and the violence that has characterized their history: Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen (1845). What originally was conceived as a French Romantic travel narrative that violently reduced post Napoleonic, post Carlist Spain to a land of new, romantic exoticism for the contemplation of the (capitalist, male) European gaze, eventually turned into an opera (Bizet, 1875) and developed a life of its own in the twentieth century with works as different as Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones (1954) or Laurie Anderson’s ‘Carmen’ (1994). In Spain, Carmen laid the ground for the cinematic tradition known as the españolada which, after the Franco dictatorship, was revived with a film that became one of the biggest international box office hits in Spanish film history: Carlos Saura’s Carmen (1983). In Evlyn Gould’s words, the success of Saura’s Carmen made it ‘a paradigm for modern European cultural identity’ (1996: 9), thus coming full circle in the articulation of Spanish identities.