Julio Medem Research Articles

Basqueing on the bayou: conflicting visions of authenticity in Julio Medem’s Vacas and Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild

This article examines a similar use of bovine vision as an act of looking at a seemingly authentic Basque and bayou identity in, respectively, Julio Medem’s Vacas and Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild. Central to both these films is a similar dichotomy between masculinity and femininity as the feminine, particularly the mother figure, is simultaneously mythologized and threatened by a masculinity tied to essential identity. Both films also attempt to suture historical debates regarding racial purity (or lack thereof) and class struggle within their own self-mythologizations. Additionally, both films centralize those discussions around a binary between rural/natural and urban/social as means of addressing the dichotomy of myth versus historical authenticity. However, where Beasts asserts that a wild authenticity can be achieved by returning to a pre-social state, Vacas deconstructs any idea of a real Basque identity. What this article shows are the high stakes that come with representing and under-represented community to an outside audience and the consequences that result when one links that community to a primal, natural authenticity.

Basque Identity Politics in the Films of Julio Medem

I have here attempted to restructure and revivify the idea of identity politics, resurrecting it from critics who have dismissed it as essentialist or even erroneous. A theoretical armature of four pillars is proposed: Mette Hjort’s notion of “banalaboutness”; the New Historicist “anecdote”; Fredric Jameson’s concept of “cognitive mapping”; and Judith Butler’s psychoanalytic re-reading of identity. This hermeneutic is used to reinterpret the works of Julio Medem, in particular his La pelota vasca (2003); Medem has constructed a metanarrative of Basque identity as a tonic to the idea of a homogenic and centralized Spain centered on Madrid.

Między polityką a kulturową tradycją

Between politics and cultural tradition. Basque Country in the films of Julio Medem
 Julio Medem’s movies reflect the problem of Basque identity in unconventional way. Here we find an analysis of tensions between the regional authorities and the government in Madrid and the problem of terrorism as seen from the perspective of victims and the separatists themselves. At the same time, Medem shows a traditional Basque culture with its unique flavour and socio‑political determinants. This tradition is reflected also in contemporary narratives, where the characters who live far from Basque Country are named after divinities from the Basque mythology and in the most unexpected situations reveal attachment to their small homeland.

A las seis patas en punta por la cabeza

If there is a leitmotiv that permeates all of Julio Medem's film production, that would be no other than incest. Tacked from very diverse perspectives, both diegetically, regarding the varied plot developments and the presentation of the films, and extra-diegetically, through the social implications derived from the family relationships suggested on the screen, the constant recurrence of incest forces us to come face to face with the evasive riddles that such a thorny topic presents. In this essay, after a brief review of incest in his full-length films, from Vacas (1992) to Caótica Ana (2007), I focus on the two extant shorts that are accessible today, namely, Patas en la cabeza (1985) and Las seis en punta (1987). In these short films, which are the germ of his later production consisting of six feature authorial films, we can already surmise what Médem would develop later on in his films. Up front, always as a minimum common denominator, incest already begins to show, half cautiously, half defiantly, as a protagonist in its own right.

Crash and Return: Choque, Allusion and Composite Structure in Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores perros (2000)

Composite structure, a feature of Freud’s dreamwork theory, is relevant to understanding cinematic works in which a range of viewpoints and narratives, dense and diverse themes, highly distinguishable productive elements (here, sound and cinematography) coalesce under a powerful ‘binding’ concept. In the case of what I have termed cine de choque, that concept is the car crash and, more specifically, the Spanish word choque, which can be translated as crash, shock or clash. This category of film refers to a number of recent works (from the late 1990s onwards) by Spanish-speaking directors in which car crashes feature strongly both as pivotal plot devices and as linguistic metaphors informing the aesthetics of the films in question. These films include Alejandro Amenabar’s Abre los ojos (1997), Julio Medem’s Los amantes del circulo polar (1998), Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s 21 Grams (2003) and Lucrecia Martel’s La mujer sin cabeza (2010). Here, I deal specifically with the relevance of composite structure to the narrative aesthetics of Gonzalez Inarritu’s Amores perros (2000), referring also to the theories of Gilles Deleuze on shock and violence, those of Sergei Eisenstein on organic unity and those of Christian Metz on the 'filmic state'. As well as discussing the movement of the film's aesthetic and thematic content from physical to emotional choque, I explore the dimensions of the crash as a plot device, a symbol of the clash between humanity and modernity and, ultimately, the way in which it is significant as much for what it fails to cause (resolution by figures of authority) as for what it triggers in the lives of the characters.

Analyzing the Woman Auteur : The Female/Feminist Gazes of Isabel Coixet and Lucrecia Martel

In a noteworthy recent discussion of gender and cinema, Katarzyna Maciniak, Aniko Imre, and Aine O'Healy highlight the need to demystify the First World/ Third World divide through the area they have designated feminist media studies (11). The critics' term calls to attention the need for specialized investigation into questions of gender and representation through the image as it travels around the globe, becoming part of the system of global capitalism. The current transcultural nature of film production is especially relevant for inquiries into gender identity and how normative and counter-hegemonic images of women circulate. As director Isabel Coixet has stated, Nadie se deja el genero o la nacionalidad en el vestuario, cuando se pone a trabajar' (Nobody leaves their gender or nationality in the dressing room when they set to work) (Isabel Coixet Motor Homepage). (1) The astuteness of such a declaration is evident when considering the films of the two writer/directors I treat here: Isabel Coixet of Spain and Lucrecia Martel of Argentina. A close study of their films, The Secret Life of Words (2005) and La nina santa (2004), respectively, uncovers trends across the Atlantic even as the subject matter of the films differs substantially: Coixet tells the story of a woman working through psychic and physical trauma, while Martel relates an adolescent girl's nascent sexuality. An analysis of both directors' diegetic constructions and their filming techniques in particular brings to light the distinctly feminine gaze constructed by both Coixet and Martel in their work. The manners in which these directors employ space, lighting, and sound result in opposing possibilities for gendered beings. Coixet's attempt to transpose gender roles in her film only serves to reassert them while Martel's ability to blur boundaries results in a more fluid conception of gender that resists the binds of heteronormativity. The obstacles involved in studying the auteur are more heightened in the film genre due to the nature of production. When multiple people are involved in the construction of a single frame, scene, and the film as a whole, separating out the auteur, or the veritable producer of the cultural product, becomes a futile task for the critic and one that would poorly represent the outcome of the artistic visions at work were it to be achieved. (2) Though Coixet and Martel may seem to alleviate some of the analytical dilemma of the auteur by also writing their own screenplays, it is still essential to consider the auteur, in Rosanna Maule's terms, as the sociology-of-production (24). Both of the films studied here were executively produced, in part, by El Deseo S.A., the production company of brothers Augustin and Pedro Almodovar. Direct connection to the internationally famous Spanish director was undoubtedly helpful in ensuring the films' successes and reveals itself in the directors' use of filming techniques akin to Pedro Almodovar's. Coixet and Martel's choice to work with Almodovar, though, as Nuria Triana Toribio's discussion of transnational/transcultural cinema demonstrates, may be less of an aesthetic decision than an economic one. Triana Toribio borrows the concept of the autor mediatico (pertaining to the media) from Vicente J. Benet, one he defined as the presence of certain auteurs (namely Pedro Almodovar, Alejandro Amenabar and Julio Medem) whose style and themes can be conveyed to journalists in sound-bites and catchy phrases (Auteurism 260). (3) What Benet refuses to acknowledge, according to Triana Toribio, is the shifting nature of film production--Benet's term, originally intended as derogatory, in fact describes the necessary characteristics upon which a lasting and lucrative career is currently predicated. (4) Triana Toribio explains that an auteur is mediatico in two ways: both in his/her use of technology and in the creation (and in some sense promotion of) a recognizable public persona (Auteurism 262). …

Hacia una teoría de lo desconocido: la aportación visual de Vacas de Julio Medem a la filosofía de la representación

Julio Medem's enigmatic film Vacas is not only a cult-classic of Spanish cinema — it also makes a contribution toward a philosophy of the unknown. This essay weaves Bergsonian philosophical ideas together with those of Henri Lefebvre and Gilles Deleuze in order to underscore the importance of the unknown in the film through three areas in particular: the heterogeneity of time, the superimposition of narrative and non-narrative cinematic aspects, and the role of a key image — the 'agujero encendido' which dominates the film's middle third. Throughout Vacas, Medem works hard to frustrate the designs of a traditional intellectual/analytical posture and visually point to that which lies beyond the simplistic representation of reality.

A landscape of their own: space and identity in Ozpetek's Hamam: The Turkish Bath and Julio Medem's Cows

A landscape of their own: space and identity in Ozpetek's Hamam: The Turkish Bath and Julio Medem's Cows

Film International 41: Baghdad Bad and Belgian brothers

Murray Pomerance examines depictions of Arabs in Hollywood movies, from Valentino to Syriana, and figures out what they say about us rather than them. Bert Cardullo has talked to the Belgian Dardenne brothers about their rare brand of realist cinema and their thirty years of filmmaking. Gary McMahon looks at how New York filmmakers, like Wes Anderson and Charlie Kaufman, turned to magical realism to describe their city and make sense of a surreal reality in the aftermath of 9/11. And Angela Tumini traces the issues of national identity and cultural fusion in contemporary Europe in the films of Julio Medem, a Basque director living in Madrid, and Ferzan Ozpetek, Turkish born but living in Rome. All this, plus a packed review section, in our next issue.

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

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

Water, window, moon: visual metaphors in Julio Medem's Lucía y el sexo

Julio Medem conceived Lucia y el sexo (2001) as a companion to his previous fiction film, Los amantes del circulo polar (1998). In the prologue to the film's script, he describes how finishing Los ...

Live flesh: the male body in contemporary Spanish cinema

In post-Franco Spain, a re-shaping of notions of the masculine has been under way for some time. The authors of Live Flesh demonstrate how contemporary Spanish films, during this modern period, have contributed to this process. They do so by visualizing the ways in which Spanish men have been abandoning old self images and adopting new ones, and they explain and explore the complexity and diversity of these fresh cinematic creations of masculine identities. The book's point of focus is Spanish films of the democratic period, both popular and auteur, made by directors of national and international prominence, such as Pedro Almodovar, Alejandro Amenabar, Bigas Luna or Julio Medem, as well as films featuring acclaimed actors who have contributed to the construction of contemporary ideas of the masculine in their country, including Antonio Banderas and Javier Bardem. Using a fresh theoretical framework, embracing queer and feminist theory and concepts of nation, race and class, each chapter examines key films that represent the male body, highlighting notable elements - young, muscular, homosexual, (dis)abled, foreign and so on - and goes on to focus on recent case studies from the early 1990s to the present. An increasingly transnational Spanish cinema is a most promising field in which to explore questions of how male bodies are represented - and mediated - in film. Live Flesh more than fulfils this promise and goes further, to reveal how these representations have intervened in the Spanish cultural imagination.

La madre muerta (The Dead Mother, 1993) and Tierra (Earth, 1995): Basque identity, or just the other?

This paper examines two films by Julio Medem and Juanma Bajo Ulloa in relation to questions raised by the lable Basque film. These questions originate in the fact that so-called Basque films are not normally filmed in the Basque language; that Basque identity has a history of suppression by the Spanish State, and that its renowned directors, such as Medem and Bajo Ulloa, try to avoid being labelled Basque. Despite their formal differences, this paper argues that anxieties in relation to masculine, regional, national, and/or transnational identity emerge in the way both films screen the identity of their protagonists as a kind of cinematographic, Lacanian battle with O/others that is represented in the internal divisions of the protagonists, in the narrative fort-da oscillation between these protagonists and the female characters, and, finally, in the two films' ironic and demystifying representations of Basque mythology and Christian iconography.

Attachment, Trauma, and the Vicissitudes of Love: Circularity in Julio Medem's Lovers of the Arctic Circle

Circularity, a salient theme in the film Lovers of the Arctic Circle (1999), is explored as a symbol that points to a consideration of issues central to psychic life. The movie sets up an expectation—two lives will be brought together to recreate a former blissful union, and complete a circle that defies finality, separation, and loss. It succeeds in creating a dialectic between two tensions, the experience of separateness where each person is a circle unto oneself, and the longing to be encircled with an “other” in a union that promises safety and permanence. The wish for fusion versus merger with the loved one is discussed in the context of traumatic loss and soul blindness. These early experiences interfere with healthy mourning and determine the reliance on magic and regressive compromise that contributes to a tragic outcome.

Animals, Machines, and Postnational Identity in Julio Medem's Vacas

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Correspondence to: Nathan E. Richardson, Department of Romance Languages, Bowling Green State University, 203 Shatzel Hall, Bowling Green, OH 43403, USA. Email: nrichar@bgnet.bgsu.edu Heiberg argues that during the 1920s, Basque nationalism was most powerfully manifest and promoted through athletic competitions, dance and music festivals, and other cultural arts (1989, p. 76). She explains, further, that political nationalism preceded cultural nationalism in the promotion of such events, and that such events were regularly promoted in a way so as to provoke opposition between Basques and Anti‐Basques, despite official declarations of the Basque community as ‘one great family tied by blood, culture, shared interests and destiny’ (1989, pp. 76–77).

"A Corpse in the Garden": Bilbao's Postmodern Wrappings of High Culture Consumer Architecture

"A Corpse in the Garden" Bilbao's Postmodern Wrappings of High Culture Consumer Architecture Annabel Martin is an Assistant Professor ofSpanhh Film and Literature, Women's Studies and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. She is currently finishing a book on melodrama, censorship , and political resütance in Spanish films of the early Franco years and has written articles on recent film and culture. A new project studies Basque Country writers Bernardo Atxaga and Luisa Etxenike and filmmakers Julio Medem and Helena Taberna, artists who focus on the role the arts pL·y in the development of democracy. But one's own must be learned as well as that which is foreign. —Hölderlin1 Introduction Since its inauguration in September of 1997, over one million visitors have made a point of traveling to the city of Bilbao each year to admire the Frank O. Gehry design of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and experience first hand the ways architecture has been used to reconceptualize the history and identity of the city. A controversial joint venture between the Basque Autonomous Government and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the museum is but another example of the ways postindustrial areas in contemporary Europe have traded in industrial economic infrastructures for cultural ones. Urban planners in Glasgow, Liverpool , Birmingham, London, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Frankfort, Barcelona, and other locations have promoted the culture industry as a means of opening new economic sectors in cities which have witnessed the gradual dismantling of their industrial base.2 In the case of Bilbao, the Basque Government believed mat the area's economic recovery would come about if the city were to adopt a new urban paradigm, one based on developing new architectural settings for the arts within the flux of global capital. This was meant as a kind of conceptual resolution of the historic political contradictions of the area.3 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 7, 2003 212 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies The Basque success owes much to the ways contemporary cultural identity in that community contrasts profoundly with the "amnesiac" quality that dominated the socio-historical context of the 1980s and early 1990s in Spain. Spanish cultural production of this period has been critiqued for thinking of culture almost exclusively as "spectacle" (as a market commodity ) due to its being immersed in a process which aimed to reclaim a "newness " and "(post)modernity" for itself in its newly articulated post-Francoist European identity. The epistemological context of this shift in focus was one that substituted the historical "utopian" projects for what some have termed pseudo-reflexive systems of political action and democratic freedoms—essentially, the disenchantment with traditional large-party politics and the consolidation of a general consumption -oriented culture.4 The Basque socio-cultural context embodies the complex identitarian tensions that the micronational political units of government face in the Spanish/European context: self-government promoted on the grounds of cultural difference and its ties to geography. The Basque Country —one of the four "national historic communities" that the Spanish Constitution of 1978 recognizes5—is, like Spain, undoubtedly immersed in both the European Union's socio-political project of a united Europe in legal and social matters and in an economic context dictated by global parameters. The Basque autonomous government translated the European Union's economic unification in cultural terms by choosing to revitalize a postindustrial wasteland—the steel industry of Bilbao's Left Bank—and give international capital, high architecture, and short-term upscale migrancy (the tourist and conference industries) a place to locate. Hence the names and architectural centerpieces which are redefining a particular kind of cosmopolitan urban paradigm for the city: Norman Foster's metro design, Frank O. Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Federico Soriano and Dolores Palacio's Euskalduna Palace (a conference and arts center built on and inspired by the ruins of the Euskalduna shipyards), the RÃ-a 2000 upscale housing, shopping, and entertainment complex, and Santiago Calatrava's new terminal for the Bilbao airport.6 The city's revitalization projects are teaching us lessons about how politicians, critics, social movements, and parties are interpreting urban change in contemporary Europe for Bilbao's new urban landscape and economic shift are...

Between Heaven and Earth: Grounding Julio Medem's Tierra

(1999). Between Heaven and Earth: Grounding Julio Medem's Tierra. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies: Vol. 76, No. 1, pp. 11-25.

Far from Home, Close to Desire: Julio Medem's Landscapes

Far from Home, Close to Desire: Julio Medem's Landscapes

Women immune to a nervous breakdown: The representation of women in Julio Medem's films

Women immune to a nervous breakdown: The representation of women in Julio Medem's films