Reviews of Books

Abstract

Santiago Fouz-Hernández’s edited collection on Spanish erotic cinema is a timely and ground-breaking contribution to the field of Spanish film studies in particular, and Film Studies in general, through its coverage of the ‘erotic content in Spanish cinema from the silent period until today’ (1). In effect, as the Introduction to this volume underscores, although the erotic has been the focus of much academic writing on Spanish cinema, this edited collection is unique in its focus on what may be defined as ‘Spanish erotic cinema’, thereby using the erotic as an enabling analytical category that remains connected to wider issues, including ‘age, class, gender, modernity, national identities, race[,] religion or sexualities’ (10). Such an imbrication foregrounds the complex ways and the multiple layers through which subjectivities and bodies are constructed and textured in Spanish cinema. The volume is characterized by its historical rigour and theoretical sophistication, as well as by its engagement with fascinating close readings of a wide range of Spanish films and cinematic genres across historical periods and regions. Spanish Erotic Cinema is conceived chronologically to pay attention to ‘the evolution of what we may understand as erotic in the Spanish cinema production of the last hundred years or so’ (10). Yet, this edited collection never falls into a teleological conception of history which would perpetuate an over-familiar, if not exhausted, narrative of historical progress that is based on moving from sexual repression, especially during the almost forty years of the Franco dictatorship, to sexual liberation, starting with the so-called destape films that were produced during the Spanish Transition to the cinema produced in our contemporary democratic, neo-liberal period. This reader found deeply refreshing the volume’s serious critical attention to the so-called destape films and how such academic attention coincides with a recent revival of these films in contemporary Spanish cinema. While this edited collection inevitably refers to film classification in Spain, once censorship was abolished during the Spanish political Transition from dictatorship to democracy, which designated erotic films with an ‘S’ and pornographic films with an ‘X’, the volume complicates clear-cut distinctions between the pornographic and the erotic. The latter, associated with the promise of ‘some sexually explicit content while preventing the alienation of audiences who may not yet be ready to watch porn’ (5), can function within and beyond the strictly pornographic. Or, as Roland Barthes beautifully argues in his study of photography (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard [New York: Hill and Wang, 1983]), the erotic can be displaced from the representation of the naked body to the effects of the texture of the underwear worn by the male model in the Robert Mapplethorpe photograph. Such a compelling problematization of clear-cut dichotomies in the chapters included in this collection opens up multiple and different libidinal economies underpinning film representation and film spectatorship in Spanish cinema. From this perspective, the erotic can, for instance, be displaced to the erotics of cinematic form, instead of merely being associated with the representation of the body—often the female body. The erotic can move beyond or undercut reductive voyeuristic and fetishistic modes of looking, often associated with a