Bryan Cameron | University of Cambridge (original) (raw)
Papers by Bryan Cameron
¡Un hijo, un hijo de mi alma! Ese es el avatar que yo necesito. ¡Un ser que sea yo mismo, pero em... more ¡Un hijo, un hijo de mi alma! Ese es el avatar que yo necesito. ¡Un ser que sea yo mismo, pero empezando de nuevo, fuera de mí, con sangre de mi sangre! --Bonifacio Reyes in Su único hijo 1 From the outset of his literary career, Leopoldo Alas (Clarín) launched a number of biting critiques regarding the verisimilitude of extant aesthetic practices in nineteenthcentury Spain. Much like Miguel de Cervantes in Don Quijote (1605/1615), 2 the Asturian novelist seeks to question the authority of stagnant narrative forms while destabilizing the traditionally paternal voice of the author. 3 As a result, Alas's second novel Su único hijo, much like Cervantes's Don Quijote, effectively renegotiates the textual mediation
Talks by Bryan Cameron
Fortunata y Jacinta: dos historias de casadas, Benito Pérez Galdós’s four-part masterpiece, is ce... more Fortunata y Jacinta: dos historias de casadas, Benito Pérez Galdós’s four-part masterpiece, is centered, at least initially, on the masculine representation of Juanito Santa Cruz, the bourgeois prince (“El Delfín”) whose father’s family business (Sobrinos de Santa Cruz) is devoted to the production and sale of fabric and drapery. From the novel’s outset (Part I, Chapter II), Galdós deftly links proprietary succession of the Santa Cruz family’s fashion enterprise to pivotal years in nineteenth-century liberal history, namely 1848 (the Spring of Nations) and 1868 (the Glorious Revolution in Spain), in an attempt to underscore how “[p]ersonal family fortunes are […] amassed at the expense of the nation’s suffering” (Bly 89). This paper, by juxtaposing Galdós’s critique of the bourgeoisie as an increasingly vacuous social entity (for its propensity to imitate foreign dress and customs) alongside his admiration for the middle and lower classes’ dynamism (whose “grandes condiciones de originalidad” Galdós repeatedly praises [123]), examines the alternative masculinity of Juanito Santa Cruz whose ‘cross-dressing’ not only defies his socio-economic status, it ultimately facilitates the birth (albeit illegitimate) of his lone biological successor. Focusing on Juanito as the heir of social class in decline, I examine the prodigal son’s adoption of “inclinaciones nuevas” (70), which “empez[aron] a manifestarse en el vestido” following his arranged (and fruitless) marriage to Jacinta (70). Slumming it in the social uniform of “toreros, chulos y matachines” (70), Juanito’s vestimentary transformation goes beyond facile allusions to the social leveling taking place in Restoration Spain. After all, Juanito must ‘man up’ by copying the wardrobe of the lower classes if he is to subvert the “feminine morphology” of an effete bourgeoisie and generate the birth of his textual heir (Foucault, The Uses of Pleasure 18).
An overtly self-conscious homage to cinematic inspirations from the past (Luis Buñuel’s Tristana,... more An overtly self-conscious homage to cinematic inspirations from the past (Luis Buñuel’s Tristana, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, Federico Fellini’s 8 ½, Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, and Roberto Rossellini's Journey to Italy), Pedro Almodóvar's Los abrazos rotos (2009) scrutinizes the porous frontier that so tenuously distances artifice from reality. Interrogating the (re)making of two films within its densely layered narrative framework, Los abrazos rotos openly revisits the madcap ebullience of Almodóvar’s earlier works by looping in references to Laberinto de pasiones (1982) and Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1988) while paradoxically breaking new ground for the 52-year-old filmmaker. By fracturing multiple directorial vantage points in Los abrazos rotos, Almodóvar crafts a deftly imagined rumination on the burdens of auteurist cinema (by alluding to what Harold Bloom has termed the anxiety of influence) just as he sets his sights on a new phase of a career that has spanned over three decades of production. This paper examines the labyrinth of citations that dominates the frames of Los abrazos rotos and its accompanying short film (“La concejala antropófaga”) in an effort to parse the kaleidoscopic vision of a director whose newfound obsession with cinematic formalism (namely the destabilization of time, character, and narrative strata) signals a departure from his works from the 1980s/1990s and the arrival of a distinct era in Almodóvar’s oeuvre that is defined by its transtextual obsession with its cinematic precursors.
¡Un hijo, un hijo de mi alma! Ese es el avatar que yo necesito. ¡Un ser que sea yo mismo, pero em... more ¡Un hijo, un hijo de mi alma! Ese es el avatar que yo necesito. ¡Un ser que sea yo mismo, pero empezando de nuevo, fuera de mí, con sangre de mi sangre! --Bonifacio Reyes in Su único hijo 1 From the outset of his literary career, Leopoldo Alas (Clarín) launched a number of biting critiques regarding the verisimilitude of extant aesthetic practices in nineteenthcentury Spain. Much like Miguel de Cervantes in Don Quijote (1605/1615), 2 the Asturian novelist seeks to question the authority of stagnant narrative forms while destabilizing the traditionally paternal voice of the author. 3 As a result, Alas's second novel Su único hijo, much like Cervantes's Don Quijote, effectively renegotiates the textual mediation
Fortunata y Jacinta: dos historias de casadas, Benito Pérez Galdós’s four-part masterpiece, is ce... more Fortunata y Jacinta: dos historias de casadas, Benito Pérez Galdós’s four-part masterpiece, is centered, at least initially, on the masculine representation of Juanito Santa Cruz, the bourgeois prince (“El Delfín”) whose father’s family business (Sobrinos de Santa Cruz) is devoted to the production and sale of fabric and drapery. From the novel’s outset (Part I, Chapter II), Galdós deftly links proprietary succession of the Santa Cruz family’s fashion enterprise to pivotal years in nineteenth-century liberal history, namely 1848 (the Spring of Nations) and 1868 (the Glorious Revolution in Spain), in an attempt to underscore how “[p]ersonal family fortunes are […] amassed at the expense of the nation’s suffering” (Bly 89). This paper, by juxtaposing Galdós’s critique of the bourgeoisie as an increasingly vacuous social entity (for its propensity to imitate foreign dress and customs) alongside his admiration for the middle and lower classes’ dynamism (whose “grandes condiciones de originalidad” Galdós repeatedly praises [123]), examines the alternative masculinity of Juanito Santa Cruz whose ‘cross-dressing’ not only defies his socio-economic status, it ultimately facilitates the birth (albeit illegitimate) of his lone biological successor. Focusing on Juanito as the heir of social class in decline, I examine the prodigal son’s adoption of “inclinaciones nuevas” (70), which “empez[aron] a manifestarse en el vestido” following his arranged (and fruitless) marriage to Jacinta (70). Slumming it in the social uniform of “toreros, chulos y matachines” (70), Juanito’s vestimentary transformation goes beyond facile allusions to the social leveling taking place in Restoration Spain. After all, Juanito must ‘man up’ by copying the wardrobe of the lower classes if he is to subvert the “feminine morphology” of an effete bourgeoisie and generate the birth of his textual heir (Foucault, The Uses of Pleasure 18).
An overtly self-conscious homage to cinematic inspirations from the past (Luis Buñuel’s Tristana,... more An overtly self-conscious homage to cinematic inspirations from the past (Luis Buñuel’s Tristana, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, Federico Fellini’s 8 ½, Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, and Roberto Rossellini's Journey to Italy), Pedro Almodóvar's Los abrazos rotos (2009) scrutinizes the porous frontier that so tenuously distances artifice from reality. Interrogating the (re)making of two films within its densely layered narrative framework, Los abrazos rotos openly revisits the madcap ebullience of Almodóvar’s earlier works by looping in references to Laberinto de pasiones (1982) and Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1988) while paradoxically breaking new ground for the 52-year-old filmmaker. By fracturing multiple directorial vantage points in Los abrazos rotos, Almodóvar crafts a deftly imagined rumination on the burdens of auteurist cinema (by alluding to what Harold Bloom has termed the anxiety of influence) just as he sets his sights on a new phase of a career that has spanned over three decades of production. This paper examines the labyrinth of citations that dominates the frames of Los abrazos rotos and its accompanying short film (“La concejala antropófaga”) in an effort to parse the kaleidoscopic vision of a director whose newfound obsession with cinematic formalism (namely the destabilization of time, character, and narrative strata) signals a departure from his works from the 1980s/1990s and the arrival of a distinct era in Almodóvar’s oeuvre that is defined by its transtextual obsession with its cinematic precursors.