Unsheltered: Visions of Future Scarcity in the Past. Pablo Berger's <i>Blancanieves</i> and Jesús Carrasco's <i>Intemperie</i>

Authors

  • Jesse Barker University of Aberdeen

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5399/uo/peripherica.1.2.10

Abstract

This article connects the dehistoricized pasts in Pablo Berger's film Blancanieves(2014) and Jesús Carrasco's novel Intemperie (2013) to the present economic, cultural and ecological crises occurring within Spain and at a worldwide level. Both film and novel can be linked to contemporary anxieties: Blancanievesto an image-obsessed society of consumer abundance facing a present and future of increasing scarcity; Intemperie to the threat of environmental collapse. Their invoking of the past suggests that economic and ecological strife bring back the specter of past violence and misery, unleashing the negative affects that pervade an individualist society based on competition and inequality. The aesthetics of verbal silence in both texts encourage a raw affective engagement and are analyzed here as a critical response to the individualist culture at the root of current crises, proposing alternative ethics of empathy and intersubjectivity. The social-political projects underlying these texts can thus be related to the 15M movement in Spain. They construct similar landscapes of anguish and hope, and they confront the same destructive ethos of fear, envy and domination that operate simultaneously on a societal level and within the self.

Author Biography

Jesse Barker, University of Aberdeen

Jesse Barker teaches in the Spanish and Latin American Studies department at the University of Aberdeen. His recent book is titled Affect and Belonging in Contemporary Spanish Novel and Film: Crossroads Visions (Palgrave, 2017). It explores the theme of belonging in a wide range of twenty-first century Spanish novels and films, drawing from theories of affect and psychological attachment.

References

Blancanieves. Directed by Pablo Berger, Arcadia, 2012.

Carrasco, Jesús. Intemperie. Seix Barral, 2013.

Cox, Anna K. "Interrogating the Real: Race and Remediation in Pablo Berger's Blancanieves." Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, vol. 94, no. 3, 2017, pp. 315-36.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi, Bloomsbury, 2013.

Deveny, Thomas. "A Film Version of Snow White with a Spanish Twist.” Marvels & Tales, vol. 30, no. 2, 2016, .

Fernández Savater, Amador. "El nacimiento de un nuevo poder social." Hispanic Review, vol.80, no. 4, 2012, pp. 667-81.

García Rodero, Cristina. España oculta. Lunwerg, 1989.

Hammond, Meghan Marie and Sue J. Kim. Introduction. Rethinking Empathy through Literature. Edited by Hammond and Kim, Routledge, 2014, pp. 1-19.

Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford UP, 2010.

Rancière, Jacques. The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Translated by Kristen Ross, Stanford UP, 1991.

Spinoza, Benedictus de. A Spinoza Reader: the Ethics and Other Works. Edited and translated by Edwin M. Curley, Princeton UP, 1994.

Žižek, Slajov. Living in the End Times. Verso, 2011.

Downloads

Published

2020-11-02

How to Cite

Barker, J. (2020). Unsheltered: Visions of Future Scarcity in the Past. Pablo Berger’s <i>Blancanieves</i> and Jesús Carrasco’s <i>Intemperie</i>. Periphērica: Journal of Social, Cultural, and Literary History, 1(2), 207–236. https://doi.org/10.5399/uo/peripherica.1.2.10

Issue

Section

Dossier Image and Storytelling: New Approaches to Hispanic Cinema and Literature