Cinematic city: the Spanish avant-garde, modernity and mass culture

Labanyi, Jo

doi:https://doi.org/10.3828/jrs.8.2.21

Labanyi, Jo

Journal of Romance Studies (2008), 8, (2), 21–36.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3828/jrs.8.2.21
Language: English
Pages: 16

Abstract

It has been suggested that the modern city, which bombards its inhabitants with a rapid succession of fragmentary visual images, trained its city-dwellers in the viewing habits required by the cinema. This article explores the dual fascination with urban life and the cinema in the Spanish avant-garde of the late 1920s, in the light of Huyssen’s suggestion that the avant-garde was a reaction against modernism’s attempt to distance itself from the rise of mass culture which accompanied urbanization. While drawing on Bourdieu’s distinction between high and popular culture in terms of their different modes of consumption, the article notes that Bourdieu’s equation of popular culture with realism forgets the importance of spectacle in popular culture. It is argued that the fascination with urban spectacle in the Spanish avant-garde allows a (sometimes ambivalent) collapsing of high and popular culture. This is effected through an exploration of the materiality of modern urban life, which coexists with – rather than opposing – the abstraction of the modern market economy. Works discussed include literary texts by Lorca, Ayala, Gómez de la Serna, and Arconada; films by Buñuel and Dalí, Giménez Caballero, Perojo, and a film script by Lorca; and (briefly) paintings by Mallo.

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