Fernando Trueba: rewriting the pedagogy of Spanish transnational musical narratives
-
Marvin D'Lugo [1]
-
[1] Clark University
Clark University
City of Worcester, Estados Unidos
-
- Localización: Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, ISSN 1463-6204, ISSN-e 1469-9818, Vol. 16, Nº. 1, 2015, págs. 45-60
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
-
Resumen
Fernando Trueba's Latin Jazz films Calle 54 (2000) and Chico y Rita (2010) mark a significant point of convergence between music and film in which narrowly defined conceptions of Spanish national cinema are refigured in terms of a broader notion of identity politics shaped by the borderless cultural circulation of popular music. Trueba's approach mirrors Homi Bhabha's conception of the refiguration of the modern national community beyond conventional geopolitical borders (Bhabha 139–70). Bhabha speaks of the tension between the cultural traditions “learned” by each subsequent generation as part of a national “pedagogy” and the “performative,” the series of cultural activities that destabilize that pedagogy, modifying the concept of the national subject in ways that affirm the prodigious living processes of the community. Trueba's films inscribe this “double-time” of pedagogy/performance of the nation by historicizing Latin jazz culture in terms of its colonial residue, the cultural interplay between Spanish-African and Latin-American roots, then staging the performance of legendary jazz performers in both the documentary and the animated fiction. In this way the dynamics of pedagogy and performance are grounded in a musical tradition which cinema contemporizes for a Hispanic cinematic audience whose diasporic presence displaces the geopolitical borders of Spain with the affective bond of an imagined transnational community of listeners. Despite the formal difference of cinematic genre involved, the two films are informed by a common conception: Each underscores the intermedial textuality of the musical cinematic tradition; each emphasizes migration narratives, which in turn mirror the migratory trajectory of Latin jazz and potentially of Spanish film for a deterritorialized Hispanic audience. In this way, cinema is affirmed as a privileged site for the shaping of that emerging transnational intermedial mass-mediated market.
