La construcción cinematográfica del espacio en la alegoría política

The film Alice in Spanish Wonderland / Alicia en la España de las maravillas, directed by Jordi Feliu in 1978, was saluted by international critics as the first open questioning of Franco’s dictatorship on screen. The film was well received in the festival circuit before being dubbed into Catalan in the early 1980s. Yet, it soon fell into relative oblivion due to its demanding visual language and political content. Like other political allegories of Spain’s Transición, this film makes a complex use of cinematic space. Visual rhetoric of space includes instances of realistic, symbolic, and allegorical compositions. Intertextual allusions to Lewis Carroll’s Alice books further compound the construction of spaces in the film. The film makes use of four main strategies for the composition of space: discontinuity, incongruity, over-signification, and symbolism. Furthermore, the film’s powerful Catalan subtext generates a particularly complex set of hybrid spaces in which Spanishness and Catalanness are ambiguously expressed.

A World Girded

This chapter analyzes the rhetoric of space popularized by Saint-Simonian thought and examines the way its main features shape narratives of imperialism and race through transatlantic discourses of Latinité between 1830 and World War I. Saint-Simonian space, which expresses the global scale of industrial capital through bodily metaphor, is instrumental both to France’s imperial endeavors in Africa and the Americas and to Latin American elites’ incorporation of racially marginalized populations into a hegemonic regional imaginary. In both contexts, the distortion of scale plays out in the tension between Fourierist conceptions of social organization and expansive Saint-Simonian networks of trade. This slippage between “embodied” and global, abstract space is tied to neocolonial arrangements of race and labor that traverse French colonial and Latin American social hierarchies, in a way that mirrors the evolution of “race war” discourse as understood by Michel Foucault.