Movies are in a certain respect windows into microcosms of lived experience. They have the ability to be race-makers and place-makers for international audiences. Namely, movies can represent voices unheard and areas ignored, offering a contribution to the structure and hegemonic view of cultural norms. When looking at urban related movies this could not be truer. The overarching attempt to understand and examine space and cities is simultaneously extraordinary and problematic for an urban studies student. Each city’s characteristic spatial communication is dependent of its history, various cultures, geopolitical location and economic value. The details of every relationship developed within the cityscape cater to the regions that surround it and more importantly affect its social developmental in a global market scale.
In the same vein, urbanist scholar David Harvey writes: “In the city everything affects everything else.” In other words, a city’s urban imaginary is the fluidity between the actual and the invented space we live in, between phantasms and projections, between dreams and our limited daily confrontations. A population that resides in a metropolitan city creates voids for spaces unknown to them while simultaneously these voids fill the residents with conceptualizations dependent on cultural perceptions. Cities are therefore in constant negotiation between the real and imagined which are deeply intertwined and mutually constitutive. The city (as a concept) is far too complex (and large) for a singular dose of interpretation.
When moving within a city one’s eyes provide a viewpoint, while the imagination of what occurs concurrently makes one’s point of view, that is, an extended vision of life in the city. Taking this further, cinematic representations of cities also determine their connectivity to the consumerist-oriented audience and thus give an additional layer of interpretation to the space represented. Media interpretations shape cities and they in turn shape us. This changing representational reproduction can define the city’s value as a commodity or a brand (i.e. film tourism, fabricated repetitions of movie characters and scenes); representations further provide escapism, nostalgia, or memory of something that happened in the imaginary “long time ago” (i.e. slavery, wild west, noir 50s); or else they can decline city’s potentiality due to negative realism (i.e. “City of God” vs. Rio de Janeiro).
For these reasons, I selected Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s film Biutiful (2010) to engage with the central issues addressed throughout the term. In accordance with Iñárritu’s portrayal of Barcelona, my main argument questions how (post) modern capitalism transforms urban social space, which in turn affects experience of immigration, social exclusion, the supernatural and race.
The city is a symbolic condenser of socio-cultural values, an intersection of space and society. I believe that space is created through relationship building, wherein each relationship increases one’s spatial experience, allowing for always more space to emerge. A space becomes a place as humans ascribe meaning to it through relationships with its physical architecture. Henri Lefebvre likewise explains how space is a triad of physical (spatial practice-perceived), societal (representations of space-conceived), and individualized (spaces of representations-lived) space which can be interpreted in different ways depending on one’s cultural and economic standing. In other words, mainstream use of the word “space” is usually related to mathematics (curved, abstract, x-dimensional), to the invisible (religious or one’s mental space), to outer space or to commercial property. I believe Lefebvre explores the construction of the knowledge of space by proposing categories to allow an understanding of the production of space. Lefebvre deconstructs the meta-narrative used by the scholarly and political paradigms surrounding language of spatial formalities, while simultaneously proposing how to bridge the gap of the word’s accessibility, that is to say, the meaning of the word and its usage. Hence, space does not neutrally hover above us but is created, felt and experienced as an inhabitant.
Moreover, when the city is represented as a cinematic stage it has the potentiality to possess perceived, conceived and lived space for the viewer to agree, contest or experience. The space created in the film Biutiful is one that encompasses Lefebvre’s triad and blends them in a fluid motion to an experience rarely seen for that particular environment. The argument is that in Iñárritu’s Barcelona is a space of density, danger, heterogeneity and that there is a linking of the life-structures to life-styles. He reveals the disinvestments, the propaganda of urban culture, and how these fool immigrants.
Barcelona, Spain, as a city in the media form, is best known for being autonomous through its history, architecture, colorful typography, and music (Spanish guitar), and affluent culinary culture. Biutiful’ s cinematic portrayal of this space normally filled with cultural stereotypes is in contrast grim; its depiction of the multicultural yet racially segregated communities proposes a critique of Barcelona’s contemporary urban contestations. Furthermore, the conditions of unequal division of societal acceptance, immigrant employment, and social politics are quenched in racial injustices. For example, in Iñárritu’s Barcelona the population lives in the shadows and their movements are done in silence and in the dark, away from the glitz and glamour of the Gothic Quarter or the pervasive touristic eye. This visual representation provides an understanding and expresses the relations, orders and overview of networks that are socially constructed.
We can therefore say that every filmic city can be a place of either aggression or of complacent behavior, depending on the director’s vision. Journalist Mott Parker described this in the following way: “Biutiful was filmed in Barcelona, Spain—but this is not the ‘Barcelona’ we know. It is not tall resplendent estates, lovely food markets, and decadent restaurants. This is Iñárritu’s ‘Barcelona’: squalid, impoverished and crowded (unlike Bardem’s Barcelona fix in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona).” Indeed, Iñárritu shows the urban changes in the layers of the city that are carefully excluded from usual media representations: a city of struggle, injustice, death, disease, and yet one filled with strange hope. Not the pleasurable hopefulness of the casual tourist, but rather existential hope that crushed frame after frame with everyday events, and as such one born out of sheer resistance.
On the other side of the spatial-political spectrum is Woody Allen’s Barcelona which can be found in most travel guides. Allen promotes consumption, tourism and capital migration for a leisure experience while Iñárritu discusses immigration as the illegal tourism, which occurs strictly in one’s struggle for survival. In Biutiful we thus see the treatment of space and how it corresponds to the social exclusion and segregation of its non-native residents, primarily Chinese and African workers, but also its native “lower-class” population to which the main character Uxbal and his family belong. Although Uxbal’s home is small and cluttered there is a serene sensation inside; the children are comfortable; in Uxbal’s bedroom there are a group of moths that accompany him each night before rest. They are large and black and slowly move their wings in a melodic rhythm; they seem to be representative to meditation, imagination, safety and solitude. The illegal Chinese workers live and work in inhumane conditions and are purposefully shown sickly and vulnerable to the outside forces whether it is the virus of contagion or the virus of the bureaucratic state. The African workers also live in poor conditions and are assaulted and brutally beaten in broad daylight by police.
One cannot miss the parallel here to the ways in which “replicants” were treated in the quintessential announcement of postmodern city in Blade Runner. In this sci-fi, the replicants are placed away from the Earth and sentenced as illegal, making them non- citizens and thus non-human, no matter how close they get to humanity in terms of physiology and psychology. The immigrants in Biutiful are equally treated as non- humans. In the same way for this non-humanity to be established, the violent extension of the state apparatus, i.e. the police, has to be brought into play. But at the heart of this force is of course corruption. A character that represents the police force has to be bought in order to keep silent about the presence of illegal immigrants. But buying of the silence leads to buying of the soul, which brings about more abuse: a proper “shock of the real” effect.
Yet, one must bring forth questions about the extent of truth provided in this cinematic display and whether or not the situation on the ground, so to speak, is so drastic and dire. Unlike the film My Beautiful Launderette where class is the distinguishing mark between “us” and “them,” Biutiful reveals a colonialist approach on race by “othering” certain characters depending on the color of their skin. Moreover, the language disconnect is severe and shows proof of the intolerance that emerges from engaging with difference.
Anthropologist Gary McDonogh wrote an extensive timeline on El Raval, a suburban neighborhood shown in the film. He discusses this banlieue as a marginalized community continuously portrayed as a negative horizon in the consciousness of the city: “Neighborhood interactions within the capitalist city are shaped by the interplay of political economic structures, social formations, and ideological conflicts. In particular, the historical development of the neighborhood as a symbol within a discourse on urban ‘evil’ in literature and journalism concerning the area over the past century is analyzed.” In this sense, speculative theories of the area and its inhabitants shape the conceived experience of the location. He further states: “For centuries, even as the barrio has been isolated from Barcelona, it also has participated-served the city. The barrio’s inhabitants have supplied a flexible labor pool; the barrio also has offered cheap housing, locales for small industry, and entertainment for the rest of the city. Yet the barrio’s life, actions and even interdependence with the city have been distorted by a discourse of separation embodied in the literary traditions about the barrio over time: the identification and construction of evil.”5 Here, it is simple to see that due to the lack of policy formation and adequate involvement communities are marginalized and marked as burdens and problems instead of trying to find solutions and initiatives for growth and improvement. In other words, the embodiment of this cultural capital is objectified and that objectification is institutionalized, by placing Barcelona as an example of the current international context: a post-industrial city that is becoming a consumer brand or product, with the goal of selling an image globally.
As noted above, in Biutiful the viewer never sees the main attractions of Spain, such as Casa Batilo or the architectural works of Antoni Gaudi. Instead the viewer is immersed in banlieue neighborhoods such as El Raval, Badalona, and Santa Coloma. The urban experience in these locations is one of economic struggle, top-down neglect and overall shared poverty. According to McDonogh this interpretation has been the stigma of the location since the dismantling of the walls surrounding Barcelona in the 1800’s. Iñárritu was successful in displaying this historical context on the contemporary surface.
The sections of the city are crumbling. There is order in the disorder. The history has inscribed itself negatively, and the economics of postmodern capitalism are eating the space from the inside. Echoing this environmental collapse of the city and its inhabitants is Uxbal body, which is overtaken by a disease that inhabits him and accompanies his actions throughout the film. Due to neglect and misinformation his prostate cancer is deteriorating him into death. It is as if the cancerous modalities (molecular, economic, political) inhabit the living city, destroying it from within its proper cavities.
Above all, cities have the capability to be time capsules of eras already passed and these eras are imprinted on physical, emotional, and mental lives of its inhabitants through the determination of the city’s current industrial state. That is to say, a period such as pre-modern feudalism may not exist in the cities of Europe anymore, but its presence can be nevertheless be felt by the traditional city layout and spatial politics. Moreover, European cities on a physical plane act as transitional representations of industrial achievements. Markedly, the beginning stages of modernity are seen in a city’s infrastructures, piping, waterways and centralization of commerce. Yet modernity has revealed its tendencies of human behavior as concurrently welcoming (in its gestures towards migration for the growth of jobs during the industrial boom) as well as unwelcoming (e.g. Berlin wall and other territorial barricades, ethnocentric policies, etc.). In relation to this Harvey states: “As spatial barriers diminish so we become much more sensitized to what the world’s spaces contain. Flexible accumulation typically exploits a wide range of seemingly contingent geographical circumstances, and reconstitutes them as structured internal elements of its own encompassing logic.” The paradox of postmodernity is that space is, on the one hand, becoming more and more “open,” with dissipating borders while it is, on the other, tightening privileges for the enjoyment of space. To be barricaded within a space that inherently belongs both to no one and everyone, and yet enforces and abides by a strict law, by any means necessary. How are barriers created? An obvious answer is through metal fencing, steel, and concrete. And a more invisible blockade comes in through language and politics. In the very openness of the city new forms of surveillance emerge. Indeed, the camera of Iñárritu is in some sense the kino-eye that wants to invert that surveillance: putting in first plan the areas that are forgotten or abandoned by the caring eye of the state. In this sense, the urban context cannot be subtracted from the structure.
Nezar Alsayyad takes this idea further by illustrating the analysis provided by Stuart Hall analysis of the modernity: “Hall’s idea of modernity as problematic and unsettling is further tied to the revision of older definitions of identity based on psychoanalysis and the construction of a distinct sense of Self and Other.”7 The binary distinction of “us” vs. “others” is still upheld in the shining metropolis of south-west Europe. The constant imposition of qualifying one sector and not the other based on societal norms, economic value and net worth is the demise to urban planning and development.
The notion of “othering” is thus thriving and cities are representative of the newer forms of postmodernity composed through neoliberal marketing, the influx of corporations and domination of privatization. This privatization specifically leads to the common theme of public versus private space and thereupon who has access to it. The answer is widely dependent on the financial standing and investment in question. It is often clear to see where a city lies in its monetary pursuits. Architecture, city planning and its arrangement function as revealers of a city’s income and asset.
Cities operate as a complex palimpsest of its history, culture, class and power structure. A mixture of gemeinschaft (society) and gesellschaft (community) is the foundation to each city’s setting. For the most part these function as a reminder of how groups of people, in or out of cinema, tend to isolate themselves in a perceived notion created by society or by the system. In an ideal world, community and society would be one word. Geographic space would be used to distribute the basic necessities such as food, housing, water, and employment equally.
Another important element of the film is the contrast between the waking life of struggle in an urban setting and the aesthetically “beautiful” side-story of Uxbal’s ability to speak with the dead. There are a few scenes in which the lighting, texture and methodology of the film give a lighter and refreshing breath to the atmospheric conditions of urban decay. For example, the first and last shot of the film shows Uxbal and his father in the snow-covered forest, a scene that is both co-present with characters life but not linear with historical time. To this end, Gilles Deleuze gives insight on the impact of cinema and the dreamscape: “There is in this image a science of precisely measured distance which separates each of them from the others, and yet an organization which connects them. They lodge themselves in a depth which is no longer that of memory, but that of a coexistence where we become their contemporaries, as they become the contemporaries of all the ‘seasons’ past and to come. The two aspects, the present that passes and goes to death, the past which is preserved and retains the seed of life, repeatedly interfere and cut into each other. Whatever the speed or the slowness, the line, the tracking shot is a race, a cavalcade, a gallop.” Uxbal’s memory of his father is thus not really a memory: he is an adult, in his present age, conversing with his young father. They coexist as contemporaries, but only in the space of dreamscape, the beautiful forest in winter season, one past and one yet to come. Here, the past that is dead contains the seed of life through which Uxbal shares intimate moments with his father in the space of the dream, which is also, not coincidently, a non-urban location (forest).
The mystical reverie that the viewer experiences in Biutiful is representative of one’s natural ability to self-care, and protection against trauma and pain. In this respect, a momentum is gained in urban cinema and in order to encapsulate it the director attempts to refrain from the realities portrayed so as to give lightness to the audience, a moment to recap and be filled with hopes and aspirations. This can be seen in a number of other examples: in Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle's use of escapism is internal; it is in his reflection in the mirror that properly him from from everyday reality. Similarly, in the City of God, Benny has the desire to escape, to leave and to begin his life again; this is shown through the love he shares briefly with a girl, which is a very common theme in urban communication. It is both a city of virtue and a city of vice.
As a result, in each dark story plot written to display the urban chaos there is remnant of innocence, of humanistic feature that acts as a reminder of our own trials and tribulations. As Deleuze states, there is a clear understanding of the jump between real and surreal, all in accordance to the laws of science and logic; but still the ability to switch the frames and perceive the space between the grayness of existence and the voice of the unspoken is important. This in itself creates a space of reality, even through its fantastical approach. Perhaps the importance for Uxbal’s to recognize his father and his legacy is correlated to the understanding of the city because history and memory is key in grasping the social construction of a space/place.
In essence, urban films stand as the grounding to the affects of the world’s reality. Starting from a macro-level: capitalism alters a space. It is in constant motion and it impacts the growth or dilapidation of its environment. It promotes or diminishes tourism; this in turn leads to illegal immigration and an imbalance in the job market. Now zooming into a micro-level: the city in turn attempts to assimilate or segregate its new inhabitants though violence and corruption. The inevitable occurs: poverty and inequities. These themes are unfortunately common, as they are lived by numerous urban inhabitants. Visualizations of city characteristics are potent in representing formed notions of cities. In the case of the Biutiful, this is captured with a lens that provides the best cinematographic expression of the human condition today, with its cancerous decay and its hopeful dreamscapes.
Citations:
1. (David Harvey. Social Justice and the City. University of Georgia Press, 1973).
2. (Henri Lefebvre. The Production of Space. Oxford, OX, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991).
3. (Mott, Parker. "Life is Biutiful." The Queen's Journal. Version Volume 138, Issue 39. Arts Section, 1 Apr. 2011).
4. (Gary McDonogh. “The Geography of Evil: Barcelona’s Barrio Chino.” Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 4, (Oct., 1987) pp. 174-184).
5. Ibid.
6. (David Harvey. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Basil Blackwell, 1989).
7. (Nezar Alsayyad. Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to Real. New York: Routledge, 2006).
8. (Gilles Deleuze. Cinema 2: The Time Image. University of Minnesota Press, 1989).